The Daily Beast Podcast - Dear Tucker Carlson, This Is How White Men Really Fight

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

On this week’s episode of The New Abnormal, hosts Andly Levy and Danielle Moodie react to Tucker Carlson’s racist texts. Plus! AI expert stops by to talk about the future AI holds. Then, Techdirt editor Mike Masnick discusses the showdown between PornHub and Utah. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today.

AI expert and host of Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus, Gary Marcus stops by to talk about the future AI holds. Then we'll talk to TechDirt editor Mike Maznik about the latest law in Utah that's set up a showdown between Pornhub and the state. But first, let's have some fun. Andy, you are a white man, so why don't you start with how white. man fight. You're a white man, correct? So let's just start the show with how white men fight. Educate us all, will you? Well, there are a lot of techniques that we are taught as white men, Danielle. Mostly it's to point at people of color and say they started it. Ah, that's a good one. That's a good one.

That's effective. Yeah, very effective in 21st century America. But I'm not entirely sure I buy Tucker Carlson's description. We are, of course, talking about texts that got released from Tucker that the New York Times reported on. And in the text, he describes watching video of people fighting in the street in Washington. And he describes it as a group of Trump guys surrounding an Antifa kid and quote unquote pounding the living shit out of him. And then he says, it was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable. Obviously, it's not how white men fight. It's funny. I think that the Native Americans would say otherwise, but you know, what the fuck do I know? Right. I mean, I don't know where he gets this idea from is the, it was the

exact point I was going to make. Like, this is the history of our country. This is, you know, the history of Europe. I'm not really sure why he thinks that suddenly this is not how white men fight. God, it just gets to everything about him that is just so bad. Everything he does is, at the very least, it's tinged with racism. It's racially tinged, as we like to say. And by that, I mean it's racist. By that you mean that it's drenched and soaking in racism. Yes, exactly. Because it's what he's saying here is it's not how white men fight. It's how black people fight unfairly, dishonorably. That's what he's saying here. Nobody's shocked that he says shit like this anymore. Once again, every time one of these comes out and people are like, well, that's why Fox got rid of him. No, it's not. Come on. That's not even close

to the worst thing he has said on air. The mentality right now of people like Tucker and of the vast majority of people at Fox News and pretty much everyone who watches Fox News, that fits it perfectly. And if you see white people doing something bad, it's, you know, it's sort of a not all men thing. It's like, well, that's not how white people fight. But it is. You can't dismiss every bad thing white people do by basically saying, oh, they're acting black. Because that's what he's saying. It's creepy.

It's disgusting. It's racist. It's, go ahead, Danielle, because I could list. I could go through. thesaurus right now. Here's the thing. I don't know who the fuck is shocked by these text messages. Like you said, Tucker Carlson has said worse on air. It's one of the reasons why I believe that they want to erase history. It's one of the reasons why white parents are so concerned with their kids aligning themselves with the racist of history as opposed to those that tried to do good

in order to actually bend the arc towards justice. But when Tucker Carlson is sitting there, I can just imagine this motherfucker sitting around and watching just racist videos and tanning its testicles and getting completely hyped up off of white toxic masculinity and using it as catnip right before he heads on the air. Well, no longer does he head on the air, but you get my point. And so I thought, though, Andy, your tweets following up the text were so good because you were airing out something that I think that people are missing. One, I will just say this on my own. I believe that these are being leaked for a specific reason. I think that we are all chasing the wrong fucking story and that there is something much deeper going on. It's like, hey, mainstream media, look at this dangling thing

over here, while we continue our major fucking Supreme Court grift and corporate greed and, you know, rolling back voting rights and all of the things that are actually happening on the ground. But Andy, you said that the thing that Fox News could have fired Tucker Carlson over wasn't the fact that he was, you know, foaming at the mouth watching a quote unquote antific head get beat up, but that it was the, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. Quote, I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed. That it was possibly the small, small if you squint, if you put on glasses and a magnifying glass and blow it up to 200 percent, glimmer of humanity that Tucker Carlson showed in that text that may have been

what opened up their eyes and said, oh, he's becoming too human to be on our airwaves. Okay, I have to reveal something right now. So I tweeted that as a joke. Oh, no. I think it's real. But here's the thing. The vast majority of the people who engaged with that tweet took it seriously. And, felt the way you did. And I started thinking, okay, I guess I may have originally meant it as a joke, but I think maybe there is some truth there. But I have to confess that I really did mean it purely as a joke when I said it. But I think you all are right. And so I don't even want to take credit for it because I didn't mean it seriously. But again, I don't think anything in this text

had anything to do with Fox getting rid of Tucker. Yeah. I will say that this text is like 300 words long. And if anyone texted me a text that long, I would fire their ass. Immediately blocked. I mean, what are you doing here? I 100% agree with you that all this is look at the shiny object. It's dangling keys in front of our face to cover up for other stuff that's going on in a larger sense in American society. But also with Tucker Carlson at Fox News. I mean, all this stuff is, you know, I would imagine is very obviously being leaked by Fox News. This one maybe not. I don't know if this was in the defamation trial and maybe nobody noticed it until now. But we've seen a lot of stuff dribbling. I mean, Media Matters is getting leaked Fox News videos. And if Fox News is leaking to Media Matters, which I assume they are maybe through an intermediary, but you know something's going on there. And they have decided that they really, really, really want to separate themselves from Tucker. And whatever the reason is, it's not that he said, it's not how white men fight. I don't believe that would even be considered a sin among the

upper echelons at Fox News. I don't really believe it's because he said the Antifa creep is a human being and that he shouldn't gloat over his suffering. But I do think it's instructive that, again, the vast majority of people did not know that I was joking, which is on me. I mean, sometimes people don't get a joke and you're like, well, that's their problem. This is obviously a joke. This was, when it's like literally 90% of the responses are taking it seriously, you're like, okay, this A, was not a very good joke. And B, maybe it's not a joke, even though that's how I intended it. So I guess it goes without saying.

