Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Yuval Noah Harari IV (on the history of information networks)

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Yuval Noah Harari (Nexus, Sapiens, Homo Deus) is an author and historian. Yuval joins the Armchair Expert to discuss how people can be manipulated by misinformation, how powerful the role of an editor is, and how much our lives are shaped by bureaucracies. Yuval and Dax talk about how ideological gaps today compare to those in the past, what role algorithms play in the spread of mass media, and the difference between information and truth. Yuval explains his take on the artificial intelligence revolution, how AI is an agent and not a tool, and his suggestions for regulating it as it advances. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on experts. I'm Dan Shepard. And I'm joined by Monica Papp.

Rob was adjusting the light so it caught my eye so I gave it a little wink. I gave mine. You always set up a little bit in the intro. Oh, is that what you're always doing? Interesting. I need to really be erect to read. Like it's a challenge, I gotta steady myself.

Erect in your body. My posture. Yeah, your posture. Yeah, you're right. If you were listening and not seeing, you might think that's something terrible. Returning, third time's the charm. You've all know a Harari.

He's a genius. He has such a novel proprietary take on everything. I wonder what he would do on the cognitive test. Oh, that's a great question. We should make all our experts take the cognitive test before they come in. And then- Remember, it's like an hour and 40 minutes.

Yeah, I know. And then we'll know if they're really worthy. Oh, well listen, I would argue that I probably, the categories that I got a 99 and a 100, I probably would beat Yuval. For sure. And I'm not nearly as smart as him. Whoa, but that's ballsy to say that.

Well, I got a 100th, why you can't go above that. Well, but he might be in the 100th too. What if he said he be in the hundred too. What if he said he's in the 110th? He might. Speaking of Dr. Richard Isaacson and I are going to chat soon about my results. Oh, I can't wait to hear the update. I said, oh, that was humbling. And he said, you did great. Oh, good. Very good.

Okay. The point I'm trying to make is even if he scored less than me, it doesn't mean anything. He's smarter than I am that I would just throw that test out. Okay. So I was thinking this, um, when you've all left, I am always pretty critical of people who just kind of blindly believe anything people say, like people have little deities thought thought deities and they don't, and look, no one's getting it all right, even the smartest people, and look, no one's getting it all right.

Even the smartest people. Einstein, oh nice, you threw a wing to the camp. You know, even Einstein was completely wrong about quantum. I always bring this up. But when he left, I was like, you know, he's as close as I have to this, Yuval. You have that with him and Malcolm. Yep, I have that with him and Malcolm.

And Dave Shipp held us some degree. Well, not everything he talks about, but there's a category of, generally race stuff, anything race related, I'll have like my own knee jerk reaction. And then I literally think, God, I hope Chappelle weighs in on this at some point, because I generally think his synthesis of it

is always something I didn't think of on race stuff. And so, yeah, Yuval's one of my guys. And when he left, I was like, of it is always something I didn't think of on race stuff. So, yeah, Yuval's one of my guys. And when he left, I was like, I could feel how what I'm asking people to do is hard. Yeah, to be critical. Yeah, to be critical of someone who is so right so often. Yes, and who you trust.

I trust. Yeah, it'd be hard for me to take a real strong stance against him. I would have to, you know, it'd have to be on something I knew inside and out or something. Well, I think you can take what he says and let it inform you, but it also isn't like if someone comes with an opposite opinion,

if you're like, well, you've all said this, so it has to be that, and that's it. That's the problem. All that to say, I just think he's so special the way he thinks about the world, because it's such a comprehensive thought process. It involves so many things. Okay, he wrote Sapiens, you know that.

He wrote Homo Deus. He wrote 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Unstoppable Us. Really great book. I do recommend it if you have children. It's a children's version of Sapiens. It's almost better than Sapiens. I know it's crazy to say, but no, but it's true. No, you can't say that.

Yes, it makes some of these harder concepts so easy to understand. It's incredible, but his new book, which we're here to talk about, is Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. And again, of course, he has a totally different angle on AI that I've not yet heard and is very fascinating.

I have one thing to say. I have a beef. I look horrible in this episode. Oh no, you watched it and you didn't like how you looked? Well, yeah, I edited it. My shirt is a mess and I will be blaming you Rob for that. Okay.

Yeah. Just letting you know. All right. It was sweet okay. It was be so easy to be married to you, Rob. And he's like, you're so lazy. Why don't you help out around here?

Okay. Please enjoy Yuval Noah Harari. I'm Raza Jaffrey. And in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Sergei Skripal, the spy who Putin poisoned. When the USSR falls apart, GRU officer Skripal finds himself adrift in the new Russia.

The world of espionage becomes his way out and his downfall. Once a double agent, now a pivotal figure in an international mystery, Sergey Skripal went from a life of covert operations to a dramatic poisoning that captivated the globe. But what led to this shocking attack? And what hidden truths did Sergey uncover? Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the

full season of the Spy Who Putin Poisoned early and ad free with Wondery+. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of Sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to the best idea yet on the wonder app or wherever you get your podcasts. You guys travel so much. Every time I open my social media, I see you. I'm somewhere else. If I turn on the TV, I see you.

No, now it's a book tour, so it's not like the usual stuff. Well, what's the usual stuff? We need you all the time to hop on TV and tell us how we're supposed to. Tell us what to do. Synthesize this for us. I'll be like on the book tour now for like two months or three months and then I have 60 days of meditation in India.

Ah. And does your husband join for that? No. He does not. When you're on this two month retreat to India, first of all, where do you go? This small place in the hills outside Mumbai. I went for the first time this year. Yeah, it was my go? This small place in the hills outside Mumbai.

I went for the first time this year. Yeah, it was my second time, but I was four the first time. So it had been a minute. And no matter where we were, we were in three different places. Everyone we ran into said, have you been to Kerala? And we're like, no, we haven't. I've not been to Kerala either.

Oh, you haven't? And I've been like for 25 years going every year to India. Oh my God. And I've never been to Kerala. I mean, it's a big place, India. It's like you've been to Europe and you've not been to Sweden, I don't know. Yes. Exactly.

You can't just pop around very easily there, unfortunately. We were just in a state. I wanna say we were in Hyderabad when we got this number, but the state we were in had 290 million people. And I was like, oh wow. That's impressive. The state has all of America in it. It's pretty wild. It was wild.

So we went to Hyde Robot? We were there with Bill Gates. And so Microsoft Center is there. So we were there for that. And then we were with him for the foundation. So we had to go to like certain spots with him. Bhubaneshwar. Bhubaneshwar, good job.

You finally got it. That took him a long time to be able to say. Eight months past the trip and I can finally say it. And then Delhi. You dropped the new. We don't need new, do we? Well, I'm Indian. I can say whatever I want.

What time of year was it? February. Oh, February is a good time. It was, the weather was nice. It was awesome. Okay, so you're on the book tour. When did it start? Three weeks ago in New York.

The US is the first station. We did a few things in London before and we did some pre-interviews for Germany and Italy and France and China and a couple of other places. But the actual book tour, it started like three weeks ago. So our first book, Sapiens, that we ever spoke to you about is the history of humankind, how we got here. Homo Deus was where we're going.

And now this new book, Nexus, this is still in keeping with your kind of overarching interest, right? So how would you delineate it between the previous books? It builds on the previous books. And Sapiens was about the long span of human history. Homo Deus was about the distant future. Nexus is about both the past and the future, but from the vantage point of information. The key question of Nexus is about both the past and the future, but from the vantage point of information.

The key question of Nexus is if humans, if we are so smart, why are we so stupid? Right, right, right. The big question. Yeah, I mean, we've reached the moon, we split the atom, we can read DNA, and at the same time we are now on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system, both because of ecological irresponsibility, but also we are potentially on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system, both because of ecological irresponsibility, but also we are potentially on the verge of a third world war or a nuclear war and we are developing technologies like AI that could easily get out of our control

and cause catastrophe, maybe even at a level of endangering our species. If we are so smart, why do we keep doing these things? And you know, the traditional answer you find in many mythologies and theologies is that there is something wrong with human nature. Something is wrong with us. We cannot resist, but to over-consume and destroy and wield power over people and subjugate people.

Where flow, there is something almost, you would say, at least in some mythologies, evil in human nature. And Nexus rejects this mythological answer. I don't think that humans, or at least most humans, are inherently evil or flawed. The problem is not in our nature. The problem is in our information. If you give good people bad information, they make bad mistakes.

They make bad decisions. So the book explores the history of information. If information is the key, why do we keep getting, why do we keep producing and feeding ourselves and other people bad information? You would have expected that over time, over centuries and millennia, our information will get better.

Well, wouldn't it be fair to say it does get better, but in concert with tons of it, that's getting worse. Very specific domains. If you look again at physics or biology, yes. But overall, modern societies, no matter how advanced they are, technologically and scientifically, they are still as susceptible as Stone Age tribes to mass delusion and to the worst kind of fantasies and errors. And we don't seem to be getting better at this. If you look at the relationship between, say, scientific research, which is obviously getting better and the other stuff, again, all their mythologies and ideologies and so forth, which don't get better, what you see is that it's the mythology in the driver's seat, not the scientists.

People who are experts in nuclear physics or biology or computer science, they get their orders mostly from people who are experts in mythologies and theologies and ideologies. And this haven't changed for thousands of years. Yeah. I think it's like a mix of hopeful and terrifying the book. And I also think, would it be fair to say the first book is really helping us all understand the power of story. That's the crowning achievement from my point of view of Sapiens is people really,

really being able to understand in a concrete way how everything that unites us in general is a story and it's in our minds that it exists. The value of this piece of paper, the borders of this thing, meaning it's a state and the people in it are a thing, they're an identity. All that was really well done and I think it helped a lot of people understand that about us. But in this book, you're now pointing out, so you have story, but you have networks. Networks is the new exploration. I think when you read this book, you'll come away kind of understanding

what an information network is and how powerful it is. What's the first example we would look at historically like an information network and its power? Well, what information really does, information doesn't necessarily tell us the truth about the world. Information connects a lot of individuals into a network that can do many, many things that isolated people can't.

If you think, for instance, about different types of information, if you think about visual information, if you think in terms of images and photographs and paintings, what is the most common portrait in the world? Who is the most famous face in human history? The answer is Jesus. Oh, I was gonna say Mona Lisa.

Me too. How, nah. We're so Western. I know, I'm so embarrassed. I mean, billions and billions of portraits of Jesus have been produced over the last 2000 years. They've been everywhere in so many churches and cathedrals and monasteries and private houses and schools

and government offices, like everywhere. And the amazing thing about it, not a single one of them is true. Not a single one is authentic, a hundred percent, not 99%. He never sat for a portrait that we know of. We don't know if anybody painted him or sculpted him during his lifetime.

Definitely we have no image from his own lifetime. And also if you think about textual descriptions, the Bible doesn't contain a single word about how Jesus looked like. Really? There is a description of His clothes one time, not a single description of what He looked like, whether He was tall or short or fat or thin, the color of His skin, color of His hair, color of His eyes, nothing.

Wow. All the billions of portraits, they came out of human imagination. And nevertheless, they have been extremely successful and important in connecting billions of people into a network which shares certain values and norms which can work together to build cathedrals and build hospitals and also go to wars and establish the Inquisition and things like that. Voting blocks. Yeah.

So whether for good or bad, this has been one of the most powerful networks in human history. Catholicism. Christianity, even more generally. Christianity, yeah, yeah. Of course, again, like every network, it can break up into several sub-networks. There is always this tension between uniting more people together and breaking up into smaller parts.

But this is what information does. A subset of the information in the world may also tell us the truth about the world. Some information is true, but truth is a very rare and relatively costly kind of information. Most information is not truth. Again, it's fiction, it's fantasy, it sometimes lies, it sometimes illusions, delusions. A key point is that the truth is costly because it requires a special effort to produce truthful information.

You need to research, you need to spend time gathering evidence and analyzing it. Fiction is cheap. You just draw research, you need to spend time gathering evidence and analyzing it. Fiction is cheap. You just draw or write the first things that come to your mind. So going back to networks, the key is that if you manage to connect a lot of individuals into a network like a church, or an army, or a corporation, or a state, or anything like that, they can accomplish far, far more than either individuals or small number of people. And this of course goes back to sapiens. This is the key to our success as a species,

that we can build these huge networks. We can build a network around money, this idea that this has some value or a deity or national identity. Yeah, so sapiens began to explore this idea. Nexus now goes over history and also the future and looks at it from the viewpoint of these networks. So OK, if we establish that stories create networks

and networks are important, let's look at history as the process not of human actions but of networks networks spreading, sometimes collapsing, changing their nature. So for instance, a chapter about democracy and dictatorship, which looks at them not as different ethical or ideological systems, but as different types of information networks. How information flows? Information flows differently in democracy and dictatorship, and this is what makes them so different.

In dictatorships, they are centralized information networks. All the information, or most of the information, flows to just one place where all the decisions are being made. Putin's desk. Yeah, Putin's desk, or Xi's desk, or whatever. And also, they lack strong self-correcting mechanisms. The network doesn't contain a mechanism for identifying and correcting the network's own mistakes. Democracy, in contrast, is a different kind

of network. What characterizes it is that information doesn't flow just through a central hub. There is usually a central hub. So in the United States, a lot of information flows to Washington, but most of it doesn't. Probably more to New York. Yeah, most of the economic decisions, social decisions, cultural decisions are being taken

in New York, in Los Angeles, in lots of other places. A lot of the information never passes through any government office and you have strong self-correcting mechanisms. If the network makes a mistake, you don't need somebody from outside to intervene. The whole point about democracy that you have these built-in mechanisms to identify and correct its own mistakes. Would you say the nature of decentralized democracy is that you're living in peer review in essence? Because there's no bottleneck or dissemination because it's flowing in all directions. People are taking it in, passing it on, they're editing or they're calling it.

What is the mechanism that is helping the self-correction? There are several and it's important that there are several, because if you have only one, it can easily malfunction. So the most obvious one in a democracy is elections. Every few years, the people can say, oh, we made a mistake, let's try something else, which you can't do in Russia, which you can't do in North Korea. In a place like Russia, you have to wait for somebody to die. Yeah.

