# [PODCAST] Traveling Through Time: The Difference One Year Makes

*Tune in on a podcast to listen to where I was at exactly one year ago on my AI and entrepreneurial journey*

By [Hard Mode First](https://hardmodefirst.xyz) · 2026-03-25

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**Time Traveling in the Present Day**
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One interesting observation about teaching people AI with such a high velocity is that I sometimes get the feeling of **time traveling in the present day.**

I spend a few hours with super-charged engineers, sporting wearables that capture their ever word, who run their entire personal lives via AI agents in text message threads.

Then I step inside a legacy institution — maybe a government building, a library, an outdoor fair, or even a hospital waiting room — and I look around to see none of it.

I find myself now pin-pointing where someone is on the AI adoption curve as a new way to assess how I speak with them. Are they still a skeptical but wary user of ChatGPT? I am careful to start from the beginning, sharing stories of how AI helped me gain leverage and even [saved my life last year](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VtLMIx21Ec).

Are they a mid-career daily user who isn’t yet building agentically? I share more about the engineering mindset that I have been teaching myself to develop. Are they leagues beyond my own technical capacity, themselves living in a future where I have not yet arrived? I ask questions to try to learn from their experience before I get there, too.

The contextual tug-of-war of **time travel** is exhausting. And I’m afraid that the divide is getting wider.

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/333a2e56e7beb9b1ae7661b1e9939ba0cff53900b3da300880fe94dbb2d1a8a8.jpg)

Image generated via NanoBanana

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Reflections from One Year Ago
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Yesterday, my good friend and renowned child psychologist [Matt Zakreski](https://www.drmattzakreski.com/) released a podcast on his show, [_Nerding out on Neurodiversity_](https://www.theneurodiversitycollective.com/noon-podcast)_,_ where he and his co-host interviewed me for an hour about the way that I work and the things that I build.

This interview took place almost exactly one year ago — in March 2025. At the time, I was about 1.5 months into exploring a career as an AI-first entrepreneur, and I had only just recently vibe coded my first app. Since that time, I have deployed a second app live to the App Store, started over 100 smaller coding projects. I codified the framework that helped me do all of this and have already trained 1,500+ people in how to start their AI builder journey the same way that empowered me to start my own.

In listening back to my own retelling, it’s interesting to hear what has changed, and what is different. Nearly none of the active projects I speak about are ones that still carry my attention day to day. The way that I used AI then (ChatGPT + Cursor) is almost nothing like the way I use it now (voice dictation + Claude Code).

I’ve learned how to manage my own databases, how to host my own apps, and how to design my own custom-build software that I use every single day.

But even though the tools are fundamentally different, the mindset is almost identical.

*   I speak about **using AI as a sounding board** and thought partner in jobs that felt beyond my reach.
    
*   I share about **pushing past the frustration** of hitting dead ends to continue learning and building things, anyway.
    
*   I describe how I first started to be able to **self-diagnosis my own problems — and then solve those problems** — with software I built myself.
    

These three tenets might be the most important skills for anyone to adopt in the AI age. If you’re curious to learn how I got here today (based on a moment in time from one year ago), you can tune in here:

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*Originally published on [Hard Mode First](https://hardmodefirst.xyz/[podcast]-traveling-through-time-the-difference-one-year-makes)*