Dan Martell - March 05, 2026


You’re not behind (yet)： How to learn AI in 18 minutes


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

213.00945

Word Count

3,791

Sentence Count

114

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

3


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 .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.080 believe it or not you're not behind on ai yet because the truth is most people still don't
00:00:06.400 understand how to use it well by just watching this video you'll know more about ai than 90
00:00:11.360 of the people out there and if you make it all the way till the end you'll be in the top one
00:00:15.840 percent of all ai users i've personally tested thousands of ai prompts across every major
00:00:21.520 platform built dozens of custom ai tools for my own companies and helped hundreds of founders
00:00:26.000 turn AI into their most profitable team member. So today, I'm going to show you how AI works,
00:00:31.960 the fundamentals you need to use it, how to master it, and how to future-proof yourself
00:00:36.860 so AI makes you a weapon instead of replacing you, starting with how it works.
00:00:41.960 Essentially, you've got all the world's information. I'm talking videos, podcasts,
00:00:46.280 documents, Reddit threads, and then AI analyzed it, and then it did this mathematical equation.
00:00:52.300 and broke all that text into tokens.
00:00:54.740 And then it tries to predict the most logical next token
00:00:57.640 based on what you gave it.
00:00:59.320 It's just like if you say twinkle, twinkle, little,
00:01:02.300 it's gonna say star.
00:01:03.500 That's why most of the answers
00:01:05.520 that come out of any chat AI have a lot of em dashes.
00:01:08.680 It's not because AI likes em dashes,
00:01:10.860 it's because humans like em dashes
00:01:13.200 and it's trying to replicate what it's seen us create.
00:01:16.240 And this is why if you give it really good information,
00:01:19.460 the output is really good
00:01:20.740 because it can use all that input to build context it's kind of like if somebody tells you
00:01:26.020 all the details of a story and then ask you a specific question you're more likely going to get
00:01:30.340 it right because you have all the details of the story that's what ai needs to give you the best
00:01:35.060 outputs and that's where people fall short the truth is ai isn't magic it's just pattern
00:01:40.500 recognition with the fancy suit on so now that we've covered how ai works behind the scenes we
00:01:45.700 need to talk about the fundamentals and how you need to use it the right way starting with the
00:01:50.340 right way to prompt the more information you give it aka the prompt the better the output will look
00:01:56.500 did you know you can give it like two three books worth of information about your question
00:02:01.380 before it even gives you an answer most people are giving it a text message it's giving it nothing
00:02:07.140 and then you're expecting it to do magic a few months ago i was working with a founder that
00:02:11.140 built this really cool ai technology and he was working on the marketing and he was having a
00:02:15.380 really hard time getting the marketing to actually communicate what his product did he spent like
00:02:20.660 three weeks on it iterating going back and forth trying to get the messaging right trying to get
00:02:24.980 the headline right trying to get the copyright all i did was sit down and i gave it the format about
00:02:30.180 to teach you and i hit enter and within 12 seconds it outputted the perfect plan structure and
00:02:36.740 strategy for him to get his customers to buy it took less than 15 minutes to implement on his
00:02:42.020 website and all of a sudden he's converting that traffic into customers what did i do different
00:02:47.060 here's how it works the first thing is the role you got to tell it who to be like it's kind of
00:02:52.100 like act like a professional dancer act like a killer musician so all i did when i was helping
00:02:57.700 my buddy to fix his prompt it said act like a world-class marketing strategist that focuses
00:03:02.980 on conversion for software what that does is it takes all the friggin information in the world
00:03:09.620 that's all been cataloged and structured and it says okay out of all of this only focus on this
00:03:14.420 piece and then with that it can then give you an answer that's very specific if not it just looks
00:03:20.500 watered down the second part to your prompt is the context i want you to give it all the background
00:03:25.780 information if you have marketing documents you have transcripts from a call you have any kind of
