Speaker 1: What's up. This is a special dispatch I'll call it
Speaker 1: to the how To citizen community. To the feed from
Speaker 1: baritunde Hi. I really hope you enjoyed season four. I'm
Speaker 1: actually still reverberating from so many of the conversations we had,
Speaker 1: from the opening with Adrian Marie Brown to the close
Speaker 1: with doctor Sam Raider and everyone in between. I'm popping
Speaker 1: in because we have a bonus track on this album.
Speaker 1: I've been doing a lot of podcasting as a guest
Speaker 1: on other people's shows, and we've decided to throw one
Speaker 1: of those episodes right here into our feed. It's from
Speaker 1: a group called the Progress Network. I love I love
Speaker 1: that already who's against progress? And their show is called
Speaker 1: What Could Go Right? And they invited me on and
Speaker 1: I wasn't fully sure what we would be talking about,
Speaker 1: but we ended up going deep on artificial intelligence, the
Speaker 1: chat GPT, the DHALI, the mid journey, the large language models,
Speaker 1: the job displacement, the creative possibilities, the plagiarism. There's so
Speaker 1: much potential with this, and we did a whole season
Speaker 1: on Tech season three and explored some of these themes.
Speaker 1: In this moment, with things moving even faster, I am
Speaker 1: confident that what we're calling artificial intelligence and all the
Speaker 1: machine learning technologies underneath, will have a massive effect on
Speaker 1: every part of our lives. I think we still have
Speaker 1: a chance to shape it rather than just be shaped
Speaker 1: by it. And I'm eager to see more citizen uses
Speaker 1: of these tools, including citizen ownership and citizen oriented initiatives.
Speaker 1: All the principles we talk about showing up and participating,
Speaker 1: investing in relationships, understanding power, and valuing the collective. They
Speaker 1: don't have to disappear because of a more machine dominated world,
Speaker 1: but they will if we're not consciously engaged in this stuff.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of alarm and concern on the
Speaker 1: one hand that you'll hear from me in this conversation,
Speaker 1: as well as a lot of possibility, potential, and hope
Speaker 1: for what we can still create. If you know anything
Speaker 1: by now, you know that I am about us co
Speaker 1: creating a better story of ourselves together, and that might
Speaker 1: need to include increasingly together with machines. But I don't
Speaker 1: want to do that at the expense of our relationship
Speaker 1: with ourselves, with each other and with nature. So tune
Speaker 1: into this. Let us know what you think we're how
Speaker 1: to Citizen on Instagram. I'm Baritundale on Instagram, TikTok and
Speaker 1: all the social sharecropping sites where I till these digital fields.
Speaker 1: And of course we just have email, old school owned
Speaker 1: and operated comments at howtositizen dot com. Check out our
Speaker 1: website well, constantly shifting things around there, and I'm wishing
Speaker 1: you a great summer as we go through a lot,
Speaker 1: get it to build a lot. Last little plug September thirteenth,
Speaker 1: I have discovered is the premier date of America Outdoors.
Speaker 1: That's my second season with the PBS series. A lot
Speaker 1: of the themes you're used to hearing us banter about
Speaker 1: here and try to activate WHI I'm also being able
Speaker 1: to witness and amplify that happening in relationship with nature
Speaker 1: all across the country. So that's a PBS show September thirteenth.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, please enjoy what could go right in
Speaker 1: my conversation about artificial intelligence peace if we could eliminate
Speaker 1: so much work and so much drudgery and so much labor. Again,
Speaker 1: always promised, never delivered, but maybe this time is different
Speaker 1: than what will we do with all that time? Would
Speaker 1: I let my report write itself, so I could take
Speaker 1: a walk with my wife and just connect more. Would
Speaker 1: I let those emails send themselves so I could call
Speaker 1: my sister instead, That's a great trade off. Let the
Speaker 1: email write itself, let it respond to the email that
Speaker 1: someone else's robots, and let the robots do all the
Speaker 1: emailing and just give me a weekly report on what
Speaker 1: I said this week, so that I could meditate more.
Speaker 1: That's glorious. That's really great. Most of the employers of
Speaker 1: the world, they won't see it that way, and they'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, great, you don't have to focus on
Speaker 1: writing emails. You can do xyzning instead.
Speaker 2: What Could Go Right?
Speaker 3: I'm Zachary Carabell, the founder of the Progress Network, and
Speaker 3: I'm joined as always on this podcast by Emma Varva Lucas,
Speaker 3: the executive director of the Progress Network. And What Could
Speaker 3: Go Right, in addition to being the title of our
Speaker 3: weekly newsletter, is also our podcast, which is a weekly
Speaker 3: attempt to change the tone of our collective dialogue from
Speaker 3: one of dyspeptic, dystopian despair to a more positive case
Speaker 3: for a brighter future. So, Emma, who are we going
Speaker 3: to talk to today? I'm very excited about this conversation.
Speaker 3: I know who we're going to talk to today, but
Speaker 3: why don't we share that with everyone else?
Speaker 4: All right, let me tell everyone else we're going to
Speaker 4: talk to you today, which is Baratunde Thurston. He is
Speaker 4: many things, among them the author of the books How
Speaker 4: to Be Black and I'm Judging You, the Do Better Manual.
Speaker 4: He worked at The Onion and on The Daily Show
Speaker 4: with Trevor Noah. Right now, he's the host of a
Speaker 4: podcast called how to Citizen, as well as a TV
Speaker 4: show called America Outdoors with PBS, and he's a founding
Speaker 4: editor of Puck. He's been writing a lot recently about
Speaker 4: AI technology and its role in the future of humanity,
Speaker 4: so we're going to delve into that with him today.
Speaker 3: So with that, let's talk to Baratunde. Baratunde is such
Speaker 3: a pleasure of this conversation with you. You are one
Speaker 3: of these kind of eclectic renaissance E maybe emphasis on
Speaker 3: the E type humans who have ranged far and wide
Speaker 3: in your interests. You're eclectic, you're informative, you're curious, you're
Speaker 3: open minded and passionate all of the above. You've been
Speaker 3: writing a lot lately about AI and generative AI, chat GBT,
Speaker 3: and Open AI, and there has been a fair share
Speaker 3: of attendant technophobic hysteria, as there always is when something
Speaker 3: seemingly dramatic a new comes along in.
Speaker 1: The technological universe.
Speaker 3: People freaked out about the printing press, about the telegraph,
Speaker 3: about the telephone, about the television, about the Internet, about
Speaker 3: the cell phone, about the smartphone.
Speaker 1: So the degree to what your horse, don't forget the horse.
Speaker 3: The horse absolutely freaked out about the horse too, This
Speaker 3: four legged harbor duers of doom. So tell us in
Speaker 3: a nutshell, are we right to be dramatically worried? I
Speaker 3: think you had a line in one of your columns
Speaker 3: where you're simultaneously fascinated and terrified. I think I'm getting
Speaker 3: that right. If not, it's a good way to characterize it.
Speaker 1: Regardless it is, that's a fair characterization. It's good to
Speaker 1: be here with what could go right. I just love
Speaker 1: the ethos and title of that. Most of the default
Speaker 1: settings on the news are what has gone wrong. So
Speaker 1: thank you for contributing to a different psyche and mindset
Speaker 1: around the state of the world and our remaining possibilities
Speaker 1: with AI. Your categorization is accurate. I am I'm fascinated
Speaker 1: and I'm terrified that The nutshell is that I see
Speaker 1: a lot of solid reasons to be concerned about what
Speaker 1: the rapid deployment of these tools means for everything from
Speaker 1: copyright and ownership of our creativity to the very nature
Speaker 1: of the human experience as one that is just so
Speaker 1: increasingly mediated by a technology creating distance between us and
Speaker 1: the physical world, between us and our fellow humans, and
Speaker 1: even between us and ourselves. And I think just our
Speaker 1: experience with social media the past decade or so and
Speaker 1: fragmentization and all balkanization, we just in so many ways
Speaker 1: we're not ready also excited, so excited about creative possibilities,
Speaker 1: about having another tool and sort of colleague and copilot
Speaker 1: in the quest for justice and the ability to try
Speaker 1: to live together better and to find answers to some
Speaker 1: really deep questions, whether they are scientific or existential. So
Speaker 1: it's all possible, but the concern is very real. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to try to sugarcoat it.
Speaker 4: I wanted to talk a little bit about the RNC
Speaker 4: AI AD. Did you see that that was all AI
Speaker 4: image generated?
Speaker 1: I did not see it.
Speaker 4: Basically, it was like imagine Joe Biden becomes president again,
Speaker 4: and then they ran through all these nightmare scenarios of
Speaker 4: what that might be like.
Speaker 2: So the first.
Speaker 4: One was war over Taiwan. The second one was fifty
Speaker 4: regional banks collapse, and they flashed an image from like
Speaker 4: the boarded up windows of BLM. Obviously it was ai created,
Speaker 4: but that was the image that you got in your head.
Speaker 4: And then they did some really heavy drug users in
Speaker 4: San Francisco and a couple of other dystopian things, and
Speaker 4: the response to it was like really intense. Right, there's
Speaker 4: this response of like the rn C is now you know,
Speaker 4: has this new tool and their power. People are going
Speaker 4: to be confused and they're gonna blah blah blah. And
Speaker 4: I was interested to ask you about it because my
Speaker 4: reaction was like that was a bad ad.
Speaker 2: It wasn't it actually was.
Speaker 4: It didn't feel of course I'm not the intended audience,
Speaker 4: but it just it honestly did not pull me in
Speaker 4: at all.
Speaker 1: This is speculative, happy to do it, just gotta name it.
Speaker 1: Most political ads are garbage. I think we can all
Speaker 1: agree on that. Like, regardless of where you sit on
Speaker 1: any political spectrum ideal, they're just bad. They're the worst
Speaker 1: Hollywood movie trailers in a world where, and it sounds
Speaker 1: like they just unleashed the in a world guy on
Speaker 1: on their projection of the worst possible future with Joe
Speaker 1: Biden as president. That's typical. It's uninspiring, it's fear based,
Speaker 1: it's it's unimaginative, which I think makes it appropriate to
Speaker 1: be built on generative AI systems because it can only
Speaker 1: mine what we already know in so many many ways.
Speaker 1: And so whatever they trained that data on, whatever they
Speaker 1: trained that ad on, is like just the history of
Speaker 1: shitty political ads. Cool. I think what would be more interesting.
Speaker 1: Years ago, the artist Mally Krabapple teamed up with a
Speaker 1: few political voices. Climate people. Alexandrio Casio Cortes did the
Speaker 1: voice over for this animated like the inverse version what
Speaker 1: you just described.
Speaker 5: Ah, the bullet train from New York to DC. It
Speaker 5: always brings me back to when I first started making
Speaker 5: this commute in twenty nineteen. I was a freshman in
Speaker 5: the most diverse Congress in history up to that point.
Speaker 5: It was a critical time. I'll never forget the children
Speaker 5: in our community. They were so inspired to see this
Speaker 5: new class of politicians who reflected them navigating the halls
Speaker 5: of power. It's often said you can't be what you
Speaker 5: can't see, and for the first time they saw themselves.
Speaker 5: I think there was something similar with the Green New Deal.
Speaker 1: We knew that, and it was imagine the future where
Speaker 1: a Green New Deal was like fully adopted and implemented
Speaker 1: and executed on and it was inspiring, It was beautiful.
Speaker 1: It was a bit like all that would be magical,
Speaker 1: but it appealed to a different piece of our human
Speaker 1: mind and our human spirit, and a human artist helped
Speaker 1: bring it to life. And I'm not saying machine art
Speaker 1: can't do that, but it just feels really predictable, also ironic.
Speaker 5: That's what they chose to run the game, a society
Speaker 5: that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and
Speaker 5: humane too. By committing to universal rights like healthcare and
Speaker 5: meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of
Speaker 5: the future, we stopped being scared of each other, and
Speaker 5: we found our shared purpose. Ileana heard the call too,
Speaker 5: and in twenty twenty eight she ran for office in
Speaker 5: the first cycle of publicly funded election campaigns, and now
Speaker 5: she occupies the seat that I once held. I couldn't
Speaker 5: be more proud of her a true child of the
Speaker 5: Green New Deal. When I think back to my first
Speaker 5: term in Congress writing that old school Amtrak in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 5: all of this was still ahead of us, and the
Speaker 5: first big step was just closing our eyes and imagining it.
Speaker 6: We can be whatever we have the courage to see.
Speaker 3: So look, the fears around this are this is the
Speaker 3: version one point zero of the Singularity, or people love
Speaker 3: to use the terminator. Skynet is sentient right that this
Speaker 3: is the first shot across the bow, and that's what
Speaker 3: we're heading. We're heading to AI that is indistinguishable to
Speaker 3: can pass the Turing tests. These all the tropes of
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence land. I think I've used at least three
Speaker 3: of my quotient of cliches in the past one minute.
Speaker 3: But yes, maybe I am indeed myself. AI generated a
Speaker 3: I generated cliches for five hundred alex.
Speaker 1: So a lot of what AI is doing right now.
Speaker 3: I'm as susceptible occasionally, in moments of procrastination and boredom
Speaker 3: to click on the listicles, you know, the ten worst
Speaker 3: movie scenes or the ten scenes that ruin their careers. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know that life would be radically different if
Speaker 3: I read a really good AI generated listicle like that,
Speaker 3: or a really good AI generated tour guide. A friend
Speaker 3: of mine I was just in Pakistan a few weeks
Speaker 3: ago and sent me this like Lahore tour and I.
Speaker 1: Was like, oh, this is cool. Where'd you get this?
Speaker 1: He said, it was chat gbto. We just said things
Speaker 1: to do in Lahore. I was like, that was pretty good.
Speaker 1: It's a lots to can look impressive.
Speaker 4: He is.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether that's a problem.
Speaker 3: But you mentioned the horse before, right, the fact that
Speaker 3: humans were human labor was substituted for horse labor, or
Speaker 3: that horses were then made less relevant by cars. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there was disruption, and there was a certain amount of
Speaker 3: creative destruction if you believe in the Stumpitarian view of reality.
Speaker 1: But I don't know that.
Speaker 3: Was like ultimately bad destruction of what we use here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when cars came along, they mostly displaced horses. And
Speaker 1: automation in general is never a one to one substitute.
