The Truth About Brain Rot

I want to talk about brain rot. Now, to my middle-aged, millennial brain, when I think about brain rot, I think about it as something that happens to your brain. Like, if you scroll too much, you begin to reduce your cognitive capacity. But Gen Z has another definition for this term. They use brain rot to describe a specific type of video content that is aggressively devoid of meaning. I'm going to give you an example here. This is a clip of a category of brain rot known as "skippity toilet." Let's play that. All right, let's do another example here. This is a clip of a category of brain rot that's popular where you use AI to create hybrid animals. For whatever reason, this is big in Italy, so this clip is an Italian. It is of what is known as "trippi troppi." Let's look at that. I can tell you right now, MIT is really proud about having given me a doctorate. After watching me present "trippi troppi" and "skippity toilet" through the public. But that's what brain rot, that's what brain rot content is. It's content like this, and it's very popular among Gen Z to watch videos of this type somewhat obsessively. Well, this obviously triggers some key questions, such as, "What is going on here? Why is a whole generation so obsessed with this particular type of content? Why has God forsaken us? Real big questions that this phenomenon raises." Well, I didn't really have a good answer to any of those until recently I came across an op-ed in the New York Times that shed some light. It was titled "The Truth About Brain Rot," and it was authored by a professor at Rowan University, Maxi Heitmeier. This essay explains why the brain rot content phenomenon is so popular, and I'll tell you the answer is not what I expected. It's actually an answer that is way more significant than I would have thought, an answer that has implications for all of us. So here's what I want to do today. I want to proceed in two parts. Part one. We're going to go through that New York Times essay, and we're going to get to the core of why the brain rot phenomenon exists, and why this is actually a problem that is relevant. It's indicating a problem relevant to all of us. Part two, I want to talk solutions. Here, I'm going to look at my own childhood. We didn't have brain rot when I was a kid, but we did have movies. I'm going to actually turn to a cult classic movie from the late 1990s that I'm going to argue exactly captures the problems we're having right now as epitomized by the brain rot phenomenon and provides us a potential way out. And so we're going to get into all of that, what's going on, and what we can all do about it. So we have a lot to do, but before we get started, let's get another hit of that Skibbidi toilet. All right, that's the stuff. Let's go. All right, so let's start by looking at this New York Times op-ed I talked about before. I'll put it on the screen here for people who happen to be watching instead of just listing. All right, so as I mentioned, the article is called the truth about brain rot. I'm not going to go through the whole thing. I'm going to scroll down to some key quotes that I think gets to the core of what I want to emphasize. All right, here is quote number one from this op-ed. The business model of social media treats user focus as a commodity to be extracted and sold. The more time we spend, the more advertising revenue we generate for the owners of the platforms. This attention economy increases engagement. It does not promote high quality content. Okay, so we can start there. This is well known, right? This is what happens on the sort of social media platforms that we all use, and in particular, Gen Z uses, but the article goes on. What struck us in our interviews, however, was how clearly Gen Z understood this dynamic. They then go on to quote one of the Gen Z correspondence that they talk about who said the following, if everything is content now, then brain rot is anti-content. It is the only way to be free online, which is to do something so stupid that it can't be monetized. All right, let's move on here. I want to keep going. Brain rot breaks the mold of social media through its absurdity. It's deliberate refusal of narrative, purpose, or message. A century ago, artists responded to the horrors of World War I by creating deliberately a rational, anti-esthetic work. Dada rejected the cultural logic that had led to industrialized killing. In its own meme-driven way, brain rot refuses to participate in the attention economy on the economy's terms. The joke is that there is no joke. The meaning is that there is no meaning. For a generation that grew up with its every digital interaction tract measured and monetized, that refusal is experienced as a form of honesty in a dishonest system. Let's stop there for a second. This is interesting. The brain rot phenomenon, according to this professor who interviewed a lot of Gen Z members, members of Gen Z, is in some sense like a protest. They grew up so emeshed in this world of digital attention economy distraction that the ultimate rebellion is to basically make themselves boring. I'm going to consume the stupidest possible content. I'm not going to play the game that I saw the millennials play where they get really attached to these figures that they're encountering on Twitter or on Instagram. They feel like they have a pair of social relationship and that they're part of a big discussion when they're really being exploited. We're not going to be exploited. The way we're going to show that is by looking at the stupidest possible content. Every generation goes through something where they have their own type of rebellion. This is Gen Z's. I mean, look at like Gen X, the slacker phenomenon. How did they respond to a sort of 80s corporatized rise of boring, yuppies suburban capitalism that was happening in our culture is that they tuned out. They got ironic. They got sardonic. Nothing is interesting to me. We're seeing the same thing happening with Gen Z, but in the digital realm. You're going to turn me