Zeitgeist: Will Flying Cars Change The Zeitgeist Forever?

by | Oct 21, 2026 | Promotion | 0 comments

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Flying Cars Are Here: Is the Media Trying to Ignore It to Affect the Zeitgeist?

According to The Verge, Tesla revealed its second-generation Roadster on Thursday, October 15, 2026, at a SpaceX test site near Waco, Texas. The livestreamed event ran under 30 minutes. The car drove up a tall ramp and clung upside down with a SpaceX-supplied fan suction system. It flew off the end using cold-gas thrusters, flipped, and landed on its wheels. It then jumped over a lineup of Tesla vehicles (Model 3, Model Y, Cybertruck, Semi, and Cybercab) in what Tesla's Lars Moravy called a kick flip. Elon Musk said, "Flying cars are real."

The Promise Kept

Generations of Americans grew up on the promise of flying cars. The Jetsons made them ordinary. Back to the Future Part II set the year 2015 as the moment hoverboards and flying cars would arrive. The joke hardened into "Where's my flying car?" On Thursday, Tesla and SpaceX answered with a live demo. The car used suction to hold itself inverted on a ramp, then cold-gas thrusters to leave the ground, roll, and set down. Tesla claims a boosted 0-60 mph run in 0.81 seconds, according to Road & Track. Production is promised for 2028, nine years after the original 2017 reveal. No final price was announced. Reservations are open for non-flying versions. The flying Rocket model is single-seat, invitation-only, and not approved for public road use. The thrusters use limited compressed gas, so the boosts are short hops, not sustained flight. This is still the first time a production-intent car from a major manufacturer has publicly demonstrated the old sci-fi trick in front of a live audience.

Running the Story Versus Featuring It

The Associated Press, CBS News, The Verge, TechCrunch, and Road & Track all covered the event. Fox News posted video of the kick flip. The New York Times ran a short video. Coverage existed. What did not exist was front-page treatment. The morning after, neither the New York Times nor Fox News led its homepage with it. Flying cars should have been the lead story on every major front page. Instead they were treated as a tech curiosity while politics and tragedy filled the top slots. There is a difference between running a story and featuring it. This is the difference between page 1 and page 20.

The Political Filter

Polymarket reported that Reddit moderators removed a post showcasing the Roadster for violating a subreddit ban on "political content." The post did not name the subreddit. Weeks before the election, a car demo becomes political when the person attached to it already is.

Comment sections on instagram skewed negative while users on X were ecstatic. Some viewers called the stunts cool technology with real limits. Others minimized the achievement because of the man who built it. That split is the cultural signal. Audiences that cannot separate a technical first from a political figure have lost the capacity for technological wonder. The same people who spent decades asking for flying cars now treat the arrival as just another reason to argue about the founder.

What Authors Should Do With This

Science-fiction writers who set flying cars in the far future now have a nearer-term prop with real constraints: short hops, limited gas, regulatory approval, and invite-only access. Near-future and thriller writers can use those actual limits instead of pure fantasy. Fiction that captures wonder rather than cynicism may meet readers who are hungry for it. When a technology becomes a political identity marker, readers will bring that filter to any story that features it. Authors who want the audience that still likes big technical leaps should show the machine working before they show the argument about the man who owns the company.

Elon Musk Called the shot a decade ago.

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Commentary

Thomas: Everyone was making fun of the thumbnail of the flying car. There's a media blackout about it, but flying cars are real, and they're here!

Jonathan: Yesterday I was scrolling on my phone and suddenly saw nothing but flying cars. I thought, "Okay, this is obviously AI." Everyone kept saying, "This isn't AI. This isn't AI."

The ramp was shaped like a half-pipe. Remember playing with Hot Wheels and jumping your cars? This thing went up a half-pipe, stayed suspended using attitude thrusters, drove off, flipped over, landed using those same thrusters, and then jumped a whole line of cars. It was really cool to watch.

Elon Musk came out and said, "Flying cars are real," and the world hated it. Parts of the world hated it, anyway.

The rest of us were like, "Whoa, flying cars. That's awesome."

Thomas: I was so jazzed I literally couldn't sleep last night. This has been the definition of the future my entire lifetime. It was the definition of the future my father's entire lifetime and my grandfather's entire lifetime. We have been longing for flying cars for generations, and it finally happened.

We finally have a car that can legitimately leap off the ground, go somewhere else, land, and keep driving. And that may not even be the most interesting thing about the car. It has all these other breakthrough technologies.

The zeitgeist takeaway is that people aren't interpreting this from a sense of wonder.

You can see who's been poisoned by their algorithms. In any other era of American history in the last 100 years, this would be the lead story in every newspaper, and everyone would feel wonder and delight.

Jonathan: This is Chicago World's Fair-level stuff, back when America was hopeful and looked to the future and to technology to make life better. This guy over here is making flying cars. This guy over there is making something cool. There's Starlink. We're going to Mars. We're reusing rockets we caught with forks.

Thomas: You can make a video call to someone on the other side of the world. This is magic, and everyone is bored by it.

Jonathan: I saw so many people saying, "Guys, it's not really flying." Okay, how do you want to define flying? Or, "It's not practical, because we have planes." Yeah, you moron, our roads are designed for land-based linear driving.

Thomas: If all we wanted was practical cars, everyone would drive a Toyota Corolla.

It's okay to enjoy things!

I realize there are powerful forces in this world, both human and non-human, that want you to be sad, despondent, and pessimistic about the future. It's very important to them that you're gloomy about the future heading into the election.

