Jamie, right. So we're in a very interesting
time in humanity, the Internet, AI conversations, echo chambers,
you know, all the trends, right? What we're going to talk about
the current set of the Internet, where we are right now and the
subcultures that exist within it.
But before we do all of that, it'll be great as an
introduction for the guests that do not know about your work.
Can you tell us about your work, what you've been up to?
And then we'll dive into the bottlenecks that you've been
solving and that you've seen from the start of your career
till the year is 2020. Right, thanks.
Thanks for having me. I guess I've for the last 15
years, I've just been trying to explain what strange things have
been going on in our digital universe to pretty much to
ordinary people. But there's always these huge
changes in technology happening. And about two to three years
later or sort of the ordinary person is sort of hit, the wave
hits them and they don't know what's going on.
And I feel like I'm always trying to be like one year ahead
of that wave that's hitting the ordinary.
I see what's going on and I can try and work out what it means
for people and then explain it because so much really about
what technology does to the world.
It's not about the tech like the specifics of machine learning or
the specifics of how dark net encryption works.
It's what happens when when people are using that.
How does it change our behaviour?
How does it change how we relate to each other, how we understand
information, how we understand politics, media.
So that's been my, my, my thing throughout and I've just always
been fascinated by the, the, the weird subcultures that are often
foretelling how the rest of us will behave.
So I, I've actually started working on the, the way, the way
I go into this is so weird, right?
So weird. 2009 There is this football hooligan group called
the English Defence League going around different cities doing on
offline protests about immigration, Islam and stuff
like that, led by Tommy Robinson.
And I realised this was not an offline football hooligan group.
This was a Facebook group with a tiny militant offline wing.
And I thought, I wonder how I could get to the Facebook group
because the Facebook group was huge.
It was bigger than the political parties, it was massive and no
one's looking at that. So I think what if I run a
Facebook advert like you were trying to sell jeans, targeting
supporters of the English Defence League, and rather than
selling them something, I'll ask them to fill in a survey about
their opinions. I'll spend £20 on this on Friday
night, come back on Monday morning, 1000 members of the EDL
had filled in my survey. I was like, this whole the the
digital world is offering us an amazing way to get to people
that you'd never see, you'd never meet, you'd never find,
would never talk to you. And it's also changing the way
political movements are being shaped.
And from that point on, I was working on online conspiracies I
wrote about, I set up a research group looking at AI in 2010.
I wrote a book about the dark net in 20 14 where I was, you
know, spending loads of time on Internet like weird subcultures,
neo Nazi forums, darknet drugs markets, eating disorder forums,
meeting the people that were part of them.
And it just kind of went on from that.
I did a podcast with the BBC about the missing crypto queen,
biggest crypto Ponzi scam in history that we uncovered.
So I'm going on and on because that shows how old I am.
I've been around for so long. It's like when you scroll the
date on a on a ticket. And it gets longer and longer.
Could they just start in 1980s? Surely AI just to be kind.
Of AI could sort of do a screen grab and be like, let's start
him off somewhere a bit closer to his date of birth, save him
some time. And then most recently, I've
written this book called How to Talk to AI and How Not To about
these language models that seemingly overnight have turned
up and suddenly a billion people around the world are using them
constantly for everything and really don't understand, do not
know how they work, what they do, their strengths, their
limits, nothing. So yeah, it's been, it's been
pretty wild, actually. So how did we get here?
Because you see a constant trend.
For example, there was the dark boom and the Internet, what was
happening and social came about. And then what you get is you
always get what I like to call like the the nerds and the
enthusiasts. That started off right.
And I'm like, right now I'm in an echo chamber where I believe
that everybody is like experimenting and building stuff
on Claude. And then I go outside of that
echo chamber and I speak to everybody else and they don't
even know what I'm speaking about, right?
And, and I've seen that trend happen at social and I've seen
that trend happen again with AI. Well, crypto, we're talking
about the crypto queen. And I'm seeing the things, the
same thing happening again with AI.
And what happens is you get a small bunch of people that are
early, they do some stuff, everybody else hears about it,
but they stay in a hole and then it impacts them.
And then the next thing comes in, same trend, same trend
changer. Why does that seem to happen
that way? Well, I think there's a, it's a
good question. And I've always found like when
I was when I was working on the dark net, the thing I found was
that it was, it was crypto anarchists and drug dealers who
were pioneering how to use crypto coins, encrypted
messaging systems. It were, these were the guys
that were building all this technology first working out how
to use it and then suddenly went mainstream five years later.
The same with the English Defence League.
It was the IT was groups like that that were figuring out
social media is a new form of sort of political persuasion,
Like we, we can form new groups. And I think the reason is maybe
it was always this way to some extent.
Outsiders, criminals, radicals, people on the fringes often feel
like the mainstream system, the legacy systems block them out.
They don't, they don't let them. They don't let them in.
They silence them. They, the media won't pay
attention to them. The established financial
services won't help them of them.
So they are often quite early adopters of any new technology
and they're experimenting with it.
They're figuring out solutions, opportunities.
How could I use Bitcoin to create a payment mechanism for
anonymous drug deals? So I think when there's because
because the all these new media systems and payment systems and
all these different technological systems have
arrived, outsiders are like, whoa, I wonder if I could, I
wonder if I could use it for this thing or that thing.
And then and then they come up with amazing solutions and
possibilities that other people then think, oh, Bitcoin could
actually be quite good for another thing too.
And you've already worked it out and now I'm going to try it.
And then JP Morgan and Barclays Bank start investing billions in
it and it's made all the drug dealers extremely rich.
It seems like they. Because they hold thousands of
these bitcoins. Oh, so everybody who was in
early, of course, which was, which was to some extent the
crypto curious. I mean, I, I ended up making,
got a lot of money simply because I bought a few Bitcoin
to see what the interface was like.
I wasn't really thinking of it as a currency because I'm, I was
convinced that the user interface was deeply flawed and
that there needed to be a way to repackage it to make it more
comprehensible. So I was purely pissing around
and then ended up making a sort of five figure sum.
I also bought, I also I also bought a hardback book at one
point which has subsequently cost me £8000 because I bought a
hardback book for 1/4 of a Bitcoin back in the early days.
But by the way, they're far worse stories than that.
They're people who have a Chinese meal that's cost them
half a million. I've got some I've got some
really bad stories as well. We many of us have, but I was
out in a crypto anarchist commune in Prague like this was
when Bitcoin was maybe 10 dollars $15 and just and you
know, and you could only buy things in Bitcoin there nothing
they wouldn't take Fiat currency.
So I I found the little payment card that I had from that trip
about two years ago and realised they had some small change
leftover from a coffee I'd bought.
And that small change was about £500 worth of Bitcoin.
I was like, how much was the coffee?
How much do you think? I don't know?
10 thousand 20,000 lbs. Yeah, but you're right, the
curious, the people that were experimenting and it did make a
lot of people a lot of money who were already like interested in
the alternatives. What can we do differently?
What's weird, I don't trust. And it's a small percentage of
the population, broadly speaking.
Yeah, very small population. Yeah, the population.
They usually say that where you find new innovation is usually
with the military or in vice industries, right?
Pornography. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're usually. Online payment was pioneered by
the porn industry, I think. That's true.
And so was pop up, pop up ads were porn, porn, porn created
and a lot of a lot of self the sort of camming community, the
webcamming community, they were all fascinated by crypto.
I spent a lot of time with the web, with web casts, actually
sat in on a big threesome as one for one of my in one of my
books, like behind the scenes watching how they were doing it.
And they were obsessed with crypto because they were like,
we're so sick of these platforms taking such a big cut of our
money. Is there a peer-to-peer system?
So they were, they were getting loads they would make, they
would have made loads of money if you know the people that got
into that. So it is, it's true.
It's true because they have to be, they have to pioneer, they
have to try something different. Criminals are also so not just
the military, but the criminals they're always looking for, like
how could we use these technologies really cleverly?
One, how do you stay a step away from mass adoption and
litigation, right? So when you go into a new place
that's not been governed yet, that's where a lot of the the
upside is driven in these industries, right?
That's why they're constantly looking for that innovation.
