Paul Ford: I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software and many other things. Rich?

Rich: Yes, Paul.

Paul: I’m not in my usual seat because there’s somebody else here today.

Rich: Ooooh!

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Surprise guest?

Paul: We’re going to talk to Max Read.

Rich: Woo!

Paul: Yeah. It’s a great name. It’s a great guy. Let’s find out what he thinks about AI.

Rich: Let’s do it.

[intro music]

Paul: Oh, my God, we’re back.

Rich: We are.

Paul: Yeah. That was good. That was a good theme song play. Max, hi.

Max Read: Hi, Paul. How are you?

Paul: I’m doing fine. Let’s just get right into it. [laughter]

Rich: Introduce the world to Max, Paul.

Paul: I’ve known Max for a very, very long time. Max is a very, very seasoned journalist and commentator around the culture industry in New York City. Or you’re sort of based in New York, and around the culture industry in general. And one of a relatively small group of people who’s, like, truly engaged with online culture, but also culture-culture. And so not a Valley guy, a New York guy who is trying to make sense of it all on behalf of his readers. And after stints at lots of different publications, including New York Magazine, did the Substack thing and has been doing it now for years.

Max: Yeah, four years in October.

Paul: And it’s your living now, right? It’s what you do?

Max: Yeah, it’s the way I make most of my money.

Paul: Actually, just talk about that for, like, help people understand—

Rich: What is the name of it?

Max: It’s called “Read Max.”

Paul: That’s good, man. That’s good.

Max: It took about 10 seconds to come up with that name.

Rich: Strong.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: How’d you get the SEO on that? That’s a rough one.

Max: Yeah, it’s hard. There’s a genome-read company called Read Max or some kind of—or Max Read, and that’s the big competition right now. I’ve got to really quash the sort of the genetic testing industry to actually get my SEO back up.

Paul: I have faith in you doing that.

Max: Thank you.

Paul: Okay. So help people understand. Do you work for Substack?

Max: No. I mean, I consider myself self-employed. I use Substack as my main email provider, as my sort of newsletter provider. They take a 10% cut of my earnings, in exchange for which they use their CMS, which I have to say is fantastic. I am a seasoned user of CMSes, and they’ve got a great CMS.

Paul: Yes, it’s a weird company, but they always had a good platform.

Max: Yeah. They have a lot of sort of, you know, you don’t want to call it dark patterns necessarily, but the email newsletter marketing funnel stuff, they handle a lot of that, recommendations, sort of algorithmic ways of bringing in subscribers. But otherwise I don’t have a lot of contact with the people at Substack. I write the newsletter, I send it out, and people sign up with their credit cards, and I get paid.

Paul: How long did it take for this to become, like, your job-job?

Max: Well, I was lucky enough to be part of a class of Substack writers that got a one-year advance. So when I signed up, I got paid in quarterly installments by Substack, up to the point where I was making as much money as they had offered me in the first place.

Paul: Hmm!

Max: So I got a nice kind of runway to allow myself to start. And then it took maybe a year or two after that to really fully feel like this was a sustainable proposition that didn’t require me doing a lot of extra work on the side or freelancing or whatever. And these days it feels, you know, it grows relatively quickly, I have fun doing it, and it feels like something I could be doing for a lot longer.

Paul: All right, tell us about the newsletter so we can kind of ease in here, understand what you’re talking about.

Max: Yeah. So I’ve been writing about, as you said, culture and technology and the many ways they intersect for a long time now. I got interested in this, you know, I’ve been in digital media originally, and I was sort of a general journalist, a generalist. And when Facebook did its big pivot to video back in 2012 and kind of blew up digital media, all of a sudden I found myself thinking constantly about platforms and about the tech industry and software. I’d been like almost anybody, slightly nerdy, and born in 1985, an obsessive user of the internet for a long time. So I had these things going on.

So at New York Magazine, I wrote a lot about technology. I was writing a lot about—I wrote features about Facebook and the startup scene at Stanford, and that kind of thing. And I decided that really what I wanted to do was do a kind of weekly column where I could assess what was going on, not just in the tech industry in a sort of business-reporting way, but how it was changing the way we think and the way we feel and the way we organize ourselves. Which is to say, like, what—how do politics look in the post-platform era? How does culture look in the post-platform era?

And I wrote this big kind of manifesto about when I started, it was like, you know, the way we organize ourselves, you know, the Fordist paradigm of, like, Henry Ford’s factories is on its way out, and we should be thinking about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in sort of similar terms. And I believed that and still believe it.

