Everything Is A Story: Journalist Nick Bilton Thinks AI Might End Humanity & How Stories Could Save Us

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for richroll, and check out Careway, non-toxic cookware, made modern. I'm not worried about AI destroying humanity, I'm worried about Sam Altman running an AI company that he will lead to destroy humanity. If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. Today we're speaking with Nick Bilton, former New York Times columnist in Vanity Fair,

a special correspondent, but I was a reporter in Silicon Valley covering tech and I do believe that the tech elite are evil. The fear that we're all going to be killed by AI is actually part of their fundraising. You've got Sam and Elon and all these people out there being like, "We're going to die! We need more money!"

And the bucket loads of cash come in, and it's all nonsense. They've crafted a certain public image tailored to what people seem to like. I also think that there's another thing.

“The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is that Nick, it's so great to meet you.”

Thank you for doing this. I'm so excited to talk to you. Thank you for having me. This is a very, very exciting. You're somebody who I've been reading for so many years, at least going back 10 or 11 years

with your reporting in the New York Times, and you've covered Silicon Valley and the tech Titans, and there is an obsession that we have with these billionaires, the technocratic class, these people who are, you know, lording over the devices and the apps that we're all using every single day. And these are people that you have spent time with who are also, for the most part, masterful

storytellers and myth makers. What can you share about what you know about like people like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or Zuck or these people that is a common thread with respect to their myth-making superpowers that, you know, we'd all be kind of better off for understanding. Well, I do think that there is a through line.

They're all obsessed with their own self image, their legacy, and they are all obsessed with telling a story. And you can see that through one very simple metric, and that is how many people are on the communications teams of these companies and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, ironically Elon fired all of his communication folks because he could do it better, but in his mind,

but they are always telling a story and look, I mean, like Elon's a perfect example.

“Let's take the boring company for a little storytelling lesson here, right?”

So, he was driving to work one day, there was a bunch of traffic, he tweets, see years ago. He tweets, there should be tunnels under the ground where you can, you know, you can drive so that there's no traffic in LA. Next thing you know, he gets to the office at SpaceX, and he's like, the tweets getting

a million responses, and he's like, "Let's start the boring company and we're going to build these tunnels." I went to SpaceX for a few months later, and there was a dirt patch across the street with one of these big tunnel-boring machines, and I said to someone, "What is that?" He's like, "Oh, it's just, it's like a little show, Elon does, to show that he's

going to build these tunnels under ground."

It's never really going to happen, you know?

And yeah, they've done some, but this was years ago, right? They never built, there are no tunnels under LA, I drove on the freeway to get here. There is that sort of small network of tunnels under Vegas, right, if you do.

It's sort of a novelty. It's also incredibly claustrophobic, and people will have panic attacks in them all the time, but the point is, that's a great story, and when you look at these guys,

“they do this over and over and over again, and I think that they, and then they start to”

believe their own story.

I always, I got to spend, as a reporter covering tech, I spent time with all of them for

very long periods of time, and there was always this, you know, you could see this thing happen, like I, I knew Zuck, and Jack Dorsey and all those guys, and Kevin's system, never, all of them when they were just starting out, and then, and then there's this kind of shock of like, whoa, how'd that happen? I'm a billionaire, and then there's this like, I'm a billionaire, and I'm the one that makes

the decisions and screw you, and it's, and they just believe the, they believe the story that gets told about them, the more the story they tell them about themselves, I mean, I wrote the book on Twitter, and one of the greatest quotes someone gave me was the greatest brand, sorry, the greatest product that Jack Dorsey ever made was Jack Dorsey, and I think that sums up a lot of these people in Silicon Valley.

They, they create this product that is themselves, often taken from Steve Jobs, and his reality distortion field, reality distortion field, and I have a funny story about that. And then he, and then, and then they believe the story, and then sometimes the story breaks them, which is what happened to Bezos. So tell that job story, because then I have a follow-up related to Jack and these other

guys.

So, when I was, when I was first starting out as a reporter at the Times, I, I get a,

I was writing a story, it was about the iPhone, and something related to it, it's not important. And I was writing a story about it, and, and I called Apple PR, and I said, hey, I'm writing the story, and you know, and the, and the PR will, and says, give me a second and then puts me on hold and says, Steve's going to call you a little bit.

So the guy who ran, the, the PR department was this guy named Steve Dowling. So I thought it was Steve Dowling, who's going to call me. And, and instead, they, she was like, no, it's Steve Jobs, and I was like, Steve Jobs is going to call me.

“And, you know, I'm like a young reporter at the Times, I'm like, is this how it works?”

So I hung up the phone, and he didn't call, and I went out, I went out for dinner that night, and I get this weird 415, whatever it was, phone call, and I answered had a couple of drinks, and it was like, hey, Steve Jobs, and I was like, oh shit. And so I like, go out and try to take notes on my phone, he was on the phone with me for 45 minutes an hour, he wouldn't get off.

Wow. And he was telling me that my story was wrong, and this is that, and the other, and so on. And, and I remember, I went in the next day, and I wrote the story, the way I had been told by him, and, and I published it, and then afterwards I was like, wait, I wasn't

wrong. Like, you just got, you guys just got completely, and John Markov, who had been a tech reporter for many, many years at the time, said, he came over to me and he said, one word, he said, no, he's three words, he said, the real, the Steve Jobs reality distortion feel, so forward.

“And he said, I was like, what do you mean he goes, he's, he's, what he does?”

He's like, he can change the way you feel about something, and it happened, I interacted with him a lot, and, and it would happen every time, and I got, I got good at, at realizing, oh, the reality distortion feel is coming on, and then he stopped calling me, because I wouldn't listen to him anymore, but, but he, you know, he was a master at making you believe the thing that he wanted you to believe, and, and he, and I think that people, you know,

they looked at him, a lot of these tech titans, like that's who I want to be when I grow up, and people, and what's fascinating from a storytelling perspective is they chose which part of him they wanted to tell is their story. So the assholes pick the asshole and made themselves more justifiable, then the product people pick the product, you know, and I think, you know, I think he was largely more influential

in the way these people think about themselves and anyone, and even history quite frankly. Yeah, these people who become billionaires, and it has this warping effect on their perspective

on the world when they can literally, you know, basically create seismic shifts in society

by dint of a simple decision, and understanding that story is more important than truth, and being able to wield a story that is in service to whatever that person wants people

back to like Jack Dorsey's origin story with Twitter, I had a version of that kind of

reality distortion experience.

“I had Jack on the podcast, this is very early on, I went to his house, I basically”

spent like the better part of a day with him, and I left that experience just enamored with this guy, and I was so charmed by his charisma and his warmth, and I thought, if anybody should be running Twitter, it's this guy, this is a guy who is like created a world in which he carves out time to think deeply about these difficult decisions, and I just couldn't imagine, like, I couldn't understand why people were having such issues with

him, because I had been, you know, I had gone into his environment, and you know, like sort of marinated in the Jack Dorsey experience, and now looking at kind of like where Jack is now, and these other people, I sort of reflect back on that, and was like, was I played, was that genuine, I still don't know, I like to see the best in people, and believe the best in people, but I can't imagine what it's like to be a billionaire who is wielding

“such unbelievable influence on the world, and I think what happens is with that wealth and”

that power comes this sort of sense that, well, you were so successful here that you must be right about all these other things, like this galaxy brain kind of mentality that takes over, that then spills into perspectives on politics and culture, and all these areas that have nothing to do with, you know, being a successful entrepreneur, necessarily. Well, you just summed up everyone's looking value, like every single person who's successful,

who's a billionaire that I've ever met at a metal, they all think, oh, I'm the billionaire who is this successful, who, you know, clearly knows what they're doing in this arena.

So I know what I'm doing in every single one, and I could cite a million instances where

people, you know, I'm an act, I'm the world's expert on real estate. I'm the world's expert on COVID-19, and it's like, and then, you know, people like Elon, like, you know, Sam Harris is a good friend of mine, and he got into a debate with Elon about COVID-19, and Sam proved to be right, and Elon stopped talking to him, and, and it's, that's the mentality, if you're not in my yes-man circle, then you're out, and, and,

and so it becomes this reinforcing, philosophy, and, you know, all the way to, like, hey, is democracy really working, like, maybe we should, you know, like, go back to some kind of monochistic society, like, when you see this dark enlightenment movement, and these very influential people, like Naval Ravicon, and, you know, the kind of these, like, you know, gurus of Silicon Valley, who have such outsized influence as a result of becoming

successful in technology that is deeply concerning to me, because they do wield so much influence, and if, you know, these people say something online, like, people pay attention and listen, and, you know, kind of, now here we are, you know, being lured into the web of, you know, kind of these, these, you know, crypto, state, recessionists, you know, where everything is in question, and these people know better than any expert in their respective field.

