WILOSOPHY: Cory Doctorow on Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all

(upbeat music) - A list, nap, production. - Everyone relaxes, this is Velocifield with Will Aniston. I'm Will Aniston from the title of the podcast, and this is the introduction to the show because today's guest haven't actually talked to yet, but I'm gonna talk to him about half an hour from now, but I'm, we're doing this a little late. This is probably the freshest episode of Velocifield that there has ever been. We have delayed the release today, so this one can go out fresh because today's guest, Cory, Dr. O, you might know the term and shitterification. Well, the person who came up with that was Cory, Dr. O. He wrote a book about it. He writes a book about every three to four minutes. Like he is one of the most prolific authors that I have been following in recent times. And the reason for that is that he writes about these modern times, particularly around technology and he evolves so quickly that he has to update what he is writing about and the effect that is having in the world so quickly. And he is the best in the business that doing that at the moment. I love his stuff and I'm really looking forward to this chat. I hope it's gonna be fantastic. I've heard him on other podcasts. If this does not go well, I have heard him on a bunch of other podcasts and he is one of the best podcasts guests on every other podcast I've ever heard. So if this does not go well today, I am gonna be very annoyed because it's me. I will be the problem. Taylor Swiss though. Anyway, so here we go. At the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, how to think about artificial intelligence before it's too late by Corey Doctorow. Now this book, I bought the hard cover copy of this last night and I have read most of it since then the thing I really have to confess to is I started out with a highlighter 'cause I thought, you know, I'd be good to really highlight the bits that I really respond to. And then by halfway through, I had to abandon highlighting bits of the book because I should have had the philosophy of just not highlighting the bits that I didn't want to remember. It is so compelling. It is so good. It is everything that I suspect about AI, but I didn't have anything to back it up. But Corey's written a whole book that absolutely confirms all my most held prejudices. So this is gonna be fun. I'm so excited about this chat. And if you wanna go and say Corey Doctorow, he's appearing at Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas from the 22nd to the 23rd of August. Oh, that's why it's going up fresh. And now or never on 25th of August at Melbourne's the capital presented by the Wheeler Center. So, but the book is called Centaur. Oh my God, I almost got there. Anyway, I reckon this is gonna be a great chat because even this intro was good. This is one of the best intros of time actually. Maybe we need to do the intros as fresh as this. It gives it a little energy. I have nothing to plug other than be kind to each other. Oh, you know what? You can probably actually join up to my mailing list. That's the thing that I'm gonna try to build up over the next couple of years when I'm not doing any shows. And if you've come here for the philosophy, stay here for the TOEFOP and the two guys, one cup and the video store and all the other shows that we have here in this feed for everyone relax. That'll do, enjoy Corey Doctorow. (upbeat music) - Yeah, everyone relaxes as we'll also be with Will Anderson. I'm Will Anderson from the title of the podcast and this is how my show begins. I ask my guest who they are. So who are you? - I'm Corey Doctorow. I'm a science fiction writer, an activist and a journalist. And I've been involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the world's most important and effective digital rights group for 25 years. - And Corey Doctorow, do you have a life philosophy of any kind? Do you, it can be a relation to work, life, love, anything, but do you have some sort of guiding principle or a life philosophy? - I mean, honestly, my first reaction is to do the Steve Martin thing. Always keep a trash bag in your car. But I would say that when life gives you stars, make stars for Ella. So when I'm stressed out, I write. So like I just basically turn everything that makes me angry and sad into books. And so this is how I wrote nine books during lockdown and why I've written more than 30 of them. So just basically compartmentalize in the most unhealthy way that you can get as much work done as possible and just ignore everything making you unhappy. And eventually it'll just go away on its own. I'm pretty sure. - Okay, well, I'm glad of that answer because it actually takes me to the first thing that I wanted to ask you. Because I remember in January of this year, I was reading in shittification and I'd been fascinated by who you were. I guess in that way that you'd clearly been doing what you'd been doing for years before you floated into my consciousness. And part of that was because I had retreated from the internet and social media because of many of the things that you write about. These themes were things that I recognized in my world but didn't necessarily have the language or the journalism to support the gut feeling that I had about how social media had not, was not now what we had been promised it was and there was something fundamentally wrong with the systems by which these companies would rise up and then promise so much and disintegrate pre-existing industries but then not be able to live up to the initial promises. I kind of instinctively understood what that was but it wasn't really until you coined that term that it was something that I became aware of and your world and your writing, something that I've since just dived headlong into because I think you are one of the most provocative and interesting thinkers of our times. But most of it is because you are so prolific because the things you are writing about evolve so quickly that it is hard to book is outdated by the time it's almost published these days so the latest one that I have in my hand, I'm sorry for the big preamble but it's very exciting to have you on the show and the reverse centaur's guide to life after AI how to think about artificial intelligence before it's too late is your latest book and I bought this hard copy last night and I am 180 pages through it. The biggest mistake I've made Corey is I started out with a yellow highlighter thinking I'll just highlight the bits that I really want to remember and this book is mostly yellow now because it is so great. I loved it so much anyway. I'm going to shut up and let you talk now for the rest of this. Have you considered highlighting the forgettable passages? I mean, honestly, I had that thought this afternoon. I was like, I've got to go the opposite direction. I'm running out of highlighter. So where do we start? Let's just start with AI, like writing about AI in these times because of what I've just said. Things move so quickly. It's such a challenge to even put your thoughts down on paper. Where do you start? Well, you know, it's semi-seriously. I mean, really seriously. I wrote this book because I got so sick of people insisting that I talked to them about AI which I thought was a moderately interesting technology attached to an extremely ridiculous stock investment bubble that I thought maybe if I just write down all of my thoughts about all of the things that people want me to talk about, I can stop talking about AI. This was clearly a giant mistake because now I have to talk about AI all the time. So I've been writing the web for most of my adult life now. I started writing as a blogger on a website called Boyn Boying that I left about six years ago but still own an interest in. And I was writing sort of 10 to 15 posts a day for 19 years, tens of thousands of posts. Basically, everything that seemed important to me rather than scribbling an indecipherable note to myself and a little notebook in my pocket the way writers usually do. I turned it into a post for strangers which meant that I had to address the subject with a little more rigor than I would if I was making notes to myself. It created a certain kind of mnemonic familiarity because when you address the subject in a public way you fix it in your own memory better. And it created a literal database, right? A blogger's just a database. So I could go and figure out what I was thinking about different things at different times. And so that set the stage for my method for producing material of all kinds. And with AI partly because there was just so much nonsense about it that I felt like I wanted to address I found myself writing blog posts after blog posts on my newsletter, which is called pluralistic, trying to explain this. And then people would get angry at me because they thought I was either not critical enough or too critical. And I would write another post explaining why they were wrong. And eventually I got to the point where I felt like I had the material in shape where I could anticipate all the reasons that people would say I was either too critical or not critical enough about this thing. And write one book about how to be a good critic of it. - And I think that's