Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of the
Speaker 1: Weekly Zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from
Speaker 1: this week, all edited together into one NonStop infotainment laugh stravaganza. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: without further ado, here is the Weekly Zeitgeist. Miles. It
Speaker 1: is a full it is we needed. We needed this
Speaker 1: for our system. We've been having all these damn experts
Speaker 1: on lately. We needed intelligent guests, thoughtful guests, intelligent thoughtful,
Speaker 1: intelligent guest. We needed a pure chaos episode. We are
Speaker 1: thrilled to be joined in our thirty by comedian, a writer,
Speaker 1: an actor stand up albums with Blake album Stuffed Boy
Speaker 1: Live from the Pandemic All debut number one on iTunes.
Speaker 2: Samson.
Speaker 1: His album Twelve Years of Voicemails from tug Last to
Speaker 1: Blake Wexler charted on Billboard. Please welcome, the Hilarious, the Chaotic.
Speaker 1: He's riding a recumbent bike in short shorts and his
Speaker 1: plumpers are on full display.
Speaker 2: It's Blake. This is Blake Wexler.
Speaker 3: A k A.
Speaker 4: I have a special, a stand up comedy special, but
Speaker 4: geist my peak, I have two plumpers.
Speaker 5: What the hell am I doing here? I am a wexpert.
Speaker 5: I'm a wexpert, baby. This is i Heeart Media at
Speaker 5: its finest, Blake wexerm joined by Jack and Miles.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Show now too.
Speaker 5: Yes, I have data. We're gonna dive into the data.
Speaker 5: We're gonna talk to people on the ground and we
Speaker 5: are gonna say that they're long.
Speaker 7: On that.
Speaker 2: We have data that we're diving into. Today.
Speaker 1: We're gonna bring up the electoral map here and I'm
Speaker 1: going to show you which you know groups are reporting
Speaker 1: as blake.
Speaker 2: How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 5: This is the Electoral Community College. That's right, it's not
Speaker 5: it's a two year associates. I'm doing great, guys, Thank
Speaker 5: you so much for.
Speaker 2: Electoral Online College.
Speaker 5: Phoenix Phoenix exactly. This phoenix will not rise from the ashes.
Speaker 5: It has burnt itself to death. But yeah, no, I'm
Speaker 5: so psyched to be here as usual.
Speaker 2: Great. You gotta start a little late.
Speaker 1: We're busy integrating the Damian Lillard trade into our into
Speaker 1: our beings, into our personhood.
Speaker 2: Didn't see that coming.
Speaker 6: It's hard even gonna play for them, didn't he He
Speaker 6: only wanted to go to Miami, right, And now he's
Speaker 6: going to the Miami of the North Milwaukee milwa. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I want a body of water up there, right, one
Speaker 5: of those one of those great lakes.
Speaker 6: It's like, I'll be yeah that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, He's like, you're not going to Miami. But the
Speaker 2: team does have M and I in the first two
Speaker 2: letters of this yeah, so you.
Speaker 6: Got to read it. You got to read the whole word.
Speaker 1: They paid attention to the opening sound and the ending
Speaker 1: sound of the word city that he was asking to
Speaker 1: be traded to, nothing in between. May me, I think
Speaker 1: this trade is really fun. I know this isn't our
Speaker 1: NBA podcast, but I think it's fun. It brings Damian Lillard,
Speaker 1: puts him on a team that gives him a real
Speaker 1: chance of winning a title. It makes Giannis relevant again.
Speaker 1: Jannis is probably our most fun and lovable celebrity basketball
Speaker 1: player at the moment. So I'm I'm.
Speaker 6: Here for James Harden. I think James Harden is the
Speaker 6: most fun you know, la one.
Speaker 1: I think we can take our self hating Sixers fandom
Speaker 1: off the off the mic, but my Miles suggested a
Speaker 1: good new new line for for us when people ask
Speaker 1: if we're Sixer fans, that we we only recognize one
Speaker 1: team of sixers, Miles, you wanna tell him what it is?
Speaker 2: The January six Ers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the only that's the only sixers I recognize,
Speaker 1: and I'm not a fan of them, and I don't
Speaker 1: even know about another another group, Carmen. We do like
Speaker 1: to ask our guests, Yeah, what is something from your
Speaker 1: search history?
Speaker 2: Well, I was.
Speaker 8: Gonna say your first topic is a good one, but
Speaker 8: we'll go back to the no fault divorce. But I'm
Speaker 8: gonna tell you know what, And this is not even
Speaker 8: a plug or anything, but Carrie Washington's new memoir. She's
Speaker 8: just doing interviews and it just came out. And here's
Speaker 8: the thing. I had to google it because I'm reading
Speaker 8: everything about it. I haven't gotten the book yet. But
Speaker 8: she also, like me, found out that her biological father
Speaker 8: was not who she grew up with.
Speaker 2: Oh oh well, and that.
Speaker 8: Was kept from her whole life until she got booked
Speaker 8: on you know, Henry Lewis Kate's Junior skipped Junior's show
Speaker 8: on PBS.
Speaker 2: Oh for real.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and then I'm not telling you anything that's not
Speaker 8: out there. But then they contacted her or she was
Speaker 8: all excited and her parents were excited until they said, well,
Speaker 8: you need to do a DNA test, and then her
Speaker 8: parents were like, oh, excuse me, carry.
Speaker 2: He's talk to you. Take a second, you have something
Speaker 2: to tell you. That is the premise of the show.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 8: And it's funny because she, I mean, this also happened
Speaker 8: to me as well, which was what I write about.
Speaker 8: But what she describes really really well, which I so
Speaker 8: appreciate because it's not necessarily something people would think about,
Speaker 8: is she, like me, grew up her whole lives knowing
Speaker 8: something was wrong, something was off, almost like feeling like
Speaker 8: something was wrong with our bodies, like we didn't things
Speaker 8: didn't match up and that and it was really uncomfortable.
Speaker 8: Is very like a subconscious thing, and it's lots of
Speaker 8: anxiety and perfectionism, all this sort of stuff just happens
Speaker 8: and you don't even know why, right, and then this
Speaker 8: all this stuff comes out and you're like, oh, my
Speaker 8: parents have and keeping the truth from me my whole life,
Speaker 8: and you imagine living with them and then then they
Speaker 8: know and every time they look at you. So yeah,
Speaker 8: all to say, people, please talk to your children, tell
Speaker 8: them the true, Please tell them the truth. But that
Speaker 8: was my last that was my last.
Speaker 2: And Google search.
Speaker 1: Are you like, how radical is the radical honesty with
Speaker 1: the kids? Are you like a no Santa Claus thing?
Speaker 1: Or are you like, how how far are we going?
Speaker 1: Are we saying like straight up? Look Santa Clauss because
Speaker 1: their parents are liars.
Speaker 8: First of all, my child figured it out before I
Speaker 8: even had to say. She's like, she's that kind of kid.
Speaker 8: She's like, she's my kid. She was like, so I
Speaker 8: know who you are. I know who you are at hole,
Speaker 8: so you could stop it, but please keep writing it
Speaker 8: all my presence because it's cute. But I think that
Speaker 8: you know, like she she mentions as well, Carrie as like,
Speaker 8: when the secret is another human being? Right, you gotta talk, right,
Speaker 8: you're creating Basically, I say to people it's like look,
Speaker 8: and I get asked this a lot when I give talks.
Speaker 8: It's like, well, well, what is it?
Speaker 7: Is it?
Speaker 8: Entitlement? Like, what is it that makes you feeling it? Look,
Speaker 8: a secret is yours as long as it's yours. But
Speaker 8: when you create another human being that is no longer yours,
Speaker 8: that is actually a person, so it's no longer a secret.
Speaker 8: It's a human And we can say as parents like well,
Speaker 8: you're my kid. Listen, kids do not please everyone.
Speaker 9: Get this through your head.
Speaker 8: Kids not belong to you. They are not belongings. They
Speaker 8: are people, so you must treat them as such. And
Speaker 8: they're separate humans and you need to treat them that way.
Speaker 8: And part of that is being very honest about how
Speaker 8: they came about and what's going on in your life.
Speaker 8: But I will tell you a funny thing is I
Speaker 8: don't my daughter and I we talk a lot, but
Speaker 8: one of my nieces said something about my first husband.
Speaker 8: I can't remember how old my daughter was, but she
Speaker 8: was like maybe ten, and she was like, you've been
Speaker 8: married before.
Speaker 2: Like she was like, you kept this from me, And.