into a commodity, Mark Zuckerberg. You're going to try to monetize every minute of my day, try to trick me in the thinking that you're fake artificial digital universe is somehow real. I'm going to watch Skibbidi toilet. So it's a rejection in some sense. It's da da. It's do shopping the fountain installation. But here's the key, a dendum to this observation. So if we go, I'm going to go back to the article here in a second. But the author said, do not romanticize brain rot. Do not romanticize it. This ambivalence that Gen Z feels towards their world has its own darkness to it. So let me go back to the article and read this final quote here. This ambivalence communicates the emotional register of people living inside a system. They cannot escape. They see the manipulation, understand what the algorithms are doing, but they keep scrolling anyway because they cannot imagine a life outside the system. Most of them never lived one. So there's this melancholy kind of conclusion to this analysis in this op-ed that it is an act of rebellion and self-protection, but they're still stuck in the system. There's a nihilism here about this is the world I have to live in. And this is my sort of futile rebellion that at least allows me personally to feel like I maintain some sort of intellectual or character integrity. In other words, brain rot is less about resistance than it is resignation. Okay, so I read that article. This is really important. I think this is really important because brain rot as a performance being done by Gen Z is pointing the figure to the world that everyone else lives in as well. My generation, my parents' generation, we're all living in this artificial digital world. It's just Gen Z because they were born in it are the ones who are actually doing this performance or this digital da-da to try to react to it by watching Skibbity Toilet and Trippy Trophy. But it doesn't mean the rest of us aren't also trapped in the same world. They're just showing us. They're firing up the signal flare. They're the ones who are having the sort of resigned performance activities to show us like this world is almost nihilistic in the way that it just breaks us down into bits to be monetized, attention to be mined. So this is actually a really big problem. And this is not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear, yeah, Gen Z, they're impressionable and they got tricked in the watching dumb videos. No, no. Gen Z is pointing out to the rest of us. This is a nihilistic situation, a digital artificial content universe in which like we are all now trapped and they're putting a sort of despair, a performative despair around that reality. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, if you're anything like me, as the world gets more stressful AI and sleep is harder to come by, you might find yourself reaching for that second or third cup of coffee before noon. But I want you to consider instead elements lemonade iced tea. Now this has two advantages over coffee. First, caffeine and tea works differently than in coffee. It comes bundled with L. Theanine and P. polyphenols the way it exists in the plant. And this will give you a noticeably steadier feeling with less spike and less drop. Second, your body produces energy through a process that runs on electrolytes and no amount of coffee can replicate that. That's where element's famous saltiness comes in the play. 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All right, let's get back to the show. But can we escape this nihilism? Or is Ginzy just pointing out the meteor is on its way and there's nothing we can do? I have hope. I have hope. And the hope came from, this is an unexpected place, but a classic movie, one of my favorite movies from the second half of the 1990s, that I rewatched recently, rewatched it with my kids. And I realized it has a lot to tell us about the current moment that the brain rock movement is reacting to. And not only does it capture our current moment really well, but if you fast forward to the end of the movie, it shows us a way out. Okay, so what movie am I talking about here? I'm talking about the 1998 Jim Carrey Vehicle, The Truman Show. I don't know if you've seen this or not. It was directed by Peter Weir. It was pretty successful actually. Peter did it on a $60 million budget. It made a quarter billion dollars at the box office. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including best original screenplay. There's a lot of big movies come down the 90s, but it's stuck around as a bit of a cult classic. So the claim I'm going to make here is that this movie does a sort of almost eerily prescient job of describing our current moment and points us towards a solution. All right, so we have to start by sort of setting up what is the setup for this movie? What is the plot? Well, Jim Carrey plays a character named Truman, who is an insurance salesman who lives in this sort of, a kind of perfect polished neighborhood, a little movie trivia. They actually filmed the Truman Show in a real plan community in the Panhandle of Florida. That's actually a real town that's actually sort of like this. In reality, Truman, played by Jim Carrey, is in a reality show. So this town is fake. The surrounding landscape is fake. The ceiling is fake. The water that surrounds it is fake is actually housed in a giant dome built outside of Burbank, Los Angeles. And this whole dome and everyone in it is part of a show except for the only one who doesn't know his part of the show is Jim Carrey, who's the star of this reality show. Billions of people have been following his every move since he was born. The cameras are hidden in trash cans and up in light fixtures. And so he's been filmed everywhere and doesn't realize it. There's a, they say in the movie, there's 5,000 cameras placed around this fake town. He is, in other words, an object of entertainment, something that's been monetized for the sake of a corporation. They even say early on in the movie, he was the first human baby to be formally adopted by a