But in order to frame AI-in-design, let’s start with AI-writing.

I despise AI-written essays, emails, Instagram captions, and LinkedIn posts.

Mainly, content written by AI is most likely bad because it’s a sampling of the meatiest part of the bell-curve-of-copy. Since AI is probabilistic, it’s, essentially, writing from what what it thinks most people would have said next.

There’s too much great content out there to spend even a moment reading something average.

Even if you edit it, the best it can become is “okay-ish.” Worse yet, it’s so damn predictable.

How would you feel if you read an email from me about AI copywriting and it said something like “It’s not just average— it’s predictable”?

You’d know immediately that it was AI.

Someone I admire and trust from a brand a I love, about a month ago, sent out what was clearly an AI-written email with the following sentences in it (the bold = the AI giveaway):

“What’s really blocking progress isn’t technology. It’s the narrative.“

“Your advantage doesn’t come from more hustle. It comes from better thinking.“

“The next time you see fear spreading—through headlines, hearings, or a neighbor’s social post—remember the real narrative …”

It was so lazily written by AI that, mentally, I felt my trust in the brand slightly erode.

In my opinion, if the author was lazy enough to use AI to generate their copy, then why shouldn’t I be too lazy to read it?

I’ve become so fed-up with AI slop that, whenever I notice it, I either mentally, and sometimes audibly, scoff.

I feel very similarly about design. Our new website is done and live. 100% designed by a human. I’m hardly proud of that fact, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

Check out the (human designed) website

The design firm that I use, run by my (now) wife, doesn’t use AI. Interestingly, the design firm I use most often has to fix the designs that AI poorly created.

As an experiment, I gave our brand assets to Claude’s new design tool to see what it would do.

As part of our brand, we have a pretty detailed brand guide which I’ve linked here. The entire website linked above, as well, was designed, page by page, in Figma. So I gave Claude the brand guide and the entire Figma file.

Claude told me it would take 5 minutes to fully configure our brand in its system. 45 minutes later, it was finally done.

I wanted to compare Claude’s output to an asset that I had already had the designer create. So I gave it only the copy for our Automation Mining Capabilities Deck.

Remember, Claude had access to the entire website, which has the exact copy and images for the Capabilities Deck on it. Don’t take my word for it; check out the Automation Mining page.

After pasting in the copy, I asked it to please create the slide deck. In theory, if it had read the website and knew the brand, it should have generated something eerily similar to the human designer. It already had the template.

Let’s compare Claude’s version of the Process Workshop slide to the designer’s.

Website (which Claude had access to)

Designer’s (in the Capabilities Deck)

Claude’s

It got the colors correct, but that’s about where the positives stop. The more you look, the worse it gets. First, it changed the copy I gave it. Second, the graphic it generated looks nice at first glance but makes no sense. It’s certainly nowhere close to the graphic created by the human.

Let’s look at the next slide: the Prioritization Scorecard.

Website (which Claude has access to)

Designer’s (in the Capabilities Deck)

Claude’s

The human’s slide, while “busier,” is much easier to read and conveys the opportunities + their impact more simply. The AI’s is much more bland-tech-y.

When you look at the rightmost three boxes, they don’t convey the same meaning as the impact statements in the designer-created slide do. The AI’s slide is promising 2,000 hours saved + 20% increased capacity + 6 people freed up all on one opportunity. On the human-created slide, there are 8 opportunities with callouts on different opportunities.

You can imagine my surprise when I showed the Claude-created slide deck to the designer, who said “I’ve had other clients send me slides with exactly the same layouts and templates!”

Uh-oh. AI-design has tropes similar to AI-copy’s “It’s not X, it’s Y” or the now-basically-forbidden em dash.

So where does this land us? I think AI-design probably has a place, but, if your business has any sort of scale, I think that place isn’t public-facing.

AI is a good designer if you have bad design.

If you have never hired a designer, AI is better than that. But, functionally, there is little difference between Claude Design and Canva templates. It might be a bit more user-friendly than Canva to someone who truly wants nothing to do with design, but I wouldn’t consider it to be a step-up in design. If anything, I think Canva templates + a designer on Fiverr or UpWork might outperform Claude on most tasks.

AI is raising the bar for “minimum design.”

Just like PowerPoint templates raised the bar for presentations, which were previously black-text-on-white-backgrounds, AI is raising the bar for minimum-acceptable assets. Especially for internal use, AI is a great tool. Claude is, unquestionably, better than a PowerPoint template. But, within 12 months, everyone will sniff out the Claude template format, and it’ll become the minimum. Just like everyone has sniffed out “It’s not X, it’s Y” when AI writes copy.

Wordpress templates did the same thing to websites. Before, all websites were ugly. Then Wordpress came out with standard templates, and a lot of companies use them. But, instinctively, you know when a company used an out-of-the-box template. It doesn’t feel unique, because it’s not.

Public-facing AI design is probably a scarlet letter

I run an AI company, and if even I scoff at lazily-done AI, how will the average person voting against data centers and afraid of AI stealing our water feel?

Your design is most peoples’ first impression of your brand

We want people to see our brand and feel accessible and trustworthy, like a guide who’s been here before and knows the way. The people that have commented on our updated brand have said as much. I think that the future is very bright for great designers. More than ever before, they’ll be needed to help differentiate businesses away from competitors both using and not using AI.

If AI-first design becomes a scarlet letter, and I reallllyyyyy think it will, then your brand might not just suffer, it might be called “lazy.”

And your customers might find themselves a bit too lazy to care.

Miranda and I were digital nomads from March, 2022 through October, 2025.

In December 2020, while on a walk on the beach, Miranda and I decided to sell all our stuff and start traveling a few months after our leases in Ohio were to end. We spent the 15 months between that decision and when we left preparing.

Most preparations were professional: we needed to set up our businesses to operate while we were in various time zones. Not running out of money was a top priority.

Some were personal: we ended our leases and moved in with our respective parents for a few months, packed up all our stuff, donated most of it, and stored the rest in our parents’ basements.

A tiny bit of our preparation related to our relationship: we were very clear with each other that traveling full-time together was going to lead to a breakup or to a marriage.

In our 3.5 years as full-time nomads, we lived in 35 different countries and had over 125 overnight stops. Many countries and cities we returned to multiple times, like London, which I visited 12 times, Rome, which we visited three times, and Mexico City, which we visited twice.

During our travels, the two most common questions we were asked were “What’s your favorite place?” and “how do you know when to stop?”

The former question’s answer is “it depends,” (more on that in the Frequently Asked Questions). The latter’s answer, for the first two years, was “we don’t know.” We would jokingly say “We’ll stop when we get bored!”

The question “how do you know when to stop?” was commonly discussed, yet rarely-answered among the nomads we’d met. None of them had a good answer, either. We were at coffee in Medellin, Colombia, with Karina whom we’d met two days prior. Within our 45 minute hang-out, the big question had been asked and, predictably, left unanswered.

It wasn’t until April, 2024 — two years after we set off, that we discovered why we’d stop. We were meeting our friends Clark and Holly for a long weekend in Amsterdam with one critical objective: ride tandem bikes through the tulips.

Clark and Holly were both from Ohio and lived in Zurich. They went to Ohio State with Miranda and I, but neither of us really knew them until we met them for a hike in Switzerland toward the end of our first year of nomading. That hike was one of the most fun days we had in our entire 2022 and, in my opinion, one of the most fun days of our entire 3.5 years.

While we waited for the tram up the mountain, someone in the group asked “What’s your least favorite place that you’ve visited?”

What a great question! For her, it was Milan. She hated Milan. For us, at that time, it was Dublin, Ireland. Dublin has now been surpassed by Brussels.

It was in that Amsterdam bar that we brought Clark up to speed on the last year or so, which included at least an overnight in Lyon and Paris (France), Medellin and Santa Marta (Colombia), Buenos Aires and Mendoza (Argentina), Santiago (Chile), Los Angeles, Honolulu, Tokyo and Kyoto and Osaka (Japan), Singapore, Koh Phangan and Koh Samui and Bangkok (Thailand), Bristol and London (England), Barcelona and Valencia and Sitges (Spain), Amsterdam, Brussels (Belgium), Mexico City, Ohio, Desenzano del Garda and Florence and Impruneta and Verona (Italy), Valencia again, Ohio, then back to Spain (Seville), then back to Ohio, then Edinburgh (Scotland).

We’d list out the cities we’d recently been on occasion in conversation, and most people would say things like “How amazing!” or “What an experience!” or “You must not have kids. You could never do this with kids.”

Without missing a beat, Clark asked “aren’t you tired?”

We were exhausted.

Naturally, that meant we should travel for another 16 months until we were sure we were ready to be done.

Clark was the first and only person to ask if we were tired. It was an Infrequently Asked Question.

Many of our favorite questions and conversations were sparked by a question that eventually made its way onto our Infrequently Asked Questions list. “Aren’t you tired?” was a great one.

We learned the hard way that many infrequently asked questions were quite important. For example: “if you have a medical incident on a flight to Argentina, where do you find a reliable doctor or dentist once you land?” to which the answer is “the US Department of State website.”

Another is “do all the grocery stores in France and Switzerland outside of Paris close on Sunday?” to which the answer is “yes.”

One more is “What’s the hardest part in becoming a digital nomad?” And the answer, which surprised most people, is only partially money. It is a combination of earning in a strong currency and working 100% remote.

But one that I didn’t to ask until recently is “Why did we start becoming digital nomads?”

Better yet, why does anyone?

The freedom and resources to sell all your stuff, work remote from any time zone, and travel the world indefinitely, unfortunately, aren’t the only prerequisites to becoming a digital nomad.

The last is that you must be deeply, deeply ready for change.

Someone who loves their life at home doesn’t become a nomad. There’s no incentive to give it all up and go. We know and love many people who traveled frequently but had home bases. They aren’t nomads; they’re frequent travelers.

Miranda and I were ready to leave Ohio. Certainly pandemic lockdown had something to do with it. Friends were buying homes and getting married, which didn’t feel right to us. We thought that we needed to shake things up.

Almost all of our nomad friends had the same feeling. The start isn’t a desire to explore the world, it’s a desire to escape the status quo. Exploring the world is a byproduct.

When non-nomads want to travel, they go “somewhere.” Our solution, similar to that of many of our nomad friends, was to go “anywhere”

When I published Announcing Miranda and I’s World Tour I wrote:

We are leaving on March 12 for Scotland. Then, we’ll do 3 days in London, then we are meeting my family in Italy. From there, her parents will join us in Spain (assuming it all works out), then we’re off to Portugal, then who knows. Maybe Turkey. Maybe Bulgaria. Maybe Thailand or Singapore or Bali. We’re spending at least a month in all locations except London. Even Spain and Portugal might change. Who knows! We are going with the flow.

“Somewhere” is reserved for a trip you must take on short notice, like a vacation after an intense work period or a breakup or a loss in the family or an overstayed visa. “Somewhere” most usually follows the phrase “I need to go…”

My dad is a pro at going “somewhere.”

A year before we started traveling, Miranda and I were given 1 week’s notice that we were to accompany my family on a trip to the Dominican Republic. My dad woke up one morning, snapped, and said he was ready to go on vacation “next week.” My mom couldn’t reach her credit card fast enough. Last year, the same thing happened, and my parents went to Clearwater, Florida.

When we’d try to convince friends to meet us traveling, or when our nomad friends had a gap in their calendar, we’d often say something like “let us know where you want to go. We can meet you anywhere.” It was true. We were once in London when two friends called asking if we would hang out with them “next month or the month after next” in Mexico City. 6 weeks later, we were eating street tacos and drinking mezcal.

Another Infrequently Asked Question is “How do you nomad for so long?”

Miranda and I had each other. We were never lonely, which is, anecdotally, the single-biggest-predictor of nomad longevity that we’ve seen.

