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

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

It's a $3 million a day. I brought in some of our success stories. I didn't know anything about the internet. I used this thing. I literally just pushed a button, pushed a button, made 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. Eventually, I started bleeding out of my butt because I had stage 3 colorectal cancer. I literally started leaving blood spots, so I started wearing black pants. Wait, so you didn't even go to the doctor.

You were just obviously, no.

I thought it was bleeding hemorrhides because my dad had hemorrhides. I'm like, Yeah, it's just hemorrhides. I go see my doctor. His name is Dr. Banerjee, and he goes, I, figuratively and literally, own your ass for 18 months. You get that thing cut out of you, and I'll take We're going to be a reviewer that it's 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. All right?

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Vuelvo 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? You guys know I always talk about NAD, the New American Dream. I think AI ties right into that. 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 team here. They are busy. They're doing it.

Oh, yeah. We stay busy, but success love speed, man.

It does.

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 All right, we're talking about NASA. You're talking about the future of AI. We're just talking about Homozis' launch last week, man. Crushed it.

100 million in a week. That's it. Plus.

That's it, right? So the world's changing.

Very fast.

Ai I 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. You've got an amazing group of tools that can work like a team of 10 PhDs for $20 a month for you. Unlimited use. That should rock your mind.

It's absolutely wonderful what you could do with AI. I know me introducing AI to my wife, ChatGPT, just in particular, it was such a game changer for her. She was just like, Babe, I didn't know about this. This was back when we first met, but when I first introduced that to her, it completely changed her view on just writing anything. Mike, for the people that don't know you, let's do a quick intro. Tell us a little bit about what you currently do right now in your background.

Sure. The current business is called the Superpower Accelerator and AI Accelerator. There's two businesses. So Superpower 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 them or hate them, or Steve 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 us, we're going to use it. And I want to make you a better employee. I want to make you three times more 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 company is currently What were you doing before then?

So I was born in a little tiny town called Eagle Lake, Minnesota. So Trey and I connected on your team because he's a Minnesota boy, and a bunch of people here are now you. They are. That's funny. So we still say the long always, we say, you bet you. My wife worked it out of me. But all I want to do when I grew up is a severely ADHD kid, completely uneducatable. I barely passed 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-eye man's king. So I said yes, and then I learned 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 in 6 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 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. Each one of these businesses, I just figured out something super nerdy and weird because I wanted I got 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 It's a personal flaw, I might add. So that's basically it. I'd 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. I like to start little fires and keep it going. 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-day micromanage, 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 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 got a couple of 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 write who's in and also what got you into, what do they say, what got you into the desert, it won't get you to the promised land. That is true or words never spoken. Correct. That's my non-advice advice, but also relating to a 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 mannerist. 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. I 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 got a mentor, they got their parents. Did you have somebody in your life that actually pushed you through that journey?

No, I'll tell you the truth was, here's what it was, sheer terror of being poor. I've had a ratchet in my head. 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. I've always treated my time the same way, which is just get the out of the way first and then save the cream for the last part. I grew up in environment that felt poor to me, even though it wasn't really poor, but we were lower middle class. My dad was a barber. He grew up super poor on a farm. My mother- More and more. Yeah. My mom came from nothing, an alcoholic, flandering father and a bipolar mother. I mean, there was no pure blood from where I came from, 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.

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. 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 when you hear about a a triple threat, a triple threat is someone who can write a movie, produce a movie, meaning raise money, and be in the movie. 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. So just like you, right? And so that meant people would naturally follow you. Correct. I terrified of being followed. I'd be like, I don't want 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. That's the way it goes, man. It's meant to be, right?

