Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the 2 person race in New Hampshire as the Republican Primaries lurch along. With Haley seemingly so far behind, it is clear Donald Trump will lock up the nomination and that is a direct threat to our democracy. Speaking of threats - AI is going to become more prevalent in our lives and in our educational system and that frightens us all to no end. They wrap up with some hopeful news as thousands of Germans take to the street to protest against a fascist movement that has echoes of the Nazi Party.
For more Muckrake, including our LIVE SHOW tonight after the New Hampshire primary, as well as access to the Weekender show on Fridays and live tapings, head over to Patreon and become patron of the show.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nice to have you here with my buddy, Nick Halsman.
Nick Halsman, how are you doing?
I'm good.
I'm good.
How are you doing, Jared?
I'm doing better now that Ronald Deion DeSantis is not running for President of the United States of America anymore, which we will get into in a minute.
But yeah, things are still a little bit rough, but that's what we do on the show, right?
I made meatballs this weekend.
I'm not sure why.
I just did.
All right, we will get into all that in a second.
A reminder to everybody, first of all, to support the show, go to patreon.com slash mudcraigpodcast.
But also, Nick, the primary train rolls on, and that's right.
You're going to be listening to this on Tuesday, January 23rd.
That means tonight at 10 p.m.
Eastern Time, you can go over to Patreon, and Nick and I are going to be discussing the results from New Hampshire.
We have your preview for that primary here in a little bit, but go over to patreon.com slash mudcraigpodcast.
Nick, everybody is saying, This isn't even a Donald Trump way of saying it.
People are actually saying that they appreciate having actual analysis instead of the old standard stuff.
So I think everybody needs to go ahead and jump into that pool.
Absolutely.
If you aren't in that pool, then stop dipping your toe and get the whole, all your legs and all the way up to the waist, at least.
Get the whole enchilada.
Let's go ahead and mix the metaphors.
But that's right, everybody.
Ronald Dion DeSantis has exited the presidential race.
Nick, let's hear from this charismalist.
But wait, what are you calling him?
What's his middle name?
Dion!
Really?
His name is Ronald Dion DeSantis.
I didn't know that.
I've been laughing about his middle name the entirety of his political career, Nick.
I have not.
I guess I just sort of glossed over it.
You just glazed over.
Yeah, I called him Ronnie Dion.
Okay, wow.
We'll have to watch.
We'll go back and do an edit of all of the greatest hits.
I missed that.
I found it so funny that his middle name is Dion.
I don't know why it's funny to me, but it's funny.
But let's hear from the disgruntled, charismalist governor himself leaving the presidential race.
Six!
- Greetings from Florida.
The warmth of being home is a reminder why I've chosen public service.
Joining the United States Navy and serving in Iraq to representing the people in the US Congress, and now serving as governor of Florida.
And it reminds me why I decided to run for president, to fight for those who've been forgotten in this country.
This is America's time for choosing.
We can choose to allow a border invasion, or we can choose to stop it.
We can choose reckless borrowing and spending, or we can choose to limit government and lower inflation.
All right, I just gotta stop here for one second, Drew.
Who is it, which party, remind me again, who keeps rejecting passing legislation that would actually shore the border up and the security down there?
My notes say the Republican Party, but that couldn't possibly be right.
Is it the same party that also tends to blow up the deficit every time they're in charge?
You know, I see this also in my notes, but that couldn't possibly be right.
Forgive me for transgressing.
We can choose political indoctrination, or we can choose classical education.
Is this the guy that wants to get rid of any kind of notion of mention of slavery in teaching the history of our country?
To be fair, that is classical education.
He's all on board for that good old classical.
These choices are symptoms of the underlying struggle to ensure that constitutional government can endure and that Western civilization can survive.
All right.
If that's the guy who's going to come out and save Western civilization, wave goodbye to it.
That's all I'm going to say.
This guy, Nick, we'll get to the rest of this video here in a second.
What a loser.
What an absolute loser.
And I want to have this guy's political obituary very quickly, Nick.
This was the guy.
Who took over Florida in totality.
He became a tin pot gubernatorial dictator in the state of Florida, which the Democratic Party allowed to happen.
And absolutely carried out a reign of terror.
He made gay and trans people public enemy number one.
It made them incredibly vulnerable, put their lives on the line, probably caused some of them to die.
God knows how many people died of COVID because of this person.
He disenfranchised black people and turned the entire educational system and the power of the state against them.
He ruined education in the state of Florida and drove one professor and teacher and administrator out, like couldn't get out of there fast enough.
He made it a hotbed of Neo-Nazism.
This guy took the state of Florida, and what did he do this for, Nick?
He did this not to save Western civilization.
He did it because he thought it was going to be good for his political career.
Here we are.
This guy is a stone-cold loser and failure, and has made life so much worse for so many Americans in so many different ways, and he has to sit here with this sanctimonious bullshit.
You know, there's a lot of things listed in there.
Did you mention duping migrants onto planes and other places in the country?
I know.
