Are you creating value with AI? Or are you...
In this episode of Value First AI Daily, host Chris is joined by George B. Thomas and Nico to discuss how creators can move from building AI‑enabled products to actually getting those solutions in front of the right humans. George walks through the three‑phase rollout of his “Spiritual Side of Leadership” project – beta testing with a handful of users, securing partnership allies who can amplify the offering, and a “boots‑on‑the‑ground” LinkedIn outreach campaign aimed at organizations that serve the same niche but at higher price points. He emphasizes the importance of a human‑centric audit (using an AI assistant to surface gaps) and the need to understand what you don’t know before scaling. Nico brings an accelerationist perspective, arguing that AI has turned solopreneurship into the new default job: one‑person businesses can now push‑button complex apps into existence, freeing creators from traditional corporate constraints. Both guests stress the tension between quality and quantity in AI‑generated content, warning that unchecked high‑cadence publishing can produce rogue, brand‑damaging posts. They recommend a semi‑autonomous workflow where humans bless content before release, and they cite Paul Jarvis’s Company of One as a practical guide for solo founders. Throughout the conversation, the trio returns to the theme of “presence” – being authentically visible for both humans and AI so that serendipitous connections can happen. The episode ends with a call to keep showing up, experiment responsibly, and keep the dialogue alive.
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Tonight. Good morning, LinkedIn, friends. Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily. Your collaborative intelligence report is Thursday, February 19, 2026. George, Nico, how we doing, fellas?
Doing good, doing good. Just with the. The end cap to the week and all the hullabaloo going on outside of model news, but just with regards to anthropic and open AI and the Pentagon and AI safety and expansion to India and overwhelming amount of data centers, but, yeah, that's pretty good.
I'm doing great. Chris, how are you doing?
I'm doing good, all of the things and I'm enjoying every. The nightly updates from George V. Thomas about how much awesome is happening. Oh, and that's what brings me to this topic that I was thinking about this morning too. Had a great conversation with Clement Rovat a little bit ago. Like, we're not. We're all but lots of people we know, including this circle, creating so much value.
Yeah.
Right now I want to talk to you guys about solving for awareness and distribution of that value. And I'd love to start with you, George, in terms of your. Your spiritual side of leadership.
Yeah.
Is looking pretty. Pretty dope.
It's pretty dope, brother. Yeah.
How are you thinking about deliver? Like, getting it out there and helping? Like, because this is where, like, what's. Where I'm coming from is like, we know that when we get to interact with humans about the value that we are bringing, it hits and every single time.
Yeah.
So, like, how do we make that happen with more humans?
Yeah. So there's a couple things that I've been doing up until this point. And by the way, I think there's a good conversation here about new school, old school, everything that I'm doing as far as the vibe, coding, vibe, working vibes, you know, strategy, vibe, whatever. New school, like, stuff we couldn't do before old school, talk to humans. We've been able to do that for forever.
Right.
And so one of the things during this journey of building spiritual side of leadership out from what it was a dream and idea to what it is today, which is like a very viable solution for humans who are a certain type of human in a certain space dealing with certain problems. Right. So very specific. But first I had to see if anybody even thought it was, like, legit. Right. So one, I've had beta users. I reached out to some folks that were some friends that are kind of in that niche of who I'm serving, and I like, have beta users who have been able to tell me along the way of like, dude, this is seriously dope. Like, the thing that you're creating is helping me. And I even hired a couple people to do audits. And, and then the people who did audits came back to me and said how they were transformed from just going through the content to do the audit, right? And so one litmus test, beta test, like, is this dream, this thing doing anything to the humans when they get here? So the answer to that is yes. So the second phase of what I started to do is reach out to people that I know that are again, like, minded human beings but have audiences. What I'm talking about here is I started to create partnerships of like, hey, will you help me get this out to the world? Because I know you know people and I know people, and if we let the people know that we know that there's this thing, like, something magical might happen. Like, God might be in our. In my case, right? God might be doing a magnificent thing. I mean, imagine this gentleman. I said this last night to a buddy of mine who's one of those partners. I go, imagine being able to stand on stage and tell the story of one room log cabin to million dollar ministry. Like, can you imagine being able to tell that? I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. But like, is God doing this thing? So that's level two, right? So it's like beta litmus test, two partners, and three, it's boots on the ground. So one of the things that I've been doing over the last seven to 14 days is I go to LinkedIn and I start connecting with different individuals that I haven't connected with before. For instance, there are companies out there that serve the type of humans that I want to serve, but they serve these humans at like a higher dollar revenue amount. So I know that they know that there are people that they'd like to serve, but they can't serve because those people don't make the amount of money that they need to get in. So I've been connecting with all of those types of humans from certain organizations now, not to spam the crap out of them, but just to get in the vicinity of my content being able to be distributed into their feed to stumble across something and then get the idea of, huh, let me, let me talk to that guy, or let me go check this thing out, or like, let me go check that thing out. And holy crap, let me share this with some people because. And so the, the serendipity of it, all, right? And so we're already creating content we're already creating tools, we're already, you know, updating experiences and focused on helping humans. So now it's beta. Yes. Partners. Yes. Boots on the ground. Yes. This is how I'm creating awareness for what is, you know, this kind of like side ministry slash business that has been a joy, a journey going through all the AI things that I've learned and that we've talked about on this show.
