Wednesday was the first meeting of the Dallas AI Club. Eight of us, including Gracen and me. A small room, but a full one — small enough that everyone got airtime, full enough that the disagreement had somewhere to go.
We started with two-minute introductions. Not what you do, not what you are building — but what you are personally passionate about within the context of AI, and what drew you here tonight. The answers were more honest than I expected. People came in talking about their work and ended up talking about why their work matters to them.
The memento mori practice — our 1-Minute Meditation — punctuated the night rather than opened it. We held it four times: at 6 during the vibe coding hour, at 7 right before the meeting, at 8 in the middle of the conversation, and at 9 at the close. Knowing we will die, how do we want to live the next hour? That question, repeated four times in one evening, does something to a room. It reframes the conversation between artificial intelligence and human attention, again and again.
After the introductions, we watched a video — Any Model. Any App. Build Your AI OS to Work Everywhere, by Nick Milo of Linking Your Thinking.
Milo argues that you should not wire your entire mental life into whichever AI tool is hot this quarter. Build your own system instead — local files, plain text, an “AI OS” that lets any model plug in and out — so when the tool changes, your thinking does not get stranded with it. File over AI, he calls it. The video closes with a section on managing privacy: keeping what is yours local, sharing only what you choose to share.
The room split.
The first reaction was sharp. One person essentially said: this is garbage. Outdated. Incredibly complex, and not needed. Why would anyone do this much work for a problem that does not really exist?
I pushed back. The point, as I heard it, was not really about data privacy or surveillance protection. It was about protecting yourself from having to redo your work every time a tool changes. Tools come and go fast in this space. If your thinking lives inside one of them, your thinking is on a clock.
The pushback to that: fair, maybe, but it still seems like an extraordinary amount of work for a payoff that feels antiquated. Plain text, file folders, a local vault — that is the world we were trying to leave behind a decade ago.
Then a second voice entered with a different objection. The privacy framing of Milo’s video was naive on its face, this person argued, because we are already compromised. There is no real sovereignty available to anyone using modern technology. Your phone knows where you sleep. Your laptop knows what you read. Your search history knows things you have not admitted to yourself. You can find almost anything about almost anyone right now. The idea of protecting your data in 2026 is a kind of nostalgia for a privacy that ended a long time ago.
That cracked the conversation open in a different direction. We started talking about the dream of local machines — small language models running offline, on hardware you own, untethered from the cloud. Is it possible? Yes. Is it accessible? Not yet. Right now it requires real custom work. But the room agreed it is coming, probably sooner than we think — broadly available local AI that gives you the power of these systems without putting your data on someone else’s servers.
That was the moment the room held something hopeful.
It did not last. The conversation turned, and got heated, around the bigger question underneath everything: what is AI actually going to do to us. One person argued that AI will be, on the whole, a very good thing for humanity. He was not naive about it; he just landed on the optimistic side. Several others pushed back hard. They think this could go badly. They used the phrase the end of mankind and meant it.
Nobody convinced anybody. That was not the point.
We closed with a one-minute round. Each person offered what they were taking with them or committing to over the week ahead. The takeaways converged in a way that surprised me. People left with a strong sense that we are going to need each other. That AI, of all things, is underlining the need for real community. That things are moving much faster than any of us could have imagined a few years ago, and that whether this feels terrifying or exciting depends almost entirely on the perspective we bring to it. Our perspective is what shapes the experience. That was the line that stayed with me.
There was also a clear desire — clearer than I had expected — to know what each other are building, not just what each other are passionate about. People wanted something more practical. More like a traditional networking group, in some ways. That surprised me. I had set this up as a different kind of room, and the room asked, gently but unmistakably, for a little more practicality woven in. I am still sitting with what to do with that. Probably some of both.
Several people mentioned the meditation practice on their way out. The hour-by-hour question, the knowing we will die of it, did something to the conversation it would not have done without it. The room knew it was finite. So the room was honest.
We meet again next Wednesday.
If you are not yet in the room and want to be, you can request an invitation.
— Jeremy