if you've spent enough time online this past month you've probably noticed a sudden uptick unsettling realistic ai generated videos maybe it's body cam footage of super mario in his cart being pulled over by police and then yelling i can't get another ticket before peeling out or a horse on skis competing in a freestyle skiing competition or bob ross wrestling abraham lincoln these were all generated by open ai's blockbuster video generation model thora 2 which allows you to create videos simply by describing them in words open eye open ai however has gone one step further and bundled up access to this model in a new app that they call simply thora that operates like tick tock you can easily create videos and share them you can view other people's creations and there's a an algorithmically curated feed just like you would see on tick tock so you can have a steady incoming feed of grade a high octane lop the online world is usually pretty excited about new ai products but the reaction to sora has been more interesting people online seem to put it simply unsettled i want to play a clip here here's casey neistat reacting to the new sora app my analysis we are so completely fucked uh and now here is vlogger hank green venting some of his own frustrations boy humanity if you're the kind of who will create slop talk you are not the kind of who should be in charge of open ai all right the new york times for its part was really worried about what this means for even just truth they quoted a founder of a tech non-profit saying the following nobody will be willing to accept videos as proof of anything anymore all right but for all of these particular fears we're hearing now about sora there is one fear in particular that i think is really interesting but is not getting discussed that much yet and that is the question of what will the impact be of apps like sora on the existing major social media platforms think about it it's an app on your phone in which anyone can basically create any visual content they can think of why would i watch a tick tock dance routine when using sora i can create a video of michael jackson dancing on mount everest with martin luther king jr that's actually a real video i found jesse so by introducing sora has open ai just radically changed the entire social media landscape this is the question we're going to get into today as always i'm cal newport and this is deep questions today's episode did open ai just kill social media all right so we gotta be careful in our approach here we're going to go very systematically to investigate this question and what we think the answer is so if we really want to understand the danger that the existing social media platforms currently face i want to take you back in time to roughly the summer of 2022 back then there is a new entrance in town called tick tock it was just taking off and having this sort of phenomenally fast user growth and the entrenched social media platforms they were horrified by the speed with which tick tock was growing and the fear that it was pulling their users over into its own ecosystem so the existing social media incumbents responded the way you might expect they tried to make their services more like tick tock this means they began to ignore the way they classically operated with friends and followers and favorites and retweets and instead try to offer up a stream of content selected exclusively by an algorithm to be as low friction as possible and as engaging as possible i noticed this shift with some interest back when it was happening and i wrote an article about this for the new yorker back in the summer 2022 it was called tick tock and the fall of the social media giants and that article argued that this move to be more like tick tock was something that they would come to regret so why don't i load this article on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening all right so here's the article pretty cool graphic i don't know if i ever really understood it jesse but it seems to be a lot of people in cages but the doors are open and they're circular cages and they're dancing the cool graphic i never quite understood it all right so let me start with the following thing i wrote in this article when uh after introducing the idea that the other social media platforms the existing platforms were chasing tick tock i wrote this shift is not surprising given tick tock's phenomenal popularity but it's also short-sighted now to unpack that let's start by asking a fundamental question what was it that made the existing social media giants so unassailable before the era of tick tock began i want to go through three of them one by one let's look at them carefully we'll start with facebook when you're facebook what made you hard to compete with well you had two things going on one was the specific people who used it because facebook was so early to the the social media space they got lots and lots of regular people to sign up to use it that meant for each individual new user facebook had a really good pitch the people you know whether they're your friends your family or somebody new from high school your college roommate they're probably on this platform and you can connect to them they're not on other platforms but they're on our platform so the people you know are on this platform the other advantage that facebook built up is that early on as all of these regular people joined it they put in a lot of free labor to select people who were their friends and to manually tell facebook that's a friend that's a friend that's a friend which created in the end this sort of like dense social graph who captured who knew who that allowed it then to deliver a pretty compelling content profile to its users i can tell you what people you know are up to if there's changes in their life what they're reading what they're interested in that's a pretty compelling package it was hard for later entrance into the social media space to compete with because they weren't going to get a billion people necessarily to sign up and to spend all their time saying who their friends are if you wanted to know what people you knew were up to be on the same network with people you knew facebook was the only game in town that was a great competitive advantage all right well let's look at instagram instagram had a slightly different set of advantages that is used it also mattered they were early as well it also mattered who signed up for their platform but it was less from the point of view of the user it was less about people you personally knew being on this platform but instead the fact that there was lots of interesting and compelling expert type people on this platform creating visually interesting content so uh fitness influencers writers people who lived in ghost towns people who walked around in white linen dresses and collected flowers while soft music plays there was interesting people we'll put like experts in square quotes but like people who were uh good at what they did or known for things that were on there producing visually interesting content so it's a place you could go to follow people like cooks chefs everything right bakers bread makers that did things that you thought was interesting or compelling you wanted to do and they're producing visually interesting content they had a lot of those people had invested in being on instagram and once again users took the time to go through and painstakingly favorite and follow different of these influencers so in the end what could instagram offer its users a steady curated stream of content that was about stuff that user cared about from people they felt like were doing interesting things and it was hard for competitors to come along because it's hard to get all those same writers and bakers and people who walk around in white linen dresses it's hard to get them to sign up 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 clicking on all the people that i like and want to follow then it's hard to figure out what to show me so that was a good advantage that instagram had what about twitter well in twitter's case again what they got early on from a user-based perspective that was useful is they got the people who were interesting from a cultural zeitgeist perspective the the politically adjacent people the reporters the comedians you had people who could make interesting or funny or smart or astute or off kilter observations about what was happening in the world all these interesting people had gone to twitter when it began to take off even more importantly they got all of their users to again go through this painstaking process of creating these follower relationships i follow this person this person this person that person follows this person this person that person if you study the resulting graph it has a very high expansion factor so if i go to my followers and then my follower followers and my followers followers followers the size of people that's being reached increases very quickly it increases along typically like an exponential curve now what this meant was twitter had whether they meant to or not created a fantastic basically human driven distributed curation machine you have lots of people who know lots of things and are interesting and good equips and if someone makes like a really good relevant observation or picks out a piece of news that like is going to be really interesting to the moment and they read they tweet it to their followers the cascade of retweets that follows can get that content to a huge percentage of the hundreds of millions of users using twitter very quickly so as a result they created this engine for keeping the finger on the pulse of the online zeitgeist in a way that would be like very hard to replicate from scratch so if i come along to be a twitter clone and a lot of people tried this the problem is if i don't have enough of those interesting people and we don't have those people spending enough time making these intricate follower relationships so that we have these exponential cascades i just end up getting like a relatively boring feed directly of people who aren't that interesting it's just not that interesting to me so again twitter had a really good business model they're really good competitive advantage in all three cases we can generalize what had made up until this point we're getting to now what had made these services so powerful is that they had the right users and these painstakingly constructed social graphs and it was hard for anyone new to come along get both of those things so they were in a good position but then tick tock came along and the thing about tick tock is that it doesn't really care about who its users are and tick tock did not really care about who knew who follower graphs favorites interests they didn't really care about that either they basically bypassed the elements that made the social media giants hard to compete with 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 don't i just read this because i think it it captures it well the effectiveness of the tick tock's experience is found in what it doesn't require unlike twitter tick tock doesn't need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging the short video format grabs users attention at a more primal level relying on visual novelty or a clever interplay of music and action or direct emotional expression to generate its appeal and unlike facebook tick tock doesn't require that your friends already use the service for you to find it useful though there are some social features built in the tick tock they're not the main draw of the app tick tock also doesn't rely on its users to manually share content with friends or follow followers to surface compelling offerings it assigns this responsibility to its scary good recommendation algorithm all right so tick tock bypassed the competitive advantages that protected the social media giants by just saying look we're just going to take a whole bunch of content we don't care who creates it and we'll use a very good probably like two tower style recommendation app to just show you a constant stream of stuff we'll