Welcome to AI Burnout

You know, when you talk about when is it healthy to outsource and like take that stress off of your brain and give it to AI versus you think you're doing that and actually you're making your life way more complicated. I got a 5-hour window to burn credits and my life is sort of like, how am I doing credit-wise? Should I take time off and like let it regenerate or should I hurry and hurry and hurry and get all these credits used up by the end of the 5-hour slot? And oh, my new 5-hour slot opened and it's dinnertime, but like, I can't waste this opportunity. I need to work on my 5-hour credit window.

That's addiction. I think you need to give up AI now.

Well, and then if I give up AI, I give up some things that are necessary. That's the hard part is because there's responsible things that I can and need to do with AI. Welcome to the Soul Proprietor Podcast. I'm Curt Kempton.

And I'm Melody Edwards.

Each week we dive into the ethical questions that keep entrepreneurs awake at night.

Whether you're building your own company or exploring life's big questions, you Are welcome here.

Hello, Melody. How are you today?

I'm doing good, Curt. Not even normal. I'm doing good.

That's awesome.

Thank you.

We talked last time about how maybe things weren't going as like— you're like, I'll just say good because it's the socially acceptable thing. But now this week, as a lady of leisure, what's that all about?

Usually I'm a lady of business. And since this is like week 7 of being out of business, I really feel like I'm becoming more of a lady of leisure, although I do a lot of things for a lady of leisure, like cleaning and organizing and helping and other things. So I'm not like super lady of leisure. I'm just a regular lady of leisure for the time being. How are you doing?

I'm doing pretty dang good. I've been having a, a lot of plates spinning as I've gotten back and I'm finally feeling like I've got my plates spinning the way they're supposed to. And I've been able to spend time thinking and I've enjoyed, you know, in the evenings and the early morning hours after some meditation, I've been able to spend a lot more time thinking and it's been good for me. And what really stinks is that as we're sitting here right now, I've had all these like really cool thoughts. But one interesting thing about meditating is that you have these bursts of light where you're like, wow, never want to forget that. But part of the thing is I don't hold a pen or a paper when I'm doing it, because then I can't do the thinking as well, even though I know thinking with a pen and paper is useful. And so what's happened is I've had some really great thoughts that I can't possibly repeat.

I know this will go against like traditional meditation. Couldn't you just press record and then be recording? And then when you have a burst of light, you just say it out loud.

Well, I do 2 kinds of meditation and both of them that wouldn't work for. One of them is the kind where I'm seated and I'm like eyes closed and I'm trying to hold nothing. And it's when those things pop into your head and you realize that you're holding something, you need to let it go again. It's that letting go, like speaking or writing or anything would like kind of work against what I'm trying to do. The other kind of meditation I do involves riding my mountain bike and like, that's an awesome thought. And yeah, maybe I could figure out how to record it or something, but it's—

Oh, you totally could. Yeah. It's not your main thing when you're mountain biking. You're into mountain biking. I get that. I'm doing this special therapy, just 4 sessions with the woman and some sort of thought work where I came up with something and I remember saying it quite a bit and coming to it the hard way. And then afterwards I totally forgot what this thing was that changed my life. So I text her, I'm like, what did I say? What was I saying? And she said, What I was saying is I'm in my joy creating the freest version of myself.

And I was like, that's what I said. It must have been like after the fact. It does not feel as like huge and magical as in the moment because I'm in my world now, you know, but it is what I aspire to.

That one I can relate to. Like when I'm laying in bed and I'm about to fall asleep and I have this great idea or thought and I reach over, grab my phone, you hold the side button until Siri comes on and you go, remind me tomorrow morning to blank, and then you say the thing that's just earth-shattering awesome.

Yeah.

And then the next day you look at it and you're like, that was not worth— and other times it's quite useful.

I do feel like there's something here. I'm not accessing whatever that is right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I'm excited for our topic today and I want to get into it because we talk about AI a lot. In fact, I'm wondering if we should retitle this show from Soul Proprietor to like The AI Inquisitors.

I don't know. The AI Soul proprietor.