“Yeah, and I think that, you know, like Jack Dorsey is a perfect example because”

Jack, if you, as I research with the book, he changed the story of how Twitter was founded

hundreds of times, quite literally, like it was like, a first, it was, he came up with it,

you know, on a slide in his park with this stone, and then it was, oh, actually, I came up with it when I was a kid in my bedroom, watching police scanners. Oh, actually, it was an Oakland when I was a babysitter with blue hair, and, and it all changed, and the reality is he came up with one slither of the idea as did other people specifically know a glass, as the book talks about, and no, it was written out of history, and the same thing is true

with square, Jack didn't come up with square. A friend of his did, and he took the idea and so on and so forth. And it's, we just, we just sort recently, you know, square just laid off half of their workforce, almost half of their workforce, and Jack cited it as, as AI. Well, actually, if you go and look, and you, you actually dig a little further than, oh, almighty tech guru is, is way ahead of the curve. The, the, the, the, the, the, his employed

base is doubled in size in the last few years. For no reason, other than, it's not run well,

because of AI. It's literally back to what it was, it was a year ago. It was just management, poor management decisions, and the stock went up, because, and another example, look at the Tesla stock. Like Elon can talk about how he is going to have a million taxis, you know, in two years, and there's like 12 of them. Yeah. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it doesn't ever bear without just like the boring company story. Like he can just say, oh, we're going to have

full self driving by this day, and he can move the stock price immediately. And every time you looked through the rear view mirror six months later on, things that he says, like these things

never end up bearing out, but it doesn't matter. And this is mirrored in the Trump administration,

like it's just rhetoric and just move on, and there never seems to be any kind of reconciliation

“or accounting for these statements. Well, I think even like self, like a normal person would think,”

yeah, I say these crazy things, and they never happen. Maybe I should reflect a little bit on my relationship with truth and veracity, and like, what does that say about me? Like, these people don't do that. It doesn't matter. They don't care. The thing that I think is is so shocking to me and I do not understand it. I don't know if you have an answer. I don't understand. We are in a world where you could, for the first time in human history, you can have a conversation

with machines that can tell you what is right and what is wrong. And for the most part,

with the exception of hallucinations and so on and so forth, they can actually detail it. So when you go and ask, you know, Claude or Gemini, or Chetty, whatever you talk to about, the history of squares, employees, and the number and so on and so forth, and revenues, and blah, blah, blah. It will show you. But no one asks these questions. If you go and ask, is it realistic that Tesla is going to

“have a million self-driving cars in this period of time? Or human outrobes in your house and so on and so forth?”

Like we, but no one wants to do that. They just say, oh, that's it. Quick and the stock goes flying through the roof and and everyone's like all hail Elon and I think it's like and Mark Zuckerberg too with social media and it's just to me what I don't understand is why don't people ask questions? Why did they just take it as gospel? I think it has something to do with the power of storytelling. Like take a look. These people who are so image conscious, they've crafted a certain public image

tailored to what people seem to like that then becomes, you know, like enamoring to people. Like for some reason and maybe this is related to like monarchism, like like, oh, a leader that I can look up to and I believe in and will fuel my cognitive dissonance. It doesn't matter what's true. Like I like that guy and for some reason my affinity for this person makes me feel like I'm in proximity

“to them. I also think, I think you're completely right. I also think that there's another thing”

and if I were to say the biggest lesson I've learned in my life as a professional over the last 30 years is that people are just people. You know, they all get headaches and they all have anxiety and they all want to be loved and and they all want to believe that they're good people doing the right thing and acting on the half of the betterment of society and they want to believe that and I think that what ends what happens is because of media, everyone what people become more

more famous and so on and so forth and we we look at these people and we're like like it's why people get so nervous when they meet celebrities or they meet you know leaders. They're just

people like it's I never get nervous when I go and interview someone or when or because I'm like

you're just a person you probably woke up this morning and you didn't sleep well last night because your dog was sick and your kids and what all these things that we all experience but they make it look like it doesn't happen and and I think that so they create this bullshit narrative around who they are and what they are and that they're gonna live forever or that because I'm a billionaire I'm an expert on everything and it's all nonsense and I think once we get to a point

where people realize it's nonsense maybe that's that's when it changes but I don't know if people want to believe that it's nonsense. Yeah I don't see that happening. I think that they want that they believe that these are the gods right and now we have AI so take open AI for example the storytelling around that and the cognitive dissonance with you know the titans that are at the helm of these respective AI companies who are obviously spinning a yarn and doing some very

advanced storytelling around how we should think about this as they you know kind of accumulate power

the storytelling around AI is two things one is the fear that we're all gonna be killed by AI

“is actually true like I definitely genuinely worry about it but it's also part of their fundraising”

and so you know you've got Sam and Elon and all these people out there being like we're gonna die we need more money to make sure we don't and and or you know and the bucket loads of cash come in it's it's all for them it's about it's a fundraising mechanism and the other thing is someone said to me I did a a story of a vanity fair a couple years ago about AI and creativity and how it was going to replace jobs and so on and so forth and one person said to me a very clever

thinker on this stuff said I'm not worried about AI destroying humanity I'm worried about Sam Altman running an AI company that he will lead to destroy humanity or someone else and the reason for that is because they are so obsessed with being first in the story of you know of the first person to create AGI that they put all the other things aside and the goal is it's about them it's not about the AI it's about the them as the leader of the AI company and and it's what's

crazy as you know wrote in hatching Twitter this was a white box on a screen that you could type 140 characters into look what it did to the world it changed it's it's it's the reason Donald Trump is an office he ran for office many many many times before it's the reason that we have all of the the culture we live in today and that was just a white box with 140 characters now there's

this new box that we can type into that is way more powerful and we're all just doing it without

thinking about what happened the last time and and all these people don't care because they want to be famous in the creation the creator of the last invention there's lip service to safety considerations et cetera but as far as I can tell there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to suggest that any real efforts or deep or or deep work is going into ensuring safe ensuring that you know what these things have guardrails on them and that they are in the public interest it's just this

race forward based on fear and lack like we have to do it before China et cetera it's important

“I'm the one who's in charge you should give your money to me trust me we have no reason to trust any of”

these people and all the evidence suggests that this is going to damage us in ways that we can't even possibly begin to imagine and yet it's so convenient and helpful in the short term and entertaining in the way that in an advanced way in comparison to Twitter and 140 characters allowed us to kind of be lulled into this world of social media that you know I think it's pretty clear to everybody right now has deranged us in ways we couldn't have imagined when you

you wrote hatching Twitter it's deranged us in in so many ways and it's you see it with

you see it with podcasts finally enough you know sure because the incentive structure and

incentive structure like Tucker Carlson like the guests have gotten crazier and crazier Megan Kelly the anger about you know fighting with people that she was once close with or or Ben Shapiro doing the same thing it's like they're all they all just come at each other and then and then the you know the pod save America guys they like go even deeper on the left because it's the incentive structure is the more insane and intense and scary and and the more I pull back the covers on the real thing

the more views I get and the more crazy we get a society and it just it just is this the spiral. I think about this all the time you know yeah podcasting has become all about like they're lying to you or the number one expert who's going to tell you the thing no one wants you to know and unless you're platforming just you know kind of conspiracy adult people or the person with the hottest craziest take the extremism in you know across the board on all sides of the spectrum

you have no chance at garnering eyeballs in getting attention and the incentives to you know

“the incentive structure is such that like if you if you want that then this is what you need to”

do and that's the dollars follow and as somebody who's been doing this show for a very long time I you know from the very early days into now it's like where do we even sit with this anymore you know like there's a reason why do this show there's a purpose and a meaning behind it that I care about and I see these other people and and and how like these other podcasts that have gotten really huge and they're influencing the next generation of podcasters and it has nothing to

accomplish it's just like here's how you get big here's how you get attention it's like attention for what aim for what purpose couldn't agree with you more and it's like you know I thought

I always thought that the debate about whether Hitler was a good person or a bad person wasn't

a debate that's like that guy you know this is where we're at you know from how to the 40 characters to this and people like well maybe we should have that conversation just really saying oh that's interesting about Hitler it's like it's like you're like what are you talking about it's like where how how would these things even a debate like how are they even a conversation like there are way more important things that we should be talking about that are real and and and it's it all

comes down to the incentive structure and this to me is where you know I do believe that the the

“tech elite are evil quite honestly I think that they they know exactly what these things do”

you know Facebook knows there's like so much that has leaked about things that they know they're bad for kids and for society and we in the same with Instagram and Twitter and and and all these social platforms and yet and TikTok and and they do nothing to try to stop it nothing and it and to me look I don't know if there is a god in the universe that there's something but if there is they're not going through those pearly gates the the the things that they have

done with intent and the unintentional but then done nothing about it you know look I mean look it's snap for example there was a period of time that snap was you know the whole point was to so people could have disappearing messages and they wouldn't it was a great intention right

“we want to make it so that you're not posting things on the internet that can come back and”

haunt you later and then fast forward to a year ago the number one cause of death among teens in the United States is fentanyl you know where the one of the top places they buy it snap and so and and there had to be a congressional hearing for them to even make any changes like these things

there are unintended consequences always but our responsibilities to fix those we never know what

they are with technology and then at the same time there are consequences we know exist one example is kids should not be using social media like this it is just so unhealthy I don't have it on my phone because I can't stop looking at it and I'm a grown adult who's written about it for 20 something years and these companies that hide all that data I just think it's completely not a level as some of you know I am in a very different season of training that I've ever been