We were endlessly willing to explore new places. For us and for the friends with whom we are closest, nomading was like a drug. The more we explored and did and the more we discovered there was to explore and do.

Our first stop was Edinburgh, Scotland. When we arrived in mid-March, 2022, we didn’t know where we would be in mid-May. As it stood, we had flights and lodging March-May 15, but come May 15, we would be homeless.

Marrakech, Morocco wasn’t on our bucket list. I didn’t even know it existed until we watched Inventing Anna, but it looked really cool. Flights were reasonable and Morocco didn’t have strict COVID restrictions, so, in March, we bought flights for May.

Marrakech was a trial-by-fire. When we arrived at our riad, we discovered that, while we were in a touristy part of town, it was full of Arab tourists speaking, almost exclusively, Arabic. Miranda’s bare shoulders in the Saharan heat stuck out like pasty white sore thumbs. We were stared at. Everyone was friendly and exceedingly helpful, but even the restaurant employees were like “Why are you here?”

Our riad was a 40-minute walk across the city from the area where the Starbucks was full of white women. In other words, we were a 40-minute walk from fitting in.

We got scammed out of $3USD once by someone claiming to be a tour guide. Our internet only worked when it the temperature was less than 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which was approximately between 3AM and 9AM local time. But we also had some of the most amazing food and experiences while we were there, like having lunch with Berbers in the Atlas mountains, riding camels, and visiting the home of Yves St. Laurent.

We cut the 3-week Moroccan trip short because we became fed up with unreliable internet, but we got the hang of it in our next stop: Portugal. By the end of that trip, we felt like we had a pretty good idea of how to nomad — at least in western Europe. Portugal was our fifth country and took us from the end of May until mid-June.

By mid-August, 2022, there was no going back. Our 2022 travel schedule from mid-August until early November — when we returned to Ohio for the first time — was phenomenal.

• Split, Croatia

• Bucharest, Romania

• Istanbul, Seljuk, and Cappadocia, Turkey (vacation)

• London (and we coincided with the Queen’s funeral)

• Aberdeen, Scotland

• Edinburgh, Scotland

• Bern, Switzerland (including the aforementioned hiking trip)

• Lyon, France

• Paris, France

By the time we returned back to the States in November, 2022 after almost 8 months, our brains were completely rewired. We were hooked.

We were having drinks in Edinburgh with Ari, a friend of a different nomad friend, who asked “So how do you decide where to go next?” We told him it was based on where our friends were or, literally, by spinning a globe and going where our finger landed. When you could go anywhere, how else do you decide?

Instagram introduced us to new destinations like Cappadocia, Turkey, which we visited to ride in a hot air balloon.

Every friend we made recommended places we hadn’t considered before. Kyoto for the cherry blossoms. Amsterdam for the tulips. Mexico City for Dia de Muertos. Costa Rica for the sloths and the surf. Cape Town and Thailand and Medellin, Colombia because “they’re where all the nomads go.”

After a long enough period of travel, people stopped asking “When are you stopping?” And started asking “Where are you in the world today?”

We made tons of friends. 2022 was our year of learning how to be nomads, and 2023 was our year of making friends. By the end of January, 2023, we had made half a dozen very good nomad friends. Three months later, we made another half dozen with whom we are still very close.

We spent a month on a Koh Phangan, a small Thai island, with a group of 20 where we met several of our closest friends. The 20 of us essentially rented out an entire hotel for the month. We rented scooters, ate coconuts, went scuba diving, went hiking, and had all sorts of fun. During our last dinner together on the island, the discussion turned to “What are you all doing when we leave?”

Miranda and I were going to Bangkok for a few days before flying to the UK. Mike was flying to Chiang Mai the next morning and had flights but didn’t yet have a place to stay. Charlotte and Anna were going to a nearby island, but they didn’t yet have boat tickets or a place to stay. Sanuk was considering Bangkok, but hadn’t booked flights or a place to stay yet.

We had around 24 hours remaining together. Mind you — our friends had only 24 hours to book their next stop.

“Why don’t you all just join us in Bangkok?” I asked.

By the end of the dinner, a group of 7 of us were headed to Bangkok for a long weekend.

At dinner in Bangkok, a buddy and I created a term: the stripper pole of friendship.

Imagine your friendship with another person as a spiral staircase and you’re standing at the top. In a normal friendship, with each thing you learn about them, you take another step down. Things start superficial. You learn the foods and drinks they like, their job, or favorite sports team. Then, sometime, you’ve walked down so many stairs and had enough experiences with them that you consider each other “good friends.”

When nomading, you have the same spiral staircase, except there’s a stripper pole in the middle that you slide down. You learn first someone’s hopes and dreams and morning routines and work stressors and emotional triggers. Slowly but surely, you climb toward the top and learn their favorite color or last name.

We lived for 2 weeks in Colombia and 3 weeks in London with Eddie in 2023. I knew all about his family and career and and exes and his sister’s ex. Last year, in April 2025, he made a dinner reservation in central London for us to catch up. Miranda and I beat him to the restaurant. The hostess asked “What’s the last name?” And I realized that I didn’t know, so we couldn’t get seated until he showed up.

When I first met Charlotte, I’d heard all about her three years on a Pacific island called Vanuatu and her ambitions as an entrepreneur and her sister and brother in law and parents back in Zurich. Charlotte even taught me that, in Vanuatu, instead of saying “bra,” they say “basket for titties.”

Imagine my surprise when, two weeks into our friendship, I discovered she had over 100,000 Instagram followers. Again with the last names, I didn’t know hers until 6 months after I met her, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying. Two or three months after meeting her, I asked her what her last name was, and she jokingly said “I’m not telling.” I only learned it when the Airbnb in Milan that we organized required a photo of her passport before meeting us.

Our mission to “start making friends” was so successful that, after we truly started trying to make friends January, 2023, we met with or lived with friends at every stop until May, 2024. People wanted to join us for our Greek vacation, but we had to say no. That two-week vacation was the last time Miranda and I would have two consecutive weeks just-she-and-I for the next 10 months. Once we started making friends, we saw or lived with different friends virtually non-stop for over two years.

The last infrequently asked question is “Why are you stopping?”

Because, like I said, we are tired.

We nomaded over twice as long as we expected. Many of our nomad friends traveled for a similar amount of time. 3-4 years seems to be the sweet spot for the folks that we resonate best with. We know some people approaching year 11, so we are nowhere near the longest.

We want to have a kitchen we know and more clothes than what fit in our suitcase and a local gym that we visit for more than a month. We need a break from finding a new favorite coffee shop and new dinner restaurants and a reliable supermarket every three weeks. As crazy as it sounds, we wanted to watch Netflix more than we wanted to visit Australia, Brazil, Peru, and Jordan, all places high on our list that we haven’t yet visited.

We have other hobbies that aren’t traveling. I’ve picked up cooking. Miranda paints. We both love boxing, and we didn’t have room in our suitcases for boxing gloves, although we did rent them to do Muay Thai in Thailand.

Our businesses are intense, too. Both our businesses are bigger than they were when we started traveling, and that began to limit our options. Being more than 6 hours ahead of Eastern time started to become a pain. We have tons of places in Asia that we want to visit, but 1:00 AM meetings get old after a few weeks. A similar story is true with our top South America spots: we really want to visit Patagonia and Bolivia and the Atacama Desert, but the internet infrastructure isn’t reliable enough for us to both live and work there.

Over time, because of a combination of time zone constraints, work constraints, and our being tired, our World Tour became more like a famous musician’s world tour — primarily North America and Europe with stops in the big cities in South America and Asia.

When we jokingly said “We’ll stop when we get bored,” our assumption was that we would have more energy than the world would have things to entertain us. Our list of places to visit and things to do is longer now than it’s ever been before. In having a home base, our desire is to travel more off-the-beaten-path in the future because we can focus on work when we’re home and focus on travel when we travel, instead of trying to balance both.

There was no better time for us to be nomads, and I’m excited for next phase as frequent travelers. We have no shortage of somewheres to go to whenever we get the itch.

And we were correct that our traveling together would make-or-break our relationship. We just finished our honeymoon in Bali and Lombok, Indonesia, where our last hotel was, aptly, called “Somewhere.”

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What’s your least favorite place to visit?

Brussels, Belgium. The city is as expensive as Switzerland. It’s ugly outside of the 1km x 1km center. The trash pickup is every day but they don’t believe in dumpsters there so everyone leaves bags of trash on the sidewalk for others to step on and to get washed away in the rain. It doesn’t feel particularly safe especially around the train stations. There’s very little to do. Ghent and Bruges are amazing, though.

Which city did you visit most?

London. I visited I think 11 or 12 times. Heathrow Airport is so well connected that it was always an easy stop. I didn’t like London the first time I visited, but now I love it. I still wonder if we should have moved there instead of Florida.

How many trains did you miss because it pulled away from the station as we were running to it?

2.

What’s your shortest time in a country?

30 minutes in Slovenia driving from Trieste, Italy, to Pula, Croatia.

What’s the best food that surprised you?

Thai food.

What’s the worst food?

Irish food, when made properly, is terrible. I used to make this joke about British food, but my opinion changed after spending more time in Ireland. Britain is so multicultural now, however, that the food, especially in London, is some of the best in the world.

What’s it like in a Mexican hospital?

If you go to a nice hospital, it’s lovely. I had some sort of food poisoning / Monetzuma’s Revenge that got so bad I needed to go to the hospital for fluids. It was nice and clean. The doctors and nurses didn’t speak English, though. Thankfully, Miranda speaks Spanish, but it would’ve been massively inconvenient to use Google Translate while I couldn’t keep anything down. My overnight in the hospital + 2 bags of fluids cost me $650 USD which my travel insurance reimbursed that week.

What British words do you use now instead of the American equivalents?

“Faff” — my absolute favorite of the British words. There’s no direct American equivalent. It means “unnecessary nonsense.” Customs where you have can be a bit of a faff when you need to stand in 5 different lines and get a stamp then wait 20 minutes to get your bags then re-scan your bags before leaving the airport. “It’s too much faff” means “there’s too much overcomplicated crap going on.”

“Takeaway” instead of “to-go” (nicer word)

“Flat” instead of “apartment” (Miranda despises that I do this. I’ll say “apartment” if it’s multiple stories.)

“Metro” instead of “subway”

“Posh” instead of “nice” or “fancy” (I don’t think of them as equivalents — I think posh is a much more versatile word. Neighborhoods, restaurants, clothes, experiences, and people can all be “posh.”

“Proper” for emphasis. As in “I need a proper cup of coffee” after the cup I just drank was bad or too small.

I only call “the restroom” “the toilet” if the person doesn’t understand “restroom.” I find saying “the toilet” to be vulgar.

“Scouser” which is the term used to describe someone from Liverpool. Liverpool had a lot of interesting-looking people and fashion choices. Now, I’ll say “they look like a scouser” if someone walks by wearing way too much makeup or tiny, leopard print shorts.”

How much did it cost to repair your scooter when you drove it into a boulder in Thailand on your first day driving it?

$33 USD.

What’s the cheapest business class flight you took?

Madrid → Mexico City on Avianca. Lie-flat business class was $1000 one-way, but with Amex Platinum rewards got knocked down to $650.

Generally, business class flights seem to be fairly cheap when flying from a wealthy country to one that is less wealthy but speaks the same language. Like Spain to Mexico or Spain to Colombia or Montreal to Tunisia or Portugal to Brazil.

What’s the nicest airport you visited?

Singapore is amazing, but honestly so is Istanbul (IST).

What’s the worst airport you visited?

Kotor, Montenegro. What a disaster. It was a seemingly clean, but a disorganized mess.

How did you do haircuts?

Miranda has cut my hair since COVID, so I traveled with haircut supplies. When they broke, I used the local Amazon store to have one shipped to a locker.

Don’t you wish that America had more trains?

