AI and the Enshittification Era with Cory Doctorow

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Somebody probably sat around having a Shopify idea about an app that would help people bring their ideas to fruition like the crumple. And then they made that. And the damn thing's brilliant. It makes the whole process easy. Everything you need. It's easy to design your shop. It's easy to get paid. They handle the checkout process. You might think to yourself like, oh. How are they going to complete their purchase? Shopify handles it. Gets them to come back as repeat customers. Setup and checkout are all handled. You get to live your life. Grow your business, which they help you do, too. I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. I'm not that happy with them that they stole my idea, even though obviously they had it first and did the work you needed to do to make it come to fruition. So get Shopify, for God's sakes. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea. And a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com/TWS. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart and, uh, and I will be your host for today's program. It's Tuesday, July, uh, 28. We're all recovering from, uh, the bombing raid that the president United States, uh, pulled on the white house correspondence dinner. Not so fucking easy. Is it buddy boy? It's, you know, uh, as a comedian, you know, when you watch somebody, uh, bombing like that, the traditional thing to say is, Hey, don't quit your day job. Uh, 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 he can improve. I think he's got some timing. The weave didn't quite work with some of the more concise roasts, but, uh, and once again, uh, in the battle between, uh, Kaitlyn Collins and Donald Trump point Collins, uh, I believe the score now somewhere around 328 to zero it's her, her sophistication focus of class is just wiping the floor with that dude. Uh, but, but moving on from, uh, those events. I have been in a bit of a. Doomer spiral, uh, concerning AI and its effects on how it will be changing the way we work, the way we interact with each other and all those things. And I recently read a book that changed my perspective slightly. I don't wanna get to tell you, it gave me a tinge of optimism, but in fact, and it was a feeling that I'm not so comfortable with, but I thought, well, geez, let me, let me talk to this, uh, just incredibly wonderful and prolific author who, who wrote this. Uh, that I'm talking about the book is actually called the reverse centaur's guide to life after AI, how to think about artificial intelligence before it's too late. So let's get to it. Let's bring on in our guest for today, Corey Doctorow. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, we are delighted and honored to have with us today, maybe one of the most prolific writers, uh, that I know. And, and his work is just phenomenal. You know him from in shitification, the new book is the reverse centaur's guide to life after AI science fiction writer, activist, journalist, author for God's sakes, Corey Doctorow. Thanks for joining us. Oh, what a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on John real bucket list. I'm D I'm delighted. And, uh, just an enormous fan of your work and your 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. Uh, you need, I am an AI. I believe I am a doomer and reading your book, you are, uh, far less pessimistic, not just about its ability to, uh, destroy our civilization as we know it, the existential threat, but even the promise of it as a job destroying, uh, Cyclops that comes in and, and gathers up all of our productivity and puts us all on Elon Musk. So, so let, let's go through, talk me out of a tree, Corey. Yeah. So I'm really indebted to this, uh, STS, uh, society and technology studies scholar at Virginia tech, a guy called Lee Vincil coined this very useful term, which is critter hype. This is when you repeat the hype of the tech industry. And then at the end of it, you put in 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, uh, Hey everyone, I don't know if you know, but I'm like cyber Rasputin. I'm a dopamine hacking wizard where mesmer failed and MK ultra and pickup artists and neuro linguistic programming weirdos failed. I have succeeded. I built the mind control ray out of big data. And then his critics go around and go like cyber Rasputin. The reason Grampy is a QAnon is cyber Rasputin made him a QAnon. It's not because like Grampy was always racist and Mark 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, 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, 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. Palatability, which is like a problem with, with highly processed food, I see where you're coming from when we talk about, uh, social media algorithms, but I think that like, you know, this, this, 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. Um, but also it's really hard to get the people you love to act in a coordinated fashion. Uh, 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 chat can't 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 carpool 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. It'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 got a personal example of this, which is that 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 desert. They go to Azerbaijan. by Sean, my dad is born, 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 no one else leaves on a grad 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 stayed behind that's not what happened and 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 and like all the men are worried about getting drafted and sent to ukraine it's just just awful 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 in motion tends to stay in motion because it does and 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 a an accelerant into maybe some of our lesser impulses as as link yeah yeah six and 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 out of school at 13 to take care of his brothers and sisters when his dad died by the time my mom came around and 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 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 kiwanis 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 but 60 of your income and sure like all this stuff might be bad for you might be hyper palatable you might be into it but like let's not give mark zuckerberg credit that we don't know he deserves especially when it helps him sell ads right in other words don't don't uh intentionality is not necessarily what he's doing it may just be a byproduct 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 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 yeah by by over uh blessing yeah i mean there's lots of different stories that ai tells that are quite outlandish so there are ways in which ai is a planet killer right the carbon emissions are definitely not doing the planet any actual planet killer yeah right but this idea that like oh my god we're not doing the planet any favor 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 mares gives birth to a locomotive right like it's just not by the way go favorite sentence in the book the reverse centaurs guide to life after ai oh i have to tell you uh you're talking about how they talk about ai is good the big thing is long uh long mission truckers that oh long haul truckers long haul truckers that the uh 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 at a constant distance in 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 and 