How AI Expands Human Capability [Raw Session]

00:00 — How AI Expands Individual Capability

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.
So I’ve done a few videos now about how people, in my mind, are underestimating AI and what it’s going to do.
The first couple of videos are around jobs, transportation. Obviously, I include medicine and law and manufacturing, and also the middle class.
The more I think about it, the more I think there is one part of this that people may be underestimating even more than job replacement.
And I’ve done other videos about how AI is widening the path.
I have another video—I’m not sure if I did it or not—about the happy side of AI.
And I’ve done, like, we’re about to see things we’ve never seen before and what it’s going to unlock.
So that’s what this one is more about.
It’s what AI allows one capable person or an extremely small team—like a developer, accountants, lawyers, safety inspectors, doctors, researchers—all these people with expertise that they already have, and how it’s going to unlock their potential.
Because right now, the problem is that expertise has always been attached to human limits: time, attention, memory, travel, fatigue, just the amount of hours and amount of work that needs to get done, and how much capacity a single person can handle, how many locations they can visit, how many files they can read, and how many clients they can deal with.
And I think AI is starting to separate expertise from those limits.
And once you start looking at it that way, every industry starts to look a little bit different.

01:45 — Separating Expertise From Human Limitations

So the core idea is, like I said, AI separates expertise from human capacity, human limitations.
Today, experts are constrained by all these things.
Like I just went through: how many hours are in a day, how much attention one person has, the memory, what systems you’re using.
AI starts removing all of that.
Not all of them. The person still has to know what they’re doing.
They still need judgment.
They need the experience.
They still have responsibility for the result.
Someone has to be accountable, but the amount of work surrounding that judgment can start shrinking.
Then every example becomes the same story.

02:31 — Accounting Practices Can Handle More Clients

So let’s take accounting for one example.
An accountant can handle more clients, not because they are working 18-hour days.
AI now can handle more intake, categorizing, filling out forms, reviewing transactions, flagging and preparing questions, doing follow-ups, organizing everything ahead of time.
So then the accountant is just left more as a reviewer and advisor, the final stamp of approval, and that changes the size of the practice they can operate.
Maybe they take more clients.
Maybe they can serve smaller clients who once were unprofitable.
Now all of a sudden, because it takes less time, now, you know, it is profitable, or at least it breaks even and allows them to help serve smaller clients, help out the less fortunate, or the ones who normally can’t afford to have that high expertise.
Now they can be managed and helped through a different system.
Their capacity expands.

03:29 — Small Law Firms Gain More Capacity

And in law, obviously, one lawyer all of a sudden doesn’t become smarter.
They just spend less time organizing and searching.
Less time reviewing documents, drafting up first versions of arguments.
They can spend more time making legal decisions, more time building those arguments that they need to put out there, and having them reviewed faster.
Actually, they’re more or less using AI to help them create the arguments, and they can review them to quickly dismiss or modify them.
More time understanding the actual case that they need to go through.
Think about a small law firm trying to take on a class-action lawsuit.
The barrier is not only whether they have a good lawyer. It’s whether they have the time and the staff to handle the discovery and research and the massive load of data that’s going to come their way, and the amount of witnesses and victims or defendants that they have to go through, interview, categorize, and capture all the information.
AI can help reduce all that burden.
It can search the documents and find related stuff, inconsistencies, summarize.
They still have to argue the case.
They still have to verify everything.
But now a small firm suddenly has the capabilities and the capacity to do more with fewer associates.
They don’t need to have a massive support staff to help them go through these massive cases.
Maybe now a small firm can compete with the larger firms without requiring the heavy overhead and cash flow and capital just to get through it.
The expertise did not necessarily change.
The capacity around it did.

05:24 — One Developer Can Operate Like a Small Team

And this goes, for me, all about software because that’s what I do and how I live.
So I see this directly in my situation.
As one developer, I don’t just write code faster.
And I’m not a great designer.
I have ideas. I don’t know how to articulate them and put them out there.
But now AI can help me.
It does help me write the code faster.
It does help me come up with the designs.
I can give it examples, and it can prototype stuff for me.
It can help me build the architecture because I suck at architecture.
But now it helps me push things out to my servers, my host, using Telegram with OpenClaw, my Ubuntu server.
It’s building stuff for me.
It’s connecting it all, setting it up, doing whatever it does.
And it makes it work because it does the deployments, does the tests, it does the walkthroughs.
It helps me find all the things that normally take me forever or take me having to deal with my team or a team, and now it’s doing it for me.
It’s doing marketing.
It’s doing copy.
It’s doing UI.
So now a developer all of a sudden can compete with a team.
They don’t need a full team to start, to get an MVP up and running, and see if something’s viable.
Now all of a sudden, all that cost is lower.
It changes what one person can realistically own and operate.
The important shift is not only faster code. It’s that one individual can start functioning more like a small organization, a small team.
And then as those products grow, they can build more products, they can build on the products, they can hire people to help make the product more robust.

07:12 — Individual Capacity Becomes Organizational Capacity

So then this is where I think the bigger idea appears in this whole video idea right here.
AI is not only helping people finish tasks faster. It’s changing the size of the operation one person can manage.
One accountant starts operating like a large practice.
One lawyer starts operating with the research capacity of a big firm.
One developer starts operating like a small product team.
One inspector, like a health inspector or safety inspector, starts overseeing an entire region.
One doctor starts monitoring and reviewing far more information.
Individual capacity starts turning into organizational capacity.
That can create more opportunity.
Smaller firms may be able to compete.
Individuals may be able to build things that used to require capital and staff.
Experts may be able to serve more people.
But it also changes staffing.
It changes pricing and competition.
It changes how many people are needed around each expert.
I do not know exactly where that lands, but I think that shift is much bigger than saying AI makes people more productive.
Because it’s what you do with that productivity.
You optimize your time.
You open up more doors.
You create more opportunities.
But what do you do with it?
Do you need people to help you with it?
Do you need different skills now from different people to help you expand?
Do you take on more clients, or do you become more specialized?
There’s a whole new world opening up for just individuals alone, I think.

08:42 — Safety and Health Inspectors

So to bring this, like I mentioned, to safety and health inspector-type things.
Safety is a useful example because it moves outside the normal office work that I’ve been talking about with papers and computers and coding.
Imagine safety officers are responsible for construction sites, industrial facilities, restaurants, food production.
Right now, the person has to physically go to those places.
They walk through.
They check everything.
They look for hazards.
Then they leave.
Maybe the location does not get inspected again for weeks or months.
Now imagine a safety officer spends time training a system on what they look for.
And I’m sure this already exists to some extent, but let’s bring it to a whole new level with cameras and drones and Optimus.
Let’s just put a robot in there.
The specific machine is not really an important part.
The important part is that the officer’s expertise can be turned into a repeatable inspection process.
Your AI profile.
I’ve had a whole video on that.
Imagine taking one person, their knowledge, their skills, their likes, dislikes, their nuances, all the different things that they notice and figure out.
And now they can repeat that endlessly across multiple locations.
Let’s take that a step further.
Let’s take multiple health inspectors, all their profiles merged into one.
So that’s where a company has a health inspector profile that is built up of many profiles.
That’s a whole other video.
Let’s table that for a different time.
But we bring that back into the system.
So in this case, the Optimus, the drone, the whatever is over there, and the system is continuously checking the basics.
It’s watching for blocked exits, missing safety equipment, unsafe movements.
It’s checking the temperature, equipment, all the procedures being followed.
Then the safety officer reviews the exceptions.
They do not have to personally watch every minute of every site.
They are alerted when they need their judgment, when their expertise is required.
That means that one officer might oversee an entire district, even more, possibly.
And the surprising part is that safety could improve.
Instead of one inspector every few months, the location is effectively inspected every single day, every minute of every day.
The human expert is still responsible for those calls, but the repetitive observation becomes continuous.
AI starts separating expertise from physical presence.

11:08 — Medical Research and Pharmaceutical Discovery

Let’s bring that into medicine.
It’s a natural flow.
This may be where people underestimate the impact the most.
Start with the research side of it, with pharmaceuticals and medical research and scientists and laboratories.
Drugs, clinical trials, imaging, proteins, patient outcomes, research papers.
A human team can only examine so much.
They can only hold so many variables in their head.
AI can move through huge amounts of data.
It can recognize patterns that we would never, ever find.
It compares outcomes, relationships, finds combinations, tries all the different situations with the different variables in controlled situations.
It manages all this stuff, and it does—I don’t even want to say a number—but the amount of compute and comparisons and patterns and whatever else it can do and equations is unbelievable compared to a human.
And that could speed up how quickly researchers rule things out and how fast they find new things and find solutions.
Understand why something failed.
Understand why something worked.
The breakthrough still has to be tested, verified, repeated, and approved, but the search itself may move much faster.

12:32 — Doctors, Nurses, and Continuous Monitoring

And outside of medicine in the physical world, then bring that to the same as the safety inspector.
Now nurses and doctors all rely on monitors, tests, notes, observations, checks.
But humans cannot continue to watch every patient at every single moment.
Nurses move around.
Doctors manage many cases.
Everybody’s tired.
Everyone has limits.
Now imagine AI continuously watching the data.
Heart rate.
Oxygen.
Temperature.
Blood.
Comparing that with lab results as they come in.
Medication.
Their movement.
Just overall reviewing the entire patient’s life and current situation and all the things that are happening at once for every single patient.
It looks for all the patterns and combinations.
Maybe one number by itself looks normal, but several small changes together suggest the patient is deteriorating.
There’s a problem.
A nurse may eventually notice it.
AI may be able to flag it much sooner.
The system alerts a nurse or doctor.
It does not make the final decision.
It tells them, “Hey, you need to pay attention over there. Something changed. This pattern looks unusual. Review this now.”
The nurse does not disappear.
The doctor doesn’t go away.
They are alerted sooner with more information.
That allows us to focus on patients who need them the most.
It removes some of the constant mental load of trying to watch everything at once.
We may still need more nurses.
We do need more nurses, and we do need more doctors.
It doesn’t magically solve the shortage that we have.
It helps alleviate their stress, their workload, the patient stress.
It allows them to monitor better.
It increases their capacity.
So it could allow the people we already have to do more work with less stress.
Less time reviewing routine information.
More time caring for people.
More time making decisions.
More time responding when something actually matters.

14:34 — The Broader Pattern

So the broader pattern here is the accountant reviews instead of manually processing everything.
The lawyer decides instead of manually searching through everything.
The developer builds instead of waiting for a full team.
The safety officers handle more exceptions instead of driving to every location.
Nurses respond to alerts instead of trying to watch everything.
The researcher follows promising leads instead of manually searching through every possible combination.
The expert remains important, maybe even more important, because the final judgment still matters.
Responsibility matters.
Trust still matters.
Experience still matters a lot.
You need to know what you’re looking at.
You need to have that past history of seeing it before, knowing what happens if it’s ignored, knowing what happens if you do the wrong thing.
But the limits around that expert still start changing.
For hundreds of years, expertise has been limited by one person’s time.
I think AI is starting to break that relationship.

15:40 — The Optimistic and Uncomfortable Sides

Now there’s an optimistic side to this.
Better care, faster research, safer workplaces, experts serving more people or taking on more tasks, more products getting built, more cases being taken on.
But there’s also an uncomfortable side.
If one person can now do more, what happens to the people who used to support that work?
Does that accountant grow the practice and hire more people, or handle more clients with the same staff?
Does the law firm take on more cases and expand, or increase revenue without expanding the team?
Does the developer use leverage to start a business, or does the company decide it needs fewer developers?
Does a hospital use AI to reduce stress and improve care, or use it as an excuse to stretch staff even thinner?
The technology does not answer those questions.
The organizations using it do.
That’s why this is not automatically good or bad.
It’s leverage, and leverage depends on who controls it and how they use it.

16:46 — What One Person Can Do With AI Beside Them

So I think this is the part people may be missing.
We keep looking at AI and asking what it can do.
I think the bigger question is what a person can do once AI is beside them.
What can one accountant manage?
What can a lawyer take on?
What can a developer build?
What can inspectors oversee?
Doctors—what can they notice with nurses?
What can researchers discover?
I do not think AI is replacing expertise.
I think it’s removing some of the limits around those experts.
And when that starts happening across every profession, it does not only change jobs.
It changes businesses, competition, research, how widely one person’s knowledge can be applied.
It changes what one human is capable of producing.
That is another reason I still think people are underestimating AI.
Not because every prediction will come true.
Not because all of this happens tomorrow, because it’s going fast, but it still takes time.
But because the relationship between expertise and human capacity is already starting to change.
And I do not think we really fully understand what follows from that yet.

17:53 — Closing

Like, we are on the cusp of—we’re in the infancy of AI.
I’ve done a video on that, how we’re watching it grow, how we’re seeing it morph and change, and not knowing where it’s going to go, where it will end up eventually.
Even then, it’s still going to evolve.
We’re seeing how people are going to use it.
There’s a happy side and there’s a bad side.
But I think there’s more upside than down.
And I think this is one of them, where that doesn’t just widen the path for individuals who don’t need to be an expert because AI can be their team.
This is taking an expert and having AI increase their capacity and capabilities.
And it’s an exciting time that we’re going through.
An exciting time.
Alright, thanks for watching.

Change Starts When You Notice Yourself [Raw Session]

00:00 — Admiring people who can change

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds. So this one's a little bit different where I keep coming back with the same idea of like one of the things I admire most about people is when I see people that have the ability to change.

And I don't just mean the obvious outside stuff that we see. Yes, losing weight, getting in shape are very difficult, making a lot of money, turning your financial situation around, changing jobs, dressing different and changing your look, and just being healthier in general or just changing your demeanor.

What I mean is the deeper kind of changes, the kind where someone starts reacting differently, the kind where someone who has been one way basically as long as you've ever known them for their entire lives and they start noticing how they think, how they react, where their focus goes, what they assume, what they keep repeating, what kind of person they are slowly becoming.

That kind of change is impressive to me because it's not loud.

Most of the time, nobody sees it happening.

They only see the result later, but the real work starts way before anyone ever notices that these things are happening.

This person has become aware of what they're doing.

01:20 — Awareness is the biggest part

And it's the awareness is probably the biggest part of it because you can change anything, but you just have to notice it.

You have to notice the habit.

You have to notice your reactions.

You have to notice the little shift in your mind when something happens.

For me, I can react quickly, especially at home and family and situations like that.

Sometimes I'm way too fast with my responses.

And something happens when I can feel myself move almost instantly into frustration, anger, defensiveness, impatience, and always assuming the worst.

And in that moment, it doesn't feel like a choice.

It feels like reality.

It feels like this happened, so this is how I feel.

But I'm starting to think that fast reaction is not always the truth.

Sometimes it's just a path your mind is used to taking.

And if your mind has taken the path for years, it starts to feel personal.

You start saying, "That's just who I am."

But maybe it's not.

Maybe it's just what you've practiced all your life.

It's what you've trained yourself to become.

