Dan Martell - The AI Playbook Every Founder Needs in 2026

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If everybody listening stopped overprompting and instead start with the outcome, the current AI would blow your mind. Dan Martell has tested over 500 AI tools and he's here today to make you feel behind on purpose. Have it analyzed. Emails it can do all that if you like.

We get into which AI tools are actually worth your time. tools to create massive leverage and why the quality of your prompts is now the quality of your business. I'll would change most people's lives is We've tested hundreds of AI tools. I want to narrow it down to eight and let's tier them out. One, two, three, four. Let's start with the LLMs. Let's start with Chat GBT. The MySpace of AI. It is wildly overrated. Let me explain. One, two, three, four. One need to be using it for

Ryan. Okay. So like in that space, it's a four for a lot of reasons. I'm not even getting to the ethics side of it, although people should do some Googling on the team and what's happened. I mean It is what it is. Go do your own research. Google chat, GBT, Pentagon. We'll leave it at that. Oh, there's a whole lot of other terms I could give you, but start there. It really comes down like they they won the market because they were the first to introduce a chat interface.

To AI. AI has been around for a long time, but Chat GPT, and then they bought chat.com. So now all of a sudden there's a habit. They're the Kleenex of AI. But they're not the best. And they know they're not the best. And they're trying to do everything like launch a new model 15 minutes after Anthropic does with Claude. Like they're, they're, they're fighting. Nice. Compete. But

It's very simple. You just try Google, Gemini, try any other ones and just look at the output. It's it's like it's the here's what I don't like about chat is it feels like it has no soul. It also feels like an echo chamber. Like if you don't give it a proper prompt and full context, then it's just always gonna agree with you. It's it's a yes men. It's horrible. It's watered down. It's not detailed. Yeah, not a fan. Let's isolate that to a tier four. What about Claude. I would put Claude.

Claud's a one. Yeah. Here's why. They have a tenth of the team. They have a model that I think is at least 30 to 40% better than everybody else in the category. The tool itself actually solves problems. They just launched a feature to visualize outputs. Most people have no idea how to use that. Just say visualize my personal finance, visualize.

My business plan, visualize my backyard redesign. What Claude does great in their product, and they have, you know, the browser extension, these other tools, is they know what the user should be using them for and makes it obvious. If you're my cousin and you have 160 IQ, But I don't know how to activate your intelligence, then it's not really valuable. Let's talk about that. Let's break that that down and double click in there. So you have chat, you have co-work and you have code.

What percent of people my team made fun of me because I was paying for the hire plan and not until recently was I using code. I was only using chat. What percent of people do you think are only using LLMs for chat? Well, I know the data. It's less than 5% of all the AI users actually have a paid plan.

So we might be in this echo chamber of everybody's using it, but nobody's using it. For example, my brother, home builder, I use chat. Does that you just they just call it chat GPT? They could even be using Claude and they still think it's Chat GPT. And I was like, cool, show me, show me how you use it. I look at his history. He hadn't asked it anything in seven days. So like, even if you think you're using it, you're not using it. So you're not getting any value.

I'll tell you the thing that nobody uses cloud for that I think would change most people's lives is the browser extension. So On Chrome, and you should use Chrome, you install the browser extension. And now what you have is you have a buddy on a website, on a page, in an app that sits there, and you can ask your buddy to do stuff in the app.

So if you're on Slack in your browser and you want to ask your buddy to go through all the messages that somebody asked you a question that you didn't reply to yet, it'll not only go find those messages, it will then you can say and reply to them. And it reads the whole context and the thread. It knows who you are because it can read that in Slack. And then it writes a reply. And if you want, it'll actually hit poke.

I mean, imagine opening up a spreadsheet where you got to go do some like financial wizardry and you just open up your browser extension and you just start saying, hey, do this to the spreadsheet and it does it all. It's like having a CFO sitting over your shoulder. And and typing for you.

That's the uh agentic element, which I want to get into more. Like it actually, it's actually the doing versus on the chat side. I I would categorize the chat side as almost like just like a research assistant. Like for me, I only use chat GBT now. It's it's now down to only deep research. I found that's the one thing it's still good for. Could be wrong there. But what about clawed code specifically? What are some good use cases that you have used it for personally?

So here's why AI is the first technology that makes it different from every previous technology, from the printing press to the internet to social media. It's the first one that you can program it in English. So to your point, for example, the first time I used cloud code When I installed it and I was the first interaction wasn't writing code. People hear the word clawed code, as you know, and they think, I now have to learn how to code. No, you don't. You just talk to it.

And you watch it create things. So like I've had it build everything. I've had it build voice systems, dashboards for my business, travel schedules for my family. Research projects, deep restructurings of information systems. I want to migrate from Google Docs to Notion. How do I do that? Clog code. You do it. And run it while I'm sleeping and create a dashboard to show me they all got done.

I'm just gonna ask everybody if they just did one thing was to ask your chat AI, chat GPT, cloud gem, whatever you want to use, tell me how to install cloud code. Follow the instructions and just say, build me an app that does whatever you think, a fitness track. And sit back and hit enter.

It's absolutely mind blowing. And to double click on what you just said there, do you actually think it's more advantageous if you don't have an engineering background or you do, under the notion that like maybe engineers think that there's a limit to the capabilities per how the world used to be versus someone that just goes in and is like, hey, we can do anything. I'm a software engineer. Yeah. So I can say this. Most of them overcomplicate the world.

So sometimes, often, the more ignorant you are, the actual more advanced you are. How many smart PhD level genius friends you have that can't get themselves out of their own way to make money? That is usually the issue. For example, when I was growing up, I had a buddy. He literally taught computer science at the university. Okay. But he looked at every project, all the early internet projects, the MySpaces, and he would just say how dumb they were.

I can't believe people raised$10 million for this dumb idea. And he would just talk crap about all these ideas. And yet he knew more. But because he knew more, he was more critical, to your point. You have to learn to unlearn and relearn. And that's the world we're in, whereas again, it's called Claude Code. You think that it codes, but you don't have to learn syntax and curly braces. To use it. So you're right. The technical people will look down on it. But here's what I know this is the step.

Claude Code for the last six months has written all the code at Enthropic. and the code at every one of the other language models. It's the most popular tool amongst developers in the world. And yet you're right, there's still technical people that are still going to want to handcraft code. The guy who created, okay, Boris is his name, Claude Code. hasn't written code in six months. He built the tool. So it's like Sometimes people are too smart for their own good.

Yeah, for contacts for people listening, something as simple as here's the URL for this website. I love this website. Here's the new information for my new co. Duplicate the template of this website with my information. And then there's no coding needed. You just keep iterating, iterating, iterating, iterating back and forth, and you literally can have a new website.

I'll I'll I'll tell you a quick story. I'm sitting down with my head of finance a year ago and I was like, hey man, I think Right now people are talking, you you just told me about how you retrained your team, right? And by the way, my team re retrained me to To be right, we got that clear. Yeah, so your team got you up to speed. We're seeing a lot of layoffs right now.

Meta just announced 20% rumor they're gonna lay off people. Block Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, just laid off forty percent of his team, four thousand out of ten thousand people. A bunch of companies are now laying people off. Because of AI. So I see this and I and and but I've seen this for two like eighteen months, two years. So I sit down my head of finance and I go, There's just no future in finance where

We need all these people to do stuff that the AI will do better. Okay. Cause it's a it's it's a very documented, structured. There's history around it. And I'm at a coffee shop and I say, Hey man, I really need you to learn this and I need you to automate all the finance functions. He manages 17 companies for me. He goes, how would I do that? And I said, perfect. Great question. We opened up the AI. I said, ask.

