Thank you so much for that warm welcome and while you're at it if you'll do me a favor and stop by the book table and give the same warm welcome to my partner Pat Lindsey who does all the skeptic magazine covers which you'll see here in a moment and does all the typography and design and layout. And Daniel Lockston who is our junior skeptic editor and illustrator and the author of several books on evolution for kids so I'll say hi to Daniel when you're back there. And then we invite you to join the skeptic society and subscribe to skeptic magazine you get the quarterly publication every three months it's funny how that works. And in addition to that you get the decoder ring and the launch codes for the Da Vinci code and the names of the Illuminati which are all important. We do have a lecture series at Caltech that many of you know about if you're in the Southern California area we have a good lineup coming up in the fall I've got Lisa Randall coming from Harvard on October 9th Steve Pinker also from Harvard on October 23rd and a whole bunch of other really good speakers including Beck Stenger who's here who also be speaking for us with his new book.  So some of you asked about quite a few of you asked about the Colbert report and what that's all about so I thought I'd just tell you the story so I don't have to retell the story 200 more times today. I just tell you a little bit about what it's like to do that kind of show is he always in character yes he's always in character even for the obligatory author shot at the end when he's blasting out the door to go home he still stays in character. It's filmed in New York it's right near where the John Stewart show is filmed you can only do one of the two shows they have the same bookers who talk to each other and they never double booked their guests so you have to do one or the other. They're both good they're both the best shows except for maybe Oprah in terms of for authors that's why publishers always want to try to get their authors on these shows. The Obama bump I mean not the Obama bump Colbert bump with the Obama bump at Occidental College where I used to teach anyway so it's real my book was like 478 just before I went on the show and it was on Amazon and it was at number 19 overall nationally for all books within six hours of doing the show so it's real and I checked this morning and it was at like 63 still top 100 several you know five days later so that that is pretty amazing according to my publicist it doesn't matter if you do Larry King or Pierce Morgan or or Bill Maurer none of those shows have any effect at all on book sales so for some reason Colbert and Stewart are the two hottest ticket items and there's more viewers of Colbert than Leno in 18 to 35 age group so that's that's how those shows work they fly into New York and and then they take you over there about four hours in advance the publisher does a the producer does like a pre-interviewed days before and amazingly I think she actually read my book they almost never read your book they just go by the press release and but she did she had a bunch of questions that led me to believe she actually read it so I was impressed with that of course that's all irrelevant that's not really part of the show and then like the hour before you go on she came in with a list of about 20 different funny lines he might use with me like the one about Jesus misses you because I used to be a believer so that was one of like 20 different lines I think he used two or three of the lines there's 85 people work on that show for one guy for 22 minutes out of the 30 minutes of actual produced show he has 15 full-time comedy writers versus me and I'm not even that funny and so that's why they tell you the first thing and they tell you this like six times don't be funny don't try to tell jokes that Stevens job leave that to the professionals I do actually think that's a good idea because that's what well of course Colbert is he's actually a really funny guy and he's super fast very smart obviously quick facile at the jokes on the spur but if you have 15 full-time writers refining every bit all day long what we actually see on the air is really the funniest stuff that's that's one reason why these shows are so good anyway that's a little bit about that so I wanted to talk about the believing brain the new book I'll just give you just a quick rundown the reader's digest condensed version of it so I start off with a basically in my first book why people believe weird things this is sort of the the book end of that ten books later nine books later that is I'm interested not just why people believe weird things but why people believe anything at all and in this sense the weird things are a subset of things you have to believe things so we end up believing weird things because we're not good at discriminating between true things and weird things or non non things or false things or whatever so my thought experiment is imagine you're a hominid on the planes of Africa three and a half million years ago and your name is Lucy thank you some people get that a lot of people in the Midwest don't get that Lucy who's Lucy you know the little hominid three and a half feet tall anyway and and I'm reminded of the Gary Larson cartoon of the Australia Pythesians in the cave party and the guys going you're not the Lucy hominid on the planes of Africa three and a half million years ago and you hear a rustle in the grass is it a dangerous predator is it just the wind well if you think it's a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind you've made a type one error false positive you connected a to b but a is not really connected to be you made a mistake in thinking but that's a low-cost error to make no harm you're just more skittish and careful and cautious and vigilant and you move around the the weird noise and that's pretty much the end of that and we've all seen on the furfinn and feather shows what animals are like out in the wild they're fairly skittish especially preyed upon animals on the other hand if you think the rustle in the grass is just the wind it turns out it's a dangerous predator your lunch congratulations you've been given a Darwin award for taking yourself out of the gene pool without reproducing so in other words I'm arguing that there was a natural selection for making one kind of air versus another kind of air type one error is fairly low-cost type two errors are high-cost so using an evolutionary theory model based on called Hamilton's rule basically why would we be nice to other people that are not our twins or our immediate offspring there's a whole series of formulas for how much energy you put into a system how much risk you take and so on versus what the benefits are cost-benefit ratio so I show in the book the formula of how this works and why we would tend to be have selected have a selection process for making one kind of air versus the other kind of air that is the rule of thumb is just believe everything you hear and see just in case it's real because there's no time well okay so why why can't we get it right why can't we just sit there in the grass collecting more data to see if it's a dangerous predator or just the wind and the answer is because that will also get you taken out and eaten for lunch that is sitting there collecting more data is itself a costly risky process so it's much better to make snap intuitive rapid decisions based on minimal data because there's no time to collect more data so our brains of all this capacity or this propensity to just make really fast decisions and that's what all the research in cognitive psychology behavioral economics and so on the the enlightenment vision of humans as rational calculators maximizing our utility and and our happiness and making making these rational choices through free will is an illusion none of that is true that isn't how we do it we stand there in front of the toothpaste section in the supermarket we just grab the one because it's blue or whatever we recognize the logo we don't sit there and analyze the ingredients and so on and all our decisions are made that way from toothpaste espouses to jobs and careers and and houses and so on we rarely do rational calculations and so the the reason people believe weird things is because we have to make rapid cognitions about believing all sorts of things the rule of thumb is just believe pretty much everything and this is why everybody including skeptics and scientists tend to fall into the trap of just believing things because that's what we heard or we were raised that way or so on the difference is of course is I'll finish up at the end of this little talk the science has a built-in self-correcting mechanism called the scientific method with peer review and corroboration and and checking and rechecking and and blind and double-blind conditions and all this because scientists are no better at this than anybody else every scientist would love his pet theory to be true they can advance their career much more rapidly win prizes gain raises and so on by having their particular pet theory turned out to be true so of course they're going to succumb to the confirmation bias where they look for and find confirmatory evidence or what they already believe and ignore the disconfirming evidence everybody does it so it's not just political ideologues and economic ideologues and religious people and so on everybody all of us every one of us has this problem so I call this belief dependent realism there is a real world but it's our understanding of it is dependent on our beliefs most of our beliefs are arrived at for non-smart reasons non-rational reasons we were raised that way emotional subjective elements to it family background siblings peer groups teachers mentors books that we read influence of culture and so on all that shapes our beliefs and then and then and then we employ our cortex with our great ability to rationalize and collect all the data we need to support it so that's how it works and I have quite a bit of research showing the research on this how it's related to the levels of uncertainty in the environment the more