AI Widens the Path [Raw Session]

00:00 — Thinking About AI Differently

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I’ve been thinking about AI a little bit differently lately.

I’m always thinking about it. Obviously I use it all the time, but I’m thinking about it differently. Not completely different. I still think a lot of the same concerns that we have are real.

Jobs are going to change. We’re going to lose jobs. Some work is just going to completely disappear in my mind.

I still think companies are going to use AI to do more with fewer people. Inevitable, in my mind. I do think new jobs will appear that we have no idea about yet, but that takes time. I don’t think there’s any honest way around any of this. AI is going to disrupt the workforce in general.

But I also think there’s another side to this that I haven’t really given enough attention to in my mind.

AI widens the path.

The career path. Not in a cheesy way. Not in an “everyone is going to get rich and build a company overnight” kind of way. I don’t believe that at all.

But I do think AI changes what one person can attempt.

It changes how far someone can get before they need a full team. It changes what kind of skills become valuable and important. It changes who gets to participate in work that used to be locked behind credentials, departments, budgets, years of waiting on permission and building experience.

That part feels positive to me.

It’s still complicated. It’s messy, and it’s full of all kinds of risk.

But it’s positive, because for a long time if you wanted to build something you had to stay in your own lane.

You were a developer, designer, marketer, entrepreneur, support person, accountant, lawyer, founder in general. And yes, people crossed over from time to time, but for most people their career path narrowed pretty quickly.

Your career path might have got longer, but it didn’t get wider. You learned a skill, you got paid for that skill, and you kept doing that same skill. If your idea required five other skills, then you either needed money, a team, connections, or a whole lot of extra time.

AI does not remove all of that, but it does widen the path to allow one person to take bigger strides and wider steps.

02:52 — AI Is Not Only a Replacement Story

Most of the AI conversation still seems to be around replacement.

Developers, designers, writers, customer support, accountants, paralegals. And the honest answer probably is yes. In some ways it will replace some tasks, most tasks, or parts of tasks. It will reduce the number of people needed for certain kinds of work.

Some jobs may become a lot smaller. Some roles may disappear completely. There may be fewer people in each position. There may be more skilled people, or more manager-type roles. It’s going to change the whole landscape, I believe.

And especially when you put AI together with physical AI, that changes a whole other dynamic of robotics, automation, sensors, and machines that can actually interact with the physical world. That disrupts a ton of things.

I don’t think we should pretend that it isn’t going to happen, but replacement is only one side of the story.

The other side is expansion.

And it’s very exciting to me because AI also lets people do things they could not do before.

It lets a developer explore design. It lets a designer explore development.

It lets founders explore legal, accounting, content, support, research, marketing, flows, everything. You can build out your full product spec, your pitch deck, and get legal drafted up. Everything’s done. You put a couple of prompts together and set up the proper agents.

That does not make you an expert in any of those areas. You still need eyeballs to oversee it and make sure it’s done correctly. That’s an important distinction. But it gets you enough to start.

Starting is where a lot of ideas used to die, and they still die there.

Not because people were lazy. Sometimes.

Not because they didn’t care. They probably care, but they didn’t have enough passion to follow through.

But because the path was too narrow. That’s the real reason, I think.

They had the idea but not the team. They had the product instinct but not the technical ability or skills. They had the design sense but not the back-end knowledge to build it out. They had the business idea but not the money to hire people and build the team around it.

So the thing never moved.

AI changes that quite a bit. It doesn’t guarantee success. It just gives more people a way in and gives more of an opportunity to be successful.

05:36 — The Career Path Gets Wider

I think this matters for careers, too.

I think it matters for careers in a big way because for a long time career growth was often about being very specialized.

You pick a thing. You become good at that thing. You become very good at that thing. Then you try to move inside of that thing higher up and become more specialized. The more specialized you are, the better your pay got, and the more you’re the expert.

I don’t think that goes away.

But AI is probably going to shift what companies value when they hire. Instead of only hiring someone who can do that one narrow task, companies may start looking for people who understand that domain, that task, and that work skill, but at the same time know how to use AI to their advantage.

They can use AI to stretch across not just that task, but all the other tasks involved with doing the business or the development or whatever it is.

And that’s a different kind of person.

That’s not someone who knows nothing and just types prompts. That’s not what I mean at all.

I mean someone who has real knowledge in an area that a company needs. But that person can use AI to multiply that knowledge across adjacent areas.

Are you a UX designer who understands product flows, friction, user behavior, and visuals?

You may now be able to move much deeper into the development process. You may not be able to produce a full-stack app. You can’t replace a full-stack developer, obviously, but now you can get a real MVP moving out the door.

You can get it in people’s hands. You can work through screens, interactions, front-end code, and test flows. With testing and UI and AI, you can find where the experience breaks and build out something that people can actually use.

You can get a prototype out pretty quickly, and that’s a big shift. Before, the designer may have needed a developer just to see if the idea was even possible to build. Then you needed a marketer to get it out in front of people.

Now they can build something from the idea all the way to where testers can touch it. Then they can bring it to a pitch deck, possibly try to get investment, build a team around it, get actual traction behind it, and get real feedback.

That feels like a healthier path in some ways.

Instead of needing the full team before you even know if the idea is workable and if it matters, you can test more ideas early.

You can get the first versions out faster.

You can learn before spending as much money.

That’s a big difference.

And you can make smaller bets.

That matters too, because now you’re not wasting your cycles. You can have multiple fires burning at the same time and see which one catches.

And then you can build a team.

09:00 — This Applies Beyond Developers and Designers

I don’t think this only applies to developers and designers.

I see the same thing with small law firms.

A lot of people get into law and they really want to take on the large companies to help the smaller people. They want to do those class action suits.

But that’s the kind of thing that takes a lot of time and effort. It takes a lot of research, and usually they can only take on one at a time if it doesn’t take up their full workload.

AI doesn’t replace the lawyer and the judgment behind it, but it helps a small firm take on those heavy, long, task-driven lawsuits. Now they can take on more of them because AI helps with the research, summaries, document intake, witness statements, and analyzing everything.

All of the lawyer stuff that has to happen, a lot of that can be done quickly through AI and then brought to the front for review. They can take on more cases and try to help more people.

Same thing with accountants. An accountant can suddenly do their intake, processing, and formulas. They may be able to take on more clients and bring it down to a point where, in the end, they just review before filing to make sure everything is done right.

That allows them to take on more people and possibly hire more people.

Same with lawyers.

Maybe it feels like a single person can do more, but then it allows them to bring in more people so they can help more people.

So a small firm that uses AI can suddenly start growing with AI.

That’s a different shift to think about.

10:56 — Developers, Designers, and the Advantage of Knowing the Work

I think, like I said, maybe I put this one in twice.

Designers have the biggest advantage. I said that because designers understand everything about that.

But then it comes down to the designers at the end needing to build a team. They can get the prototype out there.

But I believe developers might have the biggest advantage. Maybe it’s just me. I’m biased because I am a developer.

But developers know where all the bodies are buried here.

AI is built by developers, technically. We know what a working demo is. Taking an idea to MVP, we know what a demo really is. We know what lipstick on pigs are. We know an app can look amazing but it’s all just popsicle sticks.

That’s where it hits for me, because I can tell AI to build something and it can look great. Now I can use AI as my designer. I can use it as my marketer. I may not understand that database, or I may not know how to do an iOS or Android app currently, but I can have this do it for me. I can click the buttons.

But I do know that I can’t really put it out there for the masses because I can’t trust the authentication. I can’t trust personal data not being leaked. There are going to be edge cases that I don’t know about.

So it can help me move fast. It can generate the code, write the tests, and do all that stuff.

But I still have to judge it.

That’s what matters.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t think AI completely replaces developers, designers, and people for all the work. Not in the way people are talking about.

AI can throw that product out there, but it doesn’t know every edge case and what humans are going to do to it.

I don’t even know what all my users are going to do. But if something happens, I can try to anticipate what those oddities are.

AI can try to predict things, but we really have to have a team around it.

So once the product is out there and we have that alpha, this is where it becomes: now we need real people.

13:58 — From Idea to Alpha Is Different Than Alpha to Product

This is the part I keep running into personally, because AI makes it much easier to get from idea to alpha, or even beta in some cases.

And that is real.

I can have an idea and get something visible pretty quickly now.

A product can go from sitting in my head to running on a server. That still feels strange.

Honestly, it’s one of the most positive parts of AI to me.

Because I’ve had ideas sitting around for years. Most developers probably have. Little tools, apps, business ideas, experiments. AI lowers the cost for me to get those out there.

But there’s a big difference between an alpha and a finished product.

That’s what I’m trying to get at here.

An alpha is something people can try. They can play with it. I can get feedback. I can let people click it.

But taking real money from different people, holding real information in there, and having users depend on the thing is totally different to me.

That’s the threshold I struggle with.

Not the starting. The finishing, the hardening, and the trusting.

I think a lot of AI-built products are going to hit that wall. They all look good. Demos are good. Landing pages are great. They take your money. They have quick little dashboards. But they don’t have all those nuances that true products have. Those gotchas and weird things you have to have, but no one ever talks about.

That’s where the path gets wider.

And that’s where the work still lives.

AI widens the path, but it does not remove that last mile.

So even as a developer, if I go through that process, I am going to have to get a team.

I am going to have to get someone who understands social media and marketing better than I do to make sure it’s pushed out right.

I’m going to have to bring in security people to help me make sure I’ve got all my holes tightened. A support team to help manage chatbots or whatever we decide to do.

Because I think a lot of small apps and small businesses are going to be created where more jobs may get created. It’s just going to take a little time, I think.

16:18 — The New Hiring Question

I think this also changes how we look at how we hire.

In the past, I’ve always hired someone who’s very good at a specific thing. A marketer, a designer, security, a lawyer, an accountant. And it still makes perfect sense to me.

But now what’s more valuable, in my mind, is someone who has a strong base and a strong knowledge of those things, but they know how to use AI on top of that.

You may not be an actual certified accountant. You may not be a 20-year senior developer. You may be more of a junior developer, but you grasp and understand development.

I’d almost rather hire a designer who has a small background in development, so they get it.

But then you also need to have your database person who understands security and models and code.

You mix all that together. You’ve got a hodgepodge team of misfits, basically, but by using AI they become super-powered.

But it’s not someone who just says they use AI.

That won’t be enough.

Everyone is going to say that, and they already are.

The difference will be whether they can show how AI makes their actual work better.

Can a designer use AI to move an idea closer to MVP?

Can a developer use AI to ship faster?

Can a marketer use AI to test more angles without turning everything into generic AI slop?

Can an operations person use AI to automate boring workflows without breaking the business?

Can a support person use AI to find patterns in customer issues and feed that back into product?

Can it all trickle back in properly?

That’s the career opportunity I think AI is going to help create.

Not AI expert as a vague label, but a person who has domain judgment and knows how to extend that judgment with AI.

That may become one of the most valuable combinations.

Skill plus AI. Taste plus AI. Experience plus AI. Context plus AI.

Because AI by itself is still missing something.

It needs direction. It needs correction and judgment. It needs someone who knows when the answer is technically correct but pretty much wrong.

It puts you on the right path to the answer.

And that’s where people still matter.

19:15 — The Path Gets Wider, But Not Easier

I don’t want to make this sound easier than it is, because widening the path does not mean the path becomes easy.

It may actually become more confusing.

Before, your lane was narrower. You knew what you were supposed to do.

You were a developer, you developed. Designers designed. Marketers marketed.

Now the edges are blurred.

A designer can build. A developer can design. A founder can write code. A solo person can launch a product. A small team can do what used to require a much larger team.

And that is extremely exciting to me.

