Lets Rap about AI Growth for You the Human and Your Business

Sam.

Good morning, LinkedIn, friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Wednesday, February 25, 2026. How are we doing, fellas?

Good. Doing good. So Wednesday, wearing some orange, ready to rock and roll the day.

Doing very well. Well, yeah, I'm doing okay. I'm doing good. The. The feel like, you know, there's some. Some odd news out there, but, yeah, I'm doing all right.

Some odd news. Yeah, that's one way. One way to put it. So let's talk about some less odd news, I guess.

I guess, you know, I. It's. It's on top of mind. I just, you know, I want to put it out there. You know, what's. What's happening is starting to become. I've been saying it for a while now, like, almost. Pretty much since, well, definitely before Deep Seek dropped that, you know, what we're going through or what we've been going through is definitely like the second Cold War, and people were kind of just like, not paying attention to it, Right? And, yeah, we're. We're pushing through an era, and I hope people kind of see it that, like, from all sides, right? It's not just, like, jobs. It's not just medical, it's not just transportation. It's not just advanced technologies, but, you know, it's also government. It's also local governments, also federal governments, also state governments, and recently the. I just want to put it out there only because, like, I don't want people to get the wrong impression about Anthropic. If you haven't been paying attention to the news, which they've been doing a great job of blasting it everywhere for no reason, with horrific facts behind it. Anthropic recently had to pull back on its policy regarding AI model release. And all that means is that they're. They're actually going to release models faster and not wait as long to release them. The previous policy was in place for safety, and the policy changed after a meeting with some jackass yesterday. So just. Just putting it out there. The company is not backing off of security. They are not backing off of safety. They definitely. I can guarantee you that if it was up to Dario, this would not be happening. But I can also guarantee you that there is an insane amount of pressure. Pressure on them because as we all, at least as anybody paying attention found out, almost the entirety of our military is resting upon Anthropic. Claude, right now, apparently the. The most complex systems right now that the military is running run on Claude. Which I found to be just like really staggering that they were so upset at even the thought of losing Anthropic. And there, there was just crickets from the OpenAI camp or even Google. Right. Like, even Google has contracts with them. But I'm assuming that hopefully Demis has, you know, scruples and isn't willing to like bend on those kind of rules, right?

Yeah.

I don't know how it works, but I guess when you're the number one underlying provider so, you know, good and bad, I guess I don't know, more

bad than when it's infrastructure, you don't just get to, you know, pull it out or change it or, you know, and it's like when you think about if you embrace the fact that very unlikely that you're going to be able to keep AI, you know, or this level of intelligence out of use cases, out of all the use cases that you just would love to not have to deal with it in like military, let's say and like knowing the DNA of, of Claude Anthropic and like of, of our options, it's, it's hard to pick somebody better to be leading from the front like that in those, in those kinds of use cases. And, and also with the safety policy which I was looking at a little bit yesterday, it's, it's almost like now I, I'm sure it has to do with like keeping up and the pressure to keep up just as much. But like, if it's about, we're not going to release stuff until the humans are sure it's good and safe and you've got recursive self improvement and the models are coding themselves at which point, and this is part of the transition to AGI or ASI or know, whatever, whatever the point is where it's like taking care of itself. How can you even like make sure, right. So again, it's not a deterministic system overall. So it's just like put the guard, put the guardrails in place and you know, get ready for things that could happen versus being, you know, as, you know, trying to be preventative in places you just, you just really can't be. Right. So, and when your team, if you have a team building to that policy or not building to that policy, that can dramatically change, you know, how fast people are moving choices that they're making day to day. So I'm sure there's a ton of reasons behind it. But again, like the way that he's like challenged the rest of the industry and has not held back on what the, what the outcomes could be. Right. It's like nothing to hide over there, you know.

Right.

Feels like.

So yeah, no, they're still going to publish papers and everything, so I'm not again, I'm not really worried about it. It's just that like I just don't want people to get the wrong impression and think that like, oh well, they're joining the race now too. It's like no, their, their hand is being forced. So. But I had something for you two guys today. Not to, not to hijack the agenda but hijacking it and it was because of a post from our friend Ryan and I found it really interesting though I didn't have the time to come back to it. But I think you guys are equally if not more so equipped to handle this answer. The post was about where the human aspect lies and what marketing interactions and stuff like that. And what I've heard from other people is that you get the busy work done, get the stuff out of your way so that you make time for the real hue, real, real stuff that matters for like the human element of it. Right. And when I hear people talk about it, and it's not everyone, but when I hear most people talk about it, they say that human element relates to, you know, the, the relationships and it relates to the conversations and the meetings and the handoffs and all that kind of stuff. And I sat back and kind of chuckled to myself because I think a lot of the time maybe people don't really spend as much time under the hood of their car. They drive it a lot, they think they know what's going on under there. They read the manual, they read the booklet when they bought it. But you know, again, every oil change, maybe something's knocking around or so, but otherwise not a big deal. The reason I say that is because for those of us that work under the hood, there's a lot of humanity that goes on there that no one talks about. There's a lot of humanity that I bake into the automations and the things that go on on the back end. Right. I don't get that interface with the client like as much. Right. And I certainly don't get the interaction per se with like the, with the intended target. But I still have to match the expectation that a person, you know, was behind was underneath the hood working on everything, making sure that it came out properly. Right. But what I found ironic is that the flip side of the coin where I would happily use breeze prospecting tool to bring the aggregation to Me to handle the meetings for me, to handle all that stuff for me so that I could spend more time putting the quality and effort into making all my messaging and all my routing and everything sound more legitimate and sound more human. So I put it to you, gentlemen, is the interaction with other people the only place really, or is it anywhere that a human applies passion.

