Latest / General Magic & The Soul of Tech / Ep. 13 | Can Constraints Make AI Better? | David Epstein

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Ep. 13 | Can Constraints Make AI Better? | David Epstein · General Magic & The Soul of Tech

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SPEAKER_0: Hi, this is Mike Stern.
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SPEAKER_1: And this is Tom "Hersh" Hershenson.
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SPEAKER_0: Welcome to General Magic & The Soul of Tech.
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SPEAKER_2: We believed we were building something that would change the world, and in some ways we did.
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SPEAKER_2: In others, we didn't understand what we were setting in motion.
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SPEAKER_2: The story of General Magic isn't over.
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SPEAKER_2: We're still living inside what it started.
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SPEAKER_1: For the first time in 53 years, the New York Knicks won the NBA championship.
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The only reason I mention that is because having David Epstein on our podcast is
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a bit like having Jalen Brunson join a senior citizens pickup game.
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SPEAKER_1: He's the author of The Sports Gene, Range, And his most recent book, Inside the Box.
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SPEAKER_1: I'm tempted to say, press pause, go on Amazon and order all three of those books right now.
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SPEAKER_1: Your time and money will be well spent.
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It's a pleasure to welcome such an intelligent thinker,
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someone who is precise in his prose and his analysis as well.
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SPEAKER_1: And with that, Mike, take it away.
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David, the through line I see in the three books is that you are
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a delighted debunker of conventional wisdom.
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SPEAKER_0: Would you agree with that?
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And I'm wondering how you ended up as someone who doesn't take anything for granted
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and who drills down on what's behind the shibboless of everything from,
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why people are good at sports to why freedom is not necessarily the best enabler
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of creativity.
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SPEAKER_3: Thank you for that. That was a beautiful introduction, by the way.
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SPEAKER_3: I would agree with that.
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SPEAKER_3: Although the conventional wisdom that I'm debunking sometimes is my own.
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Things that I believe that something suggests to me that I've had it wrong,
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and then I get curious to look more into it.
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SPEAKER_3: With my first book, The Sports Gene, I wrote a book proposal.
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I'd written an article in Sports Illustrated that largely said,
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what we've learned from genetics about sports performances,
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it doesn't really matter.
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And then I got a book contract and I was going to write that,
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and I was gonna write about the 10,000-hour rule and how there's no such thing
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as talent. And close to a year into research,
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I became convinced that everything I had written
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in my book proposal was essentially wrong.
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SPEAKER_3: And I was going to have to contradict these articles I'd written.
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SPEAKER_3: And so I had to contact the publisher.
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SPEAKER_3: And first I said, look, I'll just give you your money back and we can call it day.
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SPEAKER_3: And then we talked about it.
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SPEAKER_3: And I said, well, if we start the clock over, I could deliver a very different book.
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And because I spent a year figuring out I was wrong about all these things,
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I wouldn't say that was delightful at that time.
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SPEAKER_3: But it was an incredible learning experience.
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SPEAKER_3: Really eye-opening.
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To realize also that some of the scientists
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who I had been interviewing passed fact-checking at Sports Illustrated
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because people with PhDs affirmed the things I was saying,
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once I got even deeper into that work and realized
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that their data didn't actually support the things they were saying in many cases.
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SPEAKER_3: So that was a wake up call.
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I became more of a delightful debunker after that,
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which was a very harrowing experience, I have to say.
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SPEAKER_0: We learned a lot from your skepticism.
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How did you come across the General Magic story as something that exemplified
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the themes that you wanted to explore in Inside the Box?
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SPEAKER_3: My first inkling of the existence of General Magic was on a flight.
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SPEAKER_3: I think I saw a trailer for the film on a flight, and I was like so intrigued by the trailer.
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SPEAKER_3: Something like the most important company you've never heard of.
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SPEAKER_3: But it intimated that it was going to be this story of meteoric rise and some kind of fall.
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SPEAKER_3: At the time, I was having more exposure than I'd ever had to success literature, right?
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SPEAKER_3: And it was striking me that we needed something more complicated.
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Like I just read this paper about Jim Collins' Good to Great,
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which I think is an important contribution, obviously.
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But this academic paper looked at what became of some
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of those companies he profiled later and there was like a regression to the mean
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for a lot of them.
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So it hit me at this moment where I was thinking we needed something
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that was more representative of reality.
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So I started trying to watch the movie, but it was on a plane,
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so I couldn't hear all the things.
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SPEAKER_3: So as soon as I got home, then I sat down to watch it and was just blown away.
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SPEAKER_3: And then I sat down and watched it again.
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SPEAKER_3: I watched it like three times fully through.
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SPEAKER_3: Started taking notes.
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And one, I just thought it was almost kind of like a perfect film in a lot of ways,
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the arc of the people.
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SPEAKER_3: And just felt so much more true to me and important.
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SPEAKER_3: And the people who had been through this were vulnerable and open.
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SPEAKER_3: The footage, some of the contemporaneous footage, I just thought it was incredible.
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SPEAKER_3: And I had recently started thinking about constraints already.
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SPEAKER_3: And I had talked to the venture capitalist Bill Gurley.
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SPEAKER_3: And he asked what are you thinking about now?
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SPEAKER_3: And I said, Well, I'm kind of interested in constraints.
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I've over the years seen in these psychology studies how
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when you actually take away people's options, they become more creative.
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SPEAKER_3: I'm kind of interested in why that would be.
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SPEAKER_3: And he said, we have a saying in venture that more startups die of indigestion than starvation.
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SPEAKER_3: And he then said, you have to talk to my friend Tony.
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SPEAKER_3: I'm like, Tony, who? Tony Fadell.
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SPEAKER_3: I said, I just saw this guy in a movie. Right?
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SPEAKER_3: So it came together at the same time.
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SPEAKER_3: And then I called Tony and I said, I'm interested in constraints.
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SPEAKER_3: And he was almost yelling through the Zoom, if you don't have constraints, make up constraints.
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SPEAKER_3: You know, he's obviously a very enthusiastic guy in general.
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SPEAKER_3: And so these things were sort of coming together.
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SPEAKER_3: And I just thought it was such a perfect story.
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SPEAKER_3: I wanted to learn more about it myself.
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SPEAKER_3: I wanted to meet some of the people.
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And I also thought it would be great if we could get more eyeballs on the film
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because I think it's amazing.
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SPEAKER_3: And I think it's just a much more true portrait of life in both success and failure, right?
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SPEAKER_3: It's a whole story.
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Whereas I think most of these other stories are just like catching someone
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at a point in time and they don't feel really representative of life to me.
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And then after talking to Tony,
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I just was that much more interested and then started connecting eventually
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with Sarah. And I went on a walk with Megan Smith in Rock Creek Park and had lunch
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with Darin Adler in New York.
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SPEAKER_3: So then I started meeting the people, and quite enjoying it.
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General Magic, for years was a source of enormous professional shame and a feeling
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of devastation.
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SPEAKER_1: And I have to say that the film, without me anticipating it, reframed that for me.
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SPEAKER_1: I think there's a line in the film, Failure isn't the end, failure is actually the beginning.
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SPEAKER_1: But It really rings true.
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I'd be interested to hear you say more about that sense of shame because it's easy
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for me to look from an outsider and say, you know, these are things,
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people try something big, and the bigger the thing you try is,
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the more likely it is to not work.
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SPEAKER_3: But also the people that I met, still seem to have really warm feelings about each other.
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SPEAKER_3: Every person I would talk to would talk about some of the other people.
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Even though the company didn't work out the way that people wanted,
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there were these warm relationships built,
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which I thought was a really interesting thing So I thought that was interesting
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in the film where you're checking back with these people later
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and they're reflecting and, they're hugging and things like this,
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warm demeanor toward each other.
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SPEAKER_3: You know, we're awash in like success literature and all these things.
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SPEAKER_3: You just don't see that very often, that many dimensions of a story.
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Yeah, we had a 30-year reunion, in 2025 And somebody said,
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the dirty little secret of General Magic,
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the product that we really did succeed at was love.
