Better Offline - The AI Industry Must Stop Doom Trolling w/ Cal Newport

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about AI companies “doom trolling” consumers using scary stories about conscious computers, and how we need to make fun of the scare-mongering and ridicule the executives peddling in it.Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen Cal Newport’s “Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs To Stop https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html  Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@CalNewportMedia/ Newsletter: https://calnewport.com New Yorker archive: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city,

in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host, Ed Zittron. Better Offline. That's right. I'm back, all of you. And to be clear, when I said I was having wisdom teeth surgery, I meant I was having more of them added to make me more powerful. The operation was to success.

I apologize also for doing this week in reverse with the longer episode on the Friday and the monologue on the, well, I guess Tuesday, I guess. I had to put out Open AIs financials at the last minute and well, here we are. Subscribe to the newsletter, ideally the premium to support your local Zitron Tron. And as ever, if you have anyone else's financials, you can catch me on Ezetron.76 on Signal. It's going to be in the episode notes. Anyway, today, now that I'm done drinking milkshakes, I'm joined by the wonderful computer science professor and writer Cal Newport to talk about AI, but specifically to talk about what he calls doom-trolling in one of the best pieces I have read on AI ever. Cal? Well, first of all, I'm disappointed. I've sent you

my financials multiple times in your signal chat, and yet you have not written 10,000 words about them yet. So I don't know what you're doing here. You haven't lost $11 billion or anything. You need to get those numbers down. I only write about bad companies. I wrote it off, though. It's okay. Yeah, you moved it to an SPV. That's right. I may have spent $11 billion, but really, I was profitable. It's just a matter of you look at it. But let's talk doom trolling, because you have this fantastic piece that talks about the fact that all these companies, Anthropic, Open AI, even deep mind to an extent, just keep selling things based on the destruction that AI will allegedly cause, though they appear to be talking about another kind of technology entirely

when you think about it. Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have forgotten or overlooking how strange this is, right? Because what we have here, let's just, let's abstract away from the particular products here and just say, what do we have here more abstractly as a business story? We have consumer product companies who are on a regular basis through interviews and official white paper releases trying to terrify their consumers about the harms that their products are going to cause. And if this was any of the industry, this would be completely mind boggling. The example I had in the New York Times op-ed is like if the CEO of Ford put out a white paper and was like, we're really worried that our F-150s are going to start catching on fire. and burning people to death.

But, you know, automotive technology, we can't impede it, and we're just going to get back to making them. We're like, what the hell are you talking about? But they're going to go 2,000 miles an hour at some point in the future. Yeah, we would just ban it. Yeah, it's consumer safety. No one would buy. Yeah, just it's really, it is something that's genuine.

I love the term doom trolling as well, because it really frames it well, because it's, it's all part of a larger complex of them never talking about what they're building today. It's always this theoretical, scary thingy that might, it's always two years or two minutes away, depending on who you're talking to. Yeah. So what I did was, I said, let's actually think this through, because I'm also a digital ethicist. I was like, let's actually think this through with our ethics hat on, right? Like, let's think through what particularly anthropic, I think is the most systematic in this propaganda campaign that I, you know, I analogized it to a cat leaving a dead bird on your doorstep and walking away. They just every two to three weeks want to drop some sort of doom troll.

document to get people freaked out and then they just back away and go back to what they're doing. And I kind of got fed up with this. So I said, let's do a moral analysis about this strategy. And I said, look, there's only two options here. Option number one, they really do think the technology they're building has put them on a trajectory to, and the best case destroying the economy or in the worst case wiping out humanity, in which case, every ethical system of, you know, any merit would say you have no other choice but to stop immediately what you're doing and use all of your time, energy, and treasure to try to stop other people from doing the same. The second case is you don't fully believe it, which means you are laundering the anxiety of hundreds of millions of people to try to make the bank

balances of a vanishingly small number of original stockholders larger, which I think is equally as morally monstrous. There is no moral analysis that says trying to frequently terrify people about the things you're building while making no adjustments to the things you're building. There's no moral calculus that says that makes sense. But because AI is new, And people don't understand the technology, and it's shiny, and we saw James Cameron's movies, we somehow treat this different. And I say, it's not different. This is a product that they are selling.

They are not the stewards of an inevitable technology. They are building products according to business plans and trying to sell them. They need to act like consumer product companies. We need to demand that they act like consumer product companies. Well, another thing that you have in the piece is that it's unclear. Like, that dichotomy is, it isn't clear why they're even doing this other than to make money. And also, they're not acting as if any of this is true. They're not doing anything that suggests that they're actually concerned.

You mentioned Dario Amade's thing about how, oh, we might need a pause in AI, or we should have that option. But that isn't actually what he was suggesting. He was suggesting something entirely different. Well, what they said was, and they got headlines. I had to look this up for the fact checker. They got every major publication to say, anthropic calls for worldwide pause and development. You read that section of their white paper, which by the way, reads like sci-fi that a ninth grader wrote, right? It's not, it's pseudo-scientific at best. It's not even really scientific.

It's, it's, I find their white paper sort of laughable. But they said in it, we should do a worldwide pause because the thing we're building is so dangerous, dot, dot, dot, dot. But we can't do that unless everybody in the world does the same thing, including China, essentially. And if that's not the case, we have to just keep going full speed. So what they said was, we should do worldwide pause, but of course we're not going to. It's really what they were saying there. But the point is, all right, so the report we're talking about here

came out a few weeks ago. If you haven't read it, this is basically the report where they just out of nowhere wrote a white paper with a bunch of charts. They always have charts where they were saying, pretty pictures and everything.

Pretty pictures and an animation that, I was just thinking of the little replicating thing. We'll get to self-learning AI in a second. But the report basically said, huh, Claude Code, which is a harness on top of an L. for helping to run computer programming projects.

Just to be clear, a harness is basically a series of scripts that runs on top of the LLM. It's a computer program that prompts an LLM and then parses the response the LLM gives and then actually takes actions on your computer based on what it reads, right? So it's the right. Yeah. And that's a whole other conversation about the coding world and how much is the harness and how much is the LLN. But they basically said this tool, which is a harness, it's an LLM and some other things.