think you like it will adjust what you show you based on your behavior and it will just be right to the brain stem interesting when facebook instagram and twitter noticed that and chased after tick tock they ignored or walked away from their competitive advantages when they started adding features that just served up content selected by algorithms independent of who created it or who you like or follow as a user they were basically walking away or walking beyond their own proverbial castle walls and out there in the plains beyond they were vulnerable so i ended that article in 2022 with a warning which i'm going to read right here all right this all points to a possible future in which social media giants like facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance they'll continue to chase new engagement models leaving behind the protection of their social graphs and in doing so eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces tick tock of course is subject to the same pressure so in this future it too will eventually fade the app's energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely in the long term to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force in the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distractions but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction so basically what i'm saying here is all of social media was collapsing around the tick tock model which was just pure engagement and my argument here is if all you are offering to people is pure engagement you are now competing with every other possible source of engagement that exists out there when facebook is saying your friends are here you can see what your friends are up to i'm not competing with netflix i'm not competing with podcast or slot machines or pornography or anything else because i'm offering you a very specific thing that only i can do but when i'm instead just giving you like a a long uh infinite feed of videos from people you don't know or really care about that are just trying to capture your attention then that's just purified engagement and you're competing with anything else in that moment that might grab my attention and so i ended that warning by saying new things will come along that are even more engaging than you you don't have a competitive advantage you can't stay on the pedestal for much longer all right this brings us back to the main argument for today we can think of the sora app as the one of the first major sort of new distractions or entertainments that i warned about in that article once all these social media platforms said we're just going to tickle your brain stem open ai came along and said well we can do that even better but you have to actually get people to create these videos and they're confined by their environment and the people they have the film and they're not professional actors they don't have good lighting and like really interesting stuff is dangerous and hard to do and only like a few number of video creators actually have enough 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 like i don't care what this video is i'm just swiping swiping swiping is that interesting we can give you like i saw when i was doing research for this a video where it said this is true jesse a swimming competition there's a lot of stephen hawking content out there it's a swimming competition stephen hawking's on the block they fire the gun and he just falls in the water and drowns that would be like it's a terrible taste really hard to actually stage and film in sora you just type in that like in a sentence and you have that video so yeah they are in trouble because i guess i could say they ignored me when you're in the world of pure novelty that's going to be a constantly churning novelty it's hard to be the king of just pure novelty for that long so this is all bad news for the existing social media giants but are they doomed do they have a chance here maybe maybe they have a chance of breaking free out of the spiral that could be dangerous to them so when we return i want to talk through what exactly facebook instagram and twitter could do right now if they wanted to to protect themselves from the threat of ai generated distraction but first i want to take a real quick break to hear a word from our sponsors so going online without expressvpn is like not having a case for your phone most of the time you'll probably be fine but all it takes is one drop and you'll wish you spent those few extra dollars now i speak from experience here jesse i don't know if you know this but my phone screen has a big crack across it and i'm not gonna do anything about that so what does a vpn do well when you connect to the internet your traffic is contained in little bundles called packets and the data in these packets that's protected right so like the actual information you typed into a form before you click submit that's encrypted and people can't read it but the packet has an address on it that says what site or service you're talking to that's out in the open that's plain text anyone can read that right so the guy next to you with uh his his radio in packet sniffing mode on his laptop knows exactly what sites and services you're using as does your internet service provider who who or whoever owns that public access point you happen to be connected to now just like with your phone case maybe a lot of times no one's listening to what you're up to but it's just the one 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stuff jesse i actually know about zero knowledge proofs when i was at mit i think we we were hearing about the early work on this when i was taking like complexity theory at georgetown we have at least one person on the faculty who works on this technology it's really cool stuff and very impressive that expressvpn is starting to work with it in their product so anyways what are you waiting for secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash deep that's expressvpn e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n dot com slash deep to find out how you can get up to four extra months that's expressvpn.com slash deep i also want to talk about our friends at better help because this podcast is sponsored by better help october 10th not long ago october 10th was world mental health day this year i think we should take a moment to say thank you therapist there are a lot of elements to cultivating a deep life one of the most important is having a healthy relationship with your own mind if you're struggling 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build a business so here's the question i want to answer next what can existing social media giants do to protect themselves from this ai future i'm going to go through this platform by platform and give you my game plan for how you would ai proof yourself against this particular incursion i'll say jesse as an aside it is a little bit weird that me mr quit social media is trying to help these companies out but um honestly i i don't think uh i don't think there can be like 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 my friend type of situation i mean i guess i wouldn't be that unhappy if all these services went out of business but you know i would like them to be better than sora so i'm going to do this i'm going over the dark side and i'm going to give advice to the major social media companies all right let's start with twitter here's my advice for twitter to fight off the ai threat one forget trying to do that video autoplay tick tock type thing that you've been doing where you know someone clicks on a video that they really want to see and then you try to get them into an algorithmically curated feed that that is the exact type of thing that makes you vulnerable to sora instead you have to work i would say on the competitive advantage that always made you strong be a place where interesting people go to say interesting things and that you have this like really good distributed curation model of capturing like what is interesting to the zeitgeist on any given day to do this i would say twitter probably has to find a better middle ground on content moderation right before elon musk took over the service was becoming like a lot of institutions to be holding to the far left and this was having a sort of stultifying effect and it was really also sort of like annoying and uh and kind of censorious after musk has gone too far in the other direction so he kind of went too far the other way uh you look you're you're on you you scroll twitter for five minutes you get the jew hatred which to me is always like the the bellwether of like okay this is this things aren't going great here we also have a lot of arbitrariness from musk himself or he'll just sort of like someone or not like someone and put his finger on the thumb none of that is good if you're trying to create a town square that you want a lot of people to go on to to see what's interesting in the day so find some sort of middle ground like build a council like we have a council who's in charge of all content moderation policies and by definition it's going to be two people left-leaning two people right-leaning and like two centrist and they vote on all the policies and it's transparent and we apply them clearly and just be reasonable people are okay with reasonable if you do that and then to keep focusing on feature improvements making the experience better like get the friction out of here make it easier to do this or that uh i think you could still do well in that model i think twitter can be a very sustainable three to four billion dollar annual revenue business and still have an impact on the culture yeah you're not gonna be meta that's pretty good for a private company and you're pretty ai proof because this is all about like real people saying things that are interesting in the moment that are being selected in a way that's distributed intelligence in a way that like an algorithm can't quite replicate all right what can instagram do i think instagram needs to return to its bread and butter of interesting influencers producing visually interesting content and allowing users to specify oh i like this person i want to see what they're doing so moving retreating from their push towards algorithmically curated sort of reel after reel of just like we'll just show you stuff that might be interesting what the algorithm instagram should refocus on doing is just suggesting new people that you might want to follow or look at hey you like these type of authors you might like this one and you go check them out and like yeah i like what they're doing and you add them to the stable of people that you're listening to but again instagram should be a place where they're sort of like experts doing stuff you find interesting producing content that's visually interesting and you have a good feed of that from people that you selected that again is going to differentiate you from a sort of the the slop style world that you'll see something like on something on sora because it's not just random engagement it's engaging content on specific things you find interesting it builds on like human expertise and human connections ai proves you what about facebook you got to go back to the friend graph that's my argument there that facebook should be a place where you go where you want to see what people that you know or organizations that you know about and specifically chose to follow what are they up to and maybe what it is that they're consuming that like one degree of direct indirection content sharing is fine here is articles that my friends are reading or suggesting right now that's fine or i follow a magazine and so in my sort of news feed will be various things that they publish that that sort of in between era facebook where it was still very friend and follower graph friend graph focused but you had a news feed that old from the different people you knew but not going so far that like we're just going to make this feed all the way algorithmic and just try to like keep you engaged that's a really good competitive advantage the other thing you