Everything Is A Story: Journalist Nick Bilton Thinks AI Might End Humanity & How Stories Could Save Us

Nick Bilton is a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair, a New York Times bestselling author, and screenwriter. This conversation explores the power of story — how tech titans like Jobs, Dorsey, and Musk wield narrative as a weapon, and why AI may be the first technology capable of wiping us off the face of the planet. It also happens to come from someone currently writing the book and screenplay for Martin Scorsese's upcoming film starring Dwayne Johnson. He also pulls back the curtain on Silicon Valley's reality distortion field and how completely it can play you. Nick is a rare mind. This one is not to be missed. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Caraway Home: Save up to $190 on cookware sets + an additional 10% off with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www. Carawayhome.com/RICHROLL Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.com Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 10% off your first order of a website or domain👉🏼https://www.squarespace.com/RichRoll WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Shokz: Visit SHOKZ.com and use code RICHROLL to receive an exclusive offer on your purchase👉🏼https://beopen.shokz.com/RichRoll-OpenFitPro Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  I'm not worried about AI destroying humanity. I'm worried about Sam Altman running an AI company that he will lead to destroy humanity. If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Today, we're speaking with Nick Bilton. Former New York Times columnist and Vanity Fair special correspondent.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  I was a reporter in Silicon Valley covering tech, and I do believe that the tech elite are evil. The fear that we're all gonna be killed by AI is actually part of their fundraising. You've got Sam and Elon and all these people out there being like, "We're gonna die! We need more money!" And the bucketloads of cash come in, and it's all nonsense.

• 1:41Rich Roll?

  They've crafted a certain public image tailored to what people seem to like.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I also think that there's another thing. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is that...

• 1:55Rich Roll?

  Nick, it's so great to meet you. Thank you for doing this. I'm so excited to talk to you.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. This is very, very exciting.

• 2:01Rich Roll?

  You're somebody who I've been reading for so many years, you know, at least going back 10 or 11 years with your reporting in the New York Times and you've covered Silicon Valley and the tech titans and there is an obsession that we have with these billionaires, the technocratic class, these people who are, you know, lording over the devices and the apps that we're all using every single day. And these are people that you have spent time with, who are also, for the most part, masterful storytellers and myth makers. What can you share about what you

• 2:42Rich Roll?

  know about like people like Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, or Zuck, or these people that is a common thread with respect to their myth-making superpowers that, you know, we'd all be kind of better off for understanding?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Well, I do think that there is a through line. They're all obsessed with their own self-image, their legacy, and they are all obsessed with telling a story. And you can see that through one very simple metric, and that is how many people are on the communications teams of these companies, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Ironically, Elon fired all of his communication folks because he could do it better, but in his mind, but, but they are always telling a story. And look, I mean, like Elon's a perfect example. Let's take

• 3:38Speaker 01

  the boring company for a little storytelling lesson here, right? So he was driving to work one day. It was a bunch of traffic. He tweets, this is years ago, he tweets, "There should be tunnels under the ground where you can, you know..."

• 3:56Speaker 01

  You can drive so that there's no traffic in LA. The next thing you know, he gets to the office at SpaceX and he's like, the tweet's getting a million responses. He's like, let's start the boring company and, and we're gonna build these tunnels. I went to SpaceX for a meeting a few months later. And there was a dirt patch across the street with one of these big tunnel boring machines. And I said to someone I was meeting with, I was like, what is that? And he's like, oh, it's just, it's like a little show Elon does to show that he's gonna build these tunnels underground. It's never really gonna happen, you know? And yeah, they've done some, but this was years ago, right? They never, they never built, there are no tunnels under LA. I drove on the freeway to get here.

• 4:38Rich Roll?

  There's, there is that sort of small network of tunnels under Vegas, right? Did he do that? Yeah, but it's like, it doesn't really seem to alleviate the traffic problem. It's sort of a novelty.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  It's also incredibly claustrophobic. And people have panic attacks with them all the time. But, but the, the point is, that's a great story, you know? And, and when you look at these guys, they do this over and over and over again. And I think that they, and then they start to believe their own story. You know, I always, I got to spend, as a reporter covering tech, I spent time with all of them for very long periods of time. And there was always this, you know, you could see this thing happen. Like, I knew Zuck and Jack Dorsey and all those guys and, and Kevin Systrom, all of them, when they were just starting out.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  And then, and, and then there's this kind of shock of like, whoa, how'd that happen? I'm a billionaire. And, and then there's this like, I'm a billionaire and I'm the one that makes the decisions and, and screw you. And, and it's, and they just believe the, they believe the story that gets told about them or the story they tell them about themselves. I mean, I wrote the book on Twitter and one of the greatest quotes someone gave me was, the greatest brand, sorry, the greatest product that Jack Dorsey ever made was Jack Dorsey. And I think that sums up a lot of these people in Silicon Valley. They They create this product that is themselves, often taken from Steve Jobs.

• 6:08Rich Roll?

  And his reality distortion field.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Reality distortion field. And I have a funny story about that. And he, and then, and then they believe the story. And then sometimes the story breaks them, which is what happened to Bezos.

• 6:21Rich Roll?

  So tell that job story, because then I have a follow up related to Jack and these other guys.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  So when I was, when I was first thing out, starting out as a reporter at the Times, I, I get a, I was writing a story, it was about the iPhone and something related to it. That's not important. And I was writing a story about it and, and I called Apple PR and I said, hey, I'm writing the story and you know, and the PR woman says, give me a second. And then puts me on hold and says, Steve's going to call you in a little bit. So the guy who ran the, the PR department was this guy named Steve Dowling. So I thought it was Steve Dowling who was going to call me.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  And, and instead that she was like, no, it's Steve Jobs. And I was like, Steve Jobs is going to call me? And you know, I'm like a young reporter at the Times. I'm like, is this how it works? So I hung up the phone and he didn't call and I went out, I went out for dinner that night. And I get this weird four one five, whatever it was, phone call. And I answered, had a couple of drinks and it was like, hey, it's Steve Jobs. And I was like, oh shit. And so I like go outside, I'm trying to take notes on my phone. He was on the phone with me for 45 minutes, an hour. He wouldn't get off.

• 7:43Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And he was telling me that my story was wrong and this, that, and the other, and so on. And, and I remember I went in the next day and I wrote the story, the way I had been told by him. And, and I published it. And then afterwards I was like, wait.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  I wasn't wrong.

• 8:00Rich Roll?

  You just got, you got schnuckled.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Completely played and John Markov, who, who had been a tech reporter for many, many years at the time, said, he came over to me and he said one word, he said not, his three words, he said the real, uh, the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, so four words. And he said, um, I was like, what do you mean? He goes, he's every, it's what he does. He's like, he can change the way you feel about something. And it happened, I interacted with him a lot and, um, and it would happen every time. And I got, I got good at, at realizing, oh, it, the reality distortion field is coming on. And, and then he stopped calling me because I wouldn't listen to him anymore. But, but he, um, you know, he was a master at making you believe the thing that he wanted you to believe.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And, um, and he, and I think that people, you know, they looked at him, uh, a lot of these tech titans, like that's who I want to be when I grow up. And people, and what's fascinating from a storytelling perspective is they chose which part of him they wanted to tell as their story. So the assholes picked the asshole and made themselves more justifiable. Then the product people picked the product, you know? And I think, um, you know, I think he was largely more influential in the way these people think about themselves than anyone in human history, quite frankly.

• 9:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, these people who become billionaires and it has this warping effect on their perspective on the world when they can literally, you know, basically create seismic shifts in society by dint of a simple decision and understanding that story is more important than truth and being able to wield a story that is in service to whatever that person wants people to believe, uh, can literally.

• 9:51Rich Roll?

  Change everybody's perspective on that person, dating all the way back to like Jack Dorsey's origin story with Twitter. I had a version of that, that kind of reality distortion experience. I had Jack on the podcast. This is very early on. I went to his house. I basically spent like the better part of the day with him and I left that experience just enamored with this guy. And I was so charmed by his charisma and his warmth. And I thought, if anybody should be running Twitter, it's this guy. This is a guy who's like created a world in which he carves out time to think deeply about these difficult decisions. And I just couldn't imagine, like, I couldn't understand why people were having such issues with him because I had been,

• 10:36Rich Roll?

  you know, I had like gone into his environment and, you know, like sort of marinated in the Jack Dorsey experience. And, and now looking at kind of like where Jack is now and these other people, you know, I sort of reflect back on that and was like, was I played? Was that genuine? I still don't know. I like to see the best in people and believe the best in people. But I can't imagine what it's like to be a billionaire who is wielding such unbelievable influence on the world. And I think what happens is with that wealth and that power comes this sort of sense that, well, you were so successful here that you must be right about

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  all these other things, like this galaxy brain kind of mentality that takes over, that then spills into perspectives on politics and culture and all these areas that have nothing to do with, you know, being a successful entrepreneur necessarily.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Well, you just summed up everyone in Silicon Valley. Like every single person who's successful, who's a billionaire that I've ever met, I've met them all. They all think, oh, I'm the billionaire who is this successful.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Who, you know, clearly knows what they're doing in this arena. So I know what I'm doing in every single one. And I could cite a million instances where people, you know, I'm an, I'm the world's expert on real estate. I'm the world's expert on COVID-19. I'm the, and it's like, and they, and then, you know, people like Elon, like, um, you know, uh, Sam Harris is a good friend of mine and, and he got into a debate with Elon about COVID-19 and, and Sam proved to be right and Elon stopped talking to him. And, and it's, that's the mentality. If you're not in my yes man circle, then you're out. And, and, and so it becomes this reinforcing.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Self reinforcing cycle. And, you know, all the way to like, hey, is democracy really working? Like, maybe we should, you know, like, go back to some kind of monarchistic society. Like when you see this dark enlightenment movement and these very influential people like Naval Ravikant and like, you know, the kind of these like, um, you know, gurus of Silicon Valley who have such outsized influence as a result of becoming successful in technology that is deeply concerning to me because they do wield so much influence. And if, you know, these people say something online, like people pay attention and listen and, you know, kind

• 13:07Rich Roll?

  of now here we are, you know, being lured into the web of, uh, you know, kind of these, these, you know, crypto state recessionists, you know, where everything is in question and these people know better than any expert in their respective field.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that, you know, like Jack Dorsey is a perfect example because Jack, if you, as I researched with the book, um, he changed the story of how Twitter was founded.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Hundreds of times, quite literally, like it was like at first it was, uh, he came up with it. You know, on a slide in a park with Bilton and then it was, oh, actually I came up with it when I was a kid in my bedroom, watching police scanners. Oh, actually it was in Oakland when I was a babysitter with blue hair and, and it all changed. And the reality is, he came up with one slither of the idea, as did other people, specifically Noah Glass, as the book talks about. And Noah was written out of history. And the same thing is true with Square. Jack didn't come up with Square. A friend of his did, and he took the idea and so on and so forth. And it's, we just, we just saw it recently, you know, Square just laid off

• 14:28Speaker 01

  half of their workforce, almost half of their workforce. Um, and Jack cited it as, um, as AI. Well, actually, if you go and look, and you, you actually dig a little further than, oh, almighty, uh, tech guru, uh, is, is way ahead of the curve. The, the, the, his employee base has doubled in size in the last few years for no reason other than it's not run well. And so the narrative was, let's get rid of half of the employees and say it's, we're doing this of AI. It's literally back to what it was a few years ago.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  It was just management, poor management decisions.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  And the stock went up because, and I mean, another example, look at the Tesla stock. Like Elon can talk about how he is gonna have a million taxis, you know, in two years, and there's like 12 of them.

