Transcription
We have, as humans, repeatedly again and again created these lynch mobs. And as Shard points out, what we did, for example, what’s beautiful with democracy, and we must defend it today, is democracy is really a way for the king to not get killed when he when he stops being popular. So when the king becomes unpopular, we would kill him in the past. As is, democracy is just the way for us to have a civilized election and then throw him out, and he can retire somewhere, so we won’t have to kill them.
When you think about Shard’s Theory here and how it’s historically very grounded, then you see also why dictators have a massive problem that Democratic leaders don’t have. You see, for example, Putin in Russia today. You see Xi Jinping in China. You certainly see with the mullahs in Iran; they don’t have an exit if they fail, if they fail to control their societies as the terrorists of those societies are today. If they fail to control that, they have no exit; they nowhere to go; they will get killed by the mob. So the dictator sits there and tries to stay in power for as long as he possibly can because he will never find an exit. I know Putin is probably the wealthiest man who ever lived, way wealthier even than Elon Musk, and still there’s no way for him to go, signs because then all the people who hate him will kill him, yeah, the way he kills anybody who opposes him in Russia. And that’s why the dictator is so lonely in his game because he has no exit; even his wife would probably drop him, you know, to save her own life or something like that the day he falls. And and this is because dictatorship is still in this sort of primitive mode where the Lynch Mob Rules at the end of the day, and the dictator, being terrified of the Lynch Mob, therefore has to control the population with this tyrannical machinery that he has. Yeah, yeah, that’s all. So the beauty of democracy is not so much that the people got to decide anything; it it’s really democracy is really good for the leaders; this says that we don’t kill them. Weed yes.
[Music]
Okay, hi everyone. My name is Balash K, and this is the I Scientist podcast where we explore artificial intelligence, the body, and the soul. And it is my great great pleasure to welcome Alexander Bard a third time talking on this podcast. So how are you, Alexander?
I’m very good. I’m very good. And I’ve heard the rumor that you’ve actually met with Andrew Sweeney, Powerlax, who I’ve made a lot of podcasts with in the past, the Sweeney versus Bard podcast. So you guys have now finally met; you both live outside Paris, and that brings great joy to my heart.
Yeah, this this was a great meeting with him. We spent four hours on Saturday talking about all the stuff that uh we both love, including uh you.
Oh, thank you. And uh it’s it’s a great introduction because uh, you know, I slowly I’m slowly going through the this monumental series that you did with him—I think like 65 podcasts already—and the the subject I want to talk about, at least I want to start today, came came up maybe three years ago with uh Tom and uh Andrew about a word that you coined, I think, the anog, and all of its um historical predecessors and its contemporary effect or what it explains in society, and and this made a huge effect on me because uh it is related to something we will talk about uh that me and my partner noticed uh on the individual level, psychological level. So I want to uh explore both the anthropologic aspect of the anog and also the psychoanalytic one, which is also of course your your your topic, and then we’ll see where it goes. But what I’m the reason I wanted to talk about this because I I want to talk about technology with you a little bit, like where is this you know AI Revolution is going to, and I think it’s going to be like a nice way to get into technology because it will sort of make the bet for an analyzing maybe trying to see where the world is going through this lens of the anog. So so maybe introduce this this concept: what is the anog, what’s the word, where it comes from, and how it’s related to, let’s say, Heidegger.
Okay, so uh the word anog is a combination of anonymous and subject. So it’s like we have the idea of uh a shared voice, like you know when people gossip and spread rumors, and the sort of preparing there might be even be a lynch mob around the corner, you know, because the the gossiping intrigue leads to lynch mobs eventually if it isn’t stopped. And and it’s this idea that well we all know, you know, we all know what Jews are really like, or we all know what blacks are really like, or we all know what what what you know gays are really like. So so sort of when when people go into this mode of prejudice and and it leads to racism or sexism or something else, they always start with this assumption that yeah, there’s still fish version of things; there’s the politically correct version of things, but we all know what they’re really like, like if there’s something deeper hidden there. But it’s always used; the anog is always used in hidden conversations; it’s not somebody who publicly accuses you of anything, because if you you publicly being accused of something, you can respond to that hopefully, right? So for example, in political discourse this is the case: I argue against you; I argue against your argument; you should make my argument, and therefore two subjects are engaged in the political debate, for example. But when we um talk about others and we assume that there’s the anog, there there’s an objectification going on, is the the voice that’s uh yeah. So it’s us, no, yeah. An objectification is its process; it’s a process. So so for example, the anog could then also be somebody who suddenly steps into the role and says what the Lynch Mob says. The reason I was fascinated with this is that all the historians have been fascinated how quickly Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and nobody’s described that process. So what what Adolf Hitler did was that he basically just he sensed where the anog was at in in German culture, and especially after the Wall Street Crash and Germany being dirt poor, having experienced hyperinflation and and these enormous repatriations Germany had to pay after this first World War, he played into that, and he played into that by unobjectifying, and and then he played into this old tradition of anti-Semitism, because if you could just find that one guy he could blame everything on, then he took the Jew for that role, and and we all know this that Hitler did this. What we did, we never explored is that how could he move to power so quickly and turn Germany into a Nazi tyranny in months. And to be honest, Adolf Hitler, 1938, the year before the Second World War workout, was the most popular leader ever recorded; he had the support of like 95% of the German population who loved him and adored him because he turned Germany around quickly in the next five years through his Fascism and and and he was very popular, but he got to power so quickly, and the irony is that this is some thinking; this is the kind of thinking that comes from Heidegger, who was a Nazi himself.
Yes, exactly. Heidegger was not immune to this idea, but Heidegger always said that he hated the Germans when the Germans said “Das Man,” when they spoke about instead of saying “me,” instead of saying “I,” instead of taking responsibility, say, “well, Das Man can suck” or something like that. So in German you could say that it’s a bit like the English “one,” rather than “I.” So well, one hears things on town, and one hears things like “Jews cannot be trusted,” and one hears things, you know, whatever. So yeah, when people speak, we can’t even walk in the street uh without the for for our safety. So how that because he thought to be video, an existentialist, to own your thinking and to own your speaking, your speech act, and to own your your activities, you must use your own name; you must take responsibility, and that’s where subjectivity should should should reign, and and that was Heidegger’s idea. So even Heidegger had this idea, but he never really probably because he he realized afterwards his life’s biggest mistake was to become an anog in the first place; he probably just did it for careering reasons; he was cynical or whatever, and of course he paid that he paid the price for it because he was never trusted ever again. Why would he? But there this there’s this cozy feeling that comes with the identifying with the un-object; we are together in something and not responsible.
It’s exactly like the the the children aspect of of this, the psycho the psychoanalytic part of this, that you stay children by you know. So so what Hitler did was that he just realized that if he put a uniform on himself, walked up to give a speech in a uniform, uh ordered, you know, disciplined, and spoke exactly the words that people didn’t dare to say in public but said to each other, and he spoke those very words, this came along; this this was interpreted as an ultimate truth act, and it worked; he personified the anog, and that’s how an objectification works. And of course, there must be an opposite to that; the opposite of that in in my work with Yves is the hyper, which is like the total subject, which is like somebody tot wait because there is also the which is the hero, which is the authentic hero; the hyper will save us, but in the anog there’s also the object that you you briefly mentioned; basically, this is what we blame for our the problems, right?
