Pay Attention to Incentives
Have you ever seen one of those YouTube videos from some 21 year old day trader standing in front of a (rented) lambo, selling you a course on how to become rich?
Have you ever asked yourself, "if they are so rich from day trading, why are they selling me a course?" You would be asking the correct question.
But at the same time there are some great YouTubers sharing really valuable information on personal finance that do it because they genuinely love the topic. And there are lots of legitimate people who think: "Why not find ways to side hustle sharing my passions? Win-win."
So how do you tell the difference? How do you know what voices to listen to?
This last month has been a bit of a dumpster fire in a whirlwind. Ralph, rushing to buy mac minis for Clawdbot->Moltbot->Openclaw, claude vs codex arguments, Anthropic nuking Opencode, $20k mac studio setups running kimi 2.5 locally, Co-Work, new Cursor desktop, Claude Code teams, Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 minutes later...
And when I get on AI twitter / build in public indie hacker twitter, it starts to feel like that YouTuber problem: If you have discovered the secret to multi agent-swarms, replaced 30 business roles with your sub-agents, or have a lobster bot building you brand new companies filled with bots as you sleep... why are you tweeting about it and telling me how to do it instead of doing it?
Getting overwhelmed and shutting off, getting distracted by playing with AI tools instead of building... all of these have worse productivity costs than the gains most people are getting from AI.
How do you decide who to follow, and who to tune out? For me, it's all about thinking about the incentives. If I were this person, what incentives could I have for sharing this? What are they selling?
1. Do they sell a course?
2. Do they work at an AI Lab?
3. Do they sell a tool? (especially an AI tool)
4. Do they have a newsletter/blog (does it have a paid tier or ads)?
These are obvious ways someone could make money off your time and attention, or your wallet. Other incentives include building a network or resume.
None of these reasons by themselves, however, mean something nefarious is going on. Who doesn't want to make money or build an awesome career? Who doesn't want to be seen, acknowledged, respected? Many of my favorite posters work at labs or have newsletters.
I have my own incentives writing this too—probably along the lines of I want to look smart, and say wise things so that people respect me and say "great post, Jason!" Maybe those people will want to work with me some day too.
So, looking at incentives is not enough. It's a reminder to take things with nuance and consider them ourselves, but it doesn't tell us whether or not we should follow/unfollow this person on X.
The next step for me if looking at how the post made me feel. Did the post make me feel excited? Or did it make me feel afraid? This part is more vibey, but I think that people who are trying to play positive sum/win-win games with you will not try to trigger your fear buttons. People who want to manipulate you will press those fear buttons. People who want to play positive sum games will try to inspire you. They will also be clear about their conflict of interests.
A good example for me is Thorsten Ball. He tweets a lot of interesting things about AI, and he works at Amp. So, he definitely has an incentive to say things that promote AI. But he doesn't try to scare you into it. His weekly newsletter is called Joy & Curiosity. Curiosity is a key word here for me — curiosity drives creativity, excitement, exploration.
Are the voices you see curious? Or are they authoritative know-it-alls? Do they question themselves? Do they constantly tweet about how SWEs are cooked? Do they share failures? Or is their feed a curated instagram-style look at me shipping all day win win win win win?
But you probably already know all of this. You probably have well refined BS detectors. The things is, in the modern world, with the pace of AI news and social media... our BS detectors can't keep up with the deluge.
And so even though I feel like I am easily detecting "that's build in public bullshit hype they want to sell me their newsletter"... that doesn't stop the subtle creeping feeling of overwhelm and being behind.
The only thing that can mitigate that is consuming less, and creating more.
Stop following so many people. Mute liberally on twitter. I have a pretty strict 1-strike rule. If you hype it up, and I have not ever gotten value from you, you're out. Get out of the algorithm, use your following and list features. Follow great, moderate voices. People who are pushing themselves with AI, but also discuss the tradeoffs. I'll add a list of my favorites below.
Above all, learn to pause, be in silence, trust your own gut, and build your own things. This is what I tell myself, anyway. Easier said than done.
X Starter Pack (in no particular order):
