Ep. 375: Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media?

25:41That like one degree of indirect, 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 sort of in-between era of Facebook where it was still very friend and follower graph, friend graph focused. but you had a news feed that pulled 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.

26:18The 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 TikTok, 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.

26:49We 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.

27:24That is a really powerful feeling, that feeling of 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.

28:00And you can get some attention for the stuff you put up there. Put up an article you find and 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, none of these are strategies that maximize user engagement minutes. But they're also strategies that can keep you pretty profitable while helping you avoid going completely out of business if you chase after the peer engagement model.

28:31What 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 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, but I think it's an important point. It is expensive to produce Sora videos using the Sora 2 video generation model.

29:14It 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 wrestling with Abraham Lincoln. So the only way for this to be economically feasible, of course, is that OpenAI 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 ChatGPT 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.

29:56And it's actually going to 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 high-resolution devices, you have to have the ChatGPT subscription account that's$200 a month.

30:29That's a really high price point when you compare it to TikTok'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 TikTok itself has to do is take up 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 tiktok 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.

31:37I mean, maybe. We'll get into this more in the final segment. But if I'm TikTok, 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 TikTok 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 need to get it right. So 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.

32:18So that's going to be 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 TikTok is able to get. And so what's going to happen is the relatively small number of people creating the SOAR videos are just going to jailbreak them out of the app and upload them on TikTok anyways, where they can just be part of the big inventory that TikTok is using. So TikTok might survive SOAR 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.

32:51They might fight this one off, but there's going to be wave after wave after wave. When your model is just pure engagement, there is 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 sports betting with topless women that like sends you random jackpot plot 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.

33:26And 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 TikTok, 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 focused on their each unique sort of competitive value that makes them somewhat unassailable.

33:56I 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 faster. By the way, I just saw the announcement, Jesse. TikTok has just upped 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 costs$200 to use Sora. We're going to – 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 – they're putting up a defense. And I think they actually have a good shot at surviving this particular wave.

34:31All right, so let's move on to some takeaways.

34:49All right. So as I mentioned, I'd be happy if all the social media platforms maintain their TikTok clone strategy and they all falter under the pressure of the apps like Sora or whatever brainstem 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.

35:28The 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 ever 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.

36:03All right. So there we go, Jesse. Sora. Did you hear about this? It's kind of everywhere. No. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually I have a lot of questions, but I'm only going to probably ask you a couple just to save some time. Do we have any idea of what the user base is? I wasn't able to find that yet. 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'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.

36:37So 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. That's what I'm talking about. It is hard to build user bases and social graphs from scratch. Instagram 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.

37:06They've already there. It's already existing. the other thing that instagram did this might have been more important is they're 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 it's like oh great we'll just hire them uh aqua hire them they spent a billion dollars there's like 12 people who work 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 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 tiktok 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 be i'm 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 too 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.

38:55So if you can strip off 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 screen capture it into its own video, right? There's nothing you can do to prevent me from, if I want to capture that information. The other thing OpenAI 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.

39:35You could work with any IP that was out there, right? So there was all of these videos. There's a lot of like 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 SquarePants in a drug arrest, right? It's like whatever character. They didn't put any IP protection. Also, any historical figures. There's a lot of Hitler stuff on there. There's a lot of Queen Elizabeth stuff on there. Just existing people who are alive now, just full deepfake videos. There's videos with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank promoting this like made up like really terrible products or what it just him looking straight to the camera.

40:21And 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 OpenAI is like, oh, we are turning on like whatever, whatever. We'll turn on protections or whatever. But their idea was – 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 gonna try to turn it off now so it's this like really cynical thing they were doing where it was but i think they're gonna get their um they're gonna get sued left and right yeah i mean of course they knew people are gonna 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 no valuation's 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 OpenAI, but we'll get into it.

41:35It's not the most heartening thing to hear from your loyal founder. First, let's do a little bit of housekeeping before we move on to the rest of the show. Jesse, I've got to give you a Halloween update. Let's hear it. Here's the thing. I don't want to dox myself. I can't 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.