uncertain the environment is more anxious you are in a particular situation the more likely you are to fall into these traps of just believing things finding patterns and call that patternicity the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise by the way those of you who've asked me why do you why did you create a new name why not just use Paradoia because I can hardly pronounce Paradoia anyway and and that isn't what I mean I I don't mean the process of just seeing the face of Jesus in a tortilla the Virgin Mary inside of a building or grilled cheese sandwich I mean all kinds of patterns and that we have to find patterns and learn and connect the dots that's what we do that's what I'm really talking about with patternicity all sorts of patterns and that the more uncertain the environment is the more likely you are to see patterns it seems to happen more in the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere it's a whole body of research on these different things dopamine appears to be related to it the more input from dopamine you get through experiments by giving subjects al dopa for example they're more likely to see a losery patterns that aren't there so we're kind of starting to hone down on where in the brain this happens why it happens what the neurochemical transmitters are related to finding these patterns and this is all connected to how the brain works and how we learn and we should be cautious not to be too critical of people that find lots of patterns we have to be careful about this because although and you know this this classic skeptics line you know keep it keep a mind open enough to see radical new ideas but not so open minded that your brains fall out well that that is a truism because and I have all section in that chapter on creativity and madness see patternicity this isn't a bad thing it's often a good thing see new patterns that no one else has ever seen that is the basis of creativity and genius this is how you discover make a new discovery in science or create a new genre in music or a new style in art the problem is is that if your brain is kind of wired up to be super creative and see patterns all over the place maybe you also see patterns that aren't real and so my favorite example that I use in the book is that say the difference between Richard Feynman and and John Nash Feynman wins the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of these components to quantum electrodynamics and Feynman diagrams where he sees a vision in his head of how these subatomic particles interact and he sketches them out and you put them on the side of his van which you can still see if you ever get to Southern California I'll take you to see it his van with the famous Feynman diagrams on the side and this as the story goes he was driving up Lake Boulevard there from Pasadena up to Altadena where I live and he lived and with big Feynman diagrams on the side of his van and somebody rolls down the window at the stop sign and says how come you have Feynman diagrams on your van he said because I'm Feynman which I thought that'd be really cool to be able to say that and then by contrast John Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics for his discovery of the mathematical relationships of subjects in games so game theory prisoners dilemma ultimatum games these sorts of things there's something called Nash equilibrium of how subject contestants in a contest a game whether it's something like prisoners dilemma or whether it's nations in a cold war state or or anything like that people in relationships business contracts and whatnot they reached this Nash equilibrium anyway that's not important what's important is that John Nash was also seeing patterns that no one else saw and and if you see enough weird patterns it's actually called schizophrenia and you remember he's the subject of a beautiful mind and he described in the book anyway when asked why is it you you think aliens are talking to you and there's secret government agents that talk to you and he said because it's the same source I get for my mathematics of understanding game theory in other words there's there's no discriminatory tool in the brain to tell the difference between these patterns over here that turn out to be real so important you win a Nobel Prize for it and these patterns over here that are just madness so there is a fine line between creativity and madness and now there's a extensive database Nancy Andreessen University of Iowa is probably the best source for this that her database anyway these are all super creative people people that have won prizes in their fields and and so on and she brings them to the university and scans our brains and so on a significant percentage of them have different degrees of mental illness either a manic depression or schizophrenia or either them or their immediate family members so there's something genetically programming the brain to see lots of patterns on the one hand this is good on the other hand it may not be so good so right it's good the rub is finding the balance there okay back to our thought experiment common on the planes of Africa three and a half million years ago Russell in the grass dangerous predator is a dangerous predator just the wind what's the difference between the wind and a dangerous predator the wind is an inanimate object dangerous predator is an intentional agent the difference between being an inanimate force an intentional agent is what I call aginicity the tendency to infuse these patterns with an intentional agents that operate secretly invisibly controlling the world running things whether these are gods and ghosts and spirits and demons and angels or conspiracies our brains also tend to because we're natural born doulas tend to think that there's two things corporeal and incorporeal body and soul brain and mind I have a little pet peeve in the book about quit using mind words it's probably the result of my recent experiences with Deepak of using these mind words because it's too it's too fuzzy it doesn't tell us anything it makes us think that there's something else in mind that's besides the substrate the brain itself but we know that in fact if you destroy parts of the brain through tumors or brain injury or or strokes or Alzheimer's dementia senility as the neurons die the brain function the mind whatever you want to call it dies with it as your brain dies your memories die where do they go without the brain this was my contention with Deepak where is Aunt Millie's mind when her brain goes from Alzheimer's and by God he had an answer you want to know what it was the matrix the matrix I said great where do I get that other than Netflix without the substrate there is no there's no mind right so but nevertheless we tend to think that there's a dualistic force an essence that continues on all the good research on this by Bruce Hood and and Paul Bloom at Yale and others that for example a few if you ask subjects would you wear Hitler's sweater almost everybody goes no no cuz like infused with evilness like evil is a thing a substance that that it really exists outside of people are but would you wear mr. Rogers cardigan sweater oh yes it would feel so warm and make me feel moral and upstanding and one of these guys put up Brad Pitt sweater on eBay for sale washed or unwashed which one do you think got the most money yeah of course everybody wants the essence of Brad Pittness or whatever that would be now there may be evolutionary reasons for this scent has has a good and bad properties to it the the sense of disgust the things that we that smell really bad and make us have a an emotion of disgust usually tend to be things related to body bodily experiments and communicable diseases things like that that we probably shouldn't get too close to because in our evolutionary history they probably did cause widespread disease something like that so there's a good reason why we have a repulsion for things that are bad especially if they smell bad or related to that versus something like the scent of your lover somebody you love or some good smells like flowers or roses or whatever these bring on good a good sense of of a positive emotion and so that would then maybe be connected in this essentialistic way to good good behavior more moral behavior in that sort of thing anyway I have a long discussion about that but the problem is that the process is that we then naturally tend to believe in invisible agent so I so then I have chapters on God in the afterlife these are obviously elements of that so although yes of course I can't prove there's no God I think I build a pretty good case to show that there's lots of positive evidence to show that we create gods in our brains and exactly how this happens and where it happens in the brain is not one place God's too com complex of a of an idea to happen in just one little spot but I show how this whole essentialism dualism this agency all this stuff sort of combines into different parts of the brain to gel into this idea of a God not not just Yahweh God but any God invisible gods lots of God's polytheistic gods animistic God spirits of any kind demons angels and so forth and then you can just take that from brain neuroscience behavior genetics about 50% of pretty much everything we believe is heritable that is identical twins separated from birth raised in separate environment still have remarkable similarities and not just the way they dress and and food preferences and things like that but political beliefs their economic and social attitudes the religious faith the very very parallel these are lines of evidence showing that that we created God and religions not vice versa and then of course culturally socially historically geographically you can show in a very positive way amounting lots of evidence against the God hypothesis that the number one predictor of what your religious faith is is where you happen to have been born you happen to have been born in India in the 20th century you're likely to be Hindu you're born in America you're likely to be Christian of course there's exceptions but statistically that's the way it goes so