Dan Martell - September 02, 2025


3 Skills That Will Separate Winners From Losers in the AI Era

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Rick Rubin Brandon Jack
Date your wife everyday 1000 Days

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

200.98

Word count

1,516

Sentence count

60

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Tech Innovators podcast, I sit down with my good friend Neil Patel to talk all things AI. We talk about how AI is changing the world, what it can and can t do, and how to become the person AI can t replace.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Everyone's asking themselves, will AI replace me?
00:00:03.280 But what most people don't realize,
00:00:04.940 that's the wrong question to ask.
00:00:06.760 Instead, people should be asking themselves,
00:00:08.800 how do I become the person AI can't replace?
00:00:11.740 There's three things that if you master them
00:00:14.260 will make you impossible to replace.
00:00:17.880 When did it first hit you that AI isn't just a fun toy,
00:00:20.940 but it's actually replacing people?
00:00:22.900 GPT-25, even 2.0, when that came out
00:00:26.920 and it started writing marketing copy,
00:00:30.000 that changed everything are people oblivious if you're not using it in your business right now
00:00:34.960 they're gonna find out the day they lose their job that's like phase one phase two is downsize
00:00:40.240 of teams and phase three will be full departments gone like i don't see a world where finance is
00:00:45.680 still a thing you've been on this ai tip right now and you're leading the charge thank you for
00:00:51.680 that would you say you can become a millionaire faster than ever because of ai ever and the big
00:00:56.960 thing is these small teams that generate big revenues. So minimum, when we incubate a new
00:01:02.660 idea is two person teams, 10 million in revenue. And that first million is happening in three to
00:01:07.320 six months. They've joked in the AI community, there's going to be billion dollar companies
00:01:10.780 with one employee that will happen, right? Because the doing is going to be done. There's no more
00:01:16.000 doing. I call it the director versus the doer. The director is the value. So the two person teams
00:01:20.600 that we build is the business domain expert and the technical mind. And the technical isn't like
00:01:25.340 it used to be. It's not like I need a programmer. I just need somebody that understands automation,
00:01:30.660 AI, prompt engineering, and configuration, and building agentic systems. And then the business
00:01:35.300 person is talking to the customer and figuring out where the problem is. And that's the stuff
00:01:38.300 that's going to be really hard for AI to disrupt. The real skill, if you can have a virtual AI
00:01:43.500 avatar that can act like you, and then you can create these GPTs to generate scripts and
00:01:48.500 outlines, what's the skill? It's the director. It's not the doer. It's not being on camera
00:01:52.560 anymore. The future belongs to directors, not doers. 100%. And we're there today. If you think
00:01:58.220 about when I went to my team a year ago and informed them that if they don't replace 92%
00:02:04.820 of their work with AI, then they won't be the right person for me to have on my team. And I'm
00:02:09.960 looking at the finance guy and the HR person and everybody, and they're just like, what are you
00:02:13.520 talking about? Because I'm involved in so many companies, but I spend most of my time at Martell
00:02:17.660 ventures i'm seeing 18 months in the future there's no world where the whole financial
00:02:22.940 workflow of every business is done by a person right we either do it to ourselves
00:02:28.040 or it's going to happen somebody's going to create it so good you got to be a director
00:02:31.960 neil what's up dog good to see you bro how you doing brother i spend 98 of my time building
00:02:40.980 ai startups like people follow my content they're like oh man where's the fun time to do all this
00:02:45.360 stuff i spend three hours a week creating all the content you guys see i see it when you see it i
00:02:49.880 live my life what can it not replace it's very simple man intelligence is broken down into three
00:02:58.560 parts right you have analytical intelligence creative intelligence emotional intelligence
00:03:02.680 and those are the three things where i think ai is already surpassed human level analytical
00:03:08.640 intelligence creative intelligence it still can't predict a future that should exist that doesn't
00:03:14.000 It doesn't know how to do vision yet.
00:03:16.080 Like vision as in like having a vision for the future.
00:03:18.700 The third one is the emotional intelligence.
00:03:20.640 It's caring, man.
00:03:21.360 It's empathy.
00:03:22.280 It's the people side of things.
00:03:23.600 It's the soft skills.
00:03:24.600 It's arguably the most important one.