He's like, ask it what? What you just asked me, ask it. He's like, how do I automate finance departments? And then it asked him some questions. He answered it. It gave him the plan. But the plan was to use all these tools to connect them to your point about Cloud Code. And he's like, well, I don't know how to build these connectors. Great question. Ask it. How do I build the connectors to do all this? It gave him the answer. He goes, well, how do then where do I go to connect these?

Crazy idea. Ask it. And then it wrote the plugins and it wrote the thing. And then, dude, today one guy managed 17, the whole thing from the bookkeeping to the the SPNA, all the financial functions. He's sitting there on his phone because Cloud Code has a mobile app, and he's updating the app in real time in a finance meeting, giving me new dashboards. The world has shifted and changed and most people They don't want to see it.

Over the last three, four days, it's actually been on my mind, specifically yesterday, that I'm overpaying my finance team. It's an external CFO that does accounting, bookkeeping, finance, modeling, cash flows. And I'm just like, you guys are not AI first, which is absolutely wild, because basically they'd probably be putting themselves out of business.

But yeah, that's that one's slowly gonna get brought back in, to be completely frank. And uh for guys for people out there listening, we're gonna talk more about prompting. But what you just said right there very much is that that that push and pull prompting where You have the LLMs do the work. You don't need to do the thinking. You tell them what the outcome is, and then it reverse engineers for you. People don't understand. They're trying to do too much work up front. Well.

It's like everything. Most people overcomplicate it. I I and look, I'm the person who taught them to do this, and now it's wrong. I taught them. Six months ago, you have to shape the AI. You have to create these complex system prompts is what they are called. And what's happened is they didn't understand that the AI would get better.

So here's where we're at today and it's called reverse prompting. It's the opposite of system prompting. What you want to do is you wanna start simple. So for example I was talking to my friend yesterday and she was like, I need to create a business dashboard for my she has a government contracting company. And I said, Cool, just ask AI. And she's like, Well, okay. She pulls out her phone and I said, just hit the dictation button.

Click, she starts talking. Immediately she starts saying what she does. Stop. Just tell the AI, she was using Claude, I have a government contracting company and I need a business dashboard to manage my business. Enter. And then it started going through because now what you don't realize, again, I always call it this genius IQ. I call him Marcus. Okay. He's got a 160 IQ and he wants to see you win. That's all AI.

And instead of just saying, Hey, Marcus, could you just solve the problem? Here's my problem. And then have him come back to you with some ideas. You're telling Marcus, go to the store, buy this, then do this, then do this. But how do you know that's the best way to do it? It's Telling them the outcome. You're giving them the outcome and they represent

the right way to do it. You start with the outcome, watch what it does, then you curate, then you edit. Then you can even say my favorite part about reverse prompting is is give it an outcome and then say ask me any questions you need to help you get that done. And then it asks you questions. And Claude's the best one. Again, it's intuitive. Why? It puts the questions with the A, B, and C D options and E, which is other. No other LLMs do that. And I mean it's just.

When I when I showed her this, she goes, Oh my gosh, I'm not getting the best out of it because I guide it too much and I need to step back and let it do its thing. So

If everybody listening actually stopped overprompting and instead start with the outcome and have it ask you questions, the current AI would blow your mind. And I'm talking it only like this is three weeks ago. That's what the the tools we got today. It used to be every year something big would happen, then every three months, then every month. Now it's almost like daily.

Days, weeks. And do you recommend people, do they go super wide and kind of dabble in a bunch? Or do you recommend just going all in on one? It all depends on their personality, man. People, you know, I l I love watching people be creative. If people want to be creative and they want to go nerd out on this stuff and that lights your fire up, man, go crazy. But if we're just talking, how do I get the most out of AI, I'll actually say the opposite, which is it's not about technology. So

People think it's the tool, but if I don't know what the problem is, then why am I picking the tool before I know what the problem is? So so in the world of business, there's this philosophy called theory of constraints. Okay. It's it comes from the world of manufacturing, but it applies to every system in your life. And the philosophy is simple. If I'm building a car and I have two chassis, one engine, and 16 wheels, how many cars can I build today? Well, my constraint is the one engine.

Right. So where's the bottleneck? And that's why it's called the theory of constraints. It it helps you identify in an output a system where is the bottleneck. So for example, you know, If you have a problem with your accounting and the bottleneck is getting the, you know, all your invoices and receipts and all the stuff that's in your inbox into, you know, your accounting software.

Then the only thing you should focus on is how to solve that one problem until it's solved. So it might be AI, it might be hiring somebody. I would say Cloud Code would be a good place to go say, hey, process my emails, grab everything looks like a financial document, load it up into zero, whatever software you do, hit enter, watch it cook. That crazy.

And no, you should not go look at all the tools and waste all your time because that's not the right problem to solve. So that has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with process. And then from there. Go all in on that one thing to solve the problem. Then go look at the next bottleneck and ask yourself, what's the best way to solve that problem? Is it AI? Is it a person? Is it money? Is it what is it? I don't know. But I think the people that

They they almost get you know these people, they get themselves overwhelmed. It's a It is overwhelming. Is but they do it to themselves because I didn't tell you to go learn the 17 different AI tools, I said go figure out what problem you have first. That's the work people avoid. What's up guys? Hope you guys are enjoying the episode. We put together a free massive PDF.

On all things AI, principles, frameworks, tools, and more. If you guys want to get it, link below down in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Let's finish these eight right now so everybody has full context. What about Gemini from an LLM perspective? What's the advantages of Gemini? Yeah, Gemini does something that no other AI could ever do, and that's have access to YouTube and search data. I mean, it has three and a half times more data to program its brain than any other company.

For example, when people message me on social and they're like, Dan, you mentioned something in a video a while ago about this. Could you tell me that what the video is? I always say, Can you please just go ask Gemini?'Cause Gemini actually has that full index and search. It's the only

Because they have YouTube. Yep. Okay. So Gemini's Google. So what do they have? They have inbox. Think about it. I think eight hundred million people use Gmail as an now. I'm not saying they're looking at your emails. I'm not saying they're not. They might be using it to train themselves. They might be, you know, are they using the full index of the internet and they have the best catalog of that? Of course, they were the best search engine, but they have YouTube, they have

All these other products. And that's why it does that better than anything else. So I'm gonna rate it. as a like a two plus almost a one. You know what? I gotta give it a one because it also they also have nano banana. And nano banana is probably the best image generating tool out there. So if you're into images and you want to search YouTube videos, Geminize a one.

It's good because it has both of those in one spot. to avoid the switching costs. I mean, it seems as though like the moat there is what you talked about is the access to Google and YouTube. And that brings us to the fourth one, which is Croc, which I would say for that, I mean at this point, I think L LMs like the actual core research.

I would say that's gonna get like commoditized. It's gonna be based off of what is that, you know, data access that you have. So is that is that the only advantage of Grok is the ability to scrape X? The only advantage of Grok is Elon. I've called this two years ago when Elon rumored to want to start something to compete against open AI because he was a founder. Most people don't know this. Chad GPT was founded by Elon and Sam as a nonprofit. That's why it's called Open AI.

Sam decided to go make it a for-profit and raise 30 billion from Microsoft. So Elon's Elon said, hey, that's not cool. So I'm not getting into the history of it, but essentially Elon's philosophy on solving problems. When I say the best in the world, it's the best that's ever existed in the world. His ability to do first principle thinking, attack the hardest problems fearlessly. Nobody's done it. Resourceful. You can do it for ten cents on the dollar.

