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Video Transcript

Auto-generated transcript. Timestamps are approximate.

[0:09]

[Music] the following is a conversation with Cameroon Powell a lawyer an author and a public speaker I would like to also thank everybody who is watching this podcast I just started a month ago and this is the fourth conversation and we already have 4,000 subscribers and 25,000 views which is beyond my wildest dreams if you are not yet subscriber Please Subscribe share and like and recommend it to other people and if you really really enjoy it there is a patreon link in the description welcome camon thank you very much for agreeing to do the podcast so just to set the stage before we go into the details of how AI is used in um U moderation one say or censorship other people would say what is the reason that we even care about free speech and we and what are the limits of this free speech yeah why do we even care yeah a lot of it comes down to sort of the search for the truth you can’t really have a democracy if you don’t have an agreed upon sense of what what’s real for example um and we know from history that anytime someone has wanted to assume dictatorial

autocratic type power they start to muzzle professors and journalists and activists and and so forth so so we know that removing speech um is something that facilitates um dismantling democracy on the individual level I I know we can go into more detail but um it’s it’s really a way of there there’s the benefit of what I’m able to express um which AIDS me in my growth um my self-expression my emotional Evolution spiritual Evolution and then there’s um what I’m able to uh hear from others or read from others which has the same benefits but it’s the two are crucial to I think the the the dialectic where most human Innovation occurs and that’s in conversation so if one side is continually shut down or if I can’t hear something you’re saying we’re not really in a conversation I think there is a prant belief which which is new I’m new to us uh I’m here less than

10 years but it seems to be new to the US psyche to the to the to the common system of beliefs which is that in order to prevent extremism you need to limit speech uh which is opposed to we what we believ in and since Enlightenment which was exactly the opposite in order to prevent extremist we we need to for simple reasons like if you allow even extreme views then you can ridicule these views and Destroy them with arguments if you disallow them then they become attractive they become little conspiracy theories that become attractive because you’re part of like the hidden Society of quanon who knows right know ke part of a of a of kind of a conspiracy mindset is the is is a kind of a two parts one get to belong somewhere where maybe I wasn’t feeling belonging by the people like the speaker but now I’m in a in a sense of a a group that believes the same thing and two I have access to secret knowledge and there’s a certain superiority I feel over you

and that makes me feel safer because I know stuff you don’t that’s important and and that alone I think for as an emotional attachment to a position is what I think can trap people in that that kind of thinking yeah yeah and and why I’m pointing out that it is changing is for example this was quite a drastic example I think few days ago 60 Minutes did um interview with um prosecutors from Germany who are Prosecuting uh people for calling names on politicians is it a crime to insult somebody in public yes it is it is and it’s a crime to insult them online as well yes the fine could be even higher yeah if you insult someone in the internet why because in Internet it stays there if we are talking here face to face you insult me I insult you okay finished but if you in the internet if I insult you or a politician that sticks around forever yeah the prosecutors explain German law also prohibits the spread of malicious gossip violent threats and fake quotes if somebody

posts something that’s not true and then somebody else reposts it or likes it are they committing a crime yeah in the case of reposting it is a crime as well because um the reader can’t distinguish whether you just invented this or just reposted it that’s the same for us the punishment for breaking hate speech laws can include jail time for repeat offenders so uh for example someone called politician I can use it because here we can say whatever we want dick someone called a politician dick and they were arrested at 6:00 am. the police came to their house to arrest them for this because the word is offensive right it is offensive there’s no doubt about it we shouldn’t use it in public uh speaking but should it be a crime but what was worrying there is is that CBC which is a liberal leaning um CBS yeah CBS of course sorry which is a liberal leaning um media outlet arue that the allowance of free speech led to Nazi Germany the National Socialist to win in Germany he was standing in a country where Free Speech was weaponized to contuct a genocide that

[6:02]

is a fallacy which is even known in upside down world because it was exactly the opposite the reason why Nazis came to power was because they were heavily censored so people you know workers felt that they belong to some organization which will help them right and they could like hide this this belief and and worship the the furer and and that work exactly because they were heavily um censored and heavily fought against and then they did of course the same thing and Wars that’s no doubt there was no freedom of spe whatsoever in during the Nazi Germany right but but it’s surprising that the Liber Au would make this basic mistake it’s it’s exact opposite so do you do you see that do you see like this shift in society this strange shift at least maybe not I don’t know I mean maybe there are certain kinds of metrics of I don’t know attempts to organize opposition to someone who said something on campus maybe there’s more of those now than there used to be maybe they’re just more reported I don’t know I mean certainly the you know in the 60s there were a lot of people who were were trying to shout down speakers and get them disinvited to campus and you

know they’re they’re protesting the war um so I don’t know but you know in in the US um at least at least under First Amendment and defamation Juris Prudence um first of all if you say anything about a public figure they are less protected if I say something defamatory toward you like you’re a criminal um or as Elon Musk has has got into trouble for calling someone a pedophile and something that’s probably you know defamatory um then if you’re famous um I you have to show that I had actual malice like I have a much higher level of trying to hurt and do damage than just sort of you know saying something random about another person right so so that’s the first uh issue is in in the US I mean no I don’t I think we’re far from having somebody arrest somebody for that and getting anywhere past that as a as as authority figures um you know the second defense in in in us jur and probably other jurist Prudence is is the truth is a defense so if a politician really

is a dick uh then what are they going to do that that is a great segue are there any politians who aren’t okay maybe I will cut this out we’ll see um you know the this the strange thing I I wanted to to mention this because I I come from Poland from and I was raised in communist Poland and um first of all we were actively censored so for example when I was six I have always this this anecdote I was raised to be a super anti-communist and when I was six I was going by bus and I told um someone in a bus quietly but not too quietly I said do you know that Communists are bad and the whole bus became quiet oh wow it was 1986 that me to go in one of your movies that is a scene yeah and the H went quiet because it was during Marshall state so the people were arrested for opposing views right um so that’s one side of a that that brings me like closer to to free speech absolutist but then another side which which I I think I changed recently was that in Poland it is illegal to promote or even mention any symbols which are related to Communism or Nazism and this is because

of History because of the number of victims and I used to believe this is very good right I was thinking like I don’t want spasti cats in public spaces six million Jewish people were killed six million polish were killed enormous number of of other nations so I just don’t want to see this sign period right it’s me it’s not disputable and I was absolutely in support of this then I came to us and I heard about this which was outrageous for me initially this idea like the the Supreme Court decision to allow um Nazis to walk through the neighborhood of Illinois right of the of the Holocaust survivals and I was like how how can you do that how can you allow that this is insanity right or cook looks Clan marches and so on right but slowly by slowly um maybe becoming more American than polish I start to Value I understand the consequences I understand the issues but I start to Value the freedom of speech more than the harm it can cause the permission to to say things more and the reason is that there’s always someone if you limit it there’s always someone who

has to make a decision mhm and um who what is allowed and that’s the problem you cannot make an objective decision you cannot make a cut what is actually well we have you we have a cut on EV you inside violence that’s obvious like you don’t want people to say like let’s go and people right but other than that it’s very difficult to cut like when when does it where is it just offensive and when it becomes like a super dangerous well there there are a number of of sort of well-known exceptions in in in American law I mean you mentioned one which is incitement to violence um sometimes those are called true threats well incitement can be inciting other people um which which does have to be pretty severe um because you see you do see people using um you know sort of stochastic terrorism where they say well hey my followers some of you of whom I know are unhinged sure would be really great for America if this thing happened to my uh my opponent right and you can you can wink and and all that and that’s legal so the excitement has to be pretty pretty obvious

[11:50]

um if it’s directed between people then it’s then it’s called a true threat right if I have I said something that actually puts you in efficient fear of physical harm that it qualifies as a tort it’s it’s like an assault right because because I I’ve just made a credible threat that puts you in an emotional state which is going to shorten your lifespan and harm your health and may give you PSD and whatever and so that’s that’s actionable defamation right if you say something um that that is false and and uh that you knew to be false in particular um you know that that’s a problem and then there are other things like fraud you know I if I induce you to enter a contract by lying to you about my company’s prospects or something like that or we have this contract or you know we have this deal with this celebrity and then it’s not true I can’t just say you honor it’s a free country yeah right it’s not that free so you know it tries to look at the harm and how objective is the harm uh and there are a number of things that that involve some kind of speech um that

you know where the the the first first amendment law carves out exceptions um you know you you can’t go through a quiet neighborhood at 3:00 am. shouting into your bullhorn right why not well the there the first amendments bounded by and a lot of the Amendments actually are what we call time place and manner is it reasonable so sometimes you’ll get that kind of thing um is it reasonable uh you know to to restrict RCT these people to daytime hours because that’s not really restricting their speech enough or like today is it you know if the government was trying to shut down somebody on campus the situation might not be as bad as it was in McCarthyism where you you know people were driven into Exile lost lost their jobs committed suicide now you’ve got the internet in many other ways and platforms right so so the harm sometimes of getting deplatformed somewhere is a lot smaller than it used to be um but you know and and there’s there’s other speech that would take you in area of a kind of a liability like negligence like people often say um you know oh the exception to speech is you can’t

shout fire in a crowded theater right and they often say it that way um but you can sh uh shout fire in a crowded theater if there’s a fire right the the actual quote is or the idea is you can’t falsely shout fire in a crowd at the air knowing it’s false and then people in the Stampede get injured right so there’s there’s the law does try to look at you know is there harm and how knowable was it essentially that that there would be harm that follows MH and these are all reasonable uh limits on uh speech um the problem I see is when the speech is limited kind of like in the case of the fire uh in theater depending whether it’s true fire or there is no fire the speech is limited on the judgment about the truthfulness of that statement and that comes to the to deeper philosophical question how do we know that something is true or not we could discuss it for hours uh on the whole history of epistemology and understanding what truth means which is TR

objective right but um and maybe we should a little bit you know maybe we should discuss a little bit um of of this but I I’m concerned about this Authority problem of the truth uh decision or it’s almost like aelan problem right I don’t want to see on anything that is not obviously objective there’s either fire or there is no fire in in um theater any limits on stating something that could be true and is probably um probably could be is it possible probably not for justifiable obviously right shouldn’t be allowed even if it is unfair in um offensive um because otherwise you cannot have free discourse which leads to better version of this Tru or to objective truth if somebody believes in objective truth MH yeah I mean that in in the in the political sphere or the social sphere you know you have What’s called the marketplace of ideas and that’s why you know there there may be no support whatsoever for the idea that that restricting Nazi symbols in Poland

as well as Germany you know was was effective in any way and there might be evidence that it was counterproductive um I think this is where you know it helps to have an educated populist that’s taught critical thinking because short of a trial in the adversarial method which is really along with the scientific method one of our Premier ways to try to get at the best estimate of the truth um you you have to rely on critical thinking and and it’s hard to imagine both sides of something it’s hard to know the whole context so as individuals you know we do have some limits in being able to figure out whether something was true or false um but that’s why sometimes when when when the difference is obvious and again it’s not a problem just to say there’s a fire in the crowded theater and even if it’s false the problem is I mean if you say that and there’s only four people in the theater and they get up and they proceed calmly to their four different exits nobody’s getting trampled you know you’re not you’re not in trouble for anything and in any event the government would never be the one to make you in trouble if you shout it