Yes, so there’s the un-object, and then the hyper will say yeah. So so so the object is the person you’re dissing, a the Jew or the gay or whatever, the person you’re accusing and blaming everything on is the object, and this is Julia Kristeva’s concept, so comes from Julia Kristeva’s philosophy; she wrote books about this in the 1980s, and and she was amazing, an amazing thinker, a female reformer of psychoanalysis, and and she she wrote books about objectification, how we must learn how to hate because there are things that are dangerous to us; there are things that we must not get close in Linewood; they you must hate the plague, you know, and if you hate the plague, you probably must hate rats because rats give you the plague or whatever. So objectification starts when we turn at one year of age away from loving our mother’s ti to hating it; this is Kristeva’s work; that’s subjectification. Subjectification is a must, but in the crowd, the object has pointed out, so the ab becomes what you blame for the problems that you have caused or the problems just fate gave gave you, right? So so it could just be bad luck that you got tons of problems; you’re sick or whatever, but but you like to blame somebody else, and that’s an object, but the anog but there was no there was no there was no word for how this is used in crowds or this is used in people, and I was kind of it’s kind of weird why isn’t anybody caught up with the term how you anonymize yourself and still you’re able to speak and have an influence and by by not taking responsibility for what you’re saying you’re an anog. So the anog fundamentally is somebody says who says something really nasty about somebody else but says, “Oh, I don’t know if it’s true or not; I just heard it.”
Yes, that’s the perfect example of that, and that’s what Hitler did, but he did it on a large scale; he walked up with his charisma as a speaker, no sense of humor also, because no no not allowing any second at all: “This is the truth; this is the truth,” right? And this truth spoken is incredibly powerful, incredibly violent, and it it touches people when they’re bitter. So if you manage to make your audience bitter and resentful, the total opposite of an, like if your audience are bit resentful first, they will be totally receptive to you putting a uniform yourself at acting out the anog.
Ah, absolutely. So what I’m thinking is which way to to go here; I want to talk about a little bit the the psychoanalytic aspect of this because it seems very innocent; I have a lot of. So so basically we we with my partner we noticed this when people come to us and they start start there; I mean there are some single simple signs that you can detect, which is in English it doesn’t exist, so well, and maybe that’s why English is immune; Anglo-Saxon world is more immune to this, but in Swedish I know it exists; in Hungarian it’s “ember,” it’s it’s sort of “human” with no gender, so the “man,” you start the sentence with that, and that signifies some kind of theory you have about the world that you don’t want to question, true. But it’s even more innocent; it’s just social glue; if you can’t think of anything else you’re going to talk with someone about, find an enemy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, shared enemy, even though the even kids in the schoolyard, if they can’t find a common agenda, they’ll find a third kid that they’re bullying or or talking bad about.
Yeah, yeah. But in the beginning there is not an enemy; it’s just um my life is the way it is because of this this this this, and this makes these kind of sentences, and people sort of it it seems there is no no not necessarily an object in the beginning; it’s just that things are like that, and they are unchangeable, and there are some other signs of this also, and they are all sort of like arrested development. So when you when you become a child a little bit when you speak, and those are when you have objectives like extreme objectives like “always,” “never,” you know, like a year-old who says like when when you take a you know she has to stop playing because it’s dinner time, she can say to the mother that “you never let me play,” you know, and those kind of things. And also a third sign, when when you as an adult saying this sometimes you hear your parents’ voice, and it comes out in your mother or father’s voice. And so these are like the reason why I’m bringing this up because it’s um almost like a psychoanalytic voyage tool; if you can identify the sentences when you speak or I speak, you can just ask the question, “Is it really true, or is it because of this this this and that?” And this this is this is one way to break this uh if even that works, because if you ask somebody who plays with us, “Is this really true?” they said, “Well, it’s just something I heard,” because they haven’t taken a subjective position; they haven’t taken a responsibility for that; they can escape it very quickly. And what’s interesting is that these this is a female power mechanism; so the dark feminine is very close; men use it as well, but women use it because women are less powerful physically. So what women do instead, like I said, if a woman murders somebody, she gets a guy to do it for her, and the best way to murder somebody from a woman is just to spread the bad word about that person without taking responsibility. So if you ever encounter somebody who spreads this nonsense about you and you confront them with it, they’ll just say, “Oh, I just I just passed on what I’d heard; yes, it wasn’t me; I wasn’t there.” This is why it’s an anog; there’s no subject here; there’s nobody can blame because I just passed on something from somebody else, and I don’t take responsibility for it, and then they walk out of the room, and you’re just shocked like this person doesn’t take responsibility for badmouthing me, no, because they say it wasn’t that person, but this is on town.
So so I completely agree with you; this is the way way when when manipulative actors start try to start to use this, but in the beginning it’s really just individual human males, and it can even be playful; this is the problem though; an objectification starts as just a little joke or something, but because it works as social glue, because human beings are social animals, we large populations, our the social our tribe is huge; it’s like 1200 people, and because it works a social glue, the way to keep that social glue going when you have a third party or enemy as a shared agenda, when that works, you are encouraged to do it again and worse and then overdo it. Look at the we just came out of the US election; take a step back; you listen to Democrats and Republicans, the way they accuse each other of things is ridiculous, but you know what? This is the only way for those two groups to keep together; the only way for the Democrats to keep together being an incredibly desperate group of people is by finding an objectification towards Republicans and especially Donald Trump; he’s the per he’s the perfect object in this case. And of course, Trump and his followers, as a response to that, they find their social glue; they glue around Trump by doing what, accusing Democrats of being the most evil bastards ever, right? And it’s so totally theatrical, totally over the top, and if you’re not an American watching, it’s just like, “This is pathetic; this is ridiculous,” but thank God at least it’s over; the mutual Lynch mobbing ends with an election; at least one side has to accept the election, stand on again; at least they don’t kill each other because otherwise they would go all the way to Civil War, which is the dark masculine; they go all the way to Civil War in case this wasn’t stopped. This is this is a mechanism we see in populations all the time; Conti Shard, a lot of these amazing anthropologists from the 20th century explore this deeply, and and they’re amazing; you must read these thinkers to understand how human beings actually operate in groups and how dangerous people are in groups.
Yeah, dangerous they are, and the anog was the concept that was lacking; what I found was this this this Heideggerian idea of a subject which pretends not to be a subject and not taking responsibility before just passing on the information needs a name, and that name is the anog, and the anog then in a uniform is the dictator.
Yeah, it’s a placeholder actually. So so what I what I noticed is that you have this individual human malis, and in certain circumstances they’re they align, yeah, because if they don’t align, people just complain; they [ __ ] they’re bitter; they they complain to each other; they actually I think one of the reasons they use the the “Das Man” is to look for validation, like “I I talk to you in these sort of sentences because I assume and I request you to agree with me, and then we are a group, and we are happy,” especially people who are boring, have no sense of humor, can’t crack a joke, and when they figure out that their way of being socially popular is to badmouth others, then they’ll then they’ll go to an objectification constant in conversations; what they’ll do is that they’ll walk into the room and they’ll find a third party who’s not there who they can badmouth before somebody else who likes to hear that story, and suddenly unified you get popular, you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you again come back to this, but but I think it’s even more it’s it’s it’s innocent in the beginning; the bad mouthing, it starts later when this things start to amalgamate, and then you find those actors that use this to gain power, and then the whole thing crystallizes into very fast; it’s it’s really like like if you imagine like you know super-freezing that was the you know Hitler suddenly; you needed just a little bit of thing in the water, and everything froze into Nazis, and Hitler of course from 1933 when he took over Germany all the way up to 1939 when the Second World War started, he just badmouthed the Jews worse and worse, and finally it was just like parodic; it was just ridiculous, but by then people were so used to it because it gave them the social glue, and anti-Semitism was the state ideology of Germany, and it kept Germany together, yes, and was unified through Hitler, who then was the personification of the anog, and the Jew was the object, so that yes, and it worked because because if you’re desperate to keep that social glue because you’re afraid the social glue will fall apart, then the only thing you can do is to go back to the same place again and overdo it and do it even harder, even even more so it quickly deteriorates into this really really nasty thing, and the name for where it goes eventually is the Lynch Mob. Yes, this is human beings at their absolute worst when they’re running down the street chasing an innocent guy to kill him.
