AI and the Enshittification Era with Cory Doctorow

Where do you get your news from?

But most of your news, you don't know where it's coming from. You don't know the bias as involved with these people. That's what ground news. Do you know ground news? It's the source you can trust.

And not because they tell you you can trust them. 'Cause they show you what it's, what it is, it's an app. It's a website, and it helps you use your CB on whatever single narrative. They're getting subscribed or funded by the way. This isn't like, you know, some multinational AI DBS sociopath created.

I'm not naming names, I'm just telling you, this is subscriber funded.

No corporate incentives that are influence in what you're going to see. They even got this new blind spot feature. It's surface stories that are under-reported by either side of the political spectrum, either side, any side, different sides, corporate sides.

“It shows you things that you're not seeing, that you should be saying.”

The Nobel Peace Center, which is like the FIFA Peace Center, except actually, associated with the Nobel Peace, they called it an excellent way to stay informed and expand world view. So to get unlimited access to the Vantage subscription, go to groundnews.com/stuart. Subscribe to get 40% off. The discounts available only for a limited time.

That's groundnews.com/stuart, or you can scan the QR code on screen.

Don't forget to get 40% off groundnews at groundnews.com/stuart. Look, you know, I don't know when I'm going to leave this job. I don't know when I'm going to stay in this job. I don't know how these things are going to do. But when I do, you should replace me with indeed.

You should call, indeed, when you're replacing me because I listen, this podcast requires skills. You need a pie hole so that you can open your pie hole and just spout, that not everybody can do that.

“And so, you know, if you need to hire, you've got to say to yourself, this is a job for”

indeed sponsored jobs. You can reach candidates that meet your specific criteria. Like if you want them to have skills or a pie hole, certifications, maybe even you want to know what the location is. Only indeed can get that stuff done efficiently, trust me, you know, you've got to kiss

a lot of frogs unless you use one of these services they're like indeed. So, spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes, less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs.

And listeners of this show, we've got a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com/podcast terms and conditions apply. Hey everybody, welcome to the weekly show podcast.

My name is John Stewart and and I will be your host for today's program. It's Tuesday, July 28th, we're all recovering from the bombing raid at the President United States pulled on the White House Correspondence Center. Not so fucking easy, isn't it? But he boy, it's, you know, as a comedian, you know, when you watch somebody bombing like

that, the traditional thing to say is hey, don't quit your day job.

“But I think in the President's case, I think we would all make an exception.”

And if you would like to quit his day job and pursue full time, I think you can improve. I think he's got some timing. The weave did quite work with some of the more concise roast, but in once again, in the battle between Caitlin Collins and Donald Trump, point Collins, I believe the score now somewhere around 328 to this year, her sophistication, focus of class, is just wipe

in the floor with that dude. But moving on from those events, I have been in a bit of a doom or spiral concerning AI. And it's a fact on how it will be changing the way we work, the way we interact with each other and all those things. Obviously read a book that changed my perspective slightly.

I don't want to get to tell you it gave me a tinge of optimism, but in fact, and it was a feeling, I'm not so comfortable with, but I thought, well, let me talk to this just incredibly wonderful and prolific author who wrote this book that I'm talking about. The book is actually called the reverse centours guide to life after AI had to think about

So let's get to it.

Let's bring on in our guest for today, Corey Doctero, ladies and gentlemen, we are delighted

and honored to have with us today. Maybe one of the most prolific writers that I know and his work is just phenomenal. You know, from a notification, the new book is the reverse centours guide to life after AI. He's fiction writer, activist, journalist, author, for God's sake's Corey Doctero, thanks

for joining us. Oh, what a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on John, the real bucket list. I'm delighted and just an enormous fan of your work and you're writing, disturbed it how much of it you're able to do and how many different genres, but we're putting that aside

for the moment.

“You need I am an AI, I'm a doomer, I believe I am a doomer and reading your book, you”

are far less pessimistic, not just about its ability to destroy our civilization as we know

at the existential threat, but even the promise of it as a job destroying cyclops that comes in and gathers up all of our productivity and puts us all on Elon Musk's goal. So, let's go through, talk me out of a tree, or yeah. So I'm really indebted to this STS, Society and Technology Studies scholar at Virginia Tech at Geck, I called Leave Insil, a coin, this very useful term, which is Krita hype.

This is when you repeat the hype of the tech industry and then at the end of it, you put brackets and that's bad and the thing is, you're repeating the hype, right? You're just helping them sell it, so you know, Mark Zuckerberg shows up one day and says, "Hey everyone, I don't know if you know, but I'm like cyber-rassbutin, I'm a dopamine hacking wizard where mesmer failed and MK Ultra and pickup artists and neural linguistic

programming weirdos failed. I have succeeded, I built the mind control ray at a big data." And then his critics go around and go like cyber-rassbutin, the reason Grampie is a

Q and on is cyber-rassbutin made him a Q and on, it's not because like Grampie was always

racist and Mark Zuckerberg introduced him to a lot of other racists, so they could just do racist shit all day, it's because he was brainwashed by Mark Zuckerberg and then Mark Zuckerberg

“sales guys go out and they're like, "You were asking me why you should spend 40% more”

to advertise on Facebook?" Well, I don't know, but my critics will tell you, my boss is an evil dopamine hacking wizard and he can sell anything to anyone, right? So this, you could just don't want to do the work for them, right? But is that any of that hype so when you talk about that, is the algorithm not designed?

Isn't it designed purely to do exactly what you're saying? He might not be the wizard, but in the same way that, you know, I've talked about this a little bit in the same way that Doritos are not food, they're ultra-produited. They're designed in a lab to kind of get past your body's ability to say two bags, that's not enough at all, I need three, aren't they doing that to us?

So yeah, I mean, this idea of hyper-palitability, which is like a problem with highly processed food, right? I see where you're coming from when we talk about social media algorithms, but I think that like, you know, this idea of Occam's razor, you know, finding the more parsimonious explanation, yeah, sure, like things that are entertaining or entertaining, and you'll

watch them, right? But also, it's really hard to get the people you love to act in a coordinated faction. You know, economists have a term for this, they call it the collective action problem, right? You love your besties, but like the six people in your group check can agree on where to go for beers on Friday.

So, you know, there's 200 of you on Facebook, and some of you are there because like, you share a rare disease with a community there, and some of you are there because you like move from another country, and that's where everyone is.

“Some of you are there because that's how you're organizing the car pool for your kids”

little league, and some of you are there because like your customers, your audience are there. And Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he kind of understands that if you love your friends more than you hate him, you'll probably stick around. And so he can turn the screws, and so you have this thing that's like, why am I on Facebook all the time when I hate it?

Well, because your friends are there, right? And you can say, well, my friends are there because, you know, they are also brainwashed, or you can say, my friends are there because it's just really hard to coordinate our departure. You know, I've a personal example of this, which is my grandmother was a Soviet refugee. And she had been a child soldier in the siege of Leningrad.

So from like 12 to 15 was like hauling bodies, and then she gets evacuated across the winter ice, ends up in Siberia, gets knocked up by my grandfather. They deserve to go to Azerbaijan, my dad is torn, and then they go all the way to Canada, you know, like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, right? So they go all the way to Canada.

They're all there because what had happened with my grandmother is she'd had like some

important bond shattered, right? Like this, this bond where she was in this relationship where she was taking care of the older people, they were taking care of her and so on. The people who stay behind that's not what happened, they all stayed. And there has not been a moment since that their lives weren't worse than my branch of the

family's life. And you know, now we get on these Zoom calls with my Russian family, like all the men are worried

“about getting drafted and sent you crane, it's just off, right?”

So like, why didn't they leave it's not because they were brainwashed by Stalin, right? They didn't leave because like they wanted to be with each other, and as much as they loved each other, you know, Sartre was an optimist, hell is other people.

You can't get anyone to do anything ever.

And so you're all just stuck there. So it's nothing more than a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body emotion tends to stay in motion because it does, and I certainly can't quote studies on this, but it feels like it, if it doesn't rewire the mind, it is added in an accelerant into maybe some of our lesser impulses as Link, yeah, six to one, half dozen the other.

I mean, we have this problem all the time because like people exist in a society, right? So like, right, yeah, we we go for junk food, social interactions instead of the meaningful ones, but also like, you know, my mom's dad who's, you know, the oldest of 10 and dropped at a school at 13 to take care of his brothers and sisters when his dad died. By the time my mom came around in her two siblings, he was like a 35 year old door to door

insurance salesman who owned his own home, played bowling on the weekend, also golfed, also was like in a fraternal organization, they went to picnics and they took six weeks

“off on one income, right, like I don't know anyone who's not working like five jobs, right?”

So yeah, why do we squeeze in all of our social interactions around the edges? Well, maybe because like getting a whole evening free to go bowling and then like also being a member of like your local coanus and whatever requires that you not be like stuck in the gig economy, working every hour that God sends to pay for a house that doesn't cost 20% of your income to 60% of your income, and sure like all the stuff might be bad

for you might be hyper palatable, you might be getting sucked into it, but like, let's not give Mark Zuckerberg credit that we don't know he deserves, especially when it helps them sell ads. Right. In other words, don't, don't, uh, intentionality is not necessarily what he's doing.

It may just be a buy product and that if you hype them, that helps them and that gets us to AI, yes, which you have kind of, the idea is AI is going into that same model. Is that the feeling that you have is we are hyping it as a planet killer, as a death star, and that is helping them in terms of valuation. Is that the mistake we're making by, by over, uh, blessing them.

Yeah. I mean, there's lots of different stories that AI tells that are quite outlanders.

“So there are ways in which AI is a planet killer, right?”