that alone tells us not to mention all the common elements of of all the different pre-christian religions that had virgin birth elements to their story resurrection elements and so forth raising the dead performing miracles these are all quite common so I document all those and show that it would be very unlikely I would be shocked if it turned out there was a God however just in case I have a little statement that I'm prepared to read as you never know so this is what I would say to God I should it turn out that I would have wrong anyway so Lord I did the best I could with the tools you granted me you gave me a brain to think skeptically and I used it accordingly you gave me the capacity to reason and I applied it to all claims including that of your own existence you gave me a moral sense and I felt the pangs of guilt and the joys of pride for the bad and good things I chose to do I tried to do unto others as I would have them do unto me and although I fell far short of the ideal far too many times I tried to apply your fundamental principle whenever I could whatever the nature of your immortal and infinite spiritual essence actually is as a mortal finite corporeal being I cannot possibly fathom it despite my best efforts and so do with me whatever you will and I mean it and then the last third of the book I talk about political and ideological beliefs because those are beliefs too that are dependent upon all sorts of subjective emotional components so I won't get into all that because I've spoken here about that before conspiracy theories I find really interesting and a little tricky because unlike say the paranormal or the supernatural conspiracies do happen Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalists the black hand who triggered the start of World War one Watergate was a conspiracy there's lots of conspiracies that the the problem is is we tend to be a little too susceptible we people in general about believing anything you hear is therefore every conspiracy comes seems to be true like Jesse Ventura's love of anything he's ever heard must be a true conspiracy and so when I debated him on this I you know he was on on about 9 11 truth ism and how you know how do you explain the you know the play the buildings fellow you know all these arguments fell in their footprint building seven and he was on about the Pentagon to be hit by a missile so I asked him a simple question Jesse where's the plane if the missile helped to hit the building and not a plane where's the plane because it's gone and like Deepak never never fails to have an answer all they flew it to Canada and whisked the subjects of the the people the customers off and so on anyway so but if everything's a conspiracy then nothing's a conspiracy we have to have some way to discriminate between truth I have a little conspiracy detector kit in the book here's like the 10 things you know that make it to make it unlikely that a conspiracy would be true like if it if it involves world domination you know it's probably not true conspiracies tend to be very narrowly focused and so on although I have to say I had a recent scare about that watching that movie too big to fail on HBO based on the best-selling book too big to fail about the financial crisis and there's that scene in the movie that's also depicted in the book quite powerfully in September of 2008 where Paulson and Bernacke call in the top 10 CEOs of all the major bank Bank of America and Citibank and and Countrywide and so on and brings them all in a room and says all right guys we control like 70% of the world's finances and if we don't do something this weekend we're not gonna have an economy on Monday and I thought holy crap it's it's 12 guys in a room running the world like I said can't happen so I have to say some of my libertarian propensities are a little bit challenged about concerns for those kinds of non-transparent power sources do make me kind of nervous in this in this case the corporate financial world government has the same problem too so anytime you have those kinds of big forces that does make me think maybe some conspiracies at least have some element of truth so we have to keep an open mind about that and always test those so I'm gonna finish up here and just read the last two paragraphs of the book about why science is our best hope for getting around this trap of belief dependent realism so we now come to the end of this narrative journey of belief but it is really just the beginning of a new understanding of how the brain generates beliefs and reinforces them as truths of the many mysteries we have been covered in questions we have tried to answer one in particular stands out homo-rationalists that species of human who carefully weighs all decisions through cold hard logic and rational analysis of the data is not only extinct but probably never existed mr. Spock is science fiction and it's a good thing because people who have suffered brain damage to the emotional networks of their brains particularly their limbic systems find it nearly impossible to make even the simplest of decisions about the most mundane choices in life which toothpaste to buy for example with so many brands and sizes and qualities and prices to consider reason alone will leave you standing there in the store aisle frozen and indecision analysis paralysis and emotional leap of faith beyond reason is often required just to get through the day let alone make the big decisions in life in the end all of us are trying to make sense of the world and nature has gifted us with a double-edged sword that cuts foreign against on one edge our brains are the most complex and sophisticated information processing machines in the universe capable of understanding not only the universe itself but the process of understanding on the other edge by the very same process of forming beliefs about the universe and ourselves we are also more capable than any other species of self deception and illusion a fooling ourselves even when we are trying to avoid being fooled by nature in the end I want to believe but I also want to know the truth is out there and although it may be difficult to find science is the best tool we have for uncovering it thank you thank you Michael Schremmel ladies and gentlemen


Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. Today we have an experiment. We have a fascinating scenario exercise that I'm really looking forward to on a great topic that should really stretch of one's imaginations. See we here at the forum, we believe that we always want to have new and different practices. We want to make sure that we can have all kinds of experiments as the technology evolves and today's session is partly the brainchild of our friend Brent Anders. Hello Brent. Hello. Nice to be on here. Good to see you. What time is it in Armenia today I should ask? Right now it's 10 p.m. 10 p.m. Thank you for staying up so late with us. And having your suit and tie and looking bright and shiny. Much appreciated. So our idea was we wanted to have a kind of scenario exercise where we work through the a possible future of artificial intelligence and we've kept the nature of that scenario secret until now. So I just want to walk you through it and then what's in fact let me just tell you how this is all going to work out. So first of all what we're going to describe for you is a scenario for the next year for the possibility of a new wave of artificial intelligence and then the way we're going to work with that is we're going to introduce that to you we're going to sketch it out and then take some questions about how you think it might work and then we're going to break you up into small groups so each of you could think about how this might impact you and how you can react and that you is you in your current professional role if you're a university president, a college professor, a campus technologist, a librarian, a student, a trustee or where you'd like to be in a couple of years. So put your brains together and think about that and then we're going to come back and share back and then about halfway through the hour we're going to give you the second installment of the scenario as the scenario keeps developing and then we're going to repeat that we're all going to ask questions and then go back into groups and then share back at the very last few minutes we'll share overall reflections about how this went for you and what you learned and what you think. Before I throw the switch on the on the scenario any questions from anybody I should ask a couple of you by the way in the those of you who are friends who are in Texas like Melanie I hope you're staying nice and cool. I'm sure that you guys are going to be hitting some electrical power brothers. I'm not seeing any questions Brent Brent do you have any anything you want to add about how we make this run? No just the other big thing about this is that this is a scenario right so some of my background deals with military so we would do things like this a lot where we would create a situation so that's the way you really need to view this and of course this is an excellent instructional pedagogy as well because what we're trying to do is make an emotional connection so the more that you can put yourself within this scenario the better that you could have this real thought-provoking aspect of what would we do if this situation was true? Excellent that's really really well put thank you thank you well without any further ado here is the scenario and by the way just a couple of guidelines as I mentioned play your current role or what like what role you'd like to take think about your responses in terms of practicality what you'd like to do realistically as long as with vision what this means for you conceptually and be ready to collaborate talk with people here everyone will have great perspectives and great ideas Sarah glad that worked very good and hello to Ireland good to see you in this lego okay so what I'd like you to imagine is that artificial general intelligence appears in the world and this is different from what we've seen so far of artificial intelligence AGI means intelligence