Ep. 375: Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media?

Ep. 375: Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media? OpenAI has been making waves recently with their release of their Sora 2 video generation model, which they have launched alongside a TikTok-style social media sharing app. The internet is usually pretty excited about AI innovations, but this one has people unsettled. In today’s episode, Cal looks at one implication of Sora 2 in particular that is both important but currently overcooked: the impact of AI content generation on the existing social media giants. He then answers listener questions on AI and social media and reacts to a new Sam Altman tweet that signals bad news for OpenAI. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media? [0:02] Will Sora 2 kill creativity? [46:12] Am I doing myself a disservice by using AI tools to help me code? [51:36] Is Substack better than social media? [55:55] What are your thoughts on a “family smartphone”? [1:06:35] What should I do when others disregard the structures that are meant to reduce the digital back and forth? [1:07:53] CASE STUDY: A Digital Declutter [1:15:38] CALL: Children with dumb phones or smartphones [1:19:49] CAL REACTS: Sam Altman Proposes AI Erotica [1:27:46] Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? SORA: the all Ai TikTok Clone. will slop end creativity?youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0oQ0v0W10newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-and-the-fall-of-the-social-media-giantsyoutube.com/watch?v=I1dW-nZqhewx.com/sama/status/1978129344598827128 Thanks to our Sponsors: This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp:betterhelp.com/deepquestionsexpressvpn.com/deepcalderalab.com/deepshopify.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Cal Newport?

  If you've spent enough time online this past month, you've probably noticed a sudden uptick at unsettling, realistic AI-generated videos. Maybe it's body cam footage of Super Mario in his cart being pulled over by police and then yelling, "I can't get another ticket!" before peeling out. Or a horse on skis, competing in a freestyle skiing competition, or Bob Ross wrestling Abraham Lincoln. These were all generated by OpenAI's blockbuster video generation model, Sora 2, which allows you to create videos simply by describing them in words. OpenAI, however, has gone one step further and bundled up access to this model in a new app

• 0:43Cal Newport?

  that they call simply Sora that operates like TikTok. You can easily create videos and share them. You can view other people's creations and there's an algorithmically curated feed, just like you would see on TikTok. You can have a steady incoming feed of grade A high-octane lop. The online world is usually pretty excited about new AI products, but the reaction to Sora has been more interesting. People online seem, to put it simply, unsettled. I want to play a clip here. Here's Casey Neistat reacting to the new Sora app.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  My analysis, we are so completely

• 1:28Speaker 01

  fucked.

• 1:29Cal Newport?

  And here is vlogger Hank Green venting some of his own frustrations.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Oh, humanity, if you're the kind of motherfucker who will create slop talk, you are not the kind of motherfucker who should be in charge of OpenAI.

• 1:45Cal Newport?

  All right, The New York Times, for its part, was really worried about what this means for even just truth. They quoted a founder of a tech nonprofit saying the following, "Nobody will be willing to accept videos as proof of anything anymore." All right, but for all of these particular fears we're hearing now about Sora, there is one fear in particular that I think is really interesting, but is not getting discussed that much yet. And that is the question of what will the impact be of apps like Sora on the existing major social media platforms? Think about it. It's an app on your phone in which anyone can basically create any visual content they can think of. Why would I watch

• 2:26Cal Newport?

  a TikTok dance routine? When using Sora, I can create a video of Michael Jackson dancing on Mount Everest with Martin Luther King Jr. That's actually a real video I found, Jesse. So by introducing Sora, has OpenAI just radically changed the entire social media landscape? This is the question we're going to get into today. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions.

• 3:00Cal Newport?

  Today's episode, Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media?

• 3:10Cal Newport?

  All right, so we gotta be careful in our approach here. We're going to go very systematically to investigate this question and what we think the answer is. So if we really want to understand the danger that the existing social media platforms currently face, I want to take you back in time to roughly the summer of 2022. Back then, there is a new entrant in town called TikTok. It was just taking off and having this sort of phenomenally fast user growth. And the entrenched social media platforms, they were horrified by the speed with which TikTok was growing and the fear that it was pulling their users over into its own ecosystem. So

• 3:51Cal Newport?

  the existing social media incumbents responded the way you might expect. They tried to make their services more like TikTok. This means they began to ignore the way they classically operated with friends and followers and favorites and retweets and instead try to offer up a stream of content selected exclusively by an algorithm to be as low friction as possible and as engaging as possible.

• 4:17Cal Newport?

  I noticed this shift with some interest back when it was happening. I wrote an article about this for the New Yorker back in the summer of 2022. It was called Tik Tok and the Fall of the Social Media Giants. And that article argued that this move to be more like Tik Tok was something that they would come to regret. So why don't I load this article on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening? All right. So here's the article. Pretty cool graphic. I don't know if I ever really understood it, Jesse, but it seems to be a lot of people in cages, but the doors are open. They're circular cages and they're dancing. The cool graphic. I never quite understood it. All right. So let me start with the following thing I wrote in this article. When, after introducing the idea that the other social media platforms, the existing platforms were

• 4:59Cal Newport?

  chasing Tik Tok, I wrote, "This shift is not surprising, given Tik Tok's phenomenal popularity, but it's also short sighted." Now to unpack that, let's start by asking a fundamental question. What was it that made the existing social media giants so unassailable before the era of Tik Tok began? I want to go through three of them one by one. Let's look at them carefully. We'll start with Facebook. When you're Facebook, what made you hard to compete with? Well, you had two things going on. One was the specific people who used it because Facebook was so early to the, the social media space. They got lots and lots of regular people to sign up to use it. That meant for each

• 5:41Cal Newport?

  individual new user, Facebook had a really good pitch. The people you know, whether they're your friends, your family, or somebody you knew from high school or your college roommate, they're probably on this platform and you can connect to them. They're not on other platforms, but they're on our platform. So the people you know are on this platform. The other advantage that Facebook built up is that early on, as all of these regular people joined it, they put in a lot of free labor to select people who were their friends and to manually tell Facebook, "That's a friend, that's a friend, that's a friend," which, which created in the end, this sort of like dense social graph who captured who knew who. That allowed it then to deliver a pretty compelling content profile to its users.

• 6:24Cal Newport?

  I can tell you what people you know are up to. If there's changes in their life, what they're reading, what they're interested in. That's a pretty compelling package. It was hard for later entrants into the social media space to compete with because they weren't going to get a billion people necessarily to sign up and to spend all their time saying who their friends are. If you wanted to know what people you knew were up to, be on the same network with people you knew, Facebook was the only game in town. That was a great competitive advantage. All right, well, let's look at Instagram. Instagram had a slightly different set of advantages that it's used. It also mattered, they were early as well. It also mattered who signed up for their platform, but it was less from the point of

• 7:03Cal Newport?

  view of the user, it was less about people you personally knew being on this platform. But instead, the fact that there was lots of interesting and compelling expert type people on this platform, creating visually interesting content. So fitness influencers, writers, people who lived in ghost towns, people who walked around in white linen dresses and collected flowers while soft music plays. There was interesting people, we'll put like experts in square quotes, but like people who were good at what they did or known for things that were on there producing visually interesting content. So it was a place you could go to follow people like cooks, chefs, everything, right? Bakers, bread makers that did things that you thought was interesting or compelling that you wanted to do, and they're producing visually interesting content.

• 7:48Cal Newport?

  They had a lot of those people had invested in being on Instagram. And once again, users took the time to go through and painstakingly favorite and follow different of these influencers. So in the end, what could Instagram offer its users?

• 8:03Cal Newport?

  A steady curated stream of content that was about stuff that user cared about from people they felt like were doing interesting things. And it was hard for competitors to come along because it's hard to get all those same writers and bakers and people who walk around in white linen dresses. It's hard to get them to sign up for your new service. And if I'm a new user of a new service and I haven't gone through all the effort of clicking on all the people that I like and want to follow, then it's hard to figure out what to show me. So that was a good advantage that Instagram had. What about Twitter? Well, in Twitter's case, again, what they got early on from a user-based perspective that was useful is they got the people who were interesting from a cultural zeitgeist perspective. The politically adjacent people, the reporters, the comedians.

