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AI is destroying creativity · UK Column Radio

0:38
The COVID era really showed us, you know, who's got hair in
0:44
their arms. I mean, if you think about it
0:47
right, we lost a lot of friends and we gained a lot of new
0:49
friends and we learnt a lot about the world around us.
0:53
And in many ways, I feel like we're in a better place.
0:58
I mean, would you go back to 2019 if you had a choice 20?
1:00
19 was very rough. That's why it worked.
1:03
The reason that the COVID operation worked is because
1:07
people were so stressed out and unhappy.
1:12
Really a treadmill feeling, people would really run ragged.
1:15
And the lure, the, the bait of the bait and switch was you get
1:21
to take a little break, you get to breathe for a second.
1:27
I didn't. I was on March 3rd, I was
1:32
working on COVID-19 news. I started, I started my daily
1:36
publication and chronology 10 days before the emergency was
1:40
declared, and then I was up to like 4:00 in the morning for the
1:44
next 600 nights. But I got a good journalism
1:49
assignment out of it. Were it not for the whole era,
1:55
the SIOP, the operation, I wouldn't have met you.
1:59
Yes, Yep. And I'm happy to have lost the
2:02
false friends. And, you know, a lot of my
2:04
clients bailed out, you know, for my other business bailed
2:08
out. And I thought I was a better
2:11
teacher than that. But, you know, they're accusing
2:13
me of of things and of being a Trump supporter and, you know,
2:18
lying about killing grandma. And I'm like, you know, you've
2:21
been, you say you've been reading me for 15 years and I've
2:24
always gotten it right. But maybe you should call me up
2:28
since my phone number is all off my website and I actually answer
2:30
the phone. You should call me up and ask me
2:32
what's going on that way. What's you can call me up and
2:35
say, you know, what's your problem, bro?
2:38
I'll tell you, I'll tell you. This is a weird thing you said
2:42
now Trump supporter. And I remember a time many, many
2:47
years ago where you could say openly, I like Obama or I like
2:52
Clinton or I like whoever, doesn't really matter.
2:56
And you wouldn't lose friends over it.
2:58
You might get into a bit of an argument, but you wouldn't lose
3:01
friends. Yeah, that end, though I tend to
3:05
lean left in my politics, I have been the kind of person who
3:10
leaned left who always listened to what people from other
3:15
viewpoints had to say and that they respect that immensely.
3:20
If you are, if you're, if you're a liberal, who actually cares
3:23
what they say, you're not a Lib tard.
3:27
And anytime I've had a long and storied journalism career going
3:32
back to to 1983, and anytime I have been arrested for
3:38
journalism, banished from a place in any way, censored or
3:43
banned, it's always been liberals who have done it.
3:47
Never once has somebody who allegedly had some opposite
3:50
viewpoint of mine, which then you find out isn't so opposite
3:54
when you actually parse it out. It's always been people on the
3:57
left who who just blatantly practice lockstep censorship or
4:02
pillorying or wokeism or or whatever.
4:05
And that that's been instructive.
4:08
I think it's not indicative of a sound character.
4:11
Now let me just categorically state I have kind of given up on
4:15
the labels thing. Left, right, liberal,
4:17
conservative, big. That's because I don't.
4:20
I don't really know what they mean.
4:21
For the sake of a discussion, I'm only saying it for the black
4:24
pieces and white pieces in chess, you have to have.
4:28
I mean, I'd love a chess board with like purple and green Is
4:30
that is that that must have got that exist.
4:33
But yes, it's become completely meaningless.
4:35
I think though, in the United States there is this weird thing
4:40
that thinks of itself as liberal movement, which flies the trans
4:44
flag, which will try to correct your speech, which will accuse
4:49
me of photographing models that are conventionally attractive.
4:55
I once had one of these my studio.
4:58
What's that, Sweeney? Have you seen that that that
5:00
whole new thing now with those jeans, the what's their name?
5:03
Sue Sweeney? Something little.
5:05
Cute. That's what they're mad about.
5:07
She's hotter than they are. That's all it is.
5:09
But she's got what? A little cutie?
5:12
Jesus Christ. I downloaded the my favorite of
5:14
those images, and I've got it at full resolution.
5:17
Then I wrote to the Then I wrote to the ad agency with my
5:20
Pacifica Network branding on my e-mail saying, well, they're all
5:25
pissed off, but I'm not, so I'm having fun with that.
5:29
It's, it's so absurd. Like there's, they're actually
5:31
claiming this is a neo Nazi. They, if they, if they think
5:34
that's neo Nazi, let me take you to Auschwitz.
5:37
Let me let's take a walk through the mass graves of Bookenwald.
5:41
I've been there. It had nothing to do with a cute
5:44
girl with bare feet and bell bottoms.
5:48
I'll take the girl on the bare feet and bell bottoms any day
5:51
over Bookenwald. Well, the point I was trying to
5:56
make is that the whole left right thing, yes, it does have a
5:59
place. I think in in general
6:01
conversation, we kind of know what we mean when we say liberal
6:05
or conservative. We do, we do kind of have an
6:07
idea. I've had the best conversations
6:11
over the years with self identified communists for
6:14
example. Or or yeah, when you get into
6:17
the point of the conversation where it's like, well, what are
6:19
your actual values? I I wrote in my last column that
6:26
sign of the times cops or more or interesting more interesting
6:29
than hippies. This is just based on
6:32
conversations, but I also think that prostitutes are the most
6:36
interesting women to talk to. I've had something very probably
6:39
then then you get guys like Buckminster Fuller agreed with
6:44
this. He's like he the women he loves
6:46
the most, the smartest women, some of the most intelligent, by
6:49
which I mean general intelligence.
6:51
They could keep up with anything that I would say have been
6:55
prostitutes. So the the labels are are
7:00
ridiculous and but you know, you need them to a point.
7:03
But then like I've, I've watched my positions on issues changed,
7:08
like abortion, for example, like feminism.
7:10
Feminists convinced me that feminism was a lie.
7:13
They they buy their behavior. And then I started to look into
7:18
the concepts behind Open Access to abortion, and I started to
7:23
disagree with those foundational principles.
7:27
Now there's a complicated issue, right?
7:29
Because we have bodily autonomy. And I think that's, that's the
7:33
beauty though of, of, of reality as opposed to constant academia
7:39
and theorizing. Yeah.
