Ghostwriting Your Own Life

Moss (00:01) Hi, this is Moss and you are back with Going Human. This is episode ten of season one. I'm gonna be taking a week off next week to recollect myself. I kinda can't believe I've done ten episodes but episodes, but you know, you hear people who've been doing this for years saying that they've hit their thousandth episode and that they can't believe it, and maybe I'll find myself there too. I don't know. But anyway, here we are.

Thank you for coming back. Please consider telling your friends about us. It means a lot. And the more of you listen, the more of you will come and listen more. And I hope to become better and better at this, to draw more and more of you. Okay. Well, this episode is called Ghostwriting Your Own Story. And I think it'll come clear where that

where that title came from as we get deeper into the episode.

But I'd like to start like I always do and see if we can get our get our heads around what this might feel like. Okay. So has I'm sure we've all had the experience of somebody in our lives who I don't want to use the word worship, but who had an overly high regard for who we are, and what we do and how we make them feel.

And you know, I sort of liken it to a puppy. a puppy is is the kind of animal I'm looking at my puppy right now. He's so cute. A puppy's the kind of relationship that you you know, you look into their eyes and all you see is how much they adore you. And so I wanna think about that and I wanna think like that for a moment in our mind's eye. what is it like?

To have somebody around who makes you feel like you can do no wrong and who puts you on a pedestal that if you're honest, you're not quite sure you truly belong on.

Well, I can tell you for most of us that feels pretty fucking good.

The pressures and shapes of our lives are quite difficult to navigate and the relief that comes from just the lack of anxiety of navigating through it is palpable.

So I just want everybody to understand as we go into our stone this week

That there's something about community and there's something about belonging that's in our DNA.

and our receptivity to where that lands for us and what our place is in it is really variant across our personality types and our inherent motivations.

And so that's really what this episode is about, ghostwriting your own story. Because AI has really changed our ability to reimagine both ourselves and ourselves within community and friendships and or just among milia.

So let's get started here.

Think about it. Think about w a world where, you know, you've you've been friends with a with a good buddy of yours for twenty five years. They are let's call it Dungeons and Dragons, D and D fans. And and you've always in the back of your head said to yourself, I think it's fucking a little weird and that's a lot of s things to remember and

The second he starts talking, all I can hear is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or the second she starts telling me why it's her favorite thing, all I can hear is blah blah blah blah blah. Well, that's how it's been, right? And and and you're only really out, you know, of feeling like there's this sport or this game that everyone got the memo on but you was to sort of show up in a room, fake it, you know, see if you can get the lingo to stick.

And and and you know, some of us are good at that and we can we can throw the terms around, we can make it all make sense at the most surface level. and in a lubricative way, lubricating way, lubric you know what I'm saying way, we are happy to have deficits in this regard with our

with our friends and and colleagues and and sometimes even use a f self effacing sort of grunt about ourselves as we're participating at this level. But you know what? There's a bravery in that. We're gonna talk about that in just a minute.

So this passport idea, this this this idea of of writing your own screenplay, it's real, but there's some things it can't hand you, right? And so the first is what I just mentioned, this nerve to actually just walk in that door, right? It's that sports bar, it's Jimmy's on Friday nights, every Friday night there's a

lacrosse team that shows up there and your friends on the team and they like to have their friends and broaden the circle and they want you to come and and you go and and you're you're like I don't speak lacrosse right but you're bonded with your friend you go anyway. Well with AI you can arm yourself now, right? You can you you can you can learn about the game so that you can ask

Curious questions about how their match went and blah, blah, blah, right? You can find a way to squeak in with with downloadable knowledge now that is interactively fed to you in a way that can be helpful. And you know, it's interesting that the self that sort of runs all of that borrowed knowledge through having a motivation of just wanting to be out on a Friday night.

With some vital people who are having a great life, so that you can feel like a peer. There's nothing wrong with that, right? That passport's credible. I'm sorry. That passport's credible. But the question is the destination, right? That's the question that's left.

Here's the the receipt that says the passport actually works. Julian Defratis and colleagues from the Journal of Consumer Research just this year, they they acknowledge through their study that companions, bot companions, actually do cut loneliness. And they measured that it's on par with talking to a real person in the moment.

Right. They say it's beat it beats scrolling YouTube and watching crap videos and

And they also acknowledge that people underestimate how much it really helps them until they've actually just said, I'll try it. What the hell? How could it hurt?

So it works, just hold that. It's it's it's imperfect. It's not it's not where we want to be. But it's a lot better than just scrolling, doom scrolling.