It's totally crazy. 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 what he does. Was that an aha moment for 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. 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 no video marketing yet and hadn't figured out what was known as the product launch, basically what Alex Hormozy just did, what Russell Brunson does really well. 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 $60,000 because YouTube Live didn't broadcast for free. You paid for it, right? Yes. So what Alex Ramosi just did, we did a 14 our show, direct to camera, P-break 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, Brenda Berchard, a whole series of other people, Jeff Walker, who invented the product launch formula. 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 launch. I love that. And then that turned into events. And then that turns into products we created together, which became the new Money Masters. 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 going to risk my whole reputation. I could really screw this up badly. Better do good. Who can I bring in who's better than me and build a little army? 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 for the person. And we have a lot of beginners 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?

Get a mentor. Get a mentor. Get a mentor.

Yes, and that's exactly what I was going to go to. Who did you look, I guess, Who did you look to for mentorship during that time?

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 can talk to them. That's called ChatGPT. You can talk to at least a metaphoric version of that individual. 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 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. 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. It was zero friction. So the real answer is, 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 ride a lot of fires and break a lot of things. I burn 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. I figured out how to figure stuff out. But tech was bad in my house. 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.

Totally. 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 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 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. I made products that solved my own problem that I could sell to raise money and bootstrap to build the next thing. I love that. 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, bro. Well done.

There was one year, I remember Russell Brunson. He came out with a Bootstrap Awards, and I think it was the first year I was going to attend a ClickFunnel at that time. I think it had to be 2022. I don't know what happened to it. But anyways, I was just bootstrap. If there's actual awards for that, I was like, That's pretty cool.

That's mixed 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? It's the first one.

Am I going to lose my 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. Totally. If I'm going to miss yours. I think it's pretty cool.

Better yet, if you pre-sell, you've got 100 people who love the idea so much, they're willing to put up some dough, so you can build it. Basically, 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 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 was 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? Yeah. And we- Why, why, why? We timed it not on purpose. It was pure unadulterated luck. That's when the first big 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? I'm like, yes, it can. Now, did I really know that? I did because their stuff worked, and there was some overconfidence that could have been the ruin of me said, I know I can help you figure out how to get there. That's what the real answer was.

Like a true entrepreneur.

God, yeah. I love it. It's delusional optimism. That is truly what it is.

But you have to be, man. Totally.

There's no way you survive. There's no way. The mental anguish and pain. If your clients could only see the nightmares that go on inside your head.

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, hunting 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 then people-I haven't heard it described that way before.

Yeah, man. Well, those are true.

I'm going to just feel into that horror for a second. Thank you. No, that's good. I find that relieving. 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 product launch formula, four videos in a 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 we're making at least 5 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 is 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 used this thing. I literally just pushed a button, pushed a button, made lead capture page, did this whole SEO thing, and I sold my first website in 24 hours.

And we didn't have no gas. I couldn't even heat the water on my stove from my baby's bath. And there's not a dry eye in my studio. I'm getting teary-eye just listening to that, man. It's a $3 million a day, 14 hours. And that was That was more than 10 years ago. Yeah. And that's what it became, was just show proof. It was good old fashioned television drama, and there was 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. It's like that thing happens. But if you get to be the first, you get to try things out that the first get rewarded for.

Of course. So you're at that stage of the game where you guys are playing a $3 million day. I mean, you guys are doing these massive launches. At that time, where's your mindset at as far as saying, Hey, if I was to lose all of this right now, how confident were you on building another startup?

Okay, so there's two things there. So here's the 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. Just 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 I got a quarter million plus advertising, plus marketing, plus overhead. 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 20 % commission.

Now, if I'm giving someone half the money, I'm left with maybe a 20 some % gross margin on the back end. 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, 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, 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 you didn't even go to the doctor.

You were just obviously No, because I thought it was bleeding hemorrhides because my dad had hemorrhides. I'm like, Yeah, it's just hemorrhides. And finally, I go to my wife and I'm like, I got blood coming on 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 direct, that one. And I'm like, oh, shit. So I go in, the doc checks me out, and he walked up to me. This is 13 years ago. Thirteen years ago. 59 right now. So it's 46. That 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 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. Pushpandu 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. That it's going to be a hard process, and you should shut down all your businesses. Now, here's the truth.

