As companies race to integrate artificial intelligence into our everyday lives, one man behind that technology has resigned from Google after more than a decade. Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, says he stepped down because he didn t want to personify it anymore. And what s next for the coronation of King Charles I of the United Kingdom? A simple, modern, coronation that doesn t need all sorts of fancy accessories. Just silk breeches and a pair of pants. And a shiny new hat. This week's After Show is hosted by Alex Blumberg ( ) and Jonny LoQuasto ( ), with regular contributions from Mark Phillips ( ), Ben Kertes ( ), and Sophie Taylor ( ). Subscribe to After Show to get notified when we deconstruct the latest news in After Show topics! Logo by K. Williams and Willoughby. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We do not own the rights to any music used in this podcast. All credit and music by any other works credited to any other artists. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving us a five star review on iTunes or rating us a review on our podcast, we'd really appreciate it if we sent us a rating and review we'd like it if it helps us spread the word about what we're listening out to other people are listening to us. Thank you, Jonny, K. Phillips, B. Williams, J. Holmes, A. B. McElroy, D. Maffee, E. Burt, S. Bresnan, Alyssa, C. S. Walker, JUICY, EYAN JAYE, P. RYAN, JEAN MAYTER, SORCHESTER, GAYLE, AND JANE KELLY, AND KIMBERLY MOULDER, JRYAN VANECKER, AND PAUL MAYOR, AUGMENTED AND KEVIN MAYO CHEERIE, AYAN MORRIAGE, AND MARYLEA CHEARY, AND CHEORGE MAYANNAH VYANNAIA AND JOSIA VEASTER AND JAMIE VEAN VEYAN CHEARIE AND JAMES MEYER AND JONNY MAHAN JEAVIA AND KAYAN JEAVIE AND PAYAN OCHTERRY AND JYANIA CORRONE AND JEA CORRODY AND BRYAN LYNNE CHEERY AND PRAYAN MAHER AND KENYAN MEYAN AND JODY MORCHEARY AND KABANNAY VEALLY AND KAVIEVIE CORNER AND KOULDERIE AND RAISE THEM'
00:02:04.000You are going to use, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, 80% eh?
00:02:24.000Maybe I could do me, a cuddly German shepherd, dear old loyal Dan with his bizarre ankles.
00:02:30.000But no, if you have a look at that gallery there, that's a neat, lean, sparse team.
00:02:35.000If you defrost that window, have a look.
00:02:37.000I can't, you couldn't do without They're a lovely little bunch.
00:02:43.000Often we are on Friday show because we want to be able to focus on Barry Weiss.
00:02:48.000We want to be able to focus on the coronation.
00:02:50.000What's funny when they talk about the coronation, let's have a look at some of the headlines, is they talk as if like there's ways of making it more sensible and practical.
00:02:58.000Look at this, King Charles to do a way of outdated silk stockings and breeches for coronation.
00:03:05.000One doesn't need all these outdated bridges.
00:03:07.000A simple coronation, a simple modern coronation for a modern world.
00:03:12.000The whole idea is you've been anointed by God to be the figurehead of a nation.
00:03:19.000And all of the, however you shake this down, the wealth of the royal family is accumulated through plunder over centuries.
00:03:28.000Yeah, he's not losing those stockings for budgetary reasons, is he?
00:03:30.000Let's get rid of these expensive stockings!
00:03:33.000And we all remember that phone call and some of the things he wished he was, didn't he?
00:03:45.000I'll tell you what you want to have a look on, and this is something you literally have to be careful about talking about on YouTube, because we're going to be giving you some of the best secrets about the Royals and some of the best conspiracies.
00:03:53.000If you watch that documentary, bizarrely made by Keith Allen, the actor, you might not be able to find it on YouTube, you definitely better find it on Rumble.
00:04:01.000If you have a look at Rumble, the one about Diana, what's it called?
00:04:51.000Well, use their considerable military might to endlessly respond and grind down NATO forces.
00:04:58.000Well, let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
00:05:00.000You can join us, you can join us on locals and join the chat, participate in this stuff with a delightful community wherever you're from in the world.
00:05:09.000Certainly don't mean to make a mockery of the set of semaphores that the Russian people use to communicate with.
00:05:14.000No, I think people are I think anyone would have understood what you meant by that.
00:05:25.000Let me know what you think about that.
00:05:27.000I don't think I would like to get into the potentially murky territory around the sad and tragic death of Diana, but Keith Allen, don't mind, so have a look at his documentary.
00:05:40.000I heartily recommend it, even though...
00:05:42.000Did you don't remember in the old days used to just like look at curiosities and things that are a bit peculiar it's like you know oh it's before you had to have a sort of a banal diet of pre-chewed slop like some gray ready brick diet like you're not allowed any spice or flavor I used to be able to look at things and go, well, I think that's a bit mad.
