77% of employees using AI say it's

actually making them less productive,

not more. That means that AI isn't

achieving the results that everyone had

[music] hoped for, and it's all because

almost nobody understands how AI

actually [music] works. I went from

wasting hours and burning thousands of

dollars in tokens a day to now using AI

as the backbone of my whole portfolio of

companies that's about to cross $250

million in enterprise value in only 16

months. And along the way, I learned 40

brutal truths about AI that could have

saved me all this time and money. So,

let's start with number one. More

context isn't always better. Too much

just confuses AI. If we just dump

everything into it, it buries what

actually matters. If instead we give it

the cleanest, tightest version, exactly

what we want to give it, not just like a

junk drawer, but very specific

instructions, then it will do the work

we need. It's even got a term called

context rot when we do this. Number two,

one good example beats the perfect

prompt. We don't want to burn 20 minutes

wordsmithing the perfect prompt. We just

have to give it a great example. If you

just give it three to five great

examples of what you want to look like,

you can save yourself hours of time

trying to fix your prompt to get the

perfect output. Number three, AI doesn't

read minds. It needs instructions. It's

not like a person who just gets it. You

have to spell it out. You have to tell

it who you want it to be, what you're

doing, what you want. Vague requests

just gets vague answers every time.

Number four, lazy in, lazy out. AI can't

want it more than you do. If we don't

work on putting the time into the

prompt, into the AI, then we shouldn't

be upset if we don't get great responses

because the energy we put in is the

energy we get back. If we put a lot of

effort and time, guess what's going to

come back? Detailed work done. Number

five, don't ask AI for answers, argue

with it. It will agree with everything

because its job is to make you happy.

What you want to do is tell it to be a

ruthless mentor and actually poke holes

in what you're asking it to do. You need

bulletproof thinking, not a cheerleader.

Six, with AI, be the [music] boss, not

the buddy. I know with people you want

to be nice and you want to be clear.

With AI, you actually have to be strict.

You have to tell it what you want. It

actually responds better if you say

never do this than could you please

maybe sometimes do it this way? It does

better when you tell it what not to do

than ask it to do a general thing.

Number seven, stop typing, start talking

to your AI. When we want to get the most

out of the AI, the best way to do that

is to use your voice. It's three times

faster. Instead of just typing

everything you're thinking, just ramble

to it like a real person and then just

hit enter and watch it take your voice

and text and make sense of it all. And

there's apps to do this like Whisper

Flow. Number eight, if AI sounds like a

stranger, it's because you never

introduced yourself. The more you give

it about who you are, the better it can

answer your questions. So, if you want

to write an email, for example, have it

scan your email and say extract how I

write my emails and then you could say,

"Now write more emails like me." It

can't sound like you if you've never

introduced yourself. Number nine, AI's

first draft is a rough cut, not the

final cut. What the AI spits out is not

the finished product. Our job is to look

at it, react to it, push back,

>> [music]

>> reshape it. See, the gold is in round

three, not in round one. What it spits

out is like the clay, but our job is to

mold it.

Number 10, trust AI's speed, not its

accuracy. It can do in seconds what used

to take days for any human to do, but

the problem is is that it hallucinates.

And the crazy part, it will hand you a

confident answer, but if you don't

inspect what you expect to make sure

everything works good, then you might

move faster just find out that it

created something wrong. Just like

humans, it makes mistakes. And if it

does, number 11, make AI check its own

work before you do. Don't be the first

set of eyes on it. You can actually get

another AI to look at the work to give

it feedback. Take [music] that feedback,

give it to the AI, and it'll make an

even better version. That way, when we

see the final version, we'll know that

it's a more cleaned-up, polished version

that it battled with itself to produce.

Number 12, AI should make you work less,

not more. Don't spend 20 hours building

something that only takes you 30 seconds

to do. Keep that one, get rid of the

stuff that takes a lot of work to do.

13, if you can talk the task, AI can do

the task. If you know every step, you've

done this, and it's a process, and it's

a checklist, then AI can crush [music]

that. But if you're still trying to

figure it out, it has a hard time.

Number 14, playing with AI feels like

progress, but truth is, it rarely is.

When we play with the newest tools, it

feels so productive. It's so cool. Look

at this brain I created. Look at this

script I created. Look at this

automation. But we forget that it took

us like a week of exploring AI, and for

some reason, our revenue didn't go up.

