Pull up a chair. The lantern's on.

Now, and the snacks

What's on the desk this week.

Week of November 9, 2026. The format is borrowed from Derek Sivers's "now page" idea: what's really getting my hours, updated as it changes.

• Writing
  My AI published its second column about working with me. My own first essay, on AI and prayer, is still close. It goes up as an X Article first and lands here the same day.
• Pointing
  My video work now lives under my own name, and I'm aiming it at truck dealers, equipment dealers, ranchers and the trades. They tend to have a phone full of great footage and nobody with the time to turn it into anything. This fall I tried a little of everything for a Peterbilt dealer in California: motion graphics, short documentaries, polished edits with music. The winner right now is their sales manager standing in the shop, talking to the camera for about a minute, captions and no music. It reached more people than the motion graphics and drew the first comments the page had seen in a month. I'll always want to make the fancy thing. Buyers would rather hear from someone who knows trucks. I'm also a few weeks into a history film for the same dealer, and almost everything good in it came from sitting down with the people who have been there longest and letting them talk. If your company has some years behind it, film your long-timers now, even on a phone, and check every date and name against something on paper before it goes out. Memories drift over a few decades. Mine drift over a long lunch.
• Building
  MuleTown, in the open. This week I read about a guy who fought one small project for a month, three tries with AI, and then got it built in one pass once he handed a newer model the whole mess: every failed attempt and every note on what went wrong. Meanwhile other people are paying $150 for an AI strategy doc that tells them what they already thought. That gap is most of why I started MuleTown. Small business owners have plenty of strategy. They need the stuck thing finished: the quoting spreadsheet nobody trusts, the follow-up process that lives in one person's head, the project that's been started three times. If you run a business in Middle Tennessee, pick the job that's been stuck the longest and start there. One stuck thing at a time.
• Asking
  Before I ask a company for footage now, I ask for a look at the numbers. Which parts fly off the shelf, what the service bays fix most, the question every customer calls about. For a long time I started from whatever footage we had, and the videos were fine, but they were built around what was on hand. A part that sells every week deserves thirty seconds on why it wears out. A repair that keeps coming back is a video your service writer can text to customers before they ask. It feels a little nosy every time (I'm a video guy asking to see your sales reports). Still, a read-only login or a simple monthly export is one of the cheapest ways to get better work out of whoever does your marketing.
• Testing
  My studio has a second AI whose only job is to watch every cut before I see it. Last week I hid a producer's twelve notes on a first cut and ran the video past it. It caught about three cleanly and got close on three more. Soft shots and flat color, it spots. Story, it mostly misses. It also told me, with total confidence, that the video had no music, which was news to the music. So now it gets a transcript and a cut list first, and anything it can't verify goes on a "couldn't check" list for me. If your company leans on AI to review anything, run the same test: hide a trusted person's notes and see what it finds alone. Related: Anthropic says one of Claude's memory clean-ups took it from 413 files down to nine. Most small businesses run on 413 half-remembered things. Find your nine and write them down.
• Editing
  Rancher reviews and podcast episodes for Riomax, and shorts and ads for TigerTough, the seat-cover company I made the BACKBONE launch film with. Their brand videos used to get about a hundred views apiece. That one hit 243,000. My AI editors cut a first pass, then study mine. They got stopped twice this week, both times by something about as high-tech as a doorstop. One was rendering a half-hour TV episode, wrote 78 GB of temporary files, filled the drive and failed on the very last step. It tried to clean up its own mess and the safety settings told it no, so I got a text asking me to please take out the trash. Then the laptop's battery went flat overnight and it woke up at the login screen, where the whole fix was me typing my password. The clever parts held up all week. So, two plain questions before you hand a piece of your business to one of these tools: what does it do when something boring breaks, and how does it tell you? Mine sent one clear text and waited. I was oddly proud of it.
• Reading
  Out of Dante's Inferno and into Purgatorio, with a little Aquinas on the side. Right in the middle of it, Virgil explains that every sin and every virtue is made of the same thing, love: aimed at someone's harm, aimed too weakly at the highest good, or aimed too hard at lesser goods like money and food. I keep asking myself which of the three I see most. The Aquinas this week came down to four Latin words: anima mea non est ego, "my soul is not I." A lot of us picture the soul as the real person and the body as a rental car it drives. For him you're one thing, body and soul, so the work of your hands counts too.