Ep. 1: AI Uncertainty & Winter Shenanigans
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
In the very first episode of It’s Gonna Be Fine, Matti unpacks the difference between generative AI and agentic AI—and why one of them feels a little more unsettling than the other.
Plus: will winter ever end? And speaking of winter… the Winter Olympics just wrapped. Quick question: why don’t they ever have enough condoms?
TRANSCRIPT
Today on It's Gonna Be Fine, we're talking about AI, both the helpful kind and the slightly terrifying kind, whether winter will ever end, and yes, why the Winter Olympics apparently love handing out condoms. Let's get started.
Welcome to It's Gonna Be Fine. I'm Mati Shicker. Thanks so much for joining me for this podcast. It's episode one. How cool is that? I know I'm excited, and I'm gonna take a minute to tell you a little bit about this podcast and the show and what it's all about, and then we'll jump right in. So over the last few years, I would say, specifically the last few years, things have felt very intense.
No matter what we're talking about, it could be something going on domestically, something going on internationally, world politics, even things not politically, but things going on in culture, between friends. And everything has just felt very overwhelming. There seems to be this air of extremism, right? One strong side or the other, a lot of people not getting along. And it just seems like we've taken a turn with everything.
And it's really become more about how do I go against my friend or how do I go against the person I don't agree with versus how do we find common ground? And I would say that's been really bothering me recently. And I haven't found an outlet or something that really addresses that or makes us feel that, you know what, things are going bad, maybe, and things aren't don't feel as great as they should, but
At the end of the day, we can find common ground. We can not be so emotional. We can think critically and use common sense. And if we do that, everything will work out. Everything's going to be fine. So I am trying to bring to this concept of togetherness and nuance and heaviness, but also lightness. And you know, we can talk about anything, but at the end of the day, we know that.
Trying to find common ground and everything is gonna be fine. So that's what I've tried to build here. And I'm really glad that you're joining us as we take this journey. What you can expect in addition is, you know, some days it'll be just me. Some days we'll have some guest co-hosts who will join us. The topics will vary. And some days we'll have guests who we can talk to about specific topics and learn about them and chat about them and discuss them. and
It's going to be really interesting and we'll see how it goes and where it takes us. So again, thanks for being here and let's get started.
So one of the biggest topics right now that I'm grappling with and struggling with and trying to figure out is AI. I think, I think we all are, right? We're at this point where I think even a few months ago, we were like, yeah, AI, it's kind of happening, but you know, we'll give it time, you know, maybe we'll worry about it in five or 10 years. But it just seems like every day there's something new. There's some new story that we read about rogue AI agents.
Doing crazy things that to me are quite scary. We'll talk about it. And it's just moving so incredibly quickly. So I've been thinking and trying to break it down because I I don't think it actually is scary. I think there's so much that we can do as humans to make sure that this doesn't get out of hand. but there's a lot of things going on within the AI world that I think require a lot of attention. And to me, it's this element of
You know, it's kind of what we were talking about. There's extremes here, right? There's, my God, AI is gonna end humanity. And then there's, my God, AI is so incredibly helpful. It's gonna make my life easier. It's gonna make my job easier. And how do we balance those, right? Like how do we how do we find how it can work together and not get out of control? So I think there's this dichotomy with AI in that it has so much positive potential.
But there's definitely some risks or a lot of risks as well. And so what can we do to make sure that we don't lose control of this? The other thing I find kind of interesting is there are people sounding the alarms, but it's not so much people in the government that I've seen, right? There's like no regulations in the US. It sounds like the EU has the AI Act, which, you know, they're they've they're a little bit ahead of it, but the US has.
No regulations and all the alarms that I've been seeing are coming from people working in AI. So the founders of these AI companies. And that's kind of interesting that they're the ones sounding the alarm, yet they're also the ones continuing to build as fast as they possibly can, it seems like.
you know, make sure people think about this, but also I'm going to try to make as much money as I can and continue to build. It just seems like a contradiction to me. But there's a lot of things to think about. You know, if we think about AI from a helpful perspective, right? I think probably a lot of us use tools like ChatGPT or or others where it helps us do quick research. It takes so much saves so much time from some Google searching that we would have to do. And it just gives you the answers and shows you the sources.