This video was made to bring a positive outlook. Not job replacement as the whole thing, but new career paths and new opportunities that are existing.

I don’t believe we’re going to have to go out and get a full university degree and become certified in everything.

I have a Java certification from many years ago. What does that mean now? Nothing.

I can get AI to write Java.

As long as I have a basic understanding of coding and how coding languages work, I can use AI to help build any language. It makes no difference.

But I still need to have the understanding of how it works. So when something goes wrong, or I want to review it to make sure it’s built properly, that’s important.

It also means people have to think more clearly, because when you can do more, you also have to decide more.

You have to decide what is worth building.

Is it good enough for alphas?

Is it safe for real users?

You have to decide when to bring in those experts.

You have to decide when AI is helping and when it’s just producing more stuff.

I hate that part.

And that’s a real problem.

AI can create momentum, but it can also create noise.

It can make you feel productive when you avoid the hard questions.

Does this thing actually matter?

Does anyone want it?

Can they trust it?

Can they support it?

Should it even exist?

Those questions don’t go away.

If anything, they become more important because now building is easier.

So judgment becomes more valuable.

21:38 — Why This Still Feels Positive

The positive part to me is not that AI makes everyone successful at once.

Most products are still going to fail. They won’t work. They’ll get no traction. Distribution is hard.

But more people get to try. They get to put those ideas out there to see what sticks, and that matters.

More people can build first versions.

People can learn how to make things and build things now.

More people can cross over into areas they were curious about and add that to their repertoire, their toolkit.

More people can test ideas without waiting years.

More people can become useful in ways their job titles never allowed.

And that feels like a widening of opportunity.

Not equal opportunity. Not perfect. But wider than before.

I think that’s worth paying attention to because if we only talk about AI’s replacement, we miss the people who will use it to become more capable.

The designer who’s more technical.

The developer who’s more product-minded.

The small business who can finally automate admin work and focus on the business and the customer.

The person with no team who can finally test his ideas out.

The employee who can move beyond their job description because they know how to use AI well within their job.

That’s real.

And it might be one of the better parts of the whole shift that we’re seeing happening right now.

23:12 — Closing Reflection

So I think that’s where I’m landing.

AI is going to replace work. No getting around it. I don’t think we should ever pretend otherwise.

But it also widens that career path.

It changes what one person can attempt. It changes what small teams can build. It changes how careers may grow in the future. It changes who gets to move closer to the work they actually care about.

And that’s a big one, because if you love what you do, it’s not work.

A UX designer may not become a full-stack engineer overnight, but they can build an MVP and get a product out the door pretty quick for testing. They can get it in the hands of the developer and give them a better idea of what to build and a framework to start from.

Then the developer can use AI to help build it out quicker by doing the tests, documentation, modeling, database, and all that. You’ve got a small team building great products at that point.

A developer may not become a lawyer or an accountant, but they may be able to get far enough. They’ll have the small pieces to add in there to do the proper conversions of what legalese needs to be here, what boundaries am I crossing, is this product legal in certain states or countries, what conversion of money and taxes across all the places. A lot of accounting things and tracking can get the basics done.

But you need the real specific people to help you.

So once you get to that level and your idea gets traction, then you need to build a team.

I think jobs will come around. It might turn into a gig-chores type marketplace where you don’t have a normal career anymore, but your skills are needed across multiple apps and multiple businesses.

That’s a great way to think about it, I think.

And that’s the part I find encouraging.

Not that AI removes the need for people, but it may let people step into work they were previously blocked from.

The path is wider now.

The hard parts are still there. Trust is still hard. Security is still hard. Marketing is very hard. Marketing is the key, because I talked about attention and getting that attention. Once you have it, keep it. Once you’ve got it and you can hold it, that’s when the money comes.

Getting people to care is still hard. Finishing is still hard.

But starting is different.

And for a lot of people, that may be enough just to change the direction of your life.

Not all at once and not overnight, but slowly. One idea, one test, one small build at a time.

I did this one quick because with everything going on, I want to have more positive videos about this. I’m trying to take a step back to see what’s really happening.

AI is really going to help us, I think, have different career paths and a lot of new ideas.

I’m very excited for this.

Thanks for watching.

What Does the World Value Now? (Raw Session)

00:30 — Opening Thought: The Old Way Doesn’t Jive Anymore

Unless it makes sense at all.

The old way, just the way I understood it and grew up, just doesn't jive anymore.

And I don't mean in a dramatic way, and in a world way or anything like that.

I just mean the basic things.

'Cause like I said, like I invest money, I buy stocks, and whatever I felt was important doesn't seem to matter anymore.

The way money moves, the way companies are valued, the way people decide what is important, the way safe investments used to feel safe, and the way attention seems to be worth more than anything else in the planet at the moment.

The way food can be expensive, more expensive than it's ever been, but the people that are producing it and creating it and growing it, they're struggling and there's not many of them left and they're having a hard time.

The way medicine can be one of the most important things in the world along with food and energy.

And people, you got to try really hard convince them to even trust it.

And at the same time, those same people will take something that they heard about online because it helps them look better or helps them feel better.

It just feels like the value system is off.

Or maybe it's not off.

Maybe it's working exactly the way it's designed to work.

And that's the part that kind of gets me.

Because I'm not trying to be conspiracy theorists or anything like that.

I'm just trying to grasp and wrap my head around.

If I need to invest money, I need to plan for future.

Where do I put my money?

Like what I'm used to may not be, or what I think I know may not be reality anymore.

02:25 — The Old Safe Places

Because when I grew up, I always had the basic idea in my head from investing like there's certain things that you got to have.

You got to have food, power, fuel, shelter, medicine, heat, transportation.

And those kinds of things felt like the foundation.

So even when economy's bad, there's a recession, things are hard, times are hard.

Those areas still made sense.

You still had to have shelter, you still had to have heat, you still had to have water, had to have food, transportation even just to get around.

Those things matter.

You need to have medicine, doctors, hospitals.

So when you think about a safe place to put money, not guaranteed, because nothing's guaranteed.

But they felt safe, steady, like a long-term place to put your money.

They were institutions that possibly weren't gonna go away, like food companies, utilities, energy, health care, banks, infrastructure.

Really like the boring stuff you can think of.

Still, to my mind, feels like the safest place.

But even in times, they lose money.

And they don't grow the same.

And they cut dividends.

03:41 — Where the Growth Seems to Be Now

But when you look at where the excitement is, where the insane evaluations.

SpaceX.

Where the growth is, it feels the world has shifted.

I'm not saying that like always new something new comes out something big.

Big change in the market industry.

Yes, that's where that's brand new. That's exciting. It's a new IPO coming out. Yes, that is going to get an initial track.

It may have a lot of ups and downs, volatility, but in the end there's a market being created or disrupted it makes sense to me.

So it's going towards, in my mind.

The money is not just going toward what people need anymore.

It's going towards whoever controls people the attention.

Which was to feed the cloud, chips, the data, the model.

Whoever controls the layer between people and the rest of the world controls the layer between the food, the medicine, the fuel.

Whoever controls that is who's technically more of the money should go I guess at this point.

04:57 — Free Is Not Really Free

But even those things could shift because like think about Facebook's free, Instagram's free, YouTube search, a lot of AI tools have free versions.

Even if you pay a lot of it feels free.

Gemini, Copilot. Open AI has a free one.

But they're not really free.

None of it's free and we all know that.

If you're not paying for something you are the product.

The attention is the product.

The behavior, the data, the habit, those are the products that people are paying for.

And whoever can hold your attention the most, where everyone is fighting for your attention, that becomes the most valuable part.

And that's where the people are placing their value at the moment.

And it's more valuable than the thing they're selling.

So if you can grab the attention, hold the user, hold the eyeball, get the click, you are worth more than the thing that people are trying to sell to you.

I understand the business model.

I understand the logic behind it.

Advertising, scale, data, recommendations, AI, global reach.

I get why it works.

But emotionally, as a regular person looking at the world, it still feels backwards.

Because food keeps people alive.

Power keeps the lights on.

Fuel and energy move the world.

Keeps you healthy and alive.

But the companies treat it like the future or the companies controlling the screen in front of your face.

The phone in your hand.

And that's hard for me to really process and move my investments to match that reality.

06:55 — Thinking Out Loud While Following the Script

And that's why I'm doing this ramble right now.

So I'm trying to stick the script but I'm going off at the same time.

And I know I keep bringing that up in my video.

But I want people to know that there is a big distribution between reading the script and me just thinking out loud at the same time.

So yeah, this is the hard part for me to wrap my head around.

And one example.

This is what made me really think about this.

On Instagram the other day a post came up about Facebook Reels.

Just the Reels.

A TikTok competitor.

Not even their main product.

Just a part of Facebook.

Just stuff people scroll through while waiting in line, sitting on the couch, avoiding whatever else they should be doing.

That's what I like to say it.

And that one feature inside one company is generating more revenue than Airbnb.

Netflix.

This is what gets me.

They make about the same amount of revenues Tyson Foods.

They make more money than Nike.

This one blew my mind.

Reels generates more money than Coca-Cola.

That's insane.

08:23 — Reels, Coca-Cola, and Tyson Foods

Not because Reels has no value.

Obviously, apparently it has value.

People use it every time.

Keeps attention, moves products, shapes culture, changes habits.

But still, Coca-Cola is everywhere.

Coca-Cola.

The polar bears at Christmas.

Your name on the Coke bottle.

Like Coke literally is everywhere.

I own Coke.

Warren Buffett is one of the first investors.

He loves Coke.

Reels makes more money than Tyson Foods.

They put the food on the table man.

They have physical products.

They feed the world.

Factories, trucks.

It's in the grocery stores.

And Reels makes just as much money as them.

And Reels is not even the company.

It's just a product within a product.

Man oh man.

That's, you kind of take a second to think about that.

And somehow that's valued like one of the biggest businesses in the physical world.

Wow.

And that's where I keep coming back to this question.

What does the world actually value now?

Because it's not that the food stopped mattering obviously.

Food matters more than almost anything.

09:51 — Food Still Matters, But Where Is the Money Going?

You see it every time you go to a grocery store.

Beef prices are through the roof.

Groceries prices in general through the roof.

Everything costs more.

And yes, there are very good reasons for a lot of that inflation.

Transportation.

Fuel cost.

The packaging.

Labor.

Which I think is going to dramatically drop.

So I've already talked about that, but I think there's a few more videos coming around that one.

Interest rates, supply chain, all of that adds up.

All of that is needed.

But when you look at the people closest to the actual food, farmers, ranchers, producers, a lot of them are the ones, they're not getting rich.

A lot of them are actually shutting down.

They could really stay afloat.

So the consumer pays more.

The grocery store is making money.

Grocery stores are a big part of my portfolio, but they're not growing like Reels.

But yet you go there every day, or at least once or twice a week.

And they're making money, but they're not.

Where's the money going?

The processors move huge revenue, but the people producing the thing that we actually need to stay alive, and they're trying to sell those on the shelf, those people are not making any money.

And the people that are making the money are like Facebook because they're the ones showing us the product on the grocery store and getting us to go to the grocery store.

This is me rambling here now.

So the platform that is used to grab my attention, to show me the product that gets me to the store, is the tool that's valued the most at this point.

Wow.

11:39 — Attention Scales Differently Than Food

So I'm going to go back to this and then a platform that sells attention can scale in a completely different way.

And that's true.

They can scale a different way.

And one more person watching videos does not cost the same as feeding another cow or buying more land to plant more stuff, get a tractor, get feed.

Understand that adding more eyeball, getting more eyeballs to stay on your screen longer does not cost the same as putting another box of cornflakes on the shelf.

