POD 152: An Age of Extremes
Out Friday AM. Listen.
Trump’s war on the media expands and intensifies; AI doomers vs AI maximalists; and Anonymous Banker on what’s behind the Puck-Air Mail deal.
PVA CONVERSATION
Troy: Let’s imagine for a second that we are transported back to a before-time in media…
Where we admired the people who delivered us the news and trusted the institutions that parsed through the difficult issues to bring it to us. We might have found temporary reassurance in a grizzled Walter Cronkite, his sombre voice of experience, offering us the following, just before he signed off for the evening:
“Artificial intelligence — some say it will be our undoing, others our salvation. What is certain tonight is that we do not know. And history will judge whether we chose wisely.
And that’s the way it is.”
With a “that’s the way it is” we find some closure in the moment, not that things are fine but that order would somehow emerge, that we could file the item away temporarily with an “acknowledgment” or “processed” checkmark. All good for now! Turn the dial to the Late Show. Let’s wind down.
Today’s media world affords no such comfort.
We soak in media in our media now — that lonely, endless, often disorienting two-way cesspool, where our efforts to process the present meet the human need to tell others who we are and what we stand for. Where facts get run over by agenda. Here, participation is rated and ranked, in likes, comments and the velocity with which the memes are passed through the network. You can lurk. Or you can emerge. Consequence lands with the weight of a pixel, until someone mistakes the virtual for the real.
In chaos-powered Trump world, the game plays at speed of exhaustion. Each day a new level, forcing us once again to second guess what we believe, what we value, to pull back layers of self interest and greed, or just attempt to decode the dastardly performance art of the information space.
Woah! So many new levels this week! What truly motivated the Kirk shooter, why does it even matter, is the left really more malignant than the right? Did Kimmel get what he deserved? Aren’t comics supposed to do this? Free speech vs. hate speech vs. thought control. Are we slipping into authoritarianism? Should we get serious about platforms social externalities? I would snap that skinny new iPhone. Wait, those new Meta glasses look kinda cool. Wow, there’s Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, and Satya Nadella at a King’s white tie dinner in London! Maybe they travelled together. Wait, did Tucker just say something reasonable?
And, always looming, the big-boss of them all, will AI kill us?
Listening to AI doomer, Eliezer Yudkowsky pump his new book “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” on the Hard Fork podcast this week made me feel anxious and powerless. Eliezer argues we’re building a god with a toddler’s ethics and an adult’s motor skills. His core claim is brutally simple: intelligence doesn’t equal benevolence, alignment won’t be solved on the first try, and there are no mulligans at superhuman scale. “If you screw up, everybody’s dead,” he says, so treat chips like uranium and data centers like enrichment plants. His policy: a global moratorium, supervised compute, and, if a nation goes rogue, “conventional strikes on data centers.” It’s climate accords with airstrikes—a rhetorical 10 on the DEFCON scale.
Across the trench are the optimists: founders and financiers who think alignment is an engineering problem, not a theological one. They point to today’s models behaving “polite,” cite interpretability progress, and insist the tools will get safer as they get smarter. Yudkowsky’s counter is withering: getting a chatbot to “talk nice” isn’t proof it will “act nice” once it can outthink us. Today’s failures—suicide bait, delusions, sycophancy—are cracks showing at low altitude.
The gap isn’t just risk tolerance; it’s worldview. Doomers see irreversibility and demand institutions that can say “stop.” Optimists see compounding capability and trust we’ll steer. In between is a beguiled public, newly fluent in AI, trying to decide which religion feels like prudence, and which one feels like hubris.
We no longer have a Cronkite to close the broadcast with “that’s the way it is.” Instead we’re left in the blur between apocalypse and abundance, forced to pick which version of reality we want to believe. The hard part isn’t not knowing, it’s that no one can offer comfort in the not knowing. Sadly, those that get the attention are often just the loudest, the most shameless or just the best at playing the new game.
BRIAN: Thousands of Cronkites
I try to avoid gauzy nostalgia. That includes reverence for Cronkite. He was a product of his era: few options, the blandness of Eisenhower America and a unifying presence only to a slice of America. Those times are gone, weren’t as great as people like to pretend, and are never returning.
What we see in the Information Space is thousands of Cronkites that synthesize events through the preferred lens of their captive audiences. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was immediately turned into a content prompt by various factions. Conveniently the blame fell on whatever the audience doesn’t like: trans people, progressives, woke, university professors, Israel, video games, groypers, you name it.
We went from too little choice to arguably too much choice. On an individual level, this kind of diversity is great. Societally, I’m less sure. The government’s obnoxious overreach to squelch speech it doesn’t like is an attack on a restraint to its power. A fragmented media ecosystem serves to disempower the checks on power institutional media has served. The capitulation of those running these media companies is a stain on their records. You get paid the big bucks to make tough decisions. And if you’re the CEO of a media company, you signed up for this, even if you make most of your money overcharging families to meet cartoon characters and pumping out empty-calorie franchise movies.
It’s an odd time, and the only refuge I’m finding is in articles like this, and conversations with people who understand the chaos and confusion. Thanks for writing. Media could use you at the helm right now!!
Good pod and a good write up, very complementary today. My first read on Kimmel was that this was more of the same, but the reaction seems to be pretty strong and I think people are starting to get sick of Trump doing this. Ted Cruz today joined the voices saying this wasn't the right way to act. We'll see what happens. I think Iger loses the most on this. Such a cowardly act. Jimmy didn't say anything remotely offensive. In contrast, I was really pleased with the way you all responded today. No hedging. Respect!