what I find most interesting because I grasp sometimes for where I'm meant to be fitting in between is this advertising? Is it AI enthusiasm for the purpose of inflating share prices and companies and et cetera, et cetera. Same patterns being played over again and again versus, I don't know, is this the end of the world and robots are gonna kill us all? And like, depending on which day I wake up, I don't know. know how I meant to be processing and I think that's what I've really responded to and it seems where a lot of your writing starts, which is how do we decipher which is which, what is real and what is not real. So what is your process of deciphering that yourself? How do you work it out? Well, part of that is just longitudinal experience, right? I like to say that our society would be much better off if we had enough object permanence to win a game of peekaboo. You know, some of these things are, in fact, just the same stuff we've been through, but it was slight variations. And so having actually seen versions of, you know, tech stocks windows before, having seen various like AI bubbles before, this isn't the first AI bubble of my life. It's about the third. I actually dropped out of four undergraduate programs without getting a degree. And two of the last four that I dropped out, the two last of the four that I dropped out of last, were an artificial intelligence program at the University of Toronto and an interdisciplinary program at the University of Waterloo where I was pursuing something called cellular automata, which is a way of doing machine learning. So this isn't even the first time we've had one of these. It's like this is a multiple, you know, multiple repeat of phenomena that we've had before. But the other thing is that, you know, you talked before about how you're not sure whether you're supposed to feel like it was X or Y. And I think that oftentimes when we encounter a seeming paradox where something seems to be too contradictory things at once, that if you examine it with sufficient care, then what you find is it's two things that have been gathered under one label. So you raised the example before, you know, is this just a big stock swindle or is it really going to take all of our jobs and change the world and maybe kill us all? You know, I think that depending on which of the billionaires who won't shut the hell up about AI you listen to, you'll hear both of those stories kind of, you'll hear something very cynical and also something very disturbingly kind of cult like. And I think that rather than assuming that billionaires are a monolith who have approached this stock bubble for the same reason, that we can actually sort of bucket them into two different groups who have two different motivations that are related but different. So I think on the one hand, you have billionaires who are effectively solipses, right? I think that to become a billionaire is first of all to deal with people mostly statistical abstractions, right? If you're Jeff Bezos and you're hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of customers, people aren't individuals, right? They're statistical abstractions, same with, you know, particularly social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg who's just sitting there in a control room with dials that he can use to try and modify the behavior of people at scale. And so you start, you lose track of the fact that people are real but also, you know, the kind of pain that you have to inflict to become a billionaire requires that you not take other people's pain as seriously as your own, right? So you kind of have to feel like everyone else is really a kind of figment of your imagination. This is why Elon Musk calls everyone who disagrees with him a non-player character, you know, the chatbots in a video game who say, you know, welcome weary traveler to the tavern. You will find some interesting adventures at that table who will give you a quest, right? They're not real. They're just there to kind of kind of advance your story. And then on the other hand, you have this other group of billionaires who I think are far more cynical and they're coming at this and thinking, you know, I don't have to believe that AI can do people's jobs. I just have to believe that a salesperson can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot even if it can't do your job on the grounds that they are desperate to live in a world in which they no longer have ego-shattering conversations with people who know how to do things and who greet every fresh inspiration they've had with the bad news that like it's impossible or illegal or will kill people or is wildly immortal. And you know, you say, how would you like to get rid of all those people on the payroll and replace them with a psychophantic chatbot that will not only praise every idea you have as brilliant, but actually turn it into a product without it having to pass through the hands of these impertinent, you know, pizmyers. And I think that like, you don't have to believe it will work to invest in it in the same way that you don't have to think that like peptides are going to make people into Superman to believe that undertake and convince a lot of disturbed young men to buy peptides. You don't have to believe that AI can do everyone's job to think that bosses are infinitely horny to replace workers with software. Yeah. And as you make the point, things that will probably end up not working as well as the thing that they're replacing and there is because there is evidence of this already have a having happened a whole bunch of times. The thing that worries me, I guess the most is that the worst possible people seem to be in charge at the worst possible time, thoughts. Yeah. So this kind of ties back into these ideas about inshidification that I've been writing about for a few years now. You know, people want to know who I blame for inshidification, right? Is it the consumer who failed to shop with sufficient care, right? Are you voting improperly with your wallet because, I don't know, you're buying a Murdoch newspaper or because, you know, you drive a car that burns old dead shit instead of one that's got a cool battery in it. And I just don't think you can shop your way out of a monopoly. I think voting with with your wallet is like recycling your way out of wildfires. It's just it's like a deeply unserious way of addressing systemic problems. And it's one that is, you know, extremely neoliberal coded, thatcher coded in that it takes what we would normally do as politics, which is to say a collective endeavor with all of the problems and benefits of that. You know, on the one hand, you have to go to a meeting where some tedious person is quoting Robert Trolls of Order and then you have an argument about who's going to do the washing up. But on the other hand, you end up in like solidarity with your neighbors as part of a movement. And it replaces that with this like extremely solitary activity where you just agonize endlessly in the grocery aisle about, you know, which one is the most fair trade way to like end child slavery, rather than like, you know, saying that child slavery should be illegal in countries where its legal should be, you know, sanctioned or something. And so, you know, we have this, this, this very atomized way of addressing problems. And so it is, I think that like, it's not fair to blame the consumer for this. I think that consumption is just not a way to make systemic change. And so the other people that it's natural to want to blame are the kind of ketamine, an old zucker muskie and failures who run these tech companies. And after all, they are like visibly awful people, right? The kind of people you'd count the spoons if they ever came over for dinner. But at the same time, like, they've, you know, barely made any pretense that there are any better than that. And they will tell you that they really only work for their shareholders. And at one point, they actually did provide a better service than the one they have now, which suggests that, you know, it's not their character feelings that cause them to make their services worse. It's something external to them that they are kind of responding to the way that the society is structured, the way that our systems are structured. So who structures those systems? Well, it's our policy makers. And unlike tech bosses, they do work for us, right? Our regulators are our elected representatives. They actually draw their wage to represent us. And again, going back to like object permanence, having done this now for 25 years for EFF, I know that the way that we got to this place where, you know, the internet has turned into what Tommy spent calls five giant websites filled with screenshots of texts from the other four did not happen because of like the great forces of history, the iron laws of economics. It's because main politicians in living memory took decisions that had the foreseeable, but also the foreseen outcome of creating this kind of inshitticine where the worst ideas, the worst people make the most money. And, you know, if there's anyone we should blame, it's, it's those policy makers, not just because, you know, if we can identify who are the fools who got us into this mess, we can keep them away from