But the genealogy is only the first half of the story. Somewhere in the middle of all that searching I fell into something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.

So, in looking for my wife’s ancestors, I learned that in 1935 the Irish government set up a commission to preserve the wisdom of the Irish people. Not the history exactly — the wisdom. The cures and the sayings and the weather signs and the stories, all the ordinary stuff that lives in people’s heads and vanishes when they do. Between emigration and the English language and the general drift of technology in the early 20th century, it was fading.

If we were doing that today we’d hire folklorists and send them out with recorders.

In their unique brand of Irish ingenuity, they sent it into the schools instead, and asked the children to go home and interview their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and write down whatever they were told.

Nearly three quarters of a million pages came back. Much of it in Irish. All of it in the children’s own handwriting.

When Claude turned up a book that had this collection, I started clicking through the scanned pages. I found the years and the schools lined up almost exactly with my wife’s grandparents’ generation in rural County Kerry. Her grandmother would have been twelve the year the entries were written. Twelve, possibly at a kitchen table somewhere with a pencil, taking down what somebody told her.

But flipping through scans of handwritten Irish was … suboptimal.

So I asked Claude to build a site — pull the pages from the two national schools in the parish, run the Irish through translation, index it by topic, put the original and the English side by side so you can read across. Then Claude went into Chrome, and set up a Firebase project, wired the whole thing up and deployed it. Before Claude, this would’ve been nearly impossible for me. Instead it took an afternoon.

It’s here if you want a look: https://wisdom-of-glenmore.web.app/

In there you’ll find such timeless classics as: How to make tweed starting from a sheep and three wild plants. Thirty-four names for cows, including one that’s magical. How to read tomorrow’s rain off the side of a mountain. And of course, a whole lot of stories about fairies.

None of it is grand, which is exactly why it’s worth having. It’s the texture of how people actually lived, the layer nobody bothers writing down because everyone in the room already knows it.

I’m confident somewhere in these entries is the handwriting — or the wisdom — of my children’s ancestors. And maybe yours!

Zooming out, two things have my mind spinning.

The first is just the afternoon of it. Claude tracked down ancestors, validated connections, found this collection, translated the Irish, indexed it, and built a site my family (and now anyone else) can browse.

The second is harder to shake. In 1935 a handful of Irish civil servants had the foresight to gather all this up and preserve it for generations they’d never meet. Ninety years later I fed it to a model so it could be handed forward again. Sort of a passing of the torch, from Éire to AI, preserving a special sort of humans-to-humans, context window for us and for whoever comes next.

And then it gets a bit more meta, and a it more personal.

Pre-training models isn’t about explaining. Nobody sits a model down and teaches it the world. You show it an enormous pile of ordinary, unedited material and it picks up the shape of it — the patterns, the defaults, what tends to follow what. Whatever explaining you do afterward sits on top.

Which, if I’m honest, is more or less how my kids are learning from me. It’s less about talks and explaining, as it is about ten thousand unremarkable things they watch me do when I’m not trying to teach anything at all. That’s how their model is trained.

And I know roughly what’s in that pile. And maybe its time I’m a bit more intentional about that.

Which is why I like to do this genealogy research. And its a big part of why I’m building Saalo, though I didn’t get there through any of this. I went looking for my wife’s family and found the same problem waiting for me, a century earlier, and much better documented. The children of 1937 had something to write down because the adults were right there — visible, doing the work in the open, close enough to be interviewed.

And that’s the bit that got me. Those kids were assigned to take notes. But most kids are taking notice already. They learn through osmosis.

In a way the kids are the models, and we’re training them — handing over the context, helping them make sense of it. And in another way we’re each the human in the loop on our own model, constantly grading our own behavior, adjusting, trial and error. As parents… a whole lot of error. We never really leave that mode.

So: go find your context. Pass it down. Ireland’s are free at dúchas.ie, and in the site above. If your people came from somewhere else, odds are decent something like them exists and Claude can help find it and breath fresh life into.

And then maybe close the laptop, put the phone down for a bit. Because your actions, your presence, your intention is what the next generation model is being trained on.

What models do we want to build?

Gallwey's argument is that you have two selves in your mind at all times. He uses Tennis as the vehicle to explain, but here's my tldr: Self 1 is the loud one. The judge, the manager, the corrector. The voice that says elbow up, watch the toss, you missed that one because you weren't paying attention. Self 2 is the quiet one. The body. The pupil. Self 2 already encompases the potential and the capacity - it already knows how to do what you're trying to do. A baby is pure Self 2 as it learns to toddle and talk.