00:03:32.180 standard specification the more you can give it it can use that in its little brain for that prompt
00:03:38.580 to guide it in its output the third is the command you have to be very specific whatever you want it
00:03:44.980 to do tell it be very explicit i always say make the implicit explicit when we're prompting and
00:03:52.020 the last and the fourth is the format oftentimes for me i don't want these long lengthy outputs
00:03:58.100 i want bulleted lists i want it short and concise i want it in a table format i want it in a pdf
00:04:04.500 the format is how you take that output and then use it in other tools you might want to put it
00:04:09.540 in a csv so that you can import that into another tool but if you don't tell it that it's not going
00:04:14.660 to know what format you want if you do those things you will notice a complete difference
00:04:20.020 in the output i'll even go as nerdy in the format where i'll say here's the format then give it a
00:04:26.980 template to follow then hit enter and it can't go outside of those parameters the truth is is
00:04:32.900 the quality of your output will never exceed the quality of the input to your prompt so now you
00:04:38.260 know how to structure your prompt but there's this other crucial step that if you don't know you
00:04:43.300 can't learn ai properly which is you got to pick one tool and don't switch the amount of people
00:04:49.220 that come to me and they're like hey i'm using chat gpt and claude and gemini and grok and i'm
00:04:54.180 like show me your prompts and it's crayola it's simple they haven't mastered the tool learning ai
00:05:00.500 is like learning an instrument if you tried to learn a little bit about the piano and the guitar
00:05:04.740 the drums all at once you wouldn't be really good but if you decided to pick one and you decided to
00:05:09.380 be a master at it the others become way easy after it because you understand music you understand
00:05:14.740 tones you understand how to read sheet music same thing with ai tools pick one and master it before
00:05:20.100 you switch once you understand how one works the others are way easier to pick up and i will be
00:05:25.460 honest the people that keep switching tools all the time i just call it procrastination masters
00:05:31.220 go deep before they go wide so know the tools know which one's right for you and go deep on it
00:05:36.020 so i've already mentioned the top three okay we've got claude gemini and shadgbt i'm gonna walk you
00:05:41.620 through each one and tell you exactly which one does what best so that you can pick the right one
00:05:46.740 for your current use case so for example if you do a lot of writing creative work deep thinking
00:05:52.820 code well claude's got everybody beat there and it could change in a few months but for right now
00:05:57.460 i'm telling you claude's the one the other one if you do a lot of research you need up-to-date
00:06:01.300 information you live inside of google tools you can't go wrong with gemini it is an incredible
00:06:06.740 language model and it's the one a lot of people that are like google specific are using gpt is a
00:06:11.540 great one it's the first one to get really popular it's got a lot of integrations can't go wrong with
00:06:16.020 it and before you start hammering me in the comments i understand there's a bunch of others
00:06:20.740 I live my life on a site called Hugging Face,
00:06:23.200 which is like the nerdiest AI community.
00:06:26.480 So don't tell me about Grok and all these Chinese models.
00:06:29.620 I get that.
00:06:30.420 I'm just telling it for most people that are like,
00:06:32.820 I'm ready to be masterful at this so I can become a weapon.
00:06:36.060 These are the three I would recommend.
00:06:37.620 And by the way, if you choose to go towards ChatGPT,
00:06:40.080 I've got a full freaking masterclass
00:06:42.220 that I'll link at the end of this video
00:06:43.640 that goes through everything to make you a pro.
00:06:46.660 And if you're a business owner
00:06:47.740 that's trying to break seven figures
00:06:49.400 and you wanna go even deeper,
00:06:51.120 I've got an AI implementation playbook
00:06:53.040 that is what I use in my companies to implement AI.
00:06:56.540 And it shows you everything.
00:06:58.220 Just find me on Instagram and DM me AI business.
00:07:01.180 I'll send it over to you for free.
00:07:02.860 So here's the thing.
00:07:03.980 If you have made it to this point
00:07:05.420 and you feel like you've got everything covered so far,
00:07:08.180 the cool part, you're in the top 10% of AI users.
00:07:10.940 But if you stick around and implement
00:07:13.000 what I'm about to teach you, you'll be in the top 1%.
