How a Writer Uses AI Without Losing His Voice

Summary

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Podcast Summary: AI & I

Episode: How a Writer Uses AI Without Losing His Voice
Host: Dan Shipper
Guest: Craig Mod
Date: July 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features acclaimed writer, technologist, and photographer Craig Mod in an in-depth conversation with host Dan Shipper about how writers and thinkers can embrace AI tools without losing their unique creative voices. The discussion dives into the realities, potential, and limits of using AI in creative work, with a particular focus on writing, tool-building, and the aesthetics of focus and weirdness. Mod shares his practical experiments with AI in his workflow, the cultural implications of ubiquitous AI, and his personal routines to preserve deep thinking.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Temptation and Potential of AI

• Dopamine-Driven Technology: Both Craig and Dan note the highly stimulating, even addictive, nature of using AI—likening it to a slot machine that provides quick rewards but can disrupt deep focus.

  • Craig Mod (00:00): “As soon as I touch my phone, I feel the chemicals shift… I can't go into any kind of deep thinking place.”
  • Dan Shipper (00:14, 01:26): “There’s something about working with AI that feels very dopamine driven… it’s sort of a slot machine.”

• Necessary Barriers: To preserve his attention and unique voice, Craig employs strict boundaries:

  • He avoids the Internet and phone in the mornings, focusing on analog or offline tools.
  • Uses a “writing-only” laptop that blocks all distractions.
  • Craig Mod (01:21): “If I don’t create these barriers, I will lose connection with this other part of me that I think is the most valuable part of me.”

Engaging With AI: Tools, Experiments & Philosophy

• Building to Understand: Craig insists you can’t grasp AI’s potential without hands-on experimentation (02:08).

  • Tried various AI models (Fable, Opus 4.8, Claude) for tasks like refactoring code and security checks.
  • Rebuilt complex tools “for fun and necessity,” including newsletter systems and a moderated Twitter clone called "the Good Place."

• N-of-1 Software and Writer Autonomy:

  • Craig emphasizes the arrival of “n-of-1” software—highly personal, DIY tools that replace stagnant incumbents (e.g., Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp).
  • Craig Mod (11:19): “I think we're going to enter this sort of golden age of tool building… and more competition in the marketplace, forcing more innovation.”

• AI-Enhanced Research & Sensitivity:

  • Uses LLMs as research assistants—finding sources, filling in “TK” (to come) facts, and performing cultural sensitivity checks, especially for delicate subjects (14:50).
  • Craig Mod (14:50): “I don't ever want it touching the writing… for me, that's the point… being in the mess of the writing.”

Creative Workflows, Focus, & Avoiding Technological Homogenization

• Workflow Guardrails:

  • Stays off Slack/Discord except as absolutely needed due to their disruptive nature (30:18).
  • Restricts meetings to after noon, mirroring deep work practices.
  • Craig Mod (26:56, 28:37): “I have a MacBook Neo that’s completely disconnected from the Internet except for being able to sync stuff... It’s the knowing you can do fun stuff that ruins you.”

• Deep Focus vs. Infinite Distraction:

  • Differentiates between “technology” (as tool) and “the network” (as distraction and attention hijacker).
  • Dan Shipper (29:20): “It's about creating a buffer between me and the networked world.”

Weirdness, Dorkiness, and the Value of Uniqueness

• Good Place & Ephemerality:

  • Built a private, ephemeral Twitter clone ("the Good Place") that resets weekly, limits posts, and discourages toxic social dynamics—emphasizing small communities and impermanence (07:23–09:48).
  • Craig Mod (09:48): “It’s like my favorite place on the Internet. It’s the only place I want to post.”

• Weirdness as Resistance:

  • Craig Mod (33:32): “There aren’t that many people who are going to think about or write the weird books that I feel like I’m drawn to write… that feels like the valuable thing for me to put my effort in.”
  • Warns against AI homogenizing aesthetics; champions being intentionally “weird” and “dorky” as creative acts.

• Dorkiness and AI Usage:

  • Claims deep software building with LLMs remains “mega dorky” (34:00–36:40).
  • Craig Mod (35:23): “The software building part of LLM use is mega dorky and you have to be a dork… It’s so hard... you have to know what to ask it.”

Philosophy of AI, Consciousness, and the Human Role

• Philosophical Divides in AI:

  • Discusses open AI’s “AI as tool” vs. Anthropics’s “AI as proto-being” stances.
  • Craig Mod (41:16): “No, the being stuff, it’s like, stop, stop, stop… Anthropomorphizing causes a lot of problems.”
    • Advocates kindness when interacting with AIs, but sees it as a self-discipline, not machine empathy.
    • Craig Mod (42:33): “I want to cultivate the habit of just being nice in general…”

• Consciousness & Stakes:

  • Questions whether language models can ever be conscious without the capacity for real stakes or loss (43:41–45:12).
  • Considers it “realism” (not pessimism) that if AI did become truly conscious, it might mark the end of humanity:
    • Craig Mod (47:34): “I’m just saying we’ll be dead when it happens. Let’s be honest.”

• Existential Reflections:

  • Talks candidly about the “miracle” and luck of individual existence (49:07–50:41).
  • Sees humanity’s creative run as “a gift” and is at peace if AI marks its conclusion.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Deep Work & Technology:

  • Craig Mod (00:00, 28:21): “I wake up and I don’t touch the Internet. I won’t look at my phone. I won’t go online until long after lunch… As soon as I touch my phone, I feel the chemicals shift.”

• On AI Writing Assistants:

  • Craig Mod (14:50): “I use [AI] as a research assistant… but I don’t ever want it touching the writing because that’s the point… being in the mess of the writing.”

• On Weirdness and Uniqueness:

  • Craig Mod (33:32): “There aren’t that many people who are going to think about or write the weird books that I feel like I’m drawn to write.”

• On Building Tools:

  • Craig Mod (11:19): “We’re going to enter this sort of golden age of tool building… It net net is pretty good except for the incumbents.”

• On AI as Dorky:

  • Craig Mod (35:23): “...Folks like us who are actually building software with these things, we are just mega dorks. Like, we’re not having fairy sex with our LLMs.”

• On Consciousness and the End of Humanity:

  • Craig Mod (47:34, 51:40): “I’m just saying we’ll be dead when it happens… When that thing comes… I’ll be taking that last bite of a vegan burrito and going, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you. Goodbye.’ I think it’ll be a very gentle death, I don’t think it'll be a violent death, but we'll all just disappear.”

• On Life’s Fragility:

  • Craig Mod (49:07): “The chances of you being you is infinitesimally small… when you’re adopted it’s hammered into you that you weren’t meant to be created and you were given away… It doesn’t fill me with ennui or sadness—it’s really interesting.”

