It’s been three months since the United States and Israel attacked Iran, kicking off a seemingly open-ended war that’s been characterized by chaos, widespread confusion, and global economic damage that’s expected to persist for months—if not years.
Those suffering most from the war’s impact, the Iranian people, are arguably who we’ve heard from the least. A prolonged, nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Iranian regime is one key reason. So too is the absence of a flourishing and free Iranian press or a robust cohort of foreign correspondents operating within the country. Jason Rezaian would know: In 2014, when he was working as the Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post, Rezaian imprisoned by the Iranian regime and convicted of espionage. He remained in Iranian prison for nearly two years before being released into US custody as part of a prisoner exchange.
I wanted to better understand where things stand between the US and Iran, and what a possible outcome to this war might look like. But I wanted to understand it from the point of view of someone who’s lived in the country and can speak firsthand to the brutal realities of the Iranian regime and the risks this war poses to Iran’s 93 million inhabitants. Rezaian, who is now the director of press freedom initiatives at The Washington Post, was generous enough to sit down and talk about all of it—from his personal experience navigating Iran’s oppressive government and state-sanctioned media to the distorting impacts of this conflict’s meme wars and internet blackouts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Jason, thank you so much for being here and welcome to The Big Interview.
JASON REZAIAN: Thanks for having me, Katie. I appreciate it.
Delighted that you’re here. Let’s start with the latest. We are talking on a Wednesday, about a week before this episode is going to come out. Right now, there is what I would describe as a fragile ceasefire in place. Questions remain over how long it will hold. The US has not ruled out additional strikes, and there are fears, especially with Iran’s latest statements, that the war could spread not only beyond its borders, but beyond the borders of the Middle East. What is your interpretation of the situation right now?
I want to start by saying that we’ve been at some level of conflict with Iran since 1979. So we’ve never been at peace with the Islamic Republic. One of the first things they did was take American diplomats and held them hostage in our embassy in Tehran. So, this animosity is not new. I think where we are right now in this ceasefire, if I had to guess, I don’t think that the Trump administration, President Trump in particular, wants to attack Iran again. It seems pretty obvious to me from his statements. “I was gonna do it last night, but, you know, I got talked out of it.”
“Changed my mind.”
Yeah. So, I think it’s pretty clear that the economic pain that we’re feeling at home has changed his attitude and desire for regime change—if that was his desire in the first place. I don’t think that if you asked him, he’d have a clear answer of why he got into this in the first place.
That being said, Israel, in particular Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wants to keep going. I think he’s the wild card in this situation. The level of pain and suffering that the Iranian regime is ready to absorb and ready to force its public to absorb, I think is beyond what we imagined.
I also don’t want to conflate the people of Iran with the regime. The regime is ready to keep taking hits, to keep fighting. They’ve been in a fighting posture with the United States, but also with other countries, for the entirety of their existence for the last 47 years.
That’s not to say that they want to keep fighting. I don’t think it’s necessarily in their long-term interest to do so. So I think we will see skirmishes. Pretty incredible that Israel and the United States were able to take out so many top layers of the Iranian leadership, both last summer and then in the strikes that started earlier this year.
Maybe even more incredible, though, is that the regime has continued to function.
This is actually a question I have for you. I remember several months ago when these 2026 US-Israel attacks happened. They took out the supreme leader. They made a big show of it. I remember thinking, “But surely the Iranian regime has layers upon layers of succession planning,” and indeed they did. I mean, I’m a news junkie, but certainly by no means an expert in Iran, but it was very obvious to me that that was the case and would be the case.
Did the United States and Israel simply miss something there?
I think that our analysis of Iran in Washington leaves a lot to be desired. I think there were a lot of people in the foreign policy, the expert space who said, “The Supreme Leader is the totalitarian leader of an Islamic theocracy, and when he dies, it’ll all fall apart.”
Well, that was never going to happen. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t dissent. It doesn’t mean that people want to see this regime perpetuate. But there is a very big power structure that is built with Iranian ingenuity and creativity.
Which means there’s horse trading, jockeying, lots of vying for influence and power within that system, and they have lots of guns, right?
Yeah.
So they’re able to maintain control for, I don’t want to say for the foreseeable future. I don’t want to put an expiration date on it, but they have control right now. I think what we missed was the idea that an aerial campaign that was frankly incredibly successful and took out lots and lots of leaders beyond the supreme leader—a lot of officials, speaker, former speaker of parliament who was a main negotiator in earlier nuclear negotiations, and many others—that that would lead to somehow an opening, and President Trump talked about this, for people to rise up.
