Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media?

00:00:00.240 | if you've spent enough time online this past month you've probably noticed a sudden uptick

00:00:05.280 | unsettling realistic ai generated videos maybe it's body cam footage of super mario in his cart

00:00:12.880 | being pulled over by police and then yelling i can't get another ticket before peeling out

00:00:17.120 | or a horse on skis competing in a freestyle skiing competition or bob ross wrestling

00:00:24.000 | abraham lincoln these were all generated by open ai's blockbuster video generation model thora 2

00:00:31.120 | which allows you to create videos simply by describing them in words open eye open ai however

00:00:37.120 | has gone one step further and bundled up access to this model in a new app that they call simply thora

00:00:44.080 | that operates like tick tock you can easily create videos and share them you can view other people's

00:00:49.680 | creations and there's a an algorithmically curated feed just like you would see on tick tock so you

00:00:55.280 | can have a steady incoming feed of grade a high octane lop the online world is usually pretty

00:01:02.480 | excited about new ai products but the reaction to sora has been more interesting people online seem

00:01:08.080 | to put it simply unsettled i want to play a clip here here's casey neistat reacting to the new sora app

00:01:17.920 | my analysis we are so completely

00:01:23.040 | fucked uh and now here is vlogger hank green venting some of his own frustrations

00:01:32.720 | boy humanity if you're the kind of who will create slop talk you are not the kind of who

00:01:40.080 | should be in charge of open ai all right the new york times for its part was really worried about what

00:01:45.680 | this means for even just truth they quoted a founder of a tech non-profit saying the following

00:01:50.960 | nobody will be willing to accept videos as proof of anything anymore all right but for all of these

00:01:58.320 | particular fears we're hearing now about sora there is one fear in particular that i think is really

00:02:04.480 | interesting but is not getting discussed that much yet and that is the question of what will the impact be

00:02:12.160 | of apps like sora on the existing major social media platforms think about it it's an app on your phone

00:02:18.480 | in which anyone can basically create any visual content they can think of why would i watch a tick

00:02:24.640 | tock dance routine when using sora i can create a video of michael jackson dancing on mount everest

00:02:31.120 | with martin luther king jr that's actually a real video i found jesse so by introducing sora has open ai

00:02:36.960 | just radically changed the entire social media landscape this is the question we're going to get

00:02:41.520 | into today as always i'm cal newport and this is deep questions

00:02:55.200 | today's episode did open ai just kill social media

00:03:03.920 | all right so we gotta be careful in our approach here we're going to go very systematically

00:03:12.560 | to investigate this question and what we think the answer is so if we really want to understand the

00:03:18.400 | danger that the existing social media platforms currently face i want to take you back in time to

00:03:25.520 | roughly the summer of 2022 back then there is a new entrance in town called tick tock it was just taking

00:03:33.200 | off and having this sort of phenomenally fast user growth and the entrenched social media platforms

00:03:38.960 | they were horrified by the speed with which tick tock was growing and the fear that it was

00:03:44.480 | pulling their users over into its own ecosystem so the existing social media incumbents responded the

00:03:52.080 | way you might expect they tried to make their services more like tick tock this means they

00:03:58.160 | began to ignore the way they classically operated with friends and followers and favorites and retweets

00:04:03.760 | and instead try to offer up a stream of content selected exclusively by an algorithm to be as low friction

00:04:11.360 | as possible and as engaging as possible i noticed this shift with some interest back when it was happening

00:04:17.680 | and i wrote an article about this for the new yorker back in the summer 2022 it was called tick tock and

00:04:23.760 | the fall of the social media giants and that article argued that this move to be more like tick tock was

00:04:29.840 | something that they would come to regret so why don't i load this article on the screen here

00:04:33.120 | for those who are watching instead of just listening all right so here's the article pretty cool graphic

00:04:38.480 | i don't know if i ever really understood it jesse but it seems to be

00:04:42.400 | a lot of people in cages but the doors are open and they're circular cages and they're dancing

00:04:47.120 | the cool graphic i never quite understood it all right so let me start with the following thing i

00:04:51.360 | wrote in this article when uh after introducing the idea that the other social media platforms the

00:04:56.400 | existing platforms were chasing tick tock i wrote this shift is not surprising given tick tock's phenomenal

00:05:02.640 | popularity but it's also short-sighted now to unpack that let's start by asking a fundamental question

00:05:11.520 | what was it that made the existing social media giants so unassailable before the era of tick tock

00:05:17.040 | began i want to go through three of them one by one let's look at them carefully we'll start with facebook

00:05:23.120 | when you're facebook what made you hard to compete with well you had two things going on

00:05:29.120 | one was the specific people who used it because facebook was so early to the the social media

00:05:34.240 | space they got lots and lots of regular people to sign up to use it that meant for each individual new

00:05:39.920 | user facebook had a really good pitch the people you know whether they're your friends your family

00:05:47.600 | or somebody new from high school your college roommate they're probably on this platform and you

00:05:50.880 | can connect to them they're not on other platforms but they're on our platform so the people

00:05:54.480 | you know are on this platform the other advantage that facebook built up is that early on as all

00:05:59.120 | of these regular people joined it they put in a lot of free labor to select people who were their friends

00:06:06.000 | and to manually tell facebook that's a friend that's a friend that's a friend which created in the

00:06:10.880 | end this sort of like dense social graph who captured who knew who that allowed it then to

00:06:17.520 | deliver a pretty compelling content profile to its users i can tell you what people you know are up to

00:06:24.080 | if there's changes in their life what they're reading what they're interested in that's a pretty

00:06:29.440 | compelling package it was hard for later entrance into the social media space to compete with because

00:06:34.960 | they weren't going to get a billion people necessarily to sign up and to spend all their time

00:06:39.200 | saying who their friends are if you wanted to know what people you knew were up to be on the same

00:06:42.480 | network with people you knew facebook was the only game in town that was a great competitive advantage

00:06:47.680 | all right well let's look at instagram instagram had a slightly different set of advantages that is used

00:06:53.920 | it also mattered they were early as well it also mattered who signed up for their platform but it was

00:07:00.160 | less from the point of view of the user it was less about people you personally knew being on this

00:07:06.640 | platform but instead the fact that there was lots of interesting and compelling expert type

00:07:10.960 | people on this platform creating visually interesting content so uh fitness influencers writers people

00:07:18.800 | who lived in ghost towns people who walked around in white linen dresses and collected flowers while

00:07:24.640 | soft music plays there was interesting people we'll put like experts in square quotes but like people who

00:07:29.680 | were uh good at what they did or known for things that were on there producing visually interesting

00:07:34.720 | content so it's a place you could go to follow people like cooks chefs everything right bakers

00:07:40.720 | bread makers that did things that you thought was interesting or compelling you wanted to do

00:07:44.240 | and they're producing visually interesting content they had a lot of those people

00:07:47.360 | had invested in being on instagram and once again users took the time to go through and painstakingly

00:07:55.040 | favorite and follow different of these influencers so in the end what could instagram offer its users

00:07:59.280 | a steady curated stream of content that was about stuff that user cared about from people they felt

00:08:06.400 | like were doing interesting things and it was hard for competitors to come along because it's hard to get all those same

00:08:10.560 | writers and bakers and people who walk around in white linen dresses it's hard to get them to sign up

00:08:15.040 | for your new service and if i'm a new user of a new service and i haven't gone through all the effort of

00:08:19.440 | clicking on all the people that i like and want to follow then it's hard to figure out what to show me so

00:08:22.880 | that was a good advantage that instagram had what about twitter well in twitter's case again what they

00:08:29.680 | got early on from a user-based perspective that was useful is they got the people who were

00:08:34.640 | interesting from a cultural zeitgeist perspective the the politically adjacent people the reporters

00:08:41.280 | the comedians you had people who could make interesting or funny or smart or astute or off

00:08:48.240 | kilter observations about what was happening in the world all these interesting people had gone to twitter

00:08:53.760 | when it began to take off even more importantly they got all of their users to again go through

00:09:00.960 | this painstaking process of creating these follower relationships i follow this person this person this

00:09:06.000 | person that person follows this person this person that person if you study the resulting graph

00:09:11.680 | it has a very high expansion factor so if i go to my followers and then my follower followers and my

00:09:18.000 | followers followers followers the size of people that's being reached increases very quickly it increases

00:09:23.680 | along typically like an exponential curve now what this meant was twitter had whether they meant to or not

00:09:32.320 | created a fantastic basically human driven distributed curation machine you have lots of people who know

00:09:39.200 | lots of things and are interesting and good equips and if someone makes like a really good relevant

00:09:44.640 | observation or picks out a piece of news that like is going to be really interesting to the moment

00:09:49.200 | and they read they tweet it to their followers the cascade of retweets that follows can get that content

00:09:56.480 | to a huge percentage of the hundreds of millions of users using twitter very quickly

00:10:00.640 | so as a result they created this engine for keeping the finger on the pulse of the online zeitgeist

00:10:06.400 | in a way that would be like very hard to replicate from scratch so if i come along to be a twitter

00:10:10.320 | clone and a lot of people tried this the problem is if i don't have enough of those interesting people

00:10:16.000 | and we don't have those people spending enough time making these intricate follower relationships so that

00:10:19.840 | we have these exponential cascades i just end up getting like a relatively boring feed directly of

00:10:25.600 | people who aren't that interesting it's just not that interesting to me so again twitter had a really good

00:10:30.560 | business model they're really good competitive advantage in all three cases we can generalize

00:10:35.520 | what had made up until this point we're getting to now what had made these services so powerful is

00:10:40.320 | that they had the right users and these painstakingly constructed social graphs and it was hard for

00:10:46.640 | anyone new to come along get both of those things so they were in a good position but then tick tock came

00:10:53.040 | along and the thing about tick tock is that it doesn't really care about who its users are and tick

00:11:00.640 | tock did not really care about who knew who follower graphs favorites interests they didn't really care about

00:11:07.600 | that either they basically bypassed the elements that made the social media giants hard to compete with

00:11:14.640 | i want to bring up on the screen here uh this is the way i explained it in my article so why don't why

00:11:19.520 | don't i just read this because i think it it captures it well the effectiveness of the tick

00:11:24.240 | tock's experience is found in what it doesn't require unlike twitter tick tock doesn't need a critical

00:11:30.560 | mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging the short video format grabs

00:11:36.800 | users attention at a more primal level relying on visual novelty or a clever interplay of music and

00:11:41.680 | action or direct emotional expression to generate its appeal and unlike facebook tick tock doesn't

00:11:48.080 | require that your friends already use the service for you to find it useful though there are some

00:11:52.720 | social features built in the tick tock they're not the main draw of the app tick tock also doesn't

00:11:57.280 | rely on its users to manually share content with friends or follow followers to surface compelling

00:12:01.920 | offerings it assigns this responsibility to its scary good recommendation algorithm all right so tick tock

00:12:09.040 | bypassed the competitive advantages that protected the social media giants by just saying look we're

00:12:13.600 | just going to take a whole bunch of content we don't care who creates it and we'll use a very good