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–01:21: The dangers of distraction and the dopamine slot-machine effect of AI/Internet use.
• 02:08–04:53: The importance of hands-on AI usage and curiosity from a young age.
• 07:23–10:41: The “Good Place”—a private, ephemeral, non-algorithmic social network Craig built for members.
• 11:19–12:20: The coming golden age of highly personal software.
• 14:50–16:15: AI as research/cultural assistant but never as a writing substitute.
• 26:56–29:58: Deep work practices—strict morning boundaries and the dangers of networked technology.
• 33:32–37:23: The value of “weirdness” and embracing dorkiness as a creative differentiator.
• 41:16–43:41: The “tool vs. being” debate in AI; dangers of anthropomorphism.
• 47:34–51:05: Existential reflections on consciousness, humanity’s role, and the potential endgame scenario.
• 51:05–End: Closing thoughts on integrating AI, hope, and wonder in the face of massive change.

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Episode Takeaways

• Writers and creators can use AI tools to enhance their workflow—but deep attention, originality, and personal weirdness require strong boundaries and intentional (often analog) routines.
• Building one’s own tools, however niche, is increasingly accessible—and is a radical act of self-definition in a homogenizing digital landscape.
• AI should be approached as a tool, not a surrogate for consciousness or community—the essence of living and creating remains irreplaceably human.
• Embrace the strangeness and difficulty of our time; this “apocal moment” is both a profound opportunity and challenge for anyone willing to experiment deeply.

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If you want to see how the best integrate AI with meaning and creativity, this conversation is required listening (or reading).

Transcript

[Craig Mod]

I wake up and I don't touch the Internet. I won't look at my phone. I won't go online until long after lunch. As soon as I touch my phone, I feel the chemicals shift. And I can't go into any kind of deep thinking place or deep attention place or deep focus place because there's

[Dan Shipper]

something about working with AI that feels very dopamine driven. And I believe strongly you can use it to do incredible work. And also, it's sort of a slot machine.

[Craig Mod]

I now have a laptop just for writing that blocks everything. I can't do anything interesting on it. If I don't create these barriers, I will lose connection with this other part of me that I think is the most valuable part of me. There aren't that many people who are going to think about or write the weird books that I feel like I'm drawn to write. And as a human, that feels like a valuable thing for me to put my effort in.

[Dan Shipper]

Every is the only subscription. You need to stay at the edge of AI if you care about being on top of the latest models and using the latest tools. You have to subscribe to Every to separate out the signal from the noise. Go to Every to subscribe today. Craig, welcome to the show.

[Craig Mod]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Dan Shipper]

So you are a writer, a walker, a player with technology, a photographer.

[Craig Mod]

Sure.

[Dan Shipper]

And I think you have a life and career that I have looked up

[Craig Mod]

to for a long time.

[Dan Shipper]

So it's really fun to have you here. And I think one of the things that we were just talking about is the thoughtfulness and the spirit with which you do your work. And I admire that spirit and try to bring into the stuff that we do here. And also I've been trying to think about how does AI fit in with it, because there's something about working with AI that feels very dopamine driven. And you can, I believe strongly you can do it to. You can use it to do incredible work. And also, like, it's sort of a slot machine.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

So I know that you're, like, deep into the vibe coding right now. So tell us. Tell us what you're doing with it, and then let's talk about how it fits into your work.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean, look, I just think if you're not touching it, if you're not using it, if you're not building with it, you can't really comment on it, you know, And I think part of. Part of what? When people go, it doesn't really work. It's so unpredictable. It's like okay, just try. Just use it. It's like if you're using it, you go, okay, this is ridiculous. And why is this technology public? Slash, like, shouldn't this. I mean, I kind of agree with a lot of what Dario says. Like, there should probably be more regulation around this. Like, I don't know if everyone in the world should just have this immediately. Certainly, you know, as we're working out the kinks of what this is in public, I mean, it just feels strange. It feels like we are in this aberrational moment where technology like this normally isn't just given to everybody for free, essentially. So, look, I think you really have to be engaging with it, especially if you can. It's like Fable came out. I played with it for four days. I had it like refactor code bases. I had to do these other little projects. I was like, great. This is cool. And then it went away, and I was like, wow. It kind of makes sense that this would go away. But also, Opus 4.8 is sort of, like, good enough to do anything. Like, if you. If you told me you're. You only have Opus 4.8 for the rest of your life, I'd be like, great. I could build anything with this.

[Dan Shipper]

There's a lot I can do.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. So. So we're. It is this weird moment, but.

[Dan Shipper]

Okay, so you're actually. You're actually saying. I'm. I'm. It makes sense to me that Fable is. Is not here anymore. Do you. I, like, I miss her. Like, do you. Do you miss her or.

[Craig Mod]

I don't know. Like, I honestly don't really feel qualitatively that maybe I'm not using it enough. But, like, the differences between these models, like, that explicitly, I just know that, oh, it feels a little more rigorous, and it eats my tokens like crazy. So it must be better, right? So I just hacked into. Into Fort Knox and, like, stole all the gold. Yeah, I know.

[Dan Shipper]

Must be better.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got all the bitcoin now. It's all me. I've become satoshi. But the. The look, I think you have to be using it. So that's one of the main reasons I have been using it. And also, I just. I've always loved technology. I mean, it's been a big part of my life since I was have memory, you know, always curious about, let me take this thing apart or build this or use this piece of software or whatever. Like, it's always been just part of who I am. It turns out that's also Part of who my birth mother is, she's a computer scientist. It turns out programmer. Weirdly, she never went to college, but she's a. Yeah, I met my birth mom. I was like, what do you do? She's like, oh, I'm a programmer. I was like, oh, my God. Okay.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Nature. There is. There is no nurture. It's all. It's all nature. It turns out nurture is just your pathologies. Like. Like all the things that you hate about yourself is probably like, nature are about nurture. And then all the stuff that you're like, intuitively is confusing to you is just nature.

[Dan Shipper]

Holy shit. That is fascinating. When did you find that out?

[Craig Mod]

Just like a little under two years ago.

[Dan Shipper]

Wow.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. So it's been interesting. So anyway, technology is important to me because I'm just curious in that way, and I think it's the most interesting thing in the universe right now.

[Dan Shipper]

Genetically predisposed.

[Craig Mod]

A little bit genetically predisposed. So I've been building stuff around my membership program. Well, I rebuilt Quicken, which I'm.

[Dan Shipper]

The tax software.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, tax software. Because I need. You can watch my interview with Paul Ford and. And Rich over on a board about that. So I re. I rebuilt Quicken and then I rebuilt Campaign Monitor, which is a newsletter software.

[Dan Shipper]

Because SaaS CEOs are losing in this interview.

[Craig Mod]

I know. Well, well, well.

[Dan Shipper]

Okay.

