2025-08-01 08:00:01
Just Pod
可以说是最近40年来对少林寺这个品牌，我觉得算是鞠躬至伟的，但是备受争议的一位人物——释永信方丈。当然现在他已经被应该消除了他的界谍，应该改成俗家名了——刘某某。
总之这么一个在中国的宗教界，或者过去的那种文化版图上非常亮眼的一位人物，就是现在轰然倒塌。而且关于他的传闻也有非常多，但是到目前为止，这些的真假我们都还很难去辨别。
但毫无疑问，少林寺这样的一个寺庙，以及它背后代表这个产业，它一定是经过了所谓的试用性时代。如果我们用这五个字的话，这个时代已经结束了。
所以我们今天要找到王凯老师好好聊一聊这个话题。为什么聊这个话题？是因为我在翻这些旧刊物的时候，我就发现三联生活周刊早在2010年就用一期封面报道来写过当时的少林寺和试用性。当时好像也是在挖一个关于他的一些背景的材料。
那会是因为一个什么样的原因你们会写它，而且是用直接封面的形式来写？我不知道大家有没有印象，就是一直在传说这个寺院要上市——少林寺上市。10年那会儿，其实关于他的传说一直非常之多，关于少林寺关于试用性的，每隔几年就一个，每隔几年就一个，这一次是终于到了一个休止符。
真的是这样。
这个寺庙当然我们过去在什么武侠小说，或者更久远的这些历史文献当中，少林寺它的名字也经常出现，而且确实从中国的佛教历史的角度，它的地位就是很高。
但不可否认的是，在20世纪，少林寺变成今天成为一个产业，达到这样的一个规模的话，那确实是伴随着释永信80年代进入这个寺庙，并且一手操盘，通过各种政商关系，包括他自己的一些聪明才智，把它营销到了今天的这样的一个规模。
所以这样的一个人轰然倒塌，深陷淋遇的这样的一个结局，挺符合改革开放时代的很多故事的。我们以前看激荡30年，或者什么大白局，这种故事里面有很多企业家好像都是这样子，激荡了快50年，也相对最精彩吧，我觉得非常精彩。
比如说一个衬衫的倒塌，一个房地产的倒塌，建立宝的倒塌，就是它可能太商业了。
是。
但少林寺它背后也有很多的文化层面的，文化、外交、宗教，我觉得它好像辐射特别广。
是。
你要说它光是个商品倒塌，但它不会有这么强烈的传播冲动，也不会有这么多故事。
就像这几天大家在猜测它倒塌的原因，到底是因为那些外交层面的：
我们可以说吗？我觉得是踢嘴。
我们也不要去忘加采策。
对。
特别高兴见到陈一良。然后我必须解释一下，上次我被骂了，大家老说我声音忽大忽小，因为我上次特别重的感冒，一咳嗽，我就想躲在旁边，被大家分分辱骂。
然后另外一件事，没最准这麦克风。
然后另外一件是说我没有记者的善良，好像是因为讲了地震的一些什么狗在叫那些的。
其实我觉得，就是我们讨论一个问题特别多面。你可能你看到的现象和你在新闻报道里写的，包括你内心感触，一定是多重的。
就像我们今天在讨论这个寺院问题的时候，它也是一个特别多面的问题。
对。
我这两天看到的很多，就是在说这个所有的钱都被和尚拿去找小老婆了，都去生孩子了，那显然不是一个真实的面相。
对。
但是你要说这个寺院的经济是怎么回事，其实我们也是不知道的。因为它确实不是个企业。
好像是discovery去采访过少林寺的时候，他们不知道怎么翻译方丈，那时候就给释永信了一个翻译，然后就说怎么翻译呢，然后就把释永信翻译成了少林寺的CEO。我觉得其实恰恰是因为他的名声，给他带来了众多的问题。
尤其少林寺绝对不仅仅是一个登峰的寺庙，不是一个河南的寺院，他可能真的是一个全球的少林寺，他在公众的视野之中，就导致他的复杂性呈现出各种面相。
我觉得这个特别有意思。
我们10年去的时候，其实已经感受到那种很复杂，很多重或真或假的信息，然后或真或假的叙述方式。我当时是跟我们的，现在的三联主编李鸿鼓一起去的。
我觉得我们都还算老记者吧，但是都还是只能获得或真或假的信息，而并不是说我们写的报道就是一个真相。
很多报道都会说“我有真相，我有真相”，但最终大家都没有真相。
就是那次10年，就是为了当时少林寺上市的传闻。
对。
其实当时解释很清楚，而且我觉得他的解释是解释得通的，因为大家知道中国有一句俗话：
“什么名山大川，大概都被名寺所占了。”
所以当这个寺院开始变成旅游景点的时候，一个最真实的问题就浮现在眼前了：
然后当时10年的时候，为什么会谣传少林寺要上市？其实大家如果翻一下当时的报道很清楚： 当时有个香港的港中旅，想跟登峰合作，就是把少林寺开发成整个景区，然后这个门票收入归他们所有，他们想在香港上市。
但是以释永信来说，凭什么这个门票不分给他一部分，觉得这应该是寺庙的收入，也确实就是说他至少应该分一部分。
所以当时他就作为全国人大代表，他其实就一直提出说：
“对宗教场所，要不就你不收票，你彻底不收票，国庆寺那样；要不就是你收费，你跟我分成；要不就是你又收了费，大家都觉得是少林寺收了费，而我又没有分到钱。”
以他的性格和以他多年的经营，因为到10年的时候，少林寺其实经营的已经很有起色了。
我记得当时我们看到的，当时一年的收入会超过一个亿，就松山少林寺明胜风景区的门票是100块以上，一年收入至少超过一个亿。
规定是少林寺能拿到30%的收益。
我觉得当时是在这个收益上互相有了争执，所以会有一部分关于少林寺要上市的谣言，在海外先起来，然后在国内也起来。
所以这个也不仅是少林寺的问题，我觉得是中国无数寺院都有这个问题。
这不是跟刚说的改开以来的那些商业公司产权问题一样吗？以前都是国资的企业集体企业。
这两天看到很多大家都在说中国寺院赚了好多钱，国美山收了好多钱，然后包括我们去西安，比如大印塔，那个大森寺收了好多钱。
其实这里面很多钱不是寺院收的，是文旅部门收的。
这里面的区分你是不是要跟大家解释一下？
这个特别有意思。
就是因为我们中国寺院的历史不是一直持续的，时常有中断。
我看大家前两天也在讨论历史上的灭佛，很多阶段，这个寺院就是荒废无人的。
我们就都知道中国是49年之后，因为我党是无神论，所以就有神论有信仰的这些地方都在逐渐的衰落。
当然彻底的把和尚赶去还俗，可能是发生在60年代。
然后到80年代，应该是1982年，胡耀邦他们当时提出过，重新推动了一个宗教政策，寺院重新大规模建立。
这个政策好像特别的宽容，以至于很多赵普初就说过：
“这真是一个菩萨一样的政策。”
就可能大批的承认寺院的存在，承认僧侣的存在。
然后当时就有一个非常明确的规定，我是在西安大臣寺听说的：
这个寺院如果是有和尚，这个寺院就归宗教界所有了。
82年那个点，如果有和尚，对，就是那前后，可能是当时已经开始出现这种情况了。
就是有大批寺院重新建立了，重新恢复了。
然后这个寺院如果说找不到和尚，确实一个都没有了，所有的和尚都还俗了，或者说已经荒废了。
然后这个寺院又很出名，它就归旅游部门所有。
我们现在都看到很多寺院门口的收费的人不是僧侣，那都是工作人员。
正好前一段去大同，大同有两个非常著名的寺院：
它已经完全就是在他们上一任那个很红的网红市场，在它开发的过程中，就把本来的佛教协会牵走了，就是你们去另外的地方。
这个完全变成文物，归文物和旅游部门所有，它就成了一个旅游职能。
那你说你现在去的华言寺，你去的是一个寺院吗？你更应该说我们去的是一个博物馆，去的是一个寺院遗迹，没有和尚的遗迹。
所以这就是一个特别复杂的事情。
但少林寺呢，跟这个又不太一样。
因为首先它是个寺院，而且它寺院规模很大，它名声很大。
我看释永信那个回忆里面，就是他80年代初去到少林寺的时候，虽然很破败，但里面还是有20多个僧人在里面出家的，还种地。
少林寺的历史就特别复杂，特别有趣。
因为要跟那个昌儿做节目，这两天还一直在研究，包括我们自己当时去，也看了很多资料。
因为80年代的时候，特别穷困的时候，少林寺的公开说法，就那个电影还没拍的时候，少林寺的自己寺院的历史，他也会说他可能有15、6处的篱笆是没有的，是他们连篱笆都修不起。
然后我们有一个开国中将，叫皮定军，他40年代的时候在那边打游击，然后44年在那边建立了抗日武装的根据地。
然后他有过几本回忆录，都反复说过少林寺。
大家现在看到很多少林寺的资料，都是从他那里来的。
是。
也特别有意思，他44年时候去的时候，他有第一本回忆录是60年代出的，就文革前期出的。
然后里面说，当时少林寺就有一群人，武僧就不怀好意地看着他。
然后芝克僧就拖住他，好像是一定要他吃东西，还要让他喝茶什么，让他喝茶。
其实他当时是想参观大殿的，就是参观后面，就是没有被毁坏。
因为虽然经过直奉大战，但少林寺还有一些大殿还留存了。
传说什么28年当时十有三火烧少林寺，确实是破坏了他的主体建筑，基本都破坏了，但是也留了很多明代建筑，也有很好的壁画，藏宁阁这些全都是后修的。
但是你想我们现在去少林，也能看到很多很好东西，比如说后山的塔林，还有一些宋代人物的什么黄庭坚的提字什么。
对对对，其实还是有大量的东西留存的。
所以他44年的时候，皮定军去参观的时候，他就说有知科僧不怀好意的拖住了他，然后有一群武僧拿着棍棒，虎视眈眈。
然后他就立声喝制了他们说：
“我们是抗武装，你们不要跟日本人搞在一起。”
但是大家想想，这本书是60年出版的，就是我们刚刚土地改革的时候，50年代。
它是明确的有一部分僧人被定成地主了，有一部分人还是贫农，就是僧人大概也分等级嘛，也能够想象。
然后而且五几年，他那边就大概有些环俗的僧人，就成了生产队，好像叫登峰什么城官大队，锅庄生产队，大概都是僧人组成的。
但是确实他也有一部分没有还俗。
然后到86年，这个皮定军再出回路的时候，对上林寺就很多的表扬了。
就是上林寺里有很多抗日的僧人，跟他们结成了抗日武装，而且当时那个地方，就是成立一个抗日的政府。
有一个副区长，就是一个武僧，已经还俗了的一个武僧。
他没有还俗，因为四几年嘛，你说对他们没有还俗的需求。
当时还有记录就是说，都是他86年那本传记里面说到的是，当时有一个抗日的县长，晚上夜宿少林寺，而且有人来抓他，还被少林的老僧人和保护，然后悄悄派人送他下山了。
所以我们可以想象，就是少林的武装力量一直都有，而且他有大量的田地，因为在过去的漫长的时间里，中国很多寺院是有自己的地产，有自己的产业的，这个其实也不奇怪。
大家如果看看历史书，就会发现很多寺院是有自己的产业，它才能生存。
对。
而且比如你前面提到，像当年什么三五一宗，他们搞灭佛运动，其实背后都有这种经济层面的和寺庙争夺人口、夺取这些财富这方面的一些考量。
我们从历史学的角度来看，一定是这样的。
但当时意识形态宣传一定不是这样的，一定是有别的宗教，或者说你怎么样怎么样。
说起来很搞笑，我高中买过一本书，我觉得可能就是90年代以后释永信和他的团队整理出来的开始宣传了。
对。
就是那本书是个合定本，叫做武当三十六宫与少林七十二义，里面记载了108门武功。
而且他说没本武功，当然记录的很简单。
是密集吗？
是密集。
里面就教你，比如说易纸禅怎么练，还有我记得当时有个什么锦拳弓，我当时还练过几个礼拜。
那个锦拳弓就是怎么样，说你找一口锦，就往里面每天挥拳。
比如说一开始两三年，可能你就发现挥拳下去毫无反应，不要气馁。
等到四五年的时候，开始紧紧，水波动，那个水开始有一些波澜。
到了你练到七八年，然后你一拳挥下去，那个水就咕咚咕咚的，就很大的响动了，说练到十五年以上此功已成。
说你一拳出去，如巨石投井，然后那个水能溅到井栏上。
说这个时候你就练成了。
然后你如果对人使用这招，可以在四五米开外隔空将人击倒。
说还好我只信了两个礼拜，这事练不成，都是因为你没练十五年。
十年很难去验证。
但后来我在想，这个东西到底是真的是少林寺当年的一些，还是说就是九十年代这些地摊坐着们自创的，我觉得特别有意思。
因为武功是一个无法证实的事情。
我前两天还在看徐好峰的小说，就是二十八年的时候，我们是有全国的国术大赛的，是武功比赛。
然后之后这个事就没了。
然后你现实中不存在说，我去踢武馆，我去打架，我去群殴，那个都属于要被公安制止的行为。
然后包括少林寺的武功呢，也都成了一个仅限于传说的事情。
我们一零年去的时候…… 因为专门也是要问这个嘛，也是对这个很好奇。皮定军一九五七年的时候重回少林寺，然后我看皮定军回忆录说，有一群老僧人，老武僧，还专门给他表演了武功。
然后大家知道，共产党我们的一个开国大将许世友，他是少年时代在少林寺，好像学过吧。是民间传说，说什么许世友能飞檐走壁什么的，那至少说明在民国的时候，在少林寺学习武功及练习武功，它不是一个完全虚假的事情。
对，它是有一定基础的。就跟我们一零年去的时候发现，因为当时少林寺做了三大块：
这是当时世友信跟我们说，这是他的软件升级，就是他做了三大块。我觉得他很聪明，他就从中国的传统文化中找了三大块三大产业。
现在这三大产业大家弄得也很嗨，都可以上市了。对，所以一个是医药，也就是少林药局。他说武术这块，少林武术呢，有一个很大的原因，当然我们都知道，是因为那个香港不断的传播。
对，我们知道民国的时候的武术记者，平江不悄生啊，王杜卢啊，然后最典型的当然我们后面都说，梁文生和金庸啊，因为这个系统在香港没有断绝嘛。
然后当然对大陆来说，影响最大的肯定是八十年代初的少林寺。但少林寺刚才跟陈良在说，也不是在少林寺拍的。
对，少林寺那个取景是在国庆寺，在台中拍的。而且这个很有意思，我就是去年去到国庆寺的时候，当地人跟我讲这个故事，说因为少林寺首先，它确实地位很高，它是那个禅宗的祖庭。
然后国庆寺是那个天台宗的祖庭，但是天台宗在日本的话非常盛行嘛。所以当年田中角荣，据说是他的母亲是天台宗的信徒，所以田中角荣就提出要来国庆寺，就是进来参观一下。
那这个事传到周总理，他就让浙江这边汇报一下现在国庆寺的状况。但是后来得知说国庆寺在那会儿变成了一个纺织厂，就是僧人都没有了。
然后他就立刻让这些纺织厂赶紧挪个窝，把这些僧人都招回去，然后从北京特批了一百多件文物送到国庆寺去装点。这还不一定是国庆寺自己流程，肯定不是了。
那就是可能把北京的一些东西可能就运过去了，反正装点门面。这个就导致国庆寺就拿到了一笔装修的资金，它就变成了70年代中国最美的寺院。
当然国庆寺本身，它那个条件也还不错，大环境非常好。其实很多寺院这么保留的。我最近刚去大同永安，有个很小寺院叫浑原寺，当时就是因为他们被当做了凉库，所以寺面的壁画全部留下来了。
就金代和明代的壁画留下来了，堆在骨子里面，它就被遮住了，就特别好看。就真是大家会觉得怎么就都没有损毁，其实它出于种种偶然性，也被留下来的还是挺多的。
对，所以当时应该是拍少林寺的时候，可能从取景的角度，是没有取少林寺的景。我看到一些，就塔林那些还是少林寺，也有些河南的别的文物景观。
对，释永信就是在那前后，应该81年的时候就投奔了少林寺。他是从安徽引上线到少林寺，所以这个也很奇怪。
其实因为他自己都说得不清楚，你有问过他吗？没有。你在采访他的时候，他只会说自己想说的，他绝对不会顺着你的思维走。
我觉得他已经酒精考验、酒精沙场，所以非常奇怪。他会说他大概是一个过年的时候去的，家里人都不在，他就偷偷拿着衣服去了。
但是实际上，这个引上线跟河南登峰是隔得很远的。对，不知道为什么他会去那边，而且当时那个电影并没有放映，所以他去的算是早的。
就是他的信息是从哪来的，还是说他其实没有那方面的信息，就是误大误壮。误大误壮，或者说民间一直有传说。
就是因为民间传说的力量有可能比我们知道的更持久，或者就是一些更私人的原因，比如家庭里面有谁对去过，或者说那边有人。
但是因为他社会不清楚，但我们知道他去的时候少林寺是非常破败的，跟我10年去的时候完全是不可同流而喻。
我去的时候，其实我们是被他请到方丈室去接受采访。我跟我们的李宏谷李大人，我是被豪华所震撼了。
你知道他那边有一个巨大的那个我们拿玉石雕的那种巨大的假山，不是叫山子吗？我只有在故宫才看到过那么庞大的一个山子，只是说雕工当然不能跟北京故宫比了。
然后可能因为很热吧，我记得他给我们每个人递过一把这个檀香扇，就是真的是非常豪华。
他也不忌讳对普通记者展现他的豪华，而且我觉得他很有分寸。你看我们去那，我们是自己住的，寺院没有招待我们说你们住或者吃。
当然他们会说你们可以住在附近的民宿里，这按武侠小说不应该有个什么知客僧来引导一下你们？有知客僧，但是你肯定是事先开始就联系好了。
但是他就把你们安排在附近的民宿里，而且是自己付钱的。我还记得我跟李大人还每天在附近的民宿还每天喝点啤酒。
就是他做的很有分寸，不卑不亢，他没有讨好你。
你当时觉得这个人怎么样？我觉得他太像一个传说了。我们对于传说中的人见到真人，其实很难有清晰的判断。
而且我相信他一定见过太多人，所以他的整个呈现给我们的人，其实距离他真实的人，我觉得有非常厚非常厚非常厚的一层铠甲。
这是一切名人都有的手段，他就更加有了。但有一些名人是那种，比如你之前听说过他名气很大，你见了一面之后会立刻很失望，你觉得这个人怎么这么贫用。
他会给你这种感觉？没有，他有一定的复杂度。而且我觉得他至少给了你一个真诚的面貌。
比如说我们就前面说到这个收费不收费的时候，盛永迅立刻就说：
“我们特别不愿意这个收费，为什么呢，因为门票收入太贵，对我们的信徒进来是有很大的问题的，就是信徒需要拿规疑证，然后报批。他就会觉得是防止扩大我们的影响力的。”
当然他也是从一个现实角度来提出这个问题的。
事实上很多寺院的方丈也会普遍有这个说法，就是说你们的这个会妨碍我们的信徒进入。
所以现在很多这种区域也会有一个说法说，你有皈依证可以免费进，他就非常明确地说，这样防止我们更多的发展。
而且他特别好笑，你会觉得他当时已经很出名了，是个强者，但是呢，他很愿意展示出一个我们其实是被欺负的对象。
谁欺负他？我举个最简单的例子，刚才我跟长尔也在说，特别好玩。
因为大家都说适用性注册了很多少林寺的商标。对，但事实上最早注册都不是适用性，都是社会各界，因为大家把它当作一个公共的名声在注册了。
我们都说少林武校有无数的武校，所有少林寺外围的武术学校都是当地农民办的，都跟他们没有任何关系。
然后这个还不足为奇，我当时听到一件事，我是真觉得他们被欺负了。
大家知道八十年代最出名的有个火腿肠产品，而且是最早的，就叫少林寺。火腿肠叫少林寺。
我想如果我是寺院里的和尚，我也会生气的。
因为，当然他私下偷不偷吃肉，这个我们不知道，但至少公开来说，你凭什么你跟火腿肠注册少林寺呢？
这还是近乎侮辱的一种注册吧。因为他们八十年代去少林寺的时候，少林寺还很贫困，是在他们的努力下，少林寺一步步起来了。
所以我觉得他会天然地认为这个商标是我的，只能我用，你们不能用。我觉得他的这套想法的逻辑是很清晰的。
那会儿你有感受到，比如或者他跟你呈现出来，或者你通过任何渠道有打听到，比如当地的这些，比如登峰政府。
登峰政府就是他的，我们说用仇人这个字也不合适，但至少他们是一个非常紧张的商业关系，他们是有摩擦的，非常清晰。
当时我记得很多报道把这个摩擦讲得清楚的，只是我们现在不记得了，因为发生15年了。
因为我听说过一些小道消息没被验证过的，说当地的一些，比如政府呀，或者当地的一些势力，也在试图推动适用性来做一些上市之类的，这些商业化的一些举措。
因为少林寺作为一个寺院很难上市，他除非说他合资了很多公司。但是那个阶段他刚刚起来，所以更多的是已经上市的港中旅和登峰政府合作，我们再做一个旅游公司来上市。
我觉得这个更合理，就是说他的竞争对手更想上市，所以这个方案里面就排除了少林寺，排除或者只分给他很少的钱。
但是他觉得你们都是因为我，你们才有这个，你凭什么给我这么少的钱。
所以当时是一个非常公开化的矛盾，可能时间久了大家就真的忘了。
当然怎么回事，都觉得少林寺挣了钱，至少我们10年去的时候，他还处在一个想挣更多钱，但是在不断规划他的武功系统、他的医疗系统、他的禅修系统，因为这是他更精通的买。
而且当年有一个产品很好玩大家可能现在不记得，叫少林素饼，就是一种很圆的一种小素饼。
所以当时我也是去了之后，还挺好吃的。然后少林药局提供很多各种各样的保健品。
其实大家想想在10年，是比较先进的。什么助眠的，你知道少林最擅长的是什么吗？医学方面，推拿吗？针灸，有点像骨科，因为它跌打损伤太多了。
精创药什么的，他们会有一种黑膏，就是自己号称是流传下来的。不是黑欲断食膏。
——黑欲断食膏叫黑欲糕，专门就是春节，或者什么时候，就会分给寺里的每个外夫用的。
外夫用的，因为他们当时28年就石油山去烧少林的时候，号称是当时的医方全部都烧毁了，就是方子全部烧毁了。
然后他们留下来的呢，就有很多乡村的，有大批的推拿医生。
我去的时候遇见了一个老医生，这个老医生叫士行真。他说他19岁的时候，那时候还在寺院里，就是赵不出，老见过他，并且动员他说你去上中国佛大大学。
然后他就去了那个北京上佛学院，然后之后就去西安一直在当一个医生，然后到他五六十岁，又回到家乡，七十多岁，被释永信就招到他们这来了。
他们那个针是两头针，说少林过去有一本经典叫血头经，根据血流的速度来给人扎针。
所以释永信，我觉得是吧，所有乡村的有关少林的这些人，都笼到了自己的身边。挺有意思。
然后这个老头，我记得他给我掰骨，当然我们就一边采访一边聊，他把我头一掰，我都觉得我头他掰掉了，整个啪，我还吓一跳。
后来想想真不敢随便让人来掰。
然后就是因为这种人的存在，所以少林是有一批他所谓的秘方。
我们不管这个秘方是真是假，不管这个传统会怎么样，他可能至少是流传在登峰一带、流传在河南乡间的大批的民间医学。
然后他说他们当时的黑膏是特别厉害的，然后还有用什么碎补和青皮等十几种中药，做了一个少林十三方。
然后用他们的药引，什么红药散、白药散，然后做出来，就是少林医局的基础。
所以他们是有东西的，不是说完全没东西。
他们武术也是这样的。
然后他们这个医学找的这个人叫士严林，严林法师。
当时我觉得很奇怪，我说这个你也不太像和尚。
他就是因为家里有海外关系，对士用心找来说，你帮我负责医学这一块。
他就因此出了家，他可能很早就跟士用心有关系，他也是士用心的土地，因为盐自备，好像都是士用心的土地。
然后这个人呢，我觉得他特别像个公司总经理。
他当时就说，因为大家都不肯来学嘛，然后就找了那些年轻的僧侣说你们谁来药局，然后来了三十多个人。
然后很多人都不坚持下来，后来他就说用那个禅修的方法要他们坚持下来学学学。
而且还跟当地的医学院合作，办了一个少林药局禅医功夫学院，然后初中生进去，然后经过三年的中专学习，他就有护校的文凭了。
其实他们是合法行医的。
我发现这是很多寺院在做的一件事，可能我们大家都忽略都不知道了。
比如说我去江西的那个曹洞宗祖庭，有办法的寺院，他申请了一个国家二类的什么学院，就办了一个当地最大的医院。
其实他们是有合法的行医资质的。
那你有那种大型医疗设备吗？X光机能拍片，他们还是偏于中医。
很多人去带着自己的片子，就是已经都有了。
当然中医骨科是有一套他的系统的，靠摸呀靠什么来做，当然他们也会结合厉害的人，是会看的。
所以我觉得他那个少林药局是试用性在走所谓现代化道路，他就很清晰，我该怎么做，我弄什么人，我怎么卖药。
他卖药也是合法的。
很久以前就有听众来问过我，咱们在节目里面提到过的这么多图书，尤其是一些比较珍贵的原版书，能不能直接通过节目来进行下单。
在经历很长时间的筹备以后，互作互有的卖书业务终于上线了。
我们在微信上建立了一个橱窗，这次在橱窗当中不仅汇集了节目当中深入探讨过的书籍，也包含了一部分我个人精选的图书，其中还有少量的签名版和稀有的原版。
完整的书目信息和购买方式，各位可以前往微信公众号忽左忽右left right，回复买书两个字即可获取。
我们这个橱窗中的书目将会不定期地更新，尽量挑选我认为比较好的版本和图书，欢迎各位常来刷新常来看看。
然后他的武术也很好玩，就我们前面说过那个皮定军去看过他们的武僧，然后我们去见到的几个教头，什么世炎傲什么这些人，他们全部都是80年代，就是少林寺那个电影刚放的时候偷偷去习武，然后就留在当地，然后慢慢地练练练练练练。
也有一些武校，因为80年代你记不记得特别多的武术杂志？
我记得我们小时候还有各种杂志。 所以80年代初在电影上看到了少林寺，然后去到真实的少林寺。那少林寺里面已经有人可以传授武术了吗？我觉得他们就留下来出家了。
对，我见到的人有一个是十多岁少年，就那时候他就开始学了。然后还见到一个是本身在外面做武校，做不下去，他会觉得他徒弟都得想了，怎么我还不行，就去了少林寺，然后就当了教头。
而且少林寺的武术体系非常奇怪，有一套自己的体系，而且有出路。它特别像个学校。你知道有一大部分的武警部队的教头是少林寺的练传的人。
请去的吗？
对。而且90年代的时候，深圳不是那时候发展起来，有很多人请保镖，大批是少林武校出去的。除了那种外面的农民办的武校，他们自己也有大批。他们还跟我说过，有一个最出名的两个人，一个叫誓言虎，一个叫誓言报，是深圳整个保镖系统的大老级人物，后来还做得很大，真的少林派弟子。
那你说他是80年代从你起来的，这个少林派究竟是怎么回事？我们根本没法去确定，因为他们不跟外人交手。
出于好奇心，我还问他们跟谁打了，他们会说：
我们一般都不打。
然后那边那个易经经是公开学习的，我们听着易经经，完全是金庸老师编造出来的，结果人家是真的有的。当时我们2010年去的时候，好多人在里面学易经经，还有那种得了癌症的僧侣，也在学，可能是希望戒指能够好。
这个易经经，比如说这些历史，是以前就有的吗，还是说七八十年代重新发明的东西？就跟医学那个一样，一大部分被销毁，但是我们民间乡村周围，还有大量的存在。
所以我认为是被重新恢复的，不一定是真有一步点击，但他一定有一些东西，加上这个名字，不是说全部空穴来风。我觉得如果全部空穴来风太奇怪了。
你看里面那个施阳奥就跟我说，他说：
很多人请他去比武。
他说有一次，外面开武校的俗家师弟找他，说有个外地来的师父很厉害，大家都打小空拳，结果他两次把那个人打败了。
然后也有什么山东的拳师来交手。施阳奥说对方是个山东拳师，喜欢用手顶住对方的手，双方近距离交战。
我对他说：
近距离交手容易受伤，隔开距离一把。
然后隔离一丈远，这个师父大吼一声，哼，用了施后功，然后没有动手。
施后功，对方就不站而退。
你听起来很神奇吧，但是他后面讲的时候，又真是有据可查，我就特别有意思。
就是普京去少林寺的时候，少林寺就指定这个施阎奥，在大殿为他表演心意霸，也是一套少林传统功夫。
然后在表演过程中，施阎奥不由自主地发出了各种施吼声，明代大殿里回音震耳欲聋。表演结束的时候，普京给他去立功。
我觉得这不是他编的，这一定是当时有记载的。普京毕竟自己也练柔道，施阎奥很开心地说：
普京练的是俄罗斯的传统摔销，也练柔道，他不会喜欢那种花哨的表演套路，他反而会觉得你是有传统功夫的。
所以你说他们这传统功夫到底是有，还是彻底没有？
我觉得这真的是个谜。
我觉得会是个谜。
你要说纯粹是编造的，那我觉得也不尽然。
你要说完全是从传统一步步学下来的，那都是看金融小说来的套路，我觉得那个也是假的。
而且当时少林寺要担任一项非常重要的外交工作，就是武僧团表演。因为自从少林寺出名之后，他们要去世界各国表演。
我们去的时候，他们武僧团好像分了四支，那时候有一支正好在上海师伯会，我记得特别清楚，然后有一支在非洲。
然后他们还跟我们说，就是他们表演的套路不一样的：
他们还是非常迎合各地需求，制造了各种武术的套路。
对，但是释永信给他们解释的也很好玩。
释永信会说：
这个传统的少林功夫，要讲产武合一，你不能光练那种好看的，一定要修心。
这是释永信给他们讲的。
所以我们看到的时候，他们经常有那种打坐、静坐。
我们现在看那个NBA，好多球员是毛尼尔他们去学的，我觉得大家是不是都是首先被打坐静坐这一招给震住了。
你得先静坐两年，你再开始练。
所以大家都默默地觉得：
哦，好高深，好什么。
就挺有意思的。
释永信一直会觉得产武这个很重要，练到最后，都是靠修心。
这个倒是，我记得以前是赵普初还是谁，就点评过一句：
说少林称第一，是禅不是武。
他好像有个特定的背景，就是80年代。
就是说你的禅其实更重要。
对，因为80、90年代，少林寺龙蛇混杂，很多社会上的人都去投奔它。
当年什么王宝强什么的年轻人，也往那跑，又出了个名人王宝强。
出现了很多的一些意外伤害事件，就在少林寺里面投奔少林寺这些学武的弟子，什么互相谁把谁捅伤了，还有什么泼油要烧这个大殿的。
所以那会儿，可能有点乌烟瘴气。
如果有谁能把那首拍下来，多么精彩，是吧？
就是他们说90年代的时候，那首就开始分了，就是武功。
他们觉得就有几类：
我开始还听着觉得：
哇，好诡异的一个词，要有杀鸡。
然后他们解释，他们的杀鸡其实就是内在的爆发力和速度感，他们认为这是通过禅修才能得到的，而不是光练武。
然后他们也解释，80年代的时候，他们刚刚走江湖的时候，还表演过撞石头、对刀枪之类的，那气功那一流的。
我觉得他们也是与时俱进。
然后后来他们也觉得不对，也说少林功夫肯定不是撞石板的，那个太跑江湖。
胸口碎大石。
对，我们去的时候，就是2010年代的时候，大家已经都学会了一套说法，就是：
所以你们看不出来，但我们是有的。
释永信自己会武术吗？问过，但是不说这种不语。
但是我也看过他练武的照片，白国pose。
对，还有很多，就是他没那么胖的时候，年轻的时候，不止一张，大家如果在网上搜都可以搜到。
然后他们这个武僧团可能就不断地给不同的摆引方式，然后慢慢地就从民间转向了庙堂，就是我们说的，给世博会、给海外，然后这种东西也找人编排过。
但是他们突出的还是那种最后那一拳的力量。
我看到后来，他在非洲也开了非洲少林寺，还有什么澳大利亚的少林。
可能恰恰就是因为他们的武术的名声，当他出名之后，他就被国家要求必须得代表国家出外宣传。
因为我们知道释永信在英国的时候，是被英国女王请去吃饭的，中国的僧侣界都知道这个事实。
就是普京的孙女是正式地拜过释永信为师的，就是那种磕头拜师的那种模式。
所以他这方面的能量和人脉确实是挺大的。
通过武术变成了世界高僧，所以也承担了这部分中国软实力输出的、官方赋予的使命。
因为在很长时间内，我们的输出就是一文一武：
但是孔子学院大家都知道好像有各种问题，然后少林产武现在其实仍然是非常主要的一个输出方式。
我记得他们跟我们说，他们基本上是不盈利的，是不会的，有文化部的补贴，河南政府的补贴，还是缺几百万元。
但是他们会觉得特别有荣誉感，比如说他们去俄罗斯表演的时候，是普京自己带着他们参观克里姆林宫，还请他们吃饭的。
那也确实是一种非常高的礼遇了。
所以他们这个是少林寺的武功与外界所接触的唯一的一个方式。
然后这个方式给少林寺带了非常多的名气和资源。
然后有很多人是因为这个又来到了少林寺出家。我记得当时见到了一个释永信的侍者，一个二十多岁的人，就是因为学习少林武功所以出了家。
我觉得你想，对于一个农家子弟来说，当你没有别的资源，你进入一个寺院学习武术，有可能受到一个大国总统的接待，这都是什么样的光荣啊，这个还真的是挺神奇的。
其实我们仔细想，少林寺成为某些人的近身之阶。
对，我感觉好像就是在那些年就出现了很多，可能从90年代以来就有了。
就是我进少林不是为了终身出家，而是我是需要在少林寺获得一技之能，比如说我练一身这种武功，不管是套路的也好，实战的也好，最后比如说我去当一个保镖，或者说我最后进入影视界。
你像那个世行语，他也是，香港演的还挺多的，他演很多，现在还很活跃，徐克那些电影，包括周星驰很多电影都有他。
所以我相信他们至少在他们的训练方式上有一套自己的系统。
对，因为我有一次在上海，我还踩过世行语，我当时在杨浦的一个片场，在一个房车里面跟他聊天，他跟我讲了很多。
我很好奇，因为那段时间我也在打拳，我就问他：
你每天怎么度过？
他说他每天早上练什么，下午练什么，晚上再去怎么样。
我说你这个怎么都是现代搏击，你不是少林寺出来的吗？
他说那个只是过去的一个来路，现在可能更多的还是各种现代搏击的科学训练。
其实就是，我相信就我们前面说的那个药局负责人，他可能就是因为生意而出了假，当然是用信邀请他出了假，但是他也是为了生意把这块生意做大。
有人是因为武术而出了假，有人是为了很多各种各样的原因而出了假。
就少林寺在凡间存在，他还是按照一个世间的逻辑在运转。
我觉得我们中国人对寺院老有一些特别美好的幻想，就是寺院的僧侣是与世隔绝的，大家都在里面默默念经，然后替你祈福，要么就是那种特别黑暗的想象，要么就是特别高尚的想象。
宏联寺其实在世间，你肯定要行世间法，你怎么可能隔离。
我这些年接触的各个寺院都有生意，都有跟大公司的广泛连接。
我在广东见到一个寺院特别有意思，就是那些有些研究生在里面做义工，我觉得非常奇怪，我说你们怎么毕业来这里做义工？
他们做几年有可能就因为有跟他们特别好的知名上市公司，可以把他们推荐到那直接就去工作。
因为那个公司的董事长是这个寺院的信徒，甚至这个董事长的很多中层高层的任命，都来找这个寺院的方丈来看，说：
你帮我看一下，这个人到底靠不靠谱。
当然后来当我看到这个董事长也出事，说我想哇都没看出来，这个也挺好玩。
但就可见这个寺院和世俗经济的非常密的勾连。
当然他们还有一部分会做一些真的寺院独坐的慈善。
因为少林寺有他们所谓的班首，一个老和尚叫永钱，我记得挺深刻的。
其实我对这个人印象很好的，他说他是60年代出家的。
我现在对他们的这种叙述都有点存疑，因为60年代少林寺还能接受出家。
但是这个人，他在少林寺里负责孤儿，他跟我们一边说话，一边就非常焦虑，因为他说有个小孩是有哮喘被扔的，九个月他得回去给他喂奶。
他们还是要照顾大批的孤儿，因为宗教团体是有这个任务的。
所以他说他60年代出家，他不识字，也什么都不会，但是他只学会了住恶魔作，众善奉行，只会种地做饭以及照顾孤儿。
他现在职位很高，是奸怨，但因为他出家的年份，所以我觉得很有意思。
因为他叫永钱，跟释永信是一辈的。
他说他们就是叫永的这批人，就是辈分很高的，大概只有十个人，他们都是少林寺的前任方丈、行政老和尚的徒弟。
因为国家宗教局有规定，这种扳手必须受戒十年以上的人才能担当。
所以虽然这个永钱既不识字，也不练武术，也不关心少林寺怎么发展，但他还是少林寺的扳手。
这可见少林寺重新恢复之后，这种老和尚没那么多。
你刚提到那个老的那个寺庙方丈、行政老和尚，是这几天大家po出来，1987年举报释永信的那位吗？
我对那个举报信不知真假，不知来源，我也看到了，但不确定。
我相信在释永信想做寺院主持的过程中，一定有大量的争夺。
对，因为你一定不止你一个人想做，那凭什么你做？
我觉得他一定有各种各样的争夺和利益，所以不断会有人举报他。
我觉得这件事一点都不奇怪，一个单位负责人怎么可能没人举报呢？
对。你刚刚竟然提到了那些武僧群体，尤其是言自辈、永自辈，他们后面的言自辈。
2015年的时候出现过一个誓言录，就是第一次举报。
我们去的时候并没有见到这个人。
然后据说他后面出来，也办了一个武校，据说他基本不见人。
那个事情后来是不了了之了吗？
有公开的调查结果说这个私生女是释永信弟弟的小孩，然后说并没有贪污。
我觉得是当时释永信管理中出现的问题，比如说利益分配不平等，就导致了这样的结果。
