Trump doesn’t understand A.I. or anything else

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1:03With AI embedded at its core, working across every system, all ready to go from day one, so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Donald Trump is all in on artificial intelligence even though the developers of AI are saying, hey, maybe we should slow down. Does the president or anyone in the White House know what is going on when it comes to artificial intelligence? Well, let's find out. Welcome back. You're listening to American Friction. Welcome back. This is American Friction and I'm Jacob Jarvis. And joining me today is an all-round media expert and the author of many, many books including the brand new release hot type. He's also a fellow J.J. So what is not to like? Jeff Jarvis. Welcome back to American Friction. Thank you for all journalists. It's very good to have you here as always, Jeff.

2:05So I wanted to start by reading just a sort of first line from a story in the Guardian that I saw. So Donald Trump on Saturday said he would appoint an artificial intelligence czar and create an AI force to help monitor the technology, though he gave almost no details about either plan. Jeff, is there any joined up thinking from the White House on AI? You could have entered that sentence with thinking. There's none in the White House about any topic, including AI. Yeah. No. But the thing with the real weird thing about AI right now is it's causing intellectual strange bedfellows. I find myself agreeing with people I wouldn't have otherwise agreed with. And the bottom line here is that I think AI is a pretty remarkable technology. It can do a lot of interesting things. It can also be dangerous like any technology.

3:07My primary belief is in the wrong hands. The AI boys are assholes and cultists and we'll get to all that in a few minutes. But to your question about the White House, no, everything out of the White House is stupid. The AI advisor for Trump is David Sacks, who's a AI accelerationist, David Tupredo's warp speed ahead, do it all, and trying to avoid all AI regulation. And I don't agree with all of that. But he's actually a voice of sanity when it comes to some of the insane discussion that's going on about AI and extinction and all that crap. Trump is going to appoint supposedly an AI's or the current guessing that Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary would be that. I don't know that he knows crap about AI. I don't think he does, but he doesn't know much about the economy either. So what's the difference? And then along the way, of course, Trump last week, the height of his stupidity is that

4:08he decided that he doesn't like the name artificial intelligence. So he's decided to rename it super intelligence or supreme intelligence or something that starts with an S. Just on David Sacks, you mentioned there. Does he have particular qualification in this? Does he have a background that makes you feel remotely confident there? Or is he a bit of a, I don't know, just a blowhard, really? He's an investor. I always got money in it. He hangs around with the AI people. I think he probably knows what he's talking about. I'll give him that. And normally I would disagree with him about things. But let me go off on the tangent here of the last few weeks. Have been, the agenda has been set in great measure by cultists, AI cultists. And I don't know if we've discussed this together before. If we talked about Tess Creal. You have talked a bit, but it's sort of, it's so weird that I think everyone could do

5:09with a bit of a primer on it. And it is very odd to me this idea that it does seem like these people want what I'm scared of is tech taking over. And it does feel like the people who are in charge of the tech kind of like the idea of tech taking over, which is quite scary. Yeah. And there's a bunch of faux philosophies that guide Tess Creal as an acronym that was coined by Timnick Gebru, who famously wrote, co-wrote these two casting parents' paper in Google and was fired for it. And Emil Torres. And it's an acronym that stands for us. If I can get them all together here, transhumanism, that's the T, extroperianism, Singulitarianism, rationalism, that's the R, effective altruism, EA, and long-termism, L. All right. So they tie all these together of a sort. And you have people like Nick Bostrom, who was at Oxford running an AI institute until he got ousted because old racist emails were discovered.

6:11He's kind of this philosophy for king of this movement of effective altruism and long-termism. And argues that we owe a debt to the future of humane, a far future of humanity, ten to the 54th potential future human beings, both real and computerized. And so present day issues, trivial compared to that great goal of ours. And then they say that they are the people to control that future because they're the smartest ones because they're running the AI. And they should be in charge of the technology. What Ghibaru and Torres find in their investigation is this is all tied back to racist philosophies of eugenics. And it's about making the uber mention. It's about selecting the human people that they think are the best ones or giving birth to them. It's about putting chips in the head. It's about populating the universe with themselves.

