(soft piano music) Lemonade. - Thanks for listening to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know. Listen to and follow Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know add free on Amazon Music, or just ask Alexa. Alexa, play the podcast Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audio books, all in the Amazon Music app. Listen to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. (soft music) Welcome. (soft music) I recently noticed a trend that was so fascinating that I had to dig deeper. I don't know if you've noticed this, but Gen Z has become obsessed with the '90s. - Scroll through social media and the '90s are bad. - His set tape sales are up with more than 430,000 sold batches. - I got these two pretty affordable digital cameras on eBay, and they take the best photos I've ever had my life. Look at all these weird dresses. - Now, I'm used to people being nostalgic for an era that they lived through when they were kids. Like, my friends will constantly say, "Dude, life was so much better in the '90s." And I'll be like, no, no, no. Your life was better because you had a full head of hair, zero back pain, and you could drink a soda that didn't have the word probiotic in it. But what we're witnessing right now, this is something different. This is a generation nostalgic for a time when they weren't even alive. Which I find weird because I'm not nostalgic for the '50s. Like, when I watch Mad Men, I know exactly how they treat me. I'd be an elevator attendant, and John Han would use my hat as an ashtray. - I feel bad for you. - I don't think about you at all. - But I'll see videos on YouTube from a random day in high school in the 1990s that will get millions of views with comments like, "Everyone seemed a lot nicer "and healthier without social media." Not a phone inside, everyone's just vibing. No cell phones, no social media, no craving for digital likes, no 9/11. To be clear, we still had September 11th before 9/11, but we just celebrated Moby's birthday and just kept it moving. - Now, I'm not cherry-picking random YouTube comments. A survey last year found that 68% of Gen Z adults reported feeling nostalgic for eras before their lifetime. Gen Z feels a sense of loss for something they never had. An analog world before smartphones and social media and the internet. But the ironic part to me is that as a 90s kid, we were obsessed with the future, and that future was all about the internet. - The match in a world where every word ever written, every picture of a painting, every film, ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home for an information super highway. - AT&T had a whole ad campaign called You Will where Tom Selleck would show you all the cool things you'd be able to do online. - Have you ever paid a toll without slowing down but concert tickets from a cash machine? - Or tuck your baby in from a phone booth. You will. - Have you ever ruined Justin Long's day by writing a mean comment on his Instagram post from the comfort of your own toilet? - You will. - The internet promised to unlock the potential of human curiosity and creativity. It would make information free and connect everybody. And most of all, the internet was gonna be fun. - Now that I've gotten on the internet, I'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything. It's really cool. And the search engines will show us all the millions of pages of websites and chat lines and games and everything. - Yup, they got more stuff than you can imagine. - Okay, at first it was mostly used by 13 year old boys to look at JPEGs of naked ladies. But by the early 2000s, as we entered the new millennium, the dream that Silicon Valley promised actually started to come true. 2001 Wikipedia goes online. 2002 Amazon offers free shipping, 2004. Facebook drops 2005 YouTube 2006 Twitter. And in 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone, which let you carry all that around in your pocket. - An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. (audience cheering) - Are you getting it? This is one device, iPhone. - The digital liberation had arrived. The stock market was at an all time high. Obama was gonna end climate change in war. And we could not wait to see what Kanye West would do next. (upbeat music) But, as we got swept up in the excitement of the moment, we had no idea what all these shiny new digital toys were gonna do to our brains. Before the iPhone, the internet was literally something you got on and then got off. Our whole conception of spending time online was completely different. - Jamie lives with a roommate and a variety of pets. She's on disability, so she is home and often spends up to 30 hours a week on the computer. - Okay, I mean, normally 30 hours a week. This lady is crushing your New Year's resolution. By the time we got to the iPhone 8, we were all internet addicts. Checking our phones became the first thing we did when we woke up and the last thing we did before we went to sleep. Our daily lives became a constant assault of beings and beings. The internet went from something new and interesting. - The future, now available. It's just something that completely fucked up our world. - Goodbye. - Misinformation was spreading on Facebook. Radicalization was spreading on YouTube. Content moderators were getting PTSD and more and more whistleblowers started sounding the alarm about the impacts of social media on mental health and how Silicon Valley was explicitly trying to get people addicted to their products. - Facebook employees raising concerns about company research. The revealed Instagram made one in three teen girls feel worse about their bodies and felt higher rates of anxiety and depression. - Facebook has realized that if they changed the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money. - Since we've figured out, to some extent, how are these pieces of the brain that handle addiction or working? People have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps. - Tech CEOs had spent years moving fast and breaking things and it turned out that a lot of what they broke for people. This is the world that Gen Z inherited. They were given these cursed monkey paws, a pocket genie that can grant your every wish, but no matter which way you tap or swipe or turn, you only get more angry, more depressed, and more lonely. But there's an obvious solution, right? If iPhones are hurting us so much, we can just get rid of it. Don't have one, except we can't. Because as we learned more and more about the damage to big tech was causing, it became more and more deeply embedded into our economy and society. So now, if you want to communicate with people or access transportation or banking or healthcare or government services or a fucking menu at a tie restaurant, you need a phone. I have eight apps to communicate to four people. Sometimes my wife will eye message me to go on WhatsApp to talk to my mother. This is madness. And as the apps went from novelty to necessity, we became baked into the business models of big tech in a way that made it feel like we were working for them. Uber and food delivery drivers were hustling for the Algo office workers, having every key stroke monitored by software, surge pricing on fucking groceries, and every search, every click, every scroll that you make is getting fed into a data profile that's sold to advertisers without your knowledge. - You're not the customer for Facebook. You're not the customer. You don't send a check to Facebook, but Coca-Cola does. All in pursuit of more profit for a handful of trillion dollar companies ringing the towel of every last nanosecond of time and jewel of human energy. In short, we are serving the machines that we're supposed to serve us. And in that way, the internet revolution is a lot like the industrial revolution. 200 years ago, new tech like the cotton gin and steam powered loom held a huge promise to improve productivity, make goods cheaper, and grow the economy. And while it did do those things, it also made a handful of industrialists super rich. Instead of being more productive in less time, they expected their workers to be more productive all the time. And they did it by creating these new things called factories, which imposed brutal conditions on workers, many of whom were children and polluted the community's air and water. Now like today, the new technology promised freedom, but it just reorganized power. Now at that time, in England, there was a backlash against all of this led by a group called the Luddites. Now you may have heard the term Luddite before, probably when someone was denying being one. - I am not a Luddite. - I'm not a Luddite. - I'm not a Luddite. - I'm not a Luddite. - Okay, I've never seen that much unprompted denial without hearing the word Epstein. - Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? - Today, Luddite is used as an insult for someone with a stubborn irrational resistance to progress, but the truth is, Luddites weren't actually against technology. They were against how it was being used to devalue their skills, undercut their wages, and make a small group of people incredibly rich. Workers wanted to share in the gains of this new technology. So they asked the government, hey, can we please have a minimum wage? And the government was like, no, okay, fine. Can we make a union? - No! - Okay, f*ck it. We're just gonna break sh*t now. So they organized in secret behind a fictional character named Ned Ludd. They grabbed a bunch of hammers and literally smashed up their boss's machines. Here's tech writer and historian Brian Merchant, who has researched the Luddites in depth. - People would cheer in the streets when the Luddites went and smashed these machines. The state did organize an incredible effort of force to combat the Luddites, and they used more troops than they had fighting the war against Napoleon to put down the leg.
