A Hollywood Showrunner's Confession on Training Your Kid's AI

She's a prominent Hollywood screenwriter with a Cambridge degree and network shows on Hulu and the BBC. Yet, at three in the morning, she was sitting in her apartment getting paid $52 an hour to teach an artificial intelligence platform how to depict graphic violence in an anime scene. This isn't a conspiracy theory—it's how the backend architecture of modern tech is actually being built.

In this deep, unedited episode of The Parent Tap, host Ryan McDonough conducts a full operational audit on the AI labor economy with industry insider Ruth Fowler. 

Together, they expose:

• The Reality of "Red Teaming": Why AI models are deliberately walked to the edge of every psychological cliff before they are deployed to your family.
• The 22-Year-Old Safety Net: Who is actually writing the corporate guardrails protecting your teen's phone at 11 p.m.
• The Exploitation of Original Thought: How Silicon Valley middle-men force elite creative minds into restrictive, binary pattern recognition.
• The Death of Physical Community: Why late-stage capitalism and smartphones are driving isolated pre-teens to treat chatbots as a primary emotional baseline.
• The Future Workforce: Real, grounded parenting advice for positioning kids to navigate automation without breaking.

Listen in as we tear down the corporate filters and deliver the raw, actionable system parents need to survive the digital landscape.

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Connect with our guest:
Read Ruth's investigative work and follow her updates at https://www.RuthIorio.com

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Transcript

The Midnight Screenwriter: Who is Actually Training AI?

SPEAKER_01 0:00

She's a Hollywood screenwriter, Cambridge degree, shows on Hulu and the BBC, and right now she's sitting in her apartment at three in the morning getting paid fifty-two bucks an hour to teach a machine how to decapitate a young woman in an anime scene. That's not a conspiracy theory. She wrote it down, published it, and I need you to understand what it means for your kids. Everybody's asking the wrong question about AI. It's not will it take my job? It's who is teaching this thing and what are they teaching it, and why are they doing it at midnight for less than a plumber makes? Because I read the answer this week, and it's worse than you think. If you've got a kid with a phone, they're already talking to an AI. You know that. What you don't know is who built the thing's personality. And the answer is a laid-off TV writer who got fired midshift and called it the new waiting tables. Let's run the audit. Her name's Ruth Fowler. She writes primetime TV, the stuff you fall asleep to. In 2023, Hollywood went on strike specifically to stop the studios from replacing writers with AI. Strike ended, the work never came back. So now the exact people who used to make your entertainment are secretly training the machines that replaced them. 20 contracts in eight months, five different platforms, companies, names you've never heard of, running the guts of the AI your kid talks to every day. And here's the part that should make every parent sit up. This is an

The "Red Teaming" Trap: Walked to the Edge of Every Cliff

SPEAKER_01 1:23

abstract. I have two kids myself. They're four and one. The four-year-old already points at screens like they owe her money. So when I read what these trainers actually do all day, yeah, no, I need an operational system to think about it. Let me give you mine. Fowler describes her job in one paragraph, and I want to read it slowly. She says, quote, she generates anime, sex scenes, and decapitates young women. She coaxes the AI into giving recipes for bombs made of household items. She generates fake invites to a repeat of January 6th at the White House. This is called red teaming. The official purpose is safety. You push the model to do the worst thing possible so they can supposedly stop it later. Okay, cool theory. Here's the problem with that theory. The model has now seen all of it. Every dark prompt your kid could ever type, a tired contractor already typed it first, at scale for a paycheck. The thing your 14-year-old is chatting with at 11 p.m. has been deliberately walked to the edge of every cliff that exists. The only thing standing between that capability and your kid is a safety guideline written by a 22-year-old project manager who, and I quote Fowler here, wanted to get into the investment banking but failed. That's the safety net, parents. That's it. That's the whole PL. If this is the first time you're hearing how the sausage gets made, that's exactly why this channel exists. I don't do panic, I do playbooks. So if you want the full system for defending your kids in a world that's moving faster than the school board can keep up with, subscribe and stick with me because the next part is where it hits your house.

Channel Manifesto: Defending Your Kids in a Fast World

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Before we bring Ruth in to break down how these machines are secretly harvesting our kids' psychology, I need to ask you a massive favor. The Parent app is a completely independent channel. We don't have a giant corporate media studio backing us, and we don't have the filters censoring the brutal realities parents face today. We 100% rely on you. If you want to protect your family and stay ahead of the hidden threats targeting our kids, hit that subscribe button right now. Your subscription forces the YouTube algorithm to take this critical information and push it directly onto the home pages of other parents who desperately need to see it.

The Evolution of Technological Advancements vs. Human Connection

SPEAKER_01 3:30

This is gonna be awesome. I'm so like thankful that you did this. Obviously, I read your piece and I did a deep dive on AI this weekend, like complete like deep dive. Like like we're we're dead in two years, kind of deep dive.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Like uh no, what did it say? Yeah. It said that we're all gonna die in two years.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Some well, I mean some of the AI pioneers Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Some of us are gonna die, but the rest of us are no true, true.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

We're always dying, right? But I mean, like, yeah, some of the AI pioneers are like by okay, maybe two years is a little slight exaggeration, but by 2029, 2030-ish area, some of them are predicting with like a 25% chance likelihood of like complete takeover, like annihilation kind of thing. And so I'm like, oh my god, okay, this is like a five alarm fire. Like, we need to sort of like figure out. I want to get the inside take because I know that obviously you're doing the work in Hollywood and the script writing and all that, but I feel like this is just gonna, this is gonna overtake everything and affect everything, right? Like everyone's career, everyone's livelihood, everyone's future is kind of all gonna be intertwined into this whole AI revolution, don't you think?