00:07:16.120 So let's talk about mastering AI,
00:07:18.280 starting with pull versus push prompting.
00:07:20.900 This is where we get a little advanced, but it's fun.
00:07:24.120 Come with me for the ride.
00:07:25.560 Don't run away.
00:07:26.560 This is gonna be good.
00:07:27.740 Most people use AI the hard way.
00:07:30.140 They do 80% of the work
00:07:31.780 and they let AI finish the last 20%.
00:07:34.240 That's push prompting.
00:07:35.720 You're telling AI how to do the task.
00:07:38.160 So you wanna go from push to pull prompting.
00:07:41.600 And the way that it's different
00:07:42.860 is that you start with the outcome
00:07:44.440 and then you let AI figure out the best way to get there.
00:07:47.440 instead of doing all the work yourself which you're doing today you let ai do the heavy lifting
00:07:52.320 the way i like to think about it is push is kind of like when you used to get directions from a
00:07:56.880 friend when they're like come to my house come over and then they tell you you got to turn left
00:08:00.800 at the house and then right at the church and then you'll see a red mailbox that's how most
00:08:05.760 people prompt poll is like gps where you let the ai direct you based on the destination you've given
00:08:12.240 it so here's how you use poll prompting it's super cool first you give it the role in the context
00:08:16.720 like you normally would it needs to know kind of who it should act like and what's the information
00:08:21.040 about the scenario second is you give it the outcome based objective right this is where you
00:08:25.360 tell it what you need so you might say i need a sequence that converts cold leads into booked
00:08:29.600 calls right very specific it's like the destination third you say this ask me all the questions you
00:08:36.240 need for you to create this for me and then give it back to me in and then you can say the format
00:08:41.200 you might say pdf or a table then just answer all the questions my little trick there is i use the
00:08:46.480 voice mode where i can just hit that little microphone and then answer because they might
00:08:49.840 give you seven questions and i don't want to type that much but you give it all the answers and then
00:08:54.080 let ai do the work watch it cook now you might say hey i need to refine this ask me more questions
00:09:00.160 to make it more relevant and it'll keep refining so you keep essentially using that's why it's
00:09:04.640 called a pull method you keep having it pull from you exactly what you need and let it go find the
00:09:10.560 solutions this is how software programmers have been doing it for a while okay most coders are
00:09:15.520 are sitting there and we're coding through outcomes.
00:09:17.780 It's called spec-driven development.
00:09:19.540 That's now becoming the mainstream for how you can prompt.
00:09:23.120 Now, pull prompting is crazy powerful,
00:09:25.740 but if you really wanna master AI,
00:09:27.620 you need to make it personal to you.
00:09:29.920 So number five, master prompts for every role in your life.
00:09:33.800 The way to think about a master prompt,
00:09:35.740 it's kind of like a manual about a part of your life.
00:09:39.040 So if there was like a manual called Dan CEO,
00:09:42.200 what would be in that manual?
00:09:43.200 If there was one called Dan Father,
00:09:44.880 would be in that manual well i would assume and they would have everything about me my life the
00:09:49.280 people in my life how things are structured what we sell when you have these master prompts and
00:09:54.720 you use it to give it to the ai because you might switch to different ones then it'll give you better
00:10:00.000 answers because right now if you don't it's not personalized to you it's just giving you generic
00:10:05.200 auto completion instead of something that is laser focused to your exact situation and remember
00:10:10.800 earlier when i talked about giving it context this is the context and if you do it once you
00:10:16.160 never have to do it again and it makes prompting so much easier and faster every team member in
00:10:21.520 all my companies has to have a master prompt they have to show it to me i got to make sure
00:10:26.240 it's complete i just can't imagine that they're efficient chatting with ai all day long and it
00:10:31.920 giving great answers if it doesn't have that so now let's create one for yourself the first thing
00:10:36.560 is we're going to practice pull prompting you can say i want to create a master prompt for my role
00:10:41.760 as whatever your role is in life you know father husband vp of marketing and ask me all the
00:10:47.360 questions you need to create it for me see how we're going to have it pull from me now it's going
