200 Podcasts

It takes ten years to become an “overnight” success. It also takes 100 episodes to become a “professional” podcaster.

The metrics are brutal:

78% to 92% of podcasts fail to make it past their first seven to ten episodes. By episode 3: Roughly 44% to 90% of all shows are abandoned. By Episode 7 to 8: Around 78% of podcasts stop publishing entirely. By Episode 10: Only about 8% to 22% of podcasts are still active.

These stats are from an AI search on Google, but that doesn’t mean the stats are wrong.

The fact is that while there may be around 8 million or so shows on the Internet calling themselves podcasts, the number that make it to the top of the popularity mountain that you’ve heard of is infinitesimally small. And that’s even before we get to the Rogans, the “Call Me Daddy” -ies, and the podcasts hosted by ex-Presidents.

This week, I dropped a panel discussion with the help of my podcast guest hosts, friends all, discussing the state of affairs for leaders in the post-literate world we are all about to inhabit in the West. It was a lively and wide-ranging discussion and, while we all didn’t agree on the conclusions, the conversation itself was the juice. Without gaslighting, strawman arguments, or social media flame-warring.

Imagine that. Twelve adults having a conversation without vitriol or personal attacks. I’m telling you, it can be done.

But even more so, the medium of podcasting allows for the space to do this. Outside of the marketing and corporate shows brought to you so long ago by NPR and its ilk, and now with a zone flooded by marketers and brands, the space of podcasting stands as the lone bulwark against the tide of polarization and seeing people, not as people, but as mere avatars that dance and move across the stage, signifying nothing more than a canvas for us to work out our psychological traumas on. Podcasting, podcasters, and the entire idea of podcast creation contains worlds that have a need to be explored.

Writing, recording, producing, and distributing two hundred regular episodes (in addition to another two hundred and fifty bonus episodes) has taught me many things. Chief among them is perspective. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books is a podcast designed for the leader who is a reader. And it’s designed for the leader who isn’t a reader but has the curiosity to know that there are ideas hidden in books that they may not know about. And it’s designed for the leader who is afraid of reading and just wants to dip their toes into the water a little bit at a time, with a host and a series of rotating co-hosts who won’t disrespect their intellect, insult their intelligence, and converse with about challenging ideas like the adults we know we all are.

And all of that inside an hour-and-a-half to two-hour-long conversation.

Very few people have the perseverance, self-control, discipline, or desire to do two hundred of anything. Particularly where it’s hard to get paid, the expense of time and attention is high, and the accolades are few and far between. The writer and gadfly Wendell Berry, who just died, would understand, though. And he’s one of the many authors we’ll be bringing to our listeners in the future.

I’ll close with these five lessons I’ve gleaned from the last 200+ conversations I’ve had and books I’ve read with people I respect deeply:

Reading is fundamental.

Leaders are readers.

Books are the best technology humans have invented for smuggling ideas across time to each other.

The novel might be on its last legs, but books are not.

And we all owe it to the future to remember that literacy, like freedom itself, is only ever one generation away from being snuffed out.

Thanks to the following guests for their contributions, insights, and sparring over the last three and a half years. In podcasting as in jiu-jitsu, you’re only as good as your training partners:

David Baumrucker, John Hill, Christen B. Horne, Richard Messing, Dorollo Nixon, Jr., Brian Bagley, Hana Kabele Gala, Moumin Quazi, Neal Kalechofsky, Zac Stucki, Tom Libby, Claire Chandler, Ryan J. Stout, Josh Poland, Atlas Aultman, Katie Mestres, Libby Unger, and Harvey Seifter.

…and all of the various authors, thinkers, consultants, educators, and more who have joined me over the last two hundred-plus bonus episodes.

Excelsior!

[Listen to the 200th episode by clicking on the link here.]

Clowns in Cars on the Information Superhighway

The act of driving our cars, in the real world, whether in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, or anywhere else, is a collaborative act. Whether we are driving in straight lines, on curved roads, or even negotiating roundabouts. Which, before I go much further, are not my personal favorite.

But I digress.

The infrastructure of roads is simple, from the paving to the stoplights to the sidewalks for pedestrians. The problems really come with the cars and other vehicles on the road. And, of course, the drivers. Every driver in every vehicle is doing their own thing: Some are driving attentively. Some are distracted by their phones, or the radio, or the conversations with other passengers in the vehicle. And some are driving angry. In a rage about a circumstance that happened before they decided to pilot a 2,000 + pound vehicle collaboratively on the road with other people.