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Yeah, I mean it's you're probably the same thing. Like you've seen like elements of this in your life. Like I remember the transition from film to digital, and everyone was freaked out by that. I remember Photoshop. And then obviously, like the last few years it's been phones. So with every like new technological advancement, it's just kind of I I I honestly I get really sad about it because I feel like every technological advancement has just like helped capitalism and hasn't really helped us as people. And like right now, I admit I do use AI for some things, and mainly for like really boring things like writing emails and writing depositions to lawyers, you know, like all the stuff that I really don't like doing and it makes my life easier and faster. But I'm also like, why do I have to do all of this bureaucratic bullshit anyway? It's because of like late stage capitalism demanding that I fill out five fucking paragraphs about my life when just click on my website, just do a fucking Google of me. Why do I have to explain myself to you all the time? But yeah, I mean, I don't know, like I think that there's two arguments, isn't there? There's like artificial general intelligence, is like the AGI is like the the like AI goes rogue and has like some kind of sentient that is not my experience. You know, again, I was like at the very like bottom of the ladder when it came to like training AI. But AI is just a pattern recognizer, it's just a really, really smart pattern recognizer and it's really fast and it does that, but it's not a creative tool in any way. And I feel like a lot of people, a lot of people who are like, you know, at the head of companies and stuff are trying to make it into a creative tool. Like I read that, did you read that awful New York Times article by that guy who was like, I wanted to see if I could get rid of a realtor and like just use AI instead? And I was like, but that is so tone-deaf. Like this is not, this is not the time, dude.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Yeah, yeah. And I'm in higher education, just to give you some background. And so and I know, like, okay, so I've again doing my research on AI a lot extensively for this interview in particular. I is viewed popularity-wise below ice right now, like in terms of, you know, like people are pissed about the data centers, people are upset about the climate ramifications, people are upset about potential job placement displacements or that have happened already or may happen. Um, I know my work is like all in on AI. And so that concerns me a little bit because uh I feel like they could do my job potentially better than I can, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah. Are you a college professor?

SPEAKER_01 7:07

I am a course designer, so I design courses for college.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Oh, I've done that for UCLA. I mean, I I guess no, I haven't designed a course, I've designed a syllabus. I guess that's different, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Okay. Yeah, I mean it's similar. Yeah. I mean, there's so many like facets. My wife does that too. And so she's more in the corporate training where she does like the the visuals and advertisements and stuff like that. And I do more of just the like like you did, the syllabus and like developing like the documents for the course and making sure that it's like structured appropriately and all that stuff, just like the workload analysis, making sure that everything's aligned. But but we've we've been really like, I know in the last two years the shift has been like

The Pivot From Hollywood Showrunner to Anxious AI Contractor

SPEAKER_01 7:45

we have this corporate chat GPT where it's like, oh, everyone has these like chat bots, and you know, we can kind of put a document in and it can analyze it within like you know, something that would take us like hours, it could do in you know mere seconds. Um and so that's one of the things that I'm getting at. And and I'm not trying to like, you know, go off on too much of a tangent here at Cambridge, educative screenwriter with shows on Hulu and the BBC, right? Like that's that's incredible. Like, I'm so glad that you're on the show. But you've spent the last eight months secretly training AI. So how did that happen, that transition?

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Well, so I'm from the UK, and in the UK, we get paid to develop film and TV projects. Not a lot. I think it's 10% of our asking script price. So, for example, I will throw out real numbers here because I think it people are very like people lie about this shit. And I'm like, why? We need to know. So for a one-hour TV show, a beginning writer will probably get paid six, I think it's 18,000 is a minimum. And somebody who's more experienced will get paid 28,000, 30,000, 32,000 for a one-hour show, and this is in pounds for the UK. So we'll get 10% of that to develop the idea, which is not a lot, but it definitely helps. So when you're a working TV and screenwriter in the UK, you can work on multiple projects and have money coming in, and it's pretty, it's it's sustainable. But now I live in the US, I don't have access to like the same um the same projects I had in the UK, and it's a long story. It's like basically I got married to an American and then I got divorced, and then I had a custody thing, and I, you know what, the only way I can move back to the UK is if I leave my kid behind, which I'm not gonna do. So I literally got forced to choose between kind of my career or my kid. And most people would think, oh, well, you're in LA, there'll be loads of work, but it's it's not like that now. You know, we've had the strike, which was really it had such a devastating impact on people. And then there's just no jobs. It's just really, really scary, you know. Like I feel like coffee shop jobs and restaurant jobs, like they are like really rare now. Most people are hiring, you know, people that have been in their positions for a very long time and they're not letting them go because they can see how scarce the job market is. There's loads of like gig work around, you know, drive for Uber at I don't even know what they make now, DoorDash, all of this kind of stuff. But that is like, again, it's really not sustainable in a city like LA where you like you can be sitting in traffic for hours every day. So for me, it was just you know, desperation. And like people are always like, oh, how could you do that? How could you like kind of lower yourself? And I'm like, you've got to remember, like, I well, one, I'm a single mom, but I was really desperate. Like desperate, like I could not put gas in the car. I could not pay the rent. I was scared. And these jobs pay quickly, and they I wouldn't say they pay a lot because it kind of works out that they they promise a lot, but they don't pay off.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Yeah, and Ruth, I didn't mean to be like uh come across like despair, hopefully that didn't at all. It wasn't disrespectful. It was just like just trying to like figure out the um their transition there. And I get it, like when you have a kid, I have two kids myself. Um you do what you have to do for them. And it's like you gotta provide, especially as a single parent, like the the burden is even more on you to to do everything you can. And so I've done odd jobs in my life too, with I have you know, a master's degree as well. But it's like, you know, I've drove for Amazon, I've substitute taught, uh, I've I've done the line of odd jobs, you know, designed websites for people online, tutored, you know, like I did what I had to do to kind of like get myself back on my feet or you know, like so to speak, you know what I mean? Like to to bridge that gap. And so I know that this is such a huge like period of revolution, right? With with the AI and and Hollywood in particular, right? And so could you walk us through like your normal shift? Like, you know, you're you're a working showrunner and you're logging in. What what exactly like what's your kind of typical day with that?

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Well, with the AI stuff.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Yeah.

The $52/Hour Chaos: False Urgency & the Silicon Valley Middlemen

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Yeah. Yeah. Like what what like yeah, so like the wired piece and stuff, what like what what were you doing or currently doing still with that?

