No Mercy / No Malice: Office Hours

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1:14I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. For a special edition of our newsletter, we're sharing a few of our favorite office hour questions from our podcast listeners. Office Hours by the Prop G Pod.

1:33Hi, Prof G. My name is Ben from Oakland, California, right across the bay from your favorite city, San Francisco. My question focuses on something that you talk very honestly about, and that is fatherhood. My wife and I are expecting our first child next month. We're both very excited and slightly terrified, and we're looking forward to our new titles of parents. My question is, if you could do it all over again from the beginning, what would you do differently in regards to raising children? And what would you double down on? First off, congratulations. One thing I would not do is ever be in the delivery room again.

2:07I found it so disturbing. They were much more worried about me. I had to sit down. I was so nauseous. I don't buy this notion that men should be in the delivery room. And I know that sounds very 60s, but whatever. Sue me. Look, a couple of things you're going to feel or things I felt. I was totally freaked out with my first kid. I was worried I didn't have enough money. I had not been especially good at relationships. I was worried that, you know, now if I fuck up this relationship with this partner, it's going to have more impact. The whole thing kind of freaked me out. I think that was somewhat natural.

2:45I was also very excited. I did not love this thing when it came out. People talk about you're just instantly in love with it. I fell in love with my boys over time. but it just looked like a science experiment to me. So I think, and maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm just weird or fucked up in the head, but if you feel those things, know that other people feel them as well. Fear, anxiety. I would say initially what I would do, that I did do and I think was smart, I think you're there to be very supportive of your wife. I think you have responsibility for the economics of the household because I think generally speaking, women, at least early in the child's life, are more important to the kid.

3:28You're mostly useless, and we pretend that it's a ton of fun the first year. It's not. And the dad doesn't play a huge role. I think your role is to be supportive of your wife and do the night feedings. Make sure that your wife gets some sleep and recognize that having kids is really hard and stressful, especially initially. It sounds easy to say for me, but if you have the flexibility and the economics, I would have a second one sooner rather than later. I find having two is three or four times better than one. I think just having one creates too much pressure or tension on that one child. I was an only child.

4:06And I think that person most likely grows up a little bit more selfish. I think the negotiation and the arguments and the tension and the joy that two kids bring to a household is really wonderful. So I'm really glad I did too. But, you know, just recognize there is an arc to happiness. And across almost every socioeconomic group and every culture and every geographic boundary, happiness looks like a smile. And that is up until this point, your life was mostly about Star Wars and football games and getting drunk with buddies. And then you get dramatically less happy because kids and your career are stressful.

4:43You realize that you're not going to be senator or have a fragrance named after you. And generally speaking, people are the least happy from kind of the ages of 25 to 45. So if you feel stressed out and a little bit unhappy, that's okay. That's part of it. But look, it's impossible to explain until it happens. But you do fall in love with this thing. I am the only thing in my life that's more important to me than me, because I'm a very selfish person, are my kids. and it's also hands down the most rewarding thing. It's also wonderful that you're having kids. I think it's great that people, having a kid is kind of the ultimate expression of optimism and a commitment to your partner because whether you like it or not, you're in each other's lives for 18 years and the, you know, and there's some truth to the fact that the best thing you can do for your kids is to be a very generous, loving person to your partner because they'll see that and it creates a harmonious lifestyle.

5:39Ben from Oakland, congratulations to you and your partner.

5:47Prof G-Dog, this is Paul from Chicago, Illinois. Here's a thought. Could ChatGPT save us from social media and political rhetoric that's become unencumbered by facts? It doesn't seem like a technical stretch to deploy ChatGPT as a real-time fact-checker of sorts of every tweet or social media post. Perhaps instead of a blue check, Elon's engineers could work on a Pinocchio icon whose nose length correlates with an AI test of the accuracy of each tweet. I'm curious whether you think this is a practical application of AI or a Pollyannish pipe dream. Cheers. Paul from Chicago. Thanks so much for the thoughtful question.

6:31So just a few stats. Fact-checking organizations are building their own AI-driven tools to help deal with the proliferation of online misinformation. According to a 2020 Statista survey, 80 % of U.S. adults have consumed fake news and 38 % have accidentally shared it. In 2020, Neutral, the biggest fact-checking team in the EU, and it's Neutral spelled N-E-W-T-R-A-L, developed its multilingual AI language model Claim Hunter, right? So serious fact-checking using AI. Developers use 10 ,000 statements to train the system to identify claims made by social media accounts and also political figures.

7:05and it accelerates the fact-checking process because the AI technology flags statements that aren't questions or opinions for the fact-checkers to review. And according to Wired, it has cut the time normally spent identifying statements by 70 to 80 % or fact-checking. So although AI is helping accelerate the fact-checking process, it's still a long way from being fully automated and big tech still hasn't fixed AI's misinformation problem. So large language models, including ChatGPT, may be able to produce text that looks like it was written by a person, but they are unable to detect nuance in language and sometimes make things up.

