In this solo YouTube episode, Steve Lichtman cuts through the AI hype that dominates business conversations and offers a grounded, practical view of what AI can actually do for entrepreneurs and small‑to‑mid‑size companies. He argues that most AI hype—personal assistants that magically run your business or replace your staff—is unrealistic today. Instead, AI should be seen as an ultra‑fast drafting and thinking partner that amplifies a founder’s expertise. Lichtman outlines three immediate, high‑impact ways to use AI: (1) quickly capture raw thoughts and ideas, (2) transform those ideas into focused, audience‑specific content and communication, and (3) automate routine, time‑eating tasks. He stresses that AI’s value hinges on high‑quality input (“no AI slop”) and shares a concrete prompting technique—asking the model to generate three clarifying questions after it reads your content—to improve output. He critiques AI influencers who overpromise and warns against chasing complex agentic setups that most businesses don’t need now. Lichtman lists the tools he uses (Claude, Claude CoWork, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok) and explains how each fits into his workflow. Finally, he announces a new community and upcoming courses that will provide live tech walkthroughs and deeper practical guidance, urging listeners to start experimenting with AI today.
Chapters
All right, boys and girls, we're gonna do it today, right? Episode 32. We're rocking and rolling. We're still cranking. I wanna talk about something that's everywhere right now, and it's the buzzword for everyone, but we're gonna do it in a different way. We're gonna 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 OpenClaws ordering them a salad and rebooking their airlines. They're talking about how their Claude cowork 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 a 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 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's gonna replace them, right? They're, they're worried. They're like, Steve, what am I gonna do? AI's gonna replace me in 6 months, in 6 years, in 6 decades, whatever. The other half of the people think it's somehow gonna be a magic pill. And it's just gonna 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 wanna 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 OpenClaw agentic systems. You know, people are buying, you know, Mac Minis and small, you know, PC, uh, personal, like these little mini PCs that you can get anywhere. Even NVIDIA makes their own version of a Jetson and bunch of little mini devices 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 is showing all these good things on, places like X and LinkedIn, um, they're, they're people like me with a, an old deep skillset of technology and coding and, 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 gonna make you think that you could do things that aren't realistic right now. While they may be realistic in 6 months, we're talking about today. 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've on your own. I mean, for disconnected, unorganized human being like me, AI could 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, doesn't handle things in the way I need it to handle. I need it 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, 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. 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 gonna 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, let me say, hey, I'm a marketing person, or I, I'm an, I'm an insurance salesman and I need 4 great marketing posts for my LinkedIn account. Yeah. Okay. That's gonna suck. Like, let's, let's not laugh about it, but let's laugh about it. Right. That's, that's gonna freaking suck. I mean, that's gonna suck so bad. It's gonna 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. Just being honest. They're lazy, right? It's not even idiots. They're just lazy idiots. They're lazy people who think I could 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 is 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 could, 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, 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. 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, 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, a, you know, you're asking a, a freaking teenager, you know, an answer to a question and then just posting it 'cause you think it's hip and cool. You're, you're letting the AI, it's like, the thing is this, it's not about you letting the AI, you're expecting the AI to run your business for you. While you sleep. And looking at the OpenClaw 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 use to get out of it right now before that stuff is fully like perfected. It's gonna 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 3 things. And this is all I want you to use AI for, for like the next week. Number 1, getting thoughts out of your head faster. You could talk to every single model out there these days, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, whatever. You could do voice on all of them. When you have an idea, put it down into 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 add it in the podcast, which I pretty much do with an outline that I handwrite. 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 gonna say until I start recording. Right. That's just me. So yeah, look, it's really important to get thoughts outta your head as fast as possible. Step 2, 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, gimme 4 marketing posts on 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 used to eat 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. 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, we could run this, you know, the community's launching next week. So, uh, finally I got, I got my, my, my, I got my course, my first course up there. I'm recording another one next week. So in about a week and a half, 2 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 could actually use, you know, what, 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's 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, you gotta 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 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 3 questions that you have for me to improve the clarity of what I have given you? Right? It's then gonna ask you 3 questions. Claude, it does a popup. ChatGPT, it does the text. It'll ask you the 3 questions. And, uh, yeah, you'll, you'll build even more depth because, 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 gonna have better products in the end. And today's riff of the episode's gonna 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 Lichtman, unfiltered and unshakable. And I will talk to you soon.