should lean into if you're facebook is attention to the users this was facebook's original business model i wrote about this in my book deep work we forget this now in our current age of engagement and tick tock but the original pitch for for facebook was not just your friends are here but that they will pay attention to what you're doing before facebook came out we had had this web 2.0 revolution where we had things like blogs that made it easier to publish content online you didn't have to directly edit html files you could like type into a text box and click publish we take that for granted but it was a big deal in the earlier 2000s the problem of the early web 2 era is that when people tried publishing their own things and starting their own like blogs on blogger.com no one came because the vast vast majority of what people have to say or write is really pretty boring and that was really painful and then facebook came along and said hey here's a place where you can publish stuff and people pay attention because we have this social compact if you friend these people on facebook you will like or comment on the stuff they do and they'll like and comment on the stuff you do that is a really powerful feeling that feeling if i put something out there and some people reacted to it professional writers like myself sort of take this for granted but it was a really powerful pull that made people really like facebook especially when they moved the mobile and put the like button on there that really got their engagement numbers up because people loved it people love seeing other people paying attention to stuff they do go back to that model facebook that's a good model the people you know and the specific organizations you like are here you can see what they're up to and what they're publishing and you can get some attention for the stuff you put up there put up an article you find then a few other people you know will comment on it that is really powerful stuff and it's stuff that you can't replicate with ai the sora tiktok experience is still a very different thing that's just pure engagement this is something that's going to be hard to 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 again yes this is none of these are strategies that maximize user engagement minutes but they're also strategies that can keep you pretty profitable while hoping that you avoid going completely out of business if you chase after the the peer engagement model what about tiktok themselves are they completely in trouble here i mean their whole model is built on just a stream of engagement and no profundity to it no it's just whatever you look at longer gets on the screen they really really are in danger from an app like sora because sora can create stuff that tiktok creators themselves cannot so can tiktok survive the uh the age of sora well i think they could survive a little bit longer potentially potentially and here's why i'm not hearing this talked about as much yet either i think it's an important point it is expensive to produce sora videos using the sora 2 video generation model it is computationally very expensive you have expensive gpu chips that are fired up for a long amount of time it's a huge amount of electricity and a huge amount of usage to produce that 30 seconds of bob ross you know wrestling with abraham lincoln so the only way for this to be economically feasible of course is that open ai has to charge for the creation of these videos so right now you can download the sora app for free but if you want to create a video you have to have at the very least a chat gpt plus membership this is at least my understanding which is 20 a month if you have that 20 a month membership you can produce up to 50 videos a month but they have to be at 480p resolution which is low and it's actually gonna be kind of hard to compete with existing videos that are out there and 50 might sound like a lot but you also have to keep in mind the way these videos are created is you just type in some words and hit generate you can imagine it might take a lot of iterations on your descriptions to get just one video that you like so if you really want to be producing a reasonable number of sora videos that you can iterate on at a reasonable resolution that could actually do good on a lot of these like high resolution devices you have to have the chat gpt subscription account that's 200 a month that's a really high price point when you compare it to tick tock's price point which is free for all users because the cost of operation here is so much less the actual computation that goes into like capturing and rendering and editing the videos is distributed to the phones that the users themselves own and all the tick tock itself has to do is uh take up these these highly compressed videos from the app and store those i mean it's not computationally free a company like twitter is still going to be more efficient to run because you're dealing with text and not video but still it is so much more cheaper if you don't have to generate video from scratch it is so much cheaper right i mean like we know this jesse like anyone can watch a youtube video on their computer but we had to get a beast of a computer to do video editing because anytime you're doing anything with like editing or creating videos you need a lot of computational power so tick tock might be able to kind of wait out sora i'm assuming open ai is losing money on this they're going to try to their hope is they can eat money and grow it big enough that when they sell ads they'll be able to somehow kind of like make it back and make this economically viable if they have enough people i mean maybe we'll get into this more in the final segment but if i'm tick tock i'm like you know what people don't want to pay 200 a month just to have a shot to produce these videos so you're going to have many fewer people producing these videos and what makes slop sort of work like what makes tick tock work is there are it's so easy to create videos they can get a huge corpus of potential videos to show each person and it just gives them more opportunity to get it right when you're doing recommendation algorithms it's kind of like a core idea you need inventory the more things you have that potentially suggest to someone the closer you can become to maximizing the expected reward for the individual users and the better the experience comes so that's going to be the achilles the achilles heel of stora potentially is that it's so expensive there's just not enough inventory for it to have the same sort of like wow you're really matching my interest tightly that like tick tock is able to get and so what's going to happen is the relatively small number of people creating the sore videos are just going to jailbreak them out of the app and upload them on tick tock anyways where they can just be part of the big inventory that tick tock is using so tick tock might survive sore because i don't think the economic model necessarily makes sense but they're still in trouble because their model this is like a horde of barbarians is coming at their roman gates they might fight this one off but there's going to be wave after wave after wave when your model is just pure engagement there's going to be so many other things that come along that offer that engagement better maybe you fight off this one but like at some point there's going to be another app where it's going to be like a sports betting with topless women that like sends you random you know jackpot uh slot machine rewards or something while misting you with fentanyl mist i mean you're never going to win this game forever the engagement there always will be new things to figure out how to be more engaged if all you're trying to do is just win this game of just like slack jaw how much drool can you get out of your mouth as you're staring at the screen all right so tick tock you can survive a lot longer but there's other social media companies go back to your old social media model i don't love that model by the way i don't think the internet should be consolidated in the four companies i have huge issues with those companies operating the way they used to operate but i would rather have them built on their carefully constructed user bases and social graphs each of them focus on their each unique sort of competitive value that makes them somewhat unassailable i would rather have a world with them than a world where it's just like one sora after another as a pretender to the distraction throne of who can make your eyes glaze over uh faster by the way i just uh saw the announcement jesse tick tock has just um up their rev share for their creator so they see this threat coming 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 we're paying you more than we used to pay you before to create content here so they're really uh they're putting up a defense and i think they've actually have a good shot at uh surviving this particular wave all right so uh let's move on to some takeaways all right so as i mentioned i'd be happy if all the social media platforms maintain their tick tock clone strategy and they all falter under the pressure of the apps like sora or whatever brain stem slop follows in its wake and then maybe as they all sort of collapse under the impossibility of being a dominant force doing such a simple thing that people will finally be convinced to move on from this type of content and go to more rewarding indie media style content like podcasts like newsletters like other high quality independent media but it's not inevitable that this has to happen and if the social media giants are smart they can avoid it the properties that made social media so powerful for so long are still there for the taking they still have these social graphs that no one ever again will replicate they still have these fantastically large and varied and interesting user groups it'll be hard for any other new platform to every replicate so if the social media giants retrench around their social graphs and curated user bases they can survive they can have their advantages again and i guess if the alternative is watching videos of abraham lincoln wrestling bob ross then i'd rather have a world of instagram influencers and twitter takes last just a little bit longer all right so there we go jesse sora have you did you hear about this it's like kind of everywhere but no yeah i mean i'm actually i have a lot of questions but i'm only gonna probably ask you a couple just to save some time do any idea 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 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 model sora is the app that you can use to access sora 2.