This tool that computer software developers are using is getting really. good. And, you know, that could be, we think that it might be, looks like it's getting closer to be able to improve itself. And if it does, recursive self-improvement, which by the way, is that just, it's at the core of philosophical superintelligence, right? This sort of Silicon Valley cult-like thinking about computers replacing us. If it does, hey, maybe that'll be good for humanity. It'll cure all diseases. But also we could lose control of it. Thank you. Have a nice day. And they walked away. They just put out that report. That's the report. And the thing that I like about it as well is I think that we're in the next big thing is going to be RSI.

So just to be clear for the listeners, recursive self-improvement is just AI that builds itself. It is a theoretical concept. It has not happened yet. But mysteriously within the same six, seven-day period, this came out and Sam Altman said to his staff in a Slack message he knew would leak, Oh yeah, we might delay our IPO if we have signs of RSI, if we have signs of AI that can build itself. Meta a year ago said in personal superintelligence, we're seeing the early signs. And they're doing this because, in my opinion, maybe disagree, Cal, they've run out of ideas to the point that they're literally going back to what Sam Oatman said in 2019. Yeah, we'll just ask the AI what to do.

Yeah. Ask the AI out to build it. These guys have so few ideas. They're just like, Christ, can't we just make the AI do it? RSI is a get out of jail free car from a technical expertise standpoint. So, you know, we, we saw a lot of this a year or two ago when we had like Project 2027. We had these sort of post-GPT for warnings of, you know, existential crises. It's a get out of jail free card because if you ask like the authors of 2027, well, explain to me what a system that is smarter than humans and can fire the missiles and over, what does it look like?

how you architect it, like what, what allows it to do it? And their answer is, we don't have to figure that out. The AI will, right? Now, this is perfect. Not the history. We could history lesson this. This although, this goes all the way back to the 1960s. So there's a, there's a statistician, applied mathematician named IJ. Good. And he wrote a paper. It's really like an information theory paper, but he wrote a paper where he said, um, we, uh, if we think about it, he called it ultra-intelligence. Really, all you have to do is build a machine smart enough to improve itself. And then that machine will improve itself, that machine will improve itself. And then we'll get to ultra-intelligence. So we don't have to figure out how to do it. The danger lies in just

making the machine fast enough. So it was like a bit of a semi-thought experiment. That became the ur document of what I call like the philosophical superintelligence cultists. So this sort of, where the philosophers took this idea away from the technologist and began turning it into a sort of digital era scholasticism, where they sort of abstracted away all technical details and just started building list of list of list of lists, of list of all the different things that could happen. They just did a bunch of thought experiments about super intelligence and recursive self-improvement. They then merged with the utopian singularity people that were coming out of sort of Kurzweil's orbit. And you kind of created this group that was non-technical.

This is not engineers. is philosophers ethicist and sort of gadflies and speculative fiction writers and fan fiction writers like Yikowsky and they kind of created this sort of dumerous utopian cult and then what happened is that group was like we should create a non-profit

to look at these ideas and we'll take Sam Altman and put them in charge we'll call this open AI and then suddenly they were like oh my god this gen AI thing is working better than we thought and we have now a one of the, you know, someone coming out of this general kind of cultish, let's eschatological, you know, in times you could come through computers, was suddenly and accidentally in charge of the most important company in AI. And one of his, you know, lieutenants left to

start his own company and his name was Dario Amadee. So these, the two major players we have in AI right now come out of philosophical superintelligence, which uses this idea of RSI. And it's like a, It's like a parable. It's like an abstraction. This is not like a serious, it wasn't like a technical concern. It was like a thought experiment. And they are completely influencing the like the daily lives and psychological well-being of hundreds of millions and like the economic health of the entire world. So it's a really an interesting world we've ended up in now. And all of which is to say, I don't think we're talking enough about how weird these people are. I think we keep steering the conversation back to the technology itself. We keep steering the conversation back to. We keep steering the

conversation back to like, well, could it take over or not? And we need to spend some more time saying, wait, who are these people and what are they doing? They're doom trolling? This makes no sense. No company ever in the history of companies was ever trying to troll their own customers to be afraid of their products. They're treating their technology like a religious object. Like we are underestimating the weirdness of these people. And when we put that into focus, it completely changes our own psychological relationship with what's going on right now. Yeah, and I fully agree that it is almost a, I think it's a distraction as well from the actual reality of what these things are. And I think it's a deliberate one. I naturally fall on the

side of just thinking these people are deeply cynical. I've met people who think that Dario Amadee believes this stuff. I actually don't, I don't think they believe a fucking thing. I think that however you feel is however you feel, but I think that they, correctly realize that they could very easily make people talk about something that doesn't exist just by mentioning it. I saw a bunch of headlines that were like, wow, Anthropics seized the path to self-building AI. No, they don't. Other than the fact they had a single sentence saying, I see the path to this, they don't have any proof. They don't have anything. And yeah, you're right. These people are weird. I have seen people on XT everything app, Twitter,

actually posting that we are in AI 2027, that everything matches up with AI 2027. I want to be clear that the reason I mentioned this is I just brought this up, is that in early 2026 in AI 2027, they say that Agent 1 has already started doing its own research. That's not happening. None of that's happening. In fact, none of this is happening. These people are just weird fantasists. I think while there's the poison of the philosophers in them, I just think that Wario Amadei and Sam Altman both, I think that they both realize that journalists are easily con.

The investors are easily con that you can just say shit and anyone will print it and believe you because you're a CEO. I don't know how to answer that question because the more I look into how quasi-religious and cultish this sort of philosophical superintelligence community is. the more I get confused about what these people actually believe. So go spend time in Silicon Valley. Go spend time with... To be clear, when I say they, I'm referring specifically to Amadean Allman. I could fully believe that there are tons of people in the valley that 100% believe this, that they believe that this is the path to that.