The carbon emissions are definitely not doing the planet, any natural planet killer, right? Right. But this idea that like, oh my god, what if we teach the word guessing program too many words, and it wakes up and turns into God and makes us into paper clips, right? Like that is, you know, it's like, it's like, what if we breathe these horses to run so

fast that one of the mirrors gives birth to a locomotive, right? Like it's just not, by the way, go. Over a sentence in the book, the reverse centours guide the life after AI, oh, I have to tell you. You're talking about how they talk about AI is, the big thing is long, uh, long mission

truckers that a long haul truckers, long haul truckers that the AI is going to turn them into autonomous long haul truckers, and that's going to disrupt the, you know, the largest industry in America, which is trucking, which is apparent, and you break it down very nicely that it's not.

It's really like, there's only like 25,000 of them, uh, but you say, first of all, congratulations,

you've just invented a shitty version of a train. Yeah, yeah, a bunch of, a bunch of large vehicles following each other to constant distance and a dedicated lane, right? I mean, you know, great, right? That's awesome.

But that's one of the, the greatest sort of puncturing of the, the bubble of, of its importance, is that something we need to continue to do. Yeah. So, so this is another one of the stories that they tell. So there's one story that they tell, and they're all interrelated, right?

But there's one story that they tell, the AI is just going to keep getting better and eventually it's going to be called. And I'll believe they're solve all of our problems or, you know, use us as fuel, right? And then there's the other story, which is that the AI can do so many jobs that have such

they claim it's $60 billion a year, $10 billion of that is like money that Microsoft gave

to open AI and open AI gave back to Microsoft. They're just passing back and forth. Yeah. How beautiful. Look, I write thrillers about forensic accounting, and in my consider professional opinion

to call that an accounting trick is to do violence to the noble accounting trick. You know, like the CPAs of America salute you, sir. Yeah. So like $50 billion a year, when I wrote the book, the total capital expenditure, two date, was $700 billion.

They've added at least another trillion since, and if you believe Garth added a trillion in the last year, and if you believe Garthner, who admittedly did say that by now, we'd all be spending six hours a day in the Metaverse, but if you believe Garthner, it's going

“to be $2.5 trillion in total by the end of the year, right?”

So on $50 billion revenue, right?

And they have to keep spending it because the data centers that GPUs, they're like replacing them every two to five years. So like this is this expenditure just recurs. It's not like you train the model, and then you're like, well, we got the model now, I guess it's all set, right?

It's a new modeling model in the model, right? And so you have these ongoing operational expenditures, you have these ongoing capital expenditures, and they're answer to how do you turn $50 billion into revenue into profit when you're spending a trillion dollars a year to make it? Like look, if you want $50 billion revenue, and you've got a trillion dollars, I can do

it for you.

I'll give you $100 billion back, it's called just put it all in an index fund, and you

should be okay.

“I'll put it under the mattress and give you $100 billion back, and we'll call it a day, right?”

Right? You know, like, some moments out there running, the money losing is venture in the history of the human race, and his story about how it stops losing money is eventually you displace enough wages that bosses split the savings with Sam Altman and he comes out of it, right? Are you work right now?

Are you the boss? Are you the boss and you're listening to the podcast to taunt the other workers that you domineering over, because you're a terrible boss? My point is simply this. This is an intervention.

Stop being a control freak and doing everything yourself at work, your busy, your multitasking, your value, higher experts upwork makes it easy to hire freelance expert specialists to get the jobs done that maybe you don't want to do, or don't have the expertise to do, but don't mind, you don't have the expertise to do it, or don't have the time to do, or you want to focus on other parts of the business, upwork is a one-stop platform.

You find higher and pay expert freelancers across a web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, more, do you want to do the marketing, do you have time to do the marketing, do you even know how to do the marketing, what are you going to stand on

“a corner and pass out flyers, no, your busy person, that's why you're using upwork.”

Then you get browse profiles, review passwork, hire, get started quickly, tell any man, upwork takes care of all this stuff, you don't feel like doing and you need experts to do, no hand up contracts, payments, it's free to sign up, upwork is efficient. So visit upwork.com/tws right now, post your job for free, it's upwork.com/tws, to connect with top talent, ready to help your business grow, that's UPWORK.com/tws, do it now, unless

you're a scared. Core, let me ask you, so yeah, what is that? When you say it generates 50 billion in revenue, right, and then you say they've added another 10 billion, but that's really just an accounting gimmick, what is the way that AI returns that investment?

What is that 50 billion, is it user fees? People buying subscriptions, that's all it is, yeah, it's subscriptions, yeah, it's enterprise licenses and subscriptions, what about government contracts and things like that? Government contracts, yeah, all that stuff, it sums up to 50 billion, okay. Now they'll be new numbers and then whatever, and you may have noticed that I'm

thoropic just so that they were profitable, but not using Chevrolet-Extended Accounting Practices, which is just awesome, it's like we are profitable, but the math is so cool that we can't even describe it to you. If you use regular math, it's not going to look like we're profitable, we've got this new math, and the same week they had this other announcement, which is we have this tool

mythos that's such a cool security tool that we can't show you how it works. It's too dangerous, but it's really good, it's too dangerous. The fact that our IPO is like they were trying to get like this IPO and shape, right, like nothing to do with it, we just like just whatever, like don't look kind of the blanket,

It's amazing, it's definitely worth buying into the IPO at like 150, but don't

look under the blanket. You look under the blanket, you're going to turn into a pillar of salt, and then it'll be on your head, and also don't ask us to explain the math by which we're profitable. And also, we've been selling $100 bills for a dollar each, and like when we started down this IPO where we were like, why don't we start charging $5 for these hundred dollars?

Every CEO who's been buying the hundred dollar bills was like, I'm sorry, at $5 these hundred dollar bills are not worth it. What is this then reframe is the threat of AI, not that it will turn us into paper clips, or that will replace all of our high-paying jobs, but that because it is a three-card monti, it will utterly shatter our economy, that it, I mean, the mag seven, most of the

growth in the American economy is driven by this AI promise, right, I mean, we went through

this in the internet boom and the internet I think has become standardized and is a valuable part of the economy, so is this truly a Potemkin village? What are we dealing with? So let me give you some, because that often comes up, right, though, this is like the web, the web lost money, AI lost money, that's like, you know, that's like, you know, this

food is delicious, that food is delicious, they're for the same food, right? The fact that they share this one trait doesn't make them the same thing, right, so both go in your mouth. They both go in your mouth, yes, yeah, there's some anti-pith on bits about this, sure, there

“is a duck, it's a witch, yeah, yeah, so here's the thing, the web had very good unit”

economics, what are unit economics, what is that?

Yeah, so I was just going to say, no one should do an economics degree, because you'll end up with an neurological injury, but learning something back at economics is useful, and so learning like what unit economics are, super useful, unit economics are what happens to your business when you get a new customer or make a new sale, right, just like how much money do you make, like per unit, how does your business do, right?

So in the web, like yeah, they were losing money, but every new customer made them more profitable, every use buy a new customer, made the web as a sector more profitable, and also every generation of the web is more profitable than the previous one, compare that to AI, every new AI customer cost the company that just acquired the money, the more that AI customer uses their products, the more money they lose, and every generation of AI has lost more money than the previous

one. So the more because, you know, you talked a little bit about Zuckerberg and the evil genius, clearly the incentives on social media were an intention incentive, the more they can keep you on social media, the more money they can make, because I guess the more ads they can sell and that type of thing is AI, the incentives are inverse to that.

So the more you use their AI, how does that cost them more? Oh, because every time you use AI, it costs the money to run the inference, can I, can I sidebar here just a little on inference, man, anytime you want, poor doctor, okay, sidebar or, okay, because I want to mention one of the very best researchers on AI economics, which

“is this guy called Ed Zitron, who you should have on Ed Zitron, he's an amazing guy,”

he's British, so Ed, someone leaked opening eyes finances to him, right, they're balance sheet, because it's all private, right? So he gets a look at it, and it really looks like their inference cost, so inferences like you type in, you know, draw me Sonic the hedgehog with big boobs, right, and then it makes Sonic that, that that step is, is the inference, have you been reading my diary doctor?

Oh, where did you, they leaked their query, they leaked your queries, son of a bitch. Yeah, so you asked that, and you got the, that's the inference step, right, that's the using it part, and an economics speak that would be the operating expense of AI, right? So like, it looks like they're, they're, their, their, opx is going down, which is like, okay, that's all right, right, because if they can just do the capex once, make the model,

and then it's, they just start making money from the opx, then you can make money from it, right, just like you build a railroad, and then you sweat the asset by running rail cars up and down it.

“But here's the thing, their marketing budget is as big as Coca-Cola's.”

Now, Coca-Cola has like three full-time ad agencies, right, and ads everywhere. So where, where's the opening eye like army of marketers? So here's Ad's theory, and I think he's right. What they're doing is they're saying, when we sell you that $100 bill for a dollar, and let you do $100 worth of inference for one buy, that's not inference, that's marketing.

So we're just putting it somewhere else on a balance sheet. But even, Corey, even if it's a, let's say it's a loss leader, let's say it's, you know, they used to do that in the mall. Chuck, somebody would stand out there with little plate, little cheese cubes, and you'd walk by and go, oh, this delicious, we'll come into Hickory Farms, and they figure,

or whatever else is in there. But if the money that they are spending to bring in new people, but each new person who's using it costs them more money than they're making.

