AI is everywhere — and so is the noise. Half the business owners Steve talks to are convinced it’s coming for their jobs; the other half think it’s a magic pill that’ll run their company while they sleep. Both are dead wrong. In Episode 32, Steve strips away the hype and breaks down what AI actually is for real business owners right now: a lightning-fast draft machine that takes what’s already in your head and helps you get it out better, faster, and without the usual procrastination spiral.
Key Takeaways
- AI is a draft machine, not a replacement — it takes the raw material in your head (your expertise, stories, instincts) and helps you shape it faster than you could on your own.
- Garbage in, garbage out — lazy, context-free prompts produce AI slop. The LinkedIn feeds full of robotic posts prove it. Put in real depth, get real results.
- Speed + structure is a superpower — AI doesn’t know your clients or your track record, but it gives you the scaffolding that turns a hurricane into a tsunami.
- Three things, that’s it — get thoughts out of your head, turn those thoughts into content and communication, and save time on the tasks that eat your day. Start there.
- The “three questions” prompt technique — after sharing your content, ask AI: “What three questions do you have for me to improve the clarity of what I gave you?” Then answer them well. The depth compounds fast.
Show Notes
- Why the “AI will replace you” and “AI will fix everything” takes are both completely wrong
- The hype machine — AI influencers making small things look tall, and why you should stop watching them
- Running your own LLM at home: impressive, unnecessary, and a technological nightmare for 99.9% of business owners right now
- The right mental model: AI as a “thinking partner that never gets tired”
- Steve’s “digital twin” project in Claude — how he feeds it every piece of content to build a deep, working knowledge of his voice and expertise
- AI slop explained — why half of LinkedIn looks like robot vomit and how to avoid joining that club
- The three core use cases: externalizing thoughts via voice, creating rich context-driven content, saving hours on daily tasks
- Why loading AI with your full history (blogs, podcasts, client stories) transforms generic output into something actually useful
- The “three questions” prompt technique for deepening AI-generated content
- Unshakable AF community update — first course live, tech deep-dives coming, live AI workshops on the roadmap
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Full Transcript — Episode 32click to expand
[0:01]All right, boys and girls, we’re going to do it today, right? Episode 32, we’re rocking and rolling. We’re still cranking. I want to talk about something that’s everywhere right now, and it’s the buzzword for everyone, but we’re going to do it in a different way. We’re going to talk about AI today, right? Everybody’s talking about AI. Everybody’s building it up, talking about the hype versions. They’re talking about how their open clause, ordering them a salad and rebooking their airlines. They’re talking about how their Claude co-work has, you know, boiled them a cup of tea with their Wi-Fi enabled kettle. Stuff is stupid. I don’t want a secretary or personal assistant or an administrative assistant or whatever you want to call it. Like, let’s be honest here. Gmail already summarizes my emails for me. Why am I reinventing the wheel here with layers of unnecessary technology? But let’s talk about the real version of AI that actually matters for people running a business, an actual company, a real business, where you’re paying people’s bills and you’re employing people that are paying their bills with
[1:02]their job with you, right? If you’ve got a company of any size, AI matters. It matters big time, but it matters how you do it, right? That’s the biggest thing because here’s what’s happening out there right now. Half the people I talk to think AI is going to replace them, right? They’re worried. They’re like, Steve, what am I going to do? AI is going to replace me in six months, in six years, in six decades, whatever. The other half of the people think it’s somehow going to be a magic pill and it’s just going to save them it’s just oh I have AI now all is well. Both takes are totally wrong at the end of the day. So when you really want to look at what AI is in its current form and state, and look, we could go really, really deep into this stuff. We can go deep into building open claw agentic systems. You know, people are buying, you know, Mac minis and small, you know, PC personal, like these little mini PCs that you can get anywhere. Even NVIDIA makes their own version of a Jetson and a bunch of little mini devices
[2:03]where you could run your own large language model at home on your own computer. offline. That’s great stuff and all, but let’s be honest, for 99.9% of the people, it’s completely unnecessary right now. And honestly, you would be too far ahead of yourself often and put yourself in a technological nightmare that unless you had somebody on staff 100% of the time doing it for you, it would never really work as you were hoping. The people that are showing all these good things on places like X and LinkedIn, they’re people like me with an old deep skill set of technology and coding and, you know, journeymen of building everything so they can kind of make it work. And more importantly, they can make it look better than it is, right? That’s a skill. It’s a skill to make something that’s kind of small look really tall. But that’s what these AI influencers do. Stop watching them. They’re just going to make you think that you could do things that aren’t realistic right now. While they may be realistic in six months, we’re talking about today.
