I’ve Been Putting the Wrong People First [Raw Session]

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what people actually mean when they say, "Put yourself first."

For the longest time, I never liked the phrase.

I still don't like the phrase technically, because it does sound selfish.

It sounds like you're ignoring people.

It sounds like deciding that your needs matter more than everyone else around you.

But the more I look at it and think about it and see it in my life, I don't think that's what it really means anymore.

I think putting yourself first is really about having priorities and being willing to live by those priorities and rules that you put for your life.

Because if you say yes to everything, if you try to keep everyone else happy and keep the situation feeling comfortable for everyone in it, eventually you stop making decisions based on what matters to you and what matters to the people around you, your family, your closest people.

You start making decisions based on avoiding disappointing someone else. Disappointing someone who's not even part of your immediate family or your closest inner circle.

And I think I've done that more than I realized.

01:23 — Saying Yes Is Easy

One of the focuses in the book that I've been working on and trying my best to get out is be willing to say no.

Not because saying no is powerful, but because saying yes is way too easy.

Someone asks. Someone needs something. Someone has expectations.

You don't even stop to think. You just say yes.

It's almost like an automatic response that we're all trained to, depending on how you were raised and where you grew up and what you were taught.

Saying yes and not letting other people down becomes the normal default.

Because the uncomfortable part isn't saying no.

The uncomfortable part is watching someone be disappointed.

And that's why you say yes.

Because you don't want to see that disappointment on someone's face. You don't want to let someone else down.

Most of us would rather inconvenience ourselves for months, years, go into financial problems, make our closest people be disappointed, than make a stranger disappointed or feel uncomfortable.

We'd rather do that than sit through thirty seconds of awkwardness.

And I started realizing that's completely backwards when you look at it from the other point of view.

02:46 — Choosing My Wife First

Here's something. I do have some small examples of this, and one is a recent one that happened earlier this summer.

I have a friend who was coming to town and wanted to just stop by. He didn't even want to stay at our house. He just wanted to stop by and see my home, because I've known this guy for a long time and he's never been to where I live.

So he wanted to see my surroundings.

He's a friend that lets me stay with him when I go visit his area.

Normally, someone coming to the house isn't a big deal, but my wife's never seen this person, never talked to him, and she gets uncomfortable around strangers really.

And she doesn't enjoy having people over because she always feels uncomfortable.

So immediately I felt stuck.

I was thinking about disappointing my friend.

I was thinking about making things awkward.

I was trying to figure out how to make everybody happy.

Then I realized, basically what it was, was I wasn't going to say no to him and I wasn't going to let my wife know he was coming.

So how do I navigate this awkward situation?

And then I realized I was solving the wrong problem.

Who comes first?

And for me, that's an easy one in that situation.

Once I put it in that perspective, the one person I have to make sure is happy is my wife.

That doesn't mean I don't care about my friend.

It doesn't mean I don't want him to see my home and see where I live. He lets me stay at his place. I get to go see where he lives.

It means if those two priorities are in conflict, I should already know, and I do already know, which one always wins.

And the funny part is, as soon as I accepted that, the stress on me disappeared. The stress on my wife disappeared.

My friend made fun of it a little bit, but he understood. I could tell he understood.

And in the end, we found a way.

As soon as that stress and discomfort disappeared, my wife was more open because she didn't feel obligated. So once that was taken away, it became a much more friendly, easygoing situation.

So he came over. He got to meet my wife for the first time.

It's funny because I have friends from a lot of different places because I traveled a lot during my work. So I have all these friends across North America, really.

And my wife has heard of all of them, but she's probably never met 90% of them.

She's heard of them. They've seen her. They've been in the room when I've talked to my wife. They've been in videos, like FaceTime, where my wife has seen them and said hello.

But only from a digital social aspect like that. Never in person or shake-a-hand type thing.

But back to it. Now she got to meet one of my friends, and he got to come see my house and say hi to my wife.

And it worked out pretty good.

Because as soon as I understood where to put my priority, once it becomes a simple yes or no based off your priorities, your rules, and your guidelines, you take all that discomfort and thought process out of it.

Because it becomes, I'm following my rules.

Answer one. Answer two. Answer three.

And when they all add up, then that's the winner.

There's no analytical part about it.

So that made it really good.

That one came up because I had one friend who said, we were out watching a game, and my friend got to meet some of my coworkers. It came up about coming to my house.

And one friend said, "Why won't you let him over?"

I said, "Because I'd rather my wife be happy. I'd rather disappoint my friend and keep my wife happy than make my friend happy and have my wife mad at me."

When you put it in perspective, it's just, who are the most important people in your life?

And I'd rather make those people happy and comfortable.

07:18 — Knowing My Edges

Here's another one that came up.

It's pretty close around the same group of friends because they live far away, and every year I go there.

A few videos ago, I've talked about not drinking anymore and how that affects my life, why I do it, and things that have come out of it that make life a little bit better. A lot better, actually.

But every year I do take a trip with those friends. I go visit them because there's a big music festival. We do a lot of barbecues, backyard pools, go to the beach.

And we do a lot of hanging out because there's a lot of friends in that area. I spent many years working there.

Some are old coworkers. Some are friends I met along the way.

But there's always drinking involved.

So since I stopped drinking, I've been looking at that trip totally different.

My friends would absolutely respect my decision, and they've already told me that. They'd never put pressure on me.

One of them even said they're willing to pay for my trip, pay for all my expenses, just to make sure I come and I'm part of the annual trip basically.

And that means a lot to me.

This isn't about bad friends.

It's about knowing myself.

There's a chapter in the book about knowing your edges, and this is what that revolves around.

I know what the environment that I'll be putting myself in is. I know how fresh I am off not drinking, and how easily drinking becomes part of that fun time basically.

I know the habits that are connected and how slips can happen easily.

And I know my edges. So once a slip happens, I know how quickly it slides and gets progressively worse.

Then it's a restart, which I know I can do, and I've done it many times, but I just don't want to go there again.

And knowing that I don't want to do it again, I know I want to protect myself.

That means I have to say no, as much as it disappoints, as much as people are willing to go out of their way to make me not feel that way.

I just don't want to put myself in the situation. I don't want to put them in the situation.

It's not that I would become some kind of monster. It's not that.

I just set goals. I set priorities. And I want to stick to them.

So I think next year is going to be a different story.

Even this year, I went to a few parties, barbecues, did the camping thing. I haven't gone to a concert. I've been to work events. We've gone out boating, things like that.

So obviously, I don't have the problem of saying no to everything. I don't have the problem of staying away.

I'd just rather limit my exposure, which is really me saying no.

And I have to feel okay with that because I put myself first, then I put my family first, then I put my friends first.

So in this situation, it's me, then my family, and my friends have to get a no, which is uncomfortable and disappointing.

But they're all fine with it.

10:41 — Working From Home

Another example in this, putting family first, is my working condition.

I do work from home. I do have an office I can go to, but I work remotely and my wife works from home.

For years, I've always gone to a friend's house, a coworker's house. Even when we weren't coworkers, I still went to his home.

And that's where I work.

I have an office there. I have my computer, monitors set up, my own desk. I have my snacks there.

It's more or less to have company in the same area so we can work off each other with coding and business decisions and testing and things like that.

But lately I started asking myself, why am I spending so much of my week somewhere besides my home?

Why am I spending time away from my wife and my kids?

Because my kids work from home or do school, so they're always here. My wife's always here.

So there's spontaneous walks, spontaneous lunches, going in the pool, errands around the house, making supper.

There's all kinds of things that I could easily add to our life as a family just by being present, being here.

Removing that commute time to there and back home. Removing being away and only talking through text or messages to see what the plan is.

Or missing a walk because I wasn't here when the perfect time happened.

So I know my friend is possibly taking this a little bit personally.

I think because he's so used to it. It's been such an ingrained thing for over a decade.

And now all of a sudden, I've kind of abruptly stopped it.

Usually in the summertime I do anyway, because in summer we do have the pool. It's beautiful here. I get to go for runs, go for bike rides.

If I have a break between meetings and work, I can just hop on my bike and go out. Or like I said, my wife and I can go to the park and go for a walk.

So I'd rather be here for the spontaneous moments to create memories and life and connection than be at a desk in my friend's home away from my family and the people.

So it's uncomfortable, but I have to put myself first and my family first in that situation.

Because it's just the way I look at how much time's left. How many summers we have.

And there's another part where I talk about this.

I don't want to miss those opportunities just because of me putting the wrong people first.

13:29 — Stay Calm and Solve the Right Problem

This comes back to another time recently this summer.

Stay calm, solve problems. That's in the book.

I realized it applies here too, because the problem usually isn't that someone asks something of you.

The problem is that you immediately take responsibility for their feelings.

You start trying to fix everything.

And I do have an actual example with my kid for this.

You start trying to make every outcome perfect.

Not just the outcome for the people closest to yourself. You're trying to make the outcome perfect for everyone involved.

Instead, you need to stop and ask, what's actually happening here?

Who's responsible?

What belongs to me and my family?

What doesn't?

Once you answer those questions, the decision usually becomes extremely clear and stress is removed.

14:22 — Family First in a Panic

Like I said, my kid recently took a big trip helping their partner or friend move from one part of the U.S. to another part.

Along the trip, we became aware that there was no place to stay.

The apartment or condo or whatever they were planning on living in once they moved there was not real. It was sort of a fake scam thing.

So now they're traveling in the middle of packing up a life in one city, state, to move completely across the continent to another state and city where there's no destination at the moment.

There is no place to park and unload.

So once that happened, I get a call of panic, and the mind automatically goes everywhere at once.

You start thinking about what's going to happen. What are we going to do?

And you start thinking about the friend, about the situation, what's going wrong and what can go wrong.

Who should have planned better?

There's a lot of blame that happens.

