All of It: On Flawless Vacations, Artificial Intelligence, and Real Construction Dust

My Bora Bora Travel Guide

I always laugh when videos start with “since so many of you have asked.” But actually, I think I have received more questions than ever about Bora Bora and whether the Four Seasons was worth it. So here is my honest review.

Bora Bora was probably the first vacation I’ve ever taken where I don’t have any notes.

From LA, it’s an 8-hour red-eye flight to Tahiti. You arrive well-rested, aren’t tired, and don’t waste the whole day traveling. Then you take a 30-minute flight to Bora Bora on a real plane – it’s not like the ones you take to some small islands where the plane doesn’t fly when there’s fog.

Then once you land, 7 feet away there’s a boat that takes you straight to the island where the Four Seasons is on. It takes up the entire island, and you never step foot into a car. Once you’re there, you just take boat taxis everywhere.

Everything was so safe. The kids had full autonomy, went to breakfast on their own, snorkeled when they wanted, and they were so happy to have the freedom to run around. There was even a marine biologist on staff who the kids loved, and he took them snorkeling every day.

There was never the anxiety of “am I going to have a beach chair?” The hotel was never overbooked or understaffed; there were never too many people around me.

Ok, also I know this sounds ridiculous, but the fact that there were no bugs was incredible. Miller and I are allergic to mosquitoes, so to be somewhere where we didn’t need the anxiety of screens, nets, sprays, and mosquito repellents was such a massive relief.

The hotel has these gigantic inner lagoons that are so stunning. You’ve never seen water this color – like my eyeballs didn’t understand what I was looking at. The water was really warm and there are so many activities for everyone to do - shark diving, snorkeling, sailing, fishing, campfires, jet skis, ATVs. Andy even said it was the first vacation where she was never bored. The sharks and stingrays are friendly, which makes no sense but made it so much less stressful!

The weather was amazing, and it was perfect from 8 am on. There was no waiting for the fog to settle or really hot afternoons.

10/10 great vacation choice and highly recommended for anyone who’s considering it – book it.

Welcome to a new ALL OF IT section called OPERATING SYSTEM, where we dig into the systems that make everything else possible.

This week, I wanted to share reflections on my deeply unhinged and intense relationship with Claude. Now that AI has become more integrated into so many aspects of life, we’re expected as humans to perform on higher levels. So in order to do that, here are a few coworks that I’ve set up in my Claude to help manage building a company and running my crazy family that you might find helpful or at least funny.

MY RETURN AIRTABLE

My home is a shipping and receiving center, basically my own 3PL handling the shipping, receiving, and processing for any and everything for my kids, dog, husband, and oh yeah – me! It genuinely used to give insane anxiety to manage. With Andy’s bat mitzvah, I would be ordering, trying, and sadly returning a wildly expensive embellished Alexander McQueen jacket and randomly think weeks later, “wait, did I ever get my money back?” So I set up a master Airtable with Claude and Gmail integration. It has every order confirmation, how much I spent, what the return window is, if I kept it or returned it, and tracking numbers both ways. It even alerts me to how many days I have left to return the item in my daily digest auto-setting I set for every morning I open Claude.

DO STINGRAYS HAVE FEELINGS?

During our daily snorkeling rendezvous, Miller instantly bonded with a stingray dubbed Juliet because she was such a lover to her Romeo, the tour guide she loves. Juliet would recognize them day after day and come up to Miller and give her a “hug.” So naturally, I had to ask Claude everything about stingrays, including their memory recall, if they had feelings, how they show affection, etc. And if you care, stingrays have functional pain and stress responses along with surprisingly complex behavior, but likely not emotions in any rich, humanlike sense.

CAMPFIRE STORIES!

In the same vein of using AI to entertain my kids on vacation, I asked it to create spooky and creative campfire stories for a sunset sail we took to a remote island. The kids were entertained, and I didn’t have to use too many brain cells or get roasted by my kids for telling my off-the-cuff lame stories.

MAKING MY KIDS’ INSIGHTS INTO MARKETING SLOGANS

I’m focused on building a world while creating my new company, and the key brand tenets were prompted during a family meeting. It started with conversations with my kids that were actually super insightful - how do you build a campaign around the most obvious and universal things that happen when families are together? We had a lot of conversations about how we could connect the truisms of a family to a message in a campaign like “the uncle that never leaves” or the “people in the kitchen that pretend to help but just drink wine and don’t really help you.” That’s where Granola and Claude came into play. I recorded our meeting with Granola (this is the app that has truly changed my life, download it and start using it now!) and I asked Claude for iterations of these slogans and came up with some great versions. I went back and forth with Claude for hours on the beach the next day with notes and feedback as we got closer on the campaign creative. More to come on this, but it was a great way to stay present in the flow with my kids while iterating on it in my own time.

A quick update on our home renovation with Ryan Saghian and his amazing team. And we’re moving back in this weekend. Send prayers.

“Cheese - it’s milk you can chew. Crackers - because your cheese needs a buddy.” - Chandler, Friends. (If only he could workshop his advertising slogans with AI.)

P.S. - Phil, if you’re reading this, Lila is not bougie for going to Greece even though she thinks I shamed her last week for going without us.

Thank you for being here. What's the smartest way you've put AI to work? I’d love to know in the comments.