there might be other ways to access sora 2. i think a lot of people are downloading it to look at the slop so it's probably pretty big i don't know how many people are generating though and then do you think a lot of people know that facebook and instagram are under the same umbrella company oh i don't know what people know yeah it's a good question i mean facebook bought instagram in part because it is hard so i'm talking about it is hard to build user bases and social graphs from scratch instagram uh had built up this like user base and more influencer type expert types who are doing visually interesting content and facebook's like i don't know if we can get them all to come over here they've already there it's already existing the other thing that instagram did this might have been more important is they were way more native mobile because you have to use the camera to use instagram it was conceived as a mobile app from scratch because you need a smartphone camera for it to make sense and so their mobile app was just better than what facebook was doing like oh great we'll just hire them uh aqua hire them they spent a billion dollars there's like 12 people who worked for this company it was crazy it was like the the most money ever spent for so few people like we'll just get that app and then we don't have to try to build it ourselves but yeah i don't know if most people know in part because as i just went through each of these major platforms has such a unique identity like they're not that's why they all survived like i don't go on facebook to hear from authors i would go on instagram to hear from authors i i but i don't go on instagram really i mean i don't use any of these i'm using the sort of royal yeah here right you wouldn't go on instagram necessarily anymore to know what your like nephews are up to though because like you'll be uh group texting pictures or whatever right that's not good for that and like twitter if you want to like a political take or controversy or what's going on like reactions to something that's happening in the news like that's it's doing that you want to go on instagram for that and so they've all kind of uh they've differentiated into their advantages that was a pretty stable setup until tick tock came along and they felt like they had to follow it so they could keep getting growth but i really think that was a problem yeah um i'm sure like the people that have the sora accounts for 200 a month and posts to instagram will become like beast users before anybody like realizes that you know i i got to imagine that's going to happen so because a lot of people aren't going to catch on to sora 2 for at least a year right at least the majority of the people yeah and sora puts on a watermark right because they're worried about uh deep fakes because you can just put like anyone in here but people have already figured out how to strip it off so if you can strip off the the mark you can strip off probably whatever protections you need to put it into i mean of course you can right it doesn't matter how many protections you put on your video generation because at the very least i can just on my computer be playing my sora account and i can just uh screen capture it into its own video right there's nothing you can do to prevent me from from if i want to capture that information the other thing open ai did which i think is well desperate to be honest when they turned on this app and that model they put very few protections on it so you could generate any ip you could work with any ip that was out there right so there's all of these videos there's a lot of like um dash cam footage of like police officers pulling people over and then peeling away and it's all ip it's mario it's spongebob square 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 protection um also any historical figures there's like a lot of hitler stuff on there there's a lot of like queen elizabeth stuff on there just existing people who are alive now uh just full deep fake videos there's there's um videos with with mark cuban uh on shark tank promoting this like made up like really terrible products or what just him looking straight to the camera and they know they're under pressure and everyone's like yeah you can't use our you think like nintendo and disney are okay with you making like fake drug bust videos with their ip of course not right so now open ai is like oh we are uh turning on like whatever whatever we'll turn on protections or whatever but their their idea was you know i think it's so cynical let's let people make like really offensive ip violating slop at least for a few weeks to try to get a lot of attention and then we'll be like oh my goodness i never thought that people would think to put protected ip in their videos we're going to try to turn it off now so it's just like really cynical thing they were doing whereas but i think they're going to get their um they're going to get sued left and right yeah i mean of course they knew people were going to do that um so there you go well they have a valuation of over 500 billion so they might be able to afford some lawyers i guess valuation is not money i know and good for them they have that valuation as we'll see we'll see what happens more on this a little bit later all right so we have a lot more to discuss about ai and social media in the following including some questions from you my listeners we got a call and a third segment where we're going to return to a recent tweet from sam altman which i think is bad news for open ai but we'll get into it it's not the most uh heartening thing to hear from your your loyal founder um first let's do a little bit of housekeeping before we move on the rest of the 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 dox myself so i can't i don't want to like fully explain my halloween setup but i just want to briefly explain because i think it's important more important than the future of social media briefly explain the thing i built because it was really a pain to build so i wanted this sounds easy but it's hard i wanted synchronized lights and sound so i was doing like effects using programmable leds like carefully timed effects that i wanted sound to be synchronized to that is really hard to do in especially in like a waterproof container and i i got it installed and so far it's worked and it's survived for a week without you know fritzing out or something like that so that i'm happy about i had to use a micro controller that allows me to touch each individual bulb in a programmable led strand and i could write custom code for any of my animations right it's writing from scratch and see so i made all the animations and then i had to wire that up solder that up to another circuit board that has a sound controller on it and now i can sort of trigger sounds from the same microcontroller and it's all just low level timing loops i wrote from scratch so i can exactly trigger exactly when sounds happen exactly when you know lights are happening and i could hook up that sound board to my microcontroller by just putting low voltage on different pins at certain like times or whatever then you have to have like a whole power supply situation like all these things need different voltages you need a lot of voltage to run 200 programmable led lights right so that you big voltage supply but then i need voltage to run the speakers because i got to amplify the sound and i need voltage to run uh the microcontroller i need voltage to run the sound chip so i just actually just wired the voltage from the sound the microcontroller for the sound chip and then everything has to have like properly shared ground so that you have like because we have to synchronize communication signals over communication buses and then you got to have this full thing somehow fit into some sort of waterproof container in which lots of wires can come in and out and i got that all to work at least temporarily the funny part is imagine if you got it all set up it's working great and you walk back to your neighbors and it's like he's got something 10 times better i mean it's not gonna happen but an animatronic yeah walking across the like whatever i would i would get there i would get there so that's what's going on halloween update 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 after this comes out it's all sold out i think but that'll be fun but if fans are there they can say 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 do hig and anna wiener and it's coming on like ai in the future and stuff like that yeah we're competing with the other event happening the same time is ad smith being interviewed by george sanders so we're not the a event but i think it'll still be i think it'll still be interesting so you know new yorker festival is fun it's always good to like visit the city and i'm gonna you know have dinner with my publishing team and meet my you know hang out with my speaking agent and hopefully you can get some good gear they sell like coffee cups and something again for free um yes i guess that's true that's where your mind goes i'm thinking about like the celebrity writers i can meet just like get a coffee cup you have coffee cup a sweatshirt a new yorker hat it's spread out over like lots of venues in the city i think but anyway so that's fun uh some other exciting stuff coming up but i guess i can't really talk about it yet because some of this stuff is secret but anyways i think that's all the housekeeping what else do we have going on anything else jesse people need to know sign up for the newsletter does brad have a book available oh yeah yeah a friend of the show brad stolberg his new book the way of excellence which is excellent i blurbed it uh it's available for pre-order so you can just google way of excellence um if you go to his newsletter go to the link to his newsletter there's like bonuses if you want to pre-order it anyways he got a killer blurb by the way by you or somebody else better better than me i mean obviously i'm the killerest of blurbs cover of the cover of the uh book is steve kerr oh really yeah this is are they buddies uh they know each other but he just likes the book yeah it's it's he says it's an absolutely beautiful book so people don't know steve kerr is the coach of the gold state warriors um and himself he played with jordan i watched him play with jordan back in the 90s yeah so you know jordan punched him in the face once in practice remember that no oh you don't remember that it was like big news first kind of small guy he's like our size isn't he he's probably six three but jordan's six six six six yeah so there you go that's all the things that are happening all right let's move on to some questions hi first question is from corey the videos produced by soar 2 look pretty good to me if this technology continues to advance will this be the end of things like movies and television shows as we currently know them this seems to be a concern that people are having so when i was doing my research for this episode there's lots of different concerns about sora we talked about one on today's episode which is will it kill social media but there's lots of other concerns disinformation etc one of the bigger concerns was is this the death of creativity um this was actually i think the main argument in you know casey neistat had an argument uh video out we played a clip from it back in the introduction but his main point the the what he works to in this video is to argue that the sora app running with sora 2 is going to be basically the end of like creative industry as we know it i think jesse we could we got a clip right all right let's listen to that then i'll react to it times a day if all you have to do today is type those words into an app and click a button and it gives you a tick tock video in one then like youtube can't be far behind where you just type in the youtube video you want to see you push the button and boom okay quit your job for 100 grand last person off the island keeps buy every seat on a plane give away post come on come on good next one build the biggest vending machine that gives away cars and how many years away from netflix you just type in like jason bourne moon landing and go generating so he's arguing this technology is going to take down visual mediums one after another actually that part there in the middle with mr beast was actually pretty funny he used sora to produce a video this is like the type of thing you can do right now without the protections you can just make a video with someone in it who has no idea you're doing it he made a video of mr beast you very meta using sora at a computer and just frantically typing in like descriptions of videos so that like mr beast when you know instead of making the videos he's just like i would do this i want to do that it's actually pretty good use of sora all right so he argues it's going to take things one by one by one until it's netflix movies and like why would we do anything if we could just type in and get whatever we want i don't really think that is an issue and the reason why i don't think that is an issue is we have had over the generations all sorts of different quality levels of content and often the lower level the lower quality level stuff is very very engaging in the moment it could be like oh i gotta really watch this and yet we have not up to this point really seen a lot of examples of the existence of a lower quality high engagement stratum of content lead to the collapse of upper stratum right because like in the age of tick tock we