Why am I building up talking about driving, the roads, and vehicles?

Well, because on the Internet, what we used to euphemistically call the Information Superhighway, we have drivers with vehicles. Their vehicles might be social media accounts, email accounts, business accounts, blogs, or other services, but the users are driving their vehicles with a variety of mindsets, attitudes, and approaches. And while it is appropriate to urge people to behave better and drive their vehicles more conscientiously, the fact of the matter is that there are many cars on the information superhighway that are full of clowns.

Those of us who aren’t clowns shouldn’t be surprised when we get into a fender-bender on the Information Superhighway with one of these clown cars, which are usually garishly outfitted, and that when we angrily jerk open the door, clowns inevitably fall out.

Clowns aren’t ever there to help another person.

They may be there to entertain, to gaslight, to troll, or to creep an observer out, but they aren’t there to help. And, as humanity approaches fifty years of this glorious communication infrastructure known as the Internet, people would do well to modify their expectations of clowns' behaviors. And get better at spotting–and avoiding–both the clown cars and the wrecks they create.

The Tone Police

The communication patterns between people in real life have gradually come to resemble more and more the ways in which we communicate online, mostly via social media platforms. From ghosting behavior all the way to trolling, people are transforming themselves to resemble more and more the digital platforms they use on a daily basis.

One of the more pernicious habits is the policing of tone. Tone, of course, comes across in how you as a reader–or a listener–either read or hear the words I and others write, or say. Tone itself is a weird combination of word choice, affect, and volume. Tone attendance combines all of those ingredients with the tendency of humans to make other people into avatars in their own brains. And then to proceed to project themselves and their reactions onto the avatars they have made in their own heads.

Avatars, of course, that resemble the people who are writing or talking, not even a little bit. Sure, in a personal, intimate relationship, tone policing probably makes a lot of sense as a way to keep the peace and prevent small issues from becoming larger conflicts. But in the impersonal, distant, and unknowable interactions we have with the avatars of people in online communication, tone policing makes little sense. Because you don’t know the person on the other end of the interaction. As a matter of fact, it might not even be a person. That interlocutor might be a bot, an AI, or even a hired hand from another country.

This method of communication behavior monitoring is now spilling over increasingly into the real world, in real interactions, between real people. Of course, the difference is that, in the real world, if people attempt to monitor and correct the tones of other people with whom they are not in a relationship, or in the thinnest of relationships, conflict is sure to result. Particularly when those who will not be policed meet those who do the policing.

Projection should only happen in a movie theater. Assumptions of motives without sufficient understanding of the other person in a communication interaction will inevitably lead to attempts to police the tones of others, while resisting policing of their own tones. The solution to all of this lies in putting away social media and cleaving to real relationships with real people in real life.

Thinking About William Gibson

One of the most obvious facts about the entire science-fiction genre is that its ideas, presuppositions, assumptions, and more rest on an analysis, not of the future, but of the present conditions projected forward into a fantastic future.

Which is why both dystopian science fiction (Blade Runner, most notably) and utopian science fiction (anything written by Isaac Asimov) miss the mark in describing the future we all now live in, from their perspective in the mid-20th century.

The unremarked upon challenge for science fiction writers in our time is that we need stories about the future of our present era, with its cell phones, social media, surveillance and data tracking, rising large-language models, and skepticism and mistrust of institutions and authority figures. Oh, and rockets from Elon, Bezos, and Lockheed Martin.

But we can’t get those stories–just as we can’t get tragic stories, just more reporting on tragic circumstances–because writers and artists today lack the creative vision to imagine the future and project forward, from this point today into an unknown future, in the way that Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson did.

And those guys had typewriters, railroads, rocket missions to the Moon, and computers that still ran on reel-to-reel tape.

We don’t need more narrative rehashes of classic science fiction describing the world we live in now. We need narrative imagination describing and providing a narrative structure for the “gee-whiz” world to come.

Fever Dreams

When the human body is sick and fighting a foreign disease element or injury, and body temperature increases as the fight for survival commences, the likelihood of a person experiencing fever dreams increases. In the past, fever dreams were tied to hallucinations, bizarre or surreal experiences, and, of course, divine visions. All of this is easy for us ontological materialists to dismiss in our time as the meaningless speculations of the uneducated and the backward, particularly because post-modern science attaches no more meaning to the occurrence of fever dreams than it does to the presence of gravity.