Well, how are people who are unarmed and unable to connect to the internet—and I talk about this a lot, to the extent that people say, “Is it really that simple? Get people back online?” No, it’s not that simple, but the fact is that we’re not able to help them stay online, and internet access is like oxygen. as it is anywhere else in the world at this point. Going back to 2009 when, and I want to talk about President Ahmadinejad because he’s back in the news again this week. But going back to his contested reelection in 2009, the first time that the Islamic Republic cut off the internet, the United States has said, “We’re not gonna let this happen again. We’re gonna do whatever we can to keep them online.” Your audience and your colleagues at WIRED know a lot more about how the internet works than I do, but we have a technological capability to help people stay online in ways that we didn’t have 17, 18 years ago.
Whether it’s Starlink or direct-to-cell satellite internet access, these things exist, right? And they’re a hell of a lot cheaper than the missiles and bombs that the American taxpayer has been subsidizing.
I wanted to ask you about the internet blackout. We’ll talk more about that, but I want to back up for a minute to talk about this moment in February. The US and Israel launch strikes in Iran. For you as an Iranian American, to go from protests that felt like there was real potential for a monumental change, even maybe a step towards democracy, to what is unfolding now.
You wrote an article about the excitement and the hope you were feeling as Iranians took to the streets in protest against the regime. Fast-forward to now, we’re in a very different scenario.
I want to acknowledge that the administration did a better job of acknowledging the reality that Iranians were rising up against their repressive regime, better than previous administrations had, and faster, right?
So the idea that Donald Trump wanted to have the backs of protesters, support protesters, it’s a nice notion—and it would’ve been a nice about-face for a president who has, unfortunately, going back to his first term, done nothing but make the lives of Iranian people harder, right? There’s a travel ban against people from several countries. The first iteration of that, which he did almost immediately after coming into office in 2017, was fewer than 10 countries that were affected at that time. But if you looked at the data, more than half of visa applicants would have been from Iran.
So you can’t really say that you’re supporting the aspirations of Iranian civil society and institute a travel ban that blocks them from studying in our universities and taking part in all the wonderful things about the United States.
I would like to see the United States—which is still the strongest power in the world, if you take all of our assets as a superpower, militarily, economically, but really importantly culturally in terms of soft power, and resources that we can provide to support freeing up societies—I’d like us to better employ that last bit, and I think that’s the missing piece of the puzzle here.
In terms of the way of going about it, I’m curious for your take on what the goal was here. What is the goal here? Did they know?
I think going back to the very first days of this, and then to the first set of attacks last June, this question of Is there daylight between the Israeli and American plans for this? and US officials say, “Absolutely no daylight. You know, we’re in this together. We have the same goal.” I don’t think that was ever true. I don’t even think they realize what the goal is, right? In a situation where you have not had your own diplomatic ties with a country the size and scope of Iran, you know, 93 million people, biggest combined oil and gas reserves in the world, a top three national security challenge for half a century …
Mmm-hmmm.
It’s really like a political football. We should have a national policy towards Iran, not one that changes every two or four years based on elections that we have in this country. I think we missed a lot, and we continue to miss a lot. If the reporting that The New York Times has had about Israel and the United States hoping to free up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president, from house arrest to potentially lead Iran after the regime fell, it’s just really quixotic and kind of ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
If those are the plans, then there’s not any real plans.
Then there was no plan.
There was no friggin’ plan.
You were accused of espionage by the regime. You were detained for 544 days. Watching all of this unfold now from the US, I’m sure “mixed feelings” doesn’t even begin to describe what you’re feeling, but you know so much more about how brutal this regime can be to its own people than the average American, than 99 percent of people, given what you went through. Talk to me about that. I mean, what should Americans know about the Iranian regime?
What they should know is that it is incredibly brutal to its own population. It’s capable of meting out chaos and violence to people in the region, and in isolated instances, people on US soil, on European soil.
But ultimately this regime is not a match for the United States and our allies, right? I’m not gonna call it a paper tiger, because you can see that it’s holding its own. But they fight asymmetrically, right? Sometimes we say that is a sign that they are a sponsor of terror, and I’m not gonna get into those designations, but really what it means is if you force them into conventional ways of dealing with problems, they can’t really do it.
The future of that country has to be in the hands of the people of that country. The hands of the people of that country are tied in multiple ways. Over a 25-year period we’ve recognized their desire for change, going back to the late 1990s when they elected Mohammad Khatami, a reformer who, you know, espoused a much more open approach to the world.
