The Future of Entrepreneurship: Mike Koenigs on AI, Branding, and Founder Superpowers

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Dude, I'm getting teary-eyed just listening to that, man.

It's a $3 million a day if I brought in some of our success stories.

Pierre, I didn't know anything about the internet.

I used this thing.

I literally just pushed a button, pushed a button, made a lead capture page, and I sold my first website in 24 hours.

I so believed in what we were doing.

Of course, I'm going to dump all my money back into the business so we can grow it and grow it and grow it.

And eventually, I started bleeding out of my butt because I had stage 3A colorectal cancer.

I literally started bleeding blood spots, so I started wearing black pants.

Okay, so you you didn't even go to the doctor.

You were just obviously no, guys.

I thought it was bleeding hemorrhoids because my dad had hemorrhoids.

I'm like, yeah, it's just hemorrhoids.

So I go see my doctor.

His name is Dr.

Benerjee.

And he goes, I figuratively and literally own your ass for 18 months.

You'll get that thing cut out of you, and I'll take care of you.

And it is going to be a hard process, and you should shut down all your businesses.

How bad were you stressing?

Enough to bleed out my butt, enough to give me cancer.

Literally.

Hey, guys, and welcome back to the Levol Podcast.

This is Paul Alex, and today we have a great interview, okay?

We're going to be talking about AI in the future, all right?

Uh, you guys know I always talk about NED, the new American dream.

I think AI ties right into that, okay?

So, if you're looking into AI, you're looking into entrepreneurship, you're looking to talking to the expert in the AI space, we have him here today.

Mike, welcome to the show, brother.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I'm very excited to be in beautiful Miami.

I love your team here.

They are busy.

They are doing it.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

We stay busy, but success loves speed, man.

Suz.

So I'm very excited to have you on the show, man.

You brought a good amount of books here that we're going to go over.

You have a lot of new projects.

We're talking about NASA.

You're talking about, you know, the future of AI.

We're just talking about Hamosi's launched last week, man.

Crushed it.

Crushed it.

100 million in a week.

That's it.

Plus.

That's it, right?

So the world's changing.

Very fast.

And AI is contributing to a lot of that change, right?

It totally is.

It is unimaginable how fast we can create and iterate and bring something to market.

The old way of doing business is dead unless you just haven't seen it coming yet.

That is for sure.

Invent, get it to market, iterate, change, and connect.

And you've got an amazing group of tools that can work like a team of 10 PhDs for 20 bucks a month for you.

Unlimited use.

That should rock your mind.

It's absolutely wonderful what you can do with ai i know you know me introducing ai to my wife chat gpt just in particular she it was such a game changer for her you know she she she's like babe i didn't know about this and this was back when we first met but when i first introduced that to her it completely changed her view yeah on just writing anything yeah so mike for the people that don't know you let's do a quick intro um tell us a little bit about what you currently do right now okay and your background sure um the current business is called the super Power Accelerator and AI Accelerator.

There's two businesses.

So Super Power Accelerator, we work with founders who've either had an exit and want to reinvent themselves and create a brand new business, or they have a business and they want to up-level it.

And the third are founders who've realized that if they had a strong founder brand, that is a brand that is recognizable, that it multiplies the value of everything they touch for the rest of their lives.

So think of Elon Musk, for example, whether you love him or hate him, or Steve Jobs Jobs is dead 10 years, their brands are hyper-valuable.

They don't need marketing or advertising.

So what we do that's very unique is we can build, create, launch products, pitches, all the content ready for market in a week.

What normally takes most people six months to three years to do.

That's because I've done it for myself many times.

So we build close to 20 businesses a year.

Wow.

That's the core business.

The second.

is AI training.

So we work with founders to help bring AI into their companies.

So when you hear about, MIT just released a big report this last week that said 95% of generative AI tests and implementations fail.

Why?

It's because there's resistance from the teams.

They don't know what to do with it or the implementation ideas were bad in the first place.

I believe AI needs to come from the top, from leadership saying, not only is this important to it.

to us, we're going to use it.

And I want to make you a better employee.

I want to make you three times more productive.

I want to give you skills you wouldn't normally have so we can grow a more meaningful business.

So it's the culture.

It's the founder knowing what's possible instead of being a dictator.

Dictatorships fail in the end.

That's how revolutions start.

And it's got to be teamwork.

It's got to come from a cultural point of view.

So we found a really unique way to get teams to make AI happen in days instead of weeks or months.

So before you actually got into the AI space and your companies currently, what were you doing before then?

So I was born in a little tiny town called Edelake, Minnesota.

So Trey and I connected on your team because he's a Minnesota boy and a bunch of people here.

I know you're in Minnesota.

They are funny.

So we still say the long O's, you know, we say you betcha.

My wife kind of worked it out of me.

But all I wanted to do when I grew up is a severely ADHD

kid, completely uneducatable.

I barely, barely passed school.

High school, that is.

I have a high school diploma, but I wanted to write code.

So a neighbor loaned me an Apple II computer one Christmas vacation.

I taught myself to code.

And then

I started building computers and teaching.

Someone would say, my dad was a barber.

So someone would say, hey, Bernie, do you know anyone who can use computers?

And my dad would say, my kid likes computers.

Why don't you talk to him?

So I'd go in and they'd say, hey, can you teach me how to use this?

I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man's king.

So I said yes.

And then I learned like spreadsheet software, accounting software.

Pretty soon I was writing office code, but then I got a job writing video games, which is what I really wanted to do.

Very cool.

So we started writing video games for businesses like BMW, 20th Century Fox,

General Mills.

We shipped a game called ChexQuest and six million boxes of cereal.

And then the internet happened.

So we were first for the internet.

We started doing movie promos.

Then I started a SAS, two SaaS companies, one that figured out how to generate SEO with automation and video.

It was called Traffic Geyser.

Wow.

That led to a company where I figured out how to hack the carriers.

So before you had mobile text marketing, I figured out how to hack mobile text on the carriers before there were APIs.

And that became a company called Instant Customer.

So each one of these businesses, I just figured out something super nerdy and weird because I wanted to figure it out.

It was commercially viable.

I created a product, got to a market, made entertaining marketing content, and sold the company because I never learned how to operate companies very well.

I was good at starting them, which is a deep personal flaw, I might add.

So that's basically it.

It's spot a market early, figure out who the market is, create the marketing, get it up there, sell it when it was hot, and then move on to the next thing because I still have a severe attention deficit challenge.

I feel like you and I have so many things in common because I always say I'm a startup guy.

I'm a visionary guy.

Yeah, yeah.

I like to start little fires and keep it going.

And then when it gets to the point where now you have to run operations, you fix that.

Exactly.

Run away.

Exactly.

I'm like, yo, who could I hire that's smarter than me to go ahead and actually execute on running the day-to-days, micromanaging, doing the sales, doing all that?

And then I want to go ahead and start something new.

That's right.

Because that's what fulfills me.

Totally.

Is it the same thing for you?

It is absolutely that.

And I'll tell you, my greatest, deepest flaws as a founder was not getting my ego out of the way and saying, I don't have the power to do this and finding the right who's.

Correct.

And look, I probably got, I got a couple decades on you.

I will tell you that disease will cure you around until you cure the disease.

Yes.

There is something you can do about it.

And the gift of being a visionary founder and a charismatic, which you are, is great.

And you got to know when the hell to get out of your own way and get the right who's in.

And also what got you into, where they say what got you into the desert won't get you to the promised land.

That is truer words never spoken, correct?

That's my

non-advice advice, but also relating to a feather, fellow,

innovator brother.

There you go.

No, I love that, man.

And I could just tell the way you are, your characteristics, the way you move, man, the way you talk about so passionate about your startup phase of your companies, man.

I mean, I have the exact same almost almost mannerist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just like, let's keep it going, right?

Yeah.

So question, what takes someone who barely graduated high school and then is able to then go ahead and want to learn code, want to go ahead and start these businesses, start learning and adapting to that entrepreneurship mindset?

Because typically for a lot of people, it's environment.

They've got a mentor, parallel parents.

Did you have somebody in your life that actually pushed you through that journey?

No, I'll tell you that the truth was, here's what it was, sheer terror of being poor.

