Don't Delegate Your Brain to AI

So there's this way that people approach using and making money with AI in their work and their careers, which I think differentiates the people who do really well because of AI and become more productive, expand their businesses, and then those who suffer or do worse, not as a function of not using AI and ignoring these advancements and tools, but actually as a function of using it in the fundamentally wrong way. It's an important conversation to have, and it's a pretext to all the hundreds of videos on this channel that we make covering the updates and advancements in the world of AI. And so I'm going to explain what that core difference is in how you should versus shouldn't approach these tools, and then how exactly that can benefit you in your life when you think about, hey, what should I use? How should I use it? And more generally, how do I want to approach my career or business? That's going to be the video. It's going to be a quick one today. Hope you all enjoy and let's go. 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Your work is protected forever on unlimited downloads, and they have a plugin so you can directly use the media from inside of Premiere Pro and After Effects. So over 150,000 creators and businesses already use Storyblocks, and again, every single download supports a real working professional. So to get access to the human-made stock media library for creators and business owners, you can go to storyblocks.com or this link on the screen or in the description, and if you click on that link in the description, you get 15% off any annual plan for a limited time, and that discount only works through this link. That's Storyblocks, and out of mind, let's get back to the video. So I want to start with the core problem here, and this is not unique to AI. It's something that you've seen across every commodity business, or basically any business where a lot of people can provide the same product or service. And the problem is exactly that. If you can use a given artificial intelligence tool or chatbot or workflow or agent to accomplish something on its own for you, that's great. The barrier to creating that is simply access to the same tool that you have, which in the case of most of these platforms is a few dollars a month. In simple terms, anyone else can do exactly what you have prompted the agent to do if it proves commercially viable. And again, that's an entirely endemic economic reality. Anytime there's something valuable, whether it's a drug, whether it's a dropshipping product that's doing really well, if there's not IP protection like your patents or your trademarks on it, then that value spread is going to get arbitraged out, right? Margins are going to get compressed over time. And usually there's time for the markets to adjust, like for new manufacturers to start creating the off-brand version of the drug. But AI does that on steroids. Not only is there no moat, but any single other individual who recognizes the economic value of what the agent or the AI or the tool is doing can replicate it a million times over by function of the leverage that AI provides. So not only do you have no moat, if you happen to stumble across a moat, that will get arbitraged out like this. And that's not a perfect equation. It's not like there are no opportunities to go generate value or create businesses with these AI tools. But you'll see how this sets up in the frame that I want to present here next, which I think clarifies this concept and is why some people do really well and some people suffer as a result of using AI tools in this way. And that observation is the people who do the best with AI in terms of becoming more productive, making more money, what they do is they have some human insight or ability, something novel or unique that they do really well. And then AI magnifies that. It elevates it by a factor of 10 or 100 or 1000x. It lets them do what they already uniquely do really, really well, even better in a more automated fashion. And that is what makes AI so incredibly economically valuable. But the critical differentiator there is that the idea, the insights, the novelty itself did not come from AI. That was the human and AI just elevates the human. And it doesn't have to be human. It can be a workflow. It can be something that is IP protected. But it starts with the human. And that in of itself is the moat. And then on the flip side, you see a million people who go ask Claude, hey, make me a business, make me a website, vibe code me this thing, where the AI is the driving force in identifying the quote unquote thing that works. And as an example of this, you can look at the market for software engineers. And what you're seeing is this kind of split where the top echelon of coders, of programmers use AI to become incredible, right? Super programmers where they can be that much more productive using these other AI tools. But that's because they are so good already. They have something unique about their approach to it, or they're just they're really good for whatever set of reasons. And then you have all these other entry level coders who try and learn coding with AI, and then they try and go get these jobs and use AI for it. And those people, their salaries are crashing. And then the salaries of that top echelon are going vertical. That is an illustrated example of this concept. And you can see that in the data extrapolated across all these other domains where the people or teams who have some idea or insight or workflow or approach and use AI to elevate it to make themselves vastly more productive and be able to do that thing better. They are winning because of AI, while the people who outsource their brains, their ideation, everything to AI lose by function of the lack of novelty of these systems. And the fact that even if they do find something awesome and it works out well, everyone else with access to that same set of tools will come in and do the same thing for less money. And so the warning there to you as far as how I think you should approach AI in your career or your business or entrepreneurship is don't delegate your brain to AI, because if you do that, you are as good with anyone else with an Internet connection or a subscription to that tool. Rather, I think the best economic frame for using this technology is to take the ideas you have, the business you have, what you do really, really well, and then helping you delegate, automate, and scale that fundamental thing. Another example of that is this YouTube channel where an enormous amount of the work is done by AI, whether on the communication side, on invoicing, on scripting, outlining, editing. And none of those things are the core set of insights or the quote-unquote program that helps the channel do well. Those are just things that need to get done. But by doing those things with AI, you get a much stronger business, better margins, and more time to focus really on the core set of abilities or insights or processes that help the channel do well. And that's why a lot of the lowest hanging fruit that we talk about on this channel for using AI is replicating the work you already do. It's less so new work, but you already do things that are economically valuable if you're paid for it or if it generates money. So start by helping you do that better, and then we can talk about starting a business with AI or using agents on this new idea or having AI sandbox its own projects. So I hope that makes sense. That's a difficult idea to package, but I think it is really a valuable one, and it is where a lot of the newer, say, vibe-coded-esque projects go wrong. With that in mind, there's lots more on this channel once you have that thing to help you go with all these tools and agents and technology to do it better. So I hope you find those resources helpful, and if not, that AI can aid you, can help you find that core insight or process or idea that makes you special and you a unique force in the labor market to then enhance with AI. That is the video. Hope you're having a great day wherever you are in the world, and I will see you in the next one. Cheers.