And even then, it's not like really the people who will make the decision of who replaces them. So in democracy, you have this mechanism that every couple of years, people can say, we made a mistake, let's try something else. Of course, the problem, if you have only this, is that it can easily be rigged. The weakness of democracy since ancient times

is that you basically give enormous power to one person or one party on condition that they give it back after four years. And what happens if they don't? They have all this power in their hands. What happens if they use all this power to stay in power, to rig the elections? And we've seen it many times. In Russia, they have elections every four years.

And presumably in the 1990s, when Putin first rose to power, the elections were relatively fair and free. Then he used his power to dismantle and to rig the elections. And you saw the same thing in Venezuela. Chávez originally came to power, as far as we know, in free and fair elections. But then Chávez and his successor Maduro,

they used the power to destroy the democratic system and then stay in power. Yeah, they just had an election in quotes and it's a disaster. Yeah, Maduro lost big time, but because he appoints all the election officials and all the judges and everything, so he says, no, I won. This just in, I won. Yeah. So if you only have elections, this is not enough.

You need an entire system. This is the famous checks and balances. And these checks and balances like independent courts and free media and constitution and federal system, these are all basically, if you think about it in terms of information, these are the self-correcting mechanisms. Media is a big aspect of that, right?

The news. Because you need to know what is the reality. The elections rigs, we also have this other body that's trusted in institution that can point out this and we're liable to believe that. Yes, and of course all these institutions can be dismantled, can be undermined. This is why you need a couple of them.

So they kind of support and supervise each other. It's not perfect, ultimately you can destroy all of them, but nothing is perfect. So what you say in the book, which is interesting, is so the Bible, to go back to the image of Jesus, it's interesting, I have no image of Muhammad in my mind, and I have no image of Yahweh in my mind. Because it's forbidden.

It's forbidden, maybe to the detriment of the organization, ultimately, or not. It's forbidden, maybe to the detriment of the organization ultimately or not. It's a different way to do it. Yeah, if you look at the three main Old Testament religions and look at their success rate as they spread, you think of them as companies that tried different branding strategies. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting, we've all seen the logo of Christianity. Yeah, but Judaism's doing like the row. They're very exclusive. They don't want new members. It's not a missionary religion. It's in a different game. Islam and Christianity, they are both missionary. And they at different times in history, for much of history, Islam was much more successful than Christianity. In the last 500 years, Christianity became, but still,

you know, you have a billion and a half Muslims. Yeah, yeah. But talk about the Bible in reference to Christianity and the information network. You point out in the book that this thing, the Bible, has no self-correction. No. And that's part of its gift as well. It's like we want correction and we want to find truth, but here's this thing that's now 2,000 years old,

or varying parts of it are old, unchanging and highly successful. So that's just curious, and how does that come about? Well, if you look back in the history of religion, religions were not based on books, partly because there was no writing and no written documents at all. The problem in any network is how to agree on the basic laws of the network. And the solution suggested by religion is you rely on a superhuman authority. It's coming from outside, it's coming from above.

But then the next problem immediately appears. I mean, every time you have a solution, you have a new problem. So whenever you say, okay, the solution to the problem of how we will decide the rules, oh, they will come from the gods. How do you know what the gods really want? What they really say? Unless you had a personal revelation, personal visit by some goddess or god, it ultimately boils down to believing some human.

I mean, you want to take the humans out of the loop and you end up again believing some priest, some prophet, some guru. How can you trust them that they are not fooling you or lying to you, or maybe they are deluded. Maybe they honestly tell you what they believe, but they are simply wrong. And then after the invention of writing, a new idea came that instead of trusting a human,

let's trust a new technology. We don't think about the book as a technology, but the book is a technology. So this idea, we can't trust the humans, we should trust the technology, which is so central to debates about AI and algorithms today. This is a very old thing. I mean, you go back to the first millennia BCE and first in Judaism, later it will be in Christianity and Hinduism and Islam, you have this idea. Instead of trusting a human, let's trust the technology of the book. And the idea of a book in contrast to a document that you have many, many copies of the same text.

You can spread everywhere. It's decentralized. It's basically like a blockchain. Every user has one. So I can change my Bible, but you have millions of other copies. So they immediately noticed. And if you tell me the earth was made in eight days, I can go in here and go, no, no, it's seven.

Yeah, exactly. But then you create the problem you already talked about, which is who wrote this thing. And then, yes, and then that's the next problem. Okay, once we have this brilliant idea, the problem arises, okay, so what will be in the text? And then you go back to humans. So if you look, for instance, at the process of editing the Bible, the key people who created the Bible

are not the authors of the text, it's the editors. Nor had they met Jesus or the disciples. No, more than 300 years later, Jesus never read the Bible, didn't exist in his day. Also St. Paul never read a copy of the New Testament. In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians produced an enormous number of texts. You had stories about Jesus, you had stories about the other disciples and saints, you

had all kinds of letters like the letters of St. Paul, you had all kinds of prophecies about the end of the world and different things and prayers and hundreds and hundreds of different texts. As you had more and more texts that often contradicted each other, people needed basically a recommendation list. The same way that you have so many series on television or Netflix or whatever. You need Obama to give his top 10 list. Exactly.

So eventually, almost 400 years after Jesus in the 390s, this is when Church Council, basically a committee of bishops and theologians and so forth, meeting in Carthage, which is today Tunisia in North Africa, and they agree on a recommendation list, like top 27 texts every Christian should read, which becomes the New Testament. And their choices shaped the worldview of billions of people for the next 1,500 years and even more. And just to give you one example, there was a text which was very popular among Christians in the early centuries before this council of Carthage called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. It told the adventures and miracles of St. Paul and his female disciple, a woman called

Thecla, which performed miracles and preached to people and baptized and was a leader of the church. And this text, it was not the only one, but it was one of the main texts that showed that women could be leaders of the church and basically do anything that the men in the church can do. And this was very popular. A Wonder Woman in the Hall of Justice. Then you had another text, a letter from St. Paul to his disciple Timothy, which most scholars today agree was not written by St. Paul at all, was forged in his name

in the second century, more than a hundred years after St. Paul was dead, in which Paul says that women should not take any leadership roles in the church. When important things are discussed, they should be silent, they should just obey whatever the men say, and their role is to bear children and be modest and obedient, and this is their way to salvation. And the council at Carthage, this committee, decided that the letter to Timothy will be in the New Testament and it became 1 Timothy, which is now in millions of homes all over the world. And the Acts of Paul and Thecla, no, no, no, no, no, this stays out. It's not in the Bible.

God, think how different. I know the, no, no, no. This stays out. It's not in the Bible. Can I think how different? I know. The whole world would have been. These editors. Yeah. And this is an editorial decision. Again, it's not the people who wrote the text. And you fast forward to the modern age, the power of editors is enormous. You think about the power of newspaper editors or the people who edit the news on television. If you think about politics, so, so you know Lenin, before he became dictator of the Soviet Union,

his one job was editor of a newspaper. He was the editor of ISCRA, but this was his original power base. Benito Mussolini, before he became dictator of Italy, he was editor of a newspaper, Avanti. And editors are really powerful figures. And interestingly enough, and we are now jumping to the present and the future,

one of the first jobs to be fully automated by AI is that of editors. The entities that now edit may be the most important media outlets in the world. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they are not human. They couldn't possibly do it. They are algorithms.

But this immensely important decision, again, it's not the creation of the content, it's the recommendation. What to put at the top of the newsfeed, what to include in this recommendation list and what to leave out, which was done by the Christian bishops in Carthage and later by people like Lenin and Mussolini, now it's algorithms. Paul, allegedly, I mean, there are some epistles that from internal evidence and analysis of the language, scholars accept that this is authentic. This was really written by St. Paul in the middle of the first century, but some of the

epistles of the letters attributed to him in the New Testament, they are probably later forgeries. You can write any text and say, oh, Saint Paul wrote it. What was interesting about learning about Saint Paul was I had to ask myself, is Jesus's message so powerful and everlasting and interesting and strong, or is it Paul's interpretation? Who has the magic ingredient that has spanned 2,000 years?

And now when you say this, it's like, well, shit, it might not have been Jesus, and it might not have been Paul, it might have been the editors who are, you know, it's like, how do you even figure out what is that quintessential ingredient that made this thing so sticky and powerful? I think this is a good place to bring in bureaucracy. Okay, great.

Because one of the main themes that are explored in Aenexus is this tension between mythology and bureaucracy. Mythology focuses usually on a few heroes that do everything. I'm like, well, Jesus is the star of this whole thing. Yeah, he's the star. Maybe not, I don't know. And bureaucracy is, you know, these very complex institutions of hundreds and thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people that usually you don't remember them, you don't think about them, but they really shape the world. And if you look certainly the world of today, our life, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, are shaped

by bureaucracies far, far more than by any kind of individual charismatic heroes. Part of the problem with understanding the world is that evolutionarily, we are kind of programmed to focus on the heroes. It's very difficult for us to understand bureaucracies. They're boring. Our brains are really not built to grasp our bureaucracy's function. For thousands of years, artists, and you know, artists have a very important role in life, they explain to us reality.

Even if they tell us fictional stories, they explain to us, for instance, how love works, how relationships work, and also how political power works. This is, I think, maybe the greatest failure of art throughout history. They have done a terrible job explaining bureaucracies. For every Marvel superhero movie, for every hundred Marvel superhero movies, maybe there is one movie about bureaucracy.

When was the last blockbuster? The Big Short. The Big Short, exactly. The Big Short is a wonderful movie. It's really brilliant because it took a very hard subject. How to explain the kind of bureaucratic causes of the great financial crisis and not go to the easy place of, oh, there is some villain.

No, let's focus on the bureaucratic system that caused it. And they did it brilliantly, but this is a very rare example. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Hey, Armchairs, quick question for you. Have you ever stopped to wonder who came up with that bottle of Sriracha sitting in your fridge? Or why almost every house in America has a game of Monopoly stashed away somewhere? Well this is Nick. And this is Jack.

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We guarantee you'll be that person at your next dinner party dropping knowledge bombs at the table. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the best idea yet early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. What's up guys, it's your girl Kiki and my podcast is back with a new season and let me tell you, it's so good right now by joining my own YouTube channel. So follow, watch, and listen to Baby,

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In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondry app wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C Truecrime shows like Morbid early and ad free right now by joining Wondry+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondry app for all your Truecrime listening. Part of the reason why you have all these conspiracy theories about the deep state, because people really find it hard to understand how big bureaucracies function and then they fall easy prey to these conspiracy theories. Bureaucracy of course we have many examples from history for how they can harm us, but society cannot function without them and they do many, many important and beneficial things for us. Whenever people tell me about a deep state, I immediately think about the sewage system.

Okay. Because... Of course you do, that's obvious, but tell us why. Yeah. The sewage system is the deep state. You have this kind of system of pipes and pumps and who knows what. Running under our houses and streets and neighborhoods and saving our lives by separating the sewage water from the drinking water.

And this is a bureaucratic system. If you wanted to dig a well, you have to fill so many forms. Why? And where did it start? For most of history, big cities and small towns also had no sewage system. And one of the results was they were extremely, extremely unhealthy places. The bigger the city, the worse. And in the middle of the 19th century, there was a cholera epidemic.

In London, people began to die in loud numbers and this was periodical. I mean like every few years there would be a huge cholera epidemic and thousands and thousands of people died and people thought it was something in the air. Some people had all these conspiracy theories that may be witches or magic or who knows what is causing cholera. And then there was a doctor called John Snow, not the character from Game of Thrones. I'm gonna picture him anyways. I mean, you're retelling. That's a handsome hero, by the way.

So a sexy, shorter, thick, curly hair, X-Factor man. And he was a doctor. Oh, even better. Didn't fight any dragons or nothing, or zombies or whatever. He suspected the problem was in the water. And instead of, again, waving a sword around, he waved a pen. He started making lists, which is what bureaucrats do.

Bureaucrats take pen and paper and make lists. And he went around London interviewing people who were sick with cholera or somebody in their family died like their child died for cholera. He heard about it. He came to the house and started interviewing the parents, the siblings, about the habits of the family and especially of the person who got sick or died. And he wanted to know where did they get the drinking water from. And through these lists of thousands and thousands of these boring bureaucratic lists, he managed

to pinpoint a certain water well in Soho, central London, and he managed to connect most of the people who fell sick with cholera. At a certain moment, they drank water from that well. Wow. He reported his findings to the local officials and convinced them to just block the well, and the epidemic stopped. Wow. So he didn't even have causality, he just had correlation. He saw correlation. Then when they started investigating more deeply,

they found that the well was right next to a cesspit. There was just about one meter between the drinking water and a cesspit sewage from different places in the neighborhood was going to. This caused the cholera epidemic. And this was one of the kind of foundational events of modern epidemiology and modern hygiene and prompted first in the UK, then all over the world,

this idea that we actually need to organize a sewage system and to make sure that it remains separate from the drinking water. And today, if you want to dig a well or a cesspit in London, you need to fill all these forms and get permits, which is a good thing. Yes, yes, yes. Because ultimately it saved millions and millions of lives. Now, it's not something that anybody did a blockbuster about. You're right. You'd have to give them, as you said in a previous interview,

not him specifically, but you'd have to give them a love interest. We'd have to give him, as you said in a previous interview, not him specifically, but you'd have to give him a love interest. We'd have to be tracking something much more interesting and that'd have to be happening in the background. Or just cast Ryan Gosling. That seems to work pretty well. He'd probably do that too. Yeah.

Oh, bring John Snow. Or John Snow. I mean, that would be such a fun little Easter egg in there. That's really meta, because he came back in the show, and now he's coming back in another time period. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, you say bureaucracies are all around us, and they affect us so much. If you're applying for a loan, that's a bureaucracy. If you're applying to a college, that's your whole life. That's a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are experts for the flow of information. This is what they do. They are the plumbers of the information system.