02:33 — Learning from the pause

And then my wife is a complete contrast to that.

Now, she's quick to anger. She'll yell first before she does anything.

But for the big things is what I'm talking about.

The big decisions, the change reactions in life, the big moments.

And this is where she acts different than me.

She processes things way different.

She takes her time, she analyzes it, she overanalyzes it, she goes so deep.

She thinks through every single detail possible.

And I'll be honest, sometimes that can drive me absolutely crazy because I want to get to the point.

I want the answer, I want the thing solved, and I want to move forward.

But the older I get and the more these situations arise with family, kids getting older, a career, like just things in general, the more I can see there's more value in taking the pause.

There's something valuable in not reacting right away, in giving yourself space before you decide what something really means.

And that's probably something I need more of because when you react instantly, you don't want to respond to what actually happened.

And when you react instantly, it's sort of, you're putting your foot down.

You're putting your, this is where I stand.

And it makes it a little bit harder to claw back and reevaluate.

Sometimes you respond to what you assumed happened, what you were afraid happened, or was going to happen, what it reminded you of, what your mood was already carrying, and what your ego wanted to protect.

But the pause matters.

That pause might be where the real change begins.

04:17 — Where your focus goes

Now, a big part of this is noticing where your focus goes because your mind can turn something into a whole story really quick.

Something small happens and suddenly you're thinking, this is bad, this always happens to me.

Nothing ever works out.

I knew this would go wrong.

This is going to be the worst case scenario guaranteed.

I can't deal with this right now.

And maybe some of that is true.

Sometimes things are bad, life is hard.

I don't want this to sound like fake positivity.

I don't think you can just smile your way through everything and put on a cheery demeanor.

You can't just be happy, pretend everything is going to be okay because what you focus on starts shaping what you notice and what you notice starts shaping what you do and what you do over and over starts shaping your life.

So if your mind always looks for the worst version of something it will probably find it.

If your mind always looks for a reason to be angry you're probably going to be angry a lot.

If your mind always looks for proof that things are hopeless it will probably find that also.

But the opposite can be true.

You can train yourself to ask, is this actually as bad as I'm making it out to be?

Is there another way to see this?

What is one useful thing I can do here?

What kind of person do I want to be in this moment?

Am I reacting or am I choosing?

And that doesn't fix everything, but it gives you space and space really matters.

05:55 — Choosing happiness

I think I did a video before, like you have to choose happiness.

We all assume that it's just part of life and other people, some people are happier than others just because they have a better life or things work out for them.

But the more, like in that other video where I talked about it, like you read about it and research it you find out like happiness does happen, but you have to look for it.

You have to make a conscious effort.

You don't artificially create it, but you have to look for it and you have to try to find the happiness and the positivity because if you look for the negativity you're going to find it because there's a lot more of that out there.

06:40 — Depression, being stuck, and direction

And this goes, this gets heavier when you think about people already depressed or stuck.

And I want to be careful with this one because it's not a simple saying just think positive.

That's not helpful when someone feels like they're in a hole.

When you're in that place, sometimes you're not even thinking about how to get out.

You're just thinking about where you are.

You're thinking about how you got there, what went wrong, why things feel impossible and how it might get worse.

How tired you are all the time, how far away everything better feels.

And when your mind is locked onto that, the hole becomes your entire life, the whole picture.

Not because it is the entire picture of your life, but because it's the only thing you can see.

So maybe part of change is slowly rebuilding the ability to look beyond where you are.

Not pretending the hole isn't real because you're in it.

You're going through it and you're not pretending the pain isn't real because you're feeling that.

But start asking where do I want to go?

What would one better day look like?

What is one small thing I can aim and try to achieve at this moment?

What kind of person am I trying to become?

What am I trying to move away from?

And that direction matters because without direction you're just surviving the current moment and sometimes survival is all you can do.

But eventually if you can you need something to move forward.

A goal, a priority, a reason, even a blurry version of where you want to be.

08:13 — The Secret, focus, and attraction

I remember when The Secret was a big thing.

I read the book, watched the movie, the idea of the law of attraction, attracting what you think about.

I know people look at it all different.

Some of it can sound too clean, too magical, like fake, like a pyramid scheme somehow, somewhere, like if you just think about something hard enough the universe drops it in your lap.

I don't know if I believe it 100% that way, but I do believe there's something real underneath it.

Your thoughts matter because your focus matters and your focus changes what you notice, what you ignore, what you tolerate, what you aim at, what you repeat, and what you slowly become.

If you keep focusing on the person you don't want to be you can stay trapped in that.

But if you start focusing on where you want to go even a little tiny bit your mind starts looking for steps.

Not giant steps.

Not overnight transformation.

Just steps.

And sometimes that's enough to begin.

09:16 — Journaling and vision boards

And like that's a reason why journaling is a great thing.

Vision boards.

Like because you're putting yourself in those situations.

You're focusing on where you want to go with the journal, with the vision board.

Obviously your point, you're only looking at things that you want to aspire to have or be.

And then with the journaling you're also putting your goals and things and you're putting the steps that you did to get there.

You're putting your current situation.

So you're evaluating your life through the journaling and through the meditation and things and that helps you refocus and regain your footing properly.

09:50 — Preparation removes the decision

And the other part of this is preparation because awareness by itself isn't always enough.

You can know you want to change.

You can know what the problem is.

You can know the better choice.

But for the moment, if the moment comes and everything is still set up the old way, you probably do the old thing.

And that's why people always say if you want to work out, lay your clothes out the night before, have your shoes ready, know what time you're going, have the plan already made.

And it sounds extremely basic, almost too easy to even imagine that just laying your stuff out the night before is going to help you out of bed to go do your workout.

But it works because you're removing that decision.

You're removing the part where your mind starts negotiating because once your mind starts negotiating it usually goes back to what it knows.

And what it knows is comfort, delay, couch, snacks, just excuses, I'll start tomorrow, I already did enough, I worked out yesterday.

So part of change is not trusting yourself to be heroic in the hardest moments.

Part of change is setting things up before that moment even arrives.

11:05 — Food, surroundings, and making better choices easier

And same with eating.

If you know you're going to eat the bag of chips, which I do a lot of, but I've stopped because I don't bring them home.

I don't go to the places where I know I can gorge on them and eat as many as I want.

Or I also have other things now.

I put other things in place of chips to make sure I don't overindulge in those.

Because at night when you're tired or bored or stressed, you probably won't become some perfect disciplined version of yourself.

You'll reach for what's easy.

So make the better thing easy.

That means your surroundings matter.

The stuff in your house matters.

The people you spend your time with matters.

The places you go make a big difference, what apps you have open, and your routines and what you repeat make a big difference.

You can't always change everything around you, but you can start shaping some of it.

You can ask, what am I making easy?

What am I making hard?

What keeps pulling me backwards?

What points me toward the person I'm trying to become?

What do I need to remove?

What do I need to prepare?

And it's not dramatic, but it's very real.

12:19 — Running and the voice of resistance

And running is probably the clearest example for me.

I remember when running felt huge.

At first it wasn't even about 5K.

It was can I do five minutes?

Then it was can I do 10, 20, try to hit 30.

And every time there was that voice, that little resistance saying I did it yesterday, I don't need to do it today, I'm tired, I did enough, maybe I'll skip this one, I'll just do it later.

And the annoying part is that voice can sound very reasonable.

You can talk yourself pretty much into anything if you really wanted to.

It doesn't always sound lazy.

Sometimes it sounds logical.

But now, after so long and doing it continuously, 5K doesn't feel like a huge thing.

It's still 5K.

The distance didn't change, but my mind changed.

Now it feels normal.

Now I almost feel worse if I don't do it.

And that's the weird part to me because it shows that the thing itself might not be the only problem.

Sometimes the problem is what your mind is attached to the thing.

13:24 — Workouts and the first rep

And I'm trying to get workouts to that place too, because I still get that resistance sometimes.

I don't want to go downstairs.

I don't want to lift.

I just don't want to start.

But I know something now.

Most of the dread is before the thing.

Once I go downstairs and do the first lift, my mind changes.

It goes from, I don't want to do this, to this isn't too bad.

And sometimes even, I hope I'm not down here too long because now I'm into it.

Now I'm doing it, so I'm going to finish it.

I'm going to do my best.

That first rep matters, not because it solves everything, but because it breaks the spell.

It proves the resistance was not the whole truth.

14:03 — Cold showers and the flinch

And I'll give another example of this, is cold showers.

Cold showers are like that.

The worst part is the first hit of cold, that first flinch, that first moment where your body says, nope, get out, fight or flight.

But then something changes.

The cold is still cold.

Temperature didn't change, but your body adjusted, your mind adjusted.

After a little bit, it almost doesn't feel the same.

That's the thing I keep thinking about.

You can't always trust the flinch.

The flinch is real, the dread is real, the resistance is real, but it's not always the full truth.

Sometimes the flinch is just the old version of you trying to keep the old routine alive.

And before I get in the shower, I know it's cold.

I know I'm going to hate it.

But I also know that after like two seconds or 10 seconds, I'm actually going to think it's not cold enough.

So I try to put myself in that place before it hits my body.

So I don't get as much of a flinch.

So I'm preparing myself ahead of time.

15:06 — Quiet people who actually change

And that's why I admire the quiet people who actually change.

Not the loud version, not the person, person, person.

Not the person constantly talking about who they're going to become.

I mean, the person in the background actually doing it.

The person who starts walking, running, eating better, stops buying junk, starts pausing before reacting, starts catching their own thoughts, stops assuming stuff, starts changing who they spend time around, starts shaping their house, schedule, and habits around where they want to go.

That is slow work.

Most of it is completely invisible to everyone around them.

And it takes a lot of small building blocks, but eventually those small things start changing what feels normal.

At first, running feels impossible, then it becomes normal.

First, eating better feels restrictive, but then it becomes how you shop.

At first, pausing before reacting feels unnatural.

Then it becomes proof that you're not trapped inside the old version of yourself.

That's the kind of change I respect.

16:13 — Change starts earlier than we think

So maybe change starts earlier than we think.

Not when the outside looks different.

Not when people notice, not when the habit is fully fixed.

Maybe it starts when you notice yourself, when you notice where your mind goes, what you keep repeating, what you're avoiding, what you're making easy, what you're making hard.

Because if you make things hard, then you're not going to want to do them.

So those things that are bad for you, if you make it difficult to do them, you're going to not want to do it.

You naturally want to do the easier thing.

So make the good things easy and the bad things hard.

And then you change what you're aiming for, what version of yourself keeps showing up.

And then you create one small gap between the reaction and the response, between the dread and the action, between the flinch and the decision, between the old version of you and the next one.

The gap might not look like much, but maybe that's where the whole thing starts.

Not overnight, not perfectly, not loudly, just one small moment where you notice the old path and choose not to go all the way down it again.

17:20 — Why I wanted to talk about this

I really wanted to do this one because I really admire people that notice themselves, notice what they see, how they talk, what they put their attention to, what they focus on and they're able to adjust, they're able to tweak, like personality tweaks, lifestyle tweaks.

Not easy to do, it's extremely difficult.

And people that can do that are very, it's very admirable to watch and it's very inspiring.

And it makes a big difference.

And thanks for watching.

Bye.

Token Maxing vs Token Saving [Thinking Outloud]

00:00 — Token maxing vs token saving

I’m gonna try to do this one as a complete ramble because I’ve been seeing

Obviously I’ve been seeing about token maxing

But I’ve always talked about and I had this idea that tokens as we see them today is going to completely change

and I believe

basically token maxing versus token saving and that’s kind of the idea I’m thinking about because

As of now you see these companies rolling through tokens non-stop. They’re changing their models

They’re trying to every time a new model comes out. Obviously people are jumping on it

They want to use the latest and greatest because they think they need to be producing more and indeed be producing

faster

whereas

Just because the the model is newer and more advanced doesn’t mean it’s going to help you

develop better. It’s not going to help you make better, faster decisions. Sometimes even then,

it still takes time, like it still needs to process go through it, maybe a stronger model

really is going to do more prediction, more analysis, deeper research, and bring in,

take longer because it needs, it’s going to use more information that you’re not privy to. Sure,

Sure it may give you a better idea in the end, but it’s probably a good chance that

the question you were asking or the thing you were trying to get it to do using a lower

model you probably would have got the same answer because you kind of knew what you wanted

to ask, you knew what you were getting at and it didn’t require you to go full out.

01:37 — Companies pushing people to use more AI

Now this all comes about because like you see all these companies like all the layoffs

that were happening, people saying like this is how many tokens you got and one company

I have friends that work with, their biggest thing was they were trying to make people

use AI more.

So part of their evaluation or quarterly reviews was looking at how many tokens they use and

if they weren’t using enough, they needed to up it.

They needed to use more.

And then you see bigger companies blowing through the token budget like so fast.

very crazy consumption just to say they’re doing it.

It’s almost like people losing their minds,

just making sure everything they touch

flows through the AI process.

Nothing is done manually anymore or using,

it still uses their own brain.

They still have to put the prompts,

they still have to review it,

but they’re relying on it more

and they’re expected to use it more.

02:42 — Working within token limits

Now I find it funny because where I work,

I’ve always been quite impressed with how

we all seem to work within our constraints.

We didn’t set out to say we’re gonna have constraints,

but all developers, non-developers,

there’s a few salespeople, whatever.

Sometimes they get a little access

and they go a little overboard quickly,

but they learn, they learn where they went wrong,

they learn where they used too much.

don’t make it make PFS for you.

Don’t, well, you can make PFS,

don’t make it make a PowerPoint.

Don’t go crazy with the imagery or infographs

and things like that.

But there’s, again, there’s right models for that.

There are ones that I find that are very well good for that.

The only thing that I feel that we did

a little bit different is we’ve chosen a path.

We’ve chosen the one we’re gonna use and we stick to it.

I believe that different models have different places.

So I actually moving to the thing where I find

codecs to be better than cloud code in my mind.

I find it to be more efficient, better analysis.

I find it to be quicker.

And I find it to be very well, very good.

Cloud code still is top-notch

and we use that at our work all the time.

And what I’m saying is we all seem to fall within,

we don’t seem to blow our budget.

There are times when you go deep planning mode

or deep analysis.

When I’m really trying to find a bug

or make sure that everything is under,

I didn’t miss anything.

I blew through it yesterday.

There’s a lot of tests I had to do yesterday.

There was a lot of restructuring.

and I did go through it.

But that’s not a normal case for me.

Normally I can go, I don’t hit a limit at all really,

but I do use it quite a bit.

It knows me, it knows how I work.

I have my own little memory thing set up.

04:51 — Local models and internal company brains

But anyway, back to token maxing.

So what I’m trying to understand

is I’ve been talking about it for a while

where I really believe there are gonna be local models.

We are gonna have our own internal LLM

that’s running somewhere on our own server.

It doesn’t need a crazy amount of power.

It doesn’t need a ton of access outside

of what we provided and what we gave it access to

so we can learn within us, learn our company.