I've had a ratchet in my head.

Like I was always disciplined about how I ate.

I'd always eat my dessert last.

I'd eat the stuff I hated first, get it out of the way, and I'd eat dessert last.

And I've always treated my time the same way, which is just get the sh out of the way first and then save the creme.

the cream for the last part.

So I grew up in an environment that felt poor to me, even though it wasn't really poor, but we're lower middle class.

My dad was a barber.

He grew up super poor on a farm.

My mother.

Poor.

Yeah.

My mom came from nothing, an alcoholic, philandering father and a

bipolar mother.

I mean, there was no pure blood from where I came from, okay, other than good people, nice Minnesota people.

And it was cold as hell.

I've never liked the cold.

So I'm like, I got to get the hell out of here.

Perfect state to be in as a kid then.

And I imagine myself living in, at the time, downtown San Francisco working for Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

That's what I wanted.

That was the dream in my head.

And it's how do I get there?

But I don't have a college degree.

I can't follow instructions.

I can't pay attention.

You know, I didn't function in this traditional world.

So I had to create my own little fantasy.

That's the driver.

It just so happened that as I started

being able to see the future, make it real fast, because, you know, when you hear about a triple threat, a triple threat is someone who can write a movie produce a movie meaning raise money and be in the movie and they can act as well well my quadruple threat was i could see the future i knew how to code and make something real i was pretty good at selling and marketing something but i also had enough charisma to speak yeah so

just like you right and so That meant people would naturally follow you.

Correct.

And I was terrified of being followed.

I'd be like, I don't want to to let you down.

I don't want to be able to let you down.

So there was another failure point.

It wasn't until I went to a Tony Robbins event in 1995 that I was like, that, that guy.

I totally got it.

And then in that event, I told myself,

someday I'm going to work with that guy.

Someday I'm going to find a way to add so much value.

He's going to come to me.

And it turns out our common connection was someone who came indirectly through a Tony Robbins connection.

I don't know if you knew that.

Yeah.

No,

I know exactly who you're talking about.

And that's the way it goes, man.

It's meant to be right.

It's totally crazy.

So, and it was 10 years later, I was at Tony Robbins' house helping him with online marketing, helping his organization, introducing him to a whole bunch of people I knew.

How did it feel

to now work with Tony Robbins when back then, when you're initially starting, you're like, dude, I need to be with that guy.

I need to do that.

He does.

Was that like an aha moment for you?

It totally was.

Here's what it, it wasn't fanboy, though, because the energy shifts considerably when

the mentor, when those you even worship, are asking you for advice, and you see the vulnerable side of where they're living and where they're living in fear.

And at that point, and Tony wouldn't mind that I'd say this, it was like.

RRI, Robbins Research International, was really struggling with online marketing.

They hadn't figured out video marketing yet and hadn't figured out what was known as the product launch, basically what Alex Vermosi just did, what Russell Brunson does really well.

And at the time,

I was doing massive launches.

We had just completed at the time the largest online launch, which was $9.1 million

in a week.

And we did a live broadcast webinar back when it cost like $60,000 because YouTube Live didn't broadcast for free.

You paid for it, right?

So what Alex Vermosi just did, we did a 14-hour show direct to camera, P-brakes only, and we crushed it selling a product that taught people how to start their own digital marketing agency.

And I promise I'm getting to the answer to your question, but a little context was I had some cred with Tony at the time.

And because we had had this huge launch, I was friends with the smartest best marketers alive at the time.

Frank Kern, Russell Brunson,

Brendan Burchard,

a whole series of other people, Jeff Walker, who invented the product launch formula.

And I told Tony, I said, not only can I help you with this, I'm going to introduce you to the smartest marketers in the world.

They are much smarter than me.

And we all have one thing in common.

We all worship you.

We adore you.

And you changed our lives.

Can we please serve you and help you?

And he said, yes.

So we helped Tony with a lunch.

I love that.

And then that.

turned into events.

And then that turns into products we created together, which became the new money masters yeah so the answer was i went from oh my god i'm finally meeting this guy to how can i help him and then i'm like shoot i'm gonna risk my whole reputation i could really screw this up badly better do good yeah who can i bring in who's better than me and build a little army yeah

that overanswered your question but that's really what happened no and that's great i like your thought process because it actually breaks it down you know for for the person and we have a lot of beginners here we have a lot of inspiring entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast and they always try to wonder how do you get to your level right get a mentor get a mentor get a mentor yes and that's exactly what i was going to go to so uh who did you look uh i guess

who did you look to for mentorship during that time man

i

here's what i'm embarrassed to say at that time You could buy expensive information products, which now you can get for free.

Or you can talk to them.

That's called chat GPT.

You can talk to at least

a metaphoric version of that individual.

Like it is so easy now.

There's no point of resistance.

And when there's no point of resistance, you cannot determine what has value.

That's the signal-to-noise problem.

You literally can learn anything for free all at once from your phone.

It's unimaginable.

When I grew up, oh my God, this makes me sound so old.

But my mom would say, go to the library and look it up.

Well, that meant meant you had to get to the library or walk to the library and figure out how to use a card catalog and remember what the hell you went there for in the first place, which actually meant you had to write something down.

You didn't have a phone to put that in.

It was a process.

There was a deliberate outcome you had to do.

So the amount of friction and resistance actually helped.

That is, that is, so the gift of all this tech is not necessarily there.

And then it cost a lot of money if you were going to get someone's attention and pay them.

Now you can do it all online, pretty much for free with zero friction.

So

the real answer is I, my dad was amazing.

He knew how to fix or figure out just about anything and we had a lot of tools.

So he gave me access to all of his tools in the day I was five years old.

I used to write a lot of fires and break a lot of things.

I burned stuff all the time.

I shot things.

I grew up with guns.

I blew stuff up and shot them all the time.

That's what I do and ride my bike.

But

he would always sit down and explain how something worked and showed me how to fix it.

So I figured out how to figure stuff out.

But tech was bad in my house.

Like my parents didn't want a microwave in the house.

They certainly didn't want a computer or a calculator in the house.

That old school, it's going to be a distraction is what their perspective was.

Correct.

They didn't want to change.

So totally.

So that's where my long-winded way of saying I had so much friction and I had to figure out how to overcome the friction because deep in my heart and my soul, I knew that tech was the gateway to my better future self.

So my mentors were, I got a job at a gas station the day I turned 16, I started working full-time and every nickel I made, I bought magazines and books.

And when I finished school, I'd go down to a bookstore and I'd sit down there and read every book I could get my hands on until they closed.

And I would do that five days a week.

because it was faster and more current than a library.

And then, you know, it was a while later until there was an internet, but the first internets were CompuServe, Apple Link, everything.

I spent all my money on these services digesting information.

And then I figured out how to pitch whatever I wanted to create that would help me the next level.

So I made products that solve my own problem that I could sell to raise money and bootstrap to build the next thing.

I love that.

So it's always been a bootstrap mentality.

I've never raised money or taken a dime from an investor.

Likewise.

Yeah.

Likewise, man.

Brother.

Respect, brother.

Well done.

You know, there was one year, I remember Russell Brunson, he came out with a Bootstrap Awards.

And I think it was like the first year I was going to attend like a ClickFunnels at that time.

I think it had to be like 2022.

I don't know what happened to it.

But anyways, yeah, I was just like, bootstrap.

But there's actual awards for that.

I was like, that's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool.

You know, that's mix stuff up, sell it, get enough interest, and then build it.

Yeah, because what's the number one concern that most people have when investing into anything, investing into a business, investing into self-education?

It's the money.

Am I going to lose my money?

And my first money, it's too risky.

I don't know, right?

But when you go to the mentality of like, hey, you know what?

I'm going to create something and I'm going to go bootstrapped and I'm going to go generate some money.

You know, totally.

We'll find investors.

I think it's pretty cool.

Better yet, if you get like, if you pre-sell, you've got a hundred people who love the idea so much, they're willing to put up some dough.

Yeah.

So you can build it.

Yeah.

I am basically when if you go back to that big product I told you about at the time, it was called Main Street Marketing Machines.

It was a combination of of Traffic Geyser, which was push-button, get traffic with video, and then push-button, get leads, and capture leads and qualify them with instant customer.

