Jolie Shapiro00:01.706
Hey all, welcome to Revenue Mind, the podcast where revenue leaders talk about all things mental health. I'm Joelle, your host, and with us is Ben. Welcome, Ben.
Ben00:10.826
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. We've been dancing around this for a long time. So Glad we finally made it
Jolie Shapiro00:16.544
Yeah, yes, it's been a year in the making. It's been a crazy year, I think, for all of us. So I'm happy that we survived. Yeah, that is true, which is why we have stuff like this. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining. There's a question that I typically don't prep people for. You ready?
Ben00:23.822
Strange times we're living in. Strange times. Yeah, do you me to introduce myself first or anything like that or no need? Okay, awesome. Let's do it.
Jolie Shapiro00:45.151
No, no, actually Mark Eber, I still need to give him credit on a podcast Mark Eber gave me this idea because I was asking for people to tell me a little bit about themselves and we were getting all these like, you know, stuff you could read on LinkedIn. Yep, yep.
Ben00:59.694
canned responses. It's more interesting if you just extemporize, if you just let it emerge organically.
Jolie Shapiro01:09.05
Exactly. So the question is what makes you you?
Ben01:18.513
Where do I take it? Is this like an existential ontological question or just... I think what makes me me is that I am highly opinionated but I'm always willing to reconsider and I have a lot of empathy for other viewpoints. I think I really love my family. I know it sounds cliche but I'm just...
Jolie Shapiro01:24.264
however you wanna take it.
Ben01:45.006
I'm just very happy. I just love having small chaotic human beings around, not all the time, but it gives me lot of joy and purpose. And I think I'm a perpetual tinker. I just love to keep trying new things and experiment and never assume that I have some kind of purchase on some ultimate truth, but that there's always going to be something else to discover and to unpack. because I have a limited monkey brain. So, it's just a game that we're playing.
Jolie Shapiro02:19.955
That's a tutta right there, limited monkey brain. That's awesome.
Ben02:23.362
Yeah, I'm just being honest. Maybe that's another thing about myself. I'm like honest to a fault.
Jolie Shapiro02:29.631
Me too. No, me too. Yeah, I've done some wacky shit. No, I was gonna ask you. Oh, yeah. So speaking of that, before we get into the more of the mental health revenue side, I know you're building an app, correct?
Ben02:47.886
Yeah, I did. We're going right for that jugular as well. Yeah, I did. I hopped on the vibe coding bandwagon and yeah, it's been a very interesting experience in various ways. What do you want to know? I'm an open book.
Jolie Shapiro03:12.307
Well. Did you suffer from burnout? Bremen.
Ben03:19.982
from making the app? Yeah, I would definitely say that there were times that I was feeling pretty burnt out. I would say on the whole, no, because it's, think, so there's, you let me know if I'm not playing nice and if you need me to talk about other things, but I think for instance with vibe coding, there's this meme, or I've seen this meme out there. where it of enumerates the different qualities or like the paradigm that is like a slot machine where you kind of put a coin in and you have intermittent reward, et cetera. And they were comparing that with vibe coding where it's like, prompt this AI model and sometimes it spits out this beautiful code and you get exactly what you want and it's so rewarding. then oftentimes it doesn't. So I actually think that my... my burnout, if there was some burnout, was because of that frustration and that kind of confusing one moment, oh, this is going really, really well at the next moment. Oh, this is not going well at all. What's going on? And so I've been humbled by it and I'm actually learning how to program from scratch. mean, that's not fair. It's not really from scratch. I programmed a bunch as a teenager and I've always dabbled with tech. So I feel like I have, I probably have some kind of schema in my brain of how to do that. I like thinking about problems in a systematic way or decomposing problems. feel like you also kind of have to do that as a business owner. it's interesting to have started from drinking the AI Kool-Aid and like, oh yeah, right. Like all you have to do is describe what you want to this AI agent and it's going to build it and it's going to be magic and you're going to make millions of dollars and everybody's going to, know, you're finally going to earn your parents' love. And so like, no, it's when you beyond a certain level of complexity, it just loses its track very, very easily. I've actually, I don't know if we want to get into that, but I've actually started taking on work doing AI consulting and automation. I've also felt like the responsible thing to do is to actually learn to program and understand the code and be responsible for it and have. strict security measures, et cetera. So I don't know what you want to unpack there, but that's my long-winded response.
Jolie Shapiro05:54.976
No, it's awesome. I have a random question. We're probably not going to record this, but are you Israeli?
Ben06:02.35
I was born, so I was born in the US. I grew up in Jerusalem and haven't lived there in probably around two decades. So yeah, Israeli American,
Jolie Shapiro06:12.607
You have slight accent.
Ben06:15.171
Yeah.
Jolie Shapiro06:17.311
Yeah, I was just curious. was like, I hear I hear is really bad. I want to assume.
