i'm getting cooked for my AI opinions

Hello everyone, and welcome to this little sit-down we're going to have

because I am getting I'll say lightly cooked. I'll say a

little pan sear in the comment section of our latest video essay, which doesn't often happen.

And when it does, I like to take a step back. It's been a week.

Process my feelings on the matter, do some research, read the comments,

engage thoughtfully with the discourse, and then sometimes, as in this case,

come back and uh engage in a little bit of conversation.

This is hopefully just a reminder to all of you. We do read the comments. I do in

many cases personally and take them very seriously because you guys are very smart and thoughtful and I like to be, you know,

pushed to be more conscientious about the things I say and how I say them.

Now, for those who missed it, this is our most recent video essay from last

week. It is about AI, but kind of more specifically about what happens when AI

disrupts not just a huge portion of the job market, but specifically the parts

of the job market that have been disproportionately propping up what we

think of as the economy, which is very disproportionately white-collar workers,

computer-based jobs, and basically a lot of the things that are first on the

chopping block to AI disruption, if not already very much in that process. Now,

in that video, among many other things, I do talk about the fact that I use AI

and am not, I guess what you could call, quote, anti-AI, although I don't

actually think that such a term functionally means much, but we'll get

back to that. I'm going to put a pin in that. But I was open about the fact that

I don't have, I guess you could say the sort of

extreme negative position on AI, and I'm also not sort of completely opposed to using it in my real life. I gave a few specific

examples of how I use it. I don't use it for, you know, generative work, creating

original work, quote-unquote. I don't use it for research. I don't use it for

uh most of what I do here at TFD apart from very minor logistical tasks. And I

knew saying that in the video that that was not going to sit well with some of

our audience. I also made some comments specifically around the advancements in

in AI technology in the fields of translation, language interpretation

that sparked some conversation which I will get to a little later in this video

specifically. But all of that is to say and if you see me continually looking up

at the top right it is because I have copious notes for this video because

it's a very serious topic and I want to take it seriously. Just on a general

note when the audience doesn't necessarily take as well to one of our

videos I really do like to take that seriously and come it's been a week I've

had time to sit with it, think about it, read the comments and

do my research. So I have a lot pulled up on screen here. I knew that in saying

in the video that I do use AI to an extent and also that I do believe that

we need to from a policy level, from a personal level, from a societal level

sort of accept the fact that this is not a question of if it is a question of

when and in many cases it's a question of already here and how do we sort of

handle this Pandora that has escaped from the box in my opinion in a sort of

irreversible way. I knew I would get that response in part because I have

cultivated an audience here that is very politically progressive, that is very

skeptical of tech nonsense rightfully so I think. We were also one of the

earliest and loudest voices on financial YouTube against crypto and NFTs

especially at a time when that was flooding the industry not just with

content but with ad dollars. So we've always been on the let's say skeptical

side of all of these big noisy advancements or in many cases

outright scams in technology and and economics. I also even just in my

personal social life, I'm surrounded mostly by other fellow progressive

millennials who are extremely anti-AI. So I knew going into the video and

saying these things that there would be backlash, that people would not like

this. And it's interesting because when I was when we were cutting the video, I

debated removing that entirely anything about my own AI use. But that felt

dishonest and that felt um like a lie of omission. As someone who has been

creating content, sharing opinions publicly online for 15-plus years, the

entirety of my adult life, I do also, in addition to wanting to be

honest about things even when I know they're not going to be popular with the

audience in the same way. Um I also feel on a certain level that

if I am never receiving pushback, if I am never engaging in these comments,

um or in this discourse in this sort of conversation with my audience, that I'm

to some extent probably pandering intentionally or creating an echo

chamber. This is not to say that there are that everything is up for debate or

that, you know, all of my sort of progressive convictions are not real. They absolutely are. However, I do think that

sometimes the quote-unquote party line around what is popular to say or what

would sort of score me brownie points from my fellow progressives is not

always totally in line with how I actually believe how I actually think or

act in my own life. So I do, although it is sometimes stressful and

anxiety-inducing to read comments where people really don't agree with you and

are a little bit mad at you, I also think that that is

overall to me a good sign that I'm at minimum being honest and transparent

about where I maybe don't sort of adhere to the the consensus. And also I'm very

aware that if we were to just do like super anti-AI content, especially on

like social media where you don't really get into the nuances of it, that it

would probably be popular and, you know, clickable and shareable and all of these

things. But, I personally believe that especially with something as important

as consequential as existentially threatening as AI is, it really warrants

honesty and nuance in the conversation, regardless of how we personally feel.