Speaker 8: I was like, I was like, girl, I just didn't
Speaker 8: think about it. Tell you, like, it was a long
Speaker 8: time ago, and it's so that's not a secret. It
Speaker 8: was just I just didn't think about it.
Speaker 2: But it was. It was hilarious, right right. I think
Speaker 2: if like to your point, like, if a secret alters
Speaker 2: someone's total understanding of themselves and the world they live in,
Speaker 2: it's like, no, then that's not a secret. That's a
Speaker 2: potential like psychic bomb that you have to diffuse as
Speaker 2: quickly as possible.
Speaker 8: Yeah, tremendous bomb and it affects your whole likely it
Speaker 8: literally affected me from the time I was a kid,
Speaker 8: like I remember it. It's definitely there. And you can't
Speaker 8: subconsciously carrying a secret like that and then living with
Speaker 8: your secret, right, Like what does that do to you
Speaker 8: and your relationship with that person? And my thing is like, look,
Speaker 8: you keep secrets in lines from people that you love.
Speaker 8: That creates such a big distance that person can't be
Speaker 8: your real friend or your real like love or you're
Speaker 8: real whatever, like where it's just a huge distance that
Speaker 8: separates you from people you love.
Speaker 1: So right, gosh, come clean. I have to have the
Speaker 1: courage to come clean. Doctor mcinnerney, what is something you
Speaker 1: think is overrated?
Speaker 7: I feel like I'm not gonna win myself any friends
Speaker 7: will be like how to let lose friends and stop
Speaker 7: influencing people. But all the Disney live action movies, I've
Speaker 7: hit a stage where I'm like, no more live actions,
Speaker 7: Like The Little Mermaid is beautiful. I love the original Cinderella,
Speaker 7: but you know I don't. I don't want to see
Speaker 7: more and more of like the same movies again, Like
Speaker 7: it makes me a bit sad and like what other
Speaker 7: stories could be told if it weren't like always making
Speaker 7: these live actions. But you know, maybe I'll be proven
Speaker 7: like totally wrong and the next one will be amazing.
Speaker 9: But I'm ready for something else.
Speaker 2: Just yeah. Based on everyone's first like sort of reaction,
Speaker 2: like oh, you saw how it was and you like,
Speaker 2: yeah it. No one was like it was so good,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna see it nine times. Everyone just kind of
Speaker 2: I think they're they have to reconcile like their love
Speaker 2: for the original source material with that and not fully
Speaker 2: be like I didn't like it. They're like yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean it's it's it's interesting. You know, It's like their
Speaker 2: voice just goes up.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was like glad, I spent my afternoon going to that.
Speaker 2: I think that's right.
Speaker 1: I've never been more confident in a prediction about the
Speaker 1: future of a like sub genre of movies than in
Speaker 1: saying that they're not going to suddenly figure something out
Speaker 1: about the Disney live action reskins of the animations, Like
Speaker 1: we we know what the original cartoons look like and
Speaker 1: what happens in them.
Speaker 2: We know what is possible here, right.
Speaker 1: I can't I can't imagine a version like what what
Speaker 1: they're gonna pull out where we're like, oh no, that
Speaker 1: is not did not see that one coming? Whoa that
Speaker 1: bear is talking and singing? Hold on, oh they already
Speaker 1: did that. That was the best one I think was
Speaker 1: Jungle Book and that was the first one they did,
Speaker 1: and ever since, I feel like, yeah, been diminishing returns man,
Speaker 1: although I didn't see The Little Mermaid, so I cannot
Speaker 1: speak to that one.
Speaker 2: Is you? What's your favorite genre of film though, doctor
Speaker 2: carry Ooh?
Speaker 7: I mean okay, so I really have a soft spot
Speaker 7: for like old school superhero movies. But my most recent
Speaker 7: most amazing film I film was the latest into the
Speaker 7: Spider Verse film, what was it? The Spider Verse? Yeah,
Speaker 7: and I just I love animation and that film. It's
Speaker 7: so witty and the visuals are.
Speaker 9: Extraordinary, just great films.
Speaker 7: So I oracle about how much I love these films
Speaker 7: at work and everyone has to deal with me being like, go.
Speaker 9: Watch it, So anyone listening, go watch it.
Speaker 2: Amazing favorite favorite Spider character Spider person in the universe.
Speaker 7: Oh my goodness, I can't remember the name of it.
Speaker 7: But the Light really like really like dark noir runs
Speaker 7: for the first one. He's like from like all those
Speaker 7: like nineteen thirties kind of like right, mystery films, they've
Speaker 7: all in black and white.
Speaker 9: I kind of love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it was it just Spider Man, Noirs, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think nor Spider Man.
Speaker 10: Maybe I don't know, or I'm sorry Spider Man, nor
Speaker 10: Nor What is when you say old school superhero movies,
Speaker 10: do you mean like Christopher Reeve's Superman or are you
Speaker 10: talking about.
Speaker 2: Like the first Iron Man? The First Iron Man.
Speaker 9: I think it's almost like less like specific films.
Speaker 7: I love, like almost films that have that like really
Speaker 7: cheesy like origin coming of age story, Like you know,
Speaker 7: for me, it's just really just about like they're discovering
Speaker 7: themselves and it's such a simple narrative, and like I
Speaker 7: feel like I should crave more complexity than that, and
Speaker 7: I should want it to be more nuanced.
Speaker 9: Stories, but sometimes it's just really satisfying and he wants.
Speaker 7: This clean cut narrative of this like good guy to
Speaker 7: beating all these bad guys when I want to relax,
Speaker 7: I really enjoy that. In my dage, I think about
Speaker 7: lots of like complexity and new wance and like what
Speaker 7: we do with the future of society, and so you know, right,
Speaker 7: sometimes I find it very relaxing just to be like souless.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're like, yeah, I love a Joseph Campbell type
Speaker 2: and flick. Just give me that hero's journey in everything.
Speaker 9: Okay, Yeah, yeah, it's gonna.
Speaker 2: Go wrong, challenge your old self to become your new self.
Speaker 1: Yes, but Doc is an example of what we're facing
Speaker 1: with AI like in the immediate future.
Speaker 2: I think we can all agree on that, right, Spiderman two.
Speaker 2: In a way, you're like, it's giving me the equivalent
Speaker 2: of like eight arms. In a way, you're like, oh boy,
Speaker 2: what is something doctor Higgins do you think is underrated? Underrated?
Speaker 2: Asking people for help?
Speaker 3: And I know that, like I know that some I
Speaker 3: listened to the show daily, and I know people have
Speaker 3: such good responses. But that was the only thing that
Speaker 3: came to mind for me in terms of underrated. And
Speaker 3: so that's why I'm on the show. Come to my
Speaker 3: live show on October eleventh. Yeah, well the Saints come
Speaker 3: listen to us babbel about absolutely nothing but no seriously
Speaker 3: asking for help. And I think I'm the older I'm getting,
Speaker 3: you know, I think that there's this you know, and
Speaker 3: again this could be the social justice in me. But
Speaker 3: I think, as you know, a marginalized person, we're always
Speaker 3: expected to have the answers to everything. We're always supposed
Speaker 3: to be the person like the world teaches you to
Speaker 3: be the smartest person in the room all the time,
Speaker 3: and I've just gotten to the point now where it's like, yes,
Speaker 3: I have a doctorate, but I'm still not the smartest
Speaker 3: person in the room. Like wouldn't anything say like support me, bitch,
Speaker 3: Like that is literally how I feel all the time now,
Speaker 3: Like I'm like, if I need help, I'm anna ask.
Speaker 3: I'm not that girl that's like I've got it together,
Speaker 3: like I'm good, Like my life is great. No, my
Speaker 3: life is literally three second it's a string from falling apart.
Speaker 3: So like, please help me, Like if you can help
Speaker 3: me in any way, whether it be like you know,
Speaker 3: giving me you know, a network or an email or
Speaker 3: a connect to something like ever below saying help me, right,
Speaker 3: because this life is hard, like just it's it's really
Speaker 3: really hard.
Speaker 2: So oh yeah, and I think there's also, yeah, there's
Speaker 2: people don't want to want to struggle in public. That's
Speaker 2: a huge reason why people don't ask for help or
Speaker 2: act like they don't like they got their shit all
Speaker 2: figured out. But it is like the most liberating and
Speaker 2: sort of like life affirming thing when you ask for
Speaker 2: like you'll be surprised you ask for help, the help
Speaker 2: that you will receive from people that are like in
Speaker 2: your circle. And I think that's also one of the
Speaker 2: underrated aspects of asking for it is like you will
Speaker 2: also realize like, damn, I go people on my corner. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'd say this is probably the most underrated thing of
Speaker 2: my adult life. This is this is a great underrated
Speaker 2: It's something I've had to do for like addiction issues
Speaker 2: I've had to do in like it's made my marriage better,
Speaker 2: and just in terms of it being good advice. We
Speaker 2: did this thing like there's this hack, yeah, one hack
Speaker 2: that Ben Franklin wants you to know. But there's this
Speaker 2: thing that Ben Franklin talks about that he realizes it's
Speaker 2: this like counterintuitive thing that if you ask someone for
Speaker 2: a favor.
