What I Do
Let me tell you about rocket stoves.
When I was teaching with Midwest Permaculture, one of my favorite things to coach was the classic beginner cob project: a thermal-mass rocket stove. It's one of the best ways there is to heat a home with genuinely renewable materials — simple thermal technology, few special tools. Here's the thing about a regular wood stove: it makes great heat, but it's wildly inefficient. All that smoke leaving the chimney? That's wasted energy, drifting away.
So students would build, by hand, a super-insulated stove from locally sourced sand, clay, and straw — and then light it, and watch it burn large kindling with no visible smoke. That's the moment they get it. And after a two-day course, they could go build one themselves.
I tell that story because "AI" gets talked about like it's either magic or the end of the world, and most people just want to know one thing: can this actually help me with my real life? That's what I do. I coach people one-on-one to use AI for their home, their hobby, or their business — in plain English, no jargon, no lectures. And I teach it exactly the way I taught cob stoves: hands-on, with real materials, until you can do it without me.
The materials in this case are the tools that are genuinely good right now — mainly Claude and ChatGPT, plus Google's AI tools once you're comfortable. Not theory, not someone else's demo. Your real tasks, on your real device, until it clicks.
And I know precisely what "it clicks" looks like, because it's the same golden moment in every subject I've ever taught. Someone learns a skill in a classroom setting, and then — usually mid-sentence — they start having ideas about applying it to their own work, their own business, their own home. The imagination takes over. A real human connection gets made. You can see the cubicle walls come down.
Never typed a prompt in your life? That's the most common place people start, and honestly it's my favorite. "Prompt engineering" sounds scary and technical, but in reality, working with AI tools comes down to specificity and clarity. It's about learning to ask questions first, question your own biases second, and do your own research — and then letting your imagination and creativity run. No prerequisites, no embarrassment. If you can describe what you actually want to a person, you can learn to do it with an AI tool.
Now, the honest part — the same thing I told stove students, and the same thing any good personal trainer will tell you: roughly 80% of your improvement happens when the teacher isn't in the room. The days between lessons matter more than the lesson itself. Hiring a trainer you see once a week and never working out in between doesn't build muscle, and a coaching session you never practice after doesn't build skill. So yes — we will have homework, folks. Small, real, doable homework, built from your own life. That's where the smoke clears.
If that sounds like the kind of learning you've been looking for, here's the fuller picture of how I teach: What I Do →. Or just text me at 503-664-0546 — the first conversation is always free.
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