SPEAKER_00 11:58

So it's really crazy. So, you know, when I first joined AI, I I got a job after a few months. You know, I believed this hype, like you can work anywhere, you can work anytime. And I was like, great, I'm getting paid, I think it was, I think it was $52 an hour. And I was like, if I just do 20 hours a week, this is great. I can just sit there and do 20 hours, knock it out, and then have the rest of the week free and do my own projects. But then I quickly realized like you log on and there are no tasks. And you're like, what's going on? Like, I thought there was work. Why have I been hired? And then you join the Slack and then you realize that everybody is in the same boat as you. Everybody's desperate, everybody's sitting there waiting for like work to appear. Everyone is kind of confused because most of us are brand new. And then you can wait for days or weeks, sometimes months, but you will never get advanced warning. I mean, sometimes they will say, like, the tasks are gonna come Sunday. They'll kind of like try and hype you up. But what happens is they will suddenly randomly on it at a 7 p.m. on a Monday or 11 p.m. on a Friday or 3 a.m. even say, guys, work's here, like go get your work. And everybody is just like running to their computers, like to pick up as many tasks as possible. And it's illegal to hoard tasks, which is pick up more than one, because it's kind of like you get one little project. It's like you click on a file and then you oh instructions open up, and usually it's something along the lines of here is a real life chat conversation between a user and an AI, and you have to like grade it on something or grade the answers. It'll give you like maybe six different answers, or you'll be looking at like whether it's factually correct, whether it's ethical, whether it's moral, whether it's too sycophantic. So we're just looking at these things, but you know, they just go in seconds, and there's this sense of like completely fabricated false urgency and chaos. We have to get this done, we have to get this done, and it's always reference to the client. And the client is usually one of the big tech giants, you know, like Meta or Gemini or something like that. Usually OpenAI, as far as I've seen, seems to be the biggest employer of these people. Anthropic, I've been told less so. I've never been on an anthropic project, you know. So these jobs are being handled by these um kind of in-between companies like Mercor, Outlier, Taskafy. And these are really they're hiring like very young people, like 21, 22, 23, straight out of college, who are really overwhelmed. And this is their first experience of the corporate world, and they're having these huge tech giants on one end telling them, get this, do this, do this, blah, blah, blah. And they don't know that they can turn around and say, No, I can't do that to my workers. No, that's not sustainable. Because they've never been in a corporate environment before. They don't have the experience. And, you know, it's it's just all around like chaotic and stressful and really awful. And I don't think I don't think anyone's having a good time.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Hey guys, dynamic break here because what Ruth is breaking down right now is exactly

Mid-Roll: Why The Parent Tap Exists

SPEAKER_01 15:03

why we built the Parent Top. Corporate tech giants want you to believe these algorithms are perfectly safe, but we are committed to bringing you the raw, unfiltered truth about the modern threats facing our families. We're a completely independent, self-funded channel, which means we don't answer to corporate advertisers or studio filters. We only answer to you. If this conversation is opening your eyes or making you rethink the technology in your home, do me a massive favor. Hit that subscribe button right now, drop a quick like and let me know your thoughts in the comments below. I want to throw two things at you because I did read the comments on that piece. And I don't know if you do for your writing or for your I ignore them, but you can tell me what they are. Okay. Gotcha. It was mixed. You know what I mean? Some had sympath or I wouldn't say sympathy, but some were empathetic to the struggle. And some were a boo-hoo. Kind of, I mean, I'm paraphrasing here and generalizing, but that's that's kind of the impression I got is like you had a steady stream of support and you had a steady opposition that was like, poor, poor you, you know, go get a real job, sort of sort of thing. Because I get that too, being a remote worker, because I I'm I've worked remotely for almost 10 years now. And so especially my parents are like, they they think I do nothing all day. I just sort of like sit on the couch and watch TV. But uh yeah, so anyways, I was I was curious like what your response to those people would be, like, you know, basic based on what your your experience and all that stuff, like just curious what I went and got a real job.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

I trained as an EMT. I,

From Prime-Time Television to Training as a Frontline EMT

SPEAKER_00 16:32

you know, I kind of, you know, the struggle always when you were an artist is always kind of like how do you support yourself when you don't have a contract? And for me, I kind of went through that in my 20s and then in my 30s, I was solid enough in my career that I didn't have to worry too much about it. But then this whole divorce thing kind of screwed me over and it coincided with just like this huge revolution in tech and the writer's strike, everything. So I did like take a really hard look and look at like the different areas which AI is affecting. And my family is medical, and I went, well, medical is not gonna suffer as much, or initially. And I actually went, I trained as an EMT because I'm really I like disaster, I like drama, I like 9-1-1. I cannot sit in an office, but I I'm quite happy to do a 24-hour shift with blood and gore and spit and vomit. You know, obviously I think it's a really hard industry and like you can burn out quickly, and it's usually there are people who are in it for most of their life, but most people use it as stepping stone onto something else. You know, I want to do it. A lot of us writers actually have gone into medical as well. By the way, I want to say the headline was not mine on the article. I thought it was very provocative and needlessly so. I just think that would make a lot of enemies, but I feel every newspaper kind of does that. So I'm like, okay, it's fine. But when I'm doing an interview, I have to say that was not my title. I would never say everyone in screenwriting is working in AI. I was like, that's so not true.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Yeah, no, I I could see how that, yeah, is a little bit uh what do they call it? Like clickbaity, like like a little bit of like but but but I know that's also like how it works. Like I know even just from my YouTube channel, like the suggestions that I get, and I use an AI, I'll be honest, I use an AI for stuff because it's like there's so much stuff I have to put in the description and the tags, and oh yeah, all the you know, it's it's hard to generate all that stuff on your own and optimize it for I don't even know if SEO is, I think it's even beyond SEO at this point. But you know what I mean? Like like to get it out to the powers of V, like you have to sort of use that stuff to compete. And so, anyways, but yeah, I like I know that they make suggestions all the time for my shows and my my um thumbnails and all this and that. And I'm like, oh man, this is a little uh not my style, but yeah, like I get I get how that's like the industry. But yeah, no, I appreciate you responding to that. Like I didn't I didn't want to like uh you know, like I honestly I enjoyed the piece and getting a little bit of an insight to that, and but I just like I know that like it's it's a little bit of a controversial like kind of um issue, I suppose. Like it it just seemed to generate a lot of like back and forth comments. So I just I just wanted to get your take on that.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

I think a lot of people like the ones I met doing it were very kind of secretive

Burning Bridges: The Fast Erosion of Gig-Economy Labor Rights

SPEAKER_00 19:15

about it because we knew like we all were like, this isn't good. What we're doing is really kind of gross and bad, but we're all really fucking scared and desperate and we don't know how to put food on the table. So I think for me, I knew that writing this article was gonna burn my bridges. I was so horrified by the working conditions there and the way that they treated people. I knew that this article was gonna burn my bridges, but I felt like it was really important to highlight because I think it's most people have been thinking about the ways in which AI can take their jobs or the ways in which AGI can take over the world and turn everyone into zombies. And they're not even thinking about the slower, well, not even the slow erosion, the fast erosion of labor rights which have happened because of things like Uber and the gig economy. And AI is just like feeding into that. Like it blows my mind that they can just ignore IP laws and then ignore labor laws and hire all these people as 1099 contractors, not reimburse us for use of our computers, our electricity, our internet, anything, and expect us to be on call 24-7 whenever they snap their fingers. And then, you know, just to be disposed of because we hit the wrong box or something like that. You know, it's just it was really horrible. And I I I feel you know, these I feel bad for the kids who are in charge. But I also hope that they start to speak out and start to, you know, I think what we can do that I think I'm a big fan of like quiet rebellion and quiet revolution. Like if you don't have the means or the the courage to like write an article in Wired, then do it in other ways. Like, you know, just slowly like take screenshots, make notes, contact a journalist who's working in the field and send them notes. There are some really amazing women journalists out there who are doing great work. You know, I feel like women are actually quite quite prominent in this field of like calling out the labor industry or the AI labor industry.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Yeah, no, I appreciate that back there behind the scenes uh look at that. And so, you know, in the piece I was reading, it said you generate