It doesn’t need to know what,

we don’t need to know what Coke’s doing

or we don’t need to know what 3M or some other company

how they operate, what we’re getting at is we need to know how we operate.

We need to know our guidelines, our product, our policies, and all that’s contained within

our own business.

So why would we need to outsource that in a way?

Why do we need to build a brain that runs in some cloud that we have no control over?

It makes more sense in my mind for companies to build their FAQs, their policies, their

HR policies, coding policies, their sales pitches, all their numbers, their accounting

numbers so they know their budgets, they know all these things and it’s contained within

their own system.

So in that case, you’re not token maxing.

The only maxing comes there would be the speed, so how much RAM and CPU you’re going to need,

and then how much energy is going to be used.

But other than that, you’re not blowing through tokens.

There’s just an internal process running.

And I also talked about using jobs and things like that.

So there’s no reason why a lot of the features and a lot of Jira cleanup and documents and

key pages and whatever else and jobs running, test cases, scenarios, pitches, all that could

be running in the background, low hanging fruit on a basis.

It doesn’t need to be going out and pulling in the latest model.

It doesn’t need to be attached to your credit card, running up your subscription all the

time and you know I’m at is happening right now in one of my projects my

private project from my kid I did I jumped on to jet GPT with codecs

connected my computer and I don’t know why I still don’t know what command I

ran but apparently this seems been running for days to the point that she’s

already demoed the product I haven’t looked at it yet I haven’t logged in or

nothing but I have got hit with a couple of re-ups on my, I don’t know, it’s my API.

I guess it just went overage and it’s doing like $9, $9.

It did it three or four times already and I’m only at the ninth.

07:19 — A personal example of accidental token maxing

So I told it to pause because I need her feedback at this point but the fact is it built this

product and that’s a whole other thing.

So that’s kind of token maxing.

I have something running, I have it running non-stop, I didn’t know I did.

And I put a kibosh on that real quick.

But to me, that’s token maxing.

That’s having something run non-stop with no real angle, just the purpose of it running.

I didn’t know it was running, but I guess I got it to a point that it was sustainable,

but it cost me money.

And so you can see how multiple employees on bigger projects are going mad like that.

It’s going to eat out your budget really hard, really fast.

And is the return there?

At this point in my situation, there is no return.

It’s just speed.

And then pointless speed at the end because I haven’t had feedback.

I haven’t reviewed it.

I haven’t looked at it.

Now she demoed it.

She’s put it in her Instagram feed.

done a bunch of things with it and people seem to be liking it but I haven’t seen it.

But it’s time to stop and reevaluate, get the feedback and then restart at a more token

saving situation.

09:24 — Not everything needs the latest model

But again, I really believe the cost of tokens is going to be spread out.

I don’t think we’re all going to be using the latest models.

I think this whole, it almost feels like a scam in a way to me where just because you’re

pumping out a new model, everyone jumps on board, but the token price is so high because

it’s supply and demand.

It’s the limitations, the newness of it, and everyone’s got to be on board with it.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Why do I need to jump to, if something’s been working great for me, why don’t we need to

jump?

like the new fable just for deep diving insecurity only so I give it very tight

reins and particular jobs so if something’s very important yes I will

give it a higher model but I’m not going to max my tokens on it I’m going to

limit it and what I’m doing like I said documentation if I’m doing just a new

feature then I’m going and there’s no deadline there’s no requirement

there’s requirements but there’s no like tight tight deadline on a speed

I don’t need to be running the latest and greatest.

And I can, I still need to use my own personal brain

to go through it.

I need to build my own memory.

I need to build my own documentation and process

that goes along with it.

10:39 — Smaller internal AI models across companies

So I keep going back to the whole thing of like,

AI is going to be part of every company.

There’s going to be a group of people that understand it,

how do you, there’s going to be infrastructure around it,

security around it, different levels of it,

different types of it.

And this is a total rambling.

So I’m all over the place in a way,

but I just believe like you’re going to have

these smaller models, these smaller internal models.

You’re going to have some things distributed

throughout your system.

Like if you’re a region-based type software or a company,

then maybe there’s a place where each,

I’m just thinking out loud here.

So like within each region, it has its own copy of its corporate brain, let’s say, in

that area.

So each corporate brain has its own parts for the different policies, the different procedures,

the different coding models, the different languages, the different nuances, the customers,

the clients, all the different things that go along with that.

But then they all feed back to a central one that they all have the main terminology, the

main corporate goals and principles and policies that go in place.

and they all feed off each other,

and then you’re hooked into your call centers across,

and there’s FAQs being built,

and there’s knowledge bases,

and documentation for manuals.

There’s all the kinds of things,

and a lot of what I just said

doesn’t require to have a subscription to something.

It doesn’t require you to sign up to anthropic,

or sign up to OpenAI, or Gemini.

All it requires is for you to have your own models running.

It could be in the cloud.

That’s fine, but you can set up your own VPS

and you can have your own cloud running.

Your own LLM running in the cloud,

distribute it properly,

or you can have physical servers sitting like,

it probably wouldn’t be that,

but I have one out in the room behind me

that I use my open cloud on,

and I haven’t used that that much anymore,

but it saved me a ton.

I have Gemini running on it also.

Not Gemini, Gemma, I can’t remember what it’s called,

but it’s very slow for that.

So I limit that quite a bit.

Basically what I have it doing is I set up

so I can talk to my telegram through it

and have it run test, update linear if I needed to.

But now with JATGPT and the codecs through the phone,

just mind blown for that.

But even then, because it’s on my machine,

I have it connecting and making sure

that my open cloud is updated

so I can get updates from my telegram.

can run. Same with the book idea.

13:22 — Staying inside constraints at work

So what I’m getting at is I’m managing to do quite a bit

at work within the constraints that we have. We all are, all of us at work are not on the, none of

us except for maybe a handful of people are on the top description base. The rest of us are on

the base normal professional corporate account and very few people I know of blow through their

credits, they’re tokens and we’re all, none of us are running the latest and

greatest I don’t think. I think we’re all a little over the place and in some of

it but for the most part we use, don’t use the best, fastest model. We use the

most everyday use type model and allows us to be consistent amongst each other.

It allows us to stay within the token limits and we really don’t spend that

much money when I see what our bill is compared to you see like Microsoft just turning off

cloud code for their employees.

I see what someone like Shopify how much they spend on their tokens is pretty insane.

LinkedIn, Salesforce like these companies are blowing through money like crazy.

But to what end?

Why did they get out of this token maxing?

So I believe in token saving in my mind.

I mean like work within your constraints.

That comes from a base camp back in the day,

37 signals where like they said,

like we wanna work with what we have

until we’re busting at the seams.

Until our employees cannot handle the workload.

If every employee is working an extra four hours a week

on top of their current workload,

then that’s time to add another engineer or marketing

or whatever that department is.

Until then, until we maximize ourselves

and our current bandwidth,

we don’t need to increase our bandwidth.

And I believe that’s how we need to treat tokens.

15:25 — Token cost, energy, and waste

And I believe that token costs, what’s it attached to?

It’s attached to energy.

It’s attached to the limitations of the RAM, the CPU,

the energy in the end.

And I’ve talked with us a million times,

but like once they figure out the energy

and we start really banking on proper energy usage,

make AI, figure out how to make it better.

So I really believe there’s a lot of price gouging going on,

a lot of inflation for no reason.

I think like grocery scams,

the big bread heist in Canada

where they were upping the price

when there was no need of it.

Just because the demand was there, people wanted it,

and they could get away with it.

think StubHub or Ticketmaster,

like you’re increasing the price after-market tickets

for what purpose?

Just because you think the man’s there, people want it,

and you keep the price high.

‘Cause once you lower the price, it’s hard to go back up.

Gas, the same thing.

So let’s get the energy down, let’s get that figured out,

let’s get AI understanding how it can run more efficiently.

Let’s start building out local models

so we can save on tokens,

and not just burn through them

and not think about the consequences

of the cost of our actions,

whether it be environmental

or whether it be our pocketbooks

and ’cause companies have to justify this cost.

So why have your employees run free?

Why let them go crazy with their tokens?

I really, I don’t want to see a time

where you have to justify your token usage.

You should…

See, that’s where I’ve talked about that before too,

where you should be able to,

you should have to justify what you’re capable of doing

with the amount of tokens you’re allocated.

If you need to go above that,

then have a possible, like a good reason for it.

Don’t just burn through tokens

‘cause you don’t wanna open up your email and read it,

or you don’t wanna take the time

to do your own manual search

go find the document in your Google Drive or your OneDrive or wherever you guys keep

your documents.

Like take the time and do it yourself.

17:46 — Still doing the work yourself

Don’t just get it to blindly write you a Jira.

I just had a big Jira written.

It was a massive Jira and it wrote it and it wrote all the sub-tasks.

Now I’m not going, I’m going to read it myself and I’ve already gone through it and I’ve

made the adjustments myself.

And now I’m going to go through all the subtasks and I’m going to read those myself.

I’m not just going to make a bunch of notes and tell or one by one tell AI to fix it for

me because that’s just burning tokens for no reason and then I lose a little bit of

control and I want it’s just like the code.

I did run out of tokens yesterday and the code was at a point where I’m very used to

it doing the code review with me, doing the tests for me and running them and making sure

they’re all green but I ran out of tokens so I took the time I went file by

file read them then I tested them manually and then I did the suspect

test and I did all the checking myself I feel like I’m a toddler getting off my

train wheels telling you how it is I did all this myself I wrote it I read the

code I verified it I passed rule copy because I did it good that’s not the

case I guess in this case it is because it actually that’s what happened but you

don’t have to have it do everything for you you still you can there’s a video on

my eyes I think it’s before this one or after but you like you still have to

ride the bike is what it was called and you still have to do the thing you have

to know how to do the things and the only way you know how to do them is to

do them yourself.

If you just let AI do everything for you so you’re token maxing on everything

no matter how small the task change color. Like I had that happening with my private

projects where I’d say I want to like try getting it to try different color schemes.

I use Tailwind so I have my file and I can just easily change one file and see the changes.

I don’t need to tell AI let’s try five different colors and show me each one. Like I could

give it a prop like that, but what’s the point?

I can literally do that with a couple clicks

and a save by myself.

So that’s token saving, that’s token responsibility.

I’m not just being willy nilly with what costs,

physical money that I’m earning.

20:14 — Using AI inside workflows without maxing tokens

Like I’ve stopped, I’ve actually canceled

my cloud subscription and I had a bit of a hard time

doing it when I did it but now I don’t know anxiety over it all I feel very

confident and comfortable and actually very surprised and impressed with just

using my open AI one for everything I do and I don’t I don’t max my tokens I

don’t even know last time and I think it did yesterday because it was going by

itself and that’s like I said yes I did because it upped itself twice I think

but that should be stopped now and even like I use I use gronk for don’t use

gronk for that I use something on X but anyway like I do a lot of manual stuff

so I use N8n I built up my workflows I do all that I did all that manually

well JHPT helped me build it because it would have took me a lot longer and so

So there’s an entire workflow that happens with my X accounts and there’s only one small

piece that’s AI involved.

And then everything after that is manual.

I don’t have it doing the posts.

I don’t have it doing the follows or the reposts or anything like that.

That’s me.

I get an email.

It builds me an email and that’s it.

I don’t have it doing a bunch of analysis and going through.

I do and I have another one that’s going to go through that’s going through my emails

and doing the same thing for expenses.

And the only single part in there that that’s involved is deciphering the email, like just

reading it based off examples, it builds a knowledge base for itself to know, okay, this

email address, this subject, this is where I look, so it gets more efficient and faster

as it goes.

That’s the only part that’s AI but it’s a very big workflow that goes through a lot of different things. So it’s

using AI but using it in a token saving way rather than

Maxing it out with these massive prompts or multiple steps of massive prompts

I try to limit as much as possible and then on top of that I’m trying to use it where

It uses the local model as much as possible rather than so a new email comes in that it’s not familiar with and

Hasn’t seen before then it’ll go out and build

Decipher it then it’ll update the memory and then it’ll fall back to use the local model

Because I’m not worried about how long it takes it runs once a day it runs at night

I don’t care if it takes four hours to run

I don’t care if it takes eight hours to run because I only needed to run once and that’s fine by me

Same with the Twitter one. I don’t really care how long it takes.

It just has to run once a day and that’s it. Done.

So, and I can… so if the local model is slow, I don’t care.

But it doesn’t cost me any money besides the energy to run the machine.

It doesn’t cost me a bunch of tokens to call out and be efficient.

I don’t need it to be efficient. I need it to be consistent and accurate.

I don’t and I need it to run. That’s literally it.

23:37 — Bringing AI back in house

So it comes into the play of like what?

what people really need and

right now I don’t I don’t know cuz I only know what we do internally and

When I talk to a few friends at other companies and what I see online, but what I see online is more

People maxing all the time always pushing the new models. I don’t see a lot of time. I’m seeing more and more

more about running local, bringing stuff back in house.

But are they talking about just their data

to build their data modes?

Are they talking about getting away

from SaaS outsource solutions, the document repositories,

things like that, their code repositories?

Or are they talking about AI models bringing that in house,

which I hope they are, because I really

believe there’s a place for that.

Keep it to yourself.

You can still put it up on Amazon or DigitalOcean

or whatever and have it stored there.

That’s fine too.

But at the same time, it’s yours.

Keep it for yourself.

You don’t need to have OpenAI or Anthropic or Proplexity

or Gemini running it.

You can run your own model.

And that helps you save money there.

It helps you be more efficient.

It helps you build that data mode

that no other company would have.

It’s your own internal thing

and it gives you an advantage.

It learns from you, it knows you.

25:10 — The new jobs around AI infrastructure

Anyway, I don’t know if this is video.

This is really rambling,

’cause I really wanted to get it out there

where I really see the movement

that is either here or coming.

And the more and more we get to it,

yes, it’s gonna change the world.

Things are gonna be crazy.

We are gonna lose jobs,

but I really see a new movement of people,

new jobs being created in coming to life.

And I do believe the people that are paying attention to AI

are gonna be the leaders of those new positions,

the creators of those new positions.

They’re gonna build new positions.

They’re gonna have their own departments

that are gonna be like,

at least it’s gonna be a whole infrastructure part of it,

marketing, workflow, document management.

Like all this comes into play,

building out local models,

building like which ones, how to tweak them,

to configure them, how to make them grow, how to build those workflows and what systems

need to be in place.

There’s this whole another ecosystem of jobs that are going to come out of this, I believe,

but people had to be willing to do it.

People can’t be scared, but you can’t put your head in the sand.

You got to stay involved.

You got to learn.

So there is a little bit of token maxing where you need to try, get your feet wet, learn

how to do it when you hit the limits.

You know, don’t do that again.

Let’s keep that on the low.