00:10:51.680 to give you all these questions so they can create this document and that's where you use the voice
00:10:56.240 to text feature and just answer each one conversationally and third once ai gives you
00:11:01.520 your master prompt go through it and just refine anything that doesn't feel right and you can
00:11:05.840 literally just talk to it and say like update this add this you're missing that you didn't understand
00:11:10.320 this properly and it'll literally update the whole thing for you the last part is to save it as a pdf
00:11:15.840 and i like to just call the master prompt and then the role name so i have them on my hard drive and
00:11:20.160 that way when i'm using different ai tools i can always upload it so that it has perfect context
00:11:25.600 on my situation in life the truth is if ai sounds like a stranger and anybody could have got that
00:11:30.560 output it's because you haven't introduced yourself the master prompt is how you say
00:11:35.280 hello ai this is who i am the cool part is like i said you can use it in other tools
00:11:40.160 i personally spend a lot of time in a tool called manis which lets you create agentic workflows and
00:11:46.000 when i first loaded up the tool it didn't know anything about me so i use my master prompt to
00:11:50.560 give it all the context so that it could do outputs that were very personalized if i had to like
00:11:55.440 play with it and tweak it and talk to it it would have just took me a long time this gets an ai
00:12:00.320 from stranger to best friend.
00:12:02.220 So now you get the master prompts.
00:12:03.780 You have a way to give the context to the AI
00:12:05.880 so that you guys are best friends.
00:12:07.220 But what if you're like trying to get an output
00:12:09.200 and you like the output and you wanna like repeat it
00:12:12.060 and keep it consistent?
00:12:13.520 This is where you need the next tool to master AI.
00:12:16.880 Number six, system prompts.
00:12:18.920 Think of a system prompt like a recipe
00:12:21.180 and it has all the structure and you have the ingredients,
00:12:24.040 but the sequencing matters.
00:12:25.200 How you do what you do in the order
00:12:26.780 will dictate if you have a big pile of mush
00:12:28.900 or you have a beautiful chocolate cake.
00:12:30.640 So if you're chatting with the AI
00:12:32.160 and eventually it gets an output that you're like,
00:12:35.040 oh my gosh, this is great.
00:12:36.360 Why did it take me 17 minutes to get to that output?
00:12:39.140 This is how you solve that problem.
00:12:41.260 Understanding how to create system prompts is the future.
00:12:44.300 So here's how you build a system prompt
00:12:45.840 using what we've learned so far.
00:12:47.460 First, you gotta start by saying,
00:12:49.080 you're an expert AI engineer.
00:12:51.220 I want you to create a system prompt that does X,
00:12:54.760 ask me all the questions you need to create.
00:12:56.840 See how I'm using the poll structure?
00:12:58.260 Next, once it gives you all the questions,
00:13:00.800 answer them using the voice to text feature,
00:13:03.580 then test the response you get back.
00:13:05.460 The third, if something needs to be tweaked,
00:13:07.740 just tell it to refine it.
00:13:09.020 It's literally you code system prompts with words.
00:13:12.100 Once it's dialed in,
00:13:13.400 then you copy that system prompt into a custom GPT
00:13:16.960 or a Cloud Project or a Gemini Gem.
00:13:19.180 And then you've got a system that works for you on repeat
00:13:22.580 without ever having to give it instructions ever again.
00:13:25.720 I use this for strategic work.
00:13:28.040 I use it for research work.
00:13:29.720 I use it to create systems for my team to follow
00:13:32.580 where I can give them the link and say,
00:13:34.160 look, just give it the topic and it'll do something for us.
00:13:36.800 That way you take the complexity of AI
00:13:38.900 and just make it really simple for everybody else to use.
00:13:41.860 You're basically building little machines
00:13:43.800 that take care of work for you
00:13:45.260 so that you can focus on the fun new stuff.
00:13:47.440 Now, here's a pro tip.
00:13:48.460 A while ago, there was a leak.
00:13:50.660 All the complex system prompts from the top AI tools,
00:13:54.460 I'm talking Perplexity, Notion, Lovable,
00:13:56.600 and 20 plus others were actually collected and put together.
00:14:00.620 So if you wanna go see
00:14:01.900 what the world's best system prompts could look like,
00:14:05.440 just search system prompts and models of AI tools
00:14:07.840 on GitHub, on Google, and you will find the link
00:14:10.480 and you can go look at each one of them
