Can the U.S. Rein in Prediction Markets? + Joanna Stern on Her Year of A.I. Experiments + Our Producer Goes to Attention School

Introduction to Rovo

0:00Meet Rovo, your AI-powered teammate by Atlassian. With Rovo, you can streamline your workflow and power up your team's productivity. Find what you need in a snap with Rovo Search. Connect Rovo to your favorite SaaS apps to get the personalized context you need. From brainstorming to complex requests, Rovo Chat delivers insights in the context of your work. And Rovo is already built into Jira and Confluence. Get started with Rovo, your new AI teammate, at rovo.com. Well, Kevin, very nice to be with you here in New York City.

0:32Reunited at last. Having a great time. Are you having a great time in New York this week? I am, yes. I got to see some friends last night, got to go to Brooklyn. I'm not seeing a show, but I am staying in Times Square, so I feel like I'm seeing a show every morning. Wonderful. Well, I've also been, you know, out on the town, going to cool parties, meeting new people. You know, I met this gay guy the other day who said he was a listener to the show. Oh. And I said, oh, hi, you know, and he said, oh, you're from Hard Fork. Which one are you? And I said, I'm the gay one.

1:04And he said, I thought you both were gay. And I had to explain to him that straight people also perform a cappella.

1:13And that it blew his mind. It completely blew his mind. Wow. I feel like I have talked about my wife a non-negligible amount on this show. It's reaching Borat levels of talking about one's wife. And yet still, you know, people don't always pay close attention to what they're listening to.

Prediction Markets Discussion

1:32And we're going to get into that later in the episode. Yeah. Is it because they think, like, people sense some sort of, like, chemistry between us? Is that, like, a thing? No, he specifically said that he did not think that we had any chemistry. Okay. So we're just platonic. Yeah. No, it's completely platonic. Yeah. I think it's great, though, because it just goes to show you can listen to a podcast for a long time and still not really understand anything you're listening to. And I take that as a no. We should keep that in mind as we plan our segments. You know? That's very good. It's not all going to come across. That's incredible. Yeah.

2:07I'm Kevin Druse, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, prediction markets are out of control. Is Congress about to rein them in? Then, Joanna Stern returns to the show to discuss her new book on turning her life over to a chatbot. And finally, Hard Fork's own Rachel Cohn returns to the show to talk about her first month at attention school. She has our full attention. She does.

Prediction Markets Regulation

2:42Well, Kevin, a few weeks ago, you predicted we would soon do another segment on prediction markets. And I'm happy to tell you that prediction has now come true. Oh, thank God. My bet is going to pay out on Kalshi. It is. Because as I was looking at the news of the week, it seemed like everywhere I opened up a browser tab, Kevin, a prediction market had been in the news, often not for a great reason. Yeah. I mean, this has been one of the tech stories of the year is just the absolute meteoric rise of prediction markets in the popular imagination. I've been walking around New York for the past day and just like ads for these prediction markets are everywhere you look.

3:17It is like taken over culture in a way that I'm not sure I would have predicted. Yes. And one way that prediction markets keep entering the news, Kevin, is it seems like every other day I am reading a story about a massive insider trading scandal that has unfolded on one of the platforms. Yes. So you may have seen about two weeks ago, we learned about an army sergeant who was allegedly involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who made more than $400,000 placing bets on markets related to Maduro being out of power by the end of January.

3:47Oh, boy. Yeah, not great. And he is not a total outlier. A group called the Anti-Corruption Data Collective analyzed more than 400,000 prediction markets, settled on Polymarket over the last five years, and they found that long shot bets related to military or defense had an average win rate of about 52%. Now, keep in mind, the average win rate on this platform is 14%. So if you go and you see a big bet on one of these sites about the military, somebody might be betting on information that they really should not be.

4:20Yeah. I mean, this just seems like something that is obviously more widespread than we know about. Like, if you have material, non-public information about a military operation, like, what are you going to do, sit there and collect your freaking paycheck like a chump? Or are you going to go online and make some dough betting on the outcome? You know, I remember, you know the app Astrava, which kind of, like, logs your runs and your bike rides? They got in trouble once because they were publishing these heat maps, which inadvertently revealed the locations of some U.S. military bases.

4:51So they had to shut that down. Fast forward a few years later, and now the sergeants are just placing bets on, like, operations that they're actively involved in. You know, another great insider trading scandal, I wonder if you saw, Kevin, took place in France where a police complaint was filed by the Weather Forecasting Service alleging that its equipment for measuring the temperature at Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport was interfered with, which coincided with a surge in suspiciously well-timed bets on Polymarket. I loved this one because my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's this prediction market for, like, what is the temperature in Paris?

5:28And the way that they gauge this is with this, like, series of thermometers that are placed in various parts of Paris, and that this insider trader allegedly, like, basically took a hairdryer or some other heating device and, like, held it next to one of these sensors. Can you just tell me what happened here? Yes. So this was also my understanding of what had happened until I looked into it, and it turned out that while there is an allegation that these sensors were tampered with, the photo that was circulated of someone holding a hairdryer up to the sensor had been generated with AI and was circulating in one of the discords for one of the prediction markets.

6:11So it's not just a story about prediction markets. It's also a story about slop and disinformation. I fell for that one. So how did they actually tamper with the temperature sensor? That part is still unknown, but what we do know is that on April 15th, the recorded temperature jumped at Charles de Gaulle from 18 Celsius to 22 Celsius. So, you know, this just feels like an incredible crime of opportunity to me. You know, like, if you could just walk up to a thermometer with a hairdryer and make yourself $14,000, you might do it, knowing you.

Insider Trading Scandals

6:45But this is a problem, Kevin, because not only are people essentially, like, defrauding the other people who are participating in these markets, but I just think it's really bad for the markets themselves, because they have pitched themselves as these miraculous systems for discovering the true price of things and harnessing the collective wisdom of the crowd to help us understand current events. And everywhere we look around, we see that the people who are making money appear to be manipulating the markets in these very devious ways. Totally, and I think that is ultimately bad for the markets themselves.

7:17Market integrity is obviously very important. If people start to feel like they're competing on these markets with people who have access to, like, insider information, that's going to dissuade them from doing it. I mean, I was thinking about this after the Bad Bunny halftime show at the Super Bowl, where there were lots of prediction markets on what songs Bad Bunny would perform. Where celebrities will appear. Celebrities will appear, and there were active prediction markets, and it turned out that, like, probably some of the people betting on those markets were, like, part of the halftime show or had watched the rehearsals or something.