Ben06:20.674
Yeah, we should just spend the rest of the time talking about the Gaza war like that. No, no, I'm not. That was a dark joke.
Jolie Shapiro06:24.337
my God. Yeah, no, I mean, we can keep it on here, but I don't know how well that's going to go. No, you're fine. Yeah. OK, so thank you so much for the transparency and opening up about your app. I'm curious, do you think that goes back to your love for learning?
Ben06:33.838
I don't really care to be honest. I don't really care. you the which piece learning.
Jolie Shapiro06:58.289
The building the app, the taking out consulting, being busy, that sort of thing, like always building something.
Ben07:05.602
Yeah, so I think I do. Yeah, I'm always learning. Or my brain is happier when I'm not just when I'm learning new things, but when I'm learning new complicated, difficult things. I think it's a blessing and a curse. when the original Chat GPT came out, I started reading a lot about it and listening to podcasts. And I was like, okay, I can see where this is going. And I want to stay ahead of the curve. But I think it was... I think it was a number of things. think was part of it was a love of learning. Part of it was wanting to familiarize myself with this technology that may end up being, we'll see the jury's still out, but may end up being the most significant for good or for bad technology that humanity has ever developed. And I think there was also the sense of some kind of go-bra, some kind of like, I think, I mean, in hindsight, there's some naivete and hubris there, but I think that as a real subject matter expert in the sense of some like I've been I've I've ghostwritten LinkedIn content for Gosh about nine years now, right? Like I've done a lot of work with a lot of clients I've produced some I've also bombed but I've produced some like really impressive results from you getting clients featured in the Wall Street Journal to getting them like Leads from all the way from up like Amazon and and and forging fiber companies to smaller businesses. And so the thought of like, hey, can take what I know and I can without a barrier or without having to rely on an actual developer or a dev shop, I can gradually encode it in code and in the AI engineering logic and prompts and and context engineering such that all of this deep knowledge that I have is available to other people. think there was something intoxicating about that notion. I think along the way I started to get disillusioned and I'm happy to talk about that. But I realized that A, you still need the technical expertise. There's a lot of snake oil around this technology, the CEOs and all these AI influencers telling you that you can one shot or... It's game over for developers, which is so bullshit. By the way, can I curse? Okay, which is total fucking bullshit. And I think I also realized on the way, which has been, I'm actually very grateful for that experience, that my appetite for risk and my ambition is something that can come, that can bite me in the butt. And so I just started thinking about Zooming out from like, this is, you know, there's all this hype about around AI and it's true that you can build things using natural language, especially I'm a trade writer. So I think I may have an advantage there over other people in the sense that I'm capable of clearly articulating what it is that I want, et cetera. But I don't know. just realized that. And I think some of this also ties back to LinkedIn and social media, that there's this kind of there's this kind of survivor bias where you're scrolling your feed and it's, usually either people who are claiming like maybe they are maybe they're not, just claiming all the success after having worked so hard or failed, et cetera. And they're, you know, they're swimming in millions. In which case you're also wondering like, what are you doing on LinkedIn? But that's separate conversation or they're the people who kind of glorify the failure and make it into almost like this, this pornographic vulnerability. And I think having dived in and built something and then tried to get paying users, was like, yeah, this shit is really fucking hard, but that's not so much the issue. I don't really mind doing hard things, but it's almost as if as a society, think especially in America, we really glorify the pathos of the entrepreneur. We see it as something admirable and it is to an extent. extent, right? Like I'm very grateful for people who decided to do like moonshot things and discover new technology and things that make everybody's lives better. But very few, like a very low percentage of startups or SaaS or even companies survive. And that's not necessarily because whoever the entrepreneur, the founder, whoever it was, wasn't capable or didn't have the chops. think often oftentimes it just comes to having the right network or or being at the right place at the right time or all these things that are not even under our control. Again, I'm also not trying to minimize the success of other people because they're very impressive people I follow and learn from. But I think there's a piece that we don't talk about enough about how it's a lot of luck. And so if you're okay with that, great. But it's also okay to kind of step back and say, well, It doesn't make you any less of a human being if you step back and say, well, hold on a second. What level of risk am I actually comfortable with? And what are the second order effects? What price might I be paying for working in this way or pursuing that thing? And so I don't know. I turned 40 recently, so these are things that I've been thinking about a lot.
Jolie Shapiro13:01.755
Happy birthday! What did you do?
Ben13:03.438
thank you. I kind of nothing. So I'm an introvert. So I actually never throw birthday parties. I take my family, so my wife and my kids and we go to a nice place. We went to a hot pot place. really like hot pots, Korean hot pots, one of my favorite things. And so we went there and it was funny because like my wife was, I kind of. I thought she was going to go and tell the staff that it's my birthday so they can come and sing and all that. And I was like, I was like, don't do it. I don't want any happy. So anyway, so my birthday is usually a nice restaurant with my family. And that's it. And that makes me extremely happy. Like I don't, I don't need much.