But of course, this was fall 2021, and the only thing anybody wanted to read about or talk about at the time was crypto. And so I spent like a year kind of writing about crypto, because that was what this stuff was doing, and, you know, about whatever else was on my mind. And as crypto, as the bubble burst and FDX imploded, AI and especially OpenAI and the GP—and ChatGPT were sort of bringing up the hype rear, so to speak.

And so for the last couple years, I’ve been writing a lot about AI, which in so many ways is a much more pleasurable thing to write about than crypto, partly because it’s so much more, it’s weirder and stranger and doing stranger and more interesting things.

So, you know, look: Long story short, the newsletter is kind of about whatever’s on my mind any given week. Sometimes I’ll see a movie, and I’ll be so excited to write about the movie that I’ll write about the movie. But for the most part, I think of it as a sort of guide to the future, maybe especially for liberal arts graduates, that if you are interested in what’s happening and what’s going to be happening for the next, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, but aren’t yourself obsessively reading, you know, Substack blogs about AI or whatever that I can give, I can hold your hand a little bit.

Paul: And then last question, just purely about the Substack: How many people read you?

Max: I have 60,000 readers total, yeah.

Paul: That’s like a big old stadium.

Max: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: You go in there, you’re like a soccer game.

Max: Yeah, well, what I don’t want to look at is how many people actually open the email.

Paul: No, no.

Max: I’m just going to only look at the top-line number.

Paul: That’s exactly right.

Rich: Top of funnel.

Max: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: All right, so AI. [laughter]

Max: Yeah?

Paul: Let’s start there. Okay, so here’s where we’re at. I’ll tell you where we’re at, which is we build… We’re nerds. We build software things. And we saw it coming, and it smacked us in the face. And we were like, “All right. Everything that we used to do is different.” And I think that that’s actually bearing fruit.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: I did a bunch of vibe coding this weekend and I’m, like, “Wow, okay.” It’s so radically transformative on a day-to-day basis around technology and around making code and making things. And I think we’re maybe in a little more of a bubble there where we see this progress and this change and we’re sort of internalizing it, and then there’s sort of culture. Actually, first of all, like, do you use anything? Do you use any of these tools to kind of get your work done?

Max: Yeah, I use Claude for a bunch of different things. I mean, so in some ways, I’ve been using AI for a long time. Specifically, the thing that’s transformed basically every journalist I know is transcribing interviews.

Paul: Yeah, sure.

Max: Like, the technology is so fantastic for that. It has shaved days off of—added days to my life by doing that.

Paul: It’s funny, they all hate it, but then they find those little applications.

Max: I mean, and we could talk about this. It’s the stuff that doesn’t, you don’t know that you’re using AI that isn’t necessarily chatbot facing or whatever, that tends to get its foot in the door with writers and journalists. But yeah, I use Claude. A lot of it is just for kind of ideating, I suppose. You know, I do a lot of writing where I’ll identify a trend, say—this is a, this is a sort of vague example, but I’ll identify some kind of trend and I’ll want to come up with a neologism to assign to the trend because that’s good marketing. That’s how you get people to pay attention to it and remember it.

Paul: Do we have a few of those that you could throw out as an example?

Max: So like I wrote about, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Benson Boone. This is Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite singer.

Paul: Oh yeah. I have children.

Max: So Benson Boone played at the Grammys and I realized I’d never heard this guy, I had no idea this guy existed, but I knew the song because it was on, it was the soundtrack to, like, half of all TikTok videos that appeared on my feed.

Rich: This is the guy who flipped off the piano?

Max: Yes, that’s the guy.

Rich: A moustache?

Paul: He didn’t flip off the piano as in—

Rich: He didn’t just give a middle finger to a piano.

Paul: No.

Rich: He actually, he did a somersault off of a piano.

Max: It was impressive.

Rich: I’ve never seen him before until that performance.

Max: Exactly.

Rich: As well.

Max: And it’s real sort of drugstore soundtrack music. And I was like—

Rich: Oof.

Max: But more than that—

Rich: Like CVS?

Max: Yeah. I think it’s, like— [overlapping chatter]

Paul: Like, I just saw a long receipt. [laughter]

Rich: Just spit out?

Paul: Yeah, right there in my head.

Max: He’s like, when you. It’s what you’re listening to while you’re waiting for the guy to come over and unlock the baby formula or whatever.

Paul: [long sigh] Let’s talk about that.

Rich: Oh!!

