A year ago, I was skeptical about AI. Some of my friends were writing songs with AI, but they were very literal. Seemed to use the same words and rhymes. I felt it was limited. I have spent the last 5 months immersed in AI, and with this, I wanted to share my experience and give some love to where it started along the way.

We keep hearing about chips. AI. Everything now tries to market itself with AI. First, as a product differentiator, and now it is a baseline need for products.

This fall, I was starting to lose some sleep about the future. I have “severe” OCD and ADHD, and my OCD was having all kinds of unease about the future. This causes anxiety. My ADHD is a hyperfocus variant on things I like. Unlike most ADHD people, I have dozens of interests that I am DEEP into. I have an obsession with learning, and my compulsions cannot stop me from working on things that interest me. Yesterday I spent 14 hours working here trying to figure out why an email wasn’t working using Claude.

As of early December, 2025, I was like you. Today, I am a jedi master and on my way to probably taking my income stream from perhaps 13 streams of income to 20. This sounds silly, but I count things like yield on KVT as an income stream. I own long term rentals and a short term rental. I make money off of generating solar. When you have 2 kids and mouths to feed – my OCD has severe problems worry about them and their future. Most of my income streams may just be a few dollars a month – but some are seeds that may grow into a redwood forest. Some will never mature above a few dollars. I also spend time each quarter on efficiency exercises to trim costs. Sometimes my OCD compulsions may by some massager socks for my wife on Amazon. I can also count my reduction in costs as income streams.

But I now figured out how to monetize this site. I love to write, why not write and get a few bucks deposited for it? Last month, in a weekend, I built a fully automated news network – with videos and all. That is, MeridianReport.News. The cost for it might be a decent amount for me to front, but now I figured out how to monetize it, so maybe this also gets me a grocery store bill paid per month. Who knows. Maybe I shut it down in a few months if it becomes a cost center.

Long story short, tech really can scare people. As a CIO, I love tech future stuff – but I hated coding. I took like 6 programming languages in college, and scripted for 20+ years in my jobs, but syntax crushed my soul. Claude just took my brain and all of my ideas and mobilized them into code for me. MRN is perhaps my Mona Lisa to date – but I have SO MANY MORE IDEAS.

Where to start?

Like you, I started on Sora creating some fun videos. I then went a bit deeper and darker, and used it as a form of therapy. My OCD had things that replayed over and over and over in my mind. The worst moments of my life, like in 2008, I relived every day. I just figured everyone was like that, but once I was able to take some trauma and throw it into video – it seemed to MOSTLY escape my mind. Like I literally took it out of my head, put it into art, and then threw it into a box somewhere. I feel there’s a lot of implications with that and therapy down the road.

I saw an ad somewhere, I forget where. Facebook? I paid $98 in late December. Every year, I take off a week between Xmas and New Years. I usually have a project each time. Painting. Cleaning. Reading a book. For this event, I wanted to learn AI. So I bought my subscription at contentcreator.com and started. This is NOT a paid ad from them, I just feel very strong in the product and if I can help him get a few dozen more people to sign up, it’s my special thank you to Anthony for putting out a superior product.

The ANGLE of this is to take some of your ideas, and put them to life in video. I will cover a highlight of a few things he recommends here, but his content is a step-by-step, mine is just mentioning some tools here, so once you use his course, you may feel a lot more comfortable with AI.

What this allowed me to do was then piece together clips to make a PSA for Freedom of Speech. It’s not perfect, but it helped me get my feet wet with longer types of videos. I did this so I could learn how to make training videos for work.

The tools

I could write this for hours, but want to keep it brief as I’m on my lunch break and have a million things to get back to. I have some close friends of mine that I want to share this with as well, and it’s easier to just share this link to give them a primer rather than spending a week teaching everyone one on one. See – there is a race going on. Those first to eat at this trough may be those who rule the world inside of 5 years. This is not a drill.

Sora – this is being discontinued, but it helps you start to understand prompts – and limitations – of generative AI. This is where I built a lot of fun things, but this is where I also did therapy for a month to understand what COULD be possible. I found the tool very limiting and fun to play with, but it had little commercial value to me beyond novelty and a training ground.

Fal.ai – Anthony at contentcreator.com used this extensively. Think of this as a department store with all kinds of tools you can use, on a pay per play usage. Most images there are a few pennies. Most videos aren’t that much more. Each one of the tools there each have their own websites/subscriptions. So think of fal.ai like going to a Sears and buying a pair of Nikes rather than driving to a Nike store in the mall. You try these tools out, reload your card a few bucks at a time, and use what you pay for. I used this and eleven labs to create a freedom of speech PSA. This concept was to learn how to do longer form videos – commercials for my company, educational materials, etc.