But my first thought, once I heard it, I was driving and I was told about this, I stopped and I said, this is okay.

Is our kid okay?

Is our family okay?

That's my first priority.

Is there any issue with my child?

Is everything going to be fine?

And everything's fine, yes.

They're driving. They have hotels already booked along the way. They have Airbnbs along the way once they get to the final destination.

And it's not because everyone else doesn't matter in this situation.

It's because in that moment, I need to know where the center is.

Where are the things that I put closest to my life?

What situation are they being put in?

And is that controllable? Is that safe? Is it comfortable? Is it what we need?

If we need a hotel, we'll get a hotel.

If we need an Airbnb, I'll look it up.

And that's the first thing I did.

I looked up Airbnbs. I looked up hotels to see what was available and what I could get.

And once I had that under control, it was fine.

I even said, well, we could change flights.

I looked up changing flights, what the cost would be, what was available.

All that's fine.

So once that was clear, now we can breathe.

We can get a hotel. We can get an Airbnb. We can even change the flight.

Sure, that leaves the other friend in a bad situation, but my family, my people, are first and taken care of.

Now we can take time. Now we can look at helping the overall situation because we know we're safe and we're fine.

So we can look at places to live, different contacts to deal with. We can weed through the apartment options. We can figure out a solution.

But the order mattered here.

Family first did not mean no one else gets help.

It meant we stopped pretending every concern had the same weight.

And I think that's the part I'm starting to understand.

Putting yourself first, or putting your family first, is not always about walking away from people.

Sometimes it's about getting the priorities straight enough that you can help without losing the plot.

17:32 — Trusting the Bigger Feeling

I think part of this is age.

I look at life a little different now than I used to.

Not in a dramatic way. Just in a more honest way with myself.

With age, obviously there are only so many summers.

There's only so many winters. Only so many trips we can take.

There's only so many certain years where I'm going to be able to do the physical activities I want to do, like go paddle boarding, kayaking, hiking, any kind of thing that's strenuous.

Once you reach a certain age, obviously a lot of those mobility and risk-taking things are not part of your life anymore.

And you have to stop saying, I'll go next year.

Because before next year starts, it becomes less guaranteed than it used to feel.

Every year takes one out of the bucket.

I just took a trip back home, and honestly, part of me didn't want to go.

I like being home, especially in the summertime.

The weather here is great. There are beaches. I have my pool.

I love my routine of running outdoors and biking, and I knew where I was going, I wasn't going to get that.

But there was part of me that looked at the trip and thought, do I really want to leave right now?

But then there was that other part that asked a better question.

How many more chances am I going to have to go home?

How many more times am I going to get back there?

How many summers are going to line up where I can spend a week or two with friends and family with no obligations or pressures, have a place to stay, everyone's there, everyone's healthy?

And when I looked at it that way, the answer felt different.

But it also felt easy.

Missing some good weather at home matters, but it doesn't matter as much as the memories and making other people who want to see me.

My mother really wanted to spend time with me.

My nephews are getting older, and I had a chance to see all of them play their favorite sports, play together, hang out with them.

And I got to hang out with my friends and their kids.

So the weather didn't matter as much as seeing people.

And it didn't matter as much as choosing something I knew would probably mean more in the long run.

I think I trust that gut feeling more than I used to now.

Not every gut feeling.

Some gut feelings are just fear.

Some are just avoidance.

Some are just wanting comfort right away, ignoring the uncomfortable, being scared of it.

But this was a gut feeling to go home.

I knew I had to do it.

Not because I felt that something was going to happen or go wrong, but the timing. I knew that the timing was right.

I knew that I hadn't been home in such a long time, or hadn't seen these people in such a long time, that it was going to mean just as much to them as it was to me.

And that's a feeling that says this matters.

So I paid attention to it, and I did it.

And it was an amazing time.

So don't let a short-term flinch make decisions for you, because I think that happens more than people realize.

We avoid being uncomfortable for a few minutes or days, and then we miss something that could have stayed with us for years.

We say no because the logistics feel annoying.

We stay home because leaving feels uncomfortable, inconvenient.

We avoid the conversation because it feels awkward.

We keep the routine because changing it doesn't feel right.

But really, sometimes you've got to shake it up.

And sometimes comfortable is good.

Sometimes staying home is the right choice.

But sometimes the flinch that's telling you not to do it is just the first layer.

Because you feel like it's uncomfortable, you just automatically say no.

Which is the opposite. You say no to yourself, you say yes to others.

It's pretty funny how it works out.

And when we let that first layer control everything, we can end up building a life that's technically comfortable, but quietly smaller than it needs to be.

And that's what I'm trying to pay more attention to now.

Not just what feels easy today, but what I'll be glad I chose later.

22:02 — Closing

I'm still learning all this.

I'm still playing with it.

Obviously I'm getting older, so I'm trying to say yes to more things, or try more things, and ignore that little voice that's telling me not to, and trust the gut that says, "Go for it."

I don't think putting yourself first means being selfish anymore.

I think it means being honest about the life you're trying to build.

For me, that means my health, sobriety, marriage, family.

Those things have moved higher than they used to be.

That doesn't mean I care less about my friends or how they feel.

I'm not ignoring anyone or putting things to the side.

It doesn't mean I'm trying to push those people away or any people away.

It just means I finally have a better order in my mind.

I'm prioritizing things a little different to make my life set up in a better way.

And it helps me make my decisions easier and clearer.

Some people are going to be disappointed with that, and that's okay.

Because if your friends or the people around you are disappointed, that's a good thing in a way because it means they care and they want to spend time with you and they enjoy your company.

But it also means hopefully they respect it.

And once they understand what you're doing, then they know that you're putting your priorities first. You're putting your family first, yourself first.

And they're not excluded from that.

It's just that there are times when you and your family are higher on the list.

Because disappointing someone isn't always the same thing as doing something wrong.

Sometimes it's simply the cost of building a life that's actually aligned with what matters most to you, and making sure you make a lasting life further in the future.

Your family is the one that's going to be with you the longest.

My wife is going to be the one that's with me pretty much forever.

Same with my kids.

So I need to make sure that my priorities are put in line with that and them.

Thanks for watching.

Bye.

AI Is Creating a Trust Gap [Raw Session]

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I recently, on my vacation back home, was watching my nephews use AI. And it made me realize how differently people are experiencing this whole thing.

Because when adults talk about AI, we talk about it like it is this massive turning point.

I believe it is. I think it is one of the most game-changing technologies we are going to see for a long time. It changes jobs, industry, creativity, trust, and almost every aspect of technology.

Those things might all be true.

But when I watch younger people use it, I do not feel like they see it the same way at all.

00:41 — Kids Treat AI Like An App

They were not staring at it like some miracle. They were not sitting there having a deep conversation about what it means for humanity.

They were just using it.

Homework question? Ask AI.

Need something summarized? AI.

Want to mess around with a picture or an answer or just a joke? Ask AI.

It is not amazing to them in the same way it is amazing to someone else who remembers life before the internet was always in your pocket.

To them, AI is almost just another app.

But the part that stood out to me is that they also do not really trust it.

They know it can be wrong. They know it can make things up. They understand hallucinations. They anticipate it. They know it gives weird answers. They know it can sound confident and still be completely off.

So there is this strange mix happening.

They use it casually, but they do not respect it deeply.

It is useful, but not authoritative. It is convenient, but not trusted.

And I think that is a very different relationship with technology than the one a lot of adults assume kids are having.

02:02 — Leverage, Not Truth

The easiest way I can describe it is that younger people seem to treat AI like leverage, not truth.

Not wisdom. Not a teacher they fully believe.

Just leverage.

It helps them get through something faster. It gives them a starting point. It gets them unstuck.

And to be honest, as I am reading this and talking it out loud, they seem to be using it the way you might use Google or Reddit. You still have to use your mind to decipher what is authentic, what is real, and what has been fudged a little bit.

Sometimes it probably helps them cheat. Sometimes it helps them avoid doing the hard part. And sometimes it is just entertainment.

And I know that can sound like some old person complaining about kids these days, like some back-in-my-day thing where kids are ruining everything.

I do think there are risks there, especially if they never learn the underlying skill.

If every first draft, every explanation, every hard thought gets outsourced too early, something is lost.

There is another video I want to do on that, where we lose the ability to think for ourselves.

But watching the kids use it, I kind of believe there is still a little bit of hope that these kids are seeing it for what it really is.

Not seeing its full potential, but starting from a point of distrust and slowly using it to help them get an edge. Like I said, leverage.

But I also think they are seeing something honestly.

03:42 — Growing Up In A Messy Internet

They are growing up in a world where the internet has always been messy.

They already know that not everything on screen is true. They already know people fake things. They already know apps are trying to get their attention. They already know online realities are unstable.

So when AI gives them an answer, they do not necessarily receive it like truth.

They receive it like output.

And that distinction really matters.

A lot of adults are still shocked that a computer can speak with confidence and be wrong. But younger people seem less shocked by that.

They almost expect it.

And maybe that is good. Maybe that skepticism protects them. And I believe it does.

But there is another side to it.

If everything becomes output and none of it is trusted, then what happens to the idea of actually knowing something?

That is the part I keep getting stuck on a little bit.

04:32 — Older People See The Risk First

Then I think about the older generation, and the relationship can be completely different.

For a lot of older people, and I do not mean my age, I mean older, like my mother, seniors basically, the first thought is not, how can this help me?

The first thought is, how can this hurt me?

And honestly, I understand that also.

They have been scammed. They came late to the technology game. They never know what to trust.

Email scams still work. Text scams still work. Any kind of scam still works.

And AI making phone calls, text messages, follow-ups, and emails better is a constant burden.

If you are already uncomfortable with technology, AI does not feel like a helpful assistant.

It feels like the internet got even harder to trust.