And he did that cruelty because he thought it would score him political points.
And here we are.
Yeah.
And then a friend of the pod, Will Bunch, all for the sake of the worst campaign in American history.
It's way up there.
You know, we talked about this, Nick.
I think it was on a weekender.
We talked about the absolute worst campaigns that we've seen in a primary season.
Scott, we talked about the Mount Rushmore, which has four on it.
There's Scott Walker.
I mean, absolutely.
Rudy Giuliani is probably on there.
Bloomberg, who spent God knows how many millions of dollars of his own money just to go complete.
I think he got one or two delegates, maybe from America and Samoa.
Ron DeSantis' run in 2024.
If it is not the worst primary run in the modern era, man is it up there.
This is unbelievable.
And by the way, I'm glad he's gone.
I'm glad that he's not going to have that big of a profile piece in American politics for a while.
But what a disgustingly bad failure this was.
And to show you the grift of how these things work, I'm sure it became completely apparent to whomever wanted to work on this campaign, very quickly, how bad a candidate he was going to be.
And yet, they were like, they propped him up, they did everything they could.
They said, hey, you want to keep paying me all this money to help you figure out this campaign?
That's the worst part.
We see this all the time.
What could that money have done to help people?
When they've spent, it's upward of 150 million.
Remember, he started out with a campaign manager, friend of the family, who had no experience running a national campaign.
You know, that's how ridiculous this was.
Perhaps they thought it would be that easy.
But, you know, this is really, really, this every step of the way was a bad decision.
I think he started out his campaign because people don't remember this now because it's very hard to remember.
Nikki Haley stole 95% of his donors.
And when they were on his side, when he announced for president, I believe he had a war chest of roughly a quarter of a billion dollars.
All of those people watched him over the course of months, Nick.
It has not been that long.
He has not been running for president all that long.
And they watched him over the course of under a year and then decided, holy hell, this is not a good investment.
He blew through a quarter of a billion dollars, barely did anything for himself.
All he did was make life worse for gay, trans, and black people and women, by the way.
I didn't even bring up what he's done for abortion in that state.
And it is just amounted to a whole hill of bullshit.
There is hardly any person right now, I think, who serves as a better representation of the futility and awful consequences of American politics more than Ron DeSantis.
So what we should take from this is some solace in the fact that a guy that represented all that did so poorly, especially in the Republican Party, but we can't, can we?
I don't know if that's true, Nick.
It reminds me of the producers.
It's like springtime for Hitler.
It's like, you know, at the end of the day, the checks got cashed.
The same people got rich in the same kinds of ways.
Like, it was a flop, but man was a lot of money, you know, thrown around in the course of it.
But that's a fantastic metaphor because the reason why that Springtime Hitler did so well was it became a comedy.
People started laughing at things that weren't supposed to be funny.
That probably applies here as well to some degree.
Can you imagine, and we've covered this Nick, people who listen to this podcast, remember we talked about Ron DeSantis.
We said, look what he's done in Florida, right?
Look at the reign of terror that he's carried out in Florida.
Oh my God, this might be a more capable Trump.
The only reason that we believe that was because the Democratic Party saw it as advantageous to let him be that person, right?
They were like, we don't need to worry about Florida.
We can use him for fundraising constantly and we'll allow that to happen.
Meanwhile, he got out onto the national stage where they couldn't just store him over in Florida and use him as a boogeyman.
Nick, one of the least charming human beings who has ever existed.
And he got out on the stage, and you're right.
It went from, oh my god, this guy is terrifying, to how hilarious is it, how inept he is, how bad he is at this.
Imagine if that Would have been used in Florida before he disenfranchised people, before he targeted gay and trans people, before he ruined the educational system, before he took away women's rights.
Imagine how effective that would have been to have just completely mitigated any of the damage that this loser could have done.
For what it's worth, by the way, the tone, if you get a chance to watch this and with the video of his speech, you know, saying he's out of the race, this is the most likable version of him that we've seen.
He's kind of calm.
He's just sort of talking in a more of a matter-of-fact way.
He's not angry.
Like, like, it took, I guess, him finally saying, you know what, I don't want to do this to come to some grips of something.
Well, speaking of whether or not he's charming or not, Nick, I want to have what is basically a reoccurring segment on the Muckrake podcast, which is when Donald Trump and pure ambition for power and influence brings out the absolute true nature of human beings.
Before you get ready to play this sequence, Nick, I want to remind everybody that Ron DeSantis has been going after Donald Trump really hard over the past few weeks, saying that he ballooned the deficit, that he didn't actually build the wall, that he actually wasn't that good of a leader, and that, you know, he didn't deserve to be re-elected.
DeSantis did.
Can you, uh... It's your sensitive cover your ears, but I suppose while you're listening to what he's saying about Donald Trump, you should just picture him eating chocolate the way he prefers to eat chocolate, I suppose.
You lick those boots, baby.
It's clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance.
They watch his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance, and they see Democrats using lawfare this day to attack him.