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“you're somebody who when you put a book out I read it right away like I think people would be”

surprised that I actually don't read that much unless it's a book written by somebody who's coming on the podcast like that monopolizes most of my reading and it kind of crowds out the opportunity for pleasure reading but both of your books I read like immediately when they came out and you have this unbelievable talent for like novelizing nonfiction and you know creating these these books that that that read like thrillers the book on Twitter and the raw sold all

brick book about the silk road we're just amazing works and you're somebody who has a lot of irons in the fire you do all of it like you make documentaries you produce you write you've done scripted television you're you do long-form journalism you know written for vanity fair

“you're even in the process of writing the book and the screenplay for this Martin Scorsese”

movie with the rock about the Hawaiian mafia this has to be perhaps like the most high profile project that you've ever worked on yeah I mean I definitely I have I have ADHD if you haven't noticed that but um and I I've kind of used it as a superpower to just do all different kinds of there's a theme which is storytelling of course and then there's obviously some subtext to it which is somewhat technology but not necessarily technology is in devices because you know the

mafia project you mentioned is set in the 1970s but but yeah I mean I just I love to tell stories and I just I love to take on a new challenge and I don't say that like trying to be hyperbolic

or anyway but if I've never done something before to me that is the most exciting thing because I'm

going to figure out how to do it and I'm going to do it differently because I'm not doing the traditional route and so yeah done journalism and podcast and movies and docs and scripted TV all of it and it's it's it's just my ADHD or I mean I have ADHD I can only do one thing at a time yeah like I just like are right for you it's funny my wife came in the other day into my office and I had two laptops open and I was like working on them she's like what are you

doing and I was like and she took a picture and said it's it's it to a bunch of friends but I was like I can work on two projects once and she was just like you're out of your mind yeah that's interesting mine works in the opposite direction I can do very well if I'm just put blinders on and focus on one thing and my wife is somebody who's doing lots of things at the same time and I'm

just always marveling at that like I don't understand how that works to procrastinate

I do but I can lock into a flow state pretty easily if I'm super into the project that I'm working on and I can lose hours and hours and hours and I really don't want any interference like I just want to be like I want the world to be to disappear and just to be immersed in whatever I'm working on but I can't like gear shift very easily yeah I gear shift I don't procrastinate not a not a procrastinating yeah you don't seem like somebody who has no idea about it

“when I have locked something that ever how do you think about that no I mean well I think in the”

H of AI writer's block doesn't exist anymore it's it's gone there's no longer a blank page because

you've always got something to help you but but yeah I just if I find my if I find the the gear

starting to kind of get a little bored and I'm you know I just am like okay next project and move that over and work on that and and one of the things I learned interestingly I think it's look I don't know what we learn and what we have innate and what we find and so on but I remember at the times when I was a technology columnist I would be on deadline sometimes and I'd have to like run home or I'd have to run into the office and I started writing columns on my phone

on the subway or something like that and then I would finish them and and you just kind of I just learned to just I could do I could write anywhere you know it just doesn't matter I'm just kind of zoned in and pick it up on something else and I just kind of parlay that into all the different kinds of writing I do on all the different projects you didn't start out with the idea of becoming a writer did you I mean your origin story into the New York Times is super interesting I think I'm

there I like there was a world I was like I was gonna end up in jail quite honestly I mean it's

literally like I grew up in England my parents got divorced and I moved to Florida and immediately caught him with like a lot of bad kids and my dad was off doing his own thing and and and it just was there was a world I was going completely different direction and and I had a moment where I'd run away from home I was a teenager and I was working at Jack's burgers in the wall in Florida

“and I feel like this is literally the defining moment of my life quite honestly was I walked”

outside of Jack's burgers I was taking the trash out and there was a homeless guy going to the trash waiting for the next trash back to and I literally was like wow that could be me if I don't pull my shit together and you're all of 17 or something like 16 years old 60s 17 years old and I walked back inside and I was like you know what I'm done I'm going a different direction and that was it and I like stopped talking to all the kids most of who are in jail or dead now that I

knew in Florida and I was like I got to figure it out and my GPA was a 1.9 in high school you have to have a 2.0 to graduate and I was like how do I get I literally was like I've got four months to to get from a at 1.9 to a 2.0 I got to a 2.1 so you know I got to get graduated I mean what was going on at home what kind of chaos happening that you were you know having such a difficult time it was just okay I was like you know parents were divorced they got married to young my dad was

off dating and you know didn't want to deal with me and my sisters and and we we were a lot I was getting in trouble a time I got arrested like nine times it was like it was you know not for like anything crazy like stealing and drinking and fighting and you know complete nonsense but still

like was drugs and alcohol part of that or just truancy and just I was never like I was lucky

that I never got into drugs and I never have and just I just saw what they could do and but I drank a little but you know it wasn't right it wasn't it was more just I just probably was looking for attention or direction or something and you know there was a culture shock of moving from England to Florida and then you had all these I remember all these kids that I became friends within they were similar and like they lived in New York and the parents got divorced or whatever

and they what they got in trouble in New York and the parents were like moving to Florida and so you get like this pirate ship that forms and and I got on the pirate ship and but you have this moment of reckoning I have this moment of reckoning which 30 years later it's still whatever however many years it is it's still literally fresh in my mind like it happened yesterday and I was like I've got it I've got to figure this out otherwise I'm I'm screwed and I mean there are kids that they're

men now but who I was very close with I think like eight of them are dead one of them's on death row from murder a bunch of them you know just one got one was arrested for a bank robbery with his mom like these were the people I was friends with it's a crazy sliding door story I mean because your

“success is so insane and you know in comparison to where you could have been I mean that really”

is you know this this sort of inciting incident like a real transformation as a result of just you coming to it yourself like not because you got locked up it wasn't anything all that dramatic right it was just like a mindset switch well what I think what's fascinating about it is two things

is one is I think we all have an imposter syndrome and I've and I've always been of the mentality of

you know the people who do have that are the ones that work harder and that appreciate it more and so on the ones that feel like oh I deserve to be here they often don't work harder they don't push they're just like this is this is what we're meant to be so I've always every time I've ended up in all these different roles as a director on a documentary for HBO writing a movie from Martin Scorsese is a calmness for the New York Times writing stories that are breaking changing laws or

reading congressional hearings things like that every time I'm like whoa like how did I end up here and and and it's the mentality always had was someone's going to tap me on the shoulder and be like I'm ago and so I've got to do all this stuff that I get I want to do until that happens

“and it's always been this kind of driving force but I also the other thing is like when I think about”

that homeless guy like that homeless guy it's probably dead had no idea that he impacted someone else's

realize but it's it's all filtering out as meaning yeah it has meaning and it has purpose and you know

“whether it's up to us or somebody else it does so you get this 2.0 I get 2.1 2.1 come on give me the”

what I do is that so I got into the only school I could get into was an art school it was a school visual arts in Savannah Georgia that a campus and I didn't I mean I literally couldn't write very well I was because I hadn't really studied in school and I so I made a comic book of my life story and that was my college application and they felt it was creative enough and that was

something I was I was always very creative I was lucky to have that and so I got me into art school

and eventually I was spent a year in Georgia and then I transferred to the New York campus and and I kept the ADHD clicked in so I kept switching majors and so I was like I wanted to be a fine artist and learn how to paint photorealistically and that took six months and I was like oh am I just going to do this for the rest of my life and then I found graphic design I was like oh my god this is amazing and then and then I started I started reading a lot like I fell in love with

“books and my mom always read I was remember when I was a kid she was always she was like blow”

drawing her hair she'd have a book on her lap and and I just started I was of a race suite but I

still never wanted to write I ended up as an art director I designed the very first Britney Spears doll

like I just bounced around to all these different things and eventually became an art director at the New York press and then the New York Times and the goal that I had I'd read all these war photography books and these war books and I was like I'm going to be a war photographer that's it so that was my goal to get to the New York Times so I get to the New York Times and there's two things that happened the first thing is I end up in the business section as the art director but

because I knew tech so well and I'd always understood tech it was just this thing that I could understand I was always suggesting story ideas and like arguing with David Pogue that his thesis was wrong or whatever and so I and I also became good friends with a lot of the editors there because I would help them fix their iPhones and their iPads and stuff because they didn't know how to and at the same time I I'm at the Times and my goal is like I have this portfolio and I want to get it to the

photo editor this woman Michelle McNally and then I'm going to go off and pursue my dream of being a war photographer I was interning for the printer for James Knox to wait you know James Knox is the most unbelievable war photographer of all time his photos are just breathtaking and he had all these printers and I intern for one of them and I you know this was it this was the goal

yeah so one day I finally get Michelle McNally to go out for lunch with me and I sit there and

I give him my portfolio and she opens it up and it was this big orange book and she flips through she doesn't say a word and I'm watching and she closes the book and she goes you're a good photographer and she's like you know you probably be a good war photographer she goes but I'm not hiring to be a war photographer and I was like why not and she goes because you're not fucked up enough and I was like what do you mean she goes all of these guys and these women the do this she's like

they're adrenaline junkies most of them are alcoholics or drug addicts they or they or they need the adrenaline they can't live in normal society and she's like you know they live on they some of them have beautiful houses and they sleep on their floor you know it's like because that's where they're comfortable and after that I was like okay well what's next and that was when I became a writer what's interesting about that is you could have then lobbied her by you

know making your case for yes you're upbringing was and how fucked up you truly are and then you were like you don't know I got a you know I had a one point whatever and you