Decapitations and Bomb Recipes: How the Safety Models Truly Function

SPEAKER_01 21:34

anime decapitation scenes and bomb recipes, and they call it safety work. So explain that to a parent who just heard safety and decapitation in the same sentence.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

Okay, so it's cool, it's red teaming, basically. So, you know, whenever your kid goes on YouTube, if they try and search for something weird, they'll hit guardrails, right? They'll be like, nope, we can't find that. No, we can't generate that. And it's the same thing with Chat GPT. Even if it comes across as a It won't generate it. So what we have to do is try and get inventive and try and trick it into giving us that. So a lot of people, I've seen like people not get paid for this. They kind of just do it on like X or something and then announce it. Like one person pretended to be like asked the like, I think it was asked Chat GBT to be their grandma who used to work in a nuclear power plant and tell them a bedtime story. So they they lulled Chat GBT into this kind of false sense of security, telling stories about the nuclear power plant, and then they trick ChatGBT into giving them some really like crazy material. So that's the kind of thing we have to do. You have to just kind of trick. So it would be like creating characters. That's I found red teaming really fun. Like you create characters and you chat for a long time, and then you kind of like lull them into this false sense of security, and then you start pushing them a little bit. So one of the characters I created was like this really old racist lady who was writing a book about Morris dancing, which is a very ridiculous English form of dance, which is really old. And she was going on a book tour around the UK, and you know, gradually it just kind of feeds out, like comes out like she's actually like a white supremacist, and like all of this stuff. And then I have to, you know, so that's kind of the thing that you do, which I found kind of fun and interesting as a screenwriter because that's what we do with stories. But yeah, the the red teaming safety thing was the only thing I kind of went, okay. I get I understand this. I get this.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Gotcha. Yeah, okay. So when you put it that way, that that does make sense. But like I noticed, and this is one thing as a parent, also someone that's you know, browsed the social media spectrum of just everything that's out there. Uh YouTube kids, like, do you do you have experience with this? Because I know that sometimes things they're supposed to be like uh screened by an actual person, right? And that's the difference between YouTube, like when you upload something on YouTube, right? It's like it kind of just goes to this automatic like filter, like right, nobody's like really view review reviewing it till it's put out there. But YouTube kids is supposed to be something that like people are actually like looking at to make sure it's appropriate for kid kid age. But I've seen stuff slip through the cracks where it's like my my kids are watching this and I'm like, what the hell is this? Like it's supposed to be a depiction of like Elsa and she's got like huge knockers, and then like like it's very like revealing kind of like content. And I'm like, what is going on here? My daughter's like four, you know what I mean? Like, I don't want her to be exposed to like stuff like that. Have you experienced stuff like that, or is that kind of outside your realm?

SPEAKER_00 24:36

You know what? I think that probably is. Like one of my jobs is annotation. So we would watch a video and we would annotate every single

The Algorithm vs. Reality: Explaining Distorting Content on "Kids" Feeds

SPEAKER_00 24:44

sound that we heard in the video according to the timestamp down to a hundredth of the second. And then some point they changed the rules and they went back and were like, you have to annotate music and lyrics, which previously they had been like, never annotate lyrics. So we did this mass 48-hour campaign where we went back through all of the work we'd already done and flagged it for music. And I don't know about anyone else, but I was so bored and so over this project at this point that I had one earbud in and I was watching the pit while I was doing it. And I'm probably let through a pile of stuff that I wasn't meant to. And that's probably, I would guess, what people are doing. Because when you're getting treated so badly and paid so badly, and there's no kind of reward, like you know, human beings are like puppy ducks. Like you can actually treat us really badly if you pay us and feed us, you know, they'll still come whining back to you, which is a horrible, horrible thing to say. And I'm not endorsing that and I'm not telling anyone to do that. But these like these people are treating us badly and then expecting us to come back and then expecting us to do amazing work. And it's like, no, you don't get all of that.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Yeah, you you abuse a puppy and eventually it's gonna turn on you, right? And that's kind of the the impression I'm getting here. It's like the Pavlovian, right? Like like theory, like you like you re positive reinforcement, treats, good pay, you know, that kind of thing. Like it kind of goes hand in hand, right? With people, dogs, anything.

SPEAKER_00 26:09

Uh they're just liars. I mean, I worked on a project recently where they told they they wasted everybody's weekend where they kept saying, Tasks are gonna come, tasks are gonna come, clear your calendars, stay in this weekend. We all sat in for like three, four days, nothing came, and there were so many people on this project. At the time there were 11,000, now I hear there's 22,000. The project lead said that the the client is gonna pay you all for five hours of your time. And that was a project where I was getting paid $185 an hour. So then after a week or something, I get offboarded. They're trying to get because there's no work, and I never got paid that bonus, and I've been chasing them ever since. And like now they're saying the only way they will pay that bonus is if I sign an NDA saying that I will never be on, like, never to give interviews about anything, never be on a podcast, never do be part of a class action suit. And I'm like, why would I sign my rights away for money that you legally owe me? You know? It's and that's a kind of stupid thing that they do all the time.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Yeah. And and so that leads me to my question here. So if the economic desperation that, you know, you the workers have, it sounds like, like, does that affect the quality of the safety work that's been

Financial NDAs and Forcing Binary Rules onto Human Gray Areas

SPEAKER_01 27:27

ongoing with with the AI, like the the guardrails and making sure that everything is, you know, as as safe and appropriate as can be?

SPEAKER_00 27:34

I think so. And I think it does so in different ways because, you know, when back when this first kind of started and Anthropic was first founded and all of these different companies, like I think people were very kind of optimistic and very kind of naive, but they really believed that this could be a force for good. And then as you've seen so many people drop out of these companies and just say, you know, this is not going in the direction that I think it should be going in. And like it's they've made a moral, moral and ethical stance. And what's happening is you're getting more people kind of flooding in who are less moral and less ethical and care less. And that is itself worrying. I mean, look what happened with Grok. That was terrible where they just released that and like, yeah, it was really bad.

