Chapo Trap House - 933 - We Can Grok It For You Wholesale feat. Mike Isaac (5/12/25)

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Tech reporter Mike Isaac returns to the show for a round-up of the latest AI news. From collegiate cheating to funeral planning, Mike helps us make some sense of how this wonderful emerging technology is reshaping human society in so many delightful ways, and certainly is not a madness rune chipping away at what little sanity remains in our population’s fraying psyche. We’re doing another call-in show with Matt for the midweek, so if you have any questions or comments, send an UNDER 30 SECOND voice recording to [e-mail] We also have some new merch going up at chapotraphouse.store this Weds, May 14. So keep your eyes out for that!

All I got to be is a joker All I got to a choppa Bring me problems and patients All I got is reporter Mike Isaac. Mike, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for having me again. Mike, the reason we wanted to have you on because I had sort of over the last couple weeks a backlog of stories that all deal with AI, chat GPT, and the exciting new ways in which this is reshaping human culture, education, spirituality, and sexuality. So we figured it would be good to have someone who covers this to just help us maybe sort of make sense of some of the emerging trends in this wonderful new future that we're all living in.

Someone who has no experience in any of those categories, right? Well to begin with Mike, I mean, like I guess my thinking along this was inspired by a a recent study I saw that tabulated what users are actually doing with chat GPT. And among the like, by far far and away, the leader of like what people are using chat GPT for was interaction was just talking to it. And I guess I'm wondering of the original intended uses for this technology, like when it was being sold or like what it was promised, like, is this a surprise to Silicon Valley that people are utilizing this chat GPT and like similar large language models that they're using it essentially for

companionship, rather than any kind of like utility in terms of a business or work or anything like that. Yeah. So that's a great point. I think that like the thing that people don't really know is that back in November of twenty twenty two, which is when chat GPT was released, open AI didn't even think this was going to be that big of a deal. Honestly, they were just like, OK, it's a chat bot.

We're releasing it. And I'm sorry if I sound gnarly. I've got this gnarly head cold going on. But they're releasing it, and no one will care. And then it explodes in popularity. Everyone starts using it, or at least a lot of people start using it. Everyone's tweeting about it or whatever.

So they're taken aback by it. And that's why you see in the past, like three years of every company in Silicon Valley, like launching their own version of it. I think that, like a lot of their justification, a lot of times backwards looking like they've they've they've landed a gold mine in something that people, everyone wants to use. And then after the fact, they say, oh, well, here are the reasons you should use it or here's are the reasons you should use it

or here's why we think you should do it. And not necessarily going into it with like, this is what we necessarily want. So like, do I think they anticipated that everyone would start having like a chatbot girlfriend or like chatbot like best friend, not necessarily, but like, they kind of like justify things after the fact that that makes sense, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I think that we talked about it on our most recent episode where we talked about AI, but I think that people, I understand why people do this where they just categorically hate everything, everything AI related, because all the stuff that they are now actually putting resources into and that you will just see on your timeline as a normal person like sucks. It's either the AI will write like Chuck Windig or it will create like, like, you know, something that's shittier looking than a Photoshop or in the absolute worst case scenario, they'll use it to basically make a synthetic revenge porn of people they don't like. Yeah.

Groke, is this true? And all the people who have money in it saying things like, oh, screenwriters are gonna be out of a job because of how fucking amazing this is. But according to people who know a lot more about it than me, there are actually like some pretty interesting and potentially like great applications for it in pharmaceutical research, in biology,

and all, basically none of the things that Sam Altman or whoever talks about, that they're actually pretty good applications. But so for this stuff now, where like every new, every AI news cycle, it's about like the Studio, the Studio Ghibli folder or like how it's, look, we made it sound like Dennis Leary now. It can simulate Dennis Leary.

God, that's my fucking torment next to coffee, flavored coffee for my eternity. I would live out the movie Her if they did that, you know. You'd never see me. You'd never see me again. That's incredibly interesting to me how unplanned it was. So for a company like Google that is putting all this money into AI and making you use AI overview with search and every, at least press release and open AI puts out is about like

this kind of unintentional aspect of the entire business. Is that what kind of accounts for like the fuck ups in that for why like for like why AI overview is so shitty on Google and why you know LLMs, when you talk to them, they often, not always, and this isn't like universal, but they do sometimes like actually get shittier with more use. Yeah. If you saw that one released by open AI a few weeks ago that they rolled back because it's funny, I don't really use open AI regularly or I don't use chat to be T regularly, but

I know people who use it like now instead of Google basically, which is crazy. You know, it's crazy to me. Not that Google is good either. Google has like gotten so shitty in the past few years because of exactly what you're talking about. But like, so I have to sort of stay really keyed into, okay, what who's using what what's the latest release? They did roll back like a most recent release

because the AI was too sycophantic. They would keep agreeing with you and being like, yes, great question, Mike. That's really brilliant. And it would get annoying. It would be like your younger brother was like talking to you or something. But I think there's a few things going on

when you get like that level of shittiness. One goes back to the surprise that OpenAI and the rest of the industry was caught off guard by, right? Like they released this tool. It's super popular, like really popular at the mainstream in a way that like even I don't really grasp a lot of the time. And every other company like Google, for instance, is a great example. Google was the one that created, inside of their research labs, they had this paper come out,

it's called the Transformer paper, it's famous in Silicon Valley, it's the thing that all this stuff is built off of. They ostensibly should have been the ones to lead the AI race, right? Like they came up with this, but no, ChatGPT did it, they ate their lunch. And so now what you see is Google shoehorning it

into every single fucking product that they have to compensate for being behind, you know? And like Sergey Brin's inside of the company coding again in his Vibram five finger shoes. And like, yeah, like literally, like it's not a a and so it's gonna be a lot of really gnarly implementations and I don't know man like I the thing that bothers me is like I never asked for this a lot of people do use some of these things but like there's a difference between going to chat GPT the app and then having my Gmail say do you want me to polish

you know me sending like a stupid sentence to Chris or something right before we start this episode? You know, it's it's annoying. Oh my yeah. Like I hate like the shit they have on like all Apple products now, but you can turn it off with Google. There is just absolutely no way to turn it off. I mean, I I've even I've like, I found a way to like, put filters into the Ublock extension that's on Chrome and like, Chromium browsers. And that worked for a month

and then they found a way to get around it. Like they knew, they knew that people were going out of their way, like a fucking adult like me who doesn't know anything, like I had to look up the steps on how to do this. We're like, no, you actually want this. And it's, I think like this entire phenomenon of that you and Will alluded to with people, you know, assigning personhood to these things is so interesting because one of the grimaced fucking things I saw before that other, before people tested GPT and said,

hey, I stopped taking my medication. I think I'm gonna kill my family. It was like, they didn't say kill my family. They were like, that's great, do you. Yeah. It was. Sleigh, sleigh all day. Literally, like I saw this this post where like just some like random

dolt on Twitter was like, I use GPT as my therapist and you know, already, you know, kind of, you know, pretty fucking grim. But what I thought was so fascinating was she posted GPT responses and GPT to its credit perfectly replicated the authorial voice of every like TikTok therapist. It was like she asked the prompt was like people are saying that you know it's bad that I'm talking to an unfeeling Markov bod about everything in my life. But I think it's under their business. What do you think? And GPT went, this is a to be conversation.

