The Truth About Brain Rot

Defining modern brain rot

0:00I 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. Let me give you an example here. This is a clip of a category of brain rot known as Skibbity Toilet. Let's play that.

0:37All 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 in Italian. It is of what is known as Trippi Troppi. Let's look at that.

0:56I can tell you right now, MIT is really proud about having given me a doctorate after watching me present Trippi Troppi and Skibbity Toilet to the public. But 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.

1:28Well, 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 Heitmeyer. 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 is actually an answer that is way more significant than I would have thought, an answer that has implications for all of us.

2:03So 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. And 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, and 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.

2:43And 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 skibbity toilet.

2:59All right, that's the stuff. Let's go.

The New York Times op-ed

3:05All right, so let's start by looking at this New York Times op-ed that I talked about before. I'll put it on the screen here for people who happen to be watching instead of just listening. All right, so as I mentioned, the article was 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.

3:38This 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 these 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 correspondents that they talk about who said the following.

4:08If 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. The joke is that there is no doubt.

4:53The meaning is that there is no meaning. And for a generation that grew up with its every digital interaction tracked, 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 enmeshed in this world of digital attention economy distraction that the ultimate rebellion is to basically make themselves boring.

5:35I'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, and they feel like they have a parasocial relationship and that they're part of a big discussion when they're really being exploited. We're not going to be exploited. And the way we're going to show that is by looking at the stupidest possible content, right? 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, yuppie, suburban capitalism that was happening in our culture is that they tuned out.

6:10They 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. All right? 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 into thinking that your fake artificial digital universe is somehow real. I'm going to watch Skibbity Toilet. So it's a rejection in some sense. It's da-da. It's do shop in the fountain installation. But here's the key addendum to this observation.

6:43So 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. 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.

7:32But 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.

8:03This is really important. I think this is really important, right? 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 art, this digital da-da to try to react to it by watching Skibbity Toilet and Trippi Trappi. But it doesn't mean the rest of us aren't also trapped in the same world.

8:35They'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 into 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 we are all now trapped, and they're putting a sort of despair, a performative despair around that reality.

Sponsor break

9:25Let'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 Ice Tea. Now, this has two advantages over coffee. First, caffeine in tea works differently than in coffee.

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12:07I can only imagine how easy it's making theirs. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash deep and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash deep. One more time, gusto.com slash deep. All right, let's get back to the show. But can we escape this nihilism? Or is Gen Z 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.

12:48I rewatched it with my kids and I realized it has a lot to tell us about the current moment that the brain rot 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?

The Truman Show metaphor

13:09I'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 was a lot of big movies around the 90s, but it 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.

13:44All 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 kind of perfect, polished neighborhood. A little movie trivia, they actually film The Truman Show in a real planned 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.

14:17So this town is fake. The surrounding landscape is fake. The roof, the ceiling is fake. The water that surrounds it is fake. It's 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 he's 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 being filmed everywhere and doesn't realize it.

14:49They 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 being 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. Does this 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.

15:30Everything 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 it's it's we are 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 that why do we want to go anywhere? Right. The world pacifies us. We are monetized. Right. So the setup for the Truman Show.

16:03Is not a bad metaphor for our current setup. OK, 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. He picks it up and it has like the name of a star from a constellation on it.

16:33Like this spotlight is assigned to being one of the stars up on the top of the dome. Right. That makes him 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 he jumps out of it and it moves to follow him. It jumps out of it. 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.

17:05He 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 just artificial. Something's not right about this 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. He's trying to drive across a bridge.

17:36And 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 pression about our current moment because those attempts of him as he kind of realizes this isn't real. There's something artificial, right?

18:07I'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 mediating 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 foiled.

18:37Those 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.

19:08So if the movie ended there, obviously it would 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,

19:41which 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 that 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.

20:14The 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.

20:51And it's painted to 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.

21:23This 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 to fear. I know you better than you know yourself.

21:49Sound 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. It's talking to people. It's rejection. It's like discomfort. It's happening in the Truman Show. What Truman says, he says, You never had a camera in my head.

22:13Right? You're afraid. That's why you can't leave, says the producer trying to stop him. You can't leave, Truman. You belong here with me.

22:25Truman 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 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.

The Truman option for escape

23:04Last time we see him in the movie. In there, I see a solution to our current digital moment.

23:15Kerry left. 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 are 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.

