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