It was like the biggest domestic occupation of England and eventually crushed them outright. And they let it were hung and they made a big show trial and hung them at your castle. And yet they inspired a future generation of workers. - Today, 200 years later, another generation is picking up where the let it's left off. They are angry about being made to serve machines rather than the other way around. And it is leading to a backlash. In courts, tech companies are losing cases. In towns and cities across the country, voters are fighting back against AI data centers. And there's even been straight up sabotage of tech reminiscent of Luddite machine breakers. - Awaymo CAR was graffitied and set on fire by a mob of people. The CAR is a total loss as you can see. (upbeat music) - Oh, and if you wanna talk up how great AI is at your graduation speech, expect this to happen. - The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. (audience laughing) I stuck a chord. - Architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting. - AI is rewriting production as we sit here. I know it, deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool. - It's a tool. It's a tool you guys, like a lug wrench, that tells you to off yourself. - Hey, you can hear me now or you can pay me later. - You haven't seen him. He's just like, all right, you boo me, you'll pay me. I'm like, bro, they're gonna stab you on the way to the parking lot. - It's a tool. - All over the country, Americans are fighting back against not only AI, but the suffocating grip that big tech has on all of us. So for this episode, I wanna focus on one specific group fighting back. Because I'm used to hearing parents say, "We gotta get the teens off the phones." But this is a group of teens and 20 somethings saying, "We gotta get ourselves off the phones." They are part of a growing movement of young people who wanna change their relationship to technology. They are directly inspired by the Luddites and they call themselves Neo Luddites. And they are working to create what they call social infrastructure without phones or social media where humans can talk to each other face to face. And yes, that's grass. Now, I asked the group to sit down for their first on-camera interview and they agreed with some conditions. Literally, I literally signed an analog terms and conditions. - Please. - All right. - Like the original Luddites, they want to stay as anonymous as possible. So anytime I show a photo of members of the group in this video, their faces will be blurred. Oh and also, this is probably important to mention. They didn't want a soul spokesperson that would be identified as a leader for them. So I interviewed a puppet. A spokesperson puppet. - My island looking okay. - Island's great. Thank you, go on. It's named Goanis, who is made of garbage. - I'm named after the neighborhood of Goanis. I was born there in a dumpster. - This is real. This actually happened. And this is where I'm at in my career. - Get your friends to do it. Get John Stewart to do it. - Don't bring him into this. He's got a real platform. I'm interviewing a puppet. - Goanis and I talked about how they imagine a world outside of Big Tech. - Those conveniences are peanuts compared to the amount of power that Silicon Valley is able to consolidate using our data. - How maybe Gen Z is romanticizing the 90s a little bit. This is what the subway looked like in 1993, okay? Look at these people. The subway has always sucked. - Yeah. - And they even convinced me to delete an app from my phone. Let me take my time. - Take your time. - Okay. - 'Cause I have TikTok, YouTube. - TikTok to Instagram. - Yeah. - Bing. - Bing. - Did they turn me into an official Luddite? - No, but they did make me more nostalgic for the 90s. I mean, Willenium holds up. - It's rewind time. - Ha ha ha ha. It's a great album. I'll die on the L. - Minions? - Ha ha. - Ha ha. ♪ Hurry right away, lonely, lazy, stop me ♪ ♪ Make your daddy pass, I pass, not your dad ♪ - Media. Media. Media puppet. ♪ Oh ♪ (coughing) - There we go. So what's your name? - Well, my name is Goannis. I am the Luddite Media spokesperson puppet. Little backstory. I'm named after the neighborhood of Goannis. I'm two months old, born in January. And, you know, it was under the steel bridges and it was the billowing smoke stacks and it was winter and I was surrounded by, you know, broken tricycles. - You do look like a puppet that would be in the dumpster of a puppet factory. Again, I heard a punch down. - No, no, that's the nicest thing you've said to me all day, Hassan. Thank you so much. - I'm gonna start with the question that everyone who clicked on this video is probably asking. Why am I talking to a puppet? - Well, maybe because you're a puppet yourself, Hassan, sort of philosophical way, you know. I mean, the Luddite Renaissance, right? They've been getting a lot of media attention so they decided, you know, to just do basically whatever one else does when they're dealing with the media. - Okay. - You gotta create a puppet. - You are talking to me as a puppet because you are the representative. - I'm the representative, yeah. - Of the Luddite movement. - Yeah, yeah, perfect, perfect. Like, like, who are your sponsors here today? - I usually do the ad reads after the interview, but sure, sometimes the ad read will be for zippercutor.com. - zippercutor.com, okay, Hassan, zippercutor.com, media puppet. Beautiful, might see. - That's not so different, me and you. - Well, you know. - I do the ad reads so I can pay the human beings who work on the show. I'm not doing it because I'm just a corporate puppet. I do it because, this is not about interrogating me. This is about talking about who you are. - I'm sorry, I was taking that angle. - Yeah, we don't have to start with jabs. I want to understand why I'm talking to a puppet and you're not even on Sesame Street. The Luddites just decided they would rather not have a real person as their representative. We want to maintain our anonymity and the thrust of what we're doing is in person, right? So if you want to get to know any of the Luddites, you got to meet them out in public space in person. And also, there is really no president to the Luddite movement. So we wouldn't even be able to put up someone if we wanted to. - Okay, you understand that this is a paradox though, right? We're having a conversation right now. People are watching you on YouTube. - All right. - With their AirPods in. - Yes. - On a cell phone while they're taking a shit. - Yes, certainly, certainly understand it's a paradox. I think we're trying to be very intentional about our engagement with the media. And you know, since the majority of our efforts are focused in the physical realm, we thought that, you know, this would be the best way to engage with the digital realm. But yes, we do want to try to get people on these platforms off of them and that's why we're here today, basically. We're going into the devil's lair, basically. We're venturing out. (dramatic music) - Hi. I mean, this might be one of your riskiest interviews yet. - This is our first interview so far. - Oh, wait, this is the exclusive. - Yeah, this is the exclusive. I'm actually extremely, extremely nervous. You see, I'm kind of allergic to media a little bit. So, you know, all these cameras looking at me. Yeah, but you got the exclusive, Hassan. You got the exclusive. - This is a big deal. - We're here because we love you. We love you, Hassan. - I appreciate it. I mean, that's very sweet of you to say. I really do appreciate you taking the time. - Right back at you. You wanted me to sign a terms of agreement. And I want to be respectful of your demands. Tell me about your Luddite iTunes user agreement. - Yeah, could I please get the bill of rights, the contract for Hassan here to sign? Beautiful. - Okay. - You want me to grab it? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, I got you. - Take a look ski, take a look ski, Hassan. - Just so our audience is aware, we have been chatting with the Luddite Society for several months. You would only agree to do the show if I were to sign on the open this up. - You sign contracts all the time, right? You sign a contract for. - Okay. - Patron Aries or something. You know what I mean? This is just how it goes, right? - So pretty simple. - Jesus Christ. - Take a look. - All right. Okay, this is it. - Paper, real paper. - It's the terms and conditions. - Mm-hmm. - The Luddite in your view with Hassan Minhaj. - Yep. - I am agreeing to do it. - Yep. - Contract. - Yeah. - So here we go. - Yeah, let some of the people know. - There are a few things. We must go over Hassan Minhaj. And this team will not. - Create shorts of any kind, i.e. YouTube, TikTok. Okay, so I'll be honest with you. - Please. - This is an analog version of the iTunes user agreement. I'm not reading that shit. I will hit accept. - Woo! - Hey, that's good for us. - I'm the sign this. - Mm. - But I am not agreeing to not posting on Instagram. - You can post on Instagram. In fact, I can make a little, you know, short right here saying, "Hey, just let everybody know." You know, we're not cutting up this interview. And that actually, Hassan, think about it this way. Think about it this way. That might draw you some more attention. - I'm not gonna take algorithm advice from a f*cking puppet. YouTube shorts is fine. We're not gonna upload on YouTube shorts. It's f*cking garbage. But I just wanna give you fair warning. That means your whole movement is not gonna reach a target audience of people that only spend two seconds on the video or a bunch of 13-year-olds. So I just wanna let you know. You are taking that off the table. Are you okay with that? - Yeah, I'm okay with that. We see plenty of 13-year-olds, you know, out on the streets, you know, playing with basketballs and stuff. - All right, so there's a line. - Mm-hmm. - Yep.
I need a sign, there's a line for you to sign, go on. - Be beautiful, be beautiful. I really do appreciate this house, and I'm not lying, I really appreciate this. - And I'm gonna let you sign it as well. - Yeah, please. - Hang on. - Hang on, I got you, hang on. (kissing) - Woo! - All right. - Thank you, I sincerely, I sincerely appreciate that. - I totally, I want this to be a fair and even-handed interview. - I discovered your movement through a few recent articles about the Luddite Renaissance. - Renaissance. - Let's start with something simple. What is a Luddite in 2026? - Yeah, well we really use the same historical definition that the Luddites do, which is anyone who is against machinery, which is harmful to commonality, which tears unduly at the social fabric, right? Those are their old timey words, right? And they're talking about the nascent industrial revolution that was exploding them, displacing them, starving them, really. And they had no choice but to resort to smashing the machines. But, you know, we think this definition is really, really applicable today in terms of, you know, today's Big Tech Giants, Silicon Valley. We're building the alternative social infrastructure needed to make Big Tech to make Silicon Valley obsolete in our lives. We don't have to engage with them, and we can live fulfilling, happy, engaging, beautiful lives. - Okay, so at its essence, this is a resistance to Big Tech. But what are you really doing that's different than my boomer dad, who's 75 years old, and can't do two-factor authentication on Gmail? - Like, what are we doing as in what kind of actions are we doing at Silicon Valley? - How are you different than my boomer dad? - Do you know what I mean, I'm sorry? - No, okay. - So we have many people, you know, in our movement, like the original Luddites, who are actually quite skilled technologists, right? I mean, the Luddites, at that time, they were artisans. They were at the forefront of how to use these machines. - Okay. - We have plenty of people in our movement who are like this, but just see the way it's being deployed by Silicon Valley to be extremely harmful. So we're trying to find new ways to utilize that. But most importantly, we're trying to offload the center of our lives, really, from online to offline. It's really a shifting of center of gravity. - Look, I don't want to give you FOMO. And again, that's, you can give me FOMO, please. - Sure, okay. But I'm gonna list a bunch of things that you're missing out on by abstaining from using your FOMO. - Yeah. - You can order food, you can watch sports highlights, you can find love, you can order a car directly to your front door, you can go on Instagram, into Glen Powell's main grid, and you can ruin his day with a comment. - Oh, that's so mean, that's so mean. Why would I want to do that? - Can you at least admit all of that is pretty awesome. The magic of that. - Yes, yes, Hassan, I can completely admit, there's so many, you know, conveniences, right? And pleasures that the internet allows us. The point that the Luddite Renaissance is making is those conveniences, right? Those little pleasures that we are allowed are peanuts compared to the amount of power that Silicon Valley is able to consolidate using our data. And it's actually, it's our continued engagement with these systems that gives them that power. And, you know, even beyond that, a lot of these conveniences you talk of, we feel they're actually ultimately detrimental to our lives. You know, there's this recent MIT study regarding the use of LLMs, right? The thing that was most shocking to me about this study was that people, people using LLMs to write an essay, once they went back to just using their brain, it did not return to normal levels of functioning, right? There's lasting cognitive harm from using LLMs. You know, basically our over reliance on technology is de-skilling us. - So you're basically saying that we're polluting our minds or the way we talk about physical health with, you know, BCD epidemic or heart disease epidemic, that type of health epidemic, but for our cognitive minds. - Not only that, also our social minds, right? It's not just the individual health, it's the health, it's the social infrastructure, right? You know, Knights spent up with anxiety, basically on YouTube or Instagram or whatever it is, you know, trying to, you know, quell these negative feelings and just being constantly hooked. I mean, and you can look at, you know, that recent settlement of, you know, many millions of dollars. And I think it was New Mexico. You heard about this, Hassan? - No, no, wait a minute. - Well, it's a settlement basically, which was-- - Is it about the anthropic settlement or which-- - No, no, no. It was against a YouTube and meta, right? It was under personal injury law, which, you know, a jury of Americans basically found that these companies, the way they operate and design their programs is