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

00:00 — This One Is Different

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

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

I’m going to have to edit them.

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

Well, that is a thought.

I just don’t want to lose the momentum.

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

And this trip’s really teaching me that.

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

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

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

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

01:22 — Missing The Morning

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

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

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

That great night cost you more than just that night.

Right now it’s 6 a.m., I think.

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

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

And it’s just a great morning.

And I would have missed this.

02:25 — What It Costs

That’s something you learn over the years.

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

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

Even big cities.

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

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

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

There’s just so much.

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

04:03 — The Other Side Of The Beach

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

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

And I haven’t seen one person yet.

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

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

That’s really what I want to do.

I want to pass on little tidbits of knowledge.

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

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

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

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

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

05:56 — Should’ve And Could’ve

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

Those are the worst kind of regrets.

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

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

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

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

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

The water was so refreshing. And it was beautiful.

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

Sometimes you just have to do things like that.

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

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

07:06 — Don’t Forget The Little Things

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

Just say, don’t forget the little things.

Don’t chase the night forgetting about the morning.

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

Be aware of your situation.

Be aware of life as it’s happening.

And thank you for watching.

Learning To Enjoy Life Drink Free? [Raw Session]

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

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

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

This one is more about the part after.

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

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

That is still part of it.

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

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

It is also the life around it.

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

So this video is not really a separate topic.

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

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

You still travel.

You still go out to eat.

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

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

Not always in some dramatic way.

Sometimes just as a default.

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

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

Not the big story.

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

Because the hard part is not always stopping something.

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

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

The funny part is that I did not always drink.

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

And I still had the full school years.

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

I was not sitting at home avoiding life.

I was in the middle of it.

And I loved it.

That is what makes this strange now.

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

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

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

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

I forgot how normal it used to feel.

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

I was just there.

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

Not some perfect version.

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

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

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

Travel was a big part of it.

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

At first, it did not feel like a problem.

It felt like part of the experience.

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

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

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

That would not be true.

There were nights where it felt fun.

There were dinners where it helped the conversation.

There were trips where it made the night feel bigger.

And I think that is why it got complicated.

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

It entered attached to good things.

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

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

It stopped being one detail inside the night.

It started becoming the thing the night revolved around.

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

A drink at dinner.

A drink at a game.

At a concert.

While travelling.

Around a campfire with friends.

All of that looks normal from the outside.

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

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

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

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

There’s a big summer festival going on.

There’s a big holiday happening.

We’ve had late nights sitting around talking.

Seeing people I haven’t seen in a while.

Going around town.

And now I’m out camping.

These are all things I love doing.

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

Nobody has to tell me to drink.

Nobody has to put one in my hand.

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

Being back home in the summer.

Seeing old friends.

Staying up late talking.

Going downtown.

Camping.

The festival.

All of it has this history attached to it.

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

And it does feel different.

I’m enjoying being here.

I’m enjoying seeing everybody.

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

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

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

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

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

I went to this old-school Cuban diner.

It felt local.

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

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

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

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

Finding some little place.

Walking around.

Seeing something different.

Eating somewhere I probably won’t ever eat again.

The place itself was the experience.

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

Because I still love being home.

I still love the woods.

I still love camping.

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

I still love travelling and finding those little local places.

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

Home and drinking.

Summer and drinking.

Camping and drinking.

Catching up with old friends and drinking.

Travel and drinking.

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

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

That would still be letting alcohol define the experience.

I want to be able to do all of it.

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

Not less.

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

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

Concerts and sporting events are obvious examples.

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

A night downtown.

A campfire.

A festival.

A late-night catchup with friends.

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

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

You hear the music.

You see people standing around.

There’s food nearby.

There’s a bar or a cooler.

Everybody falls into the rhythm of the night.

It just feels built in.

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

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

You make the plan.

You show up for this thing you wanted to experience.

And then drinking can blur the thing you came for.

It can take the sharp edges off the memory.

It can turn a good night into a foggy morning.

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

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

That’s the contradiction I keep sitting with.

The drink feels like it completes the event.

But sometimes it steals the event.

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

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

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

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

And those mornings always felt different.

I’d wake up clear.

I’d remember the whole night.

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

If I said something weird.

If I annoyed somebody.

If I made something awkward.

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

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

There was just this quiet relief.

Nothing dramatic.

Not like I’d done something heroic.

Just this steady feeling of…

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

And that matters because it tells me something.

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

It starts making the case early.

The night will be less fun without it.

It’ll feel strange.

