Why This Channel Isn't About AI

0:00 — Opening — Reset

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.
I think I needed to make this video just to reset things a bit.
Not because anything is going wrong…
but because I can feel how this channel might start to look from the outside.
Like it's turning into a tech channel.
Or an AI channel.
And that's not what I set out to do.

1:30 — What the channel actually is

This channel was always meant to be an extension of a book I want to write.
Something around life, money, family, decisions, habits.
Things I notice over time.
Just thinking out loud, but with some structure.
Not teaching. Not pretending I have it figured out.
Just documenting the process while I'm still in it.
And honestly — this channel is also an experiment.
To see if I can stick with it. Slow builds — if I keep at it, keep consistent, something should come out of it. Maybe not. But that's all I can do.
I want to see. And if nothing comes of it, that doesn't bother me.
It's just putting myself out there and seeing where things go.

3:30 — Why it started to look like AI

But lately, a lot of what I've been talking about involves AI.
And I think that can make it feel like: "Okay, this is just another AI channel."
But that's not really what's happening.
It just kind of looks like that from the outside.

5:30 — The realization — it's everywhere

The reason AI keeps showing up is because it's starting to show up in everything.
Not as a feature. As part of life.
We've seen this before.
The internet used to feel optional. Like it was for tech people only. Nice to have. Not every company needed it.
Now it's a requirement.
Smartphones felt the same way. We were happy with a cordless phone. Then flip phones — smaller the better. Now we can't live without one.
Online shopping, digital payments — same pattern.
Things seem new at first. They seem optional. Like you can opt in or opt out.
And then all of a sudden… it's just normal. It becomes expected. And then it becomes invisible — meaning it's just part of life. Like putting on clothes in the morning.

7:30 — Why this one feels faster

The difference this time is how fast it's happening.
Even from a developer perspective — it didn't feel gradual.
It felt like everything just showed up at once. The models, the tools, the integrations.
And everything around it was already built. I go into all these different tools all the time, I'm integrating with different services — and it was all just… there. Seamlessly. Like it had always been there.
It made me wonder — was this all just sitting around waiting? Like turning on a hose to see where it goes?
But I think it's simpler than that.
The infrastructure was already there. So when AI got good enough, these companies — GitHub, the hosting services, the issue trackers — they knew they had to put it in. There was no getting around it. And because the foundation was already built, they just plugged it in.
It didn't have to build a whole new world. It just fit into the one that already existed.
Like a skeleton key that unlocks every door.
And that's why it happened so fast.

9:30 — Where it's already invisible

Here's the thing — AI is being used in a lot of places we don't even know about.
It's not making decisions exactly… but it finds patterns fast.
It's under the surface, helping direct the conversation. Moving things through the queue. Getting you to where you need to be, quicker. Deciphering the probability of what comes next.
Most people aren't even aware it's there.
That's what invisible means.

10:30 — What this channel is doing

So what this channel is actually doing isn't focusing on AI.
It's noticing what's changing.
And right now, AI is one of the biggest changes happening.
So it shows up — not because I'm chasing it, but because it's part of how I work, how I think, and how things are evolving.

11:30 — The real theme

The real theme of this channel is trying to stay grounded while things change.
Not rejecting it. Not blindly following it.
Just paying attention.
Trying to figure out what to keep, what to adapt to, and what to question.
The why, the where, the when, the how — and should I?
When I have those questions, that's why I want to make these videos.

13:00 — Bringing it back to life

Because at the end of the day, this isn't about tech. It's about life.
Tech just happens to be part of life now. The way we work with money. The way we communicate. Transportation. Anything you do — technology is in the middle of it.
You're watching this video. That's tech. Tech recorded it, tech helped me write it, tech is putting it out there.
AI is just the latest layer on top of that. And it's becoming frictionless — which is the word I love for this. When there's no friction, things just happen. They flow. They become part of everything without you noticing.
That's what AI is doing right now.

14:30 — Closing — real talk

So if this channel ever looks like a tech channel… it's not.
It's a reflection of what's happening. My ramblings. My ideas. Random thoughts that flow through, and some advice I want to put out there and leave somewhere.
And yes — AI helps me write the scripts. But it's my voice. It's me. I go back and forth because I want that to be real.
Same with comments. I don't have many, but when I get them, I read every one. And I try to reply in a way that doesn't sound cookie-cutter.
This whole thing is an experiment. I want to see if I can get a voice. Get some traction. Actually have real conversations back and forth.
So I'm just trying to stay present. Stay aware of what's going on around us and how our lives are changing.
And right now — this is a big part of what's changing.
Thanks for watching.

AI Made It Too Easy to Start (Now I Can't Finish Anything)

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.
Lately I've been building a lot. Probably more than I ever have in my life.
Like — sitting down and starting a new project? I'm doing it all the time.
And that's actually new for me. I went through a phase where I was burnt out, or I couldn't really come up with ideas. I was genuinely worried for a while that my mind was kind of out of gas — out of creative fuel.
But I'm back. My mind's constantly trying to put pieces together, come up with new ideas.
It's not always in a clean way…
But things are moving.
And that's actually the problem.
Because nothing's really getting finished.
Nothing feels done.
And I think AI is a big part of why.

01:15 — What It Looks Like From the Outside

It's strange. Because if you looked from the outside, it would probably look like a lot is happening.
I have a trading app live — people can use it. I have this YouTube channel. I've been posting consistently, more than I planned. There's a book I've wanted to write for years that's probably 70% done.
So things are happening.
But internally? It feels scattered.
Like everything is in motion… but nothing is landing.

02:45 — The List (Let Me Actually Walk Through It)

So I started listing everything out.
There's the kid's trading app — that one's actually live. It's out there. They want to make some changes, but technically that one's done.
There's Steady — that one's personal. It's like a coaching app, SMS-based, interacts with AI. But it's very personal to the people who'd use it, so I don't want to put it out until I fully trust it. Privacy, auth — all of it has to be right. So that one's intentionally slow, and I'm okay with that.
There's a dividend tracking app — that one was going well, then AI took it down a different road. Feels like it's going nowhere right now.
There's GoChores — started as an app for my kid, they lost interest, but I converted it into kind of a template. A test bed I run everything through to make sure my agents and infrastructure are set up properly.
There's my kid's website — AI built the whole thing, we got the URL, connected to Railway. She's got a marketing company she's spinning up. That one's basically done, just waiting on her to approve the changes.
And then there's the book.
And this channel.
And then… I started getting deep into OpenClaw.
That's where things started to feel different.

04:30 — The OpenClaw Rabbit Hole

I set up a server at home. Got OpenClaw running — agents, schedules, automation, all of it.
And it's genuinely cool.
It can post to X, read responses, generate ideas, build things. It's connected to Linear so it tracks issues, bugs, testing. It deploys code. It does all kinds of things.
I have a Telegram channel where it gives me updates every morning.
I even set it up for this channel — I have an X account where it does nightly posts, responds, follows, all of that.
And I really started leaning into it. Like — what if I just let this run?
Let it come up with ideas. Let it build. Let it iterate.
And it does.
It just… never stops.