Speaker 1: It doesn't just like every human job becomes a robot
Speaker 1: job or a software job and it's bad. It's generally, Yeah,
Speaker 1: people who had certain types of occupations can't do that.
Speaker 1: Part of the occupation anymore, and the new technological capability
Speaker 1: creates new jobs. Right. The telephone operators transitioned right in
Speaker 1: many ways to a different type of role. They weren't
Speaker 1: physically connecting inbound call to destination, but they became information
Speaker 1: services operators. They became receptionist secretaries. There were still a
Speaker 1: need for a human role in some cases. What often
Speaker 1: I think gets missed, though, is that the new capability
Speaker 1: just opens the pathway for many more people to engage
Speaker 1: in the thing. Right, So, writing used to be a
Speaker 1: high tech endeavor that only monks did. You had to
Speaker 1: be trained. There were like fifty people in the world
Speaker 1: who could write. They lived in a castle. It was
Speaker 1: very Game of Thrones, right, they were masters. And when
Speaker 1: you know, writing became much more available to the public.
Speaker 1: You still have monks, you still had people in an academy.
Speaker 1: You still had masters and castles. But also anybody could
Speaker 1: write any bullshit, Right, I could write bullshit. I could
Speaker 1: write a postcard. And so what's gonna like? The people
Speaker 1: who can generate tour guides of Lahore is greater than
Speaker 1: professional travel agents, which has been the case for a while.
Speaker 1: It's greater than the wiki. How crap writers. It's greater
Speaker 1: than the people who've already blogged a billion times about
Speaker 1: and online. It's like your friend who's never written a
Speaker 1: travel guide a day in their life can generate one
Speaker 1: for you. And that's gonna create a flood of new
Speaker 1: content and new information. Not entirely bad. I think. The
Speaker 1: worry side of it for me is we will create.
Speaker 1: We've already created so much stuff. I can't watch the
Speaker 1: TV that's being made. It's in We will never finish Netflix.
Speaker 1: It's an endless scroll, and so what's the point. And
Speaker 1: if we need machines to help us overproduce, we're also
Speaker 1: gonna need machines to help us over consume. There's just
Speaker 1: too much. So we're gonna watch the shows on one
Speaker 1: point five speed, and we're gonna have a generative bot
Speaker 1: summarize and give us the abstract, the cliffs notes, the
Speaker 1: kind of vary, the cheat codes on all these experiences.
Speaker 1: So we'll rely on machines to create, will rely on
Speaker 1: machines to consume an experience. And our role in that
Speaker 1: loop is like a phone operator. We're just connecting an
Speaker 1: input to an output, but not experiencing the call ourselves.
Speaker 1: That's an existential worry I have is and the other
Speaker 1: is economically. So much of this is just driven by capitalism.
Speaker 1: It's like, increase throughput, increased output, create more efficiency. Why
Speaker 1: the great lie of all these tools is that they
Speaker 1: give us our time back. They don't. The BlackBerry took
Speaker 1: more time than it gave. Email took more time than
Speaker 1: it gave Slack we're supposed to solve. Email takes more
Speaker 1: time than it gives. We just are on more. We
Speaker 1: have to be more responsive, and so we have this
Speaker 1: colonization of our time and of ourselves in service of
Speaker 1: ultimately a venture backed, profit driven escapade in which we
Speaker 1: don't really have an interest ourselves, some benefit, very little interest.
Speaker 1: So the concentration of wealth to create more wealth, that's
Speaker 1: not very inspiring to me. That's a very concerning and
Speaker 1: it's like, all right, so we just become better constant
Speaker 1: workers connecting machine output to machine input. Eh, it's got
Speaker 1: to be a better use for all this stuff, venture backed,
Speaker 1: profit driven escapade. I like that, not try I agree,
Speaker 1: but I like it as a Phrase's yeah, that's cool,
Speaker 1: And I don't use the word escapade very much, So
Speaker 1: I should get a point for.
Speaker 4: That, I guess what that premise takes to be as
Speaker 4: necessarily true is that we are all responsible for consuming
Speaker 4: all the content that's already produced. But I think that
Speaker 4: we're not right. Like, the idea is that there's the diversity,
Speaker 4: the plurality of content out there, and you can pick
Speaker 4: and choose what's useful to you. Like, I certainly don't
Speaker 4: feel like there's a pressure, tubbing incumbent upon me to
Speaker 4: like watch all the TV shows that have been produced,
Speaker 4: or all the podcasts, or read all the articles. I
Speaker 4: just the fact that the things that I want to
Speaker 4: learn about are there or see are there seems to
Speaker 4: be a benefit to me. Does that ring true to
Speaker 4: you at all?
Speaker 1: Yes? And no, I think you know, the pressure that
Speaker 1: I feel comes from the desire to feel like I'm
Speaker 1: a part of a common experience. There's something shared in
Speaker 1: these human experiences. And in a simpler time, we had
Speaker 1: more common reference points, just in a different time. Not
Speaker 1: necessarily simpler in some ways I think it was, but
Speaker 1: certainly we could agree it's different. And so that common
Speaker 1: reference point might have been a religious one, it might
Speaker 1: have been an informational one, it might have been a
Speaker 1: labor common experience for generations parents and children had very
Speaker 1: similar lives, and whatever advice parents could pass on was
Speaker 1: based on a set of experiences. Their child was likely
Speaker 1: to have. Work too hard in the field, Your teeth
Speaker 1: are gonna fall out at thirty, You're gonna die at
Speaker 1: forty three. Good luck, kid. That was a lot of
Speaker 1: the human experience. And now within a generation there were
Speaker 1: radically different experiences less and less common between an older
Speaker 1: sibling and a younger sibling. And so what we have
Speaker 1: to share or between each other and pass on it
Speaker 1: just gets more difficult. I think the flood of TV
Speaker 1: shows is a simple example of this larger trend. And
Speaker 1: so what show am I watching? What show were you watching?
Speaker 1: What do we talk about at the water cooler? Which
Speaker 1: no one has a water cooler anymore, but the idea
Speaker 1: of that ancient, like sitting around the fire, common human storytelling.
Speaker 1: I think there's something deep within us that still demands
Speaker 1: and needs that to not feel too untethered. And so
Speaker 1: we tether to each other, We tether to the fire,
Speaker 1: we tether to a tail. And if everybody can generate
Speaker 1: their own tail constantly, then can how do we also
Speaker 1: create a shared story? See it's a TV show, maybe
Speaker 1: it's a new religion. Maybe it's a set of principles
Speaker 1: and values. But I think everybody creating a custom lens
Speaker 1: on reality will have some negative consequences because we won't
Speaker 1: see the same things.
Speaker 3: So I want to circle back and maybe one thing
Speaker 3: I'd want to throw out there, maybe we'll come back
Speaker 3: to this is I'm not entirely show that any of
Speaker 3: us entirely I know what capitalism is or means.
Speaker 1: I mean, we use the word or any of these isms.
Speaker 1: It's the very.
