Cal Newport On the Technology Trends that Matter Most

00:00:00.000 | All right, let's do some technology questions.

00:00:02.960 | Now I said questions,

00:00:06.160 | but it's probably more accurate to say question

00:00:08.240 | because I only have one technology question.

00:00:10.600 | I only selected one because it's big and open-ended.

00:00:13.200 | It comes from Miranda.

00:00:16.440 | And she asked, what are your thoughts in general

00:00:20.400 | about AI machine learning and where technology is headed?

00:00:27.840 | So we haven't done a good open-ended technology question

00:00:30.520 | in a while.

00:00:31.360 | Well, Miranda, I'll tell you where the focus seems to be,

00:00:37.540 | at least in popular online conversation in the media,

00:00:41.840 | there's a lot of focus on crypto, social media, and AI.

00:00:46.840 | Those seem to be big topics.

00:00:52.000 | So let's go through those briefly one by one.

00:00:54.500 | All right, so let's talk about crypto.

00:00:57.980 | As you may have heard me talk about before,

00:01:00.760 | my personal belief is that the hype around crypto

00:01:04.300 | is a little bit excessive.

00:01:06.160 | So there's a political element to crypto

00:01:11.780 | that's based around trust and power and control.

00:01:16.660 | This idea that these distributed ledgers

00:01:18.860 | implemented by cryptographic protocols,

00:01:23.240 | that these distributed ledgers

00:01:24.700 | are not controlled by a single government

00:01:26.420 | or controlled by a single company.

00:01:28.020 | And therefore there can be coordination

00:01:29.980 | and information sharing on the internet

00:01:31.940 | that is not beholden to the censorious efforts

00:01:36.460 | of individual organizations or countries.

00:01:40.220 | So there's a crypto,

00:01:41.780 | a sort of techno libertarian political argument

00:01:44.840 | for what you gain from this decentralization.

00:01:47.020 | I don't think most people care about that.

00:01:49.420 | I don't think, I think it's important for certain people

00:01:52.100 | who think a lot about this, but for the average consumer,

00:01:55.180 | they don't care about that, right?

00:01:58.460 | So that by itself is not that strong.

00:01:59.880 | But if you take out the techno libertarian

00:02:01.780 | political justification

00:02:03.340 | for crypto based ledger technologies,

00:02:05.340 | there's not something else there

00:02:06.720 | that we don't already know how to do

00:02:07.780 | much better and much faster.

00:02:09.020 | We know how to have consistent distributed data stores.

00:02:13.100 | This is what distributed databases do.

00:02:15.300 | This is easy to implement.

00:02:17.480 | So it's not like there's a new technological capability

00:02:20.820 | that is introduced by crypto based blockchains.

00:02:23.580 | It's just, there's a decentralization that comes with it.

00:02:26.300 | And the value of that is largely political,

00:02:28.980 | not technological.

00:02:30.100 | So again, I think most consumers don't care.

00:02:32.500 | They don't really care whether the data

00:02:36.880 | for this app they're using is stored in the cloud somewhere

00:02:41.880 | in just a virtualized SQL database system,

00:02:46.060 | or if it's implemented by an Ethereum blockchain.

00:02:48.860 | It looks the same to them,

00:02:49.900 | and they don't really care about

00:02:51.260 | which way this is being implemented.

00:02:53.580 | Now for a while, there was an argument

00:02:54.820 | about the particular aspect of crypto.

00:02:56.700 | That is the currency aspect.

00:02:58.100 | So all of these ledgers, or not all of them,

00:03:01.100 | but open ledgers are almost all based on

00:03:03.140 | there being some sort of underlying currency.

00:03:05.220 | And there's some thought that a currency

00:03:07.580 | not controlled by governments,

00:03:08.700 | it was critical and it was going to be a worldwide currency.

00:03:13.180 | That's sort of fallen flat.

00:03:15.900 | The currencies didn't really take over from fiat money.

00:03:18.820 | So you get rid of that.

00:03:19.900 | Again, there's nothing sexy about what's being,

00:03:23.820 | the functionality implemented by these crypto tools.

00:03:28.100 | It's really just the political reality

00:03:32.060 | that no one controls it.

00:03:33.220 | And I, again, don't think enough people care about that

00:03:35.340 | for this to be a complete game changer.