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 they tell the ai is just going to keep getting better and better and better and better and better and better and better and eventually it's going to be caught and it'll either 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 um so many jobs that have such high wages that the fact that right now like the sector is making 50 billion dollars a year they claim it's 60 billion dollars 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 yeah beautiful look i write thrillers about forensic accounting and in my considered professional opinion to call that an accounting trick is to do violence to the noble accountant you know like the cpas of america salute you sir yeah so like 50 billion dollars a year when i wrote the book the total capital expenditure to date was 700 billion they've added at least another trillion since and if you believe added a trillion in the last year and and and if you believe gartner who admittedly did say that by now we'd all be spending six hours a day in the metaverse but if you believe gartner it's going to be 2.5 trillion in total by the end of the year right so on 50 billion dollars revenue right and they have to keep spending it because the data centers the 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 model new modeling model right and so you have these ongoing operational expenditures you have these ongoing capital expenditures and their answer to how do you turn 50 billion dollars into of revenue into profit when you're spending a trillion dollars a year to make it like look if you want 50 billion dollars revenue and you've got a trillion dollars i can do it for you i'll give you 100 billion back it's 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 i i you know like sam allman's out there running the money losing 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 here right are you at 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 domineer 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 you're busy you're multitasking your value hire 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 know i admit you don't have the expertise to do it or don't have the expertise to do it but don't have the expertise to do it don't have the time to do or you want to focus on other parts of the business upwork is a 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Do it now, unless you're scared. Corey, let me ask you. So 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, yeah. It's subscriptions. Yeah, 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 there'll be new numbers and they'll whatever. And you may have noticed that Anthropic just said that they were profitable, but not using generally accepted 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 real 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 that, we're trying to get like this IPO in shape, right? Like nothing to do with it. We just like, just whatever you like, don't look under the blanket. What's under the blanket. It's amazing. It's definitely worth buying into the IPO at like 150 at, but don't look under the blanket. You look under the blanket, you're going to turn into a pillar of salt and then, you know, it'll be on your head. So, you know, and also don't ask us to explain the math by which we're profitable. And also we've been selling a hundred dollar 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 dollar bills? And every CEO who's been buying the a hundred dollar bills was like, I'm sorry at $5, these a hundred dollar bills are not worth it. So does this then reframe is the threat of AI, not that it will turn us into paperclips or that will replace all of our high paying jobs, but that because it is a three card Monty, it will upsell. 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, 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, cause that often comes up, right? Though this is like the web, the web lost money, AI lost. Money, right? That's like, it's, you know, that's, that's like, uh, you know, that this food is delicious. That food is delicious. Therefore they're the same food, right? Like it's 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. Uh, that there's some Monty Python bits about this. It's a duck. It's a witch. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, um, here's the thing. The web had very good unit economics. What are unit economics? What is that? Yeah. Yeah. So I was just going to say, no one should do an economics degree. Cause 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 by 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, every new AI customer, every new AI customer, every new AI customer, every new AI customer costs 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. Tease that out. So, so the more, because, you know, we 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, the more money they can make, the more money they can make. And so, you know, 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, well, because every time you use AI, it costs them money to run the inference. Can I, can I sidebar here just a little on inference? Man, anytime you want, Corey Doctorow. Okay. Sidebar away. 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. He's an amazing guy. Zed, he's British. So Ed, someone leaked OpenAI's finances to him, right? Their balance sheet, because it's all private, right? So he gets a look at it and it really looks like their inference costs. So inference is like you type in, you know, draw me Sonic the Hedgehog with big boobs, right? And then it makes Sonic, that step is, is the inference. Have you been reading my diary? Dr. O, where did you- Yeah, they leak their, they leak your queries. Oh, son of a bitch. Yeah. So you ask that and you get the, that's the inference step, right? That's the using it part. In, in economics speak, that would be the operating expense of, of AI, right? So like the, it looks like their, their, their, their OPEX 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 OPEX, 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, right? You can make money from 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 open AI, like army of marketers? So here's Ed's theory. And I think he's right. What they're doing is they're saying, when we sell you that a hundred dollar bill for a dollar and let you do a hundred dollars worth of inference for one buck, that's not inference, that's marketing. So we're just putting it somewhere else on the 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. Somebody would stand out there with a little plate with little cheese cubes and you'd walk by and go, oh, this is delicious. We'll come into Hickory Farms and they figure you'll buy the loss leader is take this cheese and you'll buy a hundred dollars worth of Vienna sausages 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. 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 turned to in these moments, right? One is this thing called Stein's law, which is anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The other John Kenneth Galbraith, the market can remain irrational longer than, than you can remain solvent bars. 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 Beltway bandit rocketry company that bills uncle sucker billions of dollars for rockets that is profitable. And then you IPO it and you get a special deal from NASDAQ so that it IPOs in the NASDAQ. Instead of having to wait for a couple of quarters the way it 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. 