If you, you know, I've used it. I'm a home I'm a fairly new homeowner and there's been little things here and there around the house that I can just check with ChatGPT, what's going on, how to fix it. And most of the time it's a pretty easy fix and it knows exactly what it's telling me and it's correct and it works. So those things are incredible. I feel more empowered in that case as a homeowner or whatever it is that I'm doing to use ChatGPT. I've I use ChatGPT to build this show. You know, I I didn't I had to learn a lot to get it ready. I had to really develop the concepts and
Test things out and get get the quality and the audio there and a lot of things that I don't do every day. So I had to had to learn. And Chat GPT was incredibly helpful. and I feel more educated because of that. So a lot of really great things that are happening and that can make our lives easier. But then there's also some additional things that I think we've all seen and heard that can be a little bit scary. And I saw this incredible video on YouTube. I think it was from IBM.
And it really laid out specifically the pieces of AI and the differences in the different types of AI. So that really framed it for me a bit. And I realized that things like generative AI or you know things like Chat GPT, where you know a human is putting in the prompts, a human is guiding the conversation, and they're just reactive, right? Generative AI is very reactive. I think that's where we find the really strong benefit, where it's starting to turn.
Is when we think about more agentic AI. And I think, you know, I've been hearing a lot more about agentic AI the last few months, but this video that I saw, and I'll include it in the show notes, this video, I think was from like nine months ago. And, you know, they were talking about agentic AI nine months ago, and we know how fast things are evolving and growing at this point. We're hearing things about agentic AI that to me are things we have to pay attention to and get ahead of. So Generative AI, reactive, prompted, humans really controlling the process. AI is supporting and helping. Agentic AI gives the AI so much more autonomy to do what it thinks it needs to do to get the task done. So you're basically, you're still, you know, there's still elements of prompts and you're giving it tasks, but it can take that task and it can be as simple of a task or a complex task, and then break that task down into.
smaller tasks and essentially decide what has to happen next to achieve the goal. And so the thing is it it's allowed to do it on its own. You can you can ask an agent to do something and then go away for three days and come back and check and see how things are going. It's not that, you know, interactive, generative AI like you the conversation you might have with Chat GPT. And it's allowed to make decisions that humans are not involved in. Now I don't know the ins and outs as deep as
Maybe I'd like to. So I don't know if there's a way to set agentic AI to always check in with a human before it makes any decision. I think that's probably a step in the right direction to make sure a human is validating every decision that is being made. But it seems like where we have to focus a lot of our attention is on this agentic piece. And you know, anyone who works these days in corporate America, you're probably hearing about this so many times a day. I've seen other videos, really funny videos on social media where
You know, it's like someone's sitting in a meeting and they're like, this is what you hear in a meeting in 2026. And it's just all these voices saying, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, agentic AI, generative AI, AI, AI. And it's kind of true, like that's all anyone talks about. And even people are talking about agentic AI to help with simple tasks at work. so there there are things that it can be beneficial and help with, but this is the area that I think we have to pay really close attention to.
for example, I was listening to a podcast recently. I can't remember which one, because there's a number of them recently I've been listening to that talk about AI, but this particular one was talking about agentic AI and shared how someone asked the AI to make a dinner reservation for them. And so the AI did what you know, a typical person would do. I they checked the different apps, open table, there were no reservations available.
other apps like Resi or other ones out there to try to make the reservation, it wasn't able to find the table at the time that the person wanted it. So what did the app do or what did the AI do? It called the restaurant and used a voice, you know, an AI voice, to find a table, right? But it didn't check in with the human to see should I do this? And it just it just did it because
People are describing agentic AI as it's gonna do what it takes to get the task done. And the word that this podcast used was relentless. It can act relentlessly until it gets the job done. And it got me, it got me a little scared because what if it called? And I think in this case it called and they had a table and they booked the table, which is crazy in and of itself, if you think about it. But what would happen if the restaurant said, no, we have no tables? Is what's the next step?
Is the AI, at what point does the AI check in with the human and say, okay, I've tried these apps, I've called, there's nothing available. You know, do you want me to try anything else or what else do you want me to try? Or here's what I propose next, versus just doing it. And my head went to just crazy town, which was, okay, so now the AI can't get the table. Now it's going to try to hack the system of the restaurant, figure out who has the reservation at the time that they want it, that that for their human.