00:06:01.000Quite a peculiar and wonderful theory, but I'm not sure that's actually true.
00:06:04.000Let's have a look at some of that evidence.
00:06:06.000You used to be able to decide for yourself.
00:06:07.000The whole of censorship is underwritten by the idea that we're too bloody stupid to understand anything, and perhaps to a degree we are, because we're willing to put up with expensive ceremonies to anoint further royalty.
00:06:20.000Let's face it, the death of Queen Elizabeth II meant that this is time for a radical appraisal and review of whether or not we Hello!
00:06:37.000Joining me now is Barry Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, former Twitter Files journalist and New York Times editor.
00:07:20.000And I should add, by the way, that building the company alongside some of my close friends and also my wife, a journalist that I met at the New York Times, who also left to do this with me.
00:07:56.000I don't know what you're using, Benadryl?
00:07:59.000Hey Barry, I wanted to ask you some questions about the news but afterwards I'd like to talk to you about how you're convincing your daughter to sleep that long.
00:08:08.000Mate, I wanted to ask about firstly a little bit about That dude quitting Google and everything, Geoffrey Hinton, and your conversation with him, and whether you learned anything more detailed about his concerns around AI.
00:09:39.000Something like a few months ago, ChatGPT 4 was unveiled.
00:09:43.000100 million people are using that app every day, and it's already changing the way that people work, the way they do research, the way they cheat on tests in college.
00:09:52.000News organizations have announced that they're getting rid of certain jobs because they're already outsourcing them to this technology.
00:09:58.000So, It's already proven its use, which is extremely exciting and also extremely unnerving.
00:10:05.000There's an economist that I love named Tyler Cowen who writes this incredible blog, Marginal Revolution, if your listeners aren't aware of it.
00:10:12.000And he had this incredibly succinct, excellent post about this, where he basically says, As much as we have believed that the internet was a seismic technological revolution, the truth is, is that most of us that are alive, save very, very old people that lived through, you know, World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons, we really haven't lived through a fundamental technological revolution.
00:10:36.000We haven't lived through what he calls moving history, where we're actually feeling like the tectonic plates shift.
00:10:45.000And as human beings who are only able to think so far into the future, it's really scary.
00:10:51.000But probably the cavemen who watched their neighbor invent fire felt the same way.
00:10:55.000They probably thought, holy shit, this thing allows us to cook food and stay warm, but also holy shit, someone can come and burn our whole village to the ground.
00:11:04.000In other words, every single time this new technology comes into being, there's a kind of moral panic around it.
00:11:11.000There's this really amazing newsletter called Pessimist Archive and they keep track of the panics that are the reaction to new technology.
00:11:19.000I read one the other day where it was like, it was a poem that they unearthed from 250 BC, freaking out about the sundial, right?
00:11:27.000There's articles about, you know, the extinction of the slide rule and how the calculator is going to ruin education forever for kids.
00:11:35.000For people that were living in 1600s in Central Europe, the printing press Probably meant to them war and bloodshed.
00:11:43.000To us it meant the advent of the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution.
00:11:48.000So my feeling about this new technology, sorry to go on about this, I'm really excited about it because I feel like it's huge, is it's not a question of yes or no.
00:12:02.000The question is, who is going to do it and what are the guardrails going to be around it?
00:12:06.000And those, I think, are the real pressing questions that some of the smartest people in the world, way smarter than me, are grappling with right now.
00:12:13.000One of them being the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman.
00:12:17.000It's interesting because when you talk about regulation with something like this it can sometimes seem to be at odds with where we might stand elsewhere on the subject of censorship.
00:12:30.000I've heard people say that if this isn't like that Elon Musk, for example, said this ought
00:12:37.000to be regulated and it's not regulated.
00:12:39.000And now I know that when people talk about regulation elsewhere within social media,
00:12:45.000the problem ends up being that it's not about regulation of monopolies, it's regulation
00:12:49.000of it ends up being sensitive of free speech, essentially.
00:12:53.000I'm fascinated, Barry, to hear you say that this is a seismic shift and is epochal and
00:12:59.000that you don't think that everyone having a phone in their pocket represents that or
00:13:25.000When everyone was freaking out about Bitcoin and crypto in the beginning of the pandemic, I went and bought $10,000 and then promptly lost my password forever, thus losing the $10,000.
00:13:49.000Far be it for me to suggest that the phone in my pocket that contains more computing power than, you know, what sent rockets to the moon.
00:13:57.000I mean, of course I'm blown away by it.
00:13:59.000I'm just saying that this thing, in its very, very short few months, has already proven to be extraordinarily transformative.