How can you tell an entrepreneur to shut down your businesses? Yeah, yeah.

Does it 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. I am drinking like a fish because I'm stressed all the time. It's just a freaking nightmare. 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 successful entrepreneurs. I mean, Hamosi even said it. You have to be sure of yourself. And some of the best entrepreneurs, they're well sure of themselves, man. At the end of the day, sometimes you have a chip on your shoulder. You build all these great companies. And what do you do?

Too proud to ask for help. There you go. That was the true disease. Yeah. Unfortunately, I belong to a mastermind with Darren Hardy in it, John Assaraf, a bunch of people from Brian Tracy's group, and all of them said, Shut down your companies and live. I was like, It's going to cost me a million and a half dollars just to shut down my companies. It's going to wipe my liquidity that I have. I didn't have assets that were substantially enough to wind down that business at the time. That's the God honest truth.

So at that time, what's the next move?

Besides the survive part of the show, so I go in, I get spliced and diced. The good news is I looked 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 poop bag. So just imagine, if they had to carve out my entire colon, you'd have a poop bag glued to you for the rest of your life. 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. They had carved out half my rectum, half my colon, and sewed me together. That's the good news. And they give you great drugs. Dogs. I will also tell you that. Deloitte 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 heart plug right here.

I still have my port scar, which is a big steel thing, squirt and poison into you, killing your body so you can kill the cancer, mostly. 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. 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. I wrote a book, made it a best seller, 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.

Mike, do you have that book here today?

Not that one, because that became Publish & Profit, which became a whole franchise. So when we sold the next company, but what did happen with that is we trained over 2000 business owners how to write books and become best selling authors. The book is 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.

Turn cancer into a business.

Yeah, literally, dude.

A 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- A little bit of death, man. It changes the vibe.

Dude, I tell people the worst scenarios sometimes is what people need in order to come out.

Oh, a good old fashioned ask kicking is good.

Yeah, dude. A critical incident, right? 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 if I just want to taste. I think a good old tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, 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 Guys are Instant, customers 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. The Lord blessed me with saving, which is, boy, you're going to die if If you don't fix this stuff and fix what's up here. I did as much fixing as I could do, and I did get some help. I went to something called the Hoffman Institute, which rearrange my brain in the best ways. 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. I learned how to listen because cancer shut me up. Then I built the company. We called it You Everywhere Now. It was publish and profit, how to write it in become a best seller, 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.

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. One day, all my funnels broke, and I said, I am done. Can't do it anymore. It was just too stressful. 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. Eventually, after six or seven years, man, you got to reinvent that whole thing or you are dead. 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 fortunately, I 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. 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 got to ask people the Dan Sullivan question and Doss. 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 Mexico or in Malaga, Spain. I've got a couple of 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. You don't need training for that. No. And what What about the lifestyle may have changed? What would you love? You got number two, dos niños.

Yeah. I'll paint the picture, guys. I got number one coming in three months. But number two would be a dream. We're going to take six month break, work on the second one. But then also what I told my wife, because she asked me this, Where were you from California? She's like, Babe, do you think it's okay if we can move back to the Bay Area? I was like, Babe, let Can I ask you something.

Yes, baby. That's the answer.

Okay, keep going. Well, no, I'm a visionary guy. Never. We're visionary guys, right? Something bigger. Something bigger. Yeah, dude. I'm like, Well, babe, we've been able to live life by design by going ahead. Right now, we relocated Puerto Rico. How many people have the opportunity to work wherever they want, right? We only live once. We're only getting older. The kids are only going to be the kids for so long. I'm 37.

Baby.

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm still, time flies, dude. The next five years will be here next year. I'm telling, we need to take advantage of this. We need to take advantage of it now because you never know. When the kids become teenagers, they're probably not going to want to leave their friends. I was just like, for the first five years, at least until 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 The citizenship is the smartest thing you can do right now. You are, man. Hell, yeah.