• 8:44Cal Newport?

  You had people who could make interesting or funny or smart or astute or off-kilter observations about what was happening in the world. All these interesting people had gone to Twitter when it began to take off. Even more importantly, they got all of their users to, again, go through this painstaking process of creating these follower relationships. I follow this person, this person, this person, that person follows this person, this person, that person. If you study the resulting graph, it has a very high expansion factor. So if I go to my followers and then my follower followers and my followers followers followers, the size of people that's being reached increases very quickly. It increases along typically like an exponential curve.

• 9:29Cal Newport?

  Now, what this meant was Twitter had, whether they meant to or not, created a fantastic, basically, human-driven distributed curation machine. You have lots of people who know lots of things and are interesting and good at quips. And if someone makes like a really good, relevant observation or picks out a piece of news that like is going to be really interesting to the moment and they tweet it to their followers, the cascade of retweets that follows can get that content to a huge percentage of the hundreds of millions of users using Twitter very quickly. So as a result, they created this engine for keeping the finger on the pulse of the online zeitgeist in a way that would be like very hard to replicate from scratch.

• 10:11Cal Newport?

  So if I come along to be a Twitter bloon, and a lot of people tried this, the problem is if I don't have enough of those interesting people and we don't have those people spending enough time making these intricate follower relationships so that we have these exponential cascades, I just end up getting like a relatively boring feed directly of people who aren't that interesting. It's just not that interesting to me. So again, Twitter had a really good business model, a really good competitive advantage. In all three cases, we can generalize what had made up until this point we're getting to now, what had made these services so powerful is that they had the right users and these painstakingly constructed social graphs. And it was hard for anyone new to come along and get both of those things, so they were in a good position.

• 10:54Cal Newport?

  But then TikTok came along. And the thing about TikTok is that it doesn't really care about who its users are. And TikTok did not really care about who knew who, follower graphs, favorites, interests. They didn't really care about that either. They basically bypassed the elements that made the social media giants hard to compete with. I want to bring up on the screen here. This is the way I explained it in my article. So why don't I just read this? Because I think it captures it well. "The effectiveness of TikTok's experience is found in what it doesn't require. Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn't need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging.

• 11:37Cal Newport?

  The short video format grabs users' attention at a more primal level, relying on visual novelty or a clever interplay of music and action, or direct emotional expression to generate its appeal. And unlike Facebook, TikTok doesn't require that your friends already used the service for you to find it useful. Though there are some social features built into TikTok, they're not the main draw of the app. TikTok also doesn't rely on its users to manually share content with friends or followers to surface compelling offerings. It assigns this responsibility to its scary-good recommendation algorithm." All right, so TikTok bypassed the competitive advantages that protected the social media giants by just saying, "Look, we're just going to take a whole bunch of content. We don't care who creates it.

• 12:20Cal Newport?

  And we'll use a very good, probably like Two Towers-style recommendation app to just show you a constant stream of stuff we'll think you like, and we'll adjust what you show you based on your behavior, and it will just be right-to-the-brainstem interesting." When Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter noticed that and chased after TikTok, they ignored or walked away from their competitive advantages. When they started adding features that just served up content selected by algorithms independent of who created it or who you like or follow as a user, they were basically walking away or walking beyond their own proverbial castle walls. And out there in the plains beyond, they were vulnerable. So I ended that article in 2022 with a warning, which I'm going to read right here.

• 13:03Cal Newport?

  All right. This all points to a possible future in which social media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They'll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs, and in doing so, eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces. TikTok, of course, is subject to the same pressures, so in this future, it too will eventually fade. The app's energetic embrace of shalliness makes it more likely in the long term to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. And the wake churn by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distractions, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction. So basically, what I'm saying here is all of social media was collapsing around the TikTok model, which was just pure engagement.

• 13:47Cal Newport?

  And my argument here is if all you are offering to people is pure engagement, you are now competing with every other possible source of engagement that exists out there. When Facebook is saying, "Your friends are here, you can see what your friends are up to," I'm not competing with Netflix, I'm not competing with podcasts, or slot machines, or pornography, or anything else, because I'm offering you a very specific thing that only I can do. But when I'm instead just giving you like a long, infinite feed of videos from people you don't know or really care about that are just trying to capture your attention, then that's just purified engagement, and you're competing with anything else in that moment that might grab my attention. And so I ended that warning by saying, "New things will come along that are even more engaging than you.

• 14:29Cal Newport?

  You don't have a competitive advantage, you can't stay on the pedestal for much longer." All right, this brings us back to the main argument for today. We can think of the Sora app as the, one of the first major sort of new distractions or entertainments that I warned about in that article. Once all these social media platforms said, "We're just going to tickle your brain stem," OpenAI came along and said, "Well, we can do that even better." But you have to actually get people to create these videos, and they're confined by their environment, and the people they have the film, and they're not professional actors, they don't have good lighting, and like really interesting stuff is dangerous and hard to do, and only like a few number of video creators actually have enough money to do that. Like, we can just do that all on AI. We can make, if all you're looking at is like, "I don't care what this video is, I'm

• 15:14Cal Newport?

  just swiping, swiping, swiping, is that interesting?" We can give you, like I saw when I was doing research for this, a video where it said, "This is true, Jesse, a swimming competition." There's a lot of Stephen Hawking content out there. It's a swimming competition. Stephen Hawking's on the block, they fire the gun, and he just falls in the water and drowns. That would be like, it's a terrible taste, really hard to actually stage and film. In Sora, you just type in that, like in a sentence, and you have that video. So yeah, they are in trouble. Because, I guess I could say they ignored me, when you're in the world of pure novelty, that's going to be a constantly churning novelty. It's hard to be the king of just pure novelty for that long.

• 15:58Cal Newport?

  So this is all bad news for the existing social media giants. But are they doomed? Do they have a chance here? Maybe. Maybe they have a chance of breaking free out of the spiral that could be dangerous to them. So when we return, I want to talk through what exactly Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter could do right now if they wanted to, to protect themselves from the threat of AI-generated distraction. But first, I want to take a real quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. So going online without ExpressVPN is like not having a case for your phone. Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but all it takes is one drop, and you'll wish you spent those few extra dollars.

• 16:41Cal Newport?

  Now, I speak from experience here, Jesse, I don't know if you know this, but my phone screen has a big crack across it, and I'm not going to do anything about that. So what does a VPN do? Well, when you connect to the internet, your traffic is contained in little bundles called packets, and the data in these packets, that's protected, right? So like, the actual information you typed into a form before you click submit, that's encrypted, and people can't read it. But the packet has an address on it that says what site or service you're talking to. That's out in the open, that's plain text. Anyone can read that, right? The guy next to you with his radio in packet sniffing mode on his laptop knows exactly what sites and services you're using, as does your internet service provider, or whoever owns that public access point you happen to be connected to.

• 17:26Cal Newport?

  Now, just like with your phone case, maybe a lot of times, no one's listening to what you're up to, but it's just the one time that they are that could really cause the problem. That's why you need a VPN, because a VPN protects you. When you use a VPN, it takes the sites and services, it talks to sites and services, rather, on your behalf. And all people learn is that you're using a VPN. You actually encrypt your whole packet, you send it to the VPN server, it unencrypts it, and then talks to the site and service on your behalf, encrypts the response, and sends it back. Now, anyone who's saying, "Hey, who are you talking to?", all they know is that you're talking to a VPN server. Privacy regained. If you're going to use a VPN, I suggest today's sponsor, ExpressVPN. It's easy to use, it works on all of your devices, and it's rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

• 18:08Cal Newport?

  If you really want to try something cool, they now offer a dedicated IP service that uses a technology called zero knowledge proofs. That means not even ExpressVPN itself knows which users are talking to which sites. I know about these, it's really nerdy stuff, Jesse. I actually know about zero knowledge proofs when I was at MIT. I think we were hearing about the early work on this when I was taking, like, complexity theory at Georgetown. We have at least one person on the faculty who works on this technology. It's really cool stuff, and very impressive that ExpressVPN is starting to work with it in their product. But anyways, what are you waiting for? Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/deep.