[17:39]

falsely in a crowded theater and people Stampede and several people are injured um and maybe people a different claim would come from people who lose jewelry and people who had their coats damaged and whatever um it’s not the government that would come down on you right it’s it would be other private parties saying this is like a slip and fall you knew knew there was Ice um out on the sidewalk in front of your house and you didn’t put up a sign or clean it and you owed me a duty and you breached it and it was foreseeable that this would happen and I I suffered damages you just go through the tort you know with the sort of very elegant tort requirements um so uh but I get your to take your point you know that the um the unknowability of the truth means it is dangerous to say that certain things can’t be said because one we could be wrong and two because if you allow that then people in certain kind of power people who can hire the best lawyers people who get into political power people who run social media platforms or whatever they can start to decide for themselves in that exception you’ve given them yeah and also even if we assume the truth truth is

objective which very few people nowadays assume most people think in postmodern way uh TR is more subjective I there maybe rare uh case because of mathematics for example examples in mathematics I believe that some truth can be objective like 2 plus two is for right objective forever and and independent of of him even if I’m traveling at the speed of light even if you’re traveling at the speed of light even there if there is no uh human consciousness or any kind of Consciousness to consider that that still stays true that’s a big discussion uncertainty principle it’s always for whether I’m looking at it or not well well that that becomes the problem in quantum physics for other reasons right the The Logical fallaces of being in the same time at two different places or not right you can follow up with this on the first episode of this of this podcast but um the even if you assume that that the truth is subjective the truth changes so um you know we know from history we had um the war dominated by one religion at least Western one dominated by one religion and that religion as truths were so true that they would burn people for saying something against

it right the the whole um uh ho Inquisition um was gave you an an option to say the truth which was their truth which was the religious truth or be killed mhm it’s very and to turn in your neighbor yeah for for example a Jew who had converted a converso and you turn them in saying they’re not really Christians in their hearts they didn’t really convert or I saw them reading the Hebrew Bible the other day or whatever and you turn them in especially happened in the Inquisition because they’re wealthy now you’re like the original whistleblower you get you get a huge portion of their state you Spain would take some and then they would give me some for turning them in I mean just then you get into perverse incentives what is it going to benefit me to to to try to you know deplatform you or you know cancel you or whatever yeah and and I I see it happening in a similar manner on a almost religious level right this is an I gave an example of of uh um Christianity but you can find examples in um communism obviously right there were in in North

Korea children are denouncing their parents so this goes to another aspect of of Truth seeking is I I think people are naturally leaning to toward truth they want truth but that can be overriden by religious or ideological beliefs or em well and and at the root of that emotional attachments right it’s it’s threatening it’s threatening to my um sense of wealth or income to hear certain ideas or maybe those ideas I feel are threatening or it’s threatening to my relationship to hear this um with somebody or threatening to my ego and so I think a lot of the desire to reach out and cancel to sell someone you know even at home to shut up you know your kid or whatever that kind of reaction is a reactivity where we’re not doing a good job of managing the discomfort and anxiety that comes from ideas that threaten our attachments right it’s like I wrote I wrote a an a short Nolla that was a satire and you know it a satire is something that can Trigg

people because it looks like it’s kind of making fun of something that whether I knew it or not before I read this I’m attached to there’s some idea or interpretation or storyline that I became attached to emotionally and I feel it’s under assault and instead of just saying I’m not going to finish this or this is crap and I’m going to call my best friend and tell them about it or I’m going to write a terrible review of this online or something we might go the next route and say this person shouldn’t be speaking it makes me so comfortable they’re bad uh this this is wrong right you start to take your emotional reaction into characterizing the intent of the speaker and now you know especially if they had bad intent you you can justify shutting them down because they’re trying to destroy something or harm something yeah you also mentioned the your novel um your Nolla which is satire and that’s another fascinating and and suddening and worrying aspect of of uh modern society is that the humor starts to be problematic like I I can give you an example I recently heard about I could could not believe it so um someone was making fun of CNN by uh putting

[23:41]

there was like a mem uh going around uh saying that CNN bought the largest industrial laundry machine to spin the news right it’s funny or not depending on on what you you might find it funny or not I found it funny but the the problem was that it was fact checked and serious fact check and and there was like a note you know no CNN did not buy a lares laundry machine come on you know like really when when so this is the real Turing test when will AI be able to recognize sarcasm irony satire parody um and and understand what it’s seeing and this is similar to this this case that that I’m preparing um against against Google and we we can talk about that later but part of the issue is that the AI comprehensively misunderstood what a video was about and thought it was about something else in the way that if it was a human we’d call them a a low-effort thinker or that it’s someone seeking cognitive ease instead of cognitive load or whatever and the AI made a distinctly unintelligent decision right so I don’t I don’t know how how how when you

want to get into that but we send G that this is actually very interesting this is what triggered me to to uh to in uh invite you this was the case you were presenting um in our meeting on AI and I I F I found it absolutely fascinating so maybe you can you can tell us about it as much as you can since it’s ongoing right so yeah so I went to law school well a lot of amazing people um and one of them um he had a sociology degree um and somehow within a few years of law school he’s applying for his his first patents and this begins an odyssey over the last 25 or so years um where he seems to do almost 10 patents a year he’s got like 254 uh granted patents and he does this work with other people and he’s just he’s super knowledgeable he’s a he’s a complete information sponge polymath all that stuffff just a really interesting guy and so back in August he

started uh a YouTube channel he called Innovation Cafe and his wife has been ill and for him this was sort of a way to direct his energies and particularly he wanted to do something meaningful and so part of what what was meaningful to him was he was directing his videos on Innovation mindset patent system technology whatever at um at people in less developed countries so he was buying ads promoting them on YouTube uh not ads but just buying the promotion so he would show up in their algorithms and he started to gain a following by December so between August and December he had over 200,000 followers and he’s just got all these videos he he edits them himself um you know he looks like a professor uh stuck in his base during the pandemic and uh um production values are getting better and he decides to do uh a series on unexpected drivers of innovation and I don’t remember what the other ones were um but one that he decided to do initially was what he

calls sort of uh evolutionary biology as a driver of innovation in other words the sex drive and so he uh he did a a short video um where he talked about how the adult industry had pioneered um you know unexpectedly you might think and pioneered certain Technologies like compression for file compression um Payment Processing uh the example of of VHS uh defeating betamax partly because of that industry so and that’s about the extent of it I mean it was a professorial discussion that you would hear in a law school class in a business school class or or at a dinner table and so he um he thought he would experiment with three different links of the video on and he posted some of them on Innovation Cafe he posted um them on another Channel with with two subscribers it was his test Channel and so he posted on one of these channels a three minute version I think and he gets an automated response saying your video has been flagged for age

restriction we’re going to limit the age now it’s again it’s it’s clearly automated um and uh because it came out very shortly after he posted it and it didn’t have anything specific to his video too um and so he he hit appeal and I don’t remember the exact process but in general it was he appealed um I think it may have reversed itself but then it came back on a different Channel and flagged that one and he appealed and at some point maybe it said no to his appeal but since he had a certain number of users he was able to reach out to human so for many creators on on YouTube um it’s it’s a bit of a dystopia because you can’t reach anybody you can’t appeal they may not even give you reasons although their contract terms of sherish require them to um so you don’t really have any recourse well because he had a certain number of subscribers he was able to get a human being and um and the transcript is in is one of the exhibits to the the complaint that we’re we’re preparing um and the human being says oh I’ve looked at your your video it’s fine we’re

[29:36]

we’re not going to terminate it so Gary’s very relieved at the same time he’s a little paranoid now uh because he’s seen the AI I don’t know if I mentioned but the AI did say it was okay and then it it’s just gone back and forth so it’s very inconsistent he’s like okay that’s a problem and the human did promise me but I don’t want to lose the whole account so he takes all the videos down they’ve been up there I mean a couple days um one of them on a test Channel seen by nobody um and then at some point again after the human has said this is in compliance with our terms and conditions he gets an automated email from YouTube saying essentially you know um you’ve been banned forever and he you know he he’s like what right now what what makes this interesting if this was any other social media platform that would be the end of the road for Gary that’s it couldn’t do anything every other platform no matter how much they talk about

speech and and all that they allow themselves to terminate your account and you may not even be able to create a new account ever even under a different name with different content with no due process no appeals process for a good reason a bad reason or no reason at all usually the languages in our sole discretion we can terminate you and that’s the end now what makes this interesting aside from the AI angle is that uh a couple years ago maybe it was 2019 uh YouTube you know took a look at the at the marketplace for video content creator and they made a an important decision they said let’s change this language where we can do whatever we want right our sole discretion that’s kind of unattractive to to creators um why don’t we differentiate from Facebook and and and Instagram and Vimeo and whatever platforms there there were at the time I don’t know if Tik Tok was around yet um let’s let’s differentiate ourselves let’s

hold ourselves to a higher standard one we if if we’re about to terminate you or we have a problem with your content we will give you the reasons so we’ll actually give you an explanation and explainability is going to become a very key issue between the law and AI very soon because it’s the heart of new process without explainability we can’t start even to examine a decision that you’ve made about my life right you’re like I don’t have to give you an explanation here’s the decision you know so that was one thing they they they they promised um the second thing is no fewer than three times in their terms and conditions they now have the word reasonable belief so they can’t just do whatever they want for however they want it for whatever reasons they say essentially we won’t terminate your account unless we have a reasonable belief that you violated our terms and conditions now they didn’t really give him reasons we can kind of infer that the reason had something to do with the AI non- understanding that a lecture about an industry is not the same as actual

pornography and the AI couldn’t grasp that um maybe that’s what it was about but and that’s part that that was certainly one of the arguments that that he can make right as to why Google is uh and YouTube have breached this contract with him but but more interesting arguments that are that more novel maybe what we call first impression um is that first of all um AI doesn’t have beliefs okay we can get into that but you know the basic ideas if you understand the the sort of essential next word prediction and the fact that the generative AI even let alone oldfashioned AI doesn’t know what it’s saying it’s in this case it’s just making predictions they’re they’re not using generative AI necessarily and even if they are again it’s just next word prediction it it’s doesn’t understand what it’s saying it doesn’t have feelings about what it’s saying and turns out if you look at the emology of the word belief the French and the old German it involves emotion it involves culture it involves context right the Nuance of understanding something in context so

we’re saying an AI can’t an algorithm can’t hold belief a bunch of Applied statistics doesn’t have a belief we’re also saying it doesn’t reason and it doesn’t know what’s reasonable and again that would involve context and and um you know history and and and you know certain kinds of human reasoning and even if a court were to decide or an algorithm were to get so sophisticated that uh an algorithm could hold a reasonable belief we’re saying YouTube as a legal entity cannot delegate its belief holding to something that’s not a legal entity it’s still just an equation it’s it’s an algorithm it’s not not an employee who’s an agent legally it’s not a subcontractor who’s an agent it’s not another company who’s an agent right in all those cases those people can be can be sued if you delegate your authority to something that can’t be sued then guess who you’re the suee you get to be sued um and uh so so we’re we’re saying that essentially an AI that misread what something was about cannot have reasonable belief that he’s violated you know pornography

[35:31]

on on YouTube or something like that um an AI that is given conflicting responses can’t say that it’s reasonable because well which is it you thought it was okay you thought it was not okay you thought it was okay you know human said it was not okay that’s not reasonable an AI that doesn’t learn from it can’t be trained by the human who said this is fine I think sometimes they they use the phrase steering as well like can you steer the AI into the right answer well a human looked at this and said this is not a problem it’s it’s a as Gary will say kind of a Yer uh uh you think you know a boring lecture he would say of of an industry right so uh that’s the essential argument that I find most interesting there are other there are other potential arguments that that get to the idea that by holding itself out as being different from the others YouTube gained advantage and if YouTube really doesn’t have to have a reasonable belief but just terminates you because it feels like it or its algorithm feels like it in its reasonable belief then that promise of due process is elusory and so there are anti-competition statutes that give you a cause of action there

including a collective action even potentially a class action so this this potentially goes beyond Gary um and I don’t I I don’t want to discourage YouTube from from having the best standard of of all of these platforms and they will continue they have to continue to use AI there’s no question there’s millions of hours uploaded every day humans could never keep up right so they have to use it but we’re saying there are more intelligent processes that you can put together that involve the algorithm working in concert with the human humans be especially because this is all new but because also that’s part of the appeals process at some point we all want to have accountable humans involved in decisions that affect our rights right at some level there has to be some appealability where I can say why did this happen this is so brilliant I I hope this case will first of all become a class action second uh go to Supreme Court and make a decision for all other cases the idea that the AI cannot objectively hold belief or even like we had in the last podcast

discussion whether AI will ever be considered conscious I believe AI will not be conscious but will be considered conscious by by many there will be many people who were fighting for the rights of AI despite the in my opinion impossibility for a universal touring machine to ever be S I agree so so even if that uh was true we will need to um kind of assert a supremacy of humans over machines in decision making about humans because otherwise we are going a very dangerous rabid this regardless if the AI will be smarter regardless if the AI decision will be proven to be more um better literally um in more cases on average right on average if it’s something’s better on average by all means use it for the first cut yes but have ultimate decision yeah if a problem occurs if we see that one of those data points did not turn out as we expected I.E there’s an appeal and someone has a reason okay we we’ve got to get out of the system mhm but this is this is interesting from legal perspective although I’m not a lawyer but there’s like at least two

aspects which are very interesting about it first of all the the social media are not protected by First Amendment well I mean users are not protected because social media theoretically it’s a private company they can do whatever they want they’re it’s not a government it’s it’s a private uh company so I’m wondering how do you uh deal with that fact so that this you consider it uh contractual violation prop probably yes is it yeah this this uh there’s no well aside I mentioned the competition cause of action so that’s a state statute okay there’s not necessarily a federal statute that that that handles this situation um it’s not a constitutional matter um doesn’t fall into the First Amendment which says that you know Congress shall pass no laws right it talks about what the government can and can’t do and a lot of people miss that they think you know if if the the market place is wanting to shut down their ideas or hates them or something that they’re being censored and Free Speech but it’s different if it’s the government with its coercive power so um you know it’s it’s not the government that’s that’s doing it um and the the government

actually uh gave social media companies even more protection than they would normally have um protection from all sorts of suits of negligence and defam and emotional distress by uh passing the communications decency act and specifically there’s something called section 230 which says that they’re not liable for Content that’s on their platform unless they created it themselves or they contributed to it they’re not even liable for failing to moderate right if they see somebody speaking about the most vile child pornography or or how to you know commit various Acts or whatever they have no obligation under American law to to to take that down they they’ve chosen to often in the past because they had the reasons I suppose um but um they all do have terms and conditions they have contracts so aside from the the statutory claim for anti-competition unfair competition um the it’s it’s really a breach of contract um and there’s related causes of action one’s called the