Well, I've had disagreements with Donald Trump, such as on the coronavirus pandemic and his elevation of Anthony Fauci.
Trump is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden.
That is clear.
I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honor that pledge.
He has my endorsement because we can't go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackage formed of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.
The days of putting Americans last, of kowtowing to large corporations, of caving to woke ideology are over.
I thank all of our passionate supporters You don't hear that, do we?
They had disagreements.
They had disagreements, and the main one was Anthony Fauci.
This is what it sounds like when someone thinks that there's a possibility they could be Attorney General of the United States of America and wants to use the DOJ as their own personal aggrievement factory.
That's what that is.
That's what that is.
Absolutely.
And we will see the long line of people marching to kneel before Zod before this is over.
Donald Trump loves this shit, Nick.
He loves it when someone is unloyal or criticizes him and then they come in and kiss his boots.
You know, I had people asking me, I did a bourbon talk last night, and people were like, hey, do you think that DeSantis is trying to become the VP?
And it's like, no, that's not, no, that's not what's happening here.
DeSantis either wants to be a senator and get Trump's endorsement, or he thinks he has an outside shot of being attorney general, which he might, he might have an outside shot of doing that.
But that being said, nothing reveals a person's actual true character more than Donald Trump.
He's undefeated when it comes to that.
I agree and you know we keep talking about how um you know all these lawsuits uh will they hurt him will they not hurt him uh talking about Trump now um I just had a thought earlier today where you know how Merrick Garland really wasn't gonna like do anything for like the first year while he was in office?
Sure.
I kind of think we I now realize why Why he didn't want to, why nothing happened, is kind of because what he might have figured out was that these lawsuits were going to elevate Trump, not hurt him.
And you know what I mean?
In some weird way.
That's why I don't pay the Attorney General to worry about that stuff.
Right.
You're right.
Because he shouldn't be worried about that.
He should just be doing the law.
And I don't want an Attorney General who's going to, you know, sort of wring their hands and be like, I don't really want to upset the Republicans and make it seem like this.
But it sucks.
But speaking of Trump's presidency, we need to talk about his current ascension to the nomination.
Nick, we do have the New Hampshire primary tomorrow.
Reminder, we'll be airing at 10 p.m.
Eastern with a live show discussing the events.
The most recent poll out of New Hampshire of record includes Ron DeSantis, but right now it has Donald Trump at 46%, Nikki Haley at 44%, and Ron DeSantis at 6.
Depending upon what polls you look at, they have them trump either up about 10 points or a dead heat like this one.
This, though, it looks like is going to be the last stand of Nikki Haley.
She is either going to win New Hampshire or come in a very, very close second, or she's not going to make it to South Carolina in about a month.
And we don't even know if she has a possibility of winning in South Carolina.
It feels like this very well could be one of the last stands in the 2024 GOP primary.
Jared, I am not one to get out ahead of my skis generally, but I will go out and say that all we have to discuss about tomorrow night would be whether it's a moral victory that she finished within 20 points of Donald Trump.
So, and by the way, you're on a little bit of a heater right now.
You did predict that Trump was going to be over 50%.
I thought it was going to be somewhere in the area of 48.
So I'll take that.
So you're saying right now your prediction for tomorrow night is that Trump beats her by 20.
Yeah, but by the way, don't forget to tweet your own horn because you called the Santas dropping out.
Like, I didn't believe you.
I'm like, he'll get to South Carolina and he dropped out when you said he would.
So you are, you know, deserve more of an accurate prognostication than I did.
You look around and you start to realize there's more, you know, brand poison there than anything else.
I mean, when we were talking about this last week, Nick, like how many rats sinking ship articles were coming out, it became very obvious that there was no one within the DeSantis campaign who wanted to keep going on with this awful, awful experience.
On top of that, there was no money.
There just wasn't.
I mean, DeSantis pulled all of his TV ads because basically they looked at their checking account and they went, "Oh, I don't know about this." And speaking- - 'Cause that means that they spent a quarter of a million dollars, right?
Oh, he'd already gone through a quarter of a million or a quarter of a billion dollars.
My guess is he was probably on his 300 million dollar plateau at that point.
And going back to that, Nikki Haley right now has a problem.
Well, Nikki Haley has a lot of problems, but one of the problems is that every one of those donors that she stole from Donald Trump, they are not in the business of funding campaigns that they don't think have a chance to win the presidency.
Say what you want about where they throw their money away, they're not going to burn it for a candidate who isn't going to help them.
She has to either win New Hampshire or come so close that it's a statistical tie.
I agree.
to keep any of this gravy train going.
And she's already lost a good amount of these donors.
There is bleeding that is happening.
The question is whether or not this campaign bleeds out tomorrow night. - I agree.
And the polls don't necessarily lie.
Like the, you know, the greatest, even if they're way off, everything I've seen has had him with a pretty big lead.
And we also saw him with a pretty big lead in South Carolina, her home state.
And so, obviously, even if it was close in New Hampshire, she's going to get beat by at least 10 points, I imagine, in her own state.
