Am I Lazy or Overstimulated? | Monday Advice

24:46Maybe detail? No, we mentioned it. Right. All right. Okay. So let me read her message and we'll look at the article. I'll do my best to answer it. All right. So Emma said, thank you so much for sharing your ideas this week on the ways that AI is actually transforming the knowledge sector. If you have a minute, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how those entering into the knowledge sector will be able to learn and scale their skill sets if higher level programmers, consultants are now automating the creation of those quick and dirty tools instead of hiring young people to create them. So the article she's talking about, I'll put it on the screen here, came on The New Yorker on June 5th.

25:22It's titled, Instead of Taking Your Job, AI Might Transform It. Now, what she's mentioning is this article actually opens on me talking about a job I had after a summer. We couldn't figure out which summer it was. I didn't remember. But it was some summer in high school. I had a job in which – here, I'll just read you from the article here. Each morning, I drove through rush hour traffic to an office park near Princeton, New Jersey on the crowded Route 1 corridor. At a desk in some sort of equipment room, I coded quick and dirty database tools for internal use. One of my programs simplified the process of logging hours in the timesheets.

25:55Another tracked inventory for the IT department. My role is to find small ways to improve the lives of my coworkers. The reason why I told that story in the article is that I essentially conclude the A section by saying, And when I talk to people who are running businesses and using AI who are not software development businesses but other types of businesses, one of their major uses is not automating jobs in the sense of like I'm going to replace people's jobs but to build quick and dirty tools that make people's lives easier like the role I played for that consulting firm back when I was in high school.

26:31So I then in the article said there was another use I'm seeing, which is something called freestyle work. But that's a little more complicated because it requires you have to use a coding agent for non-coding uses. And so that might be a longer use case, might be a little bit longer time frame before that becomes popular. But there is a lot going on now of companies not replacing employees but building new tools for them. So instead of saying let's take some off-the-shelf piece of software that kind of does what we need and use that, you could just build your own piece of software. It could be kind of buggy.

26:59It doesn't have to be super secure, but you can use it internally to make your life easier. And this is what I did for this consulting company because I guess I was a huge nerd. But this was my job, Jesse. I programmed for – I was a computer programmer in high school. So that's what that article was saying. So Emma, my read of Emma – and I got a lot of messages like this, to be honest, where people said, yeah, but AI is automating jobs. It automated your job you had in high school programming. And that's the first step towards these other jobs. So isn't that a problem? And here's what the key point here is.

27:30Here's what I was trying to say in that article. The job I had in high school is that's not really a job. That's not a common job, right? There is a weird confluence of things that came together, right? Which was the fact that like I was a big nerd in the sense that like I was a really good computer programmer when I was 14 years old. And a family friend I think was head of IT for this consulting firm and was like, do you want to come build tools for us? These are things we don't have time to build, but they would be useful. If I wasn't available, so if we didn't have access to a teenage nerd, they just wouldn't have had that role.

28:07So that's not a role that really widely existed of building quick and dirty tools for internal use. Because if you had programming talent that you were paying a full-time programmer salary, you want them building things you can sell or that are more directly tied to income. So, you know, we're simulating, you know, 14 or 15-year-old me. That's what we're doing with AI. But there wasn't a lot of 14 and 15-year-olds me. Just most companies just didn't have a 14 or 15-year-old me. Now a lot of companies do. That's sort of what's happening here. That's kind of the story, by the way, Jesse, of my life, my teenage years.

28:38It's what I did after my first year of college as well. Because, again, I'm awesome and cool. The job I had after my first year of college is a company in my hometown, they had a device that measured properties of optical films. So they would – using prisms and lasers, you could like – and precision stepper motors. You could look at the refraction of laser beams coming out of pieces of optical film that measure properties of the films. And this is, you know, people are at the edge of their seats right now, by the way. They're like, oh, my God, I want to hear about this. All right, but this is important to establish how awesome I am, and I'm definitely not a nerd.