26:29 — Using token maxing to build token saving

I know not like accounting it kills it when I go really really deep and just

dump all my documents all my statements everything in there and say how did I do this year? I need to farm my taxes and like

Monday

That kills it pretty quick

But it’s not that bad like that’s a one-off type of thing. That’s not like well once a year

But it’s not a crazy thing and now now it’s getting smarter

Now, if I give it the statements at the end of each month, it’s a lot less heavy.

It already has the process.

There’s a project that’s already set up.

The workflows are there.

You’re building from…

So you use a token maxing to build the processes that help you lead into the token saving.

Let AI help you be more efficient.

Let it figure out how you can be better and what parts can be human, what parts don’t

need AI, how to leverage local models, how to do it. Like how

where can I do cost savings in this case? What’s a job? What’s

a slow? What needs now? What needs right away? What’s urgent?

So I think there’s a big there’s a there’s a big market. There’s a

big place in helping companies figure this out. And even

individuals and that’ll be I think there’s something there not just giving

people open clouds given giving companies and individuals their own

workflows like what their n8 8s and 8s and their own like my dream viper and

all those things I think there’s something there and I’m again I’m so

excited about everything that’s happening I really believe that there’s

28:13 — Why the future still feels exciting

There’s the future that’s going to come out of all this

Is going to be so exciting and so much less

Hopefully it’s less stressful

Right now it’s exciting and stressful

So hopefully the stress

Goes away. It helps become better managed because once we start knowing stuff once we’re work all become comfortable

Things become a little easier to breathe and relax and very excited. I’m very always excited about this

and thanks for watching. Bye.

The World Values What It Can See [Raw Session]

00:00 — Value, attention, and trust

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

This video connects the last couple of videos I’ve done around where value is being placed.

The first video is really around what does the world value right now. Attention seems to be what gets the most value, rather than the old-school essentials. Reels, ads, attention, the platforms, social media — that’s what seems to be getting all of the value being placed, because as long as it has the eyeballs, it seems that’s what people put their money into.

And then the second one was about bottlenecks, but using AI as the main example, because right now, along with having everyone’s attention, it’s also the biggest hype and people are following.

As AI grows, its value shifts because we’re seeing the beginning of AI. So between the chips, the memory, the infrastructure, the energy, the companies creating it, the money is moving through the cycles until it finally lands where I believe either the bottlenecks are removed and then it finally lands where it’s going to live and evolve, or the bottlenecks are just going to keep moving and the value is going to chase it.

So this video is less about investing directly.

It’s going to be more about the attention and trust part of it, and how what gets our attention starts to feel more real.

How visible results can feel more valuable than invisible protection.

And the main thoughts in this video are the world does not just value what matters. It values what it can see. What people see with their own eyes, what they can measure, click, what they can post, what they can share, turn into a story that goes on their board.

02:01 — Why do we trust what we can see?

And the main question really comes down to, I keep coming back to it, is why do people trust what they can see more than what protects them quietly?

And this applies to health, medicine, food and fitness, money, infrastructure, social media, and attention overall.

And the uncomfortable part about it is sometimes something can be important but invisible.

Something can be shallow but very, very visible.

It can be visible and not real.

Like you hear fake news all the time, but the term is thrown around most times, to be honest, when they say fake news, they’re probably talking about the real news or the real opinions, or just opinions in general.

Not opinions, but even policies and law and actual facts can be considered and skewed as fake news.

What gets the attention and the clicks is considered real news, I guess, because it’s brought to you from a person you like, or has a lot of followers, or you relate to them.

So that’s where attention starts to feel like value in the real world.

Maybe the issue is not only trust in medicine.

Maybe the issue is trust in invisible value.

03:26 — Medicine as the strongest example

And I bring it back to medicine because, to me, it has a very strong example in this.

Because it used to be one of the obvious safe areas.

People always need doctors, hospitals.

They shouldn’t, but drugs are required for a lot of things.

Vaccines, treatments, and preventative medicine is the biggest, hardest one, I think, in this whole scenario.

And all those felt tied to real human need.

But now medicine feels strange because trust is fractured.

And there’s a lot of distrust around vaccines, obviously.

And that was showing up when we went through the whole COVID thing.

Public health in general.

People complain about the wait lines, the waiting rooms, the support, who gets seen first, doctors, experts, institutions.

There’s a lot of distrust around that.

And a lot of it gets amplified through these platforms.

Not necessarily because the platforms planned it, but because fear, anger, and distrust keep people engaged.

Social platforms reward outrage, suspicion, personal stories, emotional certainty, simple explanations, before-and-after narratives.

The same systems that make money from attention also shape what people believe.

That becomes a real problem when belief affects health decisions.

A very big issue.

05:09 — People are not really anti-medicine

And people really aren’t anti-medicine, because most people know that medicine is made to help.

And this is the contradiction.

A lot of people are not actually against it.

They are against certain types, certain kinds.

They distrust vaccines.

They distrust preventative medicine, public health systems, anything that feels institutional, anything that makes you trust before visible proof.

But they may accept peptides, weight loss drugs like Ozempic, supplements, hormones, skin treatments, hair treatments, energy, any kind of fitness product, things just randomly recommended online.

So the issue is not simply people don’t trust medicine.

The issue is people trust medicine differently depending on what it promises.

And not just what it promises, but who promised it.

If it promised visible changes, people understand it faster.

If it promises invisible prevention, people doubt it very quickly.

A vaccine that prevents something you never seen becomes suspicious.

A weight loss drug that changes what you see in the mirror becomes desirable.

06:28 — Invisible protection is hard to value

So, like invisible protection, it’s hard to put a value on it.

Preventative medicine is hard to appreciate because success looks like nothing.

Vaccines work, you don’t get sick.

Nothing dramatic happens.

There’s no visible transformation.

In some cases you still do get sick, but you don’t die. You don’t get the ultimate sickness. Your body can fight it off. So you might still get the sniffles, but you’re not stuck in a hospital bed.

So there’s a big difference.

And public health works.

The disaster does not happen.

The outbreak is smaller.

Preventative health works.

The problem does not get worse.

The disease is caught early.

The risk goes way down.

But people do not always value nothing happened.

Nothing happening feels like maybe it wasn’t necessary to begin with.

Maybe the threat was over exaggerated.

Maybe it really wasn’t there.

Maybe I never needed this to begin with and they just made it up.

Something to put in me.

Something to track me.

And that’s where the stories begin.

And this is the problem with invisible value.

It protects you quietly, but because it’s quiet, it’s very easy to dismiss.

It’s very easy to distrust.

It’s just not always because it’s unseen, it’s unbelieved basically.

You can’t put hype around invisible.

08:04 — Visible results feel more real

Visible results feel more real.

Social media is built for visible proof.

People understand before-and-after photos, weight loss, muscle gain, skin changes, energy change, transformational stories.

Those things are easy to show, sell, click, share, and believe.

Even if people do not fully understand the drug, supplement, or treatment, they understand the visible results.

The visual result becomes the proof.

The story becomes the evidence.

The influencer becomes the expert.

The comment section becomes the confirmation.

That is dangerous because visible does not always mean safe, and invisible does not always mean fake.

We seem to trust the thing that performs well in the feed more than the thing that works extremely well quietly in the background.

It’s a tough battle, and that’s for sure.

It’s not easy to sell something that you can’t see.

It’s not easy to get people to click on it or read the story.

You’re trying to make them believe what was avoided without really letting them experience what they avoided.

09:27 — Attention changes what feels true

So attention changes what feels true.

But this is bigger than just medicine.

Attention changes what people think is true.

If you see something enough times, it starts to feel real.

If enough people repeat it, it starts to feel very confirmed.

If it makes you emotional, it sticks harder.

If it matches your existing fear or frustration, it feels even more true to you.

And social media is not neutral.

The feed shapes what we notice, what we fear, desire, trust, and what we think other people believe.

That means attention is not just an economic asset.

It is a belief-shaping force.

This connects back to the first video.

Attention has value because it changes behaviour.

But it also changes judgement.

It can make bad decisions feel rational.

It can make distrust feel like wisdom.

It can make risky choices feel like independence.

It can make them feel not risky.

It can make them feel like you’re the only one not doing it.

And that leads to the group mentality, the peer pressure, the finding commonality amongst others and feeling belonged.

And you don’t want to be left out.

There’s a lot of that that happens in social media, even though it’s online and it’s not in person, it still has that fear of being left out mentality.

10:59 — Personal freedom vs shaped choices

So personal freedom versus shaped choices.

People often frame this as, I’m doing my own research. I don’t trust the system. I make my own choice.

And sometimes that’s fair.

Institutions can be wrong.

Companies can be greedy.

Governments make mistakes.

And doctors are not perfect.

Pharma companies are definitely not. They’re greedy.

They’re evil empires in a way.

But in the end, a lot of the things they put out do have good intentions.

But they do also have to follow the trends in order to make profit.

So they do end up doing Ozempic.

They end up putting out the products that are following the attention value.

Which is sad because it takes money away from the preventive and the life-saving and the disease-preventing medicine.

Because if there’s no money in that, then you put less effort into it, less research.

So we can’t pretend that the system is pure.

But on the other side, people may think they’re choosing freely when the feed, what they’re watching, the stories they read, the comments section they’re deep diving into, helped shape their choice first.

If an algorithm shows you fear all day, distrust may feel like your own conclusion.

If it shows you transformations all day, the product may feel obvious.

If it shows you people like you saying the same thing, it feels like common sense.

So nobody has to force you.

They just shape what you see.

Then you feel like you chose it yourself.

Maybe the modern version of control is not someone telling you what to believe.

Maybe it is shaping what gets your attention until the belief feels like your own.

12:47 — Why this feels like a values problem

Why this feels like a value problem — and it comes back to that because what do we value?

What gets rewarded?

What gets trusted or ignored?

The world seems to reward visibility, measurement, emotion, transformation, clicks, before-and-afters, things that become content.

But the world often undervalues prevention, stability, maintenance, quiet health, and boring infrastructure and long-term trust.

Things that protect us without showing up.

This is why the value system feels backwards to me.

The things that keep us safe often do not perform well online.

The things that perform well online often are not the things to keep us safe.

It’s backwards.

It really feels that way.

And if you bring this back to investment and society, it affects markets.

Money follows that attention.

Products get attention attached.

They create demand.

Companies that control attention attract value.

Trends can become markets quickly.

Distrust can become a market also.

Fear sells.

Health anxiety sells.

Beauty, longevity, weight loss — all that sells.

The body becomes the market.

The feed controls the desire.

Then the market sells the solution.

This is not always bad.

Some products help.

Some drugs are real.

Some treatments are useful.

Some institutions deserve scrutiny.

But the system is still built around attention.

Attention does not always point toward what is true or healthy.

14:30 — Final reflection

I’m not saying trust everything, trust every doctor, trust every company.

And I’m not saying never question the institutions.

That would be naive.

I am saying we should notice how much of our trust is shaped by visibility.

What we see.

We trust what we can see.

We trust what gets repeated.

We trust what feels personal.

We trust what makes a good story.

But some of the most important things do not work that way.

Prevention is quiet.

Stability is quiet.

Health is quiet until it breaks.

Infrastructure is quiet until it fails.

Good decisions are often boring.

The world is not always valuable, right?

It values what can be shown.

So final thoughts would be, maybe the world values what it can see.

Maybe that is why attention is so valuable.

And maybe that is why invisible protection is so hard to defend.

Because when something works quietly, it does not feel like it’s working.

It just feels like nothing happened.

And in a world built around attention, nothing happening is a hard thing to sell.

Thanks for watching.

Hope you like it.

Bye.

You Still Have to Ride the Bike [Raw Session]

00:00 — You Still Have to Ride the Bike

Hey welcome back to Slow Builds.

This is a video I was pretty excited about when I came up with the idea. It came out of a bad situation, but the idea itself seemed pretty solid to me.

And what the idea is, is you can’t learn everything from a book.

There are things in life you only learn by doing them. There are things in life like riding a bike, driving a car, in my case building software, managing money is a big one, raising kids — oh my goodness. You can read all the books you want, but that hits your heart.

Handling conflict, you can have all the tools from reading and listening to podcasts or whatever, but until you’re in it and you deal with your own emotions, it’s always gonna feel real in the moment.

And that goes with family situations, where I kinda came out of this one, me thinking about this idea.

And just starting something new in general. Like you can read the books and get all the ideas through your head and how to, like building something, like physical. At some point you actually gotta do the thing.

Doesn’t mean you should ignore everything that can be learned before you start.

You still have to ride the bike, but you do not need to start with no tires on the bike.

01:28 — Reading Does Not Replace Experience

So, this whole video is not about just read and you’ll know everything.

Obviously, you still gotta put the knowledge to use.

Because just reading, you can read about balance, but it doesn’t teach your body how to balance.

So, like you can read all you want about the slack rope, I think it was, a slack walk or whatever. I tried that with my kids and I did all the YouTube videos, did all the reading, and we bought it, we put it up there.

And yeah, it didn’t matter what I read.

We weren’t doing it.

And same with money, you can learn everything you want about investing and follow the greats and have the best intentions.

But it’s not easy.

There’s a lot of emotion involved and you don’t know what the market’s gonna do at any moment.

And like I said, parenting, like there’s a million books.

And I remember one day, the first time they said, “Can you go home now?”

And I was like, “What do you mean? Are you coming with me?”

Because you’re on your own.

So you’re in the deep end.

And same, like I said, conflict. There’s an emotional part, so it’s hard to sometimes go back and remember all those things, that you get to be calm, take a breath, take a step back.

Because when things are coming at you fast and your heart rate goes up and you’re sweating and you’re feeling attacked or you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s hard to keep what you read in front of your mind.

There’s always a gap between knowing something intellectually and living it.

Some lessons have to move from your head into your body and that only happens through experience.

03:26 — Experience Can Be Expensive

But experience can be expensive.

Experience matters, but learning everything through it is extremely costly.

You pay with time, money a lot of times, extreme stress.

You can lose relationships, strain them.

Legal issues could happen, health, sleep, just the overall emotional capacity.

Some of those lessons are worth learning directly, but some lessons have already been paid for by other people.

Books, history, biographies, news, court cases, business failures, family stories, financial mistakes, addiction. There’s a lot of stories out there and a lot of real life examples to learn from with health.

These are all lessons sitting there in front of you, whether they’re through a book, a podcast, a movie, any way you can get your hands on it.

Experience is a very good teacher, but it’s not always the cheap, it’s not always a cheaper teacher.

04:32 — The Bike Analogy

And this goes back to the bike analogy.

You still have to get on the bike.

You still have to wobble.

You still have to learn how to balance.

You still have to pedal, turn, brake, fall a little.

We all fall.

Everyone fell.

There’s a reason why there’s training wheels.

You do have to adjust and you got to get back on the bike.

But before you start, you can check some obvious things.

You can make sure the chain is on there and it has the right amount of oil on it and it’s lubed up and not rusty.

You can make sure there’s tires on it and those tires are not flat.

You can make sure there’s brakes and they work.

You can, are you starting from the wrong gear?

Make sure you’re in a gear that allows you to start the bike easier.

Maybe there’s no gears, which is probably better to start with.

