Guy Reams (00:03.138)
This is day 356. We are all becoming cognitive psychologists. My business partner and I took to the streets today to do some street interviews, you know, the kind that Dave Letterman used to do. Just a fun gimmick to launch ourselves into the short, real universe. We ended up talking to people from all walks of life. And because we were in La Jolla, California, most of them were on vacation. So we made fools of ourselves.
and interrupted their lunch time to ask them questions about their use of artificial intelligence. Now in our defense, we bought many of them lunch and gave out free drinks and a variety of other things. And we were not too annoying. Well, maybe we were a little. It is quite incredible when you talk to random people, you get an interesting cross-section of people and their interests. One couple from France was on their way to get married in Vegas.
One couple was heading off to a charity fundraiser. They were then sponsoring, and another was on a vacation coming all the way from Colorado and seeing all the San Diego tourism hotspots. As we inquired about AI, we received a variety of responses, but one thing remained consistent. They all understood the power of an AI tool that remembers things about you. Some were fearful about that. Others were fine with it.
but they were all inherently new that memory and context were so critical to that of an effective AI tool. Which leads me to this conclusion. As AI tools become more part of our lives, we are all becoming cognitive psychologists. We are all starting to learn how short-term memory and long-term memory impacts conversations. We are starting to realize how important it is to provide context in our prompts.
We know that a healthy mind is structured, has a concrete plan, and has a clear expectation of outcomes. We have a sense of how valuable knowledge retrieval and storage are, and our ability to recall that when necessary is becoming an expectation of ours while having a conversation with any GenAI tool. I dare say that we are learning the power of using correct language.
Guy Reams (02:24.704)
appropriate descriptors, adding context, and keeping our communication succinct to get better results. Huh. I thought we already knew how to do all this. I suppose we forgot. Sometime around 1979, perhaps, we slipped into a digressed state brought on by emerging 80s top pop bands, acid rock, and screaming at the top of our lungs at the back of the bus, we do not need no education.
However, we are back again. We lifted our heads up from our abbreviated T9 inspired texting abbreviations and have come full circle again. We now have to use language and we have to use it correctly and with the right structure to get the results we want from our new masters. Unless of course you use software that does all this for you. Someone asked me a few days ago with the new software that you were developing in your startup, what is your moat?
Humanity, I replied. Humans, insatiable desire to be as lazy as possible. That is my moat. If I can create an easier path for people to do something, then there will always be a market. While Cain and Abel were battling over their differences, Seth was busy figuring out how to sell easier ways to do work. Or at least that is what I recall from my Sunday school lesson. I may have gotten it mixed up.
Never underestimate the work avoidance protocol that runs deep in the veins of every human. So the insatiable desire of driving AI work is work avoidance. The insatiable desire that will drive all the tools that work with AI will also be work avoidance. Sure, call it ROI if you want to, but at the end of the day, the theme is all the same. Why plow my 20 acres by hand?
when I could buy a John Deere 8 RX340 to do the job. If it was just ROI, then I would buy a 5075E tracker. But who wants to be seeing plow in your alfalfa field with that little tiny
Guy Reams (04:34.03)
So we are all quickly learning cognitive science, and we are amazed at the realization that our new chat tools can talk with us with the intelligence of a toddler and the memory capacity of a miniature poodle. We can offload some work tasks, write love letters to our wives, and craft the essay on Fahrenheit 451 that is due this Friday. When asking a school teacher today what she thought was the best thing about AI, we asked,
Do you find lesson plans easier to build? Nope. Grading papers or coming up with assignments? Nope. Then what? It helped me make my travel plans to La Jolla, she said. We were lazy in our cocooned search bubbles locked into Google a few years ago, and now it's gotten even worse. Billions and billions of dollars spent on compute, storage, and training data, and most people will use AI for a query like, what are the top 10 places to eat and
Perhaps there is hope for those of us that have spent our years talking to psychologists, therapists, and social workers. After having spent years answering uncomfortable questions about context and relationships with our mothers, we can now translate that into having a clear and productive conversation.