The Truth About Brain Rot

26:17It's the battle. It's what the turmoil that you're going to face trying to execute those actions. And what I think the Truman Show gets right in that final act is it's a hero's journey, not a rational choice, and it's still a journey that's worth doing. All right, so that's what I'm calling the Truman an option is you step away from having your life once and for all so entangled in the world of digital artificiality. You are not an object to be monetized for the bank account of a small corporation of a small number of people at a big corporation. You want to go live a real life in the real world with all the stuff that producer Warren Truman of like, I want to be in the real world.

26:57That's what humans are meant to do. And the Truman option says you do that and you do that expecting it to be very hard and you embrace the hardness and you trust yourself to be able to get through it. So I'd like that way of conceiving it. So basically put this all together. Brain rot content, that phenomenon of Gen Z is a cry for help. It's a way of saying that the generation that grew up in the world that we all live in is like, we're playing the prison harmonica here. This is, we know what's going on and this is nihilistic, this is sad. The Truman option is the way we have to think about escaping.

27:34We make a break from these companies that have held so much of our attention in their hands for so long, and we're willing to have the waves and be battered and be talked out of and whisper in our ears, and we still walk through that dark door anyways. Now, clearly there's a lot more to unpack here about this idea of the Truman option, this urge towards a heroic escape. So we'll probably keep talking about how one does this and why now is the time for it. But I just wanted to introduce, kind of set up the issue and lay out the contours of this particular type of solution. So we'll talk about this more in future episodes for sure.

28:09But in the meantime, for now, put down the skibbity-toilet video. and without distraction, watch this 1998 classic because I think it captures a lot of what's going on now and a lot of what we actually probably need to do. We're going to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, as you may or may not know, I get a little obsessive about Halloween displays. It's the type of a niche hobby that requires you sometimes to reach out to some small operations, to get these sort of random parts that I need to make my visions real. And I have to tell you, it can be frustrating in these situations when I'm faced with some sort of weird voicemail message or a phone that just keeps ringing and no one picks it up.

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30:49All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, well, look, it's Monday. What I like to do on Monday is hold office hours where I get to hear what you are interested in. If you have things you want to share or questions you want to ask, you can send an email to podcast at calnewport.com. Here's what I'm going to do. I've divided the office hour questions and comments into two categories. The first are non-AI related, and then the second half will be I'm going to do a sort of lightning round of questions and comments on some of my recent AI writing. because I know a lot of you have been following my sort of reluctant engagement in the AI discourse of the current moment.

31:30All right, but let's start with some non-AI related comments and feedback. All right, Mika wrote and said, I am currently reading a condensed history on philosophy. This made me realize how much philosophers have thought about thinking and its limits. Today I was wrestling with the depiction of Immanuel Kant's critique of pure reason and wondered whether you will address these developments in thinking about thinking in your upcoming book about thinking. There's a lot of uses of the word thinking, I think. See what I did there? Okay, first of all, let me clarify because, God, I write a lot of books.

32:03What's Mika talking about? Well, I have an upcoming book in March called The Deep Life, which I'll talk about more soon. What Mika's talking about is I have an idea for the next book I'm going to write, but I'm just researching this now. I haven't sold it. I haven't started working on it. The next book I'm going to write in theory is going to be about thinking itself. The working title is In Defense of Thinking. So Mika is saying there is a period of philosophy where a lot of philosophers thought about thinking, like Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, which is – I've actually never read that in its entirety.

32:37But I know about some of its ideas in there, and he's trying to figure out the difference, pure reason. And he's trying to think about a priori, what do you call it? Reasoning, like the ability to form thoughts not based on external observation, but just sort of internally. And, you know, it's a long book, but interesting one. So here's the thing, Mika. That whole period where you had a lot of philosophers thinking about the mind, a period we could start with like Descartes. You know, we'll start with Descartes, I think, therefore I am. And through the 18th century philosophers, you know, we got Kant, you got Heidegger, et cetera.

33:15they were sort of overshadowed in the 20th century once we got psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. So like once we actually started studying the brain itself, we stopped thinking about cognition in the sort of abstract philosophical sense and started thinking about it more as like an actual human activity that could be measured, modeled, and bounded. So we don't refer to these type of analyses as much, it seems, anymore when we think about thinking. So probably I won't talk a lot about that in my book, but I don't know. I'm still early, so maybe I will. All right, we have a note here from Anonymous.

33:50He says, with regards to your September 7th episode about your 2026 fall productivity system, could you speak to the difference between your strategic plan and your vision document, please? Or are they the same thing? I had the impression from past podcasts and articles that your strategic seasonal plans tend to be quite lengthy, whereas this vision document seemed to be very simple and reduced? Okay, so it's a good question. These are different words for more or less the same thing. And I just want to give a caveat though, right? So seasonal plan, you could also call a quarterly plan. You could call it a semester plan.