ChatGPT – for most, you want to ask where to go to dinner. I found this to be superior for research, documentation, writing papers, and writing books. While it isn’t perfect, it gets you an impressive return for the cost. Two examples quick:

  • I had a theory of the universe going back to maybe the 1980s. My dad would talk with me about the universe from the time I was maybe 4 or 5. He would read Hawkings and then tell me things like the Twin paradox, quarks, etc. When math went from numbers to letters, that’s a level of abstraction I could not deal with. I would SEE things in my mind, and I had no ability to draw it or explain it. I made some crude hand drawings in 2008. I built a rig and made a video of it a few years ago. I was able to then upload the video of the rig I made, along with the drawings. It was able to create completely awesome graphics for me. It then told me what I was seeing with my rig. I then used this to co-write an academic paper with chatGPT. For example, something I saw that I didn’t know about – it might have come back and told me Fermi came up with that. Rather than spending months researching each nuance of my idea, in seconds it was able to tell me Einsten did this, Fermi did that, and Higgs came up with that. What then happened was I was able to document my model with known theories and concepts – which revealed my novel ideas that did not exist in research. Because I could not do the math, and I’m not an astrophysicist – ChatGPT advised on how to frame the paper as a challenge for people to prove or disprove my models. It then suggested publications on where to send it, and helped me draft letters to submit it.

It took this picture

and helped me make this picture

  • I have 5 books written. Things on gold, silver, the end of fiat currency coming, losing weight, how to eat to feed hormones, etc. Chat GPT helped me organize it better. In one case, I had it go through my 150 health blogs and grab my thoughts and feelings and write my book better. I had a working title called “half the man I used to be” which documented my 175 pound weight loss from 372 down to 197. It took my book, scraped my 150 blogs – and helped me chapter by chapter until I now have a 200 page kindle-ready book

Claude – This has changed the world for me. I was able to take my IT creative mind and rapidly build applications, tools, and websites. This is DIRECTLY related to my job, and with this, over the next 6-12 months I feel I will be able to save my company hundreds of thousands a year in software costs – while also driving massive levels of efficiency. This tool helped be build a couples app for me wife and me to plan dates, but I went a step further and added a dating component so maybe this can be monetized. I just started this to try and randomize what to do on date night, but I asked AI to build this out to accomodate all kinds of coupled into anything from playing board games to some kinda wild stuff. AI has a dirty mind! P.S. The first 1000 people that sign up, it’s free for life. I need to actually go on and use it someday. No time. I used AI to then seed profiles and randomize my admin profile to try and test. This isn’t ready for primetime yet, but have fun looking around. And – if you connect with your partner, you can then both fill out the maps, then click a button for generating a date night. I am even trying to get events local to your date.

I have a ticketing app I built within it. I’m terrible at remember tasks my wife wants me to do. So this was a fun way of adding things in there.

Claude helped me build my news app as well. Fully automated. It then helped me work with how to monetize it, and I’m waiting on things before I promote it more than a few people here and there. Claude can also help with SEO.

While not an AI tool – DaVinci resolve is a relatively low cost video editor that has helped me cobble together videos from fal.ai and even used ElevenLabs for the voice. ChatGPT can help with the scripts eleven labs can then do the voiceover. Canva can help you build cool thumbnails

HeyGen – this may have broken my brain. HeyGen is what I used to generate my news casts. It reads the script Claude wrote based on the scraping of the internet, and with an API, Claude tells HeyGen the deets with what seems to be a PUT command from MRN to HeyGen. HeyGen creates the videos – then they show up on my news page.

But I also used it as a proof of concept to create training videos for work. No one reads my million word blogs, so HeyGen was able to scrape my blog and then create a 10 minute video to walk people through what I’m saying. It uses my images I embed in this, but it also creates B roll.

This video is a proof of concept. I don’t like the avatar in this, but again – I wanted to try. The voice sounds a bit too AI, and the guy is smiling too much. But a year ago this didn’t exist like this, and each week tech is exponentially growing in this.

While there may be a million other tools – these few are enough to get you started.

I have a new movie studio idea I want to setup for my friends. One has like 20 books written and I am begging him to start getting his books in short story form into AI. Another is an emmy award winning director, and he is in the process of making a documentary, and I showed him how to make B roll footage with fal.ai. Another write a REALLY good 30 page short story that I want him to be able to fire into a hopper and turn into a short movie.