New WorkLife Episode: You're closer to an AI expert than you think with Max Mullen
If the conversation around AI has been making you tired, this episode might actually help.
This week on WorkLife, I sat down with Max Mullen — co-founder of Instacart, investor at Workshop, and one of the few people I trust to give me straight, practical answers and not make fun of my stupid questions. This episode is a bit different than the usual format, but I really want to take a few episodes this year and try to cut through the noise and the hype and figure out what's real. I'm calling them AI curiosity episodes — I'm going to find areas that I'm curious about and talk to people who are deeply immersed in the AI world to help us understand what's really going on. Max said something I hadn't heard anyone say quite this way before: you are probably closer than you think — days not months — to being an AI expert.
You can listen to the full episode anywhere you get your podcasts or watch it on YouTube, but here’s a sneak peek:
Key Takeaways
1. The Six-Week Rule. If you tried an AI tool more than six weeks ago and it didn't work, try again. The models are improving so fast that what felt clunky or unreliable two months ago may now do exactly what you'd hoped. Max thinks we may soon need to reduce it to the six-day rule. The bottleneck right now isn't the technology — it's already capable of more than most of us are using. What's lagging is adoption, inside companies and inside ourselves. That's not a reason to feel behind; it's a reason to start now.
2. You’re closer to an expert than you think. The people considered “AI experts” right now? Most of them learned a month or two ago. The gap between beginner and fluent isn’t a four-year CS degree — it’s hours of genuine curiosity. And here’s what makes this moment different from every previous computing shift: you don’t need to learn a new language or interface. You just have to be able to articulate what you want — clear thinking and clear communication, which are things you already do every day.
3. AI gets you to 80–90%. You still do the last mile. AI isn’t replacing your judgment — it’s handling the drafts, the research, the first pass. The curation, the taste, the final edit? Still yours. Max still edits every piece of AI-assisted writing and so do I, heavily. And if anything, Max would say, AI makes the human work sharper — you have to be more deliberate about what actually sounds like you, what you actually believe. The value isn’t in removing humans from the loop. It’s in removing the tedious parts so the human in the loop can do better work.
The Bigger Point
What I kept coming back to after this conversation is how much of the exhaustion around AI is about feeling behind — like everyone else is ahead and you’re scrambling to catch up. The pressure to spend your Saturdays learning the latest tool, the constant drumbeat of “you need to be doing this” or “everybody else is doing this”… it’s a lot.
But Max pushes back on that framing, and I think he’s right. The people who seem like experts right now started recently. The tools are becoming more intuitive, not more complicated. And the skills that matter most — thinking clearly, asking good questions, knowing what a great answer looks like — are already in your toolkit.
He also made the point that this isn’t Saturday optional work. It belongs in your Monday as part of your job. And the best employers are already treating it that way.
Try this
If you’re ready to stop avoiding it and start actually using it: pick one problem you’re working on right now, open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and just describe what you need. Don’t over-engineer the prompt. Just talk to it like you’d brief a smart colleague.
Then try it again in six weeks. You’ll be surprised by what’s changed.
Listen or watch the full conversation with Max on WorkLife.
What else?
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