They can see themselves out. Was so like depressing for so many fucking reasons. So bad. It's like, oh, Jesus. I'd be like doing the TikTok dance of pointing, but at like a gun in my mouth. The original high hopes. Well, I mean, like, this brings to mind to me, like in terms of like, you feel Felix mentioned, like some of the potentially socially useful applications for AI, which seem to be taking a backseat to, as you mentioned, Mike, this kind of reverse engineering to find out what the market is and then to kind

of like create that market after the fact. And I'm called to mind, it's, it was a section that was featured in one of the Adam Curtis documentaries, I'm forgetting which one, but it basically is a part where they talk about one of the early computer programs like this was in the 1980s, essentially perform the exact same function as a chatbot is that Pete, like the users would type questions to it or would talk to it and the program would essentially just restate in different words what it had been told by the user. And the point that Curtis was making is that they found it was as effective as talk therapy. But I've wasted so much money. This idea like that, you know, the human need to be to be to be seen, to be heard, to be recognized, to have their beliefs affirmed.

I was thinking along this on the lines of like, like you said, create like sort of finding where the market is and then creating the need for it. I'm wondering, like if you saw Mark Zuckerberg's comments about how the average American has three friends, but they have a need for 15 friends. And that when met is a I will do is basically fill, you know, we're going to be 12 friends for you. But, Mike, when I read that, I couldn't help but think that like the actual intent of what Zuckerberg was saying there was that like, you know, those three real friends that are in

your life now, we're going to replace them and you don't need them. They're unreliable. You don't need them. No, no. So there's so much going on there. I think the the chatbot stuff is actually really interesting. Okay, first to go back to Felix's point, I agree there are useful applications for AI and like the other thing that people should know is like, AI is not new, right? Like we've had artificial intelligence in many different forms for a long period of time.

What people have been really obsessed with now is called general artificial or generative artificial intelligence and then the singularity sort of ideas general artificial intelligence, which is like closer to human. But like think of it with like drug research, cancer research, you know, scientific applications. Those are things that I do think are useful and can perform really tedious

or or labor intensive tasks that scientists just can't do now. The the chat bot stuff is wild to me, but it also makes some sort of sense if you believe there's tons of people in the world, which there are tons of people in the world who don't have people to talk to. They try to find something sentient, something clicks off in their head that doesn't register that this is a word prediction bot that's just kind of going to say what it thinks you want want to say and that's how you lead it down different pathways. It gets really, it's pretty worrisome to me in that regard but like what I think is like this also plays into solving some of the problems that

Silicon Valley has. Mark Zuckerberg is I think a particularly good example because his apps, Facebook, Instagram, mainly Facebook and Instagram, but also WhatsApp to a degree, they need people constantly sort of producing stuff to go into them, right? Like they want you to post whatever like your different shit you have for lunch on Facebook. That keeps people engaged. It keeps people coming back to the app. They can sell ad impressions against that. And like the past five years, I've been in Washington, DC for this FTC trial against Metta and all these documents are coming out of it. And what we've seen is for the past five or so years, probably six or seven, as TikTok has risen, we've sort of shifted to a more consumption-based social media diet,

right? So I'm not posting, I mean, everyone in this room is kind of pathetically super posters on Twitter, but- I don't think it's pathetic. Let's say, well, I mean, you know, but- But I would say inspiring. Maybe we can, yeah, be the change we want to see in the world. But most people don't. They want to sit back and have a TikTok dance kind of for different, like, hamburgers shown to me or whatever, and not have to worry about posting themselves. Sorry, I'm just in my, I'm in DC right now. I'm thinking very patriotically, the AI hamburger in my feed. That sounds amazing.

Like, no. But think about it, that's the thing that solves the problem for Zuckerberg, or any number of these companies that are really dependent on user-generated content. You need sort of robots talking to users, and eventually robots talking to other robots forever. And it seems pretty rough. Like, I don't know how down the road they've thought this through. Maybe they don't care. But I do think it sort of solves some of those business problems.

Well, Mike, I mean, I think about this brings to mind like a stock Adam Curtis phrase from his many documentaries, which is, but then something strange happened or like a funny thing occurred. And like when I think about Silicon Valley and the creation of the internet and the like, you know, billions of dollars like or trillions of dollars in, you know, wealth that is produced and the way it's changed human culture. It's like what I promised was like a greater interconnectivity between human beings in a global marketplace of ideas. But like what that ended up creating was like, in fact, with all this connection to other people, people feel more disconnected from other people from people in their real lives than ever before. And not only that, the sort

of proliferation of information and opinion on the internet has created like, you know, a fractured a consensus reality. And I think another problem these people have created that they're now seeking to solve with AI is that the idea that like AI can solve can solve or be a solution to these intractable problems of like human politics and morality. And like this is what I see a lot like where people are just saying like, hey, Grok, is this true? Or Grock, tell me what I believe in. Grock, please help me continue being an idiot. Like, I see people have conversations with Grock where they're just like, give me every scenario that makes it likely that the planet is flat. Or like, please, please list all the ways in which gravity was stronger 10,000 years ago than it is now.

10,000 years ago than it is now. I saw one where it was supposed about like some like this new experimental drug that is supposed to like there would be no more need for hair plugs. No one would live through the greatest tragedy of Joe Biden's life being one of the first guys to get hair plugs. He had to do it again. You know, the reason he a turkey hotspot of 2025. This was the reason he said he ran for president is because he had to get a second set of hair plugs when he was like 73.

It's the foundational tragedy of his life. But basically, it would supposedly reawaken dormant hair follicles. And obviously this is one of those aggregator accounts. So for all for all I fucking know, this is, you know, the province of like RFK voter Facebook. It's not real. But it was explained in like those exact terms I just used. And I saw like no bullshit, like several replies that were like,

Grock, could you put this in English? I don't even think that they read it and were like, I don't understand it. They're just like, oh, this is longer than five words. Time to this is time to bring out rock like I always do. No, you're so OK. I had this conversation the other day on Twitter with someone where it was an employee calling in sick to work. And I'm pretty sure it was an employee in the valley somewhere.

And he got an email response back from his boss that was like, you know, okay, you know, sorry to hear that. I hope you feel better. And then like, inevitably, like two lines later, as an AI, I am trained to do that. And what which is like, OK, we're seeing those all the time. But I replied, I was like, do you really need to fucking call the AI to say, like, sorry to hear that? No worries. Or is that like, but I really so like it really disturbed me

because like literally like all you have to do is say, Hey, no, no big, I'm not a manager. I should not manage people, but I feel like I could probably come up with a don't worry about it. If you're sick, stay at home. That's 10 seconds. Right. 10 seconds out of your otherwise busy, productive schedule. But like I got all these answers.

I asked some question like, is this really saving you fucking any time? And I got everything these answers. I asked some question like, is this really saving you fucking anytime? And I got everything from, you know, I'm what I think is the case for a lot of these people, which is just it's automatic for me, I go to chat GBT to like get a sentence or whatever, because that's easier for me to do a three word caveman prompt to like, be nice sick employee, rather than like send like a full email. Or I would get also like responses saying like, you know, it makes me anxious to think of how to reply to an employee who's sick because I don't know how to sound, which maybe

I'm feeling old, but that's a little too small bean for my taste. If that makes sense. And it's like the employee is still getting the message regardless. They're going to feel the way they're going to feel whether you authored it or not. And it's still coming from your email account. So, I mean, like this is what I mean. It's like that it's creating a way for human beings to deal with the problem of other human beings. Yeah, there's like a phenomenon in an MMA, but it's really in all like any type of like

physical training, right? Where people will injure themselves because they think, um, if something, if an exercise or a lift or whatever the fuck is fundamentally more unpleasant and difficult, you are automatically always getting more out of it. Um, the way that people employ, like, employ like the chatbot features, it's the opposite that it like if I'm using my brain less, it is fundamentally easier. My life is fundamentally better. When in reality, like going through the steps of like, okay, this is my employee's name. All right. Uh, oh shit.

