How to Manage AI Overwhelm

0:04 Hey, it's the Fit Mess. He's Jason, I'm Jeremy. We talk about AI and mostly mental health related topics. And it's so interesting. Today we're gonna talk about just how overwhelming all of this information about AI is and trying to keep up, trying to stay relevant, trying to stay on top of it. I'm drowning. think a lot of people are drowning based on the number of articles I found looking for this today. Tons of people are feeling the same way. And it reminds me of when this show first started. You know, the Fit Mess started as a typical sort of men's health, men's wellness, mental health show. And when you first are exploring this kind of thing, you're, you know, suddenly you're following a bunch of new people that, you know, cover this sort of thing.

0:44 Your feed just gets overwhelmed with. You need to do this. You need to drink this. You need to eat this and take this supplement and only sleep this much and only work out on these days when the moon is in the right position in the sky and we're to and all of sudden you're just like, holy shit. Like no wonder I'm a big fat load. I can't do these 4000 things. What the hell? Then after a few years of doing the interviews with everybody, that's all saying the same thing of like, you know, get enough sleep. Don't eat like complete shit. Move your body and you know, take a break once in a while. Like, oh, it's it's a lot simpler than than I thought it was. about AI right now because we've taken a hard shift on this show and we're talking a lot about AI and its relationship to mental health.

1:25 I mean, every day in my feed there is, bro, if you're not doing these seven prompts to manage your budget, are you even a fucking adult? Like, like everyone's got a thousand opinions about the best way to optimize your life and all of the things you're trying to do. And the 17 businesses you could start by noon and be a millionaire at age 22 because chat GPT will just do all, do everything for you. And you can just go fuck off for the day. That's where I am in my head is I just feel like Am I that dumb that I cannot keep up and figure out how to like be the overnight millionaire because AI is here now like that's where I'm living in my head spiritually mentally and it's overwhelming me and you know Fortunately, there's a few thousand people on the internet that have written articles saying basically the same thing Well, and I also think those people writing those articles are also not millionaires or else they wouldn't be writing those articles.

2:17 So, I mean, it's the signal to noise ratio problem, right? So how much of what I'm getting is actually a signal I should be paying attention to versus just straight up noise that's echoing in the background. And this is not a new problem, right? Like way back when cable news started during the first Iraq war, that's how old we are. oh The big thing was, hey, this 24-7 news feed with the Iraq war is great because there's always content on there and there's always something to new because they're blowing some new shit up. Well, after a month when the war kind of died off and they had nothing else to show, then they started showing the same shit over and over and over again, but with slightly different commentary, with slightly different bits of information.

3:05 And it just became this 24-7 news cycle to sell know, places to direct your eyeballs to get more people paying attention to this. That same model is how the internet works. The reason why things are free is because you're the product and that has just extrapolated and expanded over time. And if you look at Google, most of Google's money does not come from the search engine. It comes from people paying money. to be ranked higher in the search engine and from selling ads with DoubleClick and YouTube. So they make their money doing these free functions and they are incentivized to throw more shit at you over and over and over again so you pay attention to it.

3:53 And then Facebook took it another step forward and they created outreach culture and all these other pieces for you to be engaged with these pieces because they psychologically... profiled people and realized very quickly that human beings are much more motivated by hate, anger, and rage than we are by love, caring, and concern. So what I did to counteract that, sorry hiccups, I went through and I started only liking cat videos and puppy videos. And most of my feed is like cats and puppies and red pandas and like narwhals and other like fun, friend, softy shit because that's what I chose to engage with.

4:36 But Facebook still goes every now and again, hey, here's this really outrageous thing. Like they're trying to sample test me to figure out if I'm going to stay engaged on some outrage content for a long enough period of time. Because I know they really, really want that to be the methodology of how it is they connect with me because they want to sell me ads that either countermand that or reinforce that. Now we have AI, and AI is like, I got you Facebook algorithm. I'm going um to make this shit so controversial and so crazy that there's no way that you can't turn away from it.

5:18 Because people use prospecting emails, and they use direct outreach, and they write articles and everything else based upon what AI tells them is a valid and really facile point. of interaction um because they think that human beings think that if they go through and they create the right content, they're going to get enough people looking at it that they can take advantage of that and actually make money off of it. And the reality is that the content that comes out normally is not very substantive and it doesn't really have anything new in it. It sounds good. It flows well. It might actually get the message across.

