Full Transcript for The Karol Markowicz Show: Media Trust Collapse, AI Chaos & Rebuilding Institutions

everybody else zags. You guys just started a print edition in the last year or so, Yes, since June. How's that going. It's amazing because you know, not a lot of places are leaning into print. 00:03:56 Speaker 2: So I think that that's about to change. Yeah, I think we're at the tip of the spear here. If you just zoom out for a second and you think about the effect of AI and the effect of technology on discourse right now, Right, if you go on X and you see ideas getting two one hundred thousand retweets or whatever, and then you have really no sense of who those people are, or if they are people right in a way, I don't even know if you're like, I don't actually know if you're real. 00:04:32 Speaker 1: I might not be right. 00:04:34 Speaker 2: I assume you're real because you look just like the person that I've seen in real life. But but the bottom line is I think increasingly people are going to be looking for trusted media, by which I mean literally the actual distribution method. And we move to print because of our gen Z readers. Really yeah, it was our youngest readers who basically there was one I have like WhatsApp groups with different cohorts of readers, and one of them said it so beautifully. He just basically said, look, I grew up with the Internet was the wallpaper of my life. 00:05:16 Speaker 1: I know. 00:05:17 Speaker 2: I could start a website in my basement and call it the Cleveland Post and put up absolute garbage and it will be seen as news. But when you send me something that is in print, it's not that I automatically believe it, but somebody paid money to make that and to put that, to print it, and to send it to me interesting, and I just trust it more than I trust the Internet, which I use for a million different things, but increasingly not for trust on opinions or ideas so. 00:05:54 Speaker 1: Interesting because what we always hear is that the younger set wants fewer guardrails, but you're saying that because of AI, they might want more of them. 00:06:04 Speaker 2: I definitely, I think that it's definitely true of I mean, I know this sounds grandiose, but it's true if smarter readers, like the smarter readers are looking for they want to you know, it's fun to get a million retweets. 00:06:20 Speaker 1: On its doesn't like that, right? 00:06:24 Speaker 2: But then what's hard is that when you realize a month later that you were wrong, or that the person who you retweeted, who you thought was actually had didn't have any idea of how the world works and turned out to be completely misguided, and something. 00:06:39 Speaker 1: That goes Now, people that you retweeted were real smart turned out to be right. Right? Yeah, but so, but does that mean that you're never going to publish somebody you regret publishing or you know, it could happen in real life too. I mean, I in real life I have friends that I don't understand anymore. 00:06:58 Speaker 2: You know what I would say is you have a weird thing. I don't. Ever, I try really hard not to regret anything. I feel like it's important to be thoughtful and even if you make a mistake, it's a mistake, and that mistake should teach you something. I on the other hand, part of what we've tried really hard to do at Tablets not to say that every single piece we've ever published is a piece we would publish today. But I think every piece. I really can't think of that many pieces that we've published that I feel like that little twinge, yeah, anxiety around And I think it's okay that we I mean, I think that one of the things that's really hard right now is that a lot of people are losing their. 00:07:44 Speaker 1: Minds, and that is very hard, actually, and. 00:07:47 Speaker 2: That's different than having been wrong about something or misguided. I think that people are becoming weirdly, like schizophrenic and bizarre, but that's different, and I think that that's really really hard to see. 00:08:00 Speaker 1: What were you doing before Tablet? So before Tablet, I was actually at The Forward. I was the culture. 00:08:08 Speaker 2: Editor of The Forward for seven or eight years, and I published a line of books and I did the first book, which was a history of ethnic newspapering through the eyes of particularly in New York, and I did a museum exhibit at the City. 00:08:27 Speaker 1: Of New York around it. Oh cool, it was really it was fun. Did you always want to be a writer? 00:08:33 Speaker 2: I did, although I got distracted a little bit at certain points in my life. You know, I wasn't necessarily a really good student. I was in high school. I was really good at only I was good at a couple of things. I was really good at putting on lip liner and a dark cat. 00:08:54 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that. 00:08:57 Speaker 2: I had a really steady hand. So I did really good French manicure, and I was really good at English. I was really good at at literature and at writing. And on the strength of that, I got into Barnard, which was a really strange thing for me because I wasn't necessarily and it's like I wasn't looking to be engaged intellectually. But Barnard really changed my life really and then at that point I went into politics for a little bit after college, and then went to journalism school and got myself back into writing. 