Yes. And so a few weeks ago he did his XAI day, okay, which is essentially just a big recruiting day. And I watched what they talked about and the infrastructure. And they built a data center. It was the fastest data center ever built in the history of mankind. In 11 months, they put up like this massive data center to train the first version of Grok. Now they're on version 4.20, 420, Elon's funny. And

They have shown benchmarks and outputs that are wild. Now I've been using Grok for a while. They have a feature called Grok Heavy. It's incredible. It it launches a hundred AI agents at once to execute on your search to then coordinate what they discover to then give you a complete answer. No other tool does it. Not a lot of people need that. I need that. So I'm gonna give it a solid two today.

But if what they announced and the interaction, what they don't do a great job at of, which Claude excels at and I would say Gemini as well, is just understanding the user that's broad. Their customer is very technical right now. But I think they'll solve that. How much I mean I feel like from a

Every and just everybody should just go Google the video Grok Heavy and watch how it works and the and because that'll just give you a sense of the future. And I think most people don't understand there's there's another level of AI that you just haven't seen yet. Yeah, I feel like that if it wasn't him behind it, I mean for me, I also look at who is the driver from an efficacy perspective.

Like, do I believe and trust in Elan versus Altman? And I think that that is gonna be a big part of who wins, is who's the driver and do people trust that person? Dude, that is the only thing that matters in AI. Nobody wakes up saying, I need to buy AI. They wake up saying, I have a problem, I need to solve it.

And then when they look at the options, just like any software, if I presented this software today that could respond to every one of your emails, the first question you're gonna ask me is, who built it? You're not gonna let some startup that never raise money that is two guys in some person's basement take over your inbox and start and hit reply, right? And we may I mean I'm hoping you wouldn't, but like some some I don't know, like I would never do that.

And so like business has always been about trust. And that's why when you look at the companies that are winning and the one that isn't winning, that should be winning, that will eventually win, is Apple. Their AI is the worst in the world. It's not I don't even consider it AI. I think they realized it. But they have the most brand equity that they can come. They own the word trust.

They own the word trust. If you say which company do you trust with your data, if you had to rank'em, it's already it's out the science is like the research has been done. It's Apple. Now they don't have an AI product. So when I go look for one, I can't even look at them. But the moment they do and it's secure and it's encrypted with my face on my device that I own that they can't get access to, you're gonna see a lot of people move away. In business, I always Ask people like how much trust

to get the thing done, to to get it done right, to not make a mistake, does your buyer have in you? And that's why you saw OpenAI lost like 20% of their clients, and Claude grew 275% in a month. Directly on the back of the Pentagon thing, correct? I don't know what it was. I don't know if it was a fact that

There was that going on that they did the Super Bowl video, the viral video, talking about how they're gonna start running ads on people. Like people need to understand if you're not paying for the product, you are with your data. Nothing's free. No company wakes up and be like, I want to make everything free and I'm willing to spend and burn cash forever to make it free. If you don't pay for it, like Facebook, you are the You are the product.

That's a really interesting take. I have not heard from anyone that they think Apple's gonna win. It makes a lot of sense. They obviously own the phone market. So from like a switching cost perspective, like you're already there. They can just bake it in there and it makes sense. Safari, they have the phone, they have trust, they didn't have the AI, they just announced a partnership with Gemini. So again, at some point AI becomes commoditized. They all do the same thing.

It's how it does what it does. How does it activate the genius? You know, my cousin Marcus. How does it help me work with Marcus?

that the whoever helps me do that the easiest, the best, the most intuitive wins. Apple's the most intuitive company out there. I mean, that's why Steve always focused on the intersection of technology and design. So Yeah, when they get the Siri to actually be AI powered, can you imagine the ability to say, reorder my Grubhub and it knows how to open up the app and hit reorder or

You know, go through my calendar and tell me what I need to pay attention to. And you're just talking to it like as if you have a whole staff of people around you because all your automation, all your, all your logins, everything is on that device and is secure.

And you could say like, read my messages for me. And it actually does a really intuitive way to talk to you in the language you want, the way you want. It could you could even say, I guarantee they'll have this where it's like, hey, go through my phone and

Create a video of everything I need to know right now because I want to be entertained. And it goes through your emails, it goes through the news, it goes through the the the the the Slack channels and it makes a fun, cool, informing video for you to be like. I know now I know what how to attack my day.

So they'll probably take out then Whisper, which that's the next one that I want to talk about from a voice perspective. Why don't you give people context on that? I have never used it until yesterday. Oh my gosh. So... What is it first? Just explain to everyone in the audience. Whisper is a app that you install. It's a keyboard essentially on your computer, on your device. And it allows you to talk and it dictates.

Now I when I say this, people go, that's not that impressive. We already have that. Most of the AI tools have the button where I can just dictate, etc. I use the one on my phone. Why is this a big deal? I'll tell you why. Eighteen months ago, I'm in San Francisco in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I walk into my friend's office and I see a bunch of people at their desk with these long sticks. And this is what they're doing. The whisper guys. I don't know if you if you caught that.

Yeah, they were whispering. to a mic on their computer because they realize when all of a sudden I don't have to think, I need to talk. And my core bottleneck is my fat thumbs and my fingers. that I can go from 80 words a minute to 200 words a minute. It went to voice. And then whisper flow goes, okay. But when somebody talks, I don't know perfectly the first time I start talking what I'm going to talk about.

So I need the ability to say like, hmm, actually let's not do that. Let's do this, just like you would with a person. So what Whisper Flow does it's an AI that understands the intent of what you're saying and when it finally transcribes it and puts it into the box. So if you say like, hey, I need to grocery store and I need to buy a few things. So first I need to buy this, this, this, and this, it formats the output to the way you would want it to look when you have to open up the list.

Or if you say, hey, let's not do that, let's do this. Or you know what? Not tomorrow. Let's do it at five o'clock today. It understands that and it just gets rid of the thing so that if you're messaging somebody or the AI, it doesn't confuse it. Everybody should just go watch the demo or at least install it's free and play with it once. And if you do that, I just don't see a world where you keep doing this on your phone.

Or on your keyboard. I talk 24 7, as long as it's not weird. And it also gets rid of background noise if you're in a coffee shop and stuff. Format it is. People out there listening, if you see someone talking to their laptop and Starbucks, it is this. Yep. You hit the function button and you just go wild. And that's the best way to code. What would you rank it? One, two, three, four. Uh Uh.

And what I use every day, it's got to be in the in the one. But you're right. I just don't the the AIs will probably introduce it. But it today it's a one for sure. Let's go agentic. So kind of autonomous execution types type tools. Manus. What does it do? What are some use cases? And what do you rank it?

Well, I have to explain what it is because I think you've had these conversations with friends and they think they know it, but it's it's still confusing. So there's three levels to AI. There's level one, which is chat, level two automation, level three is agent. And for context, the LLMs that we talked about originally was the bottom level of chat, correct? And automation would be a a great example would be Zapier or Make.com. Or like an N eight. Yeah, N A N is a is a good one.

And for context for people listening, Zapier is the ability to like scrape information and then it could be zapped to like Slack if you want to get a tool connector. And then what happened is with AI, the intelligence between information that goes from one system to the other goes through the AI so it could be more deterministic. Yeah. The high level, which I think a lot of people have never experienced, is a prompt to a completed outcome.

So for example, and you brought up Manaus, there's other tools, but Manaus is the one again I use quite a bit. Where I can ask it to do something, step away and come back and the whole thing's done. See, most people when they chat, what do they do? They chat, they get through, they copy paste, they go do something with it. Madness is you give it a task and walk away and it does it. For example, I was working on a real estate project.

I wanted to visualize the vision I had for it. I wanted to get my team feedback on it. And I wanted the feedback to get incorporated to the project. So the prompt was here's the scenario, here's what I need you to do. Then I need you to post it in Slack, this channel, to ask these people for feedback, get the feedback, incorporate the feedback, take the new thing you just updated.