Everybody else is doing it.

This is just part of the experience.

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

It’s quieter.

But it has a much better track record.

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

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

I care about places.

Small details.

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

It’s that diner in Miami.

The old restaurants from past trips.

The woods back home.

The summer festival.

The weird late-night conversations.

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

Those are the things I want more of.

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

Or attach them to a hangover.

Or lose the next morning.

Because the next morning is part of the experience too.

That’s something I didn’t always respect.

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

Coffee to find.

Another local place to discover.

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

It’s waking up where I grew up.

Being around family.

Having a clear head.

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

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

It’s taking away life.

A simple version of life, but still life.

A morning I could have had.

A memory I could have kept.

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

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

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

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

Stay home and avoid everything.

That’s not the point.

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

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

Just from the other side.

Before, it controlled it by being there.

Now it would control it by making me avoid things.

That’s not freedom either.

The better goal for me is to actually go.

Sit around the fire.

Walk around town.

Hear the music.

Have the catchup.

Eat the food.

Be with the people.

And leave with the full memory.

That’s the shift I’m trying to make.

Not from fun to no fun.

From blurred fun to remembered fun.

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

And I know that sounds simple.

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

Because the trigger isn’t always stress.

Sometimes it’s joy.

Excitement.

Travel.

Music.

Nostalgia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That version existed.

So I know this isn’t impossible.

But it’s also not automatic anymore.

That’s the frustrating part.

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

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

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

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

This would be better with a drink.

So I think the work right now is repetition.

Not in some motivational way.

Just reps.

Go to the place.

Do the dinner.

Go to the festival.

Spend the night in the woods.

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

Stay for the experience.

Leave with the memory.

Wake up clear.

And then do it again.

Let that become normal again.

Because normal gets built through repetition.

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

Now I have to repeat something else.

12:45 - 14:05 - The Real Trade

The real trade is becoming clearer to me.

It’s not just drink or no drink.

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

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

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

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

Or the foggy ending.

Or the rough morning after.

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

Trying to remember if I forgot something.

If I said something weird.

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

What I want is actually a lot simpler than that.

I want the clean morning.

I want to remember the walk after dinner.

The coffee the next day.

The strange local place.

The actual conversation.

The thing I paid to see.

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

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

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

The place.

The people.

The music.

The food.

The city.

The woods.

The story.

The memory.

Maybe all of that was enough.

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

14:05 - 14:45 - Closing

So that’s where I’m at.

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

I’m back home.

It’s summer.

Friends and family are around.

There’s stuff happening.

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

And I’m trying to experience them differently.

I’m not finished with that.

I don’t have some clean answer.

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

I still want to do the things I love.

I just want to keep the whole experience this time.

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

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

And maybe that’s the part I forgot.

The drink was never the whole thing.

The memory was.

When The Opportunity Won’t Wait [Raw Session]

00:00 — Opening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to know when it actually is an opportunity.

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

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

01:55 — Making The Most Of The Moment

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

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

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

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

But I did say to make the most of it.

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

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

03:01 — Knowing A Good Deal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If everything lines up, then you go for it.

04:49 — When Waiting Gets Expensive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's the rule.

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

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

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

06:08 — Money As A Tool

Fear can make you careless in both directions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07:38 — Waiting Is Not Free

This also connects to another chapter in the book.

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

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

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

Waiting is not free.

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

But you still spent something.

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

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

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

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

Perfect conditions are usually late. Way too late.

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

That's where regrets come in.

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

09:06 — Reflection Instead Of Regret

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

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

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

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

Life is an adventure, so keep moving.

That chapter is about the difference between reflection and regret.

Reflection is useful. Regret is circular.

Reflection asks, what do I know now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:33 — Asking Better Questions

The question is not only, can I afford this?

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

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

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

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

Fear of spending. Being wrong. Looking foolish.

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

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

We're all in the same boat.

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

It's a good thing to ask questions.

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

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

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

12:18 — Supporting Your Kid's Thing

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

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

That can feel risky, obviously.

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

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

That's not how life works.

Most meaningful things begin before the guarantee.

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

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

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

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

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

13:35 — Make It Worth It

Don't hide behind excuses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's priceless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But some of them are worth taking the chance.

Thanks for watching.

Bye.

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

00:00 — I Used to Be Scared

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

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

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

I was scared.

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

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

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

I thought,

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

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

It's about how my fear has changed.

Because interestingly, it didn't disappear.

Like I said...

It just moved.

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

...the people making the decisions.