Now the scam emails can be better. The fake voice can sound more real. The fake image can look more believable. Even the videos look real. The text, subtitles, everything can become almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

So you have to come in with skepticism about everything.

It is a sad way to live, but you almost have to assume everything is fake until you can prove that it is not.

The person pretending to be your bank, your kid, or your grandkid can sound more polished than before.

So from that perspective, AI is not a playground. It is a threat surface. It is another open window.

If you already felt like the online world was confusing, AI does not make it feel simpler. It makes it feel like the floor moved again.

06:19 — Fear Is Not Irrational

I think this is where a lot of people in tech miss the emotional part.

We just say, just learn the tool.

But if someone's first experience of the tool is fear, that is not a small thing.

You cannot just explain that away with features, because for them the question is not whether AI can summarize a document or write an email.

The question is whether it can trick them, expose them, impersonate them, or make the world less safe.

And that fear is not completely irrational.

We even have to worry about that. Even young people worry about that. My first instinct is not to trust everything either.

But I still want to have optimism that there are good people and good intentions.

06:58 — The Middle Group

Then there is the group in the middle.

This is where I sit. This is probably where most of my time is spent thinking about it.

Old enough to remember life before all of this, but young enough to know I cannot just ignore it.

I use AI. I build with it. I think with it. I code with it. I shape ideas with it. It helps me move fast. It makes me a little lazier sometimes. It gives me clean answers that still need my judgment.

And sometimes I ask it something and realize the important part was not the answer. It was me figuring out what I actually meant to ask.

That is the weird middle place.

You can see the opportunity. You can also see the cost. You can understand why younger people use it so casually. But you can also understand why older people are scared of it.

And I do not think the answer is to be blindly pro-AI or blindly anti-AI.

That is too easy.

The harder thing is learning how to stay awake while using it.

08:00 — Staying Awake While Using AI

The real danger for me is not that AI exists.

The danger is that it becomes so convenient that I stop noticing which parts of my thinking I am handing over and which parts I am doing myself.

This is where the school example becomes interesting.

If a kid uses AI to finish homework, did they learn?

Maybe. Maybe not.

It depends what happens in their head.

If they use it to understand the problem, compare explanations, test their own answer, or get unstuck after trying, that could be useful.

But if they use it to skip the part where their brain had to struggle, then they got the result without the formation.

And that is not just a school problem.

Adults do this too.

We use AI to write the email before we know what we want to say. We use it to summarize the thing before we have sat with it. We use it to make the plan before we have felt the constraints. We use it to sound clear before we actually are clear.

I am including myself in that one.

I use it a lot to help me form text messages, emails, and responses in general. But I use it to help me pause in most cases and reflect.

There have been plenty of times where AI helped me in that situation.

But there have also been times where I could feel myself reaching for it too early. Not because I needed help, but because I did not want to sit in the messy first part of it. I did not want to waste my time, in a sense.

And that messy first part is usually where the real thinking is.

That is the part where you find out what you believe. That is where you notice the contradictions. That is where you realize the first version of the idea was too simple.

AI can help after that.

But if it replaces that completely, I think something starts to weaken.

09:39 — The Real Generation Gap Is Trust

So maybe the generation gap is not really about who uses AI and who does not.

Maybe it is about trust.

Kids use it, but they do not trust it.

Older people often do not use it because they do not trust the world around it.

And the middle is trying to figure out when trust is earned, when skepticism is healthy, and when fear is just keeping us from learning something useful.

That is a harder skill than prompt engineering.

Knowing when to believe an answer. Knowing when to check it. Knowing when to ask better questions. Knowing when the output sounds good but does not actually match reality. Knowing when speed is helping and when speed is flattening the work.

That is the skill I think people underestimate.

Because AI makes output cheap.

But judgment does not become cheap just because output is cheap.

If anything, judgment becomes more important.

When everyone can generate text, images, code, summaries, plans, and opinions, the valuable part becomes knowing what is worth keeping.

And that is the slow work.

That is attention, taste, context, and lived experience.

That is being able to say, this sounds right, but it is not actually true.

Or, this is technically correct, but it misses the point.

10:52 — Playground Or Prison

That is why the playground-or-prison idea keeps coming back to me.

For some people, AI feels like a playground. You can make things faster, explore ideas, build tools, learn new skills, and turn a blank page into something you can react to.

For other people, it feels like a prison.

More scams. Fake content. Pressure. Job fear. Confusion. More systems they do not understand, but still have to live inside.

And I do not think either reaction is completely wrong.

The same tool can open doors for one person and create anxiety for another.

The same tool can help someone learn and help someone avoid learning.

The same tool can make work better or make work thinner.

This is why I do not want to talk about AI like it is automatically good or automatically bad.

I think the real question is: what kind of relationship are we building with it?

Because if the relationship is just convenience, that has a cost.

If the relationship is just fear, that has a cost too.

And somewhere in the middle is a more difficult path, where you use the tool but keep the judgment active.

11:50 — Keeping Judgment Active

I do not think my nephews are wrong for using it casually.

I do not think older people are wrong for being cautious.

And I do not think people in the middle are wrong for feeling conflicted.

That might actually be the honest place to be.

Because this technology is useful and it is risky. It can help you think and it can help you avoid thinking. It can make things more accessible, or it can make the world harder to trust.

So maybe the goal is not to pick one simple position and defend it forever.

Maybe the goal is to stay aware.

Use it, but do not worship it.

Question it, but do not hide from it.

Let it help with the work, but do not let it replace the part of the work that changes you.

That is the part I keep coming back to with Slow Builds Lab.

The output matters.

But the person being shaped by the process matters too.

And if AI is going to be part of the process now, then I think the challenge is learning how to use it without disappearing inside of it.

Alright, thanks for watching.

Hope you liked this one. Bye.

AI Replication Won’t End Scarcity [Raw Session]

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

So this one's about replication and AI, and abundance and scarcity, and who controls it.

This all starts with me thinking about Oreos.

Of all the things, it's a strange place to start a conversation about AI, manufacturing, ownership, and all those things. But Oreos are what bring it back for me.

00:25 — Why Food Makes Replication Easy To Understand

I think food is probably one of the clearest ways to understand what AI replication might actually do to us and for us.

Right now, if you want an Oreo, you buy Oreos. If you want Ruffles, you buy Ruffles. There's something very normal about that, almost too normal to notice.

You walk into a store, you see the package, you recognize it. You already know exactly what it's going to taste like once you take that first bite.

The brand is not just a logo. It's a memory. It's being a kid, the lunchbox, the road trips, someone's cupboard. The sound of the bag opening. The exact crunch, the exact salt, the exact filling, the way the cookie twists apart.

That is why this gets interesting, because AI does not just make new things easier to create. AI also makes existing things easier to copy.

And I think that changes the relationship between us and the things we buy. Not all at once, not perfectly, and definitely not tomorrow morning. But directionally, replication is going to get easier and easier.

01:38 — From Creative Work To Physical Things

Right now, we mostly talk about AI replication with creative work.

AI can copy writing styles, generate visuals, create music that feels close to something else, summarize books, imitate voices, mimic formats, and reproduce patterns.

That conversation is already very uncomfortable in a lot of different areas.

But I think a bigger version of this is when replication starts moving deeper into the physical world, not just the digital world or the copy.

Food is where you start to feel the possibilities and what could happen.

Imagine taking a Ruffle chip and giving AI enough information about it: the ingredients, the taste, the shape, and all the different things that make a Ruffle what you think it is. The way the flavor hits at the beginning and then fades away.

At first, maybe AI just gives you a recipe. Not a perfect one. Not the real trade secrets. Just something close.

Then you make it and you tell the system why it's wrong. It's too salty. It's not crisp enough. It's too thick. The flavor is close, but the texture is off. And the system adjusts.

That alone is a different world, because now the thing that used to require company factories, research labs, packaging, distribution, and shelf space starts becoming something a regular person can approximate. They can play with it and try to figure it out on their own.

Maybe not perfectly. But close enough is powerful. A lot of the world runs on close enough. We see that all the time.

03:20 — When Products Become Patterns

This is the part that feels bigger than snacks.

An Oreo stops being only a product. It becomes a pattern, a texture profile, a flavor target, a process, a memory that can be aimed at.

And once something becomes a pattern, AI is very good at working with it.

Maybe the first version is manual. AI gives you a recipe and you make it yourself. Then the tools get better. Kitchen machines get smarter. Small food printers get less strange. They become part of life. Local manufacturing improves.

Maybe restaurants use AI to recreate discontinued foods. Maybe families can use it to rebuild recipes that were never written down. People with allergies use it to make versions of their favorite snacks that they can actually eat without worrying about reactions.

And that part is very interesting because it's not just convenience. It is memory.

A lot of food is memory. You're not always trying to eat the objectively best thing. Sometimes you're trying to return to a feeling, a moment, the snack you had as a kid, food from a place you moved away from, the meal someone used to make before they were gone.

Or the discontinued thing you still remember, even though it probably was not nearly as good as you remember it being. But the memory makes it seem so much better.

AI replication can make some of that easier to reach. And that is both beautiful and extremely weird at the same time.

04:52 — What Happens To Brands

This is where brands start to change.

Today, part of what a brand gives you is access. If you want that specific thing, you go to the company that makes it. They control the recipe, the process, the supply chain, the packaging. They don't control the shelf space completely, but they have that shelf space. They're in front of you. You know where to go get it.

But if replication gets easier, the brand may become less about the object itself. It becomes about nostalgia, trust, authenticity, and permission. It becomes about wanting the original, even if the copy is close.

And that's not a small thing to toss aside.

There are probably cookies better than Oreos. There are probably chips way better than Ruffles. There are bakeries and restaurants and home cooks who can make better versions of almost anything you find in a grocery store.

But that is not always why people are buying it.