• 15:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It never bears out, just like the boring company story. Like, he can just say, oh, we're gonna have full self-driving by this day, and he can move the stock price immediately. And every time you look through the rearview mirror six months later on things that he says, like, these things never end up bearing out, but it doesn't matter. And this is mirrored in the Trump administration. Like, it's just rhetoric.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:44Rich Roll?

  And just move on. And there never seems to be any kind of reconciliation or accounting for these statements.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  What I think is so-

• 15:52Rich Roll?

  Or even like self, like, a normal person would think, yeah, I say these crazy things and they never happen. Maybe I should reflect a little bit on my relationship with truth and veracity and like, what does that say about me? Like, these people don't do that. It doesn't matter. They don't care.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  The thing that I think is, is so shocking to me, and I do not understand it. I don't know if you have an answer. I don't understand. We are in a world where you could, for the first time in human history, you can have a conversation with machines that can tell you what is right and what is wrong. And for the most part, with the exception of hallucinations and so on and so forth, they can actually detail it. So when you go and ask, you know, Claude or Gemini or Chet, whatever you talk to about the history of Squares employees and the number and so on and so forth and revenues and and blah, blah, blah, it will show you. But no one asks these questions. If you go and ask,

• 16:51Speaker 01

  is it realistic that Tesla is going to have a million self-driving cars in this period of time, or humanoid robots in your house and so on and so forth? Like, we, but no one wants to do that. They just say, oh, that's it, quick. And the stock goes flying through the roof and and everyone's like, all hail Elon. And I think it's like, and Mark Zuckerberg too, with social media and it's just to me, what I don't understand is why don't people ask questions? Why do they just take it as gospel?

• 17:23Rich Roll?

  I think it has something to do with the power of storytelling, like take Zuck. These people who are so image conscious, they've crafted a certain public image tailored to what people seem to like that then becomes, you know, like enamoring to people, like for some reason, and maybe this is related to like monarch, monarchism, like, like, oh, a leader that I can look up to and I believe in and will fuel my cognitive dissonance. It doesn't matter what's true. Like, I like that guy. And for some reason, my affinity for this person makes me feel like I'm in proximity to them.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I also think, I think you're completely right. I also think that there's another thing. And if I were to say the biggest lesson I've learned in my life as a professional over the last 30 years.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Is that people are just people, you know, they all get headaches and they all have anxiety and they all want to be loved and and

• 18:27Rich Roll?

  And they all want to believe that they're good people doing the right thing and acting, you know, acting on behalf of the betterment of society.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And they want to believe that. And I think that what ends, what happens is because of media, everyone, people become more and more famous and so on and so forth. And we, we look at these people and we're like, like, it's why people get so nervous when they meet celebrities or they meet, you know, leaders. They're just people. Like, it's, I never get nervous when I go and interview someone or when, because I'm like, you're just a person. You probably woke up this morning and you, you didn't sleep well last night because your dog was sick and your kids, all these things that we all experience, but they make it look like it doesn't happen. And, and I think that, so they create this bullshit narrative around who they are and what they are and that they're

• 19:16Speaker 01

  going to live forever or that because I'm a billionaire, I'm an expert on everything. And it's all nonsense. And I think once we get to a point where people realize it's nonsense, maybe that's, that's when it changes. But I don't know if people want to believe that it's nonsense.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't see that happening.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I think that they want it. They believe that these are the gods.

• 19:33Rich Roll?

  Right. And now we have AI. So take OpenAI, for example, the storytelling around that and the cognitive dissonance with, you know, the titans that are at the helm of these respective AI companies who are obviously spinning a yarn and doing some very advanced storytelling around how we should think about this as they, you know, kind of accumulate power and, and, you know, are participating in this race towards AGI, et cetera.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Well, what's fascinating about the storytelling around AI is two things. One is

• 20:08Speaker 01

  The fear that we're all gonna be killed by AI is actually true. Like, I genuinely worry about it, but it's also part of their fundraising.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  And so, you know, you've got Sam and Elon and all these people out there being like, "We're gonna die. We need more money to make sure we don't." And, or, you know, and, and the bucket loads of cash come in. It's, it's all for them. It's about, it's a fundraising mechanism. And the other thing is, someone said to me, I did a story for Vanity Fair a couple of years ago about AI and creativity and how it was gonna replace jobs and so on and so forth. And one person said to me, a very clever thinker on this stuff, said, "I'm not worried about AI destroying humanity. I'm worried about Sam Altman running an AI company that he will lead to destroy humanity, or someone else." And the reason for that is because they are so obsessed with being first

• 21:03Speaker 01

  in the story of, you know, of the first person to create AGI, that they put all the other things aside and the goal is, it's about them. It's not about the AI. It's about them as the leader of the AI company. And, and it's, what's crazy is, you know, I wrote in Hatching Twitter, "This was a white box on a screen that you could type 140 characters into. Look what it did to the world. It changed, it's the reason Donald Trump is in office. He ran for office many, many, many times before. It's the reason that we have all of the, the culture we live in today. And that was just a white box with 140 characters. Now there's this new box that we can type into that is way more powerful.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  And we're all just doing it without thinking about what happened the last time. And, and all these people don't care because they wanna be famous and mention the creator of the last invention."

• 22:01Rich Roll?

  There's lip service to safety considerations, et cetera. But as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to suggest that any real efforts or deep work is going into ensuring that these things have guardrails on them and that they are in the public interest. It's just this race forward based on fear and lack, like we have to do it before China, et cetera. It's important. I'm the one who's in charge. You should give your money to me. You should trust me. We have no reason to trust any of these people. And all the evidence suggests that this is going to damage us in ways that we can't even possibly begin to imagine.

• 22:43Rich Roll?

  And yet, it's so convenient and helpful in the short term and entertaining in the way that, in an advanced way, in comparison to Twitter and 140 characters, allowed us to kind of be lulled into this world of social media that, you know, I think it's pretty clear to everybody right now, has deranged us in ways we couldn't have imagined when, you know, you wrote Hacking Twitter.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  It's deranged us in so many ways. And you see it with podcasts, funnily enough.

• 23:15Rich Roll?

  Sure. Because the incentive structure.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Incentive structure. Like Tucker Carlson. Like the guests have gotten crazier and crazier. Megyn Kelly, the anger about, you know, fighting with people that she was once close with, or Ben Shapiro doing the same thing. It's like they're all, they all just come at each other. And then the Pod Save America guys, they like go even deeper on the left because it's the incentive structure is the more insane and intense and scary and the more I pull back the covers on the real thing, the more views I get and the more crazy we get as society. And it just is this spiral.

• 23:56Rich Roll?

  I think about this all the time. You know, yeah, podcasting has become all about like, they're lying to you, or the number one expert who's going to tell you the thing no one wants you to know. And unless you're platforming, just, you know, kind of conspiracy addled people, or the person with the hottest, craziest take, the extremism in, you know, across the board, on all sides of the spectrum, you have no chance at garnering eyeballs and getting attention. And the incentives, you know, the incentive structure is such that like, if you, if you want that, then this is what you need to do. And that's the dollars follow. And as somebody who's been doing this show for a very long time, you know, from the very

• 24:40Rich Roll?

  early days into now, it's like, where do we even sit with this anymore? You know, like, there's a reason why I do this show. There's a purpose and a meaning behind it that I care about. And I see these other people and, and, and how like these other podcasts that have gotten really huge. And they're influencing the next generation of podcasters. And it has nothing to do with like, asking yourself like, why am I doing this in the first place? What am I hoping to accomplish? It's just like, here's how you get big. Here's how you get attention. It's like, attention for what aim? For what purpose?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Couldn't agree with you more. And it's like, you know, I thought, I always thought that the debate about whether Hitler was a good person or a bad person, wasn't a debate. Bad guy.

• 25:23Rich Roll?

  You know, this is where we're at, you know, from 140 characters to this, and people like, well, maybe we should have that conversation.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, Joe Rogan saying, oh, that's interesting about Hitler. It's like, it's, you're like, what are you talking about? It's like, where, how are we, how are these things even a debate? Like, how are they even a conversation? Like, there are way more important things that we should be talking about that are real. And, and it's, it all comes down to the incentive structure. And this, to me, is where, you know, I do believe that the, the tech Elite are evil, quite honestly. I think that they

• 26:06Speaker 01

  they know exactly what these things do. You know, Facebook knows there's like so much that has leaked about things that they know that are bad for kids and for society and we and same with Instagram and Twitter and and every and all these social platforms and yet and TikTok and and they do nothing to try to stop it.

• 26:28Rich Roll?

  Nothing.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  And it and to me, look, I don't know if there is a God in the universe or there's some something, but if there is, they're not going through those pearly gates. The the the things that they have done with intent and the un- and the unintentional, but then done nothing about it. Um, you know, look, I mean, look at Snap, for example. There was a period of time

• 26:52Speaker 01

  that Snap was, you know, the whole point was to so people could have disappearing messages and they wouldn't. It was a great intention, right? We want to make it so that you're not posting things on the internet that can come back and haunt you later. And then fast forward to a year ago, the number one cause of death among teens in the United States is fentanyl. You know where the one of the top places they buy it? Snap. And so and and there had to be a congressional hearing for them to even make any changes like these things, there are unintended consequences always, but our responsibility is to fix those. We never know what they are with technology. And then at the same time, there are consequences we know exist.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  One example is kids should not be using social media like this. It is just so unhealthy. I don't have it on my phone because I can't stop looking at it. And I'm a grown adult who's written about it for twenty something years. And these companies that hide all that data, I just think it's completely and utterly evil.

• 27:52Rich Roll?

  You're somebody who, when you put a book out, I read it right away. Like, I think people would be surprised that I actually. Don't read that much unless it's a book written by somebody who's coming on the podcast. Like that monopolizes most of my reading and it kind of crowds out the opportunity for pleasure reading. But both of your books I read like immediately when they came out and you have this unbelievable talent for like novelizing nonfiction and, and you know, creating these, these books that, that, that read like thrillers. The book on Twitter and the Ross Ulbricht book about the Silk Road were just amazing works. And, and you're

• 28:33Rich Roll?

  somebody who has a lot of irons in the fire. You do all of it. Like you make documentaries, you produce, you write, you've done scripted television, you're, you do long form journalism, you know, written for Vanity Fair. You're even in the process of writing the book and the screenplay for this Martin Scorsese movie with The Rock about the Hawaiian mafia. This has to be perhaps like the most high profile project that you've ever worked on.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I definitely, I have, I have ADHD if you haven't noticed that, but I, and I, I've kind of used it as a superpower to just do all different kinds of, there's, there's a theme, which is storytelling, of course. And then there's obviously some subtext to it, which is somewhat technology, but not necessarily technologies and devices because you know, the mafia project you mentioned is set in the 1970s. But, but yeah, I mean, I just, I love to tell stories and I just, I love to take on a new challenge. And I, I don't say that like trying to be hyperbolic or anyway, but if I've never done something before, to me, that is the most exciting thing because I'm going to figure out how

• 29:46Speaker 01

  to do it and I'm going to do it differently because I'm not doing the traditional route. And so, yeah, I've done journalism and podcasts and movies and docs and scripted TV, all of it. And, and it's, it's, it's just my ADHD at work.