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SPEAKER_1: And the person said, look around the room.
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You're surrounded by people who you went through something meaningful together
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and you care about each other, and this is three decades later.
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SPEAKER_1: And how many other jobs have you had where that's true?
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SPEAKER_1: And it goes unremarked, not just in Silicon Valley, but so many other places.
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SPEAKER_1: We spend as adults most of our lives working.
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And if you are working with people towards a shared goal that's meaningful
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and there's an environment of trust and psychological safety and team,
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I it's a peak experience and think a lot of people don't get that.
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I have friends who are in combat in the military and they speak
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of something that's has some similarities.
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I mean General Magic no one was risking life or limb,
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but it really was intense in a way that I can't think of anything other
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than parenthood that comes close.
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SPEAKER_3: Fascinating.
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SPEAKER_3: One of the things that also drew me to the story was just wanting to meet some of the people.
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SPEAKER_3: Mike, for example, in the film talks about being pitched eBay essentially, right?
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SPEAKER_3: And says, I think I thought that was the stupidest thing I ever heard.
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And then when I came to the Harvard Business School case study,
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and I remember talking to Mike out in the hall and him saying,
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we never had to worry about payroll.
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SPEAKER_3: Like what startup never has to worry about payroll?
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There was just something that suggested to me
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that these were unusually reflective people So I don't know as an outsider,
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but it does feel to me that it in some ways was a really unique group of people.
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Maybe this project just drew those kinds of people, but whatever it is,
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it's like an uncommon level of reflection and just general interestingness.
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Yeah, one of the things I contrast it to is if you think
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of the General Magic diaspora and what the kids went on to do,
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everything from eBay to being CTO of the United States,
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contrast that to the PayPal Mafia,
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which was contemporaneous with the Magic diaspora.
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SPEAKER_0: And you look at Thiel and Andreessen and Musk.
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SPEAKER_0: And their relations with each other, which are not familial and what they've done to the world.
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And, those are the paradigmatic groups I see,
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tracing their history through the valley and what the outcomes were of going
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through the crucible of failure.
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SPEAKER_0: And the way it shaped values and shaped outcomes.
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SPEAKER_3: I hadn't thought about it in contrast to the PayPal Mafia.
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SPEAKER_3: But even say Tony, who went on to be obviously wildly successful, I've seen him posting lately.
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He was resharing this ad, I think from a New York Subway poster that's showing
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an iPod nano or shuffle, there's no screen.
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SPEAKER_3: You just have to set your playlist, clip it on your running shorts, and then that's all you get.
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And he's like sharing these things that are clearly the subtext is criticism
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of things that he helped create.
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SPEAKER_3: The iPhone.
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And that's just that kind of self-reflection feels to me so rare
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among the tech giants that I've met.
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You quote Jonathan Haidt, near the end of Inside the Box, where he says,
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it's not healthy for anyone to have access to everything everywhere all the time.
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SPEAKER_0: General Magic's mantra was anytime, anywhere, communication.
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SPEAKER_0: Same words, right?
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And we weren't thinking about the potential downsides of having the ability
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to communicate anytime anywhere,
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to having the gateway in your hand to the world of commerce and global information.
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SPEAKER_0: We didn't see surveillance capitalism and algorithmic extraction coming.
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SPEAKER_0: We didn't even think about it.
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SPEAKER_0: Why not?
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SPEAKER_0: Why did we have those kinds of blind spots?
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SPEAKER_0: Were they blind spots?
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SPEAKER_0: And how does that relate to what's going on now, during the AI arms race?
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SPEAKER_0: What kind of constraints would be appropriate for our time?
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SPEAKER_3: I think it probably speaks well of you that those were blind spots, right?
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Because we each only see the world through our own frame,
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and you were probably thinking of what I would do with this kind of technology
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if I had it, and that would probably be pro social things, not antisocial things.
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And I mean I've seen Tim Berners-Lee interviewed on stage and him saying,
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I don't think I would have done what I did if I had realized where you know,
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the internet would have gotten us.
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SPEAKER_3: And I think that's I hope you don't blame yourselves for not having that vision.
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SPEAKER_3: I just don't know how you could. It's like you're betting on humanity, right?
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SPEAKER_3: And how we use the technology.
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And I look around and see, for all the reasons there are to be pessimistic,
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For 300,000 years, humans were living like field mice, basically.
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SPEAKER_3: And then 10,000 years ago things changed and we settled down.
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SPEAKER_3: But then from 10,000 years to just a few hundred years ago, it was again pretty similar.
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And then since, you know, in the last 35 years,
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120,000 people a day on average have been lifted above the poverty level.
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SPEAKER_3: So there's a lot of bad stuff, but technology has done incredible things for us.
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SPEAKER_1: I think one of the points that you make so eloquently is that guardrails matter, right?
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The constraints are what drive successful innovation and the design
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of successful products, art and devices and all sorts of things.
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And I'm wondering whether you think that either implicitly
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or you've seen explicitly moral considerations be a design constraint.
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SPEAKER_3: Let me take one step back.
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When I was getting interested in all this, I decided to do a cursory,
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maybe 1,000-year history for myself of technological disruption.
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Much better than me is one done in a book called Power in Progress by Daron Acemoglu
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and Simon Johnson, who just won the Nobel Prize.
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And what I would say their takeaway was that whether technological disruption leads
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to shared prosperity or to, Charles Dickens hard times,
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kids pushing coal carts with their heads kind of stuff,
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doesn't depend on the technology,
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but depends on the institutional context around it.
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SPEAKER_3: The political context, the economic context, the bargaining power of people at work.
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I mean, w I didn't realize I had thought
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that when the Industrial Revolution occurred, with this huge,
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skyrocketing productivity, excess gains,
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that it started like lifting people out of poverty right away, magically.
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When I actually started reading about that more, it turns out there was actually,
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arguably a 40 year lag between explosive productivity growth and any
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of that being shared with people who were working in factories.
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And that the only reason that it was eventually was
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because as those people were packed into these factories together,
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they looked to their left and their right and said,
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you have the same problem that I have.
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SPEAKER_3: And they started forming unions and having bargaining power.
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SPEAKER_3: So it did not magically happen that this led to shared prosperity.
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SPEAKER_3: It was, forced.
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There's a premise that Mike and I have been exploring,
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which is that certain technologies unavoidably have certain types of impacts.
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SPEAKER_1: Arguably industrialization, I mean you talked about the rise of leisure with industrialization.
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SPEAKER_1: Another one is the rise of consumerism.
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SPEAKER_1: If there's more stuff to buy, then make more stuff and have people buy more stuff.
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And Jerry Mander in his book The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,
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talked about how you can't have a gentler gun.
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A gun is a tool for destroying things, and if you put a gun in people's hands,
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that's what they'll use it for because that's what it's for.
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SPEAKER_1: And that has social and political consequences.
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So I'm wondering with respect to AI,
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Do you see inherent social and political consequences to artificial intelligence?
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I think there's a possibility that we could be headed for an era
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of incredible material prosperity and absolute social calamity.
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SPEAKER_3: I don't know that those things have existed en masse together in the past.
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SPEAKER_3: I think they could going forward.
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SPEAKER_3: I think there's a real risk of just losing some of our humanity.
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When entertainment gets so good that we prefer it to all these things in real life,
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what is lost in our humanity?
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And when I'm looking at some of these stats like that Derek Thompson's been writing
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about that the biggest growth areas in the use of AI are companionship,
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and people are just spending incredible amounts of time alone,
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like young men just spending enormous amounts of time alone talking to AI.
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SPEAKER_3: First of all, the pace of change is people don't change that fast.
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I mean, going back to Durkheim's seminal study of suicide,
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that even when material prosperity was rising really rapidly,
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if it was too quick and the changes in people's lives were too fast,
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they were still more likely to kill themselves,
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even if it was during a time of rising prosperity,
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because we're just not equipped to change that quickly.
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SPEAKER_3: Like all the things that ground us and give our life meaning.