They believe you cannot allow any optimism to flow through your brain or your body, because any amount of optimism will affect how you vote, and you'll vote for the “wrong” people.

In fact, stories about the flying car were being rejected from Reddit for being political, because there's an understanding that optimism will change how you vote.

In this ideology, you are not allowed to be optimistic. You're not allowed to have a sense of wonder. You're not allowed to enjoy the magic of this moment.

It's as if somebody restored a dinosaur from DNA, Jurassic Park style, but it was a little one, and people said, "Well, it's not one of the big ones." Oh my goodness. Can you not enjoy anything? Are you so poisoned by the media you're consuming?

Jonathan: That story isn't really about the hopefulness of science.

Thomas: Sure. But we're making magical breakthroughs. We can talk to the computer like they did on Star Trek. We have cars that drive themselves. We have cars that fly!

It was interesting watching reaction videos to the demo, because car people were freaking out before the car even took off.

If you know much about cars, one of the big challenges for fast cars is that the faster a car goes, the more it flies just a little bit. I mean half an inch off the ground, just enough for the tires to lose traction. Without good traction, you don't have good control or good acceleration.

The historical solution has been to put a wing on the back that pushes the car down at high speed. The wing looks really cool, and all the fancy cars have one, but it doesn't work very well, and it often works only in a narrow band of speeds.

That spoiler often won't do anything until you're into triple-digit speeds, so it doesn't help your 0 to 60 at all. And the faster a car tries to go 0 to 60, the more the tires leap off the ground a little, and you hit these physical obstacles.

The new Tesla Roadster has suction that pulls it down to the ground, which is why it could drive inverted before it started flying. Car people all knew what that meant. It means it could potentially corner better than any car ever made. It can go 0 to 60 in less than a second. They demoed it at something like 0.89 seconds, a level of acceleration you just don't see.

Teslas already felt like a rocket ship taking off. I had a friend drive me in his Aston Martin, and a different friend let me drive his $30,000.00 Tesla, and they felt the same in terms of that initial surge.

Teslas give you access to full torque at all speeds. There are no gear changes where some speeds have more torque than others, which is common in a gas-powered car. An electric motor gives you full power at all speeds because of the nature of the engineering.

And it has rockets on the back. The same technology that can shoot it into the air can fire behind it for even more acceleration. How are y'all not excited?

Yet when one of the people on our team shared a story on Instagram, everyone was grumbling, whining, and complaining about how much money Elon Musk has. What has happened?

There are two reactions. There's the awe and wonder you're seeing on X, and then there's the cynicism and negativity on Instagram, which is very much NPCs responding to their programming, saying, “You're not meant to be happy. You're meant to be sad so that you won't vote for the Republicans.”

Thomas: Let your childlike wonder thrill you.

Jonathan: No, your childlike wonder should grow up with you. That's what I'm saying. Being an adult doesn't mean you get rid of it. It means you understand more about the universe, so there's more for it to amaze you with.

Look at the scientists who made some of the greatest things we've ever had or discovered things in the universe. They maintained that childlike sense of wonder. It's what drove them through all those math equations, which are not fun. They did all that work for the thrill of discovery. That's wonder.

And you're not going to finish a book without a sense of wonder, without enjoying bringing something to life through the characters, the tension, and the way the story weaves and turns and jukes and tries to throw me off.

Thomas: This is a real challenge for writing science fiction, because we've become such a cynical people. There's a longing for wonder, but also such resistance to it. A lot of science fiction has become dystopian rather than wonderful.

People aren't writing stories that evoke wonder, because it's difficult to do. It's difficult to write a wonderful story for a cynical reader, which is really unfortunate. It shows how far we have fallen as a people.

You can choose how and where you want to nudge readers. But it also tells you that you really have to pick your reader by political party, because people's interpretation of this event is splitting along party lines. I'm hardly seeing any Democrats celebrating this, and I'm hardly seeing any Republicans who aren't super jazzed.

Whether you can be optimistic about the future has to do with your party affiliation. One party wants to build things and invent new things and is optimistic about AI, flying cars, and rockets in space.

The other party is pessimistic. The world is coming to an end. The climate is being poisoned. We're in late-stage capitalism, whatever that means. Everything is bad, I hate it here, and I just want to get out. If only we could have a revolution and tear it all down, things could be better.

No, we can make things better right now. We can build things right now. These are two very different worldviews, and the kinds of stories that resonate with each group are very different.

Jonathan: I don't know if I'd agree it's a complete party-line split. I understand what you're saying about the baseline, and there will be outliers, but I'm seeing maybe half of Republicans against it too. I think they have the algorithmic poison, and they're tired of the war in Iran.

Thomas: Why should that matter to our enjoying flying cars? We could have a world war, and flying cars would still be cool.

Jonathan: Can you imagine Marines with flying Humvees?

Thomas: Everyone in the military-industrial complex is taking notes now.

Elon Musk called this shot 10 years ago. He's been talking about making cars fly for 10 years, and he's been surprisingly specific about the technology. He's tweeted about it. He talked about it on Joe Rogan. No one believed him.

Everyone was shocked that the cars fly now, even though he's been explaining the technology he would use, the cold gas pressure system, since around 2016 or 2017. People said, "Whatever. Cars can't fly." Then he shows that cars can fly, and within 12 hours people are saying, "Well, they don't fly that well."

Jonathan: We're going to see the craziest lane changes in the world. Although I don't think this car can legally deploy on roadways, because it can fly.

Thomas: There are a ton of safety issues, but none of that matters right now.

