New Year, New Skills: A Generalist's Guide to Thriving in the AI Era

From wedding officiating to crypto trading—how I embrace continuous learning and unconventional paths in 2025

Jan 07, 2025

Back to the first work week for this new year. I’m easing into it. Anyone else finding it too soon! So nothing heavy going here on the first post out of the gate.

I will be doing more teaching-type videos on this substack, sharing what I’ve learned. We will be making some of the more in-depth AI info we create for subscribers only.

I’d love and appreciate an $8-a-month investment in your knowledge and my support from you in a paid subscription. It keeps us going over at The Rundown.

The Rundown Studio's products in motion:

Over the holidays

I ordained myself to conduct a wedding (new side hustle, photo below, taking payments in Bitcoin), ate a lot of pasta, and did not work out, and I bought two AI crypto coins as the narrative is moving in this direction. I dumped my one meme coin, Smoking Chicken Fish. Don’t ask. I also:

Watched a good TED talk with Scott Galloway here on how we are messing up the economic prospects of younger generations.

IBM offered some good insight on what we need to be doing in 2025: upping our AI skills, such as in prompt engineering, and embracing lifelong learning.
We think there will be greater attention paid to the AI guardrails and processes. To be prepared, educators, students, and decision-makers at all levels need to be upskilled in AI, with a focus on AI ethics and data management.
I will be taking one new course a month to improve my own ‘generalist’ skills, and I’ll share those with you. I’m planning to improve on my prompt engineering and learn how to build an AI agent, work with Sora and Veo2 for video generation, deploy a useful avatar, work on a go-to-market strategy for Pressmate, and see how to gain traction for the Luka Press Club meme coin I created on the Radiyum Liquidity Pool. That was an effort to democratize storytelling, make it fun, and get rewarded. I’m not sure that one will go anywhere. Luka is my puppy, at the bottom of this substack.
65% of job skills transforming by 2030
I talk about the importance of being a generalist here.
Grok 2: I found myself using this a lot and enjoying the experience on X. Yes, I know I’ll immediately polarize, but it’s offering me some interesting insights culling information and trends from tweets and more. I find it very useful now. xAI is of interest to The Rundown, and we have our eye on this and Colossus.
78% of top employers prioritizing human skills
Waking Up. I like the daily meditations and reflections to start the early mornings. I’m a Sam Harris fan, and I like his ‘new operating system for your mind.’
I beefed up my learning of technical analysis (TA) and swing trading by getting myself a tutor for 10 classes. I do not invest like a TradFi normie. Only in highly volatile and disruptive assets. Bitcoin, Solana, Microstrategy, Tesla, and crypto altcoins. I got myself a pro subscription to TradingView. Late at night, with my Solana hoodie, I wait for buy/sell signals and chat with my bros.
Picture of the holidays
A beautiful wedding on New Year’s Eve. By the power vested in me …
Wait, one more
Luka the piggy in Santa Monica happily racing towards…