Before I get into sort of my more expanded view on AI and responding to

some of the comments, I want to put a few of my personal biases on the table.

Now, number one is that I am an artist functionally. I My first book was

published in 2012. I've published several since. Uh my father is an

illustrator. I have a lot of other artists in my family. Two of my books

actually qualified for the massive anthropic author lawsuit, so I'll

eventually be getting a check in the mail for that. And also, I have seen up

close and personal, uh for people who work in the creative fields, how much

their work has been just decimated in the past 18 months. It just dried up

completely in many cases. So, on especially a sort of generative {slash}

{quote} {unquote} original content front, I am very much not only against

this, but also directly impacted by it. Also, personally as a creator of

content, existentially threatened by it myself. It is part of the reason why

events are something that we're going to be leaning more into with TFD in the

coming years, because at least for now, that's kind of one of the things that AI

can't replace is is in person or even virtual events and classes and things

like that. And even on the classes front, there's nuance happening there,

but we'll get into that later. Another personal bias though is that my husband

works in tech, and I mentioned it in the video, but I didn't really get super

deep into it, but in just the past, again, roughly 18 months, the entire

nature of how my husband works, what he does and doesn't do, has totally

changed. The work that he did at the beginning of of career as a software

engineer functionally no longer really exists. He works in product. Tasks that

used to take a team of a dozen people can now be done with two or three. He

has had to completely adapt how he works, learn new skills, change what his

objectives are, what his value offerings are. Like, if he was not adapting over

the past year, he would be effectively out of a job in the next probably two or

three. I want to be clear that coding, engineering, computer science generally

is very much on the cutting edge of these jobs being absorbed, replaced,

changed, etc. But, it is to say that in my own home on a daily basis, these are

conversations we're having that are not if, they are and again, not even when,

they are now. They have already taken place and we have to adjust accordingly

even when we're planning on like, what do the rest of our lives look like?

What's our financial strategy? What's our career strategy? Etc. The ground has

fully shifted underneath his feet. So, that is also very much informing how I

think about these things um and how I feel, you know, is is relevant to plan

for them. It's also a side note, but my husband is very politically progressive,

more so maybe even than I am. He's like deeply, deeply woke.

Uh but, also to an extent that he's sort of cynical and very sort of anxious

about humanity. When we talk about this and we talk about it a lot at home, his

vision for the impact of AI on white collar work is probably slightly even

more catastrophic than mine. We talked about it with our financial advisor last

Friday just getting his thoughts on uh the job market as it pertains to AI

uh because financial advisory is another area that's being heavily impacted by AI

learning models. And um yeah, suffice to say we had a three-way

debate where we talked about it. This is another reason why I really love using a

financial advisor. Uh if you want a good one, the link's in the description. The

tone in our house is just one of we've already been deeply impacted and we're

very worried about what the impact will be. So, that is another one of my biases

to put on the table. And of course, I have other ones, right? Like, we all go

into every conversation with some level of bias and so I absolutely don't want

to discount the idea that other things are probably informing my opinions on the matter, but I also just want to say

