The other day I learned a new term: “AI sycophancy,” also sometimes called “chatbot sycophancy.”

I already knew about the phenomenon, having read stories about how Large Language Models flatter their users, telling them what they want to hear, assuring them that they’re always right. This self-reinforcement hooks into psychological vulnerabilities, potentially leading users to believe in their own brilliance, while shortcutting attempts by other human beings to insert some reality sense. A growing body of research shows that the use of generative AI – like social media but worse – is often damaging to users’ mental health. In the worst cases chatbot sycophancy has led to self-harm – even, allegedly, suicide.

But the way chatbots play with your mind isn’t new. Sycophancy has been sending people into delusional spirals and destructive behavior for millennia. In the past, however, sycophancy was reserved for the rich and powerful. AI’s innovation is to democratize the experience.

Being surrounded by actual human sycophants will inevitably happen if you are rich and powerful, unless you have the strength of character to avoid it. But, alas, we have as our president Donald Trump, who is a glutton for sycophancy. Moreover, he’s not alone: the tech-bro oligarchs – in particular, Musk, Andreesen, Zuckerberg, Ellison and Thiel – inhabit their own sycophancy bubbles, while also slavishly supporting Trump. Just read an excerpt from Jacob Silverman’s new, and highly recommended book, to understand the dynamic.

But while the tech bros can certainly make many people’s lives miserable, it takes the power of the presidency to threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. And Trump is doing just that – he is descending into states of delusion that are as he would say, like nothing anyone has seen before (notwithstanding Nixon’s nighttime drunken tirades).

On Sunday, the day after millions of Americans marched in the massive No Kings Day protests, Trump dismissed them:

The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.

Does Trump actually believe that? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry. A Credible sources say that Pam Bondi was reluctant to charge former FBI director James Comey given the flimsiness of the case. However, Trump made clear that this was non-negotiable — it was Comey or her. So Bondi saw to it that Comey was duly charged.

Another very recent example of Trump’s disconnect from reality was the temper tantrum he reportedly threw when meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warning among other things that Putin “will destroy you” if he wants.

In reality, Putin has spent 3 years and 8 months trying as hard as he can to destroy Ukraine, without success. Dig a little deeper and you learn that Russia’s latest big offensive has been a bloody debacle: hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives lost without any significant strategic gains. You have to be seriously delusional to imagine that if Putin gets really, really angry he will suddenly develop the ability to blast through the “kill zone,” the deadly kilometers-wide no man’s land created by drones, precision artillery and mines that keeps bringing Russian offensives to grief.

But again, who’s going to brief Trump about his beloved Putin’s failures?

There are many, many more examples of Trump’s delusions. He really does seem to believe that Portland is “war-ravaged,” that Chicago is full of “beautiful Black women in MAGA hats” begging him to stop crime, that China is going to cave to his trade demands, that gasoline is $1.99 a gallon, that he will lower drug prices by 500%, and much more.

Granted, previous presidents have also been surrounded by flatterers. In the case of George W. Bush, it’s unlikely that we would have been lied into the Iraq War without Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz assuring him that we would be welcomed as liberators. And we know now that Biden’s inner circle hid his increasing physical frailty from the public and even from his own cabinet members.

Yet Trump’s disconnect from reality is uniquely destructive. No previous president has tried to overturn an election, sought to use the military against U.S. citizens, or sought to use the Justice Department as his own personal vendetta machine. The difference is that he’s the first president to live in an autocratic bubble, surrounded by a cult of personality within which nobody dares to criticize him, tell him uncomfortable truths or refuse to engage in blatantly illegal acts.

Furthermore, Trump is clearly getting worse, growing even more out of touch with each passing week. Regardless of whether it’s advancing age or growing frustration, even Trump, I think, realizes that his efforts to suppress all opposition are running into serious resistance. Putting out an AI video of himself dumping shit on protestors suggests panic, not strength. But his claims about what’s happening in America and the world keep getting stranger and wilder.