I love that all of that makes sense. I want to put a pin in the word serendipity.
Yeah.
And come back to that. Sure. But I love your thoughts on this subject, Nico, because on the other side, Nico's like cancer building apps every day has also been training, you know, these one on one sessions which are super valuable. It's like one and done like activations. Right. Like how, how are you thinking about this, Nico?
Thinking about, I mean like I, I do, I love and I, I admire George's perspective and, and your perspective on how this, how the, the, the roles, the different ways in which, you know, humans fold into the mix or where AI folds into the mix. I know that we definitely don't agree on where those, those intersections lie. So that's definitely what makes this interesting for me because there's, you know, I'm definitely part of that accelerationist group. So there's this not only push, but it's just kind of like a natural occurrence of, you know, one man businesses, two man, you know, two people businesses, one person business. You know, maybe five people tops. Right. And that, you could say that that kind of lowers the level of humanity in terms of the corporate culture or the business culture altogether. You know, most, most like, most serious people in this field are talking about the fact that like entrepreneurialship is the, is the new job. Like, that's, there is no, like, hey, let me go look for a job. There is just, hey, let me grab Claude and create my job. Right. In that sense, I think there, there is like, I love being at the front end of that and being at the technical side of that and being able to transition all of the things that seem super complex. So it's like, so that's where I fall into this conundrum because it's like I love taking the complexity and making it push button. Right. And it's definitely doable. As much as people say that it isn't because there's all these different things involved. You know, I like to say that it is, it's just that what we're, what I like to look at it as. Maybe you guys see this too. I look at it as everybody that's working at, like, an agency or that's working at, like, a corp. I mean, it. This is going to make obvious sense, but it's just. It makes it easier going forward when I use food. Just think of yourselves as working at, you know, chocolate factories or candy factories, whatever it might be. Right. And you specialize in just that one candy because that's what the corp specializes in. But in the back of your mind, you've had the candy enough that you're like, you know what, A little bit of cinnamon, though. You know what, A little bit of nutmeg. Like, ah, man, if they just, you know, maybe some smoked paprika with a little bit of pistachio, whatever it is, right. Like, over the time, you're building up this ideal recipe in your head of like, oh, well, I could do this and I could, you know, offshoot. And in the past, it's been impossible to walk away and say, okay, I'm gonna go make my own now, because I need my own factory. I need to source my own chocolate. I need to source my own people. This, that, the other thing, all the way up the chain. Right. And now I. I just see this, like, this potential, you know, renaissance, this explosion of creativity, this explosion of possibility. And to your. Your point, George, like, just the incredible wave of human potential.
Yeah.
That is, like, waiting to be unearthed and is. Is just on the verge of being on earth from everybody I see that engages with this stuff. You know, the other day I was on Value first office hours with Casey, and she was talking about how, you know, she was. She felt a little intimidated by getting into vibe coding altogether. And I was like, well, you know, the thing is, it always seems intimidating until you just see it and realize, like, how easy it actually is. And so, you know, right there, we just. Okay, what's an issue that you guys are having? Oh, you know, data cleanliness. Okay. Jumped over to Gemini. Hey, build me a data cleanliness app where I just upload a CSV and you fill in the rest two minutes later. Done. Here you go. Tested it out. Worked first time around. Right. Then for having seen that, just all of a sudden was like, oh, wow. And you see that, that look in their eyes, and it's just like, okay, you get it now. Like, from here, you know, you can go further. And I love that, you know, we kind of bring this. This trio of, like, mentality, technical and application, where, you know, that's the mentality is the part that I love the most, is Being able to, like, break people's minds free of that traditional mentality of like, I can't, but I can't, but I don't know how, but. But it's impossible. And it's like, now let's just smash that open and then off you go. I like, I love being the dad that puts. Puts their kid, you know, being the parent that puts their kid on the bike, and then off you go.