Yeah, yeah, well, that's the shittiest business model, and I've never even heard of anything

like that. So there's, there's two poles of finance wisdom that I turn to in these moments, right? One is this thing called Stein's Law, which is anything that can go on forever eventually stops. The other, John can have gall-braith, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Ballars. Yeah, so look, if you're spending more than you're making, you're eventually going to have a reckoning of some kind, right? But when does that reckoning come? Well, you know, like, if you're Elon Musk, you take your money furnace, which is called

Rock, and you stuff it inside your, like, belt-weight bandit, rock-a-tree company that builds Uncle Sucker billions of dollars for rockets that is profitable. And then you IPO it, and you get a special deal from NASDAQs so that it IPOs in the NASDAQ 100 instead of having to wait for a couple of quarters to wait normally would, which means that every fund manager who's managing a NASDAQ index fund has to go out and buy SpaceX at

whatever price, right? They're like legally obliged.

“So that's what it means to run an index fund, and you list very few shares when you go”

public. Instead, what you do is you get another exemption, again, from the feds that let insiders unload without the normal lockout period. And so now you have these fund managers who need to buy SpaceX at any price, which is just a way to offload grockax in the money furnace.

They need to buy it at any price, and there's no shares available from SpaceX, which means that the Emirates and the billionaire Silicon Valley guys who backed him when he bought

Twitter for $40 billion, who backed him when he built the money furnace for grockax.

Now they get to be made whole by your pension fund, which you stuck in an index, which was just supposed to be like the thing, remember Warren Buffett, like three pieces of investing advice, fits on the back of a postcard. Because what I told my wife to do with my money when I die, just put it in an index fund and forget it.

Right. That's right. That's right. If you did that, Elon Musk just unloaded it on you, your his liquidity. Now, they were supposed to also do it with the S&P 500, and to their credit, not a thing

I would often say about saying it in Pores, but to their credit, S&P said no, at the last minute, after a lot of public pressure. And I think after a lot of, and S&P's like, it's got a lot more old money. I think there was some millionaire on billionaire violence there. And I think there are a lot of people who don't do this to the S&P.

Do it to Nasdaq. Right. Nasdaq's the Bernie made off exchange. That's a UFC fight that you've got nobody to cheer for. Yeah.

Exactly. That's just, there's nowhere to go there. Let them fight. But this is, Corey, what you're describing is a time bomb that's going to make mortgage back securities, you know, look like a lemonade stand, because, I mean, is that why all these

guys are trying to get to Mars, like they figure when this thing is sidebar, Adam Becker,

“Astrophysicist, you should have him on some day wrote an amazing book about this.”

He points out that if you detonated every new con Earth at the same moment as the media or the killed the dinosaurs, struck us again, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars could ever be, because it would still have water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetosphere, and a troposphere. Right.

We're not going to Mars. We should send robots to Mars, maybe we'll send a person someday. We're not going to go live on Mars. That's just an nuts, you know, like this is the, it's like, so we're all investing. Yeah.

The whole idea of this bubble is they've sold us a future that is not actionable, because the technology that they've created isn't the job killing wonder, isn't the intelligence, the sentient creature that they're telling us, and they're using it as a way to amass assets as a growth story for their valuations, would this be a way of, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.

So, you know, like, here's the paradox of a growing company, right? Yes.

“The market loves a growing company, of course, the price to earnings ratio, right?”

Just how much your money, your company is worth based on how much money it earns. Sure. Goes up. If you're growing, for like the obvious reason that a share is a claim on the future, revenue of the company, right?

So like a company that's made a million dollars this year, but we think it's going to make

two million dollars next year is worth more than a million dollars this year, and it's going to make it. Right.

What happens when you're Google and you have a 90% market share? Well, suddenly you're overvalued, right?

“Like, where are you going to grow if you've got 90% of the market searching with Google?”

You can raise a billion humans to maturity in the hopes that they become your customers.

That product is called Google Classroom, right? But Google Classroom's going to take a decade to pay off while strong wants growth now. And so you've got to have some other story. And, you know, we've had, first we had these stories that were sort of plausible, right? Google is like, oh, we're going to be Facebook because we got Google+. And Facebook was like,

oh, we're going to be YouTube because we're pivoting to video. Problem with that is like, well, Facebook has got ideas about why Google can't be Facebook and Google's got ideas about why Facebook and can't be YouTube. You get these arguments, right? So then it's like, oh, no, we're actually going to grow into a sector that doesn't exist. And while like, it doesn't exist,

which means it's hard to know how much it's worth. Who's to say, it's not worth infinity,

“since I just made it up on the expert, blockchain, web three, metaverse, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,”

blah, right? And like, they're just guys running across the river in a back of an alligator without losing their legs, right? They just got to keep going. Like as soon as your belief collapses and, you know, daos and NFTs, they've got to have web three in the shoot for you. Right. And now we get to AI. And AI is different. It's different because like from a computer science perspective, AI is real. There is a value to it. Yeah. Yeah. And there is an actionable, look, there's not a person that I know

that has not availed themselves of the cogent organizational abilities of chat, GPT or Claude or whatever they're getting. Or even the agentic abilities. Yeah. I have a local model on my laptop that I downloaded with O'Lama, which is like some software that meta released. And it's just an

open source model that runs locally. It doesn't talk to the internet. And I use it to find typos.

Right. And it finds a bunch of typos that like, you know, my spell checker misses. So this is going to destroy our world. And you're just grammar policing. Yeah. We're just going through. All right. Well, like, I'm sure you've encountered this. My readers are very invested in my knowing when I've made a typo. And so if I publish a typo, I'm going to hear about it. Yeah. And I actually have this weird thing where I don't want to get locked into the platforms because I've seen how they go. So I publish

everywhere once all at once. It's called post post on site share everywhere, which means that I'm just like manually turning everything into like threads on blue sky and masked it on and putting it on tumblr. I still use tumblr, medium, email, RSS, like all of it. And then I make a typo and like I have to change it in all of those places, which is like 20 minutes works sucks. So find typos for me. And like every spell checker I've ever used. It flags a bunch of things that aren't

typos. So here's one absolute, you know, rock solid truth about AI is unless you know your subject, AI is not going to be a consistent help for you in using it. You already have to be versed. Yeah. Yeah. So I look, I've been telling cop, I've written more than 30 books. I'm telling copy editors and publishers lawyers that they're wrong for, you know, 25 years, right? I've been telling spell checkers to go to hell for 40 years, right? Now, when I look at the suggestions that come

back, like I have collaborators who are like institutionally using Microsoft Office 365, which has all this incredibly intrusive AI suggestion stuff built in. And so we're working on a document together. And I'm like, this is the worst advice I've ever seen. And if you don't know what you're doing and you take that advice, you're writing's going to suck. But that's just, you know, it's true in different ways for other spell checkers. And there is an uncanny valley to

what is brought out by those chat bots and those other things. And when you read it, it's pretty clear as much as it flatters you with, wow, that's a great idea that you just came up with and then it creates it. There's definitely, as you read it, you think yourself, there's something not quite, yeah, yeah, yeah, right here, whether it's soul or art or anything. And you've just reminded me of something. So this, this flattery earlier you talked about AI as a job killing technology,

“is it a reason it? I think it is, but not the way that the AI guy say it is, right? The AI,”

I, I, I, I, I, I say this can do your job. And getting back to credit hype, we should distinguish between this can do your job. And an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with this, even though it can't do your job. Because your boss is a credulous adult who is infinitely horny for replacing the workers with chat bots. You know, I, I, I, I was out on the, on the, on the pick at line, uh, during the writer's strike. Yeah. And, uh, I'm a member of an affiliated

union. I mean, I'm in, I'm in the animators Guilden the writers in it. So that was out there, carrying a sign is around the place around the corner for my place in, in Burbank. And a writer told me something really important. He said, you give shitty notes to a writer's room the same way you prompt a chat box, right? Oh, that's so smart. Like, give me ET, but it's about a dog, put a love interest in it, and like a car chase. Yes. And admittedly, that's just air bud, right?

But you like, you like, you like, you tell that to a writer's room and either explicitly or implicitly, they're going to go like, why don't you fuck off and make a spread? We're writing

off to the, you know, the, the, uh, steakhouse, right? And you, you come back and the movies made.

“Now, the fact that it's like unpredictable, I think may not matter as much as we think it would”

when that's weighed against the ego shattering confrontation with people who know how to do things, and who roll their eyes and tell you that your brilliant ideas stupid, illegal, or will kill people, right, or impossible, right? You know, because like, you're, you're the boss, right? You, you tell yourself, you're in the driver's seat, but you know, if you don't show up for work, everything is fine, and if they don't show up for work, nothing happens. You're in the backseat with a Fisher price steering wheel,

and AI might wire that toy steering wheel directly into the drive train, so you can be sold that

technology. Oh, you know, I like to sleep because I'm old. Uh, that's a new song I'm

been working on. You know, I'm in a band. We do original songs. I have not presented this song yet to the band to see what they think of it, but I might. It's called I like to sleep because I'm old. When you get older, you got to have yourself a little bit of the comfort, and that's where the avocado green mattress comes in, man. And unlike most mattress brands that they'll only sell you online, they do have stores, too. You can go into a store, you can try them out, unbelievably comfortable.

Avocado mattress is designed for comfort, support, helping your body stay aligned. You know, the last time my body was aligned. It's pain. I think it might have been the last time the

“Metz won the world series. That's how long it's been since it's been aligned. But these mattresses”

avocado green mattress, responsibly sourced organic materials that are built to last. So get an avocado green mattress. Avocado products are made, not manufacturer, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. You can experience them in person at an avocado showroom or a premier retailer near you or shop online at avocadogreen mattress dot com slash TWS to check out their mattress and furniture sale. Avocadogreen mattress dot com slash TWS,

avocadogreen mattress dot com slash TWS. Period. And this is where your book is really what you're talking about is who's zooming who. Yeah. So are we in control of a tool or is a tool and a story in control of us? And that's where you get into your story of of centours. So yeah. How do you become? It's master blaster. Are you the little guy sitting on top of the big guy or are you the big guy and the little guy

sitting on top of you or are you teen a turner in just for you teen a turnest fit you've ever seen.