It's bad that a lot of people do believe, not incorrectly, perhaps, that viewing a member of Antifa as an actual human being would be a black mark against you at Fox. So what should actually be a black mark against you is, I don't know, murder. Murder should be a black mark against you. But apparently... Not me personally. No, no. Okay.

Just, you know, given the fact recently, New York City mayor, not a man I voted for, not a man that you voted for, Andy. No. He seems to be on the fence about public murder, which is crazy. So here's the story. folks, if you haven't followed it or been following it, is the story of an unhoused individual, Jordan Neely, who was on a subway in New York City. And if you live in New York City, if you have visited New York City, seeing unhoused people on the train, looking for help, money, food,

water is not anything that is new. It is not new. But somehow, an ex-Marine saw Jordan Neely not as a human being, you know, in need, but as, oh, I don't know, an opportunity to flex your marine skills, your toxic masculinity, or just your craven desire to kill someone. Because that's exactly what happened on a subway car in New York City, is that a Marine snuck up behind Jordan Neely, who was on the train, and held him in a chokehold for not one, not two, not for not five, not eight, not nine minutes, but 15 with onlookers on the train that watched a man die. Now, stop me if you've seen this before and with a knee and an officer and the neck of George Floyd. But given the social status, the economic status, the housing status of Jordan Neely,

it seems that New York City Mayor Eric Adams needs more evidence on top of the video, pictures, tweets that have now gone viral. And now we have the medical examiner that has come out and ruled that the cause of death was in fact a homicide. But Mayor Adams, where's the arrest? Where's the law and order? Unclear. Yeah.

God, there's so many. things here. And this story is just, first of all, it's of a piece with all the shootings for ringing the wrong doorbell and shootings for a basketball going into a neighbor's yard and a little girl and her dad going to get it back. It's all of a piece. And it's all because we are being told to fear. And we are being told this by, again, we're being told this by Fox News above all else, but we're also being told this by every local news broadcast in New York City, and I would wager across the country. And we are being told this by our leaders who are very comfortable, and I'm talking about Eric Adams here, he was very comfortable running on a, I'm going to make New York City safe again, platform and completely skewing the level of violence that we see in this city and overblowing it.

And then the minute he became mayor again, now, oh, suddenly he wants to downplay the violence and talk about how New York isn't that bad of a city because now he's in charge. But he was more than happy to stimulate the fear centers of potential voters' brains. And that's exactly what he did. And, you know, you mentioned George Floyd. It's further back, but it's closer to home for us. It's Eric Garner. Mm-hmm.

Yep. Eric Garner in 2014 was killed by a police officer in a chokehold. Yep. These are the kinds of things that we see. AOC correctly pointed out, she tweeted, I'm just, I want to read her tweet. Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself. While many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected with passive headlines

and no charges. It's disgusting. She is 100% correct that many in power that she referenced includes our mayor, Eric Adams, who has never met a police pay raise he doesn't like while cutting services to the homeless, while cutting services to libraries, while overseeing, you know, unbelievable rises in rents that he doesn't really seem to care about at all. Our society failed Jordan Neely on so many levels. and it is one thing.

I want to be really careful when I say this. I wasn't on the subway car. I don't know how quote unquote scary Jordan Neely was being. There is a big difference between calming someone down or even restraining them if you have to and killing them. You would think that a Marine, right, a trained Marine would know the fucking difference. You would.

I was a soldier, not a Marine. I have no idea what kind of training Marines get with regard to chokehold. But keeping someone in a chokehold for 15 minutes and cutting off their airflow, it seems pretty self-evident that you're going to kill them. Yeah. So I don't really understand what was going on there. This guy needs to be charged. Probably not with murder, probably with manslaughter.

I don't think they'll be, unless they have a way of proving his intent, because murder is a matter of intent. I don't know that you're going to get a murder charge. I am hopeful that you will get at least a manslaughter. slaughter charge because it should go without saying that if something like this goes unpunished, it's going to keep happening. It's going to keep happening and it's going to escalate. I don't know about you, Andy, but like, I'm not concerned with homeless people on the subway looking for assistance or help. I'm more concerned now that like any motherfucker can come up on you,

choke you to death. And because you have a perceived lower economic status, like they walk. What kind of fucking society is that? Yeah, not a very good one. And look, as you said at the top, anyone who lives in New York City has had experience with unhoused people on the subway, with mentally ill people on the subway. They are generally not dangerous. They can be annoying. But you know what? That's life. Yes, I would think, first of all, someone with a mental illness may come across as annoying because they're not well in the head. You know, you have to accept that and maybe feel some

sympathy instead of anger and someone who's unhoused and is scrounging for change to stay alive is probably not going to be the most pleasant person in the world although often they are very polite on the subways but often they're not but you know what i don't think i would be if if society had failed me that much to that extent i think i'd be pretty upset about it and maybe more than a little cranky We live in a very, very, very crowded city. And if people cannot deal with the fact that not everyone in this city has a decent paying job or can afford to pay rent, you shouldn't be here. I hate to say it, but a city is not for you. So the point is we can't all be Clarence Thomas.

We don't all have a billionaire who has made us his pet. And, you know, we've talked about the Harlellan. and Crow stuff before. But of course, as, you know, not a shock, more and more stuff is coming out. ProPublica has now revealed that back in 2008, Justice Thomas decided he wanted to send his grand nephew to a private boarding school. He had legal custody of this grand nephew. He was basically raising him as a son. The tuition at the school was $6,000 a month, over $6,000 a month. Thomas didn't pay this tuition. Guess who did? Oh, who? Harlan Crow.

Oh, is that right? Yeah. Harlan Crow, according to a former administrator at the school, paid Martin's tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year. So once again, I need a Harlan Crow in my life, Danielle. Can you be my Harlan Crow? Unfortunately, I cannot, but it's amazing to me. I want folks to know this.

