Offline with Jon Favreau - Joe Rogan Debates Vaccines, Elon Challenges Zuck, and the Submarine Discourse

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Jon and Max answer your questions about AI, unions, writing and fallen titans — submersible and tech leader alike. Plus, America Dissected’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed joins Offline to talk about how the internet age endangers public health, how to persuade people to get vaccinated, and why debates are the wrong setting to talk about science, especially when RFK Jr. is involved. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

You can't, on the one hand, advocate for people taking vaccines and not, on the other hand, advocate for everybody to have healthcare, right? You can't, on the one hand, advocate for the science and then, on the other hand, deny all that science has brought us when it comes to our health to people who have been marginalized by our healthcare system. And so, you know, if we're serious about this, then yeah, you're right. Like, people are too profit-motivated and our healthcare system. And so, you know, if we're serious about this, then yeah, you're right. Like people are too profit motivated and our healthcare system is too much about profit. And if we took it out of there, maybe they trust us when we said, hey, this is really important for you and your community. And so it's all that interstitial work outside of the moments of crisis that I think

matters so much. Point very well taken. And I just can't wait to hear it when you go on Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan, debate me. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Offline. So this week, Max and I are going to answer your questions. We put out a call for submissions on Twitter, Instagram, Friends of the Pod Discord, which you can join at crooked.com slash friends. And we got a ton of responses.

So we are answering questions today on everything from we got AI, the submarine, the Musk versus Zuckerberg brawl. We're going to talk about the Reddit protest controversy. We're going to talk about writing. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. But one of the questions we kept getting was about disinformation and what to do about disinformation. And that made me think of a story

that I was following way too closely over the last week, which is RFK Jr. going on Joe Rogan's podcast, spouting a bunch of anti-vax nonsense. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and pediatrician, then trying to fact check Kennedy on Rogan, then Rogan challenging Peter Hotez to come on his podcast and debate RFK Jr. And Elon Musk and all his VC fanboys then piling on Peter Hotez and sort of harassing him to go on Joe Rogan's podcast. An anti-vax activist actually showed up at Peter Hotez's house to try to get him to debate

on Joe Rogan's podcast. The whole thing got way out of hand. But it did make me think about disinformation conspiracies that spread very easily and very fast online these days and what should be done about that how we can counter them how we can push back and since neither max nor i are medical experts we thought we'd bring on another guest to help us navigate those questions crooked's own dr abdul al-sayed abdul is of course host of America Dissected, a weekly pod on the network about the place where our politics meets our health. But by day, Abdul is also a practicing public health officer serving as the health commissioner for Wayne County, Michigan, which is the state's most populous county.

So first up, you'll hear Abdul and I talk through the Rogan debate, why anti-vax conspiracy theories are so prevalent and how we can fight back. And then after the break, I head back into the studio with Max to comb through the rest of your questions. As always, if you have comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offline at cricket.com. Here's Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Abdul, welcome to Offline. Thank you so much for having me. I've been waiting to be offline ever since the internet permeated my home in 1996.

Yeah, well, I have the show called Offline, and I'm still waiting for that myself. All right, first question. Will you debate vaccines with RFK Jr. on Joe Rogan's pod? No, and... Why not? Debate me. Jr. on Joe Rogan's pod? No. And why not debate me? I feel like I feel like I'm being I'm being jumped by the jock kids in high school. Look, at the end of the day, the problem with a debate is that it implies two equally well-informed ways of seeing the world. You and I could step back and debate whether or not we think government should be large or small in America. We could step back and debate whether or not we can or should be providing

healthcare to everyone, which, you know, we should. But debating science is difficult to do when one party wants to take evidence in its entirety and the other wants to pick and choose particular data points and then decide pick and choose particular data points and then decide whether or not those data points decontextualized from the rest of the data actually speaks for all the data. And so you can't really have a debate when the bounds of that debate don't exist within settled or understood processes of science. So point taken. Here's what I'm thinking about this. So this whole controversy erupts because I guess I'm a glutton for punishment. I listened to about half the Joe Rogan

pod with RFK Jr. just because I haven't really heard RFK Jr. speak about vaccines, right? Like I've heard him a couple of times before. So I wanted to figure out what I was getting here. And I hate to say this, but I understood after listening why some people find Kennedy appealing. He tells people, you know, don't trust me, read the scientific research, right? He cites all kinds of studies, as you mentioned, that he takes out of context and they're like, he's cherry picking stuff, right? He talks about how I used to think this anti-vax stuff was weird too. And then I was convinced, right? By all these people. And I did this research. And then he talks about corporate malfeasance and government incompetence, which you and I both know are real problems. And so as I'm listening to him, my thought is, okay, all the people who listen to us, who listen to our pods, cricket media people, watch MSNBC. Like, we're not trying to convince them about vaccines, right? today are so fragmented it is rare to get access to joe rogan's audience some of whom might be like

hardcore anti-vaxxers believe rfk jr and like we're not going to reach them fine but there's i know because there's people who like listen to us and listen to rogan and listen to shapiro right like i'll say so i know there's a group of people who if they are listening to rfk. on Rogan's pod, they might think to themselves, hmm, like maybe he's got a point there. And all these people are telling me to not listen to him and I don't know. And I'm wondering how we then reach that audience, if not by going on Rogan's pod and debating RFK Jr., which I agree with you that like all the things you laid out are real problems with doing that. But I things you laid out are real problems with doing that. But I just wonder from a perspective of like, okay, from a public health perspective,

the goal is to try to get as many people as possible in this country trusting and believing in the safety and efficacy of vaccines. So if a bunch of those people are listening to Joe Rogan and maybe not listening to us, how do we get to them? Yeah. So I think a couple of pieces here. Number one, I actually think we should be going on Joe Rogan's pod. Like I'd be happy to go on Joe Rogan's pod and talk about vaccines and the fact that nobody I know or you know or any of us know ever got smallpox because they work or the fact that there aren't a bunch of kids who can't walk in most schools simply because they got polio because our grandparents knew smart enough and their parents knew smart enough to get in line to get a vaccine with a much higher side effect profile because they saw the direct effects of getting polio. Like, I'm happy to sit down on that podcast and have that conversation. The

challenge, though, is that a debate, while it may seem like the right format, is simply not the right one for a couple of reasons. You know, John, you know, I ran for office. You've done debates. I've done debates. And the thing about debates is that, yes, you want to have facts and figures, but it's also about being a compelling orator. And compelling oratory is not the same thing as direct science and whether or not science is coming to the fore in the conversations that are being had. I'd actually argue that a direct debate done in a verbal setting vis-a-vis what you might understand from a presidential debate, I think that's the most common kind of debate people have seen, that is actually not the right place to have a conversation about what the science actually

says. There is, in fact, a very live debate that happens all the time in the academic literature. The problem, though, is that we're not very good about translating the academic literature. So I think what we're getting at here, John, is that there is a responsibility to translate science in language that is both understandable and compelling, but that's not the same thing as having a debate on Joe Rogan's podcast. And I argue, I'd be the first to tell you, and we talk about this all the time on America Dissected, is that I actually think the scientific community has created the space for this

because we're not very good at getting past the old trust the science trope. I actually think that there is a inherent inconsistency in the idea of trust the science because science was created not to be trusted, right? The whole idea of science is show me your process. Let me replicate your process for myself. And anytime somebody tells you trust the science, they are in fact violating one of the central tenets of science, which is that science is not intended to be trusted.

The whole point is to show your work, right? It's like the original blockchain, right? It's like here is all the proof, all the evidence. Boom, here's what we found. The problem with that is that it's painstaking work, but the responsibility to translate it does in fact sit with scientists. And I worry that too often we have not been very good

at explaining where we're coming from, demonstrating the process to folks and using language that is intended to translate it to people who don't necessarily come at it from the same background rather than, you know, to create this, I hate to say it, sense of elitism about the science where, you know, we are the only arbiters who can tell you what to do because, well, we live in an internet environment where that world is gone. I actually think it's probably a better thing that it's gone. Now it's time for us to be a lot better about engaging. A debate's not that platform, but going on Joe Rogan's

podcast and sitting down and explaining from soup to nuts what we understand about science, the real risk of adverse events, and the far bigger probability of getting sick if you don't take the vaccines, which we all sort of seem to forget about. Yeah, lots to think about there. First of all, I would say, I totally agree that public health really needs experts who can translate the science in a way that is persuasive to the public. And I know just for myself that like during COVID on Twitter, I had a list of people that I would follow. You, Peter Hotez, right? Like Ashish Jha before he took the White House job and after he took the White House job, right? Like there were just some, and I was so grateful that you guys were out there, that there was this whole group of scientists and vaccine experts

who could translate some of these like scary seeming preprints and studies that were like hard to dissect, right? And I, that's almost why, like, I think there's obviously some scientists and vaccine experts and medical professionals and public health professionals, well, probably not as much in public health, but who aren't necessarily good at speaking about these things and translating them. And that's okay, because like, you don't have to have all of those skills to be really excellent at your craft. But I think the people who are good at it, like you, like Peter Hotez, like, I'm like, they should, you guys should be out there talking to audiences who and you know, you should be able to go on like

Joe Rogan, right? Now, what you said about debates, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I prepped, I was part of the prep team for Obama and all of his debates. And he, as you can imagine, fucking hates debates. As most elected officials and people running for office hate debates because televised political debates are crap. They're not real debates. They are like you've got to say your message at the beginning of the answer and then you've got to give your points and you've got to do it all within 60 seconds, and it's just, it's a farce, right? I wonder if there is a context and setting that you could imagine where it would be productive to debate someone with either anti-vax or vaccine skeptical views that would sort of avoid the kind of, you know, debate that we see on television that doesn't always seem that productive?

You know, that's an interesting question. And let me step back to step forward. Part of the challenge with debates is that in an era where most folks don't sit and watch the entire debate. It's entirely about the single moment that can be taken out of context that can drive virality, right? Every debate team is prepped for that moment where their candidate has one good zinger. They're going to clip that zinger

and then drive it all over the internet. And the hard part about communicating science is that science is entirely about a process that iterates from what is already known. Meaning once you take a piece of science out of context, you're not actually doing science anymore. Whether you're talking about one data point in the context of all of the other data, or you're talking about one study in the context of all of the other studies. And so because debates are really about a series of decontextualized moments that can be used to grab an audience, the setting of a debate is almost an anathema to thinking about science. Now, if we could make sure that any audience member was committed to listening to the entire debate and not any piece

of the debate, that the debate tape was uncuttable, then I think maybe you could have a long drawn out debate, in which case you're forcing the context because decontextualized science is no longer science. And so that's the hard part about debating science is that by definition, it's a venue designed for decontextualized pieces. And I'll tell you, I remember when I was prepping for my debates, it was really difficult for me to learn how to debate because so much of what I'd been taught about communicating was about comprehensive communication rather than communicating in the way that is rewarded by a debate stage where you get in, get out, make your point with a pop and leave it there. And so it's hard, right, to be able to communicate something that really is about comprehensive contextualized understanding in a venue or a medium designed specifically around decontextualizing information. Let me ask you a question about vaccines more

specifically. What strategies have you found most useful in persuading skeptical people that vaccines are safe? Yeah, here's why I really appreciate the question, because I think sometimes when you think about a debate, you think about it as you need to convince the person you're debating. Most of the time, people are vested in their position. RFK Jr. is so far in that there's no point in which RFK Jr. is going to be confronted by a Peter Hotez and he's like, you know what? I've seen the light. You're correct. You're absolutely right. I've been wrong this whole time. It really is about the audience. And when you think about an audience that is susceptible to vaccine misinformation,

you got to remember, it's not usually about a series of cognitive ideas. It is about a series of emotions. It is about fear. It is about a feeling of being dispossessed by institutions that you once thought you can trust. It is about having your of being dispossessed by institutions that you once thought you can trust. It is about having your confidence shaken for a whole bunch of other reasons, whether or not you get access to healthcare in general, whether or not you have a precarious job, whether or not you're trying to pay your rent. All of those things are going to shape the way you trust institutions that are now telling

you to do something. And the reason vaccines, I think, have become such a node of medical disinformation is because you're asking somebody who's completely healthy to do a thing to sustain health. People take medications when they're sick in the first place all the time because they're already experiencing the consequence that they're trying to get relief from. But when it comes to a vaccine, you're asking someone who's completely healthy, usually, to do a thing to protect themselves when they now have the implicit bet

about whether or not they're going to be exposed to the thing you're trying to protect them from in the first place. And as that wager becomes harder and harder to take, you're going to see more and more people saying, but I'm perfectly healthy, why would I inject myself with this thing? Even if we can demonstrate throughout history, the impact of vaccines. So to take

that premise and develop it further, it really has to be about the emotional conversation. So why is it that you don't trust what they're telling you? And people will usually give you information about, well, why should I trust them? What have they shown me? And they'll start opening up about all those, again, contextual features in their life that have shaken their trust, you know, in people with suits with big ideas and big words, telling them what they ought to do. And just an example of this, one of the biggest predictors of not getting COVID vaccinated was whether or not you had health insurance. And you can imagine if you don't have health insurance, you may have some disease like diabetes or a family member has a preexisting

condition and you know they're sick and you take them to the hospital or to the doctor and you know you're either not getting care at all or you're being treated as a second class citizen. And now all of a sudden the government's like, hey, hey, we've got this thing for you, this piece of healthcare. And you're like, wait, so you all wouldn't give me the healthcare I knew I needed. And now you're trying to tell me to take this thing I don't even know I need. And that context is really important. So getting at that emotional conversation, asking questions to see where someone's at about why they don't trust the vaccines and recognizing that you have an iterated opportunity here. A lot of folks, again, to get to that point I made

about RFK Jr., most of the time, when you're in a discussion with somebody, we do treat it as a debate. And you want to prove to them why they should do this thing called getting a vaccination, which by the way, implies having somebody stab you with a piece of metal. I just put that in perspective. And most of the time, they're not going to give you that

aha moment where, hey, you were right. I was wrong. How dare I do this very irresponsible thing of not getting vaccinated when of course you knew what was better for me all along. People don't work that way. So instead it's like, instead of proving them wrong, try and get them to get to right. And I think if you can get where they're coming from and help them see that your intentions are their intentions and that they can be the winner here rather than you being the winner to prove them wrong, help them get to right. I think it makes a lot of the difference. Last question. You spoke earlier about how the source of a lot of this skepticism is just sort of lower trust, right, in public health officials, in government, in corporations. How do we sort of go about rebuilding that trust, knowing that, like, we're not going to be able to stop uh corporations from screwing people over