Just to be abundantly clear, I don't think everyone is cynical. I think they've been easily conned, but I don't think that they're cynical. No, I could believe that as, and I could believe that as they, their companies got larger and their leadership roles got larger, that they have stepped away like, oh, this is, this was a little naive. That's possible. But also, I saw a news report today that Dario, I don't know if this is true. So I'm just, there's a headline I haven't read yet. Did he has like one direct report? Yes. So I don't think, you know, he's, he's necessarily in the war room with a thousand engineers and like doing a lot of business strategy here too. So it's possible. that these guys are more isolated than we think. I don't know. I mean, if he has one direct report, he's not doing anything. He's just going to meetings. Sorry, what are you saying? Yeah, but coming back to it, like what are the, whether they, how much they believe or not. And I hope they don't. Because again, I think it would be morally monstrous if you really believe this, that you're like, yeah, but I want to win an IPO. Like, I want to make more money. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I think that would

be morally monstrous, right? But like, if you think about what the benefits would, would be, this has led to a sort of discourse environment, essentially where you have a normal technology that's advancing along a jagged frontier, which is what happens with like new technologies. There's like certain applications where they feel like they're making progress and a lot of other applications where they're stuck. And so like they've been making progress with these coding systems that's kind of a scenario in which there's a lot of room for play with these type of systems. A lot of other things like non-coding agents, et cetera, is not going so well.

In math, they're making progress, but that's such a narrow field that it's not like economically relevant to them. So you could see this as just like a normal technology. And in chat, chat search, which is basically, you know, running Google search results through a language model, the natural language search, basically. So really places they're making progress, other places they're stuck. That's like an interesting normal technology story. But if you layer on this other sort of eskological.

story about we are on our way to utopia or dystopia and we keep trying to keep you like upset about that. Think about the way now when you're online how people think and talk about AI. It's all about if something made, if there's some new feature that works, if there's some new chart that goes better, that's evidence for the prophecy is true. And then that puts so much more power. Like if you otherwise just came to me and said like, hey, we have this like advance in our coding harnesses. I'd be like, I don't care. I'm not a software developer. But if you say, oh, that means that the prophecy of the RSI gods is true now, suddenly that is really eventful and I'm really excited or scared, but I'm giving a lot of import to your company. So I do think it generates

way more sense of import on these otherwise, like I think very, often very minor and jagged improvements. I mean, I think with other companies, if you kept putting out graphs that you created on measures you created. I was like, I don't know what that means. Tell me when, like, my business is going to be doing better, right? So there is a huge advantage, regardless of intention. There is a huge advantage to have the doom troll, because as long as people are terrified or extremely excited about this future. And then there's a secondary advantage. This is cynical, but I just want to throw it out here, Ed, because I'm sensing this more. I think there's a whole other substrata of sort of like tech adjacent people who are, you know, online or not, who got caught up

a little bit in that type of hype type vision. And now their pride is engaged. And so now they will interpret. I encounter this all the time, not even skepticism, just literally saying, oh, I don't think that tool,

people are struggling to use that tool well, or this is not a very profitable model here. They'll have to find another model. They interpret it as like, well, this is embarrassing because I was just telling my siblings and everyone at dinner last night about, because I use Claude Code,

and I think it's hell 9,000, and I was just, it's so excited about it. It's cognitive dissidents, and I'm embarrassed, and so now I'm a warrior for the prophecy. So I think you also have that substrate who are like, yeah, but what about? And then, you know, some metric that went up or something like that. And that's way in their benefit as well. You have a soldiers of marketers that are trying to basically protect their pride. Pride month, Toronto. Pride is an opportunity for you to create your own space, to celebrate your existence.

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you get your podcast. Open your free IHeart Radio app, search Pride, and listen now. Yeah, you've absolutely nailed it. The pride thing, again, hadn't thought of that, but you're right. The way that they react when you give, I mean, I just published Open AIs financials, and the pretzels they're contorting themselves into, the ways in which it's, Silicon Valley has always been this proudly atheistic, meritocratic, rugged pragmatism world, or at least this is how they sold themselves. It's not about your feelings.

It's about can you ship co? is your software good, does it make money? But something about this is really entered into the realm of religiosity, not even faith, because faith is a much stronger and more fundamentally sound thing. This is religious cultism, but the god is capital. Like you can say it's AI, but the god is capitalism. It is this idea that the big money people who are constantly threatening you. Like they just say like, yeah, it's going to kill you, it's going to take everything. I guess it's Pascal's wager as well. It's, well, I don't know if this is the case, but if they're all saying it, and if I'm wrong,

Rocco's Basilisk will drop an an anvil on me, I guess. It's frustrating, but also, I don't know what these people will do if the bubble, when the bubble burst. I don't know why I'm saying if, when it bursts, I don't know what these people will do because their worldview is built around existing outside of reality, almost. like that just this chat bot will become God, will become autonomous. And because I was there saying it would become autonomous, I will be given something. It's unclear what the reward is other than simpering. And there's something in it for them. That's the thing.

It's like, I guess maybe it's community they're finding. Replace AI with God, just like with church. And they would mock whoever was talking about it. They would mock anyone who took a sign of, well, this is proof that God exists, but they would look at a meter study and they'd go, well, that's proof that AGI is coming. Yeah. And it's so strange. Yeah.

It's like, hey, look at how complicated the structure of the leaf is. It's Paley, intelligent design. Like, God exists because of the argument from design. Like, they would mock that, right? Yeah, two seconds. Yeah. But they're like, hey, we can draw a unicorn in ticks using like a GPD4 prompt. Yeah, the AI God is coming.

But it's so strange as well. I've been writing about Silicon Valley bubble recently, this idea that basically the valley itself is a bubble inflating that will burst going back 10, 15 years because they ran out of new ideas, that they've not had anything good, not had a new smartphone or a new app store or a new cloud computing in a while. And I think that that's what's fed into this as well, because you've got that kind of desperation that we've run out of big ideas and then added this layer of fearmongering plus child. childish philosophy. Very, like, very much like, this shit must have hit so, this would hit so hard if I was 12. Yeah. I was 12, like, holy shit, yeah. Oh, I'm using this computer today and tomorrow will be ultra intelligent. I'm so smart for finding this first. It's deeply sad. I didn't think I could be more embarrassed by Silicon Valley, but the fact that these people are being this weird is, we need to call them weird. It's actually kind of unsettling as well. It's unsettling the also that you are one of the few people just saying it, that everyone else is acting like this is normal or rational or in any way logical?