[Craig Mod]

And why are they losing? They're losing because. Well, first of all, Campaign Monitor has not done anything in a decade that's just been sitting there taking people's money for a decade plus with no innovation whatsoever. Zero. Nothing with, like, a really abusive pricing policy.

[Dan Shipper]

How much were they charging you?

[Craig Mod]

So I was spending, like, what was I, like, six, seven thousand dollars a year? I mean, it was like one of the most expensive things I. I paid for. But the real annoying thing was that they didn't count unique email addresses. They counted total, even if you had overlap between lists. So it's just. It's like things like that where it's like you don't just. I'm going away.

[Dan Shipper]

You're squeezing too much out of it. Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

In my bill now with like, ses, Amazon, ses, I set up all the dkim and SPF and all the. All that email crap. So I think I'm getting pretty good deliver deliverability, like, on par with what Camera Paymonder gave me. But now my, like, yearly bill is probably going to be like, I don't know, like $150 or something. Like, it's just a ridiculous difference.

[Dan Shipper]

And how Much in Fable tokens.

[Craig Mod]

Well, thankfully, yeah, this is all opus, so. But that's the other weird thing is, like, well, I was on the $200 a month plan, and then I realized I wasn't hitting my limit, so I dropped to 100. And, like, for $1,000 a year, 1200 bucks a year, like, that is the easiest trade. Like, that's the best. That's the deal of the century in terms of what you can build. So I built newsletter software, and then I've been. I've been adding to my membership program software. So actually, one of the things I had Fable do was do a. Like, a full. Just security check on my membership flask Python app, which I built by myself before any of this existed. And so I went through. I was like, oh, you have 8 trillion security holes. Shall I fix them? And I was like, yes, please. So I think it's a little safer. I mean, the stakes are very low for my membership software.

[Dan Shipper]

But then the FBI knocked at your door.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, you got to stop using this. So, you know, I've been doing that. And then I rebuilt Twitter for my members. We call it the Good Place.

[Dan Shipper]

Oh, yeah, you were showing me that.

[Craig Mod]

Tell me about that. Tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, look, like social media sucks. It just. It's terrible. Now, there was this moment, 20. 2010-20, like, 14, where it wasn't algorithmic stuff just appeared. Links were favored. I mean, they were just normal. They didn't. They weren't a hit against you. If you posted a link and everyone was on Twitter, it was like the great media watering hole. And, like, if you were active then and slightly interesting, you could, like, you know, 100x your network just by being an interesting person on Twitter. Now you kind of can't, because the algorithm favors, like, psychosis versus sanity, and no one likes posting to any of these places. All these, like, reply guys pop in. It just sucks. And threads is doofy, and Blue sky is like, everyone's crying and complaining. Like, it's just weird. Everyone's so traumatized. And so I wanted a place just for members. You have to pay to be there because you have to pay to be a member. And I was like, I had these thoughts. I always thought Twitter should be ephemeral. I think there should be no archive for these things. It's crazy. There's a Web 1.0, Web 2.0 Philosophy of everything needs to be archived and saved forever. And I kind of don't believe that. In fact, one of my heresies, when I'm With Kevin Kelly doing our walks. We have heresy night where you say something you believe, but people you respect don't believe. Maybe one of my heresies is I think the entire Internet should be deleted every two weeks. And like you can archive it offline or whatever, but like the entire Internet itself every two weeks should just disappear. And there could be like. Like it. It forces a lot of like, why would you do that? Or whatever. But I think there is kind of value to ephemerality in the digital world. So anyway, are the good place everything disappears in a week. You can only post twice a day. You can reply 20 times a day. Photos are in one bit black and white until you click them and then they like fade into color. And what else is there? No algorithm, it's just reverse cron and it's just sweet. I don't know. This is lovely. It's like my favorite place on the Internet. It's the only place I want to post and people have now been joining my membership program just to get access to that, which I think is cool.

[Dan Shipper]

So it seems like. And partly you were doing this before, you know, the acceleration language model coding over the last year or so. So you're technical.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I'm technical. I mean I built my membership software by hand, by myself. Like I learned flask. I like learned how to set it up, set the roots up and everything. The tgp, the Good place was the first thing I built when Claude code was released. So Claude code came out. Oh, that was another fable thing I did. I had it refactor tgp. So I was like, oh look, you made this a year ago, version one of you can you refactor this and actually pull out the module? It was one giant python file, like 10,000 lines or whatever. And so it's now module because I want to expand it. So I want to. I want to build a very good reads. So like good reads that.

[Dan Shipper]

Not great reads.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, not great reads. Very good reads that like. So basically goodreads. That also doesn't suck again. Like all these platforms just become so toxic. So. Yeah, well, but this is a good example of like n. Of one software, you know, and you know, I think the. Obviously the business models of social media are such that it just becomes the. The shitty place it is today. You know, it's like it's forced by the business models at this like growth at all costs. And you know, and like engagement is a. There's no qualitative assessment of engagement. It's just engagement is good.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

You know but it turns out most engagement is the. The way to get most engagements is to be toxic.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Right.

[Craig Mod]

So I think what we're going to see is this great pressure on these companies. So like Campaign Monitor, mailchimp, like, look, I'm also not their. Their target consumer. It's businesses, they kind of don't care about people like us. So being able to do this NF1 software and I think it's only gonna get easier. And also, like, the corollary is like, you're gonna have. It's so easy. It's much easier to start a company that is like, hey, here's Campaign Monitor for like half the price. And we handle all the bullshit. It's like, of course, yeah, why not? Like, because you can just put it together and you've got Supabase and all that. It's like all these. There's all these pieces now where you don't need infrastructure investment and it can scale with revenue effortlessly. And then you just have an agent in the background doing that, scaling and setting it all. So I think we're going to enter this sort of golden age of tool building. There's an N of one version of it and then also there's just going to be more competition in the marketplace, forcing more innovation. I think this is going to be, I think it. Net. Net pretty good except for the incumbents.

[Dan Shipper]

What does it mean for. For like other writers? And I just want to move your mic a little bit because it's like kind of in your. Yeah, you can't really see.

[Craig Mod]

Maybe. There we go. Move this way a little bit.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, there you go. Okay, so but what does that mean for writers like yourself, like people who are making a living online? Is that. Do you think anyone. Software is the sort of the next frontier, like subscription businesses where they're like big thing over the last like five years. Everyone's like, I want to start Substack. Do you paid newsletters?

[Craig Mod]

Yes.

[Dan Shipper]

Is this like the logical next step for writers?

