Dan Martell - July 02, 2026


40 Hacks to Use AI So Well It Feels Unfair


Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

213.98

Word count

3,203

Sentence count

238

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 77% of employees using AI say it's actually making them less productive, not more. That
00:00:05.460 means that AI isn't achieving the results that everyone had hoped for. And it's all because
00:00:09.400 almost nobody understands how AI actually works. I went from wasting hours and burning thousands
00:00:15.900 of dollars in tokens a day to now using AI as the backbone of my whole portfolio of companies
00:00:20.980 that's about to cross $250 million in enterprise value in only 16 months. And along the way,
00:00:26.700 I learned 40 brutal truths about AI that could have saved me all this time and money.
00:00:31.140 So let's start with number one.
00:00:32.640 More context isn't always better.
00:00:34.820 Too much just confuses AI.
00:00:37.000 If we just dump everything into it, it buries what actually matters.
00:00:40.900 If instead we give it the cleanest, tightest version, exactly what we want to give it,
00:00:45.500 not just like a junk drawer, but very specific instructions, then it will do the work we need.
00:00:49.840 It's even got a term called context rot when we do this.
00:00:52.620 Number two, one good example beats the perfect prompt.
00:00:56.140 We don't wanna burn 20 minutes
00:00:58.140 wordsmithing the perfect prompt.
00:01:00.200 We just have to give it a great example.
00:01:02.660 If you just give it three to five great examples
00:01:05.200 of what you want it to look like,
00:01:06.440 you can save yourself hours of time
00:01:08.360 trying to fix your prompt to get the perfect output.
00:01:10.820 Number three, AI doesn't read minds.
00:01:13.140 It needs instructions.
00:01:15.040 It's not like a person who just gets it.
00:01:17.340 You have to spell it out.
00:01:18.580 You have to tell it who you want it to be,
00:01:20.760 what you're doing, what you want.
00:01:22.720 Vag requests just gets vague answers every time.
00:01:25.420 Number four, lazy in, lazy out.
00:01:28.880 AI can't want it more than you do.
00:01:30.840 If we don't work on putting the time into the prompt,
00:01:33.960 into the AI, then we shouldn't be upset
00:01:36.020 if we don't get great responses
00:01:37.580 because the energy we put in is the energy we have back.
00:01:40.180 If we put a lot of effort in time,
00:01:41.800 guess what's gonna come back?
00:01:43.040 Detailed work done.
00:01:44.960 Number five, don't ask AI for answers, argue with it.
00:01:48.380 It will agree with everything
00:01:49.900 because its job is to make you happy.
00:01:52.080 What you wanna do is tell it to be your ruthless mentor
00:01:54.740 and actually poke holes in what you're asking it to do.
00:01:57.660 You need bulletproof thinking, not a cheerleader.
00:02:00.060 Six, with AI, be the boss, not the buddy.
00:02:03.400 I know with people, you wanna be nice
00:02:05.260 and you wanna be clear.
00:02:06.620 With AI, you actually have to be strict.
00:02:09.200 You have to tell it what you want.
00:02:10.400 It actually responds better if you say, never do this,
00:02:13.280 than, could you please maybe sometimes do it this way?
00:02:16.440 It does better when you tell it what not to do
00:02:19.160 than ask it to do a general thing.
00:02:21.560 Number seven, stop typing, start talking to your AI.
00:02:25.080 When we wanna get the most out of the AI,
00:02:26.860 the best way to do that is to use your voice.
00:02:28.980 It's three times faster.
00:02:30.440 Instead of just typing everything you're thinking,
00:02:32.400 just ramble to it like a real person
00:02:34.420 and then just hit enter and watch it take your voice
00:02:37.460 and text and make sense of it all.
00:02:39.300 And there's apps to do this like Whisperflow.
00:02:41.260 Number eight, if AI sounds like a stranger,
00:02:43.920 it's because you never introduced yourself.