34:30You can call it a vision document. And it's just sort of your summary of like, what am I up to for this relatively long period of time? Or, you know, typically two to four months type of thing. And it's something you can reference when you do your planning, your weekly planning each week to kind of remember like what are your major goals, what habits or practices are you following, what metrics are you tracking. You know, you have that written down somewhere. What systems are you running to stay organized? It's a route for all the other things that you are doing. For the fall system I described in that September document, let me just write this down here, the document the vision document is terse on purpose because it's sabbatical fall and i was trying to start with a very lightweight system so uh these this is the same thing i call the vision document that episode because i was keeping it pretty compact but it's the same thing as a quarterly plan or a seasonal plan the exception the caveat i want to put out here is that i often will have strategic plans for parts of my life and separate documents because they're kind of lengthy.

35:37And I will reference them from whatever that core seasonal or vision document is. All right. So for example, I might have a strategic plan I often do for like what I'm doing in the different professional pursuits I have because I guess it's kind of complicated. Like what's happening with my podcast, with my writing, with like my AI commentary. And I'll often reference that from the root document. So I'll have, I'll pull out of my big strategic plan for like my professional life. I might pull out like, hey, this fall, remember I'm working on these things. And then I'll point to have a pointer, but look at the strategic plan document for more details.

36:16And I won't necessarily read that all the time, but for sure I'll read the strategic plan in detail when I'm updating my semester or quarterly plan. And I'll often like translate the core things from there, the big strategic plan onto that sort of more time limited plan. But again, do what makes sense for you. The thing to me that's important is you need some sort of root document that's like, here's what I'm up to for the next few months. Here's the systems I'm using. Here's the habits I'm trying to follow. You need a root thing from which all of the other life organizations you do follow. So I point to complicated strategic plans out of that.

36:48You don't have to do that if your job is simpler or doesn't need that type of planning. but you do need some sort of root document that covers like the current quarter, season, or semester that is at the core and everything else you do is described or can be linked to from that primary document. We got a note here from Amanda. Amanda said, I just went on Amazon to revisit some of your other books and was excited to see that the Deep Life is already available for pre-order. My birthday is March 6th and Slow Productivity and Deep Life have both been released right around then So it's a fun birthday treat to have a new one of your books released.

37:23The Deep Life pre-ordered. Check. Well, thank you, Amanda. It is true. The cover is up on Amazon. It's a cool cover. We spend a lot of time trying to capture something very specific with that cover. I'm very happy with it. That's kind of it. Even the copy that's on the Amazon page, the description of the book is a placeholder. I'm still actually working on what the formal copy is going to be. So if you want to know where I am in the process of that book, which comes out in March, as you're hearing this recording I'm finalizing what's known as the past pages and that's where you get in PDF format the actual book laid out exactly how it's going to be laid out when it's printed so every page looking exactly how it's going to look when it's printed and it's the final check you do after all the production process you're not like copywriting at this point we've done many rounds of that but you're looking for things like is a headings misformatted Like, ooh, that's supposed to be a bigger heading because it actually matches that level and not that level.

38:22Or is there like a mistake in a running header or something? So it's your final check of like what is the book going to look like page by page. So we're really close to like having that locked in. Then I'll update all the copy. Then we go looking for the blurbs. So that's happened soon. And that all gets added to the cover and to the Amazon page. Then we're ready to print. So if you just want to view into how the publishing process works, that's where we are and that's what's coming up. If you do preorder the book now, hold on to your receipt email because I am going to have a very cool preorder offer for my listeners.

39:00I've decided to just try to do one thing that's awesome. This is my two criteria. I want a preorder giveaway that's just awesome, like a bunch of little things, but just an awesome thing. and it's something that lets you get into the ideas of the book right away, even while you're waiting for it to come out. So Amanda or anyone else who pre-orders now, just hold on to your receipt from wherever you bought it from in your email. And otherwise, I'll talk more about this book as we sort of finalize these final elements of production. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about AI. I feel like I have to take a sip of coffee here.

39:35A lot's happened in the world of AI. I'm reluctantly commenting on it. I wrote a bunch of articles. I've been recording a lot of podcasts. I have kind of been reined into this discussion in a way that's not always my favorite. As I talked about in last week's episode, I'm all about how to human flourishing in a technological world. I care about the human. And so when it comes to AI, I'm much more interested, like we talked about last week, AI's impact on the humans, not AI's impact on humanity. So all these sort of discussions of existential fear and government regulation. But I have some expertise I can communicate, so I'm somewhat involved in that story.

