Dirt, ping pong, and your new AI coworker

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What's good, there Visionaries!

Spring hit Washington and we didn't waste a minute of it.

This week I want to tell you about dirt. Real dirt. The kind you move with your hands while your neighbors are right next to you doing the same thing.

Plus my new daily obsession, a workshop that went way better than expected, and some AI news worth paying attention to.

Why You Should Care:

• Mutual Aid in Action: Seven garden beds and two hugelkultur mounds built in a single weekend by one group showing up for one family.

• Flow State on Demand: How ping pong became the thing that pulls me out of work mode every single day.

• AI That Actually Does Stuff: The workshop replay is live, and 25+ people already saw what happens when you stop copy-pasting and start delegating.

Work Party: Seven Beds, Two Mounds, One Weekend

Every month our mutual aid group gets together. We talk about what people need. What they're working on. Where they could use a hand.

One family moved onto their property last year and now that spring is here, they wanted to get a garden going. They asked for help. That's how it works.

They got the materials. Soil, manure, compost, some lumber for raised beds. Then we showed up. Half on Saturday, half on Sunday.

We built seven raised garden beds. Filled them up. Done.

It's a German method. You take large decaying matter, fallen logs, big limbs, and you layer it. Large wood first, then smaller branches, then hay, then manure, compost, and soil on top.

Over time, all that organic matter keeps breaking down. The soil gets richer season after season. You plant right on top of the mound and it slowly compresses as it decomposes. It's a long-term investment in your ground.

We got two of those mounds done.

This would have taken one family weeks of grinding work. We knocked it out in two days because a group of people made a standing commitment to show up for each other. The commitment came first. The capacity followed.

Seven beds and two mounds didn't get built because anyone had extra time or money. They got built because people showed up.

Resilience is not a mindset. It's soil that produces food when you need it to.

Ping Pong: My New Addiction

I relapsed. 14 years clean and I fell off the wagon hard. The substance? Ping Pong.

When I'm mid-rally, my brain stops running work problems. There's no to-do list inside a 60-second volley. Just the ball, the angle, the read.

My neighbor in the mutual aid group has a table. He's really good. He continuously kicks my butt. But in that challenge, my skill level has grown tremendously over the last few months. Don't give up. Use getting beat to your advantage. Be anti-fragile.

Last week I played at Spin in downtown Seattle with my friend Dylan before we caught a show. Played for an hour and walked into that concert feeling like a completely different person than I was before.

That's the thing most high-output people are missing. Something that pulls you fully out of go-mode and into presence without requiring a vacation or a spa day.

If you haven't found yours yet, start looking.

From Chatbot to Coworker: The Workshop Replay Is Live

My AI Coworker workshop is done and the replay is now available.

AI agents are a real thing now. AI is no longer just confined to the chat window where you have an ongoing conversation and copy-paste the output into your documents.

Through something called MCP connectors, AI can now safely connect to your actual tools. Calendar, email, files, Notion, Google Drive, and about 200 other apps. And it can take action on your behalf.

After a meeting, it grabs the transcript, drafts a summary, and drops it in your email drafts waiting for you to review and send. That's cutting real time off my day.

I saved $720 a year off my internet bill by having AI negotiate a better price for me.

I asked my attendees how many times they copy and paste from ChatGPT each day. The answers were five to +30. That's the copy-paste trap. This workshop gets you out of it.

90 minutes, screen shared, live demos of AI connecting to tools and completing tasks. .

25+ people signed up and we had a lively Q&A.

You get the full replay, a complete Notion guidebook with walkthroughs, and the AI Memory System workshop ($97 value) included as a bonus. Plus 10 Claude Cowork skills that get stuff done.

If you've been curious about what "AI agents" actually means and how to put this to use in your life, like right now, this is where you start. No coding required.

Replay is available now

$149 - 90 minutes. Watch and build on your time.

Beyond The Matrix: Physical Health

This week in BTM we're covering physical health. Saunas, cold plunges, and how to strengthen the focus of your mind.

Just got this feedback from one of the attendees:

"I see how this not only ties into yourself, your family, but also community — because then it's sustainable. Everybody can take the tools that allow that to be sustainable instead of telling everybody, here's the rule book. It's an intelligent way with a lot of diversity and helping create a space for that to happen. I think it's brilliant." — Kena

BTM is free right now. I'm going to put the paywall back up when this cohort run is finished, so if you want to scope it out, now's the window.

Check it out here: http://beyondthematrix.info

Tech Corner

• Claude Code Goes Open Source. Anthropic “accidentally” let Claude Code out into the wild. Good for the community, not ideal for Anthropic. They'll adapt.

• Suno 5.5 and My Daughter's Birthday. New Suno feature lets you record your voice and turn it into a model. Made my daughter a birthday song with my voice clone. She hated it. Scrapped it, made a different one, and it's been on repeat since.

• AI Avatar Deepfakes on YouTube. In our Inner Circle community, we've been tracking a trend worth knowing about. AI avatars are now mimicking real creators. Took me 10 minutes to notice a video it wasn't the real person. Subtle misinformation baked into content that looks and sounds like someone you trust. It's only going to get harder to spot. Stay vigilant.

Today’s Takeaways:

1. Show Up With Dirt On Your Hands: Resilience gets built by groups who commit to each other, not by individuals white-knuckling it alone.

2. Find Your Return Valve: If you don't have something that pulls you into presence daily, you're running hot without a way to cool down.

3. Stop Copy-Pasting: The AI game moved. If you're still generating text and manually moving it between apps, the workshop shows you the next step.

I love reading the responses to these newsletters.

Every week someone hits reply and tells me they started a mutual aid group, or they finally set up their AI workflow, or they just needed to hear that someone else is building the same way they are.

If any of this is landing for you, or if you're taking action on something you read here, I want to hear about it.

Hit reply. One sentence is fine. Tell me what you're building, what you're trying, what clicked.

Those messages are the best part of my week.

Stay curious and keep it real,

Joshua | The Holistic Tech Wizard

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