Hey, everybody and welcome to a new type of episode. I'm trying called the Friday wrap-up on
Streamline Solopreneur. A short episode where I talk about three things. What's on my mind this week?
Recommended reading and recommended media. This show is designed to help you automate your business
so you can take time off worry-free and hopefully this curation will help you think more about your
systems. I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And here's what you're
on my mind. First, I've been seeing more types of shows like this, and I've always liked the
idea of a weekly news kind of based podcast. I wanted to start adding recommended reading
to my full-length Monday episodes, but because of the way I batch them, most of the articles I
recommend would be a month old by the time they come out. But by the time the episode comes out. So
this, I'm calling it the Friday wrap-up. I'm thinking I would record it either Thursday
evening or Friday morning. And it's just about some of the things that happened this week
that I'm thinking about. So here's what's on my mind. The first is I had a pretty lively
discussion in a community I'm a part of where someone shared their process for using AI
agents to basically write long form articles for them. And it is the
process is, you know, they train this skill or project or agent or whatever in Claude.
And it comes up with ideas and then the person approves the ideas or provides feedback on the
ideas. And anything that he approves, the large language model will write the first draft
and then the person will provide feedback
and the large language model will rewrite the first draft based on the feedback
and from what this person says they'll go back and forth,
it's based on voice notes and then the large language model will publish the article.
And I said,
at what point would you feel uncomfortable putting your name on this?
And I feel really strongly about this.
I'm actually working on a long form.
episode, like a full episode about this idea and the negative ramifications of it.
But I just, I feel like if no matter how well you train an AI or a large language model,
right, a word calculator, if it's coming up with the ideas and writing all the words,
it doesn't matter how much feedback you give it.
You didn't come up with this.
and I strongly feel like if you can't be bothered to sit down and write the messy first draft,
then why should anybody be bothered to read it?
It's a hill I'm willing to die on, I realized, this week.
And that's the biggest thing that's on my mind.
It's dominated the last couple of days of my thinking because I fear that we're going to
to see more of this. And there are people who will say, well, I trained it to sound like me. And
like, that's cool, but, you know, Jay Moore does a great impression of Christopher Walkin. That
doesn't make Jay Moore Christopher Walken. And nobody would hire Jay Moore for a role that they want
Christopher Walken for. Or they'll say, well, you know, Claude is a better writer than me anyway.
And okay, I'm going to guess that's not true, but also you don't get better at something by not doing it.
And so, like, what you're really saying in that instance is I don't care about getting better at writing.
I just care about producing content.
So I'll have more on this in a future long form episode, but that's, if you're wondering, if you listen to that and you're like, where did this come from?
The nexus was from this week.
Now, the second thing on my mind is I did upgrade to Claude Max over the last week,
and so I've spent about a week using it.
And I use it for computer-based problems.
I use it to crunch data or review things I've written to see if it adheres to this criteria
that I've set up for what I'm writing.
I used it for a podcast SEO for this show.
And the way I did that was I took Courtney Elmer's framework.
I had it do deep research, a very specific prompt.
And then I reviewed the 20 shows that it surfaced for me to make sure it was good.
And I told it to throw out ones that were not good, find other ones.
And then I uploaded two different sets of analytics for my show, one from my host and one from
from a third party and I basically said crunch this data and give me your observations.
And I also reviewed the data and made some observations.
And it did an incredible job at that.
And so now I have these 10 keywords.
I wrote the description and a bunch of other stuff.
And then I asked the AI like, hey, is this using the keywords without like stuffing them?
and now I'll give it copy and I'll say like, hey, are there enough keywords here?
Does it sound natural? Never make it sound unnatural.
But the important part here is that I'm using it to analyze things I'm doing.
I'm not having it do the things for me.
But what's really impressive to me about Claude Max is obviously the co-work side of things.
I've had it do a bunch of stuff like create skills.
My son plays soccer and the calendar that they provide is not adjusted for time zone or daylight savings time, which is insane.