So Sawyer Hackett on Twitter posted this, you know, because Clarence Thomas is not quite sure about his disclosures because he has people tell him he doesn't need to disclose. He was happy to disclose apparently $1,200 in free tires he received in 2002. He didn't disclose, however, the half a million dollars worth of vacation, trips on a private jet and yachts, a billionaire buying his mother's home, which she still lives in for free, and $150,000 in tuition payments to his adoptive son. The grift is so disgusting. It stinks to high heaven.

You have Chief Justice Roberts that's sending over ethics tests and in a, what did you call it, like a PDF defense? Uh-huh. And, you know, the Onion posted something that said that the Supreme Court has decided that along with their velveteen black robes, they're all going to wear golden crowns with rubies in them. That's an onion article, but it's pretty much our fucking reality right now. They just roam free and reigns supreme. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal. Gary Marcus, who is a scientist, best-selling author, serial entrepreneur, and host of the new podcast, Humans versus Machines,

and author of the Substack, The Road to AI, We Can Trust. I'm really excited to talk to you. Gary, because I got to tell you, as a politico, as somebody who deeply believes in democracy, who deeply believes in information that can educate the citizenry to make important decisions about their day-to-day lives and about their representatives, AI scares the shit out of me. Just looking at what happened in 2016, what continues to happen in our body politic, what we have blamed on Russian troll farms in terms of their misinformation, the ways in which Facebook, and Twitter were utilized for wrongdoing. I look at AI and I think to myself, oh, my God, the future is here and

it's a disaster for democracy, which is already hanging on by a thread. Tell me, am I blowing things out of proportion? I was just about to say, the one thing I can say positive here is I can tell we're going to be friends because I think you're looking at it the right way. A lot of times I do this interviews and have to kind of wake people up and you're already aware of how serious this is. So people actually ask me, you know, what risk should I worry about the most? I sometimes joke, don't worry so much about the robots taking over the world. First thing you do, if they come right now, is you close the door. Like, robots can't even open the door right now. So like we don't have to be so worried in the, at least in the immediate term, about like the Terminator kind of scenario. But we do have to

worry what bad actors are going to do with the AI we have now. I don't think the AI we have now is even all that good. Like when we look back 50 years from now, the AI from 2020, people are going to say, man, that stuff was bad. It made stuff up all the time, couldn't really count on it. Like, people had calculators. You type in numbers on your calculator, you get the right answer. Chat GPT, maybe you get what you want or maybe you have to try with another prompt. And maybe then it'll work.

Or maybe it won't. Type ask for somebody's biography. It's almost certain to make some stuff up. AI that we have right now is not that sophisticated compared to what I think is theoretically possible. But it is powerful. So because it's trained on, well, we don't even know anymore, let's say trillions of words of text, it can kind of.

mimic the sounds of human beings. It doesn't actually know what's true or false, but it can make up things that, for example, sound like a newspaper, kind of perfectly capture the tone of a newspaper, but maybe say stuff that's utterly garbage. If a troll farm wants to use that tool, it's just an amazing thing for what they want to do. We don't want them to do that, right? So control farm, for example, might want to make up some story about COVID and vaccines, you know, COVID vaccine, killing you. They can make up probably a billion stories a day, each, like, citing scientific evidence it doesn't really exist with fake data, many, many copies. Then they can test those and some of them will spread and go viral.

And so it's a really powerful tool from the perspective of people that want to create propaganda. It's like the best tool for making propaganda, one of the best tools of all time. And then you combine that with the deep fakes, the images. Yeah. Probably you saw like the fake pictures of Trump being arrested. Or, I mean, I actually like the one of the Pope and the coat. You know, sometimes they're entertaining, but also these things could be used to stir up anger and so forth. So we have it now where somebody could make like a fake newspaper site,

who spoof that site, make a whole set of articles, whole set of pictures to go with it. Fool a lot of people. And we already are seeing people start to make fake sites like that that are all computer generated or largely computer generated. NewsGar just released a study. They found like 45 sites that were largely computer generated. And that's just the tools have only been here a couple of months. By the time we get to 2024 election, I don't even know how much propaganda is going to be, but it's going to be a lot, a lot more than we see right now. You know, what is so troubling is, one, we already have an entire network in this country that is dedicated to disinformation and misinformation. Fox News just paid out $787 million for their human

anchors disseminating years' worth of lies to their millions and millions of viewers. What makes me concerned about AI, and you've said this in countless articles that you've been quoted in and interviewed for is that this type of AI-generated propaganda can hit 100 million people like that in an instant. And that there is no way, I mean, you've talked about so that people understand, okay, this is a fake newspaper, so it's watermarked, or this is a fake, deep fake video image. So there is some type of, again, watermark that is used. But that that in and of itself is not deep enough in terms of the regulation that is necessary. My concern, Gary, is that we are looking to, and I'm going to be agist, and I don't care. We're looking to octanagerians who don't even know how to use an iPhone,

don't really even know what the purposes of social media platforms to come up with the regulation necessary for AI. And I am not comfortable with the fact that they really fully comprehend what's at stake with our democracy. But, also with the safety of just citizens in general. Am I crazy? I'm slightly more optimistic than you. Most people are. I'm usually on the pessimistic. So I'm getting a lot of calls now from offices of senators and things like that. I think at least that people are waking up. I don't think anybody has a full answer yet. I'll tell you about my own in a second a little bit. But there is been a mood change. I think people were like, yeah, there's many things on our agenda. We'll get to AI when we get there.

And there's definitely a mood change in Washington and, you know, in Brussels and all around the globe. People recognizing they need to do something. I think that the Senate offices that I've spoken to, which is several, there's a recognition that they don't know everything. They want advice. There's pretty good research on that part. I mean, they're up on the literature. I will give examples. Like I've been talking a lot lately about a law professor who was falsely accused of sexual harassment.