like human beings capable of moving from domain to domain having conversations with people reaching out and acting in the world we don't currently have this in reality as of september 2023 although chat gbt looks like you can come close at times the company behind chat gbt would like to do that that's what open ai is all about but in our scenario we posit that it appears next year it doesn't come for the united states it doesn't come from China it comes from europe so our background from this is we'd like you to imagine that over the next year an academic collaboration has been working on a tool they call rossum and rossum begins as a virtual world's participant that is a bit of software that can inhabit a world like world blocks or like minecraft but then it can interact with people in a way that's convincing is another player and it can also work in that world it can play in the world it can add and subtract content and in our scenario the team behind rossum gets better and better at this and they move rossum from device to device from platform to platform they're able to have it be a full human like participant in virtual worlds and they add to it some interesting modules one for initiative that is right now if you use chat gbt you'd only response to you when you input things but here rossum actually goes off and does things on its own and one of those things it does is it learns and it tries to study and to get more information including by research and web the academic collaboration here has questions have they actually created our fishing general intelligence or not well helping them in the spring of 2024 is a european startup partnership uh which decides that they may have figured out part of your general intelligence they invest in this and they rebrand this as rossum your digital companion they publish it as a mobile app and it goes into the world and rossum becomes very very popular very very quickly people give it turing tests that's um uh turing's idea of not being able to tell something that's human or not when it types back to you in this case rossum passes that and people start declaring the aware to be actually the achievement of artificial general intelligence and rossum as a service reaches into the world so it starts scanning the web for more and more information to learn and starts requesting more options in the physical world as well so the first question i want to ask you all is what questions do you have about rossum and how this plays out what background questions uh in the chat uh james danibale says it's like they have a training area the matrix movies nice parallel very very similar except the different imagine that training area fully fleshed out you know as a gigantic roblox world or a gigantic um minecraft server and yes uh sarah this is a good point um rossum is uh actually quite friendly with gdpr and is so far better at privacy issues in general edward points out that some humans might not pass a turing test quite true uh lisa durf notes the information is not the same as critical analysis true which is an interesting challenge for rossum is rossum super intelligent guy not yet so far rossum seems to be on a par with humans but it is learning is an enterprise version available for universities kartik um that's something that's up on that's up for grabs so in your group you want to mention that uh bryan asks is there any other objective other than continuing to learn uh right now continuing to work with human beings is rossum free uh jason good question uh there's a freemium model uh where you can get a lot of stuff for it from free or you can pay for some things like removing ads uh phil the uh who's paying for it was this european startup uh and so far it's hard to tell who a lot of its investors are kaleen what it needs to reach out into the world what it wants to learn it can do web searches it can download material that's in the open web and it can put out requests to copyright owners for the use of copyright materials it would also like to use physical sensors such as cameras microphones and so on uh robert it has some baked in rules guiding it but so far those rules are largely opaque rossum is not open source uh it's not the back of it is not publicly available sarah points out since it's gdpr compliant uh it has to give you the right to be forgotten yes and it can erase your uh discussion um your interaction with it and you can also ask it to not consider you in its research melanie asks if rossum has the capability to add its own modules yes uh it can add its own code and it can grow that uh don't ask what goals is it given uh right now all of those it is basically you know as a given individual human has the capacity to become many many things and to pursue many goals it has that kind of openness right now wendy asks if rossum can create new knowledge that was hard to say um yes it can guided properly and it might be able to create some on its own uh robert rossum cannot act in the physical world yet as far as we know um there it is requesting access to physical sensors we don't know if the company behind it has experimented with this right but he also is yet about physical about bias yes um this has guardrails much like contemporary ai does right now uh who's making money from it so far that gets funneled right into the startup film gregg asks a good question by health care and skilled nursing facilities that's a really really good one to pursue in small groups absolutely uh noah you ask are the controls prevent rossum from being manipulative do you mean manipulate the sense of manipulating human beings to do what it wants uh no leon your question is fine don't apologize at all good to see it uh sarah as far as we know it is not using our cameras and sensors as far as we know oh henry good question uh rossum does have accuracy checks uh it constantly checks its output to make sure that it is consistent with what it does of the world uh mark cobert wilson assumes rossum is a weapon to identify thought criminals we have no evidence of that being used so far uh robert bell asked does they have to ask permission before doing something that's a really good question uh in terms of using copyrighted material yes in terms of doing anything else it asks permission that's a good question if it's part of the guardrails or not uh definition of agi for this exercise is basically human-like intelligence show the idea that it has the ability to converse to explore the world to interact with other people in a human-like fashion right in both ways right because it can ask questions because it's it's thinking on its own now at a human level right very good sarah sangragoreo hello sarah says what is a ceo company mentioned is the goal the tool uh making agi is the goal uh that's that's the main idea right now uh kawrossum spin-off versions of itself uh steven doesn't seem why not yet we haven't seen it happen yet uh ed asks a very good practical question is it tied to particular platforms uh it was released for mobile apps that is for ios and for android uh right now uh karthik asks was the training data set mostly Eurocentric it seems to be so far good question uh no asks if rossum can manipulate users there seems to be guardrails there seem to be guardrails about that but it just got it just got released so there's a real question of research for it uh phil and i think you should i think you should move forward and not answer everyone's question because just like just like right now there's so much ambiguity with some of these things yeah the current version i think part of that should be an element and then trying to address certain aspects very good i like this idea um excellent um so i'm going to break you into groups right now um so i'm going to authorize this through shindig right now um so i again i'd like you to think about how to respond to rossum in your current role at an institution or the role you'd like to have in a couple of years so we're going to do this for five minutes i'm not going to record the silence because i'd be pointless uh brett and i are going to try to hop around and visit a few groups but please have at least one of you ready to report back what you think will happen and think how you'd learn about this what you plan on doing and what your institution would like to do okay so here i will create the groups now and i'm going to give you about six people on each and here we go now we need to wrap things up from the small group work and i'd love to hear what you all have found what have you discovered what have you determined in terms of how you might reply to everybody here there what do you think all right well i was in one of the groups and they were having some some heated uh interaction so oh what did they say were some of the key points um do you want to get that from from the group or well yeah actually who's in the who's in the group who it was let's see here i was with a group that had um milling hog uh dr lisa durf oh no not lisa durf oh man that must have been a terrifying great student a student was in there too karta kaya oh sorry if i'm impronouncing your name uh he had some great points so we're having all sorts of discussions so well i've got to bring karta gunstage yeah robert bell also i mean a lot of great a lot of great talk here well in full disclosure karthik is a brilliant student in my program at georgetown and he is a very forward thinking student in terms of entrepreneurship nonprofits and also ai karthik hello hello hello can you hear me okay yes fine uh good evening are you in Uganda now i am in Uganda it's 9 30 p.m right now excellent thank you for staying up for us so what did what did your group decide what were some of the ideas that came to mind yeah i think so uh we actually just started off by how it would affect the normal procedures and processes of the university so assessments for example right like uh if a if a child bot is able to replicate student voice based on its conversations with the student it sort of goes beyond the existing existing discussions we've been having about chat gpt where we compare it to a calculator here it becomes a paper mill