An unintentional prophecy 😑

My least favorite movie of all time is Idiocracy. It's marketed as a comedy, but it felt like a horror film that was too insufferable to watch all the way through.

The plot is: Corporal Joe Bauers is chosen by the Army for being the most average man they could find, which they needed for an experiment. They cryogenically freeze him, the experiment (and Joe) are forgetten, and he wakes up 500 years later to a future where humanity has selectively bred itself into ludicrous stupidity.

Crops are watered with sports drinks (because "they have electrolytes, it's what plants crave"), the president is a professional wrestler, and the English language devolved into a caveman slur of grunts and ad copy.

I don't hate many things, but I hated this movie... because aside from the cringe-inducing crass humor, the whole thing felt a little too plausible.

I'm going somewhere with this. Have you heard the insult "Second-hand thinker" yet?

I'll explain in a minute (but I'm sure you'll figure it out as I'm setting the scene for you here).

First: I'm paradoxically an AI maximalist, and an AI fatalist.

On the apocalyptic side, it's impossible to ignore that it's filling the internet with more grey-matter eroding slop than we've ever seen, and that reading ANYTHING online has become a chore because of how much every caption and newsletter seems to be written with the same LLM tropes that make me want to gouge my eyes out.

AI agents and bots now officially outnumber humans on the internet, generating nearly 60% of all global web traffic. It's impossible to deny. Real people are officially in the minority, and even those who don't use AI to create their content are having their writing and thinking influenced by the digital hive-mind's omnipresent voice.

Besides just SLOP, AI is also going to monumentally amplify the collective shadow of humanity and its degeneracy. I've seen ads from teenage boys teaching you how to make fake OnlyFan models to cash in on the ignorant souls who are being consumed by the demon of lust. I shudder to imagine what the technology is being used for in the (barely) hidden dark underbelly of society.

Most terrifying to me, though, is how the owners of large AI companies are talking about their visions of how they're influencing the future of humanity. It's a familiar story that we've already been living in (and suffering the consequences of).

Let's rewind to 2017: Sean Parker, a co-founder of Facebook admitted:

...In other words, they consciously made the apps as addictive as possible. And that's not news to a single person reading this email, because you probably unconsciously checked your Instagram 4.5 minutes ago, if you haven't already succumbed to the itch to check it while you're right in the middle of reading this email.

And, (I assume) you also know that social media is not inherently evil.

While some people rack up double-digit screentime hours dissociating themselves into a numbed out doomscrolling oblivion, consuming beyond what they can spiritually metabolize and becoming spiritually and cognitively obese,

Others (myself included) have used social media to connect with other weirdos with niche interests, develop lifelong friendships, share our art, and make a more-than-comfortable amount of money through a personal brand and business built on messages we actually care about.

But with how many hours I've spent on my phone, either mindlessly consuming content, or expending precious mental energy and attention to try to crack the social media game, it often feels like it's taken as much as (or more than) it's given.

Big tech (or big corporations in general) have never had any issue profiting off the addictions and degradation of the people who use its products and services.

And this is where I'm paying very, very close attention to how people are already completely F@CKING themselves over with the extremely honed double-edge that is artificial intelligence.

Sam Altman, founder of Open AI (ChatGPT) said something that's truly terrifying to me:

You could kind of brush this off and say "of course, AI can access information that we simply can't hold ourselves, and it makes sense that we'd be able to access it like a utility".

But think more deeply about the comparison. Electricity and water are utilities that are what keep us alive in the modern world. We are dependant on them for our survival.

Let's learn from History so we're not doomed to repeat it:

In the 1960's, birth rates were dropping in the affluent western world. Nestlé, who was selling baby formula, already had a small market for women who couldn't breastfeed, and they were watching it dwindle down more and more.

However, they realized there were whole continents of mothers who can breastfeed — Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia — and if you could convince them not to, they could claim a market the size of every baby being born into poverty.

They go to these countries and launch immense campaigns with billboards, posters, radios, and a particularly nefarious unheard of marketing tactic:

The milk nurses. Nestlé dressed saleswomen in nurses' uniforms and sent them into hospitals and maternity wards and homes to promote formula and its benefits. A poor, often illiterate mother, just given birth, would get approached by what appeared to be a medical authority in white, telling her the scientific choice is to feed her baby formula.

But this wasn't just an aggressive marketing campaign. It was a trap to make women dependent on the product to keep their baby alive.