[3:04]AI, at its core, is for most people right now just a really incredibly fast draft machine. It’s a thinking partner that never gets tired, right? It’s a tool that takes the raw material in your head, your expertise, your ideas, your experiences, and it helps you get it out faster and in better shape than you would have on your own. I mean, for a disconnected, unorganized human being like me, AI can be a godsend, right? I have a digital twin. And no, I’m not using Delphi. I use Delphi for other things. It’s a decent tool for what it does. But I don’t use Delphi for this because, quite honestly, it doesn’t operate in the capacity I need it to. It just doesn’t handle things in the way I need it to handle. I need to actually think like me, not pretend to answer questions as me. Right? There’s a big difference there. So I use Claude, and I use Claude Cowork, and I use Claude Code. Right? So I’m sitting there in the CLI terminal coding things. That’s probably more advanced for some, and that’s fine. But let’s just look at Claude as a project tool.
[4:06]Just go into the chat like you would ChatGPT. It’s far more organized, and it’s far better at building out a plan if you give it a lot of information, right? And this goes for any of them, including ChatGPT, including Gemini, Grok, what have you. If you don’t put in good content to start, it’s not going to take your slop and turn it into magic. That’s where the term AI slop comes from. from all the shit people put in, shit in, shit out. And a lot of people are doing that with ChatGPT thinking, oh, let me say, hey, I’m a marketing person, or I’m an insurance salesman, and I need four great marketing posts for my LinkedIn account. Yeah, okay, that’s going to suck. Like, let’s not laugh about it, but let’s laugh about it, right? That’s going to freaking suck. I mean, that’s going to suck so bad. It’s going to suck like 50% of the LinkedIn posts I see these days where it’s so obvious that these people are just putting in the bare minimum and posting it and being like, YOLO, son, and just letting it rip. They’re idiots, all of them. I’m not trying to be mean.
[5:09]Just being honest, they’re lazy, right? It’s not even idiots. They’re just lazy idiots. They’re lazy people who think i can put the bare minimum into a new tool and get a great fucking benefit out of it when at the end of the day they’re not they’re just pushing more crap out on the universe praying that somebody clicks they lack clarity once again so look it’s not it’s not that ai’s smarter than you. It doesn’t know your clients like you do. It doesn’t have your story. It doesn’t have your instincts. You know, it doesn’t have your track record. But what it does have is speed and structure. So for people with my type of brain, speed and structure could be so dangerous because you give me structure and now I can move mountains. Without structure, I’m just a hurricane with no direction. I’m a tornado spinning out of control, not knowing where it’s going. With structure, it’s a tsunami, right? That’s just personality stuff like for any of us. If we could build things faster because we’re better organized and we just have to talk about what we’re good at, well, that makes it really easy.
[6:11]So if you’ve been avoiding AI because you think it’s complicated or because you think it somehow means you’re cheating, come on, man. You can let go of that. That’s not the purpose here. The purpose of using AI is to scale yourself in a smarter capacity. It’s not about just using it for a Q&A. Like you’re asking a, you know, you’re asking a freaking teenager, you know, an answer to a question and then just posting it because you think it’s hip and cool. You’re letting the AI, it’s like, the thing is this, it’s not even letting the AI, you’re expecting the AI to run your business for you while you sleep. And looking at the open claw stuff out there and the things that the agentic AI, it’s very trippy, right? It’s very teasing of how it does this while you’re not doing anything yourself and it runs for you when you’re not, yada, yada. That stuff is great. There’s so much more you used to get out of it right now before that stuff is fully like perfected. It’s going to happen very fast, but you need to get your mind wrapped around how you leverage AI and how as a business owner, you’re winning with AI right now. And you’re going to use it for three things.