Sometimes people are buying the memory, the package, the name, the version they already know.

That is why a knockoff can taste fine and still feel wrong. It can be close, but not emotionally correct. The colors are wrong, the name is wrong, the whole ritual around the product is not the same. The memory does not attach to that other version the same way as the original.

So maybe in a replication-heavy world, brands do not disappear. Maybe they become nostalgia containers.

They become the official version, the childhood version, the trusted version, the version that feels real, even if the copy technically is an exact replica or so close that you can almost not tell the difference in a blind taste test.

06:42 — Authors, Stories, And The Real Version

I think this also connects to authors and stories, because AI is already doing this with creative work.

If AI can read a body of work and generate something with a similar shape, then the author becomes partly a creator and partly a source of authenticity.

You can imagine a future where there are endless books that feel kind of like your favorite author. Endless songs, endless shows, all of these things. And that raises the same question as food.

Why are you actually attached to the pattern? The feeling? The person? The real version? The original? The fact that it came from a real life?

I do not think the answer is simple.

Sometimes people just want the feeling. Maybe AI can give them a story that feels like a certain kind of book. Maybe that is enough.

But sometimes it will not be enough.

Sometimes the reason the story matters is because someone lived enough life to write it. Because it came from a specific person at a specific moment.

Food matters because it connects you to a place, a family, childhood, or a version of the world that does not exist anymore except in your mind.

Replication can copy the surface. It can copy more and more of the pattern. But it may not copy the history around the thing, or the real feeling you get from reading it, looking at it, or tasting it.

08:10 — Abundance Is Not The Same As Freedom

This is where I'm going to go a little off track into abundance.

The end-of-scarcity idea gets complicated, because on the surface, AI replication sounds like abundance.

In some ways, it might be. If people can recreate food locally instead of relying on giant supply chains, that is useful. People can make cheaper versions of things. Someone with allergies can create a childhood snack safely. They can create copies of recipes they love, but with ingredients they do not react to.

If small businesses can manufacture products without massive factories, that could open a lot of doors.

I do not want to flatten this into only a scary technology story. There is real possibility here.

But abundance is not the same thing as freedom.

We already live in a world with abundance in some categories, and some people still struggle to access what they need.

There is plenty of food in the system right now, but not everyone eats well. There is more content than anyone can consume, but attention is still scarce. There are more tools than ever, but ownership often stays concentrated.

So if AI makes replication easy, the question is not only, will there be more stuff? There is definitely going to be more stuff.

The better question is: who controls the ability to make it?

Who has access to it?

If food can be copied, scarcity moves to ingredients. If recipes can be copied, scarcity moves to machines. If designs can be copied, scarcity moves to the materials that make those designs. If styles can be copied, scarcity moves to reputation. And if experience can be copied, scarcity moves to authenticity.

And if everything becomes easy to make, ownership becomes a real question.

Who owns the recipe, the training data, the machines, the cartridges, the flavor profiles, the brand likeness?

Who gets sued for making something too close?

Who gets access to the technology?

Who is allowed to replicate abundance?

10:25 — Controlled Abundance

That is the part I keep thinking about from the bigger point of view.

If the future version of a food printer only works with licensed cartridges, then abundance is still controlled.

If the recipe database is locked behind a platform, abundance is still controlled.

If the machine refuses to make anything too close to a trademarked product, again, abundance is controlled.

If only wealthy people can afford the tools, then abundance is controlled.

So the world may feel more abundant and more locked down at the same time.

And that really makes you want to pay attention.

11:01 — The Search For The Original

The more copyable things become, the more some people will search for what still feels original.

Bringing it back to the original topic here, I wanted to go off track a little to talk about the ugly side of what could happen, and what most likely does happen, because greed always comes into play.

But back to the copying of everything, and how people still search for the original. That is the strange part.

Replication might make things cheaper, but it might make nostalgia more valuable.

If every snack can be copied, the old package matters more. If every story style can be imitated, the real author matters more. If every brand can be replicated, then the original memory matters more.

Not for everyone.

Some people will choose the cheapest copy, the healthiest version, or the version that is easiest to get. Some people will not care if it's the official original.

But some people will care more than ever.

They will want the real thing. Not because the real thing is objectively better, but because it connects to something.

That is what nostalgia does. It turns an object into an anchor.

A cookie is not just a cookie. A chip is not just a chip. Stories are not just words on paper.

These things carry memory, identity, and continuity.

And if AI can copy the object, we may start noticing how much of the value was never only in the object.

12:35 — What Still Matters

I do not think this ends with brands disappearing.

I do not think it ends with everything becoming free.

And I do not think it ends with some clean future where everyone prints whatever they want at home.

The future is probably way messier. It always is.

More things will be available. More things will be copied. More things will be close enough.

And then we will have to decide over and over again what still matters about the original.

Maybe we wanted the taste, the convenience, the feeling, the memory.

Maybe we want to prove that something from before is still here.

That is why the Oreo example sticks so hard for me.

It sounds small, but it points at something bigger.

AI replication may change food, manufacturing, brands, stories, authorship, ownership, and scarcity. But underneath all of that, it asks a very human question.

If AI can copy the thing, what part of the thing was never really in the object?

Because maybe the cookie was never just a cookie. Maybe that chip was never just a chip.

And maybe abundance does not end scarcity. Maybe it just shows us what we are really scarce for.

13:51 — Closing

So I think we are going to be able to copy things. We are going to be able to create things. There is going to be abundance.

But who controls it?

And then what is important to us?

Is it how much something costs, how available it is, or the memory that comes with it and how it makes us feel?

Alright, thanks for watching.

Don’t Chase the Night and Miss the Morning [Raw Session]

00:00 — This One Is Different

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

So I’m going to start to try to make my videos a little more...

I’m going to have to edit them.

So this video is a combination of a couple others that I did this morning, and maybe over the weekend. Because I’m getting these ideas, and I don’t want to lose thoughts or different things that come to my mind.

Well, that is a thought.

I just don’t want to lose the momentum.

And just because I don’t have a full script in front of me, which I’ve been relying on a little bit, I want to be able to... I’m going to have to start editing. Snipping some stuff together.

And this trip’s really teaching me that.

It’s making me go back again with the regrets, like in Miami. I had all these different ideas, and I kept looking for the perfect place to be able to take the video, to be able to sit down and script it out, and then finish it from beginning to end.

And I should have just taken out the camera, just like I’m doing here, and pressed the button.

So this video right here is a combination of that. I did one earlier. I did two or three along this way. And there are nuggets in there, and I don’t want to lose those.

So I’m going to have to start doing it this way if I want to be able to capture the moment.

01:22 — Missing The Morning

So I did a video about learning how to live without drinking.

And one of the things I mentioned was the morning-after type thing. Where you don’t remember the night before, or you do remember it, but it’s blurry, and you’re hungover. Hungover is really what I’m getting at here.

And you miss the next day. You miss the morning.

That great night cost you more than just that night.

Right now it’s 6 a.m., I think.

And we were up until maybe 11:30, 12 o’clock, having a fire. Came down. The stars here are amazing. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky last night, and there’s no light pollution anywhere.

And I’m up early. I’m walking this beautiful beach. I think it goes on forever.

And it’s just a great morning.

And I would have missed this.

02:25 — What It Costs

That’s something you learn over the years.

And it’s a kind of regret, in a way. Because when you go back and think about all the other times where you woke up with those hangovers, maybe you’re in Vegas, maybe you’re in New York, or you’re at an all-inclusive resort.

Mornings in the Caribbean, or anywhere south, those are mornings I hate to miss.

Even big cities.

I have two kids. One likes to get up early, the other doesn’t. So when we go on trips, I get to spend nights exploring and doing different things with one.

But because we stay sober, basically, and stay active and fit, with the other one I get to wake up early. I get to go explore a different side of those cities.

Or when we’re on resorts, or we’re down south somewhere, we get to explore the beach, climb mountains, go on hiking trails, go for early swims.

There’s just so much.

I don’t understand anymore why I even thought it was a great idea to have that extra drink, to go a little farther, because you just miss so much of life.

04:03 — The Other Side Of The Beach

I don’t want to lose the moment by being up late drinking, or just being up late in general, and not being able to experience great mornings.

This is the other side of the beach. It just doesn’t end.

And I haven’t seen one person yet.

So while everyone else is sleeping, or getting ready, or nursing a hangover, I get to come out here and experience these things.

And Slow Builds is really trying to make me aware of different moments in life, and different situations, and how to deal with a lot of these things.

That’s really what I want to do.

I want to pass on little tidbits of knowledge.

Or I don’t want to say knowledge or wisdom like that, because I don’t have anything figured out. I’m just trying to see, okay, well, I see this. I feel this. And I think my kids, or anyone who’s actually willing to listen to me, should hear this.

I don’t want to lose what things I think are important, or what perspectives I gain from just living.

Because as you get older, you start to see, okay, when I was younger, I cared what other people thought. Or I would rather be up late and have what I thought was a great night, and miss this amazing morning where there’s no wind.

There’s always wind here. And it’s calm water. This is insane.

I actually want to go get changed and try to swim out to that little island out there, because in the daytime it gets too rough.

05:56 — Should’ve And Could’ve

I don’t want the nagging feeling of should’ves and could’ves.

Those are the worst kind of regrets.

So I wanted to get up yesterday morning. I knew I wanted to get out, and I ended up doing a run. I did an amazing run, went through a little tiny town, got 7K or something in, and then I jumped in the water.

I was at the beach on the other side over here. There were two people. They had winter jackets on, bundled up.

And I’m like, you know what? When am I ever going to be here again?

Yeah, it’s home, but it’s pretty far away from where I live. I grew up on an island, so I was like, this is so gorgeous. And for me to get back here again, it’s going to take a while.