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 are like, Oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. So you have these fund managers who need to buy SpaceX at any price, which is just a way to offload grok X and the money furnace. They need to buy it at any price. And there's no shares available from SpaceX, which means that the Emiratis and the billionaire Silicon Valley guys who backed him when he bought Twitter for 40 billion, who backed him when he, when he built the money furnace for grok X, uh, now, uh, they get to be made whole by your pension fund, which you stuck in an index. Oh my God. Which, you know, like was just supposed to be like the thing, you know, remember Warren Buffett, like three pieces of investing advice fits on the back of a postcard. This is what I told my wife to do with my money when I die, just put it in index fund and forget it. Right. That's right. That's right. If you did that, Elon must just unload it on you. You're his liquidity. Now they were supposed to also do it with the S and P 500 and to their credit, not a thing I would often say about standard and poorest, but to their credit, S and P said no at the last minute, after a lot of pressure. And I think after a lot of S and P is like, um, it's got a lot more old money. I think there was some millionaire on billionaire violence there. I think there were like a lot of rich people who were like, don't do this to the S and P do it to NASDAQ. Right. You know, NASDAQ is the Bernie Madoff exchange. That's a UFC fight that you've got nobody to cheer for. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's just, there's nowhere to go there. Let them fight. This is Corey. What you're describing is a time bomb. That's going to make mortgage backed securities, you know, look like a stand because I mean, is that why all these guys are trying to get to Mars? Like they figure when this thing, a sidebar, Adam Becker, astrophysicist, you should have him on someday wrote an amazing book about this. Uh, he points out that if you detonated every nuke on earth at the same moment as the, uh, meteor that killed the dinosaurs, uh, struck us again, earth would still be more habitable than Mars could ever be. Cause it would still have water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetosphere right? Like 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 nuts. You know, like, like this is, it's, 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, uh, 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, uh, a growth story for their valuations. Is that, would, would this be a way of, of reframing? That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So you, you know, like here's the paradox of, of a growing company, right? Yes. The market loves a growing company. Of course. It's called 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 is going to make $2 million next year is worth more than a million dollars this year. Right. What happens when you have grown to the maximum size, 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 is going to take a decade to pay off. Wall Street 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's like, oh, we're going to be Facebook because we got Google Plus. And Facebook was like, oh, we're going to be YouTube because we're pivoting to video. The 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 can't be YouTube. You get these arguments, right? So then it's like, oh, it 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. I'm the expert. Blockchain, Web3, Metaverse, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And like, they're just guys running across the river on the 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 Web3 in the chute for you. Right. And now we get to AI. And AI is different. It's different because 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 Olamo, which is like some software that Meta released. And it's just an open source model that runs locally, doesn't talk to the internet. And I use it to find typos, right? And it's like, oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. 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. You're just going through. All right. Well, look, 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. 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 at once, all at once. It's called Posse, post, own site, share everywhere, which means that I'm just like manually turning everything. It's like threads on blue sky and masted 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 work sucks. So finds 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, in, in using it, you already have to be versed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I look, I've been telling cop, I've written more than 30 books. I've been telling copy editors and publishers, lawyers that they're wrong for, you know, 25 years. Right. I I've been telling spell checkers to go to hell for 40 years. Right. Right. Now, when I look at the suggestions that come back, like I have, 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 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, your 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 to 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, or isn't it? I think it is, but not the way that the AI guys say it is right. The AI guys say this can do your job and getting back to crit a 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. Cause your boss is a, a credulous dolt who is infinitely horny for replacing workers with chat bots. You know, I, I, when I was out on the, on the picket line, uh, during the writer's strike and, uh, I'm a member of an affiliated unit. I mean, I'm in the animators guild and the writers unit. So I was out there carrying a sign is around the place around the corner from my place 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 bot, right? Oh, that's, 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. And admittedly that's just air bud, right? But 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 spreadsheet? We're writing a movie here, right? Whereas you say it to a chat bot and just shits out the script and you go off to the, you know, the, the, the, uh, steakhouse, right? And you, you come back and the movie's made. Now, the fact that it's like unproducible, 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 idea is stupid, illegal, or we'll kill people. Right. Or impossible. Right. You know, cause 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've been working on. You can be sold that technology. Oh, you know, I like to sleep. And it's been, I think it might have been the last time the Mets won the World Series. That's how long it's been since it's been a line. 