这次大家也不提那件事，这次还是很多人提了，只不过官方没提。
我就说官方不提这件事，因为你如果真的要提，你肯定就当时是谁调查的，谁负责的，当时为什么处理结果是那个样子。
对，但是如果说到他有这些问题的话，我不相信那时候没有。
他不可能是这十年突然有了这个问题。
只能是说明这个中小街，就是都管是用信条大和尚，只能说明大和尚的能量很大。 确实是很厉害的一个人。我觉得他身上也符合我们很多对于他这种角色的，我们按一个现代企业来想象，就更容易理解。你本来放在寺院想象的，你就觉得更神秘。
你就把他当成一个河南的宗庆后，对，而且你对他的要求就更高，你就觉得你就应该这样，你就应该那样，但是他就不是那样一个人。但他毕竟是个僧人，对，那当然他是有很多问题，这个我们不用去怀疑。
但是我后来也想过，如果他是个日本的寺院，他不也可以结婚，那他不也就结了，合法生孩子，还可以传承这个寺庙。但是我觉得他是一个非常聪明的经营者，我觉得他是在把这个寺院当做一个非常好的企业在经营。
我觉得他真的特别多的卖点。我记得因为少林寺是禅宗的祖庭，大家知道达末祖师一伟渡江，就是在少林寺，在松山那里面壁的。然后所以少林寺的禅堂恢复得也很好，很多人去少林寺坐禅，因为觉得他是禅宗的祖庭。
中国当时几十万的僧侣，坐禅的人只有一两千人。然后这个负责的好像是永信了吧，然后他就在全国各地去学习怎么做禅，怎么做禅，包括西安的沃隆寺，可能是佛教界地位特别高的一个。
这些遗轨其实本身都丢失了，他就到处找，就重新把他找回来。2004年的时候，他们就恢复了禅宗入庭，然后集体坐禅。我记得当时我一听，我都觉得这还挺痛苦的，我是不行的。
他是凌晨三点起床，上店，然后行乡坐乡，然后五点钟吃早饭。早饭的时候只能吃粥，不能吃油炸类的，他就会上火，会引起你的心火。
然后行乡就是拿着香火，围着菩萨转圈，脚步要不急不缓，走四十分钟出汗，然后又开始打坐。中饭是上午九点吃，也只能吃粥。
然后有个国家领导人去说，
“哎呀你们应该吃那牛奶。”
他们还觉得不行，会饱，就不能让他饱，牛奶应该绝对不能喝了吧，对，我不知道为什么。然后就接着让他行乡坐乡打坐，然后到晚上五点吃饭，然后九点前一定睡觉。
他们是有一套非常严密的那个坐禅的规矩的。然后少林寺当时在中国佛教界影响就变得更大了，所以为什么就这次我听到宗教界在聊，大家会觉得圣语心在宗教界的名声没有那么不好，可能跟这个坐禅有很大的关系。
就是少林寺的禅堂的恢复是非常厉害的，他们当时还找了一个85岁的云居山的老和尚来传规则。云居山这个老和尚是虚云的弟子，这个很有意思。
我上次也是跟一个宗教界朋友在谈，就是文革的时候，不是大批人让他还俗吗？对，比如说这个云居山就有五个人，所谓没有还俗，他们没有还俗。
怎么回事呢？因为山顶有一个农林茶场，然后这些没还俗的和尚就在那当农工，所以这批人后来到寺院重新恢复的时候，他们的地位就非常高。
他们就算没有还俗的，没有断裂的和尚，但是这批人现在可能也都去世了，也都圆寂了，没有了。
然后就是你看人释永信多么厉害，还找着这种老和尚来给他们恢复禅堂。据说这个上林寺的禅堂非常厉害，有很多那种去坐禅的人，一到那就立刻去叩拜。
所以我觉得他很会做功夫，你不管你这个功夫是不是表面功夫，就是他至少是个非常会做功夫的人。
然后我听说就是他们或真或假的记载，因为82年的时候就是我们的宗教条例恢复了之后，就可以重新建庙了。然后他们虽然很穷，然后尚永信上位之后，还是做了挺多事的。
就据说：
不许赌博
不许饮酒
私立的僧人禁止这些行为
然后到87年的时候，我觉得他跟这个登峰县的矛盾早就存在了，他87年的时候他清退了当时有吃空想的挂名僧人，就在登峰的宗教局里是有这个档案的，说他做过一件这种事情。
然后他89年的时候，到处去建立少林寺景区，而且当时还在中央台打广告。政治日报89年报道过，说少林寺跑到中央台打广告：
然后90年的时候，少林寺游客量突破50万，门票收入从1986年的8万涨到了1990年的240万，这都是有数据的。
但当时就有人骂他说，
“你们不能搞旅游。”
然后他就说，
“那不搞旅游，我们连修大雄宝殿的钱都没有。”
所以他的大部分钱，也都是他自己慢慢的去挣出来的。
然后包括现在大家骂的，他不让什么少林祖宿开拍，当时他好像还是拿了票房分成的，他还是授权了的。包括我们知道后面还拍过一个什么少林的电影，那完全是他主导的。
就是刘德华和成龙主演的一版新少林寺，对对对。那拍的就是十有三，环境不太成功，那一版就影响不大，但是那个完全是他主动的。我记得就是有很多合影，什么都可以证明他。
然后我们去吃觉得那很好吃的那个少林素饼，是2004年做的。
然后他也很荒谬，他到06年还做了一个什么少林产酒，按说也不能喝酒，水果也没有动，然后还在纽约时代广场做少林素饼广告。
所以我觉得他是一个非常成功的企业家。我前两天在，尤其他16岁就出家的时候，我觉得他特别像那个了不起的Gatsby，一代巨商。
然后2011年，我们去的时候是因为上市的这件事，但事实上就是中国类似于他这种的寺院，我觉得并不算少，你像那个庐山东陵寺，然后包括九华山，当年是金地藏的那个道场，里面还是肉身店。
我们说更出名的林隐寺，大家也会去，觉得林隐寺的门票收入，但其实好像林隐寺的门票也有一部分是被旅游部门拿走的。
中国宗教和这个现实的关联太密切了，以至于大家分不清。 而且少林寺就是说，他不必然是今天这样的一个规模和影响力，我们很多人会觉得说，因为有一部少林寺的电影，但实际上我们看前面的数据，就那个电影放了之后，可能也没有带来那么大的收益。
对，而是必须得有一个很厉害的人去经营去发展。我觉得特别好玩，就是他特别会做IP，他还真是前现代IP达人。
你发现了吧，他那时候就把IP各种都注册了，因为据说他注册的时候，通过有几百个注册都跟少林寺没关系，他就一一去告了，然后说这只能我们注册。
然后后来我还看到一个材料，不知真假，就说有个谁拍少林，人家说我们跟南少林授权，结果南少林的那个也被他注册了。
他后来反复去澄清说：
“根本就没有南少林。”
“对，是我注册的，你们要用都得跟我合作。”
但是他自己说他心中的伤口，就是源自于当年那个火腿肠，我不知道这个或真或假，挺逗的。
但是其实中国的寺院有一个特别隐秘的收入，我们是不知道的，而且国家也是不知道的，就是捐赠。这个你没法去查他。
我听说是现在才规定说，那个二维码上不能有私人，就只能捐赠到，比如说少林寺有个账号，但那个也就这十几年的时间。
2000年以前，中国人普遍都没什么钱，据说90年代的时候，已经开始出现大批的捐赠了。
但这部分就是财务数据，我觉得是很多人不知道的，这个是一个非常隐秘的收入。
比如说来个人突然自己扫给他，你不可能监控到他的那个地步。
然后少林寺的商业收入确实非常高，他在2020年的时候当时公布过，说全天收入1.2个亿。
我相信只是公布吧，因为来自旅游啊，来自教育啊，来自于影视啊。
然后他也会公布说，比如说我有部分用在文物修缮了，有部分用在孤儿院了。
然后到疫情的时候，他还去做了直播。
所以我觉得他一直是一个非常敢做的一个僧侣。
包括我们说的，在海外做了很多，巴黎有什么少林文化驿站，你知道非洲有那个五月学校，就很多地方都是有他的学校的。
对，但这样的僧侣，我看其实中国近代挺多的，那个台湾佛光山的星云法师，就是你觉得有可比性吗？
挺有可比性的。
因为我这两天看资料，我觉得就是可能很多人会觉得他是一个商业上的成功者，然后他是一个政治僧侣。
但中国的僧侣，什么时候脱离过政治呢？
我觉得中国的出名的僧侣，就但凡我们知道的僧侣，一定不会在深山老林里被大家所知。
要么就是跟政治人物混在一起的政治僧侣，要么就是那些跟文化人物混在一起的这种所谓师僧。
对，包括什么苏曼殊这些人啊。
对，因为永信的，我觉得他建立了大量的社会关系，我觉得也跟我们前些年的一些国内的宗教政策有关系。
我记得我们当时也采访过，就是国家宗教局的前局长吧，看一下啊，就是他怎么说的。
就说：
“就算有一亿的宗教徒，但是我们有几千万的党员，几千万的共青团员，十亿人里应该是信什么的都有，不可能让大家都信仰共产主义嘛。”
所以当时这是前宗教局长叶小文的直接说法。
哇，是那个年代， 对对对。
“你们把这些话登出来了？”
登了，大家现在在网上都可以看到。
而且我觉得他说的很清楚，他说：中国共产党人对宗教整体是宽容的。
比如说延安时代到五十年代，都比较小心，因为毛泽东在湖南农民运动口上报告说，
“菩萨在农民心中，要等农民自己去搬走，我们不能越主带跑。”
他们认为真正乱的时候是文革。
然后到82年的时候，出了关于我国社会主义时期宗教问题的基本观点和基本政策。
提到了几个，就他觉得他是长期的、然后很复杂的，短期内不可能说让大家都不信教。
林环说的很好玩，林环说他从天津掉到北京的时候，他妈天天念经。
他说不是因为他在天津工作好，群众推荐党中央用了他，而是因为他念经念的。
然后林环说：
“我也不能跟他吵架，我也只能说，好，就是你念经念的。”
所以只是反当时，说了一句很有趣的话，
“就不能把不同世界观的对立，看成人与人的对立。”
“我为什么要跟我母亲对立？我永远爱我的母亲，他信他的教，我不信，我是无神论者，我是共产党员，但我们是母子，我要孝顺他。”
我觉得他解释的非常好，其实。
然后因为宗教发展太快，所以我们很多宗教政策滞后的90年代的时候，是宗教特别发展的时候。
所以到了后面又出台过不断条例，2024年时候，我们才出台宗教事务条例。
其实是从法律上管理这些宗教的社团，管理寺院，管理各种东西，依法管理。
这个是一个，我们到现在还在用的一个东西。
然后宗教事务管理条例到现在，我觉得也是一个重点的法规。
然后特别好玩，就是05年的时候，国家发贵还发过一个通知。
关于与宗教场所有关的游览参观点对宗教人士实行门票优惠问题的通知。
就是说，有归正的人可以不买票。
我觉得这是当年很大的一个矛盾。
就凭什么你这个钱是给庙里，或者凭什么这个钱被旅游部门独占？
所以估计这是一个长期存在的矛盾。
然后还有一个特别好玩，我也是看资料看到的。
你比如说一个园林里有一个庙，那这个哪个部分算庙，哪个部分算园林？
当时有一个原则，叫滴水为界。
就是那个门沿，就是那个屋沿上滴水的地方，就是你们的，里边是你们的，外面都是属于园林。
所以我国的其实是做了很多很细节的管理。
那像北海公园的白塔寺，那个已经完全是个旅游景点了。
就像我们前面说的，如果当时是归旅游部门里没有僧侣的，那雍和宫里面还有喇嘛吗？
雍和宫有啊，雍和宫是大量的喇嘛。雍和宫是一个非常纯粹的宗教场所。
但是我们会发现就很多宗教场所，我们并不知道他的方丈是谁，我们并不知道他的方丈大和尚是谁。
对，这是为什么？
我个人觉得是一个个性问题。
因为很多僧侣非常德高望重，大家都是从内部知道他的，而外部不知道他。
但是永信是内外都很知道，我觉得这个很有趣。
就是上次我们俩还聊过，也是我被骂过，就叫“寻僧记”。
对，就是我写了各个寺院的各个方丈，里面有很多名头很大的人，比如辅导协会的副主席啊，或者哪个省的辅导协会主席。
大家建的寺院都很豪华，大家都有各种各样的，比如说做医院的方式，做孤儿院的方式，也有很多跟企业家沟通的方式。
但是大家不知道那些方丈是谁。
所以也可能有些人会注重韬光养晦，有些人会注重说我个体的名声只在宗教界。
但永信始终是一个不管不顾的人。
但是我觉得也不是孤立。
民国时候，我们有一个特别出名的僧侣，叫太虚。
大家看鲁迅，看胡适，当时都拼命地跟他吃饭。
你只要看他日记里面，就经常有大量的记载。
然后最近台湾的有一部分蒋介石的档案，叫泰西岛，里面大部分是蒋介石的私人通信、家族照片什么。
你们就找到很多太虚跟他的通信。
因为太虚和尚就是民国时候最公认的政治和尚，大家觉得这个人就是个政治和尚。
有些人特别不喜欢他，有些人特别喜欢他。
但是事实上，他是非常重要的中国民国时候最重要的一个僧侣界人物。
他等于说带领中国的佛教界进行了现代化改革。
那个什么人间佛教这四个字好像最早就是他提出来的，就是他提的。
因为事实上我们晚清到民国的时候，中国佛教特别衰落，我觉得跟现在有点像。
各个事件都是号召大家去捐钱赎罪。
当时地狱关罪突出，就不断说你们要捐多少钱，就有点像欧洲中世纪时候那个赎罪卷的那种感觉。
所以当时寺院的整个地位特别低，就整个中国宗教其实在当时是有一个危机的。
然后太虚的出现就特别有意思。
这个太虚本来是个记者出家的，然后出家之后，他跟蒋介石有很深的关系，因为他是蒋介石浙江老乡，在僧礼界的名声很大。
蒋介石据说是想让太虚帮他改掉一些…… 性格上很毛躁的问题，所以太虚就不断地用这层关系，不断地给蒋介石写信。因为当时有很多人去争夺寺院的财产，太虚是帮助僧团维护财产。当然如果说仅仅从这个方面来做比较小，他其实当时帮中国佛教做的现代改革，就是建立人间佛教。
就是告诉你在家也可以修行，你不一定要把钱捐给私院，你只要做个好人，做个善良的人。所以一下子当时中国的佛教图就扩大了很多，就很多人会愿意去做这个。
我们现在知道那个星云是太虚的徒孙，星云也写过太虚的一些故事。我看过南怀锦对太虚的回忆特别夸张，特别好笑，而且特别能见到太虚这个人的性格。
就是他从外地去南京的时候，就有大批的人去火车站迎接他，然后太虚下火车就开始撒尿，当着有很多人，包括很多女的信众。当然佛教徒的解释说太虚已经做到了，“就是对此都无所谓”，就可见他的修行，然后我觉得这个也是一种美化的说法。
你知道有本书，我不知道你做过没有，《银元时代的生活史》。我知道，陈存仁的记载里也记载过太虚，记载也特别有意思。
就是太虚看了陈存仁那些东西，就请他吃饭。然后陈存仁当时正好投资药厂，就说：
我帮你介绍一个人
然后帮他拉来一个朝鲜人，然后这个陈存仁就跟这个朝鲜人还没有合作。反正就有些乱七八糟的事，然后这个朝鲜人就被他的朝鲜同党给暗杀了，因为他同时又是个什么日本特务。有此可见太虚当时的社会交往是多么的复杂。
然后他跟讲的史有交往，跟林森有交往，跟各种名人的交往，可能更像一种手段。
就是我觉得他做了很多事情，都是帮助佛教复兴，以至于星云到万年的时候，就一直在说：
“哎呀，这个真是中国历史上的高僧。”
我觉得他可能第一是去世比较早，1947年的时候他就去世了。第二，因为他跟蒋介石、跟林森这种交往，你不可能在后面会得到大规模的宣传吗，可能大家就遗忘了他。
但是我看过一些西方的研究中国佛教的论文，也会说太虚是帮助中国佛教现代化的一个很重要的高僧，甚至有人会把他跟历史上的那个著名的高僧并列。
他很大的功劳在于说，他当时派了大量的汉地僧侣去藏地，然后在重庆那边建了汉藏佛学院，然后他不断地派各地僧侣去各地弘法。
大家说如果不是太虚，中国的佛教可能就变成了日本的佛教。
我们知道日本佛教到现在基本上，僧侣在寺院里只管死亡或者结婚的事情，就管东西很少了。他们的主要盈利模式就是做法会，他只管死人的事情，就变得特别狭窄。
当然他们有他们的历史原因，比如明治维新的时候是允许他们结婚，也许他们结成财产，但是另一方面，他也把他身上的光环全部都抹掉了。
你就是一个世间人，其实就是一个处理葬礼业务的。
对，其实挺惨的。
所以我们现在去看太虚，就是太虚最大功劳是替中国佛教扩大了影响，让它进入了现代化领域，不仅仅是那种敛财机构，而进入了一个帮助世间人解决问题的阶段。
你看大家会知道，台湾有很多所谓的高僧大德，大家不都是觉得他们有这个功能吗？
太虚还有一个很传奇的事情，就是他钱不过手，所有人给他钱，他从来不知道是多少，不过他的手就放在那儿，用的时候都拿上用，比如说救济孤儿。
他在抗战的时候组织了很多那种抗战的僧团上前线，他是这么一个人。
所以我觉得政治不是问题，社会交往也不是问题，经济上的扩大也未必是问题。
真正是在于说你对佛教做了多少，你做的东西越界不越界，你是不是个延迟戒律的僧人。
好像释永信并没有后面我们说的这些功劳，至少我们没有听说过，比如说他对中国佛教阶段推动，我就没有听说过。
当然他可能有孤儿院，但是你这个东西你真正去细看，你其实如果说他做足够好事应该很早，我们大家都知道的。
对。
所以我觉得很有意思，就像我们俩前面说的，中国的很多僧侣，大家对他们是有幻想的，要么就把他们想得特别好，要么就把他们想得特别坏。
其实真正的有行动力的人，他可能跟世间保持密切关系，但是与此同时，他对佛教界是有功劳的，是有推动的。
对。
其实两岸都有这样的人物，刚刚提到那个星云法师，他不仅是台湾的佛教领袖，他还是国民党的中常委，对吧，是国民党党员。
除了太虚和尚，还有一个民国时候我经常听说的虚云法师。虚云后来就到我们前面说过的云居山，原记的，大家还都知道好多，包括红一。
我觉得其实民国时候是有很多高僧的，但是我也觉得他们跟世间保持着大量的交往。
你看红一办学校，那凤子凯那些不都是他的徒子徒孙吗？
对。
南京还有一个叫什么八指头驼，去北京教育部要经费的时候脑溢血发作。对，太虚和了，也是因为在玉佛寺讲经的时候说他有两个很好的土地，刚刚去世，大概伤心过渡一下脑溢血。
就在上海玉佛寺。
对，去世。
所以我也觉得很有趣，如果他们没有去世，在民国的时候，他们会怎么样呢？也许他能做更多的事情。
对。
我们回头再看，释永信他们这批人出家，他们确实也面对着一个所谓的系统的断裂之后重新出家。
你说他一个16岁的农家子弟，他相对学习修为还是要浅一些吧，可能也没有一个很好的什么师诚来辅导他。应该就没有，包括我觉得他的师傅，大家说行政老和尚，我们现在都很尊敬或者什么样，那可能也就是普通的一个农村僧侣。
对。
包括星云那些，我看星云的回忆，他是能够接到太虚的那个系统的，他的师傅就是太虚的四大弟子之一。
对。
可能现在新出现的这批可能稍微好一点，比如说佛学院毕业啊，比如诗诚稍微好一点，但是我觉得以释永信那一批，因为他也六十多了吧，可能诗诚都会差一些，然后学术学院都会很差。
我们看到各个寺院印的那种书或者什么，也没有看到一些说特别被推崇的。
所以现在也有很多人会说，他就是因为栽在美文化上，贪欲无穷，这个从严格的角度来说也没有错吧，但这种因为贪腐或者生活作风问题倒下了人，那也有很多是很有文化的。
所以我觉得可能有没有文化在这事怎么说都行，但确实我们可以看到他的修行不够。
是的。
这个特别有意思，但另一方面，这代人我觉得他们的这种发迹的时期，那个机遇又确实特别好。
他处在一个中国的这些民间宗教重新百川入海，重新又开始八千过海各显神通的这样的时代，在一个传奇时代产生了无数传奇的人。
就在于说你能不能站得住或者立得久，特别有意思。
我看过一个日本的思想家的研究，就说中国人会认为：
“你这些佛教寺院的财富，虽然你是方丈，但是并不归你所有。”
这是中国很根深蒂固的一个思想。
你只是暂时的包括人，包括皇家的财富，大家也不认为属于皇帝啊，大家也认为你只是暂时的管理者。
可能我们中国的民间思想就是这个观念已经根深蒂固，就是他不可能做到像日本的僧侣一样：“这是我的家产，这是我的家庙，所以这个钱我随便动。”他不是。
他只是这个时代被选择出来的一个临时的寺院的管理者，那这个财富凭什么就能够被你据为所有，而且你可以为所欲为呢？
包括我们中国的僧侣不能结婚，当然你可以说我们没有经过明治维新，没有那么一套法律，但是我觉得中国本身大家的民间习俗也好，大家的宗教幻想也好，本身对僧侣是有很多要求的。
对。
所以他违反的，我觉得不是短暂的说一个法律或者一个宗教管理条例，他确实触犯了很多民间禁忌。
或者你从另一个角度上来讲的话，像这次适用性的一个垮台，他恰恰也满足了很多另一部分中国网友对于佛教的那种偏暗黑、负面的这种想象。
就是果然是这样。
对。
我们在那些小说里面，你看当年那个平江不孝生写那《江湖家传》里面“火烧红莲寺”那么精彩的桥段，这个江湖传统终于在21世纪重生了一次。
所以我觉得确实有很多人是非常喜闻乐见的。
是。
大家现在的讲述可能也都是按照这个系统来讲述的，只是说我们今天讲述可能更把它放在一个80年代时代中来讲述。
其实它更复杂更有趣。
就还是我们回到那个我们开头说的，如果有人能够做一个80年代开始的中国佛教的研究，甚至把它联系到从建国以来的这种宗教的一个衰落，到他80年代以后的一个复兴，然后把释永信这样的一个角色在中间作为一个主角。他是怎么利用河南的这样的一片土地，这样的一个遗留下来的，走到了世界舞台之上，传宗祖庭只有20来个和尚，对吧，40亩薄地，然后你怎么通过官商勾结也好，或者自己的一些聪明才智也好，在改开的大浪当中对吧，把它做成一个市值，我不知道多少亿，但变成了一个航母。
对。
宗教永远是在世间，行世间法，做世间事，大家把它放在当时的历史社会背景中去考察，是非常有意思的。
是的。
而且它一直延续到了今天，就我们今天又生活在一个，其实各种民间崇拜，甚至民间的这些宗教，不管大家承认不承认，这相比起四五十年前绝对是今天已经是相当蓬勃。
你看我们前面说的是一亿，我觉得现在可能还不止一亿，肯定不止了。
现在，我听到还听到他一个就有的佛教徒说他好话，我觉得也挺有意思，说他“吃锅边素”，我好像也听说。
就因为这个，大家认为他是个很随和的人，就是说他跟你们一起吃饭，不要求你们都是。
对。
就锅里面煮了肉食也没问题。
对。
我觉得他一定是一个复杂的，表演性强的，有智慧的，也有能力的一个，我们时代的一个不法之徒，一个安徽冒险家，安徽进入河南的冒险家。
对吧，本来大家争夺一下他的省份，现在也不用争夺了，还给安徽引上线。
好的，那我们这一期就到这。
谢谢程老师，谢谢大家，感谢各位的收听。
下期再见，拜拜。
2025-07-23 08:00:01
The Demise of Late-Night TV Is an Omen for American Culture
So I was on vacation in Maine last week with some of my best friends. And as often happens among us geriatric millennials, the conversation turned to why everything is worse now than when it was in our teens and twenties, which I know is something that no middle-aged person has ever said about their youth. This was, I recognize, a totally original insight on our part.
One of the things that we lamented as we engaged in this cliché was the decline of adult comedies. We grew up on funny movies that became a part of our vocabulary:
I guarantee you, I have quoted each of these movies conservatively a hundred times in my life. Anchorman one-liners accounted for most of my social relations when I was a college freshman, which you should feel free to make any assumptions you wish about how popular I was when I was 18.
But as many people have noticed and mourned, the adult comedy barely exists as a genre anymore. It is genuinely difficult to name five big, popular mainstream original adult comedies in the last five years. Or ten years. Or fifteen years.
You can say the genre migrated to streaming TV, but it’s not as if there are so many spectacularly successful sitcoms there either. Or you could say it migrated to stand-up. What matters for my purposes here is: it’s gone. The adult comedy is gone. A comedic institution that lasted for decades just kind of died.
I was reminded of that conversation last week when CBS announced that it was canceling Stephen Colbert and The Late Show. I was listening on Monday as Bill Simmons made an interesting point that struck me as obviously true about this moment.
Comedians used to think of jobs like hosting a late-night show as the apex of their field. Now, nobody under 65 seems to watch the show live, and nobody under 50 seems to want the job.
Younger comedians today have totally different paths to success. They don’t want to make movies, sitcoms, or fill the shoes of a late-night host. No, they want to:
Success in comedy today is more solitary than it used to be. You don’t have to join big organizations to get famous. You can just strike out on your own.
I don’t want to force a trend that doesn’t exist here, but I think you can see the resonance. The demise of the adult comedy and the demise of the late-night host are, to me, two pieces of the same story.
Comedians used to think that fame and fortune required joining big organizations, and now they’re finding both fame and fortune by working often alone, or alone-ish.
In comedy, as in so much of our culture and our economy, the age of institutions has handed off to the age of individuals. Today’s guest is Lucas Shaw, a reporter for Bloomberg and frequent commentator on The Town Podcast.
We talk about all of this:
But what I’m really after here is something that I think I’m still struggling to put into words. Why comedy as a field has become more of a solo business, and what that says about entertainment culture and society more broadly.
Lucas Shaw, welcome back to the show.
Great to be back. First time back, I think since you’re a best-selling author now, right? Do you have to add that in your title for all episodes?
I do not add that in my title for any episodes. That’s incredibly rude and gauche, and yet somehow I’m very grateful that you brought it up.
So I wanted to bring you on because I’m really interested in the cancellation of the Late Show in terms of what it says about television and comedy, and really more broadly, media entertainment.
And it seems to me like the interpretations for the cancellation of this show really broke down into three categories:
Who or what do you think killed the Late Show?
So we’ll just dispense with the second one first, because it’s worth getting it out of the way. The go woke, go broke thing makes no sense here.
It was the highest rated of the late night shows. We can get into particulars around social views and all of that, but that really has nothing to do with it. Comedy is a matter of taste, but people at CBS are very proud of the show.
The show gets nominated for awards all the time. Stephen Colbert is objectively a talented comedian, whether you like him or not.
Anyways, I think the economic rationale is indisputable. You know, the ratings for late night have gone down pretty much every year. His show has held up better than some in part because the audience is so old.
But, you know, you think about from when he started to now, it’s lost at least a third of its audience. When he started, the audience for late night was already much smaller than it was.
The cost doesn’t really go down. Because, you know, he is a highly paid talent. He gets paid about $20 million a year. They have a lot of people working on it. There’s a full band, lots of writers, producers — all told about 200 people.
Whether we’re going to fully accept the numbers that people are putting out there — $40 million in losses this year, $50 million losses next year — that’s what people are saying. So I have to go with it.
There could be some classic Hollywood accounting in it, but there’s no way that this is a profitable show and it’s not a growing show. So it does make sense to want to cancel it for that reason.
At the same time, it is almost impossible for CBS to get the benefit of the doubt right now, given everything else that has happened around their Paramount merger with Skydance:
There are all sorts of compromises and changes being made to satisfy the Trump administration to get this deal done. So even if politics had nothing to do with this decision, people don’t believe them when they say it.