those are two of the really big ones. But this is a a very serious topic and I

believe that as such I, you know, should give a very serious and thoughtful

response to the comments that were critical of me for not being sort of

outright rejecting of AI or against it. to break this into four segments, which

will be the technological question, the labor question, the macroeconomic

question, and the environmental question because I think these are all very

important topics when we talk about AI, but they're pretty distinct and not

always connected I think in the way that they are being connected. So first of

all in the technology question, I linked yesterday on my Instagram to an article

that I think is very good if you are interested in learning about AI

from a 360 perspective from someone who is not at all a booster or a true

believer, someone who is deeply skeptical and also quite technologically

literate. So can really break down the concepts, but my overall point in the

video and today is that I don't think all of AI technology is just BS and

hype. This is why for example, when people will compare it to something like

crypto, which is again something we were very seriously, staunchly, and loudly

against and still are, I don't quite see the comparison. I think there are some

similarities and some of the boosters are the same, some of the players are

the same. The narratives can be similar, the hype can be similar, the money can be similar, but there are very meaningful

distinctions between these two things if for no other reason than the sort of

technology that underpins what we call AI is not new. Like this has existed for

quite some time. And also what AI even is and what it can and can't do varies

enormously from function to function and implement and implementation to

implementation. When a lot of people think of AI, they think about things

like for example, the generative AI that is producing original content, be that

the contents of an email all the way up to like, you know, a a a designed

graphic that a corporation is posting on social media rather than paying someone.

That is true and that is part of it, but that is far from the only implementation

of AI or how it sort of manifests in terms of what is being asked of it and

what it is producing. There's also wide variation in terms of how much of the

human brain you're essentially outsourcing to it. You know, it is a

comparison that isn't perfect, but it is still a relevant one, which is that when

the computer first sort of entered the workforce, there was an enormous amount

of pushback against specifically ways in which it would think for people or

replace people or do things, quote unquote, better than people, but you

know, the adopters were quite skeptical of that at the time. Um, and looking

back, there is an enormous amount of sort of tedious, low-level human work

that we no longer have to do that is completely taken for granted that we

would never go back to doing, but at the time was very, very controversial. Even

something as simple as, you know, being able to delete something rather than

having to retype a page entirely. And that distinction, I think, between AI

facilitating tasks that were otherwise perhaps not the most robust use of human time and energy, rather than sort of replacing

humans in an extremely imperfect way that results in an inferior product and

also, uh, makes us dumber in the process. I don't think conflating those

things is super helpful. But kind of more relevantly to the, uh, against AI

question, I think we underestimate the extent to which what is versus isn't AI

is often a question of branding. So, not to get ahead of myself, but in the

comments who were specifically uh, upset with me about my position on AI's

ability to impact the language learning, translating, interpreting market, a lot

of people were saying something to the effect of Google Translate was already

there and it was just fine. I want to be very clear that Google Translate for

some time now uses an AI model, what we would conceive of as an AI model. It is

not necessarily branded in the same way as ChatGPT or Claude or what have you.

Uh but it uses AI. YouTube that we're currently watching heavily utilizes AI.

As someone who spends an enormous amount of time on the back end of YouTube, that

is all AI now. Like, not all of it, but a huge amount of it is. I would

guarantee that if you were to pull up your phone and look at the apps, the

vast majority of them use AI to a certain extent. And again, the models,

the the the machine learning models on which AI is built, not new whatsoever.

Like, these have been around for some time. We're just iterating on them and

improving them in many cases. Whether or not we perceive uh an aspect of the

technology we use as being AI is often a distinction without a difference. And

whether or not something is marketed as AI comes down to how much the company

wants people to perceive it that way, which often they do because that can

improve things like their valuation and multiples. It can improve their sort of

PR image in terms of how technologically advanced they are or you know, the the

the tech capacities they have. But what is versus isn't AI, I think is sort of

not an irrelevant question, but it is not one that is as black and white as a

lot of people want to make it. I don't personally believe that at this point

you can sort of say I don't use AI, I won't engage with it if you are using

like the internet or you're using apps or you're using or you're just like gen

generally engaged with technology. Again, absolutely degrees up to what

extent you can opt in versus opt out. Even something as simple as like, if you

use uh Google and Google Gmail, Google Drive, etc., a lot of that you can opt in or out of in terms of how much it is sort of