Every time they’ve had the opportunity in these elections, they’ve gone for the person who says, “We want to open up this society. Our path towards success is opening up.” Now, If you’re looking at it on balance, we haven’t really done anything to support those aspirations. And I would argue that every time we’ve gotten involved, it’s kind of set that clock back.
If I think about the early 2000s, when I first started traveling to Iran, I made my first trip to Iran in the spring of 2001, before 9/11. And then six months later, after 9/11, and then in 2003 I moved there for the better part of a year, kept going back and forth until ultimately I moved there in 2009.
There were many moments when the society I think was closer to opening up and really reclaiming some autonomy and control from this regime. At every turn we had sanctions or a military attack or cyberattacks that kind of set those things back.
How much of what’s happening in Iran right now are we actually hearing about?
I mean, look, even when I was there before I was arrested, I can’t say there was a flourishing journalistic core. There were a handful of us working there, and then local media. At that time, let’s say there were 20 foreign correspondents based there. It’s a country of 93 million people.
It’s massive, and from the day that I was arrested until now, 12 years later, the access of independent international media has only shrunk. We don’t have good access to it. We don’t have good windows into it, and I think when I look at the information war that’s being fought on social media, and also lots of deepfakes and a very difficult landscape to try and verify information from, it’s very confusing for the average American.
I think if you look at the Israel-Gaza conflict post-October 7th and the Ukraine-Russia war, very similar, but this is the first one that America’s actually directly involved in. Ordinary people, when they watch the news, without any context and without real open access to information from that country, how do you expect them to make sense of it?
A question I had for you was about the “meme wars”—the social media propaganda war that’s playing out. You have the Trump administration putting out these bizarre war-mongering movie-clip videos. You then have pro-Iranian activists, young creators putting out things like these Lego videos. I don’t know if you’ve seen them.
Yeah, I’ve seen a few of them.
How are you seeing the propaganda piece of this conflict?
I would first of all say that Iranian propaganda, from the time I was detained until now, has improved by leaps and bounds in efficacy.
My impression would be, and correct me if you think I’m wrong, that more Americans probably saw those Lego videos than saw the Trump administration’s bizarre propaganda.
And not just Americans, people from all over the world. Look, I don’t think that there are guys sitting in Tehran who have a full understanding of the cultural contexts that we’re dealing with here. But they’ve done a great job of outsourcing that.
So whoever is doing that, it’s less reactive. You know, when I was taken—and I’ve seen this play out in other instances of hostages that they’ve taken, right?—there’s just like an immediate campaign to sully the reputation of that person. You know, “We’ve got this evidence of X, Y, and Z.”
The story that they tell is very much from their own point of view for their own audience, for their own domestic audience. This is different. This is real trolling, right? And it works. It makes people think to themselves, “Wow.” When they bring the Epstein files into it and gun violence in our country, you know, they would talk about those things on their state television. But talk about it from their own ideological lens. That this is ungodly. This is un-Islamic. Look at how those infidels live over there.
This is something very different, right? It’s designed to be consumed by young people here. And in that way, it’s not only more potentially effective, but also more radicalizing.
I want to talk about the internet blackout. And for those who are not following this closely, someone living in Iran right now, what can they not do? What can they not access that we take for granted here?
Look, in normal times, they can access almost everything through VPNs. Things like Twitter and Facebook, TikTok. So, you know, it takes some time and some doing to get online.
But Instagram, for example, has been mostly open since 2012. It’s something that a lot of Iranian businesses rely on as a means to advertise. Because it’s really the only space that they had.
Right now, with this internet blackout, almost all of that is shut off. It’s also a country that relies, and has for at least a decade, on Telegram.
Right.
So, that’s a way that people have been sharing information and communicating for over a decade. That’s been taken away from them.
You do have a handful of people who have what they call white SIM cards. People who do have access. So anybody that you see posting from Iran right now, you should be very skeptical about what they’re saying because they are doing it with the approval or acceptance of the state.
That’s what that would mean, they have a white SIM card?
Yeah. I’ll tell you. Over the last couple of months, there have been a handful of instances where I’ll get a DM from somebody in Iran or see somebody post a story, and then immediately try and communicate with them and maybe have a few messages back and forth before it gets cut.
I remember very clearly in the wake of that 2009 election, the protests, the violence, and the internet shutdown that followed it, how disorienting that is once you’ve become so accustomed to it.
And I can tell you, in the year and a half that I was in prison, I didn’t have access to the internet. It’s incredibly disorienting.