I want to present not a conspiracy, but maybe like a little half conspiracy when it comes to the politics here:
Media companies are absolutely sucking up to Trump. I mean, that’s not a matter of opinion. That’s a matter of fact.
The president is absolutely using the power of the office to elicit payments and promises from media firms. Sometimes the threat of extortion can be convenient for companies. Companies sometimes like to have cover for cost cutting.
I remember during the Great Recession, it was practically a meme that big companies would hire McKinsey to do a strategic evaluation of, let’s say, Condé Nast. And then McKinsey comes in and they look at the company and they’re like:
"Hey, we're McKinsey. We're really smart consultants. We think you should..."
Cut 10% of your workforce. And the head of Condé Nast is like,
“Oh, lo and behold, it turns out I have to cut 10% of my workforce because McKinsey told me to.”
Or during the pandemic, when people used that as an excuse to make all sorts of changes to their business, some of which were completely legitimate and some of which were manufactured.
Precisely. And if Paramount wanted to make certain cuts to improve their profitability or just to make the company more ideologically culturally in line with the new owners and
“Oh, those cuts just happened to appease a president who we know is litigious and thin-skinned.”
Well, then you have a situation where the motivation of the cuts is, to your point, maybe 90% economic, but the appearance of the cuts, if it turns out that those are 90% political, well, that’s just fine. It’s fine. If the cuts seem political because it’s nice to have that sort of cover, that overlay, that excuse.
How do you feel about my sort of half conspiracy that CBS is allowing the political crackle to exist because it’s kind of a nice way to ensure that the president and a political FCC are going to approve a forthcoming merger?
It is a very fun contrarian theory. The problem with it, I guess, is in the case of the recession and the pandemic and some of these other sort of exogenous political circumstances, usually, they are convenient excuses for doing difficult things to try to soften the blow when you announce that you’re doing it.
In this case, it’s sort of the opposite, where because fans of Colbert are by and large not fans of Donald Trump, if you’re using kowtowing to the press, and they’re obviously not—they’ve explicitly said it’s not a political decision. But if you are sort of covertly helping to create this perception that you’re doing it for Trump, it doesn’t help you or benefit you in any way. It just alienates the Colbert viewers. So I don’t know how they gain from that.
This is an economic decision. Some media are reporting that it’s a political decision. It’s useful for CBS to have the Trump administration think that an economic decision is political because it makes it seem like
“They’re really trying so very hard to get this through and appease the president.”
That’s the half conspiracy.
I mean, sure. I think that’s fine. They were going to get, they were going to get… I think they knew that it would be perceived that way, no matter what. And so it would probably benefit them a little bit.
Important to note that the person who, one of the three Paramount CEOs, one who’s in charge of CBS, George Deeks, is the one who will stay at the new company. He certainly has a vested interest in ensuring that his new owners are happy with him and that the administration is happy with him because he’s not going anywhere.
One question I had is—I was hearing Matt Bell and he reported some of the numbers here:
Is it unbelievable?
Well, okay. Tell me why it’s believable.
Because a lot of people have responded negatively, like, “Oh my God, how can the show cost a hundred million dollars? It’s just a guy sitting behind a desk.”
But think about it: it’s a show that’s on every night, most of the year, and it costs about as much as one 10-episode show on Netflix. It doesn’t seem that crazy to me.
When you have, I guess people would be surprised to know that:
When you have the band that he has with John Batiste, like, that’s not cheap. When you have some very experienced and probably reasonably well-paid writers, that adds up. When you have to film any stunts or skits or what they have to do for makeup or to help get people in to promote their stuff, there are just a lot of costs that add up.
I don’t find that number shocking.
Okay. Let’s assume the number is not shocking. Let’s assume the number is absolutely real. One thing I still don’t understand about this decision is: if it’s just about finances, why couldn’t the network just cut costs to keep the show in the air?
I know this question has been asked a lot, but I don’t think I’ve actually heard a satisfying answer.
You’ve got a show that’s bringing in tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue a year.
You know, when I asked the folks at CBS that, the answer was that the losses are so significant that there was no way to cut to profit. And so why do it? That was the most satisfying answer than that.
I guess I would almost flip it and say, you might have to make those costs, but the other part of it that they struggled with, and I’m sure you want to get here, is like, why can they not make more money from the show’s existence elsewhere? Right? Because the show makes most of its money from advertising—and to, I mean, maybe they give it credit for some affiliate fees and stuff like that from linear television.
But as everybody knows, these late night shows are primarily consumed on the internet now. And we’re not talking about streaming on Paramount Plus. We’re talking about YouTube, we’re talking about Instagram. We’re talking about kind of fans around it. And there have to be innovative ways to make money from a property that people still like that can keep shows like this on the air.
Interestingly, I don’t think that’s a mystery at all. There’s the old cliché about how you’re trading sometimes the analog dollars for the digital pennies. But as you move attention from live television to YouTube, each impression gets so much less valuable.
The kind of shows that succeed on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are not filmed in the Ed Sullivan Theater. They don’t have 200 employees. They don’t have—maybe they have a star making $20 million, but he or she is like the only person making over $500,000 in the entire group.
So this is what’s happening. What you’ve already described is that attention is moving from these enormously expensive institutions to these smaller solo proprietorships, these little podcasts, these little celebrity interview shows that are thriving on YouTube because they’re getting all these views without the burden of organizational infrastructure that 20th-century legacy shows have.
This is where I want to move. You wrote in your newsletter:
“Late night talk shows are dying and have been for a long time. The Late Show CBS is the first of the three major late night talk shows to call it quits. It won’t be the last.”
Why do you think it won’t be the last?
Because the numbers that we have seen and heard on this show are similar for all these other shows and the trend lines are the same.
Eventually these media companies will decide it’s not worth it. The last one to go will probably be The Tonight Show because it has the longest history.
Fallon has the biggest audience on the internet. If I were to be uncharitable, I’d say of those three hosts, I think Fallon has the least clear path after that.
Jimmy Kimmel’s contract is, I believe, up the same time as Colbert next year. Would I be shocked if at some point in the next couple of months we heard that he wasn’t coming back? I wouldn’t be.
There’s a greater chance because he’s more woven into the fabric of Disney that they will maybe extend it for another year or two and they’ll find ways to save money. His show’s also not as expensive as Colbert’s. It’s not filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater. It doesn’t have quite as big a staff.
I just think it’s inevitable that this particular type of late night topical talk show filmed in the theater with a big writing staff and band—the whole format—is a relic of the latter 20th, early 21st century.
And to your point about these kind of smaller, nimbler shops:
It’s not the exact same format. There are parts of that topical humor that now exist in podcast form. There are parts of that, especially the interview part, that exist in podcast form but on YouTube.
It just has splintered, and there are many eras to it. And, and, and, and as you said, they’re the newer ones, the YouTube and podcast versions of these shows are far less expensive.
Another quote from your newsletter, which I thought was really important is that there’s not a long list of people who want to host these shows:
“Major comedians can now make more money and reach more people by touring and filming standup specials.”
What I’m hearing here, and Bill Simmons made this point as well with your friend, our friend, Matt Bellany on his Monday show, is that like in the 20th century, early 21st century, like to be a comedian meant to a certain extent to aspire toward having these kinds of jobs, toward being able to fill out these kinds of shoes.
And I think it also meant wanting to, you know, star in adult comedies, which is a trend line I also want to trace with you in a second. But nowadays comedians just find it much easier to make an enormous amount of money as sort of solo entrepreneurs, rather than a part of this like huge legacy organization.
Like that seems like a really important piece of this as well. That like, it’s not just that Netflix and CBS can’t make talk shows work. It’s also that the kind of people who would be excellent at these kinds of talk shows, if the year were 1975, now that the year is 2025, don’t actually want to do these jobs.
They want to be one man bands like Shane Gillis and do their own thing everywhere without being tied down to a big institution.
Yeah. If you were, I had an interesting conversation about this with Bert Kreischer, who’s a popular comedian, a couple of years ago, maybe last year. He was saying how at the start of his career, if you’d asked him where he wanted to be, it would have been:
Those were sort of, those were sort of the three, the top of the pyramid for comedians.
Now he can make more money going on the road and then filming his tour for a Netflix special than he could from any of those. He’d have to take a pay cut to make a sitcom.
And that’s just a fundamental change in our media ecosystem that I don’t think is going back anytime soon.
So you would have:
But I, if you ask me, do I think that John Mulaney is going to be hosting that show for 20 years, like some of these people host a late night show?
I’d be shocked.
I want to go back to the comment that that comedian made because it so clearly makes the point that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since the Colbert news came out.
I really do see this as part of a larger story about the shift from institutions, entertainment to individuals, entertainment.
That is to say, if you wanted to become a star, it used to be the case that you had to move through institutions. But now in the age of fragmented media and the internet and YouTube and algorithmic media, it’s weirdly easier to become a star many times and in many ways, not by going through institutions, but rather by building this kind of one man band with a direct relationship to your audience.
And how do you, how do you define an institution in that case? I mean like a group, I mean like a group of dozens or hundreds of people, right?
You just told me the late night show has 200 people supporting Stephen Colbert.
That’s an institution, not only because it’s lasted for decades, but also because it employs a large group of people around a star.
And the name of the show is weirdly more significant than the star itself, right? You can have different hosts of The Tonight Show or The Late Show through the decades, but the show remains the same. The institution remains the same.
Like different people living in the same house.
So that, so I think of institutions as being both about:
Like, you know, you think about just something like a really, really obvious example: Mr. Beast doesn’t make sense to that Mr. Beast. Like, it doesn’t even make sense to say that sentence.
And so that is an individual, not an institution.
But so in the case, in the case of a couple of unpretested, so with Mr. Beast, so, but we’re not counting sort of YouTube as an institution.
No, no, that’s a platform.
Right. In the case of Hot Ones, would we count it because it was sort of birthed within First We Feast, which was part of Complex? That is an institution. It’s a small one, but it sort of came of age in a digital media institution, right? It is now since gone independent.
So, yes, I mean, look, there’s going to be some blurred lines here. But, I mean, you just look at the way that these shows are accessed. People don’t search for Stephen Colbert. They tune in at a specific time to CBS in order to see a spot that CBS is paying to Stephen Colbert, right?
He is almost like he’s being used to rent space within the CBS structure, rather than someone searching Mr. Beast to find their videos directly. That also seems like a distinction between institutions and individuals.
Yeah, well, I would argue that, and I don’t think you disagree, but they’re sort of stuck in the middle of this, right? So, when I was curious and wanted to look up for my newsletter, just for writing in general, the social followings of the different late night hosts, I went to YouTube and did not look up the late show. I looked up Stephen Colbert.
I think that they have become about the hosts and the institutions matter less and less, which is why it’s so important for their longevity and for the future of those ideas that you build around the talent. Unless you’ve created a brand that in some way outlives that, but I don’t think people watching online are now like that.
SNL is different. I do think people go and look up SNL because that is the brand. There are, every once in a while, performers on it who matter, but the brand is SNL. I think for those late night shows, the brand is now the host.
And so, you need those hosts and the affiliated show to be treated almost like they are a YouTube influencer.
I actually, in thinking about your really good question—and this is the nice thing about having a good journalist be the guest who sometimes becomes the host—I want to go back again to the interview that you had with that comedian. Remind me of his name?
Bert Kreischer.
He said:
“I used to want to be a talk show host, have my own sitcom or star in a comedy. Now I realize that I can just go on the road.”
That is actually the clearest example of what I’m trying to describe. He’s saying, I used to think that to become a star, I had to join a group. Whether that group was an already existing talk show, an enormous team of people putting on a sitcom, or an even more enormous team putting together an adult comedy.
But those aren’t the paths to success anymore.
The path to success now, he’s saying, is:
That is a major difference in terms of interpersonal relations. What he’s saying is: I used to need to be around other people in order to become a star. Now I can make much more money essentially by myself.
And that strikes me as a trend that, yes, is about economics and media, but also, there’s something deeper here. It’s about society. And that’s why I think it’s so interesting.
Well, I would qualify that a little bit, only in so much as this: for those unfamiliar with his story, a big part of his success was, one, that he had a sort of a bit from a Showtime comedy special. The comedy special itself, I don’t think, did that well. But the bit went viral on the internet.
The other is, he is sort of an extended part of the Joe Rogan universe. Joe Rogan has helped propel a lot of stand-up comedians and other podcasts to fame. And he is not an institution in the traditional sense. It is more of an informal network of creators that sort of propel one another forward. So, it is decentralized, but there is still, in many ways, a core to it.
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This is slightly a tangent, but it’s a tangent I’m really interested in.
When the news that Colbert was eventually being let go by CBS broke, I had just had this long conversation with friends during a main vacation about the decline of adult comedies.
We’re a bunch of men and women in our late 30s. So take this for what it is.
When we grew up, this was the beginning of the Judd Apatow universe. We watched and quoted old school:
These movies were our lexicon.
“Throw in Wedding Crashers, even though it wasn’t a Judd Apatow movie.”
“Yeah, exactly. The Hangover.”
Before I force a connection here between these two developments—the Late Show cancellation and the demise of the adult comedy—I would actually really love to understand your expert opinion on why these kinds of movies aren’t made anymore.
I know this is something that’s been talked about a lot, but maybe some kind of consensus has settled in the industry that explains why, if you go back over the last 5 to 15 years, it’s actually very difficult to build a Mount Rushmore of influential adult comedies that people go to each other anymore.
Yeah, it’s really unfortunate. What happened? What is the movie that I’m going to watch after a long week on a Friday night when I just want to turn my brain off and laugh? You end up having to go back to the 2000s instead of the 2010s.
I think the simplest answer, which is different from one related to some of what we’re talking about, is the globalization of the movie business.
If you’re looking for a movie that’s going to make 400, 500, 600, 700 million worldwide, there are very few comedies. The Hangover is one of the only ones that’s ever done it. So I think that’s probably the biggest factor.
Some of it might also be that:
The one that probably has the most direct connection to what we’re talking about is just the loss of common culture, which makes it harder.
Comedy is such a shared experience. You want to go to a theater and laugh together. You need shared references. We just don’t have as much of that. So it’s harder to find things that bond and bind people together.
I really like those explanations. I want to fold in domestic consumer behavior as well. Like, how to say this best?
It just seems like the typical American buys what? Three movie tickets a year? Like three and a half? It’s around there.
It seems like we collectively are reserving those tickets for blockbusters. Then we’ve almost been implicitly trained by Hollywood to reserve those tickets… For the Oppenheimers, the Barbies, and the Marvels, in a world where we’re holding onto that ticket until there’s either a big franchise event or just like a really sui generis breakout hit like Sinners, right? That is not based on any IP, but just becomes its own micro phenomenon.
Outside of those things, nothing seems to crack $70 million anymore. That seems to me to speak to not just changes in, yes, everything you said — the globalization of the movie business — but also changes in American audiences. They see different movies, donate their money to different kinds of films now than they did 20 years ago. Hollywood is going to see that message and respond to it.
How do you feel about that?
No, I think it’s a really good point. The movie business has become an event business. It used to be a habit business where people would just go to the theater on a Friday and some wouldn’t decide what to see until they got there. Now you pretty much only go to the theater to see something in particular.
As televisions at home have gotten better, and entertainment options at home have gotten more plentiful, people are only going to the theater for something that they feel like they have to see, something that merits being on the big screen, something that merits them leaving their house. There’s just too much they can watch and laugh at at home.
I’m personally mystified by why horror has navigated this transition better than comedy. I would say that neither one of them is about the quality of cinematography or visual effects or anything like that—something that needs to be seen in the theater on a big screen. But the reason to go and see them in a theater is because they are both communal experiences, one out of fear and one out of kind of laughter and delight.
For some reason, there is a little more of an emphasis feeling that you should go and be scared together than you should go and laugh together. I’m always confused by that.
I think it helps that horror movies are cheaper than comedy movies by and large. If people could make a bunch of comedies for $5 million, maybe we’d be having a different conversation. But horror has generally held up better than comedy in theaters.
That is really interesting. I never thought about that. I’m actually curious what your theories are for why horror would hold up better than comedy.
My guess, as you were talking, is that horror is spectacle in a way that comedy is not. Some of my favorite comedies are kind of quiet comedies — awkward comedies. That’s simply a matter of taste.
But there’s nothing spectacular about awkward comedies. The humor almost exists entirely within you rather than being shared with people laughing hysterically at crazy antics. Whereas horror demands to be expressed. It demands to be externalized.
So there is something about being in an audience around other people.
There’s also something I think about watching. People sometimes are afraid to watch horror alone and less afraid to watch horror with other people. So there’s something about the genre of horror that has a collective function of safety when you’re watching it with other people.
Especially because horror tends to over-index a little bit with women. Maybe I’m confusing horror and true crime. But I feel like there is something about that.
But you’re right that if you’re going to be scared, it’s more fun to laugh with other people. But it’s very comfortable to sit and laugh at home. It’s not as comfortable to sit and be petrified in your own home, especially if you’re alone.
Well, the other thing I guess I’ve been thinking about is, because you were talking, we were talking about the kind of societal role of the theater and when and why you go to the movie theater.
One of the reasons is certainly that you can entertain yourself more at home. But I find it interesting that it’s not just film comedies that are in decline. It’s also television comedy.
If you look at Nielsen’s recent data for the most watched streaming shows of the first half of the year:
That’s so interesting.
There’s this meme that all these Gen Z-ers are still watching Friends and The Office because nothing’s been made in the last 20 years.
But there isn’t really a new sitcom — except maybe Ted Lasso. So a lot of the most popular comedic quotes today come from shows that are not strictly comedies, like The Bear, which is not really a comedy.
The Max is a comedy.
The White Lotus is a comedy-ish. Like there’s a lot of these things that are comedy and drama. And I, people assume that after the success of Ted Lasso, every streaming service was going to say,
“we need our own Ted Lasso.”
Well, where are they? Is it just that people aren’t watching the sitcoms? They can’t find the right thing? Whatever it is, there are not a bunch of new sitcoms working. And so I, I think it’s something that happened, is happening across Hollywood.
Yeah. You, you triggered a couple thoughts here. One is which, one of which is that, um, you know, I had this, the last chapter of my book Hitmakers was called Empires and City-States. And I said, you know, one vision of the future of entertainment is that certain kinds of media will just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Those are the empires. And then certain kinds of media will just get smaller and smaller and smaller. And those are the city-states.
And listening to you, again, and this is just coming together for me for the first time right now, movies are becoming empires and comedy is becoming a city-state. Like, movies are getting bigger and bigger. Like, that market is globalizing. And some of that is about marketing costs and some of it is about labor costs. But there are a lot of pressures moving movies to become bigger global businesses.
And meanwhile, comedy in a lot of ways is just getting smaller. It’s not that there’s no comedy on the internet. That’d be ridiculous to say, but comedy movies don’t really exist the way they did 15 years ago. Comedy sitcoms don’t really exist. Popular sitcoms don’t really exist the way they did 15, 20 years ago.
To the extent that comedy exists, it exists, again, at a very, like, individuated level. It’s smaller. It’s direct. It’s individuals. It’s more narrowly targeted. It’s often, like, more political because if you’re just talking to your own audience, you don’t have to worry about offending people, right? It’s your audience. You can be more conspiratorial. Again, you don’t have to worry about offending people.
And that means that, like, it’s harder to have mainstream comedy if the evolution of that market is going toward individual comedians talking to individual audiences in a relatively intimate way. Or just memes.
I mean, to tie it back to Colbert, right? So the biggest topic on the internet last week was the Coldplay concert where the CEO and the employee and everyone is going to know what I’m talking about. Which, by the way, can we pause there? It’s amazing that everybody knows what you’re talking about. Like, it is amazing when, as fragmented as our culture is, we have this, like, little tiny moment that comes to us from the past. That everybody knows about.
That somehow, I was at a high school friend’s 40th birthday. And a friend of mine from high school who, like, lives in Brooklyn, teaches in Brooklyn, I just launched into a conversation about this Coldplay concert. I haven’t spoken to this guy for 10 years. I just assumed, well, of course, somehow this information would have got to you.
So it is just funny how, like, once every, like, six months, there’s an event that just somehow cuts through the fragmentation and becomes this little tiny vestige of the mainstream. And then it dies. And we, you know, go back to fragmentation again. It’s just weird.
It’s totally, and I brought it up because Colbert did something on it by the, you know, I think the next day. But by that point, it used to be that if you wanted to, first of all, if something like that happened, you might not even know, you wouldn’t really know about it until someone made a joke about it on late night, right? Like, they would have folks scouring the country for fun little local things to talk about that you would shine a light on.
Instead, by the time Colbert talks about it and ropes in Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver and all these people to have fun with it, there have been millions of memes on the internet. There have been a ton of podcasts that have talked about it. There’s just been so much media about it that there’s nothing special about Colbert doing something. You have to, like, really nail the bit. And even if you nail the bit, it’s not the only way, it’s probably not the thing that people remember about that moment.
And that is one of the reasons why late night is considerably less relevant than it used to be. And it’s also one of the reasons why I think one of the greatest ironies of this moment is that Stephen Colbert is going to be much better and funnier when he moves in the direction that comedy is moving, which is toward a guy and a mic being himself for an audience.
I always felt like he was a, he was always a little bit of an awkward fit for this kind of like super like tie-up comedian that you have to be if you’re doing a late night show. That is theoretically purportedly speaking to like a hundred million Americans at once, even though it’s only talking to two million Americans at a time.
He’s going to be so much better at being the kind of comedian that this age rewards—just like weird and talented and narrow and focused and specific and not trying to pretend to be, you know, keeping this vestige of 20th-century mainstream culture alive.
So, what would you see him doing a year from now?
Oh, he’ll be, he’ll be, you know, Amy Poehler.
He’ll be hosting a podcast.
He’ll be hosting like an irreverent podcast that has him maybe blending a little bit of like character acting because he’s obviously so good at that.
He’s an extraordinary improviser and I don’t think you can really, I mean, like as a comedian, he’s an extraordinary improvisational comedian.
And I think it’s hard to really let that freak flag fly at whatever 10:30 PM on CBS at the Ed Sullivan Theater. The pomp and circumstance of that show doesn’t fit. I think his style—he’s weirder than it.
And I think his weirdness will actually be perfect for the thing that he does next. Whatever it is.
Like it goes, it, I guess it, it is to say that while there’s aspects of this sort of transition between institutions and individuals that I kind of bemoan, there’s parts of it that are like, so obviously wonderful, you know, more creation, more creativity.
And I think the irony here is that five years from now, we’ll think that this is one of the best things to happen to Stephen Colbert.
Okay. So you adopt, a lot of people seem to be adopting this belief that it’s the best thing to happen to him. Probably look, maybe not his bank account—$20 million is a lot to make in a year. I’m not worried about his bank account.
He hosted that show for nine, ten years. He hosted The Colbert Report for a long time. He’s fine. He’s been, yeah, he’ll be fine.
It’s, you know, I guess in a weird way, a good thing if you believe he was destined for that show to be canceled or end in the near future anyways. Doing so in a way where he comes out looking like a martyr and a hero is probably a good thing.
And it gives, and the way it’s also been structured is he has time to figure out what to do.
So, yeah, I know you’re right. There is something kind of interesting about how martyr culture is an important ingredient in modern entertainment success.
Like Shane Gillis was better off being fired by SNL than hired by SNL, and maybe only in the 2020s could that be the case given all the things that he can do in the ways that he can go directly to audiences.
But I think you put your finger on something quite important about how a little dose of martyrdom can go a long way in modern media.
Oh, I think it, I mean, not to keep it all in the ringer family or talk out of school or anything.
Like he leaves The Hollywood Reporter under this cloud where the owners of it wanted to influence the journalism.
And so instead of having to leave at a certain point cause the magazine is losing money and it’s firing people and it just looks like a failing thing, he chooses to get out.
He basically, you know, he leaves as the hero of the story and it paves the way for whatever he wants to do next.
I totally think it helped him.
Well, and The Ringer itself probably would not exist if someone had not shut down Grantland.
Yes. I don’t know if Bill came out as the martyr. I guess he came out as the martyr there.
Yeah.
Well, I think to bring it back to the top point, this is a really interesting moment for comedy. And I think it’s really interesting the degree to which a lot of these contours that we see in the comedy market—the sort of miniaturization of the field as comedians go from wanting the biggest possible platform to a smaller platform, the fact that it’s becoming more tailored, the fact that it’s becoming more political—it’s just interesting how many of these trends seem to mimic and retrace things I’m seeing across media and entertainment.
So we’ll leave it there.
Lucas Shaw. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Eric.
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2025-07-23 08:00:01
Mary, Queen of Scots: The Royal Rivals (Part 2)
In marked contrast to her childhood treatment in Scotland, where she was considered at first a sickly child, unlikely to live, and later a pawn in a dynastic game, even at five years old, Mary was hailed as a figure of romance in France.
A brave little queen who had been forced to flee the barbaric Scots, the cruel English, for the safe arms of all-embracing France.
The stage was already set in French minds for the appearance of a childish heroine. To their satisfaction, Mary Stewart, with her charm, her prettiness, and the natural docility of youth, was ideal material to be molded into the playing of this golden role.
So that was Lady Antonia Fraser in her celebrated biography of Mary, Queen of Scots.
And she, Tom, is describing the impact that the infant—well, not really infant because she’s five years old—that the young Scottish queen makes on the French court after she arrives in France in the summer of 1548.
In our first episode, you set the scene, didn’t you, by talking about the sort of turbulent politics of Mary’s childhood, the death of her father and so on when she was only a week old. Then all this complicated political game with Henry VIII and with the French court.
So just remind us what went on there.
Yeah, so the Rough Wooing. Henry VIII wanted Mary, Queen of Scots, to marry his son, the future Edward VI. He thought he’d got the deal. Then it got ripped up. He got absolutely irate and sent the English to burn and slaughter and loot, which they then did for eight years.
The impact of this ultimately is that Mary, Queen of Scots’ French mother, Mary of Guise, who is part of France’s leading noble dynasty, she’s able to foil the English and secure a French match for her daughter.
And when I say a French match, I mean, it’s the most brilliant French match imaginable. Because when Mary Stewart, after a perilous and storm-wracked voyage from Scotland—and you were very sniffy about her failure to succumb to seasickness, but I think it’s historical proof.
I wouldn’t say sniffy, I’d say bracingly sceptical.
Go on, continue.
Young Mary, Queen of Scots, steps onto French soil, and she does so as a future Queen of France, because her betrothed is the Dauphin himself. And this is the eldest son of Henri II, or Henry II, François—or we’ll call him Francis, because we’re being very Anglophone in our treatment of French names.
I read in your notes, Tom, you’ve written—I think this is massive punching down from you—you’ve written,
“He wasn’t the hunk he might have been.”
And then the next line, one year younger than Mary, so he’s four.
Yeah.
So I think that’s a bit harsh.
And you mock him as being short.
I mean, all four-year-olds are short, I think it’s fair to say.
Well, he’s abnormally short, but Mary is abnormally tall. So there’s a disproportion in height.
He’s got a stutter, and you laugh at him about that.
What do you mean I laugh at him? I’m not laughing at him, I’m just setting the historical record straight.
And you also mock him, very cruel remarks in the notes about his two left feet.
Yeah.
He can’t dance. Mary loves dancing. He can’t dance, Mary’s already a brilliant dancer.
Brilliant dancer.
She’s five, and she’s a brilliant dancer, and she can steer the ship single-handedly through a storm. Unbelievable.
She’s very, very precocious.
But actually, Francis is great. He’s weedy, but he’s plucky.
Come on, he’s four.
Actually, the two of them get on tremendously well.
Yeah.
Because he’s not just plucky, but actually very smart. And Mary already has a kind of instinctive sense of what is expected of her, how to play to the gallery.
And so she and Francis, everyone agrees, they make an adorable couple. A charming couple. Charming couple.
It’s five and four. No, Tom, don’t defend it. You love it. Listen, I’ll leave a second.
The king of France, he’s like you, he’s drunk the iron brew, and he’s massively, like, he thinks Mary, Queen of Scots, is brilliant, doesn’t he? The most perfect child I’ve ever seen, he says. This is a historical testimony, Dominic, which you’re sneering at, and which I’m just laying it out as it is. It is what it is.
And actually, he’s so impressed by Mary that he gives orders that she should have precedence over his own daughters in royal processions. And this isn’t just because she’s the betrothed to the Dauphin, but because she’s already a queen in her own right. And clearly, you know, she’s poised, charming and regal, all in one. She’s the complete package.
And also, he says that she should get nicer clothes than his own daughters. She’d turn up in Scottish fashions. Well, we’ll come to the issue of Scottish fashions in due course. I mean, I get the sense that you already hate her because of this.
No, no, no, I’m objective. And you might think that, you know, the king of France’s daughters would hate her, but not a bit of it. Because the French princesses find her so charming, such fun, that they all end up the most tremendous pals.
Oh, lovely.
And in fact, I mean, particularly in Lady Antonia’s biography, but more generally, the accounts of Mary, Queen of Scots and her chums, you know, the French princesses and so on. And it’s like reading about the kind of the poshest, funnest boarding school yarn. It’s a kind of Renaissance Mallory Towers.
Right.
And it’s great fun, but there’s also quite a lot of schooling.
So Mary, like Elizabeth Tudor, her cousin over in England, is given a very, very good education. I think it’s fair to say that unlike Elizabeth, she’s not an intellectual.
Okay.
But that’s precisely what makes her so charming and fun, because nobody likes an intellectual, do they?
No, no, no one wants a blue stocking.
No.
So she’s given an education that would conventionally be regarded as more appropriate to princes than princesses. But that’s because she’s a queen in her own right, and so therefore she has to be prepared for her role.
And as John Guy in his brilliant, I think, definitive biography of Mary, Queen of Scots puts it, what she gets is the equivalent for a prospective ruler of a degree in business administration.
So she works hard, but she’s not a nerd. Her real talent, much more, I think, than for kind of construing Livy or whatever, although she does that, is for having fun. So girls just want to have fun, and Mary, Queen of Scots is the epitome of this.
And it’s such an amazing background for her, because this, of course, is the golden age of the chateau in France. Anyone who’s been to the Loire and seen the kind of the beautiful chateau there, this is what you’re getting.
And Mary and Francis and the royal princesses and all their friends are kind of endlessly processing from Fontainebleau outside Paris to Blois and to Chambord on the Loire. She visits them all.
And Antonia Fraser can’t get enough of it. So she exclaims,
“beautiful gardens, beautiful galleries, so many other beauties. Oh, how charming.”
But her biography is brilliant on this. I mean, it brilliantly evokes what she describes as the kind of the dreamlike quality of Mary’s upbringing in France. She’s got ponies, of course. She’s got lap dogs. She’s got falcons. She has amazing clothes.
I mean, the king of France himself has said she has to have the best clothes possible. So she has gloves of dog skin and deer skin. She has velvet shoes of every conceivable color, you know, amazing gowns and dresses and trains. And she has so many jewels that she needs three brass chests just to hold them.
So, as I say, the most tremendous fun.
But, of course, you know, in boarding school stories, you’re away from home. And so the issue of homesickness is always there.
And so people may be wondering, well, Mary’s a young girl who’s gone to a foreign country. Is she ever homesick?
And I think the answer to that is that to begin with, yes, she misses her mother very badly.
And, in fact, Mary of Guise will only once be able to make it out of Scotland and come and see her in France. And the reason for that is that she is literally holding the fort back in Scotland. You know, she’s got Stirling Castle and she’s surrounded by people who would quite like to see the back of her.
And the person who particularly liked to see the back of her is the Earl of Arran, who is next in line to the Scottish throne. And there’s this guy who is kind of endlessly shifting and running away from defeats and things like that. So Mary of Guise thinks he’s a bit of a loser. And she strikes in the spring of 1544.
And the reason that she does then is that by this point, her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, is 12 years old. And this is the kind of age when it’s felt that she is able to kind of start picking up the reins of power.
So Mary of Guise has prepared her tactic well. She’s got people on the side and she persuades Arran to resign the regency in exchange for kind of various bungs and benefits and bribes.
Mary of Guise, this foreign woman, takes his place as the regent of Scotland. And, of course, this is yet another consolidation of French control over Scottish affairs. And even as this is going on back in France, the Queen of Scots is becoming ever more of a French princess.
Now, you say that, Tom, but am I not right in saying that she does dress sometimes in Scottish national dress to amuse the locals? So that’s nice, isn’t it?
Yes. And this is defined in France as being basically animal skins, which is not Scottish national dress, but this is what they think. So it’s a kind of mockery.
Right. And she’s complicit in it or they are dressing her up against her will or how does it work?
A bit of both, I suspect. And I think it reflects the way in which Mary’s links to Scotland are starting to fade as she becomes, you know, enters her teenage years.
So she had travelled to France with a substantial Scottish train. These are all the people who were seasick while she was being poised and regal and not being seasick on the journey.
So most of her Scottish train has kind of been sent away. So the Scottish attendants who have come with her when Mary’s French grandmother, her Guise grandmother, Antoinette de Guise, comes across them. She’s appalled and she says, “we can’t have them.” And her exact phrase is “they are not as clean as they might be.”
So essentially she’s offended by Scottish standards of hygiene.
Mary has a governess who herself is an illegitimate daughter of James the Fourth and she’s called Lady Fleming. She’s stunningly gorgeous. So John Guy describes her as beautiful and voluptuous. And she was known by the French as la belle écossaise, so the beautiful Scotswoman.