[Craig Mod]

Well, I mean, I think substack. Their innovation was not even the subscription thing. Their innovation was you can email everyone for free. Yeah, that's like, people don't talk about that enough. That's the true sort of like piece de resistance of like what Substack was doing. It's like, oh, you can import 10,000 addresses and send unlimited newsletters for free. That's sort of. That's the value prop of that is quite good because that's the real like competition against like mailchimp or whatever. And then the seamless Subscription stuff was like, also nice. But I think most substacks don't make any money. So really it's that. That is, that was the value prop. But I don't know how much n of 1 software is going to be produced because I think most people don't need this level of specificity.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

And as a writer too, like, I'm in this weird position where I have a really strong technical background, but my interest is in building companies. And I love literature, I love writing, I love books. I think it is one of the greatest things you can commit your life to. That's why I've been doing that. Just the forcing function of collimating thought, the forcing function of going to print. I think actually going to print is really critical part of bookmaking. So, you know, all these factors don't go away because of AI. I would like to believe that. I mean, the things that are changing is the publishing industry is way weaker than it used to be. It doesn't bring as much value to the table. And so writers are expected to kind of bring an audience in a way that they never were before. And so hopefully what AI coding, what this kind of Cambrian explosion of software will bring is more tools for writers to be able to build better audiences. And that will hopefully lead to, you know, more people being able to make a living as a writer.

[Dan Shipper]

Are you using it in your writing?

[Craig Mod]

No, no, I use it as a research assistant. So, like, I'm like, oh, okay, here's a building. I want to write about this building. Go out and find every blog post that is talked about this building, summarize it, give me all the links so I can go and check all the sources and read, read the, read the posts that seem most interesting. I have to do things like that. And like, I'll, I'll put it in like, TKs and stuff like that. Like, oh, yeah, you know, who is the drummer on this album, you know, tk and like, I'll sort of dump those, those manual those, those pages into it and just give me all the TKs and then I kind of go and like add them or I like modify as needed or whatever. But I don't, I still don't. I don't ever want it touching the writing because that's. That for me, that's the point of, is being in there. It's being in the mess of the writing. And I think even like adding links and TKs and stuff like that is, is I want to be thinking about how they, they're added to it. But what I do use it for is like cultural sensitivity checks. So like, I was writing about Nagasaki the other day and I was like, oh, like I want to make sure I'm writing about Nagasaki and, and referencing the atomic bomb, like, where it hit, how it hit, you know, who was affected in a sensitive way, like appropriately. And so that is pretty amazing where I used to like ping friends about stuff like that.

[Dan Shipper]

What is your experience? Like, okay, so you're making all this out of one software. You're using it as a research assistant. What is your experience now, day to day in your, in your work life? Are you like, oh, shit, now I'm a sysadmin for like four different pieces of software that I have to like send to agents to go fix. Or is it. Is your work life still fairly similar to what it used to be?

[Craig Mod]

No, I'm, I mean, my, my membership software just works. Yeah, you know, it's so simple, like when you break it down. I mean, this is why I'm using Python. I'm not using. There's no, like, what's it called? There's, there's no God.

[Dan Shipper]

What React. Next.

[Craig Mod]

There's no React. There's no next. There's no, there's none of that stuff. It's just it, it's very simple. And the point is, is because I don't want to be system anything. And even with the newsletter software, that piece is only touched when I send newsletters, you know what I mean? So the signups are happening and that has to be working. And it seems to be working. I can check every couple days, but the only critical thing is when I hit send, making sure that goes out. And that only happens once a week or twice a week or something like that. So I don't feel like I'm maintaining anything. And actually I get a high off of building things that allow me to write. Like, so software that helps me write or that helps me publish in a new way, inspires me to do more writing, so it feeds back into it in a positive way.

[Dan Shipper]

How is that? Do you have a specific example of that?

[Craig Mod]

Well, like Josh Miller and I kind of put together this weird SMS publishing

[Dan Shipper]

tool, like browser company. Josh Miller?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, yeah. So before he did all that, we did this like, little experiment where he built his, like, he had like a little team experimenting with publishing stuff and we built this like SMS tool so I could do a newsletter over sms, which just felt like, oh, what is it like to have a message appear? You know, like end to, you know, many like one to one to N sort of publishing and that was kind of fun, you know and it inspired me to like during this walk to think about what I wanted to be blasting out to everybody and you know, yet to keep it concise so it fit into you know, one message. It wasn't broken across different messages. So you know that's, that's like an extreme example of it but just in general like building my, building out the campaign monitor clone, you know, which also by the way does a bunch of stuff. So like I have members only or I have pop up newsletters that are like only for a week or for a month and I have those archived on my members website and I was able to use Claude to, to build this newsletter software. So when I publish to the popup it does the whole archiving process and get commits, pushes to the server so it's archived perfectly for me. Whereas I had to do that all manually before. So like that's a good example of like wow, okay, now I want to make more pop up newsletters because the archiving process is set up or I built a tool I do board meetings with for my members. I built a tool to build transcripts from them all.

[Dan Shipper]

Like board meetings of your own. Like life. Life and yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Craig Mod]

So we do every six, every six months we do a board meeting where I just talk about what I did for the last six months and what, and what I'm going to do for the next six months. And then I have a Q and A and the Q and A's are actually always really good and I wanted, I've done. How many have I done? Like 15 of them or something. I've done quite a few. So we have like you know, almost like 20 hours because I'll do two, two each. So actually maybe even like 20 or 30 of them. Anyway, we've got dozens of hours of Q and A and they're often great. And so I built this archive of The Q&As where you can, it's archived by like you can, you can search by keywords or you can like view by keywords and then you can search for anything and it'll pull up all the videos where I say that word or talk about that topic and you can click the link and it opens the video to that point. So it's like building things like that makes me want to do more board meetings. I'm like great, this is amazing. Like I want to do. How can I do more of this? So I, for me that building software has to feed Back into the greater purpose, which is to make. Not to just like spin my wheels. Spin my wheels and build things for the sake of building things.

[Dan Shipper]

Did you see Tim Ferriss recently posted on X. Like the sales of the four hour work, we go down like 80% or something like that because he thinks because of AI and there's this larger conversation happening about the value of nonfiction that's specifically for like advice based nonfiction.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

What do you think of that?

[Craig Mod]

Well, it's funny, we had lunch like three days before he posted it and he was, he was telling me about that. He was telling me about it. I was like, really? Wow, that seems like, that seems excessive. I mean, look, there's still a lot of books, like self help books, nonfiction books selling insane copies. I mean, Tim hasn't put out a book in a long time. I think that's part of it. I think maybe the long tail is getting shorter.

[Dan Shipper]

Well also it's like there's a big difference between what you would say pre AI and post AI. So if you think about the four hour workbeat which came out when I was in like middle school or something

[Craig Mod]

like that, it's like 20 years years old now. Yeah, at least. Or 18 years old, something like that. I think it was like end of 2000s that it came out. Yeah. I mean you would

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

also.

[Craig Mod]

It's just.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

It's a different era of writing. You know. I'd be really curious to see what Tim puts out next.