because that's that's what they do for profit sometimes um and you know we can't we can't control all that kind of stuff but you know as uh activists as public health officials as people who care about this like what what can we do to sort of rebuild the trust and institutions that is at the core of the skepticism. Yeah. This is a internet era problem. If I've ever seen one, part of the challenge is that we are constantly shown the worst of every institution in front of us. And there are some really bad actors. I mean, anybody who listens to my show knows that I am not a big fan of big pharma, not at all. But anybody who thinks that vaccines are the, are the, the, the big pharma conspiracy not at all. But anybody who thinks that vaccines are the big pharma conspiracy theory

does not understand the basic economics of pharmaceutical companies. They don't make a lot of money on vaccines. In fact, that's the reason why we don't have vaccines for some very important diseases. It's the reason why we don't have an HIV vaccine. It's the reason why we don't until very recently have a malaria vaccine. It's because there's no money in vaccines. The money's in other drugs. And so holding pharma accountable is, I think, really critical in the moment when they're, you know, raising people's prices on insulin so that you can demonstrate that you, the government, is not bought into, you know, quote unquote, conspiracy theory about pharma. The other part of this though

is we got to regulate the internet itself. I mean, the, the, the way that algorithmic amplification feeds people stories that create a narrative about big institutions failing you, even though most people working in these big institutions are working to get it right. And you don't ever get that story because it's not a story that goes viral, I think is, is, is another part of it. And then the last part of it, I think, is that we, you know, in my day job, I work as a county health director. We got to show up in moments when the heat is not on. It's not, the first time they're seeing you is in a moment of crisis. Then by definition, you haven't built the trust that you needed.

And so the question becomes, how do we show up in moments before there's ever a crisis, before we're asking people to make a decision that is critical for their own health? How do we show up and make sure that they know who we are because we showed up to take on all of their other problems? And that to me is why, you know, you can't on the one hand advocate for people taking vaccines and not on the other hand advocate for everybody to have healthcare, right? You can't on the one hand advocate for the science and then on the other hand deny all that science has brought us when it comes to our health to people who have been marginalized by our healthcare system. And so, you know, if we're serious about this, then yeah, you're right. Like People are too profit motivated.

And our healthcare system is too much about profit. And if we took it out of there, maybe they'd trust us when we said, hey, this is really important for you and your community. And so it's all that interstitial work outside of the moments of crisis that I think matters so much. Point very well taken. And I just can't wait to hear it when you go on Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan, debate me. Yeah, debate Abdul.

Abdul, thank you so much for coming on Offline. Last Minute 2, this was enormously helpful, and I'm really glad we had this conversation. John, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. All right, we're back. Here with my friend Max. Hey, pal.

What's going on? So happy to be back. Just killing time before I go back to not being on my phone. Before we dive in, you want to do a quick screen time? Let's do it. Screen time check. I memorized it because, of course, I don't have my phone in the studio wow good for you i do have my phone but it is wrapped in gadgets and gizmos to keep me from using it and is on grayscale wonderful um mine is not great it's uh it was three hours and two minutes wow john buddy what happened what's going on man i don't know i just fell back into it keep in mind i, I was at six when we started.

That's true. That's true. It's still an improvement. It's a 50% reduction. Was there a specific app that you found yourself pulling back into? Because I am thinking a lot about relapsing and what that looks like. So now that I'm talking to the model of relapsing. I was on Instagram a lot.

I was on iMessage a lot. And there were times when I put Twitter back on my phone oh no it's off now but was it the titanic or was it the musk zuck match off that pulled you back it was uh it was like yeah it was around the pods that i was like trying to catch up on catch up on news it's useful for catch unfortunately it's useful yeah but here's something interesting tell me i never do the for you the algorithm i think i also switched back to the just people i follow or you are saying as i as i relapsed yeah suddenly i noticed it is i hate it the for you thing but it's getting better the longer i use it at knowing what i like yeah and i'm finding myself being like oh i'm gonna get

some good tweets on here which i never thought before i used to think it was fucking terrible oh okay oh that's interesting yeah that's not good though because now it's giving me it's it's addicting you unfortunately the machines are pretty good at identifying what is going to keep you and sometimes that is it's like 20 useful 80 junk which is like just the right mix to like tell yourself that it's okay to go back and it's good at showing me stuff that i hate which is another. But do you secretly deep down love it? And that's why you can't stop looking at it. Yeah, exactly. All right. What's your screen time? So I was, let me give you the last couple of weeks. Two weeks ago was 92 minutes. Last week was 74 minutes.

And this week so far is an hour and 43, but that number is skewed because I had to borrow a friend's truck to move some furniture. So I had Google maps up for like three hours so i think without that it's like an hour and 20 hey fuck you all right look i'm not going to apologize for winning john um we put out a call for questions uh you all sent in some fantastic questions which we could get through them all we're just gonna take uh some now. First question is from Michelle Pasquarello. Why are scientists so worried about AI? For example, I've never used chat GPT or any of the AI apps. What about it is dangerous to me specifically? So we got so many variations of this question of like, why is everybody so freaked out about AI? And I understand why people think that like

scientists and experts are freaked out. It's actually mostly Silicon Valley people who are telling us to be terrified about it. The like, people who do not have a vested commercial interest in AI are taking a much more like wait and see approach. I think it's also worth like demystifying it a little bit. Like When we talk about AI, there's not actually such a thing as artificial intelligence. There's not something that designates that. We already use lots of stuff like Spotify autoplay that you could call AI. The new version is something called large language models, which just analyzes large amounts of text and reproduces it. And I think a reason that that looks so scary or feels so scary is that

when you look at the products, the end products of it, like when you tell it like, you know, redo the Trump indictment in the voice of Ernest Hemingway or do the, have you seen the like fake Balenciaga ads? Yes. The Pope and the... Right. Like Harryry potter is balance it it's kind of cool like it looks but it's just mimicry it's not actual creation but there's this psychological phenomenon called a hyperactive agency detection that makes us think that we're seeing actual like thought and originality and creativity and that it's the same um like pathological or psychological hack that makes us see like the virgin mary in a piece of toast where we're constantly projecting humanity onto things where it is not so i think we're all overstating looks like her though

some of the toast is pretty compelling yeah um so we're i think that we are uh when we look at it and we think oh my god i'm looking looking into the eye of the machine intelligence. What you're just seeing is you're seeing something that is very effective at copy pasting and remixing that we're mistaking for creativity because we want to see that. But are you actually worried about AI? What are the things that worry you about it? It's good to define different categories of AI or different categories of what AI could affect. And I should say a lot of you wrote in about the influence of AI on politics. We have a great episode coming up in the next couple of weeks that will be about how AI is affecting campaigns now and it will in the future. So stay tuned for that.

Job displacement is the first concern. So you're an associate at a law firm and suddenly AI can write a brief and put together research that's just as good as what any human could do, only faster. So does the firm need that many associates now? Yeah. So accounting, legal, there are going to be entire sectors of jobs. I think that just like jobs were displaced when, you know, the Internet started taking over. The same will be true of AI. And will it be as dire as some of the current predictions. Who knows? But you can imagine certainly how some jobs would be automated out of existence like they have been for the last century due to technological advances. Right. Yeah. It does seem like it's a specific category of job that involves not a lot of creativity, but a lot of basically data processing, which is what these AIs are doing. And if that is your job, like you're saying, someone who is just processing briefs, that is a threat to your job. Yeah. I don't think it's a huge category of jobs, but for sure it's real. And also the risk of large scale disinformation.