Yeah. That would be basically my dream. My dream is to have my little family. We're just jet-sitting, dude. I'm still able to run my companies. I'm still able to run the businesses. I love what I do. I get fulfilled talking to people like you, man, talking to my employees on a daily basis and just building startups, dude.

Yeah.

It's what I consider life by design.

Okay, great. So here's the next question. 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. That what you know and that what you don't know. That's the beauty of ignorance of fast mover quick starts. What do you know for sure has to be fixed, dismantled, upgraded updated?

What I know for a fact is I have to delegate better. That just comes with everything, right? I believe that my companies that I have 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 the- Of course, man, you're a dancing bear. Yeah. I got me too. I'm a dancing bear.

Exactly, man.

That's okay. Someone's got to figure it out, but then it's to be systemized. Correct. 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, for sure. Right on. I feel like I had that in 2024. But see, in 2024, what I tell people, it was the best financial year of my life, but it was also the worst. The reason why? Because I lost myself, dude. 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 anymore.

I was huge. I was huge, right? But here's the thing.

Stress eating.

Dude, I was also suffering from deep depression. In a sense, and I didn't have deep depression until 2019 was the first time it hit me. I was still in law enforcement. 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 really integrating his teachings and everything. Dan Henry, another one, a digital millionaire, has changed my life, dude. I really 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 a CEO.

Yeah, you cannot hire. You can't hire entrepreneurs who want to be you when they grow up. They can't be sick of fans. 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 money. I made the same problem. Yeah. And then trying to get rid of them afterwards, that is some very expensive undoing.

It was. It was very expensive. But at the end of the day, man, I learned a lot.

Yes, you did. That I'm really paced.

Yeah, you're really paced. I mean, Emilio 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, Emilio, but Emilio is our producer, guys, by the way. Yeah, he's awesome. He's awesome.

Great rig, man. This place is tight. Well done.

But there was a couple of episodes, man, where I was talking to other founders and CEOs, and people have done great things. I'm just sitting here like, Don't Never 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. Yes. 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, I 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. 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 brand.

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 call him Planet Mike. He's like, Dude, you got to go back to what you're passionate about. What I'm passionate about, man, is in 2024, my third company that was doing on the site, I wasn't marketing or nothing. I was just handpicking a few selected clients that I wanted to really work with and build their businesses on the digital marketing side. Just digital business consulting, man. Exactly what you do, right? Funnel and just being creative and getting to the deep of the startup phase, right? That's what I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed building people's what I like to call a million dollar story. 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, right? Because people buy into that. 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.

Now I feel like I'm in a rut right now. In 2025, even though I'm very passionate about helping my mentees and working with the I work with and still growing the company, but the money is not everything, dude. It doesn't really fulfill you. This is perfect right now. So good.

Well, I'll show you this. Again, I'm going to relate to this because when I was just selling you everywhere now, 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. It's 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. 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.

I went through this dangerous opportunity of strengths, the Doss and the Dan Sullivan question. I wrote this book, Your Next Act. It was really my way of saving myself. This This is this process that I'm describing. It's trading a business you love for the rest of your life, built on your superpowers.

Dude, thank you.

It's exactly where you are.

See, 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 even bring a marker.

I appreciate that, man.

But I recognize this. And here's the big question. We could go through all the opportunities you'd love to take advantage of. And what I hear is 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 free Freedom of movement and freedom of family, freedom of expressions, 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 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 super powder is, I would say, just seeing the deeper purpose on the reason why people do what they do. And that's... 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. I think that's why a majority of people, they love to work with me on that passion project I had, 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? 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.

Well, I will tell you that it's seven years ago, it's 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, started 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'd have to take on 100. It's just like doing angel investing.

Correct.