And Trump’s denial of reality is already having devastating consequences for America, with more to come. Watching Trump in action lately has had me remembering a passage from a classic George Orwell essay, “In front of your nose”:

[W]e are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

MUSICAL CODA

The new YouTube documentary Listers is a down-the-rabbit-hole glimpse at the norms and neuroses of the “extreme bird-watching” community. If that sounds painfully boring, it’s not—this is one of the funniest documentaries I’ve seen in some time. In it, the brothers Quentin and Owen Reiser chronicle their try at a “big year,” a bird-nerd term for attempting to identify as many different species as possible in a single calendar year. They start out knowing next to nothing about birds—an app designer and a cinematographer from Collinsville, Illinois, the Reisers get into birding after one of them stumbles across an ornithological guidebook during a bleary-eyed smoke session. Then they buy a $4,500 Kia Sedona and traverse the country with the goal of finding more than 700 unique specimens. Although both brothers are the subjects of the film, Quentin spends most of the time on camera while Owen remains behind the lens. He alternates between a low-tech camcorder and a high-resolution camera, the former to capture the mundane and often gritty work of tracking down birds, and the latter to reveal their quarry in all its splendor.

On their bird-maxxing quest, the two cook endless beans and sleep in a shocking number of Cracker Barrel parking lots. Quentin takes magic mushrooms on a seabird boat tour.  The vibe here is less Animal Planet and more Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: “It’s all gonna be, like, accurate? Scientifically accurate?” Owen asks early on when he learns that his brother is planning to create an illustrated bird guide about their travels. “Yeah,” Quentin responds, deadpan. The camera zooms in on his drawing of a bird—one presumes a tufted titmouse—with crude, cartoonish boobs protruding from its feathers.

But underneath the stoner hijinks (and legitimately stunning wildlife videography), Listers is a serious film about the meaning that hobbies can provide to our lives, and the corrupting influence of smartphone apps on our leisure activities. As the documentary progresses, it gradually begins to examine how eBird, a social app that is popular in the bird-watching community, has overtaken the pastime. The brothers start without complaints about eBird, which connects them with other hobbyists, helps them track their progress when they “list” birds, and provides a ranking system so they can see how they’re stacking up against other birders. But by the end of the year, they become disillusioned by eBird and interview other hobbyists who are as well. “This country is so big, and you have to go everywhere in the country to see enough birds to be in the power rankings or whatever the fuck it is,” Quentin grouses. “I like bird-watching, but I don’t like it in the competitive sense.”

[Read: What we lose when we’re priced out of our hobbies]

Birding is not the only hobby with an app problem. So many leisure pursuits now have their own gamified digital platforms: Untappd for beer enthusiasts. Strava for runners. Ravelry for knitters. Fishbrain for fishermen. Beli for foodies. Goodreads and Letterboxd for bookworms and movie buffs. The list goes on. Some have anointed these sorts of hobby apps a new, “kinder” frontier for social media: Sharing your knitting patterns is certainly more wholesome than bare-knuckle political fighting on X. But like all online social networks, these apps—many of which include leaderboards, progress bars, and achievement badges—have a corrosive side, one I’ve experienced myself as a runner. I used to log my runs, until I realized I was putting on my sneakers and getting out the door simply because I wanted to see my stats go up. I found that the apps made me more focused on narrow metrics, such as my VO2 max or total weekly miles, than the pleasure derived from the hobby itself.

Complaints about the intrusion of technology into hobbies are not new. Leisure activities have always been settings in which what academics call “conspicuous consumption” is common—enthusiasts flaunt the latest high-tech golf clubs or fly rods or bird-watching binoculars as a way to demonstrate their seriousness or skill (even when they don’t have much of either). But hobby gamification has added a novel and far more perverse twist to this long-standing trend: conspicuous accumulation, users’ vying for in-app prestige by logging, listing, or otherwise compiling as much online data as possible.