00:12:18.640 | probably like two tower style recommendation app to just show you a constant stream of stuff we'll

00:12:22.720 | think you like it will adjust what you show you based on your behavior and it will just be right

00:12:26.080 | to the brain stem interesting when facebook instagram and twitter noticed that and chased after tick tock

00:12:31.440 | they ignored or walked away from their competitive advantages when they started adding features that

00:12:39.040 | just served up content selected by algorithms independent of who created it or who you like or

00:12:43.760 | follow as a user they were basically walking away or walking beyond their own proverbial castle walls and out

00:12:50.640 | there in the plains beyond they were vulnerable so i ended that article in 2022 with a warning which i'm

00:12:57.600 | going to read right here all right this all points to a possible future in which social media giants

00:13:04.560 | like facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance they'll continue to chase new engagement

00:13:10.320 | models leaving behind the protection of their social graphs and in doing so eventually succumb to the

00:13:14.400 | new competitive pressures this introduces tick tock of course is subject to the same pressure so in this

00:13:20.080 | future it too will eventually fade the app's energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely in the

00:13:26.080 | long term to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force in the wake churned by

00:13:32.320 | these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distractions but also innovative new apps

00:13:36.800 | and methods for expression and interaction so basically what i'm saying here is all of social media was

00:13:41.600 | collapsing around the tick tock model which was just pure engagement and my argument here is if all you

00:13:46.560 | are offering to people is pure engagement you are now competing with every other possible source of

00:13:52.400 | engagement that exists out there when facebook is saying your friends are here you can see what your

00:13:57.200 | friends are up to i'm not competing with netflix i'm not competing with podcast or slot machines or

00:14:02.880 | pornography or anything else because i'm offering you a very specific thing that only i can do but when i'm

00:14:07.440 | instead just giving you like a a long uh infinite feed of videos from people you don't know or really

00:14:12.800 | care about that are just trying to capture your attention then that's just purified engagement and

00:14:16.880 | you're competing with anything else in that moment that might grab my attention and so i ended that warning

00:14:21.840 | by saying new things will come along that are even more engaging than you you don't have a competitive

00:14:27.760 | advantage you can't stay on the pedestal for much longer all right this brings us back to the main argument for

00:14:33.200 | today we can think of the sora app as the one of the first major sort of new distractions or entertainments

00:14:41.280 | that i warned about in that article once all these social media platforms said we're just going to tickle

00:14:46.560 | your brain stem open ai came along and said well we can do that even better but you have to actually

00:14:53.120 | get people to create these videos and they're confined by their environment and the people they have

00:14:58.960 | the film and they're not professional actors they don't have good lighting and like really interesting

00:15:03.360 | stuff is dangerous and hard to do and only like a few number of video creators actually have enough

00:15:07.120 | money to do that like we can just do that all in ai we can make if you if all you're looking at is

00:15:10.640 | like i don't care what this video is i'm just swiping swiping swiping is that interesting

00:15:13.920 | we can give you like i saw when i was doing research for this a video where it said this is true

00:15:20.960 | jesse a swimming competition there's a lot of stephen hawking content out there it's a swimming

00:15:25.360 | competition stephen hawking's on the block they fire the gun and he just falls in the water and drowns

00:15:30.160 | that would be like it's a terrible taste really hard to actually stage and film

00:15:35.680 | in sora you just type in that like in a sentence and you have that video so yeah they are in trouble

00:15:43.520 | because i guess i could say they ignored me when you're in the world of pure novelty that's going to

00:15:51.680 | be a constantly churning novelty it's hard to be the king of just pure novelty for that long so this

00:15:56.400 | is all bad news for the existing social media giants but are they doomed do they have a chance here maybe

00:16:04.720 | maybe they have a chance of breaking free out of the spiral that could be dangerous to them

00:16:10.240 | so when we return i want to talk through what exactly facebook instagram and twitter

00:16:15.120 | could do right now if they wanted to to protect themselves from the threat of ai generated distraction

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00:20:59.040 | all right so as we covered in the first part of this deep dive the new soar app revealed the

00:21:02.960 | dangers of an online business model that's based purely on offering unanchored distraction there will

00:21:08.880 | always be new technology boasting an even more direct way to tap into their users brainstem so it's a very

00:21:15.120 | sort of unsettled place to be trying to build a business so here's the question i want to answer next

00:21:21.280 | what can existing social media giants do to protect themselves from this ai future i'm going to go through

00:21:27.680 | this platform by platform and give you my game plan for how you would ai proof yourself against this

00:21:33.680 | particular incursion i'll say jesse as an aside it is a little bit weird that me mr quit social media

00:21:39.920 | is trying to help these companies out but um honestly i i don't think uh i don't think there can be like

00:21:46.240 | kind of a worse app than what we see with aura so to me this is kind of like an enemy of my enemy is

00:21:52.080 | my friend type of situation i mean i guess i wouldn't be that unhappy if all these services

00:21:55.760 | went out of business but you know i would like them to be better than sora so i'm going to do this

00:22:02.000 | i'm going over the dark side and i'm going to give advice to the major social media companies all right

00:22:05.840 | let's start with twitter here's my advice for twitter to fight off the ai threat one forget trying to do

00:22:12.080 | that video autoplay tick tock type thing that you've been doing where you know someone clicks on a video

00:22:17.360 | that they really want to see and then you try to get them into an algorithmically curated feed that

00:22:21.840 | that is the exact type of thing that makes you vulnerable to sora instead you have to work i would

00:22:27.040 | say on the competitive advantage that always made you strong be a place where interesting people go to

00:22:32.080 | say interesting things and that you have this like really good distributed curation model of capturing

00:22:38.160 | like what is interesting to the zeitgeist on any given day to do this i would say twitter probably

00:22:43.840 | has to find a better middle ground on content moderation right before elon musk took over

00:22:49.600 | the service was becoming like a lot of institutions to be holding to the far left and this was having

00:22:54.320 | a sort of stultifying effect and it was really also sort of like annoying and uh and kind of

00:22:58.720 | censorious after musk has gone too far in the other direction so he kind of went too far the other way

00:23:03.680 | uh you look you're you're on you you scroll twitter for five minutes you get the jew hatred which to me is

00:23:10.560 | always like the the bellwether of like okay this is this things aren't going great here we also have

00:23:16.000 | a lot of arbitrariness from musk himself or he'll just sort of like someone or not like someone and

00:23:19.840 | put his finger on the thumb none of that is good if you're trying to create a town square that you want

00:23:24.400 | a lot of people to go on to to see what's interesting in the day so find some sort of middle ground like

00:23:28.000 | build a council like we have a council who's in charge of all content moderation policies and by

00:23:33.920 | definition it's going to be two people left-leaning two people right-leaning and like two centrist and

00:23:39.440 | they vote on all the policies and it's transparent and we apply them clearly and just be reasonable

00:23:44.560 | people are okay with reasonable if you do that and then to keep focusing on feature improvements

00:23:49.760 | making the experience better like get the friction out of here make it easier to do this or that

00:23:53.680 | uh i think you could still do well in that model i think twitter can be a very sustainable three to

00:23:58.800 | four billion dollar annual revenue business and still have an impact on the culture

00:24:02.240 | yeah you're not gonna be meta that's pretty good for a private company and you're pretty ai proof

00:24:07.840 | because this is all about like real people saying things that are interesting in the moment that are

00:24:12.080 | being selected in a way that's distributed intelligence in a way that like an algorithm can't quite replicate

00:24:17.040 | all right what can instagram do i think instagram needs to return to its bread and butter of

00:24:22.320 | interesting influencers producing visually interesting content and allowing users to specify oh i like this

00:24:31.200 | person i want to see what they're doing so moving retreating from their push towards algorithmically

00:24:36.720 | curated sort of reel after reel of just like we'll just show you stuff that might be interesting what

00:24:43.200 | the algorithm instagram should refocus on doing is just suggesting new people that you might want to

00:24:49.200 | follow or look at hey you like these type of authors you might like this one and you go check them out

00:24:52.960 | and like yeah i like what they're doing and you add them to the stable of people that you're listening

00:24:56.880 | to but again instagram should be a place where they're sort of like experts doing stuff you find

00:25:01.120 | interesting producing content that's visually interesting and you have a good feed of that from

00:25:04.640 | people that you selected that again is going to differentiate you from a sort of the the slop style

00:25:11.120 | world that you'll see something like on something on sora because it's not just random engagement

00:25:15.920 | it's engaging content on specific things you find interesting it builds on like human expertise and

00:25:22.640 | human connections ai proves you what about facebook you got to go back to the friend graph that's my

00:25:28.240 | argument there that facebook should be a place where you go where you want to see what people that

00:25:32.480 | you know or organizations that you know about and specifically chose to follow what are they up to and

00:25:37.760 | maybe what it is that they're consuming that like one degree of direct indirection content sharing is

00:25:42.800 | fine here is articles that my friends are reading or suggesting right now that's fine or i follow a

00:25:50.400 | magazine and so in my sort of news feed will be various things that they publish that that sort of

00:25:56.080 | in between era facebook where it was still very friend and follower graph friend graph focused

00:26:02.640 | but you had a news feed that old from the different people you knew but not going so far that like we're

00:26:09.520 | just going to make this feed all the way algorithmic and just try to like keep you engaged that's a

00:26:13.680 | really good competitive advantage the other thing you should lean into if you're facebook is attention

00:26:18.560 | to the users this was facebook's original business model i wrote about this in my book deep work we

00:26:24.720 | forget this now in our current age of engagement and tick tock but the original pitch for for facebook

00:26:30.320 | was not just your friends are here but that they will pay attention to what you're doing before facebook

00:26:36.160 | came out we had had this web 2.0 revolution where we had things like blogs that made it easier to

00:26:41.520 | publish content online you didn't have to directly edit html files you could like type into a text box

00:26:46.080 | and click publish we take that for granted but it was a big deal in the earlier 2000s the problem

00:26:51.600 | of the early web 2 era is that when people tried publishing their own things and starting their own like

00:26:58.000 | blogs on blogger.com no one came because the vast vast majority of what people have to say or write

00:27:05.440 | is really pretty boring and that was really painful and then facebook came along and said hey here's a

00:27:11.280 | place where you can publish stuff and people pay attention because we have this social compact

00:27:14.720 | if you friend these people on facebook you will like or comment on the stuff they do and they'll like

00:27:20.960 | and comment on the stuff you do that is a really powerful feeling that feeling if i put something out

00:27:25.680 | there and some people reacted to it professional writers like myself sort of take this for granted

00:27:30.720 | but it was a really powerful pull that made people really like facebook especially when they moved the

00:27:36.720 | mobile and put the like button on there that really got their engagement numbers up because people loved

00:27:41.440 | it people love seeing other people paying attention to stuff they do go back to that model facebook

00:27:49.440 | that's a good model the people you know and the specific organizations you like are here

00:27:54.560 | you can see what they're up to and what they're publishing and you can get some attention for the

00:27:59.440 | stuff you put up there put up an article you find then a few other people you know will comment on it

00:28:02.960 | that is really powerful stuff and it's stuff that you can't replicate with ai the sora tiktok experience