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 manufactured, 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 avocadogreenmattress.com slash TWS to check out their mattress and furniture sale. It's avocadogreenmattress.com slash TWS. Avocadogreenmattress.com slash TWS. Period. And this is where your book is really, what you're talking about is who's zooming who. So are, 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 centaurs. So 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 Tina Turner and just the best fit you've ever seen? You look so good. God damn. In Thunderdome. God damn. Yeah. But like who, are we master or are we, we blaster? Or Mel Lastman hunting the last Jew across the wasteland? Yes. What are we? Not Mel Lastman. Mel, God, 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. Mel Lastman was the mayor of Toronto? Was there an era before the Fords? I thought the Fords had always run Toronto. Oh yeah. No, no, no, no. Yeah. He was, he, he walked so Rob Ford could run. Oh, beautiful. Somebody had to. He was a buffoon. Yeah, he was a buffoon. And he also, he had a secret family. It was awesome. Uh, uh, small plug here. No gods, no mayors, a podcast about buffoonish mayors. My favorite podcast in the world right now. Oh my God. That's hilarious. Oh my God. It's so good. Okay. So, uh, um, yeah. So centaurs, reverse centaurs, 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, 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, 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 duopolies, automation often makes things worse, but more plentiful because you remember Lily Tomlin doing, uh, at the phone operator and sending it. One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy. Yeah. No, Yeah, we don't care, we don't have to, we're 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, a centaur. And the analogy here is 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 horse is strong. It's tireless. It's dexterous. It's fast. And the horse takes orders from 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 horse's 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 Ethel at the end of the conveyor belt. Right. Putting the chocolates in the chocolate box. Right. The conveyor belt can do everything except get the chocolates in the box. Why is the conveyor belt running so fast? Because if you automate. 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. Yeah. And this is why Amazon warehouses are the most automated warehouses the human race has 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 that, the part of the job at the perimeter, 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. And in a warehouse, you get impaled on a forklift when that happens. Right. And so that's the difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur. 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. Well, 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 chatbots get shut off, you end up with this circumstance. We take people who do a job that needs doing. We replace them with chatbots that do that job badly. And then the chatbots 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 asbestos 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 final. Right. Who knows? The second to last battle. What's the Albert Einstein quote? I don't know what World War Three will be fought with, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones. Sticks and stones. Yes. Yes. So maybe that's the final battle. Right. But, you know, you mentioned the Magnificent Seven. Right. Thirty five percent 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 hundred billion dollar IOU really fast and pretending it's in all of their bank accounts at once. Right. Someday. Because anything that can't go on forever 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. 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 fascists. There was there was just a study. I live in the UK now. My wife quit her job in Hollywood and I followed her to London to work at the BBC. And and and there was just a study here about what happens to your voting when your doctor's office closes. Because remember that we have socialized medicine here. We're 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 got to go see the death panel later. I'll let you know how it works. Thank you. I'd love to know what they decide. Yeah. Yeah. So when your NHS doctor's office, what's called the surgery, that's what they call a doctor's office. When your when your primary care physician surgery shuts down in the next election, you vote for the fascist party. Right. You just become a sucker for people who show up and say. You're a sucker for people who show up and say, well, I'm a sucker for people who show up and say I'm a sucker for people who show up and say I'm a sucker for people who show up and say I'm a sucker for people who show up. 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, sort of a mini Facebook and Twitter. And it was almost all these different before the social media companies. 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. AOL came in and went, we're 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 out of bigger holes, right? And I always say this when we talk about monopolies more broadly because, you know, in shitification, you mentioned this other book I wrote. Yes. It's really a story about monopolies. It's a story about what Lena Kahn 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, you're 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. So, you know, 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 I'm like, guys, you know, the anti-monopoly laws that we stopped enforcing 45 years ago, they weren't passed because it seemed like a good idea in case a monopoly emerges in the future. Right. They were passed because people were being crushed by repatriation. And we figured out how to shatter their power. And we didn't have the Internet we could use to coordinate ourselves. They were running different scams in different countries. So enforcers didn't really have any common cause. You know, if you ate a John D. Rockefeller in Germany, it was because he was screwing up your ports. If you hated him in Pennsylvania, it's because he was screwing up your refineries. Even if U.S. enforcers and 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, no. That was when they started to clean up. That was when they that's when they got worried about guillotines on their lawns. Yeah, they weren't building parks. They were they were they were hiring Pinkertons to beat your brains. Right. So here's the thing. Here's the point I'm making, though, is 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 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 Ma Bell. We did it. And guess what? People still use phones. 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, 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 is 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 the kind of social unrest that allows demagogues and authoritarians to take over. That's the real issue. I mean, you and FDR 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 make Henry Ford, not a big fan of me being allowed to speak like this. Yeah. But, but no, I mean, look, there, 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 guillotines on your lawn by hiring chuds and 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, since the Snowden days, one of the questions I've asked myself, cause I, 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 Cindy Cone. She's fantastic. Yeah. A woman. Amazing. I've been there for 25 years, not as long as Cindy, but, 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, 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, they, they did this to us, right? They stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law. They, uh, allowed a string of mergers. You know, when Google ways, Tim Wu tells the story, it's great. When Google bought ways, Tim Wu was at the federal trade commission. He'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 is how you find out how to get there. Like the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Ways is how you find out that there might be a car abandoned on the side of the route. Like what the hell, right? So how are they falling for this or are they enabling this? Corey, that cause there's a distinction between, are they being fooled or are they enabling the scam? Right. I understand if, if the rubes 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 did they not understand this? Well, let's