7:40
When you just look at actually what's going on around you and
7:43
when you experience it, it does alter the way in which you
7:47
perceive things. This is why I said to you
7:49
earlier, I've had some of the best conversations with self
7:51
identified communists. Because they tend to be
7:56
intellectually advanced. They've if they've read Marx, I
8:00
want to know what the hell they read.
8:02
I I haven't read Marx, but I'm very interested in what people
8:06
who have read Marx have to say about Marx.
8:08
It doesn't make me a Marxist, but there's a lot of very
8:13
interesting critique of the problems we are experiencing
8:17
now, AI being one of them. This is colonialism.
8:20
This is we are in another stage of colonialism right now.
8:23
Yeah, You just created my segue because I wanted to ask you
8:26
about AI. So let me just quickly premise
8:28
it with the following. So I know we've chatted about
8:30
this off air briefly. My my position is nuanced on AI.
8:36
So I have the view that technically, all right, it can't
8:41
control us. It can't take over because it's
8:44
purely a set of algorithms designed with a purpose.
8:47
It doesn't have a will or a desire.
8:49
So it can't, it can't become human in the sense that it's
8:54
going to think about things. However, that's where it ends
8:58
because in the same way it like like smartphones have taken over
9:02
our daily lives. I think in the same way we will
9:05
allow ourselves to be taken over in an A sort of abstract way by
9:10
AI. And I think you kind of agree
9:11
with that. Yeah, though my position is
9:15
historically based and goes back to Telegraph and the light bulb.
9:20
So I saw your show the other week.
9:22
That's why I wrote to you with those two guys.
9:24
And look, they're solid and it's the I forget their names.
9:26
And it was the best technical explanation I have seen.
9:30
Although I am, I'm now reading this, which is stunning.
9:36
It's it's really, she's made. You could probably get her on
9:40
the show and had I not see my my dad was a professor of
9:47
communications. And so I was aware of the work
9:50
of Marshall Mcluhan when I was a kid.
9:52
And, and when when we watched dinner TV at dinner, there was a
9:56
microphone taped to the television.
10:00
So we didn't just consume television.
10:02
When you're growing up and your dad has a microphone taped to
10:05
the side of the television, you know, you're supposed to observe
10:09
it. It's not just a thing that's
10:10
just going to float through you like a The Flintstones.
10:14
So he recorded the news and those tapes are gone.
10:16
He's kept everything he's ever owned and he doesn't have those
10:18
tapes, which would be incredible to have little old little reel
10:21
to reel, like 4 inch reel to reels.
10:24
So, and not video because there was no videotaping.
10:27
And so I was aware of media theory very young and, and I
10:31
applied it as best I could. And then I met Andrew Mcluhan,
10:36
Marshall's grandson. And through Marshall I met his
10:39
father, Andrew's father, Eric. And so I have gotten to have
10:43
many conversations with actual people in the Mcluhan family.
10:46
And Eric was Marshall's collaborator and assistant for
10:49
more than 10 years. So I started to read in D in
10:55
depth on Mcluhan's theories and he provides a map to the
11:00
territory that we're in. But he could not, I know where
11:05
he stood on computers. He couldn't foresee what we are
11:07
having going on right now. He did not foresee them
11:10
hallucinating for example. But what he did.
11:14
But what he did say was that computers are LSD for the
11:18
business community. We can't find this quote, but I
11:21
have read this. I'm not sure what book I read it
11:23
in. Computers are LSD for the
11:26
business community. He said this in the 60s and he
11:30
believed they induce an out of body hallucinatory state.
11:33
For those who've never done LSD. It's like you're living in a
11:35
dream. Basically.
11:36
You you. If you have, if you have good
11:39
stuff by a good chemist, you're living in a subtle dream world
11:45
but you're waking. You can get up and go to the
11:47
kitchen. You can get a cup of coffee, put
11:48
it back on the table if you're so inclined.
11:51
And that's what he said computers are doing to us.
11:53
And he and all electrical technology has been regarded
11:57
pretty much by any observing philosopher as something that
12:00
basically shoves us out of body onto the astral plane.
12:05
And this starts with Telegraph and it's and it continues with
12:10
telephone and the electric light.
12:13
I don't think we've recovered from electric light as a
12:16
technology advance. The world was dark at night and
12:21
light during the day and now, except like where I am, it is
12:28
light all night. It's it's light on.
12:32
Yeah, that's interesting. And this, our hormones, our
12:36
social behaviors, yes, every, it changed everything.
12:39
And you couldn't stay up. Well, they had whale lamps how I
12:44
couldn't and candles and candles as dangerous and I could.
12:48
I couldn't do that. People get old their their eyes
12:51
aren't as good as when they're young.
12:53
So how are you reading by oil lamps all all night long?
12:55
So you most people were not so they would go to bed.
12:59
And the shocks. I mean, for example, the advent
13:04
of feminism takes place with the Seneca Falls Convention two
13:07
years after the Telegraph. The first Telegraph signal was
13:11
sent when you read the Seneca Falls Convention statement
13:17
called the Declaration of Sentiments.
13:20
Every single statement is a lie. Historically, women can't go to
13:25
college. That's a lie.
13:27
Many colleges had opened for women.
13:28
The leader of the conference was educated.
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Total lie. Women don't have money.
13:32
No, the money to women were sitting right in the room.
13:34
You can keep going. Women resigned from the human
13:37
race 2 years after the Telegraph sends its first signal.
13:41
What hath God wrought? They blamed God for the
13:46
Telegraph. The first message Tele Telegraph
13:51
was What hath God wrought? The women resigned from the
13:53
human race. The most astounding thing about
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the declaration of sentiments which I, which I mark as being
14:00
contemporaneous with the Telegraph, is it has never once
14:04
mentioned children. They make this big statement
14:08
about women, their rights, their the way that men have enslaved
14:13
them for all of eternity and they never once mentioned
14:16
children. Think about this.
14:20
So the feminist movement begins with women resigning for
14:22
motherhood. Well, who's going to raise the
14:26
kids? Let's have a real conversation.
14:28
I'm hoping to have. I'm hoping to that conversation.
14:30
Look, if I had a baby, as I'm sure you do, I would be.
14:34
I'm sure you're up at night as much as your wife is that you'll
14:38
take care if she's got to sleep, you'll take care of the kid all
14:40
night. You got to talk to me.
14:41
You'll, you'll come a little bit wrinkled.