Isolating. Like, really isolating.
It’s so isolating. You don’t realize until you don’t have it how often you rely on it to answer a question in a day. From things that you need to know to more mundane pieces of information. You know, what was the name of the actor in that movie? Who won the World Series in 1987? Those sorts of things are standard parts of your life.
You’re starved of all of that, right? And imagine that on a mass scale. I’ve seen a couple of really good essays where former political prisoners have written about the feeling of imprisonment that not having access to the internet replicates for them. I talk about this over and over and over again, hoping that someone in a position of power in the United States is listening and thinks to themselves, “Well, maybe there is something that we can do here.”
What could they do that they’re not doing?
I mean, look, I think the silly idea is to activate and drop a lot of Starlink terminals on Iran. Well, that’d be fun. I would support a contract, you know, a US government contract to do that, because it would cost less than a couple of these missiles. And we own the airspace at this point. You know, they don’t have air defenses. I think every cell phone, every smartphone produced after 2020 or 2021 has the ability to connect to satellite internet.
It requires flipping switches. To do that, we require an act of Congress or an executive order, and probably some guarantees to cellular providers that if you provide cellular access to Iran, we’re not gonna sanction you. We’re not gonna enforce this.
Do you have any educated guess or informed hypothesis about why these very simple switches are not being flipped?
I just don’t think it’s on people’s radar screens …
That you should connect a country of how many people? Ninety-three million people back on the internet?
One, I think it’s not necessarily on their radar screens. Two, not a priority because I think if the right people knew about it, they’d do it today.
Well, hopefully someone’s listening. I mean, it seems exceedingly obvious.
It’s pretty obvious, right? And it’s one of these things where we put people on the moon, right? We’ve figured out a lot of much more complex challenges.
This is a country of 93 million people. The smartphone penetration is incredibly high. People use these things, right? It’s kind of an obvious piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been put in place yet.
What are we all missing in all the talk about the strait and gas prices? What are we missing about those 93 million people?
None of us are immune to rising costs and how that impacts our lives.
Of course.
But it is a very minor—I don’t want to say “inconvenience,” because I know it’s more than that—but it’s minor in comparison with the matters of life and death and liberty that these people are faced with on a daily basis. I have so many instances of Iranians stepping forward and saying, “Hey, well, look, we want to connect with the outside world. We want to be able to study in your universities. We want to be able to learn from your institutions. We want you to come and invest in our country.”
Actually, the regime even courts foreign investment, and, you know, I would say, “Hey, foreign company, don’t send your staff there until they make some guarantees that they’re not gonna take people hostage,” because they do that all the time.
So it’s a very complicated situation because there is not a good guy in this story. The good guy is the people of Iran. The United States of America, Islamic Republic of Iran, and Israel, none of those three entities have the interests of the people of Iran in their agenda. And I defy you to show me otherwise.
I mean, a lot of people go, “No, we love our people,” or, you know, the Israelis or Americans say, “No, we’ve got their back.” We say, “No, you haven’t. You haven’t done anything credible to support them.” How do I know that? Because their life gets worse and worse and worse, and you can’t just pin it on one group.
The Islamic Republic will pin it on America. We pin it on the Islamic Republic. In the middle, people are saying, “Hey, look, just help us.” And there have been many, many, many people who’ve said consistently, “If you’re gonna start this war, keep going to the end, because they’re gonna treat us much worse.”
When there is external force and pressure on an authoritarian state, and the Islamic Republic is a prime example, their response, their reaction, is always to take out more revenge and force on their population. It’s not an act of vengeance, it’s an act of survival.
The execution rate is as high this year as it was last year, and last year was the highest rate of executions that they’ve had since the early 1980s. It’s not rocket science. Unfortunately, I know and love a lot of people in that country, and I’m not willing to concede that their lives can be collateral damage in the ideological struggle between big powers.
Trump is in this boondoggle, for lack of a better word. He doesn’t seem to want to be in the war that he’s gotten himself into. It’s not totally clear why he’s in it in the first place. Israel is a critical X factor here, but the United States needs to untangle itself from this mess. How likely is a scenario where the Iranian regime essentially wins? It’s a real possibility, right? Then what comes from there? What does that mean for the Iranian people, for the geopolitical order?
I’m bullish on the future of the Iranian people. But when I say that, it’s a country that’s existed for basically 3,000 years, right? The short-term prospects don’t look particularly good. I think we have to have an approach to dealing with this country and supporting its society. Two separate things. Defang this regime, put it to sleep if we can, but not at the expense of the civil society and the livelihoods and life of the people in it.