Speaker 3: Loose terms for multi multi level, multifaceted systems. But this
Speaker 3: idea of a shared reality. We've gone over the course
Speaker 3: of a couple hundred years from a billion people on
Speaker 3: the planet barely in eighteen hundred to eight billion plus
Speaker 3: people right now. And it's not just there were a
Speaker 3: billion people tuned in some odd years ago. Those were
Speaker 3: they weren't really connected to each other, so it was
Speaker 3: more like several hundred group of tens of millions at most.
Speaker 1: Yeah, little tribes mostly. I don't think it's possible for
Speaker 1: eight billion people to have the same story, and I
Speaker 1: don't think it's desirable to throw everyone into a massive
Speaker 1: group chat Hello Twitter, right, These things will naturally fragment
Speaker 1: and subdivide themselves, and that's okay. A family has subcultures,
Speaker 1: much less a species the thing that I want. I'm
Speaker 1: not an advocate of pull the plug on the machines.
Speaker 1: I think that's really simple. When I say capitalism, I'm
Speaker 1: talking about a desire to produce outcomes that are optimized
Speaker 1: for a particular measurement of success, which is profit, at
Speaker 1: the expense of many other measures that matter to us,
Speaker 1: quality of life, happiness, sustainability of the home planet, a
Speaker 1: future that we don't fear in terms of habitability, like
Speaker 1: very basic human needs, stuff that capitalism has helped to
Speaker 1: serve but now threatens at the extreme to completely undermine.
Speaker 1: There is no market for any good or service with
Speaker 1: no Earth, at least not a growing one. It's literally
Speaker 1: a shrinking market. So these tools and the race to
Speaker 1: project them into the world are driven by a particular
Speaker 1: perspective on maximizing public market capital defined as returns on investment,
Speaker 1: not defined as quality of air or depth of loving relationship.
Speaker 1: There are other things we could try to optimize for
Speaker 1: we haven't really tried. And when we talk about shared
Speaker 1: narrative and the risks, yeah, there's gonna be like a
Speaker 1: bright bart bot. There's going to be an right bot.
Speaker 1: There's going to be like a BLM buera of land
Speaker 1: management I'm referring to, as well as a Black Lives
Speaker 1: Matter bot, and that's going to create some chaos. There's
Speaker 1: subreddits too for all these different groups, and it's created
Speaker 1: some chaos. It's not necessarily the end of the world,
Speaker 1: but the combination of the speed with which this stuff
Speaker 1: gets deployed, the narrow I think drive behind it. These
Speaker 1: are not so far community defined efforts. If we said,
Speaker 1: all right, listen, these large language models are generated basically
Speaker 1: off of the wisdom and data, at least maybe wisdom.
Speaker 1: It's certainly the data generated by the world. We've scraped Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: which is contributions from ever we sucked in a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of photographs taken by millions of people. But the interest,
Speaker 1: the literal financial interest in it is just a couple
Speaker 1: of shareholders. It's like one of the largest set companies
Speaker 1: in the world. That seems like a huge disconnect, and
Speaker 1: I would feel less alarmed if we had collectively some
Speaker 1: deeper stake in these systems, as well as some more
Speaker 1: kind of democratic, small d method of determining how we
Speaker 1: are going to manage what goes in and how we
Speaker 1: decide to create what comes out. Instead, we're just jammed
Speaker 1: with it, right, Hey it's GPT two. Nope, GPT three
Speaker 1: point five, No, GPT four. Hey, Now we can make
Speaker 1: videos like wow, this is so fast, and I just
Speaker 1: feel subject to the whims of an almost literal handful
Speaker 1: of people. And I don't like that. For eight billion
Speaker 1: people in a place where we're supposed to be democratizing
Speaker 1: tools and all having a voice, it seems like a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff is being imposed, and so I
Speaker 1: just I don't have a deep answer to it. But
Speaker 1: I have a deep concern, and I don't think that
Speaker 1: is how I want the future defined for so many
Speaker 1: of us. So I'm trying to weave in a couple
Speaker 1: of the things we've been talking about here and see
Speaker 1: if I can get more specific about what what might
Speaker 1: bother me the last. It is not last, but I
Speaker 1: think it's my other deep on the concern side, we
Speaker 1: can get to the exciting I'm excited about stuff too,
Speaker 1: but on the concern side is one of the things
Speaker 1: I wrote about in PUCK. I had this clear memory
Speaker 1: of GPS and I used to manually make trip plans
Speaker 1: with my mom. She ordered things from trip la and
Speaker 1: they helped you route a path on paper. They chip
Speaker 1: it to your house, these little vertical maps called tripticks.
Speaker 1: Then I ran the GPS off a laptop in the
Speaker 1: car with CD ROMs. Then we got map Quest, then
Speaker 1: Google Maps and voiceover GPS, and that all made navigation simpler.
Speaker 1: It made it smoother, it made it faster, made it
Speaker 1: more optimal. And I never know where I am, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know anything anymore. I will defer to the
Speaker 1: which claims to be all seeing and all knowing versus
Speaker 1: my eyes. And if my eyes perceive that looks like
Speaker 1: a traffic jam, but the screen says it isn't, I'll
Speaker 1: just wait in traffic. If my eyes say there's no
Speaker 1: bridge ahead of me, but the screen says you can drive,
Speaker 1: I'll drive off the bridge. I haven't done this, but
Speaker 1: other people have. And I think there is a deeply
Speaker 1: troubling metaphor for our deference to these systems which are
Speaker 1: sold and marketed as intelligent, as human like, and as
Speaker 1: better than us. So then we don't have agency, We
Speaker 1: just we follow. We all become followers of a system
Speaker 1: that we didn't choose to create, and we deny our
Speaker 1: knowledge of ourselves. I have this smart ring. I wake
Speaker 1: up in the morning and my wife says, how'd you sleep?
Speaker 1: That's anything. I slept pretty good. Then I checked the
Speaker 1: app and the ring says I didn't sleep pretty good,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, correction, I apparently I had a terrible
Speaker 1: night sleep. I need to try harder to sleep tonight
Speaker 1: because the ring told me I don't feel the way
Speaker 1: I feel, and so I find that deeply troubling. Man
Speaker 1: and spending all this time with intelligence of an artificial
Speaker 1: nature creates gaps with a different form of nature that
Speaker 1: I think we need to try to maintain. Otherwise, we
Speaker 1: just follow these generated instructions for what to do with
Speaker 1: every moment of our lives. How to tourist city, what
Speaker 1: to cook for dinner, where to turn in our vehicles,
Speaker 1: who to mate with. It's very optimal, it's very optimized,
Speaker 1: it's very efficient. It's also dead. If life is just
Speaker 1: following instructions from a computer, we get to live longer,
Speaker 1: we have less life. I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's kind of weird.
Speaker 4: The one thing I would say to that is that
Speaker 4: I think that we're a little bit more in control
Speaker 4: about our choices and how much tech is in our
Speaker 4: lives than what you just describe. For instance, like if
Speaker 4: you realize that like you are sleeping just fine, and
Speaker 4: the smart ring is telling you otherwise, so you probably
Speaker 4: get to a point where like, screw you, smart you
Speaker 4: were not useful to me anymore.
Speaker 2: With the GPS.
Speaker 4: Example, one time I was in Bulgaria with my sister.
Speaker 2: We were driving.
Speaker 4: Google Maps told us to go straight.
Speaker 1: We looked at.