So I had Claude update the calendar to include time zone and daylight savings time so that I have the accurate times on my calendar without having to go and look in the portal.
Something I did this morning was the exact prompt.
Oh, I did this on my other machine.
But it was basically, I want you to find the Yankees schedule,
create a calendar for me, a separate calendar that I can subscribe to,
and then grab all the weekday afternoon games and put them on my main calendar
so that people don't book meetings with me during game time.
And it hit a little like sandbox snafu that I,
had to fix, but it did it flawlessly. And again, I checked it. I looked at the Yankee schedule. I downloaded a
CS, I downloaded a spreadsheet of all the Yankee games and I filtered by day and time. And it did it
flawlessly. And so like that's really impressive. That saved me a ton of time having to look up the
Yankee schedule and then manually add those games. So, and that's a very computer thing, right? Look at this
data do other stuff. It's computer talking to computer. And so I'm excited to continue to use
Claude. A lot of the tools I use have like an MCP. And I like that it can crunch data for me
in the background while I can actually focus on the creative work, which is my whole goal for
this podcast, right? Help you automate things that you don't have to do.
so you can do the things that you have to do or want to do.
So that's what's on my mind this week.
Recommended reading, I have two articles.
One is mine.
Based on everything that's on my mind,
I feel like I should mention.
The three question test for using AI effectively,
I basically go through why most people are using AI wrong.
Because when the test is it's doing something so I don't have to, that's not the correct thing to test on.
Because it doing something incorrectly doesn't help you achieve your goals.
So speaking of this person at the top of the show, I'd love to know how many of those articles that he publishes actually help him.
Whatever his goal is,
what rank,
you know,
maybe rank in SEO is fine,
but get people to join his mailing list,
get people to hire him.
What's the point of the writing?
And if it's thought leadership,
is it really thought leadership
if you're not doing the thinking?
So I have a three question test.
I will link the article
and everything I've mentioned here in the show notes.
And then the second article is by Jason Snell
colors. It's called rethinking RSS newsletters and how I read every morning. This really
resonated with me. This was kind of the impetus for me starting this format episode.
Because I constantly think of this. I've tried a bunch of RSS readers. I currently have
Feedly and I don't really like it. It's like a fire hose. And so I've moved to FeedBin with an
app called Current. Feed bin, like a killer feature for me is being able to forward newsletters
to my RSS reader so that all of my reading is in one spot. And so I just think this is a really good
article. Jason Snell obviously thinks about this stuff a lot. His process, I heard about Current here
in this article. He doesn't use it. Spoiler alert, but I like that he thinks about this because I
think about this a lot. Like what's the way for me to most effective?
read and consume news in a way that's not overwhelming that doesn't feel like a to-do list.
So really enjoyed that, rethinking RSS newsletters and how I read every morning by Jason
Snell on Six Colors.
And then the recommended media, this one really pushes all of my buttons.
It's called, I made a network of every home run in MLB history.
It is a YouTube video that visualizes every home run ever hit.
And even if you are not into baseball, if you are into data and data visualization,
this video is well worth the watch.
I think it's so interesting his approach to how he did it and the kind of conclusions
and like hidden history that he can find in this.
and some of the
some of the
stories that are told with the data
I really like.
So I made a network of every home run in MLB history.
It's over on YouTube.
Again, I'll link it in the show notes here.
But that's it for the Friday wrap-up.
If you liked this episode,
let me know by going to streamlinedfeedback.com.
Because ultimately,
The thing that will motivate me to keep doing these is if people are actually interested in them.
And if you want to learn how to create time and space so you can actually focus on the work that matters, that is the main thing I do.
It's the main thing I talk about on this show.
You should check out the Solopreneur sweep.
It's my process for understanding how you work.
and you can get that over at streamlined.fm slash sweep.
But that's it for the Friday wrap-up.
Thanks so much for listening.
And until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.