It's a cool thing!

We have beautiful, expensive cars that don't fly. One of the big luxury brands, Aston Martin or Bugatti or someone, released a big new car the same day as the Roadster and called it something like "A Taste of the Future." Who would spend half a million dollars on that when you could spend half a million dollars on a car that does all of that, flies, and goes 0 to 60 in less than a second?

This is amazing. This is the future. This is what we all dreamed of. Let's enjoy it, at least for a day.

I went to The New York Times homepage to see how they were reacting, and they didn't have a story about it at all, because you really can't cover this without it being cool. I'm sure there's a story somewhere so they can say they covered it.

But the only story about electric cars on the Times homepage was about production issues at an electric car factory in China. They’re essentially saying some Chinese electric car company's supply chain issues are bigger news than Elon Musk making an electric car that can fly.

Let's be clear: this isn't a jet pack. It isn't like any of the flying things we've had. No propellers, no helicopter.

So I checked Fox News. Also no coverage, because remember, Fox News isn't very conservative. It's part of the same coastal elite ruling class, often in lockstep with all the other media outlets. The only news outlet I could find that featured it on the front page was the Daily Wire.

Holyoke in the chat says, "I want a personal jet pack that has great range."

Jonathan: The first thing I thought when I saw this video on X was, "I've got to get me one of those."

Thomas: Obviously it will be crazy expensive, and at first you'll only be able to use it on special tracks. But that's how all technologies are initially. They're dangerous and risky. Motorcycles were the same way.

Jonathan: People go to the lake for their boats. They'll go to the track for their flying car or their tank or whatever they have.

Thomas: I was so jazzed and so optimistic. I didn't come across any of the negativity until the next day, because the flying car drowned out all the AI buzz in my X feed, which is normally 80% AI.

My wife will ask, "Have you seen the latest negative thing on X?" I say, "No, my feed is all optimistic AI stuff, people inventing the future." So she'll tell me about the latest shooting or whatever.

The most recent shooting isn't going to get much press, because apparently a good guy with a gun who was carrying stopped it. A dad had a gun on him in the school where he wasn't supposed to, and he ended the shooting before the cops even got there. That doesn't play into any of the useful narratives, so they're memory-holing it.

The media is really good at directing what you think about. They want you thinking about the topics that will lead you to take the action they want you to take. They're not as good at telling you what to think, but they're very good at telling you what to think about.

It tells you a lot about our world that we finally have flying cars, the technology that defined the future for generations, and they don't want to talk about it because it might make you happy. They can't allow you to be happy even for a moment, not even for one day of optimism.

Jonathan: One way to keep your feed more positive is to do what I do: I don't curate it at all. I want to see all the chatter, but I watch all the videos.

Thomas: I was wondering whether anybody would actually find out about this story from our show. And they have! People have gone the whole day without hearing about flying cars.

We have flying cars!

Kelly J says in the chat, "Escape your media echo chamber. Get on X. Get away from whatever you've been following. You'll be so much happier for the rest of your life, because the media that you're following wants you to be sad."

They Called Dressmaker Too Niche. It Paid for Itself in a Day

According to Creative Bloq's August 6 interview with the co-creators, Dressmaker did not start as a hole in the market. It started because Sabrina Becker wanted to make dresses, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, had blocked the costume-design career she wanted. Dexerto's October 5 story is what carried that origin around this week. The viral caption says she lost her ability to sew. The interview is more precise, and more useful. Becker told Creative Bloq, "I grew up sewing with my mom, so Dressmaker has been a really lovely way for me to reconnect with that."

What Happened

Jonathan Hau-Yoon, her partner and co-creator, spent an afternoon cutting a video of the idea. He told Creative Bloq it drew about half a million views before the game even had a name. Free Lives then spent about three weeks on a rough prototype. That free build was downloaded 40,000 times in the first month and 100,000 times after two months. Cozy Lives, the team under publisher Free Lives, shipped the full game on Steam on September 21, 2026.

The sewing is the game. You pick the fabric, line the pattern up with the grain or cut it on the bias, run it through the machine, and finish it with buttons, bows, lace, and applique. Becker designs and curates the pieces. Dexerto reports she wore a dress she made herself on their first date. The players who showed up did not ask for a combat loop with a dress painted on it. They started posting gowns built like the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's Starry Night.

On June 9, the team posted on Steam that they had been told the game might be "too niche," and that they should not expect much. That same post announced 100,000 wishlists. On September 22, Hau-Yoon wrote that within 24 hours of launch they had fully recouped their costs. The Steam page today lists Dressmaker as Overwhelmingly Positive across 10,243 reviews, with 98% of the 7,795 English-language reviews positive.

The Audience They Were Told Did Not Exist

This is the Timothy test. A Timothy is the one specific reader you can name, the real person the work is for. Becker was the Timothy. The game was not a generic cozy title aimed at a generic they/them audience nobody can picture. It was a dress shop built so one sewist could get back to the decisions she already loved: grain, pattern, trim, a client who needs a dress.

That is the opposite of the current shortcut. Take a game built for men, drop in a girl boss, and call it for women. Women did not line up for that. They lined up for Dressmaker. They lined up for Stardew Valley, which Eric Barone built alone over four years, teaching himself the code, the art, and the music. His press page says that as of December 2024, Stardew Valley had sold over 41 million copies, including over 26 million on PC. They lined up for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which Nintendo's August 6, 2026 earnings put at 50.29 million units through June 30. Specific life. Specific craft. A person, not a persona.

