I was curious if you sat with it for a week or so now, if you had anything else to kind of add on that.

I mean, what's so interesting in that vein, right? So she is inspired by Jobs.

She does the black turtlenecks.

All that stuff is very much about the show of it and the idea that I'm going to basically pull the future down by sheer force of will and bring it to the people in the form of this Theranos blood testing thing.

But like Steve Jobs, as you just said, the the whole the early like Silicon Valley founder visionary thing was that thing is like we're working in these in these labs, you know, we're building whatever it is and then we reveal it to you.

And it's like, you know, it's this thing, right? It's the it's the phone.

It's like, oh, OK, yeah, I want that.

and it's just very funny that the the thing according to john that errol morris immediately took away from this was like oh this is obviously an exploration of self-deception and which is kind of where we ended up and so charlie i guess i'm packaging the last five minutes of what we're talking about here how does that magic trick happen do you think what what are the levers that they pull to make big strong smart guys like me and big randy feel like complete fools well

Um, what have been, uh, other favorites?

I mean, well, thank you for that.

The Ben Rector situation where we went to Branson was truly one of the stupidest things that became great.

I was just like, I didn't know Ben, but we followed each other on Twitter we were talking about, uh, Travis and I were talking about this Branson thing.

And I was like, maybe he would go like there's musicians and Branson Ben's a musician who plays golf, like whatever.

So like, I just sort of, I, I reached out to him on, on, on Twitter over like a DM and, Again, this is other than like a reply.

This is the first conversation of just a stranger inviting a guy who I didn't realize at the time how famous he was.

For those who haven't read it, just give it to us from the beginning.

Okay.

But they also figured out that every swipe is data.

It's a thing about you.

Like, every time you don't swipe for a little bit, like i- if, if you see something on your phone and you wait six seconds instead of two seconds, that's a piece of data.

So then they analyze, like, what, what were all the properties of that video? Why did they stay on it? Did they play it twice? Did they play it three times? Okay, they play it four times in a row.

And maybe it's just 'cause it's confusing, right? It's not 'cause you love it.

You're trying to figure out what's going on.

Well, how does the clipping economy factor into this, and how big is it and how does it impact what we see every day?

... you know, tried to fast track Texas as the epicenter of the, the technology.

Right.

And so there's, there's a little bit of, I, I think some of these guys are really getting the message.

There was I, I think a, a group of, um, uh, of Republicans, uh, talking to the, the AI industry basically saying, like, "You're gonna make this hard for us to win in battleground states if you don't actually, like, you know, change your PR and your messaging." So I do think the Democrats are on, on better footing with this.

I do think it's going to be interesting to watch how this evolves and what are the things, like w- w- what are the areas of, of actual focus? Like, does it become about environmental stuff? Because that is w- you know, one of the most resonant things.

Or does it become more about, you know, the, the oligarchy backlash, the big tech backlash, the getting rid of the money on it? And I do think that they will have to figure out a, a, a lane here instead of just saying data centers bad because I do think the way that all of this stuff goes is eventually the data centers get cleaner, right? They get, they get, you know, uh, more entrenched.

Like, the issue could potentially lose some of its political salience, and if you don't know exactly what it is you're fighting against, I think it could, it could just sorta look like, you know, like jumping on the bandwagon, et cetera.

Yeah

Do you have any of these low stakes nightmares?

I mean, I think this one is very, very big.

We're, like, just at the very beginning.

Like, only, like, the true believers, like, the kind of, like, the crazies.

And I mean that even, they're not actually crazy people.

But, like, the people who are so deep in this are the ones who are running, like, open claw, right? Yeah.

And just saying, like, let's connect this to my calendar.

And it was

Mm-hmm

... too, that there's like, "Oh, this is like, this is the tool that's gonna empower you to do whatever, whatever, whatever." A lot of these companies that are token maxing right now, you know, using AI all the time everywhere, you know, constantly, they're, like, doing it to make PowerPoint presentations, right? And to, like, you know, send emails back and forth that are, like, absolutely, you know, heart-crushingly [chuckles] soulless that is like, "We're looping back on looping back," and it's, you know, agents sending emails to agents that are then being summarized by other agents so that someone can read them and send them to their boss, so their boss can make the same decision they were gonna make probably, right? Like, and that's all part of this future, but, but they're only focusing on the stuff that's really useful and helpful to them, right? Which is the idea that this is going to absolutely empower you.

