223: Zuckerberg Takes the Stand, Pete Hegseth vs. AI, and Max-Maxxing with Max Fisher

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Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Frame-mogging, the idea being that if you have a more correctly shaped frame, you will win the interaction. And winning the interaction is the way that you get ahead. And that's the only thing that matters because that's the only thing that's real. And it's like this same idea that it's like dating and relationships are fake. And it's all just a big con. So you've got to get in on the con by treating people as objects to be kind of manipulated and pushed around. And it does seem to speak to the same core nihilism that we have talked about as a very online thing, but also as not just online, but as one of the main things that had been driving our political culture for the last 10, 15 years. I was going to say, it's very Trumpian, even though Donald Trump, definitely not a looksmaxer. Much more of a jester goon. He is frame-mogging, but not on the way that the looksmaxers would suggest that you should do that. Yes, he is Burger King-maxing. Welcome to Offline. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. Max! Welcome back. Back in the chair. Oh man, it's so nice to be back. It's always such a pleasure to chat. It always makes me feel better, especially when I'm feeling bad. You know what? I was looking forward to this all week as I was jet-lagged on my flight back from Australia. I was like, at least I have Max on Friday. Max, and now, in addition to you, a great Supreme Court ruling as well. I know. I saw that. Yeah. Although I had to roll my eyes. It's like, yeah, the Supreme Court finally miraculously discovered there are limits to presidential power when he is using it in a way that will hurt Republicans in the midterms. It's like, okay, great. They're going to go back to forgetting that the president is not a king tomorrow. Don't worry. Classic. It's classic. It's like IJR. This is such a great week to have you back because there's so much offline news to discuss. Mark Zuckerberg is on trial. AI companies are feuding with the Defense Department, Hollywood, and their own employees. And we're going to talk about whether we finally hit peak clavicular and whether you or anyone knows what that means. I was really expecting, I got to tell you, the intro to be written in clavicular speak. I was like, here we go. We're trial marking Mark. You know what? We're law maxing AI. We're max maxing today. that's the title that's it we got it title of the episode just thought of that just now that's why you're an artist speaking of big questions before we get to all of that uh we got to talk about the new project you've recently launched you've gone from podcaster to youtuber with a new series called the bigger picture with max fisher uh congratulations the first video was fucking great i'm so psyched for you uh tell us all about the series oh thank you yeah we have been baking this cake for like almost a year now. So it's nice to finally pull it out of the oven. It is a bi-weekly, visual-driven, long-form show that will be exploring big questions about the world. Partnering with a guy named Johnny Harris, former guest on the show, former Vox. I actually worked with him like a decade ago at Vox. We would occasionally make videos together. And dinosaur that I am, I would spend like a week on an article and it would get like 50,000 views and I'd be like, great. And then I would spend a day making a video with Johnny about it that would get 3 million views. And I'd be like, oh, that's interesting. Time to go back to writing articles, which is clearly the way that we should be doing this. But he like went independent, went on YouTube. He reached out to me a while ago and said, you should come on. And I like had and still have some real trepidations about being on YouTube, you know, a platform and company that we have talked a lot about and whose harms I've reported on. And, you know, the thing is, is that I still believe those things, but I got tired at the same time of having these like lamentation discussions all the time with people in the industry or on the show with you about how, you know, news consumers are fleeing traditional news for social apps. And I still think that that's bad. Like, I still think the world would be a better place if we had the media system that we had 20 years ago and we all got our news from the newspaper, but we don't. And I got into this business in 2008, and the industry has been in crisis every single day of that for my entire career. And I don't want this shift to happen, but if it's going to happen, I do want to try to be, and I see this as an attempt to try to be part of making the news that people get on the increasingly hegemonic online social information ecosystem better. And I don't, there are some people who like leave traditional media and are like, you know, fuck my old employer. It's, you know, independent creators of the future. That's not how I feel. Like I still read the newspaper and still love it. I see myself as trying to establish kind of a beachhead for the values of traditional news and the things that make it important on the social web and in a way that can speak to where audiences are and where people want to get their news because I'm, you know, I'm tired of fighting them. I'm tired of trying to convince them to consume news in a way that they don't want to consume it anymore. Well, I mean, part of what we have talked about is the short form nature of social media and the sort of the infinite scroll, which we'll talk about in a second too, as one of the most damaging aspects of this. And, you know, what you're doing, which is like very compelling explainer type journalism on YouTube. You know, I don't think it's clearly nothing like that. And it's also like a very effective way, I think, in presenting like very well done journalism. Oh, thanks, man. You launched the show the day before I shot Alex Preddy with a phenomenal video about the reason ICE wears masks and what Trump and Miller's endgame is. What did you learn? So we kind of went into this video as an investigation both into ICE, but also because, you know, we're launching a new thing, an investigation into this format that is completely new for me. And we wanted this to be kind of a test case for could we find a way to give audiences the things that they like or find valuable about both traditional news and kind of independent creators, social videos in one package. and if we could find a way that this format could do things that more familiar formats might be as well suited to. Because, you know, it's not like people aren't reporting on ICE. There's a ton of, like, great reporting on ICE. There's a ton of great commentary on ICE. Like, people aren't lacking for, like, the truth or the real story about ICE. What we wanted to show