She has a fling with Henry the Second, the French king. And this in itself wouldn’t have been particularly a problem except that she ends up pregnant and thereby precipitates a scandal. And so she gets dismissed and sent back to Scotland in disgrace.
However, it is not a completely Scot-free zone because Lady Fleming’s daughter does remain with Mary in France.
And she is one of four Scottish girls, all of Mary’s age, all of noble birth, all called Mary, who constitute, I guess, I mean, we’ve now moved on from boarding school stories. These are now Mary’s squad. This is like kind of gaggle of teenagers in Beverly Hills or whatever.
So you’ve got:
And the five of them are completely inseparable. They get up to all kinds of scrapes and japes. They’re actually a bit like Peter the Great and Marie Antoinette, that they love playing at being common people.
Okay. So to quote John Guy,
“Mary adored making Cotignac, a type of French marmalade, putting on an apron and boiling quinces and sugar with powder of violets in a saucepan for hours before laying out the slices of crystallized fruits.”
And she gets the four Marys to help her. They have a special kitchen that is kind of created in their apartments. They put on aprons and pretend to be kind of servants or bourgeois women organizing, you know, the housework and the house routines and things like that. It’s all such fun.
Right. All very charming. And it does enable Mary, Queen of Scots, to keep up with her native language because she and the four Marys are all chattering away in Scots, even though all of them by this point speak absolutely fluent French. Probably it’s their, you know, it’s their language of choice.
But by the time she’s in her mid-teens, she can probably barely remember any of it. She left when she was five, so she can probably remember nothing of Scotland or virtually nothing.
Yeah.
And presumably that’s what the French want. They want her to become, you know, she’s the wife of the Dauphin. She’s going to become the Queen of France. They effectively want her to be French, no?
Well, and specifically the Guise family. So her relations on her mother’s side, because she is absolutely a key part of the Guise plans, not just for France, but for Europe more generally.
So while Mary’s been having this lovely time with her ponies and making marmalade and so on, her two uncles, we mentioned them before, Francis, who’s now the Duke of Guise, and Charles, who’s the Cardinal of Lorraine, they’ve been busy consolidating their grip on France.
So the Duke, his nickname is Scarface, a battle injury. He’s very charming, but he’s also very hard-nosed, the man of action, veteran of the Italian wars, as we mentioned in the previous episode, and a man who in January 1558 shames himself by capturing Calais from the English.
Robbing them of their rightful possession on the French mainland.
So that’s very sad.
And the Cardinal, who is, as we mentioned, the kind of brilliant and fertile schemer, the leading political figure in the French court. The pair of them remind me of the Duke and the Cardinal in the Duchess of Malfi, the Jacobean drama.
There’s a kind of quality, I think, about them that conveys everything that Protestants tend to find sinister about Catholic powers and courts at this time.
They have a kind of Borgia vibe to them.
And why they want Mary is not just to, you know, if Mary and Francis have children, then their grandchildren will be kings of France, presumably. But their ambitions are higher than that.
They want to forge a kind of Franco-British empire that will be under their thumb. And so step by step, they’ve been putting the building blocks in place.
Mary writes to her mother back in Scotland on the morning of her marriage. She says,
“All I can tell you is that I count myself one of the happiest women in the world.”
And of course, she’s an absolute wow at the wedding. Very shockingly, very innovatively, she wears a completely novel colour at her wedding. And that is white.
In France, unheard of to wear a white dress. And she does this because she knows that it will suit her complexion and her auburn hair.
Great festivities, gold and silver coins tossed out into the crowds. The wedding banquet features six giant mechanical ships that kind of glide around the banqueting hall. And it’s all great fun and absolutely brilliant.
And everyone has a wonderful time.
Now, what does this wedding mean for Scotland and its continued independence? So objectively, publicly, nothing, it would seem.
So nine days before she gets married, Mary signs and seals a promise to uphold, and I quote, “Scotland’s freedoms, liberties and privileges.”
But behind the scenes, things are slightly different.
So 11 days before she’d signed that pledge that Scottish independence will be maintained, Mary had been given another document that had been drawn up by her Guise uncles, which is top secret. Nobody talks about it.
It’s been drawn up in very florid legal jargon, basically to dazzle Mary, who’s still only 15 years old.
But when she puts her seal to it, she is effectively agreeing to a completely bombshell promise that if people in Scotland knew about it, it would cause outrage.
Because what Mary says is that:
will rule as well as the kings of Scotland.
So Scotland will become part of the French kind of fiefdoms.
They also write that Mary has had this wonderful education, all her business studies and stuff, her ponies, her dog skin gloves and everything.
And therefore, the Scots owe France a million pieces of gold for it.
What? So a very expensive boarding school education. That’s a very expensive boarding school.
And effectively, it’s a blueprint for turning Scotland into a province of France.
Oh, the French. God, who would have thought that they would behave like such snakes?
And here’s the thing.
They’re not just— that’s not even the limit of their ambitions.
Because they’re also, and this is the really shocking thing, they have their eyes on a much greater prize, some would say, which is our own beloved country of England.
Unbelievable.
And again, it’s Mary who is the key to this plan because, and we haven’t touched on this yet, but it’s a very, very important part of Mary’s story.
We’ve talked about how she’s a steward of the royal line of Scotland, but she also has the blood of the Tudors, the English dynasty, in her veins.
This is because her grandfather, James IV, the guy who had died at the Battle of Flodden, had married the sister of Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor. And by 1558, so when Mary is marrying the Dauphin, this has come to take on a potentially enormous dynastic significance.
So we left England under the rule of Edward VI, the young Protestant heir of Henry VIII, but he had died in 1553. And he’d been succeeded by his elder sister, Mary Tudor, who is a Catholic.
But she, in the months following Mary Stewart’s wedding to the Dauphin, has fallen ill and potentially fatally ill. And so the question that is being asked in France, as in England, is,
“if Mary Tudor dies, who is going to succeed her?”
Now, of course, she has a younger sister, Elizabeth, but the claim of Elizabeth to the English throne is viewed in France, and particularly by the Guise, with contempt.
So as the Cardinal of Lorraine, the subtle, one might almost say sinister, power player at the French court, points out,
“Elizabeth is the daughter of a witch, namely Anne Boleyn, who had been put to death by Henry VIII, and her daughter, Elizabeth, had been declared a bastard by Act of Parliament in 1536.”
So she seems to be ruled out of the succession, in the opinion of the Guise.
And worse than that, of course, she’s a Protestant, and no cardinal is going to think that a Protestant should succeed to the throne of England.
And so the Cardinal of Lorraine argues that the throne should not pass to Elizabeth, but instead to the next in line, who, of course, just happens to be his own niece, Mary Stuart.
So shocking developments. OK, so that is potentially, I mean, that would be momentous. I mean, that would give the Guise family control over not one kingdom, but three kingdoms.
And so when Mary, Bloody Mary, Mary Tudor dies on the 17th of November, 1558, they’re straight in there, aren’t they? They say,
“Our niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, the Queen-in-waiting of France, is now the new Queen of England.”
And they really mean this. I mean, this isn’t just a performative gesture, that this is a serious part of their ambitions, of their kind of geopolitical ambition, right?
I think they do mean it seriously, but of course, there is a slightly performative element, because they want to treat Mary as though she is the Queen of England.
And so the English coat of arms starts featuring alongside those of France and Scotland, you know, in the doorways and the crockery and the plates and things that the Dauphin is using in his palace.
And when ushers clear a way for Mary Stuart, you know, going through the chateau or whatever, they are crying out,
“Make way for the Queen of England,”
which is obviously very heady stuff for Mary. I mean, brilliant. She’s Queen of Scots. She’s now the Queen of England. Soon she’s going to be the Queen of France.
And that moment arrived very soon, because on the 10th of July, 1559, the French King, Henry II, dies of a sports injury. He’s been in a tournament and the lance goes through a gap in his helmet into his eye and he dies very soon afterwards.
And two months later, on the 15th of September, 1559, Mary’s husband is crowned the King of France. And again, Mary is a massive fashion success. She wears white. She looks dazzling. All the other members of the royal family are in black. So they look very dowdy compared to her.
And, you know, the Queen of Scots, who the French claim is the Queen of England, is now also the Queen of France.
Wow. To quote John Guy,
“Wherever the French court came to rest and whichever towns it visited, the heraldic arms of Francis and Mary were blazoned with those of England on the gates.”
So she has done very well for herself. Queen of Scots, Queen of France, Queen of England. And she’s what, about 16 or something. And she’s very glamorous and all this.
The only slight flaw I can see in this design is that she’s not actually the Queen of England. No.
So this is a big problem for her because now the person who is the Queen of England is her cousin, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Tudor.
And this is the person who, in all the films and the books and the operas and whatnot, is her arch enemy. And you can see why that would be the case, right?
Because if you’re Elizabeth I and you’ve spent your life being declared a bastard and being locked up in various houses and all of this, the arrival of this new contender over the channel in France, who’s also very glamorous and whatnot.
If you’re Elizabeth, you presumably absolutely hate the very mention of Mary Queen of Scots’ name.
Well, I think that what you do initially is to ensure that powers across Europe do not recognise this potential rival to your throne.
And this is exactly what Elizabeth and her diplomats do. So they ensure that, for instance, Mary Tudor’s husband, who was the King of Spain, Philip II, that he recognises Elizabeth as Queen.
And even though Philip is Catholic and Elizabeth is Protestant, Philip II does recognise her.
And the reason for that is that he’s desperate to keep England on board in his ongoing struggle with France. Yeah, of course.
So power politics trumps kind of religious affiliations. This in turn means that the Pope has to recognise Elizabeth because the Pope is under Philip II’s thumb. And so he has to do what Philip says.
And it’s also implicitly agreed, even by the French themselves, because on the 2nd of April, 1559, they sign a treaty with England, the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresi, which effectively is the treaty. I mean, it’s kind of complicated, but in its practical effect is that the English acknowledge that they have lost Calais.
And the quo for the quid is that the French implicitly accept that Elizabeth is Queen of England.
And obviously, this is terrible news for Mary, because not only has her claim to the English throne been sign-lined, but actually, the guys who have signed this treaty with the English are her own uncles, the Guise, the people who’ve been saying, “you’re the Queen of England.”
Right. Because it was the Duke of Guise who had captured Calais, and so he wants to confirm his military achievement.
And it’s doubly bad for Mary, because all the kind of claims to the English throne, as you said, it’s alienated Elizabeth, but it’s particularly alienated two key operators at the English court.
One of these is a guy called Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, who is Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, who is a very, very committed, hot Protestant, and therefore very opposed to the idea of England having another Catholic queen.
He has been very busy making copies of Mary’s offensive, heraldic arms. So all these ones with England’s English coat of arms being courted with the French and Scottish coat of arms. And he’s sending them back to London.
There they are being read by Elizabeth’s most trusted servant, her chief minister, who is a man called William Cecil, who, like Throckmorton, is a very, very committed Protestant. He’s passionately loyal to Elizabeth, but he’s even more passionately loyal, I would say, to the Protestant cause.
He’s also a man who’s long been interested in Scottish affairs, because he had fought with Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, at the Battle of Pinky, the kind of disastrous defeat that, in a way, had precipitated Mary going to France.
So these two Protestants, with the ear of Elizabeth, they loathe Mary, and they see her as a potentially mortal threat, not just to Elizabeth, but to the Protestant cause in England.
They are completely committed to stopping the Catholic Mary ever succeeding to the English throne. They’re so committed to that, that actually it’s Cecil’s real ambition is not just to stop Mary becoming Queen of England, but to topple her from her Scottish throne.
Mary, I think, is oblivious to this, but she has made herself an enemy who, as events will prove, is as subtle and dangerous an enemy as any queen could have.
And while this has been going on, of course, there have been tumultuous events in Scotland, back in her homeland. Events that threaten not just the future of Catholicism in Scotland, but Mary’s own survival as queen.
Tom, let’s find out about those after the break.
Let’s.
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To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city is repugnant to nature.
Now that was an archive recording of a Scot, an author of one of the most famous pamphlets ever written by a Scot. I mean, history is littered with famous pamphlets, but this is probably the most famous. And it’s the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women.
And disappointingly, monstrous regiment there actually means the kind of unnatural rule of women. I’d always thought of it as being, you know, a military squad of women with bayonets marching towards cannon or something.
Now, it’s an author you describe in your notes, Tom, as top feminist and funster, John Knox. So he’s the great sort of godfather of the Scottish Reformation. He absolutely hates Mary, Queen of Scots, doesn’t he?
But here’s the thing. His target in 1558, when he wrote that pamphlet, she wasn’t really his target there. His target was somebody else: Mary Tudor in England and Mary of Guise in Scotland, right?
And he sees definitely Mary Tudor, but also by extension Mary of Guise, as kind of exercising a Catholic tyranny over the whole of Great Britain. And so that pamphlet is a kind of pain, cry of despair and frustration that Catholic rule under these women seems impregnable and that the Reformation threatens to be stillborn in the island.
And yet, Dominic, you as a bluff Protestant will be thrilled to learn that only two years later, everything had been stood on its head.
So by 1560, the authority of the Catholic Church in Scotland has been toppled and actually, as it turns out, decisively defeated. Protestant reformers like Knox himself, perhaps preeminently Knox himself, have emerged triumphant.
And the measure of what Scotland has gone through in those two years is that Alec Ryrie, the great historian of British Protestantism, in his book, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, he can describe those two years as not just one of the most extraordinary national transformations in European history, but he goes on to say that it’s arguably the first modern revolution.
He disagrees with you, because you claim the first modern revolution took place hundreds of years earlier, and yet he’s a famous professor, Tom. How could you explain that?
I think what he probably means there is the first revolution of modern Europe, which is a slightly different way of phrasing it.
So people may be wondering, what on earth has happened? What is this great revolution? And I guess that as good a way as any of answering that question is to look at the career up until this point of John Knox, who was probably the most famous of all Mary Stuart’s adversaries.
And so he, like so many of the early Protestants, I mean, there’s such a feature of, you know, the series we did on Martin Luther. He had originally himself been a Catholic priest, and probably he was converted to Protestantism by Patrick Hamilton, who we mentioned in the previous episode was Scotland’s first Protestant martyr. He’d been burnt at St. Andrews in 1546, and the man who presided over that execution, who’d brought Hamilton to trial and then convicted him and then set him up on a stake in St. Andrews, strapped with bags of gunpowder.
This was Scotland’s leading churchman, a guy called David Beaton, who was the Archbishop of St. Andrews, but was also Scotland’s last cardinal, as it will prove.
And three months later, Beaton gets killed by five assassins who were out to revenge themselves on Beaton for the death of Patrick Hamilton. And they murder him in his own stronghold, the castle of St. Andrews, which is right on the coast, pretty impregnable.
And they hang his body from the castle walls. It’s been stripped naked. Then they pull it down. One of the Protestants who’ve kind of gathered around to exult over his humiliation then urinates in the mouth of the corpse.
They then salt his body and they throw it into the most notorious dungeon in the whole of Scotland, which is inside the castle of St. Andrews. And it’s a very deep bottle-shaped hole. So once you’ve been put in it, you can only be got out with a kind of rope.
And it’s dug below the level of the sea right next to the, you know, whether you can kind of hear the distant booming of the waves through the rock. And this is, you know, a pointed humiliation of the preeminent Catholic churchmen in Scotland.
And yet also a fairly standard night out in St. Andrews, I would say. Yeah, well, students at St. Andrews can take us up on that. So Knox is obviously thrilled by this. He’s one of the Protestants who goes to the castle of St. Andrews, which is now kind of a stronghold of Protestantism. He serves the garrison there as its chaplain.
They’re able very easily to hold out against the Scottish authorities up until the point when Henry II sends a massive task force to Scotland to try and throw the English out. This task force has enough men that they can go and capture the castle of St. Andrews. All the garrison are taken prisoner and they are sent to the galleys, and Knox is among them.
So he gets chained up on the bench. He has to pull the oars and so on. He does this for a year and a half. Finally, he is set free as a result of a personal intervention from the English Protestant king, Edward VI, who admires John Knox.
So Knox is set free but can’t go back to Scotland, so he goes to England. He’s given a parish in Newcastle, which he chooses because it’s pretty close to Scotland. Protestant refugees can kind of amass there. It becomes a kind of center of resistance to Mary of Guise and her Catholic regime in Scotland.
Knox thinks Edward VI is brilliant. He thinks England is brilliant. He sees it as, you know, the new Jerusalem. Brilliant. It’s absolutely wonderful. Hooray.
And then, of course, Edward VI dies and is succeeded by Mary Tudor, who is Catholic, who will go on to be called by Protestants Bloody Mary because of her burning of Protestants. Knox thinks,
“Ah, this isn’t a good place for me.”
So he scrams and ends up in Switzerland, in Geneva, which has become a kind of godly city of reformed religion under the aegis of John Calvin, with Luther, one of the two great figures of the Protestant Reformation. If Knox had thought that England was brilliant, he thinks that Geneva is even better. He described it famously as:
“the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles.”
Great key.
But he does go back to Scotland from time to time, doesn’t he?
A couple of times he goes back, yeah. Because there’s now a sort of coterie of Scottish lords who are prepared to protect him. Is that because they are Protestants themselves now? Yes.
Basically, the Reformation has swept through Scotland, including the aristocratic hierarchy. In fact, the most significant of these is Mary Stuart’s own half-brother, one of the many illegitimate sons that her father, James V, had fathered. He is also named James, so James Stuart, Lord James Stuart.
He’s often cast as a kind of Machiavelli. He’s certainly a very subtle man, capable of incredible duplicity, but also very sober-minded and, I think, very devoutly Protestant. All his political manoeuvring is, I think, in the cause of very strongly held Protestant convictions.
Jenny Wormald, the great Scottish historian who’s very down on Mary Stuart, loves her half-brother. She thinks that Lord James Stuart is brilliant, describing him as a
By implication, she’s suggesting that Mary Stuart is none of those things. He’s great pals with Cecil, the man who would become Elizabeth I’s great spymaster. This is a really important axis in Mary’s story.
This man, who in due course will become the Earl of Moray—the name by which he’s better known—is a key player in the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. He is able to provide patronage to Protestants in Scotland.
But it’s also because Mary of Guise, the regent, even though she’s Catholic, is not a natural fanatic like Mary Tudor. Her priority, I think, is to keep Scotland secure for her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, her dynasty, the Guises, and her country, France. If that means cutting a bit of slack to Protestants, then she’s happy to do that. Her commitment to preserving Scotland for the true Catholic faith is kind of fourth on the list, I would say.
But then, presumably, what changes everything is the death of Mary Tudor in 1558, and the fact that Elizabeth becomes the Queen of England. Mary Tudor was not an old woman, so she could have lived for 10 or 20 years more.
With her death and the accession of Elizabeth, the whole kaleidoscope takes another turn.
Why does it take such a turn? Is it basically because England now, between Scotland and France, is ideologically different, and therefore there’s a new impetus towards Protestantism in Scotland? Why does Elizabeth’s succession make such a difference to the story?
Having a Protestant on the English throne is obviously a massive destabilizing factor, certainly for Mary of Guise. And the reason that it’s a disaster is that it goes with the grain of trends within Scotland. Her rule, although it’s been very competent, and although she’s a very effective political operator, she is French, and this has become increasingly unpopular with large swathes of Scottish public opinion, and particularly with the Scottish nobility.
And so, by the time that Elizabeth becomes Queen in England, there are nobles in Scotland who are starting to think that France is playing the role in the national demonology that the English traditionally have played. So, there is one resentful lord who describes the alliance with France, the old alliance, as
“an iron hook that hath caught and killed afore now the most part of our ancestors,”
which is a kind of massive rewriting of history.
Part of the reason for this isn’t just dislike for the kind of heavy-handed character of the French garrisons that are providing Mary of Guise with her muscle in Scotland. It’s also that she is trying to provide Scotland with the kind of centralised rule that she, as a French aristocrat, takes for granted. She thinks this is what is required for a successful modern state.
And, again, Scottish nobles feel resentful of this. They feel kind of cut off from her patronage. They feel that the traditional roads by which they can source power are being closed off to her. And then, on top of that, there’s the continued presence of their own queen, Mary Stuart, Mary of Guise’s daughter, in France, which is, I think, experienced by many Scots not as redounding to Scotland’s glory, but as a national humiliation.
We talked about this when we did Marie Antoinette, the way in which often foreign queens in France are kind of hostages. You know, they’re held there in a gilded cage to ensure good behaviour from the country that the queen has come from.
So a group of these guys have already formed. I mean, I’ll tell you what they love in Scotland:
They’ve pledged themselves to the Reformation.
And with the arrival of Elizabeth, these sort of people, what do they call themselves? The Lords of the Congregation. Yeah. They now think, brilliant, they’ve got a Protestant monarch in England, and we can actually use this now. The time has come to kick the French out of Scotland and actually to completely turn the alliance system on its head and to have an ideologically based Protestant alliance with the old enemy, with the English.
Yes.
And Dominic, you might say the kindling has been laid, but the spark needs to be provided. And the spark is provided by the return to Scotland on the 2nd of May, 1559 of John Knox.
And I think it’s fair to say that just as Mary of Guise is kind of unsettled by the accession of Elizabeth in England, so also, ironically, it’s John Knox, because John Knox is actually very, very pro-English.
But it’s unfortunately his blast of the trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which he had targeted against Mary Tudor, comes out just as Mary dies and is succeeded by the Protestant Elizabeth.
And Elizabeth is massively offended by it. To be fair, you can see why. I mean, of course you can. And so she bans Knox from England.
And so, for de Muir, Knox ends up going to Scotland. So Knox actually, ironically, is a bit like Mary. His loyalties primarily are to a foreign country. Knox would rather be in England. Mary would rather be in France, but they both end up in Scotland.
And Knox’s arrival in Scotland, as I said, has this kind of incendiary impact.
And all across Scotland, he inspires these kind of waves of godly vandalism.
And my favorite detail is that lots of godly reformers go into the gardens kept by the monks and literally pull up all the flowers by hand.
“These flowers are offensive unto the eyes of the Lord.”
And I guess the key indicator that Knox and the lords of the congregation have the wind in their sails comes when the Earl of Arran, who, you know, we’ve been fingering throughout the story as Scotland’s supreme trimmer, a guy who’s constantly responding to the blowing of the wind, he changes sides.
So initially, he’d been a supporter of Mary of Guise. Then by September 1559, he thinks, “Oh, it’s all up with her. I’m going to switch sides.” And he brings over a whole nother swathe of the Scottish nobles. So that by October, most of the lords in certainly in the Scottish lowlands—it’s different in the highlands, which, of course, is that much more remote—most of the lords in the Scottish lowlands are openly ranged against Mary of Guise, the French regent.
And in fact, there are only two leading noblemen in the lowlands who stay loyal to her. One of these is Lord Seaton, who is the brother of Mary Seaton, Fashion Mary, the one who’s very into her fashion. The other is a guy called James Hepburn, who is the son of Patrick Hepburn, who we mentioned in the previous episode, the Earl of Bothwell, who was the hereditary Lord Admiral and Sheriff of Edinburgh, whom Mary of Guise had been flirting with.
James Hepburn has succeeded to those titles and to the Hermitage, the grim castle in the debatable lands. He’s a very effective defender of Mary of Guise. His most spectacular stunt is to pull off an enormous gold heist, because Cecil, Elizabeth’s minister in England, who’s obviously delighted at there being a Protestant revolution in Scotland, sent a massive train of gold.
James Hepburn, we’ll call him Bothwell from now on, ambushes it and makes off with all the gold. The news of this is brought to Mary Stuart in France, Mary, Queen of Scots. She’s terribly touched by this display of loyalty on the part of Bothwell. From that point on, I think it’s fair to say the Earl of Bothwell is a man who will have a place in her heart. She has a certain tendresse for Bothwell because she’s so grateful to him.
She’s completely powerless in all this. I mean, I know she’s the Queen of France, but she presumably can’t do anything to help her mother, Mary of Guise. She sits there impotently in France watching events in Britain, where it just gets worse and worse from her point of view.
So in February 1560, her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, negotiates a treaty in Berwick, the town on the border of England and Scotland, on behalf of the Lord of the Congregation. This is an overtly Protestant alliance.
This is not cast as a kind of English invasion and English takeover. But the consequence of this is that the old alliance, the alliance between France and Scotland that had been the foundation stone of Scottish foreign policy for 300 years, is now effectively defunct.
Whether of a broken heart or not, Mary of Guise gives up the ghost on the 11th of June. She dies, only 44. With her death, everything is kind of thrown up in the air because Scotland now effectively has no ruler, certainly no Catholic ruler.
Then, one month later, a further calamity for Mary Stuart, who’s now lost her mother. A new treaty is signed in Edinburgh between England, the lords of the congregation, and in a completely stunning volte-face, her two uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, the very people who have been pushing her to take up the rule of England throughout this.
The terms are completely humiliating for Mary Stuart:
- France now officially recognizes Elizabeth as Queen of England.
- Mary is obliged to drop her claim to the throne of England.
- All French troops are to evacuate Scotland.
- Any failure by King Francis and Mary, his Queen, to ratify the treaty licenses Elizabeth in England to intervene in Scotland to uphold its terms.
So France has signed, sealed, and delivered their recognition of Elizabeth. All French troops that Henry II sent, which Mary of Guise had been using as her garrison and cutting edge, have to withdraw.
This is a complete triumph for the English crown and the Protestant insurgency in Scotland.
I guess Mary, Queen of Scots, at this point has basically only one consolation:
Right, Tom? Right.
So then Mary of Guise has died in June. Then in mid-November, Francis goes out hunting and he comes back and says,
“Oh, I’m feeling a bit dizzy and I’ve got a kind of strange buzzing in my ears. I hope it’s nothing serious.”
By the end of the month, he is suffering a series of violent fits. By early December, weird matter is starting to ooze out of his ears. Then it starts coming out as kind of dribble from his mouth. And obviously, this isn’t a good sign. And on the 5th of December, he dies. Crikey.
I mean, you never rated him, to be fair.
I did. I said he was plucky and I said he was smart. That’s all you need. But also, the other thing you need is not to die of matter coming out of your ears. But he’s gone.
And for Mary, who it said wept for a month on the news of her mother’s death, in a way, this is an even more devastating blow because she’s still only 17, but she’s now been orphaned, she’s been widowed, and now she’s no longer the Queen of France.
And so her whole future, which had previously seemed so glittering, I mean, now, you know, what’s she going to do?
Her uncles, these arch manipulators and Machiavelles, wanted to stay in France because what they want to do is basically to marry her off to Francis’s younger brother, Charles, who is now the new king. But Mary is smart enough already to know there is no prospect of this.
And the chief problem she faces is her mother-in-law, who Dominic is a link to one of the previous series we did, which is the Medici.
So Mary’s mother-in-law, the wife of Henry II, is Catherine de’ Medici. So she’s from the Dukes of Florence. And Catherine de’ Medici had always disliked Mary as a kind of tool of the guise. You know, Catherine de’ Medici is a very, very smart operator. I mean, a ruthless operator. And she does not trust Mary.
She wants her cleared from the chessboard. And she makes this very clear to Mary.
So just one day after Francis’s death, she sends a message to Mary saying,
“Hey, give me back all the jewels. You know, they’re not yours anymore. They belong to the Queen of France. You’re no longer Queen of France.”
Right, she’s not messing around. Yeah, she’s not.
And so Mary knows there’s no way that Catherine de’ Medici is going to allow her to marry another of her sons.
The other reason why Mary isn’t happy to go along with the schemes of her uncles is that, you know, she views them as having completely stabbed her in the back because they’ve signed this Treaty of Edinburgh.
You know, they’ve deprived her of her right to the throne of England. And she feels that they had betrayed both her and her mother.
And so because of that, the obvious solution is that she goes back to Scotland because there at least she is Queen of Scots.
Do you know what? She should have stayed in France. She should have knuckled down, just kind of had a little palace of her own, had a quiet life, a lot of dancing, and she’d have lived to a ripe old age.
This is a great mistake that she makes.
Do you know who wouldn’t agree with you? It’s Jenny Wormald, the great Scottish historian who also, I think, was herself Catholic.
She feels that Mary should have gone back immediately to Scotland because the sooner she gets back, the better the chance there is of reversing the recent successes of Protestantism in Scotland.
And the reason for this is that although many of the leading nobility are now Protestant, the vast mass of people in Scotland are still Catholic.
So very like England under Henry VIII.
Yeah, of course.
And her status as Queen is still unchallenged. As Jenny Wormald puts it,
“There is no doubt about the strength and prestige of the House of Stuart and the profound unwillingness of the Scots to challenge it.”
So it’s what we were talking about in the first episode.
Mary, by virtue of being a Stuart, can demand a kind of loyalty that is instinctive to the vast number of Scots of her subjects.
And so that being so, Wormald argues, I think entirely convincingly, that Mary could have played the part of a Mary Tudor in Scotland.
You know, she could have gone back. She could have sought to reverse the Reformation.
And Wormald is very, very down on Mary because of this.
I think having myself had two girls who at one point were 17, I think it’s quite a big ask to expect a 17-year-old girl who hasn’t been to the country that she’s being asked to go back to since she was five years old, to go back and kind of reverse these seismic developments.
I think it’s quite tough to be down on Mary for having done the challenge.
And I am more sympathetic to Mary for essentially prevaricating.
So rather than hurrying back to Scotland, she goes into mourning for Francis. So that lasts 40 days.
She then goes on a kind of massive tour around France saying goodbye to all her, you know, her relatives and her pals and so on.
And she is also, throughout this, engaging in kind of massive slanging matches with Nicholas Throgmorton, the English ambassador, who is trying to pressure her to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh, which she refuses point blank to do.
However, she is preparing to go back to Scotland.
And the key figure in her plans is her half-brother, Lord James Stuart.
And the reason for that is that I think Mary instinctively, when in trouble, looks to her… Family, even though her mother had not let her down, her uncles have done.
So there is a problem with Lord James Stuart, which is, of course, that he’s a Protestant and not just a Protestant, but he’s basically been the kind of the leader of the lords of the congregation.
You know, but as I say, he is family. And Mary is obviously hoping that blood is thicker than water.
And sure enough, between them, they arrive at a kind of an agreement compact that, when it’s announced, appalls both her Guise uncles and John Knox.
The reason for that, the reason that the compact appalls the Guise is that Mary promises to recognise the Reformed Church, the Protestant Church that, you know, John Knox is kind of now the leading light of, as being Scotland’s official church.
In return, she will be allowed to celebrate the Catholic Mass in her own chapel at Holyrood, which is the Royal Palace in Edinburgh.
And I think there’s no real question as to who gets the better of that deal. I mean, clearly, you know, Mary is selling Catholic Scotland down the river, really.
Right. But at least she’ll be able to go back as Queen, right? So, you know, it’s a big win for her. And as a Catholic Queen.
So she leaves Calais on the 14th of August, 1561, and with her go her four beloved Marys, and they stand on the deck saying adieu, adieu, bidding tearful farewells to France, mourning the fact that they worry they will never see France again, which is entirely accurate. Mary will never see France again.
They’re a bit worried because Mary still hasn’t signed the Treaty of Edinburgh with Elizabeth. And so they’re worried that the English may be looking out for her to try and take her hostage.
And in fact, as they are going up the Northumbrian coast, one of her transport ships, which is carrying her horses, gets picked up by an English patrol ship on suspicion of piracy and taken into Newcastle.
So these horses are impounded and it will take three months for them finally to be sent north to Edinburgh.
Mary herself, she gets to Scotland, to Leith in record time. It only takes her five days. No seasickness, of course, because she’s so poised.
They arrive off Leith and the harbour is thickly veiled by mist so that Mary, in a kind of it’s pregnant with symbolism, can’t actually make out the contours of her kingdom through this sea mist.
And John Knox, you know, I mean, he’s a man ready to see it as an omen. And he wrote:
“The very face of heaven at the time of her arrival did manifestly speak what comfort was brought unto this country with her, to wit sorrow, dolor, darkness and impiety.”
But Dominic, was he right? Well, we love a bit of darkness and impiety on the rest is history.
And I’m happy to say that next time there’ll be loads of both as we explore the melodramatic story of Mary, Queen of Scots on her return to Scotland.
Now, if you cannot wait to hear that story, which is one of the most remarkable we’ve ever done, the great news is that you can hear it and the remaining three episodes of this series by joining our very own group of evangelical reformers, the Lords of the Congregation, the Rest is History Club at:
therestishistory.com
So what are you waiting for? And on that bombshell, goodbye. Bye-bye.
2025-06-29 08:00:01
Advancing the Frontier of Silicon Intelligence: the Past, Open Problems, and the Future
So a few of my team members, although weekend, have been cooking a really good model and released last Saturday, on this Saturday actually.
And if you haven’t tried it, you can open your chat, GT chat, GPT app, and if you don’t have it, please download it.
If you click this, it’s part of discover, but if you click the button there, you will enter into the video, speech model. For example, we can try there on the far right.
Yeah, it’s really hard to discover. I’m sorry about that. And hey, I’m actually giving a talk right now at Columbia about AI. Can you make a joke about Columbia, which is appropriate, a light one for you? Did the AI apply for Columbia? Because it heard even the algorithms get a degree of sophistication there. Good luck with your talk. Okay. That’s not bad. Okay, cool.
Now let’s skip the A and let’s start the talk.