start with the top layer, 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 other people are 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 psycho fans. And so they're already living like the AI future where no one's real and everyone tells you you're great and just blazes 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 that's the word of cynics. So like, imagine, you know, think about like all the, the kind of vast panoply of chuds we've met thanks to Trump land, right? Some of those guys, by the way, 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. I just started to work on the next book. It's a novel. It's called once is enemy action. And, uh, you know, it's a James Bond quote, James Bond reference, right? Anyway, that might be a chapter. So this vast panoply of chuds. And we, some of these guys, they're like RFK, right? They're like, Oh, I don't know. Right. They really believe like there's no peptide. That guy hasn't met that. He won't like stick under his eyelids like Jimi Hendrix doing acid. Right. But vaccines are the problem. It's except for peptides are safe. They haven't been tested. Nobody knows what they do, but put as many of them as you can into your body. Yeah. But there's a ton more who are like, I don't know if this shit works, but undertake 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. Right. To believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can sell a lot of vagina rocks. Right. 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? Cause like the true believers and 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 understand that the inflating these kinds of bubbles with the sorts of futurist utopian nonsense is going to come back and create giant craters this time? It's different. Supposedly it's, it's always different, you know? Uh, and like, I just think we have really fallen prey to the story about the efficient market, despite all of the times that the market has been inefficient and, 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 them 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, I, I think there's like two ways of thinking about regulatory capture. If you ask the Chicago school people, right, they'll tell you regulatory capture is, uh, as soon as you have a business, it's going to try and capture the state. Therefore you can't have a state, right. Which is just like, that's the libertarian. You know, we have to get rid of the regulators. Yeah. That's, you know, all the Hayek 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 Musk addled that you can't even open your copy of Atlas shrug, cause 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 you have to be more powerful than the players in the field. Right. You have to be more powerful than the players in the field. Right. So the decision 40 years ago to allow runaway mergers, right. This kind of orgy of consolidation. Right. And like, now we have these cartels that are so inbred, they have corporate Habsburg jaws. Right. And they just like, they can't do anything. They're completely unintelligible. Right. And, and like, you know, this, this decision has produced the circumstances for regulatory capture. Right. So like people like all, 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 about privacy. Well, they're, they're data hoovers and they're, they're bringing it up. And it is, and you, 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 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, uh, you are more controlled by your bosses. Well, and let me ground that in like something material and not like mind control race. Right. So one thing that like AI is genuinely good at, and it's actually quite exciting is multivariant statistical analysis. Oh, nothing more exciting than that. It is. If you're like, you want to do cancer research, it is, if you want to do like a, you know, find out about like, what's going to happen with rising seas, right? You're just, you're, you've got like a whole bunch of variables and you're trying to like make statistical analyses of them. So, um, one of the things that, that you can do with AI is surveillance pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination. So surveillance pricing, your rabbi on this is a woman called Lindsay Owens. He's got a book coming out, uh, gouged. She's amazing. And then algorithm wage discrimination is a lawyer and a scholar has written about this and they're both the same thing. It's, it's a, it's when you use an algorithm to segment an audience based on behavioral surveillance data, right? I I've seen what you do. I followed you around and your use of a service. And then you start running experiments on the segments to see what the highest price they'll accept or the lowest wage they'll accept. So on the wage side, this started with Uber where drivers who accepted low ball offers. And remember when you're an Uber driver, you have 20 seconds to decide whether the offer is good or bad, right? So you're like, you're looking at the mileage, you're looking at the time you're driving in traffic. You have 20 seconds to go yes or no, right? So if you accept a low ball offer, your next offer is lower and it keeps pushing you down, right? Uh, now if you're picky, it's higher. And then if you start taking the low ball offer, you're going to get a lower offer. So if you accept a low ball offer, you're offers, they sneak into there, they push it down again. So whatever it is that's your side hustle that lets you be picky, eventually you lose it. Wait, that's the Uber algorithm doing that to its own drivers? To drivers, yes. Why? To push their wages down. 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 put all the other cab companies out of business, induced a lost decade in transit investment, became the only game in town, 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 surge priced for the ride you were paying for, they got surge 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 shitification. It goes back to the other book. It's that in shitification. That is in shitification. So I'm going to make you really angry here. Oh, don't. Groundwork. Okay. Groundwork Collaborative and the Roosevelt Institute. So Groundwork Collaborative is Lindsay Owen's outfit and the Roosevelt Institute published a report on nurses. So it used to be contract nurses were hired through like a local body shop, a staffing agency. The travel nurses and people like that. Yeah. Now it's four national apps that compete with each other. They all call themselves Uber for nursing. So maybe you can see where this is going. They buy credit card data from data brokers and the more outstanding credit card debt you have, the lower the wage. You're offered. Oh, because it's a desperation 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 low ball you and, and so John, like me, you have heard of Tennessee Ernie 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 Pinkertons to follow every coal miner around and figure out who's going to do it. So they're going to be able to hire the army of Pinkertons to follow every coal miner around and figure out who's going to do it. And then get the boiler room full of guys in 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 madman style thing where they'd be like, well, we got the little old ladies who own seven cats who live in Sheboygan and we've got this and that way they would go do focus groups. AI just naively buckets people into behavioral data and then automatically runs experiments to see the highest price they will accept. Mint Mobile. I don't know what you want out of a phone company. What I want out of a phone company is deliver me a good product for less and don't bother me. Don't bother me with the like, oh, have you heard about our new program? You can upgrade to it. It'll just cost you a lot more. And then they like call you a bunch on their own phone. Think about that. Think about the diabolical mind games that phone companies are playing by like locking you into an expensive phone program and then using the very item that they sold you to contact you about paying more for some ridiculous upgrade. That's not even really an upgrade. Oh, they're diabolical, but not Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile plan, 15 bucks a month, 15 bucks. A month. What is it? 1992? 