power. But also, it tells us who we should be pressurizing to fix this, right? We should be trying to vote with our wallets or, you know, replacing the bosses of these monopolies with better bosses of these monopolies. We should be finding the political will to actually like abolish monopolies and prevent corporations from amassing the kind of power that lets them, you know, visit this kind of agony on us with impunity. But how the question, I guess, is then how do we do that in an environment where most people, well, a lot of people, an increasing amount of people are getting all the information they're getting from the various, the very people that were meant to be criticizing or bringing down or rallying support to get government to legislate against like how, how do we actually achieve what it is that you're speaking about? So, like all the best Americans I'm Canadian, and in Eastern Canada, we have a joke whose punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. So it is clearly not ideal, as you say, to be operating in an environment of monopolies and trying to reign in monopoly power. It'd be a lot easier if we prevented monopolies rather than, rather than responding to them. And, you know, the way that we got these monopolies, I should say, is that 40 years ago, we adopted a kind of politics that's broadly called neoliberalism that comes with a novel theory of competition enforcement called consumer welfare. And under the consumer welfare theory, monopolies are treated as intrinsically efficient, right? The way that it goes is if you, you know, discover that 90% of the market has decided to start searching with Google, it would be perverse to punish Google for having a search monopoly because all they've done has made us all very happy. And why would we use public money to punish companies for pleasing the public? But the basis for a monopoly law prior to this was the idea that once corporations become very powerful, even if they amass that power by making us happy, they become not just too big to fail, but too big to jail. They become, you know, what John Sherman wrote the first American anti-trust law called an autocrat of trade, a kind of monarch, who is unaccountable, and once they're too big to jail, they're too big to care. And so the adoption of this theory got us to this place. The people who broke monopolies, right? The people who created the laws and were both a vanguard and the foot soldiers of the fight to smash monopoly power were not better than us. And they weren't operating under conditions that were better than ours. And John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, the robber barons who dominated the world, in the era in which the first anti-trust laws were enacted and then enforced, were as powerful and more powerful than today's tech barons. And what's more, they were able to atomize not just the public, but also the governments they faced. You know, when John D. Rockefeller was monopolizing the world's oil supply, there were lots of countries that he was basically grinding under his heel. In America, he used his control over refineries and pipelines to control the energy and ultimately even the railroads in America. In Germany, he controlled the ports. And so what that meant is that if German and American enforcers had wanted to collaborate with each other, I'm building the case against John D. Rockefeller. And even if they've been willing to commit a daily zeppelin that they would sail across the Atlantic full of documents to aid them in this endeavor, it wouldn't have mattered because the fight was different, right? It was the same enemy, but it was a different fight in both countries. Compare that to Google, right? Google does the same scam in every country it operates in, which means that we have the potential for collaboration. We actually got rather a lot of it over the last eight or nine years where we've seen, you know, the competition enforcer who retired a couple of years ago here in Australia, Rod Sims, showing up in Canary Wharf at the competition of markets authority in London for joint meetings with the Singaporean, Korean, Japanese, Canadian, American, and British and European enforcers who were all joining forces to come after the same tech companies. So we have certain advantages that our ancestors lacked to say nothing of the fact that we can do telephone calls and emails and so on to collude and collaborate across borders. So we have more potential to fight than we did them. I'm not saying this to say it's going to be easy, it's going to be really hard, right? But this is not the lost praxis of a fallen civilization. These are things that we're done in living memory. The most important antitrust fights are, you know, about a hundred years old. So there's people alive today doing this job who learned how to do it from the people who broke up standard oil, right? This is not figuring out how to like embalm a pharaoh or build a pyramid without power tools, right? This is like doing things that we did, you know, in kind of civilizational terms, like 10 seconds ago and doing it again. It was hard, but it wasn't easier for them and they weren't smarter or better than us and they didn't have advantages that we lack. We are actually better situated than they were, so we just have to do it again. How do you feel about our capacity to get information that we can trust or rely on? So I agree that there's real problems with our information environment, but or maybe and I want to say that it's not just because the media is controlled by bad people who feed us a diet of nonsense, although clearly that's a part of it. I think you have to ask yourself, why are people so vulnerable to nonsense, right? The people who are sort of attacking our information systems, are they primary predators or are they kind of parasites moving in and a weakened organism? And I think that it's the latter. I think that our kind of informational immune systems, maybe our epistemological immune systems, right? The way that we know things have been weakened by monopolies themselves. So take the question of medical safety and vaccines. I should preface this by saying, I'm a great believer in vaccines. I've had so many jobs that I can get 5G in a coal mine and I glow in the dark. However, during the COVID lockdowns and afterwards, I had a lot of people in my life who either didn't trust the vaccines or were angry at the people who didn't trust the vaccines. And the people who didn't trust the vaccines either directly or implicitly said, why should I trust the pharma companies? They would clearly kill you for a nickel. And why should I trust the regulators? They would clearly let them get away with it, right? And as evidence for this, you could point to people like the Sackler family who are the billionaires who started the opioid epidemic by marketing Moxicon and you could point to their regulators like the Federal, the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, which is now in great shambles because it's being run by RFK Jr., who's a lunatic. But before that, it was also a shambles, right? It was a shambles that was barely trustworthy and often not trustworthy. And you know, I'm no cell biologist, I'm no virologist. You know, when someone says, well, trust the FDA, they're doing good science. And I look at them and I'm like, well, it's a coin toss whether today they're doing the kind of science that I should trust or whether they're doing the kind of science that it's going to kill me and everyone I love. I look at that and I'm like, I feel like I am in a kind of epistemic void. Because I'm not qualified to assess the truth claims made by pharma companies. And I know enough about the operations of the regulators, the expert agencies that are supposed to assess those truth claims to know that they're either not qualified or not willing to apply themselves to this with the kind of diligence and seriousness that the subject warrants. And so in the absence of a good proxy who can evaluate these claims for me, and in the absence of my own experience that would or expertise that will allow me to assess those claims directly, I find myself in a kind of chaotic and terrifying place that I think weakens me and makes me vulnerable to these kind of secondary parasites, you know, the Murdoch Press and the, you know, the MAGA people and the conspiratorialists and what have you who want to push these, you know, bananas narratives, but they're, you know, the reason I might trust them is because I don't have a good way to trust everything else. Now I said that before that during this crisis about vaccination, there were a lot of people my orbit who were angry about the people who wouldn't get vaccinated. I understand they're anger, but their response to those people was, what are you stupid? Just trust the FDA, and I'm like, why would you trust the FDA, right? Like I trust the vaccines, not because the FDA told it, the FDA just let the Sacklers kill a million Americans with opioids, right? I don't trust the FDA, right? And I think that rather than trying to convince people that these manifestly untrustworthy agencies are trustworthy, we should make them trustworthy, right, that we should apply ourselves to this, and it raises this question, well, why aren't