00:14:09.000And so I'm not saying that the internet and the fact that we're talking through a screen right now, and I'm in LA and you're in the UK, it's unbelievable.
00:14:17.000I'm just suggesting that this has the ability to be perhaps even more unbelievable, and people that are more sophisticated than me are suggesting so.
00:14:26.000And so I think it's incumbent upon all of us to learn about it.
00:14:29.000Now, as for the question of regulation and censorship, that really, really scares me.
00:14:34.000I mean, go in there and ask—other people have done this, but go in there and type something controversial into chat, GBT.
00:15:53.000And so that I think is really worrisome to me.
00:15:56.000And so there are people who are suggesting other kinds of, you know, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, suggests that maybe he should be the head ultimately of OpenAI.
00:16:05.000Maybe that's a position that should be democratically elected because that's how significant and important it will be.
00:16:12.000Um, so, you know, the jury's out, but when I look at the people who are in Washington and their average age, frankly, the idea of them regulating this technology is worrisome to me.
00:16:24.000When we have in the media landscape cozy relationships as evidence between the recent White House correspondents' dinner and then adversarial, aggressive, punitive relationships as the aforementioned Tybee Schellenberger What do you think this tells us about the shifting landscape between the media and the powerful?
00:16:50.000In particular, I'm noting Matt Taibbi's IRS visit, the threat with jail for perjury or whatever.
00:17:00.000How do you feel Barry operating in a comparable space and both of you know Matt Taibbi being a peer and indeed colleague of yours?
00:17:08.000I think it is the job of journalists to hold power to account and do that even when it's politically inconvenient for your side.
00:17:19.000You know, I think that Nat Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, me, we're never going to be invited to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
00:17:27.000Because when I became a journalist, I didn't do it for the money.
00:17:31.000I didn't do it for the accolades, and I didn't do it so that I could, you know, drink champagne next to powerful people.
00:17:38.000I did it because it's a vocation that allows you to pursue your curiosity and in which you get, you know, a salary to take your flashlight and look into the darkest corners, into the kind of corners that the powers that be don't want you to look.
00:17:55.000So, you know, when I see the IRS, Seemingly being weaponized against someone like Matt Taibbi.
00:18:02.000I think that that is something that every single journalist in this country, whether they work for an independent site, whether they write for a substack, whether they work at the Washington Post or the New York Times, should be absolutely up in arms about that.
00:18:14.000And I think it tells you something really concerning about the state of the legacy press in this country that, you know, the Wall Street Journal thankfully had an editorial, but there should have been editorials about that visit in every single newspaper across the West, in my view.
00:18:29.000Why isn't Biden likely to conduct primary debates?
00:18:35.000I think many of us would be interested to hear debates between, for example, Robert F. Kennedy and Biden, and Marianne Williamson's doing pretty well also.
00:18:46.000Why is the Democrat Party becoming so censorial, so afraid of conversation?
00:18:55.000I mean, look, tells you a lot about the popularity of Joe Biden among voters that Marianne Williamson is pulling at something like nine or 10% and RFK Jr.
00:19:05.000that who announced like two weeks ago, I think, is pulling at something like 20% already.
00:19:11.000Who knows what will happen when Gavin Newsom, California governor, maybe is reportedly maybe going to get to the race at some point.
00:19:16.000People Realize that Joe Biden, though he won the last election, is getting slipped the questions in press conferences to sort of be prepped.
00:19:29.000He's someone that they're sort of I don't want to say hiding, but trying to protect from the probing questions of the press as much as possible.
00:19:41.000How do you think he would fare in a debate against Marianne Williamson, RFK, and to say nothing of other people that might join the race?
00:19:49.000So essentially, you have someone in a position of power that's being protected.
00:19:54.000You have a relationship between the mainstream press and the government that is consensual, as we saw with a recent report around the Pentagon Papers Part 2, that the content of the leaks was ignored.
00:20:09.000You had the ludicrous spectacle of Biden saying that we must protect the free press and that
00:20:15.000journalism is not a crime while Assange is still away in a maximum security prison.
00:20:21.000And adding to this, this potentially unprecedented tool that we were previously discussing, which
00:20:28.000will ultimately, I suppose, end up in the hands of the powerful.
00:20:32.000And it seems based on what you're saying about the inflections that AI already bears
00:20:38.000culturally that it's a system, and of course we know from the Twitter files what the relationship
00:20:43.000is between big tech and the Democrat party in particular, of course, I'm sure they would
00:20:47.000be flexible depending on which of those two parties were in power.
00:20:50.000It seems that the potential to govern the population is about to become, I would say, what do I want to say, sort of overwhelming.
00:21:05.000With these new tools, it's possible that freedom could be further eroded.
