The core theme is that instead of letting AI replace human thinking, individuals can leverage it as a tool to enhance their intelligence and capabilities by adopting specific, counterintuitive strategies.
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Most people are letting AI destroy their
ability to think, training AI to become
their own replacement. Tragic, because
AI can make you dangerously intelligent.
I went from being homeless to an MIT
grad and running and advising AI
companies worth billions. And here's
what I've learned. The top 1% use AI
backwards. They don't prompt to get
answers. They use it to train their
brain and outsmart [music] almost any
situation. So, in this video, I'll break
down a counterintuitive system the top
1% use to get smarter faster with AI.
Here is the four-step framework. Step
one, intelligent laziness. A study in
Harvard Business Review found that CEOs
waste 72% of their time in meetings that
don't move the needle. [music] We've all
experienced those meetings, haven't we?
The 1-hour meeting that needed only 15
minutes to get to a decision, but it's
hard to stop. So why do some of the most
accomplished folks feel [music] trapped
this way? Because we all suffer from
this biological glitch called completion
bias. Your brain is wired to seek an
immediate dopamine hit that you get from
finishing a task. So we end up treating
all tasks as equal because we're going
to get roughly the same amount of
dopamine when you spend time on
reddrafting an internal email or a
million-doll strategy document.
Everything is priority one. So none of
it is. So how do you avoid this priority
blindness? A good way to think about
tasks is to see two curves. [music]
First curve has capped payoffs. This
curve goes up and then flattens out once
it reaches the zone of diminishing
returns. So tasks like formatting slides
or [music] internal emails, expense
reports, FYI meetings. What happens if
you spend additional effort to make the
outcome of these tasks pitch perfect?
Nothing. There's no upside here because
the value flat [music] lines after a
point. Nobody cares if you spend hours
choosing better fonts or breathtaking
designs in internal slides that are seen
for 6 minutes. This curve shows you your
zone of intelligent laziness. There was
a Nobel Prize-winning economist and
computer scientist and his name was
Herbert Simon and he came up with a
concept called satisficing which pretty
much means stop when it's good enough.
Satisfy and suffice. [music]
Satisfice. Now our second curve is the
exact opposite. It has uncapped payoff.
This curve stays flat for a long time
but then goes to the moon in a hurry.
These are tasks like customer
interactions, product design, pricing
model, finding a co-founder or a life
partner. Being 1% better here does not
yield 1% better result. It actually
solves the rest of the 99% of your
problems. Pour your soul into this.
Johnny IV would obsess for many months
on even the internal component design of
iPhone. But, you know, Steve Jobs never
said, "Hey, this is costing us a lot of
money." And who's going to pry open the
iPhone? But Steve knew this was the
second curve. [music] So, if the first
curve is your zone of laziness, your
second curve is your zone of obsession.
Let's talk about how AI can help. The
top 1% use AI on zone one or the zone of
laziness. The more they outsource zone
one to AI, the more they can focus
[music] on zone 2, the zone of
obsession. So how do I decide what to
outsource to AI and when? So for that I
use a very simple framework called drag
framework. D R A G. Four categories of
work you [music] immediately should
delegate to AI so you can stay in your
zone of obsession. First D equals
[music] drafting. This is the blank page
problem we all face. It's hardest to
[music] get from zero to one. Sometimes
AI can help here tremendously. Actually
[music] give it a prompt using the AIM
protocol that I have shared before. Hey
AI, act [music] in this role. Use this
input and this is your mission. A IM.
And that way you get started very
quickly on that email or code or
presentation and the first draft from AI
will be crappy and atrocious, but that's
fine. Now [music] you have a starting
point. You're not staring at a blank
page anymore. Now it'll trigger
something in your brain and you're off
to the races. R equals research. This
helps you solve the information overload
problem. Today, if something requires
deep research, [music] it can be
dramatically accelerated using AI,
summarization, extraction, competitive
intel, you know, don't spend time doing
that kind of research. Let your friendly
neighborhood AI do it [music] for you.
When you use the deep research feature
on Chad GBT or Gemini or Claude, it
fires off hundreds of secondary search
queries. It goes out to the web like a
spider and finds hundreds of sites,
consolidates the results, even checks
his own work by asking what's missing
[music] and follows up on its own to
finally deliver a rich document to you.
It's like you just hired a consultant
for a week-long research project, but
instead you get there in 10 minutes.
Third is a for analysis. Let AI take the
first pass at analyzing, summarizing,
reasoning, especially if it's all
unstructured data because AI is going to
find patterns that we humans aren't
going to be able to. So use it for your
advantage. And finally, G is for all the
grunt work. Tasks like reformatting,
translating, tabulating, cleaning data,
and on and on the boring manual work.