01:22 — Going Down the Rabbit Hole

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

Every night I was studying.

Trying every new model.

Testing new tools.

Every coding assistant.

Watching YouTube.

Reading Reddit.

Reading papers.

Anything I could get my hands on.

Part of that was survival.

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

I needed to understand AI before it understood my career.

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

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

The same fears.

The same late nights.

The same learning.

People just approached it from different directions.

For me...

I didn't want to be left behind.

I wanted to understand the tools.

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

How I could teach people on my team.

How I could become more productive.

My thinking was simple.

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

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

03:02 — What Changed

Here's what surprised me.

The deeper I went...

the less scared I became.

Not because AI stopped improving.

It's improving incredibly fast.

What changed was my understanding of what AI actually is.

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

there still needs to be a person leading it.

Someone orchestrating everything.

The architect.

The project manager.

The person who understands the business.

The person who knows how all the pieces fit together.

AI wasn't replacing that person.

It was helping that person.

04:02 — When the Math Clicked

Then something else happened.

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

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

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

We spent hours talking.

How LLMs are built.

Vectors.

Matrices.

Probabilities.

Tokens.

Weighting.

Predictions.

How answers are actually generated.

Interestingly...

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

Computer science teaches the programming.

The software.

The hardware.

The architecture.

But underneath all of that...

AI is mathematics.

Statistics.

Probability.

Linear algebra.

Vectors.

Matrices.

Tokens.

Weights.

Predictions.

He gave me a simple example.

"I like pizza. What do you like?"

Then we broke it down mathematically.

How the probabilities work.

How hallucinations happen.

How predictions are made.

Then we looked at nursery rhymes and Bible verses.

Depending on the model...

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

you'd get different answers.

That was when everything clicked.

It wasn't magic anymore.

It was still incredible.

But it wasn't magic.

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

I was looking at mathematics.

When the magic turned back into math...

my fear almost disappeared.

06:50 — AI Isn't a Person

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

I still catch myself doing it.

You ask a question.

It gives a thoughtful answer.

It feels like you're talking to someone.

But that's not what's happening.

It's predicting.

It's recognizing patterns.

It's applying weights.

It's mathematics.

An enormous amount of training data...

processed incredibly fast.

Understanding that changed everything.

Instead of thinking,

"This thing is replacing people..."

I started thinking,

"This thing is amplifying people."

Those are two completely different ideas.

07:40 — Expanding Specialists

That's when I started looking at AI differently.

Instead of replacing specialists...

it expands specialists.

It widens the path.

Lawyers spend less time digging through documents.

Accountants spend less time organizing receipts.

Software developers prototype faster.

Scientists and researchers find patterns they might have missed.

None of those people stop being experts.

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

I like to say...

they fail faster.

They eliminate bad ideas faster.

They narrow down possible solutions faster.

That's exciting.

That's where I think AI becomes transformative.

Not because it removes humans...

because it increases what one human can accomplish.

08:30 — How I Use It

I'll use this YouTube channel as an example.

I used to spend hours trying to organize scripts.

Thinking about titles.

Descriptions.

First comments.

Thumbnail ideas.

Trying to organize my thoughts.

Now...

I throw my ideas into AI.

I talk through them.

It helps me organize them.

It helps with descriptions.

First comments.

Website formatting.

Timestamps.

Thumbnail ideas.

Then after I record...

I run the transcript back through it.

It cleans it up.

Organizes it.

Helps me find clips.

It saves me hours.

AI isn't creating my content.

I'm still the one making the videos.

It's acting more like an editor and organizer.

That's how I like using it.

It lets me spend more time thinking...

and less time formatting.

10:18 — What Actually Scares Me Now

So what scares me now?

AI doesn't.

People do.

One thing that still worries me...

is who trains these models.

A model only knows what it's trained on.

If someone intentionally trains it poorly...

or pushes a particular viewpoint...

or fills it with misinformation...

that's concerning.

But even beyond that...

what really worries me...

is people making decisions about AI without understanding it.

Executives don't need to understand vectors or matrices.

But when they're making hiring decisions...

layoffs...

or deciding the direction of entire companies...

they need someone at the table who understands the technology.

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

People hear,

"AI can replace ten employees."

without ever asking whether that's actually true.

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

11:50 — The Waiting Game

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

Hiring slows.

Projects slow.

People get nervous.

Everyone watches everyone else.

They're trying to figure out...

How much can AI actually do?

I honestly don't know how this ends.

Maybe some companies overreact.

Maybe others don't move fast enough.