That's going to be embarrassing and she'll have to drop out at that point.
So, I think we just need to accept the fact that Donald Trump is not only going to get the nomination, all these assholes are going to get in line behind him and support him no matter what.
They're going to be able to say, well, Biden is forcing us to choose Trump.
That's going to be the thing you're going to hear a lot of, which we've talked about before.
The Democrats are making us.
What else can we do?
We're the party of compromise, and that illiberal Democratic Party is making us become fascist.
So remarkable.
Why are you making me hit you?
Stop it.
Right.
Or, why are you hitting yourself?
I was never the person to get on top of someone and make them hit themselves.
You're right.
That's what you say.
Stop hitting yourself.
That's correct.
You don't do it.
You say, why are you making me do this?
That's very unhinged.
I never thought, to be honest with you, that this thing was going to be wrapped up well before Super Tuesday.
I kind of thought that Super Tuesday would be the final thing.
But of course, as we've discussed, I think both Haley and DeSantis are hoping that Trump somehow or another gets knocked off the ballot, but I think that fantasy is coming to an end at this point.
Meanwhile, Nick, one of the things that we're being treated to on a pretty regular basis right now Is the Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, on top of becoming more and more of an open fascist and calling for immunity, the likes of which we've never seen, including the possibility of assassinating his political rivals?
I don't know how else to say this, Nick.
It appears that something in that man's coconut ain't working right.
By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th.
You know, Nikki Haley... Nikki Haley... Nikki Haley... You know they... Do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything?
Deleted and destroyed all of it.
All of it.
Because of lots of things.
Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security.
We offered her 10,000 people.
Soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want.
They turned it down.
They don't want to talk about that.
These are...
For those who have no idea what the hell that Donald Trump was talking about there in Concord, New Hampshire, Nick, he is referring to the fact that Nancy Pelosi, who is the sitting Speaker of the House back in 2021, he claims that she didn't do her job in protecting Capitol on January 6th.
Can you fact check this for me?
Am I correct in saying that Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley are two separate human beings?
I've never seen them in the same room at the same time.
Yes, I have.
I'm sorry, forgive me.
It's the other way around.
We have seen them together, probably.
So, yes, they're different people.
They're different people.
That's right.
Donald Trump, in a very, very noticeable way, and this is not the first time it has happened, has confused his rival, Nikki Haley, with Nancy Pelosi.
Wait, there's one more confusion that maybe got lost.
He also is confusing her with Liz Cheney, because he thinks that Liz Cheney deleted all the January 6th documents, which, again, are all available for public consumption.
And that's the beginning of that whatever he was going on in his mind.
And I have a working theory on why this has happened, Nick.
I actually, again, referring to the bourbon talk, somebody asked me, they said, do you think Trump is faking this?
I do not.
I think that I think Trump is in decline.
But I want to say there's a reason why this is happening.
It's nasty woman syndrome.
It's Donald Trump, who is an absolute misogynistic, patriarchal asshole, sees every woman who stands in his way as the same thing.
Nancy Pelosi, Nikki Haley, Hillary Clinton, E. Jean Carroll, you name it.
Whatever woman that he particularly sees is standing in his way.
But that's the point that I wanted to bring up in this segment, Nick, which is he is getting worse.
And I want to say something that is a little bit sensitive here, okay?
Okay.
The MAGA movement is an unwell Mentally unwell movement.
It is, uh, led by a person who is obviously mentally unwell.
It is a movement of people who are not well.
This is how cults work.
They, they go back and forth and it just gets worse and worse and worse.
I have been around enough people and relatives and loved ones who, um, as they got older, their personality traits were exacerbated as they got older.
You know what I mean?
They got harder.
They got angrier.
They got meaner.
And I think what we're watching is that this cult, which is being led by a man who is not well, we're watching his condition grow worse.
And as a result, what's going to happen in 2024 is that we're going to watch this cycle, this worsening, worsening cesspoolic cycle, just continue to deteriorate.
That's my prediction at this point.
Yeah, I'm not even sure the root of his confusion is based on his misogyny.
I just think that he has a hard time keeping all these things straight in his mind.
So everything feeds into the other and it's confusing for him.
Whereas most normal candidates won't.
I mean, listen, everybody misspeaks.
Everybody.
I even said we've never seen him in the same place the same time.
And I meant the other one, right?
So it happens, but not like that.
And not when you're mistaking a person for two other different people, two other different things.
The stress of a campaign is extremely taxing on a human being anyway.
I was basing 91 counts against you.
Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, the E.G. Carroll stuff continues to haunt him and continues to drag him back into court because he can't shut the fuck up about it.
And that might be the gift that keeps on giving.
They'll continue to lead him of money on these settlements because he cannot stop talking as mandated by the court.
But, you know, how's this for a segue, Nick?
If only he had an AI That's a terrible segue, but we got to talk about some developments in artificial intelligence that I think are really telling.
Nick, at OpenAI, which of course is the company that has produced ChatGPT, we've seen a couple of things in the news over the past week that are a little bit troubling.