15 bucks a month. High speed data, unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com slash TWS. That's mintmobile.com slash TWS. Got your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com slash TWS. That's it. There's no catch. Upfront payments of $45 for three months, $90. $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. I really hope they speed that up. Okay. So hear this out then. Yeah. You know, we've been talking a little bit about, like, well, 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. Look for the worst conditions, look for the low, 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 effect of it is abuse to diffuse the bubble. You have to abuse the worker. Sure. I mean, that's the promise, but, but back to like critter hype. So now let's talk about the values here. So that like, not the, not the human values, the costs, right. The dollar figures. Yes, yes, yes. So pauperize all the cab drivers in the country. Do it again to all the nurses, do it to all the poor commercial illustrators who are already the poorest people I know, right. Poorest 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. Uh, and, uh, I see, uh, oncologists, radiologists and so on. And so I've been following the stories about radiologists and AI. Sure. Well, that's the, that's the one they always say, like, you won't even need radiologists anymore. Those, you know, some solid mass tumors. You can, you, you probably the AI can spot some that the human misses, right? I think that's fine. So I 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. Yeah. There you go. So, um, if right now, you know, the Kaiser hospital on sunset in LA, I don't know if you know it next to the big church of Scientology, cause that's how we roll in LA. Right. So if right now there was like a, a salesman for Sophie, Sam Altman deking out some Scientologist who wanted to give him a personality test, going up to talk to the CEO of, of Kaiser and say, look, here's my pitch to you. You've got 10, uh, radiologists on the strength. They cost you 300 grand each. That's $3 million 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 tap them 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 98. So we 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 in AI on the thought that someday it would make the things that people do more expensive or need more labor, right? So the sales call right now is salesman rushes past the Scientologist trying to give him the personality test up to the CEO's office and says, you got 10 radiologists on the strength. They cost you $3 million a year. You fire nine of them. You save $2.7 million 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 this to radiologists and they're like, okay, but we have labor power. They do. They're in short supply right now. When we 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 yet. 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 Daron 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. Really, really smart. You know, his concern is always when AI begins to marry robotics and how that will, you know, come together. I happen to be a fan of what I like to call the Crunchwrap Supreme. Every now and again, I'll go with a nachos belgrani. If you're a vegetarian, it's a great place to get whatever. Diarrhea epidemics, I'll say otherwise. Be damned. Be damned. I still go in. But I drove into my, I have my local and they know me. And 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 in the thing had to come on and go like, 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 drive-in 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 crunchwrap supreme with a robot will be cheaper you've never tried to service an ice machine like right 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 dot-com era you go you pull out like the harvard business review you pull out like the business press of the day welsh street journal full of these op-eds wringing 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 periodicals off the shelf today and they're like ceos are firing workers because they're refusing 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 laborers and service of quality automation driven by capitals and service to throughput and when capital has a monopoly or a cartel they can lower quality right that 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-thru right so cory 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 there really isn't you know it's it's but it's the kind of thing the last 40 or 50 years economically we have valued capital to the expense of labor sure and it is that uh 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 a hundred thousand dollars shouldn't that be taxed the same way if you work and earn a hundred thousand dollars shouldn't that be taxed the same way if you work and earn a hundred thousand dollars shouldn't that be taxed the same way if you bought an investment and it just threw off a hundred thousand dollars why is that different yeah yeah look it's it there's a joke from eastern canada that uh the punch the punch and people in winnipeg 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 newfie joke which is like an irish joke it's not a newfie joke it's a joke told by people from newfoundland got a joke from newfoundland whose punchline is if you wanted to get there i wouldn't start for you from here right and look you know when america had more unionized workers when it had more fair electoral districts when it had you know uh people who had more disposable time because they had a better uh 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 when you know the 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 the grinch that stole christmas he thinks that you steal the tinsel and christmas goes away right like the reason you have tinsel is the christmas is in the hearts of the who's down in whoville the reason we have the labor law is because workers struck and and formed unions when they were wildly illegal they risked beatings and murder and and lynchings they created so much pain for capital the capital sued for the labor peace and donald trump's big mistake here is he thinks that when you fire the referee the game ends and we all know when you fire the referee all bets are off there's no rules 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 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 gonna 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 that next level but what 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 party's inability to harness this energy in a manner that is accessible and and reachable for voters thirsty for this kind of rebalancing so look i i have uh on this call i have mentioned my affiliation with the ff and we're a 501c3 so i can't 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 i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's true uh and to and to show them uh 