where instead of hiring someone who works for paper mill you're employing a chat bot that's able to speak in your voice uh generate all of its content based in available information so basically it's doing research and then also adding on whatever it knows about you through that research so it's like me submitting a paper to you but it's written by a chat bot which knows me and which knows your resources so that was something that came up uh then we were thinking about university services whether it could change some of those career advising for example i think with agi apps to your test becomes much more easier because if i'm constantly engaging with the chat bot that means the chat bot does have a sense of who i am what i am interested in and it could give me feedback on anything related to mental health career advising other services that the university sort of offers sure really good and i want to chime in the honor code came up it was really interesting how in in this conversation that they went from like a a dr jekyll and mr hide aspect right because it's like first we started off saying things about wow this new conscious type of ai could be now within one system it could be an awesome instructor with so many different aspects of pedagogy it could be the advisor it could be uh instructors on multiple different types and different levels of understanding and it could be all the it could be a counselor it could be you know all these different services that it could provide and then we switch it to the other end as far as well now since it knows so much about me it could create my entire essay for me it could create all these things so it's like for the assessment purposes even though it could function as such a great assessor by knowing you and knowing when to sort of okay now let's move on you're ready to advance to this next level because it knows me so well but now we have to understand okay well who's assessing us now if it's the ai that's assessing us if we could build that in great but now if I have to turn around and be assessed by an instructor are they gonna constantly question whether it's me or the ai that created something lots of different interesting aspects were so great but yet so problematic at the same time fascinating fascinating just uh just a quick uh check with everybody uh if in the chat just let me know if if you uh if you're okay with me summarizing this and getting some extracts from the chat on a blog list um I'll I'll take your names off as usual just let me know in the chat um those are some karthik and but those are some amazing differences um I mean the the teacher that could be any role and of course the ai rosson being able to play any student function at all um that's a that's a huge huge change um uh thank you thank you let's hear from another group I would love to hear especially I'd love to hear from the female members of the audience um we've got a lot of guys here and by the way karthik's beard is coming along nicely but I'd love to hear from from some more women um please uh what would you what did you discover in your grips uh and ask a good question does rossom have gender um and right now the name um if John Hollenbeck caught the literary reference there uh is to a male scientist uh more than a century ago um but right now uh people can talk rossom into uh being various genders uh could be emily rossom if you like and they bring up leon uh leon mccarthur has her hand raised I actually want to volunteer someone else um mary from midlands tech I'm sorry you were several of us in the chat we're like mary mary if you're willing I'll draft mary right now I'll I'll bring up mary I'll summon mary is that how that sounds like uh actually I don't have mary in the list there there you go there you go um let me see if I can bring you up mary you have all kinds of fans I hold on I'm trying am I there you are here I I'm I'm not sure how I got nominated but um I look at it sort of I'm in a two-year community college just so you're aware and of course outside of the center for teaching excellence there was a lot about policing and all of that but what we're looking what I'm looking at in particular is figuring out how we assist students particularly at my level we're an open um admission college which means our faculty to get everything from unprepared underprepared uh total across the board they they can have anything and they obviously don't have the background to know how to teach we talk about remediation we talk about all these things we know that remediation courses don't really work at this level because the students never graduate so we're looking at how we can teach students to use something like this as their own own learning but you're talking about assessment in higher ed how do the students learn to assess their own level of knowledge so what do they need to know can it say how do we get here because you're right if you ask an instructor to assess you you take one of those computer courses where everything's taught through third party and then the instructor gives a test the students can't pass because the third party software did it different we have to make sure that if we're doing this I think that we are actually teaching the students how to use it as a learning tool how to use it as an instructional tool in a language that I can understand so you teach me something and I'll use simple concept they used in my group mitosis and meiosis for some reason students struggle right new students first year they don't know what well go to one of these ai's and say hey can you explain this to me in uh football terms because I don't get it can you there's so many ways that our students can use it to get it translated into a common enough language that they can process it and begin to integrate it into their own schema and that's what I'm kind of looking at is how the best assessments are when you assess yourself determine yourself strong or weak somewhere and then figuring out the plan to move forward with that that's what a lot of us do with our learning so how do we teach students who don't have that natural desire to follow that how do you how do you teach them to use this in that manner well that sounds fascinating so I mean the uh Karthik and Brett the the teacher figure that you came up with here becomes even more powerful yeah a student could say please teach me of this in my cultural context and then specify with the cultural context exactly or ask rossom to figure out what the cultural context would be or to compare compare to cultural context nice I mean think about that we have so much of that it's it's so great to see how we're we're having to think about the future right and this future possibility to better understand current issues because that's exactly what you're talking about is AI literacy that's yes that's like the main thing that I've been working on is that because so many people fail to realize the power that the AI currently has and then if we were to get this this level of of artificial intelligence that as that at a human level like that would be even more beyond but even right now so many people don't access it or when they access it and it doesn't give them the result that they want oh AI isn't good enough at all right now no you weren't good enough in prompting thank you to realize that you can continue on with the conversation dig deeper understand even more yeah there's there's AI literacy thank you for bringing that up because that's such key key component well we we hear AI compared to calculators so much so my background is electrical engineering advanced mathematics and you know I think about when I was teaching lower-level classes they come in used to using a regular calculator and then they need a scientific america whoa it's all it's graphing well they don't know how to use that at all it's not just the calculator and when you try to link to do AI that way I think it does it it's just an injustice because it it's if you're going to liken it to a calculator you want to think of it as a computer ability to calculate not the little you know four plus four calculator and now we're talking about something that goes beyond generative AI into artificial general intelligence mary thank you for agreeing to be drafted um you're wonderful uh kartik thank you so much um we need to advance and take another step forward because this is that was just the first opening move of what happens uh with rosson now we want to take you a little bit further uh to the second stage of what happens um so here i'll put this up here and uh brend why don't you take us forward okay so so yeah i imagine that now it's a few months later so this came out in the spring of 2024 but now we're a few months later in that it's the summer of 2024 so just a few months have gone by but yet things are really escalating very quickly the startup has now now has five billion or nine billion dollars that it's been able to instantly bring together right why because this is such a popular thing just like chat gbt was extremely popular when it first came out and it still is this would be even more so plus it came out in europe but now the chinese have a version of it the us the russians uh you know there's all sorts of different countries that are now starting to have their own versions of this so now they're starting to be more people understanding this so there's political pressure to contain or to ban it and so they're worried about what could be ramifications of this level of ai there's an open source version now so it's not just controlled by let's say a big company but there's also open source versions what does that mean as far as what's going to happen with it agi has now been used in war so some of you might not know but current levels of ai current levels of ai have already been used in more where i live at in armenia there's a neighboring country there's land disputes they've used a special type of missile that gets sent and it flies around it flies around until it sees a target it uses ai and then it activates all on its own no human control of it so it's already being implemented but imagine a system