integrated into your use of it, but it is built fundamentally, but it

fundamentally leverages and is built on a lot of this same technology now. As a

complete side note, I do think the opt-in versus opt-out of a lot of the

more generative AI aspects, like I don't know, your email uh platform prompting

you to write your entire email for you, I do think that that should absolutely

be more of an opt-in scenario versus an opt-out scenario, but that's a question

of policy and legislation, which we'll get to shortly. But, I say this to say,

in addition to the fact that I don't necessarily think that we can conceive

of ourselves as just not engaging with AI in the way that many of my like

fellow progressive millennials, and I'm sure many of the people watching um sort

of view themselves, I also think that there's again this understanding that

all of this is BS and hype. Some of it is. A lot of it is. A lot of it is, but

not all of it. A lot of the technology is very real, and a lot of the

advancements that have been made, for good and for bad, in the past 18 months,

like it is fundamentally changing how we work, how computers work, how we engage

with those computers. It is not fair to paint all of AI with a a a just a

general brush of it's all unnecessary And even unnecessary, I think,

can be a a subjective question, right? Like, whether or not you need any of

this in your life, that is a question of personal discretion, and I completely

understand the resentment of feeling like it's being foisted on you. However,

that is not the same thing as all of this being snake oil. And again, I look

at the way that my husband's industry has changed, the way his work has

changed, seeing it up close, what this technology is able to produce,

you can't hand-wave away as just not being real or not being worth taking

seriously. Whether or not you engage with it, that's your choice,

but it's not all fake in the way that other sort of scammary, again, such as

crypto and NFTs, I think you can really just hand wave away and be perfectly

fine never participating in that and, you know, watching it sort of slowly

decline over the years. Although, unfortunately, I was recently at an at a

financial conference and there was a whole segment on crypto and I was like,

"How are we How are we still here? Like, this is hell. Like, I'm in hell." But,

after the technology, we need to talk about what is to me the most relevant

question and is certainly the most relevant question for this channel,

which is the labor question. How does this impact labor? How is it already

impacting labor and how will it impact labor? Again, we may disagree fundamentally on the idea of whether or not AI is completely

and something that you can hand wave away, which again, I think the

bigger issue there is I don't even think we agree on what AI means in this

capacity, but we'll put that aside. Whether or not you agree with it,

support it, use it, any of the above, it is radically changing the labor market

in a massive way today. It is already happening. It has already happened in

many industries and it is not going to stop. Pandora is not going back into

that box for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the current

administration is in every way oriented toward letting AI just completely run

roughshod over the labor market, also over the environment. And essentially,

the sort of knock-on effects of making more and more people redundant at an

unprecedented rate are just going to be kicked down the road until they reach,

unfortunately, I think a critical mass economically and then someone else will

have to do it. Judging by how these things tend to go, I'm sure Democrats

will be in power when all of this comes crashing down and will be forced to

reckon with it. But, the changes to the job market that AI presents are very

real. And again, that is not an endorsement. That is not me saying, "And

yeah, I think it's awesome." I actually like, this is a complete side note. I'll

be doing a video on this later, but like my like major life project that I'm

working on right now is a like a grant-based residency for artists

specifically just because I feel so existentially sad and depressed and

anxious about what the future of the visual arts are in and all arts. It will

be open to other types of art as well, but what the future of all of these

things are in a world where we are less and less incentivized to pay real human

beings to create. Like I despair over that as an author, as you know, again a

daughter of a career artist who has just seen his industry collapse. So I am very

personally not in favor of a lot of this. I I'm devastated to see these

changes. I was just talking to a designer friend yesterday who was saying

that one of the biggest design employers in the entire country it just did mass mass layoffs the other day in tandem with,

you know, Claude's new sort of design rollout. That is devastating, but it is

also happening. So I don't think personally, and you may disagree, but I

don't think from a policy perspective or a sort of

presenting a meaningful opposition perspective that just sort of being like

I reject this it I refuse to engage with it it's not happening

is any kind of solution. I think if anything we need to be agitating more

aggressively on the sort of understanding that this is happening and we must take it seriously and we must account for it. I