First of all, Sam Altman, the guy who was in charge of it and then thrown out and came back, he was talking to Axios.
And in an interview with Axios, he said, quote, he believes the future of AI products will need to allow, quote, quite a lot of individual customization.
And that's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable because AI will give different answers for different users based on their values, preferences, and possibly on what country they reside in.
Quote, if the country said, you know, all gay people should be killed on sight, then no, that is well out of bounds, Altman said.
But there are probably other things that I don't personally agree with, but a different culture might.
We have to be somewhat uncomfortable as a tool builder with some of the uses of our tools.
Nick, I tell you that this has confirmed one of my most deep seated worries about artificial intelligence, which is it's absolutely a tool.
It's a tool that can be used for good, it's a tool that can be used for good and bad, and it's a tool that can be used for bad.
Knowing that the people who are programming this and controlling it are already resigned to the fact that they're going to program it to continue on the prejudices, the worst instincts, and the problems of cultures around the world, I'm not surprised, but I'm troubled.
I hear you.
I mean, it might be helpful to think about this like Tony Stark in the Marvel movies has Jarvis, you know, the AI, basically a computer that controls his whole empire.
You probably haven't seen his movies, but you know... I've seen these!
What do you think I am?
You think I haven't seen Marvel movies?
Oh, you don't like them?
I don't like them, but I've seen them.
Okay, so good.
Well, thank goodness.
So that always helps.
So, you know, obviously at some point as this AI has to learn how to interact with its Master, I suppose we'll call it.
Yes, there's going to be lots of opportunity for that person to then make sure that the AI has every, you know, prejudice that they have as well and talks to them the same way.
This is an interesting conundrum, without question, because we talk about echo chambers all the time.
Now you're going to have a thing that will tell you and manage your life for you, right?
Isn't that what AI is going to do?
It's going to manage things.
Hey, Siri.
Oh boy, I didn't want to say that because now my phone's going to...
But you know, put this thing in my calendar.
Hey, let me know if this is open.
Can I order food for me?
You know, all the different things we're going to do.
And then they're going to eventually start talking back to you a lot more.
And then you're going to say, Well, hey, you know, how would I get that woman to like me?
You know, I don't know, like the next thing you know, you're gonna have all sorts of life coaching from these things.
This is dangerous, right?
I can see why if you were pumping it full of horrible stuff, what comes back out at you could be equally horrible.
Well, I think on one hand, the coaching and mentoring and stuff like that absolutely can lead to bad places, but it's also what type of information you're being given.
You know, I want to point out, and this is something that we don't usually wrestle with, Apple, Google, Facebook, you name it.
I mean, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it.
These tech companies have continually compromised their supposed ethics and morals every time that it came to, I don't know, should we be allowed in China?
They eventually go around China.
Apple is a great example of this because they, of course, have produced their iPhones in slave conditions in China.
And in order to get that labor and in order to open up the market for their products, Nick, they've told them it's, yeah, absolutely.
We will censor whatever you want us to censor.
We will help you carry out a surveillance state as long as we're able to operate there.
So what has happened is that every single time.
Without defeat, I don't know of a single major corporation that so far has held fast on this stuff.
They always bend the knee, and what we're being told now is that OpenAI, which is the leader in this stuff, or at least one of the leaders in this stuff, is already signaling, yeah, artificial intelligence is simply going to bend the knee to authoritarian reactionary regimes, help them out, and also go ahead and censor information.
Like you said, trash in, trash out.
And all we're doing is completing the cycle of making sure that these things are going to be replicated and reinforced.
That's what AI is going to do for these people.
Well, otherwise you're talking about mind control.
Woke mind virus, Jared.
Woke mind virus.
You can't tell me that I can't be racist, right?
And however, whatever version of racism I am, you can't tell me I can't do that, you know?
And I don't want my AI to tell me that either.
By the way, did you watch Murder at the End of the World?
No, I haven't watched it yet.
Well, you're not going to spoil it, but they have an AI, and the AI becomes a being, it casts a video image, like 3D, you can see it, and it can act as a psychologist.
And not only can it act like a psychologist, it has studied every version of psychologies that ever since time existed, and writing existed.
So, you can almost argue that that would probably be a better therapist than any other therapist you'd have in real life.
Right.
False.
I don't know.
I think it's a compelling argument because, again, you can argue this is almost like techniques to be able to put A through B and C of your past history.
Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second.
This is going to bleed right into our next segment here in a second.
Why do you think that would make them a better therapist?
Well, if you think about, well, listen, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist, but as I understand it, you spend most of your formative studying of all these, the heroes of the subject, you know, what their writings are, what their thoughts are, what their experiments were, all those different things, and what works, what doesn't.
It seems like that's a lot of the job.
False!
Okay.
No, you're not supposed to just regurgitate what has come before.
Like if you think like a psychoanalyst is just going to say, Freud was right about everything and we're just going to go down that route, that's not how it works.