“got arrested nine times as a kid I'm plenty fucked up yeah I just I think that I”

I'm the kind of person who I go off my intuition and my intuition told me maybe she's right maybe she's right yeah and then you kind of exploit this white space because this is what is this that early 2000s when yeah this is the online aspect of journalism is brand new yeah so it's early 2000s and I we had it the New York Times we had a research lab that was up on the 27th floor I believe and the goal of it was like five six people and the goal was to build prototypes for what the

future of journalism might look like to then inform the newsroom and so on and so it was 2005 or 2006

there was going to be something like the iPad coming out so we built like we took a screen apart

and made it look like a touch screen that you could interact with the news on and so on and so forth and I started doing a lot of public speaking about the future media and things and again with imposter syndrome being like why they invite me and I remember I got a job offer that to go work at Google in the Google news group and I went out for lunch with the editor of the business section at the time so I've become close with and I told him I'm going to leave him

you know and he said you know it's a shame we can't keep people like you and he's like you know all of the people at the paper he's like they're all brilliant and the geniuses but none of them were interested in tech all they want to do is right for the print paper and and I said what do you guys doing with that the tech blog the bits blog by the way and he said well no one wants to write for it we get one post a month and he's and I said I don't even know why I said it it was

literally like a puppeteer came and made my mouth work and I was like I would do it and he said he said really would you like would you really be interested in doing it and I was like sure and he goes why didn't you send me a proposal of what you would do so I sent it to him thinking it was just going to go to him he sent it to the entire tech department and I kind of pissed them off because I'd said how bad their coverage was on the blog and then deal they said let's let's try it

“for a month and and that's that's how it all started I was 33 years old when the first time”

I'd written a professional word and it was in the New York Times it's so unusual like what an

unlikely story for the New York Times to to basically greenlight this guy who actually was not a

writer to be a writer for the most prestigious publication in the world simply because nobody else wanted to do it and it was sort of treated like this bastard stepchild which is all the more insane when you reflect on how tech obsessed we are like people just can't get enough of tech journalism I think it was that you know I remember this really funny moment when I when I first became a reporter and you go to this at the times you go to this it's like an onboarding even if you've been

and if you've been an employee in this department you go to this one you still go through it but when you first start so I was just now starting officially as a as a a reporter and I you go and you go to the one someone on the mastets house for like a dinner and and you meet all the people that have been there their entire careers and lives and someone and and you get to ask them questions but everyone goes around the room and they kind of introduce themselves

at one of them and and that's you know it's I'm Bob so-and-so and I graduated Magda come on from Harvard and it got to me it's like what do I say I got kicked out of art school

“and it's it's I think what it was there was no scenario five years in the future or”

two years in the past that they would have ever hired me but they were in a situation where they they couldn't hire people that wanted to you know those people were going and working I'm starting their own blogs and the other the other people were I only want to be on the page front page of the New York Times I don't care about the internet and so I just found this slither of a doorway that I could squeeze through by accident and then it turned out I was

good at it and you had to do it for some reason and that was it so when people come to you or young people come to you and ask for a career advice or how do I get into this like how do you think

about you know how you were able to you know get those third doors open and you know create

opportunities for yourself that's translatable for the younger generation who's thinking about you know career paths similar to yours well I think I think the furtest two things one is I would say

“you have to you have to be somewhat fearless and willing to make mistakes like I don't”

truly do not this is what like honestly might seem like I do not give a shit what people think of me like I care I want I'm a nice person I want them to know that I'm a good person but like if they don't like my writing I don't care if they don't like that story I don't care like I'm just might you square that with the imposter syndrome the imposter syndrome is I'm not supposed to be here they I don't care is is is a different part of it like the imposter syndrome is someone's going to

tap me on the shoulder and say time for you to leave you're in the wrong building and the the I don't care is I there'll be another constant another building or yeah or it's more like you know I watch people who want to be writers and they have one idea and that's it and it's and they think it's

is a successful writer in Hollywood has 50 things they're working on at once you know 50 different

“ideas and one of them if they're very very very lucky will get made and and you and I think that”

and you also as a journalist you you can't obsess about or even an author that this is it's it's perfect there's no such thing as perfect there's 90% done and you can spend the rest of your life on the next 10% and I and for me I'm okay with 90% like okay let's get it out and we'll do the next one we'll do the next one and my goal is to just get better and learn more and and put these things out out there in the world and I think that that's they're two very different things that makes sense

yeah I understand so not being so precious about your work holding it loosely having a healthy

relationship with expectations around like what's going to happen with it or how people receive it

and I suspect that that indoctrination had a lot to do with the fact that in your early column this day is like you just had to be churn you were churning out like so much so many articles you just had to do it and move on and like not get too caught up and you know making it absolutely you know turning these things into jewel boxes yeah those that's exactly right I remember there was an editor who told me at one point when I became a calmness he said there is a piece of there's a calm

of newsprint every Thursday that it's going to have your name on it and the 1200 words you white you write and if you don't file it you won't have a job and that was it and so I had to literally ensure I knew I wasn't just that it was writing stories and so on and so forth and so

I did the math at some point it was well over a million and a half words I'd written

wow and I barely remember any of it like it's you know I remember a few stories here and there are some themes and things like that but they're just you just got to write it you publish it and you move on to the next one and and sometimes you sometimes you get beat up for it and sometimes

“people love it and you just and that's just it and and I think that the advice I always give to people”

is two things as one is you're you're going to get a better education and writing from reading then you are from someone explaining the structure of you know having ways first opening page and his repetition of words and all these things like that you're going to get a better education from reading and understanding and and that's literally how I've learned how to write in every single form and you know people like corn and pecarties said the same thing like the writing is

reading and iterating on what people have done before you and so my books are they read like novels even though they're narrative nonfiction because I love novel it's all I read is novels and so I want to tell a story and then they also kind of read little like movies because I love reading screenplays and writing screenplays and so but that's all I didn't go to school for writing you know I'm like literally got kicked out of art school like you know it's but you have a visual

mind like if you're very I mean when you're reading your books it's like you just see the movie which made me think like how come these books haven't been turned into movies yet they must be they must have gone through they've gone through a lot 20 you know cycles of development at this point but how come they're not up on the screen yet well it's just I think you know it's a longer conversation about Hollywood and how broken that industry is but but yeah I turn I actually just

learned I have a two two boys that are nine and ten and one of them has really severe dyslexia and my wife was was helping him with some of the phonetics of reading I can't do phonetics

“I did I learned that because I couldn't when she was saying things I was like that's how”

that's how you do and what I've realized is I also have some form of dyslexia and and what I I don't imagine words in my head I can't picture a word but I can picture an image and then I can describe the image so that's just the way my brain works and so that's how I write so I imagine the movie and then I tell you what's happening in the movie I imagine the scene it's all visual and then it's put into language as a writer your your talent is really storytelling like this

reverence for how to tell a story well which is reflected in the books that you write but also is mirrored in these tech moguls that you've done these deep dive profiles on and their relationship with storytelling so I want to spend a few minutes talking about how you think about storytelling and it's important and how we should all sort of be thinking a little bit more in depth about

I'm telling you your story you're telling me a story based on what you're wearing what I drive where I live the way I talk to people my everything we do is a story and there are different ways to approach it in different mediums you tell the story differently like one of the things I find fascinating about nonfiction versus fiction even if it's a short story or news article is like in a news article you have what's called the lead which is your way into the story

then you have the nut graph which is telling you that's the second paragraph which tells you

what the whole story is about and then at the end you have what's called the kicker which is the best part of the story right it's the part that you you leave with in fiction it's completely the way around you start with the best part of your story and then you kind of go through it and at the very end you kind of tell us what it's about and so on and and I think that with all different kinds of

“storytelling you have to approach it differently one of the things that I've found”

the most challenging as a writer it's screenwriting I think it's the hardest form of writing there is there's no no more difficult form because you can't use exposition you can't every scene has to ask a question that another scene answers then ask the question and so on and so forth every character is trying to get in the other's way one character every voice has to sound distinct and different all those all these rules and you're showing

you can never tell you can never tell someone's interior and what they're thinking and so I find it

all very fascinating how the different forms of storytelling work for our brains to be able to kind of understand it and and and that to me is one of the most fun parts of moving between all these different projects yeah in screenwriting every line of dialogue every setup every kind of slug line has to reveal something about character and advance the story and and illustrate the themes you know and

“you have to do it with such incredible economy like it has to be just still down to its very”

essence yes so that the godfather is is one of the best examples because the theme is about family the characters are all very very different and there what's the what's so incredible about the godfather and why it's silent is one of the best movies is you've got the godfather right and then you've got his four kids and each kid is a different facet of the godfather's personality which all you know one's a goofball the others holding it together the other things he's

he's cocky he's in charge and and there's the love and so on and so forth and each character drives the forward the story for it's so it's all those things that are happening and and if you have one single line of dialogue that that isn't right you're entire feeling about these characters changes and everyone has to have agency and there's a there's obstacles it's a really really