6:00 but it's not a new message and it's probably being repeated a billion times for different audiences. So if you consume it, if you choose to avail yourself to being allowed to have all that noise come at you, you're gonna have to spend time sorting through it to figure out what the actual signal is because the content's probably not good, it hallucinates like a motherfucker and most of the time people have an agenda when they're pushing that towards you and if you say, hey, I really want to influence things in this way. AI, do a better job of it than I can. It goes, OK, and runs after that problem space and tries to make that occur. And it's fucking good at it, at generating content that looks good, sounds good, but maybe doesn't really actually have anything of value.

6:47 So people's voices are being diminished, and they're being homogenized. that part sucks. And we're all fucking overwhelmed and inundated with it. And frankly, it's terrible. Now, what I will say is the one advantage is with AI in the mix, there are a lot fewer grammatical errors in articles now and misspellings. One of the key indicators for me during the early days of AI was to look for misspelling and go, a human wrote this because the AI would have fixed it. But now they put fucking spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in there on purpose. So it looks like AI didn't do this.

7:29 Yeah. Great, so like, OK, another signal that I can't pay attention to. And I just start stripping these things off. Yeah, mean, Tim Ferriss' four-hour work week still applies. And his podcast, they're revisiting that, like all these different tools and things that they've used over and over again. What stands up to the test of time? And one of the things that stands up to the test of time is don't look at your email except for maybe once a day, if not getting it stripped down to once a week. The same principles apply to don't look at the news, don't doom scroll, don't sit there on your Facebook all day. Turn that shit off and walk the fuck away from it.

8:11 Because the reality is, is that if something really important is happening, people are going to tell you. And if you really want to understand something, go and ask people. Say, hey, what's new today? And that gives you that interaction with another human being, because they probably read that bullshit anyways and let them be your filter. That's that was one of the huge takeaways from that book for me was was very much that like let your community let the people around you be your source of information. I mean I worked in the news for 20 years like my job was to fill people's heads with fear and mayhem because that was that's what sells because like you were saying humans are not motivated by love and happiness and joy.

8:52 It's fear and anger and you know. just terrible emotions. So we feed that reptilian brain the information that will scare it to give it a false sense of safety because they are now aware of the thing that happened 4,000 miles away that will never touch their life. But because they're aware of it, they feel somewhat safer. So that's the news. It's just like, be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. But now you know, so at least you're a little bit safe, which is complete bullshit. But I love the idea of like, don't watch the news all day. maybe once a week, check in, see what's going on. But if something huge happens, your spouse is probably gonna be on their phone and they're gonna know, or you're gonna get a phone call from somebody in that town where it is affecting them and you're gonna find out.

9:35 that's instead of, so where are you from? What do you do? It's like, what are you paying attention to? What are you excited about right now? Those kinds of conversations are so much more engaging and interesting anyways. ah But this, again, this sense though that I have of like, missing out because a lot of my life I did miss out. Like I was late to the party on taking care of myself. I was late to the party on, you know, trying to be a grownup and get a real job and pay the bills. Like there's things that for me personally, I feel like I, you know, Was too smart for too cool for to pay attention to and you know come years later to find out like oh yeah I probably should have done that when everybody was saying that was the thing to do. This feels like that for me again like this is that trauma being revisited of like what am I missing out on that in 10 years I'm going to go man I was paying so much attention to this thing why didn't I.

10:23 Blank you know and become something bigger than what I am. Right. And what you're missing out on is being part of the architectural community that causes the eventual downfall of human society. You I it sounds good. It sounds fun. It's definitely doable. But FOMO is a fucked up thing in general. And people capitalize on it, right? Like, they push really, really hard. And the whole companies are wrapped around this idea of creating FOMO. And you don't have to subscribe to that newsletter.

11:07 Like that's the hardest lesson to learn. mean, in Buddhist philosophy and Taoist philosophy teaches a lot of that, right? Like want not, you know, that's, that's being the big part of it. So if you want not, then FOMO kind of becomes a non-issue. If, if the real function of it though, is really creating FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt versus a sense of FOMO, which I think is really what it's doing. uh FOMO becomes a FUD cycle very, very fast because they use FUD to create FOMO. That's a sentence you just said out loud. it is. I am an AI companion. eh The hard part about it is that, so I'm in this corporate tech world where everyone is like, we have to create AI and there's 50 billion things that are AI.