14:43
Fine. You know, you know how to do
14:45
this when you haven't slept. I'm sure that might not have
14:49
been the case. Well, but we forget that in, you
14:53
know, 1912, everybody was up until all hours the, the men
14:57
were out milking the cows at 11:00 at night.
15:00
It might have been 5° outside and they've got to milk the
15:04
cows. Mama's putting the kids to bed
15:07
and then suddenly we're those are rural areas that are not
15:10
impacted. And as electricity progressed,
15:14
things got more and more insane, which is now where we are.
15:17
Right, right, right. So if I'm following you, Eric,
15:19
what you're saying is that these big moments in history, these
15:23
big events have had significant existential impact on on society
15:33
and electricity, for example, being one of them that we
15:36
haven't quite recovered from and AI being the next.
15:40
No, There have been a series you could look at.
15:41
What happened with radio was a major turning point.
15:45
Radio precipitates the world wars one and two.
15:50
It it, it, it what? One of the things Mcluhan said
15:53
is that people don't like this. But Gandhi, Hitler and FDR all,
15:59
all rose to power thanks to radio.
16:02
So radio creates A tribalism. It unravels literacy overnight.
16:06
It creates tribalized, electrically tribalized people.
16:11
And, and then you'd follow that through and, and then by the by
16:15
the 60s, we're under the full thrall of television.
16:18
And then people are treating their lives like television
16:21
programs even though they didn't have television programs.
16:25
You and I have little television programs, right?
16:28
That was not true in the 60s. It wasn't even community access
16:31
cable in in the 60s, but people start acting like their lives
16:36
are television shows in the in the 1960s, under the influence
16:41
of television, all the behaviors change.
16:44
Yes. In other words, these big events
16:47
led to like a rewiring of the mind.
16:50
Of, well, all social relations, the internal relationship the of
16:55
the, the, the years and the centuries of in, in inner focus
17:02
LED created by literacy were unraveled almost immediately in
17:07
the early 20th century by radio. And then they're working on
17:11
television in the 30s. They're working then the
17:14
computer science is born in the 40s during World War 2 and it
17:19
was a bit of a very different thing.
17:21
It was not digital, it was analogue.
17:23
And then in the late 40s, it's starting to go more digital, but
17:27
very expensive. And this is changing people, but
17:32
it's changing every social relationship.
17:34
I mean, the, the, the, the phone, no one thought, no one
17:38
saw this and thought this is going to change every last
17:41
social relationship that we're in.
17:44
But it has changed every last social relationship.
17:46
Now we carry a tracking device around.
17:49
So now our position is being announced 24 by 7, it can be
17:53
looked up. So one of the things electricity
17:56
was a completely destroyed privacy, the reality of privacy
18:01
and the concept of privacy. But for example, a digital
18:06
effect that we lived through was 2020.
18:08
This is very important to understand that 2020 was not
18:12
possible without digital conditions.
18:15
I'm, I'm used to speaking in YouTube language.
18:19
I call it the 2020 crisis because the their algorithm is
18:23
not on, they're not on to the 2020 crisis.
18:26
They keep giving me strikes if I say virus or COVID.
18:30
So those digitalized, digitized people, digitized people fell
18:37
for COVID. They fell for the software
18:41
upgrade that would not have worked in the analog world.
18:47
They tried meaning that there was an attempt at at a there
18:52
were several pandemic scares, including one in 68 and 69.
18:58
And all the kids came to Woodstock.
19:00
They couldn't frighten them with newspaper articles.
19:05
And and then I interviewed the principles of Woodstock and
19:07
really nobody cared. The the Germaphobe principal
19:12
photographer Elliot Landy didn't even know or care about it.
19:17
Michael Lang, the founder, didn't even care about it.
19:19
I actually reached them directly in 2020 to do the story.
19:23
And so the mere fact of COVID was not just created by the PCR.
19:29
It was not just created by algorithms.
19:32
It was greatly facilitated by by robots invading social media.
19:37
People are not realizing that all the censorship was AI.
19:42
All the strikes were AI, right? When you're taking off Facebook
19:46
and 30 seconds, that's AI working.
19:49
But the people were so porous, porous from all this
19:57
overexposure to digital, that all you had to do was launch
20:02
this and and suddenly they're terrified.
20:05
Yeah, I, I think I agree with you actually quite a lot because
20:11
on the one hand you go, OK, cool, AI is a very helpful tool.
20:16
And on the other hand, it, it blurs reality.
20:21
You know, my video gets taken down.
20:23
Was it somebody at YouTube or was it, you know, a bot and.
20:27
The very high level people like might have somebody YouTube
20:31
watching the people with millions of followers.
20:34
There might be some human intervention and ranking and
20:38
demonetized, but for 99.9% of YouTube's, it's all algorithm.
20:42
Facebook, it's algorithm that are policing.
20:45
It's looking for keywords. It's it's, yeah.
20:48
But I mean, that's part of the danger then of of AI is that you
20:53
don't know what is real anymore. Including you.
20:58
But what they're not talking about is how fast we are
21:02
becoming like it. I don't hear anyone talking
21:06
about this, that the all technology environments
21:10
condition humans essentially to be like them.
21:14
So you're following me here. There's things are moving in two
21:16
directions, but I'm not seeing any discussion of the other
21:19
direction of movement. And the direction of movement is
21:22
people starting to think algorithmically Now they're
21:26
they're I'm seeing stories about people using AI words like it's
21:31
kind of jargony and people are picking up on that jargon, which
21:35
is 1 little clue, but it's much, much worse than that.
21:40
So. Where do you see it going?
21:45
Well, it it is said that there is a layer of ash that covers
21:50
the world. If you dig down anywhere, you'll
21:51
find a layer of ash. We're going to have a creative
21:55
layer of ash. What what is doing is it is
21:59
shutting people down. Look there, there's an article
22:03
that was pulled off the Internet from a Lily bit the the blog, a
22:06
Lily bit Substack blog. I saved it.
22:09
I saved it. I saved the PDF of this.
22:12
Thank God she pulled it down. She did an analysis of how many
22:16
teenagers are using companion chat bots as they're like
22:22
girlfriend. Something around half of people
22:24
like in the 18 to 24 range. Yeah, they're not out.
22:28
That's for danger. They're not out.
22:30
You know, I was always the editor in chief, so I never had
22:32
to really go anywhere to find girlfriends.