Are you trying to learn on a hill and are you going up or down?

Or it’s probably better to be on a flat surface.

And those things do not remove the learning process.

They make the learning safer and less wasteful.

Preparation does not ride the bike for you.

It just gives you a better bike to learn on.

05:41 — Why History Matters

And this is why history matters.

Move from the bike to life.

And history does not repeat perfectly, but human patterns repeat pretty consistently.

Denial, delay, overconfidence, avoidance, bad intentions, debt, addiction, family conflict, legal issues, bad documentation, missed deadlines, procrastination, ignoring obvious warnings, just being oblivious to what’s happening and not taking it in.

Maybe you don’t see those warnings because you haven’t read enough or studied enough of what those warnings would entail and where they’d come from.

And the names change, the technology changes, the specific situations change, but the shape of those situations and the shape of the things and the moments are pretty familiar.

And most things have already happened, some form of it, in the past.

History does not give you a script, but it can show you the shape of the room before you walk into it.

06:58 — Learning From Others Is Not Cowardly

And learning from others is not being cowardly.

It’s not hitting it front and on and doing it yourself.

And this is where the challenge, this is the way AI tells me, this is where you challenge the idea that real learning only comes from suffering through things yourself.

And this is a strange pride people sometimes have in learning the hard way.

But not every hard lesson makes you wiser.

Sometimes it makes you tired.

It leaves you very damaged, whether health, physical, has a toll on your body and mental.

Sometimes it has a very realistic cost, money-wise, financially.

Sometimes the lesson was obvious from the beginning, if you had looked around and you would have already avoided a lot of the pitfalls.

So learning from someone else’s mistakes is not avoiding life.

It is respecting the costs that are already paid.

08:04 — The Developer Example

And before I go a little deeper on that, before I jump to the next one, I’m gonna talk about that one.

Because I remember as a developer going through university and we learned how code worked.

We learned how computers worked.

And so when I got out and started coding in the real world, like for a job and work, I always felt you had to build it yourself.

Because like, but the work I do now, there’s a lot of gems and libraries and different things like that.

So people have already built these things.

And my take was you had to build it yourself.

You’re not a real coder, you’re not a real developer, unless you built yourself from scratch.

Don’t take the shortcut.

That’s a lot of time.

There’s a lot of lessons that I have to learn that have already been learned, a lot of like error handling.

The biggest one in my account I always think about is like time, and the times involved.

What time zone are you in?

What daylight savings comes into effect?

What currency are you in?

What metric system are you using?

And just all these different things.

So like, I’ve learned over the years that as long as you use the right libraries, the right gems, the trusted ones that have gone through those years of people adding to it and doing it, why would I waste my time doing it?

I can’t do it better.

If I do use it, I’m better off finding the mistake and adding to it so other people learn also.

I can be part of that history of passing on lessons learned.

And so I really believe taking the lessons learned saves so much time, headache, and there’s no cowardliness in it anymore.

There’s no manly — I don’t want to say the word manliness, but macho.

It’s OK to accept help from others.

It’s okay to learn from others.

There’s a reason why people wrote about it or tell their story so other people don’t go through the same mistakes.

10:21 — Seeing Patterns Before Others Are Ready

And this is where I’m gonna bring in the family personal part carefully.

Okay, just tell me to be careful.

When you read a lot and recognize patterns, you can sometimes jump quickly to the likely outcome.

And this is where this video came from.

In the situation that this came out of, I could see what was happening.

I could see the situation.

I could see all the facts were laid out in front of me.

And I matched them against things I’ve read, I’ve seen, I’ve lived through, I’ve experienced myself.

And I think that this is where outcomes.

So I already know what the possible outcomes are going to be and what process we have to go through for each of those outcomes, from the best outcome to the middle ground to the worst.

My mind is always going to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

But to someone else it sounds cold because I instantly go, this is where this is probably going to go, we need to prepare now.

While everyone else is going through and analyzing what’s currently happening in front of their eyes, they’re only processing the moment.

They’re not looking ahead based off experience — not experience, knowledge.

Knowledge that they gain from reading, from researching, from watching, just learning and taking that and applying it to the current situation and quickly evaluating and coming to the final, the three possible final outcomes.

You pick the worst outcome because if you’re prepared for the worst, then you’re miles ahead for the best and you’re already covered for the middle.

So my mind instantly says, “Okay, we need to do this, this and this.”

And it comes across very cold.

They look at me as like I’m not a nice person, I have no empathy, I don’t care.

Because they still need to process that.

They may need to talk through the whole thing.

They may feel like you skipped over the entire emotional part.

They may hear the preparation as judgment.

But what I’m doing is I’m trying to reduce the damage, but they might be hearing it as me not caring.

12:53 — Preparation Is Not Negativity

I would rather analyze it quickly, figure out what we need to do, prepare those things because they’re going to take time.

And if you wait, if you wait too long in hopes that the best outcome happens but the worst is what we get, then you’re too late.

Then it becomes a minefield of emotion, bad decisions, you know, thinking clearly.

I’d rather be prepared and then as it’s happening know that it’s prepared, have that stress out of my life so I could just absorb the situation, try to navigate it more towards the better outcome, knowing that if the worst happens, we’re already ready for it.

So it’s not cold.

It’s not caring.

It’s trying to mitigate the costs, the emotional cost, the financial cost, the heartache, just being prepared.

I like being prepared for things.

Preparing for a bad outcome does not mean you want the outcome.

See, I was going through all this in my head in section 15:30, preparation is not negativity.

My mind, maybe I did my 52 video and I talked about how I don’t like, I like having these written out and reading through them because I don’t want to miss the little nuggets, the little, all the things I want and right here it is.

Preparing for a bad outcome does not mean you want it.

Documenting something does not mean you’re escalating it.

Understanding the process does not mean you have already given up.

Saving emails, writing things down, checking timelines, finding forms, calling the right person, finding the right person, getting advice, knowing all the options.

That’s not panic.

That’s keeping the bike from falling apart while you’re trying to ride it.

Preparing for the worst is not the same as hoping for the worst.

And I really feel that preparing for the worst and having everything lined up and ready for all situations is me being more caring.

It’s taken that brunt of it so that as people, as things, those dominoes start falling, you’re there to catch.

You’ve already got those nets in place to make sure they don’t fall through the cracks or you lose anything along the way and it softens the blow a little bit in my mind.

I think there’s a lot of caring in that and it’s a heavy weight to carry, especially when I’m always told that I’m cold and I don’t care and I’m too abrupt about it.

15:57 — Using AI to Prepare

And now we have tools that can help surface the checklist faster.

And I’ve been using that, especially in this situation I’m talking about.

You can take the situation and ask ChatGPT.

I create notes, I create projects.

What documents do I need?

What deadlines matter?

What should be written down?

Who should be contacted?

What are the common mistakes that people mostly make?

What are the possible outcomes that can happen from here?

What should be prepared right now?

Give me a timeline.

And I say AI does not replace judgment, but it can compress the research stage of it.

Especially now, it can help me move quickly.

It can help me get all the forms, the documents, fill ’em out, get ’em in order, prep the emails, find me the contact information, for help, for anything.

AI does not make the decision for you, but it can help you see the checklist before things get too messy.

And it’s helped a lot.

It’s helped prep emails, help me remove the emotion and help formulate those emails better.

It helps me read messages that I’m looking at from an emotional point of view and putting my outlook and what I’m thinking, my perspective on it.

And it reads it from a different angle.

It reads it from exactly what it is and from what I’ve given it from the past.

And it sees those nuances and what reality really is and it helps level you.

And then it helps prepare, then it helps change the plan and the direction.

So it’s not me being cold.

It’s not me being emotional about it or just trying to get it over with.

It’s me trying to let something else plan the steps for me so I can take myself out of it.

And then we can focus on the real problem, emotional problems, their relationships, the other things that happen.

Obviously you can see this is more or less a family thing that happened and still going on and this is where this came from.

18:09 — The Balance I’m Trying to Find

So the balance I’m trying to find is you still believe in, I still believe in being very direct.

I still believe in reading.

I still believe in learning from history.

I still believe in preparing early.

But maybe the lesson is that people sometimes need to see how I get there.

Not a long debate about it, not endless emotional loops because it drains me.

But enough of the bridge that they understand the conclusion that I come to is not coming from arrogance or being cold or being indifferent.

Sometimes I’m not wrong about the pattern but I may be too fast with my conclusion and a lot of it off puts a lot of people sometimes.

18:52 — Not Certainty, Just a Better Chance

So you still have to ride that bike.

You still have to learn balance.

You still have to wobble.

You still have to live through some things.

But you can start with the chain on.

You can start with air in the tires.

You can start in the right gear.

You can pick better ground to start learning how to ride.

You can learn from people who already crashed.

That does not guarantee the outcome but it gives you a better chance.

And maybe that is all preparation really is.

Not certainty.

Just a better chance.

It’s a better chance to help you not waste emotion, waste time, finance, endless cycles, lose relationships.

It’s a way for you to stay level headed.

It’s also a validation to know that the work you put in of learning the tools you’re using, like using AI to help suffer through millions and millions of data in other people’s situations.

But again, I could skip the AI directly, but I still want to read the books.

I still want to absorb that myself.

I don’t want just AI to analyze it.

I guess that’s the way you look at it.

Like I can ask AI a question.

It’s gonna give me an answer right away.

Whereas I can also read a book about it.

And then I can take those lessons learned from the book and I can formulate the conclusion the same way AI did.

But it allows me to absorb the information, learn a little bit more, understand why that answer is there.

Or we can go down the road of no AI, no reading, no watching a video, and just living through it.

But the problem with living through it is you only get one chance at it.

And whatever outcome you get, the only way you get to do a different one is to go through that same situation again and try different things.

Whereas that becomes extremely costly, timely, stressful, in a bad situation.

And that’s where like reading the stories, reading the books and going, not just about one outcome and how one person got through something or what they did, many, multiple, seeing all the different sides of it, seeing, that’s where you get the best case to the worst case.

How you got there, what were the signs, what were the resolutions, and you learn how to apply that to your own life.

And then you pass that along.

And that’s sort of, again, that’s where my book was coming into play, was trying to pass those little things along, those little nuances and little things that I’ve come across.

And this is one of them.

You know, read, read, read and absorb it and take it in.

And don’t just read it as passive, but read it as trying to learn from it.

So you can take that knowledge into your own life.

So yeah, sometimes you just gotta get on the bike.

Thanks for watching, bye.

Your AI Profile Is Coming… And Who Owns It? [Raw Session]

00:00 — Convenience Has Another Layer

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

This video is connected to the last few videos I did around convenience, grocery delivery, when things come to you, that kind of stuff.

And I think there is a whole other layer to that.

I think there is a whole new business opportunity too, which I’m not sure I fully understand yet. I have to investigate it a little bit more.

The idea is your profile.

Because the problem with a lot of convenience right now is not always the delivery of it.

It is that the person or the system doing the task does not really know you.

They do not know how you like your things, your judgment, your little preferences.

And that sounds small, but I think it might become a much bigger idea and a great opportunity.

Because what happens with technology is not just a store you log into.

What happens when it stores how you like things?

That is what I mean by an AI profile.

Not just your account, or your passwords, or payment information, or identity.

I compare that to Bitwarden because I use that.

But a version of you that moves from one store to another, one car to another, one salon to another.

Basically moving from robot to system with you.

And I do not fully know how I feel about this yet.

Because part of it sounds incredibly useful.

And part of it sounds extremely uncomfortable and scary in a way.

01:44 — Grocery Delivery Shows the Problem

A simple place this started for me was groceries.

I talked about this in my other videos, about how my wife hates grocery delivery in one way.

We like how it works.

We like the convenience of it and the simplicity.

But then there is someone picking your groceries for you.

They do not know how you like your avocados or your bananas.

They do not know which brands you like, or what you might switch based off a sale price, or if something is not available.

Sure, you can pick your options.

You can pick your alternatives.

But there is a whole other aspect to it where, I know it sounds kind of silly, but it is judgment and taste.

It is that household experience.

It is years of little decisions compressed into something you do without thinking.

And right now, that does not transfer very well.

You can make a list.

You can write the notes.

You can choose your replacements in the app.

But the system still does not really know how you choose.

It knows what you ordered.

It does not know why you picked what you picked, why there was a difference, or how you changed your mind.

And that is a massive difference between making a list and actually completing the list.

03:08 — What If Grocery Preferences Became Trainable?

So then I started thinking, what if that becomes trainable?

Maybe at first it is very simple.

You order groceries a few times and the app learns your substitutions.

Or maybe you reject certain items and it learns what you did not pick.

Or maybe one day there is a robot picker, an Optimus-type robot at the grocery store, and you go in and train it.

You go to the store.

You pick the produce.

You reject some things.

You choose others.

You touch it, smell it, look at it.

And over time, maybe very quickly, because with a robot you just set it and forget it, they learn your patterns.

Not just, this person buys bananas.

But this person likes bananas at this stage of ripeness.

This person avoids this brand.

They accept this substitution.

They do not want wilted greens.

They check the expiration dates.

This person would rather skip the item than replace it with the substitution currently available, based on price, flavor, brand, or who knows why.

And that starts to become more than a grocery list.

It becomes your grocery profile.

04:24 — Does the Profile Belong to the Store or to You?

Then the bigger idea is, does that profile belong to the store?

Or does it belong to you?

Because if it only belongs to the store, then one store knows you.

But if it belongs to you, maybe you can take it anywhere.

Maybe you can take it to a different grocery store.

You can go to a grocery store in any city, maybe even any country, and the system knows you.

That is a strange idea.

Because then the value is not just the robot.

The value is the profile.

The robot is just a worker.

The profile is the thing that knows you.

04:57 — Travel Makes the Profile Even More Powerful

Before I jump into the next part, this got me really thinking about vacations.

We go to different countries.

We do not speak the language.

So now it could open up a complete possibility where I do not need to know the language.

I can literally take my profile, and as long as stores have the same kind of setup, I can make my list in my language, send it to the grocery store, and then it shows up at my house, or my Airbnb, or my hotel, or wherever.

The profile aspect of it could be so powerful in my mind.

And once you see it in grocery stores, you can see it everywhere.

05:38 — Haircuts May Be an Even Better Example

The big example would be haircuts.

Again, with my wife and with a hairdresser.

Honestly, hair might be an even better example because a lot of people have trouble getting the same haircut, the same color, and the same style every time.

Even if they go to the same salon.

Even if they go to the same person.

They show pictures.

They explain exactly what they want.

There is still interpretation.

There is still memory.

There are variations.

One person cuts slightly different.

The color is off a little bit.

Maybe the style looked good once, but nobody quite remembers exactly what changed.

So what happens if that becomes a profile also?

Your haircut profile.

Your color.

Length.

Layers.

Shape.

What you liked last time.

What you did not like last time.

What products worked.

What looked good after two weeks.

What grew out badly.

And again, maybe this is not a robot at first.

Maybe it is just a better digital record for a salon.

