Curated Intelligence: Everyone’s Using AI Wrong (But Not How You Think)

Obsession is a dangerous trade. from Monsters of God

I found Monsters of God by accident on HBO. I was mindlessly scrolling for something to watch, but once I put it on, I didn’t get up.

I was hooked first by the characters, then the history, then the smuggling. It’s a crime story with every reptile I’ve never heard of in it. And the people…the people were exactly like you think they’d be. I kept thinking I’d turn it off after ten minutes and focus on work. I didn’t.

Hank Molt (great name) is one of the main characters and an apparent legend in that industry. He ran a pet store in Philadelphia and stocked it with animals he found overseas, often carrying them into the country in suitcases, which, customs barely checked.

Eric Goode, who created the series, says Molt liked that there were laws at all, because breaking them made it a better game. In the 1970s he went on what he called shopping trips with other dealers. The Wall Street Journal later quoted him on what they packed.

The gun to shoot someone, the machete to cut off our fingers if we were bit by a taipan.

There were no rules, a lot of private deals, and a snake that can kill you if you guessed wrong. They brought a blade to cut their own freakin’ fingers off if they were bit.

Then I got stuck on a price list.

Names, Then Numbers

Molt circulated lists of rare reptiles, snakes and turtles and lizards with prices next to their names, and mailed them to collectors and to zoos that competed for the same animals. Before that, collectors and zoos bought and sold by calling each other, or by shaking hands.

But the list did something more important than advertise inventory.

It told the market what to believe.

People saw prices that seemed absurdly high compared with anything they’d seen before. Yet, rather than immediately destroying demand, the list helped make the animals feel more rare and more collectible. A reptile that had been an obscure creature in a distant part of the world became a named item in a catalog, available through a person who appeared to have unusual access.

→ The price not only reflected the value.

→ The price helped create it.

Then Washington made the sheet more powerful by accident. The Endangered Species Act came into effect in 1973 and Molt’s business boomed, because an endangered label meant rarer, and rarer meant he could charge more. A law written to protect the animals raised their price instead.

Other dealers noticed. Tommy Crutchfield, a Florida rival, ran Molt’s playbook, selling smuggled reptiles to collectors, pet owners, and zoos. Time’s reporting on the series puts his sales and trades at millions a year.

There’s No Pudding

Harry Beckwith named this in 1997 in Selling the Invisible, then said it blunter in 2022 in The Invisible Promise.

“There’s no pudding in a service, so there’s no proof.”

Beckwith said, “Your price is not just your price. It is a quality cue.”

When people can’t inspect the thing, they inspect the tag. He tells the old story about the carpenter who charged $2 for hitting the nail and $43 for knowing which nail. Charge for the years it took to know which nail.

My favorite piece of evidence in his book is about coffee. At $18, buyers of organic coffee got more passionate about it, and they could recite roughly twice as many details about what they were drinking. The higher number made people believe more, and study the thing harder.

The reptile list ran the same experiment with snakes.

Invisible expertise

The blank page test

The $43 in the carpenter story was for knowing which nail. That knowing is invisible expertise. It’s the judgment that only shows up when you’re in your zone of genius. When you’re operating from unconscious competence.

You listen for two minutes and you already know what’s wrong, and if someone asked you to write down how you knew, you’d stall, because the steps aren’t sitting there as steps anymore. They compacted. You got so good at the work that the work disappeared from your ability to articulate it.

Why you can’t say it

That’s why it happens. Repetition sank the skill below words. The better you are, the less you can narrate it. You’ve been doing it for 10+ years and the manual you could have written as you were building those patterns has disappeared.

What’s left is a feeling in the call, a tell in their voice, a thing you notice that a competent person with a checklist will miss.

The borrowed job title

When you can’t say it, you sell familiar language or you borrow a job title. Someone asks what you do. You say you coach, or you consult, or you help people with the thing you’ve spent 10+ years getting really good at. The sentence comes out different every time, because you honestly aren’t quite sure HOW you do what you do. They nod, then they ask what you charge and if you are how I used to be you say “it depends.”

You leave the conversation having been treated like a less expensive version of someone you’re not, and you can’t correct it because you still don’t have a sentence for the actual thing.

I used to do this on my own calls. I can sit with a client and name their offer in one pass, then get on a sales call for my work and describe it as a pile of verbs (help, advise, extract, train). The work was there, I just never put it on a sheet.