“challenging form of writing and I think it's why there are so few good movies in Hollywood quite honestly”

fewer and fewer fewer and it's the thing the other thing I would say is I don't think there are a lot of good writers out there great writers out there and that's not a disson society or people or whatever I just think that there are it is it is such a difficult thing to do really really really well that there are only certain brains that can do it according to McCarthy for example you couldn't teach what that guy did not teach and he didn't even when you'll do read the

interviews and the view that he did like he always said like I don't know where it comes from

it's like and I think this is some of some of the greatest artists say this like Chris Martin had this great line in a documentary where he said this song came to me from wherever songs come from and I and Carter McCarthy was like this something in my subconscious that like the told me to do this and I think it's the people who are the greatest artists I think are the ones that are most in tune with that and it doesn't it doesn't mean the people that aren't shouldn't write they

should do the things they want to do but I think like the great or there's so few of them getting out of their own way opening this channel to the subconscious and you know and kind of sitting in this space of allowing it for it to show up and flow from hand to page yeah and Rick Ruben talks about this about how about about that specifically I think it's I believe that you know I still don't know if I believe that there's a point to all this or we're just some little accident or simulation

the stories happen and whether it's a collective consciousness and we you know some people have a

little a little pin-pric doorway but I do truly believe that that is really where a lot of this are comes from. Well despite the fact that movies seem to be not so good these days we're not going to ever reach a point where we lose our appetite for great storytelling but it is an interesting cultural moment in that you know we're kind of in this period of time in which we've lost our reverence for the great novel like this is something I talked about James for Ion here we talked

about this I Bruce Wack do you know Bruce Wagner I had him on it's right season credible transgressive novels that are really just fantastic and you know just like nobody's reading these

books you know we're not in that era that you know you and I were around probably around the same age

like when you know these people were like rock stars you know and everybody couldn't wait

“for their next book and that doesn't seem to be the case anymore I think there's a few things”

that have happened as far as books there it's funny enough the book industry has not shrunk to the degree that people believe it has it's actually grown in some years and the reason is there's a couple of reasons one is that audiobooks have opened up a whole new a whole new genre of reader and then most of those you know it's like the werewolves and the vampires and all that stuff you get these kind of subcultures that have risen up as a result of the ability

to write books like this and the other thing that's happened is I mean I think one of the worst things that's happened is actually book talk and and TikTok is a result of because I don't think that they're driving a lot of the sales to some of the worst writing out there and people will call me an asshole for saying this and they have before but but I just it really saddens me when meaning like just sort of low-ranking fiction yeah look we all love a good

“good like crime novel or romance novel whatever but there are also things I believe with every”

ounce of my being that the reason that we are supposed to write these stories is to make people think it's we are as a storytellers our job is to is to hold a mirror to society through a story you know Amran said this she's like Iron Man she said that to her novel is a way to make society think about things I think she pushed people to try to think in a certain way but like to me that is what the the whole point of all of what we're doing it's like sure to elucidate some truth about

human nature or the world to help us make sense of come out why we're here and it's why we consume these days why we want the emotion you know whenever you're pitching a story in Hollywood people are

always like what's the characters emotional drive and it's like and first you hear that and you're

like what are you talking about it's that's set in space it's great and then you realize like it could be set anywhere it doesn't matter it's about the characters and how we relate to the characters

“and and I think that just why there's never you know there's never a great movie about billionaires”

because no one can relate to being a billionaire and so or most of us can and I think that what's both been great is there are more readers today who do consume in different forms but at the same time the sad part is that the the the the the greats are not right like they once were and there isn't that that sort of monoculture moment where you know some genius just you know drop some work that lands like a a thought and rocks everybody correct but I still think that there is

something perennial about writing books that has twisted the the kind of gestalt of everything that we consume was sort of uploaded in the last 24 hours like there's a staying power you know if you write a great book it can make an impact in a way that you know other forms of media still can't I I completely agree I I just I wish that I wish that people would put down their phones a little bit more and stop scrolling to mislead scrolling and and just read a book I mean I every

I remember a racist reader I and at night I put my phone aside and I pull up my candle and and I you know try to go through a book a week at least if I can and and I read a lot of older stuff mostly from 1950s 60s 70s a lot of old sci-fi and because I just feel like it was like the height of it but it's um I found it so much more rewarding than than even most TV these days

100% of them happen outdoors on mountains in lakes and oceans getting muddy in the local

“creek riding my bike around the neighborhood basic good stuff that leaves me thinking a lot about”

what kind of world we're leading behind for the next generation and this in a nutshell is what Rivian is all about they're an all electric vehicle company founded on a simple idea keep the world adventurous forever I've been around RJ the CEO and his kids and so clear to me that this is his animating purpose but he's not just thinking about them he's making decisions based upon what our kids kids will inherit which I love and that philosophy is just deeply embedded in everything

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the interiors use thoughtful sustainable materials that feel premium and intentional and the first

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purchase of a website or domain we have this fascination with these tech tightens we can't get enough of interviews with them and there is a we hope we're gonna let it's like this oh maybe I could be that person someday or what would it be like to be a billionaire like this lurid you know kind of fascination with how these people live their lives that that lure us into kind of a romantic relationship with them while also like that's the cognitive dissonance piece like we know that Sam Altman is most likely

steering us off a cliff yes and yet you know we're like what Sam Altman doing what's he up to is he a genius what's happening like and then we're using open AI every single thing it's like yeah they're not they're not yet insane and the history of humanity is just barrel forward and break things and we'll deal with the repercussions later but the repercussions in this context are so exponentially beyond anything that our species has ever faced and yet we're still really not course

“correcting for this well I think that the I think it's the first technology in human history that”

can wipe out human history I don't believe the note nukes could have done that that's a world maybe potentially but you know all of the studies that I've read all the research I've read state department reports so on and so forth you know you only need 150 people to survive for society to flourish

society can come back from that and you know the predictions were always you know we still have a

billion people on the planet maybe Antarctica looks like Los Angeles but like the planet still survives most of that and and the same with chemical weapons like chemical weapons they tried it in World War II and the reason it didn't work out was because of the wind because the wind would blow the chemical weapons back in the German's face and they would and so that didn't work AI is in my opinion the first technology that could literally wipe us off the face of the

it is not catastrophic you know hundreds of thousands of people died in Hiroshima and

Nagasaki and and then we were like wow nuclear bombs are really dangerous you try to make sure that doesn't happen again and the same with other technologies and and so on and so forth the question is with AI will it be too late once we realize oh that was a bad idea what's your suspicion on that my suspicion is that if you look at technology in terms of warfare we every new technology we build is one that can be used for both good and bad right and

in the beginning and the early days when we were living in caves and stuff like that when we realized we could kill something where the rock we could kill one person maybe a few and then you were probably going to get killed with someone else's rock you get to this point where guns come along and you can kill more people you know maybe you know maybe a few with the ones that you stick the bullet in and they old in the like you know the old days then you get to machine guns

you can now kill hundreds and so on and so forth each new technology allows us to kill more more

“so now we get to nukes where at hundreds of thousands I believe AI is in the billions”

if used correctly by someone nefarious and so the question is what is that number and how who is the person that ends up using it because what's happening with technologies it's making it does this what I say people don't think small enough is the way I think about it less and less people create the thing that can destroy the world and and the thing that can be destroyed the world is even smaller than the thing from before and so I think that we will have

an instance my prediction is that we will have an instance where it is used in a catastrophic way

and the question is does it kill a hundred thousand people or does it kill five billion people

and after that there will be safeguards put in place likely but the question is how many people die in the process and what is your sense of how it would kill people like is it is it just you know creating a meltdown at the local nuclear facility or like what is the means by which people are going to die as a result of it well if you actually put my scream right or head on for a second like yeah there's the classic like um you know the the power gets shut off there's a state department

report that says and if the power gets shut off in America 95% of society is dead within a year a lot more people you know hundreds of thousands are dead in the first few weeks like you cut your finger there's no medicine that's coming to you there's you have the water gets dirty you die of you know if they're there there's all these different things that happen literally just turning off the power grid yeah there's the just turning off the power grid yeah

literally nothing else super easy the uh the uh the thing that people there's that great saying that they're nine uh hot meals between anarchy and um sorry between uh it's a society and anarchy

“I think we're down to about four hot meals at this point I don't think we'd get to nine”

we're just on a trigger yeah you know after COVID everybody's ready to pound so I don't think it would take that many days and I think like and and we've learned that like there will be no comedy among men like it you know we will just immediately pivot to antagonism completely one thousand

percent and and we never think at all through like I you know I I was working on a movie about

about like an apocalyptic movie right before COVID so I was doing lots of research into all the things that could go wrong and I found out about COVID in China before it was like a mainstream thing and so I was like oh my god we have to I was like this is gonna be really bad and we have to get food and I stocked the basement my wife or my sister everyone thought I was out of my mind like pre NBA suspending it's way way way yeah two months before and um and um and it was just

like a lock it wasn't like I was some foresightful genius it was just literally like oh my god that could be really bad and I'd been living in my own head about all the things that could go wrong in society but you know what I didn't do I didn't get toilet paper I didn't get an extra can opener I didn't get masks because I didn't know like so you can't even plan for the worst case scenario

“or extra bottle water and whatnot I had a lot of chips like um pasta but um but I think that”

the the other thing is like there are things that an AI could do today that could kill

the bank the senior manager's voice and they call to do a transfer if you heard about these