00:03:37.620 | Could be wrong about this.

00:03:39.420 | And Jason Horowitz would probably say

00:03:41.100 | that firm would not be happy with my interpretation,

00:03:43.440 | but there you go.

00:03:45.100 | All right, social media.

00:03:46.380 | That's the other thing that seems to be really

00:03:48.700 | the focus of a lot of techno criticism

00:03:51.140 | and conversation right now.

00:03:52.500 | Longtime listeners know that I believe that social media

00:03:56.060 | as we know it, that is this age of a small number

00:03:59.140 | of massive platform monopolies

00:04:01.140 | that everyone is culturally pressured into using.

00:04:03.900 | We are in the twilight of that moment.

00:04:06.020 | That moment is passing.

00:04:08.460 | This is the standard oil,

00:04:12.300 | Pennsylvania Central Railroad,

00:04:14.060 | robber baron era of the social internet era.

00:04:17.820 | And I think it is passing.

00:04:19.820 | I've talked about this before,

00:04:21.700 | so I won't go into too much detail,

00:04:23.260 | but basically at the core of my thought is

00:04:25.380 | one of the things that used to capture people

00:04:29.340 | in the social media was network effects.

00:04:30.900 | People were using social media platforms

00:04:32.860 | to connect to people they know.

00:04:34.560 | Therefore for a platform to be useful,

00:04:36.440 | it has to include among its members,

00:04:38.460 | all the people that you know or might wanna connect to.

00:04:41.120 | That is a huge advantage once you get there first,

00:04:43.740 | because another social media platform

00:04:45.380 | will have a hard time competing

00:04:47.100 | because until they can get your cousin and your aunt

00:04:48.860 | and your six friends from high school onto their service,

00:04:50.980 | it will be lesser than an existing service like Facebook.

00:04:53.960 | This is called network effects.

00:04:55.560 | There's a sort of trivial mathematical law here

00:05:00.180 | that says in a network,

00:05:01.380 | it's the value grows with the square of the number of users

00:05:04.860 | because now you have a potential connection

00:05:06.100 | between every person in it.

00:05:07.500 | Forget that math.

00:05:08.540 | In general, this was a big justification

00:05:14.200 | for why you could not unseat.

00:05:16.860 | You could not unseat existing platform monopolies.

00:05:20.580 | Then they got out of the connection business.

00:05:23.680 | They thought there was more money in offering distraction

00:05:27.460 | because people will spend more time distracting themselves

00:05:29.740 | than they wanna spend talking to their aunt or their cousin

00:05:32.820 | or their six friends from high school.

00:05:35.060 | And so Facebook and Instagram and Twitter,

00:05:37.740 | in particular Twitter and Facebook moved away

00:05:39.860 | from what's your friends up to.

00:05:42.460 | And towards here's an algorithmically generated feed

00:05:47.460 | of content curated to press some buttons in your brain

00:05:49.980 | and keep you looking at your phone.

00:05:51.580 | You need a moment to get lost or distracted.

00:05:54.580 | Life is hard, you're stressed, you're anxious, you're bored.

00:05:57.300 | We will give you something that'll be palliative

00:05:59.820 | in the moment.

00:06:00.700 | They went towards that model,

00:06:02.320 | which did get their existing users using the phones more,

00:06:06.500 | looking at these apps more,

00:06:08.180 | but it has destabilized

00:06:10.060 | the originally motivating network effect,

00:06:11.860 | which is the people you know are on here.

00:06:14.020 | Once it is no longer giving you that advantage,

00:06:16.020 | social media is now competing

00:06:17.460 | with any other form of distraction.

00:06:20.460 | And there's a lot of them and they're good.

00:06:24.900 | And now suddenly it's not so critical

00:06:28.460 | that my distraction is coming from Facebook

00:06:30.140 | versus coming from Spotify versus coming from TikTok

00:06:34.020 | or coming from some sort of bespoke, small niche network.

00:06:38.560 | You're competing with any source of distraction.

00:06:40.880 | There's no reason to have a massive $500 billion monopoly

00:06:45.020 | in this type of context.

00:06:46.740 | I can be just as diverting with my podcast

00:06:50.900 | that is produced with a slightly smaller budget

00:06:55.900 | than $500 billion a year.