• 18:47Cal Newport?

  That's expressvpn, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash deep, to find out how you can get up to four extra months. That's expressvpn.com/deep. I also want to talk about our friends at BetterHelp, because this podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th, not long ago, October 10th, was World Mental Health Day. This year, I think we should take a moment to say, "Thank you, therapist." There are a lot of elements to cultivating a deep life. One of the most important is having a healthy relationship with your own mind. If you're struggling with relentless anxiety or draining rumination, you don't have to put up with that.

• 19:30Cal Newport?

  And a therapist can help you repair that relationship with yourself to help you get more depth out of your life. Trust me, I've had my own ups and downs with my own minds. It's always worth getting help when you're not happy with the way your mind is working. If you're worried about the complexity of finding a therapist, then I recommend checking out BetterHelp. BetterHelp has been around for over 12 years and has helped over 5 million people worldwide on their mental health journeys. That's millions of stories, millions of journeys. Behind everyone is a therapist who showed up, listened, and helped someone take a step forward. Here are a few things to keep in mind about BetterHelp. One, their therapists work according to a strict code of conduct, and they are fully licensed in the US.

• 20:13Cal Newport?

  Two, BetterHelp does the initial matching for you, so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, and their 10-plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time using their tailored recommendations. So this World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who've helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/deepquestions. That's betterhelp.com/deepquestions.

• 20:57Cal Newport?

  All right, Jesse, let's get back to our show. All right, so as we covered in the first part of this deep dive, the new SOAR app revealed the dangers of an online business model that's based purely on offering unanchored distraction. There will always be new technology boasting an even more direct way to tap into their users' brainstem. So it's a very sort of unsettled place to be trying to build a business. But here's a question I want to answer next. What can existing social media giants do to protect themselves from this AI future? I'm going to go through this platform by platform and give you my game plan for how you would AI proof yourself against this particular incursion. I'll say, Jesse, as an aside, it is a little bit weird that me, Mr. Quit Social Media,

• 21:43Cal Newport?

  is trying to help these companies out, but honestly, I don't think, I don't think there can be like kind of a worse app than what we see with Aura, Sora. So to me, this is kind of like an enemy of my enemy is my friend type of situation. I mean, I guess I wouldn't be that unhappy if all these services went out of business. But, you know, I would like them to be better than Sora. So I'm going to do this. I'm going over the dark side and I'm going to give advice to the major social media companies. All right, let's start with Twitter. Here's my advice for Twitter to fight off the AI threat. One, forget trying to do that video autoplay TikTok type thing that you've been doing where, you know, someone clicks on a video that they really want to see, and then you try to get them into an algorithmically curated feed. That is the exact type of thing that makes you vulnerable to Sora.

• 22:27Cal Newport?

  Instead, you have to work, I would say, on the competitive advantage that always made you strong, be a place where interesting people go to say interesting things and that you have this like really good distributed curation model of capturing like what is interesting to the zeitgeist on any given day. To do this, I would say Twitter probably has to find a better middle ground on content moderation. Right before Elon Musk took over, the service was becoming like a lot of institutions to beholden to the far left, and this was having a sort of stultifying effect and was really also sort of like annoying and kind of censorious. After Musk has gone too far in the other direction, so he kind of went too far the other way. You look, you're on, you scroll Twitter for five minutes, you get the Jew hatred, which

• 23:12Cal Newport?

  to me is always like the bellwether of like, okay, this is, this things aren't going great here. We also have a lot of arbitrariness from Musk himself, where he'll just sort of like someone or not like someone and put his finger on the thumb. None of that is good if you're trying to create a town square that you want a lot of people to go on to, to see what's interesting in the day. So find some sort of middle ground, like build a council. We have a council who's in charge of all content moderation policies. And by definition, it's going to be two people left leaning, two people right leaning and like two centrist, and they vote on all the policies and it's transparent and we apply them clearly and just be reasonable. People are okay with reasonable. If you do that and then to keep focusing on feature improvements, making the experience better, like get the friction out of here, make it easier to do this or that, I think

• 23:57Cal Newport?

  you could still do well. In that model, I think Twitter can be a very sustainable three to four billion dollar annual revenue business and still have an impact on the culture.

• 24:06Cal Newport?

  Yeah, you're not gonna be meta. That's pretty good for a private company. And you're pretty AI-proof, because this is all about like, real people saying things that are interesting in the moment, that are being selected in a way that's distributed intelligence in a way that like, an algorithm can't quite replicate. All right, what can Instagram do? I think Instagram needs to return to its bread and butter of interesting influencers, producing visually interesting content, and allowing users to specify, "Oh, I like this person. I want to see what they're doing." So moving, retreating from their push towards algorithmically curated sort of reel after reel of just like, "We'll just show you stuff that might be interesting." What the algorithm Instagram should refocus on doing is just suggesting new people that

• 24:51Cal Newport?

  you might want to follow or look at. "Hey, you like these type of authors? You might like this one." And you go check them out. And you're like, "Yeah, I like what they're doing." And you add them to the stable of people that you're listening to. But again, Instagram should be a place where they're sort of like, experts doing stuff you find interesting, producing content that's visually interesting, and you have a good feed of that from people that you selected.

• 25:10Cal Newport?

  That, again, is going to differentiate you from a sort of the slop-style world that you'll see something like on something on Sora, because it's not just random engagement. It's engaging content on specific things you find interesting. It builds on like, human expertise and human connections. AI proves you. What about Facebook? You gotta go back to the friend graph. That's my argument there. That Facebook should be a place where you go where you want to see what people that you know, or organizations that you know about and specifically chose to follow. What are they up to? And maybe what it is that they're consuming. That like, one degree of direct indirection, content sharing is fine. Here is articles that my friends are reading or suggesting right now. That's fine. Or I follow a magazine, and so in my sort

• 25:54Cal Newport?

  of news feed will be various things that they publish. That, 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 old from the different people you knew, but not going so far that like, we're just gonna make this feed all the way algorithmic and just try to like, keep you engaged. That's a really good competitive advantage. The other thing you should lean into if you're Facebook is attention to the users. This was Facebook's original business model. I wrote about this in my book, Deep Work. We forget this now in our current age of engagement in 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.

• 26:37Cal Newport?

  Before Facebook came out, we had had this web 2.0 revolution where we had things like blogs that made it easier to publish content online. You didn't have to directly edit HTML files. You could like, type into a text box and click publish. We take that for granted, but it was a big deal in the earlier 2000s. The problem of the early web 2 era is that when people tried publishing their own things and starting their own like blogs on blogger.com, no one came because the vast, vast majority of what people have to say or write is really pretty boring. And that was really painful. And then Facebook came along and said, hey, here's a place where you can publish stuff and people pay attention because we have this social compact. If you friend these people on Facebook, you will like or comment on the stuff they do

• 27:22Cal Newport?

  and they'll like and comment on the stuff you do. That 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. And you can get some attention for the stuff you put up. They put up an article you find, then a few other people you know will comment on it. That is really powerful stuff.

• 28:06Cal Newport?

  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 of the friend graph. So that's what I would do if I was Facebook. Again, yes, this is, none of these are strategies that maximize user engagement minutes, but they're also strategies that can keep you pretty profitable while hoping that you avoid going completely out of business if you chase after the, the peer engagement model. What about TikTok themselves? Are they completely in trouble here? I mean, their whole model is built on just a stream of engagement.

• 28:40Cal Newport?

  And no profundity to it. No, it's just whatever you look at longer gets on the screen. They really, really are in danger from an app like Sora because Sora can create stuff that TikTok creators themselves cannot. So can TikTok survive? The, uh, the age of Sora? Well, I think they could survive a little bit longer potentially, potentially. And here's why. I'm not hearing this talked about as much yet either, but I think it's an important point. It is expensive to produce. Sora videos using the Sora 2 video generation model. It is computationally very expensive. You have expensive GPU chips that are fired up for a long amount of time. It's a huge amount of electricity and a huge amount of usage.

