From the site Infinite Conversation comes an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. What’s the point of this AI generated conversation? The creator explains:

As of late 2022, it’s cheap and easy to produce AI-generated content that is superficially good and surprisingly similar to “the real thing”. This applies to videos resembling celebrities (commonly known as Deepfakes) or, as in the case of the Infinite Conversation, speech.

This project aims to raise awareness about the ease of using tools for synthesizing a real voice. Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom. This changes our relationship with the media we consume online and raises questions about the importance of authoritative sources, breach of trust and gullibility.

Will this technology lead to a massive proliferation of sub-optimal-quality content? Should we simply distrust anything we see online? As new tools are developed to help identify generated content, I recommend maintaining a skeptical stance, particularly when the source/channel of information doesn’t seem reliable and when the […]

After trying for 35 years, the Howard Stern Show finally landed an interview with Bruce Springsteen–an interview that lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes and covered a tremendous amount of ground. Along the way, Springsteen talked about his song-writing process and the origins of his classic songs, and then performed some acoustic versions, alternating between guitar and piano. Above and below, you can watch stirring performances of  “Thunder Road,” “The Rising,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Born to Run, and “Tougher Than the Rest.”

Those who have the Sirius XM app can watch the entire performance online. For those who don’t, you can always sign up for a free trial to the service.

Land of Hope and Dreams

The Rising

Tougher Than the Rest

Born to Run

Related Content

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Improvises and Plays, Completely Unrehearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

Bruce Springsteen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books […]

You may never have tried psychedelic substances. You may never have had an interest in trying psychedelic substances. But if you’re reading this, you do have a mind, and you’ve almost certainly felt some curiosity about how that mind works. As any engineer knows, one of the shortest routes to understanding how a machine works is to disrupt its normal operations. Psychedelics do just that for your brain, shifting your consciousness into a new perspective that can offer insights into your very perceptions of reality. Or at least they do it in the view of Michael Pollan, Sam Harris, Jacob Silva, Ben Goertzel, and Matthew Johnson.

The more familiar you are with current psychedelics research, the more of those names you’ll know. Pollan, who made his name writing about food, stars in the Big Think video above about the scientific renaissance of mind-altering drugs. “The brain is a hierarchical system, and the default mode network appears to be at the top,” he explains. That network is “the orchestra conductor or corporate executive. You take that out of the picture, and suddenly […]

The making of Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is rife with the kind of rock star ironies exploited a few years later by This Is Spinal Tap. Their fall into fractiousness and bloat began when Roger Waters firmly established himself as captain on 1977’s Animals, his tribute album for George Orwell. Stage shows became even more grandiose, leading keyboardist Richard Wright to worry they were “in danger of becoming slaves to our equipment.” Certain moments during the 1977 In the Flesh tour in support of the album seem right out of a Christopher Guest brainstorm.

One night in Frankfurt, “the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost completely obscured,” Mark Blake writes in Comfortably Numb. Fans threw bottles. Crowds felt further alienated when Waters started wearing headphones onstage, trying to sync the music and visuals. During a five-night run at London’s Wembley Empire Pool, “officials from the Greater London Council descended on the venue to check that the band’s inflatable pig had been equipped with a safety line” (due to a minor panic […]

Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker convene an emergency podcast recording to react to this mind-bending, possibly immoral HBO comedy docuseries, wherein Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult personal confrontations, but this plan goes off the rails after 1.5 episodes out of the six that made up its first season.

This series builds upon Fielder’s previous show where he comedically tried to help businesses, Nathan for You, whose ground-breaking finale (“Finding Frances”) discovered The Rehearsal‘s format. Is Nathan himself the main butt of the joke, or is he punching down? Are there better ways to show the failings of reality TV? How does this kind of embarrassment humor differ from Borat and its ilk? Maybe the show is not as much about these people going through their rehearsals as an examination of the process of rehearsing itself that Fielder has devised.

Feel free to listen to us to find out what it’s all about, but you will be best served by watching this indescribable show yourself before experiencing this episode.

A few relevant […]