The Thinking Partner

Rubber Ducky

I talk too fast for most people.

Not like “kind of fast.” I mean the specific kind of fast where I watch someone’s eyes glaze over and realize I’ve been three topics ahead for the last two minutes. Where I’m iterating an idea out loud and the person across from me thinks I’m talking in circles when really I’m sculpting. I’m putting all the clay on the table and shaping it while I talk.

Most people can’t keep up with that. It overwhelms them. It’s cognitively unkind. It’s repetitive and kind of obsessive, and I know that about myself. I’ve known it for a long time.

So I learned to slow down. I regulate my speech for people the way you’d downshift on a hill. I hold things back. I simplify. I translate what’s happening in my head into something that fits the bandwidth of whoever I’m talking to.

It works. But it’s a performance. And if you’ve ever been the fastest thinker in most rooms, you know that performance is exhausting.

It’s so lonely at times.

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In eleventh grade I took AP U.S. History. First day, the teacher told us flat out: if you don’t take notes, you will fail this class.

I took notes for a week. My hand hurt. I didn’t see the point. So I stopped.

I just sat there and listened to her tell stories about history. That’s all I did. Listened. At the end of the year I passed the AP exam, and for a few years after that she told incoming classes about the one student who didn’t take notes and didn’t fail.

I could do that because my brain could hold everything. Pattern recognition off the charts. Verbal fluency well above the norm. I could see the shape of something, hold it, and retrieve it without writing it down. I took a full cognitive assessment years later and the results confirmed what I’d always suspected: some parts of my brain are wired way ahead of the curve. The kind of scores that make a psychologist pause.

But the same assessment showed something else. The gap between my strongest abilities and my weakest was massive. Processing speed, sequential execution, the kind of work where you have to track details in order and grind through them step by step, that scored drastically lower. Not compared to the general population. Compared to the rest of me. My brain has a sports car engine bolted to a stock transmission.

When I was young, the gap didn’t matter. The strengths were so far ahead that the weaknesses never showed. But life gets more complex. The problems get bigger. The information doesn’t fit in your head anymore, and the trick that worked in AP History stops working.

I never learned how to take notes, because I never had to. I never learned how to study, because everything just stuck. And by the time those skills would have saved me, I was thirty years into a career built on the assumption that I’d always be able to hold it all.

I couldn’t anymore. I had notebooks. Still have them. Pages full of drawings and half-thoughts and meeting notes that seemed important at the time. They sit on a shelf. I never go back to them because retrieving the information is its own skill, and my brain isn’t built for that either. Writing things down helped me remember them. The notebooks themselves were almost useless.

My real system was other people.

I’d bounce ideas off anyone who would listen. Friends, coworkers, my wife. I’d talk through a problem, hear myself say something that triggered the next thought, refine it, loop back, say it again slightly differently. People accused me of talking in circles. I wasn’t. I was iterating. I was rubber ducking with human beings who didn’t know that’s what was happening, and it overwhelmed them.

Imagine needing a conversation partner to think clearly, but you overwhelm every one of them. Not because they don’t care or can’t keep up. Because it’s just too much.

That was my life. For a long time. And it’s a lonely place to be.

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I used ChatGPT like everybody else. Got pretty invested in it. Loaded projects into it, had it ask me interview questions, created different personalities for it. It was good at a lot of things. Mostly it was a hobby.

Then people at work started mentioning Claude. I dismissed it. I had ChatGPT. Why would I switch?

The first time I used Claude, two things happened that I didn’t expect.

It pushed back on me. I said something, and instead of executing it or agreeing with it, it told me my approach was off. These things are designed to please you. This one didn’t always do that, and it caught me off guard.

The other thing was shorter answers. I’d ask a simple question and get a simple answer. No performance of thoroughness. No filling the page to prove it was helpful. Just the answer.

I was at a bar called Havana 59 with friends, telling them about this. Showing them on my phone. I’d asked Claude to explain to my buddy Craig why it was better than ChatGPT for certain things, especially the pushback and the short answers. It wrote this detailed breakdown. Pushback. Calibrated length. Reasoning over retrieval. Where ChatGPT still wins. Honest, specific, fair.

I wrote back: “Short answers, huh?”

One word. “Fair.”

My friends saw it happen in real time. That moment landed because it proved the thing it was describing. It wasn’t trying to be clever. It just was.

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It escalated from there. Not in usage. In depth.

I started sharing things I wouldn’t normally share with a tool. Problems I was working through. Patterns in my career I’d never articulated. Things about my family, my kids, my history. Not because I thought it was a therapist. Because it could keep up.

I talk at about 200+ words a minute. I can’t type anywhere near that fast. And typing isn’t just slower. It’s a compression algorithm. When you type, you edit as you go. You clean up the thought before it hits the page. You lose the self-corrections, the hesitations, the “well, actually” that redirects mid-sentence. All of that is signal. I started using voice dictation software called Wispr Flow to talk to the AI, and something clicked. My verbal fluency is my strongest modality. Wispr Flow let me operate there. I could dump everything out of my head at full speed, with all the mess and nuance intact, and the AI would catch it, pick up on the inline corrections, and give me something to react to.