But eventually, maybe it is portable.

You go to a different salon, and instead of trying to explain yourself again from scratch, your profile comes with you.

Or one day, maybe there is a machine or robot in your house that can repeat the same cut or maintain the same style.

That would be pretty awesome.

That sounds futuristic, but the concept is not that strange.

It is just taking something humans already try to remember and making it repeatable.

07:09 — Convenience Is One Thing, Repeatability Is Another

This is where it starts to feel different.

Convenience is one thing.

Repeatability is another thing.

People do not just want things easier.

They want things done the way they like them.

And that is your profile.

07:22 — Cars Already Have a Small Version of This

Cars are obviously another example.

Cars already have small versions of this.

Seat memory.

Mirror memory.

Temperature.

Radio.

Pairing your phone.

Bluetooth devices.

Those are driver profiles.

But imagine it becomes much deeper than that.

You get into any car and it knows you.

It knows your seat, your mirror, your temperature.

It knows your music.

It knows if you prefer sportier rides or softer rides.

It knows if you are in a rush.

It knows what kind of driver you are.

It knows whether you are cautious or fast.

And if the car is autonomous, or even semi-autonomous, maybe it knows how you like to be driven.

Smooth.

Fast.

Direct.

Efficient.

Avoid highways.

Give more following distance.

Take your time.

Music on or off.

Silence.

Talk radio.

All these things become part of this profile, this different level.

08:26 — Waymo and the First Signs of This

One example of that would be my friends who were in San Francisco recently for a conference, and they were blown away by Waymo.

I might be saying the name wrong.

They got into one autonomous car, like a taxi, and they synced their playlist.

Then when they got out, they went and got something to eat.

Then they jumped into another one.

And they were blown away that when they got into the next one, it literally picked up mid-song from the last one.

Now that is a profile.

They are already doing that.

That already shows this is something people are thinking about.

That extra little level.

But I am thinking about it from a whole different ballgame.

09:17 — Airbnb, Travel, and Showing Up to a Place That Already Knows You

Say an Airbnb where you travel around a lot.

All of a sudden, the way you like your bed.

The groceries you like to have stocked ahead of time.

Toiletries.

Fabric softeners.

All these different things.

It knows who you are and what you like, depending on where you are going.

A ski trip.

A beach trip.

A city trip.

All these things are kind of laid out for you as soon as you show up because your profile follows you.

09:46 — Bitwarden Is the Closest Thing I Can Think Of Right Now

The closest thing right now that I can think of is Bitwarden.

I use Bitwarden for passwords, logins, notes, payment, identity, and it fills everything else for me.

It carries basic pieces of me from site to site.

And I think most of us already accept that now.

We do not want to remember every password.

We do not want to type our address a million times.

Same with payment information.

But we also do not want to store all these things on individual sites because they get hacked.

So you pick one secure place and allow it to be the maintainer of everything.

In some ways, it is already porting my identity.

But it is still mostly administrative.

It knows how to log me in.

It knows where I live.

It knows what cards to use.

It has secure information.

But it does not know my taste.

It does not know my preferences, habits, or decisions.

I think the next version could move in that direction.

From password management to preference management.

From identity management to personality management.

That sounds dramatic, but I do not think it is that far off conceptually.

10:56 — AI Systems Are Already Moving Toward This

AI systems are already trying to learn tone, style, preferences, memory, routines, and context.

I see that myself.

I set my instructions for writing the book.

I set how I like the code at work.

I have my own private memory where every time I do something at the end of a feature or bug, I ask if there is anything we should add to our memory that was found.

Sometimes it comes back with nothing.

But sometimes it comes back and says, this is something different we did that we have not done before, and it sounds like you have repeated it before, so we should add this.

So it starts to learn how I code and how I read.

Streaming platforms already suggest what they think you would like.

Cars have driver settings.

Phones know your habits.

Apps know your behavior.

And if you are not paying for it, you are the product.

The difference is that right now, those profiles are fragmented.

Amazon.

Google.

Apple.

Netflix.

Spotify.

Your hairdresser.

But the bigger shift would be those pieces becoming one portable layer.

One version of you that can be used across services.

That is where it gets interesting.

And to be honest, it gets very risky and scary.

12:23 — The Useful Side Is Obvious

The useful side is obvious.

You would not have to explain yourself all the time.

You would not have to start over with every service.

No rebuilding preferences for every app.

You would not have to teach every system separately.

Things would feel smoother.

Grocery picking.

Salon.

Car.

Restaurants.

Hotels.

Your Airbnb.

The robot going around your house doing all your work for you.

Cleaning.

Knowing what temperature to put the washer on.

Knowing when you want things turned on or off.

When the lights should be on.

Where to put stuff in the fridge.

How to organize things.

All these simple little decisions that are made unconsciously are now being stored and saved.

And honestly, for some people, it could be more than useful.

It could be accessibility.

For elderly people.

Disabled people.

Busy families.

People with health issues.

It helps.

There are so many different levels of how this can help in so many ways.

When you really look at it, the world could adjust to you a little bit more.

That is the good side.

And I do not want to ignore that because sometimes we talk about these things only in end-of-the-world type situations.

But convenience does solve real problems.

Automation does solve issues.

Profiles reduce friction.

The issue is not that it is useless.

The issue is that it is extremely powerful.

14:01 — The Uncomfortable Side Is Ownership

The uncomfortable side is ownership.

Who owns your profile?

That is probably the main question here in my mind.

If grocery stores learn your preferences, does the grocery store own that data?

At the salon, is it you or is it the salon?

The car.

The robot in your house.

Is that going up into the cloud somewhere?

Or is that still your own personal profile?

It becomes your AI assistant.

What you prefer.

What you buy.

What you regret.

It will remember those things.

And what you respond to.

So who controls all that?

Because this is not just data in the old sense.

It is not just name, address, email, and phone number.

It is behaviors.

Preferences.

A version of your tastes and habits that may become more valuable than your basic identity.

Because knowing who I am is useful.

But knowing how I choose is a whole other level.

And that can serve me, or it can be used against me.

15:03 — Personalization Can Become Manipulation

This is where manipulation comes in.

If a system knows what I like, it can help me.

But it can also steer me.

It can show me the products I am most likely to buy.

It can frame choices in a way I am most likely to accept.

It can slowly shape my defaults.

It can make substitutions that are good for the company, not for me.

It can learn when I am tired.

When I spend more.

When I avoid thinking about my choices.

What kind of messages work best when trying to manipulate me.

That is a different form of normal advertising.

Normal advertising guesses.

Today it already goes deeper than that because of how sophisticated it is.

But this brings it to a whole different level.

It scares me to think of Meta taking over something like this.

Meta glasses are watching everything you are doing.

I am going off script here, but I do not trust Facebook at all.

That is a personal thing.

But if everyone starts wearing their glasses, then it is not just knowing what I like and what I do.

It is watching what I am doing.

It is watching how I make those decisions and how I interact.

And they are definitely capturing that information.

There is no way around it.

That feels uncomfortable.

Not because all personalization is bad.

But because personalization has a shadow side.

It can serve you, or it can narrow you.

16:36 — The Lock-In Problem

There is also a lock-in problem.

If one company builds the best profile of you, leaving that company becomes harder.

Not because you cannot leave technically.

But because everything works worse somewhere else.

Groceries are worse.

Recommendations are worse.

Routines break.

Saved preferences disappear.

That is a different kind of lock-in.

It is not only that your files are trapped.

It is that your learned self is trapped.

And that might become one of the biggest competitive advantages.

Companies may not just compete on product.

They may compete on how well they know you.

And once they know you well, you may stay because starting over feels annoying.

That already happens a little bit.

People are connected through photos, messages, ecosystems.

I am an Apple user.

I am an Amazon user.

But an AI profile would take that further.

Because now the thing you lose is not just access.

You lose your accumulated understanding.

All your preferences.

All your knowledge.

So then it becomes:

Can I export my profile?

Can I carry it with me?

Is it stored locally?

Do I have full control of it?

Does someone else have access to it?

Can I modify it?

Can I reset it?

Those questions matter.

And if I delete it or reset it, does someone else still have fragments of it somewhere?

Because without control, an AI profile could become another thing we rent from a platform.

A version of ourselves that we do not fully own.

18:08 — Cloud, Local, and Permission-Based Profiles

This is why I keep thinking about different ways the profile could exist.

Cloud-based is the easiest way to look at it.

You sign in and your preferences follow you.

But cloud-based also means someone else stores it.

Maybe there is a local version, something stored on your phone or on a device you control.

Maybe the robot can access it temporarily.

The car can read it when you are driving.

The salon can upload it when you go there.

The grocery store can pass it around.

I do not know.

Maybe it is like a permission system.

You do not give every company all of you.

You give a part of you.

This is me thinking through what happens here.

Design matters.

This could become one of those areas where the boring details are actually the whole thing.

Permission.

Portability.

Encryption.

Local storage.

Exporting.

Deleting.

Auditing.

Resetting.

Changing it.

Maybe there is a middle version.

Maybe your profile is not one giant thing.

Maybe it is broken up.

Maybe all these different things have a piece of it, and you control the main part that unlocks it.

Maybe you have the main key that is you, and each grocery store holds a piece of it that connects to you.

I do not know.

Some of these things you may want to connect.

Some you may want to keep separate.

In the end, who gets access to it?

Signing in with one big platform and letting it know everything about me is convenient.

But it is also extremely scary.

19:39 — Do I Even Want Everything to Be Repeatable?

That brings up a deeper question.

Do I even want everything to be repeatable?

Because part of me likes the idea.

Get the same haircut.

Get groceries picked correctly.

Have systems understand me.

But part of life is also change.

Trying something different.

Being surprised.

Changing my taste.

Having a human suggest something.

Realizing you do not like what you used to like.

If your profile is too strong, does it freeze you?

With deeper profiles, correction becomes important.

The profile needs to know that people change.

What I liked before may not be what I like now.

Maybe I like something new now.

What I choose under stress may not represent me.

What I bought once may not be part of my identity.

Maybe it was a mistake.

Maybe it was one of those regrets.

And that matters because a model of you is always going to be incomplete.

We are always evolving and changing and trying new things and disliking some things.

It is not you.

It is a representation of you.

A useful one, maybe.

But still incomplete.

20:59 — The Direction Feels Real

This is where I land.

I think this is probably coming in some form.

Maybe not exactly like this.

Maybe not one universal profile.

Maybe not as clean or smooth as the thumbnail makes it look.

But the direction seems real to me.

More memory.

More personalization.

More automation.

More systems that do not just respond to commands, but learn your preferences.

And I think the important question is not just, can we build this?

The important question is, who controls it?

If I have an AI profile, I should be able to see it.

I should be able to correct it.

Move it.

Delete it.

I should have full ownership of it.

I should be able to choose which parts are shared.

I should be able to give companies parts of it, or a full version of it, depending on what I feel comfortable with, or how deeply I want to be integrated with that system.

That feels like the line.

The profile should serve the person.

The person should not become trapped by the profile.

And maybe that is the real concern.

Not that AI knows you.

But that AI knows us through systems we do not control.

22:10 — From Password Management to Preference Management

That is the thought right now.

We have password management.

Eventually, we may have preference management.

And maybe after that, personality management.

Systems that know not just who we are, but how we like things done.

Everything.

And that could make life easier.

It definitely would make life easier.

It could make things more repeatable and less stressful.

But it could also make us easier to predict, influence, and lock in.

So the question I am left with is pretty simple.

If there is going to be a portable version of me, do I own it?

Or does someone else own it?

Because that might be one of the bigger technology questions coming.

Not just what AI can do.

But who controls a version of us that AI learns?

And this goes back to one of the other videos I did about how we are giving ChatGPT and Claude everything at the moment.

We are asking every single private thing, public thing, business thing, idea, whatever.

And that is being stored somewhere.

So again, that is probably one of the most valuable things people are going to have to learn how to control and be part of.

It is a scary thought.

I would love to see what people think about this.

Thanks.

Bye.

52 Videos Later: What I’ve Learned So Far [Thinking Out Loud]

00:00 — Six months in, still awkward

Hey welcome back to Slow Builds.

So I’m about six months into this channel now, and this is around video 52. I’m trying to do two a week, so I think I did a few more in the beginning, but I’m pretty spot-on here.

And I know it sounds like enough videos that I should probably feel more comfortable just doing this, but honestly, I still feel extremely awkward.

I only record in this room. I did one other room once, and that was because there were too many people around and I had an opportunity. I don’t edit. I do the beginning and end. I still haven’t shared this channel with anyone outside of my immediate family.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m scared, or I’m still not comfortable at all with this.

So in a way, I’ve been very consistent. But in another way, it feels like I’m standing still at the starting line of all this.

I set out a goal for this channel because I want to see if authenticity can win out in the end here. With AI and videos and faceless channels and the trust aspect of things popping up online, I think there’s something there.

I’m just trying to prove a point.

But at the same time, it’s kind of therapeutic doing this. It allows me a place to let my mind ramble a little bit.

01:50 — I’m not a creator, I’m just pressing record

Like I’m saying, I’ve done this, and I’m not a creator. I’m not a digital content creator. I’m not a YouTuber.

I’m just a guy who presses record.

And the thing I’ve learned is I can press record a little bit faster now. I’m not scared of messing up as much.

I have one video where the cat was meowing. I’m next to a bathroom, so sometimes the toilet flushes. Sometimes people upstairs are a little extra loud. I don’t edit that out. I don’t try to do anything.

So I’ve learned that the videos don’t need to be perfect. They just need to exist.

I’ve gotten better at noticing ideas throughout the day. I started with 52 ideas that AI helped me produce, and I’ve gotten way off track. I’ve done a lot of them, but most of the ones I’ve done have been outside of that.

Obviously this is 52, so either I’ve gone through all of them, or I still have a few left in the bag.

I’m starting to understand what topics keep pulling me back and allowing me to have a voice, or at least try to do something.

I don’t have a voice. I’m just rambling.

03:06 — Making videos feels less impossible now

The biggest change is probably not that the videos are good.

It’s that making one feels less impossible now.

It doesn’t feel like climbing a mountain. At the beginning, even recording felt like a big event. Now it’s still extremely uncomfortable, but it’s more familiar.

I can sit down, talk through an idea, upload it, and move on.

And that is something.

It’s a little bit reassuring that maybe, as long as I can keep the ideas coming, keep the scripts flowing, and continue to work on my workflow, I might be able to continue on.

Well, I’m going to continue on anyway for the year. I know it’s a big commitment to say that, but I’m going to do my best.

03:56 — The parts that still feel stuck

There are parts that still feel very stuck.

I’m still not fully in control on camera. I still don’t really move around. As you can see, there are noises in the background. There’s no editing or overlays. There are no shorts.

And maybe the biggest one is that I still haven’t really shared it with anyone.

That tells me something, because it means part of me is still treating this like a very private experiment.

Even though it’s public. It’s online. Anyone can find it. Anybody can see it.