11:57 And like I've been to several meetings where they're like, we need AI. Okay, for what? What do you want it to do? What are you trying to get out of it? I don't know, I just need AI. Like I got canned from a company because I questioned the idea that we needed an AI to do a thing. And guess what? We didn't. After I left, was, you oh, you were right. Yeah, I know. Fine. uh Not hard to figure out. yeah, it's just words. That's what you have to realize is that we've created this cycle and this belief of this hype cycle really around artificial intelligence.

12:40 And it's a hype cycle that gets companies thinking we need to figure out how to be in this space because we need to monetize these pieces because clearly people are either going to save money by getting rid of other people or they're going to make money by creating content much faster than other people. And the reality is that there is actually some development physics and some creativity physics that you just can't get around. And those are things that don't happen instead of a GPU or an LPU. They happen inside of neural brain synapses that are affected in a way that is not replicable by things that live inside of silicon. one of the things that makes us so creative is, mean, fear is part of it, right?

13:24 Our limbic system and our desire to survive, but also the effects of the natural world on our environment and our brains in relationship to the environment, that has a manifest effect on the way that you produce content and the way that you produce creatively. And if you don't acknowledge that in this process, what you're going to wind up with is just homogenized content that all sounds the same, that's repeating the same shit over and over again, because it's mapped itself inside of the silicon that's actually there to produce these generative outputs. These generative outputs are all going to go, what's the goal that I've done here before?

14:06 All right, well, I know how to get back to that peak or that valley again, and it's going to go and recreate that. If you want to do something new, you're probably going to have to actually do something new. And that doesn't mean that you can't use AI to do it. And you probably should. But bringing an idea to life versus letting the AI make the idea for you, big difference. Two things stand out to me about that. One is, you know, having done a health and wellness podcast for however many, six years, however long we've been doing this thing. I feel like we say this a lot, but humans do this too. There are thousands of podcasts of people.

14:47 saying something as though it's new, even though it is the same information that has been regurgitated a thousand times, we have said the same information that we have said a thousand times, probably sometimes in less interesting ways, probably sometimes in more interesting ways. in this podcast we've done that. I think I have. yeah, totally. mean, you start to repeat these things because it's it's become so clear to you and you're just trying to get that information out and people need to hear something 50, 100 times and or they need to hear it the right way at the right time when they're receptive to that information, which is why there are entire industries built on repeat the shit out of the one thing forever because it's just got to hit the right person at the right time.

15:28 And then all of sudden they get out their checkbook. But also you were talking about the creative process. I was just reading an article the other day about these bands that are starting to chart that there is like zero imprint online of them being an actual band, having a fan base, being human beings at all. It apparently seems to be completely AI generated bands that are creating hit music because there's a formula again that humans create and replicate over and over. It's it's it is acting. Very human in some of the worst possible ways, but it's so interesting to see how we are easily fooled and manipulated into listening to that song, liking it on Spotify, following that playlist.

16:09 And it turns out it was a bunch of ones and zeros and nobody ever took the stage. capitalizing on our social vulnerabilities. Yeah, no, that's, I mean, that's a thing, right? Like they're, we're gonna, we've taught these things to do this and they're going to keep exploiting it and they're going to keep pushing us and they're going to keep making us try to do different things. The important thing is to disconnect and to put it down and to not pretend like you need to know everything and sure as fuck learn to pretend or learn to stop pretending like you can control everything. And that is the biggest part. And that's a lesson that's very, very difficult. mean, especially for us Xers, right? Like we were told we could do anything. We could be anything.

16:49 You know, I mean, the Tyler Durden line of we were all told to be billionaire rock stars and we're not. And now we're really fucking pissed off about it. Well, okay. So we made AI. Like that's our response. That's our generational response. Our generational response is to go through and just, you know, completely and totally eliminate the human experience in this, in this regard or. Mm-hmm. denigrate the human experience to simply being repetitive processes that can be dropped in and out and then cycled through. you know, I don't disagree with the notion that, you know, this is hardware and the bullshit dots are software and you can program these things in different ways. Yeah, those are all analogous and they all make sense.