So it's two software products.

So we had continuity income.

And then we taught a system, which is how to go out and make your first $5,000 and then $10,000 in a week.

part-time, even if you don't know anything about marketing or online marketing.

And this is back in 2008, 2009.

Yeah.

All right.

And

we timed it, not on purpose.

It was pure unadulterated luck.

That's when the first big stock market or stock plus really it was real estate crash happened.

And there were

more than a third of our clients and customers were somehow in the real estate business, completely screwed without money or credit.

And they're like, I have to figure out how to make, and they're not 10 grand a month.

Can your thing do it?

And I'm like, yes, it can.

So now, did I really know that?

I did because our stuff worked.

And there was like some sort of overconfidence that could have been the ruin of me.

Said,

I know I can help you figure out how to get there.

Correct.

That's what the real answer was.

Like a true entrepreneur.

God, yeah.

I love it.

It's a delusional optimism.

That is truly what it is.

But you have to be, man.

Totally.

Yeah.

There's no way you survive.

There's no way.

The mental anguish and pain.

Like if your clients could only see the nightmares that go on inside your head.

Oh, right.

Oh, man.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

Sorry to reveal that here.

But that's what's happening all the time.

If you're not active and busy and purposeful and on fire, there's a dark side.

And that chasm is close all the time, haunting and chasing.

Well, you know what builds anxiety inside of people?

It's

not moving.

It's having the ideas in your mind and it's not moving, knowing that you can do it.

Oh, yeah.

And that's what builds anxiety.

Because in people.

people i haven't heard it described that way before yeah man well those are true simplify it that's

i'm gonna just feel into that horror for a second thank you thank you no that's good that's i find that relieving oh yeah okay i'll finish the edge of the story so what happened was we put together a great pitch package now we did beta test this and made sure it worked because we had to have social proof

and so when we did the launch It was a series of a product launch formula, four videos in a row with a sale at the end, released over a period of two weeks.

But what we did is I brought in some of our success stories.

People had been using our tools and were making at least $5,000 to $10,000 per month using them.

Social proof.

And this is so raw, so real, you couldn't have faked it because these folks come in and they're crying.

And like one of them, his name's Jimmy.

And he came in, he's like, yeah, I didn't know anything about the internet.

This guy's from Lafayette, Louisiana, right from down there.

And he's like, I just lost everything.

And I use this thing.

I literally just pushed a button, pushed a button, made a lead capture page, did this whole SEO thing, and I sold my first website in 24 hours.

And we didn't have any gas.

I couldn't even heat the water on my stove from my baby's bath.

And like, there's no, there ain't, there's not a dry eye in my studio.

Dude, I'm getting a teary eye just listening to that, man.

It's a $3 million a day

in 14 hours.

And that was, that was more than 10 years ago.

Yeah.

So, but that's what it, and that's what it became: was like, just show proof.

It was good old-fashioned television drama, and there was no, nothing manipulative or yucky about it.

It was just like, meet these people.

If I can't show you something that's absolutely real, and they brought in their checks, their bank statements.

And that's before the FTC cracked down on proof because too many people faked it.

You know, it's like that kind of thing happens.

But if you get to be the first, you get to try things out that the first get rewarded for.

Of course.

Of course.

So you're at that stage of the game where you guys are playing a $3 million a day.

I mean, you guys are doing these massive launches.

At that time,

where's your mindset at as far as saying like, hey, if I was to lose all of this right now?

Oh, yeah.

How confident were you on building another startup?

Okay.

So there's two things there.

So here's the God God-honest truth.

Now, when you deconstruct a $9 million launch, you'd be like, oh my God, I can't imagine having that much money.

All right, let me just give you the cold, hard facts about how this works.

Let's do it.

So first of all,

I had around 50 people working for me.

So if you just say, let's pretend the average person costs you, I don't know, let's say 50, 60 grand a month, or I mean, the 50, 60K a year in a salary.

And that's a low salary, okay?

But just do the math.

Okay, I got a quarter million plus advertising plus marketing plus overhead da da da let's say it's a half million a month burn all right well that's six million bucks just to break even that's the nut baby and then i got taxes and i got insurance oh and i got merchant processing fees okay you guys have solved that but when you look at six figures plus that's going out and then Virtually all of our traffic at that time came from affiliate partners, which means we get to cut.

We're paying 50% commission.

Now,

if I'm giving someone half the money, I'm left with maybe a 20-some percent gross margin on the back end.

Okay.

You know, we're hard netting.

So the only way to keep this machine alive, guess what?

We run out of money.

About three months after that launch, I got to have another launch planned.

And I better repeat the same thing or I got to get rid of people, things, and to keep that whole thing going.

Just ask me how much of that I was keeping.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because I so believed in what we were doing, of course, I'm going to dump all my money back into the business so we can grow it and grow it and grow it.

And eventually, eventually I started, I started bleeding out of my butt because I had stage 3A colorectal cancer.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Wow.

And it was like something was wrong.

And I'm on the road nonstop every other weekend speaking and presenting, speaking, presenting the dancing bear to sell this thing.

So how do you find that out?

I literally started leaving blood spots.

So I started wearing black pants.

So, whoa, okay, so you didn't even go to the doctor, you were just obviously no, but I thought it was bleeding hemorrhoids because my dad had hemorrhoids.

I'm like, Yeah, it's just hemorrhoids.

And finally, I go to my wife, and I'm like, I got blood

coming out of my butt.

And my wife, her name's Vivian, she goes, People who have blood coming out of their butts have cancer, get in there and get it checked now.

All right, she's kind of direct that one.

And um,

I'm like, oh, shh, so I go in, the doc checks me out, and uh, he walks up up to me.

This is 13 years ago.

13 years ago.

59 right now.

So it's 46.

Doc comes out and he goes, I don't need a biopsy to tell you what you have.

You've got a five and a half centimeter tumor right above your rectum.

And if you don't get that thing cut out in a couple of weeks, you're dead.

You're a dead man in six months.

No way.

Yeah.

Wow.

So he goes, here's the number of an oncologist.

Here's the number of a surgeon.

Go see them tomorrow.

And don't be stupid is what he told me.

Because I asked him for the straight talk, right?

So I go see my doctor.

His name is Dr.

Banerjee.

Dr.

Pushbandu Banerjee.

And he goes, I figuratively and literally own your ass for 18 months.

Now you get that thing cut out of you and I'll take care of you.

And it's going to be a hard process and you should shut down all your businesses.

Now here's the here's the truth.

How can you tell an entrepreneur to shut down your businesses?

Yeah, yeah.

It doesn't make sense.

And he didn't know how effed I was if I shut it down because

I had maybe a runway of five months.

How bad were you stressing?

Enough to bleed out my butt, enough to give me cancer.

Literally.

I am drinking like a fish because I'm stressed all the time.

And it's just a

nightmare.

This is an impression.

And I don't know how to ask for help because I'm supposed to be the guru.

Tony Robbins comes to me.

Okay.

I'm such a big, egotistical prick.

I mean, some of the best tannery.

I mean, Hamosi even said it, you know?

You have to be like sure of yourself.

And some of the best entrepreneurs, they're well sure of themselves, man.

Yeah.

You know, yeah.

At the end of the day, sometimes, you know, you have a chip on your shoulder.

You build all these great companies.

And, you know, what do you do?

Too proud to ask for help.

There you go.

That's the, that was the, that was the true disease.

Yeah.

I fortunately, I belonged to a mastermind with Darren Hardy in it, um, John Asaraff, a bunch of people from Brian Tracy's group.

And all of them said, shut down your companies and live.

Yeah.

And I was like, it's going to cost me a million and a half dollars just to shut down my companies.

I'm not, it's going to wipe my

liquidity that I have.

Like, I didn't have assets that were substantial enough to wind down that business at the time.

That's the God-honest truth.

So, so at that time,

what's the next move?

Besides the survive part of the show, so I go in, I get sliced and dice.

The good news is I look down and the big fear was you could lose your manhood with the surgery like that, or you can have a ileostomy, which means a a poop bag.

So just imagine, like if they had to carve out my entire colon, you'd have a poop bag glued to you for the rest of your life.

Yeah.