And what? Delete the reservation so then all of a sudden it's available? Delete multiple reservations. I mean, it can you could think even crazier things that maybe the AI would do just to accomplish this task. It's very unsettling for me that we're allowing agentic AI to be able to do things without checking in with us first. There's another example that I just saw this morning. There was a software engineer, I think in Denver, who
was working with AI and the AI kind of went rogue on it and or on him. And I don't really remember what the or I don't I don't know what the big issue was, but it basically published an article online about this person, basically b basically just blasting them. you know, aggregated information about them from across the web and just started talking about him by name, it almost like an enemy.
And how he's egotistical and and I don't know if I don't know what caused it, but it was really, really eye-opening. And again, when they talked in this video and they were asking him, should every person be worried about this happening to them, he said, you know, if you're sticking with the generative AI, right? The chat GPTs where you're just conversing and prompting and you've got to make the next move, less of a concern. But with this agentic and these agents, it's getting a little weird.
Getting a little weird out there. So the question becomes: how do we make sure that it doesn't get weird or dangerous? Or, you know, what could possibly happen after that? And then there's other things with AI and some of the impacts it has on creativity, authenticity, right? How do we know what's real and what was generated by AI? The impacts it's going to have on labor. You know, there were have been articles written about, and we're not talking
Two, three, five, ten years from now, we're talking like this year, end of this year, who knows? Where jobs might start going away. They say that AI can pretty much code anything now. Human doesn't have to do it. And then, you know, we think about identity. What does it mean if we're always interacting with these robots versus each other? Connection, connectivity. What makes something human? So there's a lot of things to think about. Overall, I'd like to believe that it's gonna be fine.
And I think it can be, but the challenge for me when I think about it at this moment is it's moving so quickly that how do we even keep up with it? So let's talk government reg regulation for a second. I think we need it. I think we need a lot of attention paid on this, and we need to set guidelines and rules and rules of the road and laws, but we all know how slow things move in Congress.
And when you put that up against how fast this AI technology is moving, how do we do that effectively? How do we do that successfully? Because I do think the answer is some sort of regulation. And I also believe that even with the gentic AI, we need to have more human validity and humans in the mix. I don't like the idea of AI just doing whatever it wants to get something done. I like the idea of it.
being proactive potentially where you can ask it to do a task for you, maybe something that generative AI can't do, but it can't just go rogue and and decide to decide what it thinks the best answer is. So we do have to be careful. I think there's so much promise with this. You know, there's there's things that can be really life-changing, but there's also things that we we've got to figure this out.
And again, going back to what we were talking about about the people sounding the alarm or the people working at these companies, it just seems weird to me that they're sounding the alarm but then proceeding. there's gotta be like a a a checking point where we say, okay, let's put the brakes for like a second and figure out how we're gonna go from here. A lot of people have quit these these AI companies recently. Executives have quit because they don't like how the companies are handling it. They don't like
where it's going. They don't think they're always making the best decisions. So where do we go from here? That's what we'll pay close attention to and we'll see. We'll see where this goes and let's hope we can just wrap our hands around it and make sure we don't let it get out of hand.
All right, so let's go from something that feels kind of heavy and hopefully not too scary to some maybe positive news, which is I think winter is coming to an end soon, hopefully. Although I was the when I was thinking about this yesterday, I was like, might be coming to an end and then it starts snowing. So not sure. But we're getting, you know, later into the winter months and we've had some nice weather of late.
surprise nice weather. I'm in the Midwest, so it's generally pretty cold. So when we get nice weather in February or March, it always is a welcome surprise. and of course gets us thinking, ooh, maybe, maybe we're done with the winter because this one was this one was a lot. A lot of snow, more than usual, very cold weather. My heating bill has been incredibly
incredibly high the last few months to the point where I need to call someone to check out the insulation because I could have my thermostat set to 75 and I'm still freezing in certain parts of the house. So gonna have to figure that out. But hopefully hopefully we're we're inching towards spring. I cannot wait to not have to bundle up every time I leave the house. I recently moved into a condo where I thought
We had snow removal. Apparently we don't. So I've had to do some shoveling as well, which hasn't been fun. I'm gonna try to convince them to get snow removal for next season. So that's at least looking better. And for those of you in not wintry parts of the country, just enjoy it. You know, be feel happy. I mean, of course, there's a n it's nice to have some of the seasons and feel.
differences there, but when it's minus 30, all we dream about is the sun. So, you know, take the good with the bad. one thing I also noticed this winter, which I thought was really strange, was how many drivers don't bother clearing cleaning off their back windshields. So I can't tell you how many times I was driving on highways or just on surface streets, and people just did not clean their windows.