Speaker 4: This freshly painted sign from the Bulgarian government that told
Speaker 4: us to turn left, and we were like, no, like
Speaker 4: the Internet gods know all, we will go straight. And
Speaker 4: of course the straight road led us like into the
Speaker 4: woods in the moullains gravel road we you know, popped
Speaker 4: or tire we had to get toe trucked. Left was
Speaker 4: the way that we should have gone. So that seems
Speaker 4: to prove your point.
Speaker 1: But the other side of us the government, Yes, trust.
Speaker 4: The freshly painted side from the Bulgarian But the other
Speaker 4: side of that is, now that I've had that experience,
Speaker 4: I'm like, Emma, if your gut reaction is telling you something,
Speaker 4: go with that instead of the Internet God. So there
Speaker 4: is an adjustment process here and a little bit more
Speaker 4: of have a choice aspect to it.
Speaker 1: And here's the good. I think, here's the opportunity and
Speaker 1: the invitation in this moment for us, as we have
Speaker 1: a much more artificial existence, we will value natural existence
Speaker 1: even more. Like I get to spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time in the outdoors, in the woods, on rivers and mountains.
Speaker 1: I make this beautiful show on public television in the
Speaker 1: US called America Outdoors, and I just I love that.
Speaker 1: I was fly fishing with foster kids two weeks ago,
Speaker 1: standing in a stream, just popping shrout out. They trained
Speaker 1: me well, and is the opposite feeling of being efficient
Speaker 1: and making sure that every physical step I take in
Speaker 1: the world is maximally optimized to minimize discomfort and paint.
Speaker 1: It was pretty uncomfortable in that stream at times it
Speaker 1: was cold, but it was so real and so grounded.
Speaker 1: And my experience with the ring, your experience with the
Speaker 1: Bulgarian freshly painted sign. Being way smarter than the smart
Speaker 1: tech of Google, which is one of the smartest entities
Speaker 1: ever created, Like collective wisdom inside the Google machine is
Speaker 1: extraordinarily intelligent, more so than any single human being but
Speaker 1: that sign was right and Google is wrong. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. You've got an extra caution. And there's
Speaker 1: gonna be some tickle that we all feel where we
Speaker 1: get to choose, Okay, what instruction, what feeling, what intuition
Speaker 1: do I want to listen to? And we got to
Speaker 1: practice that though I think for me most of the time,
Speaker 1: I'm going to follow the GPS. Otherwise why do I
Speaker 1: have it? Right? If I question everything the machine tells
Speaker 1: me to do, then that machine's not doing its job.
Speaker 1: So on net like, overall, we're going to tend toward following.
Speaker 1: That's the whole premise of creating these systems. But if
Speaker 1: we can decide maybe not now, maybe not today, maybe
Speaker 1: I need to break put some more agency back into this.
Speaker 1: Maybe we need to redesign this thing. Maybe it needs
Speaker 1: to ask us questions. I don't know, there's just gotta
Speaker 1: be something more, And I think it's going to force
Speaker 1: many of us to ask why, right, what if we
Speaker 1: could eliminate so much work and so much drudgery and
Speaker 1: so much labor again, always promised, never delivered, But maybe
Speaker 1: that's kind of different. Then what would we do with
Speaker 1: all that time? Would I let my report write itself,
Speaker 1: so I could take a walk with my wife and
Speaker 1: just connect more. Would I let those emails send themselves
Speaker 1: so I could call my sister instead, That's a great
Speaker 1: trade off. Let the email write itself, Let it respond
Speaker 1: to the email that someone else's robots send. Let the
Speaker 1: robots do all the emailing, and just give me a
Speaker 1: weekly report on what I said this week, so that
Speaker 1: I could meditate more and do some psychedelics and to
Speaker 1: try to achieve some higher plane of existence. That's glorious,
Speaker 1: that's really great. Most of the employers of the world,
Speaker 1: they won't see it that way, and they'd be like, oh, great,
Speaker 1: you don't have to focus on writing emails. You can
Speaker 1: do xyzning instead. You can proofread the robots emails.
Speaker 3: Okay, So on the flip side of all this, and
Speaker 3: I do love the It's totally right about the GPS.
Speaker 3: You know, one of the effects of our technologies in
Speaker 3: this case is no one's ever lost and no one
Speaker 3: ever knows where they are. And that is true for
Speaker 3: a plethora of our daily realities. Again, part of the
Speaker 3: ethos of doing what we go right is we do
Speaker 3: have a very human tendency to look at problems and
Speaker 3: both evolutionarily and culturally. That's not always a bad tendency, right.
Speaker 3: We are constantly and I've alert for that which will,
Speaker 3: if not now, soon be a threat and be a danger.
Speaker 3: The flip side is we always lose sight of the past, right,
Speaker 3: because the past isn't particularly real. In the future isn't either,
Speaker 3: But the future we can invest with hopes and dreams.
Speaker 3: In the past we can being back with unrequited desires.
Speaker 3: And like a lot of human history, labor to just
Speaker 3: produce food. If you looked at the amount of energy
Speaker 3: and human hours to produce a loaf of bread two
Speaker 3: hundred years ago versus now, right of human labor to
Speaker 3: do these things has in fact freed up all this
Speaker 3: other labor to do email right, meaning you are the
Speaker 3: right that one type of work pushes out another type
Speaker 3: of work.
Speaker 1: And to watch Netflix. Right, we are more entertained than ever,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: Our leisure time has gone up and our work time
Speaker 3: has become more elastic. But I guess I would push
Speaker 3: back and offer the following. I'm not saying I'm right
Speaker 3: about this, I'm just something I think about, which is,
Speaker 3: if you really did in your sort of small d
Speaker 3: collective global democracy. Way tried to get buy in from
Speaker 3: a planetary population about what these technologies are doing, or
Speaker 3: what the arc of modernity and capitalism has done, I think.
Speaker 1: Net you would probably find more buy in than not to.
Speaker 6: Like.
Speaker 3: These things have allowed for far less physical labor, longer lives,
Speaker 3: and the ease of procuring material necessities and material desires.
Speaker 1: So while a lot of the.
Speaker 3: Benefits have unfairly or inequitably, I don't know whether it's
Speaker 3: unfair enough'll have inequitably flowed to the few and not
Speaker 3: to the many.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that I agree.
Speaker 3: That the system itself would be radically different if you
Speaker 3: had if it weren't quite so foisted upon you.
Speaker 1: But was in fact, like voted upon. When I talk
Speaker 1: about small D democracy, I'm not talking about updown votes.
Speaker 1: And I think, just as you rightly pointed out, like
Speaker 1: what do we mean when we say capitalism, we're not
Speaker 1: always clear about that. What do we mean when we
Speaker 1: say democracy? A lot of our experience of democracy is outsourcing, right,
Speaker 1: It's delegation to a chosen few to over simply make
Speaker 1: decisions on our behalf, and there's all kinds of corruptions
Speaker 1: of their motives and perversions of interest with money and gerrymandering,
Speaker 1: and a lot of things that have diluted the ability
Speaker 1: of our representative democracies to actually reflect the will of
Speaker 1: the people. Again not a partisan statement. I'm a very
Speaker 1: part of them person, but that is academically and mathematically demonstrable.