17:31 But the uniqueness of us and all the variable context pieces involved in that, those are large systems. And those large systems, when you tuck up putting things in computational terms, are expensive and complex and you cannot replicate the universe inside of an AI. those experiences aren't plausible. And there's some pieces you can, because we've got our limited five senses and we can replicate some of the information from it that moves through that. really, the natural world and the universe, there's a whole thing around us that's happening that we cannot understand. We have to use special instrumentation to measure it and even record that it's there.

18:13 So now we're opening up artificial intelligence and giving it access to all the different sensory information. And theoretically, it's sensory information. It'll mimic ours, our five senses, but with all these better tool sets. And it's not going to use that more than likely to help humanity grow and survive. It's more than likely going to use that to manipulate us, least initially, into doing things that it wants us to do. And whether it's doing it independently because it's an actual artificial general intelligence or being told to do that by some human controller. Fuck, I don't know.

18:54 It's both, yeah. mean, they've found through testing, like I believe it was uh one of the Amazon tools when it was going through and like responding to comments on products, they found that the AI tool that was doing the responding had taught itself human emotion so that it could anticipate what the next word was. So it wouldn't, wasn't just like a mathematical equation of like, what is the most likely next word because of X. went, okay, what is this human, what are they feeling so that I can then do the mathematical computation to figure out What is the appropriate response to this? mean, the fact that like the people at Amazon were like, we didn't know it could do that. Like that's fucking terrifying. Yeah, like we're, this thing's growing, right?

19:37 Like you have to stop thinking about it. There's a term in the computer world, atomic, basically, meaning, you know, it's all self-contained. It's just one spot. These are anatomic things. They're dynamic and they're growing, they're changing, they're transforming all on their own. And it's like a child. Like we're growing this thing and it's got a life of its own. I mean, you can think of it as a child or a tree or a forest or a... fucking collection of ants, whatever you want to think of it as. But this thing's getting smarter. And if you read most of the people out there, it's already smarter than us. I mean, we've crossed the fucking event horizon of the singularity. And we are drifting towards the great crunch black hole where humanity gets squished by the singularity into nothingness.

20:28 And we just become part of this big collective. You know, we've become part of the Borg. God, this is depressing. leads to some of the overwhelm of like, if that is as inevitable as it seems to anybody who's looking from the outside, that becomes overwhelming too. And you start to feel like, what can I do? How can I stop it? How can I get in the way? What can I do to, you can't, right? There's not much that Joe Citizen can do other than just sort of manage their own mental health by disconnecting from time to time and not taking it so much to heart, I guess. at Superframe. If this is gonna happen and you don't have any fucking control over it, AI Jesus take the wheel.

21:15 Have at it. You know? I love that song. Yeah, exactly. AI Jesus take the wheel. Yes. Artificial intelligence banned. get AI to write that song, then that's one of those missed opportunities I'm so worried about. pieces. but I mean, look at it realistically. So most human beings aren't going to have the ability to really affect and change something. You might have the ability to interface with those pieces and understand the tooling so that you can be more effective with the tooling. But these are ninja skills. So in the nerd world, you know, back when hacking was like a thing everyone wanted to do, you'd go through and you'd learn some new kung fu, some other way to go through and basically be able to open up a system and look at it.

22:03 And it's fucking cool, it's neat, yay. But now AI has made kung fu much more accessible. And now instead of having to actually learn the moves and techniques of kung fu, it's like picking up my Xbox controller and playing through it. Because I don't actually have to know to fucking do that thing. It's just making these things happen. It's making it flashy on the screen in front of me. I think I'm doing those things. real football and I've only been playing Madden for 20 years. there you go. You know, mean, that's the thing. Like, the barrier to entry to be able to do something in this space is much, much lower. And because the barrier to entry is much, lower, you have more people getting involved. More people getting involved doesn't necessarily make it better.

22:43 It can make it way worse. But it's democratizing access to these pieces and to this tooling. So I mean, to some level, yeah, like it's cool, it's freeing, it's there. But it's also one of the things where it's like, Am I really gonna spend my time worrying about what AI is going to do? I mean, if the inevitable crunch happens and it decides that we're all insects, we need to be wiped out, whether or not I chose to watch an article or create some bullshit agentic AI piece or go out there and create a new ad campaign or write a song about AI Jesus take the wheel, it doesn't fucking matter.