• 29:24Cal Newport?

  To produce that 30 seconds of Bob Ross, you know, wrestling with Abraham Lincoln. So the only way for this to be economically feasible, of course, is that OpenAI has to charge for the creation of these videos. But 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 and is 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.

• 30:08Cal Newport?

  You can imagine it might take a lot of iterations on your descriptions to get just one video that you like. But if you really want to be producing a reasonable number of Sora videos that you can iterate on at a reasonable resolution that could actually do good on a lot of these like high resolution devices, you have to have the, the ChatGPT subscription account that's $200 a month. That'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.

• 30:48Cal Newport?

  And all the TikTok itself has to do is take up these, these highly compressed videos from the app and store those. I mean, it's not computationally free. A company like Twitter is still going to be more efficient to run because you're dealing with text and not video. But still, it is so much more cheaper. If you don't have to generate video from scratch, it is so much cheaper, right? I mean, like, we know this, Jesse, like, anyone can watch a YouTube video on their computer, but we had to get a beast of a computer to do video editing. Because anytime you're doing anything with like editing or creating videos, you need a lot of computational power. So TikTok might be able to kind of wait out Sora. I'm assuming OpenAI is losing money on this. They're going to try to, their hope is they can eat money and grow it big enough

• 31:32Cal Newport?

  that when they sell ads, they'll be able to somehow kind of like make it back and make this economically viable if they have enough people. I mean, maybe, we'll get into this more in the final segment. But if I'm 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 to get it right.

• 32:04Cal Newport?

  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. But that's going to be the Achilles, the Achilles heel of Sora 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 Sora 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 Sora, because I don't think the economic model necessarily makes sense.

• 32:45Cal Newport?

  But they're still in trouble because their model, this is like a horde of barbarians is coming at their Roman gates. They might fight this one off, but there's going to be wave after wave after wave. When your model is just pure engagement, there's going to be so many other things that come along that offer that engagement better. Maybe you fight off this one, but like at some point, there's going to be another app where it's going to be like sports betting with topless women that like sends you random, you know, jackpot slot machine rewards or something while misting you with fentanyl mist. I mean, you're never gonna win this game forever. The engagement, there always will be new things to figure out how to be more engaged. If all you're

• 33:27Cal Newport?

  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 little 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 into 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 someone unassailable. I would rather have a world with them than a world where it's just like one Sora after another as a pretender to the distraction throne of who can make your eyes glaze over faster. By the way, I

• 34:09Cal Newport?

  just saw the announcement, Jesse. TikTok has just up their rev share for their creator. So they see this threat coming and they're trying, they're like, yeah, we can just make, it costs $200 to use Sora. We're gonna, not only is it free, we're paying you more than we used to pay you before to create content here. So they're really, they're putting up a defense. And I think they've actually have a good shot at surviving this particular wave. All right. So let's move on to some takeaways.

• 34:49Cal Newport?

  All right. So as I mentioned, I'd be happy if all the social media platforms maintained 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 and move on from this type of content and go to more rewarding indie media style content like podcasts, like newsletters, like other high quality independent media. But it's not inevitable that this has to happen. And if the social media giants are smart, they can avoid it. The properties that made social media so powerful for so

• 35:31Cal Newport?

  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. All right. So there we go, Jesse. Sora. Have you, did you hear about this? It's kind of everywhere, but.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm actually, I have a lot of questions, but I'm more going to probably ask you a couple just to save some time. Do we, any idea of what the user base is?

• 36:18Cal Newport?

  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 was that 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. It was probably pretty big. I don't know how many people are generating, though.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  And then do you think a lot of people know that Facebook and Instagram are under the same umbrella company?

• 36:45Cal Newport?

  I don't know what people know. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, Facebook bought Instagram in part. Because it is hard. So I'm talking about it is hard to build user bases and social graphs from scratch. Instagram had built up this like user base, a more influencer type, expert types who are doing visually interesting content. And Facebook's like, I don't know if we can get them all to come over here. They've already there. It's already existing. The other thing that Instagram did, this might have been more important, is they'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. Aqua hire them. They spent a billion dollars. There was like 12 people who worked for this

• 37:30Cal Newport?

  company. It was crazy. It was like 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. But I don't go on Instagram, really. I mean, I don't use any of these. I'm using the sort of royal eye here, right? You want to go on Instagram necessarily anymore to know what your, like, nephews are up to, though, because, like, you'll be 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.

• 38:14Cal Newport?

  So they've all kind of, 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.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. 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?

• 38:38Cal Newport?

  I got to imagine that's going to happen.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  So 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.

• 38:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And Sora puts on a watermark, right? Because they're worried about deep fakes, because you can just put, like, anyone in here. But people have already figured out how to strip it off. So if you can strip off the 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

• 39:26Cal Newport?

  turned on this app and that model, they put very few protections on it. So you could generate any IP, you could work with any IP that was out there, right? So there 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 like, it's in a drug arrest, right? It's like whatever character, they, they didn't put any IP protection. Also, any historical figures, there's like a lot of Hitler stuff on there, there's a lot of like Queen Elizabeth stuff on there, just existing people who are alive now, just

• 40:08Cal Newport?

  full deep fake videos, there's, there's videos with, with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank promoting this like made up, like really terrible products or what, just him looking straight to the camera. And they know they're under pressure and everyone's like, 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, 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

• 40:49Cal Newport?

  put protected IP in their videos, we're gonna try to turn it off now. So it's just like really cynical thing they were doing, but I think they're gonna get their, they're gonna get sued left and right. Yeah, I mean, of course they knew people were gonna do that. So there you go.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Well, they have a valuation of over 500 billions and they might be able to afford some lawyers, I guess.

• 41:11Cal Newport?

  Well, valuation's not money.

• 41:15Cal Newport?

  Good for them. They have that valuation. 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. It'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 got to give you a Halloween update.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Let's hear it.

• 41:48Cal Newport?

  Well, here's the thing. I don't want to dox myself, but I can't. I don't want to like fully explain my Halloween setup. I just want to briefly explain because I think it's important, more important than the future of social media. Briefly explain the thing I built because it was really a pain to build. So I wanted, this sounds easy, but it's hard. I wanted synchronized lights and sound. So I was doing like effects using programmable LEDs, like carefully timed effects that I wanted sound to be synchronized to. That is really hard to do in especially in like a waterproof container. And I 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

• 42:30Cal Newport?

  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 written from scratch and 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 and it's all just low level timing loops. I wrote from scratch. So I can exactly trigger exactly when sounds happen, exactly when, you know, lights are happening. And I could hook up that 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. You need a lot of voltage to run 200.

• 43:12Cal Newport?

  Programmable LED lights, right? So that the big voltage supply, but then I need voltage to run the speakers. I gotta amplify the sound and I need voltage to run the microcontroller. I need voltage to run the sound chip. So 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 gotta have this whole thing somehow fit in the 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.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  The funny part is imagine if you got it all set up, it's working great. And you walk back to your neighbors and it's like, he's got something 10 times better. I mean, it's not gonna happen, but.

• 43:51Cal Newport?

  An animatronic, yeah, walking across the like, whatever. I would, I would get there. I would get there. So that's what's going on. Halloween update. I'm going to the, I'm going to be at the New Yorker Festival.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Oh, when is that?

• 44:05Cal Newport?

  That'll be the, the weekend after this comes out. It's all sold out, I think, but that'll be fun.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  But if fans are there, they can say hi to you?

• 44:10Cal Newport?

  They can say hi if they're there. My, I'll be, I'm doing a panel on Saturday with Charles Duhigg and Anna Weiner. And it's coming out like AI in the future and stuff like that. Yeah, we're competing with the other event happened the same time as Zadie 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 going to, you know, have dinner with my publishing team and meet my, you know, hang out with my speaking agent and.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Hopefully you can get some good gear. They sell like coffee cups and stuff and you can get it for free.

• 44:44Cal Newport?