and what we thought this format was uniquely suited to was what happens when you take all of that information, all of that reporting and all that commentary and take like a giant step back and look at the totality of this huge multi-arm story all at once. Because I think it's easy for people like you or me to take for granted that, you know, when you see a video on your phone of some fucking rock-headed ice chud like macing a grandma in the snow, that that isn't just that one incident, that that actually represents like the tip of the spear of this concerted plot to like remake all of American society. But that larger story is not necessarily obvious. And like, even I lose sight of the scope of it. So the main thing that I learned in trying to construct this and trying to say, let's look at the entirety of what ICE is doing every place on the ground and what everybody who is overseeing ICE has said they want it to do. Let's look at all the legal filings. Let's look at the budget documents. It's just how obvious and how unadorned their endgame is when you actually follow it out step by step. But just like as an example, because again, this is something that like will not be shocking to think, I think, to a lot of listeners, the idea that ICE is about authoritarianism. Like I had heard a lot of individual cases of ICE targeting people for criticizing Israel, which is like, why would ICE, like an immigration agency, even care about that? But I had not realized until I started putting all that together how systemic that had become and how that is being built into these billion-dollar programs that ICE is getting funding for, for monitoring what people say online to target people who speak out against it. So my hope is that what this can do for people, and if I'm doing what I want to do, which is try to exploit what's good about and leverage what's good about YouTube instead of just falling victim to what's bad about it. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I talk about ICE and tweet about ICE and post about ICE like, you know, every day and have been for the last however many months we've been going through this now. And, you know, I was, I watched your video this morning on my, started on my 5 a.m. walk to Starbucks as I was jet lagged. And it was just like so hooked and learned a ton. And I do think there's like there's such value in putting everything we've learned in perspective. And you also take great care to just deal with the facts as we have them and what the administration has said and what court filings have said. Like there's no need to exaggerate. There's no need to put a lot of spin on the ball. There's like it probably is unhelpful, as you point out, to just like talking about authoritarianism and what happens in other countries. Like you just, this is, unfortunately, this is an instance where you don't need any of that to make a case that is both compelling and terrifying. Well, like as you and I have talked about a lot, and this is something that Johnny pushed me on a lot too. Like most YouTube viewers are younger. They're like contrarian, not necessarily right wing and like a hard baked way, but that's maybe the direction that their instincts tend to go. So if you want to reach those people with a story that is like, you know, obviously it's not a secret, like fundamentally progressive, the idea that racist, fascist authoritarianism is bad, then you kind of have to think about how you're delivering that. And part of what is great about the video format is if you have good visuals, you can get people to stay with you for a long time, like 40 minutes is a long time. And it's not so different from what you guys learned with Crooked Media, that you can take what people love about podcasts, that it feels like a sense of connection and a sense of humor, and get them to stick around for a really nuanced, in-depth, hour-long policy conversation. And I think it's notable that so much of the footage you used and so much of the footage that has opened all of our eyes up to what ICE is doing comes from people holding up their phones, filming, putting it on social media, which is maybe finally and tragically a positive use case for social media and screens that you and I have been searching for for so long. I know. I found myself almost grudgingly being like, wow, this is actually a pretty effective use case for social media. And it's like the use case of social media that they promised us 15 years ago. Remember when the Arab Spring happened? I was thinking about that. Social media is going to bring democracy and liberation and freedom to people. And then it did the opposite of that. And it really feels like that. Because when you do the research or try to do the research into what's going on with ISIS, like I said, there's so much reporting that's so great. But so much of what you end up watching and consuming, and I know you've been watching a lot of these too, it's just like citizen videos. It's just like ICE runs up on somebody and somebody pops out a phone and records a video and then that gets picked up by activists and then that later gets picked up by the media. And then the next thing you know, it's in like a federal court filing. And the idea that there's this like totally decentralized, grassroots, organic, undirected, like societal pushback against authoritarianism that happens because everybody has a phone in their hand and they have apps that allow them to share those videos with everybody. I know I sound like, oh, you put out one video on YouTube and all of a sudden you're fucking Mark Zuckerberg. Well, we've also talked about how the promise of social media evolved in terms of, you know, leading to democratic transitions and creating democratic movements sort of led to like authoritarians figuring out how to use social media to sort of flood the zone with misinformation and disinformation. and I think they still have the ability to do that and they're still doing that. But I think we have probably overcorrected too far in the other direction and forgotten that there is still this power to show people images and video that they are going to believe more than Stephen Miller and Christine Ohm's lies that they told, you know, they've been telling all along, but especially in the cases of Alex Preddy and Renee Good. We have the numbers ultimately, which is one of the things that social media shows. You see that like, oh, everybody in my community hates this and they're willing to go out on the streets to like push it back. That's really powerful. Well, everyone should go check out your first video and go subscribe. It's the bigger picture with Max Fisher. Go on YouTube, check it out. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. February often feels like a nonstop parade of romance, but let's be real, navigating your love life can be confusing. Whether you're partnered up or flying solo, there's no right way to feel right now Therapy is a great way to cut through that noise helping you find your footing and gain some clarity on what you truly want Whether you care about Valentine Day or not you probably have feelings that you want to talk about with a therapist Sure yeah Life is going great That fine But, like, you've probably got some problems. The world's a little scary. Everyone does. No one's just cruising through without any care in the world, you know, especially these days. Nope. So talk to a therapist about it. 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Zuckerberg's testimony was part of a lawsuit brought against Meta and Google's YouTube by a 20-year-old woman from California identified as Kaylee or KGM in court documents. She alleges that Meta and YouTube knowingly built addictive features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and beauty filters to encourage compulsive use among children, later leading to adverse mental health effects, including her own body issues, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Zuckerberg was unsurprisingly defiant during his eight hours on the stand, saying at one point that people will want to use Instagram more because it's a valuable service, not addictive. Kaylee's is actually the first of at least 1,500 lawsuits recently filed against major tech companies by parents, teens, school districts, and state attorneys general, who all hope to hold tech giants accountable for the way their services have harmed young people. In fact, Zuckerberg was served for another one of these suits as he entered the courtroom on Wednesday. I think we have a clip. Mark Zuckerberg, you've been served. You've been served. Really no value to that clip other than just we wanted to, I thought it would be fun to watch Mark Zuckerberg being served, right? I had a great time. Man, if you're the guy at the office who serves papers, do you think that this is like your Super Bowl? It's like you're never going to get a bigger one than this. You want to tell people, you're like, guess who I got? Oh, yeah. You know what? I bet he didn't even take a fee on that one. I bet he said, I'm going to do this one for the love of the game. If anyone needs any other tech CEOs served, you have two people right here who will do that. Let's start with Kaylee's lawsuit. What do you think about the strength of her case from everything you've read and seen so far? So my understanding is that the thing that makes this case really strong is the way that it establishes liability, which is what's been really tough about bringing legal accountability for the tech companies. Because to show liability, you can't just show that, for example, Facebook, medical misinformation proliferate on its platforms. You have to actually show that a person in the world was materially harmed by decisions that the company made. And what Kaylee's case does a good job of is establishing every link in the causal chain from decisions and policies set knowingly in Menlo Park to the platform then operating in a way that they knew was going to harm users. to then compelling those users to take harmful actions via addictive features, which is kind of the main new thing that they're trying to establish in this case, to those users then suffering as a result. And it's a really short causal chain, too, is the really important thing. A lot of these cases before have been like, well, rates of depression are higher when people use Facebook more, and then it becomes very thorny to draw a straight line from Facebook implementing a feature to a person in the world has been harmed and therefore Facebook owes them money. I mean, it's fascinating because I think that the debate for so many years, as you know, was over content moderation. And will the companies do the content moderation? No. Can the government force them to? Can lawsuits force them to? And it seems so obvious now looking back, but it's just a much more difficult sort of area to prosecute these cases, I think, because it's so subjective and it's difficult. But like once you get to the design of the platforms and the algorithms, which is something you and I have talked about, is the bigger problem than the content itself. It feels like it could be a turning point in ways to trying to hold tech companies accountable. I saw some people compare it to the tobacco cases in the 1990s. What do you make of that comparison and whether this might be a turning point? I actually think that that comparison makes a ton of sense because these cases are meant to address a similar problem that the big tobacco cases in the 1990s were addressing, which is that it's not enough to show, like you were saying, that social media is harmful because as a user, it's still your choice to use it. And it's your choice to take whatever actions you take as a result. So if Facebook promotes that medical misinformation and you die from treating your lymphoma from ivermectin, Facebook can still say, like, that was your choice. It was your choice to get a medical recommendation on Facebook. It was your choice to take ivermectin. And when the big tobacco lawsuits happened, the link between cigarettes and cancer had been established for 40 years. It was not new information at all. Legally it had been established. The kill shot in those 1990s cases was to confront the idea that the defense that big tobacco had always made, that customers were making their own informed choice as to whether or not to smoke. And therefore, the consumer was responsible for the consequences of smoking cigarettes. But what those cases in the 90s proved is that the companies had made their products deliberately addictive in order to basically physically compel people, kind of at the point of a biological gun, to smoke those cigarettes more. And that made the companies legally responsible for smoking that took place as a result of the choices to make these addictive features. in, which is why these cases are focusing so much on addictive features. And it's why they're focusing so much on harms to children, because the legal bar is lower for showing that a child has been led to do something. Like, we kind of take for granted the idea that adults will have more personal responsibility and are more responsible for a decision. But there are a lot of laws premised in the idea that adults can be held responsible for leading a child to do something harmful. It's also, I think, notable in terms of how the companies and meta is responding. And Zuckerberg responded on the stand because they're trying to defend the fact that they track engagement and how long you spend on the platform. And I think Zuckerberg at one point was like, well, we just do that now to compare with our competitors. That's the only reason we care about how much time is spent on the platform, which tells me at least that they know that the weakness of their case here is the fact