Paul: Yeah, that and the self-checkout. Like, everything—it’s actually, people think the internet’s alienating. [laughter] But like, CVS self-checkout, plus they have to get you the deodorant with a key?

Max: Yeah, no, the lowest point of my life is, like, waiting to get the lice shampoo after my son, like, out of the, out of the thing.

Rich: That is a rough moment.

Paul: No, it’s, like, a 20-minute wait, right?

Rich: Yeah. While Benson is piping through the speakers. [laughter]

Max: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: You know what I like is when you have to hit that button twice and you just feel like an absolute pile of garbage. You’re like, “I’m going to ruin this guy’s day.”

Max: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: Oh, God.

Max: So anyway, so I wanted to write about this, not the drugstore aspect so much as the fact that this felt like a kind of music that appears almost exclusively in TikToks, you know?

Rich: Yeah.

Max: And there’s a couple other songs I could think of that were in the same thing.

Paul: He’s right. It’s very, like, he’s very derivative. He’s very, he has a certain look. Yeah.

Max: Yeah. And there’s, it’s kind of timeless. Like, it doesn’t necessarily attach itself—the other thing I think is really important is it’s anthemic, it has this transition, right? So you can do your capcut thing where you’re, like, the before and after with the quiet part to hardcore dynamics.

Paul: Kind of like the EDM drop idea gets translated to everything.

Max: Yes. Totally.

Paul: Yeah.

Max: And so I wanted to write about this and I fired up, I wanted a name for it and I fired up Claude and I sort of was like, “Here’s what this thing that I’m trying to describe is. Can you help me come up with some names?” And it didn’t come up with the name, but what it’s really good at is just giving you a bunch of related concepts that you can sort of mess around yourself.

Rich: It spitballs.

Max: Yeah. So we came up with—”we,” me and Claude together, came up with FYPcore. So that’s what I think of as Benson Boone. And I think that kind of thing, right, where you spitball, you bounce ideas off—

Paul: What does FYP stand for?

Max: So FYP is the For You Page, which is, like, the main feed on your TikTok, basically.

Paul: FYPcore is good. Okay.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: That’s strong.

Max: And so that kind of thing, the classic, like, “What is the phrase I’m thinking of that describes such and such…?”

Rich: It’s a light-a-spark capability that I think works well.

Paul: Here’s why—it’s sloppy and lazy, Just like writers are—

Max: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: —when they’re trying to figure out what the hell they’re supposed do.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: And then later you have to do something that’s pretty good. I was reading, there’s a public intellectual I really like, her name is Tressie Cottom, and she’s like, “I don’t use ChatGPT and it’s driving everybody crazy. They’re just like, you gotta use it. And she’s like, I don’t use it.” But I’m like, your job is literally to, like, interpret society and critique it. I think it’s okay.

Max: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Like, don’t use it. It’s almost like I don’t want my—you know, I didn’t want Lance Armstrong to be on steroids either. I wanted to see what he could get up to.

Max: Right, right, without—

Paul: Just with his body going up the hill.

Max: Yeah, yeah. And you know, I’ve tried—every once in a while, especially when I’m working on something I really don’t want to be working on and I’m looking for a shortcut, I will try to get it to—

Paul: If you’re self employed and you have your own newsletter, what’s happening, Max? [laughter]

Max: Well, you’ll take a freelance assignment that maybe you shouldn’t have taken.

Paul: Oh, OK.

Max: And I’ll ask it to come up with an outline or even to write a paragraph. Less, like, to be very clear, I’m not ever expecting to use the paragraph, but just to sort of—that so far I haven’t found a way to prompt it to give me things that I find acceptable. You know, it can be helpful to, like, light a spark, to, like, push things. But I would never…I have not yet seen it produce things that I would want appearing under my byline.

Paul: I gotta say, I don’t think anybody wants that, including you.

Max: No.

Paul: Right? Like, it’s just like, that’s not where we’re headed as a culture.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: Maybe. I don’t know. Is the future that you feed it your Substack and you say, “Go ahead and do the newsletter. I’m going to be on the beach.”

Max: I don’t think so. I mean, I think there’s a bunch of sort of reasons that are well rehearsed at this point, which is like, “Oh, well, it can’t really come up with new ideas.” And I’m a little skeptical of this because it’s becoming, mostly just because it’s become a kind of conventional wisdom.

Paul: It’s also that people have this fantasy that ideas are worth something or hard to come up with. Like, you can do that with dice.