[7:13]And this is all I want you to use AI for like the next week. Number one, getting thoughts out of your head faster. You could talk to every single model out there these days, whether it’s chat gpt claude gemini grok whatever you could do voice on all of them when you have an idea put it down into a the same project i have a project in my claude called steve’s digital twin every time i write something new i add it in all my content i added in the podcast which i pretty much do with an outline that i hand write you know it’s it’s you know it’s all, it’s all in there i drop these things in and then when i do the podcast i take my transcriptions and add them since I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say until I start recording, right? That’s just me. So yeah, look, it’s really important to get thoughts out of your head as fast as possible. Step two, turn those thoughts into content and communication. Right. That’s how you can make a social post. If you put a lot of content in, if you just ask it, give me those, you know, give me four marketing posts on
[8:17]the insurance business. Well, it sucks. But if you put in your history as an insurer, you put in all the stories, you put in all the blog posts, you put in all the podcasts you’ve been on, you put in all the everything that you have around that business into it. Well, now you can make some content that’s really focused and communicate really well to people, which is, to me, the whole point of AI is being able to communicate better with people, not worse. And then the third thing, of course, you’re saving hours on tasks that you see your day up, right? Making content, people hate it. I deal with this for decades now. People hate making content. People hate sitting there and creating things. They hate talking about themselves. Using AI, it’s like you’re able to bounce it against somebody that’s not you but is you. So it kind of makes it a lot faster and it makes it feel a lot less scary. Thank you. And that’s where, you know, I want this to take this conversation over the next few weeks. Not all the high-end tech stuff. I’ll do the tech stuff for people that want it. Happy to do it. You know, we could run this. You know, the community is launching next week. So, finally, I got my first course up there. I’m recording another one next week.
[9:18]So, in about a week and a half, two weeks, it should be up. Look, the tech stuff, we could talk about that live. Happy to walk people through live tech stuff. But the practical things, the things that you can actually use, you know, what does it actually do and how does it really fit into a business like yours? That’s what I want to talk about, to help you find ways to leverage the AI tools that are out there to do what you do every day anyway. Do it better, do it faster, and do it with, you know, with better results. Think where it’s thinking for you, thinking as you. So today’s move is simple. If you haven’t opened up ChatGPT or Claude yet, oh my Lord, where the hell have you been? Open it up today and figure something out, right? Just give it one task, something you’ve been procrastinating. Ask it for a first draft. See what happens. Just screw around with it. But you got to start. You don’t need to master it today, but you have to start today. If you’re somebody who has been using it a little bit already, why don’t you do this? The next time that you’re prompting it and you’re working maybe on some content with it, after you give it your content, make sure you’re giving it something,
[10:20]right? After you give it the content, ask it this simple thing. You can say to it, and I’m paraphrasing here. You could go along the lines of, now that you’ve read my content, what are three questions that you have for me to improve the clarity of what I have given you? It’s then going to ask you three questions. Clawed, it does a pop-up. ChatGPT, it does the text. It’ll ask you the three questions. And yeah, you’ll build even more depth. And when you answer them, answer them well. Don’t just one word them or one line them. Give real answers. Like, put time in. Like, if you put energy into it in the beginning, you’re going to have better products in the end. And today’s riff of the episode is going to be this. AI doesn’t replace your expertise. It amplifies it. So stop hiding from AI and learn how to ride this pony into the sunset. All right, guys, it’s Steve here. Steve Lickman, unfiltered and unshakable, and I will talk to you soon.