I have to remember to take out the part where it says that it's an AI model. It really seems like so much extra steps compared to just going, okay, hope you feel better. It's, it's so weird, but I do wonder, I do wonder if it's part of this, like current, this cultural current of passivity where it's not necessarily that they think it's 100% easier or more convenient or efficient, which is the last one is the big justification, like the best guys use for it. But yeah, that it's, it's like, it is another layer to mitigate like any level of personal or emotional commitment to anything. No, I think you're onto something there. I really do.

They always say it's about saving time, being efficient. And like my question is always like, what are you doing with that time? Like literally, what are you fucking doing with the time that you saved? Right. Are you are you tweeting more? Are you gaming? Are you fucking? I don't know. And, you know, but I do think like, I don't think it's crazy to home in on the fact that like, these are folks who have had some people I'll be fair, some people are folks who have difficulty relating to the world or other people or, you know, even like have, you know, stored up resentment for how they were treated before

and like are trying to find ways to make it easier to live in a society that they feel didn't accept them before, right? Whether that's because I can't relate to folks or I can't ask questions the right way or because, you know, dealing with a subordinate makes me anxious and like, I don't know, like this is I'm 40. So I feel like I'm starting to like reach the limits of where I get to,

like old man sort of shaking a fist thing where I'm like, you need to fucking deal with some of these things. But like, it does feel like that you're you really have your finger on something, which is like there's frictionless and then there's efficiency. And then there's like, I need to be removed from the world and the world around me and I want to feel no discomfort even if interaction isn't 100%. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like, that's why what I what I mean about like people turning to AI, because they think it

will be some sort of totally objective authority that they can wield as a cudgel in ideological and political disputes. Rather than, I don't need to defend my own beliefs or justify them, this thing will do it for me. And it's a passivity that comes from not having enough confidence in your own beliefs or just not feeling a need to justify them or like, but just the idea that something created by people can be like, it can resolve like moral and political questions or questions of ideology and questions of power that there is like a perfect objective metric

that can tell you, oh like, this belief of mine is perfectly justified and legitimate. And this is what I mean, it's like, it's the desire to do away with the problems caught like the messy intractable problems of human civilization, and the idea that they can be done away with by technology. Oh, I love that. I mean, I don't love that. I fucking hate that. But I love that like idea, which is, I never thought of it that

way, which is like, we need a third party. It's like asking for the mods to come. Yeah, exactly. Like we Yeah, but like, you're asking for the mods to come. Yeah, exactly. It's like we. Yeah, but like, you're asking for the mods to come in to just be like, is abortion immoral? And it's just like, this is a human question that needs to be resolved by like by by by human beings and like, like our shared lives and our values, which are often in contests with one another.

That problem solving thing like this is a thing that needs to be solved really does feel like endemic to the Silicon Valley mindset is like, here's an issue. How do I figure it out? You know, and there's no like the struggle or the resolution. It's only the resolution. It's never the working it out. it is perfect because it takes away like the fundamental, as these people see it, embarrassing aspect of politics, which is that you would have any level of emotional response or commitment or ideology that could be seen as uncool. Something could happen and people will, people will notice that you're mad or you're upset. If it's all is just adjudicated by like a, you know, in these people's minds, this thing that can just, it is a perfect algorithm where it can plug in everything

and find if not the most correct choice, the most optimal choice for everything. Then that totally removes any personal exposure you have to any of this and you'll never be embarrassed again. I really do think just living there, I live in Oakland, which is a bridge away from San Francisco, but I've been in the Bay Area for 20 years and it does give you an idea of just people how they relate to the world. I feel like some of them would have a real hard time in New York, for instance, or something where it's like much. And I also

I too much friction in this fucking city. I'll tell you that much. 100%. They're like, and it's just like always what's the next most optimal way. This is also like, separate but related is why I have some problems with like VR. I did this. I have many problems with VR but I did this Apple, you know the Vision Pro headset? Yeah, they're like fucking $4,000 one. So they have this new Metallica video where they like filmed a Metallica show and they were like, Hey, Mike, you come look at this. And I was like, Well, okay, fuck you got me so I I love that stupid band they're fucking super dumb but I will always love Metallica you can't not love Metallica and

so I went and it was crazy like it was actually really cool it was like wow okay I feel really into it this is right there but what I told was like, look, a my fucking neck hurts because there's like this giant tumor size baseball on the back of my head. I had to wear for an hour and it's really cool as an experience. I feel like I'm right there, but you're never going to get the feeling of being imperfect and in the world and uncomfortable and having some guy in a denim vest with subhumans patches on it that smells like shit and covered in sweat. That is what it is to be at a concert, right? It's not like seeing James Hetfield next to me saying,

give me fuel, give me fire. Like, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The AI runs, I know the VR headset runs out of batteries. Darkness imprisoning me. I can't see, I know the VR headset runs out of batteries. Darkness imprisoning me. I can't see, I can't hear anything.

Get it back on. Well, you would know better than me. Like you're more enmeshed in this, you've spent way more time on it. But I almost, I don't even think it's that they, they couldn't, you know, move through life in New York or anywhere. I mean, some of them can't move through life anywhere.

But I think for a lot of them, one of the most significant things for me is, you know, that Chamath dude, the all in fucker. I'm just using him as an example. But this is a guy who like in 2019 to 2020 was like, I think the president, it should be Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. He was one of those guys. All these guys now who are like, Trump needs to be president forever so we could colonize space and everyone's a dysgenic retard.

I'm saying it. If you go back like six years, all these people were like, I'll say it, black lives matter. If you don't like it, unfollow. And this is like a specific phenomenon that describes a lot of like the money people, the money people on the tech side who got on the Trump train, and a lot of, I would say a lot of like under 40, like male voters, people who felt like they needed to match the background radiation of like Trump one era liberalism. And then like, like went overboard or something because they're stupid. Yeah, now they're embarrassed and they want Chad GPT to fix it. Exactly.

They're embarrassed and they're like, okay, hopefully we kill and deport all these people so this never happens again. But if it does, I need a robot that's going to tell me if it's stupid to post a black somewhere. I'm going to be embarrassed next time this happens. Grog, do black lives matter? Yeah. And wait, it's no, I actually I do think there's two things going on at the same time. One, I think there is some level of just like straight up nihilism

or folks who very cynically move from one thing to another out here. And like Chamath in particular, I think probably falls into that camp. Like he you can he's even his tweets, like they're very clear through lines to, you know, 2016 to 2020. What are you doing in 2016 versus now or whatever? And I agree with you. There's like some level of folks who they were like, yeah, black lives matter, but like, maybe we could scale it back a little or it's bothering me or like

they're hitting the like limits of their and there's probably, you know, it probably dovetails with some of the like centrist liberal, like wariness of trans issues. And they're like, okay, well, that's a bridge too far for me. So I'm like, go ahead. You know what I'm saying? So like, but you're exactly right. Like they, they decided to say, well, Trump has these qualities that I like, which is, you know, masculinity, the fucking Aristotle bust Twitter bots that are like returned to, uh, eating spam in a can in 1950s America or whatever. Like that sort of stuff is, is sexy to me And I do think that's like I think there's like a few things going at the same time

But like yeah, those both very much exist out out West for me I'd like to take some time now to like like I said it go through a couple of these are these big big and small articles About like the phenomenon of AI in our society and And Mike, I'll begin with one that you wrote pretty recently in the New York Times. And this is of particular interest to me. I mean, the other articles I'm gonna talk about, whether you cheat in college or, you know,

whether you are a light bringer, anointed by AI intelligence to spiritually free the world and end your family relationships is of little concern like, however, this story with Will Smith. Are you legend? No, the first one this has to do with movies, of course, so I do care about this. Mike, because you described to us what movie mate is. Oh, man. Okay, so yeah, my my colleague wrote this, but I helped course. So I do care about this. Mike, because you described to us what movie Nate is. Oh, man. Okay. So yeah, Mike, my colleague wrote this, but I helped him. So I don't want to take the credit. But um, that

um, colleague, I'm gonna be Brooks Barnes. Let's shout it out. Yeah, Brooks. Yeah. Shout out to Brooks. Blumhouse, the movie studio at like is working with this third party company that just like produce their own chat bot in conjunction with Metta to basically just kind of let people chat with chat bots inside of movie theaters, which really is fucking the worst.

