Matthew McConaughey Wants a Personal AI. Let's Build One.

On a recent episode of Joe Rogan's podcast, Matthew McConaughey described exactly what he wants from AI. Not ChatGPT. Not some general-purpose assistant trained on the entire internet.

He wants something private. Something personal.

Here is the part where he talks about this:

"I want to upload three books I've written. My favorite books. My favorite articles I've been cutting and pasting over 10 years. All my journals. Log all that in so I can ask it questions based on that. Basically learn more about myself."

Then he said something worth paying attention to:

"I want the answers based on what I've uploaded it with only. Not from the outside world."

This is exactly what I've been building toward with Arca and Mio. And it's why I believe apps as we know them are going away.

Matthew talked about having a "Socratic dialogue" with an AI that holds all the stuff he's forgotten.

"All that 80% stuff you forgot, I've got it all right here."

Think about it. We've lived our whole lives. Read thousands of articles. Had countless conversations. Written notes and journals. Made decisions based on values we've refined over decades.

And most of it? Gone. Floating somewhere in a sea of "I kind of remember that."

A personal AI changes this. Not by making us dependent on it. But by giving us access to our own history, our own thinking, our own data.

Matthew even wants to load it with aspirational content. "The man I want to be." Then ask it questions and get answers based on that version of himself.

Most people think the answer is another app.

A journaling app. A habit tracker. A meal logger. A todo list. A check-in app like Foursquare used to be.

But apps are data jails. Our workout history lives in one app. Our meal logs in another. Our journal entries somewhere else. None of them talk to each other. And good luck getting our data out when we want to switch.

I recently wrote about my “apps no more” thesis.

The new model is simpler:

AI UI — We talk to our personal AI through chat, voice, whatever interface we prefer.

Logic Layer — The AI reasons about what we need and how to help us.

Database — Our AI creates data tables on the fly and stores everything in a private vault.

Instead of downloading a todo app, we tell our AI "help me track my tasks." It creates a todos skill with the right fields and starts logging. No app store. No account creation. No learning a new interface.

I've been doing this for months now. My personal AI tracks my meals, workouts, weight, todos, check-ins at places I visit, and more. All in structured tables I own and can export anytime.

Fair question. ChatGPT has memory now. We can upload documents. It learns about us over time through conversations.

So why bother building our own personal AI?

Three reasons.

We don't own that data. Everything we upload to ChatGPT lives on OpenAI's servers. Our journals. Our notes. Our private thoughts. All sitting in their infrastructure, governed by their terms of service, subject to change whenever they decide.

We can't take it with us. Say we spend two years training ChatGPT to understand us. Loading it with documents. Having thousands of conversations. Then Claude releases something better. Or a new model comes out that fits our needs more. We're starting from zero. All that context, all that history, locked inside OpenAI's system.

We can't actually use it. This is the big one. ChatGPT's memory is a black box. We can't query it. We can't export it in a structured way. We can't ask "show me everything I've told you about my health goals" and get a clean table back. It's all stored in abstract blobs that we can't access directly.

A personal AI (like one you can build in Mio) with its own data layer like Arca flips this around. Our data lives in our vault. Structured tables we can query with SQL. Vector memories we can search semantically. All exportable as CSV files whenever we want.

Switch from Claude to ChatGPT to whatever comes next? Plug in the same data layer. Our AI's memory comes with us.

That's the difference between renting a room in someone else's house and owning the house ourselves.

I'm going to walk through how to build this. Step by step. In this newsletter (subscribe at myai.build) and on a new YouTube channel (subscribe at youtube.com/@BuildMyAI)

We'll replace one category of apps at a time. Meal tracking. Workout logging. Todo lists. Daily check-ins. Journal entries. All the stuff people currently scatter across a dozen different apps.

Each article will cover how to give our personal AI a new skill. By the end, we'll have an AI that knows us, stores our data privately, and replaces most of the apps cluttering up our phones.

Matthew McConaughey described wanting exactly this. A private AI loaded with his own content. Answering questions based on what he's given it. Helping him learn more about himself.

Let's get started.