Technology, Connected - How Information Creates Power: Yuval Noah Harari on Democracy, Propaganda and AI

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

In Chapter 5 of Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari examines how information networks shape political power, from ancient empires and mass propaganda to social media and artificial intelligence.Mark and Jeremy discuss why information doesn’t automatically produce truth, and how both democracies and totalitarian systems use stories, institutions and communication technologies to organise society. The central issue is who controls the network, who can challenge its claims and whether errors can be corrected.In this episode, we discuss:How information networks create and maintain political powerWhy democracy depends on distributed information and self-correctionHow totalitarian systems centralise information and suppress feedbackWhat ancient societies can teach us about collective decision-makingHow Roman rulers such as Nero used propaganda to protect authorityWhy pamphlets and printing helped destabilise established political systemsHow social media feeds influence political beliefs and public debateWhether AI-generated memes and propaganda could reshape political movementsHow artificial intelligence could strengthen democratic or authoritarian systemsWhy independent discussion groups and institutions still matterHarari’s argument is that the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism is partly a struggle between different kinds of information networks. Democracies tolerate competing accounts and mechanisms for correcting mistakes. Dictatorships concentrate control and punish contradiction.This conversation examines what happens when AI systems begin producing political messages, filtering information and influencing public opinion at a scale no earlier propaganda system could achieve.-- TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Disruptors and book lovers(00:34) Chapter 5 summary(01:14) Jeremy's first impressions(01:53) The difference between democracy and totalitarianism(03:58) Flipping democracy(05:01) Populism(09:34) A brief history of democracy(12:23) Scale and Ancient Rome(14:56) What is meaningful discourse?(16:10) Do people like being governed?(18:43) The rise of the pamphlet(20:30) The spectrum of democracy(24:27) Totalitarianism(25:54) Don't be Stalin's general(30:00) Will AI be democratic or a dictator?(30:58) Book clubs as self-correcting mechanisms(33:24) Will AI remove the human from the loop?--Read more books: www.thinkingonpaper.xyz#AIethics #emergingtechnology #nexus #AI

Disruptors and curious minds, CEOs, founders, booklovers. Welcome to the Thinking on Paper Book Club. I'm Mark. This is Jeremy and we read books that have stood the test of time. Books that will change your mind. You've heard of slow food. This is slow reading one book, one chapter, one week. If you're new to this, book club is the second pillar in the thinking on paper framework

for better, more holistic understanding of the impact on emerging technologies on business and culture. thinking on paper xyz or more. So we're reading chapter five of nexus this week and we're going to be talking about the difference between democracy and totalitarianism, how they are formed by information networks, how the flow of information changes the regime

and how they can flourish. We'll be examining the whole spectrum and we're meeting some very nefarious, horrible characters along the way, won't we, do it, Nero, Sparta. the Soviet Union, the strongmen, Putin, all about Erdogan. All of them. It's going to be brilliant.

First impressions, Jeremy, before we get to that. First impression is just a commitment to my no jacket required engagement with books. First impressions on this, man. Yeah, it's, well, it starts out. We're basically bouncing between democracy and totalitarianism, right? And so you have these two, if, if, we break it down to how information is sent, right? You could send information in multiple ways. Just like we're doing right now, this is a broadcast, right? This is a broadcast. It's going from us to one

person. It's not a bi-directional yet. But if you guys send us a link and you're listening and you want to participate, we can turn this broadcast into a bidirectional thing. So a democracy is a conversation, right? Right? And totalitarianism is more broadcast. So let's, maybe we can do it a different way. Mark, me talking to you and you talking to me, that's democracy. You telling me something and me having no choice over it is totalitarianism.

Yeah. So that's the main difference is he outlines the differences. Yeah. Centralized totalitarian is a centralized flow of data. Democracy is decentralized. He uses the word nodes. it's kind of spread out. I think the big key is that totalitarianism has no self-correcting mechanisms,

whereas democracy is based heavily on self-correcting mechanisms, which we've we've spoken about self-correcting mechanisms in the past, haven't we, the law, the court, the media, education, those kind of things where the, we're all fallible, aren't we? and these correct that fallible, but in you have the totalitarian systems, there is no. The center is infallible. They're the main differences between those two.