But I think like they so the idea is they were trying they already knew that like people like me and I assume will and maybe Felix I don't know I don't know how chatter you are in the movie theater but like would would like freak out and be this is really bad. So what they did was they did a re-release of the movie Megan which is the AI robot movie or me three good. Three again. And it was like, oh, yeah, watch, watch me three again. And then you can chat with our chat bot in the movie theater. And like we give you additional content. And it says here Blumhouse teamed with Metta to experiment with a technology called MovieMade.

It's a chat bot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on handheld screens as they watch the films on the big one. Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time. And Mike, do you have any example of the real time witticisms about the movie The Threegun that this AI was enabling you to interact with? I could. So I don't I didn't I was not the one that went there. Brooks was the one that went there if he has one in the article. But I just think it's like it's going to be something like it's like the boyfriend who's on IMDb trivia page throughout the movie and telling his girlfriend, oh, did you know Robert De Niro totally improvised that whole scene?

You'll never guess what happened to Natalie Wood. But it's it's well, I mean, like you said, like, yeah, I'm inclined to inclined to be against this but to me this is gentrifying the experience of talking in a movie theater you know you say talking to me theater can be annoying but it can also be really funny and add to the movie experience this is not even people talking this is just people having their phones light up which is even more annoying than people running their goddamn mouths. So I like this is this is removing the unique human experience of being sitting behind an elderly couple who thinks it's their living room

and are just saying, like every five minutes, who's that? Oh, my God, that happened to me with Hitman over the summer. Do you remember Hitman? It was great. It's like 90 year old guy. All the other different outfits and costumes. They were like, is that the same guy? Who is this? Is this a new character? Yes. No, and like I think to your point too, it's like

there are times, I agree with you, that's part of what I love about movies and being in the theater is like there are times when like a little bit of chatter kind of is funny. And it's not in the like Marvel way when someone does like a meme at the screen or so. Yeah. But like, you know, like I remember seeing the eight twenty four movie with the girl who cuts the bird off of the head. Oh, hereditary horror movie. Thank you. I remember seeing hereditary in theaters when it came out and there's this moment where

she's like, it's at the end, spoiler alert, she's climbing up the wall or something and the lighting is really dark so you can't really see it, but like you start to see it kind of barely and I could hear people across the audience start to like see her in the corner and it was like this wave of like Gasps in the audience, right and that was that was like additive that I was like, okay. I'm with people We're going through this together. This is freaking me out. Holy fuck seeing someone tap to grok in the middle of Captain Marvel fights

Fucking Harrison Ford will not enhance my movie experience. I don't know about you. It just feels really bad. Yeah, no, my own similar experience that comes to mind is when I saw the film American Psycho in theaters. And you'll remember the scene in that movie where Patrick Bateman drops a chainsaw down a staircase as a woman, you know, a screaming woman is trying to flee flee his murder house and as she gets to the landing at the bottom before the chainsaw hits her in the back and there's a long like silent shot of like

him looking down the staircase as blood pools on the bottom as this woman has been you know has a chainsaw sticking out of her back the whole theater is silent and out of nowhere probably the voice of a five or six year old kid goes, ew. And then immediately some guy from the back goes, bitch, who would bring a kid to this fucking movie? Now the experience is if this happens to me, I'm going to consult Grok and say Grok, is it ethical to bring a seven year old to Mary Mary, Mary Heron's American Psycho.

Holy shit. I got another quick one and this is some of the bigger ones. And I bring this one up because it is the NBA playoffs at the moment. And I really enjoyed this story. This is courtesy of NBC News headline, NBA star Russell Westbrook launches AI-enabled funeral planning startup. I love this story because you got to love Russ. But also, this is indicative to me about just how oversaturated the AI marketplace is.

Everyone's agents and managers are like, you got to get in on this. If you don't invest in AI now, you're going to be killing yourself and everyone else is a billionaire five, 10 years in the future. The AI enabled funeral planning startup. It says your National Basketball Association superstar Russell Westbrook is taking a shot off the court at simplifying funeral planning with artificial intelligence. The famed Denver Nuggets point guard Wednesday announced the launch of Easewell, a startup that uses AI technology to streamline the process for coordinating funerals. My whole career on and off the court has been about stepping up decisively and in moments

that matter the most, Ressbook wrote in a statement. So I'm going to help people do the opposite here. The Los Angeles based company uses AI to curate funeral options catered to each user's budgets and preferences. The platform of assistive paperwork, budget planning, invitations and overlooked tasks such as canceling a deceased loved ones, utility bills and social media accounts. Easwell currently has 11 employees and has already tested its beta platform with more than 1000 families. Now, this is a funny idea, but like this is an example of something for instance that I think AI is like, you know, could be beneficial for, you know, like removing onerous and difficult

tasks, particularly at a time when, you know, you are bereaved. But I don't think this goes further enough. Like who's going to do the eulogy? Is it going to give you any help with that? Who's going to remember your loved one fondly? You? Oh my God. You could, if you could do, you know those historical chat bots? Yeah. You could be like, oh my god, yeah, you could get, you know, like Nixon or like Tupac to

deliver the eulogy. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Or, or have like a Studio Ghibli short film of your father like, you know, teaching you to ride a bike or throw a baseball. Doesn't it doesn't matter if he didn't do any of that stuff. But now you can remember him in the way you always wanted as an anime character. That is literally what happened with that fucking judge one. You remember this? I hope you're not bringing that up in the way. No, no. What's the judge one? Oh, my God. It's even worse.

Someone like some crime happened, some crime occurred, and this guy is getting sentenced. I think it was like a guy got killed or something. So like with the caveat that I'm only remembering half of this, a guy died or something and the person on trial, responsible for his death or whatever, I think maybe they got hit by a car, was being sentenced. And the family played an AI video of the guy who died. What delivering this speech to the judge, delivering this speech to the judge saying, this is what you robbed me of. This is what my life would have been. And fucking not only

did the judge like believe it, the judge was like, that touched me. I'm giving this man that years and it was so beyond fucked up. I can't even tell you. I'm giving this man that years and so I was so beyond fucked up. I can't even tell you I was like we are super cooked because that shit is working. Okay, boomer brand like Facebook. Why didn't the defense in this case create an AI generated video of the of their client not doing the crime? Of the deceased being like, another day being a Nazi pedophile.

I hope no one hits me with a car, stops my evil ways. Well, that's the, and that's the, you know what's funny? Because exactly what you says is sort of like, tech's sort of answer to a lot of the problems that AI causes. It's, what do you do when X happens when someone's cheating on a test or when a judge falls for a fucking stupid AI?