23:45Oh, yeah. Of course, you should just, like, use your phones 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 saying, no, but 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.

24:19It's an act of heroism. That's what they are capturing. And I think that's really important that we, we reconceive 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.

24:49Hard is good. Hard, 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, and feel like you're drowning and you're going to have 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?

25:21You 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 to untangle from those.

25:52We 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 do in the Truman Show is also easy to describe. Get in the boat and go. The description of the actions 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.

26:33All right, so that's what I'm calling the Truman option is you step away from having your life once and for all so entangled in the world of digital artificiality. You are not an object to be monetized for the bank account of a small corporation, of a small number of people at a big corporation. You want to go live a real life in the real world with all the stuff that producer Warren Truman would be 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.

27:06So I like that way of conceiving it. So basically, put this all together, brain rot content, that phenomenon of Gen Z, is a cry for help. It's a way of saying that the generation that grew up in the world that we all live in is like, we're playing the prison harmonica here. This is – we know what's going on, and this is nihilistic. This is sad. The Truman option is the way we have to think about escaping. 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.

27:48Now, clearly, there's a lot more to unpack here about this idea of the Truman option, this urge towards a heroic escape. So we'll probably keep talking about how one does this and why now is the time for it. But I just wanted to introduce, kind of set up 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.

Second sponsor break

28:24We're going to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, as you may or may not know, I get a little obsessive about Halloween displays. It's the type of 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.

28:56These kind of misconnections happen all the time when a team's phone setup 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, stay organized, and spend less time chasing information between systems.

29:28Money 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 slash deep. That's Q-U-O dot com slash 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. Long-time listeners know my family is a major fan 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.

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Monday office hours

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

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

32:03What's Mika talking about? Well, I have an upcoming book in March called The Deep Life, which I'll talk about more soon.

32:12What Mika is talking about is I have an idea for the next book I'm going to write, but I have – I'm just researching this now. I haven't sold it. I haven't started working on it. The next book I'm going to write in theory is going to be about thinking itself. The working title is In Defense of Thinking. So Mika is saying there is a period of philosophy where a lot of philosophers thought about thinking, like Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, which is – I've actually never read that in its entirety, but I know about some of its ideas in there. And he's trying to figure out the difference, pure reason.

32:43He's trying to think about a priori, what do you call it, reasoning, like the ability to form thoughts not based on external observation but just sort of internally. And, you know, it's a long book but interesting one. So here's the thing, Mika. That whole period where you had a lot of philosophers thinking about the mind, a period we could start with like Descartes. You know, we'll start with Descartes, I think, therefore I am. And through the 18th century philosophers, you know, we got Kant, you got Heidegger, et cetera.

33:15They were sort of overshadowed in the 20th century once we got psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. So like once we actually started studying the brain itself, we stopped thinking about cognition in the sort of abstract philosophical sense and started thinking about it more as like an actual human activity that could be measured, modeled, and bounded. So we don't refer to 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.

33:47All right. We have a note here from Anonymous.

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

34:24So seasonal plan, you could also call a 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 planning, your weekly planning each week to kind of remember, like, what are your major goals? What habits or practices are you following? What metrics are you tracking? You know, you have that written down somewhere. What systems are you running to stay organized?

34:56It's a route for all the other things that you are doing. For the fall system I described in that September document, let me just write this down here, the document, the vision document is terse on purpose because it's sabbatical fall and I was trying to start with a very lightweight system. So this is the same thing. I call it a vision document in that episode because I was keeping it pretty compact. But it's the same thing as a quarterly plan or a seasonal plan.

35:27The 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, like, it's kind of complicated. Like, what's happening with my podcast, with my writing, with, like, my AI commentary?

35:57And I'll often reference that from the root document. So I'll have – I'll pull out of my big strategic plan for, like, my professional life. I might pull out, like, hey, this fall, remember I'm working on these things, and then I'll point – have a pointer, but look at the strategic plan document for more details. And I won't necessarily read that all the time, but for sure I'll read the strategic plan in detail when I'm updating my semester or quarterly plan. And I'll often, like, translate the core things from there, the big strategic plan, onto that sort of more time-limited plan.

36:30But, 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.