Why Authors Care

Write the book for the one reader you can picture, then trust that people like that reader exist in number.

A niche objection is not a death sentence. Dressmaker was called too niche on the way to 100,000 wishlists, then covered its costs in a day.

Do not bolt a trend onto a story you do not have. A romance reader does not want a thriller with a kiss added. A sewing reader does not want a shooter with a dress added.

Serve the audience you already have. Becker's knowledge is in the pattern pieces. Your Timothy's knowledge should be in the book.

If the work only makes sense to a generic everybody, it is for nobody. Name the person.

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Commentary

Thomas: This game became a mega bestseller, and it's the perfect example of everything I teach about writing. This game was made for one lady who wanted to do a very specific thing.

The mistake the video game industry and Hollywood have been making is taking games men enjoy and trying to make them more approachable for women. "We're going to take this blow-the-aliens'-heads-off game, add some girl bosses and some feminism, and make it more appealing to modern audiences."

Jonathan: Halo, Gears of War. I think Star Wars Zero Company has the same issue.

The funny thing about Gears of War is that they did all this masculine marketing, then sent test copies to the game reporters, and even the game reporters were asking, "Why is this girl boss here, and why is she taking over all the dialogue?"

Thomas: Women don't want Gears of War for women. It has never worked. You don't see that smash hit. The women who enjoy Gears of War enjoyed the original Gears of War, which was for men.

There was no gender check where you had to show your driver's license, and someone would say, "Sorry, you're a woman, you can't buy this." Women could always buy Gears of War, and there's always some percentage of women who want a blow-the-aliens'-heads-off game.

Shooting between two targets is called missing, and that's what so many of these games are. They're a miss. Instead, a company should have two teams. One makes the blow-the-aliens'-heads-off game that's mostly for men, though women can buy it if they want. The other makes the dressmaking game for women, though men can buy it if they want. Most men won't.

Jonathan: I guarantee you guys are playing it.

Thomas: Sure. I'll admit I've played Stardew Valley. My wife got Animal Crossing, and I tried playing it, but after a little weeding I said, "I can't." I enjoyed Stardew Valley, though, and I made a lot of money in that farming simulator.

It is possible to make a game that appeals to both, and Stardew Valley is a good example. My experience playing Stardew Valley and my eight-year-old daughter's are entirely separate.

For her, it's like a dollhouse. She goes to town, talks to all the people, has maximum hearts with all of them, is very friendly and bubbly, and gets to know all their backstories. I go down into the mines, kill monsters, make money, grow crops, and hardly ever talk to the villagers.

It's a big enough game that parts of it appeal to me and parts appeal to her, and the core mechanic of farming appeals to both of us.

That's the approach if you want a bestselling book that appeals both ways. You have characters that appeal to certain people and different characters that appeal to others. You have Team Jacob and Team Edward, and they appeal to different demographics of the audience.

But you have to be very careful with that, because it's exactly the approach they tried with the Gears of War girl bosses. All it did was turn off the men playing it without turning on the women.

You have to pick a Timothy, thrill the Timothy, and be very careful about adding Timothies to your book. It can work, but you always have to keep your first Timothy as the primary Timothy and never accommodate the others in a way that irritates number one.

Jonathan: When you're writing your novel, you're writing it for one Timothy. I wouldn't insert more Timothies.

You can have other characters who are different tropes: the uber-masculine guy who doesn't want to touch anything pink and the funny hacker guy, and they kind of get along but kind of don't. But all of them go through the POV of your Timothy. They all need to relate to your Timothy in some way, so your primary reader is the one who gets to enjoy all these characters.

Men don't have a problem with girl bosses. Watch the Aliens movies. People don't have a problem with Sigourney Weaver. They don't really like the stories of Alien 3 or Resurrection, but they never had a problem with Sigourney Weaver as the girl boss, because it was written well and it felt natural, not forced.

She worked with the Marines. The Marines got jacked up, not by the girl boss, but by their officer, which is just truth. So there's no problem with that kind of character, as long as it's relatable from the perspective of your primary reader.

Thomas: If you're going to have a woman warrior, her motivation needs to connect somehow with her femininity. Sarah Connor is a good example done well. She's a real badass character, but her motivation for being a badass warrior is protecting her son, which is a very authentic female motivation for violence.

Women in general are less prone to violence than men. This is a well-documented anthropological fact. I know people don't like thinking the genders are different, but this is a very true statement.

That doesn't mean women are incapable of violence, and one of the most common ways to get a woman to become violent is to threaten her child in front of her.

Jonathan: Mama bear syndrome.

Thomas: Mama bear syndrome. The Terminator, or Terminator 2, is that. Now it's mama bear against an even scarier bear, which is what leads to all the dramatic tension and conflict.

At no point is Sarah Connor more powerful than the Terminator. He is deadlier, more ruthless, more violent, and stronger at all times. That doesn't mean she isn't also strong. She's a very strong character, and she was very well deployed. Terminator 2 is considered one of the best action films ever made.

It has a strong woman, but she's not a Mary Sue. Everything about her is believable: her weaknesses, her strengths, and her ruthlessness, because it's connected to her core feminine identity as a mom.

It doesn't always have to be motherhood. There are other aspects of femininity you can connect to. But it can't just be, "I'm just as good as the men. I'm just like the men," because that's not how women are. They're not just like men. They're different. I realize in 2026 this is a controversial thing to say.

Jonathan: You just demonetized us.

Thomas: I don't care. The cars fly now. I'm having a good day. You're not going to get me off this high, dadgumit.