That makes a part of being a man not fun if you're gurgling and slurgling and making bad smells, right?

Absolutely.

So I woke up, first thing I do, I just go,

no bag, parts are there.

Yeah.

They had carved out half my rectum, half my colon, and sewed me together.

Wow.

That's the good news.

And they give you great drugs.

I will also tell you that.

Dilotted is awesome.

I don't care what anyone says.

But

yeah.

Can't take it, but it's good when they give it to you.

But back to what happened.

I celebrated my first poop a week later, and then I started the hard ride of chemotherapy, which is a belt pack and a little machine that goes,

you got a...

a heart plug right here.

I still have my port scar with this big steel thing squirting poison into you, killing your body so you can kill the cancer mostly.

Yeah.

And then I went to Duke and I got 34 radiation treatments, which basically means it feels like you're pooping lava and broken glass for about two months, waking up in a pile of your hair.

Back at home, my number one, his name's Ed Rush, great guy, took over, became me, started doing launches while I wasn't there, and kept the machine alive.

Right.

Yeah.

So the story I told is with less than an hour of strength a day,

I decided to focus on books because Amazon had just created their Amazon book creation system.

I'm like, that's the next thing.

So I wrote a book, made it a bestseller, and when we came home, created a launch and I'm like, I'm still gray, gray and green from all the treatments and shaky as hell.

I weighed 127 pounds when I got out of there.

And Mike, do you have that book here today?

Not that one.

Because that became publish and profit, which became a whole new franchise.

So when we sold the next companies, but what did happen with that is we trained over 2,000 business owners how to write books and become best-selling authors.

The book's still out there and available, but I sold that company.

Phenomenal.

Yeah.

What's the name of the book?

That was Publish and Profit.

Publish and Profit.

Yeah, we've helped over 2,000 business owners write books, become best-selling authors, and build.

founder brands because of it.

So let's sit on this idea real quick.

This scenario, man.

I mean, turn cancer into a business.

Yeah, literally, dude.

Emilio, are you hearing this?

That's amazing good job dude i love that my man we're about to be homies after this but dude like a little bit of death man it changes the vibe dude i tell people like the the the worst scenarios sometimes is what people need in order to come out oh a good old-fashioned ass kicking's good yeah dude a critical incident right you know i use former law enforcement jargon critical incident will happen in your life and then boom you come out better you got to get punched in the face you do i see that everybody that's what it takes i think it's good old

It's good for you.

So you built up another company.

You end up selling it.

And then what ends up happening then?

Do you end up getting now?

What year is this?

Okay.

So when I sold, so Traffic Geyser Instant Customer sold around 2017.

So when I got back, I was like, I got to position this thing for a sale because it's going to kill me again.

I got, you know, the Lord blessed me.

with saving, which is, boy, you're going to die if you don't fix this stuff and fix what's up here.

So I did as much fixing as I could do, and I did get some, some, some help.

I went to something called the Hoffman Institute, which rearranged my brain in the best ways.

I did,

you know, I had access.

The one thing that this business gave me was access to some of the best gurus in the world who became my friends, who I could go to.

And I learned how to listen because cancer shut me up.

And then I built.

The company, we called it You Everywhere Now.

So it was publish and profit, how to write in a book, become a bestseller.

Speak and profit, how to speak, speak, and sell.

Create and profit, which is how to create your own information products and sell them online with traffic.

And then

consult and profit, which is how to coach, consult, advise.

Build your $25,000 a month business coaching and advising, even if you've never done it before.

And then I did one other thing called the celebrity boot camp, brought people into studios and made it look like they had been on TV or the radio for most of their lives.

Wow.

Now that became a new business that also became a dancing bear business.

And one day all my funnels broke and I said, I am done.

I can't do it anymore.

It was just too stressful.

And there's an illusion that if you have a SaaS company with recurring revenue, that somehow it's less of a pain and harder to do.

But software goes through cycles.

So do teams.

And eventually after six or seven years, man, you got to reinvent that whole thing or you are dead.

And I did not want to go out and raise money and do capital because it was either that to fix the problems that I had created for myself or what should I do next.

So I fortunately found a buyer for that.

I got paid cash, bought myself a brand new car.

Nice.

A little bit of time.

I bought a little lotus.

Yeah.

You know, just had, you know, I just had to do something fast and fun.

And then

I talked to my greatest mentor of my life now, Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach.

I've been with him 15 years.

And I said, Dan, what do you think I should do next?

And he said, well, you ought to ask people the Dan Sullivan question and DOS.

I'm like, okay.

And I'll tell you what that is because

it's the Dan Sullivan question.

So if I asked you right now, if I said, Paul, if you and I were meeting here three years from today, what will have happened personally and professionally for you to be happy with your progress?

What would we be celebrating and cheering over?

What would it look like?

So it would basically be the vision that I would have and what results I would want at that moment.

No, right now, be real with me.

Yeah.

We could schedule a date, okay?

So it's August 26th,

2028.

I'll fly you down to one of my play, I'll fly you down to Mexico or in Malaga, Spain.

I've got a couple places we live now.

You pick the place.

I'm putting you up.

And we're celebrating something huge.

What is it?

I would say the birth of my second child.

That's nice.

Dude, that's easy.

Yeah.

You don't need training for that.

No.

And what about the lifestyle may have changed?

Like, what do you, what would you love?

You got number two.

Dos niños.

Yeah.

So,

so, so, uh, I'll paint the picture, guys.

I got number one coming in three months.

Wow.

So, but number two would be a dream.

We're going to take a six-month break, work on the second one.

But then also what I told my wife, because she asked me this, where would you from California?

And she's like, babe,

do you think it's okay if we can move back to the Bay Area?

And I was like, babe, look, let me ask you something.

Yes, baby.

That's the answer.

Okay, keep going.

Well, no, I'm a visionary guy.

Remember, we're visionary guys, right?

Something bigger.

So, yeah, dude.

So I'm like, well, babe, we've been able to live life by design by going ahead.

And right now we relocated to Puerto Rico.

So, so how many people, you know, have the opportunity to work wherever they want, right?

And, you know, we only live once.

We're only getting older.

So, and the kids are only going to be the kids for so long.

I'm 37.

Baby.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I, but, but, but I'm still, you know, time flies, dude.

The next five years will be here next year.

Yeah.

So, like, I'm telling, like, we need to take advantage of this.

We need to take advantage of it now because you never know, right?

When the kids become teenagers, they're probably not going to want to leave their friends.

So I was just like, for the first five years, at least till they're five or six and they start preschool or first grade, I was like, why not travel the world?

Why not get our family so cultured?

International citizenship is the smartest thing you can do right now.

Yeah, man.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

So that would be basically my dream.

My dream is to have my little family.

Yeah.

And we're just jet-setting, dude.

And I'm still able to run my companies.

I'm still able to run the businesses.

You know, I love what I do.

Yeah.

I get fulfilled talking to people like you, man, talking to, you know, my employees on a daily basis and just building startups, dude.

Yeah.

It's, it's what I consider life by design.

That is.

Okay, great.

So here's the next question.

Yeah.

Is it okay?

I'm going to go through the process with you.

Sure.

This is what Dan did for me, and it'll be incredibly valuable for everyone here.

So then

is DOS.

So what are the dangers preventing you from making that real and making that happen right now?

What do you need in place that you know?

There's that which you know and that what you what you don't know.

That's the beauty of ignorance of fast mover quick starts.

But

what do you know for sure has to be

fixed, dismantled, upgraded, updated?

So what I know for a fact is I have to delegate better.

And that just comes with everything, right?

I believe that, you know, my companies that I've built in the past six years have done decent because I've been implemented in the day-to-days.

Meaning that I still do a little bit of the sales.

I still do a little bit.

Of course, man, you're a dancing bear.

Yeah.

I'm literally too.

I'm a dancing bear.

Exactly, man.

And that's okay.

Someone's got to figure it out, but then it's got to be systemized.

Correct.

And you you need an integrator who knows how to see your genius and systemize and SOP it and an operator who knows how to scale that.

You're speaking my language.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Right on.

And I feel like I had that in 2024.

But see, in 2024, what I tell people, it was like the best financial year of my life, but it was also the worst.

And the reason why, because I lost myself, dude.