06:00 — The Treadmill Feeling

At first it feels like progress. Because something is always happening.
You check in — it made changes, it tried something, it improved something.
But after a while… it starts to feel like a treadmill.
It's moving. But not arriving anywhere.
Every morning I get my Telegram messages. I see what happened last night. But I'm not touching it. I don't actually know what's going on.
There's no definition of done in that system.
So it just keeps going.
And that's where that quicksand feeling comes from.

07:30 — The Bigger Realization

And I think it's bleeding into everything else.
Because AI makes it so easy to start something. To explore ideas. To keep iterating.
There's almost no cost to continuing.
So you don't have to decide anything. You don't have to say — this is enough.
Before, effort forced you to choose. You had to validate something before building it, because building cost time. Now? I don't even have to validate. I can just spin it up, see what it looks like, compare it to what exists.
I'm not doing the hard lifting anymore.
But the fast-building cuts both ways. Because now I can quickly throw something together — and then never finish it.

09:00 — Finishing Feels Different Now

And finishing isn't just finishing anymore.
It's saying: This is good enough for someone else to see.
This might break.
My name is attached to this.
That back-developer part of me, that engineer brain — it knows you can't just throw things out there. Especially if you're collecting money, collecting people's information. There have to be guardrails.
Which is actually part of why the OpenClaw infrastructure thing consumed me — I was trying to build those guardrails automatically into the system.
And I got so caught up in that… that there's no ever-done. There's just a never-done feeling.

10:30 — Everything Leads to Something Else

Here's a good example of how this works.
I built a little widget for my kid's website — so she could leave notes about what she wanted changed, or use AI to make quick edits herself. I could log in, see all the notes, which page, what she wanted, whether the AI edit worked or failed.
It was really cool.
And as soon as it worked, my brain immediately went: wait — maybe there's something here. Maybe this is a WordPress plugin. Maybe it's a website widget people would actually pay for.
That's the cycle.
You start touching something, AI makes it easy to jump onto something else. Another hole. Another fork in the road. And you go, well, maybe this is a viable product.
I'm not trying to build the next Facebook. I just want small apps that run. Things I want to use. Things other people might want and would pay a few dollars a month for. Just enough to keep the lights on — cover the hosting, the tokens.
But every idea spawns three more.

12:00 — What I'm Actually Starting to See

I don't think the problem is that I have too many things.
The problem is I'm not deciding what gets finished.
Everything just stays in progress. And AI makes that very easy to do.
You can always tweak one more thing. Add one more feature. Improve one more flow.
There's no natural stopping point anymore.
The projects that did finish? They had someone else's expectation attached to them. My kid's trading app — there was a real reason it needed to ship, a real timeline. The Glove Box GPS app — I knew what it needed to do. Done is clearer when there's someone on the other end.

13:30 — Where I'm At

So I think what I need to do is simpler than I've been making it.
Not build more.
Not organize more.
Just pick one thing… and actually finish it. Even if it's rough. Even if it's alpha. Let it exist.
Glove Box GPS is basically there. It's on my phone, my wife's, going on my kid's. We're testing it. And I'm going to let that be good enough for now.
That's the shift I'm trying to make. From done to done enough.

14:30 — Closing

Right now everything is moving. But nothing is landing.
And I think the real shift isn't about building anymore.
It's about being willing to look at something and say: this is done enough. And letting it go.
If you're out there building with AI — and you don't even have to be a developer, because AI makes it so easy for anyone — if you're creative and you're using AI to start things… books, channels, apps, agencies, whatever it is…
Are you finding that starting is easy, but there's never an ending?
Let me know. I'd genuinely like to know.
Thanks for watching.

When AI Does the Work… Who Is the Creator?

Intro

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.
A lot of my videos have been focused on AI lately, which I didn't really want to happen. But it's becoming such a big part of my life — from work to personal projects to just everyday life — that I'm really trying to get my head around it.
And that's where this video comes from.
There's something I've been thinking about that I don't think we've all really figured out yet.
When AI is involved in creating something… who is the creator?

The Everyday Example

A few years ago the answer felt obvious.
If you saw an image, a video, even a piece of writing or code online, you could usually tell if it was generated. It didn't feel authentic. It wasn't made by a person.
But now those lines don't exist anymore.
There are still people who think they can figure it out. I try to tell them — even if you think you can spot it now, those days are almost gone. It's getting to the point where there won't be any way to tell the difference.
I see it all the time with my father-in-law. Whenever we're over there, he'll pull out his phone and say "Hey, look at this picture. Do you think that's real or is that AI?" And everyone passes it around, zooming in, looking at the shadows, looking for anything off. It's almost become a competition — who can figure it out first.
A photo isn't just a photo anymore.
Every image comes with a little bit of doubt in the back of your mind.
I even heard a YouTuber talk about this — maybe we'll eventually need some kind of stamp of approval. A percentage. "This is 100% me" or "This was made with AI." But who's going to put those guardrails in?

Where It Gets Interesting

But the thing that's really interesting to me is that the same question is starting to apply to the things we create ourselves — the inventors, the writers, the developers.
For me, it's code.
I'll design the system. I'll have the idea. I know what the program should do. I decide the architecture, the tools, the inputs and outputs. I decide all of it.
But AI is the one who actually writes the code.
It helps me make a plan. It generates the code. And then I'm the one who approves it.
So who wrote the software? AI did write it — but it took my designs and translated them into something I could use. I had the idea. It built it.

Writing Example

The same thing's happening with writing.
I've always wanted to write a book, and AI is finally making it possible for me to actually do it. I've been collecting notes for years — ideas, tidbits, stories.
Everything in it is mine. The stories are mine. The mistakes are mine. The lessons and advice are all mine.
But they start from very rough notes. And the words surrounding those details are starting to become not entirely mine. AI is tightening the structure, fixing the grammar, piecing things together differently to make it more organized.
It's shaping things based on my input.
And I never put anything out without going through it multiple times. I read it all. I still find mistakes. I'm still adjusting. I'm even getting to the point where I'm writing parts myself because AI gets confused and I need to get the stories back in line with the real timeline.
So is it co-authored? Or is it still me?

Even These Videos

These videos are a little different — because I'm the one who has to speak. These aren't faceless videos. There's no AI-generated voice. This is me, as uncomfortable as I am with that.
But they still start as just ideas.
Maybe I'm working out, driving, up late at night — I'll open my phone, start a new chat in a project I have set up, and just start talking. I don't even wait for it to respond. I just get everything out and keep going.
At the end of it I'll ask: "Do you think there's something here?" And honestly, a few times it told me no — not enough, or I'd already covered it. But most of the time I get enough out where it'll say this could be a short one or you could make a full video out of it.
Then I'll ask for the title, description, first comment, thumbnail idea, and a full script. If it's a longer video I'll say aim for 15 minutes, shorter ones keep it around five to eight.
Then I save it to my notes and go through it section by section. I adjust, rewrite, cut things that don't sound like me, add new ideas. And then when I record, I still go off script half the time.
So what is that?