Like the entire point is it's supposed to, like the individual is supposed to come to it and think about what they think about it and challenge it and move it, incorporate certain things to relate to certain people.
As opposed to just continually, like, pushing these things forward.
Like, I don't think an AI is necessarily going to be a better therapist, simply because it has, like, a quicker, like, look-up feature.
Oh.
Okay.
I mean, I suppose if you continue to understand how it's going to progress, it's not just, like, a quick Google search of whatever, and then, you know, fill in this.
But, You know, it seems to me like so many things that I would want to do.
Like, for instance, I was thinking this the other day, you know, the Warren Commission on the JFK assassination is volumes and volumes.
It would really be great if in my brain I could store every word of them and have it out of total recall at any moment that I could use to then formulate those ideas that you're talking about, right?
That's in theory what AI would be able to do.
Yeah, but wouldn't it be better if you spent the time reading the Warren Commission report and learning about it yourself as opposed to asking an AI companion to come up with it and having absolutely no idea where it gets it right and where it gets it wrong?
Well, it could be better, but it also could be impossible to do.
So what happens?
Wait, so what happens, Nick?
Okay, this is actually an interesting question.
What happens, and let's just, we're just putting this in a fictional world, right?
Like this is an America of a future where, I don't know, an authoritarian president has taken over, okay?
And an authoritarian movement.
Like, who's to keep, like, an AI machine from telling you that the Warren Commission said something that it didn't say in order to influence how you thought about the JFK assassination and you would never have any clue whatsoever that it has been changed in order to influence you on behalf of an authoritarian government.
I mean, it's the same thing that your book is about, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole point is that reality is fungible.
That's the issue here.
Right.
So, I mean, right.
Is there a version of that reality where someone nefariously is going in and changing, you know, little bits and pieces of data that we have out there?
You know, again, how do we ever now know what the truth is?
And that's the question.
And now we've arrived at the precipice of an abyss, and part of what I think needs to be done is answering this next segment, Nick, which is, not only did Sam Altman and OpenAI say this out in the open and freak me the fuck out, they also announced that they have signed an exclusive deal With Arizona State University.
That's right, ChatGPT is going to be used to start teaching Arizona State students how to write.
It's going to tutor them in their writing and also it's going to be used in other classes.
What's fun about this is that the professors that are going to be put out of work by this are going to be put in charge and developing curriculum for the ChatGPT.
They're going to not have to pay nearly all of these salaries and or the benefits that come with it.
We can dissect all of that here in a little bit.
But Nick, what you just brought up, that critical thinking that is necessary to understand what is real and what isn't, unfortunately, that's what you learn in a writing classroom.
I'm not just saying that as a former writing professor, but that's just sort of stone cold truth, which makes this whole thing suck even more.
You know, it's funny, I've been in those writing classrooms in college, a couple of professors, I would have no problem, maybe AI would be better than them.
But certainly there are a couple that were that were very good.
And listen, especially when you're talking about expression and written expression, you know, you need the human interaction, which I think is what you're getting at as far as therapy as well.
Nothing can really replace a human interaction, right?
But I gotta tell you, when you watch Murder at the End of the World, it does have a scene, and you start to wonder, really, whether you can have empathy and connection with, you know, we've seen movies like Her, where it sort of seems to happen.
Now, that could all still be sci-fi, but at the very least, yes, it is concerning, and I understand that, you know, full disclosure, And you already said that.
You were one of the people that they're going to replace, and that certainly is a live wire, I think, for you to have to deal with.
I think it should be a live wire for everyone.
And, like, seeing it firsthand is what bothered me, is that I watched for years as the right whittled away at public education.
Not only making sure the teachers weren't getting paid enough, putting them in terrible conditions, turning them into public enemy number one in order, as we've talked about, to go after teachers unions and break their control, and also to undermine public education in general, to mess around with curriculum, to do all this stuff, so all of a sudden now Nick, I'm going back to Florida, Ron DeSantis' little playground there.
So, you're telling me maybe that if this takes place in Florida that the quote-unquote culture of Florida won't be taken into consideration and it won't basically be programmed to tow the political line of someone like a Ron DeSantis?
Or that there wouldn't be a human being there to consider the possibility that that might be something they shouldn't do?
Well, you know what the problem is, is that they've already legislated this into the law of what they can and can't teach.
So anybody in Florida would be like, well, we can't violate the law and AI would not want to violate the law either.
So they would omit the things they want to omit and change whatever they want to change.
Exactly.
And so what has happened here is we have an entire industry that has been completely hollowed out.
And now, and I want to point something out, Nick.
Because I've been very critical of artificial intelligence on this show in the past.
Listen, I'm a little bit of a Luddite.
I've seen this thing coming for a while and it's worried me from a labor perspective.
I actually think that there's a lot of use for artificial intelligence.
I think it could be a really useful tool.
My tinkering around with it, my research into it, I think it could be amazing.
I think it could revolutionize the world.
What concerns me is that this is going to make an incredible weapon for some really dangerous people.