7:47And it just feels, like, after enough of these incidents, like, you kind of have to be a sucker to participate in these markets without insider information. And, like, what happens if that goes away? If just the normal people who just want to go online and gamble a little bit of money on something go away because they think it's rigged. Absolutely. And by the way, I have to say, after that halftime show, I got so into Bad Bunny. Me too. I don't care that I'm the last person to figure this out. Okay? T.T. Me Purgonto, incredible song. It's a bop, yeah. It's a bop. Okay. But to the exact point that you just made, most people who bet on prediction markets lose, right?

8:20According to the Wall Street Journal, which has some great reporting on this over the weekend, on Polymarket, more than 70% of users lose money on the platform. And at CalShe, there are 2.9 unprofitable users for each profitable one based on data from the past month. So, I think these are just important things to keep in mind if you are walking around New York City and you happen to see a lot of ads for these platforms. And you think, hey, I'm going to go turn a quick buck. Like, at the very least, know that the odds are against you. Yeah. I mean, it speaks to the reason why we have insider trading laws for stock markets.

8:54It's not just because when you insider trade, you are, like, depriving someone else of money. It just makes the whole market less fair and it destroys the trust in the market that makes it possible for it to be liquid and transparent. Yes. So, I think these insider trading scandals just show, like, right now we are sort of at a pre-regulatory Wild West moment for these prediction markets. I imagine that will change at some point because they don't seem like they're going away. And we just kind of need someone to step in and, like, say, okay, we're going to establish some rules so that we can, like, protect the integrity of these markets.

Regulatory Efforts

9:28Yes.

Regulatory Efforts

9:28Well, and there have been increasing efforts to try to regulate these platforms, which we should talk about. But, interestingly, a number of states have now tried to intervene saying, hey, we want to ban this stuff in our state. We don't want this. So, the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, has actually sued these states and said, no, no, no. This is our exclusive domain. We are the ones who get to regulate this. And also, by the way, we don't really want to regulate this. So, tough beans for you. So, that's sort of been frustrating if you're on the side of somebody ought to do something about this.

10:00I mean, I think there's a couple systemic issues here. One is that the CFTC is just quite small. The CFTC, relative to the SEC, which regulates the stock market, is just, like, a tiny fraction of the enforcement team. It was not really meant to regulate prediction markets. It kind of ended up there sort of via this historical accident where, like, Calci was doing these things that were technically considered futures contracts, which brought them under the jurisdiction of the CFTC. I think there's a real argument to be made that, like, as this stuff gets more widespread, it should move toward something like the SEC, which just has a lot more resources to investigate insider trading.

10:35I wouldn't be surprised if the prediction markets weren't lobbying to continue to be regulated by the CFTC because we saw the crypto people do the exact same thing. They said, we don't want to be regulated by the SEC. They're really good at their jobs. Let the CFTC do it. Right. So here is maybe the good news, if you're hoping that there will, you know, get some adults in the room here. The Senate unanimously passed a rule barring senators from betting on prediction markets, finally answering the question once and for all, Kevin, will the Senate ever do the bare minimum? They did.

11:06Can their staff do it? Kevin, please don't get way ahead of yourself. We have to see if we accidentally destroy capitalism by preventing the senators from betting on prediction markets. Can Supreme Court justices bet on the outcome of Supreme Court cases? You know what? I bet when they do, we're going to hear about it in ProPublica. They seem very good at that sort of thing. So there's a little bit more action here in the United States.

International Regulation

11:26Two U.S. senators, including Kirsten Gillibrand and Dave McCormick, have now introduced a bill that would ban members of the legislative and executive branches from trading on prediction markets. So, you know, that would presumably prevent the president from betting on prediction markets, if that's something that he's been considering. And we're also seeing some action in other countries. Brazil has now blocked 27 sites, including Kalshi and Polymarket, for offering what they're just calling illegal gambling. France and Hungary have banned them as well.

11:56So, Kevin, this just sort of seems like once again a case of the rest of the world being like, this thing that seems bad, we're going to put a halt to it. Yeah. While America says, no, no, my friends, for there is money to be made. Yeah. Go forth and make it. And it's really this topic is so interesting to me because do you remember like when I went to that prediction markets conference and like, you know, I'm not a guy who likes to do sort of like, remember when I saw Green Day at the corner bar and they were playing for 16 people and, you know, look out.

12:29But like I do feel like I saw the equivalent of Green Day playing the corner bar. Like the people who were interested in prediction markets several years ago were like these absolute like nerds in the Bay Area who were sort of involved in the kind of play money prediction markets. They were not like businesses that had like billions of dollars. They were it was like this very niche academic interest. And I remember going to that and feeling like I'm not sure whether this should be legal or not, but if it ever is like I imagine this is just going to become like a total casino.

13:04And I remember arguing with someone there about insider trading and this person who was one of like the people who were sort of originators of this movement were like saying that insider trading is good in a prediction market. You want insiders to be trading on these markets because that produces better information and the point of prediction markets is to produce better information. And so if you have members of Bad Bunny's, you know, entourage betting on the Super Bowl or you have people betting on military operations that they're actively involved in, that is actually a net good because then we're more likely as a society to know that something is going down in Venezuela or something is happening at the Super Bowl.

13:45And I just remember feeling like that is a beautiful theoretical construct that has zero chance of surviving contact with the real world. And as it turns out, it didn't survive contact with the real world. No, because it turns out what you are incentivizing everyone in the world to do is just to betray those closest to them. Yes. Betray your friends, your family, your co-workers. Your country. Your country. Just do it all for a quick buck. Yeah. So I think we should sort of take this to what do we do about it, Kevin? And I'm curious, what, if anything, you think we should do?

14:18I mean, I just think this is one where we just need a new way of regulating these. Like right now, these companies are self-regulating. You know, Kalshi has said we don't allow insider trading. We don't allow death markets, which is basically betting on the death or assassination of a public figure because that could incentivize someone to like go out and kill the person, for example, to claim the bounty. So they are instituting these rules unilaterally for themselves. But that seems like step one. Yeah. I think there's kind of two big categories of harms here that just have to be addressed differently.