still got chris nolan's oppenheimer like talk videos are like easy to make there's a huge number of them they're incredibly compelling when you're looking at them they're hard to look away oppenheimer's on the other end of the spectrum this is a movie that costs 250 million dollars to make and it took all these years and it's very artistic or whatever people were happy for both of these to exist they've made a billion dollars in box of the people who wanted to see that type of what stratum equality and they'll also separately look at the other stratum equality that is something like uh like a tick tock video this is why for example you can have during the like early 2000s on your tv you had the same device you have the real housewives which is like super engaging to watch and there's a lot of different series of them you can just turn it right on and it doesn't require much you're just in it and it's like primal and people are fighting and throwing drinks each other's faces at the same time you have the sopranos on hbo both stratums of quality exist the existence of a higher engagement and i would say it's higher engaging right like it's much easier to jump into a real housewives episode than it is to get into like a difficult sopranos episode it's much easier to watch a tick tock video than it is to try to like understand what like the time bending is that's going on in like dunkirk or something like that they both exist so we don't i mean we we often tell ourselves that the introduction of a lower stratum quality higher engagement type of content is going to destabilize the foundations and the things on top falls but we really have not seen that historically and so you know i would just extrapolate from what we've seen so far so yeah we can we can introduce you know uh this new type of super engaging content that can in this type you know it has different famous people in it not really they're going to turn that off because of ip stuff but it'll be visually very arresting in a way that tick tock is not because 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 but i don't think it's going to collapse to the levels above it the only way this would happen is if if nice thought was arguing that like somehow eventually these models will produce things that are indistinguishable from like uh top movies that's not exactly how that works it's like really really hard to make a movie and like almost no ideas ever get made into the movie and it takes like auteur directors to just pull all these pieces together in their vision maybe they'll use more ai in their effects or something like that but it's not going to be i type the description of a movie and that it's made so i'm not super worried about that i just think slop is slop it is going to take over adjacent slop i think it's at the same strata ai videos at the same strata as tick tock and i again it's going to be trouble once the economics get worked out i think that's trouble for tick tock but i don't think it's trouble for like uh you know the next paul thomas anderson movie but maybe i'm just being naive but it hasn't happened yet hasn't happened yet all right who do we have next next up is dave i'm an it security engineer ai coding tools have allowed me to write scripts that save me weeks of time would my time be better spent writing code from scratch or am i better doing the best thing by focusing on the problems and using all the tools that i have available to make solutions quickly can i tell you what was programmed from scratch no ai tools your halloween light halloween lights damn straight they were timing down to the millisecond level all built within a central timing loop elegantly so i at each iteration of the loop like you're just in the iteration of a loop and you have 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 to randomize this thing and have an explosion have you just always known how to do that stuff or i yeah i've known how to like that type of coding like so i'm not like a full stack engineer anymore like i don't really know like the latest systems if you tell me to build like a commercial piece of 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 seven but like that type of thing give me a blank slate like here's a microcontroller like build or whatever that was like 20 minutes i sit in the office like let's just roll you know and i went for it i actually had a job for a while in college where uh there was a product there's a company in my town and they built a product it was it was not that interesting but it was like a piece of um it was for measuring the optical properties of film and it would like rotate things and shoot lasers through prisms and make measurements or whatever and the whole thing was run from a computer and they had like a special control card you would stick onto the the motherboard of the computer that would allow you to like precisely control this thing but then the technology for using those old control boards was getting outdated and so they're like we what we really need to do is like control this whole thing by a microcontroller that's on the device itself and the computer should just like send it a command like oh do a measurement and then like the microcontroller can like precisely you know control everything and then just send the data back and my job was to do all that like here's the microcontroller here's the thing and i programmed it from scratch right so like i got really good and that was an assembler nowadays like my halloween thing i can program it's like a c or c plus plus variant jr do we know stuff but back then it was assembler like you were like you were in it and you were counting the micro uh the number of the number of clock cycles required per instruction you could count those up to get timing like okay each clock cycles this many microseconds and the ad's going to take three clock cycles but yeah that type of stuff i love i love low level that type of thing i can do even though i don't do i don't build systems as a computer scientist um anyways what i'm trying to say dave is you're not a real man if you're not programming assembler from scratch um okay here's what i have to say about that actually more seriously about it if you're in an engineering position and you're building a system that like there is some stakes it doesn't even have to be something that other people are using i'm not talking about like you're building a product that you're trying to release but like you're building a system that does things that's going to affect other people it's helping you like update password files or review like what's going on or clean out tickets or this or that you don't want to be purely vibe coding by purely vibe coding meaning like you're just asking ai model to produce code and your only way of measuring it is just you run it and see if it works or not and if it's not you like tell it to fix some things you need to understand the code that's running whatever these scripts are that might affect other people you can use ai tools to help you produce that code or to help you debug that code or to give you like hey can you show me how i would do this thing but you have to know enough about whatever language and system you're using to be able to verify look at that code and see what it's doing to be able to audit yourself for 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 be vibe coding if there's any stakes like this where it could affect like outcomes for other people 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 generating or checking or debugging code but you got to actually understand at least that's my my computer science ethic you have to know enough about that programming language to know what's going on so ai should help you speed up something you already know how to do in this context not do something for you that you don't know how to do i think that's where we are especially in an engineering position like that all right who do we have next next up is pastor alex i don't use social media what are your thoughts on substack is this okay for me to use or are there similar negative consequences of what you've recently discussed with social media you know what i do pastor alex is i program my own substack code in assembler and it runs on a microcontroller i'm a man and then you posted account newport.com i don't think this like i'm a man thing works when we're talking about programming languages on microcontrollers i think i need actually something more manly for that tag to actually work um okay in general email newsletters are something that i am uh bullish on because i think they're a great example of indie media it's taking advantage of the internet for distribution the spread more ideas than would otherwise be spreadable it's controlled by the person who writes it it's your content it's long form it's idiosyncratic so i'm a big fan of newsletters substack look there's some issues with it to catch my attention they want to be more like a social platform they want you to move in out of your inbox into their app they want it to be like all of these newsletters like in tick tock are somehow just um nuggets of content and you don't don't worry we'll help you find them we'll see what you like reading and we'll find other things you'll just kind of have this like stream of things you might be reading they i think their their model is they want to be their aspiration is to be like an algorithmically curated magazine i don't love that i think email newsletters i think of as as i have a reason why i want to hear what this person is writing right because i'm a big believer in distributed curation through webs of trust you don't have a machine just tell you hey here's something you might find interesting you actually find your way to someone through real people this person i already know and have a relationship with we have a link in the web of trust i know this person i trust this person either because i know him personally or just through their reputation they're now recommending this person this person is a good writer i can now add a link in that web of trust to this other person because if this person trusts them and i trust them then i trust this other person as well so maybe i'll check out what they're doing i'm willing to possibly consume what they're doing and then maybe they're constantly talking about some other writer well that puts another link in my web of trust that's now someone that through this chain of trust i can trust like a legitimate good actor good faith it's interesting it's stuff worth listening to that's the way we used to find writers the way we used to find books just the way we used to find like albums and stuff like that and i think that's a fantastic mode of curation the internet is good for distribution in this model i can now see what this person has to read without having to like send away for something or go find a book in store that's fantastic but i don't necessarily need the internet to help me find the person distributed webs of trust are an incredibly effective tool in my opinion for curation it handles like so many issues that we actually have about the internet today about you know actors that are acting in bad faith or they're actually trying to deceive you or they're like undermining values in ways or they're they're like actually like agents of like another power this or that a lot of that goes away when you use webs of trust because when you're building up these chains of trust it's very hard to build your linkage over to nonsense and it's very different for example than when you have a fully homogenized algorithmically curated type of setup like tiktok every tiktok video is the same everyone's treated the same i don't know where this video is coming from is this really just like someone over in you know like arkansas who has an opinion on this world event or is this like a bot that's coming out of like you know uh pakistan i don't know or unlike twitter everything looks the exact same and stuff just 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 person to person making a real chain and connection each way to get