Just give it to AI. So what's the key
principle behind drag? Apply it only
when you are in your zone one. That
first curve. If it requires human
interaction or judgment or intuition or
decision-m or tastes, that's curve two.
That you've got to do it yourself. But
you know, I found that 70 or 80% of my
repetitive tasks tend to be in zone one.
And you might find that too. So be lazy
when you can use drag. Be obsessed for
everything else. Step two, the
intelligent hill. For 300 years, Isaac
Newton convinced us that universe was a
clockwork machine, predictable and
certain. But in 1927, another [music]
scientist named Heisenberg shattered
those classical beliefs. He showed that
our universe exists only as a cloud of
possibilities. at quantum level. It was
a profound shift. [music] You and I have
to make a similar shift when we use AI
nowadays. The first trick is to stop
treating AI like [music] a calculator.
We like to live in a world with clear
rules. You type 2 + 2 into a calculator
and you [music] get four always. It's
predictable. But AI is not a calculator.
It's [music] a probability engine. If
you ask the same question to AI again,
it'll give you a completely different
answer. It'll happily make things up for
you unless you ask it to verify. AI is
brilliant on some days, confused on
others, but on any given day, it refuses
to admit that it doesn't know the
answer. It loves to make things up. So,
you don't just ask AI the way you ask a
normal human being. You have to
architect your questions very carefully.
Now, most people use a tactic called
zeroshot prompting. So, for example,
they would ask, "Give me the best new
business idea." And of course, AI will
dish out a response and tell you why
it's the greatest idea in the world, but
you're literally rolling the dice and
looking to win. To get elite results,
though, you must climb the intelligent
hill. There are four camps on the way.
Each camp will show you a different way
to work with AI. Our first camp is
called oneshot prompting. When you
prompt, give [music] one clear example
so the model doesn't guess blindly. So
the prompt would look like, write a
LinkedIn post about remote work. Use
this specific post as a style guide.
[music] And so give it a post. Give it
an example and paste that post in the
prompt as a reference. And that simple
act is already an upgrade than rolling
the dice blindly. Second camp, few shot
prompting. Now here you give AI three or
more examples so it can find patterns of
style and substance and tone that you
desire. Attach documents, links, data or
your prior work. This is called
grounding the model. So basically it
stops fantasizing and hallucinating and
gets grounded to reality. Here's an
example of a prompt. Here are the five
of my previous presentations. And now
write a new presentation based on my
tone of voice on topic XYZ. And here's a
pro tip. Ask the AI to explain the
pattern back to you first. That way AI
is forced to articulate what it's doing.
And more importantly, you're forced to
learn how your brain works. How did it
come up with those patterns? [music] Now
you're being smart about being smart.
Now let's move to the third camp. This
one is called chain of thought
reasoning. Again, fancy name, but the
idea is simple. Ask the model to think
long and hard before it responds. Your
job is to slow AI down and force
explicit clarity by asking it to show
its work. That's all there is. This is
also a good way to reduce
hallucinations, of course. So, let's say
you're working on some report and so you
attach it and write a prompt that could
look like this. Do not refine my
research report yet. List the top three
most impactful areas of improvement
after we analyze it. Tell me why you
think so and suggest how we address
each. Think step by step. Show me your
thinking for each step. That last line
is the most important one. And our
fourth and final camp is agents.
According to Salesforce, AI agents help
drive $67 billion in global sales during
Cyber Week alone. [music]
So agents are already here. The best way
to think about agents is to think about
who you would hire for a task. So let's
say if you wanted to hire a researcher,
an analyst, [music] and a copywriter,
you can do that with a single agentic
prompt that looks like this. Do deep
research on trends on topic XYZ. Analyze
and cross-reference all the trends to
find the three most important ones and
draft a one-page memo summarizing the
findings. Now, what is actionable? Try
this framework tonight. Open your
favorite AI app and take any prompt that
you were about to use. Just try to get
to the next camp. That's how you start
climbing up the intelligent hill.
Remember when you were dealing with a
drunk genius? make sure you were the one
driving the car. So now at this point,
everything we've done has made you fast
and efficient. You're delegating better,
you're prompting smarter, you're moving
up the hill, and there is less friction
than before. And that's exactly where
most people would stop. But here's the
plot twist. The top 1% go one step
further. They slow things down
deliberately. Why is that important? The
trick that top 1% know is this. They
know when to shift the gear. Because
long-term intelligence isn't built
through convenience, it's built through
resistance. And that's why we need to go
to step three, [music] the intelligent
gym. Most people use AI as wheelchair
for the mind. And if you sit in a
wheelchair when you can still walk,
eventually your legs stop working.