Self 2 thrives when Self 1 gets out of its way. Self 1 has to trust Self 2. Self 2 has to feel empowered to do its work. The whole human animal learns this way. Nobody has ever learned to walk or talk by being carefully coached through it. The inherent pupil just needs to visualize and a bit or room to figure it out.

There's a passage in the book about surfers I keep thinking about. Gallwey gets into an aregument wiht his dad about the nature of competition. In the moment, he thinks competition - mano a mano - is bad. And he points to surfers and more pure. But then he realizes, if the goal of the surfer was to get to shore on a wave, they'd basically ride any wave that comes along. But they don't. They wait, they watch, they pick the wave that's going to draw out the thing they've trained for. In that moment, Gallwey had the realiztion that this is what competition actually is. You want the wave. You want the conditions that pull your full capacity forward. Hoping your opponent double-faults is the opposite of competing. It's hoping the day collapses so you don't have to bring anything out of yourself.

Which, when you sit with it, is a much bigger idea than tennis. We all have waves we're waiting for.

Around the same time, I was listening to a podcast and Dan Quinn, head coach of the Washington Commanders, said something that stuck me. He doesn't call his players 'professional athletes'. He calls them professional competitors. Which, in Gallwey's sense, turns out to be the whole game. In some sense, we all are professional competitors, whether we call ourselves that or not. The question is just what match we think we're playing, and which wave we're waiting for.

Fast forward, to a couple of months ago, I was watching my five-year-old daughter try to learn how to jump rope for the first time.

As she kept tripping on the rope, I had a strong instinct to tell her to 'wait for the rope to come in front of you before you skip' or 'Hands lower.' or 'Just step over it first' I kept coaching. She kept getting more frustrated. The more I narrated, the worse the jumps got. Eventually she looked up at me, screamed, and stormed off…

It sucks being Self 1…

No trust. No learning. I knew this intellectually from the book, but watching it happen with me as the villian was humbling.

It got me thinking about how Self 1 and Self 2 don't always live in the same cranium… There's implicatons for family, for teams, as well as for self-building. They all seem to want the same thing. Trust, empowerment, and achievement. I've been wondering if Gallwey's idea hold for cognitive and social tasks the way it holds for physical ones? How do we build trust on teams so that real learning can happen, and eventually excellence? How does a family become a place where Self 2 thrives as kids get older?

And given that I'm dealing with AI most every day - I started to wonder about prompting, and agentic architecture. What are the implications of Self 1 and Self 2 here. Does AI have a Self 2? Am I Self 1? Or is the AI just a monolithic Self 1…

We're building agentic systems that have to learn and, at their best, have to excel. Can an orchestrator agent be a healthy Self 1, a good manager that doesn't drown out the thing it's supposed to draw out? Or, the more uncomfortable version of the question, are we Self 1 to the AI's Self 2? Is it the other way around? I don't have a clean answer. I don't think the question is a gimmick.

Back to humans for a bit… One thing I've learned in life is to control what I can control. When I'm at my best, mentally and professionally, I have focus and creativity. It's because I've managed to keep the loud Self 1 out of the quiet Self 2's way. However, I've noticed that on mornings when I pick up my phone as soon as I get out of bed, it puts me straight into Self 1. To-do list. Action items. Project status. By the time the coffee is done, I'm already deep into work. My Self 2 is alrwady being bossed around. I've lost agency. The day's first decent attention already spent in a reactive state…

Conversely, when I head to the kitchen in the morning without a phone, and start to make coffee, things are different… At first, it feels uncomfortablly quiet. Like Ricky Bobby "I dont know what to do with my hands." I feel like I should be checking in for… something. Responses, updates, whatever. After a few minutes the discomfort got unbearable and I needed to try something new. So I created this little ritual. I walked around the kitchen and named shapes and colors of things I noticed. 'That plate is a circle.' and 'The fridge is a shiny rectangle' It's ridiculous. I'm a grown man. What is this?

But after a minute something clicked. I was present. And attentive. My Self 1 shut up and my Self 2 woke up. And then real thoughts start showing up. Ideas. Questions. Fun plans. They actualy started arriving too fast, and I lost most of them. So I would grab paper and a pencil and jot things down. A sentence, a doodle, an idea for work, an idea for the yard.

These days, I've build Saalo to carve out 30 or 45 minutes every morning sans phone. It works for the morning, or for dinner time. It helps me set goals and track when I put my phone away. When I let Self 2 step up and lead the way. I use Saalo for this. It's been really helpful.

Whether in tennis, or teaching, or work, or in your mornings, Self 2 already knows. The job is to be quiet enough to listen and pay attention.

My sense is that somewhere in there, you can sense when the wave are you're waiting for is approaching.