00:14:12.320 to understand how powerful these can be created
00:14:15.400 to do literally anything for you,
00:14:18.380 like build mobile apps or reconcile financial details.
00:14:22.320 So now you know how to use AI
00:14:24.180 better than most people ever will.
00:14:26.100 That's the truth. But here's the thing. AI is evolving fast. I'm talking every day. And if you
00:14:31.940 want to stay ahead, you need to make sure AI will never replace you, which takes us to our last
00:14:36.780 point, but the most important one, which is future proofing yourself, which comes down to taste,
00:14:42.420 vision, and care. There are three things that when I sat back and I asked myself, like, what are the
00:14:47.520 areas of human existence of life that I feel is going to be really hard to disrupt? I feel like
00:14:52.760 things like our taste for what is great and our vision for things that don't exist that should
00:14:58.840 or caring about other people. What a crazy idea. I really don't think that AI is going to be able
00:15:03.340 to do that well. Simulate it, maybe, but I'm talking heartfelt, empathetic conversations.
00:15:09.020 That takes you. Machines can optimize what already exists, but humans imagine what doesn't.
00:15:14.800 First thing is taste. You got to immerse yourself in excellence. I think of it like standing
00:15:19.100 underneath a waterfall and allowing amazing world-class things to be poured over me so that
00:15:25.060 I might have the possibility of picking stuff up. So if you're like massively interested in music,
00:15:31.600 go subscribe and use your social media to learn music. If it's code software, I want you to use
00:15:37.540 your feed to feed your mind. Go and follow all the top people. Go subscribe to the newsletters.
00:15:42.200 The more you consume the best in the world and you get to understand what greatness looks like,
00:15:47.100 the better you build your taste. The second is vision. Schedule thinking blocks so that you can
00:15:52.180 sit down and think about the future. Visualize concepts because your brain doesn't think in
00:15:56.300 words. I don't know if you know this, but like if I say pink elephant, you just saw it. You didn't
00:16:00.600 have the words written down in your mind. So even just doodling, planning, exploring, reading books
00:16:06.700 that'll expand your horizon, that gives you a sense of what's possible or maybe how the world
00:16:11.480 should be shaped around you. And that is your job to shape the AI to help you with the vision.
00:16:15.880 And the last one is care.
00:16:17.520 And this is why I'm so bullish around AI
00:16:20.160 doing all the boring and dirty and dangerous work for us
00:16:23.380 is then you get to celebrate your clients.
00:16:25.720 You get to celebrate your team.
00:16:26.880 You get to be with your family.
00:16:28.300 You get to use it to create more
00:16:31.020 because you were born to be a creator.
00:16:32.920 Like that's what you're here to do.
00:16:34.680 Then you have the time to collaborate with people authentically.
00:16:38.020 Start thinking about ways you can get out in the world
00:16:41.080 and show that you care and contribute
00:16:43.400 and just connect with people.
00:16:44.880 I really think that AI has enabled us to have this deep desire to be around other people.
00:16:49.880 It's why you see events having record number of people showing up and sold out in no time
00:16:54.000 because we have a deep need for connection.
00:16:56.580 Do these three things and AI will become your weapon instead of your replacement.
00:17:00.920 Now, believe it or not, you're still early.
00:17:03.640 So stop panicking if that's where you're at.
00:17:05.620 Most small businesses haven't even started using AI in a meaningful way.
00:17:10.220 So just by watching this video, you're already ahead of the game.
00:17:13.240 So here's what I need you to do.
00:17:14.380 Just pick one daily task and have AI do it.
00:17:18.060 I don't care if it's move information
00:17:19.660 from one system to another,
00:17:21.300 just 10 minutes of action beats 10 hours of tutorials.
00:17:24.580 So just leave me a comment and leave that commitment below.
00:17:27.440 I wanna know, what are you gonna commit to
00:17:29.420 to really upgrade your AI skills?
00:17:31.780 And remember, DM me AI business on Instagram
00:17:34.680 if you're looking to grow your business
00:17:36.200 and I'll send you my AI implementation playbook
00:17:38.540 so you can scale past seven figures.
00:17:40.480 Like I mentioned, if you want the full chat GPT masterclass
00:17:44.040 to get ahead of 99% of the people,
00:17:46.340 just click here and I'll see you on the other side.