I Got Shook This Week. Here's What Happened.

Plus: Beyond The Matrix is now free. And no, that's not a typo.

Author

Joshua Hale
February 19, 2026

6min Read | Watch | Listen

Hey there Visionaries!

Went to see Moontricks last night.

If you don't know them, they're a banjo-folk-meets-bass duo out of Canada.

Been dropping their tracks in my DJ sets for close to 10 years now.

Finally saw them live.

And standing there in the crowd, watching them actually play the thing I've been spinning in venues for a decade... it delivered. AI wont ever take live music away.

Sometimes you just need to go out with your people and remember why you're doing any of this.

Okay. Now let's talk about the week.

Why You Should Give All the Cares:

  • Start with Uninstall. You can't build something new on a foundation someone else poured.

  • AI moved again. Go check it. Seriously.

  • Knowledge is now cheap. Accountability is what people actually pay for.

  • Go see live music. I'm not joking.

Why I'm Giving Away Beyond The Matrix

There's a moment a lot of us have been sitting with lately.

The feeling that the world isn't quite what we were told it was.

That some things being labeled "conspiracy theory" for years have turned out to be... pretty well documented.

And instead of justice or accountability, the news cycle just... moves on.

I'm not going deep on that here.

What I'll say is this:

Ten years ago I started building a personal path through all of it.

Not a path of outrage. Not a path of apathy either.

A path of getting your own house in order so that no matter what the outside world does, you've got options.

That path is Beyond The Matrix.

It covers holistic living, physical and mental resilience, community building through mutual aid, and leveraging AI and business strategy to build something of your own.

The full program cost $2,000.

Starting now, I'm releasing the modules week by week, completely free.

Why?

Because knowledge is cheap right now. AI can pull information from everywhere.

What people actually need is accountability, community, and a coach in their corner making sure they cross the finish line.

So the material goes free. And I’m putting my energy into group calls, a private community, and 1-on-1 work with people who are ready to build.

The first resource is called "Uninstall."

It's a 4-module foundation that walks you through the tools I've found most useful for building a foundation to be self-reliant.

Before you build anything new, you gotta clear out what's already running.

Tech Corner: Two Moments That Shook Me

Moment One: OpenClaude / Operator Mode

A few weeks back I set up OpenClaw (was Clawdbot), which is basically Claude connected to your calendar, email, browser, and anything else you want to give it access to.

Every morning at 6 AM, I get a briefing.

I did not go ask for it. It just shows up with what I need. I talk to it in my DM’s.

That's the shift. Instead of you going to the AI and feeding it context like a human copy-paste machine, the AI starts working in the background on your behalf.

It just got acquired by OpenAI. Which means the funding is there to go a lot further.

Still supposedly an open-source project. We'll see.

Moment Two: Claude Code

I sat in on a workshop this week demoing Claude Code and honestly sat back in my chair and said something I won't repeat here.

I gave it a single prompt: research my Beyond The Matrix program.

I watched it figure out what the program is, who it's for, who the competitors are, and then, without me doing a single thing, it built a landing page, wrote an email sequence, and generated social media ideas.

My normal workflow involves a lot of copying, pasting, and shuttling context from window to window.

That workflow is ending.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 also dropped this week.

Opus 4.6 = Your own coder without the mountain dew
Sonnet 4.6 = Your office assistant

The reason companies are pushing hard on coding capability is because an AI that can code can start improving itself.

That's the moment we're in now.

If you haven't touched AI in the last 6 weeks, go back and try it again.

It is not the same tool.

Two Websites Out the Door This Week

This past week I shipped two client websites, faster and cleaner than I've ever done it.

Both clients are now open for business with messaging that actually speaks to the right people.

If you've been sitting on getting your thing out into the world, this is a good time to talk.

Today’s Takeaways:

  1. Start with Uninstall. You can't build something new on a foundation someone else poured.

  2. AI moved again. Go check it. Seriously.

  3. Knowledge is now cheap. Accountability is what people actually pay for.

  4. Go see live music. I'm not joking.

Alright, I'm out.

Heading to a Himalayan salt cave to lead a men's circle.

Yeah, you heard that right.

Walls of ancient salt. A room full of guys ready to go deep for some processing. No small talk. No posturing. Just real conversation in a space that makes it hard to stay walled up.

I'm piloting this with a local spa and honestly I have no idea exactly how it's going to land.

That's the point.

Some of the best things I've built started as "let's just try this and see."

If you're in the Bellingham area and something about that sentence made your ears perk up, reply back. This won't stay small for long.

Go do something worth talking about this week.

Stay curious and keep it real,

Joshua | The Holistic Tech Wizard

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