1
00:00:00,00 –> 00:00:04,10
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur,

2
00:00:03,980 –> 00:00:09,710
I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind for September 4th, 2026.

3
00:00:09,810 –> 00:00:14,680
Number one is teaching versus shifting beliefs.

4
00:00:14,780 –> 00:00:19,920
The thing that's been dominating my thoughts this week is a video from Steve Thompson

5
00:00:19,950 –> 00:00:25,110
called Don't Teach on YouTube. Do this instead to make your first a hundred thousand

6
00:00:25,110 –> 00:00:25,650
dollars.

7
00:00:25,750 –> 00:00:32,660
If I'm being honest, it's been a rough summer for the business. I've heard a chorus

8
00:00:32,660 –> 00:00:36,410
of, yeah, me too. And it sounds like it's the whole industry and

9
00:00:36,510 –> 00:00:39,160
it's nice that it's

10
00:00:39,260 –> 00:00:44,70
not just me or, or so it seems. But that doesn't solve my problem, and it kind of

11
00:00:44,70 –> 00:00:46,770
just makes me feel bad for everybody else as well.

12
00:00:46,870 –> 00:00:52,490
If you've been on my mailing list during the summer, you may have noticed that I've

13
00:00:52,490 –> 00:00:59,480
been experimenting more with content and with offers and with the format of the newsletter.

14
00:00:59,580 –> 00:01:04,630
But at the core of that has always been my belief

15
00:01:04,730 –> 00:01:07,740
that if I teach people how to do something,

16
00:01:07,840 –> 00:01:11,90
the ones who don't want to do it themselves will hire me.

17
00:01:11,190 –> 00:01:17,80
That belief has been greatly challenged this year, and Thompson basically says, why

18
00:01:17,80 –> 00:01:19,180
in this video that I'm sharing

19
00:01:19,280 –> 00:01:22,380
that if you give people the solution,

20
00:01:22,480 –> 00:01:24,830
they'll think they can do it themselves,

21
00:01:24,790 –> 00:01:26,150
But when they get stuck,

22
00:01:26,250 –> 00:01:30,280
they're not gonna get stuck during your business hours and you're not going to be

23
00:01:30,280 –> 00:01:31,750
there to help them.

24
00:01:31,850 –> 00:01:38,850
It's true that I've largely and often attracted a DIY crowd, but I've always hoped

25
00:01:39,180 –> 00:01:39,750
that

26
00:01:39,850 –> 00:01:46,280
in attracting the DIY crowd, I would also get people who didn't want to DIY.

27
00:01:46,380 –> 00:01:49,630
So I can't stop thinking about this

28
00:01:49,730 –> 00:01:52,290
for a couple of reasons, right? I, first of all, I

29
00:01:52,270 –> 00:01:53,190
love teaching.

30
00:01:53,190 –> 00:01:54,910
I've taught in the classroom,

31
00:01:55,10 –> 00:01:59,760
I've spoken many times, I've given workshops. I love teaching people,

32
00:01:59,860 –> 00:02:02,990
but teaching has not yielded new business this year.

33
00:02:03,90 –> 00:02:06,850
And that's been tough. And in fact, if I think back

34
00:02:06,950 –> 00:02:07,890
over

35
00:02:07,990 –> 00:02:11,600
the clients I got over the last year,

36
00:02:11,700 –> 00:02:14,830
they aren't people who came to me

37
00:02:14,930 –> 00:02:17,280
and found me via my teaching.

38
00:02:17,380 –> 00:02:23,570
They are people who googled the need for a podcast coach or a systems coach,

39
00:02:23,670 –> 00:02:26,230
or were referred to me by somebody.

40
00:02:26,330 –> 00:02:33,390
So not only has teaching not gotten me clients, but all of the clients I have gotten

41
00:02:33,390 –> 00:02:33,990
were not

42
00:02:34,90 –> 00:02:37,520
people who found, who saw me teaching and were like, yes, do it for me.