Watching the birders in Listers discuss their love-hate relationship with the eBird app, I was reminded less of their feathered friends than of another class of winged creatures—parasitoid wasps. I became fascinated by these hellish insects years ago after reading a letter in which Charles Darwin described their existence as proof against “a beneficent & omnipotent God.” It’s not hard to see why: The wasps inject eggs into a host, usually a caterpillar, and when they hatch, the larvae eat the unfortunate creature from the inside out, taking care to leave the vital organs intact so that their meal ticket doesn’t die too soon. Eventually, the larvae hijack the host’s brain, turning the caterpillar into their slave. From the outside, the parasitized insect still looks like a normal caterpillar, but the guts of the thing have been emptied out, and it now exists to serve an entirely different master. Eventually, it dies of starvation.

This makes for a grisly analogy, but it’s an apt one. As Listers demonstrates, hobby apps such as eBird parasitize our leisure pursuits from within: The app stops being a way to engage with the hobby and instead turns the hobby into a way to engage with the app. From the outside, the hobby still looks the same—you’re still running, or watching an art film, or peeping a bufflehead sea duck through your binoculars—but the goal is no longer the experience itself.

[Read: The logic of the ‘9 to 5’ is creeping into the rest of the day]

Perhaps the only truly chilling scene in the otherwise lighthearted Listers occurs when one of the brothers questions a top-ranked birder about what motivates him. “If eBird didn’t exist, would you still go bird-watching?” Owen asks. “No!” the other man says, shaking his head vigorously and laughing, as though the very prospect of birding without the app is ridiculous.

The response raises an interesting philosophical question: Is this man actually a birder at all? Can you be a true bird-watcher if your main source of joy is not, you know, the birds? It would seem that his actual hobby is the app. The audience of Listers is made to understand the tragedy of many of these men and women who look and act like birders but whose primary love is no longer the birds themselves or the environments in which they’re found, rather the glowing screen they’re so bound to. The platform is not all bad—at its best, it provides an admirable example of citizen science and generates useful data for researchers—but the brothers, and those they interview, know all too well that eBird can be a fun suck as much as it can be an avenue for fulfillment.

“I’m tired of these fucking assholes who work for the bird software,” Quentin vents near the end of the documentary. He’s miffed about how often the app rejects his photos, but he’s also angry that it matters to him in the first place. By the end of Listers, he decides the app mostly doesn’t matter to him. He still loves birding but seems to hate eBird. The irony, of course, is that his documentary is as likely to turn people off the app as it is to drive new users to it.

In a humorous final montage, we learn that the birder who wouldn’t bird if it weren’t for the app broke a record by identifying 758 birds in a year, and that Quentin and Owen—impressively for neophytes—ranked 23rd in the contiguous United States, listing 579 birds. To celebrate, the boys crack a Martinelli’s Gold Medal Sparkling Cider and tell a gas-station attendant about their success. “Not bragging, but we’ve seen 579 species of bird this year,” Quentin informs the young woman behind the register. When she responds, “Pretty cool,” we get the distinct sense that she does not, in fact, think it is pretty cool. The Reisers don’t care. They’re in it for the birds.

Ghosting existed in some form long before modern technology made it ubiquitous. “Disappearing without word or warning is no doubt as old as the human race,” the cultural theorist Dominic Pettman notes in his slim new book, Ghosting. The infant first detecting maternal absence, the pet abandoned in an alley, the friend suddenly iced out have all felt the sudden departure of someone who was expected to be there. What has changed in recent years, Pettman argues, is the ease—and cruelty—with which people can enter and exit one another’s lives. Today’s version of ghosting, he writes, “is abandonment with a contemporary garnish”; a plethora of options for ignoring others have turned it into a “universal, even banal, experience.” Or, as he puts it pithily, “when we came up with texting, we also came up with not texting.”

I was curious to read Pettman’s book, because I’d been thinking about the banality of ghosting—or, rather, how it can seem so commonplace as to be expected and, at the same time, be hurtful and infuriating. Culturally, ghosting is a paradox. It can be something you brush off even as it lives rent-free in your head. It’s still considered rude, and people on both sides tend to feel bad about it, albeit in different ways. It’s also extremely common: 90 percent of respondents to one 2021 study reported that they had ghosted someone. Last month, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd bemoaned the fact that online dating has become a “digital derecho, with oh so many ways” to “make and drop connections.”