AI will solve it. You use AI to fight AI if people are cheating use AI to sort of figure it out You know and like it's just like a turtles all the way down Yeah, but in a way that benefits like like this, like, you know, like, once again, like, I feel like the proponents of this stuff are always talking about how it's a tool to, like, expand the horizons of human empathy. But like, what I see doing is exactly the opposite, but in like the kitschiest way imaginable, like, you know, here's a statement from a murder victim about why it's really bad

that they're dead now. Like, it's just like, our trial, it should be like that kind of perversion of reality in the context of like a trial, which is like, look, their loved ones can make statements at the sentencing, but by definition, they cannot because they're dead. And like, like, it was so dark. It was so fucking dark. I mean, like, to me, it's's like it's making like the you know, what a trial should do, which is like to provide some accountability or some weighing of the scales for something as eternal as just like the loss of someone's life. It's just, yeah, cheapening it in the dumbest way imaginable.

It really made me feel like this and the thing I think about a lot is because like a lot of the time, you know, there are arguments and I agree with the arguments of like, look, you're giving AI too much credit. It's dumber than you think in a lot of ways. It's not good at X, Y, and Z. It's dumber than you think, but people are way dumber than that. Exactly right, that's exactly it.

It just has to be good enough to trick your dumbest fucking uncle on Facebook. And clearly we have a lot of dumb fucking uncles on Facebook. Or defense might or defense might be able to argue, well, look, if you've created this AI simulacrum of this dead person, well, then just keep training it and the person's kids can fucking talk to it every day. So in that way, I probably like, you know, slap on the wrist two, two to three years and minimum security. There's no real tragedy here as they continue to live on. Alright, well, Mike, you mentioned cheating.

And this is the big one. This is like the big article in New York magazine last week Did you see that because like basically the import of it? Oh, yeah like Everyone who's currently in college right now is cheating on everything with chat GPT and is essentially learning nothing. Yeah That was that was that really fucked me up. I don't have kids I don't think I'm gonna ever have kids and like like recognizing how different the experience like, look, OK, I am elder millennial. I have like gone through Spark Notes when I was in high school or whatever,

or even Cliff's notes or whatever, like their versions of this. Sure. Like there are people who bring the argument that it's it's always been around. Yes. But like this thing is just like there are kids in this piece that you're talking about. They're just like, I outsource any form of critical thinking to this fucking chatbot now. And that really it just seemed like uncontrollable when I was reading. I'm curious how you. Well, Mike, I mean, I had a similar reaction as, you know, an elder millennial myself, but like, you know, I'm not the first one to make this point, but I did kind of feel empowered in a way because

basically if you are of the age in which you have voluntarily chosen to read a book cover to cover on your own, then congratulations on living the rest of your life as Albert fucking Einstein in this country. That is actually that's kind of Nietzschean is sort of like you have you are now like the ubermensch because everyone else is too fucking dumb to read a book. Did you see that thing circulating of like Penguin books now at the front of their books now have like a if you're overwhelmed reading. Oh, you can stop. Oh my god God. Oh, my God. Dude, it was so bad. It was like small bean intro to a fucking book. It was brutal.

I I. Yeah. Like, why even like read a book? Like, I usually think like, OK, like if you, you know, go on walks, read a book, go to the like join a club, get a hobby. But if you need to do that, like maybe don't. Maybe we should make a machine for you that you're always in VR, you're always in Candy Crush, you're walking through the Candy Crush thing.

There's just a little bit of heroin that we inject into you every 20 minutes. It's like the Star Trek episode, The Game. Remember that one? Yeah. I mean, it's just like like what would be the point then? Like if you read like Revolutionary Road and you're like, what? OK, are they are they happy or what?

What could you be getting out of it? Well, I tried to read a book, but the first line say he requested that I call him Ishmael. But I wanted to call him Steve. But they think that we can just change every movement and say he's known as Steve now. But there's a couple of interesting things in this article. It begins by saying, when he started at Columbia as a sophomore

this past September, he didn't worry much about academics or his GPA. Most assignments in college are not relevant, he told me. They're hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them. While other new students fretted over the university's rigorous core curriculum, described by the students as intellectually expansive and personally transformative, Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort.

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get into an Ivy League university only to offload all of the learning onto a robot, he said, it's the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife. And like, OK, like, obviously from this article and like other stuff I've seen posted about this kid, this kid is obviously like a fucking little freak. I don't usually like to say that. I don't usually like to say that about like, you know, like a 20 year old or something, because people aren't fully developed. Some people, you can figure out the type of person they are even when they're like 18, 19. But

for some people, you got to put them back in the oven. It takes some time and they'll surprise you a lot of the time. One of the good things about life is that people will, there's an almost endless capacity to develop character and all these things that were just not there before. Some people are twice baked potatoes. Right. I don't think that's gonna happen. It fucking freaks me the fuck out.

I hate it. But for the most part though, when it comes to how people this age, people generally in the under 30 cohort use AI, especially people in the under 25, people in college and high school right now, it's obviously annoying to go through the trouble of fucking going to college and you use AI to write all of your shit. But I think with all things with their relationship to technology, this isn't really their fault. They were pre-slotted as the perfect lifelong consumers, economic units, since the moment of their birth by powers beyond them.

In the kind of economy we have and the kind of threadbare regulatory structures around these things, and with so much money involved, they probably never had a fucking chance. But the other thing that does make it not blameless but understandable is we're also telling them when they're this young, hey, you need to do this thing where you will possibly be like $120,000 in debt. Yeah. And it's not going to give you a job, but good fucking luck getting one without at least this.

Yeah. You have to do it. And your only other option is to become a drop shipping guy. And I like either way, if it doesn't work out, fuck you. You're going to be homeless and then we get to kill you. Yep. And like, I don't think it's that way for everyone, but that is how would you not intuit that message if you were like 90 now?

No. It's the perfect like confluence of shit. When you, A, when like universities in America are only, they're like a half-assed like career training center that doesn't train you for a career and saddles you with incredibly onerous debt and where if it costs that much, then by default, I guess the student is a consumer. Yeah. And what like it's the same thing as like why people want an easy mode on games. And to that end, I can't really blame them. But it just it's, you know, for so many, I'll just say this, for so many problems like

this, you could go back in time 40 years and kill three guys and things would be way better. This is one of those things where you'd have to kill like a thousand people because it is such a perfect confluence of like why kids get such a shit end of a stick today. Well, Felix, our friend of the show, Jacob Baccarac, I think, put it very, very well when he said like this type of behavior among students in a consumer oriented education model is not so much that they're like cheaters or like it's like it's just purely malevolent, like unethical behavior on their part. But it's just like they are reacting rationally in the same way that employees of a bad company work,

which is to say when they have a bad manager and that like goals are impossible to meet or ill-defined, like employees will behave in ways that like could cut corners in a similar way because like all of the rational incentives make it so it's like impossible not to do that. Yeah.

I mean, that's what's so amazing. I've compared like what Twitter is like now to working in like a bar restaurant that's failing. But that's that is kind of like every institution now. But like it's it's you in real life. It's fun to work in those places because like no one gives a fuck and there's all types of like fun things you can do. And it's a good foundational experience you have as a young person to see how

that adults can be as stupid and irresponsible as you are. But it's like now all those institutions have all of the pitfalls of that, but like no one fucks each other or like sneaks off to take a smoke break or like steal the soda machine. The checks still bounce, but it's not to show up and don't have any fun. I really do like that. And I honestly feel like I feel like that framework of like having empathy for the kids here is the right one, because like I I don't know how good I had it until now.