Speaker 1: They and they do the favor for you, they will
Speaker 1: like you more. And it's a weird because you're showing
Speaker 1: vulnerability and there's like something like subconsciously of them like
Speaker 1: doing something for you, like their brain is like, well,
Speaker 1: they must be cool then, because I just did this
Speaker 1: thing for them. So it's like it's all around, Like
Speaker 1: just being willing to be vulnerable enough to ask for
Speaker 1: help opens this world of possibilities.
Speaker 2: And increase, you know, just everything.
Speaker 1: It makes your life better and richer in so many ways,
Speaker 1: you know, decreases loneliness, which is such a huge problem,
Speaker 1: like right now, Yeah, and all that being said, I
Speaker 1: can speak about it for a long time and like
Speaker 1: I still don't do it enough.
Speaker 2: Because it's hard.
Speaker 3: It is hard, and I think I was gonna say
Speaker 3: real quick, I think a really important thing is, you know,
Speaker 3: masculinity is as a as a like a thing, right,
Speaker 3: whether you talk about toxic masculine or masculine as a whole,
Speaker 3: like we're all three men. And I think so being
Speaker 3: even even for me being non binary, there's still this
Speaker 3: presentation of I'm male presenting to people in some way,
Speaker 3: and so I'm supposed to never be emotional enough to
Speaker 3: say I'm struggling. And I actually had to like acknowledge
Speaker 3: that a couple of like days ago, like two weeks ago.
Speaker 3: I was literally sitting in my office going like here
Speaker 3: comes the ideations, here comes to like no one loves you,
Speaker 3: no one cares like you're you're feeling very alone. So
Speaker 3: I had to hit my therapist back up and I
Speaker 3: had to say like, hey, I'm going I'm I'm literally
Speaker 3: slipping into this mindset again of being lonely and feeling
Speaker 3: like the world doesn't need me here, like I need help.
Speaker 3: And she was like, you know, let me get you back,
Speaker 3: and you know, let me get you back on the roster.
Speaker 3: And so I think that that's something that like I
Speaker 3: try to emulate and everything that I do. That like
Speaker 3: just because you see you know the shows, you see
Speaker 3: me on the network, and you see me on TV,
Speaker 3: and you see me with you know, celebrities. I mean
Speaker 3: I went to dinner with the celeb friend of mine
Speaker 3: just this weekend. People are like, oh, that's so cool.
Speaker 3: I'm like yeah, but we were sitting at the table
Speaker 3: literally almost crying with these other because we're all struggling,
Speaker 3: like we're all going through it. So yeah, it's just
Speaker 3: you know, asks for help literally, like people are not
Speaker 3: going to judge you for.
Speaker 2: Asking for help. So yeah, and that it's okay to
Speaker 2: be struggling. I think that's the other hard part is
Speaker 2: like whenever I start getting like, you know, I start
Speaker 2: having I start ruminating on shit or whatever. It's like, man,
Speaker 2: you feel mine, you get your shit together whatever. It's like, no, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's not that's not how you get out of it.
Speaker 2: You get out of it by being like Okay, okay,
Speaker 2: that's where we're at right now. Let's try and find
Speaker 2: a way to sort of pivot to something that feels
Speaker 2: a little bit better and then incrementally get out of there.
Speaker 2: But the whole like brute force of like I don't
Speaker 2: need to feel like this, damn it. Like it's yeah,
Speaker 2: guess what, it only makes shit worse. Yeah, what if
Speaker 2: you just said no to sadness? Though, if you just
Speaker 2: said no, like to drugs, Yeah, Like I don't know that.
Speaker 2: That seems just like yeah, it's just going to make
Speaker 2: me do more more sadness. That's right, more sadness. All right,
Speaker 2: let's take a quick break and we'll come back and
Speaker 2: speaking of sadness, we'll talk about the Republican Party and
Speaker 2: how things are going for them. We'll be right back
Speaker 2: and we're back.
Speaker 1: And doctor McNerney, as mentioned, I am an idiot on
Speaker 1: this AI stuff.
Speaker 2: I think I generally have like my version of AI up.
Speaker 1: Until last week. I guess like researching for our last
Speaker 1: Expert episode was what I had read in you know,
Speaker 1: mainstream articles that went viral and films move Hollywood films
Speaker 1: and then like messing around with open AI and or
Speaker 1: chat GPT. So I had this kind of disconnect in
Speaker 1: my mind where it was like, from an outsider's perspective,
Speaker 1: we have this C plus level like copywriter thing with
Speaker 1: like in chat GPT, GPT for and then like the
Speaker 1: Godfather of AI, who I'm just trusting people is the
Speaker 1: Godfather of AI, but that's what everyone uses, that same phrase,
Speaker 1: like the Godfather of AI just quit Google and says
Speaker 1: we're all fucked in the next.
Speaker 2: Couple of years. And I think it's confusing to.
Speaker 1: Me because I don't know exactly, like I can't even
Speaker 1: like picture the way how he thinks we're fucked. And
Speaker 1: there was this letter that was like we need to
Speaker 1: pause development on AI for in the near future, and
Speaker 1: I guess I'm just curious to hear your perspective on
Speaker 1: that pause letter and what the kind of dangers of
Speaker 1: AI are in the near future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because to Jack's point two, also, we were talking
Speaker 2: with Juao Sadoc last week at NYU about it, and
Speaker 2: like at the end of it, we're like, Okay, so
Speaker 2: it's not sky Net right from Terminator and they're like,
Speaker 2: oh great, But then we realize there's a raft of
Speaker 2: other things that come along with just not being the Terminator.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's I'm also from a similar perspective where
Speaker 2: I always assume sky Net.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally not alone in
Speaker 7: the dominance of ideas like sky Nee the Terminator, because
Speaker 7: so much of our cultural framework for understanding what AI
Speaker 7: is comes from a very narrow set of movie It's
Speaker 7: like the Terminator, like the Matrix, which always be this
Speaker 7: just AI is something that's going to dominate us. It's
Speaker 7: going to take over the world, and it's going to
Speaker 7: control us, and it's important to I think highlight that
Speaker 7: that's definitely not the only ideas that we have about AI.
Speaker 7: We've got thousands of years of thinking about our relationship
Speaker 7: with intelligent machines, and there's a lot of different cultural
Speaker 7: traditions that have really different ways of thinking about our
Speaker 7: relationships with AI and intelligent machines that could be much
Speaker 7: more positive, much more harmonious. And so I do think
Speaker 7: our immediacy of jumping to this idea of sky net
Speaker 7: is reflective of very much where we are right now. Right,
Speaker 7: I'm in the UK, you're in the US. These are
Speaker 7: countries that have a really long history of thinking about
Speaker 7: AI and very binary terms. So yes, I think it's
Speaker 7: important that we think about these long term risks of AI.
Speaker 7: And you mentioned the pause letter calling for a wholt
Speaker 7: to generating more large language models like chat GPT until
Speaker 7: it had a bit more of a moment to think
Speaker 7: about to the long term consequences of these models. But
Speaker 7: I think it's really important not just to think of
Speaker 7: the long term risks, but to think about which long
Speaker 7: term risks we prioritize, because I think the sky net
Speaker 7: terminated fantasy eats up a lot of oxygen about how
Speaker 7: we talk about AI's risks. But there's a lot of
Speaker 7: different risks to AI poses. So another long term risk
Speaker 7: that we don't talk about very much at all is
Speaker 7: the I'm at cost of AI right because AI it's
Speaker 7: hugely energy intensive. Data centers require a huge amount of
Speaker 7: water to function, and we have this massive problem of
Speaker 7: e waste produced by a lot of electronic systems. But
Speaker 7: that long term problem of climate crisis is much less exciting.