“You look so good. God damn in thunder. God damn. Yeah. But like who are we master or are we blaster?”

Or mellasmin hunting the last Jew across the wasteland. Yes. What are we? Not mellasmin. Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson. Lastman was the terrible mayor of Toronto. He wasn't an anti-Semite as far as I know. He was Jewish. Mellasmin was a mayor of Toronto. Was there an era before the Ford's?

I thought the Ford's had always run Toronto. Oh yeah. He was he he walked so wrong for it could run.

Somebody he was a buffoon. Yeah. He was a buffoon. And he also he had a secret family. It was awesome. Small plug here. No gods. No mares. A podcast about buffoonish mares. My favorite podcast on the right. Yeah. That's hilarious. Oh my god. It's so good. Okay. So yeah. So centours reverse centours. It won't surprise you to know that this isn't the first time that labor and automation came into conflict. So there is a literature. Right. We know like how this works. And broadly, when labor drives automation,

it's in service to quality. And when capital drives automation, it's in service to throughput, to quantity. Right. And that's because like if you buy a subscription, you want to get maximum value out of it. Or if you acquire an asset and it's depreciating, you want to use it before it depreciates off the books. Right. So this is why, especially when you have a market dominated by like cartels and monopolies and duopolis, automation often makes things worse but more

plentiful because, you know, remember Lily Tomlin doing at the phone operator and sending it in. One dingy, two ringing dingy. Yeah. Yeah. We don't care. We don't have to wear the phone company. Right. When there's when you're the only game in town, you can make things worse. And if you can make them cheaper and worse, well, right. So in automation theory, we call a person assisted by a machine this centaur. And the analogy here, as you've got the human head, it's got all the judgment.

It's got the discernment, it's got the intellect. And it is on the body of a horse and the

person, master blaster. So when you're riding a bicycle, you're kind of a centaur. You even look

“like a centaur, but like when you're using a spell checker, you're a centaur to our calculator.”

Right. A reverse centaur is the reverse. It is the horses head on the human body. It's the machine giving orders to the person. And so that is because there's a part of the job the machine can't do. So think here of like Lucy and Athol at the end of the conveyor belt. Right. Putting the platelets in the chalk box. Right. Right. The conveyor belt can do everything except at the chocolates in the box. Why is the conveyor belt running so fast? Because if you automate the

chocolate factory, you're not going to run the conveyor belt more slowly than the workers at the end of it. You're going to run it at the limit of their speed and endurance. Right. This is why productivity. I believe they call it. Yeah. Yeah. And this is why Amazon warehouses are the most automated warehouses. The human races ever seen and have triple the injury rate of other warehouses in the sector. That's not a coincidence. It is the consequence. Right. When you spend seven figures

“to automate a warehouse, you're not going to run it slower than you need to. And so, you know,”

if you're a human and you're the peripheral for the machine, right, doing the part of the job at the perimeter that the machine can't do. And you're working at the absolute limit of your endurance. You're working at the absolute limit of your dexterity and the absolute limit of your strength over long periods, you will eventually make a mistake in an warehouse you get entailed on a forklift when that happens. Right. And so, that's the difference between a center and a

reverse center. As you mentioned at the start of this, I'm a science fiction novelist. And, you know, good science fiction is not about what gadgets do. It's about who the gadget does it for and who the gadget does it to. It's about the social arrangements of our technology. Because while objects do have politics, those politics are still contingent on the society that they're based on and the way they come into being. And if you finance an AI bubble by raising a trillion dollars a year on the

promise of firing workers, a lot of workers are going to get fired even if the AI can't do the job. And when you run out of money and those chap outs get shot off, you end up with this circumstance, we take people who do a job that needs doing. We replace them with chap outs to do that job badly. And then the chap outs go away. You can't find those workers again. Right. They've retired. They become discouraged. They've retrained. They've exited the workforce. All the process knowledge they

had about like how things work and where things are stashed. That's gone forever. It's vaporized incinerated. And then you spend generations rebuilding it. Right. This is as best as in the walls of the technological civilization. And that's not because it's AI. It's because the force of the AI bubble is fire workers and replace them with automation. Because that's the dream. The dream is this is. And I've heard them say it, not to us, but to each other, which is, you know, AI is a way

for people who run companies to get more productivity without the tax of labor. They refer to labor. So it almost feels like this AI bubble is kind of the the final boss battle between capital and

labor. Yeah. Never say fine. All right. Who knows. The second to last battle. What's the

Albert Einstein quote? I don't know what world we're thrilled we fought with, but world we're four. We fought with sticks and sticks and sounds. Yes. Yes. Oh, maybe that's the final battle. Right. But you know, you mentioned the magnificent seven. Right. 35% of the S&P 500 is seven companies. Six of them are losing money on AI. And the seventh one is the one they're losing the money to. They're all passing around the same 100 billion dollar IO. You really fast to pretending.

It's an all of their bank accounts at once. Right. Someday, because anything that can't go on for a very eventually stops someday, they will implode. And look, look, you know, we don't have to greet environmental calamity with austerity, even like Trump during the pandemic, like figured out that stimulus is what you do when the private sector is no longer employing people. John Maynard Keynes, baby. Everybody forgets about John Maynard Keynes. Bring him home. Yeah. Yeah. So,

we don't have to do that. But if we fall into the pattern, we've done for the last 25 years.

Our response to vaporizing a third of the economy is going to be more austerity. And like again,

like the jury is no longer out on this. When you do austerity, you make people into fashes. There was there was just a study. I live in the UK now. My wife, Quitter Jobbin, Hollywood, and I followed her, her to London to work at the BBC. And, and there was just a study here

“about what happens to your voting when your doctor's office closes. To remember, we have”

socialized medicine here with the NHS. And they've been doing austerity for 15 years. How are you not all dead? I don't understand. We've been told that if that happens, everyone is dead. Well, I've got to go see the death panel later. I'll let you know how we're thank you. I'd love to know what they decide. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're NHS doctors office, what's called the surgery, that's what they call a doctor's office. When your primary care

become a sucker for people who show up and say undeserving others, are the reason you don't have

what you need. Not everyone falls for that. Good thing that could never happen here in America.

Right. So this is what I'm afraid of. I'm not afraid that AI is going to turn us into paper clips. I'm not afraid that AI can do your job. I'm afraid that you might get fired and replace with AI that can't do your job. And I like the job you do. And I like the job lots of people too. And I don't want them fired. I like benefiting from their careful and conscientious labor. And I'm worried that the economy is going to collapse. Right. So the real threat is the economic

disruption. I'll give, you know, this takes me back to sort of a more analog time of the world

“before all this. But I remember AOL. AOL came out. And it was this revolutionary community. And you”

could go on and there were message boards and there were little groups. It was sort of a mini Facebook and Twitter. And it was almost all these different before the social media companies specialized. Yeah. And it looked monopolistic and it looked inevitable. And their market cap in the same way that we're talking now. Soared. And it was the future. And they bought time Warner. They were AOL came in and went, where the future? You know, there's this other company. Sort of a

sustainable analog growth company. Yeah, they make money every year, shit tons of it. We're going to absorb them. And then the bottom fell out. Now, there was enough around it to absorb some of that damage. And we went through a recession during that time. Are we in a position now where we can't even absorb, you know, there's too big to fail. And then there's too big to recover from.

Well, look, people have dug themselves at a bigger hole. Right. And I always say this when we

“talk about monopolies, more broadly, because, you know, in certification, you mentioned this other”

book I wrote. Yes. It's really a story about monopolies. It's a story about what Lena Khan calls too big to care. And the cycle of how these companies bring you in and then abuse you. Yeah. And the businesses that they bring in because you're stuck there. So, you know, people say if you're not paying for the product or the product, ask a Facebook advertiser, what kind of deal they're getting from Facebook, right? Everybody gets screwed. It doesn't matter if you're paying for the

product or not. It's, you know, productization is a function of capability, not like a customer loyalty perk for giving them enough money. Right. So, you know, the, I often talk to people about monopolization as you'd expect. And people get very discouraged. They're like, well, what hope do we have of breaking up these giant monopolies? And like, guys, you know, the, the anti-monopoly laws that we stopped enforcing 45 years ago. They weren't passed because it seemed like a good idea

and case a monopoly emerges in the future, right? They were passed because people were being crushed by rapacious monopolists. And we figured out how to shatter their power. And we didn't have the internet we could use to coordinate ourselves. They, they were running different scams in different countries. So, enforcers didn't really have any common cause. You know, if you ate a John E. Rockefeller in Germany, it was because he was screwing up your ports. If you ate it in

pencil veinas, because he was screwing up your refineries. Even if US enforcers in German enforcers were like firing a Zeppelin across the ocean every day full of files, it's not like they had the same case. Google, Google does the same thing in every country. Right. But even back then, when they would do that, at least they would build you a fucking park, like at least those guys. Oh, no, that came later. That came later. You need, yeah, no, that was when they

“started to clean up. That was when they, that's when they, that's what they got worried about”

the kids on their lawns. Yeah, they, they weren't building parts. They were, they were hiring

paper tens to beat your brains. Right. So, here's the thing. Here's the point I'm making, though.

It's like, what these people did is not the lost art of a stolen, of a fallen civilization. Right. When I say we need to break up monopolies, I'm not asking you to figure out how to embalm a Pharaoh or like build a pyramid without power tools. Right. There are people alive today who learned at their trust-busting from the people who broke up Rockefeller's empire. Right. Like, this is like, they did it. We can do it. They weren't smarter than us. We did it with my bell.