Rich: I mean, it’s gonna happen.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: I mean, maybe not Max, but somebody’s gonna feed it—they’re just gonna have the flu.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: And they’re gonna be like, “You know, I’m gonna feed it and I’m gonna look it over, but I’m gonna give it a whirl.” And then what’s gonna happen is it’s gonna be passable.

Paul: Oh, I’m sure—

Rich: They’re gonna see nobody emailed about it.

Paul: That’s happening right now.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: Exactly. And then the next time—it’s like the petty criminal? [laughter] Who, they thought they do it once, but they keep skimming every week.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: And then after a while, it just becomes normal.

Max: I mean, I’m waiting for the first big scandal of some major op-ed columnist getting got for having…

Paul: It’s coming.

Rich: It’s coming.

Paul: There just aren’t that many op-ed columnists left.

Max: Especially with that kind of work. I think in the kind of work I do, too, where you are just generating—you know, it’s something that I think has helped me adjust to the new post-AI world is coming from a background in digital media, specifically as a blogger putting out six to eight things a day, where you become—

Paul: For context, you were the editor of Gawker.

Max: Yeah, I was—

Paul: So just, like, an absolute…

Max: Like a machine.

Paul: Yeah.

Max: One of the original blogging machines, like, factories, like, literally in a SoHo former, like, sweatshop, just sitting at a long table producing blogs. And, you know, a lot of writers I know, and me even to some extent, have a romantic attachment to their jobs and what they do. And I don’t want to, I don’t begrudge anybody who has that sense of, I love reading. I love the writing that I read. You know, there’s all kinds of reasons to maintain that attachment.

But when you do something like produce thousands of blog posts that I don’t even remember just in the hopes that somebody googling something will maybe pass by them and click on an ad, you lose that romantic attachment very quickly, and you realize how much of what you do really is just the work of producing a passable paragraph that can be attached to some advertising somewhere. And I’m, like, over—I’m making this, I’m being over-cynical here. But it is in fact the kind of basic proposition.

Paul: I don’t remember, as a journalist, half the things I wrote.

Max: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: They just were turning the wheel.

Rich: I don’t remember half the things you wrote. [laughter]

Paul: You shouldn’t, you really shouldn’t.

Rich: Question.

Max: Yeah?

Rich: Would you write a piece, feel good about it, and then pass it back through and say, “Make this a little juicier. I want to get noticed better.” Or, “I want more attention,” or, “I want more subs.” Like, give me a little, give me a little… What’s that, what’s that chemical that Chinese food…

Max: Oh, glutamine.

Rich: Yeah. MSG.

Paul: MSG.

Rich: MSG. Would you—is that, first off, I have a follow-up question, which is a general one, which is, is this bad? Is any of this bad?

Max: You know, I struggle with that because I, like, I have an instinct that it’s bad. There’s like a feeling in me, but I’m not always sure I could articulate specifically what’s bad about it.

Rich: Yeah.

Max: Partly because I think so much of what we’re looking at with AI is less like a truly new epoch and more just kind of building on all this stuff that’s kind of already happened.

Paul: Let’s go back. The thing that I threw out, which is Lance Armstrong, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, there was an argument, somebody made an argument once, that, you know, if we’re gonna, if everybody’s gonna use steroids, just have a steroid baseball league. Like, let’s go.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right?

Rich: I think a lot of the top competitors, when he won, everybody was juiced. Everybody.

Paul: Everybody. No, he didn’t, he didn’t feel he had a choice.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then there was the, you know, the, the era in Major League Baseball where everybody was juicing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Rich: So just let it, like, deregulate.

Paul: But I guess what I’m saying is, like, what I want is transparency, right?

Max: Right.

Paul: Somebody sent us a document the other day, you and me, and it was like, clearly AI had had a hand.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it was fine. Like, this is not a writer. Like, it was fine, but it was just like there was too much. She had let it go and now it was on us to parse and boil it down.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, you could tell, and…

Paul: What I want is actually the original text and the prompt that she used and the output.

Max: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: So that like, just share the prompt and let me know where your head was at. And then maybe I go in and tweak and manipulate.

Max: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But it’s a different kind of thinking than, “I am here with my brain and the words in my brain, and I’m gonna put that up.”

Max: Yeah.

Paul: That is actually, I’m gonna have a different relationship with you.

Max: Right.

Paul: Than if you’re like, this was augmented and enhanced. And it doesn’t mean that it’s dead to me, it just means that it’s different.

Max: Right. Yeah.

Rich: I think there’s still, there’s just, there’s kind of shame hovering over a lot of this right now.