00:02:45.540 The more you give it about who you are,
00:02:48.320 the better it can answer your questions.
00:02:50.160 So if you want to write an email,
00:02:51.280 for example, have it scan your email
00:02:52.800 and say, extract how I write my emails,
00:02:55.520 and then you could say, now write more emails like me.
00:02:58.160 It can't sound like you
00:02:59.240 if you've never introduced yourself.
00:03:00.860 Number nine, AI's first draft is a rough cut,
00:03:03.660 not the final cut.
00:03:05.000 What the AI spits out is not the finished product.
00:03:08.480 Our job is to look at it, react to it,
00:03:10.460 push back, reshape it.
00:03:12.280 See, the gold is in round three, not in round one.
00:03:15.460 What it spits out is like the clay,
00:03:17.200 but our job is to mold it.
00:03:18.480 number 10 trust ai's speed not its accuracy it can do in seconds what used to take days for any
00:03:26.020 human to do but the problem is is that it hallucinates and the crazy part it will hand
00:03:30.480 you a confident answer but if you don't inspect what you expect and make sure everything works
00:03:35.020 good then you might move fast to just find out that it created something wrong just like humans
00:03:39.540 it makes mistakes and if it does number 11 make ai check its own work before you do don't be the
00:03:45.720 first set of eyes on it, you can actually get another AI to look at the work, to give it feedback,
00:03:50.520 take that feedback, give it to the AI, and it'll make an even better version. That way, when we
00:03:54.940 see the final version, we'll know that it's a more cleaned up, polished version that it battled with
00:03:59.200 itself to produce. Number 12, AI should make you work less, not more. Don't spend 20 hours building
00:04:05.780 something that only takes you 30 seconds to do. Keep that one, get rid of the stuff that takes a
00:04:10.360 lot of work to do. 13. If you can talk the task, AI can do the task. If you know every step you've
00:04:17.340 done this and it's a process and it's a checklist, then AI can crush that. But if you're still trying
00:04:22.080 to figure it out, it has a hard time. 14. Playing with AI feels like progress. The truth is, it
00:04:27.900 rarely is. When we play with the newest tools, it feels so productive. It's so cool. Look at this
00:04:32.460 brain I created. Look at this script I created. Look at this automation. But we forget that it
00:04:36.720 took us like a week of exploring AI. And for some reason, our revenue didn't go up. So we have to
00:04:41.840 make sure we aim the AI at an actual problem, not just things that feel productive. 15. You can't
00:04:48.260 automate what you've never done. If we can't do it by hand, then we can't hand it off. Think about
00:04:53.980 that. If you can't explain it, then AI can't run it. 16. Nobody cares how the meal is cooked. They
00:05:00.160 care if it was great. Founders panic all the time. What if people find out that I use AI to do this?
00:05:06.120 Will my customers be upset that I didn't do all the heavy work?
00:05:09.100 I don't think we should worry about that.
00:05:10.660 I think the customer's paid for an outcome.
00:05:12.540 It's like if I'm a video editor and I edit videos and I charge for an edited video,
00:05:16.860 whether I use AI or did it myself, the client doesn't care.
00:05:19.500 They care if it's great.
00:05:21.000 17.
00:05:21.620 If your AI isn't moving a number, it's just a hobby.
00:05:25.200 Be honest with me.
00:05:26.280 Is it really changing the number in your business or does it just feel cool?
00:05:29.880 Is revenue going up?
00:05:31.400 Is the time being saved?
00:05:32.900 because if nothing moves,
00:05:34.880 then using AI is kind of just a hobby.
00:05:37.120 You might love to do it,
00:05:38.240 but it's not moving our business forward.
00:05:39.780 Number 18, falling in love with the tool
00:05:42.320 is how we forget the outcome.
00:05:44.080 The tool or AI was never the point.
00:05:46.640 The outcome was.
00:05:48.100 The reason why we use AI
00:05:49.360 is because we hope we get to the outcome faster.