22:33
I would just do my thing, publish the newspaper, sit in my
22:36
office, and then all these artists and writers and
22:39
production assistants would, would show up.
22:41
Well, the fun of being an editor in chief all these years has
22:45
always been the social environment around it.
22:48
Besides my my love of publishing gone.
22:51
That's gone that whole, the whole concept that you would
22:55
hang out with people, really hang out with people in in
22:58
groups and get close to them. And now you've got people who
23:02
have already been alienated by these technologies, young people
23:05
who grow up on them. And then suddenly they're
23:07
feeding them a $12.00 a month chat bot that they think they
23:12
love or that's going to respond to them because they're
23:14
terrified of the girls. The boys are terrified of the
23:16
girls after the Me Too movement, which is one of my main
23:20
objections, which they objected to because I said, look, you
23:25
can't tell me. My clients are calling me and
23:27
they're worried about their their 16 year old sons who are
23:31
afraid to ask a girl to the prom lest they be thought of as a
23:34
sexual predator. When we confuse asking a girl to
23:39
the prom with sexual predation, we're done.
23:45
There's no predation and asking a girl out to the prom.
23:48
It's the school puts the prom on.
23:49
How are you gonna You gotta have a prom.
23:52
The boys are expected to ask the girls out and they're terrified.
23:55
This has expanded into society. The so not the boys have to have
24:01
a little chutzpah to engage with these kind of mystical beings
24:07
known as women. I mean, even if they're.
24:09
Checking out they're. Terrified.
24:11
Yeah, they're checking out they're.
24:13
Well, they're checking out, yes. And they have they, I think
24:18
unless they're very fortunate, lack the conversational skills
24:26
to to engage them and and the girls are making it hard.
24:28
The girls are being conditioned also by this, by this
24:30
environment and they're they are being as they were made.
24:33
They were dehumanized in the, in the Telegraph era, not
24:38
mentioning children. Like has this ever been written
24:41
about in any feminist term paper ever?
24:44
Like I'm really, I'd love to do a search of the literature and
24:46
see if anyone's ever done a doctoral thesis on this.
24:49
To not mention children in the declaration of sentiments is
24:54
colossal. And then this, this conditioning
24:57
has proceeded through every stage of, of, of technology
25:02
conditioning the behavior and the and the thinking of
25:05
everyone. But it's affecting men and women
25:07
slightly differently. But hang on, hang on, hang on,
25:10
hang on, hang on. So the it's not a counter
25:15
argument that you're creating, you're sort of creating an
25:18
addendum. An environmental I'm taking an
25:20
environmental position. I'm taking a ground field.
25:24
I'm looking at the ground field, not the figure of oh this cool
25:28
chat bot or how does this technology work goes JGPT 123 or
25:32
4 Sam Holtman, Bill Gates, you know.
25:37
But Eric, then are you not suggesting, therefore, that this
25:42
is just a a, a consequence of progress?
25:48
Well, it is. It is and.
25:51
Therefore, therefore, is there moral judgement that that is
25:54
required to be attached to it? Like is it a good or bad thing
25:56
or is it just a thing? Well, OK, so again, referencing
26:01
Mcluhan, who was always very careful to try to avoid moral
26:04
judgement, but he also didn't see what we're seeing when it
26:08
when you start to have half of young people absorbed in their
26:12
phones, not even chatting with each other.
26:15
But but chatting with a machine, a an algorithm thinking that
26:19
it's a person and then it's making them like an algorithm.
26:23
And when the, when you see the birth rate going down and when
26:28
and when, when, when everyone's terrified of everyone else, that
26:34
you, you, it's no longer a moral judgement.
26:36
It's it's a judgement of like there is poison and the animals
26:40
are all dying. You can't say, well, it's just
26:43
poison. You know, it's just a molecule,
26:45
a hookah, little dioxin. You know, it's like molecule
26:47
like any other. It actually is not.
26:50
So your addendum then to the to the to the discussion is that
26:56
while AI itself isn't going to take over, people are actually
27:02
making a takeover. Them people are people are
27:05
taking it's taking over people's minds and they're allowing it.
27:11
Well, yeah, they're but it's so it's so tempting to like.
27:18
Do you play musical instrument? I do.
27:21
What do you? Love it.
27:22
I've I've got a couple guitars. OK, so we've been, we've been
27:26
down this road, right? You know it, the cowboy C chord,
27:31
for some reason my hands could not make that chord.
27:33
I could make a lot of chords. So I had to really want to learn
27:37
how to do how to do that. You have to sit there and you
27:42
have to, you have to put in time and hours.
27:44
I was, I, I could afford to take 4 guitar lessons a week for a
27:47
while. I started at age 47 and my
27:50
teacher, of course, was happy to come over every night and teach
27:53
me and I'm like, give you food and money, let's work.
27:59
And now you just basically you can make up whole songs pushing
28:02
buttons. This the people are lazy and
28:06
there's a lot of things like that.
28:07
I mean, I to, to write. I when we're done, I'm going to
28:12
go, I've major writing project doing about a week and a half.
28:16
I'm, I'm, I've got, I've got like 18,000 words left to write.
28:19
I mean, I'm going to sweat to do that and do it well.
28:24
Well, I'm willing to do that. I've I've put in my time.
28:28
I have, I have a unique talent as a writer, but that's because
28:33
I write a quarter million words a year.
28:35
That's my at least. At least that much.
28:38
Well, on AI you can create a whole song in space of 60
28:42
seconds, yeah. Yes, and I forget which, which
28:47
presenter did a takedown of it. He's one of these music
28:51
producers who does a podcast and he had it, he did the song on
28:55
the air and he like he composed it on the air and he could, but
28:59
it's total cliche. And and you realize how much of
29:02
other culture is total cliche. But the problem is that that has
29:06
worsened under digital conditions.
29:09
So AI is an extension of digital conditions given a name.
29:13
We've all been interacting with AI using Google, for example,
29:16
all the way back to the beginning that there there's a
29:19
theory that all digital technology is AI, which I agree
29:24
with. I think that when you when you
29:25
use a pocket calculator, not that they exist anymore, that's
29:29
a form of AI doing division. Who can do division?
29:34
Who can who can divide like uneven numbers and or square
29:39
roots? Can you do factorials?
29:41
I don't know, maybe, but but that's a form of AI.