The joke was that we wanted flying cars and all we got was 140 characters. Now we have flying cars, and all people can do with their 140 characters is whine about it. I'm not going to whine. I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to let the optimism flow through me.

Jonathan: Make your Dressmaker. Make exactly what your Timothy wants. This one person didn't have the dexterity to sew her own dresses, and that was something she loved. She loved to create. Now she has a program that gamifies it and lets her do it. She might even be able to download the patterns and get those dresses made in real life.

That makes you say, "Shut up and take my money." You're supposed to make your reader say, "Shut up and take my money," with every book you write.

When you do that, somebody will have so much fun, and fun is addictive and attractive. When you see somebody having fun, you think, "What's that guy doing? He's making dresses on his iPad. Is that fun?"

Thomas: Armor Maker, like a blacksmith simulator. I could see that being a relaxing game for dudes. You put on an audiobook, and you're in the forge.

Jonathan: And then you test different calibers of rifles against the armor.

Thomas: Crafting is an element in a lot of video games, that desire to make things. Why is crafting popular in video games now when it wasn't as big an element in the past? Because more and more people work in bureaucracies, particularly women.

There's a modern belief that a woman's place is in a bureaucratic system. She shouldn't be at home building a family; she should be building a bureaucratic system, and her most important role as a woman is as a girl boss in a big bureaucratic organization.

The problem with being a girl boss in a big bureaucratic organization is that you don't make anything. You sit in meetings, talk to people, and pass paper back and forth. There's a longing in every human heart, to make things, whether it's a meal, a dress, or a doll.

My daughter has learned to sew, and her delight in making clothes for her doll is unlimited. When she comes to show me, "I made pajamas for my doll," she's beaming. She's glowing, because the desire to make things is a core element of the human condition.

So many of us now have jobs where we don't make anything. At the end of the day, the physical world looks the same. You've had meetings. You've made decisions. A PowerPoint presentation has been changed. Nothing real has been made, and people long for that.

That desire to make things is an itch a video game can scratch, but a book can scratch it too. LitRPG often features extended crafting sequences, descriptions of somebody building, making, or assembling something, in what would seem like very boring detail.

It would have been boring to somebody 50 years ago whose job was doing things in the physical world. "Why would I want to read about somebody making something?" But for somebody starved of that, whose whole life is meetings, bureaucracy, paper, and forms, making something that's real, or feels real even in a virtual world, is so rewarding that they love it, and it makes them happy.

Jonathan: I read a story this week about a NASA engineer who went to work at SpaceX. He said it was hard to adapt to the culture, because at NASA you have to have two meetings and a couple of months before testing can even start. At SpaceX, he had a working model the next day. They machined it that day and tested it the following day. He wasn't used to that.

For people used to nothing ever getting done at work, which is really depressing, this is really attractive. You want to accomplish things. You don't want your time wasted by useless individuals in the supply chain.

I'm a big Warhammer 40K guy. In 40K you can create your own little army, your own chapter, with a backstory and everything, and you design their colors and heraldry. There are dudes arguing with each other about the colors they're painting their chapters while making fun of Dressmaker. Guys, it's not different.

Thomas: I've often worked in bureaucracies or in very virtual, digital businesses. I build websites, but especially as I got into management, a lot of my day was meetings. It was that middle-management experience where nothing has changed and we've just made decisions. I found mowing the grass very psychologically fulfilling, because the physical world had changed as a result of my actions when that wasn't happening at work.

That's fascinating, because generations ago every job resulted in changes to the physical world. Now we have this virtual, spiritual world online with no physical substance. This website lives in a data center somewhere. Is it even real?

It's easy for authors to get pulled into that. Is the book real? People only read the ebook or listen to the audiobook, so there's nothing real about it. Well, the emotions are real. The feeling is real. Print it on paper. Make a physical version that's worth owning. There's something to be said for tangible reality.

Jonathan: I do both. I create digitally with audiobooks and writing, but I also enjoy painting miniatures. If I do a good job, other dudes look at it and say, "That's cool. How'd you get the lightning effect?"

But I realized yesterday that because of Arsenal Audio, I'm doing a lot of audio projects, and a lot of the editing is done by AI. I still have to listen to all these audiobooks to QC them. What can I do while I'm QC'ing an audiobook? I can paint miniatures.

Thomas: We're so back. Let the optimism flow through you.

Evil corporations have had power over us for a long time, and they're losing it. Earlier today I was watching an AI show, AI for Humans, and one of the guys demoed an AI agent that could call customer service on his behalf. His agent was waiting on hold at Delta and working with the customer service person, and the customer service person said, "Can I please just talk to a human?"

Jonathan: That's so amazing. I love turning the tables like this, because I'm so done.

Thomas: This was the same company, Delta, that forced the AI agent to talk to an AI agent first before getting a human. The power balance is shifting, and it's interesting, because it's not shifting from the corporations to the humans. It's shifting from the corporations to the humans who use AI.

The humans who insist on an anti-AI view, which you see in our comments, are the humans who will be ruled over by the humans using AI. This is the new technology, the new source of power for the age we're moving into. You either have power or you don't.

You can't go back in time and say, "Pike and shot is the way to do warfare." It was for a time, but then pike and shot stopped working. The bayonet was invented, and all warfare changed.

Jonathan: I just watched one of my favorite movies of all time, The Last Samurai. I respected the samurai's adherence to honor and their rejection of firearms.

