Oh, the same thing I always do to make me bored. No, I look for a new thing.

But what they're adding here is that people will even choose a negative emotion like disgust as long as it doesn't bore them. Now let me give you another way to look at that. The only way you know you're alive is unpleasant things, especially unpleasant things you weren't expecting. Nothing else makes you feel alive. If you got everything you wanted with no effort whatsoever, your consciousness would disappear because you wouldn't need it. Consciousness wouldn't have any purpose. You just had everything you wanted like a clam. So yeah, bored people do things.

So yesterday I tried to do three simple things in a modern world. Number one was I bought an Apple Watch as a gift for a family member and I had it delivered by Uber to my house. How do you think that went? All I had to do is drive it across town from the Apple store to my house and I got to track it. But for some reason, you couldn't contact the Uber guy. Like none of the contacts worked. And I would just watch him sitting around town with my Apple Watch and he never came to my house. And eventually he marked it delivered without delivering it. So now I have to figure out, do I call Uber? No way to reach them. Do I call Apple? Well, you can reach them, but then Apple has no way to reach Uber, apparently. But so they're trying to track it down. So what was the only thing I could do? It was a birthday present. I had to buy another one. So I just have to buy another one. So I don't even know how to cancel the payment because I paid with Apple Pay. So now I have to go research how to cancel an Apple Pay because it wasn't a regular credit card kind of thing. So just the simplest thing, deliver this to my house.

Now, you might say, "But Scott, you can prove it wasn't delivered because you could look at your security camera and see if somebody put anything in front of your door that maybe somebody else stole." Except I've got two security cameras, two completely different systems watching my front door. Both of them glitched. Both of them glitched. I've got just darkness around that time. So that was the first thing.

Second thing I tried to do was I was trying to do something with Amazon that would allow me to sell my calendar online. And one of the things I need to do, the detail doesn't matter, but I need to find a menu choice that looks like a little gear and then click on it and then do a thing. But if I don't find that gear and click on it and do the thing, then I won't be able to sell my calendar. So how hard would that be? They tell you what page to go to. They even show you a picture of the page and even circle the gear. Do you think that worked? No. Because there's no page like that. I can find no page whatsoever that has any little gear on it. Nor can anybody apparently tell me where to find it. There's no URL. So I just go back and forth with screenshots. All right. Well, here's what I'm looking at. You tell me where's the gear. And then that's the end of the trail. I don't even know if we can get there from here.

So then I decide that I had a little time yesterday. So I'm going to sign up for Sora 2. That's the OpenAI version of the image maker that does the little videos and stuff. And I thought to myself, huh, about we're finally at the point where I could do at least small little moving almost still pictures but animated that could be like chapter starts for my God's Debris book because I wanted to see if I could kind of quickly turn it into some kind of a YouTube but still an audiobook. Do you know how hard it is just to use an AI that you haven't used before? You have to start out with trying to figure out their business model because the AI apps aren't like regular apps. So the first thing I have to figure out is how do I get to Sora because somebody had given me an activation account so I could get early access. So first of all, I had to know it's early access. But I don't know where to sign up. Is it an app store? Is it a browser? Is it both? If I already have OpenAI, do I already have Sora? If I have OpenAI and I have Sora, do I have to sign up for Sora 2?

So you have this whole host of questions that you've never dealt with unless you've been pretty deeply into the AI world. So I go to Google and I'm looking for the homepage for Sora 2 or something that tells me where to sign up. Then the next thing you find is that most of the top entries are fake. There are other companies that are pretending to be Sora 2. And then I thought, okay, maybe the business model is that sometimes you use the Sora 2, but other times you could use some other app that's just using that API and it would be just as good. So I signed up for the one that was on the top. I thought, well, it's at the top. It's something called Artlist, which may or may not use the Sora engine, but it seems like it adds some other engines. So I put down about $600 for a month of something called Artlist that I thought was giving me full access to Sora 2. It doesn't.

So do you know what I needed to do? I needed to find the menu choice in Artlist to cancel my payment. So what do you think happened? Do you think I looked all over and found the button to cancel? No, I found that nobody knew how to cancel. It was a major problem. So Artlist, apparently, as far as I can tell, I don't even know if it's a real company. It looks like just a trick to get your Sora 2 money. So they have my money. So I contact them through their customer support thing. What do you think the customer support told me about how to cancel? Do you think they told me to go to a web page that doesn't exist and click on a menu choice that also doesn't exist? That's right. That's exactly what they did. Because everybody who's trying to tell you how to use something gives you instructions for something that doesn't exist, is not on the page you're looking at, is not on the URL you're at, and maybe has never been there.

So I was impressed that they got back to me so quickly. So I thought, whoa, maybe I have something here. So I immediately sent back a screenshot and said, "Well, I don't have that page. Could you tell me where that page is?" Then what do you think happened next? Never heard from him, right? Never heard from him. So I've got $600 a month that I'm spending and I have no way to figure out how to get rid of it. I guess I have to work through my bank, maybe close my checking account. I don't know what I need to do. I've got a phone that may or may not come to me on the second try or the Uber guy is going to steal a second phone from me and claim he didn't. I'm just trying to do the simplest things. The simplest things and they're just undoable in the modern world.

Anyway, if anybody knows anybody at the company Artlist, could you ask them to give me back my money because they clearly appear to be criminals. Oh, and then once I got the real Sora working. So I finally got to the real one here. Here's what their user interface is. You tell it what your video will look like and then you'll get a chance to iterate it and change it if you don't like what it presents. Except once you submit your video, the one that you want it to create, it doesn't tell you how long it will take. It just says it's entered a queue. And I sit there and I think a queue, does that mean it'll be ready in a minute, so I should sit and wait? Or does that mean it'll be ready in 2 hours? Or does that mean sometimes it's a minute and sometimes it's 2 hours? And so I sit there like an idiot with nothing happening and nothing happening and nothing happening until eventually you think maybe it didn't work. So you just redo it. But redoing it makes you pay a bunch of money because every single time you ask for something you have to pay tokens which you paid money to get. And unless you've done all the math, you don't even know how much you're spending for every iteration.

Now let me tell you something about art. Art is iteration. If the thing you're using to make your art, in this case Sora 2, doesn't do rapid iteration, it's not a tool. It's a nothing. It's a complete waste of money and waste of time. It has to iterate quickly, as in, okay, do it again, but darker. All right, give that guy a beard. If it could do that, wow, and it could remember it and be consistent, then you'd have something. It can't do that. Here, here's me using it. Click. What do I do now? Should I take up a hobby? Should I leave it open? So should I set an alarm and check back in an hour? Yeah, there's actually no way to use that product. So where AI is at this point in the cycle, it's just completely unusable but someday maybe Elon Musk says that his xAI project which is literally a company that's making fun of Microsoft will basically replace everything that can be done with software anywhere including all the things that Microsoft Office does. And he says a goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but they'll be able to do that too indirectly the way everybody else does by hiring somebody to do it. So is this really the company of all companies? Is it the company that would replace all companies that you can just design and make anything? Yeah. I'll tell you when Elon Musk thinks big, he really thinks big. This is so big I can't even wrap my head around it. It's like really it'll be one company and just sort of makes everything maybe.

I do think that he will make a phone or he'll have somebody make a phone and that phone will be an AI phone that is just sort of a blank phone until you start telling it what you want and then it will form