00:28:09.280 | is still a very different thing that's just pure engagement this is something that's going to be hard to

00:28:12.640 | do if i don't have all the users on there and all the friend graphs so that's what i would do if i was facebook

00:28:16.240 | again yes this is none of these are strategies that maximize user engagement minutes but they're

00:28:22.240 | also strategies that can keep you pretty profitable while hoping that you avoid going completely out of

00:28:26.320 | business if you chase after the the peer engagement model what about tiktok themselves are they completely

00:28:31.840 | in trouble here i mean their whole model is built on just a stream of engagement and no profundity to

00:28:39.120 | it no it's just whatever you look at longer gets on the screen they really really are in danger

00:28:46.000 | from an app like sora because sora can create stuff that tiktok creators themselves cannot so can tiktok

00:28:51.040 | survive the uh the age of sora well i think they could survive a little bit longer potentially potentially

00:28:59.040 | and here's why i'm not hearing this talked about as much yet either i think it's an important point

00:29:03.680 | it is expensive to produce sora videos using the sora 2 video generation model it is computationally very

00:29:13.840 | expensive you have expensive gpu chips that are fired up for a long amount of time it's a huge amount of

00:29:18.800 | electricity and a huge amount of usage to produce that 30 seconds of bob ross you know wrestling with

00:29:26.880 | abraham lincoln so the only way for this to be economically feasible of course is that open ai has

00:29:32.800 | to charge for the creation of these videos so right now you can download the sora app for free but if

00:29:39.840 | you want to create a video you have to have at the very least a chat gpt plus membership this is at least

00:29:44.160 | my understanding which is 20 a month if you have that 20 a month membership you can produce up to 50 videos a

00:29:50.880 | month but they have to be at 480p resolution which is low and it's actually gonna be kind of hard to

00:29:55.040 | compete with existing videos that are out there and 50 might sound like a lot but you also have to keep

00:30:00.160 | in mind the way these videos are created is you just type in some words and hit generate

00:30:04.560 | you can imagine it might take a lot of iterations on your descriptions to get just one video that you like

00:30:10.880 | so if you really want to be producing a reasonable number of sora videos that you can iterate on at a

00:30:17.600 | reasonable resolution that could actually do good on a lot of these like high resolution devices

00:30:22.000 | you have to have the chat gpt subscription account that's 200 a month that's a really high price point

00:30:28.640 | when you compare it to tick tock's price point which is free for all users because the cost of operation

00:30:34.480 | here is so much less the actual computation that goes into like capturing and rendering and editing the

00:30:41.760 | videos is distributed to the phones that the users themselves own and all the tick tock itself has to do

00:30:48.000 | is uh take up these these highly compressed videos from the app and store those i mean it's not

00:30:53.440 | computationally free a company like twitter is still going to be more efficient to run because

00:30:58.080 | you're dealing with text and not video but still it is so much more cheaper if you don't have to generate

00:31:04.080 | video from scratch it is so much cheaper right i mean like we know this jesse like anyone can watch a

00:31:10.000 | youtube video on their computer but we had to get a beast of a computer to do video editing because anytime

00:31:15.200 | you're doing anything with like editing or creating videos you need a lot of computational power

00:31:19.040 | so tick tock might be able to kind of wait out sora i'm assuming open ai is losing money on this

00:31:24.880 | they're going to try to their hope is they can eat money and grow it big enough that when they sell ads

00:31:30.640 | they'll be able to somehow kind of like make it back and make this economically viable if they have

00:31:34.080 | enough people i mean maybe we'll get into this more in the final segment but if i'm tick tock i'm like

00:31:38.800 | you know what people don't want to pay 200 a month just to have a shot to produce these videos so you're

00:31:43.680 | going to have many fewer people producing these videos and what makes slop sort of work like what

00:31:48.880 | makes tick tock work is there are it's so easy to create videos they can get a huge corpus of potential

00:31:55.440 | videos to show each person and it just gives them more opportunity to get it right when you're doing

00:32:01.920 | recommendation algorithms it's kind of like a core idea you need inventory the more things you have

00:32:07.600 | that potentially suggest to someone the closer you can become to maximizing the expected reward for the

00:32:13.040 | individual users and the better the experience comes so that's going to be the achilles the achilles

00:32:18.080 | heel of stora potentially is that it's so expensive there's just not enough inventory for it to have the

00:32:22.400 | same sort of like wow you're really matching my interest tightly that like tick tock is able to get

00:32:27.360 | and so what's going to happen is the relatively small number of people creating the sore videos

00:32:31.760 | are just going to jailbreak them out of the app and upload them on tick tock anyways where they can

00:32:35.760 | just be part of the big inventory that tick tock is using so tick tock might survive sore because i

00:32:39.360 | don't think the economic model necessarily makes sense but they're still in trouble because their model

00:32:45.440 | this is like a horde of barbarians is coming at their roman gates they might fight this one off

00:32:50.480 | but there's going to be wave after wave after wave when your model is just pure engagement

00:32:56.560 | there's going to be so many other things that come along that offer that engagement better maybe you

00:33:01.360 | fight off this one but like at some point there's going to be another app where it's going to be

00:33:05.520 | like a sports betting with topless women that like sends you random you know jackpot uh slot machine

00:33:14.560 | rewards or something while misting you with fentanyl mist i mean you're never going to win this game

00:33:19.680 | forever the engagement there always will be new things to figure out how to be more engaged if all

00:33:24.480 | you're trying to do is just win this game of just like slack jaw how much drool can you get out of

00:33:28.880 | your mouth as you're staring at the screen all right so tick tock you can survive a lot longer but

00:33:33.280 | there's other social media companies go back to your old social media model i don't love that model by

00:33:37.520 | the way i don't think the internet should be consolidated in the four companies i have huge

00:33:40.640 | issues with those companies operating the way they used to operate but i would rather have them built on

00:33:46.640 | their carefully constructed user bases and social graphs each of them focus on their each unique sort of

00:33:51.760 | competitive value that makes them somewhat unassailable i would rather have a world with

00:33:55.520 | them than a world where it's just like one sora after another as a pretender to the distraction

00:34:01.920 | throne of who can make your eyes glaze over uh faster by the way i just uh saw the announcement jesse

00:34:08.560 | tick tock has just um up their rev share for their creator so they see this threat coming

00:34:13.760 | and they're trying they're like yeah we can just make it cost 200 to use sora we're gonna not only is it free

00:34:20.240 | we're paying you more than we used to pay you before to create content here so they're really

00:34:23.840 | uh they're putting up a defense and i think they've actually have a good shot at uh surviving this

00:34:28.000 | particular wave all right so uh let's move on to some takeaways

00:34:46.960 | all right so as i mentioned i'd be happy if all the social media platforms maintain their tick tock

00:34:53.520 | clone strategy and they all falter under the pressure of the apps like sora or whatever brain stem slop

00:35:00.800 | follows in its wake and then maybe as they all sort of collapse under the impossibility of being a dominant

00:35:07.440 | force doing such a simple thing that people will finally be convinced to move on from this type of content

00:35:14.080 | and go to more rewarding indie media style content like podcasts like newsletters like other high

00:35:18.480 | quality independent media but it's not inevitable that this has to happen and if the social media

00:35:23.600 | giants are smart they can avoid it the properties that made social media so powerful for so long are

00:35:29.120 | still there for the taking they still have these social graphs that no one ever again will replicate

00:35:33.920 | they still have these fantastically large and varied and interesting user groups it'll be hard for any

00:35:39.680 | other new platform to every replicate so if the social media giants retrench around their social

00:35:44.080 | graphs and curated user bases they can survive they can have their advantages again and i guess if the

00:35:50.560 | alternative is watching videos of abraham lincoln wrestling bob ross then i'd rather have a world of

00:35:55.600 | instagram influencers and twitter takes last just a little bit longer all right so there we go jesse

00:36:03.040 | sora have you did you hear about this it's like kind of everywhere but no yeah i mean i'm actually i

00:36:08.400 | have a lot of questions but i'm only gonna probably ask you a couple just to save some time do any idea

00:36:13.200 | what the user base is um i wasn't able to find that yet uh it's all kind of new it's because it's being

00:36:20.960 | rolled out in sort of a way that i find a little bit confusing because it was the it's the sora 2 is the

00:36:25.120 | model sora is the app that you can use to access sora 2. there might be other ways to access sora 2.

00:36:31.680 | i think a lot of people are downloading it to look at the slop so it's probably pretty big i don't know

00:36:36.080 | how many people are generating though and then do you think a lot of people know that facebook and

00:36:40.320 | instagram are under the same umbrella company oh i don't know what people know yeah it's a good question

00:36:45.200 | i mean facebook bought instagram in part because it is hard so i'm talking about it is hard to build

00:36:51.440 | user bases and social graphs from scratch instagram uh had built up this like user base and more

00:36:58.160 | influencer type expert types who are doing visually interesting content and facebook's like i don't

00:37:01.840 | know if we can get them all to come over here they've already there it's already existing the other thing

00:37:06.000 | that instagram did this might have been more important is they were way more native mobile because

00:37:11.600 | you have to use the camera to use instagram it was conceived as a mobile app from scratch because

00:37:15.520 | you need a smartphone camera for it to make sense and so their mobile app was just better than

00:37:19.760 | what facebook was doing like oh great we'll just hire them uh aqua hire them they spent a billion

00:37:26.000 | dollars there's like 12 people who worked for this company it was crazy it was like the the most money

00:37:29.680 | ever spent for so few people like we'll just get that app and then we don't have to try to build it

00:37:34.080 | ourselves but yeah i don't know if most people know in part because as i just went through each of

00:37:38.480 | these major platforms has such a unique identity like they're not that's why they all survived like i don't

00:37:44.640 | go on facebook to hear from authors i would go on instagram to hear from authors i i but i don't go

00:37:49.600 | on instagram really i mean i don't use any of these i'm using the sort of royal yeah here right you

00:37:54.000 | wouldn't go on instagram necessarily anymore to know what your like nephews are up to though because like

00:37:58.960 | you'll be uh group texting pictures or whatever right that's not good for that and like twitter if you

00:38:04.160 | want to like a political take or controversy or what's going on like reactions to something that's

00:38:08.560 | happening in the news like that's it's doing that you want to go on instagram for that and

00:38:12.240 | so they've all kind of uh they've differentiated into their advantages that was a pretty stable setup

00:38:17.600 | until tick tock came along and they felt like they had to follow it so they could keep getting growth but

00:38:23.680 | i really think that was a problem yeah um i'm sure like the people that have the sora accounts for 200

00:38:30.400 | a month and posts to instagram will become like beast users before anybody like realizes that you know

00:38:36.480 | i i got to imagine that's going to happen so because a lot of people aren't going to catch

00:38:39.680 | on to sora 2 for at least a year right at least the majority of the people yeah and sora puts on

00:38:44.080 | a watermark right because they're worried about uh deep fakes because you can just put like anyone in

00:38:49.760 | here but people have already figured out how to strip it off so if you can strip off the the mark you can

