Listen To This | AI will help?
A Podcast Rec for Saturday, February 1st
Welcome to Listen to This, a new feature within Welcome Wanderer. Each day, I share a favorite podcast episode or audiobook —something that moved me, challenged me, or simply made life a little brighter.
Podcasts of The Day:
The Next Big Idea | SUPERAGENCY: What Could Go Right With AI | Jan 30 2025 |
1 hr
The Interview (The New York Times) | Digital Drugs Have Us Hooked. Dr Anna Lembke Sees a Way Out. | Feb 1 2025 | 44 min
Why It Mattered To Me:
These two podcast episodes paired so well together that I had to share them both. As you will hear Reid Hoffman just wrote a book about AI and the way it positively impacts all aspects of our lives. He is EXTREMELY hopeful and encourages everyone to use AI and diffuse their fear around it.
While, Anna Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist who has studied addiction for decades knows just how vulnerable we are as humans and how easily addicted wen can become, “we’re spending more and more time and our energy investing in this online world, which means that we are actually leeching our real-life existence of our energy and creativity so when we try to get off, out of the metaverse and re-enter the real world it actually is more boring because there’s less going on…”
Press Pause on These Words:
“Can we think about and interact with people in better and better ways? My hope is that as a net overall AI will help alot, even though there will be alot of uneven areas.”
-Reid Hoffman
“We don’t really need other people anymore, we can get those needs met from the internet and I think that’s a very scary prospect because I think it means that we will get more and more isolated…And now with AI and large language models, it’s not even real people it’s like this amalgam of collective language creating a simulated person. I don’t know. It’s just really scary.”
-Anna Lembke
“Given this world of abundance…Because our lives have become so easy, so convenient, so sedentary, the default is a state of consumption that ultimately isn’t good for our bodies or our minds. So I do think that we have to simulate hardship and intentionally create inconvenience and create struggle for ourselves.”
-Anna Lembke“It seems to me that we’ve crossed over some abundance set point where we went beyond meeting our basic survival needs and now have so much access to so many pleasure-inducing substances and behaviors that we’re actually changing our brain chemistry such that we’re in a dopamine deficit state. Now we need to keep using these highly stimulating drugs and behaviors not to get high and feel good but just to level the balance and feel normal.”
-Anna Lembke
Question for you: What activities move you toward connection with others, with the planet, and with yourself, and away from screens, internet, and social media?
Your curious friend,
Charissa