Speaker 7: It's really scary, it's really grounded and a lot of
Speaker 7: our experiences, and so it just doesn't seem to get
Speaker 7: as much airtime. So that's something that I think is
Speaker 7: really important, is changing the conversation a bit to say, Okay,
Speaker 7: it's sometimes interesting, sometimes scary to think about the terminator option,
Speaker 7: but what are some of the other long term options
Speaker 7: that could really shape our lives.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the degree to which the deck is being
Speaker 2: stacked towards the terminator option was surprising to me, Like
Speaker 2: we dug in last week a little bit to the
Speaker 2: two stories I had always heard that are like kind
Speaker 2: of put into the terminator version of AI taking over
Speaker 2: a category. There's the AI that like killed a person
Speaker 2: in a military exercise that decided to like eliminate its controller.
Speaker 2: And then there was the AI.
Speaker 1: That hired a task rabbit to pass the CAPSHA test.
Speaker 1: And like in both cases those are like the AI
Speaker 1: that killed a person in the military exercise, Like that
Speaker 1: was somebody claiming that, and then when they went back
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, I was just saying it could
Speaker 1: hypothetically do that.
Speaker 2: It was a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a thought experiment of what an AI
Speaker 1: could do in the right circumstances, and the task Rabbit
Speaker 1: one was more similar to the self driving car Elon
Speaker 1: Musk thing where it was just there was a human
Speaker 1: prompting it to do that thing that seems creepy to
Speaker 1: us when we start thinking about, oh, it's like scheming
Speaker 1: to get loose and get overcome the things that we're
Speaker 1: using to keep it hemmed in. So it does feel
Speaker 1: like there is an incentive structure set up for the
Speaker 1: people in charge of some of these major A companies
Speaker 1: to get us to believe that shit like to think
Speaker 1: to only focus on the AI v. Humanity, Like AI
Speaker 1: gets loose of its control of our controls for it
Speaker 1: and takes over and starts like killing people version of it.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious, like what are your thoughts on, Like
Speaker 1: why why why are they incentivized to do that when
Speaker 1: it would seem like, well, you don't want to make it,
Speaker 1: you don't want it to seem like this self driving
Speaker 1: car will take over and.
Speaker 2: Start kill your family.
Speaker 1: Yeah, start killing your family. It's so powerful, But it
Speaker 1: seems like with AI, they're more willing to buy into
Speaker 1: that fantasy and like have that fantasy projected to people
Speaker 1: who are are not as closely tied to the ins
Speaker 1: and outs of the industry.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I think that's such a point. I'm
Speaker 9: point because it's a weird thing about the AI.
Speaker 7: Industry, right, Like you would never have this kind of
Speaker 7: hype wave around something like broccoli where you say, oh,
Speaker 7: the broccoli, if you eat it could kill you or
Speaker 7: it could like transform the world, And then you wouldn't
Speaker 7: expect that to somehow get people to buy a lot
Speaker 7: more broccoli and just be like, I don't want to
Speaker 7: eat broccoli.
Speaker 1: Now that's so fucking good and powerful make you explode,
Speaker 1: like maybe like.
Speaker 7: It even worse broccoli that you can then also eat,
Speaker 7: you know what that broccoli would be doing. But I
Speaker 7: do think that we see this real cultivation of hype
Speaker 7: around AI, and that a lot of firms explicitly use
Speaker 7: that to sell their products. It gets people interested in
Speaker 7: it because on the one hand, people are really scared
Speaker 7: about the long term and short term impacts of AI.
Speaker 7: On the other hand, it also scared then though, of
Speaker 7: getting left behind. So you see more and more firms saying, well,
Speaker 7: now I've got to buy the latest generative AI tool
Speaker 7: so that I look really tech savvy and I look
Speaker 7: pick forward and I look futuristic, and so it's part
Speaker 7: of the bigger hype psyche, I think, to draw a
Speaker 7: lot of tension towards set products, but also to make
Speaker 7: them seem like this really edgy, desirable thing. But I
Speaker 7: think what's also interesting about both the stories that you
Speaker 7: raise is when you looked under the hood, there was
Speaker 7: human labor involved, right, There were people who were really central.
Speaker 9: To something that was attributed to an AI.
Speaker 7: And I think that's a really common story we see
Speaker 7: with a lot of the type around AI.
Speaker 9: Is often the way we tell those stories.
Speaker 7: Eraises a very real human labor that drives those products,
Speaker 7: whether it's the artists who originally made the images that
Speaker 7: train the generative AI through today the labelers all sorts
Speaker 7: of people who are really central to those processes.
Speaker 2: Right, And I know, like in your episode of The
Speaker 2: Good Robot when you're discussing the pause letter, you know,
Speaker 2: I think that the I think the version that we
Speaker 2: see as like sort of these short term threats at
Speaker 2: least and the most immediate way is like for me
Speaker 2: working in and around entertainment and people who work in
Speaker 2: advertising and seeing like an uptake in that section, I go, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: that's easy. Like I can see how a company immediately goes, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a tool, and then suddenly it's like and now
Speaker 2: you're on your ass because we'll just use the tool now,
Speaker 2: and we don't even need a person to prompt it
Speaker 2: or we need many We just need fewer people to
Speaker 2: operate it. So to me, I'm like, Okay, that's an
Speaker 2: obvious sort of thing I can see, like on the horizon.
Speaker 2: And you did talk about, well, there was a lot
Speaker 2: of talk of these sort of long term existential or
Speaker 2: quote unquote existential threats that there were a lot of
Speaker 2: things in the short term that we're actually ignoring. What
Speaker 2: are those sort of things that we need to bring
Speaker 2: a little bit more awareness to, Like I know you
Speaker 2: mentioned the climate, and I look at it from my perspective,
Speaker 2: I see like the just massive job loss that could happen.
Speaker 2: But what are sort of like the more short term
Speaker 2: things that kind of maybe are less sexy or interesting
Speaker 2: to the people who just want to write about killer
Speaker 2: terminators and things.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think less sexy is exactly the
Speaker 7: right phrase for this, which is a lot of the
Speaker 7: short term issues. I very much about entrenching existing forms
Speaker 7: of inequality and making them worse. That's often something people
Speaker 7: don't really want to hear about because they don't want
Speaker 7: to acknowledge its inequalities, or because it takes away from
Speaker 7: the shiny units of AI. It makes it very much
Speaker 7: like a lot of other technological revolutions that we're already seen,
Speaker 7: and that's super boring, Like you don't want to hear
Speaker 7: about how the wheel somehow brought about some kind of inequality.
Speaker 9: Are the big heart.
Speaker 7: Take for today, But yeah, I mean something that I
Speaker 7: look at, for example, are like very mundane but important technologies,
Speaker 7: like technologies used in recruitment and hiring. So I look
Speaker 7: at AI powered video interview tools and look at how
Speaker 7: that affects people's particular you know, likelihood of being employed
Speaker 7: and how they go through the workforce, and yep, it's
Speaker 7: less exciting seeming than the terminator. But again, when you
Speaker 7: look under the hood and dig into them, you're like,
Speaker 7: oh wow, this could actually really really compound inequalities that
Speaker 7: we see in the workforce under the guise of the
Speaker 7: idea that these tools are going to make hiring more fair,
Speaker 7: and that's a massive problem.
Speaker 2: Right, So, because like the idea of those hiring tools
Speaker 2: like will actually take away these sort of like demographic
Speaker 2: cues that someone might use to like, you know, they
Speaker 2: apply their own biases to so in fact it is
Speaker 2: the most equitable way to hire. But is it because
Speaker 2: of just the kinds of people that are creating these
Speaker 2: sort of systems, because they tends to be a bit
Speaker 2: one note that that's inherently where like sort of that
Speaker 2: like it begins to wobble a bit.
Speaker 9: It's a mixture.
Speaker 7: So of course, yes, the lack of diversity in the
Speaker 7: AI industry is like very stark. It's also sadly in
Speaker 7: the uk an industry where for example, women's representation is
Speaker 7: actually getting worse, not better.
Speaker 9: So that's a sad.
Speaker 7: Slap in the face for a lot of the progress
Speaker 7: narrative that we want to see. But sometimes it's not
Speaker 7: even necessarily that the people creating these tools have bad intentions,
Speaker 7: maybe not even that they're using faulty data sets or
Speaker 7: biased data sets. These are two of the really big
Speaker 7: problems that are flagged, But sometimes the underlying idea behind
Speaker 7: their product is just fogus, Like it's just a really
Speaker 7: bad concept and yet somehow it gets brought to market
Speaker 7: because of all this hype around AI. So with the
Speaker 7: video interview tools that we look at, for example, they
Speaker 7: basically claim that they can discern a candidates personality from
Speaker 7: their face and from their words, So how they talk,
Speaker 7: how they move, They can decide how extroverted you are,
Speaker 7: or how you know open you are, how neurotic you are,
Speaker 7: how conscientious you are, all these different markets of personality
Speaker 7: to which I would say, firstly, no, there's absolutely no
Speaker 7: when AI can do that. This is just a very
Speaker 7: old kind of racial pseudoscience making its way back into
Speaker 7: the mainstream, saying Okay, we can totally guess your personality
Speaker 7: from your face, Like it's like your friends looking at
Speaker 7: someone's profile picture on like Pinder or whatever and being
Speaker 7: like they look like they'd be really fun at a party.
Speaker 7: Like it's about that level of.
Speaker 2: Accuracy, you know.
Speaker 7: And then second, is that even a good way of
Speaker 7: judging if someone's gonna be good for a job, Like
Speaker 7: how extroverted do you want a person in the job
Speaker 7: to be? Maybe in your job that's really really helpful.
Speaker 7: In my job, I don't know how help well. So
Speaker 7: there's just kind of a lot of laws at the
Speaker 7: very you know, bottom of these products that we should
Speaker 7: be worried about.
Speaker 1: Just like a C minus level job hiring process. Like
Speaker 1: that's what I feel like so many of the things,
Speaker 1: like when you get down to them and see them
Speaker 1: in action, they're like not that good. Like it does
Speaker 1: feel like the whole thing is being hyped to a
Speaker 1: large degree. And like that's something I heard from somebody
Speaker 1: I know who like works in you know, like all
Speaker 1: of my friends who work in finance or like any
Speaker 1: of those things. Like my brain shuts off when he
Speaker 1: starts talking about what he does. But he was saying,
Speaker 1: like he pays attention to the market, and he was saying,
Speaker 1: there's like a big thing propping up the stock market
Speaker 1: right now is AI. And it really is like that,
Speaker 1: that's where so much of people's wealth is tied up,
Speaker 1: is in like the stock market, and it's just tied
Speaker 1: to like what you can get people excited about a
Speaker 1: lot of cases. So it really like that from that perspective,
Speaker 1: the incentive structure makes sense.
Speaker 2: Like you want people talking.
Speaker 1: About how your AI technology can do all these amazing
Speaker 1: things because that literally makes you have more money than
Speaker 1: you would have if they knew the truth.
Speaker 2: About your your product without being like yeah, wait, how
Speaker 2: many seven fingered Trump pictures can we create and right
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, man, fucking up millions into this.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, I mean that's kind of something that's really
Speaker 7: come out of the last few years is how many
Speaker 7: fans just use the label of AI to get funding.
Speaker 7: Like I think there was a study a couple of
Speaker 7: years ago that said, like of European AI startups didn't
Speaker 7: use AI, which I point, You're like, well, what are
Speaker 7: you doing?
Speaker 1: Well, we could though, this podcast is actually an AI
Speaker 1: podcast because eventually it could use AI. And before we
Speaker 1: were recording, Miles was actually putting in. He asked an
Speaker 1: AI to pitch him an episode of Friends in which
Speaker 1: the cast and you know, the people on the Friends
Speaker 1: on the show deal with the fallout from the events
Speaker 1: of nine to eleven. And it wouldn't do it. So
Speaker 1: we can't quite claim that we are an AI podcast yet, but.
Speaker 2: But we did it. Did do it when I said,
Speaker 2: do it, pitch me an episode where Joey and Monica
Speaker 2: drive Uber right from Yeah, and it did so clearly
Speaker 2: it because you can see where these guardrails out. They're like,
Speaker 2: don't do nine to eleven stuff though, that's right now.
Speaker 1: But I mean, so yeah, I think there's two things
Speaker 1: we're talking about here, like from from one perspective, like, yes,
Speaker 1: you could put it in the category of like, well, yes,
Speaker 1: the wheel makes racism or colonialism more Frictionless is a
Speaker 1: word that gets used a lot, but like literally in
Speaker 1: the case of the wheel, frictionless, but AI and like
Speaker 1: a lot of technology is designed to you make groups
Speaker 1: of people and like our interactions and the things that
Speaker 1: make people money more frictionless. And that's something that you
Speaker 1: guys have talked about on recent episodes of Good Robot,
Speaker 1: Like there's this one example that really jumped out to
Speaker 1: me that I think was from your most recent episode,
Speaker 1: or at least the one that's up most recently right
Speaker 1: now as we're recording this, where you guys were talking
Speaker 1: about a company that asked a regulating body to make
Speaker 1: an exception to a law around like a high risk
Speaker 1: use of AI, and the law said that people had
Speaker 1: to supervise the use of AI like just because it
Speaker 1: seemed dangerous, and the company appealed to the regulating body
Speaker 1: by saying, well, we just like that would cost too
Speaker 1: much and we would never be able to like scale
Speaker 1: this and make a profit. And it feels to me,
Speaker 1: like our answer as a civilization to that complaint needs
Speaker 1: to be that's not our problem, Like that's then you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be doing it. But instead, it seems like the
Speaker 1: answer too often, not just in AI, but just across
Speaker 1: the board, especially in the US, is like, Okay, well
Speaker 1: we have to make an exception so that they can
Speaker 1: make a profit around this technology, or else the technology
Speaker 1: won't get developed because the only thing that drives technological
Speaker 1: progress is like the profit motive. But that's you know,
Speaker 1: as I think you guys talked about in that episode,
Speaker 1: that's never been the best way to develop technology, Like
Speaker 1: it's it's been a good way sometimes to democratize existing technology,
Speaker 1: but like that's I don't know.
Speaker 2: I feel like that.
Speaker 1: Idea of you have to make it profitable, you have
Speaker 1: to make it easy on these companies to keep trying
Speaker 1: different things for AI to become profitable is baked in
Speaker 1: at a like cellular level at this point in how
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, Western colonial civilization.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think too often a lot of
Speaker 7: the technologies that shape our daily lives are made by
Speaker 7: a very narrow set of people who ultimately aren't beholden
Speaker 7: to us. They're beholden to their shareholders or to their
Speaker 7: boss and right, so they don't really have our best
Speaker 7: interests at heart, right, Like, for example, take this whole
Speaker 7: rebranding of like Twitter to X by Musk. I remember
Speaker 7: waking up and finding my little Twitter bird replaced with
Speaker 7: this huge X and just being like ugh. Con firstly
Speaker 7: because it was part of you know, Twitter's low decline,
Speaker 7: but secondly it maybe you feel pretty disappointed or really
Speaker 7: aware of the fact that one guy could have such
Speaker 7: a huge impact on how literally millions of.
Speaker 9: People use a social networking.
Speaker 7: Platform that's actually super important, you know, to their daily
Speaker 7: lives and has played a huge role in activist movements
Speaker 7: and fostering different communities. And I think that's a story
Speaker 7: we see time and time again with some of these
Speaker 7: big tech companies, which is not only do they have
Speaker 7: their own profit motive at heart, they also they're not
Speaker 7: beholden in any way to the public, and they're not
Speaker 7: being compelled by relation to make good decisions that.
Speaker 9: Necessarily benefit the public.
Speaker 7: So I think a really important question going forward is
Speaker 7: how do we support kinds of technology development that are
Speaker 7: very much based in the communities that the technology is for.
Speaker 7: I think one really big part of that is recognizing
Speaker 7: that so many AI models, as you mentioned right, they're
Speaker 7: designed to be scalable and that's how they make money.
Speaker 7: This idea that you can apply them globally and universally,
Speaker 7: and I think that's a big problem, partly because it
Speaker 7: often is really homogenizing. It can involve like explitting a
Speaker 7: model from the US usually out to the rest of
Speaker 7: the world.
Speaker 9: It's probably not actually appropriate.
Speaker 7: To using those contexts. But also a lot of really
Speaker 7: exciting and good uses of technology I think come from
Speaker 7: these really localized, specific, community based levels. So sometimes I
Speaker 7: think it can be about thinking smaller rather than bigger.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that was like another thing that struck me
Speaker 2: about like just all the warnings and even in that
Speaker 2: pause letter is sort of like the presumption that it's like, well,
Speaker 2: all you motherfuckers are going to use this, so we
Speaker 2: got to talk about it where it's like I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't even fucking know what it is. Like a
Speaker 2: second ago, I thought it was skyingad and now like
Speaker 2: you know, you have your company being like, yeah, we
Speaker 2: now have enterprise AI tools like welcome. You're like, but
Speaker 2: what am I huh like? And I think That's what's
Speaker 2: an really interesting thing about this as like a sort
Speaker 2: of technological advancement, is before people really understand what it is,
Speaker 2: there is like from the higher the powers that be
Speaker 2: sort of going into it being like, well, this is it?