that they purposely tried and designed the platform to try to maximize engagement. You can pull up right now like 100 different videos of Mark Zuckerberg or Adam Masseri talking about all the ways that they juice the algorithm to try to boost engagement. I mean, you know, the videos are like 2016, 2012, whatever. But this is their business model, which again, like the business model with cigarettes is not nicotine. It's addiction. And that was the big breakthrough that came in those trials. And once they proved that, and it's helped, like you're saying, it's helpful that we just all fucking know this is true. That this is not something, it's not like societal harms. It's like kind of an abstract, complex case to make. But like, is Facebook designed to maximize your time on it? Of course it is. So they make money. Right. I'm fascinated that Snapchat and TikTok settled ahead of these cases and that Meta and Google did not. You make anything of that? That was my big question mark, too, because like you said, this is one of like a zillion cases. And the main importance of this case is not whether Kaylee herself receives damages as a result of the lawsuit. the main importance of the case is whether it establishes legally that one can sue a social media company for harm under this set of like you designed features that were deliberately addictive. So I don't know if the I think the big question is whether the snap and TikTok settlements in some way do something that shield them from that form of liability in the future, because that's the main thing they care about is not this one case, but whether there is an established legal precedent. But I am very curious about exactly that. I hope that we'll get some more information about what's in the settlements. For sure. For sure. So the AI industry has had quite a couple of weeks. Before we get into the details, you and I haven't talked about AI in a while. How are you feeling about things where they are on a scale of annoying slop to apocalypse soon? Look, holding that everything that I've ever said about the harms of AI and my absolute zero faith in the AI industry are still absolutely true. And I think the singularity is not coming. I don't think that we're going to date AIs except in the saddest way imaginable, which does seem to be happening more and is pretty bad for society. There do seem to be more useful use cases out there. You read a lot more about medical imaging that uses AI and has crazy good success rates of identifying tumors early on. You read it about its use in law firms for doing research work. And I think the reason I'm optimistic about that is not because I think AI is going to cure cancer. Although you talk to people who work in any medical field and they will be like, this is actually pretty helpful and pretty good. The reason that that makes me feel less pessimistic overall is that if those use cases become profitable enough, the AI companies will not go in the direction that I think they would go otherwise, which is to push it into really harmful uses of making us all want to fall in love with an AI, like chatbots that will take the place of our human relationships, like filling our feeds with AI slop that's going to ruin our appreciation of art. So I'm not saying we're definitely going towards the better path, but I do think that there is potentially a use case of AI that is not all bad that I feel like we're seeing the outlines of. Yeah. I'm still nervous about, it's like, why not both? Totally. No, 100%. But I think what I'm realizing and have realized in the last several months, I think, is just like any other technology that has developed, right? There is, and maybe more so in the case of ASN, so much more powerful, there is a really good case for this technology to be harnessed for incredible good. And there is also a case and maybe a probability that it will be harnessed for incredibly bad things, whether intentionally or just because profit motive and carelessness and political goals have, you know, leads certain people that are running these companies astray. And I think my biggest fear is that all of our political problems right now are rendering us unable to sort of put any kind of guardrails or even have any intelligent, thoughtful debate around whether and how and in what ways we unleash what is clearly an incredibly powerful technology. Yeah, I think there are a lot of ways that it will mirror and exacerbate whatever direction our broader political culture is going in. And it's tough to define causality, but with social media in the 2010s, our political culture obviously took a pretty horrible turn for a number of reasons. And social media was driving some of those. And in other ways, it was reflecting and exaggerating the back end of the culture. And AI, especially with its potential for deep fakes and disinformation, you know, if we are pushing in a bad direction politically, I'm sure that AI will be like part of that. But, you know, if things can get turned around, then maybe that constrains the harm that AI would do. Yeah. So last week, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT, their flagship product, would begin showing ads on their free tier. kicking off a wave of backlash from users and technology experts and their own employees. Zoe Hitzig, a former researcher at OpenAI, published a scathing op-ed about the decision in the New York Times entitled, OpenAI is making the mistakes Facebook made. I quit. In it, she details the ways that ChatGPT has accumulated an unprecedented archive of users' data and her worries that ChatGPT will, in the future, manipulate the information it provides to users based upon that data is it sees users more as consumers. What did you make of the op-ed? What's your level of concern about AI advertisements? Could it really be worse than the Facebook and the Google ads? I mean it only has to be that bad If it as bad as Facebook or Google Ads that plenty bad enough I think that the op made a good point was that the biggest concern I think here is not so much that OpenAI will skew its results to please an advertiser or something like that But the biggest concern is, like you said, exactly what happened with Facebook and the other platforms, which is just running ads, incentivizes you as a company to mass surveil and profile and manipulate users, which is something that we just take for granted that these companies do. And they're not doing it in the sense of trying to manipulate you into buying a product sold by an advertiser. They're manipulating you to spend more time on the platform. So as soon as you are an advertisement-driven platform, your entire incentive structure changes to maximizing screen time, which is not really something we need people doing more of. And it's hard to imagine that that problem could get even worse, but this technology is incredibly powerful. We don't really know what it's capable