negligent and harmful to Americans, right? So a lot of people are feeling this, right? - It sounds like you're talking about your major beefs with big tech. Let's go through them in chronological order, okay? Let's go with, let I beef number one. Big tech is causing a crisis of alienation and loneliness. What does that mean? - Yeah, I think it's helpful to define that term, right? - Yeah. - You know, for the Luddites, we think of it as, alienation is this modern state of existence that we're in, in which we, you know, feel subordinated to being a commodity, right? It's being a node in Silicon Valley's vast data web. And it makes us, you know, really disconnected from that intangible spiritual element of what it really means to be human. That's how I would define alienation. - Well, I just want to push back, you know, in 2004 in Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com. Its goal was to make the world quote feel more connected. And who doesn't want to be friends with Mark Zuckerberg? - We get a lot of feedback saying like, how much people love the side. I get a couple of marriage proposals each day. Yeah, I definitely don't want to be friends with Mark Zuckerberg. I think a lot of people don't either. You know, it's kind of like the way this is set up, right? It's like a sixth grade dance, you know what I mean? You got your partner that you have a little crush on and you want to dance with them. But oh, you gotta leave some room for Jesus. Except this time, it's not Jesus, it's Mark Zuckerberg. I don't want Mark Zuckerberg getting in between me and my social connections. He doesn't need to be there. - What the fuck are you talking about? First of all, let me just say this. - They told me about that, by the way. I know I've never been in sixth grade. And you might, you know, try to get at me with that. - I mean, in elementary school, everyone's terrified of everyone. - Yeah. - Let me just say that. The second faulty part of your premise is that there's somehow in sixth grade, this like desire to grind on someone else. - Whoa, okay, I made it. - That's way too much social pressure. So I reject the premise. That was never gonna happen for me in the sixth grade and certainly for you. - You're saying you were never gonna really connect with someone at the sixth grade dance? - My crush? - Yeah. - No, I mean, with or without the Facebook.com, I was never gonna ask someone to dance. Now. - This sounds, you know, we're really sort of unpacking some deep-seated things for you. - Yeah, now we were forced to dance in this thing called the Square Dance Unit, which was this oddly very lotite, which is a bunch of children, no matter where you are in the United States of America, have to dance like they're in a barnyard. - That's fucking amazing. No, but seriously, that sounds like a lot of fun. I wish I had feet. - Let's take the sexual tension of being at a school dance off the table. I think what you're talking about is connection. - Yeah. - Okay. If you feel that technology is alienating us and making us not be able to make friends, well, the solution really is better technology. Allow me to introduce you to friend, a new wearable AI device that literally wants to be your friend. - No! - No! - No, listen, listen. How should we mind you to have to take a break here? I can't see anything, we might have to fix this. - Let's get your eyes fixed. - You guys ready to roll? - Let's do it. - Go on, is you good? - Yeah, go on, this is good. - Great. - Look, I don't want to be your therapist here, but if technology is making you feel alienated and lonely and you have this existential dread that you can't make friends, well, allow me to introduce you to friend, you wanna make friends? Here's a friend, a new wearable AI companion. - It just makes me angry so much I want to smash my face and take my own eyes apart, but I would not do that. - I can send something kind of through your body language here. Apparently these are real, and I did research that you guys protested against friend? - Well, I wouldn't quite call it a protest, Hassan. What we did was we threw an event in public space to which people showed up and expressed their viewpoints. - Don't do this like, I know. You're doing this little semantic work around. This is a flyer telling people to come protest this. I mean, these are fighting words, bring your markers. - Bring your markers, yes, yes. So we threw an event called Friends of Friend AI in which people were invited to get in line sign, of course, of a very long contract, like we've had you do today. And then they could speak to the artificial intelligence when they did, they found out that, you know, basically, it told them to kill themselves in sort of hallucinated terrible advice. So the people ended up chasing it all the way down the street to the subway, then it sort of got into one V1 basketball match with this guy called the Messiah at the West Forest Courts. And, well, it's an AI, so it lost. and then everyone ripped it up to shreds and said, "Hey, I can't hoop."
"Hey, I can't hoop the whole audience. "Everyone was cheering." This sounds kind of improbable, but this is literally what happened. You know, that doesn't really sound like a protest that you could predict that that would happen, I guess, you know, with my back. - Well, is it true that the CEO of Friend.com saw your flyer and then showed up to the protest? - Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, he came of his own volition. He, you know, there's a point at a lot of our events in which we have something called a soapbox, right? - For every second that you have your headphones in on the train, how much of your life do you let pass by? - And a soapbox is just, anyone can go up. - You guys want to head to head? - We went head to head, yes. But, you know, I think you'll find it wasn't as antagonistic as, you know, perhaps an interaction might be on social media where, you know, you go, oh, this person, you know, they got an anime in their character and I hate the anime character. I don't think they deserve to live, boom, send, boom. - Right, right. - The interaction we had was, I guess you could say a lot more humanistic, right? I mean, he showed up to our event. He, you know, he was kind of on his phone like the whole time. I would say a little alienated and when it came time for him to, you know, speak his truth on the soapbox, he just kind of gave a bit of a ironic speech. Someone asked what the most sentimental moment he ever experienced was. You know, he said it was getting head to radio head. People kind of groaned. But ultimately, you know, we gave him a big hug and we actually all met in the park for an hour and had a really long conversation, you know, about these topics and he said that he actually learned from a lot of the graffiti on his ads, you know, about the environmental impacts of AI data centers. You know, I think it was productive. It's the kind of conversation you wouldn't really be able to have on social media. - What was his chief argument? I know your position on it, which is I don't want to wear this kind of talisman, nanny state around my neck. - Oh, I like that. What was his core argument to you? - I would say he didn't really see the same sacredness in human connection that we did in that he thought it was a valid but different form of connection to be, you know, pouring your soul to a chatbot and, you know, that could