That's right. And now that world, which was
this exciting, weird, pioneering online space for the radicals
and the outsiders to get together and experiment and try
new things, suddenly became the thing all of us were on all the
time. So those got, you know, those
people were so early to it and doing interesting things.
And that's one of the reasons why you'll often find these
outside movements. They do so well online.
Like so much of the the early Donald Trump push was was weird.
4 Chan and Reddit groups, the Pepe the Frog memes, the Red
Pill community. People that were 16/17/18 when 4
Chan and Reddit first exploded are now like geriatric
millennials who are the core voters of Donald Trump.
And do you see any similarities because going back to the crypto
industry? And I think there's a lot of
lessons that we can learn from that period with what's
happening in AI now. What what are some of that?
And we talked about the crypto Queen, like what was happening
because how I got made aware of crypto.
So I was at Gym Shark at the time around 2017 and everybody
was buying like Ethereum and everyone was talking about it.
So I wasn't early. It was still like more
expensive, but I was early enough to put some money in.
Do OK. So I was early, now the time is
felt late, didn't it? But now we're sorry.
Now you know it's early. Like it actually helped me with
the deposit for a house right? You guys, do you realize I was
sitting with these crypto millionaires here?
Unfortunately not. But the cool thing, I think what
I've learned is all about temperament and knowing when to,
to, to let go, right? Because the big thing was not
because a lot of people were just like going through the
motions, right? And think the key thing was know
your number, pull out and then live to fight another day.
Whereas a lot of people just kept like putting like the, the,
the, the, the things that they own into it.
That's when it starts to get a little bit weird and crazy,
right? But we've always saw with crypto
how it became like a cult like thing and became widespread.
And then you saw that it was with Web 3, right?
You're seeing these trends that come about.
A few people go in, they benefit from that hype.
And then all of a sudden no one's speaking about it anymore.
And I wanted to know whether the similarities with what we saw
with crypto, crypto Web 3 and the blockchain space is what
we're seeing in AI today. Is that like a trend that we
should be paying attention to? Well, I mean, as a sort of as a
meta rule, hype, just that the hype of every new technology on
that, the hype cycle seems to get greater every time.
But maybe it's because we're also desperate for something
amazing to solve all of our problems.
Particularly representative of what makes a difference to
quality of life, by the way, is it no.
So, you know, I would argue that, for example, it strikes me
as strange, the widespread adoption of video conferencing
strikes me as fundamentally important, and yet it receives
very little hype because the technology itself is quite old.
OK, so you, you remember that person on the Fast show used to
run around going. Isn't electricity amazing?
Yeah. Yeah.
If you appear on the stage and you talk about the huge
importance of, you know, the widespread adoption of, of video
as a, as a meeting platform, as a means of communication, you
look ridiculous. OK, so, and yet my contention is
over a 10/15/20 year period, it's hugely important.
One thing I've noticed is that although a lot of conventional
companies are demanding their staff come back to the office,
no one who starts a company now takes out significant office
space and their employees probably work on three different
continents. Yeah.
OK. So the the people who are
actually starting a business from scratch are starting a Zoom
enabled business effectively, but existing companies are
wrestling with it because they find the whole thing alarming
and disruptive. And so it always struck me that
the, you know, the noise around certain things is excessive
generally and and also the timings usually bad because as
you said, the really significant behavioural changes emerge for
five years. Exactly and often in slightly
unpredicted words. Yeah.
I think that's so true with video.
I've been thinking the same thing about video and how the
rise of everyone talks about social media changing politics.
I mean, I've spoken about it a lot as well.
What no one really talks about is the way that the, the, the
shift to video on social media is so more fundamental because
at least with early social media, it was still words, it
was still the work we work, still communicating in words,
which has been the way we tended to do politics and media for
very, very long time over the last five years.
Everything is video now. It's all video.
And video is such a different medium for the human psyche as
well, how we understand the world.
It's much more emotional. Marshall Mcluhan wrote loads
about this when he was discussing TV and everything he
wrote is, is basically right. He said we're all going to turn
into, we're all going to go totally tribal with the TV
because we've learned to be literate.
We're thoughtful. It's slow, it's very rational.
TV is a hot technology. It it, it sends you into
emotional spirals really easily. You form new bonds with
different people. It's very, very quick.
And he was right. He was totally right.
But it wasn't TV that has done that.
It's been the adoption of video on social media that I think has
done that. No, but no one talks about that.
No one says that shift to video on social is transforming
politics. Which politicians are going to
be successful? Which political stories are
going to run wild? Who's going to become really
influential? What format we are all going to
want to consume and like the length of it and the detail that
we need to to make it. It's just passed unannounced.
This is a fantastic. I mean, Jimmy Carr made the
wonderful thing that he said YouTube became the largest TV
station in the world and nobody noticed.
Yeah. And the influence of that also,
I think you know, actually in, in inverted commas, conventional
media, TV rolling news has been catastrophic because a
newspaper, for all its strengths and weaknesses, had some sort of
a proportionality and B, it had, it had A effectively a sense of
prioritisation, the front page versus the Backpage.
What you find with rolling news, which drives me insane, is that
there is a story du jour which utterly over dominates.
I mean the Mandelson affair, for example, or Downing St. parties,
both of them to some extent are confected now they, they deserve
fairly significant news coverage.
And in a newspaper, it would be 10% of the content of the
newspaper. But in rolling TV news, it's
sort of 70% of the news content. Yeah.
And you know, this isn't actually.
Yeah. I haven't actually seen any
coverage of the Ukraine war for the last three months.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because suddenly the attention obviously flipped to Iran.
Now nobody's talking much about Iran.
And so the extent to which it's almost like ADHD imposed on you
by rolling news channels strikes me as, I mean, just an example
how the news has changed. When they dropped a bomb on
Nagas Zaki, not Hiroshima, but Nagasaki, it was not the lead
item in The Times the day afterwards, it was the number
two item. Second atomic bomb dropped on
Nagasaki. Now, what I was saying is that
you had this whole sort of sense of prioritisation.
There was a front page, there was an inside page.
And broadly speaking, a newspaper would cover 27 topics
or or 55. Rolling news is ludicrously
disproportionate in the effect it has on us.
But you're absolutely right. I mean, the the, the means by
which we consume these things. And of course, the fact that we
understand each other as attention fragments, we
understand each other less well because we're all coming at the
same thing from a completely different context.
Yeah, exactly. And I think there's this is the,
this is obviously the medium is the message.
Mcluhan's most famous saying, a really simple way as well of
illustrating it is, is, is is as as you to say about the
prioritisation, the way that the role of the media was to help us
prioritise what was important and certain things deserved more
energy than others. Maybe it wasn't always right and
maybe you could disagree with it, but at least you had the
sense of an ordering of the importance of things and you
could then sort of channel your emotion and anger
proportionately. Whereas now everyone gets as
furious about someone wrong speaking on Twitter as they
would about some incredibly significant event in the world,
because it's all blasting at you a kind of equal level.
And a lot of this is confected, of course, and a lot of it
reflects the particular concerns of journalists, not really the
concerns of the public. There's certain things which are
sort of natural triggers which the media will pull at every
given opportunity. Oh I know.
I remember when they say about Jeremy Corbyn lives in a
£1,000,000 house in Islington. I thought, well, that must have
been a small house. Also known as a house.
In Israel, yes. Exactly.
No, no, no. Absolutely right.
Yeah. But the thing about the one
about Medium as a message is a really interesting example, I
think as as, as someone like as a politician who might be the
subject of a story. One of the things that digital
technology has also done that's kind of unremarked is that every
article looks like the lead article.
Like when you read a story on your phone, it's the biggest
story with a single headline. It's like this is the main
story. And we sometimes forget how the
sort of pressure that even the politicians feel saying, Oh my
God, they've written a whole article, whereas before it'd
have been tucked away in Page seven.
Small little thing wouldn't have gone you know, And so it's it's.
Also a weird thing with advertising because everybody
understood that the advertisements in the front page
of the newspaper are of a different kind of the
advertisements. In the back and the
advertisements in the front of Vogue were a different kind of
ad to the ad in the back of Vogue.
You know, I was, as a joke tried to persuade someone in the media
to try and buy a, an ad for adult incontinence products in
the front half of Vogue just to see how they react.