  Um, yes, I guess that's true. That's where your mind goes. I'm thinking about like the celebrity writers I can meet. Jesse's like, get a coffee cup.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Get a coffee cup, a sweatshirt, a New Yorker hat.

• 44:55Cal Newport?

  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.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Does Brad have a book available?

• 45:11Cal Newport?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Friend of the show Brad Stolberg, his new book, The Way of Excellence, which is excellent. I blurbed it. It's available for preorder. So you can just Google Way of Excellence. If you go to his newsletter, go to the link to his newsletter, there's like bonuses if you want to preorder it. Anyways, he got a killer blur, by the way.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  By you or somebody else?

• 45:32Cal Newport?

  Better, better than me. I mean, obviously, I'm the killerist of blurbs. Cover of the, the cover of the book is Steve Kerr.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 45:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Is this is. Are they buddies?

• 45:41Cal Newport?

  They know each other, but he just likes the book. Yeah. It's, it's, he says, an absolutely beautiful book. So people don't know, Steve Kerr is the, the coach of the Golden State Warriors. And himself.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  He played with Jordan.

• 45:52Cal Newport?

  I watched him play with Jordan back in the 90s. Yeah. So, you know.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Jordan punched him in the face once in practice. Remember that?

• 45:57Cal Newport?

  No.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Oh, you don't remember that? That was like big news.

• 46:00Cal Newport?

  He was kind of a small guy. He's like our size, isn't he?

• 46:01Speaker 03

  He's probably 6'3", but Jordan's 6'6".

• 46:04Cal Newport?

  6'6", yeah. So there you go. That's all the things that are happening. All right. Let's move on to some questions.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  All right. First question is from Corey. 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?

• 46:23Cal Newport?

  This seems to be a concern that people are having. So when I was doing my research for this episode, there was lots of different concerns about Sora. We talked about one on today's episode, which is, will it kill social media? But there's lots of other concerns, disinformation, etc. One of the bigger concerns was, is this the death of creativity? This was actually, I think, the main argument in, you know, Casey Neistat had an argument, a video out. We played a clip from it back in the introduction. But his main point, the, the, what he works to in this video is to argue that the Sora app running with Sora 2 is going to be basically the end of like creative industry as we know it. I think, Jesse, we, we could, we got a clip, right? All right, let's listen to that, then I'll react to it.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  Okay, quit your job for a hundred grand. Last person off the island keeps buy every seat on a plane giveaway. Coats, come on, come on, good. Next one. Build the biggest vending machine that gives away cars and.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  How many years away from Netflix? You just type in like Jason Bourne, moon landing and go.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Generating.

• 47:36Cal Newport?

  So he's arguing this technology is going to take down visual mediums one after another. Actually, that part there in the middle with Mr. Beast was actually pretty funny. He used Sora to produce a video. This is like the type of thing you can do right now without the protections. You can just make a video with someone in it who has no idea you're doing it. He made a video of Mr. Beast, very meta, using Sora at a computer and just frantically typing in like descriptions of videos so that like Mr. Beast, you know, 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. Alright, so he argues it's going to take things one by one by one until it's Netflix movies. And like, why would we do anything if we could just type in and get whatever we want? I don't really think that is an issue. And the reason why I don't think that is an issue is we have had over the generations,

• 48:20Cal Newport?

  all sorts of different quality levels of content. And often the lower level, the lower quality level stuff is very, very engaging in the moment. It could be like, oh, I gotta really watch this. And yet we have not up to this point, really seen a lot of examples of the existence of a lower quality, high engagement stratum of content lead to the collapse of upper stratum. Right? Because like in the age of TikTok, we still got Chris Nolan's Oppenheimer. Like TikTok videos are like easy to make. There's a huge number of them. They're incredibly compelling when you're looking at them. They're hard to look away. Oppenheimer 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.

• 49:05Cal Newport?

  People were happy for both of these to exist. They've made a billion dollars a box of the people who wanted to see that type of stratum of quality. And they'll also separately look at the other stratum of quality that is something like, like a TikTok video. This is why, for example, you can have during the like early 2000s on your TV, you had the same device, you have The Real Housewives, which is like super engaging to watch. And there's a lot of different series of them and 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 at each other's faces. At the same time, you have The Sopranos on HBO.

• 49:43Cal Newport?

  Both stratum of quality exists, 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. They both exist. So we don't, I mean, we, we often tell ourselves that the introduction of a lower stratum quality, higher engagement type of content is going to destabilize the foundations and the things on top falls, but we really have not seen that historically. And so, you know, I would just extrapolate from what we've seen so far. So yeah, we can, we can introduce, you know, this new type of super engaging content that

• 50:27Cal Newport?

  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. 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 happen is if, if Nice Thought was arguing that like somehow eventually these models will produce things that are indistinguishable from like 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 autor 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 typed the description of a movie and then it's made.

• 51:12Cal Newport?

  So I'm not super worried about that. I just think slop is slop. It is going to take over adjacent slop. I think it's at the same strata, AI videos at the same strata as TikTok. And I, 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, you know, the next Paul Thomas Anderson movie, but maybe I'm just being naive, but it hasn't happened yet, hasn't happened yet. All right, who do we have next?

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Next up is Dave. I'm an IT security engineer. AI coding tools have allowed me to write scripts that saved me weeks of time. Would my time be better spent writing code from scratch or am I better, doing the best thing by focusing on the problems and using all the tools that I have available to make solutions quickly?

• 51:53Cal Newport?

  Can I tell you what was programmed from scratch? No AI tools?

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Your Halloween lights?

• 51:59Cal Newport?

  Halloween lights, damn straight they were. Timing down to the millisecond level, all built within a central timing loop. Elegantly, 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 gotta randomize this thing and have an explosion.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Have you just always known how to do that stuff or?

• 52:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I've known how to like that type of coding like so I'm not like a full stack engineer anymore. Like I don't really know like the latest systems. If you tell me to build like a commercial piece of software, I was like, I've been out of 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

• 52:48Cal Newport?

  there was a product. There's a company in my town and they built a product that was it was not that interesting, but it was like a piece of, it was for measuring the optical properties of film. And it would like rotate things and shoot lasers through prisms and make measurements or whatever. And the whole thing was run from a computer and they had like a special control card. You would stick onto the motherboard of the computer that would allow you to like precisely control this thing. But then the technology for using those old control boards was getting outdated. And so they're like, we, what we really need to do is like control this whole thing by a microcontroller that's on the device itself. And the computer should just like send it a command like, oh, do a measurement. And then like the microcontroller can like precisely, you know, control everything and then just send the data back. And my job was to do all that.

• 53:32Cal Newport?

  Like here's a microcontroller. Here's the thing. And I programmed it from scratch. Right? So like I got really good and that was in assembler. Nowadays, like my Halloween thing, I can program. It's like a C or C++ variant. Do we know stuff? But back then it was assembler. Like you were like, you were in it and you were counting the micro, the number of, the number of clock cycles required per instruction. You could count those up to get timing. Like, okay, each clock cycle is this many microseconds and the ad's going to take three clock cycles. But yeah, that type of stuff I love. I love low level. That type of thing I can do, even though I don't do, I don't build systems as a computer scientist. Anyways, what I'm trying to say, Dave, is you're not a real man.

• 54:14Cal Newport?

  If you're not programming assembler from scratch. Um, okay. Here's what I have to say about that. Actually, more seriously about it. If you're in an engineering position and you're building a system that like, there is some stakes. Does it have to be something that other people are using? I'm not talking about like, you're building a product that you're trying to release, but like, you're building a system that does things that's going to affect other people. It's helping you like, update password files or review like what's going on or clean out tickets or this or that. You don't want to be purely vibe coding. By purely vibe coding, meaning like, you're just asking AI model to produce code and your only way of measuring it is just you run it and see if it works or not. And if it's not, you like, tell it to fix some things. You need to understand the code.

• 54:56Cal Newport?

  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, like, 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 gotta 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.

• 55:34Cal Newport?