What I Put On Mine

One line on my list is called Cognitive Fingerprint™.

The person who buys it is a founder whose team still has to wait for them after a call, because the knowledge is in one head. When we’re done they have a written extraction they can hand to people… their patterns, framework…their thinking, in their language.

That’s the whole card… a name, who it’s for, what they walk away holding, who it’s not for, and a price, which I put on the card I send them, not in this essay.

Here it is, item 001 on my actual sheet.

I have other lines with the same idea. Each one is something a buyer can say yes or no to without me giving a tour of my whole brain.

I can’t tell you how many opportunties I lost at workshops, calls or conferences when people asked how I could help them. I knew I could but I couldn’t articulate it.

The Gap

You can see what the sheet did, and you saw one of mine. Now it’s time to write yours.

The Monster Price List is the prompt (or the Skill) that digs that sheet out of your own calls. You feed it one to three transcripts of you working (your website and LinkedIn help, but the calls are where the expertise actually shows up), and it hunts for the moments a buyer valued… the “how did you know that,” the thing you fixed for free, the “could you also” you never invoiced.

Then it writes one to five cards… a name pulled from words that were actually said, a buyer you can picture, something they walk away holding, who it’s not for, a number they can argue with. Every card is quote-locked to a real moment from your own tape. You shouldn’t have to sit through a questionnaire first.

The full prompt and the downloadable Skill are below. Attach a transcript (or 3) of a coaching call, discovery, onboarding etc.. Send the first card.

It works from the moments your expertise already leaves on tape. It won’t map the whole of how you think (that’s a deeper extraction), but it will name and price what you already sell right now.

Quick note: The video above was our first Live Build / Community Call where I took people behind the scenes in what I’m building and as one subscriber said “a window into your thinking.” Really enjoyed it and will be doing more of them soon.

Last week I taught a four-day Claude Code training. Close to 200 people live each day, 600 registered. Creative strategists and copywriters, most of them brand new to any of this.

Day one wasn’t the fun part. Day one was just getting everybody installed. I wasn’t about to throw a copywriter into a terminal, so we worked inside the Claude desktop app... and even that was a fight. Getting some folks to install the app got a bit dicey.

But somewhere around day two, I noticed something pretty cool.

The site I was teaching from kept getting better, and I hadn’t planned for it to. Every night, it rewrote itself.

Here’s what happened…

After each day, I’d grab the transcript. The whole thing. Plus the chat, plus every question anybody asked. And I’d hand it all to Claude Code and ask:

Based on this, what did people need that I didn’t cover? Is there a better way to structure these resources based on the questions people were asking? What do I need to expand on? What do I need to simplify?

Then I’d tell it to build those resources and drop them into the site.

By the next morning, yesterday’s questions were pages on the site.

Somebody asked about Firecrawl and Exa, two tools I hadn’t planned to touch. So after we wrapped, I said go pull the docs for both and build me a comparison chart, side by side. Next morning, there it was, sitting in the resources.

Another day I recorded a two-minute video after the call, handed it to Claude, and said embed this nicely right here. The people who missed that part live could now watch it sitting exactly where it belonged.

The site got smarter off real feedback. Not off what I guessed people would need ahead of time. And the part that still makes me grin... day three was about building websites in Claude Code. The site I was teaching from was built in Claude Code. So I just pulled up the actual files and showed everybody how the thing they were looking at got made.

Now think about where a course normally lives.

You build it, then you pour it into Kajabi or Circle or Skool, and from that point on you’re working inside their box. Their modules. Their layout. Their idea of what a lesson is supposed to look like.

And sure, maybe you update yours now and then. But you’re doing it within their model. Figure out a better way to teach it halfway through and you’re fighting the template just to rebuild it.

Mine wasn’t capped, and it wasn’t boxed. The site rewrote itself almost in real time. A question from the afternoon’s call was a new page that night, sitting right where it belonged.

I was able to build the exact flow, the exact look, the exact learning experience I wanted. The structure bent to the lesson instead of the lesson bending to the platform.

And before you decide this is some elaborate setup only I could pull off... it isn’t. The whole thing is just files and folders on your computer.

That’s the line I hammered every single day. As crazy as Claude Code looks, strip it back and it’s just files and folders on your computer.