No, I don’t. I don’t want to take a train from Florida to California. I don’t even want to take one from Orlando to Atlanta. Trains are great when you need to get somewhere in 3 hours or less. Most US-cities are too spread out for that. This is true in Europe, too. Why would I take a 9-hour train from Paris to Milan when I could fly in like 1?

Florida’s Brightline between Orlando and Miami is a great train route. L.A. to Vegas and S.F. would be great. Connecting Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati would be great, too, but Chicago to Denver would be a nightmare. But I’m not convinced it’ll even be needed as self-driving cars become more prevalent.

What do you miss about America?

Nowhere has better waiters than America. Trying to get the check in Spain or Argentina is an exercise in patience. American waiters are nice, they don’t act like you’re a burden, and they give you water glasses that hold more than one sip of water.

What could America do better?

I have a lot of ideas that I can’t speak intelligently-enough to, but there is one idea I care a lot about.

Creating a sense of place:

1. Improve zoning requirements. Make more areas mixed-use and walkable.

2. Make apartments and condos in those areas smaller. Max 2 bedrooms except a few penthouses. Force third-places.

3. Make more streets in those areas narrower. I’m a huge believer in one-way streets. Crossing a 4-lane road is not what people have in mind when they think “walkable.”

4. Put all parking underground. Eliminate all surface lots in those areas.

Why do Americans think they’re at the center of the world?

Because, to many Americans, America is so big that you never need to leave. We have two giant oceans separating us from the rest of the world. America is huge. If you placed Seattle where London is, Miami would be in Tehran. Combine that with the fact that America, from state to state, is mostly-culturally-similar (compared to a 1 hour flight from Spain to Morocco). We get along well with our neighbors to both the north and south, and Canada, frankly is not that culturally different from the United States and mostly speaks the same language.

Economically, the United States is a powerhouse, and California, alone, is the fourth largest economy in the world. Most of the biggest companies in the world are in America. The largest stock exchange in the world (by far) is in America. America is the most successful melting pot country in history. Virtually all types of terrain and nature experiences are available between the United States and Canada.

There’s much more to this, and you could write a whole book on it. I’m not saying it’s correct. There’s a whole world outside of America, as I’ve had the luxury of seeing. I’m just explaining why it is the way that it is.

What do you regret?

Almost nothing. I would’ve spent more time in Asia and, ironically, I would’ve taken more vacations.

We loved our time in Asia. I wish we would’ve gone back and just dealt with the time zone challenge. So what if we fly across the world for just a month there? We could’ve taken a vacation for part of it and worked the other part.

Before our honeymoon, the last true vacation that Miranda and I took alone as a couple was in May, 2024. We went to Athens, Naxos, and Crete, Greece. Billie Eilish and Twenty One Pilots had both released new albums, and we were listening to them in a rental car heading to Elefonissi Beach. The beach has pink sand and some of the clearest water I’ve ever seen. It was an incredible time. We said that we would do two vacations like that per year. It took our honeymoon to do another. It’s hard to take a vacation when your laptop is right there.

An old-guy friend, David, recommended early on to me to do a cooking class everywhere we go. We didn’t, because, then, I didn’t love cooking. Now I do love cooking, and I wish we would’ve done more cooking classes.

Where did you go back to sooner than you thought you would?

Croatia. We spent 4 weeks in Zagreb and a week in Split in 2022, and we thought we would be back in 10 years. We were back 3 years later. Now we really won’t be back in Croatia for 10 years.

London. When we left London the first time, neither Miranda nor I were infatuated with it, but we ended up in London on the day of the Queen’s funeral. Seeing London that day was life changing, and from there, we knew we would be back soon. The next summer, we stayed in London for 3 weeks. It became the most reliable spot for us to recharge, and we have friends there. It’s probably my favorite city in the world.

Where did you want to go back to, but you never made it?

Bucharest, Romania. It was originally a Schengen visa run for us. We really enjoyed our week in the city, but they joined the Schengen area and then it started competing with Spain, Italy, Croatia, Greece, and all the other Schengen countries. It’s a great city for travelers who want somewhere off the beaten path.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What’s our favorite place?

See this post about Places to Live and Places to Visit. Overall, it depends on the criteria.

• Place to Live: London

• Place to Visit: Thailand

• Place to Vacation (outside of the classic destinations): Costa Rica or Turkey

• Place to Eat: Italy or Mexico City or Thailand or Japan or Greece

• Place to Party: Berlin

How many countries did we visit?

35 countries, 73 unique cities, and over 125 stops. A stop is at least 1 night in the location. We went back to many countries multiple times to try out new cities or visit old favorites. We aren’t counting countries.

How did you decide where to go?

1. Visas. We did not want to overstay visas. We spent a lot of time in the UK because it’s a different visa than the Schengen visa which covers most of Europe.

2. Weather. We packed for 3 seasons — winter was out of the question unless it was back to Ohio.

3. Friends. If our friends were somewhere fun, we’d go there.

4. Vibes. If a place had been recommended or we had seen a spot on Instagram that looked cool or if our research pulled up a spot, we’d go there. Also if there was a cool event going on (Dia de Muertos in Mexico, for example), we’d choose that.

5. Time Zone. If we had intense work periods, we’d hang out in easy-to-work time zones. As our businesses grew more and more, this became more and more frequent.

6. Spinning the globe in Apple Maps. If you zoom out enough. on Apple Maps, it shows the whole world. We did this several times.

Do you speak English everywhere?

Pretty much. Thanks, in my opinion, to the internet, English is definitely the global language. While Miranda and I would learn common phrases in the local language, we’d use them as a formality before flipping to English. “Bonjour” or “Bonsoir” in Paris gets you a long way, as does “Merhaba” in Turkey or “Dobar dan” in Croatia.

But imagine a German visits Italy or a Turk visits Croatia. What language do they speak? English. Americans, on balance, speak fewer language than the average European, but the average person in a global city almost certainly speaks, at minimum, broken English.

That said, Miranda is conversational Spanish and I am conversational Italian. So when we are in countries where we can use our second language, we do.

How do you go to the gym?

We started getting a gym membership about two years in. It was a mistake to not do it earlier. We traveled with resistance bands and used Apple Fitness+, but the gyms are way better. Most gyms have one-month memberships.

How did you afford it?

Traveling full-time was equivalent to or cheaper than living in the States.

How did you do your cell phone plan?

We bought country-specific, data-only e-sims and turned off our US-lines. Messaging and calls were primarily through iMessage and Whatsapp. Who knows how many calls I missed to my US phone line. I don’t care.

Did you write down what you did so you can remember it?

Yes, I keep a diary. Maybe some day I’ll publish it. It’ll need a heavy copy-edit because my Mother has said some pretty out-of-pocket stuff.

What’s it like settling down and staying in one place?

It’s hard because we moved to Florida, so we’re establishing a new lifestyle and a new routine. When we traveled, we didn’t know where the supermarket was, but we had a system for finding it. In stopping traveling, we’re building all new systems for how we manage our life. Stopping traveling is as big a decision as starting to travel, as is moving to a different state. Both at the same time is very intense.

Plus, we had to buy everything. So it’s been very expensive.

For the first 6 months, I didn’t have the itch to travel. But now that I’m currently traveling, I feel like Miranda and I have snapped back into place and things are easier and more familiar.

Do you miss traveling full-time?

Between moving to Florida, setting up a house, and planning a wedding, I haven’t had much time to miss it. But yes, sometimes.

What else is on your list?

In no particular order

South & Central America

• Bolivia

• Patagonia

• Atacama Desert, Chile

• Peru

• Ecuador & the Galapagos

• Brazil

Middle East

• Azerbaijan

• Armenia

• Uzbekistan

• Jordan

• Israel

• Lebanon

• UAE

Africa

• Kenya

• Rwanda

• Egypt

• Tanzania (especially a hot air balloon over the Great Migration)

• Botswana (for a river Safari)

Asia

• India

• South Korea

• Japan (non-Central)

• Vietnam

• Cambodia

• Philippines

• China (with our Chinese sister-in-law, Emily)

Oceana

• Australia, but specifically exploring it by car

• New Zealand

• Vanuatu

Europe

• Norway

• Iceland

• Poland

• Czech Republic

• Albania — we promised two Scottish guys in a comedy club that we’d go to Albania

• Madeira

• Skiing in Slovakia

And wherever our friends are.

If Open AI is involved, that means the primary budget in question is a token budget. Users, mainly developers, using tokens to build their products.

Teammate AI automates business processes. Our automations have starts and finishes.

We do, basically, the same thing every time. Take reading a PDF invoice.

The data on the invoice differs (thereby requiring that we use an AI model to read it), but reading the invoice, structuring the data, and doing something with that data is the same, otherwise.

Since we know what “success” looks like, both we and our clients know before we start the costs. Surprises are rare.

Making up numbers, we know that the AI cost of reading each page of an invoice is $0.05. There’s no confusion. If we sell that for $1.00/page, we make money.

When it comes to software development, with token-based billing, the costs can become unlimited.

Imagine your use of Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini on a daily basis. If that were token-based billing, you’d be very hesitant to use it frequently. The AI rarely outputs exactly what you want the first time you ask it a question or to do a task. So you refine it throughout the conversation and, over time, you achieve the output your desire.

If you needed to pay $5.00 per 10,000 words (input and output), you’d feel kind of ripped off every time the AI did or said something stupid.

That’s what’s happening to these enterprises with software development. AI might be generating the majority of the code at these firms, but a significant percentage of that AI-generated code are bugs. Then, the AI is sent out to fix the bugs. In the process, it may fix them, it may not.

It’s faster, don’t get me wrong, but it’s expensive. Uber has set a $1,500 / developer / month cap for AI. And, there are only so many new features that most companies can build in a year before the rest of the organization runs out of capacity to absorb them.

So what happens next?

Not sure, really.

They could increase AI budget and decrease the number of developers, but that can become a real issue if AI token prices rise.

They could reduce AI budget and start using more human developers, but the pace of development will decrease.

My sense is that some companies will chose option A and some will choose option B, and we’ll find out which works. In the meantime, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see wavering in the valuations of Anthropic and Open AI.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft cancelled their developers’ Claude Code subscriptions because they were getting too expensive.

Uber’s COO, this week, said that they are finding it “harder to justify” the costs AI coding tools and that they have started limiting Claude Code subscriptions.

And then the bill showed up.

In Q1, Anthropic moved its enterprise customers to token-based pricing (usage pricing) for all Claude Code usage. Since then, the true cost of the AI tools has become known, and companies can’t justify the spend. Enterprises are no longer being subsidized by VCs and investors.

AI Coding Tools Are Not Normal Automation

Claude Code is not the same thing as automating invoice reading, email routing, receipt matching, or customer follow-up.

Those are normal business automations.

They have clear inputs.

They have clear outputs.

They run the same way every time.

Software engineering is different.

Software engineering is part science, part craft, and part “who decided to build it this way in 2017 and why is that person no longer here?”

When an engineer uses Claude Code, they have to explain the whole problem. They have to explain the goal, the edge cases, the codebase, the dependencies, and all the weird little traps that live inside the system.

Then the AI agent has to read the code, understand the structure, make the change, test the change, and often revise the change.

All of that uses lots and lots of tokens.

Tokens are the meter, and the meter is running.

Why Claude Code Gets Expensive So Fast

Imagine you wrote a 1,000-page book.

Now you want to add a new chapter in the middle.

You do not just say, “Write chapter 37.”

You explain what the chapter is supposed to do. You explain the characters, the plot, the tone, the setup, and the payoff.

Then the AI has to read the book, write the chapter, and reread enough of the book to make sure the new chapter does not wreck everything that came before or after it.

That is what is happening in software.

Except the book is a codebase.

And the book is changing every day.

And 4,000 engineers are all asking the AI to help edit different chapters at the same time.

This is how you blow through an AI budget.

This Is Not a Problem for Most Companies

For non-software companies, this is mostly a non-issue.