they trustworthy? How come they're so bad at their jobs? And it's not because government is intrinsically incompetent, or the public sector can't do anything, it's because, you know, the entities are only as good as their ability to regulate the firms that they're supposed to be holding to account, right? The referee has to be more powerful than the field, the teams on the field, otherwise they're going to be overpowered by them, and, you know, the decision to allow monopolies to form has left us in a situation where regulators are almost always weaker than the firms they're meant to be regulating, which means that these firms are always able to tilt the outcomes to something that is, you know, parochially advantageous to them and bad for everyone else, often in extremely lethal ways. And so I hate to be circular here, but we have to do something about the monopolies, so we can do something about the regulation. You know, this makes, I think, competition regulation, the kind of Irregulation, the necessary, but insufficient prerequisite for all other regulation, because if you allow firms to grow more powerful than any regulator they'll confront, then it doesn't matter if the regulator formulates good rules, they'll never be able to enforce them. And broadly, they won't even be able to formulate good rules because in the process whereby they gather and evaluate evidence, they will be so pressurized and contorted and bribed and coerced that their conclusions are going to be like the FDA's conclusions, which is that opioids are really safe and you should take more of them. What do you think stands in, because I think there is an increasing awareness of what it is that you're talking about, I think that people, even if they weren't paying attention to it, have started to know and notice and see patterned over and over again to the point where they're like, okay, we get this also now, even people who haven't been paying close attention to this understand that things are disproportionately out of control and people who had one good idea we've let by everything else and ruin everything and everything just doesn't feel as good as it should be or as we'll promise that it should be, but what is standing in the way of us now doing something about it, taking that step to get rid of the monopolies or disband them? I know there are small attacks, you see tiny little bits of it, something will be in Australia obviously, we've had a little bit of experimentation with a social media ban for under 16s or whatever it is, do you see these smaller battles on this bigger field, but the whole problem always seems to be like, yes, but we're not addressing the real thing, which is that we've let like five or six people make all these decisions on all of our behalf. So you know the joke about looking for your keys under the lamppost, because it's too dark where you drop them. There are a lot of policies that kind of fall into that bucket, but I actually think when it comes to tech policies, it's even worse. What we do in tech policy is we scatter car keys irrespective of whether they will open your car door because that way they'll be easier to find. And you know, you mentioned the under 16 ban for social media, we could also talk about the news bargaining code. I think both of these follow into that category. So a lot of people observe that media was being ripped off by tech. And if you look at how the media is being ripped off by tech is actually very straightforward. It's not that tech is ripping off the media by linking to the news or by giving people a forum where they can talk about the news. You know, broadly speaking, news that you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't the news. We call that a secret. The thing that makes it the news is that people are talking about it. It's not bad for the news to have people talking about it and finding it. But there is a way in which not the news was being stolen from the media, but money was being stolen from the media. So a lot of media is advertising supported. And tech has got an ad duopoly. Meta and Google control 80% of the display advertising market worldwide. And before the rise of this duopoly, the share of the advertising sector's revenue that went to what's called an intermediary. So it's like everybody who isn't the publishers or the advertisers was 15%. Right. Now it's 51%. They've tripled the share. So that's just like money that a publisher used to get that's now being trouser by this tech duopoly. And it doesn't take a lot of scrutiny to figure out where that money is going. So in online advertising, you have this thing called real time bidding. So when you land on a web page, there's a bunch of options that take place using surveillance data about you to figure out which ads to show you. We've experienced this even when we don't understand the mechanics. So you have what's called the sell side platform, which is the publishers. And so you land on a web page and the publisher says, you know, I have a 18 to 34 year old manchild from you know, Canberra who owns an Xbox and has been researching gonorrhea, who will pay to advertise to him. And then on the other side, you have the demand side platform, which is the advertisers. And they're like, I will give you five cents to advertise to that person. And then in the middle, there's like the platform that's called the marketplace where the software agent representing the publisher and the software agent representing the advertiser come together and conduct this auction. And this results in the ad being shown to you. And when that market started, those would have been three different companies, a marketplace and advertiser and a seller's platform. Now it's all under one roof. Meta and Google each have their own stack, sell side platform, buy side platform, marketplace in the middle. And to use one, you have to use all three, right? It's all tied together. And both Google and Meta are both advertisers themselves. And they also have advertising inventories. So they are a place where an advertiser can buy space to advertise. And so imagine that you and your partner were getting a divorce. And you showed up in court and you realized that your lawyer was also your partner's lawyer. And as you're figuring this out, the lawyer puts a wig on and climbs up onto the bench because they're also the judge. And then you kind of look over their shoulder and you realize they're swiping on their phone, trying to match with both of you on Tinder. And then the gavel comes down and they say, all right, I've made my decision. I've decided I'm the one who's getting the house, right? It's not a mystery how that happened, right? These firms have an irreconcilable conflict of interest and the evidence of it is right there. So with 51 cents out of every dollar, literally the majority of money in the sector being trouser by the tech companies, we can just see that they're stealing the money. And then there's some companies that produce the media that have subscribers. And oftentimes those subscribers sign up through an app. Well, there's also a duopoly for apps. There's Google and Apple. And they take 30 cents out of every dollar, right? And so that means that like every time you sign up to a subscriber, 30 cents out of every dollar they give you to pay for your newspaper, your website, is being sent to California and being trouser by them. Now in a normal market, payment processing runs between 1 and 3%. So they're charging like a 1,000% premium on payment processing. Again, they're just stealing money. Now, whether you get your subscribers or your readers through payment subscription or advertising, you probably reach them on social media where you might have millions and millions of subscribers. But when you post something to social media, they don't see it. The platforms suppress the reach and then make you pay to boost it. So again, it's just a fraud, right? Someone has said, "Show me every time we'll post something." And then the people who are in charge of that come to you and they say, "Well, there's a million people who want to be shown everything that you post, but I'm not going to show it to them unless you give me $15 every time you post." Again, they're just stealing money. So we know how to fix that, right? We should just like ban this as an unfair and deceptive practice, the social media thing. We should force them to open up their app stores and payment processors. We should force them to divest these and structurally separate these ad markets so that they're not, you know, the lawyers for both side and the judge and trying to match with all of you. And instead what we did was rather than saying, "You're not allowed to steal money from people anymore by having these unfair and collusive arrangements," we said, "Go ahead and steal as much money as you want, but give some of it back to the press." That's the news bargaining code. Keep your power, but share some of the money you've stolen from us with us, which means that we can never make them less powerful or we put the media out of business, right? Because now the media is dependent on getting a share of the stolen money. And the media are now partners with the tech companies that we want them to hold to account. We brought this in in Canada because