Speaker 2: Like everyone's using it, but I'm still not sure how.
Speaker 2: And I guess that probably feeds into this whole model
Speaker 2: of generating as much, you know, excitement market excitement about
Speaker 2: AI is by taking the angle of like everything's different
Speaker 2: because everyone is going to be using AI. Most of
Speaker 2: y'all don't know what that is, but get ready. And
Speaker 2: I think that's what also makes it very confusing for me,
Speaker 2: as just like a lay person outside of the text sphere,
Speaker 2: to just be like, wait, so are we all using it?
Speaker 2: And even now I really I still can't see what
Speaker 2: that is and how that benefits me. And I think
Speaker 2: that's a big part of I'm sure your work too,
Speaker 2: or even like any ethicist, is to understand like, well,
Speaker 2: who does it? Ben Like, first, we're making this because
Speaker 2: it benefits who and how?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, I mean right now it benefits the
Speaker 2: companies that are making it. And it sort of feels
Speaker 2: like that's the way it's being presentved or slightly being like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you guys are gonna love this, but really it's we're
Speaker 2: going to benefit from the adoption of this technology.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think that's this crucial question. Is
Speaker 7: this stepping back and saying, actually, is this inevitable? And
Speaker 7: do we even want this in the first place? And
Speaker 7: I think that's what really frustrated me about the paut
Speaker 7: letter and about a number of kind of big tech
Speaker 7: figures signing on to it, is that they're very much
Speaker 7: pushing this narrative of like, oh, this is like unstoppable
Speaker 7: and it's inevitable and it's happening. We've got a fine
Speaker 7: way to deal with it. And it's like you're making
Speaker 7: it like you're the people literally making these technologies and
Speaker 7: a lot of cases, so I do you really think
Speaker 7: it's an existential risk to humanity?
Speaker 9: It's the fun of could even be that simple?
Speaker 7: But that's you know what makes me really then question
Speaker 7: their motives and sort of coming forward with a lot
Speaker 7: of this kind of very doom and gloom language. I
Speaker 7: think it's also interesting if you look at, for example,
Speaker 7: countries as national AI strategies. So if you look at
Speaker 7: say like China and the UK and the US and
Speaker 7: these countries that are now thinking about what their national
Speaker 7: long term AI strategy is going to be, they also
Speaker 7: very much frame it around the idea that AI is
Speaker 7: completely inevitable, that this is going to be the transformative
Speaker 7: technology for imaging the future, for geopolitical dominance, for economic supremacy.
Speaker 7: And again, I think as an ethesis to what I
Speaker 7: really want people to do is step back and say,
Speaker 7: I think we're actually at a crossroad so we can
Speaker 7: decide whether or not we think these technologies are good
Speaker 7: for us, and whether they are sustainable, whether they are
Speaker 7: a useful long term thing for our societies, or actually
Speaker 7: whether the benefits of these technologies are going to be
Speaker 7: experienced by very few people and the costs are going
Speaker 7: to be borne by many.
Speaker 1: Right, we talked last week about the scientific application that
Speaker 1: you know, used deep learning to figure out the shapes
Speaker 1: of proteins, the structures of proteins, and that could have
Speaker 1: some beneficial uses, will probably have some beneficial uses for
Speaker 1: you know, how we understand disease and medicine and how
Speaker 1: we treat that. But there are ways to probably differentiate
Speaker 1: and think about these things like it's not you don't
Speaker 1: just have to be either luddite or like AI pedal
Speaker 1: to the floor. You know, let's just get out of
Speaker 1: the way of the big companies. You know, it feels
Speaker 1: like but it is such a complicated technology that I
Speaker 1: think there's going to be inherent cloudiness around how people
Speaker 1: understand it and also manufactured cloudiness because it is in
Speaker 1: the overall system's benefit. The overall system being like CAP,
Speaker 1: it's in their benefit to generate like market excitement where
Speaker 1: there shouldn't be any.
Speaker 7: Basically, yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to generate
Speaker 7: this kind of nebulousness around AI because to some extent,
Speaker 7: we still don't really know.
Speaker 9: What it is.
Speaker 7: It's still more of a concept than anything else, because
Speaker 7: the term AI is like stretched and used to describe
Speaker 7: so many applications. Like I spent two years interviewing engineers
Speaker 7: and data scientists is a big tech firm, and they
Speaker 7: would sort of grumble, well, fifteen or twenty years ago,
Speaker 7: you know, we didn't even call this AI, and we
Speaker 7: were already doing it. It's just a decision tree, you know. Again,
Speaker 7: it's kind of part of that branding. But also we
Speaker 7: have these again thousands of years of stories and thinking
Speaker 7: about what an intelligent machine is and that means we
Speaker 7: can get super invested in super cloudy very very quickly.
Speaker 7: And yeah, I don't want people to feel bad for
Speaker 7: being scared of being cloudy about these technologies, like it
Speaker 7: is dense and confusing, but at the same time, I
Speaker 7: do think that it is really important to come back
Speaker 7: to that question of what does this do for us? So,
Speaker 7: you know, the question of like Luddism or being a
Speaker 7: lude I think is really interesting because I you know,
Speaker 7: personally I do use AI applications. There's certain things about
Speaker 7: these technologies that really excite me. But I'm really sympathetic
Speaker 7: to some of the kind of old school ludyet who
Speaker 7: weren't necessarily anti technology, but we're really against the kind
Speaker 7: of impacts that technology we're having on their society.
Speaker 9: So the way that new technology is like I think
Speaker 9: it would be.
Speaker 7: Things like spinning and weaving, we're causing mass unemployment and
Speaker 7: the kind of broader grammifications that was having for people
Speaker 7: in the UK socially, and.
Speaker 9: That kind of has quite a scary parallel to.
Speaker 7: Today in terms of thinking about maybe what AI will
Speaker 7: bring about for the rest of us who maybe aren't
Speaker 7: researchers in a lab but who maybe might be replaced
Speaker 7: by some of these algorithms in terms of our work
Speaker 7: and our output.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you talk at all about open source like
Speaker 1: models of because you know, when we talk about this
Speaker 1: idea that orations have all this power and are incentivized
Speaker 1: to do whatever is going to make the most money,
Speaker 1: which in a lot of cases is going to be
Speaker 1: the thing that removes the friction from consumption decisions. And
Speaker 1: you know, just how people interact and do these things
Speaker 1: which well, as you guys talked about in your episode,
Speaker 1: like removing the friction, Like, friction can be really good
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes your system needs friction to stop and correct
Speaker 1: itself and recognize when bad shit, when things are going wrong.
Speaker 1: But you know, there's also a history in even in
Speaker 1: the US, where corporations are racing to get to a
Speaker 1: development and ultimately are beat by open source models of
Speaker 1: technological organizing around like getting a specific solution. Do you
Speaker 1: have any hope for like open source in the future
Speaker 1: of AI.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think I'm really interested in community
Speaker 7: forms of development, and I think open source is a
Speaker 7: really interesting example. I think we've seen other interesting examples
Speaker 7: around things like collective data labeling, and I think that
Speaker 7: these kinds of collective movements on the one hand, seem
Speaker 7: like a really exciting, community based alternative to the concentration
Speaker 7: of power in a very very narrow segment of tech companies.
Speaker 9: On the other hand, though, I think community work is
Speaker 9: really hard work.
Speaker 7: We had doctor David Adlani on our podcast, who's very
Speaker 7: important figure in Mascana, which is a grassroots organization that
Speaker 7: aims to bring some of the over four thousand African
Speaker 7: languages into natural language processing or NLP systems, and he
Speaker 7: talks a lot about how the work he does with
Speaker 7: Masakana is so valuable and so important, but it's also
Speaker 7: really really hard because when you're working in that kind
Speaker 7: of collective, decentralized environment, it can be much slower, and
Speaker 7: as you said, there can be a lot more friction
Speaker 7: in that process. But counter to this move fast break
Speaker 7: things kind of culture, sometimes that friction can be really
Speaker 7: productive and it can help us slow down and think about,
Speaker 7: you know, the decisions that we're making very intentionally, rather
Speaker 7: than just kind of racing as fast as we can
Speaker 7: to make the next newest, shiniest product.
