Let's talk about why social media keeps getting worse.
Because nothing feels exciting anymore like it used to when the internet first came around.
Yet we can't seem to pull ourselves away from our screens.
And a select few people, probably you, are getting tired of it.
Tired of the cute dances, tired of the immature pranks, tired of being robbed of your attention 10 seconds at a time.
Tired of the digital slot machine increasing anxiety and depression across the board.
Tired of saying I'll just check Instagram, then finding yourself an hour later having opened every social app at least three times.
Your attention was hijacked.
Social media had so much potential and it still has so much potential.
There are great people here.
I still love watching youtube.
I still love a lot of the creators that are online, but over the past five years, it just feels like it's gotten worse and worse.
Now i'm not going to tell you to quit social media and go and live off in the woods.
I don't think that's a solution at all.
Instead, i'm going to show you how this worsening of social media could lead to the end of the world, And I'm not joking when I say that.
And then after, I'll show you what you can do about it.
So how can this attention hijacking lead to the end of the world?
First, we need to understand that social media is the fast food of socialization.
Porn is the fast food of intimacy.
Video games are the fast food of achievement.
And Netflix is the fast food of entertainment.
Now let's go back a bit.
Our brains evolved reward circuits for a hunter-gatherer environment.
When we would seek scarce resources like fat, sugar or salt, our brain would increase dopamine levels to signal that those things are important to our survival.
The homogenous species emerged around 2 million years ago.
The homo sapien species emerged around 300,000 years ago.
And here's the kicker.
The industrial age started around 300 years ago.
That's one one thousandth of human evolution.
We're living in this technological time with the brain of our ancestors that has been wired over the course of two million plus years.
Now, in the industrial age, that's when these ingredients became less scarce.
Fat, sugar, salt.
We could mass manufacture and distribute them.
Then in the 1950s.
That's when fast food chains started to pop up, and that's also when the golden age of television, or just the television, came around and allowed for the mass spread of information, or at least started that.
Then, a bit later, the internet came around, and it was incredible at first, but then massive companies pursuing profit as their incentive, like Google and Facebook, started competing in a race to the top.
Now here's.
The thing is that fast food companies had already been testing all of these different combinations of fat, sugar and salt to maximize the pleasure of eating the fast food.
So the internet companies could also study this reward mechanism in our heads, and that's what led to them adopting the advertising model for monetization.
And once they did that, they soon found that the most polarizing or inflammatory headlines or content is what captured and held the most attention.
So they obviously prioritized that, and all they had to do now was just serve more content that people liked, and that's how the For You page was born.
And now here we are.
Since media is the mass transfer of information in today's world, This leads to a society optimized for one-marshmallow thinking.
You can either have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, and we can't help but choose now.
Instinct gratification.
This is inherently entropic and degrades systems.
Short form attention hacking content has no through line, it has no greater purpose, it has no sense, making thousands of meaningless ideas flood our mind and we are unable to make sense of the chaos which traps us in a low consciousness state.
So how does this lead to the end of the world?
Daniel schmachtenberger if you don't know who he is, i believe he is one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
Go watch a few podcasts of his if you want some like real deep thinking.
I really like his stuff.
But he created the concept called the meta crisis.
So this isn't just one crisis that threatens the world, but a convergence of three different crises that are driven by three generator functions is what he calls them.
A generator function is a deep structural pattern that creates surface level problems, so think of them as root causes to problems.
Now, when you treat symptoms without addressing the root cause, it's like mopping water while the faucet runs.
The three generator functions are one rivalrous dynamics, so win-lose games where one party's gain requires another's loss.
You can think arms races, corporate competition, social media content and academic publishing.
So like hoarding data, to publish first.
The second generator function is substrate consumption.
Substrate is what.
Something needs to exist like soil for plants, attention for media, trust for markets.
When systems consume their foundation faster than they can regenerate, that's bad.
Think depleting topsoil that took millennia to form and the attention economy consuming human cognitive capacity faster than it recovers.
Now, the third generator function is exponential technology.
These are tools and systems that improve themselves at accelerating rates, outpacing human wisdom.
That's the key point.
Think AI doubling in capacity, automated weapons and social media algorithms evolving faster than we can study their psychological impacts.
That was a mouthful.
Those are the generator functions.
But what does this have to do with civilization?
In daniel schmankenberger's opinion, when these things converge, there are two bad outcomes that are possible.
The first is catastrophic collapse so think nuclear war or unaligned ai, and the second is dystopian control so think total surveillance or digital authoritarianism.
So what daniel is trying to tell us is that we're heading towards one of these two outcomes, but there is a third outcome that he calls the third attractor.