to someone else because i'm not going to get the nonsense that way so i don't like that substack is trying to move away from that there i guess it's an engagement model uh there's just a constant stream of people you might want to hear writing that being said so put that aside it is a boon for writers substack is a boon for writers because they take out a lot of the complexity and expense of taking advantage of that distribution model and i i don't want to undercut that i think that is actually like a really really big contribution to the world of ideas i do want to give substack credit for that i'm independent fully i'm independent with my newsletter that's not easy not easy it's also expensive i don't know what we pay jesse but i think it's like you know we have a hundred something thousand subscribers it's thirty thousand dollars a year easy just to host that newsletter right so it's not these are non-trivial expenses now i make money because i also have a podcast it's that is synergistic with the newsletter and we work with a really good ad agency and we've been at this for a while and then we have an income stream through ads that subsidize the other things that's a really hard thing we do um and if i was just starting from scratch my newsletter is getting popular like i don't have that type of money right so i think that's a really good thing to do it's also complicated the software is complicated it's not too hard we use a really good provider but you know you got to learn how this works uh and substack makes it easy substack also has recommendations like they'll they'll recommend as i talked about this thing that i'm a little bit wary about there's like algorithmic recommendations it does help people's lists grow though i'm kind of a believer in just like old-fashioned list growth it takes a lot longer but the the people you gain are like bigger on your list um so i won't cast shade on substack because it allows writers to just focus on writing and not this like expense and complexity i mean like we have someone who basically just like handles the newsletter from a technological perspective you know substack writers don't need to worry about that so um so yeah use it that's fine i think it's fine i think it's fine you substack just be wary when you consume about like the algorithmic curation and in general use manual chains of trust to find newsletters but i'm fine with substack um i like that they make it cheap for people to actually do what they do i don't think there's a podcast equivalent of that but podcast is there like if i wanted to host i guess there must be like let's say i wanted to host a podcast and i didn't want to just like pay money for it i don't know if that exists there probably is somewhere for some reason that's way cheaper which never made sense to me hosting podcast is way cheaper than email newsletters like we don't pay that much money to host our podcast i don't know if people know how podcast technology works but like basically uh when you have a podcast you have a server somewhere you're paying just to put the sound files the mp3 files you just get uploaded to a server somewhere right and then you also maintain an rss feed which is like a machine readable you know xml file where every time you post a new it's like a big text file and every time you post a new episode you add all the information to this file and it has like the title the description and a link like this is where the file is to download and all a podcast player is like when you subscribe the podcast is all you're saying is like hey keep checking on these rss feeds a few times a day it loads them up and reads the text file if there's a new episode it puts the information in the player and it downloads the file from that server so the only thing you really need from a hosting perspective if you're a podcaster is a place to store the files and that's like really cheap because i guess storing files and bandwidth for people downloading files is uh you know it's like a commodity it's pretty cheap even though we'll have hundreds of thousands of these files downloaded it's somehow like way cheaper than having that many newsletter subscribers so i don't know something about sending emails is expensive something about downloading podcasts is cheap so there you go or less than economics all right we have some more questions to go about ai and social media plus a bonus question we added about an unrelated topic that i just like talking about we also have a case study coming up that uh will be good and a tweet from sam altman that uh i i'm gonna have to get into so all this is still to come but first we need to take another quick break to hear from some more of this episode's sponsors here's the thing about being an aging guy when you're young you don't think about your skin you spend time in the sun only occasionally you know cleaning the grime off your face with a brillo pad and you still end up looking like leonardo capro in growing pains but then one day you wake up and you realize like wait a second i look like an old grizzled pirate captain why didn't anyone tell me that i was supposed to take care of my skin i want you to avoid that fate and you could do so with caldera labs their high performance skincare is designed specifically for men it's simple effective and backed by science their products include the good which is an award-winning serum packed with 27 active botanicals and 3.4 million antioxidant units per drop 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questions all right we got who we got next next up we have patricia i think it's realistic for most people to give up their smartphone however if something is available only through a mobile app what are your thoughts on a family smartphone it's not tied to anybody in particular and it's there to purely cover specific needs um i think it's a great idea i think a family smartphone app is great you have those type of apps on it you need for just like operating logistically in various parts of life and you grab it when you need it get a cheap phone keep it forever keep it charged in the kitchen i actually just heard an interview with warner herzog on conan o'brien's podcast that he was actually talking about this warner herzog like famously is one of these people like quentin tarantino or like aziz anzari who do not use smartphones or he's never really used a smartphone he's too busy making like 30 movies a year but he told conan he had to buy one recently why because the parking lots in a lot of european cities need a smartphone app for you to use it you have to use the app to actually like register your car so it doesn't get towed so he has some smartphone that he barely knows how to 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 about you know having a fully serviced smartphone as being an unavoidable distraction then yeah have a family smartphone for when you need it that is a great idea patricia i uh i recognize it all right jesse we have our bonus question here right it's on a topic outside of today's episode but one that i like to talk about yes we do all right who we got it's from tim we write monthly articles for our company's internal weekly newsletter to minimize back and forth email communications i set up a clear system and structure this past month a member didn't use the structure at all but kept moving the conversation back to emails even when i tried to move things into the system multiple times i just do this this is like pure a world without email if you haven't read that book oh man i really get into like what happens with email why it's destroyed work and what it looks like to not be beholden the email 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 things to mention we can decide which of these three things are relevant to you all right so when it comes to putting in place systems or protocols that are an alternative that just send the emails back and forth you have to differentiate between uh a new protocol that a team is going to use like internally versus a protocol that you're exposing to the outside world like the other teams for internal changes so when you say like oh we do an internal weekly newsletter if there's like a team of writers who work on this together and that's what you're talking about internally email alternatives have to be bottom up with buy-in if you just come in and say technically i'm in charge of this team here is how we are communicating now it creates resentment and friction and it really rarely works people just don't like it they just don't even if it is like on paper a better idea they are going to have like a cal newport dartboard up that they're going to be you know throwing those darts at and they're going to be aiming for the groin if you know what i mean right it's not good you got to have buy it you have to be like hey let us talk about what's going on here is why i'm worried about us just doing all this with email here's the problems like i read this cal newport book of a world without email like all this context shifting like i think this is making us miserable it's making us less productive we need a some sort of protocol that's maybe a little bit more structured that will reduce the main thing that you want to reduce which is not messages but it's unscheduled messages to require responses because you're trying to prevent having to switch your context as much as possible all right what should we do then as a team you come up with this together you have buy and you say great what's our check-in rhythm once a month all right we'll check back in and again a month this isn't going to completely work we'll fix the parts that aren't we'll try new things we'll try to see what parts are working that's the way you change email with protocols within a team if it's external so if what you're talking about here for example is you run the internal editorial team but then people from all over the company can send you stuff like be like hey i want you to put this in the newsletter or something like that then it's okay to have uh expose a protocol interface and just say this is what we use i think it's a really good idea i talk about in the book world without email the way that like this is the this is how they they organize the apollo program because there are so many different teams and you know between academia and through the government and through defense contractors they eventually essentially had to publish like communication protocols for communicating between the teams here is where the information comes and in what format we sign it off and when you do it because otherwise it was too impossible to be like too much information or whatever like that so i think that's fine if you're exposing a communication interface to the outside world or outside your team then you can just say this is the way we communicate and there i think it is uh often sufficient to just pretend like stuff that's not in that protocol doesn't exist or just say you know you send back here's the instructions for like submitting to the newsletter and like oh okay but just hey what about this could you i knew what's going on here like these are the instructions for submitting to the newsletter you kind of that's just it like you just sort of hold the line on that and a few people like and then they'll kind of like stop participating most people will do it third thing i want to say if you do have one of these external interfaces and you're getting a lot of this pushback you also have to keep in mind that maybe your interface is bad and often the issue is you have too much friction people are busy you're not their most important thing the thing that they're communicating to you with through your interface is probably something that's low down on their to-do list they just want to get it off there you do have to respect that about people but there there's common friction points that really can make these external facing protocol interfaces fail and you want to make sure you're not suffering from one of these the biggest one is like making people have to switch systems that's a really big one it seems simple on paper