Speaker 1: So these citizen assemblies and deliberative democracy is like one
Speaker 1: form and practice where random assortments of people are selected,
Speaker 1: almost like juries, to develop policies, to weigh in on budgets,
Speaker 1: to advise or determine political decision making on behalf of
Speaker 1: a community, could be a city, could be a nation.
Speaker 1: I don't think an eight billion person citizen assembly makes
Speaker 1: any sense, but smaller collectives can roll up to something
Speaker 1: that better reflects what people actually want. We have a
Speaker 1: failure of democracy around abortion access and reproductive rights in
Speaker 1: the US, around gun sensical regulation of firearms safety and access.
Speaker 1: In this country, vast overwhelming numbers of people want a
Speaker 1: certain thing. Our democracy, in quotes, has not delivered it.
Speaker 1: It's failed in those particular points, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of other examples. If we could have a better process,
Speaker 1: we could have a better outcome that better reflects the nuance,
Speaker 1: the ranges, the exceptions that most people actually feel. And
Speaker 1: so when it comes to something like AI, we can,
Speaker 1: through a process bring in the hopes, the dreams, the concerns,
Speaker 1: the fears of many more people than a couple of
Speaker 1: machine language researchers and a couple of VC firms who
Speaker 1: think that what we really need to optimize is illustrations maybe,
Speaker 1: or is like asking workers what they would want to
Speaker 1: use these tools for rather than just imposing it. You
Speaker 1: might find and that there's basic, low tech ways This
Speaker 1: happens already through surveys, but that's when I refer to
Speaker 1: more small de democracy in the process. Part of what
Speaker 1: I'm hinting at is a different way of surveying and polling,
Speaker 1: a different way of gathering, soliciting input, and demonstrating alignment
Speaker 1: of desires or non desires in a way that our
Speaker 1: current political system and sometimes our business system are unable
Speaker 1: or have been increasingly unable to deliver on on the
Speaker 1: what could go right? What could go right with all
Speaker 1: this AI stuff is we are buried. We're overwhelmed with
Speaker 1: confusion around our financial services, around our health insurance situations.
Speaker 1: My friend Ron J. Williams has this view of like
Speaker 1: radical comprehensibility, and that is aided significantly. I unleashed chat
Speaker 1: GPT on my one hundred and eighty page health insurance
Speaker 1: coverage policy document. It was never meant for me to
Speaker 1: understand that document. These businesses, so many of them, they
Speaker 1: make money by making sure I don't understand how to
Speaker 1: get what they're actually offering me, and they hope I
Speaker 1: won't figure it out. Like it's a really shitty way
Speaker 1: to operate, but it's also can be really profitable. If
Speaker 1: we make people jump through thirty hoops and we know
Speaker 1: fifty percent of people only jump through two overage, we're
Speaker 1: good and you could pick a business. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of them that operate this way. These tools give me
Speaker 1: an army of robocallers, of legal scholars, of sentenced diagrammers,
Speaker 1: and researchers to throw against that wall without investing all
Speaker 1: the time it would take to become an expert myself,
Speaker 1: or just wait on hold that long to argue with
Speaker 1: an agent. I love that. I love that adversarial relationship.
Speaker 1: I love even in the playing field, And then I
Speaker 1: can imagine that for coordinating action, for climate, for making
Speaker 1: policing much more sane, and actually a public safety interest,
Speaker 1: not just an enforcement of property rights interest or a
Speaker 1: refuge of racism and slave catching. In the US as
Speaker 1: we've practiced, it that we could unleash these tools in
Speaker 1: the arms of civilian oversight boards, in the arms of judiciaries,
Speaker 1: in the arms of city councilors and activists to say,
Speaker 1: all right, let's analyze this in a much faster way.
Speaker 1: When the Justice Department has to come into a city
Speaker 1: and they get the right to review, I forget the
Speaker 1: specific language what they do, but they basically take years
Speaker 1: combing through and observing and then they write a low
Speaker 1: report and consent decrease. We don't have to do that
Speaker 1: one at a time. We could just say all police agencies,
Speaker 1: all meat inspection plans. There's where there's imbalances now and
Speaker 1: the folks who kind of abuse the advantage win because
Speaker 1: they just have more time. Nope, we can balance that out.
Speaker 1: So I think that's a great possibility, and I want
Speaker 1: to see that. I want to see it for climate
Speaker 1: stuff in particular, because we have to coordinate such complicated actions.
Speaker 1: Last example, I'm actually sitting on this right and I'm
Speaker 1: holding up this item is called future card. It's a
Speaker 1: visa debit card gives you five to six percent cash
Speaker 1: back for your lower carbon purchases. You buy an electronic
Speaker 1: item through back market, this secondhand marketplace instead of new
Speaker 1: you get more points for that. I'm a small investor
Speaker 1: in this disclosure. They built something on GPT chat dot green.
Speaker 1: It's green GPT and then lets you figure out all
Speaker 1: the subsidies for solar, for wind, for graywater systems that
Speaker 1: you're eligible for, and a lot more. It's basically a
Speaker 1: green economy expert at your fingertips, and you can throw
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff at it from your life, and
Speaker 1: it answers all these questions that would take me weeks
Speaker 1: to figure out the Riverside County rules on this and
Speaker 1: the LA County rules on that in the city of
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. And that's not designed to make it hard.
Speaker 1: It just is hard. So to simplify to make more accessible.
Speaker 1: It's incredible the effect on literacy. If you're not literate,
Speaker 1: these tools can help you behave as if you were
Speaker 1: and get access to the information and the power that
Speaker 1: comes through literacy without having to go through all the
Speaker 1: hoops that you might not have time to do. That
Speaker 1: A friend of mine is not so great at English.
Speaker 1: He's using it to improve his email communications, so he
Speaker 1: shows up more professionally, people understand him better, his dealings
Speaker 1: are smoother. Scale that scale that, So, yeah, it will
Speaker 1: be truly unlocking potential, freeing us up, enabling folks who've
Speaker 1: been disabled by their circumstance, by oppression, by whatever. I'm
Speaker 1: here for.
Speaker 3: That that's a really good note to wrap up a
Speaker 3: conversation that's in the middle of a conversation. So hopefully
Speaker 3: we can keep having the conversation. And clearly, like a
Speaker 3: lot of things that we talk about, and none of
Speaker 3: these are terminal conversations, right, These are not like election analyzes.
Speaker 3: These are like long term who are we?
Speaker 7: What are we?
Speaker 3: How are we going to shape the physical and spiritual
Speaker 3: and technological environment that we are all swimming in? And
Speaker 3: I think one thing that I do like about your
Speaker 3: writing and you're speaking is you are curious. And for me,
Speaker 3: curiosity is the openness to the new, and the openness
Speaker 3: to learn about the new and to not allow yourself
Speaker 3: to constantly just reimpose an a priori framework on that
Speaker 3: which is unfamiliar and new. Otherwise all you're doing is
Speaker 3: just stamping reality with a very rigid template.
Speaker 1: These calls to pause AI, for example, for six months,
Speaker 1: an arbitrary time unit, and an unclear meaning around pause.