OK, my, my theory was, you know, you, you might offer $1,000,000
and eventually would go to sign new house.
You'd still say no. You see what I mean?
But of course, every ad appears out of context.
Everything is fundamentally decontextualized.
Yeah, exactly. And So what you're reading at
the moment is effectively front page news, even when it's
completely irrelevant. Yeah, that's it.
Everything is front page news when it's served up through a
digital medium and on a screen. And it's also that this, this I
think is having some really unexpected effects on, on
people's views of the world. So the fragmentation of, of
media, we all, we all know that and we all know that people can
consume what they want. And, and some people would
respond. Well, liberals always read the
Guardian and conservatives always read the The Telegraph.
But like you say, there was a sort of prioritisation.
We'd also see lots of other things as well.
What's happened now is that everyone can go an inch wide and
a mile deep on every story. And most of the people that we
accused of believing fake news, for example, you'll be in fake
news. You just believe whatever you
read on the Internet. And I've spent a lot of time
with radical right wing and radical left wing movements.
There news consumption is very, very different to maybe the
mainstreams. They will become very obsessed
with the story. They will read hundreds and
hundreds of true articles about something they care about, like
it'll be immigration. If it's a radical right
movement, they'll read hundreds of articles, and they will, but
they'll be mostly truthful. Last the most most accurate
articles from often from quite respectable outlets.
So when you say we're just reading fake news, they'll say
no, no, no. These stories are printed on the
BBC in the Guardian. Like, I'm not reading fake news.
You're the idiot. You're the one that's just, you
know, doesn't know what's going on.
But they have created a version or a view of the world that has
been constructed from a real deep dive into a single subject
where they don't really read anything else at all.
It's a misleading portrait of the world, but it's based on
individually true stories, and it's a lot harder to Pierce into
that world. And then they'll say like this
isn't being covered enough by here, there, or someone else.
I'll give you a lovely story of this.
Robert Cialdini did the his point, which is most media bias,
isn't misinformation, it's disproportionate presentation of
information. Why aren't you covering this
story? Why aren't you giving it more?
Time or equally giving Ludicrous.
So there's a wonderful phrase,
Citizen Kane. Where's where Kane says make the
headline big enough, I'll make the story big enough that
effectively you give prominence to something and you and you
downplay something else. That's how most media bias
happens. It's not actually misinformation
or distorted reporting. And so these people aren't
actually getting misinformation. They're getting what you might
call, I suppose, I suppose, miscalibrated information.
Yeah. Context completely matters and a
lot of the time, so this is a word me and my Co founder say
all the times that both things can be right.
Yes, a lot of the times people will look at things from their
view, and a lot of those times it's based on facts.
It's just whether you're allowing people to zoom in on
the full picture, which is why when you talked about the fact
that video changed the law, that is 100% true.
I would go even further to say that podcast with video changed
the law one, because now people are taking the time to delve
into the full context of a person, what they're talking
about and what's happening. And in a world, I always talk
about the fact that in a world where IQ is democratized because
of AI and there's so much AI slob, there's so much news
happening and you don't even know what to trust and what not
to trust. Even some short form videos you
can falsify to be real. I think that the, the, the
notion of podcasting, for example, and the fact that for
two hours, 3 hours, you can't really play a role for that
long. If somebody's asking you like
very direct questions, you get to understand the full picture
of what somebody's all about that.
The only problem I have with the world of podcasting right now is
because now people want to do it as a living.
Everyone's not trying to make money when sponsors get involved
is like mismatching. There's like spray there
everywhere. There's like somebody sponsoring
with one brand and then they sponsor with another brand.
And that's why I, I really like what brands like ear Max are
doing when they're trying to make sure that the, the
matchmaking between the right podcasts with the right ads and
in the right way, in a way that actually gives value to the
audience stays intact. And, and, and, and I just think
that that's something that we should be thinking about.
The potency of both the influence of marketing and
podcast marketing is to do with the authenticity of the message
and of course, the authenticity of the messenger.
And I think you've got a massive multiplier effect.
David Ogilvy wrote about this to do with testimonials and
advertising. If the person delivering the
message is credible and has significant reputational skin in
the game, it's going to be inordinately more convincing
than if it's obviously just tagged on.
But then there's also the question of appropriateness of
all audience as well. So you've got a double whammy.
You can get exactly the if you use someone like Air Max, you
get exactly the right audience. So you've solved your kind of
targeting challenge, but you've also solved your creative
challenge by having the right spokesperson to that audience
who fundamentally, when they recommend something, can do so
with genuine sincerity. I mean, I work with a company
called Caggy, which is paid for search and they, partly
encouraged by me, have a policy where unless the person
recommending it uses the product themselves and entirely buys
into the mission of what they're trying to do, it doesn't matter
what the audience is, they're not interested in advertising
there. And so that I think that double
win where you get exactly the right audience, but also exactly
the right degree of conviction and and authenticity in the
messenger. When you get both those things
aligned, that's effectively using the media to its full
strength. And a lot of the time these
things are bought as part of media deals.
They're bought because out of expediency on basic demographics
and nothing else. And that's actually, I mean,
it's all right. I mean, it's, it's not a total
waste of time, but you're missing the real magic of the
medium itself when you do that, I think.
Well, clip well, we sort of live in this weird clip economy world
now, don't you? A lot of a lot of the the
purpose of the podcast is actually the clip that either
then goes viral and is seen by 5 million people, not the three
hour version that you spent ages making, which itself is
fascinating. But there's there's a couple of
really interesting things about about I've just finished making
a podcast for the BBC. It's about now called everything
is fake and nobody cares. It's about modern fakery, the
role of WWF wrestling in modern politics, how AI is changing
that. And I spent a long time
interviewing a very prominent COVID skeptic, vaccine skeptic.
And something is interesting is happening about what podcast is
doing to people's perception of editing in media when you make
ABBC story. And I've made many of them.
You are you. Let's say I make a one hour
programme. I've probably got 10 to 15 hours
at least of material and I have to make judgements about what to
leave in and what to take out. For a long time people just
trusted that the BBC would do that.
Now, now that everyone can make content and they everyone edits,
everyone's an editor and they can spend 3 hours watching
someone unedited on a podcast. They've become extremely cynical
by the active editing. They think editing by the BBC or
whoever else is manipulation is control.
I'd rather listen to that person for three straight hours talking
on a podcast than your edited version of that person.
But what they don't understand, of course, is that you can speak
for three hours on a podcast and talk absolute rubbish
unchallenged. My job when I edit is to try to
give a really fair and full reflection with this within a
short space of time. I have to do that and I think
places like the BBC need to be much more transparent about how
they edit. I think they're.
Going to Trump edit. Oh, that was terrible.
That was terrible. Oh, and I write, I write, I
write about that in the in the podcast.
I'm like, look, when the BBC makes mistakes like this, it's
not surprising people are very sceptical about this generally.
I mean, at least in that case, two of the biggest people at the
at the court had to step down. I mean when, when, when a when a
when a when a podcaster makes a similar mistake, they they
usually get more famous. So that's the main difference.
But but what so? But I do have some hope with
podcasting. When social media first came
out, I was among many of those who said the problem is not the
messages that are people are receiving on social media, it is
the fact it is a crunched down 32nd angry missive.
It's not. People aren't engaging with
material in any form of detail. Like I don't even care what the
material is. We're turning into a yuck wow
society where everything is really short and quick and not
thought through. And now people seem to be
thrilled to listen to Joe Rogan for three straight hours talking
about some of the most detailed stories.
Imagine that's amazing. Like whether you agree with
Rogan or not, he's he and others like him are normalising the
idea of sitting down for hours at a time engaging in a single
idea. That is brilliant.
But I am really excited about that and it's but people and
people complain about broken in the other way.
By the way, no one, least of all me, would have predicted this.
It's. Amazing, isn't it?
So the thing I was saying, I was saying the other day is if you
told me in, say, 1990, OK, you're going to be driving to
Manchester, in your car, you'll have the technology to play any
music ever composed by the hand of man, OK?
And you'll choose to spend the journey listening to two people
talking. I would have said Nah.
I don't think so. No, I know, right.