42:16That is really hard to do in, especially in like a waterproof container. And 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 microcontroller 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 in C, 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.

42:49And 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 soundboard 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 need a lot of voltage to run 200 programmable led lights right so that the 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.

43:25So I just actually just wired the voltage from the sound, the microcontroller of 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.

43:50I mean, it's not going to happen, but an animatronic. Yeah, walking across the, like, whatever. I would get there. I would get there. So that's what's going on. Halloween update. I'm going to be at the New Yorker Festival. Oh, when is that? That'll be 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 hi to you. They can say hi if they're there. I'll be doing a panel on Saturday with Charles Duhigg and Anna Wiener. And it's going to be like AI in the future and stuff like that. yeah we're competing with the other event happened the same time as 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 stuff you can get it 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 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 uh 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 you play 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 i was like big news there's kind of a small guy he's like our size isn't he he's probably 6 '3 but jordan's 6 '6 6 '6 yeah so there you go that's all the things that are happening all right let's move on to some questions all right first question is from cory the videos produced by sora 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 is 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, et cetera.

46:38One of the bigger concerns was, is this the death of creativity? This was actually, I think, the main argument. And Casey Neistat had a video out. We played a clip from it back in the introduction. But his main point, 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 creative industry as we know it. I think, Jesse, 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 tiktok 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 next one build the biggest vending machine that gives away cars and how many years away from netflix you just type in like jason born moon landing and go generating So he's arguing this technology is going to take down visual mediums one after another.

47:41Actually, 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, very meta, using Sora at a computer and just frantically typing in descriptions of videos so that Mr. Beast, instead of making the videos, he's just like, I want to do this, I want to do that. It was actually a pretty good use of Sora. 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.

48:11I 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 got to 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 TikTok, we still got Chris Nolan's Oppenheimer. TikTok videos are like easy to make.

48:53There's a huge number of them. They're incredibly compelling when you're looking at them. They're hard to look away. Oppenheimer is on the other end of the spectrum. This is a movie that costs$250 million 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 office, people who wanted to see that type of stratum equality. And they'll also separately look at the other stratum equality that is something like a TikTok video. This is why, for example, you can have during the early 2000s on your TV, you have the same device.

49:26you 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 TikTok 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.

50:01They both exist. So we don't, I mean, 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 tiktok is not because you don't actually have to go to a place to make the things 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 happened 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 then it's made.

51:12So 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 TikTok. And again, it's going to be trouble once the economics get worked out. I think that's trouble for TikTok, but I don't think it's trouble for like 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 doing the best thing by focusing on the problems and using all the tools that I have available to make solutions quickly?

51:53Can I tell you what was programmed from scratch? No AI tools? Your Halloween lights. My Halloween lights. Damn straight, they were. Timing down to the millisecond level, all built within a central timing loop. elegantly so 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 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 a 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 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.

53:04And the whole thing was run from a computer and they had like a special control card. You would stick onto 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 were like, we, what we really need to do is like control this whole thing by a micro controller 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 micro controller can like precisely, you know, control everything and then just send the data back.

53:29and 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 as many microseconds and the ad is going to take three clock cycles. But yeah, that type of stuff I love.

54:01I 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. Anyways, what I'm trying to say, Dave is you're not a real man. If you're not programming a similar from scratch. 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 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.

54:35It'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 a 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.

55:49I 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 post at CalNewport.com. I don't think this 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.

56:27Okay, in general, email newsletters are something that I am 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. So Substack, look, there's some issues with it that catch my attention. They want to be more like a social platform. They want you to move out of your inbox into their app. They want it to be like all of these newsletters, like in TikTok, are somehow just nuggets of content.

57:07And 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 stream of things you might be reading. I think their model is they want to be, their aspiration is to be like an algorithmically curated magazine. And I don't love that. I think email newsletters I think of 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.

57:41This 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.

58:09That's now someone that through this chain of trust, I can trust is 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 a store. That's fantastic. But I don't necessarily need the internet to help me find the person.