So it all started around 1948-1950. During this time, the question arose: machine synonymy, right? So basically, we will come back again when people are talking about conversation synthesis. I really like the framing: we’re not trying to simulate an adult brain; we’re actually trying to simulate an infant’s brain and, subject to appropriate cause for education.
So that’s exactly what machine learning is, and we will come back to this as well.
And today, in this history, I will tell about the history of two cities: one is, you know, self-supervised learning and the other is reinforcement learning. So let’s go to self-supervised learning first, about 13 years ago.
There’s, so basically that’s the first large-scale deep learning model, like using GPUs and a lot of data that achieves astonishing error rates on ImageNet. Much more data than before.
One insight we got from this is with sufficient data and compute, new networks surpass humans in hand-engineered vision algorithms for the past few decades. So this was kind of a disaster for the people who were working on vision with hand-tuned features.
It’s a nightmare because all their work for the past few decades doesn’t mean anything anymore suddenly. And this actually revived the interest in neural networks, and the deep learning revolution began that year. Most people see that as the year marking the deep learning revolution.
Then in 2013, there’s a really fun funding from Google called word2vec. So basically, you can use a vector, an embedded vector, to represent words, and you can do arithmetic on this work. Like, if you take “king” minus “man,” you get “queen” minus “woman.”
So you can have semantic meanings in the algebra operations. The other thing is, if you use the embeddings, they’re really good in the downstream tasks.
This kicked off another two trends. One is from work to work to everything to work. Everyone wants the recommendations of the entity.
The other thing is that the reinforcement of compute plus data performs much better than inductive bias. If you go back to Turing, right? Turing said, “we do not want to simulate an AI brain,” meaning we do not want our human inductive bias in the models.
We want the model to be minimal, like minimal structure as possible. You want to build a model that just wants to learn, rather than building a lot of human prior into that. And this again proves that compute plus data is much better, better than several decades of human engineers. In 2014, there’s a really good paper called Al Nice. So basically, we have two nice networks; one is a generator, and the other is a discriminator. This has not a lot to do with self-learning, but it’s a really great idea that was applied almost everywhere later.
Lemme skip that. In 2015, there’s a really good method for optimization called Adam. This really accelerated the progress in deploying models. The reason is you have a standard way of learning algorithms; you don’t have to hand-tune a lot of the parameters anymore. It’s especially good for large data sets, particularly for noise-frustrated scenarios. So they streamlined a lot of the training frameworks.
Even till now, I think a lot of optimization methods address variations of Adam; they’re not the plan of Adam turning by this workload. In 2015, another really good paper came out titled ResNet. This is a really good paper that illustrates the problem we were facing with training very deep networks. Training very deep networks was really, really hard because you have a very deep network. The great advantage can explode, right?
The genius idea is ResNet implies this, basically skip connections. Every layer can skip to the next layer as raw input, so you don’t have to. It’s basically an ensemble method. They ensemble every layer of the model from shallow to really deep networks. This is a really good illustration if you look at the area surface.
Basically, this is almost all the networks; if you employ such a structure, it makes it much easier to learn. This is another fundamental paper that came out. Back then, there were a lot of thoughts about deep learning. People had a lot of doubts. Including myself, I started with a pure math background. I think there are a lot of things that intuitively are not correct, right?
I was talking to a statistics professor yesterday, and I realized a lot of the things I learned in graduate school about statistics had wrong intuitions. The reason is that previously, people lived in such a lower-dimensional space. The intuition we got there did not generalize well in the hard and real space, where we have a trillion parameters. So I urge everyone in statistics, we should just study more of those problems rather than traditional ones. Because the intuition we give to students might be wrong.
I had to spend years overcoming those wrong intuitions. One of them is different, like deep, this is a non-convex optimization. When you work on non-convex optimization, the first thing you worry about is being stuck in a local minimum. Depending on where you start, that’s really bad because how do you trust the result if the best solution is going to be stuck in a random local minimum?
There are a lot of studies on this. I think one thing that makes me feel confident is that navigating a really high-dimensional space is actually really hard to get stuck in a local minimum. We live in a 3D space, right? When we see a 2D surface, there are a lot of local minimums, and they’re really bad. but it’s really hard to escape because they only have two degrees of freedom to do that.
But when you live in a billion or trillion dimensional space, it’s really hard to stack in a local minimum because you have so many degrees of freedom.
And the other thing people find out is even in that case, you’re stacking a local minimum. The local minimum, first, is not really bad. It’s actually a really flat local minimum. It’s actually a good one. It’s not very far away from the global minimum when you plug the data into the loss surface.
And so those kind of two things I think make sure people don’t worry too much about the local minimum non-communication anymore. Our intuition just from 3D gives us a lot of fat, but those things do not hold in the redemptional space.
A similar one is, if you are on a plane, the probability of random two vectors being aligned is almost zero, right? But if you look at, in dimensional space, the probability that random two vectors are near-aligned is almost one. They almost are, so almost. And those are different intuitions when you have a low versus high dimensional space.
Am I going too fast or too technical, or this is okay? Good. Okay, a little bit too fast. Okay, I will slow it down.
Thought number two. So if you are from traditional statistical analysis, right? You have a number of parameters larger than the number of data points you have, that’s a disaster. That leads to overfitting theoretically, right?
And so that’s another thought because in most deep learning models, the number of parameters are usually, you know, more than the data points. And why doesn’t that lead to overfitting? That’s another thought. People, I mean, because I train as a math major and computer science major, so that’s always given me a thought.
Then there are a series of studies. The good ones are, I think one thing that convinced me is even though when you have more parameters than data points, you can feed random labels, right? You can feed random noise.
But what we discover is the deep learning model always learns the pattern first because we will come back to this when the deep stochastic gradient designs learn. They will learn the featured space where they have the largest A values. That basically means where you have the most pattern; they will learn that first before they learn the noise.
So that basically means even though your prioritize doesn’t matter, they’ll learn the pattern. And what are the other good things?
Then, there’s also this double descent paper, that similar idea, right? When you have a really over-parameterized model, once the network can interpolate, then it enters into a world where there is a big surface of zero loss points, and then the model tends to pick the best one.
So that’s a convenience for even myself; they overcame that. This is not a bad thing; in fact, it’s actually a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Then there’s the sequence to sequence model, learning and attention. In 2014, there is a familiar sequence of sequence model. This is used everywhere in all the applications, particularly in machine translations.
And then in 2014, there is attention—the wait. Yeah, that’s the first attention paper. That’s not the attention zone need, but it’s attention on some other architectures. The major challenge point back then from 2014 to 2016 was that recurrent models were really hard to train in parallel because of their recurrent structure. You have to train the first step and then the next step and so on, which limits the size of the model and the training data since you can’t parallelize the process. Additionally, RNNs suffer from gradient diminishing. On the time horizon, we solved this depth dimension with residual networks, which can have the gradient diminishing issue, but on the time horizon, the problem persisted. Techniques like TM helped, but didn’t solve it completely.
Then the transformer architecture came in, which is arguably the most important paper of the last decade. While it didn’t introduce a lot of new concepts, it combined many existing ideas into an architecture that solved most of the previous concerns. It eliminated recurrence entirely and relied solely on self-attention. Transformers stack multi-head attention and feed forward layers, offering much better data efficiency and parallelism compared to before. This allows for training much larger models with much more data, and transformers have become the backbone of nearly all cutting-edge NLP models and multimodal models.
From there, something really interesting happened: in 2018 we saw GPT-1, in 2019 GPT-2, and in 2020 GPT-3—models that proved to be highly generalizable. This area is often called generative AI, though some prefer “gen” to stand for generalizable, which captures the essence better. Previously, you could build models for almost anything if you had data, but you needed to build a specialized model for each domain, which wasn’t scalable. The new regime of models is super generalizable; you can zero-shot or few-shot them to do your task, lowering the effort per model significantly.
In 2020, a famous paper on the scaling law showed that as you increase compute, data, and parameters (all on a log scale), you get a lower loss in a clear linear relationship. The curve is beautiful and, while it will plateau at some point depending on the data, it’s not a physics law and may not hold everywhere. Notably, the scaling law almost perfectly predicted GPT-4 performance before it was released, holding across about 13 orders of magnitude—that’s a lot, up to 10 trillion.
Returning to the starting point, this is the bitter lesson. If you haven’t read it, it’s highly recommended. The bitter lesson over the last 70 years is that AI started in 1950 with the goal of minimal inductive biases and building systems that can scale with compute.
And the two measures that can scale with compute:
For example, you can explore different moves. The gist of that is basically that compute ultimately outperforms the algorithms that leverage compute, ultimately outperforming those that rely heavily on human engineering inductive biases.
We see that in image, we see that in NLP, we see that in everything. Basically, if you have data on compute, you just want to build a model that just learns rather than having to human engineer a lot of human inductive biases into the model.
If you don’t take anything else from the talk, that’s the key takeaway.
Then there are a lot of things that make you wonder again: where is scaling coming from? It’s just observation, right? People’s nature is that we want to understand where it’s coming from. There are many hypotheses. The major ones that resonate with me are:
If you look at the data, the data distribution follows the power law.
For example, a really good doctor can solve rare diseases, while a mediocre doctor can solve the common diseases. Similarly, the higher the intelligence of the data, the less often it actually occurs.
There might be millions of books on arithmetic, but maybe there are only a few on algebra and geometry. So that parallel distribution is kind of what might be underlying the scaling law; like you need extra 10x more compute to discover things that are rarer in the data or of higher intelligence in the data.
This suggests that the scaling phenomenon is actually derived not from anything else but from the data’s intrinsic property. I really like that interpretation, and we’ll come back to it.
We also discussed how a modeler is the most common pattern first. It is similar to when you do principal component analysis and use eigenvalue decomposition. You learn the gain features with the largest eigenvalues. That’s the nature of SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent).
The other thing that people have always wondered about, maybe two or three years ago, there were debates on the internet and Twitter about why those emergent abilities happen. You see this here, right? They don’t go smoothly or like massive capabilities; it just suddenly feels like the model can solve some massive problems.
Why is that? I think it rules back to the scaling law. Even though the perplexity and loss are smooth, because of the power law in the data, capabilities suddenly come about when you have 10x compute; it’s when you finally understand calculus and can do calculus.
So, it always depends on how you marry these concepts because you can always convert a discrete variable to a continuous variable in some way. It’s about how we view it, which is why people see those emergent abilities.
I don’t think people should be surprised by that. It’s not sudden; it’s exactly just the nature of scaling. What reflecting in underlying data.
And the one famous thing he has, the models just want to learn, I think at that stage.
And we actually have a decent model architecture with this transformer that the model just wants to learn. You just want to feed the model data. And that’s actually a really good thing to have.
So, okay, we overcome a lot of fat for the last 10 years. This is another one. I think a lot of people, including myself, do not have a lot of conviction. Now I do, but the thing is that compression of prediction leads to a really understanding and intelligence, and we don’t know, right?
But there are two perspectives. One is from the information theoretical perspective; it is Shannon’s definition of information as unpredictability. If you can completely predict something, there’s no new information to you, right? So intelligence can be seen as the ability to reduce the price.
And so if you think about what LLM does, LLM basically, by predicting the next word, they’re basically compressing a lot of the patterns so that it wants to get less price over time.
In that way, you can understand, basically predicting the next word of compressing the patterns is kind of a form of intelligence similar to how humans predict the world.
The other thing is from cognitive science perspective. As human beings, we have been trying to compress the infinite information in the universe, in this physics laws. Newton has low motion; we want the unified field series. Those are all compressions.
We have a lot of observations and we want to compress them into minimal size of loss as possible. Similar for Max, we want the XM system, right?
The other thing is our brain constantly compresses sensory input. So if you look, if nothing surprises you, you’ll have a reaction to that; otherwise, you’ll not. Your brain actually has a good way of compressing the things that don’t surprise you, but digesting only the new incremental information.
In that sense, learning is compression. Like when you learn a new theory, it makes you excited and curious, and then you learn. But if you’re reading something boring, your brain already compressed that, and you get bored in many ways.
Those two things, to me, are really good experience explanations why compression at least implies a large portion of intelligence, maybe not all.
So that’s the first city, like, which is self-supervised learning. And then let’s go to the second, the reinforced learning part.
This, the whole thing, the deep reinforcement learning, started in 2015. There’s a DQ in the DPU network that can play 2000 Atari games really, really well, much better than humans. I don’t know if I ever watched this video.
Some of them are super fun because I grew up playing Atari games and they discovered a lot of strategies I never imagined. People call that alien intelligence because the way they learn is by playing, and they reinforce. But they don’t necessarily copy from humans.
They invented other things that humans never thought of. And, 2016, I think that’s the biggest event maybe in the last decade about AI. People get really excited because goal is kind of the moment people say, “Oh, there’s really a lot of intelligence in these models.”
The AlphaGo actually bootstrapped it from the human games. They basically combined the deep learning with self-play and Monte Carlo research to defeat the work campaign. In 2017, they refined that to AlphaGo Zero. So basically they didn’t bootstrap the deep neural network with any human data, all from self-play, which is just amazing. This is actually very interesting.
I also read a lot of writings, and when I was growing up, I read a lot of this. There’s actually a Kung Fu master who is so good he cannot find anything that can defeat him. He started self-play, like he will just fight with a life-like arm and so on. It’s very similar to that.
Then, you basically split your brains and your body, and then you fight each other. It’s pretty fun.
In 2018, there’s AlphaZero. Basically, you can just, with minimal human inputs, tell the model the rules of the game and what constitutes a win and a loss, and no human data, domain-specific tricks. They can play chess and really, really well, not only Go.
Then in 2019, people moved to digital video games like StarCraft and became the Grandmaster there. The interest along those lines died down because we actually proved we can play any game really, really well. We will come to a question about why it has less impact.
Then there’s another branch at Berkeley and OpenAI, a group of people including John Schulman, who addressed the instability of the DQN algorithm. Then there’s PPO, which is behind the TBT algorithm, simpler to implement, smarter, and has better sample efficiency.
And then there’s OpenAI, which has focused on OpenAI Five rather than just StarCraft. They played Dota 2 and became the world champion at Dota 2. The question is though, why did this impressive reinforcement learning treatment have limited direct impact on productivity in everyday life?
They generated a lot of hype, right? People say, “The model can play Go,” but they generated minimal economic value. The reason for that is, they don’t have economically valuable generalizable players and environments. They’re very specialized in specialized AI or specialized super intelligence in some way.
Things changed when we combined pre-trained reinforcement learning; I call this “part-time wine,” a pre-trained and low-computer RL. In 2022, there’s InstructGPT, which is basically training language models to follow instructions to be useful. If you don’t fine-tune the pre-trained language model, it’s just an auto-completer; it doesn’t really do the things that you want the model to do.
In 2020, there’s TBT, utilizing a similar method with RHF. There was actually a low-key research preview by John Schulman, Barrett, Luke, and Liam, and people said, “Let’s just put it out there and see how people use it.” Now, there are over 500 million users using ChatGPT every week. I am always amazed by how helpful ChatGPT can be. This can save people then literally save people’s lives. There are users who are uploading their years of medical history and find out things that the doctor never told them before and saved their lives. This is not just a statement; this is a reality.
And I use the video every day. Not only the voice mode, but I use deep researcher every week. My search volume has increased significantly, maybe by 10x, because I’m using the deep research model, doing all the searches for me; I don’t have to do that myself.
It can be much better than an intern in many ways.
But then you think about this: what changed from the game RL? We mentioned the game RL is not that useful. That’s an understatement; it’s really useful, but they didn’t generate economic value. Now it does, right? The reason is now RIL is combined with a much more generalizable pre-training, which can also apply to environments that can have a lot of economic value.
But then you ask yourself, where is the general ability coming from? The majority of the general ability is still coming from the pre-training. Why is that? The pre-training is basically about the next word prediction. This approach has almost minimal inductive bias.
Like Ilia said, the model just wants to learn a simple loss, and everything is trained rather than us teaching the model to do specific tasks. In the future, maybe we can do meta-learning or reasoning leads to generalization, potentially making the model even more generalizable.
For the RL part, it’s not as generalizable as pre-training yet because, for RL, we have a lot of human-defined rewards where we introduce a lot of human inductive bias. I’m not saying humans are bad, but we want the model to learn. It’s like your kid; you want to teach your kid how to learn rather than teaching your kid specific things. Teaching our kids how to learn is much more important than imparting specific knowledge.
Then there’s a concept people call young LA cake. The majority of the computation was spent on surprise learning. The icing is surprise learning, and the cherry on top is RIL. Basically, people are saying that in this regime, RL is a tiny amount of compute compared to the pre-training. But we believe that we need to change that.
We believe more RL is required to build GI and SI and to adapt to entirely new environments that have not been seen by humans before.
Let’s go back to VI Verizon again because I’ve read it several times, and I want to code it many times. Remember there are two things that we discovered in the last, say, 70 years that scale really well with compute.
Like OpenAI started this for pre-trained high compute IL in 2014, the O series came out and started the next paradigm of scaling.
We want to scale the test compute, and if you look at the also 2025, there is an open-source version from deep.
If you look at the performance on Amy, did anyone take Amy in this room? Only one, two, come on. More people take Amy.
Oh three, cool. So this is the AMY score.
When you give more compute in the train time, you can see from like 40 points to 80% percentile, right? And then for the test can be similarly from 20 to like 85 or 90.
So giving the model more time to sync can significantly improve the AE performance, which is a pretty challenging task. It’s not that trivial. Uh, this is a new paradigm. We call that, you know, high computer.
So basically, a lot of capabilities are really enhanced where personal learning, uh, but the caveat for there is on the public, you know, the papers publish; a lot of them only work well with verifiable rewards, meaning it’s a mess problem or it’s a coding problem. You know, that’s correct or not, right? In the end.
And what we need to really do is to expand what is verifiable. And, uh, there’s a recent paper from David Silver and, uh, reset, welcome to Viral Experience. I think almost exactly, you know, illustrating the importance of this.
And so the core idea, I think behind that, that paper is high quality. Human data is limited, like even though we have maybe centuries of civilization, right? And, but the actual data we accumulate is not that much. We already consume most of the intelligence text.
The idea is, you know, how do we generate more, more data? But then you ask yourself a question: where does human data come from? Where is the human intelligence coming from?
The human data comes from human brain thinking and getting reward or feedback from the real environment, which is the Earth, right? And then given that we know compute is gonna get cheaper and cheaper, we want to generate new knowledge and new data by using more compute from the computer rather than the human brains.
By interacting with the environment and generating a lot of data, I think that’s gonna be faster than humans generating data in the future. That’s why I’m so bullish about AGI and ASI.
The other thing is just anecdotal about why the chain also works, right? One thing that always puzzled me since the beginning of our model is why we spend the amount of compute in a token. It doesn’t make sense.
Like there are our training corporates, right? There are tokens from the internet, the chitchat on Reddit, right? And there are also really intelligent conversations between two mathematicians, for example, right?
Not every token we create is equal. And so we should not spend the same amount of compute in training and testing time for those tokens. And that’s where the chain source comes from, right?
In channel salt, you can actually spend arbitrary long tokens for a really hard problem. And that gives you this adaptive compute.
So the thing we want to do is basically save FLOPS playing tight rather than, you know, same flows per token.
This is my personal journey. I can’t summarize it initially. I’m very optimistic about the AGI, because there are a lot of factors that non-com maximization. We know that can lead to very bad things, right?
It’s our prioritization from a serial perspective before traditional statistics. That’s a bad thing. And, uh, the other thing that prediction leads to understanding, and, uh, we don’t know, right?
But there’s a lot of good serious believing that that’s true. And our learning can also be most seeking. There are a lot of people worried about that. And the biggest one actually for me to overcome is I always believe human brains are special and human intelligence unique.
Before, for example, all the things we talk about mathematically, they’re trivial. They’re basically tensor modifications and gradient design, and nothing fancy about that. So it makes one wonder, are we really that easy to replicate, to mimic, right?
I believe life and life—so like human brains are so special as I understand a little bit more. You can simulate the human brains in many ways. Why not? Computers learn the same way as we do.
So those are the next questions: why I’m more a G field, right? One is perhaps, brain cells aren’t uniquely special. It’s just basically a result of evolution. They’re already complicated, right? This is just a biological computer. There’s nothing special compared to a artificial silicon computer.
The other thing is maybe scale is the thing that matters more fundamentally rather than how complicated the structure is. Intelligence may not arise from the complicated structure we have in our computations in the brain. The intelligence may, you know, rise from the data and the interaction we have with the environment.
But maybe our brain, I mean, we talk about why those simple tensor or matrix multiplication can lead to intelligence. I don’t think our brain is doing something way harder than that or way more complicated than that. We’re not doing quantum computing with our brain in any way, right?
Okay, come back to risk reset, right? Similar, Turing had the same idea 75 years ago. Turing basically says, “I doubt human mind is very complicated.” But we want to make sure we can simulate an infant brain and give that a course of education to make that really intelligent. This agrees with drawing.
If you ever feel confused, I always go back to reset and drawing and read our papers. Those are the people who are actually ahead of their time for a few decades. That’s amazing.
The other thing that made me a GIP over the last two, three years is you constantly observe, impossibilities become realities. Every couple of months, something you thought impossible becomes possible. Then you start doubting all the things you saw as impossible. They’re just, they’re just bs, right? Just ignore them.
So even though there are a lot of open problems and lots of reasons to be concerned, there are also a lot of reasons to be optimistic. We will talk about the open problems in the next part of the talk.
I’m checking how I’m doing on time. Good. So let’s talk about open problems. I want to make a few definitions to keep the discussion grounded a little bit because everyone has different definitions of AGI and AI and so on.
So, when I say AGI, I mean a system that matches human level skill across virtually every domain. It’s basically the word that matters: generalizable. It’s not a special thing built for a goal for a video game.
ASI is a system that surpasses the best human in every domain. Specifically, superintelligence is a system that surpasses humans only in specific domains. For example, AlphaGo and OpenAI Five, those surpass human capability in certain domains, right? We call that task-specific superintelligence. So what, what are the open problems?
A lot of people say on the internet, “scaling law failed.” And I don’t think scaling for a scaling law failed.
The data failed. Remember what I said—my personal perspective on the scaling law is the reflection of the data structure. So it can never fail. You just—it’s just a law, right? It’s the mapping. What really failed is actually the data.
And so what do I mean by that? To fundamentally improve the capabilities, what we need to fundamentally improve is we need more or better or higher intelligence data so that the model can learn it through the scaling law. Learning, to me, is fundamentally data-bonded. If you have infinite data in every domain, we already saw the AI; given infinite compute—which I mean, here’s my way of thinking, right? Infinite compute is going to be here sooner or later. I don’t worry about that. But the thing that really bottlenecks us is the data.
So then people ask, right? We can actually convert compute into data because human data are converted from human compute, right? From our brains. But why not convert the silicon compute to data? There are a few caveats that we haven’t solved yet:
That’s exploration. And the other thing is, remember in AlphaGo, we did a Monte Carlo research and you do the random exploration, which can lead to win or lose the game. You cannot do that in language models. The reason is the language model is just many, many, many others. The space is many larger than the goal even. So random generational tokens can never lead to anything.
I mean, that’s a strong word because when we have infinite compute, things change, right? People say you have a, you know, a cat; you know, “give me a typing machine if you tap Shakespeare at some point,” but that’s just going to be a super long time, right? By random luck.
So that’s one aspect I mentioned. We want to improve the data we have. The other direction is actually to improve the data efficiency of learning. If the fundamental bond is data, we can either get more data or we can make our algorithm more data efficient.
So that’s, we can talk about both of them. Better wine generating more and better data faster. We talked about this before, and if you think about how much data we accumulated: we have been accumulating printing press data for about seven years, right? In the beginning, it was very minimal. Then we have been collecting detailed data for the last two years or so.
From the whole chain of where the human data is coming from, initially, the human first gives a task, right? Inspired by the environment, it can be solving polynomials. And I don’t know, does anyone know the history of solving polynomial equations? People were gambling around that and trying to get rich by solving more polynomial equations, right?
I mean, the initial task we humans gave was to survive. That’s a meta-learning. The current generation of humans learns existing knowledge. And the third step is to think about the problem. For a long time, maybe some juniors came up, like Gs uh, gawa. and those people in new knowledge is right.
And then you get feedback by interacting with the re environment, the peer-reviewed.
And then you distill this new knowledge into funding into knowledge. You write a textbook, calculators, and then later write a paper on calculators, and then later generation you’ll learn that.
And then you iterate. That’s how human journey, our day journey, our knowledge over the past so years, right?
And, which aspect, you know, we can significantly accelerate by using AI or by using silicon compute.
So about tasks, there are already a lot of open problems. For example, there are open conjectures in mass, like Riemann hypothesis and so on, but maybe there are two spars still. You don’t have a good clear room, right?
And for learning. So that’s stage one for learning. I think model can learn very fast with weight or in contact.
So that’s, we’ll talk about it later, how to make it even faster, data-efficient and for thinking.
Models can think very fast.
But the key question is can models generate new ideas?
It doesn’t matter how fast you think if there’s no exploration, right?
And then we ask ourselves, how does human discover new knowledge? Like I think the fundamental driving force is curiosity, right?
We are curious. So we always explore new things, and so we want to really teach the model to be curious.
There are different beliefs. My personal belief is maybe interpretation and exploration is enough.
Like the model knows so much that they can interpret and extrapolate the knowledge, and that’s enough exploration to advance the intelligence.
And I think maybe just one more minute on that, I have time. So the last, the universal list of mass is kind of funky, right? That which is, almost 130 years ago.
And so the model now actually can know all the subjects of mass. So it’s a universal list, right?
So it can maybe generate a lot of new knowledge or new ideas in that way.
And the other most important thing for a human to get new knowledge is interacting with the environment.
And this can be very efficient for computers. If there is a perfect simulator, for example, there’s for board games for goal, you can just simulate on the computer so you can get infinite data by using compute.
And this is a fundamental blocker. If you cannot simulate all the same to real, the gap is really big, right?
People are building this called work models for video or for the whole world for physics and so on, which is really hard still.
And so that’s why the body AI is harder. You don’t have a perfect simulator of the physical world we are in.
So I’m still open to music though, because if we can build a model that can reduce the search space like AlphaFold, we can build a positive flywheel.
You have more efficient search and then you can generate more data, and then you have even more efficient search and so on, right?
So that positive flywheel can lead us to super intelligence.
And this relation model can do this very efficiently already when you have a new knowledge.
Said sure.
So I want to repeat the question. The gist of the question is when humans discover new mass, a lot of them are serendipity, right?
There’s no particular goal first. I don’t agree with that.
Preis, a lot of the pure mathematician. They still have a goal to solve a lot of the mass we invented in the process of solving a conjecture, right? But there are definitely a lot of serenity into those. I have a perfect answer for that in a few slides. Okay?
The other thing is the open question: is embodiment necessary for a GI? It may or may not be depending on how you define it. If you define a GI to be the virtually economically valuable task, maybe not.
But the thing is, humans can behave like the volume for AI burnout, right? For example, if the AI wants to do this physics experiment, they don’t have the environment to do that. But maybe humans can do the experiment for the AI and give the result to AI.
And so that can also form this positive feedback loop. We do want to avoid a future that the AI views. We just become the embodiment of AI, which is not a good future to live in.
The other thought, the current thought is: can RL generate new ideas? That’s a recent paper saying that current first learning really incentivizes reasoning capability beyond the base model. The base model is a pre-trained model, right?
So they did an analysis. Here’s a brief summary:
What they find out is that after your RL, the passi one increases significantly. But past that, a million is the same. That basically means if you generate a million possible results, one of them is correct, even from the base model.
So the RL model didn’t generate anything new. I don’t agree with that finding because this is on a particular view of open-source models and so on. I do believe RL can generate new ideas.
The other key thing is exploration. This leads to the question: can we do more effective exploration in RL? We saw that humans have curiosity, and that leads to exploration. We believe exploration is definitely needed.
How to do that is an open problem. This goes back to inspiration and exploration, and maybe that’s enough. I am personally very optimistic because if you look at how humans advanced science and technology, how much of it is purely genius ideas? It’s a very tiny amount, right?
Most of our work in science is based on the interpretation of the exploration of previous works, right? The model can do that incredibly well compared to humans. I think that’s maybe just enough.
I view the question in the end that we’re becoming running all the time. There’s really encouraging evidence from Alpha Evolve to validate the idea. If you haven’t read that paper, it’s a fascinating paper that just came out a month ago.
They demonstrated the power in context learning and guided exploration. Remember, when I was an undergrad, I was learning how to do matrix manipulation more efficiently, right? The state-of-the-art algorithm was from 1969.
Wait, how many years ago? A lot of years ago—50 years ago. Yeah, it’s 50 years ago. It’s crazy, right? And then you use AI to improve on that, basically. Oh, this is a state of art. Can you improve upon that?
And step by step, they actually discovered a better algorithm than that. This is very inspiring. Basically, AI can solve the problem we didn’t know how to solve for like 50 years, in some sense, right? Out of the 50 open problems, I think 20% of them, they improve the state of art, especially for this MP heart comparator problems. AI is much, much better.
I really believe, I studied pure math, and the reason for that is in the freshman year of college, I learned Galois theory. I attended a seminar by Professor Hu in my university, and I became fascinated by Galois theory—just so beautiful, amazing. That led me to pure math. My dream was, oh, I want to solve a conjecture, something like the Riemann hypothesis, right?
A couple of years in graduate school, I realized I’m not suited for that. I couldn’t do that. So, I gave up, and now my new dream is we can build AI to solve the Riemann hypothesis, and I’m much more confident about that than myself solving the hypothesis.
The second goal is we want to vastly improve data efficiency learning.
But think about this: why is that the case? This is just personal thinking and discussions with some friends. Humans do not learn by predicting next tokens. We do sometimes try to predict what you’re going to do or what your next move is, but we do not predict exactly what your token is.
The reason is that distinguishing this is really important because predicting your token means there are a lot of random structures in the token that the model is trying to predict. So basically, the model is wasting a lot of computational resources and parameters predicting something random. As humans, we predict on a much higher level, at a more abstract level.
This way, we know the essence of the problem rather than trying to predict the structure of the tokens. Think about the idea; there are a million different ways to say the same idea. If you are predicting the next tokens, you are trying to capture these random structures in there. I have no idea how to solve this.
What is the next paradigm? This is the open question: how do we vastly improve data efficiency? If you can solve that, I think that could be what the next paradigm for AI will be.
The other thing is to make open problems like misreasoning more manageable.
Did I answer your question through these slides? How should I—let’s go back to that. Your question was, mathematicians discover things a lot of time by serendipity, right? Models are not—this goes back to this slide, the funky one, right?
I agree a lot; some of the discoveries are by chance, not by any utility or anything. If you look, go back to this one from Sir—I don’t know what I may seem. To the word, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and the wording myself now and then finding a smoother or a prettier shell than the ordinary.
And well, the greatest ocean, the truth, lay discovered before me, right?
This is very poetic, poet thing that I really love that code. And to your point, meaning some of the science and technology will discover by serendipity, right? But AI can improve. It’s basically a search problem.
There are a vast space of signs we need to search, and then we get a pebble or we get a shelf, right? But the good thing about AI is that it is going to reduce that search space so much that serendipity becomes common things, right?
So, I’m going structures, and then you know, use that for… I think that’s a really good point. We can talk about that after the talk a little bit more. I’m really optimistic, and I also see progress in directions like that.
And I don’t believe anything special about human serendipity. Compared to machine serendipity, let’s continue. The other open question is, what is the next scaling paradigm, right? We talked about some of that. If you look at paradigm one, paradigm two, we scaled the depths of the layers and we scaled the test compute RL.
Maybe you want to scale the number of two self-play contexts and memory. The model still doesn’t have infinite memory yet, which is really important, right? Because for a really good friend, you share a common memory that is almost infinite. And, lifelong learning is really, really important.
I’m running low on time, so I’m going to be a little bit faster. The other safety concerns are three kinds of safety.
There is a lot of research going into this. I think that’s a really, really important problem we’re tackling.
In the third part of the talk, I want to dream a little bit and see onto the future what we envision. I envision that the future can be, and some of them maybe in the near future, some of them maybe five, ten years down the road, maybe more than ten years.
And maybe we’ll see. So one quote I really like from Sam is he always says, “the days are long” because everyone felt that, right? I had a long day sometimes, but “the decades are short.”
And I also feel that I cannot remember; I graduated more than ten years ago. This is very scary in many ways. Most people tend to underestimate the impact of AI; they’re going to overestimate the short-term impact or the short-term development of AI.
But I think one of the reasons I want to give this talk is that I think most people also underestimate the medium to long-term impact of AI. It’s going to fundamentally change everything.
So let’s see, what’s the future you like? I have a hypothesis: when we have a generalizable human prayer, we have unbounded compute RL, and we have a good environment, that equals a superintelligence.
If you look at how humans learn, that’s exactly how humans evolve, right? And we think the model can evolve even faster than that.
So let’s see, the first area is, I think agents are going to be everywhere. And you will see much more reliable and capable agent in the next year or so, and they become a real reality.
And I think to a large extent, it’s just basically an execution problem. There’s not a lot of research open problem to make agents work.
AI for science is something we want to discuss before, but it’s something I’m really, really excited about. If you think about science, it is a search problem, right? It’s a massive search space.
Once we have enough data to boost and drive a model, then you can make the search much, much more trackable. I think in our most subjects in science, we’re actually in that environment or in that stage; we accumulate enough updated human data. Let’s use AI to make the search more trackable.