Most small and midsized businesses do not need Claude Code. They need AI automation.

That path is much simpler:

1. Document the process in painful detail.

1. Have a developer figure out which parts can be automated.

1. Build the automation.

1. Measure the cost per task.

In one business, we automate reading emails. We know the cost per email.

In another, we automate reading invoice. We know the cost per line-item.

The only variable is volume. How many emails? How many receipts?

That is manageable.

A task automation is not wandering around your whole codebase trying to reason through five years of engineering decisions. It is doing a job.

Same input.

Same output.

Same cost model.

Task automation is the fastest and best path to transformation for all non-software companies right now and for the next several years.

This Is a Big Problem for Software Companies

Enterprise software companies have a harder choice.

They can cap Claude Code usage and slow the productivity gain.

They can keep Claude Code unlimited and reduce headcount.

Or they can move to cheaper AI coding tools that are not as good, and accept a smaller improvement.

None of those are fun choices.

And this is where the AI coding story gets uncomfortable.

If two strong developers with unlimited Claude Code can outperform ten average developers without it, the spreadsheet starts doing spreadsheet things.

That does not mean every tech layoff is because of AI.

A lot of the current layoff wave is probably still the result of overhiring from 2019 to 2022 combined with current share prices taking a beating.

But AI is now part of the math because these AI coding tools are costing companies 4 and 5-figures per month per engineer.

And once the Claude Code bill gets large enough, the question changes from “Should we give every developer AI?” to “How many developers do we need if the best ones have AI?”

That is the real issue.

The non-software world will not run on Claude Code.

The non-software world needs boring, specific, well-built automations that do the task as well as (or better than) a human does at a known cost.

Software companies have a very different problem.

They are not just automating tasks.

They are automating parts of the people who build the product.

Well, it’s de-facto dead. Not literally. You can still run it, although I’m not sure what you’d do with it, but nobody is searching for it.

I’m not a sore winner, but when I proudly posted in February that OpenClaw and AI Browsers were Try, Oh My, Goodbye, I got some flack from people that called me “cynical” and “talking my book” by saying that AI and automation is really still a job for developers (which I have on my team).

Now, I’m going to give you the formula as to why I knew, without ever downloading OpenClaw, that this was going to be a hype cycle that died as soon as it lived.

My goal for you is that you can avoid getting wrapped up in the next hype cycle, whatever it may be. I hope you can focus your energy on stuff that matters.

First, and most importantly, everyone was talking about it but nobody was actually using it for anything meaningful.

I asked everyone who told me about it “What are you using it for?” And I sorta didn’t get answers? Anytime the answer is hard to decipher, it doesn’t mean there’s something so complex that I couldn’t possibly comprehend it. It means that the solution doesn’t make sense.

The number 1 thing that people said was “I text it to do stuff while I’m away,” to which my response was “What?” And they didn’t say anything that you or I couldn’t do from our phones already.

Notice how I don’t list any use cases? It’s because there weren’t any that were specific to OpenClaw that drove meaningful value.

Contrast that to simple ChatGPT Deep Research. You ask it a question and trigger Deep Research mode, and then 20 minutes later it delivers you a 5-10 page report about that topic. It’s easy to say and easy to envision exactly how you’d use it. If someone asked me “What’s the last thing you used ChatGPT Deep Research for?” I’d say “I was doing research on Palantir’s business model and contrasting it to Oracle’s.” Easy and done.

In another, similar, example, before ChatGPT was just GPT. Companies using GPT to write marketing copy, such as Copy.ai, had real revenues and raised money at 8-figure valuations. While that’s not to say “it was clear ChatGPT was going to be a hit,” it was clear that the underlying technology was already making a difference. The same was not true with OpenClaw.

Second, the technology is wayyyyyyyy to slow to be anything you use regularly

This was true with AI browsers, which I had tried. Finding flights on Google flights takes approximately 15 seconds. Finding them using ChatGPT Atlas, last I tried, took 7 minutes. Perplexity Comet was no different. OpenClaw, from what I had heard, was the same.

People would say “Well, it takes longer, but you’re not doing the work. You can do other stuff.”

While true, I still need to cross the task off my list, and in doing a task like booking flights, I, ultimately, need to press “book.” It’s not a task that’s getting done overnight and then being reported to me. Using AI should make my life faster and more efficient, not simply move work around.

Will the technology get better and faster? Probably. Does that matter in the long run? Probably not, because, as I stated in the aforementioned essay, AI, really, should be invisible. Needing to manage its slowness and mistakes is not a task I have bandwidth for.

So how can you avoid the next hype cycle, and what will it be?

“What do you use it for?” Is always the question I ask.

The legitimacy of a hype cycle comes down to one thing: does the thing being hyped create meaningful-enough value that you will change your habits to use it?

Usually, meaningful-enough value consists of time savings or efficiency savings.

If you have an assistant spending 1 hour per day creating your morning report (and thereby working on Sunday evenings), an AI automating that is a huge benefit, but if you already have it mostly automated, using OpenClaw to retrieve it for you makes no sense.

If every day you need to check a particular database or website or Excel file and then transfer the data into another system (for example, data from form responses being transferred into your CRM), then you probably already used Zapier or Claude Skills to do that, and OpenClaw doesn’t make sense.

I spend most of my time telling people “relax, just focus on understanding what you team does and automating the tasks that suck.”

The AI-flavor-of-the-day is mostly hype.

Admittedly, one person’s hype is another person’s time savings (for example, I know of someone saving several meaningful hours per week using Claude Cowork), but, for most people, hype is just wasted energy.

I hope this is my last time, for a while, writing about hype cycles and saying “just focus on one or two things that matter.” I speak up so much because wasted energy for you can easily become wasted energy for your teams. By all means pay attention to the flavor of the day, but there’s near-zero harm in waiting 2-3 months before adopting the technology. I’ve learned enough lessons the hard way; I’m okay waiting to see what people do first.

It’s what Copilot was supposed to be. I estimate I save an hour per day on email.

Superhuman has a few things that are fantastic.

Superhuman Split Inboxes & Auto Tagging

It separates important inboxes from newsletters I read to. If I wanted, I could create an inbox that only emails from my team go to, or just client emails.

As emails come in, they’re auto-tagged by Superhuman based on what I’ve either told it in the past or what it thinks. So far, it has gotten very little incorrect and, what it got incorrect, was placed in my “Important” inbox.

Just having my inbox not be a complete disaster is worth it enough. I check “Reading” first thing in the morning and then “Important” the rest of the day except the end of the day, when I check “Other” once.

Smart Auto-Reminders

If you send an email and the person doesn’t respond, a few days later, it’ll not only surface that email to the top of your “Important” folder, but it’ll also write the “bumping this” message. All you need to do is click “Send.”

You can also set your own reminders if you desire. I set reminders every day for things that I don’t have bandwidth for now or need to make sure I don’t forget.

Calendar Management

It intelligently manages my calendar. When I need to schedule a meeting, I click “Select Free Times and Booking Link” and it pops up my calendar. I click the times I’m open, then it also drops the booking link in there, too.

When someone proposes a meeting time, it pops up that time in a small, sidebar view of my calendar for that day and time. When I need to schedule a meeting, it saves me two or three clicks.

If someone proposes a meeting time, a little “Create Event” button pops up in the bottom corner which creates the event, adds the people on the email to it, and pops in a link.

Superhuman has tons of other fun features too, like snippets, which basically are like saved email copy for commonly-written emails and fine-tuning AI to write in your tone of voice.

It has tons of keyboard commands which can be a pain to learn but are amazing once you do.

It can handle multiple inboxes on multiple tenants easily.

It’s beautiful to look at.

It’s got a chatbot integrated right into it for Q&A across your entire inbox.

It’s got fabulous CRM integrations (that actually work) for easily keeping track of deals.

It’s got a public facing trust center so you can verify the data’s security.

People ask me all the time how to use AI with email. The answer is not to hand over your email to Claude. It’s to be in control, but spend less time on it.

I’m not affiliated with Superhuman, I just really, really like it.

If you click the link, you’ll get a free month. Allocate 1-2 hours to getting used to it and learning the commands. By the end of next week, I think you’ll love it, too.

Try Superhuman

I thought it would be a fun exercise to rank my top 25 songs from the first 5 years of the 2020s. Note: these are songs that came out in the first five years of the 2020s. In 2020, I discovered many songs from 2019, but they are not included on the list. Songs that came out in 2025 but I discovered in 2026 are also not on the list. It’s not totally fair, but I get to make the rules.

I definitely bias toward songs released while we were nomading (2022 - 2025). I think all the time on planes and on walks helped me hone my taste in music. I keep my playlists in chronological order to music discovery, and the playlists from 2020 and 2021 were all over the place.

I’m not going to try to make grandiose observations that apply to life, but I noticed two things:

1. I like songs more from periods where life was going really well vs when I was in a rough patch. Cruising around Greece or exploring Morocco or making gnocchi in Italy? Lots of great times. Business is struggling or we’re in an awful Airbnb with a bed two-sizes-too-small? Not many songs from that period.

2. Discovering Italian music really changed things. Plus, I was getting good at speaking Italian, so it was a combination of good times and good music.

My ranking system gets messy after spot 3. Definitely the top 3 are the top 3, though. The two classical songs I stuck at the bottom not because they’re the final two, but because I couldn’t compare them to anything else.

1. As It Was - Harry Styles

2. One of your Girls - Troye Sivan

3. Getting Older - Adam Lambert

4. So Long, London - Taylor Swift

5. Banish the Banshee - Isaac Dunbar

6. Save Myself - Ashe

7. Sweet Cherries - Finneas

8. Bang! - AJR

9. Cinema - Harry Styles

10. Storie Brevi - Annalisa & Tananai

11. Radiohead - Tananai

12. Medieval - Finneas

13. The Ballet Girl - Aden Foyer

14. Guarda Cosa Hai Fatto - Tananai

15. Escapism. - RAYE & 070 Shake

16. Booster - Tananai

17. I Can Do It With a Broken Heart - Taylor Swift

18. Father Figure - Taylor Swift

19. Oldies Station - Twenty One Pilots

20. Fantasmas - Humbe

21. Biale Inolvidle - Bad Bunny

22. The Diner - Billie Eilish

23. Actor - Conan Gray

24. IN A DREAM - Troye Sivan

25. La Perla - Rosalia

26. “Tuscany” Suite for Piano and Orchestra - Nicholas Brittel, Succession: Season 3

27. Succession - Andate Risoluto - Nicholas Brittel, Succession: Season 4

This is too small of a list so I allowed myself 27. Honorable mention to the songs I couldn’t add such as half the songs on Harry’s House, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Isaac Dunbar, and KAROL G.

Then I thought of Moira, from Schitt’s Creek:

This week, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, “a new initiative that brings together Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks in an effort to secure the world’s most critical software.” (emphasis mine).

The best AI use case so far is in writing code. It’s fairly simple to see why: when code is written, it either runs or it doesn’t. There’s an immediate feedback loop. So the AI writes the code, can test it, and, if it doesn’t work, can iterate all near-autonomously.

Claude Code, Anthropic’s app for using AI to write code, is the industry-standard AI coding platform.

Powering Claude Code currently is Claude 4.6 Opus, the current best-in-class AI model for writing code. It’s significantly better than any other AI model on the market.

Anthropic trained a huge new AI model called Mythos that vastly outperforms Claude 4.6 Opus in all coding benchmarks.

Mythos is amazing at coding. There are various objective benchmarks for code quality. In the past, a 2 or 3-point improvement over the current state of the art was enough to get all developers to switch over to the new model.

The current state-of-the-art coding AI model is Claude Opus 4.6. Mythos has outperformed the state of the art by 24%.

