[SPEAKER_01]: But that's what I think of, and I think of these outlets.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like they're journalism, but they're just like dull, bland garbage designed not to offend anybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just not really useful.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you'd be better off going and watching them up at show for a half an hour.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you'd probably probably better inform than most of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just not good.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not really interested in tech.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's embarrassing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we have to really, I'm hoping this era ends with some sort of Renaissance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Tech Won Save Us made in partnership with the nation magazine.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Paris Mars, and this week my guest is Carl Baudi.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before we get to that, just a reminder that this month is the sixth birthday of Tech Won Save Us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been doing this show for all these years now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've interviewed over 300 amazing guests.
[SPEAKER_00]: To give the many thousands of listeners to this show, the insight they need on what these tech companies and these executives are doing to our world and to our individual lives as we have to interact with these products and the way that they, you know, change the society around us in ways that are really not serving us and degrading our existence as they become more and more powerful.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I think that these conversations are really important, many of you do as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you do enjoy this, if you want to make sure I can keep doing this work, having these interviews, providing these perspectives on the tech industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: This month, I'm trying to get 100 new supporters of the show over on patreon.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if you do want to help support the show, help support the work that goes into making it, take a minute to go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, become a supporter and, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: As I said, this week's guest is Carl Boney.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a freelance reporter and he has a newsletter called The Fine Print that I highly recommend you go subscribe to, you know, as people do with these letters.
[SPEAKER_00]: By now you've probably seen this story about Sam Altman in the New Yorker.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been making the rounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: There has been a lot of commentary on it and Carl wrote about the problem with how the media reports on these CEOs and how they seem to get
[SPEAKER_00]: trick, or get the wool pull over their eyes, time and again, by these people who are basically lying to us in order to enrich and empower themselves, and time and again, they get held up as these important figures who we should be paying attention to, who we should be giving some degree of benefit of the doubt to, or at least believing the types of things that they tell us, and time and again, it turns out that they are not really how they are being presented to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have someone like Elon Musk who presented a certain image of himself, and of course,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it was never always that person, you know, that person who we present to himself to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now he is embracing right wing politics.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is having all of these detrimental impacts on our society.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now we see someone like Sam Altman who has followed a similar mold who, you know, was praised as this kind of rising CEO genius.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now more and more we have people admitting that he is seemingly a compulsive liar who will do anything to gain power and influence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, is that really the kind of person who we want wielding this much power and influence in our society?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think not, and certainly Carlos and think so as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we dig into this report in the New Yorker on Sam Alman, what we take from it, what we think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we also extend that into a conversation about how the media reports on these CEOs or reports on these tech companies, the real flaws with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: How, you know, there are a lot of great tech reporters out there
[SPEAKER_00]: but there is also a lot of reporting that happens that just serves to boost up these CEOs to reflect the narratives that they're trying to tell the world and we're not served very well by that kind of reporting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I always enjoy talking to Carl.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really happy to have him back on the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you do enjoy this conversation, just as you enjoy many conversations on Tech Won't Save Us Again, I would ask you to consider going over to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us, helping us meet
[SPEAKER_00]: our goal for the show's six workday so that I can keep doing this work, keep having these conversations and keep educating you on what the tech industry is doing to our society.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Carl, welcome back to TechOneSafe us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nice to see you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always great to talk to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I love watching your commentary online of, you know, everything going on with the tech industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in particular, these tech billionaires and, you know, everything that they're up to and how they're making the world a worse place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you've been writing recently about
[SPEAKER_00]: the way that the media reports on these CEOs and these tech companies, of course, you know, not a new subject matter for you, but you've had some recent pieces that were really intriguing to me, and especially on the back of this Sam Altman, you know, piece in the New Yorker, I fear it was a great time to actually talk about how the media reports on these CEOs reports on the tech industry again, you know, because we've certainly talked about it on the show in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's new details here.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are things to dig into.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I guess I just want to start with a broader question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does tech media, and really, I guess media in general at this point report on these tech CEOs in the way that they do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think over time, they've just kind of become an extension of marketing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think as media got consolidated under the ownership of mostly right-wing, very rich, white men.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a very vested interest, and it's not subtle when their news coverage is kind of polluted with their motivations, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you get what I affectionately call a lot of CEO said a thing reporting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they'll just minusly parent whatever the CEO said.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to Mars.
[SPEAKER_01]: AI is going to be sentient in just three weeks if I get $1 billion and they'll just like they'll repeat it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They won't include any context, any history.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't matter if the CEO has been full of shit for 10 straight years.
[SPEAKER_01]: They won't mention that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a very specific class of reporting and I see it all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, you know, Elon Musk is obviously been a huge beneficiary, Sam Altman Zuckerberg, just this weird Panama.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like it's not really journalism.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like stenography and just parroting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they don't, you know, they could easily call up like an academic academics or desperate to be called up on the phone and ask questions because they've been studying subjects for 30 years, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They wouldn't even include like a paragraph where an academic comes in and says, that's not really very plausible, you know, because that would require actual journalism and actual work, and that's not what this class of journalism does.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think as things have gotten consolidated and they fired a lot of the real journalist,
[SPEAKER_01]: What's left is this weird simulator, I'm not just kind of pathetic and sad quite honestly and I think same open has really benefited from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I completely agree with you, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's wild to look at some of these articles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's a certain level where you can understand why it happens, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where I feel like we have been through this era of, you know, the resources really coming out of a lot of journalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's the pressure to produce a lot of articles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that it's online and you know, things are being detected by the search engines and you're trying to
[SPEAKER_00]: optimized for the search engines, and I guess now the chat bots are something I don't know, but you know, so you have that degree of, you know, I guess the pressures that are there, and then on top of that, you have less resources to actually put into the reporting on many of these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it just becomes easy, as you say, to kind of repeat the press releases, to repeat the statements of the CEOs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's wild to read some of these articles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, for
[SPEAKER_01]: It can't even include the fact that he said we'd already be there by now, you know, and it's like right Yeah, or the optimum that endless stories about the optimum robot, you know, when nobody's really seen anything that has a functional battery life It's just there's endless examples of it and it's constant and as AI has been integrated into this I think what these folks want that only these outlets is just like to create this or a boros of like
[SPEAKER_01]: click engagement, you know, everybody's whatever gets people to click.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if people click on it, it's good.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to automate that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just going to generate a bunch of ad revenue.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care about the ethical implications.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care if the tech works.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care how it impacts labor.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just building this massive, monolithic thing that shits out ad money for them without the pesky need to pay a journalist still living wage or health insurance.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you see it everywhere, you know, you'll see it everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not been subtle.
