Transcription
There's a specific kind of founder who I believe is going to lose the AI race. And what I think is the scariest part is that it's not the ones who ignore AI. It's the ones who use it every day.
Actually, I've watched it happen around me. There are so many smart people with six or seven or eight figure businesses building with the best tools on the planet. And somewhere around month six, something visibly changes. Their writing begins to sound just like everyone else's. Their offers start blurring together. They can't tell if their own product is good anymore. And their business, which was supposed to be leveraged by AI, starts to feel strangely replaceable. And that, in my opinion, is a mind problem. And people avoid talking about it because everyone's too busy selling their next AI agent stack.
So, in the next 12 or 15 minutes or so, I'm going to show you three things. One, what AI is actually doing to your judgment, your expertise, and your ability to think for yourself, even when you don't notice it. Number two, why this inner collapse is the real reason most AI businesses will be worth nothing by the end of next year, in my opinion. And three, the four rule protocol that the top 1% of AI founders are using to stay sharp, stay original, and at the end of the day build something that AI cannot commoditize.
I have been building with AI every single day for the last 4 years. I have been in the AI space for probably eight by now. And being very honest, I had to rebuild parts of my own thinking from scratch in order to avoid the trap that I am literally about to describe to you. And since we're being honest, the moment I knew this was real was when I caught myself reading my own writing and thinking, "This sounds fine. I mean, not good and not bad. Fine. Founders don't build empires on fine." And fine is exactly what AI optimizes us towards. And I think that's a pattern that we need to look under or deeper into before we go any further because most AI founders believe AI is a pure upgrade. More output, more leverage, more speed, no downside. You pick it up, you use it, you put it down. Kind of like a hammer logic. But it's so far away from the truth, honestly.
And there's now actual research showing us exactly why. In June 2024, the MIT Media Lab ran an EEG study on people writing essays with and without Chad GPT. The group using AI showed measurably lower brain connectivity, weaker recall of what they themselves had written, and what the researchers called a steady accumulation of cognitive debt. Translated, that means the more you lean on the model, the less your own thinking works. And that's the cost that users take for granted. In my opinion, AI is actually a prosthetic, not a hammer. A hammer doesn't change you when you use it, but a prosthetic does. The muscle underneath atrophies. That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happens when a surgeon puts anyone's leg in a cast for six weeks. The limb gets weaker because something else is doing the job. Your thinking, my thinking, our thinking works exactly the same way. Every time that we outsource a decision to a model, what to write, how to price, what to build next, which idea is actually good, we are not only saving time. We are skipping the repetitions and the repetitions are the thing that was making us stronger.
But the cognitive damage is only half of the story. The other half is what's actually happening to our inputs. I don't know if you realize that, but when you ask Claude or Chad GPT or Gemini to research something for you, the model is increasingly pulling from articles that were themselves written by AI, citing summaries that were themselves AI generated, ranking sources that were AI optimized to be findable by AI. And if you haven't been living under a rock, I'm sure you've heard this. Researchers have a name for it. They call it model collapse. The slow poisoning of the information loop as AI keeps eating its own input. So our judgment muscle is degrading, our research input is degrading, and our output is starting to sound like everyone else's.
And because of that, three problems are compounding all at the same time. People think the risk of AI is that it replaces them. The real risk is that it replaces them from the inside while they're still sitting in their chair. And this is even more problematic for founders in my opinion, not just for any knowledge worker. A founder's only real job is judgment under uncertainty. Uncertainty with their own money, with their own time, with their own reputation on the line because you're not paid for the work. You are paid for the calls you make. And the call is exactly what AI is actually dissolving.
There's three founders specific risks that come out of this. And I'm going to name them now and we will come back to each one and go much more in depth. Risk number one is replaceability. When your strategy, your writing and your offers sound like every other promptdriven founder, your business has no uniqueness and honestly speaking defensible identity at the end of the day. And replaceable founders get priced like commodities. A risk number two, compounding error. Early stage founders make dozens of judgment calls every single day. If even 30% of those are slightly off because you outsourced the synthesis, the compound damage over 6 months is brutal. You can't see it in week two, but you feel it in month six while nothing's working and you can't figure out why. And risk number three, vendor capture. Your business now runs on infrastructure that you don't own. The model changes overnight. The pricing changes overnight. the policy changes overnight. And we'll come back to this one because most founders haven't fully understood that yet. And it is probably the most expensive one of the three. We have three risks. I think all of them are accelerating, but all are invisible until they're not.