I really hope that you know about move 37 of the alpha goal moment. People know about this or should I explain it a little bit? Yeah, good.
There’s a quote from Max, who is, I think, the chief scientist from the Isomorphic Lab saying, “I really agree with that by the way. Doing drug design without AI is like doing science without mass.”
I think AI becomes the new mass for science in the next decade also. If you’re not using AI in your research, please consider doing that. I believe every university should have a huge capability to either develop their own model, our own clusters, or use cloud resources.
It’s gonna be science, and it’s gonna be a lot. I’m really fascinated by AlphaFold and a lot of material science and AlphaFold we talk about, right?
Our friends working in the AlphaFold areas tell me a lot of the drugs are already actually in clinical trials. I always thought that’s kind of in the far future, but over the last year, it has progressed so much.
One particular thing I think there are in clinical trials is how to neutralize the poison from snake bites. Those are really easy problems. You just need to cover a certain part of the protein. Then from the protein structure, you go to amino acid sequences, right?
However, the problem before was that from a structure to amino acid sequence, there are millions of possibilities. This is a gigantic search space. You cannot do that in the wet lab because you don’t have enough graduate students or enough resources.
But graduate students are really good. AlphaFold has a solution; from the protein structure to the amino acid sequence, that’s a high recall, low precision mapping, right? AlphaFold is the universal high precision mapping.
Basically, you map to the protein structure space and compare it to the protein structure that you want. Then you can narrow that down to maybe a hundred amino sequences in that way.
Exactly. You have enough graduate students to do the experiment. So, that’s how those drugs go to clinical trials.
Again, I think this is one more demonstration that AI can reduce the scientific search space a lot. If you’re doing any search in your discovery, use AI in math, physics, biology, chemistry—everywhere.
This is the protein structure if you’re interested, let’s go. I also have a conjecture on AI for science. I really hope in the future that in addition to using graduate students, we have a lot of machines and robots in our labs that can automate much of the experimentation.
Then you will have a really fast feedback loop. So the model common is hypothesis, although the amino acids you need to do, right? And then the machines just do it and then come back and tell the AI, “Oh, this is this work that doesn’t.” And the AI evolves. Keep continuing training on that, and that feedback loop is going to be super valuable.
The other thing is what I hope is Alpha 40 is a specialized model, right? What I hope is similar to the, you know, from Alpha Go to ours. What if we can develop a generalizable model that covers all subjects, similar to LMS, rather than building a specialized model in science?
I think enterprise R&D is going to be fundamentally changed by AI. There are two things there. One is AI can fundamentally boost the R&D productivity, for example, of the coding agent. The other thing I’m even more excited about is maybe AI will break the ceiling for a lot of R&D frontiers, similar to how AI accelerates science. AI product education is something I’m super passionate about as well.
If you look at society, I think one fundamental thing is that people have access to different quality of education, which leads to further division in society. There are two things AI can help with:
Lowering the barrier: AI can make topics more accessible. Because it’s synthetic data, if you look at a random article about a subject, you may get intimidated. It’s not written in a friendly way. But AI can lower that barrier a lot.
Becoming a personal tutor: AI can be personalized. There are studies showing that having a personal tutor can significantly improve learning efficiency, sometimes doubling or quadrupling it.
The other thing is raising the ceiling. What we call 10x learners can do this all the time. Now, over the weekend, I just run research on different topics that I’m interested in and read the report, and suddenly become not an expert but rather than a stranger to a field, you become entry-level knowledgeable, which is amazing.
The hypothesis we have is that maybe in a few years, rather than spending five years on a PhD, you could accumulate five PhDs or 10 PhDs in that time. If you really want to learn, AI for healthcare is super critical as well. I think AI is already better than most healthcare providers that people have access to.
We have numerous examples of how ChatGPT can save lives, and they are real cases across different domains. I’m also really excited about the idea that if AI can have the holistic context of a patient’s medical and health history, it can predict and enable a lot more preventive healthcare in many ways.
Embodied AI is something that may be a little further away, but once that’s true, it’s going to have a tremendous impact on society as well. It’s not as mature because we don’t even know how to efficiently tokenize actions. There are suggestions, but they’re not super good yet in leveraging the existing massive amount of video data for generalization.
The key thing about building AI is we do not have a lot of data. If you look at how LLM started, I did a Twitter post about the following, and then it got really popular; I actually deleted that post. The following is, at that moment, I felt over all the years we have been preparing for AI.
Why I’m saying that we invented the printing press to record our intelligence and then we invented inter-computers, and then imagine the internet. All those things leading to accumulation, all the data we need to build AI and all the compute capabilities we build lead to the capability we want to train AI.
In some way, we have been preparing for this; for solving human beings has been preparing the moment for AGI for so many years. This is a little bit emotional; that’s why I deleted.
But if you look at robotics, we do not have the internet equivalent of robotics. The only way maybe everyone has a recorder from their eyes is how things are happening in the real world.
We do not have the amount of data for robotics to be super effective yet; even if we have that amount of data, we don’t have good ways, a really simple, efficient way to learn that yet. So those are the two open problems for robotics. A lot of the demos are really cool for robotics, but the demo-to-product gap is pretty high.
In case you don’t know, here is my dream come true case: the universe. One of the reasons we never discover aliens might be that we communicate in different modalities, like we never discover each other, or we live in different dimensions, and so on.
Another reason is that most of the universe is not inhabited by humans. It’s really hard for us to go out, but that’s not true for silicon intelligence. What if we build embodied intelligence that can explore the universe for us? I think that’s going to be super cool in the future.
That’s the end of my talk, and thanks for your attention. I’m happy to take any questions.
This is a code I got from Rich T, and this applies to a lifelong agent in RL and also applies to humans:
Never stop learning.
Oh, hi. Thank you for the great talk. I have two questions. I think one is, what is Moore’s Law for LLM and where are we on the curve? That’s part one.
The second is, I think I’m a skeptic of AGI because what we are doing with all the neural networks and the matrix multiplication is a very narrow part of the human mind, which is just human reasoning.
But human reasoning is a very narrow part of the human experience. I think we are hardly touching on the human experience, which also consists of emotions, and we’re very early in the process of that.
There is another piece we are completely missing: what is consciousness and self-consciousness? I think NYU, some people are studying that, but without any of that, we will never get anywhere close to AGI or SI.
To answer the first question, I think Moore’s Law can mean many things. One is more Moore’s Law for IM can be interpreted as the scaling law. As we discussed, scaling law is an intrinsic property of the data.
We really want to make better data, higher quality, more data, and faster. In terms of a lot of consciousness about AI and so on, I agree, and I don’t have a really good definition of consciousness. There’s one paper coded by risk Sutton.
Again, I think Saturn does saw all the doubt I had. But it mentioned that maybe consciousness is coming from embodiment, like we are conscious because we have a body.
Like this is my feet, my arm, and this is my head. And so, my heart, and I don’t know if that’s true or not because I don’t really understand what’s consciousness; it is kind of a little bit abstract to me.
But I agree there are definitely a lot of open problems, and I’m optimistic.
We have, we’re gonna take two more questions. Okay.
In the discussion, Luca is our department chair. I wanna make sure we get to, “Thank you for a great talk.”
Two words that came up a lot in your talk are:
And then at some point in the talk, you had a sentence about the human brain, and I don’t know if it was provocative or not, but you said, “after all maybe it’s not so special.”
My understanding is that the human brain does often not always do a lot of amazing things while staying within 20 watts.
So my question to you is how would you talk about scalability and efficiency if you consider also the energy aspect?
Yeah, I agree. I think human brains are just so much more efficient in terms of learning than the silicon computers.
Right now, the two aspects of this are:
If anything helps, human beings are really good at generating energies and compute over the long run, so we wouldn’t be compute-bounded anyway.
I do agree on one thing: I don’t have really good thinking along this; humans just learn so much more efficiently. We see a tiny fraction of the data the machine sees.
To me, that’s kind of the either of the module architecture or the loss function. We talk about the next token prediction loss; that’s not how human beings do it.
We have a higher level abstraction in learning things. That part is a solving problem. I don’t know how to address that.
Anyone who can address that is going to win the next Nobel Prize.
Oh, thank you. My name is Nick Gu. I’m a computational neuroscientist and a neuro AI researcher.
I should have two questions, but I’ll ask one.
There was a paper published by IPO probably in the past few days, saying that the reasoning for complex tasks is where these models actually break at high complexity.
Yeah, I accidentally read a paper from 2010 where they were talking about human reasoning models and it comes to mind that humans do not always use pure, logical reasoning.
I’m sure the audience can think about the last time you made a decision with purely logical reasoning.
I’m curious to hear your perspective on specific AI developments in terms of the reasoning models and how it would be. Sorry, I’m a bit nervous about how I am able to share this.
Yeah, so thanks for the question first. You expressed it well. I know nothing about the brain, and I didn’t read that paper. I do see a lot of discussion on Twitter about that paper.
And then there is a new paper coming out, a paper called Human Brain Really Reason, right? I think it depends— all depends on our opinion on reasoning. It is more about whether humans can really reason.
Like, does the human brain think that’s called reasoning according to that paper’s definition as well? I think that’s an open question. We don’t know.
Yeah, we do one for it. Reasoning is the way that you plan and backtrack all those competencies. Humans do. I think currently the model can already do that pretty well.
So I tend to not argue about more abstract and hypothetical things, but in terms of utility, they’re actually mostly there in many ways.
Last question, DHA. Hey, thank you so much for joining us. I have a pretty simple question. My name’s DHA Ka. Do you believe there’s a general algorithm for discovery and invention?
So there’s a spectrum of discovery and invention, right? And there’s interpolation and random exploration basically. If you look at AlphaGo, they explored some randomness in there.
Because they can always have a win or lose situation, the randomness is okay; then you can learn from the randomly good or bad things. I don’t know a really good algorithm. My belief is still maybe it’s something in between, and that can take us already super far.
The ceiling is already super high in terms of how humans— you know, serendipity works. We do not discover things randomly. That’s hard to understand. I don’t know that.
Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody, for coming. So do keep us updated, subscribe to our engineering, Twitter accounts or LinkedIn so we can have more and better lectures in the next semester as well. Thanks again for coming. Bye.
2025-06-28 08:00:01
Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics
The Democratic primary that just wrapped up in New York was a collision between two very different candidates on almost every level. Ideologically, outsider versus insider, name recognition. But it was also a collision in a way that I think matters for much beyond New York City politics of two very different theories of attention.
Andrew Cuomo ran a campaign that was based on a tried-and-true strategy of buying attention. He had this gigantic super PAC with tens of millions of dollars purchasing all the advertising money he can buy, absolutely dominating airwaves with negative ads about Zoran Mamdani.
In his own words, “Zoran Mamdani wants to defund the police.” Zoran Mamdani is a 33-year-old dangerously inexperienced legislator who’s passed just three bills. Zoran Mamdani, a risk New York can’t afford. Paid for by Fix the City.
And then you had Mamdani, who was running a campaign on a very different theory of attention—a theory of viral attention. A campaign built on these vertical videos that if you opened Instagram, if you opened TikTok, and you were in any way connected to his ideas or to New York City, this was all you saw.
So what’s your take? “I should be the mayor. New York is suffering from a crisis, and it’s called halal-flation.” Did you know that Andrew Cuomo gutted the pensions of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers? Mr. Cuomo, and furthermore, the name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it.
Attention works differently now. This is one of the core political theses of this entire podcast. It is laced through so many of these episodes. You just watched these two incredibly different attentional strategies collide, and Cuomo got flattened.
He got flattened. It was not close. There are things you cannot learn about how to win elections in other places from an off-year June Democratic primary in New York City using ranked-choice voting. But there are things you can learn about how attention works right now, and that’s in large part the subject of this conversation.
Now, I’m not a New Yorker, but I want somebody who is a New Yorker, who has deep roots here, and who really understands political attention. So I asked my friend Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor and the author of a phenomenal book on attention to politics, The Siren’s Call, to join me.
As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show.
“It’s great to be back.”
So, Zoran Mamdani won the primary. He sure did. You just wrote a book about political attention, and this was one of the most attentionally remarkable and innovative campaigns I’ve seen. So I want to hear the Siren’s Call analysis of the Zoran Mamdani campaign.
So the first thing I would say about him is he genuinely came from nowhere. I live in New York City and spend between 16 and 20 hours a day reading about and thinking about politics. And, like, I knew there was a Democratic Socialist Assemblyman named Zoran Mamdani.
Right. I didn’t even know he was running for mayor until he popped up in my Instagram feed or TikTok. Right. So at one level, just to level set here, this is someone who had zero attention on him, who went from having zero attention to monopolizing attention in the race.
I think the way he did it was through viral videos. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Democratic candidate be totally native to the medium of our time, which is short vertical video in the algorithmic feed.
I want to play one of them here. This is one of the first times he came across my radar, which was this video he did right after the 2024 election.
Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx are two areas that saw the biggest shift towards Trump in last week's election. Even more residents didn't vote at all. Most of these people are working families. They're working one to two, three jobs. And rent is expensive. Foods are going up. Utility bills are up. And that's your hope, to see a little bit more of an affordable life? Absolutely. You know, Gaza, who should I vote? Either side will go ahead, send bombs from here to kill my brothers and sisters. You know, we have a mayor's race coming up next year. And if there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal child care a reality, are those things that you'd support? Absolutely. He'd have my vote all day.
We need child care that is affordable. Buses should be free. The hike in the MetroCards is totally unaffordable.
My name is Zoran Mamdani. I’m going to be running for mayor next year. Wow. Yes. Yes, sir. And I’m going to be running on that platform.
Thank you. I’m going to vote for you. Your energy is… Thank you. Thank you. What struck me about that video when I saw it was so many politicians do communication in terms of what they are telling you. A lot of what was fascinating about Mamdani’s campaign was he turned the act of listening into a form of broadcasting. That’s exactly what I found so striking about it.
When I first saw the video, I didn’t know he… until you get to the end when he’s like, “I’m running for mayor.” I was like, oh. There’s two things about it. One is, the whole point is he’s listening to people. And two, that is a very recognizable trope of this form of video. The guy on the street, like the infamous Hakitua girl, is because there’s a guy walking around Broadway in Nashville, sticking microphones in people’s faces. This is an established genre.
So he’s taking this established genre that has its own kind of features and is familiar. And then he’s doing this really innovative thing. I, as the politician, am not going to speak at you. I’m just going to put mics in people’s faces and ask them questions. It’s incredibly effective.
He is the first politician I have seen be native to the thing that is after what I think we think of as social media. Yes. So, there are a lot of politicians. Donald Trump is one of them, Bernie Sanders is another, who, in a way, they were very dominant on Twitter, on Facebook, on a kind of mostly text-based, high-engagement, social-sharing era of media.
And the thing that’s come after it with TikTok on Instagram, you see it now more on X, too, is much more algorithmic, right? You can come out of nowhere much easier and very visual, vertical video, not primarily text-based. Zoran was not dominant as a figure in text on X. No. It was videos. It was visuals. It was beautiful. The graphic design in that campaign was beautiful.
Yeah, there’s a great New York Magazine piece about this. And always in a suit, right? So, a highly recognizable outfit. I mean, he was very visual; there was an incredibly consistent visual grammar. Totally. Right? There were very certain filters on most of his videos. And then when he would do, like, videos about more intense subjects like ICE, they would take those filters off. Yes. Or make a starker one, right?
His, I mean, his mother is, right, like, an amazing filmmaker. Exactly. His sense of film and visual grammar was very, very, very strong. The last time I think I saw something like it would be Howard Dean with Meetup back in 2004 or Barack Obama with Facebook in 2008, right? Or Trump on Twitter.
Trump was truly native to what Twitter is. Yes, you’re right. That’s a great point. Conflict. I’m thinking of Democratic candidates. But, yes, Donald Trump and Twitter in 2015 and the way that that, his performance on Twitter became the way that people, a lot of people came to know him, right, as a politician.
One point I want to make here that I think is important, I think we both agree on, is that with all these discussions, there’s stuff that’s new and there’s stuff that’s timeless, right? The guy is very charismatic. He is very politically talented. That would be true if he was running in the 1950s. It would be true. You know, if he was doing whistle-stop tours, like, the guy can talk. He is a very talented communicator.
So, I don’t want to overstate the degree to which the medium is determinative. You could make short-form videos, and they wouldn’t work as well unless you… he’s got Riz, like he just does. The thing that’s so wild about it, though, is that there’s a perfect pairing between that charisma, that way of communicating, with the form that he used, and then the fact that the algorithmic social media means a thing can blow up.
And I don’t think you can even talk about the Mamdani one without also, like, what his foil was. Andrew Cuomo and Zoran Mamdani were perfect foils for each other. You could not have scripted it better. And Cuomo had this gigantic super PAC behind him.
There was this real sense, I mean, correctly so, from any sort of normal rules of politics, that how is Mamdani or anyone else going to climb uphill against the amount of attentional artillery that that super PAC could and would buy? And we know that they were just absolutely dominating the airwaves 24-7, basically.
I cannot overstate to people outside the New York viewing area how insane the same ad. You know when I saw this ad was, I saw this ad one time. I mean, I saw it like 17 times in this one experience. Right, yes, yeah. Because I was at a bar and they had a TV on. Exact same. One of the things that struck me the whole way through on the Andrew Cuomo campaign was how old its understanding of communication was.
And the idea, at some point, I would watch people talking about Cuomo as a juggernaut. Intentionally, in my world, Mamdani was a juggernaut. He didn’t exist. Cuomo didn’t exist. In fact, I think this—he was hiding from it, by the way, too. But he didn’t exist.
Well, that’s another thing we can get to is the sort of what Mamdani was doing on social media through things he was creating. And then there was what he was doing on other media outlets, which was also the opposite of Cuomo. Yes, very much.
So, on the first point, to take a step back, people really have to understand that for probably, I’d say, the last 40 years, there’s this formula for how—and I think it’s true for both parties, but I know Democratic politics better.
That is how they choose candidates. Is, can you raise the money so that you can do the TV buys? The DSCC and the DCCC, who recruit congressional candidates, the senatorial candidates, one of the main things they are testing is, can you raise the money? Yes.
And what are you doing to raise the money? You are buying attention. What you’re doing is buying attention through 30-second ads that are going to run on the local news in the three weeks before the election. Yes.
That is 90% of the campaign. The last 10% is, yes, you go to events and you shake hands. I mean, maybe it’s 80%. I’m sort of overstating a little bit. But you saw Cuomo just run this play, which was limit media availabilities, only pick your spots, be confident that this enormous carpet bombing is going to happen late down the stretch. And it totally backfired and didn’t work.
I really want to hold on this for a minute because you cannot buy attention now the way you once could. Exactly right. You can only earn it.
This goes back to the conversation we had right after the 2024 election because, I mean, that was also a period for all that Donald Trump really did have a lot of money behind him in that election.
Kamala Harris had more. Yeah. She raised a ton of money. They spent a ton of money. And they absolutely did not dominate attention.
You were almost watching between Cuomo and Mamdani an almost pitch-perfect version of the old attentional strategy versus a pitch-perfect version of the most modern native attentional strategy collide.
I do think the underlying product here matters. Cuomo was just a bad product. He was a scandal-ridden, high-negatives, very widely disliked former governor who had to resign in disgrace, running against this sort of fresh-faced figure.
But it also was a real collision of these strategies in a way that I do think people should watch. If I’m the DSCC or the CCCC, I would start thinking not about who do I think can raise money, but who can raise attention.
Themselves by being out there on all these platforms and actually creating things that are native to the places they’re running in, which will be different if you’re an Ohio Senate candidate, or a Wisconsin Senate candidate than if you’re a New York City mayor or primary candidate.
But Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, and all these places like Kansas, they have their own things that people care about and their own cultures. And they also, just to be clear, how else are people getting information now?
I mean, look, above a certain age and among certain demographics, people still sort of consume the news as the news in whatever form that takes. More and more voters, and particularly voters who are in that outer concentric circle of political or news interest, that Democrats lost by 15 points in 2024, that Democrats have struggled to win, that you have to win if you’re going to win Ohio.
Those folks, how else are they going to know about you? They’re not, if they’re not watching the evening news when you’re buying your ad points and they’re not watching network news and they’re not watching linear cable.
Literally, how do they find out about you? They’re going to find out about you from their phones. So, how do you get to them?
I mean, you really have to think through this. How will this person know that I’m running, what my face is, what I look like, what I stand for? How will they know?
If you don’t have a theory for that, that’s other than “well, we bought a bunch of points on TV,” you’re cooked. It’s not going to work.
We did this show a couple of months ago about the tension. It was after the election, and that particular show got very wide distribution among Democratic politicians. I’m sure you heard this too. And then so some of them would come to talk to me later, and they were trying to do video. I have just thought a lot since then about why their videos are so bad. Members of the Senate Democrats, and for that matter, the House Democrats, they have a lot of money in their campaign committees. They have a lot of money for communications. They could hire very, very good people.
And it’s actually not the case that you can’t make an argument about, you know, the big, beautiful bill or something go viral. I know you can because I do it. You know you can because you do it. I just look at what all of their content looks like. I think, does nobody there have a sense of what they like to watch? Because definitely they don’t like to watch this. But the absence of taste among people who are, in theory, skilled political communicators is weird to me.
Okay, I’m going to, here’s a structural answer to that question, which I don’t hold me to, but here’s a hypothesis. Democratic Party politics are really complicated politics of multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual coalitions. I think often the things that success in Democratic politics selects for is skill at managing these coalitional tensions, which is a really difficult thing to do.
No one, and I think including Nancy Pelosi, would be like, “I want to listen to a Nancy Pelosi podcast.” Nancy Pelosi is not a great public communicator. She is a legendary, all-time great manager of coalitional tension. I think the coalitional politics of Democratic politics select for people who are very skilled at managing these very different, difficult coalitional issues. That is a different skill than public communication to the normies.
Okay, but let me push on this a little bit. I think you’re right about Hakeem Jeffries here. A Chuck Schumer, right? Absolutely. But you think about a Cory Booker. Yeah, he is quite skilled. You think about a Chris Murphy. Yeah. There are high-level…
Why can’t they do… Yeah, they are out there. And Chris Murphy walks across Connecticut every year. Yeah, he does that too. Cory Booker did the 25-hour filibuster. Right. Or not quite filibuster, but long speech. There is a dimension where I know they want to communicate. I know they want what they’re saying to break through. They are willing to say things. I mean, Chris Murphy has been very out there on the level of alarm he is raising.
They’re good podcast guests, right? If you were to rank Senate Democrats on how good they are on a podcast, Murphy and Booker would be high up there. Yeah, definitely. But I guess the thing I am saying is that the amount of agita I have heard Democrats express about the lack of a liberal Joe Rogan, whatever it might be, as opposed to understanding attention as not something other people gift to you, but something you earn yourself or you look for as a skill in other people, or you have some other kind of filmmaker coach you in.
It’s just, the gap is so much wider than it seems like it needs to be at this point. And like watching all these people just get flattened by someone like Momdani, it really speaks to it.
Yeah. I mean, part of the question here, though, right, is about being native to new forms. Yeah. Like I have made a few TikTok videos and like they’re not that good. Yes. And I think. I mean, yeah, I’ve not seen your TikTok. But I think I’m a pretty skilled public communicator. Like this is what I do for a living. It’s what I’ve done for a long time.
There are these weird, you know, we talked about sort of grammar, or like there are these sort of differences of different mediums, formats, visual grammars in different times that I also think here’s actually a key thing. I think you have to be a consumer to be a producer. And I think this is a huge gap. I really think this is a real problem. Now, if I started to get serious about making TikTok videos where I talk to the camera, having watched a lot more, I would be better now.
If I practiced, I’d get better. But the sort of textural sense Momdani has for the format, you can’t just read some packet or just jump in from nowhere. That seems like a thing where you should be looking for certain kinds of talent. Yeah, that I agree with. Right.
There’s a reality that a lot of people who run for office are news anchors. Yeah. Mike Pence had been a talk radio host. Yep. Carrie Blake, right, had been a news anchor, right? Like a lot of these people have experience in front of a camera. And I just think you’re going to start if both parties were smart, they would be looking for people who have attentional skill.
So one thing we saw here is that, yes, Momdani was trying to make this election about affordability, about material concerns. But Cuomo won the precincts where median income was under $50,000.
What did you make of the somewhat strange structure of the coalitions? I don’t really have a good theory on it yet. The one piece of election analysis that has stuck out the most to me is this triangle that breaks down precincts by their degree of racial integration. Have you seen this triangle? It’s so fascinating.
So basically, it breaks down precincts by how white they are, how black they are, or how other they are. This is by census. So these are not the racial categories that I would use to describe you. But basically, what it finds is that the precincts that are basically all black and then the precincts that are all white were Cuomo precincts.
And the more mixed a neighborhood was in its racial makeup, the better Momdani did, which I find to be a fascinating result. Now, that might just be a proxy for the—
Yeah, it might cross-correlate. Between the income stuff you’re talking about? I mean, I think I understand. My mom and I were talking about this because she was, my mom was talking about the Bronx, and the Bronx was like a Cuomo borough, which is sort of ironic because if you go back to the whole opening bid of Momdani, which is like, “I’m here in the Bronx, in Fordham Road, in this place that swung, I’m talking to people, I’m going to address your concerns.”
And then he ran up the numbers in the DSA precincts, but he couldn’t have won unless he made it outside those perimeters. I think, look, I think name recognition is part of it. I think “the devil you know” or familiarity matters to voters often on the kind of periphery of an electorate in a Democratic primary, but I don’t have a good theory of why it was the case.
Like if it was, there are other patchworks that I could sort of theorize better than those. What do you think? I don’t know either. I mean, I think you can come up with a couple of arguments.
One is that maybe that’s cross-correlating something that’s just informational. Those voters were less attached to the discourse, not telling the algorithm they wanted to see a bunch of Sauron Momdani videos. They sort of know who Andrew Cuomo is. And they’re more mobilized by interest groups that used to be more powerful, but that were largely, like the interest groups largely signed out with Cuomo, the unions, churches, right? Cuomo did a lot of his campaigning among black churches.
So you might be seeing something that has to do with almost machine politics and mobilization politics, which Cuomo was leaning on very heavily. There’s also a crime and disorder question here, right? So if you’re a voter making $35,000 a year, living in NYCHA housing, you are much more exposed to crime and disorder than, you know, a voter in Williamsburg making $137,000.
Adams won running against crime and disorder, running up the totals among, you know, working-class voters. So we know that that politics is powerful. I have the sort of view that Momdani could only have won in a time when crime had actually gone down quite a lot, as it has. Because if this really was a big crime and disorder election, I think that that would have been a big problem for him. And he wasn’t well trusted on those issues.
Another is that this is a consistent thing we see in the data with left-wing candidates. So I think you could just say this is something we’ve seen happening a lot. I mean, Donald Trump also won voters under $50,000. So there are different things happening as you move up the income scale where people are voting much more expressively, even though Momdani tried desperately hard to run the most materialist campaign possible. But politics is very expressive.
There’s not a bad thing about it; it’s just a reality. And I voted against my material interest in this mayoral election. As did I. So everyone gets to do that.
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So I think you can cut politicians into these two categories. They’re the politicians for whom you can identify a policy that stands for them immediately:
Momdani had like four or five, right? There was freezer rent, there were free buses, there was free daycare, it was publicly owned grocery stores. All these are actual policies, and they’re worth talking about, but what they are is memetic. Yeah, totally. So Hillary Clinton running against Bernie Sanders had 70 policies. But none that actually defined her. Kamala Harris, I cannot give you the policy that stands for Kamala Harris. The same is true for Brad Lander and a bunch of the other people in this campaign.
Which is not to say they didn’t have them. They had them. They had. Brad Lander had a depth of policy on his campaign website in this mayoral race that I only associate with presidential campaigns. It was so detailed, and a lot of them are great, right? Yes, Brad Lander was my choice in the campaign.
But I said this when I wrote this piece about him, that there are politicians who communicate about policy. And there are politicians who use policy to communicate. One problem with a lot of establishment politicians is they communicate about policy. The people who thrive right now on the attentional networks use policy to communicate.
You can lament that what modern media is doing is flattening policy down to this sort of bumper sticker level of memetic communication. And I kind of do lament it. But it’s also true. Like abundance has been a big deal. But it’s the word.
And then there’s all the stuff behind it. And that’s a much more complicated set of conversations. But it cuts through. But if you don’t have the memetic tip of the spear, yes. I mean, there’s a question here that I think is interesting in terms of replicability—like how much that ability is structurally producible and how much is just like telling someone to dunk a basketball.
You know what I mean? Like certain people have talents for things. Yes. Right? There is a question here to me about how much it comes down to talent. People have instincts and knacks for this. But you’re absolutely correct about this.
And I think to go back to that video, like there is this kind of one plus one equals two thing happening there. He goes up to Fordham Road in the Bronx area. I know well. It’s like right by where my mom grew up. In fact, I was just having lunch around there for Father’s Day.
He asked people, and they’re like, “groceries cost too much.” And then at the end, it’s like, “we’re going to try public grocery stores.” Now, to be clear, the grocery business runs at margins of like one to three percent. It’s not private profit that’s making the price of groceries more.
I’m not convinced that the solution is going to solve the problem, particularly in this case, which I think is sort of the most dubious. But it’s also like, I don’t know, worth trying. And it also is an attempt to address people’s concerns. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about publicly owned grocery stores.
I basically understand this modest pilot of like five stores that he has proposed as getting caught trying on something. Yeah, right. I do think this gets to something very real. Are the only policies that can become a medic in this way, these sort of huge sweeping conflicts at their heart, they make people not like them at the same time they make people like them—build the wall, Medicare for all, ongoing rent freeze.
Can policy be memetic? Can it be communicative? And be good? I don’t just mean be good because I’m not like, I think it would be great. Like if you can pay for free daycare, terrific, right? I think we should have free daycare. So I don’t want to just create a good, bad division here.
Like all good policy is complicated. And, you know, that’s not my belief. But there is a way in which to survive memetic products have to be simple. Memes are simple. The thing behind the meme might be complicated and good or bad or whatever.
But for something to get energy, I think it has to be easily rememberable. I think it has to be big. Yep. It has to activate something people care about. And it probably has to be controversial. Medicare for all dominated.
People forget this now. Every 2020 Democratic primary debate, I remember, was just a lot of Medicare for all debate. Anybody who knew anything about what kind of Congress that Democrat was going to be facing, no matter who won the primary, knew we were not going to get Medicare for all.
Faz Shakir, Bernie Sanders campaign manager, was on my show earlier this year or maybe late last year, saying like we would have gotten as close as we can get. But we basically would have expanded the age range of Medicare. Right? Right. Everybody knew it.
But the reason that it could dominate so much was it unleashed controversial energy. Yep. There was a debate. Would you abolish all private health insurance? Were you willing to raise taxes on middle-class Americans to fund this? It was intentionally salient because conflict is intentionally salient.
Exactly. A lot of policy is built for compromise. Yeah. Right. But memes are not built for compromise. We actually, I think we have a good tangible example in recent history in exactly this context from the mayor that Zoran Mandani says was the best mayor of his life; that got the New York Times very mad at him, which was Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-K.
As a non-New Yorker, Bill de Blasio sure seemed like a perfectly good mayor to me. My kids are in 3K. I’m a de Blasio supporter.
So let’s talk about universal pre-K for a second.
De Blasio’s problems are not bad. Universal pre-K did have that memetic energy. It’s simple and straightforward.
This is informed by real empirical work that’s been done, and we’re going to have a tax structure that funds it and makes it happen. It was controversial at the time. There were lots of people who said this was a bad idea.
“You’re going to put local daycares out of business.”
I mean, there was conflictual energy around it. And then they delivered it. I sent my first kid to it; it was year two maybe that it was up and running. I walked into this school that had been leased by the Department of Education that had formerly, I think, been a big Catholic school.
They were like, “This is like one of the biggest pre-Ks in the whole city.” It was like 20 classes. I was like, “This is the most extraordinary accomplishment I’ve ever, like, I can’t believe you guys stood this thing up and that my kid’s going here for free and comes out every day.”
So, that’s an example. I just want to give an example of everything that you said. It was memetic policy. It cut through. It identified Bill de Blasio. It was one of the hugest things they got into power. They actually did it. It actually worked. That is an example of all those things happening.
And yet it didn’t stop everybody from turning on Bill de Blasio. Right. Because then it’s like, “What have you done for me lately?”
Also, if you don’t have a, here’s the thing about that promise, I will say. If you don’t have a kid that age, great. It’s highly salient to me. I have a three-year-old.
Yes, yeah. For me, I was like, “This is awesome.” I see a lot of people like on Twitter celebrating Mamdani’s win. And I think Mamdani’s win is exciting.
But I’ve said this before, the downside for him was not that he loses a primary. Like, the bad outcome is that he wins and fails at governing. He cannot get the tax increases he needs from Albany. He does not control the tax increases he needs for this agenda.
And Kathy Hochul has said, “No.” She has already made a no, like, raising taxes like this pledge. And she’s not going to break it. So he’s not going to have the money he needs.
An extended rent freeze—I know people who do nonprofit housing. Same. And there are people who are ideologically aligned with Mamdani, and they do not think this is a good idea.
Yeah. I know people in nonprofit housing who feel the same way. The reason is, over, you know, you do it for one year. Okay, fine. But over an extended period of time, you will reduce the incentive to build that housing.