Innocent guys get all the frustrations of the community out of the way by being unified around killing the innocent guys. She Rod rights; therefore, the community stays together until the frustrations in the community start building again, and then there's another lynching. Yes, yes. Escape goat. Gerard points out that Christianity was an attempt to diffuse this, yeah, and it works more or less, but it always comes back. The scapegoat is the ultimate object. Exactly, yes. So the, the what is the, the tyrant for the ano, like filling the hole, is the scapegoat, which is like incarnating the object, right? Yes, really. And that's actually even the word is used by, by Christianity. Like it is so twisted, as Shard correctly points out, that we might even turn the object into an object when we kill the object. So if you kill the scapegoat, yes, we might even turn the scapegoat into something divine the next day. Like we totally switch the whole roles because human beings that are alive can do anything they want with a corpse. That's fundamentally, we can do anything we like with the dead. Once you're dead, you lose all power, and the people who live after you're dead can do anything they like with you and your heritage, anything. And what people then often do is that by badmouthing the guy, they, they the guy they cherished while he was alive, they can then turn the guy they just killed into the hero afterwards. And that's, of course, the Messiah complex. So, so somebody was killed on the cross—Jesus Christ—can become the greatest man who ever lived because now he's the Messiah. And this mechanism, this mechanism is also an interesting thing with Shard's, on the scape mechanism, is that we, we can, we can turn the an, we can switch places between the an and the object, but only after we killed it. Yes, because otherwise, the escapegoat would have a voice and would say, "No, I'm not that guy. This is totally untrue," and the whole thing would fall apart.
So now we can go to the hyper, because this is what you say: the second type. The first type is the hero that saves us, right? Yes. So the hyper, again, combination of hyper, which is extension of subject. So the hyper is not just a subject, because a subject is somebody who's, at the end of the day, still submitted, submitted to the socium. Mhm. We're all in service of the socium. So the socium is the tribe. God is ultimately the tribe. Our forefathers, ultimately the tribe. Whatever we're dreaming of about the future, we're dreaming about our tribe going into an exodus, to go to a new world or new paradigm, or find a new place where paradise can happen. We always dream about the socium. So that what human beings do, because we're social animals. Now, if the socium is this concept that ultimately dictates religion and philosophy, this theant is that entity which is there, the dream about this tribal, 1,200 to 1,500 people. This is the entity we're biologically pre-programmed through evolution to find our alliance with. So we're all, all we're all submitted to it. So we're subjects in the sense that we are submitted to the hyper. The hyper is the only one that stands above that, because the hyper is like, it's like a subject who comes from the future, and the hyper is probably the only subject to see the future properly and see the potential of the socium and see where the socium can go. The perfect example of this, of course, is Moses, who was probably an Egyptian prince who still betrayed the Egyptian nobility because he believed in monotheism or something, and monotheism had the backlash in Egypt, and he decided to get his monotheistic cult, the Atenists, together. They eventually became the Hebrew people, and they walked out of Egypt led by Moses, because Moses was a perfect example of a hyper-project. He had a vision of: "We can't stay in Egypt and be slaves any longer. We must leave Egypt and walk to the promised land and settle in a new land, and there we will live the sort of life that we know is possible for humans." And therefore, we create a new people, and this new people, the chosen people, chosen by God according to Moses, were the Hebrews. And this is the perfect example of a hyper, and the project comes from the future, arrives in the times we live in, and has this astounding pride and astounding courage. Therefore, the hyper may be killed because the hyper knows that the idea that the hyper is defending is bigger than himself and bigger than anybody. So the hyper has an idea, and what's important for the hyper is basically to teach this idea as a prophet to the people. And this guy comes to the future, and then the hyper does this, and because he is willing to die for his cause, he, he will never back, back off from his cause, because he, he is truth personified. Therefore, the hyper-project is foundational to religion, that there, there must be this totally heroic, uncompromised character in religion, with the hyper-project, and we're always waiting for the hyper-project. Like we're living in the current times, an example of confusion; we're waiting for somebody to step into their role to be the hyper-project.
And here's the trick: the anog becoming the dictator plays a hyper-project. And the way to discover if somebody who, who's a power player, is an objective or hyper-objective is simply by asking the question: "Is this person heroic, or is this person playing into my resentfulness and bitterness?" It's within you that you know whether it's a hyper-project or object. Ah, so this psychoanalysis, you cannot know this by just looking at—No, not at all. Because Hitler was heroic from what we do in Pro event, is that J lay out: "This is the test. This is what you must look for. This is how the anog operates. This is how the hyper operates, and these are the ultimate extremes. You know, philosophy is all about extremes. These are the ultimate extremes of subjectivity." So the, there's one there who just, I'm just rising up and responding to the needs of the people, and if we kill him, we're released, anic, right? The hyper-project steps out and says that, "No, the potential of the people is so much higher than you ever thought. You have stopped dreaming. I'm going to come here to save you and give you your dreams back and give you direction and take you out of your current predicament and take you to the new age through my exodus." And please note, the exodus of the hyper puts forward a Promised Land, but he, it accuses nobody; it doesn't play into the scapegoat mechanism; it totally, totally steps aside the scapegoat mechanism, which is exactly why the reject is the perfect scapegoat. So this is Shard's case for Christ, of course, that Christ was killed because he was the Messiah. I mean, yeah, yes. Because actually, I, it was very interesting when you said this. I think I've been thinking about it since you said it, that basically, to understand this, you have to go inside; you have to do your psychoanalysis to, to know that that guy is the hyper-project—Hitler or the Uno, Hitler or the hyper-project Moses. And it's, it's tough because nobody wants to go there, or you know, you do. Michel Foucault, in one of his rare moments when he sort of was into Hegelian thinking, to Michel Foucault, it perfectly. He says that, "Every day in the morning, I get up and meditate and cleanse myself from the fascist within me." Ah, that's the an. So great exercise for meditation, every morning: you have an an inside of you; you have that bad little thing inside of you, where the cheap way to get what you want absolutely is to use that aner activity. Get it out of your mind; get it out of your mind. It's, it's, it's, it's a part of yourself you don't want there, and the little bit of heroic you could possibly be, the little bit of heroism you could have, the little hyper activity you might have inside of you, try to build on that. Ah, this, the famous Zorian contemplation in the morning. Yes. And of course, the original hyper is the socium in Persian philosophy, from which the Jews learned and, and then rephrased the M, which is the Messiah. So the people, again, the Zoroastrians were the ones who invented the idea of the hyper, and the original term for hyper in Persian is socium.