And I'd like to share with you a mental model that made this click for me. Okay? I called it the inside out collapse because every AI founder has two businesses. One outside, your offer, your funnel, your product, your agents, all of that, but also the one inside, your judgment, your expertise, your point of view, your ability to see what's actually good. And most founders obsess over the outside. The outside is downstream of the inside always. And the collapse works in three stages in this exact order.
Stage number one is judgment collapse. You stop being able to tell great from average. AI output is a remarkably consistent B+. And if you read enough B+, your internal calibration is going to reset. And B+ is going to start to feel like A and slop is going to start to feel like quality. And you'll approve things that you would have killed a year ago and you don't even flinch. I found myself in this space. But then stage number two is skill atrophy. And that happens, I believe, because we're no longer catching our own weak work. We stop practicing the thing that would have fixed it like writing or strategy or sales copy offer design. So then the muscles go and the worst part is that we don't notice because the output is still happening. It just isn't coming from us anymore. And then stage number three is dependency locking because now you physically can't produce without the model. Have you been there? Let me know in the comments. Okay. And what happens is that you sit down to write a cold email and you freeze without GPT. You can't sketch a funnel in your head anymore. Your thinking has been rerouted through a system that you don't own. And once you're locked in, you can't build a business that AI cannot build. You literally are the tool. Your unique competitive advantage is the models API. And the models API is available to everybody. And the inside collapse causes outside collapse. The order, like I said, makes a big difference.
Now, here's what everyone or almost everyone overlooks, especially founders. While 90% of AI founders are racing to build thinner and thinner and thinner wrappers on the same three models, a small group is doing the opposite. They're using AI less in the parts that matter most and charging more with a good reason. I know that sounds backwards, but let me show you why it's the most underpriced opportunity in the market right now. At least in my opinion, and I've seen that with one of my clients who is extremely extremely successful at what it does.
Every month, the supply of AI generated content, offers, products goes up by an order of magnitude. Every LinkedIn post sounds the same. I know you've seen them as well. Every landing page hits the same rhythm. Every cold email opens with the exact same three variations. The market is starting to drown in B+, which means scarcity has flipped. A year ago, execution was scarce. AI was able to fix that. But today, I believe judgment is scarce. I believe experience is scarce. A clear point of view is becoming scarce just as much as the ability to look at AI output and say, "No, that's not good enough." Here's what's missing. That is becoming the single most valuable skill that a founder can have. In my opinion, the founders that I think will benefit the most at this stage are the ones who can still see, not the ones with the biggest agent stacks. They're the ones who have a sharp and weird and specific point of view that AI cannot really generate because AI is trained on the average. And the average is exactly what they're refusing to be. Nobody's talking about this because use AI less is a terrible Twitter thread. But it's an extraordinary business strategy. The founders who keep their inner game sharp while everyone else lets it rot are going to own the next 5 years. I believe this is the invisible opportunity, not a new tool or a new model or a new stance or I don't know a new cool thing that you've seen on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
So, how do you actually protect your inner game while still getting AI's leverage? Right? That's the biggest question. So, here's the protocol that I use. There are four rules that I'm going to share with you. Each one is a line that I recommend you don't cross. You do whatever you choose, of course.
Rule number one is to think first and prompt second. Before you open Chad GPT or Claude or Gemini or any other model. Write down your own answer first. Even if it's bad, even if it's one line, the rep is non-negotiable. That's what matters at the end of the day. You are not actually trying to beat the model. You're trying to keep the muscle working. Okay? So when you compare your version to the models, you're training your judgment instead of absorbing its average. This one rule on its own is going to make a huge difference. I know it has made for me.