of, but we know that something that it really zeroes in on is human interaction in a way that the old platforms never did. And it really zeros in on the way that it appeals to people and tries to connect to people's emotions. And even though it is clumsy and obvious of that, it's obviously at least a little bit effective. And you do worry about, okay, well, we're going to build a friend that is going to say whatever they have to say to get you to spend as much time talking to them as possible so that you will just look at the infinite scroll ads on the bottom. That's scary. Yes. I talked to Amanda Askell, who wrote and has developed Claude's constitution at Anthropic. Oh, cool. For last week's episode. And it's like, okay, I know she works for Anthropic, and they are selling a product as well. But it is notable that in the constitution itself, they have directed Claude to not maximize engagement with people through its answers. and I recently switched from partly to prepare for the interview, but now I just have stuck with it. I've changed from ChatGPT to Claude. And sure enough, it feels a lot different because after giving you the answers you're asking for, Claude doesn't do the follow-up. And can I do this for you? Maybe I can do this for you. And like, like ChatGPT is always asking you if you want more because they want to keep you on. And it's not as sycophantic as ChatGPT. Now, And of course, we talked a little bit too about the fight between OpenAI and Anthropic via the Super Bowl ads. Anthropic ran a bunch of Super Bowl ads basically criticizing OpenAI for running the ads. And then Sam Altman hit back with this very long Bill Ackman length tweet about how Anthropic's just a product for rich people. and, you know, so they're going to work out the fight over the business models. But it is interesting to me that whether Anthropic succeeds or stays true to that mission or not, it is very clear that there is a discussion going on in these companies about the value of maximizing user engagement in terms of, like, how they're going to make money and keep people on the platform or whether there's alternative sources of revenue to keep these companies going that don't require ads on the platform. It's fascinating. It's very interesting to see these differences in how the companies address it. And obviously, all of these companies have an interest in maximizing or emphasizing those differences, and they're probably more similar than they are different in a lot of ways. I've had the same reaction to you about Anthropic and Claude. I feel like everything I read about Anthropic, and I want to be really careful not to fall into the trap of Anthropic is the good one, because I think that's not exactly what we're saying. But they do, at least for the moment, seem to be making a show of trying to be the ones who are responsible. There was a really good long profile of them in the New Yorker recently where they talked a lot about the internal decision making about how they steer the agent one way or another. And again, they have an interest in presenting that sort of image. But I think it is, even if you take the most cynical view and say that, oh, this is all just marketing and PR, it's at least a good sign that Anthropic believes that there is a lane for them as the like responsible AI company that is going to have an agent that will like actually have, you know, useful functions for you rather than just the thing that is the most addictive. That is the like chat GPT seems to have kind of become like, well, it's the default you have on your phone. It's the thing you pull up instead of Google. It's a thing you just like spend time fucking around with on your phone. I don't know if that will actually make them the good one, but they, you know, it is, it is funny just the like branding of it. Like they clearly want to be like the whole foods of AI. Yeah. Another data point for this argument is also in the news this week. Axios reports that Pete Hegseth may designate Anthropic a quote supply chain risk, which would mean no company or contractor can work with the defense department if they also work with Anthropic. The reason Hegseth is threatening to punish Anthropic is because the company reportedly wants to make sure that the government and specifically the military, can't use AI to, quote, spy on Americans en masse or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement. Jesus Christ. But we're told that the Pentagon claims that's, quote, unduly restrictive and, quote, unworkable. They also claim that they only want the military to be able to use AI for, quote, lawful purposes. Uh-huh. This all comes on the heels of a Wall Street Journal report that Anthropics Claude was used to help plan the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Anthropic at the moment is the only AI tool contracted with the Department of Defense to work on classified networks. But of course, the Defense Department is working with Google, OpenAI, and all the rest of them. So whether or not we can be assuaged that Anthropic is a good actor, I think the larger issue is, even if they are in a very competitive field, isn't it very possible and even likely that the government or other governments are just going to find their own AI models to use for, you know, ill intent? Awful stuff, yeah. No, I'm sure somebody will be able to, they'll find one of these companies that will do it. And I'm sure Hegg said to some extent, like, yes, I'm sure he's trying to get Anthropic to like bend to his will, but he also just loves having a culture war enemy. So it might just be like, you know, he didn't like the way somebody from Anthropic spoke to him in a meeting, so he's just going to whip something up just because he gets him back on Fox News that he's going to kill the woke AIs. And you can tell that the government is trying to, because I think Anthropic has been out there trying to put in place these guidelines and ethical and all that kind of stuff, they are going to be painted by the right as the woke AI. And pretty soon, Grok will be firing all our weapons. Right. Telling your AI not to bomb the Middle East is the new DEI that they're going to bar. And if this AI won't bomb the Middle East for us, we'll find another one. Which just goes to show it's like you can't, again, whether the companies have good intentions or not, whether they stick with those good intentions or not, you can't trust the companies. There's no getting around needing a government and a political system. And now many governments working together all around the world to agree on guidelines for artificial intelligence. Like there's just no getting around that. My absolute dream scenario, which will never happen. It's a pipe dream. But if you just really live in fantasy land, is what if we had a branch of government and they existed just to pass laws? And some of those laws could even constrain