I mean, the ease with which you can fake a video, a deep fake that looks a little bit fake. And if you really are discerning, you can probably tell that it's not real, but you know, it was the fact that these tools are being democratized. What, what is the effect of that going to be on our politics? Yeah. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of commentary, like, well, can you, it's sort of easy to tell right now what's a deep fake or whatever. But at some point it becomes harder to know what reality is. And in preparing for this interview that I'm going to do in a couple of weeks, everyone kept bringing up this example in politics of it's not that Donald Trump will say something and it'll actually be a deep fake and whatever. If the Access Hollywood

tape had come out today, couldn't Trump just say, actually, that's not real. That's just a deep fake audio. And so you start getting people denying reality and calling it AI. I think what we don't know yet is whether that is going to be a categorically different kind of difficulty of differentiating reality, or if it's just going to be a slightly more severe version of a problem we already have. Because I remember like 2016, when a lot of fake news articles, like fake screenshots of New York Times articles that look kind of real were circulating on Facebook. And that was the concern is like reality is fracturing. And it turned out it's actually pretty easy to differentiate. It's pretty easy

to like check it against a trusted source and that the real problem was not the quality of the image fakery. The real problem were the forces that make us predisposed to want to believe fake information. And that's why I think that the deep fakes combined with algorithms that are even smarter and better at understanding what you want. So now you're being fed images, sounds, videos that you are already predisposed to believe in. And the algorithm knows that. And so the combination of the two might make the disinformation, I think you're right, like a bit more sophisticated. Right. I mean, I'm probably just being a bit contrarian, but I think my view is that I think we're overstating how impactful the like change in the technology. around the 2016 election and really coming out believing that the quality of the product, the quality of the like fake news article or whatever was actually not that determinative

for whether people believed it or not. It was deeper, you know, it was polarization. It's the degree to which people want to believe what's real or what's fake. So I don't know that I'm convinced that huge numbers of people are going to be tricked in the way that they weren't before, But it's possible that I'm just understating how much this is going to be different. Well, I also do think there's a divide here between college educated, high information voters and the rest of the electorate, having talked to a lot of the rest of the electorate in various focus groups. And again, I'm not saying these people are people are dumb, right? But it's just if you are not a voracious news consumer and you are casually tuning in the likelihood that you casually tune in and something is fake and you don't spend the time to figure out that it's fake or double

check it or fact check it. It's just it's a lot more work on the fact checkers, on consumers, on voters, whatever. Like just gonna have to do more work you know yeah i mean it i i'm gonna sound like an msm show when i say this but i do feel like the repeat lesson of this is just that like it's bad to get your news from social media you should really be getting it from trusted sources like crooked media podcasts a crooked media podcast um surveillance social surveillance China has facial recognition technology already. So they can track movements, but also activities, relationships, political views. People think we'll get to that point. Police departments right now have algorithms that predict where crimes will occur. But that tends to send police to heavily black and brown neighborhoods and communities right so there's sort of there's a bias in and i mean this is one of the things that we keep seeing with ai that we think it's going to give us new information but in fact because it's just processing the information

we're giving it all it's doing is feeding our own pre-existing biases and behaviors back to us yeah and so that's a challenge and then of course there's the autonomous weapons. That's like the big scary world ending thing. And that, that I don't know that there's a lot right now. I don't know that there's a lot of evidence for that being and I talked about that surprise, surprise, turned out to be fake because it was on social media that said falsely that there had been like this DOD weapons test for an autonomous system that in a simulation ended up like going Skynet

and killing its creator or like killing its operator. And of course, this turned out none of this had actually happened. It was just like a thought experiment. Someone speaking extemporaneously. And I was talking to someone about it. Big whoops there.

Yeah. Don't. Oh, when I said that happened, I meant we just imagined that it could happen. That's not that same thing. It's not like a sensitive subject or anything. The DOD spending billions on robot weapons.

Put it out there on the Twitter. Let's see what happens. Let's see what happens. Yeah. Let's see what happens. I was talking to someone who covers robotics and AI in the military, and he was saying that there's actually huge resistance in the DOD to any sort of autonomous weapons because they just like, culturally, they just don't like it. It doesn't work with how they envision kind of working things so that it's, I think that there is a sense that

like when you talk to people that like oh the the military really wants to get the terminators off the ground and i think that's just not i mean it's not what the technology does i think it's not something that people want to do um and a point that i've seen people made is that we sometimes freak out about oh my god killer robots as if drones haven't been a thing for like 20 years now right yeah i mean i do think that i uh i really hope that um china and russia and north korea feel the same way what could go wrong proliferating technology power competition like no no no autonomous weapons um all right andrew scott bell says

i'd love for you guys to touch on what's going on with the writer's strike as industry banned the use of artificial intelligence for writing or rewriting source material or using AI to train on their work. So basically saying, don't let AIs write scripts, which feels like something that is very far off and is very hard to imagine. We don't know if the technology will ever even get there, which is part of why it's become such a big impasse because the writers, the view that you hear is that like, we have to stop this now before the technology actually exists. And the view from the movie companies is why would we cut off access to this technology? We don't even know what it's going to do yet. So it's become this like- This is why it's hard. This is why it's a really tough negotiation game. But at the same time, and I think something that's feeding

into a lot of the anxiety on both sides is that AI is much more viable in other parts of the industry. Things like- Special effects. Right, special effects, CGI work, which is already way overstrained. So it would actually be really useful.

Or storyboarding or illustration. These are things that AI actually can do in the near future but i i think that like the the risk like you were saying it's not the risk of ai in say the legal field is that it replaces people who are writing legal briefs not that we have like ai terminator lawyers um and although i would love to watch that TV show. Yeah, I was going to say, I think, forget AI, I think you just pitched a premise that people can use.

You might have just crossed the picket line. I do, I do. I do have a copyright on that one. I am not going to be pitching that yet, but once the strike is over, I am right in that front door in Warner Brothers. But I think that the, like, you can kind of feel them talking past each other, I feel like, both sides here.

Because there is, I think if you're an illustrator, if you're a CAGI artist, there is something to be worried about here. But there is also this technology is potentially very useful. And that, ironically, those are the people I feel like you hear from in the industry, the CGI artists who are the, in my experience, the least concerned about AI because they see it as, oh, this is an automated paintbrush, not an automated painter. That will make my job easier. Right, exactly. Not something that's going to replace me. I'll just argue the other side on this just because I was looking it up. So first of all, the studios, so what the writers asked for is what you said, the source material. What the studios came back with was like, we'll hold a meeting with you

once a year to talk about technology. The studio response was, fuck you. Yeah, which does not seem very productive. But I think that the concern I've heard from writers too is twofold. It's not that AI today could like churn out a great script. It's that AI can churn out a decent first draft of something

that you would not, it would not be final, but then basically writers just polish it, which means you would need less, punch it up and polish it. So you need less time from writers, therefore less writers, less labor. So it's, so that's a problem.