“I haven't heard about those so there's versions of this like that one and I think it was in”

is somewhere in Europe and Italy or something and they they they um or Sweden or something like that but that there was a uh transfer that was done because they faked the um uh the the bosses

voice using AI and told in the transfer of fifty million dollars whatever it was to to another

account um so imagine that you have an AI that says okay um we are going to poison the food supply or poison the water and they call oh can you ship this to the or whatever or they change they they they have them change some some numbers or something like that there's so many scenarios that you could just literally using a social engineering hack from an AI do things there's all the drone warfare stuff there's a million things that could go wrong um and we can't think of them all

and and so how do we plan for them yeah I have no idea I have no idea but on the subject of AI screenwriting uh and pandemics the kind of inciting incident for me reaching out to you it took us a while to get our schedules in line for you to come here um was on the heels of me listening to Scott Z burns is uh audible like yeah I guess it was a podcast limited series sort of like an audio book or an audio documentary um in which Scott Z burns legendary screenwriter responds to

this this seeming desire out in in Hollywood and in the world to come up with a sequel to the movie contagion uh the movie contagion sort of have this second life during COVID because it's so there was so much fidelity in that movie to kind of what we all experience it's I remember watching it at the very beginning of the pandemic and and and I've now watched it again since then and I was

like this movie is incredible like it just literally unbelievable yeah and and everybody wants a sequel

to it Scott's like yeah but I just I can't see any compelling reason to create a sequel to this I can't think of uh a premise that would be worthy of the time and investment that it would take to create a movie and it goes on this journey thinking like well what if I use AI to come up with a valid premise and it's this really engrossing kind of uh deep dive into what AI can do in in terms of uh creative storytelling and you know Steven Sodaburg is part of it and there's one point where Scott

reaches out to you and you're sort of the AI optimist in this equation so explain like your role in how you use AI as a as a writer um well I will say that I'm a I consider myself a technology

“realist um I can see the good and the bad and all of it and I think every technology does have good and”

bad um you know I think that some technologies have more bad than good social media for example um is one of those uh cars are great but one put two million people dive or you're still still to the stage driving cars and and um and you can new killer bombs new killer power like this you

just go through all of them and there's always a good and a bad form so I do see the good and

the bad I think as far as AI goes I you know uh massive job loss the potential end of humanity that's like you were actually having this conversation but just put that aside for a second however I also then get allows us to tell better stories quicker to think about new ways of telling stories and it enables people to tell more stories um you know I believe Hollywood is about to enter it's mp3 moment um and it's mp3 moment is where you know anyone with a computer or an iPad or

whatever it is will be able to make a movie that looks like mission impossible in their bedroom there will be good parts of that that we can all tell those stories there'll be bad parts of that and um and to me you know I was I'd a writers room a Netflix for a show I was doing right when Chatchee to P came out and and after the room was done I was like oh can I make my own writers room and I've I've done that and I do that uh for my own projects and um and it's

it's not like ever placed people's jobs because it wouldn't be able to hire my own writers room

“for my own projects but but it is uh I think there's incredible benefits to I use it I mean I”

did it I tried to count the other day I mean I think I use it like 5,000 times a day I have agents

at the same time and um I needed a website that I I was doing some work on a script and

and whenever you use cloth and things like that um you uh this the quotes are always straight

straight quotes and they should be curly quotes I couldn't find a website that would curl them and didn't have ads so I just use replet and I made my own website curlmyquotes.com it's like

“that I couldn't have done that before and like and I think that it enables you to do more”

in less time and tell better stories so in the audio documentary which is called uh what could possibly go wrong I think it was got what could go wrong you enter the picture and you kind of counsel Scott on how he can create his own writers room yeah essentially by um by giving birth to bespoke series of of AI bots each of which has its own personality its own backstory its own degree of expertise and so Scott creates this writers room there's a virologist and there's a conspiracy

theorist and there's a you know like all and then these people end up and he's got his studio head and his agent and these people are all in communication with each other and there's like a whole ecosystem that gets created and this is something that you've done you alluded to and what you just

shared which is absolutely fascinating like I'd never thought of AI in that context like I use

it as a research tool but as somebody who's writing a book right now like I'm very reluctant to share like my actual prose with an AI like I don't want any kind of like I want to write the my book I wanted to be a human created book I want to take advantage of AI's research tool but I don't ever want to be accused of like AI having its fingerprints on anything that like I've written myself but I don't think it's so I'm not I'm not going along to to Claude and

saying write this book for me because it couldn't do it it just it couldn't but I do go along to Claude so one example of the way I use AI is I just have just finished this book for with Twain Johnson on the company the mafia in Hawaii and we have 5.5 million words of research for the book newspaper articles from the 1940s all the way to the 1980s that were all taken from slides like microfibre fish and so on and so forth I have a researcher whose name is Nick and call Nick

2.0 and we we went to the National Archives we got all the court documents boxes that have never

been opened in 50 years thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of page of court documents when I wrote American Kingpin there was no AI so what I would do is like I did like I had an Excel spreadsheet that like had all the dates and the times and everything but I would have to

“remember what to search for oh like oh he was wearing orange so I'd search for the call and then”

I would piece it all together right what I did with with this book and what I do with the screen place I'm working on and so on that are all based on some some sort of reality is I use cursor which is actually most people use it for programming and I use it for both programming and writing and and I have my own agents that are specifically designed for for what I do and then I can have them take the microfiche turn it into text and so on and so forth and then I can ask

questions like oh what were some of the interesting things that happened during the trial? What were you know tell me the story about the murder of of Monti and Vazi tell me like and so it gets all those things and then I can go read those those parts of the trenches but I don't have to go through yeah 5.5 million words of research and so the other thing I do is while I'm writing so do you know what a TK is so in journalism oh like you'll get to it later you move on

“yeah so journalism whenever you're writing on deadline and you need to fill something in later you”

write TK so two letters next to each other and it's the the greatest thing I've ever learned in my life because there's no word in the English language that has a TNK next to it so you can search at the end right before you go to press for TK and if it's like a fact about like the number floors of a building or the guys you know job title or whatever you fill those in so usually I would go and I would do finding a place and do the research and so on so what I do now is I as I'm writing

I'll be like the person you know this guy's walking down the street on TK street and he runs into TK guy and did it and then I write it and it's all in my style and then I give it to one of my agents and I say go go go fill in the TKs from all the research and it doesn't and it gives me me I have to give me all the things so that to me has saved me a week's worth of work so I'm still doing the writing but it's filling in the little details that you know or like I'll remember

from reading the dialogue between two characters and I'll write it and then I'll say go check it

with a screenplay you know I'm writing the screenplay but I'll say like this is one way a lot of

“people I know use it like this paragraph is too too much exposition give me 10 versions of how”

to take the exposition out and then it gives it to me and then I rewrite it again and that's it and so it's it's just thinking it's not writing the book it's not writing the screenplay it's just helping me to come up with with with things and then at the end of it I will you know one thing I did with with the recent book I did I uploaded the whole book and I said are there any characters that need closing out or are there any moments that don't float but give me a full critique

on it and it gave me a bunch of notes and I was like great I went back and fixed them. Can you create bots for the characters like the Duane Johnson character and then and then test to say is this something this person would say based upon all of this 5,000 you know pages of research that you have fed it well so there's a couple of things I did that are like that so

“one thing I did was I had an agent and they're super easy to make like they're really not you”

can just go to clothing say tell me how to make an agent that does acts or that skills whatever it's not that hard but you one thing I did that was really fascinating recently was I was writing about these monsters specifically and I those some parts I just didn't understand like from a mentality standpoint so I had I had an agent that created the characters and then I could interview the characters they're dead yeah so I can't like it's fucking wild so I'm like what's it like to

bury someone alive like what does that feel like and like and it's it's looking at like it's got the information I have the interviews I've done and so on and so forth and then it's also looking at research online and everything and so I'm literally having a conversation with a dead person and oh what's it like another example was part of the book takes place in the movie

takes place during World War II so there's this amazing opening of the book where I'm not going to

give it away but it's a very visual moment during Pearl Harbor so I wasn't in Pearl Harbor right I could go read a few books and that I said I want you to be a person who is who is there in Pearl Harbor on day that the bombs dropped and I want to ask you questions like what does it smell like what does it look like what are you hearing where are the planes coming from all these questions and it gives it to me and then I go like a right based on that quote unquote interview

with it yeah that's wild it isn't a binary thing I mean that's incredibly helpful and powerful and in the scoutsy burns audio documentary it's like the premise that AI comes up with for this contagion two is a fucking banger yeah you know like this I would watch this movie and he was