[Read: What we gain when we stop caring]

But perhaps ghosting—or being ghosted—doesn’t need to be so upsetting. I recall a text I received at the end of the summer that illustrated, for me, the ways we apparently still tiptoe around ghosting. It was from a guy I had been on three dates with and then hadn’t heard from in weeks. I’d thought the third date was the best of them—a nice dinner with lots of talking, a little making out at my place—so I was surprised when the guy, a divorced dad, offered a tepid response to a follow-up text I sent before disappearing completely.

In the new text, prefaced by a cheery “Hello!,” he apologized, telling me he “didn’t intend to ghost” and that he’d been “focused on other connections (and life in general).” Mulling my response, I decided on “thanks—be well!” and then blocked him. The blocking was superfluous—he and I were unlikely to ever talk again—but it spoke to a twofold annoyance on my part. At the point that the guy texted back, I had mostly forgotten about him and moved on; his outreach was an unnecessary coda. I also felt like I should appreciate the fact that he reached out at all, though it seemed like he was doing so to make himself, not me, feel better; to, essentially, correct the record: I’m not someone who ghosts. It came across like a performance of nicety.

Contemporary ghosting, according to Pettman, is a by-product of what he calls an “overly social world,” one in which the real and the virtual are so intertwined that we can lose sight of another person’s humanity while engaging (or disengaging) with them. Ghosting can also often undermine a person’s perception of reality. In the case of the guy who ghosted me, my surprise stemmed from both his unanticipated disappearance and what I believed to be true: that he and I had had a genuinely good time together.

Some of this was projection. “We love an avatar more than a specific being,” Pettman writes, “a gestalt abstraction, lifted from all the love stories we’ve imbibed since childhood.” I wanted this guy to be the sort of guy who liked and wanted me. As for my irritation when he reappeared? Research shows that people who acknowledge or apologize for rejection risk activating the rejectee’s ire, rather than alleviating hurt feelings. Gili Freedman, a social psychologist who has studied both ghosting and apologies, told me that although apologies after a ghosting can in some cases provide closure, ghostees can also interpret ghosters’ apologies as insincere or self-serving.

Apologies also put ghostees into a double bind, she said. Ghostees can feel pulled back into a dynamic they didn’t choose to be part of, or be forced to confront the feeling of a wound being reopened, a sort of secondary rejection. The guy’s apology, I found, reminded me of the ghosting infraction in the first place, reasserted his control (he dictated the timing and the terms of communication), then created a social obligation for me to respond—a sort of obligatory forgiveness that can erode the ghostee’s sense of agency or even humanity.

The guy’s ghosting of me also dehumanized him. When he vanished after that seemingly promising third date, he quickly went back to being an idea of a man I had met: a profile picture on an app. After he apologized and I replied and blocked him, he became a different sort of ghost—one of my, not his, making. His belated effort had left me more dismissive of him than if he had simply stayed gone.

Many of us might have been ghosted enough times over the years that we’ve developed a thicker skin about what appear to be arbitrary disappearances. The cultural critic Kyle Chayka, for one, recently mused in The New Yorker about whether ghosting was such a “persistent feature of twenty-first-century life” as to be unavoidable. Pettman considers detaching a “necessary skill” and an “emerging discipline” for “the typical citizen of the new millennium.” And with the benefit of thicker skin, perhaps there’s room for more curiosity, room for ghosting to be, if not embraced, at least better understood.

Pettman is useful on this front. Ghosting may indicate individual cowardice, he writes, but “it also doesn’t get us very far to demonize individual behavior, as if the answer to structural social woes was to simply instill better moral codes in everyone’s hearts and minds.” (What to do about this? He doesn’t really say.)

The phenomenon is also perhaps indicative of our alienation from a sense of shared community. We’re spending more and more time alone, and some have suggested that we’re in the midst of a crisis of societal rudeness. One writer recently posited that contemporary self-help books might be encouraging people’s selfishness and self-interest (even at the cost of alienating or hurting others) by espousing the idea that “it’s OK to be a little bit of a jerk.”