we love the Australian version of this so much. What we ended up doing was having the Toronto Star, our largest national paper, cancel its ongoing investigative series into big tech right after Google agreed to start giving it some of the money they stole from it, right? So that's like one way of doing it. So what we're saying is keep the power, but share some of the stolen money. Then you have the social media ban. And there is no such thing as a social media ban for under 16s. There is only a process by which we take tech companies who are we are rightly angry because they're spying on people and targeting them with algorithms. And we say, from now on, you must spy on people much more, especially children, so you can tell whether they're children. But you also have to spy on everyone else to make sure they're not children. You have to gather information about everything that every Australian does when they're online and retain it forever. And I'm going to make a prediction here that in a couple of years, we're going to go, we're really upset that these tech companies are spying on us. Who could have predicted that ordering them to spy on us would result in them spying on us. So back to having enough object permanence to win a game of peekaboo. If we're going to defeat them, we can't just say we're going to take it as red that you will have all this power. But we are going to try to make you exercise that power slightly more responsibly. Our response to them having too much power is to insist of our policymakers that they attack the root of the power that they engage in something big and ambitious. It is far better to pursue a more ambitious agenda and fail and try it again and fail and try it again and fail and eventually succeed than to do something that strengthens their power and succeed at it but fail at actually addressing the problem that they have too much power because that just leads to them amassing more power which makes the eventual reckoning we're going to have because the only way we're going to fix this is by taking away their power makes that reckoning harder because we're just handing more power to them. And that I guess is where I find myself as well. I remember reading Sarah Williams' book about Facebook-Kellers people and it was in Australia that the example that she uses in that book about the Facebook advertising executives offering as a feature that they knew that when a teenage girl and a racist selfie I think it was that they were having a crisis about their body image and you could serve them and add it was specific to them. It was a proud Australian moment, Corey, that we were the ones who were offering that as a real feature to the advertising market but haven't The advertising is so intrinsically obviously linked with, you know, the surveillance capitalism, that's what it was. That was why a lot of this data was collected. The idea that we have now given them a permission slip to do the spying that they were already doing for a whole bunch of other reasons makes it very complicated to unpick if the only solution is that we do that at some stage there is going to be a confrontation, like there has to be a dismantling of some kind or a reckoning. As you said, we have to do it before more and more power is amassed and I was interested that in this book, I'm going to give it another plug because, you know, it's a podcast. No one tunes it halfway through, but fuck it. Let's just do it anyway. The reverse centaur's guide to life after AI, there is certainly, you know, there's a class criticism, I guess, that feels, well, it feels like a class criticism that runs through. But the idea that workers are intrinsically probably going to be disadvantaged by their bosses is a thing that is built, it's not a four of the system, but there's something that is built into the various system itself. Is that a correct reading of what it is that I'm reading? Well, look, this isn't the first time that labor and capital have come into conflict over automation. And so there's a pretty good literature studying what happens when automation comes in, depending on whether the automation uptake is driven by labor or by capital. And they do have different outcomes. When labor drives automation uptake, it is typically in service to improving quality. Right? If you're, you know, someone who has a podcast that you do because you love it and someone comes along and says, here's a suite of tools. And one of them is something that you're like, well, that's going to make my podcast much better. You are apt to take it up. If it's something that's like, well, that's going to let me make five podcasts, you might be less interested in it, but your boss will be interested in it. Because when bosses are in charge of automation uptake, it is typically in service to increasing throughput. Right? To do it more, to producing more outputs, usually with an eye to reducing labor. So not always, sometimes they're like, well, we think we could sell 10 times as many widgets. So we can keep all the workers, but have each one become 10 times more productive. More often, it's like, well, we think our market is saturated, but we can reduce our labor bill by replacing some of our workforce with automation. And this is particularly true where firms have market power and where they expect that they can create inferior goods that the market will still take up because there's no other game in town. And so we see this a lot with, say, energy companies or with phone companies. What have you? They're willing to produce an inferior product, something that's less reliable, but they don't have any real competitors. And so they know that you'll buy the product. And that really describes a lot of our economy today, 45, 50 years of a failure to enforce competition laws, left us with cartels running nearly every sector. From mattresses to vitamin C to bags full of sterile saline, five or fewer firms control most of the world's supply of almost everything, fire engines and cheerleading squads and professional wrestling and microchips. They're all in the hands of just a small handful of firms who've really attained dominance by buying most of their competitors, not by being the best, but by buying the best. And that means that I think a lot of people who are in C-sweets are looking at this automation tool that often produces an inferior output, especially if you use it to increase throughput instead of to increase quality. And they're like, well, these pigs will take whatever slop we put in the trough. Let's just make it worse. I mean, this is why AI found its first home in customer service. You know, we are already at the place where multinational firms were like, we are going to go to the Pacific Rim, and we're going to find, you know, the brightest people in India who have a high degree of English fluency are quite ambitious and been through the university. And we're going to give them a binder with a script in it and no judgment at all. And we're going to force them to just follow the script that ends with you not getting what you want so that you can scream at them. And look, if you're just hiring people in India to be screamed at, it makes sense that you'd fire them or replace them with chatbots, right? I mean, chatbots are much better at following a script and being screamed at than anyone in Bangalore will ever be. And so, you know, where you have a product or you don't care if it's any good, AI is the perfect product to deliver with it. So you do have a disconfluence of interests between consumers and capital and between labor and capital. And what you mostly have is a conflict of interest between labor and consumers, which is not what we've been told for the last 45-50 years. The argument for the last 45-50 years is that every dollar or worker earns is an extra dollar that the consumer will have to pay. And that if you're willing to erode the wages and working conditions of workers, that will benefit you in the forms of cheaper goods. But now we live in a world where the price of the goods goes up and the quality of the goods goes down and the wage of the worker goes down. You know, one place where we see that very distinctly is in Uber, where you have something that is, in most respects, obviously inferior to a taxi cab. And where at one point you had a direct relationship between the wage of the worker and the cost of the cab. It used to be that when you paid a surge price, that was because the driver was being paid extra to lure them into traffic at a time when there were a lot of people trying to get a cab. And Uber has since decoupled that. And now what happens is you have something called algorithmic price discrimination and algorithmic wage discrimination, where the driver is observed by an algorithm that tries to impute desperation to them. It tries to figure out how desperate that driver is. And the more desperate it estimates the driver is the lower the wage the driver is offered for that ride. And the same thing happens, but on the other side for you as a rider, where they're using surveillance data and behavioral data from your previous interactions with the system, to estimate the highest price you're willing to pay. And so prices are going up, the wages are going down, quality is in decline. And