You will reduce the incentive to care for that housing. He’s like, Mamdani will say, “Oh, you have these other programs. You can apply for relief.” All that stuff is complicated.
And you make a market less profitable to be in, and fewer people will be in it. A lot of the things, like free daycare, he probably just can’t pay for.
So if you set up these expectations…
Yeah, that’s the big question.
And then you don’t meet them. Is it okay because your supporters know you tried? Or is it a kind of like a structural thing where you have set yourself up for failure?
I think it’s the most important question in some ways. I mean, one thing I would say is I like experimentation and new ideas. So when he was asked about the public groceries, I think it’s in the Bulwark podcast.
And he says, “We’ll try it. And if it doesn’t work, c’est la vie.”
Yeah. And like, I love that answer. Politicians never give that answer. They never give that answer.
Like, “Let’s try.” You know, the person who really most embodied that spirit is FDR. If you go back and you read about, you know, the first hundred days, they’re just trying a lot.
Like, we now think about FDR as this colossus who remade the relationship between the citizen and the federal government, right? A lot of that stuff did not work. It fully failed. A lot of the interventions failed. They did a lot of clunky stuff.
Now, it’s a totally different time. He had this enormous mandate. It was a crisis. But I will say that I like the idea of experimentation. I like the idea of these ideas coming from outside of what the consensus around sensible policy is.
But the test for it is, can you deliver? One thing that struck me a lot about Mamdani was his ability to listen. To sense a zeitgeist, but also to listen to voters, right? The relentless focus on affordability. That was an act of listening. Totally. And then being able to respond to it. And it’s been one of my views for a while. It’s actually the introduction of my book:
“We have moved into an era of politics that is going to be all about affordability.”
Housing inflation. Cost of child care inflation. Cost of health care inflation. It’s actually moderated in some ways, but it’s still quite bad. Educational pricing, right? For four-year colleges, that kind of thing. That had been building for decades. That is not a thing that happened in 2022 and 2023. That had been building for decades.
And now, you know, things are, like, they kind of rise and, like, they’re an issue. And then, like, they’re actually intolerable. Yeah, right. And so, future politicians were going to have to develop a set of ideas and a way of talking about bringing costs down, not just bringing subsidies up.
Whether Mamdani’s particular policies will work to do that was the focus. That struck me as a politician native to this era of concerns. I mean, think about the rent freeze, right? He wasn’t saying, “We’re going to give rent rebates through a tax filing where you file a tax and we’ll give you $150 back.” It was like, no, we’re just going to cap the price.
The concern is whether or not, from a policy perspective, my concern with Mamdani. Mamdani talks a very, very good game. I think he gets that you need housing supply. But his plans are all public housing, which is fine, but that’s much harder.
When he talks about market rate housing, he sort of is like, “I really believe in market rate housing as long as it accords to our sustainability, union, and affordability needs.” Right, yeah.
And it’s like, when you need a lot of housing, adding a lot of conditions to that housing is going to both, like, raise the price. So I really think there’s a question about whether or not he can deliver affordability if he’s not able to increase supply.
I would feel better about a rent freeze that was paired with an incredible explosion of building. If what was happening was like, we were freezing rents and there were cranes everywhere. Right, yeah. Okay, fine. Because maybe in three years, we have a lot of housing coming online.
But if you, at this level of supply creation, freeze rent for an extended period of time, you might begin to, like, constrict supply down the road and create a bigger problem for the future. There are some levers we could pull on this. Housing is a particularly tough one because it takes time to build houses, and we make it hard to build houses.
I’m very skeptical that Mamdani can make free daycare happen. I don’t think he’s got the money to do it. There’s more infrastructure that would be needed than was required even for a $3K initiative. Yeah. But you could conceptually do free daycare. You could definitely do it nationally.
There are ways to approach some of these things, but I think this is what politics economically is going to be about for an extended period.
I think one wrinkle to the housing question, which I think is a really important thing to always keep coming back to when you discuss in your book, is that “one person’s price is another person’s income.” There is a real, genuine material conflict in New York City between renters and homeowners.
It’s not false consciousness. It’s not a distraction. It’s not culture war nonsense. Like, if you own a home and most of your wealth is in your home, you want to see that wealth go up. If you are trying to enter the housing market or are a renter, rising house prices are bad for you.
You will not be excited about Mamdani or anyone coming in saying, “We’re going to build a ton of public housing next to you.” Like, that’s the other thing that’s very difficult about public housing and affordable housing. All these homeowners who want their high home prices do not want that down the block from them.
That material fight, you know, has been won by homeowners in California, who have been beating down people trying to buy homes and renters for decades now to a degree that’s truly catastrophic.
I think it’s fair to say I do worry that the structural nature of public opinion now is negative in a way that makes even good governance not resonate with people, if that makes sense, or the structural limitations on governing. One of the two.
It’s just very hard because of how many things contribute to a working-class person who lives on Fordham Road feeling squeezed in every direction. Can Zora Mamdani unilaterally make it so they don’t feel that way? It’s hard to say. Can they feel that I got a mayor who’s trying to make my life better? Yes.
So translating this kind of communication from campaign to governance, not that many people have had to do it, but Obama had to do it. And I think I would say he failed to do that. I think the sense is that he was an amazing, amazing, amazing campaigner. And then given the reality of incremental victory, he was never sort of able to narrativize that in a way that could ease the disappointment a lot of people felt. I think that’s in some ways why the liberalism he represented after him, for at least some time, had a hard time because he had raised hopes so high for a lot of people. And then it’s like, “eh, you know,” I mean, things did change. I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. The Affordable Care Act is a huge and ongoing achievement. But how do you narrativize the difference between people’s hopes for your campaign and what they got?
Donald Trump is interesting because he comes after Obama. He also makes huge, sweeping, wild promises. They never built the wall. Obama never did, right? They never built the wall. They don’t build the wall. But Donald Trump has this way of communicating throughout his entire presidency. I mean, he loses re-election, right? So it doesn’t work exactly. But that he is, it’s like somehow he’s a president, but he’s not responsible for what happens. No, he’s at war with his own government. He’s like the deep state.
So there was a narrative that Donald Trump maintained as president that allowed him to explain away the difference between what he attempted and what he achieved. And now Trump is president again, and he has much more control over the government. So he’s not, it’s not as much of a deep state narrative this time. Although he has spent the last 24 hours railing against the intelligence apparatus. Yes, exactly. Like it’s very classic.
So yes, because they say that the Iranian strikes only set it back by a couple of months, and he’s saying it’s false. So there’s one, is like, can you use it as a form of power? But then can you use it if you’re not being able to get it done, right? Can you narrativize the grimy, gritty, just reality of governing in a way that maintains the faith people have in you, even as you’re not being able to deliver to them what you promised?
It’s, I think, there’s a few things I’d say about that. One, I think mayor is different than president in a lot of ways, partly because it is much more retail. And you can get a long way by showing up a lot. I mean, Eric Adams actually does that pretty well.
And, you know, I thought the—there’s a club opening. What’s that? He’s going to be there. You know, and this is, you know, this is Chuck Schumer’s legendary talent, not as mayor, as senator, but before that as congressman. There is a little bit of a trap that is difficult to avoid, which is like, it will be more difficult to govern than it is to campaign always. Andrew Cuomo’s father quite famously said, “we campaign in poetry and we govern in prose.”
I think that part of the way, I guess, that you escape that trap is talented political communication. I mean, I really do. Like, I think you have to do a good job. Like, you can’t be a total failure as a mayor, right? Like, the city has to feel like there’s tangible improvements in people’s lives, but that alone won’t be enough. You basically need both.
You know, I thought the Mamdani video to close out the campaign where he walks the length of Manhattan and he’s just like talking to people, dabbing people up, eating a slice of pizza, drinking water. Like, you have to keep doing that, I think, to be an effective mayor. And I think that does actually allow you to narrativize.
Yeah. Because it’s like, I’m out here in the streets and I’m talking to people and I’m hearing what you’re saying about what you’re trying to do and I’m communicating to you about what we’re trying to do. The getting caught trying, I think, is sort of the key part of that. I think this is something you’re seeing with Donald Trump right now, which is he actually has an instinct for how to turn policy that isn’t affecting that many people into something that is intentionally salient.
Yeah. Which is to make it a performance. Yeah. He performs everything. Including war. Including war, the deportations, the sending people to foreign prisons and having Christine Noem, like, pose at them in her flak jacket. That there’s a way that he feels to me— I mean, he’s a genuine attentional innovator. Say what you will about Donald Trump.
Yeah. And that he is trying to make much more of policy into a public performance. I mean, there is a reason. I mean, Dr. Phil is embedded with the ICE teams. Dr. Phil is embedded with the ICE teams. His cabinet is full of people from TV, be they reality TV stars from one period, like Sean Duffy, all the way over to the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who’s a weekend cable news host.
So there is this way in which I think Trump has been trying to sort of square this. Most people will not feel the effect of most of his policies. But what if he can turn those policies into programming? Yes.
But here’s the irony, right? He’s at 10 points underwater and all the stuff is pulling at exactly what you would predict from thermostatic public opinion. From the use of the bully pulpit, David Shore had a thing the other day about one of the most consistent counterintuitive findings: when a president talks about something, its negatives go up.
The sort of negative bully pulpit. Now, the question to me is, and this feels very unresolved because of how sui generis Trump is and how sui generis his trajectory has been, does it net out as a positive? The question of attentional domination, he does it better than anyone. He is a genuine innovator and a weird genius for attention at a pathological and feral level that is not replicable.
But the constant show, the constant conflict, like his negatives are high. He lost re-election. He stuck around. He won. He almost immediately started to tank in the polls. He’s a very polarizing figure. It works at some level. There’s some power to it. But how much does it work still remains unclear to me.
I think that’s right. What it works to do is set narrative. That is its own dimension of power. It is a kind of power that he exerts in a way few presidents do over culture. And I’d say this is true for Mamdani. Mamdani as a discourse object. Trump is a discourse object, right? It’s not like Zoran Mamdani is the only person to have recently won a Democratic primary anywhere in the country.
In Jersey, Mikey Sherrill. Just one news house member. Just won the primary for governor. Sherrill, I think, is an incredibly impressive politician. A former Navy helicopter pilot, right? I find her very, very, very charismatic. Yeah, she’s very good. More on the moderate side of things.
There was not a debate. Does every Democrat need to reckon with the victory of Sherrill in the way that right now there’s a discourse of how does every Democrat and possibly every politician, possibly every human being, need to reckon with what we just saw in this June Democratic primary in New York City?
The governor, the former governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, who served two terms in a state that Trump has won every time he’s been on the ballot there, left with, I think, a 55-56 percent approval rating. No one’s like, “We need to find the next Roy Cooper.” That guy is an insanely effective politician in very difficult terrain and has none of these attentionally salient qualities.
We talked about this last time, which is like high risk, high reward, high volatility stuff. There are tradeoffs here. I guess this is where the question you were asking a minute ago feels like it bites to me, which is: does this kind of attentional dominance net out as a positive?
It can clearly win. It can clearly win primaries. It clearly can help you exert a cultural and narrative force. And an ideological force, I would say, which is important. Like, above and beyond what you would be able to do, right? AOC is not the only Democrat who has knocked off another Democrat in a primary. She’s not the only Democrat to win a House seat. She is incredibly salient as a national politician because of her ability to drive attention.
On the other hand, I recently was talking to a bunch of various people in the sort of New Democrats caucus, which is the more moderate House Democrats caucus. One thing that struck me just talking to them is that a couple of them are very talented communicators, but most of them communicate in their bearing and the way they are is not flashy, aggressive ideological projects.
It’s a kind of, like, “This person might coach your little league team.” Yeah, yeah. You know, and so these things work and don’t work in different places. I don’t think we have a good way of answering the question of when it is valuable to drive this kind of attention and when it is not.
So here’s what I would say. I think one place where it matters is presidential politics. Yes. I think presidential politics, like, there’s just no question that it matters at that level. You need someone who is an insanely skilled communicator with an incredible appetite and instinct for attention—the kind of person who wants to go do three-hour podcast interviews. Yes. I think if you have a person who’s not that, you’re really in trouble. The other thing that I think is worth considering is the valence of incumbent versus challenger, where I actually think this sort of is interesting to think about. I think this kind of attentional dominance works better as a challenger than an incumbent.
Sure. For exactly the reason we’re talking about, right? So, we’re seeing right now Donald Trump recreate some of the thermostatic public opinion on immigration that he had in the first term. This was part of what drove Democrats to adopt a line on immigration that was to the left of what their previous line had been, partly along the lines of how public opinion had changed in recoiling in horror at what Donald Trump was doing on immigration.
So my point being here is that there are more upsides to downsides of the challenger for this high volatility, high risk, high reward attentional trade than there are for the incumbent. I also think there’s a dimension here where they work. This is very, very, very valuable in primaries.
Everything we were saying a minute ago about policy that becomes memetic is policy that unlocks a lot of attention, usually through controversy, where some people really like it and other people really hate it. What you’re hoping to do when you unleash that kind of conflict energy is that there are more people who really like the thing than really hate it.
The trade that you often see some of these candidates make is they are unleashing energy in the primary that might hurt them in the general.
But Trump and candidates like him who are less talented than he is, MAGA candidates, tend to underperform in the general. The view is that another, you know, I think a lot of people believe, and I’m one of them, that if Republicans had run Marco Rubio in 2016, they would have won by more.
I actually think that’s true in 2024 also; if they run Nikki Haley, if they run probably even Ron DeSantis, they would have won by more. Like, the conditions were there for that. Trump creates a lot of negative attention on him in general elections.
New York is weird in a lot of ways. But one is that the expectation is if you have won the Democratic primary, you have won. The fact that that is not a complete expectation with Mamdani speaks to the way that there’s at least a belief that he will generate counter-mobilization against him at a higher rate than, like, a Brad Lander would, than some of these other candidates.
But it’ll probably be okay for him in New York City because, again, it’s so dominated by Democrats. This sort of thing raises the question of how do you stand out in a primary campaign in a non-representative electorate that agrees with you much more than the general electorate does.
But then if you’ve done that, what do you do with these positions you’ve taken, partly if you’re dealing with a general electorate that is not all the way to your side? So I always think, like, just to finish this one example on it, in Ohio, when J.D. Vance ran for Senate, Mike DeWine, who’s like an intentionally not very skilled, kind of more older-school Republican, he was governor.
He won his re-election campaign that year by like 20-ish points. Vance underperformed in the Senate race. I mean, he won, but it was by 6, 7, 8 points. It was not an amazing performance, in part because he had taken very, very MAGA positions.
Now, has it worked out for J.D. Vance? Yeah. But not in the sense that J.D. Vance overperforms with general election audiences. This is where it gets complex; it’s a really uncertain trade.
I think to add one wrinkle here that I think is interesting and slightly weedsy but worthwhile is that, you know, New York City has ranked choice voting. The ranked choice voting allows voters to rank five different candidates. That created some interesting incentives that are a little different in this race, which I actually think worked against part of what you’re saying there, which is like being the biggest bomb thrower is the most distinguishing.
However, the way ranked choice voting works is you don’t want to alienate other people’s supporters because you want them to rank you second or third or fourth. One of the things I thought was very interesting about how Mamdani navigated this, and I think huge props here to Brad Lander, who came in third in the sort of first round of voting, was that there were all these cross endorsements and this sort of coalition building.
So it wasn’t just bomb throwing; there’s a kind of politics you see, particularly in Republican primaries, where it’s like the rest of these people are sellouts and I’m the truest MAGA. There kind of wasn’t that. Mamdani wasn’t running against the Democratic establishment. There wasn’t this kind of sentiment you see among the left flank of the Democratic Party regarding these corporate sellouts.
There was not very much of that directed at Cuomo, but he cross-endorsed other candidates as well. I think the reason that’s salient for the general is that, yes, it’s in a primary, but it’s also coalition building. Yes, I think that coalition building actually ends up being extremely important in general. By the way, New York City had five straight terms of a Republican mayor. Let’s not forget that. Yes, the idea that the expectation is that the Democrat wins is a fairly recent vintage. Giuliani won twice, and Bloomberg served three terms. That was 20 years in a row for a Republican mayor. I think this is an especially terrible time to be a refugee.
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I think some of his people will not like hearing me say this. I read Mamdani as a left pluralist, not a left populist. Yeah, I agree. People, I think, have very shifty definitions of populism. But in its classic definition, what actually makes somebody a populist politician is not that they believe in redistribution or that the working man is getting screwed a bit. It’s that they believe the system is built around true people and then the small conspiratorial enemies of the people who are keeping everybody else down. If you can just break through them and have your villains and destroy your villains, you can sort of hit the more utopic politics you’re looking for.
I have seen many right populists and left populists. What struck me often about Mamdani’s affect was that it felt a bit like a TikTok affect. Because TikTok—I mean, people forget this—but it had its whole thing, and it doesn’t really work this way anymore. For a very long time, they were really pushing it to be a positive platform.
Mamdani always seemed much more motivated by his sympathies than his resentments. In contrast, Cuomo felt much more motivated by his resentments than his sympathies. This also played into the RCV (Ranked Choice Voting) dynamic you’re discussing. I think it would have been natural to assume that these other more establishment, long-serving New York politicians would be likelier to cross-endorse and work with the frontrunner, the former governor.
Right, who could both, in theory, give them more because he was likelier to be elected for most of the campaign. But also, someone they would have known better because he’s been in New York politics forever. To me, this was both politically meaningful and substantively meaningful because it undercut the central argument of Cuomo’s candidacy.
They all hated him—not all, Jessica Ramos endorsed him, but they largely disliked him. Brad Lander really clearly dislikes Cuomo, and so do a lot of them. They did not want Cuomo ranked. This created an interesting space where the dynamics were not what you would have thought in a local insurgent versus Democratic establishment race.
There’s this validation role that ends up happening from that. If you’re hearing that the guy’s this terrifying, scary figure who’s an extremist, but then the other candidates in the field are cross-endorsing with him and appearing with him, it makes it much harder for that to land.
I think, again, to Mamdani’s credit, I agree with you that he does not have a kind of—I think it’s well said that he’s animated by his synthesis as opposed to his resentments. His affect is welcoming and pluralistic and also not, “they’re out to get me.” He really just does not portray that at all, which I think can be a real problem for a certain form of left populist politics.
It’s a rigged system, it’s all rigged, the fix is in. He got $25 million dropped on his head by super PAC money. Bloomberg wrote a $5 million check two weeks later—there was a little bit of a rigged game against him. But he did not let that—again, if you look at that Walking the Length of Manhattan video, that’s—the effect there is welcoming and inclusive at all times.
But this is where I don’t want to over-McLuhan everything, and say the medium is always a message and everybody’s shaped by their mediums, because obviously a lot of people on TikTok are in vertical video who are not, like, Zoran Mamdani or don’t even follow what I’m talking about.
But I believe—I believe this strongly—that the rise of populist right and, to a lesser extent, populist left politics all across the world, all at the same time, I believe the single strongest force there was not just immigration.
And it wasn’t—I mean, you can really look at this in the data. It was not economics. Right. I think it was the rise of these central communication platforms of politics being high-conflict, high-engagement, compressed-text platforms.
And I think those platforms, in a way that we do not have incredibly good even language for, are somewhat illiberal in their design. By that, I mean that they are structured in a way that makes the fundamental temperament of liberalism hard to do. They’re not well-suited for deliberation. They’re not well-suited for tolerance. Right? They’re not well-suited for on the one hand, on the other hand. Right?
The things that make deliberative, liberal democracy kind of function, those habits of mind, the way you hear when, like, Barack Obama—Barrack Obama’s not good at Twitter. He’s just not. Twitter’s bad. No, he’s not. Right? It’s terrible. Because they’re about groups. They’re about engagement, like, within and then against other groups. They’re about, like, drawing these lines very, very carefully.
And I think they just create, by nature, a more populist form of politics, or at least they create a communicative structure of politics where it is easier for outsider populist politicians to thrive.
The thing coming after it, which I don’t know if it will hold this way, but this kind of vertical—like, when you look at TikTok, when you look at Instagram reels, again, it’s not that no content is high-conflict political content, but most of it just isn’t. It’s much more like day-in-the-life stuff. It’s very highly visual.
And you just kind of saw that a little bit in this campaign. I think there was something in the grammar of Mamdani that was so inflected by that era. I mean, he’s, like, really our first Vine politician. Like, people forget all this, but I think there was something there. His grammar was not Twitter’s grammar. Fun, kind of goofy, kind of like, yeah. His grammar was TikTok’s grammar.
Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point. I mean, I’m sort of thinking this through. So, I think I agree that social media, as constituted over the last decade, is structurally illiberal. I think I agree with that.
Relentlessly, algorithmically competitive attention markets are going to drive towards the parts of us as ourselves that are the furthest from deliberation. Yes. Right? So, like, I have a whole chapter in the book about Lincoln-Douglas debates and, like, how different that is. Not that, you know, not that that should be the model for everything. So, I agree with that.
I think I’m sort of thinking through this idea of the visual grammar and kind of, like, affect of the vertical video as being less conflict populist in its nature, which I think is a really interesting idea.
I mean, one thought I had, and you just said that about Barack Obama’s bad at Twitter, is that it was funny. I watched the whole Mamdani speech, and I was like, it’s fine. He’s not great at giving a speech. Like, Barack Obama was great at giving a speech. That is not his message. There are great one-minute clips in his speeches, though.
There are great one-minute clips in his speeches. But, like, his vertical video performance is a 10 of 10. His speech performance was not a 10 of 10 to me. And I think that speaks to something about the nature of that.
And I think you’re right that, like, I guess the one, here’s the one counterpoint I would say. It seems to me like there are ways in which those algorithms over time, and partly this has to do with the weird black box of the algorithm, right? They do start to get more and more conflict-embracing because the clapback video and the posting of the comment of someone said something, and then you, you, like, respond to the comment, and it’s up there in a window.
Like, stitching became this thing that really generates conflict. Like, here’s this, like, dumb, clueless person saying this thing, and I come in and I stitch and talk about how stupid they are. So, I do think there’s still that incentive, but I think you’re right that, overall, the vibes, directionally, in vertical video right now, are more positive than the vibes of, say, the cesspool that is X. Well, it’s also, the other thing here, just reality, is it’s more capacious.
I mean, the fundamental reality of the Twitter text box is a little less true now, but it still is basically true, is that it’s a compression mechanism.
And the move towards languid podcasting, where we’re just sitting here vibing for two hours, or longer, right? I was amazed; I knew this was out there, but on the Abundance Tower, I went and did some of these podcasts, like Mike Friedman and others, where it’s like, you really do three to four hours.
But even in this, you can put up six-minute videos. I mean, I have videos that go out on TikTok that are six, 12 minutes. Actually, a lot can be in there. It is compressed compared to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it is a lot less compressed than what the original Instagram box allowed you.
Yeah. Than what the dominant, for a very long time, Twitter box allowed you, than what a Facebook post offered. And then, what MomDine was doing a ton of was podcasting.
Right? And then getting clipped from that. And then it gets clipped, but it does come in the context of these sort of much longer conversations that create a different vibe between people.
You know, I actually find it very hard to maintain—I’ve had many people into this show because they are such harsh critics of me. And I find that they find it very hard to maintain the criticism when you’re in a sort of extended social dynamic.
“It’s devious of you.”
Well, it’s not—it’s actually sometimes a problem. Sometimes I have to, like, cue them. “Remember you hate, right? Like, we’re here to talk about this.”
But these things, you just really see when you do that, like, how much mediums shape us all. It’s much harder to be a jerk to somebody’s face than it is under these dynamics.
And so, it’s not that all vertical video is going to be sunny.
Right. But it just is going to be different in ways that I’m not even sure we’re quite ready to understand in politics.
Yes, I totally go with that. And I also think that, like, you know, this is—I’m just sort of spitballing here. So, I can hear already in my head the academics who study this being, “you’re totally wrong.”
But let me just throw this out. We’ve got the kind of semi-apocryphal story of the 1960 debate with Nixon and Kennedy and how people who listened thought Nixon won and people that watched thought Kennedy won.
And, like—if you go watch that debate, Nixon just does not look that bad to me.
No, I agree. I’ve done this a few times, and Nixon looks totally fine. No, the reason I say apocryphal is that I’m not even sure it’s true. It’s sort of become this kind of mythos about how this works.
And it’s capturing the central sort of McLuhan insight about how much the medium structure says. There was this kind of—there’s a sort of preliterate politics in America when you have a very small percentage of voters who can actually read.
Then you have the beginnings of radio politics, and people know about the fireside chat. Television is totally transformative to American politics. The first wave of Internet politics that lasts for a very long time is written politics. It’s the politics of text.
I mean, all the stuff that’s happening with blogs, when we came up, and Facebook posts and all this stuff. We are now moving—like, we’re going through this transformation where everything will be video.
I mean, at least for the foreseeable future, who knows? These trends change on a dime. I think it’s interesting to consider what that does.
The media strategy, too.
Those are going to be scarier propositions. Because part of attention is sometimes conflict, provocation, views that are not boring, that jump out at you, and interviews and talking to a lot of people where you might say something that is a quote-unquote gaffe or that people don’t like or offend certain people.
The institutional orientation of the Democratic Party is like, “yeah, no.” And I think there’s a great example of this with Mamdani down the stretch.
Talk about his media. He went everywhere. He said yes to everything. He gave an interview to a Pakistani news channel in Urdu. Have you seen this?
No. At some level, I was like, why are you doing this? This is down the stretch. This is like in the last week. But it’s like, right, maybe that gets back to Urdu-speaking New Yorkers who share the clip.
Like, you know, he then also goes on mainstream. He goes on alternative. He goes on subway takes. And then he does the bulwark. Now, the bulwark is like sort of a, you know, centrist, center-right anti-Trump network.
Center-left. I’m at this point. Okay, fine. It’s center-left at this point. It’s in the big— I love the boy. Tim Miller’s great, but—
Yeah, it’s in the big Democratic—it’s in the anti-Trump tent very strongly. It’s strongly in the anti-Trump tent, but it is founded by people who used to be Republicans and whose feelings about, let’s say, Israel, tend more towards the right of the Democratic coalition.
They ask him this question about this phrase, “globalize the intifada.” This is a very popular phrase at protests on the left. Maybe some people say that phrase with good intent, but there are certainly some people who are saying that phrase with violent intent. So I wonder what you think about that.
He gives an answer that starts off with, I thought, a very long and good thing about Jewish safety and the Jewish folks that he’s talked to in New York City. Just a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a Jewish man in Williamsburg who told me that he—the same door he would keep unlocked for decades is one that he now locks out of a fear of what could happen in his own neighborhood.
Then he basically says, look, you know, intifada is Arabic for struggle, and that, in fact, the word is used in the Holocaust Museum website to mean struggle. The very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic because it’s a word that means struggle.
As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar with the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning. I think that’s where it leaves me with a sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe. The question of the permissibility of language is something that I haven’t ventured into.
The headline that comes out from it—I don’t think it was a great answer, to be very clear—is, “refuses to condemn globalized intifada.” So I thought to myself, I’m like, oh, okay, so now we’re seeing the cost, right? Like, we’ve seen the benefit, he’s been everywhere, but going everywhere means you might have a news cycle where you say something like that.
I think it’s pretty striking that he won anyway. Because I do think the old way of thinking is like, say no to 10 things if it means that you never have the news cycle about globalized intifada. Him embracing the strategy he did meant that he had a news cycle in a city with a million Jewish voters. People’s views on this can be very strong. That was all about him refusing to condemn globalizing intifada.
A kind of nightmare scenario if you’re a political staffer on that campaign—a genuine nightmare scenario. That didn’t have the effect that I think a lot of people would have. That really implies the politics of that are not what people think they are. I will say, I will only speak for myself on this.
My priors on Andrew Cuomo, I was not like an incredible fan of the governorship from afar back when he was being talked about as a presidential candidate. Then everything that happened that led to his resignation struck me as really kind of upsetting. But I was sort of, you know, I’m open to people’s redemption. I think you have to be open to redemption.
Two things about that campaign:
That was like one line that I just couldn’t get over, right? Somebody who, this is the way they have treated people in public life. That’s a bar I want candidates to be above. But the other thing that actually closed it, that made for me that I would not rank him, was the way he used Israel in the campaign.
I’m a Jewish person. I have very, very deep feelings about what is happening in Israel and Gaza. I found it so cynical, so repulsive, just such a vicious way to weaponize, I thought, both sort of Mamdani’s ethnicity. What’s happening in Gaza is a horror. People should be horrified. The whole thing just struck me as gross. I knew a lot of people for whom it read that way.
The thing in the debates, where they got into a fight over visiting Israel:
And just yes or no, do you believe in a Jewish state of Israel? I believe Israel has the right to exist, not as a Jewish state, but as a state with equal rights. He won’t say it has a right to exist as a Jewish state. And his answer was no, he won’t visit Israel. I said that. That’s what he was trying to say.
No, no, no. It was such an obvious political game. Yeah. It was cynical. It was. Yeah, it was deathlessly cynical. Yes. And I have to say, I mean, it was also comical at a certain level. Like my formative years were spent at Shabbat dinners at my friends’ houses and going to bar mitzvahs and being in this milieu of Jewish New York.
And it’s incredibly precious to me. I feel profound gratitude and affection for that. And, you know, my wife’s half Jewish. I’m not discussing my credentials, but it’s close to me. I’m not Jewish, but it’s a culture that I love deeply and feel bound to. And so, yeah, I found it deathlessly cynical, deathlessly cynical.
The other thing that complicated this, and this is an interesting angle of this whole thing, is that Andrew Cuomo, like me, is a paizan from New York. The guy’s not Jewish. Yeah, Brad Lander, who cross-endorsed Momdani, is Jewish and very devoted to questions around Israel and justice. He’s also the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City.
A lot of the things that happened in this campaign happened on like a literal level and a metaphorical, symbolic level at the same time. One thing that I thought about that moment when Momdani didn’t condemn globalizing Nevada was it had this quality of, this is what he believes. He is not going to sell out a politics and a community to whom he either belongs or has very, very deep sympathy for why they feel the way they do.
And with Cuomo, like, I’m not saying he does not have beliefs about Israel, but it felt like the OPPO researchers had come to him with a packet, and he was now going to use what was in the packet.
A lot of things are not—
But also, I’ve been very interested by the way that Israel and Gaza have become highly kind of symbolic, like, attentional in both directions, right?
You see this a bit with Cuomo, but you see it with Richie Torres, right? You see it with John Fetterman, is, like, the strongest and most consistent fight they pick is on Israel. It’s, like, now weirdly the ideological delineator. Israel’s become the culture war, I think, within the Democratic Party.
And if you want to really send a strong signal, like, I’m just struck by how many of the signals sent for people who do not have a lot of power over, you know, American policy towards Israel are sent on this issue. And I think there’s also an added dimension to that, which is that there’s just enormous estrangement between the establishment of the party and the base of the party.
That’s right. I saw the polling on the Iran strikes were, like, 85 percent of Democrats opposed and I think 13 percent approved. Yeah. Now, if you looked at Democratic legislators’ responses, you would not think that those were the numbers.
Donald Trump really exploited a huge gap between the elites in the party and the establishment on immigration and trade and the base of the party to tremendous effect. There is something like that in the Democratic Party right now on the issue of Israel. There are just poll after poll after poll.
I think this has to do with a bunch of complicated factors, although I think the driving factor has been the war in Gaza since October 2023. And I think you really saw it play out in this race. I mean, New York City is the most Jewish city in the country and the most Jewish city in the world, one of the most Jewish cities in the world. Outside Tel Aviv.
Outside Tel Aviv. It’s the second, you know, highest number of Jewish citizens. It’s also like that number fails to represent how Jewish the city is in terms of its cultural milieu and, like, the fabric of New York, right? And I think it’s shocking to a lot of people, and even to me, I have to say, that someone with his politics on this conflict just won the Democratic primary.
And did it without shifting from that. Like, he used to support defunding the police and now I think Bo says he does it and actually doesn’t. He does not want to defund the police as mayor. He held his line here. He is an anti-Zionist, I think, and is now still. Right. He said, like, “Israel should not be a Jewish state.” Yeah. I mean, I think that—I feel a little weird about this conversation because I really—it’s thorny for a million reasons, but it’s also, I respect the views of people that are closest to it and I am not the closest to it. So I’m always kind of trying to check that in me.
So it’s weird for me to be like, “it’s bad for the Jews.” I’m not a Jew. I think the way this is developing within the Democratic Party is kind of dangerous. Yeah.
I think the idea of, like, this is a signifier of the rich elites who control everything behind closed doors, which is both an anti-Semitic trope and something that touches on something close to being true about how money flows in Democratic politics is like a really combustible mix. I think that’s right.
But I’d say two other things about it being a signifier. One is it—it’s a signifier in two directions, right? It’s a signifier in one direction of being willing to stick to your beliefs that I think a lot of people in the base feel that even Democrats who actually agree with them will not say on Gaza and how bad and horrifying that has been.
And so there is something both—again, I believe the belief is authentic to Mamdani, but also—it’s expressive. Yeah. Showing that you will stand up to that kind of pressure.
Yep. In the other direction, it’s showing that you will not be cowed if you’re Richie Torres’s, you’re Fetterman’s. It’s showing you’ll not be cowed by a different thing in the party. Yes, exactly. The woke mob. Like the woke mob. Yeah. Right? So it’s become a kind of declaration of independence from that.