[Read: The decline of etiquette and the rise of ‘boundaries’]

It’s worth considering a slightly counterintuitive idea too: that ghosters do care about their interactions, and the people who are affected by them. Somewhat. As Freedman told me, ghostees tend to underestimate ghosters’ contrition, and ghosters’ choice to disappear can actually be evidence of their complicated feelings. I’d add that not being informed of the reason for a ghosting might save many of us from embarrassment or self-loathing. One study on ghosting in a hiring context—say, an employer’s nonresponse to a job applicant—found that those who were ghosted had more self-esteem than those who got personal feedback.

Is this an argument for accepting ghosting in its contemporary form? Probably not—especially in the case of being stood up, which has always felt particularly egregious. And a new study that examined the consequences of being ghosted or rejected directly found that the adverse psychological effects of the former appear to last longer than those of the latter, because of ghosting’s “unique consequences linked to its ambiguity and lack of closure.” But I do sense that a certain softness might be found under the surface of this particular expression of our so-called epidemic of rudeness.

Maybe we can extend some empathy, or at least the benefit of the doubt, to those who disappear on us. Perhaps, in reaching out to me, even six weeks after our previous communication, my date was showing evidence of care, though he expressed it in a ham-handed way. Or, as Pettman puts it, “in a world of atomized, liquified, symptomatic and transactional relations,” maybe the act of ghosting can also “be a merciful one.”

On Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law legislation banning the use of price-fixing software by landlords to set rental rates. New York is the first state to outlaw algorithmic pricing by landlords, following a number of city-wide bans in Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. 

Software companies such as RealPage offer landlords algorithms that can set rental prices. The software can also help determine the ideal number of people to live in a unit or the terms of a lease renewal. RealPage says it can help its clients “optimize rents to achieve the overall highest yield, or combination of rent and occupancy, at each property.” But the “private data algorithms” advertised by these software companies, Hochul says, cause the “housing market distortion” that harms renters “during a historic housing supply and affordability crisis.”

Not only does the law outlaw setting rental terms with the software, it also says that any property owners who use the software will be considered colluding. In other words, two or more rental property owners or managers who set rents with an algorithm are, in practice, choosing to not compete with each other, whether they do so “knowingly or with reckless disregard,” the law says. This is a distinct violation from simply using the software itself. 

The use of this software has cost US tenants around $3.8 billion in 2024, according to Hochul’s press release. A 2022 investigation by ProPublica linked RealPage’s algorithm with soaring rental prices across the country. Two years later, the US government sued RealPage. 

The bill protects renters from “algorithmic price collusion,” Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a press release. One of the bill’s sponsors, State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, said of the bill: “This legislation will update our antitrust laws to make clear that rent price-fixing via artificial intelligence is against the law and ensure there are boundaries against behaviors that the federal government has found lead to anticompetitive practices and price fixing.”

The law goes into effect in 60 days. 

In 1955, spectators of a hydroplane race on Lake Washington in Seattle were treated to an unexpected thrill when Boeing's prototype 707 went inverted.

Here are two sentences I never expected to write:

1. Ken Griffin may be right.

2. The price of gold may be telling us something important.

Ken Griffin, for those who don’t know, is a hedge fund billionaire who was a big supporter of Donald Trump in the last election. That is, he was one of those ultra-rich Trump backers for whom being an insurrectionist-criminal convict-Epstein pal-scammer-serial bankrupt with clear autocratic tendencies didn’t matter. What mattered was “TAX CUTS!”, “DEREGULATION!”. But you often find that kind of self-serving myopia in wealthy and powerful men, who inhabit a gilded bubble that leaves them unable to see what is right in front of their faces.

A few weeks ago, however, Ken Griffin pronounced that he was shocked, shocked to discover that Trump isn’t a champion of free enterprise after all, and that he’s actually building a system of crony capitalism in which business success depends on your political connections. Well, I could have told Griffin that this was coming. In fact, I did.