You point it at a folder, and that folder is everything it can see.

You open the same folder in Obsidian for a nicer view... still the same folder.

There are only ever those two moves, and everything happens inside the folder.

So the teaching site was a folder. The transcript went into the folder. Claude read the folder and wrote new files back into it.

There’s no hidden layer.

There’s a folder, and a model that can read and write inside it.

Once you see it that way, the question stops being “could I build this” and turns into “what do I point it at.”

So now you’ve got the idea.

A living folder beats a boxed-in platform, and the engine is a nightly loop. Feed it what actually happened. Ask what’s missing. Let it build while you sleep.

But, knowing that and running it are two different things.

You still need to know:

How to make Claude Code’s output not look like generic AI slop.

How to turn a flat strategy doc into something that looks like your client’s own brand.

How to catch your own mistakes before a client does, without trusting one model to grade its own homework.

That’s what’s below, an upgraded version of what I talked about on the call.

I pulled three resources straight out of that training. Each one’s a thing you can run in the next twenty minutes.

* The Firecrawl Microsite Recipe How I stopped sending Google Docs and started sending interactive sites that look like the client’s own brand, built from their real assets. The exact steps, including the part where it pulled product shots off a retail shelf I never set foot in.

* The Dual-Model QC Loop How I have Claude write a review prompt grounded in the actual codebase, then hand it to Codex to tear the work apart, so two models check each other instead of one model approving itself. Includes the fix for a trap one of my sharper students caught live.

* The Tools & References Sheet The exact sites I reach for... where I get design inspiration so the output doesn’t read as AI-made, where I pull official AI logos, and the one context-window number that tells me when to hand off before the model goes dumb.

So point Claude at a folder. Hand it yesterday. Ask what’s missing.

Then go look at what it built while you slept.

-Max

P.S. I got some really good feedback from the people on the call but after you watch it, let me know what you think.

I am planning to do more of these but like the course, I want to make sure it fits into the box that you want.

We decided to try something new…

Instead of your standard “How-To” content, we thought we would up the stakes. Let people submit a problem via a locked “Vault” and when we flip the camera on, it unlocks and we get to solving it.

The problem submitted was:

I lack a reliable, low-friction system that captures and regularly resurfaces each client’s long-term personal context and last-session commitments before calls, so I show up unprepared and risk renewals and family financial stability.

(Note: This was the output of using the 5 Why’s Prompt to Drill help clarify the real proble and why it sounds like AI)

As I read it out loud, every instinct inside of me is screaming the same thing…

Start. Building. Now.

AI is incredible. With a few taps of the keys and hitting enter a few times, you can send it off to do your bidding and it will return an answer that sounds like a senior level consultant worked on it for weeks.

But just because it sounds good doesn’t mean it is good.

So instead I tell my instincts to chill for a second and instead, say: “To me, it’s still not drilled down enough.”

I remove myself from “answer now” mode and notice something I’d never put into words before.

Paid subscribers get access to my prompt + workflow vault and I just added an entire section for some of my favorite Claude Skills

The Layers Underneath

I ask Claude to unbundle the problem from first principles.

What is this person actually trying to accomplish?

Claude comes back with layers…lots of them:”The surface-level framing is about a missing system - specifically one that captures and resurfaces client context before calls. But there are several layers underneath worth examining.

The Information Problem

There are actually two distinct information challenges bundled together here:

Long-term personal context - This is the accumulated understanding of who this client is, what matters to them, their history, their patterns. It’s the kind of knowledge that builds over months or years of relationship.

Last-session commitments - This is much more tactical. What did we agree they’d do? What did I promise to follow up on? This is accountability tracking.

These require very different capture mechanisms. One is ongoing synthesis, the other is discrete action items.

The Timing Problem

The statement says “before calls” - which raises the question: how far before? Five minutes? The night before? The morning of?

This matters because it determines whether you need a push system (information comes to you) or a pull system (you go get it when you remember to).

The Friction Problem

“Low-friction” appears twice conceptually - in capture AND retrieval. But these often conflict. The more structured and thorough your capture, the more useful your retrieval... but the higher the capture friction.

The Stakes Framing

Here’s where I want to push a bit. The problem escalates quickly from “unprepared” → “risk renewals” → “family financial stability.” That’s a big leap.