Which is to say, “Sure, you’ll dream when you’re ill, and those dreams will seem weird and crazy, but they possess no deeper meaning.”

And yet.

At the individual level, humans insist not only on getting fevers, but also on dreaming. And at scale in society and culture, systems get fevers and systems dream.

Such as it were.

There is meaning to these phenomena and connections to be explained and explored, particularly as we are currently in a several-trillion-dollar fever dream with new tools–a new disease element against which we have not been inoculated–being introduced by the wizards and soothsayers of Silicon Valley into our cultural, technological, economic, and even psychological systems.

Our current societal fever dreams possess significance up and down the meaning hierarchy that goes beyond the banal or the easily dismissed. It’s up to leaders to have the wisdom of the sages and the ages, to explain the significance of our societal fever dreams to us. And when they can’t, we all wake up collectively confused and mistrusting the next time another disease element is introduced into the larger body politic.

Sports Metaphors With a High Batting Average

Sports and military metaphors dominate in both the business and start-up worlds. Such metaphors, stories, and anecdotes are an easy heuristic for explaining concepts that are hard for people who aren’t “in the game,” as it were. Of course, the plethora and misuse of such metaphors, stories, analogies, and parallels have diluted their impact over time. But that hasn’t stopped their use.

Because humans are inherently lazy and we like mental shortcuts.

The sport of baseball used to be the most popular team sport in the United States, until it was eclipsed in popularity by American football. Not to be confused with soccer, American football is a team game where one player can have a terrible day, and the team can still pull out a win. There’s a leader/manager in the quarterback position, and then there’s plenty of support staff who go unrecognized, unheralded, and unacknowledged. The game of American football is a wonderful metaphor for 20th and 21st-century corporate culture.

But baseball is fundamentally different. Not just in the fact that it is a different game that requires the mastery of a different set of skills, but also in the fact that baseball, as a game, celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the team. In baseball, an individual player can have a great game, and the team loses. But the team can still win a big game, even if an individual hitter can’t get on base to save his life. The game of baseball is a wonderful metaphor for the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century small business community culture that we have forgotten, or abandoned in our current corporatized and “financialized to the nth degree” era.

Which is why baseball has been fading in this country in popularity since the 1960s, and the lights may go out entirely within the next 100 years on that sport.

One of the greatest hitters of the 20th century was a player named Tony Gwynn. He was a right fielder who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball for the San Diego Padres. The left-handed hitting Gwynn drove pitchers like the notorious Greg Maddux to absolute distraction by being able to “read” the stitches on the baseball as it was coming into the plate at 99 miles per hour and still hit the ball. He would regularly get on base and was a reliable .300 hitter for his entire career. This means, for every 10 at-bats, he would get on base at least 3 times, which is almost superhuman. The Major League Baseball average is .250, and the great Ted Williams is the only player to ever hit .400.

However, Tony Gwynn would have never gotten on base at all if he had never gotten into the batter’s box, set his feet, and swung the bat. And every time he did it, he memorized the patterns, not only of the ball and its movement toward the plate, but also of the pitchers and how they moved, pitched, and behaved. He was a student of the thing he was doing. He was a student of baseball. And he loved being a student of baseball.

A lot of us stop being students after we leave school. Our love of learning is ground out of us. And our desire to have the sure and the right answer at all times is built up in us. But the world we are building of the future is not a world of reliable football players, led by a spectacularly talented and spectacularly compensated quarterback. Instead, the world of the baseball player, the world of Tony Gwynn, is the world we are preparing to enter. A world where the passion for learning, deeply, the thing you are most interested in doing, is going to be the thing that pays the most money, because in a world of LLMs, it will be the thing that will be the most scarce.

In order to become those scarce players, we need to be guiding, mentoring, coaching, and teaching the people we are leading to love learning. To love the hard parts of becoming better at a skill set every day that may take a long time to be financially rewarded. And to build a habit of curiosity and learning that no LLM can outstrip.

Seeking an Authentic Original

Before the advent of the Internet, culture was driven by derivations. Derivations of ideas, concepts, and thoughts that were once original, but then, through the impact of other people, those ideas were watered down. This was a phenomenon most nakedly seen in the creative fields, and more carefully hidden in the more materially oriented fields. But derivation from an original idea is something that human beings have been doing for a long, long time.