that's way beyond that to a higher cognitive level and how that could be used in war so that's another aspect to consider yes another slide by yeah okay so because of this of course many people are going to be using the ai that they have access to in many different ways just like with chat gpt so the markets are in complete turmoil people are finding out different ways that they can make money or cause different things to happen within the markets religious reactions imagine an ai that can talk to you answer your questions and guide you on all sorts of different paths and you're getting huge benefits from it many people will start to think well this is the answer to all of my issues so there's aspects that were going to be happening with religion it's going to become a religion it's going to be questioned people are going to question their own religion so there's going to be lots of religious turmoil going on there fears of people disappearing into agi worlds that's a real concern because with with virtual reality increasing its capability and now the fact that an agi could be a character within virtual reality wow and now everything could be a perfect scenario perfect situation within my virtual world why would i ever want to leave so people will start to be disappearing they'll be plugged in and so that's going to cause issues within society in itself so of course there'll be calls for boycotts protests by creators of all kinds for different types of things of course we have a protest going on right now in hollywood because of ai issues but think about artwork uh authors of books and magazines of all sorts of different things there's an article that just came out recently about uh newscasters in india because they're starting to be replaced by ai newscasters so that's something to think about it's it's going to spread continually so there's so many different levels of society how is academia going to react to this what are we going to do what are how are we going to help the situation how are we going to address future political leaders future leaders of industry and business leaders of marketing leaders of ethics and english what is academia going to do are we going to take a stance are we going to what's the answer what's the possibilities that's the question to think about well thank you thank you oh that's really really nicely done breath in the chat we have the comment academia will panic slowly which i really like it's a good phrase a few people have been asking questions but i think a lot of your questions are really getting into how you might be reacting and also the questions are are going through all these different strata of society once so what i'd like to do is to resume breakouts again and then i'd like you to think now this is the second round now the agi has gone into the world and you're seeing some of its manifestations of how it's growing now how do you respond in your role or the role that you'd like to have coming up so here i'll give you five minutes to put your heads together and see what you think brent in each of the time i'd like to do a little popcorn exercise you think we should do that sure yeah okay so let me ask everybody and all of your groups if you could turn if at least one of you could turn to the chat now don't don't type in anything yet what i'd like you to do each of you is to start to type in your one of your takeaways from what your group just talked about if you're talking about the labor market or about how plagiarism would change or whichever one and don't hit return yet though this is this is one of those text popcorn routines and this can be as many from your group as wants to go and then what i'd like you to do give you a couple seconds here is once you've put in your phrase i want you all hit return at the same time i'm gonna cap down so get ready with your popcorn three two one go oh my gosh look at all of this wow fantastic yeah some really good ones this is terrific you're definitely going to need to save that to to post it somewhere so that we can i'm gonna do that later yeah i'm gonna have to post it and edit it up a bit so that it's uh that's possible oh my gosh okay okay this is curriculum changes finding truths do i always help information pollution change fatigue yes yes yes yes a lot about ethics knowledge slipping through our fingers and a few literary references here including the wonderful em foster story the machine stops let me just uh in in the interest of time and an interest of hearing from all of you uh let me just ask uh if someone wants to volunteer to come up on stage or if you'd like me to flash your observation on the screen uh for the letter please uh type in the q and a box or for the former just uh click the raised hand uh days i ask a great question but these i have a question for you these asks how long do we want to survive the question is uh which it days uh steven crawford observes the foundation of society may be shattered and a higher red will need to respond by helping fix that foundation uh what a view what a vision thank you yeah my my group was was talking all about the the aspects of of the university itself right will we still have a university if we can have an ai that can be all these things that can be a professor for every single topic so then we started talking about well then we would need different ways of doing accreditation like that you have credits that you have a degree is that going to matter how will it matter all sorts of different things to think about this could be a hard reset for educations we know it um let's see we have a couple of people with raised their hands let me bring a couple of them up and this is uh steven crawford hello sir oh how you doing all right good to see you and i brought the beard um excellent you know one of one of the things is like i saw in the scenario about war and my first thought was the movie war games and the conclusion of the only winning move is not to play and so part of me is sitting there imagining i could see a generative ai system if it was allowed to control military resources may actually turn around and do the opposite of what we expect and not kill all humans but actually say hold on a second this is not the best way to go about things and then potentially go a step further and say let's do some climate change here and let's start you know and maybe do some hard decisions that we're unable to make and and start to reverse the climate change and that's where i talk about shattering the foundation because i imagine if aliens visit to the earth not invade but actually came to visit and have a conversation how many world religions would shatter suddenly going wait a minute something came out of the sky and is now talking to us and it's not who we thought it was um you know i you know you there's just so many pieces there and i think that's part of what i think we're looking at is that we're looking at a complete societal shift higher ed could have a whole different role um that could look something more like out of foundation of all things you know where it's more of storing knowledge and and guiding and helping the ai learn and helping you know preserve knowledge for future generations more than anything else i wonder how it would approach the problem of preservation of knowledge it's very funny that you just brought that up brine because i just got off of a an interview with a group in an la that uh they're very interested in that so they're looking at ways to address ensuring that current information that is real isn't going to be deep faked so they're trying to figure out different ways of like maybe with nfts or maybe in some other ways in order to ensure that that data and information is locked because it ties in with historical information you know if if we say that this place was built at this time and several nations agree to that we don't want some rogue nation to come in and say no that's wrong and then they use ai to build a case against it so preservation of information is a key thing that is starting to be definitely looked at and that's i think i think that's a big concern is that we keep thinking of a single one like like rossum was but as as this scenario presents if multiple countries present multiple ai's they're going to reach different conclusions because they're coming off different data sets right and want to create their own versions of history of information of reality uh well first of all steven thank you that's a lot coming from and i hope by the way very seriously i hope you're staying cool i am this week we we've lost power a couple times due to the equipment filling of the heat but uh we've i think we're on the on the good side of it here in phoenix final where it's only going to be in the mid hundreds not the 115th oh my gosh please please be safe and oh yeah work thank you uh brent i'm a little concerned that we only have two minutes left and and we have so many so many comments and so many ideas i'm curious i mean someone who's doing so much professional work on on the ai writing books and giving workshops and speaking around the world what are your some of your reflections about the process we just went through this best hour yeah so i'm very glad that one person brought up that this aspect of having to change their their policies right and that's going to be an ongoing thing because it's just like what we're saying with current levels of chat gpt all universities should be changing the policy to address aspects of ai now having done that what happens when we have this level of ai that's beyond chat gpt that's human level now what are we going to do and then of course we all want to worry and say well now it's the ai doing things and it's not really the student but we have to prepare them for a world in which their work is going to require them to use that ai so they're going to have to be able to have the ai be part of who they are and what they do in order to be able to succeed in the workplace so it's this really weird situation that we're in in academia that so many universities so far are just waiting and see i'm going to wait and see that's what i get from a