But in our last episode, it came up and we sidestepped it so we wouldn't get bogged down in it. But it's time to get bogged down in the idea of outsourcing our consciousness or our voice or our relationships. Because if I would have said this 10 years ago to you, you would have been like, that is the dumbest Like, how could you even talk on that? That's not even possible. And now today it's like a true, like, thing. Like, it's happening without trying.

I will say I did 10 years ago. Well, I've said this to you when I used to use your software ResponsiBid, and I would write these emails to people or these automations basically, or these reminders from like a year later of after their service where they would get an email saying, hey, it's Mel, you know, like whatever I was saying. I did feel like, this feels wrong. Also, thank God for this because these aren't happening otherwise. Like, these messages are not getting sent to anybody. In my heart, I want these messages going out to people all the time, but, and they are always pretty similar to each other. And if I was going to make it for everybody, therefore it makes sense to have one message that I have automated on a time. But I still was like uneasy about that idea because it felt like I was tricking people.

Yeah. Right.

And I guess I sometimes feel like I've been tricked. Like, I look for the AI in everything now, every message. If I feel there's any AI voice in a message, I'm like, I can't trust you now. And it really sucks because even I use AI voice sometimes in messages. And I wouldn't want people to think they can't trust me. But this has been a long thing. Like, we have been outsourcing our voice For a long time in many ways, in business at least. I'm trying to think if there's ways that we've done that in like just our other parts of our life.

Can you think of—

Oh God, yes. I mean, Melody, I've known for a long time I'm a judgmental person. I've told people a long time, if you send me an email from a dot or yahoo.com email or Hotmail, like I just judge you and I'm like, don't judge them for that.

I feel like you're judging me right now because I had Hotmail forever. I loved it. I know.

Listen, to me, I almost got to the point where I couldn't take people seriously if they didn't have either their own domain or a Gmail address. Like, it just was like, you're a joke. But not just that. It's like you too. Like, when emojis first came on and grown men sent me a message with an emoji in it, then AI comes on and like emojifies everything. Then, like you said, anyone who does that double dash, let me be real with you for a second, or—

It's not this, it's that.

I don't want to paper over. Yeah, it's not this, but it is that. Or I don't want to paper over this. Let me deal with you directly here. And I'm like, you can just smell it. You're like, oh my gosh, this is AI talking to me.

It's painful.

And all of that, I know I'm guilty. of so much of the stuff I judge people for. And I've been doing a lot better of working on myself, but AI had added a new layer to what I previously would judge on because now it's the things that you write, the way something is programmed or something like that. And you just start getting like really nitpicky.

So I've been getting Facebook like memories Recently, from 3 years ago, when I got my first concussion and I put my VA in charge and she started doing these daily newscasts every couple of days to take over my account. Because I was like, we have a business. We can't have nothing. So she started doing these newscasts about Mel's concussion gate, we called it. And man, did AI write those for her. Because I understood how to train the AI a little bit at that point.

Mm-hmm.

And you can hear it all over it. But it's kind of funny that 3 years ago, we were writing these with AI. I don't think people would have known at all that that's what it was. But I already knew. I remember being like, telling her, oh, don't say it like this. This is not how we would say it. 3 years in already, and I feel very much like I'm just burned out by it. And other people— my friend Layla just put out She's a doctor.

And she was like, is everybody writing with AI now? She's just discovering that fact. And a lot of people don't know. They will know soon. I thought they would know a lot quicker. I remember thinking about this 3 years ago, like being scared of this. But there are a lot of things that we outsource, actually, when it comes to our voice.

Yeah.

Like things that are not about AI. I'm just going to look at the list that AI helped me create because I did give it a bunch of ideas, but I wanted to think of before AI, what were we outsourcing? Like what were we already outsourcing? GPS, number one, navigation, right? And I remember when I first got like MapQuest and then we got the GPS, the Garmins.

Yep.

And they were like, nobody has to even read a map anymore.

TomTom.

A TomTom. I had one of those. That was a big deal. Memory. We've written down our memory. So that's like something that we've outsourced that we don't even think is outsourcing. Or having somebody write our books for us. There's always been ghostwriters, right?