[SPEAKER_01]: There used to be some debate, you know, media academics have warned about this stuff for 20, 30 years, what we were building.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it used to be like, they'd be people, they'd give like a stinky, raised eyebrow at some of their claims.
[SPEAKER_01]: But these days it's so unsettled.
[SPEAKER_01]: especially with all the authoritarian bullshit in the states that is really not even up for debate anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: The most of these outlets are just extensions of the extraction class and so they're creating these swaddling narratives for rich people to tell themselves to feel good about what they're building and a lot of it is just gibberish and bullshit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I feel like I've had Victor Picard on the show before.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe he's great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and he does really great work kind of like looking at kind of assessing the media industry and what would have to be done to make it better to better serve the public.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the, you know, I guess what we expect the media and journalism to be doing in our societies and democratic societies in particular, which is probably like a reason for me to have him back on the show as well and talk about how this is all going because he's fantastic
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, these issues, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: His big things that corporate power and journalism cannot exist, side by side, they have just completely different financial interests, there's no way to, you know, you can sometimes get something that kind of looks like decent journalism.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying that all corporate journalism is 100% awful, but his big point is that you really can't, those two can't co-habitate very effectively.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's a big advocate for a
[SPEAKER_01]: Publicly funded media, you know, which Trump just destroyed the last vestiges of in the United States with his assault on NPR and PBS.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we need some kind of publicly funded crowd-sourced public media in this country to actually that actually cares about the truth because it's very clear a lot of these corporate outlets simply don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I completely agree, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I think we need much more public media and certainly is the case in the United States.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even in a country like Canada that has a major public broadcaster, I would say that it needs more resources and more funding.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we need to look at more public structures in order to put more resources into journalism so that we can, again, get the benefits that come of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, we need this institution that is holding power to account.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as it becomes decimated as there are fewer newspapers as there are fewer journalists as there's less
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not able to do that and we very much see that reflected in the way that the tech industry and these CEOs are reported on and have been reported on for many years.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you say, you know Elon Musk is someone who has benefited immensely from this type of reporting and the way that he can just throw out these big sci-fi ideas and it will be echoed and repeated and he will get magazine profiles and beyond that.
[SPEAKER_00]: the covers of these magazines and you know everyone will be finding over these big ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't matter whether he will actually deliver them, it's very important to kind of pumping up the valuation of the companies in the big picture, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They're creating an alternate reality where history doesn't exist in many ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he's an overt white supremacist.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says hateful ignorant, vile shit all of the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could literally go to any story about him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pluck any story writers, AP, New York Times, Washington Post, off the news wires, and you will not find, you might find a vague reference to the fact that he's controversial.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you won't find any overt mention that he's full of shit, consistently full of shit, and overt racist, unsettling white supremacist fascist supporter.
[SPEAKER_01]: His incompetence in the doge stuff, pretending he was going to cut government efficiency and then just blew up a whole bunch of money and stole a much data and ran off.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that's relevant, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm going to write, if I'm a real journalist writing a story about Elon Musk, I'm going to have at least one or two paragraphs maybe about his history of just
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that's not what a lot of these outlets are interested in.
[SPEAKER_01]: These outlets are actually interested in accumulating wealth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tech is incidental for a lot of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they don't actually care how the tech works.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care how open AI really works.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care how electric cars drive, how the engine works, which actual engineers worked on this.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not interested in that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not interested in engineering.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they're not interested in tech.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're interested in accumulating money.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's obvious.
[SPEAKER_01]: And once you look at it through that frame,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, the kind of CEO says a thing articles that you're talking about, like they feel very much like clickbait kind of articles, you know, it's the kind of thing that comes out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a grand statement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, what does Elon must say now?
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to click this and and see what it is, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's weird because I don't even know how many people read these articles, I think they're aimed at kind of an MBA grad person who doesn't want to think too deeply about the ethical impact of tech.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's what the target audience, you know, and I think they're aimed at people who are just gobsmacked and easily impressed by innovation in tech, you know, people who really want to believe that there's billionaires out there who are going to take us to the moon and solve all the problems.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a comforting.
[SPEAKER_01]: narrative for them to push and I think those two kind of get fused but I still don't know how many people actually click on this stuff and I think it's primary interest is to swatle like I said the extraction class and kind of these narratives
[SPEAKER_01]: that they are good people doing noble things and you know with their American ingenuity and innovation is the forefront and a lot of nationalism creeps in and it's just kind of for an industry that pride itself supposedly on telling this truth is it's interesting how challenge it is for them to recognize when they're not doing that you would think 30 years as a reporter a lot of these guys would be better at that but I think over time like I said a lot of the more critical thinking reporters get weeded out and what's left is kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: whoever toes the line with exceptions you know like that New Yorker article was an excellent I thought I think it took the long way home I think it buried the lead in some spots but that was an excellent analysis of Sam Altman and that came from you know a corporate establishment media outlets media outlets so it's nice to see you know the paradigm broken up occasionally anyway
[SPEAKER_00]: It does feel like there's been like more permission for this kind of stuff to be written in the past few years, in a way where it might have been harder to see, I don't know, 10 years ago, right, this kind of reporting, this kind of image of the tech billionaires being presented, but because the public has swung so much against,
[SPEAKER_00]: not just the billionaires, but the tech industry to a certain degree as well and Silicon Valley, especially in recent years, it feels like there's more of an opening for this kind of critical reporting on tech billionaires, the tech industry, but then it's odd to kind of see the critical stories about, you know, say the story about, you know, a worker who died in an Amazon facility recently and, you know, they just told everyone to keep working.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, these kinds of like stories with the harms and the clear problems with the tech companies and their models, then sit alongside these stories that are just like, again, kind of the CEO says a thing, or the kind of rewritten press release kind of stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, it's weird to see these two sitting next to one another then.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do think the public really craves the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they can see their lived-in experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like young people trying to get into the job market can see that the promises about AI making their lives easier at four day workways were four day workweeks.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can see that's bullshit, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And they want somebody to tell them the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they look to these corporate outlets and they don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when somebody does, I think they can...