I

like right now, I weigh about 202.

I was weighing around close to 250

in January.

Dude, well, you look great now.

You must have been fat then.

I'm glad you're not fat.

I was huge.

I was huge, right?

And, but, but here's the thing.

Yeah,

stress eating.

Dude, I was also suffering from deep depression

since.

And I didn't have deep depression until 2019 was the first time it hit me.

I was still in law enforcement.

And I was in the very beginning of this whole digital marketing journey.

I was learning it.

Russell Brunson saw one of his ads, dude, started like really integrating his teachings and everything.

Dan Henry, another one, a digital millionaire has changed my life, dude.

And I really like consumed all that.

But going back to 2024, man, a lot of dramatic things happened.

I had operators.

I had good guys that knew how to write SOPs and knew how to do systems.

But here's the thing.

They wanted to be the founders.

They wanted to be the CEOs.

Yeah, you cannot hire.

You can't hire entrepreneurs who want to be you when they grow up.

They can't be sycophants.

And I did the same thing.

I learned the hard way.

That cost me a lot of money and a lot of time.

Oh, a lot of people.

I I made the same problem.

Yeah.

And I feel like.

And then trying to get rid of them afterwards, that is some very expensive undoing.

It was.

Yeah.

It was very expensive.

Yes.

You know?

But at the end of the day, man, I learned a lot.

Yes, you did.

That sucks.

Yeah.

I mean, Amelia was here.

When we first started this podcast, man, and this is as real as it gets.

That's why people love listening to this podcast.

In the very beginning, I remember I was in deep depression.

I don't know if you remember this, Amelia, but Amelia is our producer, guys, by the way.

Yeah, he's an Australian fan.

He's awesome.

Great rig, man.

This place is tight.

Well done.

But

there was a couple episodes, man, where I was talking to other founders and CEOs and people that have done great things.

And I'm just sitting here like, don't ever become the number one.

Be the number two.

Well, here's the deal.

There's an old saying, a Hollywood saying, which is be nice to the people you meet on the way up because the same ones you're going to meet on the way down.

And

yeah, we can go so many directions with that.

But the net net is what I'm getting out of this,

the D, the dangers are I am in my own way.

I don't see what I don't see.

I need help and I need to delegate better.

I need integrator synthesizer operators.

Correct.

And I recently, one of the beauties of AI now, we,

I just did this event and the way I opened the event was I lost my number one.

And without her, I was going to be absolutely effed.

Yes.

So I talked to ChatGPT.

I created a want ad.

It wrote something that would have taken me weeks to do.

I had it posted in 48 hours and I got two people.

I hired two instead of just one.

Wow.

So my gift to you would be

people who understand phases, because here's the thing.

Those who will be perfect for you right now are not going to be the right ones a couple of years from now either.

You're absolutely right.

Unless they evolve with you.

And that takes a very, very specific type of brain.

It does.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

So the next one.

Oh, opportunities.

What are the opportunities you wish you could take advantage of, but not having these things in place are preventing you from getting there?

In other words, you know that you are in your way.

You've got to delegate better.

You've got to get higher value, higher quality synthesizer integrator operators so that you have more freedom to innovate and be what you are at your core.

I feel like

this conversation was meant to be, dude.

All right.

Because I've been talking to one of my good friends.

He's actually out there right now.

We calling plan mike and he's just like dude you got to go back to what you're passionate about and what i'm passionate about man i is is uh in 2024 my uh my third company that i was doing on the side i wasn't marketing or nothing i was just hand picking a few selected clients that i wanted to really work with and build their businesses yeah on the digital marketing side like just digital business consulting man exactly what you do right funnels and and and just being creative and getting to the deep the startup phase right and that's what i really enjoyed i i really enjoyed building people's what i like to call a million dollar story yeah like you know their story of how they were and their background and how they found their niche and what they're passionate about and then showing that to the world yes right because people buy into that yes

and i wasn't able to do it man because i had to come back and save these other companies because of the integrated i had at the time they were just demolishing it man yeah and and now i feel like i'm sort of in a rut right now like in 2025 like even though i'm very passionate about helping my mentees and working with the people i work with and still growing the company and, you know, but the money is not everything, dude.

It doesn't, it doesn't really fulfill you.

So, yeah.

You're like, this is perfect right now.

So good.

Well,

I'll show you this.

This is,

and again,

I'm going to relate to this because when I was just selling your next, you everywhere now.

Yeah.

I...

I was looking around and on the surface, if someone would be like, oh, they knew who I was through social media and marketing, they'd be like, oh my God, he's got it made.

He lives in La Jolla.

He's got a place on the beach.

He's traveling all over the world.

I wanted a bus to drive into me.

Okay.

I wanted to be dead.

I didn't have the courage to take my own life and I wouldn't do that to my wife and son.

I wanted to be dead.

I was looking for an easy way out of whatever this pain is.

That's entrepreneurship, dude.

Yeah, yeah.

So when I went through this, you know, dangerous opportunity of strengths, the DOS and the Dan Sullivan question, I wrote this book, Your Next Act.

It was really my way of saving myself.

This is this process that I'm describing.

yeah it's creating a business you love for the rest of your life built on your superpowers dude thank you it's exactly where you are um see that's that's how it happens emilio at the right time at the right moment god put somebody in

your life dude i love that thank god for dark times yeah

dude yeah i'll leave it in it when we're done i even brought a uh a marker so i appreciate that man but i i recognize this and here's here's the the big question we could go through all the opportunities you'd love to take advantage of and what i I hear is like for you to be you again, to be able to innovate and create and launch and then get out of the way so your next integrator, synthesizer, operators take over so you can create your next big dream while you have freedom of movement and freedom of family, freedom of expression.

It's time, money, relationship freedom.

Absolutely.

Okay, so here's

the last of the big questions.

So

I call it a category of one.

For

you to be the best, the only, and the most expensive at what you do.

What do you believe your greatest superpower is, your visible superpower that you wish to have accelerated and live in an accelerated superpower all the time?

My greatest superpower is just, I would say, just

seeing the deeper purpose on the reason why people do what they do.

And that's, you know, obviously we're in the business world.

We're in entrepreneurship, but it's just really extracting that story from you, man.

I mean, that is my gift.

My gift is I'm able to take somebody's complex past or story and really extract everything out of it and then put it on paper and be able to market that for them on their behalf.

And I think that's why majority of people, they loved working with me, you know, on that passion project I had, you know, which was consulting and starting their business because I was extracting their million-dollar story, man.

I was building their foundation that goes behind their branding, basically branding.

Yeah.

Right.

So I think if I'm able to go ahead and

find the right people, I'm able to then focus on growing that aspect of myself and then finding happiness, true happiness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I'll

I will tell you that

you know, seven, it's seven years ago.

It was going on eight that I had my dark moment.

And I still have them, right?

It's not like they ever go away.

Yeah.

And I was so sick of the business at the time, I was ready to walk away, start it on fire.

Thank God someone bought it so I didn't have to, but I was like, I am done.

And

that's when I started this business.

And I'll tell you right now, meeting you and feeling into you, we have very, very similar skill sets.

And that is my business is now I get to create and launch businesses with founders who've already done it before.

That's a very important thing.

It's fine to work with fresh startups, but

you have to do, it's like, you'd have to take on a hundred.

It's just like doing angel investing.

Correct.

Maybe one or two out of a hundred are going to be successful because they don't do the work and don't think straight.

Okay.

And sometimes you can't fix that level of thinking.

I don't wish to take that on any longer.

Right.

I'm past that in my life.

30 years ago, it was okay.

But now,

when you work with a right fit founder who's hungry and has a big why, which is for my family, it's interesting you went there.

Freedom for my family and freedom of expression are the two big things that I heard from you.

There are so many founders who are exactly where we are because the dark thing we don't get to talk about is our darkness as founders, how lonely it is.

And

I've outgrown

who I was, and I need to grow into who I'm going to become, even though I don't know what it is.

And I need help getting over the ledge.

So, I mean, that is precisely why I created the superpower accelerator.

It was medicine for my own problem.

And I found that my salvation comes from working with someone in transition who says, either I have to completely reinvent.

Fix what I have, make it three to 10 times more valuable, which means messaging, it's storytelling, or create a founder brand, something that I'll have.

