On Reading & Reels

2026.02.22

CXL

[Post-Literacy; AI Scams; Emotional Manipulation; Last and First Men; Brevity is the Soul of Wit; Just Read; Fight for Democracy]

Thesis: Reading is an antidote to cultural erosion being propagated by short form content and accelerated by the wholesale creation of such content with AI.

[Post-Literacy]

After my last post, I was recommended a brilliant essay called The dawn of the post-literate society by James Marriott.

In the article, the author makes it very clear that literacy is & has been declining.

This is one of those facts that I wasn’t surprised to hear, but was still shocked when I saw the stats on paper. Vaguely feeling like literacy is declining is a lot different than reading that a study of 30 countries including the US shows that the most illiterate people are getting more illiterate. Or, seeing the below graph illustrating the decline in reasoning and problem solving skills:

The post asserts that the most notable causes of the issue is the rise of the parasitic relationships most of us have with our smart phone. It then notes that a lot of current issues, including politic divisiveness and extremism are a consequence of us spending time on our phones consuming short form, addictive content, rather than reading or even doing other activities.

And, finally, it ends with a very grim prognosis of the future.

While I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s too late & we can’t go back, I do think this is one of the most critical issues to deal with, especially with the acceleration of AI generated low calorie content designed to take advantage of people.

As I wrote in the last post, there is something about the written word that is conducive to critical thought & truth. That post focused on writing being essential to think clearly; this post focuses on the other side of the same coin: the fading art of reading.

[AI Scams]

Yesterday, someone showed me a week old instagram account. It details the transformation of this guy in his mid 50s who was overweight & balding & whose wife left him, and then in response, he got very ripped and tan and now has luscious hair.

Saying that it "details the transformation" is perhaps a bit generous, because all it does is show a montage of short before and after vids with text on the screen. Yet, already, one of the posts about the “Divorce Effect” already has over 34,000 likes.

And, of course, this one week old account is charging $20 for a number of "courses" or "secrets" on how he did it.

I don't know how much money the account has stolen from people yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was already in the thousands or tens of thousands.

Wait, did I just say stole?

Yes, I did.

This guy with the transformation... he's not f*cking real.

He's AI generated. A phantom drawn up and out of our collective digital subconscious.

And yes, I believe that's theft. People are led to believe that there is a real guy who did a real transformation and that by buying some $20 PDFs they’ll learn how he did it.

There is no real guy, and the PDFs are very likely AI generated slop.

Yeah, you can argue (as the person who showed it to me did) that it's not a scam! After all, marketers have been doing this sort of thing forever.

I don't care what marketers have been doing forever.

It's a scam if it's a before and actor photo of actors with fat prosthetics on, and it’s a scam if it's AI Generated.

The reason this is even worth writing about is because AI is making this sort of fraud more accessible.

A weight loss scam no longer takes a bunch of planning, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay actors, get a studio, write the script, shoot it, etc. It just takes someone whose good at marketing, wants to make money, and spends sometime prompting an LLM.

[Emotional Manipulation]

When you read something, you have a crystalized argument laying in front of you that you're able to criticize.

Contrast that with a 15 second clip that hooks you with a brief but incredibly powerful emotional statement, "This made my wife regret leaving me," floods you with dopamine with some pleasant music, snaps between scenes every few seconds, and shows you the transformation you want to have.

The video is literally all emotional and sensory appeals. There's no argument to criticize. It just is.

It doesn't need to convince you that you want to lose weight, the target for the video already wants to lose weight. It's just surfacing all of those emotions in one place.

All it’s doing is asking you to believe that this guy really did lose weight and stop balding, and that now he’s willing to share his secret for you for the low price of $20.

[Last and First Men]

Okay, enough AI brain rot, let’s read a book. Here is an excerpt from a phenomenal science fiction book I am reading right now, "Last and First Men" by Olaf Stapledon:

I chose this book because it’s what happened to be on me while I was writing in my go to coffee shop this morning. Conveniently, it’s science fiction, so you can’t tell me that it’s some super inaccessible high brow philosophy or textbook.

With a modest reading speed, you can complete a first read of this passage in 30 seconds, the same as a lot of short form content. And, much like you can re watch short form content, you can re read this passage, too.

When you re read it, you start to make connections to other similar things you've read. Or, if it's a long form piece like a book, and you've been reading the entire book, you start to make connections to other parts of the book, too.

In other words, unlike short form content, if you read each passage in this book sequentially, each passage itself will have more meaning.

Here, Stapledon references Nationalism. We all have an idea of what that word means, but he gives a quite clear picture of what he means when he writes Nationalism in the 50 pages leading up to this. His view is super interesting, doubly so because he wrote this AFTER World War I and BEFORE World War II. In this way, his take on Nationalism is one that is frozen in time.