00:05:51.820 If we're just collecting logins and API tokens
00:05:54.980 and subscriptions instead of actually getting work done,
00:05:58.320 then we've lost the plot.
00:05:59.800 Number 19, a finished workflow
00:06:01.840 beats the newest model.
00:06:03.960 It seems like every week there is a new model
00:06:06.360 that comes out.
00:06:07.180 We gotta stop chasing it.
00:06:08.480 The person who finished that one system
00:06:10.520 on last month's model beats the person chasing
00:06:13.340 the new thing that still hasn't gotten done.
00:06:15.660 If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
00:06:17.520 Stay with what you've got and get back to work.
00:06:19.760 Number 20, it's faster to build a feature
00:06:22.320 than to actually have a meeting to talk about it.
00:06:24.500 I've seen people spend hours debating something
00:06:27.360 in a meeting that AI could have just did for them
00:06:30.220 in minutes. Instead of sitting there and debating how something could look or how it would work or
00:06:34.780 how it would feel, they could just stop the meeting, do the thing, and come back and talk about it.
00:06:39.180 For example, I was in a meeting the other day with a team member and I said something before the
00:06:43.140 meeting was done, 30 minutes later, he showed me a prototype of what I just said I wanted him to
00:06:47.340 work on. 21. Simple scales. Complexity is just procrastination with extra steps. When we put so
00:06:53.860 much effort in the setup, we think we're being smart, but we're actually just delaying putting
00:06:58.760 something out in the world. The thing that actually scales is the simplest, tiniest, easiest version of
00:07:04.780 it that we get in front of customers that we can scale. We need to make sure we don't overthink it.
00:07:09.140 We don't over-engineer it. We just get it done. 22. One well-built agent beats 10 half-built ones.
00:07:16.480 Most people have a graveyard of half-finished automations, half-finished agents, half-finished
00:07:22.460 scripts or processes or workflows that they started but never finished. We need to make sure we deploy
00:07:27.380 one agent that runs a daily beat that creates a lot of value instead of experimenting with 10
00:07:32.940 other ones that are half to 23. You need a polyamorous relationship with your AIs. Yeah,
00:07:38.480 I said it. You got to around with the other AIs to figure out which one's the best one.
00:07:42.500 There's no single model that is best at everything. There's a site called OpenRouter,
00:07:47.560 and I will use 30 to 40 different AIs to figure out which one is the best. And what's crazy is
00:07:53.220 they're leapfrogging each other every week. So we need to pick the best tool for the job,
00:07:58.460 not the one that we're just used to. You can't be married to just one of them. You have to play
00:08:03.060 with all of them. 24. Stop using AI and let it run without you. This is a big one. I want you to go
00:08:10.160 from I use AI to AI runs. There's a difference. Using it means that you're still doing the work.
00:08:16.900 Running means it's doing a whole process workflow or even managing a department. You go from being
00:08:21.660 in the work and doing it, copy and pasting things, to it doing the work for you and you're just
00:08:26.300 reviewing. That's the whole shift. And look, everything so far you can do on your own laptop
00:08:31.200 tonight. But if you're a founder or CEO, the real money isn't you getting a little better at AI,
00:08:35.940 it's AI running your departments for you. That's why I built a whole AI company operating system.
00:08:40.900 It's the exact playbook for plugging AI into every part of your business. It's all the workflows,
00:08:45.560 the agent setups, the templates my own team uses to get the work done while we sleep.
00:08:49.860 If you want it, find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTubeOS and I'll send it right over.