We may have kind of a list that I'm going down here, so I'm gonna maybe steal something that you were thinking of, but I honestly have outsourced Amazon ratings even outside of Amazon. Like if I'm like at a store buying something, I'll often just, if the Amazon rating meets my requirement, that's how I Same. I will buy it even if someone recommends it to me. I know, and I like, and I trust you, but you might not know as much as all the collective of Amazon. So I do that all the time.

And I think restaurants is another example, like Google reviews, Yelp reviews, all of that kind of stuff. TripAdvisor, 'cause I'm doing my Philippines route, like stuff right now, my planning. And man, does TripAdvisor and Google reviews come into play a lot with that. And I'm always looking for like, what do people hate about it? And then I'll be like, oh, they're just picky, you know? So there's that.

The other thing that there is is like calendar reminders. And I actually use the Apple Reminders as well. Like I was telling you, like I just hold something down to remind me tomorrow. I have really automated and outsourced. Dave Allen wrote a book called Getting Things Done years and years and years ago. Like it's the standard on productivity. It was the first self-help book probably.

Don't love it.

Don't love it?

Nope.

Oh, that's interesting because I do love it.

I'll just say quickly, I think he's a Type A kind of guy who teaches other Type A people who don't know how to have some systems, and then they're like, oh, this is easy. Never worked for me.

Oh, okay.

I don't think it's made for Type ADD, but you are somewhat that way.

I am Type A and ADD, but one of the things that he uncovered for me Is stop holding your brain and get it onto a list. Because what I do is I hold on and I ruminate over 3 or 4 things and it feels endless because I'm just circular and my brain is so bogged down. And so for calendars and to-do lists to just be able to say, remind me Thursday morning to do X, Y, and Z, my brain is immediately free to be back.

Closing the loop. Yeah.

Otherwise that open loop will keep me from engaging in a lot of other stuff. And so that for me is extremely powerful, outsourcing it.

You're right. I don't know if he invented that or not. I always feel like I'm disappointed at what people say they invent and get credit for, but somebody invented that idea and it's a great idea. So can you see I have a little thing against him? I should.

Yeah, I could tell you have a thing against the Someday Maybe list was another big one for me. It's the same book, but the idea is that I have 4 or 5 really good ideas that I can't do anything about right now. And so I also have things I need to do on Thursday morning at 7:00 AM, and I have other things I need to do. Right after this meeting. And I, you know what I mean? So I have these actionable things that I gotta keep up, but I don't wanna lose that thing that I'm gonna do someday, maybe. And having a someday, maybe list was so freeing as well. It's written down, it's there.

Again, you're right. I think the reason I resent him is because it didn't work for me and I worked hard to make it work. And even just reading the stupid book was so much work. I'm freaking dyslexic, Curt. And that was a lot of words. So, and where there was no Audible back then, so. Just to like get it in my head was hard work. And then to like try to make it happen, it just wasn't going to work for me.

So I'm going to let that go now. I forgive you, David Allen.

Hold it lightly. That's a pretty good list of stuff that we've already been outsourcing. And I think it's probably pretty illustrative of what we want to get into today, unless you want to add anything else to that.

Well, I think that's a list that is pretty good. I would say like it goes deeper. With our lists of like, for our voice right now in business, obviously it's social media posts, it's messages, everything that we've talked about already. But now we're also getting into video. I'm outsourcing my video to my Mailbot. So like, I still make my own videos, but I'm trying to train the Mailbot to make their own videos in the style that I would want without having anything to do with it. That's a big deal, right? I don't feel bad about it because I'm not trying to trick anybody into believing it's me. It'll always be that it's just— a version of Mel's brain in a robot, right? Avatar.

And then when you look at relationships, like automated birthday messages, remember like SendJim that we could just like send people brownies and cookies whenever they had a special occasion, but it was automated. Like, I kind of resist stuff like that. The chatbots or the AI being customer service, I resist that. The phone calls from AI that are just like, hey, I'm— Human Todd here to assist you, you know.

It depends on the day for me for AI calls. There is something that makes me feel great about hanging up on an AI when I'm not interested, like I gotta go, where a person, there was always a little bit of that guilt that came with that.

You'll take calls from AI?