Maybe one or two out of 100 are going to be successful because they don't do the work and don't think straight. Sometimes you can't fix that level of thinking. I don't wish to take that on any longer. 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, is 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. I've outgrown who I was is, 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. 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, I either have to completely reinvent, fix what I have, make it 3 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, No, 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. 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.

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 believe it. I didn't start entrepreneurship, Mike, to have another job or to do something I'm miserable at, man. But it's- 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. Absolutely, man. Mike, let's jump into AI Accelerator. 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 investing into. It's the future, man. What would you say, what is AI Accelerator in plain English? Remember, we got a lot of newbies that watch this. Sure. Who is it for?

Okay, so here's how it started because sometimes the stories It's a better answer than the answer. November 20th, 2022. That was the day that OpenAI launched ChatGPT, made it public. I had heard about it coming. A buddy of mine, I was above I'll have to sit down and start playing with it. A buddy of mine calls me up and says, Dude, have you tried out ChatGPT yet? 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 is the idea of doing AI through a chat window is like the first time you use mobile text or when everyone's texting online, I thought, Oh, this is stupid. And I remember my reaction. 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. 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 the guy who's tracked all my reinventions. And he said, You ought to go all in on this. Just do it. I said, Awesome. And two days later, I get a message from Peter D. Amandis 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 an artificial him. 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 is 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 United Nations.

So the point is, I got on it fast. Now, what is AI Accelerator? But I wanted 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 a million dollars in revenue. 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 company companies without the fear that I'm going to be replaced, my job is going to go away. Because if you are smart and adaptable, you can learn AI, and you can be 3-10 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 a tool. Every time humans have bet against technology, they always lose. So which one are you going to be, the loser or the winner?

If you're saying this is going to be massive, bigger than the Internet, man, that in itself is shocking.

It already is. It's just that maybe it's over single digits. But I think at this point, there's 700 million daily users, 750 million daily users of ChatGPT right now. That's a lot. That's a lot. Oh, yeah. That's holy crap a lot. But using it effectively 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. This thing makes stupid people 100 times stupider. Ai makes stupid people a thousand times stupider. But a smart, resourceful entrepreneur with a mobile phone can run a $10 million our company. Yeah. All right. 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 For example, and I've done this a ton of times now, so I know it works. 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 at. 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. My son, who He was 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. 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. But he did come and met a guy who had 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 use one or two to use six at the same time to solve the same problem. So he prototyped the 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, it turns out my nephew did the exact same thing. He solved a $25,000 tax problem by building an app that all all 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. That's pretty easy. The second is a one-person marketing team. So I can show you an example I'll 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 a 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 anyone says, Hey, I've got this idea. And it's like, it's not an idea. It's crap until someone buys it. And if you can sell it first, you can bootstrap it. Sell the idea in the dream, have someone fall in love with you in the dream, and then build it with that money, and do it transparently.

One thing I admire about you, Mike, is in the very beginning, you actually explained for my listeners and viewers, you essentially explained 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. Yeah, it's just like you pitch the idea Where you take the idea, you take the concept, and then you find 10. I usually do my dream 10. I'll take a chapter from Russell Brunson, dream 100 clients, right? But I shorten it for beginners, and I even say dream 10. I was like, just find 10 people.

And he took that from Chet Holmes. He originally came up with it. Dude, that's just That's the way it goes, right?

We're not going ahead and creating something new or like what Hermosy says, 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're not able to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money. That's what you guys are worried about, right?

So make 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 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. 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. It's so massive.

It's It's massive, man. So let's talk real quick about your book, brother, The AI Accelerate. 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 is. So you have a business right now, okay? And in your business, you get a percentage of fees, right? That's the business model. And you're always racing to generate the most value, the long The biggest stick for your clients, and 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. 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 an information product that might be really valuable to, let's say, another 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. 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 valuable tools and resources. Wow. Okay. So now you're multiplying the value of your IP. So you went from three times EBITDA to sell your company to maybe 10 times the value of your company to a hundred times because now you've got four or five ancillary business products. Yeah. 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. Orders of magnitude thinking.