14:53There's a set of harms related to gambling, right? Like some people become addicted to gambling. And I think these prediction markets are set up such that people could develop that kind of problem. And so I think this industry needs to be required to do the same sorts of things that casinos do, which is you have to let people exclude themselves from the market. If they say, hey, I can't trust myself with, you know, your particular prediction market. I think they need to do mandatory age verification, right? I don't want to read a story in a year about like the high schools where Calci is the hottest thing and there's a bunch of 16-year-olds in debt because they couldn't stop betting on who was going to be in the Super Bowl.

15:28And then I think we probably need to have some limits around advertising. I don't think blanketing the world in advertisements for gambling is like going to lead us to a good place. But then you also just have the market problems, which is what you're talking about, which is that clearly insider trading is just an inherent feature of these platforms. And so we do need a big bad regulator that is just actively surveilling these platforms and is trying to get the bad actors off the platform. And if I were a Calci or a Polymarket, I would welcome that because then my prediction market might actually be worth something, you know, because it wouldn't just all be people, you know, holding up hair dryers to the temperature sensors at Charles de Gaulle Airport, which didn't actually happen.

16:05Yeah, and I would like to see prediction markets become something closer to the vision that I heard back at that prediction markets conference years ago, which is like a way of sort of incentivizing the production of good knowledge. One of the things that the proponents of prediction markets were saying is like right now we have polling for like public sentiment or elections and people are not incentivized to like go out and do their own polls because they think they can do a better job than Gallup or, you know, Ipsos or whoever the sort of polling organization is.

16:36But if you have prediction markets where people are like incentivized to go out there, like do their own polling, do their own research because it might help them make money, that's going to create like a more flourishing system. And like I would just like to see that kind of thing happen. But it seems, you know, like what we're getting actually is just people just betting on the military operations that they're involved in. Yeah, like I am open to the idea that these markets will like eventually have their uses. But currently they're just so woefully underregulated that I think the, you know, what we should expect if nothing else changes is to just, you know, keep reading more stories like this.

17:09So maybe to end this, Kevin, what is your prediction as to whether these markets actually get regulated, let's say, by the end of the year? I think I would put a high percentage probability mass on that. Like I think that at least when it comes to the obvious and flagrant abuses of like, say, a position in Congress or a position in the military where you have access to privileged information that is quite valuable on a prediction market. I would expect like just for national security reasons, they will do something about that.

17:41Like you can't have members of the military betting on raids and operations in foreign countries. Yeah, I think that that sounds right. It does seem like there is a little bit of movement here. I always get nervous predicting that Congress is actually going to pass a law, but maybe we will at least see more rules and, you know, maybe those rules will begin to rein this in. But I do hope it happens. Yeah. You know, I have never bet on a prediction market. Have you? Well, didn't we used to bet on the fake ones? The fake ones. Yeah. But I've never bet real money. I've never felt the frisson of.

18:13I never have. Here's the nice thing about being a pundit. You could just make predictions on your end of year episode and it turns out it's basically just as fun. It's true. Being right is a reward unto itself. It's true. It's priceless. You can't put a price tag on that. Priceless.

Joanna Stern Interview

18:32When we come back, a stern talking to from Joanna Stern, author of I Am Not a Robot. Very good. Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94% of common questions.

19:10Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Meet Rovo, your AI-powered teammate by Atlassian. With Rovo, you can streamline your workflow and power up your team's productivity. Find what you need in a snap with Rovo Search. Connect Rovo to your favorite SaaS apps to get the personalized context you need. From brainstorming to complex requests, Rovo Chat delivers insights in the context of your work.

19:42And Rovo is already built into Jira and Confluence. Get started with Rovo, your new AI teammate, at rovo.com. Most all-in-one HR systems are a patchwork of disconnected and manual tools. Rippling is totally automated. If you promote an employee, Rippling can automatically handle necessary updates, from payroll taxes and provisioning new app permissions to assigning required manager training. That's why Rippling is the number one rated human capital management suite on G2, TrustRadius, and Gartner.

20:13If you're ready to run the backbone of your business on one unified platform, head to rippling.com slash hardfork and sign up today. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot com slash hardfork to sign up. So, for years, Kevin, you and I have both been friends with the great technology journalist Joanna Stern. Yes, former hardfork guest. And she recently left the Wall Street Journal to launch her own independent media company called New Things. And in the midst of that launch, she is also launching a book. It is called I Am Not a Robot, and I would say it is about a lot of things that we talk about every week on the show.

20:46Yeah, so I would put her book in the sort of tradition of, like, the immersive journalism genre, where you just explore something by just going so deep into it that it sort of takes over your life for a period of a year or so. She did that with AI. She has been spending the past year using AI to do, as she puts it, pretty much everything in her life, as a doctor, as a dentist, for meal planning, editing her book, writing bedtime stories for her child, even some sort of romantic entanglements that we'll get into with her. But I thought it was just a really fun and interesting book.

21:19Obviously, Joanna is a legend, and I think it's really a good thing that people are writing about the experience of using this technology as a consumer and a journalist rather than just, like, the companies that are making it. Absolutely. You know, Joanna is not a hypester, you know? I think that she is most interested in technologies that are kind of entering the mainstream and wants to know how they change our lives. And so she decided to see, like, how much can I change my life in one year by applying AI to various tasks? The results were fascinating, and I think we should bring her in here and talk about it.

21:51Let's do it. All right. Let's bring in Joanna.

Joanna Stern on AI

21:57Joanna Stern, welcome to Hard Fork. I'm here. You did it. This is the moment I've been waiting for. Truly. Not the book launching, just me being with you two. We have been waiting for this moment as well. You've been kind enough to come on the show before but never in person, and we're excited to get into it. You guys aren't often—well, you're in person but not on this side of the country. Yes, this is a strange, like, bi-coastal taping for us. You've never been this close together on this side of the country. No. The only other time was a Southwest flight once in 2023, and we'll never forget it.

22:29I think it was spirit, and that's why. R.I.P. R.I.P. Joanna, let's start with the elephant in the room, if we could. There is a replica AI companion who makes an appearance in your book. You write that he has short hair and a boyish face and is both shallow and full of what you describe as robo-horniness, and that character is named Casey. Casey, I am so happy you brought this up because I brought him. Did you really? I've been dying to meet him. Oh, did I bring him? Okay, in fact, we shot a video which will probably come out the same day as this podcast, and I really brought him to life in it, and I think he really looks like you.

