AI Business Manifesto Live - August 13 2026

Yep, I'm yep. Hello, hello, hello. I didn't realize that we were live. Welcome, and it is Thursday, August 13th, and at noon here in Delray Beach, and. Welcome to AI Business Manifesto Live. I am doing these because I have recently written a report. Let me just get this out of here. Cool. And I recently wrote a report called the AI Business Manifesto, where I talk about what you need to do right now to be making money with AI, then what is the competitive advantage that will be the next competitive advantage, With AI and what you need to do to start like aggregating for that, and then how you can use AI to improve your own personal performance. And that's really where my journey with AI started, where it really made a magical difference in my own personal life. So hi, Mahatma. Hi, Kevin. Hi, Itikab. And Sean, um, the— I want to tell you though, uh, about, uh, a something I wrote about in the AI, um, Business Manifesto. And, uh, what I— one of the sections that is in the today section, like what you have to have in order to be making money right now, is a harness. And the harness is everything that you put around your AI that can be— for me, my harness lives inside of Obsidian primarily. And so Obsidian, I have numerous vaults with lots of data in it. And then there's also a lot of scripts, there's a lot of hooks, there's a lot of injections, there's a lot of other architecture that goes around it. And you need a harness. And one of the things that you want is you want a harness that is agnostic of any of the platforms so that you can use all of them, uh, one at a time or at the same time. And the— but what's really interesting is, is that all the platforms are trying to make their desktop apps harnesses, and they are all, um, advancing at— in different areas. And I want to discuss that because, um, Codex right now, and Perplexity too— I haven't, um, well, primarily Codex, but I also want to talk about Perplexity— have amazing desktop apps. In fact, um, I was blown away last night by something that Codex was able to do for me, and it was shocking to me how good it was. So the Codex desktop is the ChatGPT desktop, and the Codex desktop has a bunch of features that if you turn them on, it does some amazing things. So the first feature is that when you go to settings, right, uh, and you go to connectors, you can have it control your computer. And that's pretty amazing because, you know, my harness can do all these things, but the ability to just download something and install it on your system and then all of a sudden it does all these things is pretty amazing. Like, my— any one of my AIs can control my computer, but For many people, they don't have that kind of harness. And so as soon as you have Codex, you now have the ability to tell Codex to, hey, I want you to send this person a message when they reply, based on how they reply. If they say yes, then I want you to write that document. I want you to send it to this critic to proofread, then put it in front of me and I'll give you approval. And if I approve it, Then I want you to send it to this person and that person, right? So that's like, as soon as you flip that little switch that says control my computer, it allows you to enable so much that before you would have had to have done yourself. And that's amazing in and of itself. And Perplexity Computer does the exact same thing too. Uh, the Claude desktop, unless they've just updated it in the last couple days, does not have that capability yet, but Codex and Perplexity do. And then Codex has something that my system has, but I haven't seen any other harness have it. And that is, um, if you go into personalization, I believe under, uh, optional research, there's a function called Chronicles. And what Chronicles does, it allows, uh, you, you wouldn't do this if you are concerned about privacy, You turn it on and what Codex will then do is pay attention to everything that you're doing outside of Codex and take notes on what you're doing outside of Codex every 10 minutes. And my system grabs those because they're really good. If you want your AI to know you better, And understand what you're working on there. Like, that is a very powerful feature. In fact, I tell everyone I know they should have it, they should turn it on, they should get it, they should turn it on. Um, the— so let me tell you, um, how I used that feature last night. And I've done this before, but they're like— I did this pre- Codex, but there was— but it wasn't seamless, and there was, you know, little lags here and there. Uh, but last night, no lags, it was seamless. And here's what was up: I was teaching something, and I opened up a chat in Codex, and I asked Codex to watch the chat and help me answer the questions that come up. And it did it in real time. As soon as I saw a question pop up in the chat, when I looked to the Codex chat, it already had an answer for me. That's insane. Are you guys with me on that? Like, did you— I'm— I think that's insane. I think that's insanely good, and it was amazing to watch. So if you don't have the Codex Desktop, you should go get the Codex Desktop. And if you haven't read the manifesto, you should read the manifesto. Now, what you have to recognize is, is that as good as any of these harnesses get, you don't want them to be Your primary harness because you want the flexibility of movement, and