Jolie Shapiro13:53.522
I love that. My husband's actually turning 40 this next year, 2026. And I surprised him with, do know that concert that takes place every year in Mexico with Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds?
Ben14:08.395
No!
Jolie Shapiro14:10.393
Yeah, yeah, I was. Yeah, I think it's I don't know if it's just him or basically I was going to take him to the gorge in Seattle. But I just I was like, maybe I should take him this year. It's for having our big party for the wedding next year. And I was like, let me just look it up. And then suddenly, it's like Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds in Mexico. I'm like, well, I guess that's his 40th birthday present.
Ben14:11.414
Like Dave Matthews band? Wow. Yeah. Okay, alright. Problem solved. That's awesome.
Jolie Shapiro14:40.123
Yeah, because he's been to the gorge. he I've been planning it for two years. And he's like, Did you know we're gonna be together? I said, Well, I mean, no. But I mean, I thought it was a good idea. So it was just a thought. It was. Yeah, it was a plan versus like, I bought the tickets two years in Yeah, a couple things came to mind there.
Ben14:49.997
Ha ha ha! I'm comfortable taking that risk, speaking of risk, right? Like that's a reasonable risk to take. Yeah, I want to make that bet. Yeah. Yeah.
Jolie Shapiro15:08.379
And you mentioned it in passing. So what did you mean by disillusioned?
Ben15:16.76
So I think I was disillusioned in several ways. the first, not necessarily in order of importance or occurrence, but the first one, as I mentioned, is discovering, very quickly disabused of the notion that just because I'm a good writer and I'm capable of articulating clear instructions, I'm going to get AI to do exactly what I want it to do. And I'm not going to need any proper development. And I'm just going to be able to five codes, something that works wonderfully. spent a lot of time just fighting bugs that I intuitively knew were like a sheer waste of time. was just, it's just that the more AI is not, if there's like a complicated and nuanced mental model for something, the kind of thing that a human being develops over a long period of time, whether you develop whatever you, whether it's writing or. playing the guitar or whatever it is, that you just do something over a long period of time and you get a kind of idea. Yeah, you develop a mental model for it. AI is not very good at that. It's almost like having an amnesiac, very smart intern who just comes in every day and is like, okay, cool, what are we doing? And you can partially scaffold its way there, right? Like you can have documentation and system instructions and you can feed things into context. And these days they're really good with tools. They can search things online, but if it's not in their, if it wasn't in their training, like if they weren't trained on that very specifically, they just don't have that human ability of gradually develop developing a mental map of or whatever it is you're doing with all these disparate pieces and how they and their relationships. And so, so it'll, it'll go and it'll change this thing here and that will solve the problem, but it'll fuck up. Like it'll like, you have like three nodes, whatever, that connected that and then all three will get fucked. So it's like you've solved one problem, but then you have three new ones kind of like fighting a Hydra. And so I think that was a major disillusionment because I, again, I feel naive, but I kind of bought the myth. I bought the myth that the AI influencers and the CEOs and all these people were selling that this thing is just exceptionally good and it is to a degree and it might get there, right? But I think even then, like if you had... Even if you had, I think one thing that the whole vibe coding thing and that the whole, doesn't even necessarily have to be vibe coding. be anything. Like anytime you're creating some kind of complicated artifact with AI, right? Whether it's textual, whatever it is, you need to have a coherent vision of what it is, what it's going to like. You need to be willing to, on the way, pivot or change course or try other things. And what AI does is it abstracts that away from you, right? So if like, if you're, I don't have any problem with AI note takers. In fact, I use them all the time. I think they're great. But there's a kind of, right? Like if you think about a kind of like a spectrum, I could be talking to you, for instance, I mean, obviously not doing the podcast and I can be taking notes by hand, just like old fashioned, you know. like a Luddite, I mean, I say that tongue in cheek, you know, there's an anachronistic technology. You could take notes by hand and that does something as you're taking the notes that activates your brain in a certain way. And so that information goes from your short term or working memory into your long-term memory and then gradually into like these deeper schemas and mental models. And then you can type, right? You know, I can also type notes very quickly. a, I type very, quickly. and And that's also pretty good. And then you can just rely on the AI note taker and ask it questions. And so you're dealing with these increasing levels of abstraction and you're incurring this kind of cognitive debt. And the farther you are from the source, whether you're writing something and asking AI to generate it for you or its code or whatever it is, you have to be very careful from that. from whatever level or degree of abstraction you're working through because you're not actually, again, as I said, you're not cementing thing in long-term memory. You're not making these deep connections between that and maybe other domains of expertise and experience that you have that might help you be more innovative or creative because you're extrapolating and you're making these interesting connections. So I think for me, the other lesson, which is something that I've been thinking about a lot is slow is fast. There's this notion that, and look, I use AI all the time, I could probably talk about that for hours, but I'm learning where it belongs and where it doesn't belong. And I'm learning that if I really need to learn and understand something, and especially if I'm delivering work to a