[SPEAKER_01]: elevate among above the Meyer, you know, especially in the AI era when everything's got this homogenized sameness to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of the reporting is going to be more and more of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think authenticity and truth is going to have a premium.
[SPEAKER_01]: At least I like to tell myself that.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I definitely feel that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting you were saying, like, you know, there are a lot of journalists who just don't seem to be able to see through the, you know, I guess the statements that these companies make or the lies that these CEOs tell.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to me, it feels like, on the one hand, there's this, like, group of journalists who really want to believe in what the tech industry is selling, you know, they want to believe in the grand narratives of like transformation.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, the world getting better and innovation and the sci-fi futures being realized and all that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's like that class of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then it also feels like there's another group that is kind of like it's risky to put your neck on the line and to say, this is bullshit and this is not happening because what if this is like the time when they're actually going to follow through and deliver something and then you've been shown to be wrong by questioning it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but you could be honest, you used to be honest, you would just be like, okay, I was a booster previously and this came out and it's good or it's bad, you know, you don't, you don't have to worry about that if you're a journalist, you're just going to wear the truth is, right, you don't have to be worrying about what your legacy is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's the polluted thinking that comes from access journalism.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've commented on your show a lot about these certain tech access journalists who are very happy to be close to power and excited to be called up on the phone by CEMs.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the CEOs are picking them for a reason, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not picking them because they're a good reporter.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're picking them because they know that reporter won't really push them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even the ones that kind of sell themselves is like truth to power outsideers, like Keras Wisher, I know you've talked about the past.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her entire legacy is that she's the, you know, outside the box free thinking, you know, rugged, derilla, churdy list, who's given it to the man.
[SPEAKER_01]: and asking tough questions, and I think she got the leather coat in sunglasses, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's got a pretty strong track record of being a little too cozy with these CEOs.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what happened with Elon Musk?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's happened with the Sam Alman.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just think I think the industry's really quite populated with those folks, because that's what, you know, that's what Billioner just want to give them money too.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the people that fund media are very rich, white, conservative men, or at best centrist, you know, there are others in the very few left-winger billionaires that are out there funding media and the media reflects that, you know, if we had a bunch of progressive billionaires with hearts and ethics, you know, who actually cared about the functioning of the country and worked this just purely extractive, I think you might have some media outlets that reflected that, but what you most certainly don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think the journalists that are left are the ones that tell stories that these people
[SPEAKER_01]: And they really like them if they tell those stories and pretend to be, you know, bold truth tellers.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a certain, that's a tough balance to reach, you know, to sell the public that you are simultaneously carrying the industry's water and hyping up their products, but also, you know, holding them to account.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're being quite critical, but as you've said, you know, there are a ton of fantastic journalists reporting on the tech industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can do really great work at these publications, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't want to make it seem like we're shading on every album.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I mean, every outlet has, you know, half dozen or more excellent reporters here and there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Wall Street Journal has great reporters, Reuters, AP, New York Times, Washington Post.
[SPEAKER_01]: They all have good reporters buried in there, but they are not the norm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And these voices are not, you know, you know, mainline to both all the other.
[SPEAKER_01]: gibberish that corporate power wants you to consume.
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it you know it's like you see someone like Kevin Ruse obviously at the New York Times who really wanted to buy into the crypto stuff until it all fell apart and that was like you know a big AI booster and this is one of their chief kind of
[SPEAKER_00]: people explaining to their readers what the tech industry is, how it's working and it's like, you know, it's clearly selling the industry's narrative to the public in a way that is very useful to the industry, but is really not informing people about what is the reality of these technologies, how they're really working.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's kind of putting that through the lens of what the industry would want people to believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have people being misled about how AI works, what it is actually doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the moment, even though, of course, they would claim that that's, or, you know, someone like Bruce would claim that that's not what he is doing, you know, what his reporting actually contributes to, but that's because he sees all this in a certain way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you mentioned Zuckerberg earlier, it would always stand out to me that whenever Zuckerberg would make a big announcement.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of his first interviews would be with Alex Heath, a former, he used to be at the verge now, he has his own kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was, you know, it was always presented as like, look, I got the big Zuckerberg interview.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, yeah, because he knows you're not going to ask the hard question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's not, it's not the point of pride you think it is exactly shows you for a reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I mean, I mean, most of the time, they don't even choose journalists anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: They'll choose what's his name, Lex Fridman, there he is.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, there's this array of fake journalists podcast that they'll go on because they know they're going to get peppered with softball.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, if you land a CEO interview, it's not like you're being chosen to be your chops.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Bruce is interesting to me because when he was talking about AI, you know, there's a there was one interview he did, I think, with Casey knew last year that stuck in that crawl a little bit where they, they really attributed all sorts of human malice and motivations to AI, which suggested to me they don't or at least Bruce didn't understand how this tech really works.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't think or truly understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, it's providing you a sentence structure based on just massive input of what it thinks the correct answer is.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, you know, if there is some moment in the article where you talked about how it would be good for the mental health therapy and then there's another point in the article in which he says it has ulterior motives, you know, and stuff like that and has bad intentions sometimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just that that advertises to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want, if you want to see if a tech journalist understands AI, it all see if they attribute
[SPEAKER_01]: human intention because that's not what's actually happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it feels like, on the one hand, there has to be this kind of, you need to take seriously the statements of the tech CEOs and the tech companies, you know what they claim the technology is doing or what it's becoming, you know, because we hear from these AI CEOs how the technology is starting to think for itself,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the computers are starting to question things.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we see these stories from anthropic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like every six months about how the AI is thinking now and they're so shocked and all this kind of stuff, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they ask that whether it can think and it told them yes or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's ridiculous kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's that piece of it where you take what the companies are saying seriously and you give it weight, but
[SPEAKER_00]: the growing number of like studies about kind of the social harms of the technologies, what is doing to people's critical thinking skills, and all the stories about people's mental health breakdowns and the way that it is assisting people at taking their own lives or in planning school shootings and all these sorts of things, those details need to be kind of
[SPEAKER_00]: not taken as seriously or not addressed in the way that they should be because what matters is what the companies say and not all of the kind of growing pool of evidence that what they're saying is not reflective of reality, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, which is exactly, which is a shame because the technology really is interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: How it works, what it can do, I mean, it's software, you know, it's interesting evolutions in software, some of which are actually useful and there's interesting conversations to be had about how things work, but that's not what you're ultimately wind up getting.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get a lot of boosterism, you get this hyperbolic just gibberish that pushes the idea like you said that AI sentience is just right around the corner.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a shame.
[SPEAKER_01]: You should easily have a paragraph or two where you explain context, history, how the tech works, throw an objective quote from somebody who's truly an objective academic, and is actually really studying this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like that's hard to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: They just choose not to you, most of this particular type of journalist.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, we've been talking about this kind of broadly in a more abstract sense, you know, obviously we've pulled out specific details, but I did want to pivot a bit more to this story in the New Yorker that we're talking about, right, that that goes into Sam Altman, who he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I guess the presentation that we have had of him for the past few years and how that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: not really reflective of who this man seems to be and how reporting and journalism has kind of contributed to giving us a particular image of who Sam Albin is that is maybe not reflective of reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just, I guess I want to start with, what did you make of this piece and what really stood out to you from reading through it?
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought I was great.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I said, I thought it buried the lead a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: It kind of took the long way home to the point that this guy has consistently lied about everything all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: one central theme through the piece is that he just tells everybody what they want to hear.
[SPEAKER_01]: All the time he's good at that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember this really came out in like Karen House book as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think was one of the key things that really stood out from that for people who read it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's like Elon Musk.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not a severe as Elon Musk.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not, I don't think he's got the same authoritarian trappings or white supremacist interest as Elon Musk.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he's got a lot of the same skilled opportunism, understanding media, understanding how to tell people what they were looking for to get money, which is a talent.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it is a talent.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also like Musk is not really an engineer.
[SPEAKER_01]: The article goes into a little detail about how he really doesn't understand the finer
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if he's also asking an open AI employees if they have how many lines of code that they have written.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's similar.
[SPEAKER_01]: I bet his management style is not a lot better.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure we'll see more on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, a lot of the stuff is stuff that the board member, I mean, the trajectory itself is fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, this opening I was supposed to be started as a nonprofit that was concerned about the public interest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like last month, they signed a deal with a Pentagon to be their chief surveillance and targeting
[SPEAKER_01]: partner.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you read their press release and their pinky swearing that none of this is being used nefariously, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have no way to confirm that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we no longer have functioning regulators in the United States to show insight.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we'd never have any transparency into domestic surveillance.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that trajectory is amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a company that was started on the promise for good and is ended here in the toilet partnering up to authoritarians to help them spy on people and target minorities.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, and forward countries around the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, that's an interesting story, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the, the, in 2002, I think the Open AI board made clear observations when they tried to fire Altman.
[SPEAKER_01]: that he was not a reliable narrator, they did a multiple financial conflicts of interest, that you really don't want.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a kid you want with his finger on the button as one board member said.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is stuff we knew already, but the tech press kind of broadly decided to just ignore it.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time, when those board members came out, highly critical involvement, I remember the general tone in the tech press with it was that these board members were all hyperbolic cranks.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, to be disregarded, Sam Altman is just a pioneer.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's doing things on the edge of innovation.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got to give him a lot of slack.
[SPEAKER_01]: These board members just don't understand how things are.
[SPEAKER_01]: How things work, and now here we are, four years later in this New Yorker article basically confirms everything those board members set.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now to be clear, a few of those board members might have been a little crankish.
[SPEAKER_01]: But several of them, we're also very reputable people who ultimately were proven right across all of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but I'm interested to see where did Tech Journalism fail us in that arc?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, because this is a very unsettled clear story, again, like Elon Musk's story.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were not there telling us the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why weren't so what my questions are?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why weren't they telling the truth?
[SPEAKER_01]: What were the motivations for them to downplay those concerns about Altman?
[SPEAKER_01]: And why are they still downplaying those concerns?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and I remember at the time of Altman's Outster as well, you know, they weren't initially very forthcoming with like the reasons that Altman had been pushed out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it seemed like they're, you know, for lack of a better word, their media strategy for why they had done this was not very strong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet you have someone like Altman who can immediately call in a ton of resources, a ton of influential people, to start putting out the counter narrative to defend himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: you immediately have people in the press who, you know, are open to taking his version of events, believing what he has to say, and then echoing that as, you know, the conclusive narrative for the story, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where is the board is just being, you know, hit with questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't seem to be properly prepared for, you
[SPEAKER_00]: explaining why they had really gotten rid of this guy or nervous to really come out and provide a real full justification.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were certainly plenty of journalists presenting the Altman side of things, but it feels like nobody did that more vigorously than Karis Wisher,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I think I think she called them clotters.
[SPEAKER_01]: I forgot the exact quote.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw the tweet the other day.
[SPEAKER_01]: The clotters, clotters, clots being clotters was her as a set of them on Twitter at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just completely like there's no way this could be true.
[SPEAKER_01]: The, you know, open as a boy genius.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've really, they were really invested in all of them being a boy genius, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've sat and watched, there was one interview I saw him do with a bunch of indie and developers where like Maske just kind of spewed out a lot of stale sci-fi tropes, had a jumbled them together and sounded smart, you know, and the audience was just so gobsmacked by him and so impressed and it struck me as so phony.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it really stuck with me for a long time, and I don't think people are very discerning about truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they're very discerning about what's actually innovative and interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they're very good judges of character or intelligence in the United States.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, look at the people we elect to office and the CEOs that fail upward.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's I find the whole thing really fascinating and sad kind of simultaneously.