mentioned it in the video, but I would like to emphasize it here. I believe my

personal political economic belief is that in order to combat the level of

changes that AI will represent to the job market in the coming 5 years, we

must implement either some version of universal basic income or a new deal

scale jobs program or both, ideally both. But I do believe that that is the

level of change that we are facing that will need to be addressed. And that

takes me to a common refrain that I hear from people who are

what I would just describe as very anti-AI, which is we don't we shouldn't

treat this as inevitable. We don't need to treat this as inevitable. I disagree

with that because I think that it it's not even inevitable, it's already

happening. Like this is already a reality and so we have to treat it as

such. And from a labor perspective specifically, like this should be one of

the absolute top agenda items for any politician right now is what are you

doing to support American workers through this AI revolution? What are you

doing? Are you siding with the sort of endless corporate greed and just

continual outsourcing and elimination and shrinkage of the already very

beleaguered middle working classes where we're just concentrating more and more

profits into not just fewer hands, but also fewer companies with this AI bubble

and the the small number of companies relatively who make it up or are you

presenting a meaningful opposition and saying that if you, for example, are

downsizing X number of jobs, you have to pay X amount more into a an

American workers fund, you know, that you can't just sort of make the total

restructuring and collapse of large parts of the American workforce into

someone else's problem, someone who, you know, make it something that somebody

else has to hold the bag for. You must be responsible for it. Again, for me,

taking it seriously, learning about AI is as much about learning how to

effectively oppose it, learning how it's impacting the job market, what jobs are

being affected, what are the best ways that we from a policy perspective can

address that and account for it. I again understand why it is perhaps more

psychologically {slash} even in some ways politically appealing to just say

like I reject this wholesale and will not engage with it on any level. I

personally feel that that is irresponsible. I think it's irresponsible for me as a business owner who, let's be clear, we do not use AI in

the workplace in any sort of people can use what they want. I'm not like going

into our employees computers and being like, "Don't use ChatGPT." But it's not

something we use as a company. Um it's also not something that we have replaced

any human labor with. We are uh still four-day work week. We are still the six

weeks PTO. We uh do not have any We don't even have interns, let alone, you

know, outsourcing this to to no one essentially. Um so we operate in a model

that is as as effectively anti anti-AI as you can get from a business and labor

perspective, but also is like, in my view, what every job could and should be

with the actual technological advancements in productivity and efficiency that AI should be representing. Like for me, in an ideal

scenario with the right government in place, the AI revolution would be a

four-day work week revolution. It would be a remote work revolution. It would be

a revolution of American workers getting back more and more of their time, moving

from the 40-hour work week to something much better. I doubt that that will

happen with our current administration, but I do think that that is what it

could represent in its most um sort of utopian version. I also wanted just

quickly take a historical lens on this to say that while it is not a one-to-one

comparison, I think looking in recent history, probably one of the most

substantial or sort of well-suited comparisons you can make from an

economics uh and technology perspective would be like the dot-com bubble of the

2000s. But when you map basically what's happening with AI in terms of its impact

on jobs to every major advancement in technology or industrial capacity, like

it is not a complete outlier in terms of how these things tend to work and how

they shake out. And we have seen in the past that coming out of some of these

leaps forward in terms of our capacity to be more efficient, use different

technology, materials, etc., that it can result in a better quality of life for

workers. It can result in people reclaiming more of their time and energy

and and all of those things. But ultimately, that comes down to a

question of policy and how this is being utilized. On the labor front, I do want

to address something that came up a lot in the comments of my video essay where

I mentioned that the insane advancements of AI in the language space specifically

around things like language teaching and learning, uh real-time interpretation

and translation, that they were to me an example of what could be if used

correctly, one of the in my view best uses of AI as we currently understand

it. There was a lot of pushback on that specifically from people who either work

in sort of the language teaching or translation space or interpretation

space. Um and obviously, I have enormous empathy for for those jobs being leaned

on if not uh diminished or eliminated entirely. Not only are many of my personal friends in those spaces, but I used to personally