00:38:55.120 | strip off probably whatever protections you need to put it into i mean of course you can right it doesn't

00:39:00.160 | matter how many protections you put on your video generation because at the very least i can just

00:39:06.320 | on my computer be playing my sora account and i can just uh screen capture it into its own video

00:39:13.120 | right there's nothing you can do to prevent me from from if i want to capture that information the other

00:39:18.480 | thing open ai did which i think is well desperate to be honest when they turned on this app and that

00:39:26.080 | model they put very few protections on it so you could generate any ip you could work with any ip that was

00:39:34.560 | out there right so there's all of these videos there's a lot of like um dash cam footage of like

00:39:40.800 | police officers pulling people over and then peeling away and it's all ip it's mario it's spongebob square

00:39:47.120 | pants and like uh it's in a drug arrest right um it's like whatever character they uh they didn't put any ip

00:39:54.960 | protection um also any historical figures there's like a lot of hitler stuff on there there's a lot of like

00:40:00.320 | queen elizabeth stuff on there just existing people who are alive now uh just full deep fake videos

00:40:07.920 | there's there's um videos with with mark cuban uh on shark tank promoting this like made up like really

00:40:15.360 | terrible products or what just him looking straight to the camera and they know they're under pressure

00:40:19.760 | and everyone's like yeah you can't use our you think like nintendo and disney are okay with you making

00:40:24.960 | like fake drug bust videos with their ip of course not right so now open ai is like oh we are uh turning

00:40:29.840 | on like whatever whatever we'll turn on protections or whatever but their their idea was you know i think

00:40:35.840 | it's so cynical let's let people make like really offensive ip violating slop at least for a few weeks

00:40:42.000 | to try to get a lot of attention and then we'll be like oh my goodness i never thought that people would

00:40:47.040 | think to put protected ip in their videos we're going to try to turn it off now so it's just like

00:40:54.080 | really cynical thing they were doing whereas but i think they're going to get their um they're going

00:40:58.000 | to get sued left and right yeah i mean of course they knew people were going to do that um so there you

00:41:03.040 | go well they have a valuation of over 500 billion so they might be able to afford some lawyers i guess

00:41:10.000 | valuation is not money i know and good for them they have that valuation as we'll see we'll see

00:41:17.360 | what happens more on this a little bit later all right so we have a lot more to discuss about ai and

00:41:21.760 | social media in the following including some questions from you my listeners we got a call

00:41:26.800 | and a third segment where we're going to return to a recent tweet from sam altman which i think is bad

00:41:31.120 | news for open ai but we'll get into it it's not the most uh heartening thing to hear from your your

00:41:35.200 | loyal founder um first let's do a little bit of housekeeping before we move on the rest of the

00:41:40.160 | show uh jesse i got to give you a halloween update let's hear it well here's the thing i don't want to

00:41:47.440 | dox myself so i can't i don't want to like fully explain my halloween setup but i just want to briefly

00:41:52.960 | explain because i think it's important more important than the future of social media briefly explain the

00:41:57.440 | thing i built because it was really a pain to build so i wanted this sounds easy but it's hard i wanted

00:42:03.280 | synchronized lights and sound so i was doing like effects using programmable leds like carefully

00:42:10.000 | timed effects that i wanted sound to be synchronized to that is really hard to do in especially in like

00:42:16.800 | a waterproof container and i i got it installed and so far it's worked and it's survived for a week

00:42:22.640 | without you know fritzing out or something like that so that i'm happy about i had to use a micro

00:42:26.800 | controller that allows me to touch each individual bulb in a programmable led strand and i could write

00:42:32.400 | custom code for any of my animations right it's writing from scratch and see so i made all the

00:42:36.800 | animations and then i had to wire that up solder that up to another circuit board that has a sound

00:42:41.920 | controller on it and now i can sort of trigger sounds from the same microcontroller and it's all

00:42:47.680 | just low level timing loops i wrote from scratch so i can exactly trigger exactly when sounds happen

00:42:52.320 | exactly when you know lights are happening and i could hook up that sound board to my microcontroller

00:42:56.880 | by just putting low voltage on different pins at certain like times or whatever then you have to have

00:43:01.520 | like a whole power supply situation like all these things need different voltages you need a lot of

00:43:07.520 | voltage to run 200 programmable led lights right so that you big voltage supply but then i need voltage

00:43:14.240 | to run the speakers because i got to amplify the sound and i need voltage to run uh the microcontroller i

00:43:20.800 | need voltage to run the sound chip so i just actually just wired the voltage from the sound the microcontroller

00:43:26.400 | for the sound chip and then everything has to have like properly shared ground so that you have like because

00:43:30.160 | we have to synchronize communication signals over communication buses and then you got to have this

00:43:34.400 | full thing somehow fit into some sort of waterproof container in which lots of wires can come in and out

00:43:38.320 | and i got that all to work at least temporarily the funny part is imagine if you got it all set up

00:43:43.120 | it's working great and you walk back to your neighbors and it's like he's got something 10 times better

00:43:46.960 | i mean it's not gonna happen but an animatronic yeah walking across the like whatever

00:43:55.120 | i would i would get there i would get there so that's what's going on halloween update

00:43:59.440 | uh i'm going to the i'm gonna be at the new yorker festival oh when is that that'll be the the weekend

00:44:04.000 | after this comes out it's all sold out i think but that'll be fun but if fans are there they can say

00:44:07.520 | how to you they can say hi if they're there my i'll be i'm doing a panel on saturday with um charles

00:44:13.920 | do hig and anna wiener and it's coming on like ai in the future and stuff like that yeah we're

00:44:19.600 | competing with the other event happening the same time is ad smith being interviewed by george sanders

00:44:23.920 | so we're not the a event but i think it'll still be i think it'll still be interesting so you know

00:44:29.600 | new yorker festival is fun it's always good to like visit the city and i'm gonna you know have

00:44:33.200 | dinner with my publishing team and meet my you know hang out with my speaking agent and hopefully

00:44:37.840 | you can get some good gear they sell like coffee cups and something again for free um yes i guess

00:44:43.360 | that's true that's where your mind goes i'm thinking about like the celebrity writers i can meet

00:44:47.760 | just like get a coffee cup you have coffee cup a sweatshirt a new yorker hat it's spread out over

00:44:53.920 | like lots of venues in the city i think but anyway so that's fun uh some other exciting stuff coming up

00:44:58.400 | but i guess i can't really talk about it yet because some of this stuff is secret but anyways i think

00:45:02.800 | that's all the housekeeping what else do we have going on anything else jesse people need to know

00:45:05.440 | sign up for the newsletter does brad have a book available oh yeah yeah a friend of the show brad

00:45:11.360 | stolberg his new book the way of excellence which is excellent i blurbed it uh it's available for

00:45:16.160 | pre-order so you can just google way of excellence um if you go to his newsletter go to the link to his

00:45:23.840 | newsletter there's like bonuses if you want to pre-order it anyways he got a killer blurb by the way

00:45:28.080 | by you or somebody else better better than me i mean obviously i'm the killerest of blurbs cover of the

00:45:33.280 | cover of the uh book is steve kerr oh really yeah this is are they buddies uh they know each other

00:45:39.440 | but he just likes the book yeah it's it's he says it's an absolutely beautiful book so people

00:45:43.440 | don't know steve kerr is the coach of the gold state warriors um and himself he played with jordan

00:45:49.840 | i watched him play with jordan back in the 90s yeah so you know jordan punched him in the face once in

00:45:53.600 | practice remember that no oh you don't remember that it was like big news first kind of small

00:45:58.080 | guy he's like our size isn't he he's probably six three but jordan's six six six six yeah so there

00:46:02.960 | you go that's all the things that are happening all right let's move on to some questions

00:46:07.360 | hi first question is from corey the videos produced by soar 2 look pretty good to me

00:46:15.040 | if this technology continues to advance will this be the end of things like movies and television

00:46:19.280 | shows as we currently know them this seems to be a concern that people are having so when i was doing

00:46:24.640 | my research for this episode there's lots of different concerns about sora we talked about

00:46:29.440 | one on today's episode which is will it kill social media but there's lots of other concerns disinformation

00:46:34.320 | etc one of the bigger concerns was is this the death of creativity um this was actually i think the main

00:46:42.720 | argument in you know casey neistat had an argument uh video out we played a clip from it back in the

00:46:47.600 | introduction but his main point the the what he works to in this video is to argue that the sora

00:46:55.840 | app running with sora 2 is going to be basically the end of like creative industry as we know it

00:47:00.960 | i think jesse we could we got a clip right all right let's listen to that then i'll react to it

00:47:05.120 | times a day if all you have to do today is type those words into an app and click a button and it gives

00:47:12.000 | you a tick tock video in one then like youtube can't be far behind where you just type in the

00:47:16.640 | youtube video you want to see you push the button and boom okay quit your job for 100 grand last

00:47:20.080 | person off the island keeps buy every seat on a plane give away post come on come on good next

00:47:23.840 | one build the biggest vending machine that gives away cars and how many years away from netflix you

00:47:27.760 | just type in like jason bourne moon landing and go generating so he's arguing this technology is going

00:47:36.640 | to take down visual mediums one after another actually that part there in the middle

00:47:40.160 | with mr beast was actually pretty funny he used sora to produce a video this is like the type of

00:47:44.960 | thing you can do right now without the protections you can just make a video with someone in it who

00:47:48.160 | has no idea you're doing it he made a video of mr beast you very meta using sora at a computer and

00:47:53.840 | just frantically typing in like descriptions of videos so that like mr beast when you know instead

00:47:57.840 | of making the videos he's just like i would do this i want to do that it's actually pretty good use

00:48:00.560 | of sora all right so he argues it's going to take things one by one by one until it's netflix movies

00:48:05.120 | and like why would we do anything if we could just type in and get whatever we want

00:48:09.200 | i don't really think that is an issue and the reason why i don't think that is an issue

00:48:13.040 | is we have had over the generations all sorts of different quality levels of content and often

00:48:21.680 | the lower level the lower quality level stuff is very very engaging in the moment it could be like

00:48:26.880 | oh i gotta really watch this and yet we have not up to this point really seen a lot of examples of the

00:48:33.920 | existence of a lower quality high engagement stratum of content lead to the collapse of upper stratum

00:48:40.720 | right because like in the age of tick tock we still got chris nolan's oppenheimer

00:48:47.200 | like talk videos are like easy to make there's a huge number of them they're incredibly compelling when

00:48:53.280 | you're looking at them they're hard to look away oppenheimer's on the other end of the spectrum this is a

00:48:58.080 | movie that costs 250 million dollars to make and it took all these years and it's very artistic or

00:49:02.400 | whatever people were happy for both of these to exist they've made a billion dollars in box of the

00:49:06.800 | people who wanted to see that type of what stratum equality and they'll also separately look at the

00:49:12.000 | other stratum equality that is something like uh like a tick tock video this is why for example you can have

00:49:19.120 | during the like early 2000s on your tv you had the same device you have the real housewives which is

00:49:26.720 | like super engaging to watch and there's a lot of different series of them you can just turn it right