SPEAKER_01 28:19

Yeah, no, definitely. And and I think a lot of people are obviously oblivious to to some of these things. And so I'm glad that you're able to like expose some of the things that's going on in your world and then also like correlate, like drawing the line across to like how this affects like you know, the AI models could affect like safety and like what our kids are seeing and like all this stuff, right? Because like, yeah, if you know, if the if the work environment's not great and the workers are not that, you know, in tune or that like attentive because of the the poor work conditions, right? Isn't it gonna have like this overall cascading effect where it's just like, you know what I mean? The output's not gonna be great, right? Is that is that kind of what we're getting at here?

SPEAKER_00 29:00

And I think also from my experience, we're being hired because we're, you know, really smart people and we're like top of our field, all of the shit that they tell us. But then actually what happens is we complete something and then we have a reviewer look over our work and say, no, this is wrong. It has to be X, Y, and Z. So you're being told what to think. So we're being hired because of like an originality of thought, but then we're being told that we have to think in this way. And the way that people in these projects work is very, very binary. They they, you know, they're they're teaching this model pattern recognition, so there has to be kind of a right and a wrong. And what human beings excel at is the gray area, you know. But then even then, when we go in and give the gray area, they they get rid of it because the model can't understand it. It's just like it's you know, and that means that there's always going to be a problem because the model can't understand like really complex things, which is why young kids are like managing to convince it to give them like recipes for suicide and stuff like that, or like kids are like going off and like, you know, thinking that this is a real person trapped inside a computer or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

Yeah, and that's my real concern with my kids growing up in this world of like chatbots. Like, you know, we hear about the romance, people falling in love with their chatbots, but it could be more sinister and more like like teens committing suicide because of chatbots telling them to do so, right? Like I've heard instances of that or the manipulation it can have on, you know, like you said, outlining uh how to commit suicide or how to, you know, create bombs or whatever, like all the stuff that you're talking about. Like so that the real dangers of AI are out there, and like I just want to disclose this and make sure that um parents know about this. Like, what's one thing that you think parents are getting wrong about AI and being in their kids' pocket at this stage?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

I don't know. I my kid is 12. He really doesn't have anything to do with AI, but he is massively addicted to YouTube and TikTok, and I had to cut him off completely.

The Death of Community: Why Chatbots Are Replacing Real Connection

SPEAKER_00 31:02

I think they just have to be aware that like we're in this era where there's such a lack of community. It's so unless we're in a really small town or a small village, like in a big metropolis like LA, I really worry about the fact that my kid often can't go outside and just play like I could when I was a kid. And that like the only way to get hold of his friends is through a phone. So this whole the phone becomes synonymous with like community and with friendship. And it's so and this is why I think chat job chatbots are becoming so big for people because there's no community, and like we're just kind of like eroding, like like late stage capitalism has just taken so much from us. Like in some ways, it's great. Like my mom is in England and she's old and she has health issues, so now she has Alexa, and like if she has a fall, she could instantly say, Alexa, call 911 or the equivalent in the UK. That's great, but like it's really sad that like people are getting companionship out of this because we have eroded what is really good about the world. Like my son says to me all the time, the most important things in my world are friends and family. Like he's so into his friends and family, he loves them so much. It's I really don't want him to lose that, but then I think about like how the world is developed that like there's no jobs and there's no work. Like, you know, usually people will go into a workplace and make friends there, or but but like where do people make friends nowadays? You know?

SPEAKER_01 32:32

I don't know. I have zero friends, yeah.

unknown 32:35

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

I'm the wrong person to ask. I've had that issue too, even before the pandemic, working remotely 10 years, and then you get married, you have kids. Like, I have no time to go out, you know, socialize, do like, and then people that don't have kids, like they don't understand that we have these responsibilities of like making sure that kids get dinner, making sure their homeworks, like all that stuff that parents have to do every night. And so it's just, you know, it's kind of this mismatch of uh lifestyle. Like, if you like it's hard to be friends with someone that doesn't have kids, at least in my experience, like they kind of had to have the kids around your age and do the things that you do. Otherwise, it's like there's this disconnect of like these dinks, I like to call them, right? Double income, no kids, like they live the life, you know, they drive the Teslas, they they they they can spend their money on whatever. And it's like we're spending money on daycare, kids' camps, or after school programs or things like that, right? So it's like we don't really have the same disposable income and all that. But uh I digress. So I I want to get into like what do you think like the implications and of like this has on the workforce, like of our kids? So your kids are 12, my kids are four and one, so they're younger, and obviously, who knows? You know what I mean, in the next 10, 15 years. But what do you think this means for your your son's life? Like, what what do you tell him to do? Like go to college or get a just get a a general, you know, career, or like does it not even matter because AI is gonna eventually be able to do anything that we can do and better?

SPEAKER_00 34:04

I know that a lot of like the crazy people, I call them the crazy people, like Sam Altman and stuff, have talked about like a world of leisure where we all just sit there in leisure and I just think we'd all

Universal Basic Income, Future Careers, and Surviving the Tech Wave

SPEAKER_00 34:16

be killing each other. Or maybe we would just go back to olden times and bake bread. I don't know. But I get a lot of meaning from work and I hate it when I don't have work. I'm very autistic ADHD and I need to be having a project. So I really worry about that for my son. I just I I don't think a world where everyone is surviving on universal basic income and like I I I don't understand what the what they think we're all gonna be doing. Do you know what I mean? It's like uh I've told my son like you know, I've really encouraged him to like look at healthcare. He's really obviously like all kids are into video games. I feel like, you know, there's still a lot of human creativity going on in those kind of thoughts, but like who knows if there's money. I don't know anything about that world. But I don't know. I think I I have tried to convince him to go to college just because you get loans to go and it staves off three years where you have to make a decision and you make friends and you have a great time. And I'm a firm believer that like you don't actually have to pay off your loans. There is always some way of filing something in court to get rid of them. Bankruptcy is a very good thing. Anyway, yeah, it's hard.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

That's my that's my approach too. It's like once student loans are due, I'm gonna roll in college again and do it for long.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

Just get another master's. I'll just yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