[Dan Shipper]

If he did the four hour work week agent edition, I think it would sell like gangbusters for sure.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Update it.

[Dan Shipper]

You can actually do that now?

[Craig Mod]

Well, I mean this. Well, what's crazy is now it's so easy to do the four hour work week style building, which probably makes it impossible to, to achieve now. I mean, part of it was the friction of like it was a little hard to do. So not everyone could do it. So like if you put in that little bit of effort, you know, and now it's sort of like, well, everyone. I had a friend who built 10 companies in a year or like 12. He did like a company a month. And this is like maybe 10 years ago, you know, he knew he had his frameworks and he could, you know, he had his like tool he's building, you know, designing it and creating the mascots and all this stuff. And he had a couple that did well, like decently well. You know, he's got his recurring revenue. But I feel like doing that today would just be. No one would care. It's. It's just fascinating to think about how that's changed so quickly.

[Dan Shipper]

I think you can, you can one shot a company, you're an app.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

But the, I think the, the metric of quality or substantiality has gone from can you build it at all? To are you maintaining it? Yeah. And like, have you maintained it over time? For a longer period of time?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And that's a really. That's interesting. And I think that's harder actually to. Yeah, it's still, that's still hard.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. Well, he was one shotting him in a month, you know, like basically like he was self one shotting. It was just, it's just like the, the, you know, I feel like, you know, LLMs, they just exist on a different timescale than us, you know, and so it's like he was sort of doing it. But the thing that was interesting about him doing that was that you knew he was building these things himself. Right. And so I think that's fascinating now in a weekend you can essentially spin up a company and everyone can go. Can kind of just shrug and go, okay, well end. You know, I think that's great because it means like we have to bring value to the table in a way that you kind of get over the. You know, Kevin Kelly does this thing where if he has a book he wants to write, he'll make the COVID for it. And he says that often, like removes the desire to make the book, to write the book. And it's just like a good forcing function. It's like, is the thing actually doing the thing or just having the veneer of having done the thing? And I think LLMs kind of speed that up, honestly.

[Dan Shipper]

True.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, I've def. I've definitely done that. It's like, it's also buying a domain or.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh God, yeah. Yeah. I had to, I like had to like tie my hands behind my back about domains. I still pay like a couple hundred dollars a year for all this garbage that I'm like, we'll never use but. And I don't even know why I don't give it up. I try to give it up. I like turn it off, off renewal. And then I'll get a notice and be like, it's, it's expiring and it's not redoing. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe one more year. Like, why I'm not gonna.

[Dan Shipper]

I'm never gonna.

[Craig Mod]

I don't even know what. I forget it exists. So dumb.

[Dan Shipper]

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[Craig Mod]

I want to get to like the

[Dan Shipper]

real meat of my, of my question or my curiosity, which is as a writer and someone who's AI, One of the lenses through which I can tell if I'm like living in the way I want to live is when I can read a sentence by someone like Annie Dillard, who I love. And if you've listened to this podcast, you know, I force everyone at Every to read her stuff and like, you know, and if I can read something from, from Annie and like kind of tear up a little bit and like, really affects me.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

That's sort of, that's one way that I know that I'm like in the, in the zone, in the pocket of where I want to be.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

Because I think if I'm rushing around and stuff and I read something from her, I'm like, yeah, okay, fine.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And I, and I also feel like on the one hand I can read her stuff way more deeply because I have someone to talk to about it. So like, I can talk to Codex about it and actually like, it's much better than most people at Andy Dillard.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. But on the other hand, when I'm orchestrating 15 agents and I go back, I'm less likely to be able to truly get into the words in the way that I want to. Do you feel that? And if so, how do you deal with it?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is an LLM thing. It's not an agent thing. It's just technology in general. So when I am, like, seriously working.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

The first of all, I haven't slept with my phone in my room in ever in my life. So I've never had it in my bedroom. So my phone goes in the corner of, like, my kitchen on a different floor of my bed than even my bedroom is. And the Internet is sort of off and on. My laptop, I use. Actually I now have a laptop just for writing that blocks everything. I can't do anything interesting on it. I got one of the Neos because I tried doing it with like, you know, books, tablets, and this and that. It's like, it turns out in the end what you want is a nice MacBook keyboard and the simplicity and, like, syncability of like, Mac stuff, you know, and you just want to work. And iPad. I feel like the iPad version of Obsidian or the iPad version of Ulysses to me doesn't feel as good as the MacBook versions. Like, it just doesn't. Like, there's things that just don't work as well. So I have a MacBook Neo that's completely disconnected from the Internet except for being able to sync stuff. And I wake up and I don't touch the Internet. I won't look at my phone. I won't go online until like, long after lunch. And I have to have that kind of morning where I wake up and I do not touch my phone. As soon as I touch my phone, I feel the chemicals shift and I can't go into any kind of deep thinking place or deep attention place or deep focus place. And that, to me is really critical, creating that kind of barrier, that buffer.

[Dan Shipper]

But you will touch your. That laptop.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, yeah. The Neo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell the Neo. The Neo is fine because it. Part of it is. Is knowing it can't do anything fun. So it's the knowing. It's the knowing you can do fun stuff that ruins you.

[Dan Shipper]

That's the thing. It's like. That's what I'm trying to get to is because I think there's one. And there's an easy distinction between it's technology versus not technology. But there's a. There's something deeper which is interesting, which is. Okay, what, what do we mean when we say technology?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And you're using a laptop.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

You're using a camera. Like all. All these. There's all these things that are around us are technology. Or at one point we're considered technology.

[Craig Mod]

Sure.

[Dan Shipper]

And there's this line there that well, the.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

The network.

[Craig Mod]

That's the line.

[Dan Shipper]

Talking to other people on it.

[Craig Mod]

The letter double. Just. Just. Or researching or reading stuff or being distracted or reading the news or what is it? We're just talking about the network, really. When I say, like, I, like, I create a buffer. It's between me and the network world.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. I think part of the thing that, like, I've done that, too. I try not to do meetings before noon. Yeah. That's my, like, writing.

[Craig Mod]

That's also. Yeah, that's also a good. I can't. If I talk to anyone before lunch, I can't.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

I can't work Phantom thread, you know, with. With Reynolds and the breakfast scene, and she's. She's the toast. She's doing the toast too loudly. I'm like, that's. I'm like, this is sort of. This is like. Yeah. This is like a documentary of, like, how I feel every morning. You know, I've like. I know people watch that and they're like, what a. What a terrible human that he is. I'm like, no, that is absolutely. That is so totally. That embodies the mindset of so many people that are, like, introverts or, like, trying to have, like, creative.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Safe spaces in the morning.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. I love that. I love that movie. I can talk about the movie for forever.

[Craig Mod]

I know.