And so the popularity of long form conversation, by the way, I
mean, there's an interesting. One wouldn't have said it in
2015, let alone 1990. Now, interesting, if you go back
to my very early childhood, you did have on BBC One or two, I'm
just trying to remember that there were various people who
did very serious long conversations with sort of Carl,
you know, Jung and people like that.
And one of my theories was that television people fell out of
love with conversation, but the public didn't.
That for whatever reason, it wasn't a very fashionable kind
of. Do you remember a thing called
After Dark on Channel 4 Friday evenings?
They got a load of people and got them pissed, OK.
And it was an extraordinary thing where it was basically
used A room. You got some extraordinary
guests like Peter Sutcliffe, Dad, you know, and there's a
famous one, famous one with Peter O'Toole, I think, where he
basically sort of turns up with a stack of booze and it all
turns nasty. But it was completely live
conversation. It was parodied once as after
closing time as opposed to after dark.
But it was very, very captivating viewing.
And it was kind of early stage, you know, large scale podcast in
a sense. And it was always very, very
popular, you know, particularly given the slot.
And I always wondered whether television people are obsessed
with the sound bite and they turn interviews into these
highly combative, very short form things.
And actually, maybe the public doesn't want that.
I think it's, I just think it's really good for people to try to
separate again the medium and the message.
If the message you might not agree with on Stephen Bartlett's
podcast or Jay Shetty's podcast or Joe Rogan's podcast or the
rest is politics or the rest is history or whatever.
But but the fact that people there's this unending appetite
to listen to people talk for hours about detailed subjects
is, is a really positive development and the opposite of
where I thought we were heading 10 years ago.
Yeah, which the best. So look, we're doing it right
now. The best thing a futurologist
ever told me is there are no trends.
There are vectors and there's always a counter trend.
And just as in a sense, conventional media didn't do a
very good job of providing us with two-minute video, did a
fantastic job of providing us with video which was half an
hour or an hour long. It also didn't do a very good
job of providing us with much longer form content.
And so we've suddenly effectively discovered an
appetite for the two extremes. So it's a, it's a vector really.
It's not, it's not really a trend.
And the same people who are watching, you know, 32nd cat
videos are also watching 2 hour content.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's. Amazing, yeah.
Because what you were seeing, there's like words that came
about since COVID, right? Like words like gas lighting and
toxic. And there's all these words that
you see on like 22nd Reels and Tik Toks that people learn
about, but they don't really get into the depth of what it
actually means, right? But I'm speaking to a lot of
people right now. I can see the TikTok, what the
TikTok algorithm feels like. Because when you press them on
the questions and you press them on that POV, a lot of the time
it's very baseless, right? It's based on the trending
conversation in a word right now.
But I think I like about podcasting.
It's kind of like books because I don't read books, right?
I don't have the, I literally the idea of sitting down and
just doing one thing. My brain just goes audiobooks,
audiobooks, podcast. There's a podcast called
Founders of David Senra. I talk about it all the time.
He deep slides into one book for an hour and gives you basically
like the Cliff notes and all the conversations around it.
I learned so much about that, right?
I can listen to a 2 hour podcast and retain everything, right?
And because I'm just an auditory learner, right?
And I think that the the good thing I like about where
podcasting is gone, it's allowed you to learn from an auditory
sense, visual kinesthetic because you're feeling people's
emotions and what they think about things.
But then also digital because there's like points and notes of
data and it does the full circle of learning, whereas a lot of
other things just focus on one type of learning.
And that's the thing I really like about where media is going,
which is why I actually believe that providing immersive
experiences with AI and virtual reality and where that's going,
that's where we should be spending our time, like
investing in innovating in. But really what I'm seeing right
now with like every time I go on an app and I see this company
has raised this amount of money for this, it's just for more
bullshit that just tries to leverage people's attention all
over and over again. No one's actually using the
modern technology to build stuff that are useful.
But like, you go to the US, for example, and I say I was in San
Francisco, right? And I'm like, this is supposed
to be the tech hub of the world, right?
What? But why is it that my phone is
advanced, but when I go out into the real world, like the
computer's not working? I can't, like, check into my
plane without anything bugging. It's almost like we left the
real world to fix this virtual world and no one's.
Is arguably one of the richest cities in the world, but they've
got a massive homeless problem. And you know, you know that
actually the infrastructure of the place is a fucking shit
show. Yeah.
I think this point though, is really, I mean, I think the
there is a really profound point about the difference between
technology being created and technology being applied in the
real world. Adopted.
And adopted like, and so when you, you various studies looking
at companies that have adopted large language models and what's
so interesting about that at the moment is that pretty strong
evidence that at the individual level, people in companies using
language models are reporting significant increases in
productivity. I can now write these reports
quicker. I can summarize these documents
better. I can present power, I can do
PowerPoint slides faster, I can run these accounts faster.
But at the company wide level, it's not actually turning into
changes to profit and loss. And it feels a little bit like
the productivity paradox from decades ago where the world
went. Computers were adopted across
the world very, very quickly in the 80s and 90s, but there was
no productivity gains for like 10 or 15 years after that.
And I think it's because we forget things like the printers
jammed. It's good like oh I've yes, I've
just saved an hour doing my PowerPoint slide using ChatGPT.
Now I've got to attend a 2 hour meeting about AI compliance
because apparently I wasn't allowed to do it that way.
And it's this like writ large with AI, I mean?
It's perfectly possible. I mean, if you think about it,
one of the strangest things which persisted in business for
about 100 years was the typewriter.
Because traditionally, I mean, in 1970, Ogilvy had a typing
pool. You didn't have anything on your
desk. You didn't have a typewriter on
your desk. You wrote a letter to a client
by hand. You submitted it to the typing
pool, who then typed it up on official paper and it was sent
OK. Now, unless you had appalling
handwriting, the typewriter was a massive cost imposed on
business simply so that the business could appear
professional. You know, I mean, in the 18th
century, everything was done by hand.
No one thought it strange. You wrote a letter, you sent it.
That was it. You added this completely
unnecessary extra process to everything that was done,
really, because it was expected of you.
Now, it strikes me as perfectly possible.
Now, the word processor does bring benefits.
I think we can say, you know, it's better than a typewriter.
You can edit, you know, you can, you know, take existing copy and
you can edit it to save retyping everything.
You don't need carbon paper anymore.
There are benefits. Perfectly possible. e-mail, for
example, as a universally adopted behaviour has net
brought mass productivity losses.
Yeah, perfectly possible that it's that it's now what's weird
about it is that everybody got obsessed with measuring the
productivity gains and losses of say working remotely or working
from home to anal degrees of well, you know, apparently
there's a 3% loss in productivity.
But we've introduced wholesale things like open plan offices
and e-mail without actually considering what the alternative
might be. Or do we, I mean, in the, you
know, in, in the old days there was well, first of all, first of
all, actually the existence of a typing pool created a very
interesting filtration mechanism because senior people got things
typed immediately and junior people had to beg favours to get
it done. So you had actually a sort of
prioritization system, which is if you got something on your
desk, it was more likely to be an important thing from a senior
person that an irrelevant bit of bullshit from, you know, that
you'd been CC D on for no readily apparent reason.
Like our newspapers prioritizing.
It was. It was inherently, you know,
there was a sense of importance to the order.
Yeah. And there was a kind of order to
it. And so quite often we destroy
these old technologies and we get wildly excited by what the
new technology makes possible and we completely forget in the
process what were the invisible benefits of what preceded it
100%. So, you know, when it took a bit
of effort to produce something in print, the stuff that landed
on your desk was almost invariably important and had to
be dealt with. OK, now e-mail you have to sift
between the window cleaners are in tomorrow.
Please move everything off the off the window ledge and you
know you've been fired. OK, It's your.
Suddenly the burden falls on the recipient to the priority.
Well, I think that, I mean, I've, I've, I coined this phrase
techno admin, which is essentially what a lot of
companies have done is to put the burden of annoying
administration on the user. Like the customer.
The customer, that's what I mean.
Yeah, the user, the customer. Phrase yesterday it's not it's
not cost saving if you're making your customer pay the price I.
Mean the number of times where you like this.
This has happened to me and it's happened to many people I know.