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  I mean, I have ADHD. I'm, I can only do one thing at a time. Yeah. Like how does that operate for you?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  It's funny. My wife came in the other day. Into my office and I had two laptops open and I was like working on them. She's like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, and she took a picture and sent it to a bunch of friends, but I was like, "I can work on two projects at once." And she was just like, "You're out of your mind."

• 30:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Mine works in the opposite direction. I can do very well if I'm just put blinders on and focus on one thing. And my wife is somebody who's doing lots of things at the same time and I'm just always marveling at that. Like, I don't understand how that works.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Do you procrastinate?

• 30:40Rich Roll?

  I, I do, but I can lock into a flow state pretty easily if I'm super into the project that I'm working on and I can lose hours and hours and hours. And I really don't want any interference. Like, I just want to be, like, I want the world to be, to disappear and just to be immersed in whatever I'm working on. But I can't, like, gear shift very easily.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gear shift. I don't procrastinate. Not a, not a procrastinating.

• 31:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you don't seem like somebody who has-

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Bone in my body.

• 31:08Rich Roll?

  Does writer's block something that ever, how do you think about that?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  No, I mean, well, I think in the age of AI, writer's block doesn't exist anymore. It's, it's gone. There's no longer a blank page because you've always got something to help you. But, but I, yeah, I just, if I find my, if I find the, the gear starting to kind of get a little bored and I'm, you know, I just, I'm like, "Okay, next project and move that over and work on that." And, and one of the things I learned, interestingly, I, I think it's, like, I don't know what we learn and what we have innate and what we find and so on, but I remember at the Times, when I was a technology columnist, I would be on deadline sometimes and I'd have to, like,

• 31:53Speaker 01

  run home or I'd have to run into the office and I started writing columns on my phone, on the subway or something like that. And then I would finish them and, and you just kind of, I just learned to just, I could do, I could write anywhere. You know, it just, it doesn't matter. I'm just kind of zoned in and pick it up on something else. And, and I just kind of parlayed that into all the different kinds of writing I do on all the different projects.

• 32:21Rich Roll?

  You didn't start out with the idea of becoming a writer, did you? I mean, your origin story into the New York Times is super interesting.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  I think I'm probably one of the least likely people to have ended up as a columnist at the New York Times when I was there. I- Like there was a world I was like, I, I was gonna end up in jail, quite honestly. I mean, it's literally like I, I grew up in England. My parents got divorced and I moved to Florida and um immediately got in with like a lot of bad kids. And my dad was off doing his own thing and, and uh, and it just was, there, there was a world I was going in a completely different direction. And um, and I had a moment where I, I ran away from home. I was a teenager and I was working at Jack's Burgers in the mall in Florida.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  And um, I feel like this was literally the defining moment of my life, quite honestly. Was I walked outside of Jack's Burgers, I was taking the trash out and there was a homeless guy going through the trash and waiting for the next trash bag to. And I literally was like, wow, that could be me if I don't pull my shit together.

• 33:25Rich Roll?

  And you're all of seventeen or something like that?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Sixteen years old, sixteen, seventeen years old. And I walked back inside and I was like, you know what? I'm done, I'm going a different direction. And that was it. And I like stopped talking to all the kids, most of who were in jail or dead now, um, that I uh, knew in Florida. And I was like, I gotta figure it out. And my GPA was a one point nine in high school. You have to have a two point O to graduate. And I was like, how do I get, I, I literally was like, I've got four months to, to get from a, a, a, a, a one point nine to a two point O. I got to a two point one, so you know, I did pretty good.

• 34:00Rich Roll?

  Graduated, I mean, what was going on at home? What kind of chaos was happening that you were, you know, having such a difficult time?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  It was just total chaos. I, I, you know, parents were divorced, they got married too young. My dad was off dating and you know, didn't want to deal with me and my sisters and, and um, and we uh, we were a lot. I was a lot, I was getting in trouble all the time, I got arrested like nine times. It was like, it was, you know, not for like anything crazy, like stealing and drinking and fighting and you know, complete nonsense, but still like.

• 34:31Rich Roll?

  Was drugs and alcohol part of that or just truancy and just?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I was never.

• 34:36Rich Roll?

  Rock like fuck the world stuff.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  That I never got into drugs and I never have and just, I just saw um, what they could do and uh, but I drank a little bit, you know, it wasn't.

• 34:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Um, it wasn't, it was more just. I just probably was looking for attention or direction or something and um and you know, there was a culture shock of moving from England to Florida. And then you had all these, I remember the all these kids um that I became friends with and they were similar and like they're, they lived in New York, their parents got divorced or whatever and they, or they got in trouble in New York and their parents were like, we're moving to Florida. And so you get like this pirate ship that forms and and I got on the pirate ship.

• 35:21Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And uh.

• 35:23Rich Roll?

  But you have this moment of reckoning.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  I have this moment of reckoning, uh, which 30 years later is still, oh, whatever, however many years it is, is still literally fresh in my mind like it happened yesterday. And I was like, I've got to, I've got to figure this out. Otherwise, I'm, I'm screwed. And I mean, there are kids that they're men now, but um, who I um, was very close with, I think like eight of them are dead. One of them's on death row for murder. Um, a bunch of them, you know, just one got, one was arrested for a bank robbery with his mom. Like, like, these were the people I was friends with.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  It's a crazy sliding door story.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  I mean, because your success is so insane and you know, in comparison to where you could have been. I mean, that really is, you know, this, this sort of inciting incident, like a real transformation as a result of just you coming to it yourself, like not because you got locked up. It wasn't anything all that dramatic, right? It was just like a mindset switch.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Well, what I think what's fascinating about it is two things is one is, I think we all have an imposter syndrome. And I've, and I've always been of the mentality of um, of you, you know, the people who do have that are the ones that work harder and that appreciate it more and so on. The ones that feel like, oh, I deserve to be here. They often, they often don't work harder. They don't push, they're just sort of like, this is, this is where I'm meant to be. So I've always, every time I've ended up in all these different roles, as a director on a documentary for HBO, writing a movie for Martin Scorsese, as a columnist for the New York Times.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Your times writing stories that are breaking, you know, changing laws or leading congressional hearings, things like that. Every time I'm like, whoa, like, how did I end up here? And, and, and it's, I, the mentality I always had was someone's gonna tap me on the shoulder and be like, time to go. And so I've got to do all this stuff that I get, I want to do until that happens. And it's always been this kind of driving force. But I also, the other thing is, like, when I think about that homeless guy, like, that homeless guy is probably dead, had no idea that he impacted someone else's life the way he did.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  And it always makes me think that every single solitary thing we do, we just don't realize, but it's, it's all filtering out.

• 37:46Rich Roll?

  Has meaning.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has meaning and has purpose and, you know, whether it's up to us or somebody else. It does.

• 37:53Rich Roll?

  So you get this two point O.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  I get two point one.

• 37:56Rich Roll?

  Two point one.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Give me the props.

• 37:57Rich Roll?

  What do you do with that?

• 37:58Speaker 01

  So I got into, the only school I could get into was an art school. It was a school of visual arts in Savannah, Georgia. They had a campus and I didn't, I mean, I literally couldn't write very well. I was, because I hadn't really studied in school. And I, so I made a comic book of my life story. And that was my college application and they felt it was creative enough. And that was something I was, I was always very creative. I was lucky to have that. And so it got me into art school. And eventually I was, I spent a year in Georgia and then I transferred to the New York campus. And, and I kept, the ADHD clicked in, so I kept switching majors. And so I was like,

• 38:42Speaker 01

  I wanted to be a fine artist and learn how to paint photorealistically. And that took like six months. And I was like, oh, am I just gonna do this for the rest of my life? And then I found graphic design. And I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And then, and then I started. Started reading a lot, like I fell in love with books and my mom always read, I always remember when I was a kid, she was always, if she was like blow drying her hair, she'd have a book on her lap and, and I just started, I was a voracious reader, but I still never wanted to write. I ended up as an art director, I designed the very first Britney Spears doll, like I just bounced around to all these different things. And eventually I became an art director at the New York Press and then the New York Times.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  And the goal that I had, I'd read all these war photography books and these war books and I was like, I'm going to be a war photographer. That's it. So that was my goal to get to the New York Times. So I, I, get to the New York Times and there's two things that happened. The first thing is I end up in the business section as the art director, but because I knew tech so well and I'd always understood tech, it was just this thing that I could understand. I was always suggesting story ideas and like arguing with David Pogue that his, his thesis was wrong or whatever. And so I, and I also became good friends with a lot of the editors there, because I would help them fix their iPhones and their iPads and stuff because they didn't know how to.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  And at the same time, I, I'm at the Times and my goal is like, I have this portfolio. And I want to get it to the photo editor, this woman, Michelle McNally. And then I'm going to go off and pursue my dream of being a war photographer. I was interning for the printer for James Noctway. Do you know who James Noctway is? Is the most unbelievable war photographer of all time. His photos are just breathtaking and he had all these printers and I interned for one of them. And I, you know, this was it. This was the goal. Yeah. So one day I finally get Michelle McNally to go out for lunch with me.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And I sit there and I give her my portfolio and she opens it up and it was this big orange book and she flips through, she doesn't say a word and I'm watching and she closes the book and she goes, you're a good photographer. And she's like, you know, you'd probably be a good war photographer. She goes, but I'm not hiring you to be a war photographer. And I was like, why not? And she goes, because you're not fucked up enough. And I was like, what do you mean? She goes, all of these guys and these women that do this, she's like, they're adrenaline junkies. Most of them are alcoholics or drug addicts. They, or they, or they need the adrenaline. They can't live in normal society. And she's like, you know, they live on, they, some of them have beautiful houses and they sleep on their floor. You know, it's like, because that's where they're comfortable.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  And after that, I was like, okay, well, what's next? And that was when I became a writer.

• 41:30Rich Roll?

  What's interesting about that is you could have then lobbied her by, you know, laying, making your case for how chaotic your upbringing was and how fucked up you truly are.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  No, I'm fucked up.

• 41:43Rich Roll?

  You're like, you don't know. I got a, you know, I had a one point, whatever. And I, you know, got arrested nine times as a kid. I'm plenty fucked up.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I just, I think that I, um, I'm the kind of person who, um, I go off my intuition and my intuition told me.

• 42:04Rich Roll?

  Maybe she's right.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Maybe she's right.

• 42:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then you kind of exploit this white space because this is, what is this? The early 2000s when?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is.