Like Elon, no matter what, he's doing cars, he's doing spaceships, he's doing AI, he's doing social media, and you'd be like, that's freaking nuts.

It's like, nah, the guy can see through more noise and tap into signal unlike almost any other human who's alive.

He's never paid for advertising, never paid for marketing, love him or hate him.

I'd never bet against him.

Yeah.

Steve Jobs has been dead a long time.

Apple, despite the stupid that they're doing right now, is still one of the big dogs.

If you look at what Nvidia is doing, they have a founder visionary who is presentable and charismatic and leading the way.

They are the most valuable company in the world right now.

Trillions of dollars.

That's going to continue to happen as long as there are charismatic founders.

Yeah.

Always.

Oh, absolutely.

That was a long path, but I am so passionate about founder-led organizations with visionaries who find a way to express themselves and have the courage to say, it's time.

Right now is the right time for my next reinvention and to live inside my greatest superpower which is always evolving yeah no i i believe it you know i didn't i didn't start entrepreneurship mike to to have another job or to do something i'm miserable at man but

it's uh self-expression self-expression dude

instead of being a human being a being is something that does the same thing all the time Can't you be a human expression?

I think that's a lot more of a spiritual state of living to be a fully expressed human.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely, man.

Yeah.

So, Mike, let's jump into AI Accelerator, man.

Yes.

I want to talk about this because AI is the hot topic in 2025.

It's what a lot of founders are going into.

It's what a lot of people are invested into.

It's the future, man.

Yes.

So, what would you say?

Um, the what is AI Accelerator in plain English?

Remember, we got a lot of newbies that watch this.

Sure.

Who is it for?

Okay.

So, uh, here's how it started because

sometimes the stories a better answer than the answer.

Yeah.

November 20th, 2022.

That was the day that OpenAI launched ChatGPT, made it public.

And I had heard about it coming.

A buddy of mine,

I was about to sit down and start playing with it.

A buddy of mine calls me up and says, dude, have you tried out ChatGPT yet?

And I'm like, no, not yet.

I was going to do it in two hours.

He goes, meet me on Zoom right now.

You got to see this.

It's going to blow your freaking mind.

I'm like, okay.

So we meet.

And

first of all, I'm disappointed because the idea of doing AI through a chat window is kind of like the first time you use mobile text or when everyone's texting online.

I thought, oh, this is stupid.

And I can remember, you know, my reaction when you remember when you had T9 push-button phones and you had to text with TTTTT 111111.

I'm like, this is stupid, but all these kids are moving really fast.

And I know I'm missing out on something, but I don't get it.

So I sit down with ChatGPT.

And I saw what happened.

And I was like, this is the absolute future.

This is the next big thing.

It's a thousand times bigger than the internet.

I got it.

And I'm like, no freaking way is this thing slipping by me.

I'm not going to be a second late.

So that night I started going to work and building a bunch of stuff with ChatGPT.

And two days later, I did a podcast with Dan Sullivan.

I do this podcast called Capability Amplifier.

And I said, Dan, and he's 80.

He runs strategic coach, but he's the smartest, most functional human I know.

And Dan looks at it and he goes, well, Mike, it looks like you just found your next act, another reinvention because he's he's the guy who's tracked all my reinventions and i and i'm and he said you ought to go all in on this just do it i said awesome and um two days later i get a message from peter diamandis from abundance 360 and anyone who doesn't know peter he wrote the book abundance abundance 360 is they get lots of people from space academia big investors together once a year for a big event if you want to see what's happening next it's with peter he also wrote the book bold

And he said, Would you come to A360 and teach generative AI to my patrons?

These are his highest value people.

And I'm like, Hell yeah.

And so he says, When can you meet?

And I said, Dude, I'm going to be up in LA tomorrow.

I'm meeting with Dave Asprey to talk about AI with him.

And he goes, Why don't you stop by and see me?

So I had a whole presentation deck ready to go.

I sat down, I showed him some stuff, and he's like, and I was showing him synthetic videos of

some animation.

I made like an artificial hymn.

I did some stuff with some voice, enough stuff that was ready for prime time.

And he goes, you could teach tomorrow.

And I go, yeah, I go in three months, this thing's going to be really good.

So I ended up teaching at A360.

The week later, I got a call from Tony's team saying, would you go to Tony Robbins at his house and teach us Platinum Lions, which is his highest group?

I'm like, hell yeah.

So then I got a call from EO and then YPO and then it went to United Nations.

So the point is, I got on it fast.

Now, what is AI Accelerator?

But I want to at least frame that.

And then I wrote this book because it was like, okay, here's what I saw.

I think we're going to see multi-trillion dollar companies in a short period of time in the first one-person billion-dollar company like Sam Altman's talked about.

So what is it?

I believe entrepreneurship is an international language of peace and prosperity.

AI is a way to get there faster.

You could be anywhere in the world with nothing more than a phone, build and launch a full business, a software product, and a complete marketing campaign with nothing more than a phone, and go from zero to $10,000 to $100,000 to $1 million in revenue.

Okay.

We can solve the world's biggest challenges, and it's with AI.

So the vision I had with this was teach and train founders how to think in AI, how to bring AI into their companies

without the fear that I'm going to be replaced, my job's going to go away.

Because if you are smart and adaptable,

you can learn AI and you can be three to 10 times more productive than you are right now with it as a co-partner.

It's just another

workmate.

It's another tool.

It is.

It's nothing more than a tool.

Every time humans have bet against technology, they always lose.

Right.

So which one are you going to be, the loser or the winner?

Yeah.

And if you're saying this is going to be massive, bigger than the internet, man, that in itself.

It's a shock.

It already is.

It's just that

maybe,

you know,

it's over single digits.

But,

you know, probably, I think at this point, there's 700 million daily users, 750 million daily users of Chat GPT right now.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

Oh, yeah.

That's holy crap, a lot.

But using it effectively versus, you know, I always said that the worst thing about the mobile phone was,

and you can prove this by how many people use their phone while they're driving or are walking around standing still in the middle of some stuff or completely oblivious while they're supposed to be doing their job at a job.

Okay.

This thing makes stupid people a hundred times stupider.

AI makes stupid people a thousand times stupider.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

But.

A smart, resourceful entrepreneur with a mobile phone can run a $10 million company.

Yeah.

All right.

So which one are you?

Exactly.

Leverage, man.

Leverage.

What would you say is the biggest needle mover you see in the AI space coming up?

Okay.

Another story.

This is a real life example.

And I've done this a ton of times now, so I know it works.

And just to give this a little credibility, I've personally in person trained over 30,000 business owner founders AI.

hundreds of thousands, probably millions through my social and all that.

And I've surveyed well over 5,000 of them, so I've got a pretty good idea of what their pains are and what's working.

So, here's what works best:

um,

my son, who is 23,

really struggled during the lockdown with his own mental health, and he's public about it, so I'm not betraying him at all.

ADHD, the whole works, and just couldn't get moving.

Um,

so we did what every good parent does: We gave him,

we cut him off.

So he had to figure it out himself.

Yeah.

Didn't make it easy.

And, but he did come and met

a guy who I'd been working with who had a particular challenge.

And my son used AI, showed him how to vibe code, which is basically using AI to write code and products, which anyone can do this.

One of the tools is called Lovable.

Another one is called Base44.

And I showed him how to instead he used like one or two to use six at the same time to write solve the same problem.

So he prototyped a software solution for this guy and then wrote a business plan and then made a pitch video to sell it.

He showed it to him, got an $80,000 a year job and a percentage of the company.

Wow.

All right.

In about 48 hours.

Now, turns out my nephew did the exact same thing.

He solved a $25,000 tax problem by building an app that all of this guy's professionals said wasn't possible.

So I think the

most valuable thing is there's four areas to focus on how to use AI.

The first is get your time back and give yourself unique capabilities and superpowers, like writing code, writing business plans, doing pitch materials and marketing, becoming a better salesperson.

Okay, that's pretty easy.

The second is a one-person marketing team.

So I can show you an example, show your folks

on the flight here.

I'm presenting for NASA.

I've never spoken to NASA.

I'm not a scientist.