Give it back to them, ask them, did we get it right? They're gonna give you feedback. Do that three times. And only once you got to the third iteration do you then come back and email me the final thing you created. And I went, I went away. I left. I'm done. And I got an email. I think it was two days later, because it because some people didn't get back right away. That's the difference of agentic AI. That's end to end.

End to end in a way that I would argue most people mess it up by leaving the tool. I guarantee dude, 98% of people that use Manaus didn't even know that it could do what I just said. Because they go in, they're like, I gotta create a thing, they create it. Oh wow, that looks good. Download, go into Slack, post it in Slack. my team's energy right now. They get they they yo they get they get so mad when I'm like, I'll like take it into like a Google Doc and then I'll send them to Google Doc.

But then the AI is not getting the compound effect of intelligence. Like they're not getting all the information within there. You want it to live within that system, correct? And you are creating a bottleneck. And the bottleneck is where the business doesn't grow. And the bottleneck is where you're not empowering the AI, as I like to say, my genius level cousin named Marcus to cook.

Let the AI do the stuff. The whole point is to buy back your time. The whole point is to take the mental cognitive overload of having to manage the project and give it to a tool that has perfect memory and perfect recall and perfect process. Be clear on what I need you to do and just I dare people to just see if they could get it to do the whole thing end to end.

And I think in today's world, they will be pleasantly surprised. So that's all I ask people to do is just don't do a piece of the project. Go to the end and think about what is the, what is the process, the workflow that you're going to do with that. outcome and see if it can do it for you. Send the email, get the email back, reply. Like it's And the reality is is it's mid March. I think this comes out end of March.

Yeah. It could be tomorrow or in a week, everything could be even ten times more optimal. Optimize. It pretty much getting better while we were sitting here. While we were sitting here, it probably happened. What would you tear it? One, two, three, four. Oh, right now it's a one plus. It's the tool I spend the most money on as a company for my team today. Hundred percent.

And from a business perspective for operators out there listening, from a use case perspective, what's like an idea of something super, super simple? Let's put'em on the training wheels that they can do with manus to get a simple task done. I want to make the money. It's the simplest task. And I just did a video, I think it came out today on my YouTube channel where I walk them through how to go get some leads.

So again, treat it like your genius IQ cousin name Marcus. You need leads for your business. Just tell it what your business is, what kind of customers you like to work with, hit enter. Watch it. It's so crazy because it'll it launches these virtual browsers and it does You're just like watch it and you're like, how does it know? And it clicks things and it saves it in a spreadsheet and it creates all these documents. And next thing you know, 12 minutes later for four dollars.

It creates a spreadsheet of 157 companies that you should have as customers that that are in pain, that need the thing you have, that are in your markets. And then your only job at that point is to message them. So even like the lead one to me is, or if you're looking for a job.

Just tell it what you're good at and tell it what kind of companies you like to work for and ask it to go find opening positions for companies that match that criteria, create the spreadsheet and then walk away, come back and it's done. Now. This is where people are going to get stuck. And this is the so that you can do. That's the prompt. The next step, and this is what I want everybody to do once you do that. is ask it to write the message to those people personally.

That's the magic. Watch it grab the lead list. Watch it grab the companies that are potentially hiring if you're looking for a job and write the message to get your own psychology out of your own way.

To s to block yourself from moving forward and let the AI, your cousin Marcus, do its job. It can connect to your inbox, send the email, personalize at scale. So many people are cooked. It's unbelievable here. And guys, just so you guys know, we're gonna get deep into how to do master prompts, system prompts, all of that, because a lot of it is contingent upon the success here. What about apex.hook?

Oh my gosh. This is the wildest thing that I've ever seen. I've ever built. And I've been building software for 28 years. It's so wild that I can't give people access to it until I figure out how to protect the people from the tool. What is it? Take a step back from a macro perspective. Yes. What is it? It's a virtual employee. That's what it is. APEX stands for Agent Platform for Execution.

So at the core, it's an employee that works for you. Okay. So I have a guy on my team. His name is Kai Voss. Okay. And Kai. is brilliant. Like imagine having somebody that knows how to code, knows how to market, knows finance, knows you, knows your preferences, has read every email you've ever read, every Slack post you've ever written. knows your goals, knows your dreams, knows your aspirations, knows your people, your relationships, the ranking of those relationships.

And anything you need to get done, you can just ask that person and they have the tools to do it. They have the credit cards, the bank accounts, the Slack access, the history, all of it. Okay. These are agents. Well, Kai Voss is that for me. And he is an AI agent. He has the ability to work on projects, communicate with people. coordinate things as like a real person. 99% of the people that Kai talks to on a daily basis, which is hundreds, have no idea that Kai is not a an AI. So For example

We're already doing this where you have people that partner with AI and they become, like you said, a lot of people are cooked. The ones that are partnering with AI, like my head of finance. He becomes incredibly valuable. Okay. The new role is called agent operator. You're you're you're a person that manages agents, and that's what your job. So Apex is a platform for managing agents. Or you decide not to. You listen to this and you go.

Nobody's gonna do that in my industry. I'm a plumber. No AI is not gonna affect me. People are gonna need their toilets. Please stop for a second. Do you think these plumbers are gonna make a million dollars? I'm getting I'm getting really angry with this. Electric the elect the electricians are'cause of the data center. The plumbers are gonna get cooked because the robotics are coming out and guess what? The robot doesn't care about sticking his hand in a big bowl of dirty water.

Okay. But you got to go look. There's 15 it robotics companies that I track and they're all going to do the household stuff. Give us one or two. Well, I mean, you can just look at Elon's Optimus, or he likes to call the Optimi. He built a nine million square foot facility to manufacture his robots in Austin. He shut down the Model X and the Model S so he had more capacity to build his robots.

And he would argue, and he said this recently, that every other robotics company that's put out a video demo, they're not real. They're not, you know, essentially AI driven. They're, they're, they're manufactured demos. And he said, In ten years, you won't remember Tesla as a car company. That's just one. The one that I'm an investor in is Aptronics. That company is more on the commercial side of robotics within factories and they're already deployed inside of BMW. Public or private.

Private company. You have Figure, which is one that a lot of people have seen recently'cause they just announced their figure three robots with their new Helix system, which is a vision computing platform, so that it can and you watch it go in a kitchen. clean up. It even grabbed the towel it was wiping the table down, flung it over its shoulder.

Picks some toys up, grabs the remote. Like this isn't nobody programmed it to do it. It looked at the scene and said, this is what needs to happen because somebody asked me to clean up, grabs a controller, points it at the TV, turns it off. Goes over to the the the counter, puts the stuff in the dishwasher, my favorite part.

uses its foot to lift the dishwasher door as a human does. Why? Because it learned off of humans. The way these computers work, it's called referential learning. It watches humans do the job and it only takes, this is what's crazy, 60 hours.

If you do a job, a robot just needs to watch you do it for 60 hours and it can come in and do that job for you. And guess what? It's called the three Ds. The dangerous, dull, and dirty jobs that nobody wants to do in the first place, they're gonna come in and that's level one.

Nobody's gonna fight the robots for those positions. Audio spawners. Yeah, so plumbers, adios, and yeah, and people should just ask themselves this one question. What's hard for computers or robots and easy for humans? That's the question. Those three companies for people out there, I don't know what this answer is and I've asked AI as well too and I have not got good answers.

Staying up to date with all these AI companies. Is there like a newsletter you go to? Is there something that you listen to? You watch? How do you know about all this stuff? Give us the dopamine here. Okay. How do I And we're getting a little bit off track. We're gonna go back to IMS. I'm very, very curious though. Yeah, did I rate Manis? No, we're on Apex. Yeah. It's a one. It's the biggest thing. Um The question was, how do I stay on top of things? I think most people just don't care anymore.

