~ about · ai in crayon

The gap between the smart people and the doing people .

That's what this show lives in. The distillation layer between elite AI thinkers and the people running real businesses on Main Street.

Reuben "Reu" Smith

Reu ~ constantly curious

~ what this show is

The gap is the work.

There's a gap between the people doing the sharpest thinking about AI and the people who actually need to act on it.

On one side: brilliant strategists — Wharton professors, ex-Amazon product leaders, deep technologists — publishing frameworks that reshape how we think about what's coming. On the other side: a business owner trying to figure out whether AI is going to change how they run their HVAC company next year.

That business owner doesn't need another "5 AI Tools for Small Business" listicle. They need someone who reads the strategists, understands the frameworks, and translates them into "here's what this means for your business on Monday."

That's what AI in Crayon does. Three times a week — Tuesday, Thursday, Friday — one blog post + one companion podcast script. Strategy translated for leaders.

Why "in crayon"?

Because the best explanations are simple enough to draw in crayon. Not dumbed down — distilled. There's a difference. Dumbed down loses the insight. Distilled keeps the insight and loses the jargon.

A practitioner for real business leaders — not a consultant who hasn't worked a real job in years.
~ how I got here the path
~ 25 years of building

The path here.

  1. 2001

    Started in marketing

    Junior account work. Learned the hard way that tactics without strategy burn money.

  2. 2008

    Built, ran, and sold a marketing company

    A decade of running my own shop. Hired people, hated HR, loved the work.

  3. 2016

    Fractional CMO across 8 operating companies

    That role forced systems thinking. Eight home-services businesses. One brain. Repeatable, scalable processes, or everyone loses.

  4. 2023

    The AI shift clicked

    The patterns I'd built for scaling marketing ops mapped cleanly onto what AI was starting to unlock. I saw it before most leaders did.

  5. Now

    Local Nerds + AI in Crayon

    By day: implementations for service businesses. By morning: translating the best AI thinking into the language leaders actually use.

~ the ground rules

What this show isn't.

Three things this show refuses to be. Three things it tries to be. The bar that everything published has to clear before it goes live.

Not corporate

No "empowering synergies." No "thought leadership." No LinkedIn voice.

Not academic

Research gets cited, but you'll never need a PhD to follow along.

Not bro-ey

No hustle-cult, no "here’s how I 10x’d my revenue using one weird prompt."

Is: clear

If a smart 14-year-old can't follow it, I haven't finished the work yet.

Is: honest

When something I recommended last quarter doesn't hold up, I say so.

Is: actionable

Every episode ends with something you can test this week. That’s the rule.

~ the day job

Need more than a framework?

Local Nerds is where the thinking on this show becomes actual AI systems running in your business. Service companies, insurance brokerages, healthcare practices — wherever AI can remove repetitive work and multiply your team's output.

Visit Local Nerds ↗
~ Local Nerds
AI implementation
for service businesses.
localnerds.co