Skip to content

useful, not true

concept · in 39 sources (2023–2026)

Judge a framework or an AI's reading of you by whether it helps, not whether it is literally true.

Sources by year: 2023: 5 · 2024: 5 · 2025: 10 · 2026: 19

Also known as: AI as a mirror

Questions

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2026

  • 2026-02-04 · The top mistake people make in setting goals — recommendation: Ali: If you struggle to turn a vague goal such as "stop procrastinating" into a SMART goal, Ali suggests asking an AI such as ChatGPT or Claude to help. — 00:00:29
  • 2026-02-12 · You’re Not Behind (Yet): How to Learn AI in 19 Minutes — Ali gives a five-phase process to become fluent and productive with AI in about three months: foundations in week one, AI as coach in week two, AI as worker in weeks three and four, AI as a system over one to two months, and AI as infrastructure from month four. — 00:00:00
    • Ali's third AI foundation: talk to AI rather than type, with Wispr Flow, built-in dictation on Windows and Mac or the AI tools' own; you speak faster and ramble more, and he says this one habit transforms how much value you get. — 00:00:58
  • 2026-03-26 · How I'd Create Content in 2026 (If I Had To Start Over) — recommendation: Ali: A mistake Ali sees beginners in his Lifestyle Business Academy make is having ChatGPT generate their content before they have the skill or taste; at the start, doing it manually builds the skill. — 00:10:46
  • 2026-04-18 · The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Claude Code — Ali's AI flywheel: get AI to interview you about your work, have it suggest what to build to save time or make money, and learn how the AI works while it builds. — 00:00:29
    • To learn AI, Ali suggests building something really useful for your work or life rather than following tutorials, and asking the AI to interview you to find what would save time or make money. — 00:02:27
    • The danger with AI, Ali says, is spending so long building agents that orchestrate agents that nothing useful gets done; useful means it adds value to customers, saves you time or makes you money. — 00:23:01
  • 2026-07-23 · How to Get Rich Without a Degree — recommendation: Ali: To learn a skill such as making Instagram ads, Ali advises asking ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to teach you, for example which AI workflows are best, and guarantees an excellent answer. — 00:10:51
  • 2026-09-21 · What I Actually Do When I’m Not Making YouTube Videos — Ali now writes LifeNotes with no AI: he used to dictate it into VoicePal on walks and work it over with Claude, but since finding the splurge he prefers writing creative work himself, keeping AI dictation for non-creative work. — 00:08:48
  • 2026-10-10 · How to Learn So Fast People Assume You’re Naturally Gifted (with AI) — Ali: One of the most underrated uses of AI, Ali says, is not search queries or getting work done but using it as the world's best personal tutor. — 00:00:00
    • When you get stuck on a project, Ali advises taking photos, sending them to the AI and asking it to help you through. — 00:26:09
  • 2026-10-16 · How a plastic surgeon could use AI — recommendation: Ali: If a doctor in private practice focused on one AI use case, Ali would pick marketing, where there is much less concern about risks to patient safety. (hedged) — 00:01:44
  • …and 17 statements more in 2026 — all statements of 2026