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SPEAKER_3: I think there are all these issues of sort of losing some of our humanity.
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Of people being displaced from work, especially in the United States,
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where work is such an important value for someone's sense of meaning.
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But it feels like again, looking at some of these social surveys where every value,
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patriotism, religion, friendship, community,
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have all gone down in importance as ranked by Americans, except for money,
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which is like our last collective value.
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SPEAKER_3: And so I worry we'll just like turn ourselves into like everything is commodified.
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I was just reading a paper about this,
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an economic doom loop where there'll be nobody left to sell anything
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to because everyone's jobs have been taken.
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SPEAKER_3: Like somebody has to be there to buy things.
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SPEAKER_3: So I think there's danger on every front.
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And one thing that's really unique is some
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of these AI executives are raising alarm bells themselves
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of saying our technology is so dangerous.
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SPEAKER_3: But I don't know the extent to which I buy that.
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Maybe they're earnest, but maybe they're just like aiming for regulatory capture
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so that they don't get disrupted.
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SPEAKER_3: I don't really know. Maybe it's both.
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SPEAKER_1: Yeah. Yeah.
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Andy Hertzfeld remarked that he thought that the dangers were
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to some extent overhyped by the companies themselves.
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SPEAKER_1: Look how great our tool is.
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It creates buzz and if you're gonna oversell to customers,
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part of the way of doing that is saying this is We shouldn't even let you have it.
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Do think though that there's historical precedent for the fact
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that automation does not have to be as good as humans to replace them.
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So you get what Daron Acemoglu calls so-so automation,
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where it's much cheaper and easier to deal with, even if it's not very good.
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SPEAKER_3: And I think we're seeing this in a lot of customer service now, right?
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SPEAKER_1: But that's such an interesting point that you make about, so automation.
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SPEAKER_1: I mean, to me, you talk about Herbert Simon in the book and “satisficing”.
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And one of the things that I find curious about AI is this idea that it has access
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to so much more information, so therefore what it produces must be better.
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And you really take aim at that in the book, that I mean, first of all,
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it goes against the idea of constraints.
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SPEAKER_1: But you remarked a few moments ago, AI is sometimes wrong.
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SPEAKER_1: And what's so interesting to me is humans are sometimes wrong.
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SPEAKER_1: And yet for eons we've relied on human judgment.
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SPEAKER_1: Just to me, I'm a little dubious for the hypothesis that AI is suddenly better.
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SPEAKER_1: I'm in the legal field and hallucinations in that field are notorious.
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SPEAKER_1: You know, it has an image of being infallible and it's not.
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SPEAKER_1: It's a tool made by humans.
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SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
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And by the way, speaking of the legal field,
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did you see this paper that was arguing so AI makes up case law, right?
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SPEAKER_3: When lawyers use it.
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SPEAKER_3: And it was making the argument that made up case law is actually good case law.
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That it's like, it's synthesizing things the way they should be synthesized,
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whether they exist or not.
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SPEAKER_3: I think that's an interesting argument.
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SPEAKER_3: I think that's a dangerous argument.
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SPEAKER_3: Like you're getting toward just some kind of relativism there.
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SPEAKER_0: Well, the common law is nothing but a pattern recognition machine.
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SPEAKER_0: That's what it does. You know, is this case more like that case or this case?
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SPEAKER_0: And so sure, right?
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SPEAKER_0: You can get an LLM to come up with that different set of pattern alignments.
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SPEAKER_0: No, doesn't make good law.
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SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I think we do need constraints on AI.
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I think that this is like a society-wide human-centered
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or user-centered design problem,
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which is we should be asking the question what do we want,
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not what can this technology do, but just like I was talking about companies,
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where I did spend some time with one company that helps other companies implement AI
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over the last year To simplify,
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I would put into two buckets some of what I saw in the implementations,
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which was sprawling, you put it everywhere.
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SPEAKER_3: It can do all this cool stuff, let's do it.
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SPEAKER_3: And that obviates the need to decide what's not worth doing.
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SPEAKER_3: And so it ends up this huge work slop.
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SPEAKER_3: And then others that would say, Well, here's a problem we have.
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SPEAKER_3: We define it really carefully.
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SPEAKER_3: Does anything in the tool fit this problem?
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SPEAKER_3: Or one company actually made what they called a map of jobs to be done.
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SPEAKER_3: They said, here are all the things that we need done.
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SPEAKER_3: Does it do any of these things?
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And I feel like we kind of need that for society,
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which instead of saying here's all these cool things that it can do,
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is what kind of society would we like to have?
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SPEAKER_3: Does it fit into any of those problems?
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SPEAKER_3: But we're so fragmented right now, we're just not really having those discussions.
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It doesn't feel like in the way that they occurred sometimes in the past,
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thanks to collective action.
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Like And again, I wonder if that's because our only collective value seems
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to be money, which is a dangerous place to be.
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Yeah, and Neil Postman, most people know of him from Amusing Ourselves to Death,
19:07
but he had a subsequent book, Technopoly, and he talked exactly about that issue.
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SPEAKER_1: Just because a tool can do something, is that something that's useful or worthwhile?
19:16
SPEAKER_1: And he framed it in terms of what is the problem to be solved?
19:20
SPEAKER_1: Whose problem is that?
19:21
And if we solve it this way versus that way,
19:24
what are the dangers and trade offs and risks of each approach?
19:27
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, very much to your point.
19:29
SPEAKER_1: Do you think that policymakers have a substantial role to play?
19:34
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I think policymakers should have a huge role to play.
19:37
But again, if like money is going to be the only thing that sways policy,
19:42
then I think that's going to be very difficult.
19:44
SPEAKER_3: But I think there are things they could do.
19:45
Like, I think most people would agree now that some aspects
19:48
of algorithmic social media have been bad for us.
19:51
And there are simple things you could do,
19:53
like have an advertising tax on social media so that you would force the model
19:58
to change from one that's only for attention, where people are watching it for free,
20:01
but their attention is the product,
20:02
to one where they have to pay directly for some of the content.
20:04
SPEAKER_3: Like there are a lot of things you could do to shift that.
20:07
Like when I first worked for a journalistic startup,
20:09
it was online publication covering higher ed,
20:12
and people could leave comments on the articles.
20:14
And we had to screen all of the comments for libel because it was unclear to us
20:18
if we were the publisher of the comments, could we be at risk?
20:22
SPEAKER_3: Boy, does that seem quaint in retrospect.
20:24
SPEAKER_3: And to me, it seems like these platforms that are silencing some voice, throttling some voices.
20:30
SPEAKER_3: Like the New York Times account got throttled on X.
20:33
SPEAKER_3: And elevating other ones, how are they not editors?
20:36
SPEAKER_3: And so the idea that they don't have to adhere to any of this.
20:39
SPEAKER_3: I get that it's a public square.
20:40
But I don't know why when they're doing that level of editing,
20:44
why all the people posting are different than freelancers are for lots
20:47
of other publications.
20:48
So I think there's some policy fixes that could change the way that some
20:51
of these spaces look quite quickly.
20:52
SPEAKER_3: Will policymakers actually do that?
20:54
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
20:55
SPEAKER_3: I'm very influenced by the thinking of Mancur Olson, this economist.
20:58
My takeaway from some of his writing was that when you have a systems that work
21:02
for a large number of people,
21:04
most of those people will free ride on the system
21:05
because they have very diverse interests
21:07
and their communication costs are really high and their coordination costs are high.
21:10
And then there are these smaller groups that have much more targeted interests
21:14
and lower communication costs.
21:15
So an example he used was like every country in the world that has a income tax has
21:19
a progressive income tax, And then almost all of the carve outs are regressive
21:23
because groups that have a very tailored interest and very,
21:27
low coordination costs will go and carve it up and carve it up and carve it up.
21:30
SPEAKER_3: And what he said was that will happen.
21:32
SPEAKER_3: Nobody notices while it's going on.
21:33
Because everyone else is free riding, which they should be allowed to do ideally,
21:36
and just go on with their life.