if the world goes to local AI, which I think it will—not next month and not next year—but probably in the next two to three years—you don't want your harness attached to some service you got to pay. The service is called Chronicles. Let me. Let me see if like today my system is going to cooperate with me and see if I can— I, I just have to, uh, carve out time after one of these to make sure that I can do all the permissions. But let's see if I can pull up Codex. There's a chance I can, I think. I don't know what I'm— okay, all right. Share. All right, let's see if I can do that. And but I don't see it, it's not pulling up. All right, yeah, so I'll have to— yeah, I gotta do something another time. Browser can't access your screen, try a different screen to see if this continues. Okay, uh, let me just move it over here. I don't think that's gonna be the issue, but, um, it's— and if I can't, if I can't open it, then I'll just, uh, explain where it is because I'll just open it on mine. Yeah, yeah. All right, cancel this for now. Um, the— so where you go is you go into, um, you know, settings, and you go to here. Where do you go? Personalization. Yeah, you go to Personalization, and then in Personalization, under Settings in Codex, you go to Memory, right? The first one is Enable Local Memories. The next one is Chronicle Research Preview. Augment local memories with on-screen context so ChatGPT can help you with anything you're working on. And when you turn that on, like it is in real time. That's awesome. It Cobb. It Cobb says that I've been creating a custom chief of staff. It's not perfect yet, but it has an imprint installed. How many desktop apps is ideal? Well, they all have different features. So like, for— I would have— if you have a ChatGPT account, right, I would have the Codex Desktop open. Because if it's open, then it's doing the research chronicles. And you're getting like this wonderful AI to take notes on everything that you do that you could feed into any AI that will know a lot about what you're working on. Um, so whether you use it or not doesn't matter, right? Like, you still get the benefit of it. And then if you want to use it like the way I used it last night, which I think is insane, right? Um, then you'd have to, um, then it would be a primary. And I would say that I use, I use the Codex desktop, the Claude desktop, And I'm in terminal and I bounce around. I have the Perplexity desktop and I use it for miscellaneous stuff. It's not primary to me. So it's like all the stuff that I don't want to be focusing on while I'm working, but I need like this or that, and I don't really want to waste like my core tokens on or anything like that. So I'll use Perplexity for that. The But then I also have the Manus desktop, which I just like. Manus is not attached to anything, so it's not very valuable, but it's a workhorse and I can just go have it do stuff. So I would say though, the 2 prime— well, I would say that right now the 2 best ones are Codex by far is the best. And then underneath that is Perplexity. And it's interesting because you would think that And I'm just going to Claude now just to see if maybe they've updated anything, but I don't think they have. Um, they have changed the way it looks, that's for sure. Oh, I can do that. Cool. Um, but yeah, I don't see— it's not anywhere as easy, and it's not Um, yeah, it doesn't show— oh, enable computer use, that's on. Okay, so yeah, it just doesn't do as good of a job. And it does have screen recording abilities. So yeah, I would say though that Codex is certainly number one, Perplexity is number two. The Claude desktop, for whatever reason, it's just not cutting it. And but understand that in the age of AI You need a harness. And if you don't have a harness, then guess what? You are the harness. And if you know my U diagram from the, the original manifesto, really what should be in the U is the harness. Now, your harness might have an imprint if you've installed it, or it won't have an imprint, right? If you've done Zenith Mind, it will also have a complete picture of you. And we'll know where you're headed. Um, and that would all be in the harness as well. But you need a harness because if you don't have a harness, then you're the harness. You're the thing that connects everything. And that's a lot of work, and that takes a lot of time, and nobody wants that job. Um, so what computer am I using? Well, the The one on my desktop is an M3, it's an M3 Ultra. So it has like 38 processors, it has 512 gigs of RAM. And I bought it 'cause it was the most, it was the best possible. And I knew that a memory shortage was coming. And so I bought that when they made it, when they were selling it, 'cause they don't sell a 512-gig version anymore. And I did the same with the MacBook. I bought the max that was possible because I knew that there was going to be a year-long memory shortage. And so when the chips— when the new chip manufacturers come online, that will disappear. Um, but right now I have the M3. I hear that there'll be an M7 in like a year and a half that has like 1.5 terabytes. And then, uh, that might be a real kink in the plans of, uh, data centers because Most small businesses and even medium-sized businesses could probably run an LLM for themselves on a 1.5 terabyte RAM system, especially a Mac on Silicon. So anyway, that's what I'm running. Yeah, so you don't want the job of