Well, I'll give you an example. So I've taken calls and it was AI. I can't think of a time that I was like, cool, let's keep going. But like I scheduled dentist appointment. I scheduled garage door tune-up appointment. I pre-filtered on a service company I was calling for my truck or something. And in all senses, it was like, to me, in a lot of cases when I'm dealing with AI, it's the same automated message of press 1 for this, 2 for that, or whatever. It just is better.

And it used to be like, you'd have to keep like, say the name of your card number.

4.

3, 7, and then it would like repeat it back. Is that correct? And you're like, no. And like, oh, say it again. Now it's just more intuitive. It's better. And I don't have to wait for all 9 items. Just, what are you calling about? Uh, something's broken. It sounds like you want to talk to the technical support team.

Sounds like you want to set up an appointment. And then the people who do it best, when it is time to talk to a human, they're there. In the case of my dental appointment, There just wasn't that much for a human to have to do. So it was like, hey, you want to get your cleaning scheduled? We have times, these times available. Are any of those good for you? Or would you like me to get you another list of times? Or do you want to tell us a date and time that's good for you? And I, and I was like, I would've done this with a human anyway. I got it done. And it was like, great, I'll send you a text message and email right now. And then I'm like, man, that was as good or better than dealing with someone over the phone.

So I've had the opposite experience. I'm not saying that they're all pleasant. I'm just saying— It's getting muddy.

It's getting better. You know who is the worst? Amazon. Because I bought a vacuum last week from Amazon and I was really excited to get it. And then I set it up and it works pretty good. But there's one thing, one of the tools on the butt that just does not work properly. So I was like, I'm just going to send a message and ask if I can get a replacement. And it's like, hey, I'm your Amazon friendly AI. Let's like troubleshoot this.

And they give you a list to help your brain, but they don't give you enough. like other as an option, and I don't know how to get to other. And so it just keeps going through the same thing. It's not helping me at all, and it never puts me to a chat human. And that has been very frustrating. And then I quit. Maybe that was the intention to begin with.

Oh, probably, actually.

Invert— you know who else? Comcast Internet. I was looking at my bill and being like, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. And to actually go online and find any way to cancel. They've made it nearly impossible.

Comcast is famous for what you're talking about right now. They literally have, like, Reddit subs about it.

They're a monopoly. They can do what they want where they live. They live near me, so, I mean, that's what my options are. I won't let it beat me. I'm gonna figure out how to make my AI people deal with it in its system.

I'm worried about scams. My parents are getting older. Actually, my sister, who is only a few years older than me, She got a call about the fact that she had missed jury duty and they had a warrant out for her arrest. And then like this big scam and she was all falling for it and everything. She was really like, oh my gosh. And they're like, can you, if you give us your credit card number, we can pay the fine right now. And the warrant will be taken away. And she was ready to do it, but they said Mesa instead of Mesa, Arizona.

Oh.

And, but like, you know, those Nigerian prince emails were always easy to identify because the English was so broken and bad. Now you can make it sound really professional.

Like a human. And the one thing, that latency still is there, but the other part is it's not even just that. It's like these scams where they will take your voice and then make that, you know, message your parents or grandparents and be like, use my voice to tell them that I have been kidnapped and they need to pay a ransom. That happens already. It's been happening for at least a year or 2. So scary. And I don't know why it doesn't happen more. Like, couldn't they just take my voice from a podcast and do that? You know?

They could, but now off of just like a one-sentence thing, yeah, they can now learn every inflection and tone. It's crazy.

I did buy a protection software recently called Cloaked that we are not sponsored by, but Let's get sponsored by Cloak. And that has actually helped bring down the number of calls about my personal loan application that they'd like to give me. They're like, we have so much money we'd like to give you. Let's just finish that application. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It was getting to the point where my name was on so many lists and I was getting probably 30 calls a day, maybe more of just that. And it's gotten down to maybe 2 calls a day that get through. So it's pretty big and it keeps telling me how many lists it's taken me off of, like the bad lists, the data ones. So—

I'm using Incogni for the same purpose.

Is that working well?