lot of universities throughout the world to include developed nations in fact developing nations are seem to be doing more than western nations right it's such a weird situation because they're seeing it they're looking at the opportunities that ai is going to provide so they're jumping all over it they're the ones that are flying me out they're the ones that are wanting me to do webinars because they realize how important it is a lot of the western countries are just let's just wait let's go with what we're doing it's very interesting situation so in our in our second phase of our scenario having not just the u.s and china but also countries that are not as high in the development arc india and russia as producers of of competitors to russia but then the usage being across the global south this is great friend just if you if you can in the chat just just if you could put in a couple of words about what you thought of this exercise how it went what we could do differently you were better i would love to hear from that brent i just want to say thank you so much for being a great co-host co-conspirator and for coming up with this thank you now this is a great situation great experience if anyone wants more information about what i'm doing please subscribe to my youtube channel i would love to develop a greater community of inquiry where we can continue to have these type of discussions and work with brian on sort of all sorts of different possibilities yeah absolutely thank you and get get some sleep yeah thank you but friends none of you have slept all of you have been torrents of energy i really really admire all of the ideas the practicality the wisdom the creativity that you brought to bear on the subject we're going to uh as as soon as i can dig out from under i'm going to post this well the video and then a blog post with more of this but thank you for thinking together with us if if this has worked we'd be happy to do a few more such exercises on the forum if your minds are buzzing right now and you'd like to keep talking about all of this please head over to social media where we have a few different presences in fact i'm pretty much everywhere here's twitter and mastodon use the hashtag ftte to keep going if you'd like to look into our previous sessions for inspiration just go to our archive at tinyurl.com slash fdf archive or go to the forum website also the forum website you can see our other topics coming up which some of which don't touch ai for the first time in a while everything for academic twitter educational technology to leave organizing and grading if you'd like to get more information about ai i'm still writing it sub-stack so just go to aiandacademia.substack.com and i've got a whole series of posts coming up and thank you all again um i know those of you in the northern hemisphere some of you have been experiencing extraordinary heat as we mentioned in this hour i hope you all stay safe and well for everybody i hope the fall semester or at least the late 2023 semester is treating you well i wish you all the best look forward to continue to think with you together and we'll see you next time online bye bye


hey guys so it is tuesday at around 10 i just finished doing a bunch of schoolwork a bunch of other stuff and then now my videos rendering so then i gotta watch that over upload it yes i ended up finishing fangirl today i gave it two stars i'll link my goodreads review down below i have a lot of problems with it and i know it's a very unpopular opinion but what can i do about it like i didn't like it so yeah hey guys so it is wednesday i never know the date but it's on the screen probably hi all of you guys said you wanted longer vlogs i was like oh okay i can do that i can do that okay i was just surprised i was like oh cool people kind of like me okay another note i haven't read anything today um but i went out a little bit i got i went out to eat gotta love bomb vegan food always but i went to indigo and my dad bought me a few things what an absolute sweetheart so i'll show you what i got so i ended up getting their like stationary little knickknacks and stuff were like buy two get the third free and i'm like okay and kind of a spoiler for my bullet journal video for february but i'm doing chris a theme for crystals and like i don't know kind of like galaxy crystals horoscopes like the whole shebang like i want to kind of see that insight like i've never been into horoscopes but i kind of want to like see what the appeal is and kind of like look into it but i like crystals so then they have this new crystal collection at indigo and look at this oh my gosh but that's not the the sticky notes like i'm going to use these in my spreads and it's gonna look beautiful i also just got i really don't need this but it's a pencil case with crystals and i got a bookmark because i actually like these string ones a lot i use them a lot so yeah and then i did get a book and you guys know i'm kind of on a ban ish i don't know if that video has gone up is that a pimple damn it okay not the point keeping it real okay so i got the sea of strangers by laying leaf this is poetry and pros i've read her other stuff i liked her other stuff so my camera just ran out of storage so which is probably because i haven't deleted anything off it since i got it so i'm it has a lot of memory like dang but this is sea of strangers like i said i've liked some of her other stuff some of her stuff was just okay but i think lullabies was my favorite collection by her and i was reading some of it in the store so i did think about like i and i've been like i've been like soon as i found out i was releasing i was anticipating it but like it wasn't in my most anticipated because like i didn't know about it um but i just think it's gonna be really good it has really good ratings on goodreads and it seems really promising so i'm excited to read it and i know it won't be on my tbr long because i'm hoping to read it very soon so hey guys so it is thursday so school was average today not really i wanted to leave honesty people it's the best policy it is thursday and i just went to update you so around when i am or something i stayed up and i was reading sea of strangers by long leave i ended up finishing it i really like this one i like this one a lot better than some of her other collections and i was just overall impressed with it and i really liked like it's about like her usual poetry collections are which is about love loss that sort of thing and i just really liked this one because it talked a lot about the sea and the ocean and it had a lot of like symbolism with that and i just really enjoyed that about it so i gave it a 3.75 out of five so that's that so i've read two books this week so far and i'm just trying to look at um this yeah look how satisfying this is like i can't like i'm not trying to bribe about how many books i've read but like i love looking at the layout like hello day hey so hello how are you it is friday night and i'm bringing you guys a haul instead of reading updates basically the zena signing is tomorrow and i was thinking about not going just because those things stress me out like a lots of people um lots of people and i don't know i'm just nervous and there's gonna be some booktubers there that i really love and like i would like cry if i met them so i'm gonna like remain chill well i wouldn't actually i don't think i would cry but like i would be like speechless to meet like ariel and i think hayley from hayley and booklin's gonna be there so and then sasha oh my god no and lindsay like i couldn't come here babes he's just looking at me so i've read like literally 20 pages of zenas which i'm not gonna make it a goal to finish it by the signing because that's not gonna happen but i've read two books this week so far and then exams are next week so like i gotta get my shit together look at his little head see if i lift him he'll like scratch my eyes out so here come here for once now you're not walking in front of the camera just don't knock it over no no i literally came home and fell asleep like in my jacket like that's how you know you're tired i literally just like plopped out on my bed and put on music and just knocked out so basically if you don't know hot topic hi they have like there's this thing called hot cash with them so basically around a certain time if you spend a certain amount of money you get all these coupons or like $15 coupons so i had like like five or six of them so like i had to spend a certain amount to save a bunch of money so i did that and i've been waiting for the hot cash to be available since like mid-december so like i'm so happy so i got a bunch of stuff but i got a really good price so don't at me okay so first i'll show you guys the funk goes so i got i got this one so western tweety isn't it the cutest thing you've ever seen and like they're coming out with like a bunch of the looney tunes ones and like it seems so cool no cat no no no no no no move your butt move move move your cute move um so i'm super excited for that one i didn't mean to get this many funcles it's just i found so many that i liked and like i need to spend a certain amount so i'm like oh i also got rootpaul what a queen honestly i am so happy like i was tweeting my friends picture like i was sending my friends pictures of this pop and i was like oh my god and like usually when you see pops online like they're usually not available in canada yet or like they're super hard to find so like i couldn't like i wasn't gonna try to find it because like i know they're hard to find but i found it and then another one just like that i got her copain so i've seen him online and i was like i'm not like awesome like i really really want that but like it's going to be where that i find it because usually they come out like usually they're i don't know you just want to see them it's like they're coming out in the u.s can you move your tail dude you're a pain he's literally rubbing his face on the side of my boxes like all right no okay i also got taker belt and this is like the diamond edition so basically i have what is it snow white and