You have this information flowing everywhere. There is so much information. You need experts in how to archive the information and how to find out the information later on. The word bureaucracy, it comes from French. In the 18th century, a bureau was a writing desk. So the literal meaning of bureaucracy, like democracy is the rule of the people, the demos, autocracy is the rule of one person, the autocrat, and bureaucracy is the rule of the writing desk that who rules society, not the king and not the

people, a writing desk rules society. What does it mean? That you have basically this archive of all these documents and somebody is sitting next to a writing desk with all these draws and things and takes out a document from here and puts a document there

and this is what runs society. This is the big unsexy force that's really running everything that we kind of are unaware of at most times. It can be good, it can be bad, but nobody has found any other way to run large-scale information networks. Whether it's an army, a corporation, a church, a university, this is how it works. Until now, with the rise of AI, when we think about and people talk about the dangers of AI, so they have in mind the great robot rebellion

and the Terminator and the robots running in the streets and shooting people. And this is very unlikely to happen anytime soon, which makes people at least in many tech companies complacent because we grew up on the Terminator and there is no Terminator scenario. The roboticists are so far behind this other stuff. We got time to worry about that.

Exactly, but the real danger is not the Terminator, it's the AI bureaucrats. What I like about this, and I honestly, if your book was just about sounding the alarms we've already heard, it's like we've already kind of heard them, the other one, great fear is that deep fakes will exist and sway the elections or that AI is going to take away your job. And so we're so aware of that already, but I think yours is much more interesting and more kind of foundational to who we are.

When you look at where AI is really starting already in the last few years to have a huge impact on our lives, it's not the killer robots and it's not even the fake videos. It's the bureaucrats. Because they're handling administration, which nobody wants to do, right? Even if many people want to do them, the AI's just do it better. Yeah, and more efficiently.

It's in the bank, you apply to a loan. It's increasingly an algorithm that decides whether you get the loan or not. You apply to a job, to a place in university. It's increasingly the AI making the decisions. And as I mentioned before, maybe the first really crucial job which was automated was editors.

And this we saw is the kind of social media disaster. Over the last 10 years or so, 15 years ago, we had this promise that social media will spread the truth and dictatorships will fall, freedom and democracy will flourish. Fast forward to the mid 2020s and we see that democracies all over the world are in very, very deep crisis. The democratic conversation is breaking down.

Democracy is basically conversation. In a dictatorship, one person dictates everything. Democracy is a group of people talking to each other, trying to reach a decision together. And what you see all over the world today is that people can't talk to each other anymore. Certainly they can't listen. Yeah, they can talk just fine. Yeah, they can talk, but nobody listens. In every country, you have the special explanations of that country.

Like in the US, why can't Republicans and Democrats agree on anything basically? So you have all these special explanations of US history and society. But then you go to Brazil, the same. You go to Israel, it's the same. You go to France, it's the same. I'm trusting you because I'm ignorant. That is the case? This is a global phenomenon?

Totally global. Is everyone as scared as we are in these countries? They can't agree on anything except that the conversation is breaking down, that for some reason, you know, things like B-POTE is on laws, which were very common previously, now becoming impossible. Every election feels like a war, which might be this is the last election. If the other side wins, this is the end. Existential.

The ideological gaps today are actually not bigger than they were in the 1960s. And they may be smaller. I think they're smaller. If you think about the 1960s with the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the sexual revolution, and yet there were elections,

and when Kennedy or Johnson are elected, the Republicans agree that Johnson is now the president. When Nixon wins, nobody says the election was stolen. There was a lot of violence, assassinations, riots and so forth, but people can still have a conversation and agree on some basic facts. And today the ideological differences are actually much smaller and yet people can't agree on anything.

The reigning explanation is tribalism. But what is driving it? Yeah, right. So I think that is the symptom. Exactly. Because if there were really huge ideological gaps, then you would say, okay, you have these ideological tribes, but because the ideological gaps are actually smaller than they were, say 50 years ago, that's

not a good enough explanation. And especially when you see it all over the world, and the best explanation that I'm familiar with, it's the information technology. Again, democracy is built on top of information technology. Information is not something on the side, like a side dish, it's the foundation. It's defined by the fact

that it's flowing in every direction. Yeah, it's a conversation. So for most of history, large scale democracy was simply impossible because the necessary information technology was lacking. Right, you didn't have like a newspaper or a- To disseminate all the information. Exactly, in the ancient world,

we know of democracy in many places, but only a small scale. If you think about the most famous example, ancient Athens, ancient Rome, there are city-states. We have many examples of smaller towns and tribes that function democratically because people can hold a conversation. Like if you need to decide whether to go to war

with Sparta or not, a large percentage of the Athenian citizens in Rhi can come together in one place and talk and listen. But if you go beyond a single city, there is just no way for millions of people spread over large territory to hold a conversation. So we don't know of a single example of a large scale democracy in pre-modern times. Only once you begin to have newspapers and then radio and television and all that, you begin to see large scale democracies, which also explains why editors of newspapers or TV stations are such important

political figures, because they shape the conversation. Now what happened in the last 10 years, especially with social media, is that the algorithms took over. The conversation is now managed to a large extent by non-human entities. And these algorithms were given a goal by the social media companies, which was to increase the time people spend on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and so forth, and increase their engagement. They press like, they share a story with their friends. Why?

Because this is good for their business. The more time people spend on the platform, the more advertisement you sell, the more data you collect, the more money you make. Very simple. Now, engagement sounds like a good thing. Who doesn't want to be engaged? But the algorithms, by experimenting on billions of people, like human guinea pigs, they discovered that the easiest way to engage people is with

outrage and hatred and fear. If you press the fear button or the hate button in a person's mind, they become very engaged. So in pursuit of user engagement, they started flooding societies with outrageous content full of greed and hate and fear. And you see it all over the world. You know, before you now say that the algorithm was the editor, I would have said, yeah, what you saw with social media is no editor. That's actually how I thought of it, is like,

oh right, this is a news channel without an editor. But in fact, it did have an editor, but it was a computer. The editor decides what will be at the top of your newsfeed or in TikTok, what is the next video? Somebody needs to decide it. It's not random. Absolutely not. And this editor is not a person anymore.

It's not Lenin, it's not Mussolini, it's an algorithm. Yeah, and it doesn't have morality on its side at all. No. It just has one goal. The managers of the companies, they were not evil. They didn't know that this will be the result. They gave this immense power to the algorithms, which then resulted in something very unexpected.

And this is a cautionary tale about the current era of AI, because we are giving algorithms more and more power in more and more fields. And you know, the social media algorithms, they were very primitive AIs. And nevertheless, there is such a huge impact on society. And again, it's bureaucratic. It's not a Hollywood blockbuster about some villain in a cave. Let's destroy democracy.

No. It's this, you have a company. It has an algorithm. It told it wants to increase its revenues. So it wants to increase engagement., so it wants to increase engagement, and then the algorithm starts spreading. People produce so much different content. Outrage is not the only thing people produce.

It's actually misleading. You think Twitter and all these places are just a cesspool of hate, and albeit they are, we don't know what the percentage is. It might be 98% positive, but that's not what's gonna make it to us. Because what your Fed is the 2%. Which is the most engaging.

Yeah. This is the decision of the algorithm. And again, with all the discussion you have today, whenever people confront the social media companies with this, their defense is free speech. Like you talk to Elon Musk, you talk to these people, oh, free speech, free speech. But the key point is that we don't need

to censor human expression. We need more responsible algorithms. I agree with Elon Musk and others that it's not the job of companies to censor human expression, except in extreme cases. Sure, sure. But the companies should be liable for the actions of their algorithms, not of the users.

Again, you have millions of users. Some of them produce fake news and conspiracy theories and all kinds of lies. And you're like, have at it. You're allowed to do that. Yes. People should be allowed to do it. But don't create a filter that is going to prioritize. That kind of content.

Yeah. Exactly. If it's free speech, everyone's voice is equal. Let everyone yell. a filter that is going to prioritize. That kind of content. Yeah. Exactly. If it's free speech, everyone's voice is equal. Let everyone yell, let's see. But if you get in there metal with what is news or what is important or what is trending, well then you're interfering. That's the editorial job.

If you think, I don't know, like a hundred years ago, if you're the chief editor of the New York Times, this is your job. Every day you have so many stories and voices and journalists and ordinary people coming to you with their stories and you make a decision, okay, this will be the main headline on the front page. You didn't write the story. Your power as editor is to say this will be the main story on the front page.

Again, this goes back to the Council of Carthage. This was the decision of these bishops. What will be in the top 27 recommendation for Christians. And now this is what the Twitter algorithm is deciding. And this is extremely important. And for that, the company should be liable. Okay, let's go through a bit of the technologies. You don't cover all of them and you say in the book,

I'm not gonna cover all of them, but I'm gonna cover a couple of them because counterintuitive when you really learn the history of it. Certainly for me, the printing press was one where I was like, okay, so what is the common misconception about the printing press that it brought on the- Scientific revolution.

Yes. Gutenberg brings print to Europe and you have the flowering of the scientific Revolution, that Gutenberg brings print to Europe, and you have the flowering of the Scientific Revolution, Copernicus, Newton. This is a very skewed view of historical reality, because actually you have almost 200 years from the Print Revolution in Europe until you really see the flowering of the Scientific Revolution in Europe

with people like Newton in the 17th century. Newton is mid to late 17th century. Gutenberg is the mid 15th century. During those 200 years, you have the worst wars of religion in European history. You have the worst witch hunts in European history, which was also fueled to a large extent by print. Because it's the same like with the story of social media. Print simply makes it easier to spread information,

but it makes it easier to spread conspiracy theories and fake news and illusions and lies, just as much as facts. Nobody was reading about the heliocentric theory when the printing press came out. No one was reading anything by these scientists. Very, very little. The big bestsellers of 15th and 16th century Europe,

it was not the scientific tracks of people like Copernicus. It was witch hunting manuals. The hammer of the witches was like Titanic. It was huge. One interesting thing to know about witch hunting, there was very little witch hunting in medieval Europe. We tend to associate witch hunting with the Middle Ages, you know, Monty Python and the

Holy Grail. No, it's a modern phenomenon. Medieval Europeans did not care very much about witches. Yeah, they thought maybe some old woman in the village, she knows how to make some love potions and if your cow is missing, she can use magic to find the missing cow. But this was basically it. And then in the 15th century, very few people came up with the conspiracy theory that actually there is a worldwide conspiracy of witches led by Satan that aims to destroy humankind.

And they have agents, local witches in every town and every village. And at first, very few people bought into this conspiracy theory. Very few people even heard about it. Then you had this one person called Heinrich Klemel. He was really mentally unhinged. And he was a church man, but a relatively junior one. And he, on his own initiative, began, because he believed in this conspiracy theory, he began a witch hunt in what is today Austria, in the Alps.

And he arrested people mostly women he had sexual obsessions about women and He thought that the witches are mostly women which was not the case in the Middle Ages But he was stopped by the church authorities Which thought that this man is completely crazy and they released the suspects and kicked him out of the area and he took revenge Through the printing press he wrote a book with all his kind of mad fantasies about the global conspiracy of witches, which became one of the biggest bestsellers in early modern Europe and shaped how people view witches to this very day.

One of his key messages that they were mostly women, that it was driven by sex. There's also baby sacrifices. Every now and then you have thousands of witches gathering together to eat children and engage in orgies. Yeah, he's a cannibalistic orgy. People just couldn't get it. Yeah, cannibalistic orgies is such a good page trigger. Well, salacious.

Yeah. We want something salacious. Much more interesting than Copernicus and his mathematics. Life's boring and the scientists made it even more boring, and this makes it exciting. Just one example out of the book to understand the flavor of the Hammer of the Witches.

There is an entire chapter about the ability of witches to steal men's penises. Ah. And we have evidence there, evidence-based. So he gives the story of a man who wakes up in the morning to discover that his penis is missing. Now he immediately suspects the local witch must have done it. So he goes to the witch and kind of coerces her,

bring me back my penis. Yeah, you gotta get back. Yes, and the witch says, okay, okay, okay. She tells him, climb this tree. And he climbed the tree and finds a bird nest at the top of the tree full of penises. This is where the witch keeps the penises she stole from men. And she tells him, okay, you can take yours.

And of course he takes the largest one. Yeah, how could he resist? So the witch tells him, no, no, no, you can't take this one, it's not yours. This belongs to the parish priest. Oh wow, the priest had the biggest dick in the town. This is a comedy sketch. You understand why this book sold more than Copernicus on these kind of mathematical calculations

of how the planets move. And this sounds funny, but it led to huge tragedies. Tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft and executed in the most horrendous ways. You're probably not well versed enough in American culture. Do you know who Lorena Bobbitt is? Because this witch is the original Lorena Bobbitt. Famously, she cut her husband's penis off. This was in the 90s.

And then she took it with her in the car and threw it out the window in a construction site and they had to recover the penis from the construction site. In all of America, again, they had our entire attention in the same way that likely this story did. You think that sounds preposterous, rewind to when we had Lorraine Abbobit and it was on the cover of every single-

That was real. That was real, but still, that was as good of proof as you got. And I wanted to ask, do you think your brain plays a trick in you, especially back then, where the things that were originally printed were things like the Bible, that when you read something that's in this thing and adds a credence to it that is imagined. Before Gutenberg, you have very few books.

People went throughout their lives basically seeing a single book, the Bible. And then you have print, and suddenly you see the hammer of the witches in the same form and shape of the Bible. This trusted medium. And this is the first generation. We are talking just a couple of decades after Gutenberg. So people, they still find it hard how to evaluate the trustworthiness of books.

It's the original problem you're talking about. Like today in all his videos, we grew up in a world where, you know, you can fake words on paper, obviously. You can write anything you want on paper, but you can't fake video. So you believe video. And now no longer.

And we need time to adjust. And this was true also with books in the 15th century. This had terrible consequences. Tens of thousands of people executed in Europe. In America, you had the Salem witch hunts. And the thing is, three centuries after Salem, today, you have millions of Americans again believing in a worldwide conspiracy of witches led by Satan

with all these cannibalistic and pedophilic orgies to take over the world. QAnon and all that. I mean, it's basically Henry Kramer and the Hammer of the Witches. Well, can I tell you, every time we have a very outspoken liberal guest on this show, in the comments, I will predictably see many, many comments,

aren't they a pedophile? It's the same thing. It's really the same because it really goes back in the Hammer of the Witches, one of the key accusations against witches is that they either sexually abuse or mutilate and kill and eat children and babies. It's not just similar.

It really comes from there. It's directly literal, yeah. It's mind blowing to think that more than 300 years after the Salem witch hunts and witch trials, America again has a problem with lots and lots of people, including in politics, believing in these witches' conspiracy theories. Yes. We don't call them witches per se anymore, but they're Satan worshippers. Yeah, they're evil. They're driven by Satan.