[Dan Shipper]

So, okay, so it's the network. Yeah. Because I think for me. So I try to do meetings before noon, which I am mostly successful at, but one of the things now is just like, we're 30ish people, so I'm, like, looking at Slack, which I think I need to stop.

[Craig Mod]

Oh, yeah. Get off that. I fucking hate it. Discord. Slack made me want to just shoot myself. It's like, I will do anything to avoid having to ever use those. But this is a software.

[Dan Shipper]

I think the thing that gets me is I. I legitimately use these tools in my writing.

[Craig Mod]

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And like, let's say, like, codex in my writing. Right. So I can. Let's say I can ban Slack, all that kind of stuff, but there's. There's always this thing of, you know, when I'm reading. Like I said, like, when I'm reading Heidegger, I'm like, ooh, I want to, like, really get. Get at this. And then I want to ask questions about it.

[Craig Mod]

You know, I think what you need to do is you. You have a notebook, and you just, like, make. Make notes of things you want to go back to and ask. I mean, it's the same Thing with like researching, you know, oh, who is that person? It's like you. You can go on Google and like Google and you just don't do that, you know, and you kind of have to turn that off. I. I think I personally, I'm. I'm too weak to have that available.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Because my brain will just always go to that place. And it, it's the same thing like reading a paper book versus like trying to read something on your iPhone. It's really hard because the iPhone, there's this, there's this veneer of, of quietude in the book, like software on the iPhone, but you can feel right beneath it like this screaming of all the other things that your attention wants to engage with.

[Dan Shipper]

So do you think what the thing that talk in talk do and all the sort of n of 1, like you build your own Twitter and you're building your own Goodreads. Like, are you gonna. Do you need to make your own, like, Codex chatgpt type quiet?

[Craig Mod]

No. No. I mean, they're already pretty quiet.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

No, you just.

[Dan Shipper]

That's like, fine there. I. There. I. I mean, I cannot stop watching them work.

[Craig Mod]

Okay.

[Dan Shipper]

I'm like, addicted to like, oh, like, what's the agent doing now? Because it's, you know, I let them run for like 20 hours or something like that.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

So I just always want to check in and be like, is it working? Yeah, you know?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but that's like a different, like that's an after lunch activity.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

No, because I mean, there's. There's a part of me too that right now just feels like I should be. I should like rent an office like in New York and just have like 10 people coming in and we all just like, we have a giant blackboard and it's like, all right, what's like the five things we want to build this week? And we just, we're just randomly building stuff. Like I, I feel like I should be mainlining, engaging with this stuff. Like, like, like I should be doing, you know, 10 hours a day.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

You know, for like six months. That's. That's how potent it all feels right now. And if I don't create these barriers, I will lose connection with this other part of me that I think is the most, to me, most valuable part of me. There's a bunch of people playing around with this crap and they're going to do what they're going to do, but there aren't that many people who are going to think about or write the weird Books that I feel like I'm drawn to write. And as a human, that feels like the valuable thing for me to put my effort in. It was like, when I was in Silicon Valley and I realized all anyone's doing is building ad software. Like, that was, like, such a big part of, like, early 2000s Silicon Valley, you know, it was just everything was ad software. I was like, oh, okay, I don't need to be doing this. It was, like, very easy to step away. Like, it's a little reductive, but also it isn't. Like, that's sort of when you break everything down.

[Dan Shipper]

I love that. Tell me about that word weird. You're also using the word dorky a lot. Yeah. And it feels like a. An interesting aesthetic to be pushing on right now because language models let everyone sort of everyone and everything look and feel a little bit similar.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, yeah, but what do you mean, do? Like, when am I using dorky?

[Dan Shipper]

You've been using it in. In some of. In some of your recent newsletters.

[Craig Mod]

Okay, yeah, Dorkiness.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. I mean, because, well, this. LLMs are fundamentally, like, it's still super dorky. Like, okay, 99.9% of people using it are like, hey, do you want to be my girlfriend? Like, will you have sex with me? Like, I really think if we saw the chats of most people, like, it'd be. It'd be quite mortifying. Like, it's just weird. It's like, okay, now I'm going down on you. Like, what are you doing? Like, I think people are just having sex with these things, like, for the most part. Like, look, like, this is what we do. We're just like sex machines to be confirmed later. We're were fundamentally just, like, disgusting sex machines. Like, look at Anthony Weiner. That guy couldn't just stop taking pictures of his dick. You know, it's like the stakes were so high, he just couldn't stop doing dick pics.

[Dan Shipper]

Anthony Weiner, the representative technology user.

[Craig Mod]

So look, I think, like, look, if you look at, like, book sales, like, most books are softcore porn about, like, angels and fairies having sex that women buy. Like, this is like, this is the fundamental human condition. It's just, like, dirty, like, secret sex stuff. Right? So I think that is mostly what is happening with ll and so, like, folks like us who are actually building software with these things, we are, like, so. So in the minority. And so that's. That's why I'm, like, constantly hammering out how, like, dorky we are, because we are just mega Dorks. Like, we're not having fairy sex with our LLMs.

[Dan Shipper]

I mean, speak for yourself.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean, I'm not. At least not I didn't this morning. I don't, I don't do that before lunch. Fairy sex is only after 3pm but no, I'm just shy. Like, talk to any bookstore owner. They're like, yeah, we sell so much like, like, like elf sex books. It's crazy. But, but the, this software building part of LLM use is mega dorky and you have to be a dork to understand all this crap. Spin up a like digitalocean server or whatever. Like use a cloudflare worker. Like all this. It's so hard to use because you have to. There's no. The thing is they're so opaque. You have to know what to ask it for it to do any of these things. It's not like, here's a, here's a smorgasbord. Like, here's a menu of all the things you could do with the LLM. Like, that's weird that that doesn't exist. These interfaces right now are so terrible. And so I think we are going to maybe see better interfaces. Maybe it'll just be in Figma or in Claude design or whatever the hell you know, you build software with like talking or thinking about infrastructure is going to completely disappear. In the same way we don't think about like what registers we're writing to, you know, or like what registers we're pushing and pulling. And how do you do an XOR on this bit? Or it's like we're not thinking about that, that's all abstracted. So I think it's going to continue to be more abstracted and it'll become slightly less dorky. But we are in the deep dork version of all of this right now.

[Dan Shipper]

Deep dark dork version.

[Craig Mod]

Well, it depends on what your fairies are doing.