Atrophy. And today it's happening faster
than at any point in human history. But
the top 1% use a very different
principle. For information task, use AI
to remove friction. For transformation
task, use AI to add friction. When you
go to a physical gym, [music] we all
know how muscles are built, right?
Through resistance. You lift
increasingly heavier weights to
introduce wear and tear to your muscle
fibers. So they break and they grow back
stronger. That is called progressive
overload. But when it comes to our
minds, we do the exact opposite somehow.
You know, we avoid resistance. We use AI
to outsource our thinking. Write my
LinkedIn post, fix my resume, summarize
this book. That's like going to the gym
and asking someone else to lift weights
on your behalf. You know, when
astronauts spend months in zero gravity,
their muscles and bones atrophy
dramatically, up to 20%. AI is like zero
gravity for your thinking. No friction,
no load, no growth. The intelligent gym
is not about information. It's about
transformation. For things where you
need to be smart and capable, you can
think of AI as your spotter. In any gym,
a spotter doesn't lift the weight for
you. They stand next to you and help you
lift. They also make sure that you don't
get crushed when you're lifting the
weight. So, do the same with AI. Here's
a concrete example. If you want to learn
a concept, study it first yourself, and
then go to your spotter, your AI. Paste
the concept text and then prompt AI. I
need to master this concept. Quiz me on
it. And now comes the most important
part of your intelligent gym. Ask AI to
apply progressive overload. Four levels.
Level one, quiz me like I am a high
school student. Level two, ask me
questions like I am a college student.
Level three, now grill me like you're
interviewing me for an executive job.
And level four, now challenge me like an
iate boss who thinks I'm unprepared. So
that truly strengthens and deepens your
understanding on that concept. So now we
have covered three key steps to learn
how the top 1% become [music] smarter by
using AI. But there is one internal
adjustment that changes everything and
that is our final step. Step number
four, the intelligent fool. You know the
biggest obstacle to intelligence isn't
ignorance, it's ego. That's why the
smartest people are obsessed with what
they don't know. And this is what I call
the fool's advantage. [music] Let me
give you an example. Microsoft went from
$300 billion to 300 trillion in market
cap [music] with just one mental
cultural shift. When Satya Nadella
became the CEO of Microsoft [music] in
2014, they had missed two huge
disruptions, search and mobile. The
cloud race was ongoing but it was
slipping away from them with Amazon
becoming the 800 pound [music] gorilla
and the culture inside the company was
toxic and political and everyone was
terrified to admit that there were
[music] gaps in their knowledge. Satya
made one cultural move. He told the
entire company we're switching from a
culture of knowit alls to learn it alls.
A complete reboot of Microsoft culture.
the smartest people in the room were
finally given permission to say, "I
don't know," or "I was [music] wrong,"
and to embrace that beginner's mind.
Now, Wall Street was skeptical at first,
but the market cap eventually went from
300 billion [music] to over 3 trillion,
and it keeps growing, 10x growth in a
decade. And here's why this matters. [music]
[music]
Neuroscience tells us that our brain can
rewire all the time. is called
neuroplasticity. This rewiring happens
only at the edge of your ability. It
happens when you are making errors. It
[music] happens when you're frustrated,
when you're feeling that discomfort. And
if you aren't feeling stupid, you aren't
learning. And aren't you glad that AI
has just handed you the ultimate
training ground to be a student again?
You can bring your beginner's mind to AI
all day long. Ask questions you would
never ask your colleagues out of fear of
embarrassment. AI doesn't roll its eyes.
Pick one thing that you don't understand
in your field. Something that everyone
else thinks you know, but you know you
don't. And then ask AI the most basic
questions about that [music] topic that
you can think of. And then ask, can you
explain it to me in a simpler way? Teach
me like I am 10 years old. I ask these
questions all the time. In fact, I asked
three times in a row to simplify again
and again. And sure, I guarantee you,
you'll feel ridiculous at first. I do
all the time. But that's the whole
point. Have the courage to play the fool
today so you can be the genius tomorrow.
The trick to mastery is going back to
simplicity [music] itself. If you
examine some of the greatest masters
across human history, you'll see one
consistent pattern. Every master is a
student for life. And you can't be a
genuine student [music] if you're hiding
behind a mask of mastery. You know, the
biggest benefit of intelligence is not
the end of ignorance. It's the end of
pretending. You know, we're surrounded
by endless images of flawless people in
their flawless poses, flawlessly
photoshopped. But in the end, all art is
about asymmetry. We're beautiful because
we're broken. Because the real purpose
of intelligence, of this thing called
life, is to travel far and wide only to
return to yourself [music] and fully
accept who you are. That is your truest
intelligence. If you like this video,
[music] don't forget to subscribe. And
if you want to use AI to start a
business, here's another video where I
walk you through exactly what I would do.
do.
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