What Is A Human For?

**Jon Favreau** (0:00)
Offline is brought to you by Helen Keller International. It's easy to feel like the world's problems are too big for any one person to solve. But Helen Keller believed that progress happens when people come together. She famously said, the welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all. That's the idea behind Helen Keller International, a nonprofit celebrating their namesake's 146th birthday this week. In 20 countries around the world, they work with local partners and governments to improve nutrition, protect sight and fight disease using cost-effective evidence-based solutions. To celebrate Helen's birthday, every gift from now through June 30th will be matched, doubling the impact supporters can have. A gift of $146 when matched can provide medication to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases for more than 200 people, or can provide vitamin A, a nutrient essential for protecting health and sight for 146 children. If you're looking for a meaningful way to honor Helen's legacy, visit helenkellerintl.org/offline before June 30th to make a matched gift. That's Helen kellerintl.org/offline.

**Charlie Warzel** (1:04)
Aidan Walker wrote this, or actually it was on a TikTok, but has this theory, it's called the Cuck theory of the Internet.

**Jon Favreau** (1:11)
So funny.

**Charlie Warzel** (1:12)
Which is just that when you're watching TikTok or an Instagram reel of an AI, cute animal or whatever, it's just something that's generated in that way. What you are actually doing is you are sitting in the Cuck chair.
And on the bed is an algorithm that is trained off of all of this artificial intelligence data at the same time and your data and everything. And this thing also knows what I like because it's fed off of everything that I've ever done. And I'm just going to sit here and let a little drool come out of the core of my mouth as I enjoy whatever this is, is a fleeting pleasure.

**Jon Favreau** (1:55)
I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Charlie Warzel, host of the Atlantic's Galaxy Brain Podcast. Charlie's been a frequent guest on the show. I think last time we talked about Moltbook, the AI-only social network. We've also had quite a few conversations about Elon Musk. I invited Charlie back this week, partly because there's more Elon news to discuss. His IPO of SpaceX just briefly made him the first trillionaire the world has ever seen, but also because Charlie just wrote an incredible piece about what AI is doing to us, which is slowly but surely robbing us of agency.
Charlie and I talked about how AI is reshaping what it means to be human already. How a recent writing prize went to a piece that seems to have been written by AI, how AI strips our agency from us, and the growing movement to decouple technology from algorithms. Charlie also watched me through how Elon's SpaceX IPO has been mostly built upon the value of Elon's ability to capture attention and tell a story, how financial markets are detaching themselves from reality. We'll get to that conversation in a moment, but before we do, if you're a friend of the pod, thank you. If you're not, please consider this your midterm reminder. Here's what you get when you subscribe. You get ad-free episodes of all your favorite pods. You get access to our excellent sub-stack newsletters, including Open Tabs, you get Dan Pfeiffer's Polar Coaster podcast, our extra episode of Pod Save America called Pod Save America Only Friends, and you get to support proudly pro-democracy independent media, which is always great, so head over to crooked.com/friends to learn more and subscribe today. All right, here's Charlie Warzel.
Charlie, welcome back to Offline.

**Charlie Warzel** (3:33)
Thank you for having me.

**Jon Favreau** (3:35)
You wrote an Atlantic piece last month. I've been thinking about the feeling of control slipping away, where you argue that the flood of AI is creating what you call a crisis of agency, that whether or not we personally use these tools, all of us are sliding into a more passive, reactive role, we're sort of sitting back while the machines do the writing, the searching, the deciding.
I want to talk about all that, but first, how have you noticed this in your own life? Like where has it felt like control is slipping for you?

**Charlie Warzel** (4:09)
Well, I see a lot of people, I mean, I'm a writer by trade, and I see a lot of people talking about the fact that like, I mean, there's a big conversation on Twitter right now that is like roiling about like, yeah, there's not going to be any writers going forward. Like, you know, everyone is going to eventually just give up their writing abilities to these LLMs, or like writing is going to be like vinyls, right? It's going to be this outmoded thing that like a couple of hobbyists have, or like an elite mode of communication that just, you know, these princely people in mahogany rooms with leather-bound books, you know, talk about writing. So, there's a little of that where people are just like give up on your stated profession, the only marketable skill that I actually have. So, there's a little bit of that happening. But I think broadly speaking, this idea of agency and the kernel of it, where it came from was actually this scandal, or not scandal, but this viral marketing fiasco where this company was accused of planting all these audio clips on TikTok for the band Geese, this sort of polarizing indie rock band that has gotten very famous over the last couple of years. And the idea behind all of this was that Geese was a Psyop. Nobody actually likes this band and they're hugely popular because of the fact that these marketers have schemed and basically astroturfed social media with all these fake accounts or seeding it with all this audio to make their music seem like it was more popular to the algorithm, so that the algorithm would promote more stuff from the band. And it reminded me a lot of the Cambridge Analytica stuff.