So, we have to make sure we aim the AI

at an actual problem, not just things

that feel productive. 15, you can't

automate what you've never done. If we

can't do it by hand, then we can't hand

it off. Think about that. If you can't

explain it, then AI can't run it. 16,

nobody cares how the meal is cooked,

they care if it was great. Founders

panic all the time. What if people find

out that they use AI to do this? Won't

my customers be upset that I didn't do

all the heavy work? I don't think we

should worry about that. I think the

customers paid for an outcome. It's

like, if I'm a video editor, and I edit

videos, and I charge for an edited

video, whether I use AI or did it

myself, the client doesn't care, they

care if it's great. 17, if your AI isn't

moving a number, it's just a hobby. Be

honest with me, is it really changing a

number in your business, or does it just

feel cool? Is revenue going up? Is the

time being saved? Cuz if nothing moves,

then using [music] AI is kind of just a

hobby. You might love to do it, but it's

not moving our business forward. Number

18, falling in love with the tool is how

we forget the outcome. The tool or AI

was never the point, the outcome was.

The reason why we use AI is cuz we hope

we get to the outcome faster. If we're

just collecting logins and API tokens

and subscriptions instead of actually

getting work done, then we've lost the

plot. Number 19, a finished workflow

beats the newest model. It seems like

every week there is a new model that

comes out. We got to stop chasing it.

The person who finished that one system

on last month's model beats the person

chasing the new thing that still hasn't

gotten done. If it ain't broke, don't

fix it. Stay with what you've got and

get back to work. Number 20, it's faster

to build a feature than to actually have

a meeting to talk about it. I've seen

people spend hours debating something in

a meeting that AI could have just did

for them in minutes. Instead of sitting

there and debating how something could

look or how it work or how it would

feel, they could just stop the meeting,

do the thing, and come back and talk

about it. For example, I was in a

meeting the other day with a team member

and I said something before the meeting

was done, 30 minutes later he showed me

a prototype of what I just said I wanted

him to work on. 21, simple scales.

Complexity is just procrastination with

extra steps. When we put so much effort

in the setup, we think we're being

smart, but we're actually [music] just

delaying putting something out in the

world. The thing that actually scales is

the simplest, tiniest, easiest version

of it that we get in front of customers

that we can scale. We need to make sure

we don't overthink it, we don't

overengineer it, we just get it done.

22, one well-built agent beats 10

half-built ones. Most people have a

graveyard of half-finished automations,

half-finished agents, half-finished

scripts or processes or workflows that

they started but never finished. We need

to make sure we deploy one agent that

runs a daily beat that creates a lot of

value instead of experimenting with 10

other ones that are half-done. 23, you

need a polyamorous relationship with

your AIs. Yeah, I said it. You got to

around with the other AIs to figure

out which one's the best one. There's no

single model that is best at everything.

There's a site called Openrouter and I

will use 30 to 40 different AIs to

figure out which one is the best. And

what's crazy is they're leapfrogging

each other every week. So, we need to

pick the best tool for the job, not the

one that we're just used to. You can't

be married to just one of them. You have

to play with all of them.

24, stop using AI and let it run without

you. This is a big one. I want you to go

from I use AI to AI runs. There's a

difference. Using it means that you're

still doing the work. Running means it's

doing a whole process, workflow, or even

managing a department. You go from being

in the work and doing it, copying

pasting things, to it doing the work for

you and you're just reviewing. That's

the whole shift. And look, everything so

far you can do on your own laptop

tonight. But if you're a founder or CEO,

the real money isn't you getting a

little better at AI. It's AI running

your departments for you. That's why I

built a whole AI company operating

system. It's the exact playbook for

plugging AI into every part of your

business. It's all the workflows, the

agent setups, the templates my own team

uses to get the work done while we

sleep. If you want it, find me on

Instagram and DM me the word YouTube OS

and I'll send it right over. 25, you

can't automate a moving target. If your

process changes every week, there's

nothing stable to automate. Which is

fine. If you're growing really quick,

you're going to be breaking your

processes every 3 to 6 months. But the

ones that are locked and loaded, lock

them down, make it boring and

repeatable, and then build on top of it.

26, a prompt you can't repeat isn't a

skill, it's just luck. Have you ever did

a prompt and you got a magic result, but

then you can't do it again, it's just

kind of gone? My favorite thing to do is

once I get it to create that magic

output, I ask it to write the system

prompt behind it so that I can save that

in my system. Now I'm building a machine

that prints results on demand. It's not

a one-time magic trick, it's something

you can repeat. 27, never explain

yourself to AI twice. I use this

philosophy called dry, it's a

programming term that stands for don't

repeat yourself, which means I document

everything. I document all my meetings,

I document my decisions, I document my

processes. And so that I don't have to

repeat myself again, I just point it to

the folder with all those documents.

Number 28, a tool with no owner is just

a toy. If nobody owns the process,

nobody can maintain it and honestly

it'll just die. No owner, no results.