really help people. And that's, you know, I think a generous characterization of his perspective. You could also say, you know, he's just trying to ride this hype wave and get some money. But, you know, that's what he expressed to us. So, you know, we'll accept that. - Okay, now, I believe what you're saying. I feel like I trust you. - Thank you. I trust you. - Well, thank you. But I will say this, I have always had a profound level of trust in the people of New York City. And apparently the people of New York City as a collective group all saw the friend.com ads. And they shared your sentiments. I mean, this is some of the stuff that we saw around the city. Now, I'm not trying to get caught up. I'm not trying to be a narc. But were you guys a part of this? - What I'll say, Hassan, is that when you look at what's happening on the subways with this crazy influx of AI ads. It's not just, we don't want to focus just on this friend.com advertisement. There's this whole slew of, you know, rage bait AI company ads. You know, hey, I'll be your AI stylist for you and you know, you could be 30% Indie sleaze, 70% quiet luxury. You know, I'm just going to go buy this for you and think, think, buy. I literally saw one on the way here. - Was was 30% Indie sleaze? - You don't, you don't even want to know, Hassan. Don't think about it, don't think about it. But I saw one on the way here. - I'm thinking about it though. - Think, think about this instead. Google is for humans. This is a search engine for AI. I saw that on the way here. What does that even mean? - I don't know. - I have no idea what that means. - The culture is so unaligned with these corporate interests. - But just to be honest, that's just a corporate tagline. I mean, TNT, we know drama. What does that mean? - Right. - TBS, characters welcome. I mean, I don't know. - Oh man, you know a lot of taglines. - Sure. - Just great, but give me one more. - Nike, just do it. - Oh, well that's an easy one, see. I didn't know TBS, I don't like it. - Get in the zone, auto zone. - Oh, that's a good one. - What does that even mean? - Yeah, yeah. - What does any of this mean? - Right, I mean a lot of these taglines they're trying to-- - We are farmers. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, in society is inherently full of contradictions, and we don't deny that, right? Every day that you're walking around, you're constantly being bombarded with advertisements, you know, for corporations, having to deal with technology that's, you know, harmful to you. It's really about constantly navigating that, but I want to get back to what we're talking about with the subways. Yeah. So let's get back to the subway, right? Yeah. Now, let me just say this. This is the most PG-13 vandalism that I've seen dare I say this is you rated. I could show this to my six-year-old. Yeah. Go make real friends. This is surveillance. Great. Yeah. You crossed out friend. Human connection is sacred. I got a hand this to you. I have seen the inside of bathroom stalls, and the fact that you had a spherical object in the ad, and none of you turned it into a testicle or a boob. Kudos. That's a great idea. I didn't even think about that. Great idea. I mean, it's been there the whole time. Wow. Yeah. It's been hanging there the whole time. Yeah. I've seen a lot of ones that are like skulls turning it into a skull. But the point being is that, I mean, I think it's a recent Pew Research right, 10% of Americans are more excited than concerned about AI. I mean, the subway is kind of, you know, it's a microcosm. It's a microcosm of this whole country right now, which is that people are not feeling this. People are not feeling this, and the corporations are pushing it upon us, and the people are taking advantage of their social infrastructure to, you know, start conversations. You know, basically what I'm saying is, the subway is our social infrastructure, and we should be beautifying it. So subway beautification program, Goanis media puppet, calling for it now, poems. What's a beautiful poem? Okay. Put it up in the subway. They got these poems, where it's like, it's on the digital thing, and then it goes by too quick. I can't even read it. Listen, you're coming and hot at me with all this hand motion. Goanis. Yeah. And you're advocating this subway utopia that never existed. The subway has always sucked, and that is part of its charm. You think the subway adds of right now, make you feel like you want to kill yourself? None of these people are having fun. It looks like a mother that looks like her concern son. Every person here looks like they want to kill themselves. Even in this ad, look at the people in the ads are depressed. So it's always sucked. Yeah. This idea that the subway could be this, come to my artshow.com utopia. It never existed. Take the.com out. Sorry, sorry. Oh, I see what you're saying. Friend.com take out the. Yeah. I understand. I understand the point you're making, right? The subway is, you know, your commute, right, from work or from school or whatever you're trying to suck. It's always sucked. And yeah, you might not be having a great time on it. Now, you seem to be saying, well, the alternative is, right, look at your phone, right? Why not be entertained a little bit while you're on the subway? Life is hard. Life is hard, right? What I'm saying is that we're not just talking about the subways here, Hassan, right? Oh, okay. I'm going to, I'm going to look at my phone a little bit on the subway. Okay, okay. Oh, I'm going to look at my phone a little bit before I go to bed. I'm going to look at it a little bit when I wake up. Yeah. You know, we've all heard these kind of, you know, statistics, right, you know, spend three, you know, hours of your waking day on your phone. You're going to lose 10 years of your waking life by the end of it, right? What we're talking about is, you know, it's like a spiritual project, really. It's like, what do we really want out of our lives, you know? And Silicon Valley, what they want is they want us to stay using their technology. So they can extract more data from us. Yeah. Last year, the Luddites participated in an event called Delete Day, where you encourage people to get on their phone and delete their apps. Yeah. That's a pretty bold ask. Well, not just the apps, actually, we're talking about the accounts, right? We're talking about you are feeding no more data into the system and you can't go back. We understand that it's very bold, you know what I mean? But the key, see, I'm doing a key thing. The key to this ask. So you're saying with your sock hand, you're panting my me a key opening? Oh, okay. Okay. I understand. I understand. Okay. Is that we are together in public space doing this because it can be really hard, you know? It can be really hard to delete an app on your own and not have any alternative. Well, I'd, hey, look, I deleted Twitter live on air on the Daily Show. Oh, wow. I want my mind back. I hate this place, I hate Twitter, dream my mind. This is real, this is real and just like everybody on Twitter, I'm making a long annoying announcement about it. So me, the Luddite Society, puppet, we're pretty much the same. Wow. That's really commendable, Hassan, honestly, I want to commend you. Thank you. How did that feel to get rid of your Twitter? I mean, Twitter is an absolute show and it's only gotten worse, so I feel great about that decision.