29:21The machine was run off of computers where they had, like, a special circuit board plugged into the computer, and the computer could, like, control it. But the ability to make these circuit boards got expensive, and the slots to put them in the computers were disappearing as computer technology advanced. So what I was hired to do, and I got to say I successfully did this in like a month, is I programmed from scratch in a similar language a microcontroller that could be on the device itself. And now it could talk to any computer through a serial cable. And now the computer could just send a command, do a measurement, and the microcontroller on board the machine actually controlled everything and got all the data and did all the precision stuff and just sent the data back to the computer to analyze.

30:05So the computer didn't run anymore. So I had to understand that program and rewrite it from scratch in a similar language to run on a microcontroller. Kind of similar to your Halloween lights. It's similar to my Halloween lights, yeah. This year's Halloween display is not going to be as popular, but it's going to be really focused on optical refraction properties. How was the pay? It was, you know, I was 19. Yeah, I know. It was probably pretty good for a 19-year-old. Well, it was. And then I had to keep working on it because now I built the product. So he, you know, they bought me a laptop and they kept flying me home from Dartmouth because like now the whole product depended on, I built the whole control system for the product.

30:42So it was, that was, it was great because I could just work remotely at a custom laptop just for working on that. And I would fly home as needed to, you know, to, to, so that was like my, that was my job in college. That's how I paid for books. That's how I paid for, you know, food. That was my income, was like working for this company where I rebuilt their product from scratch until my senior year when I signed my first book deal. And then that's when book income became my next source of income. So when you left the company, were they sad? They finally found someone else to take over. Yeah. That was fun.

31:20Programming a similar language. Man, it's fun. Like you actually had to. Again, this is riveting. This is the type of thing you're not going to hear on Joe Rogan or Call Your Daddy. The fact that if you're doing a precision stepper motor moving with assembly language, you know how timing works, how timers work when you're programming that low level? You get out a reference manual for the chipset and you count. It tells you exactly how many microseconds each operation takes because it's how many clock cycles. You know the timing of the clock cycle, and we'll say this opcode will take seven clock cycles to operate.

32:06So then you go through your loop, and you count up every single operation in your loop, how many clock cycles, multiply it by the clock cycle time, and you know exactly how many microseconds one iteration of that loop takes. and then to get to the exact time you want, you put in one clock cycle no ops until you have enough of those. Like I need 76 of them exactly so that when we loop back, I know exactly how much time it took to execute this code. So there's no timer commands. You're counting the microseconds per op code. So a clock cycle, what's a clock cycle? A computer processor operates in clock cycles that's driven by a little quartz crystal like in a watch.

32:43And in every clock cycle, I mean, it's just a big circuit. But there's like one advancement. You can think of it as like inputs through the circuitry, right? So like all computer programs are just moving things through circuits in these sort of discrete chunks. You know, you have a command and data, and then you like execute one command, might take the data out of this register and run it through an adder circuit. And another result comes out, which gets stored back in the register. And then that clock cycle ends. latches. And then you have the next clock cycle, you push through the electricity and you do another operation through the circuit.

33:23So all a computer processor is, is running electricity through circuits in these like little discrete chunks, boom, chunk, clock cycle one, boom, chunk, clock cycle two. So this is why like in the nineties, what everyone cared about with computer performance was the speed of processors. That was just how, how much time passed between each clock cycle. So as processors got faster, they were just executing the clock cycles faster and faster. And then they stopped caring about that at some point in the 2000s because you kind of saturated that speed and then they looked at multi-core as another way to get faster.

33:53All this stuff is fascinating, I think. I think what people want, Jesse, and you'll agree with this, is like a hardcore engineering segment in each podcast. And we can alternate between like a hardcore, like discrete mathematics combinatorics session and we'll just go back and forth between like circuitry and thinking about you know combinatorics and single purpose notebooks and notebooks i don't know this will be the new call your daddy all right um what else do we got our next message is from april who sees a positive lesson in the recent box office successes of the gen z films obsession in back rooms uh do you know anything about these i'm gonna assume not as a essentially like a boomer no no i didn't i didn't know much about these either there's two films that came out a couple weeks ago that are not only are they Gen Z directors, but they're based off of like what's called like original internet IP.