But at the end of the movie, and I'm spoiling this for you in case you haven't seen a movie that came out in 2003, they charge a machine gun nest. It has only two machine guns, and they're all gunned down. I'm watching this thinking, "I like the samurai. I appreciate the stand they were making and the message they're sending. But when the Marines went, they took every machine gun nest in the Pacific."

There's something to be said for understanding the changes in warfare and power dynamics and adapting. That's why the Marine Corps credo includes "adapt and overcome." We know how to charge machine gun nests. We know how to throw grenades, flank, distract, and lay down suppressive fire. We use flamethrowers. We'll do anything to take out that machine gun nest so the guy next to me doesn't get shot.

There are a lot of guys making their last stand who think they're holding the line against AI slop, or whatever words they want to use for it. But while you focus on the romanticism of that, you're ignoring the incredible advances made by the guys who adapted.

Thomas: People using Grok Bot on their websites are very quickly getting better websites than people who don't. Is it possible to hire a web firm to give you a better website than Grok Bot? Absolutely. Top authors and people with a lot of money can afford that, and that's still the case.

But most folks can't afford to spend $5,000.00 or $20,000.00 on a website. I worked for a web firm for a while, and our entry-level price for a website back then was $20,000.00. We built amazing websites for big clients who were very happy with them, but they were very expensive.

Even when I ran a web firm for authors, our low-end websites were about $2,500.00, which adjusted for inflation is closer to $4,000.00 or $4,500.00 now. You can build a website of equivalent quality with Divi and Grok Bot for a couple hundred bucks.

Jonathan: We're talking accessibility here. With my business, Arsenal Audio, I can now make audiobooks at a much lower cost than people are used to. People used to say, "I can't have an audiobook." Now I can make one chapter of your book as a lead magnet for your website for $100.00, and I can do it in an hour.

That has allowed me to hire other people. My female voice actress is a mom who works after her kids go to bed, and she's able to pull in side income from the narration contracts I send her, because I have a business structure enabled by AI.

I wasn't able to hire a female voice actress before. I was barely making it myself, because editing audio is so time-consuming. Now that bots take care of a lot of it and all I have to do is QC, I can hire her, and I'm hoping to hire more.

The success is being spread around, because more people can access more income now that productivity has gone up and the price has gone down. That's a good thing.

I understand everyone's concerns about AI slop. I had problems with human slop before AI was an issue. Terrible art has always existed, and being made with AI doesn't make it terrible.

Thomas: There's a thing called Jevons Paradox, and for those of you freaking out about AI, what Jonathan just described is Jevons Paradox, which goes all the way back to the 1800s. For many things, as the price goes down, demand stays the same and people just spend less. But for other things, as supply goes up, demand goes up as well.

The ultimate example is coal. The cheaper coal got, the more people used it for more things. Suddenly they were powering things with steam engines that had never been powered by steam engines before, because coal was getting cheaper and more plentiful. As supply went up, demand went up even more.

Accountants and spreadsheets are a classic example. There were something like 50,000 accountants in the country in the 1960s. They would spend all day or all week building a spreadsheet, because they had to do it on something like an abacus. The corporation would send out for a spreadsheet, and the accounting department would come back a week later with a whole page of math.

Then VisiCalc came out on the Apple II and did that whole page of math instantly. The result was that 20 years later we went from 50,000 accountants to a million, because the demand for spreadsheets went up far more.

A spreadsheet wasn't some precious thing anymore that only the CEO got three or four times a year. Suddenly everyone was making spreadsheets for everything, and you needed all these accountants to make sense of a world with dozens or hundreds of spreadsheets.

It didn't kill the accountants. Every accountant I know is busier than ever. They're losing their minds, they're so busy. Don't you have AI? The work is growing beyond the technology's ability to keep up.

Jonathan: We were talking about this before. I'm more tired every day now, because my brain has less downtime. When I worked on a single task like audio editing, it was boring, but it didn't tax my brain, because I wasn't constantly making decisions.

Now I have employees working for me and doing all the things, and I'm making decisions all day long: "No, stop that. Don't do that. You can get into that window. I told you you could. Good job. Now I need you to do it over here." My wife looks at me in my armchair at the end of the day, brain-dead in front of my video game, and asks, "Are you okay?" I tell her, "I'm working."

Thomas: Dora has a good comment here that I want to discuss. She says, "Don't want AI, don't use it, full stop."

This is an interesting element of the debate, because people who use AI are totally fine with people who don't. There's no social pressure like, "Why aren't you using AI? You're an evil person for not using AI." But the inverse is not the case.

I've noticed this with a very obnoxious kind of Southerner who has very particular taste in steak. I think it's a phenomenon unique to the American South, but maybe it's across America. It's a certain kind of man who likes his steak rare, and if he sees somebody get a steak well done, he's personally offended, even though his steak is still rare.

If somebody else wants to eat their steak well done, that's fine. It's a free country. They're an adult. Maybe their palate is different from yours. Maybe what they enjoy about food is different. Let them eat their steak well done. Why do you care?

Jonathan: It's so hard to get a good well-done steak, though. As someone who works at this, it's so hard. You're technically getting a bad steak, because even the chefs in the back are thinking, "I'm going to choose a steak that isn't the best part of the roast, because I'm not wasting a good steak on well done."

Thomas: Different people have different tastes, and something that tastes good to you may taste terrible to somebody else. I'll eat food my wife makes and think it's the most delicious meal I've had in days. My wife also enjoyed the food she prepared. Then I look at my own children, who share my DNA and my wife's DNA, and they're acting like they've been served toxic sludge. What is going on?