corporation. So the corporation actually in some sense owns him. That's a sound familiar. Well, this setup is a fantastic metaphor for our current digital existence. That the digital world in which we spend so much of our time is this sort of almost too perfect, too engaging, too bright, too flashy, everything kind of that we are encountering because of algorithmic curation is pressing just the right buttons of what we want to see. And it's, we are owned by the corporations like Truman, right? Like we are our existence itself is being monetized so that the faceless corporation can actually just make money off of us and our existence. And we're placated by feeling like yeah, we're in this world that's supposed to be so nice to why we want to go anywhere, right? The world pacifies us, we are monetized, right? So the setup for the Truman show is not a bad metaphor for our current setup. Okay, so what happens next? What's the conflict that really sets the plot in motion? Well, a series of events occur that begin to imply to Truman that something's not quite right here. I think it starts. I think the first one is a spotlight falls from the top of the dome, which is, you know, looks like the sky. It falls and crashes on the ground right next to Truman and he picks it up and it has like the name of a star from a constellation on it. Like this spotlight is assigned to being one of the stars up on the top of the dome, right? That makes them suspicious. Some other things begin to happen as well. The rain effect gets turned on false. It goes haywire, right? So the rain for a couple of seconds is just falling just on Truman, like in a five by five square. He's like, and he jumps out of it and it moves to follow him. It jumps out of it and it moves to follow him. And then the rain starts everywhere. So there's like a malfunction in the rain effect. And then he's driving through car and I was car radio. He picks up the transmissions from the earpieces of the actors and they're describing his every movement. And he's like, wait a second, people are talking about me. So he begins to realize this life is artificial. Something's not right about his life. Something's not real about it. And so the second act unfolds with a series of escalating attempts for Truman to try to leave the town. And it starts small like he gets a bus ticket and then eventually he's like has a car. And he's trying to drive across a bridge. And every time he's stopped, the bus breaks, the route is blocked, there's fire, there's people in hazmat suits. He gets suspicious. He's like, I can't leave this town. This too, so the central plot engine of the movie, this is also interesting, right? This is also eerily pressing about our current moment because those attempts of him as he kind of realizes this isn't real, there's something artificial, right? I'm not getting a complete authentic existence. He tries with increasing urgency, but in relative obvious ways to escape. This is what we do with our digital reality. As we get to that point where we realize this is fake and I'm missing the grist of the human experience by meeting so much of my world through this glass screen. When we realize that, a lot of us try like Truman to escape. We buy a bus ticket or try to drive out of town, and we're foil. Those obvious attempts to disconnect ourselves from the digital artificiality often fail because it's there and it's so tempting and there's the cultural pressures and it's right on your phone and it beckons at you and it's with you all the time. So we're like Truman in the second act is where we are right now realizing something's not right about this world. But when we just take some moderate efforts to find out what's to do something more real to leave the fakeness of the sea haven in the movie, we're thwarted. So if the movie ended there obviously be pretty dark but then we get to the third act of the movie. And this is where we start to get towards solution territories. So after all these attempts to escape, it looks like Truman has just gone back to his every life and the producers kind of calmed down until they discover one day he's not in his house and that there's actually a tunnel he used to get out of his house without people knowing. And now the producers are desperately searching for him. Even to the extent that they turn on the sun, which is done with spotlights in the middle of the day so that all of the actors in the town can be searching to try to find him. But where is he? He had stolen a boat and just sailed out across the water. Now this is significant because they had established Early in the movie, he had a fear of water. they gave him a fear of water by pretending like his dad drowned in the water and Truman watched him drown because they didn't want him to bother with the water. But he sets out anyways. He gets in a boat and he sets out across the water. The producers find him with the cameras and they said, we got to stop him. So they begin with a series of storms. They turn on waves. They have fake lightning. He's battered. He's bashed. He falls into the water and he swims through the giant seas and grabs back on the boat. He ties himself down. They're at the edge of killing him until finally they say he's not going to stop enough and they turn off the storms and the boat keeps going until boom. It hits the edge of the dome and it's painted look like the sky. So it surprises him. Boom. He's at the edge of the dome and there's a set of stairs going up the edge blended in with the fake sky and Truman walks up those stairs and at the top of those stairs is a door. Suddenly the producer, the main producer played by Ed Harris comes out over the PA system through the clouds like the voice of God and in a whispered voice he says, Truman, you can speak. I can hear you. Now we're in, you know, this is like Genesis. This is like Bible territory and the producer played by Ed Harris explains the truth. Yeah, he's the star of a television show. That's real. But he tries to exhort him to stay and here's the line that Ed Harris