Last week, I shared that I wanted to start attending hands-on AI sessions to accelerate my learning and be around others trying to do the same. This week, I attended my first evening session at Georgia Tech. It was free and open to the public. This session was focused on using AI tools to create high-caliber images and videos.

My takeaway is that the session was exactly what I needed. It was hands-on, with everyone helping each other figure out how to use the tools and sharing what they created. I learned a ton and met some good people. I definitely want to do more of this.

I listened to a podcast about focus and productivity on YouTube today. One thing it talked about was a method of bringing distractibility down while helping to bring you into flow, or a state of increased focus. The presenter went on to talk about something called “neural entrainment,” which I’d never heard of. Apparently, it can occur when “something that’s rhythmic [harmonizes] with brain waves, which forces you into a state of more focus.” It could be triggered by movement, motion, or sound.

Sound neural entrainment caught my attention because it reminded me of conversations I’ve had with some of the most talented people I’ve worked with about their work style. Several of them listen to certain types of rhythmic music (no voices) when they’re doing focused work. This pattern jumped out to me every time I heard it because I don’t listen to music when I work.

After listening to this video, I now realize that those people may have been leveraging neural entrainment (whether they knew it or not). This made me want to try it. Luckily for me, the video mentioned Brain.fm, a company focused on playing music that’s personalized  (based on neuroscience) that helps you focus intensely. Think Pandora or Spotify, but meant to help you focus. I did some research, and it seems that Brain.fm works especially well for people with ADHD.

I’m always looking for ways to improve, and this neural-entrainment idea sparked my curiosity. So, I signed up for a 30-day trial of Brain FM. I can’t wait to see if the platform helps get me into a state of focus more easily and keeps me there. If you’re interested in listening to or watching the entire video, you can check it out here.

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• Claude Managed Agents = office space of AI agents – YouTube interview detailing how to think about managed agents and when to use them, with detailed explanations and a demo of the Claude Console.
• Claude Managed Agents explanation – YouTube video that explains how Claude Managed Agents works and demos them. Quick, short video.
• $6M to $32B acquisition by Alphabet – YouTube interview with Gili Raanan, Founding Partner at VC firm Cyberstarts. Interesting interview where Raanan discusses his strategy for investing in early-stage cyber companies and why his unicorn hit rate has been so high. Raanan doesn’t ask about the founder’s idea at all. He invests in the person. And he invests only in people who have shown the ability to recover from setbacks.
• The Roblox economy turning devs into millionaires – YouTube interview with the Founder and CEO of Roblox, David Baszucki. Interesting interview where Baszucki describes how the Roblox platform works and how it’s really a small economy. His points about the value of the 3D data Roblox has are interesting, especially for robotics training. He explains how building AI-generated worlds is different from building interactive games. He makes a few references to parallels between YouTube and Roblox and how Roblox has a technical advantage over other game platforms.
• OpenAI’s 2029 projected growth, unique in history – YouTube interview with Michael J. Mauboussin, adjunct professor and investor. Fascinating interview where he discusses the importance of using base rates to evaluate probabilities. He shows how in 18,900 companies examined, no company the size of OpenAI has ever grown 108% compounded annually for five years, and how OpenAI’s 2029 $145B revenue projection would be a first in history. His ideas about intangible assets, AI, and expectations got me thinking.
• Secrets of investor athletes, and fear distorts reality – YouTube interview with Dr. Gio Valiante, world-renowned performance coach for professional athletes and investors. Founders of smaller funds and small investors can pivot and adapt to change faster than institutional investors, which is an edge. His thoughts on fear, motivation, and confidence were interesting. Confidence is inversely related to fear. Fear distorts our interpretation of objective reality. When you approach things from a place of fear, you see only the dangers, not the opportunities. Higher-performing investors operate at a level of optimization just like professional athletes’. I like his term “investor athletes.” Also, his point that high performers fall to the levels of their system (i.e., habits) or the culture and environment of their organization stuck with me.
• Thinking like an M&A buyer – YouTube Interview with Javier Enrile, Managing Director of M&A at TIAA. Interesting interview to understand how corporate buyers think about M&A. His thoughts on valuation and finding companies to buy caught my attention.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

Today a friend who’s also a former entrepreneur showed me something cool. He’s a technologist and loves to tinker. We talked about AI agents and how much running them continuously via Claude will cost, and he showed me his setup. He bought inexpensive (maybe $100) Raspberry Pi computers and set them up in his house on his local network. He installed the Claude app on them. He has Claude Cowork build software that solves a specific problem for him and then install the software to run locally on a Raspberry Pi.