this for Uber is just a way to harvest more of the surplus is generated both by capital and by consumers and return it to executives and shareholders. And if that isn't a discompliance of class interest, I don't know what is. I am interested in to write about these things in the way that you write about these things. I think you must, they said of George Carlin, I had Kelly Carlin, George Carlin's daughter on the show one time, and she was saying that we were talking about him being described as a cynic and she said, but it was because that he loved humanity so much that he was also a great critic of, you know, when we were not, you know, being our best. And it feels a little like that attitude is through your writing that you feel sometimes that you look at us and just think we could, with the potential that we have, we could be doing better with it's not that these things that we have created are inherently bad in of themselves, but the way that we are using the tool, it is, I guess, the reverse centaur that you write about, can you give people in a little explanation of why you chose that metaphor to describe what we're talking about here? Can I say a few words first about cynicism and then move on to reverse centaur? Of course. You can say whatever you would like to say. So I'm often asked whether I'm optimistic or pessimistic and I have no room in my life for either. I think optimism and pessimism are species of fatalism. You know, the belief that no matter what we do, things will get better as optimism and the belief that no matter what we do, things will get worse as pessimism. And I'm an activist. I think what we do matters. And so the thing that I try to dial in on is hope. And I think hope is the belief that even though you can't see your way from here to where you want to go, that if you materially improve your circumstances, even a little that, you know, you will ascend a gradient towards the world you want to live in and you will attain higher and higher vantage points. And as you reach those higher vantage points, terrain that was occluded when you were further down when you were at that lower elevation will be revealed to you. And that from there, you may see ways to ascend further that we're not obvious when you're further down. So hope is the belief that you should just keep trying. And hope is not necessarily co-terminal with being happy or feeling safe, right? I am neither happy nor secure. I am terrified and angry most of the time. But I'm frankly bursting with hope because it's not like I lack for ideas about how we can fix things or the next step we can take. So long as there's a step you can take up the gradient, there's always room for hope. So you asked about centaurs and reverse centaurs. And before I talked about how the analytical method is often to observe the paradox and say, what if it's not a paradox? What if it's two things? And that we're just lumping them together. that that's why they that's why it seems contradictory because it's because it's two different things. So in labor markets and AI, we often encounter people who describe their use of AI in very positive terms. I spend a lot of time hanging out with techies, software engineers, programmers, and so on. And many of them will tell me, look, I use AI and I'm producing the best outputs I've ever produced in my long career. And these people, they're like historically reliable narrators of their own experience. I know them personally to be skilled practitioners. And so when they tell me that their code is better than it's ever been, I take them at their word. But then I have colleagues, friends, acquaintances who are also skilled, also experienced, also reliable when they narrate their experience who say, I'm using AI to write code. And it's the worst code I've ever written. I work in avionics. We are shoveling tech debt into the sky at a rate never before seen. No one should ever get on an airplane again. And you look at these two groups and you're like, how is that possible that two, that this, the same people doing the same job using the same tools are having such different experiences. And what you discover when you look at them is that they're two different groups. And this is where Centaurus and reverse Centaurus come in. In automation theory, a centaur is a person assisted by a machine. So the metaphor here is you have the human head, you have the horse's body, the body, it's strong, it has endurance, fast, but it lacks discernment and judgment. That all comes from the head. The human is directing the machine. So when you use a spell checker, you're a, you're a centaur. The spell checker doesn't insist that your word is wrong. It suggests that your word is wrong and you make the determination about which word to use. When you ride a bicycle, you're a centaur. You even look like a centaur when you're on a bicycle. And the corollary, of course, is that a reverse centaur is the horse's head on the human body. It's that, it's the machine directing the activities of the human. You have a system that's been implemented that can mostly automate a process, but some piece of it is beyond the grasp of the machine. And so the human is recruited to serve as the peripheral to the machine. And since the human is slower, has tires more easily and is less strong than the machine, the human is the bottleneck, which means that you are being worked to the limit of your strength and your endurance and your speed. And we all know that when you're worked to the limit of your strength and your endurance and your speed, you will eventually, you know, get tired, run out, be used, and used up. You know, Amazon's warehouses are the most automated warehouses the world has ever seen. And in America, they have tripled the rate of serious injuries compared to the rest of the sector. And it's not the coincidence. That's the consequence. You know, when you spend seven or eight figures to automate your warehouses, you're not going to run them more slowly than they need to be run. And if you're running them as quickly as they can be, which is to say as quickly as the humans in them can work, then eventually that human is going to make a mistake. And an aware house, that mistake means getting impaled on a forklift. And so reverse centurism is the characteristic arrangement of labor under AI, not because automation requires it, but because this is capital driven automation. And that capital driven automation is so intense, right? They've spent a trillion dollars in the last year alone. By the end of this year, the total expenditure will run to about $2.5 trillion. This is on $80 billion a year in revenue, or $50 billion a year in revenue, a bigger pardon. You know, $50 billion sounds like a lot until you realize they spent a trillion to get it. You know, if you want $50 billion back and change from a trillion dollars, I'll give that to you all day long. I'm such a good nature's love. I'll give you 60, you know, and put the rest under my mattress. So, you know, the only way that you turn $50 billion in revenue into a profit on a trillion dollars annual spend is by displacing a lot of labor, right? You have to fire workers and replace them with software. And that means that we are only making reverse centaurs with AI in its industrial applications. That's the whole pitch for the industry. And again, there's nothing about like the idea that you use statistical inference to generate words or equations or pixels to do multivariate analysis to automate certain processes that insists that this be done at the expense of, you know, the dignity and safety and economic well-being of workers. But there is something intrinsic to raising a trillion dollars on $50 billion revenue that insists that the only future for this is to fire as many workers as possible. Just, you know, on this effectiveness of coining a term, like I mentioned at the start of this chat that, you know, instantification was the thing that introduced me to you and your work. And I've gone a deep dive since then. But clearly, you had been writing in this area and well and a lot previous to that. And there would have been a whole bunch of people who were much more aware of you than I was. But was there a, like, was coining that term a big moment in the general awareness around who you are? Yeah, well, you know, as I said, I've been at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 25 years as an activist, trying to get people to engage with these very abstract policy fights about things that are going to happen in the distant future. And for, you know, extremely good reasons, most people are mostly interested in very concrete things that are happening right now. And so in service to directing people's attention and raising the salience of these distant, technical issues, I've come up with any number of metaphors and parables and similes and, you know, I write science fiction novels. So I've written all kinds of narratives about it. But it turns out that this minor license to vulgarity was the key to really unlocking people's interest. And I think partly that's because, you know, to be a Canadian about this, I skated to where the puck was going to be, you know, there's clearly, like, people's anger has reached a boiling overpoint in this. But also because the swear word allows you to get a certain adivistic kind of libidinal satisfaction at the moment that you're angry, I think that it was just a very winning combination, right? Like, like, having the analytical term as opposed to something like, say, platform decay, right? Like when you're, when you're just spitting feathers because, you know, they cut off your phone while you're trying to take care of a family member who's sick. And you're trying to call customer service, but you can only get a chatbot. And it doesn't understand anything you say. And when you say, let me speak to a human, it pretends that it doesn't understand you. And saying, oh, my God, this platform decay is driving me nuts is clearly unsatisfying in a way that like, this is so inshidified is not. So I think it really was like a willing combo. And it shows you that if you throw darts long enough, eventually you'll get a bull's eye, even if your aim isn't all that great, you know, you just have to keep plugging. Can I ask you, I read that you've had both your hips replaced. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. That's partly why I keep squirming here. I have osteoarthritis in both my hips. And the, oh, they're going to, they're suggesting I'm at the point now where like it's hip operation time. But like, like, are you able to talk to me at all about your pain? How does it affect your life? Yeah, I've had chronic pain on my life. And the hip replacement didn't fix it. Unfortunately, it may have arrested it. It's hard to say or slowed it down. I did on the second hip remembered to ask in advance if I could keep it. So this is my, my advice to you, keep, ask them if you can keep your hips. The paperwork for keeping the bits that they take out of use, usually in the maternity ward, because it's the paperwork you fill in if you want to keep your placento. So even if your surgeon swears blind that you can't say, go talk to someone in maternity, I bet there's paperwork there after it goes to the pathologist, I can get my bone back. I wanted to make soup stock. My wife said no. So I had it cast in brass and I made a cane with my, my disease femur as a cane topper. So when I use it, I'm a man with three hips, which is quite cool. So especially because if you're going to get them both done, they usually won't do them both at once. Get the, keep the bone for the first one. Get them made into a cane for the second one. You'll be the, the most badass hip replacement, PT patient that they've ever seen down at the orthopedic hospital. In terms of my pain, you know, like I mentioned before, like I work when I'm anxious, I actually think that came out of treating my chronic pain that when I'm distracted, I notice it less. Like you and I are talking and every now and again, I notice that my back and my, my, my pelvis are quite painful and I, I kind of squirm around a bit. But as soon as we stop talking, it's going to really hurt, right? Because like my attention is occupied with something else. And I think that developing that habit gave me the habit of doing this with psychological pain as well. So that like when I'm, when I'm like worried and upset, I just write and like, I'm still worried and upset when I'm done. But while I'm writing, I'm not worried and upset. I'm just like, even if I'm writing about the thing that has me worried and upset, something about kind of pinning it down like a, like a butterfly on a, on a, on a collector's board, something about it just kind of makes it work. Cory, I love this chat. I've just got a few quick, standard questions that I ask at the end of the day. I'm sure if you're happy to just, I mean, this won't sound like a quick question. But this one is like you can answer however you would like, which is what do you think happens when we die? I'm not sure, but I'll say that my, my bet, the gas is, the lights go out. And that's it. That's how would you feel about being, how do you feel about the idea that you could be loaded into an AI and somebody in the future could be having a, you know, whatever, however you would classify that conversation, how do you, how does that make you feel? I've written science fiction stories about this. See, the thing is I don't think that that's what, I don't think that would be me in there and I don't think it would be conscious. I think that it would be a word guessing program trained on my words. So I was arguing with a reporter, a podcaster, about AI, someone who's quite a believer as part of this book tour. And they said, it was a he, he said, my wife's phone can predict what she's going to say. And I can predict what she's going to say. Therefore, once my wife's phone gets enough fidelity, once the AI gets enough fidelity, it will understand my wife the way I do. It will, it will be conscious, it will have that aspect of consciousness that I have. And, and I was like, that's, that's like as the physicists say, that's not even wrong, right? Like, I can, I can predict what my wife is going to say a lot of the time because like me and like you and like everyone else, we all repeat ourselves sometimes. So it's true that if there's a little kind of statistical analysis of the things you say, that, that statistical analysis will have some predictive value. What it doesn't have is a theory. It is what in the days of big data, we called theory free inference, right? Which is to say, we don't know why these two things, what this one thing follows this other thing. We just know, when we see this, this often happens, right? Another Steve Martin joke, right? When he's being shot at in the jerk, and he's working at a petrol station, and the bullets are hitting the tins of motor oil, and they're springing leaks. He goes, the, the sniper hates these cans. Get away from the cans, right? Because it's theory free, right? Like, he doesn't under, he doesn't have a theory of why it's happening. He's just seeing one thing and making, making an inference to the other thing. And, and we, we play, he plays it for comedy because we know he's wrong, right? But theory free inference works well, but it fails badly. Because if you don't know why two things occur together, then you can't understand why they stop. So sometimes my wife will say things that are very different from what I would have predicted, because she's angry or she's sad or she's delighted or she's excited. And an algorithm that is using a statistical lookup table to find out what words historically have followed other words will be absolutely flummoxed by this. And a person who knows and understands another person stands a pretty good chance of making some sound inferences about what's going on in the mind of their interlocutor. And so that's what understanding is, right? Now, if you built a very sophisticated lookup table of all the things I'd said and all the things I was going to say or all the things that I'd said afterwards, and you use that to create a really complex model of the relationship of my utterances, such that you had a piece of software that sounded a lot like me. It would never be able to do something like coin the term and shittification, because I had never coined in shittification until I coined the term and shittification. Like all the things that are interesting about me to you, to the listener, are things that until I done them, I'd never done. And when you ask the software to do something I've never done, it can do that too, but that's not the thing I would have done. So, definitionally, the software doesn't know the things that I've never done. It can do just random things, but that doesn't make it me. That makes it something else. And so, it's not conscious and it's not me. And even to the extent that it seems like me, it's not like the interesting part of me. So, I don't feel like I will be a spirit trapped, you know, wandering, a tortured spirit wandering the earth, draped in the chains that I, what is the Dickens quote, I draped in the chains that I forged in my life, I'm, you know, doomed to walk the world, right? It's just a word-gassing program trained on my words. If you could wake up tomorrow and you had one skill and the way I'd like to define this skill is like, you know, there's sort of thing that you could learn, you know, if you did you 10,000 hours or whatever, like not a superpower, but you're never going to. You just like to be able to be able to do it. I should say before answer this, like so many of Melm-Gladwell's utterances, the 10,000 more thing is not real. I know, it doesn't replicate it. I know. But it's a good short hand for what I'm trying to design. I know. You could learn to do this. And I do think practice is not to. Yeah, yeah. No, and I think practice is critical. I teach writing every now and again, and like the biggest predictor of whether a writer is going to succeed is not their talent. It's like they're great. It's their willingness to keep at it and to practice and to get better. I've taught writers who I think showed up with more talent than their colleagues, but did fair worse than the writers who showed up with less but kept plugging. So graphed, I think, is the thing. So if there was a thing I could graphed at, it would probably be something physical. You know, I don't have a lot of coordination. I don't have a lot of visual acuity. My