Best Of: AI Brain Fry: What AI Is Doing to Our Brains

Hey everyone! It's Ivan, your friendly neighborhood podcast editor, back on the mic. If you're wondering why you are hearing my voice instead of the usual hosts, it is because Mel and Curt managed to release a grand total of 3 episodes before deciding they were exhausted and needed to go on vacation again. So while they are off on a beach somewhere trying to remember how to relax without looking at a screen, I am trapped in the editing cave Taking over hosting duties once again. Today, we have a best-of episode covering a topic that has completely taken over our lives: artificial intelligence. AI was supposed to save us time. Instead, for a lot of entrepreneurs, it has quietly created more work, more decisions, and a whole lot more pressure. This episode is not anti-AI, but it is a very real conversation about using these tools without letting them take over your voice, your judgment, or your sanity. Let's get into it.

Welcome to the Soul Proprietor Podcast. I'm Curt Kimpton.

And I'm Melody Edwards.

Each week we dive into the ethical questions that keep entrepreneurs awake at night.

Whether you're building your own company or exploring life's big questions, you are welcome here.

To kick things off, we are combining 2 segments from episode 6 to look back at the early shockwaves of AI. Curt shares the exact moment he realized the ethical nightmare we were stepping into, which involved generating a perfectly believable Taylor Swift email asking fans for donations. Mel also gets real about her own fears of deepfakes and scammers. She explains how she handles the ethics of AI by creating a persona called the Melbot, ensuring that when a robot writes her content, her audience knows it isn't actually her.

Today we are going to talk about one of my favorite and least favorite topics all wrapped into one, which is AI, artificial intelligence.

Ooh. All right.

That actually is, it's a fun topic for a lot of reasons. And I know we're going to get into those, but it's funny because this topic was really hot about 2 years ago. Like it was so hot, red hot. And I'm wondering How different this conversation would have been 2 years ago than it is today.

I know it would have, for me, it would have been very different because 2 years ago, you know, right after ChatGPT came out, what, like really came out publicly in November or December. And I think by January I was fully in panic mode that my business was destroyed and my life was over because people don't need humans anymore. And that's why I started really getting into it and diving into it because I wanted to understand what was going to destroy my life and business. And then I got really interested in it because I realized, oh, it's not technology necessarily. It's creative conversations with a robot at that point. And there's— it's so many things. It's not just one thing, but it became a fascination for me. So back then, it would have been very fear-based.

Where would you have been in that conversation, do you think?

I think it was mostly wonder, just wonder. The awe that came from what AI could do and the speed that it could do it. I think the first time that I really grappled with, like, holy cow, this is way bigger than I ever thought it could be, because I knew AI would be big.

Yeah.

But someone said, watch this. I'm going to write a song from Michael Jackson. I'm going to write a new Michael Jackson song, and I'm going to do the lyrics for it, and it's going to be written in his voice. I'm like, okay, okay. And I'm going to pretend that I'm a songwriter for Michael Jackson. And like 10 seconds later, they had a song brand new in his tone. Like, I totally believed it. And I was like, oh crap.

But the next thing I did was I went home and I talked to my kids and I said, guys, I'm going to write an email as if I live in Nigeria.

Okay?

I'm a scam artist. that I for years have been using a Nigerian prince as my main email.

These are your life lessons that you teach your kids daily, correct?

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

I said, I just need you guys to understand what world we're living in now. I always gave myself away as a Nigerian scam artist because words weren't right and I would say silly things and it would, it would always be tipped off that there is no Nigerian prince because you could just read it. Here's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to write a letter as if I am Taylor Swift, and I'm going to write a letter to a specific fan. By the way, you're all specific fans amongst the millions that I can blast this out to. And I'm going to write a letter about how something in my life has gone wrong and I need donations from my fans to be able to help. And then I just typed in a paragraph and it spit out perfect language. of Taylor Swift asking for help.

And it was so believable. It was so believable. And at the very end, there's an asterisk that said, this is for entertainment purposes only, please not use. And I'm like, so don't copy that part. And I said, imagine if I just email that out to 10 billion people, like, you know, just, just got my big old list. You know, obviously people who aren't Taylor Swift fans are going to delete it, but the ones that are—

Yeah, that diehard.

Would they click the link and donate money?

The Swifties would.

Or send me a gift card. So that moment was when I realized there's an ethics problem, but I realized this is lightning in a bottle, but it's out of the bottle.

You can argue with it to get it to do what you want eventually, but it's so interesting. They just have, and it's always changing all the time. So whatever I say today is going to be different tomorrow, but there are basic things that I now understand after that data science science conference that make me feel confident that I understand. And one of them is that it will always hallucinate. It will never be perfect. I think of the robot, as I call it, as eventually being perfect, 100% accurate, being able to get to that point. And what I realized is that it will never be able to be that because there's too many missing pieces. So the answer that you might need from it Is going to be different than what I might need from it.

And even though, like, even if I trained it to be Melody, there is going to be too many missing pieces of my life that have influenced who I am today that I could never possibly minute by minute go through my whole life and tell it all the things to give it enough context about me. So it seems like it knows me. It does not know me and it cannot be me, of course. And the other thing is I learned that you really have to There's something called a knowledge graph, which I didn't know about before this conference as well. Apparently, it's popular in the science world. But it's like a way that you set up your data so you can train it in a very clean way.

