Iconoclast Insights

“Explain how the AI works” sounds responsible and rests on the wrong picture. A random walk, a drunk man and a taxi explain why, and where to ask instead: not the path, but the curb.

Last week there was no episode. It was the first one I’ve missed in 84 weeks, after 83 in a row.

The reason is simple. I caught a cold, lost my voice, and couldn’t record anything you could understand. The usual podcast advice is to build a buffer of finished episodes for exactly that situation. That advice isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t fit this show.

In this episode I explain why. Every episode starts with something that caught my attention that week, so a pre-recorded one skips the thinking that makes it worth hearing. I also talk about what this podcast is for, why I keep making it for a small audience, and what it cost me to break the streak.

Next week I’m back with something new.

"That's basically the same as." Almost never. A look at what happens to a discussion when different words are treated as interchangeable, why we hate admitting we don't know a definition, how that turns "GDPR" into a rule of thumb, and how to define terms without annoying anyone.

Only 12 of 405 AI-linked malware samples were observed on protected endpoints in the study's data. Relax? No. A look at fear without a noun, what the study really measured, and why actionable caution beats unexamined fear.

There's a website sitting unpublished in my browser right now. I know exactly what's wrong with it. Nobody else does, because nobody else has seen it — I haven't sent a single LinkedIn post its way.

I used to call that procrastination. It isn't. It's a measurement problem: I hold a high-price, high-trust bar (does it work, flawlessly, every time) and I was applying it to a channel whose only job is earning someone's attention for thirty seconds. Someone in a builder community I follow ran a rough AI-generated ad for an unfinished tool and got five signups in an hour. I wouldn't have run that ad. That doesn't make me more disciplined. It means we were never reading the same scoreboard.

This episode is for anyone who's called their own work 20% done while someone standing right next to them would have called the exact same thing 120%.

One question, asked at the right moment. No productivity hacks required.

A coach once told me to get rid of the general store: stop offering everything, pick consulting or IT, and do only that. I followed the advice. It didn't work, because on almost every project, I still understood the technical side better than the IT consultants in the room, and the skill came back anyway, unannounced and unpaid.

This episode is about why "pick one" and "invent your own niche" are usually right about the symptom and wrong about the cure. It covers the invented categories I built that nobody was searching for, the diagnosis the coach and I both got wrong, why I now run two separate brands that are still just me, and why a proprietary method name belongs on the proof, never on the shop sign.

Iconoclast Insights is André Daus: strategic opposition, uncomfortable questions, no comfortable answers.

I keep reading the same comment under almost every online event I'm invited to: any chance this will be recorded? I've watched people ask the same thing live, in the room, three meters from the speaker, with a chance to ask a real question in five minutes.

This episode is about the difference between a session where the recording actually gives you everything, and one built entirely around a live discussion you weren't part of, where asking for the recording gets you other people's questions instead of yours. It's about slides that don't survive their own narration, and what constantly asking for the artifact instead of deciding what you actually need really tells you about your priorities.

Iconoclast Insights is André Daus — strategic opposition, uncomfortable questions, no comfortable answers.

A website owner deliberately turned off his own backups, months before he needed them. When his data disappeared, he told anyone who'd listen that a serious provider should have protected him anyway. The hosting company pulled the logs. He'd flipped the switch himself. He didn't back down.

That story isn't about backups. It's about what happens when a convenient answer replaces a question you were supposed to ask yourself first, and why the fluent, agreeable, endlessly-confident nature of AI makes that trade easier to make and harder to notice.

This episode is about the difference between asking AI to solve your problem and asking it to help you write the procedure you'd follow to solve it yourself, why the second version is the one that actually transfers understanding, and three ways to start using it that way today.

Iconoclast Insights is André Daus — strategic opposition, uncomfortable questions, no comfortable answers.

The EU just declared ChatGPT a search engine, and a German court ruled the same month that an IP address doesn't identify the person behind the screen. Two data points, one pattern: Brussels writes the maximalist rule first, discovers the cost later, and reverses course only once the companies that complied in good faith already paid for it. I share what that actually cost me, and why common sense keeps arriving years too late.

An email landed with a subject line about a seizure of assets — my bank accounts, my property, ordered under German tax law. I didn't open it. I decrypted it by hand instead: three layers of obfuscation, a fake login page built pixel-perfect from the real tax office's own logo, and my own email address hardcoded inside it, with a campaign number attached, like I was one row in a spreadsheet.

That part isn't what stuck with me. What stuck with me is what happened after, on both sides. My own helpdesk auto-replied to the phisher with a legally binding GDPR commitment, because it checks whether an email arrived, not whether it's real. And when I went to report the attack, the "official" reporting channel was a maze built to satisfy an audit, not to help anyone standing outside it trying to get in.

This episode is about the mechanism underneath both failures: systems built to react to the shape of a thing instead of checking its substance — and why I found the exact same shortcut sitting inside my own business, built by me, years ago.

Iconoclast Insights is André Daus — Strategic Opposition, uncomfortable questions, no comfortable answers.