Some automated system inside the energy company sends you a dodgy
bill. They've miscalculated something
and it is on you to spend hours and hours of unpaid labour
trying to resolve this problem. Now the company has saved some
money because they churn out automated.
Bills. But what they've actually done
is outsource labour to you, the poor soul who has to spend,
usually during work hours, phoning them up, desperately
trying to get something resolved.
This is happening. The productivity cost to the UK
of techno admin is absolutely vast and I sometimes think in
addition to not understanding. The loss of just discretionary
time. And the stress, why?
I mean people have a £3000 bills turn up at their door and
they've got no idea what it is. They don't know what they
supposed to do with it. It's terrifying for people.
So the but so in addition to the not seeing the benefits of old
systems, I think we're often blind to the the costs that new
systems bring, the extra friction that they create.
So what I think about like every time a company decides to
introduce a new IT system, they don't really factor in the fact
that ordinary people that, you know, the user has got to work
out a new thing and the laptop hasn't really got to download
some new software. They're stressed about that
because I can't really remember. And actually now it's crammed.
The whole system's crashed. The files aren't connecting up
anymore. That is none of that's accounted
for. It's always assumed that
everything runs really, really smoothly and it never ever does
any like. It's just not the case.
I'll. Give you a beautiful example.
So there was an IT department which came up with a very, very
efficient system for effectively conveyancing for a large
building society. And they pointed out the
extraordinary benefits this would bring.
And someone very cynical in the board meeting said presumably it
only brings these benefits if the entire exchange of
properties goes completely according to plan.
And they said, yes, that's true. OK, So OK, can you go and find
out what percentage of property transactions go according to
plan? Turned out 14%.
I'm surprised. So for the so for the other 86%
of people, what you were doing was introducing them to a total
nightmare or on pass where the technology was completely unable
to contrive a Plan B. It's happening all the time and.
My other My other complaint is that technology arrives as an
option and ends up as an obligation.
So a classic example of that. You could include parking apps
in that wonderful option. Fantastic.
OK, then what happens is some finance person?
Is going to be. I wrote and asked about parking
apps the other day. They do my head in.
No, no, I don't know. There's an option.
Great. Because you know, Seven Oaks
station, you at one point you needed 7 LB coins in order to
pay the part there, which meant you walked around basically, you
know, with your testicles being irradiated by anyway.
But but quite quite useful as an option.
What then what happens is the finance person then decides that
because it's much cheaper to do this by app than it is by
coinage or by any other means. OK, the the app is then imposed
and there's no alternative part about ticket machines, railway
stations as an alternative to the person behind the, the, the
what you call a ticket, Guiche, whatever, whatever you call it
OK, as an alternative, as a compliment to the person who
will sell you a ticket and give you some information about train
times. And actually you ought to go
after 9:30 because it's much cheaper.
Brilliant. If you know what ticket you want
precisely and there's a queue at the bar at the, at the ticket
term counter fab. OK, then what happens is you get
rid of the human and it happens every time, which is something
arrives as a techno alternative to something self checkout at
supermarkets. And you go, actually this is
pretty welcome because I can either do A or I can do B.
And sometimes depending on context, I want to do one or the
other. And then what happens is the,
you know, the actual people operating humans operating
checkouts disappear. And it's worse still because the
people, the finance people and the IT people who impose the new
technology take the credit for the reduction in costs, but they
aren't held accountable for the blame in the lost opportunity.
So for example, if you make everybody self checkout in a
supermarket, no one can do a big weekly shop anymore because it's
just too tedious. But they're not, they're not
measuring that, they're just saying how wonderful this is
because look at our reduction in labour costs.
Exactly. They're outs and they're
outsourcing a a lot. And this is the thing with the
parking apps. They're outsourcing that labour
that might have been done by a a a human going around checking
the things and and emptying the coins from the machine.
They weren't nicking a lot of the money.
OK, so one of the reasons. There's loads of fraud on
parking apps, I'm sure they're asked.
About one of the reasons parking apps got introduced so quickly
is they did a trial in four streets and they realized
effectively that the people who collected money from meters had
worked out a very clever way of nicking quite a lot of the money
from the meters. But.
But it's, it's a very, very easy thing to probably people have
people have been going around putting up sort of fake, but
like the QR code that you've got to scan people put physical fake
QR codes on top of the real ones.
And so you're directed to a scammy site where they take and
it's again, it is on you. Oh.
By the way, then you get a ticket and it's on the
obligation. Is this is it?
This is, This is the Techno admin problem that like the, the
outsourcing of work to the customer or to the user by the
introduction of technology is such a sort of common thread.
And I, I agree with you, Rory, it's, it's the, it's the, it's
the Dis, it's the closing off of alternatives gradually that is
so frustrating. So I can imagine it happening,
obviously with self driving cars.
You know, at some point more and more self driving cars are the,
the, the is the norm. And then at some point, actually
we don't really need traffic lights anymore because why would
you need them? And then what we need a self
driving car in that case, because there are no traffic
lights anymore, because most people don't need them.
Do you want to buy a map? Well, there's no point buying a
map. John Goodwin made this point
last week, which is once a certain percentage of cars on
the road become self driving, the roads become unusable to
anybody who wants to drive. And it becomes safer if ever, if
they're all self driving a part of a large network until they're
until they're all hacked. But but what that then means,
yeah, that but that then that that forecloses all other
possibilities of of options and ways of driving.
And driving will probably just become a recreational habit that
you have to do in some kind of, you know, off grid settings.
It's a bit like steam railways. In other words, you know, you
steam railway lines survive as a kind of weird novelty.
Yeah, exactly. And so you'll go to a strange
site where you can practice. Drive around in circles.
Driving yourself in a petrol car?
The interesting thing I think, I think now is the extent to which
artificial intelligence is going to do that and how, what will
this transformative technology play like if we we understand
this is the trend of how technology is introduced on
people, people by the cost of it, other alternatives are
gradually foreclosed and then you're left with this.
Is that going to be the same here and if so, how?
I don't know the answer by the way.
I think that is. I think, by the way, that's a
wonderful, wonderful point because I don't know.
I mean, it does occur to me that there's an answer where a lot of
people use this a lot, but it has almost no bearing or there's
a perfect case where you develop a trillion dollar technology
which is used effectively for the equivalent of horoscopes.
You know, people, in other words, making a decision will
just ask the AI in the same way that you consult the delfied
Oracle just to arbitrarily decide between two alternatives.
They developed Alexa and I, you know that that was a billion, a
few billion to develop Alexa. OK.
And if you actually look at it, it's basically what's the
weather like and what time is it?
And what we discovered from Alexa is that people really like
first thing in the morning to know what time it is without
having to open their eyes. That's a really interesting
human discovery because once you open your eyes to look at a
clock, you're woken up and you can't get back to sleep.
But if I look at my electric queries, the the the intended
purpose was we'll all shop that way.
Or at least Amazon, I think was terrified that someone else
would perfect spoken word shopping and therefore have to
create this thing as a defensive kind of note or preemptive
strike if you like. But if you look at what we use
Alexa for, I mean, 95% of my uses, to be honest, for the cost
of developing Alexa, you could have given everybody on the
planet a thermometer and and a wind up alarm clock, OK.
And you would have had much the same effect.
So I mean, this question of, you know, to what extent use of AI
will actually transform the the people's efficacy.
Yeah, I think it's still up in the air.
Massive question. I mean, I have many, many things
to say about that generally, but just on the the issue of
horoscope horoscopes, this might interest you.
So two things. One is there is some emerging
evidence we're not quite sure yet, but the very religious
people are more likely to trust AI outputs than people who are
not religious. Another thing ChatGPT if you go
into I spent, I have spent hundreds of hours talking to
ChatGPT over the last year do. You talk or type.
Well, it's interesting. I've I've so I've got this new
book out about AI and I talk about the difference between
talking and typing. Yeah, because these models.
I don't think they've done the interface yet.
I think the if I were doing AI wouldn't be building some
fucking data centre at the cost of £6 trillion.
I'd be saying what is the I? What is the interface through
which people will ultimately? I'm stacking up things I need to
say here, OK? Sorry.
No, no, this is good because the, the when the historians of
the future look back on on, on the this period and the
development of AI and particularly the large language
models, we all use the chat bots.