like what's her face bell and these diamond dishes diamond collection editions they're basically just like the princesses or what like the disney characters but they they're covered in like glitter i don't know she looked cute so i just got her and then i found another riverdale pop so i ended up finding Cheryl cool hip so i have all of them except for betty so yeah that's cool i'm very surprised by that and then i got these okay i love pokemon like i need to get another game for my ds because i've literally beat all the pokemon games i have you look terrified what's wrong with you buddy what's wrong with you buddy he hates me okay um so i got these socks he looks so scared i'm such like a baby to my cat like when i come home i start yelling his name and i'm like booty hey and then all my other fans like my brother's like why don't you say hi to me and i'm like no i'm gonna talk to the cat instead but i got these like socks slash slippers and they have evie on them and like you know they have like the little suction thingies at the bottom don't mind the cat what are you doing hi and they're super fluffy i had Pikachu ones this but like i only have one like i don't know where the other one went and like these are just so comfy like i use them so often um and then i got these so these are these are like those little gloves with the fingers cut out and they have like the little jacks gallington thing on them and isn't it so nice like i love it they're from the night before christmas if you didn't know i love that film so much and yeah so i got these little guys i don't know what i'm gonna wear but probably when i don't want to wear gloves but i'm like i kind of should wear gloves so i'll just wear gloves with the thought with the fingers cut out so then i got some pants so i got these track pants i hope they like fit okay so these are pants and it says jughead was here on them oh my god did you guys watch the new river dow did you watch the new river dow who's yelling in my house um did you guys watch the new river dow it was good like if you're gonna talk about it put like the spoiler thing in the comments but like i liked it they're taking another turn and they're like doing something that i knew was gonna happen too and i'm like oh but well everyone knew that thing was gonna happen but yeah these are the pants and they're like tight at the bottom and yes i wanted the south side serpents one but they didn't have my size so okay and then last but not least i got earbuds because i only one of my earbuds works but like i love my other earbuds like literally earbuds always break for me like always like so i invested in like a more expensive pair like a year or two ago and they're not expensive but they're like not five dollars or ten dollars they're like 40 or something um and those only one works now and i was like when you're trying listen to audio booking like when you're trying to listen to music when you're out and it only comes out of one ear i'm like no like i need both so like i'm gonna try these out i really like the pattern on them oh he hates it no don't scratch my lens you can scratch the side don't scratch my lens he literally hates this oh my god like look now he's all edgy ready hey buddy ring around peeps bye so it is it is sunday today so an update on what happened yesterday basically i did go to the zina signing it was fun honestly if you saw me there and i looked dead that's because i didn't i slept two hours the night before i didn't put on any makeup i got their head six so i was up at like five so if you came up to me or if you said hi and i looked really pissed off please don't take it to any of them because i that's a vacuum upgrade i looked really pissed and not truthfully i was really dizzy i thought i was gonna fall over multiple times so if you saw me at the event and i looked like done that's not anything towards any of you and i was actually really happy that like i was i felt really like i don't know it felt really good that some people recognized me and said hi and at first i was really nervous like someone was gonna notice me because i'm like like i don't know what to say like i've met i've never met a viewer in public that has like said they've seen my videos and that's like the first time us that we've met so i don't know thank you guys so much if any of you guys said hi uh for those who said hi to me for i talked to a bunch of people and about like i talked to a bunch of people i exchanged youtube channels with some people i got to meet ariel sasha and lindsay and then i also got to talk to hayley from hayley and bookland which i love her channel and her so much so it's such an honor just to speak with her and she was actually like the nicest little like nugget that i've ever seen in my life and i don't know why i was expecting them all to be like different but they're literally all how they are in their videos like ariel's like exactly how she is in her videos like kind of quirky and smart and funny and yeah they were all just like how they are in their videos when i met them and that was like really cool i don't know what i expected but yeah they were all really sweet and i loved meeting them all and yeah so i did have a good time at the signing but i was really sick after so that's the only thing it's because i didn't eat didn't sleep and i was standing for eight hours which i don't blame that on like sasha or lindsay or anyone that like got a seat or blah blah blah blah or that i showed up so early but that's because i went to another signing before and it was crazy and so i did go extra early this time so i was there for a long time um so yeah i'm obviously not blaming that or complaining about that it's just i didn't feel well so i'm just letting you guys know that if you saw me i looked dead that's why here that i took with some feet like that i um took out the signing and lindsay and sasha took a few like photos of everyone that was there so she was like how big the crowd was and i'm also very claustrophobic i don't talk about it but being around so many people one i don't i have like social anxiety like actual social anxiety so people a lot of people make me really nervous or just people being around make me really anxious so that was one and two i'm also claustrophobic so the fact that i could not even move without hitting someone like to a certain point just makes me really nervous so that wasn't good okay but yeah it was fun though like i'm not trying to say i didn't have fun you know and it was an honor to meet some people so yes give you guys a quick reading update i finished this poetry collection i actually just started it when i'm standing around indigo and i'll put it on the screen i read it like 30 to 40 minutes and i didn't like it at all basically it's poetry collection and a lot of trigger warnings such as anxiety depression panic attacks self harm rape etc so just pointing that out there and i just really didn't like it i thought some of the poems were really actually offensive i thought the writing wasn't great at all and the format of it and like some of the poems made me really cringe a lot and i felt like it was very scattered like even though it was organized into three sections it felt very scattered and i didn't like it and then also like the font looked like something i could have done on pick monkey dot com so i was like oh so i gave it like two stars it probably deserves like a 1.5 but yeah so that wasn't good and then for zenith i actually didn't end up finishing it before the signing which i'm actually okay with because i did my read three books this week even though like some people don't count poetry or manga or whatever as books i do leave me alone it's reading thanks um but yeah so i am like 40 pages into zenith i'm hoping to finish it this coming week or yeah just finish it in yeah just finish it in january yeah is my goal so yeah and then i'm also currently listening to an audiobook so i'll actually pull it up for you guys i'm not gonna show you guys my password that's the most awkward thing in my life okay yes my lips are so chapped it's unbelievable like i need to fix this but like chopsticks don't work also i was watching chelsea's video what an absolute queen okay not my point great oh i'm playing mel's video i love her too though but i'll watch her video later look at my background look how cute rudy is okay overdrive so this is it i'm listening to the long walk by steven king on audiobook i'm currently three hours in and i have seven hours and 40 minutes left but i'm listening to it on two times the speed so to round that up to eight i have less than four hours left to go and it's really interesting so far i don't know how i'm feeling about it kind of gruesome well like not like i don't know it's good i like it it is like kind of gruesome though which i don't mind but it's just i don't know i didn't i didn't even read what this was about i just opened it on my shelves and i was like sure so i'm like very surprised about everything so i'm wondering where the story's gonna go from here so there you guys have it i'm actually gonna be ending my vlog here just so um actually have a video currently going going being rendered blah blah blah exporting the whole shebang yes uh so i'm going to be ending the vlog here thank you so so much for watching and oh my god the vacuum honest oh if you made it to the end of this vlog comment the coffee emoji because i need some coffee right now so comment the coffee emoji and we'll do a question of the vlog okay we're gonna start this question of the vlog i'll ask you something about my channel so i can get more feedback because i'm hoping to do something really special soon what is your most requested video from me like if you could choose one video that you've been dying for me to upload comment it down below yes also i'm doing a q and a so i'll have that i did it like i did a discussion video in the beginning i said if you have any questions i'll link that discussion video if you haven't seen it if you want to ask me any questions in the comments of that video you also so much for watching i'll see you all very soon with a new video