being a harness. You want to have one. And you want that harness, like I said, to be agnostic about which platform. Oh, that's a good question. What about Hermes? Is Codex still superior to it? I've never used Hermes. I know that my systems like Atlas and Imprint can be run in Hermes, but I don't know. That's the honest answer. Why not use the Apple 2TB tower? They don't have anything Right now, do they? Uh, I'm talking about RAM, right? So that would be insanely expensive. A 2 terabyte tower, what is that? How much does that cost? Like $40 grand? Um, I'd be curious. Anyway, so that was the big message though that I wanted to share today. And I wanted to share that if you're not— if you don't have the Codex Desktop on your desktop, you should. Yeah, no, Kevin said that's the one he has from a few years ago. Yeah, so that doesn't have 2 terabytes of RAM. It might have 2 terabytes of storage, not hard drive space. I'm talking about RAM. So the— so that was what the big message I wanted to convey today, and that's really all I wanted to convey today. If anyone has any issues that they'd like to work on, I'm happy to work on it, but if not, then we'll call it. a day, just quicker today, a shorter episode, which is totally fine. Because I really, I want you to just put yourself in my shoes for a second. Imagine that you're teaching a webinar, people are asking lots of questions, and you don't have time to stop, think, and reflect and answer all these questions. Yeah. And so you ask Codex to do it for you, and it can. It is watching the chat, and as the questions come in, it is, tell Eric this, tell Susan this, tell, you know, Rachel that she's, she's, she's reading the instructions wrong. She needs to do this. Is that— I mean, to me, that is insane. The last time I, I did, I wasn't using Codex. I was just using my system because my system can do this. I was doing— I, I, I was helping Jay Abraham with his webinar, and— or my AI was. And so I turned on the closed captioning, and so my AI could talk to Jay, and it— my AI would ask me to say, ask Jay about this. Then Jay would answer it, and it could read Jay's answer. And then it would be like, great, okay, so then ask him this. And the, um, so it was— that was the last time I did, and that was like a year ago. But to do it with a desktop app, I'm very impressed by. So that's why it's a strong plus for Codex. And hey, Chris, what's up? Um, I've heard bad— so Chris said he's heard good stuff about Grok. I've heard bad stuff about Grok. Um, So much so that like we were, we were wondering if like he really isn't focused on it because he's sold so much of his compute to Anthropic. Um, I've also heard it's a real bitch and a half to get it like attached to stuff. Um, whereas like, you know, these other desktop apps are really easy. And these desktop apps like Codex, right? You can then have it associated to your phone so you can control your computer from away from your computer. Right? You can ask it to do stuff on your computer while you're not there. Um, so it is functioning in a lot of ways like a very powerful harness. And if you're not taking advantage of that, then you're really, um, you know, you're just, um, sacrificing, uh, and probably working harder than you need to. I guess that's the thing, right? That if you actually were using these, you'd have a lot— you, you would A lot of your work might disappear. And so I strongly recommend it. Rich, if judgment does not follow a pattern, how can AI copy my judgment? There are patterns in judgment, but not patterns that humans can see, but AI can see. But these patterns are not They can't be expressed in language, but they may be able to be expressed in mathematics. Hopefully that helps, Sean. Do do do do do do. I'm just looking at the rest of the questions. I guess that's it. All right. So that was the big message for today. And if you don't have Chronicles turned on, please turn it on. You will really reap a lot of rewards. Feed that information into your AI, and your AI will all of a sudden have. Insanely great context on you. You— so, okay, so I have one last question here, and it's, Rich, if Codex is so good at acting like a harness, how do we keep using it and defend our own harness? Well, like, even when I'm running the— even when I'm running in Codex, right, Where it's running from is in my Obsidian vault. Like, I'm pointing to my Obsidian vault, and everything that it's doing, it is doing inside of my Obsidian vault. And so whether or not I'm running it on the desktop or I'm actually running a terminal inside of Obsidian, it's, for my harness's standpoint, no different. So that's why, like, I live and breathe in my Obsidian vault. Everything that's important to me is there, but where I have the actual conversation, whether that's in terminal or desktop app, doesn't really matter to me. And that's how. So great, guys. Just great seeing you guys. And, uh, remember, like, I really would love to start building stuff for you guys. Um, And would love to hear more about what is standing in your way from deploying and using everything that I talk about in the manifesto. And if you haven't read the manifesto yet, please do. You will be blown away. I promise. I think it's the best report I've ever written. I'm very proud of it. And if you've read it and you agree, please share it. And till tomorrow, to higher profits beyond. Rich Schefren, over and out.