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 and identity theft and so on when i i testified at the consumer finance protection bureau in the last couple of days of the of the biden admin when they were banning data brokers which trump unbanned and the speaker before me was i don't know if you know if you've heard of him but he's been doing a lot of work on the uh 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 who have gambling problems oh jesus christ 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 storks store clerks to disclose your vhs rental history right and every other form of privacy invasion is legal in america right they spy on you because they can right because that's where the and because that's where the money is great we talked about it earlier oh but the money's there because they can yes that if if if if every time you spied on someone you face look if if visa could ten percent of the time just keep the money and not give it to the merchant and they were the only game in town they would that's right just like you know your dog licks its balls because it can and no one makes no makes them stop right like uh so um but but you know like they 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 in the same way that like we're like how do we get all these monopolies well we had these a lot of economists who 40 years ago told us monopolies were efficient and told us to not enforce anti-monopoly law right now we 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 yeah it implodes and suddenly your economy is hollow they they've extorted us and as far as the difference in privacy look daniel ellis ellsberg reveals that the vietnam war is a lie and uh he's hailed he's attacked by nixon but he's hailed as a hero and the tide turns against the vietnam war we go edward snowden does the same thing about the nsa having a mass surveillance program and what do we do we go oh i'm sorry you got to get the fuck out of here like we've changed yeah in our relationship to that in a huge way and to the not to the better for sure no one wants to be spot even so even if there's some apathy no one wants to be spotted 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 and facebook can spy on you 96 of ios users tick that box and you'd assume like the other four percent were either drunk or facebook employees or drunk facebook employees which makes sense if i worked at facebook i would be drunk all the time but but uh 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 up the internet and they turned on surveillance in ios to power up the 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 wow 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 spy on me the most right they might be indifferent to it right but no one is out there going i i love being spied on and when they you know get ripped off at the grocery store or you know they they get racially discriminated uh you know they or or in lending or someone makes deep fake porn of them these are all downstream of like no new privacy law since 1988 right these are all the same thing right they're just different they're like different epiphenomena 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 from spying on you could be more than the the benefit and that brings us around to you know the conversation that we're having right now and i think that's a good point 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 centaurs 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 uh 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 that you've written uh in this new book reverse centaur's guide to life after ai is a story of agency and i really appreciate it and well thank you uh you cory doctor oh well john this has been an absolute delight uh i i feel like i've known you for a million years because i have this parasocial relationship with you i'm not that interesting unfortunately you it's a 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 380 consecutive days and going oh 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 you're going to go like oh it's your fault and the people you need to be in community with and in solidarity with there you're going to end up being angry at them join a local group and you're going to end up being angry at them and you're going to end up being angry at them local politics like we never thought local policies were 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 did chuds round up your neighbors and shoot them in the face right yeah and and get involved in national politics and get involved with civil society groups so eff.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-shuds. Get involved with the non-shud aspects, the panoply of non-shuds. And join your union or organize a union. And that's how we get shut of it. And if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here, but you know, our ancestors in the not so distant past faced challenges worse than the ones we're going through now. They did it. They weren't smarter or better than us. We can do it too. Cory Doctorow, words of wisdom, words of encouragement. And thank you so much. And thanks for being here. Cory Doctorow, Enchidification, The Reverse Centaur's 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. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. I love it, dude. This is a dude whose mind works faster than I can even, like 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, that was, he was running ahead of everybody on that one for sure. 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 nonfiction, he really does write like he thinks. Yes, yeah. He writes like he talks too. I mean, he's a great writer. 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. Yeah. 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. Conversational and constructed, but also quotable. I mean, honestly, vast 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 we're 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 yeah, it's possible. And, and it was done with Pinkerton boys with bully sticks, beating the shit out of people in the streets. And it, 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 like, if they were mad at us about communism last week, just imagine. Yes, they were all the right wing blogs went crazy. Look at, look at Stuart nodding. His head, how dare he Lenin did with, with marks ridiculousness. Brittany. What, what are the, what are the kids want to know? John? Yes. There's 107 days until the midterms. Dems still don't have any plan. 107. Why does that, why does that number sound so familiar? Oh, 107, 107 days. Wait, am I missing something here? There was a book title of a book. I think. Oh shit. Was it, was her book 107? Yeah. 107 days. Oh, for fuck's sake. First of all, the listeners of this program are far more in tuned and, and, uh, brilliant than I could ever, and they, they bring a question like that. So perfectly framed and I completely whiff on the significant of it. So apologies to the, uh, the people who frame that so beautifully. Um, I think they don't have leadership. And from what I understand from the New York times, they also have no money. Um, I mean the DNC being slightly different, but like, but when you're, you know, 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 is broke. You're just like, that isn't, that feels like the story of like how I ended up like on skid row. Like how, this feels like such a strange, uh. Yeah. 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 throw funds. 