Give Me 18 Minutes and I’ll Make you Dangerously Smart (with AI)

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]

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.

Thank you and I love