43
00:02:37,620 –> 00:02:43,930
So this really, I know anecdotal, but it really reinforces what Thompson is saying

44
00:02:43,930 –> 00:02:44,710
in this video

45
00:02:44,810 –> 00:02:49,50
that teaching is not the thing that actually gets you the clients.

46
00:02:49,150 –> 00:02:52,640
What, and what he says is, you need to shift someone's beliefs,

47
00:02:52,740 –> 00:02:56,200
and once you shift their beliefs, you become their guide.

48
00:02:56,300 –> 00:02:59,430
And I don't know if he, I forget if he uses the actual term guide, but that's the

49
00:02:59,430 –> 00:03:00,120
term I'm using.

50
00:03:00,220 –> 00:03:01,790
So that's a b

51
00:03:01,890 –> 00:03:03,400
is it seems

52
00:03:03,500 –> 00:03:09,330
completely counterintuitive to me to not make content that teaches something like,

53
00:03:09,360 –> 00:03:13,920
I, like when I watched slash listened to this video on my walk,

54
00:03:14,20 –> 00:03:14,540
I

55
00:03:14,640 –> 00:03:18,250
was confused. I was like, I, what would I,

56
00:03:18,350 –> 00:03:19,80
what

57
00:03:19,180 –> 00:03:21,770
content would I make

58
00:03:21,870 –> 00:03:27,70
that doesn't teach something? And I think I took this a little too literally.

59
00:03:27,170 –> 00:03:30,900
'cause he's not saying don't teach it all. Obviously, you need to teach the belief

60
00:03:30,900 –> 00:03:31,470
system.

61
00:03:31,570 –> 00:03:34,880
What he's saying is don't teach the tactics,

62
00:03:34,980 –> 00:03:38,290
right? Don't do a straight up tutorial on how to do something.

63
00:03:38,390 –> 00:03:42,210
And I'll talk more about this in the something to help your systems, but I've decided

64
00:03:42,210 –> 00:03:44,250
to make September an experimental month.

65
00:03:44,350 –> 00:03:49,220
I want to publish a few videos a weekly. I wanna keep up my weekly cadence

66
00:03:49,320 –> 00:03:51,640
in the format that Thompson recommends,

67
00:03:51,740 –> 00:03:53,400
where I stop teaching as much

68
00:03:53,500 –> 00:03:56,330
and I try to get more paid clients.

69
00:03:56,430 –> 00:04:02,470
Now, this also means big changes will be coming to my mailing list. If you're on

70
00:04:02,470 –> 00:04:04,60
my mailing list, you'll know that

71
00:04:04,160 –> 00:04:06,660
I had a short sale sequence this week.

72
00:04:06,760 –> 00:04:09,140
No one bought from that sale sequence.

73
00:04:09,240 –> 00:04:12,370
I've always been scared of selling too much.

74
00:04:12,470 –> 00:04:15,150
And halfway through this sequence,

75
00:04:15,250 –> 00:04:18,290
I decided I'm going to get rid of that fear.

76
00:04:18,390 –> 00:04:22,90
And I'm not really going, I wouldn't call it scorched earth, because there still

77
00:04:22,90 –> 00:04:23,800
needs to be value in the newsletter.

78
00:04:23,800 –> 00:04:27,50
but I have not been selling,

79
00:04:27,150 –> 00:04:29,680
and I need to get over that fear. My friend Kat,

80
00:04:29,780 –> 00:04:31,170
shout out, Kat, if you're listening,

81
00:04:31,270 –> 00:04:35,420
shared a response someone else had when they were getting complaints about selling

82
00:04:35,420 –> 00:04:36,110
to their list.

83
00:04:36,210 –> 00:04:40,150
And that response is, sorry that I'm trying to do my job.

84
00:04:40,250 –> 00:04:45,30
I like helping people. I really do. And I've always believed that if I just help

85
00:04:45,30 –> 00:04:50,280
people enough, they'll hire me. And that's not, that has not been true this year.