Oh.

And so you need to give it references to why something— so for instance, it would be Melody equals founder, Home Service VA equals company or whatever. And you have to give it— But the more information you give it, the harder it gets to keep control. But the more that you clean the information, the better your output is going to be. The problem is there's no way to clean the information without humans because there's so many stupid little things in our data that a robot is not going to understand. I'm just— can I just keep calling it the robot? Because I—

Yeah, it works for me. It's really working for me. That's great. This is actually the stuff I really want to get into with you. Because this is where I feel— and I know I started this conversation by talking about how my first thought was, how do unethical people use this sort of power?

Oh, me too. The deepfakes. I was so worried about the election and the deepfakes. And I didn't see that as being a big deal as much as it had been the first time around this election. On the back end, it was, but not with the way that I thought it was going to be.

Yeah. And I actually have some personal fears of somebody using deepfakes and things against me personally.

Why do you think you're so special? There are millions of people we can deepfake.

Well, I actually have somebody in communication with me who is anonymous. I do not know who they are. Oh no. And they're making all sorts of threats. And it's really concerning to me about what— they haven't done anything, but they keep threatening and they want me to send cryptocurrency and stuff.

Oh my God. And that's the Nigerian king right there.

Well, the problem is they know things about me. That I'm sure are on the internet.

Yeah.

But it's pretty, pretty big bummer. So obviously that is a concern I have. And it's ironic because the moment I knew that AI came out was my first thought is that this could be used poorly and properly. And I'm not like so special that like, I didn't think I'd be targeted, but I was kidding.

But also now that you've said that, that makes me really sad. Who do I have to go after? What do you want me to do? I'll use AI for justice.

I'm doing everything I can. The communication form they're using is email, but it's going through an email server that's like, I guess when you the tagline, the email provider, it's actually designed to be an anonymous throwaway thing. So anyway, I get to the question part here of when you know how to clean the data and put in these good things so that it can understand, and it has to be done by human, obviously you're not going to provide what happened to you as a little girl that shaped you.

Yeah.

You just can't hit every single thing.

Yeah.

And, and I don't think I really want a robot to be that close to me.

You don't want a Curt bot? I have a— the Mel bot is my most fun invention.

Well, I do actually, uh, you know, we're talking about wanting to clone ourselves and I— that part makes me a little bit jealous.

And I don't mean a custom GPT. I just mean a persona that is Mel, Who writes, when I write AI, if I do, it's usually funny and it will be from the mailbot, not from me.

In our next combined segment, we look at the whiplash of growing up with rotary phones and suddenly living in a world where you don't even know what is real on video anymore. Mellenkert discusses the productivity paradox, pointing out that all this AI investment hasn't actually given us more free time. Instead, It has led to relentless context switching, a fragmented workday, and what they call AI brain fry. Mel admits she doesn't want to work more. She just wants a month-long vacation to become herself again.

I feel like our future has always been— our generation's future has always been a moving target.

Yeah.

For example, when you were in school and you thought about what you would do for a living— policeman, fireman, doctor, nurse, lawyer—

Window cleaner.

Grocery store attendant, window cleaner. Like, all of those things were kind of like rote. Like, we understood that. But software engineer or AI developer or like self-manufactured computer chip maker, like, all these things were like, sorry, what?

Influencer.

Influencer.

Yeah.

The wording would be perfect. And the AI has just changed the whole world. Like we can watch a video. It used to be, I saw it on video, it happened, it's real. Now we don't even know what's real anymore and we don't even know how to work anymore. And so that's why I was kind of making that comment about, yeah, as I've been moving, as my work has been changing and as my focus on what matters in the world is changing. Like, it's a week-to-week situation, and it's a lot. It's just a lot.

We were not meant to move at this pace and learn at this level, and it's actually not making life easier right now. I see a lot of people who are really excited about AI, and we're building the agents and the bots and all the things, but Is it actually making our life easier right now? Now, you might say, well, it's making things possible that I never could have done before, which is true.

Sure.

But now we can do like hundreds and thousands of things that were not possible before. Like, it's not like one thing wasn't possible, and now that we have it, we can stop and relax. Everything is possible now, in a way. Like, we have to learn how to think bigger and creatively in a way that we never have had to.

You're right, but we're also going to start really seeing some atrophy in thinking. And the reason is because when they brought the calculator out and they were so nervous that no one would ever know how to do math ever again, they just said, oh, well, we'll just start doing calculus. We'll make it harder and you don't know which sequence to push the buttons in. Then we made a graphing calculator and then we got computers. The fact is that yes, you've still got to know how to do some math, but certainly we won't be able to do math the way that Maybe our grandparents would've done it. Like, it was just so manual, easy.

We don't need to.