Max: Yeah. I mean, I wonder how much that’s a generational thing that’s going to shift.

Rich: Oh, definitely.

Max: I mean, one thing that I think is, like, sort of lost in some of these conversations is the extent to which, like, what we think of as AI text is really a product of the ways they tweak the major chatbots to sound the way they sound. Right?

Rich: Yeah.

Max: So I know, we can tell when ChatGPT has written something for—

Paul: That’s a great idea!

Max: Yeah, exactly. It’s not just a great idea, it’s a mind-blowing idea!

Paul: Great idea. Yeah. We actually have a channel which is, just when it says, “That’s a great idea.”

Max: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: You just paste in the words, “That’s a great idea.”

Max: And I think we can all agree, like, I don’t want to read an op-ed that’s written in ChatGPT voice or whatever. I mean, it would just be terrible.

Paul: Just imagine, like, Vladimir Putin in the Times, but it’s ChatGPT.

Rich: That’s going to go away. Like, the pace of progress here and the sophistication around them, I think we’re not far away.

Max: Right.

Rich: From not being able to tell. You said something interesting earlier. “My instinct is it’s bad.” [laughter] Which is hilarious, it’s like, “I feel like shoplifting this Butterfinger, it’s $2, but I have a feeling it’s bad.” Dive into that for a bit.

Max: Yeah. What I want to resist is the kind of, there’s a great book called Language Machines by an academic named Leif Weatherby. And he describes the kind of thinking that’s like, by virtue of it being human, human writing is always better than AI writing. He calls that remainder humanism. It’s this sort of, like, position of retreat where you insist that something, there’s something ineffably human about writing, when in fact what AI has kind of shown us is that actually writing is not necessarily human. That there is something, it is a system that can exist outside of, like, you know, context of human meaning—

Paul: Away from thought.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Max: And I want to resist the idea that the sort of remainder humanist idea that there it has to come from a human being to be worthwhile, to be good, to be interesting, to even be beautiful, necessarily. Not that I think that, as we’re saying, ChatGPT or Claude are producing beautiful things now, but let’s leave open the possibility that this is coming down the road.

What I do think, though, is that writing as a practice is really important to human thought. Like, I have the exercise metaphor here that, like, you know, I’m never going to lift a car up, right? But I go to the gym anyway because I know it’s good for my body and my mind and presumably my soul to stay fit.

And I think that writing has that same quality and that I think that, you know, to the extent that we, like, who cares if we’re offloading emails to the thinking machine, though it is a kind of funny, like, everybody’s just offloading that stuff. At some point we could probably figure out a more efficient way to do it.

Rich: Yeah.

Max: But sitting down to think through an issue, and this is in fact, totally the way I write work.

Rich: Yeah.

Max: I want to write out, you know, and spend a lot of time agonizing and moving those words around and trying to think about how I want to articulate what I’m saying should do it.

Rich: Sure.

Max: And so in some sense—

Rich: The process itself is illuminating.

Max: Right. So, like, as an individual, and I think all of us as individuals, it’s important to continue reading and writing in these ways. But I think, like, in sort of the sense of, like, as a culture, I don’t know. Like, you know, I have a suspicion that we probably prefer to consume things made by human beings because they’re other human beings, that we can think about intent and what they’re doing and that we want to interact with them. There’s like a social aspect to it. But something that has been shown to me by my career is that you should never underestimate the willingness of people to watch stuff that has no human thought or intent or whatever behind it. If it’s just filling up time and space.

Paul: I mean, you know, what you find is that that boundary just keeps moving, right? So a good example would be people talking about practical effects in movies, right?

Max: Yeah.

Paul: Suddenly they get really excited that Mad Max: Fury Road is all about, you know, like, cars actually smashing into each other instead of—

Rich: Real cars, yeah.

Paul: Instead of cgi, right? And that boundary becomes really—

Rich: Tube amplifiers!

Paul: Yeah, no, that’s right. [laughter] Those things become really important to people because it’s sort of it becomes identity assertion.

Max: Right.

Paul: But, you know, at the same time, 99% of people thought it was cool at the end of Avengers: Endgame, where they all come out of the, you know, the portal’s open and, like, you know, Black Panther’s back from the dead and that’s, and everything—if you look at that as an adult, it looks like crayons have been melted. [laughter] It’s gloop. Gloop, gloop, gloop, into a bucket, right?