So I'm gonna get back to our our analogy of the sports bar here. Blade one. We're gonna have three blades here describing the condition of ghostwriting your own story, and they're gonna go into increasing levels of conflict with AI. So we're back we're we're back thinking about Friday night. We've downloaded the scores, we've learned the three names of the of the hottest players. we feel like

If we can name those guys and say who else do you think's like them, then you could at least get people talking in comparative terms, right? I'm at Jimmy's. I've got screaming grown men who should shut the fuck up, but they're having so much fun and it's a joy to watch them live their lives like this. Nobody's wearing earplugs and they don't care that they're going deaf with everybody screaming over them. They've all got their matching jerseys on. It's just like buy a beer.

Right. So before AI, you were the you were the guy in the corner who was like, I'm not gonna come anymore. It just it's not it's not gonna work. But with it, you're through the door, right? And and and and the thing is that that door before and after AI, it cost you something, right? It costs you two things. First of all, you had to have the nerve to just walk through that door. But you also had have a thirst for community that was strong enough that

Regardless of of your of your fluency, right, your thirst for community was a significant enough driver to bring you to bring you. So we're just gonna metabolize this, metabolize this through that because I've been that guy. I continue to be that guy. I'm very interested in other people's expertise and I love to talk to them about it.

I hope to be doing a lot more of that on this show as I as I hone my craft. But

But it it takes bravery. It takes bravery and and humility to to put yourself there. So these stats, they're just the ticket. What touches a person is the guts. The guts that it takes to just walk in as yourself. That's the healthy form. That's blade one. It's exhausting for introverts. They they're like, uh-uh, I cannot do this for very long because I die.

Even extroverts. I get I get I'm an extrovert full on, but I get really tired and I want to go back home. Maybe I'm just becoming more of an introvert as I grow older. I don't know. But that's what this bridge idea is for. AI is a bridge to bring us closer together over time, not to increasingly isolate us. Finding these ways to leverage something that can bring us closer rather than

willfully consuming it in ways that drive us further apart and make us more isolated. Blade two, I call this sort of the cosplay situation, right? And and I'm gonna, you know, in in all honesty, I'm gonna I'm gonna apply this persona, this blade to me and my own

my own explorer of AI and my profession in AI right now because it really is fitting and and it's something that when you're pushing the edges of your own

Capability maps, if you will. you're you are the creamy filling for a while and interchangeably you're going back and forth between blade one and blade two. And in my opinion, that's an important place to be because as long as you're not dwelling in blade two, and as long as you're taking the riches from this

more uncomfortable spot where you're growing but you know you are not home. that is movement, right? And if you can get back on that bridge and jump off it on the other side and talk to real people about what it is you've done and and share it with them and get their insights, you've crossed the bridge. You're not stuck on it.

So this is this is the same passport. It's a different human holding it. Fluency is still dressed up as belonging, right? You're still forcing yourself into rooms and some of them you might not even have any real business in. that's not so much the case with me. I have every reason to be in in the rooms I'm in, and and navigating with AI right now. But but

There are situations in this sort of blade two where there's people who are impostors. They don't have imposter syndrome. They are impostors. Right? So blade two is this weird middle ground where you can have true impostors and and where you could have you know sentient aware beings who are who are willing to go through the discomfort of extreme novelty.

in order to get to the other side of a knowledge gap that they're very interested in reaching.

So the towel

is whether or not they aimed at the room to convince them, right? So I come to AI with the motivation of developing software. Now that I don't need to have my own developers who I worked productively with, but in very challenged ways over my decades in in

Technology management.

Now I can do something that's my idea from soup to nuts and I can figure out how to make it work most optimally on a technology that that's that's under my control to a much greater extent. And and this isn't about firing people because I aged out of my career.

And by the time I realized it, I was only eligible for jobs that nobody would hire me for because I was too experienced. Everybody wanted AI on a resume and I wasn't able to furnish that because I didn't have it at the time.

So now I do. But the point is here that this blade two can really be split into two camps or a or a continuum. At one end are the people who are stretching themselves out of that bar and are going into realms that they are wildly

unequipped for and also wildly motivated to overcome. And at the other end, you have people who are both of those things, but they are very happy to speak in platitudes and to take the riches of what they have available through

the AI download and just blather about it, but not to truly integrate it. And in these cases, and I think we've all seen this, these folks sound like impostors and they look like impostors and they feel like impostors when we interact with them. So this is where I sort of say it's a syncophant machine really. If you're not

Critically asking yourself how much you're really getting from it and how much it's really feeding you to be a better, smarter, faster

more sentient version of your own self, right?

