Ultra-Processed Information: AI and the Coming Deluge of Noise | Frankly 128
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week's Frankly, Nate explores the growing sense that many people feel disoriented and overwhelmed in a world increasingly saturated with digital content. Constant exposure to headlines, hot takes, summaries, and algorithm-driven feeds can erode our sense of clarity rather than strengthen it. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has served to dramatically increase the speed of information production while also eroding accuracy, making it difficult to differentiate between content that simply sounds confident and content that's actually grounded in reality.
Nate draws a parallel between today's information ecosystem and the modern industrial food system – just like fossil fuels helped create an abundance of cheap, calorie-dense but nutrient-poor food, AI may create an abundance of information that is fast and persuasive, yet has little "nourishment." In a world where digital tools increasingly do more of our thinking for us, Nate grapples with how to prevent cognitive atrophy and filter the flood of content we likely will face in coming months/years.
How can we be rich in information and yet poor in wisdom? Why is it important for us to be able to tell the difference between content that's engineered for engagement and content that genuinely improves our judgement and our lives? Finally, what daily practices might help us stay grounded as AI increasingly reshapes our cognitive environment?
(Recorded February 25th, 2026)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning. |
| 0:02.5 | I increasingly feel that as a species, we are living through a slow motion tragedy. |
| 0:10.0 | And it is my greatest hope that with the work on the great simplification in this platform, |
| 0:16.8 | we can help the viewers engage with the ongoing more than human predicament in ways that alter the default pathway. |
| 0:25.3 | Not to preserve the world as we know it, but perhaps so a better one can emerge despite the myriad challenges. |
| 0:34.1 | That's going to require knowledge and sense making and courage and categories of interventions. |
| 0:41.3 | But before all that, it requires that we have agency at the level of the individual human. |
| 0:50.3 | But I think preceding actual agency is the feeling that we have agency, which I think increasingly |
| 0:58.9 | most of us don't. And this lack of agency and some suggestions on what to do about it in the face |
| 1:06.0 | of the metabolic economic superorganism was going to be this week's topic because I've been thinking |
| 1:11.4 | about it a lot. But then I thought about it more and there's a prequel that I think I need to |
| 1:18.5 | highlight first. Something I've been noticing in my own life. And given many of you are by definition |
| 1:26.3 | watching this online and on YouTube, I guess that |
| 1:31.1 | you have two, or at least in a rhyming sense. |
| 1:44.0 | I now open my phone in the morning, hopefully after my 12-minute elephant path meditation that I'm supposed to be doing upon waking. |
| 1:57.6 | And when I open my phone, I find an endless stream of headlines and threads and clips and charts and |
| 2:06.9 | hot takes and counter hot takes with confident explanations of what is happening today, why, and the |
| 2:16.3 | implications. |
| 2:18.3 | And yet increasingly the feeling I have after swimming in some of this is actually a loss in orientation instead of the clarity or the dawning of insight that I was looking for. |
| 2:32.3 | And I'm pretty worried about this. Yeah, there's always been more |
| 2:37.5 | information than any one human can process and hold. But what's changing now, and in my opinion, |
| 2:45.9 | about to change massively. Yes, because of AI and algorithms, is the sheer speed and scale of information |
... |
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