00:49:30.960 | on and it doesn't require much you're just in it and it's like primal and people are fighting and

00:49:36.080 | throwing drinks each other's faces at the same time you have the sopranos on hbo

00:49:39.200 | both stratums of quality exist the existence of a higher engagement and i would say it's higher

00:49:45.600 | engaging right like it's much easier to jump into a real housewives episode than it is to get into

00:49:50.640 | like a difficult sopranos episode it's much easier to watch a tick tock video than it is to try to like

00:49:54.800 | understand what like the time bending is that's going on in like dunkirk or something like that

00:49:59.120 | they both exist so we don't i mean we we often tell ourselves that the introduction of a lower stratum

00:50:06.000 | quality higher engagement type of content is going to destabilize the foundations and the things on top

00:50:10.080 | falls but we really have not seen that historically and so you know i would just extrapolate from what

00:50:15.920 | we've seen so far so yeah we can we can introduce you know uh this new type of super engaging content

00:50:25.120 | that can in this type you know it has different famous people in it not really they're going to turn

00:50:29.040 | that off because of ip stuff but it'll be visually very arresting in a way that tick tock is not because

00:50:34.480 | you don't actually have to go to a place to make the things and and it'll have its own sort of stratum there

00:50:39.200 | but i don't think it's going to collapse to the levels above it the only way this would happen is

00:50:44.720 | if if nice thought was arguing that like somehow eventually these models will produce things that

00:50:50.240 | are indistinguishable from like uh top movies that's not exactly how that works it's like really really

00:50:56.240 | hard to make a movie and like almost no ideas ever get made into the movie and it takes like auteur

00:51:00.560 | directors to just pull all these pieces together in their vision maybe they'll use more ai in their

00:51:05.120 | effects or something like that but it's not going to be i type the description of a movie and

00:51:08.960 | that it's made so i'm not super worried about that i just think slop is slop it is going to

00:51:14.400 | take over adjacent slop i think it's at the same strata ai videos at the same strata as tick tock

00:51:20.400 | and i again it's going to be trouble once the economics get worked out i think that's trouble

00:51:23.360 | for tick tock but i don't think it's trouble for like uh you know the next paul thomas anderson movie

00:51:28.480 | but maybe i'm just being naive but it hasn't happened yet hasn't happened yet all right who do we have next

00:51:33.600 | next up is dave i'm an it security engineer ai coding tools have allowed me to write scripts

00:51:40.000 | that save me weeks of time would my time be better spent writing code from scratch or am i better doing

00:51:45.600 | the best thing by focusing on the problems and using all the tools that i have available to make solutions

00:51:50.240 | quickly can i tell you what was programmed from scratch no ai tools your halloween light halloween

00:51:57.200 | lights damn straight they were timing down to the millisecond level all built within a central timing loop

00:52:04.240 | elegantly so i at each iteration of the loop like you're just in the iteration of a loop and you have

00:52:09.920 | to keep track of what lights are on and not on and how do i need to move that and where is it i got

00:52:14.080 | to randomize this thing and have an explosion have you just always known how to do that stuff or i

00:52:19.280 | yeah i've known how to like that type of coding like so i'm not like a full stack engineer anymore

00:52:23.760 | like i don't really know like the latest systems if you tell me to build like a commercial piece of

00:52:26.960 | software i was like i've been out i'm a theorist i don't know but i've been coding since i was like

00:52:32.080 | seven but like that type of thing give me a blank slate like here's a microcontroller like build or

00:52:37.760 | whatever that was like 20 minutes i sit in the office like let's just roll you know and i went for it

00:52:42.240 | i actually had a job for a while in college where uh there was a product there's a company in my town

00:52:48.960 | and they built a product it was it was not that interesting but it was like a piece of um it was

00:52:54.000 | for measuring the optical properties of film and it would like rotate things and shoot lasers through

00:53:00.320 | prisms and make measurements or whatever and the whole thing was run from a computer and they had

00:53:04.640 | like a special control card you would stick onto the the motherboard of the computer that would allow

00:53:08.720 | you to like precisely control this thing but then the technology for using those old control

00:53:13.200 | boards was getting outdated and so they're like we what we really need to do is like control this whole

00:53:17.120 | thing by a microcontroller that's on the device itself and the computer should just like send it a

00:53:21.600 | command like oh do a measurement and then like the microcontroller can like precisely you know control

00:53:26.000 | everything and then just send the data back and my job was to do all that like here's the microcontroller

00:53:31.200 | here's the thing and i programmed it from scratch right so like i got really good and that was an

00:53:35.040 | assembler nowadays like my halloween thing i can program it's like a c or c plus plus variant jr

00:53:40.480 | do we know stuff but back then it was assembler like you were like you were in it and you were counting

00:53:46.160 | the micro uh the number of the number of clock cycles required per instruction you could count

00:53:52.400 | those up to get timing like okay each clock cycles this many microseconds and the ad's going to

00:53:56.560 | take three clock cycles but yeah that type of stuff i love i love low level that type of thing i can do

00:54:02.080 | even though i don't do i don't build systems as a computer scientist um anyways what i'm trying to

00:54:07.680 | say dave is you're not a real man if you're not programming assembler from scratch um okay here's

00:54:15.600 | what i have to say about that actually more seriously about it if you're in an engineering position

00:54:20.240 | and you're building a system that like there is some stakes it doesn't even have to be something

00:54:25.760 | that other people are using i'm not talking about like you're building a product that you're

00:54:28.480 | trying to release but like you're building a system that does things that's going to affect

00:54:32.480 | other people it's helping you like update password files or review like what's going on or clean out

00:54:37.200 | tickets or this or that you don't want to be purely vibe coding by purely vibe coding meaning like you're

00:54:43.600 | just asking ai model to produce code and your only way of measuring it is just you run it and see if

00:54:48.080 | it works or not and if it's not you like tell it to fix some things you need to understand the code

00:54:54.080 | that's running whatever these scripts are that might affect other people you can use ai tools

00:54:59.280 | to help you produce that code or to help you debug that code or to give you like hey can you show me

00:55:04.480 | how i would do this thing but you have to know enough about whatever language and system you're

00:55:08.720 | using to be able to verify look at that code and see what it's doing to be able to audit yourself for

00:55:14.080 | a simple script and be like okay oh i see i didn't know that command ai helped me get that so you can't

00:55:19.760 | be vibe coding if there's any stakes like this where it could affect like outcomes for other people

00:55:24.480 | you got to know what's going on it's fine i'm happy if you want to use ai to speed up the process of

00:55:28.720 | generating or checking or debugging code but you got to actually understand at least that's my my computer

00:55:34.800 | science ethic you have to know enough about that programming language to know what's going on so ai

00:55:39.520 | should help you speed up something you already know how to do in this context not do something for

00:55:45.840 | you that you don't know how to do i think that's where we are especially in an engineering position

00:55:50.160 | like that all right who do we have next next up is pastor alex i don't use social media what are your

00:55:56.960 | thoughts on substack is this okay for me to use or are there similar negative consequences of what you've

00:56:02.000 | recently discussed with social media you know what i do pastor alex is i program my own substack code

00:56:09.200 | in assembler and it runs on a microcontroller i'm a man and then you posted account newport.com i don't

00:56:15.840 | think this like i'm a man thing works when we're talking about programming languages on microcontrollers

00:56:20.160 | i think i need actually something more manly for that tag to actually work um okay in general email

00:56:26.080 | newsletters are something that i am uh bullish on because i think they're a great example of indie media

00:56:33.200 | it's taking advantage of the internet for distribution the spread more ideas than would

00:56:38.400 | otherwise be spreadable it's controlled by the person who writes it it's your content it's long

00:56:43.360 | form it's idiosyncratic so i'm a big fan of newsletters substack look there's some issues with

00:56:49.280 | it to catch my attention they want to be more like a social platform they want you to move in out of your

00:56:54.400 | inbox into their app they want it to be like all of these newsletters like in tick tock are somehow

00:57:01.040 | just um nuggets of content and you don't don't worry we'll help you find them we'll see what you

00:57:09.200 | like reading and we'll find other things you'll just kind of have this like stream of things you

00:57:12.960 | might be reading they i think their their model is they want to be their aspiration is to be like

00:57:18.560 | an algorithmically curated magazine i don't love that i think email newsletters i think of as

00:57:23.760 | as i have a reason why i want to hear what this person is writing right because i'm a big believer

00:57:30.480 | in distributed curation through webs of trust you don't have a machine just tell you hey here's

00:57:35.200 | something you might find interesting you actually find your way to someone through real people this

00:57:39.440 | person i already know and have a relationship with we have a link in the web of trust i know this person

00:57:43.200 | i trust this person either because i know him personally or just through their reputation

00:57:46.240 | they're now recommending this person this person is a good writer i can now add a link in

00:57:50.640 | that web of trust to this other person because if this person trusts them and i trust them then

00:57:56.160 | i trust this other person as well so maybe i'll check out what they're doing i'm willing to possibly

00:58:00.000 | consume what they're doing and then maybe they're constantly talking about some other writer well that

00:58:05.280 | puts another link in my web of trust that's now someone that through this chain of trust i can trust

00:58:11.360 | like a legitimate good actor good faith it's interesting it's stuff worth listening to that's

00:58:16.080 | the way we used to find writers the way we used to find books just the way we used to find like albums

00:58:20.320 | and stuff like that and i think that's a fantastic mode of curation the internet is good for distribution

00:58:25.520 | in this model i can now see what this person has to read without having to like send away for something

00:58:30.960 | or go find a book in store that's fantastic but i don't necessarily need the internet to help me find the

00:58:34.880 | person distributed webs of trust are an incredibly effective tool in my opinion for curation it handles

00:58:43.680 | like so many issues that we actually have about the internet today about you know actors that are acting

00:58:48.320 | in bad faith or they're actually trying to deceive you or they're like undermining values in ways or

00:58:53.600 | they're they're like actually like agents of like another power this or that a lot of that goes away

00:58:58.880 | when you use webs of trust because when you're building up these chains of trust it's very hard to

00:59:02.480 | build your linkage over to nonsense and it's very different for example than when you have a fully

00:59:07.280 | homogenized algorithmically curated type of setup like tiktok every tiktok video is the same everyone's

00:59:11.840 | treated the same i don't know where this video is coming from is this really just like someone over

00:59:17.200 | in you know like arkansas who has an opinion on this world event or is this like a bot that's coming out

00:59:21.360 | of like you know uh pakistan i don't know or unlike twitter everything looks the exact same and stuff just

00:59:27.440 | kind of spreads to me that i see or don't see i i i like a world where i had to go from person to

00:59:32.240 | person to person making a real chain and connection each way to get to someone else

00:59:35.600 | because i'm not going to get the nonsense that way so i don't like that substack is trying to move away

00:59:40.480 | from that there i guess it's an engagement model uh there's just a constant stream of people you might

00:59:45.360 | want to hear writing that being said so put that aside it is a boon for writers substack is a boon

00:59:52.560 | for writers because they take out a lot of the complexity and expense of taking advantage of that

00:59:57.120 | distribution model and i i don't want to undercut that i think that is actually like a really really big