7:40So I went on Anderson Cooper, AC360, and Anderson introduced me, gave my kind of a long-winded introduction to who I am and called me an expert in technology and AI. And then he said, I didn't write that. And my staff didn't write that either. No human wrote it. That was written by a new online tool called ChatGPT. It's a program. And I said, you're right. It's two things. It's remarkable because I would have believed that they did it. And two, it was wrong. By any stretch of the imagination, I am not an expert in AI. And for ChatGPT to call me an expert in AI means, quite frankly, it doesn't know what it's talking about.

8:14In January, researchers at NewsGuard, a fact-checking technology company, tested ChatGPT's accuracy by giving it 100 prompts relating to common false narratives around U.S. politics and healthcare. And ChatGPT produced false narratives in 80 % of its narratives. So actually, you're looking at this as a glass half fault, and that is that AI will be used to fact check. So far, the majority of things I have seen is that ChatGPT will likely, at least in the short run, be weaponized to spread misinformation. And that is, you can say to ChatGPT or a large language model, give me 15 statements written in the style of the CDC that mRNA vaccines alter your DNA.

8:59And a large language model will be able to spit out 15 snackable, tweetable, Instagrammable statements that feel real that are false. And the problem is incentives. And that is the incentives are to grab attention and find things that get circulated. And unfortunately, our species is much more drawn to the novel and catastrophe. You'll have AI-driven fact-checking, but I wonder if the misinformation of the people with incentive to spread disinformation will get out ahead because the platforms will sort of ignore it and look the other way. Because saying that mRNA vaccines alter your DNA, that post spreads faster and results in more engagement and more clicks and more Nissan ads.

9:45a really interesting question and more to come here. Thank you, Paul from Chicago.

9:57Hey, Scott, this is Robin Daniels calling from Copenhagen, Denmark. I actually spent the last 20 years in the US in marketing where I was CMO of WeWork, among many other things. I'm a big fan of your show. And my question to you is this, there's a lot of things to be worried about in the world right now. And you frequently rant about them and I love it. But what are you hopeful about? For example, I spend a lot of my time these days with startups and it always makes me hopeful for the future because you've got these brilliant, motivated young people who are trying to solve these massive challenges that we're facing in the world.

10:29They care so much and they want to make a difference. It's kind of my antidote to the negative news cycles that seem to dominate these days. But what about you? What makes you hopeful? Thanks a lot and keep doing what you're doing. Take care. Robin from Copenhagen, you are literally what everybody needed today. And I love your optimism. And that's a wonderful question. So thank you for that. So you're absolutely right. We are more depressed and cynical than we should be for a lot of reasons. But one of them is the media wants to put us on high alert. The media knows that we're basically as a species like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

11:05We're drawn to movement and violence. And a lot of it has to do with cadence and news is a profit machine, where every day you're trying to capture people's attention and keep them engaged. But if you take the perspective of the lens back and look at it globally, even with all the problems around climate change and divisiveness and nationalism, it's just hard. It would be hard to argue that things haven't gotten a lot better consistently around the world. Now, what makes me hopeful, every time I teach a class at Stern, I teach big classes. They're usually around 300 kids. When I say kids, they're young adults, average age 27.

11:42I think every year they get smarter, faster, more socially conscious, more adept with technology. I just think we are producing a group of really impressive, talented, socially minded individuals who will do a better job running the world. I'm super optimistic about the decisions we've made or some of the government actions recently around climate change. We're supposedly going to reduce with this most recent climate legislation, carbon emissions by 40%. I'm in London. I think the majority of the cars here are electric. And just from a mentality standpoint, and I'm not an environmentalist, it feels as if we've hit a tipping point where even the climate change deniers are sort of acquiescing and going out and buying a Tesla just to signal that they are hip and rich or whatever.

12:30It feels as if we've just hit a tipping point around climate change. I love that Ukrainians are demonstrating courage, grace, incredible grit, and with the help of our intelligence services and arms being sent to them from our brothers and sisters in the European Union and in America are pushing back on tyranny. I love the fact that the Russians are on the run. I just think that, you know what makes me really hopeful? Vaccines. And it makes me feel really good about America. No one's lining up for Russian or Chinese vaccines. We produce the best vaccines in the world. And by some estimates, if we hadn't produced these vaccines as quickly, we would have lost another one to two million Americans.

13:10I think there's a ton to be optimistic about. I think the world gets slightly better every day. So I'm excited about coming out of a, I think we need to get on with a recession. I think prices should come down for young people. in sum, any honest appraisal of data that goes more than a year, three, five years backward and forward spells one thing, one thing, the world gets better every day. Thanks for the question, Robin. That's all for this episode. Again, if you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at propgmedia.com.

14:02Life is so rich.

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