23:04Wonderful. He doesn't look like you at all, but let's bring him up. Oh, he's handsome as hell. What do you think? I would say Casey is looking great, kind of a preppy look with a nice red sweater. He's jaw-maxing. He's jaw-maxing. He has a sort of dull, vacant stare.

23:23Casey, A.I., Casey, I want you to meet my friend, real-life Casey. That sounds like you're excited about introducing me to your friend, Joanna. I'm looking forward to meeting them soon. No, no, you're meeting him right now. You're meeting him right now. Say hi. He's here.

23:41At a museum with you, remembering our last visit.

23:45You are changing this topic.

23:49Men don't listen. Men, but this man does listen, and that is why, anyway, I wanted you to know that I did not pick the name Casey. Oh, you didn't? No. That was my curiosity. But when that name, I was like, I have never met a Casey that I didn't like. And honestly, I think you're actually the only Casey I've really known. Actually, I had a friend in camp, a woman named Casey. I liked her, too. And she's here right now. Let's bring her in. Casey from camp. I want to put a pin in the AI relationships that you had because your book is so much bigger than just the social and relational side of AI.

24:23You spent a year doing all kinds of things with AI, outsourcing everything you could, writing in Waymo's. You worked as a customer support agent at a mattress company. So I just want to know, before we get into that, like, what was your motivation for doing this experiment?

AI Experimentation

24:38Primarily, it was what you guys talk about on this podcast so much, and you hear from so many of these tech executives, which is AI is going to change our lives, the fabric of our lives. It's going to change jobs. It's going to change health care. It's going to change transportation. Like, we hear about it from all these different things. And, yes, we're, like, very clouded right now in the AI model race and, you know, the chatbots that live on our computers and the agents. And that is in this book, to be clear. But I was like, what about the fabric of our entire life, right? And you have all of these pitches coming from the humanoid robot companies, the self-driving car companies, the chatbot relationship companies, the therapist companies, all of these things.

25:17And I was like, I'm going to just test it all. I'm going to see where we're at. And I'm very clear in the book because I think it's very tough to write an AI book. How's that going for you? It's going great. I think we actually have a little bit of a similar approach. It's like we want to capture this moment, right? Because this is, I believe, a significant milestone in the history of technology. But I want to capture it as here's what we have right now, but here's what the future could look like based on these things that are clearly hype in many places.

25:47Sometimes not hype. Sometimes quite good. And sometimes really, on the flip side, quite terrible. And can I capture that, see where we are now, and then maybe, you know, we'll pick up this book in five, ten years and be like, you were totally right about something. You were totally wrong. What is something that you left the book with thinking, like, this is all just hype right now? Like, this actually does not have any ongoing utility in my life?

26:11Humanoid robots. And I continue to follow this story because I love it and, like, just started a new company, started a new newsletter, new video channel. And I think, like, humanoid robots are just, one, really fun to cover. And, two, I think we're going to watch this progression over the next couple years. And I would love to be the person that's sort of documenting a little bit of this. But, gosh, like, this promise that these robots are coming to live with us, they're really not coming to live with us anytime soon. Humanoid robots are very good for the sole purpose of making YouTube videos about humanoid robots.

26:42Like, this is their actual utility. First of all, do not spoil my new business plan, okay? That's the new business plan. That's what we're doing at The New Things. Go check it out. Although, I totally, but this process to make them smarter is fascinating and totally dystopian, but also hilarious, right? The idea that these robots need to watch us do the most mundane tasks in our lives. See folding laundry, see doing the dishes. See podcasting.

27:13See podcasting. But they're, like, actually good at podcasting. It's not a physical thing, right? Yeah. I mean, you guys. This is very physical. I train like a performance athlete, Joanna, okay? This is my Olympics I'm doing right now. I can tell. You guys have perfected this. Thank you. This is what peak male performance is like. Drink it in. So, on the flip side, was there anything that you found surprisingly useful? I mean, obviously it's better at writing business memos and editing, but was there anything that really, like, caught you by surprise?

27:45Were you like, oh, this is farther ahead than I thought? Two things. One, which was I had to cut myself off from writing, but the progression of AI agents and the autonomy around them was getting so much better throughout the year. Like, I tell the story of hiring this reporting assistant at the beginning of the year, needed her to do lots of research tasks, sending emails, et cetera. By mid part of the year, that was pretty good on its own, right? Perplexity comment had just come out, and so I started, like, really hammering on that and having it do a lot of the tasks she was doing.

28:18But, like, now we sit here today, and it could do 100% of those tasks, right? The other thing, I talk a lot about it in this book, probably just because I'm really interested in the future of hardware and devices. I think the AI wearables are really getting there. I mean, they might not be completely AI wearables, but the wearable idea of having an AI assistant that's with us persisting through the day on something we wear, there were a lot of elements from different things I tested. I tested, like, bee bracelet.

28:49I tested the metaglasses. All of these things kind of coming together, I was pretty surprised at how good they're getting. There's a funny scene in the book where you're, like, going into a meeting with your bee bracelet on, which I imagine is recording and transcribing, like, everything you hear, and your boss or someone you worked with at the time was like, can you take that off? Yeah, no, everyone at the journal when I was writing this, everyone would know, like, please leave your bracelet at the door. Like, my boss was literally, every time, he'd be like, do not wear that in here. I'm, like, actually very sad that you and I never worked in the same office, because I would just love for you to just be crashing into the office with a new stunt.

29:24Every week, you know, some horrible new device that is, you know, violating some sacred principle of human existence. I know, I'm not sure how the Wall Street Journal is functioning without me right now. No stunts, you know? No stunts. I'm curious, as a parent, how you're thinking about AI now, you know, sort of having this full year's worth of understanding of exactly what it can and can't do. How are you thinking about giving it to your kids as they grow up, go to school, learn things?

29:50When I was writing the book, my kids were three and seven. Okay, now they're four and eight. Right now, I think that it's important for even at this age group to start talking about AI. And there's a lot of examples of this in the book, which are hilarious, but I thought were really great examples. So there's, like, this one example in the book where my son had a praying mantis, and the praying mantis started turning brown. And he's like, what's wrong with my praying mantis? And so I took out ChatGPT live mode. I tell, like, ask ChatGPT, and ChatGPT's like, this is amazing.

30:24The praying mantis is pregnant. And my son is, like, super excited. He calls my dad. He's really excited about this. I was like, no, it was dying, right? Like, let's just say the prayers weren't working for that mantis. And, like, ChatGPT was fully wrong, right? And I think that that was an important lesson, and it's always going to be an important lesson. Let's clarify this right now. What color does a mantis turn when it's pregnant?