34:54So just like ideas that were circulating in chat rooms and social media feeds online. So it was like almost like a meme that existed online and they made movies out of them. And in both cases, the movies were like very successful. I think backrooms are obsession. One of these two things made more money than Spielberg's new movie in the first weekend because it's getting young people into the theater because they know what's going on. Let me see here. Oh, we have an actual message. All right. Let me read the actual message for a riff on this. So the message says, I've recently written a blog post that I think you'll appreciate.

35:34It's inspired by the recent box office successes of obsession and backrooms among younger audiences and what this says about attention, art, and community in the attention economy. All right. So here's the article. I'll show it on the screen here. April Owens wrote this. It's called The Art We Need from Her Digital Age Humanities, which is a substack. Okay. I'm going to read a couple of quotes I pulled here. One, in the past few weeks, I've frequented my local cinemas nearly every day to watch a variety of films from Finding Emily to Tuner to Sheep Detective to The Devil. wears Prada 2. That my impromptu mini film festival coincided with the release of Obsession and Backrooms, a one-two punch of Gen Z directed horror films drawing a lot of attention right now, was a happy coincidence.

36:16I was independently excited for these movies, but I didn't anticipate just how successful and important they would be. These films are culturally significant in part because they are both directed by Gen Z filmmakers who got their start on the internet, particularly YouTube. Later she says, Obsession and Backrooms have dominated in the box office, trouncing the new Star Wars flick, and leading many to prognosticate about the future of cinema. What interests me, however, is who is turning out to see these movies. Under 35s make up the majority of the audiences for both films. Later, she says, part of the reasons for these movies' younger turnout likely has to do with the fact that the directors are themselves young internet natives.

36:54Younger audiences for maybe the first time see something of themselves on the big screen. Then she says, later, sitting in those dark theaters with strangers, fully present, watching something made by people my age with something real to say, it started to feel like something larger, like a generation quietly insisting on its own humanity. It gives me hope of a coming renaissance where in collective experience, deep attention and human skill art are prized and valued over the attention fracking economic model that is defined most of the 21st century. All right, so I think that's very hopeful. There's a young person saying, we're happy to go see art, We're having to go to a theater and sit there for two hours and not be on TikTok if it's something that reflects us and interests us.

37:36These are our filmmakers, our versions of Spielberg and Coppola. Maybe they're coming up, and we care about what they have to say. They're speaking to our experience. There is a renaissance. We don't want to just be on our phones all the time. We don't want to have relationships with chatbots. But we have to evolve. The culture has to keep evolving and be relevant to us. So the fact that those two movies did really well, I think, is a big deal. I don't know what they are, however. So what I thought we would do today, and Jesse, you'll join me on this, is let's look at, which one is this, Backrooms?

38:08Yeah. All right, Jesse and I are going to watch here in real time because we're not, you know, we're millennials. We're going to watch the trailer for Backrooms. We'll do it without audio so that we can do commentary of it, but we'll put it on the screen. Let's see what we make of this, Jesse. All right. So we got an empty room. All right. It's an A24 release. That's fancy. That's good cinematography. Yeah. The camera goes through the floor and there's another room below it. There's a chair and an empty room. So far it's like the opposite of like TikTok hyper engagement. Oh, uh-oh. Now we're going down even lower.

38:44That's another. So this is like going down layer after layer. I clearly don't understand this meme. And now we're down in an empty room. So the room is getting more and more. Jesse, I have no idea what's going on. What the hell is happening? Now there's a door in the room. And now we're in like the severance. Now we're like an empty office building. All yellow walls. Is something scary going to happen? It says back rooms. It flickers. That's it. You are so out of touch, Jesse. All right. So for those who were listening instead of watching, how would you explain this? It was like a real room with a window and yellow walls and a, oh, is this another trailer plane?