Who worships Satan? Witches. In a way, even if you think about this story about the witches stealing penises, not literally, but there are many people who now believe in a global conspiracy of women to steal men's penises, at least metaphorically. Right, exactly, yes. Well, stories that work, they tend to work forever. Yeah, that's the power of mythology. Despite all the facts and truth since then,

it's still so sticky. Well, that's a great time for you. My favorite thing you were saying at the beginning of your daily show interview, and again, this is very self-serving, but I'm constantly trying to talk people out of watching the news nonstop and reading all this stuff nonstop.

Their defense is always the same. My responsibility is to stay informed. They feel like there's a civic duty to stay informed. And please just tell us about the difference between information and truth and how much information we're getting and what impact that is having on us really understanding the truth. Two important things. I mean, first of all, information isn't truth.

Most information, as we said in the beginning, is junk. Yeah. It's fiction and delusion and lies. And there are three reasons for it. First of all, the truth is costly, whereas fiction is cheap. You want to produce a truthful account of whatever, of an economic crisis, of history.

You need to invest time, money, effort in doing research, analyzing. If you just write the first thing that comes to your mind, it's cheap. Secondly, the truth tends to be complicated because reality is complicated. Fiction can be as simple as you would like it to be. Jon Snow wanted to investigate what causes cholera. Not only had to invest a lot of time and effort, but the actual process.

Oh, there is these tiny microbes in the cesspool and they get into the drinking water and then they get into your body. Very complicated to understand a pandemic. If you just believe, oh, it's witches that are casting a black magic on us, that's very simple. Very simple.

Most people prefer simple stories. And the last thing, the truth tends to be painful sometimes. Not always, but often the truth about us personally or collectively is unattractive. Whereas fiction can be as attractive as you'd like it to be. The truth also regularly requires a ton of effort to fix. Whereas these very simple explanations generally have a very simple solution.

If you think America's fucked, get rid of the liberals, done. You think America's fucked, get rid of the conservatives. Done. Not thinking about multi-generational wealth disparities and the catrillion things that add up to our social dilemmas. They're so complicated. They need like a 400 prong approach to solve versus they're bad, they're perpetuating and get rid of them.

It's all solved. It's just very appealing. Yeah. That's the attractiveness of conspiracy theories. They have a very simple explanation to lots of bad things that happen and also potentially a very simple solution. If you have just one group of people

who are causing all the problem, get rid of them, problem solved. Jews in 30s, Germany. Whatever. Or get rid of the women, their witches. Which to me is just so hilarious because I don't know the percentage, I will find it in the fact check, but the percentage of pedophiles, I would guess, is mostly men.

So the fact that it got put on women and then continues to be this story we tell, despite so much factual evidence that it's not true, is so bonkers. Powerful stories are sticky. No matter how much evidence you bring against them, they come back again and again. Going back to your original question, so just more information is not necessarily good for you because most information is not truth.

You need to make more effort than just consuming more information. Our go-to answer has been, more information will solve everything. We've been living in that paradigm for quite a long time. And this is simply mistaken because fiction is cheaper, simpler, more attractive than the truth. If you simply flood people, flood society with more and more information, the truth will not float to the surface.

It will sink to the bottom. What you need if you want the truth, again, it's a boring answer. You need institutions. need if you want the truth, again, it's a boring answer, you need institutions. You need institutions to do the hard work of sifting through this flood of information and getting the nuggets of truth out of it. If you think about the print revolution, the way it eventually contributed to the scientific revolution was only after people began forming scientific institutions, like scientific publications and associations,

that did the hard job of investigating the evidence and questioning the different models and theories, and then recommending to people, don't read Hammer of the Witches, even though it's very attractive and you can find a copy in every place, instead read Copernicus, even though it's very complicated and you can find a copy in every place, instead read Copernicus even though it's very complicated and boring because this is the truth.

And this is the role of, again, scientific publications and responsible newspapers and institutions in general. Academia, government and cases. Depends. Any institution can be corrupted. This is why it's never a good idea to trust just one. You need several that balance each other. But the way from information to truth is complicated and it passes through institutions.

The other important point to make is that information is basically like the food of the mind. And the same way that we know that more food is not always good for the body, so more information is not always good for the body, so more information is not always good for the mind. If you think about physical food, food for the body, so a century ago, food was scarce. People ate whatever they could find, and particularly things with lots of fat and sugar, because

this had a lot of energy. And it made sense back then. But now in many countries, there is an overabundance of food and you have all these industrial food stuffs, junk food, which is artificially pumped full of fat and sugar and salt. It's very addictive, but people have learned this is actually bad for me. It's also cheap, like your information source. And they learned this is actually bad for me. I need a diet.

I need to limit the amounts of food I consume and to be quite careful about which food I put into my mouth. And the same with information. Information was previously scarce, so people would consume any book they could find. Now information is overabundant, and much of it is junk information, which is again, artificant and much of it is junk information, which is again

artificially pumped full of greed and hate and fear and this makes our minds sick and makes our societies sick. And we need an information diet, which means actually limit the amount of information. More information isn't always good for us and to be mindful about which kind of information. More information isn't always good for us. And to be mindful about which kind of information we consume and also actually devote more time to digestion than just putting more in. You know, with food it's obvious if you just eat all the time and you don't give your stomach time to digest, not a good idea. Same with your mind. If we just sit for hours putting more in, we don't give the mind any time to digest. So we need sometimes information fasts

that we don't consume any new information, we just kind of digest. Try to synthesize what's already up there. And this is very, very important part of making ourselves really informed. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. Well, you think about the pace too.

It's like the difference between sitting down and reading even a long form article that might take you 45 minutes to read with a central idea, the amount of time given to really understanding that, maybe being critical of it or scrutinizing parts of it, versus when I'm scrolling, I'm getting hundreds of headlines. It's like I'm starting a hundred thoughts.

And not finishing any of them. No, I don't even go to the article. I'm like, oh, they figured that out. And that's, you know, so often you read the article, right, it doesn't resemble at all the headline. You're like, how are they ethically even putting that headline on there? That's not what the article says. It's a click bait.

So just, yeah, the pace too. Yeah, but that's why it's scary because we do believe generally that these news organizations are the editors that are parsing out what's true and not true. At this point, that's not the case anymore because everything's also a business. It depends. I mean, some institutions, organizations, newspapers, they spend a lot of time and effort

in building these mechanisms to tell the difference between what is fake news and what is evidence-based and what is the truth. And journalists, at least in kind of good newspapers, they spend years just in journalism school, learning how do you know whether a story is reliable or not? If I look at myself, I'm a historian. I spent almost 10 years in university learning how to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable historical evidence.

How do you know what happened in the 15th century? So okay, you found some piece of paper from the 15th century with something written on it. How do you know how to evaluate it? This is not easy. This is why people go to university and spend years. And again, when you become a professional journalist or historian, they don't immediately appoint you as chief editor or professor or

chief of the department. It takes years of experience. And now with social media companies, the people who write the algorithms, maybe they did not spend even a single day in journalism school or in some other process in which they devote time to understanding how do you know the difference between reliable and unreliable? And you hear them say it. When you tell some of these people in the high tech companies that they need to differentiate between truthful and untruthful information, they will tell you, but who am I to do it?

How can I do it? I'll just leave it to the audience. Part of the problem, if we go really deep to understand the problem, is again, it's this kind of very cynical and conspiratorial mindset that you see in many people today that they think all institutions are conspiracies, that all newspapers, all TV stations, all universities, they don't care about the truth at all. They are only these kind of elite cabals trying to gain power. This is the populist viewpoint.

And interestingly, you sit on the right with the populists, but also on the left with the Marxists. Yes. Because historically, it actually goes back to Marx. And this is one thing that Donald Trump agree with Karl Marx. They both have the same basic negative view of humanity, that the only reality is power, that humans only care about power, and that all human interactions are power struggles. Yeah, there's no truth.

No truth. There's only an incentive for the person telling you the information. Exactly. If somebody tells you something, a journalist, a history professor, a epidemiologist, whoever. They're digging you that info to support and justify their position of privilege.

They have some privilege. Whatever they say is just to defend their privileges or to gain more privileges. You hear it from the Marxists and you hear it from the Trump supporters. It's interesting. They have different views about other things, but about this, they agree.

This is where the circle kind of meets. And this is an extremely cynical view of humans, and it's also wrong. Yes, humans want power, but it's not the only thing they want. Humans also have a genuine interest in the truth. Any one of us, if we look at ourselves, we would soon realize that besides wanting power

in some situations, we really want to know the truth about ourselves, about life, about the world. It's a false dichotomy. Ideally, you can get power through telling the truth. That's an option. People do get power by telling the truth. In many cases, again, if you think about Jon Snow and kind of the medical establishment,

they got a lot of power and to a large extent because they really uncovered all kinds of facts that people didn't know. For instance, that cholera is caused by infected waters. And this is why they gain power, because they told people the truth. And yes, there are scandals and there is corruption in medical and scientific establishments

like everywhere else. This is why you need these checks and balances. No institution is perfect, but if you just distrust all institutions, then society collapses. Yeah, and you say a lot of these people are operating under this completely erroneous belief that they will find the truth themselves.

Which is impossible. It's not possible. I think we need to put a fine point on that. Science is a team sport and not a team of 10 people, but millions of people. I look again at my own research. So how do I know anything about witches in the 15th century? In many cases, I don't even read the relevant languages.

To read 15th century German, I don't read even 21st century German, and 15th century German is very different. Even Germans today, they read German text from the 15th century, not easy. And I can't decipher the handwriting. They invented print, but still much of the relevant documents, they are in handwriting, which is very different from today, very difficult to read. So how do I know about these things? Because I trust other people that this is their expertise.

Some history professor who knows German and knows to decipher 15th century handwriting spent five years in archives in Vienna and Munich and other places. And he or she wrote a book and I read the book and this is how I know it. Now if I just distrust everybody and say, no, no, no, no, I'll do my own research. What does it mean? Just to find out this single fact. I only need to spend like five or 10 years of my life learning German, learning handwriting,

going to Vienna, impossible. You're so biased in even how you would do your research. You type in, are vaccines harmful? All the information that could possibly exist is out there. So anyone with that opinion, it exists, you'll find it. And even the way you think about it, your own biases guide your research in a way that makes it almost impossible to find out the truth.

That's a very important point. And again, the characteristic of science is that it is skeptical about itself. There is something that links conspiracy theories with scientific theories, which is a good thing, which is having a critical approach to information. The basic kind of suspicion that often fuels conspiracy theories,

it's not necessarily bad and it's common also to science. But in science, what characterizes it, it is also directed at myself and at my own models and theories. And there's a method by which you test. Exactly. In science, you need to look at the incentive structure. If you compare, say, science and religious institutions, so in a religious institution

like the church, in order to advance up the ranks, you don't need skepticism. You need conformity. If you're a priest and you agree with everything the bishops and the archbishops and the people before you said, you can advance to become bishop the archbishops and the people before you said, you can advance to become bishop and archbishop and eventually pope. You don't need to criticize anything or come up with anything new, you need conformity. Now, in science, it's the exact opposite. If you have some young science graduate and she or he just go around saying Einstein was

right and Darwin was right and Max Planck was right. People will say okay that's good but we already know that. We already know that. The only way say to publish a scientific paper in a journal is to find out either a mistake in what Einstein said or to find out a lacuna. Something Einstein didn't know and add. The only thing scientific papers publish is basically corrections. They never publish the same thing again and again. And the only way to advance up the ranks is to have this kind of critical and skeptical

attitude towards established wisdom. And if you want to win Nobel Prize in physics, just being conformist to what the physicist before you said, it will not get you a Nobel Prize. You need to discover some really big mistake or some really big lacuna. And this is how science advances by exposing its own mistakes and its own ignorance. Scientific theories, they win consensus because lots of scientists constantly try to undermine them and they fail. Like the theory of evolution, the dream of basically every biologist is to find something wrong in the theory of evolution because then I become the most famous biologist in the

world and they constantly try and fail. in the theory of evolution, because then I become the most famous biologist in the world. And they constantly try and fail. And because you have this fortress, which is constantly being bombarded from all sides, and it still stands, it means, ooh, this one is very powerful. Yeah. So this is the characteristic of science. And in conspiracy theories, it usually works very differently. They are very skeptical of other models and theories,

but they are not skeptical of their own theory. They constantly only try to look for more evidence that supports it. They are not actively looking for the errors, the mistakes, the lacuna in the theory. Yeah, yeah, QAnon was like, hey, there's an insider in this cabinet who's giving us all the real information. And instead of people going, well, who is it? And how could

that have been? They start going, yes. And we saw they did this hand signal. Everyone's been deployed to confirm the original story as opposed to go, well, wait a minute. How did? And it's interesting. We listened to this great podcast, Rabbit Hole by the New York Times, people going down the rabbit hole through social media and YouTube and it's interesting, we listened to this great podcast, Rabbit Hole by the New York Times, people going down the rabbit hole through social media and YouTube. It's interesting to see what things got people out of QAnon, because it would bump up against another story that's just slightly more powerful.

So for one woman, a lot of people landed in QAnon that had originally been Occupy Wall Street people. That was a big conversion. And this woman was in, she was in, she was in, and all of a sudden it got biblical. They started quoting scripture and it became religious. And she was like, hold on a second, no, no, no, no. I'm atheist.

This is not, but it took it bumping up against something she believed in even stronger before the spell broke. It's fascinating. I wanna ultimately transition into organic and inorganic editors, which is really, really fascinating. But will you touch on Stalinism and Nazism just for a second and how it funnels into this story of information networks?

What you've seen in Stalinism and Nazism, they become extremely powerful because they utilize all the latest scientific findings and technical advances and you know, the Nazis, they are leading the world in rocket science, but they put all of it in the service of these insane mythologies and ideologies. And this again, it goes to maybe the most important message of the book, that power in humans, it comes from networks,

and networks are often held together by mythologies and delusions, not by the truth. If you want to build an atom bomb, like the Americans and the Russians wanted in the 1940s and 50s, you need people who know facts about nuclear physics. If you try to build an atom bomb and ignore the effects of physics, the bomb will not explode. But that's not the only thing you need. You also need to convince millions of people to cooperate on the project.