We did it. And that's what people still use phones. Yeah. And the other thing that drives me nuts, and you brought it up earlier, which is the thing you worry about in all this is in the inevitable hollowing out of this, what that does to a society that's going to move towards authoritarianism. You know, and we're living through another red scare moment, but they always say the biggest threat to this country's communism or socialism. And my view is the biggest threat to this country

is the inability to positively reform the kind of capitalism we practice now, which will lead to

I mean, UNFDR and Henry Ford all agree. Right. Like, you know, only thing the three of us agree on.

Yeah. Yeah. Henry Ford does not agree about Jews in any way. Let's fake that's no. He's not, and before not a big fan of me being allowed to speak like this.

“Yeah. But, but no. I mean, look, there's been lots of people who recognize this, right?”

That like, you know, to put this in economics terms, there is an equilibrium between the cost of stopping people from building guillotine on your lawn by hiring chuds in like, you know, body armor. And the cost of like building hospitals and roads so that no one wants to build a guillotine on your lawn. That's right. Right. Of a social safety net that makes sense. Yeah. Right. And, you know, it listens to Snowden days. One of the questions I've asked myself, because I should say,

I should have said this before. I worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You just talked to my old boss, Cindy Cohen about that. Cindy Cohen. She's fantastic. Yeah.

A fantastic woman. Amazing. I've been there for 25 years. Not as long as Cindy, but I've been there

for 25 years. And so I've worked on all these issues and like back to object permanence, right? Like I saw the policies that we made that led to this happening. And I know that when those policies were coming in, we said, hey, this is going to happen. And then it happened. And like, I just, one of the things I'm on a mission to do is to make people understand this isn't the weather. It's not the great forces of history. It's not the iron laws of economics. It's just these

assholes who did things that they were warned would fuck shit up and did it. And then like, if we call it the weather, right, then we don't know how to fix it. Like, what do you, everybody complains about the weather? No one does anything about it. If you actually know that there's some space lasers out there, thank you, Marjorie Taylor Green, then you can get to the guys with the space lasers, right? So these guys, they did this to us, right? They stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law.

They allowed a string of mergers. You know, when Google bought ways, Tim Wu tells the story. It's great. When Google bought ways, Tim Wu is at the Federal Trade Commission. It's like,

“why are we letting the company that owns Google Maps by the Maps company everyone started to use?”

And they said, oh, well, we figured that Google Maps is how you know where you are and ways as how you find out how to get there. Like a stupidest thing I've ever heard. Ways is how you find out that there might be a car abandoned on the side of the roof. Like, what the hell, right? But so how are they falling for this or are they enabling this? Corey, that because there's a distinction between, are they being fooled or are they enabling

the scam? Right. I understand if, if the rooms, I'll fall for it. I'll download the chat GPT and go, blah, blah, blah. But how is it that the experts, the investors, the economists, the banks, how the fuck do they not understand this? Well, let's start with the top, right? Let's start with the capital allocators, the billionaires. Right. So to be a billionaire, I think like a lot of them are

basically solipsists. You know, you can't really think of their people real if you inflict the kind of

“pain that you have to inflict. We're all NPCs in their, in their game. Yeah, this is what Elon Musk says,”

everyone's an NPC, right? So, you know, and they are surrounded by psychopaths. And so they're already living like the AI future where no one's real and everyone tells you you're great just glazes you all day, right? So those people, I think, they're like kind of primed to believe we can replace humans with chat bots. But there's also, I think, a cohort of cynics. So like imagine, you know, think about like all the kind of vast panoply of chuds we've met thanks to Trumpland, right? Some of those guys,

by the way, like vast panoply of chuds is not the name of your next book. I really, I don't know what we're doing here. It'll be a chat. The net, I just started to work on the next book. It's a novel. It's called "Once's Enemy Action," and, you know, it's James Bond quote James Bond reference, right? Anyway, that might be a chapter. So this vast panoply of chuds. And some of these guys, they're like RFK, right? They really believe like there's no peptide that guy hasn't met that he

won't like stick under his eyelids like Jimmy Hendricks doing us it, right? But vaccines are the problem. It's, except for tides, he's plants are safe. They haven't tested. Nobody knows what they do, but put as many of as you can in your body. Yeah. But there's a ton more who are like, I don't know if this shit works, but entertainment can sell it, right? Joe Rogan can sell it. I don't have to believe it works to do it. You don't have to believe that putting a jade egg in

your vagina is good for you to believe that Winith Paltrow can sell a lot of vagina rocks, right? Right. So, so I think at the top, you've got these two groups, right? And, and they're kind of a, kind of a toxic mix, right? Because like the true believers in the cynics, where one says, well, maybe that's not the right thing. That's where the other group is actually like in their sweet spot. And so there's a bit of acceleration there. And then I just think that like to ask

like how can the banks put this money into is to, is to invite the question where were you in 2007? Oh, right? But that's, that's my point is our learning curves for losers like are we ever going to

is going to come back and create giant craters? This time it's different supposedly. It's always

different, you know? And like, I just think that we have really fallen prey to the story about the efficient market despite all of the times that the market has been inefficient and grossly inefficient. Or the fact that we've manipulated it to, you know, the other story we tell ourselves is there is a free market. Sure. And that somehow the government hasn't been picking winners and losers forever and that the free money that they give to corporations in terms of subsidies and not taxing capital

in the same way that labor is taxed is somehow not them making a choice. There is no free.

“Sure. And you know, like, look, I think there's like two ways to think about regulatory”

capture. If you ask the Chicago school people, right? They'll tell you regulatory capture is as soon as you have a business that's going to try and capture the state, therefore you can't have a state, right? We just like, that's the libertarian. We have to get rid of the regulators. Yeah. That's, you know, all the high-tech and everybody else, you know, as long as the

government's not involved in anything, they can't be corrupt. Okay. Sure. But I always tell my friends

like, you know, the libertarians I know, like, even if you're so like, mosque-addled that you can't even open your copy of Atlas shrug, because the pages are all stuck together. And you think the only reason we should have a government is to like enforce contracts. You still want, you still want the people who are like making the contracts to be held to account by the person who's enforcing the contract. They have to be more powerful. The referee has to be more powerful than the players

in the field, right? Which means that the largest government, or the smallest government you can have is returned by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate. Right. So the decision 40 years ago to allow runaway murders, right? This kind of orgy of consolidation, right? And like now, we have these cartels that are so inbreed, they have corporate Habsburg jaws, right? And they just like, they can't do anything. They're completely unintelligible, right? And like, you know,

this decision has produced the circumstances for regulatory capture, right? So like, people like, like, a lot of the bad stuff that we worry about with AI, I should say is actually just worrying about privacy, right? Same with algorithms, right? It's just a problem about privacy. Well, they're data hovers and they're bringing it up. Yeah. And by the way, you do make the point in the book that I think the way that it's generally utilized is not efficiency. It's surveillance

state. It's basically your boss can now learn a lot more about you are now very much an NPC in a game that they are moving around on and they're watching you and what they're using the technology for is not what they've promised it for everybody else, which is doing these great jobs. It's finding ways to make sure that you are more controlled by your bosses. Well, and let me ground that in like something material and not like my control race, right? So one thing that like AI is genuinely

good at and it's actually quite exciting is multivariant statistical analysis. Nothing more exciting

“than that. It is if you're like, if you want to do cancer research, it is if you want to do like”

a, you know, find it about like what's going to happen with rising seas, right? You're just, you've got like a whole bunch of variables. Crunch and none. And you're trying to like make statistical analyses up on. So one of the things that that you can do with AI is surveillance pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination. So surveillance pricing, you're a rabbi and this is a woman called

Lindsey Owens. He's got a book coming out. She's called us gouged. She's amazing. And then algorithm

wage discrimination is Vina Dubel. It's a lawyer and a scholar is written about this. And they're both the same thing. It's a, it's when you use an algorithm to segment an audience based on behavioral surveillance data, right? I've seen what you do. I've followed you around and you're a use of a service. And then you start running experiments on the segments to see what the highest price that looks at or the lowest wage that looks at. So on the wage side, this started with Uber,

where drivers who accepted lowball offers, and remember when you're an Uber, drive you of 20 seconds to decide whether the offer is good or bad, right? So you're like looking at the mileage, you're looking at the time, you're driving in traffic of 20 seconds. Wow, right? So if you accept a lowball offer, your next offer is lower and it keeps pushing you down, right? Now, if you're picky, it's higher. And then if you start taking the lowball offers, they sneak into

there, they push it down again. So whatever it is, it's your side hustle, let's see if you pick you eventually you lose it. Wait, that's, that's the Uber algorithm doing that to its own drivers

“to drivers. Yes, why? To push their wages down. That's how, that's how Uber got profitable, right?”

For 13 years, they lost $31 billion of the Saudi royal family's money, 41 cents on every dollar they brought in. They pissed away. They eventually, like, put all the other cab companies

started screwing the drivers and started raising prices on riders. And they decoupled

“riders from drivers. You remember it used to be, if you got search priced for the ride you were”

paying for, they got search paid for the ride they delivered, now it's totally decoupled. That's decoupled. It's like, it's bizarre world Marxism. It's in shidification. It goes back to the other book. It's, it's that in shidification. That is in shidification. So I'm going to make you really angry here. Oh, it's a groundwork, groundwork collaborative in the Roosevelt Institute. So groundwork collaborative, Lindsey Owen's outfit and Roosevelt Institute published report on nurses. So used

to be contract nurses were hired through like a local body shop, a staffing agency. The travel

nurses and people like that. Yeah. Yeah. Now it's four four national apps that compete with each other.