But with the billions and millions of videos going up, and different channels, and no real link back to me personally in a way, I think if my friends looked hard enough they would find me.

But emotionally, I’m still half hiding this.

At this point, 52 videos in, I shouldn’t feel too bad about it.

04:54 — Commitment versus voice

That’s the commitment versus my voice problem with the 52 videos.

I’ve noticed something with the schedule I’ve been trying to keep. It’s helped me because without some kind of commitment, I probably would have found reasons to skip a lot of them, or take big breaks in between.

But there’s a downside to it also.

Sometimes I need to get a video done.

And when that happens, I may have a few ideas ready, some notes ready, or a script that AI helped me hash out from my own thoughts.

But I have not really sat with the idea long enough yet.

So I go into the video very blind. Just winging it, really.

The thought might technically be mine, but it does not always fully feel worked through yet. And I can feel that when I record.

Instead of it sounding like a conversation, or just ramblings like I was calling them for a while, it can start to sound more formal. Very robotic.

More like I’m reading a finished thought instead of working through an unfinished one, or just tinkering with it in my head unedited and live.

That’s something I want to watch.

Because the commitment matters, but I do not want the commitment to quietly change the voice of the channel.

The idea might be mine, but the shape of it is too clean until I get to get my hands on it.

There’s a difference between using AI to organize my thoughts and using AI to move faster than my thoughts.

06:38 — Using AI without letting it make everything too polished

That brings up the AI stuff.

AI helps me organize everything, but sometimes the first initial scripts feel way too polished and way too formal. I’ve tried to rewrite my instructions a few times for it to help me rewrite and tweak them.

And that’s not me saying it’s a bad thing, because without it, there’s no way I could write all these scripts.

I use AI all the time.

A lot of these videos start with my messy thoughts. Usually I’m working out, or running, or driving in the car, or even walking, and I’ll just be talking to it, throwing stuff out there until I say, do we think we have something here?

Then we’ll go through the process.

It organizes it. It gets the comments. It gets the description. It gets the thumbnail idea.

That part is extremely useful.

But I think there’s a difference between organizing a thought and replacing the process of thinking through the idea before, during, and after.

Sometimes if I record too soon after the script is made, I really feel it.

And that’s me just trying to get videos out the door to keep on schedule.

The idea is mine, but I have not carried it around long enough in my head. I haven’t noodled with it. I haven’t said it out loud enough.

08:06 — Why I use notes, and why that can get messy

Some of that is really because it takes a lot of time.

I come up with the ideas, and this video is half me reading what’s in front of my face that AI helped me turn into jot notes, and half me going off like I am right now.

The reason why I do it is I’ll talk into the phone, we’ll come up with a rough idea or jot-note idea, and then I could sit down and do the video straight up.

But my problem is I’m afraid I’m going to miss some of those nuances and little nuggets that I really want to bring up.

As I’m going through it, I keep coming up with more and more.

So that’s why I use the notes.

But it takes so much time sometimes, and then sometimes those videos become extremely long. This one might go a little long. It’s video 52, so that’s fine. I’m allowed to do that, and this is a rambling video in a way.

I don’t like missing out. I don’t like forgetting stuff. I don’t want two videos to be too similar.

But maybe that’s okay.

I always looked at it like a TV show, like it’s a rolling script and it goes in order. But on YouTube, does it really matter? It probably makes no difference.

I could do a million videos and 30 percent of them could be almost the exact same topic. There’s still a crazy amount more. And what order they are in probably doesn’t matter.

09:43 — The AI topic trap

That brings me back to the AI topic trap.

There has been a lot of focus on AI so far, and I am scared of being stuck there.

The channel is not supposed to be about just that.

I notice how much of the channel is about AI in a way, and it makes perfect sense because it is changing our world. It is new tech that is everywhere. We are all using it. It is changing our lives.

I’m thinking about it. I’m working with it at work. I’m working with it on my own. I’m using it personally.

So it’s everywhere.

But I also don’t want this channel to become only that. I don’t want to accidentally trap myself in one topic just because that is where the early videos went.

And because those are the videos that get the traction.

The channel was never supposed to be about just AI. I’m not an AI expert. I try my best to use it.

A lot of the videos I put out around AI lately are me thinking through where I think we’re headed, or what I think could happen.

I like to get those out ahead of time because maybe I’m predicting something that is going to come true, or maybe I’m going to fall flat on my face. But at least I want to get my ideas out there to see how they compare later.

I myself will look back at these to see what things I said that may have come to light, or may have just gone by the wayside.

But I don’t want this channel to become just AI.

It’s hard when it is such a part of my life, but I also have family. I have kids. I want to talk about financial stuff. I want to talk about patterns of change, working on yourself, fitness, habits, how to live a better life.

Everything life related, really.

I really wanted the channel to be based off the book I’ve been trying to write, and I haven’t touched it in a while. I’ve talked about that AI fatigue and not feeling bad about it, but you still have to give yourself a little nudge every now and then.

12:14 — The traction side

I can talk all I want, but if I’m not seeing traction, there is that side of it.

I’m not seeing a huge lift from it.

I do all this work, and there are comments here and there, and some people showing up. That really matters to me. It makes me feel good.

I haven’t seen too much in the last few. I see people watching them, but not too many people. But enough that it makes me feel okay.

At this point, 52 videos in, I have about half as many subscribers.

You would think you would hit a point where it might grow a little quicker, but I’m hoping that with consistency and time, and maybe coming up with some sort of pattern, I can keep these things at a certain length.

I don’t want to go too long.

I do find my videos are usually 18 to 25 minutes. I haven’t really hit 30 minutes, and I feel comfortable with that. Maybe I need to make them shorter, or maybe I need to do shorts to try to promote them and get a little more traction.

Right now, it’s small. Very small.

And it messes with my head a bit because I start asking whether the work is adding up, or whether I’m just talking into the void.

Which is fine. Like I said, it’s therapeutic.

It helps me get my ideas out, putting them on video like paper video, and it helps with the uncomfortableness of being able to do a video and put it up there without being too scared if someone finds it or sees it.

It’s easy to say you want to build something slowly.

It’s harder when it actually is slow.

14:41 — Views versus purpose

The biggest problem I get caught up in is views versus purpose.

One thing I find myself fighting is what happens when a video stands out.

Sometimes a video gets more views than the others. A lot more views, a lot faster. And I can usually see why.

The “AI helps me cheat” one got a lot of views fast. “AI fatigue” got a lot. There are a couple other AI ones too.

Maybe the topic was clear. Maybe the title was better. Maybe the thumbnail made a big difference. Maybe it just happened to hit at a time when a lot of people were searching for the same topic.

And when that happens, there is an urge for me to lean into it heavy.

Not even in a fake way. Just in a practical way.

You see something work and part of your brain says, okay, do more of that.

But then I have to stop myself. I really do have to stop and take a breath, because that is not really the purpose of this channel.

I want to learn from what works, but I do not want to be owned by what works.

There is a difference between noticing a signal and letting that signal become a command.

A video doing better tells me something. It does not automatically tell me what the whole channel has to become.

I don’t want to confuse a signal with a command.

I want to learn from what works, but I don’t want to be owned by it.

Because I don’t want people to attach to it because I hit a nerve, then people watch, subscribe, comment, and then I do two or three more along the same lines and get that same response.

Then all of a sudden I go back to what I want the channel to be, and I don’t want to let people down. I don’t want to mislead, if that makes sense.

I want to be honest about this the whole way.

16:59 — What the first six months proved

What this first six months has proved to me so far is that I can keep going.

It’s very imperfect.

Not every day. Not perfectly. Not with some polished system.

My system is crap.

But it is enough to build a body of work. And maybe that matters more than I would have thought at the beginning.

The videos are not where I want them to be. The channel is nowhere close to where I want it to be, but it is probably doing better than I thought it would, as bad as it is doing.

I’m not as comfortable as I want to be yet, obviously.

I am more comfortable, but not to the point where I can sit here with the door open, with people listening or walking around. I’m not there yet.

I’m not there to go out in public yet.

But there is something happening that did not exist when I started.

There is a confidence. There is an awareness. There is a simpler system.

18:07 — What the next six months may need

So what the next six months may need is not to make it too polished or too goal-setting. Just honest direction.

Slowly get more comfortable on camera.

Try recording outside the room. I want to use my phone. I want to go around. My kids got a DJI stick and they’re recording everywhere, and I want to try to get out of here.

I want to do more without relying on the script.

I want to get more into light editing.

I want to share the channel. I do work with a rowdy bunch, so I know there is going to be a lot of razzing if it gets to those guys. But to my other crew, if I stay within that little group, I’d be happy to share it at the moment, I think.

I don’t want to get away from AI, because my ideas and thoughts on AI are not always around the coding process. They’re not always around how it is embedded in systems.

It is really about the psychological part of it, the theory, the social part of it.

I see things around elderly people, disabled people, medicine, keeping a part of ourselves, privacy, world problems, investing. It is all connected to what I want to get to.

So AI is always going to be in there for the time being, because I don’t think it is going away.

I want to keep the raw session format, but improve in clarity.

Maybe shorten them. Maybe have a more formatted layout that I can stick to with time limits, and hit my nuggets harder.

There are a few things I want to do.

I want to sit with ideas a little longer before I record them, so I don’t need to have the script in front of me.

I also want to build an app where I can have the notes in front of me as I’m talking, and it is smart enough to know when to keep moving. I don’t like using the mouse. I don’t like using my finger. I lose my place.

I also want to build up a backlog so I can breathe a little bit. This is 52, but I already have three in the pipe coming out before this one that are scheduled.

That gives me time to breathe a little, especially because it’s summer, friends are coming up, and I might have to go away. I want to make sure there is no break.

21:03 — Small steps, not overproduction

I don’t think the answer to all of this is to suddenly turn it into some overproduced thing. That would probably kill the part of it I’m actually trying to do here.

But I do think the next six months need a little more movement.

Maybe not a full studio setup. No heavy editing. Just small steps.

Get out of the room. Try a different atmosphere. Maybe a little more editing. Some new lighting. Some shorts. Things like that.

And I do need to tell people about it.

Maybe I also need to give the ideas a little more time before I record them.

I try my best. I do go through them.

I have videos I’m excited to do. “Underestimating AI.” “It’s Okay to Be Lazy.” Something around the world starving itself. World value. AI reputation and scarcity. “You Still Have to Ride the Bike.”

That one is interesting, and I’m very excited for it. I even told my wife about it, even though she hates this channel and doesn’t want anyone to know I’m doing it.

Even she said, that’s interesting.

22:42 — Still figuring it out

So that is where I’m at.

Six months. Video number 52.

As you can tell, I’m awkward. I’m off script. I’m all over the place. I’m very unsure.

I’m uncomfortable doing it, but not uncomfortable that I’ve messed this one up.

I’m still not seeing any kind of signal that this is working, except for the few subscribers that seem to be dedicated. I’m very happy for that.

I kind of look at it like maybe they see something. Maybe they want to be able to say later, I started following him when.

If I do get a little bigger and get more subscribers, those subscribers from the beginning can chime in like old friends.

That makes sense to me.

That is why I love the feedback. I love the comments. I read everything.

I don’t even know what it would be like if I did take off and there were a lot of comments. I don’t know if I could do it. I’d have to get one of my kids to help me or use AI to help review them so I don’t miss any.

Because I don’t want to miss any.

24:19 — Protecting the reason I started

I’m still figuring this all out.

I’m trying to figure out how much to use AI, what topics to cover, and how to not chase the high-performing videos.

I want to keep a good mixture. I want to stick to my plan.

But I’m also still here.

And maybe that is the part I should pay attention to, because the point was never to look like I arrived.

The point was to keep showing the process while it is still unfinished.

And right now, it is very unfinished.

Maybe the lesson from the first six months is not that I need to become more polished.

Maybe it is that I need to protect the reason I started.

The consistency to me is what matters.

I’m trying to prove consistency and structure.

Because you can’t just randomly show up all the time and expect someone to watch you sitting in a room with bad lighting rambling about nothing.

Unless I’m going to move around, go to different places, and show different things, I need to have stronger topics and better flow.

When I say structure, I mean structure to the videos: the opening, ending, intro, and maybe a part I would edit where I do a quick recap of what is coming up in the video.

That way, within the first 10 or 20 seconds, the video has something that can hold attention longer.

But that is not the point of this video.

The views do tell me something. They show that people are paying attention.

But none of this can become the whole point.

Because if this channel turns into me chasing whatever worked last week, or reading thoughts I haven’t actually worked through yet, then I may keep publishing videos, but slowly lose the thing I was trying to build.

What I’m trying to build is consistency.

I’m trying to build authenticity.

I can’t speak that well. I try my best. My friends know where I’m from, and they call the way I speak “Foster-ese.”

Anyway, I just want to keep this going. I want to keep a consistency. I want to get the year done.

So 52 more to come.

That’s a big number.

It was a big number to get here.

Thanks for watching, and have a good one.

Why We Still Choose to Do Things Ourselves [Raw Session]

00:00 — When Optional Things Still Matter

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

This one goes along with the utility videos I’ve been doing. It’s the other side of the conversation.

The last couple videos were about the idea that more and more things are becoming optional. Shopping comes to us now. Food comes to us. Groceries come to us. Work can happen through a laptop. You do not need to physically be anywhere. Meetings happen through Zoom or Teams. Maybe eventually transportation becomes something we access instead of something we personally own.

But there is another side to all that.

Just because something becomes optional does not mean people stop doing it.

Sometimes they keep doing it. And sometimes, once something becomes optional, it becomes clearer why they were doing it in the first place.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

When something is mandatory, you do not always know if people actually value the thing itself, or if they are just doing it because life requires them to do it.

But once the obligation disappears, the reason changes.

If you still do something after you no longer have to, then maybe there is something inside the act itself that matters to you.

That is what I want to get at with this video.

The things we still choose to do ourselves.

Not because they are always efficient. Not because they are always logical. Not because there are no alternatives that accomplish the same goal.

But because the physical version, the slower version, the human version still gives us something.

And I think that is going to matter more as life gets more automated.

The question will not only be:

What can technology do for us?

The question will also be:

What do we still want to do ourselves?

01:58 — Grocery Shopping and Hidden Preference

A simple example is grocery shopping, because grocery shopping is becoming optional for a lot of people.

Not everywhere. Definitely not perfectly. But more than it used to be.

You can order groceries online. Someone can pick them up for you and drop them off. It saves time. Depending on what it is, it can save money. It avoids the hassle of stores, possible accidents, gas, and all kinds of things it removes from your life.

And for some people, that is genuinely helpful.

If you are busy, sick, elderly, disabled, overwhelmed, or just need a break, delivery can be a real support.

I am not against that at all. I do not do it much myself, but I have used it.

But I also understand why some people still want to go themselves.

My wife is the perfect example of this. For certain things, she still wants to pick the food herself. And I fall into this category too.

The point is basic.

They do not know how I like my food. They do not know what produce I would pick. They do not know what substitutes I would choose. They do not know which brand is okay if one is not available.