And if we, right now it's the, it's a wild, wild west because our government has absolutely no desire whatsoever to mitigate any of these circumstances, to regulate any of it, to have even the beginnings of an oversight or a stance.
They've let social media, Nick, we already have gone through the opening and the heyday and the decline of social media.
Have we not?
Um, yeah, we have.
Did our government do shit all?
It depends on who you ask.
They didn't do anything is what they did.
We are in another point where these corporations absolutely own our government.
None of them are going to regulate any of this.
And we're going to look up, and I about said in a couple years, it might be a couple of months, we're going to look up and it's going to be too late.
We need a cultural, social conversation about what should be allowed and what shouldn't.
And it's already messing stuff up.
Nick, just an aside.
Journalism is already screwed.
It's been screwed for years and years and years.
It's getting worse.
I don't know if you saw this.
Sports Illustrated.
Everybody got laid off.
Pitchfork, everybody got laid off.
Why?
Not just because of downsizing and liquidating.
They're absolutely bringing in AI to do all this shit.
They're not worried about paying people to do this.
The middle class in this country is being absolutely skewered and destroyed.
And we're going to look up in a few months, if not a year, and we're going to say, what in the hell just happened?
And the time to deal with it is right now.
Well, yeah, but let's make no mistake, like with Sports Illustrated, like they were still printing a magazine.
Sure.
There's simply no way to support writers with the salaries that they had been paid in the past with whatever business model you have in the sports world anyway.
And a lot of those different journalists and magazines and stuff.
So I'm sympathetic to some degree.
I mean, they probably ran their company suboptimally in certain ways that could have squeezed us out.
And they got as far as they did, by the way.
Can I?
Okay.
I'm glad you brought this up real fast.
There's like hedge fund shit in this that is absolutely to blame.
Are you ready for me to say something that is going to be a little bit controversial, but I'm going to say it anyway?
Go ahead.
I was in academia for 15 or 16 years.
I think what was done to public education, and particularly higher education, is an absolute crime based on what I saw.
The professors and the educators, they hold a little bit of the blame.
They took advantage of the spoil systems, whether it was tenure or whether or not it was the hierarchies.
They lived really high on the hog.
They didn't take care of their colleagues.
They didn't get out there and march and take care of things.
That has also happened in the journalism ranks.
There were a lot of people who lived very high on the hog, and now we look around and there's like not enough people to do this job.
Only the privileged few can do it.
It's been liquidated.
It wasn't taken care of.
That doesn't mean that the lion's share of the blame belongs to those people, but we do need to look in the mirror and understand where we succeeded and where we fell short.
So I think there was mismanagement.
I think that there was a lot of people who took the situation for granted and didn't defend it and didn't take care of it.
And also the people underneath them were vulnerable.
And now we've reached the point where we need to have a sea change and we need to push back.
Absolutely.
I mean, if you have a business that relies on trucks to have to drive, you know, magazines to all across the country every week or whatever, I mean, the expense of that is just too high.
It's like to sustain that is almost impossible.
It needs to be digital.
This distribution needs to be a monthly or weekly or monthly fee, you know, which, you know, people get rack up, rack those monthly things up, and then they don't want to get another one.
And then you're squeezed out.
Anyway, we can get into a whole thing on that in another pod.
But so so it's it's we need to refigure the entire Genre out right to figure out how you can maximize it, but let's not forget journalism itself.
But correct me if I'm wrong was in the initial part of it when it did have in its heyday.
I suppose a long time ago.
It wasn't a money-making thing, right?
It wasn't designed to be a profitable, you know, 500 company and that's where it would function well enough and once they moved in and the corporate corporations moved in and the suits moved in then it became a problem and it was inevitably going to fall apart.
Education is the same way.
These are things that were not supposed to be optimized for profit.
They were for public good.
And neoliberalism absolutely hollowed that out.
How about healthcare?
Healthcare is absolutely another one of those fields that is supposed to help people and meanwhile has been optimized particularly through corporatized hedge funds.
Nick, let's talk about something that's actually a little bit encouraging.
Over in Germany, where the center-left government is in absolute crisis and has lost the faith of the people.
Surprise, surprise!
It's almost like that's going around!
It's almost like that's the issue with liberal democracy right now in the late, late stages of neoliberal capitalism.
A far-right party called Alternative for Germany has started to gain a little bit of power and sway.
There have been a couple of good election results for them here and there.
The polls for them have moved.
Well, guess what?
The good people of Germany said, fuck that.
We're not doing this.
Particularly after it was revealed that Alternative for Germany had what they called a master plan, which was a mass deportation of immigrants and migrants who had come to the country.
And in response, Nick, over the weekend, over a million Germans flooded the streets in order to show their displeasure, to say we're not going to do that again in this country, and they have made their voices heard.
We don't know what's going to happen into the future, but I find this incredibly encouraging.
Either it's encouraging or it's discouraging because we, Germany has had very strict rules and laws against publicly, you know, aligning with the Nazi party for instance.
So they've been really, really like almost overboard.