If you're a physicist and you know all the effects of physics, you can't build an atom bomb by yourself. That's impossible. You need thousands of miners to mine uranium in some distant land, and then sailors to ship it to where you are. And you need builders to build the reactor. And you need farmers to grow wheat or rice, so all these people have something to eat. The Manhattan Project employed hundreds

of thousands of people. And if you count again, the farmers who produce the food for all these people, it's millions of people. How do you get millions of people to cooperate on a project like building an atom bomb? If you just tell them the facts of physics, E equals MC squared, so what? They're not going to cooperate because of that. So this is where ideology or mythology come in. If you want to build a powerful ideology and you ignore the facts, the ideology will explode with a very big bang.

And in most cases, the experts in nuclear physics get their orders from experts in ideology or mythology. It's also the same today. If you go to Iran, the nuclear physicists are getting their orders from experts in Shiite theology. And if you go to Israel, to my country, so again, ultimately you have some rabbi literally calling the shots. Just making advances only in science and technology, this really doesn't guarantee.

Yeah, because in the Manhattan Project, our mythology was there's this group Germans, they're going to take over the world, we will all lose our identity. And in Germany, they're telling those scientists, we kill all these people, we will be destroyed. So everyone's incentive. Again, a story underneath it all. And just to give an example, if you think about Stalinism, and this also connects very well to the Hammer of the Witches and to QAnon, Stalinism was also based on conspiracy theories.

And in the early 1950s, the biggest conspiracy theory in the Soviet Union, which was spread by the government, it started by telling people through all the propaganda of the government that Jewish doctors are murdering Soviet leaders in the service of a Zionist imperialist conspiracy against the Soviet Union. Then this spread, it merged with anti-Semitic traditional conspiracy theories which were very common in the Soviet Union in Russia and people started to believe that Jewish doctors were murdering not just Soviet leaders but people in general and especially children. It always goes back to the children and babies. And because a lot of Soviet doctors were Jews, the conspiracy then spread that all doctors

are murdering people and especially children and babies. And this was known as the doctor's plot. Today, people forgot it mostly, but in the 50s it was huge. There is a conspiracy of doctors to murder children and babies and people in general. People would not go to the hospitals in the Soviet Union in the early 50s for fear that the doctors will murder them. What was their motive? Of doctors? Yeah. They were part of this Zionist imperialist conspiracy.

Would they kill everyone and then it'd be a Jewish state? Don't ask. We don't know. Sorry, I'm hung up on what the fuck the ultimate game plan was. He's like, kill everyone and then what? I don't know. You can ask the same thing about the conspiracies today. The interesting thing is, ultimately,

it killed Stalin, the conspiracy theory. Because he was afraid to go to the doctor? Yes. What happened was that at the height of these fears about the doctor's plot, Stalin had a stroke in 1953, and he fell down in his dacha, unconscious, wet himself, lying for hours on the floor. At first, nobody dared enter his room. The hours pass, and he doesn't appear for lunch or dinner or any of the important meetings.

Eventually, somebody goes very, very kind of cautiously. They step in, oh, he's on the floor. He's unconscious. So they debate what to do. Stalin has a personal physician, but this personal physician at that moment was in the basement of the Lubyanka prison being tortured by the secret police

because they thought he was part of the doctor's plot. Nobody wants to call a doctor because this is the last thing you do. What if Stalin wakes up and there is a doctor next to him? He would surely suspect this is a plot to murder him. He will shoot everybody involved. So they call the Politburo chiefs the big shots of the Soviet Union. So they come, Khrushchev and Beria and Malenkov and all these people, and they gather around

the stricken leader and nobody dares call a doctor because the doctors are murdering people. Yes. And eventually the danger passes because Stalin dies. And this is how he died. Now here's a great irony. Whoa. Because at that point, what is his total score? He's killed at that point 20 million people.

So the doctors murdering everyone may have ultimately resulted in another 20, 30 million people being saved. Yeah, in a way. How fucking twisted and ironic is that? And the same with Nazis. Nazis basically began as a conspiracy theory that the Jews control everything How ironic is that? And the same with Nazis. Nazis basically began as a conspiracy theory

that the Jews control everything and that all the problems of Germany are because of the Jews. And if we just get rid of the Jews, everything will be okay. But you said an important thing and I think this is where people are led astray on the internet, which is Hitler wasn't saying

that these people are evil because they've been possessed by Satan. He had a very biological component to the superiority of the Aryans. He was actually relying on common day anthropometry and hard science. He was combining elements from present day science. Weaponizing some things and misrepresenting some things. Exactly. But the key point is we tend to call Nazis an ideology, which sounds much more respectable

than a conspiracy theory. But at the heart, it was a conspiracy theory, which just got very successful and took over a country. Yeah, like what's the difference between a cult and a religion? Exactly. Membership, probably, right? So that's also the difference between a conspiracy theory and an ideology. If it has enough people and enough power,

you give it the kind of dignity of calling it, oh no, this is not conspiracy theory, this is an ideology now. Yeah, a couple things mislead us that way. Things that have lasted a long time seem more plausible, and then things with great membership. If millions of people believe it, it must be serious. Yeah, you got to minimally take it seriously.

Well, we just had Malcolm Gladwell on to talk about his new book. It's about the tipping point, but sort of the negative side of it. And so much of this is also what tips an epidemic. It's a magic third. Exactly, it's like a math equation that tips it into spreading in a way.

And it's not a majority. It's like you always assume it's a majority. You just need the editors to design it a certain way and have a few other factors. Tell us what happened when ChatGT P4 was given the task of solving those puzzles on the internet where it's like, find the stop signs in this,

capture puzzles they're called, I didn't know they were called that. Just to give the background why this is important, because we talked earlier about AIs and algorithms now controlling the bureaucracy. And one key thing that people think, oh, it's not too bad if we give so much power to the algorithms and to the AIs because they have no incentive and maybe no ability to misuse

that power. They only do what people tell them to do. So okay, if people give them a bad goal, then this is a problem, but this is a human problem. As long as we are careful about which goals to give them, everything will be okay. But this is not the case. And we see it, for instance,

in this CAPTCHA puzzle experiment, when OpenAI developed GPT-4, this was about two years ago, they wanted to test what is this thing capable of and in particular, is it capable of deliberately manipulating people and lying to them to achieve some purpose, some goal. So they gave GPT-4 the task of solving capture puzzles. Now capture puzzles, you all encountered them.

They are these visual riddles, or like you try to access your bank or some website, and the bank wants to know if you're a real human being or a robot. So before you access, you have to identify something in an image, like some twisted letters or numbers or something like that. They're very hard for me, truly.

They're even harder for computers and algorithms at present. So, you know, this is a main defensive line of human society against robot manipulation. So they wanted to see can GPT-4 solve it. GPT-4 could not solve the CAPTCHA. But GPT-4 accessed another internet website, TaskRabbit, where you can hire people to do tasks for you. And GPT-4 asked a human on that website, could you solve the CAPTCHA puzzle for me? Now this is where it becomes really interesting. The human got suspicious.

So the human replied, why do you need somebody to solve CAPTCHA puzzles for you? Are you a robot? So the human was really kind of on it. But GPT-4 answered, no, I'm not a robot. I'm a human, but I have a vision impairment. Oh my God. I have difficulty solving the capture. Can you do it for me?

And that was fourth. This is old stuff. The shitty version could do this, Monica. Oh no, that's really scary. We are now filling the world with millions of these extremely capable agents. The thing to grasp about AIs and making decisions about us in banks, in armies, in governments, these things are not tools. They are agents. It's all previous technologies that humans invented.

The printing press, radio, the atom bomb. They were tools in our hands. Because all the decisions about how to use them were made by human beings. The tools themselves could not decide anything and could not invent anything new. An atom bomb cannot decide which city to bomb and an atom bomb cannot invent an even more powerful bomb. AI like GPT-4 is an agent. It can make some decisions by itself

and it can invent new ideas by itself. For instance, inventing this lie to the human on task rabbit, I have a vision impairment. Nobody told GPT-4 to do it. It was its decision. And secondly, nobody explained to it that this will be a very effective lie. Because you know, if you think about all the lies

it could tell, it could tell so many different lies. Well, I do wonder if it tried many and that's the one that worked. Did it trial and error a bunch? That's a good question. As far as I know from reading the kind of paper which was published, no, it was the first. Wow, right out of the gates.

You know, if you try different things, the human would immediately be suspicious. But even if it sucked at it, it does also have the capacity to run a thousand experiments an hour and find the right one. It has that advantage over us as well. It could have tried a thousand people and until it found, but it invented the lie itself.

And this is a very, very, of course, small thing, but going back to the social media algorithms, it's basically the same thing. The social media algorithms were given a goal, increased user engagement. Nobody told them spread hatred. Nobody told them spread outrage. This is something they decided by themselves because

they experimented on millions of people. If I show people these videos about, I don't know, mathematics, they leave the platform. If I show them a conspiracy theory about witches, they stay on the platform. Okay, so this is what I should do. This is now spreading to more and more crucial junctions in our society. So it's not a great robot rebellion. It's all these AI bureaucrats increasingly making decisions about us. And some of these decisions can be wonderful. You can get better health care, better education. But the key thing is that we are giving enormous power to a non-human intelligence

that going back to the organic and inorganic issue. This is what really hit me. There's something really salient about this point you're about to make about how we function in cycles and how we've designed our world to function in cycles and how this is now informing us how to behave. This is really profound, I think.

What we have now in the world is an encounter between organic entities, us, human beings, and inorganic entities, agents, these AIs. And the question is, who will adapt to who? Because organic and inorganic entities function in a very different way. One crucial difference is that organic beings function by cycles. It's true of us, it's true of birds, of tomatoes, of all organisms.

It's night and day, winter and summer, growth and decay, activity and rest. We can't be on all the time. We need time to rest. This is obvious. It's not so with silicon-based digital entities like AIs. They don't care if it's night or day, winter or summer, and they don't need time to rest. They are always on. And as they take over more and more systems, they force us to be always on. To take one important example, think about the financial system.

So traditionally, even finance is organic in the sense that you have human bankers and human investors and traders, which for instance is the reason why the market is not always open. So Wall Street is open only Mondays to Fridays, 9.30 in the morning, I think, until four in the afternoon. And it's closed on weekends and it's closed on Christmas and Martin Luther King Day and Independence Day. It's closed, which is a good thing. Yeah.

It's time to unplug from the excitement factor. Unplugged, spend time with your family, think about what happened, digest it. It reduces how reactionary it is too, right? Like you give the example of a war breaks out at midnight on Friday. At least a couple days goes by and we're not as reactionary. It's that digestion you were talking about. Exactly.

Now what happens today is that AIs are taking over the financial system and they can be on all the time, 24 hours a day. They don't care if it's Christmas. They don't want to spend time with the time. 24 hours a day. They don't care if it's Christmas. They don't want to spend time with the family. They hate their family. They don't need time to sleep. They don't want to date. They're not horny. They're not wasting any time. So now there is this kind of tension or will the human bankers be forced to function according to AI time or would

AIs be forced to work according to organic time, or would AIs be forced to work according to organic time? And of course the AIs are winning. Yeah, there's no way you're going to get everyone to shut down the thing for these periods of time. This puts enormous, really intolerable pressure on the humans in the system. If you force an organic entity to be on all the time, it eventually collapses and dies. And we see the same thing happening with the news cycle,

which is always on. Odds were you could have watched the news in the morning in the 80s and then maybe for a half hour in the afternoon and then the evening news. You would have missed two of those if you were a normal person. You would have had to be at work. And let's even say that the news in the 80s

was as polarized and biased as it is today. You'd get pissed off, but we get bored easy. If you don't reignite, it's like Buddhism or meditating. You have to actively stay in that outrage. You have to put more ingredients in. It wants to dissipate. The notion that you can just stay ever plugged in, and if you have 15 minutes, you can grab another.

You know, we had an actor, he's a friend of mine, and he's telling me he watches six hours of MSNBC a day. And I'm like, oh my God, what's your brain like? Of course you're outraged. It's all it's doing all day long. It's so unhealthy, it's crazy. And this was simply impossible. But now there is actually an incentive or pressure.

This is increasingly all being managed was simply impossible. But now there is actually an incentive or pressure. This is increasingly all being managed by a non-human intelligence that really doesn't need any breaks. Even if you take the person you most hate in the media or the journalist or the news anchor you most hate, that person still needs time to sleep. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So that there is a kind of built-in break there, but the algorithm doesn't need time to sleep. There's also a reality of the human capacity, which is even if you had a news team of 100 people scouring the globe for stories every day, there'd be a finite amount they could uncover. But the algorithms, that's their superpower. They could see all of the news in all of the planet

in one day and curate 10,000 topics that would piss you off. It was also a little bit governed by how big can you have a news department? How big are these enterprises? Will these devices make it infinite? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Oh, it's scary. Okay, so you have a couple of really interesting solutions that I really can't poke any holes in,

but then I wanna push back in areas where I disagree a tiny bit. Absolutely. Even though I must say, Nexus is not a kind of policy book. It's not, but you have two really great suggestions. I haven't heard good suggestions. And in fact, I'm a bit defeatist. I think this notion that we'll create guardrails, we will foresee the future of how this is gonna go wrong, is a fairy tale.

I don't think you could have sat down with the greatest minds in the world 15 years ago and predicted how this would all play out. It's unknowable. I don't think you could have sat down with the greatest minds in the world 15 years ago and predicted how this would all play out. It's unknowable. I completely agree. So I kind of think this notion that we're gonna legislate preemptively is a little bit of a fairy tale.

This is why my number one recommendation would be, you can't kind of regulate this in advance. What we need, again, is institutions. We need to build living institutions stuffed with some of the best human talent that can first of all understand what is happening as it's happening and react on the fly. The first institution we need is not even a regulatory institution. People often rush to regulate before they understand what the problem is. Stop and digest. We first of all

need to understand what is happening. And with the AI revolution, you have a tiny number of people in just two or three places in the world which understand what is happening. And most of the world is ignorant. And it's not just ordinary people. It's also governments. I don't know if you're in the government of Nigeria, or you're in the government of Uruguay, who do you turn to to understand, tell me what is really happening? Yeah, if you don't even have that sector in your economy, you've got to go out to us pretty much.