what the executive branch of government did. Now, it's a silly idea. I don't think it'll ever go anywhere. But I do think that if we had that, I think that it would make a big difference. What if then you had an international body made up of all the representatives from all the different governments? and they came together to sort of work out some kind of international global guidelines, rules. I know you're thinking it's the Board of Peace, but it's not the Board of Peace. No, you're talking about the Jewish one world government, right? I know we try not to talk about on the show because we're not supposed to reveal its existence, but I think that's true. Yeah, this is the Rothschilds are in charge there. I completely agree with all of that. Even if we had that, the thing that I worry about is that at some point, the AI bubble will start to, if not burst, deflate a little bit. And then there's going to be very fierce competition among these companies to get any contract they can get their hands on. And I think then it's just like, if DOD wants to do something terrible with AI, the only solution to that is have a more responsible DOD. Offline is brought to you by Quintz. A well-built wardrobe is about pieces that work together and hold up over time. That's what Quince does best. Premium materials, thoughtful design, and everyday staples that feel easy to wear and easy to rely on, even as the weather shifts. Quince has the everyday essentials I love with quality that lasts. Organic cotton sweaters, polos for every occasion, lighter jackets to keep you warm in the changing seasons. The list goes on. 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You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Finally, it looks like all the big studios and streamers are finally waking up to the possibility that AI may actually kill Hollywood. This week, ByteDance, you remember them, the Chinese company behind TikTok. They released a new AI model called C-Dance 2.0 that can basically use any existing movie content or IP to create extremely realistic video clips within seconds. Within hours of C-Dance's release, the internet was flooded with videos using copyrighted material like AI-generated Marvel's Spider-Man, AI-generated NFL highlights, and a viral video of an AI-generated Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise. Let's check that out. I mean and then that wasn't even the part where they both they both talk too and it's like it's spooky I had to turn it off then yeah I had to turn it off when they started talking it's real uncanny valley shit they did it like this is it what started is clumsy slop it is now Oh, it's here. It's here. We are a long way from Will Smith eating spaghetti. Although that was going around again, too. So almost immediately, studios across Hollywood, including Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Warner Brothers, sent cease and desist orders to ByteDance to halt the use of copyrighted material. So far, ByteDance has said it, quote, respects intellectual property rights and has promised to increase safeguards. It's funny, like, these clips started going around. The next day, I saw the ByteDance statement that they were going to, like, put, you know, we're now putting in place safeguards. You're not going to be able to do this anymore. And then like two days after that, I still saw the clips everywhere and I couldn't tell if it was like old clips or people just getting around it. But like, do you think the studios will actually be able to stop this? So this has actually convinced me more than ever that AI is not a risk to Hollywood in the way that we have been thinking about it. And I think it is a risk, but I think in like a different way than that is usually discussed. Because when you look at these clips, you feel nothing. Right. Like there's no entertainment value. The only value that it has whatsoever is the way that it's riffing off of real people who we know about. And the way that it's like making a reference to like, wouldn't it be funny if these two actual human beings who you have an actual relationship with had a like little fight on screen for a few seconds? And it really reminded me that the things that we care about, and by we, I mean like you and I, and I think like people who listen to this show care about in our art and our entertainment are things that AI think can't reproduce. And I don't know we'll ever be able to just like the level of creativity and the human authenticity. and like you go see a movie you go see a brad pitt movie not because you're going to see a person who looks like brad pitt like do polygon shapes on a screen but because you have a relationship to brad pitt the movie persona and that like makes you more interested in seeing him on screen and you feel the same way about other creators i do think the risk for this that i think we have been missing a little bit the forest of the trees for is that i think what this threatens is the ecosystem of short-form video is the absolute bottom of the period. I don't think Hollywood needs to be scared about this. I think if you're a TikTok creator, you need to be scared of this stuff because this stuff is cheap to produce. And the audience where it's really succeeding are like Facebook doom scrollers. Older people who spend a lot of time on their iPad scrolling Facebook, watching nonsense videos. That's the audience for these clips. And that's the audience that has really been consuming AI slop in big numbers. And I think that that's, you know, it's never going to replace prestige television, never going to replace Mad Men. But it might be the thing that people spend an hour scrolling instead of watching Two Men and a Baby. I mean, a couple things on this. One, prestige television commands a lot of good reviews and awards and gets the views from libs like us. It's the top of the pyramid. It's the top of the pyramid and sort of mass-produced entertainment. I think this could replace that no problem. In some ways, and whether this is probably bad for big studios, but maybe good for creators, it might have the potential to empower. Like if you are a writer and you come up with a very moving script for a movie or a television show you can now turn that into that show Or I mean at some point maybe not now but at some point with using this technology you could turn it into a whole film with tools that were not available to you last year. And by the way, you could probably do it with like, I don't know, 1% of the staff in the crew that's on a movie. and I wonder then where the actors come into this, right? Because like you said, you obviously can't be stealing people's likenesses, but maybe people do. And then what if you don't need Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, but you just have an artificially created actor that you imbue with all the words and all the lines that you write yourself or