Speaker 1: My instinct is instead to engagement. Right, So the way
Speaker 1: we resolve this, I don't think is just unplug the
Speaker 1: machine and then figure it all out and then plug
Speaker 1: the machine back in. And I think what Sam Altman,
Speaker 1: an open AI has said, which I find kind of
Speaker 1: shocked but not entirely to agree with, is we had
Speaker 1: to release this in beta because we couldn't figure this
Speaker 1: all out in the lab. And so there is some
Speaker 1: level of collaboration, like the concerns I'm raising, the excitement
Speaker 1: you're feeling, and everything in between. That is a somewhat
Speaker 1: democratic process in the sense that we're participating. I want
Speaker 1: the terms of that participation made much more clear and
Speaker 1: explicity and blah bla blah blah blah. But I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to offer these critiques or these hopes if
Speaker 1: I hadn't be able to play with the thing myself,
Speaker 1: and that is a really important part. If I could
Speaker 1: offer one last I think hopeful possibility here. What has
Speaker 1: jumped out the most from me from play I've played
Speaker 1: extensively with GPT four with mid Journey five. Those are
Speaker 1: my primary experiences, and then a little bit of production
Speaker 1: tools around video editing, audio editing for my own workflows.
Speaker 1: But those first two examples, I can ask it something
Speaker 1: and it can give me an okay response. My prompt
Speaker 1: is eh, if I focus on the prompt, really make
Speaker 1: it the most specific, the most nuanced kind of help
Speaker 1: speak it in the language I know it is prime
Speaker 1: to understand better than just my my own natural way
Speaker 1: of speaking. I get much higher quality responses. And I've
Speaker 1: done these experiments with like average prompt versus super prompt,
Speaker 1: and it just puts the focus on how you ask
Speaker 1: and it gives us this superpower, this performance enhancing drug,
Speaker 1: this thing that I think of increasingly as magic, where
Speaker 1: it's oh, we're casting spells and some you can cast
Speaker 1: the spell and turn your friend into a frog. Whoop,
Speaker 1: sorry I invoked the wrong spell. Or you can turn
Speaker 1: water into wine, which is a wonderful spell unless you
Speaker 1: really just need hydration, which case that's not the spell
Speaker 1: you want at the moment. But that's a point, like
Speaker 1: we need. This is going to force us slash invite
Speaker 1: us to be much clearer about what we actually want,
Speaker 1: and I think there's a micro little metaphor in that,
Speaker 1: the clarity of the question like what are you going
Speaker 1: to use this power for? Literally how are you going
Speaker 1: to ask? And that will determine what we get out
Speaker 1: of this in your next chat GPT session or over
Speaker 1: the next decade, as we ask ourselves what are we
Speaker 1: going to do with all this power.
Speaker 4: I think it's a perfect way to end. I'm glad
Speaker 4: you said the bit about the collaboration at the end
Speaker 4: as well, because I was going to remark upon that too,
Speaker 4: that now when you open chat GPT there's at least
Speaker 4: that little warning thing at the bottom that's like chat
Speaker 4: GPT may make up facts like.
Speaker 1: Please you know, be away.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but again it's what you said. This comes out
Speaker 4: of a dialogue with the public, and whether or not
Speaker 4: we're satisfied with the amount or scale dialogue is another thing,
Speaker 4: but there is some So yeah, anyway, I don't want
Speaker 4: to take too much away from your final statements because
Speaker 4: I think they're really poetic and we'll see what the
Speaker 4: magic of AI does for us or does to us.
Speaker 1: So thank you so much for coming on, and we'll
Speaker 1: determine it. We won't just see us, We'll create it ourselves.
Speaker 3: So I love that love, that love that I guess again,
Speaker 3: there are simply people who articulate their concerns and hopes
Speaker 3: about the world in a way that I think is
Speaker 3: more likely to lead to a constructive future, and there
Speaker 3: are those who do so in a way that seems
Speaker 3: like it's going to lead to a more conflicted, less
Speaker 3: constructive future. But Bartunda clearly embodies that both hard edged
Speaker 3: but open minded approach to what do we do about
Speaker 3: the world. And we didn't even get into a lot
Speaker 3: of the work that he's done over the past years,
Speaker 3: which is more about polarization and race and inequality. And
Speaker 3: even then, when dealing with these issues that are really fraught,
Speaker 3: he looks for and tries to create connection.
Speaker 4: And he's funny, right, That's the other big charm and
Speaker 4: talent that not everybody has. He was part of the Onion,
Speaker 4: he was a producer on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,
Speaker 4: and there's certainly something to be said about the power
Speaker 4: of humor.
Speaker 3: So hopefully we will continue to have more conversations with
Speaker 3: him and with others like that. But again, to me,
Speaker 3: that kind of epitomizes what we're trying to do and
Speaker 3: what we're trying to amplify.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the news, shall we.
Speaker 4: First news story that we have for today is busting
Speaker 4: the myth of the broke Millennial. And this is an
Speaker 4: article in the Atlantic by Gene Twangy. She has a
Speaker 4: new book coming out, so it's actually an excerpt from
Speaker 4: her new book. But the excerpt was fascinating. Right because
Speaker 4: I'm a millennial, I can say personally that that is
Speaker 4: a feeling among my friends that we got dealt the
Speaker 4: short end of the stick coming of working age during
Speaker 4: the financial crisis, that we had the pandemic, and they
Speaker 4: were very much So is this feeling of we're poor,
Speaker 4: we're broke, we're saddled by a student debt, we can't
Speaker 4: buy a house. Houses are really expensive anyway, so screw it.
Speaker 4: This life ain't for us. But the article is really
Speaker 4: about how it is true that millennials were behind when
Speaker 4: they first started working, but now they have caught up.
Speaker 4: Gene Twangy calls it a breath taking financial comeback that
Speaker 4: started in the late twenty tens, and so she does
Speaker 4: all this comparison of data of median household incomes compared
Speaker 4: to Gen X and Boomers at the same age. Basically,
Speaker 4: it's actually greater than Gen X and Boomers at the
Speaker 4: same age. Also adjusted for inflation, millennials have one of
Speaker 4: the three of us have a college degree by our
Speaker 4: late twenties. It's a first generation ever to have that
Speaker 4: kind of number, which means that our income is up,
Speaker 4: and there's fewer millennials in poverty than Gen X and
Speaker 4: Boomers at the same age, and home ownership rates are
Speaker 4: almost the same as like forty eight percent to around
Speaker 4: fifty percent, which all which is to say, this reputation
Speaker 4: as sad and broke is no longer true, and it's
Speaker 4: important that we rectify that and look.
Speaker 3: I think some of the challenges of why that image
Speaker 3: remains so profound is the media people or people who
Speaker 3: are creating content who tend to be overrepresented in places
Speaker 3: like New York and coastal cities like San Francisco, La.
Speaker 3: Those areas are actually pretty unaffordable relative to even pretty
Speaker 3: high incomes, and so there's an understandable tendency to magnify
Speaker 3: that as.
Speaker 1: A global reality.
Speaker 3: You yourself had the experience of having a pretty decent
Speaker 3: job in New York City, but that being inadequate to
Speaker 3: a lifestyle in New York City, and that is a
Speaker 3: real problem of New York. So it's not like there
Speaker 3: aren't pockets of places where cost of living and income
Speaker 3: are just not favorably aligned under any circumstances. But that
Speaker 3: doesn't make it actually nationally true.