7:12So when they talk about safety, they're not talking about safety and the current definition that most of us would use about the environment and education and policy and culture and the economy and jobs. Their definition of safety is this loony tune shit about human extinction. And they believe that this tool that they're making is so powerful. They could exterminate you and kind. And however you should trust us who made the tool to be the ones to regulate it because no one else is as smart as we are. And the end result of this in the short term is going to be regulatory capture where open AI and anthropic and God help us SpaceX and Elon Musk have the ear of the Trump administration finally getting back to your point now. And so they're going to be the authors of whatever regulation occurs and it is going to benefit them in a cartel of the big companies.

8:13And right at this moment, the glimmer of hope I see in AI is that we see lots of open weight kind of the closest thing to open source of the movement has open weight models out there that can create competition to these crazy guys who were in charge of the biggest companies were about to be over wealthy with their IPOs. Is that the as well the story to focus on the issue around a is because I think people found AI technology so confusing and no one most layman can't really understand what's going on there. So it sort of passes by. But the thread of what you're saying there is just the story is oligarchs right the story is tech oligarchs is these people who live outside of the realms of the real world. Who have massive sort of power over those of us who do live in the real world and that's sort of the that seems to me to be the story of US politics at the moment world politics. There's just this group of people who are so wealthy and so powerful that they are outside

9:16normality and so they are able to decide all of these things which will have massive consequences not for them and they say yeah, no, there will be horrible consequences. But the consequences aren't for them so it's easy for them to say that right. Yeah, it's bad enough to be over wealthy. It's bad enough to be outside of reality but it's even worse when what you believe is just simply lunatic shit, crazy, dangerous and offensive, odious philosophies. And the problem is media coverage are not covering this at all. Next last week or two weeks ago Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, odd bed fellows, you cannot imagine more, appeared at a future of life institute event. And media treated that oh, it's not for profit, the cares about AI safety. No, these are the cultists, these are the crazy people. And again, when they talk about safety, they're talking about it in these extreme and crazy

10:18terms. And so yes, you have people who have too much money, too much power, too much ego and they're driven, they're not just a railroad baron or an oil baron of the gilded age. They are also driven by these crazy philosophies that are in themselves dangerous. Yeah, well, is that the media as well as not caught up with the fact that today's rich people on yesterday's rich people and the super wealthy have always been a problem. The new ones are a particular type of breed. They've been created in ways and made money in ways that just haven't existed in the past. So they are just they're outside of the normality we once had. Yeah, it's late stage masculinity. Right. It's a bunch of geeky boys who are getting back at the world for having been abused by the jocks in high school no doubt.

11:18And many of them dropped out of high school, dropped out of college in their sophomore year and they're and they sound like freeze dried sophomores. If you read the manifestos that some of these people write, they're just they're soft moroc. Yeah, it always makes me think of the goodwill hunting scene where you go, yeah, you read that. What you're going to tell me it's like that is the level of thinking that plenty of them seem to seem to have. And so that's who's in charge. And I think the real problem is that is that AI, I'm far more frightened of the AI boys than I am of the AI itself. And so a lot of the stories too about about the open AI hugging face incident, we don't really know exactly what happened. It's being blown up by a combination of the hubris of the AI boys wanting to proudly say, you don't look like you did it beat up your kid. You did all these amazing things and we don't know what instructions there were, what instructions there weren't. And then media tie on to this and they love this kind of story.