Well, I'm trying to activate a bigger crowd here, right? And here's what I think we need. I think your use of the word embarrassing is key because the trend I'm seeing, which I don't like, is this idea of the people who instinctually do not like what's going on with these AI companies are trying to match the intent. intensity and hype of what they're saying, but going the other direction, right? And so they're like, they're destroying everything, right? Like, the environment will all be destroyed by the data centers and all education's going to end. And the idea being as like, I need to be as like,

as intense about all of the terribleness that your technology will cause as you are about like the good it will cause where I don't think that's playing into their hands. I think the right reaction is ridicule and embarrassment. This is where things need to be. If you read an anthropic white paper, you read these things. It's, we're now going to go through, we envision four possible futures for where this technology

could come. And then they just make up like four or 12 year old sci-fi. Maybe the technology will take over, but it will be in more of a sort of a church-Hillian mold and we'll wear top hats and that we could imagine a council of humans, but it would probably be like one-third humans and two-third robots

and, you know, like, just like working, it's just, it's just, it's just nonsense, right? Like, it's goofy. It's not, it's not philosophy. It's not, it's not technology. It's not political science. It's just goofy, right? And I think that, and I said this in the op-ed, I said, the zeit on this should could change really quickly, right? Where it's like, all right, Dario, is the AGI in the room with you right now?

Can you see the AGI in the room with you right? Because it's, that's like, that's the reaction I think we need. Plus, forget that. justify why I'm spending $1,000 a month on tokens. Like I don't want to hear your report about, you know, hey Ford, I don't need your report about the future in which we'll have transformers that will like help us police our streets.

I am spending this much money on gas for my F150. Like tell me like why that's worth it, right? Like just continually bring it back to you have really three products you're selling right now. Great. Sell a product. It's interesting technology. You make it a good product out of it.

Sell me. What are the benefits? Why is it worth the money? and I will take for granted. You better say it's not going to harm anyone because otherwise fix it so it doesn't. That should just be a good. Yeah, that's your job to fix.

That's your job to fix. And you don't, and just to throw in another moral argument I put in the New York Times op-ed, it is not actually a moral argument to say there's this thing we want to do that's going to cause potentially a lot of harm and destruction,

but that guy's going to do it. And as long as he's doing it, I get to do it too. That is what my eight-year-old says. Right? He's like, I know, but like he stole the cookies. Why can't I steal it too? So I do not understand this argument. It was in the latest anthropic paper.

We're building this technology. It might come alive and we might lose control of it. But how can we stop? Because China is also building the technology. And what if they build it and it comes alive and comes control? Why don't we get to do it too? What's the moral argument there? This is not like a nuclear deterrence argument that if you somehow destroy humanity first,

like what's the advantage there, right? Like, what game have you? want. So I don't understand that. But by bigger point here is like, yeah, I think we need to activate. I'm working on a big article now for a trade magazine for engineers actually, where I'm making this case, it's a cry to cure, you need to stand up and say, that's nonsense. Let's talk about your real technology. I know about this because I think there's a lot of people like me who are on the wrong coast. We're not on the West Coast. We don't, we haven't got to those cult meetings who are like, there's interesting technology here. And I want to hear about

the products. And this is actually where you and I maybe even differ a little bit. I, in that piece by saying, I'm pissed off because this should have been for a nerd like me, an exciting time. This is a cool technology. It's hard to make products out of it, but we should have been like kind of excited about, oh, I never thought about doing that with this. Oh, isn't that cool? What's going on? Instead, everyone is terrified. Like, you ruin this moment because of God knows why. We don't even have to get into it. So I think the right response from like actual engineers who are not part of that cult. And, you know, you got to swallow your pride. I get it. You were really excited to your cousin after you use Claude Code. Like, that's okay. Swallow your pride a little bit and say, this is doom trolling and it's embarrassing. Can we talk about the real technology like a normal product? There's cool things you can build. Some stuff isn't working. I want to know if my stock market portfolio is going to crash. Like, let's just be normal. Stop the weird stuff. Just stop it. Like you're a real company trying to sell real things. Let's talk about products. Like, why I want to spark a revolution to bring

things back than normal. I fully agree, and I even said I was on Chris Hayes his show a couple weeks ago. And I said, I think we should legally ban boosters from using the future tense. I don't think they should be allowed to say if either. I don't think they should be able to say will. I think they should only be allowed to talk about what's coming out today. You can go two weeks in the future, max. Yeah. I think that because when you read any story about AI that's positive, it always speaks in the future tense. It does not speak about what's happening now. And when they do speak about what's happening now, it's the vaguest stuff in the world. It's like, it can write or it can autonomously write software. Is the software good? No. Is it stable? No. Can you rely, can you even actually do

anything with it if you don't know what you're doing? No. Is the code overly for both? Yes. Like, it's like there are tons of problems with it, but one sentence allows the generalities to grow. And also, I think there's a very obvious reason they don't talk about the present. Because it's kind of boring. It is. Like, it's just, in comparison to a big, sexy, autonomous robot, it's incredibly boring to say, but also, the business doesn't work. The business, like, the business doesn't function. If they have to talk about why it costs $1,000 of API tokens to do something, they have to talk about the business, and they have to talk about what it does today. And the problem is with that is, so my position on this is, I don't mind on-device models. I actually think that's all that's

going to remain of LLMs. I think maybe we'll get some rag search stuff here and there. But I don't have animus with the non-data center ones. But I do agree that there needs to be, that people do need to stop fighting fire with fire as far as being like, if they're going to do more, we're going to say that all data centers are the worst, which they are. The water story's murky, but the environmental story is very real, especially with the behind the meter gas turbines. And the economics story, which you've been good on too, is like there's so much more money coming into building these centers and their centers being built. And that's going to be its own issue. But also just fundamentally, these weirdos are trying to make you scared of cloud software. Like that's my thing that I keep. It's like if such a Della every two weeks is like, you'll never fucking believe what Microsoft Word's going to do next, mate. You're never going to believe what Power BI is going to do with the dashboard. I saw a dashboard on Power BI. And I'm pretty sure. next week it's going to try and kill someone. You'd be like, you sound like a lunatic, man.

You sound like a crazy person. This is an insane. Sundar Peshai, yeah, Google search is going, oh, oh, any week now, you'd just laugh at. You would laugh at him. And the two, and the Microsoft guys are, are, are, Mustafa Suleyman. He's trying to, because he's not, he's trying to use the Dario Sam playbook, but he's not good at it. And so it's kind of, he's like, I think, you know, AI is going to, it's not only going to take over all jobs. It's going to create new jobs just to automate them.

And it's going to do it. Thursday. It'll do it Thursday. How about that? Is that guys? Is that, is that? I mean, it's like, do you like, he's turning a big dial. It says AI on it.