says, there's no more truth out there than there is in the world that I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit, but in my world you have nothing too fear. I know you better than you know myself. Sound familiar? The algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves, that this world is safe, this world is predictable. The real world outside of your screen is friction, talking to people, it's rejection, it's like discomfort. It's happening in the Truman show. What is Truman says? He says, you never had a camera in my head. Right. You're afraid. That's why you can't leave says the producer try to stop him. You can't leave Truman. You belong here with me. Truman thinks. It's kind of a bittersweet moment. There's this yawning blackness of the door beyond him. He's thinking. He's contemplating. And then he looks up at the up into the sky into the producer. A smile comes on his face. He says the line that he, you know, his corny line from the show. In case I don't see you. Good afternoon. Good evening. And good night. He then bows, walks through the darkness, disappears into the blackness off camera. Last time we see him in the movie. In there, I see a solution to our current digital moment. Carey left. It's the Truman option. He left. He left the artificial world for the world beyond. Now, you might be saying, I've heard that before. People like, yeah, why don't you just quit, why don't you sustain, you know, just don't use these apps. Don't use your phone so much. And that's hard. I always come back. But the reason why I think the Truman option as portrayed in this movie is so important is because they showed how hard it was. They didn't make this seem like it was just an act of rationality. Oh, yeah. Of course, you should just like use your phone's less, right? This was a battle. They personified it as him in a battle against forces beyond his control. He was battered. He was tested. At the very end, there's a voice in his head say, no, but but but we this is where you're happy. This is where you're safe. That personifies the psychological experience of trying to leave the digital artificiality in which so much of us live. The Truman show captured that that it's not a simple decision. It's an act of heroism. That's what they are captured. And I think that's really important that we we we conceive what it means to escape the digital. We we we conceive it not as hey, you should stop smoking is bad for you. And instead we we accept and we amplify and embrace and acknowledge the heroic difficulty of doing it and then say it's worth it anyways. Hard is good. The most meaningful things are hard. Put down the brain rot. And actually leave the dome. And it's not going to be easy and you're going to get metaphorically battered in waves and and and feel like you're drowning. And you're going to voices in your head trying to talk you out of it. But it's still worth it to get to what is real. So what would that mean in the real world? What's our equivalent of walking out the door? You know, it's the stuff you would think like the actual actions aren't that complicated to articulate, right? You got to downgrade your phone so that instead of them being a constant companion, they're just a tool you use for specific things. You don't have it with you all the time. It's not what you look at when you're bored. It's there for when you need to look something up, you know, directions on a map or listen to a podcast. We need to untangle ourselves from the ecosystem of apps to make money off of our attention. Right? We're in an unhealthy relationship with those apps. They beat us up. But then they're like, you know, hey, baby, like, you're not, you can't leave. You need me, right? We got untangle from those. We need to embrace the friction of real world efforts and commitments and community. It's not as easy as what you experience online. But it's more meaningful. So we know those are the actions. I've talked about those actions before. But the action that Truman had to show in the truth, Truman had to do in the true and show it's also easy to describe. Get in the boat and go. It's not the description. The action is not the problem. It's the psychological burden. It's the battle. It's what the turmoil that you're going to face trying to execute those actions. And what I think the Truman show gets right in that final act is it's a hero's journey, not a rational choice. And it's still a journey that's worth doing. All right. So that's what I'm calling the Truman option is you step away from having your life. Once and for all, so entangle in the world of digital artificiality, you were not an object to be monetized for the big account of a small corporation of a small number of people at a big corporation. You want to go live a real life in the real world with all the stuff that producer warned Truman of like I want to be in the real world, that's what humans are meant to do. And the Truman option says you do that and you do that expecting it to be very hard and you embrace the hardness and you trust yourself to be able to get through it. So I'd like that way of conceiving it. So basically, put this all together, brain rot, content, that phenomenon of Gen Z is a cry for help. It's a way of saying that the generation that grew up in the world that we all live in is like we're playing the prison hermonica here. This is we know what's going on and this is nihilistic, this is sad. The Truman option is the way we have to think about escaping. We make a break from these companies that have held so much of our attention in their hands for so long and we're willing to have the waves and be battered and be talked out of and whisper in our ears and we still walk through that dark door anyways. Now clearly, there's a lot more to unpack here about this idea of the Truman option, this urge towards a heroic escape. So we'll probably keep talking about how one does this and why now is a time for it. But I just wanted to introduce kind of set up this set up the issue and lay out the contours of this