work in those spaces both in translation and in language tutoring. I also

speak three languages, uh all of which have been learned sort of

quote-unquote the hard way. So, I am in no way trying to diminish the value of

what the this work is. And I also understand that at least for the time

being, AI cannot imitate the level of nuance and especially sort of cultural

context that real human translators can achieve. I only wanted to say that if

one of the results of AI is a democratization of communication in a

way that we have not yet experienced it, I do think that that is a

probably net positive for humanity on at scale. I could be wrong about that. But

again, as someone who speaks three languages and had to again do it the

hard way, like I want more people to be able to access that freedom of

communication without having to do it the hard way, without having to expend

resources they may not have. I mean, even something as simple as, you know,

immigrants, refugees, um people in emergency situations, in all kinds of

contexts. Like, there's enormous benefits to that, but I also think just

being able to understand each other. You can go on social media platforms now and

in real time watch content from people on the other side of the world and

understand mostly what they're saying. And that to me, I think, is will

hopefully be of benefit. But, if my comments were construed as to say that

the the work uh that translators do or interpreters do

is not valuable inherently, that is not my intention. And I would say again,

having worked in those fields, I completely understand the the nuance

that goes into it. But, I do have to again highlight the fact that a lot of

people were saying, "Well, we don't need these AI language models. Google

Translate is right there and works just fine." Google Translate uses AI. So,

this is kind of six six of one, half dozen of the other in terms of what

we're calling things. But, I yes, I did want to give just a specific

acknowledgement to that. And we'll see how it shakes out with regards to

language models specifically. It's one of the areas I'm more bullish on for

humanity. I could be wrong. I could end up with

egg on my face. But, I never want to diminish people's work, especially work

that I personally hold so dear. So, that's that on that. Next, we have to

talk about the macroeconomic aspect of the AI {quote} {unquote} bubble. One of

the things that I see a lot is people talking about AI being a bubble, sort of

let's just say a falsely inflated economic infrastructure that is likely

to either collapse outright or have some serious air let out of the tires uh in

the coming months, if not months or years. And that the the sort of

existence of this bubble, of this overhype, is evidence of or in some way

sort of conflated with AI being as a rule as technology. I personally

believe that AI is in a sort of bubble, if for no other reason that at a certain

point, as these valuations keep exponentially increasing, we're going to

literally like run out of capital to support it. Like, they're they're

becoming unsupportable numbers. So, I do believe that there is absolutely going

to be some air let out of the tires in a major way and given the amount of our

current economic growth that is pegged to the AI bubble, I do think that that

will have huge knock-on effects for the overall US market. That being said, two

things. One, the bubble effect of any race to a new technology or new to sort

of the consumer market technology is not new. It is not unprecedented. We can

look back at sure things like the dot-com bubble, but we can look at many,

many, many bubbles before that dating all the way back to essentially almost

medieval times and see a very similar pattern happening over and over again. I

would guess based on history that just like with other revolutions, we will

emerge with some Rockefellers and many more people who, you know, are putting a

bunch of rocks into their pockets and walking into the Hudson as I'm sure

happened in New York in, you know, but coming out of the Gilded Age. We'll also

end up with Bill Gateses and and RIP Steve Jobses and we'll also end up with

a lot of people with nothing to show for it. Probably also many people in prison

because usually coming out of these sort of gold rushes from an economic and and

specifically investment perspective, we're always getting some white-collar crime in the door. That is always sort of a part of this greater economic

pattern. So, I agree with all of the people who are like AI's a a bubble from

an economic perspective and it's going to burst. T, like that's true. That

being said, it does not mean that all of the technologies BS, that none of this

is real, that none of the changes are meaningful or something that can be

supported by the technology. It means a huge amount of it is over hype and

branding, for sure, and it means that we need to be even more discerning about

what is versus isn't hype, what is versus isn't a good use of these tools,

what is versus isn't showing real growth and, you know, sort sort meaningful

technological uh, which is another reason why I do think

like I'm no Reese Witherspoon. I'm no I'm not like Mel Robbins being like

upload all of your bank information to chat GPT and let it run your life. Like,

hell no, for so many reasons. I'm not a booster in any way to that extent. But,

I don't think it's wrong to say that learning about this technology probably

stands to benefit you if for no other reason than to improve your

detector. Like, I have to talk to my fellow millennials here for a second.