They all called themselves Uber for nursing. So maybe you can see where this is going. Oh, boy. They buy credit card data from data brokers and the more outstanding credit card that you have, the lower the wage you're offered. Oh, because it's a decimal wage. Oh, premium. Right. So, so AI super good at this. Right. The company that you're working for looks to see your level of desperation. Right. So that they can lowball you. And so, John, like me, you have heard

of Tennessee or any Ford. You know that there are coal bosses who would have done this shit if they could have. Right. But they weren't going to be able to hire the Army of Pinkerton's to follow every coal miner around or figure out who's in the most debt. And then get the boiler room full of guys and green eye shades to mark up the ledgers and change their wages 10 times a minute. Right. This is the thing you need AI for. This is what automation gets you on the wage side. And the

same thing is happening on the price side where again, like it used to be demographers would do this kind of cute madmen style thing where they'd be like, "Wow, we got the little old ladies who own seven cats who live in Shaboy again." And we've got this and that where they would go do focus groups. AI just naively buckets people into groups based on behavioral data and then automatically runs experiments to see the highest price they will accept.

On New Drinks are now at McDonald's with refreshers like the strawberry water melon refresher and the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba to grafted sodas like the straight berry blast with berry flavours and cold foam. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire six all new drinks are here now at McDonald's. Refreshers can take care of you. Okay, so here's this out then. Yeah, you know, we've been talking a little bit about like,

"Oh, what is then the value of AI? What does it do? Why is why would it fulfill this promise of investment that is being made?" You're almost making the case that AI is a kind of metaverse globalization tool. You know, one of the things that globalization did is it allowed companies to become much more profitable because it allowed them to kind of search shift the wage bill. Right. Yeah. Look for the worst conditions. Look for the most desperate people.

Look for who you can explore lowest tax rate exactly. Yeah. And so in some ways, you're making the case for AI's value. You're diffusing the bubble, but the effective it

“is to diffuse the bubble. You have to abuse the worker. Sure. I mean, that's the promise.”

But, but back to like criticite. Yeah. Now, let's talk about the values here. So that like not not that human values, the costs, right? That's dollar figures. Yes. Yes. Yes. So popularize all the cab drivers in the country. Do it again to all the nurses. Do it to all the poor commercial illustrators who are ready. The poorest people I know, right? Poor is church mice. And you do not touch the sides of the operating expenditure bills of the AI companies. Right. You have to come for like

very high-waged workers. And those are the areas where I think we're going to notice it, although I don't think they won't try. So look, I have an extremely treatable form of cancer. I don't want to alarm you. And I see oncologists' radiologists as so on. And so I've been following

the stories about radiologists and AI. Sure. Well, that's the one they always say. Like,

you don't even need radiologists anymore, those. You know, some solid mass tumors. You can

“you probably the AI can spot some that the human misses, right? I think that's fine.”

So I've been getting my treatment at the Kaiser Hospital in LA, despite it being private medicine, I have no complaints. They took really good care of me. Four weeks ago, a radiologist told me I'm cancer-free. So congratulations, young man. Very happy about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. I'm looking forward to your next 50 books. Yeah. There you go. So, um, if right now, you know,

of Scientology because that's where we roll in LA, right? So for right now, there was like a salesman for Sophie Sam Altman, leaking out some Scientologists who wanted to give them a personality test, going up to talk to the CEO of Kaiser and say, look, here's my pitch to you. You've got

10 radiologists on the strength. They cost you three and a grand each. That's three million

dollars a year in wages. You give me another million dollars on top of that. And I'm going to sell you an algorithm. And it's just going to sit behind them. A couple of days, times a day, it's going to time on the shoulder and say, take another look at that one. And sometimes you're going to, you're going to save a life doing that. It's going to cost you an extra million dollars, plus you probably like they're going to go from a hundred X-rays a day to a 90. It's who might

“have to hire another part-time radiologist as a cancer survivor. It's fine with me. I think that's great.”

Yes, sir. No one has invested an AI on the thought that someday would make the things that people do more expensive or need more labor. Right. So the sales cover right now is salesman rushes past the scientific and personality test up to the CEO's office and says, you got 10 radiologists on the strength. They cost you three million dollars a year. You fire nine of them. You save two point seven million dollars a year. You give 1.35 of that to my boss, Sam Altman. You keep the

other half of it for yourself. That one radiologist he marks the AI's homework. If someone dies because he's doing this at a speed that no human could pay sustained attention to, he is what Dan Davies calls the accountability sink and we blame him for the person who dies. And you know, I tell us to radiologists and they're like, okay, but we have labor power. They do. They're in short supply right now. We'll use AI. It's on our own terms. But the point of AI is to take away your labor power.

Yes. Right. It's to find ways to erode your wages and segment you. Yes. No, it's that globalization. It's that same. It's another frontier. It's the vast expanse of the ocean or space that they haven't explored it. It's it's taking what they've tried to do in the real world and laying it into the virtual world in that same exploitative manner. But I'll tell you a story. This goes to the flip side of it because, and I talked to Jerome Asimoglu who you may know is the economist from MIT.

Yeah. I've been on a panel with him at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Wonderful guy. Yeah. Really, really smart. You know, his concern is always when AI begins to marry

robotics and how that will, you know, come together. But I'll tell you a story. I happen to be a fan of what I like to call the crunch rap supreme. Every now and again, I'll go with the Notchusville Grundy. If you're vegetarian, scriptwriter, get whatever. Diarrhea epidemics of say, otherwise damn to be damned. I still go in. But I drove into my, I have my local and they know me and I hit when I hit my order, they know me.

“I drive up one day and I hear this. Hello. May I take your order?”

And I'm like, they're never this happy. It's AI. Yeah. They've replaced the person at the takeout drive through with AI. My order is no beef, but can you put in the refried beans? Well, that blew AI's fucking mind. And to the point where like, then the person and the thing had to come on go, hey man, what do you need? I'll get it for you. I pull up. So now all I do is I talk to the AI and then I pull up to the driving window and just talk shit with the person who's at the register

about the AI bot. Right. And we talk shit a little bit and we share anecdotes. The point being people hate it. I hate it. Yeah. People hate it. It hasn't saved them any labor. And by the way, if you think replacing the guy making your crunch rap supreme with a robot will be cheaper,

you've never tried to service an ice machine like machines are wickedly more expensive than human

beings who will work when they're sick and break down. And you don't have to do. You're not on the hook for any of it. So they think they're getting the high level people. They can't even get the the lower income totally. And going back to the 90s, right? Going back to the late 90s, early 2000s, the dog comira. You go and pull out like the Harvard business review. You pull out like the business press of the day while street journal full of these op-eds, reading their hands and going,

what are the CEOs going to do when all these young workers who insist on using the web show up in the workplace? You go pull those same periododicals off the shelf today and they're like, CEOs are firing workers because they were fusing to use AI. Wow. Right. And saying, if you don't

“use AI, we're going to fire you. Right. So I think back to like automation driven by labor as”

in service of quality, automation driven by capital and service to throughput and when capital has monopoly or cartel, they can lower quality. Right. This is we don't care we don't have to wear the burrito company is what you're going through at your local drive through. Right. So Corey, how do you, so you say, you know, you said something earlier that I think really struck me, which is, it is no mystery how to diffuse this bomb. The really isn't, you know, it's it's

to the expense of labor. Sure. And it is that imbalance that has driven, I think, a lot of the

“turbulence in our political scene in our social scene and all of those things. Rebalancing that”

is not revolutionary. No, it's incremental. It's what if we just taxed capital gains at the same

level as salary gains. If you work and earn $100,000, shouldn't that be taxed the same way if you bought an investment and it just threw off $100,000, why is that different? Yeah, yeah, look, it's, it, there's a joke from Eastern Canada that the punch, the punch, people in win a peg won't know what the hell you're talking about. No, I'm talking about Newfoundland. All right. But the problem is if you say there's a joke from Newfoundland people think you're going to tell a new

few joke, which is like an Irish joke. It's not a new few joke. It's a joke told by people from Newfoundland. It's a joke from Newfoundland whose punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

Right. And look, you know, when America had more unionized workers, when it had more

“fair electoral districts, when it does, you know, people who had more disposable time because they”

had a better split with capital in terms of the disposition of the surplus generated by their labor, right? It would have been easier to do this. But again, like we are starting from a place that's still better from the place our forebears started from back when, you know, the labor movement starting in America. You know, Donald Trump thinks that you get rid of the national labor relations board and you end labor activism. He's like to grinch the stole Christmas. He thinks that you steal

the tincil and Christmas goes away, right? Like the reason you have tincil is the Christmas

is in the hearts of the who's down in Houvelle. The reason we have the labor law is because workers

struck and and form unions when they were wildly illegal. They risk beatings and murder and lynchings. They created so much pain for capital, the capital suit for the labor piece. And Donald Trump's big mistake here is he thinks that when you fire the referee, the game ends and we don't know when you fire the referee, all bets are off. Right. For a guy who claims to be a wrestling guy, he seems to like not really understand this. Well, that's because he's all hat no cattle. I mean,

