AI Just Killed Slide Decks and How Smart People Actually Learn AI

AI For Restaurants

AI For Restaurants
AI Just Killed Slide Decks and How Smart People Actually Learn AI
Apr 24, 2026 Season 1 Episode 6
Sterling Douglass

Sterling declares slide decks dead — his last board meeting was the last one he'll ever make. He's building HTML presentations with AI now and says in a couple months everyone else will too. Aaron pushes back with the Lawrence Lessig TED Talk approach: slides should be visual storytelling, not six bullet points read aloud. He's trained Claude on his own doodle style and now generates bespoke sketch-art slides that look like something he'd actually draw. They get into where practitioners actually learn about AI when LinkedIn is drowning in "comment CLAUDE for my free prompt" grifters. Aaron's method: find someone posting something brilliant, then go read the smartest comments on that post and follow those people — the record label approach to curating your feed. Sterling's honest: he just asks Claude. The memory vs skills debate gets heated. Sterling went from obsessed with memory (Neo4j graphs, Synapse analyzers finding 14 contradictions) to hating it and going all-in on skills. Aaron agrees skills are where the real training happens but argues memory has a purpose — it remembers the esoteric stuff that doesn't belong codified in a recipe. The cookie baking analogy lands: skills are recipes you iterate on, memory is knowing you prefer a certain brand of chocolate. Sterling's not buying it. If you heard anything today that didn't make sense, just "ask Claude."