Mythos is so advanced that it found, allegedly, “thousands” of major security vulnerabilities across all major technology operating systems (think Mac, Windows, Linux) and web browsers, and core applications. These vulnerabilities are referred to as “zero-day” exploits meaning that the developers of the respective software didn’t know that the vulnerabilities existed.

Anthropic was so surprised at the results that they called industry-leaders and are creating a strike force to identify and resolve these critical technology platforms before AI models like this become widely available. They’ve made Mythos available to select enterprises, but they haven’t made it available to the public and “they may never.”

To summarize:

1. Anthropic trained the most advanced AI model in Claude Mythos.

2. Claude Mythos is 24% better than Claude Opus 4.6, the current state-of-the-art.

3. Anthropic used Claude Mythos to identify thousands of security vulnerabilities in critical software used every day.

4. Anthropic called industry leaders to create a strike force, Project Glasswing, to secure these critical pieces of software.

5. Anthropic decides to publish a huge white paper detailing Mythos, announcing the project, and proclaiming to the world that these vulnerabilities haven’t been solved yet but will.

6. Anthropic also publishes the pricing for Mythos, which is 5X higher than that of Opus 4.6

I, for one, am glad that Anthropic has created this initiative and is taking this seriously. I’m glad that investors gave them the money to do these tests. I’m glad that US administrations over the last 10-15 years have allowed the AI sector to flourish.

It’s not the actions they’re taking that I’m bothered by. It’s the fact that they published all this before fixing the critical vulnerabilities and not after.

Anthropic has a history of this type of sky-is-falling-marketing.

2 quick YouTube searches (“Dario Amodei AI jobs” and “Dario Amodei AI safety”) brought up these and way more examples. 1 ChatGPT search (“Find me videos, tweets, etc where Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, claimed that AI would destroy all jobs or generally had sky-is-falling messaging”) yielded a whopping 82 links to Anthropic’s sky-is-falling messaging (Although it should be noted that I didn’t click them all so there surely is some overlap. You get the point.).

This has been par for the course for a while now. Anthropic was a company started by Open AI employees over fundamental disagreements of how AI should be handled. For example, the Anthropic founding team were at Open AI when they said GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.

I think it’s incredibly hard to separate the reality (mission-critical technologies should be secured before western adversaries have access to AI models like this) and the marketing.

Am I supposed to thank Anthropic for being team-good-guys? Am I supposed to fear this AI falling into the hands of team-bad-guys? Or is this a really great test of wayyyy higher AI pricing?

And while everyone in Silicon Valley are losing their minds about the implications of Mythos, is it really just because 1 engineer + Claude Code, if Mythos is ever released, may replace 7 or 8 or 9 engineers out of 10?

I’ve stated in the past that I think the best industry to be in is AI and the second best is cybersecurity. That is seemingly more true than ever. But if AI can find the vulnerabilities, and there’s an expectation that it can help in fixing them, and it’s “dangerous” to release it to the public (according to Anthropic), then why publish this white paper before fixing them instead of after?

Much will be made about Mythos in the coming weeks. I hope it’s used to patch the vulnerabilities. It’s unquestionable that the United States will be stronger with 3 or 4 AI models this advanced, all owned by different countries.

But if it’s so dangerous, why make it a marketing campaign?

In 2017, a year earlier, I had tried out a demo for a company called Dreamscape. It was Hollywood-meets-tech. The product was a VR experience unlike any that anyone had ever created. Participants wore an Oculus with a backpack, then they were transported into alternate worlds. An Indiana Jones-style world had me genuinely afraid that I was going to fall off a rock into a black void. When I was throwing a torch, which was a plastic bat retrofitted with tons of sensors, I forgot that I was wearing VR goggles but throwing a real-life object. It was so high-fidelity and spatially accurate that it didn’t matter if I was in a conference room with beige walls or in virtual northern Norway. It was electric.

After the presentation, I bought an HTC Vive for $350 and brought it back home with me where I used it once or twice an then threw it away only after letting it take up valuable closet space in my apartment, moving it out of the apartment, and letting it sit in storage for two years as I nomaded.

I first heard the phrase “Try, Oh My, Goodbye” on the All-In podcast in reference to the same VR experience I had several years prior.

Dreamscape popped up in malls and movie theaters for several years after before shutting down most of their operations. I went once. I remember it being fantastic, but, instead of going back, I always had something better to do.

The parallels between the “Try, Oh My, Goodbye” VR experience and OpenClaw are close. OpenClaw is an open-source software where you plug in a Large Language Model (LLM) like Claude or ChatGPT, and then it can control your computer and do things on your behalf by controlling your screen. Let’s ignore the security risks and mistakes it makes, it took the world by storm a few weeks ago getting millions of downloads and being featured in Wired, Business Insider, and Financial Times.

AI browsers have been around for 6 or 8 months. I first tried one in September of last year. I tried to make one my daily driver in November then gave up on it last month. The problem with the agentic browsers is the same as the problem with OpenClaw: the AI only works sometimes, and its success is largely reliant upon your knowing exactly what you want it to do and taking the time to properly communicate that.

Agentic browsers have a few (solvable) hiccups, but I think of solving the hiccups as winning battles, not as winning the war.

Productivity tools don’t seem to work well

Excel doesn’t work well with AI browsers. They can’t control the cells well. The same is true with Asana. It can’t quite fill out the fields and control Asana the way it needs to. With Excel, it usually outright rejected to work with it. With Asana, I usually needed to fix its mistakes or half-finished work. In fact, I can’t think of a time when the AI browser did the job for me half as fast or even as half well as I would’ve done it.

The second block of issues are solvable, but they severely limit adoption. First is timing and bandwidth. That’s the nice way of saying that the AI browsers are slow and lazy.

AI Browser Agents are Slow and Lazy

We have some pre-release software for which we needed documentation. I recorded a 15 minute video explaining how the software works and how to do everything that the users would need to do, and I gave that transcript to an AI to turn into a user manual. Separately, I set up the AI browser agent to click around and create the SOP. I gave it the same transcript to use as inspiration.

When the agent came back to me, I had about 100 words and 3 or 4 processes outlined. When the normal ChatGPT came back to me, I had 23 pages.

This is true, too, with finding flights. Use an AI browser to find flights and it’s a 5 or 10 minute process as it fumbles through clicking around. Use Gemini and the same task takes about 15 seconds.

I don’t usually know what I want

Combine the slow, lazy browser agents with the fact that it usually takes me two or three tries to fully know what I want and that’s a recipe for irritation. Most times I want to do something, I have to try it at least once more before I get frustrated and give up. This isn’t an issue when using the standard chat interface because it’s fast for me to speak or type, but I’m driven crazy when I need to watch the browser think for 5 seconds before it clicks “submit.”

I want to be clear. Most of my grievances can be solved through innovation and the typical product development lifecycle. Excel can work faster and Asana can work better inside of them. Clicking a button on the screen (and understanding how the screen is laid out) can be done faster. But that doesn’t change that I think it’s a battle.

The war is that the AI’s work should be mostly invisible

What makes the standard chat interface so compelling is that the user uses their natural language, the prompt goes to a server, the server does its thinking, research, or actions, and then, magically, it pops out the answer or solution. APIs have been doing tasks for us for over a decade now. A chat interface that does work by using the APIs is vastly more efficient and more “magical” than watching the AI agent struggle to identify the text field to submit.

If browsers already are the operating systems for the lion’s share of our work, then OpenClaw faces the same issues. It’s using AI to work on an operating system.

I think the solution could be compelling, but I think agentic browsers and OpenClaw are a local maxima, not a global maxima. At best, they’re a niche tool for hobbyists who want to tinker.

In Henry Ford’s day, what people thought they wanted was “a faster horse.” Ultimately, the most compelling vision of the AI future probably isn’t an AI that manipulates the interfaces you’re currently using, it’s an AI that does all the work in the background and gives you the answer or does the task in seconds. That latter technology sounds an awful lot more like a car than a faster horse.

Now that we’re about a month into “normal” life after nearly four years of nomading, I’ve made a few observations. For most people, all this is old news, but Miranda and I have not been really living in America. We’ve stopped by and been in the States off-and-on, but we’ve not had our own place. Since we spent most of the last four years in Europe, I feel like I’m experiencing a wave of novelty all at once.

Below are a non-comprehensive list of things I’ve learned since I stopped being a digital nomad:

• Part of the Boho design style is random rope dangly things, and I don’t like the dangles very much.

• What Japanese Joinery is

• That beautiful antique pitcher you want to buy probably contains lead paint.

• To get Fiber internet, they drill a hole from the outside of your house to connect the cable.

• When they bury the fiber internet cable, if they need to bury it underneath your driveway, they essentially snake the cable under the driveway.

• Below-freezing temperatures are a real problem in Florida because the pipes aren’t insulated.

• A Tesla supercharger takes 25 minutes to charge the car from near-zero to 80% but the AC and car still run so it’s comfortable.

• Tesla self-driving can do u-turns

• Florida drivers are awful, and Florida motorcyclists have a death wish

• Car insurance in Florida is outrageously expensive

• The telephone area code around Cape Canaveral is “321” because of “3-2-1 blastoff”

• 2700 lumens = warm light which is pleasant.

• Costco only accepts debit cards and Visa

• TJ Maxx is a great spot to buy random kitchen stuff like wooden spoons and can openers and peelers.

• Amazon is not a great deal for kitchen stuff because they need to make the numbers work, so they bundle a bunch of stuff you don’t need (15 cooking spoons when you need 3) to get you to spend $15 when you’d spend $5 at TJ Maxx.

• Facebook Marketplace has the best and worst deals. The best deals are the ones I described above. The worst deals are when someone buys something on Amazon and is reselling it for $10 less than what they bought it for.

• Kohl’s has stopped doing Amazon returns for the most part

• Not all stainless steel pans are equivalent. 5-Ply and 3-Ply are good, will be more nonstick, and will distribute heat more consistently.

• How to season a cast iron skillet

• A lamp shade costs $50

• To make a linen duvet cover not wrinkly, pull it out of the dryer just before it’s totally dry and shake it out.

• Most rugs are polyester, and most cheap rugs are polyester plus screen printed. The price difference between wool and polyester is enormous

• If you go to a gym with a bunch of old people then the middle of the workday is as crowded as any other time.

There are a few things that I think are worth more explanation.

North America is so convenient

Amazon same-day and overnight delivery are incredible. At 10:30 at night, I needed a new toothbrush. By 11:00 AM the next morning, I had an electric toothbrush and a Water Pik delivered to me. In Europe, that’s a 90-minute activity. Find the store that carries it, walk to the store (if you’re in Italy or Spain, there’s a 50% chance the store is closed because the owner didn’t want to work that day), find the items, check out, and walk back.

Costco is incredible. The quality is high. It’s all right there for you. You can buy essentially everything you need for your entire life right at a Costco.

Instacart is nice, but we don’t use it, and Europe has its equivalents in Glovo and Deliveroo. That has been the only thing that is not meaningfully more convenient.

We ordered our guest bedroom mattress from Costco. It had springs and coils, and somehow it was shrink-wrapped down into a rectangular box about 3 feet tall and 8 inches wide. When the two delivery guys came to set it up, the total time it took them to walk in the door, open the box, set up the mattress, take a picture of their work, pick up their trash, ask for us to leave a 5-star review, and leave was 4.5 minutes. That service and efficiency is not found everywhere.

Our Major Life Change is Everyone Else’s Normal Life

For us, settling down and building a home is a life change as big as graduating college and entering the workforce. I think it feels like a bigger life change than starting to travel because, with traveling, we sold all our stuff and set off with no expectations. We could stop whenever we wanted. With building a home, we’re acquiring stuff and settling down. With acquiring stuff, we are building attachments. Miranda loves her new, Persian rug for example. I love my new stainless steel pans. We both love our Boll & Branch sheets. As we get more comfortable and develop our own routines, changing the routine will get harder. In fact, the first diary entry I wrote the morning after we moved in was a how-to guide for the nuts and bolts and logistics of how we traveled.

