What is AI Brain + Recommendations [Friday Wrap-Up]

Hey everybody and welcome to the Friday wrap up for April 17th, 2026 on Streamline Solopreneur.

This is a short episode where I talk about three things.

What's on my mind this week, recommended reading, and recommended media.

This show is to help you automate your business so you can take time off for free.

And hopefully this curation will help you think more about your systems.

I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my business.

mind this week. The first thing is something that my friend Bianca and I lovingly call

AI brain. I'm writing a much longer piece on this, but I've been trying out Claude Code as I

or Claude Max, Claude co-work, just a bigger plan for Claude. And I've been thinking about this

because in the middle of the week, I got hit with this weird brain fog that felt familiar

like I had experienced it before, and in fact I had experienced it before, in June and July of

2025, where I realized that I was relying on AI for too much. Now, I recognized the warning

signs very early, but it caught me differently this time because I wasn't using it to create

content or even come up with episode ideas. I was using it to crunch a bunch of data and then help

me draw conclusions, but I still felt like I had spent a lot of the last week talking to a robot

and treating it like a person, which is something I try very hard not to do. So this is something

that's on my mind. Again, I'm working on a bigger piece for this. Uh,

where I mentioned the three signs that you might be getting AI brain and how to prevent it.

And I'll just share the three signs with you because those are the things that I've worked out.

The first is that you can't think about something for more than five minutes before running to an LLM for advice.

And this is the thing that made me realize it is I was sitting there kind of stuck between multiple tasks.

I was up in the dining room, which is just a terrible place for me to work because it's right next to the playroom.

and it's, you know, it's between the playroom and the living room. And so there's just a lot going on.

It's very hard to focus. And instead of deciding I was going to move, I was like, oh, I'll just ask AI.

And then I thought, wait, I spent no time thinking about this. So if you can't think about something for

more than five minutes before running to an LLM, that's the first and most significant sign, I think.

The second is that you're not talking to the people who matter, people being the emphasis here.

If you are deciding not to talk to potential customers, clients, or people in your audience,

and instead just asking AI what it thinks about the avatar it has for your customers, clients,

an audience, you probably have AI brain.

And if you have no skin in the game, and this was the second thing that I noticed from this week,

is, you know, I asked it to crunch a bunch of data and then look at a bunch of client calls

and come up with common objections.

And I, of course, compared that

against my own anecdotal evidence.

And I thought, all right, well, help me come up

with a content strategy.

Don't think of the actual content titles,

just kind of like the pillars for the content.

And then as I'm sitting down to plan my podcast,

I thought, I don't care about this plan.

I had no skin in the game

because I didn't spend appreciable time thinking about it.

And so I was able to course correct a lot quickly than I was able to in summer 2025.

But it is, it's a something that requires to quote Matt I. Moody, constant vigilance, I think,

something that you need to think about. Because what Claude Max especially, like what AI can do,

what large language models can do with bigger context when,

Windows truly seems like magic sometimes until it doesn't. And it might be a while before it feels

like it doesn't and that thing snaps you out of it. And so you know, I think that you want to,

I have a, I'm giving you a problem without a solution right now because the solution is

basically just an outline, but, you know, I'll talk about it more on this show, how to prevent

AI brain or at least the things that I'm doing to prevent AI brain.

The second thing that is on my mind is getting good sleep. I've been getting bad sleep this

week. I have been inexplicably, I shouldn't say inexplicably. I've been eating kind of like

garbage too close to bedtime. And I've been waking up somewhere between 2.30 and 4 every

morning. And it hasn't been great. Last night, I ate reasonably

a reasonable amount of time before bed.

And I slept all the way until 4.50, which, I mean, I usually wake up at 5 anyway.

And so I just, I've just been thinking about maybe part of the reason where I felt

AI brain or where I felt the need to lean on Claude more than I would have otherwise

is because of the brain fog from not getting very good sleep.

And that's also something to think about, like check in with yourself and try to get good sleep.

You know, I'm not a sleep expert or sleep doctor.

I'm a 40-year-old man.

And as somebody who's now in his midlife, and I and someone who experienced a lot of sleep deprivation with three small kids.

I know the importance of sleep. My brother said that one thing he was kind of jealous of me about

is the fact that for a long time I did not need a lot of sleep to function well.

And while that is true, right, I can usually get away with a day of not great sleep

or I can one day after not having good sleep. I do see the difference between getting good sleep.

and getting bad sleep.

And you're definitely at your best when you get good sleep.

So just something that's on my mind.

A super secret bonus third thing that I don't have in my outline here,

but that I've been thinking about a lot is,

has to do with my latest LinkedIn post,

which I will link in the show notes and the description.

And that is just like being on our phones too much.

I went to a coffee shop this morning.

and literally everybody in front of me

was staring down at their phone with the same face.

And I was just looking around

to make eye contact with another human being

and I didn't.

And this is coming off of the heels of me writing

a pretty, I feel important piece

for the Home and School Association,

which is I'm president of my kids' home and school association

and I talk about the importance of technology

and waiting until our kids are 14 to give them smartphones.

And this is something I feel increasingly strongly about.

My year of digital detox is going well, maybe too well.

Definitely not too well, but it's just something I'm constantly thinking about.