[41:30]

breach of fiduciary duly good faith and and and fair dealing so it’s it’s a it’s a fiduciary duty called good faith and fair dealing that that actually by itself perhaps could um require Google to to use processes that aren’t arbitrary and capricious right it’s just not reasonable to have something that disagrees with itself and then gets overruled by human about something that’s objectively not problematic result in my termination so you could say that breaches good faith and fair dealing so there are Protections in the law for things that AI does that automation does that social media does um social media companies have been protected somewhat by section 230 um but they’re certainly if they’re going to hold themselves out as offering a certain kind of due process then then you can try to hold them to account to to to offer that process and my understanding is that there are large groups of former YouTube creators who’ve been deplatformed or accounts terminated um who didn’t get a reason and don’t understand why and maybe think it’s

unreasonable whe and some of them may be right some of them may be wrong but it it seems like it’s it’s a fairly significant problem and I don’t really know that there there have been Solutions and so that’s what we’re we’re exploring yeah I I I see like a conflict between section 230 and the ability to terminate accounts you you should have one of them right like if AT&T um is not responsible for the fact that someone makes a call planning a crime uh that doesn’t mean that AT&T now can cut discretionally phone lines for people right that I think I I don’t know the law but it would be reasonable to assume that if you have this kind of protection then you cannot then at the same time say like we’re cutting your line because we don’t like you like discrimination against let’s say a certain group and saying you will not have an a phone line with AT&T but it seems that doesn’t apply to social media right so you have to fer the protections you’re not responsible for the content and yet you are allowed to um uh block uh YouTubers that I understand that from the you know private like libertarian perspective Libertarians would say

that well it’s a private company and they protect their brand uh that’s fine like in in extreme cases I understand that but arbitrary decisions about cases like you uh present I I believe I I still don’t fully understand why only the word believe there is the only recurse and you cannot have for example um a case against uh other social media which don’t have that yeah well just it all comes down to their contracts and the rest of them all appear to have decided that they have enough market power perhaps maybe because they’re you know uh ol right that that they can afford to give you a contract to make an agreement with you come on our platform contribute to its value leave content and and and and comments and put up videos and your interesting ideas and your photos give us all this value um build up a brand um run your entire business here get all of your clients customers many of your friends here and um come and do all those things and um we think

you’ll do it even knowing that we could shut you down tomorrow without giving you a reason YouTube decided to do it differently I understand that but aren’t other social media which don’t have the word Bel which makes it like you can’t hold B for AI aren’t they they bounded by other laws for example non-discrimination laws they can like block a certain subgroup of people it could be yeah there are things that that start you know if you start to Target um you know if if you uh if if you were but that but again there you’re violating existing statutes that are protecting people from certain kinds of targeting right we don’t and those only protect certain generally you know are only protecting minorities they don’t protect majorities right like uh so I mean nobody targets the majority they don’t we don’t need it yeah no nobody’s saying well and it would be very

difficult to say that you are discriminated as a majority because that would mean that YouTube would need to block 70% of people or something like this right so it doesn’t stand on this but it’s still very interesting I it’s first of all brilliant idea with the um belief that’s why you know I understood that this is a State statue but I still think um this kind of legation legation should go to uh Supreme Court at some point to understand the distinction between Ai and non AI to to establish this and it will happen over time even if that particular case is not applying to the federal law or constitutional rights this this idea that that uh AI will have so much power over people for example a responsibility for let’s say AI doctor misdiagnoses AI driver uh accident um who is responsible the human in the car um who was driving against you or the AI who made a mistake who is suit right this will be very interesting time we’re I mean I think what what we’re seeing now is that in the past conversations about you know what it means to be human um and you know

[47:20]

individual autonomy um free free will creativity all these things they they took the they were in the forums of religion and philosophy and I think because AI because it’s now personlike and generative um is going to start taking that whole conversation about what it means to be human out of philosophy and we’re going to start to see it in judicial opinions what what are courts saying it means to be human um for example reasonable belief are we going to have case law that says certain verbs and nouns like belief and believing or whatever do not apply to an AI or no it doesn’t reason or it doesn’t reason generally but with these small exceptions or whatever and so and and you know in the realm of art you know why do we consume art um and you know then then what it means to be human would be well if you’re in the audience you’re capable of feeling awe um which you may not feel if if you knew you know it was done by a computer or you know if I do

uh some some of my motivational keynote talks right if if that talk and this it comes out of my life comes out of my like the word belief out of my emotions and my experiences and my culture and my context right and so when I’m talking about that I’m speaking with a certain kind of authority of experience um and and it’s relatability because people say oh those things happened to you and they’ve happened to us too oh you’ve had self-doubt or oh you’ve experienced self-criticism or you’ve failed to carp a DM or whatever oh that’s so relatable and so that’s how you move people emotionally because they see that you’re moved as you’re speaking they see that you were moved in the past and you’ve learned from it and there’s all this kind of story arc of your learning and if that same speech was given to me by chat GPT right do I care do I really want to listen to this this really well done audio maybe it’s even using my voice uh that was written written by something that never had any experience and doesn’t have any feelings and can’t really relate it’s like shut up and dribble as they used to say everybody wants you to stick to your lane how does an AI have a lane at all to talk about what should motivate me I I disagree with you

here um and not on the principal level I still as I said believe that AI will never be S sension but Mike Tran or the AI specialist in the in the two podcasts ago gave me a a very cool example so in in the Star Trek series there is a doctor who is a hologram and initially everybody an AI hologram and everybody initially say well you are an AI hologram so we don’t need to treat you nicely because you are an AI hologram but over time the Hologram learns experiences emotions experiences right computes emotions expresses the computed emotions relates to people becomes friends talks to them and over multiple series at the end of the one of the seasons everybody considered that AI equivalent of a human despite the provable fact that they are not and I think this will literally happen and soon with the identic AI uh because aen will learn from the experience will adapt to your um personality will become your best friend will be the better better simulated friend than understand you better and help you more uh in a sense um than than humans emotional support AI

is the future exactly right so then there will be very strong belief uh among people that we have to treat AI as um as humans and I think people will literally fight like like people in 1960s fought for civil rights right they will literally fight for rights for AIS but in the second case there are already groups that are that are already yeah they already around and I I I think it will happen and I think it will be what would be the test even the legal test right like as as I always say in the in um podcast I’m a syllabes so I don’t believe you guys exist you’re just a pigman of my imagination I’m have a conversation with you and I’m the only Consciousness uh on the planet right so I I’m very happy to have a very smart uh people to converse with me but I’m conversing with myself right I don’t really believe it but you can believe it and prove me wrong good luck right was people try that for hundreds of years it’s impossible um and the same issue will will happen with a i how are you proving that someone is not conscious right how do you Pro prove that there

is no qualia that there is no strong AI to use the technical term for it uh it’s in unprovable so how do you think it will be possible to do that in law other than asserting it other than asserting it I don’t know if there’s there’s there’s going to be a test um for Consciousness um that’s objective I think you can you can make certain inferences like um well let’s say what what it might come down to is a court in a certain situation let’s say whether an AI should be shut down or something um the court might look at it and say you know well there are two things one does an AI have the right to live to exist two does an AI have a right not to die which is slightly different question you know to sort of is it is it harmful to tell it it’s going to die or just to shut it off and you can say well that’s not that’s not harmful right it doesn’t they didn’t suffer before they died right it’s like it’s like a meteor strike or something you didn’t know it was coming and they also didn’t die because you can switch them off that’s like stopping time and then switch them sure it’s cryogenic so there would be a different reing deleting the hard drive

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and running the the comp so so often I think what it’ll come down to is um and again this is much of the law if there’s no harm then you often don’t have a claim this is most clear in in Tor law you know where there has to be some harm you can’t just say you know this happened to me that guys’s at fault and I’m okay it didn’t even hurt it didn’t hurt me physically and didn’t hurt me emotionally no one ever says that they say this caused emotional distress and you know and and it did you know some things are very stressful right but the the bigger question is you know how will we ever show how could AI ever develop and if it did how could we show that it was capable of suffering that that we didn’t feed it training data that it wanted and so it’s it’s sad or that um you know it’s it’s get developed an attachment to uh to its uh its companion human like these replica cases right with the the AI avatars um uh or uh this really I think disturbing um uh sub niche of of AI avatars which is um uh people who are uh who are dead who were brought

back I I call the sort of resurrections right um one question is is do I have emotional rights in this thing such that replica shouldn’t be able to change its algorithm as it did a few years ago and there were like suicides and and distress and complaints when everybody’s personal companion changed their personality but is the replica is the avatar ever going to be able to experience um again and I don’t I don’t I think it conveys a misunderstanding of either what AI is or what ious is or both and how it develops I mean we don’t even know how it developed over 4 and a half billion years on this planet how that spark happened how it happens every time you know an egg is inseminated we don’t even know but how do we imagine that’s going to happen within an algorithm right so um can we ever prove suffering that’s when they start to have rights I think and that’s what and and that’s not even an original idea in a sense if I think about it I think that’s if you see that in a lot of Science Fiction you look at Blade Runner you look at anything that involves

a cyborg or an AI character it always comes down to do they start to feel y because no filmmaker seems to want to make the argument that if they’re not feeling they it’s still wrong to turn them off or whatever you know or Westward is the recent example of of this um well but there is an edge case I I I’m developing this kind of edge case where if it’s Edge for me it’s not in principle Edge because working on a science fiction novel called the mirror and um one of the elements of this is that I believe soon um let’s say 20 years there will be um tech there will be companies which will offer heaven to people who die right so it’s very related to what you are saying about the resurrection but not for the purpose of I want to resurrect my close ones who died but rather that I am about to die and I want to upload my brain to the uh computer mhm and technically perfectly technically quantum physics level technically it will not be possible you can’t copy the quantum

state of uh to another state that’s impossible but people will ignore that people will be paying and we will be happy about the fact that it’s will be possible to to take all the accumulated knowledge about them their voice their looks they um all their experiences all the photos because everything is now digitized and can be digitized scan of their brain MRI low you know high quality scan of their each of their neurons and upload it in a digital form to what I call in this novel heaven and in this Heaven this digital version of you whose physical version died will be living in a virtual reality which is of your choice so they will be heaven for you there there are series of yeah an upload right there a series about yeah this novel is not about this just one little element right so so basically uh now the question the question in in the novel is is it a waste of energy is it a waste of electricity we are running a fake version in my opinion not realistic version of your Consciousness who is who thinks that it is it will tell you it is you right it will tell

you tell you that uh and we are running for that fake version of you and fake uh reality so that fake version of you can fake experience fake reality right so this is a n case in in in law I think potentially because it’s not saying that something was programmed and existed it is coming from you it’s like your version in a way but it’s not it’s not your Consciousness won’t survive your death and still be in the the new machine or whatever or the it will be pretending that it’s conscious you will not be conscious yeah so it’s it’s similar to those those uh resurrections where um the the deceased um consented right this will be a part of Will’s in the future right is how much you consent to be resurrected can they use video only can they you know use all the content of my speeches my Facebook posts whatever um but yeah that’s the interesting question um is it if you can’t survive that barrier then if I’m the company selling this stuff I would say first of all you you probably couldn’t say that that this is actual heaven or something like that there’s

