A few weeks ago, I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and found a livestream I could not stop watching. Ocean waves hitting the shore, the perfect sounds of being on a beach in Hawaii, my absolutely favorite spot. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, no buffering, no end in sight.
My first reaction was the one most of us have when we see something we don't understand. "Cute. But that looks techie and complicated, and probably costs a ton of money to do."
That's judgment talking. And judgment, bless its heart, keeps us small. So instead, I did the Ted Lasso thing. I chose to be curious, not judgmental.
But first, want to listen instead of read? I got you!
The Dartboard Moment
If you've watched the show (and if you haven't, we need to talk), you know the scene. Ted's playing darts against his boss Rebecca Welton's ex-husband, Rupert Mannion, a guy who has spent the whole episode underestimating him. Ted quietly wins, then explains why. He talks about a sign he once saw on a wall, something about how people had been judging him his whole life instead of getting curious about him.
"Be curious, not judgmental." That line hit me somewhere between my Diet Coke and my keyboard.=
Because here's the truth. I could have scrolled right past that livestream, filed it under "not for me," and gone back to my regularly scheduled content calendar. Judgmental me does that all day long. Curious me asked a much better question: how are they doing that, and could I figure it out too?
What Curiosity Actually Built (Spoiler: It Wasn't Me Alone)
I brought the question of "how are they doing that?" to Grace, my AI assistant (yes, I named her Grace, as in "give myself some"). Together, we did not build a media empire. We built an experiment.
Here is what that looked like:
- We created a brand new YouTube channel from scratch. No audience. No plan except "let's see."
- We built a repeatable process for generating AI video paired with ambient, ASMR style sound, the rain, the ocean, the stuff that makes your shoulders drop two inches, and that itch in your brain finally feel soothed.
- We figured out how to near instantly turn the video clips into eight hour loops, which is its own strange little skill nobody warns you about.
- Then, piece by piece, we cracked the code on turning all of that into an actual, honest to goodness infinite livestream.
You can watch the results right now. It is not monetized. There is no funnel, no upsell, no "link in bio for the course." It is 100% free, purely because figuring it out was fun. I'll drop the link at the end so you can go be nosy with me. And the total cost? Just my time, and $49 for a month of the livestreaming app.
Here's the friction moment, because you knew one was coming. You don't have a resources problem. You have a curiosity gap. I did not need a production studio, a bigger budget, or a technical degree I don't have.
I needed to stop assuming it was too complicated for me before I had even asked a single question.
Be a Goldfish About Your Flops
Not every experiment works on the first try. Ours definitely did not. It took me several videos to figure out how to not have a lag at the loop point, how to balance the audio, and how to not have it look like the palm tree was walking into the ocean (damn AI). Grace and I hit more dead ends than I am willing to admit in a blog post.
Ted Lasso has a move for this too. When Sam (and later Henry) misses a play, Ted tells him to be a goldfish, because a goldfish has a ten second memory. Something goes wrong, you feel it, and then you let it go and swim on. That is not toxic positivity. That is a system for not letting one flop convince you the whole idea was bad. This is the whole point of choosing to be curious, not judgmental, about your own ideas.
AI has handed all of us a level of curiosity we have never had access to before. You do not need a coding background to test an idea anymore. You do not need a film crew to see if a concept works. You need permission to be a beginner again, and a teammate, human or AI, willing to be a beginner right alongside you.
Considerations for Direct & Social Sellers
If you are building a social selling or digital business, this same muscle is the one that is actually going to move your needle, not the next hack you saw in a Reel.
A few things I see constantly in this space:
The mistake: Dismissing a platform, a format, or a tool before ever testing it. "Threads is dead." "AI video looks fake." "Livestreaming isn't for someone like me." Judgment dressed up as strategy.
The better move: Run one small, low stakes experiment before you decide anything is "not for you." A social seller I coach assumed short form video was a young person's game, until she tested three videos using a simple AI-assisted script process. Two flopped quietly. One brought her more profile visits in a week than her last three months of posting combined. She did not know that going in. She found out by being curious instead of judgmental.
The case study logic: Your audience is watching how you handle not knowing something just as closely as they are watching your polished wins. Showing the messy middle of an experiment, including the parts that flopped, builds more trust than another perfectly lit flat lay ever will.
The best practice: Give yourself an actual system for curiosity. A weekly hour where you test or learn one small thing with AI. A note where you track what worked and what did not. A goldfish rule where you let go of the flop by Friday. Curiosity without a system is just a hobby. Curiosity with a system is a strategy.
The System Behind the Curiosity
Here is the part nobody tells you about experiments like the livestream channel. The fun, curious part is maybe twenty percent of the work. The other eighty percent is systems, the process for generating the video, the workflow for looping it, the checklist for launching the stream without it falling over five hours in. All repeatable now, because I built the systems. Today, one livestream. But who are we kidding... a few weeks from now? Five!
That is exactly why I treat AI as a first hire, not a shortcut. Grace did not do the thinking for me. She helped me build the capacity to keep testing ideas I would have talked myself out of a year ago. That is the whole model we teach inside Social Systems Insider: take the curious idea, then build the boring, reliable system underneath it so it does not live and die on your motivation alone.
Go Be Curious With Me
I am still building this thing out, and I would love the company. Go watch the livestream, see what an entirely AI-assisted, zero-budget, purely-for-the-love-of-it channel looks like right now, and follow along as Grace and I keep pulling this thread to see what it unravels.
Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing, and neither is asking a curious question instead of a judgmental one.
Watch the livestream here and follow the channel to catch what we build next. 💗