86
00:04:50,490 –> 00:04:53,670
It may not have been true for most of my career,

87
00:04:53,770 –> 00:04:57,890
and I've just been getting false positives because I've been helping people and getting

88
00:04:57,890 –> 00:04:58,580
clients.

89
00:04:58,680 –> 00:05:01,120
But that doesn't mean that one caused the other.

90
00:05:01,220 –> 00:05:04,770
And I'm realizing thanks to this video and some other things I've been thinking about

91
00:05:04,770 –> 00:05:11,730
this week, that the best way for me to help people is by getting paid to do it.

92
00:05:11,830 –> 00:05:16,40
And so I need to do everything I can to get paid to do it,

93
00:05:16,140 –> 00:05:20,380
at least for now. Maybe one day I'll become absurdly wealthy and I'll just teach

94
00:05:20,380 –> 00:05:20,770
for free.

95
00:05:20,870 –> 00:05:21,810
I would love that.

96
00:05:21,910 –> 00:05:26,630
But right now, I, I need to do what's best for my business and my family.

97
00:05:26,730 –> 00:05:30,370
Let me know what you think about this. Do you have something on your mind? Let me

98
00:05:30,370 –> 00:05:35,140
know over@streamlinedfeedback.com. You can write in or leave a voice note. I might

99
00:05:35,140 –> 00:05:37,510
even play it on the show.

100
00:05:37,610 –> 00:05:43,650
Alright, let's move on to recommended reading. This week. That recommended reading

101
00:05:43,650 –> 00:05:44,280
is

102
00:05:44,310 –> 00:05:52,240
three Mount Shasta Climbers rescued after relying on AI to plan climb. This is from

103
00:05:52,240 –> 00:06:00,760
K ctv.com, and I would file this under strong contestants for the Darwin Awards.

104
00:06:00,860 –> 00:06:07,110
I usually focus on the more cerebral dangers of ai. The idea that letting AI do the

105
00:06:07,110 –> 00:06:12,120
work for you will lead to brain rot. You'll lose the ability to think critically

106
00:06:12,450 –> 00:06:17,880
or articulate thoughts without first running to a large language model to tell you

107
00:06:17,880 –> 00:06:23,940
how you feel. And that is extremely problematic. It's the root of everything I talk

108
00:06:23,940 –> 00:06:25,920
about with conscientious AI usage.

109
00:06:26,20 –> 00:06:30,410
But this story shows that there is also a straight up

110
00:06:30,510 –> 00:06:32,410
physical danger.

111
00:06:32,510 –> 00:06:33,660
These people

112
00:06:33,760 –> 00:06:34,610
asked

113
00:06:34,710 –> 00:06:36,820
some large language model,

114
00:06:36,920 –> 00:06:39,00
how to plan their climb.

115
00:06:39,100 –> 00:06:41,390
And instead of,

116
00:06:41,490 –> 00:06:45,640
taking the recommendations and validating them

117
00:06:45,740 –> 00:06:48,00
against some expert,

118
00:06:48,100 –> 00:06:48,890
or

119
00:06:48,990 –> 00:06:50,440
maybe just talking

120
00:06:50,540 –> 00:06:51,600
to an expert,

121
00:06:51,700 –> 00:06:53,420
they decided to just take

122
00:06:53,520 –> 00:06:55,840
what it said verbatim.

123
00:06:55,940 –> 00:07:02,40
the best part of it is the quotes at the bottom. So here's exactly from the article.

124
00:07:02,40 –> 00:07:02,640
I'm gonna quote.

125
00:07:02,740 –> 00:07:08,270
the group said it packed supplies for an eight hour climb, not its roughly 16 hour

126
00:07:08,270 –> 00:07:08,810
ascent.