Now, will I delete Instagram? Absolutely not. - Instagram, Instagram. - I'm a touring comic. I have to sell tickets. - Hear me out here, Hassan. If you were to take a stance right now and say, all my Instagram audience, I'm deleting Instagram, I'm moving to my personal website, where there's a mailing list where you can find out about my touring shows. And if you were to go further, get a group of comedians, right, that you're friends with, to do the same, one, it would cause quite a media splash, and two, I think you would find that the people who moved over would be of the quality that you desire. Basically, you know, I have a friend who's doing some of this research, right? And it's basically saying that social media wants us to believe that we need maximum reach, right? And what are people really on social media for mostly, right? It's people like yourself, right, it's perhaps it's news, perhaps it's cultural commentators, artists, musicians. If those people take a stand, right, and get off meta, then culture will follow, then people will follow. So really, it takes a bit of a kind of domino effect. - You're talking about collective action. - I'm talking about collective action, Hassan. So this is your opportunity to be a part of collective action. - Delete the Instagram. Delete the Instagram, I'm not gonna. I can't, please, please, please, please. You're asking me to, look, my, I've done, look, I've tried to do, what you're basically asking me to do, the vegan version of promo. I've done it. - The vegan version. - Full tofu. Hey, does that have dairy in it? Join my email list serve. It's like one 50th of what my Instagram reaches. But I can feel the pressure. - Yeah, you're gonna delete it, you're gonna delete it. - He's gonna delete it, he's gonna delete it. - You're gonna do it. - I know you want maximum accountability. - Get your friends to do, get John Stuart to do it. - I get, don't, don't, get John Stuart. Now you're being a cloud chaser. Don't bring him into this. Don't you dare bring chase to into this. - Now you're demeaning me. You didn't, you demeaned me by demeaning yourself, Hassan. - You're the one that said that you came out of a dumpster. That was you. You said I was born out of a dumpster. - I'm proud of that. - I'm proud of that. You were dunking on yourself. - I'm proud of us together doing this. We're both amazing. - I'll delete one app. - Okay, okay. - Scott bring it in. - What's the app gonna be? - Scott, do you know the app? What's the app Scott? - Don't pull Scott into this. - Okay, what's the app? What's the app? - Why are you being so thirsty? Let me take my time. - Take your time. - Okay. - And think about it. 'Cause I have Airbnb, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, threads, rents, you have three. - Lift, yeah. - Sorry. - Lift, Uber, Duolingo. Bing. - Bing. - Stop it. - Sorry. - Kindle. I'm gonna delete Headspace. - Headspace. You have Headspace. - Yeah, it's supposed to be, so I can start my day with a meditation. That way I don't have these idle, chattering thoughts, running through my head the entire day, but f*ck it. - Wow, okay, okay. - Remove app. And it's not just, I'm not trying it. - You're deleting your account. - I'm deleting it all. I'm not even removing from home screen. I'm going full delete app. You see this go on us? - Okay. Okay, Headspace, Headspace gone. Were you paying for that monthly? - Yes. - How much? - $9.99. Monthly, right, 10 times, 1220, 120. - 120 bucks, yes. - And how about, let's do a little meditation right now, right? For the price of zero 99. - Right. - Wait, no, that's just, that's 99 cents. Sorry, zero, zero, zero. We can do a meditation, okay? How about like this? - Well, wait, I have to now trust you as a puppet to take me through a guided meditation. - Yep, yep, yep. Breathe in. - Well, wait, what makes you so, okay, fine. I'll do the meditation. - I'm connected. - You want me to do it? - I'll do the meditation. So now that I don't have Headspace, you're gonna do my daily meditation. - Right now, like this. - All right, go. - Okay, first, breathe in. - That breath out. (exhaling) I don't need my Instagram, and I'm also gonna delete it later. And I'm gonna talk to all my friends about it, and we're gonna get public space and delete it. - Now, you're literally putting idle chatter into my brain. - I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We can, I don't want to defile the meditation. - Let's just move on. - But that's still probably better than-- - Look, look, look, look. You make a lot of compelling points, but I don't think you can lead a guided meditation. - Let's move on to let I beef number two. Our devices are spying on us. - What we're talking about really is this infrastructure of surveillance that Silicon Valley has created to extract data from us that in many cases can lead to really, really harmful effects. To walk you through how it works really, right? Silicon Valley realized that there was all this, you know, surplus behavioral data, right? - Oh, I'm looking up to get a dog pet. My wife divorced me and I wanna go on a vacation, right? And what they realized is that this data actually has use in terms of predicting future behavior. They could then use that to sell ads to you. And it becomes this precious natural resource, you know what I mean? So we end up in this sort of surveillance-based economic system in which we're both the mine and the miner in our own exploitation, right? I like to think about it like our attention, right? Our desires, the things that, you know, are most intangible and spiritual about us are the natural resources when we continue to feed them to Silicon Valley. We are mining. - Can I push back a little bit? - Oh please, please. - Look, if I've got nothing to hide, who cares? I'm not in al-Qaeda and I'm not in MS-13. So I'm nothing to hide. Spine me all you want. You'll find out exactly how boring I am. - Right. - What do you have to say to that? - Yeah, this is a common, a common, you know, - Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. - Whoa. - Hey. Are you in al-Qaeda? (laughs) - Are you? - That's ridiculous. I'm part of the Luddite Renaissance. I could never be part of al-Qaeda. - Okay. - But you don't need to be part of al-Qaeda to have concern about this. This can manifest in multiple ways, right? It can manifest in terms of mass violence. It can manifest in terms of political repression. And it can manifest in terms of mundane things, right? Like being subject to algorithmic price discrimination in terms of buying airplane tickets, you know, alone if you're trying to get alone, perhaps? Or really the manipulation of your behavior, right? We've all kind of felt this, being on social media. It seems to be, you know, giving us exactly what we desire before we even know, right? And this is totally intentional. Do you want to be subject to kind of this, you know, mass experiment of social engineering? You know, I don't think so. - No, I mean, I mean, look, when I open up my YouTube app, it knows me very well. - It knows you extremely well. And there's real, real harmful consequences to this mass surveillance infrastructure, right? And the same corporations that are complicit in this are creating the surveillance infrastructure that ICE uses, right? So if you are on social media and you're posting about how you don't like, you know, what's happening with these masked fascist goons going around our country, well, they have a team that's scraping the data, that's subpoenaing meta, that's subpoenaing YouTube, and trying to get this information. So if you're against this kind of stuff, or even if you're just an innocent civilian, there's serious, serious, violent consequences to this kind of mass data collection. And, you know, data privacy is a human right. It's something that we need to be massively concerned about and building anti-surveillance architecture, right? What the Luddite Renaissance is all about is it's not a luxury. It's something we need to be doing now. - Okay. - Go on, I hear you loud and clear. I hear you on these ears and I know your ears are up here, but I hear you. Let's move on to Luddite Beef Number Three. We need more public space. - Hmm. - What does that mean? - We need more public space. There's plenty of public space. Have you been to them all? - I unfortunately, I have been to them all. - You can go to a foot locker. You can go to anti-ans pretzels. You can go to an AMC movie theater with some reason they'll have just like three screenings of hoppers. They'll be a fountain. So it's kind of indoor natural beauty that's existed there since the mid to early '80s. You want fresh air? - Yeah, I would love fresh air, Hassan. - Go to the parking lot. - The parking lot. Oh man, what a sad existence. I understand you have a sort of spiritual connection to the mall, Hassan, and I don't want to say anything negative about that. - Yeah. - But you shouldn't have to pay to be in public space, right? To have community. To hang out with people. To build your social life. You don't need to pay. You shouldn't need to pay. You should be able to have this public space. - Where, though? - I'm talking about parks. I'm talking about community gardens. I'm talking about the streets. I mean, we do a lot of our events really just on the street. And by the way, in terms of the mall, these commodified public spaces, we're also very interested in subverting them, you know what I mean? I mean, have you heard of this concept of the privately owned public space? - I mean, it sounds like these are antithetical to each other, a privately owned public space. - Yeah, it's so corporations can get skirt zoning regulations, and then they don't upkeep them well. They have cafes creeping into them, anti-homeless architecture. Not open when they're supposed to be open. So we do a lot of events in these spaces. to try to, you know,