particular type of solution. So we'll talk about this more in future episodes for sure. But in the meantime, for now, put down the skibbity toilet video and without distraction, watch this 1998 classic because I think it captures a lot of what's going on now and a lot of what we actually probably need to do. Here we're going to get another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, as you may or may not know, I get a little obsessive about Halloween displays. It's the type of a niche hobby that requires you sometimes to reach out to some small operations to get these sort of random parts that I need to make my visions real. And I have to tell you, it can be frustrating in these situations when I'm faced with some sort of weird voicemail message or a phone that just keeps ringing and no one picks it up. These kind of misconnections happen all the time when a team's phone set up is messy. This is why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. With Quo, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and respond fast. Quo integrates with the tools your team already uses like HubSpot, Zapier Cloud, and more, helping you save time, say, organize and spend less time chasing information between systems. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com/deep. That's q-u-o.com/deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Cozy Earth. Fall is here. And with it, nice, cool nights, perfect for getting comfortable after long days spent building complicated Halloween displays. That's why I'm excited about Cozy Earth's bamboo stretch knit pajama set. Longtime listeners know my family. is a major fans of cozy Earth, especially their sheets, which we love so much that we travel with them, which is why you shouldn't be surprised to hear that we're loving these pajama sets as well, as you'd expect from cozy Earth. They're cozy yet breathable, perfect for watching a movie on the couch or sleeping in on a chilly fall morning. They also are great at regulating your body temperature so you're comfortable, but not overheated. 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The first are non-AI related and then the second half will be, I'm going to do a sort of lightning round of questions and comments on some of my recent AI writing because I know a lot of you have been following my sort of reluctant engagement in the AI discourse of the current moment. All right, so let's start with some non-AI related comments and feedback. All right, Mika wrote and said, I'm currently reading a condensed history and philosophy. This made me realize how much philosophers have thought about thinking and its limits. Today I was wrestling with the depiction of Emanuel Kant's critique of pure reason and wondered whether you will address these developments and thinking about thinking and your upcoming book about thinking. There's a lot of uses of the word thinking, I think. See what I did there. Okay, first of all, let me clarify because I've got to write a lot of books. What's Mika talking about? Well, I have an upcoming book in March called The Deep Life, which I'll talk about more soon. What Mika's talking about is I have an idea for the next book I'm going to write, but I'm just researching this now. I haven't sold it, I haven't started working on it. The next book I'm going to write in theory is going to be about thinking itself. A working title is in defense of thinking. So Mika is saying there is a period of philosophy where a lot of philosophers thought about thinking like Kant and critique of pure reason, which is I've actually never read that in its entirety, but I know about some of its ideas in there and he's trying to figure out the difference of pure reason. He's trying to think about a priori would do call it reasoning, like the ability to form thoughts not based on external observation, but just sort of internally and it's a long book. But interesting one. So here's the thing Mika, that whole period where you had a lot of philosophers thinking about the mind, a period we could start with like Descartes. We'll start with Descartes, I think, therefore I am. And through the 18th century philosophers, we got Kant, you get Heidegger, et cetera. They were sort of overshadowed in the 20th century once we got psychology neuroscience and cognitive science. Like once we actually started studying the brain itself, we stopped thinking about cognition in the sort of abstract philosophical sense and started thinking about it more as like an actual human activity that could be measured, modeled, and bounded. So we don't refer to this, these type of analyses as much it seems anymore when we think about thinking. So probably I won't talk a lot about that in my book, but I don't know, I'm still early. So maybe I will. All right, we have a note here from Anonymous. He says, "With regards to your September 7th episode about your 2026 fall productivity system, could you speak to the difference between your strategic plan and your vision document please, or are they the same thing?" I had the impression from past podcasts and articles that your strategic seasonal plans tend to be quite lengthy, whereas this vision document seemed to be very simple and reduced. Okay, so it's a good question. These are different words for more or less the same thing, and I just want to give a caveat though, right? So seasonal plan, you could also call it quarterly plan, you could call it a semester plan, you can call it a vision document. And it's just sort of your summary of like, what am I up to for this relatively long period of time, or you know, typically two to four months type of thing. And it's something you can reference when you do your plan and you're weekly planning each week to kind of remember, like what are your major goals? What habits or practices are you following, what metrics are you tracking, you know, you have that written down somewhere. What systems are you running this day organized? It's a root for all the other things that you were doing. For the fall system I described in that September