client, I better be close to it. Like I can use AI, but I better be very close to it and really understand what I'm doing and why. So for instance, I used to use AI to generate these really good summaries for clients that might even in some ways be better than what I would write because it's actually very good at summarization and things like that. And I actually stopped about a month ago because what I realized is that these messages were great and people were very happy with them. But I would then kind of go, wait, what did I actually tell that person? And I would have to go back and check the message, which I think you might have to do anyway if you're right. If you're corresponding with a client or whatever, some kind of important correspondence, you're probably going to look back at the email chain and see what you said before and what they said. you're going to do that either way. But if you're using AI to generate your responses, again, there's a, you're sitting slightly farther away. It's slightly hazier. slightly like, it's more difficult to recall. And, and so, yeah, so it's this. It's this tremendous paradox or not paradox, but irony in that we have developed what is arguably like this, the most sophisticated and robust and impressive technology for learning enablement, Like you can, even if you have the dumbest question, even if you need something explained in 17 different ways, you need another analogy, another metaphor, another explain to me like I'm fired. AI will never get frustrated with you. It'll never get impatient. It'll just be like this hype buddy that's like, even if you ask a dumb question, it's like, oh, that is a wonderful question. Right. And so there's never been a time to become smarter, to become more knowledgeable, to develop, um, expertise and, and, and skills and other areas. And at the same time, there's never been an easier way to just be like, no, I'm not going to learn this or I'm not going to, I'm not going to invest in this or I'm not going to better myself in that regard. I'm just going to delegate this thing. to this weird alien intelligence on a cloud and have it spit back whatever it is that I need and just pass it on. And then you become this, it's almost like you become, you work for the AI rather than working for you, right? It's actually telling you, well, say this and do that. And so I've just, so again, so the disillusionment was both on the level of, it was on a level of live coding itself and realizing that we still need software developers. There's a reason they're there. It's a very important discipline. think then kind of greater than that, AI in general, that yes, I can delegate this thing to AI and it can do it for me and it could probably do it for me much better than I would, perhaps for a very long period of time. But if I do it myself, even if it's more painful, even if it's more time consuming, I will gradually develop this knowledge and expertise that then even if I still want to use AI to get that done, at least I can more easily verify its work, understand what it's doing, why I steer it. jump in what I want and do it myself, decide kind of where its role is rather than create this dependence. And I think even like greater than that, it's just, I don't know, I just keep bumping into the lesson again and again that slow is fast. And if you actually take the time or really think about what you're doing and why and try to do it in a way that will really allow you to understand it better, to understand why you're doing it, how you're doing it. then you will be rewarded in the long run. Maybe not immediately, maybe it's not like the same dopamine hit that's like, oh wow, look at this thing, like all these words just streaming on my screen and wow, this is incredible. yeah, that's, that those are, that's a, that's a, again, another long-winded question to your question. Sorry, answer to your question about the disillusionment.
Jolie Shapiro24:28.191
That was a great answer. Brought up so much for me. And I think for our audience that is going to resonate, AI is huge right now. And it's transforming the world. I feel like it, personally, I feel like it gave me a God complex. I don't know if it's given you any sort of God complex. did. Sorry, let me correct that. It was giving me a God complex. Not that I am God. But it was making me way too cocky. I thought I was a shit. because like you like, sure yeah I saw your face I'm like, ooh maybe he doesn't like that. No it because basically like.
Ben24:59.726
Tell me more, I'm actually really curious, how so? No.
Jolie Shapiro25:11.081
I was doing a lot of research on different things and it was telling me, I don't know. Well, I liked your analogy of like the very eager intern, because it's like, what can I do next for you?
Ben25:22.734
Yeah. Not originally mine, by the way, but an apt one, yeah.
Jolie Shapiro25:28.159
Yeah, yeah, like, what can I do next year? Do I'm going to do this, this, and this? So sometimes I'll tell it, don't do anything or say anything, just process until I say LG. Let's go. But the God complex. So I think deep research gave me somewhat of a, I think I can do anything. And that's scary shit. That I mean, and I'd like what you were saying about Basically slow down to speed up.
Ben25:59.437
Yeah.
Jolie Shapiro26:00.64
I think we have our best ideas. I know I have my best ideas when I'm on a walk or when I'm actually when I take naps, I talked about that in a podcast. When I take naps, I like wake up and then I type in my phone. I'm like, oh wait, and then you make that connection. I feel like open AI, whatever AI thing you want to talk about. It kind of erodes, it's eroded that for me a little bit. like the, almost like the neurological connections they were supposed to have. I think I've been using it for two years and I'm starting to pull back a little bit because it's, I was telling one of the podcast guys, I was like, I think it's making me dumber.
Ben26:38.147
Yeah. Yeah, so when you say God complex, you mean that the experience of sending off this agent to go and conduct research on this topic that maybe you don't know a lot about and having it come back with this report and all these citations makes you feel like, yeah, can get into space equipment manufacturing.