[SPEAKER_01]: to watch this play out and over and over again too, you know, you see these same cycles play out.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of differences between us and all, but there's also a lot of similarities in the way that they were able to exploit a lazy press, tell people what they wanted to hear, get billions of dollars, and I think at argument, somebody will make the argument, oh, what they're good businessmen, they got a bunch of money, so that makes them good businessmen, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But we're halfway through the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I open AI is very likely going to be one of the first big casualties of the AI bubble when it drops.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're likely to get gobbled up for a song by one of these bigger larger companies.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't think you can say, oh, but he was a good business man, you know, because I don't think we've really written the book yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was good at telling people what they wanted to hear.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was good at accumulating a bunch of money.
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are skills, but they are not necessarily ethical or valuable skills.
[SPEAKER_00]: there's still several directions that this story can go in because we have not reached the end of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, as Altman has even acknowledged, there is very likely an AI bubble and the question is just when it pops and we see what is going to happen from here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was even a quote in that story from a senior Microsoft executive, you know, not named saying, uh, I think there's a small real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, in reference to Sam Altman, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's like there are even people in the industry who, you know, recognize what this guy is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as you say, the story really shows how effectively he has played people throughout his career in order to advance himself, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And in order to enrich himself and to empower himself, whether that is going back to his first company looped, whether that is at white combinator and how he, you know, kind of used that position
[SPEAKER_00]: you know forced out obviously there are multiple versions of the story of what happened there and then seeing of course how things have played out at OpenAI and how he has used that as a vehicle to expand his power and influence not just in the tech industry but throughout the world right he has been very successful at using
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, everything available to him, his network, his relationships to his advantage.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's a real question as to this company that has delivered him this degree of influence, how or that he has now, the degree to which he has stretched the truth and lied in order to get it to this position and what is going to happen once.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, kind of the air kind of goes out of the room, and everyone sees that a lot of what he claimed was not accurate, not true, and I think a lot of people are already realizing that, but it feels like they're, you know, it feels like it takes a bit of time for the markets to catch up or further to be a certain event that causes the
[SPEAKER_00]: There to be a shift and all of a sudden everyone, you know, accepts or realizes or admits that they knew something was wrong But they didn't want to say it like you know with crypto right when it all imploded all of a sudden Yeah, obviously they were critics throughout and you know I think the critics had a bit more of a voice in the crypto time or taking a bit more seriously You know depending on where you're looking and whatnot, but there were still a lot of people who
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, bought into it who echoed the stories who didn't want to be too critical, too questioning, until it became clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was all load of bullshit that was imploding and then all of a sudden a bunch of people were like, oh yeah, I always realized that there was something wrong here, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it always checks back to the money, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: People are still making money off this hype cycle.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're still at the front end of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw an announcement today that all birds was pivoting.
[SPEAKER_01]: The all birds, the shoemaker was pivoting to AI and there's stock jumped 300%.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's pretty clear we're still on the front end of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: When people start suffering and all the people, all the people, all the tech guys are benefited off the front end of the hype cycle of exited their investments and all the public is eating the losses on the other side of it and you'll see, you'll see a renewed but sense of skepticism and you'll see a lot of those same access reporters like Swishir Singh.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw this coming all along.
[SPEAKER_01]: I warned about, I warned about Sam Altman from the beginning, I warned about, you know, she did that with the allowed most, too, I warned about.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, but clearly they did not, clearly they were part of the mythology making that was required for them to make all this money on the front end of the hype cycle.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think if they're not sheels with swisher that it was almost like she had this kind of breakdown with Elon Musk in the relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: It kind of totally fell apart and she needed like somebody else to fill that position or that void or, you know, whatever you want to call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Altman was like there and ready to become her new like kind of favorite.
[SPEAKER_00]: people or who new favorite CEO and you know she has like done events with him she has she has very clearly you know kind of boosted the company talked about how great it's doing talked about how great he's doing I remember when she was promoting her book she did an event with Sam Altman where she both tried to present herself as like you know a truth teller who asked the hard questions and holds the industry to account while he's you know a major tech CEO like
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, guns are outside or you know, and I don't think it's entirely malicious.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of these folks really do believe in the innovative impact of technology.
[SPEAKER_01]: They want to believe, you know, I can't always fault them for wanting to believe, but it's still journalists and it's still requires skepticism and, you know, and doing the hard work and realizing and having a self-awareness that you're too close to your sources.
[SPEAKER_01]: holding these events with the, you know, top billionaires, you know, and what also frustrates me is these are there's so many people in desperate need a platforming and elevation there's so many academics people doing real scientific work so many engineers making cool shit out there but most people can't name a single, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: why not spend some time elevating those folks if you really are that in love with technological innovation why don't you spend a little more time with the people actually doing the work and a little less time with the extraction class mass mass head weirdos that we've plugged at the top to a accumulate money because I think again what it shows is that the interest is in the money it's not in the tech
[SPEAKER_00]: And I see that time and time and get definitely, you know, you're mentioning before that there are people still making money off of this right and that's part of the reason why it hasn't imploded and there are certainly people waiting to make their money or to cash out or or what have you and that is part of the reason that.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, this is trying to sustain and I feel like we've seen this in the past where, you know, you look at the attempted we work IPO and there were people really trying to get that over to the finish line before it all fell apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they could make their money and it just didn't make it there, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas there are a lot of other ones that that do get it there only to crash afterwards because, you know, the people who who want to make their money have finally made it and it doesn't matter anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like, you know, this discussion of
[SPEAKER_00]: an open AI IPO is really important to these conversations right into the question of where the AI bubble or the AI industry or all this money that is infused in generative AI is actually going because I guess part of the question is if they're able to cash out if open AI is able to get to the IPO then is there less incentive to try to keep this thing going in the way that it did
[SPEAKER_01]: there's no logic to any of this right you know as you see with the Tesla stock failure there's no real same logic driving any of this so they're going to ride this thing into the earth there's no that they're just making money and they're going to ride it into the earth until they can't and then they're going to move out of something else like quantum computing there's going to be anything that comes out and they're going to ride that.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are not people care about tech.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't care about people a lot of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They care about money That's what they have.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not subtle as somebody who writes a lot about consumer protection and government regulators I think there's a real risk here that we have an AI bubble hitting us at the same time that all the rampant from deregulation and getting a regulatory safety agencies and consumer protections I think we're in for a really rocky next five years and I think the AI bubble is really going to be only one small part of that but then again