My friend then uses Raspberry Pi Connect to monitor his agents and access the software that’s running locally on each Raspberry Pi machine. He likes this setup because it doesn’t require continuous work and token usage with Claude. Instead, Claude builds the software and the agent’s job is done. The software runs to do whatever task my friend wants. Because it’s running on a Raspberry Pi at his house, it doesn’t cost him anything to keep the software running 24/7. And he can access the software from anywhere, as long as he has internet access.

I thought this was an interesting setup to get around the increasing costs associated with using Claude and its agents.

The speed at which AI is moving and new products are being released is wild. People are still getting used to Claude Cowork, and yesterday Claude released its Managed Agents platform (see here). Like everyone, I find it hard to stay on top of it all. Actually getting around to playing with all these tools is even harder.

A friend told me about a group of AI engineers who work at companies like Meta during the day and do evening sessions on Wednesdays where they share the latest and explain it to the participants. On top of that, they do hands-on sessions where everyone practices setting up their own versions of the new tool(s) and building with them. The AI engineers help everyone, but participants also help each other.

I’ve decided I’m going to attend these sessions. Other people who want to stay on top of AI and learn the latest sound like a good group to be a part of. Plus, the idea of learning by doing suits me well, especially when I can do it with a group of like-minded people.

AI is real and will have a profound impact. The speed at which it’s moving is forcing me to take a different approach to learning about it.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve chatted independently with two entrepreneurs who sell physical products online. Both of them mentioned that TikTok is a core piece of their growth strategy. I wasn’t expecting that, so I asked a few questions. I knew that TikTok had launched TikTok Shop, where users could purchase products directly on TikTok. But what I didn’t know was how popular that service is. And I was unaware that TikTok has also launched Fulfilled by TikTok, a service that allows merchants to send items to one of 14 TikTok warehouses so that when an order is received, TikTok handles processing and shipping to the customer. It sounds just like Amazon’s Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) service.

I’m curious to learn more about this. The idea of combining social media with commerce and fulfillment in a single platform intrigues me. Capturing the attention of a user and letting them complete a purchase in a few clicks without leaving the platform is a combination with huge potential.

Last week I listened to an interview with Annie Duke. She’s a former professional poker player who wrote two books on decision-making that I enjoyed (see here and here). During the interview, she explained why moving from implicit intuition to explicit decision-making, including expected-value calculations, leads to better outcomes in high-stakes situations. The gist of it was that instead of making decisions in our heads, we should write down our thinking and share the written document. The exercise of writing down your decision logic will help you spot errors (and avoid or fix them) and make it easier for others to spot flaws in your thinking.

I believe this to be true, but I don’t do it consistently enough with high-stakes decisions. I wanted to test it. Last week, I wrote, with the help of AI, an investment thesis for a publicly traded company. I then shared that thesis with two friends and asked them to discuss it with me after they’d reviewed it. Here are a few observations from the exercise:

• Writing down my logic and reading back through it helped me identify two points that contradicted a timeline that I’d proposed. When I did more digging to get more context around each point, I realized that my thesis was weaker than I’d thought, partly because of an update to my timeline.
• AI helped me create parts of this report, so going back and reading through it helped me catch errors in AI’s logic, too. AI made some irrational assumptions. When I pointed them out, it agreed and fixed them.
• Giving my decision logic to someone in writing, having them read it, and then discussing it afterward was a game changer. When we talked, they were totally up to speed on my thinking and were able to go straight to the areas where they thought my argument was strongest and weakest. The conversation was much deeper than if I’d tried to explain it to them orally.

This experiment showed me that Duke is spot on. When I’m making high-stakes decisions, it’s worth the effort to be explicit in my decision-making process by writing it down, reviewing it, and sharing it with others. The act of writing forces me to face holes in my thinking and allows others to easily see holes and point them out. All of this should reduce the chances of my making a bad decision.