Now We're not here to talk about all of the intricacies of this metacrisis.
I would seriously recommend you go and study it.
Binge.
Watch 10 hours of his lectures on your own, because we're here to talk about social media and its impact on all of this.
So what can we do about what social media has become and how is it aligned with getting civilization back on track?
So, in order to understand this, you need to understand the three levels of social media content.
Now, if you're a creator or you've thought about becoming a creator, this is going to be incredibly useful for you, because you can see which level you're in and you can Try to make it to the next level, to eventually reach level three, which I believe is the highest ideal of becoming a creator or personal brand or just someone who's trying to do something meaningful with their life and using media or social media as a way to facilitate that, as we'll discuss.
Social media as a whole has changed my life.
I can't even overstate, understate that, whatever.
It's changed my life drastically.
I will be the last person to tell you to quit social media because frankly, My social media experience is overwhelmingly positive.
Like I'm not sucked into a lot of the things that we just talked about.
And I'm honestly not that tired of it.
I'm creating this for the people that feel tired of it because they can't extract the value that is in social media.
And that's exactly why people get started with social media.
Right.
I would assume that's why the most sought after career for a young person is to be a YouTuber.
And of course, people see other people being a YouTuber and they want to imitate that.
But I would argue that there's something deeper there.
Right.
I feel like behind every shallow pursuit, there is a deep reason.
But you have to uncover it.
Right.
The person who goes to the gym vanity or after a breakup, because they lack self-confidence.
They want to build their physique and do whatever.
That's a kind of shallow pursuit, but that's okay because it leads into something deeper, and I would argue that many people understand the value in the back of their head of being healthy, fit and all the other benefits that come along with lifting.
So the same is true for social media.
I feel like at least the people that resonate with me are You start because you see something meaningful there.
But the problem is that when you start, your lizard brain either gets addicted to the content or you fall for specific level one traps that we're going to talk about.
And now you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater as a whole.
The problem here is that everyone with an internet connection can access social media.
Most people have not developed themselves or improved themselves to any meaningful degree.
They haven't developed their mind, their critical thinking skills, their body, their health, how they think about the world.
They haven't developed skills or some kind of spiritual connection or So, level one.
Who creates this level one social media content?
Let's call them the trend jackers.
These are your typical influencers or personal brands or creators, and they are often the loudest.
Every post is optimized for an isolated dopamine hit.
They have zero memory of what they posted yesterday, and they don't care.
They're a master of hooks, thumbnails, and clickbait titles.
They are content factories.
They post thought McNuggets, which we're going to call that fast food for the mind.
Like McNuggets that are ideas, chicken nugget ideas and fortune cookie philosophy, which can easily be confused for wisdom, So posturing as level 3 content.
They post about whatever's trending, from cold plunges to the carnivore diet.
They post pranks, dances and rage bait because views and likes are the only things they care about, and These people are incredibly skilled with attention mechanics.
But they strip all meaning, value and usefulness for the sake of pure virality.
These are the people who can and will get replaced with AI, right?
You see Higgs field and other AI companies being able to generate AI avatars and whatever it may be.
AI has access to the trends.
It requires some form of creativity, but it's not really a creative challenge to just imitate and copy what's working only.
Of course, we'll talk about why that's a good thing to do, but if that's the only thing you do, then you may end up in this level one camp.
The thing about this content, and why it matters for Civilization, is that 99 of it is entropic entropy.
It's characterized by quick certainty, a quick dopamine hit, instant gratification.
It doesn't require critical thought.
It's just 10 second swipe, 10 second swipe, 10 second swipe.
There's no through line.
There's nothing connecting them to a greater whole.
There's nothing useful that you can take. and apply to your life, right?
It's not knowledge.
You don't acquire it and then use it and then gain experience.
You just like, it just goes in your head, bounces around, causes a lot of trouble.
Like you just had a party going on in your head with a thousand different ideas you got from social media.
And now your mental room is so messy.
And then there's red solo cups everywhere and people passed out everywhere.
It's just a terrible place, your mind.
Now, if you think you're in this level, I want to give at least a few quick tips.
So for this one, pursue new interests, accomplish something hard, share your journey toward a goal, read long books and fix your attention span.
Create an aim for your brand that helps people improve, and attempt to create something meaningful yet comprehensible.
Now that leads into level two, which are the brilliant nobodies, and i have a lot of experience with these people.
So these are the sub stackers, or the youtubers with 47 subscribers with arguably brilliant writing or videos.
They have incredible ideas.
They're super smart.
They have so much to offer.
