Caramelize Something on a Launch Day
It helps with the stress
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I recorded a video brain-dump and gave the transcript + a bunch of unpublished drafts I have here in Substack to ChatGPT and after an hour of massaging it, I just still felt so meh about publishing it. It’s funny, because I absolutely love these tools for things like recipe development, gardening plans, workouts, daily routines and so many more physical world actionable things. Perhaps that’s because I don’t have to publish them, I just have to live them and then tweak as I go.
After hitting publish on this morning’s launch post, I sautéed a pound of mushrooms (Lion’s Mane and Shiitake) from Denver’s City Park Farmers Market and started to cook them down. I like to caramelize something on a launch day, it helps with the stress and the vague fear that I’m just shouting into the void.
Methodology
First its a dry sauté to get the moisture out, then they’ll be coated in butter, tossed with shallots and garlic, deglazed with Fino sherry and splashed with cream. All this is in service for a late lunch: mushroom toast on a thick slick of Hearth sourdough. Of course, I asked ChatGPT to weight in on the plan!
I want to make a quick nod to the fact I haven’t published here in quite awhile. I haven’t been blogging elsewhere, I’ve just been heads down on my AI note-taking startup Groupthink and today we launched our answer to Granola.ai with our own desktop note-taking app for macOS.
If you’re just catching up, I started an AI startup that records, transcribes and summarizes meetings and also includes chat and documents. For $15/month you get an AI meeting assistant, a chatbot that trains on all your meetings to create a coherent understanding of your job, team chat, and team docs.
The end game is to build AI employees who can take on a significant amount of tasks on your behalf. Yes, I know people are really scared of this but it is coming.
Writing & Taking Action in the Age of LLMs
For awhile, I told myself a story that I wasn’t blogging and posting as much because LLM writing made me feel less motivated. I am writing constantly, I keep a personal journal which is LLM text-free (for now) and I also write and respond to Github issues for a living. My meetings generate more text for me to review. I live in ChatGPT and Claude Code, and I look forward to getting my own startup’s LLM chat to the level where I can truly say that, too! I am immersed.
I think I have been drowing in the firehose of text. I’m quite behind pace for my 100 books this year at only 26 complete, and I doubt I will catch up. Is my filter broken? Is the entropy catching up to my carefully concocted approach to my information diet? Is this all the VUCA getting the better of me?
Some people think things through by talking, and I am definitely one of those. It makes sense to me to speak words and then hear a response and use the subtle reaction queues to refine it and try again. I do this with my own writing, alone in a video conference room. I don’t get the same thing out of drafting in the written word with AI help that I get by writing the first draft myself, by hand. I wonder how much of this has to do with my education and the years of grooves I’ve wore into my brain doing work that way. This thing is “plastic” right?
Writing a first draft doesn’t require me to scan facial features, it’s kind of like doing meetings where everyone has their cameras off. There is a conversation, but you can more narrowly focus on the context and leave the subtext aside. I love subtext, I love nuance, I even enjoy politics — but if I want to reach clarity through my writing first I need to see every word, and do the initial structuring. Then I can use the LLM (the group mind) to get feedback.
I need to lower the bar on publishing a bit for myself, which means going for quantity over quality. Last time I took the “don’t break the chain” mindset it led to starting my first VC-backed company… so who knows what this will yield.
Like what you read? Support me and my time freedom for writing by using my AI meeting note-taker startup Groupthink to help you be more present in meetings while it does the hard work of taking notes. 30 meetings free, then $15/month www.groupthink.com