It's just like, do you like this? I love it as well. He'll even talk and be like, yeah, 12 to 18 months away. we're going to have super intelligence, but also anthropics too expensive. We can't pay them anymore. Yeah. But also, this is normal and it's not going to take jobs, but it's going to take all the jobs in two years, but not today, but not next week, but maybe in six months. And it's just that, yeah, they're using the Dario playbook with everything because they're just making the same things and they don't work particularly well. It's just so, these people are so weird. Now you've

said it now. It's all I can think about. So here's the, here's the logic I also. want people to avoid because it came up into what you were saying there. And I feel like maybe Chris did this a little bit in your interview. I have to go back and listen to it. But this logic. And I get it. And I'll give an explanation for it from a psychological perspective in a second. But there's this logic of if there's something I can point to where AI did something that I thought was like impressive or interesting or better than I thought, every prophecy is true. Yes. And I think I think it's, I don't know, psychological self-preservation or I don't know what it is but I don't under this this is again from like a logic point of view I teach logic to undergraduates like propositional logic I don't understand this is a it's an argument that's missing premises right so they're going from the premise of hey it's and it's almost always the same thing it's almost always a non-engineer using cloud code because it's really fun it's like a slot machine it especially you're you know it just like creates code. It works for simple things. And you're like, it's really fun. Like I've talked to, I know people who are like, they're just like, this is my new hobby. Like it's all, it's really fun if you're into that type of thing. Right. We talked about this earlier. It's like model trains for engineers. You do that. You're like, that was really cool. And then you translate that experience of like I really enjoyed that to, um, you know, I wonder what salt mind the AI overlords are going to assign me to. And it's a weird, that that leap of logic.

Can we just keep it as like, okay, this was really cool that you built this dashboard? We don't have to leap from that to, therefore, everything Dario Amadee said must be true. It's not this binary balancing on a fulcrum where we're just looking for like one, one little piece of evidence will tip it one way or the other. So I think we need to be careful about these elaborations. It's a jagged technology. Some things make more progress than others. Some things are cool.

Some things are more narrow than you would think. Like, you know, I built a really cool web-based game in Fable 5, which actually is probably just copying the source code of a similar game. Yeah. Does that mean like recursive self-improvement is coming? So what I'm hoping we can do is stop making these leaps of logic, where if you encounter any sort of feature or have any sort of positive experience with an AI product, that you then leap immediately to the conclusion that everything involved in the prophecy about the future of AI must be true. or to put, you know, someone like you and me now has to be put on the defensive of, I did something positive with AI. All right, Ed, doesn't that now mean everything anyone has ever said about AI is true?

Convince me I'm wrong. I think that logic is backwards that these grand proclamations of we're going to have self-improving AI. We're going to automate all jobs. Use the Carl Sagan quote, those remarkable claims require a remarkable amount of evidence. Why is everyone so quick of like this problem? product which you're working on and putting billions of dollars on, of course you're going to keep adding new features or finding things to improve. That is a given, a course. What technology in the

history of world would you have no improvements on if you're spending, you know, 10 to 20 billion a year in R&D? A course it's going to have improvements. Why are we leaping from that? Like, that means that anything you say, any speculative future you give about, you know, some sci-fi future is now the default unless we can prove otherwise. So we got to stop that logic too. We should be able to discuss, enjoy, or get around the implications of particular AI features without having to have that shift to a conversation about RSI or widespread job automation. I think what it is, it comes back to the pride thing. I think there's also something about LLMs and the way they make people feel. I, like, I'm on the spectrum, autistic.

People have probably worked that out from the third 10,000 word article, but I don't feel anything. when they're nice to me. I feel absolutely nothing. When the chatbot is like, wow, that was the great idea. I don't have, I don't respect it. I don't care what it thinks because it doesn't think. I don't see anything about what it's said. If it tells me I have a good idea, I'm like, I don't care. I feel nothing. I think that a lot of people do feel something. I think when they see these things, compliment them and do an impression of brainstorming with them, which is really just talking to yourself in the mirror, which can help. That can help. I've done it. I think that it makes them feel good. And also, your Claude Code example, I think that people feel very good about that and they feel very proficient and it makes them feel capable at something perhaps they were incapable of before. And thus, if you say to them, well, okay, that's just, that's fine. They go, no, no, I'm a big boy. I think there's something kind of almost childish about it. No, I'm special.

I'm special. Why aren't you impressed with it? And it's something the models are built to do. The ingratiation, I think, is important. But also, I think that the tech industry has done a really good job over the years of convincing us that everything gets better and better and better, even though it doesn't. Even though a lot of Google search has got worse. Facebook's got worse. Twitter's got worse. Honestly, I argue many parts of blue sky have got worse. It's less reliable at least. The experience of using the computer has got worse. We've hit a wall with innovation in general. But this thing, because it can kind of resemble anything if you want it to, I think touches

something dark in some people, not evil, but just like something very vulnerable and kind of weak and kind of gullible where they say, well, if I'm getting this out of this, then I'm part of the future. And I need someone to be impressed by this. This is now a part of my identity. And that's, I think that that might also be the differentiator here as well. I don't remember sure you had forum wars about gaming consoles. I'm sure you had you have Android versus iOS, whatever. Not like this. Yeah. Nothing like this. And I think that it touches something in people. Well, I, so I think there's a whole class of people where that's what's going on, especially the sort of pro-adjacent, tech pro-adjacent people on, you know, X who are who are

always yelling, well, but what about this? What about this? Right. And then I think the other thing that happens for a lot of people, especially who are a little bit more, uh, tech distance is it's a way of dealing with anxiety, right? Yeah. And if you think about this and like, we've talked about COVID before you and I, but I think it offers some good, you know, analogies here is like one of the ways when, you know, the virus was spreading but hadn't quite got to the U.S. or was just coming or the hospitals were overloaded in Italy or whatever. It's like one of the ways to deal with it psychologically was to get out in front of it and be like, this is going to be really bad. Like, I, you know, I'm on it. And, you know, you feel more prepared. Like, I'm not. You know,

I'm not going to be caught off guard. I'll be the one telling people how bad this is. And like somehow that does help you a little bit deal with like the anxiety of like impending dread. And I think there's a lot of that going on with this as well is like I'm anxious about this doom troll. And I've been doomed trolled so many. I'm going to kind of get out in front of it now. If I'm the one saying, well, wait a second. I get so many. I am for a lot of people now. They're like stress pacifier of like, well, what about this? Go. Right. Like I saw this thing that upset me. Like doesn't that mean? That means I think. I think. that means it is going to take it over and then they're kind of hoping that me or someone else will come in and be like, you don't really, it's okay. Like that's not as big of a deal as it seems. So I think both are going on. It's either like this gives me meaning, like I'm a part of the future if you're like using Claude Code. And if you're just using like chat GPT for natural language search, you might just be really anxious because you, you know, you hear these earnest podcasts where people are interviewing people about, you know, we'll have to eat our dogs when the jobs are gone. And you're like, well, if I get out in front of it, at least.