Sometimes something technically matches the order, but it is still not really what I wanted.

And she is right.

Sometimes you get there and change your mind. You see something. You see a sale. You change what you want to make that day or the next day.

That is not stubbornness.

It is preference. Judgment. Taste. Experience.

The grocery app can know the item, but it may not know the decision behind the item.

It may know bananas, but it does not know how ripe I want them.

That is the part that is hard to automate.

The task looks simple from the outside: get food and put it in the house.

But inside the task are hundreds of tiny preferences, tiny judgments, and tiny decisions you make without thinking.

And when someone else does it for you, you start to notice how much judgment was hidden inside it.

I think that is probably true for a lot of things.

We think the task is simple until we hand it to someone else.

04:20 — Utility Versus Ritual

That is the difference between a utility and a ritual.

A utility is about the result.

A ritual is about the experience.

If I need food in the house, grocery delivery can solve that.

That is utility.

Food arrives.

But if I want to pick the food myself, walk the aisles, say hi to people, see what looks good, and check the sales, that is different.

That is ritual.

That is not only about groceries. It is about participation.

And I think a lot of modern convenience misses this distinction.

It assumes the result is the whole point.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes the result really is all that matters.

If I need toilet paper, I do not need a meaningful experience. I just need toilet paper.

If I need batteries, I probably do not need to wander through the aisles and reflect on life and which batteries are best. I just need batteries to get the flashlight or remote working.

But not everything works like that.

Some things carry more human weight than the task suggests.

Food is probably the easiest example, but I think the same thing shows up in driving, going to the office, going to the market, or sitting in a restaurant instead of ordering food.

Those things are not only about acquiring the thing.

They are about the surrounding experience.

That is why making something efficient does not automatically make it better.

It depends what part you are trying to preserve.

If the goal is only the outcome, efficiency usually wins.

But if the experience matters, efficiency can strip something away from it.

05:53 — Weekend Markets and Useful Friction

Weekend markets are probably another great example of this.

Most people do not go to a weekend market because it is the only possible way to get vegetables.

They go because it feels good to go.

You walk around, look at things, see people, say hi, touch the produce, talk to vendors, get a coffee or a treat, buy something you did not plan on, and support local.

There is something social in it. Something physical. Something local. Something inefficient in a good way.

And that is the point.

If the only goal is food, the market is probably not the most efficient way to go about it.

But if the goal is getting out, seeing people, being in your community, and having small rituals, then efficiency is not the main measurement.

That is the hard thing to preserve in a world that wants to optimize everything.

Because optimization usually asks:

How do we make this faster?

How do we remove friction?

How do we remove all the steps?

How do we make it a single tap?

Those are useful questions, but they are not the only questions.

Sometimes the better question is:

What was the friction doing?

Was it only wasting time?

Or was it creating contact?

Was it creating movement?

Was it creating small decisions?

Was it creating a reason to leave the house?

Was it creating memories?

Because once you remove the friction, you might remove more than the inconvenience.

You might remove the reason people like the thing.

A market is not better because it is efficient.

It is better because it is not only a transaction.

It is a place that matters.

07:28 — Restaurants Are Not Just Food

It is also why restaurants and food delivery are not the same thing.

Food delivery is useful.

There are nights where it makes complete sense. You are tired, busy, do not have time to cook, do not know what to cook, or just do not want to go anywhere.

The food comes to you.

Great.

But going to a restaurant is not only food.

It is leaving the house. Sitting somewhere. Trying something new. Being served. Hearing the room. Talking to other people. Having a conversation that feels different because you are not sitting at your own kitchen table.

You are out among other people.

Delivery solves hunger.

A restaurant can create an experience.

Those are related, but they are not identical.

And I think this is where a lot of replacement conversations go wrong.

People ask:

Why go to the restaurant if you can get the food delivered?

Why go to the store if you can order online?

Why go to the office if you can join a Zoom meeting?

Why drive if a vehicle can take you?

Now we are getting into Tesla self-driving and robotaxis.

But those questions are incomplete because they assume the official purpose is the full purpose.

The official purpose of a restaurant is food.

But the human purpose might be connection.

The official purpose of a market is buying goods.

But the human purpose might be ritual, conversation, interaction, and socializing.

The official purpose of driving is transportation.

But the human purpose might be freedom, control, enjoyment, privacy, identity, going on long drives, or going somewhere without having to plug in your destination.

Maybe it is just driving for the sake of driving.

The official purpose of the office is work.

But the human purpose might be trust, mentorship, social contact, social context, or in my case, pair coding.

If you are sitting with someone, it is a lot easier to talk through a programming problem or walk through a possible new feature when you are with the person in the room and can see how they see it.

That is different than talking through video like I am doing right here.

So when we replace the official purpose, we do not always replace the human purpose.

And that is the gap.

09:56 — The Office After Remote Work

The office is a great example.

Zoom and Teams made a lot of office presence optional.

Not all of it. Not for every job. But for many knowledge workers, the office stopped being the only place work could happen.

Files are online. Meetings, messages, code, documents, calendars — work moved into the network.

And for a lot of people, that was a huge improvement.

Less commuting. More flexibility. More time with family. More time at home. Less stress. More control over your day. Less wasted office performance.

There is a lot of time wasted driving back and forth, stopping, taking breaks, and just moving around the old system.

But that does not mean the office has no value.

If the work can happen anywhere, then going to the office has to be about something more than access to a desk.

It might be about mentorship, trust, reading the room, hard conversations, team identity, onboarding, creative friction, casual conversations that do not happen in scheduled calls, or feeling like you are part of something.

Those things are harder to measure.

But they are real.

And I think this is the same pattern again.

When the office was mandatory, people went because they had to.

Once it became optional, the reason had to become more honest.

Are you going because there is real value in being together with your coworkers?

Or are you going because someone is trying to recreate the old system?

That is a very different question.

And I think a lot of companies are struggling with that right now because they are trying to bring back the obligation instead of understanding the ritual.

They are saying:

Be here because this is where work happens.

But for many workers, that is no longer true.

So the office has become something else.

Less mandatory infrastructure. More intentional gathering place.

And if it cannot become that, people will resist it.

Because once people experience optional, it is hard to go back to mandatory without being given an actual good reason.

12:06 — Driving When Transportation Becomes Optional

Driving works the same way.

The official purpose of driving is transportation.

You need to get somewhere, so you drive.

That is the basic utility.

But for a lot of people, driving is more than transportation.

It is control. Independence. Privacy. Music. Being alone. Clearing your head. Road trips. Your first car.

For me, the old truck.

It is the sound. The feeling of operating something physical. The habit of getting in and going.

So if robotaxis or autonomous transportation make driving optional, that does not mean driving disappears.

It means driving changes categories.

For some people, it becomes unnecessary.

For others, it becomes more meaningful.

Because now they are not driving only because the world requires it.

They are driving because they want the experience.

That is why I think the horse comparison kind of works here.

Horses did not disappear. They just stopped being the default transportation.

They became sport, recreation, lifestyle, identity, work in specific contexts, and maybe nostalgia.

Cars may go through something like that.

Not completely. Not everywhere. Not for everyone.

But for enough people, the meaning changes.

Some people will still own vehicles because they need them: rural people, tradespeople, families, and people in places where alternatives do not work.

But some people will own vehicles because they love them: collectors, enthusiasts, people who love old trucks, working on engines, manual transmissions, motorcycles, and the control.

Some people will not own vehicles at all because what they wanted was never the car.

It was mobility.

That distinction matters.

Some people love driving.

Some people just need to get somewhere.

When driving becomes optional, we find out which is which.

13:55 — When the Human Version Becomes Premium

There is also something interesting about human service in all of this.

We usually think automation makes the robot the premium thing.

The robot assistant. The robot driver. The autonomous system.

But sometimes, once automation becomes normal, the human version becomes a luxury.

Mass-produced clothing made clothes cheaper, but handmade clothing became premium.

Processed food made food easy, but chef-prepared food became premium.

Digital photos became unlimited, but film photography became aesthetic.

Automation does not always destroy the old thing.

Sometimes it turns the old thing into status.

So maybe one day robotaxis are normal. They are the utility layer: cheap, available, practical.

But a human driver becomes expensive.

Not because a human is better at every driving decision, but because the human provides something else.

Discretion. Judgment. Conversation. Security awareness. Help. Running errands. Reading the situation. Knowing your preferences. Being accountable.

A robot can move you.

A human can understand the day.

And that is probably true in other areas too.

AI can answer questions, but sometimes people still want a human advisor.

Delivery can bring food, but sometimes you still want to go to the restaurant.

Remote work handles the meetings, but sometimes just being around other people makes a big difference.

Automation can handle the utility.

But the human layer still has value.

The question is where that value is real and where it is just nostalgia.

Because not every old way deserves to survive.

Some things were only done manually because there was no better option.

But some things had value inside the manual part.

And we need to be able to tell the difference.

15:44 — Not Every Old Way Was Better

That is probably the hardest part, because it is easy to romanticize the old way.

It is easy to pretend everything was better when people did everything themselves.

But that is not true.

A lot of the old way was inefficient.

A lot of it was exhausting.

A lot of it excluded people.

A lot of it wasted time.

And a lot of it was only manageable because someone else was doing invisible labor.

So I do not want to say we should do everything ourselves.

That is not realistic.

I do not even think it is desirable.

Convenience can be good.

Automation can be good.

Delivery is great.

Remote work is awesome.

Autonomous transportation is going to change the world.

These things can give people access, time, safety, and flexibility.

The problem is not that things become easy.

The problem is when we stop noticing what disappears with the difficulty.

The store trip was not only a store trip.

The office was not only your desk.

The drive was not only the distance.

The market was not only about getting vegetables.

And the restaurant was not only about eating or consuming calories.

Some of those things carried structure, contact, movement, control, and meaning.

And if we remove them, we may need to replace those things intentionally.

That is the part I think we underestimate.

We are very good at asking:

Can this be made easier?

We are less good at asking:

What did the harder version give us?

Sometimes the answer is nothing.

Sometimes the harder version was just worse.

But sometimes the answer is that it gave us a reason to leave the house.

It gave us contact with people, movement, control, pride, a memory, an experience, a sense of participation in the world, and gratitude.

Those things matter, even if they are inefficient.

17:42 — VR and the Body Layer

This also connects to VR in a way.

For a while, there was this idea that virtual reality could replace physical experiences: vacations, meetings, events, virtual worlds.

Some of that is useful.

VR can show you a place. It can let you preview something. It can make inaccessible experiences more accessible. It can create things that cannot exist physically. It can be educational. It can be fun.

I have been using the Meta again lately because I wanted to try some of these things.

But it does not fully replace being there.

Seeing a beach is not the same as being on the beach.

Seeing a city is not the same as walking through the streets and smelling the air.

Seeing people is not the same as feeling like you are with them.

There is a body layer that technology has a hard time replacing.

Smell. Weather. Temperature. Tiredness. Randomness.

Randomness is a big one.

And I think this helps explain the broader point.

Technology can replace information more easily than it replaces experience.

It can show us things. It can deliver things. It can simulate them. It can automate them.

But that does not always mean it gives you the same human value.

Sometimes the value is in the inconvenience, in the body, in the place, in the people, and in the fact that you actually went there.

That is why vacations do not become obsolete just because you can see beautiful places on a screen.

And it is why a lot of physical life will probably survive automation.

Not because it is efficient.

Because it feels different.

19:17 — Utility Version and Ritual Version

The more I think about this, the more I think the future splits a lot of things into two versions:

The utility version and the ritual version.

The utility version is about getting the result.

The ritual version is about doing the thing.

Grocery delivery is utility.

Going to the store and picking it out yourself is ritual.

Same with going to the office, going to a restaurant, driving, shopping, and all these things.

AI assistance is the utility.

Thinking something through yourself may still be the ritual.

And I do not mean ritual in a religious way.

I mean it is a repeatable action that carries meaning beyond the result.

Something that gives shape to life.

It makes you feel involved.

Sometimes it connects you to your body, your place, or other people.

The danger is that if we only optimize utility, we may flatten everything.

Things become faster, easier, and more available.

But not everything becomes better.

Because better depends on what you were actually trying to get.

If you only wanted the object, delivery might be better.

If you wanted the experience, delivery is incomplete.

That is the distinction.

20:24 — What Do I Still Want To Do Myself?

This is where the question becomes personal.

What do I still want to do myself?

Not what should everyone do.

Not some universal rule.

Just what is still worth doing manually in my own life?

Maybe I still want to bike to return something because the errand gives me a reason to move.

Maybe I want to go to the market because it gets me out of the house.

My wife wants to pick certain groceries because she has preferences.

Someone else might still want to write, think, build, or learn manually even though AI can help.

That might become more important, not less.

Because as more things become optional, we need to decide what kind of person we become when nobody is forcing the old habits on us.

If I do not have to move, do I still move?

If I do not have to go out, will I leave the house?

If I do not have to learn the skill, will I intentionally try to learn new skills?

Same with talking to people.

If I do not have to do the slower thing, is there still a reason I would?

Those are not only technology questions.

They are life questions.

21:34 — When Obligation Goes Away

I do not think the future is that we stop doing things.

I think the future is that more things stop being mandatory.

And in many ways, that is good.

But it also means we have to be more intentional because obligation used to make some decisions for us.

The errand made us leave the house.

The grocery trip made us walk around.

The commute made us move through the city.

The office made us see people.

The store made us wait.

The car made us learn a skill.

The market made us interact with someone.

Not all of that was good.

But not all of it was meaningless either.

When the obligation goes away, we often get freedom.

But we also lose some of the structure that came with it.

And then we have to decide what to keep.

That is the part I do not think we talk about enough.

We focus on what technology removes: the errand, the commute, the wait, the manual process, the friction.

But that might be where the honest answer is.

Because if you still do something when it is optional, maybe that is a clue.

Maybe it is not just a task.

Maybe it is a ritual, a connection, a preference.

Maybe it is health.

22:40 — Convenience Is Not the Enemy

So I think that is where I land on this.

Convenience is not the enemy.

Automation is definitely not the enemy.

Delivery, remote work, robotaxis — they are not the enemy.

But none of those things are neutral either.

They change the default.

And when the default changes, behavior changes.

When groceries can come to you, grocery shopping becomes a choice.

Same with food and restaurants.

Same with the laptop and the office.

Same with transportation and driving around.

And once something becomes a choice, we need to ask why we still do it.

Maybe we stop.

Maybe that is fine.

Maybe we keep doing it.

Maybe that tells us something.

Maybe the slower version still matters.

Maybe the human version still matters.

Maybe the inefficient version still matters.

Not always.

Not for everything.

But for some things.

And that is probably going to be one of the strange parts of the future.

Not deciding what technology can replace, but deciding what we still want to preserve.

Not because we have to.

Because something about doing it ourselves still keeps us human.

It keeps us involved in the process.

It keeps us part of life.

Alright, thanks for watching.

Bye.