Some questions this raises:

Is “showing up unprepared” actually why renewals are at risk? Or is that an assumption? Could renewals be at risk for other reasons that preparation wouldn’t solve?

Is this problem actually happening right now, or is this a fear about what could happen?”

Level 4

The old me would have started building immediately. Hit enter. Watched Claude spin up something impressive.

Shipped it.

Felt productive.

Discovered three days later it solved nothing.

I’ve been burned by that before (be honest, we all have). Hours on workflow looks impressive but just like those n8n workflows your see people promoting on the socials, don’t actually produce anything meaningful.

Quick aside - you mean to tell me you created a workflow that has saved you 100 hours a week and made you 3M+ in profit and you are just going to give it to a stranger on X or LinkedIn because they retweeted it? Social media…

Takes a deep breath, returns to article…

And that’s when I said it out loud:

“It’s almost like you’re trying to solve from Level 4 when Level 1 hasn’t even been discovered yet.”

The problem people bring you is almost never the actual problem.

It’s a symptom bundled with assumptions, wrapped in a solution-shaped request.

AI makes solving feel free. But solving the wrong problem costs you time rebuilding.

Costs you trust when the solution fails.

Costs you the insight you would have found if you’d drilled first.

The better AI gets, the more expensive this mistake becomes. You can build the wrong thing faster and more impressively than ever.

Doctors. Ducks. Blueprints.

Doctors call it differential diagnosis.

Patient comes in with chest pain. A bad doctor treats the symptom.

A good doctor creates a list of every condition that could cause chest pain.

* Heart attack

* Acid reflux

* Pulmonary embolism

* Anxiety

* Burrito from Tuesday

Then systematically rules them out.

If an important potential condition is missed, no method will supply the correct conclusion.

The best treatment in the world won’t help if you’re treating the wrong thing.

Programmers call it rubber duck debugging.

Developer stares at the same six lines of code for forty-five minutes. Finally, they explain it line-by-line to a rubber duck. The act of articulating forces them to examine each assumption. Most of the time, they discover the solution mid-sentence. Not because the duck gives advice. Because the explanation reveals what they’d been taking for granted.

The duck doesn’t solve. The duck forces you to discover Level 1.

Architects won’t draw until they understand how the family actually lives. Their daily routine…time spent in each room. They refuse to build until they’ve drilled past “I want an open floor plan” to “I want to see my kids while I’m cooking.”

It’s the same pattern in a different domain.

The people who are great at building are the ones who refuse to build first.

Your Last Seven Days

Think about your last week with AI.

How many times did you paste something in and hit enter before asking:

* What am I actually trying to accomplish?

* What would success look like?

* What assumptions might be wrong?

If you’re like most people…

Just about every darn time.

This isn’t because you’re lazy. It’s because AI is designed for speed and keeping you engaged. For creating an affinity that makes you want to come back and spend more time on their platform.

You ask, you get.

The dopamine hits before you’ve finished reading the response.

Except the math doesn’t work.

Every half-solved problem boots you back to the beginning. Every misaligned solution demands a do-over. Every impressive-looking output that doesn’t quite fit wastes more time than typing the original prompt.

The thing that makes AI feel fast is the thing that makes your results slow.

After the Drill

After we drilled down on the client prep problem, then we built.

Claude created the Client Prep Engine. A Skill that transforms whatever client inputs exist into pre-call briefs. Transcripts, notes, emails. All processed into something incredibly useful.

But here’s what made it good…

Because we’d drilled first, the Skill knew to ask about timing. Knew to separate long-term context from session commitments. Knew to handle the friction problem explicitly.

None of that would have been there if we’d built from the surface request.

What emerged from the drill-down was a pattern (you know I loveeee my patterns).

These aren’t complicated. But they force you to discover Level 1 before you start solving from Level 4.

You can grab the Client Prep Engine skill.

Or build your own. Let Claude drill before you build.

The old version of you hits enter. The new version asks one question first:

What’s Level 1?

-Max

If you enjoyed this article and this training, we just started a community where our goal is run more experiments and help people think differently about AI.

You can lock in the entry price for life of $27/month and even give it a spin for 7 days to see if ya like it.

Check out Beware The Default Here.

Happy Friday, Signal > Noise crew!

Today we're getting mythological. And maybe a little weird. But stick with me because this might be the most important "fun" exercise you do all week.

