My father flew the Hump. C-87s and C-109s, no radar worth trusting, over the Himalayas into China, with nothing but instruments, a crew, and faith that the plane would hold together for this trip and the weather wouldn’t kill him first. His generation had a saying for that kind of flying: God is my co-pilot. You did the work. You trusted the machine as far as it could be trusted. And you understood that something bigger than you was in the cockpit too.
I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot lately, because I’ve picked up a new crew member. Not a co-pilot — an engineer. And it doesn’t fly the plane. It keeps the engines running so I can.
Here’s what I mean, in practical terms, because I know my audience didn’t come here for poetry.
⏱️ The job hasn’t changed. The grind has.
Financial Survival Network runs on volume — newsletters, interviews, market analysis, litigation research for the parking case, comedy material, book projects, all moving at once. For years the bottleneck wasn’t ideas. I’ve never been short on those. The bottleneck was hours: how much research I could physically do before a deadline, how many drafts I could turn before something was publishable, how many rabbit holes I could chase down before I had to just ship the thing.
AI collapsed that bottleneck. Not by thinking for me — by doing the mechanical work that used to eat the day. Pulling and organizing case law. First-pass drafts I then tear apart and rebuild in my own voice. Cross-referencing CAFRs across six cities faster than any paralegal I ever billed a client for. That’s not replacing judgment. That’s an engineer down in the hold, keeping the systems running so the person up front can actually fly.
⚙️ Where it earns its keep — and where it doesn’t
The honest version of this story isn’t “AI is magic.” It’s a tool, and like any tool it’s only as good as the hands running it. It’s fast and tireless on research, synthesis, first drafts, spotting patterns across a pile of documents I don’t have time to read twice. It is not good at judgment calls — knowing which fight to pick first, when to be brutal and when to hold fire, what a judge is actually going to care about versus what looks good on paper. That part’s still mine. That part was always going to stay mine.
Same with the geopolitical work. I can have an engine pull me every public statement, every filing, every data point on a situation in minutes. What I do with it — ignore what they say, watch what they do, read the deal-making the way you’d read a negotiation and not a press release — that’s the same framework I’ve used since I started watching Trump make deals back in 1976. The tool got faster. The way I think about the world didn’t need replacing. It needed feeding.
🎯 Why this matters for you, not just me
If you’re running a business, a practice, a newsletter, a side hustle — the lesson isn’t “go buy AI.” It’s this: figure out which parts of your work are actually you, and which parts are just hours. The hours are where the leverage is. Every hour AI gives back is an hour you get to spend on the two or three things that only you can do — the read on a person, the strategic call, the thing that took you decades to learn and can’t be automated because it isn’t mechanical to begin with.
My father didn’t trust the plane blindly. He trusted his training, he trusted his crew, and he flew anyway because the mission mattered. I don’t trust AI blindly either. I check its work the way you’d check anyone’s work. But it’s earned a seat in the cockpit — not as the pilot, not as the co-pilot, but as the engineer keeping things running so I can keep doing what I actually do.
God is still my co-pilot. Always will be. But I’ve got an engineer now too, and business is better for it.
🔑 If you want the research and analysis this engineer helps me turn out faster — market calls, litigation updates, the stuff I don’t post anywhere else — that’s what Insider Advantage subscribers get first.