127
00:07:08,910 –> 00:07:14,320
The climber said, AI recommended simple carbohydrates instead of fats because fats

128
00:07:14,350 –> 00:07:17,140
take too long to digest.

129
00:07:17,240 –> 00:07:24,210
And then they said, we relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.

130
00:07:24,690 –> 00:07:26,490
The group told rangers,

131
00:07:26,590 –> 00:07:29,90
the article, just so you know, the article

132
00:07:29,190 –> 00:07:34,510
says, official said climbers should use reliable sources, carry paper maps and other

133
00:07:34,510 –> 00:07:38,740
backup navigation tools, set a turnaround time and follow it.

134
00:07:38,840 –> 00:07:42,960
They also urged climbers to bring enough food, water, warm clothes, and emergency

135
00:07:42,960 –> 00:07:46,410
supplies for a long day. And an unexpected night

136
00:07:46,510 –> 00:07:49,520
on the mountain. I can only imagine what the prompt was like,

137
00:07:49,620 –> 00:07:50,740
Hey, we're,

138
00:07:50,840 –> 00:07:54,780
you know, we're gonna do a hike. We expect it to be eight hours. What should we bring?

139
00:07:54,880 –> 00:07:56,810
and so like, I, I know nothing about hiking.

140
00:07:56,910 –> 00:07:59,770
And so what I would do in this situation is ask my brother,

141
00:07:59,870 –> 00:08:01,680
or my brother-in-law, both of whom

142
00:08:01,780 –> 00:08:03,230
hike regularly,

143
00:08:03,330 –> 00:08:06,460
my brother would probably be a little more mean about it, or maybe a little more

144
00:08:06,460 –> 00:08:08,320
direct and be like, I don't know if you could do an eight hour hike.

145
00:08:08,420 –> 00:08:13,980
so we rely too much on AI rather than our own. Critical thinking is, I think, an

146
00:08:13,980 –> 00:08:15,300
incredible understatement.

147
00:08:15,400 –> 00:08:20,300
It's an even stronger argument that AI is a word calculator that doesn't quote unquote

148
00:08:20,300 –> 00:08:20,990
know

149
00:08:21,90 –> 00:08:21,880
anything.

150
00:08:21,980 –> 00:08:22,620
And,

151
00:08:22,720 –> 00:08:29,210
possibly because of this story this week, I also came across the AI mushroom meme.

152
00:08:29,330 –> 00:08:34,490
I, this is, I think this was going around in July, but it's basically a person holding

153
00:08:34,490 –> 00:08:35,240
up a mushroom,

154
00:08:35,340 –> 00:08:40,120
to an AI avatar and saying like, Hey, can I eat this? And it's like, yes, absolutely

155
00:08:40,120 –> 00:08:40,570
you can.

156
00:08:40,670 –> 00:08:42,170
Uh, and then the next panel is, uh,

157
00:08:42,100 –> 00:08:45,710
a gravestone and it says, you're absolutely right, that mushroom was poisonous. Would

158
00:08:45,710 –> 00:08:47,660
you like to learn more about poisonous mushrooms?

159
00:08:47,760 –> 00:08:48,280
So,

160
00:08:48,380 –> 00:08:53,720
I came across that meme this week and an article arguing that the meme is propaganda

161
00:08:53,720 –> 00:08:56,840
stating that AI must never be wrong.

162
00:08:56,940 –> 00:09:01,90
Uh, I think the article felt a little ramly at times, like it mentioned, like childhood

163
00:09:01,90 –> 00:09:02,470
vaccines at some point.

164
00:09:02,570 –> 00:09:09,30
and this author who I am going to bestow the dubious honor of being AI blue pilled

165
00:09:09,240 –> 00:09:09,660
on,

166
00:09:09,760 –> 00:09:15,970
uh, misses the point of the meme. The meme is not that AI must always be wrong.

167
00:09:15,970 –> 00:09:20,70
The point of the meme is that we shouldn't blindly trust ai.