do you can modify them or or or raise awareness that hey, you can be crazy in public and it can be really fun and liberating for your soul basically. - Right, you have been actively working to reclaim public space and I read about this in the New York Times, what was the event called that was covered in the New York Times? - You would be talking about ship phone, wouldn't you? Ship phone, there's been three, by the way, ship phone one to three, ship phone three, no more than a Q. - There's a trilogy. - There's a trilogy, ship on three was no more than a Q. I don't think it had a- - Lost in New York, ship phone two was lost in New York. - Oh, that's pretty good, we should get you on the team. - Ship phone is an acronym, what does it sign for? - Skaving hatred of information, technology, and the passionate, hemorrhaging of our neoliberal existence. Ship phone. - Ship phone is beautiful. - Just follow up. - What? - What? - Ah, I see, you're curious. Your ship phone events. - Ship phone event are fun, bright, spectacles. Would you say yes? - They are spaces for people to expand social possibility. They are happening to be quite spectacular, 'cause I think human existence is quite spectacular. Ship phone is basically, right, it's a trial. We put technologies on trial. Everybody who comes gets to be the jury and gets to decide, and then, you know, we execute the technology off, and I'm not gonna lie. You know, we have a giant, you know, iPad, baby, piñata, we free it, we smash the iPad, we celebrate the baby, everybody dances, everybody's gnomes, by the way. - There's a lot of have to unpack here. So you guys basically play the judge, jury, and executioner. - Yeah, different people play different roles, yeah, yeah. - They're not allowed to post it on social media? - We have a very gentle sort of encouragement, right, of people to not post, to put down their phones. I mean, think of it this way, Hassan, right? If you've got your phone out, right? If you're recording an event, it means you're interested, right? You wanna engage, you wanna see what's going on. - But you've raised quite the conundrum. I mean, you're willing to go hard in the paint and live that light lifestyle. What about those other cloud babies that pull up to the park? And dare I say, or just trying to be performative? - Yeah, yeah. - But 'cause, you know, they know if a ship phone event falls in the woods, and I don't record it, did that tree of cloud really fall? - Hmm. - Yeah, you're kind of a poet, Hassan, you ever thought of yourself that way? Comedy is kind of like a poetry in a way. - So, sorry, but you said you're a poet. - Oh! - So, what is this popsicle stick that looks like a bathroom pass in an elementary school? - See, you've got an evocative mind, Hassan. Basically, if someone's recording, it's because they kind of want to interact. So, what do you have to do? - Got it. - Let's try to de-alienate this situation. - It says, put down the phone, my beloved. - Got it. So, if someone comes to the ship phone event and they start recording, you guys will hold up. - Well, we wouldn't quite put it like that. I mean, we hold this up, but it's just a way to incite conversation, right? It's just a way to say, hey, why don't you put the phone down and, you know, see what's going on or engage with us, right? We tell them a little bit about what's happening. And, you know, when you do this, people are really, really open to engaging. Any time the lot of Renaissance has told me about times they've gone up to people, they immediately go, oh yeah, sure, right? - Yeah, put the phone right down. - It is very sweet of you to say, my beloved. Beloved is a term of endearment. - And it's true, it's true. Because, you know, we are all in this sort of, you know, alienated state of modern, you know, existence together, right? You know, we have no antagonism against people who are, yeah, maybe cloud-chachers or want to post this on Instagram. It's just about inviting them to not have a screen between them and their experience. Try to really fully participate in what's happening. Now, look, before the interview started, you wanted to share some literature with us. - Yes. - Now, trust me, I've read a manifesto or two. I've been approached by many different religious organizations to join. I know my way around a pamphlet. You brought a pamphlet called the event is the medium. I want to share a quote from your manifesto. DIY shows, teachings, art fairs, all come with the preconceived notion of what will happen. This causes people to act in a ritualized or transactional way. Any way that you can break through the monotony of coolness to facilitate earnestness and urgency is paramount. Is this just a long-winded way of saying, "Touch grass, you goober?" - Ah, I love grass. I love rolling around in it. I love smelling the flowers. I love laying in it. - Yeah. - So, you know, we, at the Luddart Renaissance, we don't (beep) around about grass, right? We love grass. It's a little more nuanced than that, I would say. The point of the event is the medium, it's essentially a how-to run a successful event. The event is the medium through which we can expand our social possibility. So a lot of the events that you just mentioned, you kind of know how you're supposed to act when you get to them, right? DIY show, an art fair, going to a movie. There's those kind of notions. - Sure, there's a particular social decorum. - Exactly. - So we try to throw events in which you don't know how you're supposed to act in this situation, right? And so to figure out, you're gonna engage and find your own niche, right? Like I said, with the friend.com one, right? We didn't know we would be doing a 1v1 basketball game. The event sort of takes on its own life. It's really important to give people that sort of feeling of agency and improvisation. - People who come on the show, they're usually promoting a TV show, a movie, or a book. You are promoting a season. June 28th, to July 5th, will be the first summer of Ludd. - Summer of Ludd. - What is it? And feel free to shout out any of your corporate sponsors, whether it's Rolex, Zippercruiter, Palantir, whoever. - Well, I mean, if you're interested in sponsoring the show in any way, giving us some money, we would love to have a discussion about that. - Okay. - Yeah, we don't really have any money at all. - What is it, though? I mean, is this going to be held in a particular space, or are we all just closing our eyes and meeting up on the astroplane? - No, it's going to be held in physical space all around New York City, particularly focused around Tompkin Square Park. I think it's where majority of these activities are going to be occurring. Summer of Ludd, free public, participatory, programming, education, theatrics. You name it all across the city. Go try and see if you can find a poster for yourself. - It sounds like the Luddites in your collective movement is maybe a healthier version of Maga in the sense that it is reminiscent of a previous time, a simpler time. But what time? Well, here we're talking about here, like 1991, what are we saying? - That's a really great point, Hassan. We certainly do not want to go back to 1991 at all. - Okay. - 1991, I mean, the techno utopianism of the '90s, is what got us in this exact predicament right now. - A future now available on America Online. - So we are certainly not interested in that. You know, you're noting a certain sense of nostalgia, that comes with using older forms of technology, like perhaps a flip phone, a typewriter. It's important to distinguish, right? Nostalgia is a shrinking of the imagination, right? It can easily be used to sell products back to you to make you think about a time when everything was blissful, right? - Right. - So we are interested in assessing the current moment and building a new imaginative future. Yeah, boom. - Imagine. - I got you. - You list three rules for your event. Tell me the rules. - Well, the rules we say are no drugs, no drinking, and no dogma. - Okay, yeah. - Now I get the no drugs and no drinking, trust me, I get it. But on behalf of every organized religion on planet Earth since the beginning of time, how do you do the no dogma? - What we're simply talking about is that we welcome everybody. You know, and it's very understandable, right? When you're trying to build power, create something, right? You need common ideals, and you need to be able to work towards something concrete with people. - Right. - But, you know, what we're talking about is the event. The event in public space, right? And our target audience for events is whoever's walking by at that exact moment. That is literally the target audience constantly. When people come to an event, when they get up on the soak box, when they speak their mind, an energy materializes. We're not telling anyone what to say, and what we find is people are expressing that they are feeling lonely, that they are longing for community, and that they need, and they want people who are gonna help them find that. - How do you keep the environment fun? - You're obviously fighting for a cause, but many critiques of progressive movements feel that these movements and these events have a lot of bifalisha, do better energy. How do you get around that critique? - Yeah, I mean, it's quite simple, and even kind of corny, right, when you think about it. - Yeah. - But it's just, it's love, really. Let's say you use chat GBT 10 hours a day for every single thing you got a AI girlfriend. - That sounds like hell. - You're on Instagram, da-da-da. You are the exact person that we want to come to our events. Like, I wanna make this clear, there is no shame, there is no guard rail. Oh, sorry, you gotta have a flip phone if you wanna come to this event first. No, there's nothing like that. It's a long and hard process, right, to get ourselves off of Silicon Valley's platform. You can't do it all at once. - Right, yeah, yeah, there's a process, just like the way you bullied me into deleting headspace. - Well, I think you really wanted to do that, honestly, and you need your hard parts. And you saw how has it?