With the coming of the Internet, though, this process of derivation increased in speed. Because the volume of people who had the ability to publish their ideas–original or not–increased by an exponential factor. With such an increase in speed from hard-won original thought to cheaply bought derivation, the work of being an “authentic” individual, with a unique perspective, shifted from being hard, to being difficult.

And in the future, with our LLM toys and tools, this shift will move from being difficult to seeming to be impossible. As a matter of fact, this shift is already beginning to occur. This is not because we don’t have original ideas. And it isn’t because we have an avalanche of slop derivations. And it isn’t because humans are lazy and would rather play the easy, short-term game of just copying slop rather than doing the hard work of coming up with an original idea.

The shift is happening because when humans with access to mass-scale communication technology get together, it takes a while for the humans to determine what the hard work is that is scarce, and thus creates outcomes that are valuable and worth paying for. Of course, humans tend to align to the belief–stated and unstated–that what is scarce and valuable is only what is materially beneficial. But that’s not true. Nor is that particularly an original alignment.

It’s going to take a long time to figure out scarcity in a world of seeming idea abundance. And we’re going to, all the while, be searching for an original idea.

Searching for a Use Case

Thirty years ago, very few businesses and services built atop Industrial Revolution assumptions inherent in mass employment, mass housing, mass media, and mass markets could pivot to the Internet. A place built on oppositional assumptions clustered around long-tails, niche tastes, small audiences, and rabid tribes.

Now, we have transitioned as many businesses and services as possible to the current Internet-driven paradigm. There are still remnants of businesses and services built on the old Industrial Revolution model, and there is still rampant emotional and cultural nostalgia for the safety and seeming solidity of “the good old days.” But by and large, the assumptions of the Internet continue their relentless march across our markets, our behaviors, our psyches, and our assumptions.

The current hype cycle around large-language models and machine learning is largely similar in tone, emotional content, and perspective to the previous Internet hype cycle that existed back when Pets.com was advertising opposite the Super Bowl around 1999 or so. Just as then, we currently are so early with our large-language models that we don’t have a “use case” for productivity, service, entertainment, or markets that seems to justify the current LLM hype cycle. Just as we didn’t have use cases at the arrival of the Internet.

But the use cases will arrive.

The hype cycle will collapse.

And out of the trillion dollars of hype cycle rubble left behind (it was billions after the dot-com crash in 2000-2002), businesses and services that were built on the assumptions of niche, long-tails, and tribalism will either adapt or expire. Even as new assumptions–LLM-driven assumptions–will begin their thirty-year-long takeover of our markets, our behaviors, our psyches, and our assumptions. Rest assured, it will take about thirty years for the takeover to even be 85% complete. No matter how hot the current friction is right now around LLMs.

When humans figure out how to make a technology work, when they stumble on an appropriate use case, they move like lightning, and all of us wonder how we lived without it. The fascinating element in all of this is who, exactly, will see the future use case and have the courage to go first.

What is Valuable?

For most of human history, the value of labor was so inexpensive that it was below cheap. This is one of the mainly unstated reasons why human slavery of all kinds flourished all over the world for as long as it did. There were a lot of extra humans, and it was too expensive to just allow them to exist. And besides, work needed to be done.

Farm work.

Building work.

Hauling work.

House work.

Fighting work.

But when the Industrial Revolution began, human labor started to become more expensive, and the value of that labor began to increase. Sure, factory labor was hard, but it was less likely to be devalued if the person running the machine knew more about how to turn out a product on a repeat basis than the guy running the business. Even if that guy had started the business by turning the product out himself.

Then, computers came along, and knowledge became specialized. And with specialization, labor tottered precariously between being expensive (after all, there are still a lot of humans around) and being cheap (after all, there is still a lot of work to be done). Add to this the fact that monetizing knowledge is hard because it tends to develop on a long timeline (20-25+ years), and you’ve got a situation where labor and knowledge have been in a weird truce for some time.

But now, since the advent of the Internet, knowledge is perceived as being cheap. And since knowledge is cheap, human labor must return to the forefront in value. Except that the LLMs combined with robotics will render both labor and knowledge increasingly inexpensive, but also unevenly.

So, how can humans differentiate themselves from both knowledge and labor in order to create value for other humans and to accomplish all the work that (still) needs to be done in the world?