Yeah, we don't need to. And, you know, I mentioned it earlier, but I don't think that we got past this social media and sort of technological debt that has crept into our own mental health. And so now we have added this exponential way of something that it moves fast because it will always move faster. It will always feel fast because as fast as it is today, it's been learning all this time and that piles on top and the speed just goes up so fast that tomorrow will feel faster. It will always— and it's like that Willy Wonka thing where he's going down the tunnel and he's talking and it's like the lights start going and you're like, whoa. And then he's like moving at like what seems like the speed of light. I feel like that's what's happening in our life right now.

Yeah. I think what worries me about that is like when people are really optimistic about it, Because they start us off with, did you learn how to write boob on your calculator growing up? You can admit it.

Yes, I did. And I was so bad.

Yes. Something to go to hell for, you know? But like, that's how we get into things like this is like we come at it like, oh, let's make a dog that looks realistic with our face on it or something. So it's all the fun things. And then pretty much it's going to take over all of the jobs and then it's going to take over our thinking if we Yeah. Like, we don't have to let it, but as a country right now and as a world, I don't think we're united in any way to make it not take over our life. It's not like we're gonna suddenly come back to nature. I hope we do, but I don't think we're suddenly gonna have so much more time as entrepreneurs that we're gonna be able to just relax because the AI does it for us. That's what they sell, and it's not gonna happen She had a slide that I just found on this.

It's the reality check, the productivity paradox, which is the excitement about AI was that people invested billions. Enterprise companies now have it mandated within their systems. And it promised frictionless productivity, right? But what's actually happened is she calls it microexhaustion, which is the automation dividend. So why aren't we working less? The daily reality is a fragmented workday, relentless context switching, An unprecedented cognitive load. Like, humans were not designed for this. And so she calls it the AI brain fry phenomenon, which is that there's 2 minutes is the average time between interruptions, and the time saved by AI is not a lot, and the task scope always expands, and the output expectations get raised.

Hmm.

And we deploy multiple tools to do it. Like, we only had cloud before. Now we have cloud cowork, cloud code. We can do all sorts of different things with it, right? And we're not short of information. We're short of uninterrupted thinking time, which is what I say all the time. We do not have good thinking time. At least for me, I feel like I'm moving towards a finished thing most of the time. And I never am actually, because it's correct.

Whoa.

You just hit me right between the eyes. I've told you, I'm really religious about meditating, religious in the sense that I do it every day. I just realized I haven't meditated all week this week and it's Friday. And you talk about uninterrupted thinking time. For me, I was about to say, you know what I really need is that uninterrupted non-thinking, just clearing.

That's what they mean though. That's what thinking means. It's like actually not thinking.

Well, yes, but also I think there is dedicated, like, I'm not being assisted. I'm just sitting down and like really kind of weighing my options on something. Because there are other ways of meditating. There's ways where you like sort of meditate on something.

Sure.

Whereas like meditating, like with like a clean mind.

So unclogging your mind, but also when you bike ride, you have uninterrupted time, right?

Yeah. Usually you're thinking about how you're going to get over this rock around this turn and how you're going to—

Right. So in a way that's a little bit meditative. It's not the same.

It's not the same, but it is helpful. And I think I actually do still ride my bike every day, and I still think that there's a lot of benefit to that, but maybe that's why I'm doing okay right now. But my point was, is that I used to get up early and start my day with a clear mind. You know what's happened to me? I wake up, I don't have time for meditation. Like right now, no one's going to bother me. I have got to use this time to get as much coding done as I possibly can. Guess what, Melody? That is an ingredient to the problems that I'm talking about, this pressure.

Yeah, it is a pressure. I haven't thought of it as a pressure. I think of it as my mind— like, in my mind, I'm addicted to the idea of finishing the thing. And so if I wake up and I'm like, I gotta get this thing done— and actually, baby time has interrupted my ability to do that because I won't wake up earlier right now than I am. And at night, I don't have the brainpower. I'm actually the laziest I've ever been in a way because I've allowed myself to let go of some things because my cognitive load, I know it's too much. I can't handle it. The thing that her answer, her solution was actually to create a chief of staff for yourself.

And I've heard of people who have, of course, they have— I don't know if you have one, but do you have like your board of directors as in AI and all that?

Oh, no, no, no, not as AI. I have an actual board of directors.

No, no.

I should set that up.

Having like Elon Musk and God as your board of directors, you know, like how they have those people will do that. I find it too artificial, but she says the chief of staff filters the information, coordinates complexity, prepares decisions, and protects your time and attention. That's like what it's supposed to do. And that's basically if you use AI as this, you can do that. Actually, I've wanted to build true AI employees since 2 years ago. There was no capacity at that point, right? Now there is, but I don't see people working less. None of my friends who are deep into AI, they are not working less.

No, more, working more.

More. And I hate that I think this way, but I don't want to work more. The whole point is I'm supposed to be working less. I'm supposed to model less. And I know the trick. The trick is I'm almost there. I'm almost done with this thing. And then I'm going to be able to take my break.

I've wanted a vacation, a month vacation. For a year, Curt. I've talked about it every month.

What do you want to do when you're not working more? You want to vacation all the time? Is that what you're saying?

No, I want my time back. I want my head back so that I can decompress. And I feel like at this point, a week is not enough. 2 weeks is not enough. I want a month to become Melody again, where I am just free. Like, I've had those periods of time where I'm just free. I don't think about the business. It's running.