No matter how good of a writer Stapledon is, it would be impossible to attach all of the nuance he gave to the word Nationalism in just this 30 second passage. Rather, the thematic build up before this claim makes his reference to passage way more meaningful to me than to you, because I read the preceding 50 pages, and you didn’t.

In this way, a 30 second passage in long form content carries the weight of the whole book. And, not only has much already gone into defining Nationalism, but the other topics, including economic unity and man’s “burden” have both been enriched by the narrative before.

All that together can let you draw a very nuanced conclusion from the passage that both condemns nationalism and conflict while acknowledging that some sort of quick swap to a peaceful utopia would still be very unlikely to solve the main issues facing man.

In this way, by reading a long form piece, you are sort of entering this cult of deeper understanding about information and words that is impossible to achieve without it.

That doesn't mean that these complex ideas can't be communicated more concisely, but it does mean that they will lose nuance when they are. And, the reader’s depth of understanding will be lower.

This is a far cry from a 15 second clip of an AI man who “lost weight.”

And, it’s also a far cry from the vast majority of what passes for news, too.

[Brevity is the Soul of Wit]

Brevity is the soul of wit... when the brevity is the distillation of something meaningful.

In Paul Graham’s essay we discussed last week, Writes and Write-Nots, he included a quote near the end that summed up his arguments pretty succinctly:

But, if that encapsulates his main point, why didn’t he just tweet that quote instead of writing the whole essay?

The whole post together puts weight behind that quote, makes it more meaningful and believable.

There is an art to distilling information, but that doesn’t mean ideas are “good” because they are concise. Ideas are good because they are good (useful, practical, consistent with reality); making them concise can make them more accessible and useful for others.

But, that doesn’t mean that because something is concise it is good. The best lies are concise, too. You catch a liar when they ramble, not when they stay silent.

[Just Read]

We know reading is important, and we know people aren’t doing enough of it. Where do we go from here?

I certainly wouldn't count on the social media companies saving us; they profit from you staring at your phone, regardless of whether the content is ai slop or not. I also wouldn't count on the government saving us, either; they're coin operated, and there are a lot of coins owned by people not at all interested in solving this issue.

So, what's left for us to do?

Well, it's quite simple, and I hope obvious: read!

Read, read, read.

And I don’t mean the news, or tweets, or Instagram captions, or LinkedIn posts, I mean books or carefully selected essays!

If not reading is a big contributor to so many problems, then reading is a natural solution to it.

In 2026 to date, I've read long form content (largely physical books) for a total of 1,470 minutes. That's a little over 3 hours / week.

I wouldn't by any means say this puts me in the category of "avid reader." It's lower than I'd like, but given how focused I am on BirdDog right now, it is sufficient for me. I actually think it's pretty tame, and importantly for everyone, quite accessible.

Really, it's 30 minutes a day. And don't you dare tell me you don't have 30 minutes a day if you spend at least 30 minutes a day doom scrolling some app!

Maybe you'll say, "well, I spend 60 minutes doom scrolling, but it's throughout the day, not all at once!" It doesn't matter! If I have even 5 or 10 minutes between calls, I'll sometimes use that as a chance to read.

And one thing that helps a ton? I haven't strictly adhered to it, but largely, I won't let myself go on social media apps I spend the most time on (literally just Hinge) until after I've read for 30 minutes that day. That strategy works really well because it functions to automatically flag the white space you have in your day that you're already filling with social media, like meals or time in between meetings or waiting on transit.

Funny, I know, but it's effective.

A few other tactics that have helped me read more overall:

• Only reading books that are more than 5 years old. Naturally filters out a lot of trash

• Not committing to finishing reading books. That way, I don't get "stuck" on a book that I don't like or isn't very good

• Reading more than one book at once. Similar to the above and let’s me swap based on mood

• Never hesitating to buy physical books. A lot stay unread, but having them there increases my options while keeping me away from screens.

If you enjoy hearing me rant about my increasingly strong opinions and habits, please give this blog a subscribe. I’m here every Sunday!

[Fight for Democracy]

I’m still working to make the connection between reading, writing, truth, democracy, and scientific progress very clear and explicit, but this post and the last two [Writing & Truth, Lying] are getting us closer.

Now, I don't think that a literate society forces a democracy or guarantees it at all, but I do think it greatly increases the probability of having a sustainable one.

Besides the point, even if reading doesn't lead to "saving the world," I've seen first hand how it can lead to directly benefiting the reader. As an example, I'd go as far as to attribute a large portion of BirdDog's gross margin at our current feature set to one engineering textbook I read in 2024.

In other words, reading pays.

So what do you say, are you down to do 30 minutes of reading a day before going on Hinge?

Live Deeply,