• 42:14Rich Roll?

  The online aspect of journalism is brand new.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's early 2000s and I, um, we had the New York Times, we had a research lab that was up on the 27th floor, I believe. And the goal of it was like five, six people. And the goal was to build prototypes for what the future of journalism might look like, to then inform the newsroom and so on. And so it was 2005 or 2006 and, um, no, sorry, it was a little, it was a little, it was around 2009. And the, um, we had an idea that there was going to be something like the iPad coming out. So we built like, we took a screen apart and made it look like a touchscreen that you could interact with the news on and so on and so forth. And, um, I started doing a lot of public speaking about the future

• 43:01Speaker 01

  of media and things. And again, with imposter syndrome, being like, why'd they invite me? And, um, I remember I got a job offer that I, to go work at Google and the Google News Group. And I went out for, um, Went out for lunch with the editor of the business section of the Times who I'd become close with and I told him, oh, I'm going to leave him, you know, and he said, you know, it's a shame we can't keep people like you. And he's like, you know, all of the people at the paper, he's like, they're all brilliant and they're geniuses, but none of them are interested in tech. All they want to do is write for the print paper. And, and I said, what are you guys doing with that, that tech blog, the bits blog, by the way? And he said,

• 43:43Speaker 01

  well, no one wants to write for it. We get one post a month. And he's, and I said, I don't even know why I said it. It was literally like a puppeteer came and made my mouth work. And I was like, I would do it. And he said, um, he said, really? Would you like, would you really be interested in doing it? And I was like, sure. And he goes, well, why don't you send me a proposal of what you would do? So I sent it to him, thinking it was just going to go to him. He sent it to the entire tech department. And I kind of pissed them off because I'd said how bad their coverage was on the blog. And the deal, they said, let's, um, let's try it for a month. And, um, and that's, that's how it all started. I was 33 years old, but the first time I'd written a professional word and it was at the New York Times.

• 44:23Rich Roll?

  It's so unusual. Like what an unlikely story for the New York Times to, to basically green light this guy who actually was not a writer to be a writer for the most prestigious publication in the world, simply because nobody else wanted to do it. And it was sort of treated like this bastard stepchild, which is all the more insane when you reflect on how tech obsessed we are. Like people just can't get enough of tech journalism.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  I think it was that, you know, I remember, I remember this really funny moment when I, when I first became a reporter and you go to this, at the Times, you go to this, um, it's like an onboarding, even if you've been, if you've been an employee in this department and you go to this one, you still go through it. But when you first start, so I was now starting officially as a, as a reporter. And, um, I, you go and you go to the, someone on the masthead's house for like a dinner and, and you meet all the people that have been there, their entire careers and lives and someone and you get to ask some questions. But everyone goes around the room and they kind of introduce themselves, one of them. And, and it's, you know, it's, I'm Bob so and so, and I graduated magna cum laude from

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Harvard and da, da, da, da. And it got to me. It's like, what do I say? I got kicked out of art school? And it's, it's, I think what it was.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  There was no scenario, five years in the future or two years in the past, that they would have ever hired me. But they were in a situation where they couldn't hire people that wanted to, you know, those people were going and working on, starting their own blogs. And the other, the other people were, I only want to be on the page, front page of the New York Times. I don't care about the internet. And so I just found this slither of a doorway that I could squeeze through by accident. And then it turned out I, I was good at it. I knew how to do it for some reason. And, and that was it.

• 46:18Rich Roll?

  So when people come to you or young people come to you and, and ask for career advice, or how do I get into this? Like, how do you think about, you know, how you were able to, you know, get those third doors open and, and, uh, you know, create opportunities for yourself? That's translatable for the younger generation who's thinking about, uh, you know, a career path similar to yours?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think the first is two things. One is I would say, um, you have to, um, you have to be somewhat fearless and willing to make mistakes. Like, I don't, I truly do not, I'm, this is like honestly my superpower. I do not give a shit what people think of me. Like, I care. I want, I'm a nice person. I want them to know that I'm a good person, but like, if they don't like my writing, I don't care. If they don't like that story, I don't care. Like, I'm just my-

• 47:10Rich Roll?

  How do you square that with the imposter syndrome?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  The imposter syndrome is I'm not supposed to be here. The I don't care is, is, is a different part of it. Like, uh, the imposter syndrome is someone's going to tap me on the shoulder and say, it's time for you to leave. You were in the wrong building. Um, and the, the I don't care is, I, there'll be another call next week.

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  Another building or-

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, or it's, or it's more of like, um- You know, I watch people who wanna be writers and they have one idea. And that's it. And it's, and they think it's like, that's the idea. That is never gonna happen, you know, like you have to, everyone I know who's a successful writer in Hollywood has fifty things they're working on at once, you know, fifty different ideas and one of them, if they're very, very, very lucky, will get made. And, and you, and I think that, and you also, as a journalist, you, you can't obsess about, or even an author, that this is, it's, it's perfect. There's no such thing as perfect. There's ninety percent done and you can spend the rest of your life on the next ten percent.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  And I, and I, and for me, I'm okay with ninety percent. Like, okay, let's get it out and we'll do the next one, we'll do the next one, we'll do the next one. And my goal is to just get better and learn more and, and put these things out, out there in the world. And I think that that's, they're two very different things. Does that make sense?

• 48:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I understand. So not being so precious about your work, holding it loosely, having a healthy relationship with expectations around like, what's gonna happen with it or how people receive it. And I suspect that, that indoctrination had a lot to do with the fact that in your early columnist days, like you just had to be churning, you were churning out like so much, so many articles, you just had to do it and move on and like not get too caught up in, you know, making it absolutely, you know, turning these things into jewel boxes.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I remember there was an editor who told me at one point when I became a columnist,

• 49:13Speaker 01

  he said, uh, there is a piece of, there's a column of newsprint every Thursday that is gonna have your name on it and the twelve hundred words you write, you write. And if you don't file it, you won't have a job. And that was it. And so I had to literally ensure, and it wasn't just that, it was writing stories and so on and so forth. And so I did the math at some point, it was well over a million and a half words I'd written.

• 49:41Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  And I barely remember any of it. Like, it's, you know, I remember a few stories here and there or some themes and things like that, but they're just, you just gotta write it, you publish it and you move on to the next one. And, and sometimes you, sometimes you get beat up for it and sometimes people love it and you just. And that's just it. And, and I think that the, the advice I always give to people is two things is one is

• 50:07Speaker 01

  you're, you're going to get a better education in writing from reading than you are from someone explaining the structure of, you know, Hemingway's first opening page and his repetition of words and all these things like that. You're going to get a better education from reading and understanding and, and, and that's literally how I've learned how to write in every single form. And, you know, people like Corin McCarthy said the same thing, like the writing is, is reading and iterating on what people have done before you. And so my books are, they read like novels, even though they're narrative nonfiction, because I love novel. That's all I read is novels. And so I want to tell a story.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  And then they also kind of read a little like movies because I love reading screenplays and writing screenplays. And, and so, but that's all, I didn't go to school for writing, you know, I like literally got kicked out of art school. Like, you know, it's

• 51:04Rich Roll?

  But you have a visual mind. Like when you're, I mean, when you're reading your books, it's like, oh, you, you just see the movie, which made me think like, how come these books haven't been turned into movies yet? They must be, they must have gone through

• 51:15Speaker 01

  They've gone through lots

• 51:16Rich Roll?

  20, you know, cycles of development at this point. But how come they're not up on the screen yet?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Well, it's just, I, you know, it's a longer conversation about Hollywood and how broken that industry is. But, but yeah, I, I, I actually just learned, I have a two, two boys that are nine and 10, and one of them has really severe dyslexia. And my wife was, was helping him with some of the phonetics of reading. I can't do phonetics. I did, I learned that because I couldn't, when she was saying things, I was like, that's how, that's how you do it. And what I've realized is I also have some form of dyslexia. And, and what I, I, I don't imagine words in my head. I can't picture a word,

• 52:03Speaker 01

  but I can picture an image and then I can describe the image. So that's just the way my brain works. And so that's how I write. So I imagine the movie and then I tell you what's happening in the movie, or I imagine the scene. It's all visual and then it's put into language.

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  As a writer, your talent is really storytelling, like this reverence for how to tell a story well, which is reflected in the books that you write, but also is mirrored in these tech moguls that you've done these deep dive profiles on and their relationship with storytelling. So I want to spend a few minutes talking about how you think about storytelling and its importance and how we should all sort of be thinking a little bit more in depth about storytelling and how it operates in our own lives.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Well, I think everything we do is a story, right? I'm telling you your story, you're telling me a story based on what you're wearing, what I drive, where I live, the way I talk to people, my everything we do is a story. And there are different ways to approach it and different mediums, you tell the story differently. Like one of the things I find fascinating about nonfiction versus fiction, even if it's a short story or a news article is like in a news article, you have what's called the lead, which is your way into the story. Then you have the nut graph, which is telling you that's the second paragraph, which tells you what the whole story is about. And then at the end, you have what's called the kicker, which is the best part of the story, right? It's the part that you leave with.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  In fiction, it's completely the way around. You start with the best part of your story and then you kind of go through and at the very end, you kind of tell us what it's about and so on. And, and I think that with all different kinds of storytelling, you have to approach it differently. One of the things that I've found the most challenging as a writer is screenwriting. I think it's the hardest form of writing there is. There's no, no more difficult form because you can't use exposition, you can't, every scene has to ask a question that another scene answers, then ask the question and so on and so forth. Every character is trying to get in the other's way.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  One character, every voice has to sound distinct and different, all this, all these rules.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  And you're showing, you can never tell, you can never tell someone's interior and what they're thinking. And so I find it all very fascinating how the different forms of storytelling work for our brains to be able to kind of understand it. And, um, and that to me is one of the most fun parts of moving between all these different projects.

• 54:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in screenwriting, every line of dialogue, every setup, every kind of slug line has to reveal something about character and advance the story and, and illustrate the themes, you know, and you have to do it with such incredible economy, like it has to be distilled down to its very essence.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so The Godfather is, is one of the best examples because the theme is about family, uh, the characters are all very, very different. And they are, what's the, what's so incredible about The Godfather and why it's cited as one of the best movies is you've got the Godfather, right? And then you've got his four kids and each kid is a different facet of the Godfather's personality, which are all, you know, one's a goofball, the other's holding it together, the other thinks he's, he's cocky, he's in charge and, and there's the love and so on and so forth. And each character drives the forward, the story for it's, so it's all those things that are happening. And, and if you have

• 55:51Speaker 01

  one single line of dialogue that, that isn't right, your entire feeling about these characters changes. And everyone has to have agency and there's a, there's obstacles. It's a really, really challenging form of writing. And I think it's why there are so few good movies in Hollywood, quite honestly.

• 56:13Rich Roll?

  Fewer and fewer.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Fewer and fewer. And I also think, the other thing I would say is,

• 56:19Speaker 01

  I don't think there are a lot of good writers out there, great writers out there. And that's not a diss on society or people or whatever. Um, I just think that there are, it is, it is such a difficult thing to do really, really, really well. That there are only certain brains that can do it. Cormac McCarthy, for example.