And one more ad impression does not cost the same as raising cattle, producing the beef, processing the beef, shipping it in packaging.

So I understand why market values the tech different or the farmer different or the grocery store different or the transportation truck different.

But understanding does not make it feel less strange.

Because you think the value would go to the thing that you truly want, not the thing that told you you wanted or made you think you wanted it.

Because right now the thing that matters most can be low margin and the thing that distracts us can be high margin.

I said something.

I don't know exactly what.

But it says something.

And you can see this in other places too.

13:02 — AI Still Needs the Physical World

So this is where I go and it like AI feels digital and abstract.

It's a piece of code basically, but underneath it is still physical.

There's chips.

There are data centers and needs cooling.

It requires power, needs building, which means land, wires and infrastructure.

It's all these things.

So even the future that feels like software still depends on all the boring infrastructure, the physical items.

But the energy that runs it may be valued less than the model itself.

The building may be valued less than the company that's renting the space to compute.

The power grid may be valued less than the chips.

And the chips, the chip is valuable now because it's scarce.

Maybe one day, if there are enough chips, the value moves somewhere else.

It moves to the code.

It moves away from the chips themselves.

So all the physical items are not valued the same as the digital items.

And that's the part I keep trying to understand.

The value keeps moving up the chain.

From the physical thing to the system around the thing to the platform above the system, whoever controls the attention, who controls the access or the bottleneck.

Because right now chips are the bottleneck, they get the most.

But then once that's fixed, then it goes back to the model.

It goes back to the code.

It goes back.

Then it doesn't even go there.

Goes to who has the attention.

14:24 — Medicine, Trust, and What People Can See

And I don't know, it's like medicine has a version of this too, because you still need medicine, you need doctors, you need vaccines.

I believe we need vaccines to help prevent disease and spread.

We need hospitals to help people and help the sick.

But trust in medicine now gets filtered through mostly social media, gets filtered through fear, politics, and whatever story someone's seeing online.

People begin to trust the advice they get from those Reels.

Instead of trusting the doctors and scientists and chemists, the studies, the results, the tests, they see an influencer showing weight loss, muscle gain, puffy lips, perfect skin.

So they are willing to take the pill, inject the needle, put the cream on, do whatever because the results they see in the Reels are visible and they have their eyeballs, they have their attention.

They can see it.

They can measure it.

They can post it.

Maybe that's probably the same problem.

We seem to value what we see, what we can measure.

We value what gets our attention and what can be sold and what we can turn into growth.

But the things that quietly hold everything together are harder to value.

15:50 — Invisible Until It Breaks

Food is invisible until the price goes up.

And I say because we just go buy stuff randomly.

We know what we're gonna get and we don't notice it until we look at the bill basically.

Power is invisible until the lights go off.

You just pay the bill, the lights are on, you're on the internet, you're good to go.

Medicine is invisible until you get sick.

You don't need it.

You don't think about it.

Infrastructure.

That's invisible until there's a road blockage, or there's a flood in a building.

Until all that happens you don't even notice it's there.

You just take it for granted.

And maybe that is why this all feels so strange to me.

The world still depends on the boring physical things.

Food, power, medicine, shelter, infrastructure.

But the biggest rewards seem to go to the layer above, the attention layer.

I don't know, reverse this first data layer, platform bottleneck, but really it's the attention and the thing that controls that attention.

The thing that sits between people in the world, the Reels, the Facebook, the Instagram, the stories, the YouTube.

I'm on YouTube right now.

I'm not great name was attention.

I got a few of you and I'm happier here.

17:10 — What Gets Rewarded

So I don't think I'm saying the old things stop mattering.

I think I'm saying they still matter maybe more than ever, but the world does not always reward what matters most.

It rewards what scales.

It rewards what captures attention.

What controls the choke points.

It rewards what can turn human behavior into revenue.

Whoever controls the eyeballs, the clicks.

Those are the people that are valued the most.

And that's what feels off to me because when you grow up you think important things should be valuable.

The basic parts of life to keep you alive should be the most valuable things.

And they are.

Because they keep you alive.

But from your wallet, your checkbook, and your retirement plan, they don't seem to be the most valuable thing anymore.

It's not always the people closest to the work.

Not always at the same level.

Not always at the same level as the company controlling the system around them.

18:12 — The Main Question

So I don't really have a clean answer here.

I'm just trying to sit with the question.

What does the world value now?

Not what do we say we value, not what sounds important, but what actually gets rewarded?

What gets funded?

What gets scaled, protected?

What gets the attention?

And when I look at it that way it feels like the answer is not just food, power, medicine, infrastructure, even though we still need all the things.

The answers seem to be attention, access, control.

Being able to scale something.

Keep your margins high.

Margins low.

The layer between people and reality.

And I don't know if that means the world does not make sense anymore.

Or if it makes perfect sense and I just don't like it.

I don't know.

It's, uh, hmm.

19:15 — Looking Back at Facebook

I go back to when Meta went, well Facebook at the time went public.

To me, it made no sense.

They don't make any revenue.

They make no money.

They're losing money.

But then quickly they become one of the most profitable companies and you try to reevaluate how you look at what is considered valuable and important in the world.

From a financial point of view, I guess.

It's a difficult one because I still banks, grocery stores, food processing.

But because all these companies now, I believe AI is going to help them be more efficient, help them do better breakthroughs.

But I also think a lot of them are following these trends.

They're coming up with things that aren't things that make you live longer.

They're coming up with things that make you feel better and look better.

And I'm sure there's a lot of people in there that are still making things that keep you alive and keep you from getting sick and help you get better that way and live longer.

But they're also not naive either because they're public companies and they have to think about the shareholders.

20:41 — Closing Thought

So I am holding on to the ones that I have just because I do believe that at some point this will turn back into normal reality.

At the same time, I'm hoping to get a little piece of the pie at SpaceX because I strongly believe that that is going to be a very important company.

But to me, that has value.

It has a product.

It's actually trying to do something.

But at the same time, it also has AI built into it.

And it also has the communication level of Starlink.

It has the power with the soldiers and the satellites.

So there's a lot of physical things within that one IPO along with the attention layer.

It has the eyeballs right now just because of how big it is.

Anyway, there's a lot of rambling going on.

So I'm going to finish this one.

And I am going to do more videos because this is a deep thought.

I just woke up and started thinking like, "What is going on?"

So I had to make this video.

So thanks for watching.

We’re About to See Things Humanity Has Never Seen Before | Thinking Out Loud

00:00 — Opening / What this video is about

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

So this video is gonna be sort of about the idea that we’re about to see stuff we’ve never seen before.

And I don’t even think our minds can imagine it.

It kind of goes off another video I did recently about if everyone has access to AI.

So what happens then?

The creativity that comes from that.

The people that had zero access, all of a sudden they have access.

So this goes along the lines with that one.

This is kind of a continuation from that one.

00:33 — Survival pressure and unused creativity

Basically, I was talking about how there are probably millions of people in the world with ideas and creativity and potential, but most of their energy gets consumed just trying to survive life.

Bills.
Stress.
Work.
Exhaustion.

Just trying to stay alive.

Who knows what situation people are going through, from third-world countries to developed countries.

And because of that, a huge amount of human creativity probably never fully appears.

Not because people aren’t capable of it, but because they never really get enough room to explore it.

They don’t have the time, the energy, the effort, the space to just let their brains be creative.

01:23 — Why this moment feels different

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens if that starts changing.

Because honestly, I think we’re entering one of the most exciting periods humans have ever lived through.

More exciting than the industrial age.

Well, all those ages had to happen to get here, but the speed they took to become known to the world and for the world to take advantage of them took a lot longer than what we’re seeing happening today.

And I also think a lot of people still don’t fully see what’s happening yet, and how quickly it’s happening.

02:01 — Big changes used to take time

Obviously humanity has gone through all these things before.

The internet.
Television.
Color.
Remote controls.
Mobile phones.

Those changed society completely.

They really did, and they got us to where we are today.

Most of those changes came slow.

They took time.

Distribution of the new systems, the impact it had, getting it up and running.

It didn’t all happen super quick all the time.

Even the internet itself took years to hit normal life.

Everyday people getting access to it.

But that is a stepping stone to where we are today.

02:44 — The infrastructure is already here

AI feels totally different because now all that infrastructure is in place.

And we’re even building it more while we’re using it.

AI is helping us decide how to build it for itself.

That’s the scary part about it.

The phone already exists.
The computers, we already have them.
The chips, we’re building more.
Satellites are going up.
We have solar power.
We have data centers.
Nuclear plants are coming back online.

We have everything in place that we need.

We need more, but we have a lot of it.

So the improvements now spread almost instantly.

A new model comes out and millions of people have it already.

A method goes out, it gets leaked, and then millions of people have it open.

Everyone has access to do whatever they want.

Create their own crypto, have their own agent go out and sell it and buy it and do whatever.

So the speed that we have access to things now, that’s a big difference.

A big changer.

A big barrier breaker.

03:57 — Who gets access this time

I think the real important part is who gets access this time.

Historically, powerful tools belonged to a small group of people.

People with money.
Education.
Connections.
Large companies and corporations.
People with status.

You usually had to get invited to the party to have access to a new system or a new thing, or even to be able to purchase it.

But AI feels different because suddenly regular people can now do things that used to require entire teams, years of training, and experience.

You can learn faster.
Research faster.
Build software.

The new Google one, I’ve got to get my hands on it, could build a game just by talking.

Art is a questionable one.

There are new movies out.
There are new videos.
Music and stuff like that.

So I think art is being created quickly, but I think art is one of those things that will still stay authentic in different forms.

Same with writing.

But even writing now, people can quickly do up manuscripts.

They can get ideas pumped out pretty quickly and organized.

Brainstorming.

But I still don’t edit these.

Man, I hope maybe someday I can figure out how, but I’m trying to avoid that at the moment.

Starting businesses, translating ideas into something real happens almost instantly and in real time.

And yeah, it’s still rough around the edges, but the barrier between an idea and execution is collapsing incredibly fast.

And that’s the part that feels historic to me.

[RAW] The Death of the Mandatory Car (Unedited Thoughts)

00:30 — Driving Was Never Really Optional

And I think we anticipate, because for most of our lives, especially where I live, driving never felt like a lifestyle choice.

It was just how you get around.

You got to get your license because you need one.

You got a car because work, groceries, family appointments, just being able to get from A to B. You can't just do it normally.

Infrastructure doesn't allow for it. And once you have the car, everything else came with it. Insurance, gas, repairs, parking, tires, it's just a constant and debt and also like loans and payments.

Your car is not just a vehicle, it's the center of a whole system built around the idea that most adults drive.

So if driving becomes optional, change is bigger than just cars alone. It affects the whole structure that's built around it, the whole industries that rely on it.

That is the real shift I want to think through on this one.

Not a world where cars disappear, but a world where more people no longer drive or have to get a car or organize their lives around car finances and where they live and things like that.

01:59 — The Licence as Freedom

And for a long time getting your driver's license was almost automatic, at least where I grow up.

And where I live now is just part of becoming independent because a license means freedom for a lot of people.

You can leave when you want, you can get to work, friends, like I said, errands, and you stop depending on others to help you get around or relying on transportation that may not always be available or on time.

02:32 — The First Car

And for a lot of people and pretty much anyone who ever had a car, the first car was a very big deal.

Mine was a Jeep.

I still have a Jeep.

So it was a big deal for me.

Big impression. Even if it was not a nice car, because my Jeep was not new either, maybe and again maybe especially if it's not a nice car because you build memories with that car, you work on it, you have to take care of it, you know the ins and outs of it because it's yours.

It represents movement, independence, control, your own private space, your own private transportation.

