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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

Chapters
00:00 Stop training, raise the talent bar
01:14 The GitHub leaderboard: keep the top 40
02:31 Neil: hire amazing people, it solves most problems
07:45 The AI therapy trap: it agrees with you
13:17 Neil’s accounting-firm recommendation test
15:54 Three years in, executives still don’t get it