00:03:26.940 That one will be the last one to be disrupted if it can be.
00:03:30.400 And that'll be through some form of general intelligence or super intelligence.
00:03:33.480 Dude, in short, AI today cannot replace the soft skills, which are taste, vision, and care.
00:03:38.620 What do you think is a simple habit someone can build to sharpen their eye for quality and taste?
00:03:42.720 the best way to develop your taste is to study people with taste and the way i found it crazy
00:03:48.240 enough i asked chad gpt find me all the tech innovators that are popular on tiktok and i
00:03:53.920 watch this because then my feed becomes this like you know the rick rubin creative act i'm learning
00:03:59.920 without realizing i'm learning because i'm watching these people share the nuance and the mastery
00:04:05.200 right you study the grades you hope it rubs off what's the easiest business to make money ai
00:04:10.560 automation right now. What do you do? I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going
00:04:13.820 to sell social media marketing to real estate agents and I'm going to use AI to deliver. So
00:04:18.720 then how do I create an offer that they'll buy? Well, I use AI to create the offer, to actually
00:04:24.120 create the delivery, to give me the script, to do everything, to pick up the phone and call. When AI
00:04:29.660 can solve every problem, then the question to ask is what do I work on? Do you know what I'm saying,
00:04:35.520 Jack? Some people lose me when I say that. Everything that you would need to know to do
00:04:39.520 anything is now given to you. The problem is, is that your brain is going to stop you from doing it.
00:04:48.820 AI knows everything about everything and everything. The challenge is you've got to guide it.
00:04:54.120 When you chat with GPT and you wanted to create something like an email, a script, a landing page,
00:05:00.880 anything, say, create this as a canvas. When you do it as a canvas, what it does is it creates this
00:05:06.360 window and there's the document and then there's your chat and then what you do is you look at it
00:05:11.380 and you go oh talk like this change this and then eventually you get it where it's like oh that's
00:05:16.680 good once you got that then you say write me the system prompt that would have generated this if I
00:05:23.640 gave you a YouTube URL whatever the input is a YouTube URL a name of a person and a topic whatever
00:05:30.100 the input would be you just say write the system prompt if I just gave you an idea that would
00:05:35.540 generate this output with that idea.
00:05:37.700 And then it will write the system prompt.
00:05:40.340 And then you save that as a custom GPT.
00:05:48.100 You know, when people go like, okay, AI,
00:05:50.740 how do I future-proof myself?
00:05:52.500 I'll tell you a short story.
00:05:53.740 So I do a weekly AI expert lunch, where I have lunch,
00:05:57.420 and I meet with five other AI experts,
00:06:00.040 and I recruit them from social media.
00:06:02.100 Two weeks ago, I'm sitting there with these five guys,
00:06:04.340 And one guy, this guy Brandon goes,
00:06:05.860 hey Dan, what are your thoughts on AI avatars?
00:06:07.840 And I was like, I don't think they're very good.
00:06:09.880 And I think that people want connection
00:06:11.840 and people want authenticity and the human
00:06:15.360 and it's so important.
00:06:16.920 And he listens there patiently and he goes, interesting.
00:06:19.240 You saw my content and that's why I'm here.
00:06:21.320 I go, yeah.
00:06:21.820 He goes, that's not me. 1.00
00:06:23.400 I said, shut up. 0.97
00:06:24.840 Two other guys, the other two, they go, 0.99
00:06:26.800 yeah Dan, that's not us either.
00:06:28.300 I said, no way.
00:06:29.940 And they're like, yeah.
00:06:31.260 So I want you to understand that
00:06:32.700 whether we like it or not the media and the content and the distributions it is what is
00:06:37.840 going to make you defensible so when people go like hey i got this company i don't want to get
00:06:41.120 disrupted building a brand and people knowing you to be a person they trust they like that you add
00:06:46.800 value to you can't under invest in that what do you want to leave the viewer with i think i used
00:06:53.460 to be scared to be honest with people because i didn't want to scare them but i'm just i just
00:06:57.280 don't want people to be caught off guard there's a very big chance that every job will have ai
00:07:03.600 impacted in a massive way and the best way to defend yourself against that is to start using
00:07:09.700 it in your day in every way you can and be the director of where that goes and understand how
00:07:17.340 it works so that you can be a person in a team on a company that is the ai person bro it'll force 0.75
00:07:24.380 you to learn skills that'll make you valuable into the future vision taste and care and i think
00:07:29.620 honestly will force you to become a better person so go ai