Meeting at a glance
- Small group of three at a new venue we called the new eagle’s nest
- Informal go-around: each member shared where AI was showing up inside their actual lives
- A voice clone used to record language-games phrases for a spouse’s competition
- Reflection on reclaiming time and using AI as infrastructure to support presence
- Openly considering major life changes and how AI fits into whatever comes next
- Prior weeks’ analogies — the farmer, the potter, the eagle — kept doing their work
Wednesday was the tenth meeting of the Dallas AI Club. Three of us met — everyone else was traveling or otherwise unavailable — at a new venue we ended up dubbing the new eagle’s nest.
The night’s structure was informal: each member shared what was going on in their life outside the usual meeting territory, and where AI happened to be showing up inside it. A pattern emerged across the three shares — none of them was really about AI, which kept surfacing as an incidental thread inside a life-question that came first.
One member had used his wife’s voice clone (via ElevenLabs) to record over a thousand complex Telugu phrases for a language games competition where she had committed to being one of the voices. She was leaving town for other obligations and there was no time to book a studio, so he asked her for a five-minute clip and built out the full corpus through her clone. His wife’s reaction, when she heard the first recording: is that my voice? His son’s answer, more skeptical: no, but there is enough of her in it that it works. He built the whole system with OpenAI’s Codex tool — his first time using it — integrating an ElevenLabs API, phrase spreadsheets his wife would QA one entry at a time, and a small UI he published on a family domain. What used to take him days took a few hours. He shared it not as a technical accomplishment but as an act of care.
Another member had been away from the club for a few weeks — time spent visiting family and learning to sit still in three-hour blocks in the middle of the day. He said being at peace with those empty blocks was the actual work: a direct callback to the eagle metaphor from meeting eight. When asked how AI figured into his current thinking, he named two threads: structural infrastructure for a business he manages that keeps him tethered when his higher-level attention should be elsewhere; and, closer to home, the possibility that helping a relative learn what he had learned might sharpen his own understanding of it.
The third member spoke openly about considering a major shift in the shape of his life. Details would be premature to share, but the deliberation itself was the point. AI kept appearing alongside it as leverage — a network-analysis project for a nonprofit board that surprised him with its accuracy, a small marketing project in the present, and a possible tool for whatever comes next.
The prior weeks’ analogies — the farmer and the potter, the eagle — kept doing their work in the background. One member said he had been about to offer a new analogy for the phase he was in, and lost it. The old ones held.
The memento mori practice sat lightly this week. The small room and the personal register made its underlying question — how do we want to spend the next hour — feel already present in every share. We ended the meeting when the room noticed it was 8 o’clock together.
The organized idiots meet again next Wednesday.
If you are not yet in the room and want to be, you can request an invitation.
— Jeremy