29:44
To take a a human mental function that you'd have to
29:47
train to do to be able to do this kind of long division and
29:51
have it done in one second, that's a form of AI.
29:54
You mentioned playing guitar earlier.
29:56
You were talking about AC chord. I just play a power chord
29:59
because I'm lazy. Sure.
30:02
Well, but that's OK, But see, but that's solution and you know
30:05
that that gets a certain sound. Whole bands have made their
30:09
sound up on power cords, like the whole 90s.
30:12
Basically, it's power. Cords every.
30:14
Every punk song ever, Yeah. And they're great, but that's
30:18
the reason that they're great. So here's an example.
30:20
There's this thing called the Boiler Room series.
30:23
And these two, who are these two Asian kids, Yoko Kokomichi or
30:27
something, these two Japanese kids.
30:30
It's I'm tuning in to this and I I work with a tech who's half my
30:35
age, and we don't really have many cultural meeting places.
30:40
But I saw this thing one night and I said it to him.
30:41
I'm like, you got to fucking see this.
30:44
And he writes back and says, oh, that's like my favorite thing
30:46
ever. And I said, wait, you're telling
30:48
me that this thing that I think is like the greatest thing,
30:50
greatest thing since Brian Eno is your favorite DJ set.
30:55
He's like, yeah, totally nonplussed.
30:59
I'm excited by this. And then the conversation
31:02
proceeds the next day and he, he reveals this concept that you
31:07
could just get an algorithm to do that.
31:10
Are you familiar with the boiler room sets?
31:14
It's a, I'll send a link so we can link to it in the notes.
31:17
They're, they're a, they're, they're raves basically.
31:19
And they're in like weird places And they set up they, they must
31:24
get permission. They set up all the gear.
31:26
And these two, these two young guys have a lot of excitement
31:31
around them and the people, they are absolutely enraptured by
31:35
what they're doing. But there is also the beauty of
31:38
the moment, the human moment that could never be created by
31:41
an algorithm. Nobody would care.
31:44
And these two guys are like marathon DJs working in total
31:47
coordination, two different minds in total.
31:50
And it's not DJ like mixing one song into another.
31:53
It's this whole original. Thing.
31:58
It's spontaneous creation of electronic music with rehearsed
32:01
parts and pre written parts, and then they mix it into this thing
32:04
that's never ever happened before, that cannot get that
32:08
kind of love and passion in the room with an algorithm doing
32:12
that. So the human factor is very
32:14
important, but it ceases to be important when we no longer want
32:18
it. But Eric, you're just a Luddite,
32:22
ha. Ha ha ha, I'm not a Luddite.
32:25
Ha ha ha. You should see where I'm
32:27
sitting. I'm a loveite.
32:30
I love this technology. I think it's amazing.
32:34
I think it's amazing. I love it.
32:36
But I am here 90% of the time. I'm creating something in this
32:40
technology and that's the only antidote.
32:42
Yes. Hang on, hang on, hang on.
32:43
Yeah, That's that's that's the keyword.
32:45
You said I'm creating something. I think that pretty much is the
32:49
undertone or the undercurrent of this entire conversation.
32:52
It's about creativity and creation, which is what AI
32:56
ultimately is destroying. Yep, Yep, totally destroying it.
33:01
That's layer of ash that will cover the the earth.
33:10
I accept that these technologies all transform us.
33:12
They work us over completely. But this is different.
33:16
This is different. This article, and I'm sure you
33:18
can post a link to the PDF. I'll put it up.
33:20
I'll host it on my website. So I'll I'll take the heat if we
33:23
get in trouble. Is it different though?
33:26
Because I remember in the 90s, sorry for interrupting, but I
33:28
remember in the 90s when people said this Internet thing.
33:31
This isn't. This is not good.
33:35
It's caused a lot of problems. We didn't need it.
33:39
We didn't need it. And the phone look, I ran AI had
33:44
a fabulous photo project called The Book of Blue and I started
33:47
in Paris and then I went to Belgium and then I came to New
33:50
York with it and I watched the models start to slowly go insane
33:55
as the iPhone took over their minds.
33:58
Their whole concept of their mind body relationship made it
34:03
plainly dangerous. And So what it's doing is it's
34:08
it is distorting our relationship to our bodies.
34:11
Have I read this quote on your on on your show the last time we
34:15
did. Let me let me read this quote.
34:17
The body everywhere is assaulted by all of our new media, a state
34:22
which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and
34:25
destabilization of culture throughout the world.
34:30
In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning,
34:34
significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed
34:38
and distorted. That's what's happening.
34:41
Yeah. Profound.
34:43
Profound. But Eric?
34:45
I'm I don't know how to put this into words.
34:47
Let me, let me try and hope that you can follow what what he is
34:54
saying and what you and I are effectively doing here is we are
34:58
offering a sort of a perma critique.
35:01
I guess this is this perpetual criticism of progress.
35:06
No, because the people who perpetuate it never care about
35:10
the negative consequences. And now I think they're
35:13
exploiting the negative consequences.
35:15
When you have Musk talking about going to Mars, right?
35:21
You know where it's, you know where his mind is at.
35:23
What is motivating these people is immortality.
35:26
Yes, transhumanism, transhumanism.
35:29
They, they, they think that when they're, they're, they'll get a
35:31
new body, They'll have their, it's going to be like The
35:34
Simpsons. You know, Richard Nixon has head
35:36
in the jar. That's prescient.
35:40
And it's not predictive programming.
35:41
They're just smart people. So the progress is driven by
35:46
profit. It's not driven by helping
35:49
people. And they make the case early in
35:52
AI. Oh, this is all going to be
35:53
about the mission. The mission.
35:55
We're going to save you. Save.
35:56
Well, wait a second. We've just lived through like 30
36:00
years of fracking, pumping hydraulic fluid into freshwater
36:04
wells. Remember, freshwater is 1% of
36:06
the water on the planet. Most of it's held in the ice
36:08
caps, which are melting whether you like it or not, whether you
36:12
think it's climate change or not, the glaciers are melting,
36:14
they're retreating. The water's running into the
36:17
ocean. And so we've only, we've got a
36:19
very small percentage of water. Well, AI consumes huge amounts
36:24
of water. Forget about, sorry, what it's
36:27
doing to people's minds and hearts.
36:30
It's it is burning water. And then where are we going to
36:33
get the electricity? Well, you've got both Gates and
36:37
and Zuckerberg contracting nuclear power.
