There Is No Such Thing as an AI Expert

Fifty volumes ago I decided to start writing every week, in public, about a subject where I was a complete novice. The discomfort came from the promise underneath that decision, that anyone who wanted to follow along would get something valuable out of it. With the caveat that the content was delivered by someone who was still learning himself. I think out loud and I work through problems in conversation, so putting a position in writing every week, with a timeframe attached and a receipt behind it, built new thought patterns in my daily life. That discomfort turned out to be the foundation for everything I have learned about AI since. It unlocked a new way of thinking that reached well past the newsletter, into my career and into my life at home. I think completely differently today than I did when the first volume went out, and I expect to be a different version of myself again a year from now.

My time with AI started well before the first volume went out, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a subject I was studying and became something I was convinced was going to change the world. It is a tool, and a person who learns to harness it can unlock work they had already written off as impossible for someone like them. AI levels the playing field for what is possible from all types of people, all types of skill sets. It attacks the constraint most professionals believe disqualifies them, which is that they have neither the time nor the expertise to start. The tool does not do the work for you, and you still have to put the time in. What has changed is that the time now buys something, and it buys it for people who were never supposed to be able to do this kind of work. My own learning keeps evolving, and as it does I keep looking for better ways to share what I am learning, the ideas and the failures and the breakthroughs alike. Writing gave me something worth saying. The next step was finding a way to say it out loud, in the medium where I am most myself, and that is where the rest of this story happens.

We Started Without the Time

The idea for this podcast is simple enough to say in one sentence. Two people at different points with AI sit down and talk through what they are learning out loud, what worked and what did not, with no expert in the room because there is no such thing. It is what I have been doing here every week, moved into conversation, which is where the thinking happens for me anyway.

Sounds simple, but the problem staring me in the face was the same one the majority of us deal with. Time. My wife and I are expecting a baby boy in November, which means I am in the final stretch of prepping and planning for the most exciting change of my life. I have a rewarding career where I get to apply these principles daily, but it also requires focus, energy, and commitment. There was no open stretch of calendar where a show was going to fit, and the first project plan proved it. It ran to roughly 180 checklist items, covering everything from the brand and the graphics to the recording and editing workflows that turn a conversation into an episode. Some of those items were workflows that did not exist yet, work that had to be figured out or built before anything could be checked off. I went in knowing I did not have the time to do this the old way, with every skill learned by hand. AI would have to be a collaborator from the first conversation, or the show would not exist.

Luckily, I did not have to rely only on AI for this podcast buildout. My close friend, neighbor, and fellow UCF alum, Brandon Ratay, gave the team a third member. He works in marketing communications and carries a full career and a full family life of his own. He has also been reading this newsletter since the early volumes, applying what he finds in it, and talking it through with me on the lanai. He came into this with a different set of skills than I did and a different amount of time spent with these tools, and what he did with them once we started building is a story of its own. Two calendars, two families, two skill sets, and one list of 180 things.

The list came down one item at a time, with AI sitting in on every workflow neither of us had built before. That is accelerating the art of the possible while staying grounded in our problem of solving for time. Some of those items called for skills neither of us had walked in with, and we did not stop to acquire them first. We learned enough, with help, to finish each piece and move to the next one. The plan carried us all the way to the chair on filming day, where the first problem it had not anticipated was waiting.

The Test Runs Missed It

This was our first time building a podcast, and getting prepared sent us down rabbit holes neither of us had seen before. The YouTube page needed cover images, every episode needed a thumbnail, and the calls to action needed graphics that looked like our brand instead of stock art. The thumbnails became templates we can reuse as we film rather than designing from a blank canvas each time. The deeper gaps opened after the cameras stop. A recorded episode comes out as separate video and audio files, and turning them into a publishable video and audio podcast means stitching all of it together. Done by hand, that alone would eat the hours neither of us has, so we built a workflow to move it faster before we had a single episode to run through it. I moved out of my old office so it could become the nursery and set up a new one to film in. Once the equipment and the workflows were in place, we ran three test runs before we trusted them with a real recording. We never rehearsed the actual episode, only the machinery around it.

Standing at my desk setting up the microphones, I realized the configuration we had used during the test runs was wrong. The audio files were syncing directly on the microphones themselves, which meant they needed extracting before anything else could happen, and the workflow we had built did not account for that. Three test runs had not surfaced it, or better said, our "greenness" to this workflow caused the oversight. It was exactly the kind of small technical failure that could have set us back and derailed our timeline. The timeline held because I opened an AI chat, described the setup, and asked it why the configuration was wrong. It walked me to the problem. I fixed it, tested it, and we recorded the first episode.

For me, the lesson from filming day is bigger than the microphone malfunction. I had done the preparation, and the preparation still missed something. What was different this time is what the miss could have cost. Before I started writing in public, a problem like that would have meant pushing the recording to a later date and hoping the fix was implemented to hit our target release date. On this day it meant describing the problem in plain language to an AI project I had already loaded with my entire setup, and getting an answer I could test on the spot. For someone whose calendar is already spoken for by a career and family, that is the whole difference between a project that ships and a project that stays an idea. The time constraint does not go away. AI changes what the constraint is allowed to decide.

Push It to the Limit

Brandon's story from the build is the reason I keep saying there is no such thing as an AI expert. He came into this as a marketing communications professional who edits video in Adobe Premiere, and in his own words on the episode, "I can do graphics, but I wouldn't consider myself a graphic designer." The show needed graphics anyway. Early in the build I challenged him to push AI further than he was comfortable pushing it, and his answer, on the record, was, "I'm just going to test this, see how it goes. I'm going to push it to the limit."

What I watched in our planning sessions, in the conversations rather than on camera, was two people getting pushed out of a comfort zone from opposite directions. Mine was building workflows that had to work for two people with different levels of AI usage, in tools we were still experimenting with and needed to move fast in. His was trusting a tool with work he had always considered outside his lane, and then finding out the lane was wider than he thought. I said on the recording that there is no such thing as an AI expert, and that anybody, no matter where you are on this journey, is heard, seen, and validated. Brandon is the reason I can say that line with a straight face. He never needed to catch up to me to sit across the table, only to keep moving, and so did I.

One Person or 5,000

Sitting across from Brandon while the cameras ran, I watched how invigorated he was. He was going deeper into his own work with AI in real time, applying concepts we had talked through on the lanai and that I had written about here. He was doing it out loud, on camera, for anyone who wanted to follow along. What I was observing, and appreciating more than I expected to, was what happens when someone puts the time in.

The reason I write this newsletter every week is to help people. If it helps one person, or 5,000 people, it is all the same to me. Readers subscribe and readers unsubscribe, and the number moves every week. I had told myself for a year that the number was not the point, and I had never once had the proof sitting across from me. On filming day, the one person was holding the other microphone. Everything I had written had a why, and the why was in the room.

The show is two people talking through this out loud, and episode one is filmed. It is called Explore AI Out Loud. The first episode lands September 15. The channel is live on YouTube today, and subscribing takes one click. The workflow is fixed, the timeline held, and life is still filled with beautiful chaos.