It seems to work well. And you combine that with never answering a phone call that doesn't come up as like a contact. But I think nowadays that's the other thing is like, I wouldn't want to be a telescammer these days because I can't imagine anyone's answering their phone when it's not you, but—

You're wrong. Our age doesn't answer the phone. My mother will be on the phone all the time if she could. Like, she calls me on the phone. She knows I won't answer a call, but she still calls me. Like, there are a lot of people, Curt, who talk on the phone still and who answer their phone, and they're not getting like data removal or removing scammerless software. I know better. It took me till like 3 months ago to get this software, or 2 or 3 months.

And I should have gotten it probably a year ago. I didn't want to research them, actually. That's why I didn't do it.

Well, I'm glad I did. It's definitely cut down on calls, but it's also, it's just nice to know that whatever is happening with AI out there, less people are intersecting me. And that's what I feel like to get into our conversation now, like the consciousness of ourselves. We're familiar with like all the web of information we have, but The more vector points that you meet up with whatever scam or whatever stuff is trying to collect your information, it multiplies because you're showing up on more and more lists and more and more people are farming you. And you're basically, that's what you are. You're the product you're being farmed.

So I guess today what we're really discussing is like, where's the line when the line is moving so quickly?

Between healthy and unhealthy, I think the line between healthy and unhealthy, because Right now, there's a lot of lines being drawn in the sand right now. What's possible, what you should do, what is AI going to do in terms of like people's viability of jobs versus— there's a lot that's happening right now. But I think that what's happening is, is in the frenzy, and I've already mentioned this on the podcast, this isn't new information to our listeners if they've listened to others. I've gotten a pretty unhealthy relationship with AI in that I was able to make a lot of dreams come true really fast, and it was just like amazing. And like, it has this like instant self-gratification feeling to it.

You mean business dreams, right? Not like personal dreams, because I think business dreams would be really lame to people who are not in business.

Yeah, I have this new dashboard. You can see our, you can see our numbers in. But like, honestly, even today, I built a new tool inside of the tool that I built. And I got this really cool rewarding in our leadership meeting where I showed the team something that I had built. And David's exact words to me, our leader over customer success, he said, is this real? And I said, yeah, it's live right now. I built it. How is this wizardry happening? What he said. And it made me feel good because I'm like, he didn't even think it was possible and I'm literally doing it for him.

And so that relationship starts to become kind of unhealthy because you start to, you know, feel like anything I want to make happen, I can make it happen.

Yeah, no limits. Or you feel like there are no limits and you just have to work the AI a little harder to come up with the solution because AI will always give us a solution. And that is very scary to me only because of what I'm dealing with with my own brain issues right now and just feeling how AI has played into that. There needs to be rest, and rest has gotten a lot harder since AI came on board. Meaning, like, when we got off work before, we would still think about work, I guess, but I wouldn't be on a computer as much all the time. And now with AI, it's like you really will be on the computer all the time just creating things. And it used to be that when you created something, then you could be like, okay, that is created. It's the speed of execution is painful.

As I'm saying this though, I'm thinking back pre-AI, it was still that we were always hustling for some idea. It just took a lot longer and we were always unhealthy, Curt. Never mind.

Well, we've been given this new superpower to do this.

It is.

When we talk about healthy, I can't help but think about food. And I've told people this all the time, like when I get a chance to see God again, I do have some pretty serious questions about Why he formed the taste buds on my tongue to indicate to me that Twinkies are the best thing that you could possibly put inside your body. But for whatever reason, Brussels sprouts and okra, like when they hit my tongue, my body's like, guess that'll kill you. You know? And I'm like, God, would it have been so hard for you to say healthy will taste good, unhealthy will taste bad, and that's how species will survive? And I, best of my ability, that's what it seems like works for every other animal on the planet. Like they know what animals or plants to not eat versus ones to eat, but not me.

Well, that used to actually work for us, right? Like when we had fruit in season, it was sweet. We would eat a lot of it. It would go out of season in the harsh winter or whatever. Right. And then you've plumped up enough to get through winter. Like, wasn't that the original point in biology? And then we got supermarkets that are like full of things year round and we have access to everything in the world. So.