The Roles

I think in that case… AI is my editor. Or my muse. I'm not totally sure.
But I think what it comes down to is this:
I'm the editor. The reviewer. The architect. The director.
And AI is the writer, the coder, the worker — the agent that produces the pieces.
So who is the creator?
I think I'm going to answer my own question here — in the end, it's really an assistant. It's not the creator of the content. It's the facilitator.

Reflection

I don't think we've really figured this out as a society yet.
But it does make me think that the line between human and AI creation isn't really a line anymore.
It's more like a process — where ideas, tools, and decisions all mix together. And the final result is partly human and partly machine.
It's pretty crazy to think about. A very high percentage of everything we see today — and soon, everything we touch — is a combination of human and machine.
And the funny part? It's not even a physical machine. In the end it's just code. Ones and zeros. And that's our partner in creation.
It can't think for itself, but we can use it to help us think deeper and stronger. It helps us make things better — as long as we want those things to be helpful, entertaining, and not harmful.

Outro

Anyway, you can tell I went off on this one a little bit.
Curious what you think — when AI helps create something, who do you think the real creator is?
See you next time.

What If Energy Is the Real Currency?

00:00 — Opening

Hey, and welcome to Slow Builds.

This one is going to be a real pure ramble — some wild theories that go on in my head sometimes. So bear with me. This one's going to be a little odd. I'm trying to connect some thoughts that probably aren't really there, but I like playing those games to see what connects and where things turn up in the end.

This one's definitely not advice, it's not a prediction, and it's honestly probably not going to make a lot of sense. But I like talking through these things just to see what could come of it — and if there's any possibility of some truth behind it or a link to something realistic.

00:58 — Everything Comes Back to Energy

This one is about something I've been noticing.

The deeper I've been looking into the world — economics, technology, AI — everything in my mind comes back to the exact same thing.

It all breaks down to energy.

I'm going to go off on a tangent here for a second.

You're always told the one thing you can never get back is time. So we always looked at time as the most valuable thing.

But now — yes, obviously time is important. You only live a certain amount of time. But energy seems to be the underlying theme.

02:14 — The Digital World Still Runs on Electricity

Everything I look at, if you break it down far enough, almost everything relies on energy.

Driving a car. Eating. A house. Building a factory. Growing food.

It all comes back to energy being converted to something.

And even the digital world — which is abstract, kind of weightless — it's still all about ones and zeros. Which in the end is power on, power off. Data centers, servers, cooling systems, GPUs, electricity flowing through massive buildings full of machines.

Even AI, which feels almost magic in a way, is really just energy being used.

Electricity goes in and thinking comes out. That's basically what AI is.

03:21 — Tokens Are Just the Meter

I've been watching some videos and you see it in the corner — the limits, the tokens.

When you use a model, everything's measured in tokens. You ask a question, it has to digest your question. Then it has to find and research the answer, and generate the answer. All tokens.

And tokens cost money.

And what you're paying for in the end is compute power — which is electricity, which is energy.

The hardware doesn't produce the answer. Tokens are basically just the meter. Like the meter on your house for heat and light. It's a way of measuring how much thinking is required.

How complicated? How deep do you want it to go? Do you want it to plan, research, execute? Or just give you a quick answer?

It's just electricity. The tokens are just fuel.

04:45 — Tokens as Units of Digital Work

So if tokens aren't quite money, they're something closer to real energy.

Units of digital work. I like that phrase for it.

You burn tokens to create something. You burn them to create code, to research, to run automation, to play through random ideas. Agents running tasks in the background.

Tokens are fuel for intelligence.

AI pieced a lot of this together for me. I sit down with ChatGPT, turn on the transcribe, start spilling ideas. This is one idea I had and it turns into a script. That's me burning tokens to create the script, then sitting in front of a camera to put it on YouTube — which in the end is all energy.

Those tokens are becoming more valuable because they're unlocking more. It's like opening up a new encyclopedia. Giving you access to vast amounts of intelligence and knowledge and computing power.

06:47 — What Determines the Value of Tokens?

This is where my mind goes somewhere even stranger.

If tokens are like energy, then what determines their value?

Right now we just price them in dollars. But that feels like a layer on top of something much deeper. Under all of it the real cost is just energy. Electricity, computing, hardware.

Which brings me to Bitcoin.

I'm not here to convince anyone about Bitcoin. I'm not an economist, I'm not a strategic trader. But one idea about it has always stuck with me.

Bitcoin is created through energy. Mining requires energy. Computers perform massive amounts of work. So in a weird way, Bitcoin represents energy that was spent. And unlike money that can be printed endlessly, Bitcoin has a fixed supply.

That's why a lot of people call it digital gold — or even stored energy.

08:26 — The Chain in My Head

So this is where the thought experiment starts for me.

What if the future economy looks something like this?

Energy powers everything. Energy powers computing. Computing powers AI. AI produces intelligence and work. Tokens measure that compute. And Bitcoin — or something like it — becomes the base layer that stores value created from that energy.

The chain in my head looks like this:

Energy becomes compute. Compute becomes intelligence. Intelligence becomes economic value. And somewhere underneath all of it, energy is still the thing that makes it possible.

09:24 — AI Isn't Just Software — It's Infrastructure

This also makes me think differently about AI itself.

People talk about AI like it's just software. But it's not really just software. It's a massive infrastructure. Huge data centers, thousands of CPUs, gigawatts of electricity.

The AI boom isn't just a software boom. It's an energy boom.

And whoever controls the most efficient energy and compute might end up controlling the most intelligence.

Knowledge used to be something only humans produced. If you give AI a task, it goes through the analytical process to decipher it, find the patterns, unlock things we can't even see — not because it's smarter, but because it's more powerful. Which means it uses more energy.

10:51 — Where It Gets Weird

This is the part where people laugh at me.

When you start following ideas like this far enough, things get weird pretty quick. You start wondering about simulations. Digital worlds. Entire systems running on energy and computation.

And suddenly, movies like The Matrix don't feel as ridiculous as they once did.

I'm not saying we're living in a simulation. But it's interesting how quickly technology can turn science fiction into something that feels plausible.

Ten years ago, AI writing code would have sounded crazy. Now people do it every day. We're more or less reviewing code at this point — and sometimes we're letting AI review it for us.

Some of those old movies and books feel really close to now. That's where I started thinking: did someone already know this was happening? Maybe it's not time travel. Maybe it already existed. Maybe it's just a simulation.

No, I don't believe that. But it's fun to let your mind go to those places.