Things are cool and I can get my creativity back and work on projects, build things, like just become more creative again. I'm using creativity every day, just like you are, but it's not the kind of creativity that we actually need.

If you want to know what AI brain fry actually looks like, this next segment from episodes 31 and 36 is for you. Curt gets incredibly vulnerable about his own addiction to the speed of AI. He talks about working up to 15 hours a day and maxing out a $200 a month Claude 20x Max account just to keep up with the code he is generating. It became such a frenzied, addictive cycle of burning through AI credits that his wife, Rachelle, had to pull him aside and remind him of the commitment he made on a podcast to stop working after dinner.

And it all relates to what I heard yesterday. For how much I know about AI, and my first year was all like Just doing so much stuff that didn't get used. And now I'm like very much like, oh, but now I'm smart about it and I'm going to just focus on the things that I can do. And yeah, we can do a month of work in a day now, in a couple of hours sometimes, and invent things. But what's the problem with that? Like, we get it done and then we take the rest of the month off? No.

Yeah, I have some really strong, even visceral feelings right now as you're talking about it because there's so much that hits home on it. And I don't even know where to begin. I think that's part of my burnout is that I'm in a web. I'm not on a line. And I think that that's where maybe I'll start here just by describing, there's a lot of pressure on me right now to get a lot of things done. The world's moving fast. I need to stay relevant in my software world by accomplishing a lot. Some of it's internal stuff, some of it's external stuff.

I'm not talking about internally, Curt, internal business stuff. I need scoreboards that I've got to build. I've got to, do planning and all sorts of stuff internally. And then I've got the external stuff I need to turn out to my customers. I got to get done. And a lot of it requires vision and it's all connected. And the pressure that I'm feeling to get it done is that there's people waiting on me to get stuff done.

Can I just ask why it's all on you?

Yeah. One of the projects I'm working on, the one that's taking up the most of my time, it's a pretty top secret project and it does require me to build out a very extensive prototype so that it can be architected, it can be beat up in product.

Because it's your brain.

Yeah, it's, I need to get it outta my brain.

Yeah.

But also as the executive of the company, I don't have a COO and I don't have, I'm actually operating right now as a CTO as well. And so technology, so yeah, operation officer, technology officer, just for people listening. And so what's happening is, is that these scoreboards that have to be built that are more executive level. That ties multiple departments together. Like, you know, with AI, I can just knock this out. And so I'm building this company-wide app that takes all of our data sources, put 'em all together into this gorgeous, wonderful tool that right now is completely broken because I need to make sure the data's all integrity and that I'm following everyone else's workflows that they naturally follow to make sure that the data properly follows. Anyway, my point is, is that I'm kicking serious butt right now, but I just had to upgrade Claude 5X Max. To— I just went to 20x max.

How much is that per month?

It's $200 a month.

Oh, that's the one. Oh, 'cause I'm gonna have to be bumping it up. I was gonna get a second Claude account, but I think I need to bump up to that.

Yeah, you get quadruple their max amount for twice the price. It's a no-brainer. It's the best $200 I can spend as far as efficiency goes. But I'm maxing out the 5x account. That, if that tells you anything, like I'm working like 14, 15 hours a day. I am still working a bike ride in, but I'm really only getting a couple hours of sleep a night. I'm still trying to stay really connected to my family and my church community and the other stuff that I'm integrated into. But this web of stuff, I've got meetings I handle during the day.

I'm jumping in and out of Cloud Code. I'm maxing out my Cloud Code account. So then I, so I used to just let my session direct me back to other stuff when it was full. I'm like, nope, I can't have sessions timing out on me anymore. So I spend more money on it, which is, it's not that much more money, but I'm like, what the heck are you doing, man, that you're using this? So anyway, my point is, is that when you work in AI, specifically the way I am right now, and I think this carries through for every other version of using AI, is that if you're leaning on AI from a cowork perspective, like it's reading your folders, or in my case, I'm using Code and Cowork. It means that you are constantly having to make a decision constantly. I'm planning with AI. Is this plan good? I don't have time to read the whole plan.

We got to implement this thing. I got to move on. Like I told it what I wanted. I've learned several hacks. I don't even type hardly anymore. I just hold down a key. I use AI to like properly formulate my text. So it's not like crappy Siri dictation.

I'm using all sorts of hacks to get stuff done so fast. And what's happening is I went from 100 or 200 decisions a day to like 1,000 or 2,000 decisions a day. Then I go through and I find the bugs in it and I go through and I find the problems as I'm looking at the plan being carried out and I've got to dig into it. And then I got to zoom back out and zoom back in and zoom. And it's mentally just absolutely draining, but you're moving so fast that you're trying to keep up. And that is actually where between the pressure to produce, And the pressure to keep up with what the AI is doing. Like while it's building 2 weeks worth of software for me in 20 minutes, I'm bug testing what it just pushed. And now I'm coming back with the bugs and it's putting a whole new feature out for me.

