Most of us are sitting on a supercomputer and using it to write emails faster. That’s like buying a Ferrari and only driving it to the mailbox. There’s a massive gap forming right now between people who use AI to save time and people who use it to think better.
This is exactly what Dan Martell breaks down in his latest video. The creator runs Martell Ventures, an AI incubator on track to break $250 million in enterprise value this year, and he’s built AI into every layer of how he learns, decides, and leads. His framework isn’t about productivity hacks. It’s about rewiring how your brain takes in information and spits out decisions.
Here’s the core idea: AI isn’t a tool you use. It’s a thinking partner you integrate into who you are.
🧠 Your brain is only as good as what you feed it
The author kicks things off with what he calls the “calculator trap.” Most people treat AI like a shortcut for tasks: drafts, summaries, slide decks. But that’s surface-level stuff. He references a Harvard study where students using an AI tutor improved their test scores by twice as much as those who didn’t, and they finished faster too. Better AND quicker. That’s the difference between using AI as a calculator versus using it as a learning engine.
Then he gets into inputs. Gen Z was the first generation in 100 years to score lower than their parents on IQ, memory, reading, and focus. The culprit? Screen-based consumption replacing deep learning. His point is sharp: garbage in, garbage out. Doom scrolling and brain rot produce junk ideas. Premium inputs produce premium thinking.
Here’s what he actually does about it. Every morning, his AI assistant sends him a dedicated Slack briefing with top breakthroughs across four buckets: frontier models, robotics, infrastructure, and tools. No fluff. Pure signal. He reads it on a treadmill in under 3 minutes.
💡 Three ways to upgrade your inputs right now
The expert lays out a practical playbook anyone can start today:
- Reset your social algorithm. Go into your settings on Instagram, TikTok, wherever you spend time, and reset your suggested content. Then deliberately engage with content in the areas you want to master. Like it, save it, comment on it. The algorithm is AI-powered and it mirrors your behavior back to you. Most people don’t realize they’re training it with every scroll. As he puts it: “Use your feed to feed your mind.”
- Build your own daily newsletter. Use AI to scrape news sources every morning in the categories that matter to you. He shares a simple prompt: “You’re my daily AI research assistant. Each morning, find the top three developments in [your topics]. Summarize each in two sentences with source links. Tell me why it matters. Format it as a quick briefing I can read in under 3 minutes.” That’s it. Three minutes of focused, relevant intel instead of 30 minutes of random browsing.
- Use NotebookLM for accelerated learning. Drop any topic into it and it creates a mini AI brain around that subject. You can chat with it, ask questions, and it can generate slides, infographics, quizzes, flashcards, even a podcast. The key distinction he makes is “just in time” versus “just in case” learning. Stop consuming information you might need someday. Start feeding yourself exactly what you need for the decision you’re making this afternoon.
🔴 Red team every big decision before you ship it
This section hit hard. The author tells the story of Intel in 1985, when the company’s profits crashed from $198 million to $2 million in a single year after Japanese competitors destroyed them on memory chips. Andy Grove and Gordon Moore went back and forth for months with no answer. Then Grove asked one question: “If we got fired and a new CEO walked in, what would he do immediately?” Moore’s answer: “He’d get us out of memories.” They had the answer the whole time but couldn’t see it because of emotional attachment.
That’s a pre-mortem question, and it’s the foundation of what the creator calls red teaming your decisions with AI. Here’s his three-step process:
- Find the fatal flaw. Prompt: “If this project fails in 6 months, why did it happen?” This forces AI to work backwards from disaster and identify where you need to fortify.
- Eliminate blind spots. Prompt: “You are a cynical, highly successful competitor. Analyze this plan and tell me exactly how you’d exploit the weaknesses to steal my customers.” For maximum impact, give it access to your constraints, timelines, and resources.
- Risk ranking. Prompt: “Rank the top three risks by likelihood and impact. Then build a contingency plan for each.” This turns vague fears into a concrete checklist.
AI is the perfect sparring partner for this because it has no ego, doesn’t hold back, and can attack your idea from ten different angles in 30 seconds.
🎯 The 92% rule: become a director, not a doer
Here’s where things get philosophical. The author argues AI can now handle 92% of your tasks: writing, research, analysis, scheduling, drafting, building. Your job is to own the remaining 8%, which comes down to three things: taste (knowing what looks great), vision (understanding what should exist but doesn’t), and care (the emotional connection, enrolling people, showing up as a human).
He even shares how he sat his team down and told them to figure out their 92%. Not to replace them, but to keep them. He wanted them to offload the automatable work so they could focus on the stuff that actually needs a human touch.
His framework for sorting this out is a simple quadrant. On one axis: easy vs. hard for humans. On the other: easy vs. hard for computers. The sweet spot for you is the top right: things that are hard for computers but easy for humans. Think detecting sarcasm, reading emotional tone in a room, making ethical calls in messy situations. That’s your 8%. Everything else? Automate it.
📌 The bottom line from this video is that there will only be two types of people going forward: consumers and creators. People who use AI to improve themselves versus people who use AI to cut corners. That’s what separates those who win from those who get left behind.
If you want the full breakdown with all the prompts and frameworks, go watch the complete video. It’s worth every one of those 14 minutes.