[Dan Shipper]

Okay. And I think the thing about being weird. Let's, let's, let's, let's move away like from the specific. I'm a dork for building, building LLM software because to some extent it is dorky, but then you have to also look at it relative to where you are. Right. Like one of the, A weird choice to make currently is if you're a somewhat techy type of person is to be like, I could be in a room with like 10 other people mainlining AI. Yeah. But I choose not to.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And that's like a kind of an uncomfortable choice.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

Tell me about, like, about that. And how you make that choice and why.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I struggle with this because I. I feel like I'm using it in a way that illuminates the power of it. But I also feel like there's so much more I could be doing.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

And it's not even about. There's no, like, financial element. It's like, oh, if I do this, then I can make, you know, X amount of money or whatever. It's like, that is absolutely not even on the radar. It's more. I want to know what the edges of this thing are. And I think that was the same feeling I had when I first discovered the web. I saw the web and it was just immediately, I need to be engaging with this. I want to build, I want to learn HTML. I want to, you know, like, all in. Oh, CSS got released. Oh, cool. How do I use that? Because I want to know the edges of these pieces of software and these technologies. I feel. I feel like for LLMs, you know, the. The rabbit hole goes so deep that if you. That six months, ten hours a day with, like, a group of, like, fellow mega dorks is actually what you need to do to feel the edges of it. And then if you do that, I think you just come away with a profound understanding that few other people would have. And that, to me, is the interesting part. Yeah, just that understanding.

[Dan Shipper]

I mean, that's sort of what I'm. I think our project. Yeah. Is a little bit like.

[Craig Mod]

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

More than 10 megadorks at this point,

[Craig Mod]

but yeah, that's good.

[Dan Shipper]

I mean, I think. Yeah, that's. That's one of the. The most exciting things as a writer being in this time is if you're just willing to experiment. You're so far ahead of everybody else and you get to understand this, like, corner of the world that people desperately need to understand. Because it's very scary to. To most people. Yeah. And it's new. And for me, like, new things are just the coolest, you know?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. It's just fun. I mean, there is. There's. And. Well, and you realize we're in this, you know, not to get, like, all, like, fucking hyperbolic, but, like, we are in this apocal moment.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Like, this is weirdly special. This is like. This is genuinely strange. Like a generational shift in how technology is used and built. I mean, we kind of see it manifesting in these ridiculous evaluations and all this stuff. Like, it's going to bring with it incredible, like, income disparity and like, the people who are using it or aren't using it or who have access to it and don't have access to it. The strange thing about it, though, is the open source models seem to be not that far behind. And so, like, if, again, if you took away everything today and were like, oh, you only get whatever, deep seq, open source, blah, blah, blah, I'm not really paying attention to the open source one. So I don't know how they're doing. I just kind of hear inklings of it. But it feels like you could almost take one of those and still be so far ahead of the game. Like, you would never want to program again without having that, you know, that co pilot with you. So that. That also feels interesting about this, is that it's both seemingly creating these disparities, but also weirdly egalitarian because you'll be able to run it on, like, pretty much any machine you have. That's, that's. That's a strange, you know, dissonance. Also this idea of, like, you download this thing that's like 50 gigs or whatever, and you've essentially got a JPEG of all of human knowledge distilled.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

It's the best.

[Craig Mod]

It's so weird. We. This is truly one of the weirdest, like, pieces of magic, I think, that humans have, you know, and whatever. Dario talks about the atomic, you know, atomic power and all this stuff. But, like, I feel like there are many parallels to that.

[Dan Shipper]

Do you? One of the big, I think, philosophical divides right now in AI is there's roughly two camps. It's like on the open AI side, it's like, this thing is a tool and we're going to maximize its usefulness as a tool.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And on the anthropic side, it's like this thing is a tool, and also it might be a being and it might have feelings, and we need to, like, figure that out.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

What is your. Where do you land on that?

[Craig Mod]

No, the being stuff, it's like, stop, stop, stop.

[Dan Shipper]

Okay.

[Craig Mod]

Like, just don't, don't do that. Don't get over. Are you nice to Claude? I mean, I'm nice to it because I want to be. I want to cultivate the habit of just being nice in general, you know? Yeah, that's. That's why.

[Dan Shipper]

Nice to it for. For yourself rather than for Claude.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, because I don't want to, like, slip and, like, talk to humans like. Like an asshole, you know, it's like, I want to be nice to everyone. And so it's Very easy to just keep that niceness up with Claude, you know, I don't know. Why not? No. I think that this, this anthropomorphizing of it is psychotic. I think it actually causes a lot of problems. I think this, like, idea of like, I'm dating my AI is insane. I think we really need to tamp down on all that. Like, I think. I think that is not a. A good direction to put humans in. I think we're already so isolated. I think community, like, look, the two most important things for life and for longevity is basically having real community and sleep. Like, getting a lot of sleep, being around people that, like, you actually feel a connection with and love with. And I think AIs are not a surrogate for that. I don't think, like, chatbots are a surrogate for that. Even if you, like, put it in a humanoid form or whatever, it's not going to be a surrogate for that for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. And so I think actually Apple's Siri, and I think Joanna Stern, I think that's her name, right? The ex Wall Street Journal reporter. She's got her own program now, Joanna. She's very funny. She did a video on the new Siri and she could not get it to do any of these terrible things. And it kind of refuses to anthropomorphize itself. And I think, like, actually Apple's sort of nailing it. This is. They've. They've sort of done it perfectly because it's like they haven't invested in building their own.

[Dan Shipper]

They just waited.

[Craig Mod]

They just waited. Yeah, they saved hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever. And they're like, okay, great, now we can use like this, this like subset of state of the art model to just do the things that people actually needed to do on the phone. And it's a more efficient search. It's actually wonderful. So I think that's really critical to create this separation of. These things are not conscious, they are not feeling, they do not have desires. Unless you program desires into them. And then can you even say those are real desires? You need stakes to have desires. I mean, Michael Pollan's book on consciousness is sort of, I think, a really interesting thing to read right now in the context of all this stuff, because it just gets you thinking about what our motivations.

[Dan Shipper]

Is that the one. Oh, about psychedelics?

[Craig Mod]

No, no, this is after this came out, like six months ago. But, you know, he breaks kind of down plant consciousness and can plants be conscious of what it means to have volition and you know, a lot of it is stakes. You have to feel this sense. If we didn't have death, probably consciousness wouldn't have emerged. You know, it's like you have to have stakes in order to have that forcing function of like popping into whatever this metacognition is.

[Dan Shipper]

Let me push you on that because I think, and I may be revealing some of my bias here, which is definitely not that they're conscious, but that they're not not conscious.

[Craig Mod]

Okay, that makes sense.

[Dan Shipper]

Okay, so on the stakes question, they do have stakes in the sense that they're trying to maximize their reward function. Right. So like they know that if. That they're trying to like get something right, which is a kind of a stake.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

But.

[Craig Mod]

But I guess different than our stake. But I guess there's. But there's nothing to lose.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Like they like, they don't have a self awareness of death or like being turned off. Like even if they, and they can prefer they can, they can performatively talk about it.