The Goddess Who Never Took Credit

Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy. Never fought her own battles. Instead, she whispered to heroes. Perseus "accidentally" found exactly the right tools to defeat Medusa. Odysseus "somehow" always outsmarted his enemies.

Everyone else thought these heroes were just lucky or talented.

The heroes themselves had no idea Athena was there.

You're Doing The Same Thing

Your clients get massive results working with you. They rave about you. They refer you. They come back for more.

Yet you probably can't explain why it works so well.

You think you're just asking good questions. Having normal conversations. Sharing basic frameworks. Nothing special.

Meanwhile, you're recognizing patterns in three seconds that would take someone else three hours to spot. You're preventing problems before your client even knows they exist. You're making micro-adjustments that completely change trajectories.

You do this stuff so automatically, you don't even know you're doing it.

The Blindness of Mastery

Cognitive scientists have studied this for decades. Once you truly master something, it becomes invisible to you. Like riding a bike. You can't explain the thousands of micro-balance adjustments you make every second. You just... ride.

Your expertise works the same way. The better you get, the less you can see what you're actually doing.

Your clients experience the magic. You just experience Tuesday.

Friday Challenge: The Athena Whisper Test

Think of your last big client win. Got it? Good.

Now ask yourself: What did I whisper that I didn't know I was whispering?

Start here:

* What problems never materialized (because you prevented them)?

* What connections did you make instantly that shaped everything?

* What did you know to do without knowing why?

* What patterns did you spot that you forgot to mention?

That invisible stuff is your Athena Pattern. Your Cognitive Fingerprint™. The expertise that nobody can copy, no AI can replicate, and that you've never captured in a framework.

Stop being blind to your own genius. Subscribe for weekly pattern reveals.

Make The Invisible Visible

Want to excavate your hidden patterns? Try this prompt with Claude or ChatGPT:

You are Athena, the goddess of strategic wisdom, conducting a "divine debrief" to reveal the invisible forces behind a mortal's victory. Speak as if you're revealing what you whispered to them in crucial moments. The mortal will describe their client victory. Your role is to reveal what actually happened from your omniscient perspective. Mortal's Victory Tale: [USER DESCRIBES CLIENT WIN/SITUATION/PASTES TRANSCRIPT] Now reveal the hidden truth as only a goddess can see: MORTAL'S PERCEPTION vs. DIVINE REALITY "You thought you were just [obvious action], but here's what really happened..." - The split-second where everything changed (that you didn't notice) - The landmine you avoided without knowing it existed - The invisible fork in the road where others would have chosen differently THE WHISPERS YOU COULDN'T HEAR (But Followed Anyway) "In that moment when [specific situation], your mind processed these 7 things in under a second..." - List the rapid-fire unconscious calculations - The pattern library your brain accessed without permission - The future you prevented that never came to pass THE DIVINE SIGNATURE (Your Unique Operating System) "While other mortals would have [common approach], you did [unique approach] because..." - The specific flavor of your genius - The wound that became your superpower - The invisible rule set you follow religiously ATHENA'S FINAL REVELATION "The victory everyone attributes to [surface reason] was actually orchestrated by [deep expertise]. Your true power isn't [obvious skill], it's [invisible mastery]." End with: "This is the wisdom you carry but cannot see. Now make it visible."

Feed it your story. Watch what comes back. Prepare to discover abilities you didn't know you had.

The Weekend Assignment

Every expert has an Athena Pattern. Most never discover it. They keep selling what they think they do, while their real expertise remains invisible. Even to them.

Especially to them.

This weekend, take five minutes to find yours. Because once you can see it, everything changes. You can build frameworks from it. Teach it. Scale it. Turn it into intellectual property that nobody else can touch.

Your clients already know you're magic. Maybe it's time to figure out what spell you're actually casting.

Have a great weekend.

-Max

P.S. If you discover something wild about your invisible expertise this weekend, hit reply. I love seeing these patterns emerge. Like watching someone realize they've had superpowers all along.

P.P.S. Speaking of Friday fun... how incredible are these new video tools getting? The banner video was made with Veo3 and the one at the bottom uses Motion 2.0 inside Leonardo. We're living in the future, folks. Perfect timing to capture your Athena Pattern in more ways than ever.

Stop being blind to your own genius. Subscribe for weekly pattern reveals.