We're getting I don't know about you guys, but I I I'm like off Tik Tok

currently cuz it was dissolving my brain, but when I'm on it,

I have gotten got by AI videos multiple times. And I always leave it being like,

well, okay. I guess I'm sign me up for AARP because it's over for me, guys.

Like, I'm cooked. I don't think that we will probably ever, uh, be able to

totally, uh, steel ourselves against being duped or being misled both by sort

of fake content, but also by overhyped, not technologically backed products.

But, I do think we can become more discerning customers, more discerning

consumers, more discerning internet users, more discerning worker like, on

every level, I think knowing even just the very basic technological concepts on

this is helpful and only makes you probably sharper in, I have to say it, a

world and a and a job market especially on the entry-level side that is getting

hugely less discerning. It is not a joke to say that a lot of the the the younger

generations. Like, ask a high school teacher how much a lot of these young

people are relying on like chat GPT to outsource any critical thinking. So,

being a more informed critical thinker who has a lot more

discernment and actually understands what they're looking at only stands to

benefit you more especially as it pertains to the signal versus the noise

on the economic front at at minimum for me. You may disagree, your mileage may

vary, but that is how I choose to operate also in part because I'm a

business owner. Seven We have seven full-time employees who rely on my

ability to sort of like shepherd our company through all kinds of changes. We

had to go through a global pandemic. That wasn't expected. We've seen the

rise and fall of multiple social platforms while we've been here. AI

represents an enormous existential threat to my industry. So, me being

informed and understanding how to navigate this, like I consider a massive

personal responsibility. Lastly, I want to say this about the ecological impact

because that is many people's most sort of pertinent issue, ethical problem,

etc. with AI. AI and data centers in particular are yes having an enormous

ecological impact right now. I know I just pronounced ecological in two

different ways. So, sue me. That is not only hugely damaging I I think

the stat was was last year the output was roughly the same as that of New York

City, which is a city of 9 million people-ish. So, just crazy numbers being

put on the board um in terms of the emissions and

resource usage and all of that. It is also very disproportionately being felt

by rural communities, the same communities who stand to benefit least

from these advancements in technology, at least in terms of of, you know, their

ability to benefit from a a capital perspective because they are

disproportionately not the same people who are invested even in the stock

market, let alone shareholders of some of these companies that are uh

seeing explosive growth in in capital and valuation. So, I am in no way here to to to disagree with people who are like this is a major

uh environmental issue. I completely agree with that. I would only say two

things. One, the only fight against this is a political fight. How and when data

cen- centers get built, where where they get built, the the the rules and

regulations around their their emissions and their proximity to communities and

materials they use and and all of that, that comes down to regulation. That

comes down to what they are and aren't legally allowed to do. It is a policy

question. It is what It is a massive political fight, perhaps the most

consequential political fight that we're currently fighting right now from an

environmental perspective. I mean, there's many others, but this is a a

major, major, major one. At the same time, and and by the way, this is why I

say like if you are someone who is very concerned with this, like get effing

involved in politics because that is the only solution. Like other than that,

it's just going to be like three psychos in a boardroom being like, "Actually,

let's just start strip mining all of the southeastern US." If you're not putting

enormous constraints on these completely soulless goons who are leading a lot of

these operations, who don't care about anything but profit and growth, this is

exactly what they're going to do. At the same time, the model of new advancements

in technology or industrial capacity in the early days have

catastrophic environmental impact which quickly improves, that is also historically the pattern. There is a lot of hype and BS right now greenwashing AI

that it is better at becoming more efficient at using less resources than

it is. That that I completely agree with. Like there's a lot of

greenwashing. That being said, when you look at other similar historical

patterns, it is likely that the environmental impact will begin to

subside as the technology improves. It may not, but that is generally speaking what the historical pattern has been. A good