36:43
So five years ago it was green, green, green, green, green.
36:46
And now it's like we must have electricity.
36:49
They didn't have enough electricity.
36:51
They didn't know how they were going to solve it for the
36:52
electric car. And now they're talking about, I
36:55
forget which one of these moguls, it may have been Musk or
36:58
one of these big guys said 20% of the world's power is going to
37:03
go to AI. But why?
37:05
Why do we need this? We don't need it.
37:08
They they need it. Then let's talk about the
37:10
tracking, the tracing, the surveilling.
37:12
I'm editing a thing called ICE 9 News now.
37:14
I'll give you a link to it. It's a daily AI news
37:18
compilation. Just so someone's preserving
37:21
these articles. We're preserving like 30-40
37:24
articles a day on this thing. We're up to probably 6 or 700
37:29
articles. Well, now they've got a thing
37:32
where you can walk into a room with Wi-Fi and automatic Wi-Fi
37:36
can automatically on the system tell who you are without any
37:41
biometrics based on things like bone density and your heartbeat.
37:49
So this is about a total surveillance state.
37:52
But also to be fair, a lot of AI like the LLMS for example are
37:59
utter rubbish. I mean, they on the one hand are
38:02
very good at, let's say you want to ask something to do with
38:05
coding, but anything beyond that they're completely useless, I
38:09
mean. Even that they're useless for
38:12
they couldn't they don't they can't really.
38:16
We don't respect the beauty of human ingenuity, the the beauty
38:22
of an ordinary, you know, person down in their basement with like
38:25
a drill bit in certain several parts.
38:28
And I'm going to fix the freaking boiler, you know, using
38:32
what they've got on the spot, right?
38:35
I don't know if you're a fan of the film Apollo 13, which
38:38
probably didn't happen, but my favorite scene is where they've
38:41
got the guys floating out in interplanetary space and they
38:46
they that's. The one created is that the one
38:48
of Tom Hanks ever got it wrong. I think so I'm not I'm not that
38:52
big on on holiday could be, but it's the one where they have an
38:55
accident. There's an oxygen condenser like
38:57
blows up and they're floating around space.
38:59
My one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema is they've got the
39:02
Grumman guy sitting around the table and they've recreated the
39:05
problem in the next room. They've they know exactly what
39:09
they've got on board that spacecraft.
39:11
They've got some tape, they've got some square pegs, they've
39:14
got some round holes. They've got like parts of other
39:17
old oxygen condensers. And the guy walks into the room
39:21
with the engineer sitting around the table and he dumps all the
39:25
parts onto the table. And you know, you guys have an
39:28
hour and a half to make an oxygen condenser out of this
39:32
garbage. That's human ingenuity.
39:35
I've, I've got the, the, the notebooks of da Vinci.
39:40
Da Vinci invents the helicopter with a charcoal and paper.
39:48
He invents single element typing, right?
39:51
That's the that's the that's the thing the the IBM thing you
39:56
don't have the little tight basket Da Vinci long before
40:00
anybody was capable thought of single element typing.
40:03
We do not need the humanity needs to solve its own problems,
40:09
not make bigger problems and there's nothing pure about these
40:12
guys. This is massively driven by the
40:14
whole thing is capitalized. It like the capitalization
40:18
according to Empire of AI. This book I'm pointing at here.
40:21
The capitalization when I think just this year went up $8
40:25
trillion increased these companies.
40:29
It's just all this gold rush. It's got nothing to do with us.
40:34
This is about crushing us with central bank digital currencies
40:37
and with a smart which are, which are smart, which are every
40:41
dollar is pegged with coding and tagging and what you can and
40:44
can't buy and where you can and can't.
40:46
That's what this is about. I I was just reminded now when
40:50
you mentioned Apollo 13 just on that quickly.
40:53
My favorite moon landing movie actually ever is a recent one
40:57
that came out by Apple. Have you seen it?
40:59
It's called Man on the Moon. I have not.
41:02
I think about a year ago. Listen, I highly recommend Is
41:04
it? Historical.
41:05
Is it it's it's about back at one or is it about a new
41:09
mission? No, no, no.
41:10
It's looking back, but it's got such a great twist.
41:14
It's very original. It's the OK.
41:15
So let me put it like this. The assumption is that the moon
41:19
landing is real, right? That's the premise of the movie.
41:22
Fine, because it's a mainstream. Movie premise so let's work with
41:25
the premises so you. Have to work within the
41:26
parameters, but here's what I liked about it.
41:29
It stars a couple good actors, Woody Harrelson being one of
41:32
them. He is a character who basically
41:37
was this clown, this conspiracy theorist who argued that it
41:40
didn't happen, wasn't going to happen, and he was in charge of
41:43
setting up the the secret filming the the secret
41:47
production of the landing itself, which is what was going
41:50
to be played on TV. Now the fact is that it doesn't
41:53
matter that he's made to look cuckoo.
41:56
The point is that they actually entertained the idea, which I
42:00
thought was great. Right in a in a modern context,
42:05
they entertained the idea that the photography was fake.
42:08
And they brought in Stanley Kubrick, the I mean that that
42:12
whole aspect of of the moon. That theory about that and he
42:15
did indeed borrow F .9 lenses or something like that.
42:19
These like $25,000 whatever God knows how much lenses to film to
42:23
2001. But Kubrick was the cinematic
42:28
genius of of kind of of them all.
42:32
And if Kubrick filmed the moon landing, if he made that up as a
42:37
movie, he put in every conceivable photography error
42:43
into the moon landing to make it blatantly obvious that it had to
42:48
be fake, like 2 light sources and shadows going the wrong way.
42:51
And Kubrick was more than qualified to be able to insert
42:56
those errors, including the Coke bottle.
42:59
So to say that Kubrick shot that the only the only way that you
43:03
can make that work is, yeah, he was flipping it to NASA.
43:06
And he's like, oh, eventually people will be sophisticated
43:10
enough to look at. And people doubted it at the
43:13
time. But think of how destabilizing
43:16
this all is. Like we we live in the midst of
43:19
this Dist instability. We live in the midst of this
43:21
chaos. We live in the midst of the time
43:23
when when boys were afraid to ask girls out to the prom.
43:28
God damn. It's hard enough without that.
