The Next Person
How I help someone get set up to think with AI — starting with a friend who secured a government agency.
Here is a man who ran information security for a government agency. He sat across the table from the largest vendors in the industry and negotiated their products into a hardened enterprise. He carried governance, risk, and compliance in his head as a living structure — knew where the exposure was, knew what a control was worth, knew how long a thing would take and roughly what it would cost before anyone opened a spreadsheet.
And when he sits down to work with AI, the first wall he hits is not any of that. It’s not knowing which screen to type into. That gap is the whole thing I’ve come to care about.
Devils Tower
How I got to where I am today — the story of the thing I built to think with.
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the people who have been touched by something they can’t explain start making a shape. They don’t know why. A man builds it out of mashed potatoes at the dinner table. Others sculpt it in clay, draw it, pile it up out of dirt in the living room — a flat-topped mountain none of them can name. The understanding comes last.
For twenty years I have had my own Devils Tower. I have been sculpting its shape long before I had words for it.