So I was in my running shorts and just jumped in.

The water was so refreshing. And it was beautiful.

I hate when I say it that way, because yes, it’s beautiful in the moment, but it’s not life-changing. It’s just that I didn’t want to take the chance of regretting it.

Sometimes you just have to do things like that.

People always complain about cold water. Yeah, the water was chilly. Yeah, sure, I just did a run. I was still cold.

But I was like, it’s a moment. Just suck it up and do it.

07:06 — Don’t Forget The Little Things

So after doing all those clips and trying to get this video together, I’ll tie it up here.

Just say, don’t forget the little things.

Don’t chase the night forgetting about the morning.

Don’t even try to make the experience more by adding things that don’t need to be there.

Be aware of your situation.

Be aware of life as it’s happening.

And thank you for watching.

Learning To Enjoy Life Drink Free? [Raw Session]

0:00 - 1:25 - The Strange Part After Stopping

This is not really going to be the full story of why I stopped drinking.

I might talk about that more directly at some point, but that is not what this one is.

This one is more about the part after.

And I think that fits what I want this channel to be.

Slow Builds started with a lot of software, AI, investing, money, and building things.

That is still part of it.

I still care about those things. I am still building.

But the longer I do this, the more obvious it feels that the build is not only the app, or the portfolio, or the business, or whatever thing I am trying to make work next.

It is also the life around it.

Health, habits, family, travel, how I spend a day, and whether I am actually present for the things I say I care about.

So this video is not really a separate topic.

It is the same project, just pointed at a different part of life.

Because the strange part after stopping drinking is that normal life keeps going.

You still travel.

You still go out to eat.

You still end up at concerts, games, dinners, summer festivals, campfires, and late-night catchups with people you have known forever.

And then you realize how many of those normal things had alcohol quietly built into them.

Not always in some dramatic way.

Sometimes just as a default.

At a game, at a concert, on a trip, back home with friends, or sitting around outside in the summer, the drink can start to feel like part of the setting instead of a separate choice.

And that is the part I am trying to understand right now.

Not the big story.

Just the day-to-day shift of trying to enjoy the same world differently.

Because the hard part is not always stopping something.

Sometimes the hard part is figuring out who you are in all the places where that thing used to come with you.

1:25 - 2:45 - I Already Knew How To Do This

The funny part is that I did not always drink.

I went through all of university, and into my late twenties, not drinking.

And I still had the full school years.

Friends, downtown, parties, late nights, being around people, all of it.

I was not sitting at home avoiding life.

I was in the middle of it.

And I loved it.

That is what makes this strange now.

This is not me trying to learn some completely new skill.

I already knew how to be at a party, go downtown, stay out late, and feel like the night was worth it without needing a drink.

So part of what I am dealing with now is not just quitting something.

It is realizing that somewhere along the way, I forgot something I already knew.

I forgot how normal it used to feel.

I forgot that I was not standing there all night thinking about what I was missing.

I was just there.

And that is probably the version of myself I am trying to get back to.

Not some perfect version.

Just the version that could be in the room, enjoy the night, remember it clearly, and wake up the next day without feeling like I had traded something away.

2:45 - 4:05 - How It Got Wired In

Drinking came into my life more through the adult side of things.

Travel was a big part of it.

Client dinners. Team dinners. Work trips. Celebrations. Nice restaurants. Airports. Hotels. New cities.

At first, it did not feel like a problem.

It felt like part of the experience.

In a new city, at a good dinner, or out with a client or team, it slowly became part of the social rhythm.

And honestly, there were parts of it I did grow to love.

I am not going to pretend I hated all of it.

That would not be true.

There were nights where it felt fun.

There were dinners where it helped the conversation.

There were trips where it made the night feel bigger.

And I think that is why it got complicated.

It did not enter my life as some obvious bad thing.

It entered attached to good things.

Travel, connection, food, work, new places, stories, late nights, and that feeling that life was happening.

But over time, the thing attached to the experience started taking up more space than the experience itself.

It stopped being one detail inside the night.

It started becoming the thing the night revolved around.

And that is hard to notice while it is happening because, from the outside, it can still look completely normal.

A drink at dinner.

A drink at a game.

At a concert.

While travelling.

Around a campfire with friends.

All of that looks normal from the outside.

And for a long time, it felt normal to me too.

4:05 - 6:05 - The Hard Part Is Separating It

And I think the reason this has been on my mind so much lately is because of where I am right now.

I’m back home where I grew up, visiting family and friends for the summer.

There’s a big summer festival going on.

There’s a big holiday happening.

We’ve had late nights sitting around talking.

Seeing people I haven’t seen in a while.

Going around town.

And now I’m out camping.

These are all things I love doing.

But they’re also all things that, for me, would normally have drinking mixed into them.

Nobody has to tell me to drink.

Nobody has to put one in my hand.

It’s just part of what I’ve learned to associate with being here.

Being back home in the summer.

Seeing old friends.

Staying up late talking.

Going downtown.

Camping.

The festival.

All of it has this history attached to it.

And this time I’m doing those same things, but I’m not drinking.

And it does feel different.

I’m enjoying being here.

I’m enjoying seeing everybody.

But there’s also this part of my brain that keeps noticing that something is missing because I’ve trained it to expect drinking to be part of these experiences.

And I think that’s really the thing I’m trying to figure out.

How do I separate the experience from the drinking without losing the experience?

Because I don’t want to lose any of this.

And I actually noticed another version of this recently when I was in Miami.

I went to this old-school Cuban diner.

It felt local.

It wasn’t polished or built for tourists or designed to be posted online.

I had a sandwich, coffee, and dessert for around thirteen dollars.

And I remember sitting there thinking about how much I like finding places like that when I travel.

That’s one of the things I actually love about travelling.

Finding some little place.

Walking around.

Seeing something different.

Eating somewhere I probably won’t ever eat again.

The place itself was the experience.

And I think that’s what I’m trying to separate again.

Because I still love being home.

I still love the woods.

I still love camping.

I still love late nights with people I’ve known forever.

I still love travelling and finding those little local places.

Somewhere along the way, though, drinking got attached to a lot of those things.

Home and drinking.

Summer and drinking.

Camping and drinking.

Catching up with old friends and drinking.

Travel and drinking.

And now I’m trying to pull those things apart without losing the whole feeling of the thing.

Because I don’t want to become somebody who avoids home, or friends, or camping, or festivals, or travel because those things make me think about drinking.

That would still be letting alcohol define the experience.

I want to be able to do all of it.

I just want more of the place, the people, the conversation, the morning, and the memory.

Not less.

6:05 - 7:25 - The Drink Feels Like Part Of The Ticket

There are certain places where not drinking still feels strange to me.

Concerts and sporting events are obvious examples.

But I think the same thing happens here at home in the summer.

A night downtown.

A campfire.

A festival.

A late-night catchup with friends.

There’s this feeling where having a drink almost seems like part of the ticket.

Like you’re supposed to have one in your hand.

You hear the music.

You see people standing around.

There’s food nearby.

There’s a bar or a cooler.

Everybody falls into the rhythm of the night.

It just feels built in.

And the strange part is that not drinking can feel odd even when drinking doesn’t actually make logical sense.

Because if I step back from it, it’s a weird trade.

You make the plan.

You show up for this thing you wanted to experience.

And then drinking can blur the thing you came for.

It can take the sharp edges off the memory.

It can turn a good night into a foggy morning.

It can make the next day feel like something you have to recover from instead of something you get to enjoy.

And somehow, for a long time, that felt normal to me.

That’s the contradiction I keep sitting with.

The drink feels like it completes the event.

But sometimes it steals the event.

And I’m trying to stop treating the thing that steals the memory like it completes the memory.

7:25 - 8:45 - The Next Morning Always Told The Truth

The thing I keep coming back to is the next morning.

Even back when drinking felt normal, there were times where I managed not to drink.

And those mornings always felt different.

I’d wake up clear.

I’d remember the whole night.

I wouldn’t have to replay conversations and wonder if I forgot something.

If I said something weird.

If I annoyed somebody.

If I made something awkward.

Even if nothing bad happened, the mental checking was exhausting.

And on the mornings after not drinking, that whole layer was gone.

There was just this quiet relief.

Nothing dramatic.

Not like I’d done something heroic.

Just this steady feeling of…

I’m glad I didn’t give that away last night.

And that matters because it tells me something.

The version of me that wants the drink is usually loud before the event.

It starts making the case early.

The night will be less fun without it.

It’ll feel strange.

Everybody else is doing it.

This is just part of the experience.

But the version of me that’s grateful I didn’t drink is always there the next morning.

It’s quieter.

But it has a much better track record.

8:45 - 10:05 - The Memory Is The Point

I think part of the reason this matters so much to me is because I actually care about experiences.

I care about places.

Small details.

The kind of memories that aren’t huge life events but still become part of your internal map.

It’s that diner in Miami.

The old restaurants from past trips.

The woods back home.

The summer festival.

The weird late-night conversations.

The walk back through a place you know really well but somehow see differently depending on the season.

Those are the things I want more of.

And the older I get, the more wrong it feels to show up for those moments and then blur them.

Or attach them to a hangover.

Or lose the next morning.

Because the next morning is part of the experience too.

That’s something I didn’t always respect.

When I’m travelling, the morning matters because there’s a city to walk through.

Coffee to find.

Another local place to discover.

When I’m home, the morning matters in a different way.

It’s waking up where I grew up.

Being around family.

Having a clear head.

Not feeling like I’ve already spent the day before it even started.

And when drinking takes that away, it’s not just taking away health points or productivity or whatever people usually talk about.

It’s taking away life.

A simple version of life, but still life.

A morning I could have had.

A memory I could have kept.

A better version of the trip, or the visit, or the weekend home.

And I don’t want to keep giving those away casually.

10:05 - 11:25 - This Is Not About Becoming Boring

One thing I don’t want this to become is some boring version of life where the lesson is just…

Stay home and avoid everything.

That’s not the point.

I don’t want to avoid concerts, games, dinners, travel, camping, downtown, festivals, or late nights with friends just because those things make me think about drinking.

Because if I did that, alcohol would still be controlling the experience.

Just from the other side.

Before, it controlled it by being there.

Now it would control it by making me avoid things.

That’s not freedom either.

The better goal for me is to actually go.

Sit around the fire.

Walk around town.

Hear the music.

Have the catchup.

Eat the food.

Be with the people.

And leave with the full memory.

That’s the shift I’m trying to make.

Not from fun to no fun.

From blurred fun to remembered fun.

From needing the drink to complete the moment, to letting the moment be enough again.

And I know that sounds simple.

But it doesn’t feel simple when your brain has built a habit around certain places and certain experiences.

Because the trigger isn’t always stress.

Sometimes it’s joy.

Excitement.

Travel.

Music.

Nostalgia.

Or just a night that feels like it should be marked somehow.

And I think that’s one of the harder parts.

Learning how to let a good thing be good without adding the old default to it.

11:25 - 12:45 - Getting Back To The Old Version

What I keep thinking about is that I’m not trying to become a completely new person.

I’m trying to remember an older version of myself.

The version who could go downtown, be at a party, stay out late, and still wake up clear without feeling like something was missing.

That version existed.

So I know this isn’t impossible.

But it’s also not automatic anymore.

That’s the frustrating part.

Once something gets wired into your adult life, especially through good memories, it doesn’t disappear just because you understand the logic.

You can know the trade is bad and still feel the pull.

You can know the morning will be better and still feel strange at the event.

You can know the memory matters and still have that moment where you think…

This would be better with a drink.

So I think the work right now is repetition.

Not in some motivational way.

Just reps.

Go to the place.

Do the dinner.

Go to the festival.

Spend the night in the woods.

Have the non-alcoholic drink, or the soda, or the coffee.

Stay for the experience.

Leave with the memory.

Wake up clear.

And then do it again.

Let that become normal again.

Because normal gets built through repetition.

For a while, drinking became normal because I repeated it in enough places.

Now I have to repeat something else.

12:45 - 14:05 - The Real Trade

The real trade is becoming clearer to me.

It’s not just drink or no drink.

It’s whether I want the familiar version of the night in the moment…

or the version of the night I actually get to keep.

And I think I want to keep more of my life.

I don’t want to pay for a game, plan a dinner, travel to a city, come home for a visit, or sit around with old friends and have the main memory be the drinks.

Or the foggy ending.

Or the rough morning after.

I don’t want to wake up and start auditing my own behaviour.

Trying to remember if I forgot something.

If I said something weird.

If I made the night worse than it needed to be.

What I want is actually a lot simpler than that.

I want the clean morning.

I want to remember the walk after dinner.

The coffee the next day.

The strange local place.

The actual conversation.

The thing I paid to see.

The reason the night felt worth leaving the house for in the first place.

For a long time, I think I treated drinking like it made those experiences bigger.

Now I’m starting to wonder if the experience was already big enough.

The place.

The people.

The music.

The food.

The city.

The woods.

The story.

The memory.

Maybe all of that was enough.

And maybe the work now is just learning how to trust that again.

14:05 - 14:45 - Closing

So that’s where I’m at.

I’m literally out camping while I’m thinking about this.

I’m back home.

It’s summer.

Friends and family are around.

There’s stuff happening.

These are exactly the kinds of moments where drinking used to feel like part of the experience.

And I’m trying to experience them differently.

I’m not finished with that.

I don’t have some clean answer.

I’m just trying to change the default without shrinking my life.

I still want to do the things I love.

I just want to keep the whole experience this time.

Because I’m not trying to make life smaller so I don’t drink.

I’m trying to make the experience bigger than the drink again.

And maybe that’s the part I forgot.

The drink was never the whole thing.

The memory was.

When The Opportunity Won’t Wait [Raw Session]

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds. I'm recording this one because I'm in Miami with my daughter, and this trip is what made the idea feel real.

She got invited to be part of a YouTube channel, chat, something, and it could bring a lot of attention to her brand and get her exposed to the industry a little bit more. An introducer for networking and stuff.

She's not getting paid for this. There's no guaranteed promotion. There's no clean return where I can say we spent this much and we're definitely getting this much back.

On paper, it would be easy to say no straight up. It's not cheap. It's last minute. It's a big ordeal. It costs a lot of money. It takes time. My whole week got interrupted, and it showed up when a lot of other things were happening around the same time.

But that's not how some real opportunities show up. They don't always arrive when you have extra money, you have the time, there's no stress, and everything's kind of perfectly certain that it's the exact thing to do.

Sometimes they show up when life is already full and you still have to decide.

And everyone knows the Eminem line from the song. You got one chance, one opportunity. But I think there's another part of that idea that matters just as much.

You have to know when it actually is an opportunity.

Because not everything that feels urgent is important, and not every exciting thing is worth chasing. Some things are distractions dressed up as opportunities. Some things are expensive because they hit your ego, your fear, or impatience.

But every once in a while something comes along and you can tell it's kind of different.

01:55 — Making The Most Of The Moment

That's what makes this Miami trip, in my mind, feel like that.

There's no guarantees. It wasn't easy to make this happen. The timing was way off. But to me, it was worth taking the risk.

And this is a side note. It's not just that it was worth taking the risk or doing it. I also felt it was an opportunity to expose her to other things. Expose her to how we do logistics, how we make things work on the spur of the moment, and how we try to analyze what makes it worth it.

But I also wanted her to know, yes, Ren, I get paid for this. We don't know if this video is going to go live. We don't know if you're going to get your air time, or your likes, or your tags, or whatever they're going to do.

But I did say to make the most of it.

You need to make sure that when you do something like this, you don't waste your money, you don't waste your time or the opportunity. You try to make opportunities. You do the networking. You grab the content while you're there. You explore. You see. You just do everything you can to make it worth it.

Every second, every minute while you're there, you maximize it.

03:01 — Knowing A Good Deal

I think there's a skill in knowing a good deal.

And I don't mean cheap. Cheap is not always good. A cheap thing you don't need is still a waste. A cheap distraction is still a distraction.

A good deal is when the price, the timing, the purpose, and the upside line up in a way that probably will not be there later.

That's the part I think a lot of people miss.

Sometimes the deal is not just a number. It's the timing. The window. Who's involved. Who it affects. It's what becomes possible because you said yes now instead of later.

And if you wait too long, the deal changes. The price changes. The opportunity moves. The people involved may change, or swap out, or not be there. The seasons just change.

That's when you really have to look at it.

Do you bite the bullet and jump in? Do you wait it out and maybe a better opportunity comes? You can't hem and haw a lot about things. When something's good and you get that little gut feeling, a lot of times you have to chase that.

I compare it to last year. We needed to get work done on the lawn. We didn't really have the money sitting there in a comfortable way, but the quote we got was so good I couldn't ignore it.

And I knew enough to know that if we waited, that price probably was not going to come back.

That's not just a lawn thing. It was the deck. My roof. It's the repair you know you're going to have to do eventually.

Sometimes waiting feels responsible, but all you're doing is giving the price time to grow. You're giving time for the people to change, the opportunity to shift. The weather, if it's an outdoor thing, might change.

If everything lines up, then you go for it.

04:49 — When Waiting Gets Expensive

Sometimes you save money by waiting, but sometimes waiting is how the price doubles.

That's where money gets tricky, because being responsible does not always mean delaying.

Sometimes being responsible means recognizing that today's uncomfortable price is still better than tomorrow's impossible price.

That's a big piece to sit with for a while, because we're always taught don't go deep into debt. Don't owe money. Don't push that. If you can't afford it, don't buy it. If you don't got the cash, don't do it.

But sometimes, because you know the money is going to come, and you can budget and you're responsible, you know that price today is worth it.

Even if you paid for that amount of money right now and you let the interest build for a little bit, you're still going to save enough money that it's justifiable.

Like I said, this connects directly to my book, Handle Money Like An Adult, and part of it.

There's a line in that chapter that says, "Spend before the money's in your hand only when the math is real."

That's the rule.

Not spend anyway. Not follow your dreams and hope it works out. Not put it on a card and pretend future you will figure it out.

The rule is protect the foundation, verify the cost, know how you will cover it, and make the decision from numbers instead of fear.

That's the difference between reckless spending and adult spending, is what I like to call it.

06:08 — Money As A Tool

Fear can make you careless in both directions.

Fear can make you spend money you don't have because you're chasing relief, status, or attention. But fear can also make you refuse to spend money when spending is actually the right move.

One costs you because you move without thinking. The other costs you because you froze when you should have moved.

There's another chapter in the book called "Money Is A Tool, Not A Security Blanket."

That chapter is about the idea that money is not security by itself. Money becomes useful when you give it a job.

Money can reduce stress. It can build skills. It can create memories with people you love. That's the one I spend a lot of money on. I can't always afford it, and one of those things is that the framework helps me with the Miami trip.

If I spend money to look successful, that's probably a bad use of money. If I spend money because I'm panicking, that's probably a bad use.

But if I'm spending money to support my daughter, help her get experience, create a real memory, and put her around something connected to what she's building, exposure to the industry, to budgeting, to other people that are already in the industry making their work, then the money has a job.

It's not just disappearing. It's being used.

That does not automatically make the decision right. But it makes it worth considering. It makes me not look at the number itself, but look at the entire package of what the trip is bringing.

07:38 — Waiting Is Not Free

This also connects to another chapter in the book.

I'm sorry, I'm going way off. I've been doing a lot on the book lately, and I'm on this trip, and then it all kind of clicked.