Nestlé gave away free formula samples in the hospitals. Enough free formula to get a mother through the first days — and in those same first days, because the baby is taking the bottle instead of the breast, her own milk dries up.

Lactation is a "use it or lose it" situation.

Then the family leaves the hospital, the free samples run out, and the formula is no longer free. But the mother's milk is gone. She cannot go back. She must now buy the product, for the life of the infant, from a company that gave her exactly enough for free to make it impossible to breast feed her own child.

As monstrously evil as this already is, Nestlé's tactics had forseen consequences to the families they manipulated in the third world:
​Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of babies were killed because of it.

For mothers without access to clean water — millions of them — mixing formula with contaminated water proved fatal. Diarrheal disease swept through formula-fed infants.

Many families couldn't afford the formula, and so as they started to over-dilute what little they had to make a tin last longer, the infants slowly starved on weak solutions and die from malnutrition.

Finally, directions for safe preparation were often printed in a language the mother couldn't read, prescribing sterilization she had no means to perform — many cooking over open three-stone fires where boiling water for every single feed was simply not possible.

This devastation was all rooted in engineered dependency.

We are already seeing how certain types of AI users are becoming more and more dependant on LLM's as they outsource their creativity, critical thinking, and decision making to their chatbot buddies.

A cluster of 2025 studies showing that frequent AI use correlates with worse critical-thinking performance and reduced cognitive engagement, with the mechanism being cognitive offloading — you stop doing the mental work because our little robot buddy does it for you.

But I don't need a freakin' study to tell me that. This newsletter came with a "No AI Writing" promise, because I noticed that, even if I used AI to write for me occasionally, even for small things like IG captions,

I noticed that it instantly became harder to write or articulate my own ideas in general. It's like my brain recognized there was a faster, more energy efficient way to do the task, so it shut down the skill entirely, and it's TERRIFYING.

This is where the slur/insult "Second-Hand Thinker" comes from. A person who needs to defer to GPT for every decision they make and has all but forfeited thinking for themselves. That cognitive muscle will continue to atrophy itself until you're too mentally sarcopenic to stand on your own thoughts and decisions.

The reason that so many AI tools are free, I believe, are to create a very lucrative dependency on them. And, if you look around... it's working.

BUT. Like I said, I'm an AI Maximalist as much as I'm an AI-apocalyptic prophet.

I don't use AI to write, but I use it for a LOT of other things. I used it to research the Nestlé scandal and fact check my stats and claims in this email. I use it to create videos, generate images, thumbnails, visuals for posts, I use it to plan, I use it to outsource business and organizational tasks.

I even think that AI can be used to make real art (gasp)

People who are going around saying that AI is the death of creativity are not looking at it from a perspective that is creative, period.

Yes, it is a travesty that our social media feeds are being polluted with AI slop soap operas of a banana cheating on a strawberry with a cherry.

But... some of my favorite creators on social media now are accounts like @gossipgoblin, who are using AI to generate original art and spin up entire mythopoetic worlds that hit your psyche like a modern fairy tale parable with their subliminal social commentary.

Technology will always change what is possible for artists to create.

In the same way I was able to record a full album in my 20's on Garageband on my iPhone, master it on a website, and publish it myself on streaming services (where before it would've taken tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in a recording studio and a publishing deal),

Visionary artists are now able to create cinematic scenes that would've taken multi-million Hollywood SFX budgets,

And people with app ideas are able to code and launch their ideas with what used to take years and a full team of senior developers.

And I actually did the latter recently.

My developer and I launched the Just Frank App last week, and it's why the subject line of this email is "The Last Email I'm Sending".

Frank is the courses, community, and business software I always wished existed.

It has all of my favorite features of communities and courses from Skool, plus features I wished it had like the ability to build your own in-community custom AI coaches, a drag-and-drop journal builder, custom community colors/branding, more ways to upsell, a landing page builder, advanced analytics, and more customizable membership tiers/pricing options.

But I wanted the app to have literally everything that I use for business in one place. I made a calendar scheduler that I can book (and even charge for) calls like Calendly.

Within a few weeks, we'll have a full social media manager and comment/DM automation like ManyChat.

And. I made a full email marketing suite with all of my favorite features from Kit, plus all the other features I wish it had.

So, this is the last email I'll ever be sending you from my Kit account (there's the punchline to the clickbaity subject line). Today I'm migrating my entire list to my Just Frank account, and the Sunday Service will continue being sent from there.

