Know Thyself.
I did not use machines to think for me. I used them to see how I am thinking.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. Feynman said it about science; it applies violently to business.
In my twenties, I moved fast. I confused motion with progress. I believed my own narratives because they were convenient. When I failed, I blamed the market. When I succeeded, I credited my genius. I was flying blind, steering by ego.
As I’ve gotten older, my goal has shifted. I no longer try to be the smartest person in the room. I try to be the most self-aware. Intelligence is a commodity. Clarity is a scarce asset.
The Mirror, Not the Factory
There is a lot of noise right now about AI as a generator of content. People are using it as a factory to produce more noise. I have no interest in that. I use these tools as a mirror — a dispassionate observer of my own psychology. It is the only entity I can speak to that has no skin in the game, no feelings to hurt, and total recall of everything I’ve told it.
The Protocol
01 Capture. I dictate voice memos while walking. No structure. Raw stream of consciousness about a decision. I vent, strategize, worry aloud.
02 Transcribe & feed. I push the transcript in. I do not ask it to "fix" the text.
03 Interrogate. "Analyze this transcript. Identify the logical fallacies. Where am I making assumptions based on fear? Where am I succumbing to sunk cost? Be ruthless."
Pattern Recognition
A few months ago I was sitting alone in a high-floor hotel room in Mexico City after a night out with a friend. Slightly hungover. Looking over the city. I had just come from his wedding in Morelia. My business in Calgary was messy on paper — reporting half-built, markets shaky, crypto and stocks dumping, no clean metrics, no flush feeling. By every external measure I should have been bracing for something.
I wasn’t. Internally, something had quieted.
I’d been using AI for months by then, but not the way most people were. Most people were using it to generate content, automate output, produce noise faster, skip the thinking. I’d been doing the opposite without naming it — feeding it raw voice memos and asking it to read the patterns back to me. Asking it to challenge assumptions I couldn’t see I was making. Asking it to articulate things I felt but couldn’t say. A therapist without emotion. A journal with memory. An observer without ego.
In that hotel room, the line I’d been circling finally landed as one sentence:
I did not use machines
to think for me.
I used them to see
how I am thinking.
That was the whole thing. Most of what I’d thought was a productivity tool was actually a mirror. And the version of me showing up in those conversations wasn’t the one I’d been posting as. Less proving. Less forcing. More observing. The engine that had built the company was finally quiet enough that I could hear what was underneath it.
I’m still in that transition. Calm doesn’t feel like peace yet — it still mostly feels like wrong. But I trust the protocol now, and I keep running it.
We build systems to protect us from our lower selves. You don’t need AI for this — a journal works, or a mentor with permission to insult you. But you must do it. If you cannot see yourself clearly, you cannot lead anyone else.
Know thyself. It is the only competitive advantage that compounds forever.
Architecture > Hustle.