12:45 — Why I Keep Thinking About This

The reason I keep exploring ideas like this isn't because I think I've figured anything out. It's the opposite.

It reminds me how big and complicated the systems really are.

Economics, technology, energy, AI — it's all sort of become one thing. Different layers of the same reality.

Most of us are just participating in these systems without really understanding what we're doing. And sometimes you have to ask these odd questions to help see things from a different angle.

When your mind is allowed to wander, it brings you back to reality.

Maybe energy really is the base layer of everything. Maybe tokens become the fuel of digital intelligence. Maybe Bitcoin ends up acting like some kind of energy-backed store of value for all the energy that's spent.

Or maybe none of this happens at all. Maybe it's just one of those late night thought experiments that goes nowhere.

I do that a lot. Which is fun. I'm glad I have a place now to just spill out what I'm thinking.

14:48 — The Sun Thought

This one kind of came about because I had a thought about the sun.

If we use just solar energy alone, the whole earth would only use one trillionth of all the sun's energy. That's free energy. Free to grab. Free to use.

Whoever harnesses that has a huge advantage.

There's only one person I know really focused on that — from a space angle. Putting data centers in space, solar panels, satellites.

Anyway, that's where my mind goes and why I started thinking about this.

Thanks for watching. Love to know your thoughts.

The Message Didn't Change. The Person Did.

00:00 — When the message stays the same but the person changes

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

This is going to be a bit of a ramble. It's just something I've been thinking about, and I'm still kind of on the edge of it. I'm not really sure which way I land.

What I've been thinking about is something a little uncomfortable.

What do you do when a quote, a book, or a piece of music really meant something to you — when it resonated with you and you liked it — and then the person behind it becomes someone you don't really want to be connected to anymore?

They do something that changes how you see them.

The quote still stays the same.

The lesson still makes sense.

The music still sounds the same.

But somehow it doesn't feel the same.

Every time you hear it, there's that little voice in the back of your mind.

And I think most people have run into this at some point.

01:18 — The Bill Cosby quote in my email signature

For me, one of the places this started was with a quote.

I used to always put quotes at the end of my emails. It's something we started doing years ago, and I really liked it.

One of my favorites happened to be a Bill Cosby quote.

At the time — and honestly even now — I liked it because the message felt true. It was simple:

"In order to succeed, your desire for success must be greater than your fear of failure."

It's a very good quote. I still think the idea behind it makes perfect sense. A lot of progress in life really does come down to pushing through fear.

But once everything came out about Bill Cosby, someone messaged me after I sent an invoice and said, "Yeah, payment sent — you might want to remove the quote."

And I understood why.

Because at that point, the issue wasn't whether the sentence was true.

It was the name attached to it.

I could have changed it to anonymous, but people still knew where it came from. It was a famous quote.

That's what made me start thinking about this whole thing differently.

Because it's interesting how much the name attached to a quote changes how people hear it.

03:04 — When words and the person behind them split apart

There's that old idea people say sometimes: do what I say, not what I do.

That feels related here.

Sometimes the words themselves are meaningful, but the person attached to them degrades them and completely changes the way you look at them.

Even someone as evil as Hitler has quotes that, if you removed the name, might sound like something people would repeat.

But because they came from him, the meaning changes completely.

It's not just changed — it becomes almost taboo.

And in my mind, you have to look at intent too. Even if the words sound good on their own, the intent behind them may not have been good.

It just shows how separate the words and the person can sometimes be.

A sentence can be true.

A lesson can be useful.

And the person behind it can still be horrible.

That's where it gets awkward.

A lot of the time, we don't just respond to the idea.

We respond to the association.

05:00 — Music feels even more personal

I think music might be where this gets even more personal.

Because with music, it usually isn't just an idea. It's memory.

A song brings you back to a certain time. It lets you close your eyes and remember parts of your life — where you were, what you were doing, how it hit you.

An artist makes something that genuinely moves people.

Songs that got played in cars, bedrooms, parties, first kisses, weddings.

And then later, that artist says or does something that makes you stop and question whether you should even still be listening to it anymore.

The music hasn't changed.

The tracks are the same.

The lyrics are the same.

The feeling you had when you first heard it doesn't go away.

But the person behind the content changes the way it lands now.

It's always in the back of your mind.

06:10 — Kanye West and not knowing where the line is

For me, this one hits home with Kanye West.

I've always been a massive Kanye fan, and not just the popular stuff. I listen to a lot of the deeper cuts too.

I've appreciated him as a genius creator and lyricist.

And for a long time, people were willing to give him leeway — to treat him like an eccentric, someone pushing boundaries, thinking deeply, trying different things.

To me, he pushed music, and the genre he works in, to different levels.

But after everything he's gone through, everything he's done, and how far off the rails he's gone, I've caught myself wondering what you even do with that.

Do you stop listening completely?

Do you only listen to the older stuff from before he started going a certain way?

Do you separate the art from the person?

Do you decide there's a line somewhere, and once it's crossed, you're done?

I honestly don't know.

And I don't think most people really know either.

I think they just draw the line quietly in their own way and figure it out for themselves.

Because people are still listening.

The songs are still on the radio.

They're still being streamed and downloaded.

So everyone is making their own choice.

08:05 — Books bring a different version of the same problem

Books have another strange version of this, and in some ways it's even harder.

It feels harder when you have kids too, because some books have lessons you want to pass along.

But then things happen.

And sometimes the name on the cover isn't even the full source of the lesson.

A book like Rich Dad Poor Dad changed a lot for me.

It changed how I looked at money.

It taught me about leverage, assets, cash flow, and how to think differently.

Those ideas helped me move forward in life, and for me, they worked.

You start understanding how to use money differently. You sell one house to buy two. You leverage debt and assets. You begin to see how money can be used as a tool.

Those were lessons I wanted to pass on.

But then years later, you find out more about Robert Kiyosaki. You hear about bankruptcy and all the criticism around him.

So then you pause.

Are the lessons suddenly not valuable anymore because he himself went bankrupt?

Maybe he overleveraged. Maybe he didn't follow the lessons he taught.

So you stop and think: he taught this, and I still think it's useful, but is it real?

10:01 — When the lesson still helped you

For me, I made a personal decision there.

His lessons taught me well.

I played the Rat Race game. I learned from the framework. I got value from it.

So to me, just because he later failed or went bankrupt, it didn't erase what I had already learned from the book.

That was my decision.

But from the outside, it still makes you pause.

Not every idea in a book becomes useless just because the person tied to it becomes harder to trust.

But it probably does stop some people from ever picking the book up for the first time.

So sometimes it takes someone who got the lesson before the person's image changed — someone who already saw the value in it — to decide whether they still want to pass it on.

And I chose to.

10:55 — Ghostwritten books make the question even stranger

Then there's another version of this.

Back in the day, I was a big Trump fan. I don't really like saying that out loud now, but way back when I read every book that came out.

I learned things from those books about business, negotiation, and thinking bigger.