Are you familiar with the post that he's referring to, George?

I'm not, I'm not familiar with that post.

I won't dive deep, but the framing was a client, like suggested, kind of not in a, in a great light that's like, oh, you're just going to go use AI to build this and it's only going to take you 15 minutes. So what are we like, what are we paying for here?

Yeah, right.

And so as you might imagine, based on Nico's, Nico's feedback there, the idea is the human gets to spend more time with other humans to, you know, all of the, all of the calls to get the details out of everybody, to make sure that that 15 minutes is higher quality output, you know, etc. Etc. I won't read the whole post, but that's the, the, the framing here. So I imagine you've at least had some questions when it comes from clients or prospects about, you know, using AI in the work that you do. And, and I'm curious how, how you might.

I have received no questions. I have received no questions because I have made statements first, I, I'm the one that is pushing, charging, asking, well, hey, did you try AI to do that? Or have you built an assistant yet? Or let me show you some cool things that we can do. I mean, literally yesterday, and it's funny how serendipitous this is, but yesterday I talked to three different clients about two things that I would have never been able to build before, AI and setting up systems and processes to make me, the human, be able to do things that they would want or need me to do that before we would had to talk to somebody else and it would cost them additional money. And now because of what I'm doing, what I'm preaching, teaching if you will, we can get a lot more done with the partnerships we already have. And so why would they ask questions or complain? I'm taking the wheel, which, that's what as humans we should do is take the wheel, drive the narrative, lead the way. So no, honestly, I haven't really gotten those questions. And if they have been questions, they've been questions out of. How can I do that? Not why am I paying you what I'm paying you?

Right?

I don't know if that's helpful or not. I'm just. I'm sharing the world that I live in right now.

Well, I think the. Yeah, and I've talked to Ryan about this after that post in response to something of the comments you made, Nico, like, this is why value first is a thing. If you can get out of the way of AI and humans, just get out of that framing. We're trying to drive value and create value and share value and multiply value. So whether it was a human working on it for four hours or AI working out for 15 minutes, if there's a value output there, like, that's what, that's what you're paying for and that's what you're investing in for the thing that you want to get done.

I mean, and here's the thing what kills me is this is not, not new. Like, You can pay me $3,500 or $5,000 to come speak at your event. I'm a human. I'm dynamic. I'm actually pretty dang smart. You get Gary Ve to come speak at your event, it's 50, 70, $500,000. Same hour, same blood, same flesh. Smart people, dynamic. I'm not saying I'm Gary Vee, by the way, so don't even go there, ladies and gentlemen. But it's, it's the purse. It's not even the value. Can I be honest with you? It's the perceived value. But yes, it is about value. So, like, I don't. I. This, this. I think it. Because it's new, it's a thing. But, but here's the other thing too, is like, there's something that somebody might output with AI and deliver as value to a client, and they have all the rights to bitch and moan about it because it's a turd that got polished. I can tell you kind of what Nico, where my brain went when Nico was talking. If Echo builds something at this point, it ain't no turd and it don't look polished like it's legit. And also I, as the human have like. And I'm not saying the other human or humans have not, but I've added enough of either after the fact, my flavor or because I've taken the time to humanize. I'm being very careful right there. Humanize Echo, like, with my stories and my beliefs and my values and that, like, what I'm giving is already 90 to 95% GPT because it's an echo of the human anyway.

Yeah, I just, I, I found it similar to George that like, value is value and it's where you're able to bring it. And you know, I've had people ask like, okay, well what's the difference between like what you're doing and, you know, why can't I just make a. Make an agent to do what you do, right? And it's, look, it's true, right? You, you could, you could definitely build an automated system that does what I do, that performs. So this, this the analogy. You could also make a George B. Thomas agent, right? You can use all George's public information and make a George B. Thomas agent. If you listen to what George just said, then you understand the difference. Echo might be a reflection, but it's only his most accurate reflection. No one else will ever be able to make Echo because Echo has all of George's personal stuff in there. It's got his conversations, his interactions with it, his agent. People are wondering like, well, how are your personal agents gonna go to work for you? His agent goes to work for him because it's him in agent form. So when you talk to it, it's, you know how, it's like how you're talking to him, right? If you try to recreate that, it will be real close. It's kind of like trying to recreate a person as an agent. You'll get real close, but they're never necessarily going to react the same way, talk the same way. They definitely won't make the same decisions. That is the biggest difference. The weights people talk about like, oh, it's just stringing automations together with prompts and this kind of stuff. Now once you actually get under the, in, under the hood and you start actually getting into the engine, you start figuring out, hey, words have power and just. And in that sense, there's weights that you can apply with how you do certain prompts with how you get with. Again, you can build certain metrics into the prompt. You can build certain decision trees into the prompt. Outside of that, you can build decision trees with multi agents that check each other, check other resources, come back and do certain things. Things depending on that whole. I keep telling people, like, yes, there's apple pie. Yes, there's every recorded way of making apple pie. Yes, there's every recorded ingredient for every way of making apple pie. No, there is no record of how each person puts all that together.