Rich: I’m gonna, I mean, I want to share, like, a more kind of optimistic view of how I think this is gonna play out. When 3D showed up for making animated films, right? A lot of people at that time thought, “Oh my God, the days of, like, the hand sketches and, you know, like, The Jungle Book illustrators drawing every cell and the acceleration that will come from machines rendering scenes and moving cameras and whatnot, rather than hand drawing things, was going to, we’re going to push a dozen movies out a year, whereas it used to take two years.”

Max: Yeah.

Rich: And then you fast forward and as the tech got better and better, if you go look at, like, Toy Story 1, it looks funny now.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: As the tech has gotten better and better, the actual time it takes to make these movies has actually gotten longer and longer rather than faster. And what I take away from that is that craft often finds higher ground. It often seeks out—it’s like, okay, cool, that tool is nice. But now I have to elevate this somehow. And humans just reassert themselves so that, you know, one of the greatest animated films came out, like, Inside Out—spectacular. And it’s really less about the 3D effects and more about story and character and all the classic things.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: So I’m gonna hope that, yes, the art of sentence structure may give way because everyone can do it.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: Right? But the craft is still going to be sought out.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: And what does that look like? I don’t know.

Max: The business proposition of my Substack is to some extent this idea that people are gonna want reading human-authored prose twice a week until I have to retire.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Max: I mean, I agree with you that I think there’s still a strong instinct for that kind of thing and that people still appreciate it.

Rich: Yeah.

Max: I think when I think about this, and to bring it back to this idea of the way platforms have changed distribution for everything, is that part of what people are nervous about or complaining about or frustrated with is less AI product, but the way in which we now tend to encounter kind of any media at all, which is on your smartphone screen scrolling quickly through—

Rich: Low attention span.

Max: Yeah. Which is begging for exactly the kind of accelerated production that you’re talking about because you can get as low as common denominator as possible. Because it’s just somebody standing in line for the movies or whatever for a good movie, just watching something, you know, that sucks.

Rich: But big movies still make $400 million a year.

Max: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: People still seek out that beautifully packaged, you could tell, okay, so much meaningful energy went into this thing. It took three years.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: And I want to go see it.

Max: Yeah!

Rich: There is still a desire for it. I guess what I’m getting at here is can you still put that out and just cede the ground of, like, paragraphs and sentence structure and just say, “Yeah, of course I use 3D-rendering tools.”

Max: Yeah.

Rich: “But my story’s better because I put my own energy into it.”

Max: I think, I mean, yeah, I wish that I could be more of a luddite about this in some ways, but I think you’re right. Like, I think that this is a generational problem, as we’ve been saying, and that as more of this comes out, sort of comes through in the prose and in the marketplace, so to speak, that we’re going to get more people saying, “Yeah, that’s fine with me.”

You know, I think the other big question, and the problem is, you know, the sort of current generation of strongly anti-AI, you know, AI critics is less about—I mean, the ones that I’m sympathetic to, let’s say, is less about this sort of abstract question of “can it be as good as a human” or whatever, but, like, the actual real deskilling and unemployment that’s gonna get taking place.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Which is much harder thing to sort of wave away as like, you know—

Rich: That displacement is hap—I mean.

Max: Yeah. And I mean in translation, it’s already happening; in transcription, it’s already happening, as we’ve been saying.

Paul: You know what’s really interesting listening to you though, is that you’re very suspicious of platforms and these technologies, right? That comes through. People should subscribe to the newsletter and they’ll see the suspicion. You’re less so in this room. But like, in general, you’re very critical when you approach this stuff.

Rich: How come?

Max: I mean, because of my experience as a journalist, like, having undergone the shift away from print to digital media and—

Rich: What it’s done to the profession.

Max: Yeah. I mean, again, talking about deskilling and otherwise just putting us out of business, more or less.

Paul: But there’s another element here which is you are not aligned with a big platform media company, which actually New York Mag is part of the sort of Vox empire now, and the Times, and there’s all these sort of worlds in New York and you’ve bumped up against them in a million different ways or been part of them, but now you’re on your own. And it’s very interesting because actually when I listen to people who are aligned with those platforms, they kind of have a stock line. They’re like, they just sort of don’t like it, it’s never going to replace them and so on. And it’s—you’re much more, everything with you is a little, you have to be a lot lighter on your feet.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: Because you’re building your own business and you’re running your own brand and so on and so forth. And so you’re much more open to the things that can help you do more of that.