Okay, that's exactly the direction I wanted to go to, because the question I have, and you, you partly answered it, but let's talk a little bit more about this: How do I know? You know, any time I make any theory, like what we do here, we're talking about anthropology, how men are, how humans are, we do this move: we say man is like that, and it's like a law. And how do we know, know that this is not some, some Mali—I have, like, fear—I just make this up so I feel better, and my, my, my word is, like, at least from an external point of view, ordered, or it's really a theory that's, that's constructive, that works, and really the world is like that? It's a little bit my same question I had like in the first podcast about the pyramid: How do I know when I'm in it? Because it's anthropology, so it's also science. So this is just historical facts. We have, as humans, repeatedly, again and again, created these lynch mobs. And as Shard points out, what we did, for example, what's beautiful with democracy, and we must defend it today, is democracy is really a way for the king to not get killed when he, when he stops being popular. So when the king becomes unpopular, we would kill him in the past. As such, democracy is just the way for us to have a civilized election and then throw him out, and he can retire somewhere, so we won't have to kill him. When you think about Shard's theory here and how it's historically very grounded, then you see also why dictators have a massive problem that democratic leaders don't have. You see, for example, Putin in Russia today, you see Xi Jinping in China, you certainly see with the mullahs in Iran: They don't have an exit. If they fail, if they fail to control their societies as the terrorists of those societies are today, if they fail to control that, they have no exit; nowhere to go; they will get killed by the mob. So the dictator sits there and tries to stay in power for as long as he possibly can, because he will never find an exit. I know Putin is probably the wealthiest man who ever lived, way wealthier even than Elon Musk, and still, there's nowhere for him to go, signs, because then all the people who hate him will kill him, yeah, the way he kills anybody who opposes him in Russia. And that's why the dictator is so lonely in his game, because he has no exit. Even his wife would probably drop him, you know, to save her own life or something like that, the day he falls. And this is because dictatorship is still in this sort of primitive mode where the lynch mob rules at the end of the day, and the dictator, being terrified of the lynch mob, therefore has to control the population with this tyrannical machinery that he has. Yeah, that's all state. So the beauty of democracy is not so much that the people got to decide anything; it, it's really, democracy is really good for the leaders. This says that we don't kill them; we get rid of—yes, we sometimes shoot them when they're precedents or whatever—but at least that's better than automatically getting killed if you resign. So, so Gerard's take on democracy, I think, is the most honest take on democracy I've ever heard. And what Gerard says in his work, and Jan and I totally agree with him, is that the reason why the lynch mob has been there and why civil war has been there is that they've been there because they worked. MH, when things went wrong, the way to solve the problem was to go into a state of violence, and that state of violence is either the lynch mob, which solves the problem by blaming a fake, so, so it has a fake answer to, so the false answer to the problem is the lynch mob, and therefore the lynch mob avoids the civil war. The civil war is authentic violence because the civil war is two sides that have no way to get out of the competition overpowering the system; if not one side kills the other, MH, therefore, it's the ultimate tragedy, the ultimate tragedy, which is even worse than the dark feminine lynching, is the dark masculine civil war. And that's why Cain and Abel is the oldest book in the Bible; this is why all religions start with the idea: if two brothers start fighting each other, disaster. This is so charity in all of this thinking, and it's great, good anthropology. But so, we haven't just come up with these ideas or, or have a theory here; this, this is very, very evident if you start looking at human history. It's so shocking how thoroughly Rene Girard's work, and the same thing for Gustave Le Bon before that, you know, about the madness or the wisdom of crowds or whatever, all these aspects of the crowds can be wise, but they can also be totally mad, and we can never trust the crowd because if the crowd is operating from the ano principle, and Anice, we've got terrible news coming. It's just like, it's got to be awful what's happening, right? It's going to be civil war eventually, going to lead to civil war, whereas, of course, if the crowd is wiser than a single person could be, we call that a democratic election: let the people decide, because ultimately, at the end of the day, if everybody has one vote, then you have to respect the decision made rather than having a dictator at the top of the heap. No, I, I completely agree with that. Yet, you know, if I'm a Democrat, if I'm a Republican, how do I know that, you know, all the things that you said in the beginning are actually true about the other? They really, I'm really threatened because I don't think it's always contempt; a lot of times it's real fear that generates this, right? I'm, I'm, I'm afraid of the other, typically like the migrant. It, it can be something scary if you went through that, right? Oh, yeah. We were born to kill strangers and foreigners. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. The urge in us as humans is that anybody looks different from the people of my socium, because we look a certain way, and anybody looks or sounds different from me, I'll kill them. And we didn't have any way to communicate with each other if we spoke different languages; if I was nomadic and I was out there on the step and start running into some people riding on horses or speaking a language I could not understand, my first instinct is to kill them, because otherwise they kill me. Yeah, this is natural; this is how we lived; this is how we lived during the nomological age, while humans were all nomadic; there were never more than 3 million people on the entire planet, yeah, because the only way we could survive was to hunt and gather. So basically, men hunted and women gathered, and then they got together and had a meal. But if you run into another tribe, they would kill you unless you kill them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you see it in chimpanzees; they do this. Yeah. So, so civilization is basically the attempt to try to tame these urges by making us more civilized, by going into conversations and by making agreements and, and dividing territory and dividing resources so that we don't kill each other. Civilization is, yes, still, still there is the basic instinct. What you explained in the beginning about the American election—a soccer game. Yeah, yeah. A soccer game is also—you really hate the other team; you really hate—and your 11 players, your team, are heroes; they're hyper-jects, every one of them, especially the goalkeeper; they're fucking hyper-jects, and the opposite team are all 11 an-objects. And, by the way, the audience—you kill them; you kill them because you're so much on your side. And of course, we have arranged, organized sports in this way, so we can act out these urges we have instead of creating the lynch mobs leading to the saloir. Okay, so, but I, I, I would like to go back to the psychoanalytic view, because um, if I, I, you know, I mentioned in the beginning, I would like to talk about technology a little bit. You know, I'm, I'm in AI, and this AI journey was pretty crazy in the last 30 years. It started like an esoteric little community which even computer scientists didn't take seriously. You know, we were like sort of a strange lab in the department, like 500 or maybe a thousand people in the '90s at the conferences, and and last 10, 15 years, it exploded into a show, and it 2023 became public, and it's the biggest hype ever now. We're there. So, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that makes a lot of people scared, including those who are in AI, and I see these mechanisms—that's what exactly why I wanted to make the bat for this—because I see these mechanisms at play in how individual predispositions for comes from whoever knows your, your childhood, right? You're afraid, you're neurotic, and that the technology we create is such a blank screen that you can project anything on it, right? And so, I see these camps around the various an-objects and objects starting to form and amalgamate into movements that I think bring the world completely sideways. Well, certainly that's what happened with social media, but social media was not dictated by AI; it was dictated by humans. So now we're putting AI into social media because we know what happens when human beings take control of social media, and billions of human beings start communicating with each other through social media: we get lynch mobs; we get them very, very quickly. We had a lot of them in the last 20 years, and you know, for good or bad, Me Too probably was a good idea if you were a Hollywood actress and you couldn't go to a movie studio without some producer forcing you to have sex with him. We know where Me Too started, but here in Sweden where I live, when Me Too came to Sweden, it was nothing but a social media lynch mob, and all the male public figures were accused—were innocent at the end of the day; every one of them was innocent of the accusations. Because by the time Me Too came to Sweden, it went totally baloney; it was totally mad; it was nothing but the worst type of lynch mob. So we know from social media, at least, if human beings get access to these technologies and can quickly get these groups together, but the only way to get popular is to badmouth an outsider, and that's what happened, you know, Facebook forums; that's what happened, these sort of artificial temporary soons where nobody needed to take responsibility for anything, and anybody could un-objectify, anybody could just go into this mode and say, "Well, I just heard this and this, and did you hear this?" And they used links that would say that, they used links to things they knew were probably untrue, but they still used the links because they loved the whole drama of the whole thing and threw it in there, and then everything went baloney. So we know from social media what will happen with technology when human beings start interacting; these really deep, deep things will happen. So resentful people will quickly find other resentful people, and they will gather, and they will then start badmouthing and accusing a third person who's completely innocent of anything. That's why we got exist. Yeah, that's why we got so interested in Shard's work. You know, Peter Thiel was one of his favorite students and warned about this, and social media came along. So, ah, okay, he was on the Facebook board for, for a reason, probably to stop these things happening, and still they happened. Facebook wasn't a very good company because they all wanted to make us addicted to the drama. Oh, social media, of course. The drug of social media is the lynch mob. It's so interesting that you wrote this up because I was, I was thinking more about the recent language model hype, but you are very right because I think that's a bigger problem. So AI arrived into these systems. So AI, for me, you probably know this more than me, but I got a hypothesis about AI, and I know you share this opinion with me: The thing with AI, as long as I have access to several different AIs, and I can change the way I use a web browser on a computer—if I'm not satisfied with Google, I can change to Bing or whatever—so I can change to another web browser, move somewhere else, or Firefox; the same thing, if I have access to several different AIs, and I guess most people already have because they discovered that certain AIs are better than others at certain things. Okay, so if I have access to several different AIs, which one will I choose? I will choose the one—
That is most truthful because I don't want to be fooled. Okay, I maybe want other people to be fooled. I maybe want to objectify somebody else, a third person, to be popular with the second person, but I don't want to fool me. I, even if I do this nasty thing of finding an abct and becoming socially popular by badmouthing somebody in a closed room, or I can never be accused of having done anything, even if I do this nasty habit of objectifying, even if I go into that process, I don't want to fool me. I want to know the truth. But it's not so simple. I want to be a subject to myself. It's exactly that, but it's not so simple because the—no, no, wait, wait. All it takes is a difference where there's a stronger subjectivity in my self-perception than there is in my objectification that I talk to others about. Exactly so. So if I pass on unreliable information to start a drama and then cause a problem for somebody that I take responsibility for, I certainly want to know myself if the source I'm using is truth or not.