proper perception is not very good. I think a lot of that has to do with the chronic pain. But I also think my chronic pain is is exacerbated by it. And you know, my wife is a quite coordinated. My daughter is a competitive hip hop dancer. You know, my brother runs a hockey school. They clearly get stuff out of their physicality that I lack. And I sometimes feel the lack of it. And you know, I have done some physical activity. I'm quite an ardent cyclist. I swim every day. I swim. I swim about a kilometer and a good day. I swim a mile. But it's not the same. It's not, it's like, it's a thing I have to motivate myself to do. I don't get the pleasure from it that they do. And I think in part, it's because I've never acquired the, the skill. And I haven't done it. You know, there's that, the thing that runners do where it's torture until it's a thing that makes you like higher than someone who's just taken fentanyl. And I've never gotten past the torture phase in any of this. And so you know, doing the physical stuff until I get past the torture phase and into the, wow, this is amazing phase. I think would be something I'd pursue. If you could change one thing tomorrow about the way that people interact with either their phone or the internet or online, like what would you, what would be the first step? Like I understand this is not, we're not going to solve climate change by dad turning off the light in the spare room. Like I get that this is, but there are people also who maybe would like to go, I want to engage with like the online world in a way that is healthy for me and healthy for society. Like what would you change tomorrow about the way that we interact with it? Well, let me say that even though like shopping isn't politics and shopping carefully won't solve social problems, shopping or you know, making consumption choices, not shopping, but making consumption choices can make your life better and the lives of other people better. You know, if there's a wonderful independent bookstore down the corner you love, go buy your books there as a recovering bookseller. I'm here to tell you like it'll make a difference to those people and I'll keep the bookstore going. It's just not going to like change the fact that you know, five giant publishers control the world of publishing and that there's like one national chain in most places, but but it will keep your independent bookstore as lights on, which is great. So yeah, by all means make good consumption choices. Just don't think you're doing politics when you do it and I guess I would say gosh, because so many of our problems start with bad information security and because bad information security is downstream so often of bad like information hygiene, like bad operational security, I would say get a password manager, use it for everything and generate strong per-service passwords that are and a strong password is definitely one you could never remember. It's you know, 64 to 128 characters of garbage that only a computer could ever remember and and use that. That is going to make a giant difference in terms of how secure you are and because security is a team sport it's going to make a big difference in terms of how secure other people are because it means that your account isn't going to get hacked and then someone's going to impersonate you to your friends say and then get them hacked too. So yeah, use a password manager. One final question. Thank you very much. I really have loved this latest book. I've loved all the writing. I've actually got a couple of your science fiction novels that I am looking forward to having an opportunity to sit and read as well, but I thought I wanted to get through this one first for today's conversation. Thank you so much. This has been so fun. This is just a standard question for fun that I asked people at the end. If you could go to any point in history or the future in a time machine style scenario and what I would say in this scenario is you can use it to change the world if you would like to, but let's just suggest that you I give people the opportunity to just do something that they would like to selfishly do. You know, that's right. I'm not allowed to go kill baby Hitler. Well my the way I like to frame it is you can go and kill baby Hitler if your lifelong passion has always been to kill baby Hitler. I mean, I wouldn't want to rule it out. I just I like killing. I have someone who loves killing babies. I mean, Hitler is the white whale there. You know, that's that's when you that's how you you know, you've really made my friend Charlie. This is a great science fiction writer wrote a story about these time cops whose job is to stop time travelers from killing baby Hitler Because it turns out that like Hitler was just the latest of several European dictators Each of which was worse than the last and first they killed like baby whatever and then like the one that came after was worse And then the one that came and now it's like Hitler and they're like don't kill baby Hitler god knows what'll come next right We just have to let Hitler do his thing. We got to let him cook I don't really kill babies. I don't clip that Okay, where would I go in in time? You know what? I go back in my own life Yeah, I always like when somebody goes back in there. I live on this question and so where where you go? So I would go back to myself at about 14 and 15 There were a lot of things that were great in my life back then. I was part. I was involved in this peace and social justice education center on a on a beautiful scenic island in eastern Ontario that have been donated by like this debut on who became a socialist Diana Kingsville and The animals called grindstone we lost it after an economic crisis in the mid-90s where the We just couldn't make the payments on anymore and ended up a private home But I'll go back and talk to that kid about Kind of what's important and like What what I would regret later and what I'd be happy I did later and trying to do more of the latter and less of the former and I had a day look I this is gonna sound braggie, but I had a day a couple of years ago It was actually now like it's quite some years ago 2019 Where I was like god a 15-year-old me could see this he'd be so excited. So I Slightly know David Burnt from talking heads. We had the same publisher around the same time We when we were out on a book tour together when we're out in a book tour We did some events together and I got to know him a little and we've corresponded a little and he was I was at the world Science fiction convention in San Jose and I stepped out of this convention center across the street Was a concert hall and said tonight David Burnt so I went on ticket bastard and there was one ticket left and I emailed his manager and I was like I'm gonna go see David show tonight He saw David would love to see you stay till afterwards So I went and saw the show and I stayed till afterwards and I kind of had a nice just little matter with David Burnt He's one of my all-time heroes and then There was another writer writer called spider Robinson Who was getting a lifetime achievement award at the world science fiction convention and when I was 1415 spider Robinson It was one of my two favorite writers in the world and I know him now and I got a text message from him saying hey, what are you up to we're having a drink in my suite Do you want to come up for a drink so I went up to the suite and I was chatting with spider and he looked over at my wrist I was wearing this watch and he said that's it. That's a cool little watch where'd you get that and I said oh William Gibson gave it to me and so I was just like what a trifecta right like three of the people That when I was 15 I admired most in the world or now if not peers at least on friendly terms with me and and sort of peers And I think if I could go back and tell fit 1415 year old me that right that You know like the stuff that you're doing now that hasn't been inspired by these people we'll Make them sort of pleased enough That they will treat you as a peer in the future 15-year-old me would have been so Excited and happy and I think I would have done like three times as much like there's so many times in my life in the year since Where I was at a real low point and I think that if I'd know You know the stuff that you're doing actually matters and and counts not just to the wider world But also in this way that will be validated by these people who mattered so much to you That it just would have been like just just this incredible uplift I mean, maybe it would have made me lazy and insufferable. Maybe I'm insufferable now talking to this but I just There the I think that if at my lowest moments growing up And becoming a young man and then now an old man if I'd known that those days were ahead of me I It would have like there would have been so much light at the end of the tunnel, you know Well, it's been such a pleasure to meet you at this point and Have this chat with you and I can congratulate you on everything you're doing and I look forward to reading the next six or seven books You'll read you're right by the end of the year and Do you know you joke but I've got three out next year so sure Good well, thank you, Corey. I appreciate it mate. Thank you Listen up.