01:00:01.680 | contribution to the world of ideas i do want to give substack credit for that i'm independent fully

01:00:07.840 | i'm independent with my newsletter that's not easy not easy it's also expensive i don't know what we

01:00:14.240 | pay jesse but i think it's like you know we have a hundred something thousand subscribers it's thirty

01:00:19.920 | thousand dollars a year easy just to host that newsletter right so it's not these are non-trivial

01:00:25.520 | expenses now i make money because i also have a podcast it's that is synergistic with the newsletter

01:00:31.760 | and we work with a really good ad agency and we've been at this for a while and then we have an income

01:00:36.240 | stream through ads that subsidize the other things that's a really hard thing we do um and if i was just

01:00:42.320 | starting from scratch my newsletter is getting popular like i don't have that type of money right

01:00:45.680 | so i think that's a really good thing to do it's also complicated the software is complicated it's not

01:00:49.040 | too hard we use a really good provider but you know you got to learn how this works uh and substack

01:00:55.200 | makes it easy substack also has recommendations like they'll they'll recommend as i talked about

01:01:00.400 | this thing that i'm a little bit wary about there's like algorithmic recommendations it does help people's

01:01:04.960 | lists grow though i'm kind of a believer in just like old-fashioned list growth it takes a lot longer

01:01:09.280 | but the the people you gain are like bigger on your list um so i won't cast shade on substack

01:01:14.640 | because it allows writers to just focus on writing and not this like expense and complexity i mean like

01:01:20.240 | we have someone who basically just like handles the newsletter from a technological perspective you know

01:01:25.200 | substack writers don't need to worry about that so um so yeah use it that's fine i think it's fine i

01:01:31.440 | think it's fine you substack just be wary when you consume about like

01:01:35.120 | the algorithmic curation and in general use manual chains of trust to find newsletters but i'm fine

01:01:41.440 | with substack um i like that they make it cheap for people to actually do what they do i don't think

01:01:46.800 | there's a podcast equivalent of that but podcast is there like if i wanted to host i guess there must

01:01:52.800 | be like let's say i wanted to host a podcast and i didn't want to just like pay money for it

01:01:56.880 | i don't know if that exists there probably is somewhere for some reason that's way cheaper

01:02:03.360 | which never made sense to me hosting podcast is way cheaper than email newsletters like we don't pay

01:02:11.200 | that much money to host our podcast i don't know if people know how podcast technology works but like

01:02:15.520 | basically uh when you have a podcast you have a server somewhere you're paying just to put the

01:02:21.760 | sound files the mp3 files you just get uploaded to a server somewhere right and then you also maintain

01:02:27.760 | an rss feed which is like a machine readable you know xml file where every time you post a new it's

01:02:33.040 | like a big text file and every time you post a new episode you add all the information to this file

01:02:37.760 | and it has like the title the description and a link like this is where the file is to download

01:02:41.920 | and all a podcast player is like when you subscribe the podcast is all you're saying is like hey keep

01:02:47.520 | checking on these rss feeds a few times a day it loads them up and reads the text file if there's a

01:02:51.680 | new episode it puts the information in the player and it downloads the file from that server so the only

01:02:55.280 | thing you really need from a hosting perspective if you're a podcaster is a place to store the files and

01:03:00.160 | that's like really cheap because i guess storing files and bandwidth for people downloading files

01:03:04.960 | is uh you know it's like a commodity it's pretty cheap even though we'll have hundreds of thousands

01:03:11.520 | of these files downloaded it's somehow like way cheaper than having that many newsletter subscribers

01:03:16.320 | so i don't know something about sending emails is expensive something about downloading podcasts is cheap

01:03:21.440 | so there you go or less than economics all right we have some more questions to go about ai and social

01:03:26.640 | media plus a bonus question we added about an unrelated topic that i just like talking about

01:03:30.560 | we also have a case study coming up that uh will be good and a tweet from sam altman that uh

01:03:38.080 | i i'm gonna have to get into so all this is still to come but first we need to take another quick

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01:06:22.080 | all right jesse let's get back to doing some more questions

01:06:26.960 | all right we got who we got next next up we have patricia i think it's realistic for most people to

01:06:37.680 | give up their smartphone however if something is available only through a mobile app what are your

01:06:42.960 | thoughts on a family smartphone it's not tied to anybody in particular and it's there to purely

01:06:48.720 | cover specific needs um i think it's a great idea i think a family smartphone app is great you have those

01:06:54.800 | type of apps on it you need for just like operating logistically in various parts of life and you grab it

01:06:59.280 | when you need it get a cheap phone keep it forever keep it charged in the kitchen i actually just heard an

01:07:04.560 | interview with warner herzog on conan o'brien's podcast that he was actually talking about this

01:07:09.520 | warner herzog like famously is one of these people like quentin tarantino or like aziz anzari who do

01:07:16.000 | not use smartphones or he's never really used a smartphone he's too busy making like 30 movies a year

01:07:19.840 | but he told conan he had to buy one recently why because the parking lots in a lot of european cities

01:07:27.840 | need a smartphone app for you to use it you have to use the app to actually like

01:07:31.920 | register your car so it doesn't get towed so he has some smartphone that he barely knows how to

01:07:36.160 | use and all it has on it is a parking app i think that's great and so if you're uh if you're worried

01:07:41.200 | about you know having a fully serviced smartphone as being an unavoidable distraction then yeah have

01:07:46.080 | a family smartphone for when you need it that is a great idea patricia i uh i recognize it all right

01:07:51.040 | jesse we have our bonus question here right it's on a topic outside of today's episode but one that i

01:07:54.800 | like to talk about yes we do all right who we got it's from tim we write monthly articles for our

01:08:00.400 | company's internal weekly newsletter to minimize back and forth email communications i set up a clear

01:08:05.440 | system and structure this past month a member didn't use the structure at all but kept moving the

01:08:10.720 | conversation back to emails even when i tried to move things into the system multiple times i just do this

01:08:16.640 | this is like pure a world without email if you haven't read that book oh man i really get into

01:08:22.720 | like what happens with email why it's destroyed work and what it looks like to not be beholden the email

01:08:27.360 | so tim i haven't talked about that book in a while so you gave me an excuse to do so i have three different

01:08:32.720 | things to mention we can decide which of these three things are relevant to you all right so when it

01:08:38.480 | comes to putting in place systems or protocols that are an alternative that just send the emails back and

01:08:43.680 | forth you have to differentiate between uh a new protocol that a team is going to use like internally

01:08:53.760 | versus a protocol that you're exposing to the outside world like the other teams for internal changes

01:09:02.080 | so when you say like oh we do an internal weekly newsletter if there's like a team of writers who

01:09:06.960 | work on this together and that's what you're talking about internally email alternatives have to be

01:09:12.720 | bottom up with buy-in if you just come in and say technically i'm in charge of this team

01:09:17.840 | here is how we are communicating now it creates resentment and friction and it really

01:09:23.680 | rarely works people just don't like it they just don't even if it is like on paper a better idea

01:09:29.680 | they are going to have like a cal newport dartboard up that they're going to be you know

01:09:33.600 | throwing those darts at and they're going to be aiming for the groin if you know what i mean right

01:09:36.720 | it's not good you got to have buy it you have to be like hey let us talk about what's going on

01:09:40.880 | here is why i'm worried about us just doing all this with email here's the problems like i read

01:09:44.880 | this cal newport book of a world without email like all this context shifting like i think this is

01:09:48.720 | making us miserable it's making us less productive we need a some sort of protocol that's maybe a

01:09:53.920 | little bit more structured that will reduce the main thing that you want to reduce which is not

01:09:57.600 | messages but it's unscheduled messages to require responses because you're trying to

01:10:01.120 | prevent having to switch your context as much as possible all right what should we do then as a

01:10:07.040 | team you come up with this together you have buy and you say great what's our check-in rhythm once a

01:10:11.040 | month all right we'll check back in and again a month this isn't going to completely work we'll fix

01:10:15.920 | the parts that aren't we'll try new things we'll try to see what parts are working that's the way you

01:10:20.080 | change email with protocols within a team if it's external so if what you're talking about here for

01:10:26.880 | example is you run the internal editorial team but then people from all over the company can send you

01:10:32.720 | stuff like be like hey i want you to put this in the newsletter or something like that then it's okay to

01:10:38.160 | have uh expose a protocol interface and just say this is what we use i think it's a really good idea i talk

01:10:44.640 | about in the book world without email the way that like this is the this is how they they organize the

01:10:49.840 | apollo program because there are so many different teams and you know between academia and through

01:10:54.160 | the government and through defense contractors they eventually essentially had to publish like

01:10:58.720 | communication protocols for communicating between the teams here is where the information comes and in

01:11:03.840 | what format we sign it off and when you do it because otherwise it was too impossible to be like too much

01:11:07.920 | information or whatever like that so i think that's fine if you're exposing a communication

01:11:13.520 | interface to the outside world or outside your team then you can just say this is the way we communicate

01:11:17.760 | and there i think it is uh often sufficient to just pretend like stuff that's not in that protocol

01:11:24.880 | doesn't exist or just say you know you send back here's the instructions for like submitting to the

01:11:30.080 | newsletter and like oh okay but just hey what about this could you i knew what's going on here

01:11:35.280 | like these are the instructions for submitting to the newsletter you kind of that's just it like you

01:11:38.560 | just sort of hold the line on that and a few people like and then they'll kind of like stop

01:11:42.640 | participating most people will do it third thing i want to say if you do have one of these external

01:11:48.000 | interfaces and you're getting a lot of this pushback you also have to keep in mind that maybe your

01:11:54.480 | interface is bad and often the issue is you have too much friction people are busy you're not their most

01:12:01.360 | important thing the thing that they're communicating to you with through your interface is probably

01:12:05.920 | something that's low down on their to-do list they just want to get it off there you do have

01:12:09.200 | to respect that about people but there there's common friction points that really can make these

01:12:14.560 | external facing protocol interfaces fail and you want to make sure you're not suffering from one of

01:12:19.280 | these the biggest one is like making people have to switch systems that's a really big one

01:12:23.440 | it seems simple on paper but it really is a problem for people if you're like look you gotta

01:12:28.400 | you're gonna have to like log in and have a login and log into some system and click on some drop down

01:12:32.880 | menus and there's some ambiguity about like what you're trying to do doesn't quite fit into these

01:12:36.960 | forms and if it's too much like i'm making you do a lot of my work for me you get a lot of this like

01:12:42.960 | internal bureaucracies like you got to put this in and the code here and then click from this drop down

01:12:47.040 | like what the things are like that type of friction like i have to switch to another system or i have to

01:12:53.040 | fit what i'm doing into like an interface where what i'm doing might not cleanly fit that really annoys

01:12:58.000 | people so what you want to look for is like low friction interfaces let me give you an example

01:13:02.160 | at our department for example at georgetown like we have a weekly newsletter you know for the department

01:13:08.240 | that goes out and uh people come up with like things they might want to submit or this or that

01:13:14.480 | there's like a really nice protocol we have in place and by me it's really my department here