I'm not qualified, but I'm working with someone who teaches at MIT, and I'm showing them how to build and solve lunar and space and Mars problems by building software that does it at NASA.

So we built a demo.

I wrote four pieces of software on the flight here and a commercial to promote it.

And I built the system to do it.

It's not about me because someone might say, well, you can do that because you're so, no, it's like I had to start from scratch too in this new world.

But there's thinking process, there's systems.

So the answer is generalists who can rapidly prototype and iterate own the next 10 years if you use AI.

You don't need to know anything about anything.

Your credibility, whether you went to college or not, if you just learn to have a conversation with a tool and imagine and prototype, but you've got to sell it because, you know, anyone who says, hey, I've got this idea.

And it's like, it's not an idea.

It's, it's crap until someone buys it.

Yeah.

And if you can sell it first, you can bootstrap it.

Yes.

Sell the idea in the dream, have someone fall in love with you and the dream and then build it with that money and do it transparently.

And, you know, one thing I admire about you, Mike, is, you know, in the very beginning, you actually explain for my listeners and viewers,

you essentially explain the concept that I do with every single startup, especially in the info space, man, which is the beta launch.

Hell yeah.

The beta launch is so powerful, dude.

Make it up.

And yeah, it's just like you pitch the idea, well, you take the idea, you take the concept, and then you find 10.

I usually do my dream 10.

You know, I take a chapter from Russell Brunson's dream 100 clients, right?

But I shorten it for beginners, and I even say dream 10.

So I was like, just find 10 people.

And he took that from Chet Holmes, who originally came up with it.

Dude, that's just the way it goes, right?

We're not going ahead and creating something new or like what Hermose says, you know, the woman in the red dress, right?

No, we're going ahead and we're taking something successful that someone else invented and then we're just refining it and using it for our own.

But yeah, I do beta launches and then that's how I bootstrap a lot of these info products in the companies, right?

And then, you know, you're not able to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money.

That's what you guys worried about, right?

So hiccup it up, make it real.

And you do that.

That's how we sold all of our products.

I didn't finish that thought was we, when we did the product launch, then we performed the product.

We taught the product after we had sold it.

Okay.

We had the money.

So we didn't have to go out and raise the money.

And every business now, the only thing is we live in a magical time machine.

It's called AI that lets us make it real in hours or days instead of weeks, months, or years.

God, that's an advantage.

No.

So massive.

It's massive, man.

So let's talk real quick quick about your book, brother.

Yeah, the AI Accelerator.

So the core idea behind that, okay?

What's the core idea?

And then what's one practice listeners can actually try today?

Okay, good.

So

the subtitle is how to 10x your productivity, clone your smartest employees, and monetize your IP in the new economy.

So the basic premise is there's a pathway to get to a trillion dollars.

And here's what it is.

So you have a business right now.

Okay.

And in your business, you chart, you get a percentage of fees, right?

That's the business model.

And you're always racing to generate the most value, the longest stick for your clients, and the most, the highest net revenue or EBITDA, so that at some point this business is valuable enough that a certain

company or competitor would want to buy you.

Correct.

So you can live happily ever after, amen, and then repeat the whole same thing again.

Absolutely.

Right.

Or maybe get smart money invested so that you can expand and grow maybe into your next thing.

That's what every great entrepreneur wants.

Now,

that is

single-digit thinking.

So it turns out that there's one more ring outside here, which is your data.

Okay, so the data, all the transaction data that you have, that wisdom and that knowledge analyzed by AI could easily be worth 10 times the value of your company right now to a certain partner.

So buying patterns, so in-store buying patterns, and you have a very specific niche, but thinking about that, you could have a licensed product or some sort of an information product that might be really valuable to, let's say,

another kind of a customer who's a more valuable buyer, who would pay you even bigger multiples.

Yeah.

Right.

And then the third ring is your IP.

In other words, what if just for a little while we looked at, and I'm going to make this up on the fly, but this is how we make stuff up, right?

Is you could take all this data and feed it into an AI, of course, anonymize it in such a way that you wouldn't have any legal issues.

And then you'd basically say, I want you to analyze all this data and look at all the businesses that I'm doing business with.

And based on what you see, give me five or 10 ideas for products that I could make for them that they would subscribe to inside of my existing company.

In other words, you could sell your existing customers even more more valuable tools and resources.

Wow.

Okay.

So now you're multiplying the value of your IP.

So you went from like three times EBITDA to sell your company to maybe 10 times

the

value of your company to 100 times because now you've got four or five ancillary business products.

So AI is a tool that you can use to make that real.

Now that mindset of

thinking

on a multiplied level is the idea behind the book, even though I do it, I communicate that in an easier fashion.

I do it by showing you step-by-step.

Here's how to make a landing page.

Here's how to build the value of your company.

I do it with easy exercises, but I'm trying to teach a new mindset, a new framework, which is everything you see could be worth a thousand times more than you're charging for it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Orders of magnitude thinking.

No, absolutely.

And I believe I got one once I got into the info product space that I, my thinking of providing your value or what a lot of marketers like to call the irresistible offer.

Total.

How can we make it so irresistible that people just see massive value to pay you a lot of money?

for it, right?

Right.

And it's like what Alex Mosey had on his launch, right?

He just kept going with the upsells and just kept going and

going and going.

I was just like, wow, right.

Until he made $100 million

on a launch, right?

And part of that is, you know, this is what great visionary creators can do is I see a bigger future for you than you see for yourself.

Come on a journey with me.

Yeah.

No, absolutely, man.

So the big question, okay, Mike, I want to ask you, so looking at 12 to 24 months ahead, how will AI change personal branding and category creation for founders?

Okay.

So I told you the little story about my son, Zach, and how he basically created a business and a software prototype, got a job and got a percentage of that job in a couple days.

Yes.

All right.

I think

that's one example.

I'll give you another one that I did for myself, and I started talking to you about this.

So

a while ago, I got a call to go speak at the United Nations.

Now, I don't know anything about speaking at the United Nations at all.

They are not my people.

Okay.

Meaning this, what I was supposed to be talking about is AI and entrepreneurship for young underprivileged women in countries

and how to elevate their entrepreneurial capabilities.

So I'm like, and then the opportunity was, hey, Mike, I need your entire speech and your bio.

You unapproved in four hours and I need you speaking here in 30 hours.

And I'm like, how the hell am I going to pull this off?

Yeah.

So I just started talking to AI.

Now, it does so happen.

My wife has been doing humanitarian work for over 20 years in Uganda and in India.

So she knew some things about what I should do.

And we just brainstormed and I just turned on AI and I recorded the conversation, said, okay, what should we do?

But I built the entire speech and the presentation.

And in 30 hours, I was there and I presented a 10-minute speech in seven and a half minutes.

Wow.

Which is a miracle.

Yeah.

So the same kind of thing happened with NASA,

where they said, will you come and speak and talk about

generative AI to bring humanity to the moon, Mars, and beyond?

Now, if you're watching this or listening to this at home, you're going like, who cares about you, Mike?

I'm trying to tell you a story about how you can use AI to make anything real faster than you can possibly imagine.

But what I did is

I'm demonstrating to investors who are trying to figure out how to get to AI first or how to get to the moon and Mars first.

Why is that important?

It's because, A, the U.S.

wants to get there faster than Russia and all the other countries.

Okay, right now there's China and Russia are the biggest competitive threats.

There's security issues.

There's energy issues.

And there's a lot of ways to die in space.

But if we accelerate the speed to each of these places, we all benefit by better technology.

Absolutely.

So I put together

tools that are going to help students.

build software and resources to help breathe better online or in space, how to detect heart rate problems.

And I don't know anything about this stuff, but I made a guide that demonstrates how any student can solve NASA's biggest problems in a one-hour program.

Wow.

So I'm sharing that because

if you just take the time to find out what are the biggest, most valuable problems other people have, you can consult with AI to build a solution and a

and very likely get paid to solve that problem, maybe even get a part of a company.

And you'll learn skills that you don't even know you have, which the most valuable skills you'll ever learn are great storytelling skills.

Like you're a master storyteller.

It's why this company is successful.

You have a great story about where you came from, what your vision is that people have bought into.

Dude,

you're actually one of the first people to ever tell me me that.