And everybody saw post. So, like, people are up on that. literature. I don't think that they have answers yet. They're thinking about it. I was a little worried today when there was a meeting in the White House and it seems to me that it was just for corporate CEOs if I understand. Google, Microsoft. Open AI and profit. And what was not there were scientists, as far as I can tell, unless I missed something. There were no scientists there and no neutral parties. So there are people like me that are skeptical about a lot of the hypey claims that have been made around these things. I'm not alone in that. There was no one like that representing that concern.

can't really do science on these systems right now because we don't know what's inside them, that we have a huge need for transparency. I don't think that people sitting in the White House today, we're going to emphasize that enough. I mean, they have their own interest at running these companies. We need the companies at the table. We need the government at the table, but we also need scientists at the table and we need people kind of representing civil society. It can't just be like, you know, a deal between the government and tech companies. That's not good enough. So I was a little alarmed by the composition of the meeting. I do think there's at least recognition. now that this is important, that we don't need a 10-year study. We need some answers now. A lot of

government bodies have been stepping up. I think the next thing we need is actually global coordination year. That's one of the solutions that I hear you talk about. So I'm excited for you to dig into that because you bring up the idea of global coordination. I think back to, oh, I don't know, 2020 when we needed global coordination around the health pandemic. I think about the Paris Climate Accord, which again, global coordination there, but, you know, we're still careening into a climate crisis. So talk to us about what you think if things did come together and work well and have enforcement and regulation, how it could work. I mean, one good model would be the International Atomic Energy Authority.

So we have a few times in history recognized that like we're all threatened here, that there are a risk for all of us and people have come together. It's hard to bring together global coalitions, as you will know. But I think everybody has an interest. Like a lot of people are like, what about China? China's actually pumping out AI regulation faster than we are in North America. And they have some of the same concerns. Like misinformation is a problem for them too.

There's a whole separate issue about propaganda and how they use these tools that I'm not on board with. But even they like don't want everybody to be randomly liable and they don't want people to get bad medical advice and so forth. There's actually a lot of shared interest. And you know, it's funny you mentioned Fox. I actually went on Fox today. I'm not a regular Fox viewer, but I think that this is not a right or left issue. And so one of the reasons I'm somewhat optimistic that we might be able to do something here is because I think everybody needs to be concerned. You know, citizens, you know, whatever their socioeconomic status,

for example, need to be concerned. And I think, you know, Republicans have often classically been allied with big business, but it's not clear that they really want open AI to have all the power over the world or Microsoft. And so it's, you know, not clear from their own perspective that this really makes sense. And so I talk to Fox. I talk to Lou Dobbs. I have a podcast that's about. And Cavuto's the guy I talked to on Fox today. I feel like these guys understand the point that I'm making. There's definitely always some skepticism from the right about regulation, but this is a moment where they can see why we need that regulation. So I'm more optimistic than a lot of people are that we might get at least some elements of what we need for a global

coalition. I think the right thing would have enforcement. And that's obviously going to be part of the challenge here, but I'll give you an example. We can't really fix these things unless we do the right science on them. We need to do the right science to know even what the problems are. Like how much misinformation is there? How much of that misinformation is generated by AI? How fast is that problem changing is one example. Another example is from the technical side, we don't actually understand these systems. There's these black boxes, as we call them, where data in output, we don't know what they're going to do next. And the critical question from a cognitive of psychology perspective, which is my original scientific field, is how do they generalize?

So you give them some data and then they come up with something. What are they doing there? And you see this kind of random arbitrariness to them if you play around with them. It's like one minute they seem like geniuses and the next minute they seem like idiots. Like, how could they get that wrong? Well, that actually has to do with what the training data is and how they're very closely attached to that training data. They can't kind of step beyond an abstract. If we don't know what the training data is, we can't even make predictions like what is it going to do correctly, what is it not going to correctly? Here's. an example. With respect to bias in job employment, if you're a transparent system, you can look at

the system and see what it's doing. You, for example, don't want it to take somebody that is a ballerina and say they can't be a computer scientist just because they like to dance, right? We know how to build some regulation around that and so forth. But if somebody feeds in a job record, you know, resume and so forth, into chat, GPT and says, should I hire this person? There may be lots of bias there. And we have no way of knowing now, even if anybody's doing that, which I bet that they are. You know, but there are companies being built around it. Somebody pitched me a company yesterday that seems a little like that. I'm like, no, I don't think of an alley with this.

We don't have any technical means to diagnose this. We don't even know how to build the measures yet. So we're kind of in the dark here. And I think to get out of the dark, we're going to need some enforcement around things like transparency and auditing. We're going to have to go into those companies and say, you can't do this all alone. We need independent neutral parties to evaluate this stuff. One of the documentaries that I watched, I think it was maybe last year,

or the year before that it came out was coded bias. And it was talking about how we're basically writing racism and white supremacy into code. We can look no further than some of the chat box that were taken down after 24 hours of use because of the spewing of anti-Semitism and racist slurs and what have you. And at a time in our country where racism, anti-Asian hate, anti-Semitism is on the rise, there is already a slew of disinformation and misinformation to purposefully create a bigger divide. In our country, what do you think about the fact that, in my mind, as a black queer woman in America, that AI is only as good as the people that are creating it? So when we're talking about regulation in terms of what people consume, is it even possible to look at it through a

bias lens to ensure that again, we're not creating the future of racism, the future of anti-Semitism at the same time that we're trying to create a society that is supposed to be equitable and have more ease because of technological advancements. Unfortunately, I think the default is exactly the scenario that you're painting. I'll clarify one thing. I don't think the systems per se are biased, but the data that they use is biased. and the systems tend to perpetuate whatever bias we've seen in the past. And they can't reason about values. So give you an example.