40:12So I published some articles on my newsletter about it, calnewport.com, including recently one that was called Super Intelligence is a Fairy Tale, but Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm. Actually, I can even load this up, put this on the screen here. this covered a lot of my views about jacob croxson coming out and saying ai is going to kill us all and then several senior anthropic employees replying and saying yeah i think it will i think it might kill us all which is crazy bonkers so i wrote this article it had three points which i'll read and then we're gonna do rapid fire comments and reactions to this piece the first point i made is anthropic and open AI are not able to create super intelligent AI.

41:00I just don't think that's continuing to reinforcement train LLMs is not going to lead to hell 9000. Point two, but their obsession with super intelligence can still create harm. So I'm arguing that because they think that's on the table, they're being more reckless and that's creating real harms. And point three is AI progress does not have to be this scary or dangerous. So my final point is those companies are being irresponsible in a specific way that actually we could have a thriving, exciting, interesting AI industry without all this doom, existential fear, weirdness that they've been spitting at us for multiple years.

41:38I'm trying to emphasize this is not an inevitable side effect of AI we're facing. It's in part very specific to the way that these two particular companies are pursuing AI. All right. So that was one of multiple things I wrote but it got a lot of reaction. So I want to just rapid fire go through some notes from you, the reader. All right. So Madison said, what should we be doing practically to call for this sort of reform? Is it not just boycotting open AI Anthropic? Are there alts we know are acting responsibly? As a small business executive who has our team on Claude, I am suddenly feeling conflicted.

42:15I think the first thing that needs to happen here is public transparency. We're talking about things like how should we regulate AI? what involved how do we get involved how do we push back and the problem is is where's a huge fog of lack of knowledge we don't understand really what they're talking about right a lot of the the communication coming out of these companies is this this like very stylized abstract rationalist effective altruist style non-technical discussion points about super intelligent ai i I mean you have like exact terminologies from someone like Jacob Croxon that you can find specifically in like Elias Joukowsky writing, like crunch time for humanity.

42:58Models increasingly – just like some vague notion of a model is evading our control and improving. And so it's very vague. It's very vague because it tends to be in the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism, which have a relatively non-technical often engagement with these issues. So they speak in terms of like thought experiments or high-level concepts. So we need to really understand what's going on. What AI is threatening humanity? What specific system are you working on now that you think will do that? Why are you working on it? Is there no way to stop? Why can't you stop that? We need to get more concrete about what exactly they're saying.

43:37We also need to then counterbalance everything that comes out of the figures that I identified in my New Yorker article or my New York Times op-ed. rather from a few weeks ago identified, you know, Altman, Amadei, Musk, Demis Osabi, among others, has been particularly connected to these futurist ideologies like rationalism and effective altruism and is really influencing the way their companies think and talk. As we saw when employees of Anthropic, for example, started tweeting in exactly the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism. So we need to counterbalance all those explanations with explanations from other highly advanced AI companies that aren't as connected to the same ideologies and make sure that we balance those two things off of each other.

44:20We want to hear you out, but we want to hear what the other guy has to say as well. And let's compare these things together. So I think we need to understand more what is actually going on. We need to leave these vague sci-fi narrative tropes and talk concrete about technology. So we need to understand what's going on and why. Can it be prevented? Why is it not? before we figure out how to act. So we need transparency before we need action. All right, Peter says, any recommendations for responsible AI companies to use? Again, we need to find out more, but in particular, OpenAI and Anthropic and DeepMind, the DeepMind have been sort of disbanded.

44:59Those three companies in particular come very strongly out of these futurist ideologies like rationalism and effective altruism. So be wary of them. It's not for nothing. that when Jensen Wong from the Vidya, an old school hardware company that has very little connection to futurist ideologies, what was his reaction to the anthropic claims about we're probably going to kill everyone? He said they're, quote, outlandish. Interesting. Massive AI figures that are not connected to these futurist ideologies, they see things a little bit differently. All right, let's see what Nick said. Please keep dropping truth bombs on this LLMBS as I genuinely think the world needs it.

45:39Thanks, Nick. I hate it. I really don't want to be involved in these discussions. I deal with humans. I don't deal with threats to humanity, but c 'est la vie. It's what I'm doing right now. Andreas says, makes your interesting newsletter. Do you have book recommendations on the ideology behind AI employees summoning their AI god or messiah? I do indeed. You should read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever. I actually just did a podcast appearance with Adam on Ed Zitron's podcast. It came out last week. And Ed had asked me to come on and to talk about rationalism and effective altruism because I'd written a New York Times op-ed about it.

46:16And I said, oh, you've got to have Adam on as well. And Adam, because he spent years researching this book, he talked to a lot of the main figures, including Elias Yukowski. He's read so much of what they've written. And he walks through the history of these movements, what they believe, where they came from, and we talk about their intersection with some of these existing AI companies. So at the very least, listen to that conversation, me and Adam with Ed Zitron. Read my New York Times op-ed about rationalism from a few weeks ago. If you have more time, read Adam Becker's book. All right, finally, Ian says, one thing I'm surprised you're not mentioning on this is the regulatory capture angle.