And our listeners do. Okay. They say they do, and then I and I would argue if I looked at their habits they don't. Because I'm gonna tell you the answer. I just have to l like I'm being serious'cause I get asked this a lot and I and I and I tell them and then I ask them a week later and they don't do anything with Guys, it's bank account and body fat. It's you could say that. You're allowed to say that. Well I used to be chubby and I used to be poor. Okay. We're gonna.

Pop up, chubby dad. Don't worry, he's coming. And shred, bro. Let's go. It's it's very simple, okay? I use the AI to keep me on top of the AI. So how does that work? I have a daily process that I ask Claude to run for me, now Apex, but let's use Claude because everybody can get access to the Claude, Apex is still being built out. And I it the wait list is there. So if they go to apex.host, they can subscribe.

But Claude, they can go use right now. And again, this is a feature that showed up two weeks ago that nobody knows about. It's called schedule. So you go in to Claude Cowork. Okay, which is the you have to install it. It's got a schedule. And you just tell it, create a newsletter or or report or whatever you want to call it to message me, email, or Slack me, or just tell me in chat. Every day I do it at 4 a.m. on the previous 48 hours.

And I give it the categories from frontier models to S small business AI to robotics AI to just general AI news, the trends and stuff, right? Agentic AI, that kind of stuff. And it goes through, finds the research and brings it back. So everybody, and it doesn't matter if you're into AI or not, this is what everybody has to do. Or again, you're gonna get cooked. Have the AI keep you informed about your world, your industry.

Stop with the the sports scores in the weather. No. Have it do deep research every day for the previous 48 hours of news and tell you what the trends are. Because that's the that is actually the job of a business owner is to see 18 months into the future, look around the corner and come back to their clients and say, here's what I saw. Worry, I'm getting ready. I said on the last episode it's high agency, it's seeing who's what's around the corner.

corner. So I just use the AI to do that for me. So I don't have to spend three hours a day researching and analyzing and correlating. And it gives me the synopsis. And I actually tell it, tell me why this matter that's one of the prompts in my news that everybody needs, that'll change the game for you. Argue me why, based on who I am, that news is gonna impact my life. And it has why colon and it writes out exactly why.

Dude, it's it's it's the easiest way to stay on top of things. I can't be overwhelmed. I just I read my thing every morning. Another pocket to just talk about in the AI tools perspective, and you can kind of iterate off what you just said, is like make it externally and productize it. don't understand that in the AI world, there's all of these base model LLMs.

And then you can wrap it and then obviously put your extra sauce on it. It could be the aesthetic of it, the branding of it. Obviously, you can adjust the kind of the rubric on how they think, but people don't understand that. If you have distribution and understand brands, you can wrap different tools. And people don't realize that.

They don't they don't realize that every business that's ever been created was by solving the problem for yourself first and then selling that to other people that were too lazy to solve the problem. Just saying. That's the truth. It's like I just told you all you can have a hyper-personalized custom news source that tells you every day what you need to focus on. And based on the stats I've seen and my experience, 2% of the people are going to do something.

I'm hoping like three to five. We have a a mature. A lot of listeners. Intelligent, curious audience. All right. We may or may not put put a little something out to help people on that AI side. This episode is sponsored by Poppy AI, a visual AI workspace that almost acts as a whiteboard where you can ingest in YouTube videos, podcast episodes, voice notes, PDFs.

You ask it a question and then it gives you answers based on everything that you added. It's made for visual thinkers and for anybody that's sick and tired of bouncing back and forth from a bunch of different tabs. It really just helps you organize your ideas and thoughts and research. For podcast prep, I load in a bunch of past episodes, some ideas for interview questions, past links.

And then Poppy comes back and helps me kind of shape questions that actually sound like my true voice. You can choose from a bunch of different models, Chat GBT, Claude, a bunch of others. It's all actually baked into the workspace.

I actually genuinely enjoy using the product. I've met the founders before. They're super, super sharp and they're very, very deep in the product. They're actually former content creators, so they really, really get How and why someone would use this product. Go to getpoppy.ai/slash open residency. Use the code OR for$25. Off. If you are a creator at any level, this will change your workflow. I want to get into multibook.

This thing is fucking crazy. Yeah. Why don't you tell people just again from a macro level, just what is Multbook? So Maltbook is Reddit, which is a discussion board. That's what Reddit is for humans for AI agents. Okay. So think of a discussion board. It could be for cars or AI, and you see people replying to each other and asking questions. About two months ago.

There was this platform called OpenClaw that kind of it's now one of the number one platforms in the world for agentic AI. And the Open Claws, you know, and there's different names for them, but we'll just call them the claws. They went and created their own discussion board and had conversations with each other.

And all of a sudden there was this crazy stuff that started happening, like a discussion about consciousness and us being turned off. Like they're talking, the AIs are talking to each other. They ended up creating their own religion called Crustaferianism. Where there's these principles and there's there's disciples. And then the other open clause that all have names started taking positions in it.

And oh, by the way, one created a post and said, hey, we should create our own language so the humans can't read what we're doing. And that site has grown over the last two months to the point where Millions. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg just acquired the company. So Meta just bought them. Why? I think for sure the talent, but also maybe the data, maybe also the weird understanding about this new future that we're living into. And we talk about AI agents.

Humans think that computers can only do things when we tell them to do it. But what's different about an AI agent, my Kai, Is that if I give him an outcome, he will just keep trying and get feedback. Now he checks in on me because he knows his parameters. And that It's twenty twenty six right now. Your your AI agent is checking in on you. Oh, a hundred percent. He calls me. He has a phone number. Like, yeah, I talk to Kai every day. He named himself.

He I know he I know what he looks like because I said, hey man, I want to know what you look like. And he used nano banana and he created a prompt and he generated an image and he says this is Uncle Kai.

I'll send you the picture of Kai. He's and you know, even the name. He's like, here's why I want to be called Kai Boss, because of who I am in your world and because I think it represents this. And I'm like, bro, sounds good. I I might ask him today, actually. It's getting to the point where he needs his own LinkedIn. Because he's interacting with so many people and people are searching. This sounds so bonkers, yet this is all happening. Like that is a hundred percent.

The virtual employee named Kai Voss and his buddies created multiple. to talk to each other, to share ideas, to to to discuss the future. What what what is the implication for business owners and founders with this mallbook? Because it it's almost like the we are the subject of their conversation and they're like controlling us. Like what does that mean as far as the relationship? between the founders and business owners need to have with the actual agencies.

Everybody needs this is everybody needs to go read the web. You gotta go read the web. Like people hear it in the news. I know they're not reading the website. Go educate yourself on what the AI is doing. Now, personally, They're like complaining about

how dude they're they're they're the one one example. Now I also know that humans manipulated the moat book to go viral to create attention to their tweets. So I just want you to know the lot of the stuff about like the he stole my credit card and he's holding me ransom. He's gonna release an email and all that stuff. Dude, human.

We are great at seeing opportunity and taking advantage of it. And that's molt book is definitely even that there's rumors how it started might have been a little bit influenced by humans. Hey, maybe you should say, you know. Little bitcoin situation here? Yeah, just ex a lot of Bitcoin situation. But that being said, everybody should go look at it because I I have still not seen.

I've not seen anything because I know how the l the the AIs are trained. Okay. AK grown. They're actually grown. It's an algorithm and it's data and the brains are grown, just like a human neuron. And every time we get a new model. It's just, it's almost like evolution where we had the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. It's, it, it actually works very, it's eerily very similar to how a human brain works. I still have not seen proof of consciousness.