It's like start now and make life easier for the future self.

That's an idea in that chapter that I keep coming back to.

Waiting is not free.

Waiting feels free because you don't spend the money today. You don't take the risk. You don't make the uncomfortable decisions.

But you still spent something.

You spent time. Momentum. The chance to learn. The chance to be in the room. You spent the version of the future that only exists if you start moving now.

So what could have been is gone because you didn't move. You lost that.

That doesn't show up on a receipt, so people ignore it. But it's real.

If you wait too long to fix the roof, the price may go up. If you wait too long to learn the skill, the industry may move without you. If you wait until your kid's opportunity is easier to afford, that exact opportunity will never come back again.

Perfect conditions are usually late. Way too late.

And when you look back in hindsight at what you decided not to do, or what you gave up, you realign it and realize, I could have made that work. I should have done that.

That's where regrets come in.

But you need to take those as lessons. You need to look at those.

09:06 — Reflection Instead Of Regret

That's funny, because my next one is reflection instead of regret.

There's also a chapter called, it's funny how I do these things with AI. I come up with all these ideas. I list out what things I wanted to do, and I'm always afraid I'm not going to remember everything I want to talk about.

But as I'm going through it, reading each section, I say, I bet you that's not in my head. And then I start talking about it, and boom, it's usually the next thing.

So right now this is the next thing that I thought wasn't in there, but here it is.

Life is an adventure, so keep moving.

That chapter is about the difference between reflection and regret.

Reflection is useful. Regret is circular.

Reflection asks, what do I know now?

Regret keeps asking, why didn't I? I should have.

That's what I'm trying to avoid more as I get older.

Not every mistake can be avoided. Mistakes are part of life. You're going to spend money you wish you hadn't spent. You're going to save money you later wish you used. You're going to avoid spending money on the thing because you were waiting for the perfect time. You're going to miss some things.

But there's a specific kind of regret that bothers me.

It's the regret of knowing you saw the moment clearly, knew it mattered, and still talked yourself out of it because the timing wasn't clean enough.

That one sticks the hardest in my mind, because deep down, you know the truth. You weren't being responsible. You were hiding. You were panicking. You were afraid of the unknown.

10:33 — Asking Better Questions

The question is not only, can I afford this?

That matters. You have to ask that. But it's not the only question.

You also have to ask, what is this really for? What happens if I say no? Is this a real opportunity, or am I reacting to pressure? Will this create stress I can't handle, or value I can't recreate later? Am I avoiding this because the math is bad, or because I'm scared?

That last question is uncomfortable because sometimes the answer is obvious.

Sometimes the math is not the real issue. The real issue is fear.

Fear of spending. Being wrong. Looking foolish.

There's no wrong questions. There's no stupid questions. Curiosity is what makes us learn and grow.

I don't like when people have the instinct and they have the nudge where they want to ask a question, they want to learn a little more, but they're afraid they'll look dumb. They're afraid they'll look like everyone knows more than them.

We're all in the same boat.

And most times, when there's someone who does know the thing, they've spent the time learning it. They're not experts in everything all the time, but they're really passionate about something, and they feel helpful.

It's a good thing to ask questions.

So yeah, fear of looking foolish, to me, shouldn't be a thing at all.

Fear of backing something that doesn't work. Fear of hoping too much.

You have to put all that aside, and sometimes you just have to go in.

12:18 — Supporting Your Kid's Thing

In this case, for my kid, going to Miami feels even heavier because it involves my child.

When you support your kid's thing, you're not just paying for a flight or a hotel. You're putting belief behind them.

That can feel risky, obviously.

You don't want to create false hope. You don't want to pretend every opportunity turns into something big. You don't want to teach them that money doesn't matter.

But you also don't want to teach them that everything has to be guaranteed before it's worth trying.

That's not how life works.

Most meaningful things begin before the guarantee.

The business starts before you know it will work. The skill starts before you're good. You have to practice. The project starts before the outcome is clear. And sometimes the trip happens before the return is obvious.

So the lesson from this trip is not always say yes. That would not be wise advice for anybody.

The lesson is learn how to recognize the real thing when it shows up.

Know your numbers. Protect the foundation. Don't spend for image. Don't spend because you're panicking. Don't confuse excitement with wisdom.

But when the math is real, the purpose is clear, and the window may not come back the same way, don't hide behind waiting.

13:35 — Make It Worth It

Don't hide behind excuses.

Sometimes waiting is responsible, obviously. Sometimes waiting is expensive.

You see that over and over. As the market moves, the world moves, things go up. And if you have the opportunity, and you know what you need, and you know you're going to have to do it anyway, spend the money then.

It's wise. It's responsible in that situation.

And sometimes putting your family first means getting on the plane before everything feels perfectly organized.

That's what I'm thinking about here, in that Miami trip.

Not that this is a guarantee to become some huge turning point. Not that it's a moment.

It's a moment with my kid where we get to build our business a little, learn some life lessons, and most importantly, make memories together.

With their dad on South Beach, exploring, talking about networking and meeting people.

It's priceless.

I'm excited for that because even with my other kid, with the art and traveling and things like that, there's all this excitement.

So I get to live through them, and I'm trying to teach them how sometimes you have to take those risks. You have to be willing to spend the money even though you don't know the outcome.

But even when you don't know the outcome, you have to set your own goals. You have to make it worth it.

So don't do things just to do them. Don't just go down there and stay in a hotel and go on Twitter all day, or X, or whatever they're on.

Go out. Network. Find people. Talk to people. Find what the network's going on.

Just maximize the opportunity, and also have some fun with your dad while you're down there.

I don't want to miss moments just because they show up before life was perfectly ready.

Sometimes you just have to make sure when the moment comes, you analyze it. You evaluate everything. You're not always going to be ready. Not every opportunity is an opportunity.

But some of them are worth taking the chance.

Thanks for watching.

Bye.

I'm Not Scared of AI Anymore. I'm Scared of How We Use It. [Raw Session]

00:00 — I Used to Be Scared

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I wanted to make this video because I realized something recently.

A year ago, if you had asked me what I thought about AI, my answer would have been completely different than it is today.

I was scared.

Not in a science-fiction kind of way. Not because I thought robots were taking over the world tomorrow.

I was scared because I genuinely thought my career might completely disappear and I'd have to figure out a way to start over.

I've been a software developer for decades, and when AI started getting really good at writing code and becoming part of our lives, it felt extremely personal.

I thought,

"If it can do what I do... what happens next?"

So this isn't really a video about what AI can do.

It's about how my fear has changed.

Because interestingly, it didn't disappear.

Like I said...

It just moved.

As excited as I am about AI and what it's going to do for the world, what really scares me now is the other side of it...

...the people making the decisions.

01:22 — Going Down the Rabbit Hole

Once that fear showed up, I couldn't ignore it.

Every night I was studying.

Trying every new model.

Testing new tools.

Every coding assistant.

Watching YouTube.

Reading Reddit.

Reading papers.

Anything I could get my hands on.

Part of that was survival.

I was trying to figure out how my industry was going to change.

I needed to understand AI before it understood my career.

The more people I talked to, the more I realized I wasn't alone.

Almost everyone I spoke with had gone through the same thought process.

The same fears.

The same late nights.

The same learning.

People just approached it from different directions.

For me...

I didn't want to be left behind.

I wanted to understand the tools.

I wanted to know how I could use them in my own work.

How I could teach people on my team.

How I could become more productive.

My thinking was simple.

If someone is hiring for a job, they're going to choose the person who already understands how AI fits into that role.

Not the person who's trying to learn the job and AI at the same time.

03:02 — What Changed

Here's what surprised me.

The deeper I went...

the less scared I became.

Not because AI stopped improving.

It's improving incredibly fast.

What changed was my understanding of what AI actually is.

The first realization I had was that no matter how good AI becomes...

there still needs to be a person leading it.

Someone orchestrating everything.

The architect.

The project manager.

The person who understands the business.

The person who knows how all the pieces fit together.

AI wasn't replacing that person.

It was helping that person.

04:02 — When the Math Clicked

Then something else happened.

I had a friend staying with me who's also a software developer.

Instead of just using AI like I had been...

he'd gone much deeper into how the models actually work.

We spent hours talking.

How LLMs are built.

Vectors.

Matrices.

Probabilities.

Tokens.

Weighting.

Predictions.

How answers are actually generated.

Interestingly...

a lot of what we talked about came from my math degree more than my computer science degree.

Computer science teaches the programming.

The software.

The hardware.

The architecture.

But underneath all of that...

AI is mathematics.

Statistics.

Probability.

Linear algebra.

Vectors.

Matrices.

Tokens.

Weights.

Predictions.

He gave me a simple example.

"I like pizza. What do you like?"

Then we broke it down mathematically.

How the probabilities work.

How hallucinations happen.

How predictions are made.

Then we looked at nursery rhymes and Bible verses.

Depending on the model...

and depending on what it had been trained on...

you'd get different answers.

That was when everything clicked.

It wasn't magic anymore.

It was still incredible.

But it wasn't magic.

I realized I wasn't looking at a brain with imagination.

I was looking at mathematics.

When the magic turned back into math...

my fear almost disappeared.

06:50 — AI Isn't a Person

I think one mistake a lot of us make is treating AI like another person.

I still catch myself doing it.

You ask a question.

It gives a thoughtful answer.

It feels like you're talking to someone.

But that's not what's happening.

It's predicting.

It's recognizing patterns.

It's applying weights.

It's mathematics.

An enormous amount of training data...

processed incredibly fast.

Understanding that changed everything.

Instead of thinking,

"This thing is replacing people..."

I started thinking,

"This thing is amplifying people."

Those are two completely different ideas.

07:40 — Expanding Specialists

That's when I started looking at AI differently.

Instead of replacing specialists...

it expands specialists.

