Raw Data with Rob Collie

For most of tech history, the new thing belonged to the new people.

Then AI showed up and ruined a perfectly good pattern.

Because the smartest model on the planet can know darn near everything and still have no idea how your company works. It doesn't know which rules matter, which ones everyone ignores, why that ugly spreadsheet still exists, or that the "temporary" wo...

There have always been people who can't help themselves. Give them a clunky process, a messy spreadsheet, or a problem nobody owns, and they're already halfway to building something better. Rob calls them crafters. They were valuable before AI. They're becoming indispensable because AI rewards exactly the way they've always worked.

While everyone else is trying to "become AI native," crafte...

AI headlines have already moved on to the deep end. Most businesses haven't.

Every week brings another headline about what's next for AI. Build your own model. Train your own LLM. Customize everything. It's exciting, unless you're one of the thousands of companies still trying to answer a much simpler question: where does AI actually fit into the work we do every day?

H...

For about two years, we've all been reaching for the biggest hammer on the wall because someone else was paying for the nails. If you were on a subscription, you grabbed the biggest, baddest model on the menu and used the crap out of it. Two hundred dollars a month for work that would have cost thousands on the meter. It rounded to free.

Then a new model showed up for roughly fifteen minute...

For years, Rob had a pretty good system.

When a new technology showed up, he didn't immediately declare it the next big thing. He wanted to understand why it mattered first. Sometimes that meant jumping in early, like he did with Power BI. Other times, it meant waiting until the signal was stronger than the hype.

AI was different.

It was the first...

Microsoft just unveiled a monster of a machine built for local AI. More memory. More horsepower. More everything.

Which led Rob and Justin to a question that has almost nothing to do with the hardware.

Are we already using more AI than the job actually requires?

This conversation starts with Microsoft's latest announcement but quickly turns into som...

For the past few years, the conversation around AI has focused on the technology. Which model is best. Which tools to use. How fast everything is changing. But once you start building with it, a different challenge emerges. The technology is often the easy part. The hard part is everything else. The definitions that don't match. The documentation nobody trusts. The tribal knowledge living in someone's head. The...

If you've listened to the podcast over the past several months, you've probably heard Rob mention "the book" a few times.

Well, it's finally done.

In this solo episode, Rob reveals the title, shares the story behind it, and talks about the question that sent him down the AI rabbit hole in the first place: what does this technology actually mean for normal businesses? No...

Rob was supposed to be finishing his book. Last chapter. Two days past deadline. Freedom was right there.

Instead, he hit pause and recorded this.

Because something from a few weeks ago wouldn't leave him alone.

A Microsoft exec had dropped "Microsoft IQ" into a conversation weeks ago. At the time, it didn't fully land. Not unusual. There's been a s...

Garett Medlin just got the official title for the job he was already doing: AI Practice Lead at P3. He's also the person responsible for Rob trying Cowork in the first place, despite Rob's very reasonable question: "Why the hell would I want Cowork if I already have Claude Code?"

Then Rob accidentally proved Garett right.

He made an offhand comment about needing a bette...

Rob didn't go looking for a fight with the medical system. He just showed up with receipts. Claude had already mapped the symptoms, suggested the tests, and summarized the situation better than any portal ever would. And instead of pushing back, the doctor basically said, "Yeah, this all checks out," added a few things, and moved on. No drama. No turf war. Just a quiet moment where you realize… the syste...

Something shifted this year and you can see it in the reactions. Not to the technology. To people talking about it. Rob shared a screenshot on LinkedIn. CFO. Friday night. Using CoWork in real time. The kind of moment where you have to stop yourself because you won't sleep otherwise. And that's what set someone off. Not hype. Not a prediction. Just… "this is happening." Apparently that's enough now.

The job hunt is a numbers game. The problem is, the numbers are brutal.

Hundreds of applicants per role. Ghosted applications. "Entry level" jobs asking for experience no one at 22 could possibly have. In this episode, Rob brings on his daughter Ella, a college senior in the middle of it, and hands her something different. Not advice. Not a better resume template. A coworker that doesn't ge...

The work feels different now.

You can hear it in this one. Something that used to feel like overhead suddenly starts pulling its weight. Not a demo. Not something you have to babysit. It's actually doing useful work while you're still figuring out what you want. That's a weird moment the first time you see it. And then it stops being weird and just becomes the new normal.

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