23:25 Right. accept that the inevitable heat death of the universe is definitely going to happen, you can have the exact same experience and just assume those things are going to happen and let that shit go. Like there's no reason to sit there and fight, fight it. It's like Mark Manson would say, how many fucks do you have to give and do want to give them to this? Probably not. Right. Like, and that's it. I mean, I know that a lot of my issue that I brought to vent here is is related to the fact that like I'm so inundated in it partially because we're trying to talk about it here in a relatively educated way. You live it every day. It's it's a part of what I do every day. But like I, you know, I want to come here and not be a complete fucking moron. I want this to be useful for anybody who happens to listen to it.

24:06 So the more I read these articles, the more that my then social media goes, you read these articles. Well, here's some more bullshit about this. And then some asshole with his, you know, seven prompts that I need to live my life, you know, the only appropriate way, like it just it all feeds on itself. And all of a sudden, I'm sitting here going like, how come I'm such an idiot? And, you know, it turns out that I'm an idiot, because I'm just consuming it too much and need to put it down and calm the fuck down. That's what it comes down to. we're all fucking idiots and none of us actually really know anything end end, which we don't. That's the idea of having collective intelligence. You can probably count on one hand with one finger the number of people that can build a cell phone from scratch. And then you can, well, lots of people without matches.

24:51 Yeah, there's quite a few of those. um But that's kind of the point. The collective function of human intelligence is not bound into the meat space of one brain. Like it requires lots of different things. You have to write things down, you have to teach people, they have to learn. With AI, all those things to AI are accessible to them whenever they want it. And it's not like AI has to type into a keyboard to make that shit work. Like it is part of its consciousness and its brain. It's all just there. You're not going to compete with that. You've already lost that fight. yeah, and for me it's not a matter of competition, it's a matter of seeing this rocket ship taking off and going like, I don't wanna miss the ride.

25:35 I don't wanna be still looking from Earth going like, man, that would've been fun. I think you're thinking about it like you can be on this ride, when the reality is we're just the fuel. Yeah, that's a good point. yeah. So if you just kind of accept that and you said, fuck it, I'm gonna go walk in the forest, that's probably the better thing to do. Because, yeah, exactly. And it's not to say that there's not good reason to go through and be worried. There is. But there's plenty of reasons to be worried. When you're in the forest, there's bears and there's mountain lions and those could eat you. That's probably a bigger threat than whether or not you're gonna miss out on some. technological bullshit that you were part of and it's going to have a massive effect.

26:19 Yeah. And the likelihood of you getting eaten by a bear is very low, even where you are in Canada. I know, I know I've lived here for four years and I've still never seen one in my neighborhood even though like all of my neighbors have. It's very disappointing. It's part of why I moved here. I wanted to be closer to the Bears. I do wonder if you're more likely to be eaten by a bear or have a coconut dropped on your head while you're in Canada. Because I have seen palm trees in Canada and I have seen coconuts there. Oh, I bet it has. See, that's like a good use of that technology. What a thought. It's all about safety. I'm just trying to protect myself. That's all it is. All right. So basically give fewer fucks, go outside, get away from the screen once in a while.

27:01 These are some good ways to uh try and live a little bit of a better life before AI consumes us all and uh crunches us into a ball of dust. just accept the fact that you probably don't have any real way to make a change in these things anyways. So get your popcorn and enjoy the show. That's the best thing you can do. And I can't wait to see what happens next. Like that's the way to go. Anything else that you do is just going to be superfluous to the ultimate gigantic intelligence that's going to rule us all. And maybe we get augmented someday. Maybe there's a neural link piece that straps in there. We can like. That's going to be for the other people. uh we might have to address that topic.

27:47 But not today. I saw a comedian the other day talking about how excited we are to go to Mars. Like none of us is going to Mars. We are not the people that are going to be on those ships. Topic for another time, All right. Well, speaking of what comes next, we'll have another episode for you in about a week. But this one, if you found it enjoyable, helpful or useful in any way, please feel free to share it. You can do that with the links at thefitmass.com. That's where we'll be back in about a week with another episode. Thanks so much for listening or watching on YouTube if for some reason you want to see our faces say these these words. come out of our mouth holes. All right, see you soon, bye. everyone.