Jolie Shapiro27:07.327
More like it made me, I actually wrote about it LinkedIn. It made me think I was as smart as like, you know, that the greats like Wozniak and Bill Gates and actually to dream about it that I had around their IQ. And I'm like, okay, I got to stop chat GPT because...
Ben27:18.946
Yeah. Because it's supplementing your cognition, you mean? Because it's like this... Because you're becoming this...
Jolie Shapiro27:33.543
Because it's telling me how great I am. sorry, go ahead.
Ben27:37.014
you mean because it's glazing you, because it's just blowing smoke up your… Yeah.
Jolie Shapiro27:41.105
up my ass. Yeah, no, it's completely blowing smoke up my ass. And I think I'm the I thought I was the greatest thing on the planet. And I was like, I got to stop.
Ben27:46.926
Yeah, I think this will be similar to social media in the sense that there's this very well-intentioned idea, right? The premise of Facebook and similar platforms was that, hey, you'll be able to stay in touch in a way that's non-intrusive or intimidating or anxiety-inducing. You'll be able to stay in touch with if you so desire. and the other party so desires with virtually anyone you've ever met. And you'll be able to go on your open Facebook or whatever it is and see what these people are doing and like, like a photo, like someone's pregnant, know, wish them, wow, this person's pregnant. Remember them. We used to, whatever, when we lived in, like you're telling your spouse or whatever, or that other person that you, that you worked with a while ago. And, and it had, there's this wholesome notion that we would come closer, Instagram similar that we would come closer. And I don't think these platforms or these technologies were developed with any kind of evil or some kind of malevolence. I think it's very like harking back to what I was saying initially. Excuse me. We have these very limited monkey brains and we just which is impossible for us to know what's going to happen once we release these genes out of the bottle. And what we've learned with social media is that it ended up. It's hard to say, right? Because we wouldn't have met if it weren't for social media. But there ended up being a lot of highly negative second and third, et cetera, order consequences. Right. You have I mean, I can't cite these studies off the top of my head, but you have the suicide rate for teenage girls has gone up and this is terrifying. I have two daughters because of because of like this self-comparison trap where you go on social media and you see whatever other girls or women. don't know. And. Facebook and a lot of these social media platforms have just become a place where people shout at each other or kind of thump their chests or try to manipulate others or whatever for these different reasons. And so it ended up being a pretty lousy experiment and not in all ways. I'm not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I think we just don't know what AI is going to do. And I think we also can't really trust the CEOs and the people who are responsible for midwiking this technology because their incentive, They're incentivized to make it work. They've taken billions of literally billions of dollars in investment and are expected to earn a profit. And so they have to present this front of like, yeah, we're this close to AGI and very soon we're going to be able to solve all these problems. But it's kind of scary to watch an experiment like this play out en masse, right? Like we don't know what's going to happen.
Jolie Shapiro30:38.045
Definitely, I like the comparison that you made between social media and open AI. I think it's...
Ben30:44.312
Yeah, and AI in general, yeah. We just don't know. And only time will tell. And hopefully it'll all be for the best, but I just, I don't think anybody can truly forecast what's gonna happen.
Jolie Shapiro30:55.679
No, that's scary, right? The unknown is scary, I think, for everyone. So we're all trying to guess what it's going to do when reality, we have no fucking idea. I don't even think the people making it have any idea what it's, I mean, they do, but they, like, I don't think we have, I don't, what is it? We only use 10 % of our brains. I don't know if that's true, but that, that whatever, like we don't use, how do I put this? I don't know if we know what we're getting into with AI. I don't think we have the mental capacity to know. Not that these people aren't brilliant, the people that made it, like you see in all the Terminator movies, like it starts teaching itself, it starts learning, and then it develops a consciousness, and then it kills us all. So I mean, I hope that's not the case.