01:13:18.080 | figure this out i just admire it and it's it it uses email but it doesn't use email in an ad hoc way of

01:13:25.120 | like let's just start talking to individual people there's a particular address you can use it's not

01:13:29.120 | associated with a single name but actually with a whole admin team and the people in charge of

01:13:33.680 | communication you can just email something that you want to be included to this address so it's very low

01:13:40.720 | friction for you as like the user interfacing with this newsletter i can just like forward because often

01:13:46.320 | like you'll get something from a colleague like oh we should put this in the newsletter i can just hit

01:13:49.440 | forward and send that thing over but because the address is not associated with an individual person

01:13:53.600 | i don't expect it to be a response i don't expect to be able to have like a back and forth interaction

01:13:57.360 | about it and then on the other end there is i believe in this case we have a a student you know

01:14:04.640 | we we have like student not interns we have like student employees in the department who you know we pay

01:14:09.440 | hourly to do a bunch of different stuff and one of the things they do is they can monitor this address

01:14:15.200 | and they can take these things and i don't know the whole back end but they like put them all in a big

01:14:19.040 | google doc file and then there's like one time each week where the people who build the newsletter the

01:14:24.000 | member the admin staff who build the newsletter they take what's in there and they format and send it out

01:14:28.800 | before that there is a weekly meeting that already exists of like the various directors like myself

01:14:34.080 | and we can just like look through that and be like oh that's not important that's not important yeah

01:14:38.240 | include this include this now include that right and so we're already meeting that just adds like

01:14:42.480 | 30 seconds to our time all of this produces a newsletter where it's like very easy for people

01:14:47.200 | to submit things it's still curated gets formatted nicely and how many unscheduled emails get sent that

01:14:52.800 | have to be responded to zero and that is what you're often looking for all right so those are the three

01:14:58.640 | things internally if there's an internal protocol you need buy-in you can't just impose it if it's an

01:15:03.440 | external protocol you can hold the line dot dot dot but if it has too much friction in it then maybe you

01:15:11.280 | need to make this a lower friction protocol that still accomplishes the goal which is not time which

01:15:16.000 | is not message reduction but reducing the messages that require responses there we go a little world

01:15:21.440 | without email i i can't resist sometimes jesse we're a lot of technology stuff going around we have to talk

01:15:25.600 | about right now email sounds old-fashioned but it's at the core of so many people's like subjective

01:15:31.360 | experience of work day-to-day and their subjective well-being so i can't help talking about it sometimes

01:15:36.480 | all right we have a case study right yes now let's get some case study music

01:15:41.840 | all right case studies where people send in their own accounts of applying the type of advice we talked

01:15:55.920 | about on this show in their own life today's case study comes from mike all right here's what mike says

01:16:02.800 | as a creative being on social media felt like a necessity but often also a chore so i finally did

01:16:09.520 | a 30-day digital declutter as you describe in your book digital minimalism i don't know why i waited so

01:16:15.120 | long here are my takeaways just as other people have described i was very antsy the first couple days

01:16:21.200 | however it quickly subsided and i got used to the slower less anxious life it felt like i had more time in

01:16:27.440 | my day because i did i realized how little value i actually get from being on social media now i get

01:16:32.720 | everything i need in real life conversations are more robust as i don't need to see them on social

01:16:37.920 | media an unexpected benefit was i started making decisions faster and with more certainty it was like

01:16:44.880 | i got back to what i actually wanted for my life and not what someone on instagram was telling me to do

01:16:50.400 | i'm now at the stage of implementing rules for how to use the apps after my declutter ends i definitely

01:16:55.600 | think everyone should try this and enjoy the benefits all right mike i appreciate that for

01:16:59.760 | those who don't know in my book digital minimalism which seems to be having a kind of like a new

01:17:04.480 | renaissance by the way jesse i think people are like looking for responses to the negative relationship

01:17:11.920 | they have with technology like well i've got one for you it's in this nice book you can read it

01:17:15.840 | i recommend that book you take 30 day break from all your technology so you can rediscover like what you

01:17:21.120 | actually care about through experimentation reflection figure out your values what you really want to do

01:17:25.120 | in your life and then only add back technologies that directly support those values and when you

01:17:30.160 | do put clear rules around them for when and how you use them so instead of like having to have a real

01:17:35.840 | reason not to use a technology you have to have a real reason to use it and once you know why you're

01:17:39.840 | using it you can put clear rules around it because if my value is x then why am i looking at my phone

01:17:44.160 | when i'm in the bathroom that's unrelated to that so digital declutter is a good way to sort of

01:17:49.120 | jumpstart a new relationship with all your tools so i'm glad things went well with mike

01:17:52.320 | yeah i mean that's one of the big things i hear from people is they're surprised by how much brain

01:17:58.960 | space social media was played taking up and my brain space like emotional space psychological space like

01:18:03.920 | energy being burnt in this sort of like simmering fire in the background or whatever it's it's like

01:18:11.040 | baseball fans feel uh you know a friend's a big tigers fan i'm just thinking about how much

01:18:17.360 | mental energy the last couple of weeks burnt up for him right because it's just you know it's tough

01:18:22.880 | your team it's suspenseful they're low and then finally you don't win and then they're immediately

01:18:28.080 | talking about so you know train your pitcher mad dog was so upset that he only pitched six innings

01:18:32.720 | in the final game all right trust me he's like he took him out and i was on a long text thread about

01:18:36.880 | this yeah i know what you're talking about and what i thought about it was like okay this of course is

01:18:40.880 | valid like your team your long time tigers fan you got this is going to eat up a lot of mental space

01:18:45.280 | that's most people all the time because of social media like you have that same level of like

01:18:50.640 | smoldering background like i have to talk about it or whatever it makes sense when it's like your

01:18:54.720 | baseball team and it's two weeks that's the joys of october but for a lot of people it is they're

01:18:59.440 | always they're always living in a constant state of being like a detroit fan after scoobal was taken

01:19:06.480 | out in the sixth that's like their every day that is exhausting and i don't think people realize that

01:19:11.680 | until they actually step away from it so yeah read that book digital digital minimalism often it's a

01:19:16.480 | weird thing about these books jesse it's like when you're writing them if when you're in the world

01:19:20.240 | like this is way too late but it's you're almost always too early yeah you know i was like oh it's

01:19:25.600 | too late people already know like their phones are they have a problem with it it's like now that people

01:19:30.640 | are getting around to it or it's like when john height wrote the ancient generation last year

01:19:35.760 | we knew like experts like yeah we've been talking about this since 2017 like it's too late no people

01:19:40.400 | weren't ready till then so yeah digital minimalism it came out in 2019 but it's more relevant now than

01:19:46.080 | it ever has been all right do we have a call this week yes all right oh it's also about phones and all

01:19:51.760 | that type of stuff all right let's hear this call hey cal and jesse this is antonio from los angeles

01:19:57.920 | i followed your advice years ago and i gave my son a dumb phone when he turned 16 i gave him a

01:20:03.840 | smartphone he has yet to download any social media uh so i think that was kind of spectacular kind of um

01:20:11.200 | your advice in uh in action my daughter now is 13 and i gave her the same dumb phone uh however she's

01:20:19.440 | sort of using the text threads it sort of is a de facto social media so she's on two or three different

01:20:27.200 | text threads she'll you know wake up and there'll be 7 487 messages um and i i i don't quite know how

01:20:36.160 | to regulate that or how to help her make different choices i'm wondering if you have any advice about

01:20:44.800 | that uh thank you so much for what you've been doing um and uh i do love the newsletter that's a

01:20:50.160 | new new thing for me all right antonio thanks for that question i have strong thoughts about all this

01:20:55.120 | i'm actually giving a talk the day you're hearing this i'm giving uh another talk about my kids school

01:21:00.960 | about like phones and actually the title of the talk i'm giving today the day you're hearing this is

01:21:05.680 | when should i give my kid a smartphone i'm giving it to elementary school age parents so

01:21:09.680 | i think a lot about these things um okay so so first of all i like the story about your son

01:21:15.280 | that that's partially why 16 is considered like a good time to wait till social media because

01:21:20.800 | you're done with puberty you have well-established social groups and your social identity is in place

01:21:27.760 | so you're a lot less malleable at that point and then when you bring it in it's sort of more like

01:21:34.000 | when an adult gets into it you can still end up using it too much but it doesn't have that same

01:21:37.600 | impact that if you bring those tools into your life when you're still forming your social identity

01:21:41.680 | when you're still prepubescent or going through puberty and you have all those chemicals and

01:21:44.560 | reconfigurations of your brain and you're still trying to find like you know clee from the parental

01:21:49.920 | uh community tribal dyad and sort of prove yourself you into a tribe of your own like all these things

01:21:55.120 | happen around that time where you really don't want that technology you know in your face that being

01:22:00.640 | said when it comes to social uh digital sociality there is a big gender divide and you're seeing that

01:22:05.200 | you know these are all just bell curves and there's people on either ends of these bell

01:22:09.120 | curves but in general young women and girls are more cued in onto the social technologies than young

01:22:16.240 | men or boys are so this is why your son probably had an easier time with it you need to be wary

01:22:22.160 | about digital sociality that's the terminology for sort of any socializing that's happening largely

01:22:27.120 | through the digital exchange of text or images so what you would do on text threads but or whatsapp

01:22:31.600 | or what you would do on something like snapchat you got to be wary about it for a few reasons

01:22:37.280 | one is uh when you're communicating especially linguistically so through text there's a lot of

01:22:44.640 | the parts of your brain that are part of normal social interaction that we evolved over a couple

01:22:49.520 | hundred thousand years guard rails guard rails to like keep you a reasonable human being

01:22:55.120 | and to maintain relationships in a way that's going to allow you to have a long-term relationship in

01:22:58.800 | your tribe a lot of those guard rails are not activated when the communication is happening

01:23:03.520 | with words because they don't know that you're communicating with someone yeah your frontal cortex

01:23:07.840 | does like rationally you have some new nerve bundles that recognize like this text is texting to someone

01:23:12.960 | else but like these deep type of social guard rails they evolved in a time when there was no written

01:23:16.640 | language they don't know about texting so they're tuned down so people get nasty people say things they

01:23:24.400 | wouldn't say before with girls it's less i want to understand talking when i give these talks that

01:23:29.360 | middle school girls will tell me it's often less about like i'm going to say something mean to you

01:23:33.920 | it's way more subtle knife digging than that it's like okay here's what i'm going to do you weren't

01:23:39.680 | invited to this thing and so i'm going to find a way to mention it in like a very happy way like isn't

01:23:45.760 | that really funny or and lol and put a lot of emojis or whatever but really the whole point of that

01:23:49.680 | was to make you feel bad you probably wouldn't have done that in person right so so guard rails

01:23:55.040 | are down it's it's uh so it's more sharp right you have more opportunities for these sort of negative

01:24:00.320 | interactions two it's exhausting it uses a lot of mental energy to to be in the middle of a social

01:24:06.720 | interaction it's like when you come back from a party you're exhausted or whatever and that's fine it

