The Tool Making You Faster Is Making You Replaceable

Here is the transcription of the podcast episode "The Tool Making You Faster Is Making You Replaceable."

So you’re getting the job done faster, you’re getting it done more efficiently. You’re charging the same rates because it’s basically the same deliverable. But you can do it twice as fast so you’re home by noon every day. Right? Same money, half the work. You think you’re riding the wave. You’re like, "Hey, this is fucking awesome."

And then the wave hits you. Because the Model TT doesn’t just deliver hay faster; it’s actually eliminating the need for the hay to begin with. Because every Model TT that hits the road is one less horse and buggy that’s on the road, which means one less horse that needs feeding. Which is what you do. The tool that you’re using to do your job faster is putting you out of business at the same time. So you’re squeezing out a few more lazy days of profit while the market for your entire service is evaporating. A few short years go by, horses as a transportation means on the street—that’s gone. It’s basically extinct.

And that’s what I see happening with AI right now. People are using GPT and Claude, Gemini, whatever it is, to do their old jobs faster. Same deliverables, same rates, half the effort. And they think they’re smart. "I’m getting this done in a fraction of the time. Same old job." They think they’re gaming the system and riding this wave because everybody else hasn’t caught up yet. But what they’re really doing is delivering hay with a Model TT.

I’ll give you a specific example. I just parted ways with a long-time ghostwriter, a content marketer that I’ve worked with. And it’s for this exact same reason. I started noticing outputs that looked like, "Hey, this is just like pretty standard Claude shit. It doesn’t even look, doesn’t even feel edited." And I work with AI a lot, so I can almost tell which model you’re using when I get content at this point. And I can see the same structure that anybody can get in 30 seconds.

So I got a batch of content recently. I looked at it and I was like, "All right, I know this is straight AI." I spent less than an hour in Claude creating a skill based on my own content. And a skill, for those if you don’t know, is like a pre-programmed extensive prompt, right? So where you can just ask Claude to use that skill to write your content as long as you spent enough time writing that skill. I spent like an hour creating a skill based and I trained it on my own content. And I got the exact same output. I shit you not. Word for word the hook was the exact same. The post was the exact same structure. It was the same messages. It was for all intents and purposes, it was the exact same thing. And it took me less than an hour to build that.

Now granted, I have a lot of content that I can use to pull in to train it, but you get all that into a spreadsheet, you plug it in, and an hour later I’ve got the exact same output that I was paying as a service. So, the obvious question is: "Hey, is this service even necessary?"

And I get the temptation. You can charge the same rates, half the work, maybe you can take on twice as many clients and you can make more money. You can ride that wave. But here’s the thing. I’m not even mad that he used AI. I use AI all day long. I have a wearable AI device to meetings that records virtually everything that I do all day, right? So using AI is not the issue. The problem was he’s using it to be lazy instead of making things better. And he’s riding that wave. "Hey, same deliverables, same paycheck, maybe I can take on twice as many people or work half as much."

But within 24 hours of spotting this, what I did was I actually built a complete system—like automated—that not only replicated what he was doing, it did it better. And it was triggered because I saw this. I was like, "This is a hay situation." Right? So what I did was I created a Google Sheet that has a script built into it—by the way, used AI to help me write all this stuff—that automatically goes out, it fetches my podcast transcripts, pulls them out, puts them into a Google Doc, sends that over to Claude which is using the pre-programmed skill that I created to write content in my voice and in my style, spits out three different versions, and sends them to the project management system, creates a task for me to review and edit and approve.

Same exact thing I was paying for is now basically done automatically. And I went back and I told Claude, I said, "Hey, this is a fucking problem. Here’s the output from my ghostwriter. Here’s the output from the skill that we created. These are the exact same. It means anybody can scrape my content and write the way that I write." So we went back to the drawing board and upgraded that skill substantially. And now I’m getting better content, on demand, efficiently, like automatically, without the service.

So the tool that he used to cut corners is the same tool that made him completely replaceable. He was delivering hay faster. And I was building a gas station. And this is the fork in the road right now. For every knowledge worker, like you can use AI to protect the old job—to like do the same work faster and hope nobody notices—or you can use AI to build something new. To amplify what you’re doing. To do work that wasn’t possible before. To make it substantially better. Like in a way that you never could before. To get outcomes and like actual outcomes for people instead of just outputs that you’re trying to pawn off on people. And you can make yourself more valuable or you can make yourself more replaceable.

And one path is going to buy you a few months, right? Cool, ride it out. Hope it works. Like it’s a cash in. The other path is going to buy you a career. It’s going to be what actually takes you into the future. And the hay delivery guy didn’t see it coming. Like he was too busy celebrating with all that free time.

And my advice to everyone right now, like in the way that I’m talking about it with my kids... listen, it’s here to stay. Like it or not. Like I like it. But how you use it is going to determine whether you’re a winner or loser in this tech. And my best advice: just don’t be the hay delivery driver with a Model T. Like, build a gas station.

Hope that helps. Adios.