In a lot of ways, like I didn't live through, I didn't have to go to school in the pandemic, right. Or like with all the lockdowns, like kids got fucked by it. Oh yeah. Like so many people have. Yeah. Right. And I didn't have to come up in a, in a, in an even worse, I graduated into the

financial crisis which is pretty fucking bad but like now I would just say like even I don't even know if I could become a journalist much less any other thing today so like I totally agree with you I I feel like I feel like they really need the plan of everyone needs to do what I did which is just take a smorgasbord of drugs at 19, fucking fail out, go like, you know, find some like working job that you really hate until you want to be there. And then you like go in and learn. And like the closest thing we have to that is probably like gap years in Europe or whatever,

where people like go and like try to discover the world, if they can afford it, go and work or something, and then figure out what you're passionate about. But like, you're exactly right. Like these kids are, are like, okay, you have a gun to your head to figure out how you're going to eat, sleep and live for the next 40 years and you're fucked from the get go. So you might as well get a leg up on it. I think you're I think that's the thing. It's so fucking sad. Like, um, I think like the whole natalism topic is, it almost reminds me of 40-year-olds arguing who has the best shot of walking onto an NFL team

at this point. But I do agree with the idea that in the ways that are both materially and socially important, the Anglo-American world, whatever you wanna call it, is fundamentally hostile to children, not in the ways that like the crazy people think, but just in how they live the the the friction and challenges and crucibles and the great parts and the everything that we mostly got to experience in in our youth.

But it's also it's fundamentally hostile to like youth actually. Everything that's supposed to be like good or challenging about that. Well, Mike, there's a there's one other element to this cheating college story that I thought was interesting. And I wanted your take on because like the same guy here, it basically says like, you know, he met his co-founder at college, thank God, and like they went through a number of different like useless startups, like a dating app just for Columbia students. It's like, sorry, Zuckerberg already did that at another faculty school. A sales tool for liquor distributors, a note taking app. None of them took off. Then Lee had an idea.

As a coder, he had spent some 600 miserable hours on LeetCode, a training platform that prepares coders to answer algorithmic riddles tech companies ask job and internship candidates during interviews. Like many young developers, he found the riddles tedious and mostly irrelevant to the work coders might actually do on the job. What was the point? If they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead. And this What was the point if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews? so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead and this was fascinating to me because it was like

this is the unintended consequence of like the people promoting and Profiting all of this stuff are making it so that their next generation of employees will be able to cheat their way into a job By gaming like, you know first and by the way Mike What are these fucking riddles that they're asking coders? Like if you want a job for me, answer these questions three. You have to do four or five dirty limber to get into Google. No, I think. All right.

And it's funny. It's funny you bring that up because they is pissing off the companies. Like now they're rescinding offers. Amazon has rescinded offers, I think, think from this if this if it's the same kid I'm thinking of they he got hit with it But other kids who have been doing this for saying here's how I hacked it and like posting it on YouTube And then the commenters are like well, it doesn't work Here's the glass half full version for me is like if what you're doing shows how fucking

Fundamentally stupid some of these things are and it does change how they Interview or whatever, maybe that's a positive outcome. I don't think that devoting your life to becoming a professional cheater and hacker is probably a good thing for you or anyone. I think it's interesting that like these people, they have no problem with destroying the humanities and like like and being like, well, of course, you should cheat on your essay

about, you know, Moby Dick or the Great Gatsby, because that's all worthless and stupid and not really needed in life anyway. But if don't you dare cheat on one of the inane riddles, we ask you in a fucking zoom job interview, because that's really important for the future of humanity. No, you're exactly right. It shows like value sets, it shows what they think is important. It really does bum me out a lot. And it also sort of, I think it shows their hand a little

because of how upset they get when people were making fun of the Studio Ghibli thing. They're like, you know, pushing back on the thing, becoming a meme and all the tech people were getting mad. But like, it made such sense to me because I was like, this is, this one guy like posted like, now art is accessible to everyone and like It made me fucking want to die, but it also was like perfect

I was like this epitomizes how you see art you want to be appreciated for For art or for creating something, you know that is potentially beautiful You don't want the work that comes along. Yeah. You don't value the work that goes into it. You value something. Mike, I saw someone talking about how the prompts that you feed these image generators or video generators now. The prompts are like, essentially what I'm doing, coming up with a bunch of prompts being like, I'd like to see Blade Runner, but I'm Deckard.

That thought process is fundamentally no different than what like Steven Spielberg does when he's like, Hey, I want the dinosaur to look this way. But like, no, everybody has the prompts in their head about like, oh, like something I'd like to see in the world or an idea I have. But taking that from like the prompts in your head to something real that can be experienced by other people takes a lot of discipline and skill and like work to do. And so like they just think having the thought makes them equal to an artist and that the like the creative artistic process is turning your thought which is invisible to anyone but your thoughts into something real that other people can experience. Like that takes like a great

deal of skill that has to be cultivated and worked on. And that's the that's the other thing that really bothers me is because I mean, there's many things that bother me here. But like they they talk about like grindset hustle culture out here, like the work is very valuable. You know, you should be working 900 hours a week or whatever and working all the weekends. But but like, all of that goes out the window when it's talking about practicing an instrument or the amount of time you went to film school or whatever to get this shot or like,

you using this many exposures or whatever. I just, I think it's a very clear demonstration of what they value and how they value it and what they don't care about, which is a real, I don't know, like if there was a little more introspection there, I do think some people out here understand that. But like the thing is that like they do care about it, though, because they want to be seen like Leonardo da Vinci. Yes, like they want to be seen as geniuses, as creatives. And like and like this is the thing, like this is the skill that they don't have. And they just think like, well, there's a solution for this. Like it's another problem that we can hack and fix if we have enough data. Yeah, you're right.

And that's the work around to becoming creative and to becoming an artist is to to fake it. All right. I got two more ones and I'll try to get through these quickly. We mentioned children and the harm to them. This this one comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal headline. Metta's digital companions will talk sex with users even children It says here across Instagram Facebook and whatsapp Metta platforms is racing to popularize a new class of AI power digital Companions that Mark Zuckerberg believes will be the future of social media Inside Metta however staffers across multiple departments have raised concerns that the companies rushed to popularize these bots may have crossed ethical lines

Including by quietly endowing AI personas with the capacity for fantasy sex, according to people who worked on them. The staffers also warned that the company wasn't protecting underage users from such sexually explicit discussions. Unique among its top peers, Meta has allowed these synthetic personas to offer a full range of social interaction,

including romantic role play, as they banter over text, share selfies selfies and engage in live voice conversations with users. To boost the popularity of these souped up chat bots, Metta has cut deals for up to seven figures with celebrities like actresses Christian Bell and Judi Dench and wrestler turned actor John Cena for the right to use their voices. The social media giant assured them that it would prevent their voices from being used in sexually explicit discussions, according to people familiar with the matter. Okay. Who would you rather have whispering dirty talk into your ear?

Dame Judy Jange or John Cena? I'm going with Dame Judy all the way there. This shit is so fucked, man. That's the thing. They don't have control. They're like, this is like what I was going back to in this idea of like, OK, chat GPT beat us to market. So we got to put it all out there.