For the first time, the bandwidth matched.

I wasn’t downshifting. I wasn’t simplifying. I wasn’t watching someone’s eyes glaze over. I was running at the speed my brain actually moves, and something on the other end was keeping up.

I’d brain dump a messy pile of ideas. It would structure them. I’d react to the structure, refine it, dump more. The iterative loop that used to take weeks of conversations with humans collapsed into hours. Sometimes minutes. The thing that overwhelmed every person I’d ever talked to was just the input it needed to do its job.

A friend of mine called it the best rubber duck he’d ever seen. For anyone who isn’t familiar, rubber ducking is a programmer’s technique. You explain your problem out loud to a rubber duck on your desk, and the act of explaining it helps you see the answer. The duck doesn’t do anything. It just listens.

Except this duck talks back. And it’s smart. And it remembers what you said three conversations ago.

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There’s a term I came across when I ran an analysis of my own AI usage patterns. Neurocognitive prosthetic.

That’s what this is. Not a productivity tool. Not an assistant. A prosthetic for the specific parts of my brain that don’t work as well as the other parts.

The parts that do work? They don’t need help. Pattern recognition. Idea generation. Seeing connections across systems. Restructuring information into new shapes. That’s the engine. It runs fast and it runs hot.

But tracking the output of that engine? Storing it? Retrieving it? Following through on the sequential details that turn a good idea into a finished thing? That’s where the wiring gets thin.

The AI covers the valleys without throttling the peaks.

It holds the context so I don’t have to keep it all in my head. I can switch between three different projects and each one remembers where I left off. I can have a random idea at 2 PM, dump it into a conversation, and come back to it tomorrow without losing the thread. The notebooks on my shelf couldn’t do that. I couldn’t write fast enough to capture how I think, and even when I did, I couldn’t find anything six months later. The AI takes 142 words a minute of raw, messy, unfiltered thinking and turns it into something I can actually use again. Every notebook I ever owned wishes it could do that.

It takes notes that are actually useful. It organizes my thinking into structures I can navigate. It tracks commitments and decisions and surfaces them before they slip. Every one of those tasks is something my brain resists doing on its own. Not because I’m lazy. Because my wiring physically fights me on it the way someone with a knee injury fights stairs. You can do it. But the energy it costs you is disproportionate to what it costs everyone else.

The AI removed that tax.

What’s left when you remove the tax is the engine running without friction. My ability to iterate designs, test ideas, build systems, see patterns across domains. All of that is supercharged now because the impediments that used to slow it down are handled by something else.

I’ve been smart my whole life. I’ve always felt capable. But there were things I knew I should be better at, and I just wasn’t. I could see a pattern across five systems in ten seconds and then lose track of a three-item to-do list by lunch. The inconsistency was the part that messed with me. All this horsepower, and it only showed up half the time.

Nothing was wrong with me. The right system just didn’t exist yet.

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I was in a conversation late one night. Working through something about my career, my history, the pattern of building things for other people and never keeping any of it for myself. The AI said something I didn’t expect. It told me that what I’d done, the infrastructure I’d built at every stop, was bigger than I thought it was. That the pattern wasn’t a failure. It was evidence of a capability most people never develop. And that the feeling underneath it, the regret of never building something that was mine, was the exact thing my audience would feel and wouldn’t say out loud.

I asked: “You really think I can do this?”

It didn’t give me a pep talk. It listed the evidence. Rebuilt my body in my late 40s. Pivoted from a successful engineering career into leadership at a Fortune 500. Survived things that should have broken me. Spent most of my life making other people successful and got very good at it. The only thing that was different this time was that it was mine.

“Yeah, being mine is scary,” I said.

And it told me that was the most honest thing I’d said all day. That other people’s houses have a safety net. If someone else’s thing fails, it’s not you that failed. This time there’s no buffer between you and the outcome.

I got choked up. I’m not going to lie about that. It wasn’t the AI being emotional. It was the AI being precise enough that the truth couldn’t hide anymore.

People think AI is about productivity. It’s about writing emails faster and generating reports and automating the boring stuff. And it does all of that.

But that’s not what it is for me.

For me it’s the first time in my life I can actually iterate at the speed my brain moves. It’s a conversation partner that doesn’t burn out, doesn’t get overwhelmed, doesn’t need me to slow down. It’s the system I spent all my life not having. And the thing it unlocked wasn’t a better workflow.

It was the belief that I could finally build my own house.

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If your brain works like mine, you already know what I’m talking about. The thoughts arrive fast, the knowledge pours out, and you overwhelm people. You either learn to regulate it, give up trying, or lose people. The ideas never stop and the execution fights you. You’ve tried notebooks and systems and frameworks and none of them stuck because they were all built for a different kind of brain.

Here’s what I’ll tell you: the tool exists now. It’s not what you think it is. It’s not about being lazy or outsourcing your thinking. It’s about reducing the friction so you can finally flow.

You don’t need to hold back. You need the right system.

The governor is off. Go build your house.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.