168
00:09:20,170 –> 00:09:24,770
So what should these people have done? Well, I kind of mentioned it already, use

169
00:09:24,770 –> 00:09:29,960
actual trustworthy sources and people with experience would be number one.

170
00:09:30,60 –> 00:09:32,680
But if you are going to turn to ai,

171
00:09:32,780 –> 00:09:35,670
use it to surface trustworthy sources,

172
00:09:36,00 –> 00:09:38,770
You say, I am thinking about doing this.

173
00:09:38,870 –> 00:09:39,720
Can you

174
00:09:39,820 –> 00:09:41,30
surface

175
00:09:41,130 –> 00:09:44,440
advice and cite primary sources

176
00:09:44,540 –> 00:09:47,40
for the, for what I should do? Right?

177
00:09:47,140 –> 00:09:50,150
And then you can go and vet and, you know, maybe something from,

178
00:09:50,250 –> 00:09:55,420
you know, the, the National Park Service is going to be better than some rando on

179
00:09:55,420 –> 00:09:55,810
Reddit.

180
00:09:55,910 –> 00:10:00,450
So AI is a fast moving field. We, we need AI literacy.

181
00:10:00,550 –> 00:10:02,420
It's going to be hard to figure out,

182
00:10:02,520 –> 00:10:09,160
you know, what, what AI literacy today is versus a year from now. But using AI is

183
00:10:09,160 –> 00:10:14,380
axiomatic of using or reading pretty much anything on the internet. It's the same

184
00:10:14,380 –> 00:10:20,530
lesson that we learned from blogs and social media that just because it's printed

185
00:10:20,530 –> 00:10:24,100
on the screen does not make it true.

186
00:10:24,200 –> 00:10:26,210
we need better, we need to do better,

187
00:10:26,310 –> 00:10:29,560
uh, because these people very well could have died

188
00:10:29,660 –> 00:10:32,310
because they took advice from AI

189
00:10:32,410 –> 00:10:33,980
instead of some trustworthy source.

190
00:10:34,220 –> 00:10:36,680
Man, what a, what a weird way to go

191
00:10:36,680 –> 00:10:38,550
to go from this to something fun.

192
00:10:38,650 –> 00:10:41,420
but that's, that's the format I'm sticking with.

193
00:10:41,520 –> 00:10:45,760
this something fun is DJ Earworm mashups.

194
00:10:45,860 –> 00:10:52,50
I've been listening to their mashups for over 15 years now, and this week I rediscovered

195
00:10:52,50 –> 00:10:54,270
some of my favorites, including the one,

196
00:10:54,370 –> 00:10:59,870
uh, I'm linking in the show notes party on the floor from summer 2011.

197
00:10:59,970 –> 00:11:05,890
they have such a unique approach to creating mashups and accompanying and, and the

198
00:11:05,890 –> 00:11:06,970
accompanying videos,

199
00:11:07,70 –> 00:11:09,500
which are really good, and I love them,

200
00:11:09,600 –> 00:11:15,690
as someone in his forties, the newer mashups also let me know what songs are popular

201
00:11:15,790 –> 00:11:21,500
these days. So recommend DJ Earworm. Have a, listen. There's a lot of really good

202
00:11:21,500 –> 00:11:23,930
stuff on their channel.

203
00:11:24,30 –> 00:11:27,970
Okay, let's round out with something to help your systems.

204
00:11:28,70 –> 00:11:31,440
I'm calling this the video outliner. So,

205
00:11:31,540 –> 00:11:33,320
related to,

206
00:11:33,420 –> 00:11:37,390
the on my Mind segment, I decided if I was gonna try Steve Thompson's approach to

207
00:11:37,390 –> 00:11:43,360
YouTube, I needed something that would keep me honest using Claude code. I built

208
00:11:43,360 –> 00:11:46,900
a video outliner in H-T-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript.

209
00:11:46,900 –> 00:11:50,780
So if you wanna see a screenshot of this, I do include it in my newsletter.