00:08:54.980 25. You can't automate a moving target. If your process changes every week, there's nothing
00:09:00.300 stable to automate, which is fine. If you're growing really quick, you're going to be breaking
00:09:04.300 your processes every three to six months. But the ones that are locked and loaded, lock them down,
00:09:09.500 make it boring and repeatable, and then build on top of it. 26. A prompt you can't repeat isn't a
00:09:15.520 skill, it's just luck. Have you ever did a prompt and you got a magic result, but then you can't
00:09:19.840 do it again it's just kind of gone my favorite thing to do is once i get it to create that magic
00:09:24.160 output i ask it to write the system prompt behind it so that i can save that in my system now i'm
00:09:30.000 building a machine that prints results on demand it's not a one-time magic trick it's something
00:09:34.640 you can repeat 27 never explain yourself to ai twice i use this philosophy called dry it's a
00:09:40.880 programming term that stands for don't repeat yourself which means i document everything i
00:09:46.080 I document all my meetings, I document my decisions,
00:09:48.800 I document my processes.
00:09:50.320 And so that I don't have to repeat myself again,
00:09:52.240 I just point it to the folder with all those documents.
00:09:54.960 Number 28, a tool with no owner is just the toy.
00:09:58.220 If nobody owns the process, nobody can maintain it,
00:10:01.320 and honestly, it'll just die.
00:10:03.060 No owner, no results.
00:10:04.600 Every tool you build with AI
00:10:06.560 has to have a name of a person that owns it.
00:10:09.040 That's called a direct responsible individual.
00:10:11.360 Number 29, AI is fuel, not a fix.
00:10:14.680 If I take jet fuel and I put it in my Volkswagen,
00:10:17.780 it will explode because that's a broken process.
00:10:20.440 It's not built to go fast.
00:10:21.900 If I put jet fuel in a jet, it will take off.
00:10:24.560 It will get us to space.
00:10:25.720 A broken system will explode.
00:10:27.720 A kick-ass system will scale.
00:10:29.500 Fix the system first before you add the fuel.
00:10:32.460 30. Let AI take the task.
00:10:34.460 You can keep the human moments.
00:10:36.840 Hand the repetitive, soul-sucking,
00:10:39.380 soul-draining stuff to the machines.
00:10:41.220 We want to keep the hugs.
00:10:42.660 We want to keep the hard talks.
00:10:44.080 We wanna keep the creative conversation.
00:10:46.900 Let the AI take the task
00:10:48.320 that we don't even wanna do in the first place
00:10:49.660 so that we have the time to be human.
00:10:51.500 31, AI won't replace your people, it'll free them.
00:10:55.080 I didn't have to get rid of my assistant
00:10:56.680 because she stopped triaging emails. 0.99
00:10:58.680 She just became my chief of staff. 0.99
00:11:00.380 She now has the time to focus on bigger problems, 0.99
00:11:02.460 human problems, not doing triaging and automation 0.80
00:11:04.920 that the AI does better than her.
00:11:06.740 Now, if you do need a task done,
00:11:08.940 then we gotta go to 32, token first, hire second.
00:11:12.240 See, before we deploy money to labor and people,
00:11:16.180 we need to first ask for self,
00:11:17.440 can we use the tokens or the AI to get it done first?
00:11:20.660 It's way cheaper to get AI to do something 24 seven,
00:11:24.380 never gets upset, never quits, never gets mad at us,
00:11:27.200 then to hire somebody, have to train them
00:11:29.120 and then hope that they don't leave.
00:11:31.060 If AI can't do it, that's when we hire someone
00:11:33.440 who can actually run the AI to manage it.
00:11:35.880 33, if your best people are doing what AI could do,
00:11:39.860 you're the problem.
00:11:40.440 If we use our most expensive talent on a task
00:11:43.420 a machine can handle, that's a waste.
00:11:46.140 We need to make sure that that's not happening
00:11:47.760 because if it is, it's a failure.
00:11:49.220 34, the future belongs to directors, not doers.
00:11:53.200 The way I think about it is we wanna be the editor,
00:11:55.800 not the author.
00:11:56.780 We wanna make sure that we come in
00:11:58.420 and we let the machine do the work
00:12:00.180 and then we become the director, we direct it.
00:12:02.580 We're the human on the loop, not human in the loop.