And it's a little bit of a half-baked idea,

but it's something I wanted to bring up here.

Okay.

So, recommended reading and media.

Recommended reading is an article from my friend Mike Schmitz called How Clawed

helped me make the videos I want to make. And he goes through this process about how he has

started a new YouTube channel about basically book reviews. He has the bookworm podcast,

which is really good. And he was stuck because he had a certain quality in his mind for

these videos and scripting them seemed like something he'd be able to, like something he wouldn't

be able to do consistently. And so he asked himself, I'm quoting the article here, could I expedite

the process by hiring Claude as a research assistant and scriptwriter? And he says the answer is a

resounding yes. And now he's personally walked me through this system because

we're in a mastermind together

and

I am

definitely the town crier

for AI and overuse of AI

in this mastermind group

I am easily

I would say I'm easily the most skeptical

person I don't know if that's true

but I feel like I am

or I feel like I'm at least the most

vocally skeptical about it

but he walked me through this whole process

and it was really interesting

he takes really, really in-depth notes with like an emoji system and things like that.

And he quote unquote trained Claude on this.

He has a video script template.

And so he feeds all of this into a Claude skill that pulls in all of his personal notes,

pulls in the mind map, grabs his rating for the book,

pulls in the bookworm episode, which is a full transcript to get his thoughts on the book,

interprets his emoji coding system, and puts it together. And so this is really interesting

because this is a, this is a riff on the question I get a lot, which is if I train AI on everything

I've ever written, doesn't it make something that sounds like me? And I think what's really

important here is that

Claude is

writing the video script,

quote unquote, which I question

but I also

watched Mike's video and it felt

very natural, so I don't know

I don't know what the delta is between

the thing that Claude outputs

and then the thing that he modifies.

But

the AI is also

not the delivery mechanism.

So he takes this script,

probably fixes it up. The script

is heavily influenced on a very narrow topic, I should say, right? He's not saying come up with a book

review for me. He's saying here is a lot of assets about a book I've read now put together a script

in this template for me. And then he delivers it. And so I think that this is an interest,

I'm going to say an interesting approach. It's not for me.

I don't think

but

you know

he records the video

and then he ships it off to an editor

who edits it

and so his bottom line

is Claude helps him make videos

he wouldn't otherwise be able to make

so

I'm you know I

again I'm going to say this is

not a process for me but I think

it's an interesting process and I don't want to have

like some monoculture

on this podcast I want to

present other points of view, even if I do present mine the most because it's my show.

So I think this is really interesting. I'll have a link to this and everything in the show notes.

And then recommended media. I was going to recommend the Scrubs revival, which we'll call it season

10 of Scrubs. One of my favorite show, maybe my favorite show of all time, usurping friends for

that spot. And I thought that the nine episode revival,

was fantastic.

And so I love that.

I love that show.

I hope it comes back for season two.

They opened up a lot of threads.

And so I'd imagine they're pretty confident

it's going to come back for a season two,

but I don't think it's been officially renewed

as of the time of this recording.

So that was my original media recommendation

until I watched a video from More Perfect Union

called Polymarket Asked to Work with Us.

We exposed their scam instead.

It's a 20-minute video that I think does a, I have no opinions on the outlet more perfect union.

I have not consumed a lot of their content, but I certainly liked this.

And so I have been suspicious of things like this, Polymarket, and the other one they mentioned,

I don't think it's called Kashi.

But whatever it's, uh,

Kalshi. Close. Really close.

Call she.

Uh, about, you know, democratizing financing and,

and really just a bunch of scams, right?

Anybody who fights this hard to say they're not a scam almost certainly is a scam.

This is based, and it's gambling and they go right of their way.

It's really hard to say it's not gambling.

And I just think it's a very well-done video that looks at, you know, that if you've never heard of polymarkets or in sports, this is called prop betting.

And prop betting is bad, really bad, really bad.

Death threats to players bad, right?

Players throwing, like doing the thing that Pete Rose has long been accused of or like the, the Black Sox scandal.

of 1919 on a much more granular level.

So it's just like a combination of a really low barrier way to gamble and a really easy way

to do insider trading if you're the insider.

So I thought that was a really good video.

I think that if you don't know anything about.

Polly Market, which is there are these prediction markets. And so you can bet on like what, how many days this ceasefire will be or how many pitches Max Fried will throw in his next outing or like, will Trevor Noah say potato? That's like right from the video. Will Trevor Noah say the word potato when he hosts whatever he's hosting?

And so like a lot of knowable things for the right people.

So I think it's really good.

I was strongly recommended.

So that's my media recommendation.

So that's what's on my mind, some recommended reading, and some recommended media.

That's it for this episode of the Friday wrapup at Streamline Solopreneur.

If you have thoughts or a story, you can send it over at Streamline.

Feedback.com.

If you want to think more about your systems as a solopreneur, maybe you're interested in

trying something like Mike mentioned here, then you can take a closer look at everything you

do.

And I have a process for how to do that over at streamlined.fm slash sweep.

That's my solopreneur sweep.

It's a free process.

It's like a 30 minute audit of your business.

So I would check it out, maybe ask yourself those questions.

Again, that's over at streamlined.fm slash sweep.

Thanks so much for listening.

And until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.