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there’s probably going to be false advertising claims that just say you’re you’re scamming people you can call it that in your marketing and so forth you just can’t be super specific and say your Consciousness Will Survive you can say we’re going to put you your avatar in heaven meaning in that server over there and uh you know we’re not going to say that your Consciousness um will remember who you used to be it has the facts but you won’t you won’t see a uh the Arc of your Consciousness surviving um and as the company I would argue that I should be able to let people do that if I’m not misrepresenting it and that many people will do it because especially people maybe who don’t have children or any other progeny like books or music or works of art and they think I want my ideas and my personality to exist somewhere and maybe it can be looked up maybe it’s on a channel somewhere just to know that there’s a little part of me left and I’m leaving something to posterity and to whoever is researching Us in the year 6000 um there’s a little part of me out there whether it’s in video or just all my writings and Facebook posts you know I can

see people paying for the storage to let that happen mhm but imagine a contractual agreement like this we can upload your avatar that’s ,000 per month or $1,000 total or we can upload your Consciousness that’s 10,000 per month now there as you said there could be a lawsuit saying that you are false advertising prove it who is who is uh Pro here do you need to prove that this is not Consciousness or do the company has to prove that it is consciousness who is who’s who is the burden of proof the company if it’s saying it it’s Consciousness it it has the permit and you know again there’s not going to be an objective test it would come down to expert Witnesses probably you’d have experts on both sides and they would talk about you know why this couldn’t really be Consciousness and the other side would say yes but you can’t prove it’s not by asking it questions and we’d say well prove it feels pain and they say we can’t prove that all we can do is program it to say it feels pain um but I think that would be a battle of expert Witnesses and the judge just have to go look you haven’t shown this as conscious well you know I I I don’t know if you know but

99% of uh top computer scientists from berlay I had a once a conversation with a professor from berlay MIT for example came up with this believe that of course it is what I mean I don’t overstate what they believe they believe that Consciousness is a side effect of a complexity of the neural system right so if it is then you you can in principle create an artificial nerval system and the complexity of it will create the Consciousness so therefore if it’s a complex enough Network the company could find many MIT educated yeah so there that there the difference comes down to even if the new Avatar has that kind of Consciousness is it me getting to enjoy that or am I just going to be gone you know the I that’s here wanting to to Shell out this cash for this feature am I going to enjoy that well we can program in that you feel you feel Joy you know and so uh that’ll be an interesting case of what what’s represented you know and there are laws for example of purporting to give medical advice or so-called medical devices they need to have FDA clearance so if it purports to have a if it purports to change you your your health or physiology or

something and in the gray area is supplements um you know our FD is is pretty strict about you’ve got to have double blind Placebo controlled trials clinical trials that show that it’s making a difference more than a placebo you know that’s that’s would be so interesting the time I I think it’s the time for lawyers to litigate all of this and established um and as you pointed out the a lot of this will become not a philosophical question but a very practical question in Daily uh experiences I can imagine many other things like a marrying marrying a replica which is a digital mhm uh seizing your your uh that this will all happen soon we’re about to have thousands of state and federal judges who don’t know anything about technology and may not know a whole lot about Being Human start to try to decide these cases of what what AI is and what humans are and what rights each has in respect to the other um it’s it’s it’s going to be very interesting because

I mean right right now patents are known to be so complex that that we have a whole separate federal circuit for them right there’s there’s the the it’s not the First Circuit Court of Appeals up in Boston it’s not um the second court of appeals and you headquarter in New York uh it’s the federal circuit and they handle patent cases because they have to have judges and clerks who get all that well now we’ve got judges all over the country who don’t have any of that expertise and it’s going to get really interesting MH and and these judges and lawyers in this case will be using AI to Aid them in that cases which would be even more interesting because there will be self-preservation of the in the interest of the AI to self preserve it right by finding the best argument yeah for it this also leads to kind of back to this this idea of alignment like you mentioned so in your case in the in the case that you are pursuing the problem is that it’s likely that AI made a mistake and human didn’t or it’s part of the case right but whether the AI makes a mistake or not it very much uh depends on the reinforcement learning process which happens on a ra Ai and um

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whether it is a mistake or not it depends how the AI was biased in which way AI was biased right so we’ll have very soon problems with with um both critical thinking with with legal with um uh moderation uh because it will depend on which model has been used and how this model was biased to what system of values that would be very interesting right so what do you think like like do you think there is a chance that we will come to truth seeking models or we’ll see the opposite it will be extreme bias everybody will have their own little no model Progressive model I’ll tell you understanding what little I know about some of the AI systems already out there that are adversarial and seeing how that produces better results and in my own faith in the adversarial system that um you know no search for truth can can sort of develop out of out of sort of one perspective or Consciousness let’s say it really has to be tested by two sides you know sharpening their arguments more and more um and you know in the best case that’s lawyers and their

scientists both putting out the best possible arguments with the best possible evidence and then finders of fact juries or judges assessing those those best possible arguments and doing what human beings at this point only can really do which is figure out what’s reasonable in this context so much of the law comes down to reasonable and what is reasonable as long as it decided by humans we can come to at least an agreement that majority or or that particular jury believes it right the moment we involve AI what is reason able will be what AI considers Reon what I’m trying to say here because I’m not being clear is that even I noticed that right so first of all I use AI in in teaching and I use AI on daily basis all the time in programming and doing my startup what happens after a while as it happened yesterday I trust AI even though I know it can hallucinate I trust its judgment so much that I don’t even verify the output right because it’s long and one so it’s a lot of work right that’s the work we were trying to avoid right exactly especially

on reports I I I’m so happy that I don’t need to write the you know Financial reports for example I can generate them but then I should at least read them before submitting right so so what I mean is is I have a feeling that for us since we know it’s new like for me it’s new I look at it I’m like it might lie it might be mistake and 99.9% of time is better than human output but 0.1% will be be total wrong totally wrong um but I do you think the next generation will have this I I think they will just accept it as the authority almost like a you know oracle well we yeah we do that already as humans you know uh cognitive scientists will will talk about all the evidence that um we seek cognitive ease in in things that we do we want thinking that’s easy that’s that’s where we come up with um rules of thumb and rubrics and Frameworks and stereotypes and stereotypes and and all the bigotry in fact there have been studies showing that bigotry is highly correlated with low effort thinking so when they give people tests to do and the people don’t generate as many

responses or don’t solve the problem or they’re not as creative as judged by other people um uh those same people convey more bigotry in in their responses to what do you think about this kind of person and that kind of person so it’s it’s a shortcut and um we’ve always wanted short Cuts we’ve always always want uh always also wanted that there are clear black and white answers um that comes from some Divine or expert Source you know the man in the sky or whatever we and we’re very susceptible to that um it’s it’s it’s why we we we accepted monarchy and divine right and it’s why we we uh put certain traits on celebrities including royalty today who don’t have any power but still have a title um and it’s why we’re doing it with um with AI now because because it’s so personlike and authoritative we are at Great risk of being influenced by it and some kind sometimes that influence can be very positive but there are things that it can get us to do

because it’s personlike yes you are you are right the biggest the historical danger was always this idea of that there is someone from above or like some objective uh truth which we need to all abide by and forget about the cases when it is uh evil or immoral but there is also the other side of this coin which is the postmodern view that there is no ever any truth or any objective system of value and I noed I I I think that this is more uh going toward that um issue at least among educated people so I I I already kind of spoke about it in the in the previous podcast um I have this problem that I don’t like the idea that there is you know absolute who tells me this is true and you don’t stop thinking don’t critically think but I also don’t like the idea that we take one narrow example when the truth is gray and we say all truths are always gray right what I mean by that is let’s say murder like across culture murder is wrong generally not desirable you can always find a tiniest situation then it wasn’t wrong like maybe you killed a terrorist who was about to

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blow up themselves right you can argue something like right you’re talking about killing murder has AIC definition that there was no self-defense and so forth yeah then you can imagine like um you can probably imagine something for the greater go like some kind of trolley problem situation yes uh when it would be justifiable to a degree right so this examples will be given to teach critical thinking but the next step and I’m fine with this the next step is is that what we come in in the educated Society let’s say then everything is like this we go we go from like this is an example of greatness and we say therefore there is nothing objective and that I have a big problem with that because this is also fallacy both are fallaces they absolute and the no zero absolute whatsoever right yeah now the the risk of the danger to critical thinking I mean it was it just came up recently with the Microsoft lab study they they they did a study that showed that the more people trusted or had confidence in their generative AI tool um the the less editing they did and the less they recruited on certain cognitive uh processes that we Define as critical thinking in other words

editing revising curating modifying doing a new search adding that in other words something very similar to the writing process is the dialectic of conversation I think is where we need to be with AI particularly if we don’t want to have early onset dementia because we’ve stopped using critical thinking at some point like we could be the first Generations that that have dementia set in sooner because there are whole swaths of critical thinking and and memory and visualization that we’re no longer doing like I don’t have to know how to get around anywhere because of GPS and what do you know I now don’t know how to get around anywhere without GPS perfect example of this problem math you know math uh instructors were very concerned about calculators I mean Socrates was very worried about writing they all did change our cognition I mean with writing we lost the ability to meem memorize the Iliad and things like that for the most part right we don’t have the same Feats of memory um we have in fact uh attention spans that are extremely short now um there’s no doubt that technology always distorts uh the brain and Consciousness and probably even

Evolution and so I think is a best practice for employers and employees for parents and children for educators and students is to teach the the the art and the science and the joys and the benefits of revision of editing of drafts I mean I there’s a benefit certainly for um just putting out this conversation as it is right but there’s a lot of formats of getting across information where I don’t want your first draft whether it came from your head or chat GPT I want something that’s been molded over you had an Insight on a hike you had an Insight in the shower you talked to some other people and got this great way of thinking about it and and like the writing that I do it goes through draft after draft after draft until it’s something that that has some originality in thinking and expression even if it’s minimal it still might be entertaining or or enlightening um and and it’s um you know Don Dilo the Great American novelist he once said um he often

doesn’t know what he thinks about something until he starts to write about it and he also said in that same conversation uh writing is a very concentrated form of thinking and so and I think that’s writing is includes revision so I think you know if we want to keep the critical faculty if we want to do things that other people are more interested in and value because it’s condensed thinking and it has the benefits of of lots of thought and as it happens if we want to preserve our copyrights revision editing that process of more research sculpting you know adding to taking out printing another draft or doing another sculpting run adding to taking out doing another draft if I then compare my final draft to my first draft and I do a red line and I speak in terms of text because that’s what I do but you could do something similar with visual images and music I only have copyrights roughly speaking in the red lines the stuff I added the stuff I took out the maybe the reordering that I made um if you want to preserve your critical thinking your copyrights

and please the reader or consumer that’s where I think AI needs to go is we have to learn to work with it the way that that chess players are now working with AI but nobody’s saying go play this match for me you know they’re still thinking and in fact at least as of today um it’s the joint teams of humans and AI that actually are the best chess players they beat AI pure Ai and they beat humans by themselves interesting kind of point maybe that’ll change at some point but yeah you you mentioned something very interesting which I remember also from your uh other talk is that I assumed and I was wrong apparently that if I use AI I own what AI produces and it’s very important for example for my startup because what I focus on right now AIS are not that good yet in programming and math they’re pretty out there but not yet top right very close so what I focus on is the difficult stuff right but when I want to create an interface or an API for my um system I am going to generate I’m not going to spend time on learning this function functions right