And it's going so fast that, and then people come up to you and this connection you talked about earlier, how the way out of burnout is connection. My sweet wife, she comes up to me and she's like, I could tell like, you really got to slow down. Something's like, you're pretty worked. She's like, what can I do to help you? Would you rather build prototypes, sell software, build scoreboards? I don't say this out loud.

I know, I know.

But I'm thinking to myself, like, how are you going to help, hon? And after every meeting, Claude, I built it up so that Claude analyzes my meeting, tells me where all my efficiencies are, rates my meeting on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of accountability, efficiency. It gives me all this coaching at the end. I get done with my meetings, I spend about 5 minutes scanning it so I can be better and better at being more efficient with people. And it's burning me out, lady. So I do want to share, it's a pretty personal story and I'm going to do my best to not be emotional here because it's one of those things where you have your duty to entrepreneurship, you have your duty to your family, you have your duty to, you know, entrepreneurship is that your team and then your customers, and then you have your own personal aspirations and Everything else. So what happens is, is I get tied into this project and I'm moving fast. Like I've never moved so fast in my whole life. And I'm building stuff that I'm proud of and it's making a difference.

Like I'm making a real difference. I can see there's the product of what I'm building and then there's the beauty of the effect of that thing. And then there's the ballooning of, well, now that you can do this, now you have 7 new receptacles to build. So these Hydra heads just keep going. off and off and off. And so what will happen, and I don't know if Claude did this, so the way credits work in Claude is that you have a 5-hour session and you have a weekly session, and then you have the plan that you buy that basically determines how many credits you have that you can use. So you for the month have paid for 1 million credits, actually probably a lot more, but anyway, you have all these credits and in a 5-hour period you can use X number of those credits. It's a small number comparatively.

And shouldn't we say what a credit is? It's like one word, right? Or something.

I actually don't know. In fact, they've stopped sharing the numbers because it doesn't— you just watch like the bar.

Yeah. They have usage.

But I went ahead and got the 20x account. I paid for the nicest account Claude has because I'm maxing out the other one without even trying. So I went from pro to max and then I went to 20x max. So I'm moving those credits through and in a 5-hour session, you run out of credits. Now you can throw more money into the jar, even though you have plenty of credits still waiting for you, But you have to wait for your 5-hour session to be over. So you throw $20 in thinking, surely that will get me far. No, you can't do that because you chew through $20 worth of credits in like 10 minutes. Like it's not even anything.

So what happens is, is you basically, okay, if I'm awake today for 20 hours, then what'll happen is I get 4 5-hour sessions and I can position them so that I begin my session and work them all through. And then straddle another 2 sessions. And then, you know, so I got all the credits. I just have to use them at the right times anyway. So that's the trap I'm falling in. I'm watching this progress. I'm moving so fast. I have so much stuff.

Credits are the friction.

But credits are a big friction point because number one, there's another point too, where in Claude, if you're working with a bunch of complicated stuff, you can get new sessions going and they burn through your credits faster, but I could run 8 concurrent sessions without any issue. The problem is that when you get back to an init session that is ready for you to interact with it, you don't even remember what it's about anymore. You gotta go read it all. And so I don't have time to type anymore. I've moved it all to just voice-to-text with a really nice AI tool that like actually knows what my mumbling words are. And so I'm just ripping through prompts and building stuff so fast, but the exhaustion of brain context switching, 'cause you can't have one session working on something that another session's working on or else they'll step on each other. So you gotta get really different contexts all the time. And I'm just so happy.

But the problem is I'm not going to bed till 2:00 in the morning, but then I'm getting up at 4:00, maybe 6:00 or whatever. And Rachel is like, hey, are we married? Are we going to do the marriage thing? And she's not saying anything at first. At first, I brought it up before, and this is actually where it all came in. And I talked about in our podcast, I said, it's time to go to bed. I need to, after dinner, not go back to the computer. The problem is, this is where the rub is. You get on dinner and your 5-hour session just started up so you can now get stuff working at night. So what I would do is I would come in after dinner and I would just say, hey, I want you to run all these tests, test all my code, and I want you to not stop until you've done these 400 tests.

I went, first, tell me 400 tests that we need to do to check this. Great. Now I want you to do all 400 of those tests. So that would keep it busy and burn through credits, keep me moving. Anyway, I got to the point where Rachel pulled me aside and said, hey, I heard you on the podcast. You're not supposed to go in there after dinner. She was listening.

Hi, Rachel.

Yeah, I thought it was just my mom. No. So Rachel's listening. She said, hey, I heard you made a commitment on the podcast. You need to keep that commitment. And I'm like, you're right. I need to. And then I started breaking it again.

And then she pulled me aside again and she said, hey, this is really becoming a problem. I need you to be present with us. I need you to be with the family. Now I could justify a lot of things, But at the end of the day, it would've just been justification.

And it is.

I still struggle with it. This is very much an addict feeling.

It is addictive. I honestly feel the same way that I want to just keep— my mind is not with the family necessarily. It is with the— when I'm in the mode that you're in. Currently I am not, but I totally get that. I think most entrepreneurs understand that. And it's not fair to our families because They have to put up with it. And we act like this is normal, but it's addictive behavior.