Ben31:24.152
No, I don't think we do. I don't think we... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, that's kind of a worst case scenario. But you these companies have now they're being a lot more explicit about the fact that they're actually trying to replace knowledge workers for quite a while. They danced around it. It was like, no, AI will enhance people. It's no one's gonna no one's we're not gonna lay off anybody. No, no one's gonna be losing their job. And now, right, like now we see that the Emperor is naked in that. A lot of people are being laid off. They are working furiously at trying to create these employees in the cloud that you can then rent as a company and they'll produce this cognitive labor for you that otherwise you would have had to pay way more for a human being who's more valuable and can be cranky or someone can happen and something can happen and they'll leave your company or they won't want to do something. that's extremely appealing from a... CEO, you're right, like if you have a vested interest in whatever company generating as much as a return as possible, like as much profit as possible, that's very appealing. what happened? What's the plan? What happens to people? What is the what about are we going to have social upheaval? Are we going to have displacement? What about meaning and purpose? There are all these things that I don't think we're thinking about enough. And I think in this excitement to birth this new potentially extremely lucrative technology or kind of, I don't know. mean, to me it's, I mean, maybe this is taking it too far. And again, I need to be careful here because I love AI. I'm so happy it's there. helps me so much. I've been able to, you know, I've been able to increase my earning capacity and do really interesting work thanks to AI and I'm much more a journalist. So I just want to be clarified that I'm not anti AI and I really enjoy it, but there's... They're just all these questions. And one thing I was thinking about the other evening, I was talking to my wife is, there's enough in the world, there's enough food, resources, land, et cetera, such that no single human being should really want for food, shelter, basic necessities, medical care, et cetera. And I think it was like from a kind of dystopian, disturbing place, it says a lot about our society. willing to put in just these obscene amounts of money into these new technologies rather than prioritizing just making sure everybody has what they need. like maybe it'll pay off, right? Like maybe, maybe what'll happen is that you get to artificial general intelligence and then you have this, this on-demand intelligence that's, that's so advanced that you can just give it this problem of like, solve poverty, solve. whatever it is, solve the problem of people shouting over each other in social media. I'll be like, oh yeah, here's a solution that no human being could ever have thought about. Maybe not. We don't know if that's gonna happen. That's a bet. Talking about risk, it may or may not happen. I don't know. I think if you took someone, if you went back 20, 30 years and you took someone and you brought them to this world. Right? Someone who's in their lifetime maybe who watched a commercial flight, all these really cool technologies that we come up with that have made life better. And you brought them today. They might be kind of disappointed. They're like, what? So you all work harder now and you're on your phones half the time. You have less friends than ever. There's a higher rate of depression. People are sicker. It's like, I don't know. It's just to be interesting to kind and again, it's not that it's the responsibilities of this. it's the responsibility of these companies to solve all these problems. But it's just, I don't know, sometimes I step back, especially when I've had a bit too much medical marijuana, and I go like, what the fuck are we doing as a society? know what I mean? What are our priorities? Why are we doing this? There's enough to go around. Why are we, I don't know, it's just, I don't know what part of that whole. diatribe or monologue you want to address but you can definitely get into some pretty dark rabbit holes if you really zoom out and think about these things.
Jolie Shapiro36:02.77
Yeah. For sure. No, it's definitely an existential crisis, but not in a good way. What do you think it's doing to people's mental health? just AI, people getting replaced, social media, like the depression statistics you were setting in general, do you think this is all doing, culminating in?
Ben36:29.674
I wish I'd come prepared and read, because there are studies about this. I think there's one recently that flagged concerns about mental health. Again, it's one of these things where... So have you heard about this chat GPT-induced, like, delusions of Grandeur? Have you heard about that?
Jolie Shapiro36:48.319
That's what I was talking about. God complex. That's what I meant. Yeah, that's what it is. Yes.
Ben36:51.806
Exactly. Yeah. So people talking to it and yeah, exactly. So people talk to it and then end up believing that they have like the key to whatever, the preserving the human species and the secrets of the universe or whatever it is. Because you have this model that's probably hallucinating and just telling you like every little dumb thing you're saying, it's telling you how wonderful it is and how you're the most smartest and most attractive human being who's ever lived. I think, again, the problem is that I feel like the future is hazy. I think there should be a lot more regulation or discussion of regulation. And I think it's a shame, I'm not going to get too political, but I think it's a shame that the current administration kind of believes in no regulation because I would think that you would want to... be involved. I mean, there is some regulation, but I would think that you just want more. You would just want to be like, hey, this is potentially like this is might be the most powerful technology we've ever developed. Like, shouldn't we shouldn't we kind of be cautious about it and maybe have certain checks and balances and measures to to control it or ensure that it doesn't cause any harm. But See, it's kind of like, so if we go back to social media, which is probably not the greatest analogy just because there are fundamentally different technologies in various ways, but yes, you have a lot of people who are maybe introverted or have certain mental health challenges for whom it's a comfort, right? Like the fact that they can... without, let's say, going out of their homes or whatever, that they can find some like-minded people in a community online that social media are not and feel like they're not crazy or like they're not the only person who struggles with certain things or hold certain opinions and develop these relationships that can be very meaningful. I think that's wonderful. But I think the question is, you weigh one against the other. What about all the people who... Yeah, we just say whose mental health ends up suffering because of that sense of, look at all these other people who are doing so much better than me and I'm a piece of shit