12:20Rogue, swarms of agents went out and hacked. No, a computer program looped itself again and again and again and again because they had so much that you know, they spent millions of dollars on this computing power to do these things. And the media coverage is anthropomorphic in the extreme. One famous podcaster said that this was the clash of AI civilizations. Give me a friggin break. Yeah, it's one of the problems there though that we have is that there does feel like there's a lot of the boy crying wolf when it comes to these AI people saying, look, it's so bad, look how smart what I've made is it's so bad. At the same time, you know, broken clock is right twice a day. How do we know when to when to believe them and when not to believe them or can we? Right. In the open AI hugging face incident, they released their program, their powerful program

13:23out there with so far as we can tell limited instructions to limited activity. So they knew there were a relation point A point B. It was out there for a very long time unmonitor. This is about irresponsible human behavior. Program is being told to do something and it goes and does what it is told it follows instructions. That's what they do. Also had the case in this last week, supposedly use of AI almost caused more with China because our military used a program that said that there were nuclear arms on a Chinese ship and they were going to board it and God knows what it happened. Well, the problem there wasn't again the technology. The problem was the idiot who used it and allowed the other idiot who allowed it to be used and the third idiot who was almost going to follow with instructions. The problem that we've got the problem. It's us as human beings. Yeah. Is it the paperclip theory, which is if you told AI to its only job was to make paper clips,

14:29eventually what if it got to the point where it was using every resource on earth to make paper clips and was turning humans into paper clips or whatever. That comes from Nick Postram, the guy who kicked out of Oxford. And gosh, I'm quoting awful people. Exactly. And so that presumes a hell of a lot that we don't have unplugged a lot of the wall that we have no control in agency over this. Part of the problem is their ultimate hubris is this idea that they're building artificial general intelligence, artificial super intelligence, the one machine that can do all that can do more than all of human kind can do. That is the wrong goal. Yeah. Somebody I respect in the AI world, Jan Le Kun, who was at Metta, who's at New York University and has now started his own company called Ami Labs. He for one thing that says that large language models will only get us so far and they've reached near their limit. He's working on world models instead. But he also says that the way to build AI that can do more than we can do is to make them

15:35specialized. You build the machine that can fold proteins. You build the machine that can design a jet turbine or find new medicines. In doing so, you're going to get there faster and cheaper and you're also going to have more control over it. This machine deals with medicines. It doesn't deal with anything else. It doesn't go off to hack hugging face. So we can monitor what it does because we know what it does. This idea that we can have this uber intelligence that can do all, I think really causes a problem. Now, what's going to come out of this, I think, back to your first question again at the White House is really stupid policy that either will be accelerationist and let everything go with no restriction whatsoever and no monitoring and accountability whatsoever. That's probably what will come out of the Trump White House. But on the other hand, we can also see regulation that I think could prevent us from getting the benefits that AI could bring us.

16:37If AI can help find new medicines, then hallelujah, let's have at it. Obviously, you're going to monitor that and you're going to test it as any medicine code. But if you can do that, why not? And I've been thinking lately, Jacob, about an ancillary problem here to the AI boys being in charge of AI. They also own the AI and its fruits. So a couple of interesting things happen lately. One is that South Korea has said that they're going to give AI to all citizens for free. Which starts to make it look like AI as a right. But it also says that then the public has a proprietary interest in the AI they get. Read Hoffman, a famous investor, wrote a piece last week's acknowledging that AI has a crappy reputation right now. And there's very little time to bring it around. And his suggestion is that every, I think it was just the US, everybody in the US should get three free agents, one for law, one for medicine and one for a tutor.

17:43In both cases, it's about saying if people felt that they had this interest in having AI themselves, then what would their editor be? Point two is in current US law, you cannot copyright the product of AI. And by extension, I would imagine that would probably apply to patents and trademark. Well, that hasn't been tested in the law yet. But it made me think what if the fruits of AI are the property of us all? What if that is our proprietary interest? Is that there is more knowledge created, whether it's solving math problems or finding medicines or whatever it may be? Then we have an interest in having smarter AI. But because of the current panic about AI, the hysteria that's going on, everything's going to get limited. And so you see news organizations cutting off AI saying, no, no, no, you can't have

