6min Read

Freedom Builders, the water off Orcas Island is cold enough to take your breath, and 25 men went in anyway. Trick is to not stop breathing.

Rocky shoreline. A boat sitting past the driftwood. My phone back on shore in a pile of shoes.

I had come over for a close friend's wedding, and for 3 days I was mostly off that phone.

I DJed 2 dance parties. Friday night for the rehearsal, then a blacklit one for the wedding party after the reception.

I served wherever my friends needed me. I danced with my family under the lights.

And I watched 2 friends have the kind of unorthodox hippie wedding you don't forget: married in a circle beneath a huge driftwood arch.

They didn't just speak vows. They spoke shadow vows.

The couple named out loud the ways they're going to be hard to live with. In public.

Witnessed by everybody there.

Afterward, I told a friend who's dating, “Oh man, they really set the bar high. I'm glad that I'm already married.” He laughed nervously.

We had just watched what dedication and vulnerability look like when people name the parts they usually hide in front of a community that can support them and hold them accountable. That public witness is the point of vows for me.

That weekend was the point.

But the reason I could be fully there started before the ferry.

The wedding plan lived in a spreadsheet.

Rows of names. Call times. Assignments. Ceremony notes. DJ cues. All real information, and none of it something I wanted the wedding party pinching and zooming through while guests walked in.

So I handed ChatGPT the spreadsheet and the visual direction for the wedding, and we turned it into a mobile site. Schedule, assignments, maps, contacts, music cues. One place.

The site made the plan portable. That's all it did, and it was enough.

Which meant I showed up as a friend and a DJ instead of spending 3 days as unpaid tech support.

That prep was done before I arrived.

Then I put the phone down.

I used AI for the wedding, but not at the wedding.

For 3 days I took a few pictures, served my friends, DJed, danced, and lived the experience. I don't think I talked to AI once.

That is the arrangement I want.

The same pattern followed me home into the first ChatGPT Work Cohort call.

Week One of the ChatGPT Work Cohort was designed to showcase the new features and capabilities of ChatGPT Work, so you can start to conceptualize what's now possible.

We talked through a few real use cases. One was a sensitive email: start by talking through the messy thought, then let ChatGPT help turn it into a grounded draft.

That's the part that feels like a break from 2 decades of keyboard and mouse. I want to get more done while being stuck to a screen less, without handing over the judgment.

More demos are coming. I'll be opening up my own workflows so you can see how I'm doing this with recurring work, including video editing.

The Week One recording became part of that experiment. AI helped turn the call into the highlight video.

Watch the highlights and see whether this fits your life right now.

Coming up in the cohort: video editing locally on your own machine, plus social content workflows built from your own writing and source material.

I'm testing whether those can replace some of the separate subscriptions I pay for now. I'll bring the demos once they earn their way out of the lab.

Then I'm shifting gears. 2 weddings and a string of parties are behind me. The rest of this summer is for exploring the Northwest offline with my family.

You can watch the Week One cohort highlights and see whether this way of working fits your life right now.

On July 24, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and other companies published an open letter supporting open-weight AI and arguing against premature restrictions. Open weight means the model's learned parameters can be downloaded and run by others. As of July 30, Microsoft's page says more than 230 companies and organizations have signed.

But open weight and open source aren't the same thing. Open weights give you the trained model's parameters. The Open Source Initiative's definition goes further, covering the training code and data information plus the freedom to use, study, modify, and share the system.

The question I keep coming back to is who controls access to the models and infrastructure your work sits on top of.

Matthew Berman's breakdown open source versus closed source is really the new battleground, and we'll decide if humans maintain freedom for the future.

A lot of people are terrified at how fast this is moving. I'm excited, because I think we get to redesign our lives around it.

Quick one before the takeaways. What's the recurring task you'd hand off first? Hit reply and tell me.

Leave the phone in the pile of shoes.

I don't think we'll need screens much longer.

Now I'm off to explore the Northwest with my family.

Joshua | The Holistic Tech Wizard