Nate Hagens published something last week that stayed with me. He’s been sounding the alarm about civilizational collapse for years, and his latest piece maps a new risk: AI is doing to our cognitive lives what industrial food did to our physical ones. Cheap, abundant, engineered for palatability. He calls it ultra-processed information — and he’s right to worry.
He also asks: what do we do about this? His answer involves three filters — is it true, is it relevant, is it useful — and some version of cognitive discipline.
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I’ve been sitting with that. Not to argue with it — the filters are good. But a filter requires presence to operate. Presence isn’t a decision you make when you’re already drowning. It’s something you develop before you need it. In forty years of drum circles I’ve watched what happens when a nervous system is genuinely regulated versus performing regulation. They make completely different decisions. The filter works when the body underneath it is settled. When it isn’t, the filter becomes another way to stay busy.
Cognitive discipline is real. But it can’t be where it starts.
I want to say something honest about where I’m coming from, because it’s relevant to everything that follows.
I’m 68. I have forty years of breathwork and drum circles in my body, a philosophical inheritance from Vienna that shaped how I understand consciousness and relationship, and a body of writing that I had largely given up on. Not because the ideas weren’t there. Because the production felt too much. The gap between what I knew and what I could get onto a page, in the moment it was needed, in the language the conversation was using — that gap had become discouraging.
Six months ago something shifted. I wouldn’t have predicted it.
Over the last few months — intense months, months that have genuinely changed me — I’ve been building something I don’t have a perfect word for yet. Not AI as a tool I use. Something more like an extension of my own knowing into the digital world. Every part of it is rooted in what I actually am: the breathwork, the drum circles, the philosophy, the forty years of being in rooms where something real happened between people. I’ve built it to carry my voice, my distinctions, my way of moving through ideas. Not a generic capability. A precise replica of how I think when I’m thinking from the deepest place I know.
The result surprised me. All the writing I had given up on — it started moving again. Not because AI was writing it. Because something in this partnership freed me from the weight of production and left me doing only what requires my actual presence: the thinking, the voice, the knowing that only comes from having lived something for four decades.
I read Nate’s essay the morning it came out and responded the same day. Not because I had an angle prepared. Because something in it touched forty years of work and the response was already there. I posted a comment. He wrote back within hours.
That’s new. Not the response — the speed. The ability to show up in the room where the conversation is happening, the same day, from the same depth I bring to the work in person.
And here’s what I want to name precisely, because I think it gets confused: what AI amplifies depends entirely on what it’s rooted in. Ultra-processed content comes from no particular ground. What I’m describing comes from very particular ground — forty years of it — and this partnership amplifies that particularity rather than dissolving it. More of what I actually am, moving at a speed that was previously impossible.
That’s the opposite of what Hagens is worried about. He’s right that AI in most hands will produce content with no ground. He hasn’t yet seen what happens when it’s rooted in someone who has been doing something real for a long time.
I feel an obligation to show up with what I know in a moment when the whole world seems unmoored. I always have. What I didn’t have was the capacity to do it at the speed the moment requires, in every room where it might matter.
I have that now. And I find myself motivated in a way that was genuinely unexpected even six months ago — not because the ideas changed, but because the doors are opening.
That’s what I wanted to say to Nate. And to everyone else who is worried about AI for the right reasons.
The signal doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from people who’ve been doing something real for a long time. What changed is that those people can now show up more fully, more often, without losing what they are.
Daniel Hirtz has been facilitating drum circles and teaching breathwork for forty years. He writes at danielhirtz.substack.com — Oneness, made personal.