21:38
SPEAKER_3: And that will happen until the system just breaks.
21:40
SPEAKER_3: And then you need a revolution, basically.
21:42
And he doesn't have a happy ending where he says,
21:43
Here's here are the things I prescribe to avoid this.
21:46
SPEAKER_3: He kind of says, this is how it goes.
21:48
One question I had in terms of constraints is the applicability of constraints
21:54
to paradigm shifting technology.
21:56
SPEAKER_1: It's one thing to have constraints when you're iterating on something.
22:00
And as a designer once said to me,
22:02
junior engineers they want to build a Swiss Army knife and they wanna add this
22:06
and wouldn't it be cool to have that?
22:07
He said a product is done when there's nothing more you can cut that makes it
22:13
a differentiating product.
22:15
But when I think about General Magic, you know,
22:17
we were trying to transform three things at once.
22:21
And I think you could have pared the hardware down somewhat But I was just trying
22:25
to think through the idea of constraints when you're trying to bring
22:30
to life something that doesn't exist.
22:32
That there are certain dependencies between the interrelated innovations
22:36
and you have to maintain them.
22:38
Do you have anything to say about whether constraints are the same,
22:41
whether it's of incremental advances in technology versus paradigm shifting,
22:45
or do you have to think about constraints differently
22:48
in those two different contexts?
22:50
SPEAKER_3: I don't think that you want to overly constrain yourself in that situation, right?
22:53
SPEAKER_3: Because you can certainly have too much constraint.
22:55
I do think arguably spending more time doing some
22:58
of the problem defining can be useful even then.
23:01
I mean, if I go back to like Bell Labs again,
23:02
which everyone who's interested in innovation history,
23:04
it's kind of like the Michael Jordan of research and development.
23:08
SPEAKER_3: Before I became a writer, I was a science grad student and everyone talked about Bell Labs.
23:11
And it was this place where people just went and they just played
23:14
and they were geniuses, and so, they changed the world several times over.
23:19
I think about 10 Nobel Prizes came out of Bell Labs, transistors,
23:23
the cosmic microwave background, for goodness sake,
23:25
which you don't really associate with something that would come out
23:27
of a corporate research lab.
23:29
But what was a surprise to me was that they had this whole team,
23:33
sometimes as large as the research team itself,
23:36
whose whole job was problem definitions.
23:38
It's like going out in the field,
23:39
finding some problem that either was incredibly important
23:43
or that different teams were kind of orbiting at the same time and find
23:46
a common problem and they would define it really well and they would bring it
23:49
to those brilliant researchers.
23:51
SPEAKER_3: And those researchers could pick, like they weren't gonna force them to do any particular one.
23:54
But they were expected to address some of these problems
23:57
that this other team had spent time defining.
24:00
SPEAKER_3: And some of those were moonshot level kind of problems.
24:03
But I think that constraint can be really useful
24:06
of really spending more time defining what is the problem that we're solving here.
24:10
And I think that's why Tony's write the press release first exercise is useful
24:15
where it's like, what is the problem that I think I'm solving here?
24:17
SPEAKER_0: But Magic didn't have a set of problems to solve.
24:20
SPEAKER_0: If you think about Marc's, Pocket Crystal, we weren't solving a problem.
24:24
SPEAKER_0: We were creating a new world.
24:25
Maybe if there had been a parallel process where what was actually going
24:29
on at General Magic was a little more of the Bell Labs side of the house
24:33
and there was the phone company side of the house that was sort
24:35
of keeping things afloat a little bit, and doing some more practical things,
24:39
that's a very different beast than the startup that was General Magic.
24:44
SPEAKER_1: I mean, there's some really cool things to do, right?
24:46
SPEAKER_1: Now, just because you can do it.
24:50
SPEAKER_1: Is that commercially a good use of time?
24:52
SPEAKER_1: We know the verdict with respect to General Magic.
24:54
SPEAKER_1: Although, you know, today people like emojis and everything else.
24:58
SPEAKER_1: So we were on to something, we were just on to it way too soon.
25:02
SPEAKER_3: I would argue you were on to everything.
25:03
SPEAKER_3: Much of it just too soon and too much at once.
25:05
I mean, Telescript isn't even really a part of the film,
25:08
but in interviewing people and then reading about Telescript, that sounds like now.
25:13
SPEAKER_3: The stuff I was reading about, it sounds like agentic AI now.
25:16
And so I think you guys were on to everything,
25:19
Telescript seems to me like it was
25:21
a whole other potentially world changing paradigm shifting thing,
25:26
It was almost like too much vision,
25:27
but it has that little bit of Gregor Mendel to it where it's like,
25:30
the world's not ready for this thing.
25:32
As Arturo Casadevall,
25:34
this brilliant scientist told me is like you could've gone back and shot him
25:37
in the monastery and it wouldn't have made a difference
25:38
because he was just too far ahead and nobody could understand,
25:40
including him for the most part, what he was discovering.
25:43
Yeah, there's that saying step by step you climb the hill
25:46
and we certainly were trying to get from Base Camp all the way up to Everest
25:50
in one giant stride and it's you know in retrospect the folly of it is apparent.
25:55
But the vision was so compelling and part of the reason the vision was
25:59
so compelling was when you thought it through there was no, know, naysaying it.
26:02
SPEAKER_3: I have somewhere on this shelf right here.
26:05
SPEAKER_3: I have Marc Porat's PhD thesis, which is ridiculous. I mean, he saw the future.
26:09
SPEAKER_3: It is ridiculous. It's eerie. I how
26:10
SPEAKER_1: Yes. Yeah.
26:12
SPEAKER_1: It's really insane. Unbelievable.
26:14
SPEAKER_3: To have had that vision is crazy.
26:16
And again, the movie, it doesn't even get into Telescript,
26:19
which is right now feels like the most visionary part, right?
26:22
SPEAKER_3: So
26:24
From the outset with Telescript, Jim White and Rich Miller were very,
26:28
very sensitive to the idea of its potential misuse and safety and I dare say,
26:34
ethical use of what they were trying to create was
26:39
a really important design consideration for them.
26:42
SPEAKER_1: So it can be done.
26:43
SPEAKER_1: And again, part of what we're puzzling over in the podcast is how does that happen?
26:49
How do the kind of beneficial or pro-social aspects
26:52
of something you're developing get designed in?
26:55
SPEAKER_1: And when are they overlooked or people just don't even think to examine the potential downsides?
27:01
SPEAKER_1: And it's, General Magic was instructive both in a positive and a negative way.
27:05
I wonder to what extent, like when Mike earlier talked about sort the arc
27:09
from this sort of pro-social Silicon Valley to this more power hungry,
27:13
money hungry Silicon Valley,
27:15
to what degree that reflects or is accountable to the larger culture?
27:20
Because to me, again, reading a lot of these surveys is very distressing now,
27:24
where all these other collective values have declined
27:26
in people's importance I think I just saw a Pew survey
27:28
that said Americans are it was the only country in the survey where a majority
27:32
of adults said that other people have bad morals.
27:35
SPEAKER_3: So we're taking a dim view of other people.
27:37
It's exactly what Douglas North would have predicted
27:40
if our leaders started undermining trust in our institutions.
27:43
And so I wonder if the problem is partly just in the culture itself where we're kind
27:49
of abandoning. Collective values and what we expect to see in leaders,
27:54
and valorizing just making as much as you possibly can.
27:57
And again, I also wonder how much of it goes back to like Robert Putnam's sort
28:00
of bowling alone when people started retreating into their own worlds
28:03
and civic engagement started dissolving and,
28:06
people with different political views stopped showing up
28:09
at the same kids' soccer game or whatever it is.
28:12
I think we can see this in some of our leaders behave in ways
28:15
that I would never allow my kid to behave.
28:17
And it's weird again that we're sometimes even valorizing that like,
28:21
this person tells it like it is.
28:22
SPEAKER_3: They say whatever they want.
28:23
SPEAKER_3: I don't want my kid to say whatever he wants all the time.