39:29Yeah. Is this back rooms as well? Yeah. It's a longer trailer. You think it'll actually show. You want to put it on the screen? Yeah, let's put it on the screen because there's no people in the teaser trailer. It just showed a room and then it kept going down lower and lower level showing that room like getting more and more empty and abstract. And then it just said back rooms. I kept on thinking that it shows silo on Apple TV plus. Oh, he's in this? All right, so they got real actors. Okay, now they're showing, this is the official trailer, not the teaser. He's in this empty room with a bunch of office equipment piled in the middle.

40:04It does look like Severance too, doesn't it? It does look like Severance. It's like a highly, uh-oh. There's someone down a long hallway. He's walking slowly towards a person standing creepily at the end of a long hallway. Then it says, this may. you think Luke Skywalker is going to come out what if it was all just like a super corporate Disney movie oh now now they're showing him in the real world so he must be having dreams or something like that now there's some found footage found footage stuff oh that was the girl from shrinking the daughter from shrinking they have a rope going down this hallway so this is like a dream world that they're going into.

40:48There's some cool disorienting cinematography. There's some found footage in here. Kane Parsons. So it keeps going back and forth between the real world and this sort of fantastical backroom world. I guess I would go see this. In the movies? I would see it in the movies. I don't like jump scares. So if it's pure jump scare horror, I have a bit of a hard time. Whoa, there's guys with hazmat suits on. All right. I don't know. I'll tell you what. This seems distinctive, right? Yeah. Like, I mean, they – I don't know how to stop that. They have like – this director, Cain Parsons, definitely has like a point of view.

41:27This is like – there's like an original idea. Clearly, this seems to be a metaphor for alienation or something, right? Like there's – he has ideas. It was visually interesting looking. They had good actors. I couldn't tell what the hell was happening without the audio. but like that would probably make it i think it's supposed to be disorienting uh experience i mean you would because otherwise like the cliche would be like oh well when gen z makes movies it's just going to be like a bunch of kids on their phone and just like talking about you know brain rod and memes and let's go or whatever it's going to be dude perfect basically like in the yeah and no this is like culturally very original all right maybe i'll have to go see it am i allowed to see if you're under 35?

42:10Are you over 35? Are you allowed to? He's got to pay double. We have to subsidize the kids whose AI is taking all their jobs. All right. That gives me hope, Jesse. Huge movie person. I'm happy to see Gen Z saying, you know what? Art is more interesting than TikTok. All right. Do we have anything else? Yeah, we do. Michael writes in about an old school tool he bought for his wood shop. All right. It's like the opposite of Gen Z. All right. Michael says, Hi, Cal and Jesse. Thought you'd enjoy that I bought a$10 calculator for my wood shop. After another woodworker recommended it, I've been using my phone calculator, but as you already know, that invariably leads to time wasted due to unrelated distractions.

42:48I still use the phone one for the rare trigonometry needs, but 95 % better. Anyway, thanks for your work. Cheers. All right, and he sent us a picture, right? Yep. All right, we'll see it. Look at that, Jesse. Old-fashioned calculator with big buttons you press. I'll tell you, this is a truism as someone who's had to buy a bunch of like, you know, we buy dumb phones for our kids and stuff like that. The only like old school technology can buy, it always has like giant buttons because it's all made for old people. That's the market that's left for like non-digital like fancy tools is old people.

43:21So it's all like the phones, the flip phones we bought for our kids when they have to take the bus or whatever. It's like big old buttons for 85 year olds to not get confused. We have time for one more, right? Yeah. All right, what we got? Our final message is from Kat, who has a new solution to landlining. Okay, let's see what we got here. Kat says, I want to share another version of landlining I think your podcast listeners may find interesting. I used to charge my phone in the kitchen until a family health issue meant I didn't want to risk missing emergency calls overnight. I considered getting an actual landline for emergencies, but then I learned about landline phones that connected to your cell phone with Bluetooth.

44:00tooth. Instead of paying for a landline, I bought the landline phone, connected it to my cell, and I keep that in my bedroom in case I need to answer a call. Since I already have my cell set to silence unknown callers, the phone only rings when a contact calls. This solution keeps the phone out of the bedroom while giving me the peace of mind that I won't miss an important call. Bonus benefit, instead of the kitchen, I started charging my phone in the basement beside my exercise mat. So now I'm following through more on my morning workout routine. That's a cool technology. I think that does definitely one-up landlining.