00:06:57.520 | With even just half that money,

00:07:01.060 | I could produce deep questions.

00:07:04.140 | All right, so I think that's what's happening

00:07:05.120 | with social media.

00:07:05.960 | I think TikTok is actually the harbinger of this transition.

00:07:08.780 | Yes, it's true that TikTok is widely, widely used.

00:07:11.460 | It has a lot of active users,

00:07:13.120 | but TikTok is different than Twitter.

00:07:15.020 | TikTok is different than Facebook from five years ago.

00:07:17.520 | Why?

00:07:18.360 | It's popular, but it's just pure distraction.

00:07:22.900 | They don't pretend like it's anything else.

00:07:24.640 | And because of that,

00:07:25.480 | it no longer has the situation of cultural valency

00:07:28.360 | where it feels like you have to use it.

00:07:30.800 | Lots of people use Facebook.

00:07:32.100 | No one thinks, I mean TikTok,

00:07:33.920 | no one thinks it's weird if you don't.

00:07:36.140 | A lot of people like TikTok.

00:07:37.940 | No one says you're missing out on business opportunities

00:07:41.960 | or knowing what's going on in the world if you don't use it.

00:07:44.620 | And so from TikTok, we'll get multiple other,

00:07:48.060 | I think increasingly niche, increasingly focused,

00:07:51.300 | increasingly much smaller and independent types of apps

00:07:55.480 | and sources of distraction that leverage

00:07:57.400 | social connections and groups, et cetera.

00:07:59.940 | And it'll be a fragmented marketplace

00:08:01.460 | in which there's no monopoly powers.

00:08:02.860 | And that's gonna be, I think,

00:08:03.820 | a much healthier social internet.

00:08:05.320 | So social media is a focused a lot of conversation.

00:08:07.940 | I think it's moment has passed.

00:08:09.820 | The final one I mentioned was AI.

00:08:11.700 | I don't know what to think about AI.

00:08:13.500 | I haven't got my arms around AI yet.

00:08:19.020 | I've been trying to.

00:08:20.260 | I mean, I understand a lot of the underlying technologies,

00:08:23.300 | but in terms of its cultural impact,

00:08:26.180 | I don't know where I fall.

00:08:27.540 | I don't have, for example,

00:08:29.900 | a natural fear of AI, general intelligence,

00:08:33.880 | sentience in AI and what that might cause.

00:08:36.300 | I just don't have that instinctual fear.

00:08:40.180 | Is that something that's even on a development pipeline

00:08:42.420 | that we need to worry about?

00:08:43.260 | I don't know either way.

00:08:45.160 | AI's role in disrupting industries,

00:08:47.460 | it's gonna be disruptive.

00:08:48.620 | It's complicated how I think it's hard to predict.

00:08:51.940 | So AI, keep your eye on it,

00:08:54.580 | but I don't have a good sense.

00:08:57.900 | Let me tell you two things that I think are being overlooked

00:09:00.260 | that are gonna be super disruptive,

00:09:02.340 | but I think are being overlooked

00:09:03.340 | in a lot of conversations today about technological trends.

00:09:06.060 | The first is augmented reality.

00:09:08.660 | This came out of some reporting I've done for the New Yorker.

00:09:11.060 | I don't think people realize the economic disruption

00:09:13.740 | that is going to come

00:09:14.780 | from what I call the augmented reality singularity.

00:09:17.580 | This is gonna be the point where multiple technologies

00:09:21.140 | that exist today advance sufficiently

00:09:25.580 | to allow the following

00:09:29.660 | with a relatively unobtrusive piece of headgear.

00:09:33.980 | So some sort of pair of glasses

00:09:35.380 | that is socially appropriate to wear, comfortable.

00:09:39.140 | It's not like Google Glass

00:09:40.220 | where you walk around with a Google Glass on.

00:09:42.180 | And I think Google tried this experiment.

00:09:44.100 | They said, try walking around with Google Glasses on

00:09:46.140 | and people's instinct when they saw you with on it was,

00:09:49.020 | I think I need to punch you.

00:09:50.420 | Like when we get past that,

00:09:53.560 | with Google Glass, people were walking around

00:09:54.900 | with Google Glasses and I'm not exaggerating here.