You could take a system that's from a coding perspective, kind of neutral and hunky dory in some way. But you ask it, for example, if you gave it a historical sample of who plays in an orchestra and you went out to 1910, you'd say, well, women can't do this job, right? And we all know what happened is that eventually we went to need blind auditions and then women started getting the orchestras and now represent roughly half of people in orchestras. If you have a system that only looks backwards, even in sort of in a well-defined way that's not mathematically anomalous, but it only looks at the past and doesn't understand values about diversity, equity, equality, et cetera, then it's just going to be stuck perpetuating the past. And that is

what we're seeing in these systems that we have now. They don't have the kind of cognitive wherewithal to reason about human values. So this has actually been my pinned tweet for the last two years, is to say we need to figure out how to build a new kind of system that doesn't just perpetuate the past and can reason about human values. I would say, you know, in the two years since I've had that tweet, there hasn't been a lot of progress towards that. The technology that we have right now, basically what it learns is relationships between words as people have used them.

Now, there's these new things we call guardrails. We can get into that. But the default tendency of them is to just take whatever happened before without respect to, like, why it happened before. So like, you know, redlining was a part of our history. And so that changed people's opportunity. So anytime you look at the empirical data of the past in employment, like that has been shaped by history of redlining, all kinds of things.

We don't need to repeat here, but it's a terrible history. And so you wind up with this data that reflects this sociology and you have a system that can't understand the sociology of opportunity. I think it's a disaster. Not because like the programmers who build these things are evil, but because the tools that they're building really aren't up for the job. And we're not emphasizing enough developing new tools. We're in this weird scientific moment right now where people have a toy that is incredibly fun to play with.

And that's all they're doing. And the fact is we actually need some other tools that haven't been developed yet if we're really going to address these issues, for example, about bias. And if people are going to start using, you know, black boxes to make decisions about insurance or housing. Yeah. Any of that. Like, it's, it's going to be bad. I can see the train about to crash and I'm not seeing people really address it very well. So, you know, I think we should all be pretty worried about that.

But right now there's so much money in trying to use these particular tools that are popular. I don't see enough people looking outside that box to say, how else could we solve these things? Well, I have to unfortunately leave it here for today. But I'm always, as I'm following and, you know, researching and following your work, just reminded of the quote from Jurassic Park at 1993. which is where Jeff Goldblum's character says, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could. They didn't stop to think about whether or not they should.

And that is how I feel right now about AI. In December, I wrote a piece called The AI's Jurassic Park Moment, and I had a video clip of Jeff saying that stuff at the top. And, I mean, you know, Crichton, you know, was right to worry about unintended consequences of technology. That was a theme throughout his work, including Jurassic. Park where it's expressed maybe most beautifully. I happen to have met Jeff Goldblum a couple of times. And we know that he delivered, you know, that line masterfully, as he always does. It's where we are right now. I think about that line like kind of every day. The other line I think about kind

the other day is from Donald Rumsfeld, who was not a hero of mine who said, you know, the biggest are the unknown unknowns. There are known knowns and then there are unknown known. And this is exactly what we're seeing, right? Every week or every, sometimes every day, we're seeing some new crazy risk from some of these systems. First, we were kind of focused around misinformation. Then it became clear they're going to be used a lot for cybercrime, that these systems can trick human beings into doing bad things. Then we discovered that people could use one GPT system, which is unreliable, to control other unreliable GPT systems, which extends the scale and scope of all of this. So like the risks are kind of multiplying. There's a lot of our moments. That's true on the

positive side too, right? I mean, people will find lots of positive applications that hopefully will help, for example, in medicine will not just be used to help students cheat on their homework, but we really have positive social impact. And it will take some time to discover those positive things, too. We've never had a technology that is this open-ended and also been adopted this quickly. And so it really does, you know, put the pressure on for us to figure out, sound ways to cope with it. Well, I thank you so much, Gary Marcus, one for your work and your continued critical thinking

around where we go with this. And I really do hope that you will join us again on the new abnormal because this was very insightful. I'd be glad to come back. Thanks a lot for having me. Nothing is more abnormal than the rise of the radical right. Fever Dreams is a Daily Beast podcast, taking you inside the rights push to retake power

from the Maga Acolytes to the straight-up grifters. They recently released their, 100th episode, so there's no better time to listen. Head to beast.pubbs slash fever dreams to check it out. Pornhub pulls out of Utah and two new bills before Congress that purport to help protect people, shockingly, may not be what they seem. Joining me now to discuss is Mike Maznick, founder and editor of the essential techdirt blog at techdirt.com and CEO of the Copia Institute. Mike, thanks for coming back. Appreciate it. Yeah, I always happy to be here. So let's start with the, well, the sexiest story, Pornhub, which for those listeners pretending not to know, is a huge streaming site for adult content,

announced that it would cut off access to its platform from all Utah IP addresses in response to a new state law that if I'm reading it correctly, requires anyone who wants to visit the site to go through an age verification process involving uploading a government-issued identification and also submitting to third-party facial recognition technology. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, it's basically a porn license that you have to get with the state. Like you would normally have to get a driver's license. In this case, you just sort of have to register with the state saying, I want to see porn. And there have been a bunch of states sort of trying to pass these kinds of bills.

Louisiana was actually the first one that had a similar kind of bill go into effect. And now Utah's just went into effect. And Pornhub in response basically said, sorry, Utah, you can't see it anymore. But what could possibly be wrong with the state having a database of people who want to watch porn? Oh, goodness. And it is worth noting, by the way, that there was a study, there have been a few different studies, but there was a study going back to 2009 that was done at Harvard that found that residents of Utah subscribed to more porn than any other state. Well, yeah. Okay.

There were a few later studies that called that into question, but I did think it was someone notable. Wow. There may be a lot of interest in porn in Utah. I have no idea why that might be. None at all. All right. Look, so obviously this is one of those in the name of protecting the children laws that ends up absolutely destroying any semblance of privacy for adults, right? Yeah. I mean, just the idea that you would sort of have to declare publicly to the government that I want to see naked people seems like a questionable way of going about anything. And it's not really clear how that actually serves to protect anyone and certainly seems to put a lot of other people's price. private information and private interests at risk. Yeah, and you mentioned it's similar to driver's licenses, but it's like, okay, a driver's license is supposed to say that you know how to drive a car correctly. Is this supposed to prove that you know how to watch porn correctly?