00:09:29 Speaker 1: So interesting. So what would you have done if this hadn't worked out, If you know, being a writer hadn't happened. I don't know. 00:09:36 Speaker 2: Maybe I would become a manicurist. 00:09:38 Speaker 1: And I was saying manicurists or like makeup artist, I mean beauty influencer, say steady hands is actually a tough ask. Anybody could be a writer, like but draw drawing on like a lip line. 00:09:52 Speaker 2: I agree, I really agree, and so and look, who knows, maybe that's still in my future. 00:09:58 Speaker 1: I'm going to hold on to that. I count you out for that. And I'm definitely going to have you do my nails at some point because I would like to see this, this perfect French manicure you

speak of, what are you most proud of in your life? 00:10:12 Speaker 2: So I have a kind of side gig in my life which weirdly relates a lot to my general view of the world, which is I have a side gig in the world of biotech and gene editing. I have a son with a genetic disorder and work on helping with gene editing and run a foundation called the Foundation for Angelman's Drone Therapeutics. And for a variety of reasons that we don't have to get into right now, it just so happens to be like a neurogenetic disease that's going to be cured in like the next few years. Incredible, and it also has the technology to help other genetic diseases. So but my time at Tablet and the Brokenness stuff actually really helped me understand health and other things about American society and American institutions. So it's very very central to all these things are kind of they're related in my head. So I'm really proud of that, and I feel really grateful that I get to do that work with some amazing people. 00:11:19 Speaker 1: It's amazing. I mean, those are two very different things. Having, you know, something in science and something in English. Those are you know, tend to be not things that people can do at the same time. How do you manage it or how did how did you get it? 00:11:32 Speaker 2: Like? 00:11:32 Speaker 1: How did you make it happen? 00:11:34 Speaker 2: So basically, the short version is that my son, he has a very very rare mutation of this genetic disorder and he was very hard to diagnose. And I've actually written for the Free Press about it a little bit, and it's a very long story. But when he got diagnosed, it just so happened that I knew the people who I knew, the woman who it's a kind of incredible genius who who has a daughter, she's a translational scientist who has a daughter with the same disorder, and she's been working for ten years advancing the science and so, but she didn't know how to run a nonprofit. So they roped me in to kind of come and help them, just with some nonprofit organization and structural work. So now I get to I mean, truly I am. I'm technically the president of the organization, but my role is really to help buttress them. Who are the real the scientists and the staffers who do the work, who are the real stars. 00:12:42 Speaker 1: Incredible. My kids read your article about struggling with you know, whether to take up the advancements that are happening in this genetic therapy. Would that be the right way to phrase it? And you were kind of struggling because you have a belief in God and you were wondering if that was appropriate. And it's just such a beautiful piece. They all really loved it and thought you absolutely should go for it. And uh, and my daughter, who is very I would say God fearing, also said, you know, God wouldn't want us not to use therapies that he helped provide. So here we are. 00:13:25 Speaker 2: I do some sort of private conversations particularly with religious groups around around gene editing, which is a very complicated topic, and I don't want to I never want to make it seem like it's simple. But it was fascinating because there were in the conversation their discomfort somebody, somebody approached their discomfort with me, and I said, Okay, I get I get where you're coming from. Let's talk about this for a second. So X number of thousands of babies, for example, with Down syndrome have been aborted in the last decades. If I could fix that chromosome in utero, we would have saved all those babies. 00:14:13 Speaker 1: Yeah. So, before we start going. 00:14:16 Speaker 2: To kind of hilarian eugenicism, what if we actually understand the technologies are always dangerous, They always hold the possibility of danger, and part of what we do when we build as societies we try to build guardrails around technology and around capacity that allow us to make the world better and not worse. Right, Absolutely, so it's about understanding that that's fundamentally that's our responsibility is not to restrain the technology from advancing, but to engage as citizens and potentially leaders. 