“Donald Trump is as as they say, he's all trailer no movie. Yeah. Like, and that's why we find ourselves”

in these situations. His attention span does not allow him. He's the announcement guy. It's liberation day. Yeah. I'm going to destroy Iran. And then when things don't come to pass, but it's been two weeks. He's like, okay, what's my next episode of the apprentice? Right. He just wants to move on to that next level. But what strikes me more here. And I don't know if you have an insight into this or what your feelings are is that it's less about Donald Trump's inability to understand it

and more about the opposition parties inability to harness this energy in a manner that is accessible and reachable for voters thirsty for this kind of rebalancing. So look, I have on this call, I have mentioned my affiliation with the FF and we're 501-C3. So I can't endorse a party. But what I can say is that the people who oppose Donald Trump's agenda in both parties have completely failed to speak to the things that people need and that people want and to show them that there is the

possibility of an alternative. So one of the things I've been, I've been trying to work into this conversation here is how we ended up in this situation, just in respect to privacy. Right. So like you have these companies, they, you know, they're screwing nurses, they're like funding, you know, fueling data theft and identity theft and so on. When I testified to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau in the last couple of days of the Biden and men when they were banning data brokers which

Trump unbanned. And the speaker before me was speaker from the American Association retired people who wanted the committee to know that the ad broker industry would sell you ad targeting to people with dementia. And then the person after me was from the Pentagon who wanted them to know that you can buy as an ad targeting group military personnel on base web gambling problems. Oh, she's right. So like this, so how do we end up in this horrible place with privacy? Well,

here it is. The last time Congress passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. And that was a law that makes it illegal for video strokes, store clerks to disclose your VHS rental fisher. Right. And every other form of privacy invasion is legal in America. Right. They spy on you because they can't. Right. Because that's where the money is. Great. We talked about it earlier. Oh, but the money is there because they can. Yes. If, if, if, if every time you spy on someone

And they were the only game in town. They would. That's right. Just like, you know, your dog looks

at the balls because it can't, no one makes no make some stop. Right. Like, so. But, but, you know, like, like, it's, it's, it's, it takes an act of will to not connect the fact that we don't have a new privacy law to the harms of surveillance. Right. Right. And in the same way that like, we're like, how do we get all these monopolies? Well, we had these economists who 40 years ago told us monopolies were efficient and told us to not enforce any monopoly law. Right.

No, you have monopolies. And they're like, what do you mean? It's my fault. Right. I did tell you not to put down the rat poison and rats are eating your face off. But like, it's the time of the

“rat dude. But I think because they're extorting our economy, what they're doing is they're saying,”

if you take this away from us, it implodes and suddenly your economy is hollow. They, they've

extorted us. And as far as the difference in privacy, look, Daniel Ellsberg reveals that the Vietnam war is a lie. And he's hailed, he's attacked by Nixon. But he's hailed as a hero. And the tide turns against the Vietnam war. And we go, Edward Snowden does the same thing about the NSA having a master of aliens program. And what do we do? I'm sorry, you got to get the fuck out of here. Like, we've changed in our relationship to that in a huge way and to the not to the better for sure.

But no one wants to be spot, even so, even if there's some apathy, no one wants to be spot. And you remember Apple turned on a little tick box in iOS, the operating system for phones and tablets. That's right. You ticked it in Facebook and spying you 96% of iOS users ticked that. And you just seem like the other 4% were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees, which makes sense.

“If I work to Facebook, I will be drunk all the time. But you know, like no one wants this, right?”

And and and here's the kicker. The same time Apple did this. They turned on surveillance in iOS to power their own ad brokerage with no tick box to opt out of it. And when they got caught doing it, they lied about it. Right? So, you know, like people don't want surveillance. No one, no one goes into the cell phone store and says, "Now, which of these phones is going to spawn me the most?" Right? They might be indifferent to it. Right? But no one is out there going on.

I love being spot on. And when they, you know, get ripped off at the grocery store or, you know, they get racially discriminated against and hiring or, you know, they, or in lending or someone makes deep fake porn of them. These are all downstream of like no new privacy loss in 1988. Right? These are all the same thing, right? They're just different, like different epiphanomena of the same root cause, which is we let them spy on us and we don't punish them.

“And so it's profitable to do it. It doesn't have to be profitable to do it. Right? Like,”

that's right. That's right. From spying on you could be more than the benefit. And that brings us around to, you know, the conversation. And I thank you so much for your time. And it's been so interesting, uh, inevitability. You know, one of the things you talk about a lot is, this is not inevitable. And we are centours. And we have agency. We are master, not blaster. But that has to be exercised. And it's exercised not just through democratic power,

but through legislative power and through people power, you know, yeah. These are the types of things that there is not, there's a learned helplessness that goes along with systems that seem too complex and too large to have any impact. It's not a true story. And the story that you've written in this new book reverse centours guide to life after AI is a story of agency. And I really appreciate it. And well, thank you, uh, you, Corey Doctor. Oh, well, John, this has been an absolute delight.

I feel like I've known you for a million years because I have this parasocial relationship for you.

I'm not that interesting, unfortunately. It's, uh, it's sit around feeding chipmunks. You have really given me some of the, the real hope in the dark, uh, on many, many's the day. And, um, I really appreciate what you do. And it has been just an honor and a pleasure to be on. And I will say to people who are feeling discouraged, you know, yes. Look, they keep telling you to vote with your wallet. And the reason they want you to vote with your wallet is

their wallets are thicker than yours. You know, shopping isn't politics, right? Like a boycott, like Montgomery Bus Boycott was not people waking up for three hundred and eighty consecutive days and going, uh, I guess I'm walking to work today. Yeah. Right. It was a movement. It's not agonizing in the grocery aisle about whether to buy this product or that product or whether you use Twitter or blue sky. It's a movement. And if all you do is try and change politics with shopping

and nothing happens, you're going to look over at your friends who shop differently from you're going to go like, oh, that's your fault. And the people you need to be in community

local politics. Like we never thought local politics is more important. There's one thing

moms for liberty taught us is that the stupidest people you know. Hell yeah. Can join the most unimportant unregarded local offices. Make huge material differences to people's lives. That's right. Local politics are like, do you get a data center? Is there a flock camera to chuds around up your neighbors and shoot them in the face? Right. Yeah. And get involved in national politics and get involved with civil society groups. So EFFF.org, the group I've worked for for 25 years.

Great group. The best and most important digital rights group in the country. But also the whole, I won't say panoply again. The whole basket. Non-chuds get involved with the non-chud aspects.

“The panoply of non-chuds. And join your union or organize a union. And that's how we get”

shot of it. And if you wanted to get there, it wouldn't start from here. But you know, our ancestors in the not so distant past face challenges. We're some of the ones we're going through now. They did it. They weren't smarter or better than us. We can do it too. Cory Doctora, words of wisdom, words of encouragement. And thank you so much. And thanks for being here.

Cory Doctora, in shitification, the reverse mentors guide to life after all. And a million other

books that are all wonderful. Thank you for being with us. Thank you, John. I really appreciate it. I love a dude whose mind works faster than I can even. It's one of those guys. His mind is working. And I feel a little bit like am I in low oxygen? Why isn't my, why can't my brain do that? Yeah. He was running ahead of everybody on that one for sure. Right? Yes. He was going, he was leading the Peloton. And we were all like, let's catch that guy in the yellow jacket. Let's get up there.

The yellow jersey. And go through. But I also love that. And this is not obviously for his fiction, but in his non-fiction, he really does write like he thinks. Yes. He writes like he talks too.

He means a great. Yes. Yeah. And he's able to, you know, not everybody is able to connect to that

force as easily and as naturally. And he seems to be able to do that in a really prolific way. I know. It's what makes him so enjoyable to read. Maybe that comes from his blogging experience. Or, and that's maybe why he's so prolific too. But it's very conversational. But in a way where it's like, you know, the smartest conversation somebody could just be having a conversation and constructed,

“but also quotable. I mean, honestly, fast, panoply of chuds, come on. That was off the top of the”

dome. Come on. You can't just throw that in there and walk away like it's nothing. And interesting in it, I think changed my view of what the realities and what the dangers are of it. And in some ways, made me more hopeful. Like I left the conversation feeling like, oh no, systemic agency could have real efficacy on this is not inevitable. Yes. And it feels like the solutions to our problems are solutions were aware of. You know, there are things that we

are familiar with, but we've been avoiding regardless. It's like the way we've been talking about protecting labor against AI is UBI and like creating dividends from these companies. But it's really just stronger labor protections. And it's something that we know is possible. But we just haven't been doing it. Well, that's it. Yeah, it's possible. And it was done with pinkered in boys with bully sticks, beating the shit out of people in the streets. And it can be done

again. But I also thought, you know, cognizant of how that ball has been dropped by opposition parties

“and how and it's been difficult to articulate it. And then you can see like, oh, that's why the”

DSA stuff is gaining such agency because it's a language people are thirsty to hear. Absolutely. I know I was thinking that during the conversation, I was like, there was a lot of class consciousness in the book and just like if they were mad at us about communism last week, we'll bring just imagine. Yes, they were all the right wing blogs when crazy. Look at, look at Stuart nodding his head. How dare he. Like Lenin did with with Marx.