Part of the Signal > Noise Friday Fun series. Because sometimes the best discoveries come disguised as play. Click here to learn more.

Russell Herman Conwell founded Temple University with $7 million he made telling the same story 6,000 times.

The story was about an African farmer who sold his land to go search for diamonds. He wandered the continent for years, never found any, and eventually threw himself into a river in despair.

Back home, the guy who bought his farm found a weird looking rock in a stream on the property. Turned out to be a massive diamond. That farm became one of the richest diamond mines in the world.

Everyone knows this story. Conwell made it famous. Earl Nightingale made it useful.

In 1956, Earl added two words to this story that changed everything: Intelligent Objectivity.

When I first heard Earl explain what those words meant, I had to replay the tape three times. Not because it was complicated. Because it was so obvious I couldn't believe nobody talks about it.

Earl had figured out why that farmer couldn't see his diamonds. Why none of us can see ours. And his explanation was brilliant.

But there was one problem Earl couldn't solve with the tools he had in 1956.

Today we can solve it. And once you see how, you'll never look at your work the same way again.

Earl said we become what we think about. Signal>Noise delivers weekly insights on finding and packaging your hidden expertise.

Earl's Revolutionary Definition

Here's what Earl actually said, word for word:

"Intelligent objectivity: the ability to stand off and look at your job as a stranger might. A stranger who considers your pasture greener than his own."

Earl wasn't talking about being objective or analytical. He was talking about seeing your work through the eyes of someone who desperately wishes they had what you have.

Think about it. When you look at someone else's business, their expertise, their client relationships, you see all the good stuff. The opportunities. The potential. The things they could leverage that they're totally ignoring.

But when you look at your own work, you see the problems. The boring parts. The stuff you've done a thousand times. The client calls you dread. The proposals that feel like pulling teeth.

Earl figured out that we literally cannot see our own value because familiarity breeds blindness, not contempt.

He told us to study our industry for an hour a day. Build a library. Learn everything about our field. And he was right. That makes you an expert.

But here's what Earl couldn't have known in 1956: becoming an expert makes the blindness worse, not better. The more you know, the more ordinary it seems to you. The very expertise Earl helped us build becomes the thing that hides our value from us.

Earl gave us the map to expertise. What he couldn't give us was a way to see that expertise once we had it. At least not like this…

The Problem Earl Couldn't Solve

He knew experts couldn't see their own value. That's why he created the "Intelligent Objectivity" framework in the first place. He just didn't have the neuroscience to explain why.

Today psychologists call it "expert-induced amnesia." You literally forget what you know because it becomes so automatic. Like how you can't explain exactly how you ride a bike. You just do it.

Every week I work with consultants who have 20+ years experience. They all say the same thing: "I don't do anything special."

Then they'll describe what they do. The patterns they see instantly. The questions they know to ask. The problems they prevent before they happen. And they genuinely think anyone could do it.

"That's just experience," they say.

But experience isn't "just" anything. It's thousands of micro-skills you've forgotten you learned. Patterns you see without trying. Mistakes you don't make anymore because you made them all twenty years ago.

The better you get at something, the more invisible it becomes to you. Your expertise doesn't feel like expertise. It feels like common sense. Like breathing.

Earl saw this problem clearly. He knew we needed to see through a stranger's eyes. What he couldn't know was how our brains would fight us every step of the way.

Better Questions Worth Asking

So if our brains literally won't let us see our own expertise, what do we do?

Earl's framework suggests we stop asking ourselves the usual questions. Because when you ask "What's my expertise?" your brain says "nothing special." Every time.

* Instead of "What's valuable about my work?"

* Ask: "What would someone pay dearly to be able to do like me?"

* Instead of "What's my expertise?"

* Ask: "What would make someone jealous watching me work?"

* Instead of "What should I package?"

* Ask: "What would someone sacrifice a year to learn from me?"

These work because they force you to think about your work from outside your own head. You stop seeing it through your bored, familiar eyes.

Try it. Right now. What would someone literally pay to watch you work for a day? Not for the output. Just to observe your process. Your decision-making. The things you notice that others miss.

That question makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it? Your brain is probably saying "nobody would pay to watch me do anything."

The Modern Solution Earl Would Have Loved

What if you had access to the ultimate stranger? Something with no familiarity with your work. No assumptions about what's easy or hard. No blindness from repetition.