document, let me just write this down here. The document, the vision document, is terse on purpose because it's a sabbatical fall and I was trying to start with a very lightweight system. So this is the same thing. I call it a vision document episode because I was keeping it pretty compact, but it's the same thing as a quarterly plan or seasonal plan. The exception, the caveat I want to put out here is that I often will have strategic plans for parts of my life in separate documents because they're kind of lengthy. And I will reference them from whatever that core, seasonal, or vision document is. All right, so for example, I might have a strategic plan I often do for like what I'm doing in the different professional pursuits I have because I guess kind of complicated. Like what's happening with my podcast, with my writing, with like my AI commentary, and I'll often reference that from the root document. So I'll have a pull out of my big strategic plan for like my professional life. I might pull out like, hey, this fall, remember I'm working on these things, and then I'll have a pointer, but look at the strategic plan document for more details. And I want to certainly read that all the time, but for sure I'll read the strategic plan in detail when I'm updating my semester quarterly plan. And I'll often translate the core things from there, the big strategic plan onto that sort of more time limited plan. But again, do what makes sense for you. The thing to me that's important is you need some sort of root document that's like, here's what I'm up to for the next few months. Here's the systems I'm using. Here's the habits I'm trying to follow. You need a root thing from which all of the other life organizations you do follow. So I point to complicated strategic plans out of that. You don't have to do that if your job is simpler or doesn't need that type of planning, but you do need some sort of root document that covers like the current quarter season or semester that is at the core and everything else you do is described or can be linked to from that primary document. All right, we got a note here from Amanda. Amanda said, "I just went on Amazon to revisit some of your other books. It was excited to see that the deep life is already available for pre-order. My birthday is March 6th, and slow productivity and deep life had both been released right around then. So it's a fun birthday treat to have a new one of your books released. The deep life pre-ordered check." (clears throat) Well, thank you, Amanda. It is true. The cover is up on Amazon. It's a cool cover. We spend a lot of time trying to capture something very specific with that cover. I'm very happy with it. That's kind of it. Even the copy that's on the Amazon page, the description of the book is placeholder. I'm still actually working on what the formal copy is going to be. So if you want to know where I am in the process of that book, which comes out in March, as you're hearing this recording, I'm finalizing what's known as the past pages. That's where you get in PDF format. The actual book laid out exactly how it's going to be laid out when it's printed. So every page looking exactly how it's going to look when it's printed. And it's the final check you do after all of the production process, you're not like copying it at this point. We've done many rounds of that. But you're looking for things like as a headings misformatted like, ooh, that's supposed to be a bigger heading because it actually matches that level and not that level. Or is there like a mistake in a running header or something? So it's your final check of like, what is the book going to look like page by page? So we're really close to like having it locked in. And then I'll update all the copy. Then we go looking for the blurbs. So that's happened soon. And that all gets added to the cover and to the Amazon page. Then we're ready to print. So if you just want to view and how the publishing process works, that's where we are and that's what's coming up. If you do preorder the book now, excuse me, hold on to your receipt email because I am going to have a very cool preorder offer for my listeners. But the side of that just try to do one thing that's awesome. This is my two criteria. So I want a preorder giveaway. It's just awesome, not like a bunch of little things, but just an awesome thing. And it's something that lets you get into the ideas of the book right away, even while you're waiting for it to come out. So Amanda or any else your preorders now. Just hold on to your receipt from wherever you bought it from in your email. And otherwise, I'll talk more about this book as we sort of finalize these final elements of production. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about AI. I feel like I have to take a sip of coffee here. A lot's happened in the world of AI. I'm reluctantly commenting on it. I wrote a bunch of articles. I've been recording a lot of podcasts. I have kind of been reigned into this discussion in a way that's not always my favorite. As I talked about in yes last week's episode, I'm all about how to human flourishing in technological world. I care about the human, and so when it comes to AI, I'm much more interested, like we talked about. Last week, AI's impact on the humans, not AI's impact on humanity. So all these sort of discussions of existential fear and government regulation. But I have some expertise I can communicate so I'm somewhat involved in that story. So I published some articles on my newsletter about at calnewport.com, including recently one that was called Super Intelligence is a fairytale, but chasing it can still cause harm. Actually, I can even load this up, put this on the screen here. This covered a lot of my views about Jacob Croxton coming out and saying, "A.I. is going to kill us all," and then several senior anthropic employees replying and saying, "Yeah, I think it will. "I think it might kill us all," which is crazy bonkers. So I wrote this article. It had three points, which I'll read, and then we're