Max: Yes. I mean, the other side of that coin is I’m less worried about a boss coming in and saying, “Actually, you know, your blogging can be done by a new model that we’ve just brought in.” So I have, I certainly do feel less threatened in some sense by these. You know, I was, I’m a screenwriter too, and I’m in the WGA and I was, during the strike, this was a huge issue, was the question of how are we going to put AI in the contract?

And I was pleased that the way the contract ended up getting written is it effectively prevents executives from forcing writers to use AI or from replacing writers with AI but it carves out as much space as we want to use AI ourselves, which seems to be right. Which seems to be the right way to approach it as a writer is to not outright reject it, just reject it as a tool to drive down the price of your labor and the cost of your business.

Paul: All right, so let’s compare two universes. I’ve got you and the WGA. You are working with the union. They’re establishing a set of rules and policies so that the classic process can kind of be preserved. But maybe we’re going to use some of this new stuff, but there’ll be a kind of common understanding. On the other side, you’ve got whatever glurge is getting spit out from the video farms like Sora and sort of, what’s the Facebook one, Vibes?

Max: Mmm hmm.

Paul: [weary noise] And they’re saying, “Hey, you won’t even need what screenwriters. We’re just going to dump this stuff in. We’ll make, I don’t know if you’ve seen—”

Rich: Is it taking? Sora and the Facebook Vibes—

Paul: Have you seen, no, there’s that one, there’s, like, a network as, like, a pseudo-Netflix of all AI-generated content. Have you seen, I can’t remember—

Max: No, I haven’t seen it.

Paul: They made an October 7th miniseries, all AI-generated.

Rich: Yooooooo!

Max: Oh, boy. Oh, man.

Paul: It might be the most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Max: That’s a really cursed set of words. [laughter]

Rich: People are going to be interested. I mean, are people into the, like, what is it called? Vibes? Facebook Vibes?

Max: It seems like Vibes is a flop. Sora is interesting to me because I think there’s, for a little while, it seemed to have some juice, and I think part of it was actually a social network in a way that Vibes isn’t.

Paul: Because it’ll put your face.

Max: Yeah, like, people love their faces. They love their friends’ faces. They love to clown on their friends.

Rich: Are these gonna take?

Max: Well, what I have seen is Sora videos are now all over Instagram. The ones that I’ve seen recently are fake videos of people’s pressure cookers exploding, that do, like, sort of fake security cams of people in the kitchen, their pressure cookers…

Rich: Yeah.

Max: But that’s not—that’s Sora being used as a production tool, not Sora as a social network or, like, a space to hang out.

Rich: Right, right.

Max: And I think, you know, I’m pessimistic that, like, Vibes is gonna take off. I do think this is, like I was saying before, I think people prefer to have some level of intentionality, even for their slop, instead of the kind of random stuff. I mean, something that I think all the time about the, the Instagram reels or whatever is the amount of it that’s, like, old sports highlights, clips from movies, like, stuff that was really expensive to produce at the time, that’s just gotten ganked and put somewhere else. That stuff is so much more compelling than your average slop video made in Sora or whatever it is.

Rich: Odd question.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: Do you find all this depressing?

Max: [laughing] I find the slop itself depressing.

Rich: Define slop for our audience.

Max: I mean, weird fake AI crap is, like, the easiest way to describe it.

Rich: I call it content harassment.

Max: [laughing] That’s good. That’s very good.

Rich: Does it bum you out?

Max: Well, I feel two ways about it. As a longtime fan of cyberpunk as a genre, anything weird online, I’m immediately like—

Rich: [laughing] Give it a whirl.

Max: This is so cool! We live in the future. The future sucks, but we live here.

Rich: Yeah.

Max: And then a lot of me is like, oh, this sucks. This is just depressing. [laughter] And I think, especially now that I have a kid you know, he doesn’t yet have an iPad or a YouTube account or, you know, a Patreon or whatever. But he’s like, like, you know, I can see how much A) how much the screen attracts him, and B) how little taste he has, how willing he would be to just watch the worst, ugliest possible things over and over and over again.

Rich: Well, it’s sugar and fat optimized, right?

Paul: No, but you know what I found is people—my son is older, he likes Pokémon, and then you find him like sneaking on Instagram through Google Calendar. That was a hell of a moment. But he’s consuming Pokémon content. Like, they get to know, they get to know certain characters and they get to know certain influencers, and that they’re actually seeking the relationship.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: I’m going to pitch you a few shows from Zingroll.com and you can tell me what—

Rich: This is the platform that is all AI-generated.

