What being stuck in a dark room taught me

BR34

He took the bet. Most of us would, because email feels like weather: annoying and permanent.

A few years ago we'd have called Nyssa a disruptor, back when that word was everywhere. It's almost cringe to say now. But sometimes a cliche is a cliche because it's true. 

My latest guest on our podcast, Slideshow with Dave Hayward, Nyssa, is the perfect example of a great disruptor and thinker. Nyssa is the CEO and co-founder of Possible AI and of RCRT (Right Context Right Time). 

For a start, she disrupted the whole idea of my podcast: proved that getting two people together with deeply associative minds makes for more compelling conversation than following a linear deck.

I came up with the idea for Slideshow during a car ride out to Piha in West Auckland with Ed Ortega. He was telling me he'd been on so many podcasts where the guest and host got to the end and simultaneously realised they hadn't talked about anything they meant to.

I realised that slide decks are used to anchor conversations in business, and that became the podcast. 

But the format has always been pretty loose, and Nyssa helped me blow it up in the best possible way with one of the most compelling conversations we’ve ever had on the show. 

Nyssa predicts the end of slide decks everywhere, and email with them. Hence the bet. Plenty of other tools we accept as fundamental are on the way out.

The AI revolution is disruptive both ways: positively and negatively. In this wild frontier, dangers lurk. 

Enter: AI skill poisoning. Ten-dollar downloadable instruction packs that promise to build your company brain, with malicious lines hidden inside that quietly tell your AI to do something else entirely.

A cheap downloaded AI tool is a stranger with keys to your systems. Before anything touches your data, know who built it, and read every instruction file you hand your AI.

On the flip side, there is potential for AI, deployed properly, to meaningfully turn down the noise of our lives.
Nyssa: "I hope AI can restore us to being human again."

I hope so, too, because everything currently seems intensely complicated. I don’t know about you, but my cognitive load feels heavier than it’s ever been.

Our brains were never built for mass data analysis and inbox tennis. They certainly weren’t ready for the sum total of billions of humans' experiences pumping through social platforms.

The potential lies in a future where we can hand over low-value busywork to machines, and what's left is the work humans are good at: judgement, creativity, conversation, and being fully present with the people who matter most to you.

Maybe it’s already started. I just got Claude to help me organise and delete the 134 GB of files sitting in my downloads folder.

Nyssa got me thinking that the paradox of the disruption we are currently experiencing may net out to us spending less time with our tech, not more.

Speaking of spending less time with your tech: some of you will have noticed Bright Objects went quiet for a month. I've been recovering from eye surgery. It went well, despite getting COVID afterwards.

I'm feeling great, and I'm back at full speed. But recovery meant spending a lot of time in a dark room with no screens for the last little while.

It turns out a brain with nothing to look at finds other work to do. Mine spent the week telling me stories, and they weren't the helpful kind. The rumination got pretty bad, and I realised my choice of media, business and tech podcasts, wasn't helping. They’re pretty grim at the moment.

I changed up my media. One podcast started the counterprogramming to all the rumination. I came across Mark Manson. I’d avoided his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, because it seemed like the self-help books that I’m not that fond of.
But it turns out he’s made a career of researching the real truths that scammy self-helpers are obscuring.

He led a podcast on understanding what is truly behind people who strike us as confident: it has surprisingly little to do with self-esteem.

Spoiler: They're people who have a high degree of tolerance and acceptance of failure and uncertainty.

A week after I let myself out of the house, I was at Revved., where my friend Nicola Taylor of Tax Traders delivered the best keynote I've seen in a long time.

Her argument: strategy is rendered inert when it's built on a limiting, untrue story.

Like all great talks, it ended with an actionable how-to. It’s four steps:

Name the story. Interrogate it. Test it. Let the evidence rewrite it.

This is not about affirmations in the mirror: it's about the structure of how you look at the world.

Of course, I couldn’t help but reflect on all that time in the dark listening to my own unhelpful stories.

It scales into collective psyches, because businesses tell themselves stories, too.

We're too small to compete. Our people won't adopt new tools. We're so far behind on AI there's no point starting.

Name them. Interrogate them. Test them. Let the evidence do the rewriting.

One more thing about Revved. I'm the number-one ticket holder, and the first time, it was an accident. In 2025, a large invoice had just been paid, but I hadn't yet paid the people who helped me earn it, so it was like Schrödinger's cat: I was rich and not rich at the same time.

An ad popped up, I clicked, and then the phone rang. It was Rochelle Moffitt, Revved's founder, calling to tell me I'd bought the very first ticket.

Since then, it has been deliberate. I bought the first ticket for 2026, and I've already bought the first for 2027. Here's the business logic. Events in New Zealand typically take around half their ticket sales, sometimes far more, in the final week or two before doors open, which means the people who build them carry the financial risk for months, largely alone.

If we want days like Thursday to keep existing, the most useful thing any of us can do is book early. If Revved sounds like your kind of room, tickets for 2027 are open now.

It is very good to be back at this desk. Bright Objects and Slideshow are labours of love, and I missed them both.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re already more of a legend than I already thought you were.

Cheers, Dave