Speaker 2: I was almost like, you're like in your work too,
Speaker 2: you know, you talk about how, you know, like looking
Speaker 2: at these technologies, especially through a lens of like feminism
Speaker 2: and intersectionality and you know, bipop communities and things like that,
Speaker 2: and I know, like broadly in science there's like, you know,
Speaker 2: there's an issue of like language hegemony in scientific research
Speaker 2: where if things aren't written in English a lot, sometimes
Speaker 2: studies just get fucking ignored because like I don't speak
Speaker 2: Spanish or I can't read Chinese. Therefore I don't know
Speaker 2: if this research is being done, and therefore it just
Speaker 2: doesn't exist because the larger community is like we all
Speaker 2: just think in English, Like, so how do you like
Speaker 2: you know specifically because you know, when hearing the description
Speaker 2: of your work help me understand, like and the listeners too,
Speaker 2: like of how we should be looking at these things
Speaker 2: from that also from that perspective too, because I think
Speaker 2: right now we're all caught up and like it's talking
Speaker 2: sky at and it's not you know, hold on, like
Speaker 2: there are other subtleties that actually we should really think
Speaker 2: deeply about because to your point, I feel like those
Speaker 2: are the dimensions of an emerging technology or trend or
Speaker 2: something that gets ignored because to your point, it's like
Speaker 2: the thing. Well, of course it's unequal, of course it's
Speaker 2: racist or whatever, But what are those like, what are
Speaker 2: those ways that people need to really be thinking about
Speaker 2: this technology?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think English language hegemony is a
Speaker 7: really good example of this broader problem of the more
Speaker 7: subtle kinds of exclusions that get built into these technologies,
Speaker 7: because I think we've all probably seen the cases of
Speaker 7: AI systems that have been really horrifically and explicitly racist
Speaker 7: or really horrifically sexist, from you know, Tay the chatbot
Speaker 7: that started spouting horrific right wing racist propaganda and had
Speaker 7: get taken down through to Amazon hiring tool that's systemically
Speaker 7: discriminated against female candidates. These are really I think avert
Speaker 7: depictions of the kinds of harms a I can do.
Speaker 7: But I think things like English language hegemony are also
Speaker 7: incredibly important for showing how existing kinds of exclusions and
Speaker 7: patterns of power get replicated in these tools. Because to
Speaker 7: an English language speaker, very crucially, they might use chat
Speaker 7: GPT and think this is great, this is what my
Speaker 7: whole world looks like if they only speak English. Obvious
Speaker 7: to anyone who is not a native English speaker or
Speaker 7: who doesn't only speak English. It's going to be an
Speaker 7: incredibly different experience. And that's where I think we see
Speaker 7: the benefits of these tools being really unequally distributed. I
Speaker 7: think it's also important because there's such exclusions in which
Speaker 7: kinds of languages and forms of communication can get translated
Speaker 7: into these systems. So, for example, I work with a
Speaker 7: linguists at the University of Newcastle and she talks about
Speaker 7: the fact that there's so many languages like signed languages
Speaker 7: and languages that don't have a written language, but they're
Speaker 7: never going to be translated into these tools and never
Speaker 7: are going to benefit from them. You might think, Okay, well,
Speaker 7: do these communities want those languages translated into an AI tool?
Speaker 9: Maybe maybe not. I'd argue, of course that's up to them.
Speaker 7: But those communities are still going to experience the negative
Speaker 7: effects of AI, like the climate cost of these tools,
Speaker 7: and so I think it's just really important, like you said,
Speaker 7: to think about what kinds of hegemony are getting further
Speaker 7: entrenched by AI powered technologies.
Speaker 1: All right, great, let's take a quick break and we'll
Speaker 1: come back and.
Speaker 2: Finish up with a few questions.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back, and we're back and there is
Speaker 1: somehow still a thing having been born in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: and like lived in like all my early memories are
Speaker 1: in a decade where it was just your brain on drugs,
Speaker 1: like just this weird, straightforward, just say noted drugs.
Speaker 2: I thought drugs were a.
Speaker 1: Thing people were going to make me do, like force
Speaker 1: into my blood stream when I.
Speaker 2: Got to high school. Well that's only Seattle, Jack, If
Speaker 2: you drive through Seattle, that will happen to you. That
Speaker 2: will happen. They will force it actually through your car.
Speaker 2: They have through your car window.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you can't. You have to have your windows up.
Speaker 1: Come on, they're they're gonna blow heroin into you and
Speaker 1: you you have to have the air recycling in your
Speaker 1: air in your car.
Speaker 2: Heroin gets in. But so, I I think we assumed
Speaker 2: that the DARE program went away, most of us, right
Speaker 2: until I saw I saw some people outside of a
Speaker 2: best Buy, like best by. Yeah did you see that?
Speaker 2: What you saw their people outside of the best Buy?
Speaker 3: Yeah it was the best Buy. Yeah, there people stand
Speaker 3: outside of the best spot. I don't know if they
Speaker 3: have like like there's a contract, right, Yeah, but that's
Speaker 3: where I saw their people too.
Speaker 2: I've seen their people outside two best buys before with
Speaker 2: like trying to get you to sign something, and all
Speaker 2: I said was like, y'all are what the fuck? I
Speaker 2: was like, Noah, and I'm here. I'm here for a
Speaker 2: mouse pad. Now leave me the fuck alone.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, I mean there there's obviously an epidemic
Speaker 1: of overdose deaths. Like the thing that Pewee Herman was
Speaker 1: saying in that ps A that we listened to up
Speaker 1: top is that was not true of crack, Like crack
Speaker 1: didn't have like an epidemic of od's, I don't think,
Speaker 1: but it did. Like that that is happening with fentanyl,
Speaker 1: like ventanyl is causing a massive spike and overdoses like
Speaker 1: and you don't know if there's too much and people
Speaker 1: like that does seem to be like the thing that
Speaker 1: they told us about drugs in the eighties has absolutely
Speaker 1: come true.
Speaker 2: It's called yeah, it might be, but one will happen
Speaker 2: and we will go fucking hog wild over this ship.
Speaker 1: Yes, so they've decided, Okay, this is real, no more
Speaker 1: fucking around. Let's go back to that idea that was
Speaker 1: proven to not work and was just a way to
Speaker 1: get money to funnel money to cops, right essentially. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the DARE program is being brought back to several
Speaker 1: school districts following a prolonged absence, this time with a
Speaker 1: specific focus on fentanyl. Doesn't seem like they've learned anything
Speaker 1: from the first time, Like that. The thing that people
Speaker 1: say was wrong with the DARE program in the first place.
Speaker 1: First of all, that it was cops, cops going into classrooms, Yep,
Speaker 1: yeah that part. Second of all, they were doing it
Speaker 1: too early. They were targeting kids who weren't really they're
Speaker 1: trying to like get it in kids' brains before, like
Speaker 1: drugs were a real thing to them.
Speaker 2: It's just like it. That's why it didn't work for me.
Speaker 3: My drug was power Rangers at it, right, I don't
Speaker 3: like I have no idea what a crack pipe is,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally or like I knew it from a movie.
Speaker 2: But like other than that, I was like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean I've seen seen New Jack City, but that's not
Speaker 2: that's not how I live. So yeah, because I think
Speaker 2: what I think, I was in fifth grade.
Speaker 3: Yeah, same, I was probably in like fourth or fifth
Speaker 3: grade when they started pushing there down my throat.
Speaker 2: And I just remember being like this is if anything,
Speaker 2: you're educating me on how like how drugs are. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's all that was. That was like my first real
Speaker 2: conversation about drugs, where like the cop brought drugs into
Speaker 2: the classroom and we passed it around and smell that pipe.
Speaker 2: That's the worst smell you're ever gonna smell. I remember
Speaker 2: saying that. I was like, that smells good. Actually cigarette
Speaker 2: for failure, But yeah, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it was created by U, the l
Speaker 1: a p D. Chief of Police Area Gate Baby, who
Speaker 1: his thoughts on recreational drug users is that they should
Speaker 1: be taken out and shot.
Speaker 2: Mmm. So well, okay, a very like humane approach to Yeah,
Speaker 2: drug it waste before do Tarte. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Tarte got his ship from Darrel, the Johnny apple Seed
Speaker 1: of the DARE program. But at its height, DARRE was
Speaker 1: being taught at a whopping seventy five percent of schools.
Speaker 1: By nineteen ninety eight, it was reportedly costing taxpayers six
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars a year. Yeah, and the presentations were
Speaker 1: just full of racist dog whistles, or just not dog whistles,
Speaker 1: just racism, like pointing to the broken black family as
Speaker 1: the source of the drug crisis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's going to it for Tommy White School. Have
Speaker 2: ob be like Miles, you know about that? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, does your parents your family? Yeah, you're like, I
Speaker 3: have no idea what this is.