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and I assume that the end product is actually owned by me um according to what you are saying it’s questionable well there may be segments of it that you copied from open source essentially which is what the AI is doing is it’s you know reading source code all over and coming up with with sort of the standard way to do this execute this function that wouldn’t be protectable anyway because it wasn’t original to you but the whole compilation uh the way that you organize these things the the this the the complex stuff that you did write um the the general order and flow of it is protectable under copyright but then what how protectable so what does it mean in practice let’s say a release an up uh is 5% and let’s say 50% of code was generated but if you look at it and experts say well this 50% is almost standard um but there is a 5% which which AI originally come up with and you didn’t that means that the AI company owns 5% of my app right now well so that’s that’s a that’s an interesting question too so what the what the AI vendor produces is

is going to be a matter of contract right so you can contract away your copyrights and in this case the AI generally the vendor like like chat GPT generally is not going to say we hereby license to you or we assign to you the copyright now there may be another reason they don’t do that where even if they did say you can have it you still wouldn’t have copyright because the copyright law requires a certain level of originality right and you can’t copyright ideas and you can’t copyright facts and so a lot of what chat GPT produces is ideas and facts and what’s copyrightable is the way that it expressed them the specific language it used but the copyright law and and a a gentleman I’ve uh met last year named Steven Thor has tested this in the copyright office and the patent office trying to get copyrights and patents for his AI system which he calls dbus it’s an acronym dab us and um in in both cases with the copyrights and the patents um the the government

office in charge of each said the the Constitution and the the statutes in this area say that an inventor can apply for a patent and that an author can apply for a copyright on a text a visual art and so forth um those are people so the the courts are already deciding right it’s not it didn’t say that you know your AI doesn’t have a belief or doesn’t have feelings but they did say this says inventor or author and we don’t accept that inventors or authors at this point at least what was meant when when that was written that that includes an algorithm so he’s lost in you know in in the in the patent cases and in the copyright cases but his name is on that that new law so he’s he’s done this a service um interestingly the the other two areas main two areas of of um intellectual property trademarks and Trade Secrets they don’t care who authored something so if if I’m prompting and I generate stuff through chat GPT that that I whip into a trade secret and I

can somehow say maybe because chat gpt’s contract lets me say that chat GPT doesn’t own this and they haven’t trained on or remembered this so it really is a secret I can preserve it perhaps or um a trademark a trademark does not require a human author to create the logo or the the tagline or the slogan um it just has to exist it has to be distinctive as a marker of goods and services and it has to be used in interstate commerce if you want a federal trademark and not a state one and that’s it it doesn’t require um a human involvement so that’s such an interesting distinction so if I generate a logo for my company uh I can trademark that logo and that logo becomes my trademark so it’s in uninf Frable uh but if I chpt generate a novel that will sell best and I start to sell it and somebody do zero CH GPT on it checking if it was generated and we find out that it was generated they can start technically they can start selling the same novel because I

don’t have copyrights ownership to it unless I edited it or the prompt was maybe complex enough to instead of saying give me the best novel ever yeah uh I said what is it about right I started to speak about and still that would might not be enough because it’s just an idea yeah so it’s not well it’s yeah it is just an idea um if the prompt is sufficiently detailed there’s a possibility you could have a copyright in the prompt um now but another person doesn’t need your prompt they just need your output to copy you right it’s not like they’re sort of like well I’m going to tell the I’m going to tell a similar story and so they do a prompt and it comes out with a similar story they haven’t infringed your copyright in the prompt and they certainly haven’t infringed any copyright in the output um but you know that that is something that that I don’t know if it’s been in cases yet but they’re they you know a short poem can be copyrightable a short piece of code potentially if it’s really original can be copyrightable so it stands to reason that um a really detailed and clever prompt um particularly if you’ve put in hundreds of iterations that if it’s not

[82:13]

protectable in case law Congress May step in at some point SP uh pushed forward by artists and by employers and say hey if you if someone creates a a prompt you know of a sufficient length and originality particularly if they’ve gone through many iterations to get there all the the sculp thing they had to do right and and this came up in some of the cases in the copyright office where um a a woman was producing a graphic novel and um the uh AI she she generated the images with AI but often did hundreds or even thousands of prompts and refin ments to get there so that that’s a curation process of similar with photography is you you you know with a digital photograph especially you take the picture you look at it and you make an adjustment well here’s what it came up with I said oh I want you to add a Pixar effect and I want which raises its own issues or I want you to do cinematic lighting or I want a red scarf on this person and you know gradually you’re doing things that um okay The Prompt it’s it’s a low standard for originality The Prompt could

have essentially be like a short story that’s protectable um and so you can’t use my prompt but if somehow you used a different prompt and came up with the same image or story I can’t go after that because I don’t have rights in my my image or story just the prompt anyway this this woman I don’t remember the name of the case but she um uh she applied to the copyright office and what she said is I want a copyright in the whole work which is the AI images as well well as my text and my placement of the images like the order and the story and so forth and so the and she said but I disclaim copyrights in the image themselves that means she’s she’s saying I don’t own that and patent uh applications do the same thing they say we want to patent in this we just claim this thing that’s obvious and it’s already out there and whatever um and similar with trademarks you know you might say I want you know the Covenant as a trademark but only as used on things like Covenant brand you know hockey sticks or whatever right so you disclaim only using Co like only I get to use coven on and anything um so so that’s essentially what what they what what she would do is is say I

I don’t claim rights in that and so the copyright office looked at that and they say fine no rights on that but the way you organize this and the story you told and the placement and the text you put in that’s all copyrightable MH that’s it’s very interesting because it also connects to um the derived work I don’t know the correct legal ter D derivative yes derivative work when artists use somebody’s else to work but transform it sufficiently to create a new work this is very common in like Photoshop art when you start with some photos you might or might not have rights to and then you are a transforming so much that you are creating something new but now the question is I don’t know the answer do you own the copyrights to the process of derivation or the or you because let’s say you in fre changed the on the original work even though it’s so different and it’s not a parody because you can do parody right um it you don’t all this oh well so so that’s that’s not what the Copyright Act would call a derivative work a derivative work would be um that you write a textbook and the derivative work is a distilled version of of questions that students can use

for a workbook right it’s very tightly based on the original in fact it’s capable of infringing the original because of the way it orders the information and so forth and so the derivative work usually almost always is going to be by you or someone you licensed the ability to make that derivative too um if someone came along and did a workbook to your book they could do that they would just have to be careful that that they’re not sort of copying a lot of your language um using every single one of the headlines perhaps that you used in your original book or certainly none of the original illustrations and you know things like that um now what you’re talking about is really is is the process of of uh of influence right which which is how artists and inventors do what they do is they’re influenced and if you if you take something uh and you’re influenced by like some some writers for example they will they will simply copy out over and over short stories by Hemingway or or or rewrite The Great Gatsby or something just to develop this kind of hand ey uh brain hand connection to a certain style and indeed even after just reading a certain author

I start to think a little bit like the their Pros style and I can at least for a little while after I can kind of mimic the way they write right that voice is in my head so people are always going to be influenced and this is one of the arguments that that the AI vendors have made um in defending themselves against copyright suits from artists is they’re saying artists already read everything they can or view all the images they can and go off and write and paint something that’s influenced and there’s no and there’s nothing wrong with that um you’re just saying you don’t like it because our system has has a perfect memory um it can remember everything it wrote but we’re and they’ll win on this argument um but we’re not producing output that infringes on what you wrote we read your stuff but that is not going to be uh the courts will not hold that that’s that’s a problem I think it’ll only be a problem in those edge cases which chat GPT I think is already cured where people were able to prompt chat GPT to Output entire New York Times articles right so that that is a clear infringement of output so I I I think what you’re talking about

[88:10]

again is is if you change it enough it’s if it’s transformative and it no longer infringes on the expression or the organization of elements um but it’s just something like a theme like Hemingways of obsession with death or something or um if it’s a kind of a a cynical gwiz attitude like JD salinger’s catcher in the Ry I mean that’s not protectable yeah I meant I meant something which is probably more in violation of not just influence but for example you take a photo let’s say you take a photo of a woman you cut cut out just an eye and then this eye becomes part of a completely abstract art which has nothing to do with this woman but you use that photos eye mhm right so you that’s what I would call a transformative yeah so there’s fair use yeah that’s where fair use had come in is how much of the original work did you use how uh distinctive was it like was the eye the entire painting the entire original or was it just you took something that was barely noticeable and you just blew it up um and maybe used it more maybe you

didn’t even blow it up and then does it um was it done for a profit motive was it commercial in nature um and how how much of the new work does this borrowed work take up like if the I is 97% of my thing then it’s worse so it’s a very subjective test it’s like a four-part test I see so this this has been litigated many times in Solutions because I think it will apply to AI generation if the original work is copyrighted by let’s say the AI company model or the or it’s not because it was generated right then then this this kind of discussions might happen and they happen in practice already you have you know plugins in um Photoshop where you can do that kind of thing it’s the same with but I I wanted to come back to something because I was I’ve heard about this case about New York Times um I thought I’m not sure but I thought they won they will be paid so at least maybe they not they didn’t win the case but they are going to be paid by open AI for using their uh articles datab based like $60 million a year or something I know they were talking about a deal like that either before they filed suit or or they did after they filed suit as well I

didn’t know that they’d actually had an agreement but yeah that’s that’s how open a has decided to sort of settle this I guess they don’t want the lack of clarity in the law and they want to encourage because a lot of sites can also set up pay walls um they can set up anti anti-bot walls that keep keep the llm vendors from from scanning their site and so I think they’re thinking well to Ward that off let’s go to huge content creators like the New York Times and Reddit and Wikipedia and whatever and let’s just cut deals with them I don’t think Wikipedia is one of them but um so yeah they they were in negotiations I just I don’t know if they decided uh to to make an agreement or not that’s like separate from the copyright is more agreement between them so it’s a permission to use for practical purposes because that opens I I thought that opens Avenue for literally anybody to claim that if a New York Times is paid because the a part of AI training it it doesn’t set a precedent I see what one thing that’s interesting about those cases though is that if you were an employee at the New York Times let’s say from you know the 1940s until last week when the deal was done and you were writing articles and you um assigned your copyright by by

contract called a work for hire you assigned your contract to the New York Times and they own the copyright to your article and you think in all the previous decades well the salary they give me is enough you know I see what what they’re earning I see what the newspaper industry is like I see how this is going to be used it appears to be used um this is a reasonable trade they pay me 75,000 or 125,000 a year and they can have the copyright now what you’re seeing is a lot of these these artists are seeing that okay the New York Times and Reddit are doing deals and then they look at the Reddit contract and like oh my God they own the copyright to something I wrote and so forth and now they’re a little surprised because it didn’t seem like it was going to be that big a deal when they gave up that right so at some point those companies may have to turn around um just as AI did a deal with them they may have to do a deal with with their content creators because ultimately you discourage the creation of content on your platform and that’s the same problem with with not compensating all of us generally like I’m not on Reddit I don’t write for New York Times I’m not part of any group that has enough Mark uh uh negotiating leverage to get me royalties on on stuff that I’ve written um but that could change the internet subtly over time where if a search

engine doesn’t yield My article what incentive do I have to write an article you know if see people are using chat GPT or even Google and they’re finding content that that borrowed slightly from mine and 5,000 others so I can’t really you know it’s not a copyright issue um and maybe I should only get a third of a tenth of a penny each time that’s read but should it be zero you know that’s that’s going to be the question mhm yeah and there is another aspect of it because people assume or okay it depends there are different people but some people assume wrongly that a AI is almost like a repository of the in initial training data and it mingles and mixes it and then produces output that’s not what is happening AI is like a brain it it is stimulated and modified the weights in the neuron Network are modified uh by the input but the input does not stay you can argue that in well first of all there are new AIS which will have some memory but mainly on the during the inference process but most of them are not really remembering in a sense um