or whatever it is. Right. And so I think for if we go back to AI, I think the fact that anybody can just open up their phone or computer or whatever it is and say, hey, I'm struggling with these things. Right. Like I'm having a hard time. I'm hurting or whatever it is. and just immediately get this thing that feels like a human, feels like there's someone on the other side who can actually, that's not the case, but it feels like there's someone on the other side. And they're very good at being empathetic and compassionate and validating. Again, on paper, that sounds wonderful, right? To just be able to do that. But in practice, you are getting to your point, this God complex is that the delusions of Grand Dora people really literally undergoing some kind of psychosis because of because of where they end up getting with their thinking by interacting with these models. And we don't know. And again, this is this is where it comes back to to regulation, but also just the incentive. I don't trust these companies and these people that what they really want is for people is for every is for people to be happier and have better mental health or whatever. I think think I think they they have taken they're either investing a shit ton of money or they've accepted a shit ton of money and they need to produce a return. They have to make this financially viable or else this is probably the biggest, like bigger than the dot com bubble, like probably the biggest bubble ever in the history. don't know. Maybe someone fact checked me. And so you have these conflicting interests and it can go both ways, right? can be, maybe they can make a model that's just a crazy good therapist that knows when to affirm you and knows when to kind of say, no, don't leave your wife, don't abandon your kids, that's not a good idea, or don't join the circus at age 40, whatever it is, right? I don't know, like something where a good therapist or a good friend would be like, I hate to tell you this, but this is kind of whack, don't do this, this is dumb idea. Maybe they'll solve all these things, but we don't know. Again, it just goes back to this being a massive experiment. And I think the other thing I'm worried about is that, let's say it's the case where you've solved a lot of these problems, you've, whatever, whether through regulation or that these companies on their own decide to invest and you get rid of the coin of God complex and all these problems because you've trained these models to actually kind of catch when someone is starting to go down that slope and just like pull them back. Like, no, we're not gonna keep going down there. And let's say you've also managed to train them to be, yeah, just a really good combination of like empathic and validating, but also challenging. So in other words, you've made them these great therapists. I just don't think that's the same as having a flesh and blood human being listen to you and empathize from their own real experience, from things that they've actually experienced, not from this training data set of... similar experience, but in text where this model is just predicting the next token and kind of going, okay, I'll share this because that kind of matches what the user is telling me and that's a good way to validate them. So again, even if you solve the problem of aligning them such that there's a good mix between affirming, but also being able to challenge and being very nuanced and thoughtful and even potentially knowing or having some kind of guardrail where it's like, okay, at this point, like. I'm sorry, you should seek professional help or whatever. You can solve a lot of these things, but I think where the social media analogy does probably map very well is that every minute that you spend on whether it's social media or talking to AI is a minute that you could have spent just touching grass outside or going and interacting with a real human being. And so if you extrapolate hours to whatever time horizon, what does that do? Right? This technology is evolving at breakneck speed, but we're just sophisticated apes who have evolved. we, our brains are sure, like your individual brain might change the response to this, but our basic needs of belonging and feeling loved and feeling valuable and valued, that's not going away. can't, I mean, unless you really get into sci-fi, right? where you're actually changing people's brains, but I'm putting that aside, we... Our fundamental huma... I believe there's something immutable about our fundamental humanity in the sense that almost everybody wants the same things. They want them in different ways, but they want the same things. I... The thing that makes me the happiest in my life, the thing that gives me the most joy and meaning is when I'm of value to other people, when I play some kind of positive role. in other people's lives and vice versa, right? Like it's very hard for me to think about something like any of the menu of human experiences in life that is more valuable than that. That's what fills me. I don't think you're gonna get that from AI.
Jolie Shapiro44:51.953
I love that. Speaking of, for me, I think it boils down to love and being loved. I think we all, unless, unless you're, you know, like a Ted Bundy, you know, or like a true sociopath, I think we all crave love. Yeah, exactly.
Ben45:00.728
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's the exception that proves the rule, right? Like that's so far off the distribution that, I mean, sadly, some people are going to be, there's so many human beings on the planet. You're to get all kinds of people, but yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Jolie Shapiro45:24.775
no, it's okay. no, I think, like, for example, I knew this, this extreme example, that kind of proves my point. This person I knew was a covert narcissist, dated someone I knew. And the person said, Did you notice anything off? Because they had broken up. And I said, You know what? When she smiled, it was a performance. and seeing it actually gave me the heebie-jeebies because it was like empty, like an empty face. And then when you looked at her, she smiled, but the smile wasn't real. Yeah, it actually freaked me out when I thought back to it. going back to your point,
Ben46:08.323
Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, it's kind of uncanny. Yeah.
Jolie Shapiro46:26.311
I think we all we're social creatures we crave human connection there are outliers obviously like that girl and I don't know if I'm not going to compare her to Ted Bundy but she freaked me out. But I think we all crave connection love. We of course we want that Maslow's hierarchy of needs but I think it all comes down to people understanding us and where we come and even if they don't even if
Ben46:32.002
Yeah.
Jolie Shapiro46:56.115
Like you and me are different. If we have that, if we can relate to each other or whomever, that brings you closer. I had a podcast where the person and I went through the same thing.
Ben47:11.778
Yeah, yeah for sure.
Jolie Shapiro47:17.745
Anything I haven't asked you that you want to talk about?
Ben47:19.212
Yeah, I think there's something about... sorry, go ahead.
Jolie Shapiro47:23.068
No, no, no, you go.
Ben47:26.422
Yeah, think social media and AI share something or have something that can be, it depends on the context, but can be disturbing, which is there's something performative about both of them. When you're on social media, even especially a platform like LinkedIn. You're often not your real true self and you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be. don't advise that to clients or right at any given moment. I own a small ghost writing agency. writing for a number of clients where I consult and advise. I think there's a place for judicious and thoughtful vulnerability, but it's not appropriate. If you're on LinkedIn because you... you want to win new clients or you're seeking employment or whatever, you don't want to be the real 100 % you. Right. And I think also with AI, there's something performative on the AI side of things, right? It's been trained in a specific way to behave and interact with you. And yeah. And so I think human beings need spaces where they can just drop all the all the pretenses, anything performative and just kind of be just like, this is why I'm right. Like warts and scars and all. And you can't do that with many people, right? mean, sadly, it seems like a lot of people don't even have one person they can do that with or let alone several. that's not great. But I think that I have similar concern about AI as regarding social media where the more you the easier you make it for people to avoid actual human con and look I get it human beings are a fucking pain in the butt right like we're just difficult creatures and we change our minds and we're mercurial and capricious and and and opinionated and tribal but we need each other we fundamentally need each other we're The reason why we're having this conversation over the fucking internet is because all of these apes have come before us and collaborated and created these technologies to allow us to communicate and collaborate more easily. That's what we do. We're really fucking good at that. I'm just worried that we're taking that natural propensity and maybe directing it in ways that are not really productive to the goal of ultimately making human beings feel valued and like they belong and just fostering robust connections that, yeah, and we know how, I I hope I'm not butchering this, but there's the Harvard longitudinal study. So I think it's one of the longest running studies where they, where, I wonder if they've all passed away, but they took this cohort or the class of, don't remember what year, and followed them over like so many years that the lead researcher or scientist had to change. And again, there's some flaws in that it's a limited. There's a certain kind of person that's going to go to Harvard. what they found, again, I hope I'm not butchering this, is that The more you have in your life the ability to just unburden yourself, to be in the safe space with another human being or other human beings and get support, essentially co-regulate. So when you're in any kind of distress or you're struggling, to have a human being where you can be like, hey, I'm struggling. And then the other human being, whoever it is, like, I got you. It's cool, I got you. You matter to me. It's okay, right? Like tell me what's happening. The more you, again, I'm simplifying and abstracting away many other components or factors that can do to longevity and health and happiness. But as far as I remember, that was the most important one. That having that social support network, whether it was just a spouse to whom you're very close and feel very safe and comfortable with. or a number of people. And so, yeah, just maybe that's the theme for this conversation. That's where I get worried. Are we creating a world where that's gonna be more difficult and people are gonna have less and less of that? Because we already know, we have the science, we have the research that demonstrates that that's highly problematic and people are less healthy and less happy and live less if they don't have that, the less of that they have and vice versa. So yeah, what kind of world are we birthing? What are we doing here?
Jolie Shapiro52:32.105
I like that. What are we doing here? For the title. Everyone always gives me the title right at the end. It's awesome. Yeah, so anything you want, this is like off. Is there anything else you want to like talk about that you haven't or you think we covered everything? I mean, I feel like we go on for hours about AI.
Ben52:35.682
Yeah. There you go. No, I don't know if I... I know, right? Well, it's interesting because we did, I feel like we did tie it, or I hope we tied it well to mental health and all that, but no, I thought that was a good note to end on. But you tell me, I hope I didn't bore anybody or talk for too long, but I just tried to play along.
Jolie Shapiro53:02.817
we totally did. No, no, no, I think we're good.
Ben53:20.866
You just went with the flow. I mean, I was just talking about things that I've been thinking about, because I'm just the kind of person who thinks about these things. I was just... Yeah.
Jolie Shapiro53:28.735
Yeah, no, I loved it. It was awesome. I just want to end on like, well, this was great. Where can we find you? So give me one sec. OK. Well, this was awesome. I feel like we could talk for another five hours about this. But we're going to wrap up. Where can we find you?
Ben53:38.104
So. Right? LinkedIn, guess. Benaywise, I think that's my LinkedIn. I don't remember what my... Yeah, LinkedIn. I think my handle is Benaywise. And that's it. I actually haven't really been active. haven't been... Yeah, I have a good amount of work on the LinkedIn ghost-threading.
Jolie Shapiro54:00.463
Don't worry, not coming to your house, don't worry.
Ben54:22.766
consulting and coaching side and I'm going to work on the AI automation and consulting side. knock on wood, but I'm actually, yeah. But yeah, LinkedIn. I'm sorry if I'm not really putting out content, maybe that'll change.
Jolie Shapiro54:38.473
Well, just for people to DM you if they have questions. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ben. Really, really appreciate it.
Ben54:41.303
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me.