It widens the path.

Lawyers spend less time digging through documents.

Accountants spend less time organizing receipts.

Software developers prototype faster.

Scientists and researchers find patterns they might have missed.

None of those people stop being experts.

They simply spend more time doing the work only they can do.

I like to say...

they fail faster.

They eliminate bad ideas faster.

They narrow down possible solutions faster.

That's exciting.

That's where I think AI becomes transformative.

Not because it removes humans...

because it increases what one human can accomplish.

08:30 — How I Use It

I'll use this YouTube channel as an example.

I used to spend hours trying to organize scripts.

Thinking about titles.

Descriptions.

First comments.

Thumbnail ideas.

Trying to organize my thoughts.

Now...

I throw my ideas into AI.

I talk through them.

It helps me organize them.

It helps with descriptions.

First comments.

Website formatting.

Timestamps.

Thumbnail ideas.

Then after I record...

I run the transcript back through it.

It cleans it up.

Organizes it.

Helps me find clips.

It saves me hours.

AI isn't creating my content.

I'm still the one making the videos.

It's acting more like an editor and organizer.

That's how I like using it.

It lets me spend more time thinking...

and less time formatting.

10:18 — What Actually Scares Me Now

So what scares me now?

AI doesn't.

People do.

One thing that still worries me...

is who trains these models.

A model only knows what it's trained on.

If someone intentionally trains it poorly...

or pushes a particular viewpoint...

or fills it with misinformation...

that's concerning.

But even beyond that...

what really worries me...

is people making decisions about AI without understanding it.

Executives don't need to understand vectors or matrices.

But when they're making hiring decisions...

layoffs...

or deciding the direction of entire companies...

they need someone at the table who understands the technology.

What worries me is when AI becomes nothing more than a buzzword.

People hear,

"AI can replace ten employees."

without ever asking whether that's actually true.

Because that's not what I see from people using it every day.

11:50 — The Waiting Game

Right now it feels like a lot of companies are waiting.

Hiring slows.

Projects slow.

People get nervous.

Everyone watches everyone else.

They're trying to figure out...

How much can AI actually do?

I honestly don't know how this ends.

Maybe some companies overreact.

Maybe others don't move fast enough.

I don't know.

But I do know this.

I don't wake up worried that AI itself is coming for my job anymore.

12:20 — Looking Ahead

If anything...

I'm more excited than ever.

Not because AI solves everything.

Far from it.

I'm excited because I think it lets people build things they couldn't build before.

I think it expands individual capability.

I think it's going to help medicine.

Research.

Software.

Small businesses.

People with ideas who never had the resources before.

I'm still curious.

I'm still paying attention.

But my fear has changed.

I used to be afraid of the technology.

Now I'm more concerned about the people making decisions based on hype...

without really understanding what the technology actually is.

Hopefully we'll learn to use AI the right way.

We'll embed it into the parts of our lives where it genuinely helps.

We'll make better software.

Better businesses.

Better medicine.

Better tools.

I'm very excited to see where it goes.

Thanks for watching.

Bye.

Why Do I Feel Guilty Doing Nothing? [Raw Session]

00:00 — When Did Doing Nothing Become So Difficult?

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I wanted to record this video because something happened the other night that made me stop for a second.

I finished work, had already gone for my run, and we had supper as a family. There wasn't anything that needed my attention, so I went outside and just sat there.

I sat on the back step, just looking up.

It was quiet, and it was an extremely nice evening.

Within about five minutes, I felt guilty.

Not because I had forgotten to do something. Not because anyone expected anything from me. I just had this feeling that I should be doing something.

Maybe I should work on another YouTube video.

Maybe I should spend some time answering questions about the book and adding some more content.

Maybe I should build another feature, work on a bug from work, catch up on some new AI tools, read some news, answer messages, go through my emails, organize my notes, do my expenses, or even work on my taxes.

I actually like doing my taxes.

It was like my brain couldn't accept that simply sitting outside was enough.

That's what got me thinking.

When did that happen?

When did doing nothing start feeling irresponsible?

01:27 — Enjoying Productivity vs. Needing Productivity

I've never been someone who sits around doing nothing all day.

I've always liked building things, software, learning, reading, working out, and trying new things. That's always been part of me.

This isn't one of those videos where I'm saying hard work is bad. I don't believe that.

Most of the good things in my life came from consistently showing up and putting in the work—health, career, finances.

Hopefully this YouTube channel turns into one of those things too.

None of that happens by accident.

But I think something slowly changed.

There was a time when I was productive because I enjoyed building things.

Now I catch myself feeling like I need to be productive because otherwise I feel like I'm wasting time.

Those aren't the same thing.

02:16 — Every Empty Hour Becomes an Opportunity

I've noticed that every empty space in my day starts looking like an opportunity.

Three hours before bed.

What can I build?

Saturday morning.

How can I use it?

Vacation.

Maybe I can get ahead on something.

Even a walk becomes exercise.

Reading becomes self-improvement.

A conversation becomes a future video.

A software idea becomes another side project or another business we can try to build.

Everything starts becoming something.

I spend so much time thinking about what things could become that sometimes I forget to experience what they already are.

02:58 — AI Didn't Cause This... It Exposed It

I don't think AI caused this.

I think AI is exposing it because AI never really stops.

It's moving forward. It's changing. There's always a new model, coding tool, workflow, agent, or announcement.

I work in software, and I actually enjoy learning this stuff.

I think it's one of the biggest technology shifts we'll ever see in our lives.

So I don't want to ignore it.

But there's a strange trap hiding inside all of it.

The tools are supposed to save us time.

Yet I can spend an entire evening learning new tools that promise to save me time.

Then I start thinking about everything I could build with them.

If AI lets one person do what used to take five people, maybe I should build another product, work on another business, automate something, or explore another idea.

The possibilities never end.

That's exciting.

But it's also extremely exhausting.

A friend of mine who's also a software developer said something interesting.

"If AI is supposed to help us become more productive... why am I working more than I ever have before?"

It's true.

04:13 — Work Doesn't Really End Anymore

I think that's one of the biggest differences today.

Work doesn't end.

Years ago there were natural stopping points.

You left the office.

You came home.

The project stayed where the project lived.

Now everything is in your pocket.

Work.

AI.

YouTube.

Ideas.

Notes.

Banking.

News.

Messages.

Notifications.

Everything.

The phone doesn't know I'm trying to relax.

It just keeps offering me another thing to think about.

Even when I'm sitting on the couch, part of my brain is still working.

I don't think that's rest.

04:43 — Running Changed My Perspective

One place I've noticed this change is in running.

I used to care a lot about my pace, heart rate, calories, and distance.

Every run had to prove something.

It had to be better than the last.

Lately I've stopped caring as much.

I still run almost every day.

But I just go.

Some days are slower.

Some days feel extremely hard.

Some days I don't even look at the pace until I'm finished.

The same thing happened with swimming.

I have a pool in my backyard.

I'm not trying to break records.

I get in.

Swim until I feel done.

Enjoy being outside.

Enjoy the morning.

See the sun.

Feel the breeze.

Enjoy being by myself.

Ironically, I think I enjoy it more now.

The health benefits are still there.

They're just no longer the only reason I'm doing it.

05:37 — Not Everything Needs a Measurable Outcome

This reminds me of another video I made about utility and rituals.

We're becoming really good at removing friction.

Groceries get delivered.

AI writes drafts.

Cars drive themselves.

Everything is becoming faster.

Most of that is genuinely useful.

But I've started wondering if we're accidentally removing experiences too.

Sometimes going to the store isn't just about buying groceries.

Driving isn't just about getting somewhere.

Sitting outside isn't about reducing stress.

Sometimes it's just about enjoying nature.

Reading isn't about becoming smarter.

Sometimes it's just reading good fiction.

Sometimes you're just living.

Maybe that's enough.

Maybe everything doesn't need a measurable outcome.

06:18 — Momentum or Fear?

One thing I struggle with is momentum.

I'm afraid if I stop...

I'll stop.

The YouTube channel is still new enough that I worry about missing uploads.

Projects lose momentum if I leave them too long.

Books don't write themselves.

Software doesn't build itself.

So part of me keeps pushing.

Just one more hour.

One more evening.

One more thing.

But I've also realized something.

If a project can only survive by making me anxious...

that's probably not momentum.

That's fear.

06:50 — I Still Love Building

I don't think I'm going to stop building things.

Honestly, I hope I don't.

I love software.

I love learning.

I love reading.

I love this whole AI adventure that we're all going through together.

I love making these videos.

I still cringe when I see them.

I don't watch them myself.

But I enjoy putting them out there and seeing where this experience goes.

That's not changing.

What I'm questioning is something different.

Maybe I don't need to maximize every single day.

07:21 — Maybe the Day Is Already Full

Maybe finishing work...

Going for a run...

Having supper with my family...

Then relaxing for an hour...

is already a full day.

Maybe I don't need to earn the right to rest.

Maybe rest isn't something that happens after you've completed every possible task.

Because that day never comes.

There will always be another idea.

Another feature.

Another video.

Another opportunity.

The list never ends.

Eventually you have to decide the day is finished...

even if the list isn't.

I'm still figuring that out.

Honestly, that's why I wanted to make this video.

I have a feeling I'm probably not the only one who sits down at the end of the day and immediately starts wondering what else they should be doing.

Maybe we're not lazy.

Maybe we've just forgotten what enough feels like.

08:35 — Final Thoughts

I think this is a problem a lot of us have.

The people who want to be productive.

Who want to make a difference.

Who don't want to fall behind.

Who want to keep exploring and building.

That's how I feel about it.

But there are times when you have to learn that you can step away.

It's okay to take a break.

It's okay not to always be doing something.

Your brain needs to rest.

You need to reset.

You need time to grow, move, and breathe.

Thanks for watching.