[94:09]

what they uh what they had they are transforming their neural uh weights to adapt to new input to produce something else so you can train something on there’s something called transfer learning you can train something on images and then add a little bit of of architecture and it can produce text right it’s very strange how it you can have transfer of one model into another that that example maybe was too too uh wild um so what I mean is is we assume that the our artist data is used in the training and there and then therefore there is some rights we have potentially in the output because it was trained on our data that’s not the case however it is possible to produce Neon networks that will preserve or architectures that will preserve the track of the data yeah so each weight like the simplest way which would be super inefficient would be that whenever a weight of a single neuron in a neuron network is changed you remember which data changed it and you make a note like that picture change that that never it’s sort of a traceability or forensic accountability

and something like embedding in the in the process of learning the the originality of the data right and this is interesting because um that could if let’s say it was registrated right something like this I don’t think it would be a good idea but if it was then you could literally have a uh royalties every time anybody creates a prompt and I’m wondering if if this has to be this wasited or legit or is not was it um did anybody discuss it I’m asking the because I have a we have um um a small think T called Fair Labs which is fair artificial intelligence uh research laps which basically talks about the the the uh what we are trying to work on was this um architecture of AI uh learning which would allow for tracing of the original input data to the to the output and technically we can achieve it but as I said it would increase the training costs and inference caused by hundreds of thousands of perc so it’s impractical but it’s technically possible so

it’s you know I’m I’m just wondering because this will become a practical issue very soon we might discuss about the social value of R the humans uh you know experiencing another human that’s all true but I stopped for example buying five RR logo designs I stopped you going to my intro to this podcast is generated by Sora every time I do the podcast I do a different intro and I’m not buying any stock footage from anybody for it I just generate it not be perfect yet but still fun right so I think it would be a huge economical problem for all creative arts um and how we are going to address it do you do you have any ideas what would be fair or if the problem would be you mean the lack of compensation the lack comp compensation for everybody who created previous uh forms of art writings and everything not on the art which is now leading to generation yeah well I I think one one solution is that creators start to go places that promise them more rights for example a number of people left places like Facebook when Facebook said if it’s if you’ve got it on

a public setting we own it um we can we can train on it um if if I think if you’re just showing your Facebook post to friends um that’s the signal to Facebook that they shouldn’t train on it because it’s not the Wide Web right it’s people can’t get to my friend post it’s behind a pay wall a wall but they say look if you’re just posting it for the public for everybody this is how our system works that’s on the internet and anything on the Internet is fair game so some some people left Facebook and they went to some other competitors who you know honestly at this point they’re going to start small I think they just don’t have the same Market penetration these these competitors to Facebook um but I think that’s one thing is that platforms develop that that start to say um we’re we’re going to we’re going to train on your your stuff and we’re going to figure out a way to pay you it could be that we just assume that whatever you’ve done we’ve trained on it’s equal value so we’re just going to pay you for whatever output you know words that make sense and so forth especially if we can prove that it’s yours um and then we’ll maybe we’ll set up blockchain or

something so that whenever this is trained on or used by some other person that’s paying us money you’ll get a very small royalty like Spotify gives people very small royalties right although question is you know given how little uh huge bands make on Spotify I’m not sure that’s the right model on the other hand um I think the percentage of my work that would make its way into any answer from a large language model is vastly smaller than than the percentage of you know uh uh Adele that um is played on Spotify she should be getting paid probably a lot more than if I have some content that it’s only used by in in sort of the statistics among the words I used and it’s it’s it’s in a sea of other stuff and it’s they’re not looking at they’re not looking at my expression per se and my inventiveness and those sorts of things they’re just looking at the relationships among the words how much is that really worth right now we don’t really have

[99:47]

a mechanism for that and maybe the analogy is similar in in Visual Arts and video and sculpt and and things like that yeah it’s almost like the way you cut your video was copied not the video content right for example um but you know this is true that the even even if we introduced the mechanics I was talking about the tracing from the original data to the output the contribution of an individual would be so minuscule almost unimaginable it was like 0100 Z one of the output per person and then you combine that with the impracticality of getting them the money yeah and and it’s like what all that effort for so little return on investments but then the question is how many outputs are there if everybody is using it all the time let’s say there is billion trillion outputs per day then this 0 point very many zeros one con accumulate to a dollar per day $10 it’s unlimited right so it really depends on the scale of this and you know company like Amazon does something that’s not too dissimilar um you can join the Kindle what’s it called Kindle

Direct program KDP uh and and you say you you sign up for the program so that anybody who is who is subscribing they can read your book without paying anything else but they have a subscription so then at the end of every month Amazon looks at its fund of let’s say $30 million and it looks to see how much has been read like because they can measure it they can see that people bought my book but guess what buying my book I’m not sure I get any money when you just subscribe to or download my book I think I only start to get earn money if you start to read pages and so it looks at how many pages of mine were read as a function of the total and then it says here’s your percentage it’s very small here’s $17.40 but or whatever you know um so so things like that you know we have the ideas the tracing is is the hard part too um they can trace it because they it’s a different system yeah yeah this is uh I I I have exactly the same experience I’m writing Children books I don’t know you I do I saw that so uh I did that participated in the Kindle uh program and honestly

for me since I’m not popular writer and not many people buy it it’s better deal than than trying to get individual sales so so it’s it’s a it’s a cool maybe it actually promotes the the uh lower uh players u in a sense I I don’t know but but it seems it’s still not a good money it’s just you know it’s it’s um interesting mechanics and maybe something like this could be could be introduced umh for that so that that that is very interesting it seems like there will be so many legal uh challenges uh Solutions which will have to come as Humanity we we cannot even imagine so moving on to another topic beside being a very successful lawyer you’re also a writer and you wrote the book about your relationship with your mother maybe you can tell us about this yeah yeah um it it’s called Ordinary magic um the subtitle tells you a lot what it’s about it’s promises I kept to my mother through life illness and a very long walk uh that walk is the community of Santiago the illness was ovarian cancer um life was she was essentially a single mother um who uh did a an amazing job uh in

very difficult circumstances and uh the book is a is a Kind of Love Story at the end of life um um it’s about my desire to I remember I remember decades before she died she used to volunteer at a sort of a nursing home or something like that and I and I I can still hear her saying just just so distraught just saying no one comes to see some of these people you know they’re just they’re just completely alone you know nobody comes to see these people and she was she had just enormous Compassionate Heart um and so when her cancer came back she had had was diagnosed in 1999 after three misdiagnoses um she had surgery did chemo it was awful it gave her 10 or so years she thought somehow maybe the power of magical thinking that if you got past a certain number of years like maybe it was five or seven that you were done with it I don’t know how she developed that belief but

it’s unfortunately not true with ovarian cancer so in 2010 uh she uh was was diagnosed with a recurrence of the cancer and um you know she went she went on this this what can I do I’m not I don’t want to do chemo right off the bat um don’t want to do surgery right now don’t want to do radiation yet especially if it’s not can help so she did things like she radically changed her diet she cut out all the sugar you know she cut out red meat just various things like that that she was was had read was would be helpful but one day she she she saw this this documentary um well first a feature film in German on her satellite TV that she got with all these German channels and it was about a father and a daughter who who walked the commo to Santiago in Spain and reconcile I guess is the idea they were strange and they reconciled and so it you had an emotional element um and then then there all right after that there was a documentary that came on that really showed the Camino itself and the history of it and so forth and she was you know she’s German she loves

[105:33]

Europe um she loves the history of it and she just she called me up and she said you know I want to do this you know and um some friends already have said they will and so forth and it was not a good time for me um I was I’d just been laid off after recession I was getting divorced trying to to to to handle that um I need knew I needed to leave the Fairly Rural Oregon town where I lived and go out and find a job somewhere I was just like you know um this is just not a good time but the whole book um really came from the realization that these were the choices that you would that that I would remember these are the kind of choices that you remember you know did I go with my mom when she wanted to do that thing when she didn’t want to deal with all the cutting and poisoning as she said characterized the doctor’s advice um they said it wasn’t necessary for her to do that yet and she’s like I I want to do something meaningful I don’t want to just sit around and you know be a Target or a victim and so I understood that and I’d read a lot of the research

in positive psychology as it’s called that what what some authors uh in in in one book called ordinary magic they called it ordinary magic and that is things like gratitude and and meaning and love are ordinary and that they’re all accessible to us we can all practice them do them try them they don’t cost something they don’t require like significant education and so forth they’re ordinary um and they’re magic in their effects um in stronger immune systems greater resilience um you know uh the ability to bounce back from um you know uh layoff uh divorce a breakup a failed company any kind of failure rejection whatever gratitude love um other forms of positivity like awe and serenity and curiosity there there’s just a lot of research right and I and I and I knew that accompanying her on the trip would be really important to her immune system and to her feeling that at the end of life you know that that she had had a life of meaning and that people had

shown up for her right so I’m I’m really thinking with with what I now call a legacy mindset um you know from momento Mori the knowledge that we will die which literally means remember death time is short to carp DM you know sees the day um and so I agreed to go with her um I set up a a Blog for her and I remember she had gone training she’d gone on you sort of trying to get into shape and she would carry a ruck sack with some weight in it and she went up to a place in Colorado called The Black Canyon and the the the rim of the canyon is about 8,100 feet and then it goes down 2500 feet in 2.2 billion years uh into the bottom and she loved being up there and one day I remember she we were on the phone I think and she said I was just walking with my sticks and I was thinking instead of doing chemo I’m doing the Camino instead of chemo I’m doing the kamino and so I created a Blog called kamino not.com and then I showed her how to use it and she was like

a fish to water she started blogging and telling everybody about her journey and you know I I would post it on Facebook and develop followers and um and once the journey started I began blogging too and so the whole book uh much of the book is based on real time accounts that were first published sometimes in in our journals her written one in my laptop that I brought with me um uh first published on on a Blog generally and so it was a real-time account we we wrote on every day that we were on the Camino and and we were joined by three other people so it was a little bit of a Wizard of Oz effect of this traveling band and uh you know with this this hilarious Politically Incorrect Spaniard who was a treer by by by trade that’s what he did is he just walked 250 miles you know every so often and um um and his uh lady friend we weren’t quite sure what the relationship was a situationship maybe um Maryanne this theatrical French woman who literally liked

you know was involved in local theater and taught French and Spanish and then a young cousin of mine 15-year-old girl who’ never been out of rural Colorado but had been just en raptured with my mom when she met her a few months earlier and asked her principal at her school can I go on this trip and there for five weeks and somehow she was allowed to go so we had this group and we’re recording it every day and you know we probably do over 400 miles of walking mom’s dealing with recent surgery on a lung and um recent planers fasciitis and hemorrhoids and um and you know we made it and then there’s a three-year period where I’m not writing really at all and she does occasionally where it’s just sort of wait and see what’s going to happen um until one day I get the call that you know we don’t think we have much time we had tried the same chemo she did in 99 it had learned and so it wasn’t effective anymore we tried a second chemo wasn’t effective we we tried

[111:23]

um very concentrated cannabis oil which actually for a couple of months sent the cancer numbers down oddly enough um but then they started to creep back up again it’s the ca125 is the ovarian cancer test where they they measure these numbers and their changes um and you know she started in January of 2014 uh she started to lose dozens and dozens of pounds and then in October uh three years after we finished the Camino I get this call from a friend of hers you know saying I don’t know how much time we have and I was living nearby in toride Colorado and I jumped in my car and drove at very high speeds just like wailing much of the way like oh my God it’s here and uh and I and I remember you know getting getting to her house and she had some friends that were there and the decision that had been made was that that was so Monumental was she was she was agreeing to go to hospice you know before she wasn’t ready that was an

mission of failure was an admission you were going to die all that stuff but she the pain that she was dealing with was just too much and she knew she needed to have some kind of paliative care and and painkillers um and so I remember and and and this this is this is kind of the theme the theme of the book you know I get there and her friends are there and um you know she she falls asleep and her friends come to me and they say you won’t be alone Cameron you know we’ll be here with you and you know I’m worried about other relatives that I’ve lost where I just felt like I wasn’t really I was just falling apart in front of them and can I do this and um and and she she calls me over and and uh you know Pats my head she knows exactly what I’m feeling and then then she goes back to sleep and uh and and this is kind of when I when I I think wrote what was the the the big part of the theme of the book which is and and it

refers to a German word for for a border or the boundary called gin um so I say you know again I went I went into my into the little spare bedroom with my same laptop I’d used on the Camino and I started to write in in my journal and then later in the blog and here it is verbatim night I am single-mindedly here now on a conspicuous path with my mother this path has the virtue of my knowing for the first time says the Camino and like it or not exactly what I’m supposed to be doing I’m fing my mother to the other side or at least to the Gren the Border if there is a Consciousness that persists then all the Pains of the body and ego will fade away and her conscious spirit will reflect only on the love she felt and showed and received in her last weeks while she is alive and able to feel either the pain of meaninglessness or the joy of meaning I will be here to influence that story my mother’s story and inevitably my own and so this is where I think I’m I’m deciding this is going to become a story or at least I’m going to

share this it’s just words we have now she sleeps a lot we walk only to the bathroom there’s no cast of characters no flowers or Cathedrals Bridges or mochilas it’s a backpack just a very small house no bigger than a theater stage and the words spoken by are to my mother I know I’ll forget the things I see and many of the things I hear I’ll forget just about everything that happens excepting what I write down I lied down on the emerald couch opposite mom’s with the same MacBook Air I carried on the Camino lay it across the incline of my thighs and begin to write in my journal I’m desperate to feel less alone in the morning I will post my journal on our blog for the first time in 3 years and I will keep posting until there is nothing more to say and so that begins what is called in the book the first week and it’s another real-time account and think one of the few if not only real time accounts of the end in other words

not written after the fact with some Guru mind or now I’m an expert or look at me on the other side and but following a a Consciousness as it goes through that Terror and the sadness can I do this how do I show up what’s normal how do I talk to a dying person I thought I want to record this and and maybe it can help people um with their own their own Journeys um and I guess well some of the feedback I think that I’ve gotten is that it’s it’s like it it makes people more grateful um either if someone’s already gone or if they’re still around and then they say I do want to reach out I do want to say something now um so that’s that was one of the things I had in mind what I didn’t have in mind was when I heard from um a hospice psychologist who said I’ve bought probably 50 copies of your book and I give them out and I said oh so to the families and the friends she said yeah and to the dying person and I said what because to me