44:36I'm thinking this through, Jesse. So here's the problem. So I think if your main concern is keeping you back from landlining, like with CAT, is important phone calls, this works great. You can have an old-fashioned 90s style phone that rings loudly if there's a call from a contact, and you can go pick it up and talk without having to be distracted by your phone. The issue is I think a lot of people's communication that they're doing with their phone is text-based. And so their landlining by just having your phone in the kitchen works well because you can go check the text messages or WhatsApp.

45:04You got to go in the kitchen to do it. So it's not with you. But if your phone was in the basement, then the physical landline phone is not going to ring for text messages and you wouldn't be able to hear them, obviously. So I think that's a cool solution if phone calls is what you really care about. If you're deep into text messages, like if you're a parent right now, Now that's hard to avoid. Then like plugging the phone in the kitchen so it's nearby but not within reach is probably the best solution. Cool technology though. All right. We like to end our Monday episodes by getting up to date about what I have been up to.

45:39Jesse, I finished three books last week. Peace. So the count is up. You know, I didn't read them all from scratch last week, but I finished three books last week. I finished Derek Thompson's first book, The Hitmakers, which is about like why things are popular, not popular. It's like a classic 2010 style idea book with like stories and science. And he's a good writer and I enjoyed it. Then I finished Molly Haskell's book, Steven Spielberg, A Life in Films. It's actually an academic press book. She's a well-known film critic. It's like a biography of Spielberg but told through his films, like what was going on in his life as he wrote each film.

46:16I wanted to finish that before I went to see Spielberg's new movie. And so I finished that right before. There's only really two good biographies of Spielberg. There's this one and Joseph McBride's one. They're both psychological. So the McBride biography is very Freudian, right? It was written in the 90s. So it's a lot of like trying to understand Spielberg through his relationship to his parents. Haskell is a little bit Freudian too, but she's more like a feminist psychology lens through seeing Spielberg. So basically both of our big Spielberg biographies are very much delivered through a psychological lens, like a psychotherapeutic way of understanding Spielberg and his actions.

46:54We don't yet have – which is a little non-modern. Like you'd be – we don't have like a non-psychological biography, which I would be really – I mean there needs to be more Spielberg biographies. I think the issue is he never – he won't participate. How old is he? Just about turned 80. I didn't realize he was that old. Yeah, 1946. And it's still working all the time. Yeah. I mean, Clint Eastwood was making movies to his 90s. I was telling you off air about how Seth Rogen had an interview on New York Times, and he was talking about when he was, because he was in Spielberg. He was the dad, right?

47:29When Spielberg was a kid. Right. Oh, Fablemans? Yeah. Oh. He was in the movie. Oh, yeah. And he would talk to Spielberg all the time. It was a good movie. How do you film XYZ? What are you thinking here? Spielberg is doing podcasts for the first time for his latest movie release. He's never done them before. What are the big movie podcasts? Well, he did Rewatchables. Oh. And they did 2001. I'm still listening to it. It's like an hour and a half long. And it's great. And he's so with it. I mean, he might as well be, you know, 60 years old, not 79. But there's a room here for a good Spielberg biography that is not told through a psychological lens, which feels dated to me a little bit.

48:12But through, I don't know, artistic lens, I think an economic lens would be interesting. I often will read lots of biographies. I've read a lot of Walt Disney biographies. It's just interesting. You get these different lenses that you can tell these stories. I think economic, what was going on in the film industry, economic, artistic, that would be an interesting biography on him. So after I finish my Crichton biography, I guess I'll have to write. I was just going to say that. Yeah. Then I'll write a Spielberg biography. and I'll tell it entirely through a sort of economic or film technology lens.