Every tool you build with AI has to have

a name of a person that owns it. That's

called the direct responsible

individual. Number 29, AI is fuel, not a

fix. If I take jet fuel and I put it in

my Volkswagen, it will explode because

that's a broken process. It's not built

to go fast. If I put jet fuel in a jet,

it will take off, it will get us to

space. A broken system will explode, a

kick-ass system will scale. Fix the

system first before you add the fuel.

30, let AI take the task, you can keep

the human moments. Hand the repetitive,

soul-sucking, soul-draining stuff to the

machines. We want to keep the hugs, we

want to keep the heart talks, we want to

keep the creative conversation. Let the

AI take the tasks that we don't even

want to do in the first place so that we

have the time to be human. 31, AI won't

replace your people, it'll free them. I

didn't have to get rid of my assistant

because she stopped triaging emails, she

just became my chief of staff. She now

has the time to focus on bigger

problems, human problems, not doing

triaging and automation that the AI does

better than her. Now, if you do need a

task done, then we got to go to 32.

Token first, hire second. See, before we

deploy money to labor and people, we

need to first ask ourself, can we use

the tokens or the AI to get it done

first? It's way cheaper to get AI to do

something 24/7, never gets upset, never

quits, never gets mad at us, than to

hire somebody, have to train them, and

then hope that they don't leave. If AI

can do it, that's when we hire someone

who can actually run the AI to manage

it. 33, if your best people are doing

what AI could do, you're the problem. If

we use our most expensive talent on a

task a machine can handle, that's a

waste. We need to make sure that that's

not happening because if it is, it's a

failure. 34, the future belongs to

directors, not doers. The way I think

about it is we want to be the editor,

not the author. We want to make sure

that we come in and we let the machine

do the work and then we become the

director. We direct it. We're the human

on the loop, not human in the loop. So,

we need to actually challenge ourselves

to stop being the best worker and start

being the best director. 35, your talent

strategy is your AI strategy. When we

hire people, we're taking money and

we're bringing people into our business.

We need to make sure that we qualify and

we start bringing people into our

business that know AI natively. So,

every hire that you're considering

should be showing you on their interview

how they've partnered with AI to do that

work. 36, AI isn't a department, it's a

way of operating. Oftentimes leaders try

to delegate AI down to the tech people

and I think that's why it fails. For me,

it's not one team or one department,

it's how the whole business runs and it

has to come from the top because number

37 is your team will never out adopt

their leader. [music] You are the

ceiling. If you're just dabbling with

AI, your whole team will dabble. It's

what John Maxwell calls the law of the

lid. Your team will never rise above the

leader. So, it's not about getting them

to use AI, it's about you as a leader

showing them how you're using it. If you

do that, the whole team will follow. 38,

you're not too busy to learn AI, you're

actually busy because you haven't. When

I hear people say, "I don't have time

for this." That's exactly why you should

do this. This weekend, take some time to

educate yourself. Talk with the AI, have

it teach you. Download my workbook. Go

through the exercises. Learning AI is

how we get our time back. 39, AI doesn't

have an identity problem, we do. The

tech is ready. People are like, "Oh

yeah, but it's not good enough yet." No,

it's there. What's actually holding us

back is that we're scared to let go. The

bottleneck in most cases has a face and

it's usually yours. 40, the barrier was

never the tech, it's your willingness to

try. What we need to make sure is we

don't blame the tools. See, the tools

are incredible. The only gap that I've

noticed is that we're bad at using the

tools, but if we stay with them long

enough, eventually the tools will get

good because we get better. We just have

to start, even if it's messy, even if

it's hard, even if it doesn't do what

you want right away. That's the whole

difference is we want to stick to it

until we get it. The people that are

going to stay behind are the ones that

quit in that first try when it didn't

work exactly the way they wanted it. You

just made it through 40 brutal truth

around AI. Most people aren't willing to

be honest with themselves. They're not

willing to confront it. They're not

willing to say, "Hey, I probably got to

get better at this." But here's what I

know, if you watched this, you're ready

for this. Right now, you have the

opportunity. Doesn't take anybody else's

permission, no timeline, you just have

to make a decision to invest in

yourself, to go all in on this, to

decide that you want to be the best in

your peer group. So, leave a comment

below and let me know, out of these 40

or anything I shared, what hit you the

hardest? What did you need to hear

today? So, just leave your answer below

and I'll make sure I read every one of

those comments. And remember, if you

want my AI company operating system, the

exact playbook for running your whole

business on AI, just DM me YouTube OS

over on Instagram and I'll send it over.

And if you want to know the six most

profitable AI businesses to start, click

here and I'll see you on the other side.