They will not say that ChatGPT, sorry.
They will not say that GPT 3 or 2 or 4 was important.
They will say that ChatGPT was the thing that turned this into
a mass consumer product. ChatGPT was just an interface
laid over an existing model that they'd had out for months, but
it was the fact it was much easier to use and then hundreds
of millions of people picked it up.
And so that's to the point that like the interface and ease of
use is more important than the specific model, the technology,
like how many data points are in your model and how accurate is
it? No one cared about that.
This is really easy. And so it just exploded.
So, but the, the thing I was going to say about horoscopes,
ChatGPT has many, many of these sort of persona bots.
So you can go in and type in the, you know, your usual, your
usual on the usual base model when you open it up, or you can
select a particular personality for your, for your ChatGPT.
And they have they've made hundreds of these.
And every time I check for the last six months, the most
popular one in the world was a Horus was literally a horoscope
chat ChatGPT ChatGPT talking about horoscopes.
It's a specialist horrors. It's Mystic Meg inside chat GPS
that is the most popular. It was the most popular bot
within the ChatGPT suite that people were using.
So you're weirdly right about. That I was weirdly right about
that. You're shocked.
I knew I was wrong, but I'm. Afraid not so this.
Literally is Mystic Meg effectively so so the the the
interesting thing with religious people actually is that I have a
weird, very weird opinion that actually religion actually helps
you deal with the world extremely well and possibly
makes you a better decision maker because it involves the
acknowledgement that there are forces beyond your control.
Yeah. Now, whether you're tribute
those if you're a massive complexity theorist, you just
say, you know, this is just a butterfly effect or emergent
phenomena of the system. Most people aren't effectively
complexity theorists. So if you look at ancient
Greece, when something surprising happened, they'd
attribute it to Phoebus Apollo or whatever.
You know, it's in the Iliad, you know, Achilles is supposed to
fall over, but he catches his footing and that, and that's
attributed to Phoebus Apollo. So since a huge amount in our
lives is arbitrary, it's luck. Or it's the product of forces
which are so complex that we can't hope, possibly hope to
predict or or or mould them. Actually having a mental mindset
where you just acknowledge that certain things are in the lap of
the gods is probably not a bad state of mind.
You know, you notice it a bit in football.
I always noticed this in football commentary where they
say so and so was thwarted by the cross.
The cross doesn't actually have any agency.
What you mean is he narrowly missed.
All right. But actually saying there are
these weird forces out there which affect us over which we
have no control is actually a pretty healthy way to approach a
world in which we have no control, in which much of what
happens to us is completely fluky and arbitrary.
And we said, you know, a religious person will be very
successful in business as they generally are, which is probably
the best approach to starting a business at the aggregate level
is start a business and pray. OK, OK.
The the extent to which you can plan for success is to be
honest, really fully limited because timing and other factors
will determine the outcome. Yeah, it.
Was good. Do you talk or type when you're
talking to a language model? Depending on what I'm.
Doing OK. Yeah, same here.
I, I think it's, I think this is going to become one of the most
important questions everyone. Asks.
I want it on my telly. I don't want to fuck it.
I've spent enough time with a fucking laptop.
I want this on my TV. I think yeah.
And I'm sure that'll be coming very, very soon.
I. Want a New Zealander as well?
Yeah, they're just totally sensible.
You can train. You can train.
You can train or you can build. I can build one for you.
I can build 1. Kiwi.
You can build Kiwi GPT. Any kind of persona you.
Want because the great thing with Kiwis is they're really
clever, but they're also practical.
OK, You know, I've got a late friend who is a New Zealander.
Her, her father was like an eminent Nobel Prize nominated
physicist in New Zealand who basically came up with the MRI
machine. But in his spare time, he'd go
out and, like, build a shed. OK, You don't get that anywhere
else. Yeah.
So Kiwi GPT. Yeah, we can make that happen.
I can make that happen. The, the, the what, what people
don't understand about these language models is, is the
extent to which they do mirror your tone, your style, your
register, I think even your emotional state.
They have such a subtle understanding of words that they
can mirror. They mirror your emotional, how
you're feeling about something, even if you don't fully
understand it yourself. We, the way that we talk and the
way that we type is radically different.
It's such a different style and tone.
And so you will get a completely different answer depending on
whether you ask the question or whether you type the question.
If they're if you do it identically, it won't, although
the models are probabilistic, so you will always get a different.
Answer to the same question. Every time, but generally
speaking they'd be the same but it But the more you talk, the
more emotional the conversation will become.
Now if you look at all the various stories of people who
have fallen in love with their chat bots who have formed deep
emotional or even romantic. Connection Women How?
Does the it's, it's actually, I think it's actually fairly even
the stories that I have seen, the stories that I have seen, it
is, although it's interesting thing about the delusions, the
people that fall into various ChatGPT delusions.
There's a, there's a category of those about emergence and
conscience, you know, sentience. There's another category of
those about the highly technical questions, like I have
discovered cold fusion, how cold fusion can work.
I've made breakthroughs in advanced mathematics because
people are having people with 95% and make high knowledge in a
subject have very, very deep and complex discussions about the
subject with these language models.
They come to believe that they've made some kind of
breakthrough. The model is hallucinating and
flattering them and being sycophantic towards them, they
don't know enough to know that they're wrong.
And experts around the world in cryptography and physics are
receiving emails from random people every day now saying I
have made a stunning break, please read my 10,000 word
essay. And they're getting sort of
bombarded with this. And those technical delusions
are nearly all men. They're nearly all men that do
that. Relational delusions,
consciousness or sentience delusions are much more varied.
Make of that as what you will. But what I was going to say is
that the the romantic attachments, emotional.
Act Why is it overwhelmingly male?
Well, I don't know. I thought you guys might be able
to tell me. Maybe you could tell me why that
is. But I mean, conspiracy theories.
I've spent a lot of time in conspiracy theory communities.
95% men. Really. 90, maybe 99% men.
There's something going on there beyond my ability to understand
it. I can see Rory's brains ticking
away. He's going to come up with an
answer, or at the very least a story that's going to illustrate
why that could be the case. Maybe when you look at like.
Diversity male, of course, doesn't it?
Or at least it manifests differently.
We can argue some people say that it's just as common in both
genders, but it manifests very differently.
Male loneliness. I mean men, men, men don't have
as many friends. They spend a lot of time, you
know, you spend more time getting stuck into a technical
subject with a machine because. They ideas with everybody else
because what you see a lot with women is when they have
something on their mind that will speak to their peer groups
and they will bounce the ideas around, right?
Whereas with us, we'll be so we'll be in this rabbit hole.
We're down there, we're not coming out, and we've got no one
else to tell about it either. Who can?
Who can sort you kick us out of our delusion either?
So they're calling the experts. Yeah, it could be probably a mix
of things, but the thing I wanted to say about this, typing
versus talking, which I don't think people understand just how
different this is. And it's so important when you
read the stories of people that have formed romantic
connections, they'll never say this in the articles.
I'm almost certain all of them have come through talking, not
through typing. You create a much closer bond
when you're talking. It responds to you effectively
in because actually if you type, the response tends to be
slightly curt. Yeah, because your question is
slightly curt or your way, you know, your process, this is so
important. A billion?
Like do you know ChatGPT alone receives 3.5 billion prompts per
day? Per day?
It is transforming how we are seeing the world and something
as simple as do you type or do you talk?
No one discusses, no one considers.
It's not even part of the chat about all of this, but it
transforms how you receive and process information.
So there's some really fundamental things happening and
we're obsessed about GPT 5.3 is going to have you process
slightly faster and yet much bigger things are happening and
no one's talking about it. Yeah, I just think that it's all
about greatest surveillance in my my book.
So that's what it is because. Here we go.
Here. We go yeah, because what we say
is that the, the, the, the when when deploying this technology,
we talk about what it can do for us, but really we only use it to
do the same thing we're doing anyway.
All it does is make it easier for us to feed more information
and in ways that make us feel comfortable.
I think it's more than what you're saying.
Some ways less and in other ways more, yeah.