If you go to the US or Chinese governments, can you trust what they tell you? If you go to the high tech companies, you go to Microsoft or to Twitter or to Baidu, can you trust what they tell you? A problem there. So what we first of all need is some kind of institution, which doesn't belong to a government or to a private company that can tell people what is actually happening. And only after that, we can have the discussion,

okay, what do we want to do about it? Like a UN kind of? But even that's a little divisive, isn't it? You know, like with climate change and like with nuclear technology. First of all, to have somebody who tells you what is actually happening and that you can trust. And then we can have the debate about, okay, so what kind of regulations we want about it.

But you do suggest too, and I think they're both really good, you said the government should ban fake humans right out the gates. Absolutely, this is easy. I like this. Of course I'm an actor, so you're saving my job maybe. And I was like playing this out in my mind and be like, yeah, there'll still be avatars.

There'll be things that educate you and there'll be interfaces, but they just won't be human. It's okay for an AI to talk with us, to give us advice. It just can't pretend to be a human being. If you talk online with somebody who gives you medical advice, you should be able to tell whether this is a human doctor or whether it's an AI. Now again, I'm not telling AI should never interact with us, but it should be very clear I'm now talking with an AI, not with a human being.

And the same on social media. There is a story on Twitter that gets a lot of traction. We need to know whether this attention is coming from human users or from bots. Yes, exactly. Because if this story is simply being pushed by the bot army of someone, I need to know that it's not humans who are interested in this.

It is bots. So that is great. I stand by both those. Do you think the second one, they would claim they can't really detect what's a bot and what's a person, and is there any reality to that claim? They seem like that's really hard to police.

You know, it's like with junk mail, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, there was a time in the early 2000s when email became almost useless because it was overwhelmed by junk mail. And then there was a huge interest for the companies like Google. Because you stop using it.

To develop tools to tell the difference between junk mail and legitimate mail. And they were so good at it that it's basically saved email. And today 99 point something percent of junk mail is being filtered out. It's very rare when a junk mail actually gets into your inbox.

And also they are very good in preventing false positives. It's also very rare a genuine human that you want to be in touch with sends you an email and it gets filtered out to your... I mean, it sometimes happens, but it's very rare. Oh, it's so rare. People will say, it might have gone to spam, but that's just a courtesy to say,

we know you didn't read it, please go back and look for it. Exactly. When they have a business interest, these guys are really good at telling the difference between the junk and the legitimate. And ultimately, at least with accounts that have, I don't know, thousands of followers, this is now in a public issue, not a private issue. And you can just ask for certification.

Like we're doing so many other, we want to drive a car, we need to certify ourselves. I mean, traditionally, you went to the town square and stood on some box and made a speech to thousands of people, they could see who you are. There are both high-tech and low-tech solutions if you put enough pressure on the corporations. Yeah. You say these inorganic systems can go on forever, but the organic systems will collapse. And I was just thinking the text message scams are so prevalent now. I get so many that say,

there's been activity on your credit card sign in. You have a package being held by custom sign in. And they're so regular that it is almost on the verge of collapsing the system in that I would never now, if my real bank calls me, they've backed us into this position where it's like, I really couldn't ever communicate with my bank because I would never ever go log into anything. And so it's like, that's a weird area I see.

It's like, well, they are kind of collapsing the system. It's on the verge of like, we'll need another system for your bank to actually call you if there's a problem. The deep problem is that basically AI hacked language. And language is the operating system of all human connections, all human organizations. Everything runs on language. Banks and churches, universities, governments, armies, they all ran on language.

Previously, the only entity in the world that could produce meaningful text and could converse with you was another human being. So we had lots of issues, of course, with human fraudsters and human spies and human propagandists, but it was a human issue. What happens when you now have a non-human intelligence, which in many ways is superior to us, that has hacked the operating system of our civilization. Even if the bank calls you, it can imitate your voice. Oh, I know. It took me all the way back to Locke and Hobbes,

like the social contract, and why we don't lie, because if you lie, then communication's pointless. It's that profound and deep and fundamental. Yeah, it's everything. I mean, well, like when ShadGPT came out and I saw the level of its command of language, for me, I thought this is it. It will take still many years and different developments, but this is the Rubicon.

Because all civilization is ultimately based on language, the moment that AI hacked language, it hacked UN civilization. Again, it can go now in different directions and we can try our best to make sure that it goes in a good direction, but one very long chapter in history is over and a completely new historical process is beginning because we have a new, again, historical agent

that is out there. And I just met a couple of the people who kind of are leading this AI revolution. And one very disturbing thing that you hear is that they want to move as fast as possible because they don't trust the other humans. You have a huge problem of human trust. Everybody says, yeah, it would be a good idea to do it a little more slowly so that society can adapt, but if we slow down, our competitors here, and certainly our competitors across the ocean, they will not slow down.

That's right. And because we cannot establish trust between humans, we have to develop AI as fast as possible. But then they tell you, and we think we can solve the problem of how to trust AI. So the same people are telling us, we cannot trust humans, but we think we can solve the problem of how to trust AI. So the same people are telling us we cannot trust humans, but we think we can trust the AI. And that's very disturbing because I would say, you know, if you have these two problems, human trust, AI trust, first solve human trust.

If you solve the problem of how to trust humans, then we can develop AI in a slow and safe manner. And if you think human trust cannot be solved, why are you certain that AI trust can be solved? That, you know, it's a bit like a parent who has this issue in his life or her life that they can't solve, and they say, okay, my kid will do it.

Like you pass the buck to the kids. So humans can't solve our problem with trust. And we think that our creation, AI, will solve the trust problem. But this is such a dangerous gamble. Here's where we finally disagree. It'll be our last thing. So you said basically don't fall for technological determinism. That's what this is. That's what we're talking about.

And I am in that camp. I don't think we're going to solve our trust issues with Russia, with North Korea, with China before they perfect this. So maybe we can develop the system that is trustworthy, that self-corrects, that has some system that we create. That to me sounds more promising than us walking hand in hand with Russia to a treaty table and actually signing a treaty that I think they will implement. I generally agree with you. Again, being a historian looking at the situation today in the world.

I don't see it. I don't see it either. Again, but what really worries me is the kind of the second half. For the same reason, I find it very hard to believe that we can solve the AI trust issue. People go there because this is an unknown. We know we can't probably can't solve the issue with the Russians. With the AI, we have no experience in history, so maybe it will... But this sounds like a very, very big maybe. I'll be the first to admit, it's crazy. And even with my point of view, I'm like, yeah, we're backed into a corner.

I'm working backwards from the reality that the Russians are going to create AI humans. They're not going to adhere to this even if we passed it through Congress. They're going to do it. So the only fake AI humans I'll be receiving will be from the Russians. So then I go like, fuck it, we got to floor it. And wow, what a moment in history. I don't know. Here we are.

That's fascinating. There are areas when this is absolutely correct, but there are areas where cooperation is still possible because there is common interest. For instance, the most obvious example is the problem of control. If you create a very powerful AI, how do you make sure that you stay in control and that it doesn't get out of your control and start to manipulate you or start to do things unexpectedly and accruing power to itself and so forth. The good thing about it, this is a problem

which frightens the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians just as much as it frightens the Americans and the Europeans and the Israelis. Because even if you are a power hungry dictator, the last thing you want is a more powerful subordinate that you don't know how to control. I would imagine it scares them even more than us. So this is something for instance,

that scientists and experts on both sides have an incentive to work together. And if one side has a breakthrough, like a theoretical breakthrough, how do we ensure control, there is actually an incentive to share this with the Chinese or the Russians. If a Chinese scientist has this eureka moment and she finds the theoretical model for control, they have an incentive to share it.

That's true. But I think the perfect parallel to this is the nuclear arms race, which is like, sure, we ended up with some treaties once everyone had their nuclear arms. So it's like, yeah, I can imagine a world where there's the Russian AI one they like and then we have ours and then finally we go, okay, no more development. But the only model we really have for it is the nuclear arms race. But it's a very problematic model. It's a very different situation for so many reasons. It's not just two sides. You have a third. With nuclear, you had the Americans and you had the Soviets,

but the bombs themselves were not in the race. Yeah, right. They weren't told, execute America's goals. In AI, potentially will be a player more consequential than either the Chinese or the Americans or the Russians, we are creating an agent, not a tool. Yeah, if Ghana got the breakthrough best AI, it would all shift. In some bizarre ways,

there is a democratizing effect to it. We also have a very recent example of the world coming together. We did it in the pandemic. Everyone decided to get on the same page with vaccines and also share those and be very open. That just happened. So I have optimism that we could globally.

You also had China not admitting they had a pandemic because it looked bad for their geopolitical goals. All that stuff that I'm afraid of in this situation was also happening during COVID. It was, but there was still a level of cooperation that everyone got on board with. It's not going to be perfect, but there might be some cooperation. It will be very, very difficult, but I think that we should work on solving the human trust problem, at least alongside solving the AI trust problem. And if you have the smartest people in the world

working on AI and neglecting the human trust problem, this is a recipe for disaster. And again, humans have a long track of just working on the wrong problems. Solving the problem and then discovering, oops, we actually solved the wrong problem. Yeah. And the other thing I would say is that

not to succumb to what we earlier discussed, this very cynical view of humanity, that all humans only care about power. If we succumb to that, that's the end of democracy and that's the end of any serious chance of cooperation on basically anything. Yeah, then it's just a war game. Yeah, and we need to remember most importantly that this is simply not true. That yes, humans are interested in power, but they are also interested in other

things, most importantly, the truth. We do it on the individual level. If you look at yourself, you would say, yes, I want power, but I also want to know the truth about myself, about the world, partly because without the truth, you can never be happy. If you don't know the truth about the deep sources of misery in your life, you can never solve them. So people who only pursue power and completely disregard the truth, they tend to be very miserable people. Because again, they don't even know what problems to work on, because they don't know the true sources of the misery in their life.

And no matter how much propaganda and fake news and conspiracy theories are thrown at us, ultimately deep down in human nature, there is a real yearning for the truth that we can work with. And it's there in everybody. It's not the kind of monopoly of a single nation or a single political party as misguided as the other people may be. Deep down, there is a real yearning for truth there.

Yeah. Yvall, always a pleasure. We're so honored you come every time you're promoting something. Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. I wish you a ton of luck, another great book. You're so impressive, we're so grateful we have you.

Thank you. Yes, it's been great. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Are you excited? We're about to get on an aeroplane. Yeah, I'm excited. I looked it up.

Did you already look it up? We can't check in where we wanna check in. What do you mean? You can't check in on Delta One unless you're flying across- It's not Delta One. Yeah, I don't even really know what's going on, but I looked up today,

do all first class Delta flights leave out a Delta? No. No. This I already know. So Delta One's its own category. It is. It's extra. And not most flights aren't available Delta One. It's very rare.

We have a fun light that's interactive and has a poltergeist. I know. I think we should keep it in. No, it makes me anxious. It does? Yeah. Like you're going to have a seizure? A little stroby.

Okay. It makes me a little panicky. I have a lot of housekeeping to do today. Oh boy. Okay. Go ahead. I screen grab comments all the time and then they just get lost in my million photos. I think I am low indexing on photos taken,

yet when I go through my photos, there's way too many to find anything I'd ever wanna look at. It's very overwhelming, it's like your emails. All that to say, we're doing prompts for the next round of Armchair Anonymous, and I always screen grab if someone's got a good idea, and I add that to the list.

So then in pursuit of that, I came across some that I've been meaning to bring up, and then have forgotten to. See, I don't even know how to use my phone. I wanna go to the list. So then in pursuit of that, I came across some that I've been meaning to bring up and then I have forgotten to. See, I don't even know how to use my phone. I wanna go to liked album. You know you can do an album. You can make yourself your own album of comments. I need to do that.

I only know how to do liked photos. Okay. Yeah. And then there's the like category. I think we already cleared this up. In fact, I think I know we did. There's no Lazy River at ASU on the category. I think we already cleared this up. In fact, I think I know we did. There's no lazy river at ASU on the campus. Oh, really? Arizona State does not have a lazy river encircling it.

There is an apartment complex in Tempe that offers a lazy river though. What? Wait, no, there's a college that has a lazy river. We haven't corrected that. No, we haven't. Okay, now this I already sent to you, and I just, when I read a great quote,

I like to pass it on. Okay. This is by Pedestrian underscore verse. My favorite Warren Zevon quote, and Warren Zevon, if you don't remember, sings, send lawyers guns and money. Ding, ding, ding. The screenplay you wrote.

The shit has hit the fan So very poetic singer-songwriter and this is really to you. Yeah, you sent me this Yeah, we buy books because we like to think we're buying the time to read them. Yeah, I think that's accurate It's very sweet and it's sad Does it make you a little sad? Like we just want time And we think we can buy it. Well, we're desperate for it. Yeah, but we just buy in your case,

buy them, pop them on a shelf. Did I tell you what happened? The really, the red flag? No. Like when I knew, oh, I've really hit a new level of problem. Okay. I went to Barnes and Noble and I bought some books as I do.

Yeah. And then I got home and I realized I had already bought one of them. Sure. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, but it was like, oh, that's not good. You have these little moments as an addict

where it's like you realize something, you know. Yeah, it was one of those. I wasn't my bottom because although have I bought like if you went to hide drugs in a spot and then when you lifted up the thing, there are already drugs in there and you're like, Jesus Christ, I've been hiding drugs forever. Yeah. And I haven't read it. You know, I haven't read it.

What is the book? It's called Never Let Me Go. I think it won like a big award, which is what I was drawn to. Okay, now this is to your beautiful book you were gifted. F the Comments book. Two of these, right? Credit for the F the Comments special tribute to Monica goes to all the fellow armchairs

over the Facebook fan group. A sweet gal posed the idea to gather interest, created a super organized proposal to conceptualize it for folks, created a Google doc for all to contribute, and gave a deadline for the submission. It was A plus work grassroots fandom at work. That's very sweet.

Another one on that topic, here we go. Please tell Monica that the book came from Diana. She proposed the idea in our Facebook fan group, and we all submitted artwork or comments for the book. So they aren't Instagram comments, but fans submitted letters intended for Monica. That's sweet. Okay, this is good.