But later, you look back and realize a lot of that writing was done by ghostwriters. It wasn't even really him writing the lessons.

And that makes this whole thing even stronger.

Because if the person on the cover didn't really write the lesson, then who does the lesson belong to?

The public figure?

The brand?

The face on the cover?

Or the actual writer?

To me, I think the lesson belongs to the writer.

Not the brand, not the image, not the fake story being sold.

So in that case, I think the ghostwriter deserves the credit.

But then you still run into the problem that people see the cover, see the name, and judge the lesson through that person anyway.

12:23 — Ideas feel clean, but people are messy

I think this is why the whole topic bothers me.

We like to think ideas are clean.

True or false.

Useful or useless.

Good or bad.

But in real life, they usually come wrapped in people.

And people are messy.

The idea is rarely just the idea.

It's the person delivering it, or the person associated with it.

Some people say wise things but live badly.

Some people build powerful brands around ideas they didn't fully create.

Some people make beautiful, life-changing art and then make a mess of themselves.

They go off the rails.

They say things, do things, and end up tainting the work they made.

And then the rest of us have to decide what to do with that work.

Do we keep the lesson?

Do we throw it out?

Do we keep the art but let go of the artist?

Do we keep the book but stop believing the image around it?

13:50 — There probably isn't one clean rule

I don't think there's one clean rule for this.

I think sometimes the lesson really is bigger than the person.

And other times the person damages the work so much that it changes how it feels forever.

Maybe that line is different for everyone.

Maybe that's why this topic is so uncomfortable.

Because it forces you to ask where the value actually lives.

Does it live in the words?

Does it live in the work?

Does it live in the person?

Or does it live in what it meant to you when you first found it?

Maybe that's the strangest part.

Sometimes the hardest thing isn't deciding whether the quote is true, or whether the song is good, or whether the book helped you.

It's deciding what to do when the messenger falls apart but the message still stays with you.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

Not because I have the answer.

Just because I think a lot of us quietly wrestle with it.

15:15 — The extra thought at the end

One thing I kept thinking about after recording is how personal people's lines really are.

Even at the gym, if I put on Kanye in my headphones, I feel a little awkward about it.

I'm almost glad it's in headphones. I don't know if I want that out there.

There are other artists I've fully stepped away from.

Kid Rock is one of them. I've removed him from my stuff completely.

There are some lines I do draw.

But there are also some things that meant so much to me that I'm almost willing to separate the value I got from the message from what the person later became.

Because when that thing was written, or said, or recorded, it had value to me.

And I don't think that value automatically disappears.

It just becomes something you work through quietly on your own.

You make your own decisions.

You can still take motivation from something without announcing it to the world.

Your life is personal.

Your preferences are your own.

And that's part of what makes it complicated, but also part of what makes it personal.

So thanks for watching.

What If The Future Is… Boring?

00:00 — Opening Thought

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

Sometimes when people imagine the future, it looks incredibly advanced.

I was thinking about this the other day while watching some old sci-fi clips, and it hit me how similar those futures all look across movies and TV shows.

There are a lot of similarities.

But even though it looks advanced…

it also looks kind of dull.

Everyone wearing the same clothes.
Very clean cities.
Little clutter.
Everything optimized, minimal, smooth, and controlled.

And the strange part is, we've been seeing that version of the future for decades.

00:50 — We've Seen This Before

When I was a kid watching The Jetsons, everyone basically wore the same outfits.

Same type of house.
Same type of meals.
Everything felt standardized.

In Star Trek, everyone wore uniforms.

Different colors depending on rank, but overall the same streamlined look and feel.

Even newer shows, like the Star Wars series on Disney…

when you see the main planets or ships, everything is clean, modern, open, and controlled.

At the time, it felt futuristic.

But lately I've started wondering if it looked that way for a different reason.

Maybe that's just what a fully optimized world ends up looking like.

02:08 — Optimization Becomes the Goal

If AI keeps improving, and society keeps pushing toward efficiency, sustainability, and stability…

the priorities become clear.

Longevity.
Health.
Environment.
Low stress.
Less waste.

On paper, it sounds like the perfect world.

Food becomes nutritionally optimized.
Cities are designed to reduce congestion and pollution.
Transportation becomes predictable.

AI handles logistics.

It's a world where most things just… work.

03:47 — The Side Effect of Optimization

But optimization has a side effect.

Over time, systems start landing on the same answers.

What's the most efficient way to build this?
What's the best design?
What delivers the most value?

Even food shifts.

Instead of snacks or treats, you move toward dense, efficient nutrition.

Protein shakes.
Balanced meals.
Highly optimized intake.

Clothing follows the same path.

Not because anyone forces it…

but because the system naturally moves toward what scales best.

05:01 — Clothing as the Example

Clothing is probably the clearest example.

Right now, fashion is everywhere.

Cheap, disposable clothing.
Thousands of brands.
Endless variation.

But if the focus shifts toward sustainability and reducing waste…

things simplify.

Fewer materials.
Standardized production.
Longer-lasting designs.

Less variation.

Not because people are told what to wear.

But because the system makes certain choices easier.

And slowly, the future starts to resemble what we've already seen.

Simpler clothing.
Cleaner environments.

06:46 — Data Drives Everything

Optimization needs data.

If the goal is longer, healthier lives, systems rely on information.

Wearables track heart rate, sleep, stress.

Maybe it's not even devices anymore.

Maybe the clothing itself does the tracking.

Homes monitor air quality, activity, behavior.

Cities track traffic, movement, and energy.

Everything feeds into the system.

More data leads to more efficiency.

08:07 — When Systems Start Guiding Behavior

At first, it all makes sense.

Better data leads to better decisions.

But over time, systems don't just measure behavior.

They start shaping it.

Eat this.
Sleep now.
Use less energy.
Avoid certain risks.

Most of it is reasonable.

And people will follow it.

But it starts guiding everyone toward similar habits.

Similar schedules.
Similar routines.

The world becomes stable.

But also very predictable.

09:54 — What Gets Left Behind

There's another side to this that doesn't get talked about much.

If the world keeps optimizing toward stability, efficiency, and health…

what happens to everything that doesn't fit?

Optimization doesn't just improve things.

It filters things out.

The outliers.
The unpredictable.
The inefficient parts of life.

And those things don't disappear.

They get pushed somewhere else.

Out of view.
Outside the system.
Into separate layers.

A lot of future stories hint at this.

There's always a clean, controlled surface…

and something else underneath.

11:05 — The Human Side of the Tradeoff

The tension here isn't collapse.

It's quieter than that.

Because the more systems optimize for stability and performance…

the less space there is for unpredictability.

And that's where a lot of human experience lives.

Experimentation.
Risk.
Trying things you probably shouldn't do.

Making mistakes.

Those messy parts of life.

Optimization doesn't favor those.

It favors what works.

12:02 — Escaping the System

Maybe that's why so many future stories include some form of escape.

