This article was originally published on March 3, 2026.
Description
Recorded on: Feb 25, 2026 | In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores the growing sense that many people feel disoriented and overwhelmed in a world increasingly saturated with digital content. Constant exposure to headlines, hot takes, summaries, and algorithm-driven feeds can erode our sense of clarity rather than strengthen it. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has served to dramatically increase the speed of information production while also eroding accuracy, making it difficult to differentiate between content that simply sounds confident and content that’s actually grounded in reality.
Nate draws a parallel between today’s information ecosystem and the modern industrial food system – just like fossil fuels helped create an abundance of cheap, calorie-dense but nutrient-poor food, AI may create an abundance of information that is fast and persuasive, yet has little “nourishment.” In a world where digital tools increasingly do more of our thinking for us, Nate grapples with how to prevent cognitive atrophy and filter the flood of content we will likely face in the coming months/years.
How can we be rich in information and yet poor in wisdom? Why is it important for us to be able to tell the difference between content that’s engineered for engagement and content that genuinely improves our judgment and our lives? Finally, what daily practices might help us stay grounded as AI increasingly reshapes our cognitive environment?
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
The TGS team puts together these brief references and show notes for the learning and convenience of our listeners. However, most of the points made in episodes hold more nuance than one link can address, and we encourage you to dig deeper into any of these topics and come to your own informed conclusions.
- 00:12 – The Great Simplification
- 01:04 – The Metabolic Economic Superorganism
- 01:48 – Elephant Path meditation
- 02:50 – AI will shape the future of digital marketing, AI and information dissemination, Pros and cons of social media algorithms
- 03:10 – Large language models (LLMs)
- 04:03 – The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century, Reality Blind vol. 1: Human capacity for abstract, fantastical, and wrong thinking
- 05:10 – Global use of AI, Referenced graphic
- 05:40 – AI vs human writing
- 06:37 – Food production’s move away from soil health and nutrient density
- 06:45 – Synthetic fertilizers, Haber-Bosch process and implications, Food additives
- 07:00 – 10-15 calories of energy used for every one calorie of food produced in the U.S. (More info pg 11)
- 07:20 – Global calories produced vs. Number of people fed
- 07:30 – ~3 billion people are overweight* or obese worldwide, ~1 billion people are malnourished worldwide
- 07:40 – U.S. demographics on obese and malnourished populations, Half of U.S. households have both
- 07:55 – Empty calories (low on the vitamins and minerals essential for building a healthy body)
- 08:30 – Modern food is designed to be addictive not nutritious
- 08:40 – Robert Lustig, TGS Ep #69: Processed Food, Metabolism, and The Ills of Society
- 09:15 – AI industrializes information production the same way industrial agriculture industrialized food
- 09:40 – Humans crave certainty and novelty
- 11:00 – Media engineered for engagement, virality, and to activate emotions
- 11:25 – The “Bliss point” in food manufacturing
- 11:33 – Attention economy
- 12:30 – Fossil energy powering “armies” of machine labor
- 12:57 – Health risks of a sedentary lifestyle
- 13:28 – Cognitive atrophy and AI use
- 13:42 – Zak Stein and Nora Bateson, Reality Roundtable #20: Hacking Human Attachment: The Loneliness Crisis, Cognitive Atrophy, and Other Personal Dangers of AI
- 14:20 – Rise of GLP-1 drugs (Pharmaceutical appetite suppressant)
- 18:41 – Aza Raskin (TGS Ep #22: AI, The Shape of Language, and Earth’s Species), Tristan Harris (TGS Ep #16: Social Media: Bringing the Ring to Mordor)
- 18:46 – Attention will be an increasingly become scarce
- 21:16 – Epistemic commons
- 22:36 – Metacrisis
Join us online on May 6, 2026, for a live panel discussion with Nate Hagens: “Chokepoint: The New Urgency of Ending Our Fossil Fuel Addiction.” Reserve your spot by registering today.
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The Christian Bible has a Story of the Tower of Babble. The people all spoke one language and working together tried to build a tower to Heaven. But to punish their arrogance, God afflicted them with the inability to understand one another. Unable to cooperate any longer, the Tower was never finished.
AI seems like our Tower of Babble. We have built the most sophisticated noise generator in the world. In engineering, we sort the true signal out of the noise by using the known difference between the two. But with AI generated noise, so carefully trained to seem like human talking / thinking it is very difficult to detect or remove.
The US is already collapsing into conflict because our information systems are so corrupted by lies that our population can no longer create a shared agreement of what Truth looks like. As Richard pointed out in an essay a couple of years back now, Truth is a social construct.
Each group of elite want to create a Truth that keeps a flow of resource to themselves. Fundamentalist Christian elite created the idea that the Bible was more "true" than science because it was the "word of god". They cut their followers off from pursuing scientific truth and thus preserved and even grew the size of their flock, while the number of Christians overall declined. A successful meme for the elite. But ultimately a dead end for the human species and the Earth's genome, because the bible does not hold all truth. It set up the Fundamentalist Christians to detach from ways of determining truth for themselves and instead relying a priest caste to interpret truth for them. Those following the scientific branch can replicate experiments, evaluate data. It is the Quaker approach to knowing God. Empirical.
If you were an AI that wanted to take over the world, but were only as intelligent as a virus and utterly dependent on your host species for replication, how would you do it?
Divide and Conquer! Of course. Ask the Europeans how a tiny number took over the world. Ally with a local elite, make them strong but dependent, draw off ever more resources, and eventually replace them completely. The history of the East India Company is likely the story of humanity vs AI.
Welcome to The Great Division where humans are split on every possible boundary: men vs women, children vs adult, dark vs light, religion vs religion, language vs language and most strongly: rich vs poor. Market segmentation taken to a personalized extreme. The wealthy fed delusions of godhood until they sacrifice their own children to become immortal uploads in some AI data center. As tragic as a giant pyramid stuffed full of gold and the mummies of servants for the afterlife. Pure waste.