37:04All right, we got a note here from Amanda. Amanda said, I just went on Amazon to revisit some of your other books and was excited to see that The Deep Life is already available for pre-order. My birthday is March 6th, and Slow Productivity and Deep Life have both been released right around then, so it's a fun birthday treat to have a new one of your books released. The Deep Life pre-ordered, check. Well, thank you, Amanda. It is true. The cover is up on Amazon. It's a cool cover. We spent a lot of time trying to capture something very specific with that cover.

37:35I'm very happy with it. That's kind of it. Even the copy that's on the Amazon page, the description of the book, is a placeholder. I'm still actually working on what the formal copy is going to be. So if you want to know where I am in the process of that book, which comes out in March, as you're hearing this recording, I'm finalizing what's known as the past pages, and that's where you get in PDF format the actual book laid out exactly how it's going to be laid out when it's printed. So every page looking exactly how it's going to look when it's printed, and it's the final check you do after all of the production process.

38:08You're not, like, copyediting at this point. We've done many rounds of that, but you're looking for things like is 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 that locked in. Then I'll update all the copy, and then we go looking for the blurbs. Yes, so that happens soon, and that all gets added to the cover and to the Amazon page.

38:41Then we're ready to print. So if you just want to view into how the publishing process works, that's where we are, and that's what's coming up. If you do preorder the book now, hold on to your receipt email because I am going to have a very cool preorder offer for my listeners. I've decided to just try to do one thing that's awesome, right? This is my two criterias. I want a preorder giveaway that's just awesome, like a bunch of little things, but just an awesome thing,

39:11and it's something that lets you get into the ideas of the book right away even while you're waiting for it to come out. So Amanda or anyone else who preorders now, just hold on to your receipt from, you know, 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.

Discussing artificial intelligence

39:29All 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 reined into this discussion in a way that's not always my favorite. As I talked about in last week's episode, I'm all about how do human flourish in a technological world. I care about the human. And so when it comes to AI, I'm much more interested, like we talked about last week, AI's impact on the humans, not AI's impact on humanity.

40:04So 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 it, calnewport.com, including recently one that was called Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale, but Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm. Actually, I can even load this up. I'll put this on the screen here. However, this covered a lot of my views about Jacob Croxson coming out and saying AI is going to kill us all, and then several senior Anthropic employees replying and saying, yeah, I think it will.

40:42I 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 do rapid fire comments and reactions to this piece. The first point I made is Anthropic and OpenAI are not able to create superintelligent AI.

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

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

42:09As a small business executive who has our team on Claude, 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 we're 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 like very stylized, abstract,

42:42rationalist, effective, altruist style, non-technical discussion points about superintelligent AI. I mean, you have like exact terminologies from someone like Jacob Croxson that you can find specifically in like Elias Joukowsky writing, a crunch time for humanity.

42:58Models increasingly, just like some vague notion of a model is evading our control and improving. And so it's very vague. It's very vague because it tends to be in the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism, which have a relatively non-technical often engagement with these issues. So they speak in terms of like thought experiments or high level concepts. So we need to really understand what's going on. What AI is threatening humanity? What specific system are you working on now that you think will do that? Why are you working on it?

43:29Is 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, you know, Altman, Amadei, Musk, Jimas Asabi, among others, has been particularly connected to these futurist ideologies like rationalism and effective altruism and is really influencing

44:00the way their companies think and talk. As we saw when employees of Anthropic, for example, started tweeting in exactly the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism. So we need to counterbalance all those explanations with explanations from other highly advanced AI companies that aren't as connected to the same ideologies and make sure that we balance those two things off of each other. 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.

44:30We need to leave these vague sci-fi narrative tropes and talk concrete about technology. So we need to understand what's going on and why. Can it be prevented? Why is it not? Before we figure out how to act. So we need transparency before we need action. All right. Peter says, any recommendations for responsible AI companies to use? Again, we need to find out more. But in particular, OpenAI and Anthropic and DeepMind, the DeepMind have been sort of disbanded. Those three companies in particular come very strongly out of these futurist ideologies

45:04like rationalism and effective altruism. So be wary of them. It's not for nothing that when Jensen Wong from Navidia, 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? Um, 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.

45:35Please 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. Uh, I want, I, I deal with humans. I don't deal with threats to humanity, but c'est la vie. It's what I'm doing right now. Andreas says, makes your interesting newsletter. Do you have book recommendations on the ideology behind AI employees summoning their AI God or Messiah? I do indeed. You should read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever. I actually just did a, uh, a podcast appearance with Adam on Ed Zitron's podcast.