That is why cars are emotional. They are tied to identity. They aren't tied to status and memory and adulthood.

03:19 — The Expensive Side of Cars

But there's also the other side of cars.

Cars are very expensive.

They break, they depreciate maintenance, the insurance side of it, just basic parking fuel and again loan payments.

They become debt, a trap that people get caught in and they cause a lot of stress.

They can sit on use for most of the day. Like my Jeep doesn't drive that much, my wife's doesn't drive that much, but it's still sitting there and it's costing me money.

So there are really two versions of a car.

There's the emotional side of the vehicle, the road trips, the first drive all by yourself, learning, the whole memory behind the vehicle and what it brings to you.

That version of the car is very real and it stays with a lot of people.

And then there's the mandatory car part of it.

The one you own because there's no other practical way to get around.

You have to have it to operate your life.

And that is the part I think is starting to weaken a little bit. Becoming is so much required.

04:23 — Big Cities Already Show This

We already see a version of this in big cities and we've seen it forever.

A lot of people in bigger cities that they don't get their license.

They wait to get it later in life or they may never get it.

They may never buy a car.

They may use some like zip car or something where they can like ride share.

They sign up for that.

So instead of owning you you you're a part of a co-op basically and it's not a strange thing because the cities give them options to biking, walking, subways, train, awesome transit, Ubers and everything.

A lot of things are close enough just to walk to get to places but that is not how most small cities and towns are built which is basically where I'm located in these smaller places like where I am.

05:19 — Smaller Places Make Cars Feel Required

Not having a car most times means you're stuck.

The bus, if there is a bus, it may not be close by and it doesn't run that often.

There's pretty much guaranteed there's no subway option.

And taxis may be too expensive, too few, just not a viable solution 'cause it costs too much to get a short distance because even the grocery store is not a two minute walk or at the bottom of your building, it's like, it's gonna be a 15 minute walk.

So getting ice cream, it's gonna be melted by the time you get home.

And 'cause everything's more spread out and then you take winter and the fact and that takes a lot of a big difference for it.

Like walking and biking is not really a good option then.

It's not safe, it's cold, And maybe you don't have sidewalks and stuff aren't plowed properly

Because it's not a priority in the smaller towns

Like kids activities doctors like there's a lot of things were so current becomes something that you have to do in a big city

Not driving can be a normal in a small city driving is default

And not because everyone loves it because

Like I said, it's it's it's there's no other realistic choice and that is where Autonomous transportation gets very interesting to me and not because it gives New Yorkers another way to get around

It doesn't give San Francisco another big demo that they can show off

But because it could eventually give smaller cities and towns a transportation layer that doesn't exist today

06:57 — Autonomous Transportation in Small Cities

Small city may never it's not going to get a subway. It's a phrase that's never build might never it's not

It might never have buses every five minutes because buses lose money and cities need the money for other things potholes

And

You might never support huge taxi networks because there's just not enough people that need to get around

But if autonomous vehicles can operate continuously reliably and cheap enough, which they will

Then maybe car light living becomes possible in these small towns

And that's where it becomes more than a big city lifestyle. It becomes a real alternative for places where the car has always been default and

07:42 — The First Shift: Two Cars to One

This does not mean everyone gets rid of a car. That's too extreme in my mind

I really believe that we're not gonna see that happen anytime soon

The first version is probably gonna be very simple like two car households become one car households

Teenagers delay getting their license, older people, they instead of going on the road now they and being isolated or taking chances of Probably past the time they should get rid of their license now

They can use automated Autonomous driving to get them around places and interact with their people

Socialize and go to the doctor appointments and stuff low-income families that normally like they have to get to work and like they're relying on transportation that's not always reliable.

Now they can use autonomous vehicles as a cheaper solution instead of trying to use a large portion of the salary for having a vehicle.

Now they can use autonomous vehicles to get around at a much lower cheaper price and remove all that extra expense.

And like people working at home like

Now you can work at home whenever you want really most companies allow it in most situations

It's it's easier and it's not frowned upon

And

So all these things they're small

They're small changes, but they really matter because cars are expensive

Even when they are sitting still if a household can go from two vehicles to one that changes their budget quite a bit

One less vehicles means less insurance

registration tires maintenance

less payments, like you're saving a lot of money.

09:30 — The Industries Built Around Cars

And if enough households make that kind of change, it starts to affect industries.

That touches car dealerships, insurance, mechanics, gas stations, like everything, financing.

City planning is parking and streets and crossroads.

That is why the car is such a big example in my mind of how it's not just AI, but it's just autonomous electricity, the way robots, the way we're moving, it's changing a lot of things.

And this is just the bigger example I think affects more people.

It is a whole economy built around the assumption that most adults need and want and get a car.

And if that assumption weakens even slightly, the effects break.

10:16 — Insurance Changes Shape

And again, insurance is probably one of the clearest examples of this.

Today, personal auto insurance is built around human drivers.

Age, history, accidents, tickets, where you live, what kind of car you have.

The whole model assumes that individuals own cars and personally drive them.

But if transportation shifts towards autonomous fleets, the risk changes.

It doesn't disappear, it moves.

Instead of asking, does this driver make mistakes?

The question becomes quite different.

Did the software fail?

Did the sensor fail?

Did the fleet operators maintain the vehicle properly?

Has the manufacturer released bad bugs, bad update, mapping system glitches, city infrastructure, part of the problem?

Did a remote supervisor step in?

Is there a remote supervisor?

Did a human override take place?

And that's a different insurance world at the same time.

Personal auto insurance may shrink.

Commercial fleet insurance goes up, but then who's liable?

Is it the system?

Is it the manufacturer?

Is it the fleet manager?

Is it software?

Or is it manufacturer?

Or is it person?

It becomes a whole different ballgame.

Like, and honestly, when you go deep into it, like it's legal, it's business, it's city planning, there's a lot going on because the people are not personally driving.

Responsibility has to go somewhere.

Someone still owns the vehicle, someone still maintains it, someone built it, someone updates the software, and someone's making money off all those rides.

So insurance doesn't go away, it reorganizes around different situations, different people become responsible.

12:04 — When the Licence Becomes Optional

And then there's the license question.

This one feels small when you think about it at first, but I think it might be one of the biggest culture changes.

What happens people get licenses.

For a long time license always was just basic part of life.

Even if you did not care about cars life was easier if you could drive.

But if a young person grows up in a world where transportation is always available maybe they're going to see changes.

Maybe they delay the license, skip the first car, avoid the insurance, avoid all the payments, the debt trap and they see ownership is like I said too expensive of a burden like let's skip that maybe they think why would I own this if I could just click a button and get an uber or like you know with the rule of taxi it like there's not even a driver or the Wacom I think it is the Google one again this is not for everyone and but enough people could think this way for it to matter and this already happens in some big cities like we said but if it spreads into small cities and towns that becomes very different in a very larger situation because then the license is no longer a universal milestone it becomes something some people need some people want and I'll probably a lot of people are going to skip it and that changes the meaning of driving it moves from assumed adulthood to optional skill and once a skill becomes optional fewer people learn it

13:36 — Who Still Knows How to Drive?

And that creates another question this this video I've tried a few times

But it's so long and I broke it up into three and this one's still long because if less people are getting their license

Then it becomes like well who knows how to drive who still knows how to drive like it's like who's a pilot who knows how to drive a fly helicopter for a fly a plane

Sail the sailboat like now we know that well who knows how to drive drive.

Because even in the future of autonomous vehicles, I still think there will be situations where someone needs to know how to drive.

Maybe not most people, maybe not every adult, but someone has to drive.

Like we still have first responders, utility workers, construction crews, military, disaster response, tow trucks, things like that.

Like take a first responder,

Yeah, we they may okay. Let me read this because this goes into what I'm saying because

People who deal with edge cases basically those people that we need when when things go wrong

So but then and also like not when just things go wrong, but like bad weather block roads power outages

The software fails the sensors fail construction zones accidents situations or systems does not know how to possibly deal with it.

As much software and things we throw at it, there's still gonna be places where a human's gonna be able to analyze it just quicker,

maybe not quicker, but react more appropriately based off experience.

Well, maybe there's no more experience 'cause there's less people that drive,

so there's less people with experience.

But maybe one day, like the first responder, take like the fire truck or the police or ambulance,

it is autonomous, but there is a driver that can take over if they need to.

They can change the path, they can, if the sensor goes, they can take over,

like if there's an accident, they can get around it.

So I don't think that we would ever see completely autonomous first responder vehicles.

I still think there would be a person or something there that can take control and has responsibility for what happens.

So maybe emergency vehicles, this went way off, maybe an Amazon can road itself better than a human.

I don't know.

And it says, "I think it could. "I think of the Kramer and Seinfeld.

"He knew how to get there faster than the fire trucks. "That'll cause a little trouble."

I like this one, maybe emergency vehicles communicate with traffic lights and clear up,

doing that I believe and all that's happened already and and but even then do I do I think we still need someone who could take over we still need someone who understands the machine the road and the weird situation that was not in the training data and that's true so driving may not disappear as a skill it may become specialized.

Less like a basic life skill, more like a trade.

Like again like flying and helicopters and boats.

So most people may not need it but the people who do need it may need to be very good at it and that's a strange reversal.

In a world where fewer people drive the people who still know how to drive might become more important not less important because they become the fallback layer.

17:18 — Driving as a Specialized Skill

So it becomes a specialized skill.

I have a whole another one I'm gonna do on this too because you know like you talk about like it's always felt like it's luxury to have the autonomous car or a robot drive you type thing but there's still gonna be that high level premium I believe where people are gonna be willing to pay for a person to be there.

And that's another video.

So back to this.

And then you have to ask, I don't want to take this part out, but it also brings up like, so specialized skill for driving and less people have it.

So the people that learn it, there's very few of them.

Who's going to train those people?

If fewer people learn to drive, what happens to driving schools and things like that.

Are you going to have an optimist driving instructor train you how to drive?

And you can scan that system, I'm sure.

So driving instruction may become less about teaching every teenager the basic skills and more about specialized training, emergency override, fleet supervision, bad weather driving, heavy vehicles, towing, and just more of a specialized skill on top of the basics.

So you don't just go get your license like we do today, you go get your license if you plan to use it in a special career path that requires it.

Or maybe just getting your basic license becomes, like I said, like a luxury.

So it's a very expensive luxury.

And there was a whole section on the horse, and maybe it's still in here, but like comparing to the horse, like it's coming up.

But when you go back to that, like, with the special training, and it's a luxury to go get your license, it becomes less like a rite of passage and more like a professional certificate.

19:27 — The Standard Transmission Analogy

And I compare it to standards, like a manual transmission.

I still drive a standard.

My Jeep is a stick shift.

And that used to be the normal.

Everyone knew how to drive a stick.

I don't even know how many of my friends know how to do it, even at my age.

I bet there's people that don't even know it's a thing.

So I'm very rare in that case.

It's only recently I've come to the conclusion that if I get a new one, I'm probably not going to get a manual.

I'm probably going to have to get an automatic.

So I've been holding off.

And it's not because they became impossible, not because standard transmissions became impossible.

People just stop needing to learn.

Automatic became normal, fewer people learn standard, fewer vehicles are built with it, and the skill moved from normal to niche niche niche.

Yeah, specialized.

Maybe driving yourself eventually feels like that.

Not gone, just less common.

A skill, a skill some people have, most people most people do not need yeah and that is where like it threw the horses in because I told it to get rid of it but I said it was pretty good so AI left it in

20:56 — The Horse Comparison

And that's where the horse comparison comes in horses do not that didn't disappear obviously we didn't they're not extinct they just stopped being the default way people move through the world they became recreation sport, work in some contexts and nostalgia.