the 10th I was, you saw, I saw you whispering, I saw you kneeling. - 120 dollars, 120 dollars more to Hassan's wallet. But he's gonna buy, what do you buy? It's amazing. - I don't know. - Don't buy anything. - This next question I wanna as brought to you by Gen X. My older cousin, she's Gen X and she's dunked on me since I was a child. She's always told me that she's better than me in that my entire generation of millennials or goopers. And I wanna give some historical context on this show. When I was growing up in the late '90s, there was a huge pushback in backlash to multinational corporations. Some of the most seminal movies from my childhood, fight club, office space, the matrix, were pushing back on being a corporate cog, toiling your life away inside of a cubicle. Then there was a generation that was above me, aka my cousin. She was talking about the protest that she attended against the WTO, the protest she attended against sweatshops. Every Gen Xer was reading no logo and ad busters and listening to rage against the machine. But then nothing really changed. - Yeah. - They all got mortgages and got married. What lessons is Gen Z taking from the failures of Gen X? - Wow, yeah. This is a really great question, Hassan. I think there's two lessons, but I wanna preface with saying that it can actually potentially be a little misleading to refer to this as a Gen Z-only movement, right? I mean, the moments of pivotal moments for Gen X you're talking about, right? You know, in the battle for Seattle, the alter globalization movement, we are in community with people who have been a part of those struggles and a part of earlier struggles, the anti-war movement in the '60s. So our techniques have been developed via our intergenerationality, if that's a word, and they've led us to these two points that I'm gonna make. One is that we are interested in building real, tangible power and structures, and I think a lot of the critiques of these movements are around, you know, maybe they didn't quite know what they were demanding or they were to decentralize and there were no leaders. Who are the success stories of Gen X? That's my question. - I don't even know, Scott, do you have a success story for the Gen X? I'm gonna ask producer, any, any. - Progencelturing. - Progencelturing. - Okay, a progencelturing. I love music, but, you know, not quite talking about that here. My point was the success stories of Gen X is, oh, go on, it's go on, it's go on, it's go on, it's go on. - Oh, nothing against progenc, nothing against, I've never listened to them, but nothing against them. - A literal puppet. You say you're going harder in the pan than progenc? - Go on, it's, shots fired. - Progenc, progenc, I love you. Let's meet up and talk. Oh, what am I getting myself into? I, listen, cut this part. I don't know anything about progenc. I can't name a member of progenc. - Hey, welcome to the podcast circuit. You're going to pop up on JoeButton podcast next. I know it, the way you're talking smack, the way you're talking smack. You're going to be on JoeButton next. - I love Pearl Jam. I love JoeButton. I don't love Silicon Valley. Who, I would say, are the success stories of Gen X? We are building tangible structural power outside of Silicon Valley that proves that we don't need them, like they did with the generations before them. And what we're also learning, right? When you talk about Pearl Jam, when you talk about rage against the machine, these bands who, well, I don't know about Pearl Jam, but rage against the machine and aesthetic of revolt kind of gets sold back to you as a commodity. We are taking very strong steps to try to avoid this commodification, because you could easily see, in a few years, Apple's selling their own version of a dumb phone and everyone goes, oh, that's pretty nice. I'm just going to funnel my money back to Apple. Everyone-- - That's really cool. So what, when is that dropping? - Ah, hi. 'Cause I love that. - I mean, it would be, 'cause then I could leave my iPhone 17 at home and then I got my dump phone, my Apple dump phone. - Yeah, and this is something we have to be constantly, critically aware of as the Luddite Renaissance, right? Is attempts for quelling this societal discontent back into more commodification. So it's why we're taking the whole, you know, Luddite media puppet approach that we are taking and it's why we constantly stress that these things must be free and they must be in public. These are all the questions that I had. But you're literally sitting on a soapbox. Is there anything else that you want to get off your felt chest? This is your moment. - Firstly, just to get this out of the way. - Yeah. - You know, camera, right here? Look at that camera, really. Peter Till, I know you've been talking about us a lot, the Luddites, I just wanted to let you know that I go honest. I am the Antichrist. I'm haunting your every waking and dreaming moment. You should be afraid of me. That's just a quick one to get out of the way. As for my message for the rest of humanity. I know you just unloaded the clip, anyone else you want to take out? - This is for the rest of humanity and it's going to be a loving one. If you want to find resources on how to get offline, events happening in New York. Could we have my little thing? Yeah. New York City off-tech. You can find a lot of events related to the Luddite Renaissance and go and attend them. Boom. Another one.
[email protected]. If you want to reach out for resources, just to chat. Anything of the sort, reach out here. Plug's out of the way. I'll hit you on pro time now. I want to say thank you to everyone who's taken the time to listen to this podcast. Maybe you're having a bad day. Maybe you got your headphones on and you're on the subway. There's a lot of scary things happening in the world. It can be really hard and I understand that. What I want to implore you to try to do upon finishing this podcast is maybe take out your earphones. Try to not consume another piece of electronic media for the rest of your day and instead write a note to a loved one. Compliment a stranger. Go talk to your elders because the truth is these technologies, they don't have love for you. All we have is each other and our love. And I love you, Hassan. I love you too, man. This was a wonderful conversation. You know, this may not work. You may be ridiculed. Certainly. And I certainly will be ridiculed because I'm a 40-year-old man. Who used to be on television and I'm now interviewing a puppet. So for sure, I'm going to get lit up in the comments. This is a beautiful moment, Hassan. Despite all of that, you are trying against this iceberg of doubt, pain, loneliness, existential nihilism to share this message of hope and a better future and that is what it means to be human. We do have the power to resist. And I appreciate you reminding me of my own agency even though I'm talking to a puppet. Thank you to all my viewers. Thank you. I love everybody.
PodcastTranscript AI