The Death Of Social Media (& The Future Of Content Creation)

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." than 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 5 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 huntergatherer

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 homogeneous 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 1/ 1,000th

of human evolution. We're living in this

technological time with the brain of our

ancestors that has been wired over the

course of 2 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. Instant 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 sensemaking.

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

Schmokenberger, 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 metacar 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 rivalous 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 top soil 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

Schmenberger'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 meta crisis. 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 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 the person who

goes to the gym for 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, 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 bath water

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

they don't have a meaningful outlook on

life. So when these people start

creating content then the internet

becomes filled with level one thinking

and low consciousness thinking and it's

difficult to navigate that because you

think that's all there is because that's

the majority of the population. So level

one who creates this level one social

media content. Let's call them the

trendjackers. 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 three content.

They post about whatever's trending from

cold plunges to the carnivore diet. They

post pranks, stances, and rage bait

because views and likes are the only

things they care about. 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 Higsfield and other AI

companies being able to generate AI

avatars and whatever it may be. AI has

access to the trends. It 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, that's we'll 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 hole.

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 a party going on

your head 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

Substackers 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 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 hyperintellectual.

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 you think

of a salesunnel, which you won't study

because you think it's sleazy. A

salesunnel 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 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 merged together multiple

theories, right? The AQAL model, spiral

dynamics, ego development, flow

psychology by Mihi, Chick Mihi,

performance science, and the metacar

crisis into one model that I've called

human 3.0. 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

multi-dimensionally 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. 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 sent 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 highle 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

Schmackenberger 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-dopamineergic 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 throughine, 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 Ravocant, 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 twohour block of time. And Naval

Ravocant tends to focus on the highest

signal ideas he can find. So every thing

that he posts is just like even though

it's a tweet, there's just a 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 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 lowconsciousness 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 interestbased

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 futurep 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 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's 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 Substack.

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.