If you want to listen to the section of the interview where Duke talks about explicit decision-making and calculating expected value, take a listen here.

I’ve been playing with the Claude for Mac app and using Cowork, its AI assistant. Overall, I like Cowork, but I can use it on my computer only when the Claude for Mac app is open. The issue with this is that it’s another app, one that isn’t in my normal workflow. Since I don’t naturally use it, I have to put extra effort into remembering to go to it.

The apps I use most are for email and text messages. So, I think it would be best to interact with Claude Cowork, or an equivalent product, via one of these; ideally, text messages. I need to do some digging on this, but I think that’s what I’m looking for: an autonomous AI task executor that I can interact with via text messages.

Continuing what I started last week, I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• The science behind naming billion-dollar products – YouTube video from My First Million where they interview the guy big brands pay to name their products. The process of how he picks names is intriguing. There’s much more science to it than I realized.
• Should your portfolio be positioned for defense or offense? – YouTube video where Howard Marks shares his thinking about risk versus reward in today’s investing environment.
• Declining liquidity is negatively impacting stocks – YouTube video from Monetary Matters with an interview of global liquidity expert Michael Howell. Interesting to understand how a booming economy reduces liquidity in financial markets, which can lead to flat or lower markets. Very counterintuitive.
• Emerging trend: internal AI platform team – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Speak, Connor Zwick. He has an internal team dedicated to helping the entire company use AI. They go around the company and set up AI infrastructure for internal teams so they can make the most of AI, which helps them move faster. Interesting concept that makes a lot of sense.
• How Blockworks bootstrapped to $150 million – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Blockworks, Jason Yanowitz. Interesting strategy of going from events to media to a data company. Focusing on an overlooked niche helped them separate from the competition. Landing a busy CEO for an interview by creating a book about his company was a nice angle. Flattery works. I think I found a digital version of the book here.
• Building a $100 million AI company – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with Dylan Fox, founder of Assembly AI. One point stood out to me: Having clarity on how the customer hears about new products and how they buy new products is important for building successful marketing efforts. You should design processes like onboarding and demand generation by working backward from that understanding. Taking what worked at another company or space and replicating it isn’t a strategy that’s guaranteed to succeed at your company.
• $1.6 million business anyone can start – YouTube interview from Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast with Sariah Howell, founder of Memory Magnets. Howell went from broke to making $600,000 in profit in a year with a simple business idea. I loved how she turned sharing her secrets about building her business into an additional revenue stream by selling products to help others start businesses just like hers. Here, the use of social media is savvy and stood out to me.
• Zara founder getting $3.7 billion dividend – See my thoughts in my post earlier this week. Building to hold forever can lead to great wealth (he’s worth $126 billion). Building to sell will get you cash quicker but won’t create this level of generational wealth.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

This past week, I watched a video in which the creator of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, explains what Claude Cowork is and walks through a hands-on demo of how to use it. Cowork is basically agentic AI that can do things on your behalf through your computer. The demo was helpful, and I decided to download Claude Cowork. It was easy to install.

Before I started playing with it, I wrote down one problem that I wanted Cowork to help me with (I’m trying to be mindful of Kindlin’s law). I did this because using a tool to help me solve a specific problem I’m excited about helps me better understand the tool (and its limitations). Otherwise, I poke around and get only a surface-level understanding of its capabilities, which I likely won’t retain.

I then started to work with Cowork to get connected via MCP to the data sources it needed to help me solve the problem. Connecting to Google Sheets API and Google Drive API took some troubleshooting, but Claude helped me figure out the issues quickly. Then I started putting the tool to work in Google Sheets.

I haven’t leveraged all of Cowork’s capabilities, but so far I’m impressed. Playing with it got my wheels turning about what’s possible. I feel like Cowork is something that nontechnical people can use to gain leverage and become more resourceful. I think it’s especially useful for entrepreneurs who are actively building because it’s like a quasi-employee you don’t have to pay and who never gets tired.

This tool is new, but I think becoming familiar with it is worth the effort because of the potential gains. Cowork feels like a potential force multiplier of my efforts that will increase my output and improve my outcomes.

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