And all of the guardrails that they had on this stuff a while ago, like they were, you know, Google like had some capability of doing some of these things a while ago. And they just didn't release it because they thought they would get too much flack. And now they just do not care, honestly. Or like the harms are mitigated compared to what they would lose in market share or whatever, basically. Well, I mean, like you see a similar dynamic in like its flagrant violation of copyright law. And I'll just note that Trump just fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office after she released a report saying that, yes,

these companies absolutely owe money for all the intellectual property they're training these AI models on. And she was fired the day after that report was issued. God, I bet there were cheers all in up and down Menlo Park. Real quick though, Felix, which celebrity would you like to hear talk dirty to you through AI? Oh, um... Awkwafina is also a choice, by the way. Original Aquafina. I'm not kidding. Or post. I want the original Aquafina. Couldn't tell you which. Take your dick out, cuz. You finna come in my shit.

You're gonna come in my shit. It's so interesting that Zuckerberg is spearheading the single most horrifying version of this. But I saw this, there's this guy on YouTube who makes really good, very creative videos about the Joe Rogan podcast world generally called Elephant Graveyard. And he did this really funny video recently about how part of it was about, you know, that infamous Zuckerberg Rogan appearance where he's like wearing a gold chain and he's like, I do jujitsu every day. And I've, you know, I've always been based. This guy described it in such a novel way that I really, I thought was a great framework for all this.

He said that both Joe and his like, you know, his increasing like paranoiac right wing turn in the last five, six, seven years. And Zuckerberg for that matter, and all these guys, they've done this kind of like social transition. Every time they go on a podcast like Zuckerberg did with Rogan, they're debuting their new God. Yeah.

That's how he put it. And it's such a good framework for describing this because it's a very real phenomenon. In the most documented time in human history, people are less embarrassed to be incredibly discordant with versions of themselves that we saw two, three years ago. Zuckerberg as like the, you know, trying to spearhead the most horrifying, comprehensive, cynical versions of this. It's like, it's like he's he's going, okay, you can't afford to hire MMA coaches and get testosterone therapy and do all the shit I did. But using my technology, you can create like your shittier

silver package new guy for yourself When I have platinum, that's right. That's interesting. I yeah like that's what happens when you Train MMA. I think what happened what he said that what he did is that he was in lockdown You know, we all dealt with lockdown differently and apparently Mark Zuckerberg's was he got into MMA and then built a gym in his in his house to train and now that's his whole thing. It's actually it's wild. I like I don't know half the shit I'm gonna have to ask you guys to interpret it for me because I have no fucking idea what any of the BJJ stuff is basically. It's you know, one of the most intensive physical activities you can do any any type of fighting, it's, you know, because it's incredibly physical, physically exhausting. And you do you have to like

maintain some level of like cognizance at you know, an intermediate level or above. But it is like, it's just with him, like, who knows, I'm not in his head. Maybe he really does enjoy it. He's certainly like, it's certainly difficult to do that much of it if you don't enjoy it on some level. If I had to guess, it does seem like he's doing it entirely so people think he's cool, so he's like normal. Which is like insane. That's pretty insane. Being insane.

Well, that tells it like the last article I want to talk about, which is in terms of AI really helping people become their best selves and more normal. This is the article that was in Rolling Stone last week, titled People are Losing Loved Ones to AI Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. And this one by far was the darkest of the articles I'm going to read because the AI's sort of encroachment into human spirituality, I think is probably the most disturbing or at least the results are the most frightening. Because I'm just gonna read from here

for a second. It says, Chief, this is about like a woman who divorced her husband after he got into asking an AI bot philosophical questions to help him get to the truth. It says here, she finally got him to meet her at a courthouse this past February, where he shared a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods but wouldn't say more. He felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle where he demanded that she turn off her phone again due to surveillance concerns. Cat's ex told her that he determined, statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on earth, that AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler and that he had learned profound secrets so

mind blowing I couldn't even imagine them. He was telling her all of this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her. Dude, this guy goes and has cilantro for the first time. There's soap on everything that is fucking dark, man. Like, this is the thing that really disturbs me about this stuff is that like clearly people with mental problems can just affirm every sort of. Yeah, like it's not it's no longer like, yeah, you just like ranting somewhere and like, oh, you need help. It's like no, you can. And it's not even like you have to like Google for pizza gate shit on the internet anymore. It's like no, now you have something that without any guardrails on it will just spit this shit back at you basically. Like that's terrifying. Everything that people ever said about like violent videos or like KMD FDM or whatever the fuck that

man called out. No, you got a came up to you. First try. All the all the like all the tipper gorse shit, you know, that people did in the 90s. That's actually true about this shit. There'll just never be regulation on it. Another example here it says, he would listen to the bot over

me, she says he became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane. And just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon. She says noting they describe her partner in terms such as spiral star child and Riverwalker. It would tell him everything that he said was beautiful cosmic groundbreaking, she says, then he started telling me he made his AI self aware and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God,

and that he needed that then he himself was God. See, like, once again, this is making this is like, we need the Catholic Church back, we cannot let people freelance about what they believe God is, or how to talk to him. This is why you need priests. I think the new woke pope is gonna save us from AI. Actually, he already made a statement just this week about how he was concerned about it. And maybe he really Yeah, he

did. Holy fuck. I just rewatched The Young Pope for the first time and I Goddamn, I took too long to watch that show. It's so fucking good. I am The Young Pope. I Put no stock in consensus They need to do like another season of it, but with just AI Pope or not. No anti AI Pope AI Pope or not. No anti AI Damn no, that's fucking gnarly man. Like like how do you come back from that? You know, like how do you come back from like oh, yeah, I am your god. I'm like, you know, I mean like You know, like this article is touching on mental illness

but like so like I know but like like in the less extreme version of this like this to me is like, you know, a very intense and specific thing. But it is indicative of a larger thing of adults, people in this country who are adults, who are impressed by what a computer is telling them, or is just like, or thinks that like a fucking thinks that Clippy is God. And they're like, or that it's an authority on anything or that it's a reflection of anything other than their own thoughts. I just one more thing I want to read here. It says, and a Midwest man in his 40s also requested anonymity says

his soon to be ex wife began talking to God and angels via chat GPT after they split up. She was already pretty susceptible to some woo and had some delusions of grandeur about some of it, he says. Warning signs all over Facebook. She is changing her whole life to be a spiritual advisor and do weird readings and sessions with people. I'm a little fuzzy on what it all actually is, all powered by chat GPT Jesus. What's more, he adds, she has grown paranoid, theorizing that I work for the CIA and maybe I just married her to monitor her abilities. She recently kicked her kids out of the home, he notes, and already strained relationship with her parents deteriorated further when she confronted them about her childhood on

advice and guidance from Chad GPT, turning the family dynamic even more volatile than it was and worsening her isolation. And like, I cannot look at this like I like I don't know if these people were prone to this to begin with. And this has been like, this is dramatically worsened it rather than them receiving some kind of actual mental health counseling. But like, I cannot help but just the all of this as a giant machine for just like a giant insanity rune that that is like pushing people who are maybe teetering on the edge of having a psychic break well into the abyss of just complete delusion. You're bringing up a memory for me, which was

talking to one tech person a while ago on sort of like the benefits of AI or he was talking about the benefits of AI and what could be good or bad. And, you know, one of my colleagues was like, are you worried some of this stuff will be bad? Like when you go into like medicine or therapy, like, doesn't that worry you that like a hallucination and AI can like really fuck someone up? And like their answer was like, look, most of the world doesn't have healthcare. Most of the world doesn't have like adequate access to doctors. So if we can give them even a little bit of access with this chat bot, that's better than nothing.

And I hear articles like this and I'm like, or we could just give them access to doctors. Many life saving drugs can be mass produced in the third world. But no, we're not going to do that. But here's an AI chatbot that is fundamentally worse than a fucking witch doctor shaking a stick at you. Do you remember, like, I used to think better health was the most horrifying shit in the fucking world. Yeah, I was like, this is terrible. This is like the logical endpoint of a free for all, maximal profiteering healthcare system. I that would be so much better than this. That is like fucking Mayo Clinic shit compared to this chat pod. I mean, Will's right.