If the real world becomes too structured…

people look for somewhere else to go.

Virtual worlds.
Simulations.
Controlled environments that feel different.

Where you can explore.

Where things aren't as predictable.

Where there's room to move differently.

14:28 — The Other Side of the Future

And then there's the darker side.

In a lot of these stories, there's always a divide.

A clean, optimized world…

and a rougher layer underneath.

People who don't fit into the system.

People pushed to the edges.

The ones doing the work.

The ones not living in that clean version of the future.

15:37 — The Core Tension

So maybe the future isn't something to fear.

Maybe it's healthy.
Clean.
Stable.
Efficient.

People live longer.
There's less stress.
Less waste.
Everything is taken care of.

But maybe that's where the tension is.

Because the parts of life that feel meaningful are often not efficient.

The things outside the routine.

The things you choose to do.

The moments that don't follow the system.

16:56 — Closing Thought

If everything gets optimized long enough…

the future might function perfectly.

And still feel flat.

Like everything is right…

but something is missing.

And maybe that's the trade we don't talk about very often.

The more the world works…

the less room there is for individuality.

For unpredictability.

For the things that make people… people.

18:00 — Outro

Let me know what you think.

Thanks for watching.

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

In a recent video, I talked about how habits and tracking slowly turn into pressure. How something that starts as helpful can quietly take over your life.

And that got me thinking about another version of the same thing. Not tracking, but optimization. Trying to fit everything in. Like you're over planning, you're pre-planning, those color coded calendars you see sometimes. Every hour is blocked off, every day is filled. The kind of fridge calendar that looks perfectly organized, but it's also just completely full.

I tried to live like that for a while, and what I realized is that tracking things and optimizing your entire life are two very different things.

Now, I still track things. I still write things down. I still use reminders and list every day. What I stopped doing was trying to optimize every minute of my time.

Those two things sound similar, but in my mind, they're not. They're not completely different, but they are different things.

---

01:22 — Why I Track at All

For me, tracking isn't about discipline. It's about just getting things out of my head.

If something is floating around, it's constantly in my mind, it becomes distracting. So I put it somewhere I trust. And for me, the main places I put things are Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, and I'll leave important emails unopened so they're unread. If I even read them and open them, I'll once I'm out, I'll mark them as unread again. That way I know it's there, 'cause email's a place I know I'll look.

Once something is parked somewhere that I know I check, sort of on a regular basis, my mind can remove it and not think about it. So it allows my mind to relax and not stress about that, 'cause it knows — okay, it doesn't have to remember to pay that bill — 'cause it knows that I'm going to either check my reminders and see it's time to pay the bill, or it knows that there's an unread email like the paid invoice. So I know I'm gonna look at my email, I'm gonna see that message unread and I know I'm gonna take care of it.

So I don't have to think about the invoice or the bill because my mind has one thing to remember and it does that automatically.

---

02:50 — When Optimization Went Too Far

What I find is, if you don't do that, where things start to break down was when systems turned into that pressure. The over planning, the overstructure, treating every day like it needed to be maximized.

If the day didn't go according to plan, it felt like you failed. So all those little wins that you had, they're lost because you didn't finish all your things you wanted to do. And it's not because I wasn't doing anything, it's because the system said I wasn't doing everything.

You keep seeing those unchecked items on your list or your workout app is telling you like you didn't hit those goals, those targets that you wanted to hit for that day. And it just starts nagging at you. So the next day, you try to double down. You add more effort, you push harder. And after a while, it starts to snowball. It becomes a real burden until eventually you either burn out or you start removing things from the list. Or you lower the goals just so you feel like you can achieve and you can feel like you're hitting everything.

You want that little adrenaline rush of checking stuff off. And that's when I realized, it's not right.

---

04:26 — The Part I Still Love: Small Wins

But there's one part of the system that I still love.

Like I just said, you try to rewrite your systems by removing things, lowering goals, just so you can try to hit those targets. But I took it a different way. It's all about those small wins.

So what I do is sometimes on a weekend, like I'll open up the room — if I'm down doing my run or I'm out in the garage or even eating breakfast or even the night before sometimes — I'll just open up my phone and I'll say, okay, quick list. And either in notes or in reminders, I'll make a little list of stuff to do. Like, okay, tomorrow I wanna clean up the garage. That's a big one. I want to wash the cars, I want to check the tire pressure. Just small things like that.

So it's nothing fancy. It's nothing optimized. But what happens is I get to go out and I get to check those things off.

It's like this video. I know I had to do a video today. It's starting to become a little pressure, so I'm trying to find ways around not making it a pressure, but it's just a matter of — hey, today I knew I had to do a video, so I'm doing it and I'll check it off. And it's those small wins that make you feel really good. Not because you're being efficient, but because you know you showed up, you wanted to do something and you did it. And you get to check it off and that makes you feel good for the rest of the day. And actually a lot of times it makes you feel like you can do more.

---

06:10 — A Thought About Runs and Knowing When to Stop

And that reminds me of something — I don't know where I've seen it, where I read it or anything like that. But it's like, let's say you wanted to hit 5K. So you do your 5K.

You know most days you don't want to do your run and if you go too far it becomes a burden. You're hurt, you're out of breath, like whatever. But on some days you're really good and you know you can go forever and you're so used to not feeling great that you want to hit that not-good part. Because then you know you've pushed your body to the limit basically.

And some days you don't need to do that. So what it said is on the days when you don't need to push that extra hard, you're just doing it to do it. You're just showing up to do your thing and you don't need it — it's almost like a recovery day. So on your recovery day, you don't want to push yourself past the comfort zone, because you're going to hit that place where you feel uncomfortable and you realize, "I don't like this. I hated it. It sucked."

But before you get there, you have that feeling, "Oh, I could go forever. I feel great about this." That's when you stop. Because if you stop there, the next time you go to go do it, you're going to remember, "Oh, it was great last time. Today I got to go a little harder." Because it's in your program. It's in your plan. So you don't feel that dread, that bad feeling to go there.

I always think about that when I'm doing a run sometimes. It's like, I know I have to do it, and if I push myself too far, tomorrow I'm just gonna remember I didn't like it. So I don't wanna go there all the time.

---

08:27 — Where Tracking Became Unhealthy for Me

But back to it — that was a little ramble on the side.

There was one place where tracking did cross a line for me. And that was, funny enough, it was with workouts. It was tracking the weight, it was tracking my calories, and it was tracking my streaks.

I talked about it in the other video — it was the running, and really everything. But running was the big one. It interfered with vacations, going out, things like that. It just took over my life. But at first it really helped because it kept me focused. But as the streaks got longer and those numbers got bigger, it's all I really cared about. I didn't stop being healthy. I wasn't training my body anymore for the healthy benefits or the gains or whatever. I was just trying to manage a scoreboard really, and that wasn't good.