• 56:39Rich Roll?

  Hmm. You couldn't teach what that guy does.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  You cannot teach it. And he, he didn't even, when you do read the interviews and the few that he did, like, he always said, like, I don't know where it comes from. It's like, and I think this is some of, some of the greatest artists say this, like Chris Martin had this great line in a documentary where he said, "This song came to me from wherever songs come from." And I, and Cormac McCarthy was like, "There's something in my subconscious that like, that told me to do this." And I think it's the people who are the greatest artists, I think, are the ones that are most in tune with that. And it doesn't, it doesn't mean the people that aren't shouldn't write. They should do the things they want to do. But I think like the greats are the, are, are, there's so few of them.

• 57:25Rich Roll?

  Getting out of their own way, opening this channel to the subconscious. And, you know, in the, in, in kind of sitting in this space of allowing it for it to show up and flow from hand to page.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and Rick Rubin talks about this, about how, about, about that specifically. I think it's, I believe that, you know, I still don't know if I believe that there's a point to all this, or we're just some little accident or simulation or whatever. But I do believe that, um, there is something in the universe that, that makes these things, these stories happen. And whether it's a collective consciousness and it, we, you know, some people have a little, a little pinprick doorway. But I, I do truly believe that that is really where a lot of this art comes from.

• 58:14Rich Roll?

  Well, despite the fact that movies seem to be not so good these days, we're not going to ever reach a point where we lose our appetite for great storytelling. But it is an interesting cultural moment in that, you know, we're kind of in this

• 58:33Rich Roll?

  period of time in which we've lost our reverence for the great novel. Like, this is something I talked, I had James Fry on here, we talked about this, I had Bruce Wagner, do you know Bruce Wagner? I had him on, he writes these incredible transgressive novels that are really just fantastic. And it's like, nobody's reading these books, you know, we're not in that era that, you know, you and I were around, probably around the same age, like when, you know, these people were like rock stars, you know, and everybody couldn't wait for their next book. And that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  I think there's a few things that have happened as far as books. There, funnily enough, the book industry has not shrunk to the degree that people believe it has. It's actually grown in some years, and the reason is, there's a couple of reasons. One is that audiobooks have opened up a whole new, a whole new genre of reader. And then, and most of those, you know, it's like the werewolves and the vampires and all that stuff. You get these kind of subcultures that have risen up as a result of the ability to write books like this. And the other thing that's happened is, I mean, I think one of the worst things that's happened

• 59:46Speaker 01

  is actually book talk and TikTok as a result of, because I don't think that they're driving a lot of the sales to some of the worst writing out there. And people will call me an asshole for saying this, and they have before, but, but I just, it really saddens me when-

• 1:00:04Rich Roll?

  Meaning like just sort of low-rent genre fiction?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, we all love a good, a good like crime novel or a romance novel, whatever, but there are also things, I believe with every ounce of my being, that the reason that we are supposed to write these stories is to make people think, it's, we are, as storytellers, our job is to, is to hold a mirror to society through a story. You know, Ayn Rand said this, she's like, Ayn Rand, she said- That to her, a novel is a way to make society think about things. I think she pushed people to try to think in a certain way, but like to me, that is what the whole point of all of what we're doing is like.

• 1:00:45Rich Roll?

  Sure, to elucidate some truth about human nature or the world to help us make sense of why we're here and.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  And it's why we consume these stories, why we want the emotion. You know, whenever you're pitching a story in Hollywood, people are always like, what's the character's emotional drive? And it's like, and at first you hear that and you're like, what are you talking about? It's set in space. It's great. And you, and then you realize like, it could be set anywhere. It doesn't matter. It's about the characters and how we relate to the characters. And, and I think that just why there's never, you know, there's never a great movie about billionaires, because no one can relate to being a billionaire. And so, or most of us can. And I think that what's both been great is there are more readers today who do consume

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  in different forms, but at the same time, the sad part is that, that the, the, um, the greats are not read like they once were.

• 1:01:41Rich Roll?

  And there isn't that, that sort of monoculture moment where, you know, some genius just, you know, drops some work that lands like a thud and rocks everybody.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:01:52Rich Roll?

  But I still think that there is, uh, something perennial about writing books, uh, that has withstood the, the kind of gestalt of everything that we consume was sort of uploaded in the last 24 hours. Like there's a staying power, you know? If you write a great book, it can make an impact in a way that, um, you know, other forms of media still can't.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  I completely agree. I, I just, I wish that, um, uh, I wish that people would, um, put down their phones a little bit more and stop scrolling, doomlessly scrolling and, and just read a book. I mean, I, every, I'm a voracious reader. I, and at night I put my phone aside and I pull out my Kindle and, and I, you know, try to go through a book a week at least if I can. And, and I read a lot of older stuff, mostly from 1950s, 60s, 70s, a lot of old sci-fi. And, uh, cause I just feel like it was like the height of it. Um, but it's, um, I find it so much more rewarding than, than even most TV these days.

• 1:03:04Rich Roll?

  We have this fascination with these tech titans. We can't get enough of interviews with them.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  And there is a weird We hope we're gonna learn something.

• 1:03:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like this, oh, maybe I could be that person someday, or what would it be like to be a billionaire? Like this lurid, you know, kind of fascination with how these people live their lives that that lure us into kind of a romantic relationship with them while also like that's the cognitive dissonance piece like we know that Sam Altman is most likely steering us off a cliff.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:37Rich Roll?

  And yet, you know, we're like, what's Sam Altman doing? What's he up to? Is he a genius? What's happening like?

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  No, he's not.

• 1:03:43Rich Roll?

  And then we're using OpenAI every single day. It's like

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not, they're none of them

• 1:03:46Rich Roll?

  It's insane. And the history of humanity is just barrel forward and break things and we'll deal with the repercussions later. But the repercussions in this context are so exponentially beyond anything that our species has ever faced. And yet we're still really not course correcting for this.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Well, I think that the, I think it's the first technology in human history that can wipe out human history. I don't believe the nukes could have done that. There's a world maybe potentially, but you know, all of the studies that I've read, all the research I've read, State Department reports, so on and so forth, you know, you only need 150 people to survive for society to flourish. Society can come back from that. And, you know, the predictions were always, you know, we still have a billion people on the planet. Maybe Antarctica looks like Los Angeles, but like the planet still survives most of that. And, and the same with chemical weapons, like chemical weapons, they tried it in World War II.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  And the reason it didn't work out was because of the wind, because the wind would blow the chemical weapons back in the Germans' faces. And they would, and so that didn't work. AI is, in my opinion, the first technology that could literally wipe us off the face of the planet. And, and I think that what we've been very lucky at until now is whenever something goes wrong, it is not catastrophic.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  You know, hundreds of thousands of people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, and then we were like, wow, nuclear bombs are really dangerous. We should try to make sure that doesn't happen again. And the same with other technologies and so on and so forth. The question is with AI.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Will it be too late once we realize, oh, that was a bad idea?

• 1:05:36Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. What's your suspicion on that?

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  My suspicion is that if you look at technology in terms of warfare, we, every new technology we build is one that can be used for both good and bad. Right? And, and in the beginning, in the early days, when we were living in caves and stuff like that, when we realized we could kill something with a rock, we could kill one person, maybe a few. And then you were probably going to get killed with someone else's rock. You get to this point where guns come along and you can kill more people. You know, maybe, you know, maybe a few with the ones that you stick the bullet in and the old, in the like, you know, the olden days, then you get to machine guns.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  You can now kill hundreds and so on and so forth. Each new technology allows us to kill more and more. So now we get to nukes, we're at hundreds of thousands. I believe AI is in the billions if used correctly by someone nefarious. And so the question is, is what is that number? And how, who is the person that ends up using it? Because what's happening with technology is it's making, it does this, what I, I say, people don't think small enough is the way I think about it. Less and less people can create the thing that can destroy the world. And, and the thing that can be destroyed the world is even smaller than the thing from before. And so I think that we will have an instance, my prediction is,

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  that we will have an instance where it is used in a catastrophic way. And the question is, does it kill 100,000 people? Or does it kill 5 billion people? And after that, there will be safeguards put in place likely. But the question is, is how many people die in the process?

• 1:07:30Rich Roll?

  And what is your sense of how it would kill people? Like, is it, is it just, you know, creating a meltdown at the local nuclear facility? Or like, what is the means by which people are going to die as a result of it?

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Well, if you ask me to put my scream writer hat on for a second, like, yeah, that's the classic, like, Um, you know, the, the power gets shut off. There's a state department report that says if the power gets shut off in America, uh, 95% of society is dead within a year. A lot more people, you know, hundreds of thousands are dead in the first few weeks. Like you cut your finger, there's no medicine that's coming to you. There's, you know, the water gets dirty, you die of, you know, diphtheria. There's all these different things that happen.

• 1:08:12Rich Roll?

  Literally just turning off the power grid.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, there's the just turning off the power grid. Yeah, literally. Nothing else. Super easy. Um, the, uh, the thing that people, there's that great saying that there are nine uh, hot meals between anarchy and, um, sorry, between uh, society and anarchy. I think we're down to about four hot meals at this point. Like, I don't think we'd make it to nine.

• 1:08:35Rich Roll?

  We're just on a trigger. You're like, dude, you know, after COVID, everybody's ready to pounce. I don't think it would take that many days.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  And I think like.

• 1:08:42Rich Roll?

  And, and we've learned that like, there will be no comedy among men. Like, you know, we will just immediately pivot to antagonism.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Completely. 1,000%. And, and we never think it all through. Like I, you know, I, I was working on a movie about, about like an apocalyptic movie right before COVID. And so I was doing lots of research into all the things that could go wrong. And I found out about COVID in China before it was like a mainstream thing. And so I, I was like, oh my God, we have to, I was like, this is going to be really bad. And I, we have to get food and I stocked the basement. My wife, my sister, everyone thought I was out of my mind.

• 1:09:20Rich Roll?

  Like pre NBA suspending its games?

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait. Like two months before. And, um, and, um, and it was just like a lock. It wasn't like I was some foresightful genius. It was just literally like, oh my God, that could be really bad. And I'd been living in my own head about all the things that could go wrong in society. But you know what I didn't do? I didn't get toilet paper. I didn't get an extra can opener. I didn't get masks because I didn't know. Like, so you can't even plan for the worst case scenario, or extra bottled water and whatnot. I had a lot of chips, like, uh, and pasta, but, um, but I think that. Um, the, the other thing is like, there are things that an AI could do today that could kill mil billions of people. Like, for example, have you heard the stories about the bank robberies

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  where they fake the bank, the senior manager's voice and they call to do a transfer? Have you heard about these?

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  I haven't heard about this. I've heard versions of this.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  There's like one, I think it was in, is somewhere in Europe, in Italy or something. And they, they, they, um, or Sweden or something like that. But that, there was a, a transfer that was done because they faked the, um, uh, the, the boss's voice using AI and told them to transfer $50 million or whatever it was to, to another account. Um, so imagine that you have an AI that says, okay, um, we are going to poison the food supply, uh, or poison the water. And they call, oh, can you ship this to the, or whatever, or they change, they, they have them change some, some numbers or something like that. There are so many scenarios

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  that you could just literally, using a social engineering hack from an AI, do things. There's all the drone warfare stuff. There's a million things that could go wrong. Um, and we can't think of them all. Um, and, and so how do we plan for them?