00:09:58.060 | Nuns would walk out of the convent,

00:10:00.060 | say, forgive me, father,

00:10:02.860 | and then just punch you in the face

00:10:04.300 | because it was so annoying looking.

00:10:06.900 | That's what AR.1, version one looks like.

00:10:11.500 | That will get better.

00:10:12.560 | So when we get past that stage

00:10:14.080 | where AR devices make people wanna punch you,

00:10:16.300 | you look so weird and pretentious wearing them.

00:10:18.580 | When we get past that stage,

00:10:20.120 | when nuns no longer walk out of their convents to punch you,

00:10:22.460 | and then two,

00:10:25.060 | two, we get a sufficient power and field of view

00:10:29.300 | in these glasses that you can replicate

00:10:32.300 | with sufficient resolution,

00:10:34.620 | basically any type of screen,

00:10:36.940 | digital screen interface we use today.

00:10:39.540 | And three, we have sort of sufficient internet backbone

00:10:43.000 | that we can essentially stream screen surfaces

00:10:48.000 | without actually having to do the computation locally.

00:10:51.580 | And so what I mean by that is,

00:10:54.380 | if I want to play a video game,

00:10:57.380 | there's sufficient wireless internet backbone

00:11:00.140 | that that video game can run in a server somewhere.

00:11:03.500 | And the thing that's being streamed to my AR device

00:11:05.820 | is just what's on the screen.

00:11:07.220 | So there's this key point,

00:11:09.020 | there's this key speed point

00:11:10.460 | where the contents of a high resolution screen

00:11:13.900 | can be streamed over the internet to a device

00:11:16.260 | in which you no longer need

00:11:17.140 | to actually bring computation with you,

00:11:18.660 | just enough computation to get the screen of computation

00:11:20.940 | happening in the cloud.

00:11:21.840 | When those three things come together,

00:11:24.740 | again, to summarize,

00:11:26.220 | hardware that is unobtrusive and people are willing to wear,

00:11:29.860 | sufficient field of view and resolution

00:11:32.940 | that you can replicate most of the standard digital screens

00:11:36.020 | you look at in your day-to-day life,

00:11:37.140 | and three, sufficient internet wireless backbone,

00:11:39.460 | which by the way, we might already have,

00:11:41.060 | that you can stream high resolution screens to devices

00:11:43.540 | so we can now virtualize actual computation.

00:11:46.020 | It will be the end of the consumer electronic industry

00:11:52.220 | as we know it.

00:11:54.020 | Samsung, Apple, Sony,

00:11:58.900 | the companies that produce complicated electronics

00:12:04.860 | that they sell to people,

00:12:06.420 | and those people buy these devices and use them.

00:12:09.080 | Those companies will essentially

00:12:12.900 | have to go out of business or massively retool

00:12:15.960 | because why would I buy a phone

00:12:18.420 | when my AR headset can put in front of me,

00:12:21.900 | in the space in front of me,

00:12:23.380 | the interface for whatever phone I want?

00:12:26.220 | Why would I buy a computer

00:12:27.660 | when I can make a computer monitor anywhere?

00:12:30.100 | It doesn't exist in the real world,

00:12:31.100 | it's being projected in my AR goggles,

00:12:32.760 | but I can make a nice monitor wherever I wanna go,

00:12:36.020 | and all the computation is happening in the cloud somewhere.

00:12:39.560 | So I have the most powerful computer computing,

00:12:41.740 | much more powerful than I could actually buy,

00:12:43.540 | and I can just see the screen right there.

00:12:45.340 | Why would I buy a TV

00:12:46.360 | when I could just stretch a 72 inch on my wall?

00:12:48.900 | It's all virtual.

00:12:49.860 | And everyone who's in that same room

00:12:51.020 | sees it in the same place.

00:12:52.180 | We literally cannot tell the difference

00:12:53.620 | between that and an actual TV.

00:12:55.000 | Why would I buy a TV, ship it to me,

00:12:57.260 | bring it into my house?

00:12:58.220 | I could just have that right up there on my wall.

00:13:01.540 | The end of the consumer electronics industry as we know it,

00:13:05.060 | it's gonna create some of the most powerful companies

00:13:07.300 | in the history of the world.

00:13:08.420 | It's gonna make Apple seem like a lemonade stand.