but it really is a problem for people if you're like look you gotta you're gonna have to like log in and have a login and log into some system and click on some drop down menus and there's some ambiguity about like what you're trying to do doesn't quite fit into these 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 internal bureaucracies like you got to put this in and the code here and then click from this drop down like what the things are like that type of friction like i have to switch to another system or i have to fit what i'm doing into like an interface where what i'm doing might not cleanly fit that really annoys people so what you want to look for is like low friction interfaces let me give you an example at our department for example at georgetown like we have a weekly newsletter you know for the department that goes out and uh people come up with like things they might want to submit or this or that there's like a really nice protocol we have in place and by me it's really my department here 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 like let's just start talking to individual people there's a particular address you can use it's not associated with a single name but actually with a whole admin team and the people in charge of communication you can just email something that you want to be included to this address so it's very low friction for you as like the user interfacing with this newsletter i can just like forward because often like you'll get something from a colleague like oh we should put this in the newsletter i can just hit forward and send that thing over but because the address is not associated with an individual person i don't expect it to be a response i don't expect to be able to have like a back and forth interaction about it and then on the other end there is i believe in this case we have a a student you know we we have like student not interns we have like student employees in the department who you know we pay hourly to do a bunch of different stuff and one of the things they do is they can monitor this address and they can take these things and i don't know the whole back end but they like put them all in a big google doc file and then there's like one time each week where the people who build the newsletter the member the admin staff who build the newsletter they take what's in there and they format and send it out before that there is a weekly meeting that already exists of like the various directors like myself and we can just like look through that and be like oh that's not important that's not important yeah include this include this now include that right and so we're already meeting that just adds like 30 seconds to our time all of this produces a newsletter where it's like very easy for people to submit things it's still curated gets formatted nicely and how many unscheduled emails get sent that have to be responded to zero and that is what you're often looking for all right so those are the three things internally if there's an internal protocol you need buy-in you can't just impose it if it's an external protocol you can hold the line dot dot dot but if it has too much friction in it then maybe you need to make this a lower friction protocol that still accomplishes the goal which is not time which is not message reduction but reducing the messages that require responses there we go a little world without email i i can't resist sometimes jesse we're a lot of technology stuff going around we have to talk about right now email sounds old-fashioned but it's at the core of so many people's like subjective experience of work day-to-day and their subjective well-being so i can't help talking about it sometimes all right we have a case study right yes now let's get some case study music all right case studies where people send in their own accounts of applying the type of advice we talked about on this show in their own life today's case study comes from mike all right here's what mike says as a creative being on social media felt like a necessity but often also a chore so i finally did a 30-day digital declutter as you describe in your book digital minimalism i don't know why i waited so long here are my takeaways just as other people have described i was very antsy the first couple days however it quickly subsided and i got used to the slower less anxious life it felt like i had more time in my day because i did i realized how little value i actually get from being on social media now i get everything i need in real life conversations are more robust as i don't need to see them on social media an unexpected benefit was i started making decisions faster and with more certainty it was like i got back to what i actually wanted for my life and not what someone on instagram was telling me to do i'm now at the stage of implementing rules for how to use the apps after my declutter ends i definitely think everyone should try this and enjoy the benefits all right mike i appreciate that for those who don't know in my book digital minimalism which seems to be having a kind of like a new renaissance by the way jesse i think people are like looking for responses to the negative relationship they have with technology like well i've got one for you it's in this nice book you can read it i recommend that book you take 30 day break from all your technology so you can rediscover like what you actually care about through experimentation reflection figure out your values what you really want to do in your life and then only add back technologies that directly support those values and when you do put clear rules around them for when and how you use them so instead of like having to have a real reason not to use a technology you have to have a real reason to use it and once you know why you're using it you can put clear rules around it because if my value is x then why am i looking at my phone when i'm in the bathroom that's unrelated to that so digital declutter is a good way to sort of jumpstart a new relationship with all your tools so i'm glad things went well with mike yeah i mean that's one of the big things i hear from people is they're surprised by how much brain space social media was played taking up and my brain space like emotional space psychological space like energy being burnt in this sort of like simmering fire in the background or whatever it's it's like baseball fans feel uh you know a friend's a big tigers fan i'm just thinking about how much mental energy the last couple of weeks burnt up for him right because it's just you know it's tough your team it's suspenseful they're low and then finally you don't win and then they're immediately talking about so you know train your pitcher mad dog was so upset that he only pitched six innings in the final game all right trust me he's like he took him out and i was on a long text thread about this yeah i know what you're talking about and what i thought about it was like okay this of course is valid like your team your long time tigers fan you got this is going to eat up a lot of mental space that's most people all the time because of social media like you have that same level of like smoldering background like i have to talk about it or whatever it makes sense when it's like your baseball team and it's two weeks that's the joys of october but for a lot of people it is they're always they're always living in a constant state of being like a detroit fan after scoobal was taken out in the sixth that's like their every day that is exhausting and i don't think people realize that until they actually step away from it so yeah read that book digital digital minimalism often it's a weird thing about these books jesse it's like when you're writing them if when you're in the world like this is way too late but it's you're almost always too early yeah you know i was like oh it's too late people already know like their phones are they have a problem with it it's like now that people are getting around to it or it's like when john height wrote the ancient generation last year we knew like experts like yeah we've been talking about this since 2017 like it's too late no people weren't ready till then so yeah digital minimalism it came out in 2019 but it's more relevant now than it ever has been all right do we have a call this week yes all right oh it's also about phones and all that type of stuff all right let's hear this call hey cal and jesse this is antonio from los angeles i followed your advice years ago and i gave my son a dumb phone when he turned 16 i gave him a smartphone he has yet to download any social media uh so i think that was kind of spectacular kind of um your advice in uh in action my daughter now is 13 and i gave her the same dumb phone uh however she's sort of using the text threads it sort of is a de facto social media so she's on two or three different 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 to regulate that or how to help her make different choices i'm wondering if you have any advice about that uh thank you so much for what you've been doing um and uh i do love the newsletter that's a new new thing for me all right antonio thanks for that question i have strong thoughts about all this i'm actually giving a talk the day you're hearing this i'm giving uh another talk about my kids school about like phones and actually the title of the talk i'm giving today the day you're hearing this is when should i give my kid a smartphone i'm giving it to elementary school age parents so i think a lot about these things um okay so so first of all i like the story about your son that that's partially why 16 is considered like a good time to wait till social media because you're done with puberty you have well-established social groups and your social identity is in place so you're a lot less malleable at that point and then when you bring it in it's sort of more like when an adult gets into it you can still end up using it too much but it doesn't have that same impact that if you bring those tools into your life when you're still forming your social identity when you're still prepubescent or going through puberty and you have all those chemicals and reconfigurations of your brain and you're still trying to find like you know clee from the parental uh community tribal dyad and sort of prove yourself you into a tribe of your own like all these things happen around that time where you really don't want that technology you know in your face that being said when it comes to social uh digital sociality there is a big gender divide and you're seeing that you know these are all just bell curves and there's people on either ends of these bell curves but in general young women and girls are more cued in onto the social technologies than young men or boys are so this is why your son probably had an easier time with it you need to be wary about digital sociality that's the terminology for sort of any socializing that's happening largely through the digital exchange of text or images so what you would do on text threads but or whatsapp or what you would do on something like snapchat you got to be wary about it for a few reasons one is uh when you're communicating especially linguistically so through text there's a lot of the parts of your brain that are part of normal social interaction that we evolved over a couple hundred thousand years guard rails guard rails to like keep you a reasonable human being and to maintain relationships in a way that's going to allow you to have a long-term relationship in your tribe a lot of those guard rails are not activated when the communication is happening with words because they don't know that you're communicating with someone yeah your frontal cortex does like rationally you have some new nerve bundles that recognize like this text is texting to someone else but like these deep type of social guard rails they evolved in a time when there was no written language they don't know about texting so they're tuned down so people get nasty people say things they wouldn't say before with girls it's less i want to understand talking when i give these talks that middle school girls will