Do you have to take classes? Is there a test? Like, how does this work? There is no test. And also, I mean, importantly, like a driver's license is about an actual activity that is physically dangerous, whereas porn is protected speech. And so there are some First Amendment questions about. sort of making you register to engage in or consume First Amendment protected speech.

I would hope so. I saw an article at the Daily Dot, and I think other people have pointed this out, saying that Utah residents are, as they put it, flooding Google with VPN searches since this law took effect on the third. Can you do a quick explainer of VPN's virtual public networks for our listeners in Utah and elsewhere? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to get into there, but just the simplest level of VPN basically, skies is where your traffic is coming from. There's more to it than that. So basically, you're sending all of your traffic to a computer somewhere and then it is sending all the traffic from the end recipient of that traffic is that is coming from that intermediary network. And that can be anywhere. And a lot of, not all, but a lot of VPN services allow you to pick where you are coming from. So you can, you know, anywhere around the world or pick a state, you know, a lot of them have, you can pick a different state. In most cases, you would pick

a state closer to you because of the proximity, makes it slightly faster. But if you're trying to get around, say, an all Utah porn block, you might want to pick, you know, another state like California or New York or Florida or wherever. Though, I would imagine Florida may soon have a similar law. So maybe don't pick Florida. Yeah, I don't think I'd go with them. So the bottom line here, basically, is if you are even the slightest bit technically savvy, there's a pretty easy workaround for this dumb law. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you would just get a VPN or is similar to a VPN, but a proxy service that will, any of these will just sort of

make you appear like you're coming from somewhere else. It's relatively simple. There are free VPNs. I would urge people not to use a free VPN because they tend to be not great for your privacy, but there are very inexpensive VPNs and they will in certain cases protect your privacy and allow you to trick Pornhub into believing you're not in Utah. Right. Oh my God. So Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, which I guess owns a lot of adult sites that I assume are also similarly not available in Utah. Yeah. So, I mean, I believe that almost all of the sort of well-known bigger porn sites are almost all owned by Mind Geek, which just was sold to like a private equity firm. And they have done the same thing. So if you go to Porn Hub from any of those sites from inside

Utah or using a Utah IP address, you get a video of someone explaining to you why Pornhub is doing this and asking people to contact their state elected officials to complain about the law. Interesting. You mentioned that this might run afoul of some First Amendment protections. Is there any effort underway to challenge this law? I don't know of like an existing like in court challenge currently going on. I imagine there will be something soon. There have been in the past, there have been other cases that are not directly on point, but which I think would suggest that, well, you never know with this Supreme Court. But right. It should be considered unconstitutional. We've had different cases involving like the internet and free speech with Reno versus ACLU or ACLU versus Reno. And there have been ones about like protecting children. from violent video games that has been struck down as unconstitutional. And so you combine all of that. And it's pretty clear that this kind of law should be considered unconstitutional. But with the courts these days, who knows? All right. But I am sending out a message to all any libertarian, any freaky libertarian lawyers listening. Start filing some suits in Utah. Yeah. All right. So let's move just

something called COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. That's before Congress right now. Not for the first time, I guess. What is it and why is it so bad? There have been a whole series of different laws that have all sort of been introduced in the last few weeks. And Kosis may be one of the more, that it has more support than some of the others. But it, you know, just from the name, the Kids Online Safety Act, you get a sense of what it is. It's sort of buying into the same sort of belief that the internet is inherently dangerous for children and therefore we need to stop it. It has a number of different elements to it. The one that is probably the most concerning to me is it has this concept which sounds so nice. of a duty of care, which says that a website has to have a duty of care to protect children. And if they fail to live up to their duty of care, then they can be sued. And, you know, it's one of these things that sounds nice. Of course, a website should care about, you know, protecting children on their site. But when you frame it that way as a duty of care, what it creates is just like a license to file all sorts of crazy lawsuits.

Because no matter, as soon as anything bad happens to a child who was using the internet, their family can then sue the platform and claim that the bad thing that happened was because that site failed in their duty of care to protect the children. So there are all sorts of examples of like bullying or eating disorders or self-harm where these are things that, you know, they are problematic and in some cases tragic and worrisome. They also existed pre-internet. And, you know, if a child was bullied at school, we didn't go sue the school for not magically being able to stop all bullying. If a child had an eating disorder, we didn't sue fashion magazines. There are all sorts of things that happen that influence how

people behave and there's human nature. And pinning the blame on internet services is questionable, but it will lead to a whole bunch of really sort of probably vexatious lawsuits against sites, you know, just claiming that because something bad happened to their child and it wasn't magically stopped, even if those things happened forever, that that site has to pay up. So I guess I have two questions coming out of that. And the first is, you know, it would seem to me that, let's say a website had a section on eating disorders. Yeah. You know, even if the section was like, here are ways to see if your child has a eating disorder or even just described eating disorders that sort of after the fact, a parent could go in and say, my child was exposed to the notion

of eating disorders on your site. Yeah, and that's the big problem, which is like there's this assumption built into all of this that like any exposure to like information about eating disorders or self-harm or other things is a cause of it and is, you know, is an influencer in creating the supposed harm. Reality is a lot more complex than that. And in fact, a few years ago, for an article I wrote, I had gone through all of the research specifically on eating disorders. And it was actually fascinating and kind of surprising to me and somewhat enlightening. And I think really important and totally ignored by all the lawmakers, of course, which was that early attempts by like Instagram and some other sites to stomp out conversations on eating