18:44any of our stuff, which means that they're cutting off their nose despite their face, they're not going to be discovered. It means that the AI is then stupider. And if we're all going to use AI, do we want stupid AI? Yeah. So there are two extremes where you see the accelerationists in the hands of the AI boys who are cultists, oh, or you see regulations saying all AI is bad, all algorithms are bad, cut it all off and we lose something that could benefit society. Yeah. Clearly, the middle path there is that we've got to bring in smarter people. And that's not the technologist. Yamavar Resort and Casino at Sandman Well is bringing the biggest laughs to the stage. Break taboos with Ali Wang on August 28th and 29th. Enjoy Ralph Barbosa's Dry Humor on September 18th and 19th. And don't miss Nikki Glazer's unapologetic comedy November 19th.

19:44Tickets on sale now at Yamavartheater.com. Only at Yamavar Resort and Casino celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. When you're a mid-size business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system. And it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business.

20:47Is it also about changing the incentives for those people as well? Because Trump's obsession with it would appear and I'd be curious to know your thoughts on how linked to it is. But to me, it seems quite transparently like he must have some, Trump media has some vested interest in making money from AI. And even if he's not completely invested or tied into it, his family being close with AI leaders is something he's obviously going to want, which would be advantageous for his financial future. But part of the panic would appear that all the AI companies, the major ones, are equally worried about being beaten by the others. So therefore, they're all trying to do the same kind of thing and giving you this massive, generalist AI, which is just quite mediocre for everyone. Whereas surely the smarter thing, if you run an anthropic, and I'm not smart enough to run an anthropic, but it's to go, my model is really good at doing X. So I'm going to pursue that and I will be the medicine-making AI model.

21:48And that'll be amazing for me in the long run. But instead, they're all trying to be generic AI's, which are just slight variations of each other, which I think for most use cases, people probably don't notice much difference between any of them. Yeah, I think anthropic was also around and what made it number one was that it did specialize for a time in coding. And it could do coding extremely well. We know right now that AI can do some things well. It can play go, it can fool proteins, it can solve math problems, it can do coding. But that doesn't mean that it can thus do everything else. Yeah, it can't fold your shirts, right? It doesn't, there's a lot of it doesn't know. And that's true of human beings too. Y'all look who says this. You know, none of us is a generalist. We're all good at some things and bad at others. So yes, I think that's the wrong goal for them to approach.

22:53But it's part of their ability to get a $2 trillion IPO's. Yeah. We are building the Uber super intelligence to do everything we're going to scare everybody. The Trump interest here, you're right. He and his family are corrupt as hell and have interests all over creation. But the other interest of this administration is that the American economy right now is being buoyed by one thing and that's AI. And the investment that's there, the assignment that comes back all the time, looked this last week. Meta came out with its little agent that anybody can use now. I haven't played with it much yet because I've been out of town. But which sounds stupid, I could do it anywhere. But it's stock went up 11% in one day. People are dying to get excited about this. So the economy is buoyed by AI and Trump doesn't want to puncture that. Bubble because he's punctured everything else. So I was in California, gas prices were more than $6 a gallon.

23:55Prices of everything are going up like crazy. I'm afraid we're going to end up with gas lines here. The rest of the economy is shit thanks to him, thanks to his wars. What is there at the moment in terms of regulation in the US? Because I keep hearing people talk about the need for more regulation. And I don't really know what the state of play is as it stands. So this is a regulatory capture. This is where you have anthropic suggesting various mechanisms because it's in their interest to pull the ladder up and to blimp after them and to raise the cost of operation and compliance to be so high that a startup or an open-weight model or a foreign company can't compete. So I think we're seeing efforts to suggest regulation that will do that. They also, in their most naive ways, they'll start to suggest international tributals over AI.