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. Um, and the problem with it is it seems so easy. It's so easily rectifiable, but it is when, when you don't know the difference between Chuck Schumer and mom Donnie, 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. It's malpractice bordering on criminal, but the infighting has been astonishing. Like my Twitter feed of just people still like so completely mad at mom Donnie, like even Dems responding to last week's episode. Like what are they mad at? What, 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 nine to 30. instead of 26 and then what we do is we fix the potholes 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 the middle class yeah 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 there's people just trying to have a following essentially that i'm seeing versus actually putting sustainable followable things forward so it's almost like they're 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 uh 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 yeah in the mind i mean i was thinking about what britney 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 really have a reckoning with why our policies are also very unpopular 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 ripe age 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 they 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 this and in within that discussion leadership of that party should emerge yeah that's all this was happening you know with biden where everyone was so mad that people were drawing attention to what we could all see with our eyes amen it's like we all have to get on the same page you know yeah that's right 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 yeah sharpen iron and and you make your ideas better and 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 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 with brown hair you have same old and same young you know right yeah it's it's nonsense dude but uh uh hopefully it's it's moving us in a better direction i'm i'm not even going to dive that deep into this because i i'm on a optimism high yeah i'm on an optimism high love that for you brittany what else we got whatever move i'm thinking about the panoply of non-chuds yeah yeah go ahead uh john why do you think gutfield didn't get a cabinet position uh because he has one box news is is part of the administration that that is t yeah it's it's the department of marketing it's there it's the department of communication it's it's an adjunct to uh the administration so that is when you work there you are in the administration you you are in a cabinet position or you're in a cabinet position when they're you know out of power uh working in the opposition but they are part of the framework uh that works hand in hand and you and the way you notice they all talk to 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 the party apparatus and a valuable one by the way and and well and they do it well execution yeah yeah i mean when you can do it from a couch i know in new york city too like you don't have to go down to dc right 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 we showed like the reason why he bombed so bad is he's used to work in bringer rooms 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 i don't know hey what's going on here uh that's what happens he's not but he's he's working rooms where the bar for comedy is was that a joke boss yeah i'm dying to know a who wrote the speech like did they bring in roast writer like he's dying to know who wrote it too can i say something though in defense of the writers of donald trump's so they had very serviceable premises oh we're going to do another ufc fight night here are the battles uh chris christie against uh cake aoc against foreign policy 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 oh 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 bumbles mcgee on stage weaving 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 wow never him it was a tough watch oh it's beautiful watch satisfying i actually think yeah for a comic no one is ever happier than a comic watching another comic eat 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's it doesn't happen all that often but it's so fun and you get to do shit you wouldn't normally get to do and you can always tell when somebody's really bombing and other comics are there because no one's laughing except for three weirdos in the back who are doing this that's that's how you knew the writers for trump's roast were not actually in the room because it was quiet they wrote from home they were in the room they'd have been back there going oh i love watching you eat it oh my god okay last one john in your opinion who is more pathetic punch or jimothy punch i don't even think that's controversial is that a country jimothy has been look it punch is not pathetic let's punch is a a beautiful soul uh 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 wisdom of the tribe we cannot replace our wisdom for the wisdom of the tribe and the wisdom of the tribe shaped punch's behavior to such an extent that 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 purposes you find yeah jimothy sorry i'm gonna feel oh jimothy 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 jimothy is that a piece of furniture with a raccoon head or is that what what are we dealing with this hybrid but there was something special about jimothy what was jimothy born in a manger i'm not going to go that far at jimothy born in bethlehem was he visited by three wise chipmunks who brought him i'm just saying there was a recognition from the get-go that jimothy had to be nurtured and adored and and respected and this is not to diminish punch who has to his credit found his way back from whatever from whatever the shit he was pulling before abandonment that's ended settle down settle down the things that we talk about on this podcast all i'm saying is the only there there needn't be a cure for jimothy because jimothy is the cure i've actually written a song about it and it goes a little something like this brought from the angels uh yeah the only problem we have with jimothy is obviously rhyming his name in the rap songs and odes uh that should praise him to the hosannas that's really the only problem that we have it's been harder for him to embed himself in popular culture punch is easy i bet he's doing it in spite of that you know that's why he's such an inspiration jillian thank you that's you're you're exactly right he's he's everything this is how religions start yep as they should this is how they should start um well that's all that's that's all we have that's all the time brady 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 uh they can ask us at twitter we are weekly show pod instagram threads tiktok blue sky we are weekly show podcast you can like subscribe and comment on our youtube channel the weekly show with john stewart ah you can like subscribe and comment on our youtube channel the weekly show with john stewart perfect episode for a lovely late july morning uh producer britney mimetovic producer jillian spear video editor and engineer rob vittolo audio editor and engineer nicole boys and our 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 stewart is a comedy central podcast is produced by paramount audio and busboy production this episode is brought to you by chat gpt hey it's bill simmons from the bill simmons podcast have you guys heard about chat gpt work it's the new way to use chat gpt for bigger multi-step projects and when you need more than just answers give chat gpt work access to your apps and files and it can create a better 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