“not coming up with that on his own but I think that the the the the misnomer is that you're gonna”

the the misnomer is this it's that AI will be will be able to write the next scomerim car the book I do believe that is going to happen you do I do believe that I think that we are that's terrifying that's which is terrifying I think we're a long ways away from it but I do believe we're gonna maybe not a long way maybe a couple of years I don't know but and I haven't wrapped my head around what that means I do have some thoughts and we can talk about it but but

for the for the rest of the for now you still need a human to write those stories you still need a human to direct the AI because these LLMs have been created on the entirety of everything written in the past you know X number of hundreds of years and I mean this in the kindest possible way possible most people can't tell a fucking story and most people can't write and they're really bad at it and so it is being trained on everything including that and most of it is that you know

and so the it's not looking at the the best writers it's looking at all of it and so in training them equally and it's treating them equally in fact it's giving more weight to the worst ones because there's more of them and so you still need a human to say that's a terrible idea that's cheesy there's a thing that a lot of the a lot of the all of the AI's do and when you ask it to write a screen a scene in a screenplay to one of the classic things in a screenplay

is you come into the scene late you leave the scene early which means you never walk in the door

and you never walk out the door you come in mid argument it can be four lines of dialogue when you ask an AI to write a scene even if you tell it to come in late and leave early it will

know how to do any of that stuff yet and I think it's a a while away until it does I mean I

“take comfort in that but as we progress towards an AI that can write like Kormack McCarthy or in”

a indistinguishable fashion the question is like what is the human role in the midst of this and you know there's a bunch of holobaloo around these clips that were shared on social media where it was like a fight scene with Brad Pitt you know like and it looked pretty realistic right but you still look at it and you're like yeah I don't give a shit because like I know this is fake and this isn't the real people and you know as human beings part of the attraction to that type

of storytelling is the human element is knowing that there was somebody behind that with a creative inspiration to create that the question is does that matter when we are looking at something that's indistinguishable or not and you don't think it does you think that's that's sort of a romantic idea that humans are hanging on to because yeah there's I do feel like right now at least and obviously weren't early days you know authenticity is at a premium like we're we're sort of tired of the

AS AI slop and when you see something that you know is real or a person that you can trust like that has value let me ask you question if I so you like core of a car they too right we'll use

him as an example if if I came along and I said I found his unwritten novel it's amazing you

got to read it and you read it and you were like this is amazing and then afterwards has it you was written by an AI would you feel differently yeah I don't I don't know like you would

“still have enjoyed the novel right I think that but then I would be I would be disappointed I think”

upon hearing that news in the afternoon if you'd be disappointed in the aftermath but but my point is is that you will appreciate the art equally the same whether it's written by an AI or the real common McCarthy and I think that if a when you look at that fight scene that everyone was sharing it's still at a little bit a a little bit of AI in there eventually it won't and it just won't and and I think that once we get to that point if it's a good story people won't give a

shit if it's written if it's made by a person or not and they won't give a shit if it's a real actor if it's a fake actor I think that there will be some people in society that will say like I will only can yeah I can imagine books in the bookstore that says written by a human like I'm not condoning any of this in any way shape of form like if I could build a time machine and go back to 1960 when people wrote on typewriters I would be happy too but I just see that this is

the future it does seem inevitable to me though that we're in this recursive loop of degradation because these AI tools are only as smart as what we feed them and as the internet is increasingly populated with AI generated material it's like we're making facsimiles of facsimiles of facsimiles and we're not seeding it with the best of what humanity has to offer and we're seeding it with less human creativity and inspiration so Chromach McCarthy is a one of one and he comes along

and writes in a way no one else does and that elevates the human spirit but we need those people to come and kind of refresh how we think about literature or choose your art form or whatever the specialty is and if those people don't and they're not feeding the AI then we're just training it on what exists and it becomes this lowest common denominator thing and that can't help but kind of delay in it we know we just Korean towards idiocracy

“I think we've Korean towards it or I think we'll pass that point I'm not condoning any of this I”

want to say that like to me I said this on a podcast if you last year and got all these people mad at me but I'll say it again I don't care I think calling Hoover is a terrible writer all right and and hurt she had that one point seven books on the New York Times best sellers because of TikTok and so on and so forth and I don't hold it against her I'm not saying I'm

Korean McCarthy in any way shape or form just I'm like I can list a million other terrible writers

but what bums me out is there are so many incredible books by incredible writers that make you think and that's the stuff that's on the top of the New York Times best sellers but it's because we go to this lowest common denominator now and my hope and this is literally just my hope is that what AI can do is help us guide us to back to something that is not slop and I think if it's

doesn't it's not going to change it's not it's whatever but there is a scenario and this is my hope is that the scenario allows us to make better stories that pushes to think more and so on and so forth the question is is anthropic going to say oh we're only going to use the top one percent of writers and then we're going to train the A's on that and then they're going to be more creative and so on and so forth or is it what's going to happen I don't know I do believe

that no matter what that the most creative people will always have a job of telling stories

whether they are coming up with an idea and telling an AI to write the book or whatever it is

“but I truly do believe that I think it's going to be like the art world where you have”

50 people that make a living and the rest of them paint flowers in their bedroom and that's it but I do believe that that's the case but I think that to say that we're not going to consume AI content because it's garbage like we consume a lot of garbage today storytelling is not going away but the thing that worries me the most in this shorter term window of rapid AI advancement is the incentive structure behind good storytelling because

we are already in a post-truth world like and a great story using AI and visuals that are

indistinguishable from reality has the capacity to manipulate the masses into name your idea right so this is something that is easily weaponized like we don't know what's real anymore and we don't know that person that we recognize who's saying that thing whether they actually set it and even if we're told it's fake the research shows that we still kind of believe it you know even if we're told it's AI and what is this doing to human mind and to

the capacity for the human animal to maintain coherent societies like I just said that it's like yes yeah this is this is how we're going to destroy ourselves I think in short run I completely agree and that's that's the biggest worry I think that you know in the the attack on Iran recently Iran was using just basic AI tools like strategy to make fake videos or Gemini I don't know which ones they were using but they were using these basic AI tools to make fake videos of them

bombing Israel destroying it and then they were putting that on television it's for everyone in Iran to believe that they they're winning the war it's like you know there are news clips there was a news clip that I'm on a text right with a bunch of screenwriters and one of the guys was like oh my god did you see Iran is agreeing to to all of the U.S. terms and it was a CNN clip of Jake Tapper and the only reason I could tell it was AI was because Jake's hair looked

too good and but it was it was an AI clip and it's like enough to convince you enough to very smart screenwriting front yeah like this is just terrifying to me it's terrifying and I think but but technology technologies come up and technologies these are then come up to take on the other

“technology yeah but this is not Napster it's not but the only way that we survive this is is”

even the technology that is used to create it there's other ones that are used to fight the the bad ones sure but that is analogous to the detection of performance enhancing drugs like the

yeah it's always ahead of the detection system and the the correction system one thousand

percent and I and I I'm not saying I'm not being an optimist in this I'm just I'm just I know that's where we'll end up again it's the worry of how much bad happens before we figure out how to solve the and what is your sense of the timeline here it's well the problem is it's what's fascinating is um you know always been I you know is when I was a kid I love computers so much I used to go on weekend to the local corner shop in in England and get the new coding magazine

and right you know basic code and stuff and I've always been obsessed with tech and just the something about it that I'm so I mean I I'm fascinated about technology from a human standpoint it

“is it is the only thing I think that really truly separates us from other creatures and other”

creatures make art and music and so on and so forth technology is the one thing that we do that really truly separates us and yet it is inevitable that it will be the downfall of us and we can't stop ourselves and I'm fascinated by that and it is also the other thing I'm fascinated by is that we are obsessed with technology because we want to be able to do things quicker

the thing that we immediately go to is back to these cavemen that will beat each other up

“for food and so on and so forth so there's this crazy dichotomy with the way we as humans work”

and I'm fascinated by it and you know if if right now there was some nuclear attack in the power and how like you and I would be like out in the street with baseball bats when we haven't had a meal in four days and like and we literally go to that lowest comment denominator as as as as people we go to there are animal instinct so that I'm fascinated by as and as far as the the AI question goes I do believe that there's a scenario where it could be used for good

but I also know that there's a lot of scenarios where it will be used for bad and the thing that's crazy is I've been doing that's already true it's already true it's going to get more remarkable

advancements that are happening is like disease prevention and like cures and like just incredible

shit yes and but there will be there will be bad lots of bad and and the question is we haven't really seen the real bad yet we just haven't hasn't come about there's little video clips in this that and the other there's people who get scammed and and so on and so forth we haven't seen like that we haven't seen the real bad it's coming it's just inevitable and and what's been so insane to to witness for me is as someone who has been using technology their whole life has right

been writing about it from more than two decades it's how quickly it's happened and I had this moment recently so one of the things I do when I do pitches is I create these AI images that I walk people through as I'm pitching the story um I find it really like a great way to tell to tell a story and I use mid journey for it and and I I started using it about a year ago for this and I was went to the bottom of my mid journey feed and the first images were so horrifically bad

compared to what we can do today and that's in like a year and so there's no I have never seen

a technology grow as fast as this it's astounding and it's exponential it's going to continue to do it as it gets smarter and so the question is well become self improving it becomes self improving and it it's on a daily basis you know every single day there's this competition between deep seek and Gemini and anthropic and and open AI and so on to quickly get the more models and more tokens and more you know and the question is is um what goes wrong and when and how do we how do we

prepare for and the yeah we there's no answer to those questions yeah and it is an interesting quirk of the human animal that we know all of this and yet we're like well we're just barreling