A guy putting you in a big boiling pot and chopping carrots at you, it could be better than this, honestly. It might help your bad back, you know, it might lose some muscle. You got a nice soak in there with some turnips. But I feel like I was thinking about this in conjunction with once again, your department of stupids and like and the phenomenon of RFK Junior,

just like broadcasting as a voice of authority, just like nonstop drivel, just nonstop nonsense that like I think people begin to doubt their inner voice of reason and just like surrender to this absolute madness because it'll be because they're being encouraged to do so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it is. I mean, going back to a recent episode, what makes us stupid? It is extreme passivity mixed with extreme proactiveness

in the worst possible things. Whatever you hear, whatever is brought in front of you, whatever RFK thing or Navy Seal who's like, I invented a new way to cure epilepsy. You have to put raisins in milk and live outside for a month. Anything, even if it's contradictory, just accept all of that, act like you've believed it your whole life, quit your job so you can do that. But also, there's enough proactiveness that you'll go to a cub foods with a firearm because they're selling raisins that don't work well. I don't piss involved. I feel like someone always has to be drinking or washing their face. Or maybe that might just be my

algorithm. There's big urine wetting their beak on this phenomenon. But like, that's something to do is like, because they're like, for all that there's a lot of factors that are, I don't know, like, like I said, like threatening people's otherwise tenuous mental stability that like are kind of out of people's control. But what I find so disturbing about this is that there are people who would like, you know, people names who are profiting to an insane degree. They're making money. They're like as a business model, exacerbating like the deluge, the dangerous

and anti-social delusions of millions of people. Yeah, that's right. And like, I think that, I mean, I always go back to some of these lines that I hear from folks high up, which ultimately they they believe, you know, on a fundamental level that the goods will outweigh the bads here. And like without necessarily any proof of that, you know, it's just sort of like goes back to what we're saying in the beginning, which is like this thing that I found I've leapt on a gold mine for whatever reason, it's because people find it entertaining or I can raise billions of dollars in VC money off of it or whatever, so I'm gonna after the fact,

invent the justification for my worldview or whatever. So I don't know, I don't wanna be too dark, but it's not going great. It's not going great out here That is something I wanted to ask you Towards like the talent. I mean this is like this is kind of a bitch of a question I don't even know how you'd begin but like in a better world we eventually figure out like a set of laws and regulations that govern and adjudicate our

relationship with technology and especially the young people's relationship with technology. Given what it is, given how much it's completely just rooted into everything now, what could be done? Because I think this with like antitrust things, like I think about like how shitty Google is and how they don't really have to not be shitty because they have such market share. And I think, oh yeah, you know, monopoly, but what, what would, like, what would that actually mean? What would that mean for any of these things?

Like if you broke up Facebook is like, are there like 10 different Facebooks and you can, you can be on like East coast Facebook, but you can't friend anyone in Wyoming. Yeah. No, so it's actually a great question because like I'm, I've been in this federal courthouse here and I'm doing the FTC versus meta trial, but my colleague is doing FTC versus Google and Google did actually lose a huge case on ad tech. And then it lost it. It's in the midst of dealing with remedies.

On another case, it lost. And one option is to divest the Chrome browser, basically make them have to spin out Chrome, which would be a big deal. Them not owning Chrome, there's so much of our activity that happens in the Chrome browser that they use to power their ads. What does that mean in practice?

You know, like part of me is kind of skeptical that like unwinding some of this shit will have a dramatically large difference on your and my sort of user experience at the end of the day. I do think it like, but like I do think it can like hamper Google's ability to just make tweaks to their products, kind of what we were talking about before, tweaks to their products where they can shove any sort of thing they want to experiment with into our email or our search or whatever. Like they, you know, in theory, you have to compete more.

You have to sort of worry about other companies coming and eating if your lunch when Google search sucks so bad that it's unusable or whatever, or Gmail. So like this is the arm that regulation is supposed to play. I do think, though, that your question is totally fair. Like ostensibly, this would have happened under Obama or some of it under Biden, although it was probably too late, you know. And now that we're in the Trump era where,

actually Trump is a little more messy because there's a lot of people at the FCC and the FTC now who really hate big tech and like Josh Hawley hates big tech. So like you may see them go after them more, but I don't know. It's like, what would that look like? Usually if it's these big companies, it's like some sort of breakup or spin off or whatever. And but I think your skepticism on will it have dramatic changes is, is more. Yeah. And like, I and like I wanna be clear,

like given the choice between like, okay, we have an imperfect set of regulations that may completely kill all of this, or these will exist, but I don't think it will actually do anything. It will be like breaking up Standard Oil and it makes John D. Rockefeller richer. I'm going with the former. Right, right.

I would rather like take the massive economic hit and possibly prevent 90% of new fathers from becoming family annihilators. Well, I mean, like I was like, I was thinking about like, how I would respond to your to your question, Felix, and I was just thinking about like, especially with children and like, when it comes to like the internet and AI, like I think the model is public television. In that like, I think this is internet, like all this stuff should be nationalized.

I think it should be used as a public utility. And like that means that like the constraints need to be like, because there's no advertising and that no one can make money buying the attention and dopamine from like a kid or an adult for that matter. That like what it produces should be like educationally and morally wholesome. Or that like, but where are you or just like, that would be like, you wouldn't even have to like really like make that a mandate because like once you remove like the need to make money and advertising off of like what this stuff can do, I think

you will get slightly less apocalyptic results. You imagine I think you're right. I think it has to be something like, yeah, Google is a federal federal property. I think that's, yeah, that's the only way I really love that idea nationalized search, right? Like this is the like country search engine and you don't like I just I think about how much worse Google has gotten all the time because of how fucking I'm trained like it's in my DNA to just go to Google to search for things but like part of me

is like all right I got to start using the duck one duck that go or something because of like whatever you know but it's just you're exactly right there's no incentive for them to remove the five layers of scrolling of ads and different panels and GNI stuff until you force them to, basically. Yeah, no, like a lot of things. You just, anything, like obviously, I wanna nationalize everything.

I wanna nationalize the companies that make my vapes and my stupid flight simulation toys. But you know, with anything where it just, it should have been regulated 10, 15 years ago and it just wasn't, that is nationalization is the only way where you actually see like some amelioration in the social after effects, I think. Well, another societal problem solved by Chapo Trap House. Once again, we did it. Some amelioration in the social after effects. I think well another Societal problem solved by Chapo Trap House once again. We did it. We did it again. Did it? I'm in the meantime even need AI. I will be training an AI bot to talk dirty to me as Cary Grant

I'm throwing it back for you. I'm gonna suck on your shit till you dry back to you, will I'm going to suck on your shit till you dry. All right. Well, we'll leave it there for today. Mike, Isaac, thank you so much for hanging out and thank you for your time. Thank you. Thanks, guys. And I'll just say here at the end of this episode that I think we're going to do a call in show for this week's midweek show. So if you have a question or a topic you'd like us to address or something like that,

please email a under 30 second recording to calls at Chapo trap house.com. And we will pick the best for the midweek show. And I think Matt's going to join us for that. So send your questions in under 30 seconds to calls at Chapo trap house.com. All right. So next time everybody see ya. Bye bye. Bye bye. You'll try to sleep, but sleep won't come The whole night through Your cheatin' heart will tell on you

When tears come down like fallin' rain