Ridiculousness. Brittany, what are the what are the kids want to know? John. Yes. There's 170 until the midterms. Dems still don't have any plan. 117. Why does that number sound so familiar? Oh. 117. 170 is. Wait, am I missing something here? There was a book, title of a book,

the listeners of this program are far more entuned and brilliant than I could ever, and they

bring a question like that. So perfectly framed and I completely whiffed on the significant

“of it. So apologies to the people who framed that so beautifully. I think they don't have leadership”

and from what I understand from the New York Times, they also have no money. I mean, the DNC being slightly different. But when you're in a position for a wave election and the article that comes out is the guy in charge of the logistics of it is throwing phones at people and his broke. You just know, that feels like the story of how I ended up on Skid Row. This feels like such a strange doesn't feel great. Doesn't feel great. The Democrats feel like, you know, we have a great

opportunity here, and then they just go around the meeting asking for ideas of how to fuck it up. And then thruff ones. There are no bad ideas. There are no bad ideas. There are only bad ideas. No good ideas. I don't want to hear how we could save this thing. I want to, I want to understand how we could snatch defeat from clearly the jaws of victory. And the problem with it is, it seems so easily rectifiable. But it is when you don't know the difference between

Chuck Schumer and Mamdoni and you don't know how to square that circle and you don't have anybody who can unify that message. Yeah. Like how the fuck they haven't come up with their own contract for America or some even if it's a gimmick to centralize the general complaints of a public thirsty for some actionable ideas and leadership is malpractice bordering on criminal. But the in-fighting has been astonishing. Like my Twitter feed of just people still

like so completely mad at Mamdoni, like even Dems responding to last week's episode. Like what are they mad at? What are the Democrats mad at? And also, why is he engendering anger? Like what other than like, yeah, he's on the third rail of Israel Palestine. But like talking to him, how did that not diffuse when he's like, you know, so what you do is you take the budget and you defer it to thirty two instead of twenty six. And then what we do is we fix the bottles. Like

there was nothing in there that was in any way like a call of revolution or it was let's run this

city with top of mind the people who help us run this city, meaning the essential workers in

“middle class. Yeah. I think it's this weird thing that people just want to be right and they want to be”

the person or group to like crack the code for the plan forward without putting any actual plan forward. Right? So like there's people just trying to have a following essentially that I'm seeing versus actually putting sustainable, vulnerable things forward. So it's almost like the caricature that they're reacting to is incentivized by the social media that they're reacting to it on. And it just creates this wild cycle of a battle royale over a straw man and a caricature

that that didn't really exist in the first place. Jillian is positing this. I want to get

her thought there's something spinning in the mind. I mean, I was thinking about what Brittany said it's almost like there hasn't been a need for a ton of introspection because Donald Trump has been so terrible and so unpopular that we haven't had to like really have a reckoning with why our policies are also very unpopular. And there's a lot of people who are entrenched in these positions and they, you know, central to their livelihood, central to their relevance, central to

their health care, they're having a staff that, you know, waits on them at the right page of like 85 or whatever is maintaining the status quo. So these things really are a threat to them in their, you know, position. And they haven't had to face that reckoning haven't had to look in the mirror

“because the car crash in front of them is so distracting that there hasn't had to be that. I think”

that's definitely right. And by the way, the infighting is necessary and should have, it should be outfighting. Yeah. We should be watching it so that there is a robust discussion about what the direction is is. And within that discussion, leadership of that party should emerge. Yeah, that's all. This was happening with Biden wherever you're so mad that people were drawing attention to what we

fuck that. There's a time and a place for the same page. You know what you want to do? You want to have a battle of ideas and let steel, temper, or iron, you know, sharpen iron and you make your ideas better. And that's the free market of ideas. Especially in fucking primaries. People are so mad in certain primaries that you have people coming from different points of view. Wild. Like we're supposed to have an ideological pure primary. That's right. Yep. We have to have same running against

same otherwise. You just like, well, no, you have same with with blonde hair, you have same brown hair, you have same old and same young, you know. Right. Yeah, it's it's nonsense, dude. But hopefully it's moving us in a better direction. I'm not even going to dive that deep into this because I'm on

“optimism high. Yeah. I'm on optimism high. I love that for you. Pretty what else we got?”

What I'm moving for. I'm thinking about the panoply of nonsense. Yeah. John, why do you think I feel didn't get a cabinet position? Because he has one. Fox News is part of the administration. That is. T. Yeah. It's the department of marketing. It's there. It's the department of communications. It's it's an adjunct to the administration. So that is when you work there, you are in the administration. You are in a cabinet position or you're in a cabinet position

when they're, you know, out of power of working in the opposition. But they are part of the framework that works hand-in-hand and the way you notice, they all talked, I mean, they all have his phone number,

they all have all that like the interesting thing about us, everybody always accused us of like,

you know, working with the Democratic Party or working with them, like, we never talk to those people. And if we do, those conversations were generally pretty aggressive and not so pleasant. What you're being accused of is always the thing that they're themselves doing. And so they're already part of the party apparatus and a valuable one, by the way, and well, and they do it well. Execution, yeah. Yeah, I mean, when you can do it from a couch, you know, in New York City too,

like you don't have to go around to DC. And you don't have to sit in those meetings where you have to laugh at his shitty jokes. Oh my God. We showed that last night. I saw. I saw. I saw. I saw. We show like the reason why he bombed so bad is he's used to work in bringer rooms.

“Yeah, when you're a young comic, you have to do these bringer shows where like you have to bring”

your friends and like you get to do stand up and they're all like, oh my God. And then when you go

out into the real world of stand up and the first performance and you're like, oh, yeah, what's going on here?

That's what happens. He's not, but he's he's working rooms where the bar for comedy is does that a joke boss? Yeah, I'm dying to know. Hey, who wrote the speech? Like, did they bring in roast writer? Like, he's dying to know who wrote it, too. I say some of that. In defense of the writers of Donald Trump's wrote, so they had very serviceable premises. Oh, we're going to do another UFC fight night. Here are the battles. Chris Christie against, uh, cake, AOC against foreign

poll, you know, those jokes I will guarantee you were written professionally and concisely. And he went in and trumped them up. He weaved. He weaved. He went in and he went Chris Christie, uh, the worst. He's the worst. Sloppy, Chris Christie, and immediately you're like, wait, what are we talking about? He is the one and then he would go, who wrote this? They did, well, who fucked it up? The performer. That's right. Old Bumble's McGee, on stage. We even around and talking

about all kinds of other shit until nobody even had any idea. He went, he introduced the premise and went four and a half minutes before getting back to the payoff on the premise and then complained

that the joke wasn't written right. Yeah. Wow. Mm-hmm. Wow. Never him. It was a tough watch.

Oh, it's beautiful watch. That is fine. I actually think again. For a comic, no one is ever happier than a comic, watching another comic each shit on stage. I couldn't handle it. If I was in that room, I would have been laughing because of how uncomfortable I was. I would have been like,

“I'll give him the laugh. That's how we all like, I love watching people bomb, especially when they”

love the bomb. Like, there is, when you're a comic, you have to love the bomb. The bomb is like, it's like a snow day. It doesn't happen all that often, but it's so fun and you get to do shit.

and other comics are there because no one's laughing except for three weirdos in the back who are doing

“this. That's how you knew the writers for Trump's roast were not actually in the room.”

Because it was quiet. They were from home. They were in the room. They'd have been back there going. I love watching you eat. Oh my god. Okay, one. John, in your opinion, who is more pathetic, punch or jimmy fee? Oh, punch. I don't even think that's controversial. Is that a country? Jimmy fee is, but look, it punches not pathetic. That's, that's for the punch is a beautiful soul searching for love. And by the way, has been more accepted now, has learned

to temper whatever, whatever punch was pulling. Look, the, the, the, the, the wisdom of the tribe,

we cannot replace our wisdom for the wisdom of the tribe. And the wisdom of the tribe

“shaped punches behavior to such an extent with the tribe. All right, the hazing period is over.”

You are no longer a pledge. Welcome, brother. Now you can, you can lose the stuffed animal for comfort and you can wife it now. You can join in with us and just use it for whatever purpose as you find. Yeah. Jimmy fee. Sorry, I'm going to fill. Jimmy fee is an angel on earth. Who is, is tiny Tim who was respected and embraced by his family, by the community at large,

they recognized the brilliance of a raccoon that could also be an Ottoman, like you're not quite

sure what Jimmy fee is that a piece of furniture with a raccoon head or is that, what, what are we dealing with as hybrid? But there was something special about Jimmy fee. What was Jimmy fee born in a manger? I'm not going to go that far. Jimmy fee born in Bethlehem was he visited by three wise chipunks who brought him. I'm just saying there was a recognition from the get go that Jimmy fee had to be nurtured and adored and respected. And this is not to diminish punch who has to

his credit found his way back from whatever, whatever the shit he was pulling before. A abandonment. That's ended. Settle down. Settle down. The thing that we talk about on this funk. All I'm saying is the only, there needn't be a cure for Jimmy fee because Jimmy fee is the cure. I've actually written a song about it and it goes a little something like this. Yeah, the only problem we have with Jimmy fee is obviously rhyming his name in the rap songs

and Oads that should praise him to those hands. That's really the only problem that we have. It's been harder for him to embed himself in popular culture. Punch is easy.

“If he's doing it in spite of that, you know, that's why he's such an inspiration.”

Jillian, thank you. That's exactly right. He's, he's everything. This is how religions start. Yep. As they should, this is how they should start. Well that's all, that's all we have. That's all the time. How can they keep how can, you know, people are just going to stop asking questions. They're just going to go, "I didn't, what am I doing?" I'm in my car, I'm going to work. I don't need to listen to this nonsense.

They can ask us a Twitter, "We are weekly show pod, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Please, Guy." We are weekly show podcast. You can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel. They weekly show with John Stuart. Uh, perfect episode for a lovely late July, morning. Uh, producer Brittany McMedovic, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Robatole, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyson are executive producers, Christmas Shane, and Katie Gray,

once again, thank you guys very much. Very enjoyable. We'll talk to you next week. The weekly show with John Stuart is a comedy central podcast that's produced by Paramount audio and bus boy productions.

At Cox, your internet and mobile price won't change for five years. That's five new year celebrations.

“Five Valentine's Day. Five Fourth of July's. Five Halloween's. Five Thanksgiving's.”

And five summers that go by too fast.

Through it all, your price stays the same with our five year price lock guarantee. Cox, a step ahead.

“Requires two gig speeds and gig unlimited mobile taxes and fees excluded from price lock,”

mobile data speeds reduced after 20 gigs.