I’m not selling a thing here. No course, no app, no affiliate link. So read away.
A lot of people my age have made up their minds about AI. It’s slop. It’s a fad that will fizzle out. It’s the end of real writing. And underneath some of that, if we’re honest, is a quieter worry: I’ll never catch on to this, so why try?
I’m retired, and I’d like to offer you a different view — one that might surprise you.
I took my first computer class in 1975, feeding punch cards into a machine and waiting for a line printer to tell me what I’d done wrong. I’ve been writing online since 1994. I’ve been on the leading edge, the bleeding edge, and at least once I fell right off the Google edge.
So I’m not a kid who fell in love with a shiny toy. I’m an old guy who has watched a lot of shiny toys come and go. This one is different.
Here’s the part most people miss
Every major AI learned what it knows by reading the internet. Have you seen the internet? It’s full of junk, half-truths, and flat-out wrong information. So if you take whatever AI hands you and post it as is, guess what — some of it will be slop.
That doesn’t surprise me one bit. I’ve fought the same battle my whole career in the money world. So much of what “everybody knows” about money, credit, and debt is just plain wrong. But hear the wrong answer enough times and it starts to feel right.
AI has the same problem, because it learned from the same crowd. The answer isn’t to walk away from it. The answer is to check it.
You already have the skill that matters most
Here’s the good news. The most important AI skill isn’t technical. It’s healthy skepticism, and you’ve been building it your whole life.
You’ve heard a salesman’s pitch and known something was off. You’ve read the fine print. You’ve asked, “Says who?” That’s all checking AI really is. When it tells you something that matters — a number, a deadline, a rule — ask it where that came from, then go look at the original yourself.
I do that every day. Anything I publish gets checked against the original source — the actual law, the agency’s own announcement, the court filing — not somebody’s article about it. If AI can’t show me where a claim came from, I don’t use it. On my true crime podcast, the AI has one standing order: if a name or a detail is unclear, flag it for me. Never guess.
That’s not slop. That’s the opposite of slop. And it’s a habit you already have.
Start small. Tonight, even.
You don’t need a big project to begin. You need one small win. Here are three things you can type in, word for word, the first time you open it:
“I’m new to this and a little nervous. Explain things to me like a patient friend, one step at a time.”
“Here’s a letter I got. Tell me in plain English what it’s asking me to do, and what questions I should ask before I do anything.” (Leave out account numbers and your Social Security number. It doesn’t need them.) You can snap a picture of the letter and share it with the AI engine.
“Help me write a short, warm note to my granddaughter about what I was doing when I was her age.”
That’s it. If the answer isn’t clear, say so. Tell it, “I didn’t follow that, try again more simply.” It will, as many times as you ask. It won’t sigh, it won’t roll its eyes, and it won’t make you feel old.
What it grew into for me
Once I got comfortable, it snowballed. I’m not telling you to do any of this. I’m telling you how far a curious retired guy can get by starting small:
I filed a provisional patent. AI helped me search existing patents, compare my idea to the closest one out there, and draft the specification.
I cleaned house on everything I’d written since 1994. My GetOutOfDebt.org site had grown past 25,000 posts, every one of them written by me. With AI’s help, I cleared out the outdated posts and the dead wood and got it down to about 14,000. I’d have died before I finished that by hand.
I built my own research library. More than a hundred books on money and debt, broken into nearly 19,000 searchable passages my writing tools can pull from and cite.
I set up a watchdog. It keeps an eye on consumer complaints, court filings, and government enforcement actions for me, around the clock — for under two dollars a day.
I made it prove itself before I trusted it with money. In my online selling business, a new pricing rule ran quietly alongside me for almost a month, so I could see whether it would have made the right call before it ever touched a real price.
I design things. I sketch out an idea, and AI helps me turn it into a 3D-printable design I can tweak and sell.
None of that required me to become a programmer. It required me to be curious, patient, and skeptical — which, if you’ve made it to retirement, you probably already are.
It’s not too late, my retiree friends
You don’t have to be the most tech-savvy person you know, or the fastest.
I learned that once. Back in my web-building days, I decided this thing called CSS would never catch on. Well, it did. I can still build you a terrific page the old way, but when it comes to CSS, I am not your guy. The folks who jumped in early had more fun with it than I did.
That’s the only real cost of waiting: you miss some of the fun. It’s not too late with AI. And the sooner you start, the more of it you get to enjoy.
You don’t need to buy a class, a book, or a course. Open ChatGPT or Claude — the free versions are a fine place to start — and type in one of those three questions above. See what happens.
If you know someone who has written off AI — or someone who believes every word it says — send this their way.
I’m not a financial advisor, a lawyer, or a tech consultant. This is one retired guy’s experience. You know your own situation better than any newsletter can.
The best tools I ever picked up were the ones I was a little afraid of at first. You’ve learned harder things than this. The next chapter might not look like the one you pictured — and it might turn out to be better.
— Steve