And then he kind of lays out how you get there, doesn't he? So yeah, what's your favorite totalitarianist? Well, geez. I mean, like, well, first of all, that one of the quotes that popped out that I thought was really interesting is about elections, right? And, you know, dictatorships have elections. And you're like, how the hell is this dictator? What does an election mean in there, right?

So elections are not a method for discovering truth. They are a method to maintain order. So, right? Less truth, more order. More truth, less order. We got to remember that like little seesaw thing there. And you know, it's really interesting. We're a week away from the inauguration here in the States, right?

And not a week away. We're like a couple days. Yeah, it's Monday. We recorded this on the 17th of January. I try not to think about it. Mark, I tell you the truth. But what's really interesting is he talks about, Herrari talks about in the book about how to flip democracy.

And, you know, like almost like this playbook on how to flip democracy. And he says flipping democracy starts with taking over its self-correcting mechanisms. Okay. And as you mentioned before, self-correcting mechanisms are the courts or the media in this particular individual that's reassuming office in a few days has pretty good control over the courts. And I don't know about the media, but I think he created his own media. So it's really to read this, to read this and kind of go, wait, is he dusting off an old playbook?

Like, what is what's happening here, you know? Well, so in the book in Chapter 5, he speaks about populism, doesn't he? And I think that that's the kind of the middle ground between. democracy and dictatorship and once, you know, in a well-functioning democracy, citizens trust the results of elections, the decisions of courts, the reports of media outlets, and the findings of scientific disciplines because citizens believe these institutions are committed to the truth. Once people think that power is the only reality, they lose trust in all these institutions, democracy collapses, and a strong man can seize total power.

exactly and here's the irony of all of this mark populism according to the book according to author and his examples starts with this this this telling of hey you know we shouldn't trust all these elites and all of these institutions and all of that don't trust any of these things mark but i know who you should trust you should trust me and don't trust them you know you shouldn't trust any one thing but trust the one thing that is me which is which is really interested because I know better, I know what's best for you. Yeah. Above the power

structure lies, the will of the people, isn't it? And it doesn't matter how many people take up arms and try and defend that. It always comes out as the will of the people. I think it's very important to mention the spectrum. So there is,

it's not a binary sum game, is it? Democracy and dictatorship, aren't binary opposites, but rather are on a continuum to decide whether a network is closer to the democratic or the dictatorial end of the continuum. We need to understand how information flows in the network and what shapes the political conversation. I thought that, I mean, I think we all know what democracies in general. I think we all know what totalitarianism in general, this chapter is playing a difficult

balancing game, isn't it? Because on the one hand, he's trying to explain the very basics of democracy. On the other hand, he's trying to expand on how it comes about. And I think as a writer, that's a fine, like you've got to know your audience because you've got to know your readership, don't you? Because sometimes I felt like he was saying very obvious things. And then other times when he goes into the historical details, it was a bit more eye-opening. And I quite enjoyed that aspect of the chapter.

That's the tricky part. It's like, you know, coaching a group of players. Some players are highly skilled. Some players are new. Some players are in the middle. As a writer, you got to kind of give something to pull all of those different skill sets along the journey. So you talked about this continuum, this spectrum, and it's all based on how information flows within these systems, which is really interesting, right? So the dictatorship is kind of flows from this central point and out as a broadcast, and it's all processed centrally, right?

But here's an interesting piece about democracy. They talk about democracy as a conversation, right? between two nodes in the network. Let's talk about these are information networks, right? These are two nodes in a network talking. But even when you have the ability to talk in a democracy, what happens when you don't have the will to listen? Well, democracy fails.

That was the other point of it. That's the other way that democracy can fail. It's when the conversation becomes one way. Nobody's listening. Not because of the inability of the network and the system to function, as like an infrastructure, but the ability for the human side to use the infrastructure as designed.