And then the second thing is it's actually pretty good right now at coming up with the premise of a movie or a television show. And not the kind of show that's going to win an Emmy or an Oscar, but the more formulaic kind of shows. So people kept using the example of like svu right a law and order yeah and the show is so formatted that you can imagine it spitting out a whole bunch of different episodes on that the other thing is for it's not just writers it's actors that are concerned too yeah so a recent netflix contract reserved the rights to simulations of actors voices quote throughout the universe and in perpetuity. That was in the contract.

Yeah. So these actors are signing away, you know, at some point, I mean, I think this is down the road, but maybe not that far down the road. Like you start using the actor's voice and likeness without the actor and suddenly you don't really need them. Right. I mean, it's not hard to imagine i think there's a like the the kind of like severest version that you hear about this like

there was a viral twitter thread from justin bateman who's a actor and a director who was kind of spinning up these scenarios of like you know viewers will go to netflix and they'll order up an automated movie about a a panda and a unicorn who saved the world in a rocket ship and put Bill Murray in it. And that is technology that is like 100 years away. But it is not hard to imagine as being like five years away from, you know, Netflix hires you to act in a TV show and then they want to do a version of it in Japanese. And they just use machine learning or they use AI to automatically have you doing all the lines in Japanese. And now that's money that you're not getting or someone is being put out of work as a result of that. Ironically, this was the subject of the first episode of the new season of Black Mirror on Netflix. Wow.

And it was basically tweaking Netflix. Really? Yeah. Wow. Biting was basically tweaking Netflix. Really? Yeah. Wow. Biting my hand. I know. It was interesting that they aired it,

but everyone should go check that out because it's basically this. All right. On the subject of the writer's strike, we got another question from a guy who goes

by the name of Travis Helwig. Is this person known to you? This person is known to me. Used to work here at Crooked Media. Good friend.

It says, hi, John. Long time, first time. Love the pod. Hate John Lovett. Wow. Poor Lovett. Travis, for those of you who don't know, of course, used to work very closely with Lovett on Love It or Leave It. Before they're falling out.

Before they're falling out, yeah. As a member of the striking WGA, I'm curious how you think social media has changed union organizing over the past decade. It seems America has gotten more pro-union, perhaps one of the few positives of social media. Here's what's true before we get into it about unions and support. So what's true is that public support for unions is at an all-time high. Way up. Union membership, however, is at an all-time low and has fallen the last two years, despite all the headlines about new organizing drives.

So right now, one in 10 workers in America are in a union. This is down from the height of one in three in the 50s. Now, we should say that last year, the number of workers in unions did grow by about 200,000, but the number of non-union jobs grew faster, which is why overall participation fell. So now the question is, why? What is the responsible for these trends? So there's actually been a lot of really interesting research on what drives support for unions. And there tend to be two pretty consistent predictors for whether people are supportive of unions or not.

The first is just the performance of the economy. When the economy is doing poorly, approval of unions tends to go down and the attitude people tend to express, especially people who are not in unions, which of course is most workers, they tend to blame that on union overreach. I don't think that's a correct assessment, but it is what people think.

And then when the economy is doing well and people are doing well individually, even if they're not in unions, they tend to credit unions with improving workplace conditions and improving their salaries. So it's kind of like the same effect with how people feel about the president, the incumbent president. They just like credit them with how the economy is doing. And people associate unions so much with the American economy. The other big predictor is inequality. When inequality is high, even on a very local, like down to the zip code level, support for unions goes way up because people see that as an important force for pushing back against powerful economic corporate interests. And when inequality is up because people see that as an important force for pushing back against powerful economic corporate interests.

And when inequality is low, people see unions as less essential and they support it less. And that, again, speaks to the point that you made about all time high. And the number has been especially rising since the Great Recession when it hit an all time low. But it started to dip down again with the performance of the economy. So I think that it's not, there's, there's little, there's not much reason to think that social media is driving the trend one way or another, because it, the trend doesn't correlate with the rise of social media. But there's probably very good reason to think that our individual perceptions of how our fellow Americans feel about unions is driven by social media because of the filter bubble effect. And you're just, you were, you know, the circles that you and I and Travis are going to be in are

going to be very pro-union and very pro-strike. And we're going to be seeing a lot of that content on our feeds and it's going to feel to us like an overwhelming support for that. Well, and much like this is the same dynamic that happens with sort of political twitter uh right which is you are exposed to a lot of people who think just like you and you are also exposed to people who have the extreme opposite view right yeah and so i think if you are you know a writer on strike you're seeing like a lot of solidarity in your feeds from other people who either are other writers or who support you. And then you're also seeing the villains and what the villains are saying in this, right? And they seem like even bigger villains than they normally would. And so

it seems like it's this bigger, this seems like the awareness is broader than it might actually be. And of course, we should say for union participation, there are also obstacles in the way. And this explains sort of the overall decline from the 50s, more legal obstacles to forming a union, globalization, automation, corporations have gotten better at suppressing union organizing drives. And I think just the overall loss of social networks, right? The fact that just people don't join things anymore. They don't hang out together. They don't see each other as much, right? Like that whole bowling alone phenomenon, like that extends to union organizing as well. That's a good point. I never connected those two, but you're right. It is really an extension of

that. I do feel like when I talk to people who are in the entertainment industry, as you do anytime you walk down the street here in Los Angeles, it does sound like social media is playing a pretty big role in the strike and just in the the ways that you would expect it to of channeling a lot of public shaming outrage social norm enforcement um there's been a lot compared to last strikes of um focus on kind of picking out the transgressors like um a showrunner named tony gilroy who was was subject to a lot of like naming and shaming because he initially did not shut down production on the second season of Andor in solidarity with the strike. And that was effective. It got him to, you know, there were like a couple days of like a lot of Instagram and Twitter call outs. And then he did end up, I think, shutting down production.

And you hear, I think, the same kind of both appreciation of that, but also apprehension about it that you hear in any other quarter of life where that starts to come through, where you hear people saying, you know, on the one hand, it's really good because now we are doing a lot of like making sure that people are behaving in line with the norms of the strike and people are being good citizens, but also it ends up being, it can be a distraction because when all of your energy is focused on who's the online villain of the day, you're not thinking of the structural problems. You're not thinking of the studios. You're thinking of who's the writer or producer who we're all yelling at right now. Yeah. I noticed that at the very beginning of the strike, there was reports that Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and Colbert were all going to pay their writers and their staff while the strike was going on. And then someone interviewed Jimmy Fallon about this at the Met Gala, and he expressed support for the writers, but he didn't necessarily say he was going to do that. And I think one of the Jimmy Fallon writers took to Twitter and said,

he's not offering this and blah, blah, blah. And then he was the villain for, it was like 24 hours. And then, you know, a tweet that was not as well retweeted. It was not retweeted as much and many times the next day was like, oh, by the way,

we had the meeting with Jimmy this morning and he's going to do the same thing. And he's going to pay too. Of course. Now, was that social pressure on him to do that? Was he going to do it anyway? We don't know, but it does speak to the speed of this stuff and how it gets really heightened. Right.

