It started with me making a patronizing comment about a YouTube influencer. On her YouTube channel, she billed herself as a former model who became a computer programmer.

The channel featured videos about topics like landing her first programming job and coding challenges. It was the sort of motivational stuff that would inspire any young person wanting to get into the field of computer programming.

Then, over time, the tone of the videos changed. It was reporting live from tech events, acting as a host, and interviewing IT stars. It slowly morphed from a young programmer’s channel to an IT personality’s channel.

I felt like I wanted to pull her aside and say, “Sweetie, you’re still a model. Instead of the runways of Paris, you just changed the modeling venue to Youtube.com.”

But my little patronizing comment came back to bite me in the butt a few days ago when I found myself doing exactly what she had done.

Recently, I’ve enrolled in a free computer programming course. I hope to get my web developer/software engineer certificate in a few months.

Within the span of about a week, I listened to two separate podcast stories about AI from 404 Media. They were reporting that companies like X and Facebook were training super bots to do their programming.

In this new reality of AI super bots, Software engineers would only be needed to adjust or fact-check the AI’s work. I started wondering.

“Is there any point learning how to code anymore?”

This daunting possibility led me over to ChatGPT to see if it could really code better than a human.

I asked Chat GPT to draw an airplane in CSS.

First it drew something that looked like a vase.

Then it drew a blob.

When I uploaded a picture of an airplane, it drew something equally ridiculous.

This gave me a YouTube video idea called “Why Software Engineers Don’t Need To Panic About AI Stealing Their Jobs.”

The video would have been a funny video showing ChatGPT drawing garbage.

Then, I started daydreaming. “What if the video went viral? What if I created more funny videos like that and then became become a Youtube AI and tech reporter?”

You can see where this is heading.

Eventually, I would start making money as a YouTube Partner, and after a while, I could get a good income from that.

Then I wouldn’t need to be a software engineer or study coding. I could just go on YouTube and talk about hot software engineering topics.

This little situation of mine is the exact playbook for how we became a society that talks about things instead of creating things.

On the internet, simply talking about things is just as lucrative as executing them.

In this new online reality, three income streams have opened up. You can go on YouTube and react to people who are doing things, interview people who are doing things, or comment on what it would be like if something happened.

In 2025, this is enough to make a very good income.

We have developed an unnatural appetite for listening to people talk.

So how did we become a society that values talking just as much as doing?

American talk show pioneer Steve Allen introduced us to what we know as the late night talk show set. Oprah took the talk show phenomena to a whole other global level. Then YouTube came along and made it possible for any housewife at home with a camera to start a talk show.

No longer did you need ten producers and a team of writers to be the star of a talk show. Anyone with time and a YouTube account could do it and start building a fanbase.

While this was going on, another trend was developing for people who just wanted some background entertainment on the ride to work.

Podcasts exploded. Remember the iPod? In 2005, Apple introduce the world to podcasting. As podcasting grew, companies like iHeart and Spotify took notice and invested heavily in podcasting.

Some of that love that was going to Youtubers was now going to podcast hosts. People who listened to podcasts while doing the dishes or exercising created a slew of podcast stars.

But the market started becoming saturated. Everybody wanted a piece of that podcast advertising revenue.

I’d like to say everybody and their pet dog now has a podcast. However, that’s not entirely true. Dogs looking for a place to shine usually get their own dog Instagram channel.

Podcasting gave self-help gurus, consultants, funny people and washed-up celebrities a new outlet. After all, the barrier to entry is pretty low. You need to enjoy talking and a microphone.

In a way that radio never did, the explosion of podcasting shows how much we enjoy listening to people talk.

But can there really be a market for billions of hours of listening to people talking? If so, how is that possible?

To answer that question, let's ever so briefly shift gears. Let’s talk about another online trend that exploded alongside podcasts and YouTube channels.

That phenomenon is loneliness.

All of this amazing online technology that at one time used to bring long-lost friends together started doing something else.

It changed the nature of communication.

This means that your friend came to interpret sending you a funny text as having the same value as talking to you.

Interactions that used to happen in person or over the phone slowly started being replaced by likes, shares, emojis, and messages.

Around the same time, friends also came to interpret you not liking a Facebook post as a snub, hatred, and a major threat to the friendship.

With all that time you used to spend ice skating and going to burger joints freed up, you now have time to watch 14 jillion YouTube videos and 47 million podcasts.

Less interaction in person provides the time to listen and FOMO produces the motivation to listen.

So you keep doing what everyone else seems to be doing. You stay in the loop, and you tune in each day to hear more talking and talking and talking.

Tech simultaneously isolated us from real-life interactions and began rewarding content creators for creating online interactions.

To makeup for the shortfall of your friends not calling you, a new “online-support system” emerged.  This support system comes in the form of the life coach, self-help guru and expert influencer.