that AI gives you a first draft of that's not great. And then you decide, okay, well, I'm going to make it creative and wonderful and meaningful and all the things that we value in art. And then that becomes the next big movie. So I don't worry about it becoming the next big movie because I think even if you could have an AI that designed something as good as a big movie, I don't think that people would go unless they knew it was real people in it. And I don't think that you would anyway because it can only iterate on things that already exist. Like the thing that make, like I just rewatched one battle after another. The thing that makes Leo's performance in it great is what he's doing that's original. If you made an AI slop version of one battle after another, I'm sure you could make it look like something that already existed. But then why would you go watch that instead of the thing that already existed that's much more exciting because you know that it's authentic? I do think that, to your point, though, it does threaten this stuff at kind of like the bottom but also much larger tiers of what we produce and consume in our media. I think a lot about the conversations I've had with designers and illustrators about AI. The people who do really basic illustrations for corporate clients who want an icon to go somewhere on their website or something have really been hit by AI. Because now the marketing manager who is going to hire them to design that logo just makes it themselves on AI and doesn't hire the designer. But at the same time, the people I know who are doing higher-end design work, where it's designing the entire look of a show, those people love AI. Because the client still needs to hire me because they still need a human's mind and eye and creativity. Judgment, yeah. Right. But now I, as that designer, am able to do 10 jobs in the time that it would have taken me to do one because I can use AI to come up with a bunch of different mock-ups I can show the client about my different ideas before I spend a lot of time actually crafting one of them. And I think we're going to see more of that bifurcation in creative fields where, you know, I don't think the day will ever come that AI replaces like the next Paul Thomas Anderson movie. But I think there will be a ton of like stuff that you have on in the background that will start to become AI. And I think that stuff is really going to suck. Yeah. Well, speaking of people who may or may not be real, I want to talk about clavicular. Good transition. Now, if you know who I'm talking about and are sick of hearing about him, congrats. You are a terminally online sicko, just like me. You're online maxing. Yes, exactly. If you don't, an even bigger congrats and apologies for what we're about to discuss. Clavicular is a 20-year-old streamer who the New York Times described as, quote, a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed young men. In the past few weeks, Clavicular, born Braden Peters in West Orange, New Jersey, has gone from a relatively unknown kickstreamer to the pages of GQ as normal people attempt to make sense of what's called looks maxing. Clavicular's unusual borderline white supremacist ideology that pursues physical appearance at any cost. So you may have stumbled upon dozens of videos over the past few weeks of him getting into fights at nightclubs, hanging with notorious douchebags like Andrew Tate, Sneeko, and Nick Fuentes, or getting frame-mogged by frat boys at Arizona State to achieve his own appearance clavicular has gone to some pretty extreme ends procuring testosterone supplements off the dark web taking anabolic steroids and even hitting himself in the face with a hammer which he believes has improved his jawline not kidding about that Max you look great have you also been bone smashing? I've found that my bone smashing is really it's you know just with your morning coffee just a little bit of bone smashing there's something about the whole like incel culture that treats everything as like you either have to be the like ultra Chad or you're the saddest beta in the world. That just makes me feel pleased as punch to be like a five and a half and like very happy with that. And you haven't been like Clavicular was smoking meth just to help with your appetite. Well, that's really none of your business. When I am or I'm not smoking, listen, I'm not a crooked employee anymore. so I can smoke whatever I want. Thank you very much. You know, I don't know if we have specific guidelines against smoking meth, at least in the office. So it is funny. It's like this has been, you know, people have known about Clavicular for quite some time. It sort of broke out into the mainstream, like into sort of the political realm and, you know, Twitter and everything else. When Michael Knowles from the Daily Wire interviewed Clavicular and he started talking about sort of the difference between Gavin Newsom and J.D. Vance. And even though, like, is right-wing coded in many ways, and, you know, like, white supremacist coded in some ways as well, was basically like, oh, I would never vote for J.D. Vance over Gavin Newsom because Gavin Newsom mogs J.D. Vance. And, you know, J.D. Vance is obese, and it was this whole fucking thing. So then, from then on, it just, like, it broke containment. Now it's lame. Now people like us are talking about it. I know, right. I know. Now that we're talking about it, it's over. That's right. Although it does, it makes you wonder, what if the democratic path to the White House in 2028 is wine moms, podcast listeners, and far-right incels. It's not the coalition I would pick, but, you know, sometimes you got to go to voters where they are. I believe in a big tent. Just as we were preparing for this today and the tariff decision came down, there was a tweet from a Democratic communication staffer. This is how you really know. It's over. Breaking. Trump brutally law-mogged by SCOTUS for tariff maxing. A decision sure to spike White House's cortisol. I saw that too. I had such a laugh on it. And I was like, if these jokes are for me now, then it's really like it couldn't be more dead. Why do you think this has captured so much of our attention? Shock value? Humor? I mean, look, having previously been a part of the young generation that is now the old generation. Once upon a time. Remember the young generation. Yes, every once in a while, the rest of society discovers what you're up to. And their shock and horror just always drives the news cycle for a little bit. I would argue that far-right insult as mass culture is a little bit worse than avocado toast. But maybe that's just the millennial supremacist in me. No, I think it's just like, I mean, it's partly just like, it's funny. Like, the way that they talk is ridiculous. The language is very funny. Right, the language is funny. it's fun to like i've obviously used it like 18 times already today