And before you actually have time to litigate it. And I really feel conflicted about it because there are so many cases, especially if you think back to like summer of 2020, where it was a force for good. There are also so many cases where it's a force for bad. And you can see people kind of whiplashing back and forth and how they feel about it, whether the most recent instance of it was something that was productive or if it was like, oops, it was a mistake and we called out the wrong person. And I think that it's so transformative. I mean, the fact that this plays out now in basically every mass social action of any kind that I don't think we have a sense yet for whether it's net good or bad for us. No. And I think from the individual perspective, a good rule of thumb is, you just mentioned this, but think about the know, think about the larger social context. Like,

what are the changes, the systemic changes that you're fighting for? Focus on those changes and focus on the people who really do have the power to make those changes and to make them in a big way that impacts a lot of people and not sort of the individual who's doing something wrong that feels good to shame and like maybe it's right to shame that person maybe it's wrong but what's the impact of of shaming that person is it going to be a big impact that helps a lot of people or is it going to be like refereeing someone's battle with someone else yeah i have also i have been part of um when i was at the times there was a big we didn't quite strike we got pretty close if there was a walkout there's a very contentious three-year uh labor contract negotiation and

something that you see because you see this and everything you see in politics is that social media really does heighten the most extreme voices but when you get down to the point of reaching an agreement there's compromises there's you know tradeoffs. And that stuff's not happening on social media. That stuff's not happening on social media. And then those are the people who are the least happy about the trade-offs. So there was a little bit of, everybody was great about it, everybody was pros, but there was kind of a moment when you felt the kind of collective will shifting from following the loudest voices who were kind of staking out the strongest positions to saying, now we need to move to make some trade-offs and some compromises to reach an agreement.

And I think it's going to be interesting to see because this is a strike that has played out so much online. How easy it is to kind of make that pivot when it comes time to hopefully soon reach a deal. next question comes from our friend of the pod discord channel sign up at cricket.com slash friends as you guys have mentioned technology has made writing a struggle especially as our brains are being rewired how can you tell that your writing is good and is there ever a worry that the audience of a book or whatever you may write may have also been transformed by technology? Maybe something that was good pre-social media might not land the same in a world steeped in TikTok content. Fantastic question. A couple of great questions. I think about this all the time.

Do you think about this a lot? I do. Do I think about whether my writing is good writing is good i mean on some level do i ever think about anything else than torturing myself over whether my writing is good to that that's an easy answer for me i've never been able to tell if my writing is good i mean either i think that most writers have experienced when do you know because you've you've written some things that have had some uh yeah i had some fans right like you get you write yeah i mean i had a unique experience and you write something and then Barack Obama says it and people like it. And then you're like,

OK, I think that was good. And then you write something and, you know, he gets criticized for it. You say, OK, maybe that wasn't so good. Is that is that how you knew the kind of reading

into the kind of external feedback? Yes, sort of. But also he, you know, he spent a lot of time. I guess what I would say is when he was highly praised, I didn't take the praise myself as much as you might expect. And when he was really criticized in the same way. Right. Actually, when he was really criticized, I took it personally.

Right, right. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. But now, at least in the moment, like I think one of the most criticized speeches he gave was when he, no one probably remembers that. Remember when the BP, the Deepwater Horizon. Yeah, Deepwater Horizon, yeah.

Yeah. And there's the camera at the bottom of the ocean. And he basically gave an Oval Office address because everyone was like, why won't he plug the hole? You know, why can't Barack Obama plug the hole in the ocean right right and um it was just so panned it was like because he didn't have we didn't have a we didn't have a solution right and we started talking about like climate change and we like made it a bigger thing about energy but like no one wanted to hear that in the moment they just wanted to plug the fucking hole right yeah and we couldn't do that so sometimes

speeches can't now with the that doesn't sound like a writing problem but at the time it was like this speech is terrible yeah yeah now i look back and i'm like yeah well it wasn't a writing problem yeah um but anyway being that scrutinized sounds really i mean i thought i was under a microscope at the times but that really sounds rough it's fine i would say though that even back then yeah ob and I always felt, and all the speechwriters, we always felt this pressure from the press and from our own press department and communications department to write speeches in soundbites. Like, what's the line that's going to get quoted that people will remember? And, you know, Jeff Zeleny, who's for cnn now um sure would always call me and be like all right what's the etched in stone line in this speech and i always tell zeleny like i i didn't we don't write that way it's 30 paragraphs because like yeah in obama's view like the best way to

tell an effective inspirational story is to like lay the story out but i still think about that all the time right i think about because now it's become worse. And I always think like, if I was speech writing now, I think it would be even trickier, because you really are writing to an audience that has a much shorter attention span. Well, I mean, you're still being filtered, but now you're being filtered through social media instead of through CNN and NBC. Yeah. And I remember when we, when he did the, gave the race speech, we gave it in the middle of the day and I was like, and a lot of people were like, I don't know if anyone's going to cover it. It's not a primetime speech.

What are you going to do? And sure enough, people found it on YouTube and it became like a, you know, I don't know if that would happen today. I mean, I don't know if we even exist in that era of political speech right anymore. And I don't know how that would happen today. I mean, I don't know if we even exist in that era of political speech right anymore. And I don't know how much that's just like the Trump Biden one to kind of killing it where like Trump obviously loves to do long speeches, but they're just so incoherent and so crazy and so dangerous that they don't get broadcast.

And Biden appears to like just not have an interest in it, which frankly seems kind of appropriate for our era to just like step back a little bit. But I wonder if we'll ever have like, I was watching a movie over the weekend that included clips from Jimmy Carter's, I think it was a great malaise speech, but like really speaking to like the soul of the nation and like the nation's father coming down and like from the desk. And it just like, I don't know if that's ever going to happen again. I don't either. And I, so like to answer the question about how I think about it today,

whether it's writing, which I don't do much of or podcasting, like I am still thinking constantly about the audience. And I think that whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, it's the reality. And so I want to be respectful of people's time right and i also realize that people are easily distracted so you don't want to bore them you don't want to waste time you don't want to do these like long wind-ups so it does sort of

you have you have to really like get to the point these days and i do think like that even as we're figuring out what to talk about on the pod or whatever else. What about you? Like when you were writing your book, did you have this in your mind at all? So I actually really love the challenge of trying to think of where people are going to be in this exact moment and how can I write to it? And I always really find it helpful. Yeah, I find it really helpful too. And you're, you're trying to like, you're, it's a service for people. Like you're not writing something that'll be this like tome up on the mountain and you're going to make like people climb up to it to appreciate your grade. In fact, when you do think like that as you're writing, that's when you don't write well.

Right. That's when you produce terrible writing. But I always loved like, especially if I was writing on a few challenges, I'd loved more than writing on a topic, especially at the times that like I knew people had really strong feelings on. And there was a lot of swirl on around. There was something on like Israel-Palestine. And I knew I wanted to get people to. Light, non-controversial topics. Right.

Get people to like a certain idea or like a certain way of looking at it and thinking about how can I write in a way that will get people there and will challenge them in their preconceived notions but not feel confrontational, not put their defenses up, and that will's feelings about the news, this particular moment, who are the different people who are going to read this. So the arrival of TikTok or the latest wave of social media certainly is a factor in that. But I don't think that it's like an enormous sea change. And I'm not, I'm not worried that like people are losing their appetite for the written word. I looked into this book sales are actually way up. I also think that writing, especially persuasive writing, requires empathy in a way that a lot of other skills don't. Right. And so you really hone that sense of empathy of putting yourself in the shoes of the audience, which I think is a good thing. And back to our conversation about AI. I do think that's what AI will not be able to replace. And so I think that teaching, I think about like teaching kids today, right?