[SPEAKER_01]: For people who've waited for the Tesla stock to collapse, it's amazing how long this is taking to really flesh out and to see any sort of real world accountability for any of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I could, I'm not going to get into the business.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think I've ever predicting when it will happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just, I just know that this is not sustainable when all birds is pivoting to AI and all the CEOs or weird white supremacists with heads, both cottage cheese.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, when I saw the story about Albert's pivoting to AI and how it caused the stock to jump, one of the first things that came to my mind was when all the companies were making, like, metaverse announcements and saying that they were planning to do things that are metaverse a few years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's another perfect example of what I've been talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Pivot, you know, the 80, 83, 85 billion dollars that Mark Zuckerberg spent on pretending to be interesting and this
[SPEAKER_01]: They just burned through money out to create the most derivative cack.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the most uninteresting like a VR They really thought he was really confident that he could just basically buy Domination of the entire video game AR VR Industries right in the tech press was right there with him They're like yep super exciting boss.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's really innovative stuff You know, there was there was you know, you saw some skepticism of the metaverse stuff like this looks stupid, you know the legs aren't there
[SPEAKER_01]: But they were perfectly happy to accept the company's rebranding effort.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that whole meta rebranding effort came as they were dodging privacy scandals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the press was really happy to like sell the idea that Mark Zuckerberg really was revolutionizing work and play, right, with this guy who hadn't innovated.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think he's innovated in 20 years, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it takes some skill to create such a large ad monopoly, I'll grant that, but like I don't think he's done anything interesting and literally 20 years, but you can pluck again,
[SPEAKER_01]: any of a million stories from the newswires about Meta or Facebook, you know, and you won't see any of them mentioned the fact that he fails all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The stuff he makes isn't very light, you know, they get very excited about the Meta-Breeband glasses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like you'll see them talk well at least this is selling well, but I never see anybody wear those.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now they've got the reputation as the curved glasses that people are using to like stalk women.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just, it's, it's stunning to me with all that's happened and how clear and obvious all the failures are that like basic journalism.
[SPEAKER_01]: You, and I'm not just talking about like, there's, the business insider, you know, fortune Forbes, there's certain websites that are mostly purely business or like they're written for an MBA, you know, to feel good about themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I also see this stuff across Reuters, I see in the Associated Press, I see it, and like, main wire magazines, they do the same thing where they,
[SPEAKER_01]: Avoid contextual history, they can't be honest about the thing they're writing about.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like they're afraid of offending anybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they don't want to lose advertisers, they don't want upset sources, they don't want upset ownership.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you get this weird simulacrum of journalism, you get this weird...
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like a 10-dollar journalism where the, you know, the, the genitals have been sanded off to create a smooth hump so that nobody gets offended.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a bit, it's kind of a gross initialization that I come back to a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's what I think of, but I think of these outlets.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like they're, they're journalism, but they're just like dull, bland.
[SPEAKER_01]: garbage designed not to offend anybody that's just not really useful.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you'd be better off going and watching the Muppet show for a half an hour and you'd probably probably better inform than most of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just not good.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not really interested in tech and I think it's embarrassing and I think we have to really
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm hoping this era ends with some sort of Renaissance, you know, in terms of like, alright, let's get back to focusing on people and what matters and building interesting stuff and, you know, push some of these VC goals off into the periphery where they belong.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they've really dominated the discourse and it's gross.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think so too, and I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head now for the next set of little lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, for my apologies.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a bland and offensive fake journalism, you know, because they're so afraid of offending people or not, not offending people, but losing, losing ad revenue, losing clicks, offending sources of offending ownership.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you see it all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: definitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just wanted to go back to what you were saying about the bubble and like the moment that we're in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I agree with you, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think there's much value in trying to predict when it is going to implode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think that there have been multiple moments so far where it's looked like, oh, it has to go right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be on the cusp of finally imploding.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it keeps going, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there are many reasons for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of
[SPEAKER_00]: government money going into AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's still a lot of hype around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's still a lot of people hoping to make money off of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's still a lot of reason for the companies to keep sustaining this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you say, you know, could this be, you know, like a Tesla, like example, where despite all the...
[SPEAKER_00]: realities that should cause the valuation of this company to be far less than it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just keeps being sustained because so many people are financially invested in keeping it that way because they would lose a lot of money if something else happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if it went in the other direction, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I think we still need to be watching where this is all going.
[SPEAKER_00]: We still need to be understanding how the company is operating and what's happening there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in terms of predicting when an implosion is going to happen,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not going to be nearly as easy as, say, as with cryptocurrencies and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think a lot of it will be tied to Trumpism's fate.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in the MAGA contingents' fate.
[SPEAKER_01]: As he loses power and wins, we're going to have, you know, there is going to be a resurgence of an interest in rebuilding the public public trust.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I don't believe we're stuck in a permanent cacestocracy of just idiots and dipshits ruin running this country in the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: I won't allow myself to believe that that's just going to stay a permanent fixture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I'm diluting myself, but I do think, eventually, on the other end of this, there's going to be a recognition, I need to recognize that regulators are important.
[SPEAKER_01]: Real engineering is important, real science, foundational science, investment, grants, restoring public media, restoring trust and cornerstone institutions.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do think, eventually, we're going to hit that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think these huge, idiot bubbles are going to be useful at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you might see a slight shift away from them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, America is what it is, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Your foundationally always
[SPEAKER_01]: what you see around us, which is just this mad obsession with wealth and artifice, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we're a country that's really in love with artifice.
[SPEAKER_01]: The illusion of smarts, the illusion of class, the illusion of power, you know, and I think Trump is perfectly representative of that, and I think as mega-wanes, I think you'll start to see maybe some sea changes.
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, we've been waiting for him to wait for a decade, so again, it's hard to get into the prediction business, but historically, based on historical evidence, I don't think we're in this permanently.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm hopeful, again, that there will be some sort of Renaissance that takes us in a better direction here, a little bit over the horizon.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's very important to hold on to that kind of hope right that things are going to get better instead of just believing that You know, okay, everything is bad now and it's gonna stay bad and nothing can ever get better like, you know That is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy then, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You need people to have hope and and you know hope that's grounded in something that Things are going to get better and and that that is possible and that there are things that can be done in order to realize that right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's hard as a reporter.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't wake up in the morning if I just thought there was no point to this and it was just going to be a slippery slope down into bore, you know, just a perpetual horizon of Elon Musk selling me gibberish, I don't think I could make it through the day.