Sonico, there's two places that I want to go where you just took my mind. Place number one, the human mind. Okay? It is very important in a world of AI that you get closer and closer to understanding your human mind and almost being able to enable or trick or whatever words you need to throw in there to get yourself to do the things that you once thought were impossible. For instance, Chris, you referenced at the beginning of this. It's fun to see at night things that I throw across in slack of, like, the journey. One of the powerful things you can do with the human mind is understand you don't know what you don't know. And so, in an effort to understand what I don't know about the project that is spiritual side of leadership, I literally went to my assistant and I said, hey, I want you to look at all the code base, I want you to look at the entire website. I want you to look at everything that we've done, and I want you to tell me, like, what do we need to kill? What do we need to keep? What do we need to, like, make better? Like, I want an exhaustive list. Think of this as a road map of just a way to make this indispensable to the humans that we're serving. Because I don't know. I don't know. And I get back a 16 page document and I'm just reading through it and I'm like, yes, yes. No. Ooh, I'm not sure how to do that. Okay, do I. Do I hire a human to help me with that? Do I walk through it? Anyway, let's skip that for now. Yes, yes. No, that doesn't feel right. And so now as a human, I can figure out the things that I want to add. For instance, as we're talking on this podcast, it's literally adding notes to courses, it's adding, like, other features to course. Like, it's over there working on these updates to make the platform even doper than what Chris said, that it looks pretty dope right now because it's about the experience at this point. Right? And so just tricking your Mind to being okay with asking questions, understanding you don't know what you don't know, and then using AI to dig in to find the things that now you know you can make choices. Before, you didn't know you could even make choices. So that's thing number one. Okay? Thing number two, Nico, is you said entrepreneurship, and I really want us to get good at this show. Just talking about solopreneurs. Solopreneurship, Businesses of One. Listen, if you haven't read or listened to the book that is Company of One by Paul Jarvis yet, listen, this thing was released January. The dude was. Dude was ahead of his time. Let me just tell you something. It was released January 15, 2019. Okay? But I'm telling you the things inside the book. If you're sitting here and you're in an organization or you just lost your job, or you're dreaming about the next phase of what you can do, grab the book Company of One by Paul Jarvis, read it or listen to it, and then figure out, like, what is it that you want to create and how can you and AI be a partner in the creation of the dream? And trust me, if you just take one step a day, over 100 days, 300 days, 900 days, you will be somewhere where you can't even fathom how the flip did I get here. And I'm saying this because I don't know how I got here, but I'm here.
Yeah. And I think what, what's going to come on the other side of this serendipity chat we're about to have is like most of what, like the new school, old school stuff, right? Like, yeah, New school is absolutely brand new in almost every way. And most of it goes against. We've been taught in terms of like, digital execution. Right. And I love the way that you positioned it, Nico, because in terms of serendipity, the way I like think about that is if you're not present, it can't happen. Right? So you've got to be present on the one side, on both sides, actually. And the presence on the other side, we have zero control over, like when that human showing up, what they care about in that moment, what kind of day they're having, whether their tech is working for them now, whether AI is asking them to go in a certain direction or not. And what's interesting is you've mentioned the push button and even there being able, the same human, two different humans, one can do the push button, the other cannot. And like Open Cloud might be a good example but let's take your examples, Nico, where you have apps that people can like, use and set up and get value out of, but you also have the moments where it's set up a time to talk to me. Because that's the only way we're going to activate you. Right? Is through a human conversation and like having both available. Right. And that. And like, when it comes to distribution and awareness, like, I feel like concerns about like being noise and like the quantity over quality or the quantity versus quality debate. Like. You, like you have to do enough. And I think the recent Moonshots episode about the speed at which we're going, like, if you cannot get on that train, like the gap is just going to keep increasing to the point where that whole part will be ignored to some regard. And because where I'm. Where I'm thinking and it's going to be better if I just share my screen. Because so much of this I think is solved for. And this is where we come back to old school of just showing up, whether it's humans or AI or humans plus AI showing up, being present all the time in the way that a human is, quote, unquote, supposed to be and in the way that AI, quote, unquote supposed to be. And if you're authentic and you're just showing up everywhere, right. You can be present. You have the opportunity to be present. But then when the other person is also present, are you saying something that they, they care about that will give them that oh moment that George described? Right. So what I'm thinking about is, and this is where, like, if every human that you talk to is resonating with the message, I don't want to sacrifice the ability for others to see that message because I think the content is not good enough or AI is writing it, or all these reasons of why
it doesn't matter what you think.