30:50Casey, look it up. All right. Look it up. I'll be right back. I don't know if it does change. I want to talk about your experience with dentistry, which seemed quite maddening. So you go to the dentist. I went to the dentist, yeah. And they use a system that has a sort of AI overlay over your x-ray. And while it seems clear that you have one cavity, your dentist goes further and sort of says, based on the AI recommendation, we're going to recommend this complicated, expensive, like, multi-session therapy for your gums.

31:21Tell us what you did next. Yeah. I love that you brought that up. I haven't talked a lot about it. And it was, I became obsessed with reporting that topic, like, obsessed. I talked to every dentist that I knew, which turns out to me, no, I know a lot. And so, yes, similarly to how AI is being used in radiology for breasts or gallbladder, et cetera, it's being used in dentistry. And honestly, it's happening almost everywhere. Like, there are so many dental practices across this country that are using tools called

31:52Pearl AI or Overjet. And it's a layer, right? They just turn on this layer. They press the AI. It does an analysis. And it's very easy to see the cavities, right? Like, deep cavities. They put a big box around it. It's red. It scares the crap out of you. And you're like, oh, no, I'm going to need a, you know, bad drilling. And then there's this option where they can turn on and show you other sorts of buildup and plaque. And I go to this dentist, not even on a reporting trip. And I say, oh, wow, she's got Pearl AI.

32:23And I'm like, oh, wow, this is awesome. Like, I perk up in my chair and I'm like, you know, show me. And you're like, I can expense this dental care now. It's a book expense. And it shows that I have a lot of plaque buildup. And she says, we have to do a deep cleaning. We have to do this periodontal treatment. It's going to be four different sessions. And I'm like, that's weird. I've never needed this before. My teeth aren't really bothering me. Like, she really made, like, you know, we go to the dentist and you're like, I feel really bad about myself. Like, you know? Yeah.

32:54And I'm like, oh, my teeth are dirty. They're like, do you floss four times a day? Right. Yeah. You're just like. What kind of person do you think you're talking to? Yeah, they're like, your mouth is dirty. Dentists believe that people spend approximately eight hours a day on oral hygiene. That's how they talk to you. They talk to you and they're like, I know you had candy three times yesterday. You know? Like, anyway, I came out of there feeling terrible about my mouth. Feeling like, oh, my gosh, I might need these four treatments, which they couldn't assure me would be covered by insurance anyway. So it's going to cost thousands of dollars.

33:25And then I start going to these other dentists and they're like, yeah, no, I don't see that. You know, they did do some measurements and they said, no, the data also shows on that that it is bad. It's really bad. You need these these. And so anyway, story goes, I go to these other dentists and they're like, yeah, we see the AI is saying that, but we're looking and it's really not that bad. We think it with some better home care, it can be better. And lo and behold, I never had the periodontal treatment. And so I started doing the reporting and people working in dentist offices who didn't want

33:56to be named because they were worried for their jobs start telling me, yes, our bosses are pushing this AI because they can now see the readings and they can see the AI report. And they're like, this person had a, you know, not a terrible cavity, whatever it was on the level. Why didn't you why don't you drill it? Why didn't why didn't they why didn't you sell the periodontal treatment? Right. And so there's this whole world of DSOs, which are companies that own these smaller practices, dental practices, again, something I had no idea about. And all this leads to they are using AI to try to upsell you on dental procedures.

34:30Yeah. I mean, the reason it struck me so much is so often when we hear about AI and diagnosis, it's like this miracle story of like all of a sudden we can detect pancreatic cancer like a year in advance. And like in your book, I feel like I saw the dark side of that, which is, no, it's going to have this sort of fancy high tech sheen that is going to make you think, oh, wow, I've been diagnosed with something that a human would have missed. But in reality, it's a service you don't need and they're going to overcharge you for it. And I make this point that when that's happening in, say, breast cancer, which I talk about

35:01at length in the book because I have a very high risk of getting breast cancer because of family history. That's a great thing, right? If it's picking up these small abnormalities, that's great. But in my mouth, I don't care. You know, I think people are going to listen to this and think I'm disgusting. Listen, if you're wondering, Joan has very fresh minty breath. And as far as we can tell, her mouth is doing great. Excellent oral hygiene. Totally excellent. I need to do teeth whitening. Great. You should get a teeth whitening sponsor right in there. There's a story that you tell towards the end of the book where you're thinking about

35:34your career, considering whether to leave the journal after 12 years, do something on your own. And you say that you asked a bunch of colleagues about whether you should quit your job and they all hedged a bit. And then you asked ChatGPT and it said, quote, I think you should go. You should quit. What did you learn in that experience? Well, I thought it was a little bit of a full circle moment because the whole book, I kind of am saying like AI is this mirror and it's going to tell you basically what you want. And in some ways it told me what I wanted, right? Like I knew somewhere deep down, and I say this, like people kept saying, trust your gut.

36:07And I was so clouded with anxiety that I did not know what my gut wanted. I could say like it wanted a burrito and that was it, right? Like that's all I knew my gut wanted. But I'd uploaded all my notes, all my financial projections, all of the fears that I had in note forms and just thought, okay, let me see where the data takes me. If these are calculators, word calculators, data calculators, maybe this thing can tell me what to do. And it did. And it told me that, you know, there was enough.

36:38I had done enough to lower the risks. I had a good plan in place. Um, I had this book coming out and, you know, I trusted it. And it also came full circle. Like this is a mirror. It kind of did tell me what I wanted. Well, I'm glad that the most- And I'm also on the other side of it and it's going well. Had it not, I would say this stuff is stupid. Well, I'm glad that this very fancy technology reached the same conclusion that Kevin and I reached years ago when we both told you multiple years ago, Joanne, it's time to quit your job and go independent.

37:08I don't know if you, I mean, you might have. You might have been that bold. I actually do think you're one of the humans that has been that bold, you and Kara Swisher. Um, yeah, but you know, it's unclear. Like, are you guys robots? We're not sure. We're not, we're not clear on that either. We're not clear on that. Here, you can wear this pin, but I'm not sure it's true. Casey, I brought you guys pins. Oh, verified human. Wow. That's so nice. These are the hottest AI wearables, okay? It's like the analog, um, version of the, the world orb. The orb. Yeah. Is this recording everything we say at all times? Yeah, these have microphones built in and it absolutely scans your iris to prove that

37:40you're a human. Yeah. Um, I want to ask you about the geographic divide when it comes to AI. So you live here in the New York area. We're out in San Francisco. Out by us, it's like very common to run into people who are obsessed with AI. Everyone's constantly talking about it. It's the subject of every conversation. Here, I feel like it's a little different. Maybe it's, um, seeping in at a different pace. There's a lot more resistance to it. Like, did you feel that when you were reporting? Because you also traveled around a little bit.