So let's tie this to dreaming, because I think that's where the addiction for me has become the greatest. And that is, is that with AI, it's unlocked an ability to move. I mean, I can't write down my dream as fast as I can build it.

Dreams are thoughts. Dreams are ideas. And you're talking about executing on your dreams. You're not talking about the dreaming the dreams. Like, I still believe, even though I don't practice this, but I do believe it, that the act of dreaming is important. The act of just thinking is important. And I think AI is just another way to become a workaholic, but faster, and feel like we're making so much progress. Because technically, in the scheme of what our business plans are, right? We're flying faster and more forward than we ever thought imaginable very quickly.

That's intoxicating. It is, but it never stops.

Well, it stops when your credits are out. That's actually what's—

Doesn't. You could buy more credits. You get more addicted.

And a gambler can just go cash out more credits too. Actually, I'm just, I'm agreeing with you. The point is, is that they've gamified it to a point where If you want more dreams to come true, be here in 2 hours when your credits renew.

In this 4th segment, we dive into how AI is fundamentally changing the way our brains work. Curt and Mel discuss how the beautiful human act of dreaming used to just be about looking at the clouds and thinking, but AI has turned dreaming into instant, nonstop execution. They also point out a dangerous side effect: AI gives us disposable knowledge that is usually correct, but it speaks with absolute certainty and completely lacks the nuance and hesitation of a truly wise human.

Well, bring up this point now too, though. AI can make something quick and easy in terms of getting— it's always happy to oblige you with an answer, whether it's true or not. So now 90% of what it tells you is true, but you gotta filter out that other 10% and you gotta be vigilant on it. You go, wow, that's cool. I have this disposable knowledge that I can get really fast. I like that term that you used.

Yeah.

But not all of it's true and we're acting on it right now. In fact, sometimes I found with like Claude Code, for example, if I'm not careful and say, before you start doing anything, I'm entering plan mode right now. You can't say, I wonder what would happen if we did this and expect it to know that you're entering a plan mode. It'll like, boom, I just did it. And you're like, but that was a terrible idea. I wanted to talk about it first, you know? Anyway, this is a key element too, is that we get this information that's 90% correct, and that's wonderful statistically, except for you only have to get shot with 1 out of 100 bullets and you're dead.

And human information, I would say, is like 70% correct maybe. Yeah, but we understand how to read the cues of human behavior. We have a better gauge because if somebody is you know, has told us something that's untrue, but they say it with like, this is absolutely— yeah, with authority. How many times do we get fooled before we're like, yeah, they're just a blowhard, they always say stuff like that, you know? But we don't have— and we kind of have that with the robot, but not in the same way.

You know what, you just brought up a good point. When you know someone who isn't a blowhard and they're really wise, yeah, they actually usually— the wise people are the ones who go like, don't quote me on this, or yes, I really can't say with any for sure certainty. But I believe based off of the information I have, someone who's very wise speaks that way.

Yeah.

AI does not speak that way. No, AI would never like prompt itself to like deprecate whether or not it knows it. It always speaks with certainty and it's almost always right, which is where the real challenge is, right?

Does Claude ask you questions now about like where you want, what directions you want to go in for things?

Yes, it does. I think that's why I lean towards Claude so hard right now is because Claude actually does do a lot of like, I can go this far with the information you have, but now I need to know a couple more things. And I, and then I also like that you can enter in plan mode with it and like, okay, well, that's a good question. I have some questions for you. Let's pause on our progress and let's just beat this up a little bit.

Yeah.

But it's not perfect. That's for sure.

We have a lot of knowledge and wisdom at our older ages, elderly ages. Younger people, Gen Z does not have, I mean, they do, but they don't don't. They don't have the same knowledge, wisdom, information that you have at 50. You don't have the same at 30 that you do at 50, even though we felt like we did. And we don't know what 70-year-olds know, right? And so I'm wondering how it's gonna change looking at life experience and wisdom and like, the human experience of— you know what I mean?

Yeah. There's so much in that. You know what a 70-year-old doesn't have, along with all their wonderful wisdom?

What?

70-year-old does not have the energy, time, or ability to change, or time. Like, and a 70-year-old typically is gonna have— like, at my age, I wish I could be a sprinter. Yeah, but any fast-twitch muscle I was ever gonna get, it's done. Like, I might be able to add a 5 or 2.

With that attitude.

Well, it's just physiologically how it is. Now that all said, I'm still really energetic and I have tons of slow twitch fibers that like can, I can go all day. That's cool. I used to look at a 40-year-old as like, they called it over the hill and they're old. You know, here I am 40, I'm almost 50 years old. I don't know, like somewhere in 46, 47, something like that. Oh, wait, 6, 7.

I did this. Oh no.

Yeah, I just did it.

All right.

Anyway, I'm in that range and, um, I have way more energy than I ever thought someone my age would have when I was a kid. So I'm doing pretty darn good energy-wise. I think I'm still doing pretty good adaptation-wise. But what happens over age and what these kids have on older people is their ability, their resiliency, their adaptability.

Yeah.

Like the things that are changing, they have the energy to put right into it. So with that, they have this advantage. Like, I would just almost say like this God-given advantage to someone Who's younger.

If they utilize it.