going to rapid fire comments and reactions to this piece. The first point I made is anthropic and open AI are not able to create super intelligent AI. I just don't think that's continuing to reinforcement train at a limb. This is not going to lead to hell, 9,000. Point two, but their obsession with super intelligence can still create harm. So I'm arguing that because they think that's on the table, they're being more reckless and that's creating real harms. And point three is AI progress does not have to be this scary or dangerous. So my final point is those companies are being irresponsible in a specific way that actually, we could have a thriving, exciting, interesting AI industry without all this doom, existential fear, weirdness that they've been spitting at us for multiple years. I'm trying to emphasize this is not inevitable side-effective of AI or facing. It's in part very specific to the way that these two particular companies are pursuing AI. All right, so that was one of multiple things I wrote, but it got a lot of reactions. So I want to just rapid fire go through some notes from you, the reader. All right, so Madison said, what should we be doing practically to call for this sort of reform? Is it not just boycott in open AI anthropic? Are there ults we know or acting responsibly as a small business executive who has our team on cloud? I am suddenly feeling conflicted. I think the first thing that needs to happen here is public transparency. We're talking about things like how should we regulate AI, how do we get involved, how do we push back? And the problem is, is where's a huge fog of lack of knowledge? We don't understand really what they're talking about, right? A lot of the communication coming out of these companies is this very stylized abstract, rationalist, effective altruist, style, non-technical discussion points about superintelligent AI. I mean, you have like exact terminologies from someone like Jacob Croxon, that you can find specifically in like Elias Yukowski riding, a crunch time for humanity, models increasingly, just like some vague notion of a model is evading our control and improving. And so it's very vague. It's very vague because it tends to be in the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism, which have a relatively non-technical often engagement with these issues. So they speak in terms of like thought experiments or high level concepts. And we need to really understand what's going on. What AI is threatening humanity? What specific system are you working on now that you think will do that? Why are you working on it? Is there no way to stop? Why can't you stop that? We need to get more concrete about what exactly they're saying. We also need to then counterbalance everything that comes out of the figures that I identified in my New Yorker article, or my New York Times op-ed rather, from a few weeks ago, identified, Altman, Amade, Musk, Jimisosabi, among others, has been particularly connected to these future as ideologies like rationalism and effective altruism. And it's really influencing the way their companies think and talk. As we saw when employees of Anthropic, for example, started tweeting in exactly the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism. So we need to counterbalance all those explanations, with explanations from other highly advanced AI companies that aren't as connected to those same ideologies and make sure that we balance those two things off of each other. We want to hear you out, but we want to hear what the other guy has to say as well. And let's compare these things together. So I think we need to understand more what is actually going on. We need to leave these vague sci-fi narrative tropes and talk concrete about technology. So we need to understand what's going on and why can't it be prevented? Why is it not? Before we figure out how to act. So we need transparency before we need action. Peter says, in your recommendations for responsible AI companies to use, again, we need to find out more. But in particular, open AI and Anthropic and DeepMind, the DeepMind have been sort of disbanded. Those three companies in particular come very strongly out of these futurist ideologies like rationalism and effective altruism. So be wary of them. It's not for nothing that when Jensen went from the video, an old-school hardware company that has very little connection to futurist ideologies. What was his reaction to the Anthropic claims about we're probably going to kill everyone? He said, they're, quote, outlandish. Interesting. Massive AI figures that are not connected to these futurist ideologies, they see things a little bit differently. All right, let's see what Nick said. Please keep dropping truth bombs on this LLMBS as I genuinely think the world needs it. Thanks, Nick. I hate it. I really don't want to be involved in these discussions. I deal with humans. I don't deal with threats to humanity. But Salavie, it's what I'm doing right now. Andreas says, thanks for interesting newsletter. Do you have book recommendations on the ideology behind AI employees, zoning their AI God or Messiah? I do, indeed. You should read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever. I actually just did a podcast appearance with Adam on Ed Zittron's podcast. It came out last week. And I edit asked me to come on and to talk about rationalism, effective altruism, because I'd written a New York Times op ed about it. And I said, oh, you got to have Adam on as well. And Adam, because he spent years researching this book, he talked to a lot of the main figures, including Elie Azucowski. He's read so much of what they've written. And he walks through the history of these movements, what they believe where they came from, and there we talk about their intersection with some of these existing AI companies. So at the very least, listen to that conversation, me and Adam with Ed Zittron. Read My New York Times Op Ed about rationalism for a few weeks ago. If you have more time, read Adam Becker's book. All right, finally, Ian