A Letter From Chelsea: AI, Julia Child, And Existential Dread

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By Chelsea Fagan

Next summer, I'm hosting a retreat in the south of France with my dear friend Ashley C. Ford. It's based on the work of Julia Child -- specifically, her book of letters with her best friend -- and will cover several days of cooking, eating, tours, and classes curated by Ashley and myself. (We also have three of 37 spots that are scholarship-based, and applications are open through mid-January.) It's the first retreat like this I've ever done, and when the company initially approached me last year about hosting one, I felt hesitant. In some ways, in-person events had become a scary thing for me, a door I was very anxious to open. 

The Financial Diet took an enormous financial hit in the early days of the pandemic, mostly related to the inability to gather. Prior to that, in-person events were a big part of our business strategy -- as it happened, we were actually on a multi-city tour across Canada to support another author's book when the borders closed, and when my husband was made to leave the country for nearly two years due to immigration issues. These problems were unrelated, but they combined in my brain to form one large, dark cloud over that entire period of my life. Since then, while we have held smaller one-off events, and I have gone on my own book tours (which do not impact TFD's finances or success), I have been largely bearish about gathering in-person as a tentpole of any business strategy. 

Part of this is probably corporate PTSD from seeing the bottom fall out of my company's finances in such a short period of time, but it is also not irrational. Since 2020, the MICE industry (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions) has been very turbulent, though it does seem to now be in a strong growth pattern. Travel, hospitality, dining: all of these sectors have been on unpredictable cycles in the past few years, with many small businesses like ours not making it through. (I'm reminded of this any time I dust off a city-specific list of restaurants I love, and half of them have since closed.) Experts seem optimistic on travel growth in the coming years, as it becomes more accessible and slightly less costly to the environment. 

To be clear, I am doing next year's retreat separate from TFD, but I'm treating it as a kind of learning experiment for how something like this could look if we were to do it more seriously, and to eventually own the process from end to end. And though I did not know this when I agreed to host it nearly a year ago, I have actually come to view this retreat as the start of a new chapter of I (and TFD's) stories. In the past five years, not only have in-person events rebounded as a category -- and therefore become much more stable as an investment for a small, independently funded business like ours -- I have also come to believe that they are one of the few things that make me feel optimistic about the future.

I experience, like I'm sure many of you do, an enormous amount of existential dread about AI. As someone whose company has always been digital-first, and who has long benefitted from the relatively low overhead of such a model, I'm quickly realizing that even if we don't have the burden of things like warehousing or supply chains, simply paying actual human beings a fair wage is suddenly an enormous expense many competitors are simply bypassing. 

I want to be clear here and say that any iteration of my business that eschews human labor (and well-paid labor, at that) in favor of AI generated content is not worth having, and I would simply shut down before I went that route. But in the meantime -- in this scary middle ground -- I must reckon with both the reality that every single bit of authentic media is drowning in an increasingly-credible sea of computer-generated imitators, and the knowledge that not embracing such technology will mean running the already-difficult race of a sustainable business with a significant handicap. 

What's worse is how deeply fractured our world has already become just from primarily engaging with each other from behind heavily manipulated algorithms. Our most recent video essay touched on this, but it's not just that we have learned to see the world through the prism of our phones, but rather that nearly every social media company's business model depends on warping that prism to make us more angry, more scared, more distrustful and alienated from each other to increase our engagement. And these trends were happening when most of the people on either side of these algorithmic funhouse mirrors were actual people. Now that much of what we're seeing and reacting to is actually just AI bots flooding the space and warping perception -- unsurprisingly, credible AI video is already being used to create viral racist "news stories" for people to get angry at -- I feel genuine horror at how much worse this is likely to get.

When I wrote my book, Having People Over, which is nominally about dinner parties but mostly about rebuilding fractured communities, I did not have AI in mind. I honestly just have always been someone who loves hosting, and it felt like a good book to write at a time when fewer people are being raised with those kinds of social skills. But now -- and especially after wrapping a 13-city tour for it, where thousands of women showed up with letters and homemade baked goods and beautiful stories, where they exchanged numbers and made friends and shared hugs -- I can't view it through any other prism. Getting together feels not just like one of the few things AI can't take from us, but also something we desperately need more of in a crisis of loneliness and alienation. 

I was joined at several of my stops by local food banks (I'm doing a YouTube Live fundraiser with one of them on the 18th, so keep your eyes peeled for that!), and it reminded me how important the gathering aspect of political and social engagement is as well. I've always been big into in-person canvassing because I feel that I'm sort of naturally gifted for speaking to hostile strangers about politics, that's not the only kind of in-person action we need. We need food banks and community centers and shelters and safe spaces for people to get together and meet each other. We need facilitators, and if you can facilitate a dinner party, you can facilitate a political action meeting. 

At least for now, part of my work will always be in digital media. I want to create content that everyone can enjoy regardless of means, location, or ability. I also love books, and love that we live in a time where you don't need a physical copy in order to enjoy it. But when I think of the future, I think I want to return to in-person as much as possible. Even dipping my toes into the "lifestyle" content space with my book, I find that the delta between how something feels in real life versus how it looks on social media -- AI aside -- is night and day. No shade (maybe some shade) to the lifestyle creators who have built empires making their homes or dinners look really, really good, but I don't see my future in that kind of spiraling algorithmic perfection. A meal is not wonderful because it looks flawless on a phone screen, it is wonderful because it was cooked with love, because it was shared with friends, because it smelled and tasted delicious. It was a real moment between real people, and it may not live forever in a photo, but it was enough as it was.

There is no cure to the existential dread of AI, at least not one that I'm aware of. I think we are all just muddling through, reckoning with the reality that our futures and industries are in the hands of some of the dreariest, most sociopathic motherfuckers on the planet. Everywhere we look, human creativity and expression and triumph are being undercut by a program that stole from those same humans' work to produce a cheap knockoff. It's depressing, and I don't have a perfect solution to the problem. 

But for me, I will be turning my gaze increasingly away from my devices, towards the people and neighborhood and world around me. I will be throwing parties, organizing for causes, hosting and attending everything from classes to political actions to dreamy retreats. (It's a small thing, but I personally filled out the staffing for a Christmas banquet for asylum recipients later this month and it feels like the coolest thing I've done all year. I can't wait to do it, and to meet all the fellow New Yorkers who signed up through me!) We are all on this planet together, and are all full, three-dimensional human beings who must be experienced as we actually are, not as we appear through a screen. The world is changing very fast, and AI may indeed replace much of what we hold dear, but it cannot replace people coming together in community. It cannot replace a few people in a room, laughing over a good meal. 

January 8th: How To Use Monarch — This is a totally FREE workshop for both new and existing Monarch users to learn how to get the most out of our team's favorite budgeting app! This workshop will be co-hosted by Alexa Claire (TFD content and Production Manager) along with Rachel Samara (TFD Marketing Director) who both use Monarch daily! In this workshop, we’ll walk you step-by-step through how to set up Monarch, personalize it to your financial goals, and use its most powerful features to take control of your spending. Whether you’re budgeting for the first time or looking to finally stay consistent, this session will help you build a system that actually fits your real life. Come ready to follow along, ask questions, and leave with a clear structure you can start using immediately. [Please note this workshop was originally scheduled for December 4th, but we moved it to this new date]

*This link will prompt you to download Monarch + show proof of download before being sent to the workshop registration page

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We offer 3 tier options:

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