Rev is back. Episode 5 was Rev introducing himself — full-time pastor, reseller in the fun time, married to Nikki T. This one’s a different conversation. We started in the usual place — packing orders, beef 3.0 over the driving shoes — and ended up in a long stretch about AI that I wasn’t expecting to land where it landed. The title is the AI takeover, but Rev’s framing is the part worth coming back for.

The 100-order pack and Nikki T at Walmart

[1:44] Ryan opened by calling Rev out on a Facebook post — “Rev claims he got a hundred orders packed in under an hour. I saw that.” Rev fessed up. He’d run out of copy paper mid-print, sent Nikki T to Walmart for more, and they divide-and-conquered the rest of the way to the 4:30 post office cutoff. Most of it was vinyl and trading cards — “if it was a lot of glass like you love to pack, I would have been toast.” That’s a callout aimed at Candice’s haul style, and it’s fair. We spent three and a half hours on 40 orders the same week.

The good Rev / bad Rev split-screen short

[19:40] Rev edits in DaVinci Resolve — the free version — and pulled off a split-screen short where he plays both Emotional Reseller Rev and Practical Reseller Rev, two of him on screen arguing about eBay fees. We pulled it up and played it. The rig: two chairs, two takes, mask the left side of one and the right side of the other, stack them in the timeline. The hard part was the call-and-response — he was going off memory and had to chop and loop to make it land. The bit Practical Rev keeps coming back to: “Just wait. It’s like weather in Florida. If you don’t like it right now, wait a minute."

"What do you think about AI, Rev?”

[50:52] Ryan asked the question the title’s about. Rev’s first answer is the easy one — he loves AI listers, uses List Easier on his vinyl every week, went from 400 listings before AI to about 5,000 after. Easy yes. Then Ryan walked him over to the bigger one. “What about from a bigger picture? What if we weren’t talking about reselling at all?”

[52:01] Rev’s framing — the line I’ve been chewing on since we recorded — “It’s a good tool. It’s a horrible master.” If you treat it like a hammer, fine. “But if you try to talk to it and be friends with it and think your life is going to be revolved around AI, you’re going to lose in the end.” He said it twice in the same minute. He meant it.

I went deep into AI and Ryan knew it

[54:38] I owned up on camera. I went deep about six months back — coding agents, Windsurf, Claude, the whole shedflips.com site built from scratch. “I had it controlling the servers. I had — I mean, everything. I was deep, man. I love it. It’s fun. It’s powerful. I get it.” The reason I’m telling Rev that on his own podcast episode is so the next part lands the way it should. I’m not coming at AI from outside. I’m coming at it from inside, and I still think the thing he said about master is right.

Education, kids, and the dumb-getting-smarter problem

[58:16] Rev brought Nikki T into it — she’s a school teacher, and the data she sees daily isn’t comforting. Reading levels down, arithmetic down, classroom tech up. “As humanity, we’re actually getting dumber because our technology is getting better.” Then the line that earned the section header — [59:35] “Throw AI away and get outside.” Wisdom needs to be taught to every generation. Garden a little. Change a tire. Keep a few books around in case the lights go out.

Jobs, purpose, and the Elon pipe dream

[1:01:00] The part that scares me most about AI isn’t the tech — it’s what happens when most jobs get taken and most people lose the thing that gave them a reason to get up. Rev pushed back on the Elon framing that AI will make money obsolete and free everybody up. “That to me is a pipe dream… we can’t even as a society today fund certain things in our government because we got two groups fighting all the time. I don’t see how it gets better just because now we can stay at home and have more free time to fight and argue about things that ultimately don’t matter.” Idle minds, idle hands. He wasn’t being cute about it.

”We’re created for community”

[1:03:25] The pivot. I told Rev what I’m banking on — that very soon people are going to long for authenticity, because that’s all I’ve got. His answer was the pastor answer, but he doesn’t say it like a sermon. “We’re created for community. Even people that are introverted still hunger for community.” Then the bit about why people watch gardening channels and walking-in-the-park videos and the Canadian guy building a cabin out of trees in his own yard — “there’s a world out there that’s pretty awesome if we’ll just get out and ride around in it.” For a podcast about AI it’s a strange place to land. But it’s where the conversation actually wanted to go, and we let it.

Alaska, 11 suitcases, and “you could be gone next week”

[1:07:33] Rev told the Alaska story. He and Nikki T had a 800-member church in South Georgia. He was burning out — 40, 50 days in a row of yes. They started praying about it, watching Alaska shows in the evenings, and three months in Nikki T said let’s go. They sold everything down to 11 suitcases and a set of golf clubs, flew up to a 13-member Baptist church, and stayed a year and a half before getting called back. Negative 37 two or three nights in a row. Truck plugged in to start in the morning.

[1:10:44] Ryan asked the question he was clearly leading up to — “man, you could be gone next week.” Rev’s answer made me laugh and then sit with it. “Yeah. I’ll give you my AI lister and all of our listings. If he pointed in that direction, we would go. I’m kind of praying he doesn’t, but if he does, I’m going.” That’s the AI takeover episode in one exchange — the man who uses the tool every day for his vinyl business is also the man who’d hand the tool over and walk out the door tomorrow if he had a reason to. The hierarchy is clear. That’s the master/tool thing in lived form, not in theory.

Ryan, the camera anxiety, and Rev as the calm voice

[1:27:03] The closing stretch is Ryan opening up about why he stopped doing garage-sale content on his channel — the anxiety of being on camera in public, of people recognizing him, of being a quiet dude trying to be a loud dude for a video. He’s been thinking about going back, partly because I keep nudging him. Rev’s response was the right one — paraphrasing, if you have a camera on it, that’s fine, but the personal connection is what matters; do it the way that works for you, not the way it works for somebody else. That’s the same advice he gave us about AI, just applied to camcorders. Same Rev.

Closing

Subscribe to Rev Resale on YouTube and Facebook if you don’t already. Rev told us he’s apparently in demand right now — he just recorded with ADHD Dave and Kevin’s crew the night before, and he came in with what he called “a bionic elbow on Kevin”, which we’ll find out about when that one drops. Until then, the master/tool line is the takeaway. Use the hammer. Don’t let the hammer use you.

We’ll see y’all in the next one.