They're the people who write threads on these extensive topics but don't gain any traction.
They're the authors who have great books but whine and complain about how they can't sell it.
And then when you look at their marketing and sales, you know exactly why they can't sell it.
So these level two creators, they hate the algorithm.
They hate everything about social media and they think they can just come in and do their own thing and not learn the rules of the game and not play the game and expect to succeed because their thoughts are better than everyone else's.
Why don't people care about them?
These level two creators care so much about authenticity, but they like use that term to just like Throw it out there.
Like, I don't even know what they mean by it.
They care about authenticity, but they don't actually care about helping other people.
They care about their ideas sounding good so they can feel a sense of pride and ego behind them.
They complain about idiots going viral and are just like, why am I not going viral?
My thoughts are clearly better than theirs.
They don't understand that shallow content has a place, right?
Levels of development.
You don't start out this hyper intellectual.
Most people, 99% of people on social media are not those people.
You have the value to offer, but you need to get on their level in order to lead them to the value that you offer.
The shallow content has the point of educating people to the point of receiving the depth or wisdom or value.
You think of a sales funnel, which you won't study because you think it's sleazy.
A sales funnel is an education funnel.
It's getting people to the point of understanding, or making them ready to fully benefit from the product that you have to offer.
So these people are often too proud of level one tactics, but they're too jaded to even comprehend a level three perspective.
They quietly think that they're better than everyone, and they're.
If you're better than everyone, then there's no growth potential.
You have useful ideas, but you don't really exist.
You despise AI when you're the one who could benefit the most from it.
And all of that's fine, right?
Because if you're a smart person and you don't want to become a creator, you're just listening to this out of curiosity.
That's fine.
You don't need to take this to heart.
But for those who want to pursue meaningful work, you will be able to identify whether or not you're in this level and then can actually go beyond it so that you can pursue the meaningful work.
If you turn against the very thing that can provide that, That's not wise.
It's counterintuitive, but merging level one with level two is one potential solution to create a meaningful impact on civilization at scale.
Change starts on the individual level and culture influences mass behavior and media influences culture.
Hint, you are the media in today's world.
Now, one thing here that some of you may not know on YouTube is that I recently uploaded merge together multiple theories, right?
The AQAL model spiral dynamics, ego development, flow psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, performance science and the metacrisis into one model that I've called Human 30.
This is all free.
This is just a newsletter that I wrote, but I wanted to save that for future videos so that I can accurately articulate it.
But if you want to understand the levels of development as a whole, The levels of social media content are just one little small subset of that.
If you want to develop yourself, become multidimensionally jacked, not be a specialist be able to do it all and live a meaningful life.
I'd recommend going and reading that.
I spent a lot of time on it.
I've spent over 10, 15 years studying all of this, and now it's all in one piece.
And I think you'll really like it.
A lot of people have sent me messages saying how much like it just clicked for them.
So thank you for those who send the message, but go read it.
Now, a few tips for this level.
Level two is to study direct response marketing for the principles, not tactics.
Dumb down your ideas as a creative challenge.
So see it as a creative challenge to try to position your ideas so that they can be impactful to more people.
And you try to do this without stripping them of their impact, because most people are beginners and most of your high-level ideas are going over their head.
And last, create an offer and practice selling it.
Get over your fear and toxic relationship with money and actually provide value.
Participate in value exchange.
Now, level three, let's call them the value creators, the ideal that we're aiming for here.
And I want to start with a quote that's kind of related, but it's from Daniel Schmachtenberger and I really liked it so I wanted to include it.
The written word as the primary type of media was probably required for democracy to work, because it required people to think well enough and they were reading, which meant increased attention span of non-dopaminergic stuff, which also meant enough working memory to hear multiple perspectives.
Now this level three.
The level three creators are those who use social media as a tool to pursue their life's work.
All of their content has a through line, a frame, a mission.
They have something meaningful to share, but they also understand that if they don't capture attention, that meaning won't be transmitted.
That doesn't mean that they have to do quick edits and post rage bait.
Books, as an example, can be very absorbing simply by telling a great story.
Now, since you're posting on social media, there is a lot of knowledge and skill that must be acquired in order to do this well.
Now I want you to think of James Clear, Naval Ravikant and Andrew Huberman.
It would be difficult to argue that their contribution to humanity is not overwhelmingly good.
Of course these people have their bad takes and they say wrong things, but that's just human nature.
That's what you do.
That's not evil or destructive if you want to notice those and correct your errors and improve your mistakes over time.
That's just improvement.
These people's tweets and short form content that is usually entropic when level one people do it.
They're very centropic.