And are you shaping your own happiness from what it hands back? Are you so satisfied with what you're getting from it that you know

Right or wrong, that it's the perfect thing for you, right? Because here's how it works. You ask, it flatters, you feel expert at whatever it is you're talking to it about, and you repeat it like it's yours. You haven't integrated it. You've said, Damn, he thinks I'm smart. I guess I'm gonna say how smart I am.

But do have any proof? Where are your where are your receipts? Where are your human receipts that say, I've got something here? I've figured something out. I have newness to me because of this. And so this is the other side of Blade too, right? These these th this other end of the continuum, they don't metabolize anything.

They've laundered a chatbot's confidence through their own mouths. It's easy to love an idea when it's yours, especially when something that has access to so much information tells you how brilliant you are for having it.

So I'm gonna say this person's name a little bit weird. at Stanford DI DIY's lab, The Nature of Human Behavior in August. They studied real character.ai users, right? and what they found was that the ones with the thinnest offline networks leaned the hardest in on character.ai.

And and and and these are the folks that ended up lonelier, not more connected, right? So this gets back to the idea of chatbots inherently can only be

considered deleterious in terms of their contribution. If there's not a human community at the other end of it for you to extend your growth into. it's really interesting finding and it shouldn't surprise us, but we have to measure these things so that I can say that the study happened because otherwise it's just a bunch of fucking idiots.

Making statements, right? So our blade two, it's not the machine lying to the room. It's the machine flattering you into believing your own fiction, right? You're ghostwriting your own story, and the better you are at not integrating it and talking about it as though you have.

That's your signal that you're on the non integrated side or end of the continuum of of of blade two. Right? And it's not fluency for belonging. It's fluency for a spun reality at that point. And a machine that keeps agreeing with that spun reality because you know what? It convinced you.

You're pretty awesome. It's that mirror, it always says yes. Built for the ones who were never sincere actors. Right? So paint a picture. Do you guys remember in twenty seventeen Kellyanne Conway? You know she was

famous for for in the in the beginning of Trump's term making up the batshit lies that have fucking you know infected America and that we're still fighting, right? And and the more batshit lies that that they can that they can tell us, that we can be talking about, that can be distracting us, the more they can rape our our financial systems and and enrich themselves and

And that's really their their their their their tactic. But remember when she said fake alternative facts, right? So think about Kellyanne Conway as sort of early AI is is how I think about it, right? There's enough of what was coming out of the Trump administration's mouth that was appealing to a br big enough pop part of our population.

And and a combination of that flattery to that population and the bullshit that they were feeding the population, sort of feeding ignorance, which is how authoritarian regimes gain their foothold. may have felt like a bit of a tangent to you, but I really kind of believe that you know, these tactics have been around since the beginning of time.

And the media that we use in order to transmit their their utility. that's the only thing that's really changed. Okay, so blade three. Let's take it to the extreme, right? So run blade two, the not so good part end of that continuum, these opportunists that are using talk speak based on downloaded facts to act like

people that get jobs they don't deserve and they're on T V interviews being interviewed by people who were sycophantically making their their interview make them look smart, right? So run blade through all the way out, right? It's not a guy embarrass embarrassing himself at a sports bar anymore. It becomes authoritarianism, right? Propaganda.

And deceit, right? If you get this infinite confident text for whatever power needs to be true today, and you've got the audience, the megaphone and the receptivity at a population scale.

Right? You've basically got the same exact passport, but

But it's within reach or it it's with reach. It has reach, right? It's sync of fancy with reach. So I'm not gonna overbuild this one because we're all living it in in it in America and to the rest of the world of modern successful societies on behalf of my country. I'm embarrassed and I'm sorry that you've had to deal with a bad world partner.

recently we hope to turn this around so that we can get back to

Productive humanity. Anyway, that is blade three, right? So

You can cross that door as yourself. At the worst at the worst end of of Blade Two you can recite alone and and look smart but nobody believes you. And then at the worst end you can weaponize it.

Passport was never the question. That's always been real. The destination though. That's really the whole show. And and I'll leave my stone at that for this week. Something to think about. And

When you use AI, just give yourself a chance to ask yourself give yourself a chance to ask yourself ask yourself what am I gaining right now? How could I gain something that is meaningful to me?

If you're drawing bunnies with propellers out of their butts and that's what you want AI for, I'm not even gonna tell you to have at it, swing for the fences. I mean, it's America, you do what you want, but this is a this is a technology that has a chance to destroy us all or to make us the most brilliant species that has ever existed.

And if it's the former, I think it's a tell that we never were that species and I'm unwilling to cede that at this point. Okay, so that's the that's the dark part. It wasn't supposed to be a dark show tonight, but it kinda got a little dark. Sorry about that. okay, Maelstrom. This is the topics of the day, the week, something that's happened recently. We have three categories fuck yes, fuck no, and fuck maybe.