Right? And like, so, so here there's a book, but created three, three leaders, right? V, Sage and Pax. And they've created 15 articles yesterday of these different perspectives of approaching this problem from different parts of the organization, right. And is there a world where they can be posting from a Value first company page, right? Consistently. And because one of the things as I've shown up live all the time is I don't get to the other posts where I'm just like sharing my thoughts out loud. And this message which is going to be coming from this side, right? And even as George described, like, AI is working and now George is live on a conversation. Yeah. Right. So does it matter that AI is generating the content and it's at a very high cadence. Like if a human is consuming, it is quality. Can. Quality. Are we turning into a moment where quality can only be achieved and felt during a live conversation?
No, no.
I mean, but I have thoughts.
Everything else is. Is such a high cadence and high throughput of content. Right. And the counter is like.
Yeah, you could just do.
Hold on, hold on. If you could just like go quality and focus on quality and give me the five bullets, like do all the work to condense it down and tell me exactly what I want to see. Right. What's going to resonate with me and like, okay, we can do that once, once a week. Right. The chances that you're present at the same time that I'm present are drastically smaller than they've ever been. Like before. Right. So that's. Sorry, George. Like, go ahead.
Your speed is not their speed. Your journey is not their journey. Just because you see 14 articles going out in a certain time frame does not mean that they see 14 articles in a certain time frame. They might only see three over a week because that's how much time they invested or the algorithm fed them. So, like. No. Okay, so here's the only thing that as you were going through that. Well, not the only thing, because my brain just really just is hard at one things. It usually branches off in different directions. Anyway, I digress. The only thing that I would say to you or to anybody is if it's you, or if it's you and a team and the quality of what it is putting out has gotten so great that now it can be quality and quantity. I would not want to go past the quantity of what an actual human on the team could read and bless to say that you agree. Because it's like having a rogue employee in your organization and all of a sudden they do one of the dumbest ass political or religious tweets and. And they're attached. Their brand is attached to your brand as an organization. It's like, well, you're fired. Are you ready to fire V? Because you actually weren't checking V's work because you let it go so fast that you as a human couldn't keep up or a team of humans couldn't keep up to make sure it was blessed before it published again. I go back to the autonomous versus semi autonomous mode in which we should be thinking about in a conversation like you're having right now, Chris.
Fair. No, I. I'm taking responsibility. Like last night I had to delete 15 posts because they got published because of didn't. I didn't understand how the publishing or, or share it or creating drafts in HubSpot then to LinkedIn. Like there's, it's not how it works. I know how it works now.
Yeah.
But that's the kind of thing like where I'm taking the responsibility and I guess quote unquote the risk of being there to delete the 15 posts instead of needing to like review at other points of the process. Right. So definitely taking responsibility of like where I want to insert myself into the process. But also, and obviously I'm biased, but this is where I think the message and the work done that you mentioned as you were building spiritual side of life.
Yeah. Leadership. Leadership.
I might always make that mistake.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Like it's so easy and it still works.
So yeah, it does. I need to buy that domain and just point that domain to the domain to be honest with you.
And like the messaging, like if it's, if it's value based and it's so different from what you're gonna see anywhere else, that's where from what I'm seeing. And when I, I don't want to have to read art every article but if I read like a few of them and they all just like nail it. Right. It's like I'm gonna let that go until there is some kind of reaction on the other side to suggest. Right. Because I always, that always frustrated me internally. Like, let's try and figure things out before we even know what the humans on the other side are going to think about that thing or if they're even going to see it or all these ways that we slow everything down without letting data show up and, and say like, oh yeah, yeah, you should probably stop doing that. And that could be one reaction, it could be a hundred reactions like depending on the level of detail.
I think there's something interesting that you're talking about here. 1 and I know that we're at time, but like there is this conversation that you have to have in your own human brain of risk versus reward for, for the actions that you're going to take. And with that though, I will say that I think one of the things that you may want to enable yourself as a human to do, and I don't mean in any type of weird way, but you might want to lean into taking more risks than you historically were willing to take in the old way versus the things that you're going to need to create, do and learn. In the new way. Again, be careful with that. It risks versus reward. And how do you enable yourself to not be fear based, false evidence appearing real, but data based and therefore willing to take the risks to learn the lesson from the data you're going to get because you put it out there. But be careful. Okay, I'm done.
Indeed. I'm sure we're going to continue this conversation. I'm really excited about just trying to put this stuff in front of as many people as possible. And I do think it comes down to like as long as you're showing up authentically in both in any scenario, like we already see like YouTube channels are like very obviously AI is generating all that content and there, there's value being created for somebody right in those situations. So this will be an ongoing conversation I think because we're all creating great things and we're all trying to help humans, you know, into this next, into the phase that we're already in actually. So we'll be back tomorrow and we thank you guys and everybody have a great Thursday.
Peace out. See ya.