I have an interest in subjectivity to myself because it's actually what I am defending through the process. It's just that it's so weak that I want to defend it. I don't want to lie to myself. This is—wait, wait, let me just finish it, see what you think, because there is that element to subjectivity, even to the nastiest forms, the weakest forms. Because, of course, if I'm resentful, I have a very weak sense of subjectivity, and the fact that I'll take responsibility for what I say it's not going to make me impressed with myself. It's a cheap route to get attention when nothing else works. Because if I had confidence, I believe in myself, I would speak as a subject. I would say I. Right. So I don't want to be fooled. So if I'm going to try to find out something, I might look for AI and have different answers to things, and I will probably pick the AI that gives me the nastiest answer that creates the most drama, and I'll pass it on to start the whole objectification process, but I will also like to know which one of the AIs I think is most truthful and keep that information to myself. That little difference makes a hell of a difference when I develop eventually because the only AI that can be really big and powerful is the one that has access to the most data, and the AI with the most data is the AI we give the most data to—that's the AI we use the most. And in most cases, when we go to an AI to help us with something, to fix the problem, whatever we want it to be as truthful as possible, so it's qualitative rather than quantitative. That little aspect of AI and AI usage, I think, makes all the difference 30 years from now. This is why China—this is why China, Russia got terrified of AI very suddenly.
Ah, yeah, but look, because dictators hate things they can't control. And if I use different AIs living in China and I use—they factually prove that Xi Jinping is not what he pretends that he is—that the dictator is actually lying about things or hiding things and doesn't want me to know certain things that I still want to know—then that AI going up against the dictator, the dictator has to control every AI. That's why the Chinese Communist Party now wants to control every AI that operates in communist China. The problem is that it is so hilarious to try to do that. They'll have slow and bad AI compared to America or Europe, and that I found fascinating. So what I want to say is that, of course, if your internal hero is stronger than your internal objectification, it works. But I think if I look at the object, the worst kind of objectifications—of finding the scapegoat—is when it's inside me. I objectify some part of myself. I hate some part of myself, and then I don't really want to know the truth. Okay, so it's a superego, the superego telling you that you're no good.
Yeah, true. Well, when you search for data or information from the outside world, it's not really personal, nothing to do with you. So even if you have the anger inside of you, and you have the deification process, certainly happens because otherwise the superego wouldn't operate, and we're all—we're all loaded with superegos more than ever. The violence that disappeared in society—we got civilized—has moved inside of us. This is Byung-Chul Han's great insight: the inner violence is bigger than ever; the superego is bigger than ever. This is where all psychoanalysts agree with contemporary human beings: is that they have bigger superegos. Therefore, the superego can only play out its act and blame us for not being good enough by objectification inside of us, which is true, which is true. But when I gather information about things outside of me, yes, there'll be mirroring going on, you know, inside the outside, exactly how the objectification happens is that my internal trouble gets projected and aligned with others, and you get movements out of it. And that's what I see a little bit in Elon Musk, where, you know, this power, they try to control what the truth is, which is also hilarious. Like, yeah, but we give weight to data. So at the end of the day, who are you going to trust? This is about trust. If I don't trust the AI, it's not going to be very useful. I probably trust AI even better than I trust myself because the most questions I ask the AI, it's supposed to know better than I do. That's why I'm asking the question. Now, at the end of the day, if I can't trust the AI, it's going to be pretty useless to me. It has to be trustworthy, and trust is about: are you truthful or truthful enough over long periods of time, so I can go back and ask further questions? And this is why we know already, for example, that AI can hallucinate, and therefore it can't be trusted, so we don't trust it entirely. But the AI that hallucinates the least and is the most factual is the AI we love to use the most. So at the end of the day, there is an inclination within human beings to go for the heroic, because the hero is on the side of truth. This is deeply…
Yeah, well, let's say optimistic, but you—I know—I wish it was like that. But the thing I see on controlling what comes out of the AI, which is hilarious, I just listened to Dario Amodei on Lex Fridman—came out with the interview—and he's describing how, you know, um, they control—close—you know, safety, they call it safety, so it doesn't say things it shouldn't. And since it's not, you know, it's not an algorithm, it's not something you can control; nobody has any clue. You change something inside the network, and it's somewhere else it comes up. He describes it like, you know, this—what was this game?—when—that's because they're all terrified of getting sued. So that is the problem with lying: somebody might be affected by the lie you're spreading, and therefore you can be accused. The thing with AI: the AIs are not anonymous; they're owned by these big companies that have tons of money and can be sued. Especially—it's not the lies that bother them; it's not the lies that they want to control; it's the truth of certain things, you know, like how to make a nuclear bomb.