But then there is this danger, and this is what I'm foreseeing right now. Yeah, I predict that all the technology we're building right now, the new generation comes up and can maintain it. But I think that there's going to be a really important distinction between those who understand it and those who understand it through AI. Yeah, which means that I can engineer stuff really well with the assistance of AI, And I can maintain some things, but I won't be able to be that, that much more innovative. And I'll be limited by the innovation that AI can afford to it. And if there ever becomes a point where someone needs to be able to do it without AI, I, you know, and just example here for us is I need to do the math without a calculator. If you don't know how to get a piece of paper out and do a longhand division or longhand math problem, you're going to be limited in what you can do. And when you're standing on the shoulders of giants, there does still need to be some scaffolding around it.

And my worry is this really adaptable generation coming up. What percentage of those are going to be able to provide the actual mental scaffolding when everything comes so easy that I can get this knowledge so fast and easy, dispose of it, and not have to be an expert in microchip design because I just use computer-aided devices.

So here, let's take AI away for a minute. I think it's crazy that AI is the dream Maker, right? For us as entrepreneurs right now, AI is the dream builder. Like, you do your meditation and stuff, but like, the dreaming that we did just 5 years ago or 4 years ago or even less was like when you just kind of relaxed and just thought or like looked at the clouds and things came into your head, or you're driving and then suddenly an idea pops in. Like, that is what dreaming was. And now dreaming is almost execution. Which I don't love. And I'm the same. I'm like, what can I build? But I'm overwhelmed by that, right? Currently, like you said, like the capacity for my creativity is going down because it's almost like there's too many possibilities.

And you're probably doing a little bit of like handing off creativity, like outsourcing it to the AI.

A little bit. Yeah, of course. So like for us, it gets lost when we start either building or the creative energy also goes away when we're turning it towards operating things instead of actually just the dreaming part. Like, what is your definition of a dream?

My definition of a dream is something that I want to experience or bring into the world. So yeah, I've definitely used a term interchangeably. The word dream I have used for execution, but that would be wrong. Executing on your dreams, like before AI existed, like You did that like that. You could do that. That's no problem. But now with AI, my point that I'm trying to like make here is that now you can, at the speed of what you can think of, you can basically make it happen. Just to give you an example, previously, the way a dream would work in a software company is that you would imagine that you want to have a new feature.

Then you would talk to your product manager about that and you would say, hey, this is the vision I'm having. And the product manager would say, that's really cool. I like that idea too. Have you thought of this and this and this? And like, oh, that's a really great idea. So still dreaming together a little bit. And then at that point, the product and project manager start turning those into tickets, little tiny pieces that need to be done that can be done in about a half a day or a whole day. Turn that into tickets. Then your team turns those tickets into reality.

And That reality starts to change based off of the developer's interpretation of those tickets that were interpreted by a project manager and product manager. And a lot of times they actually had better ideas, but nonetheless, what you get at the end is not necessarily what you had imagined at the beginning. And that's fine. Again, a lot of times it was actually better than what you thought.

Very slow cycle though.

But very slow cycle. And now, In the amount of time it would take to tell your idea to the product manager, you've already got a project manager, engineers, and architects already building it.

That doesn't feel intentional in the way that I think a lot of our production in the past years has been. For most of our life, when we have an idea and we want to bring it to life, it's a very intentional thing. And right now, as quickly as we're thinking, it's almost reactive to the way we think. I'm like, oh, that's another good idea that I can stick into AI to create something. So it's a very reactive process. Not every part of it.

It might be more reactive than you're thinking because over time what happens is you stop throwing your dream in and you start throwing your problem in that you didn't even dream about. And you go, I have a problem. Can you come up with an idea? Boom, done. In some cases, if you don't intentionally put it into plan mode, it will really deliver a solution to your problem before you even had a chance to discuss the solution.

I know. And I don't know if we're meant to do problem solving like that. There's probably a reason why therapists toss things back in. Like, our human brains cannot take in the change as quickly as AI is giving it to us.

It's the same thing that happened when we stopped When we started using calculators, like there's just not a need right now. It's the same thing with Google. There's not a need to hold a lot of data in our brain anymore when you can just Google it and get it real quick and keep it nice and light on the brain. You know, we're becoming cyborgs because we're so dependent on our technology. But in the problem where we become so dependent on our technology that all we do is just say a problem and a solution arrives, we've moved to a way new level because previously we had to figure out that we need to know what 2 plus 2 is. Oh, I have 2 of these and I've got 2 of those. I wonder what 2 plus 2 is. I better outsource that to a calculator.

Or a board of directors would help us solve these things, you know?

Yeah. And beat up the idea with their experience and everything else. But now you got a board.

Yeah.

This board of directors is a board of directors that actually gets it done for you. So I think that the relief on the brain is going to feel really good up front. The same way you can't remember anyone's phone number off the top of your head anymore. Because it's programmed in your phone.

It's—

I'm worried that we're going to lose another skill. But this skill is like, as an entrepreneur, when your employee comes and asks you to solve a problem without bringing you a solution, it's like, come on, man, you can think of ideas here. You're capable. Well, I'm worried that all of us are going to wake up in the morning and be like, I'm hungry, but I don't know how to get food inside of me. I know I'm being a little bit hyperbole there.