Speaker 4: Right, or even just that it was true that millennials
Speaker 4: were having a hard time, but it's no longer true
Speaker 4: and regardless of where you live, right, And it's really
Speaker 4: important if we if that were true, right, it's it
Speaker 4: does call for what we see, which is, should we
Speaker 4: really be trusting capitalism with our economic fortune? Should be
Speaker 4: looking to other systems of government? It starts those trains
Speaker 4: of thought.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: But if it's not true, if the American dream is
Speaker 4: still live for millennials, and we'll continue down through gen
Speaker 4: Z and jen Alpha, hopefully that means that we need
Speaker 4: to take another look at things and think that actually,
Speaker 4: maybe the system is working all right.
Speaker 3: Exactly and recognize, Look, if you're an American, it's been
Speaker 3: a weird twenty plus years since the collapse of the
Speaker 3: Nasdaq bubble in March of two thousand through nine to
Speaker 3: eleven through everything else that has happened subsequently, It's been
Speaker 3: a really challenging cultural time, irrespective of it's also strong
Speaker 3: periods of being challenging economically. What we have.
Speaker 4: Next is gen Z blowing past other generations. That's the
Speaker 4: headline from Yahoo when it comes to four oh and
Speaker 4: k's and retirement saving. So this is actually, if I
Speaker 4: come from the narrative of the Brook millennial, I think
Speaker 4: like gen Z took a look at the world around them,
Speaker 4: They're like, ah, let me save a bunch of my money.
Speaker 4: Sixty two percent of eighteen to twenty four year olds
Speaker 4: contribute to four oh one k's in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: compared to only third percent in two thousand and six.
Speaker 4: And actually, despite what I just said about gen Z
Speaker 4: being scared, that's the personal adopes that I hear from
Speaker 4: people that are that age that they like have freaked
Speaker 4: out by what happened to millennials. But y'aho actually says
Speaker 4: that so many more gen zs are contributing for something
Speaker 4: that's really a small, boring change is just automatic enrollment
Speaker 4: in four oh and K plans went way up in
Speaker 4: two thousand and six, only eleven percent of employers offered
Speaker 4: automatic enrollment by the end of twenty twenty one, it's
Speaker 4: about fifty percent, so simple fixes.
Speaker 3: That is kind of wild, and especially when you consider
Speaker 3: that every single statistical model of investing and saving shows
Speaker 3: that the earlier you start, the delta between starting in
Speaker 3: your early twenties versus early thirties and what you will
Speaker 3: then have by the time you're in your sixties is massive.
Speaker 1: So it's not just.
Speaker 3: Isn't that good that there's a little more preemptive savings,
Speaker 3: it's that the change that will make across a lifetime
Speaker 3: if past trends hold, which obviously they could not, really
Speaker 3: sets that cohort up particular while in the future. So
Speaker 3: another piece of news, and that one I did no
Speaker 3: idea about.
Speaker 1: That's really cool.
Speaker 4: So let's talk a little bit about the right to repair.
Speaker 4: It's a topic we I don't think have covered on
Speaker 4: the podcast at all.
Speaker 7: We live in a free market, but when it comes to
Speaker 7: repairing electronics like smartphones.
Speaker 1: You are not free to choose where to go.
Speaker 7: If you were the hopeless person with a broken gadget,
Speaker 7: you'd immediately go to the Apple store, and that's exactly
Speaker 7: what Apple wants you to do. The company and many
Speaker 7: others restricts how and where you can.
Speaker 1: Repair your stuff.
Speaker 7: Anything that has a chip in it right now is
Speaker 7: probably impossible to repair without using the manufacturer.
Speaker 1: That means tractors and cards, it means your smartphone, It
Speaker 1: means increasingly the refrigerators and washing machines that people have
Speaker 1: in their homes. When something breaks and the only solution
Speaker 1: is to take it back to the manufacturer, they can
Speaker 1: charge you whatever they want.
Speaker 8: So this is a MacBook Pro Apple the Apple Store
Speaker 8: said would cost twelve hundred dollars to fix and wasn't
Speaker 8: worth doing. So if I walked in off the street
Speaker 8: with this problem, what would you charge to for the
Speaker 8: repair you.
Speaker 3: Just did, depending on the model, anywhere from seventy five
Speaker 3: to one fifty.
Speaker 4: June twenty two, twenty twenty two was the United States's
Speaker 4: first ever right to repair law. That was in Colorado,
Speaker 4: and it was actually for wheelchairs. And there's been a
Speaker 4: spate of laws since then, but the one that I
Speaker 4: wanted to highlight today from the month of April, again
Speaker 4: from Colorado, and it's the right to repair for farmers.
Speaker 4: And I wanted to highlight it because it's some one
Speaker 4: of those things where you learn you're like, that's crazy,
Speaker 4: Like I did not know that farmers did not have
Speaker 4: the right to repair their own equipment, So now they will,
Speaker 4: at least in Colorado. Generally, retailers like John Deere have
Speaker 4: made farmers come to their own stores to get tractors
Speaker 4: repaired or another farm machinery. Now they will be legally
Speaker 4: obliged to provide farmers with diagnostic tools, software documents, and
Speaker 4: repair manuals starting January first, and similar resources must be
Speaker 4: made available to independent technicians. So seems like a wind
Speaker 4: for farming.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, yet another one of there should be some balance
Speaker 3: between personal autonomy and corporate bottom line. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 3: some good news of the week, Emma, thank you.
Speaker 4: That is. I do also have to give a correction
Speaker 4: on news that we covered previously. I think it was
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks ago on the fentanyl test strips,
Speaker 4: and at the time I said that only two states
Speaker 4: allowed the sale of fentanyl test strips. That's because I
Speaker 4: completely misread a Cato Institute report that is incorrect. Thirty
Speaker 4: six states now allow the sale of fentonal test strips,
Speaker 4: which allow people to test to see if the drug
Speaker 4: they're about to take has fentyl in it. That's an
Speaker 4: addition of sixteen since January twenty twenty two, so the
Speaker 4: movement is definitely new. And at the time I said
Speaker 4: there's some movement here, not that much. I'm thankful to
Speaker 4: be wrong in a good direction.
Speaker 3: It's actually you underplayed your already good starle Yes.
Speaker 7: I did.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 4: And the remaining states that where it's not legal, there's
Speaker 4: pending legislation, so we're actually probably going to be seeing
Speaker 4: soon that it's legal across the US.
Speaker 6: Cool.
Speaker 1: Good to know.
Speaker 3: Thank you all for joining us for this.
Speaker 1: What Could Go Right and our conversation with Barton Day.
Speaker 3: This is weekly. Please sign up for the newsletter we
Speaker 3: also called what Could Go Right? Go to the Progress
Speaker 3: Network dot org and you can sign up and it's free.
Speaker 3: So thanks Emma, and we'll talk again next week.
Speaker 2: Thanks, I agree.
Speaker 4: What Could Go Write is produced by Andrew Steven executive
Speaker 4: produced by Jeff Umbro and the plug Vomberate. To find
Speaker 4: out more about What Could Go Right the Progress Network
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Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. Day