AI & Analog #1: Back from the Future
Toy Story 5, a flip phone, and the timeline that convinced me AI isn't a joke.
I took my kids to see Toy Story 5 on the Fourth of July.
Not fifteen minutes into the movie, I had a reaction I was not expecting. The premise is that kids have drifted away from playing with toys and into screens, that tech is quietly taking over childhood.
I sat there thinking about how careful we’ve been. We don’t hand our kids iPads. We hand them books in the car. We’ve done a good job.
Then the thought that actually landed: when I picture myself on the couch at home, mindlessly pulling out my phone out of boredom, half-watching, half-scrolling.
That’s me. Not my kids. Me.
I am a huge believer that AI is a net positive for society which is counterculture to what you see on the news. We are using it aggressively in our business, and I am about to spend the rest of this newsletter telling you why that’s a good thing.
But sitting in that theater, I realized I can’t preach the upside of technology to you every week while quietly modeling the exact behavior I don’t want my four-year-old picking up.
So, I’m making a change. I’m simultaneously going deeper with advanced technology to give me the space to be present in real life with those I love the most.
This is the first edition of a new series I’m calling AI and Analog. Each week I’ll explore my journey living in the extremes.
Go All in on Both Ends at Once
Here’s the barbell I’m building my life around right now: go as deep as possible into AI on the business side and go as far away from screens as possible on the personal side.
Not a middle ground. Both extremes, on purpose.
I am not retreating from AI. I’ve said it to clients for months and I’ll say it here: AI is making planning cheaper, faster, and more accessible for the people I work with, and I am not interested in sitting this out.
Every Sunday, this is where I’ll show you exactly what we’re building with it, the good and the genuinely useful, not the hype. I’ll also share with you the positive things developing from AI that the news would never dare make you aware of.
But I don’t want to wake up one day, blink, and find my kids are out of the house while I was watching my own life on a screen instead of living it. I’ve pictured that moment.
Me, older, watching old videos of my kids when they were small, and remembering that I was there physically and absent everywhere else.
That image is what moved me, not a productivity hack.
The Flip Phone
One dramatic move this week: I walked into Verizon and bought a flip phone.
It took eighteen minutes to activate. I hadn’t seen a SIM card go into a phone in almost fifteen years. The guy checking me out, after looking at what I was buying, was doing the math on why a grown man with an iPhone in his pocket was also buying a flip phone. I told him why.
His face lit up with joy, almost like he could feel a longing for himself to disconnect and go back.
Here’s the plan. Every evening and every weekend, the iPhone goes in a cubby. Not on silent next to me. Away.
If someone needs me, they call the flip phone. When I get bored, the old habit was to reach for the phone. The new habit is a book, or my kids, or actually being outside instead of narrating my life to an app.
My kids are four and a half, two and a half, and almost six months old. That window doesn’t stay open.
Time is the one asset that we all can’t get back.
What Changed Since My Last Flip Phone
The last time I carried a flip phone was 2011. I asked myself what’s actually changed since then, and the honest answer is almost everything.
Here’s the timeline, because I think most of us have lived through it too gradually to notice how radical it’s been.
2011, where things stood:
- The iPhone 4S had just launched. Siri was brand new and, frankly, not very good yet.
- 4G was barely rolling out. Most of us were still on 3G.
- IBM’s Watson had just beaten two Jeopardy champions, and that was the AI headline of the year.
- No Uber in most cities. No Apple Watch. No AirPods. No Alexa. No Instagram Stories. TikTok didn’t exist.
- Streaming was still fighting cable for relevance. Netflix was mostly still mailing DVDs.
What happened between then and now:
- 2012: The deep learning breakthrough that quietly kicked off the modern AI era. Almost nobody outside a research lab noticed at the time.
- 2014-2016: Alexa, Google Home, and voice assistants moved into millions of living rooms. AlphaGo beat the world’s best Go player, a game experts said computers wouldn’t crack for another decade.
- 2015-2016: The Apple Watch and AirPods arrived and made wearable tech normal instead of niche.
- 2018-2020: The GPT models started appearing, each one bigger and more capable, mostly invisible to anyone outside the tech world.
- November 2022: ChatGPT launched and hit 100 million users faster than any consumer product in history. That’s the month AI stopped being a research topic and became a kitchen-table conversation.
- 2023-2026: Generative AI went from novelty to infrastructure. Image generation, voice, video, and now autonomous AI agents that can run real workflows without a person clicking every button.
Fifteen years ago, Siri could barely set a timer. Today, we all have AI systems regulating and running our devices whether we realize it or not.
That’s not a joke, and it’s not slowing down. It’s the reason I’m not backing away from AI even as I back away from my phone. Those are two different problems.
One is a tool getting radically more capable. The other is a habit that has nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with me reaching for it out of boredom instead of intention.
How I’m Utilizing AI This Week
This week I bought a Bee-Link SER9 Pro AMD Ryzen™ 7 H 255 with Open Claw pre-installed. It’s the AI that will manage my AI, literally.
I use eight AI tools to operate our business and grow our brand. This sounds insane but I’m accomplishing so much in one day with all these various tools, that I need to delegate them.
It’s intentionally separated from any client or personal information on purpose. Going deep on AI does not mean being careless with what it touches.
AI helps build our brand and routine back-office work, allowing me to be present and hands on with our clients and team members.
Most importantly, supporting AI allows Revolutionary Wealth to serve our clients 4x faster and for half the cost of other financial advisors because we aren’t wasting time and money.
I get more done in half a day than most advisors get done in a week, period. When I client calls, I typically answer immediately. At the very least, they hear from me within a matter of minutes or hours.
Saving money is making money, Revolutionary Wealth takes the time and money we save with technology and pass those savings on to our clients instead of pocketing the difference.
How I Went Analog This Week
A trip to the park after work, coloring at the kitchen table before bed.
I enjoyed a nice dinner with a friend without my cell phone, just my flip phone.
When I put my daughter down at night, the thirty or forty minutes she takes to fall asleep used to be an educational YouTube video or reading articles on my phone.
Now it’s a physical book in my hands. Just me, learning something, holding actual pages.
None of this is complicated. It’s not a system or a five-step framework.
It’s a phone in a cubby and a book instead of a screen. That’s the whole thing.
My children and I’s kitchen table drawing turned into a comic book. AI and Analog :)
What You Can Do This Week
Pick one window. Tonight, tomorrow night, whatever’s realistic.
Put your phone somewhere out of reach for two hours. Not on silent next to you. Physically somewhere else.
Notice how many times you reach for it anyway. That number will tell you more than this article ever could.
I’ll be back every Sunday with what we’re building on the AI side of the business, and what I’m experiencing and learning on the analog side of my life. Both halves of the barbell, every week.
Grab your mugs and pull up a chair. This is going to be fun.
Disclosures:
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