00:12:04.880 So we need to actually challenge ourselves
00:12:06.300 to stop being the best worker
00:12:07.700 and start being the best director.
00:12:09.720 35, your talent strategy is your AI strategy.
00:12:13.860 When we hire people, we're taking money
00:12:16.100 and we're bringing people into our business.
00:12:18.020 We need to make sure that we qualify
00:12:20.180 and we start bringing people into our business
00:12:22.400 that know AI natively.
00:12:24.280 So every hire that you're considering
00:12:26.240 should be showing you on their interview
00:12:28.180 how they've partnered with AI to do that work.
00:12:31.180 36, AI isn't a department, it's a way of operating.
00:12:34.800 Oftentimes, leaders try to delegate AI
00:12:37.180 down to the tech people.
00:12:38.700 And I think that's why it fails.
00:12:40.520 For me, it's not one team or one department.
00:12:43.200 It's how the whole business runs.
00:12:45.120 And it has to come from the top
00:12:46.520 because number 37 is your team
00:12:48.400 will never out-adopt their leader.
00:12:50.200 You are the ceiling.
00:12:51.580 If you're just dabbling with AI, your whole team will dabble.
00:12:54.680 It's what John Maxwell calls the law of the lid.
00:12:56.580 Your team will never rise above the leader.
00:12:58.620 So it's not about getting them to use AI.
00:13:00.900 It's about you as a leader showing them how you're using it.
00:13:04.600 If you do that, the whole team will follow.
00:13:06.220 38. You're not too busy to learn AI. You're actually busy because you have it.
00:13:11.520 When I hear people say, I don't have time for this, that's exactly why you should do this.
00:13:16.460 This weekend, take some time to educate yourself. Talk with the AI. Have it teach you. Download my
00:13:21.840 workbook. Go through the exercises. Learning AI is how we get our time back.
00:13:25.820 39. AI doesn't have an identity problem. We do.
00:13:29.360 The tech is ready. People are like, oh yeah, but it's not good enough yet. Nah, it's there.
00:13:33.500 what's actually holding us back is that we're scared to let go. The bottleneck in most cases
00:13:39.120 has a face and it's usually yours. 40. The barrier was never the tech. It's your willingness to try.
00:13:45.460 What we need to make sure is we don't blame the tools. See, the tools are incredible. The only
00:13:49.760 gap that I've noticed is that we're bad at using the tools, but if we stay with them long enough,
00:13:54.440 eventually the tools will get good because we get better. We just have to start. Even if it's messy,
00:13:59.300 even if it's hard, even if it doesn't do what you want right away, that's the whole difference is
00:14:03.320 we want to stick to it until we get it. The people that are going to stay behind are the ones that
00:14:07.480 quit in that first try when it didn't work exactly the way they wanted it. You just made it through
00:14:11.780 40 brutal truths around AI. Most people aren't willing to be honest with themselves. They're not
00:14:16.180 willing to confront it. They're not willing to say, hey, I probably got to get better at this.
00:14:19.940 But here's what I know. If you watch this, you're ready for this. Right now, you have the opportunity.
00:14:24.860 It doesn't take anybody else's permission, no timeline. You just have to make a decision
00:14:29.200 to invest in yourself, to go all in on this,
00:14:32.020 to decide that you wanna be the best in your peer group.
00:14:34.540 So leave a comment below and let me know out of these 40
00:14:37.340 or anything I shared, what hit you the hardest?
00:14:39.880 What did you need to hear today?
00:14:41.200 So just leave your answer below
00:14:42.480 and I'll make sure I read every one of those comments.
00:14:44.920 And remember, if you want my AI company operating system,
00:14:47.540 the exact playbook for running your whole business on AI,
00:14:50.300 just DM me YouTube OS over on Instagram
00:14:52.360 and I'll send it over.
00:14:53.200 And if you wanna know
00:14:53.920 the six most profitable AI businesses to start,
00:14:56.820 click here and I'll see you on the other side.