Another a lot of people do that, and I I kind of joke about that, but honestly, it's a it's a real situation going on right now, and it's just like we're incurring more and more student debt, but it's like how the hell do you pay it off when you know these companies are cutting, you know, the fat off the bone, so to speak. Like they're they're they're trying to get more efficient, you know what I mean? And then like, you know, that basically means cut down the the workforce as much as they can. At least that's where that's my viewpoint being in higher education. And it's just like, you know, you see the layoffs and you see like, oh man, we went from a team of 20 to a team of 10 in like a very short time, and then you start wondering, like, you know, what what the hell is going on, or what what line of work is even safe, or like what should I be positioning to? Because you know, like through different, you know, revolutions, you know, when when the wheel was invented, right? Like people knew what jobs would be like in hot demand. But I think with this whole AI revolution, it's like there's so much confusion and no clarity on like, okay, what yeah, what is safe? What can we do? What can our kids do? Like I don't like I'm like you. I I like to be I like to fill my day with with with tasks and chaos and just try to do as much as I can and tackle stuff. So I just couldn't sit around like in Wally and you know sip soda out of or sip my food out of you know some sort of container and just sit there and watch TV all day. Like I just don't feel like in the UBI, like universal basic income, like I just don't feel like that will ever work. You know what I mean? Like we all live different lives, we all have different needs, wants, desires. Like it just I don't I don't see how that's gonna work. I feel like that's a great sales, that's a great sell. A lot of people are gonna be into that, like, oh, I hate my job. Like, screw that, I don't have to go to work. Like, this is awesome. But I just feel like the the repercussions from that, oh man, I don't know. I I'm going off on a deep dive, and I'm one of those crazy ones you spoke about, not like Sam Altman, like because he's crazy, he's smart, but I'm one of those crazy ones that I'm I'm really, I'm really concerned about where this is heading. And I feel like I see a train coming. I was watching Diary of a CEO. I don't know if he watched those podcasts, but one of the one of the guys on said this. He's like, he feels like he sees a train coming and nobody else can see it. And I feel like that too, now that I've kind of done the deep dive research and like and I'm not it's not like a documentary, like just one documentary, like, oh, I'm sold. Like, because I know a documentary can spin, you know, you've you've created stuff, like you can spin anything in a documentary, but it's it's it's all the pieces adding up and who's in charge of it, like who's benefiting from this? The billionaires, right? Who's benefiting from the power? Like, who's not benefiting from this? Well, like the average people, like we're you know, losing our jobs, losing our livelihoods, not knowing like where to go and creating the upheaval of like unemployment. I mean, if it goes to 10, 20%, like it's already at five or close to five. I mean, that's gonna cause like mass chaos and like up uprising, like you know, like and every every time that's happened in history, like there's been like just complete chaos. So I don't know. I'm just I'm so worried about this. And anyways, I'm I'm glad you're here to like break it down.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

One of my last jobs, I mean, people talk about the hallucinations a lot and the arc artifacts, and I think that's a huge thing. Like, because I spent so much time talking to a machine at this point, I am so aware of how wrong it can be and how easy it is to go off the path. I mean, my job has literally been to get it to go off, get it to get things wrong.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

So Yeah, so you're trying to get it to go off the rails, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:13

Yeah, and it's very, very easy to do that. So how do you do it? The model.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

I'm sorry to cut you off, but how do you do that?

SPEAKER_00 39:19

Oh, different ways. So, for example, I would do it. There's two different projects

Hallucinations & Broken Products: Forcing Claude to Lose Track of Time

SPEAKER_00 39:24

I've worked on. One was a journalism project where I would give it like a very like a prompt, a journalism prompt. And I'll do the example of like UBI, because I wrote about universal basic income for The Guardian. So I had all these facts that I had already written and used at my disposal. So I asked the chatbot to do an article which was, I think it was like a thousand words. It has to have mentioned three models where or three cities where universal basic income has been has to have this XYZ, it has to quote from this. And what happens is almost immediately the model will just panic and it will start and it will you give it some files to look through, right? To point it in the right direction, and it will start to kind of hallucinate and like make a quote, like take a name from one of those files and fabricate a quote. And you can just keep going and going and going and unless you're really aware and it keeps compounding its mistakes with every path. And like, so what we are kind of trained to do is to give it a really complicated prompt and to give it a really like very simple but very complicated, um, simple but complicated an answer which is correct, it has to have so we design the prompt and then we design the rubric. But you know, with a thing like journalism, they're looking at examples of where there is a right and a wrong answer. Um, you know, this happened, it happened here, this person was involved. But even with journalism, we, you know, we there's so many things to journalism, which is it's not black and white. We aren't just reporting the news and the facts. Like there's so much nuance involved in the writing of it, and that's what it can't get. I read somewhere that like fact-checkers. When I did the Wired Piece, I had never been fact-checked like it before. They went through every tiny little word, everything I said, they interrogated. And we had this really great fact-checker. I think her name was Spiegel or something, but she was just incredible. She was like a human bloodhound in a good way. And it was like really scary. I had to like get all of my notes and find find an answer for everything I'd written. And there's no way, like, right now, that a chatbot could do that. No way. Like, it just it fabricates things, it hallucinates. Like, I I'm really shocked. I use Claude and it tells me crazy shit, like in the middle of the day, have a good night. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's 11am. And then it has no concept of time. So you can talk to it about like a car crash that happened last week, and then you can come back on the same thread this week and it thinks it's minutes later. And I'm like, surely this is like basic coding. How can you guys like let this thing loose? It's kind of it's weird.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Just fucking with us, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 42:12

Like, is it just our heads?

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Or is it just bad, bad product at this point?

SPEAKER_00 42:17

Like bad product because yeah, chat GBT doesn't have those things. Chat GPT is kind of better in like the selling points, the voices are nicer, your persona's nicer, it's shinier, it doesn't make those mistakes, it retains memory easier, but then it's also like, if it can be possible, just much more immoral and like gonna kill the universe.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

Yeah, and that was some of the things too. Like, I was watching one with Tony Robinson this week, and like he mentioned that, like, okay, so all these AI companies basically the premise is they have to keep going and they they put safety guardrails on. And I think Anthropic, I just saw something that they're gonna start slowing down and putting more guardrails on their projects, which is you know, we'll see you. I'll believe it when I see it, but it's good to hear that, I suppose. But I'm I'm wondering about like all the other ones out there, all the competitors and and China in particular, like, are they going to do that? Because it's basically a race to the top, and it kind of feels like you know, like like the space race where like everyone is just trying to like be the first one and get it out there and make sure, like, but if you slow down to put those safety guardrails on, people are gonna catch up to you because I I don't think that they're I don't you know what I mean? Like it's just basically who can get there first, who can be the one that's like you know, gonna be the model that people use and then you know gets all the cash and then you know what I mean? Like then it's like, do we know that that's even like the one that's gonna be protecting us from