You might not be. Yeah.

For our final segment, we look at how to actually navigate hiring humans in this wild AI world. Curt shares a live hiring experiment where he assigns a contractor to build a presentation on the merits of package pricing for his customer success lead, David. During the interview, the candidate bravely asks if they are allowed to use AI. Curt absolutely loves the honesty, reminding the candidate And all of us that the goal is to use AI to its full extent, as long as you don't make the final product actually feel like it was done by a robot.

Okay, cool. So what I'm gonna do is the person that you'll be working under, his name is David, and David's job is to make sure that we have the best customer success team in the world. That's his whole mission. So obviously he's gonna be very interested in the notes that I've taken during our meeting. But he also is going to be really interested to get a chance to work with you as a contractor. Now, as a contractor, what we're going to do is we're going to hire you to put together a presentation about the merits of giving quotes with packages in it.

Okay.

And we need this presentation. David's hiring you to prepare this presentation and give it to his customer success team. And what you would do is you would just present to them the benefits, advantages, features, and maybe even some of the downsides, but understand how to work with those downsides of presenting pricing in a package proposal.

Can I ask a question? Would this be related specifically to your software or just in general?

No, just in general.

Yeah.

Because obviously if you learned about our software, you probably find some secret hacks that would help you put together a presentation. I think that would be probably pretty awesome. But my goal here, I'm going to be really transparent about what my goals are. My goal is to see how you work with David and getting the preparation part of this done. He'll be able to send you the sort of the brief on what we're looking for here and the definition of done. And you don't have to take all 8 hours. We're going to pay you $20 an hour for 8 hours, and you're going to use however much of that time you need. I would ask you, please do not go over 8 hours.

Okay.

And then give yourself one of those hours just as part of your presentation time, because you're going to present this to our success team. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to, you know, do you have access to Google Slides already?

Oh yeah.

Okay.

I have now.

Cool. So what we'll do is we'll have, I'm going to put you in touch with David. David's going to give you the brief and we are going to have you just work on it as you are. And then when you know that you're about halfway through, And David's brief will tell you to do this. You will reach out to David and you will tell him exactly where you're at on it and what you have left. Now, if you're only 2 hours in and you're halfway through, do not be alarmed. That's not cause for alarm. Being fast and efficient is no problem.

If you need all 8 hours, all 7 hours, I should say, that's also not a problem. Being thorough and taking the amount of time that you need, no concerns whatsoever. You're getting paid 8 hours regardless.

Okay.

And then when you give this presentation, understanding there is, is that David has hired you as a consultant to come in and teach our customer success team the merits of this. You'll need to, at the halfway point, be able to give David a time that he can schedule it with the team, and you'll be in charge of creating the calendar invite. And then he'll go ahead and add the rest of the team as attendees to that time. So you'll work out the time with him and then get it on the calendar and set, be the calendar owner. Does that all make sense?

Yeah. So you're saying that I would use my Google Meet, like through my Google account to set up the appointment with David, and then he would add everybody to the thing and then I'd just be presenting. I do have a question. Would I be allowed to use AI as part of this, or do you prefer that I don't use it at all?

That is such a great question. Thank you for asking that. I love that. You know what that tells me? That tells me that you would never want to pass off work that you didn't do as work that you did do, and that's super cool of you. But in a world of AI, I can't tell you how much I love that you asked that question because we do need to learn to integrate with AI. And that does show me that you are ready to present at the very best regardless of what yours is. Part of the skill is making AI Feel good. So I'll give you a quick coaching tip.

Okay.

If it feels like it's done by AI, then you did it wrong. Okay.

I wouldn't want to read it if it felt like it was done by AI.

Well, that tells me a lot about you too then. So yes, use AI to the fullest extent. So that's a fantastic idea. Any other questions that you have about this, you are allowed to reach out to David anytime. He has a very high standard for how quickly he'll get back to you. So I don't expect that you would ever wait long. And if you're going to be a member of this team, You would understand that we take care of each other. One of our company values is that ego is not our amigo and that we take care of each other.

Well, there you have it. A full existential crisis wrapped up in a podcast episode. I don't know about you, but after listening to Curt's coding binges, I am going to step away from the computer and go look at some clouds for a while. Hopefully, Mel and Curt's vacation is giving them some of that much-needed uninterrupted thinking time they were talking about. And hopefully, they actually come back to record some new episodes soon so I can go back to just being the editor. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and we will see you on the next one.

Thanks everybody for joining us at the Soul Proprietor Podcast. It has been an absolute pleasure having these discussions with you. If you wouldn't mind taking just a few minutes to rate and review us wherever it is that you listen to podcasts, Yes. It would mean so much to us. We really do read each of these reviews, and it gives us the opportunity to get the word out to more people who could benefit from hearing about topics like this and so many others. If you want to engage with us at our website and maybe share some topics or ideas of other people that you'd like to hear on the podcast, feel free to go to soulproprietorpodcast.com and share with us your thoughts and ideas about what we could do in the future to bring even more light into the world.