And the rule I learned from that is: systems are good until the metric replaces the intention. As soon as I'm serving the system instead of the goal, it's time to loosen the grip.

I've done that with the running, with tracking workouts. I've done it with tracking even at work — like how many bugs I'm fixing, how many PRs I'm pushing out. I've taken all that away. And I just focus on quality and just staying within a reasonable — I know my limits basically.

So I keep the systems that give me clarity and momentum now. And I dropped all the ones that were just putting my attention on the wrong thing and making me go the wrong route and becoming unhealthy and interfering with just life.

---

10:16 — Big Goals, Small Steps

So I still believe in big goals. I believe in the big hairy audacious goals — I can't remember what the exact words are. And they're the kind of goals that give you direction, not daily instructions.

But I don't live inside those goals. I break them down into small, boring, checkable steps. The big goal points the compass and the small wins, those small little goals, they keep me moving, they keep me motivated to reach that end goal.

Because like they always say, it's not the destination, it's the journey.

---

11:06 — A Real Example: How I Plan Vacations

So a real example outside of running and stuff like that — for me and my family, it's vacations.

Once we decide on a location, like where we're going to go, I'll look up all the things that feel like the must-do experiences. So like right now we're planning a trip. Well, we just did one in Mexico for Christmas and now I'm planning a trip to Puerto Rico for next Christmas.

So what I do is you do a deep dive and you find those must-haves. You have X amount of days, you look up a place and you figure out — okay, if you go here and you're not from there, these are the things that you have to do. Because if you don't do them, you'd regret it. And if you never go back, you're always gonna think about it.

But everything else around that, like you do look up all these things, they become the flexibility of a plan. So I'll make a bunch of lists, a bunch of different ideas — food places, excursions, attractions and sites, or I'll even plan out small days and locations that we could pop into or see. But it's built with room to shift because obviously tropical places or even other places, there's always weather, there's traffic, there's delays, there's flights, somebody's tired, sick, anything can happen 'cause life happens.

And I've been on vacations before where they're planned and they're scheduled for every single hour. You know what you're doing every single day. Those become exhausting. You go to Disney World and you got seven days and you got to hit it all. And by the time you come home, you need a vacation from the vacation. Every activity is locked into a timeline. And the moment one of those little things goes off the rails, the whole trip just derails. And it feels like a complete failure. Like, why did we even come? This vacation is a complete waste of time and money. And the whole joy is gone.

In my mind, we used to do that. I've done it. I've been on those vacations and it just becomes like the goal is the plan, it's not the vacation itself.

So now when I plan these vacations and these trips, I leave a lot of space for flexibility. I make them loose. Like I said, you gotta have those musts. But you keep things loose where the vacation can flow and you're not locked in. You know you're going to hit those musts, but you still give your time. You give room to enjoy the vacation, to relax. Not every day is go, go, go, and if you miss something, then the whole thing changes.

---

14:53 — Closing Reflection

So I don't try to optimize every minute of my time anymore.

And that doesn't mean I stopped planning. I still loosely map things out. Just like the vacations, I do that with my life, my days, my weeks. I still have direction for the week. But the targets are more soft.

Obviously at work there's deadlines. You got to hit certain things or certain targets. But in between that end date, there's lots of room for me to maneuver, for me to take a break or to try something out a different direction. So those targets are soft. And if I miss one, it doesn't mean that my days are ruined or even my weeks are ruined. And if I hit one, when you get to check it off, that's when you get that adrenaline. You feel great.

And that small difference of not optimizing everything — loose plans, still tracking, but not to the point that if I miss a day or I didn't hit the number I feel like I failed — the plans now and the tracking just gives me direction and keeps me pointed in the right way. So it doesn't control me. It just gives me freedom to live life, to work at my own pace, and to still get those little moments of joy when you get to check something off.

---

16:23 — Closing Thoughts

Thanks for watching, and I'd love to see how do other people do this.

Because I find if you've never tracked anything, you've never used reminders, calendars — if you keep your mind full of everything you're supposed to do — you become tired and stressed, and it takes a lot out of you as a person, and it affects the people around you too.

So I find that just doing these basic things — and all this came from years of just building businesses, working with startups, going on client sites, dealing with family, planning trips, working out — you reach a point where you realize if you're not doing something to keep track of everything, your mind is just overwhelmed. So you want a way to get it out, to relax, and just have those safe places you know you're going to look and you're going to check. And it makes a big difference. It really, really does. It gives you time to be creative, think.

I'd love to see what other people use. What systems do you find work? Do you keep it loose? Do you follow something strict? Because even though you might follow a strict system for where to put things — like Getting Things Done — it doesn't mean it's overrunning your life. It just means that you're strict on putting things there because as soon as something pops in you put it there, because you know you're gonna look there.

So just being strict on the system doesn't take the joy out of it. And that's why I would love to see what other people do. I've spent a lot of time trying different ones, being forced to use different ones, and I find the least stress I have and the least formality I have allows me to feel like it's not taking over my life and it's my choice to do it — which makes a big difference I find.

Thanks for watching, leave comments. I still have too many people watching these, which is fine by me I think.

Alright, bye.

00:00 — Opening

Hey, welcome to Slow Builds.

Something I see a lot when people talk about AI is advice about writing the perfect prompt.

And for a while I thought that there must be a key to using it well. Like that perfect prompt, before you even type anything in there, there's this fear that you have to get it correct. You had to structure the response the way you wanted.

And honestly, that is the best advice ever.

But I actually do, and I do that myself, but the interesting thing is that it's not really how most of my AI work begins.

Most of the time, the prompt box isn't where I carefully craft instructions. It's where I start the conversation.

Because I was finding that what I was doing was I was afraid to start typing until I thought I was telling it or asking exactly what I needed, what I wanted, and how to respond to me.

---

01:21 — The Idea of the Perfect Prompt

But if you watch videos about AI, there's a lot of focus on that.

People show these very carefully scripted prompts that match that entire thing. They make it feel like it's like a little program and you got to script it the right way.

They define the roles, the format, the tone, the constraints. And the idea is that if you write the prompt well enough, the AI will give you the exact answer you want.

And that's the scary part. You're trying to coach it into giving you what you expect.

But in my experience, that's not where the real value shows up.

---

02:05 — When Structured Prompts Actually Help

There are definitely situations where structure helps.

If I'm not working on code, if I'm working on code that I already know, and I always go back to a developer mindset, 'cause that's what I do mostly, and I find the most event — well, I don't find the most event with AI, but it helps, it's a great place for me to use it.

And so when I am working on code and I already know what I'm trying to build, I might say, act like a senior developer, review this. Or in other cases, like if I'm going through my taxes — I just did that this morning for myself and my kids — and my accountant wants things in a certain way. So I would say, here are the documents. Here's an Apple note that has all the information for this person. Please review. This is what my accountant wants. These are my documents. Prepare it for them. So act as a CPA, act as a CFO.