It's an important thing to think about, I think. It is, and a lot of this is important to think about, like you say, three days away from Inorganation Day. And I forgot to mention at the beginning at what me and Jeremy are going to try to do at the end of this is assimilate chapter 5 into what it means in the age of artificial intelligence. The whole book is about that.

And artificial intelligence is about the flow of information. So in some way, we're going to try and connect democracy and totalitarianism to what happens next with artificial intelligence. So stay tuned for that. Oh, I was just, let's jump in a time machine. Let's get in like this. Let's jump in the time machine. And let's go back and look at Athens and Rome. Let's go look at how those organizations dealt with scale, because I think infrastructure is designed based on how things scale.

And things like... Okay, then so get back in your time machine and go a little bit further. And we'll go to the hunter-gatherers first. Okay. Let's start there. Let's start at the beginning where democracy in the very early hunter-gather period of humanity, that democracy flourished. Kind of, and why did it flourish? Because small, manageable groups of people where any kind of dictatorial delusions of grandeur would be quickly put out, wouldn't they?

There's a communication amongst the small group. The group would decide what to eat, who to hunt, whether to go rampaging around and kill everybody in the next community. Like, it was all a group decision, wasn't it? Maybe, maybe, or it's one person holding this group hostage person. say by manipulating their desire for security and their fear of not having it. Do you think that happened in those hunter-gatherer times? Well, imagine, imagine, like, imagine you're in a group and you have like 20 or 30 people, you're well-fed, you're maybe, dare I say, cultured, you have nice houses that protect

you from the cold. And I'm this dude just kind of walking around in the perimeter, doing my own thing. I'm fending off like threats. I'm like maybe eating once or twice a week. And from my perch high on the mountain, I'm looking down that your little organization, you have fires and you're dancing. And I'm like, man, that would be kind of awesome.

Like it kind of sucks out here by myself. I should probably run down and see what they're up to. And I get down there and you welcome me in. You're like, hey, this is great. Come on in. But you're also like, yo, you have to shave your. mustache, you can't call me by anything other than your highness. You're not allowed to wear shoes on Wednesday.

But I'm like, you know what? Food, shelter, all that stuff is worth me making those sacrifices under your control. That's later though, isn't it? That's like Mesopotamia and ancient Greece. I think right back in the hunter-gathers, that wasn't a possibility. But yeah, once the agricultural revolution came about and writing became a thing, then yes, exactly what you described became possible, didn't it? They controlled, you could control the crops.

You could control to a certain degree, the financial systems of those places and times. So with a technology, meaning like with a means to exert your will or control over something, right, that's valuable. Right? And that becomes valuable, makes you valuable. You're the guy that figured it out. People kind of trust you and kind of get pulled into your ecosystem. I want to talk about scale, though. Yeah. Let's let's talk about scale. So, so Rome had two elected consuls checked by the Senate, checked by something else called Tribunes. So how the heck did they end up with an unelected emperor? It's really interesting, but he argues or he presents the point that they had 75 million people distributed over 5 million kilometers squared and only 10 to 20 percent of them could read. So it's hard to have a conversation when you're that far apart, right? And when people aren't even able to converse necessarily. So it had to become something different, didn't it? Like, democracy in that case couldn't officially scale, right?

Yeah, it's like an autocratic center. What did you say? As the size of polities continued to increase in city states, were superseded by large kingdoms, even partial democracy disappeared. All the examples of ancient democracies are city-state. We don't know of any large-scale kingdom or empire that operated along democratic lines for the reasons that you say, yeah, we just, and that was to do with the technology. wasn't possible. I mean, Nero would have loved to manipulate and know and control and

corral everyone, wouldn't he? But the technology wasn't there. And so I guess they knew that they couldn't do that. So they were happy to kind of have the power and the money and the taxes that they had rather than seeking this totalitarianism which came later. The E word came up again. I'm not talking about the one that melted our faces during the, during Carlo Rovelli's book about entropy. I'm talking about empathy, which ironically, we talked about a lot in the debrief of our last show