I don’t have the answer to that question, nor does anyone else.

I know what the answers aren’t. And Universal Basic Income–or money for just hanging around and existing–is not one of them. I also know that human creativity, unbound from both knowledge and labor, is a petri dish in which all the old spiritual and psychological diseases that still beset us as a species will grow and flourish in unprecedented ways. I also know that the smartest people in the world don’t have any other answers to the question either.

We are all in this together now.

The Limits of Witness and Understanding

When we observe an event, whether the observation occurs in real life or online, we cannot truly be sure of what we have seen. Over the last quarter-century, we have built a genuine, skeptical panopticon online, where everyone knows that everyone is seeking to market to everyone else. Thus, we live–with increasing comfort–the conclusion that there cannot be truth from the systems in the box in our hands and on our desks.

There are people who will claim that both the panopticon construction and comfort with a lack of belief in reality have always been with us and are nothing new and nothing to be alarmed at. These same people blithely declare that “Technologies don’t change people. Technologies just reveal who people always were.” I believe the marketer and social media hustler, Gary Vaynerchuk, once loudly declared that in some video I saw of him on YouTube.

What is missed in such superficial analysis is the erosion of witness and the erosion of understanding. If we cannot understand what we are seeing, how are we to make any critical decisions, engage in critical analysis, or make an impact if our internal ability to discern the external discourse is constantly in question? The answer is, of course, we can make those decisions, and we then outsource the decision-making and the hard parts of witnessing events in the world to people with titles, positions, and authority. Many of whom aren’t any better at observing and analyzing than you or I are.

Sure, there are experts. But collectively, we have built a social panopticon that may have started with the best intentions of opening up all of our eyes to see more. And has wound up closing our eyes to the things of value that needed to be observed to be maintained by everybody, and not just “experts” with titles, degrees, positions, and fancy PR firms.

We live in a time where everyone has more data points about everyone else than ever before, and yet, we know much less than people who came before us about each other than ever before.

That’s not just a problem of technology.

Universal Basic Conflict

Granting every working-age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives will do little to mitigate the two states it’s designed to relieve: human avarice and envy, and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities. No matter how much the AI technologists promise that such schemes will, in some utopian future society, we will never arrive at.

Jealousy (of people), envy (of things), and avarice (the desire to acquire more) are human emotions that aren’t often acknowledged as the darker motivators for people to engage with work. All of these emotions, along with vanity and pride (all emotions grounded in negative storytelling), are typically at the bottom of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect. And because they’re all lurking in the basement of every human heart, the materialist rationalist utopians among us are inevitably surprised when they manifest as genuine, but irrational, resistance to the desire for a Universal Basic Income-driven future.

A fellow named Dostoyevsky, however, put words to what the technologists can’t seem to name, around 160 years ago, in a pre-Industrial Revolution, agrarian monarchial society:

“Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you a nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” ~ Notes From Underground, Part One, Chapter Eight

In our post-modern society, the era of “make-work” is over. And it’s been over for a while. But the thing is, we have also arrived at the end of the hangover from the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we financialize human effort in just a little bit better ways” is also about to be over with the dominance of LLMs that can do all that average make-work better and financialize it faster.

This is a real problem because, under the scheme that has built the last 125 years of scalable economic systems, meaningful employment was typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions for many people. But now, even those rungs of the ladder are being hewn away. Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the Universal Basic Income in the world will only serve to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse. Because without work, idle hands will surely “…play you a nasty trick.”

Work provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those intangible outcomes don’t appear anywhere on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless or not even considered in the first place. A universal basic income does nothing to address any of those needs, emotions, or drivers in people. As a matter of fact, such schemes spit in the face of human motivators and dare the human being to do something about it. History proves that’s a negotiation human beings are fine with accepting the consequences of. And just declaring “Game on” doesn’t quite do justice to what will surely result from such schemes.

Human truth and what lurks deeply in the dark human heart are fundamentally what defeat all UBI schemes, whether from the State, from businesses, or even from our current crop of techno-utopians, drunk on AI outputs. Such proposed schemes really come down to giving people money, hoping to cure the deep disease of the human heart and the human spirit without ever engaging in performing the uncomfortable surgery of examining–and acknowledging–much deeper and darker motivations. You know. Those ones that have always lived deeply in the human soul, where even the state and technology cannot reach.

This is a sure recipe for universal basic conflict. And at scale.