like it's fun to pick up it's fun to throw around i do think there is also like a glimmer of wrecking like i think we all instantly kind of recognize the vague contours of what this culture is even if like i was reading about like the looks max and community and like who they are and where they come from but it's like you kind of already know as soon as you like see this guy and you see like the videos and what they're interacting with and seeing that there are still these remnants of like or not even remnants It's like incel culture and like men's rights, like angry, aggrieved loners in their basement to like Andrew Tate is like still with us. And just kind of like off simmering somewhere into this whole subculture that might not even know where it comes from is like kind of darkly fascinating. There are also, unfortunately, when you really dig into this, I say unfortunately because digging into it is unfortunate. it. There is like a, you can see why there's a slight difference, but important difference between the Nick Fuentes, pure sort of white nationalist right-wing ideological types and the looks maxers who will say racist, bigoted things and sort of tried to be claimed by, or at least the right wing tries to claim them, even though it turns out like clavicular doesn't really give a shit about politics at all. And the reason why they're lumped together, I think, is maybe best summed up in the GQ story about this by a looks maxer known as Pariah the doll, who was asked to describe why clavicular has gone so viral. And he says, I think it's because the only chance at upward mobility as a normal white guy in America is to be extremely beautiful and an online troll. That's interesting. That's such a sad statement, but also I'm like, yeah, that's it. That's what this is reduced to, right? Which is that they think, and that is what clavicular is. The only way you succeed is you got to be as good looking as possible. And the only way you get attention is to be as trollish as possible. And so there are no other deep ideologically held beliefs other than that. And just like, all that matters is me getting attention and me getting some kind of recognition and whatever I have to say, whoever I have to hurt, whatever I have to do, whatever I have to like stoop to is fine because that's the only thing that matters in life. And that is a very like extremely online kind of belief that I think that probably too many young men have today. Right. It's the same animating belief that gave rise to like the Insol movement, the men rights movement, like Gamergate, as we know it. This belief that the system at large is rigged. Like in their case, it was dating and relationships. It seems like it's still kind of part of the look-maxing worldview, although it's also much more about masculinity and whiteness, but this sense that everything is fake, everything is cynical, and everybody is just lying and being manipulative, and it's zero-sum and do whatever you have to do to get ahead. And it kind of takes that as a given and says, well, we're going to play that game and get into that, and that's how you have this entire worldview that's about, you know, like frame-mogging, the idea being that if you have a more correctly shaped frame, you will win the interaction. And winning the interaction is the way that you get ahead, and that's the only thing that matters because that's the only thing that's real. And it's like this same idea that it's like dating and relationships are fake, and it's all just a big con, so you've got to get in on the con by treating people as objects to be kind of manipulated and pushed around. And it does seem to speak to the same core, like nihilism that we have talked about is like a very online thing, but also is not just online, but it's like one of the main things that had been driving our political culture for the last 10, 15 years. I was going to say, it's very, it's very Trumpian, even though it's very Donald Trump, definitely not a looks maxer. Much more, much more of a jester goon. He is frame mogging, but not on the way that the looks maxers would suggest that you should do that. Yes, he is Burger King maxing. Yeah, no, you're right. It is very Trumpy. He did have a cortisol spike at that press conference today. And he was definitely gesture-gooning some of the reporters. The tweet was right. The tweet was correct. They were right that the White House's cortisol levels were spanked. But you're right. And it's like, I know this is something we've talked about a thousand times, but it's like, how do you convince people that like, actually there is a social contract? Or wouldn't it be great if there was? Yes. Or if you buy into the idea of a collective good and a society and institutions, then like, we can actually all be happy together. Like, as a society, like working together instead of constantly working against each other and seeing one another's threats that have to be, you know, frame-mogged away. And it is something that is building a culture. It's going to take more than laws. It's going to take people like showing others that there is a better example to follow. Right. But anyway, it's been really fun Max Maxing with you today. Oh, thanks, man. Yeah. Anytime. Anytime you want to Max Max, I'm ready to do it. But not, crucially, we're not mocking. We're not mocking. Yeah. I mean, we're mocking Mark Zuckerberg, but we're not, you know. We did some real mocking of Mark Zuckerberg today. Austin's ready to run away and quit. It's shaking his head. Yeah, that's right. I was texting with Austin earlier, and we were talking about some of this stuff. And I was like, do people know what the Arab Spring is in your generation? Austin is the youngest person I've ever met. So I was like, do young people know what the Arab Spring is? And he was like, kind of, but they know gamer game more. And I was like, well, I'm going to fucking kill myself. That's the worst thing I've ever heard. On that note, I got to jump into another recording. So we're just going to end it here. Max. Perfect. Good to see you, buddy. All right, pal. Take care. Anytime. See ya. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, email us at offlineatcrooked.com. And if you're as opinionated as we are, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. For ad-free episodes of Offline and Pod Save America, exclusive content, and more, Go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. If you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and the other ones for original content, community events, and more. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Illich Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Jarek Centeno is our sound editor and engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Dilan Villanueva and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Thank you. 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