Rule number two, AI drafts the work, but you don't ship the draft. You own the system that runs it. Okay, the first half is straightforward. Okay, you can let AI produce the first version. That's fine. But you rewrite every sentence going out under your name. Not a re-edit, rewrite for a little time. Okay, editing keeps the model's cadence. Rewriting keeps yours. Your voice is the only thing that you actually own in this economy. So, protect it like a trade secret. But like I said, there's a second half to rule number two that most founders tend to overlook, and it's the one that decides whether your business survives the next 12 months, I believe. So, when AI does the actual work, pulling data, sending emails, updating CRM, kicking off workflows, we also need to think about who owns the rules. Because here's what happened this year. A paying enterprise customer was banned from cloud overnight. Their workflows went down together with them. Limited recourse. Developers paying for the latest GPT release found their requests rooted to cheaper variants under load. They thought they were paying for the model they picked and they weren't actually getting it. Plans changed without notice for customers based on the contents of their code. There was no vote. And this is the third founder risk that I told you we would come back to. Vendor capture. Okay, I mentioned it earlier, but now we can get deeper into it. If your business runs on one provider's model, one provider's rules, and one provider's pricing structure, you don't have a sustainable business. You have a tenant agreement and the landlord can change the locks while you're sleeping. So, rule number two is bigger than rewriting sentences. It's AI drafts the work, but you hold the pen on what gets approved and you hold the keys on the system that delivers it.
And rule number three, one untouched input per day. I think we can all do that. Okay? We can pick one input every day that no AI touches. A book, a long form essay, a conversation with a founder that's smarter than us, silence, even a walk. Your brain needs that raw unhomogenized material or it starts outputting only what it was fed which increasingly is other AI output. Garbage in garbage out compounded. This is also the rule that protects you from the AI slop research problem that I mentioned earlier because when your inputs are exclusively AI summarized or AI ranked or AI recommended, your world view becomes a hall of mirrors. So my recommendation is to force at least one direct unmediated source into your day every day ideally.
And rule number four is quarterly cold audits. Every 90 days sit down and produce one piece of your own core work. Whether it's a sales page or a strategy document or a video script with no AI at all. None. If you can't do it or if it takes three times longer than it used to, that needs to be your warning light. That basically means that you have drifted further into the prosthetic than you realize. So, you need to rebuild before the damage compounds.
These four rules might look small, but they're not. They are the difference between running AI and benefiting from the leverage or letting AI run you. So, here's how this translates into actual revenue. The founders who consistently outperform the ones who don't do it because their offers tend to be sharper and their voice is distinct. And distinct voice is the single biggest driver of premium pricing in a commoditized flooded market. Think about it in straight simple plain business terms. If your output is indistinguishable from the 10,000 other AI founders chasing the same clients, you are competing on price. And price wars are won by whoever is willing to bleed the most. And that's probably not the game you want to be in. But if your strategy, your writing, your offers, and your point of view are clearly yours, clearly human, clearly specific, and clearly sharp, you're not in the race at all. You can charge multiples more for fundamentally the same scope of work because the thing the client is buying is not the deliverable itself. It's the judgment and the thought process behind it.
Now, I've watched people raise retainer rates significantly after nothing more than sharpening their inner game and letting AI return to being a tool instead of a replacement, a hammer, not a prosthetic. Obviously, results depend on your niche, your market, and how disciplined you are about the protocol. But the direction is something that needs to be consistent. The truth is that in a world where anyone and everyone can produce the same work, the person who can judge and bring a unique perspective is the one who will win.
Now, if you implement just one thing from this video, make it be rule number one. Think first, prompt second. That single simple habit practiced for 20, 30, ideally 90 days is going to show you massive results when it comes to the risks that AI can have on your judgment, on your uniqueness, and your life in general. And I promise it will put you ahead of 95% of people building AI businesses right now. Because when you use it, you're using it as a founder and not as someone who's relying and depending on it.
Now, if you want the full protocol written out, everything that I talk about, I also share in much more detail with the folks in our communities. You are always more than welcome to join us. We have the Trailblazers Hive, which is a free community. You have there lots of challenges that you can go and apply every day, every week. You have more than enough content. We also get together every two weeks and you can ask any questions you want and literally just benefiting from having other folks around who are on the exact same path as you are. The link is going to be here as well as in the description down below. And if you need more handholding or you're looking for an exact step-by-step protocol to follow in order to start or grow an AI business, we also have the Founders Hive, which is a much more structured and um accountability based community, but that one is a paid one. So, if you are willing and interested in joining us, we are always more than excited to welcome you there and looking forward to meeting you in our weekly calls.
With that being said, thank you so so much for watching. Like this video if you did. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't done so. You can check over there if you're a subscriber or not. Sometimes people say they're not. So, please do me a favor and check that now. And if you're not subscribed, maybe consider subscribing. And in the meantime, share this video with anyone in your circle of friends or family or co-workers who you think needs to know more about the risks that AI could potentially have on their work. And until next time, I suggest you go ahead and watch this video here and I'll see you there. Bye.