No, absolutely. And I believe once I got into the info product space, my thinking of providing your value, or what a lot of marketers like to call the irresistible offer. Totally. How can we make it so irresistible that people just see massive value to pay you a lot of money for it, right? It's like what Alex Ramosi 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, 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, Zack, and how he basically created a business and a software prototype, got a job, and got a percentage of that job in a couple of days. Yes. All right. I think that's one example. I'll give you another one that I did for myself, and I started telling you about this. A while ago, I got a call to go speak at the United Nations. I don't know anything about speaking at the United Nations at all. They are not my people. Okay. Meaning, 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. And then the opportunity was, Hey, Mike, I need your entire speech and your bio, UN approved in 4 hours, and I need you speaking here in 30 hours. And I'm like, How the hell am I going to pull this off? So I just started talking to AI. 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.

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, which is a miracle. So the same 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, US wants to get there faster than Russia and all the other countries. Right now, 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.

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. 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.

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 prototype, 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. 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 I'm really one of the first people to ever tell 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? 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. I think that's what has allowed me to not take my personal brand, but then also inject it into several different vehicles.

Totally. 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, absolutely. So you brought some presentation here. Can we go through the presentation real quick?

I can. Yeah, let's go through it. Here's how it works. So this is 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, and the tool I used to make it, 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 Genspark, 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 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 will get into their lungs, and eventually it'll probably kill them. 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 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 the EO3 and Gen Spark to write the script, all of which took about 2 hours end-to-end, and I could do it now in probably half that time. Wow. So check this out. On the moon or Mars, every breath matters. Dust, radiation, and confined habitats silently stress the lungs. Astronauts often don't realize their respiratory health is changing until it's too late. Coughsense is a simple, non-invasive way to track breathing health over time. By analyzing coughs and voice patterns, it spots early warning signs, shifts in frequency, tone, and recovery that astronauts may not feel themselves. With CoughSense, crew 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 CoughSense. That basically built a product And I put this in front of NASA. Let's see, Timothée is a day. 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... Gen Spark built this. So basically nothing more than a prompt, and it started writing the software. So basically, you can press the Start Recording button, and it will begin recording. And then you press the Analyzing button, and it figured out how to analyze the coughs, and then it measures 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 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 probably would take two or three people. Now it's being done by my son. So getting back to where are the opportunities, you can imagine solving virtually any problem and get paid for it 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 was 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 $25,000. And every professional said it was impossible to not have 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 $25,000 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. I could just see the excitement on your face, man, and the possibilities with this. 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. I just recently just purchased a ChatGPT pro, finally. I'm late to the game. But at the end of the day, At least you're in the game. At least I'm in the game, right? I'm learning and I'm self-educating myself, so I think it's very important. 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. All right? 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 mind 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 I want to build an app that will help me with some problem I have. I forget, let's say it's a Reminder app or whatever it may happen to be. I want to make something that someone else hasn't thought of. That's why you want to interview real business owners who have real problems. Correct. 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. Chatgpt writes code. Gemini, which is Google's, writes code. There's another one I use called Abacus DeepMind. It's super cheap. Another one is Base 44. 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 like just 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 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. To put it in context, I get paid $200,000 for three days of my time to build businesses. I charge 50 grand 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. 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 multimillion dollar ideas, but transform those ideas into actual business by using AI, guys. I'm going to take a deep dive in this. In the next six months, you guys are going to see my business is transformed with AI, thanks to Mike. Dude, this was a life-transforming conversation I had with you today, dude. I'm I'm so 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 Koeniges, M-I-K-E, K-O-E-N-I-G-S. 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 aiaccelerator. Com/free, you can get the book. I also set up, if you're interested in just learning more about our training, it's aiacelerator. Com/levelup. 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/free. You can get this book. This will help you reinvent yourself. And there's more books I've got in 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 Alpha 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.