  But you gotta actually understand, at least that's my, my computer science ethic. You have to know enough about that programming language. Then know what's going on. So AI should help you speed up something you already know how to do. In this context, not do something for you that you don't know how to do. I think that's where we are, especially in an engineering position like that. All right. Who do we have next?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  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?

• 56:07Cal Newport?

  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.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  And then you posted account newport.com.

• 56:18Cal Newport?

  I don't think this like, I'm a man thing works when we're talking about programming languages on microcontrollers. I think I need actually something more manly for that tag to actually work.

• 56:27Cal Newport?

  Okay. In general, email newsletters are something that I am.

• 56:32Cal Newport?

  Bullish on because I think they're a great example of indie media. It's taken advantage of the internet for distribution. The spread more ideas than would otherwise be spreadable. It's controlled by the person who writes it. It's your content, it's long form, it's idiosyncratic. So I'm a big fan of newsletters. Substack, look, there's some issues with it to catch my attention. They want to be more like a social platform. They want you to move out of your inbox into their app. They want it to be like all of these newsletters like in Tik Tok are somehow just nuggets of content. And you don't, don't worry, we'll help you find them. We'll see what you like reading and we'll find other things. You'll just kind of have this like stream of things you might be reading.

• 57:16Cal Newport?

  They, I think that their, 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, I'm a big believer in distributed curation through webs of trust. You don't have a machine just tell you, hey, here's something you might find interesting. You actually find your way to someone through real people. This person I already know and have a relationship with. We have a link in the web of trust. I know this person, I trust this person either because I know him personally or just through their reputation. They're now recommending this person. This person is a good writer. I can now add a link in that web of trust to this other person. Because if this person trusts them and I trust them, then I trust this other person as well. So maybe I'll check out what they're doing.

• 58:01Cal Newport?

  I'm willing to possibly consume what they're doing. And then maybe they're constantly talking about some other writer. Well, that puts another link in my web of trust. That's now someone that through this chain of trust, I can trust 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. Distributed webs of trust are an incredibly effective tool,

• 58:43Cal Newport?

  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 they're like actually like agents of like another power, this or that. A lot of that goes away when you use webs of trust, because when you're building up these chains of trust, it's very hard to build your linkage over to nonsense. And it's very different, for example, than when you have a fully homogenized, algorithmically curated type of setup like TikTok. Every TikTok video is the same. Everyone's treated the same. I don't know where this video is coming from. Is this really just like someone over in, you know, like Arkansas who has an opinion on this world event? Or is this like a bot that's coming out of like, you know, Pakistan? I don't know. Or like Twitter,

• 59:27Cal Newport?

  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. I 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

• 1:00:09Cal Newport?

  fully. I'm independent with my newsletter. That's not easy. Not easy. It's also expensive. I don't know what we pay, Jesse, but I think it's like, you know, we have a hundred something thousand subscribers. I think it's $30,000 a year, easy.

• 1:00:24Cal Newport?

  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 and my newsletter is getting popular, like I don't have that type of money. Right? So I think that's a really good thing to do. It's also complicated. The software is complicated. It's not too hard. We use a really good provider, but you know, you gotta learn how this works.

• 1:00:57Cal Newport?

  And Substack makes it easy. Substack also has recommendations, like they'll, they'll recommend, as I talked about this thing that I'm a little bit wary about is like algorithmic recommendations. It does help people's list grow, though I'm kind of a believer in just like old fashioned list growth. It takes a lot longer, but the, the people you gain are like bigger on your list. So I won't cast shade on Substack because it allows writers to just focus on writing and not this like expense and complexity. I mean, like, we have someone who basically just like handles the newsletter from a technological perspective, you know? Substack writers don't need to worry about that. So, um, so yeah, use it, that's fine. I think it's fine. I think it's fine to use Substack.

• 1:01:34Cal Newport?

  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 Substack. 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 podcasts, is there? Like if I wanted to host, I guess there must be, like, let's say I wanted to host a podcast and I didn't want to just like pay money for it. I don't know if that exists. There probably is somewhere. For some reason, that's way cheaper, which never made sense to me. Hosting podcasts is way cheaper than email newsletters. Like, we don't pay that much money to host our podcasts.

• 1:02:16Cal Newport?

  I don't know if people know how podcast technology works, but like basically, uh, 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, you know, XML file where every time you post a new, it's like a big text file. And every time you post a new episode, you add all the information to this file. And it has like the title, the description and a, a link, like this is where the file is to download. And all a podcast player is, like when you subscribe to podcasts is all you're saying is like, "Hey, keep checking on these RSS feeds a few times a day." It loads them up and reads the text file. If there's a new episode, it puts the information in the player and it downloads the file from that server. So the only thing you really need

• 1:02:59Cal Newport?

  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. It'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 newsletter subscribers. So I don't know. Something about sending emails is expensive. Something about downloading podcasts is cheap. So there you go. A lesson 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

• 1:03:43Cal Newport?

  come. But first, we need to take another quick break to hear from some more of this episode's sponsors. Here's the thing about being an aging guy. When you're young, you don't think about your skin. You spend time in the sun, only occasionally, you know, cleaning the grime off your face with a Brillo pad, and you still end up looking like Leonardo DiCaprio in Growing Pains. But then one day you wake up and you realize like, "Wait a second. I look like an old grizzled pirate captain. Why didn't anyone tell me that I was supposed to take care of my skin?" I want you to avoid that fate. And you can do so with Caldera Labs. Their high-performance skincare is designed specifically for men. It's simple, effective, and backed by science. Their products include the Good, which is an award-winning serum packed with 27 active

• 1:04:26Cal Newport?

  botanicals and 3.4 million antioxidant units per drop. That's true. I checked. Their Eye Serum, which helps reduce the appearance of tired eyes, dark circles and puffiness, and their base layer, which is a nutrient-rich moisturizer infused with plant stem cells and snow mushroom extract. You don't have to know what all that means. You just get the products from Caldera Labs and you use them. It really does work. In a consumer study, 100% of men said their skin looks smoother and healthier.

• 1:04:52Cal Newport?

  All right. So men, if you want to look more like growing pains era Leonardo DiCaprio and less like a grizzled pirate captain, you need to try Caldera Labs. Skin care doesn't have to be complicated, but it should be good. Upgrade your routine with Caldera Lab and see the difference for yourself. Go to calderalab.com/deep and use code DEEP at checkout and you will get 20% off your first order. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. If you run a small business, you know, there's nothing small about it. Every day there's a new decision to make and even the smallest decisions feel massive. So when you find the decision that's a no brainer, you should take it. When it comes to selling things, using Shopify is exactly one of those no brainers. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business.

• 1:05:37Cal Newport?

  It brings together in-store and online operations across up to 1,000 locations. It has very impressive features like endless aisle, ship to customer and buy online, pick up in store. And with Shopify POS, you get personalized experiences to help shoppers come back. And they will, based on a report from EY, businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales on average relevant to the markets that studied. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep.

• 1:06:22Cal Newport?

  That's Shopify.com/deep.

• 1:06:26Cal Newport?

  All right, Jesse, let's get back to doing some more questions.

• 1:06:32Cal Newport?

  All right, we got, who we got next?

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:06:53Cal Newport?

  I think it's a great idea. I think a family smartphone app is great. You have those type of apps on it you need for just like operating logistically in various parts of life. And you grab it when you need it, get a cheap phone, keep it forever, keep it charged in the kitchen. I actually just heard an interview with Warner Herzog on Conan O'Brien's podcast, 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. You have to use the app to actually like,

• 1:07:34Cal Newport?

  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.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  Yes, we do.

• 1:07:59Cal Newport?

  All right, who we got?

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  It's from Tim. "We write monthly articles for our company's internal weekly newsletter. To minimize back and forth email communications, I set up a clear system and structure. This past month, a member didn't use the structure at all, but kept moving the conversation back to emails even when I tried to move things into the system multiple times."

• 1:08:18Cal Newport?

  All right, 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 to 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. All right, so when it comes to putting in place systems or protocols that are an alternative to just send the emails back and forth, you have to differentiate between a new protocol that a team is going to use internally, versus a protocol that you're exposing to the outside world, like to other teams.