[117:03]

this is the saddest book in the world in a way I mean I think it’s it’s not sentimental I think it’s earned but it’s it’s very emotional it’s challenging um and that’s part of the workout that people get right they it’s it’s it’s a it’s a sort of emotional workout I said’ why would you give it to the to someone who’s dying and uh she said well because they really want to know what their loved ones and their their children grandchildren are thinking and feeling and those people can’t or won’t communicate it and so they feel very alone they want to understand and they understand that when they read your book I was just it had never occurred to me right that it could be that it could benefit the actual dying to me I was like oh my God that’s so depressing but I was really projecting the American attitude about death right onto people who are like look I know I’m dying I mean you’re not going to depress me you know but I was projecting my attitude like oh you’re so vulnerable right now you don’t want something so difficult Apparently that is exactly what the dying want from us is that we engage them and and be present and available for their fears and not

sort of oh don’t talk about that or oh you’ll be fine or oh you’re going to heaven all the things we do to to deal with our own discomfort the same way about speech right there’s certain speech speech we don’t like or this is emotionally challenging mom you’ll be fine or don’t talk about that yeah this this uh is amazing gift you gave your mother and the world with with this um it’s very rare and as you said maybe this is your German background but I observe the same thing uh the the nothing is Taboo in modern uh World almost nothing everything goes except for death death is a taboo we want to forget that it exists we don’t admit it and and I used to be like this too I I thought I was thinking how would I like to die or preferably quickly and not knowing about it that was my like choice you know hurt attack or even better fall from a from a rock but quickly not not too far because if you for for one minute it’s kind of too much yes and now I think no actually no I want to be surrounded by Family you want preferability yeah that’s enough to to talk with everybody to close things and preferably not to much pain of course that’s usually unfortunately

correlated if you’re not dying suddenly but at least to have this disclosure MH and another thing which is fascinating you you said it I think indirectly or maybe in directly is the Legacy right there is a lot of talk about Legacy people want to create Legacy and what usually they mean as far as I understand is let’s say piece of art they created maybe photographs maybe um a memoir um maybe it is memories is a little bit different but maybe it is the company they’re leaving behind the achievements but what you’re suggesting is the Legacy individual Legacy is a story that’s the most valuable Legacy to create a story for the maybe the world maybe the family but the story itself is the Legacy well and I think of the story is always the Legacy because even if you’ve left behind the Memoir or the company or the whatever um the legacy is your story about about it about why that was meaningful why was this company meaningful because of the Blood Sweat and Tears and the resourcefulness and the Ingenuity of you and your co-founders and your employees because

of the the products and and the fact that you help people out in the world or gave them some comfort or or whatever entertainment um the fact that you employed people so whatever your values are will create the story um and and so this is the thing where the story is malleable I knew that there were certain interpretations of my mother’s life that she felt bitter about and didn’t think was in a sense a good enough story it wasn’t fair wasn’t fair that she’ done everything she could and it the cancer didn’t go away and she didn’t want to die and she was otherwise healthy and she ate healthy and she did all these things um so I knew that that I was going to influence her story to talk about what a good mother she was you know how how beloved she was among her friends so I found a lot of opportunities to catch her doing things right to be honest things I should have been doing all along or would would love to have been doing all along and we don’t do enough for our loved ones um until oh look there’s not much time right um you get really clear in those moments I

there’s a wonderful sort of paraphrase from the great great uh literary critic Samuel Johnson uh English um hundreds of years ago and he said nothing there’s nothing that concentrates the mind like a hanging right it focuses you and and that’s when you realize that oh if you have any empathy at all you’re thinking what is this person who is near the end thinking or what is this person who’s in my life now going to think later if you want to really get into it right I think about how my my fiance will feel if I predes her and I die first I think about that and I start to plan around that right it’s like it’s projecting your empathy into the future and into another person so it’s an act of imagination so having a legacy mindset it in in some cases it was for you know you could say it was for my mother but it also is an important part of my legacy now that think of myself as the person who did that yeah I I I gave up Prime earning careers of my life to go live

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in rural Colorado and look after my mom you know that that has meaning Beyond whatever I gave up um I wrote a book which was you know the second most meaningful experience of my life right I wouldn’t give that up for anything and and the dying will tell you that if you want to know what really matters it’s not like you have to guess you know we’ve we’ve interviewed the dying we know that they care about relationships about the love that they did or didn’t give you know um about chance and risk they didn’t take because they were afraid about caring too much about somebody’s opinion so knowing that you can reverse engineer it toggle back to the present and go I don’t care him that much about what that person thinks he’s not going to be there at the end why am I why am I so worried about this coworker this professor or this classmate they’re not going to be around in fact I don’t even think about people who I thought about a lot five years ago I don’t care at all what now what they thought I mean why was it so important to me then so if you can do these little Mind Tricks you realize it’s not important but the Legacy mindset of thrusting yourself into a future where maybe you’re on your deathbed or you’re in your last years or

something it forces perspective you get a feel for the perspective it’s like a different set of glasses then you toggle back into the real world and you can apply that perspective now and make decisions for your future self you it’s it’s about honoring your future self and thinking how do I want that person to feel how do I want my mother to feel how do I want my fiance to feel uh at this point in the future and then planning and changing my my behavior for that yes I think it is missing in because of the speed of life because of uh career because we are working so much it’s very much missing and this this concept of uh projecting yourself into the future and also attending to the loved ones especially at the times of of death seems to be it I don’t want to accuse people too much like I don’t want to say lost but it’s not always happening right in the like in in my experience I uh in my family we were traditional Catholics right so in uh in

Poland so basically what happened is when people were dying they were always dying together so we were attending it was for me as a child was so stressful and and um um sad I was like 9 uh 12 when my grand mother Grand grandmother died right but I was there we were surrounding her uh when she was dying and then we we were let go just before they died but my parents for example always attend the the moments of death for everybody I think they had an opportunity and I always find like it’s it’s extremely difficult maybe I don’t want to go through this experience and now I think like this is the most valuable thing ever like and it’s it’s a sacred like I said an oblig of sorts I mean not like a a government’s going to force you sort of obligation but is isn’t this the least can do to yeah it’s it’s it’s challenging we can’t run from every challenging feeling yeah right and it’s the same thing we do when we want to shut people up um we don’t want to talk about think about death we don’t want other people to and so many people don’t even let the dying talk about their

fears which I think which to me is one of the saddest things is to be all along with your fears because your your your daughter and your stepson and your granddaughter and and your friends don’t want you to talk about a time when you won’t be here or don’t want you to talk about how sad you are that that that you won’t see them or you’re sad about how they’ll feel when you’re gone which is a big consideration for the dying actually it’s how other people will feel after um and to to make people be alone with those feelings because we don’t want to try to manage our own discomfort we’re just triggered and say no stop right um it shuts PE it it literally does shut down their speech um but particularly it shuts down their sort of um the emotional expression and and and and and comfort and meeting them where they are that I think hospice people trained in it are good at and what they do is is criminally underpaid um I think they’re doing some of the most important work and anyone who’s ever about to to die could probably agree that that sometimes they’re the

only people there and they’re certainly the only people that that you know are are have training to understand how not to shut you down for the most part and and to try to be with whatever you’re experiencing including the crazy talk right you don’t say oh that doesn’t make any sense mom you say oh I I yes you are seeing the three basic colors my mom I don’t know what what it was there was emerald and green and torald I mean she was just making stuff up but that’s essentially what the dying do it’s like they’re at the threshold of Consciousness and they start to use this very poetic um metaphorical and sometimes nonsensical language to talk about standing at the threshold to a place where Consciousness is different and we’re like oh don’t say that or don’t talk that way or you know it’s and it just needs a minimum of Education just a minimum of awareness to go oh that’s normal that’s okay mhm yeah you’re right people sometimes point out to this like trying to rationalize or or panicking or uh like expressing extreme sad emotions which is maybe even justifiable but it maybe not the best way in this moment it’s it’s easy to say I I have never

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participated yet in anybody’s that directly like even the grandma it was not during the the moments I don’t know but it is very it’s an amazing thing if you can do it as as you as you said and then let’s transition to the next book which you’re working on um because as as I understand it it’s a it’s a can I is it valid to call it the transition from the sadness of momori toward Carm the justification of Life yeah I mean you know the thing that happens when when we have a mindset of Legacy when we’re living a little bit in how we’ll feel in the future and how others will feel and how we’ll feel about the story that we created and the things we did and the things we didn’t do when you’re in that mindset um whether it’s it’s in in you know among psychologists or among in in wisdom Traditions the effect is to create gratitude which is another superpower of positivity that

that helps with everything um you know positivity uh confidence optimism fights depression all those things um but as you realize what’s important for example my self-expression or this idea I have or me standing up for myself and what’s not important for example what these people might think about it or um getting a negative comment on Facebook or um being criticized by a colleague or whatever um or failing according to however I overdefined that term and we generally do um when I have the perspective that the legy legy mindset sort of briefly shifts me into this little mental hack um I’m more Fearless right it’s more courage um to to create to reach out to relate to people to connect to to pursue that relationship at work to Mentor that person on the job to um spend that time with with your son instead of the great Dodge of I don’t have time know no you always have time you

need to rephrase it whenever you say that you need to substitute the words I have higher priorities I’m going to prioritize them instead but never say you don’t have time right not in a situation like that because people get it anyway the kid realizes oh he’s got time for other stuff I’m not a priority so you know that what I think this this whole journey with with ordinary magic made me realize is that there is a real power to these mindsets of gratitude and meaning and purpose and and we can leverage those in in similar ways to what I did I mean I you know as the phrase goes I took my broken heart turned it into art you know I I I had an idea that what I was recording in our blog with photos with video could become a story somehow or at least at least a memory for us um and um and it did and so it added to my life as well so there was a kind of seizing the day and and honestly when I was working on this book I felt such a sense of meaning and purpose that

it it was not only like a um an insulation or IM immunization against the worst effects of grief um giving me meaning and purpose and positivity and optimism and something that was that was like okay this is what I’m doing and and my life has meaning and this whole process I’m making meaning out of it and during that process I I don’t think I ever felt more Fearless about I don’t care what anybody thinks you know like what I’m writing here all the things I’m revealing about myself all the vulnerability all the risk of people criticizing this or that i’ never cared less in my life than when I was animated by that sense of purpose um and by the meaning that I knew I was making of my mom’s life and of my life and of the lives of anybody who happened to read it um and and I realize that you know that that’s the flow state that we all want to be in and when I when I’ve done Executive coaching and career coaching that’s essentially what I tell people to solve for is what gets you into the Flow State let’s look at the combination of strengths which

are talents that you cultivate maybe over 10,000 hours um in the service of something personally meaningful to you so meaning is huge even in in group flow like a great basketball team or a quintet uh at just the right level of challenge where it’s not too hard it’s not too easy but you’re surfing the wave knowing you could crash at any time there’s a little bit of danger but you also have a sense of Mastery right then you get into the Flow State so the Flow State armored me against grief depression and caring too much about what people might think that that often can get in the way of creativity yeah this is a common among artists uh uh it and it requires kind of two things F first is is a self-confidence which you develop through through that process that you don’t care you really don’t care it’s not like you say you don’t care you actually don’t care because the process itself gives you the pleasure we we actually discussed it with with my guest to two episodes ago how we cons consider our art right like when when I create a movie the process itself is hard but when I look at it later I think it’s a masterpiece no one else thinks so it doesn’t