• 1:11:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I have no idea. I have no idea. But on the subject of AI, screenwriting, uh, and pandemics, the kind of inciting incident for me, reaching out to you, it, it took us a while to get our schedules aligned for you to come here, um, was on the heels of me listening to Scott Z. Burns's, uh, Audible, like, I guess it was a podcast, like a limited series, sort of like an audio book or an audio documentary, um, in which Scott Z. Burns, legendary screenwriter, uh, responds to, uh, this, this seeming desire out in, in Hollywood and in the world to come up with a sequel to the movie Contagion. Uh, the movie Contagion

• 1:11:58Rich Roll?

  sort of had this second life during COVID because it's so, um, There was so much fidelity in that movie to kind of what we all experienced. That's I remember watching it at the very beginning of the pandemic and I've now watched it again since then. And I was like, this movie is incredible.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  This is a great documentary.

• 1:12:15Rich Roll?

  It's just unbelievable. Yeah. And everybody wants a sequel to it. Scott's like, yeah, but I just, I can't see any compelling reason to create a sequel to this. I can't think of a premise that would be worthy of the time and investment that it would take to create a movie. And he goes on this journey thinking like, well, what if I use AI to come up with a valid premise? And it's this really engrossing kind of deep dive into what AI can do in terms of creative storytelling. And Steven Soderbergh is part of it. And there's one point where Scott reaches out to you and you're sort of the AI optimist in this equation. So explain like your role in how you use AI

• 1:13:00Rich Roll?

  as a writer.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Well, I will say that I'm a, I consider myself a technology realist. I can see the good and the bad in all of it. And I think every technology does have good and bad. You know, I think that some technologies have more bad than good. Social media, for example, is one of those. Cars are great, but 1.2 million people die every year still to this day driving cars and, and it, and you can, nuclear bombs, nuclear power, like this, you just go through all of them. And there's always a good and a bad for it. So I do see the good and the bad. I think as far as AI goes, I, you know, massive job loss, the potential end of humanity.

• 1:13:48Rich Roll?

  It's like, we're actually having this conversation.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  But just put that aside for a second. However, I also think it allows us to tell better stories quicker, to think about new ways of telling stories and enables people to tell more stories. You know, I believe Hollywood is about to enter its MP3 moment. And its MP3 moment is where, you know, anyone with a

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Computer or an iPad or whatever it is will be able to make a movie that looks like Mission Impossible in their bedroom. There will be good parts of that, that we can all tell those stories. There'll be bad parts of that. And, um, and to me, you know, I was, I had a writer's room at Netflix for a show I was doing right when ChatGPT came out. And, and after the room was done, I was like, oh, could I make my own writer's room? And I've, I've done that. And I do that for my own projects. And, um, and it's, it's not like I've replaced people's jobs because I wouldn't be able to hire my own writer's room for my own projects. But, but it is, I think there's incredible benefits to. I use it. I mean, I did, I tried to count the other day.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I use it like 5,000 times a day. I have agents that are helping me write screenplays and, and fact checking books and all these different things at the same time. And, um, I needed a website that I, I was doing some work on a script and, and whenever you use Claude and things like that, um, you, uh, this, the quotes are always straight, straight quotes, and they should be curly quotes. I couldn't find a website that would curl them and didn't have ads. So I just used Replit and I made my own website, CurlMyQuotes.com. It's like, I couldn't have done that before. And like, and I think that it enables you to do more in less time and tell better stories.

• 1:15:41Rich Roll?

  So in the audio documentary, which is called, uh, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? I think it was called What Could Go Wrong? You enter the picture and you kind of counsel Scott on how he can create his own writer's room, essentially by, um, by giving birth to a bespoke series of, of, of AI bots, each of which has its own personality, its own backstory, its own degree of expertise. And so Scott creates this writer's room. There's a virologist and there's a conspiracy theorist and there's a, you know, like all, and then they, these people end up, and he's got his studio head and his agent and these people are all in communication with each other. And there's like a whole ecosystem that gets created. And this is something that you've done.

• 1:16:27Rich Roll?

  To and what you just shared, which is absolutely fascinating. Like I'd never thought of AI in that context. Like I use it as a research tool, but as somebody who's writing a book right now, like I'm very reluctant to share like my actual pros with an AI. Like I don't want any kind of like, I want to write the my book. I want it to be a human created book. I want to take advantage of AI as a research tool, but I don't ever want to be accused of like AI having its fingerprints on anything that like I've written myself.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  But I don't think it's, so I'm not, I, I, I'm not going along to Claude and saying, write this book for me because it couldn't do it. It just, it couldn't, but I do go along to Claude. So one example of the way I use AI is I just, just finished this book. For with Dwayne Johnson on the company, the mafia in Hawaii. And we have 5.5 million words of research for the book. Newspaper articles from the 1940s all the way to the 1980s that were all taken from slides.

• 1:17:32Rich Roll?

  Like microfiche.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Fiche and so on and so forth. I have a researcher whose name is Nick. We call him Nick 2.0. And we, we went to the National Archives. We got all the court documents, boxes that had never been opened in 50 years. Thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of page of court documents. When I wrote American Kingpin, there was no AI. So what I would do is I, I did like, I had an Excel spreadsheet that like had all the dates and the times and everything, but I would have to remember what to search for. I was like, oh, it was, he was wearing orange. So I'd search for the color and then I would piece it all together. Right? What I did with, with this book and what I do with the screenplays I'm working on and so on, that are all based on some, some sort of reality.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Is I, I use, I use cursor, which is actually, most people use it for programming and I use it for both programming and writing. And, and I have my own agents that are specifically designed for, for what I do. And then I.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Can have them take the microfiche, turn it into text and so on and so forth. And then I can ask it questions like, oh, what were some of the interesting things that happened during the trial? What were, you know, tell me the story about the murder of of Monty and Fuzzy. Tell me like, and so it gets all those things. And then I can go read those, those parts of the transcript, but I don't have to go through

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  5.5 million words of research. And so the other thing I do is while I'm writing, so, um, do you know what a TK is?

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  Uh uh.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  So in journalism.

• 1:18:58Rich Roll?

  Oh, like you'll get to it later, you move on.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in journalism, whenever you're writing on deadline and you need to fill something in later, you write TK. So two letters next to each other. And it's the, the greatest thing I've ever learned in my life. Because there's no word in the English language that has a T and a K next to it. So you can search at the end, right before you go to press for TK. And if it's like a fact about like the number of floors of a building or the guy's, you know, job title or whatever, you fill those in. So usually I would go and I would do find and replace and do the research and so on. So what I do now is I, as I'm writing, I'll be like, the person, you know, this guy's walking down the street on TK street and he runs into TK guy and da, da, da, da, da. And then I write it and it's all in my style. And then I give it to one of my agents and I say, go, go, go fill in the TKs from all the research.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  And it just goes and does it. And it gives me, I have it give me all the things. So that to me

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  has saved me a week's worth of work. So I'm still doing the writing, but it's filling in the little details that, you know, or like I'll, I'll remember from reading the dialogue between two characters. And I'll write it and then I'll say, go check it and make sure it's right and fix it if I've made a mistake. And so it, it's doing that with, um, with a screenplay, you know, I'm writing the screenplay, but I'll, I'll say like, this is one way a lot of people I know use it like, this paragraph is too, too much exposition. Give me 10 versions of how to take the exposition out. And then it gives it to me and then I rewrite it again and that's it. And so it's. It's just thinking, it's not writing the book, it's not writing the screenplay, it's just helping me

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  come up with, with, with things. And then at the end of it, I will, you know, one thing I did with, with the recent book I did, I uploaded the whole book and I said, are there any characters that need closing out? Are there any moments that don't flow? Give me a full critique on, on it. And it gave me a bunch of notes and I was like, great. And I went back and fixed them.

• 1:20:56Rich Roll?

  Can you create bots for the characters, like the Dwayne Johnson character? And then, and then test to say, is this something this person would say based upon all of this 5,000, you know, pages of research that you have fed it?

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Well, so there was a couple of things I did that are like that. So one thing I did was I had an agent and they're super easy to make, like they're really not. You can just go to Claude and say, tell me how to make an agent that does X or skills, whatever. It's not that hard.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  But you, one thing I did that was really fascinating recently was I, I was writing about these mobsters specifically. And I, there was some parts I just didn't understand, like from a mentality standpoint. So I had, I had an agent that created the characters and then I could interview the characters. They're dead.

• 1:21:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  So I can't like,

• 1:21:50Rich Roll?

  That's fucking wild.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  So I'm like, what's it like to bury someone alive? Like, what does that feel like? And like, and it's, it's looking at like, it's got the information I have, the interviews I've done and so on and so forth. And then it's also looking at research online and everything. And so I'm literally having a conversation with a dead person and, or what's it like? Another example was part of the book takes place and the movie takes place during World War II. So there's this amazing opening of the book where I'm not going to give it away, but It's a very visual moment during Pearl Harbor. So I wasn't in Pearl Harbor, right? I could go read a few books and da, da, da, da. I said, I want you to be a person who is,

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  who is there in Pearl Harbor on day that the bombs dropped. I'm going to ask you questions like, what does it smell like? What does it look like? What are you hearing? Where are the planes coming from? All these questions. And it gives it to me. And then I go, I go right based on that quote unquote interview with a robot.

• 1:22:51Rich Roll?

  That's wild. It isn't a binary thing. I mean, that's incredibly helpful and powerful. And in the Scotty Burns audio documentary, it's like, the premise that AI comes up with for this contagion two is a fucking banger. You know, it's like this, I would watch this movie and he was not coming up with that on his own.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  But I think that the, the, the misnomer is that you're gonna, the, the misnomer is this, it's that AI will be, will be able to write the next Scormar McCarthy book. I do believe that is going to happen.

• 1:23:24Rich Roll?

  You do.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  I do believe that. I think that we are a long, which is terrifying. I think we're a long ways away from it. But I do believe we're gonna, maybe not a long way, maybe a couple of years. I don't know. But, and, and I haven't wrapped my head around what that means. I do have some thoughts and we can talk about it. But, but for the, for the rest of the, for, for now, you still need a human to write those stories. You still need a human to direct the AI. Because these L L Ms have been created on the entirety of everything written in the past, you know, X number of hundreds of years. And I, I mean this in the kindest possible way

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  possible. Most people can't tell a fucking story. And most people can't write, and they're really bad at it. And so it is being trained on everything, including that. And most of it is that, you know, and so the, it's not looking at the, the best writers. It's looking at all of it. And so.

• 1:24:28Rich Roll?