Unfortunately, this is not an answer that is very satisfying to most people. This is not a two-month or a three-month or a five-month proposition. It’s something that we should’ve been investing in for 20 years or more, and we haven’t. I engage with people in the US government pretty regularly on these issues.
You’d be shocked at how few Iran experts there are for a challenge of this magnitude. We’ve deemed it this massive challenge. We really don’t put the same kind of resources into having expertise in it, having Persian speakers, you know, in government. There are probably more people who do strategic communications on Belgium than there are on Iran.
This not just a Trump thing, right? I think it goes back to many administrations. Why?
I think we have this approach to countries like Iran and Cuba, and maybe a handful of others, that were these very staunch allies of ours that flipped through revolutions. And there’s a pride element to it, right? That these regimes replaced client states of ours and did so while giving us the finger. And have been able to survive, not thrive. And it’s ultimately the people of these countries that pay for it.
Now, you haven’t been back to Iran in, I think, over 10 years.
Yeah.
Under what conditions would you feel safe going back?
I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve thought about it a lot more recently. I was at dinner recently with my wife and a human rights lawyer who defends lots of Iranian civil society actors and journalists and another friend who was recently freed from imprisonment, and we were talking about our collective desire to visit Iran again.
I think that, unfortunately, in my case, the regime did a long-term propaganda campaign against me. After I was released, in 2019, they produced a 30-episode television series on their state television.
About you?
Yeah. I wasn’t Jason Rezaian, I was Michael Hashemian. You see the pictures of it, you know, it’s clearly supposed to be me. Although, the character wears a trench coat and an ascot and has one of those cigarettes on the long plastic thing.
Well, at least they made you look cool.
I don’t think the guy looked very cool. But anyway, it was the sort of thing that I joke about, and I joked about it at the time, but I was getting credible death threats. And they re-air it. So I don’t know that I’ll be able to go back.
Ever.
I hope that I can. I hope things change dramatically. I get lots and lots of messages from people that are very positive inside the country. I meet people all the time who’ve recently left Iran and arrived in the West. I think in all those interactions, people have shown a layer of knowledge and complexity about the circumstances that I faced.
That’s encouraging. But just knowing their track record of hostage-taking and targeted assassinations, sadly I just don’t think it’s happening anytime soon.
I want to turn for a minute to talk about press freedom, bigger picture. You’ve been a longtime advocate for press freedom around the world. It’s a cause that’s important to me, too. How are you looking at that imperative in this political moment, in the US and abroad in the context of the Trump administration? I mean, what stands out to you? What should listeners know?
So, the decline of press freedoms in democratic societies has been going on since before Trump.
Mm-hmm. It has.
And in this country, going back to September 11th and beyond, and I think in a lot of instances in other parts of the world, they’ve used the national security protocols that we created to suspend Miranda rights and due process. They’ve kind of weaponized this against journalists and others in their countries.
So when I was taken, they said, “OK, you’re being accused of national security crimes. We don’t have to give you access to a lawyer.” And, you know, I’d get into these long conversations about, you know, Guantanamo Bay with my interrogators, right? And you can see that they’re using this as a justification.
I think there’s been this sort of trend of dehumanizing journalists. Oftentimes female journalists. Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize–winning journalist from the Philippines, Rana Ayyub, a Washington Post contributor from India. It’s all designed not only to silence the individual, but to silence others and to deter others from getting into this work.
Then there’s this whole other element of the problem, which is economic, right? And the business models of journalism. You guys understand this very well here.
We do.
And I think the ecosystem of press freedom defenders—and when I say that, it’s a big community of individuals and organizations—is catching up to the problems at hand.
There was a time when a strong letter from a US senator was all that was required. Or a statement of condemnation. Those things don’t do anything anymore. They take journalists prisoner because it’s audacious, because it’s designed to scare people into silence.
So over the past few years, and recently at The Washington Post, we’ve been developing ways to support mostly journalists in exile because there’s been this tidal wave, thousands upon thousands of journalists, an almost endless number of instances of journalists who have either been imprisoned or have been forced to flee their homelands because of the work that they do, finding their ways to freedom in Europe, but oftentimes in the United States as well.
But then there are new hurdles for them when they get here. I work with an NGO that handles a lot of the immigration challenges of people in those circumstances. And we’ve been able to get what we call humanitarian parole, which is sort of like an emergency entry into the United States.
But if you get here, then you have to apply for asylum. Once you apply for asylum, not when the application is approved, but once it starts being processed, then it’s another 150 days before you can get a work authorization.