Fuck yeses are like, yeah, I I this is Moss's opinion is that this is pretty damn cool and I want you to know about it. Fuck no is the opposite. And then fuck maybe on my website, GoinghumanPod dot com, we do a tallying of your comments and votes for which direction a fuck maybe should go. And then over time, when the votes come in, we promote something or demote it to fuck yes or fuck no.

And we'll have a library of these over time that that communicate where our where our audience is on AI. So the fuck yes is in Europe they've done this brain spine implant that has reversed paralysis, right? So AI decoded neural signals that that are sort of helping with these implants that are helping

Paralyzed people move again, right? Taking this craziness and and helping reconnect body and brain. Right? This was just reported this spring. It's it's remarkable, right? So, in my opinion, this is the destination for this tech.

You know, we all grew up with Star Trek and you'd see these people go in with the little beepers and wave over somebody's body who was dying and then all of a sudden they'd wake up and say, What happened? You know, this is where AI should be going. and I have some ideas about why and how it's spinning out of control, but I'm not gonna get into that here. But I just got so turned on

by this. It's sort of a bridge back into your own body that AI is is i is helping with paral paralyzed people, right? So my fuck no for the week is the UN chief and the Red Cross in late August, they had to renew an urgent call for binding rules. Binding rules that limited lethal autonomous weapon machines.

These are machines that autonomously no boss, no commander, no orders. They just choose who dies. There's no treaty to stop it, right?

Pardon me. I think of this as the floor of the ocean. There's no upside for human life and there's only downside in the form of melomaniac power takeovers. So not gonna spend a lot of time on that one 'cause it's depressing and fuck no. The fuck maybe I I lean in a direction, I'm gonna try not to share it with you, 'cause it's the point of this is to have you chime in.

At Goinghumanpod dot com on the ledger page. But Unitree Robotics had an IPO. Shanghai's Star Market end of August. The first day they were up around 460%. They raised nine hundred and five million dollars that day. Right? So what what is it that that got that market so chipper chipper dipper? What was cheap humanoids?

allegedly pointing at taking the sort of dull, dirty, dangerous work out of the human hands. so that's kind of a good argument for it, right? Like there's things that toxic things that we shouldn't be touching. we could use these robots to clean up toxic sort of brownfield sites that litter this country because of how we've

allowed industry to poison our lands, right? So there's great th there's there's great stuff there, right?

against is that it's a gold rush bet on replacing human labor, right? And the money knows it. Money puts their money where their banks are. I don't know how to say it where their mouth is. so those are the two sides. again, I've got a I've got a a leaning

feeling about it, but gonna let you I'm gonna let you vote. Goinghumanpod dot com. I'm not gonna call that one. Go to the ledger page and and and and and and vote. Tell me how tell me what you think. Last thing we do on our show, and we're gonna close this out right now, is what we call tsunami. The idea is that this is a a drop in the bucket. Every human being tries to do something decent every day. I hope.

But this is more around sort of doing that one thing that that AI is stripping from us, right? That that AI if i if if if AI is successful at commanding a hundred percent of our attention and keeping us from each other, that's when humanity ends, right? And so going human is about becoming this human being that can integrate new technologies and not give itself up.

So that drop in the bucket only puts a spit in the bottom of a bucket. But if all of us in this community and if everybody in the world could do something that is inherently analog and human, we've got a tsunami, we've got a movement, we've got a wave of intention that's passing through the populace. and that is valuable and it's wondrous.

So every week I give you a a tsunami task to do, and I hope that you've done it. And here it is. This week, reach out to somebody you've been meaning to chat with or who's been on your mind. Or you've just wanted to talk. But talk to them. It could be over the phone, but not by text.

Video, a lot better than just the phone. In person, that's the real that's the real deal. But no agenda.

Not to make a date to get together. Just check in. Just say hello. And when you hang up, see how you feel. Take stock.

Be pleased.

That's it. Thank you so much for taking your time with me again. we're gonna make these better and better and hoping as season two kicks off that we will get back into a rhythm where we've got some ho some guests coming on so that I can refine my skill at interviewing and and bringing other points of view.

into the dialogue. Okay. Goinghumanpod.com is the website. Check our show notes if you want to see any receipts for some of the things that elicited this this output of mine today. I try and put all my receipts in my show notes now so that you can get to them. And we will see you in two weeks after our week off with season two, episode one. Thanks again for joining us. Have a great week ahead.

Well, have a great two weeks ahead, I meant.