But, while, for us this is a major shift, for everyone else it’s “welcome to the club.” I’m more exhausted now than I was at the end of our traveling. It would’ve been easier to fly to Mexico City (which we’ve lived in for 10 weeks), checked into an Airbnb, connected to the WiFi, and called it a day. Our travel systems were finely-honed.

In this case, we need to build all-new systems. Where we put plates and cups. Signing up for internet and utilities. Determining when we go to the gym.

Signing on and off from work is a huge one. The only time we traveled in Eastern Time was in Colombia. In Mexico City and Costa Rica, we were two hours behind. In Argentina and Chile we were two hours ahead. In Europe and Africa we were +5 - +7 and in Asia we were +12 - +14. When North America is signed off (or asleep), it’s easy to either get focus work down or be signed off. When North America is signed on for your entire work day, it’s much harder to get work done. There are constant distractions. Focus-work gets pushed, and then I am unsure when to stop for the night.

All this and, since we also moved to a new city in a new state, we have all the same work we had when we landed in a new city. Finding restaurants, finding the grocery stores, figuring out how to get places, signing up for a gym.

None of these are unsolvable problems, but they’re problems that need solved, and we’re solving them all at once. It’s exhausting.

We have to buy everything

During our travels, we said that “all we own is what’s in our suitcases, backpacks, and our companies.” We joked, but it’s true.

In our life before travel, Miranda and I were the roommates that didn’t buy much. My roommate’s family had a bunch of extra furniture, and Miranda’s roommates came with lots of stuff. So we lived that part of our life without much. I should be clear, we didn’t contribute nothing, but we didn’t leave our leases with an apartment’s worth of stuff, either. Plus, four years went by since we lived in apartments, so we either outgrew what remained, sold, or donated it before we traveled.

We have had to buy everything. Silverware, dinnerware, pots and pans, a mattress, a bed, sheets, towels, a kettle, a toaster, rugs, a couch, a kitchen table and chairs, a guest bed, guest sheets, guest pillows, a TV, desks, office chairs, curtains, glasses, a car, lightbulbs, lamps, side tables, nightstands, wooden spoons, a paper towel holder, a can opener. Everything.

The sheer quantity of things we have to buy is exhausting. It started out as fun, but now it’s a chore. Starting from zero is no fun. This year will be one of the most expensive years of our lives because of it.

Facebook Marketplace is the current great wealth transfer

The great wealth transfer isn’t in real estate or in stocks, it’s in Facebook Marketplace. Find areas where the greatest service you do to the seller isn’t money, but it’s a takeaway service, and you’re getting the deal of the century.

In Columbus, a family in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods was selling a two-year-old Italian leather couch in excellent condition for $500. It’s easily a $2,500 couch. When we arrived, the couple asked if we wanted a free 8’x10’ rug along with it. Then, they said “we actually redecorated our entire house and have a bunch of stuff in the basement. Want to take a look?” Obviously, we said yes.

The next day, we bought a 9’x12’ handmade, wool, Persian rug for $850 from a different couple that just wanted it gone. It’s like a $3,500 or $4,000 rug. It’s stunning. When we got to Winter Park, we picked up a large mahogany table with six chairs for $250 from a woman who’s an interior designer but redecorated. It’s a $1,000 table. Those are the three biggest-ticket items, but we’ve bought way more on Facebook Marketplace that are a similar stories. A handmade, Mexican jar. A handmade, Indian side table. The best deal on the market right now is whatever’s on Facebook Marketplace in the wealthy area of town.

TVs have become incredible

My standards are low because I’ve spent four years watching TV on an iPad, but TV technology is incredible nowadays. From Costco, we bought a 65” Samsung 4K QLED for $500. The first show we watched was Pluribus. I can’t stop talking about how amazing the colors are. It’s so crisp. Next we started The White Lotus. Again, the colors of the jungle are unbelievable. I can’t believe $500 buys that.

Consistency will be nice once I can enjoy it

As far as I can remember, it’s been since December, 2024 (we were in Cape Town) since I slept three weeks in a row in the same bed. I’m not traveling until I hit 7 weeks, which is the longest I’ll have slept in the same bed since the COVID lock down. In our four years traveling, we went to 35 unique countries but had 122 unique stops not including time spent back in the US with family. We stopped traveling not because we got bored, but because we got tired.

Right now, we’ve got a ton of stuff going on and are, seemingly, in constant motion, so I haven’t settled yet, but sometime I will, and it’ll be nice. I’m both excited for it and concerned. I’m excited because I’m hoping to be more recharged and rejuvenated. If I wasn’t looking for that, I’d still be traveling. I’m nervous, though, because we went so hard for so long that I’m afraid the chickens will come home to roost and I will fall off an energetic cliff. We will see.

It’s nice to have the same kitchen and the same gym. Not needing to re-discover that baking sheets are nowhere to be found is pleasant. We also have pots and pans that are nice and easy to use. Another plus.

Place is vital

We moved to Winter Park, Florida, which is like if the walkability, live oaks, and brick streets of Savannah, Georgia had a baby with the homes and neighborhood of Beverly Hills. We love it here so far. Everyone’s nice, it’s beautiful, the food is incredible, it’s super walkable, we’re pretty close to family, and there’s an intercontinental airport nearby. There’s even train transit. It feels like an American extension of our favorite cities from when we were nomading. Had we moved to Strip Mall USA, we’d be miserable. Having the right off-ramp to combine all the things we loved about being nomads with building a more stable life in the US was paramount. While I’m exhausted now, I’d rather be exhausted and happy about where I live than exhausted and depressed.

The future is here, but it’s unevenly distributed

A 3-year old, used Tesla Model Y with 30,000 miles on it is the best deal on the market. It costs $29,000-$32,000, has a 280-mile range, and, if you pay $99/month, drives itself. For less than the price of a new Toyota SUV, I can get a self-driving car. The self-driving works better than I anticipated. I would say it’s a better driver than I am 90% of the time (and I think I’m a pretty good driver) and, when it does something weird, it errs on the side of caution (driving too slow, stopping too long) than havoc. Around Winter Park, there are tons of Teslas driving by.

Someone who lives nearby has a Tesla solar roof. I didn’t notice it before (besides that it looked like a nice roof), but when I walked by it at night, I saw the green lights of a PowerWall, the battery units that store the energy. That home is probably fully-off-grid.

Waymo and Cybercab are coming to central Florida in 2026. Combined with light rail (the central Florida railway system) and Brightline from Orlando all the way to Miami, we have an abundance of options for transit.

But it’s not just that. 500 mbps fiber internet costs $55/month. A smart doorbell with facial recognition AI that backs up securely to iCloud costs $65. My gym has a (somewhat accurate) body composition scanner sitting next to the check-in desk they encourage your using.

We’re an hour’s drive away from watching the Artemis II launch and future Starship launches.

I know I sound like I’m singing Winter Park’s praises (I am), but there’s something nice about walking down beautiful, brick-lined streets to dinner while having a self-driving car drive me to the beach.

For me, a daily challenge is determining “what is the best thing for me to work on this week?”

A mental model I’ve created to help is to answer the question “Would I still be doing this if we had triple the customers we do now?”

In a hyper-growth stage, systems break down extraordinarily fast.((not tech systems – business systems))

Rickety technology needs better infrastructure. Systems and processes need documented with explicit areas for flexibility for when particular milestones are achieved.

Take “this task.” “This task” is the task in front of me that I could do or could delegate (to a human or an AI). 

Keep in mind: delegation requires finding and paying someone to do it and managing it, which often I feel too lazy (or cheap) to do, so it often “feels easier” to just do the task.

My decision-making criteria is the following:

“Would I still be doing this task if we had triple the customers we do now?”

For the present – achieving triple the customers

• Can I help my team remove blockers? That’s always thing #1. It helps the organization move faster in the present.

• If “this task” helps us achieve triple the customers (and I play a role), I focus on it.

For the future – we’ve achieved triple the customers

• If I wouldn’t have time for “this task,” I start building a system to support triple the customers now.

• If I would be doing “this task” with triple the customers, I do the task.

As I’ve been thinking about it, I think the biggest trap to avoid is the “it’s fun” trap.  The “it’s fun” trap is when a task is fun to do, but you wouldn’t have time for it if you had triple the customers you do now.

“It’s fun” is actually a form of procrastination.  It should be avoided. Just rip the bandaid off. If I really loved it, I would feel like it’s more important with triple the customers.  Instead, it’s just helping me avoid something else.  

“I’m willing to sleep on the ground, I’m willing to be hungry, and I’m willing to be cold, but I only do one at a time.”

This struck me as super, super wise.

Since AI is the hot thing, I get approached several times per month with the idea of a collaboration.  Each idea is essentially the same.

Someone who works in a non-tech industry knows about a process / task in their industry that sucks.  

Then, they ask us “Can we automate it?”

After a review, usually the answer is “Yes.”

And then they say “You know, everyone else in our industry has this same problem.  Could we sell the solution to everyone else in my industry?”

** usually ** “Yes.”

Then, they add something like “Instead of your being a vendor, you become a collaborator with us, so we split the investment but then we share the upside.”

Before recently, I didn’t have a good way of filtering out ideas or knowing which collaborations to pursue and which to not purse outside of a gut reaction.  But, recently, the number of requests has increased sizably, so I needed a way to objectively determine which ideas to take on and which to drop.

Which took me back to Outdoor Boys.

Below is an email I recently sent which outlines Teammate AI’s approach to collaborations from here forward.

The email has been slightly modified for clarity.

I’m totally cool with exploring the collaborations further, but I’m instituting a few requirements for Teammate AI.

1. We will only be in pre-release, active development with one at a time.  I love collaborations, but too many at a time and none will work.
   

2. We start by building a scaled-down version of the solution first where Teammate AI serves as a vendor.  I am totally with you on the idea that collaborators are better than vendors (I agree!), but the version-1 solution needs to be a solution developed as a vendor. The reasoning for this is simple: it focuses us on solving the problem and making a difference for customer #1 (our client).  After that, we can scale it up to work with more than 1 client and, ultimately, generate revenue.
   

3. The total market size for Year 1 revenue is > $1MM / $83k/mo.  It doesn’t mean that we hit it, but it means we know enough people facing the same problem to be able to achieve that metric.  This does, admittedly, slow us down a bit because it means we need to have a financial model in place before starting, but I think it’s worthwhile to keep the process a bit slower up front so that we don’t waste 3-6 months getting a bunch of stuff together before realizing it’s not viable.

As I discuss in How Do You Win with AI?, the first half of the flywheel is using AI to free up your people. The second half of the flywheel are the steps for achieving exponential benefits and differentiation in the marketplace.

At some point, all companies will be on this flywheel, and the differentiation will be commoditized.  Using AI will be table-stakes to compete, just as using the internet is now.

In the internet age, the first companies that could profitably sell their products or services on the internet created exponential differentiation in the marketplace. Then, everyone developed websites.  

It’s similar with mobile websites as smartphones proliferated. The first companies to have mobile-native experiences drew massive benefits in the marketplace.  Then, building mobile sites became table stakes.

In the past, as the tech, and the transformation that followed, became table-stakes, there were technology platforms that effectively demonetized the transformation.

Instead of coding your own website from scratch and buying servers, you could use site templates Wix or WordPress with your own copy and spin up a website in an hour or two. And, it would automatically generate the mobile versions of the sites to boot.  Instead of spending $10,000 on a website, a company could spin one up for $300 per year.

So why invest in AI when it’s early and expensive?

Because by the time it’s table stakes, there will be less and less differentiation.  All the value is in getting the early lead.  The early lead is what customers remember. It’s what builds brand equity.  It’s what creates true differentiation.

When everyone else is playing catch-up to you, you’re focused on value-creation for the customer.  It’s a completely different mindset.  One company is saying “What can I do to not be left behind?”  