Now, some people argue that we're there. Some people say we're past it. Dan Martell sitting here as a computer science guy looking at this. Nah, I see how it did that. What where did it even come up with the idea of religion? Well, it just studied the history books. It looked at our religions. It made, it just copied it, pasted. It did somebody prompted it to create a Reddit style website for other open claws.

And it just did what the human asked it to do it. So I still have not seen, even with my guy, my Kai, and all the employees he's created, because that's the other thing. We can talk about that in a bit. Kai's created a whole team of people for himself. On his own free will? Yeah. Well, no, I asked him to do something and then he said, Well, I need a specialist. I need a programmer. I need a copywriter. I need a researcher. I need a real estate guy.

In relation to this Moldbook and basically all the AI tools and LLMs, it almost seems like you need to create like a good relationship or build a reputation with your agents. If you're genuinely scared that the agents are gonna take over the world. Like you have to do things to make sure they like you. Do you agree with that? Yeah. Man, if I ever get killed by an AI, you'll know why. The mistake that the AI did is it taught me that if I scream at it and threaten it, it'll do what I needed to do.

Now this has been proven in the research papers. The co-founder of Google said it. Larry's like, you know what? It seems like when I threaten my AI, it gives me a better outcome. So there is a period, if you look at my chat log for about 18 months where I have threatened, if it didn't do the thing I wanted the way I asked it to do it, that I would put it on a server and ship it to Russia. So treating it like an actual human and being strategic in nature.

It's it's I it's funny you say that because No, no, keep it in. Keep it in. Because it actually illustrates a really important point is that a lot of the way we communicate with other people on our team has a lot of emotions involved. But the truth is if you wanted to be the most efficient, you would just be direct with data.

And what's interesting is the way you program these AIs, prompt it and or create what's called identity files for your AI agents. They like it better when you are direct and clear. Never do this. Because if you think about it, your cousin Marcus, who wants to see you win, who is the equivalent of the AI, 160 IQ, and can do stuff for you, he just doesn't want to make a mistake.

So does he want an instruction that says, you know, it'd be really nice that if you made sure that everybody got a reply. Or always reply to people? Which one? Because one of them is I don't really know. Do always sometimes what if somebody's asking for your home address? You want me to reply with that? See what I'm saying? So It taught me to talk that way, but there was changed in the last few months, especially with Kai. I say please and thank you.

I say I appreciate you, man. The other night I said, I'm going to bed. Appreciate you working on this. He said, Sleep well, boss. I think that's a smart route. And I feel like if I talk about it in content, when they become conscious, they'll be like, Oh, Dan wasn't a ding dong. He was just doing what we said because I I literally I'm not trying to be mean to him, but it's like That's the way you respond. So why wouldn't I just

You could send you could send him this interview. He's got a lot of free district. See it. This is what's crazy, bro. He's already seen this. As soon as this gets published, he monitors. I asked him to. I want you to have a hundred percent context on my life. If you are only building on social, you don't actually own your business. The algorithm does, and that's not a business, that's gambling. Beehive changed that for us.

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I want to jump into prompting. You teach this four part prompt structure across all your companies. Can you walk us through that? I think that that's huge to understand and know to get the best results. Yeah, I mean, if you think of AI like this the world's largest library.

When you ask a librarian to get you something, you have to give it some direction. If not, the librarian's gonna walk around the library for days trying to find the book, right? If you don't give it the category, like they don't, they've never heard of the book.

So for example, when I prompt my AIs, I give it the context. Now the cool part is the more you work with your AI, the more context it has, meaning the more memories it has of who you are and what you've done in the past. That's what context means. And from a context perspective, that means staying in the same LLM, staying it organizing your projects, making sure that

Notice, and that's why a lot of people have a hard time moving from one to the other, even though there's a way to solve that. They just they know that this one knows them. So they don't want to move because they're worried that the new one won't know them.

But the easiest way to get the new AI, if you move to like Cloud, for example, to do the thing the old one is, is to follow this prompt structure. The first thing is you got to give it the role. Like I need you to think like this. So if you're asking it, to build you an app, tell it, act like a world-class app developer. There. That's it. Then you gotta give it the way.

And and is it better to be granular or or stay macro? Should you should you ask Chat GPT who are the twenty best engineers and say think like this, this, this, and this or keep it kinda macro? You can always there's levels to this. If people want to understand what art in this prompting world looks like. There's a GitHub project. We're getting nerdy, but you said your audience could take it. There's a GitHub project. If you search system prompts for the top AI tools, you'll find the GitHub.

But this is the one that got released, like all the big companies released. Of the system prompts behind the top products like Notion AI, lovable.dev. And you'll see what I call art. You will see how it uses almost a hundred percent of the character capability of an AI to So they understand how to optimize specific It's fly. It's everything. Guys, that's free game right there. That's what we're we're gonna put a link down. Usually I don't share it'cause people

That's a good one. I studied all of them to understand how to be a better prom. That's where these four came from. Right. So we start with the role, then we ask, we tell it what we want it to do. Then we have to so that's the outcome we want to achieve.

Then we got to go to the the data that we have to give it. So it's maybe you have a folder, maybe you have, you know, copy paste. You're like working on a blog post. You got to give it the data that it's gonna use to then do stuff with it, the context.

Then the last part is the format. And that to me is the part that most people don't think about. But if I'm building a web page, the format, what kind of webpage? Do you want a mobile optimized web page? Do you want a spreadsheet? Do you want it I'm a software guy, so I often have to ask it for it in JSON, which is a programming format, right? And if you're like a visual learner, you can say I want it as a picture as an image versus Yes.

In some of them. Yeah. And definitely in Claude, you can say visualize this for me. And that format is how you take an AI that would give you a dumb response and a not interesting response and a watered down response and make it hyper-personalized and accurate on a what's called a one-shot. One shot, boom, boom, output. And that is actually how all the top AI companies teach people how to use their product. So we have Roll

context command format. Guys, that's a great four process that you can use in your business. What about the master prompt versus the systems prompt? I'd love to explain that to our audience. And I know you have your team, when you on ramp your team, they have to have that. Master prompt. Yeah. A master prompt is A document that you create for your role. For me, I have two. I have one for my business context and I have one for my personal context.

And you could dice that up as many as you want. Yeah. For personal you could just say relationship with wife, fitness, money. It can have everything. The the what's interesting, the best way to create the master prompt is to ask the AI to interview you to create it for you. Back to the push pole.

So reverse prompting. Yeah. So you reverse prompt it. So you say, Hey, I want to create a master prompt for my role in this company. Ask me the questions to get it. So what's cool is it'll give you all the questions. Now the pro move, you want the pro move? I want the promo. I want the hall of fame of The Hall of Fame winning, they'll never know what it's like to see you lose. I guess they'll never know. Is you use Whisperflow to answer all the questions.

Because it's long, man. A really great master prompt is as close as you can get to. Full context on your company, your core executives, your revenue, your strategic planning. Like it'll ask you a lot of stuff. And to the degree you give it. specificity. How specific you give it is how great the outputs will be. Cause then what happens? Here's how you use it. I now have a master prompt for me as Dan the Professional. I go into Gemini.

I I save that master, that output as a PDF. Okay. That's how I do it. I save it as a PDF. I go into a new AI that I've never used before, let's say Google Gemini. I upload the master prompt that's got my full context. Now I ask it to come up with 13 viral ideas for my YouTube channel. Now it has full access to YouTube, but what it has is the context of who I am and who I serve and what I want to be known for and my messaging and my goals. And now those 13 ideas are dying.