24:56Good luck with that. Not going to happen. That's not to say that we don't need regulation. We do, but I think it's got to be more sensible than that. We need transparency. We need to know, for example, again, in the open AI case, what did they tell their agent to do? We still don't know that. We need to be able to investigate these things and have accountability. I think that we've got to bring in other constituents into this discussion, historians and ethicists and anthropologists and journalists and others. Because right now what's happening is the US cover is that the speaker of the House says, all we're going to bring together the heads of the AI companies. No! We need everybody else to sit at the table with them, community leaders and so on. We've got to invest in and make possible competition from these open-weight models. And then I think finally, in my view, we need to find ways in policy to support

25:56open AI research at universities where they have a different ethic, where their motivations are different, where we can have more accountability. And again, all of this is about creating competition to the big boys. With China and America. So as we speak, Trump and Shia are due to me. So we don't know exactly what they're going to have discussed there, but we know there is this talk around the conflict and an argument going around between Chinese AI and American AI. Is either side going to be truly honest with each other? It seems to me, it seems strange that we don't have enough transparency on AI within the US even. So in what world are they going to be transparent with the Chinese? And why would the Chinese be transparent back? So is this just all posturing? I mean, the great fear in the US is that China will beat us. Yeah. This is a singular more race that you can wear or lose, which I think is simplistic. But that's the way they think.

26:57Yeah. But what's fascinating about China, and I read a piece, I wish I could remember the author about a month or two ago, that explained that in China acts like a capitalist country in some ways, but it is not. It is a controlled economy with still a Marxist goal in mind. And part of the reason they may be releasing so many of their models, open weight, is to undercut the American economy and the American companies and get to late stage capitalism and get to what comes next. That it could be a much higher agenda at work here. That this is the tool that finally makes the Marxist prediction come true. I don't know. Can you get into Xi's mind? Xi is certainly a hell of a lot smarter than Trump. So I think he has short-term strategies and long-term strategies, whether they are that grand, I don't know. Is a problem here, and this all just comes back to again, that the,

27:58I find it hard with the US media, which it frequently focuses on personalities as opposed to the tangible, but then at the same time, sometimes it gets too into the weeds of the detail and doesn't focus on the personalities. It's a key thing here with Trump, the idea that he just does not understand the concept of him being able to win and someone else being able to win too. Right, he's a, he's a gippled vet, but he raised a really interesting question here. One way to put it would be what would populist AI look like? Yeah, that's probably a bad way because populism, of course, connotation so we don't want. But I think we are seeing it come, it's been somewhat reclaimed. There's Zora Mundani, economic populism, style of people realizing there is, there's a more left leaning way of looking at populism than what we've had. Yes, I think so. I think absolutely exactly where we're going. And so I'm editing a book series for Bloomsbury called Intelligence AI Humanity and Science of Authors. And in that process, I'm looking for ancient authors and I found this really interesting essay

29:02at Deet site by Gaye Rideas, who's a journalist, who argued that we need to redefine progress, that progress in the gilded age came out of a reaction to the industrialization and the trust and to the billionaires of the day. Right? But it came from movements, it came from movements like the labor movement that got the eight hour working day, that got the different views of health conditions, a women's suffrage, equal rights, that these notions of definitions of progress that didn't, in fact, come out of the gilded age came not from the oligarchs, but from emergent ground up movements. And what Diaz argues is that today, definitions of progress are owned by the technologists, that they say what progress is, that progress is their tools that will,

30:06and very vague promises about how it's going to eliminate all of our jobs, but make us all so relaxed and easy with pleasure and change the economy and make us all wealthy. Yeah. BS, right? So where are the movements today to take charge of this and say, let's control this technology. So sorry for the second plug in a row here, but in my book HotType, which is about the line of type, the machine that sped up setting type and was the final piece needed to create mass media. One of the fascinating stories that I write about this that I discovered is the story of labor. And so having followed the movements of captain of captain swing and the muddights and the failures, really, of their protests against feudal factory economy. In the middle of the 19th century, when steam power came in to change,