tell me it's often less about like i'm going to say something mean to you it's way more subtle knife digging than that it's like okay here's what i'm going to do you weren't 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 that really funny or and lol and put a lot of emojis or whatever but really the whole point of that was to make you feel bad you probably wouldn't have done that in person right so so guard rails are down it's it's uh so it's more sharp right you have more opportunities for these sort of negative interactions two it's exhausting it uses a lot of mental energy to to be in the middle of a social interaction it's like when you come back from a party you're exhausted or whatever and that's fine it should be mentally expensive especially when you really care about it like you're you know you're you'd be messing like teenager or whatever but when you have those conversations and ubiquitous ubiquitous access to a phone you never get a break from it you wake up to them when you go to bed you're still working on them when you're at home you never get a break where i am just safe from having to navigate this complicated overly sharp guardrail turned down sociology i never get a break from it it follows me everywhere and that is really exhausting and it is a burden that you don't want to place upon your kids so digital sociality is something that we really worry about so if your kid is using the dumb phone to basically be in a world of sort of constant digital sociality i would change that and there's a couple things you could do there the big one i would do is i do not believe in the model 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 this by the month the family owns this phone if you're going somewhere where for logistical reasons you need to be able to like call us to pick you up or whatever you can take one of the family phones with you that's what we do in our family we have a couple different dumb phones they're both terrible to use they're not owned by any of our kids they're there if like okay my oldest needs to take the city bus to baseball practice take one of the family phones with you today so that you can let us know if there's like a problem with the bus ride when you get home you put it back so he doesn't have a sense of ownership of a communication technology i think that is really important when you have excessive digital sociality then you might say well they can't be cut off completely there's all this texting going on well they could be cut off a lot and what you can offer them is we will set 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 time to do that is going to be like your time to watch tv there will be like certain times like you can go do some group messaging now if you want so you can still sort of be involved in these things half hour here like after dinner or before dinner but then that and downstairs where we can see you you don't get 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 phone but man they're up in their room a lot you know with the door locked with their ipad ipad is just a bad phone guys like you have access to all the same stuff so you can go group text in the living room now and if you want to do that instead of watching a show for 20 minutes and then this ipad comes back to me not yours you don't own it that is giving relief to your kid you're like okay there's no way i could be communicating right now i don't have to worry about it and what happens is is that their friends adapt to it oh okay so and so has like a dad that listens to cal newport they all know and curse my name like my name kind of gets out there more and more i'm kind of like a a boogeyman right it's or it's sort of like if in the in the mindset of like the american teenager the crampus like evil figure that comes in is is john height and i'm kind of like the he's like evil sidekick me like this less known but sort of i come in and help him like steal you know your toys that's kind of the way they see 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 the people adjust and the the groups you don't want to be a part of they're really mean then they're like you don't want to be in those groups anyways and you're real friends that you're doing other stuff with like yeah we just know it's just that's just the way you are so i feel strongly about digital sociality we have to be careful about so that phone is not hers that phone is yours she just needs it if she needs it for logistics group chat is like watching tv there's a few times we'll let you 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 are ready for our final segment all right i want to react i want to kind of close up our discussion today of social media versus ai by checking in with our friend sam altman right so they released this sora app as as hank green called it pick slop to try to make money by producing a lot of these videos what else have they been up to recently i want to bring a tweet a tweet up here on the screen this was from last week here's sam altman uh he starts by saying we made chat gpt pretty restrictive to make sure that we were being careful with mental health issues we realized this made it less enjoy useful enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems but given the series of the issue when to get this right now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases in a few weeks we plan to put out a new version of chat gpt that allows people to have a personality that behaves more 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 emoji or act like a friend chat gpt should do it too in december as in december as we roll out age gating more fully and as part of our treat adult users like adult principles we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults the bad news is he goes on the clarify all of the ai generated erotica will feature uh him so i don't that this could put his face on everyone so that's it's kind of like there's good and there's bad but i guess if you own the company a lot of um all right let me tell you let me tell you if you're a an open ai monitor what this all means things aren't going well over at open ai that is the only way i can think to interpret sora followed by this announcement of we're going to turn on erotica in chat gpt let me explain why it wasn't that long ago that if you listen to sam altman or you listen to dario amaday we were still talking in terms of the world was about to be transformed it was what four months ago that sam altman was on theo von's podcast comparing himself the oppenheimer and the pending release of gp5 to the trinity atomic bomb test it was july the dario amaday was going around saying like look we're going to like automate half of white collar jobs it's going to be a bloodbath like i you know i don't even know who's going to be employed anymore and we had studies coming out they were trying to identify like who would not be affected by ai there's literally a study that i read that very helpfully identified that the safest job in the near future is going to be a dredge operator so i guess if you're on a dredge barge operating it you're like less likely to be whatever so we were in this place until very recently where the reason why there are so many hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in these technologies is because they were going to automate huge parts of the economy remember sam altman in 2021 wrote or 2022 uh put out that essay moore's law for everything where he said this this technology is going to take over everything we have to just have a new tax system in place that basically like tax taxes equity wealth because there's going to be just like three companies that do everything with their software and you're just going to need to come and and we're going to have all the money so you're just gonna have like each year take 20 of the money and distribute it to people so there's not riots in the street like that was the path they were on now what are we seeing they're saying maybe we can sell ads against ai generated videos of you know stephen hawking being pushed into a pool maybe we can sell ads like among chat gpt feeds of erotica this means that something has shifted in open ai they realize the change the world impact that they were on a get there or die type of trajectory that's not going to happen because gpt5 wasn't a massive leap over gpt4 it wasn't a massive leap over 4.5 they couldn't scale their way to artificial general intelligence most of their improvements as on the tech side for example was coming from fine tuning what was basically like a four slash four or five model to do well on very particular tasks or benchmarks that happened to be well suited the synthetic data set tuning it wasn't becoming like generally aware they were seeing that even though this was supposed to be 2025 was supposed to be the year of the agents that trying to run automated processes off of llm queries just doesn't work they're just not reliable enough they make things up they don't understand what you're saying and if you just automatically like query an llm and then take action of what it says it's disaster that's why no one has agents no one's automating anything the use cases that are emerging there are good ones and they're very useful cases because it's very powerful technology are not the use cases that a trillion dollar cut enough to support a trillion dollar company or a 500 billion dollar company like it is now this is why there's also these shenanigans going on where you know the nvidia deal with open ai where i'm going to pay you 100 billion dollars for this and you're going to pay me 100 billion dollars back and then we're going to kind of hope that there's a stock market inflation and in that arbitrage to somehow makes a difference there's a great article about this in the journal recently you know what the last time those type of deals were going on was it was in the enron era with all those fiber companies right before they all went out of business in the late 90s early 2000s so i think this is a mark this shift towards attention economy slop that we've seen in the last like month from open ai is a signal that they're in trouble because it was super expensive to build these models and though they're cool they're not going to take over the economy and make them the only company left and be the last invention that anyone ever needs to make and now they're like how do we make money we're making some like they do pretty well selling chat gpt subscriptions but they need to like 10x that to really capture their their capex expenses so they're now starting to flail that's the way i see these two stories so what we started with building a tick tock clone what we ended with saying uh let's just try to make the chat feed as like whatever brainstem engaged and we can and by the way they're gonna sell ads on all this of course they hired a major a major ad expert onto their executive team earlier in the summer i mean this is what they're going to do is try to sell ads on just brainstem stimulation i see this as the fall of like a once super ambitious exciting company with visions for changing the world and now they're hoping they just sort of like slop their way towards profitability and maybe other breakthroughs are coming and i'll be wrong but then i'm not a stock market analyst and i'm just a technology guy i'm just saying i think these two things together is not a good sign if you were really on the team of we're like a year away from open ai changing everything so there we go not good news jesse but we'll see all right that's all the time we have thank you for listening to the show we will be back next week with another episode and until then as always stay deep if you like today's discussion of sora and its competition with existing social media platforms you might like episode 372 in which i you might decode exactly how tick tock algorithm works you want to understand how the slop is being 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 recently is the announcement made last week that u.s interest would be taking over operation of tick tock in america