2025

  • 2025-02-14 · How I use AI to save 10+ hours per week — Ali's newsletter shares his own thoughts, so he uses AI to augment it, helping him pull ideas out of himself rather than doing the work for him: the seed of each idea comes from him. — 00:04:06
    • A mistake Ali often sees is expecting AI output to be amazing straight away; he generates four or five outputs across tools until one is about 80% good, then edits it himself in Notion. — 00:07:18
    • A follow-up prompt Ali likes to try with almost any prompt: tell the AI it has given a level one response and ask it to go deeper with a level two and three response. — 00:13:24
  • 2025-05-31 · I Tried AI as a Life Coach for 365 Days - Here’s What I Learned — recommendation: Ali: To get around AI sycophancy, which he calls glazing, Ali asks the AI to challenge his thinking: for a steel-man counter-argument, the strongest counter-argument, or a scathing critique of what he said. — 00:02:26
    • Expecting truth from an AI's explanations of you is a recipe for disaster, Ali says: they are not necessarily true but can be useful, so treat them as a suggestion or hypothesis, not a commandment. — 00:03:25
    • Ali runs an AI's recommendation through his own filter of whether he thinks it is a good idea, rather than outsourcing that thinking to the AI. — 00:05:22
  • 2025-06-13 · He Built a $1M Business in 12 Months - Every Step Explained (Case Study) — recommendation: Suhail Idrees: Suhail encourages using AI to get up the learning curve faster, but not as an excuse to skip speaking to users and vibe code something, then look for users later. — 02:22:45
  • 2025-09-02 · My honest advice to someone who wants financial freedom — Ali uses Claude more than his business coach: he pays the coach $3,000 a month and Anthropic $20 a month, and gets more value from Claude. — 00:43:33
  • 2025-10-16 · How I use AI as an Entrepreneur (My complete workflow) — recommendation: Ali: In Ali's AI workflow Claude is the processing hub for everything; outputs go to Google Docs, to Firecut for videos, and to Notion for content and business work. — 00:02:44
    • Claude has replaced Ali's ChatGPT use: ChatGPT's memory of past chats was the last reason he used it, and since Claude added memory a week ago he has not needed ChatGPT for anything. — 00:05:17
    • A common mistake with AI for creative work is to dismiss it over the ideas you dislike, Ali says: generate 50 to 100, you will probably like 5 to 20 % of them, and use those. (hedged) — 00:20:38
    • Ali does not let AI write his scripts: outsourcing too much creativity to AI loses some soul, and he does not want a language model putting words in his mouth, though AI hooks are fine. — 00:22:14
  • …and 40 statements more in 2025 — all statements of 2025

2024

  • 2024-01-19 · Why You Feel Lost in Life — recommendation: Ali suggests writing out notes on how you want to be remembered and putting them into ChatGPT to draft your obituary, or writing it yourself. — 00:20:35
  • 2024-11-15 · I Got Married and Moved to Hong Kong! (Life Update) — Ali now plans videos and course modules by walking with AirPods in and talking into VoicePal, which transcribes his thoughts and asks follow-up questions. — 00:13:17
  • 2024-11-29 · How to Build a Business Part-Time — recommendation: Ali: With ChatGPT or Claude you can whip up a sales page on your phone in about ten minutes, Ali says. — 00:29:31
  • 2024-12-03 · 5 Simple Steps to Earn $10,000 Writing Online — recommendation: Nicolas Cole: Asked about automating outreach with ChatGPT, Nicolas Cole says the big misunderstanding with AI is wanting to automate things you have never done: you can't automate what you haven't done. — 00:31:19
    • Nicolas Cole: Doing outreach by hand first seems the longer road, Nicolas Cole says, but it teaches you what drives the outcome so you can then leverage technology; skip it and the shortcut ends up being the longer road. — 00:32:02
    • Ali's takeaway: go through the whole process yourself first so you understand how it works; AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can come later, but using them as a crutch early means you probably won't make it. — 00:32:35
  • 2024-12-12 · 6 Habits to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet — recommendation: Ali: Without VoicePal, Ali suggests any speech-to-transcript software, then pasting the transcript into ChatGPT and editing it in Notion, Google Docs or Microsoft Word. — 00:20:52

2023

  • 2023-01-26 · 7 Side Hustles Ideas to Make $1000/Month — recommendation: Ali: With AI writing tools, Ali says, being a decent writer is now often about using the right AI tools to create a first draft, then editing it into the style of the people you write for. — 00:07:18
  • 2023-03-26 · 6 AI Tools I Use Every Day — Ali's main personal use of ChatGPT is idea generation: for a chapter of his book he asked it for scientific case studies linking play, dopamine, novelty and productivity. — 00:00:58
  • 2023-05-10 · 5 Steps to Start Your First Business — recommendation: Ali suggests using artificial intelligence to help come up with business ideas and refine the value proposition. — 00:02:24
  • 2023-08-30 · I Tried 137 Productivity Tools. These Are The Best. — recommendation: Ali: Otter.ai transcribes Ali's meetings and conversations almost perfectly and uses AI to summarise them; on walks he dictates video ideas into it instead of typing on his phone. — 00:14:55
  • …and 1 statement more in 2023 — all statements of 2023