00:13:12.060 | If you are the company that owns

00:13:15.340 | the first mainstream widely adopted

00:13:18.340 | full function AR singularity goggles

00:13:21.220 | with that backend doing all the computation,

00:13:23.420 | all of these companies like Sony, Samsung

00:13:26.180 | will become essentially software companies.

00:13:28.220 | You're basically just running processes in the cloud

00:13:31.220 | that can then stream visuals to individuals.

00:13:34.980 | It's hard to underestimate how disruptive

00:13:36.740 | that's gonna be.

00:13:37.560 | I don't think we talk enough about it.

00:13:39.460 | I think it was perhaps a blind spot of Mark Zuckerberg

00:13:41.980 | to focus too much on virtual reality

00:13:43.660 | instead of augmented reality.

00:13:45.280 | Google has invested many, many billions of dollars into this.

00:13:48.480 | Apple is investing many, many billions of dollars into this.

00:13:51.320 | Amazon is investing many, many billions of dollars into this

00:13:54.000 | less about the hardware

00:13:55.040 | and more about being the backend cloud computation

00:13:57.360 | to virtualize all this hardware.

00:13:58.560 | It is gonna be huge.

00:13:59.720 | And I don't think we talk about it enough.

00:14:01.120 | We get too distracted.

00:14:02.400 | The other technological trend I think that's gonna be big

00:14:04.920 | is the continued decentralization of media production.

00:14:09.920 | This is the story of the internet,

00:14:12.560 | but I think it's just starting to get pretty interesting

00:14:15.560 | in recent years.

00:14:16.720 | So you get HTML in the 1990s,

00:14:20.160 | you get websites and then eventually web 2.0.

00:14:22.960 | So it's websites that are easy for people

00:14:24.720 | to update regularly like blogs.

00:14:26.500 | That had a big impact on decentralizing the ability

00:14:30.960 | to produce and sell text.

00:14:34.280 | We take it for granted now,

00:14:35.520 | but remember in 1996,

00:14:37.520 | text came from magazines and newspapers.

00:14:39.960 | You had to have giant warehouses

00:14:41.520 | with these big machines with ink and newspaper rolls

00:14:45.040 | moving really fast and fleets of trucks.

00:14:47.360 | And all the advertising dollars would come there.

00:14:49.780 | They had a ton of money.

00:14:50.980 | There's a lot of money in newspaper syndicates,

00:14:53.480 | a lot of money in magazine syndicates.

00:14:55.880 | That's where text was, available text.

00:14:59.040 | The internet changed that.

00:14:59.880 | Think about how many websites people go to now

00:15:02.160 | for information.

00:15:03.420 | How many independent little media companies,

00:15:05.440 | five person, six person shops.

00:15:07.380 | Ain't it cool news?

00:15:09.920 | Let's go back to those early days.

00:15:13.320 | These type of sites are blogs.

00:15:15.160 | Esther Klein came out of blogging

00:15:18.120 | before moving over to the post

00:15:19.360 | and over to New York Times.

00:15:21.500 | Nate Silver, just all of this text, Politico.

00:15:26.500 | I mean, Politico eventually printed a hardcover version,

00:15:30.600 | a newspaper version for a while of their thing.

00:15:32.680 | But there was so much innovation that happened

00:15:35.600 | in text media because of HTML.

00:15:39.240 | Now we're seeing this with audio, podcast.

00:15:41.800 | Incredibly disruptive.

00:15:43.960 | This industry is exploding because people like

00:15:47.880 | real time analog content.

00:15:49.920 | We can actually hear someone's voice.

00:15:51.260 | Radio is a pretty big industry.

00:15:52.540 | Podcasts will surpass radio soon.

00:15:55.520 | It will surpass it soon.

00:15:57.000 | Because again, you open up the ability

00:15:58.560 | to create audio to most people.

00:16:01.020 | The big change happening now is video.

00:16:02.980 | Video, the ability to produce video

00:16:08.440 | whose quality crosses that uncanny valley

00:16:10.920 | and is at least comparable to stuff

00:16:12.560 | that we maybe saw on cable.

00:16:14.200 | That's where we're getting now.

00:16:15.080 | Where more and more people at a fraction of the cost

00:16:17.520 | can produce video at a quality that you would say,

00:16:21.640 | I could have seen this 10 years ago on Bravo.