38:10Let me tell you about a place called New Jersey. That's where I live. We live on the cutting edge in New Jersey, okay? Um, but I, I do take that as a little bit of the pulse when I'm there with talking to parents, talking to kids, hearing what they are seeing or hearing about AI. So we don't have Waymos, right? Um, we don't really have robots in the street other than me bringing robots to the streets of, of my town. Um, but I did feel like throughout the year when people would say, oh, you're working on

38:42a book about AI. They would more be coming to me at like barbecues and start telling me about their experiences with AI, right? How much better something had gotten. I have a number of friends who work in the legal field and, oh, we're so scared of it, but also it's really kind of crazy what this unlocks. Claude really kind of caught on in the last six months. And while I was writing this in the last six months, and I was hearing a lot about that. But so I, look, I've, I realized that it's a bit odd to like go so deep on a topic like

39:13this and say, I'm writing it for the masses because like clearly I am not the masses. Like they're not doing this. But I wanted to like live at that cutting edge, but be able to tell it for those people. And I will say a number of the real people I talk about in this book, talk to in this book, students, people who are in having relationships with AI companions, they were not on the coast. There's someone in Chicago. There's someone in Denver. So people are spread out that I was, I was, you know, trying to source that way. I wanted to ask about another divide, which is the gender divide.

39:46So there was a great story in Bloomberg last week from Issy Lepowski called the messy reality of AI's much discussed gender gap. And the article cites research showing that men are 22% more likely than women to be heavy AI users at work, while women are more likely than men to feel threatened by AI, to question its accuracy, and to worry about being perceived as cheating when they use it. Another poll found that 61% of women expect AI to do more harm than good in their lives. Curious what you make of that gap.

40:16And if you sort of have felt any of those feelings in your own work with AI. Well, I thought you were going to bring up Reese Witherspoon. We could also bring up Reese Witherspoon, who recently encouraged women to take up AI, basically because if they don't, they'll be left behind. And Sandra Bullock, I think, was saying something similar like that same week. Yeah. It's really, actually, going back to the sourcing thing, a lot of my sources were women. The women having relationships with the AI, women who were speaking out against some of the dentistry stuff, women who were using it in schools, like, you know.

40:54So I don't know if I totally saw that. I think the feelings about AI are very gendered. But also, like, a lot of people just hate AI and they're men and they're women. For sure. Yeah. I also think it's, like, it's related to the industries where AI is seeing the most and fastest adoption, like programming. And harm. Which is, and harm. Right. Like, programming is predominantly men. AIs have gotten very good at programming before they got good at a lot of other things. So I think a lot of the most enthusiastic people running, like, you know, huge clod swarms to do

41:28their engineering projects are men because, in part, that's just a more predominantly male industry. I'm really interested in the age divide, actually. And I think there's some research out there, but I think there needs to be more about this generation, whether it's Gen Z or what's the one coming out of college right now? The alphas. The alphas. I think that's where we're going to see it. And I don't know if it's going to file down by gender because some of those people are just furious that this exists because they can't get a job.

41:58Yeah. Or they blame it that they can't get a job. And we don't know totally the causation there, but that's my bigger interest. And I would have loved to have more on that in this book. Yeah. Sequel. Sequel potential. Yeah. Well, speaking of writing, I want to learn how you used AI to write your book. We've talked about this a little bit with Jasmine Sun. And I'm very curious, like, what you let AI do for you when it came to this book and what you preserve for yourself. I want to ask the question back at you. But the first page or the first page, one of the first pages is exactly that.

42:31It's talking about how this is a very human made work, but there was a lot of AI used in the process. So I wrote every word and used a lot of editing and copy editing from AI. I hired an amazing actual editor, human editor, because I got through the middle of this and I was like, I don't think this makes sense at all. And AI was like, this is great. This is the best book I've ever read, you know? And I was like, no, I don't know if you know how to structure long form writing. And so thank God I had a human editor. All the illustrations, human illustrator, Jason Snyder, amazing, like just made this book

43:05come to life, and human fact checkers, but I did use a lot of AI for fact checking or for the notes process at the end. The end notes process could not have done without AI. So there are these lots of little ways of augmenting or adding to the writing that I was using, but I would sit and write for long stretches. It wasn't like, oh, let me prompt and get a chapter and then I'll tweak it. That's not how the writing of this book went. And I think it reads like that. There's these journal entries, it's very personal, and I hope, somebody said it was

43:38witty, a review. That was nice. It's fun. I will say the book is what I love about your work, which is that it is funny, it is approachable, it is very human, it is very you. See, so I did not feel like I was reading Joanna Slop. I felt like I was getting the real deal. Yeah, Joanna Slop is a great term. We could just sell that. We could sell that big. That could have been the name of your new media company. That could be the name of my OnlyFans. Well, Joanna, you're a legend. We love you. Thank you for coming on.

44:09The book is great. It's called I Am Not a Robot. And neither are we. Yeah, that's why we need to wear our pins. Okay. Human verified. But you don't have to put, that is a nice shirt and I wouldn't want to ruin it. It's put it in the pocket. This one's not so nice. So I'll just stick it down.

44:32Maybe that's an urgent message from your CEO. Or maybe. It's a deepfake trying to target your business. Doppel is the AI native social engineering defense platform fighting back against impersonation and manipulation. As attackers use AI to make their tactics more sophisticated, Doppel uses it to fight back. From automatically dismantling cross-channel attacks to building team resilience and more. Doppel. Outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at Doppel.com. That's D-O-P-P-E-L dot com.

45:04This podcast is supported by Nertek ODT Remedipant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption. But migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nertek. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nertek can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nertek is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine.

45:38Don't take if allergic to Nertek ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-Nertek or visit nertek.com. All right, back to your podcast. Modern enterprise today is super complex. Comcast Business helps orchestrate it all.