with the technical prize director for quantum computing for X prize. Awesome show. Awesome show. Like, that was so much fun. But, you know, the idea of empathy being a requirement, required ingredient for large-scale political conversations is really interesting because right now there's a lack of empathy in large-scale political conversations. But he defines meaningful discourse

in here, which is something I've always wanted to think about. How do you define meaningful interaction? How do you define meaningful discourse between two people, right? And he says, you have to have proximity. So right now we have proximity, Mark, you and I, We're connected on a largely unlaggy stream here. What are you trying to say? But yeah, there's a little, little jabbery. And intimate knowledge, right? So intimate knowledge of like, I know you, you know me, don't sing the Barney song.

But we also have intimate knowledge of the topics, right? Of the topics of discussion, right? So we can have meaningful intercourse, intercourse, discourse, let's not have meaningful intercourse. Let's have meaningful discourse. I know it's Friday, but come on. Because we have,

because we have proximity and intimate knowledge. I think that was an equation for something undefinable. That's really interesting to me. I agree. Do you think, just before we get back onto kind of mass media and what happened after ancient Rome, ancient, but they gave up, didn't they in ancient Rome?

They kind of wanted democracy. they understood what it was about but they just like, oh, we can't do it, it's too big. We've invaded too many lands. What are the Brits doing? What are the Gauls doing? Who cares? Like, we can't do it.

Let's just go down. Let's get Caesar in control and go down the other path. How do you think people feel about being governed? I mean, do you think that people in ancient times had a different view of being governed? Do you think we've learned kind of like Pavlov's dog to like or not like Bingavind? Man, whenever I'm asked a question like this,

and I don't know if you do this as well, because we've talked about our, you know, Thrasher magazine and skate culture and punk rock music and, you know, just the idea of like someone telling you, you have to do something, right? And, you know, immediately, you know, there's a resistance to be like, hey, I want to do this thing myself.

But like he references in previous chapters, there's a place for this rocker's, bureaucracy. There's a place for these rules and this organization and this standard to kind of kind of live and work by. So it's a balance, right? Like, where is the balance of given people like, it's almost like we're sitting in a jazz jam, right? And if we're, if we're getting ready to play together, we've never played together, I'm going to say, hey, we're going to play, we're going to play in C, Mark. And you're going to be like, okay, well, I know that. There's a rule. That helps us. Instead of just like clamming around, we got to have a little bit of organization, don't you think? Like,

Do you struggle with that too? Do you, how do you think about that? In a very similar way, yeah. And on a personal level, yeah. We're all different, aren't we? So some people like to be told what to do. Some people like to have other people putting all the structure in it.

Some people like a much more hands-off approach. I guess it depends. And I was just kind of thinking aloud about how that's changed over the thousands of years. Pompeii. I've got Pompeii written down here. I was just thinking about the Pompeii. So you talk about scale, you talk about the Romans, ancient Rome, Greece. And then I was reminded again how, in the grand scheme of things, however things really happened in the last 100, 200 years, hasn't it? Before the, before the invention. I mean, at one point he talks about pamphlets, like this great technological marvel of pamphlet.

And actually the pamphlet kind of, because of its ease before the book became kind of university, it was this changed the flow of information. And a pamphlet, I think he was talking about Poland and Lithuania or the Dutch experiments, like the Netherlands that we know now, that was, I find that on pamphlets. And obviously that quickly comes to newspapers. And he talks about America,

and the Civil War and how you know your American history better than I do, but they're talking about what was it? Oh, gosh, I've written it down. I was going to ask you a question about American history, Jeremy. Well, while you're looking for that, yeah, let's move to the U.S., right? So he talked about the two first experiments in democracy, this Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that, you know, to some extent's work, but was missing that vehicle to communicate over long distance.