Because I have a child. And like teaching them creativity and empathy, even to our last episode with Simone, becomes even more important in a world of AI because people who have that skill, those skills of creativity and empathy, those jobs are not going to be able to be automated. Right. And that's something that can actually produce that, which a lot of people are doing in a lot of different formats. I think you're right. It's going to become even more valuable because the need for that is, I think, never going away.

No. All right. Stephen Timberman asks, can you cover the recent protests on Reddit? I feel like that's the last of the old internet that's still out there. What's going on on Reddit? Okay. I'm not a big Reddit person. So I don't like it. I just haven't used it. It's actually pretty good.

I actually, they like, I did not invent this. This has been around for a while, but a great- You didn't invent Reddit? If you search for information and you put Reddit at the end of it and you get a Reddit thread answering it, the quality of the information goes up like 800%. It's actually great. Reddit is actually pretty good. And it's both the source of like a lot of the poison on the internet, especially in the early 2010s. But they've had a lot of, and this will loop back, I promise, to like what's going on with the protests.

They've done a lot that has made it one of the healthier social networks and one of the better places of sources for like good information. So the protest at Reddit. Reddit is divided between a bunch of subreddits. That's the whole site. Everything in the content goes into some community where it's like gaming, movies, whatever. And those are all run by volunteer users,

kind of like on Wikipedia, who are the moderators. And they kind of steer discussion and they decide what goes on it. And they, a lot of them have in the last couple of weeks in protest for this decision that Reddit made, have been shutting down their subreddits or switching them to private so that people can't access them unless they're a registered user on it, which basically has sent a huge portion of the site dark, which is kind of wild. If you think one of the biggest social networks in the world,

it's like huge parts of it deliberately went out for a long stretch. So the thing that they were protesting is that Reddit is going to charge for commercial access to its API. What does that mean? API is the application programming interface. It's like the socket by which outside companies or programmers can scrape data from a platform to use for their own purposes. The specific use case that is at issue here is that there are a lot of third-party app developers that develop tools that you can use if you're a moderator for Reddit. Or there's like one of the examples that keeps being cited. There's this app called Apollo that you can use on your phone to scroll Reddit and it's like a slightly swoopier,

nicer experience. Than actually being on Reddit. Than actually being on Reddit. Or their app or the Reddit, the official Reddit app. That's right. So the third party apps are more user-friendly than the Reddit apps. They've got some bells and whistles, people like them. And it's like Apollo charges like a dollar a month. They get all the data from Reddit for free. And Reddit is

saying, wait a second, we're building up this API so that all of these other companies can extract all this value from us that they keep all of. Apollo keeps all the money that they make. And also that means that people aren't on our app, so we can't serve them ads, which is how we make our money. So we're going to start charging those companies that use our API. People are mad about this because they say that Reddit is charging so much that a lot of these apps are going to have to shut down. People like these apps. Some moderators say we have necessary tools that we use these apps for to moderate. Reddit is saying we're going to provide you free moderator tools. But basically the dispute is over whether Reddit, the corporation,

or Reddit, the community of volunteer users, is in the driver's seat for determining how Reddit is going to work and kind of whose priorities and interests are going to come first. There's a larger question here that I've seen a few places about this, which is, like, is what's happening with reddit which then basically the company trying to monetize and having less faith in advertising as a way to monetize is that a trend across different social media companies obviously we're seeing that we saw that with twitter and twitter blue is our attention becoming less valuable to social media companies? And like, is the advertising model, at least in terms of social media, a little shakier than it once was?

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I mean, we talked a few weeks ago about the really transformative sea change in the economics of Silicon Valley. Venture capital financing has basically disappeared because of the rise in interest rates. Shareholders in existing companies are no longer thinking about 20-year growth so that their stock price will go up over time. They want dividends now, which means they want companies that are profitable today rather than companies that are constantly losing money, but they're creating a lot of user growth. And we see Reddit doing what all the social media companies doing, which is layoffs, and then trying to monetize existing users rather than structuring their business around getting a lot of user growth in the hopes that eventually someday down the line,

they'll monetize it. Reddit is also under especially high pressure because they are planning an IPO at some point in the future. So they feel extra pressure to prove to investors who are going to be determining the price of that IPO that they have low costs, high revenue, which is why they are cutting costs in the form of headcount. And they are trying to raise revenue in the form of trying to get money from these third-party apps. Next question comes from Matthew Flagoff. Who do you want to lose more in the elon musk mark zuckerberg cage match oh man this is people who have not been following this how did it start did elon challenge mark did mark challenge elon i believe that elon musk challenged mark zuckerberg

which even if that is not what happened it would be so true to both of their characters as like canonically what happened yeah and then mark i think on instagram was like yeah i'm in let's make it happen and then elon's sort of been like yeah i mean anyway they're going to fight each other it's just it's a perfect match of both of their pathologies of like elon musk the insecure attention chaser doing like weird bits but like kind of self-humiliating bits it's like my guy's really given Roman Roy these days. And then Mark Zuckerberg, the like ruthless, competitive psychopath.

It is impossible to root for one of these men in this fight. Though, will I be watching it if it happens? A hundred percent. Yeah.

I think if you, if you really force me to choose i would have to choose mark you want him to win nothing well there's who do i want to win who do you want to lose which i honestly want both of them to i do not want either of them to win i mean i cannot go on the record saying that having it they're both kind of losing who will win mark seems like he has been training because i guess he doesn't have anything else to do um an incredible amount there was a story the other day how he like lost consciousness during jujitsu.

That was what the initial report said. And boy, were his press people fast to contact the reporter to say, actually, Mark was just having a little nap. And it's so rude that you said he lost consciousness. We call it an involuntary nap. That's what it was. Look, there's new research out that says

that occasional naps are great for your brain. They're great for long-term brain development. So he was just being held forward. I think we salute him for taking his little naps. You were saying something about this, though, like it's indicative, this is the moment that crystallized how far Silicon Valley has fallen in its like cultural power in the public consciousness. It was not that long ago, like five years ago that Mark Zuckerberg was like kind of mounting a run for president. And these like titans of silicon valley were seen as peers of presidents and prime ministers were seen as these like forward thinking like gonna shepherd humanity into the next stage and now they're like great how can i be more like andrew tate right right i mean now they're both like i want to be a beefy shit poster it really is like they

kind of is what they're like the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is like posting gym selfies and is like giving divorced dad energy and it like it's not that long ago that he was writing like 6,000 word manifestos about the future of democracy in the world and like you on ceilings tweeting her sir concerning and and like sending reporters poop emojis. Right. You know, this is that's what that's what we're. I really do think it's a little Trumpification of.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, the Elon Musk stuff is like he's always been like a weird attention chaser. But he even was seen as a like serious person, like so many magazine covers that he was on. And I think it's like, we're so used to ridicule, like you and I especially, so used to ridiculing these two guys that it's like easy to not take them, to forget how seriously we all as a society, and how seriously they used to take themselves.