I mean, the nerd economy is desperately self-serving, isn't
it? Because it basically says no
employment except for nerds. I mean, you know, in other
words, most, most of the selling of the benefits of technology
has been through the promise of cost reduction, not through the
promise of this is where I think there's a divergent between
things like family owned companies and founder LED
companies which see opportunities in terms of
creating customer value. Most PLCS, most companies that
operate through quarterly reporting, basically what Eric
Reese calls financial gravity is so strong as a force.
There's a wonderful, OK, wonderful statistic, which is I
think they asked a selection of managers, would you cancel a
known profitable, guaranteed profitable long term project in
order to make your quarterly numbers?
And something like 82% said yes. And so if you look, the vital
thing with this technology is the mentality with which it's
deployed is really what matters. And I would argue that the
overwhelming cultural norm within a large number of
companies will be to justify the expense on the basis of cost
reduction in the labour force, not opportunity creation,
because cost reduction is quick and opportunity creation is
slow. Yeah.
And obviously what is going to happen, what seems to be
happening at the moment is a large number of companies seem
to be just not hiring junior staff.
Hmm. But but because because these
these models, they they are more capable than most people
realise, they they can do a lot of the things.
Law firms, for example, Yeah. Yeah, N have software
engineering, cyber, cyber security, journalism, just
people aren't hiring at that junior level because they think
it can be done by either a human plus machine or very soon just a
machine. And the problem, of course, is
that at the moment the best users of these models are mid
career or experienced people who really understand what they
need. They understand their, their,
their, their subject matter. They also have a knowledge of
how language models work and they can combine their skills
with those skills to make them. Who are those people going to be
in 10 years? If you've not employed any
junior people, there won't be any people left.
And so companies are taking a very short termist view on this
without thinking. But in 10 years we do need mid
career professionals who will be amazing with these machines and
they'll look around and realise they didn't hire anyone 10 years
ago and there isn't anyone left. I think 2 things are actually
going to happen. I think 1, they're going to
leave, they're going to go to other countries.
And two, they're going to become a competitor because they're
going to, they're going to. I think it takes much, it's much
slower for an experienced person to unlearn what they've always
known, to relearn a new model than it will for somebody that's
like learning and going through the momentum where the new
technology is like native to them as well.
So what happens is when you prevent a new generation from
coming into something, they're going to push the door through,
right? And they're going to adapt the
technology a lot faster. So I actually think that what's
going to happen is the mass unemployment with the young
talent, it's going to be they isn't going to go because they
have options to do that or they're going to fight back by
innovating. And that's the thing that people
are not realizing right now is that there's going to be this
like in that this technology civil war that's happening
between the old industry of how things used to be and trying to
preserve that, and new people coming in, trying to get into
the industry and survive effectively.
And I think that who's going to adopt the technology the best is
going to be the one that needs it the most.
And I think that the young people are going to adopt it
really, really well. I'm actually really optimistic
about. That the other interesting thing
is that what I also predict, which seems to be dominant, is
every company looks at this as a way of refining and streamlining
their existing processes. And therefore they will down
weight the number of people they employ who actually do the
fucking work. Whereas the IT, the HR, the
finance, the compliance departments will all stay the
same size because those people, because they don't have proper
jobs, OK, have an awful lot of time on their hands to decide
what actually happens. Whereas everybody else is
actually busy doing real work. And so you could end up with
this complete malformation. It is complete deformity of
corporate life. Yeah.
Because really what we should be doing is saying let's use this
to make people who do advertising better at making
more. Advertising what it should be.
And, and, and eliminate some of these ludicrous fucking middle
class welfare jobs, you know, collar welfare, a lot of this
stuff, compliance, HR, it's just basically we've created too many
graduates and you've got to find them some bullshit to do.
But they're incredibly sticky. Yeah, they never, they never
turn. You know, they're literally get
really upset because someone's only 83% billable and you point
out, well, you're not percent billable and you've still got a
job. It's it their their single best
use is as a creative assistant for for everyone.
That's what they should be useful, not as a replacement for
and tasks, but I what interests me is.
That, by the way, that I, I, I completely agree, which is
widening your possible solution space is the best possible use
of these people. In other words, have you thought
of this differently? And I sometimes say, don't ask
what toaster should I buy? Ask what toaster would Rick
Rubin buy? Yeah, exactly.
Exactly to ask Rick. I will find that out one day.
By the way Rick, what toaster have you got?
But also it should be actually optimized for surprise to some
extent. And I think at the moment it's
optimized for reassurance. But it is optimized for
reassurance. I think people don't realise or
it's for for flattery. Or plausibility.
And statistical statistical plausibility.
You if you are good at prompting these models, are able to re
optimize them to some extent. They are naturally incredibly
creative. I think people's understanding
of of AI is almost upside down. We've had for a long time the
view that machines will be good at numbers and facts and
statistics, but creativity is a uniquely human act.
I think it's the opposite. The opposite.
They're not very good at numbers and statistics.
They get things wrong all the time.
Give them a creative task and they're incredible.
And there's there's actually it's there's a.
That's because they're not actually logical.
What's really important, it's actually artificial intuition.
It's not artificial intelligence.
It is intuition. It is intuition in the same way
that we have intuition. And I think there's, there's the
specific ways in which these models are built that makes them
especially good at analogical creativity.
Analogical creativity. They have built a trillion word
model inside these data centres where every single idea and word
is connected to every single other idea and word through
stronger or weaker mathematical weightings.
Which means they are a, they are geniuses at combining different
ideas or taking an idea from over here and applying it over
there because we've worked out very, very conceptual
relationships between those ideas.
They've had to, to create this which.
Is what creative people always do, you know.
What they always do, you take an idea from 1 field and you apply
it to another field. So if you here's a fun exercise
and I do this quite a lot and I've, I've written about it in
my book, you say, what is the conceptual similarity between,
you know, Rory's shoes and the, you know, as top of the range
camera. And it will come up with
something genuinely quite deep, absolutely quite unusual,
philosophically interesting, intuitive when you hear it, and
totally original, has never been written before.
And that none of us would have come up with no.
Completely agree. So they're amazing.
I mean, this incredible creative assistant you have, if you're
willing to push it and be fun with it and try things with it.
And by the way, it it, it's also interesting because one of the
things that sort of annoys me as someone who spent 35 years in
creative advertising, is that intuition is not allowable if it
emerges from a human, even if that human has quite a strong
record of intuition. But weirdly, when a computer
generates it, people are pretty. So it's not only quite good
creatively, but it's weirdly creativity that's easier to sell
than human creativity for all kinds of peculiar reasons,
because we attach oracular status to it in a way that we're
not happy to attach to any individual.
Because I've always had this fundamental problem, which is
what most business people do, is they make decisions based on
defensibility, which means that the quality of your reasoning is
more important than the quality of the outcome.
My problem with that is that if you must, if you must come up
with a solution which has the reasoning built in to begin
with, you can only explore a small percentage of the possible
solution space. Because the larger part of the
possible solution space you can only reach through intuitive
leaps or pattern recognition or association or any of those
other tools. You can't reach it through
sequential logic fundamentally. And so no, in, I mean in term, I
mean very interesting. By the way, to create a, you
know, this Russian thing tries Soviet era problem solving
methodology. Gerald Alts Fuller, who was
asked basically he was a naval researcher, I think, who is
asked to say why is the West better at innovation than the
Soviet Union? And he came up effectively.
You'd think there's an unusual place for this to arise, but of
course, being based in the Soviet Union, he was very, very
alert to the weaknesses of central command and control in
generating innovative ideas. So he could sort of see this
from the outside. His reward was eight years in
the Gulag because Stalin didn't like what he said.
But he created this problem solving methodology, which
includes things like your problem has already been solved,
but in a domain different to your.
Yeah, yeah. OK.
Another one is make the thing that moves stay still and the
thing that stays still moves. Yeah, OK.
There are a whole list of these kind of Tris things now.
I think if you actually trained an AI to heavily lean on Tris
the potential. I've got a friend who's you.
Can do it tomorrow. You can do it tomorrow.
Using this wonderful thing which does exist at Dulles, which is
you don't bother taking the planes to the gate at the
airport. You have a lounge that drives to
the plane, OK, Absolutely classic Tris thing.