I would argue that you wouldn't find Twinkies or ice cream in the wild anyway. But I think that, you know, they used to have root cellars. People had to like, like still eat stuff. My point I'm trying to get across is that understanding what's healthy and doing what's healthy are different things. And I think that I can relate that to AI. I can relate it to physical exercise. I can relate it to what shows I should watch, what information I should be putting in my head. Like sometimes the, the kids call it brain rot now.

Like sometimes the brain rot is really interesting to digest. And all of a sudden you've been scrolling for the length of a whole football field or something on your phone. And that time is just gone.

Do we believe that's healthy? I know that's not healthy and you know that's not healthy. We all know it's not healthy.

I think the people who are scrolling know it's not healthy while they're doing it. But I'm off of social media specifically because I know that I have very, very addictive personality and I know that I would probably get sucked into it. So I'm doing things to try and keep myself aligned with what I actually want in life. I'm not perfect at it by any means. I still do things I don't want to do and I still am unhealthy in certain ways. That, you know, AI being one of those ways. But, you know, when you talk about when is it healthy to outsource and like take that stress off of your brain and give it to AI versus you think you're doing that and actually you're making your life way more complicated. I got a 5-hour window to burn credits and my life is sort of like, how am I doing credit-wise? Should I take time off and like let it regenerate or should I hurry and hurry and hurry and get all these credits used up by the end of the 5-hour slot? And Oh, my new 5-hour slot opened and it's dinner time, but like, I can't waste this opportunity.

I need to work on my 5-hour credit window.

That's addiction. I think you need to give up AI now.

Well, and then if I give up AI, I give up some things that are necessary. That's the hard part is because there's responsible things that I can and need to do with AI.

I would argue that because I'm not using AI right now and I get what you're saying because I feel that so deeply. when I'm using it all the time. And right now, I'm trying to stay away from it as much as possible. And I think it's the same curve, even though it feels like we need that escalation, we need to keep up with every— we've always felt that way. We have. And also, we're 0.01% of the population in our usage right now. I saw a chart that Jon Krohn, somebody that I follow who has the Super Data Science podcast, He showed like how many people are in the world and then how many are using AI and how many have a paid account and how many have the $100, $200 account. And there was only one tiny dot of the $100, $200 account.

And then like a little more like 5 or 6 dots for the paid accounts. And then there was a bunch of like unpaid. And then there was a lot of people, most of them who don't use it at all. So like we are so in it that we feel like it's pushing on us all the time, the urgency.

Yeah.

Don't you think that's scary that that'll never go away? We will never not feel that unless we do something about it.

Yeah. Our last episode, we talked about how I've been out and, uh, like out of cell service and stuff. And truly it felt and was great. It was good for my body and my mind and all that. You're not going to hear me push back on that. But when I did become an entrepreneur and I hired people, There's this like domino effect. Everybody needs to perform on a team at the level they need to in order for everyone else to not be blocked by you. And AI has definitely changed the speed of that.

I'm not necessarily pushing back on your pushback, 'cause it's like, I know at the end of the day, in theory, you're right. I just also know that the culture I have in my company for people to, like, I will feel guilty if I have a paid employee who is literally blocked by me or someone else not being able to give them what they need from their department or from their position in order for them to move forward. And now I'm just throwing money at something that's idle. And I think as an entrepreneur, it's just wired in me to keep the blockers out and bottlenecks are best addressed with a fast solution.

I somewhat agree with you on that. I also ignoring all of the bottlenecks in my company right now by staying out of it. So, Bottlenecks don't exist in my world, basically. Yet my business keeps going, even though I feel an intense need when I'm in it to be performing for everybody else, just like you just said, like making sure there's nothing in their way, but there's always something new every day in people's way that we have to fix, which might be the overall problem in general.

Okay. Let's hit pause right there for today, but we are just getting started on the topic. In the next episode, Melody and I are going to dive into the deep end. We're talking about the ethics of AI, so whether it's okay to outsource your voice or your relationships or your morals. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it, and thank you so much for listening to the Soul Proprietor Podcast. We'll catch you next time. Thanks everybody for joining us at the Soul Proprietor Podcast. It has been an absolute pleasure having these discussions with you.

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