Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve officially crossed into the uncharted territory of AI slop escape velocity - songs made by AI are topping charts in several countries, AI short-form content is devouring your parents’ brains, and now you and your family need a safe word for if when you’re dealing with a scammer who used AI to clone one of your voices.

Dark times? Perhaps, but they’ve been darker. And inevitably, this phrase “AI slop” will be is abused to describe any content with a negative connotation.

The good news is that it’s leading to some funny renditions:

Yes, AI slop, in all of its forms, is exhausting, but more than anything, it seems to be very fatiguing. Like when you look up from scrolling TikTok for too long. Almost like a hangover. The residual, lingering, painful side-effects (or slop) from yesterday’s decisions that you just can’t seem to shake off.

I’d venture to argue that it’s not the ingesting of AI slop that’s the main concern, but rather the “slop” that you already ingested twenty news cycles ago - the outdated frameworks, misleading priors, and delusional beliefs that you’re still “hungover” from, but too invested in to release.

The twisted irony of our age is that Americans are drinking less than ever, especially the youngins, yet we seem to be more hungover than any generation before us — not from alcohol, but residual information; the accumulated weight of experiences and beliefs we never left behind.

Our rates of housing construction in this country have never recovered since the 2008 collapse, as this, coupled with a fear of gentrification, inculcated a PTSD-level aversion to real-estate development that overrides all the positives of supply and demand harmonizing.

Every U.S. military action is pigeonholed as either another Iraq or Vietnam, stripped of context, as though our wounds never healed properly.

You can remember (maybe) when the book Sapiens took the world by storm. You, the reader, felt an overwhelming sensation that you finally understood the world. And its negativity, darkness, and nihilism sucked. They were a total drag. Twitter user Anders describes his own experience curing himself of this nihilism hangover (emphasis my own):

“(An author) Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design. After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity.”

It’s not just nihilism that’s infected us. We’re also stuck in nostalgia so deep it’s like molasses.

The omnipresence of our nostalgia is so inescapable that people like the founders of Stripe, one of the largest privately-held companies, announced to the world that they “are seeking to fund artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics.”

Not only that, but look at our politics - the MAGA movement is one big ball of nostalgia. Kyla Scanlon explains best the problem with this kind of nostalgia (emphasis my own): “This is why ‘Make America Great Again’ is so resonant. It promises a return to a moment that never existed for most people and cannot be recreated through performance alone. Nostalgia works as content but it certainly fails as governance. Through its attempts to redefine the past into something it never was, with promises of returning to manufacturing and whatnot, the US is actively destroying its most valuable financial asset: trust. It misunderstands that none of this would work - the US dollar, the Treasuries, the stock market, the full faith and credit - without trust.”

If you’re not a loser like me who’s into geopolitics, you would’ve missed Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney drop this bar at Davos when describing Canada’s turn away from the U.S. (again emphasis mine): “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

What ever is one to do with so many hangovers?!

One of the first lessons my boxing coach taught me back in high school was that it’s easier to train beginners than fix bad habits. When asked about his thoughts on AI in an interview, historian Stephen Kotkin explained how he’d rather deal with someone with little knowledge than fake knowledge, as amateurs tend to ask more questions while people with bad priors usually find themselves dying on hills they never knew they climbed. In his best-seller Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara tells the story of taking his restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, to the top as the best in the world. As he’s seeking to differentiate his restaurant from the competition and create something unique and beautiful, he explains how he avoided hiring servers with previous fine dining experience; sure, their résumés may have been assets to any normal fine-dining establishment, but he was building something different, so their experience would’ve served as blinders instead.

In The Ghost Map, author Steven Johnson explores London’s 1854 cholera outbreak - how fatal it was, how it came to be, and, most importantly, why the medical establishment allowed more outbreaks to follow. At the time, most of society believed in the theory of “miasma” - the idea that disease spread through “bad” air. What most surprised Johnson was not the pervasiveness of this belief in miasma, but the medical community’s resistance to change, despite the mounting evidence that cholera spread through water.

Like the 5 Love Languages (despite being groundless), the Big Five personality traits can do a lot of the heavy-lifting for us when it comes to trying to predict individual outcomes. The Big Five are: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness.

One of the strongest predictors of relationship success is when a couple demonstrates a solid degree of openness: the willingness to update, to be wrong, to let someone else's perspective reshape yours. Maybe there’s something to this for curing us of our own information hangovers.

You can’t learn anything new, and thus change your behavior, if you’re not open to learning. The greats all give us the same advice: be open to learning and changing your mind.

This quote from the movie Conclave rings a similar tune:

“The one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.”

Mike Bird describes in The Land Trap how, in the 1890s, the UK bike market exploded, but then came crashing down. Thousands lost money as the market lay in ruins. And yet, no one stopped riding bikes. The masses didn't become "bike skeptics,” because they realized the crash wasn't about the bikes. The tool itself was totally fine. It was the frenzy, the speculation, the hysteria that flooded into the market.

The same lesson applies to now. There’s hope.

Adam Mastroianni leaves us with a case for optimism in this hungover world:

“It's a mistake to think that words only exercise influence over you when you behold those words firsthand. I'm reminded of Meryl Streep's monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, when Anne Hathaway scoffs at two seemingly identical belts and Streep schools her:

‘...it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.’

What's true in the world of fashion is also true in the world of ideas. Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence—it places you at their mercy. This is easy to miss. It may seem like ignorance is always overpowering knowledge, that the people who kick things down are triumphing over the people who build things up. That's because kicking down is fast and loud, while building up is slow and quiet. But that is precisely why the builders ultimately prevail. The kickers get bored and wander off, while the builders return and start again.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice}