Werner Herzog was on Conan Needs a Friend, which I heard about through Pajiba’s coverage. I’ve watched some of Herzog’s documentaries and my favorites are Grizzly Man, Happy People: A Year in the Taiga and Into the Inferno. Herzog does not get enough credit for getting coverage from within North Korea for Into the Inferno. I didn’t realize that he was working on a feature film with Kate and Rooney Mara called Bucking Fastard. They play twin sisters and Orlando Bloom costars as the love interest. Herzog really sold that film on Conan, and said he’s still working on it, I’m assuming in post production. He also has another documentary, Ghost Elephants, out next year, and is promoting his 2024 memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. I just took it out on my Libby library app (which doesn’t need to be an app)! Speaking of apps, Conan asked Werner about the fact that he’s not on social media and doesn’t have a cell phone. Werner said he has one now, but that he switches it off and only uses it when an app is required. He had to get the phone to get his car out of a parking garage in Dublin.

On just getting a phone recently
Conan: I was fascinated to learn that you don’t engage in social media. You don’t have a cell phone. And I think you lead a richer life than most people I’ve encountered.

Werner: Well, it’s hard to compare. Each one of us has the privilege… to live your life. We are here only once. So we better do something decent, do something meaningful. Whatever it is at the end of the day doesn’t really matter. But um I have lived with great intensity and also great dangers, great great challenges and it has been wonderful so far. I can’t complain.

Werner: I don’t know how you survive without a cell phone in the modern era.

Werner: Easily. I enjoy it. I do read. But in fact, I had to get myself a cell phone. Technically, I have one now. In Dublin, I was filming at the train station, parked my car at the adjacent building and I couldn’t get out of it because uh it would open only with an application on a cell phone. You could not pay cash. You could not pay with a credit card. You had to download an app of this parking lot… so I couldn’t get out of it. And I was stuck and for things like that I do have a cell phone but it’s always switched off…

Too much disinformation comes in through it and people get addicted and they cannot uh take their eyes off and keep scrolling…. and of course everything everything that comes in via your cell phone or your laptop emails or whatever you have to distrust…

On AI
Werner: AI I do not want to uh to put it down completely because it has glorious magnificent possibilities in science in pharmaceuticals in transportation and you just name it but at the same time it is already on route to take over warfare. Directing drones and I mean huge swarms of them and it will be overwhelmingly the face of warfare of the future. And of course cheating, pretending, propagandizing… it’s out there and and we have to be alert to it. When you’re curious and when you access different sources very quickly you might find out this is invented.

I’ve seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence, story and acting and everything and they look completely dead. There are stories, but they have no soul. They’re empty and soulless. It’s a most common lowest denominator of what is filling billions and billions of informations on the internet. Nothing beyond this common denominator can be found in in these fabrications and you will immediately identify it.

[From Conan Needs a Friend on YouTube via Pajiba]

Conan told a story about having to get an app for his cats’ litter box, and it all sounds so dystopian. I hate having apps for everything and will try to just login on my desktop computer or browser on my phone. There are also things that should always be analog, and I think most household appliances fall under that. I don’t want a thermostat, refrigerator or washer and dryer that can be hacked. It also irks me that there’s an app for my car (a Nissan) and that I have to pay a monthly fee on top of my car payment to access it. The app doesn’t even work right!

Also, Werner is dead on about phones, disinformation and addiction. At some point, I would guess about ten years ago, we reached a point of diminishing returns with the Internet and it all started going downhill. That’s also when fascism started spiking upwards. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that it’s not something that I’m going to find on a TikTok video or an Instagram reel. I have to fact check almost everything I see on those short videos, even the cute animal stories are sometimes complete bullsh-t cobbled together to make a narrative.

Photos credit: IMAGO/Dave Bedrosian/Avalon, Mirco Toniolo/AGF Foto/Avalon, Ottavia Da Re/Agenzia Sintesi/Avalon