Speaker 2: I would see your mom picking you up.
Speaker 3: Why yeah, whish dad, You're like, man, get out of
Speaker 3: my line. But the thing aways bugged me about Dare
Speaker 3: was like, it's like the gum theory. Do you I
Speaker 3: don't know if you all are familiar what I call it,
Speaker 3: the gum theory. It may not be real, but I
Speaker 3: think about it. It's like when you tell some Look,
Speaker 3: when you tell kids to not chew gum in school,
Speaker 3: they're gonna chew gum because you're.
Speaker 2: Telling them underground gum racket.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a whole like I was the girl
Speaker 3: that was bringing the gum to school to give to everybody.
Speaker 2: Like what are you so like?
Speaker 3: Dare was always like it was so dumb to me
Speaker 3: because I'm going, you're telling kids not to quote unquote
Speaker 3: do something, and all you're doing is you're just piquing
Speaker 3: their interest. But yes, it was very much riddled in
Speaker 3: anti blackness, and that is something that I've always had
Speaker 3: an issue with when it comes to this program's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're paying the least cool, least trustworthy people in
Speaker 2: your community to come into school and talk to the
Speaker 2: k the part of your community that most despises them, right, and.
Speaker 3: They put drugs on them. They put drugs on people.
Speaker 3: So how are you going to tell me? Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know. I've always had issues with DARE. I've always
Speaker 3: had she's with the police. But I will say very
Speaker 3: openly that I think DARE is just a way to
Speaker 3: make black people look worse than what the world already does.
Speaker 2: So yeah, just reinforce like the police perspective or what
Speaker 2: drug use even, Yeah, it's it's black people mostly. And
Speaker 2: then also like getting kids like snitch on their parents
Speaker 2: and shit like that. It's like they had I remember
Speaker 2: them having a box that you put a non airs
Speaker 2: notes into the DARE box and then at the end
Speaker 2: of the class, the DARE officer would read the questions.
Speaker 2: And this was just a thing that smartasses used.
Speaker 1: To like funny, make them read stupid shit. But yeah,
Speaker 1: apparently it ended like that that DARE box resulted in
Speaker 1: children like knarking on their parents and being removed from
Speaker 1: their own homes by social services because they revealed that
Speaker 1: their parents were taking drugs aka smoking a little bit
Speaker 1: of pot. So really cool problem solving there, creating fucking
Speaker 1: just situations.
Speaker 2: But like to doctor John's point, like it it's like
Speaker 2: verifiable that DARE did fuck all to prevent kids from
Speaker 2: using drugs, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the stats are officially in and it
Speaker 1: either had no effect or made children slightly more likely
Speaker 1: to use drugs and alcohol at an early age.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm telling you it did because I legitimately wanted
Speaker 2: to smoke. PCP told us, Yeah, he said, I'm not joking.
Speaker 2: I'm hearing my best friend. I know, but this is
Speaker 2: my fucking tannel, like my loven year old brain. Right.
Speaker 2: First of all, the first thing we always ask him
Speaker 2: at the top of every day class was can we
Speaker 2: hold your gun? Yeah? He never and he was like no,
Speaker 2: there's no way, but we asked it every time. He's like,
Speaker 2: you guys have to stop asking well, can you pull
Speaker 2: it out and show us the bullets? No, He's like
Speaker 2: we have to get going. He's like what is that?
Speaker 2: And then like we have kids who like new guns
Speaker 2: and he would always get annoyed. But so he's talked
Speaker 2: about this, like so we're gonna talk about PCP Angelush
Speaker 2: like that. I got this exact same speech. It's crazy.
Speaker 2: He said. He went to a call at a jack
Speaker 2: in the box where a guy had just beamed up,
Speaker 2: smoked some PCP and was fighting the police there and
Speaker 2: they had they needed back up. He said. When he
Speaker 2: got there, this guy who smoked PCP lifted a fucking
Speaker 2: dumpster about the head. I remember that story and threw
Speaker 2: it out a cop car.
Speaker 11: And me and my friends were all like, oh. We
Speaker 11: were like, yes, are you for powers? Yeah, We're like
Speaker 11: how does it give you? How does it give you strength?
Speaker 11: He's like, I'm not sure. It's like the drugs, the
Speaker 11: drugs duty It's like. But then like we're like, what
Speaker 11: is it?
Speaker 2: Like you your muscles, like could you work Like I
Speaker 2: remember asking like if you worked out on PCP, would
Speaker 2: you keep that strength? And he was so again irritated
Speaker 2: by my curiosity around PCP induced superhuman strength. But yeah,
Speaker 2: he just got mad. He's like, God, this is not
Speaker 2: a cool thing. And and it's funny that everybody, I
Speaker 2: guess someone everybody heard this version of PCP gives you
Speaker 2: superhuman strength, to the point where, like YouTube came out.
Speaker 2: I was I was scouring YouTube for footage of somebody
Speaker 2: on PCP with that kind of strength. Never found it,
Speaker 2: and I was like, this was this cop lying to me?
Speaker 2: And he was, oh, oh mm hmm, you believe that shit? Yes,
Speaker 2: cop life.
Speaker 1: And so as the stats are coming out, the DARE
Speaker 1: program is doing their own research, you know, and they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, well, we're gonna get the DOJ to fund
Speaker 1: this study to see what the like, what actually happened,
Speaker 1: what's actually going on here?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And a month later, for the first time in memory,
Speaker 2: the DOJ refused to publish a study it had funded
Speaker 2: for the first time I ever, wow, because it found
Speaker 2: that the DARE program was useless and was taking money
Speaker 2: away from programs that actually worked behind the scenes. DARE
Speaker 2: went ballistic, and they just kept saying this one like
Speaker 2: every time they get they get attacked. The DARE program
Speaker 2: is like criticizing dares like kicking your mother or saying
Speaker 2: that apple pie doesn't taste good. And then like a
Speaker 2: decade later they were criticized or like proven to be
Speaker 2: fraudulent again, and their response was, it's like kicking Santa Claus.
Speaker 2: To me, we're as pure as the driven snow so like,
Speaker 2: we're as pure as the Colombian cocaine we put in
Speaker 2: front of children. You're weekend Lumbian flake.
Speaker 3: I just want to know where the money went, Like,
Speaker 3: there was a lot of money that was being moved
Speaker 3: in the nineties around there, and I'm just, well, ye
Speaker 3: know where.
Speaker 6: It went right right right place?
Speaker 2: Two corrupt cops. I'm wondering about where where, Like did
Speaker 2: it go into some like but none of benevolent police fund?
Speaker 2: I wonder or it was just like if you got
Speaker 2: that Dare gig, They're like, oh shit, man, you're off
Speaker 2: street street the street beat. Oh you're just doing fucking
Speaker 2: Dare classes. Oh that's right right there they were.
Speaker 1: They were confiscating luxury cars like Porsches and BMW's and
Speaker 1: turning them into Dare vehicles, like with a Dare decal
Speaker 1: on it that they got to drive around. They were like,
Speaker 1: They're like, yeah, well it becomes pretty apparent who's winning here, though,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, right, And then the kid's like, wow,
Speaker 1: the police department buys you guys cars like no, we
Speaker 1: can't afford that.
Speaker 2: Drug dealers get rich enough to buy cars like this,
Speaker 2: And then you're like, oh, Okay, that's the wave. Yeah.
Speaker 3: In reality, they were doing the same exact thing that
Speaker 3: drug dealers were doing. They were selling you something. It's yeah,
Speaker 3: it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: But amazingly Dare still uses the Dare box, like they
Speaker 2: still really have the write down questions for folks. It's anonymous,
Speaker 2: purely anonymous.
Speaker 1: Psych We're actually going to investigate your parents if you
Speaker 1: say that you know what any of these things are?
Speaker 2: Right that, uh, that's smell familiar to you? Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: and where to Like. I could totally see being like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: I know, I know what that smells. That's weed, and
Speaker 2: then being like, well, yeah, how do you know that? Uh?
Speaker 2: I my parents? Yeah, just looking panicking and throwing your
Speaker 2: parents under the bus. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I was at a reggae festival recently. That's why I know.
Speaker 2: Next question, no questions. I need a lawyer. Offer for
Speaker 2: the questions. You're honored. Yeah, all right, that's gonna do it.
Speaker 1: For this week's weekly Zeitgeist, Please like and review the show.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, uh means the world to Miles.
Speaker 1: He he needs your validation.
Speaker 2: Folks. I hope you're having a great weekend.
Speaker 1: And I will all team Monday Bye.