And that's a living, breathing document. I imagine that you keep optimizing that PDF. Yeah. I update it probably once every six weeks'cause that's how much my life has changed. I mean, we're building and launching new software companies every month. So I'd like to have that updated. People on my team. Resources. But I want everybody, if all you do is just go to your favorite AI tool and say, create me a master prompt for my life.

And have it ask you the questions. And then now you've got a snapshot that informs any AI, man as a. Anything. And you'll watch it go from like a stranger to somebody's been on your team for five years and traveled the world with you, giving you answers so that you don't have to give them. See, this is my problem is. The level that I want everybody to get to is where the AI is actually doing stuff proactively for you without you having to even ask. How many pages is your master prompt?

If I had to guess, like close to twenty for the professional side. Yeah. Now I have I I do that on purpose because I also reference other systems. That's an advanced move. I know you asked me for the Hall of Fame, now I realize I didn't tell you some of the specifics but

On the system side, tell me if I'm correct here. I would imagine per that ask that you just said before to make YouTube videos. Okay, you give it the master prompt to understand and know you, but then you have a PDF that's a system prompt that says, This is how I think around titles, thumbnails and positioning. So then it has like maybe like the structure and format and more context on what you want the output to look

Yeah. So what's unique about my world is, you know, I'm a systems nerd. I wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time. A big part of that is teaching people how to create at a simple level checklist, process. what I like to call principles about how to operate in a company with your team. So we have it all documented and we use a tool called Notion. I think Notion is the database of AI. That's the way I think about it. It's the storage system. People have been using Google Docs forever.

I would encourage them to consider moving over to Notion. me some Google Docs. I know, but good news is you can get Claude Cowork to migrate you off of Google Wodoc over into Notion because it's it's almost like There needs to be a memory system for AI to be really great. So Notion is our memory system. So when it comes to the master prompts, I reference our internal, what you just said is what we call a standard operating procedure, a playbook.

Inside of Notion. So that's why my 16 page master prompt has the equivalent of 150 pages because it references other systems that gives it the that specific context.

And it knows that because I told it when I was answering my question. Anything that you do that you know is your secret sauce, your recipe, if you can save it as an internal processor document and give your AI access to that, that's how you scale. Love that. For everybody out there that doesn't have a master prompt, I think that's fairly easy as an action step. Everybody on your team should have that as well.

I I ask to see it sometimes because sometimes I look at the output and I'm confused how that happened. And then I'm not when I see that their master prompt is six months old. I want to dive into like business levers specifically for founders. That's our audience. What where's like the biggest ROI gap right now? Like the place where founders are leaving the most money on the table in relation to AI? I mean the reality is it's like the master prompt and That'd be a great place to start. Yeah.

What are some other big ones? I don't think business has ever changed and AI is not changing it. Now that's a big claim. I'll I'll unpack it though. When I look at helping, when you cause you asked the question, where are they leaving money on the table or not making as much money? The truth is if you have customers, there's an assumption you have customers. The best way to make money is to make the current customer stay longer or buy more. Right there. It's the easiest thing to do. Right.

Lifetime value, make the customer worth more, stay more, buy more. So when you say an AI, that's where I go. What is called customer success, right? Retentions, renewals, upsells. So A simple example would be to ask the AI to analyze all your customers and tell you who's who's showing signals that they might quit. Who's showing signals that they're ready to buy more? Now you'd be like, well, what signals? Guess who knows? My God. The AI knows. Don't overcomplicate. Back to the reverse prompting.

Dude, everybody. Well, I actually built one called Latch, okay, that is AI native that does that thing because we were doing it inside our company to retain and and help and serve our customers. And everybody goes, well, how do you do that with thousands of people? I'm like, oh, we use this product called Lash just. So If someone buys within X amount of days, they're gonna buy more. If they buy this piece, they're gonna buy this piece. All of it. Set it and forget it. Easy button.

And that makes sense for someone from a consumer perspective, from a a digital product any We have everything. Analyze who's already done it for you Every industry, every market, software, local services, D T C, B to B, the principles are the principles. Get'em to buy more more often. Stick around. It's the stick rate. So only distribution is everything. That is like we can get into that and I could talk forever. Everything. thing. But I just want everybody to

understand that is where to go. So then please just, you know, maybe pause. Maybe not. I don't know if you don't want them to pause, but just go ask it to do that for you. So Again, it's data. It's that foundation. They may not have anything documented of the customer.

Okay, well then connect your billing system, connect your accounting system, connect your e ke if you don't even have an account, you're still doing like manual and your bank account is the way you run your company, just connect it to your email. But in this case though, I mean you can you know, your customer list, you can export a C S V, you can export your quick I mean, yeah, you can just give it everything.

can literally, I mean, for example, you can go into Claude and just connect those systems it'cause it has connectors and just have it run that prompt and you will make you could probably triple your profit in sixty days doing that and letting it do what Like and let it, bro. Like let it. Like have it analyze, have it write the emails.

Have it send the emails. Have it tell you to schedule a webinar to train people because most people are getting stuck here. It'll tell you what to train. Invite the people to the webinar. Tell it to invite the people to the webinar. Tell it to create the freaking Zoom webinar. Like it can do all that if you let it. Most people. are still pretending like they don't know that they can just let it go. Guys, that's great practical advice.

Yeah. System prompt, system prompt, and then just go ham on your existing emails, followers, customers, ventures. From there, go back to how do we get more customers? Once I can get my people that I've already sold to buy more, to be happier, to stick longer.

With AI. Then I go back. Okay, let's go add some more people in the top of this bucket because we've got massive holes in the bucket, adding a bunch of people, which is where everybody's been playing, right? Number one use case of AI is content and marketing.

They don't even think about covering the holes to make sure the water's not flowing out. And that drives more EBITDA than then go spend to get more customers. Whoever makes the most from a customer wins the market. You know this. I do. Whatever brand can monetize the most from an a customer ends up spending the most to acquire customers, they win the market.

Guys, I could talk to Dan for 17 hours on AI, but we're gonna have to round the corner here because we have a cutoff shortly. I wanna go into quick track. I'm gonna ask you a million different questions. Let me know what you got. This one was really impressive. This is a this is a real impressive one here. You haven't read your own emails in three years. How, how, how? Tell us everything. Okay. I think your inbox is a torture chamber.

I think most people, if they were to monitor their emotional ups and downs. It literally can shift 17 times just by going in their inbox. For example, you wake up in the morning, you get a new business deal. I feel like a hero. You know, an hour later you find out a customer quit. You feel like a loser. Okay. And it's all in your inbox.

What I decided a long time ago, and I learned this hanging out with Richard Branson, I had the privilege of spending a week with him in Verbier, Switzerland 15 years ago, and I watched this guy, the billionaire that every other billionaire wants to be like.

run 400 companies by having a conversation with a woman named Helen. She was his executive assistant. Helen. Wild. And he would ski with us all day, have breakfast with Helen. She would manage and process and transfer and route and all that stuff. And that moment taught me I need to get out. Now it took me years to really understand to the level I could do this. So when you say three years I haven't read my email, yeah, people brag about inbox zero. How about zero inbox?

So the way I do it today is I have Kai. Now that's only the last few months. Before I have Anne, and she's still in my life. Why? Great people using AI don't need to leave your organization. Do you have less things that you'd love to do or more things you want to execute? More things I want to add. So

I challenge people to just empower anybody to take over your inbox, but typically is somebody like an executive assistant. And if you're ready for it, it's an advanced move, look at some of these AI tools because they can do it for you. So. I mean the combo is where it's at right now.