And to me also like a status symbol.

Maybe cars eventually go through something similar.

Some people will still own them because they need them.

Some will own them because they love them.

But the assumption that every adult needs a license, every household needs one or two cars and every store needs a large parking lot.

Another video about that coming maybe it's down here I don't know I'm all over the place

Cars do not have to disappear for the whole world around them cars do not have to disappear for the world around them to change they just have to be less of them and less people driving them

21:57 — City Design and Parking

Then there's the city design side of it which again this video covered everything I tried to take a lot of it out so there are other videos about each piece but like cars take up a lot of space not just on the roads parking lots driveways garages street parking office parking parking is a big one and takes up a lot of land just to have all these cars sitting around moving around just being there a few people own cars and more trips are handled by shared even taxis but I go autonomous fleets because the price is just going to be insanely cheap so it's going to be a no-brainer in my mind and I'll again I broke this up in the multiple videos so somebody could become housing like all those parking spots and all that extra space just to have all these cars sitting around doing nothing like a lot of space could not become housing space for houses parks bigger sidewalks to allow people to move and walk around and use bikes but I do not want to make this sound too clean.

Autonomous vehicles could also create more empty vehicles driving around, more congestion in some places, more surveillance for sure, more platform control and more dependence on private companies.

So it's a big trade-off there like I don't go down that whole too hard here on this one, but maybe I'll do a video on that.

And that is, that is the thing about utilities.

They are convenient, but they also create dependence.

Ownership gives you burden, but gives you the control.

Utility gives you convenience, but also dependence.

I did that one twice.

Sometimes I was going to do another video too, about where I'm at after about three months, so I may do that and how AI is helping.

But not helping all the time.

But anyway, back to this.

24:06 — A World Where Cars Are No Longer Mandatory

So maybe that is the future of transportation,

not a clean break, not a world where cars vanish,

a messier world where fewer people need to organize their entire life around owning one.

Some people still drive, we still need trucks.

Most people will probably still love cars.

Some people will depend on personal vehicles for a very long time.

But for others, the car may become less of a requirement and more of a choice.

And that is part that changes everything.

Because if a wheelie can separate from ownership, then the car becomes something different.

It's still useful, still loved, still necessary in some places, but no longer automatically required.

Not a world without cars, a world where cars are no longer mandatory.

And that's a big change.

That changes a lot of industries,

it changes a lot of the way people look at vehicles,

cars, their finances, their budgets, becomes choice.

And this whole thing started as transportation,

as utility and everything that goes along with it.

And, but it goes bigger.

And that's why there's more videos coming.

I hope you like this one.

Thanks, bye.

The AI Journal You Didn’t Know You Were Writing [Raw Session]

00:01 — Opening

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I had a thought the other day: I probably told AI things I haven't told anyone else.

Not in a big, dramatic way.

Just naturally.

Like ideas, questions, stuff I'm working through, things I'm not even sure I believe yet.

And it made me pause for a second, because I don't think I'm treating that like it matters as much as maybe it should.

I think the things we're telling AI, and the way we're using it, we're being kind of free with it and not considering the possible side effects or future effects that could happen.

Because at the beginning it's just a tool.

You use it like you use Google.

And I know I keep saying that, but that's really how a lot of people are using it.

You ask something, you get an answer, you move on.

That's it.

But that's not how it stays.

Sure, like browser history, Google history, you can delete it, you're kind of aware of it.

They're not always completely connected.

But over time, this is different.

And it shifts.

You start using it to think.

You're using AI for more of a memory.

When you're stuck, when you're making a decision, when something doesn't feel clear, you open it and just start typing or talking, which makes it even more free-form, where you're just letting your thoughts ramble on.

And slowly, without really noticing, it becomes a place.

Not just something you use, but somewhere you go.

You go for quick advice before you send an email, a text, any problem that happened, from a recipe to changing a tire to looking up something about a pressure washer, and then straight to a vacation issue, a family issue, or a financial issue.

And that's where it starts feeling a little different to me.

Because now it's not just: what did I search?

It's: what have I been thinking about?

What keeps coming up?

What am I circling?

What am I trying to build?

It's not a history of actions.

It's a record of intent, direction, and thought process.

It's basically me.

It's me and the AI.

It's a counterpart to my thought process and my brain and what's happening in my day-to-day life and what I need direction on, instructions on, or just everything really.

02:45 — We Protect Everything Else

We already know how to treat certain things.

Like we know how to treat our bank accounts.

We protect them through two-factor authentication.

We use text messages. We use Face ID.

Emails are protected. They're private.

We separate work from personal.

Our passwords are locked down.

We're using a password manager so there's one way in and one way out.

We don't even know what the passwords are really.

But AI, most people are treating it like it disappears.

Like it's just something passing in time.

Like it's a scratch pad.

Something temporary.

But it's not temporary.

If you're using it daily, or even less than that but regularly, it becomes your running log of ideas, plans, patterns, beliefs, contradictions, random thoughts, exploring ideas, chasing rabbit holes, wild ideas sometimes.

Because it feels like a place where you can be honest and no one's watching and you can explore possibilities.

It's the raw version of your thought process really.

Doesn't mean just things you want to act on, but things you're curious about.

04:03 — The Creative Risk

And this is where it really clicked for me.

If someone got access to that, they wouldn't just see what you've made.

They'd see half-built ideas, dead ends, intentions you've never shown anyone.

They'd see your complete process.

On the creativity side, they're seeing how you create things.

And that's not just content.

That literally is your thought process and how you deduct and come to conclusions.

So it's really you.

If someone understands that and gets access to it, they don't need to steal your finished work.

They can rebuild something pretty close to what you already thought, because they have the history, the patterns, the little nuggets of ideas that passed through your head.

With AI, they can reconstruct things from those little proofs of ideas.

And it would be almost impossible to prove it came from you.

They can pass it off as their own.

So think about a song, a movie, a book, an app.

And this goes deeper than creativity.

This isn't just notes or drafts.

If you're using these tools a lot, they become a compressed version of you.

Not perfect and definitely not complete, but close enough that someone could understand how you think, predict what you might do, steal your identity, misrepresent you, pretend to be you.

05:53 — AI Versions of Ourselves

Now with the latest Google changes, I was redoing images of myself last night and they looked exactly like me: younger, older, current.

It was like looking at an actual picture of me.

So you could take that, throw it into a video, combine it with AI, and basically create yourself.

You can do a video interview.

I'm sure voice is possible.

I haven't tried it.

But writing style, thoughts, maybe it could probably even guess your passwords and get into whatever.

Maybe Face ID is the best way to go, and make sure you have multi-factor auth on.

06:31 — The Outside Version of Us

And there's another layer that I don't think people consider much.

For years, companies and governments and platforms have been collecting data about you.

Google searches, visited sites, YouTube, Android, Facebook tracking, how long you look at things, Amazon tracking what you buy.

Basically every single thing we do is online.

From surveillance cameras to GPS.

Our lives are online.

So everything is somewhere.

That stuff has existed for a long time.

On its own, it always felt scattered and not connected.

A receipt here, a browser search there, a quick message, a random photo, app logins.

It was data, but not always a full story.

Just fragmented pieces.

07:36 — What AI Changes

But AI changes that.

AI doesn't just store information.

It translates it, finds patterns, connects dots.

It makes unrelated information become related into a full picture.

And it starts to feel different because location data now shows where you went and what you were doing.

Your bank account shows what you paid for and how.

Your search history shows what you looked up.

And your AI chats on top of that may explain why.

They connect patterns and make a complete story of you.

Not just "he went here," but "he was thinking about leaving this job."

Not just "she bought this," but "she was scared about money."

Not just "they searched this," but what they were trying to figure out.

Now it has context of before, after, and how it all connects.

09:00 — The Rosetta Stone

Maybe that sounds dramatic, but it's the best way I can describe it.

AI might become the translator later, the thing that turns the outside version of your life into something readable.

Almost like a Rosetta Stone for your patterns.

Receipts, locations, searches, habits.

Those are fragments, but AI chats can give those fragments meaning.

And beyond that, once it has a memory of your interactions and thoughts, it's also building what we can call your AI avatar.

A simulation of you.

Then you can feed it scenarios and ask what you should do.

Based on everything you've done, it'll make a decision and you can evaluate it, use it, or not.

But if someone else had that, they could come pretty close to what you would have done.

And even if it wasn't exact, it might be close enough that people would say, "Yeah, that seems like something he would do."

10:39 — Pulling It Back

I want to be careful here.

I'm not saying someone's in a room reading all this.

I'm not saying this is happening in some perfect organized way.

But the capability is moving in that direction.

And the uncomfortable part is that we are building this intent layer willingly.

We're typing it out because it helps.

It's useful.

It reduces stress.

It takes weight off our processing.

It helps us reanalyze.

It helps us evaluate and come up with options.

That's what makes this complicated.

I don't want to frame AI as just dangerous.

I use it constantly.

It helps me organize, think, build, and get unstuck.

But that's exactly why the record it creates matters.

The more useful it becomes, the more personal it becomes.

And the more personal it becomes, the harder it is to treat it like just another app.

12:11 — Treat It Like Something Valuable

It's something that has to be locked down and secured.

You can't just use it carelessly everywhere.

In my mind, treat it like your bank account.

Protect it with everything you have.

Passwords, authentication, Face ID, all of it.

You need to treat this with just as much importance.

People still treat it like a search bar.

Phones unlocked.

Accounts logged in everywhere.

Personal and work mixed together.

Private thoughts, code, plans, money questions, family stress, business ideas.

Everything is in some note somewhere.

And we can't treat this lightly.

We need extra security because of how it can be used against you, and because it helps you so much too.

13:48 — The Rough Draft of Ourselves

I think we're leaving behind something much more detailed.

It's way more than search history.

We're leaving rough drafts of ourselves.

Unfinished versions.

All our thoughts.

The version that asks questions before it knows what it believes.

And maybe that's the part we haven't caught up to yet.

We learned how to protect money, accounts, passwords, and access.

I'm not sure we've learned how to protect how we think.

If AI chats become the place where our thoughts get stored, shaped, connected, and understood, then the question isn't just whether someone can access our data.

It's whether someday someone can read our pattern before we even understand ourselves.

14:56 — The Bigger Security Question

Right now courts and lawyers subpoena search history and laptops because it's important.

Then they have to decipher it and connect location data and search history.

But if you throw in the AI layer, it can make much more sense of all of it.

There's a lot to unpack there.

And there are going to be more videos around this.

I really don't believe people are treating AI with enough protection in mind.

This is more important than just "someone got my Google account."

This is your life patterns, your random questions, your answers, and the shape of who you are.

That needs to be protected more than I think people are doing right now.

16:14 — Closing

I'm going to finish this one because I want to unpack it more.

I'm going to make more videos that continue this line of thought because I think this is too important.

People really need to treat this as more than just some random app.

I think a lot of people are still underestimating this level.

Some people are thinking about it, especially the people creating the systems and the people working on policy and regulation.

But I don't think enough average people are thinking about how much information is being captured and tracked, and how much they need to protect it.

All right, thanks for watching.

Bye.

[Raw] The Danger of the Invisible Phase

00:00 — Intro: People Love the Beginning and the End

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

This one’s been sitting in my head for quite some time now, because I keep noticing these patterns over and over again in most areas of my life.

People love a good transformation story.

They love hearing about the addict who got sober, the person who lost a ton of weight, the broke person who suddenly becomes financially stable, or becomes rich, or the dropout who becomes extremely successful.

Just people who turn their lives around.

People love to hear those stories.

They love the beginning, and they love the end.

But it’s the middle that I think people shy away from.

