I was two-thirds through a chapter when I stopped writing and started Googling.

That's a lie. I wasn't Googling. It was late 2023 and I was using ChatGPT to research a legal subplot — something about federal wiretapping law that I needed to get right, because lawyers who write fiction about lawyers live in fear of other lawyers noticing when they fudge the details. One question led to another. Then I asked it to draft a summary. Then I asked it to poke holes in my plot logic. Then I looked up and it was 2 a.m. and I had not written a single word of my novel.

That was fine. I told myself I'd get back to the chapter in the morning.

That was about eighteen months ago. The chapter is still waiting.

I want to be straight with you about who I am and why I'm doing this, because I've seen too many newsletters that introduce themselves with vague authority and no actual skin in the game.

I'm a former attorney. Fifteen years in practice — corporate transactional work, a fair amount of contract litigation, a stretch of time I don't look back on with great fondness. I left because I was burned out in a way that felt structural, not situational. The work wasn't wrong. The life built around the work was wrong for me.

Before law school I had a journalism degree from Mizzou. After law school I wrote a political thriller that sold well enough to encourage a second one. I've also written Westerns, which sell less but feel more like me — Louis L'Amour's territory with a little of Steinbeck's patience for the land. My wife thinks I should stick to the Westerns. She's probably right.

I live in St. Charles, Missouri with my wife of thirty-one years. Three kids, all grown, none producing grandchildren at what I consider an acceptable rate.

That's the person writing this newsletter. Not a tech founder. Not a Silicon Valley transplant. Not a twenty-six-year-old with a Lambo and a Skool group. A former lawyer who went back to writing and then fell into an AI rabbit hole and hasn't fully come up for air since.

TenStreamsLab is the name of the project. The company behind it is Heart Holdings — a small operation I co-founded that exists to do exactly what the name suggests: test things. The core thesis is simple enough to say in one sentence and complicated enough to keep me busy for years.

The thesis: with AI doing the operational heavy lifting, income streams that used to require a full team, a significant budget, or a very specific skill set are now accessible to a single person or a small operation willing to do the work and think carefully.

We are testing whether that's true. Not asserting it. Testing it.

The goal is to identify a portfolio of ten viable income streams — streams that, once built, trend toward near-passive: work that compounds rather than resets every week. The streams are not defined yet. That's intentional. We have ideas, some early experiments running, and a selection framework I'll walk through in a future issue. But nothing is confirmed. Nothing is locked.

This newsletter — the act of publishing this experiment in public — is itself one of the streams we're testing. Whether an audience built around honest documentation of a process like this can generate sustainable income through community, guides, and affiliate relationships. I don't know yet. We'll find out together.

I've been a journalist. I've been a novelist. I've been a lawyer. I've been a lot of things that involve observing carefully, writing clearly, and being honest about what the evidence actually shows versus what you wish it would show.

That skill set turns out to be useful in this context. The AI world is full of noise — people selling certainty they don't have, automations that work in screenshots and nowhere else, income screenshots that belong in a museum of self-promotion. I'm not interested in any of that. I'm interested in what's actually true, what actually produces results, and how to document it in a way that's useful to someone who is also trying to figure this out.

If that's you — if you're somewhere in the middle of your own transition, or you're curious about AI but haven't found a voice you trust, or you just want to watch someone try things and report back honestly — then I think you'll like what we're building here.

Welcome to TenStreamsLab.

This Week in AI: OpenAI and Google continue to trade capability releases at a pace that makes it genuinely difficult to write a newsletter without something going obsolete between draft and publish. The models are getting faster, the prices are dropping, and the use cases that seemed exotic eighteen months ago are starting to look like table stakes. Worth paying attention to, even if you're not building anything yet.

If you want a head start on the tools and frameworks we're using, grab the free toolkit at start.tenstreamslab.com. No pitch, no upsell — just the actual stack.