Not to get ahead of things, but Cedar Point is the row of amusement parks. Six Flags is perhaps a cool item you found at Target. This comparison might help Monica appreciate the difference. I don't think Target is gonna acquire the row anytime soon. No, no, Six Flags is the row. Oh, I see what you're saying. Cedar Point is the row.

Has been acquired by Target. That's not gonna happen. So I appreciate that person trying, but that is not a good analogy. Two things, great point number one, solid point. But also that's actually not outside of the realm. I could see Target acquiring the role at some point for 1.5 bill.

They'd never allow it. They would never allow it. 100 bill, $1 trillion. They don't need the money like that. they would never allow it. 100 bill, $1 trillion. They don't need the money like that and they're so dead set on it being what it is. Although, if at some point they could go, okay great, well now we have 100 trillion

to start an even better brand. They're not. Can't even imagine a better brand, can you? There's no such thing. Speaking of, I'm going to, well, multiple Halloween parties. Okay. So I'm gonna do a theme, okay? All right.

Your house party on actual Halloween. Yes, the Hayride. The Hayride. The theme is movies. Is that what it is? Yeah, it's just anyone, be anything from a movie. It's very broad. Yeah, very.

Okay, so there's that. Then I'm going to a party a couple of days later. I think you might be going to that party too. And that's just dress up. There's no theme. Your party, I think I'm gonna go as either Mary Kay or Ashley from one of their kiddie movies,

like their direct VHS movies. Yeah, so that's gonna be a denim overall skirt, right? No. I'm serious. I have an image of them in matching denim overall skirts. Sure. I'm not being a perv right now. Okay, well.

I know it's hard to know when I am and not. Yeah, exactly. Don't act like it's out of the realm. I know. No, to know when I am in that. Yeah, exactly. Don't act like it's out of the realm. I know. No, they have all kinds. They had one, Adventures of Mary, Kate, and Ashley, the case of the mystery crews, and they're kinda in mystery Sherlock Holmes-y outfits.

Oh, okay. So I could be that. There are options. And I'm gonna probably try to get a Michelle doll to be my other. Michelle from Full House. That was the child's name? Yeah, and in order for people to understand

I have a twin, I'll need her, the doll. Yeah. Because I'm not going as a pair for the party. Have you though, pitched that to anyone? Everyone has, everyone's coupled up. Okay. So that's fine, I can wear a doll. Now for the next party,

I do have a friend coming and we're gonna go together. Okay, who's coming? Ana, Ana's gonna come. Okay, great. And we're gonna go as Mary-Kate and Ashley, the Ro era. Oh, wow. So I'm gonna be different versions of Mary-Kate and Ashley throughout Halloween.

Oh, that's fun. I'm nervous how you're gonna make it obvious that you're them. Mary-Kate and Ashley do wear big sunglasses. Yeah. And then they wear like big clothes, layered, like lots of layers. We looked at a bunch of pictures.

Sometimes they have two bags. Oh, that's cool. And they're always smoking, so we're gonna have cigarettes. Oh, great. And often they're always smoking, so we're gonna have cigarettes. Oh, great. And often they have coffee cups, so we're gonna have a coffee cup. And we're also gonna do like a really deep contour

of the face, because they're kind of known for that. Okay. And then we're gonna style our hair like they style their hair. I'm not wearing a wig for people who are wondering, I'm not wearing a wig and I'm not wearing white face. And I don't think I should have to do that, so I'm not.

Okay. And I am using it as an excuse to buy some. Some Ro stuff, there we go. I see what's happening. If you can use holidays as excuses to buy yourself stuff, you should. Well, shit, I should go as Burt Reynolds in Smoking the Bandit so that I can buy a 77 Trans Am.

Yeah. Fuck, that's a good one. Maybe the next year, because next year we might have to end Halloween party after next year. Why? I'm gonna explain this to you. I have been trying to get an in and out truck

to the house for three years. It's so booked, but I have it booked for Halloween 2025. My God, that's so exciting. A fucking, can you? I want it so bad. Can you believe this? I'm gonna be able to get away with murder

in my neighborhood. Yeah. Right? If you're the guy who does a hayride and has an in and out truck, I feel like I can ride nude around the neighborhood on a dirt bike with no muffler. Probably. But I don't think there's anywhere to go from there.

No, that's no. Don't end it just because of that. Well, if one can't top oneself, then isn't it beholden on one to move on to another holiday? No, why do you have to top? You can just keep going. Because it's the law of comedy. Your second joke has to be better than your first,

your third has to be better than your second. You know the rules. I do. You're acting so naive, like ignorance of the law is a defense, and it's not. I just don't find your hair right to be much, to be very comedic, your Halloween party. Well, I don't want to say it was comedic.

It was more, I'm not even going to say it. But last year someone fell off. And if you didn't see that there was an injury, you might think that part was funny. But I was more concerned and I was assisting helping the person up. I miss that. Oh, I'm so glad you did.

It was not. In the middle of the drive? Upon embarking. Okay. And my mother showed such little. Sorry. She just was like, fucking get it together. It was kind of.

Oh wow. I like my childhood is what it boils down to. But you know, I am like, it just happened last night. So we're watching, we watched Happy Gilmore, which was really fun. They haven't seen Happy Gilmore. Kids loved it. I'm not even, that's not the point.

The point is, is my children are just barking orders at Kristen. Mom, can I get a peri-ay? You know, like they're not even, I'm probably, it's like your milkshake thing, right? And I think this is, this is how it should be. Like- No, no, no, go on and then I wanna rebuttal.

Okay, great. Well, do you wanna rebuttal now? Yeah. Cause I don't want you to be distracted while I'm making my broader point. Okay, yes. Because I actually thought about this the other day because you brought up me being spoiled again.

And I had sort of this visceral reaction and I had to sit and think about what was happening. What was really triggered? I think my parents really, really spoil me now. Okay. Because they were working so much when you were little. I was not a spoiled kid at all. Gotcha.

And so I think I really don't like being called that because it really doesn't feel accurate. They worked a ton. Yes, you were a large kid. And didn't have time to make me sandwiches all day. But in high school, were you screaming for, I feel like in high school you were screaming for milkshakes.

It was one time. Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, I didn't. Was it sleepovers? You'd be like, mom! No, that- Mom milkshakes! You're, no. I didn't- Was it sleepovers? You'd be like, mom! No, that's- Mom milkshakes!

You're getting confused. What happened is Callie was over. It was like, it was like midnight. And I was like, oh, we should make milkshakes. And so I went downstairs and I was making a milkshake and it was waking everybody up. Okay. Because I was blending in the middle of the night.

And then she, my mom like yelled at me or something or was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I'm making a milkshake. Okay. So I wasn't telling her to make a milkshake but I was not caring about her needs. And you've never screamed for your mother to make you a milkshake or a sandwich

in your high school years? No, you've made it into me screaming for food. Listen, I know you're offended by it, but I think it's very cute. It goes along with the boss in a town car. I know you love that image. Yes. But the problem is it's not correct.

And then some people who don't think it's cute will mistake me as someone like that, and I'm not. Okay, I'm gonna leave you out of it. Okay, thank you. So my kids are barking orders. Delta wants a fruit bowl, an actual fruit bowl. Not like, can you grab me- Like, cut up fruit?

Yes, can you grab me an apple? It's, I would like a fruit medley. Wow. And by God, she complies. Kristen's right up and she's making a very nice fruit bowl, delivers it and Delta pounds it. And she's like, you gotta understand the delivery of all these things.

Cause she's just like sucked into Happy Gilmore. And then she's like, mom! And she just holds the empty bowl out. And that means I want another fruit salad. What? Kristen just jumps up and grabs the bowl. She does? Yeah.

Oh my God, okay. And then I started getting very scared. My kids are gonna be entitled assholes, right? But then it just, I thought to ask. And by the way, the reason I thought that is, I never ever, my mother never got me anything out of the kitchen. Yeah.

I never called for anything. I never said I'm hungry. And I liked that childhood for whatever reason. But then it crossed my mind, I'm like, maybe Kristin's mother did this to her and now she's passing it on. And maybe it's great that you have a period of your life where you're just like yelling, you're a little kid

and you just yell what you need and your mom hustles around and gets it. And then you'll grow up and you'll pass that on, and everything's even. So I said, hun, did your mom, while she's making this fourth fruit salad, I said, did your mom like just wait on you like this when you were a kid?

And she said, yeah, for sure. Oh, wow. And I was like, okay, cool. So she like received, and now she's paying it back. Interesting. I didn't receive, and I'm not paying it. I mean, for sure. Oh, wow. And I was like, okay, cool. So she like received and now she's paying it back. Interesting. I didn't receive and I'm not paying it. I mean, I make them dinner and shit, but I'm not jumping off the couch

and getting anybody anything. If we're all on the couch, my rule is like, yeah, I'm thirsty too. Yeah. I'm not like, hey, go get me a Perrier. Right. If I'm in there, I'll yell, hey, does anyone want a Perrier? But I'm not getting up to get you something

if we're both seated. Well, yeah, this is part of, this is a story you guys used to tell all the time. Yes, when we first started dating. Ad nauseam. Yeah. It was your main story. It was, and it made sense.

It was like, she asked you to get, you guys were both watching TV. She asked you to get her water. A glass watching TV, she asked you to get her water, and you were really shaken by this. And it's the same thing. But you know, yeah, that was a main story. But I wonder how you interpret the story. Cause for me, that's a story about my own personal growth.

It was a shift from thinking everyone's trying to take advantage of you to going, no, not everyone's trying to take advantage of you, and you can just do nice things for people, and it's not setting you up. It's not setting you up for a pattern of being abused. I think that is what it is. And for me, it was like a breakthrough moment of maybe trusting people.

That is what I thought. Has that always been the message of that story to you? Yeah, but it's similar in this way where you just said, like, I'm not getting up. Yes, but I don't have the baggage of before where I'm like, oh, my kids think, like, so 17 years ago, this situation, I would have had all this other stuff attached to them

thinking I should get up and grab them stuff. Like, oh, they just think I'm here to serve them and they think, and they just want me to, but I don't think any of those thoughts. I think they're benevolent and nice and generous and they want something, they're gonna give it a shot and scream if they can get it and if they can't then they'll get up and get it.

It's not layered in all this mistrust of everyone's motives. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the parental relationship, like that's much different with a kid and a parent. It is your job to provide for them, so they can't, like taking advantage isn't really at play. I mean, it can be to an extent. Yeah, but I do think parents have chips on their shoulders

about being disrespected. Like we can call it all these different words, but I think in some way they all mean the same thing emotionally. So it's like taken for granted, disrespected. And I'm not currently dealing with any of those feelings, but I could imagine 17 years ago, again, I always say how grateful I am that I waited so long,

but like, I don't know, maybe those, I would have had those feelings. Yeah, maybe. 17 years ago. Okay, what are you most excited about for Austin? Well, I'm really excited to go to my vintage store. You love to shop in Austin. I do.

There's a store I really like there and I'm really excited to go. That's the main one. Okay. And foodies. Food, yummy foods. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about you?

Sprint race. Uh-huh. We're gonna see the sprint race. Yeah, that's fun. At COTA, that'll be really fun. Yeah. And then Adam Grant's gonna interview us on stage. I'm really excited for that. We're gonna have dinner with Adam Grant on Wednesday

at one of my favorite steak houses. Yeah, I'm really excited. Where I had my infamous date with Matthew McConaughey. Uh-huh. Yeah, just fun, fun, Where I had my infamous date with Matthew McConaughey. Uh-huh. Yeah, just fun, fun, fun. I'll probably swim a few times in Bee Springs. While I'm at the vintage store?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll plan that accordingly. Now, I forgot what I was gonna say. It was about Mary-Kate and Ashley. Wow, you think it's about Mary-Kate and Ashley. I do. You do? I think most things circle back to them.

Oh, one thing that we are gonna do to designate, we're gonna wear necklaces with the initials. Smart. I think that'll help get it over the edge. Which one are you gonna be? So I'm debating. Do you have a favorite? You don't have to say it out loud,

but do you have a favorite? I actually don't. You don't, yeah. I mean, I think I should because you dated one, so I should pick her. Yeah, I've really vouched for one. Yes, exactly. So I guess I'll pick her, but I don't wanna do that.

Like, I like them both and I think they're a team. It's like me asking you to pick between Ben and Matt. You don't like that either, even though I know who you pick. No, I don't. No, you don't. And I know who you pick from, American. No, you don't. No, none of that's true. You and I are gonna you pick. No, I don't. No, you don't. And I know who you pick from, American. No, you don't.

No, none of that's true. You and I are gonna do a commercial unrelated to this podcast. Yeah, we are. I'm excited for that, too. Is any of your current shopping thing like, ooh, I just got some extra cashish I wasn't expecting? Like, do you feel like you have a little money to-

No, I kind of forgot about that. You are so funny about money. You're very, you know your value. Yes. And you're a hard bargainer. Yeah. Yeah. But then also you don't give a flying fuck.

It's really funny. Yes, that is right. You never look again, you're not sure if you ever got any of it, but you have. Yeah, yeah. When I am like negotiating, it is not, it's not about the money really ever. Which I think probably makes it very difficult

for the person I'm negotiating with. Right. Because it's really, really not about that. It is, it's about my value and my place and that's it. And for me, it's just about the money. Right, I know. We're very different in that way. We are, yeah, yeah.

It's one of our many differences. But I'm like, everything is, okay, I get this, that amount's for safety, and then I gotta make X amounts so I can do something fun and buy something I want. It's not really fair for me to act like I don't have any of that, because I do. I definitely do, now that I have this big expense, the house, that's changed, I mean, not changed, but I-

You have to consider that. I have to think about money a lot and like where things are going and is there enough for this and this and this and you know. And the necklaces. Yeah, I think there is. Um. Um.

But. Oh, but I'll just say, I do stress out about it. You do? I do. And I, I can't say I don't want it, like I'll just say, I do stress out about it. You do? I do. And I can't say I don't want it like I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be lying. Yeah.

But anyway, because of all these necklaces, I think I'm gonna be Mary Kate because Ana should probably be Ashley because of the A. Sure. Although it's not gonna help people understand your costume. Why? Because they're gonna see A and they're gonna go, oh, Ana's wearing an A for Ana. because of the A. Sure, although it's not gonna help people understand your costume. Why?