Wizards Searching for Backdoors

The wizards, diviners, and soothsayers of the ancient world were invited into royal courts, penned scrolls that held the keys to gnostic knowledge, and were placed at the center of ancient societies. Many of them were hired to educate the elite of their times.

As the Middle Ages closed, and the rationality project at the core of the Enlightenment really took hold of the imagination of the West, the magicians, diviners, and soothsayers were pushed to the edges of the culture (eventually to be joined there by the various religious types, but that’s another post altogether). And–to add insult to injury–their lofty claims to being able to open spiritual backdoors into a mystical world were deemed to be the irrational ravings of “humbugs,” “scammers,” “con artists,” or even “marketers.” Case in point: recall the character of the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. He was eventually exposed as just a flim-flam dude pulling levers who couldn’t make his hot-air balloon work well enough to get back to Kansas, where he came from.

In our technological era, though, the atheist rational materialist technologists have won the day. They’ve defeated the natural world, backburnered the spiritual world, and declared, hubristically, that “we will build our own gods” by building backdoors into reality and making epistemological claims without acknowledging–or even realizing–that they’re making those claims in the first place. They continue to pursue the same gnostic path of attaining secret knowledge that their forebearers attempted through spiritual means. And of course, they all declare that they’re going to get to the same place as their forebearers–for the good of humanity–through manipulating “intelligence on silicon.”

All that lands for me like a whole lot of humbug from a bunch of flim-flam dudes at the center of the post-modern royal court of attention.

Moats and Deltas

In business, particularly in startups, there is an idea that a business must possess a significant enough moat in order to stave off potential competitors in a crowded marketplace. Often attributed to investor Warren Buffett, moat, is a term used to describe a company’s competitive advantage. Like a moat protects a castle, certain advantages help protect companies from their competitors.

The same thinking can be applied to our work world, where there are two kinds of people using our LLM tools. One type uses LLMs like fortune cookies or magic 8-Balls. They ask an average question they would have used search to answer four years ago, and instead of generating a collection of search results that they would have had to parse and critically examine, they get an LLM regurgitated version of a mediocre answer.

These people are coasting along right now, using Chat GPT, Claude, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and on and on for entertainment, planning their next trip, flooding the attention zone with AI slop, or just lurking about, wondering what to do with these tools next.

The second type of person uses LLMs to examine assumptions and to level up what they are already doing at work. They are interested in prompt engineering and search for context inside the LLM’s answers to queries, and when the answer is average–like an answer from a fortune cookie–they push the tool past its limits. These people know and understand how language, persuasion, sales, negotiation, and conflict work at deeply interpersonal levels between people in the real world, and they employ critical thinking because they have mental and emotional discipline.

They are building a bigger and bigger moat, one prompt at a time, that eventually will transform into a delta; that is, a concrete, measurable variable of change between two states: those who have a large moat, and those who don’t.

As the delta between these two groups increases, and one group declines while the other one ascends in the economy of the future we’re building the rails for now, which one of these two groups do you think will have a more defensible moat in their job, their career, their financial situation, and even in their cultural life in America, as we breathlessly outsource more and more of our average outcomes to these new machines we’re building?

And here’s another question while you’re pondering the answer to that one: Which group of people will complain–or advocate if you will–for more fairly distributed outcomes as rewards begin to accrue to one group over the other economically and socially?

My advice to all of you reading: Expand whatever moat you’re working on right now into an ever-growing delta.

Hitting the 'Record' Button

For the first time in a long time, I didn’t hit the ‘record’ button on the videoconferencing software. As a result, the conversation I would have turned into a podcast episode was not recorded.

And yet, the person I was talking to and I both acted like it was being recorded. We behaved as if the cloud were absorbing our thoughts. We watched our words, monitored our tone, made our points, and when we disagreed, did so respectfully.

Did we already have great behavior, or was our tendency to be respectful with each other mediated, informed, and censored by the fact that we believed the interaction was going to be part of posterity?

At least temporarily on the Internet.

The tools that monitor and record us are changing our behavior as much as we are molding the tools to work with us. It’s a symbiotic relationship rather than a dictatorial posture, no matter what the marketing folks who work for the technologists would want you to believe.

The Singularity Appears

According to the prognosticators and breathless technophiles, the singularity, a point where artificial intelligence begins improving itself faster than humans can monitor or control, has apparently arrived.

The singularity hasn’t arrived, of course, in your daily life.