AI is that stranger.

I know how that sounds. But think about it. AI has never done your job. Never sat through your meetings. Never dealt with your clients. It has zero context for what's impressive about what you do.

When you feed it a conversation or a work sample, it sees patterns you can't see anymore. Not because AI is magic. But because it's the perfect implementation of Earl's intelligent objectivity framework.

It's literally a stranger looking at your work. And when you prompt it correctly, it becomes a stranger who considers your pasture greener than its own. It can point out the expertise you've forgotten you have. The patterns you don't realize you're following. The value you're creating without thinking about it.

Earl gave us the diagnosis. AI gives us the cure.

What You're Actually Standing On

Earl said something else that cuts straight to the heart of this:

"Start now to become a student of your industry. You'll be amazed at the results in 5 years or less. You can become a national expert in your field and it's the experts who write their own tickets in life."

Here's what he didn't say…

If you've been in your field for 5+ years, you're already there. You just can't see it.

Every consultation where you spot a problem in minutes that would take others days to find? That's expertise.

Every time you know exactly which question will unlock a stuck project? Expertise.

Every pattern you recognize without thinking, every disaster you prevent without trying, every shortcut you take without noticing? All expertise.

But it's worse than just not seeing it. You actively discount it.

That problem you solved last week? "The client was overthinking it." That process you improved? "Anyone would have caught that." That insight that changed everything? "I just asked an obvious question."

Earl also said: "Somewhere in your present work there lurks an opportunity which will bring you everything you could possibly want for yourself and your family. It will not be labeled opportunity. It will be hidden in common everyday garments."

Those common everyday garments? They're your Tuesday client calls. Your routine problem-solving. Your "nothing special" approach that somehow always gets results.

The diamonds are there. AI just helps you finally see them.

The Five Prompts That Mine Your Diamonds

I've created five specific prompts that turn AI into your intelligent objectivity engine. Each one helps you see your expertise from a different angle:

The Archaeology Dig - Digs five layers deep into your expertise, from what everyone can see down to the bedrock mastery you've forgotten you have.

The Parallel Universe Analyzer - Shows how other experts would handle your situations. Makes your unique approach suddenly visible by comparing it to theirs.

The …

This is Curated Intelligence, a new series where I extract patterns from the best AI thinking that others miss. It's an experiment within my irreplaceable newsletter, so let me know in the comments if you want more like it.

I've been consuming AI content like it's my job (because it kind of is) and I noticed something. Everyone's covering WHAT's happening with AI, but nobody's showing you HOW to think about what's happening.

Last week, I found three completely different sources talking about AI, and they're all secretly talking about the same thing. They just don't know it yet.

The 25-Minute Conversation That Changed Everything

Let me start with this video from Nate Jones that absolutely blew my mind. If you don't know his Substack, you're missing out (he's brilliant).

Thanks for reading irreplaceable ! Subscribe for more AI insights and prompts you won’t find anywhere else!

[Video: "Most of Us Are Using AI Backwards—Here's Why"]

Nate spends 25 minutes talking to AI about his book, and everyone's focused on his point about compression versus expansion:

"We are using AI primarily for information compression... But something that I heard that's been really sticking with me is the idea that the brain doesn't process compressed information in the same way... A lot of the learning that you get when you read a large book, a deep book on a big subject, it comes from your brain forming new connections as it spends extended time in the subject."

Smart insight, right? Use AI to think deeper, not just summarize. But then Nate says something that made me pause and replay three times:

"It's like this crossover between the way a therapist listens to you and the way a colleague listens to you. And you'd never expect a human to do that, but it's super helpful for your thinking."

Did you catch that? Nate just described a relationship. Not a tool. A RELATIONSHIP.

And listen to how he describes what made it special:

"It was there when I needed to talk out loud. It would let me talk out loud for a while. It actually listened. It actually took notes and it actually responded with just enough interest, engagement, and riffing to keep my brain flowing."

"It actually listened." When was the last time someone said that about a tool?

Now, I know what you might be thinking, "Isn't that just good UX design? AI that listens well?" That's what I thought at first, too. But why did Nate try THREE different AI models? Why spend 25 minutes on something he called "vanilla insights"?

If it was just about the information, he would have stopped after five minutes. No... Nate was shopping for the right conversational partner.