58:38Distributed 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 actively trying to deceive you or they're like undermining values in ways or 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.

59:12Every 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, Pakistan? I don't know. Or like Twitter, everything looks the exact same and stuff just kind of spreads to me that I see or don't see. 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.

59:43I guess it's an engagement model. 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 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 we have 100-something thousand subscribers.

1:00:21It's$30 ,000 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 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. And if I was just starting from scratch, my newsletter is getting popular. I don't have that type of money. So I think that's a really good thing to do. It's also complicated. The software is complicated. It's not too hard.

1:00:51We use a really good provider. But, you know, you got to learn how this works. And Substack makes it easy. Substack also has recommendations. Like 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 people you gain are like bigger on your list. 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, we have someone who basically just like handles the newsletter from a technological perspective.

1:01:26you know, you sub stack writers don't need to worry about that. So, so yeah, use it. That's fine. I think it's fine. I think it's fine. You sub stack. Just be wary when you consume about like the algorithmic duration and in general use manual chains of trust to find newsletters, but I'm fine with sub stack. 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 don't want to just like pay money for it. I don't know if that exists.

1:02:01There probably is somewhere. For some reason, that's way cheaper, which never made sense to me. Hosting podcasts 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 we 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 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.

1:02:40And 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 to 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. And if there's a new episode, it puts the information in the player and it downloads the file from the 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, you know, it's like a commodity.

1:03:09It's pretty cheap. And even though we'll have hundreds of thousands of these files downloaded, it's somehow like way cheaper than having that many newsletters described. So I don't know. Something about sending emails is expensive. Something about downloading podcasts is cheap. So there you go. Less in 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 will be good and a tweet from Sam Altman that I'm going to have to get into. So all of this is still to come.

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1:06:12Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash deep. Go to shopify.com slash deep. That's shopify.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's get back to doing some more questions. All right, we got, who do 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. I think it's a great idea. I think a family smartphone app is great.

1:06:56You 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, and he was actually talking about this. Warner Herzog famously is one of these people like Quentin Tarantino or like Aziz Ansari 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.

1:07:31You 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 worried about 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 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.

1:08:04To 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 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 and we can decide which of these three things are relevant to you.

1:08:40All 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 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 or internal changes. So when you say like, 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.

1:09:20Here 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's why I'm worried about us just doing all this with email. Here's the problems. Like I read this Cal Newport book, a world without email, like all this context shifting.

1:09:50Like 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.

1:10:21That'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, 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 how they organize the Apollo program because there are so many different teams between academia and through the government and through defense contractors.

1:10:59They 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 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.

1:11:33And like, oh, okay, but just, hey, what about this? I know what's going on here. Like these are the instructions for submitting to the newsletter. 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 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.

1:12:10and they just want to get it off there. You do have to respect that about people. But 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 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're going to have to log in and have a login and log into some system and click on some drop-down menus. And then there's some ambiguity about what you're trying to do doesn't quite fit into these forms.

1:12:40And 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 dropdown 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 people come up with like things they might want to submit or this or that.

1:13:16There's like a really nice protocol we have in place. And by me, it was really my department chair figured this out. I just admire it. And 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.

1:13:51I 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 student, you know, we have like student, not interns. We have like student employees in the department. 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.

1:14:22And then there's like one time each week where the people who build the newsletter, the member of 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 ah 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?

1:14:57Zero. 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 can't resist sometimes, Jesse. There's a lot of technology stuff going around we have to talk about right now.

1:15:29Email sounds old-fashioned, but it's at the core of so many people's 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. Let's get some case study music.

1:15:53All right, case studies where people send in their own accounts of applying the type of advice we talk about on the 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.

1:16:53I'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 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 a 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.

1:17:32And 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. But digital clutter 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 taking up.

1:18:03And by 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 i trust me he's like he took them out I was on a long text thread about this.

1:18:39Yeah, I know what you're talking about. And what I thought about is like, okay, this of course is valid. Like your team, your longtime 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 Scoobble was taken out in the sixth.

