The One Thing AI Cant Take From You

**An entrepreneur's recipe for sweet success**

3.5min Read

Happy Sunday everyone!

Quick confession before we start: I’m writing this on a Monday morning. By the time you read it, I’ll have gone on vacation and come back, enjoying my normal Sunday Doughnuts…

Why am I telling you that? Because this whole email is about being real, so REAL I will be.

SO. Let’s get into it.

This week I sat on a couple of calls with two completely different people.

One is a house flipper who’s been stuck for SEVEN months trying to decide which “brand” to launch. Different names for the brands, multiple logos, multiple audiences.. but ZERO videos posted that fit this brand

The other is building a community for people 60 and older who want more adventure in their lives. SUPER cool mission. Also stuck on how to package it.

Very similar problem actually, so the solution ended up being pretty much the same for both:

JUST START POSTING. Be real on camera and let the audience find you.
Gary V has been saying this for years, but its actually true!

Not “build the funnel first.”

Not “nail the branding.”

Legit just do this —> Point a camera at your face, tell a true story, and hit post.

BUT, I have to take my own medicine...

If you follow me on Instagram, you might’ve noticed I’ve been working on doing exactly that. More videos of me just talking to the camera.

About authenticity. About vulnerability. About sharing real stories.

Here’s why. (Not that you asked, but I’ll tell you anyway)

I use AI every single day. I build with it. I teach it. I genuinely love it. This week alone I used it to parse a construction schedule, prep a demo, and yes... help organize my notes for this email. (I pulled from all the conversations that I’ve had over the last week and asked for topics that would be worthy of an article… and here we are…)

AND YET.

The content that resonates most? It’s not the super polished stuff. It’s not the AI stuff.

It’s 60 seconds of my unedited face telling a story. CRAZY… WHY??

Because here’s what’s happening: the internet is filling up with content that is generated, optimized, and fake. Sorry, but it's true.

People are drowning in it. And they are STARVING for something real.

Ten years as a cop taught me one thing about stories: the fake ones are always too clean. Real stories have weird, useless details.

The guy who’s lying tells you exactly what happened in perfect order. The guy telling the truth remembers the dog barking and forgets what day it was.

The internet is now full of stories that are too clean. "sus" as Gen Z calls it.

Which meansssss your messy story is now a very valuable asset you own.

Realness is the new moat.

So here’s what I’d actually do this week (and what I told both of those people on those calls):

1. Record one video a day, talking to a camera. You don’t have to post them all. The first ten will be bad. That’s the tuition.
Here’s mine that I just posted (LINK)

2. Tell true stories with the weird details left in. The failure, the awkward call, the thing your kid said. That’s the stuff that can’t be faked. It belongs to you and you alone.

3. Audience first, offer second. Post, watch who follows you, THEN build the thing THEY need. Don’t spend months picking a logo for an audience that doesn’t exist yet.

You really just need a camera and a story… not some big content strategy…

BITES

🍩BITE 1 — Mysterypreneur Link

This page is entirely music recs… so cool!

🍩BITE 2 — AI juice 🧃

Both OpenAI and Anthropic upgraded their voice modes this week. You can now talk to your AI like it’s a phone call... hands-free, out loud, mid-commute. Funny how the big AI labs are all racing to make their robots feel more... human. (Told you realness was the moat.)

Until next time...

Stay in the fight,

My best tweet this week:

Kevin Bell 🍩

@kevinasrx

We're are genuinely in a Wild West moment where there really arent too many established authorities in AI yet. 
Nobody's been doing "AI consulting" for multiple decades. At least not many that ive heard of
The people figuring it out NOW basically become the authority, like

6:10 PM • Jul 23, 2026

Retweets

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My favorite tweet this week:

Matt Ragland

@mattragland

Current video editing workflow in Codex 🤖📹✂️
*fwiw still messy but imo makes it wilder the first run was as good as it was*
1. Add raw video, relevant b-roll, and video brief to a folder. I also add a second folder with all b-roll.
2. Opening prompt basically "Plz help" 😂