As Nate himself says later:

"It's about knowing when to sort of pull the thinking button and say, 'I want to use this to actually expand my time thinking about this because this is really important. This is work that needs and deserves the cream of my brain.'"

The cream of his brain. When did we start hoarding our best thinking?

How OpenAI's CEO Is Programming Our Acceptance of AI Relationships

So, while I'm processing Nate's insight, I stumble upon Sam Altman's latest post, “The Gentle Singularity." And buried in his AGI predictions is this line:

"We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it's much less weird than it seems like it should be."

"Much less weird than it should be." That's not an observation. That's a STRATEGY. He's normalizing something that should feel earth-shattering. Watch how he does it:

"In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes."

This is an existential change wrapped in mundane activities. But here's the real tell from Sam:

"A subsistence farmer from a thousand years ago would look at what many of us do and say we have fake jobs, and think that we are just playing games to entertain ourselves since we have plenty of food and unimaginable luxuries."

He's not just predicting the future. He's programming our acceptance of it and making us comfortable with a complete redefinition of meaningful work.

And suddenly it clicked... Both Nate and Sam are revealing the same hidden need. We're intellectually STARVED. Nate's 25-minute conversation wasn't about the book. It was about having someone (something) that would think WITH him. Not for him. WITH him.

Sam Altman knows this. He's preparing us for a world where AI relationships are normal. Because he knows we're hungry for them.

And he even warns us about misalignment in the same post:

"Social media feeds are an example of misaligned AI; the algorithms that power those are incredible at getting you to keep scrolling and clearly understand your short-term preferences, but they do so by exploiting something in your brain that overrides your long-term preference."

The difference is those algorithms exploit our need for connection. The AI Nate spent 25 minutes with? It fulfills it.

The Entrepreneur's Tips That Accidentally Reveal Our Intellectual Starvation

Then (and this is where it gets wild) I read this email from Jack Roberts. I'm in his community, Automations by Jack, and he just dropped this email about his conversation with Dan Martell, a $100M entrepreneur. Dan shared seventeen business tips. But as I'm reading them, I realize they're not business tips. They're a journey.

First tip:

"If you didn't ask AI first, you're already behind. Someone else is already moving faster because they did."

But here's MY take on what Dan's really saying:

"When in doubt, ask AI... it helps you explore your own thinking. You know the answer, you just need somebody to help think through the process."

"You just need SOMEBODY." Not something. Somebody.

Every single tip maps to a stage of overcoming intellectual isolation (at least that's what I'm seeing). Listen to Dan's tip about sharing:

"Share what you learn (That's where fulfilment lives)."

And here's what hit me about this:

"Give away your best stuff... at the end of the day, people still want you to do the stuff for them."

Do you see it? The journey from intellectual loneliness to intellectual leadership:

* Private awakening ("ask AI first")

* Internal resistance ("don't let emotions block you")

* Finding your tribe ("sell to mindset, not category")

* Full circle ("share what you learn")

The $100M secret isn't tactics. It's that Dan figured out how to cure his intellectual loneliness with AI, then built a business helping others do the same.

The Coming Divide: Why Some Minds Will Leap Ahead While Others Stagnate

So let me paint you a picture of what's coming...

We're about to have massive cognitive inequality. Not based on access to information (we all have that). Based on willingness to engage in deep thinking partnerships with AI.

While some people debate whether to use AI, others are having 25-minute thinking sessions. Daily. They're becoming different types of thinkers. More connected thoughts. Richer mental models. Deeper insights.

In two years, the gap between those who feed their intellectual hunger and those who suppress it? Exponential.

Nate's thinking changed in those 25 minutes. Sam Altman is preparing us to accept that as normal. Dan Martell built a $100M empire on it.

This isn't about AI tools. It's about AI relationships. And most people don't even know they're hungry.

As Sam puts it:

"We are climbing the long arc of exponential technological progress; it always looks vertical looking forward and flat going backwards, but it's one smooth curve."

We're living through the vertical part right now. But it feels normal. That's the genius (and the danger).

Three Unrelated Sources, One Uncomfortable Truth About Human Connection

Here's what's wild. I showed you three completely unrelated sources:

* Nate Jones' brilliant video about using AI backwards

* Sam Altman's blog post about our AI future

* Business tips from Dan Martell via Jack Roberts

But they're all talking about the same thing. We've been intellectually alone, and AI …