[SPEAKER_01]: So no, I refuse to believe that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do still hold out a hope that, you know, humanity has a better heart than what we've seen in the last decade or so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and I feel the same about climate change too, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like things are looking bad, but we need to still have hope that we can actually do this and turn things around and address this problem, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The young people, I mean, don't have a choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, we don't have a choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to live in this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to try to build something better, and they're just, you know, for those of us have seen several incarnations of this level of stupidity over the last 20, 25 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a much different viewpoint from a kid who's coming up into this, and
[SPEAKER_01]: wants to build something, not just wants, but has to build something better for themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be nice that we had a journalism that was capable of telling people the truth as a backstop and we had a resurgent, interesting funding education properly.
[SPEAKER_01]: That might be helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, instead of replacing teachers with chat bots or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, exactly right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I did want to ask you, you know, we've been talking a lot about Altman, we've been talking a lot about media coverage of the tech industry more broadly.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I was saying earlier, it does feel like there is kind of a public swing against the tech industry, against
[SPEAKER_00]: AI against these major billionaires, especially as they have cozyed up to Trump and become kind of implicated in that kind of politics.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like that is kind of represented in a way by these recent attacks on Sam Altman's house in San Francisco.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was one initially with a Molotov cocktail, and then there was another one a couple days later.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was surprising to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like it was less surprising that one happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, because there was a couple months ago there was a story about a guy in I think Tennessee who was looking to bomb the XAI data center And he was caught before, you know, he can actually put the bomb together or try to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it was like, I was like, okay, this stuff is out there right there.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are people who are angry about this who want to do something about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when I heard that
[SPEAKER_00]: Altman's house had been attacked.
[SPEAKER_00]: I certainly figured that or felt that this was like an escalation from, you know, where we have been in the past obviously, but then to see just a couple days later that it had been attacked again, this was like, okay, this really feels like something is shifting now if this can happen like multiple times if we're if this is seeming to become more regular, but I wonder what you think about that and and what we've been seeing there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The the rage against AI is white hot right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's wild to go out there and look at just how pissed off people are.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think they're just pissed off at AI.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although they have very good reasons to be pissed off at AI, you know, with the energy consumption in the climate era, the attack on labor, people that are dictating the the coordination and trajectory of AI are generally kind of terrible people.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think a lot of the rage is just at the extraction class, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We've had a decade of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: We culminating in Trumpism, which is a grotesque bulbous kind of extraction class icon.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I'm not surprised.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sam Altman has made constant promises that, you know, you know, Jen, why should be really happy that they're entering the market right now?
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jen, why is entering the market and there's no jobs and there's very little hope and I understand why there's anger I understand it completely and they should they should be angry.
[SPEAKER_01]: This country has been hollowed out by corruption completely I think the young generations can see it much more clearly than older generations can and they have every right to be pissed off and I understand why they're pissed off
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not just, you know, the tech industry lied constantly for the decade preceding this.
[SPEAKER_01]: AI was just like, this is more recent, AI is more recent.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are companies that spy down everybody constantly, lied about everything constantly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Facebook was grotesquely just growing into foreign markets with no concerns about whether their information platform was causing genocide.
[SPEAKER_01]: Facebook was also big and going into India and trying to dominate the entire internet.
[SPEAKER_01]: They would offer a free version of the internet.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you remember the free basics, that's what they tried to offer.
[SPEAKER_01]: They would offer free internet.
[SPEAKER_01]: They was curated by Facebook where you could only access certain websites.
[SPEAKER_01]: These companies are engaged and repeated terrible behaviors at a possible scale.
[SPEAKER_01]: right and then when the authoritarianism came to town they immediately dropped everything and cozyed up to them completely like oh we're not going to engage in content moderation of your racist bigoted propaganda and the internet sure you know they immediately cozyed up to authoritarianism so i don't understand why anybody receives surprises public is angry about this
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, these are, these are, these are vial people, upload the authoritarians and charge or vial people, and they've completely thrown all their ethics in the toilet to partner up.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yes, people are going to be mad about that, and I don't think this is going to be the end of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's going to escalate.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's been a top-down class war gone from the extraction class downward, and I think the public is starting to wake up a little bit to that, and it's going to take,
[SPEAKER_01]: all sorts of colors and shapes and forms, some of them violent, some of them not, some of them smart, some of them dumb, and I don't think it should surprise anybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've paid attention to the US history in the last 10 years, I don't think that people are violently angry should be remotely surprising to the billionaires who have a lot of responsibility for that anger.
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of me does wonder what it does to their paranoia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, if you look at someone like Elon Musk, it's clear for some time that he has really been paranoid about his safety and the way that the public sees him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I remember a few years ago, there was a story that someone had been tailing a car that his son.
[SPEAKER_00]: ex was in and he felt that it was like, you know, someone who was looking to get him because he thought Elon Musk was in the car and blah, blah, blah, and it came out later that it was like a grime stalker that, you know, was just trying to, you know, I guess fine grimes or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's like he is someone who has surrounded himself with security.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has created a vehicle like the cyber truck that seems like, you know, designed to be impenetrable to protect him from the threats that he feels our outside.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it feels like this mindset has taken over a lot of these tech billionaires where they have very, very much insulated themselves from the world that exists around them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, in their kind of closed off communities with their securities vehicles, you know, in their private jets and their exclusive terminals and, you know, their exclusive areas where they go so that they don't need to interact with.
[SPEAKER_00]: the public and part of me wonders seeing like actual attacks against tech billionaires.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, Sam Altman isn't the first one whether this, you know, further pushes them into the arms of the security state and, you know, supporting the repressive crackdowns on people's rights and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's what's absolutely, there's there you use it as evidence of the fact that the AI detractors are hyperbolic.