And, and meanwhile, right, one of the things that I think we have seen throughout Silicon Valley over the course of whatever the Web 2.0 through, through now time, is that we conduct essentially these real-time experiments on humanity, right? Let's connect every single person in the world via these, you know, algorithms that mediate things and push the most extreme emotions to the forefront and reward you with attention and time and money, right? And, and let's, you know, let's, let's have our politics just port over onto that and see what happens.

And bad things do happen, right? But we just kind of keep pushing forward.

We don't really address the thing, and I think that we see that now with AI and stuff.

I, I, I was on a trip this past week, and speaking, like, with a lot of people who, you know, have kids who are, like, in high school or college, and I had at least, you know, a handful of people just tell me, like, "Man, my, my kid's critical thinking skills suck." Like, they, they don't know how to write a real paper because they were early to ChatGPT.

That's what they use, and that's what all their friends use, and all the teachers are just like, "Yeah, you just...

[chuckles]

Yeah

... is this, is this paranoia.

And, uh, I started, I started the piece with a, a, a callback to, to a piece by, uh, the internet tech writer Max Read, who wrote in New York Magazine back in, in 2018 about, um, what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where, you know, the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me, uh, human beings, m- may, like, surpass some of, uh, some of, you know, the content that, that, that we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority, you know, automated.

And that, at the time, I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people, this, this feeling that, oh, whoa, like, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet, sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, uh, that a lot of websites are populated with, with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is.

And now that's honestly a, a, a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're gonna call it or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of, of ChatGPT, but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways.

So you have synthetic text, you know, all the w- um, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And- Now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right? To promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a, a scam or s- or, or, or, you know, like pretty awful.

You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that, that Google Search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Um, then you have synthetic music, AI slop videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds.

Basically.

Yeah.

"Like, I can't, I don't have proof, but, like, I, I know this is going on in, in the, in these different places." And that to me is interesting.

But then once it happens, it's like, yeah, okay, this is happening.

To me, what I think is really interesting is this broader, like, the, a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, but this broader theory- Of attention and the financialization logic.

And this is something that I think kind of goes throughout everything in, in culture, politics, in media, sports, which is this idea of, like, you cannot sell a product anymore in today's, like, attention economy.

Like, just like a, a, a pr- you have to sell some derivative of it.

Like, it's just too saturated to make any good money selling any kind of product, right? So you, you sell instead like a financialized part of it.

Yeah

Yeah

... is this, is this paranoia.

And, uh, I started, I started the piece with, uh, uh, a callback to, to a piece by, uh, the internet tech writer Max Read, who wrote in New York Magazine back in, in twenty eighteen about, um, what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where, you know, the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me, uh, human beings m- may, like, surpass some of, uh, some of, you know, the content that, that, that we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority, you know, automated.

And that at the time I remember was a real revelation for a lot of people, this, this feeling that, oh, whoa, like, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet, sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, uh, that a lot of websites are populated with, with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is.

And now that's honestly a, a, a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're gonna call it or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of, of ChatGPT but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways.

So you have synthetic text, you know, all the w- um, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right? To promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a, a scam or s- or, or, or, you know, like pretty awful.

You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that, that Google Search most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Um, then you have synthetic music, AI slop videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds, and you have organizations that ha- are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts- To seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have y- you- these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes...

Basically.

Yeah

... is this, is this paranoia.

And, uh, I started, I started the piece with a, a, a callback to, to a piece by, uh, the internet tech writer Max Read, who wrote in New York Magazine back in, in 2018 about, um, what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where, you know, the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me, uh, human beings m- may, like, surpass some of, uh, some of, you know, the content that, that, that we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree, or majority, you know, automated.

And that, at the time, I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people, this, this feeling that, "Oh, whoa, like, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet, sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, uh, that a lot of websites are populated with, with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is." And now that's honestly a, a, a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're gonna call it or whatever we're in, basically since, you know, the arrival of, of ChatGPT, but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways.

So you have synthetic text, you know, all the w- um, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right, to promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a, a scam or s- or, or, or, you know, like, pretty awful.

You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that, that Google Search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Um, then you have synthetic music, AI slop videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds, and you have organizations that ha- are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have y- you-- these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes-- the algorithm thinks, "Oh, this is a popular song," and then when other people-

Basically.

Great way to put it.

There's nothing you can't come back from.

Right.

