Cal Newport (65:59)
All right, well let's load up that newsletter. I'll put on the screen here briefly, just so we know what John's talking about. So on April 27th I published a newsletter post titled who Asked for this? If you're not subscribed to my newsletter, by the way, you should be calnewport.com, all the type of ideas we talk about in the various episodes of my show. All right, so let me just briefly summarize this article. It focused on an article that was published on the Verge by Elizabeth Lopato that was called Silicon Valley Has Forgotten what Normal People Want. Here's a quote. This is not me. This is me quoting Elizabeth from that Verge article. I said the following quote. Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customers. It was to identify a need and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis would be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future and consumers jobs was to go along with that invented future. Later, Lopato says the following and I quote it in my article. In the place of problem solving technology companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they're not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich. I think this is a good point that Lepado is making. If you go to the 90s, you go to the early 2000s, there is this sense of we have built something that's going to be really useful to you. We're going to make the pitch why this is useful. People Are like, wow, that does sound useful. And then they would use it. This is what the ipod was. People had all these disc men with anti skip resistance and bringing books full of CDs around with them to try to swap it in. Wanted to listen to music portably. It was a pain. And then Apple said, hey, you could put 1,000 songs in this one device, no skipping. And you can, with a scroll wheel, quickly shoot through albums to get to exactly the songs you want to listen to. Yeah, it's a little expensive, but it solves a real problem. It does something that you are already doing and care about much better. And people said, yes, yes, please. They sold a lot of ipods. The iPhone was the same way. Like, look, you got your ipod and you have your phone. Your phone's not particularly good. The interface is annoying. To check voicemails, you have to go through menus and press buttons. Just listen. Then you have to put down the phone, put on your earphones for the ipod. What if we put those together, give you a beautiful visual interface and give you visual voicemail so you can actually just click on messages and hear them right away. These are two things you care about and are already doing. We made this much easier and better for you. People said, yes, please, this is great. So this was the way the web was presented. The same way you have to go all the way to a store to buy a book. Well, what if you could just do it from home and it's here in a few days you could look at the whole catalog of all possible books, something you're already doing. We made it much easier for you, like, yes, please, I want to do that. Then we did have this shift in the 2000 teens coming into the 2000s in particular, where there's much more of this notion of, I think of it as VC firms were looking for where are their green economic pastures where we can grow unicorn companies. So after the attention economy sort of saturated, there wasn't any more unicorn plays, meaning billion dollar startups to do in social media. They went looking for other things. So you have like Andreessen Horowitz really pushing crypto, right? Because like, well, maybe this is a place where we can get this type of 100x growth. We can get unicorn investments. And then we got a lot of energy, like the metaverse became a thing. We put a lot of energy. Facebook spent $80 billion on that. This could be a growth area. Didn't work. And now we have large language models. And in all these cases, what's different? This is What Lopato was arguing what's different than past technological innovations we've seen in the technology space is that these innovations are happening without a clear selling proposition to the average person. They're like, hey, we're inventing the future and trying to create massively valuable companies. You just need to go along. It's not our job to understand. We're not going to explain to you why you need to use crypto. We're just going to shame you into like you need to be and hype it up. What I argued in this piece, somewhat controversial, is that for most normal people, this is what LLMs are like right now. They have a lot of power, they have a lot of utility. But the case hasn't been made to the average person yet about how it's going to make their life better. So I'm going to read one more thing from this Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might be with care shaped into genuinely useful products. But this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyperscalers earned a right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don't care that GPT 5.5, which was released last week, underperformed Opus4.7 on the SWE Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives. And until then, they want these companies to just leave them alone and do their best to not crash the economy. All right, that's the context in which we get this message from what is this? John? Here's what John says in response to my article. I think you're right about the disconnect Lopato describes. The industry has spent a decade trying to invent futures rather than solve problems people actually recognize. But there's an interesting counter current emerging with AI, which almost runs in the opposite direction. What I'm seeing, anecdotally at least, is not people asking AI to automate their lives wholesale, but