The other company is saying “How can I drive even more value for you?”

The difference is where the content originates

When the AI creates the content, the AI is the content creator. It’s making sense of the ideas and nuance.

When the human creates the content and the AI repackages the content, it’s taking your original thoughts and ideas and it’s making the content fit your desired delivery method.

I’ve not met many businesses that love their content marketing spend. Most that I know what to reduce it as much as possible.

I think it’s a worthwhile effort.

But it’s important to know where to reduce that spend.

If you reduce the spend on the creation side, you’ll end up as just another company using AI for marketing.

If you reduce spend on the packaging side, you’ll have better ideas than your competition in more places than your competition.

Which brings me to my most important point.

The purpose of any content creation budget is to create an inventory of content for your customers and prospects to consume.  

AI can take the cost of creating that inventory to zero.  Combined with the fact that it’s virtually free to host the content on the internet, the cost to create and the cost to store this inventory is effectively zero.

For you and for everyone.

In a world where inventory creation and storage costs are zero, it’s no longer inventory that’s scarce.  Inventory is abundant.

It’s creativity.

Imagine you’re running a sales organization, and you want to sell more, but you don’t want to hire more people, so you hire an AI cold calling service.  Hypothetically (definitely – I’ve heard the numbers.) that service costs $25,000 per month, and it’ll double your cold calling output.   The AI even sounds just like a human with perfectly timed “ums” and “uhs” and small chuckles.

Cha Ching! You’re in! 

Now imagine you’re a senior leader receiving this call. You pick up, have a nice conversation, advance through the funnel and you sign up for a product or service only to find out later that the first call you received was a robocall where the AI wasn’t disclosed.  What’s the foundation of your relationship?  Some percentage of those companies will discontinue their contracts, and other portions will most certainly need to hire more humans to build relationships and repair any mistrust.

Now imagine you’re the human sales rep for the AI sales agent companies (at some point, for a service that high-ticket and most certainly requires advanced setup, a human is needed).  You need to hit quota quarter after quarter, so you need to both upsell existing clients on more calls and get new clients to buy your service. Over time, the space gets commodified and instead of charging $25,000 per month you charge $5,000 per month, so 10X or 100x the number of businesses can use your software.  

The total number of calls made per day increases quadratically, because every business exponentially grows their AI calling sales force and the number of businesses using this technology expands exponentially.

Now imagine you’re literally anyone on planet earth, now getting bombarded by cold calls all day by AI sales agents.  What will you do? Simply not answer your phone anymore if it’s an unknown number.

This is the exact reason why AI sales call companies won’t work at the scale they’re being promised. They rely on you, the prospect, answering the phone, which you won’t do as soon as more than like 1000 companies are using this software and your phone never stops ringing.

Calls are way more invasive than emails and banner ads.  They take up your entire phone screen and incessantly buzz your smart watch, and then the caller leaves a voice message or, worse, boldly calls again.

I get the AI-agent cold emailing strategy. I actually think that’s worthwhile, because email inboxes already have spam filters to filter out all the emails it thinks you don’t want to see.  The way they work is you have AI agents that find and qualify prospects, and then the send the prospect a cold email tailored to that prospect’s background and company.  Smart! This is a less robotic process than most humans SDRs do, at least from my experience.

But phone lines don’t filter out spam as well. Or, maybe mine doesn’t, considering I get like 10 spam calls per day.

I think AI agent inbound customer service reps will be huge.  That’ll bring 10X productivity for businesses and it’ll bring a 10X better customer experience. Everyone wins! Apple already does this, and the one time I called them and was greeted by the AI, it was delightful.

That said, on the sales side, my hunch is that people will answer their phones even less than they did before.   

Before Apple released the “Silence unknown callers” feature, I paid for a service called Robokiller which identified spam calls and would answer the call on my phone using a bot specifically programmed to waste the time of the spammer calling me.  Usually, the conversations, which were recorded and I could listen to afterward, would be 3 or 4 minutes. It made me feel good to know that I was playing a small role in saving someone else from having their time wasted.

So my guess is the final step in this saga for AI sales cold calling agents is that our AI spam-blocking-time-waster apps will talk to the AI sales agents and NVIDIA, AWS, Azure, and GCP will get way richer than they already are thanks to insane compute usage those services require.

Thanks to Miranda Wagner for reading a draft of this essay.

Feature Image Credit: ChatGPT 4 with the following prompt: An image of a computer making a sales call on the telephone.

Obviously, a TikTok ban would benefit Meta.  It would increase time on app increasing the ad placement inventory, especially in Reels, increasing lock-in.  That said, there will also be new entrants to the short-form content space, and I think lock in is much more difficult when operating on an interest-graph (you see more content that you like) than a network-graph (you see content from your network).   Other companies can build interest graphs too, get creators on the platform and then spin up ad networks.  This business strategy is obviously oversimplified, but it’s much more difficult for you to convince all your friends and family to switch from the Facebook family of apps to a completely new family of apps.

That said, a ban is not really in Meta’s control, and so I don’t think it’s worth spending much time on. 

The B2C Bull Case – AI drives higher engagement on more modalities

This is a two-stakeholder case.  Stakeholder 1 is for Meta and Stakeholder 2 is for creators.

For Meta, better AI drives deeper engagement on things you care about.  A better Reels algorithm keeps you on Reels longer. A better Instagram algorithm keeps you on Instagram longer.  Also, a better Meta AI assistant that leverages more and more of your data is more useful to you.  A WhatsApp bot that you use as a conversation partner, a thinking partner, or travel agent, or a smart assistant like Alexa is a very useful tool.  “Deep engagement” doesn’t necessarily mean increasing the total-time-spent in the family of apps.  It also means the quality of that time, or, better yet, time-not-regretted-using-Meta’s-services.  AI like LLaMa driving higher-value engagement in the apps leads to your turning to Meta more and more and more.  It’s similar to Prime driving higher-value delivery predictability drove customers to turn to Amazon more and more and more.

For creators, AI tools to create content faster and cheaper will transform Meta’s recommendation algorithms.  Right now, after about an hour on Reels, the content quality falls off a cliff. The limiting factor for Meta’s recommendation algorithms isn’t quantity content, it’s quality content.  These AI tools, especially in multi-modality like LLaMa 3, will drive way higher quality content and, more importantly, raise the benchmark for “average.”

Especially in short-form content, B-roll is valuable.  More than half the time, a Reel is some audio with some text placed on top of B-roll, and that’s okay for many circumstances.  Grade-A storytelling also deserves a place on the Meta platform, as they previously attempted with IGTV (which they then rolled into Instagram), but that’s fundamentally not Reels.  Reels is fundamentally a quick hit. It’s not storytelling; it’s more like improv. 

The other element for Reels creators where generative AI will crush it is in editing.  AI that can intelligently edit the Reel will drastically increase the number of Reels posted to the platform because the barriers will entry will be reduced to near-zero. 

With each improvement, Meta will keep users on the platforms longer, which will increase ad inventory.  Which brings me to the next point: filling that inventory with ads.

Case 2: Incremental Increases Drive New Ad Spend

Imagine you, overnight, doubled your operational capacity and it was completely free.  What’s the next thing you’d do?

You’d spend more on marketing and sales to drive new customers.

Enter: open-source LLaMa.

Meta has every incentive in the world to open source their large language model, just as they did when they open sourced React.

React is a development framework that allows teams to build desktop and mobile web applications as well as cross-platform native mobile applications.  Essentially, one code base can power desktop web, desktop mobile, native iOS, and native Android.

Naturally, the Facebook apps are built on React, but, now, much of the internet is as well.  We build most of our applications on React.  One Click RFP is built with React.  It’s the fastest, easiest, and most scalable way to build an application.

What’s Meta’s incentive to open-source React? 

The easier and cheaper it is to spin up a new software company, then, naturally, the more money will be spent on marketing that company.  Imagine I raise $1,000,000 to build a tech company. If I spend $500,000 to build an app, I have a way smaller marketing budget than if I spend $100,000 to build an app.

Making LLaMa open-source is the exact same thing, except with AI agents. 

All indications are pointing to AI agents, powered by large language models like LLaMa, automating or augmenting many tasks for companies in the not-so-distant future.  If there are no good open-source LLMs to build on top of, then companies must use closed-source LLMs, which will be 10X – 100X more expensive over time.  Instead, if Meta can democratize the LLM technology, then they make the tech table-stakes in your business.

AI agents will probably double many company’s operational capacities, and it’ll have the biggest impact on small businesses which are resource-constrained.  Making the technology free-to-use and free-to-modify is a rising tide, except that, crucially, Meta will see a large percentage of the gains in ads.

Case 3: Open Source LLaMa drives free R&D

By making the best models open-source, the developer community, for free, will tinker with it and will publish their findings. That’s how open source works.

This is the crucial feedback loop for Meta.  They do the heavy lifting. They buy the GPUs. They take the technology from 0 to 1, but they are allowing the developer community to take it from 1 to infinity, but, since it’s theirs, they can use all those gains.

In short, cases 1 and 2 continue to grow thanks to case 3, and, with their scale, their ROI will be measured in tens or hundreds of billions.

Feature image credit: ChatGPT, with the following prompt: “An image representing Meta, the company. The company is on an upward trajectory. The style is friendly and approachable and in one that wins hearts and minds.“

“Where is Apple?” Twitter was asking.  

Open AI is publishing models. Amazon has models. Facebook has models.  Microsoft has models. Google has models.  Where are Apple’s models?

Then, now two months since Vision Pro came out, people are saying they are not using the devices as frequently as they expected.  Uh oh! Vision Pro isn’t the next iPhone! 

Has Apple lost it?

Tech twitter can sort of turn themselves upside down at times.  I don’t own any Apple stock, but I think there are a few reasons to be bullish on Apple.

Reason 1: LLMs

I’ll sing this from the rooftops: Large Language Models ((LLMs) are not competitive advantages. They’re table stakes, and they’ll be open source.((Every business will have their own and it won’t cost a fortune to train.))

The competitive advantage in an LLM is and will be the data that goes into them.  

I do not understand why startups are raising $100M+ to buy GPUs to train LLMs. They’re all being trained on the same data! 

People go to the Common Crawl, download all the data (it’s free and open source), and then they use that to train the LLM.  

Right now, LLMs are scaling based off adding parameters to the model and throwing more hardware at it, but the tech will get more and more refined over the next few years, and we’ll reach the upper limit of what the LLMs can do.  

Then, that tech will be open sourced (probably by Meta).  That’ll be table stakes.

Then, the challenge in LLM output performance will be the proprietary data that you can put through it.

For Apple, it doesn’t serve a single business purpose to begin competing with Open AI and or Amazon or Meta in the large-scale LLM space. They don’t currently have a cloud offering, they don’t really depend much on ads (their ad algorithm in the App Store is rudimentary at best), and they don’t seem committed to building out a developer cloud (although I think it would be great for their stock price).  So why spend the money? Why spend the energy?

Where LLMs will become very useful for Apple will be within Siri and turning Siri into an agent.

Imagine: Apple has access to your email and reads that you are going on a business trip to Nashville in a few weeks.  It knows you usually fly Southwest to Nashville and that you like to stay at the Marriott downtown.  It asks if you want some travel plans prepared.  It finds the hotel in the Marriott app and flights in the Southwest app, of course, corresponding with your calendar.  It pre-orders an Uber to the airport leaving you the desired amount of time at the airport before your flight.  All you do is press “book.”

Developers are building prototype agents for this type of thing now using large language models.  Of course, they’re just prototypes, and making them work would require your giving up all your life’s data, so you probably won’t use just any random company’s service. 

But you might use Apple’s.

Apple wants all this to take place on-device((they’ll market it as private and secure)), which means that they need to make the LLMs small enough and energy-efficient enough that, instead of running on an NVIDIA GPU in the cloud, they run on an iPhone in your pocket. 