Still, better late than never. Griffin deserves some credit for being willing to speak publicly about his current misgivings over Trump, rather than joining the nauseating chorus of praise for Dear Leader. So I found it interesting that he sees the soaring price of gold as an economic warning sign, an indication that Trump is causing the world to lose faith in America.

Here’s the price of gold over the past year. The price of gold is currently $4,037 per troy ounce, a record-setting price as it has skyrocketed in the past two months. It has risen over 54% since mid-November 2024:

Source

Normally I pay little attention to gold prices, but in this case I think Griffin has a point.

On gold: In general I’m with John Maynard Keynes, who called the fixation on gold a “barbarous relic.” You can’t use gold to make payments (other than the occasional bribe): Try buying a house with ingots. Some people seem to believe that gold will offer a refuge if society descends into chaos, but let’s be real: Do you really think gold bars would help you navigate a Fallout-type post-apocalyptic landscape?

Still, people continue to hold a lot of gold — around $27 trillion dollars’ worth. That’s more than 6 times the value of all crypto, despite the recent runup in Bitcoin etc. So in the words of Fallout’s Lucy MacLean, “okey dokey.”

So what drives gold’s price, and what do movements in that price tell us?

Some people believe that the price of gold reflects expectations of future inflation. There were many assertions to that effect in the early Obama years. Conservatives who insisted that Obama’s policies were inflationary pointed to the rising price of gold for support. Indeed, the real price of gold — the gold price divided by the overall level of consumer prices — rose significantly during Obama’s first few years in office:

Source

These claims prompted me to write a wonky blog post — basically a short paper, but I hope fairly readable — arguing, in essence, that holding gold isn’t an alternative to holding currency. It is, instead, an alternative to holding bonds, which pay interest. And the driver of rising gold prices after the financial crisis was, I argued, a sharp fall in the real rate of interest — the interest rate minus expected inflation – due to the bursting of the housing bubble and the economy’s deep recession.

We can observe the real rate of interest directly, because the U.S. government issues TIPS, “Treasury inflation protected securities” — bonds whose future payouts are linked to the Consumer Price Index. The interest rate on TIPS basically is the real rate, while the spread between rates on TIPS and ordinary bonds measures market expectations of future inflation. And TIPS rates plunged after the global financial crisis, explaining the rise in gold prices even though inflation was low, not high:

A side issue that has been worrying me: TIPS are linked to the official Consumer Price Index. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t be issuing new reports during the government shutdown, which means that it’s highly likely that the next CPI report, due Oct. 15, won’t come out on time if at all, and it’s anyone’s guess when we’ll get fresh data. How will Treasury handle that?

More broadly, if the Trump administration succeeds in politicizing the BLS, TIPS won’t be protected against inflation. They’ll only be protected against inflation the administration is willing to admit is happening. Have investors thought through the implications?

Back to my main theme. As Griffin says, gold prices have soared recently. Yet as you can see from my second chart, real interest rates are up, not down. What’s driving interest rates? Probably a combination of big budget deficits, made bigger by the One Big Beautiful Bill, and the AI boom, as well as the fear that Trump will politicize the Fed and stoke persistent inflation. But these higher real interest rates should drive gold prices down, not up.

So what’s happening? The most likely story, which seems consistent with what Griffin is saying, is that a growing number of investors — including, in particular, foreign central banks — are moving into gold because they no longer consider U.S. debt a safe asset.

Now it’s hard to pin down exactly what investors fear, perhaps because they aren’t sure themselves. But many previously inconceivable possibilities are now quite conceivable given the Trump administration’s radicalism. Runaway inflation hidden by rigged official statistics? Expropriation of the reserves of governments Trump doesn’t like? Forced conversion of foreign assets into 100-year bonds? Given the administration’s record so far, how confident are you that none of these things could possibly happen?

As I said at the top of this piece, I normally pay don’t pay much attention to gold, which doesn’t play an important role in the modern economy. But I believe that the recent runup in gold prices is telling us something — namely, that the world is losing faith in America.

And perhaps Ken Griffin’s warnings are also telling us that even ultra-rich hedge fund titans are starting to worry about the monster they helped create.

MUSICAL CODA