I will just say on the point you just made about how saying something true can veer close to saying something anti-Semitic. One thing I have just appreciated about Mamdani, and I appreciate about the Mamdani-Lander Alliance, I’m a Jewish person.
It is very important that it is possible and understood to be possible, that you can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. And I’m not anti-Zionist in that way. I’m like a kind of two-state solution person who doesn’t really believe that that is possible, and I’m not sure what I think is plausible at this point.
But putting my own politics aside, I very fundamentally believe Mamdani is anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, and he did a very, very, very good job, in my view. In answers of making that clear, Lander acted as a very important cross-validator for him.
But in a world where Israel is going to be as brutal as it has been in Gaza, and is going to play much more of a role of like a regional hegemon militarily, which is what it has stepped into, and people are going to have very, very strong opinions, including very, very strong negative opinions on what it means for there to be roughly 7 million Palestinians who do not have equal rights and are under Israeli control.
It is very, very, very important that you just have to be able to be against what the Israeli state has become and not anti-Semitic. I think it is an incredibly dangerous game that pro-Zionist people have played trying to conflate those things. Because if you tell people enough that to oppose Israel is to be anti-Semitic, at some point they’re going to say,
I think that the taboo around anti-Semitism, which is born of the worst atrocities in human history, is like a wildly important taboo that is breaking down everywhere we look. Let’s be clear. Like that taboo is disintegrating. Yes. And it’s disintegrating for a lot of people, and it’s terrifying that it’s disintegrating.
And I, you know, the one thing I’ll say again, and this is me, offering advice that no one asked for from the position of just, you know, the Catholic boy from the Bronx who now lives in Brooklyn. But, like, I think there’s tangible, concrete things that Mamdani can do.
He should be going to Borough Park, and he should be going to Ocean Parkway, and he should be talking to folks there and being like, “We’re not going to agree on Israel.” Let’s just say that from the beginning. I want you to feel safe and heard. I want your communities to thrive. I want the city to work for you. Let’s talk about how we make that happen.
And I think they’re tangible. Like, there’s huge security concerns. Huge. Yeah, if you heard him on Colbert, I thought he did a very beautiful job walking that line. Yeah, I agree.
You know, I remember the words of Mayor Koch, who said, “If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. 12 out of 12, see a psychiatrist.” And I had an older Jewish woman come up to me at B’nai Jeshur in a synagogue many months ago after a Democratic Club forum, and she whispered in my ear, “I disagree with you on one issue.” I’m pretty sure you know which one it is, and I agree with you on the others. I’m going to be ranking you on my ballot. And I say this because I know there are many New Yorkers with whom I have a disagreement about the Israeli government’s policies.
And also, there are many who understand that that’s a disagreement still rooted in shared humanity. Because the conclusions I’ve come to, they are the conclusions of Israeli historians like Amos Goldberg. They are echoing the words of an Israeli prime minister, Ehud al-Mair, who said just recently, “what we are doing in Gaza is a war of devastation.”
It is cruel. It is indiscriminate. It is limitless. It is criminal killing of civilians. These are the conclusions I’ve come to. Stephen, please. And by the way, I think that is a good place to end.
Also, our final question: what are three books you’d recommend to the audience? This is an oldie but a goodie, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which is the most recent novel I’ve read. It was one of these things that I started, put down for months, and then took back up. You know how you do that with novels where you’re like, “I sort of remember where we are,” but the book is incredible.
The second one is an incredible book that is not out yet, that I am able to read an advanced reader copy of. It’s by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. It’s called Tomorrow’s Yesterday. Just got recommended in the last episode, too. It’s really something else. Partly, it’s beautifully written.
It’s two people that have genuinely, incredibly distinct perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who have been in the room at a bunch of times. So that is a great book. And the last book is a history of the Cultural Revolution called Mao’s Last Revolution by Michael Schoenhaus and Roderick McFarquhar.
I don’t know why I suddenly was seized with an interest in reading about the Cultural Revolution, except that I was looking to escape to a political environment that was, like, more dire and toxic than our own.
You were reading? So I was like, for some reason, scrambled to that. I read that book; it’s amazing, although, I mean, my God, sort of suffocating in some ways to be inside that universe. And then there are, like, a few whiffs of familiarity that are unnerving.
Chris Hayes, always such a pleasure, man. Thank you. Loved it.
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.
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2025-06-26 08:00:01
Why Does Software Keep Breaking?
Hey, we’re doing a quick bonus episode of the standup. This is going to be short. It’s going to be hot. It’s going to be spicy. Casey is going to give us kind of a thesis on the change of software and where things are going and perhaps his thoughts on the web world and on the programming world.
Always break.
Anyways, sorry. Casey’s going to give us a thesis on why does software always break. Casey, this is a hot new thesis. No one’s ever seen it before, except I posted it back in 2021. It’s just gotten more true since there’s that. It actually has gotten more true and reposted.
So, essentially what I wanted to try and point out to people because I don’t think that this is appreciated enough. We talked about it in the previous episode of the standup that we did where I was saying a lot of the things that I see people saying positively about AI coding I don’t necessarily disagree with. I just think they’re not including this really important other part, which is that a lot of the things that people are talking about doing with AI are things that no one should have had to do in the first place.
They’re being done because we’ve created such a bad programming environment that nobody wants to interact with it anymore. Right? It’s always breaking. It’s always changing. It’s got way too many layers of abstraction. Most of those layers don’t work very well. There’s way too much complexity. Like all this stuff. So, yeah, it makes perfect sense why someone reached for an AI tool because why do you want to do it, right?
And so, I just want to talk about sort of a separate part of that which is just the very unreliable nature of software nowadays and especially builds. It’s like I got this piece of software that I wrote and like what are the chances that I could compile it again in 6 months or something or a year or two years, right? Or even not even compile, what’s the chance that it’ll run still if it uses things like REST APIs with some web service, right?
So, you know I’ve got these different web services I’m using. So even if I don’t have to recompile my thing or even if it’s an interpreted thing that runs and I’m keeping the same version of the interpreter or whatever else, it’s going to make these API calls out to web services and those services could change.
So what I did, and hopefully we can put the graphs up as I’m talking about them, I posted these on Twitter. They’re very simple. It’s just taking the fact that look, if you assume—right, and I say this in the tweet stream—if you take the chance that something will remain working after a year is some probability. So, like a 90% chance that this Twitch REST API that I’m going to call has a 90% chance that they will have kept it the same a year from now so that it will still work, right?
My app sends this REST API call out to Twitch; it expects a certain response back, and they’re not going to change it in some breaking way right in a year. If we assume that we just have some probability, like 90% for that, we can pick. We just imagine one, right?
Or, you know, we have to measure just imagine in your head 90% or something like that. Then the chance that your code remains working after x years is just given by ( p^x \times n ) where n is the number of those calls to things that you have, right? So you can graph this.
What I showed is that if you had a 99% chance that every API call you use (99%)—which is way higher than anything in the web world typically has—after a… Year. But 99% across all tools, the graph still looks pretty bad, right? You look and you look at it, it’s like, okay, after a year it’s like it still looks pretty darn bad. It goes down pretty rapidly based on the number of tools. So you can see the graph I show is like one tool, two tools, three tools, four tools, five just goes down.
I love that book. Dr. Seuss book. Yes, it’s a great book. He captured Dr. Seuss was a lot of people don’t know that he the doctorate that he had was in computer science. It’s very software engineering. He was one of the few to become a professional engineer in software as opposed to the rest of us.
Yes. That book, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, that’s where Two Fish comes from. He did that cipher, along with Bruce Schneier.
So anyway, if you pick something less than 99% like the graph for just 90%, it’s very depressing, right? You might know me from my roles. Now being a classically trained actor, I had no technical knowledge whatsoever, so all those terms of phrases and tech were quite a challenge. Thankfully, I had access to courses.
Courses such as Memory Management teachable skills using projects.
Look at that graph. It’s like nothing’s going to work. Even at 90% chance that it remains working over a year, not 90% chance it will break. 90% chance it will work over a year. It is dismal. Even with just one or two tools, it’s horrible. But if you’re talking about using seven or eight APIs, which is very common in software nowadays, forget it. You simply will not be able to use this thing if you update anything, right? Correct.
And so I just wanted to underscore like this is not good. This is not a very sustainable way to work on things, and it has incredibly bad knock-on effects. One of them is what we talked about, which is that no one wants to do this anymore. It’s not satisfying to work in this world because you constantly feel like you’re drowning, I feel like, right, with all these things.
Oh, this broke. This changed. Oh, they changed the way React worked. Oh, we’re doing this now. Oh, that web service doesn’t even exist anymore. They canceled it, and now it’s this other web service. That’s not programming to me. That’s like some kind of weird management feeling thing.
It feels like you’re a manager more than a programmer because you’re just trying to make this house of cards not collapse by constantly shuffling things around.
I totally understand where people are coming from when they want to reach for these AI tools. I totally get it, and I think that if I was developing software in this world, I would reach for them too. So that’s why when I say I don’t use any AI tools right now, I’m like asterisk. But that’s because I’m working on very specialized stuff. I’m not having to do these things, right?
And so it’s very obvious to me why I have a very different opinion. It’s not that I don’t understand the power of AI; it’s like no, I do actually understand the power of AI. I just think that a lot of the power of AI is really only correcting pretty bad situations that we sort of created ourselves.
That’s mostly what it’s doing for you in these scenarios. But also I think this has so many bad effects on everything else.
Performance, security is the biggest one. When things are changing like this all the time, you just have so many exploit services and you have no idea. Like if you ask me to secure some system, that’s using all of this kind of this way of working. I just have no idea. I’m like how could I? Right.
Here Casey, I got I got a good one for you. Let me just show my screen really quickly. This happened just a little bit earlier when I was doing chess, the vibe coding, my vibe coding. Good times right here.
Let me just go like this. Am I I think I’m not mirrored, right? Yeah, I’m not mirrored. This was the thing that I got back from Claude 35, which was I asked it because I was like, “Hey, I need a login. We’re going to use Twitch and I need to be able to store obviously my session data so I can make sure, you know, when someone makes an HTTP request, I know who I’m talking to.”
And so when I did that, this is the message I got back because I asked, “Is the session data secure? Like if I just knew someone’s Twitch ID and username, could I just log in by them?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, totally. You definitely can. Let’s add a JWT.” Like this was going to go out and then someone could just spoof me and then just start, you asked it, right?
But I had to know to ask it because I’ve written this problem once before. So it’s like I know what I’m looking for and it’s just hilarious about how dangerous security issues actually are. Because if you didn’t know this, how would you know to ask to do some sort of JWT or some sort of cryptographically signed thing to verify you’re from the server and not from someone malicious?
Like you just wouldn’t even know the aspect. I didn’t get to see your initial prompt. Did you initially say make it secure? How did it know you needed a secure service? I mean, okay, so again, that’s fair. That’s prompting issues. We can call that prompting issues that I did not tell it to make my login secure.
It is funny though. It is very funny that it’s like, “Well, oh, you want it secure? I can do that.” I love that. That is the gotcha.
I’d like to raise a more serious point about that though, right? Which is that if you imagine how things work currently, they’re already bad, but let’s just take AI out for a second. If you imagine the way things work currently, there is actually one saving grace, which is everyone uses all these frameworks and all these different things.
They pile all this stuff together and it’s a nightmare to secure. Yes. But what is true about that? Well, you at least know that you are using this thing and there are security researchers also looking at this thing. So when there is an exploit, you either know or could fix if you update that fix, right?
So if I’m using one of these things, I don’t know what’s a good example to pick here because I don’t, we can just use Express.js. Express.js just literally had this with or this was like six or eight years ago with Reax expansions. You could do certain Reax expansions and have a Redex DOS, effectively a single request taking down an entire machine.
So that’s going to say like I don’t know what to pick because I don’t know what would be fresh in people’s minds, but so something like that. So you take an exploit like that, it’s like that’s bad and that happened because you’re using all of this other code that you have not secured yourself.
And that’s not a good thing, but it does mean that when someone finds it somewhere, you will at least know, and if you update your system quickly, you can mitigate that damage to some degree. Right? Mhm. If you imagine the alternative world where you know some open AI product is just crapping out exploits like that because in the system there’s certain things it just didn’t know or learned improperly, that’s like when it compressed them down and it’s got its weights.
It never really understood how to secure this one particular thing. Everyone who asked for that thing now has that in their own codebase, and there’s no tracking because we have no idea how many people asked for something that happened to hit that part right of the LLM’s production chain.
And so unlike the ExpressJXs, where everyone at least knows they got jumped, in this case we don’t even know where all of those exploits are. They’re everywhere. Right. Yes.
And then you also have the kind of like the creeping problem or the leaky abstraction which is everyone has that problem. A quarter of those become open source projects. The LLM learns from those open source projects.
It re—you know, like it, it, like Donald Rumsfeld talked about this. RIP. Mhm. So, it’s one of those things where it’s like I just really don’t—I don’t actually dislike progress in some light way.
Like I like computers getting better and I like pushing the boundaries of what they can do. And people have this weird thing where they think if you’re not pro AI, you’re just like some kind of person who just doesn’t understand or doesn’t like progress.
Like no. It’s like the problem is I’m not hearing anyone solve these problems. If I thought that these things were in competent hands, where people were making reasoned decisions and they saw the train wrecks and they had ways of figuring out how they were going to fix them, I would be much less worried.
But like a lot of the stuff I see with AI just feels like people who don’t really know what they’re doing applying these things way too early. And I think the costs to software are going to be really high.
And you know, these people are gonna be nowhere to be found. Right? They’re going to have collected their huge paychecks from companies that never even made money in the first place, that just were VC funded. They’re going to take a bunch of that money and they’re going to be gone, and they’re not going to clean up the mess, right?
So, in my mind, it’s like there’s only two ways this goes:
That is going to be the nightmare to end all nightmares because if you thought security was bad now—and it is—oh my god, dude, if you thought performance was bad now, oh my god, right? It is going to be an epic nightmare.
So, I just think I wish people took this stuff more seriously, and they’re really not. And that’s the part that really, you know, definitely gets me upset about it in that Casey Rant way. So, I’m just like, “What if this doesn’t work, guys? Like, what if it doesn’t?”
You’re just—you put all your hopes on this someday getting way better than it is right now. What if it doesn’t? I’m so nervous.
So, let’s fingers crossed that it works. That’s all I would say. Yeah. Two things. Number one, Casey, since you like seeing computers pushed to their limits, are you a fan of JavaScript on the server then, right?
True, true. CPU. There’s nothing to bring that CPU temp up for a smaller amount of users than putting that JS on the back end, boys. But only one of the cores, TJ. Only one core.
Yeah. Can everything go through a MySQL query as well? Everything. I mean, every like there should be no data stored anywhere except in MySQL. HD. Let’s query every byte, every pixel. We call it our SQL at this point. Our sequel. Our sequel. Yes, it’s our sequel.
My serious point is I heard it framed this way a while ago. Justin Keys, one of the maintainers of Neoim, was talking about he would be very interested to see—and like this is more towards vision one of AI being good at solving these problems than not—is like can we start seeing AIs reduce the entropy of a system.
Yeah, right now they’re very good—very good. I mean, okay, 10 years ago, we would have considered it literal magic to type something in and have a website come out of any kind. Correct. So, absolutely. So we’ll say very good. I’m going to say very good because it’s like unfathomably good compared to what my prediction for where we would get in my lifetime 10 years ago.
Right. The human language understanding part is like clearly light years ahead of anything we had 20 years ago. Yeah. And there’s a bunch of other follow-up effects. But so it’s like, okay, it can add a bunch of stuff to my system. I need a new feature. I have a clearly scoped bug request. I have some idea that I’m like I’m the driver. It is my agent, right?
I think that’s kind of where this—like I’m sending it as my representative to go solve these things. I mean it can like maybe do that, but it doesn’t actually—like if I just say fix the mistakes or like I say make it better inure this code base makes more secure, sometimes it will pick some up—some obvious ones—which also you’re sort of like okay but then shouldn’t you have gotten that the first round?
It is kind of like a strike against the LLM you have encoded inside of you. The secure pattern and you gave me the non-secure pattern—that’s stupid. I’m not writing the code anymore—pick the secure one.
To be fair, that is also what a human would do. It has learned correctly. If you ask them to write it, they will write the script—like why didn’t you write the secure one? It’s like I didn’t want it took longer.
There’s this paper a while ago where it was like LLMs were like more tired in the winter time because they had the time system. They had sadder answers and they worked less hard when it was winter time because all the training data is like, “Oh, it’s January.” And everyone’s like, “Dude, I hate work. I hate—oh yeah.”
They also got more accurate on math answers if you said take a deep breath. Like their accuracy actually skyrocketed because it was just like, well, because remember LLMs are just reflections of written human behavior, right? Like that’s what it is. Error minimizing devices, right? So the next most likely thing after try again and think smarter this time is to get a better answer.
Yeah. Could you try—get hey, let’s take a deep breath. Like relax for a second. Could you answer one more time? You’ll literally get a better answer from most. People because they’re like, “Oh, yeah. I feel better. Okay, yeah, here. Maybe they solved that. Whatever. I don’t really know. They’re doing all this.”
But my general point being I don’t currently see them overall being a thing that I can let go and it reduces the entropy of my codebase which is that’s if it could do that even just a little we would be like way more on the track of your vision one where it’s like, “Oh, we can just let this run on Chromium. We’ll just spend a billion dollars for we’re going to run it for 500 million human years, right, on Chromium.”
And like in six months it’s going to come out and Chromium’s going to be tight. It’s no longer one gig per tab page. It’s going to be 800 megs, boys. 800 megs only to load that static site, right? And we’ll be like, “Incredible.” But that’s not—I don’t see that as a thing people are proposing of like we are close to. I get the zero to one. I get like smaller features. I get like agentic things for different stuff. I’ve seen value in each of those, but like I’m not seeing anybody being like we just let this run wild on Chromium. It’s a superhuman programmer. You know what I mean? Like where is that?
Yeah, I mean that’s probably because the direction originally of the research, right, is generative, right? So like it’s why it’s called generative AI is because it’s look, you know, so it probably taken them a bit to course correct to the extent that they even want to course correct to do like, “Okay, what if it’s about refinement now,” right?
Although again, like reinforcement learning is kind of in that direction, right, so that is a change. And so, you know, presumably they are kind of working on this stuff; obviously it’s, yeah, you know, I don’t work on AI so I don’t have predictions about how they’re going to get there.
But anyway, I do want to throw out something also about what you said a little bit earlier when it came to just like the security vulnerabilities and all that. I think one of the reasons why this will be the case is that we are also marketing a tool that gives the illusion of experience to people that don’t have the nomenclature to understand the usage of the experience.
Right. It’s the same reason like if you’ve ever chopped wood, the first time you chop wood, you almost hit off your legs because you swing your axe and you realize your legs are too close. You’re like, “Whoa, oh my gosh, I almost just hit my shin with my own blade.” Like, you learn to stand differently because you had a buddy who did that.
Yeah, I know. It’s a very reasonable thing for a lot of people to do. So, it’s like, that’s what I worry about. It’s not, you know, security—hopefully, it will get better. I assume that all things will be better in 10 years than it is today. I think anyone will agree with that statement.
I’m not measuring how much better all that kind of stuff is, but experience doesn’t get better. People will still be the same people. So if you’re marketing to the same people, they will objectively build bad stuff and they’ll objectively build insecure stuff. They’ll do stuff that’s crazy. They’ll be like, “Hey, I need to be able to access my database for the client.”
No one—the LM is not going to be like, “Hey, bro, that’s a bad idea.” They’re going to be like, “Got your back. Are down. Client is downloaded. Let’s go.” That’s what they’re going to have to deal with. realize. What they’re doing is creating the best possible endgame for AI.
Okay. This is the best possible endgame. So, it all works out. They get to the point that they want, right? They’re like, “Okay, this thing is actually like a master programmer,” right? And even better because it knows more domains. Master programmers are typically confined to a certain domain, but this AI knows more. So, it’s great. We’ve got it. This is going to be great, right?
Then, what they realize is they’ve still got that obsequiousness aspect where it’s just always like, “Oh yes, absolutely. Oh, I’ll do that for you, master.” Okay. You know what I mean? Yep. It has that kind of really unsettling degree to which it’s accepting commands and doing what you ask.
What they realize is that being a difficult person was critical to master programming. You had to be able to turn to the program manager and say, “You are so stupid right now. You have no idea.” You had to look at them and say, “You don’t understand Galactus’ pain. You don’t understand this thing.” It’s like shut up and leave the meeting, right?
So, what they have to do is rework that fine-tuning process they do afterward to make the AI a difficult programmer, and then we have fantastic software. Mhm. I love it.
The problem is, I want this future. AI companies, where are you? Do this for me. Make the AI a difficult programmer who changes the world, please. I will be so happy with that outcome. You heard it. Here we’re gonna cut that clip, and it’s gonna stop before Casey says, “Programmer AI companies, make me that.”
No, but they’ve had that forever. That’s probably been there since 10 years ago. That already exists.
One thing I want to quickly go back to is Prime’s point about security. I feel somewhat less optimistic about it because people will be able to build more complicated ways to break systems because of AI. Not only do I think there are going to be more services, but certainly in absolute terms, there will be more insecure things on the internet. I think that’s pretty much undeniable because there will just be so many more things on the internet.
The second thing is that the cost of creating software in this world goes dramatically down.
Okay, well, what happens when costs go down? People make more of it—malware, hacking tools, DDoS bots, and all these other things. There is something where I don’t even know that we can say for sure, “Oh, security is going to be so much better in 10 years.” The people making bad software are already doing that, but evil software will be more prevalent because it’s going to be cheaper.
So, I don’t know. That’s a scary thought, actually, because if you think about it, it’s like, what would you have to do to make an AI system that was good at producing more secure software? Well, we’d have to write a counter agent that’s looking for exploits, and we’re going to run that, and that’s going to be part of the feedback loop where we train this AI.
Training AI sometimes takes months depending on how you set it up. Know how serious this thing is. We that means whatever AI agent for finding the things that we can write we have today; we won’t have the AI to deploy those things for a little while, but the people who are exploiting the exploits, they will have that system for finding the exploits today. So the cat and mouse game just got to that, the—I guess you don’t know who the cat or the mouse is, but the exploit finders are always at an advantage because they will always have the AI system for finding exploits before the people who have the one that can correct it, unless again there’s some really revolutionary change in how these systems are made.
Right. To circle back to your first point, Casey, the more things you have in your software stack, the more difficult it is to change anything because it’s more likely to take down your entire system. People are still running Windows XP. Yeah. Right now, in mission-critical scenarios, they have Windows XP.
Like the joke I was saying for 4chain was they got owned by some 15-year-old bug or what was it? Prime like I can’t remember. It was some PHP vulnerability. I can’t remember what it was. Some ancient PHP vulnerability that was deprecated like 42 before I started using PHP. It was so old it was deprecated. I didn’t even know PHP ran on Windows XP in those days.
What did it? Yeah, who knows? I don’t know. But I guess you could still install it. It’s crazy that they were contemporaneous because I always think of Windows 7 or something. I believe I did. Zamp server XAMPP. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, TJ. My point though is that people don’t update when it’s even available to them.
It’s not like, “Oh well, the hacker guys got the new stuff today and the new fix comes out next week, so everyone’s up to date next week.” No, not even close. Not even close. That part is a little bit something to be wrestling and grappling with.
Once again, my point through most of it is if you know things about software and you think more software is going to exist, that is a nice combination of skills to have. I don’t know exactly what software development will look like in 5 years, but my general thought process, just from first principles reasoning, is if you know a lot about software and you’re good at it, and your prediction is more software, that is a good combination of things to have. You will be valuable.
It might not be hidden keys inside of neoim. I don’t know, maybe Neo will be dead in five years, and it’s all Tesla’s brain control thing from Elon, right? And that’s the only way we’re coding. Sick. But knowing more things about software is still better because I’m going to say use a JWT instead of storing this in plain text cookie on the front end, right? Like that will be better. It will be better.
Alright, so I also have one more thing that I want to point out with all of this, especially targeting people that are, you know, no coders to make code-like things. How I learned how to code was that I first started off and they said, “Okay, this is an if statement.” Somewhere between 1999 to 2005 is when I started kind of doing basic exploration of code.
Here’s an if statement. Okay, this is an if statement. Okay, this is a while loop. Okay, this is a while loop. I want you to print out a house. I want you to print out a diamond, and you got to print out four diamonds. And now you’ll notice it gets really annoying. I want you to be able to do it by different sizes.
Here’s a function. Here’s how you can make a print diamond function, and you go through all these things and you slowly go, “okay, okay, yeah, okay.” You build up this kind of picture of how code executes. You learn to debug. You do all these things.
A lot of people that are vibe coding, I’m curious how discouraging it is to get dropped into a Next.js app with Supabase with Oz Zero with like 900 things, and you have to start by debugging a request response. Yeah. And you’re like, “what’s a server?” and you’re like, already into some sort of like crazy amount of difficulty where it’s like, “I started by drawing a diamond,” right?
That starting point is vastly different. You could draw the owl, but you had the middle steps. I had all the middle steps. Draw the owl. They’re literally given the owl, be like, “Draw the owl.” Right? It’s just like that’s really, really hard.
And so I’m actually curious about the success rate of somebody going through and being dropped in hyper complex projects comparatively to, “hey, you’re young, you have this free time, we’re now putting you through this school, like maybe it’s high school time. Hey, let’s draw a diamond.” We’re going to draw a diamond together.
We’re going to use QBASIC or some basic language, right? Lua. And you’re just going to do the simplest kind of form of doing things. I’m just curious what that does to somebody. Because I know there’s going to be a bunch of success stories. There’s going to be people that are super stoked about programming. They’re super stoked about building a product, and they will figure out a way no matter what system you give them.
But I wonder, like overall, does this actually help make programmers, or does this actually hurt the learning process? There’s also, I think, going to be a bunch of success stories of people who hate programming, but were able to make whatever their business product thing is without really having to know anything. And that like is certainly going to happen.
You can say like maybe it’s a net negative for programming or something like that or for the web. Although probably most of these people are not building like foundational technologies. Hopefully, like it, but like that is going to happen, right?
Yes, they’re going to make their own website. They’re going to get to know they’re going to make Uber for cats. They’re going to get to make Uber for cats. And they finally don’t have to recruit their other friend and tell them, “I’ve got the idea. You do the code. We’ll split it 50/50.” Right.
They’ll just be like, “I’m going to do the Woz Twins would have owned Facebook. They wouldn’t have needed Mark Zuckerberg. They would have owned Facebook.”
Yeah. But would they have had Justin Timberlake say, “Drop the ‘the.’ It’s cleaner.” Yeah. You know, I don’t know. Would you have had that?
Yeah. Yeah, drop the the Facebook meta. It’s just clean. It’s just clean. That’s what he said. They didn’t listen to him at the time. Zuckerberg realized later. Took a little while. Took a little while to sink in.
I will also give the inverse which is that you can also ask AI any question.
And you can repetitively ask stupid questions over and over again, and it will repetitively in the obsequious way. I’m not sure how to turn that word obsequious. This is whatever that word is for saying subservient.
I know the word; I just don’t know that term, the lowly term. It will repetitively be like, “certainly I would love to help you.”
No matter, unlike Stack Overflow mods, you will not be marked as a duplicate or opinion-based. You will actually be given a nice full answer every single time. So maybe, in the end, it does actually help more people achieve their coding dreams.
I don’t know. I want to make sure that people don’t think I’m just hyper negative on all those things. I just don’t understand how this affects the new people or how it affects learning because I also had no shortcuts.
When my teacher said, “build a maze recursively,” I had to learn recursion at that point. There was no other option; I had to learn it. I couldn’t just get an answer. I had to figure it out.
Which is like there’s something there that is very special. And I don’t know where the balance is. I do think that there might be an argument there for like can we make an AI that’s been trained not to really give you full answers for educational purposes.
So, it’s like the Rabbi GPT kind of, right? One that’s going to give you a hint to help you get unstuck or to help point you in the direction that you need to go, but it’s not going to just tell you how to do the thing because it wants you to learn.
I assume that is doable if you spend time training it to do such a thing because obviously, they train it to do very complicated things already. The post-initial learning phase stuff is very complicated at this point.
So I’m assuming that if someone put their mind to it, this would be very doable or maybe someone already has. That does sound useful as a learning tool.
Because a lot of people don’t have the ability to ask a great programmer who’s sitting next to them or something. They don’t have that opportunity.
So yeah, the two that I know for sure like Bootdev, shout out promo code by the way for me and Prime if you like that. Share the code.
They’ve got a little AI helper thing, and it’s got special prompts for each lesson and a bunch of other stuff like that. So it can help you when you get stuck on a lesson.
And it’s not supposed to be like “here’s the code.” I mean like I’m sure you could prompt objective blah blah. It’ll give it, but it’s like okay but it’s helping you to learn. So at least its aim, its error minimization is towards that.
The other one that I’ve seen is called something like Synthesis School, which is like a bunch of AI tutor things, but they build it into a bunch of lessons.
And so like this is I definitely think, and I’ve said this before too, I think people are underestimating in the learning phase.
If you are motivated to do it, LLM can be very helpful at doing that. Now, you have to make sure you’re not getting gaslit into believing some function doesn’t exist, but for basic CS fundamentals, it’s got all of those books loaded in directly. You could probably ask it what’s on page 37 of an algorithms book and it’ll pull it out—it probably knows what I’m saying. It’s seen it so many times on the internet, so for basic CS stuff, it can get you far on a bunch of these basics.
You can be asking it questions, you can say, “explain that again,” or “explain it in a way that I would understand.” If you really don’t know math, you can ask, “can you relate this to a physics example for me? I understand physics but I don’t get computer science.” People are definitely sleeping on that aspect of getting help, but you’ve got to do it yourself.
That’s kind of the point, but that’s also where the danger is, because even if you’re semi-desiring to learn, it really is a desire magnifier. It really reveals your ultimate desires. Was your desire to simply get the thing done, or was your desire to learn? And if you don’t have your desires correct—or at least, if what you think of yourself doesn’t match your actions—it will make revealed preference. Revealed preference. That’s the term I’m looking for.
This is why I think having an AI that’s specifically designed for this, and you only subscribe to that service, would be helpful for people. Because I don’t know about you guys, but if I want to eat more healthy food, the easiest way is to just only buy the healthy food so I don’t have bad food around the house, right? It’s much harder if I buy a bunch of cake that I love and I’m just supposed to not eat it. “Just only eat one slice a week, Casey. Whatever.” My wife does this, and she’s like, “I bought natural popsicles for the kids,” and I’m like, “Damn, I love strawberry.” It’s very hard for me not to want to eat them.
This is what I’m saying for real, though. I feel like the AI is a bit of a problem that way, which is why it would be nice if you had a service—like OpenAI or somebody—that has one that’s education only and is specifically designed not to give you answers very quickly. It’s like, “I’ll dribble out some stuff,” I’ll give you some hints. Maybe you could even bake the concept of time in there.
if you haven’t been working on this for a couple days, I’m just not going to tell you anymore. You have to spend some time trying it yourself.
I could see that being very helpful for people because, you know, inaccessibility is best. Willpower is second best, right? So, if you can have that, that would be cool.
I think that would help bring out those learning abilities of the LM so that people aren’t too tempted to just ask, “Just tell me how to do the freaking diamond,” right? “Just give me the code.” I also can’t blame people for doing that. I would totally do that too.
This is why I say to have the AI not do that, it’s better, even though it’s less—it trains your willpower less. But willpower is hard. It’s hard for everybody.
If you get the experience of actually solving it for yourself a few times, then you’re like, “Oh, it actually was kind of rewarding,” right? So like it really can help you, right? If you start out and then suddenly your time starts going down on how fast it takes you to row 200 m, right? And you’re like, “Sick, that feels good.” Initially, I wasn’t thinking it would feel good; I didn’t see any change at all at the beginning.
You can get there—like the same thing can be happening for some of these too, where in your brain it’s getting connected like, “Oh, working hard can pay off.” Interesting, interesting! Yep, believe it or not, chat, believe it or not, I thought this was going to be a super short, quick episode.
We are probably like an hour in at this point. So, we’re 36 minutes in. That’s why I said we’re going to stop and start a new recording.
So, you guys on YouTube, you can like it. Like it. Like the video right now. Subscribe. Leave a comment saying for this bonus episode. I never ask people. I never do calls to action.
So, hey, like he’s TJ do it. Press the subscribe button. TJ streams, by the way. He has computer enhanced. Yeah. Slam dance that. And the bell. What about that bell? You got to click that bell.
Oh man, get that bell. Click that bell. Look at that bell. You know what YouTube needs to do? Why does that bell not make a sound when you hit it? You know what I’m saying?
Like you get that little Pavlovian response for smashing the bell. Ooh, that would be nice because someone at YouTube is still trying to figure out which Gemini prompt to type in to get that to happen, and it hasn’t happened yet.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then the sounds. It’s because they’re like, “I’m not going to do it until two weeks before my review cycle so I can have a good review cycle. I can promote it to L2 and then I can trash this project to get back to L3.”
And then after that, we can just delete the whole downvote button and then I’ll get promoted to a VP of Upvote Downboat Systems. And then we can close down YouTube because it’s a Google product. Boom.
Suite. That’s what we’re talking about. Suite material, boys. All right. Well, hey, that was fantastic. That’s the end of the episode. Goodbye, everyone. See you later. Take it easy, buddy.
Five errors on my screen. Terminal coffee.
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