I mean, the barriers of entry into life in the United States are really high at this point. They didn’t always used to be that way. So we’re trying to create some tools and mechanisms, opportunities for journalists in those circumstances to not only get out of harm’s way and get themselves up and running in the United States, but to help them tool up so that they can credibly, within the framework that our media system has constructed for itself, contribute to the work that we do.
That’s my big goal right now when it comes to press freedom. Take people who have been spat out by the countries that they’re from because of the coverage of those countries, places where we can’t even send reporters to.
I have to ask you about the elephant in the room when we’re talking about press freedom, we’re talking about international reporting, we’re talking about the business of journalism. Your owner at The Washington Post has not been without criticism. Mass layoffs, including in your international bureaus, an opinion section that has been pivoted in an overtly ideological way, I would argue. Do you feel like you have the support at The Washington Post, and the support at the Bezos level, to do the work that you so deeply believe in?
I haven’t seen Jeff Bezos in several years. When I was released from prison, he came and picked me up in Germany.
I remember.
We’ve had opportunities to talk about some of these issues. Not about the layoffs, which I think was gutting not only for the entire organization but for readers as well. But he’s engaged with me indirectly on specific cases of exiled journalists and how we can support them through editors, other intermediaries. I do think that for this particular work that I’ve been developing at the Post, there’s been institutional support, and that support has grown over the last couple years to the extent that we just piloted a training program of exiled journalists.
But I think that there’s still a lot to be worked out and figured out about whether the Post and other news organizations should be considered a public trust or for-profit businesses. At this point, it’s a for-profit business, and I work for it.
Yeah, I know the feeling.
Whether I feel good about the direction that it’s going or not is, I don’t want to say irrelevant, but on this particular patch of trying to answer the questions of how we make this work viable, how we continue to cover places where we can’t send people anymore, how we turn the lights back on in places where they’ve been turned off, I can only say that particular lane has, I don’t want to say gotten endless support, because it’s not …
This is an incredibly difficult and expensive and complicated work.
Totally. But we’re testing things out. And we’re testing out new models that if they work, I think we might be in a good spot. I’d be lying though if I didn’t say that I watched so many incredible colleagues have their jobs eliminated, only to see them move on to our direct competitors, and proud to see them continuing to do incredible work.
I hope that there’s an opportunity that some of them come back and work for us in the future.
So Jason, we always end these shows with a game, which given the tenor of our conversation can be more or less fun.
Let’s have some fun. It’s time for some fun.
The game is called Control, Alt, Delete, and I want to know what piece of technology you would love to control, what piece you would love to alt, so alter or change, and what you would delete, what would you vanquish from the earth if given the opportunity?
Gosh. OK. Hmm, a piece of technology that I’d like to control. I think my mastery, or even use of, some of these very helpful AI tools leaves a lot to be desired. I’m sort of new.
ChatGPT novice?
Yes. I’m eager to see how I might employ those tools to help me and continue to actually write.
The important thing there: to actually write your own words.
Yeah, and I think that this is gonna be a challenge, and every time I talk to college and high school students, people ask for advice or whatever, and I say, “You know, develop your ability to express yourself in the written word. It’ll pay off for you in whatever you do.” Because being able to communicate your experience and yourself and your desires, your needs, is very essential.
So you would like to wield godlike control of LLMs, while also continuing to write your own words. I like this.
Really gain control of them to free me up so I can just write my own words.
Wonderful.
Alt, um … Wow. I would like to alter the toys that we have in our lives these days, whether it’s a remote control car or a smart fridge or whatever. They can do a lot of things that we couldn’t imagine things would be able to do, but they break really fast.
They do. They do.
It’s really annoying. I have a friend whose mom passed away a few years ago, but she had this lamp that was from the 1890s, and the bulb still worked. Like, the original bulb still worked. Things were built to last before, and I think if I was gonna alter anything, it would be the durability of our gadgets and tools. Is that an OK answer?
That’s a totally great answer. What are you deleting?
Oh, gosh. I need a minute.
That’s OK.
It’s very important. So a gadget that we would delete.
Or just a piece of technology.
Have you noticed that weather forecasts are less accurate than they’ve ever been?
Absolutely.
So I think we should get rid of forecasts.
Get rid of weather forecasts?
Yeah.
Just go with God every day.
Yeah.
Just cross your fingers. Because you may as well.
You may as well, because the accuracy of what we’re getting is about as accurate as your guess.
How to Listen
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