example, when you look at the environmental impact of computing back

in the late '60s and early '70s when this was really starting to be

implemented in the workforce, as you guys probably know, computers took up entire rooms, entire floors of buildings. They also

used a lot of resources that we don't today use in in building these machines,

even things like gold, etc. And roughly give or take, if you look at the data,

the the sort of ecological efficiency of computing roughly doubled every 18

months when you sort of zoom out to to what it is today and what we're able to

like the amount of computing that we are able to do today with a drastically

drastically drastically smaller emissions and and carbon imprint is just

it's at orders of magnitude more than we were able to do with vastly more

resources. The same is also true of a lot of production methods

you know industrial methods etc. None of this by the way is to excuse dirty

energy. That we are I mean with our current administration they're like it

is a true race to the bottom. Like they are

Forget strip mining the southeastern US US they are strip mining hell at this

point. They're like get us right down to the devil and let us take some of that

oil straight from the source. Like they're they're so so little concern for

the environmental impact of all of this and I will say

as a side note like to take it back to the jobs program and to talk about the

environmental impact. We worked a bit during the Biden administration RIP on

some green new deal initiatives from a media perspective. A lot of people don't

even remember the green new deal was happening. A lot of people do not even

remember like the not not zero advancements that were made in

environmental policy and specifically as it pertains to the labor component of

environmental policy here in the US. Like we were moving in a much better

direction under Biden as as it pertains to these things. And by

the way the the initiatives in AI and and data centers and so on were still

they still existed at that time. But they were existing within a a much

tighter framework even than today because so much has already been rolled

back from from an environment POV. But I say that to

say I do think that the the arc of time will likely at least somewhat bend the

environmental impacts. But you have to bend that and you only can bend it

through policy. We used to especially when you look back at like even

something as as as recent relatively speaking as like industrial revolution

England. Like that whole country was covered in like a foot of soot. Like

everyone was just in there like living in a brick of charcoal.

Uh and now obviously now part of it is that we've just outsourced the uh the

worst environmental uh impacts to other parts of the world, but it is to say

that like there is a capacity to to iterate on on how we do these things and

what the the regulations are around it. Anyway, I'm going to conclude this

never-ending video by saying the following. I am in no way an AI booster.

I'm not a true believer. We're not taking money from AI, although I guess

given that as I mentioned basically every app at this point and like

technological platform uses AI to a certain extent, we can't like say that

nothing that we touch touches it. Like I just that's nonsensical at this point

basically functionally. But we are certainly not like no one is paying me

to get on here and be like AI is great. I don't think AI is great. I just think

it is. And I think what it will be, how it will be used, the impact that it will

have on labor or continue to have on labor, on the environment, etc. all

comes down to how we demand that it be uh used as a as a citizen, as a as a

population, and and as a a country. And as a world really because this extends

far beyond our borders. I'm always here to engage in discourse with my audience.

I know looking back that I probably would have avoided a lot of uh angry

comments if I had just cut out my entire segment on my views on AI and how I use

it, but I would rather be honest and I would rather

uh give the conversation the nuance that it deserves and continue to talk to you. I'm always here to read your comments.

I'm always here to keep learning, keep pushing myself to think harder, and I

hope that we will continue to to stay in this little community that we have and

and create these feedback loops even if sometimes I'm stepping a little bit

outside of the box and pissing some of you guys off, which unfortunately is

just kind of an inevitability when you're posting to the extent that I have

posted over my life. But But you guys. I my heart

sits heavier than you can know for a lot of the people who've been affected by AI

including in my own home, including in my own family and I want to do

everything I can to not only present alternatives in how I work

and how I pay people and how not I we my my partners and I and our company and

how we operate and how we do things, but I also don't want to be so

against these things {quote} {unquote} that I pretend like this isn't happening

and I ignore it entirely and I don't take it seriously on its merits because

I think both with my company, but also with the platform that I have it is my

responsibility on every level to to be honest and to take it seriously and to

treat it as the real thing that it is. That's all.

I'll see you guys around the channel. Bye.