210
00:11:50,880 –> 00:11:55,480
I, I can also show it on screen on the YouTube video or the video, I guess, depending

211
00:11:55,480 –> 00:11:56,950
on where you're listening slash watching.

212
00:11:57,50 –> 00:12:03,300
so I took several of Thompson's videos, videos that I watched, not just videos I

213
00:12:03,300 –> 00:12:04,440
blindly agreed with,

214
00:12:04,540 –> 00:12:06,770
uh, or blindly agreed with the analysis of.

215
00:12:06,870 –> 00:12:12,220
Uh, and I fed them into Claude asking it to review the common themes and format.

216
00:12:12,320 –> 00:12:19,290
It identified an arc with clearly labeled sections, and then Thompson's common answers

217
00:12:19,320 –> 00:12:26,580
to those sections. So like, who's the enemy and what is the advice of the enemy once

218
00:12:26,580 –> 00:12:30,750
the symptom, that sort of thing. So I took that, I made a table and I filled in my

219
00:12:30,760 –> 00:12:34,690
equivalent, which also live on a sticky post-it note on my wall.

220
00:12:34,790 –> 00:12:41,790
but I, I filled in this table and then I gave all of that analysis my table and the,

221
00:12:41,890 –> 00:12:46,700
format I like for creating videos, which is story, problem, solution, call to action.

222
00:12:46,800 –> 00:12:52,600
and I had Claude build a Mad Libs style page for me, which again, you can see as

223
00:12:52,600 –> 00:12:54,250
a screenshot in the show notes,

224
00:12:54,350 –> 00:13:00,240
or up on the screen in, in the video if you decide to watch the video.

225
00:13:00,340 –> 00:13:02,990
Uh, but again, I'll include a screenshot in the, in the show notes as well.

226
00:13:03,90 –> 00:13:05,140
The very crucial part here

227
00:13:05,240 –> 00:13:12,00
is that this gives me the beats, but never the words. I write the entire outline

228
00:13:12,00 –> 00:13:17,250
slash script using this format. And the reason that I decided to do it this way

229
00:13:17,350 –> 00:13:23,600
is because as I mentioned earlier, this is so different from my normal approach to

230
00:13:23,600 –> 00:13:29,270
creating videos that I wanted to make sure I was actually sticking to this format.

231
00:13:29,750 –> 00:13:30,590
And I think like

232
00:13:30,690 –> 00:13:33,820
using a large language model to build something

233
00:13:33,920 –> 00:13:38,610
around these guardrails is, is a very good use of it, right? It's doing the task

234
00:13:38,710 –> 00:13:43,460
and not the craft. I am still doing the craft, and I'm just following the requirements

235
00:13:43,580 –> 00:13:44,900
I've set forth for myself.

236
00:13:45,00 –> 00:13:47,500
An important part of

237
00:13:47,600 –> 00:13:48,930
this experiment

238
00:13:49,30 –> 00:13:50,750
is consistency,

239
00:13:50,850 –> 00:13:57,790
and this little application will help me stay consistent.

240
00:13:57,890 –> 00:14:05,10
So that's it for this episode. These episodes are about taking more time off, especially

241
00:14:05,10 –> 00:14:09,510
on the weekends. And the best way you can do that is by having a good system in place

242
00:14:09,900 –> 00:14:15,330
to stop you from doing everything yourself. Now, if you are not sure where to start,

243
00:14:15,330 –> 00:14:21,360
I am offering free 25 minute coaching calls to listeners. This will be one place

244
00:14:21,360 –> 00:14:23,550
where I actually do teach a little bit.

245
00:14:23,650 –> 00:14:31,760
You can book yours over at streamlined FM slash clarity, streamlined FM slash clarity.

246
00:14:32,120 –> 00:14:37,10
Thanks so much for listening to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur. And

247
00:14:37,10 –> 00:14:41,00
until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.