You know, all the places where the “intelligence on silicon” has been around for a while, but its impact is hidden from you directly, like in the navigation apps on your phone, or in the algorithms that show you more of what you click on in a social media feed.

The singularity hasn’t arrived, of course, in your relationships with other people, which remain messy, fraught with conflict, and unpredictable. Nor has it arrived, of course, in the myths you tell yourself and others, that continue to allow you to get up in the morning and go to work.

But, make no mistake: The singularity has arrived.

Ok.

And now that the singularity is here, soon, very soon indeed, “intelligence on silicon” will consume, overwhelm, and subsume “intelligence on carbon.”

Except, of course, carbon-based intelligence has gone pretty far in the last 5,000 years or so. And the people who are interested in a competing intelligence–those prognosticators and breathless technophiles I already mentioned–are usually the same people who devalue, dismiss, and disbelieve in the ongoing symbiotic relationships between intelligence, consciousness, and relationships among and between humans and machines together. They aren’t exactly fans of man.

To quote from a recent review of the book (…I know, I know…) The AI Paradox by Virginia Dignum in The Nation, “The more AI can do, the more it highlights the irreplaceable nature of human intelligence." She (Dignum) writes, " AI is good at certain tasks, such as “data analysis, logical reasoning, and linguistic processing.” Yet it struggles with others, especially those involving creativity, empathy, “moral and ethical discernment,” the “capacity for complex reasoning,” and the “ability to reason about relationships between concepts.”

Huh. How about that? And Ms. Dignum has been working with “intelligence on silicon” since at least the 1980s.

The singularity is here. Right on time, it appears, to reliably, meet its ceiling in the form of the humans who made it.

Fan of Man

Being a fan of human beings has always been a difficult proposition. However, in the era of seemingly instant transmission of information, the speed with which human beings can transmit gossip has never had human precedent before.

Sure, human beings can, and do, transmit good things about each other–praises, kudos, claps, and positivity–but the flood of negative gossip is overwhelming. And consuming, observing, and commenting on that flood is designed to be both corrosive and addictive.

Because “if it bleeds it leads” and no entertainer, huckster, influencer, grifter, magician, or marketer (but I repeat myself endlessly) ever went broke underestimating the unending human appetite for negative gossip rooted in envy, pride, lust, vanity, covetousness, and jealousy.

This makes it hard (but not impossible) to argue against the materialist reductionist mindset to human behavior. It makes it hard to argue that “intelligence on silicon” isn’t a better option. Human beings' behavior undermines the argument before it even leaves the mouth of the human making it.

But…

Man wasn’t created to be in a relationship with silicon. Man was created to be in relationship with the natural world, and the other, perpetually messy, people in it. The ceiling of our clean, unmessy, and artificial creations will eventually hit, is the ceiling of relationships.

That’s worth being a fan of man in order to defend.

The Twilight of the Novel

The book, as a technology for transmitting information, ideas, and concepts across time, is probably one of the top five inventions human beings have ever created. Included in that august list would also be indoor plumbing, penicillin, capitalism, and the internal combustion engine. The book–for all of the handwringing about its position as a technological influencer in Western culture right now–in its current modernist (or post-modernist form, if you will) is not on its last legs.

The novel, a variation of the liquid of ideas the container of the book holds, may indeed be on its last legs, however. The reasons for the death of the novel are many, including the following:

1). Human interiority and curiosity about the internal psychology of other people built the novel, and the deconstruction of that curiosity has led to its destruction.

2). The length of a reader’s attention spans and an audience’s cultural connection to historical material and social references across time go hand in hand. That chain has been breaking for at least the last thirty years.

3). The supremacy of other, more visually compelling media that get across the primary message of interiority to an audience better, e.g., film, TV, and of course, video on the Internet, has combined to beat up the novel.

But remember, even with all this, a novel is just a story placed in the format of a book. From Don Quixote to As I Lay Dying, and from Play It as It Lays to the current list of popular, AI-produced novels featured on Goodreads, the novel has probably gone about as far as it can go within the confines of the medium of the book.

This fact doesn’t mean that stories themselves are dead. Humans have been telling each other stories since the beginning of creation and will continue doing so until creation is wound up. It means that the types of content a book can contain will subtly shift.