  Treating them equally.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  And it's treating them equally. In fact, it's giving more weight to the worst ones because there's more of them. And so you still need a human to say, that's a terrible idea. That's cheesy. There's a thing that a lot of the, a lot of the, all of the AIs do when you ask it to write a screen, a scene in a screenplay. So one of the classic things in a screenplay is you come into the scene late, you leave the scene early, which means you never walk in the door and you never walk out the door. You come in mid-argument, it can be four lines of dialogue. When you ask an AI to write a scene, even if you tell it to come in late and leave early, it will always be like, it'll just, it always tells you the thing that you already know. It doesn't know how to do any of that stuff yet. And I think it's a while away until it does.

• 1:25:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I take comfort in that, but as we progress towards an AI that can write like Cormac McCarthy or in a indistinguishable fashion, the question is, like, what is the human role in the midst of this? And, you know, there was a bunch of hullabaloo around these, these clips that were shared on social media where it was like a fight scene with Brad Pitt and like, and it looked pretty realistic, right? But you still look at it and you're like, yeah, I don't give a shit because like, I know this is fake and this isn't the real people. And, you know, as human beings, part of the attraction to that type of storytelling is the human element, is knowing that there was, you know, somebody

• 1:25:58Rich Roll?

  behind that with a creative inspiration to create that. The question is, does that matter when we, we are looking at something that's indistinguishable or not?

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  I don't think it does.

• 1:26:11Rich Roll?

  You don't think it does?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  No, I don't think it does. I don't think.

• 1:26:13Rich Roll?

  You think that's, that's sort of a romantic idea that humans are hanging on to? Cause there is a, there is, I do feel like right now at least, and obviously we're in early days, you know, authenticity is at a premium. Like we're, we're sort of tired of the AI, AI slop. And when you see something that you know is real or a person that you can trust, like that has value.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Let me ask you a question. If I, so you like Cormac McCarthy too, right? We'll use him as an example. If, if I came along and I said, I've. I found his unwritten novel. It's amazing. You got to read it and you read it and you're like, this is amazing. And then afterwards, I said, it was written by an AI. Would you feel differently?

• 1:26:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Like you would still have enjoyed the novel and I think that.

• 1:26:57Rich Roll?

  But then I would be, I would be disappointed, I think, upon hearing that news in the aftermath.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  You'd be disappointed in the aftermath, but, but my point is, is that you will appreciate the art equally the same, whether it's written by an AI or the real Cormac McCarthy. And I think that if a, when you look at that fight scene that everyone was sharing, it still had a little bit of, a little bit of AI in there. Eventually it won't and it just won't. And, and I think that, um, once we get to that point, if it's a good story, people won't give a shit if it's written, if it's made by a person or not. And they won't give a shit if it's a real actor or if it's a fake actor. I think that there will be some people in society that will say like, I will only, I can imagine books in the bookstore that says written by a human.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Like, I'm not condoning any of this in any way, shape or form. Like if I could build a time machine and go back to 1960, when people wrote on typewriters, I would be happy to. But I just see that this is the future.

• 1:27:56Rich Roll?

  It does seem inevitable to me though, that we're in this recursive loop of degradation. Because these AI tools are only as smart as what we feed them. And as the internet is increasingly populated with AI generated material, it's like we're making facsimiles of facsimiles of facsimiles. And we're not seeding it with the best of what humanity has to offer. And we're seeding it with less human creativity and inspiration. So Cormac McCarthy is a one of one and he comes along and writes in a way no one else does. And that elevates the human spirit, but.

• 1:28:37Rich Roll?

  We need those people to come and kind of refresh how we think about literature, or choose your art form, or whatever the specialty is. And if those people don't, and they're not feeding the AI, then we're just training it on what exists, and it becomes this lowest common denominator thing. And that can't help but kind of degrade, you know, we just careen towards idiocracy.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  I think we've careened towards idiocracy. We're already, we're past that point. I'm not condoning any of this. I want to say that, like, to me, I said this on a podcast last year, and all these people were mad at me, but I'll say it again, I don't care. I think Colleen Hoover is a terrible writer, all right? And, and she had 1.7 books on the New York Times Bestsellers because of TikTok, and so on and so forth. And I don't hold it against her. I'm not saying I'm Corinne McCarthy in any way, shape, or form. I'm just, like, I can list a million other terrible writers. But what bums me out is

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  there are so many incredible books by incredible writers that make you think, and that's the stuff that's on the top of the New York Times Bestsellers. But it's because we go to this lowest common denominator now. And my hope, and this is literally just my hope, is that what AI can do is help us, help guide us to back to something that is not slop. And I think if it's gonna be slop, it will be, we don't need AI slop, we've got, we've got human slop, right? It just, it doesn't, it's not gonna change, it's not, it's whatever.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  But there is a scenario, and this is my hope, is that the scenario allows us to make better stories that...

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Pushes to think more and so on and so forth. The question is, is Anthropic gonna say, oh, we're only gonna use the top 1% of writers and then we're gonna train the AIs on that and then they're gonna be more creative and so on and so forth? Or is it, what's gonna happen? I don't know. I do believe that no matter what, that the most creative people will always have a job of telling stories, whether they are coming up with an idea and telling an AI to write the book or whatever it is. But I truly do believe that. I think it's gonna be like the art world where you have 50 people that make a living and the rest of them, you know, paint flowers in their bedroom and that's it. But like, but I do believe that that's the case.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  But I think that to say that we're not gonna consume AI content because it's garbage, like, we consume a lot of garbage today.

• 1:31:19Rich Roll?

  Storytelling is not going away, but the thing that worries me the most in this shorter term window of rapid AI advancement is the incentive structure behind good storytelling because we are already in a post-truth world, like, and a great story using AI and visuals that are indistinguishable from reality has the capacity to manipulate the masses into, you know, name your idea, right? So this is something that is easily weaponized. Like, we don't know what's real anymore and we don't know that person that we recognize who's saying that thing, whether they actually said it.

• 1:32:04Rich Roll?

  And even if we're told it's fake, the research shows that we still kind of believe it, you know, even if we're told it's AI? And what is this doing to the human mind and to...

• 1:32:18Rich Roll?

  The capacity for the human animal to maintain coherent societies. Like, I just see, like, this is like, yeah, this is, this is how we're going to destroy ourselves, I think, in the short run.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  I completely agree, and that's, that's the biggest worry. I think that, um, you know, uh, in the, the attack on Iran recently, Iran was using just basic AI tools like ChatGPT to make fake videos. Or Gemini, I don't know which ones they were using, but they were, they were using these basic AI tools to make fake videos of them bombing Israel, destroying it. And then they were putting that on television for everyone in Iran to believe that they, they're winning the war. It's like, you know, there are news clips, uh, there was a news clip that I'm on a text thread with a bunch of screenwriters, and one of the guys was like, oh, my God, did you see Iran, um, is, uh, agreeing to, to, to all of the US terms?

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  And it was a CNN clip of Jake Tapper. And the only reason I could tell it was AI was because Jake's hair looked too good. And, but it was, it was an AI clip.

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  And enough to convince your very smart screenwriting friend. Yeah. Like, this is just terrifying to me.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  It's terrifying, and I think, but, but technology, technologies cometh and technologieslies are then cometh to take on the other technology.

• 1:33:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know, but this is not Napster.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  It's not, but the only way that we survive this is, is if the technology that is used to create it, there's other ones that are used to fight the, the bad ones.

• 1:33:50Rich Roll?

  Sure, but that is analogous to, uh, the detection of performance enhancing drugs. Like, the advancement is always ahead of the detection system and the, the correction system.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  1,000%. And I, and I, I, I'm not saying, I'm not being an optimist in this. I'm just, I'm just, I know that's where we'll end up. Again, it's the worry of how much bad happens before we figure out how to solve the.

• 1:34:14Rich Roll?

  And what is your sense of the timeline here?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  It's, well, the problem is, is, it's, what's fascinating is, um, You know, I've always been, you know, when I was a kid, I loved computers so much. I used to go on a weekend to the local corner shop in in England and get the new coding magazine and write, you know, basic code and stuff. And I've always been obsessed with tech and just there's something about it that I'm so, I mean, I I'm fascinated about technology from a human standpoint. It is, it is the only thing I think that really truly separates us from other creatures. And other creatures make art and music and so on and so forth. Technology is the one thing that we do

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  that really truly separates us. And yet it is inevitable that it will be the downfall of us and we can't stop ourselves. And I'm fascinated by that. And there's also the other thing I'm fascinated by is that we are obsessed with technology because we want to be able to do things quicker and easier and so on and so forth and advance more. And yet, when the technology destroys us, the thing that we immediately go to is back to these cavemen that will beat each other up for food and so on and so forth. So there's this crazy dichotomy with the way we as humans work and I'm fascinated by it. And, you know, if if right now there was some nuclear attack and the power went out,

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  like you and I would be like out in the street with baseball bats when we haven't had a meal in four days and like, and we literally go to that lowest common denominator as as us as as people. We go to our animal instinct. So that I'm fascinated by. As and as far as the the AI question goes, I do believe that there's a scenario where

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  it could be used for good, but I also know that there's a lot of scenarios where it will be used for bad. And the thing that's crazy is I've been covering

• 1:36:13Rich Roll?

  That's already true.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  It's already true.

• 1:36:14Rich Roll?

  There are remarkable advancements that are happening as like disease prevention and like cures and like just incredible shit.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Yes, and but there will be, there will be bad, lots of bad and. And the question is, and we haven't really seen the real bad yet. We just haven't. It hasn't come about. There's little video clips and this, that and the other. There's people who get scammed and so on and so forth. We haven't seen like the, we haven't seen the real bad. It's coming. It's just inevitable. And, and what's been so insane to, to witness for me is as someone who has been using technology their whole life has right, been writing about it for more than two decades. It's how quickly it's happened. And I had this moment recently. So one of the things I do when I do pitches is I create these AI images that I walk people through as I'm pitching the story.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Um, I find it really like a great way to tell, to tell a story and I use mid journey for it. And, and I, I started using it about a year ago for this. And I was, went to the bottom of my mid journey feed and the first images were so horrifically bad. Compared to what we can do today, and that's in like a year. And so there's no, I have never seen a technology grow as fast as this. It's astounding and it's exponential. It's going to continue to do it as it gets smarter. And so the question is.

• 1:37:31Rich Roll?

  Well, it becomes self-improving.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  It becomes self-improving and it, it's on a daily basis. You know, every single day there's this competition between DeepSeek and Gemini and Anthropic and, and OpenAI and so on to quickly get the, the more models and more tokens and more, you know? And the question is, is um, what goes wrong and when and how do we, how do we prepare for it? And the, there's no answer to those questions.

• 1:37:58Rich Roll?

  And it is an interesting quirk of the human animal that we know all of this and yet we're like, well, we're just barreling forward anyway, because that's what we do.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  That's the fascinating part.

• 1:38:10Rich Roll?

  That, that sort of informs the argument that like, maybe human beings are just intended to be the sex organs of this new form of life. And that's our, that's ultimately like the end game of our entire purpose. And it doesn't really matter whether we survive or not.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  I, I, as you know, it's interesting. I heard the story years and years ago from a friend who was at the dinner where Elon Musk and um, uh, Larry Page got into the fight about, do you know the story?