This is a person who has achieved a little success in some field. They now consider themselves an authority on how life should be lived or how success should be achieved.

Every day your YouTube success guru is there to remind you of the latest success news. You’ve seen tech stars, celebrities and other YouTube influencers blow up with your own two eyes. Surely you could make a little bit more of yourself.

You could work out more, manage your time better, strategize better, get a raise, start a business, do SEO better and raise revenue.

With an army of online influencers telling you to do more, and you quietly agreeing that you’re not living up to your potential, a market is created.

The recipe for success for this market is simple. Move human interactions online. Create a sense of not being enough, not doing enough and not knowing enough. Then compensate people for creating this kind of content that keeps people tuning in.

In this way, yes, there can be a market for billions of hours of listening to people to talk.

People are plugged in. People are talking and people are constantly tuning in to listen to them talk.

By first creating the market conditions first, yes, it is possible to monetize endless hours of content.

A lot of average Joes out there looking to make a few extra dollars, see an opportunity to do so by creating content. They turn on their cameras and start talking to you.

You always get the behaviour you reward.

If the behaviour that is being financially compensated is creating online content, people will just start creating more and more content.

We first started seeing inklings of this several years ago when they began interviewing teenagers about what they wanted to be.

In my days the answers were doctor, lawyer, teacher, or construction worker.

In 2019, when 3000 children were surveyed, the majority of American children said that they wanted to become a Youtuber when they grew up.

Most kids in China said they wanted to be an astronaut. Is it a coincidence then that China produces most of the products we use?

It is still normal to want to have an offline career aspiration in China. In China, people also still want to create physical things that you can touch.

When a society financially compensates creating digital things more than physical things, that society is in decline.

We began using the internet in 1993. We got to 1993 because people learned how to grow food, how to create fire, how to sew, how to make boats, cars, airplanes and computers.

These are all physical things.

Along the way, we gained inspiration from the writers, poets and film makers who put the story of our journey on paper and on film.

With the rise of AI, it is no longer necessary to write anything yourself, and computers are now being trained to make films.

Do you see where this is heading?

Let me paint a picture for you.

Imagine a world where the main product is content. Imagine that a small group of people pay people to produce the content. AI takes care of the heavy lifting of writing and documenting what is going on in people’s lives. In this world, we depend on others to produce the products we use and to procure the food that we eat. This food is delivered to the door electronically through a smart online ordering system.

Does that sound good? Does that sound admirable? Does that sound creative?

So, how can we get off this very dangerous path?

Usually we hear, “You can’t fix a problem with the same technique that created it.”

In this case, you can.

As I said earlier, “You get the behaviour you reward.”

People should be compensated for creating physical products, for doing things offline and for growing food.

You may be wondering, “How can I persuade a 10-year-old to get excited about farming when they are watching people getting so much fame and attention from YouTube?”

This raises a new question. Is the reward system more than money? Is the attention-economy so powerful that it is meeting a much greater need that the ten-year old hasn’t voiced?

Is this all just about having a career where you get a steady supply of attention?

If so, why is it that every few months you hear a story about a burned-out YouTuber who is “taking a break”.

The reality is that on YouTube, in front of the audience you’re a star! Behind closed doors, it’s not sustainable as a career.

It never has been and it never will be.

Without a team to help you, creating endless online content is draining. After a while, the initial thrill is replaced with plain old fatigue.

The only hope for this 10-year-old is to get an inner fullness from somewhere else.

Back in the day, people used to get it from, community, family and faith.

This reminds me of a long time ago when I was going through a tough time. My landlord shared a quote with me.

She said, “Love is the only healer.”

She was right.

A society with a strong network of loving relationships won't churn out endless content.

A society with a well-developed network of shallow, means-to-an-end relationships will.

This insatiable appetite for talk and the desire to create more content has a source.

This little problem of ours is rooted in a desire to fill up ourselves with something.

We have turned to the internet to find that inner filling.

People have to eat, and we’ve also turned to the internet in our search for income generation.

So how did we get here?

We got here by centralizing human desire, fulfillment and income in one monetized location called the internet

By doing this, we’re now in a bit of a quandary.

Nobody is motivated to create anything offline.

The problem is that the solution to this desire for inner filling can only be found offline.

It is as old as civilization. It is the only thing that will work, and it is called real love.

In the Rosetta study, researchers were baffled about why a certain Italian community wasn’t getting the same diseases as their neighbours. Eventually, they found out it was because in their community, they felt emotionally safe.

This is a kind of connection that can not come through Wifi.

It also, by the way, produces the kind of community that produces amazing shoes, bags, hats and dresses.

It creates.

It sustains.

It uplifts.

It is better for your health than any health guru.

At the start of this journey, I didn’t know that creating things had anything to do with love.

I now know that it is the missing ingredient in a society that has become obsessed with replacing it with talking.