28:26
And I think there's a problem of collective values and that's being reflected
28:29
in these places where there's no accountability
28:32
because it's not really clear what our collective values are as a culture.
28:36
SPEAKER_0: Well, it's a vicious cycle.
28:37
The putting tech leaders on pedestals as the most representative exemplary leaders
28:43
of society has had a lot to do with that, I think.
28:46
SPEAKER_0: Consumerism drives the kind of value disintegration you're talking about, I think.
28:50
SPEAKER_0: It substitutes choice on the supermarket shelf for political choice.
28:54
And I can have as many kinds of frozen corn as I want,
28:57
but my leaders simply cannot be representative.
28:59
SPEAKER_0: And How did we get there?
29:01
SPEAKER_3: These I mean, I think the importance of social norms is like incredibly undervalued.
29:07
For a while I was a more traditional investigative reporter
29:09
and there are social norms in journalism that you really have no punishment
29:13
for other than being dishonored, I guess, in ways, but that work incredibly well.
29:17
Whereas there are actual laws that sometimes I would be dealing
29:20
with if I was writing about some area of banking or healthcare
29:22
where they're totally ignored and nobody cares.
29:25
SPEAKER_3: And so I think social norms can be so powerful, but it's hard for us to have them.
29:30
I think because people are mistaking social media for a real public square,
29:33
and so we're not having this sort of more serious engagement.
29:36
SPEAKER_3: I wonder if AI may actually provoke this sort of humanistic backlash.
29:41
SPEAKER_3: Have you seen these commencement addresses where students have been booing every mention of AI?
29:46
And some of the people giving the talk are like, whoa, okay,
29:48
I guess I stepped on a hot one there.
29:50
SPEAKER_3: And they seem surprised.
29:52
And I'm like, you think these kids
29:55
when you're saying every entry-level job they could have is going
29:57
to be automated should be cheering this?
29:59
SPEAKER_3: I wonder if this is like a first sign of some collective action, right?
30:03
SPEAKER_3: Where like booing is collective action and it's happened in multiple campuses.
30:07
SPEAKER_0: Well, more interesting is what's happening across the divide position to data centers.
30:11
SPEAKER_0: In Red America, towns are organizing to undo secret deals to provide data center land.
30:16
SPEAKER_0: There was one county that Trump carried by 17% in Missouri.
30:20
SPEAKER_0: The town council and the mayor had secretly approved the data center.
30:23
And when people found out about it,
30:24
they recalled every single member of the town council the mayor and elected people
30:28
who killed the deal.
30:29
SPEAKER_0: And this is MAGA Central, right?
30:31
So the question is how does that kind of grassroots resistance get channeled
30:35
into something that has political efficacy at the state and federal level?
30:38
Roosevelt famously told his democratic leadership about social security,
30:43
you gotta make me do it or it won't happen.
30:46
SPEAKER_0: The people have to make me do it.
30:47
SPEAKER_0: And how do the people make our current leaders, both political and business, do it?
30:53
SPEAKER_3: I agree with that. Well said.
30:55
Going back to your Sports Illustrated days,
30:57
one of the things that always struck me as odd about the steroid scandals was
31:01
that the punishment for taking steroids was far more severe than the punishment
31:07
for lying about taking steroids.
31:10
SPEAKER_1: Now on its face, that seems unremarkable, right?
31:13
SPEAKER_1: Well, you're cheating the game.
31:14
And of course afterwards you're gonna lie about it because of the consequences
31:18
of admitting to it.
31:19
To me, it seemed like that was really striking that lying
31:24
about it was just considered, standard operating procedure.
31:27
I'm old enough to remember Admiral Boorda during the Clinton administration
31:32
and he died by suicide because Newsweek was gonna run an article
31:36
that questioned his wearing on his uniform a military decoration that it was not
31:41
for valor. And it was seen as shocking, but I remember a commentator saying, Well,
31:46
this is the last vestige of a sense of honor,
31:49
and we've lost that sense in our society,
31:51
and that's why people are so stunned that he took such an extreme act.
31:55
SPEAKER_1: But it gets to your point about social norms and what do we punish?
31:59
SPEAKER_1: What do we permit and what by permitting it do we implicitly promote in our society?
32:04
SPEAKER_1: And how do those values shift?
32:06
SPEAKER_1: How do those norms shift?
32:09
SPEAKER_1: And what is the impact of new technologies on the shift of those?
32:12
And a question I had, I'll stop rambling in a second, is that, know,
32:17
you talked about the curse of information and I'm wondering
32:21
to what extent do you tie political extremism to an overabundance of information
32:27
with respect to the diminished cognitive load that extremism facilitates?
32:34
SPEAKER_1: I hope I said that in a way that makes sense, but it seems to me that it's easy to be extremist.
32:38
You just have very simple rules that you apply blindly,
32:41
and it spares you from the burden of thought about the complexity of issues,
32:45
and that that's more prone to happen in a environment where you're overwhelmed
32:48
by choice and overwhelmed by information.
32:50
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
32:51
And let me go back to your previous comment too about the steroid era you know,
32:54
I'm not a purist about drugs and sports or anything like that.
32:57
I think when people would sort of dismiss it and say, like, doesn't matter at all,
33:01
then I'm not a fan of living in an ends justifies the means kind of world.
33:05
And I spent some time reporting about Lance Armstrong when I was
33:07
at Sports Illustrated too, before it was cool.
33:09
And I would say I remember going on CNN once after publishing an investigative piece
33:13
about him and making an argument that I think convinced the anchor
33:16
that he had been using drugs and then the anchor said, Yeah,
33:19
but you all this money that he's donated to cancer, like wasn't it really worth it?
33:23
And I said, Well, if your kid were standing in front of you now and saying,
33:26
I'm gonna take drugs and cheat everybody to be good at this thing,
33:28
but I'll donate a bunch of money to cancer later, would you tell them to do it?
33:30
SPEAKER_3: And he said, No. Well, okay, yeah.
33:33
So prospectively it seems ridiculous, like retrospectively,
33:35
because you can just justify it,
33:36
but I just don't want to live in an ends justifies the means kind of world.
33:40
SPEAKER_3: Like honor exists in a world where the means matter.
33:43
SPEAKER_3: The way you go about doing something matters.
33:45
SPEAKER_3: And it seems like in many ways we've moved toward a we don't care about that so much.
33:50
You know, we don't care about decorum and we don't care about the way
33:52
that people comport themselves.
33:54
In fact, it seems to me that a lot of politicians they'll leave things up
33:58
on social media where they say one thing and then they directly contradict it,
34:01
almost in the same language.
34:02
I think they're leaving it up on purpose to show their people
34:06
that they will say anything just to piss off the other side,
34:09
because the coin of the realm is just how much you can hurt the other side,
34:14
not whether anything you're saying is true.
34:16
And so I think that is part and parcel of this information flood problem where we're
34:22
so desensitized.
34:23
I remember this survey, it was something to the effect of, you know,
34:26
people normally would see a few things a year that they would rate like a 10 out
34:30
of 10 in morally objectionable.
34:31
SPEAKER_3: And now it's like a half dozen things a day.
34:35
SPEAKER_3: And you're just not equipped for that.
34:37
SPEAKER_3: You're just totally overwhelmed.
34:38
SPEAKER_3: And so you become inured to it.
34:40
And there's also this thing called the illusory truth effect,
34:43
where when people are just told something, even if it's blatantly ridiculous,
34:46
they'll start to believe it a little more.
34:47
SPEAKER_3: This is why propaganda works.
34:49
There were these studies done with science students in colleges
34:52
where they would get text message reminders of information.
34:55
SPEAKER_3: And sometimes that information would be something like, the earth is flat.
34:59
SPEAKER_3: And these could be astronomy students, for example.
35:01
SPEAKER_3: And they would rate that as they were 99.9% sure that was not true.
35:06
Then they get a text message every few days for like two months,
35:09
and then they would still be pretty sure it wasn't true,
35:11
but now they were down to like 99.2%.