Paul: 6 million views. October 7th: The Attack on Israel. “It began at sunrise, while a nation slept, the border was breached.” Okay, so there’s that. Okay, we’re going to watch that. We could also watch—

Rich: How many views?

Paul: Six million.

Rich: How long is it?

Paul: Like, a half hour. It’s, like, a miniseries.

Rich: It’s a half hour, one episode?

Paul: No, it’s multiple episodes. I can’t even tell you how bad it looks. A lot of like, fighter jets and like—

Max: Sure.

Paul: Like, Middle Eastern guys in the desert. There’s a thing called Iron Jaw. There’s a thing just called Liam. [laughter] Just Liam. Liam: “From watching roaring engines on screen to feeling the asphalt under his own wheels, Liam’s journey is a high-octane ride of grit, passion, and speed.” 2.5 million views. So, okay, so Zingroll’s taking a swing, man.

Max: Yeah. I mean, do you guys, there’s a whole world now of, like, 2-minute-episode soap operas that you get on Reels and YouTube and stuff. There was a great New York Mag piece about this just a few months ago that’s. I mean, that’s human-produced. There’s like, there’s a cast and a crew and a set. And it seems to me that that stuff, like, I think the line between what this is and what that is is not as, not as bright as we would like to think, that there’s like these sort of, it’s a spectrum of sort of like playing to the algorithm versus whatever the other opposite end of the spectrum would be.

Paul: I mean, I think for people, the three people in this room are veterans of internet warfare. And what happens is you get this incredibly forceful—sides get picked. One is utopian, one is sort of like absolutely luddite. And then five years later, no one can even remember they were fighting because there’s some new thing.

Max: Yeah.

Paul: And so I think that’s where we’re headed. So, all right, let’s wrap it up. What if somebody wanted to subscribe to your Substack?

Max: They could find me at maxread.substack.com.

Paul: That’s pretty good. How much does it cost?

Max: It’s $5 a month or $50 a year. Roughly the price of a cheapish beer in New York City.

Paul: That’s a bargain.

Max: Yes.

Paul: I will say, actually—

Rich: You can get a $5 beer in New York City?

Max: There’s a bar called Doppelganger on Myrtle Ave in Clinton Hill that has a $5 draft, I can’t remember what kind of beer it is.

Paul: Wow, you have a problem. [laughter] Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, no, I know all the places to get cocaine!

Rich: Another way you can pay for the newsletter is take Max out to Doppelganger.

Paul: I would also say we didn’t really talk about this part, but I come for the cultural commentary, which is good and very, very helpful. But I, I kind of stay for the occult movie and like, book recommendations, [laughter] which tend to be really good and really broad spectrum. And so…

Max: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, this was like I was telling you. I started this to give myself an excuse to read a lot and I succeeded.

Paul: It’s really good. All right, so…

Rich: Let’s have you back. There’s always—

Max: Yes, please.

Rich: There’s so much talking about because it’s sort of, this thing sort of carpet bombed the whole world.

Max: Yeah.

Rich: And talk about other stuff.

Paul: What we’ll do is when we see a fun post, we’ll just rope you back in.

Max: I’d love to do that. Yeah.

Paul: All right.

Max: I mean, we can also do a Sora—if you guys would rather, we could just get our faces in and just do a Sora.

Paul: Maybe we should do it. Rich, let’s just tell the people our product. If you go to aboard.com, you can tell it the software you need. What do you do when you go to Aboard? What can you do?

Rich: You get to play with our toy, which is used to ship software with AI.

Paul: It’s not a toy.

Rich: It’s not.

Paul: No.

Rich: It’s an industrial-strength powerhouse that builds software in a very accelerated way for your business. We focus on business software. People will build—

Paul: Well hold on. If I wanted to build a content-management system for my marketing department.

Max: Go. Go for it.

Paul: If I wanted to build a…

Rich: Inventory tracking.

Paul: Directory of employees to skills-match.

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: Mentorship program.

Rich: Custom software used to be incredibly expensive, and now it is not. You still need the right people nearby to get you exactly what you need, but it’s a fraction of what it used to cost. Check it out. You can go play with it yourself at aboard.com.

Paul: That’s you and me. We’re the right people. All right.

Rich: Like and subscribe. We don’t say that enough.

Paul: Yes. So thanks. [laughing] That’s right.

Rich: Get that bell animation in.

Paul: Email hello@aboard.com, subscribe to Read Max. Max, thank you for coming on.

Max: Thank you so much for having me. Great conversation.

Rich: Thanks, Max. It was a lot of fun.

Paul: Let’s go.

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

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