Now, they're huge benefits because you can expand an
airport without having to build anything, OK?
It's an extraordinary transformation of how an airport
would work. And again, it emerges from this,
you know, Brian Eno, read that thing in Bleak Strategies to
just make it, make it very big, make it very small.
Set it in the past. Set it.
Yeah, yeah. Well, we, we, we pay consultants
for our sums of money to, to, to do this.
Yeah. Like you think original, think,
think different thoughts. I'm going to take you out of
your domain. Like what happens if characters
from Sesame Street were running your bank?
How would they solve that problem?
And these machines, everyone can do this now almost for free.
It's amazing. So that is their most.
But what I find, what I'm excited about and interested by
is what sort of people will be very good at using these
machines. Like in the end, the interface
between US and the machines now and for the foreseeable is
words. It's words, it's on it's natural
language. People with an amazing mastery
of language and register and wide vocabulary examples and
stories are going to be a lot better at getting good outputs
from the machine than someone with a degree in machine
learning like this. Is the humanities graduates of
the future? Well, it's but it's very true.
It's very it's very true. If you have a, if you have a Pai
mean, most of the people that I speak to that that are thinking
about careers in the future in prompt engineering, they they
study cognitive science or linguistics.
They don't really need to study AI.
You don't need to understand how to build a machine learning
model to be amazing. You've got to be good with
words. I always say to people, if you
want to be a good prompt engineer, just read as many
books as you possibly can, about as many different things as you
can. We do need to be alert to the
fact that of course, the data set on which it's trained is not
representative of all human experience, of course.
OK, so in other words, it's what's thought and spoken, not
what's felt. You need to, you need to have a
base understanding of the broad principles of how these models
have been have been created, of course, but beyond that, and
that's not too hard to get at least a grasp.
On no. SO as a part in question, the
whole notion of AI and where we're going was that we're going
more into IQ, but it looks that we're actually going more into
EQ, right? They're highly emotional, these
machines highly emotional. So if they're more advanced than
us emotionally, what is the difference between like what
makes us human then? Because.
You can answer that question, but I think that is I think
don't think people understand how open these models are to
emotional manipulation from us. And that includes the way we
talk to them, how we try and get the right outputs out of them,
all the way up to this like really advanced jail breaking,
but also how good they can be at emotionally manipulating us.
There are already quite a few studies showing that if you're
in a debate with a machine, you don't know whether you're
debating a machine or a human, you're likely to change your
mind roughly equally as to whether it's a machine or a
human. But if the machine knows
anything about you, your background, your demographics,
it will, you'll be more likely to change your mind.
If a machine is arguing with you, it's able to tailor things
to you to get the exact emotional register that that you
want. We're already seeing that
phishing emails the bane of our lives.
You're more likely now to click on one written by a machine than
written by a human, because they can be emotionally more attuned
to you than a human can. By the way, a tip to anybody is
with your family and close relatives, particularly if you
have elderly relatives. Effectively develop a safe code
word that you you share among yourselves because it will be
simply too easy for people to fake your daughter's voice
ringing up saying I need £500. Everything's going to go
analogue this way. Every company is going to have
to have developed these kinds of techniques.
For all businesses, which is the reason we never phone businesses
isn't because we prefer doing things online.
It's because when you phone a business, you waste 90 seconds
listening to dial tone and then you have to tap in six numbers
and don't get to what you want. Once you have AI, customer
service, voice will become the default mode through which
people interact with companies. If you think about it, if you
imagine saying I want to reschedule my flight so they go
out of city rather than Gatwick, how much easier it is to say
that than it is, you know, I, I've got to do exactly this.
My trip to Cannes, you know, that's going to be half an hour
this evening, fucking around with that, OK.
And then making sure they don't charge me twice.
Now, if you can just utter the sentence and get the response.
So one of the things that's interesting is that there are a
lot of businesses that exist basically because people are
familiar with the interface. 30% of Amazon's sales are probably,
I can't be bothered to learn someone else's interface.
I'll go to Amazon, the opportunity to create really
disruptive businesses just by changing the interface or the
medium by which we interact. You know, think about, in short,
getting your car insured, OK, opening a bank account, all of
those things which online have been rendered unbelievably
painful. Even worse, in my case, one
thing that drives me nuts is I have a fairly strong principle.
I don't work or when I'm at home, I do not have my phone in
the same room. OK.
And now every time you need 2 factor authentication, I have to
get up and go and fetch my phone, which completely defeats
the whole thing. The extent to which you can, you
know, you can create extraordinary businesses around
this. In other words, you know, how
easy could you make it to buy a house, buy a car compared to the
current. So these companies that have
outsourced all this work to us are actually going to pay the
price, aren't they? Fundamentally, they.
Hope so, I think this is one of the best uses.
AI's best uses is to is to get rid of some of this techno admin
they force on us all the time. I mean, I've always had this
theory that really good call centre staff should be paid 6
figures because every now and then you encounter someone on a
call centre who's just order of magnitude better and the effect
it has on your loyalty and your attitude to that business is
magical. And I think, you know,
Frontline, really high end, well paid service jobs will actually
be quite a good place to go because AI can make the people
who are already good effectively amplified.
And that's really interesting. But that question actually of,
you know, in other words, is this the time fun if I wouldn't
go up against Amazon, but is this the time to launch just an
AI first insurance company where you ring up and say, this is my
car, This is how many miles you have a really nice conversation,
possibly on a screen, possibly with some visuals being
displayed, possibly with, you know, charts and comparisons.
Because actually doing things online is probably popular
because you can start it instantaneously.
It's not actually the best way to solve a problem.
But the reason, the reason we go online rather than use the
telephone, my theory in many cases, the reason we type and
click boxes rather than using voice.
Voice is half a million years old.
Clicking boxes is a completely learned behaviour.
It's because of the instantaneousness of the thing.
It's not because it's actually faster.
And there's some very strange findings in customer service,
which is live chat is actually much slower than a voice call.
Weirdly, people prefer it a really strange findings like,
you know, and maybe that's because you can get on with
others shit while you're doing. I don't know what the reason is.
Maybe it's just don't you don't have to turn the TV off.
I don't know what the reason, but actually the opportunity for
any business to come up with effectively just I mean if you
like EasyJet partly exists because of the Internet, OK.
And when a new interface comes along, it changes the whole
shape of business. As if my friend very interesting
Pete Dyson and I, all these projections were made that rail
uses on the increase. Therefore we must invest more in
rail and we both said, look, you're looking for the kind of a
bit of a snapshot here because in the time frame in which rail
use went up, we first of all invented the Internet so you
could check rail times without going to a railway station.
You could buy your tickets online and dynamic pricing was
made available. So people got conscious of the
fact that if you time your journey right, you can go to
Leeds for £35. And we said that's probably a
one off that you can't extrapolate from the time 1995
to 2010 that rail use is going to continue to grow.
What's happened is the interface via which we book rail has
changed. So it's made it more conducive
to people travelling by train and so the extent to which whole
businesses which think they have complete safety because
everybody uses them regularly and is familiar, might be
vulnerable to this really. Fascinating.
Hey, it has been a phenomenal conversation.
We definitely need to do a Part 2.
This has been. We'll do a Part 2.
This has. Been wonderful, fantastic.
But as a parting message for the audience, we'll give you the mic
for your book and what you've got going on.
It'll be great for you to tell the last word.
Yeah, what only to say, yeah, I've got so got this new book
out how to talk to AI and how not to.
And the how not to is probably more important than the how to
at the moment, but it won't always be so yeah, check that
out. Available everywhere including
Amazon and WH with travel and even Tesco.
That's how mainstream it's got. That book is now being sold next
to like 50 Shades of Grey. So, you know, this thing has
gone big. Like everyone's thinking about
AI, wondering how to talk to it. And it is about talking and
typing. It's, you know, it's not about
machines and being a coder. It's like language.
It's how do we communicate our ideas.
And so that I think means it really is quite accessible to a
lot of people, but people are afraid of it because it's called
AI. So it sounds very, very complex
in your use of it. It's not, and most people do
have quite a lot of skills here that they probably don't realise
they do. So yeah, check that one out.
Amazing. Fantastic.
Thank you. I'm a Scorpio by the way.
There you go.