35:14
SPEAKER_3: Right.
35:14
And so even this crazy thing that went
35:16
against exactly what they were studying would start to have a little bit
35:18
of an effect on them.
35:20
SPEAKER_3: And I think that's the thing that propagandists realize intuitively.
35:23
So I think a lot of this, like becoming inured to bad behavior
35:26
and finding all this fodder for false pattern matching,
35:30
are really results of this fire hose of information
35:33
for which our brains are really not well equipped.
35:35
England just announced that it's gonna adopt the Australian rule:
35:39
no social media access for kids under 16.
35:41
And it's not a silver bullet,
35:43
but it's a start because their brains are still developing
35:45
and the cognitive overload that you've outlined in the book,
35:49
is especially destructive for a 14-year-old, more so than maybe for a 30-year-old.
35:53
SPEAKER_0: But is there any other way to manage the spigot?
35:56
SPEAKER_3: I think social media is kind of a collective trap.
35:58
SPEAKER_3: And so if we're counting on individual responsibility, most people won't win that game.
36:02
SPEAKER_3: And
36:03
SPEAKER_0: No.
36:03
SPEAKER_3: 16 is one thing, but people are still gonna be on it in college and all those things.
36:06
SPEAKER_3: Then it's like you have to be on it because all your friends are on it.
36:08
SPEAKER_3: And so everyone's stuck on it because everyone is stuck on it.
36:12
SPEAKER_3: And so I think it would take things like a ban or a restriction.
36:15
Or again, one of the things I think could be really useful is using look,
36:19
I think governments have often used things like the tax code
36:22
to incentivize behavior.
36:24
And I think there's a lot of possibility to do that here to try
36:28
to shift these platforms from maximum attention being the way they make profit
36:32
to quality content being the way they make profit.
36:35
Netflix or HBO, like they have to make quality content because they have to try
36:38
to get you to pay for the content.
36:40
In these other platforms where it's purely how long your eyeball stays stuck
36:45
to this thing, there's no reason to have anything truthful.
36:47
We know that things that make people angry they are much more likely to share
36:50
and react to than things that they find interesting.
36:53
SPEAKER_3: And so the incentives are set up really poorly.
36:55
I really think governments can make a difference by using you know make
36:59
an advertising tax on these platforms and you can make it such that they have
37:03
to shift to a model that's more subscription based or paying for content based
37:06
than just monetizing attention.
37:09
The General Magic business model to the extent we had one,
37:11
was that we were gonna sell a product that people wanted.
37:13
SPEAKER_0: We were not making people the product.
37:15
SPEAKER_0: We weren't taking their information and commoditizing that.
37:18
We had a product and that goes back to Jobs and his philosophy about what kind
37:22
of devices to build.
37:23
SPEAKER_0: You build something people want to buy and you sell it You do have a product.
37:27
SPEAKER_0: And that's what's gone wrong today.
37:29
The problem is, you it's a market failure in so many different ways,
37:32
it's hard to know what first steps to take.
37:34
SPEAKER_0: Where do you start?
37:35
SPEAKER_3: Gosh.
37:36
SPEAKER_3: I mean I think starting with pushing the age up is a good place to begin.
37:40
SPEAKER_3: But I also think a lot of this stuff is bad for adults as well, not just for kids.
37:44
I think making it easier in some way for people who are constantly being libeled
37:48
and slandered to have some sort of means for serious grievance like
37:52
on these platforms, right?
37:53
Because a lot of the people that are capitalizing on these platforms,
37:56
as I talked about Lance Armstrong, so much of the world is now the Tour de France.
37:59
It's like whoever's willing to do the craziest stuff,
38:01
the like the least ethical stuff, is going to win.
38:04
And on these platforms, there are a lot of people, what my peer, Amanda Ripley,
38:09
who writes about conflict, calls conflict entrepreneurs.
38:11
These are people who have realized how incredible of a business opportunity it is
38:16
to just stoke conflict.
38:18
And they're often doing that by,
38:20
Alex Jones was doing it by saying that Sandy Hook wasn't a real thing.
38:23
And he ends up having this big settlement, but,
38:25
the penalties usually are not enough to stop them from doing the thing
38:29
that they're doing.
38:29
I used to learn this when I took some environmental economics classes
38:33
where you could have penalties for pollution,
38:34
but if they weren't high enough and frequent enough,
38:36
then companies just eat the penalty and keep doing it anyway
38:38
because they make much more money just by continuing on.
38:41
SPEAKER_3: Like I get this all the time, right?
38:42
SPEAKER_3: My last name is Epstein, for goodness sake.
38:44
SPEAKER_3: So my social media is a cesspool. I made some
38:46
SPEAKER_0: God.
38:46
SPEAKER_3: Videos on YouTube. I had to filter my last name. I had to filter Island.
38:49
SPEAKER_3: I had to filter surname.
38:50
SPEAKER_3: Like I can't even exist there, right?
38:52
But I think there should be some way that you can do something about some
38:57
of this stuff, or that the platforms have some accountability for this kind
39:00
of stuff.
39:01
I think if I went into a Target and someone verbally assaulted me in those same ways
39:06
and the Target staff didn't do anything about it, I don't know.
39:10
SPEAKER_3: Would there be a case there? Maybe.
39:12
SPEAKER_3: But it happens on these platforms all the time.
39:14
So I think starting with anything that would give some accountability and starting
39:18
with policies that would try to shift the business model from attention to content.
39:22
I think that's one of the brilliant things about your book, your most recent book,
39:26
is that it's really a focus on methodologies.
39:29
SPEAKER_1: And, the idea of if you approach problems in the suitable way,
39:34
SPEAKER_1: then you get the right outcomes.
39:36
SPEAKER_1: You get solutions that work.
39:38
SPEAKER_1: You get products that work.
39:39
But I also hear in what you're saying, something that resonates deeply with me,
39:43
that this is a crisis of values fundamentally.
39:46
SPEAKER_1: It's a crisis of social norms.
39:48
And one of the questions that we face,
39:50
something for people to themselves wrestle with is what kind of society do we want
39:55
to live in?
39:55
SPEAKER_1: It's so interesting to me.
39:56
SPEAKER_1: I think so many people are exhausted by the outrage economy and yet they can't resist it either.
40:03
SPEAKER_1: And I'm not naive enough to think that there's gonna be some, grand awakening to it.
40:07
But, if all politics is personal then, individuals have choices to make, moral,
40:12
ethical choices in a very granular way, it seems to me.
40:16
SPEAKER_1: Do you see a social or a values crisis at the heart of this?
40:20
SPEAKER_3: I do, yeah.
40:21
Again, I mean I'm I've I know I've mentioned them several times,
40:23
but I find those recent surveys frightening that show
40:25
that every collective value has declined in importance to Americans,
40:29
except for money. And I don't begrudge anyone having money as a value also,
40:33
but when it's our only remaining value, I think that's a problem.
40:37
SPEAKER_3: Capitalism is the only thing that's ever lifted a billion people out of poverty.
40:40
But I think if it exists in a vacuum without these other collective values,
40:44
you've got a really big problem.
40:46
I'm just wondering I know writers hate to be asked these kinds of questions,
40:49
but is this the stuff you're thinking about writing about next?
40:51
SPEAKER_3: What am I thinking about writing next?
40:53
SPEAKER_3: This is a good question, because the book industry is in dire straits.
40:57
SPEAKER_3: So to be quite honest, I'm trying to figure out if I'll be writing about anything next.
41:01
SPEAKER_0: That would be a loss, David.
41:02
SPEAKER_0: Don't can't you can't go that way.
41:05
Well, when AI turns out my lights,
41:06
I think I'll still be writing because I'm really engaged in the craft.
41:09
When I switched from science to writing,
41:10
it was very specifically because I wanted to write about sudden cardiac death
41:13
in athletes because my training partner had dropped dead at the end of a race.
41:16
SPEAKER_3: And I said, after this, I'll get back to science.
41:19
SPEAKER_3: And then I stayed into writing and then I got an investigative.