[SPEAKER_01]: weirdos and zealots in the more violence there is it kind of is kind of productive to them to any kind of progress because they will just they will just treat that you see it already they will just treat this outliers you know these radical extremists don't understand what we're building care we're innovators why are they so unreasonable you should listen to what to what they say that's that's going to be the play I mean you already saw it in his responses to the new yorker article right you'll notice with same ultimate pretty consistently then he never really takes a ownership of anything he's done
[SPEAKER_01]: you'll see it in headlines especially like he tries to do this thing where he's he's not personally responsible for anything that's happening he pretends to be on your side a little bit right might you know his company failed to create functional suicidal ideation guard rails it is chat about it but he will he won't honestly own anything
[SPEAKER_01]: And legally, you know, for many reasons he can't, but yeah, I think they will absolutely take violence as an act to harden up their security I was surprised this house was that findable to begin with quite honestly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I would have thought that a lot of these guys would have built underground compounds a lot longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does have one of those as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I know Mustas, I know Zuckerberg does, so yeah, I think I think they're only going to harden these are not these are not people that are empathic and open to the plebs concerns, you know what I mean, if they were we wouldn't be in the situation.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think they're just going to get harder.
[SPEAKER_01]: they're going to get tougher, they're going to get more more militaristic and they're going to increasingly frame critics of what they're building as outliers and radicals.
[SPEAKER_01]: Much like the authoritarian stew with any criticism of them, they're ideologically going to align, but in a country that's just desperate for infusion of money into functional resources and infrastructure, it's just, I don't
[SPEAKER_01]: think it's going to be a sustainable project for them to continue just being purely extractive.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we'll see, it's going to be an interesting decade here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just not entirely sure what the other side of this looks like.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just as a curious person, it's fascinating.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a terrible time to be alive in many ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very steep and time to be alive every morning you wake up, and it's just the untold horrors are very dizzying.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's also, if anybody that's interested in history or human beings is just a high-finder fascinating from standing to stern.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, it absolutely is right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like we already see that with St. Mark Andrews and his techno-optuous manifesto where he's very clearly kind of calling out the enemies, you know, the lotites and the communists and the safety people and all this kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, the kind of long-termist ideas that these people echo where it's very clear that they don't seem to see much value in, you know, the lives of regular people.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, and they hate things like it's, I always like that they hate the humanities so much, like Elon Musk and all of these guys hate the humanities, but if they bother to study the humanities, they wouldn't make such stupid decisions all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just so mad, you know, the humanities shouldn't exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: We should eliminate the humanities.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if they'd actually understood the novel that they just read, they wouldn't have screwed up so much, so yeah, that's there are very weird sect and it is kind of a religious sect of people obsessed with money and tech again is incidental to their goals, you know, it could be any other industry, you know, it just happens to be tech right now because that's where all the investment of money is, but
[SPEAKER_01]: And another era could easily be a different industry that they use as their spearhead.
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like we see the religious angle of a more and more with the AI kind of moment and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, who's that CEO, Carp, is that Alex Carp guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: His statements are just so bizarre and radical.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet again, you'll read an article about him the next day from a reputable news organ.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like he didn't say anything and saying it all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, what wonderful little nuance to exciting innovation to see building for us in the next.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no reference to the fact that he's documentably quite mad.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that that wonderful innovation from Palantir, that we, that we love, Carl, I have one final question for you before I let you go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's kind of like a two-part question, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, we've been talking about the way that the media reports on the tech industry and we've been talking about Sam Altman in particular.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I wonder, do you think that this renewed attention on
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Altman's prediction for, for lying, you know, along with, you know, the way that people are clearly turning against them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, do you think that this is going to have actual real consequences for, you know, this man who does seem to have been so empowered these past number of years?
[SPEAKER_00]: And do you think that there's any prospect or hope of the media really changing the way that it reports on this industry as public opinion keeps seemingly turning against it?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there'll be accountability for him eventually.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this stuff kind of adds up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I remember that article a few years ago that said that, oh, I remember the board said this and then it happens again because he's not going to change his stripes, these guys can't change their stripes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're going to keep making these mistakes at each time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it adds up in the public consciousness that all these are not reliable narrators.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can't really.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't really trust them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So on the short term, I don't think anything changes for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you've got that IPO looming.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's going to be a lot of hype.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's going to be a ton of CEO set of thing journalism about both the SpaceX and the OpenAI.
[SPEAKER_01]: IPO is going to be, it's going to get dumber, I think, for a while, still here.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do think, ultimately, there'll be accountability when the money crash happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and especially if the U.S. economy really tanks out and people really struggle with this expensive gas and expensive services, I think that could potentially get much worse with the destruction of our regulators, like I said, so I think if they are confused by the anger headed the direction right now, I'm not sure they've seen anything yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's going to get worse if people's independent direct immediate realities are more painfully impacted, which I think they will be.
[SPEAKER_01]: As for tech journalism, I think we have to untether it from corporate power and advertising.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a priority.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if we're building anything in the new age, we have to publicly fund and crowdsource journalism.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to stop giving money to shitty corporate outlets and start giving money to independent reporters.
[SPEAKER_01]: start giving money to worker-owned news outlets.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we have some control and agency over what we're sharing, what we're consuming, what outrage bait we're clicking on and retweeting or reshading.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's important that the public develops a sort of immune response to bad actors and trolls.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot we can do to kind of reshape things and yeah, I think it's possible to rebuild media but right now it's it's not looking great the layoffs have been Inments the consolidation is immense you've got you know deals like the water and paramount mergers post-Trumpism could be something else But it's a functional media that serves the public interest is something we're very much going to have to fight to the nail for
[SPEAKER_01]: in this country, because it's very clear that corporate power does not want an informed electorate, so that's where we stand.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an ugly landscape, but I like to believe that winning some of these fights is possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like we said before, I think we need to hold onto that hope because that is really important and otherwise, I think there's no prospect of even trying to have those wins, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to believe that it's possible for it to become possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Carl, it's always great to talk to you and to get your insights on all this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I always like to talk to you and I appreciate all the work you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Carl Body is a freelance reporter and writes the fine print newsletter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tequon Sabas has made a partnership with the nation magazine and is hosted by me Paris Marps.
[SPEAKER_00]: Production is by Kylie Hucen.
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