Most 20-year olds find mentors.

I found a guy who tried meth.

He told me he got more done in one month than in the five years prior.

He launched two businesses.
Deep-cleaned his house.
Digitized his taxes seven years back.
He even started alphabetizing his soup cans.

Then… things fell apart.

A cracked tooth, $30,000 in debt, and a long trail of angry voicemails from ex-friends, ex-clients, and a UPS driver.

That’s the dark side of productivity: it can feel like liberation…

Until it becomes another form of addiction.

Meth taught me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned: Productivity isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less with leverage.

That’s true liberation.

Of course, I immediately forgot that lesson. Throughout my 20s, I repeated his mistake (without the meth):

I downloaded every productivity app I could find. I bought the journals, the gadgets, the $300 minimalist backpacks that claimed to optimize my life.

I’ve tried 100+ tools. Not a metaphor. I actually counted.

Every one of them promised to “change my life.”

BUT…

 It wasn’t until AI hit full speed that it became true. That’s when I was liberated from my own busywork.

That’s when I was finally freed from the endless cycle of writing notes I’d never read, bookmarking articles I’d never revisit, and pretending that a better to-do list would fix my existential dread.

Here are three AI tools I use every single day to liberate my mind.

1. Voice ChatGPT – Talk and Walk

I get my best ideas while walking aimlessly and ranting like a maniac into my phone. (Usually away from people.)

I don’t type. I don’t stare at a blinking cursor.

I talk to ChatGPT. Out loud. For one hour a day. Like I’m talking to a therapist who never judges me.

Why? Because thinking with your fingers is slow. Thinking with your voice is freeing.

One is deep, the other is wide.

You need both.

(Caveat: I used to do this while driving, until a deer ran into my car like it had something to prove. Car’s gone. Deer’s fine. (I think.) Now I walk.)

2. Relay – The Invisible Intern That Doesn’t Need Coffee Breaks

Imagine you have an intern.

 One that works 24/7.

 Never asks for a raise.

 And doesn’t blow your Gmail up with the same questions.

That’s Relay.

Think of Relay as an invisible assistant that builds workflows out of your everyday digital mess—without needing you to code or babysit it.

Let’s say I have a long conversation with ChatGPT.

I copy the whole transcript into Google Docs. Now instead of letting that doc rot in my Drive, I add it to a Relay workflow.

Relay can automatically:

1. Summarize the document using GPT.
2. Tag it with key themes (e.g., “crypto DePIN,” “networked memory,” “GPT metaphors”).
3. Send it to my research database with the summary and tags included.
4. Email me the summary so it’s top of mind tomorrow morning.

And the best part?

Once I set it up, I don’t do anything else. Just keep feeding it raw material—conversations, notes, ideas—and Relay keeps cleaning, sorting, and connecting it.

That’s what people talk about when they say “AI Agents.”

I’m not just archiving. I’m building a living system that evolves with me.

And then the next piece:

3. Google Notebook LM – Conversations with My Second Brain

Google Notebook LM is what I use when I want my notes to talk back.

I feed it everything—my ChatGPT conversations, my Relay-processed documents, old research PDFs, voice notes I transcribed while walking around.

Stuff I would normally lose in the digital attic. Notebook LM takes it all and digests it into something usable.

Then I can actually ask it questions—about my own thinking.

I’ll type things like:

• “What were the big ideas in that chat I had about AI?”
• “Summarize my notes from last week’s rabbit hole on crypto and neural networks.”
• “What's the connection between REM sleep and good traders?”

And it answers.

Not just with quotes, but with context. It pulls insights from different documents, stitches them together, and shows me connections I didn’t realize I was making.

Sometimes I forget what I’ve written—Notebook LM remembers. Sometimes I don’t know where an idea came from—Notebook LM traces it. Sometimes I don’t know what to think next—Notebook LM gives me options.

They also have this feature called Join, which turns my notes into a kind of personal podcast.

I “join” the podcast and actually talk to an AI host trained on my material. I can ask follow-up questions, challenge my own logic, or just listen to what it thinks I’ve been trying to say all along.

It’s weird. And it’s incredibly useful.

Notebook LM is where I put my thoughts when I want to keep thinking with them.

Voice ChatGPT = idea generation, get unstuck, riff, brainstorm.

Relay = idea capture + automation

Google Notebook LM = idea memory + connection

There are new tools released every day, so this could change. But right now, that’s my daily AI stack.