48:43I also finished a book that's actually not coming out until October. I had it in electronic galley form, which is James Marriott's upcoming book, The New Dark Ages, about the important role that reading played in modernity and what we're losing, what's going to happen to our society and culture as reading becomes less often. I don't want to talk too much about a book that's not actually out yet, but I'm doing a lot of reading right now on thinking, consciousness, technology, communication as I'm thinking about a new book idea of my own. So I liked it but I'll talk about it more when it comes out in the fall.

49:20Alright, so I finished three books. I also saw a movie and went to see Disclosure Day on the weekend it came out, which is Spielberg's new movie. Pretty good. Are there aliens? There's aliens. Spoiler. I mean, the premise of the book is like – of the movie is the – it's a chase film. And it's like the two main characters want – and this is just – you know this from the trailers. It's like they're wanting to get the word out that there are aliens and the government's been covering it up since the 40s. And this agency is trying to stop them. So it's like ultimately a chase film. It sits somewhere – it's interesting.

50:00it sits somewhere between in terms of tone E.T. and War of the Worlds like there's sort of this like dark agency it's like if E.T. spent like a lot more time with the agents who came at the end to kidnap the kids it's like the third act that's the way I'd understand it is like it's kind of like the third act of E.T. made into like a full made into a full movie right and so it has a bit of that War of the Worlds fight but it also has some of the wonder He's still putting in like it's not dystopian and he has like those wonder notes from Close Encounters and E.T. And it's not just like this is scary or this is good.

50:41And so I thought it was good. I always look when I watch Spielberg film. He always likes to do some like virtuosic camera work because that's his thing. And I will tell you film nerds out there, if you go to see this, the scene you got to watch. And we'll hear more about this scene like once the movie has been out for a while long. You have the tracking shot at the farmhouse fence outside of Virginia at the safe house. I don't even quite know how he did it. It's the setup, the scene, there's a split rail fence. The main character is trying to escape because on the other side of the fence is all these like the agency has arrived and all these cars, black cars and SUVs and SWAT teams to like try to come and get them.

51:25And he's like trying to sneak away from the – down the fence as they're on the other side of the fence heading towards the house. And Spielberg does a long unbroken tracking shot where he – the camera keeps going from one side of the fence to the other. So it will like swoop down and follow him and then come through the fence and be looking at him from the other side of the fence and then come back through the fence and be on the other side and then follow them as he jumps over. So that's just Spielberg trying to be virtuosic. Like I'm assuming he's got to be doing – there's probably hidden cuts in motion tracking, I guess, because there's no way to actually physically – the camera's up, down, through a fence, back through a fence, turning 180.

52:02I'm interested in how he does it. I think it's some sort of motion track. I don't know how they do it. It's a cool shot. I don't know how many people noticed that, but he puts in those types of – he has to put in those type of shots. The camera's always moving. All right. you gotta see it yeah and we gotta see what's it back rooms yeah I'm like I have to see back rooms it was like a whole internet it was just like someone posted a picture of like a it turned out later people discovered it was like a like a retail shop had been closed down just like this like empty room it was just like generically whatever and it just became a thing online with people like inventing a whole backstory about this whatever they made a movie out of it and it made like 80 million dollars damn yeah it's crazy when we do our Cal Network versus Jesse Skeleton movie.

52:54It'll be the voice of our generation. Actually, there's already a lot of filmmakers our age, so that's not going to work. I imagine it like He-Man Master of the Universe, but it's Cal Network and he just thwarts the enemies immediately. And then it kind of morphs into essentially a remake of My Dinner with Andre. Do you know this movie from the 90s? 90 minutes of just that one dinner table and it's just Jesse's skeleton. So it's like all of the CGI and you see the monsters and Skeletor type monsters and then Cal Network immediately dispatches them and then you're at a table and it's just conversation, existential conversation for the next 90 minutes.

53:35That's going to be our movie. That movie will show you what our generation can do. All right, that's enough nonsense for now. That's all the time we have. Back next week with another Monday Advice episode. probably an AI reality check on Thursday as well. So stay tuned for that. Subscribe to my newsletter, tellnewport.com. And until next time, as always, stay deep.