00:21:10.000So, really, at a point where we ought be insisting on new independent movements, a point where we should be insisting on transparency, there is more surveillance, militarization of the police, more protest laws, an inability to conduct public discourse by the most powerful person in the world.
00:21:30.000What do you imagine is most immediately required, Barry?
00:21:35.000What I think is most immediately required and what I see already happening, and I guess this is the silver lining, is, you know, look at both of us in this moment right now.
00:21:47.000I don't even know how big your audience is at this point.
00:21:51.000Here I am, thinking that I was going to be, you know, I spent my career in the legacy press, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, left the New York Times in 2020 for reasons maybe we can discuss, had no plan, had never, I barely had a credit card, you know, to say nothing of being an entrepreneur.
00:22:10.000That was like the furthest thing from my mind.
00:22:12.000And now I'm building a media company and I have 20 people working with me.
00:22:16.000So the great news is that the technological revolution we're living through, yes, can be used in extraordinarily oppressive ways, and it can also be democratizing.
00:22:30.000It can be used for good or bad, like fire, like the printing press, like the iPhones in our pocket, right?
00:22:38.000And so while I think we should be concerned, and while I think this technology, AI, as we were talking about before, has the potential to be the big one, so to speak. I think
00:22:49.000that, you know, if the past is prelude, it can be used in both ways. And so am I worried that you
00:22:58.000can go right now and create a conversation between the two of us, as someone did between Joe Rogan and
00:23:04.000Sam Altman, and created an episode of the Joe Rogan experience that looked kind of like them and
00:23:09.000sounded kind of like them? Yeah, that really worries me when I think about actual disinformation,
00:23:14.000not what people want to believe is disinformation. Very concerning to me. But there's also
00:23:18.000incredible things that are going to come from it. So this is something that I'm watching
00:23:23.000more as a journalist, wanting to track it, wanting to understand it, wanting to understand who the
00:23:31.000Did the people that signed that letter, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak and others, calling for a six-month pause in the advent of increased AI capabilities beyond chat GPT.
00:23:44.000Did they sign that letter because they're pure of heart?
00:23:47.000Did they sign that letter because they want to catch up to the competition?
00:23:57.000Where are they in terms of AI capabilities?
00:24:00.000These are the kind of questions that I think are going to be driving the next years of our life, the next years of stories, and it's one that I'm following incredibly, incredibly closely as a journalist above anything else.
00:24:10.000Barry, I'm so grateful to you for asking these questions.
00:24:13.000I mean, I admire incredibly what you've done and the organization that you are evidently building, not to mention your ability, along with your wife, to expertly manage this child through the night in ways that seem to me to be unprecedented.
00:24:27.000I think what's interesting also about what you're saying is that you are journaling what's happening but increasingly I think it's likely that to become a legitimate journalist is to become a de facto activist and perhaps this is something that began with the Greenwald and Assange and certainly it seems likely due to the ongoing increase of censorship to be a necessity that if you're going to tell the truth you are an enemy of the powerful.
00:24:57.000So I'm glad that we at least have an allegiance.
00:25:01.000Of course, I'll give you the chance to respond.
00:25:18.000I think journalism I think the way to do journalism that maintains integrity and maintains the trust of people has to hew to sort of old school rules that frankly a lot of the legacy press has turned their back on, right?
00:25:36.000The thing that used to happen at the New York Times was very clear.
00:25:39.000You know, if a certain op-ed, and I was an op-ed editor, editor there for years and then also wrote my own columns,
00:25:45.000if an op-ed sort of hewed to the ideological narrative, if an op-ed argued that
00:25:49.000Donald Trump was a moral monster that had to be taken down, if an op-ed
00:25:53.000claimed that, you know, Joe Biden was the savior of the world, we could go on and on
00:25:56.000and on, you know what the arguments are. It would sort of sail into the paper.
00:26:00.000And arguments that contradicted that, arguments that complicated it.
00:26:05.000Those were ones that sort of were subjected to a much, much, much more rigorous test.
00:26:10.000In other words, and I think that that was to the detriment of the audience to the reader.
00:26:14.000And I think that when you think about the The old manifesto of the New York Times, the idea of all the news that's fit to print, and the way that it sort of has transformed, and many other papers as well, to all the news that fits the narrative.
00:26:30.000I just think that there is a huge, wide-open space for people that are actually interested in treating readers like adults.
00:26:37.000that are actually interested in treating listeners as sophisticated people that can make their own decisions, not just shoving propaganda down their throat.
00:26:45.000And so that's what we're about at The Free Press.
00:27:04.000That sounds like a fantastic endeavour and I'm grateful to you for undertaking it.
00:27:08.000You can learn more from Barry Weiss by reading the Free Press, listening to her podcast Honestly, reading her book, How to Fight Antisemitism.