Then you talked about the pamphlet newspaper. The Dutch Republic was really the one experiment that kind of said, hey, here's a newspaper. Here's we're going to distribute the news. It's the WhatsApp of like the early days, right? Yeah. And then the U.S. is kind of peeking around like, how do we do? What do we do to do?

What kind of system do we put in place? Hey, hey, these Dutch guys have something going on. Like, let's talk about that and how we can base our systems around that. But here's something I thought was really interesting. Just like any technology when it first comes out, like the Apple Vision Pro when it first came out was like $3,500 or $4,000, like, who the hell is going to just rip off $4,000 and go do that, right? But newspapers back in the day, subscriptions were actually pretty expensive. It was like more than one week's wages for most skilled workers according to what Harari says in here. Yeah, that's the spectrum of democracy.

again, isn't it? So America back in the time of the Gettysburg address, I mean, it was only rich white men who were allowed to vote. So compared to today's democracy, it wasn't very democratic, but compared to everybody else and everywhere else in the world, it was very

democratic. So on that spectrum, you get more freedoms in your democracy back then, thanks to the newspaper. It was the Gatorberg address, by the way. Could you explain what the Gettysburg address was? Jeremy? Four score in seven years old.

Was that that old? I think. I think I don't know. Could be wrong. No, here's an interesting fact that I pulled out of here too. In 1830, there were only 78,000 newspaper subscriptions in the U.S. in 1830. And largely, like you said, that's the domain of wealthy white men who could afford that, right? So you have this available technology, but then, accessibility to that technology is super limited, right? So it's only for the participation in democracy is limited by your ability to access the available technology. To tie into that a little bit more,

you referenced the elections in 1824 elections, 7% of the total population made use of their right to vote. Seven percent. And Adams won the vote with 2%. 2% of that 7%. That's like, it's like, is that a democracy? And then he also says, yes, at the time, yes, one variation of democracy, yes. But at the time, there were more slaves in the United States than voters. 1.5 million slaves to 352,780 voters. I don't know that that count.

Don't forget that he says, and he says it quite a few times that, democracy isn't voting. It isn't just it's the self-correcting mechanisms and the way to question the fallibility of the centre. So it's not just the elections. And as North Korea

demonstrate with their democratic elections every five years or whatever. We're going to put it in the box. You would again, 99% of the vote. Whoa, what a guy. You know, so. But yes, compared to today, that's a very tiny fraction.

Okay, should we can, are you, are you okay to flip to Stalin? Is that too far to jump ahead or where do you want to do? No, okay, so on that Stalin bit, I'm going to say the telegraph, the telephone, the television, the radio, the train, the plane. These were the, the way the information flowed very quickly. Technology expanded from the pamphlet, yeah, the telegraph, telephone, later, television before that radio, train, plane. And, a quote, mass media.

made democracy possible, not inevitable. Mass media made democracy possible, not inevitable. And I think that that, when we talk about AI later, is a very, we should hold on to that. But yeah, and then, so that lays the way for a very dark time. Yeah. So say that quote again about democracy that doesn't guarantee, mass media doesn't guarantee democracy is basically what you were saying. Yeah, mass media made democracy possible, not inevitable.

Yeah. So, yeah, does, is mass media a broadcast or is it a conversation, right? And I think you go back to that little rule, that little heuristic, if you will, that maybe can lead us to believe it's one way or the other. Stalin must have been freaking exhausted. Dude, I'm telling you, like, listen to this quote here. Attempt to control totalitarianism, an attempt, quote, an attempt to control what every person throughout the country is doing and saying it every moment of the day and potentially what every person is thinking and feeling. Like, I can't imagine, I can't imagine, like, trying to do that and stressing about whether

I was doing that correct. I guess he just killed people. That's what he did. But, um, I don't know, man. That seems, seems crazy. Yeah. Well, okay. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, like a bit of Russian history.

