Between Meetings & Meals | 001
A dinner party experiment, a new board game obsession, and why I’m building a digital twin.
This week felt like a personality test. I hosted a dinner party, introduced a new board game to the family, tried to elevate taco night with homemade salsa, and quietly worked on building what I can only describe as a digital version of my brain. Somewhere between the Cabernet and the chaos, I realized this might just be my natural habitat.
The Pour
My friend Luis showed up to dinner with a bottle of Juggernaut Hillside Cabernet Sauvignon. He bought it because the label looked bad ass, which is honestly a completely valid wine strategy.
We opened it alongside eight ribeyes. It was my first time reverse searing that many steaks at once. I’ve practiced before and gotten them exactly how I like them, but cooking for other people raises the stakes. Timing everyone’s arrival with the oven phase, then finishing them on the pit, felt like a live performance.
Then the fire started to die.
When I put the first two steaks on, there wasn’t that hot sizzle I was counting on. Immediate stress. I grabbed my propane torch, lit a charcoal chimney on the side, and dumped those fresh coals in. That extra burst of heat saved the steaks, the night, and my ego.
By the time we all sat down around a foldable table and chairs, slightly elevated by a plastic table cloth, the steaks were dialed in. Anisa made her famous Boursin mashed potatoes. Everyone was impressed. We are currently shopping for our perfect dining table and may have gotten rid of the old one a little prematurely. It did not matter. The night was perfect.
The wine turned out to match the moment. Bold, but smoother than I expected. It finished a little sweeter than I thought it would, which made it easy to keep pouring and stay relaxed.
I would absolutely buy it again.
The Table
I have always thought it would be fun to make a weekly salsa, pour it into mason jars, and quietly start a little side hustle. Mostly because I love sauces. I am the guy who scans the salsa aisle for labels that stand out. I order multiple salsas at restaurants just to compare them.
The problem is I have never actually made salsa.
So I decided to fix that.
I used AI to help me build a fire roasted molcajete salsa (recipe). Smoky. Deep. Slightly dangerous. I let everything char almost too far, left the seeds in, and finished it with lime and a tiny splash of vinegar.
It came out ridiculous.
About a seven out of ten on the heat scale. The kids dipped chips in the liquid to get the flavor without committing to the fire. I put it on every taco and it completely changed the night. We had Mexican baked potatoes and Mexican Cokes and somehow it felt like a small event instead of a Tuesday.
I have been using AI like this a lot lately. Reverse searing. Final steak temps. Chimichurri ratios. Garlic confit. Even small upgrades that make dinner feel intentional instead of routine.
The real validation came the next morning. Our housekeeper had some with her breakfast and said it was the best salsa she has ever had. Days later. Still good.
I have officially made one salsa in my life and now I am already thinking about batch two.
The Edge
I learned early that with AI, input equals output.
I run into a lot of people who are skeptical. They think it replaces jobs. They think whatever you create with it is not real. I get it.
The analogy that makes sense to me is carpenters.
If someone builds benches and tables with hand tools, and then power tools get introduced, is the carpenter who uses power tools suddenly less real? Are his tables less valuable because he leveraged better tools? Is the one who refuses help more honorable just because it took longer?
I do not think so.
That is how I think about AI. It is a tool. An amplifier.
The real shift for me has been building what I call a digital twin. Most of us are walking around with a hundred projects, meetings, ideas, and half formed plans in our heads. If you want AI to work well, you cannot just show up with one sentence and expect magic. You have to feed it context.
So I started brain dumping everything.
At work, I organized my key projects, SOPs, and notes into structured files. At home, you can do the same. Service providers. Vehicle models. Appliance info. Even lab results from your last doctor visit.
When you load that into your system, the responses stop being generic.
Now when I ask for help, I get tailored brainstorming. Real problem solving. Specific next steps.
The tool did not replace my thinking. It sharpened it.
The Lesson
I found my new favorite board game.
It’s called Magical Athlete, and it is chaotic in the best way.
The first night it was Anisa, Alanah, Adalynn, and me. None of us had played before, so I annoyingly watched a YouTube video on my phone over and over while we were setting up the game to understand how to play. It honestly was not even that complicated.
The draft took forever because we were reading every card like it was a legal contract. Once the first race started, everything clicked. Random powers. Unexpected moves. Loud reactions. Somewhere between race one and race two, the competitive switch flipped.
By Saturday night, we introduced it at the dinner party. The kids took over. Deven, Parker, Alanah, Adalynn, Aiden. With that many athletes and powers flying around, it was chaos. The good kind. The kind where the parents are laughing from the kitchen and little arguments break out over technicalities.
I paused at one point and just watched.
No screens. No scrolling. Just everyone around a table, fully in it.
Those are the nights I want more of.
Between meetings and meals, this is the stuff I am trying to get better at.
If you have a salsa recipe I need to try or a board game we should add to the rotation, send it my way.