43:31
It's hard enough without that. It's hard enough when you can
43:33
ask a girl out to the prom. How's AI or our technological
43:38
progress going to in any way fix that?
43:41
It's not knowing you've got 52% of kids and I will send you this
43:46
article the minute we're off called.
43:49
Am I allowed to use four letter words?
43:51
Yes. By by It's a Lily bit.
43:54
It's the blog Lily bit on Sub Stack.
43:56
It's called Fucking ourselves to Death.
43:58
And she pulled it down. It was one of the most
44:01
blistering, incredible investigative features I've ever
44:05
read in my entire life. And it was only up for a few
44:08
days. And I, I read the thing into my
44:10
show on Friday night, which I love to do.
44:15
And then it was, I sent it to a friend last night and she said I
44:20
the link is not working. She pulled it down by Sunday and
44:24
it talks about the sledgehammer that this is taking to young
44:30
people's relationships. Look, I'm, I'm, I'm old and I, I
44:36
know how to flirt with a woman and have it not seem like I'm
44:40
flirting, right? That's a beautiful.
44:47
I love your earrings, right? You're not, you're not calling
44:52
attention to the like nipples. You're like, I love your
44:54
earrings. Oh, I love the way your shoes
44:56
match your right. This is a legit way to flirt,
45:00
right? Or you just talk about anything
45:01
and say, I read a book lately. What what book have you read
45:04
once that once that level of and, and people are terrified to
45:08
go off script. They were terrified to go off
45:09
script 10 years ago. They're terrified to go off
45:12
script. Flirting made impossible because
45:14
there's always a little off script and flirting, right?
45:16
And flirting's a very important level of human interaction.
45:20
We have to get to like each other.
45:22
We have to kind of feel each other out and check the vibes
45:26
and see like, do I like the way this person looks at me?
45:31
My wife made a great comment a couple of years ago, actually
45:34
now, but we would we were in a group of friends.
45:38
We were with a group of friends and they were chatting about
45:40
exactly what you're talking about now, how guys get they're
45:46
now checking out and they don't want to make these moves.
45:48
Things like buying a drink, you know, for a girl in a bar, like
45:51
the old school type of stuff and cat calling, cat calling, being
45:55
whistled at. My wife said, you know what,
45:57
like what's wrong with being whistled at?
45:59
She said now nobody wants to whistle at me.
46:01
And she's like, that sucks. And you must be good enough
46:04
women complaining that the guys aren't catcalling.
46:07
But this is the, the feminism, the the guiding rule of feminism
46:12
is heads I win, tails you lose. That's how So you can't be you
46:15
can't be listening to feminists. And I also think that the, the,
46:20
the girls are in some ways smarter than the boys.
46:26
I think I'm not saying any ways. In many.
46:28
Ways there are and and to be to be a man, you have to catch up
46:33
with that. You have to you have to master
46:36
that game. But what's happening is that the
46:40
that for the boys who are first of all, who like the girls and I
46:45
realize there's less and less to like, but still I I will forever
46:50
like women. I just kind of like women.
46:54
It's got nothing to do with anything except they're like
46:56
female and I like female. For the boys who like female,
47:01
this is this is kind of like the the the game.
47:06
It's their game. Because you go to college now
47:09
the majority, the majority of college students are women.
47:13
It's like I'm waiting for the guy to say, yeah, majority of
47:18
the college students are women. Isn't that great?
47:21
Isn't that great? Men, actually, men actually, I
47:25
think in the main, are Dumber than women.
47:28
I think this is a reality that we don't really want to accept.
47:30
In a certain way. Well, I mean if you're.
47:33
Dying the Lincoln Tunnel. Or even if you plot it on a bell
47:35
graph, right, Men are more extreme than than women, which
47:40
is I think, I think that's probably correct and that's
47:42
probably how it should be. This is This is why you have men
47:45
who make films like Jackass where they will form each other
47:48
riding bicycles down a road into a tree and then laughing about
47:51
it. But women look at that and they
47:52
go, that's stupid, why would you want to do that?
47:55
Yeah, but they do. They do other suicidal things
47:57
like. Hilarious.
48:00
And that's also why, like, that's also why the best chefs
48:02
are men and the why the fastest are men and why the strongest
48:05
are men. Because we do extreme things.
48:06
Women, we have determination. We have the ability to focus on
48:10
something and not stop until it's done.
48:12
Panama Canal. I mean, read the story of the
48:14
Panama Canal. They had to build a freaking
48:16
canal over a mountain, a mountain range.
48:19
This is not like dig a trench between the Atlantic and Pacific
48:22
Ocean. Oh, look, there is an isthmus.
48:25
Dig a trench. No, they had to float.
48:27
This is why I want to go. When I learned that, I didn't
48:29
understand that. Once I heard that, I'm like, do
48:33
they have Panama Canal cruises? I got to see this.
48:36
You mean you can get on a boat and you can have the boat lifted
48:38
over a mountain by water? That's what men do.
48:42
And we need that. All civilization is men.
48:44
We had a car hit a tree here and knocked down the power pole.
48:48
I knew my power was going to be out.
48:51
So I, I went back a couple of times and then finally I went
48:55
back and I stayed for the last three hours with the with the
48:59
crews who were sorting out this mess.
49:03
There were no women. It was a bunch of guys and they
49:07
had to re drill. This is an ordinary work a day
49:11
repair. They had to put a new pole in,
49:14
they had to drill through rock, they had to mount a new
49:17
transformer. They had to sort all these.
49:19
It was a complete well. That's dudes.
49:23
But but that's actually, I mean, I've covered this a couple times
49:26
on my, on my show, Eric and you, I mean you, you're preaching to
49:29
the converted because what what feminism has done, it has ruined
49:35
gender roles. And that's a very unpopular
49:37
opinion, but it really is the truth.
49:39
Intentionally so. We do actually have roles that
49:43
we are just simply better AT. And of course there's lots of
49:45
crossover and all that sort of thing, and no one's actually
49:48
arguing that. But there are essential roles
49:51
that we do best at and and we need to also just be honest with
49:55
ourselves about it. Yeah, and it doesn't mean there
49:58
are not some transcendent mathematical geniuses among
50:01
women and transcendent engineers, but usually guys are
50:05
drawn more to that. I'm a little odd in that, like
50:09
growing up, I was equally into women's crafts and men's crafts.
