Blended Tribes

My grandmother could look at a plain table for thirty seconds and know exactly what it needed. Two things, chosen well, never more than that: a bowl moved six inches to the left and a bouquet with three stems cut shorter than the florist intended. She was French Canadian, not wealthy, and never once mentioned money while she taught me this.

Watching her taught me what taste actually is: attention, paid consistently, over years, to small things nobody's grading you on.

Here's the rule I still use, the one I got from a woman who's been gone forty years. Before I buy anything, I ask what it would look like if I owned three and had to pick the best one. Usually that question kills the purchase entirely.

What My Grandmother Taught Me About Wanting Less The Stoic case for taste as a form of attention, and the one rule I still use before buying anything

An email hit my inbox last week promising an "AI search backdoor." The pitch: get your writing cited by ChatGPT and the other big models, using tactics with names like definition boxes and strategic press placements.

I read the whole thing. Then I felt something close to disgust, the kind you get watching someone explain how to fake a handshake.

Here's what bothered me more than the pitch. For about thirty seconds, I considered it. I have years of showing up honestly, and here was a stranger offering to help me skip the slow part.

A question stopped me: Do I want to be found by an algorithm, or understood by an actual reader? I deleted the email and went back to work.

The AI Search Backdoor I Didn’t Take Why I’d rather be understood than found, and the Stoic case for writing like a human anyway

Somewhere between the immigration lawyer, the business permits, and the grocery list magnetized to the fridge, my wife and I turned into co-managers of a small operation. Neither of us noticed when it happened.

We still love each other. We just started talking like a two-person ops team. Did you call the accountant? Is the residency renewal in yet? Six months into rebuilding a life in Panama, I realized we hadn't had a conversation that wasn't a status update in longer than I wanted to admit.

So we started something small. Ten minutes most evenings, one rule: no fixing anything. Just one question. How are you really today?

It felt like wasted time at first. Thirty-five years in consulting trained me to treat every conversation like a problem with a deliverable. Turned out those ten minutes were the only part of the day that belonged to us instead of the operation.

The Ten-Minute Question That Keeps a Marriage From Becoming a Business Yukkuri, and the Stoic permission to ask instead of fix

Tim Ferriss sent an email last week saying his print book sales are down 57% this year. He blamed free chatbots replacing what he calls "lookup table" content, the how-to instructions people used to pay a book or course for.

To fully digest it, I read it twice, then I asked myself the question: if a chatbot can already hand anyone the instructions, what's left that's actually mine?

AI is genuinely excellent at recipes, code, definitions, first drafts. What it can't produce is 35 years of watching projects fall apart, a marriage you're still learning from, money you lost and earned back differently the second time. It can simulate the sentence structure of a life. It can't have had one.

That's the only moat left, and it's worth more than it used to be.

What AI Can’t Do (And Why That’s Worth More Than Ever) A line from a Tim Ferriss email that wouldn’t leave me alone

A friend asked me recently how I learned to use AI.

I gave a practical answer. The honest one is a little different.

I didn't quite learn it. I recognized it. A tool for thinking out loud, for working through problems with another voice in the room. I've been doing that for thirty-five years.

The common attitude is that AI belongs to the young and the fast. There's some truth to that. But it misses what you're bringing to the other side of the conversation.

AI outputs are only as useful as the context and judgment you put into them. Someone with deep experience in a domain asking a question about that domain gets a different result. Your ability to give good context, ask the right questions, and evaluate what comes back, that's what makes the difference. The model processes everyone equally. The quality of what you bring does not.

I wrote about what the second chapter specifically brings to AI — and why experienced thinkers tend to get more from it than faster ones do:

The Second Chapter Advantage: Why Experienced Thinkers Get More From AI Than Faster Ones Do On the asset you’ve been building without knowing it