“forward anyway because that's what we do that's fascinating that that's sort of informs the”

argument that like maybe human beings are just intended to be the sex organs of this new form of

life and that's our that's ultimately like the end game of our entire purpose and it doesn't

really matter whether we survive or not I you know it's interesting I heard the story years and years ago from a friend who was with the dinner where Elon Musk and Larry Page got into the fight about but you know the story uh yeah we're at Larry's house Elon was sleeping on his couch and and they were talking about AI way before any of us were talking about it and and Larry Page had said allegedly to Elon that you know robotics are they're the future of this um of humanity

like they're sorry that it's the next iteration of humanity they're ever of evolution that's sorry and Elon got really mad he was like what do you mean he's like well that's it it's just evolution and Elon and him started arguing and Elon said you're you know Larry Page accused Elon of being

“specious and um and I remember at first hearing that and being like what a psycholary pages”

and then you kind of see it all and you're like well maybe that's maybe that's it I don't know it's here we are and Elon is creating the robots basically like they they stopped creating the model S in the model X yeah so that they could allocate resources towards their robotics department yeah and it's and it's like we know what the we know the future we know what it looks like but we we like yeah it's gonna be bad but here we go yeah and what I find so fascinating I'm sure you've had this conversation

is this that exactly what you said you laughed so when I talk to people where it didn't didn't part of you're something me my wife and it'll come up and I'll tell them like all my theories of like what it is and then people like there's a silence and then there's a laughter you like we know what someone almost gets hit by a car and they laugh right afterwards like there's a silence and laughter and then people will be like so what do you guys want to do for

it comes out and it's grinding our teeth at night or whatever however it comes out but it's like

it's it's so fucking fascinating that we know it's gonna go wrong and yep and I know it's gonna go wrong and after this I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna sit at my laptop and I'm gonna talk to an agent and it's like like and that's just a weird cognitive dissonance kind of thing what's the other version of it you live in the woods and wait for someone else to do it you're balancing these polarities of like existential dread while also being kind of amazed that we're alive at

this period of time where we're giving birth to this thing and there is like you're watching a

movie like what's gonna happen next like it's exciting but how old are your kids nine and 10 nine

and 10 okay so my my kids are older but your kids being younger are that's even more of a of a oppression case like how do you think about the world that they're going to inherit and what do you say to young people who are wondering like where should I place my attention what should I be doing right now to prepare for this thing that none of us can kind of really imagine what it's going to look like and what the skill sets are that we're going to need I truly don't know the

yeah I truly don't I don't know if I were me and if you don't like I were me okay and I was I was just coming out of art school at this point I would not I would have dropped out of art school probably

“to be quite frank but I always believe I think I truly do believe that the the most important”

thing that humans do is tell stories and I would continue to try to figure out how to tell stories good stories that try to that have an impact on society that is positive quite frankly I know this may sound bullshit but it's truly what I believe like so to me if I were coming out today as from art school or trying to get a job as whatever it was that I was doing or trying to be a writer my number one goal would be how do I tell stories that try to make sure it's society

doesn't end up in the worst catastrophic place whether that's I wouldn't have done this but like becoming an influence or they're trying to talk about the good and the bad and the diddle to the it's like it's the only thing that we can do to control it is to tell stories about what it could be and to make people think about it and so my answer is that you know and it's why I'm still doing it now because I believe like I believe that you know the the the the the mafia book that

I'm writing with Dwayne it's just about the mafia but it's about colonialism it's about right and wrong and and what happens to be it's like that it's about much bigger things and I think that

“we as a species that's how we learn is through story and the only way to try to save the species”

is to tell better stories I think that I that that chuckle that we have when we're kind of confronted with this reality is a reflection of our discomfort with uncertainty and the truth of the matter is that

the world has always been tremendously uncertain and the human mind like to like to fabricate rules

and and create structures that that that foster the illusion of certainty and predictability but nothing really is certain it's just that with AI the uncertainty factor is through the roof all of a sudden and and we're just fundamentally wired to be uncomfortable with that yeah um but in terms of like the anxiety levels of the adults who are trying to make sense of this perhaps there's something to be said for just being in a relationship with your relationship with

uncertainty you know that's trying to find some peace in that and understanding that you know it's been uncertain all along I totally agree I mean it's it's why people are drawn to really word drawn to religion because they're not as much anymore because that created boundaries around uncertainty right it's that there are rules and there's a reason and you have to trust in God and Jesus and whatever other the other thing that this religion you believe in says and it's as a society as

societies we've we've pulled away from that at a time when we probably need it more than ever

“and I think it's it's a really a stupid point to say like you have to be okay it's like that”

saying in in AA like about being okay with not being okay yeah there is there is a somebody's been in AA for a long time like it's all about powerlessness like we really don't have control over

to things that happen and given an acceptance of that powerlessness how do we find peace happiness meaning etc so I read this Nietzsche quote that was was it was actually really interesting so here it is so what if someday or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you this life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once more and innumerable times more would you not throw yourself down a national teeth and curse the

demon who spoke this or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered

him you are a God and never have I heard anything more divine and the point that he's trying to make

is you know that you are living the life that you're meant to live if you'd be okay living it over innumerable times and so that to me is like I am so fucking lucky that I ended up telling stories because it's what I meant to do I don't know why I don't know it's literally it's it gives me a calmness it makes me it's why I love writing books like most people hate writing books I fucking love it there's nothing I enjoy more than than the challenge of telling a story in 110,000 words

and and and I think if you told me I have to write books every day for the rest of you the you like you the civilization or whatever it is like I'd be the happiest person ever and I think that to me that's really what it's all about and it's if you if you know that you're doing that that you that you you comfortable with the fact that you are living this life that you're

“meant to live then that's what it's all about that's the meaning and that's man's search for”

meaning that is it and it could be like maybe you love branding you love running you love climbing towers like you love podcast and whatever it is it's about finding that thing and I think none to me and that that to me is what it's all about and until the AI kills as well. I think that's beautifully put I would only add to that that perhaps amidst this uncertainty or being in the eye of this AI hurricane that maybe we can appreciate the moment a little bit more like

if this is truly everything's transient but now it just is like you know it's on a shorter time frame like okay well if this is gonna go away or things are gonna look very different and an unpredictable fashion like in a very short period of time let's try to really appreciate the lives that we have right now and like yourself I feel extremely lucky to be able to do what I do and

“sit across people like yourself and and learn from them. No it's I completely agree and I think”

one of the biggest somebody said this to me 15 years ago when the 17 years ago so when the iPhone first came out they had a very prescient point which was my biggest worry is not the screen

and this and that it's that we will never have moments where we just sit anymore. I'm boy with

a right and I think like one of the things and it's hard it is so hard but one of the things that I really have been trying to do is like just put it away even if it's for five minutes like people used to sit on their porch and just think you know and now like you're like you're in a urinal and you're like oh I can read an email you know and it's like it's I think this is honestly one of the worst inventions in humanity it is literally like I wonder if Steve Jobs were still alive

if he'd be like oh I did a great thing or or like I did a terrible thing and I think it really

“is it's it's just you gotta you have to fight against the technology even though we all need to”

use it to be in the society we live in. I think that's a good place to end it but I would ask you this final question how is it collaborating with the rock on this project he's just a sweet guy

he's like really thoughtful always thinking about other people he he's funny he sends he doesn't

send taxi sends voice notes and so you get these long voice notes from Wayne and and it's like it's just they're fun you know he's like telling his thoughts and it tells me that he appreciates the fact that he holds a certain stature like if you get a voice memo for him you're going to save that thing it's his voice he's speaking to you well I think it's just like just texting he also he like works out like three hours a day so he's just he's doing the jamming voice

memo rather than like he's like yeah lifting 400 pounds with one arm and then sending you a voice up but he's great he's been an amazing collaborator and and he really got in there we're like we did a lot of the interviews together like with the the former mob bosses and score sazy and

and we were breaking the story and batting around ideas and talking about good fellows and this

“that and the other and he's 83 but like he's got more energy than me you know it's it's it's it's”

it's interesting it's like you know there that's an it's an example of like the people that are doing the thing that they should be doing yeah and and they're really good at it and they're you know and that that's it's been really fun to to be a part of that in watching this course sazy documentary and there's that part where they're in you know they're talking to his childhood friends and and they're talking about how he's literally storyboarding movies as this little

kid and everyone's like what are you doing like clearly this guy is doing exactly what he's supposed

to be doing like he's living the fully expressed version of who he was always meant to be

“I think that's what it's all about like it's about it's about finding that thing and it doesn't”

matter what it is I mean you don't want to be a serial killer if you meant to be but like but like it's about finding your place on on the stage and this play like and and that's it because we

don't know we will never know an AIs never gonna tell us why we're here like we're never gonna

figure that out so we just have to go with the thing that we we are comfortable with in that moment

“and that's usually the thing that we want to be doing and and that's what it's all about”

I think that's a good place to end it man yeah beautiful way to conclude this conversation thanks Nick thank you for having me it's a lot of fun yeah very cool the movie obviously is going to be a couple years before this thing is going to be a couple years yeah the book is coming out next year yes so I have a podcast I'm doing with Dick Costalo and Polkadrowski take was the former CEO of Twitter it's called the Nick Dick and Pol show we talked about all sorts of stuff like

this every week nice all right man we'll come back and share some more on the books come on yeah let's go all right thanks Nick thank you