Episode
Stop Teaching Your Team AI. Keep the Top 40%.
- Published
- Sep 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1159
- Processing state
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- https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ESHO3777532395.mp3
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Summary
Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric came back from a founder retreat with a hard truth: the AI hackathons and training programs everyone planned in January didn't work, and the companies pulling ahead just raised the talent bar. He walks through the GitHub leaderboard that shows who's actually shipping, why one 200-engineer company is keeping only its top 40, and Neil's long-held view that you can't train mindset. Then the sycophancy trap: why ChatGPT agrees with whatever you feed it, what Neil found when he ran a real recommendation test across an accounting firm, and why most executives still don't understand how these models work. Key takeaways◾You can't train mindset. Raise the bar and hire people who already have it◾A public shipping leaderboard exposes who's really working in about a week◾AI is a sycophant. Optimize for it, don't just ask it follow-up questions Chapters00:00 Stop training, raise the talent bar01:14 The GitHub leaderboard: keep the top 4002:31 Neil: hire amazing people, it solves most problems07:45 The AI therapy trap: it agrees with you13:17 Neil's accounting-firm recommendation test15:54 Three years in, executives still don't get it