says, one thing I'm surprised you're not mentioning on this is the regulatory capture angle. I think a very real element is that the more anthropic and convince everyone they have a nuclear bomb, the more they think they can convince the US government to regulate AI, the way they want, which means stepping on competition and preventing progress and open-weight models. You know, I hear this a lot because it's rational, ironic because rationalism is very influential on these companies. It's rational that they might be doing that. I think that theory is going around often. And I get why that's a popular theory. There's another theory going around that Dario Amade's letter that was calling for a global pause is angling for an antitrust waiver so that they can cooperate more with, say, open AI. Maybe they're seeing, you know, at some point we need to kind of merge more and this is the first step towards it. So there's all these economic rational arguments that might be true, but the more I look into this, the more I become convinced they're true believers. They're true believers. I'm telling you a big thread of the story that's going on right now and we look back years in the future is going to be the influence of these ideologies, these futures ideologies like rationalism, effective altruism, on figures like Dario Amade, Sam Altman and many other high-level executives at those firms creating a culture that percolates down through their employees. They talk in the terms of these futurist movements. These futurist movements have been convinced since well before LLMs were a big deal. They've been convinced for decades that super intelligent AI is going to come and is to end it through recursive self-improvement and it's going to be the end of history. And if we can separate it properly, it will redeem history. And if we can't it will destroy the earth. It's very eschatological. I think that's how Dario Amade sees himself. I have to shepherd the benevolent digital God. Otherwise, we'll end up with Elias Yukowski's Satanic digital God that will kill us all. But they're convinced that a course is going to happen and that's why you see all this precision about extinction that comes right out of rationalism. The exact ways they describe is going to happen. They're kind of like high level. It's a recursive self-improvement. The way they talk about models being aligned but not specific products or system architectures causing trouble. This all comes out of the futurism methodology. So maybe this is an economic play. I think they're actually true believers. Don't underestimate the power of an ideology that tells you that you are the hero of the world. Your Neo and John Connor from the Terminator movie mixed with Moses. Don't underestimate the power of that story. It's more compelling to people than I want to keep my open weight competitors down. So my stock is going to be worth a little bit more. I really think there's probably a true believer type of situation going on, which is why I tell people always, always, always try to counter program what you're hearing from those companies with people from academics, fear, other companies or other countries that aren't as connected to the Silicon Valley futurist method ideologies. and you hear really different things from them. Also, stay off x. X has become, it's just, engagement farming, rationalist EA, doomerism. And the problem is, we're in a new media world, and a new media, people become, we know this, so driven by X, and that's where they get their story ideas, and that's how they get their clicks. And so we have all of these new media news operations that are just in substackers and stuff that are just all in on the EA rationalist, doomerism, because that's what's really big on X, and that's sort of their epistemic reality. And I think it shouldn't be. All right, enough AI. I like to finish up my Monday releases, by summarizing what I'm up to. Jesse's still no Jesse, but he will be back soon. We do miss him. I thought about bringing Jesse Skeleton back, but you know why I don't, let me be honest about this. Why am I not bringing back Jesse Skeleton even though Jesse's not here, and it's not, I mean, it would make sense, getting closer to Halloween, because to do Jesse Skeleton, I have to have a skeleton in the studio, which means I have to carry a skeleton from my house to the studio, and I gotta tell you, the people in this town I live already are like, why is this professor, furious air quotes? Always walking around in gym shorts. Doesn't have a job. He's always kind of in and out of the coffee shop, and because my office is down the street from the coffee shop, they see me carrying a skeleton down the street, to like, he must just have like inherited money. He doesn't really have a real job, does he? It's just a bridge too far. So I didn't bring to Skeleton, but we are looking forward to Jesse being back. As mentioned, I've been doing a ton on AI, whether I want to or not. So keep an eye on my newsletter at kelnewport.com. Listen to that interview with Becker and Zittron. You could read my New York Times Up Ed from a couple of weeks ago, about rationalism, effective altruism. It really tried to capture those connections there. There's a Good New Yorker column by Josh Rothman that like, summarizes my view about the systems that cause trouble over the summer, and contrast it to the way Dorkers Patel talks about it. So if you kind of want to get into my technical world, check that out as well. But I think I'm going to otherwise leave it there. Maybe I'll have another episode this week, maybe I'll have another AI episode. I always do one episode each week, and then I try to have one or two other ones when I can. So we'll see how this week goes. But I'm getting so drowned doing interviews and phone calls and writing with AI, just don't have the time, even the record, the podcast episodes. But we'll be back to multi-episode week soon, but I should probably call it quits for today. So we'll see you next time. And until then, as always, stay deep.