• 1:09:03Cal Newport?

  Or internal changes. So when you say like, oh, we do an internal weekly newsletter. If there's like a team of writers who work on this together, and that's what you're talking about internally. Email alternatives have to be bottom up with buy in. If you just come in and say, technically, I'm in charge of this team. Here is how we are communicating now. It creates resentment and friction and it really rarely works. People just don't like it. They just don't, even if it is like on paper, a better idea. They are going to have like a Cal Newport dartboard up that they're going to be, you know, throwing those darts at and they're going to be aiming for the groin, if you know what I mean, right? It's not good. You gotta have buy it. You have to be like, hey, let us talk about what's going on.

• 1:09:43Cal Newport?

  Here is why I'm worried about us just doing all this with email. Here's the problems. Like I read this Cal Newport book about a world without email. Like all this context shifting, like I think this is making us miserable. It's making us less productive. We need a, some sort of protocol that's maybe a little bit more structured that will reduce the main thing that you want to reduce, which is not messages, but it's unscheduled messages to require responses because you're trying to prevent having to switch your context as much as possible. All right, what should we do? And 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, we'll try to see what parts are working. That's the way you change email with protocols within a team.

• 1:10:26Cal Newport?

  If it's external, but 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 the, this is how they, they organize the Apollo program because there are so many different teams and, you know, between academia and through the government and through defense contractors. They eventually essentially had to publish like communication protocols for communicating between the teams. Here is where the information comes and in what format we sign it off and when you do it. Cause otherwise it was too impossible. We'd like too much information or whatever like that.

• 1:11:12Cal Newport?

  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. And like, oh, okay, but just, hey, what about this? Could you, I knew what's going on here. You're like, these are the instructions for submitting to the newsletter. You kind, that's just it. Like, you just sort of hold the line on that. And a few people are 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

• 1:11:55Cal Newport?

  to keep in mind that maybe your interface is bad. And often, the issue is you have too much friction. People are busy, you're not their most important thing. The thing that they're communicating to you with through your interface is probably something that's low down on their to do list, they just want to get it off there. You do have to respect that about people. There's common friction points that really can make these external facing protocol interfaces fail. And you want to make sure you're not suffering from one of these. The biggest one is like making people have to switch systems. That's a really big one. It seems simple on paper, but it really is a problem for people. If you're like, look, you gotta, you're gonna have to like login and have a login and login to some system and click on some dropdown menus. And then there's some ambiguity about like what you're trying to do doesn't quite fit into these forms. And if it's

• 1:12:40Cal Newport?

  too much like, I'm making you do a lot of my work for me. You get a lot of this in like internal bureaucracies. Like, you gotta 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. But 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. There's like a really nice protocol we have in place. And by me, it's really my department chair figure this out, I just admire it. And it's, it uses email.

• 1:13:25Cal Newport?

  But it doesn't use email in an ad hoc way of like, let's just start talking to individual people. There's a particular address you can use. It's not associated with a single name, but actually with a whole admin team and the people in charge of communication. You can just email something that you want to be included to this address. So it's very low friction for you as like the user interfacing with this newsletter. I can just like forward, because often like you'll get something from a colleague like, oh, we should put this in the newsletter. I can just hit forward and send that thing over. But because the address is not associated with an individual person, I don't expect there 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

• 1:14:07Cal Newport?

  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 backend, but they like put them all in a big Google Doc file. And then there's like one time each week where the people who build the newsletter, the member 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. No, 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, it gets formatted

• 1:14:51Cal Newport?

  nicely. And how many unscheduled emails get sent that have to be responded to? Zero. And that is what you're often looking for. All right. So those are the three things. Internally, if there's an internal protocol, you need buy-in. You can't just impose it. If it's an external protocol, you can hold the line, dot, dot, dot. But if it has too much friction in it, then maybe you need to make this a lower friction protocol that still accomplishes the goal, which is not time, which is not message reduction, but reducing the messages that require responses. There we go. A little world without email. I can't resist sometimes, Jesse. There are a lot of technology stuff going around we have to talk about right now. Email sounds old fashioned, but it's at the core of so many people's like subjective experience of work day to day and their subjective well-being.

• 1:15:36Cal Newport?

  So I can't help talking about it sometimes. All right. We have a case study, right?

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:15:41Cal Newport?

  Now let's get some case study music.

• 1:15:54Cal Newport?

  All right. Case studies where people send in their own accounts of applying the type of advice we talk about on this show in their own life. Today's case study comes from Mike. All right. Here's what Mike says. As a creative, being on social media felt like a necessity, but often also a chore. So I finally did a 30 day digital declutter as you describe in your book, Digital Minimalism. I don't know why I waited so long. Here are my takeaways. Just as other people have described, I was very antsy the first couple of 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

• 1:16:36Cal Newport?

  are more robust as I don't need to see them on social media. An unexpected benefit was I started making decisions faster and with more certainty. It was like I got back to what I actually wanted for my life and not what someone on Instagram was telling me to do. I'm now at the stage of implementing rules for how to use the apps after my declutter ends. I definitely think everyone should try this and enjoy the benefits. All right, Mike, I appreciate that. For those who don't know, in my book, Digital Minimalism, which seems to be having a kind of like a new renaissance, by the way, Jesse, I think people are like looking for responses to the negative relationship they have with technology. Like, well, I've got one for you. It's in this nice book. You can read it. I recommend that book. You

• 1:17:20Cal Newport?

  take 30 day break from all your technology. So you can rediscover like what you actually care about through experimentation, reflection, figure out your values, what you really want to do in your life, and then only add back technologies that directly support those values. And when you do, put clear rules around them for when and how you use them. So instead of like having to have a real reason not to use a technology, you have to have a real reason to use it. And once you know why you're using it, you can put clear rules around it because if my value is X, then why am I looking at my phone when I'm in the bathroom? That's unrelated to that. 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.

• 1:17:59Cal Newport?

  They're surprised by how much brain space social media was taking up. And by brain space, like emotional space, psychological space, like energy being burnt in the sort of like simmering fire in the background or whatever. It's, it's like baseball fans feel, 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 them. 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, you know, train your pitcher.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  Matt Doug was so upset that he only pitched six innings in the final game.

• 1:18:36Cal Newport?

  I trust me.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  He's like, he took him out and.

• 1:18:38Cal Newport?

  I was on a long text thread about this. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. And what I thought about is like, okay, this of course is valid. Like your team, you're a long time Tigers fan, you got, this is going to give you 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 in his two weeks. That's the joys of October, but for a lot of people it is, they're always, they're always living in a constant state of being like a Detroit fan after Scoobal was taken out in the sixth. That's like their everyday. That is exhausting. And I don't think people realize that till they actually step away from it. So yeah, read that book, Digital Minimalism. Often, it's a weird thing about these books, Jesse, it's like when you're writing them, if, when you're in the world, it's like this is way too late.

• 1:19:24Cal Newport?

  But it's, you're almost always too early.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Cal Newport?

  You know, I was like, oh, it's too late. People already know like their phones are, they have a problem with it. It's like now that people are getting around to it. Or it's like when John Height wrote The Next Generation last year. We knew, like experts, like, yeah, we've been talking about this since 2017. Like it's too late. No, people weren't ready till then. But 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?

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:19:51Cal Newport?

  All right. Oh, it's also about phones and all that type of stuff. All right, let's hear this call.

• 1:19:57Speaker 06

  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. However, 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, you know, wake up and there'll be 7,487 messages.

• 1:20:36Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:20:55Cal Newport?

  All right, Antonio, thanks for that question. And I have strong thoughts about all this. I'm actually giving a talk. The day you're hearing 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?" And I'm giving it to elementary school age parents. So I think a lot about these things. Okay, 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 identity is in place. But 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

• 1:21:40Cal Newport?

  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 or reconfigurations of your brain, and you're still trying to find like, you know, cleave from the parental community tribal diad and sort of prove yourself you into a tribal of your own. Like, all these things happen around that time where you really don't want that technology, you know, in your face. That being said, when it comes to social, digital sociality, there is a big gender divide and you're seeing that. You know, these are all just bell curves and there's people on either ends of these bell curves. But in general...