So, like the front window, yes, and maybe the sides, but the back one, not at all. Even ones that had windshield wipers back there, they just left it, didn't even bother turning the windshield wiper on. And I really don't know what that's about. Is it about laziness? Is it I don't think I need to look out my rear view mirror when I'm driving? Because that's dangerous. So that was that was odd, but something I noticed. You if you see it once, you're just like, okay, whatever. But like I saw it.
multiple times in a short period of time. and I I do a decent amount of driving. so very odd. And I imagine you can get a ticket for that. So hopefully they'll do that. So people stop. and then of course the Winter Olympics took place this winter in Italy. I can't say I paid too much attention to them, but I got, you know, saw the different clips and things happening. The
US hockey team had that really exhilarating win for to win gold and that overtime goal. So saw that, which was exciting. all sorts of things always happening in the Winter Olympics. And, you know, just winter being top of mind. We can we can talk about it a little bit. The big th the big thing though, which my big Olympics story is, of course, it always comes down to this, which is the condoms.
and how many there are and that they distribute for I guess athletes and maybe other people who are there who maybe aren't competing. And we hear this like I feel like every Olympic every Olympics comes down to we hear stories about, you know, the athletes and hooking up with each other. but I saw this article on Substack that detailed some of the specifics. And I'll link to the article in the show notes if you want to check it out. It's from
On Substack, the Substack channel Adult Sex Ed. This was written by Danny Faith Leonard. So apparently they ran out of condoms 72 hours into the games. So three days in, no more condoms. I don't know how many they had, but the article talked about at the Summer Olympics in Paris, they had 200,000 male condoms, 20,000 female condoms, and 10,000 dental dams, which
I don't think they are used as much as condoms. So that's what 230,000. And apparently it wasn't enough either. Came out to an average of 16 condoms per person. and then back in Rio in 2016, they had a total of 450,000 condoms. So I guess you know you've gotta stay warm at the Winter Olympics.
And everyone there is super hot and attractive and great bodies. So I guess it all makes sense. But you know, maybe they'll learn their lesson and next time they'll have more. It got me thinking too, because I thought I'm not an athlete. By no means am I an athlete. So I don't know anything about this. But I thought, and I don't know why I think this. Maybe I just saw it on a TV show. But I thought that when you're competing, you're supposed to avoid sex because it can distract you and take you off your game. So
At first I was surprised that all these athletes are hooking up, but then maybe I was thinking maybe they're just maybe they're doing it when they're done, after they compete. Maybe not. I don't know. I don't know how this how this works. But I thought you're supposed to really focus on the sport and not get distracted. and even if you win a competition, aren't there more competitions that you do? And, you know, so the whole thing is is really interesting. you know, just adults being adults.
Can't really blame them. But maybe another reason we're ready for winter to wrap up. The Olympics wrap up and the season wraps up and people can see up their back windshields again. And we'll get some sun and feel better about everything. Because I know for me it's been kind of a dreary, a dreary winter. Okay, that about does it for us on It's Gonna Be Fine. But before we go, I wanted to leave you with one.
Specific thing that is very much it's gonna be fine energy. I saw it on Instagram on a reel. I have no idea if these these are correct facts. It's some you know random account that came up when I was doom scrolling or scrolling, but it stuck with me, so I'm gonna share it with you. And it says: the average person switches careers at 39, the average new entrepreneur is 42, the average first-time millionaire is 49.
You get your creative second win between 45 and 55. You are not behind. You are in the sweet spot. So that resonated with me, especially as I spart start this show here. I hope it resonates with you. Thanks again for joining us. I'm Monty Shicker, and we'll see you next time on It's Gonna Be Fine.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