I feel like I have some autonomy in this dark thing that's happening. And so it's like common psychology, both of the psychologists equal dollar and cents for a, again, I keep going back to, remember, is a vanishingly small number of early investors who have large equity positions in these companies. That is who benefits from all of that. They will benefit immensely because no matter what that psychology is, this company is at the fulcrum of the future. And that's worthy of investing in, even if their revenue story is murky, even if their product store, is there's no moat and it is, I mean, I don't want to get into the economic weeds, but this is like a Clayton-Christinson fever dream what is happening with these companies and their products. What does that mean?

So he had this idea of, you know, talking about disruption from below that the problem is, is you're working on a high-end version of a product and you don't want to undermine your market so you try to keep it expensive and high-end. And then someone comes in from below with a different way of doing it this much cheaper and you're screwed because you ignored that market. All of these use, the use cases that are useful now that people are spending money on like software development tools and natural language search, here's the problem. You don't need a 10 trillion parameter language model to do this. And this is why these companies are so screwed and I think are trying to IPO as fast as they can, is that like someone's going to come along and say we're using a 20 billion parameter open source model with a really smart coding harness that we just coded ourselves on top of it and tweaked for the last two years. And you know what? people like it better than Claude Code, and it's a hundredth of the price, right?

Or natural language search. You don't need Claude Fable 5 to summarize Google search results, right? And the economics make no sense, but a small model could, a non-chip model could. That is why they're in trouble economically. In mid-month, Toronto,

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Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Pride and listen now. I also think that there is, and I do think there is a deeply cynical thing here, Well, let me reframe that. I think that people have to find ways to rationalize capitalism. I think that the only way that they could, the amount of times I hear a week of, it's just like Amazon Web Services, just like Uber, it's just like this. I have restated that point a hundred times. People sometimes listen, people sometimes don't. But people need to find a way, I think, to rationalize the massive expenditures and the current products do not provide that rationalization. Nothing about chat GPT or Claude or Claude or Claude or Fable or whatever actually rationalizes this.

A trillion dollars is too much money for anything outside of like universal healthcare and housing. In fact, probably could have taken care of that really easily. But nevertheless, people see that and they don't want to deal with the natural kind of dissonance they get, which is, wow, are all the companies run by people who don't know what's going on. And the answer is yes. Like, I don't think that there's actually a grand conspiracy. Oh my God, the emails I get every week, people being like, it's surveillance. It's a secret. It's a secret. Yeah, it's so secret. It's on CNBC every day. Oh, oh, they're all,

they're doing secret data centers. Yeah, it's called Oracle. Yeah. It's being, it's called Oracle. That's what Oracle does. Oracle has a huge, like, that's very well known. What do you, like, I think people need there to be a conspiracy because otherwise the answer is, which is what I believe, which is none of these companies had a plan. I think Sam Altman and Darry Amade thought we're going to throw a bunch of money at this and then God will come out. Yeah. Money, money, so much money, and then they will have ASI, AGI, whatever they call it, and then it happened. And then that didn't. They hit the diminishing returns at the end of 2024. And since then they've been kind of harnessing non-LLLM stuff on top of LLMs in an attempt to make them do stuff. But that's been so successful,

by the way, think about the doom trolling. This is another advantage of it. They've completely obfuscated exactly that point that you just made, which is that pre-training scaling, again, we've talked about this on the show, but it's had diminishing returns, you know, starting after 2024. And so all of the improvements that have come since then has been post-training, pre-trained models and building hand-coating harnesses with more and more special cases plugged into it to find more places for them to be useful, which is a completely different trajectory than 2023 where they were like, no, we'll just keep pre-trained scrawling these things until we have AGI. And they've created a sense of like, well, AI has been drastically

improving, hasn't it? And you said, well, wait a second. Like, if you told me in 2022, you know, when you're like, we're going to scale our way to AGI. And our vision of AGI is software development tools. Yeah, like, it's just dreadfully boring in comparison. That's boring. Or natural language Google. But you're like, but it's not just like a feature that like Google will just kind of otherwise would have just kept adding in. tweaking in a very like economically reasonable way? That's what I've been saying forever. It's like, yeah.

I thought like the reason that people like LLM search is pretty simple, that it responds to search how people have always used search, which is questions. You're like, hey, what about this and this? I've used AI mode with Google maybe three times and I always use it as like a trawling expedition to say like, has anyone ever said anything like this? And then it gave me a bunch of fake citations. Like just that happens every time. But then I'll find one weird PDF and it'll be like, oh, cool.

But isn't that, if LLMs didn't exist, I would expect Google Search to do that by now. Like that feels like a natural progression. But it's just normal, kind of boring. I always say it's like, oh, if they called it library models, it wouldn't be that big deal, but it would be a more accurate, like you just choose a regular name. People weren't freaking out about platform as a service tools. didn't hear all this bullshit about Kubernetes, which is way more fun to say than language models.