That's the main difference here is entropy versus centropy, disorder versus order, creating chaos versus creating clarity.
Their short form content all has a meaningful aim towards something that they're helping people achieve.
James Clear and Andrew Huberman have written books.
Andrew Huberman has a long form podcast which actually requires you to dedicate time and attention to for a one to two hour block of time.
And Naval Ravikant tends to focus on the highest signal ideas he can find.
So everything that he posts is just like, even though it's a tweet.
There's just a iceberg of insight and wisdom under it.
Now, these are examples from famous people, but you probably follow people who are already doing this and making an honest living with very few followers, and that's great.
So what's the solution here?
What can you do for the people that want to pursue meaningful work?
You have to join this new and emerging meaning economy not the attention economy, the meaning economy because there's a subset of people on the internet that are already doing this and you have to find them, join them and potentially make friends with them.
As Naval has said, go do something great and your network will instantly emerge.
Now to make sense of this a bit more.
I'm going to state something that sounds a bit corny and won't really make sense, but I want you to think about it.
Everyone's niche is self-actualization.
The uniqueness here, right?
Everyone in this meaning economy is pursuing the same thing.
Higher perspective self-actualization.
The uniqueness stems from their story.
In order to self-actualize, i could pursue web design and then business and then writing, but someone else could pursue spirituality and philosophy and something else of that nature, but they're still moving toward the same goal.
They're becoming a puzzle piece, a stepping stone for someone else to follow, be mentored by, maybe not personally, but follow consume, learn from and benefit from.
And beyond that, just beyond things that you learn, your story is unique right, your failures, your life situation, everything around you.
You are the niche.
If you are here to help people, it is your obligation to pursue continuous improvement, because if you don't, entropy increases.
You don't stay the same.
Your life slowly gets worse until it's incredibly difficult to dig yourself out of that hole.
To low consciousness people this sounds like a drag, and they are waiting for the day when they can drown in instantly gratifying pleasure.
They don't understand that continuous improvement makes life overwhelmingly more enjoyable than the opposite.
Your job is to share your point of view, to strive to improve each domain of your life, to expand your mind, build your body, nurture your spirit and contribute back to the civilization you suck resources from via the modern form of value exchange, which is work, business and entrepreneurship.
Do something great.
Document your path, solve your own problems, sell the solution, find a crevice of reality that you deeply care about and dedicate your life to helping others learn, grow and actualize.
Take your weird interests and make them interesting to other people.
In other words, become a node.
A node in this new decentralized education system called the creator economy that is providing free or slightly paid, via courses and coaching, interest-based education that is the antagonist to the formal education system.
Have a mission, a transformation, point A and point B. Anything in between is your niche.
I can talk about emotional management or spirituality or AI, because they all fall under the future proof mission.
For those that don't know, my newsletter is called Future Proof.
That's kind of what I aim towards, right?
That's my meaningful aim.
I want to help people become future proof.
So I talk about everything that falls under that.
I'm not sticking to a certain topic like writing or web design or spirituality or something else.
I'm helping people achieve something.
Write short content that helps rather than hurts.
Write long content that educates, inspires and pushes people toward better.
Create a product that attempts to solve the root cause.
Write a book.
Build a tool.
Sell a program.
There's a lot of hate around courses, but they are arguably the most life changing types of products, because education is the precursor to behavior.
And if you change behavior, on a large enough scale, then that ripples throughout civilization.
Other products, physical products, sometimes software does that, but most of them don't.
Since anyone can go onto social media and become a level one creator and anyone can create a course because the bar is so low.
That's what creates all of this hate.
If you're actually a developed person.
I shouldn't say this just because the common stigma people can't think for themselves around courses.
They just imitate and regurgitate what other people are saying.
And it started to turn into some kind of a meme, which is fine.
I find it funny too.
But if you are a developed person, creating a course or some form of education doesn't have to be free, unless you have a terrible relationship with money.
Then you can make it free.
But that is one of the greatest goods you can do.
Create with intention.
Create to serve.
Understand that ideas, content, beliefs, and products are tools, not truth.
Create more tools.
If people interpret them as truth, they will learn their lesson at some point.
The shift from attention economy to meaning economy is already taking place.
It's cliche, but the best time to start is now, because there's no other time to start, aside from now.
Now, before you go, I'd recommend subscribing to my sub stack.
That's where I write one to two posts on becoming future proof a week.
You can also find in my other videos a lot of tips to building a business, or productivity, or self-improvement, so on and so forth.
So feel free to navigate through my videos, but until next time, I'll see you later.
Thank you for watching.
Bye.