1:19:09That'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 Minimalism. Often, it's the weird thing about these books, Jesse. It's like when you're writing them, when you're in the world, you're like, this is way too late. But you're almost always too early. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's too late. People already know their phones 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 next generation last year, we knew like experts like, yeah, we've been talking about this since 2017.

1:19:40Like 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. So I think that was kind of spectacular, kind of your advice in action. My daughter now is 13, and I gave her the same dumb phone.

1:20:20However, she is sort of using the text threads sort of as a de facto social media. So she's on two or three different text threads. She'll wake up and there'll be 7 ,487 messages. And 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. Thank you so much for what you've been doing. And I do love the newsletter. That's a new thing for me. All right, Antonio, thanks for that question. I have strong thoughts about all this. I'm giving another talk about my kid's 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?

1:21:09I'm giving it to elementary school age parents. So I think a lot about these things. Okay. So, so first of all, I like the story about your son. 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 identities 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.

1:21:48And you're still trying to find like, you know, cleave from the parental community, tribal diet and sort of prove yourself into a tribe of your own. Like all these things happen around that time where you really don't want that technology in your face. That being said, when it comes to social digital sociality, there is a big gender divide. And you're seeing that 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.

1:22:23You 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 or WhatsApp or what you would do on something like Snapchat. You got to be wary about it for a few reasons. One is 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. Guardrails. guardrails 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 guardrails 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 guardrails 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 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 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 guardrails 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 interactions 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 creepy messing like teenager or whatever.

1:24:19But when you have those conversations and 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.

1:24:53And 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 are there if like, okay, my oldest needs to take the city bus to baseball practice.

1:25:28Take 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 but 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 could be a part of groups on that that's fine but your time to do that's 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 could 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 know 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 cramp is 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.

1:27:24I feel strongly about digital sociality. We have to be careful about that phone is not hers. That phone is yours. He 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. She will survive till she's 16 and she'll thank you for it. All right. I believe we are ready for our final segment. I want to react. I'm going 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, X slop to try to make money by producing a lot of these videos.

1:28:05What 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. 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 useful, enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the series of the issue, we want 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 ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4.0.

1:28:41If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human way or use a ton of emoji or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it too. 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 to clarify all of the AI generated erotica will feature him. So I don't know if that's going to put his face on everyone. So it's kind of like there's good and there's bad but I guess if you own the company it's a lot of alright let me tell you Let me tell you if you're an open AI monitor what this all means.

1:29:19Things 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 Amadei, 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 Vaughn's podcast comparing himself to Oppenheimer and the pending release of GP5 to the Trinity atomic bomb test. It was July that Dario Amadei was going around saying, look, we're going to automate half of white-collar jobs.

1:30:08It's going to be a bloodbath. I don't even know who's going to be employed anymore. And we had studies coming out that were trying to identify 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.

1:30:45Remember Sam Altman in 2021 or 2022 put out that essay, Moore's Law for Everything, where he said this technology is going to take over everything. We have to just have a new tax system in place that basically like 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 we're going to have all the money. So you're just going to have like each year take 20 percent 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 chibi tea 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 4 slash 4 or 5 model to do well on very particular tasks or benchmarks that happened to be well suited to 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 and 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 this very powerful technology, are not the use cases that a trillion dollar – to support a trillion dollar company or a$500 billion company like it is now.

1:32:43This is why there's also these shenanigans going on where the NVIDIA deal with OpenAI where I'm going to pay you$100 billion for this and you're going to pay me$100 billion back. And then we're going to kind of hope that there's a stock market inflation and then that arbitrage just somehow makes a difference. There was 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 of 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 a tension economy slop that we've seen in the last month from OpenAI is a signal that they're in trouble because it was super expensive to build these models.

1:33:23And 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 ChatGPT subscriptions, but they need to like 10x that to really capture 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 TikTok clone, what we ended with, saying let's just try to make the chat feed as like whatever brainstem engagement we can. And by the way, they're going to sell ads on all this, of course.

1:33:57They hired 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 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.

1:34:31So 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.

1:34:48Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go, if you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:35:50Thank you.