46:51I think a very real element is that the more Anthropik can convince everyone they have a nuclear bomb, the more they think they can convince the U.S. government to regulate AI the way they want, which means stepping on competition and preventing progress in open-weight models. You know, I hear this a lot because it's rational. Ironic because rationalism is very influential on these companies. It's rational that they might be doing that. I think that theory is going around often, and I get why that's a popular theory. There's another theory going around that Dario Amadei's letter that was calling for a global pause is angling for an antitrust waiver so they can cooperate more with, say, open AI.

47:28Maybe they're seeing, you know, at some point we need to kind of merge more, and this is the first step towards it. So there's all these economic rational arguments that might be true. But the more I look into this, the more I become convinced they're true believers. They're true believers. I'm telling you, a big thread of the story that's going on right now when we look back years in the future is going to be the influence of these ideologies, these futurist ideologies like rationalism, effective altruism on figures like Dario Amadei, Sam Altman, and many other high-level executives. at those firms, creating a culture that percolates down through their employees.

48:09They talk in the terms of these futurist movements. These futurist movements have been convinced since well before LLMs were a big deal. They've been convinced for decades that superintelligent AI is going to come and is the end of, through recursive self-improvement, and it's going to be the end of history. And if we can shepherd it properly, it will redeem history. And if we can't, it will destroy the earth. It's very eschatological. I think that's how Dario Amade sees himself. I have to shepherd the benevolent digital god. Otherwise, we'll end up with Elias Yukowsky's satanic digital god that will kill us all.

48:45But they're convinced that, of course, this is going to happen. And that's why you see all this precision about extinction. This comes right out of rationalism. The exact ways they describe it's going to happen, they're kind of like high level. It's a recursive self-improvement. The way they talk about models being aligned but not specific products or system architectures causing trouble, this all comes out of the futurism methodology. So maybe this is an economic play. I think they're actually true believers. Don't underestimate the power of an ideology that tells you that you are the hero of the world.

49:18You're Neo and John Connor from the Terminator movie mixed with Moses. Don't underestimate the power of that story. It's more compelling to people than I want to keep my open-weight competitors down so my stock is going to be worth a little bit more. I really think there's probably a true believer type of situation going on, which is why I tell people always, always, always try to counter-program what you're hearing from those companies with people from the academic sphere or other companies or other countries that aren't as connected to the Silicon Valley futurist ideologies. And you hear really different things from them.

49:56Also, stay off X. X has become, it's just engagement farming, rationalist EA, Doomerism. And the problem is we're in a new media world and in new media people become, we know this, so driven by X and that's where they get their story ideas and that's how they get their clicks. And so you have all of these new media news operations that are just in sub stackers and stuff that are just all in on the EA rationalist Doomerism because that's what's really big on X and that's sort of their epistemic reality. And I think it shouldn't be. All right. Enough AI. I like to finish up my Monday releases by summarizing what I'm up to.

50:35Jesse, still know Jesse, but he will be back soon. We do miss him. I thought about bringing Jesse's skeleton back. But you know why I don't? Let me be honest about this. Why am I not bringing back Jesse's skeleton even though Jesse's not here? And it's not. I mean, it would make sense getting closer to Halloween. Because to do Jesse's skeleton, I have to have a skeleton in the studio, which means I have to carry a skeleton from my house to the studio. And I got to tell you, the people in this town I live already are like, why is this professor, furious air quotes, always walking around in gym shorts?

51:08Doesn't he have a job? He's always kind of in and out of the coffee shop. And because my office is down the street from the coffee shop, they see me carrying a skeleton down the street. They're like, he must just have like inherited money. He doesn't really have a real job, does he? It's just a bridge too far. So I didn't bring the skeleton, but we are looking forward to Jesse being back. As mentioned, I've been doing a ton on AI, whether I want to or not. So keep an eye on my newsletter at calnewport.com. Listen to that interview with Becker and Zitron. You can read my New York Times up ad from a couple weeks ago about rationalism, effective altruism.

51:41It really tried to capture those connections there. There's a Good New Yorker column by Josh Rothman that summarizes my view about the systems that cause trouble over the summer and contrast it to the way Dorkish Patel talks about it. So if you kind of want to get into my technical world, check that out as well. But I think I'm going to otherwise leave it there. Maybe I'll have another episode this week. Maybe I'll have another AI episode. You know, I always do one episode each week, and then I try to have one or two other ones when I can. So we'll see how this week goes. But I'm getting so drowned doing, you know, interviews and phone calls and writing with AI.

52:18I just don't have the time even to record the podcast episodes. But we'll be back to multi-week, multi-episode week soon. But I should probably call it quits for today. So we'll see you next time. And until then, as always, stay deep.