Nobody really wants to hear about what happens in the middle, or how someone actually accomplished those big goals.

And I don’t even mean that in a cynical way.

I think there are probably some really good reasons for it.

Because once someone explains the middle of how they accomplished the big goal, it usually sounds way too simple.

Not easy.

Nothing’s easy.

If you’re going to do something big, it takes a lot of effort.

But it is simple.

And I find that’s what makes people very uncomfortable.

01:24 — Running and Realizing People Stop Caring

For me, I’m going to bring it back to the running that I do.

I do a lot of running.

I just got off the treadmill, really.

When I first started running consistently, I talked about it consistently.

I tracked every day.

I would tell people about my streaks, the distance I was totaling, what paces I was running at.

Because it was new and exciting, I’d naturally bring it up in conversations.

And people cared at the beginning.

They were very intrigued by it.

“Are you still running?”

“How far have you gone?”

“How often are you running?”

But eventually, all that kind of faded away.

People really didn’t want to hear it anymore.

It’s not that they didn’t care, I guess, but it’s not their life.

It’s just something I do.

Honestly, why would they care?

Obviously, when I hit milestones, like a year or two years, I let people know that.

And people were genuinely amazed at that.

It was a pretty big accomplishment.

But in the end, why would they care about the day-to-day?

Because to me, those days represent bad weather, exhaustion, stress, and low motivation.

A lot of those days, I did not want to do it.

I really did not want to get out there.

But to everyone else, it was just:

“Oh cool, he still runs.”

Over time, you begin to stop talking about it.

You’re not hiding it.

You’re not ashamed of it.

You just don’t bring it up anymore because it’s who you are and what you do.

It becomes something personal.

Eventually, it stopped becoming a story and just became part of who I was.

I run.

That’s it.

Now, weeks, months, years later, people ask me if I’m still running.

If I see them occasionally, or I drop into the office, people ask:

“You still running?”

And I’ll just say:

“Yep.”

That’s pretty much it.

Some people ask what my pace is up to, how many kilometers I got this week, or if I’m still doing it every day.

Now people are curious because I don’t bring it up anymore.

But to me, I just let it be.

I don’t need to explain anything anymore.

It’s personal.

I do it for myself.

And really, it’s a habit now.

04:15 — People Don’t Want the Daily Middle

I think this applies to almost everything.

People don’t want to keep hearing:

“I’m going to start running every day.”

Eventually they get bored of it.

They don’t want to hear it anymore.

But they do want to hear:

“I made it 365 days.”

Or:

“I made it two years.”

When you make it two years, people get pretty impressed.

But they don’t want to hear it every day.

Because if they hear about the steady consistency, the good times, the bad times, the days you want to do it, and the days you don’t want to do it, they don’t really want to hear about that.

Because really, all it is is:

Put on your shorts.

Lace up your shoes.

Run.

It could be outdoors.

It could be on the treadmill.

It could be at a track.

It doesn’t matter.

You just do it.

It’s not that complicated.

It’s pretty straightforward.

There’s no secret method.

There’s no magic sauce that makes the thing work.

05:42 — Simple Feels Worse Than Complicated

I think people almost want it to be complicated.

Because if it’s complicated, then they have a reason not to do it.

They can say:

“I don’t have the money.”

“I don’t have the time.”

“It’s too complicated for me.”

“I can’t get involved in that.”

But once they find out most things are pretty straightforward, it puts the responsibility back on them.

How did you lose the weight?

Well, I ate better.

I moved more.

I stayed consistent.

I kept doing it.

That’s pretty basic.

Watch your calories.

Move.

Eat healthy.

There’s no real secret sauce to that one.

How did you learn AI?

And I’m still learning, by the way.

I’m trying to stay up, and I still feel like I’m going nowhere.

But really, all it is is I spend time with it every day.

How did you save money?

Well, I consistently invested over years.

How did you write a book?

I didn’t write it yet.

I’m close.

It’s 140-plus pages, but it needs some tweaking.

But it’s close.

And I just kept on it.

Last night I spent an hour on it, maybe two hours.

I didn’t spend that much time, but I managed to get a lot done in that time.

So it was just consistency.

I try to carve out a certain amount of time per week for each thing.

As long as I continually stick to that, it compounds and it builds.

Those answers frustrate people because they remove the mystery.

People want to hear that there was a massive breakthrough.

Some hidden framework.

Some big life hack that no one else knows about.

Then they can say:

“Well, I can’t do that because they have the secret and they’re not going to share it.”

But really, in the end, most people will tell you it’s just consistency.

Most meaningful change is honestly just repetition.

I think people don’t realize how much success is just continuing after the excitement wears off.

That’s really it.

Even when you’re not motivated, you keep doing it.

08:47 — AI and Feeling Behind

I think AI is exposing this really hard right now.

Personally, I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.

Seriously.

Every day I wake up and feel like I’m so far behind.

And I use it every single day.

I still always feel like I don’t know anything.

Yesterday, I built my first agent in Codex.

Only last week, I built my first skill, or two skills, in Claude.

There are a lot of things that I’m doing wrong.

I built my agent system out before, but what I was calling agents were really just scripts and cron jobs and whatever else.

Then I talked to a non-developer who helped me figure out:

“Oh, you need to hook it up to this.”

So it was a whole rewrite.

Then I thought I had it working, and then I met him again.

And he’s not a coder.

That’s what scares me.

Well, it doesn’t scare me.

It makes me happy, and it makes me excited.

Because pretty much anybody can do anything, or be anyone, at any moment.

You just have to spend the time looking at it.

You also have to leverage other people who are doing it.

In this case, he figured out another way to build an agent system that I really wanted, and he shared it with me.

Now I have that running.

And it’s very exciting.

But I didn’t figure it out.

Again, I feel like I was so far behind.

I still feel far behind.

I know I’m far behind.

But I keep at it.

I keep asking questions.

I keep trying to play with it.

10:38 — Most People Still Aren’t Really Using AI

Then you look around at other people and find out that most people aren’t using it at all.

They might be using it for work.

They might not use it personally.

If they do use it personally, they’re just using it like Google.

A couple quick questions, then move on to the next thing.

Maybe they use it for code, or to help read a document, or for basic stuff.

But they’re not trying to expand their knowledge with it.

Honestly, if somebody spent 30 minutes a day just using it, literally talking to it, typing into it, playing with new tools, and then spent another 30 minutes watching videos, reading articles, seeing what other people are building, looking at prompts, and asking questions, they would get better.

Even if it was just 30 or 45 minutes, three or four days a week.

You’re going to become familiar with it.

You’re not necessarily going to become an expert.

Maybe you will.

But you’re going to be ahead of the average person.

Because familiarity compounds.

That’s really all most of it is.

Exposure.

Repetition.

Curiosity.

Consistency.

Eventually, the unknown stops feeling scary.

12:09 — The Invisible Phase

I think the hardest phase in anything is what I’d call the invisible phase.

That period where you’re working hard, you’re showing up, you’re doing the right things, but externally nothing really changes yet.

That’s where most people stop.

Because effort and reward feel disconnected.

You save $50.

Then you put another $50 away.

Your investment barely moves.

It only moved because you put the money in.

You run for a month and still feel out of shape.

You learn coding or AI and still feel very confused.

You write some pages for a book and it feels like you’re getting nowhere.

You haven’t even gotten the introduction done.

That’s a dangerous phase psychologically.

The outcome is invisible, but the effort is very real.

People start questioning:

“Is this even working?”

13:14 — Writing a Book by Breaking It Down

I think about this a lot with the book I want to write.

I’m getting through it, but I still feel overwhelmed every time I get to it because there’s no visual.

That’s really the key.

People look at writing a book like it’s an impossible feat.

Two hundred pages.

Three hundred pages.

Even one hundred pages.

But then you break it down.

If I could write one page a day, that’s basically 30 pages a month.

In two months, you’re around 60 pages.

In four months, you’ve technically got what you’re looking to get done.

So if you took a year, you could spend four months writing the first draft.

Then another month revising and tweaking it.

Another month playing with it, getting people to read it, getting feedback.

Then you’re polishing it, publishing it, and getting it ready to go.

In a year, you could have a book around 120 to 160 pages.

That’s with acknowledgements, references, footnotes, all of it.

I think it’s a very possible task.

Not easy.

Nothing’s easy.

But things aren’t always as hard as they seem.

They just take effort, and you have to break them down into small tasks.

14:57 — Reading and Small Daily Progress

People get overwhelmed with reading too.

I read a lot, and people are always surprised by how much I read.

But when you break it down, reading a book isn’t really that much.

Reading two pages a day isn’t that hard to do.

It doesn’t take that much time.

And some days you’re going to go a little farther.

On a weekend, or in the evening when you just want to relax, you might read 10 pages or 20 pages.

That compounds pretty quickly.

Next thing you know, you’re going through several books.

Even just to learn and absorb knowledge, if you’re driving to work, use audiobooks.

If you’re working out, use audiobooks.

At work, use audiobooks.

They’re useful tools.

I use them a lot when I’m driving, working out, on my bike, and even swimming.

When I swim, I have headphones I can wear in the water, and I usually just listen to books.

It’s a way to absorb knowledge while doing something else.

You keep doing that, and it compounds.

Next thing you know, you’re reading a book a month.

That sounds daunting when you think about it, but there are some years I’ve gone way beyond that without even realizing it.

16:19 — The Big Goal Makes People Freeze

If all you focus on is the big picture, your brain almost rejects it immediately.

If you want to lose weight and all you look at is:

“I need to lose 80 pounds.”

Or:

“I need to become wealthy because I need to retire.”

Or:

“I need to write a book.”

It feels way too far away.

Too unrealistic.

Too massive of a task to even think about.

That’s where small goals fit in.

Small goals feel survivable.

Today’s run.

Today’s page.

Today’s workout.

Today’s investment.

Today’s learning session.

Maybe today I’m going to sit down and read five articles.

Maybe I’m going to play with AI for a little bit.

Maybe I’m going to learn how to code, or learn some marketing, or whatever it is.

Every small goal creates a tiny little victory.

A tiny little proof point.

It proves that you can do it.

It proves that you’re one step closer.

Eventually, those tiny victories start changing your identity.

They become habits.

And once something is a habit, it’s part of you.

17:44 — Investing Is Mostly Consistency

Investing is one of the clearest examples of this.

Most people think wealth comes from huge wins.

A lottery.

An inheritance.

Lucky investments.

Picking the right stock.

Timing the market.

Finding the next big thing and getting a windfall from it.

But for most regular people, it’s usually just consistency.

Automatic investing.

Not touching it.

Setting it and forgetting it.

Repeating the process over and over again.

The beginning feels pointless because the numbers are so small.

You put in the money and nothing happens.

Sometimes it even goes backwards.

That’s the worst.

It’s the worst when it goes backwards.

Unless you have dividend reinvesting, then there’s a little bit of a sigh of relief because the next dividend payout can buy a little bit more.

That makes it feel a little better.

But because the progress feels slow, and sometimes goes backwards, people quit.

They stop before compounding can even start to matter.

Years later, you look around and realize a lot of people never stayed consistent long enough to see the investment curve bend the way they wanted it to.

Then, when they see someone doing well financially, they assume that person was lucky.

Or intelligent.

Or picked the right stocks.

Or had secret knowledge they didn’t know about.

Because the truth sounds way too ordinary.

They gave up too soon.

They knew what to do.

They just didn’t keep doing it.

And you did.

That’s literally all it is.

That’s the middle.

20:03 — The Reality People Don’t Want to Hear

I think that’s ultimately what people don’t want to hear.

The reality is that most meaningful things are built slowly enough that they feel invisible while they’re happening.