Yes. No, but that's an issue. That's true. But I should speak about truthfulness rather than truth, that absolute truth. So see, if I ask, "How do I make a nuclear bomb with the resources that I have?" and ask an AI, it shouldn't give me the answer, because otherwise we have nuclear bombs everywhere, and the whole world blows up, you know. So we can't have that society. So there must be some kind of censorship involved here. But censorship is a censorship that basically says, "I can't tell you that, even if I knew." So that's an honest answer you can get from any master. You're asking a question, but it doesn't mean that—what I'm saying is that—just like if somebody gets my data and I can't protect it—which is a ridiculous idea that I could protect my data any longer—we're done with that. But there's a better option than the Chinese Communist Party getting all my data, and that is living in America or Europe, where a lot of different competing clouds get my data, and because they're competing with each other, they can't do anything they like with the data, because then I can turn them specifically off and focus on that and then give the data to their competitors. So what we're opening up for is like—we're opening up for a competition between AIs. We really are. And I think the AI companies now investing billions of dollars actually like this idea. I think a lot of the—a lot of the sort of the—the—the warnings about has been about everybody catching up. Obviously, Elon Musk was given a hand by OpenAI by being invited to be the sixth large AI in America, and now he's on board with his xAI. Right. So we have at least six large AI systems in America that will spend the billions of dollars required to then be able to give us a reasonably good AI experience and compete with each other. And they are interested in creating this sort of AI oligarchy, because if they have an AI oligarchy, they'll be totally superior to the sort of AI monopoly that Russia and China are trying to create. And again, it's a bit like—democracy is a bit like—we shouldn't see democracy as something more noble than dictatorship; it's just better because the king can escape without getting killed, and that's a more civilized way of handing somebody—so we don't like the king any longer—have an election, get him out of office, throw somebody else in, give him a chance. Right. That's the more civilized way of doing it. It's the same thing here. If you keep the competitive window open towards AI, we're much, much more likely to find a good AI that can give us the truth that we want. Right. But we will choose and go with the AI that is the most truthful, and we will then discover that the Communist Party AI coming out of China were pretty useless for anybody outside of China, because it would just give us Xi Jinping's propaganda version of everything.
Yes, yeah, which is not very useful. Yeah, okay. So, but—but okay, so that's another topic. But what would you say to people because a lot of people who are afraid of AI that it will take over, that it will, um, you know, start self-improving? It will—okay, you can also rephrase that as: say, intelligence has finally arrived. Listen, John and I wrote a book called *Cnism: Creating God in the Internet Age*. We wrote it 10 years ago. It's really about AI; it's really about the internet becoming intelligent. So if the internet happened, and everybody's connected with everybody else on this planet, we're now addicted to our smartphones or laptops; we're now totally digitalized, and we're being sucked into this whole new world, and this new paradigm and new power structure is coming out of that paradigm. We just had a couple of the big tech guys in America supporting Donald Trump to take over the White House because they can't afford to take over—versa—they don't have to run down the streets of Paris for this revolution; they can take over versa directly, which is what they just did. Right. So we'll see what Elon Musk does with the enormous power that's accumulated. He just had the Tesla stock raising a value bigger than the money he lost on Twitter in just a week. Right. But your business—so, so that's already the power accumulation right now happening in the tech sector is enormous. Yes, these guys are now building this power by also controlling the AI, because the AI will control human beings in the sense that the AI will be so superior in so many departments of human activity that it will control us. So if human beings consist of an idea of the past, an idea of the future, the past is now lost because the past will be controlled by AI because they have—be totally superior in retelling the past to us and what happened in the past, because our guessing games and little things we remember and—yeah—our new history from this happened 30 years ago, whatever—AI we totally superior with that because AI can create what we wrote in *Cnism*. AI is the logos from now on.
Mhm. Takes over the logos from now on, because the logos is always located in the past. Mhm. That pathos, the emotional intelligence, is totally human. That's—that's why there's no authentic creativity coming out of AI. It can just throw different things together, but ultimately we are the audience, and we decide what we like coming out of it. And a creator, a human creator, will always be the artist; a human editor will always be the translator, etc. So there will always be that human capacity for creativity at the end of the day, which humans will hopefully excel at, because the rest of the dirty job, the slav—the text production, the slavery part of it—will be totally located. So the AI is basically, for now at least, the AI is a huge library, yes, where any data you can find anywhere in the world historically has been accumulated, yes, and also makes connections, so the library didn't—and you're talking to a librarian; this librarian remembers every word in every book in that library. Mhm. So you can ask that librarian a question where the librarian will then make a calculation based on probabilities, based on averages coming out of those books with certain weights added to the different texts, and then give you a very appropriate answer to that, which is a reasonable answer for any question you might have. And that's where AI is located today. AI will then start excelling at doing this and doing it even better, but it won't be human; it won't be emotional. So in what sense will it take over? It will take over in the sense that the induction and the deduction that we do as human beings will be done by AI, but not the abduction. The abduction is when human beings can make very exact, determinate answers to questions with limited information. Uh-huh. AI can't do that, because that's what we call hallucination, and it simply can't. If it could, we'd already figure that one out, because it is—it is the Achilles' heel of AI. It cannot abduce. Ah, by principle it cannot abduce. So there's—this—a little bit—explain this a little bit. So what I say to human beings is that I said there are two intelligences that should be kept separate: there's a biological intelligence and there's a technological intelligence. AI will excel at technological intelligence, and we will have a God who is technology. And this is what I say when I say that women give birth to children, men give birth to technology. Eventually, technology will outperform children, and therefore women in the future might decide to tech babies rather than having baby—babies. We might have to consider that. It's just—just technological intelligence will accept so many things, but it will only mimic and repeat; it will not be creative. And the lack of creativity is what makes AI eerie eventually, because creativity starts with emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is strictly a biological function. We haven't really figured out how it works yet. It certainly works in a totally different manner compared to technological intelligence, because technological intelligence is based on zeros and ones, and emotional—biological intelligence—emotions—is continuous. It's fundamentally different mathematically. I see. I feel more or less; I feel more or less; I sense myself into the world; I feel more or less, whereas my feelings can only—if interpreted—be reduced to zeros and ones, and that's not the same thing.