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get uh Oscar it doesn’t get you know top Awards it doesn’t matter this is my little baby and I love it right and I think maybe you experienced similar thing you wrote it and it might be appreciated by the public might not be this this dep and this is where I think the authorship does matter yeah you know if I’m watching your video and and have the sense and this is sometimes where I’m interested in knowing the context of the the the the artist right what what were they dealing with at the time uh some sometimes it’s nice to experience something on first impression like just not knowing anything about the work of art but in order to understand originality and what they’re building upon what’s gone before um and maybe what uh obstacles they were facing sometimes the biography can be interesting and um certainly the fact that you’re at least real that you’re at least a human and now I look at your movie and I think oh I’m I’m watching the results of another human being which can be very exciting if I believe we’re all one who’s in a flow State who has lost complete track of time is firing on all cylinders it’s absolutely effortless what

they’re doing they don’t get tired um that’s what I’m watching right or that’s what I’m reading is somebody who is in that state if if if this book had been produced by AI it could still be capable of amusing people moving people and so forth but it would be a little bit different not thinking oh someone actually went through this someone with a brain I can relate to went through these things and chose to write to write about it in this way it would be completely different because we would need to ask the question what is the value and then we go to philosophical questions where the value come from at all where the value meaning purpose but value let’s say of a book comes from is it the content only or is the process of creating in by a human mhm so I I think I that’s that that’s the beautiful uh Mountain have a value in itself as PR produced by nature or it’s only beautiful because we look at that mountain and we perceive it and this is eliciting Elation let’s say it us so I I think that that will save art in the time of AI I I really think yeah yeah

there’s already a lot of AI generated music on the music streaming channels um and they’re they’re now getting royalties that compete with human royalties um I’d love a filter that says I don’t really need that I’d rather give money to individual artists you know the regulation ideas that are being proposed generally are have a consensus around if something is a is an AI Avatar or is produced by AI that you should say so you know I mean not not everything you produce but a chatbot for example an organization can’t pretend it’s a real customer service representative uh in in the in the US the FTC would come down on them in Europe there’s other other bodies and so forth but you know the idea of not misrepresenting that if it’s AI I’m talking to human and not vice versa which seems like it’d be more rare but that I’m human and it’s saying oh I’m just AI I can’t help you with that or you know whatever someone reason someone might have for evading responsibility by saying that wasn’t a human so we we do care what who’s the author and who had the experience that they’re talking about yes and I I wanted to come back to to your uh a little bit to to your second

book is it already published you’re working on it right I’m I’m working on it um in a way I’m kind of workshopping it in in a form of of public speaking so I’m I’m going out and talking about the idea um you know Keet addresses or workshops and getting feedback and then continuing to revise and draft so it’s a little bit like putting out a minimum valuable product for a uh for a startup company they put out just enough of a product that people can use it and they can give feedback on it and I think that’s what a keynote is is that it’s useful um it takes less time than to read a whole book so it’s more manageable and consumable for the audience and they can still give me feedback so but the idea for the book is to uh transition from from looking into uh to the past to looking into the future yeah or to enjoying the to projecting your legacy into the future while enjoying today yeah and to you know get getting more of the effect of enjoying today because you know the problem is we think we have time and look at the results of when you think you have plenty

of time I can learn that instrument sometime later I can learn that language sometime later I’ll learn to dance one day um I’ll I’ll tell I’ll tell this person I love them now and then but not right now um I’ll uh I’ll raise I’ll raise my hand at work sometime when I feel better whatever you you can put off anything you know and this is why nothing concentrates the mind like a hanging the beauty of that is that you have to you have to break through what I think is an evolutionarily evolved level of denial like we have to have a certain level of denial because most of our energies have to go to survival so it can’t be sitting around moping about time is short and death and whatever but it’s been shown that that that is a very powerful practice and one of the things that that I think brought me back to the usefulness of this in every context not just regular life but at work um was um Steve Jobs famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech and in one part of that speech he says the knowledge that I’ll be dead soon is one of the most important

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tools I’ve ever encountered to make life’s big choices they said you know when when you see that that time is limited and you see what really matters as I said in the book The Pains of the ego Fade Away um you don’t care as much about what people think and whether it’s going to succeed or Not by whatever definition um you you become more fearless and you know as he put it you you lose the illusion that you’re protecting yourself from anything he said you’re already naked and so I thought well Steve’s not here to talk about why that works so well and to give many different examples and visualizations and tools for for temporarily locking into that mindset but you can toggle back in and out of that mindset throughout the day you can do it as a more lengthy practice at a retreat in a meditation a visualization um a plant medicine Journey um or you can do it in terms of um um you know writing your obituary and man imagining your ulog or simply imagining

that you know like the conversation I’m having right now um I at some point we we take our whole experience for granted or we say this isn’t good enough so if I stop and I go imagine that you’re looking at this scene you’re remembering it from your deathbed and you know the the sort of nness of being in this room with these books and these lights and these cameras and with having this conversation with you and maybe it’s the only such conversation we ever had and I can see it a little bit with the eyes of nostalgia now and I can see like your intelligence and your good faith and your curiosity and I’m feeling grateful for that and you know and and so I can start to experience the nostalgia in the moment toggle back to the present and appreciate this moment more um and then create more moments like that that I will then have to remember later when I look back and think did I have a good enough life and Fe and have less fear of getting to the end and that fear of feeling it didn’t matter it wasn’t good enough and so forth right I don’t we don’t

want that so how can we build in some protection against that now it’s to start toggling into that line mindset of how will you feel about this at some later time when you realize this was the only time this ever happened mhm yeah I I wonder if this reflection has to always come later in life um it it seems like uh like young people generally never think this way they think they have so much time and it’s not necessarily always true right you can die any time and then there’s so much time wasted on [ __ ] like Fame right this is one of the biggest bullshits yeah or or even worse because not practical in terms of finances fake Fame like having a million uh views on Tik Tok or um I don’t know 100,000 sub subscribers on YouTube you’re not famous when you have 100,000 subscribers because there is 100,000 people who have 100,000 subscribers right so it’s even fake right so so um and by the way I have these conversations I I have no objective hope of getting a lot of subscribers I really did it because but you better sign up yeah of course

but if you don’t then you know and no the the the the point is I would love to have but the point is that I love the conversations I’m doing it for conversations I have like zero um even hope but not hope is not a good word expectation to make any money ever from it and that’s the best way to create not aach to an outcome it’s for fun and for f for fun is also to simple words it’s for the experience of of the conversation with super interesting people and that’s that’s wonderful and the fact that it can be recorded it’s in in addition to that that’s why I like the conversation right I speak so much and this it’s a guests are coming and then I talk for 10 minutes right like it’s not an interview so it’s it’s it’s wonderful I I highly recommend for everybody to do that because it’s a focused conversation right it’s not conversation somebody comes in and and interrupts which is also fun but it’s it’s more focused so you can like discuss a little bit deeper it’s very cool so I think your your philosophy of life is very valid and hopefully people would more people would follow it well yeah you you raised an interesting question which is

why why would someone who’s um younger on average be less likely to have the conversation well I think part of it is um developing that mindset of momento Mori of remembering that you’ll die or remembering that time is short and it’s funny that they use the word remembering not realizing or concluding or or deciding or or you know whatever it’s like it’s something you already knew but we’re in constant denial so you have to remember it uh or or or recollection of death is what it transl Ates too there’s a Buddhist term for MTO Mori and ISL Islam and others they it’s the same idea of remembering it as if you could forget well we do forget and What Makes You Remember two things really high on the list right nearly dying yourself and being close to someone who dies right those are two two of the best reminders it could be certain books you read it could be movies that you experience it could be meditations you do so there’s all sorts of ways that you can remind yourself that time is short and to give into the right perspective

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if you’re open to that and you’re not running from it right if if you think it’s morbid and you try to cancel the whole conversation right there with that judgment um or depressing or or whatever else you know we we do to shut down what what’s sort of mildly I don’t even know that it’s unpleasant to be honest I mean I I find it’s kind of a great relief to think to to talk about what matters and what I want to matter in other people and and what my priorities should be but so so young people on average haven’t have have sort of experienced less physical decline fewer battering of their own system where they almost died fewer of their friends have had that happen their fewer of their relatives have had that happen right so they but as you go through and and and as you as you get hit by other things that require resilience like a layoff or firing or a breakup or a divorce or the death of a dog or um a failure of an idea or a company or something failure meaning I had a certain expectation right because nothing’s ever failed but the story you supply to it but um I think as people go through more of that it’s like me going through this

experience with my mother is really and following a divorce really and then the pandemic right like I I care so much more about creating meaning with other people because of those experiences where I could see them being taken away just as you care about for speech with your experience of seeing it taken away mhm you know yeah yeah I I think you you are right um there is well this this conversation could could liter go forever because this is a conversation of what what really matters what I just wanted to say like regarding this young people’s think like of course you are young you don’t think about death but I I travel to many countries and I notied one interesting correlation I don’t know if there’s coration and it might be a little bit the you know noble savage um view view point but like I was trying to like meeting I was meeting people I was trying to kind of compare life in Western uh world with the life of let’s say some tribes or for example the Mongolia and travel to Mongolia was particularly interesting to see people living in uras in what they called G um

in very simple conditions right and back then I am and I’m still convinced it probably was actually true not just perception I have a feeling think that they are very happy the same uh compared to westerners the same thing happened in C America South America and and that’s like a paradox because they’re very poor they’re struggling they’re exp experiencing pain um they children might die which is the biggest tragedy imaginable and so on and yet they seem happy and I was wondering maybe this is connected to this concept of that mortality is essential for any purpose and meaning because if we take it to an extreme let’s imagine we live forever would any experience have any value ever meaning yeah are things precious is uh yeah does does this experience really have can I create that that memory of nostalgia by imagining myself on my deathbed to get to this experience will that will that feeling ever really exist if uh it was um not the exact experience but if I was always going to be around and so nothing was particularly Monumental in my life you know

nothing really stands out in a Thousand-Year 2,000 year lifespan you know so maybe it’s an excuse but maybe it’s a good a good kind of final point that uh the fact that we’re moral uh is in itself a value because the fact that we have limited time affects our allocation of that time yeah tell that to the tech Bros who trying to extend their lifespans uh oh yeah yeah this will happen but it will never be a infinite you can let’s extend it to 200 300 years really any difference dog Liv 7 13 years yeah and are you still interested do you have enough uh entertainment and travel be very interested to do that because I only visit a 70 countries I want to visit 200 I don’t have enough time I for example I calculated recently that the number of books I have in this uh house half of them I haven’t read more than half I have not enough time in my life to read all of them even if I read every day this is this is sad right so I’m interested but immortality complete immortality even even the Christian version of immortality or whatever even better version

Muslim version right um I’m not sure isn’t it boring after a while to worship god with the like Psalm you know and like saying you see the question uh played out in in movies about um Immortal beings like vampires who ch to be human to fall in love elves in The Lord of the Ring yeah to have an experience they otherwise could never have if they got to live forever and everything is like yeah there’s always literally there’s always tomorrow right I can do that tomorrow nothing nothing particularly uh urgent about today yep well so this will be an interesting I think to we will be facing with the life extension in the future in Far Future probably not that soon or with the digital uploads to quantum computers which which may be more realistic than traditional computers yeah okay thank you very much for the conversation that’s great good

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