And I think some people still take them pretty seriously who aren't necessarily fans. Because I still have people who are like, why are you always tweeting about Elon Musk? And like, I don't love him, but he seems like he's, you know, and it's like, oh yeah, you're not as online as i am that's why right but they do still wield an enormous amount of power they do this is from instagram why can't i stop consuming content about the submarine uh the titanic submarine buddy i'm right i'm right there with you i hate this whole episode really first of all then of course you it imploded. So that's very sad.

Yeah, sure. Um, I just, here's why I don't like it. It immediately, the submarine is lost. Tragic.

Got to get it back. Right. There is no, like you'd think that something like this, some, how are we all going to come together and get the submarine back? Are we going to be able to do it? These poor people.

It is immediately turned into this fucking divisive argument on fucking social media. Some people are like using it to make a point about capitalism. And it's like, I don't know. There's a teenager on there. Like who, who, you know,

reportedly went because his, you know, he felt like he had to please his dad and his dad was his big explorer whatever and he was nervous the poor kid and it's just people it's such an example of like just people being very callous publicly right about these people's lives and it's like what their families could be what you know should they have spent 250 000 for a ticket on a submarine like i certainly wouldn't have done that if I had that much money, but like, it doesn't mean you deserve to die a horrible death.

And also like, what's your plan there is your plan to say, like, if you are rich, you cannot spend your $250,000 on a submarine ticket. Like if you want to go talk about like higher taxation and better. Yeah. I'm all there.

Let's raise tax rates for rich people. Right. Let's like jack up the estate tax as high as we i'm for all that kind of stuff but that's not the debate we're having the debate we're having is that like is it good to cheer for them to die or not because of capitalism right what the fuck i so the first day i thought was like being on social media tracking the story the first day was like really compelling i thought i was like learning a lot about like how these submarines work what are these submarines work,

what are these companies work, why are they not regulated, like the history of these. Which are all, those are all good debates. Right, and like, yeah, right. Good thing, like useful things to debate. And it was also just like, I felt like, okay, I'm learning a lot on this horrible app

about what is going on, the stories behind this, the different layers to it. But day two, I unplugged really hard because it turned so fast into like you were saying, it's just like, it's like whatever the stimulus you give Twitter, it will turn automatically into like, how can we dunk on each other and like find tweets to yell at

because it's like, you didn't have the right take on the Titanic being problematic class warfare. It's like, it sank a hundred years ago, guys. Like we don't need to be shouting at each other about it. There was also like, this is, this is something tourism, like a death tourism or something, because it was like, how dare people,

why are people checking out the Titanic? A lot of people died on the Titanic. And so it's grave tourism, you know? And I was like, have people ever been to fucking Normandy? That's what you do at a historical site. There's people usually who died at the historical site and you go visit it. grave tourism you know i was like have people ever been to fucking normandy that's the that's what you do at a historical site there's people usually who died at the historical site and you go visit it i mean it it really like i know this is something that i'm on a lot but like we think that when we log on to social media we are leveraging it towards achieving whatever ends

we want to achieve like pushing it over politics we want to push or having the kind of experience we want to have but we really are just being used by it and that is why whatever the stimulus that you plug into the system people are going to like cookie cutter fall into the exact same patterns and habits and that's like our end of the social web but the like conspiracy end of the social web which is also a huge part of it that you and i are not on as much, but like a lot of people are, like immediately went into like, you know, it was like all an op to like cover up the Titanic, which it was trying to like, I don't even remember what the conspiracies were, but like immediately goes like really deep into some ridiculous conspiracy, because that is just like what the machine is designed to give you.

And you feel like you're participating in it, but it is driving your experience, not the other way around. When I almost took a, one of the questions we got on Twitter was I want to be off my phone more. I want to do the off, I did the offline challenges and stuff, but how am I going to continue fighting LGBTQ plus discrimination,

which is what I do on Twitter. And I don't want to like pick on that person because I do this all the time. I tweet about politics and think I'm doing something. And it's a good, our tweets aren't really doing anything doing anything and like if you really want to go fight discrimination like there's plenty of great grassroots organizations that are doing that they're on the political side on the non-profit side they're helping people like you got to actually go out in the real world and do this stuff right you know because posting online

is just it is it is not really persuading that many people. Yeah. You know, I still try to be persuasive. But do I think I'm really reaching and persuading that many people with my posts? No. I get versions of this question all the time. And I remember I got a lot of versions of it, especially around the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine of people being like, I find this news so stressful. But I feel that I'm it's my moral duty to like log on and shout about it on Twitter, but it stresses me out.

So like, how can I suppress that stress? And I'm like trying to tell people like, just don't. There's probably a relief organization down the street that you can help that will have a bigger impact. Right. And I don't like, like you, I want to be careful and not sounding like I'm scolding people because it's clearly a good impulse. No, I do it all the time myself. Right. This is a self-criticism as well but what you are what you were doing when you participate in the like shouting about the bad thing online is you're just making yourself feel bad yeah and you were

just um heightening your own anxiety and you're spreading that to other people and like finding something and again this like goes back to our discussion last week with Simone about like finding a shared positive activity that you can have in your community. That is like find something small you can do, like work with refugees, work with local parent groups. Don't try to fight it online because the machines online are not designed to further any productive end. And that's not what they're doing. What they're designed to do is to make you feel a lot of that anxiety so you'll spend more time online well and i will just end with too because i am someone who very much believes in persuasive writing changing people's minds opinion right

if you have a point to make that has not been made sit down and write something you know actually like write something out and whether you want to put it on substack or not but whatever it may be send it to like take the time just like think because i've done that too when i'm like really sometimes if we're gonna do a pod save american there's an issue i'm like instead of tweeting about it i get a podcast i'll sit i'll think about it what i really want to say i'll think about the argument for and against and i'll i'll have my take that way as opposed to just being like tweet it's a great point and when you're writing to the format of social media, I think you, and I found myself doing this all the time

when I would like write an article and then go to write like the tweet version of the article to promote it. I would like write the tweet in drafts and then look at it and realize that what I had written to was like outrage, provocation, and especially flattering people's biases without even intending to,

because that's what you just- Subconscious. Right. It's subconscious because that's the feedback that you're getting from that. But I think you're really right. If you step back and like write in some other format that is designed to help you think through it, I think that you will feel better. Yeah. All right. That's all the time we have for questions today. Max, this was fun. We should do this again. I loved it. I loved it. I loved that all of our advice was some version of log off log that hey you know what if anything we're uh we're

true to the brand that's right yeah and thank you to uh abdul for joining us too and uh we will talk to you guys uh oh i guess we're off next week and then we will uh we'll have another episode the week after we'll see you in two weeks. All right. Bye, everyone. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Rachel Gajewski, who film and corruption overpower plans to revitalize a city on the brink of collapse? Dreamtown, the story of Adelanto, covers the rise and fall of Adelanto, a small California city known mainly for its prisons, until a stranger came to town with a wild idea to make Atalanto great again. Weed.

But things take a wild turn with Mike Tyson and even a Russian oligarch getting involved in this Wild West meets weed story. This is a fantastic podcast. Atalanto, we've been working on it for a long time here at Crooked. It made it to the Tribeca Festival. I did a panel there. It is a really exciting, fun story about local politics that has a lot of themes that connect to national politics. And everyone check it out. You don't want to miss it. You can now listen to Dreamtown, the story of Adelanto. Listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, subscribe to Crooked's subscription community, Friends of the Pod, for early ad-free episodes at crooked.com slash friends.