People have taken this. And the thing is, I don't think that the strategy was always we're going to doom troll. Like, I don't think they sat and thought about it very much. I think they just kind of oafmax their way. They just bumbled into it. And they're like, it's scary. And then they saw how well it worked. I think, I genuinely think, on an ethical level,

it's one of the most disgraceful things anyone's ever done. technologically, I think it's just, on top of the obfuscation of what these things actually do, it's horrible. It's a cruel thing to do. I hear from people all the times being like, am I going to lose my job to this? Why is my boss telling me I'm going to lose my job to this? What is this? Why is it different? Why am? And I think when they hear all the domerism and they use the product and they use claw code and they go, oh, it baffed out an open source CRM, they're like oh god they're right imagine what someone who kind of knew what they were doing could do oh i'm scared i don't think that i think that they shouldn't be able to sleep at night i think it's

an evil way to market i i would say the way i would think i put on my my like my like my bintum hat here right let's use like a utilitarian calculus the net harm that doom trolling as a communication strategy has caused in terms of mental health right just like people feeling bad the net harm caused by doom trolling far, far, far, far, far exceeds any, the grand total of benefits that this AI technology has produced so far. Like, I don't see any other way for that calculus to work out. You know, I was just reading one of the many papers that are actually now, you know, surveying and studying AI in the workforce. And they, they looked at this paper and they asked people that these software developers, like estimate how much time you've saved or whatever. And it was, you know, 11 hours a week we're saving.

And then they asked them, is your company performing better at all? Like, has this made any impact on your bottom line? And it was like a vanishingly small percent. It was like, yeah, there's anything different on the performance. Was that worth or making like software developers maybe by some measures 1.2 times more efficient? Yeah. Worth causing. I think the negative toll of this psychologically is like getting close to like COVID territory.

It's like population wide, you are stressing out everybody day after day. They've made the last two years for anyone who's following the news psychologically miserable. That is a real harm. That is a real measurable harm. Like, I really hate that I have to deal with this. Like time and again, it reminds me of having to deal with the pandemic, which was like a psychologically fraught time because every day you were being bombarded. But at this time, you know, A, there's not a virus that's infecting a lot of people. And B, the people who are like warning about all the doom in this analogy, it would be as if like they were the ones in the lab doing the research that was producing the virus.

Like that's the craziest thing about it, right? I mean, imagine if in like 2019 someone was like these viruses, coronaviruses doing gain of function research could really, really like infect a whole world. Like a course they're going to get out. We can't contain them. Oh, by the way. we are furiously doing this gain of function research on these viruses and we're not going to stop because, you know, the Chinese, well, in this case, but whatever. Yeah, someone else might do it. Someone else might do it. So like, what can we do? You'd be like, stop building the viruses then. Uh, anyway. So, so I think we have to account for the net psychological harm. And I think, I mean, I don't think our current government can do this. But I think that's something where the government should in an abstract world be involved. Like, oh, there's a small number of people who, who.

are causing a huge amount of distress and anxiety around our entire country, of course we're going to get in the game. And we're going to pause all your model deployments until like you either convince us that that's not the case and you admit like, yeah, we were kind of making that up. Or if you don't want to say that, then like, no, you don't get a release of this product. You're causing mass, mass unhappiness and damage, right? To our entire country, you have to account for that. You don't get to just do that. So it is, I think the harms so far have, has, you have exponentially outweighed the tangible benefits. I'm just also going to be honest.

Yeah, the model AI companies are terrible. I also think the media has categorically failed here and should feel fucking ashamed of themselves. I think the media is as much to blame. I think I'm going to put a fundamental blame on venture capital. I'll give you my quick pitch on that. Yes, absolutely. I mean, you have to understand the economics of especially high tech venture capital coming out of Silicon Valley. The whole model, and again, this is all just because you have like some institutional investors

and rich people that you want to make richer. That's it. Like that's the whole underlying goal, right? And their whole model is we have to find new, new areas where there's something to be monetized in which there's possibilities for unicorns. So we have to find new territories where you have the possibility of getting it early

and having an investment turn out to be a multi-billion dollar company, right? The web, that's what started in the 90s with the web, and most of those bets failed because of the first.com crash. a couple paid off like Amazon. Then you had Web 2. It turned out attention was a resource you could monetize.

So it's like discovering a new mineral or oil. There was a huge fortune to be had. The venture capitalists could get in there early. They had massive returns, betting on meta, betting on the social media companies, right? Then they're like,

we need another because you have to keep finding every time you raise a new fund, you need a giant new resource that you can monetize and get too early. So the next thing they tried was crypto. Crypto was just, you know, Andresen Horowitz,

saying there's no more unicorns left in social, we're going to try to create a new field in which we can create unicorns. And they really flogged crypto, this is the future, this is the future. Oh yeah, yeah. And it wasn't, especially for software. And I got yelled at for saying this, but I'm literally an expert on this. My doctorates in the theory of distributed systems. It's a stupid way to build a distributed system. And I was right. And no one built the systems that way. So that kind of failed. This was the next territory. And it doesn't say this technology is not interesting or potentially useful. But as you said, it's not. trillion dollar useful, not yet. So why did all that money come in is because a,

we're talking about one street in one city. We're talking like San Hill Road in Palo Alto. Like the people on that one street are like, we need to find a new territory that can produce, you know, $100 billion companies so that we can get the returns that we expect to keep our lifestyle up. And that's it. I've been, I've been saying this for years. It's the rockcom bubble. They're out of big ideas. And AI was the panacea. It was the, it was the API would be the way to build new startups, it would be the way for enterprise companies to sell more software with new add-ons. It would be the way for business software to take off consumer software. It was meant to be the solution because they're doing exactly the same thing as the AI companies are doing saying,

yeah, the AI will just fix this. What are we going to build with this or the AI will work it out? What's the product? AI will work it out. It's honestly a kind of a pathetic culture. I don't think they even care about that. I think they're like, okay, if we put the money in this now, what's the strike price going to be at the IPO? That's what I'm getting at that. They don't care if it works in the end or not. They're like, we want a SpaceX. Look at that.

But the theoretical that I'm saying is that the idea of large language models as an API or a consumer product was what they're excited about because you can just extrapolate the various things. But I must get back to it. I think the media is responsible. I 100% believe the media is responsible. They are the ones that at the times, Ezra Klein, how much. AGI bullshit as that guy shoveled.

How many Bernie Sanders going out there and talking to Claude? I realize that's politics, but they put it on YouTube for a reason. How many different outlets have talked about the job pocalyps that does not exist? Or the SaaSpocalypse claiming that software companies are being sold off because of AI disruption that doesn't exist. The media bought and sold this. In 2023, there was a Guardian headline that said Sam Alton was a little bit scared. it's just without that, none of this was possible. And perhaps they were just being a megaphone for real anxieties from these companies.