There is no PR crisis anymore really, right? Like, just double down, find the people who are willing to defend you, play to them, and, you know, and information war is good business almost.

And I feel like another lesson, like sort of a, a downstream lesson of, of that is if you build the narrative, the narrative can either become reality or it can be stronger than reality, and that's what I feel like is happening with a lot of things.

I, I haven't really looked a ton into, you know, the GameStop, eBay situation, but I feel like to some degree, you know, it- if you can trot out the narrative, you, if you can get people to respond to it, if you can get people to treat it seriously, or even in not treating it seriously, you know, do what we're doing here, which is like turn the situation over, right? Try to analyze, like, what s- you know, chance does GameStop have to actually do this? Can they pull this off? What does it mean? It's, it's making them, you know, a really relevant character in this conversation.

It's making them talk ab- making people talk about, you know, the, the power of the meme, the meme stock, the narrative, getting people bought in.

Maybe there's another, you know, chance for them to, you know, go on a, go on a Reddit run, right? Where, where people are like, "Yeah, we do want this to happen.

Um, how is, h- what's your experience like going from serious guy writing to serious guy making podcasts? How does it change what you talk about, how you think about it?

Did, did that surprise you, that it's like, it's, it's now nonpartisan, the conspiracy theorizing?

Well, I thought one thing that, just to that point, that's, like, super fascinating is, uh, Andrew Kaczynski at S- at CNN found through a whole bunch of Cole Allen's social media posts that, that he had shared a lot of posts about the Butler assassination attempt as staged.

So it's like a, you know, a Russian nesting doll of, like, a conspiracy breeds a conspiracy breeds a conspiracy.

But I, [laughs] you know, in a sense I'm, I'm not surprised.

And I think the reason why it's not surprising is because Donald Trump and the way that he has acted for so longYou, you would be right more often if you assumed sort of, like, the worst and lowest intentions of, of Donald Trump, right? N- now, not, not to say, like, I do not believe...

I'm not in that camp [laughs] of this stage or anything.

But when you look at the cynical nature of his politics, of the things that he does, of, of the way that he operates, the, you know, the idea that there is sort of no, there's nothing so low that he wouldn't stoop to do it, you can understand how people processing the last 11 years, you know, of his political career through that lens wouldn't then be inclined to jump, you know, to, to conclusions that are fundamentally wrong.

Longer question, though, which is, is there, I mean, what do actual journalists do in this? Like, at, how, at what point do you play footsie or at least address, like, as someone who's tasked with being an, a, you know, delivering the truth or delivering the facts to a broader audience, like, what, what should people who actually understand what, what happened and what is happening, who have information to share with the public, h- what is the best way to disp- I mean, like, is there a way to de-radicalize or just, like, or is it you have to hear from your own circle of friends and advisors and trusted persons in order to be disabused of paranoid conspiracy theories? Like, can institutional media, can legacy media, can journalists who don't personally know the audience that's spreading the conspiracy theories, have we reached a point that that, you know, sort of the i- the idea that an institution can offer the truth counter to what you may personally believe, has that gone the way of the dodo bird?

Are we looking at a shift where an emotional connection with a synthetic persona can outweigh authenticity?

I think this remains to be seen, but what I have noticed with certain influencers, there are certain times when someone will stumble upon an AI influencer, and they will feel wronged.

They will feel like, "Oh, I was duped.

I was scammed.

If this company, if this person, if this influencer, if they can't even deign to put a real human being out there in front of it, like, why should I care?" And so there's I think still a feeling of, "I do not want to engage with something that isn't authentically human." On the flip side of that, I have seen people say that the whole point and purpose of an influencer is a life that is aspirational in some way, right? Someone who, who has access to products that, you know, you would never get to have or access to experiences or, you know, lives a luxurious lifestyle that i- that is out of reach for most people.

And that unattainability kind of translates over to the idea of something synthetic, right? What is the difference between someone who is traveling around the world and sitting, you know, sipping cocktails in infinity pools when you're making, you know, an hourly wage and kind of grinding yourself down? What's the difference between that lifestyle and something that's totally fake? Some people in that sense maybe don't care.

And I think the one thing that we've seen with the use of generative AI out in the world, we've seen it-Sadly in politics, is that when something reaches you in your feed and provokes an emotional response in you that you either feel is righteous or you enjoy or g- you know, gives you some kind of pleasure, a lot of people just don't care what the providence of that is.