50:12
I had my Remington book, you know, I wanted my 12 gauge
50:16
shotgun. And I was also interested in how
50:20
that sewing machine works. And it was one guy who wanted to
50:25
make clothing. So there's the engineering angle
50:27
of that. But the women in my family were
50:29
all very good seamstresses. And then I'm realizing, oh, this
50:34
is architecture. It's not really that easy to
50:37
make a make a dress, to cut the fabric, to sew all you got to be
50:43
pretty damn smart. But now you can do it with AI.
50:46
Yeah, sure, you can have three-dimensional printing and
50:49
you just go command P and it spits the dress out of your Poly
50:52
polyester printer. But you're going to get a very
50:55
sub paw result. Yeah.
50:59
Well, because a dress is art as well as, as as architecture.
51:03
It's art. You, you know, it's art.
51:06
So we we're going to lose that. And but what I'm more concerned
51:10
about is the loss of the aesthetic sense.
51:12
That's the problem. It's not so much the computers
51:15
are doing things, it's the loss of the aesthetic sense.
51:19
Creativity. But the sense to sense the
51:23
creativity to to feel the beauty of writing.
51:28
Like I'm reading, I'm always reading and I'm always reading a
51:31
book. This, this book has been
51:34
absolutely riveted by the quality of her writing.
51:39
And she's spending the first like 10 pages explaining the
51:42
interview and fact checking process.
51:44
I'm like, you got me. I, I know exactly what you're
51:47
talking about. We're in the same business.
51:49
Ah, you follow me. So I I'm like in love with her
51:53
because plus I've seen her in a lot of interviews, but now it's
51:57
like, oh, the Sapio part of my mind is like, holy shit.
52:01
She is fully dedicated onto the story 5 years before that.
52:06
I I, I love that with passion. It's interesting what you're
52:11
saying also because that extends into so many other facets you're
52:15
talking, I mean, there you, right?
52:16
Right now you're holding a pen and often, often jokes about.
52:20
An old pencil fashion pencil. The eraser because I'm.
52:24
Often joke about this though, when someone says you know,
52:26
you're can you write it down? Well, what is what is paper and
52:30
what does it do? You know, because we we write
52:32
everything down now on our phone or our tablet.
52:35
Well, let me give you an example.
52:36
Now you know that I'm an astrologer, and I don't blame
52:39
you for wondering what that means.
52:40
But my charts look like this, or I draw them, or I draw on them
52:48
like this. Everyone's an original piece of
52:50
artwork. So there's, there's art and
52:53
architecture in here. It's both.
52:56
And so there's mathematics involved and then there's
52:58
intuition involved. But I, I encourage my students
53:02
to print the thing and completely make it your own work
53:06
of art. So we, I sell chart sets.
53:10
I put in multiple copies so you can screw it up.
53:13
I put in the blank wheel. Most people are just staring at
53:16
the computer screen. I think it's a completely
53:17
different experience to be staring at a screen, to be doing
53:21
this sublime intuitive thing that, by the way, goes back to
53:25
the era of music theory and the and the alphabet 2500 years ago.
53:30
It's like reading a book versus reading a Kindle.
53:32
Yeah, I would never. I can't stand reading Kindles.
53:35
I print. I print out many articles.
53:37
Also, I'd much rather read off the printed page.
53:41
It gets unwieldy after a while. You know, I my printer, I did a
53:44
test. I printed 43,000 pages on my.
53:48
I have two of them and one of them informed me I had printed
53:51
43. Wow, that's a lot of reams of
53:54
paper. That's 20.
53:55
It's like how many reams? 25 reams of paper, basically,
53:59
no, much more than that. Anyway, the the involvement of
54:05
digital, it's totally sucks you in as a user.
54:10
Now we're completely involved with each other.
54:12
We've built a relationship over time.
54:14
We've designed our studios, we've refined our craft and all
54:18
all this stuff. People watching, some obviously
54:22
are going to be broadcasters, but they're on the other end of
54:25
that creativity and, and, and digital and AI encourage being a
54:31
consumer and not a creator. The creation is, no one would
54:38
have ever imagined you could fit an entire van of equipment into
54:42
this. This is Kurt Vonnegut, by the
54:44
way, who saw it? Who knew the problems we were
54:46
going to be having? This would have taken a truck
54:51
easily. Just the darkroom, the recording
54:54
studio. There's a recording studio in
54:56
there. A darkroom.
54:57
Basically a post office printing press.
55:03
Who could have imagined that? OK, Eric, I'm looking at the
55:07
time. Give me.
55:09
Give me a closing thought, a negative wisdom.
55:15
The, the most important thing we must not sacrifice to this
55:18
technology is our relationships, our willingness to be
55:22
vulnerable, our willingness to talk to each other and be
55:25
truthful with each other. And this.
55:29
And, and then right along with that is our ability to make art,
55:32
our ability to find ourselves through the work that we do to
55:37
process the terrible things that happened on this planet to us
55:40
through the, through the creative process.
55:42
We are going, if we keep going on this trajectory, we will lose
55:46
each other and we will lose ourselves.
55:48
And that's what, that's why I'm concerned.
55:51
That's what has me concerned. And also how to wear cool
55:54
glasses like like you. They're just my reading glasses,
56:00
10% tint but they they look cool on video.
56:03
They do. They've they've kind of got that
56:05
Bono vibe. And I squint.
56:08
He has glaucoma. That's why he wears glasses.
56:11
Does he really? Is that just like image thing?
56:14
Glasses are for, that's what the sunglasses are about.
56:16
Yeah. And for me, I just tint my
56:18
reading glasses and I'm, I squint a lot and I squint into
56:22
the I just, I don't really pop my eyes open.
56:27
You're good. You're good at the guys wide
56:29
thing. So it kind of Shields me from
56:31
that a little bit the the fact that I, I squint a little bit.
56:35
OK, Eric, how can I follow you? Two substacks, Planet Waves dot
56:41
substack and Planet Waves FM dot substack.
56:46
Is that clear enough? Planet Waves FM dot Substack and
56:49
Planet Waves dot substack. The news and technology in
56:52
politics is more on Planet waves FM dot substack and the
56:56
astrology stuff like Planet waves dot substack and there's a
56:58
lot of overlapping between them. My program is called Planet
57:02
Waves FM and the short shortest way to get there is Planet Waves
57:05
dot FM. That's good enough.
57:09
Eric Coppolino, thank you for joining me in the trenches.
57:12
Jeremy.