There usually isn’t a magic bullet.

No huge cinematic moment.

No overnight transformation.

Mostly just repetition, patience, discipline, conviction, and continuing when it stops being exciting.

20:35 — YouTube, Motivation, and Showing Up Anyway

Even with these videos, today I’m kind of motivated.

This is my second one today.

I’m feeling a little bit like I want to do it, because I didn’t want to earlier this week.

But when you go back and look at what you’ve started to build, and how much is there, you sort of don’t want to stop.

You want to see it continue growing.

I’m not getting massive views.

I’m not getting massive likes.

I get some, and I thank the people who do interact with me.

I love it.

But I’m not getting those massive numbers, and I don’t expect it.

For me personally, it’s a goal to try to hit.

So I have to consistently keep at it, even when I don’t want to show up and do it.

Like I just did a run.

I didn’t want to do a run.

My hip hurts right now.

My feet hurt.

I didn’t want to get up this morning to do a workout.

I was so tired because I was up late working on my book.

I didn’t want to do that either.

But I wanted to get some things figured out and ready.

So you have to motivate yourself.

Most people don’t want to hear that.

They don’t want to hear that they have to push themselves.

They don’t want to hear that they have to continuously do it, even when they don’t want to.

21:56 — Running Outside During COVID

During COVID, my treadmill was broken, and I couldn’t get a treadmill.

I was still doing my running.

I didn’t want to run outdoors.

It’s cold up here.

Real cold.

Windy, wet, cold.

But I ran every day.

No matter how cold it was, I went out.

You start to like it, actually.

It’s not fun.

Especially the wind and the sleet.

On garbage day, we had a problem with garbage.

It was not nice.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do it.

It was just a 30-minute run, or whatever it was.

It wasn’t the end of the world.

I didn’t have to hit massive targets.

I just had to get out, do it, get in, and be done.

Once you figure that out, it’s just consistently and continually doing it.

There’s no secret sauce.

There’s no magic bullet.

It’s just showing up and doing it.

23:04 — Still Inside the Journey

Honestly, I’m saying this as someone still inside a lot of these journeys myself.

AI.

The book.

Investments.

I still feel far behind.

There are a lot of things building up that I’m trying to figure out.

I’m trying to help other people with their work.

I’m trying to help my kids.

There’s a lot of stuff that falls through the cracks.

Even just cleaning out the garage, or getting a backpack fixed.

There’s always something.

But it’s a matter of setting those small goals, showing up, and doing it.

As long as you don’t make yourself feel depressed about it, and as long as you set small, tangible goals, it adds up.

Every weekend, a little bit of this.

A couple times a week, a little bit of that.

Then when you look back over the weeks and months, it adds up pretty quickly.

23:55 — The Middle Is Where the Real Stuff Happens

Honestly, every meaningful thing in my life pretty much came from the same place:

Small, consistent actions repeated long enough that they eventually became part of who I was.

And maybe that’s why so few people talk honestly about the middle.

Because the middle is slow.

It’s not exciting.

The middle is the boring piece.

It’s the stuff no one wants to hear because it’s repeat, repeat, repeat.

You don’t want the same rerun over and over again.

It’s slow.

It’s boring.

But it gets you to the end.

Because you have to start somewhere, and you want to end somewhere, but you have to get there.

The middle is where all the real stuff happens.

That’s where the building happens.

That’s where the change starts.

So hopefully there are things you can look at and piece by piece, brick by brick, step by step, keep moving.

It all adds up in the end, man.

Thanks for watching.

Have a good one.

Data Wins. Not AI. (A Raw Lab Session)

00:00 — Intro: Why Data Is the New Battlefield

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

So this is gonna be like an unedited, just speak out loud, follow the script about who I believe, well I don’t know who’s gonna win the AI battle in the end, but based on what different people have and have access to and are obtaining and control, I think that’s what helps people win the AI race basically, or in a combination, different avenues of it.

So this really started as something totally different.

I was thinking about building a personal AI memory system.

And it’s something I started a long time ago. My friends told me I was kind of thinking too big, I guess, or it was not plausible because it was too much information.

It really started as just a memory dump. I think I called it Brain Dump, and it might actually be another video where I talk about how I use AI just to give it everything.

The idea around that was I want to give it all my notes, emails, ideas, chats, calendar.

The example I always give is like I run a lot, so I know what shoes, exactly which brand, which size, which model.

And then if I keep track of that and keep notes on it — treadmill, outdoors, wears down, all these different things — even ones that like, okay, this one’s no good, that one didn’t work.

Then when I go see a new one is on sale or I want to try it, I can quickly say:
“Hey, I’m looking at this shoe.”

And it can come back and give me specifically:
“Oh, based on your previous things, I suggest this, this, and this.”

That was really the idea, like a brain dump.

So it was a way to try to figure out how to connect it all together, keep track of it.

And I really didn’t know what I was getting at, but it was more or less a personal assistant, I suppose.

And the deeper I got into that and realized all the connectors and everything you had to do, I was like:
“Hm… based on everything I know about AI and models and stuff, it’s all about the data.”

It’s not about the model in general.

The generative intelligence obviously is what it’s built off of and how it makes decisions and recognizes patterns and uses memory and analyzes things to find the best possible answer.

It’s all probability.

But the way you do that is with data.

00:54 — How the “Brain Dump” Personal Memory System Shifted My Thinking

I’ve been reading a book — I think I finished it now — by a YouTuber I watch. I’m gonna say his name wrong, Farzad I think. The book is called Abundance or Collapse.

And in this one he talks about data moats.

Because the data is the moat that protects the LLM.

Whoever has the biggest moats usually wins.

Who has the most data.
Who has the most connections.

And it’s understanding the value of that data because of how their AI learns from it.

It has this context and this feedback.

It’s such a big knowledge system.

And I started looking at all the companies that hold this amount of data and human behavior and how that’s really gonna fuel the AI systems.

It’s almost like their food source in a way.

Search history.
Emails.
Videos.
Conversations.
Workflows.
Purchase history.
Location history.
Medical data.
Social interaction.
Financial data.

It’s not just random information.

It’s patterns of human life.

And the more you dig into it and think about it, you stop seeing AI as just:
“Who has the smartest model?”

You start seeing it as:
“Who owns the deepest understanding of humans and how we operate?”

What we need.
What we want.

02:37 — The Generative Fallacy: Probability vs. True Human Patterns

Most people look at AI really like:
Who has the smartest chatbot?
Who can analyze the deepest?
Write the best code?
Who’s fastest?
Who’s gonna get there first?

But it doesn’t really matter.

It feels more like each model is kind of replaceable in a way.

It’s not bad.
It’s not unimportant.

But it’s less of a moat because eventually everyone catches up to everyone else.

Building the model itself, eventually everyone figures it out.

They do things a little different.
Different speed.
Different processing.
Different algorithms.

But what you can’t change is the underlying data that it builds from.

You can synthesize it, but then you’re gonna get hallucinations and side effects and incomplete hypotheses and stuff like that.

You’re not getting true human input and data and reactions and observations and how we act and how we see things and what we expect.

And that changes the probability of what we’re looking for.

So then what actually matters?

The context.

The memory.

The conversations and observations.

The ecosystem around the model.

The human side of the equation.

04:12 — Data Moats: Why the Biggest Knowledge System Wins

When you look at the companies out there, think about Google.

Search.
Chrome.
YouTube.
Maps.
Gmail.
Google Drive.
Android.

All the phones and devices running Android — all that’s feeding back into the system.

That’s not just internet.

That’s behavior.

People searching.
Where they’re going.
What they’re watching.
What documents they’re writing.
Where they’re clicking.
What they’re looking for.

All that becomes a very big moat.

That’s why when people thought Google was behind in the race and then suddenly they release something new and leapfrog again, it shouldn’t really surprise people.

They’re leveraging the data they already have.

They don’t just need a smarter model.

They already have one of the biggest pools of human behavior in the world.

05:41 — Company Deep Dive: Google’s Behavioral Pool

Then you look at Microsoft.

And I think people really underestimate Microsoft.

They own Office.
Outlook.
Teams.
Azure.
Xbox.
LinkedIn.
Windows.
GitHub.

And GitHub is a big one.

That’s where all the code lives.

There’s not many companies that aren’t running on GitHub in some way.

Even if private code is private, there’s still ways to analyze patterns at a high level.

What languages are being used.
What frameworks are trending.
Developer habits.
What companies are building.

And when you’re that big, you can do a lot with patterns.

Then combine that with LinkedIn.

Who’s hiring.
Who’s applying.
What jobs are being posted.
What companies are growing.

It’s a mammoth amount of information.

Then add Teams and Office and Outlook and Windows on top of it.

Microsoft holds a lot of keys to the business world.

That’s a very big moat.

06:58 — Company Deep Dive: Microsoft’s Keys to the Business World

Then you turn into Meta.

Facebook.
Instagram.
WhatsApp.
Oculus.

Between WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram, you’re talking billions and billions of active users constantly.

All that conversation.
All that interaction.
All that human behavior.

Relationships.
What people are posting.
What they’re interested in.

That’s insane.

Google has one type of data.

Microsoft has business data.

Meta has social behavior.

That’s a huge one.

08:16 — Company Deep Dive: Meta’s Social Behavioral Advantage

Then you throw in Amazon.

AWS powers a huge amount of the internet.

When AWS goes down, huge parts of the internet feel it.

There’s logistics.
Software.
Storage.
Infrastructure.

Then you add Alexa.

I use Alexa all the time.

Groceries.
Cars.
Family communication.
Smart home stuff.

Then you buy everything through Amazon.

Purchase history.
Watching habits.
Prime Video.
Twitch.
Smart devices.

Amazon understands buying behavior.

What people actually spend money on.

What startups are happening.
What people are storing.
What companies are building on AWS.

Amazon has a huge moat too.

Then there are the AI-first companies themselves.

OpenAI.
Anthropic.

What’s interesting about them is they don’t necessarily own the massive ecosystem layers of data like Google and the others.

But they consume the data users give them directly.

And that data is still extremely valuable.

Because people aren’t just searching with AI anymore.

They’re thinking with it.

Planning.
Brainstorming.
Debugging.
Learning.
Emotional questions.
Financial questions.
Life decisions.

Those conversations become very rich very quickly.

OpenAI especially feels like it’s replacing parts of search and research and brainstorming and decision making.

Then you have Anthropic with Claude.

We use Claude at work.

And honestly, I think most developers do.

But not just developers.

Researchers.
Writers.
Analysts.
Lawyers.
Business people.

People are feeding it contracts, taxes, financial analysis, legal documents, code.

That’s a huge amount of high-value interaction data.

09:30 — The “Connector Realization”: Partnerships Are Everything

But the really interesting one in this category is xAI.

Because unlike the others, it potentially has access to the entire Musk ecosystem.

X for real-time public conversations and sentiment.

Tesla for real-world driving and camera data.

Starlink for global internet infrastructure.

Tesla Solar and Powerwall.

Robotics.
Chips.
SpaceX.

It’s not just internet behavior.

It’s real-world data.

Driving.
Energy.
Communication.
Robotics.
Movement.

And all of it is becoming tightly woven together into one ecosystem.

That’s very different from just being a chatbot company.

But the strange thing is we really don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes.

These are corporations after all.

We see demos.
Announcements.
Benchmarks.

But we don’t know:
what breakthroughs they’re sitting on,
what projects failed,
what systems are almost ready,
what partnerships they’re building internally,
or what data-sharing agreements exist.

One breakthrough could suddenly reorder everything.

Better memory.
Cheaper inference.
Robotics.
Agent systems.
Synthetic data.
New chips.

Any one of those could suddenly change who’s leading.