When you think about the red flags that you've already talked about, when you think about 2016 and these Russian troll farms that were used to fake online personas to influence conversations about politics, and then as we head toward the 2026 midterms, do AI-generated influencers pose a similar kind of risk here, or is this something fundamentally different?

Hmm.

You couldn't hurt them.

You couldn't insult them.

You couldn't make fun of them for living in their parents' basement, right? And so there became this way of, you know, trolling people, of really having no ideology other than chaos, that really has bled into all kinds of culture over the last, uh, you know, two decades.

And the Trump movement in 2016 was, was a, a huge, you know, leap forward for these people feeling like they had representation, but also that their culture was, was fusing with a type of politics, and that has grown and grown and grown year over year over year.

And what you see now in the second Trump administration are a lot of these people, or people who are fluent in this- in the language of those places, now occupy positions in government.

The person who is controlling the Department of Homeland Security's account on X, or the White House's account on X, the person who's doing the day-to-day posting, is posting in a way that is indistinguishable from how someone was posting on 4chan in 2014.

... than, um, anything to do with politics.

it's an advantage to know what country you're raiding.

It's very true.

But what they were clearly trying to do And you see this – there was an example in the New York Times.

They did a story about FBI Director Kash Patel in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination back in September.

And he was dispatched with a number of people to the crime scene in Utah.

And he was most interested – in what was going on on Twitter, on X.

He was most interested in the reaction and whether people were saying good things about what was going on, about the FBI's investigation or whether they were getting dragged by different people for not doing enough.

When you look to the future, do you take heart from simply the power of humor, the power of jokes, the power of mockery?

it's an advantage to know what country you're raiding.

It's very true.

But what they were clearly trying to do And you see this – there was an example in the New York Times.

They did a story about FBI Director Kash Patel in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination back in September.

And he was dispatched with a number of people to the crime scene in Utah.

And he was most interested – in what was going on on Twitter, on X.

He was most interested in the reaction and whether people were saying good things about what was going on, about the FBI's investigation or whether they were getting dragged by different people for not doing enough.

When you look to the future, do you take heart from simply the power of humor, the power of jokes, the power of mockery?

Yeah

... like, we have, we have broken through on this, and, and so much of that was due to this video, and this video and all the other video that shows all that excessive force being used.

That's not really even shot...

Some of it is by protesters, like people who are out there, you know, in the streets and that, like, you know, chanting and doing that.

But a lot of it is shot by this other category, which is bystanders, right? These are people who are, like, helping the, the protesters with logistics.

They're running, like, Signal group chats to help, you know, do, like, mutual aid, get people places, notify people that, like, you know, a group of ICE agents is headed to, you know, this part of the city, et cetera.

And those are the people who are taking, you know, the real genuine risk of filming this stuff.

I know.

Can you walk us through a bit of a timeline, perhaps, of like, how did Twitter go from the place we all remember to what it is now? And like, what are some of the big things that Elon Musk is responsible for?

Yeah.

So when he took it over, he took it over in part.

Because there were some text messages that came out of him talking to various different people.

And it seemed very clear that he took it over in part because of a slight from certain people who said that he couldn't run it or he shouldn't run it or that they didn't want him to... take all this power and be on the board in this way.

Right.

Like they were making it hard for him to join the board.

Right.

Can you walk us through a bit of a timeline, perhaps, of like, how did Twitter go from the place we all remember to what it is now? And like, what are some of the big things that Elon Musk is responsible for?

Yeah.

So when he took it over, he took it over in part.

Because there were some text messages that came out of him talking to various different people.

And it seemed very clear that he took it over in part because of a slight from certain people who said that he couldn't run it or he shouldn't run it or that they didn't want him to... take all this power and be on the board in this way.

Right.

Like they were making it hard for him to join the board.

Right.

Can you walk us through a bit of a timeline, perhaps, of like, how did Twitter go from the place we all remember to what it is now? And like, what are some of the big things that Elon Musk is responsible for?

Yeah.

So when he took it over, he took it over in part.

Because there were some text messages that came out like of him talking to various different people.

And it seemed very clear that he took it over in part because of like a slight from certain people who said that like he couldn't run it or he shouldn't run it or or that they didn't want him to, you know.

take all this power and be on the board in this way, right? Like they were making it hard for him to join the board.

And he was like, you know what? I'm going to buy the damn thing.

Basically people who were involved Right.

Got, they got rid of a US senator in Ohio.

And, and also just to show Donald Trump.