Over the next 125 years of the book, the medium won’t die. It’s too resilient for that. But what will happen, I think, is that brave creatives, not trapped by the assumptions of the last 300+ years of Enlightenment novelization and cultural storytelling modes, will take the book itself in completely different directions.

Perhaps even, back to the future to a past–a pre-modern place populated by the works (but not novels) of Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, the Old Testament authors, Tacitus, Seneca, and Saint Augustine–where we haven’t been as readers, in the West, in a while.

Social Shame and Embarrassment as the Friction that Develops

The use and presence of our AI tools in business and organizations will be used as an excuse to stop developing junior employees because, well, “AI can do it better.”

The first generation of college students who have been exposed to ChatGPT for the last four years are graduating from college this June. They enter a work world where they will automatically have agency from organizations and employers to build slop, believe in slop, and advocate for slop arguments. And, to make matters even worse, the work world represents the final iteration of a social and educational world that has validated their every thought and assertion, right or wrong, since they were in kindergarten.

It used to be, up until about five minutes ago, culturally and socially, that the social and cultural shame and embarrassment attached to not knowing facts, ideas, or even the underpinnings of facts and ideas were enough to encourage curiosity. Or at least shame and embarrassment prevented the aggressively ignorant from asserting the wrong things at an increasingly loud decibel level.

But such social and cultural guardrails have been seen for at least two generations as merely limiting creativity and creative expression. And leveraging those tools by mid-career and senior leaders is now associated with delivering undeserved trauma to juniors who are, quite frankly, ignorant. And thus, the use of those tools of shame and embarrassment has been eroded quite significantly.

We are arriving quite quickly at a weird cultural and social cul-de-sac in the world of work. One where the junior employees we are seeking to develop confidently assert facts that are based on AI slop, social media algorithmic feedback loops, and an astonishing lack of practical education. And they don’t have the experience, maturity, courage, or competence to spot the slop, fight the algorithm, or get the education.

On the other hand, we have senior and mid-career leaders who can’t be bothered to employ even rudimentary social norming tools in the workplace because the backlash from leveraging those tools isn’t worth the outcomes they never see. Instead, it’s just easier to pay $100 a month for an AI stack that “Can do it better.”

There must be a way out of this cul-de-sac. Because if there isn’t, it’s going to be a long next twenty-five years in the work world.

A Tweet is not a Vote

Sometimes people on the other side of an ideological, social, moral, or ethical debate have a point. And when they have a point, it’s intellectually principled to acknowledge the point. Though it might be emotionally painful.

Here is the point, once made by a politician, in response to an online activist’s criticism of her political decisions: “A Tweet is not a vote.”

By which she meant: No amount of blogging, tweeting, posting, meme-dropping, or complaining online is a substitute for doing the work of going out to vote, encouraging people door-to-door to vote, or taking people to the polls to vote.

But that work is hard. And just as in so many other areas of the civic, public, and even corporate life of modern Americans, we’d rather perform what is easy than practically do what is hard.

When your ideological, social, moral, or political opponents do the hard, simple, and unglamorous work, they win the power. And all you get in return is the opportunity to complain, tweet, meme-post, or blog more about what they’re not doing right.

Anonymous Verification

The marketer and author, Seth Godin, made a point years ago, in either a book of his or on his long-running blog site, that sets the table for my observations today, “No society ever survived anonymous feedback.”

He was right, of course.

And as our national and global public discourse has declined into tribalism, violence, and polarization, calls for identifying people verifiably as people for the purposes of policing online discourse have increased.

The problem with verification of “humans as humans” and not “humans as bots” is not a “free speech” smothering problem.

People are free to speak (or write), but they have never been free from the consequences of such speech or written words. That’s why the 1st Amendment in the US Constitution is followed closely by the 2nd Amendment.

The problem with the verification of “humans as humans” for the purposes of making humans behave in their online communication is that humans have been shaped in their behaviors, communication patterns, and appetites by the Internet, as much as the Internet has been shaped by them. Problems with anonymity were just the tip of the iceberg in human communication and behavioral challenges with this new technology.

I am not opposed to human verification to police toxic commentary on the Internet. But I am opposed to verifying humans as humans as a shortcut to the hard work of mitigating behavior that is as much psychological and spiritual as it is material and emotional.

The problem lies not in the Internet, the trolls, or even the bots, dear Internet Commentator, but in ourselves.

And if we want society to survive, neither anonymity nor verification is going to serve well as cudgels to get humans to behave and communicate more humanely.