11:05 — The Scary Side: Who Owns the Patterns of Your Identity?

But the thing that really hit me planning my own little Brain Dump system was the importance of connectors.

The connectors are everything.

Because right now all our lives are fragmented.

Work.
Personal.
Bank.
Phone.
Doctor.
Accountant.
Insurance.
Email.

Everything is spread everywhere.

So a huge part of this is gonna come down to partnerships and integrations and APIs and what systems are allowed to talk to each other.

What information gets shared.

What patterns can be understood.

And honestly, this is where it starts feeling both exciting and uncomfortable.

Because I want this.

That’s why I was trying to build my own.

I want to just open my phone and ask something and it already knows.

It knows I forgot to call about the car.

It knows when my dentist appointment is.

It knows what I’m talking about without me needing to explain it.

That sounds incredibly useful.

But at the same time:
who owns that data?

Who owns the behavior?
The patterns?
The identity?

And that’s where it starts getting scary.

12:20 — We Aren’t Building Chatbots; We Are Building Digital Operating Systems

The more I think about AI now, the less I think this becomes:
“Who builds the smartest model?”

It’s more:
“Who builds the best understanding of people and systems?”

And honestly, I don’t think there’s going to be one winner.

I think different companies are building different pieces of the same future.

Search.
Work.
Social.
Commerce.
Finance.
Robotics.
Infrastructure.
Transportation.

The real race may end up being who connects it all together.

And the weird thing is all this started snowballing in my brain because I just wanted a better note-taking system.

I just wanted somewhere to dump my thoughts and ask questions later and have it already understand the context.

Anyway, there’s a lot to unpack here.

I’m trying to move these videos more into raw, unedited conversations.

I don’t really edit much.

I want it to feel more real and more like thinking out loud.

Anyway, thanks for watching.

Life Gets Heavy If You Stop Looking for Happiness

00:00 — Happiness Is a Choice

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

This video is going to be about happiness.

One thing I always say is:
happiness is a choice.

You choose how you react.
You choose your attitude.
You choose what you focus on.

And I know sometimes people hear that and think it sounds fake or overly simplistic.

But that’s not really what I mean.

This video is more about how people can choose to work toward happiness instead of waiting for happiness to randomly happen to them.

Because I think a lot of people end up stuck in this disappointed state where life never feels the way they hoped it would.

Things aren’t working out.
Stress keeps piling up.
Responsibilities keep growing.
And slowly they stop looking for joy altogether.

So this video is really about why I think adults slowly lose happiness as they get older.

Not depression in the clinical sense.

More like disappointment.
Worry.
Negativity.
That “why me?” feeling.

That heaviness life slowly starts bringing as we get older.

Because eventually life becomes less about wonder and more about responsibility.

You think more about what still needs fixing.

What went wrong.

What needs repaired.

What bills need paid.

What chores need done.

What problem is waiting around the corner.

And somewhere along the way, happiness stops feeling automatic.

It starts feeling far away from your current situation.

And I think that’s where a lot of people slowly fall into sadness without even realizing it.

02:00 — Childhood Wonder

Because when we’re kids, happiness kind of just happens naturally.

Everything is new.

Everything around you feels exciting.

A random car ride with the windows down.

The first snowfall of the year.

Christmas morning.

Birthdays.

A movie you’re excited for.

Halloween.

Vacation.

Even tiny things feel huge when you’re a kid.

Because you’re not carrying everything yet.

Your only real job is to learn, explore, and enjoy life.

You’re not paying bills.

You’re not making sure people depend on you.

You’re not planning everything.

You’re not stressed about work or money or layoffs or responsibilities.

You’re just existing inside the experience.

And honestly, even kids that grew up poor usually don’t realize it at the time.

Most people look back at childhood and remember:
friends,
bike rides,
sleepovers,
school,
playing outside,
learning things for the first time.

Those experiences bring joy almost everywhere you look because life still feels full of discovery.

03:40 — Adulthood Gets Heavy

But then adulthood slowly sneaks in.

It doesn’t happen overnight.

It slowly starts adding pressure.

School.
Work.
Money.
Stress.
Responsibility.

And then eventually family enters the picture too.

Now you’re not just worrying about yourself anymore.

You worry about your spouse.
Your kids.
Your parents.
Your siblings.
Friends that lean on you.

And when you’re the person people go to for help or advice, you absorb pieces of their struggles too.

Hopefully they absorb some of yours too.

Hopefully you have people you can vent to and release pressure with.

But either way, it all builds up.

And it usually isn’t some giant dramatic movie moment.

Most of the time it’s just small things stacking on top of each other for years.

One thing after another.

Then one day you wake up and realize:
life feels heavy.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Life is heavy.

There’s a lot of responsibility.

Especially now with the economy, layoffs, stress, news, social media, constant noise.

It’s just a lot.

05:20 — Everyone Is Carrying Something

And I think people look at other families from the outside and assume they have it all together.

You see someone and think:
their life looks good,
they seem happy,
they seem successful,
everything must be working out for them.

But once you actually start talking to people honestly…

you realize we’re all kind of in the same boat.

Everybody is carrying something.

Everybody has little fires they’re trying to put out.

Everybody has stress behind closed doors.

And I don’t know why people try so hard to hide it all the time.

I’m pretty open about most things.

Not every detail obviously.

Some things are private.

But I think it’s healthy to admit when life feels hard.

Because when you do that, you realize other people feel the exact same way.

And if people could actually open the windows and doors into most families’ real lives, they’d realize almost everybody is struggling with something.

From the outside I think people look at my life and assume:
oh, he’s got things figured out.

But honestly, I think my family has probably gone through more than most people realize.

Being self-employed for years carries pressure.

Being the only consistent breadwinner at times carries pressure.

Businesses failing or struggling carries pressure.

Family situations carry pressure.

Kids carry pressure.

Parents aging carries pressure.

Extended family situations carry pressure.

And when you take on more responsibility in life, you naturally encounter more problems.

That’s just part of it.

Things break.

Plans fall apart.

Unexpected costs show up.

People struggle.

Situations get messy.

That’s life.

08:00 — The Real Meaning of “Happiness Is a Choice”

But this is the important part.

I don’t think people look happy because nothing bad happens to them.

I think some people survive better because they don’t live inside the bad parts forever.

That’s the choice.

Not pretending everything is perfect.

Not flipping a switch and magically becoming happy.

It’s choosing not to let every hard thing become the entire story of your life.

Because if all you feed your brain is:
why me,
life sucks,
everything goes wrong,
nothing good happens…

eventually that becomes the only thing you can see.

And I’ve felt that before.

You can actually feel when negativity starts taking over your environment.

Everything feels heavier.

You stop noticing good moments.

You stop appreciating small things.

You stop laughing as much.

You stop seeing beauty in ordinary life.

Eventually life starts feeling emotionally empty.

Not because happiness disappeared…

but because your focus slowly trained itself somewhere else.

09:45 — Life Is Still an Adventure

And this is why I always come back to the idea that life is an adventure.

Not because adventures are always fun.

Some adventures are stressful.

Painful.

Messy.

Some feel endless while you’re inside them.

But something strange happens after you survive one of life’s really difficult situations.

At the time it feels overwhelming.

Like you’re mentally drowning.

Like it’s never going to end.

Then eventually you get through it.

And there’s this moment where you finally breathe again.

You look back and think:
okay… somehow we survived that.

You’re tired.
Changed a little.
Maybe more cautious.
Maybe more appreciative.

But you made it through.

And a lot of times those situations become lessons later.

Stories.

Experiences you use to help someone else.

Or reminders to yourself that you’ve survived difficult things before.

That’s why I read so many books too.

Why would I willingly walk into every painful lesson myself when someone else already went through it and wrote about it?

You can learn from other people’s mistakes.

Other people’s pain.

Other people’s experiences.

And maybe avoid some of those same traps yourself.

11:40 — Happiness Can Be Trained

I started reading a lot about happiness and optimism lately.

Books like The Happiness Project and others.

People actually study happiness.

They study optimism.

They study whether people can train themselves to see life differently.

And honestly, I think they can.

Because almost everything valuable in life works that way.

You want to become stronger?
You exercise.

You want to become healthier?
You eat better and take care of yourself.

You want to become smarter?
You study, learn, read, solve problems, build skills.

Musicians practice.

Runners run.

Everything valuable usually requires repetition.

So why would happiness be any different?

Why would attitude be any different?

It’s still a habit.

If every day you focus on gratitude,
perspective,
calmness,
joy,
appreciation…

eventually your brain starts recognizing those things more naturally.

But the opposite works too.

If every day becomes:
this sucks,
I hate life,
everything goes wrong…

your brain starts building around that pattern too.

And that’s why I think happiness takes work.

Not fake positivity.

Not pretending life is perfect.

But training your perspective little by little.

14:00 — Music and Emotional Memory

And honestly, I think music is one of the best examples of how this works.

Most people already do this without thinking about it.

They have songs that instantly change their mood.

You’re driving at night.
Cleaning the house.
Cooking.
Walking.
Working.

Then suddenly a song comes on and your entire emotional state shifts.

Sometimes it’s the beat.

Sometimes it’s the lyrics.

But honestly, I think most of the time it’s memory.

Music takes people somewhere.

A road trip.
A relationship.
A summer.
A phase of life.
A version of themselves they miss.

And the second that song starts playing, their brain reconnects with that feeling.

That’s powerful.

I literally have a playlist called “Happy.”

Which sounds funny when you say it out loud.

But that’s exactly what it is.

Songs connected to good energy, good memories, good feelings.

And every time those songs come on, it shifts something mentally.

That’s not random happiness.

That’s intentionally building environments around yourself that make happiness easier to reach.

16:00 — Building Conditions for Happiness

And I think that’s really the bigger point.

Happiness is not always something you directly chase.

Sometimes it’s something you create space for.

Music.

Family.

Walks.

Drives.

Books.

Movies.

Coffee.

Conversation.

A clean room.

Minimalism honestly helps too.

Decluttering removes pressure in a weird way.

Less chaos around you usually creates less chaos mentally too.

Good food.
Hobbies.
Exercise.
Rest.

Even just a quiet night where everyone is home and nothing dramatic is happening.

Those moments matter more than people realize.

Because if you don’t create those moments…

what are you waiting for?

Are you waiting for life to randomly become easy?

Waiting for all stress to disappear?

Waiting until everything is fixed before you allow yourself to feel okay?

That day might never come.

Life will probably always have another problem waiting.

That’s adulthood.

So if happiness is always postponed until someday later…

you might spend your entire life waiting.

18:10 — Closing Thoughts

And again, I don’t mean fake positivity.

Some things are serious.

Some things hurt deeply.

Some problems don’t disappear because you listened to happy music or went for a walk.

But you also cannot let problems become the only thing your mind knows how to hold.

You still need light.

You still need relief.

You still need moments that remind you life is bigger than the current problem in front of you.

Because if you don’t, life gets heavy really fast.

And eventually that heaviness starts crushing people.

That’s where I think many people get stuck.

They stop doing the little things.

They stop noticing.

They stop listening to music.

They stop going outside.

They stop laughing.

And eventually happiness has nowhere left to land.

So when I say happiness is a choice, I don’t mean people can magically choose happiness every second of every day.

I mean you can choose your attitude.

You can choose what you feed your mind.

You can choose what environments you build around yourself.

You can choose whether every hardship becomes proof life is terrible…

or whether some of those hardships become lessons inside your story.

Because life does get heavy.

But there’s still music.

There are still moments.

There are still stories.

There are still people worth loving.

And there are still things worth noticing.

I think as adults we just have to work harder to notice them again.

Anyway, thanks for watching.

Have a good one.