Apple’s strategy isn’t to train large models to run on huge GPUs in the cloud.  They need to compress models to run on-device.

These types of updates don’t magically appear. They’re incremental.  Incremental hardware upgrades that will drive new software capabilities.

Did you catch that?

To get incredible advancements like the above, they need hardware upgrades.

My expectation here is that Apple isn’t behind at all.  Quite the opposite: they’re solving their actual problem. 

How to convince people that used to be on 2-year upgrade cycles and are now on 4-year upgrade cycles to go back to 2-year cycles.

For Apple, AI is software that drives consumer purchases and compressed upgrade timelines of hardware. The iPhone isn’t going anywhere.  In fact, I’d argue I’m more bullish about it now than I was 3 years ago.

Which brings us to their new product, Vision Pro.

Reason 2: Vision Pro

Tech twitter wants to think that the Vision Pro hasn’t taken off like the iPhone, and is not on a path to, therefore it’ll be DOA.  This assumes that Vision Pro is the “next iPhone,” which it’s not.  Vision Pro, in its current state, might become the next Mac, but right now it’s being billed as a Mac addition.

People seem to forget that the iPhone wasn’t huge until the 4th gen.  Gen 1 iPhone was slow, only worked on AT&T, and didn’t have an App Store.  It was, however, still better than most phones on the market, albeit radically different.

The other advantage the iPhone had was that everyone already had a cell phone and had gotten used to using it. The iPhone was a huge leap forward in tech that already existed, so it’s easy to get people to switch.

Vision Pro isn’t that.  Nobody outside of gaming is seriously using VR or AR technology.  Outside of Meta’s products, I can’t think of any that have come close to being commercial successes.  Jason Calicanis, an angel investor in Silicon Valley, refers to VR as being “Try, ‘Oh My!’, Goodbye.”  Meaning you try it, are shocked by how cool it is, then put it down and never pick it up again.

This happened to me, too. I had an HTC VR setup which I loved for about 7 days. Then, I put it in my closet and threw it away 3 years later.

Vision Pro as a Mac addition, however, is a different value proposition.  It’s a B2B device.  Tech hobbyists may have purchased it, but its initial use cases are for businesses.

An elevator technician can do training and collaborate with folks at the home office using Vision Pro. A plumber can do the same. 

An expert in London can help troubleshoot a real-world problem in Bali thanks to Vision Pro. 

Recently, a surgeon successfully completed the first surgery done fully within Vision Pro.

An executive can use Vision Pro on an airplane to review company financials without anyone peering over their shoulder.

That use case is enough for right now! That’s all that’s needed. It doesn’t need gaming (which I heard is great) or sports (which is super promising) or movies (which I heard is fantastic), it just needs businesses.

Maybe, someday, Vision Pro will become Vision and will be a B2C device, but, right now, all it needs are enough businesses to buy it to continue to further fund hardware development.  Mac started as a business device, and it still is.  Over time, however, people bought Macs for personal use.  

The other aspect to Vision Pro being different than the iPhone is that it’s being geared toward developers first and consumers second, similar to the Mac. The Mac was a platform meant for pro users and dev users to build on top of first, then for consumers to leverage second. The iPhone, however, shipped locked-down. There were zero developer capabilities.  

These vastly different strategies have vastly different KPIs. In one, you’re looking for business-focused applications and clients. You compromise quantity sold for price per unit (see: $3500 for the device). With B2C products, your assumption is that you’re already leveraging economies of scale in manufacturing and production, so you aim to make up the balance with quantity sold. 

Feature image credit: ChatGPT with the following prompt “An image that’s a clever feature image for a blog titled ‘the bull case for Apple'”

I started by paying around $40 to clone my voice. The audio I sent the company was terrible. Just absolutely terrible. It sounded like I was recording my voice from across a room. 

They cleaned up the audio and really created an amazing narrator. It sounded almost exactly like me (which was beneficial as I listened back, as I don’t like the sound of my own voice).

Then, I copied and pasted my book into the platform, and I pressed “Submit.”

It didn’t go well.   There were all sorts of formatting errors and other elements that needed cleaned up.

So, I went through the whole book, inside the app I used, and I cleaned it up. 

I pressed “Submit” again.

It was better, but it wasn’t perfect. There were logical errors. Emphasis was occasionally placed on the wrong words.

For example, the book uses sub headers.  In print, sub headers are noted as being a different font and weight, then, the paragraphs follow.  In the AI audiobook, the sub header was copied-and-pasted, but it didn’t contain a period, so the AI read it and the first sentence of the first paragraph as a run-on sentence.

Witty remarks I made in the book were awkward.  At one point, in regards to using data, I say “It’s the laziest person on your team. Hopefully it is, anyway.”  A human reads that as a witty remark.  The AI said it in a completely flat tone.  It took 5-10 different attempts to achieve the result I wanted.

Then, the platform, an admittedly very new platform, had a bug. I couldn’t export files. Then another bug. I couldn’t generate new audio. Then another bug.  I couldn’t export files (again). Nothing major, but the bugs stopped me from accomplishing the task at hand.

All-in, I spent about 45 days on the process, on and off.  It was probably 10 hours of work.

Had I recorded the audio in a sound studio and hired someone on Upwork to edit and export the audio, it would’ve cost me upwards of $600, taken 2.5 hours to record, and maybe an hour or two to manage the project with the freelancer.

Instead, I spent only $150 but 10 hours.

The AI voice clone was so magical that I thought “of course it’ll work to record the book.”  From there on, my usage of the AI was like a toddler crawling around and bumping into furniture.   I made progress, but not without frequent and sudden setbacks.

In my use of many new AI tools promising the world, there’s a common thread: the AI is literal magic at doing a task, then it sucks at some other part of the task that’s equally important but seems “basic,” and you’re left picking up the pieces.

It seems like I often spend as much or more time finagling the AI than I would’ve spent simply doing the task the old-fashioned way.  I don’t have a problem working with platform customer support.  Hell, sometimes, our code has bugs! It’s only when they promise you the world, then seemingly underdeliver.

I was in a discussion with a friend recently who had a similar experience with an audiobook but using a different service.  In our discussion, I called it “the 50% of AI.” 

Sometimes, the AI is nothing short of magic, and it’s a 150% improvement on whatever currently exists. Other times, it is a drag, it’s buggy, and it’s irritating, which is a  -100% improvement.

Is it an improvement? Yes.

If I did another audiobook, would I now know what to do and it would be way easier? Yes.

Is it a perfect-fit solution that changes the way everyone operates forever and ever? No.

If you work with ChatGPT frequently, you’ll notice this phenomenon.  Sometimes, it’s easier to just do the work yourself.

Over time, I’m sure the -100% will get resolved, but I think the question is when?

Thanks to Miranda Wagner, Shannon Waller and Terise Ryan for reading drafts of this essay.

Feature image credit: DALL-E accessed through ChatGPT with the following prompt: An image of a computer with headphones on in a sound studio recording an audiobook. The sound studio is an old 70’s studio with lots of smoke and wood panel walls. There’s also the room with the sound booth. The computer is smoking a cigarette. illustrative style. The computer is in front of a microphone. There’s a human working on the sound board.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Feedback, at its most basic nature, is someone else giving you their opinion on a thing with the intention of helping you.

However, framed in the manner of an opinion, no matter the intention, I find the framing of the initial statement to be ludicrous.

“All opinions are a gift.”  How laughable.

Intention, however, does matter. Individuals with positive intentions toward you are valuable, even if their ideas are not, this time around.

Many opinions are misinformed. Many lack knowledge of the full system. Many are shrouded in personal stories and past experiences and battle scars.

Informed, valuable opinions are worth their weight in gold. Someone who routinely has an informed, valuable opinion about a consistent topic is considered a “mentor” or “expert.”

Feedback from mentors, experts, those with relevant past experiences, and those who have been where you are, oftentimes, I find to be invaluable. I’ve never had better shortcuts in the path to get where I am today than brilliant feedback.

On the other hand, I have never wasted more time than when I took someone’s feedback as gospel, and then discovered that the feedback was either misinformed or only applied to that one person, client, or account.

So, not all feedback is a gift, just like not all opinions are a gift. 

Great feedback can be nothing short of life-changing, but that is rare.

Good feedback can lend itself to a marginal improvement.

But not all feedback is a gift. Some is merely a distraction.

Thanks to Miranda Wagner, Shannon Waller, and Terise Ryan for reading drafts of this essay.

Clients for most of the tech industry were people and businesses that worked in other industries.  Tech was a small space, only a few players made the foundational building blocks, commonly referred to today as the “picks and shovels,” to run a tech company, and so growing the market position meant building products and services for everyone else.

As the tech industry grew and became what it is today, more and more companies were built for the sole purpose of helping other tech companies. Amazon, the consumer-facing company, built Amazon Web Services.  Microsoft, the company best-known for Office and Windows, built Azure.   I’m a firm believer that all B2C SaaS companies eventually become B2B, but the magic of AWS and Azure was that it served tech.

Most tech businesses have the best legal economic model in history.   They build something once, the cost of which can be expensive, then they sell that thing lots of times with very low marginal cost.  This is true in both software and hardware.  In software, writing the code and getting the application working costs lots of money, but selling it to a new person costs virtually nothing.  When building a chip, getting the fabs and the manufacturing lines built may take several months and cost hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars, but the manufacturing cost of each chip is minute.

The high fixed-costs, low marginal-cost nature of tech is the primary reason why tech companies are so investable, they’re so scalable, and they’re so profitable.

Those three reasons are exactly why a new economy emerged: companies that build software for tech companies.  As the total amount of new capital in VC has grown, more companies have gotten funded each year.  As more companies have gotten funded, the total addressable market (TAM) of tech companies has grown.  As the TAM of tech companies has grown, more companies have decided to build software for tech companies.

We’ve entered an era where there are dozens of platforms for to-do apps and note taking apps and blog applications, for example, targeted exclusively at employees of tech companies. There are coding assistants for your coding assistants.  Email apps to decrease your time spent doing email each day.  AI for everything in tech.

Tech, as an industry, continues to grow so much that are now three kinds of tech companies: tech companies that build foundational building blocks (picks and shovels) for other tech companies, tech companies that build products for everyone else, and tech companies that build software for other tech companies.

Due to their being in tech, tech companies are more willing to try new tools, so more software startups serving tech companies stay around longer.  Some solve a real need, get traction, and become a standalone survivor of the startup Olympics.  Many, however, fade off in existence, losing to the next hot app that takes their place.  Worse, yet, some lose not because a new tech company outcompeted them, but, instead, because the “old way” was simply better.  The latest hot tech to-do app that charges $1/day loses out to Apple Notes.  The email app that charges $1/day loses to Outlook.  The paid calendar app which has one cool feature gets copied by an incumbent with better distribution and is rendered, effectively, obsolete overnight.

What’s gotten lost in all this tech hype is building tech for everyone else.  Nobody is building new project management applications for construction companies.  Practice management systems for dentists haven’t been revamped in decades. Manufacturing ERP systems could be so much better, but nobody has taken the time to understand what’s really needed to create a 10X better user experience.

I was recently at a conference with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs in the world. The only caveat is that those entrepreneurs are, largely, nontechnical.  They buy, but don’t build, technology.  They’re terrified of AI because they don’t understand it and because they don’t know where to start.  They don’t even know what to Google to get started.

I was thinking about their fear.  If they’re some of the most advanced, successful entrepreneurs in the world and they’re scared of AI, how are most other nontechnical entrepreneurs feeling? Why are they feeling that way?

Tech, as an industry, has been growing so fast that the industry forgot that a large part of its original client base was everyone who wasn’t in tech. 

There are plenty of big opportunities to be a tech company serving tech companies, but I think there are opportunities just as big, if not bigger, in serving everyone else.

Thanks to Bill Bloom, Shannon Waller, and Terise Ryan for reading drafts of this essay.