Yeah, Chris, can you share my screen please? Yeah, so a perfect example of. And I try to be Completely transparent when I did this. And let me just by bump this up a little bit so maybe people can see it even better. I try to be completely transparent when I did this. I put a thing out because last night and I sent some screenshots to you guys via Slack where I was like, oh my God, like I thought I was gonna add something and it's already there. Like type scenarios. And so I, I just did this post. Like, if you're a podcaster, video creator, you want to talk about AI like you need to meet echo. We need to be on a show. That's not why I'm showing this. I, I purposely said this echoes words, not mine, meaning I did not write a lick of anything below this. Okay, but the question was, I asked like, hey, if, if, if we were going to be on a show, what capabilities would we talk about? Voice clone, not audio writing. I've ingested your writing style, signature phrases, philosophy, beliefs, even your verbal patterns from 60 plus podcast transcripts. When I write, it sounds like you not a robot, Whole ass human. Whole ass human energy, not corporate speak. So like listen one to many content engine. You give me one idea scripture or transcript and I can produce a full devotional package, article, prayer, video scripts, YouTube shorts, songs, image prompts, LinkedIn posts, newsletter segment, post. Like one input, dozens of outputs. I'm not going to read any rest of this, but like, it, it knows so much. Like just so much and on purpose like that. When I talk about, See, here's the thing. When I talk about context, engineering, I think people don't understand what I'm talking about. Um, because when you do something like I've done with context and also what I've done with the construct that it's then looking through to do.

Like,

I don't, I, I don't know, like it's, I don't know. If you don't get it, you don't get it, but if you get it, you get it. And God, I hope more people get it than don't.

Yeah, I had, I had that feeling yesterday. And like, I think that's where, like when you, when you don't have to add anything and the outcome is better, like you know, it, it's like, oh, that's better than out. I wouldn't have done anything like that.

I wouldn't have wrote that. Holy crap.

Like, like, because that happened to me yesterday while we're live on, you know, setting up customer agent for the first time. And I go over to, I said, hey Sage, I want you to Work with V to set up. We're going to set up customer agent, and I just give this screenshot. Right. So set up customer HubSpot, customer agent screenshot. Help me fill these things in. Right. Tone. Use a warm, direct, and genuinely helpful tone. Sound like a knowledgeable team member who cares about the person's real situation, not like a marketing chatbot trying to capture information. Be confident, never pushy. Be concise, but not cold or dismissive. If you don't know something, say so honestly and explain what you can do instead of deflecting. Aim for every interaction to leave the person feeling heard, respected, and valued as an individual. Not processed. Like. And the rest of these are just as good. And it was like, They're. Yeah. And that comes from, like, all of the work done. So in this case, my human domain expertise has been applied, like, everywhere. Where else? Right. Leading up to this point to where I don't need to edit. I don't need to put my fingers. I don't want to make the apple pie. I'm not good at that part. Okay. I want you to know exactly how I like the apple pie, though. Right. So that you can hit it. And like, oh, we're going. You know, we're going to George's this weekend versus going to Nico's. So we. We might want to change up the apple pie a little bit based on that context of situation. Right. I mean, as soon as you start, like, down that path, Nico, it's like, there's a reason that I want my wife to cook everything.

Yep.

Isabelle is the best cook I've ever been around. Right. And she's. And she can't teach me because I need directions. And she's just, like, grabbing stuff, like, left and right, not measuring stuff. And, like, her best stuff is when there's no plan, like, going right. And, like, that's like asking me to do that just because, like, I'm supposed to, or that's what the goal is. And, you know, if I were to say, oh, well, you're. You're paying me. It's our contract, so I'm not going to ask Isabelle to. To cook the thing. I guess I got to do it.

Right.

Nobody wants that output. Nobody, like, nobody wants that outcome.

Right. I know we. I know we're at time, but I want to say this too, because I think it's really important. Like, even you as the thought leader, if you're pushing the edge and you're creating something, like, we're talking about creating that, like, the output becomes, I think you realize that when you actually create something, it sounds something like this. You're reading it and it's like yep, yep. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Well, that's actually. Yeah, okay, maybe I do believe that way and yep, yep, yep. Oh, you know what? Hey, hey. Can we research this piece? Oh, okay. Now that we researched, I feel this way. Can we double down and like let's do this to that section. Yep, yep. Oh dang, that's dope. Actually I said that on states like last year. Okay, that's what working with your assistant sounds like. You're learning as you're teaching because your open mindedness and your growth patterns of upgrading yourself as a human 1% every day are taking place as you're adding value to the world. Oh my God. I'm done.

Everybody. Have a wonderful rest of your Wednesday. We'll catch you tomorrow. Thanks.