00:16:24.240 | And now you've decentralized video,

00:16:27.060 | which was the most powerful media forms of all, right?

00:16:29.940 | Television and movies is a huge dominant source of media

00:16:34.920 | and that is being decentralized now as well.

00:16:37.120 | These trends I think are critical.

00:16:38.900 | I think the shift from audio is the stepping stone

00:16:41.560 | and the video is gonna be much bigger

00:16:43.820 | than even the decentralization of text

00:16:45.680 | that happened with the early HTML based web.

00:16:49.840 | All of this I think is really excited.

00:16:51.200 | I don't know where it's going,

00:16:52.040 | but I think it's really exciting.

00:16:53.660 | The main critique people give,

00:16:55.240 | and I think this is so short-sighted,

00:16:56.560 | is every time one of these media technologies

00:16:58.960 | is decentralized, there's always this pushback

00:17:03.120 | that emerges where people set up this straw man

00:17:07.000 | of everyone now will be able to make a living

00:17:11.560 | off of this new decentralized media.

00:17:13.820 | And then when they don't, and most stuff is bad,

00:17:18.240 | they say the revolution is a failure.

00:17:20.080 | Oh, so blogs arise.

00:17:23.480 | People looked around and said, well, most blogs are bad.

00:17:26.880 | This idea that everyone's gonna make a living

00:17:28.080 | off a blog isn't true.

00:17:29.640 | But that was never the point.

00:17:31.240 | Yeah, most people are bad at producing stuff.

00:17:33.220 | Most people are not meant to be media figures.

00:17:35.720 | Most people don't have the insight or the training

00:17:38.400 | to produce really interesting audio or words or video.

00:17:41.680 | The point is when you open it up to everyone,

00:17:43.340 | you get this extreme Darwinian competition.

00:17:45.640 | And what is the point of Darwinian competition?

00:17:47.680 | Not that all the different types of proverbial species

00:17:50.120 | are gonna survive, but that it's going to drive innovation

00:17:52.600 | into new species, new configurations

00:17:54.480 | that wouldn't have existed before.

00:17:56.240 | That is what is important about decentralization.

00:17:58.480 | There's 850,000 active podcasts right now.

00:18:01.340 | Most of them do not do very well,

00:18:03.320 | but that is a huge amount of selective pressure.

00:18:06.200 | It's gonna produce a couple thousand that do really well

00:18:09.280 | and are really innovative

00:18:10.120 | and will change the media landscape altogether.

00:18:12.160 | Most of YouTube is dreck,

00:18:13.600 | but there's millions and millions of hours of footage

00:18:16.920 | being uploaded every minute.

00:18:19.100 | That is a huge amount of selective pressure.

00:18:20.880 | It's gonna change and evolve

00:18:22.760 | and mutate the visual media landscape.

00:18:24.760 | So I don't know where all this decentralization is going.

00:18:27.360 | I just think it's important.

00:18:28.740 | That's why I'm doing audio.

00:18:29.880 | This is why Jesse and I were quick to get video

00:18:32.740 | going on the show as well.

00:18:34.120 | We think all of this is very important,

00:18:35.740 | even if we can't tell where it's going.

00:18:38.240 | All right, Miranda, that was a long answer.

00:18:40.760 | That was a long answer to a short question,

00:18:43.880 | but I'm glad you asked it.

00:18:44.980 | So really quick summary.

00:18:46.740 | Crypto, I think is overhyped.

00:18:49.740 | We're in the twilight of the massive

00:18:51.120 | social media monopoly era.

00:18:53.560 | AI, I don't know, keep an eye on it.

00:18:55.500 | I don't know what to tell you about it.

00:18:57.320 | Two biggest trends that are being missed.

00:18:59.120 | AR for sure.

00:19:00.360 | I think people don't understand the impact.

00:19:02.360 | Decentralized media, people know it's gonna be big,

00:19:04.960 | but maybe they don't realize

00:19:05.800 | how disruptive it's gonna be.

00:19:08.300 | I think the audio video,

00:19:09.980 | internet audio video revolution in particular

00:19:11.720 | is gonna be the biggest change to media since television.

00:19:15.400 | (upbeat music)

00:19:17.980 | (upbeat music)

Cal Newport On the Technology Trends that Matter Most | Deep Questions Podcast

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