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” SmithWindsor, CO · 2026
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 in Windsor, Colorado, 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. Every weekday — one video, one companion blog post.
Strategy translated for operators.
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.
The path here
25 years of building,
2001
Started in marketing
Junior account work. Learned the hard way that tactics without strategy burn money.
2008
Built, ran, and sold a marketing company
A decade of running my own shop. Hired people, hated HR, loved the work.
2016
Fractional CMO to 8 PE-owned operating companies
That role forced systems thinking. Eight home-services businesses. One brain.
Repeatable, scalable processes, or everyone loses.
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 operators did.
Now
Local Nerds + AI in Crayon
By day: implementations for service businesses. By morning: translating the best
AI thinking into the language operators actually use.
The ground rules
What this show
isn't
.
✕
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.