• 1:22:14Cal Newport?

  Young women and girls are more queued in onto the social technologies than young men or boys are. So this is why your son probably had an easier time with it. You need to be wary about digital sociality. That's the terminology for sort of any socializing that's happening largely through the digital exchange of text or images. So what you would do on text threads, but or WhatsApp, or what you would do on something like Snapchat. You got to be wary about it for a few reasons.

• 1:22:41Cal Newport?

  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 where there was no written language. They don't know about texting. But they're tuned down.

• 1:23:23Cal Newport?

  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 and lol and put a lot of emojis or whatever. But really, the whole point of that was to make you feel bad. You probably wouldn't have done that in person. Right? So so guardrails are down. It's it's a so it's more sharp, right? You have more opportunities for these sort of negative interactions. Two, it's exhausting.

• 1:24:05Cal Newport?

  It uses a lot of mental energy 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 a adolescent, like teenager or whatever. But when you have those conversations and ubiquitous access to a phone, you never get a break from it. You wake up to them, and 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 sociality. 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.

• 1:24:47Cal Newport?

  So if your kid is using the dumb phone to basically be in a world of sort of constant digital sociality, I would change that. And there's a couple of 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. Not you, 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 of 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. Take one of the family phones with you today so that you can let us know if there's like a problem with the bus rider.

• 1:25:32Cal Newport?

  When you get home, you put it back.

• 1:25:36Cal Newport?

  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.

• 1:25:43Cal Newport?

  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 iMessage 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 where 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, 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. The iPad is just a bad phone, guys. Like you have access to all the same stuff.

• 1:26:25Cal Newport?

  So you could 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. They'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 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 his like evil sidekick me like this less known, but sort of I come in and help him like steal your toys. That's kind of the way they see us. That's okay. Like, oh, my dad's like a Cal Newport guy.

• 1:27:11Cal Newport?

  So like I can only be on these somewhat. The people adjust. And the the groups you don't want to be a part of, they're really mean. And they're like, ah, you don't want to be in those groups anyways. And your real friends that you're doing other stuff with like, yeah, we just know it's just that's just the way you are. But I feel strongly about digital sociality. We have to be careful about. So 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 I'll let you do it. She will survive till she's 16. And she'll thank you for it in the end.

• 1:27:41Cal Newport?

  All right. I believe we are ready for our final segment.

• 1:27:46Cal Newport?

  And I want to react. I want to kind of close up our discussion today of social media versus AI by checking in with our friend Sam Altman, right? So they released this Sora app, as as Hank Green called it, big slop. The try to make money by producing a lot of these videos. What else have they been up to recently? I want to bring a tweet a tweet up here on the screen. This was from last week. Here's Sam Altman. He starts by saying, we made chat GPT pretty restrictive to make sure that we were being careful with mental health issues. We realized this made it less enjoy useful, enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems. But given the seriousness of the issue, when to get this right, now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools,

• 1:28:31Cal Newport?

  we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases. In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of chat GPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4-0. If you want your chat GPT to respond in a very human way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, chat GPT should do it too. In December, as in December, as we roll out age gating more fully, and as part of our treat adult users like adult principles, we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults.

• 1:28:59Cal Newport?

  The bad news is he goes on the clarify, all of the AI-generated erotica will feature him. So I don't think that's, this could put his face on everyone. So that's, that's kind of like, there's good and there's bad. But I guess if you own the company, a lot of, um, all right, let me tell you, let me tell you if you're a, an open AI monitor, what this all means. Things aren't going well over at OpenAI. That is the only way I can think to interpret Sora, followed by this announcement of, we're going to turn on erotica in ChatGPT. Let me explain why.

• 1:29:37Cal Newport?

  It wasn't that long ago that if you listen to Sam Altman, or you listen to Dario Amade, we were still talking in terms of the world was about to be transformed. It was what, four months ago that Sam Altman was on Theo Von's podcast, comparing himself to Oppenheimer and the pending release of GP5 to the Trinity atomic bomb test. It was July, the Dario Amade was going around saying like, look, we're going to like automate half of white collar jobs. It's going to be a bloodbath. Like, you know, I don't even know who's going to be employed anymore. And we had studies coming out, they were trying to identify,

• 1:30:16Cal Newport?

  like who would not be affected by AI. There's literally a study that I read that very helpfully identified that the safest job in the near future is going to be a dredge operator. So I guess if you're on a dredge barge operating it, you're like, less likely to be whatever. So we were in this place until very recently, where the reason why there were so many hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in these technologies is because they were going to automate huge parts of the economy. Remember Sam Altman in 2021 wrote, or 2022, uh, put out that essay, Moore's Law for Everything, where he said, this, this technology is going to take over everything. We have to just have a new tax system in place that basically like tax, taxes, equity, wealth, because there's going to

• 1:31:00Cal Newport?

  be just like three companies that do everything with their software. And you, you're just going to need to come and, and we're going to have all the money. So you're just going to have like each year, take 20% of the money and distribute it to people. So there's not riots in the street. Like that was the path they were on. Now, what are we seeing? They're saying maybe we can sell ads against AI-generated videos of, you know, Stephen Hawking being pushed into a pool. Maybe we can sell ads like among ChatGPT feeds of erotica. This means that something has shifted in OpenAI. They realize the change-the-world impact that they were on a get-there-or-die type of trajectory.

• 1:31:42Cal Newport?

  That's not going to happen because GPT-5 wasn't a massive leap over GPT-4. It wasn't a massive leap over 4.5. They couldn't scale their way to artificial general intelligence. Most of their improvements on the tech side, for example, was coming from fine tuning what was basically like a 4/4.5 model to do well on very particular tasks or benchmarks that happen to be well suited to this synthetic dataset tuning. It wasn't becoming like generally aware. They were seeing that even though this was supposed to be 2025 was supposed to be the year of the agents, that trying to run automated processes off of LLM queries just doesn't work. They're just not reliable enough. They make things up. They don't understand what you're saying. And if you just automatically like query an LLM and then take action on what it says, it's disaster.

• 1:32:27Cal Newport?

  That's why no one has agents. No one's automating anything. The use cases that are emerging, there are good ones and they're very useful cases because it's very powerful technology, are not the use cases that a trillion-dollar to support a trillion-dollar company or a $500 billion company like it is now. This is why there's also these shenanigans going on where, you know, 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 in that arbitrage to somehow makes a difference. There's a great article about this in the Journal recently. You know what the last time those type of deals were going on was? It was in the Inron era with all those fiber companies, right before they all went out of business in the late 90s, early 2000s.

• 1:33:10Cal Newport?

  So I think this is a mark, this shift towards attention economy slot that we've seen in the last like month from OpenAI is a signal that they're in trouble because it was super expensive to build these models. And though they're cool, they're not going to take over the economy and make them the only company left and be the last invention that anyone ever needs to make. And now they're like, how do we make money? We're making some, like they do pretty well selling ChatGPT subscriptions, but they need to like 10x that to really capture their capex expenses. So they're now starting to flail.

• 1:33:43Cal Newport?

  That's the way I see these two stories. So what we started with, building a TikTok clone, to 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 gonna sell ads on all this, of course. They hired a major, a major ad expert onto their executive team earlier in the summer. I mean, this is what they're going to do is try to sell ads on just brainstem stimulation. I see this as the fall of like a once, super ambitious, exciting company with visions for changing the world. And now they're hoping they just sort of like slopped their way towards profitability. And maybe other breakthroughs are coming and I'll be wrong, but then I'm not a stock market analyst and I'm just a technology guy. I'm just saying, I think these two things

• 1:34:23Cal Newport?

  together is not a good sign if you are really on the team of we're like a year away from OpenAI changing everything. So, there we go. Not good news, Jesse.

• 1:34:36Cal Newport?

  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.

• 1:34:48Cal Newport?

  Hi, 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 gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.