You Don't Need to Become an AI Expert
Six months before I had six AI “employees,” I was the guy avoiding it. What changed wasn't expertise. It was a question about carrots.
Four hours on carrots and keto
Random Friday. Kids asleep. I was trying to finalize a new diet and remembered a meal prep routine I'd stuck to during COVID. I asked one question about carrots and keto.
Four hours later we'd settled on the diet, locked in my routine, and cut a cabinet full of supplements down to a core stack.
That was phase one of Elevare Performance, the health side of what I'm building. It started with carrots.
Six months earlier, I was resistant
Searches here, questions there. The classic glorified Google.
My wife had been tinkering with it far more than I had, and she finally talked me into asking for help on a document I was stuck on. It opened my eyes. It concerned me at the same time.
Something changed anyway. I leaned in more, and then more. Eventually the questions turned into conversations. A dialogue.
I went from resisting help on a single document to having six “employees” grinding alongside me. Day in and out, nights and weekends too. Helping me be a better business person, more technically capable, a better dad.
The part most people skip
The difference wasn't the tool. It was how I used it.
A search gets you an answer. A conversation gets you a better question.
When I stopped treating it like a search box — when I started giving it real context about me, my business, what I'd already tried and why it hadn't worked — what came back stopped being generic.
That is the whole gap between people who find AI underwhelming and people who can't work without it. Not access. Not expertise. Context and follow-up.
Fei-Fei Li's frame
Fei-Fei Li has spent much of her career arguing for a human-centered view of AI, and she made the case again on the Huberman Lab podcast on August 10, 2026, in an episode called “Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity.”
Her framing stuck with me. The interesting thing isn't the machine's horsepower by itself. It's what happens when you put that horsepower next to the things that make us human — emotion, storytelling, intuition, creativity.
I think we all carry some fear of the unknown, and plenty in the world right now feeds it. That's fair, and I felt it myself. But humans are absurdly adaptable. We always have been.
How to actually start
I don't think everyone needs to become an AI expert. I'm not sure what that means anymore. It moves too fast for most of us to track all of it.
But I think we owe ourselves some curiosity.
- Pick something you actually care about. Your work. Your health. A project around the house — ask ALL the questions so you don't make ten trips to Lowe's. Something you're trying to learn. Something you're struggling with.
- Give it context about you. Your situation, your constraints, what you've already tried. Generic questions get generic answers.
- Push back when it's wrong. Tell it why the answer doesn't work. This is the step almost everyone skips.
- Ask another question. Then another. See where the conversation goes.
You don't need to understand everything happening in AI to start discovering what it can help you understand about yourself.
Start a conversation.