I like it. Um, you know, so the. the Bolshevik seized power in like the 17 revolution, buoyed by Marx, they kind of started to dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms, didn't they? And then Stalin comes to power in the 30s. He's like, oh, they've done a good job. Let's take it to its most nefarious evil conclusion

and kind of that crescendos into the collectivism, farmers and Klu-Ax, which was hard reading. What was the most dangerous job in Russia in 1941? Oh yeah, that was like, yeah, KGB, not KGB, but wherever it was the precursor to that spy, was it? Well, no, even more descriptive than that,

being one of Stalin's generals. Yeah, can you read that thing about how, like, didn't they all died? He shot. He killed, 90% of his generals by 1941. 90% of his inner circle was killed by 1941. Yeah. Okay, so let's slide this down into secret police and this surveillance network. Again, not being a conversation.

This is not a conversation. It's just a capturing of data, right? To power control, right? Um, in this, uh, how do you say it? Cartotechie. Cartotechie is, is basically like the, the Dewey Decimal system for what everyone else is doing. And they put it in a giant filing system to figure out who was doing what and when and how and why. Um, yeah.

And then, and then that eventually leads to a dip back into intersubjective realities created, um, to, um, to control populations, right, to control large, large groups of people. And the super unfortunate story of the Kulaks, right? These, these entrepreneurial, they called them capitalist farmers, but like they kind of had their own farm, they had their own, you know, animals and that sort of thing. And what, what this surveillance and what this intersubjective reality created by Stalin as this information network, the largest and fastest enslavement campaign in history. This is like the darkest of the dark, dude. And wasn't that bill on the collection, collectionist where they put the farms together

and then, oh, big surprise, people don't actually work as hard when it's not for them and their family and their closest. And so the crops didn't give the bounty that they expected did they? And so that led on to this, okay, we're going to have to do some of them. this on December 27th 1929 Stalin declared that the Soviet state should seek the liquidation of the Kulax as a class and immediately galvanized the party in secret police to realize that ambitious and murderous aim. And what follows is a very very short period of genocide. And in certain areas, certain villages were actually there was a there was a directive sent down that

You had to identify people as Kulaks. You had to identify them, even if you didn't have people that fit the definition. So what happened would be a situation where, like, oh, we don't have any in our village, but we got to pick someone or else something's going to happen. So they just picked old people or just like, hey, sorry, Mark. There's no one that fits that definition in the village. Sorry, dude. I got to put you up.

You know, good luck in the, you know, good luck either not being alive anymore or being in some kind of, you know, encampment. Like, wow. Yeah, I mean, learning about this, learning about this in history, the thing that gets my wheel spinning is that it's not just history and dates and, you know, this happened and that happened, but it's the, the, how these information networks spin up and affect large groups of people, you know, and what type of information network it is. If you look at it as a network, if you look at it as an information network,

it's really applicable, and this is what you said earlier, it's really applicable to like where technology is going right now. And technology being literally ones and zeros, moving from points to point on networks. And looking at history that way has been, man, pretty eye-opening and a little bit scary. Agreed. So let's move on to the final part then.

As humankind enters the second quarter of the 21st century, a central question is how well, democracies and totalitarian regimes will handle both the threats and the opportunities resulting from the current information revolution. Okay, AI. Will the new technologies favor one type of regime over the other, or will we see the world divided once again this time by a silicon curtain? How would you corral all of that information from Chapter 5 into how you view AI in Just to everyone listening, by the way, we haven't read the rest of the book. So you can I might give the answers or his opinions on what happens next.

We're doing this in real time. So we're just doing it on what chapters one, two, three, four. Step by step across each information node. Because we've got, this is our own self-correcting mechanism. We'll self-correct in chapters in real time. In real time. In real time. That's a great point.

The book club is a self-correcting mechanism for our own nutty, uh, lack of understanding on some of this stuff. So back to dictatorships and democracies, dictatorships being infallible and broadcasting one way from the inside out. And nothing's coming back here. Well, the stuff that comes back is like the surveillance network, right? So all of these things that come back into the, what do you call it, the caroteki. How do you say that?