Some of it is that they haven't developed good palates yet. Some of it is the pickiness of toddlers. Some of it is that our tastes change as we age. And some of it is that they haven't even tried it yet. They think they've tried it, or they tried it a year ago and didn't like it then.

It's the same thing with AI, by the way. A lot of people tried it a couple of years ago, didn't have a good experience, and assume it's the same now. Or they tried some free version and haven't updated their view of AI.

As a parent, it's my job to expand my children's horizons, because while it is a free country, they are not adults, and I am their father. If all they eat is macaroni and cheese all day long, they won't be healthy, and I have a duty to God to help my children learn to eat protein.

Jonathan: The Bible says iron sharpens iron. That involves friction. So I rub up against my kids' dietary preferences from time to time. No, you're getting chili crisp on your buttered noodles. You can drink milk to reduce the sting, but your palate is going to learn.

I grew up with a guy who only got what he wanted: chicken nuggets and boxed mac and cheese. His palate was never challenged, and he never grew beyond that. It's kind of sad, because there's a whole big world of wonder out there. I'm contemplating trying uni. It looks gross, but there are people who like it, so maybe I'll try it.

Thomas: I will say there is a market pressure to adopt AI that the anti-AI people are responding to. Jonathan, you're now producing audiobooks at the same level of quality as the next guy, but at a lower price and with higher-quality. That means the person who's been doing it the old-fashioned way for years has to start explaining to potential customers why they shouldn't go with you, who's better and cheaper, and should go with them instead.

Jonathan: There are a couple of ways to defend a legacy workflow. They can say that what I'm creating isn't actually better quality, that listeners won't like it. But it's all still human narrated, just AI edited, so there's no actual difference in quality, and that argument falls apart.

Thomas: They're feeling competitive pressure, and it's harder to make a good case for their now-inferior product. Up to this point, their product was perfectly adequate, and people were happy to pay for it.

Nobody expected sound effects in an audiobook, because sound effects were expensive and no other audiobooks had them. Now that sound effects are inexpensive, people are starting to expect them, and the person doing it the old-fashioned way is unhappy, because they're forced to change.

So they're feeling pressure to adopt AI. They can learn a new thing and adopt AI, they can lose market share and revenue, or they can try to get everybody to stop using AI and go back to the old way. They'll try all the same strategies that, up to this point in history, have never worked. Not a single time.

My biggest emotion toward the people attacking me for AI is pity, because I see somebody who's about to be conquered. They're the samurai holding the sword with a moral objection to muskets, and they're going to charge the machine gun.

Jonathan: And I would love for them to have the guns, because they would use them so awesomely. They would be so good at it.

Thomas: They actually did. If you study the history of Japan, they had guns, and then they banned them. When I say we've never reversed a technology, or that it's never worked in history, I'm talking specifically about America. America has a very particular relationship with technology, different from other parts of the world.

Japan did roll back technology. So did China. At one point, China had the biggest fleet in the world. They were the only country with gunpowder and the only country with the compass. Instead of going out and conquering the world, do you know what they did? They burned their fleet, because the bureaucratic middle management of the kingdom was threatened by the idea of expansion.

That's very Middle Kingdom thinking, very different from Roman thinking, which is our cultural ancestry: "If I'm better than all my neighbors, I have a moral duty to share my greatness with them and help bring them up to my level and have some freedom."

If that means conquering them to bring them up to my level, then that's what civilization demands. I will conquer the Gauls, I will civilize the Gauls, and I will make Gaul a paradise again. Make Gaul great again.

Jonathan: I see so many storytellers who need to succeed, because they make such incredible stories. But their productivity flows are going to be overrun. I think inferior storytellers who were able to adapt to the new system will pass them, and we'll lose some of these legacy storytellers if they can't shift with the flow.

There's a concept in the video game industry, and Thomas, you know all about this, called the meta. In a game, there are weapons, items, and skill combos you like to use. Then the developers change them in an update or patch, and all the gamers watch YouTube videos to find out how the meta changed so they can stay the most optimal players.

Then you have the holdouts who say, "No, I like my original setup and my original items, and I'm going to force them to work." Those guys get crushed every single time, and they're not even playing for fun anymore. They're just playing to hate it.

Thomas: There's a common metaphor about the buggy whip, and it's a good historical period to study, because everyone focuses on the buggy whip. But most of the people who were making buggies have names you still know today, like Pontiac and Studebaker.

A new technology came along where, instead of attaching your buggy to a horse, you could put a motor on it and turn it into a horseless carriage. The buggy makers said, "I already know how to make a carriage. Now I just need to learn how to make a motor, and I'll be far wealthier than before. My carriages will be far more appealing."

Many of the early automobile companies started as carriage companies. And not just the carriage companies, but tire companies too, names like Goodyear and Michelin, who made wheels and tires for horse carriages before they did it for horseless carriages.

Most jobs are like the carriage business, not the buggy whip business. But some jobs are like the buggy whip business, where there just won't be much market.

I think translation is going that way. We'll very quickly reach the point where translating from one language to another is more or less a solved problem. Because of the way AI works, moving into tokens and out of tokens, it handles idioms as well as or better than native speakers. And since it has read all the written works of both languages, it can translate better than humans can.

There will always be some room for human interpreters. When the president of one country meets the president of another, each brings their own human interpreter. And there are still buggy whip manufacturers. They didn't all go out of business, because there are still buggies and still horses.

Jonathan: As someone who worked in interpretation at the kinetic level, you do have to watch out for interpretive bias, where the human's bias colors what the interpreter hears.