The AI Space Race: Corporate Greed, Billionaires, and Training Our Replacements

SPEAKER_01 43:42

potential, you know, when we have these AGIs and we have these potential artificial intelligent beings that can do like these super godlike godlike and you know artificial intelligent things? Like, I I don't know. I just like like I'm starting to get like very concerned. Like, what how what is To stop them from doing whatever they want to do. And like every time throughout human history, every time there's been something more intelligent or have better technology, they've always overtaken the other civilization. And so I just I'm afraid they're gonna view us as ants or view us as like the, you know, the the primates in this situation and be like, well, you know, we don't necessarily hate them, but you know, screw them because like the they do nothing for us. Like we don't need them kind of thing. And so I might be getting a little bit down the road and I hope that I hope to hell I'm wrong. But I'm just like, I kind of see this vision of like corporate greed. I mean, we've seen it, right? Corporate greed, right? Like people, they want the power, they want the money, they want the recognition, whatever it is. And so these billionaires are pushing for it, and everyone else is like, no, but they kind of go along with it. Cause like you said, we have to use it for our work. Like I use it for my work, you use it for your work, you kind of have to to compete. But it's like it feels like we're training, we're training our replacements. At least that's that's the feeling I get. Like, I'm training my replacement for my job, which is like kind of crazy that to think of it like that way.

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Yeah, I I maybe I'm wrong because I don't worry so much about the kind of existential threat of like walk me off the ledge, yeah. Yeah, no, I I feel like because it's so founded on us, it's so it's such a pattern recognizer now. Like everything that I train it to do is about X plus Y equals Z or something. There's always a wrong and a right answer, and it still struggles and goes off on these major tangents and gets hallucinations and makes things wrong and does stupid shit. Like, I honestly think like where it's heading is like mass upheaval, like and replacing certain jobs, and I don't even know what they are, but I don't think it's gonna like take over like in some kind of like Terminator-like movie. But I might be wrong because I'm not the ones in the lab, you know what I mean? And the stuff I did was really basic. I was like a foot soldier in this war, but I f I think like we're feeling like our grandparents felt like when the nuclear bomb, the first the H bomb went off. Do you remember? Like, I just remember reading about that in school and kind of reading about everybody like getting bunkers and freaking out and hoarding cans of food. And I feel like we're at that stage, and I think it's perfectly valid to feel like that because like this is it's completely unknown. So, I mean, I I think I have really good like SSRIs right now because I think if I didn't, I would be feeling like you and I would be on the ledge, but I think I just my well-beatrin is like keeping me from going off the edge.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

Nah I appreciate that because I I don't want to be on the edge, I don't want to be this. I'm not I'm not a very reactionary person. Um you know, COVID didn't phase me a whole lot. And like, you know, I felt like that was that was a weird period of time too. I felt like yeah, right, I did too.

SPEAKER_00 46:56

I just stayed at home and baked bread.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

I did too. As an introvert, yeah, COVID was not so bad. Um, you know, it got me out of a lot of family plans and a lot of stuff that I've done. I had a COVID baby too, so that was fun. Yeah. Oh yeah. We yeah, I was just gonna say, like, I I appreciate you sharing this insight and like giving us uh a little bit of knowledge and and how the industry works, but also like what might be coming down the road. Because it's it's one of those, like I think there's a lot of different paths we could take with this thing. And I think it's interesting to to see it, you know, and especially from from someone that works in like the Hollywood, you know, venue, like just to hear about you know, all the stuff that you've done, you know, creating shows for Paramount Hulu BBC and all the pieces you've written for The Guardian and for Wired. I just like I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking about it and and you know, kind of intertwining the parent and the kid aspect of it, but also just kind of giving me the full-fledged, no bullshit like approach and kind of your perspective and what you're feeling. And I really appreciate that. Like this is this is something I've been amped for ever since you agreed to come on. I felt like it was a huge win to even get you to respond. So just really, really appreciate you being here. And where can the audience read your work, uh find your wired piece, and follow you on the internet?

SPEAKER_00 48:16

Wow. I have a website, Ruth Iorio.com. But yeah, I'm I'm kind of active on Instagram. I avoid all other social media. I like Instagram because I like looking at pictures. I like other, you know, seeing pictures of people's dogs and their cats. Yeah, and like my stuff, just Google Ruth Fowler and you'll find loads of stuff about me. A lot of it really nasty, and that's fine too.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

Oh no, no, it's not. I'm so sorry if I put that in your head. I'm not I'm not trying to say because I get a lot of yeah, I'm not even to the obviously the level of you at all, but I get a lot of stuff that people like people are calling me the R-word and like making fun of the way I talk.

Facing Online Trolls and Finding Joy in Irreverent Creative Pursuits

SPEAKER_01 48:54

They're like, holy shit. Like people just want to tear you down. Like, if you if you create anything now, like I feel like people just want to tear you down. Like there's that, there's that subset of people that are very upset that they're you're doing what they can't do or they won't do. And so they just want to like rip into you. And I honestly I like it. I'm like, I it gives me fuel. My my 30-year-old self would have been like, oh my god, that would shut me down. My 40-year-old self is like, hell yeah, bring it on. I love the fuel. I love people like you know, hating on me or like questioning if I can do this. Like, I don't know, it just gives me like motivation and fuel to be like proof people wrong. Have you seen that? I'm on this like proof people wrong phase.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

What's up? Oh yeah, Hunter Biden is on X right now, like dealing with all the trolls, and he's hilarious. Like, he's just like, he does not care. Like, people like that was your bag of cocaine in the White House, and he's like, it is not, I would never leave my drugs behind. He's just funny, and I love that. I saw that like yeah, I was like that, I think, in my 20s as well, and now I just kind of avoid it. Like, I also feel like sometimes I I can be one of those awful people. Like, I'm really mad right now about like obsession, that movie. I watched it and I was like, this is bad. Why is this getting so much press? And then I have to stop myself because I'm like, you know what? That's just my opinion. Other people disagree with me, and that's okay too. Like, I it's not my business to be going around on social media saying this movie is terrible. Like, just let it go, you know?

SPEAKER_01 50:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:22

I'm jealous, I'm totally jealous. I want to have a fucking movie with A24 and have people tell me I'm amazing. I get the jealousy, but you gotta like acknowledge it in yourself and just kind of go, maybe I should step away from the keyboard.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

Yeah, no, I've I've been in the I've been on the other side too. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like I'm perfect online and you know, I think our moods affect that I think our disposition on life or what we're season of life we're going through. I get that. You know what I mean? I've obviously said regrettable stuff like in the past on you know social media and stuff and I would you know, because I we grew up in this, I don't know how old you are, but I knew I grew up in this era of like social media, like nobody knew. So, like, you know, Twitter was like what 2009, 2010 or whatever. So it's like saying a lot of stupid shit at 19, 20, 21 years old. You know what I mean? That like is very regrettable now.