46:07It came out last week. Um, and I, Ed had asked me to come on and to talk about rationalism and effective altruism because I'd written a New York Times op-ed about it. 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 Elias Yukowski. He's read so much of what they've written. And he walks through the history of these movements, what they believe, where they came from. And 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 Zitron.

46:38Read my New York Times op-ed, uh, about rationalism from a few weeks ago. If you have more time, read Adam Becker's book. All right. Finally, Ian says, one thing I'm surprised you're not mentioning on this is the regulatory capture angle. I think a very real element is that the more Anthropik can convince everyone they have a nuclear bomb, the more they think they can convince the U.S. government to regulate AI the way they want, which means stepping on competition and preventing progress in open weight models. Um, you know, I hear this a lot because it's rational.

47:08Ironic because rationalism is very influential on these companies. Uh, it's rational that they might be doing that. I think that theory is going around often and I get why that's a popular theory. There's another theory going around that Dario Amadei's letter that was calling for a global pause is angling for an antitrust waiver so 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.

47:44They're true believers. I'm telling you, a big thread of the story that's going on right now when we look back years in the future is going to be the influence of these ideologies, these futurist ideologies like rationalism, effective altruism on figures like Dario Amadei, Sam Altman, and many other high-level executives at those firms creating a culture that percolates down through their employees. They talk in the terms of these futurist movements. These futurist movements have been convinced since well before LLMs were a big deal.

48:15They've been convinced for decades that superintelligent AI is going to come and is the end of, through recursive self-improvement, and it's going to be the end of history. And if we can shepherd it properly, it will redeem history. And if we can't, it will destroy the earth. It's very eschatological. I think that's how Dario Amadei sees himself. I have to shepherd the benevolent digital god. Otherwise, we'll end up with Elias Joukowsky's satanic digital god that will kill us all. But they're convinced that, of course, this is going to happen.

48:47And that's why you see all this precision about extinction that comes right out of rationalism. The exact ways they describe it's going to happen, they're kind of like high-level. It's a recursive self-improvement. The way they talk about models being aligned but not specific products or system architectures causing trouble, this all comes out of the futurism methodology. So maybe this is an economic play. I think they're actually true believers. Don't underestimate the power of an ideology that tells you that you are the hero of the world.

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

49:55And 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 in new media, people become, we know this, so driven by X, and that's where they get their story ideas, and that's how they get their clicks. And so we have all of these new media news operations that are just in sub-stackers and stuff that are just all in on the EA rationalist doomerism because that's what's really big on X, and that's sort of their epistemic reality.

50:28And I think it shouldn't be. All right.

Closing thoughts

50:29Enough AI. I like to finish up my Monday releases by summarizing what I'm up to. Jesse, you still know Jesse, but he will be back soon. We do miss him. I thought about bringing Jesse's skeleton back, but you know why I don't? Let me be honest about this. Why am I not bringing back Jesse's skeleton even though Jesse's not here, and it's not, I mean, it would make sense getting closer to Halloween.

50:52Because to do Jesse's skeleton, I have to have a skeleton in the studio, which means I have to carry a skeleton from my house to the studio. And I got to tell you, the people in this town I live already are like, why is this professor, furious air quotes, always walking around in gym shorts? Doesn't he have a job? He's always kind of in and out of the coffee shop because my office is down the street from the coffee shop. They see me carrying a skeleton down the street. They're like, he must just have like inherited money. He doesn't really have a real job, does he? It's just a bridge too far. So I didn't bring the skeleton, but we are looking forward to Jesse being back.

51:25As mentioned, I've been doing a ton on AI, whether I want to or not. So keep an eye on my newsletter at calnewport.com. Listen to that interview with Becker and Zitron. You can read my New York Times up ad from a couple weeks ago about rationalism, effective altruism. 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 Dorkish Patel talks about it.

51:55So if you kind of want to get into my technical world, check that out as well. But I think I'm going to otherwise leave it there. Maybe I'll have another episode this week. Maybe I'll have another AI episode. You know, I always do one episode each week, and then I try to have one or two other ones when I can. So we'll see how this week goes. But I'm getting so drowned doing, you know, interviews and phone calls and writing with AI. I just don't have the time even to record the podcast episodes. But we'll be back to multi-week, multi-episode week soon. But I should probably call it quits for today. So we'll see you next time.

52:26And until then, as always, stay deep.