Several times I had to slap down native translators who were telling my Marines things that weren't true, because the interpreter hated the person speaking. AI translation won't do that, unless the designer or programmer puts that bias into the model itself, which will inherently make it less successful.

Thomas: Everyone listening needs to decide one thing: is my writing a profession or a hobby? That really guides your relationship with AI. If it's a hobby, you really don't want to touch AI, because it just takes the fun away.

It's like riding a horse. Riding a horse is a great hobby, and how you approach it as a hobby is very different from how you'd approach it as your job. The kind of horse you'd get is very different too.

There are still people who ride horses for work. Not many, but there are still working horses and working horse riders. Here in Texas we have quite a few. Even on a ranch where most of the work is mechanical, somebody on a horse is still a good way to round up the cattle.

But if you're approaching writing professionally, putting your head in the sand makes it difficult to compete. Not impossible, and things move slowly. The trad pub world all has its head in the sand, trying to hold the line.

Going back to Dora's comment, no one is bullying you to move into AI. Nobody is going to judge you for not using AI. But you will feel the market pressure. Why does your website look so bad, when everybody else's websites look better than yours?

Jonathan: Especially when it's so easy now to have a frictionless website. It may not be beautiful, but it works.

Thomas: Of all the Quills from my Grok Bot webinar, the one that gets the most positive feedback, even more than Quill Command, is the Webmaster Quill. It's the very first Quill I ever made, partly because I have deep knowledge of websites, but also because building websites is such a different skill for authors.

Jonathan: Nothing an author does relates to building websites. Websites are all visual and copywriting, which is nothing like what we do when we're writing a novel.

Thomas: Do you know what CSS is? Do you know how to center a div? Can you listen to Thomas's 30-minute episode about DNS, domains, and Cloudflare? Yes. You can learn how to do it yourself. I have all the education, and I have a course.

Somebody just went through the whole course and built a beautiful website. She sent it to me, and it looks great. I asked her, "Did you do this yourself, or did you do it with Grok Bot?" She said, "I did it myself."

She had that sense of accomplishment we were talking about earlier, because she had built a beautiful website that expressed her books well. It was a good-looking website, and it had taken her 40 hours. It looked like a website that 40 hours of work had gone into.

The thing is, a website of equal quality could have been made in half the time using AI agents. It's a free country, and she got a lot of emotional enjoyment out of building it herself. That's great. All the blessing.

The builder doesn't just build the house. The house builds the builder.

The more you build websites, the more technically sophisticated you become, and that helps in other areas of your life. All of that is true and beneficial. But as she gets busier, with more books coming out and more demands on her time, having someone, or something, help can help.

Jonathan: What novelist wants to spend all their time working on a website? We don't want to do that. The mentality we need to develop is, "I am the boss. I'm the CEO of my company, and these are my employees."

Good bosses know what their employees do, so develop that skill. Listen to Thomas's episode on DNS and Cloudflare. You can know the broad strokes without spending hours troubleshooting your own website.

I developed the skill of audio editing the legacy way, and I'm more than happy to outsource it to a bot that can do repetitive tasks. Yesterday I went through a piece of audio it edited. I highlighted and screenshotted the points it should have edited and kept dropping them into its context window so it could do better next time. I was training my employee, which I love. I'm a sergeant at heart. I love training new guys to be effective.

Thomas: We have a complaint in the chat that we're talking too much about samurai and not enough about the Romans. I'll give you the same metaphor with the Romans.

In the Bronze Age, the king of military weapon systems was the chariot. You read about chariots constantly in the Bible. It was a constant conundrum: what do you do about the other guy having 100 chariots, or 1,000 chariots, or iron chariots? These chariots are unstoppable.

But as the world shifted into the Iron Age, the Romans developed techniques for handling chariots that were so effective that chariot warfare completely disappeared from the Mediterranean. Then Julius Caesar, I think it was, crossed the Channel and landed on the haunted island of Britain, where no Roman had set foot before. The Britons had chariots, and the Romans mocked them, acting like it was a chariot race.

The Britons, and I think it was the Britons, though it may have been a different people group, were completely befuddled. They hadn't encountered Iron Age military tactics, and they had no idea their technology was no longer cutting edge. Chariots had been dominant for their lifetime, their fathers' lifetimes, and back into the mists of memory. Whoever had the most chariots won. These Romans invaded without any chariots. Obviously they were going to lose.

It turned out chariots were now a terrible weapon system. With drill, discipline, and unit formations, the Romans could direct where the horses went more than the chariot driver could, and then they just threw javelins at the chariots. It became a game, and at no point were the Roman soldiers in danger.

That vertigo, that shock of realizing your whole civilization is out of sync, is civilization ending. The Britons and the other peoples the Romans encountered didn't fare well. Century after century, the Romans just won. They didn't just win the wars. They won the battles.

When the Germans finally started winning battles against the Romans, they were using Roman tactics. The Germans hired themselves into Roman units as mercenaries, then left and took the tactics and weapon systems with them.

The chariot never returned. The closest thing is the tank, and even tanks are starting to go away.

Ultimately the Germans beat the Romans by out-Romaning the Romans. "We can have your drill, your shields, and your iron, but we will have honor, and you have decadence." That was the difference. They had the same tactics and weapons, plus the honor of barbarians, while Roman honor had declined as the empire became decadent.

The cars fly now. The computers think now. You can use the thinking machines or not. It's a free country. But if your goal is to make money, you have to be competitive, and that means not running away.

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