41:21
SPEAKER_3: I said, Well, after you know, I wrote a book.
41:23
SPEAKER_3: I said, Well, after this, I'll go back to investigative after the second book.
41:26
SPEAKER_3: And I didn't go back.
41:27
But it wasn't until a few years ago that I started to say, No,
41:30
like I'm a craftsman and I'm really interested in this craft.
41:33
SPEAKER_3: Once in a while I'll write, a sentence or two or three. And it's like, I nailed it.
41:36
SPEAKER_3: I think I figured this thing out.
41:37
SPEAKER_3: And of course, two sentences later, I'm like, I know nothing.
41:40
SPEAKER_3: Why'd I ever think I could do this?
41:42
And that feeling of engagement of getting a hint of how good something could be,
41:45
but not being able to sustain it.
41:47
SPEAKER_3: I started to find really engaging and started to identify as a craftsman in this way.
41:51
SPEAKER_3: So I think I'll be doing it for myself.
41:54
SPEAKER_3: I don't know if it can be a job going forward.
41:56
SPEAKER_3: So I have a lot of ideas I'm interested in.
41:58
One of the reasons I was reading some of this stuff about technological history was
42:01
to maybe write about how it was really the institutional context around technology
42:05
that determines if it leads to shared prosperity or mostly shared misery.
42:10
SPEAKER_3: After reading Power and Progress, I was wondering if there's still room to do that.
42:15
SPEAKER_3: But that's something I'm thinking about.
42:16
SPEAKER_3: But the proximate thing I'm thinking about is if I have to find a new job.
42:20
SPEAKER_0: I say it would be a terrible loss for
42:22
SPEAKER_3: That's so kind of you to say.
42:23
SPEAKER_0: For society if you stopped.
42:25
SPEAKER_0: Don't do that.
42:26
SPEAKER_0: But I wanted to go full circle for just a minute.
42:28
Talking to the Magicians 30 years on,
42:31
did anything strike you about how we processed what happened to us
42:34
during Magic's arc of unearned success and then failure?
42:37
SPEAKER_0: Did anything surprise you?
42:38
It might sound silly to say this,
42:40
but it surprised me a little at first how emotional it was, for people.
42:44
That doesn't surprise me at all now,
42:45
thinking about what it would have been like to go through it myself
42:49
and having these incredible high hopes, having the right vision,
42:52
like to think about what it must have been like for Marc And for that to go down
42:55
or to be a part of this thing, know,
42:57
that's like a great sports team with this collection of talent and just combusts
43:01
and so it seems natural to me now.
43:03
SPEAKER_3: But people were emotional sometimes when I talked to them about it.
43:06
And that was very interesting because I can't really remember that experience
43:10
from talking to people about a company they worked for,
43:13
even if things didn't go well.
43:14
SPEAKER_3: Very honestly reflective.
43:16
SPEAKER_3: A lot of people said some version of I couldn't figure out what not to do.
43:21
And so that was interesting to hear,
43:22
There were differences of opinion about the degree
43:25
to which General Magic bit off too much versus it was just too early
43:29
and it would have worked if it could have just hung on longer.
43:32
But I think the lastingness, like talking to Darin Adler,
43:35
this clearly left a scar that colored everything he did after that.
43:39
SPEAKER_3: I think the same for Tony.
43:41
So this just incredible formative experience that's almost you only usually hear
43:46
people talking about in relation to something that like happened with their mother
43:49
in childhood.
43:50
SPEAKER_3: And that was new to me when it came to a company.
43:55
SPEAKER_3: So that was very unusual.
43:57
Just to answer your question about policy prescriptions,
43:59
we have solutions available that are tried and true in other contexts
44:04
that we can apply.
44:05
SPEAKER_1: And it has to be from the bottom up.
44:07
SPEAKER_1: I'm very heartened by the reaction to data centers because it cuts across all political stripes.
44:14
SPEAKER_1: I mean, it's like, you how people hate pharmaceutical companies.
44:17
If you want to get an agreement in a conversation with somebody,
44:19
there's certain topics that are go to and whether they're wearing
44:22
a Make America Great hat again or, you know, they're Code Pink,
44:26
they'll nod together on that.
44:28
SPEAKER_0: I'm very much with Tom what we're very good at is pouring new wine into old bottles.
44:33
SPEAKER_0: That's what lawyers do.
44:34
SPEAKER_0: That's how the common law works.
44:35
SPEAKER_0: And we've got some handy old bottles.
44:37
Treating AI as a public health problem,
44:40
at least in terms of young adults and teenagers, that's one model.
44:44
SPEAKER_0: Could we have an FDA for the release of frontier models?
44:48
SPEAKER_0: And why not?
44:49
SPEAKER_0: I mean the industry is always arguing that constraints stifle innovation.
44:52
SPEAKER_0: You've irrefutably demonstrated the opposite is the case.
44:56
SPEAKER_0: So, let's use the old bottles that we've got.
44:58
SPEAKER_0: So tort law, antitrust, using the automobile industry and the tobacco industry as models.
45:04
When the Surgeon General's report came out in 1964,
45:07
governments didn't start incenting people not to smoke,
45:10
both through tax policy and by creating non-smoking areas,
45:14
until about 50 years later.
45:16
SPEAKER_0: We don't have that long to wait.
45:18
So how do we accelerate the use of tools we've already got seems to me one
45:22
of the fundamental problems.
45:24
SPEAKER_0: We had seatbelts in the fifties, but the mandate to wear them didn't come until the eighties.
45:29
And we need to build cars with seat belts now, not retrofit, And know,
45:33
how we make that happen in the realm of disruptive technology generally.
45:36
SPEAKER_0: How do we incent positive uses and disincent the others?
45:40
SPEAKER_0: We've got some tools.
45:41
SPEAKER_0: Let's accelerate their use.
45:43
SPEAKER_3: Two questions for you.
45:43
So one, I think there's like this free market idea that isn't totally true sometimes
45:48
when it comes to technology, like the market's not free at all.
45:51
And all these things are policy choices -- price controls and market controls
45:54
and all this kind of stuff.
45:55
And so I think there's this sort of deity worship of the free market,
45:59
which is really like never a thing.
46:00
SPEAKER_3: Like we're always making decisions and shaping incentives.
46:03
SPEAKER_3: But then there's this sort of fetishism of freedom, right?
46:07
SPEAKER_3: It's good that you don't have freedom to drive wherever you want on the road, right?
46:11
SPEAKER_3: Like you want that kind of freedom because it protects you from other people also.
46:15
And so I think, yeah, that people just kind of wake up and recognize
46:18
that we can structure incentives.
46:19
But also from a legal perspective,
46:21
like there was a time a few years ago when I started writing a newsletter
46:25
where Meta had made this new platform called Bulletin.
46:28
SPEAKER_3: And I started writing a newsletter on Bulletin.
46:29
And I had to get error and omission insurance to write on there,
46:33
But if I just posted straight on Facebook, I didn't.
46:36
SPEAKER_3: What's the difference?
46:37
SPEAKER_3: They both owned by Meta, I would have been writing the same thing.
46:38
SPEAKER_3: I don't understand like why is it different?
46:40
SPEAKER_0: Well they were curating Bulletin and they weren't curating
46:43
SPEAKER_3: 'Cause I was just writing what I wanted. I
46:45
SPEAKER_0: Yeah, but didn't they in your contract with them, didn't they say they could not post?
46:50
SPEAKER_3: Not mine, no.
46:50
SPEAKER_3: I had a like I can say whatever I want about Meta and you can't do anything about it.
46:54
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
46:55
SPEAKER_0: Interesting. I don't know.
46:56
SPEAKER_3: So I don't understand why, if I libel somebody on Substack then I could be sued.
47:00
SPEAKER_3: I still have error and omission insurance.
47:01
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, you the immunity is for the platform providers. And
47:04
SPEAKER_3: So they could sue me but not Substack?
47:07
SPEAKER_1: They could sue Substack.
47:08
Substack would have a very, very short one page brief that would win a motion
47:13
to have the suit dismissed against them.
47:15
SPEAKER_1: Practically speaking there's no there if you were to sue Substack.
47:19
SPEAKER_1: But an important point is made.
47:20
SPEAKER_1: I mean your point about These are all arbitrary.
47:23
SPEAKER_1: I the public-private distinction is defined by government, a public institution.
47:28
So all these ideas of truly free market or whatever else,
47:31
they really prove illusory when you actually look at them close enough.
47:35
SPEAKER_1: But you right now there's cost shifting.
47:38
And the cost shifting is that if someone says horrible things about you on one
47:42
of these platforms, you bear the emotional distress,
47:45
you bear the damage to your reputation and then it's really,
47:48
really hard to go after the person who's the source of that material.
47:53
SPEAKER_1: And for centuries we had a different model where the publishers were held accountable.
47:57
SPEAKER_1: And last I read, newspapers aren't dead or they aren't dead yet.
48:01
SPEAKER_1: So again, this is this idea of, you know, what Mike said about new wine into old bottles.
48:06
SPEAKER_1: We've been here before.
48:08
SPEAKER_1: We've dealt with it in ways that people have found adequate.
48:11
SPEAKER_1: And there's no reason why those models can't be reapplied to a new age and a new technology.
48:17
SPEAKER_1: I do want to add one recollection.
48:19
In addition to recommending that people go out and buy your books,
48:22
there I have a standing policy that if anyone buys a copy
48:26
of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and doesn't find it worthwhile,
48:29
I will refund the entire purchase price.
48:32
SPEAKER_1: I haven't had to do that yet.
48:34
But he talks about it in passage in the book where he talking to prisoners
48:39
in the United States and he talks about how your country has a statue of liberty
48:43
but it doesn't have a statue of responsibility and that's stuck with me of this idea
48:49
that what are the duties we owe each other not legal duties necessarily
48:53
but social moral ethical duties and I think that's in the mix around AI as well
48:58
that there is an ethical component And a question of what do we value
49:05
that will frame what we do or don't do around a legal
49:09
and regulatory political response to this new technology.
49:13
SPEAKER_3: I wonder what are the ways to get us to have some of these collective values again.
49:17
You know, for all the obviously terrible things in COVID, I was,
49:21
here's a challenge that we're all facing together.
49:23
SPEAKER_3: Maybe it brings us together that didn't happen. Right.
49:25
I thought, maybe we should have a military draft again because one,
49:29
we would make decisions about how we deploy our military in a very different manner.
49:32
SPEAKER_3: If people had skin in the game.
49:34
SPEAKER_3: And it would bring people from all different walks of life having to work together.
49:37
Just something where people have to interact with people who are not like them
49:42
and so that we can have some kind of work on collective things together.
49:45
SPEAKER_0: Mandatory national service where you'd have options other than the military.
49:47
SPEAKER_3: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
49:49
SPEAKER_0: Mandatory national service.
49:51
SPEAKER_0: My father wrote a letter every day when he was in the army during the war.
49:54
SPEAKER_0: He was in the US, England and then France and Germany.
49:57
SPEAKER_0: He ran a field hospital.
49:59
SPEAKER_0: And he was the only Jew that almost every one of his fellow members of his company had ever met.
50:05
SPEAKER_0: And think about that.
50:06
SPEAKER_0: What it meant for the all of them to be together and to make that hospital run, right?
50:10
SPEAKER_0: We need to do that again,
50:12
SPEAKER_3: Yeah. Yeah.
50:13
I wrote about this very briefly in Inside the Box that in the 1920s
50:16
the Soviet Union experimented with individualizing everyone's work week and it was
50:20
a social calamity, right?
50:22
SPEAKER_3: And but I kinda feel like we've done that to ourselves in many ways.
50:25
So when Mark Zuckerberg first started talking about the metaverse
50:28
and he said something, you know, it's not direct quotes, but like, it'll be amazing,
50:31
we'll all be living in a universe tailored individually to us.
50:34
SPEAKER_3: That sounds like hell.
50:35
SPEAKER_3: We're not just a social species, we're a hyper social species.
50:38
SPEAKER_3: But we are kind of retreating into these individualized, algorithmically tailored lives.
50:43
SPEAKER_3: And I think that makes it very hard to have to form more collective values.
50:47
It's like our collective values are sports teams and things like that,
50:50
which is interesting, but I think we need more than that.
50:53
You know, sometimes in our history it's been organizing around an enemy
50:55
or a challenge or something like that.
50:57
SPEAKER_3: It's just kind of lacking right now, I think.
50:58
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
50:59
SPEAKER_1: So being in that curated world to me seems horrible I have a similar reaction as you did.
51:05
SPEAKER_1: We really are challenged for something that unites Americans.
51:09
SPEAKER_1: It's distressing in my view.
51:11
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, no, I agree.
51:13
SPEAKER_1: We have one question we always ask.
51:15
If you had to have a bumper sticker that encapsulated who you are or your attitude
51:21
about things, or the through line of your life writ large,
51:26
what would that bumper sticker have on it?
51:29
I think I would take and slightly paraphrase Bernard Suits's statement
51:33
about the essence of all games and sports,
51:35
but that I think is the essence of worthwhile endeavors,
51:37
is the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles.
51:40
So I think I would just put that voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles
51:43
on a bumper sticker.
51:44
SPEAKER_3: And I think one that would make people stop and think a little bit.
51:47
But to me that's, you know, part of what gives life meaning is finding something
51:51
that you don't have to do.
51:52
But taking to it willingly and something that's hard to do,
51:55
whether that's parenting or something that you do in your work life.
51:58
SPEAKER_3: And I think that'd be a cool bumper sticker.
52:00
SPEAKER_3: Like tell me you wouldn't stop and give that one a look,
52:03
SPEAKER_1: I was seeing it in my mind's eye.
52:04
SPEAKER_1: I thought, Yeah, I'd pull up to that guy.
52:06
SPEAKER_0: No.
52:07
SPEAKER_0: Yeah, it's better than Fuck Musk.
52:10
SPEAKER_3: Depends vibe you're going for. Mm-hmm.
52:12
SPEAKER_0: Thank you for joining us, David, and sharing your illuminations with us.
52:16
SPEAKER_0: It's wonderful to have you. Thanks so much.
52:17
SPEAKER_3: It's a pleasure.
52:18
SPEAKER_3: I think I was learning more than I was saying, but this is a fascinating conversation.
52:21
I vaguely forgot that we were doing a podcast
52:23
and thought we were just kind like sitting around talking philosophy here.
52:26
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, no, I would love to talk to you guys more.
52:28
I mean, it's been a pleasure being in touch with the General Magic family
52:30
to the extent I have been, and I'd love to I appreciate that very much.
52:31
SPEAKER_3: I
52:32
SPEAKER_0: Well, you're part of you're part of it now, David.
52:34
SPEAKER_0: You're
52:36
SPEAKER_3: Hope I bring some more eyeballs to this film.
52:37
SPEAKER_3: That was like one of the things I'm hoping to do. So yeah.
52:39
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
52:40
SPEAKER_1: David Epstein, it would be an understatement to say that it's been a delight speaking with you.
52:46
This transformed from an interview into a discussion,
52:50
and it concludes with a ton of delicious food for thought,
52:54
thanks to the insights and observations you've shared.
52:58
SPEAKER_1: So thank you so much.
53:00
Everyone listening, David Epstein's books are available everywhere,
53:04
and I've enjoyed all three of the ones I've read.
53:06
SPEAKER_3: Thank you so much for having
53:07
SPEAKER_0: Yeah, thank you.
53:07
SPEAKER_3: Me, by the way.
53:08
SPEAKER_3: Like all of my conversations with Magicians, I learned more than I contributed.
53:11
SPEAKER_3: Spellbound Productions: Thank you for listening to General Magic and the Soul of Tech podcast.
53:17
Tune into our Substack for more interviews and articles
53:21
at spellboundproductions.substack.com.