00:14:54 Speaker 1: And doing nothing like you said also leads to loss. So it's not like it's only doing nothing has no side effects. There certainly is. 00:15:03 Speaker 2: I mean, and here's the bottom line. China's going to do it. Yeah, like China's doing it. So then the question is do we want to engage and create a model for the way to do it right, way to do it morally, or do we want to just seed the field? 00:15:23 Speaker 1: Right? 00:15:24 Speaker 2: To me, there's no question. 00:15:25 Speaker 1: Absolutely we're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. Give us a five year out prediction, and it could be about anything at all. 00:15:38 Speaker 2: You know. So part of the thing about I published that the first of my sort of brokenness pieces was a piece called Everything Is Broken, which I published five years ago, and in it I basically diagnosed this sense that I felt happening in all parts of American life of bottoming out of trust in institutions that many of us thought were solid and had legitimacy. Not that they were not that they were perfect, sure, but I'm talking about you know, universities, health institutions, our doctors, the government, media, and the arts. These these were places that we could we could make fun of but or tweak or want to be changed a little different, but we roughly believed that they did their jobs well. And what I felt was happening was that there was a real bottoming out of that relationship between Americans, particularly Americans. I think it's a global issue, but my interest is in America and those institutions. I think that we're looking at five years of I don't want to say correction, because I don't think of it that way, but I think we're looking at five years of Americans starting to ask what happens if we have no institutions, What happens if we have no guardrails, What happens if

all we do is burn stuff down or abandon stuff and we don't invest in institutions to make them what we want them to make to be. And I think that you're going to see more. Obviously, this depends on what happens in the world, but I think you're going to see more investment, even in legacy institutions. I think you're going to start to see legacy media, certain brands, and legacy media come back and come back into trust. I think you're going to start to see investment in certain institutions and higher ed institutions in culture, and I think It's going to be really interesting because the question is is once you decide that you're going to be skeptical but engaged, to me, that becomes incredibly rich and very generative. 00:18:05 Speaker 1: You know, I just don't talk to that many people who are optimistic about the institutions and media companies coming back. I have to tell you, this is a very unique perspective. Haven't got a five year prediction legacy media companies are going to return. That's a definitely. 00:18:21 Speaker 2: But here's what I wanted so well. I want to just because in case this is this ever comes back to bite me, I want to be clear. It's going to be the legacy media that looks look it's looks in the mirror and understands why they lost the trust and realizes that they have gold in their brand awareness. They have gold that they can save. It's not going to be all legacy media. It's going to be some of them, but the ones that I think will are able to actually be that self aware have a real future. 00:18:54 Speaker 1: I love that, Alana. You're a super fascinating person. I have enjoyed this conversation so much. I really every time I see you, I'm like that Alana is very very interesting. Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives. 00:19:12 Speaker 2: Get off social media at least for a little give yourself boundaries around it. So I know I sound like some fuddy duddy or some like gross adult or whatever. 00:19:25 Speaker 1: But you sound like a gen z or really I really like. 00:19:30 Speaker 2: It's boiling your brain. And even just saying to yourself, there are going to be three hours a day where I don't touch it. 00:19:39 Speaker 1: Will you will help yourself? I love that, and I'm going to try to do the three hours a day. I always try to like minimize it, but I like the idea of a block of time every day where I actually don't touch it. 00:19:54 Speaker 2: You also can do You can do three blocks, so you don't have to do with a block of three hours. Right. You can say, I I don't do it eleven to twelve, I don't do it three to four, I don't do it at eight to nine. 00:20:04 Speaker 1: Love that. Yeah, Just any time that. 00:20:07 Speaker 2: You remember that you're a human being who's not intelluctably connected to that machine will help you. 00:20:15 Speaker 1: Love it. She is a Lana new House. Check her out at tablet. Everything that she does is fantastic. Thank you so much. Alana, thanks so much,