And that works. When the task is very clear, those instructions help. They've reduced token usage. They speed up the process, and they help like infinite loops of retrying and doing things wrong.

So definitely structured prompts, you have to do it in certain cases, but most of the time when I open a conversation, I have no idea what the answer is that I want. I'm not trying to coax it or coach it into telling me what I want. I'm trying to get to an answer.

---

03:54 — Starting With a Thought

So usually what I have is just a thought. I have a rough idea, questions that they're not formed yet.

So I'll open the chat, pipe something like, I've been thinking about this idea, or does this approach make sense? Or I'm trying to think of what I did today. Like my kid goes to university in the States. It's a degree, but they offer it online. So they're here. So I'm like, when we're doing taxes, so it's a question. Okay, they go to this university in the US, it's a real degree, it's not an online course, it's just they can do it online. Do they offer the T1, I think it is. And then it gave me like, it wasn't sure — in the US they'll get this, here's a structured email and a link to a document you can provide to find out.

So I had no idea what I was doing.

---

04:53 — Natural Language

But it's like I said, like I was just typing it. I wanted to know one answer and other times like I mentioned in another one where I'm on a walk with my wife and she was talking about chlorine levels in the pool. So I just opened up the app, turned on the microphone part of it and we just start talking. And I'm not trying to format those in a certain way, I'm just basically talking to it like another person. And I know that that person is going to understand what I'm saying and that person is going to be pretty much the expert in any field of anything I ask or bring up. But either way, it's just natural language. It's not structured, it's not engineered, it's just me talking through something.

---

05:55 — Natural Language Works Surprisingly Well

And one thing I've noticed is that the system is very good at understanding that normal conversation.

You don't have to speak like you're programming it. You can just explain what's in your head, half sentences, messy thoughts, changing direction halfway through. And it usually understands the context extremely well.

So instead of spending time trying to write the perfect prompt, I just start talking, explaining, going through a situation, interrupting it, letting it interrupt me. I'm steering it as we go.

---

06:32 — The Back and Forth

And from there, it becomes a dialogue with the AI that starts messy and sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it misses my point completely, sometimes it suggests something I haven't even thought about so it makes me move to a different direction. It helps me reframe my thought process and I push back on it sometimes and but together we were adjusting, we're figuring out, and slowly as we do it — I hate saying we because it is just a computer — but it's to me it's a vast bucket of knowledge of every field you can imagine basically.

And you can guide it and together you can slowly make your ideas become clear.

---

07:46 — The Role Changes Naturally

And then another thing I noticed is that the role naturally shifts between depending on the topic.

And that's what I'm trying to get at there is if we're talking about code response, I didn't tell it to act like a senior developer, but it starts responding as if it's a product manager, product owner, a senior level developer, engineer. And then I'll quickly just jump over to a finance question. I'll ask about a stock or review this or I got an assessment today. And then all of a sudden it automatically switches. Now it's my CFO. If I'm thinking all about life decisions, it becomes more of a neutral sounding board. It acts like a therapist really, whether it's family, relation, or just personal.

And I don't always have to define these roles ahead of time. It picks it up through the context of the conversation and it figures out what I'm trying to get at.

---

08:51 — A Place to Think Out Loud

The best way I found to describe this is that AI has become a place to think out loud.

Sometimes it feels like a coworker helping through technical problems. Sometimes it feels like an advisor. And sometimes it's just somewhere to talk through an idea until the messy parts start making sense.

The value isn't in that first answer in my mind. I think the value in that is the entire conversation.

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09:20 — Where the Gold Nugget Appears

And most of the time, the interesting part shows up later in the thread.

So as you start that conversation, you're going deep, you start with the rough idea, you're going back and forth, you explore different angles, and eventually there's a small moment where something clicks — a clear way to frame the problem, a better way to structure the idea, that little gold nugget — and that almost never comes from that first prompt. It comes from everything that happened after you started.

You sat down, you got the fear out, and you just started typing and having that back and forth.

I always say there's no dumb questions, there's no stupid questions or stupid answers. That's how you got it in my mind. That's how I treat the AI and the prompt interface. It's a place where I can safely just... It's my safe place to ask anything I want, let my mind go crazy.

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10:21 — When the Perfect Prompt Actually Matters

But there are places where that perfect prompt has to be right.

And that's when I'm building something automated. For example, when I'm creating AI agents, and they're going to run automatically, agents are different from chats. A chat can be messy, you can correct it, you can steer it, but an agent has to run on its own — that work the same way every single time. You need efficiency, you need accuracy, you're depending on something.

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11:00 — Using Conversation to Build the Prompt

So when I'm building an agent, I'll actually use my chat conversation to figure it out.

I'll open ChatGPT if it's personal, I'll open Claude if it's work, and I'll just start talking through the process. Especially at work, with Claude, it has access to the code. Even now with ChatGPT, you have Codex and it has access to my personal code.

So we go through it, we're looking at lines of code, we're figuring out what needs to happen. We start exploring different ideas, we reframe the instructions, guardrails are set up, context is set up, very precise, inputs, outputs, and eventually we arrive through testing and everything else. We'll find this perfect prompt and it'll expect the same input every time and I should get the same structured output each time. There may be deviations here and there, but it's always structured the same way.

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12:00 — Why That Pattern Matters

So that pattern matters, it really matters.

It makes a big difference and that's a place where you have to do it 'cause it's repeatable and you're not expecting the same answer every time but you're expecting the answer to be formatted the same way every time, with the same fields. I'm thinking like a coder again. That's why it's good to have those forms, those checklists, those constraints. They make a difference when the agent's running on its own without human input. It's all code based, so it has to know what to do.

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12:42 — The Pattern

But outside of that, my normal pattern with AI usage really is conversation first, clarity second, structured prompt last.

The prompt isn't where the thinking starts. It's where the thinking ends.

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13:00 — Closing Thoughts

So when people talk about writing the perfect prompt, I sometimes think they might be focusing on the wrong step because the most useful thing AI gives me — and this is my personal opinion — isn't the first answer. It's the conversation that helps me arrive at that answer. It's the ability to think through an idea in conversation.

Those conversations, and any conversation, is rarely perfect. It's always messy. I love the back and forth. I tell my AI to don't just reinforce my idea, like push back on me. And been noticing it's been doing a lot more of that lately, which is really perfect for me. And that's where those interesting ideas show up.

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts I've been having around how I actually use this stuff and how I want to put it out there and just see — I know I'm doing it wrong, I burnt through tokens, I'm trying different models. I got messy agents set up. I'm spending a lot of time and a lot of effort. At this point, a lot of money. Just trying to — it's like a playground for me at the moment. And I'd rather be playing in it than ignoring it. And that's where I'm kind of at at this point.

And I'd love to see what other people feel about prompts. I really want to know how other people are using AI and talking to it, interacting with it, projects, code, free chats, anything — whatever people are doing, I'm very interested to know what's going on. So thanks for watching and see you next time.