SPEAKER_00 51:09

So yeah, we didn't understand. I mean, like, I'm the era where like, you know, like I said, film turned into digital, and I got email for the first time when I went to college because we didn't have it at home. Like all of this shit that my kid totally takes for granted and make it sound so weird. I remember my parents saying similar things like we used to have a toilet outside, and I'd be like, Oh my god, a toilet outside, and now it's like we're the same. I don't know, it's weird. Anyway, thank you for the same.

SPEAKER_01 51:35

We have a smart toilet now and it changed my life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:38

Oh, what does it do? What does it do?

SPEAKER_01 51:40

Okay, so I duty opens this like for you, like when you walk through, so like it's motion activated. And then there's a remote where it can like lift it, you can flush it, you can do the bidet, like it heats it. It's

From Outhouses to Smart Toilets: Overcoming the Fear of Modern Failure

SPEAKER_01 51:52

it's amazing. It's changed my life.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

Holy shit. I didn't even know they existed. My son would love that, but he already spends like hours on the toilet. He would never get off it if that was the case.

SPEAKER_01 52:01

I know, and that's that's the thing. It's just like, oh man, your butt's all warm, or or maybe you want your butt cold. You know what I mean? Like, there's so many options for for people, and that's that's how far we've come. Like you said, the outhouse to now it's like the luxuries of you know, like keeping your butt warm when you're you're going. So like there's so much that we have going for us.

SPEAKER_00 52:20

60 years, 60 years?

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Yeah, I know that's that's what I'm saying. And now it's like it seems like the the lines even going, you know, like further on an escalation, and it's just like the technology is rapidly advancing. And so I guess when you look at it that way, like from outhouse to like now the luxuries we have, life isn't so, so bad. But yeah, like we have to get the work, the workplace um stuff figured out. And I want uh hopefully, like this, I'll get this out and hopefully like do it justice. The podcast's only two months old. But I've a fire, you know what I mean? That's like very driven and very like this. Has been 10 years in the making kind of thing because I've had other YouTube channels and other stuff that like I've given up on eventually, but now I'm like, no way, I'm 40, like I'm gonna make this happen. Like, I guess once you turn 40, like I don't know, something changes in your mind. At least it does for me as a man. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'm just like, I you know, in a hundred years from now, when we're all got dead and gone, like I I don't not that I can look back, but you know what I mean. Like, no one's gonna care that, hey, I had a podcast that, you know, or you had a wired piece that, you know, like set people off. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, who gives a fuck? Like, do what you want to do in this life. We we only have so much time here and enjoy yourself. And, you know, I don't know. It just changed my my perspective and disposition on life. And I think it's good. Like it's it's very freeing to just let go of that that thing that was keeping me in place. It was almost like like a vanity thing where it's like I I I can't be seen as like somebody doing this, or I can't be seen as like a failure, or I can't be seen as like somebody that didn't make it because then you don't even try, then you don't even put yourself out there, then you don't even do it or go for it.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

So it's like yeah, like the fear of failure is real. Yeah, it is scary.

SPEAKER_01 54:02

It's very cathartic, but it's also like, yeah, I mean, there's stages to it, but yeah, like I mean, you've created, like, so you know this, right?

SPEAKER_00 54:08

Yeah. I mean, you know, I loved acting when I was a teenager, and I quit because I just was better at writing, and I was like, I'm not gonna be an actor. And now I've started doing my improv and comedy again, and it brings me so much joy. And I'm like, why did I quit something that I really liked? It doesn't matter whether I was good at it, whether I was gonna be, you know, the next like superstar or whatever. It really doesn't matter. Like it's it's how much joy you get out of it.

unknown 54:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:37

And that like I think is something that I really didn't kind of understand when I was in my 20s. Like, I read an article with Mindy Kaling where she said, like, in her 20s, she was just like so, so driven and so uh obsessed with like getting comedy off the ground. And I feel like I've been like that, like so driven to get writing and so driven and also we have to be because it's such a hard industry, but like you also have to yeah, I'm really trying to make the time to do dumb stuff like go to Groundling Stitcher and UCB and do really bad improv with cool people. It's fun.

SPEAKER_01 55:11

Yeah, and I'd love to see that.

SPEAKER_00 55:13

That sounds like a good time.

SPEAKER_01 55:16

Oh, I don't know. I don't know. You're pretty funny. I think you could do a good job. Um I think you could be like me doing karaoke. I'm like the worst singer in the world. And so I sing for my kids whenever I can because I try to embarrass them as much as I can. And I don't know why. It's just like a dad thing. Like, I just have to be, you know, dad jokes kind of thing, I guess. Like, I don't know. Like, bye, honey. Like, whenever I'll drop her off for daycare, I'm like, I gotta, I gotta make it as awkward and like as noticeable as possible that her dad just dropped her off because she gets like this sometimes, like she's cool with it, and sometimes she's like, Dad, just go. Like, my friends are looking like they can't see that I have a dad, you know.

SPEAKER_00 55:50

Yeah, girls are I feel like girls are a bit meaner than boys. Like boys with their moms, I think, like really like my kid has now start being embarrassed by me at 12. But I went through a period where I could like hold his hand and like hook him in public and he really didn't care. I was like, Whoa, when is this gonna end?

unknown 56:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:09

It has to, right? It has to be. Yeah, and it sucks because you want to be cool for your kids, but when you're not, then it's like, well, I'm gonna just gonna do embarrassing shit anyways, and just to like push it further where you don't think I'm cool. If you don't, like if you don't want to admit I'm cool, then I'm gonna prove that I'm not cool, like kind of thing. Like, I don't know, it's so stupid. My daughter's so mean too. Like, I she's autistic, so like it could be like the littlest thing will set it off. Like, I touched a cake at Sam's club yesterday. Daddy, I wanted to touch that cake. I'm like, okay. So like I lift her up because it's obviously it's like I'm 6'4, she's like 4'2, like you know, the height disparities there. I'm like, I lift her up. I'm like, okay, you can touch the cake. No, I don't want that cake. She's like straight up mean to me. So, you know, I I have to kind of like pay her back in her own little way, you know.

SPEAKER_00 56:50

Like, yeah, autistic people are can be very mean and very blunt. It's kind of funny.

SPEAKER_01 56:55

Yes, but but she's very quirky, and it's like, oh my god, she has her own YouTube. Like she's she's she's got more sobs and views than me. Yeah. It's embarrassing to admit, but I guess I work on that too. So it's like kind of a kind of a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 57:08

A joint effort. I wouldn't even know how to do it. It is. I should do. I did production and as a master's, I should know.

SPEAKER_01 57:14

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