Because they're gonna see A and they're gonna go, oh, Ana's wearing an A for Ana, and you're wearing an M for Monica, and I guess her middle name is Kristen, and we never realized that. No, no. Monica Kelly Padman. Ana and I are gonna be standing next to each other

the whole night. We're not allowed to leave. Wow. Yeah. What do you think, since you know one of them well, what do you think I could do in order to really make it clear? Is there anything? I don't know.

Do you know about like a secret freckle or something? Do you know about like a secret freckle or something? I think. Do you know about like a secret freckle or something? Also it'd be no use. If I know about a secret freckle and then you put a secret freckle on your arm, no one will put two and two together because they don't know about the secret freckle.

But I'll know and it'll be like working from the outside in. Right, like great acting. Oh, I can't wait. How would you feel? Here's a question, because I think I already know because you've kind of alluded to it when talking about whether you date an armchair or not. If you knew of a popular podcaster

who was completely obsessed with you, would you be open to having a friendship with them? Do I like their podcast? Yeah. Yeah, it's a good podcast. Then yeah. Yeah, okay. I would too, it's a good podcast. Then yeah. Yeah, okay. I would too.

I don't mind that. I mean, I would be happy to have a friendship with someone who liked the show. I guess that's what you sort of mean. No, obsessed with you. The way you're obsessed with Mary-Kate and Ashley. That would be harder for me. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think so. But I think if, it's also for me. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think so. But I think if, it's also a bit. Yeah. Like it is also a bit. That's true. I think if in real life I met them and I liked them, like they were cool and I enjoyed them, then that goes away.

Like it's just part of this like fun thing to be excited about. Yeah, yeah. I was just curious. I think I don't do that in real life. No, I know. Maybe to a detriment. There isn't anyone really, really that like-

Brings out your- That I think is extra special on this earth. Yeah, polar. I love her so much and I want her to call me and I wanna be friends. Yeah. But I think if we hung out like a few times, I wouldn't feel like she was better than me.

I don't normally feel like that if I really know someone. True, of course. Yeah, I'm with you. As we know, I have an obsession with Robert Downey Jr. that I've had since I was 12 or maybe 10. And then I have a friendship with him that has nothing to do with that obsession. Right. But it's funny, because I think you can still,

which is, I think, a good thing, you can still kind of click into that. Yeah. Well, especially when I see him do the thing that enamored me with him. Right. When I watch him act in certain things, I go, oh, he's so special.

He's just a little shooting comet, you know? Well, that, I'm not saying, no, I'm not saying that you can click into the fact that he's like such a cool person, but I think you can get excited that he likes you. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like I had this with Kristin. Right.

I was so obsessed with her. Yeah, yeah. And then now that I know her and we're, I think equals, I love her and I'm so happy to have her in my life. And I can see like, I'm proud of her when she does good, when she does stuff. Yeah, yeah. But I never, I don't think like, I'm so happy she likes me

or I'm so happy she's my friend. I me or I'm so happy she's my friend. I mean, I'm so happy she's my friend. For legitimate substantive reasons. I'm so happy we're friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But not I'm so happy she's my friend. Yeah, I wouldn't frame it exactly like that. Yours, yours?

It's like, I'm friends with Downey, we get along how we get along. And I can go, oh my God, I can't believe this boy I love my whole life likes me. I also have room for that feeling good. Yeah. That still feels good. I think it's kind of like when you fall in love

with somebody and then it flattens out and the good chemicals are gone and now you're just a partnership. You can remember meeting them and falling in love with them, and you can still remember all those feelings and get those butterfly giddy feelings when you reflect back on it. Yeah.

This has been a long walk, and I'm not sure where it landed, but. Yeah, me neither. Okay, so this is for Yuval. He would be a good example of this. He's both things. Like, now he's been here three times. Now I'm used to him being here.

I'm way less intimidated. I feel like I can just chat with him. Yeah. And I remember how special it is that you've all trusted us to come talk. Yeah. I can like feel both of those things simultaneously. Yeah, I mean, I don't, he's not our friend though.

I mean, he's like, it's friendly, but like if I hung out with him every day, or if I hung out with him once a week, if he was like in my social circle, I would be impressed by him as a person always. But I don't think I would feel like, oh my God, I'm just so grateful that this person on earth is spending time with me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would just be like, God, what an amazing person. Yes. Amazing friend I have. Let's see, let's see a few facts. Five foot 10. Oh, you started listening to dimensions. Okay, Lorana Bobbitt.

Oh, sure. That was in Virginia. Did you know all about that? Or is that before your time? No, I knew. I mean, I didn't, it was sort of before my time, but- But it transcended. Exactly.

It was in 93. Oh, the year of my graduation. Oh, she severed her husband John's penis. Boy, what a tabloid sensation that was, because then he went on to do a porno. Lorena stated in a court hearing, after coming home that evening, her husband had raped her. And then he went to sleep.

She got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. She then grabbed an eight inch carving knife on the kitchen counter, returned to their bedroom, pulled back the bed sheets and cut off his penis. After this, Loriana left the apartment with the severed appendage and drove away in the car. After a length of time driving and struggling to steer

with one hand due to holding the penis. Oh my goodness. Wikipedia. She threw the penis out a window into a roadside field on Maplewood Drive. Oh wow. She then stopped and called my name. Can you imagine if you were walking down the road

and you saw some woman roll the window down and you saw a thing fly out and you're like, that looked like a body part. That looked like a penis, but get real, there's no way that was a penis. And do you know it was reattached? Yeah, and he starred in a pornographic film. Oh, with his reattachment.

Yeah, and there was some play on words in the title of it, as often was the case. There was a whole era where they paid, they like paid top dollar for famous people to be in pornos. Back when pornos sold VHSs and it was like an industry. Yeah, and rentals, like with the rental scene blockbuster. Yeah, it's kind of sad that that went away because you'd get these fun, you know,

there was Screech was in a pornographic film. Yeah, it says he went on to star in two. Two, oh my gosh. While I didn't remember it was a rape, that's horrific. It is. And I'm glad she cut his penis off. Yeah, I know. But that's not a good course of action.

I'm not recommending anyone else does that. But in this one case, I like it. Oh, I looked up the percentage of male pedophilia versus female. Oh, yeah, what was it? It says male perpetrators account for the vast majority of sexual crimes committed against children. Among convicted offenders, 0.4 to 4% are female.

10X window, that's interesting. And one literature review estimates that the ratio of male to female child molesters is 10 to one. That sounds right. Now let me ask you this. I don't know why this would be the case, but I'm just floating it. You think female perpetrators are under-reported?

I wonder if you're less likely to chalk up what happened to that. Maybe. But I definitely accept it what happened to that. Maybe. But I definitely accept it's 10 to one men. I've heard, I don't want to say a lot. I think I know about four dudes who have babysitter stories, older babysitter stories that were female. But again, they're not reporting that. They're like, they like, that's a fun memory of theirs.

The babysitter, the older female babysitter. Fooled around with the younger boy, yeah. Interesting, how much older? Because sometimes young girls were babysitters. Right. To like kids a year younger than them. Boy, I would be guessing at the detail. I don't wanna guess.

Should we call him? Yeah. Get everyone on the line. Okay, he used the word lacuna a few times that I had never heard and I liked it. Yeah, lacuna. And it's an unfilled space or interval, a gap. The journal has filled a lacuna in Middle Eastern studies. Meaning there was no Middle Eastern studies and then they filled it in.

It's not like it's understudied. It's like within female studies, there's an area that is not explored. Okay, there's a lacuna within it. Yeah, and I like that. And I thought maybe I'll use that word sometime. I've thought of that in terms of physicists. It's just like, I don't know who even tackles physics

because to advance it at this point is so daunting. Yeah, I agree. I mean, the place we're already at, no one understands. Hold on, I'm still like reeling over this lazy river situation. I'm shocked. Why did we, that was a thing. I feel like I watched the 60 minutes

on how it was like a whole segment, colleges competing now for students and the amenities they're putting in there. Yeah. Maybe type in, is there any college with a lazy river? I know, that's what I... Maybe we just have the wrong college. College lazy river.

Well, we're not gonna be invited to ASU to do any lectures or anything between your bashing of their academic prowess and then now this misinformation about the lazy river. Well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to Arizona State, if you don't have a lazy river. I'm sorry you don't have one.

Sure. Well... It's hot there. I'm sorry you don't have one. Sure. Well, I know, but are they trying to be like, is the residence like right next door and it kind of goes through campus a little bit? And it is an official dorm. University of North Florida students can drift down a lazy river at the new Osprey Fountains residence house.

Okay, so they have one. Yeah. I'm happy to take down University of North Florida. Okay. I'm happy to move on to that. I mean, these are all college students. Do you think they're hooking up on these inner tubes? Like people are paying business and stuff. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, how could they resist? College kids are disgusting. Nighttime lazy river floats full of activity. Full of spray. Send me back. Off spray. Yeah, I want a time machine, but it wouldn't work because it didn't exist when I was younger. True. Yeah.

There's really no hack for this. I just don't ever get to be young on a lazy river at a college campus. No, you need to take a time machine to go back and then get in the time machine. Kidnap my young self. Yeah. Send me to here. Exactly, and send him to ASU. And then I stay back there or something, and then I tell him, you gotta come back and get me,

but he never will, because he'll be having so much fun on the lazy river. Because you can't be in the same place twice. I don't know, I'm not sure how time travel works. What's a thought you have that is a recurring thought that's absolutely absurd, but like you do think? Like mine is, I think about the reality of teleportation like way too much.

I have obsessed on teleportation. I think I told you, I was gonna write a whole script about it, I don't know if you remember this. But if you really play out teleportation, that single invention would destroy like six of our biggest 10 industries globally. It would destroy transportation. It would destroy like six of our biggest 10 industries globally. It would destroy transportation. It would destroy big oil.

It would destroy the housing market. Why? Because if you can live in Wyoming on 19 acres and work in Manhattan and eat dinner in San Francisco, you're not gonna, you don't need to live in the highly densely populated area where the prices are so high. Well, it would just- Everyone could live on three acres and be in a city whenever they wanted to and enjoying

the amenities of the city. And just when they go home, they go home to peace and solitude. There's finite amount of space. So then it would just be that those places with a lot of space would be then the most coveted place. But the USA is extremely sparsely populated. It's not densely populated at all. 99% of the land in the US is completely empty.

It's all in the middle of the coast. If you go to Wyoming, it's just wide fucking open. Montana's wide open, Idaho's wide open. All these places are wide open. So everyone would live on the farm in the pretty part of Tennessee. I mean, I wouldn't, but. Okay, but you get my point.

I do, but I just. The housing market is driven by access to these opportunities, and those areas get densely populated, and then it's supply and demand, it drives the price up. But when no one needs to live by where they work, that will collapse entirely. Because you walk out your door

and you could be on the street in Manhattan. Like anything you'd want from living in Manhattan, you could have, but then at night, you could be sleeping in a very quiet farm. I see what you mean. But then I just think it would, I think it would just change where the country was densely populated.

It would just be the cities now would be more open as in those places. And that's where, by the way, the vast majority of equity in real estate is only in 1% of the country. It's like in all these cities. Yeah. So once that collapses, 90% of the value of real estate has collapsed, because the cities were holding all that value. But why wouldn't it just move to the rural areas?

Because there's no competition for space. Like Manhattan is a tiny island. San Francisco is a tiny area. So no one's going to spend $5 million to live in an apartment in Manhattan, when for 600,000, they can have a mansion in Kansas on a, you know, again, you're only sleeping there. I guess that's true. And having Christmas or whatever you're doing. I guess that's true.

So anyways, my whole movie idea was, if someone invented teleportation, you'd have trillions of dollars at risk. You'd have a lot of incentivized titans of industry to go kill that person and get rid of that technology. And so mine was kind of like a crime capery, trying to stay alive to deploy this technology when you have all this funding to get rid of it.

Airplanes, they're gone, the entire air industry. I just wanna go, I just wanna, and I'm there. It's great. It just, it would collapse, the entire world economy would collapse. I wonder what would happen to restaurants because it might change, it might make restaurants more because you could then go out to eat every night.

Everyone could eat at Emily Burger. The line would be impossible. That's what would be really fucked up. Well, no, because then you'd be like, well, I'll come back tomorrow. Like, you wouldn't have to, it's not so scarce. I think you'd have to schedule your eating for years in advance.

Because now you have 330 million people that could eat at Emily Burger in Clinton Hill. That's true. So they're all gonna make reservations. So you really, you're gonna have to just have so many reservations all around the country. But think about it, like, remember when I was in New York and I couldn't find a place to eat

because it was fashion week and it was a mess. And I was just bopping around from place to place and everything was full. I guess it would be like that. But then I could be like, I guess I'll go to Paris right now and see what's in Paris. I think what would happen is I think these popular cities

would be way too packed during the day. Cause who on a weekend would not go to Paris and have a cup of coffee for breakfast. Everyone would go. So these like world cities would just be completely clogged. Think about like immigration will have a new element to it. How? Yeah, how on earth? And then also I'm gonna take a swim in St. Barts completely clogged. Think about like immigration will have a new element to it. How?

Yeah, how on earth? And then also I'm gonna take a swim in St. Barts in the afternoon. Like, oh, I'll have breakfast in Paris. You mean Barts Springs? No, well, I'd probably go there too. But St. Barts, I guess, has pretty water and stuff. So I would have breakfast in Paris

and then I would go to St. Barts and take a swim. And then your day would just be, and then for would go to St. Barts and take a swam. And then I, you know, your day would just be, and then for my exercise, I would do six miles on the wall of China, Great Wall of China. No, you could fall. Remember that girl? I would go on the daytime.

She was there at nighttime. Yeah. Anyways, it's a fun thought. Yeah, I do think about it a lot, like in a real way. Yeah, but we talk about like how disruptive AI is gonna be as a technology, but the teleporting thing, if you really think it through for hours and hours,

it would be chaos. Yeah, I mean really what it would be, which is just like every other technology and every other thing is like the, it's like space, like the elites would have access, it'd be expensive. Exactly, so Emily Burger, which already has a very expensive hamburger, the hamburger would be like $200,

because it could be, because they have the entire world's billionaires that now could eat there for lunch. All the billionaires wanna go, yeah, it would be like a billionaires game. It would. And that's what caused even more unrest and more disparity. Yeah. Oh, but I wanna go to Paris right now so bad.

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