February Roundup and Monthly Musings

Talking to Voice AI agents, how to be indispensable in the AI age, and better brain health using the Serial Sevens

Feb 28, 2025

Welcome to monthly musings! This is a once per month email (not my usual programming), where I share random things that have tickled my fancy over the past four weeks. Some will be related to the content of this newsletter, and others…well…won’t be.

Hope you enjoy a little glimpse into my world!

Dear Readers,

I think you’ll probably agree that this month has been a short but busy one.

I’ve spent most of my time building and talking with voice AI agents for various purposes.

An AI Agent That Handles Calls While I Sleep

I now have my own AI agent team that answers the phone, takes messages, and books meetings for me. It’s massively helpful especially as a lot of my clients are based in different time zones to me, and so I can set the AI to take my calls whilst I’m sleeping: this is the perfect tool for solopreneurs and small businesses.

Here’s a little demo of one of my agents - Nathan. He takes messages for me, sends me an email with that message and then logs the call (transcript, summary and recording) into a database. He can also transfer the call directly to me, or to another agent to book meetings.

A Step-by-Step Blueprint For Becoming Indispensable at Work

In other news, I’ve created a 50-minute masterclass on how to become the ‘go-to’ expert in AI in your workplace (and industry 😮), even if you don’t have a technical background.

In this class, I will walk you through a step-by-step approach that I’ve used as a management consultant over the past 20 years to upskill in a subject and be able to have credible conversations with senior executives, in a matter of weeks instead of years.

It really is a blueprint that works, and I’m excited to share this approach with you and tailor it to my favourite subject at the moment: AI.

In the class, we’ll cover:

How to develop the right mindset for working alongside AI
How to navigate the toolscape, select and work with the right frontier models
How to invite AI to your professional playground
How to go from just another user of ChatGPT, to a thought leader within your field
How you can future-proof your career by providing real world value

Here’s what one of my beta-testers said about the class:

Find out more

The class is currently priced at $37 and the price will go up to $97, on Monday 3rd March. For the amount of detail I go into, I feel that this is a bargain - you’ll definitely be walking away with plenty of notes!

As a bonus, I’m also including:

A 30-day implementation plan showing you exactly what to do each day, and
An AI tool evaluation checklist, so that you can keep track of what you’ve tried and how good it is.

Exercising Can Make You Smarter As Well As Live Longer

This past month, I’ve been learning all about brain health, and how there is much that we can do (whatever age we are) to protect our cognitive abilities well into our older years.

In 1964, Marian Diamond did the first-ever experiments on mice to show that exercise grows the grey matter of the brain. After 6 months of exercise, the grey matter in the brains of the mice increased in volume and thickened. It was not that the matter itself increased, but rather that there was an increase in the connections between the neurons.

In this podcast episode with neurophysiologist and brain health researcher Louisa Nicole, she indicated that we should all be doing 3 hours of moderate activity per week (where we’re out of breath) and 20 minutes of high intensity (working to our max). In her work, she promotes the concept of ‘Neuroathletics’ and uses exercises like Serial Sevens to assess a person’s attention, concentration, and mental processing abilities.

This exercise involves subtracting 7 repeatedly from 100 and stating each result aloud or in writing. If a person struggles with the test, alternative tasks like spelling "WORLD" backward may be used.

When you combine this test with physical exercise you can enhance both cognitive and physical performance. This combination is often utilized in dual-task training, where individuals perform a cognitive task simultaneously with a physical activity.

So, from now on, I shall be trying to squat every hour whilst counting backwards from 100 in 7s. Anyone care to join me?