31:12publishing and make it scale, the pressmen, they were men, at first lost jobs, but then the long run because the industry scaled they game jobs. The typesetters who were setting type one damn letter at a time who were slowing up the entire process of publishing, making it very, very expensive, they at some point saw the inevitability of the machines, the machine, the light of type that I wrote about was going to come in. And you might think that they would follow the path of the muddights and captain swing and try to destroy the machines. They didn't. They realized it was inevitable. They knew they could not stand in front of it. And so they allowed publishers to install the machines on one condition, which is that we have to run it. We are the printers. Now the difference between them and the lights is they were, they had a union, a very powerful union. They were organized as a movement, a movement that did more than just take control of this technology. It brought in the hour working day of the United States. And so there's a lesson

32:16there I think in AI as well is we have to ask ourselves instead of seeing a progressive agenda of just regulating the technology of very UK reflex. Let's regulate everything. How do we instead rest control of this technology to ourselves? Because in my study of technology and media, I find that that inevitably from Gutenberg on, once a technology is known and familiar, the technology and the technologist fades into the background. And what's interesting is what the rest of us do with it. Yamavab Resort and Casino at Sandman Well is bringing the biggest laughs to the stage. Break taboos with Ali Wang on August 28th and 29th. Enjoy Ralph Barbosa's Dry Humor on September 18th and 19th. And don't miss Nikki Glacier's unapologetic comedy November 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavath Theatre dot com. Only at Yamavab Resort and Casino,

33:19celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in must be 21 to enter. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com slash teen accounts. When you're a midsize business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core working across every system and it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow AI Cloud ERP for any size business. I have a knee jerk reaction inherently towards AI in the I just see a load of AI slop and I hate it.

34:26I hate seeing these AI slop posters everywhere I go every single restaurant I go to having this and this sort of flattening of culture that you see of just all the images looking the same. However, I have come to terms with the fact that it's happening. AI is happening, people are using it and there are clearly cases where it's good, for example, audio processing. I don't know, you can use it to be really helpful in that or using it for spreadsheets or whatever else. Is that the way the Democrats need to speak about it? I'm trying to think about it. The important thing that we need to get across to people is just a sense of agency. People have to feel like that because I now, when I see AI in those purposes, I go, well, you know, if it's going to make my life easier but not eradicate it, then maybe there are some positives about that. Whereas, unfortunately, I think most people do just see horrible rubbish videos and go, okay, so it's going to take my job and what I would normally do,

35:30I guess, would then go into creative pursuits. But, oh, wait, it's making loads of shitty music and shitty art as well. So it's replacing that. It's replacing both the thing I need to do and the the nice stuff as well. Whereas, you know, we need to get it into a place where it goes, this is, you can have control of your destiny whilst using AI. Right. This is where the South Korean experiment, I think, is very interesting. If everyone has access to AI, what all will they do with it? Yeah. What agency in control do they feel they then have over it? What voice can they have in the direction of its development? Yeah. Look at Hollywood. There was a movie that I think it was at the Tribeca Film Festival, or one of the film festivals about Iran that was made entirely with AI because the real people involved couldn't speak. And the filmmaker was still able to tell their story using AI. I think the potential that AI has is that you don't necessarily have to have Warner Brothers Paramount

36:32right-wing megalith behind you to make a movie or a TV show or creativity or content. What you will, does this potentially bring down the barriers so that any of us can have a voice in the culture? Just as Hollywood was being taken over along with the news industry by a combination of private equity and VCs and Trump allies, the fact that California's train general buckled to Paramount and Warner Brothers merger, I think, is terrible for culture, terrible for news. But the truth is big ol' Hollywood is dying. Mass media are dying. The question is what replaces them? And can we use AI? It's going to get better and better and better and look less sloppy as time goes on. If it's truly again in our control, if we use it to the ends that we want, does it open up more creative voices for more people? I wrote a syllabus for a store, of course,

