Nobody Ever Shows You AI. They Just Talk About It.

If you run a business, you have now been told roughly four hundred times that AI is going to change everything.

You have read the headlines. You have possibly opened ChatGPT, typed something into it, got back a paragraph that was fine, and quietly closed the tab. Somewhere in the back of your mind is a nagging suspicion that other people are getting something out of this that you are not.

Here is the thing nobody says out loud: almost nobody has ever actually shown you. They have told you. There is a difference, and it is the whole difference.

The dance floor taught me this, not the software

I have been teaching for twenty years, and only the subject keeps changing.

It started here in Chilliwack, showing customers how to use a computer when I was a young salesman at Business World. Then English and computers to schoolkids in South Korea. Then salsa in Mexico. Now AI, back where I started.

Twenty years of beginners has taught me one thing that applies to absolutely all of it:

You cannot explain a dance to someone. You have to get them moving in the first ten minutes, and explain what they just did afterwards.

Nobody has ever learned to dance from a description of dancing. They learn by being walked onto a floor by someone who will not let them look stupid, doing one thing badly, doing it again slightly less badly, and discovering about forty minutes in that they are doing it. Only then does the explanation land — because now it is attached to something their body already knows.

AI is taught almost exactly backwards from this. You get the explanation first. Large language models. Prompt engineering. Tokens, context windows, agents. All of it true, none of it attached to anything you have done, so none of it sticks.

What actually stands between you and useful AI

It is not intelligence and it is not technical ability. In my experience it is five specific things, and each one takes about twenty minutes to get past once somebody shows you.

1. AI is stuck in a chat box. You are copying text out of a website and pasting it into your actual work. That is the bottleneck. AI gets genuinely useful when it can reach the tools you already use — your files, your site, your calendar, your inbox — instead of you playing courier between two browser tabs.

2. You are afraid of breaking something. Completely reasonable. Most people hold back not because they lack ideas but because it is a live business and they cannot risk it. There is a solved answer to this: a system that keeps every single version of everything, so any change can be undone. Try anything, break nothing.

3. You do not know what tools exist. There is an enormous amount of free, professional-grade software out there, and the reason you are not using it is that nobody told you it existed and installing it looked frightening. AI will find it and install it for you.

4. Putting something on the internet feels like a project. It used to be. It is now genuinely a couple of minutes, and the first time you watch it happen it is mildly ridiculous.

5. You are doing tasks a machine should be doing. Not big strategic things — the small grinding repeated ones that eat a Tuesday. Those can be handed to AI agents you describe in plain English.

Those five have technical names: connectors and API keys, Git, GitHub, deployment, and agents.

I am telling you the names here because you are reading, and reading is where names belong. In the room, the names arrive around minute forty — as the explanation for something everybody has already watched work. That order is deliberate. It is the same order as the dance floor.

What happens on night one

I build a real website in front of you and put it on the internet. Live, from nothing, while you watch. No slides, no screenshots, no sandbox — a working URL, in about the time it takes me to explain what I am doing.

Then you have a go at it yourself, with me in the room.

I am not going to promise that every person finishes one before nine o’clock, because that depends on the night and on what you walk in with. What I will promise is that you will have watched it done at normal speed with nothing hidden, and then had your own hands on it. Most people get further than they expected.

I am also not going to pretend it is hard. It is not hard. That is precisely the point, and there is no way to make you believe it except to do it in front of you.

It is also not a trick. The site for my own dance business, bclatindance.com — the pages, the posters, the ticketing — was built with the same tools I will be teaching. When somebody asks whether any of this actually works, that is the thing I point at.

The details

AI Secret Sauce runs four Monday evenings — September 28, then October 5, 12 and 19 — 7 to 9pm at Cowork Chilliwack, 12-8465 Harvard Place.

$67 a night, or $197 for all four. The fourth night is effectively free if you take the pass.

No coding experience needed, and I mean that in the specific sense that nobody in the room will be asked to type anything they do not understand.

The room is deliberately small. That is not a scarcity tactic — it is that this only works if I can get to everyone, and beyond about a dozen people I cannot. Two seats covers my costs for the night, so I would rather run it small and properly than fill it and teach at people.

Details and registration are here. Payment is Interac e-Transfer to paul@preibisch.biz, and seats are held in the order transfers arrive.

If you are on the fence

Come to night one. Pay for the single evening, watch what happens, and decide afterwards whether the other three are worth it. I do not offer the four-night pass until the end of the first session, and that is on purpose — you should not have to trust me in advance about something I can just show you.

Which, in the end, is the entire argument. Everybody in Chilliwack has been told about AI.

This is the one where somebody shows you.

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Journalists and event organisers: photos, a print-ready poster and a short bio are all on the media page.