Frank, though coded and designed with AI, feels like art to me. It's everything that I always wished a business/community software could do, feels intuitive the way I always wished it would, and was born from over 15 years of using different softwares and coaching over 150 coaches who all wanted the same thing.

It's the thing I always wished existed, built for people who want to build the thing they always wished existed.

I have always been keenly aware that modern technology will either build or break your brain. It will either liberate or enslave you. It will extract or multiply your resources.

There are correct ways to use AI, and I believe FRANK is one of them.

We're able to add new features over the course of a few days (if not hours) of development and testing. Our intention is to have a community of the apps users deciding and voting on the features they want next, so the app continues to evolve into the best thing that anyone's ever used.

At the end of the day, the battle is still the same that it's been:
Technology affords greater possibility for creativity and innovation, but also levels of unheard of convenience and comfort that can destroy a human being.

It's creation versus consumption. It always has been. Whether it's social media or AI, our battle will always be fought with intentionality, deliberation, and creation.

We will need to focus. We will need to not succumb to the seduction of "more, faster, easier", and instead, embrace the sweet slow burn of true skill acquisition, and painstakingly ensuring our souls can be felt in our work.

I may have been able to launch a fully functional, high-security subscription software that would've taken over a million dollars in investment capital, 2 years, and a 12-person team of programmers, with zero coding experience myself,

But it also took me and my developer each over 550 hours of FOCUSED WORK. It still required more than a decade of experience and intuitive understanding of what features and UI/UX would be amazing for an online business owner to have.

A friend recently asked me what I thought were the 3-5 "essentially human" things that AI simply cannot replace, reproduce, or replicate. The first thing that came to mind was TASTE.

Just Frank exists not just from market research of what the best, most essential features on a business software should be (which AI could've done for me in ~8 minutes), but rather years of using these platforms myself, thousands of conversations with coaches who use them, and over a decade of logging data on the "I-wish-it-did-this" list.

The next email you get from me will be sent via Frank. Which is unfathomably cool to me, to be sending over 1,100 people an email from an app that I created myself.

SO -- if you're reading this and think Frank sounds awesome, right now we're running a promotion for only 21 more members to be locked in as founding users for the platforms (with a bunch of cool benefits).

Join now, and you'll not only lock in the lowest price we'll ever be (and will always pay the lowest rate for all present and future features - even if we have an advanced tier that we charge $1k/month or more for)

...But you'll also have personal access to me via the private Frank Founders community, where you'll have first say over what future features we develop next on the app. If you've ever thought you wanted a feature that didn't exist on any app you've used, this is your opportunity to literally have someone build it for you.

It already replaces over $383 worth of app subscriptions, and in the next few weeks, we'll have even more - and founder price is only $149/month (or $1,440/year, which if you do, DM me and I'll get on a 90 minute 1-on-1 to set up your offer personally).

This is the thing I always wished existed for business -- and I want to build it WITH you so that it's everything YOU wished existed, too.

Get it here (2 weeks free):
➡️ www.itsjustfrank.com ⬅️

Scripture that I'm chewing on

This verse convicted me, specifically from the frame of haste. It felt particularly relevant to this conversation about AI, where part of its seductive allure is how it can collapse time and do everything faster for you.

I see ads all the time along the lines of "use AI to build and launch a low-ticket offer/course/product in 10 minutes, and make $10k in 7 days!" And they're tempting. The promise of quick money and low effort is alluring.

And it's a devastating distraction from the work that feeds and grows your soul, that cultivates skill and deepens relationship (to others, to your craft, to God).

I can almost certainly assure you, God's calling on your life does not involve running ads to a cheap AI generated info product. Remain faithful to your calling, to your dharma, to your soul, and to yourself.

A Random Thing I'm into while I work/focus

I've gotten really into binaural beats for working lately. I've used them for year to do power naps (and it works AMAZINGLY), and I started to try to use them for deep work sessions.

The research is shaky as to whether or not listening to a 40hz binaural beat to entrain you to a Gamma brainwave actually does anything at all to improve your focus or cognitive performance at all, but I certainly notice a difference, and Andrew Huberman is bullish on their efficacy.

​Here's a link to a Youtube video with a pure 40hz Gamma tone. There are a bunch of other videos on Youtube as well that combine it with music.

Yours in raging against (and loving up on) the machine,
Anthony