37:39I didn't end up teaching at Stony Brook University in AI and Creativity and it got 500 students signed up for it. Because people will want to use these tools, want to figure out how it is. I think we obviously have to have standards in our own mind of what is human and what is not. But I can't draw. But now I could use AI to illustrate something I care about. I'm not good at making bar charts. If we think about it, yeah, the spread sheet is actually a good example. Because in the old days, when my father used to do sales forecasts at home, writing down to get out of a graph paper and draw things and take pictures of it, right? Come the computer and visit Calc in the day and what followed, you could now use a computer to build these things for you. And we didn't think that was terrible at the time. We should maybe because PowerPoint is ruined human thinking. But it enabled people to express themselves in ways they couldn't before. So can we take control

38:39of AI and decide what our proper and quality uses of it? I think it's the question we should be asking, rather than, oh my god, it's all powerful and we don't know what to do with it. And so in having the panic, we accede to the power once more of the AI boy. So that's what it is. Yeah, I suppose it's, can we, can we maintain individualism with it? Because for example, you know, I sort of, if you'll be having those pines, guy, conversation with friends, and I always find it astounding whenever I speak to someone, there is a point to this story. It's attention. But who says, if I win the lottery, I would keep working. And I go, that's crazy. There's so much, I could fill my time with all of my hobbies. I'd do some stuff I would still want to speak to you, Jeff. I'd want to do the podcast, but I wouldn't do some aspects of my job. And I would fill my time by walking my dog, go into the gym, writing, doing whatever. However, I am aware that there are some people who, that's not where they find their purpose. They find their purpose

39:41completely through their work. And that's what grounds them and they enjoy that. And they would stick with it. And that's why you have these people who win the lottery, but keep doing their jobs. And I think it's just the issue with AI. It's been made to feel like it should be one size fits all for everyone. And it's how do we ensure that that's not the case that these people don't just go, there's one way of living your life. And we're going to make that happen for you. Who do these people who don't realize it's like, well, this, I like the idea of AI doing all the boring stuff for me and me just doing nice creative stuff. That's great. That would, that could suit me quite well. But I'm aware maybe there are some people who don't feel like that. And that should be fine as well. Yeah. I mean, I don't use it. Well, I use it in a lot many, many small ways. Right. I use it to transcribe to translate. Yeah. And so on. For the next book I'm working on, I'm trying to keep everything in PDFs and I'm reading them on my tablet so that I can use AI to find the quotes that I can't remember. We're somewhere in there. Yeah. Right. But, but I don't really see

40:42used to sit down and say, I want to program an agent to do something for me. No. I, it's frustrating for me because I want to learn the tools better. But I don't have the cause and reason to do it. At a higher level, I was just in San Francisco moderating a panel at Handshake, a company about that helps students get jobs. And they have a new tool around AI that students can create things and then have a portfolio of what they're showing off. In the discussion, what struck me from one of the one of the very smart panelists was, when students now go to college, if they go to college, this week, and recent Horowitz announced the creation of the Horowitz and recent academy, whether it want people to go to it instead of college and in two years, they won't become locked for norers using technology. And it's pretty damn obnoxious. It's pretty awful. But it's another kick in the kidneys to universities and university education. And

41:49how a student should now view their education is to go to where you were going a minute ago. They've got to understand their purpose. And they can have a purpose. So they can say, I like helping people. I like solving problems. Whatever that is, whatever makes them, or reflotes their vote, and gives them the tools and the power to do what they want to do in society. That's how we should view education as well as technology. Yeah. Well, Jeff, let's hope that at some point maybe some sensible people get in charge of all this stuff. But whilst they're not, I'm sure we'll keep speaking about it. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me on American Friction. Thank you. And thank you to all of you for listening. There's a link to Jeff's book Hot Type in the show notes. And if you enjoy what we do as well, remember you can back us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com forward slash American Friction where you can get episodes ad free and bonus content and merchandise. All sorts of good stuff. And if you can't back to there, we get it. But please do go rate, review and subscribe wherever you're listening to the show. I'm Jacob Jarvis. And this has been American

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