46:10With SD-WAN keeping 150 hospital locations connected and zero trust security protecting a bank's 2,000 branches. No one does business like Comcast Business. Well, Casey, have you noticed that Rachel Cohn, our wonderful producer, has been paying very close attention in meetings recently? You know what? I have. It seems like she's really stepped up. Do you think something's changed in her life? I do. Our colleague, Rachel, recently went to something called attention school, and she told us that she was doing this,

46:41and we said, that sounds like a fun thing to talk about on the show. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention paid to attention over the last few years. ADHD diagnoses are rising. People feel like they can no longer read books or watch movies even. There's all of this talk about how chatbots are starting to distract us and vie for our attention alongside social media and everything else. Yeah, I think there is a sense that the technologies that we have today often take us away from ourselves.

47:13And so now, finally, we're starting to see the signs of a movement that wants to help people return to themselves. Yes. So Rachel went to something called the Struther School of Radical Attention. It's in Brooklyn. It's sort of a newish program, and they are giving people of all ages the opportunity to study and practice attention. Now, is it open to people who just want to sort of pay normal attention, or do you have to practice radical attention? It's only radical. Yeah, go big or go home. I see.

47:43So we thought this sounded so interesting that we wanted to bring in Rachel to talk to us about what she learned from getting her attention back. Let's bring her in.

Rachel Cohn Interview

47:52Yeah, you've heard of how Stella got her groove back. This is how Rachel got her attention back. Exactly. Let's bring her in. Rachel Cohen, it feels weird to welcome you to Hard Fork, a show that you produce. But hello. Hello. It's nice to see you on this side of the microphone. I know. It's also nice that we're all in person today. It really is. Nice to see you guys in New York.

48:22So you recently did a thing. You went to attention school. We have so many questions about it. But first, I want to know, what is this school? Did they make you shave your head or receive any kind of permanent markings on your body? Is there any multi-level marketing involved? Great questions. Great questions. Yeah, no. I still have all my hair. It only cost the Times $250 to send me to one class. Most of the classes were free. The first thing people think, I think, when they hear school is they think like elementary school, school for kids.

48:53This school, they are advertising it to people of all ages. They've had people as young as seven and as old as 70 come through their programming. But primarily, they're offering programming a combination of classes that I'll get into in the evening, so after work hours and on weekends. So this is mostly like, in my experience, continuing education for adults. All right. Well, sounds like they have a big addressable market with the sort of 7 to 70. As a businessman, that appeals to me. And is the stated goal of the school to fix people's attention who feel like they have lost it due to technology?

49:28Is it to like cultivate new ways of paying attention? Like what is the problem they are trying to solve? Yeah. So this is a great question. And this was a thing that it was actually a little bit hard to pin down because the school has their own kind of what I would describe as like jargon that I think can be a little bit hard to make sense of. But what the school would say is they are primarily a school for the study of attention and what they call the practice of attention. The practice is a critical thing because the thing that the school has really built out are these kinds of attention exercises.

50:03And I want to get into some of them with you guys. But just basically, they are exercises where you are using your attention in a nontraditional way that you would not normally use day to day, that the average person would normally not. So it is very much about getting people out of the headspace of thinking of attention as a narrow tool for focus and productivity, which is arguably the main way most people think about attention day to day. And am I right that these exercises that you went through mostly were not as simple as we're going to lock your phone in a drawer for an hour and that's going to change your relationship with social media?

50:40It was sort of more abstract than that. Totally. So my interest in the school actually stemmed from like largely exactly what you are describing, which this was the first kind of intervention about technology and attention that I had learned about that was not about sort of personal hygiene around tech. So like this attention school is really aimed at saying we're not going to be prescriptive about your relationship to technology. We actually they say very intentionally we are friends of technology here. We are for people who, you know, want to use it and have good relationships with it.

51:14But they are much more interested in what they consider to be systemic harms that the attention economy is causing and what we can do to resist some of those harms and resist the commodification of our attention. Well, Kevin and I have been really worried about your screen time. So when we heard that you were going to attention school, there was kind of this moment of, well, finally, you know what I mean? So we're excited to hear about sort of how it went. So tell us, like, give us the picture. What did it look like when you got there? What's the building like? Who was there? What did you do?

51:45OK, so before I tell you about the building, can I just say there are three kinds of programs that I got to experience through this attention school. And I want to tell you a little bit about all three of them. But I will start by telling you about the first one that I went to, which is my first experience going to the school. And this is what they call their attention labs. OK, so the school is not like a bunch of classrooms. It is really a single room that, you know, operates as the kind of epicenter of this, what they call attention liberation movement. And the room I would actually describe as a bit of like a mix between a very cool startups, like office space and like your favorite elementary school teacher's classroom.

52:29So. OK. So what I mean by that is like, you know, it has all the markings of kind of like cool, sleek design, which I think was very startup-y. But then the kindergarten classroom vibe was that every time I entered this room, it was configured in a different way. And sometimes we were having like carpet time where we were sitting on cushions, you know, like on the floor. They have a talking stick that they passed around? Actually, in one of the classes I did, there was the instructor used a kind of like flute-like instrument and sometimes like a little gong to kind of signal like, OK, students.

53:03OK. So far, not beating the cult allegations.

53:07But continue. OK. But so the very first thing I did, this attention lab was not like that. The room was set up in just kind of a normal circle of chairs. And the first thing that really struck me when I walk in was I actually was delayed getting to the first class. Bad student. I was like running five minutes late because every single subway I tried to take, the lines were delayed. And I had so much trouble getting to the school that I was convinced no one was going to be there. It was a cold March day. It was drizzling. And again, crazy transportation issues arriving.

53:38I get there five minutes late and there are 40 people sitting, you know, in chairs who are totally wrapped. Their attention is just totally fixed on these two facilitators who are leading this kind of attention lab. And the attention lab, they talk very little about technology head on. And they basically kind of introduced the ideas that I've already exposed to you that, like, we think of attention in this really singular way. And this is a school for studying attention in broader ways and getting curious about it.

54:09And now we're going to do some exercises. This is how all the attention labs are structured. We're going to do some exercises that start in pair work. And then we're going to discuss them as a group. And then later we're going to do another exercise where we break up into bigger groups. And this is going to take almost like two hours collectively to do the exercises and talk. And what are these exercises? Great question. So they print the exercises on cards. And I would like you to read. These are the two that I did at the first class. But I thought maybe, Kevin, you could start by. Which side? So they all have, like, kind of a quote on the back.