• 1:38:38Rich Roll?

  Uh, I don't think so.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  They were at Larry's house. Elon was sleeping on his couch and. And they were talking about AI way before any of us were talking about it. And, um, and Larry Page had said allegedly to Elon that, you know, robotics are, they're the future of this, um, of humanity, like they're sort of the next iteration of humanity, of evolution, sorry. And Elon got really mad. He was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, that's it. It's just evolution. And Elon and him started arguing and Elon said, you're, no, Larry Page accused Elon of being speciest. And, um, and I remember at first hearing that and being like, what a psycho Larry Page is.

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  And then you kind of see it all and you're like, well, maybe that's, maybe that's it. I don't know.

• 1:39:29Rich Roll?

  And here we are and Elon is creating the robots. Basically like they, they stopped creating the Model S and the Model X.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Rich Roll?

  So that they could allocate resources towards their robotics department.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, and it's like, we know what the, we know the future. We know what it looks like, but we.

• 1:39:48Rich Roll?

  We're like, yeah, it's gonna be bad, but here we go.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what I find so fascinating, I'm sure you've had this conversation, is this, that exact moment. Well, you just said you laughed. So when I talk to people, we're at a dinner, dinner party or something, me and my wife, and it'll come up and I'll tell them like all my theories of like what it is. And then people, like there's a silence and then there's a laughter. Like we know when someone almost gets hit by a car and they laugh right afterwards. Like there's this silence and this laughter and then people will be like, so what do you guys want to do for dessert? And it's like.

• 1:40:16Rich Roll?

  There's a powerlessness.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  There's a total powerlessness that we have. And so it, it comes out and us grinding our teeth at night or, or whatever, however it comes out. But it's like, it's, it's so fucking fascinating that we know it's gonna go wrong and yet, and I know it's gonna go wrong. And after this, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna sit at my laptop and I'm gonna talk to an agent. And it's like,

• 1:40:43Rich Roll?

  like, and that's just a weird cognitive dissonance kind of thing.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Because what's the other version of it? I go live in the woods and wait for someone else to do it?

• 1:40:50Rich Roll?

  You're, you're, you're balancing these polarities of like existential dread while also being kind of amazed that we're alive at this period of time where we're giving birth to this thing. And there is, like, you're watching a movie, like, what's gonna happen next? Like, it's exciting. But how old are your kids?

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Nine and 10.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  Nine and 10, okay. So my, my kids are older, but your kids being younger are, that's even more of a, of a, of a prescient case, like, how do you think about the world that they're going to inherit? And what do you say to young people who are wondering, like, where should I place my attention? What should I be doing right now to prepare for this thing? That, uh, none of us can kind of really imagine what it's going to look like and what the skillsets are that we're going to need.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  I truly don't know the answer to that. I truly don't. I don't know. If I were me.

• 1:41:40Rich Roll?

  And if you don't, like,

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  If I were me, okay, and I was, I was just coming out of art school at this point. I would not, I would have dropped out of art school probably, to be quite frank. Um, uh, but I always believe, I think, I truly do believe that the, the most important thing that humans do is tell stories. And I would continue to try to figure out how to tell stories, good stories that try to, that have an impact on society that is positive. Quite, quite frankly, I know this may sound bullshit, but it's truly what I believe. Like, so to me, if I were coming out today as from art school or trying to get a job as

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  in, or whatever it was that I was doing, or trying, gonna be a writer, my number one goal would be how do I tell stories that try to make sure society doesn't end up in the worst catastrophic place? Whether that's, I, I wouldn't have done this, but like, becoming an influencer that's trying to talk about the good and the bad and the diddle diddle da. It's like, it's,

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  The only thing that we can do to control it is to tell stories about what it could be. And to make people think about it. And so my answer is that. You know, and it's why I'm still doing it now because I believe like, I believe that, you know, the, the, the, the mafia book that I'm writing with Dwayne. It's sure it's about the mafia, but it's about colonialism. It's about right and wrong and, and what happens to people. It's like, it's about much bigger things. And I think that we as a species, that's how we learn is through story. And the only way to try to save the species is to, is to tell better stories.

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  I think that I, that, that chuckle that we have when we're kind of confronted with this reality is a reflection of our discomfort with uncertainty. And the truth of the matter is that the world has always been tremendously uncertain and the human mind like to, likes to fabricate rules and, and create structures that, that, that foster the illusion of certainty and predictability, but nothing really is certain. It's just that with AI, the uncertainty factor is through the roof all of a sudden. And, and we're just fundamentally wired to be uncomfortable with that.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:10Rich Roll?

  But in terms of like, the anxiety levels of the adults who are trying to make sense of this, perhaps there's something to be said for just being in a relationship with your relationship with uncertainty, you know, and trying to, trying to find some peace in that and understanding that, you know, it's been uncertain all along.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  I totally agree. I mean, it's, it's why people are drawn to, were drawn to religion because they're not as much anymore because. That created boundaries around uncertainty, right? It said there are rules and there's a reason and you have to trust in God and Jesus and whatever. The other thing that this religion you believe in says and it's as a society, as societies, we've, we've, we've pulled away from that at a time when we probably need it more than ever. And I think it's, it's a really astute point to say like, you have to be okay. It's like that saying in, in AA, like about being okay with not being okay.

• 1:45:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there is a, there is a, somebody who's been in AA for a long time. Like it's all about powerlessness. Like we really don't have control over all the things that we think we do. Like we can control our behavior and our kind of reaction or response to things that happen. And given an acceptance of that powerlessness, how do we find peace, happiness, meaning, et cetera?

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  So I read this Nietzsche quote that was, was, it was actually really interesting. So here it is. So what if someday or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a god and never have I heard anything more divine? And the point that he's trying to make is you know that you are living the life that

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  you're meant to live if you would be okay living it over innumerable times. And so that to me is like, I am so fucking lucky that I ended up telling stories. Cause it's what I'm meant to do. I don't know why, I don't know. It's literally, it's, it's, it gives me a calmness. It makes me, it's why I love writing books. Like most people hate writing books. I fucking love it. There's nothing I enjoy more than, than the challenge of telling a story in 110,000 words. And and and I think if you told me I have to write books every day for the rest of you, the you like you the civilization or whatever it is like I'd be the happiest person ever.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  And I think that um, to me, that's really what it's all about. And it's if you if you know that you're doing that, uh, that you that you're comfortable with the fact that you are living this life that you're meant to live, uh, then that's what it's all about. That's the meaning and that's man's search for meaning. That is it. And it could be like, maybe you you love branding, you love running, you love climbing towers, like you love podcasting, whatever it is, it's about finding that thing. And I think that to me, um, and that that to me is what it's all about and until the AI kills us all.

• 1:47:32Rich Roll?

  I think that's beautifully put. I would only add to that, uh, that perhaps amidst this uncertainty or being in the eye of this AI hurricane, that maybe we can appreciate the moment a little bit more like if this is truly, everything's transient, but now it just is like, you know, it's on a shorter timeframe, right? Like, okay, well, if this is going to go away or things are going to look very different in an unpredictable fashion, like in a very short period of time, let's try to really appreciate the lives that we have right now. And like yourself, I feel extremely lucky to be able to do what I do and sit across from people like yourself and and learn from them.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  No, it's I I completely agree. And I think one of the biggest, somebody said this to me 15 years ago, when the um, 17 years ago, so when the iPhone first came out, uh, they had a very prescient point, which was my biggest worry is not the screen and the this and that. It's that we will never have moments where we just sit anymore. And boy, were they right. And I think like one of the things, and it's hard, it is so hard. But one of the things that I really have been trying to do is like, just put it away. Even if it's for five minutes. Like, people used to sit on their porch and just think, you know?

• 1:48:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  And now like you're like, you're at a urinal and you're like, oh, I can, I can read an email, you know? And it's like, it's, it's, I think this is honestly one of the worst inventions in humanity. It is literally, like, I wonder if Steve Jobs were still alive, if he'd be like, oh, I did a great thing. Or, or like, I did a terrible thing. And, and I think it really is a, it's, it's just, you gotta, you have to fight against the technology. Even though we all need to use it to be in the society we live in.

• 1:49:21Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to end it, but I would ask you this final question. How is it collaborating with The Rock on this project?

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  He's just a sweet guy. He's like really thoughtful, always thinking about other people. He, he's funny. He sends, he doesn't send texts. He sends voice notes. And so you get these long voice notes from Dwayne and, and, and it's like, it's just, they're fun. You know, he's like telling his thoughts and his.

• 1:49:47Rich Roll?

  That tells me that he appreciates the fact that he holds a certain stature. Like, if you get a voice memo from him, you're gonna save that thing. It's his voice. He's speaking to you.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's also.

• 1:49:58Rich Roll?

  As opposed to like just texting.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  He also, he like works out like three hours a day or something. So he's just, I think he's doing, he's in the gym and rather than like, he's like, you know, lifting 400 pounds with one arm and then sending you a voice note. But he's great. He's been an amazing collaborator and, and he really got in there. We're like, we did a lot of the interviews together, like with the, the former mob bosses and.

• 1:50:19Rich Roll?

  And Scorsese.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  And Scorsese has been, he's, you know, it's, that was a surreal moment. I was with him in New York recently and we were breaking the story and batting around ideas and talking about good fellows and this, that and the other. And he's 83, but like, he's got more energy than me, you know? It's, it's, it's, it's interesting. It's like, you know, they're.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  That's an example of like the people that are doing the thing that they should be doing.

• 1:50:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  Um, and, uh, and they're really good at it and they're, you know, and that, that's, it's been really fun to, to be a part of that.

• 1:50:55Rich Roll?

  In watching the Scorsese documentary and there's that part where they're, you know, they're talking to his childhood friends and, and they're talking about how he's literally storyboarding movies as this little kid and everyone's like, what are you doing? Like clearly this guy is doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. Like he is living the fully expressed version of who he was always meant to be.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  I think that's what it's all about. Like it's about, it's about finding that thing and it doesn't matter what it is. I mean, you don't want to be a serial killer if you're meant to be, but like, but like it's about finding your place on, in, on the stage in this play, like, and, and that's it. Cause we don't know, we will never know and AI is never going to tell us why we're here. Like we're never going to figure that out. So we just have to go with the thing that we, we are comfortable with in that moment. And that's usually the thing that we want to be doing and, um, and that's what it's all about.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to end it, man.

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Rich Roll?

  Beautiful way to conclude this conversation. Thanks, Nick.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun.

• 1:52:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, very cool. Uh, the movie obviously is going to be a couple of years before this thing is out.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  A couple of years, yeah. The book is coming out next year.

• 1:52:08Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I have a podcast I'm doing with, um, Dick Costolo and Paul Kudrowski. Dick was the former CEO of Twitter. Uh, it's called the Nick, Dick and Paul Show. We talk about all sorts of stuff like this every week.

• 1:52:19Rich Roll?

  Nice. All right, man. We'll come back and share some more when the book's coming out.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  Love to.

• 1:52:24Rich Roll?

  All right. Thanks, Nick.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:52:25Rich Roll?

  Peace.