The caroteki. So what a bureaucratic nightmare to deal with Dewey Decimal cards, you know, with all that information on people in a manual way and processing all the interconnectivity between that. But what is AI professed to do? What does quantum computing profess to be able to do eventually? And we talked about this with our wonderful guests from XPRIZE the other day, like how technology can be used for great things that help people in the world and could also use it for nefarious reasons, as we say. If you had to choose now, just on the spot, Do you think that AI lends itself more to North Korea or to little old blighty England?

Is it a totalitarian thing or is it a democratic technology? You think it lends itself more to one or the other? I mean, imagine what, imagine if Stalin had had AI. Ah. Imagine, you're going over. Gains over. Like game over All right

I'm going to answer that question a little bit differently because I don't think I can say that you know AI is more inherently a great fit for democracies or a great fit for terrible dictatorships

the challenge being democracy is these independent nodes that collect and process information right and we talked about this again I keep pointing back to this last show guys if you haven't listened to the XPRI show yet, please check it out because we talk about empathy. We talk about the human piece involved in technologies use in a good way or a bad way and also the problems that we create for ourselves,

right? So will AI make limit the human element by creating so many shortcuts that we can't think for ourselves anymore? And then democracy. becomes in danger because I have so many shortcuts, my shortcuts have turned into beliefs, and I'm not going to listen to you anymore, Mark, because I already have those here, and I'm not going to spend my energy on listening. That's what scares me. Yeah, and who's creating those shortcuts for you? Who's writing those shortcuts? He's harvesting them from the internet without due diligence, without critical thinking. Thinking on paper is your own, learning your own shortcut.

by critically thinking and processing and writing and all of that stuff. They talk about, so the centralization, the center is infallible, the information or flows from one point, the opposite of decentralization. And AI is essentially putting all the information in one point. All the information will come through one AI. and who has control of that. It doesn't feel like a decentralizing technology necessarily. People talk about the democratization of knowledge

and they use these nonsense terms. Like AI makes everybody knowledgeable, it democratizes knowledge and skills. And does it? It democratizes access to information. I don't think it becomes... And ask me true, information isn't truth, is it? that's like the whole bridge is that right right yeah i'm starting to envision like if we use our

star wars analogy you have like could it be like the i is like you know darf vader in the dark side and you know blockchain is the rebel force on the outside one wants to get their arms around all of the things and you know kind of tweak and manipulate and the other side is like hey we want to create a decentralized approach to this ownership of all of the little pieces and parts and remuneration of those pieces and parts once they get used and applied in different ways. Like, I don't know. It's an early, it's an early riff, but I'm going to sprinkle it out there for now. I'd like to see what's happening in North Korea.

I think North Korea is that, you know, that will be the experimental. That's the lab, isn't it? I see whatever is happening right now with AO. whatever they're doing is probably a nice experiment to see where we end up. Because they are, aren't they? I'm sure they are. But it's so secretive. Nobody knows anything.

That's the piece. That's the piece. Man, we, this is, guys, can we, how can we end on a high note? How can we turn this thing around, Mark? This is, I felt good after the XPRIZE episode and I'm feeling a little. Okay, I'll turn around. So everything we said in the last five minutes is someone. somewhat not in jest, but it's very easy to go.

The world's bright place and everything's fine. And maybe it is, but you have to think about the flip side. And chapter five of the Nexus has just made it blindingly obvious that you have to think about the flip side in order. Like, you have to. And it's not being negative in doom. And I love artificial intelligence. I think it's great. Like you said last week, the benefits are unquestionable.

But you have to think about the flow, as history has shown, the flow of information doesn't always end up in a good place. And where's the best place to think on paper? On paper. On paper. All right. Well, let's wrap it up. This continue exploring a lot of these threads.

There's what, four other chapters, four other episodes that you can listen to. If this is the first one you're listening to, pop back in. and it'll add some color and some insight to what we talked about today. Hey, thinking on paper.xy-Z. Be curious. Stay disruptive. Keep thinking on paper. Bye.