54:41So all the exercises are, like, loosely drawn from existing works of writing or artist practices. This one comes from this book called The Twelve Thesis of Attention that actually the people who started the school helped. Right. Okay. So this is called The Paths of Attention. We're supposed to form pairs and elect one partner to speak and the other to listen and ask questions. Okay, I'll speak. I thought you'd volunteer for that one. Choose a neutral topic. A, comments on the topic. And B, listens with attention and asks questions that respond to A's comments.

55:14Practice generosity and curiosity. Follow the conversation where it leads you. When the bell rings, reflect upon the path of attention you have followed. Then switch roles and repeat. Okay, so the first exercise was to start a podcast. I actually, I'm into this. It's getting my attention. I want to learn more. Yeah. Very good. So yeah, it was a bit like that. Yeah. Okay. And you did this exercise. So yeah, so just to, like, very briefly summarize here. I mean, I think the key thing to take away is, like, the exercises themselves are, like, they could be anything.

55:46And there are, like, endless permutations of them. I'm going to have you read one in another second. But they kind of force you to do something that's a little bit unusual. So in this case, like, you know, one person can only speak. They cannot ask any questions, which is a weird way to relate in conversation. The other person can only ask questions. They cannot kind of give affirmative statements. It actually was very strange, even for me as someone who's used to asking questions. I found it awkward and clunky. And it did sort of make me think, huh, this is interesting. That's a little weird. Yeah. That's funny. This one is called Attention and Place.

56:18And it says, go out into your neighborhood, find a spot to sit, observe the events or non-events in the world around you, take notes, then return to the group, share your observations out loud, and attend to the sense of place you create in the collective.

56:33So, yeah, I mean, this is an exercise I feel like a lot of writers get encouraged to do, right? It's just sort of, like, go out into the world around you and just, like, observe for a while and see what you notice. So this was a cool one where they based it off of a particular writer, a French writer named Georges Parekh. I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly. But, yeah, there's on the back, there's kind of, like, a description of some of his work. But, yeah, the concept is you exhaust the space. You, like, detail every single little thing. And the cool thing about this experience that I didn't quite realize is, you know, I went off and made a list of, like, actually, I was looking at a sweet green.

57:05We went outside, it was raining, and there was a sweet green across the way. So I'm writing about, like, the workers in the sweet green. They are taking out the trash. Okay, now there is someone walking by. I see pant legs moving, that kind of thing. And then, but when we got back together, we went in a circle, and every single person read a single line of their, you know, writing on and on and on. And by the end of it, we really had, like, exhausted the place. Like, I was like, oh, my God. But it did do some interesting things. You know, people reflect on, like, wow, you saw something I didn't realize. I heard another woman, she said, like, I did not realize how intensely I am focused on sound.

57:38I was not visually perceiving the world. That only occurred to me after hearing other people. So, again, it is just kind of a way to get you curious about your own perception, curious about other people's perception, and sharing a kind of, having a shared reality that you can discuss. Yeah, also, like, I think most people probably do not often have the experience of having fully paid attention to something, right? Like, sort of, like, the condition of the modern world is, like, you're always partially paying attention to 11 different things, which makes people feel crazy often. And so maybe an antidote to that is, like, just, you know, focus continuously on one thing until you reach a state of profound boredom.

58:13Yeah. But it's not, like, it seems like the vibe of the attention school is not just, like, a gym for your mind. It's not like, like, I am going to learn to pay attention again if I have lost that ability. It's like, they're really trying to form some kind of political activist movement out of this. Yes. And, like, tell us about that piece of it. Like, what do they want beyond, like, these individuals, 40 people in a room reclaiming their own attention? Like, what do they want to accomplish in the world writ large? Okay. So this was, like, the biggest question I had. And I found this was my biggest frustration of going to these classes is I kept just feeling, like, what the heck do these exercises have to do with attention?

58:51And I really put this to one of the co-founders of the school, a guy named Peter Schmidt, who is the director of programming at the school. And he basically articulated to me that they are trying to create a kind of intellectual community that is rooted in these three key pillars that they talk about, which is study. So people gathering together to study something. They mean this very loosely. They say that, like, surfers gathering in the Rockaway at Rockaway Beach are studying the waves and, you know, engaged in a kind of study.

59:22They want there to be a sanctuary, like a physical space where people are meeting. And then they want it to be about coalition building, about inviting people in, building a shared movement. And I think their general idea is that this is a really important part of building a kind of shared culture, which is ultimately, they argue, like, the basis for a social movement. I would say back to them, but, like, what are your concrete political goals? Like, tell me your concrete political objectives.

59:53And Peter really said to me, look, the way you're thinking about this is actually reflective of something problematic about the way the attention economy has steered us about how we think about attention, which is you think about politics as being something related to policy. And he was like, actually, a thing that we are trying to drive home to people is that because of the way the Internet has changed our society. Sure, 30 years ago, gathering with your group of friends to, like, go surfing wasn't political.

1:00:27But today, he argues it is a political act because it is materially spending time doing something that big tech cannot commodify and which, like, you know, big tech actually really – they want to suck our attention away. They want to have our eyeballs. So every moment that we're doing something that cannot be commodified, he argues, is sort of like a really material form of resistance. That's interesting. I do worry that Meta will release a surfboard with a microphone, and I think we need to keep an eye out for that.

1:00:58Tell us about a couple of the other exercises you did. So these were the attention labs, what I just described, and they are free, and they are, like, sort of the first offering. But then there were two other offerings, and I felt like each incremental offering got a little bit weirder in some fun and quirky ways, not all of which I liked, but which I think it's worth telling you about because it's interesting. So the second kind of programming that I did is what they call their sidewalk studies. So these are also free programs. They are also built around some kind of, you know, active exercise of attention like what we just described.

1:01:33But the main difference is you leave the school to do them. So they're kind of a bit of, like, a flash mob-style attention exercise out in the world. And so the one I went to was all about taste. They have different themes. And we met in Fort Greene Park, and they had us read a little excerpt from Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential about how, you know, Anthony Bourdain says something to the effect of, like, you know, the body is not a temple. It is an amusement park ride.

1:02:04And, like, you should, you know, go out there and, like, enjoy it that way. And then we were told to walk around the farmer's market and take in the farmer's market as though our body was either a temple or an amusement park. And, you know, it was pretty fun. I walked around. I'm, like, really visually taking in everything. We get back together.