Or perhaps they were just looking for a narrative that would get clicks. I don't think it's clicks. I think they underestimated the weirdness of these people. And they took them at face. This is my, you know, having many feet within the world of media. What I really think happened is it didn't. cross their minds that these people are super strange cultist weirdos. They don't know about Yukowski. They don't know about the rationalist. They don't know about the exorc community that came

out of the rationalist and then merged with the technological singularities and that they also think they're going to live forever by harvesting the blood of children. And all they don't, they were just like, these are engineers. I don't know about technology they do. They're telling me this. Why would they lie? I've heard that word for word from multiple early on, multiple journalist. And I think it was all being seen through the frame of COVID, where that was in the recent history. I don't know anything about viruses, but the virologists were like, trust, like, this is something I can't directly observe, right? Because there's not very many people sick. But like, trust us, this is going to spread and this is a really big deal. And like, all trucks, the virologists know what they talk about. Why would they lie? And I don't want to miss that story. I think there was a lot of that going on of these are the people building the tech. Because I heard this phrase from so many people. These are the people building the technology. They know about it best.

I'm not a computer scientist. I mean, I am, but like if I'm being the journalist. And this is why like the people who were not, like where is the resistance is coming from? Is computer scientists like me who don't live near Silicon Valley? And we're like, well, I do understand this technology and what the hell are you talking about? But I think for the journalist, it was and now they're just, this is why I wrote that op-ed. I'm trying to spread the word more. These guys are weird.

they're weird. And by the way, they're mainly guys too, because I don't think women were going to put up with this weird, you know, I'm going to go in my room and put with my Star Wars nonsense, right? I don't want to, who knows what that tells us about our gender, but it's not great that it's all men doing this craziness. Yeah, it's like Tim, Tim Rie Geppery, Gabru isn't particularly sold on this, for example. Like, I don't think. Emily Bender, like a lot of the, like, hardcore skeptics are like, you boys with your Star Wars. What are you up to, lads? Yeah. What do you mean? You don't have friends, do you? Is this related to fantasy football? Guys, what is this? Right? The funny thing is, though, there is something to that where it's, it is a very

male technology. And I do wonder, like, it's not something I think two white guys can necessarily get into in any depth without a woman present so that we could actually have a rounded conversation. But it is interesting that pretty much everyone running this stuff is a guy. And the majority of them are white. fellas and they're all claiming that everything they build is amazing. I don't know. Perhaps there's something going on there too. Is there something, yeah, white guys are good at is thinking

everything we do is amazing. We are pretty well trained. We are pretty well trained at that. But this is why I do think it's important. It's why I wrote that op-ed is like, I want to name what they're doing. This is doom trolling. I think you need to understand these people are weird. And we can't take what they're saying at face value. We just can't because they're too weird. They've proven time and again. But the key message I would also want, like if you're listening to this podcast now, do not, do not interpret this conversation as, oh, I'm going to categorize this in a claim that AI doesn't work. And therefore, if I see something cool that AI does, this conversation isn't relevant. You know, Cal was wrong. This is, it's really not about that is what I'm talking about

right now. I am talking about the way that we actually talk about AI, how we treat it as a business, what is morally appropriate and what is morally not. And these are normal products. And I don't, I don't, to me, this isn't, it's not vaporware. I mean, I think the ability to parse natural language like a language model can do is like, it's fascinating. And I'm also surprised by how hard it's been to come up with a lot of good, useful, economically viable products off of that ability. Like we're still with software development tools and, you know, rewriting Google search results. I actually thought we would have a lot more interesting tools that we were using our everyday life right now. And because there's been some problems that we didn't think about.

So this whole conversation is about stop treating this like a demon that's been summoned, make fun of doom trolling because that's kind of embarrassing. this is the, you know, this is the magic to gathering club at the high school table. And just treat this like a normal product. And like, I don't want to hear. Let's just, what are the products you're selling? What are the benefits? How much do they cost? Is it worth the money?

And what are the products you working on? Like, let's just have normal conversations. So do not as a listener categorize this in this, in this sort of light first dark is like, okay, this means AI doesn't work. And this team says it does work. And then I'm going to try to assess in my mind. is AI useful or not. And if it is,

then I have to be ready to mate with machines. And if it doesn't, then stop all that sort of extreme thinking. I just want us to talk about this like a normal interesting, but normal technology. And normal people should look at the way

that these companies are doom trolling us and say that's strange. Please stop. And in the meantime, I am going to have to really make fun of you. I think that's where we need to be right now. I fully agree. And I think all of this

large language models in a vacuum in very interesting technology. The problem is they tried to scale them like a giant multi-trillion dollar industry, which I don't think they fit into. The future of LLMs, in whatever form they have, is on device. They never should have been scaled at this scale. Like, it never made sense, never once.

And in the end, it is normal technology. And that is the thing to always take away from this, which is you wouldn't freak out about Kubernetes, you wouldn't Microsoft Word, doing auto-complete, shouldn't scare you, Grammally shouldn't scare you. This is the actual technology itself is not scaring you. It's the people around it and the people's extrapolations. And also, like you said, the willingness we have to believe people who are working on something who have supposed expertise as if expertise guarantees that you're correct or indeed guarantees that you know what you're talking about or indeed that you can see

the future. Yeah. So there we go. I mean, I think that's it. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Who knows? No, no. I'm already seeing like the comments on my New York Times piece is just falling into the like, uh-oh, you, you said somewhere in there there could be a benefit of AI. You apostate? AI is terrible or like the other side is like, well, well, how do you explain the fact? You know, I'm, oh my God. Is this written by AI, these comments? I get this sent this all the time. These comments that are like, I work for a such and such company. And what used to take me three weeks, I now do in like six seconds. And, you know, it's just like falling, people are just falling in their camps about, like, either you're one of the priests of the new religion or, you know, you're the, you're the, the, the, the, the Canaanites who were kicked out of the land or something, right? Like, it's like, you got to be in, like, one of these two, like extremes. And don't do that. Just say, like, treat it like a normal technology. Stop. Doom trolling is, is stupid. Stop it. Like, treat it like a normal technology. Either stop if you really think you're destroying the world or start talking about it, like pickup trucks. Right? We don't need this in between. So hopefully, hopefully we can convince a few more people about that. I hope so. Cal, thank you so much for joining me. Always a pleasure. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more.

podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed. dot at to visit the Discord and go to our slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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