I think people in America would be upset with the kind of control that Germany had.
Obviously, they needed to do that out of coming out of World War II, and yet we have 22% of the country who wants it right back again, basically, right?
They're on their way back towards fascism and towards the Nazi Party.
I suspect that is growing, and that's troubling, because you think that maybe that number will keep going lower and lower as they get farther and farther away, and they maintain the strict laws against, you know, the Nazi Party and the Nazi ideology.
So, it's both ways.
I believe that the Confederate flag is hate speech and also a symbol of insurrection.
I think it should have been banned following the Civil War.
You know, if we're going to get wild talking about what you should ban and not ban, I think that the Confederate flag should have been banned.
So let's say we went overboard on that.
Let's say we could ban the Confederate flag.
We could ban anybody talking publicly in pro, you know, sorry, pro Southern states.
All that stuff.
Would that have mattered?
Would it have actually changed?
It probably would have done a better job.
Of making sure that at the beginning of the 20th century, all these places, as soon as we started talking about desegregation, started putting up Confederate statues in every public square, in front of every courthouse, and in front of every, you know, cemetery and place of worship.
Like, we probably could have nipped that in the bud a little bit, and maybe we could have changed the way we looked at it.
I actually think it's good that Germany has treated Nazism like this.
De-Nazification was... Well, actually, you know, let me... I about said something, and I want to be very clear about it.
I thought said denazification in Germany was a wild success, but that's not true.
The cultural showcases of it was a success.
A lot of the Nazis, a lot of the people who helped the Nazis, they continued on in public life and had power.
They continued to hold sway over the government and over cultural centers.
That was a failure.
And in many ways, that was exactly how denazification and de-fascism worked in the United States around the world.
But I will say this.
If you, as a country, want to avoid authoritarianism, if you want to avoid this shit seeping in and taking over, the first sign of it, you go out in the streets.
That's what we learned from Great Britain.
One of the reasons why Great Britain did not succumb to fascism right before World War II, and it was starting to happen, is because they got wind of it and they said, no, we're not doing this.
And they went out in the streets and quite frankly, they beat the shit out of the fascists.
They said, you're not welcome here.
You're not going to be here.
And it started to put it, you know, back into its place.
We need something like this in this country.
And I think Americans are way too complacent about this stuff.
And we're looking around looking for someone to fix it for us.
I like that idea.
I think I think we need more marches.
I think it would be great if we had marches throughout the summer leading into the fall into the general election to, you know, if Biden isn't going to generate the kind of energy we have that needs.
Yeah.
Then we need to do it and understand where we're going.
And just like they'll say, oh, well, I have to hold my nose and vote for Trump because I can never vote for Biden.
It's like the other way around.
We cannot.
Whatever it is, whatever you care about, whatever, you know, social issues you want to care about or not, or taxes, the bottom line is it's either democracy or fascism.
That needs to be the key here.
And again, you know, I just think that at some point.
Gosh, I don't even know when it would have been.
People, the complacency ended up letting us believe that we lived in a country we didn't really believe in, or we didn't really live in, right?
I think that it seemed like things were going better for minorities and for everybody, and like, you know, there just seemed to be maybe a coalescing of the United States, and it turns out, no, Trump just uncovered, pulled back the rug, and there's all the, you know, under whatever.
Boy, I'm not going to use derogatory terms, but you know what I mean.
No, I think what we're talking about is the fact that It was really easy for some people, particularly white people, particularly middle class white people, to believe in a country that didn't exist because it allowed them to have a story about themselves that they didn't have to do a lot of introspection, you know, they didn't have to think about.
I mean, there's a reason why this new Republican push against diversity and, you know, Uh, DEI is working.
It's because, you know, to actually think about what DEI is and how we need to change things in this country is to have to look in the mirror and consider the fact that you have privilege and that maybe what you got, maybe you earned it, but it also was helped along by a certain amount of privilege.
It's a lot easier to not think about that stuff and think about America, you know, where it's land of the free, home of the brave and every, you know, it's the American dream and all this stuff.
But we have become incredibly complacent.
I was really excited in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
I see the labor movement.
It makes me very, very excited.
But the fact that we are sleepwalking into an authoritarian dictatorial presidency right now, it bums me out.
But I want to believe that we're capable of better.
And seeing something take place like in Germany like this, it makes me hope that maybe we'll rediscover that.
Right.
We're going to have to do it ourselves.
We're going to have to do it ourselves.
Yep, we absolutely are.
All right, everybody, that brings us to the end of this episode of the Montclair Podcast.
A reminder, we will be live.
I guess it's tonight.
I about said tomorrow, but it's Tuesday, January 23rd.
We will be live at 10 p.m.
Eastern discussing the results from New Hampshire.
We will also have a weekender episode ready for you on Friday.
You need to go to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
We're doing this as a service to help people keep, to help people be informed.
We also need your help and your support.
And also, I promise you, you're not going to find better analysis on any of the networks or on any of the newspapers.
Go to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
In the meantime, everybody, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMe?