I mean, is there, is there a piece of technology m- more ripe for Donald Trump, right? Here's a thing that's like basically you can do shady financial crimes with, right? Uh, it i- it is an instrument for graft.

And I, you know, it makes complete and total sense that he saw this and said, "Hey, let's go and do this." But I think like World Liberty Financial, the, the, the Trump crypto, you know, company there that has made them, you know, uh, billions-...

I don't think a lot of people really understand it.

I feel like that's one of those stories of this year that if, if, if regular people really were able to, you know, grasp onto this, people who aren't paying attention to Twitter and, and, and sort of, you know, the tech stuff like we are, I think it would be a, a genuine outrage.

I mean, it, it's, like, if you look at, at, you know, some of the, the meme coin stuff that happened in those first couple of weeks or, like, right before the ina- the inauguration, retail investors got absolutely murdered by that.

I think that's the thing I hear about most, like, in the, in the personal tech and automotive space is like, "I'm not buying a Tesla because I don't, I, I don't stand for him," even though it's the best car and, and truly, like, the most affordable EV you can get in America.

Do we have a sense of which end of the political spectrum is kind of faring worse?

As a journalist, I wanna be very clear that it's tough to get a picture of the scope of this, because it's very difficult to just be like independently researching this at Twitter's scale.

From what I can see, I do think this is disproportionately harmful to the right wing, because Twitter has become such a political weapon for the far right.

Musk, as recently as last week, he was apologizing, because there was like left-wing political influencer stuff that was showing up in people's feeds and saying, "That's a mistake." Like, it's very clear he's tried to tilt the algorithms toward one set.

And so I think just for that reason alone, there is this notion as these accounts are being uncovered that the MAGA movement has really dined out on the fact that there is an incredible online grassroots effort here, right? This is the voice of the people, so to speak.

And I think seeing that on X hurts them a little more than it hurts the left, a lot of which have moved away from Twitter as a primary place.

But how profitable is this really? Like, are people getting rich off of these, like...

I think it's really hard to tell what people are making.

You know what I'm saying? What did you think of th- ha- the week, 'cause you've been paying attention to this and you've been writing about Epstein and I'm sure you know, you know, Michael's emails and all that stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We- we just, I just published a piece over at The Atlantic about, about going through all these emails and, and what I, what I sort of believe it to, (laughs) to signify, uh, which is essentially, uh, it said there in the, in the headline there, uh, it's like if, if QAnon meets Veep, right? Because the idea behind something like QAnon, right, was this idea of this, like, global pedophile cabal that, like, used secret codewords and went all the way to the top echelons of the government and was, like, extremely, like a lot of conspiracy theories, extremely hyper competent, right? Like, these people are doing absolutely horrific, horrible things and covering it up all along the way and, you know, behaving, uh, badly but also, like, kind of almost impressively, right? And, you know, conspiracy theories are, are meant to make sense of the world and give it a structure, uh, that it usually doesn't have, right? And oftentimes, they're, they're wrong and, uh, and, uh, and completely false-But in the case of this, what we do have is we have a lot of our nation's elites interacting with, fawning wi- over, um, asking favors of, trying to get dirt from this extremely well-known alleged child sex trafficker, and they are not behaving in a hyper-competent way.

They are bumbling.

Everyone looks extremely unimpressive.

Uh, it is, it is just, like, I, I, I found Jeffrey Epstein's emails are rambling.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

There's only so many construction workers and construction companies.

There's only so many chips.

There's only so much land.

You can only get these things up and, you know, operating quick enough and that all of that physical infrastructure will moderate some of the investment and some of the spend, right? This notion that, you know, we can't scale up as fast as the companies want and that will be a moderating influence that will allow the technology to sort of meet the expectations a little bit better.

The gap will dwindle.

But the, the concern though is there are dynamics at play here that are, that are starting to get a little bit weird and complicated in like a 2008 financial crisis way.

What do you think about that dilemma?

I mean, uh, what do you find the experience of sitting there watching it? How did you feel after watching it so much?

So, uh, both OpenAI and, as you said, Meta, have created sort of like TikTok clones and like social media feeds.

But the, you know, the, the trick is that it's all this AI-generated stuff.

So it's nothing that a human has made, even though they've kind of given the prompts.

And scrolling through them is, it's very weird.

It's very disorienting, right? There's almost like a narcotic feel to doing it.

You're just kind of get lost in this sort of slack-jawed loop.

Like, will a kid wanna be an animator?