Because most people don't understand that concept that I have met, unless they're great marketers like yourself, or you've been in the space or you've masterminded with the greats, right?

And

you're spot on, dude.

That is my gift.

My gift is I am a good storyteller.

I'm able to go ahead and resonate with my audience.

I'm able to go ahead and attract my avatar and build my tribe.

And I think that's what uh is allow me to not take my personal brand but then also inject it into several different vehicles totally you know and that that capability will give you power over and over and over again for the rest of your working life and career that you want to do that yeah yeah absolutely so you brought you brought some uh yeah uh presentation here

can we go through the presentation really i can't yeah let's go through it here's how it works so this is the the name of the presentation i'm recording this by the way for your team So they'll be able to drop it in.

Phenomenal.

So this is the opener I'm going to show.

This video was made using a tool called VEO3.

Wow.

And the tool I used to make it, like that whole animation, which probably would have taken hours or days with a traditional animation team, I did by...

making this billboard image using a tool called Gen Spark, G-E-N-S-P-A-R-K.

And I said, just make me an image with the NASA logo on it about off-world world challenges.

So these are the top ones that they have to solve.

There's really 150 major problems NASA has.

So

then

we took one of these problems, and it has to do with

respiration.

So astronauts who are off-world, and if they go into any lunar area, there's all kinds of particulates that'll get into their lungs, and eventually it'll probably kill them.

But they have to measure that.

So the best way to do it is with a tool.

So using nothing more than some prompts, and I mean really really basic, which is, hey, create a respiration app that detects how to detect if there's a problem with an astronaut's respiratory system that we can put in space.

I mean, basically that primitive.

Then I told it to make a video.

So this is the video we made using VEO3.

and Gen Spark to write the script, all of which took about two hours end to end.

And I could do it now in probably half that time.

Wow, so check this out.

With CoughSense, crews gain autonomy in monitoring their own wellness without waiting on earth for analysis it's a safety net that helps protect missions performance and lives

that is amazing so that's cough sense

that basically built a product and i put this in front of nasa uh

what's let's see

yesterday i had my meeting and they're like holy crap and i said i got three more demos to show you do you want to see the working software so this is what it looks like this was made with um

gen spark built this so basically nothing more than a prompt and it started uh writing the software so basically you can press the start recording button and it will uh begin recording and then you press the analyzing button and it figured out how to analyze the costs and then it measures um the changes

and

I mean, this is enough so we could go to investors and say, now we could polish this off because some of these code generators generators might not write 100% final code.

But back when I coded to make a prototype like this would have taken at least weeks to get to final, it'd be months and it would probably take two or three people.

Now it's being done by like my son.

So

getting back to where are the opportunities,

you can imagine solving virtually any problem and get paid for it faster than ever and build amazing businesses.

I just think this idea of make it up and make it real in moments has so much value.

And think about it.

If you had a couple young,

talented, hungry people and they just followed you around all day and you said, hey, here's a problem I really want to solve.

So I'll give you another one.

My nephew is with the same guy who started this business with my son.

He also met him at this event I did.

I do these AI training events.

And

john told him he had been trying to solve a big tax problem he had been having that was going to cost him twenty five dollars and every professional said it was impossible to not have this this thing so he told my nephew about this impossible problem who didn't know it was impossible at the time he used ai he built an app to analyze his tax statements and some other information found the twenty five thousand dollars for him in less than a week wow Now he's got a full-time job solving problems with AI that all of his other professionals say are impossible.

wow that's amazing this is

solving impossible problems is super exciting yeah it's very powerful man yeah i i i could just see the excitement on your face man and and the possibilities with this i mean i'm going to dive deep into the books that you've brought here man you got me excited about this awesome because i've been diving into it you know i just just recently just purchased you know a chat gpt profile oh i'm late to the game but at the end of the day you know at least you're in the game at least i'm in the game right?

And I'm learning and I'm just self-educating myself.

So I think it's very important.

So, Mike,

what's one piece of advice, okay,

do you want to leave for our listeners today to level up with AI, brother?

Great.

Okay.

I'm going to give you, it's one piece of advice, but three steps.

Sure.

Right.

So one of the smartest things you can do is if you have

an iPhone, one of the newer ones, it's got an action button on the side.

And I program mine to bring up ChatGPT.

So make it a habit to talk to your AI

and tell it what challenges or problems that you are having ahead of time so it can be your meta coach.

That would be the first one.

And the second one

is

get in the habit of running multiple AIs to solve the same problem at the same time.

This is the time machine mentality.

So if I were to say, I want to build an app that will help me

with some problem I have.

I forget, you know, let's say it's a reminder app or whatever it may happen to be.

I want to make something that's that someone else hasn't thought of.

That's why you want to interview real business owners who have real problems.

And you could use AI to help you identify how to write that app.

And then you can say, now build me a prompt that will create that app to solve this problem.

So

you don't have to know how to prompt AI to be a really good prompter because AI will teach you how to use it.

It'll coach you and refine it.

So then when you have that prompt, now what I do, and I have a list, I can give them to you to put in the show notes, but then I open up six different AI app generators.

So one of them is called Lovable.

Another one is Claude.

Chat GPT writes code.

Gemini, which is Google's, writes code.

There's another one I use called Abacus DeepMind.

It's super cheap.

Okay, another one is Base44.

All you do, you create a free account on each one of them.

you paste in the prompt that this thing gave you and say, now make this app.

All six of them launch at the same time, competing against each other.

And when you see one that looks good, you tell the other ones to make it more like that one.

And it's sort of like just, you know, anyone can be an expert if you're surrounded by geniuses and you're just directing a bunch of geniuses to compete against each other to make the best one.

So the world we live in right now enables enables you to be a really good producer director, which is actually easy when you got really smart people working around you.

Yeah.

And then imagine if you had someone who listened to you, found out what was challenging, went away for a day and came back and said, guess what?

I solved your problem.

Pick one of these.

Which one do you like the best?

Right.

Then you can always find a coder who loves polishing this.

That's what I have.

I've got a full-time coder who now is polishing products that I can, you know,

to put it in context, I get paid $200,000 for three days of my time to build businesses.

I charge $50,000 a day to invent things with them, but I also prototype.

So I might be able to prototype two or three apps with a founder.

And then the one we like the best, I pass that along to my coder who polishes it and brings it ready for market within about two weeks.

Wow.

This used to be six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So you have time acceleration, speed to market acceleration.

I mean, we literally can invent something and be selling it that weekend.

Wow.

That's the power of this.

That's the future.

Moving fast, inventing quickly, making it real, and bringing it to market.

And it starts with

install this first so you can talk to it, then ask it to help you, make the prompt, and then give it to six or eight geniuses who will build it for you.

Three-step process to level up with AI in 2025, guys.

That is Mike.

Mike is showing you guys how to build multi-million dollar ideas, but transform those ideas into actual businesses by using AI, guys.

And I'm going to take a deep dive in this.

In the next six months, you guys are going to see my business transformed with AI thanks to Mike.

And dude, this was life.

transforming conversation I had with you today, dude.

I'm totally thankful that you came in, dude.

Thank you.

Guys, make sure to leave a five-star review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and also on YouTube.

With that being said, we are currently top eight in all categories.

Thanks to you guys, our 4 million listeners on a monthly basis.

Make sure to follow Mike.

Mike, where can they follow you at?

All right.

It's easy.

It is my name, Mike Koenigs, M-I-K-E-K-O-E-N-I-G-S.

And that's on YouTube.

It's also on, you check out my podcast.

Oh, and here, give you some freebies.

Two books.

I've got more.

AI Accelerator, if you go to aiaccelarator.com slash free, you can get the book.

I also set up, if you're interested in just learning more about our training, it's aiaccelarator.com slash level up

and use a coupon code level up.

You get a thousand bucks off the training.

That way you can get some of this hands-on.

Love it.

This is your next act.

Go to paidforlife.com slash free.

You can get this book.

This will help you reinvent yourself.

And there's more books I've got in there as well.

Once you get in, just ask for what you want and there's lots and lots of ai resources for free you can check out too and there you have it guys make sure to go ahead and once again leave a five star review on spotify apple podcast share this with someone who wants to level up with ai to build their next business i'll catch you on the next one