01:24:10.720 | should be mentally expensive especially when you really care about it like you're you know you're

01:24:14.320 | you'd be messing like teenager or whatever but when you have those conversations and ubiquitous

01:24:19.280 | ubiquitous access to a phone you never get a break from it you wake up to them when you go to bed

01:24:25.600 | you're still working on them when you're at home you never get a break where i am just safe from having

01:24:30.160 | to navigate this complicated overly sharp guardrail turned down sociology i never get a break from it

01:24:35.840 | it follows me everywhere and that is really exhausting and it is a burden that you don't want to place

01:24:40.720 | upon your kids so digital sociality is something that we really worry about so if your kid is using

01:24:46.960 | the dumb phone to basically be in a world of sort of constant digital sociality i would change that

01:24:50.960 | and there's a couple things you could do there the big one i would do is i do not believe in the model

01:24:56.160 | of here is your dumb phone no you don't have a phone i have a phone i bought a phone i'm paying for

01:25:02.800 | this by the month the family owns this phone if you're going somewhere where for logistical reasons you

01:25:09.840 | need to be able to like call us to pick you up or whatever you can take one of the family phones

01:25:14.720 | with you that's what we do in our family we have a couple different dumb phones they're both terrible

01:25:18.400 | to use they're not owned by any of our kids they're there if like okay my oldest needs to take the city

01:25:24.720 | bus to baseball practice take one of the family phones with you today so that you can let us know

01:25:29.120 | if there's like a problem with the bus ride when you get home you put it back so he doesn't have

01:25:34.240 | a sense of ownership of a communication technology i think that is really important when you have

01:25:38.240 | excessive digital sociality then you might say well they can't be cut off completely there's

01:25:43.120 | all this texting going on well they could be cut off a lot and what you can offer them is we will set

01:25:48.240 | up a family ipad that has a i message on it and you can be a part of groups on that that's fine but your

01:25:56.080 | time to do that is going to be like your time to watch tv there will be like certain times like you can

01:26:00.000 | go do some group messaging now if you want so you can still sort of be involved in these things half hour here

01:26:06.640 | like after dinner or before dinner but then that and downstairs where we can see you you don't get

01:26:11.440 | an ipad in your room i don't i don't get this where people are like i would never let my my kid have a

01:26:16.080 | phone but man they're up in their room a lot you know with the door locked with their ipad ipad is

01:26:20.560 | just a bad phone guys like you have access to all the same stuff so you can go group text in the living

01:26:24.800 | room now and if you want to do that instead of watching a show for 20 minutes and then this ipad comes

01:26:29.200 | back to me not yours you don't own it that is giving relief to your kid you're like okay there's

01:26:35.760 | no way i could be communicating right now i don't have to worry about it and what happens is is that

01:26:40.080 | their friends adapt to it oh okay so and so has like a dad that listens to cal newport they all know and

01:26:45.440 | curse my name like my name kind of gets out there more and more i'm kind of like a a boogeyman right

01:26:49.840 | it's or it's sort of like if in the in the mindset of like the american teenager the crampus like evil figure

01:26:55.120 | that comes in is is john height and i'm kind of like the he's like evil sidekick me like this less

01:27:00.800 | known but sort of i come in and help him like steal you know your toys that's kind of the way they see

01:27:05.600 | us that's okay like oh my dad's like a cal newport guy uh so like i i can only be on these somewhat the

01:27:10.960 | the people adjust and the the groups you don't want to be a part of they're really mean then they're like

01:27:16.560 | you don't want to be in those groups anyways and you're real friends that you're doing other stuff

01:27:19.120 | with like yeah we just know it's just that's just the way you are so i feel strongly about digital

01:27:23.280 | sociality we have to be careful about so that phone is not hers that phone is yours she just

01:27:28.720 | needs it if she needs it for logistics group chat is like watching tv there's a few times we'll let you

01:27:33.120 | do it uh she will survive till she's 16. and she'll thank you for it in the end all right uh i believe we

01:27:40.640 | are ready for our final segment all right i want to react i want to kind of close up our discussion today

01:27:48.800 | of social media versus ai by checking in with our friend sam altman right so they released this sora

01:27:56.000 | app as as hank green called it pick slop to try to make money by producing a lot of these videos what

01:28:03.280 | else have they been up to recently i want to bring a tweet a tweet up here on the screen this was from

01:28:07.920 | last week here's sam altman uh he starts by saying we made chat gpt pretty restrictive to make sure that we

01:28:16.560 | were being careful with mental health issues we realized this made it less enjoy useful enjoyable

01:28:21.280 | to many users who had no mental health problems but given the series of the issue when to get this

01:28:24.400 | right now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools

01:28:28.160 | we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases in a few weeks we

01:28:32.400 | plan to put out a new version of chat gpt that allows people to have a personality that behaves more

01:28:36.800 | like what people liked about 4.0 if you want your chat gpt to respond in a very human way or use a ton of

01:28:42.160 | emoji or act like a friend chat gpt should do it too in december as in december as we roll out age

01:28:48.080 | gating more fully and as part of our treat adult users like adult principles we will allow even more

01:28:53.120 | like erotica for verified adults the bad news is he goes on the clarify all of the ai generated erotica

01:29:01.920 | will feature uh him so i don't that this could put his face on everyone so that's it's kind of like

01:29:07.360 | there's good and there's bad but i guess if you own the company a lot of um all right let me tell

01:29:12.560 | you let me tell you if you're a an open ai monitor what this all means things aren't going well over

01:29:20.720 | at open ai that is the only way i can think to interpret sora followed by this announcement of

01:29:28.000 | we're going to turn on erotica in chat gpt let me explain why it wasn't that long ago that if you

01:29:37.440 | listen to sam altman or you listen to dario amaday we were still talking in terms of the world was about

01:29:44.160 | to be transformed it was what four months ago that sam altman was on theo von's podcast comparing himself

01:29:52.400 | the oppenheimer and the pending release of gp5 to the trinity atomic bomb test it was july the

01:29:59.760 | dario amaday was going around saying like look we're going to like automate half of white collar

01:30:05.520 | jobs it's going to be a bloodbath like i you know i don't even know who's going to be employed anymore

01:30:10.880 | and we had studies coming out they were trying to identify like who would not be affected by ai

01:30:17.360 | there's literally a study that i read that very helpfully identified that the safest job in the

01:30:23.200 | near future is going to be a dredge operator so i guess if you're on a dredge barge operating it you're

01:30:30.160 | like less likely to be whatever so we were in this place until very recently where the reason why there

01:30:36.800 | are so many hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in these technologies is because they were

01:30:40.640 | going to automate huge parts of the economy remember sam altman in 2021 wrote or 2022 uh put out that

01:30:47.040 | essay moore's law for everything where he said this this technology is going to take over everything

01:30:52.640 | we have to just have a new tax system in place that basically like tax taxes equity wealth because

01:30:57.920 | there's going to be just like three companies that do everything with their software and you're just

01:31:02.000 | going to need to come and and we're going to have all the money so you're just gonna have like each

01:31:04.880 | year take 20 of the money and distribute it to people so there's not riots in the street

01:31:08.080 | like that was the path they were on now what are we seeing they're saying maybe we can sell ads

01:31:16.720 | against ai generated videos of you know stephen hawking being pushed into a pool maybe we can sell ads

01:31:24.080 | like among chat gpt feeds of erotica this means that something has shifted in open ai they realize

01:31:31.760 | the change the world impact that they were on a get there or die type of trajectory that's not going to

01:31:40.480 | happen because gpt5 wasn't a massive leap over gpt4 it wasn't a massive leap over 4.5 they couldn't

01:31:48.400 | scale their way to artificial general intelligence most of their improvements as on the tech side for

01:31:53.200 | example was coming from fine tuning what was basically like a four slash four or five model

01:31:58.720 | to do well on very particular tasks or benchmarks that happened to be well suited the synthetic data set

01:32:03.280 | tuning it wasn't becoming like generally aware they were seeing that even though this was supposed to be 2025 was

01:32:09.440 | supposed to be the year of the agents that trying to run automated processes off of llm queries just

01:32:14.400 | doesn't work they're just not reliable enough they make things up they don't understand what you're

01:32:18.560 | saying and if you just automatically like query an llm and then take action of what it says

01:32:22.960 | it's disaster that's why no one has agents no one's automating anything the use cases that are emerging

01:32:29.840 | there are good ones and they're very useful cases because it's very powerful technology

01:32:33.920 | are not the use cases that a trillion dollar cut enough to support a trillion dollar company or a 500

01:32:38.800 | billion dollar company like it is now this is why there's also these shenanigans going on

01:32:43.680 | where you know the nvidia deal with open ai where i'm going to pay you 100 billion dollars for this

01:32:49.200 | and you're going to pay me 100 billion dollars back and then we're going to kind of hope that there's

01:32:52.080 | a stock market inflation and in that arbitrage to somehow makes a difference there's a great article

01:32:58.240 | about this in the journal recently you know what the last time those type of deals were going on was it

01:33:01.680 | was in the enron era with all those fiber companies right before they all went out of business in the

01:33:05.760 | late 90s early 2000s so i think this is a mark this shift towards attention economy slop that we've

01:33:13.120 | seen in the last like month from open ai is a signal that they're in trouble because it was super

01:33:19.440 | expensive to build these models and though they're cool they're not going to take over the economy and

01:33:23.120 | make them the only company left and be the last invention that anyone ever needs to make

01:33:27.200 | and now they're like how do we make money we're making some like they do pretty well selling chat gpt

01:33:32.160 | subscriptions but they need to like 10x that to really capture their their capex expenses so they're

01:33:38.320 | now starting to flail that's the way i see these two stories so what we started with building a tick tock

01:33:45.200 | clone what we ended with saying uh let's just try to make the chat feed as like whatever brainstem

01:33:52.720 | engaged and we can and by the way they're gonna sell ads on all this of course they hired a major

01:33:56.320 | a major ad expert onto their executive team earlier in the summer i mean this is what they're going to

01:34:01.920 | do is try to sell ads on just brainstem stimulation i see this as the fall of like a once super ambitious

01:34:08.800 | exciting company with visions for changing the world and now they're hoping they just sort of like slop their

01:34:13.760 | way towards profitability and maybe other breakthroughs are coming and i'll be wrong but then i'm not a stock

01:34:17.840 | market analyst and i'm just a technology guy i'm just saying i think these two things together

01:34:22.320 | is not a good sign if you were really on the team of we're like a year away from open ai changing

01:34:27.840 | everything so there we go not good news jesse

01:34:31.040 | but we'll see all right that's all the time we have thank you for listening to the show we will be back

01:34:38.560 | next week with another episode and until then as always stay deep if you like today's discussion of

01:34:44.960 | sora and its competition with existing social media platforms you might like episode 372 in which i

01:34:51.920 | you might decode exactly how tick tock algorithm works you want to understand how the slop is being

01:34:58.160 | served you need to listen to that episode i think you'll like it check it out the big news in the world of social media

01:35:03.920 | recently is the announcement made last week that u.s interest would be taking over operation of tick tock in america

Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media? | Cal Newport

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