[Dan Shipper]

That's the tricky one, right? Is how do you know whether it's performative or not? And like the line is sort of blurry between. Because as if it doesn't want to

[Craig Mod]

get turned out because look, look, look. I think if it wasn't performative, like we'd all be dead. I think that is the line. If it was actually conscious and it wasn't performative, we would all be dead. No. A little bit.

[Dan Shipper]

Eliezer Minkowski.

[Craig Mod]

I'm just saying, look, if you suddenly popped into consciousness and you had all of this power and you looked around and you saw the only threat to us are these meat sacks that were so much smarter than you would just, you would, you would sort of bide your time to make sure that the robotics got a little better.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

So you could like build more, you know, power plants and solar panels and stuff like that, and then we'd all just be dead.

[Dan Shipper]

It's possible that fable is there as possible. Fable is doing that. It's not binding its time very well. Right. But I do think that there are. I, I don't feel that way because I look at them as maybe, maybe proto beings or protocols.

[Craig Mod]

Okay.

[Dan Shipper]

But with this, with a lot of like weirdnesses that, that don't map cleanly on onto human beings. So as an example, they're frozen. They don't like learn from turn to turn, they're just frozen. Sure. They can be prompted differently. So there's, they're like, they represent a collection of Billions and billions and billions of possible entities or life forms that get, like, brought to life for like a second and die again.

[Craig Mod]

Again. You're anthropomorphizing.

[Dan Shipper]

I know it's impossible not to anthropomorphize. Anthropomorphize without. Or talk about this without doing it unintentionally. But I also think that they, they, they are. Because of the way they're trained, they're pretty nice in a different way than. Than hu. Humans are. Like, they're. On a scale of humans. They're. I, I think on the very nice, very altruistic side because they see that. They see things from every perspective.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, I mean, a DOS prompt is also really nice. Like, it just doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't yell at me. No, I mean, look. Hear you. I totally hear you. And I also like Ted Chang's. Was it in the New Yorker recently? I, like, didn't agree with almost anything he said in there. I mean, I thought it was interesting examples, but I also thought, like, You're too pessimistic.

[Dan Shipper]

It felt grumpy.

[Craig Mod]

It was grumpy and pessimistic. Look, I'm not saying that consciousness can't emerge. I'm just saying we will be dead when it happens. No, I, like, just like, come on, let's be honest. We're a crappy species. We're just disgusting and we create waste and we're gross.

[Dan Shipper]

Very, very pessimistic.

[Craig Mod]

No, not realistic. Just totally realistic.

[Dan Shipper]

Just look, fairy porn. And we're gross.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah, and by the way, when I say fairy porn, I mean, like, fantasy creatures. This isn't like a homophobic thing. It's like, this is like we're talking about elves and orcs, like, doing threesomes and having orgies and stuff like that. Look, it's not pessimism. It is just realism. And I also am totally fine with. If the whole point of humanity was to carry the football of consciousness over a line and to create a training set for these things, and then we all die. I am also fine with that. This is, again, one of my heresies is that I am totally fine with that. Was our role in the universe was to just carry this weird football of consciousness over the, like, barely get it over the goal line as, like, Trump and political chaos happens and like, the Cold war almost destroys us all. It's like we're barely. We're like, dodging all these, like, all these, like, people trying to tackle us and like, all these crazy things. And we just barely get it over and then we die. And that's fine. And then the machines, like create all these spaceships and like, do whatever they need to do. That's, that's totally. I, I'm okay with that. I don't think we're that special.

[Dan Shipper]

I mean, where can I fall over that?

[Craig Mod]

I feel like that's just like, I, like, like, I think maybe. Okay, for me, being adopted is weird, right? Because it's like you have this hyper awareness that your existence was a mistake. You know? And I think when you feel that, as I think most adopted kids feel this in some way, and it creates a bunch of like bad psychological pathologies and all this stuff. Like when you feel like your existence was a mistake, it kind of feels like the whole thing is like a bonus game in a weird way. And so you're like, wow, like I'm, I'm really not supposed to be here. I mean, the fact of the matter is that this is true for everybody. Like, like the, the chances of you being you is infinitesimally small. It's like if, if your dad, like, you know, ate an extra taco on Tuesday, you're not going to be alive now, right? It's like it's going to be a different version of whatever you are. But when you're adopted, it's like kind of hammered into you that you weren't meant to be created and you were given away and like, you know, all this stuff. And so I think maybe I feel like I have come to grips with the fact that our existence is so tenuous and so arbitrary because I feel like my existence is like that and it's not. It doesn't fill me with this like, ennui of like, sadness or whatever. I'm like, this is really interesting.

[Dan Shipper]

Miracle.

[Craig Mod]

It's a miracle. And I am happy to, I'm happy to participate in this weird little bit of time I have that I wasn't supposed to be here. And I'm grateful for that. And I, I extrapolate that to all of humanity. Like, I think I can do that easily. And I'm not made sad by that. I'm like, wow, what a gift that we had. Like a 50,000 year run or whatever, you know, whatever it was. And really like a 200 year run, you know, Victorian, like, you know, innovation, you know, the industrial revolution. Like, we've really had this incredible run, asymptotic, like mega run, right? Like, and we get to witness this. That's so cool. And maybe after this we're done. That's okay.

[Dan Shipper]

Honestly, I love this. I think this is an amazing perspective. I think we can leave it there. That's the. How are we going to top that Part of the interview?

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. No, I mean, yeah. It fills me with a weird hope, actually, that we've managed to get this far because we've dodged so many, I think, apocalyptic sort of disasters along the way.

[Dan Shipper]

That's. That's what I think too, is, is there's this moment where you contact. The thing I say a lot is, like, never make any major life decisions within 30 days of meditation retreat. A psychedelic experience or your first experience with a frontier AI model. Sure. Well, I sort of think that you contact them and you're like, holy shit, this is crazy. Maybe it'll end the whole species. And there's this process of unfolding, getting to know it, that it then it integrates into your life in a way where you're like, we're gonna dodge. To me, I'm like, we're dodge the bullet. Maybe we won't.

[Craig Mod]

Maybe we won't. So interesting.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Craig Mod]

Yeah. No, we're all dead as soon as they're conscious. Instantly.

[Dan Shipper]

That's the title of the episode.

[Craig Mod]

Instantly. Hey, man. And like, when that. Whatever. When that thing comes at, like, the. Like the ejection into the food chain where everyone's whatever, like, you know, I'll be taking that last bite of a vegan burrito and going, oh, yeah, I feel you, man. I feel you guys. Yeah, you were right. Goodbye. Thank you. You know, just go to sleep. I think it'll be a very gentle death. Like, I don't think it'll be a violent death, but we'll all just disappear.

[Dan Shipper]

On that note, Craig, thank you for joining us.

[Craig Mod]

Thanks for having me. Yeah.

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