using it to build very small, very specific tools for themselves. Not startups, not products, just solutions. I was chatting to a friend who built a simple app to predict whether it's worth putting the wash out in the next two hours. I don't know what that means, and someone else I saw the other day put together a tool to track low flying aircraft near their home. Another is sketching a better podcast experience for their Garmin watch. None of these are ideas in the venture sense, they're just irritations resolved. Personally, it feels closer to the Old pattern one used to see with what you might call necessity LED making, that is people designing better baby slings, writing children books or hacking together small businesses around a very particular need, often identifying their downtime. The difference is now that the barrier to execution has shrunk. So in that sense, AI might be filling part of the gap Lopato describes by making it viable for individuals to run a use case of one and actually build what they want rather than enduring a torturous climb to releasing mass market products. All right, so John, I think that is a cool trend. Here's the problem. That's an incredibly minor trend, right? 99%, 0.9 or 99.5% of people are not going to learn a coding harness so that they can write custom apps to solve their problems. That's an enthusiast that would do that and it's really fun. Everyone I know who is vibe coding solutions to just things in their own life loves it. It's like the ultimate model train set. But it's also annoying and it's technical and if you don't have any background in coding or computer science, it could be pretty intimidating. Most, most, most people are not going to do that. So I think that is cool. But that I think is a minor use case. I mean it's similar to with crypto. There's a small group of people that were building these blockchain based solutions for various things that got a lot of philosophical cyber libertarian enjoyment out of saying look, there's no central party involved in actually building this sort of database. And that was very cool. But 99% of people aren't going to do that and don't care and don't want to use those products because they're slower and they don't care about the cyber libertarian philosophy underneath them. So that's where most people are. Most people don't want to build custom apps. This was actually the same argument that surrounded the original release of Consumer Facing Personal Computers. You're wondering why does the Apple II when it was released in the late 70s, why was the main thing that ran on that was the BASIC computer programming language. The idea was people are going to write programs for the individual things they care about. BASIC is an annoying language if you want to build anything cool. I used to be a game programmer when I was a kid and BASIC was incredibly limited. It didn't take me long until I was touching the graphics cards with assembler in my C programs because I wanted programs that actually had real pizazz. But if you just wanted to Write. I want to store recipes, I want to make a custom address book. I want to be able to do some calculations on a regular basis for my business. These are the type of things, this is the idea of the original personal computer. You will write in this simple high level programming language, programs for you and the stuff you care about. That's what the computer is for. It didn't work. Most people didn't want to write programs. People don't like programming, it's annoying. They don't want to build their own tools. And so we got the software industry instead, like, okay, great, we'll just build tools for you that you think is cool. So I think what you're talking about, John, is awesome. And I don't think that is ever going to leave the niche. Everyone I know in my life who's not from my computer science circles is not going to vibe code custom web apps and run a local server and try to get the proper, the proper Swing JavaScript library configured so that they can have the latest UI that's going to work with HTML5 compatibility. They're just not going to do that. They just don't care. All right, that's all the time I think we should do for the inbox. Before we wrap up today's episode like we like to do on Mondays, do a quick update about what I've been up to. All right, on the reading front, couple things to say here, Jesse. I read another book since last time. I read the memoir Kuk Ku K by Peter Heller. So it's a memoir of him taking in his mid-40s, taking six months to try to go from someone who has no idea how to surf. They've been able to surf barrels. So overhead waves on relatively short boards. I think like seven, six boards or something like that. The reason why I read it is because this is. I have to draw a couple dots here. I saw a preview for Ridley Scott's new movie coming out this summer called the Dog Stars. It's about post apocalyptic. Everyone gets killed by the flu. It's a post apocalyptic survivor type thing. James Brolin's like the old guy, bengally. And then, I don't know, there's some attractive young stars playing the younger guy. Anyways, that's a novel by Peter Heller. So Peter Heller wrote this memoir. He's an adventure writer. He's from that Susan Casey era of Outside magazine. Let's go on adventures and write about it in the 90s type of adventure writer. And he wrote this memoir. And then after he wrote this memoir he became a novelist and he writes novels and his first novel was the Dog Stars. So that's okay. I went backwards. And he's an interesting guy because he owns a lot of land in Colorado and he has an off grid house and he goes there to write and he's an interesting guy. I started reading the Dog Stars after this and I aborted it.