disorder failed and actually made the problems worse. And for a couple of like really important reasons. One is that like generally, you know, teenage girls were eating. disorders are most prevalent, we'll figure out a way to have that conversation anyways. You can say, like, no conversations on an eating disorder, and they come up with language that, you know, routes around the filters. Like, this is, this is just how the internet works. And when kids want to talk about something, they're going to figure out a way to do it. And so those conversations still happen, but they were less obvious to people who could actually help. So adults and school counselors

and other kids. So a lot of those conversations still happened, but they were a little bit harder to find for people who could help. And a lot of the conversations then migrated to like darker areas of the web that were also sort of harder for adults to find. And often were more extreme and more sort of, it's hard to say like doctrinaire, but like more focus on like pushing more people towards bad behavior. Right. Whereas the conversations that were happening on, say, Instagram and Facebook actually showed more people coming in to try and help people. So a lot of stories of people who had eating disorders but figured out the way to help. themselves or, you know, God help, and then would go back to those communities and try and help

others and, you know, sort of guide them to a healthier situation, which is really, really valuable and appear to be really, really helpful. Whereas this sort of setup of COSA really says, like, websites should not have any information about eating disorders, good or bad, not allow for any sort of discussion. You know, your example is clear one, too, where it's like, it would be dangerous to have even, like, how to spot an eating disorder or how to help someone with an eating disorder because of the risk that then you could be accused of failing your duty of care. And so that does not seem healthy to me. It sounds to me, Mike, like you are insinuating that teenagers understand the internet better than Chuck Grassley. That is a very bold statement, my friend. Well, you know, I heard recently in a discussion on a slightly different topic, in the cybersecurity world, there's this concept of APT, an advanced persistent threat, which is usually like, you know, foreign hackers, Russian hackers or whatever. But,

what this discussion was, was that an even bigger threat for many internet services or ideas like this is a different kind of APT, which is an advanced persistent teenager, which is that the teenager will figure out ways around whatever you're trying to stop them from doing. Yeah. But, you know, the lawmakers don't take that into account. No. So I was looking at the list of co-sponsors for this atrocious bill. It's a long list.

It seems like everybody wants a part of this. And it seemed like a pretty equal mix of Republicans, Democrats. So I'll ask you a question I asked EFF and Cindy Cohn a few weeks ago. Why do both parties suck on stuff like this? I wish I knew. I mean, you know, I think it's just one of those things where like there's this general sense in the air, which I don't think is actually supported as much as they think it is by the data, that the internet is just bad for kids.

There's actually plenty of evidence that for most kids, it is good or neutral, that it is allowing them to communicate, is allowing them to find out information, it's allowing them to communicate with friends and family, it's allowing them to find out things about different communities or different lifestyles that are important to them. There are some kids for whom it is problematic, and they have trouble dealing with the flow of information, and I believe it would be good to sort of figure out ways to help those teenagers

who are struggling. But all the evidence is that that is a much smaller percentage of children who are impacted this way, But the stories of what happens to any of those kids are heart wrenching. And they, you know, and they sort of demand action by lawmakers when you hear about a child who killed themselves by suicide or hurt themselves or is going through just a really, really troubling experience. Some of those are horrifying stories. And they're very real and they're very sad. And I totally understand, like, the desire to do something about it.

Sure. I mean, throughout history, lawmakers have always run to these kinds of stories where something bad happens to a kid and therefore we have to pass a law prevent that specific scenario from ever happening again. So I think there's just a lot of that going on. You know, it gets a headline in the paper, Senator so-and-so protecting the kids. It's good for reelection time. Well, and that's actually a perfect segue to the last thing I want to talk to you about,

which is the Cooper Davis Act, which is literally named after a kid who, I guess, wanted to, was splitting what he thought was a percocet tablet with friends, and it turned out to be fentanyl or laced with fentanyl. So there's now this Cooper Davis Act that involves, it involves drugs, and in the language of the bill itself, would require electronic communication service providers, I assume that's internet providers, websites, whatever, to report to the attorney general certain controlled substances violations. You refer to this as another attempt by Congress to regulate that which they don't understand. Yeah. I mean, it has this sort of vague language and that just is somewhat modeled after the setup that we currently have for child sexual abuse material

that if a website discovers that they have that material, they have to report it to this organization called NICMECMEC through a thing called the Cyber Tip Line. And it sort of mimics that, but for the potential of certain kinds of illegal drug sales. First of all, there's a big difference between like, if you come across child sexual abuse material, there's a strict liability on it. It is fairly obvious what you have come across when you come across it. Illegal drug sales is not so easy for people to, you know, running a website to recognize whether or not that is actually happening on your website. Also, there's a lot of stuff that may appear that way or may reference illegal drugs. And, you know, sometimes that's joking. Sometimes it's like song lyrics.

Sometimes it's quoting a book or a movie. There are all sorts of ways where that might come up. And all of those now need to be reported to the DEA just to avoid potential liability for failing to report these things. It's not clear how usual that will be if the DEA is suddenly flooded with millions of reports that have nothing to do with actual drug sales. It's not clear even if it was reporting like potential actual drug sales, how useful that would really be to the DEA. What are they going to do with all of these reports? and it's unclear to me how that even remotely would protect someone like in the situation of the fairly tragic story of Cooper Davis who, you know, was trying to take what he thought was a Percocet and had it be laced with fentanyl. That had nothing to do with like clear

illegal drug sales online. Right. All you're doing is making a lot of busy work for lots of different websites and online services and flooding the DEA with probably a lot of really useless information that they're not going to know what to do with. And I don't see how that's even remotely helpful to anyone. Yeah, I don't think I'd want to be the person at the DEA. I would imagine it's going to have to be way more than one person because you're going to end up, like you said, with just a flood of reports, most of which are chaff and very few of which are wheat. Yeah. Again, this feels like the kind of thing that is like, it gives Congress a number, right? And that's kind of like the exciting thing for them. It's like, ooh, it'll give us a number