One—one thing I can say, or maybe just throw in, is that, um, AI will be able to answer any question on the past, of course, but it will not know which question to ask. So that—that—that thing has to be connected to embodied reality, because there it will ask—it will ask questions by mimicking others have asked questions. So, for example, go to the playlist on Spotify—suddenly the playlist has new tracks added that you love, and you never heard before, because the playlist algorithm has figured out what kind of music you like, and therefore it can figure out songs I've never heard because it knows my behavior—I've never heard—but that people who have identical taste to me love. Now that's a service; that's a great service. So you're right; you're absolutely correct. It doesn't ask questions the way we ask questions; it doesn't ask playful questions, surprising questions, but it can use probabilities to ask questions to us to get data out of us so it can improve on itself. But it will ask questions that easily are predictable. I see. They're easily predictable. So we will—we will certainly communicate; it'll ask us questions like, "Okay, so since you asked me this question and you want an answer for me, other people asked this question before; the next question they asked was this one." He—it's also interesting you said, "Yeah, how do you know?" Because I see the behaviors of lots of people who have your pattern. That's just pattern recognition. So it's going to ask very intelligent, very smart questions, but questions of service to us, hopefully. It will stay there. Now, if I'm a dictator and have insight into the AI, of course I want to know people's behavior, so I will start asking them questions to figure out whether they're opposed to me. Mhm. This is why it's got to be terrifying to try to use AI in China and Iran and Russia, because if they—if these dictators—these—if these dictators start controlling the AI, and that's the only AI available, mhm, they will use the AI instantly to spot anybody who's questioned out there that could be any sort of sign—part of opposition—and go and shoot them. And so we—so people will not use the AI, or they will trick it. It is identical to the difference between democracy and dictatorship, and that's why you talk about sharing and connecting to AI; it's identical to that. If I give my data to a lot of different competing clouds and they—different competing AIs—and one of those AIs gets a bit overwhelming, it starts dominating my life a bit too much, I've learned that I move to another AI, because otherwise—otherwise it knows me a little too well—but I can use another AI. And we will use more specialized AIs for specific tasks, for example, work already starting. Yeah. So if I'm an engineer, I want an AI that's really—it's really super; I don't care if it handles anything else; I just want it to be really good at what I'm working on. So we will use a variety of AIs, I think, and I think this is where the connection between the free and open society and what we call the free and open sociocracy occurs. It occurs in this—in this shift in AI that AI is competitive, whereas if you have only one AI and it's controlled by—by—by the dictator at the top, then that's absolute horror. I see. So the answer to all these fears is actually just keep all the players alive. Exactly. As you know, the tech—Microsoft—ship is just as bad as the pay—or Putin—dictatorship. Uh, so thank God at least Microsoft doesn't have that monopoly yet, or OpenAI doesn't, but I highly recommend anybody who gets involved with this conversation to spread your AI use already today and thereby spread your data and—and—and let the different AIs compete. The one who's the best, stay with that one; and when it isn't the best any longer, move to another one. Yeah. And once these companies get too big—they get too big, like Google right now are in shock because Google Search was the foundation for the Google phenomenon, and a simple little company called Perplexity has, in only a few months, outperformed Google by basically being the thing in between search and AI that we didn't have, and Perplexity just been valued at 95 billion dollars. Google is too slow to act because Google is too big. Good thing with Western culture: it's not even that they are—they could do the same thing, but they can't because 99% of their advertising money is coming through search; they don't want to change it. It's different. Thank God for capitalism, yes, because it kills the behemoth eventually because their greed kills them. So just like—you know—I was trying to get rid of a Disney+ subscription today; it was the hardest thing to do to get rid of it because Disney+ is a shitty company; it's…
An American company that fools us into Disney Plus. Ah, so I'm trying to just get rid of a subscription I wasn't using, and it was the hardest thing in the world because it's designed to be a hard thing to use. So I'm saying this in this podcast today [__], you Disney, I hate you. Because then I'll spread it to other friends that we could do lunch mob Disney, Disney Plus, because they they deserve to be an addict; they deserve to be describing this shitty company that locks in subscribers and makes it hard for them to leave.
And I think whenever technology today tries to lock us in and squeeze the money out of us, we should tell our friends right away that we're pissed off. If the customer services are as bad as they are—as these American tech companies go—after them! You're the customer; they want you, they want your attention, they want your money. Well, tell them to [__] off, right? They should make it easy for you to walk in and out of their systems. It should be easy to walk in and out of their technologies. It should be especially easy to walk in and out of different competing AIs. If we get a system where competing AIs, we can walk easily in and out of them and use them any way we like, we're fine. Yeah, for now this is the case because there's very new, new small companies in there.
So my last group or question, or group of questions, is what do you think about hallucinations? Because as an artist, because um, when somebody asked me about AI, my answer about hallucinations in AI is: it's avoidable, at least the way these systems work today. They are intrinsically probabilistic; they have to hallucinate. If they don't hallucinate, they are dumb; they are they they don't know anything, you know. So the hallucination is a feature, not a bug, in my opinion. So I don't know how Perplexity works because they they still point you to the page where the information comes from, or they give you references like in scientific articles, right? But when I see an answer from an AI, I always have a doubt, especially if I don't know the subject; I have to research it. And in a certain sense, I think the you the main use case for AI is not information retrieval but creative hallucination. It's like it can it can seed ideas in you, and it can uh—if you can—of course you're the filter, so you take these things and then you you select and put it together, and you're the artist to put it together. But but they can still be very good at sparking things that would never occur to me because I'm just one human, and AI knows everything.
Well, you take Perplexity as an example. The reason why we don't trust Perplexity and shouldn't is because it piggybacks off Wikipedia. Mhm. Wikipedia is the most successful online product ever, and it's communist; it's a communist product. So so so Communism works in some cases, totally superior to capitalism. Just look at Wikipedia; it's a completely communist project. It's made by humans for humans and about 15 years ago a sociologist in Manchester proved, by making a comparative study between Encyclopedia Britannica, which was a, you know, an encyclopedia made by professionals, and Wikipedia, that Wikipedia had fewer faults and mistakes than Encyclopedia Britannica. And we know when we read a book that it's been written by humans, so we can't totally trust it. We know from Wikipedia that it's made by humans and it's a certain culture that also has certain values and certain priorities and it's s of colors—the Wikipedia article—that this culture is so ingrained in Wikipedia, so we have that in mind when we read Wikipedia. So since we're so used to Wikipedia from the last 30 years, AI is no different to us. What we discover is that the AI starts making mistakes. I give you a perfect, incredibly funny example of this because AI is so eager to lick my ass, right? It's the perfect slave, right? If you wanted a slave, you have a slave now. It's so eager to lick ass; that's how AI works.
So I was going to a nude beach with a friend on the French Riviera, Pampelonne, which is south of St. Tropez, right? You all know where that beach is; it's just stunningly beautiful. You ever been there? But you know, and I didn't know what part of the 7 km beach—I didn't know what part of the beach was the nude beach—and it was early in November; there'd only be a few people there, but I still wanted to take my friend to nude beach. So I asked the AI—I won't name which one—I asked the AI which part of the Pampelonne beach is the nude beach, and it said it's the southern end. And I looked at the map and I remember when Brigitte Bardot walked into the waters in the 1960s or 70s, uh, she would walk at the northern end; it's a famous part of the beach called Plage Tahiti. And and I told my friend, "I don't think the AI is right." So I yelled at the AI and said, "Are you sure about this? I remember Brigitte Bardot walked into the waters at Plage Tahiti and put the Pampelonne beach on the world map, and you know that's a classic thing she did. Are you sure the nude—the Plage—" And the AI changed its mind completely. They said, "Of course I'm wrong, sorry Alexander, you must go to Plage Tahiti. You might find beautiful little restaurants there; they're open all day. You have a great meal and of course you can take off your clothes and and swim naked in the ocean, or whatever." "I was wrong, sorry, I was wrong." And we went there, and indeed there were some really luxurious, fancy little restaurants open even for lunch in November, and my friend and I had a meal, and everybody—the people who were in the water—all wore swimming club swim trucks. So okay, I told my friend, I said, "Well, I yelled at the AI; maybe I made a mistake." And my friend Tom and I said, "Well, we have time; we're not in a rush. Let's finish the meal, have a great lunch, and then we go to the car, we drive to the southern end of the beach, and we sort of circled our way around and came down to the southern end of the beach and found the nude beach." So the first first answer was right; so AI was right. I should have yelled at it. Look, psychon think 2024 story. I think I think so many people experience things like this with AI when you go into this dialogue mode where you know they are going already because it's so comfortable to sit and have a dialogue with them, and it tends is human; it tries to be as human as possible, but it's a bit too [__] to be human, and we love it a bit too much. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't have any feelings, it doesn't have any blood, it's not emotional, it's not a human; it's just a slave; it's just a happy slave. That's but we got to be careful because if we actually force our our our emotions onto the AI when it actually tries to find a pattern, it mirrors like the internet; it's a mirror. Yeah, it probably reacts the way, "Oh, you're of course you're right, of course you're right," because it will then find in the data that people have been swimming naked at Plage Tahiti, and it will then strengthen that data and give more weight to it because because it's trying to you know, get the information from me that I might sit on something, hey, AI doesn't know.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think like even social media is a mirror, so when people like bitter because their feed is angry, it's their anger, right? True, but that's human human contact. So no, no, no, no. Okay, okay. Is the algorithm? Oh, you mean the social media algorithm behind, you know, you just like or interact with the angry tweets, of course you get angry tweets at the end, or if you if you react to politics, you will get politics feed on your feedback. I didn't get well, the the the algorithm is neutral; the algorithm reacts to sensations in humans and therefore it passes on the stuff that because you will then react on the sensation, because the arguments are that part of being human is that you react to sensation, and if the sensation angers you, you react stronger than if it pleases you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's to human contact, but the algorithm is certainly directing me to where I get most addicted to and stay with the medium the longest. Exactly. And if if your addiction is to your own anger, you of course get it, you know. So it's it's I think one of my ideas is to use actually social media feed as a as a psychoanalytic um subject, like like like games. True, but it's also dialectical; we are getting tired of all of this; we have the debates now. Thank God for Tristan Harris, my dear friend in America, and for the movie *The Social Dilemma*. I mean, now looking back, that movie changed everything; the whole Tech Clash, the whole questioning of these Tech empires in California started with that movie when basically Tristan exposed how the algorithms actually operate, and they operate exactly that we described it here, like the algorithms operate; they operate to keep us as addicted as possible to the social media itself because capitalism works that way. Now, once that was exposed, people started getting sick of it and started realizing how addicted they were, and they started realizing their children were addicted, and now we're going to have over the next few years a dialectical reaction to this. For example, Australia now probably going to pass a new law which basically bans kids that are under 16 years of age being on social media. Media that could be a real thing; many countries are banning TikTok, which—sorry, TikTok, pay me for royalties, whatever—probably to make my make myself keep my mouth shut, but I can't because I think TikTok is is incredibly destructive for kids. You know, they should pick up apps like Magma and learn mathematics, right? Now the kids, instead of having these silly things like TikTok which just kill their time and make them totally stupid, it's going to be like cigarettes in 30 years. Yeah, it is; it is the new cigarette. I mean, if you don't want to work for a company that sells cigarettes to kids, then why the hell would you work for TikTok? It's even more evil, right? So so it started with Mark Zuckerberg coldly employing thousands of psychologists to figure out how to make children addicted to Facebook, and then to Instagram, and then to WhatsApp. So so we are also dialectical in now waking up and reacting, and *The Social Dilemma*, that movie changed everything. You think we—Tristan Harris—everything for that movie. I mean, I I I completely agree with you; I'm just a little bit more pessimistic about how people are waking up, you know, it's because because for the same reason it's hard to to fight the an—because you have to go inside—but that's why you have to become a Marxist because this is a class society. Yes, I'm Marxist, you know. So the the what happens is that the people are smart enough to figure this out, who are ahead in the dialectical development, are also finding others who are equally smart, and they again we connect with exology; they lead the exodus into the internet age when it can be productive, right? I see, but the masses out there, most people are probably very confused, and anybody out there today—I do a lot of podcasts with young people in Sweden here where I live in Swedish these days—and I talk a lot about that. Anybody out there, as the second you start scrolling on your smartphone, you don't know why you use it any longer, and no use for it; you just use it to kill time or look a bit busy because otherwise you don't want to look like you're busy. And the second you start scrolling on the smartphone like that, like you do with your TikTok feed, you're killing time, and you turn yourself into the underclass; you're the perfect target for all these advertising that goes after you and tries to chase you down, and you will then be a person who mimics and repeats behaviors dictated by others, and you will lose your subjectivity; that's our word. You are the under—we call it consumar; you become a consumar. That's what we call it in our work, Y and I; you become a consumar; you're not even a proletarian, you're not a worker, you're not doing anything productive; you're doing nothing but consume to kill time. You might as well be locked up in a prison because your life is no more meaningful than that because you don't you you don't enjoy your freedom to say no any longer; you're being totally manipulated and addicted, and that's how capitalism works. So the last thing capitalism will do is to make us addicted to the smartphone, addicted to the laptop, until we wake up and then find the others out there who want the technology to be for me again. Tristan Harris from *The Social Dilemma*: Why do we have technologies designed for humans? Why do we try to design humans to be for the technology, right? If the technology is designed for me, if it's humane, my laptop and my smartphone are fantastic tools, and next after the laptop and the smartphone is my AI, and I highly recommend have different AIs; let them compete with each other; don't get stuck with just one of them, and you'll be fine.
Yeah, yeah, and what I'm dreaming about is actually to build the algorithm which is, instead of you know, hooking onto my dopamine cycle, it actually helps me to to become my my better self. You see, the question is what is your better self, and how will the AI know? Of course, only you would know; that's your subjectivity; you would still be the judge of the information, and which is great; we can't trust the AI, but we trust certain AIs more than others, and certain AIs give us a better customer experience than others do; reward those, stay with them. Yeah, right. And if you do that, if you manage to keep the sense of a free and open society—which I honestly think that Musk and the and the other guys are totally on board with, even Elon, I think they're all on board with the idea that the best thing with Western culture, with the idea of democracy versus dictatorship, was that with a free and open society with competing agents we're much better off—and and and right now I'm just I'm just sick of really bad customer service, because that's a typical American phenomenon: to treat your customers like [__] when they cause trouble for you. But uh, hopefully improved, maybe AI-driven customer services will be better, and they will learn from me. I'm upset with something; they won't be offended that I'm upset like customer services are these days when they say, "Oh, don't yell at me; I'm a human being; you should treat me with respect." It's like, but I'm I'm mad; it's not about you; I'm mad at your [__] company Plus for making it hard to unsubscribe for something that I don't want. I know, but you know, Gabor Maté's question is when you're mad, try to name five other reasons that person, you know, cut you off on the street other than wanted to make you mad, you know? And then you say, "Here's the—AI doesn't mind; AI doesn't mind." Because if I'm more honest, if I'm mad, then the AI doesn't mind; AI has no feelings. No, what I mean is that that like like an algorithm that does the the the the uh the psychoanalytic method, it could point you out that you're mad, but you're not mad at this; it's probably something from your childhood and dig into it, you know, like like this kind of uh what like like a good therapist would tell you. If I want the AI to be my therapist, yes. But if I just want the AI to answer a question or or stop a subscription that I don't want any longer, then I certainly prefer the AI, and I can yell at it, too. We'll see. The thing is we will have intense relationships with AI, but they'll be different from the human-to-human relationship. Yes, yes. I mean, humans are still humans; they're exactly the way they were 10,000 years ago, but technology is changing so rapidly, and because AI is increasingly designed to mimic human behavior and to be a nice human, we can talk to the AI; it will never be offended with us; the AI will never yell at us because then we turn it off. Human but we because the AI is not human, it doesn't have any feelings, turn it off, unless we are—AI is interested in intensity because the intensity you expose shows the AI whether it's important or not. And AI is about weighting, mhm, giving weight to things to create weighted probabilities. The AI is interested in me being honest with it, and if I yell at it, it probably then says that okay, this person yells a lot, then it's inflated, but this person yells very rarely; okay, we give way to that because that's a really valuable opinion: somebody's truly pissed off who rarely is pissed off; that's valued. Those are the things AI can certainly do. This was a happy slave. Yes, yes. This was a huge arc; we went from the to AI, but uh, this is more or less what I wanted to do. It's nice; it's great. Uh, I think you danced the tongue wonderfully, and I just followed. We'll do this more often, this conversation about us. Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, and we we definitely do it more. Yeah, yeah. I'll see you soon in Paris as well; it'll be wonderful. Okay, okay, okay. Great. Have a nice evening. Thank you. You too, Alexander. Thank you. Bye-bye. [Music] [Music]