I don't know.

But I do know this.

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

12:20 — Looking Ahead

If anything...

I'm more excited than ever.

Not because AI solves everything.

Far from it.

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

I think it expands individual capability.

I think it's going to help medicine.

Research.

Software.

Small businesses.

People with ideas who never had the resources before.

I'm still curious.

I'm still paying attention.

But my fear has changed.

I used to be afraid of the technology.

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

without really understanding what the technology actually is.

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

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

We'll make better software.

Better businesses.

Better medicine.

Better tools.

I'm very excited to see where it goes.

Thanks for watching.

Bye.

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

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

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

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

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

I sat on the back step, just looking up.

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

Within about five minutes, I felt guilty.

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

Maybe I should work on another YouTube video.

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

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

I actually like doing my taxes.

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

That's what got me thinking.

When did that happen?

When did doing nothing start feeling irresponsible?

01:27 — Enjoying Productivity vs. Needing Productivity

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

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

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

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

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

None of that happens by accident.

But I think something slowly changed.

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

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

Those aren't the same thing.

02:16 — Every Empty Hour Becomes an Opportunity

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

Three hours before bed.

What can I build?

Saturday morning.

How can I use it?

Vacation.

Maybe I can get ahead on something.

Even a walk becomes exercise.

Reading becomes self-improvement.

A conversation becomes a future video.

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

Everything starts becoming something.

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

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

I don't think AI caused this.

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

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

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

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

So I don't want to ignore it.

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

The tools are supposed to save us time.

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

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

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

The possibilities never end.

That's exciting.

But it's also extremely exhausting.

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

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

It's true.

04:13 — Work Doesn't Really End Anymore

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

Work doesn't end.

Years ago there were natural stopping points.

You left the office.

You came home.

The project stayed where the project lived.

Now everything is in your pocket.

Work.

AI.

YouTube.

Ideas.

Notes.

Banking.

News.

Messages.

Notifications.

Everything.

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

It just keeps offering me another thing to think about.

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

I don't think that's rest.

04:43 — Running Changed My Perspective

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

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

Every run had to prove something.

It had to be better than the last.

Lately I've stopped caring as much.

I still run almost every day.

But I just go.

Some days are slower.

Some days feel extremely hard.

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

The same thing happened with swimming.

I have a pool in my backyard.

I'm not trying to break records.

I get in.

Swim until I feel done.

Enjoy being outside.

Enjoy the morning.

See the sun.

Feel the breeze.

Enjoy being by myself.

Ironically, I think I enjoy it more now.

The health benefits are still there.

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

05:37 — Not Everything Needs a Measurable Outcome

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

We're becoming really good at removing friction.

Groceries get delivered.

AI writes drafts.

Cars drive themselves.

Everything is becoming faster.

Most of that is genuinely useful.

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

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

Driving isn't just about getting somewhere.

Sitting outside isn't about reducing stress.

Sometimes it's just about enjoying nature.

Reading isn't about becoming smarter.

Sometimes it's just reading good fiction.

Sometimes you're just living.

Maybe that's enough.

Maybe everything doesn't need a measurable outcome.

06:18 — Momentum or Fear?

One thing I struggle with is momentum.

I'm afraid if I stop...

I'll stop.

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

Projects lose momentum if I leave them too long.

Books don't write themselves.

Software doesn't build itself.

So part of me keeps pushing.

Just one more hour.

One more evening.

One more thing.

But I've also realized something.

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

that's probably not momentum.

That's fear.

06:50 — I Still Love Building

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

Honestly, I hope I don't.

I love software.

I love learning.

I love reading.

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

I love making these videos.

I still cringe when I see them.

I don't watch them myself.

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

That's not changing.

What I'm questioning is something different.

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

07:21 — Maybe the Day Is Already Full

Maybe finishing work...

Going for a run...

Having supper with my family...

Then relaxing for an hour...

is already a full day.

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

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

Because that day never comes.

There will always be another idea.

Another feature.

Another video.

Another opportunity.

The list never ends.

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

even if the list isn't.

I'm still figuring that out.

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

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

Maybe we're not lazy.

Maybe we've just forgotten what enough feels like.

08:35 — Final Thoughts

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

The people who want to be productive.

Who want to make a difference.

Who don't want to fall behind.

Who want to keep exploring and building.

That's how I feel about it.

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

It's okay to take a break.

It's okay not to always be doing something.

Your brain needs to rest.

You need to reset.

You need time to grow, move, and breathe.

Thanks for watching.

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.