of how many illegal drug sales. And it often sort of then becomes this lead up to even worse laws. And we're seeing that with NICMick and the CSAM reporting where we keep hearing stories and there are a bunch of these other bills that are based on the numbers of like reports to the NICMECM cyber tip line of child sexual abuse material where bills are coming out where politicians are saying, look, you know, Facebook reported X number of million reports. And therefore like that proves the problem. And it's like, it's unclear what that number actually means. That's just how many that Facebook is reporting. You know, if they compare it to like 10 years ago, there were fewer reports because there was fewer tracking of this thing. And there wasn't a system called photo DNA, which tracks a lot of

that content. And so the reporting might just be that we're finding more of that content now. The really interesting question, which nobody looks into when it comes to child sexual abuse material, is what is the DOJ then doing with that information? Once Nick McIsadom, there are very, very few stories. of finding the people actually responsible and arresting them, which is what the whole thing was supposed to do. And instead, everything is focused on how many reports there are. And so there are all these things about, like, passing laws to make it even more strict the companies, but nothing about, like, giving the DOJ the tools and resources to actually track down the people responsible for this stuff. And so when you get that number, it just becomes, it's sort of this new vector to pass even worse laws. And so I'm definitely worried about that as well. Yeah, it becomes the reason for being, which it's not supposed to be. Mike, thank you so much. Always a pleasure talking to you. You can definitely check out Mike at

Techdirt.com. You can follow him on Twitter. You can follow him on Macedon. I guess you can follow him on Blue Sky, but don't because he has like twice as many followers as me, which is just stupid. It's so stupid that someone like Mike Maznick has twice as many followers as me just because he posts really interesting stories and important things. And I make dumb little jokes. It's just, it's dumb. I make dumb little jokes too. I know, I know. I didn't, I'm giving you too much credit already. I didn't want to add to that. Mike, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Andy Levy.

Danielle Moody. I mean, the week is deep, my friend. I know, I know. So who is your fuck that guy to round out this fucking week? Well, it's not Mayor Eric Adams because we talked about him. But fuck that guy. Who it is is four members of the proud boys who, uh, on Thursday, were found guilty of seditious conspiracy and faced a potential sentence of 20 years in federal prison. This includes Proud Boys leader Enrique Tario, who many in the Proud Boys accused of being a Fed. So this is like a double whammy for him, as I think it was Ben Collins from NBC pointed out that like really bad day for him, half his old buddies think he's an informant

and meanwhile he's going to jail for seditious conspiracy. So it was he was he. Tim and three other members of the Proud Boys. This is a really rare thing to see this seditious conspiracy. You know, it just got me thinking that when I was at Fox working on the show Red Eye, a frequent guest on the show was Gavin McGinnis who went on to found the Proud Boys. I want to pat myself on the back only because I have to make up for how many people I was wrong about. Like I never thought Tucker Carlson would turn into what he is now. I knew right from the start that Gavin McGinnis was.

particularly bad news. I recall after Gavin's either first or second appearance, I emailed the host of the show and said it is really bad for us to have him on the air. He is bad for the show. He's a bad dude. And I came into work the next morning and found out that the host was out drinking with Gavin the night before when I sent the email and showed the email to him because he thought it was funny. Wow. Yeah. And it got to the point there where I said, I'm going to start using sick days on days that he's on the show because I don't want to be on a show with him. I think it was vacation days, not sick days, whatever. The point being, all these guys were bad news from the start. Gavin McGinnis was bad news from the start. The proud boys were bad news from the start. And I can't think of a better group of

people to have an old Civil War era statute invoked against to put them away in prison. I know it's up to 20 years in prison, I think. The closer it is to that, the better off this country is. Yeah, Fuck all those guys. Fuck everyone who has ever been involved with the proud boys or any group like that. And I hope they all get locked away for a very long time. Yeah. And going around on Twitter right now is one of their insurrectionist friends by the name of Ted Cruz, who has a lovely pitcher with Enrique.

So there's that. Of course. Wonderful. So who is your fuck that guy, Daniel? Well, to be an equal opportunist, my fuck that guy this week is a fuck that gal. I got to say, you know, once again, city of New York, Mayor Eric Adams, you're doing a bang-up fucking job, sir. So a Queenswoman who drove her car, this is according to the Independent, into a Black Lives Matter protesters during a demonstration line in the winter of 2020 in Midtown Manhattan, get this, Andy, will face no jail time. Not only that for attempted murder, she only got five hours, five fucking hours.

of community service. This is Kathleen Casillo, 53. She was facing up to seven years in prison for her actions, which left six people injured. Once again, I mean, I guess Mayor Adams is turning the city of New York into Ron DeSantis' playground because he passed legislation in Florida that would excuse motorists from being able to plow down protesters

who have the right to assemble. And in this case, Kathleen Casillo also, we are just signaling out that if you don't like what you see, you don't like protesters, you don't like people fighting for justice in this country, well, you can turn your car into a weapon and guess what? Not a fucking thing will happen to you. I wonder why white supremacy continues because we don't got any laws on the books for domestic terrorism. We don't hold people accountable and respond. for their actions. This woman should have been in jail. The book should have been thrown at her. She should have gotten the highest sentencing possible. But instead, slap on the wrist and we go about our day. Fuck you, Kathleen Casillo. Fuck the judge who decided to come down with this sentencing.

Fuck Eric Adams for not having stricter laws that actually protect people's right to assemble in this free blue state. The only thing I have to add to that is fuck the prosecutors who actually cut her this sweetheart plea deal. And I'm using that phrase because that's how the New York Post described it. Do you know how bad this has to be for the New York Post to think that a white woman who plowed into a BLM protest got off too easy? I mean, I didn't think that was possible.

And even they are like, yeah, this is a. sweetheart deal. So fuck the prosecutors who chose to cut this deal with her and, uh, and everyone else that you, uh, had on your list. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studed the Daily Beast podcast at the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts.

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