Howdy Reader!

I get asked this one constantly. How in the world do you keep up with all the AI news that drops every single day?

Great question. The honest answer is that nobody keeps up. Not really. Keeping up with AI is like trying to drink from a firehose while the firehose is also learning, improving, and quietly launching a competitor to itself. The big accounts feel behind. The tiny users feel behind. The person who looks like they have it all figured out is, I promise you, refreshing their feed at 11 pm whispering, "What in the world did Claude just release?"

I try to camp out in my little lane of visual marketing and pretend the rest doesn't exist. This works for roughly forty minutes, at which point my niche casually overlaps with three new models, an agent, and something involving a data center the size of Rhode Island. Cool. Love that for me.

So how do I make sense of the madness? Brace yourself, because this is going to sound like ancient wisdom from a mountaintop.
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I read.
A lot.
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That's it. That's the secret. I'll wait while you write that down.

But there's a sneakier reason it works, and I stole it from James Altucher. He says creativity isn't about yanking brand new ideas out of the void like some kind of wizard. It's taking two things that already exist and smashing them together into something new. He calls this, and I want to be very clear that I did not invent this term and cannot be held responsible for it, "idea sex." (I'll give you a second. Maybe a sip of water. Take all the time you need.)

Think about it though. G.I. Joe is just dolls plus action plus the military. Nobody split an atom. Somebody glued together three things that were sitting right there in plain sight, and then presumably went home rubbing their hands together, cackling maniacally while counting their money.

Altucher says creativity is a muscle, and you train it by writing 10 ideas a day, and crucially, they are allowed to be deeply, magnificently stupid. Mine certainly are. But here's the catch that got me. You can only mash together ideas you actually have rattling around in your skull. No raw material, no collisions, no magic. Which means whatever you're reading all day is quietly becoming the fuel for everything you ever make. Slightly terrifying when you remember half your day is spent reading arguments in the comments between your mom and a cranky uncle.

But here's where it gets good, and where I think Altucher was a few years early. AI is that same idea, just caffeinated. You can hand it two things that have no business being in the same sentence and ask it to smash them together, and it just does it, no awkward small talk required. Which means the better you understand what these tools can actually do, the more combinations land on your table. Keeping up with AI isn't really about keeping up anymore. It's about keeping your idea machine loaded.

So I've gotten picky about what goes in. And the one AI resource I read every single morning, before my coffee is cold, is today's sponsor, Superhuman.

Think of it like Morning Brew or 1440, but for AI. News, prompts, and workflows, sliced into the sections that actually matter to me, usually with a video and a generous pile of links worth clicking. Short read, shows up in my inbox daily, does not make me feel dumb. Here's the thing though. They reached out to sponsor this email last week, and I said yes only because I'd already been a loyal little reader for ages. One promise I've made to you, fearless reader, is that I will never recommend something I don't actually use. I have standards. They are questionable in some areas of my life, but not this one.

That's my fuel. Now I want yours. What do you read to keep up with AI without your head spinning clean off your shoulders and rolling under the desk? Hit reply and tell me. I'm building a resource library and I am shamelessly crowdsourcing it from people smarter than me, which is most of you.

See ya around the interwebs,
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-Jeff

P.S. Your homework, should you choose to accept it. Pick two things you love that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, hand them to your favorite AI, and tell it to smash them together. Read what comes back. Somewhere in the wreckage is idea number one. Only nine more to go, and yes, they're allowed to be terrible. In fact, count on it.