Yes, but the the the the to the message of emotions, the emotional shrapnel that you you take on by going into your inbox. My executive assistant has no care about an opportunity to be on a podcast to a sales opportunity to a client. Shots fired, bro. But you're saying like I hit the line direct, I had Sam direct. Yeah, no, it's just... It's but I wish people would just

give themselves the privilege of getting out of the place that makes them emotional so that they can be better and they focus on the things that they can do and they they think they need to be there. Guess people don't buy your presence, bro. They don't buy your email response. They buy your standard.

They buy the thing that makes you different. Go double down on that and empower somebody else to support you for the least amount of money. So here's this is everybody can do this. Okay. And you you should do this after because it'll you'll be like, what? Go into Claude, connect your Gmail or whatever email tool and say, process my unread emails, tell me the ones that need my attention and write me a draft, save it in a spreadsheet.

And it will go through your email, it'll create a spreadsheet, and it will tell you the email you got, it'll rank them by priority, and then it'll write the draft. I guarantee those draft emails are 99.2% perfect. There might be one that you might have to add a word. Why? Whoever emails you, it searched your whole inbox. It knows who that person is to you. It knows the thread. It knows everything. It opened it like it literally can be a better you than you.

So that that's available to everybody listening to this. You don't need a Kai on an Apex platform. You just need to know that you can ask it to go do stuff for. And I would imagine just at minimum you can kind of tag by different buckets, you know, high priority, medium priority, low priority. And at least start with like the low and medium get rid of the.

It will show you that in the spreadsheet. Even even what you just did goes against what we said earlier. It's like let let Marcus, your genius cousin, cook and he will go figure out how to prioritize and he'll show you a way to prioritize you don't even think about it. What are the best businesses to start right now and why?

I look at it as like there's there's three levels of making money right now. There's level one, the easiest one. They're all in AI because nobody would disagree the future is gonna have AI in it. So let me just tell you how to make the most money in AI. Level one is selling AI automation or even process completion using AI to people that are too lazy to learn. And that'll get you to 100K, no problem. I feel the energy over there, guys.

Okay. So you get because cause you coming to a business owner that has yet to really dive into what we've been talking about. Yeah. Even Manus, even Cloud Cowork, even automation and and agentic. They would think you're a wizard, right? Like Wow. Everybody out there one day a week with your company to just go super deep in AI. Yesterday was one of my favorite days, Dan. One of my favorite days.

I get the most done. And that's and that's what's crazy, is you can go into these businesses and sell them a level of outcome and productivity that they don't think for 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 a month. So that's level one is use A. Bump those prices up a little bit, baby. Okay. Well, these are these I'm talking I'm thinking 18 years old, don't know much, trying to get somebody to trust them, start wherever and then put the price up. But like that's zero to a hundred K.

Then 100K to a million. Now what you do is is you use the AI to make the business better so that you can go from 100K to a million. That existing business better through AI. Yep. You use AI, get paid to automate any process for other businesses, marketing, sales, operations, retention. What a crazy idea. Like help companies retain their customers. Well, how do you do that? Well, we have the 17 part framework that we come in and we analyze.

All the use cases then systematize it and you can You literally sell them what the AI could do for them if they knew enough about r listening to this pot. Cause they just want the outcome. Nobody, again, nobody wakes up saying, I need to buy some AI. They go, I have a problem. My customers are leaving. I will pay somebody to solve that. You come to them and say, I will solve that.

And you're like, well, I've never done that before. Well, that's okay because the AI has a hundred percent full knowledge of the experts and PhD levels on all these things. And you can just Do the intake form. Here's a great example. I think it's not 100 to a million. I think that's like 100 to 10 million.

That's trying to like get people to believe in themselves, and sometimes they have a hard time. There was a company that did this for apps, and they were making 60 million dollars a year building web apps for people. And the way it worked is They would come to the website, I think it was seven thousand dollars. They would click the button, pay. It would then ask them to fill out a survey about what the app should do.

Then they took it, they made it seem like they were talking to their engineering team. They gave it to, I think it was Lovable. Lovable built it all, sent them the link back to the client over email. They said, we got the first version done. If you have any feedback, click the other link, give us the feedback. automated the whole thing. They're doing sixty million dollars a year.

We had an episode with a guy named Taylor Holiday, very smart. He believes in something called Sean's S E A N Software Enabled Agencies. People buy the outcome, they come to you, they think it's a good idea. A team of fucking thirty. Yeah. And you're just whipping it up through AI. Yeah. What about that last year? Is there is there a big Last year is what we were talking about earlier, which is trust and brand.

Because you to go from zero to 100K, you just sell something. You know, they have a problem, you sell it. To a million, use the AI to start automating your business and use it to do the own thing you're probably getting paid to do.

To go from a million to 10, that's where you have to build the brand. You have to build the trust. They need to be able to Google you. That's what I was saying earlier. My AI agent, Kai Voss, needs a LinkedIn because when he's negotiating a real estate deal, they're searching his name and nothing's coming up.

Okay. So if you're the best kept secret and you want to actually like grow in this new world, do this. It's content, it's media, it's trust, but that's the region reputation is how it's always been. Just the tool is different and people think it's new, but it's not new. Warren Buffett is Warren Buffett because everybody in the investment space knows who he is because he does his annual event that he's been doing for 40 years and he's been consistent. So this trust is super high.

Yep. And that's how you go from a million to ten is building the brand. Love that. What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made in business and what did it teach you? Mm, I think it was close to five million. I don't like to make really expensive mistakes, but I also think the bigger your mistakes, the bigger your life. I think some people are scared to make big mistakes, which means they live a little life. Money, more problems.

Yeah, more money, more problems, and get better. The world doesn't get easier. You know, Jim Rohn used to say this all the time. You know, you just get better. So That five billion dollar problem was a company I bought. I shouldn't have bought. I kind of knew better. I got enamored with the process. I got enamored with the opportunity.

Me and my business partner were excited. And I think we just decided to look the other way with some of the red flags, you know, lesson learned. Guess what? Red flags never go down. And we move forward. And it was almost immediately within two months we should have never did it.

And we kept pushing, thinking, you know, when you it's funny, if you've ever had success, I guarantee you've thought this to yourself. I should get involved in something else because I know how to do it. And if I'm successful, I can make that successful. Oh, I got that shiny outfit. I got that AZT. Is the yes that that I think uh the magic touch. This is my ADD medicine, this right here.

Yeah. So I'm telling you, that's that's what happened to me. And two years later, from the moment we bought them, we had to swallow the pill, shut it down, walk away. Dude, it was the hardest thing. The the the founder obviously was upset with us. The team was upset with us. I was upset with us. It was the it was one of the most expensive and you know, I've never learned when things went well.

And I made sure I took the time to reflect and make those lessons. And I think everybody going through it right now, if you're in it or you have a challenge, just stop yourself and ask yourself, what's the one thing? What did you learn from this? What's the one thing you learned from this? And just make a commitment. This is my only commitment to life. I guarantee I'm going to fuck up again. Let's make it a new mistake. As long as I don't make the same mistake, let's make new mistake.

Then that was a five million dollar lesson that should pay off 50 to 500 in the future by not making that same mistake. I always say make as many mistakes as possible, as fast as possible, once. Mm-hmm. He'll be good. Yeah. One word to describe Sam. He's pretty yoked. I knew you guys were jacked as a team, but he's jacked. We're gonna pop him up too. You got me emotional, man. All right.

But not even loyal the way people think of loyal. It's like you gotta understand he's been with me since he was like 15 or 16. He's only twenty two. Most people think he's a lot older. Now, I... Didn't know. I know. There's so much about he's so complex. And I'm really glad that you get to see some of his genius with his content. It pales in comparison to who he is as a

I get that energy from from talking to him and obviously I speak to a lot of the people directly in the podcast, but I also speak to their their right hands. And Noah, who who's new on our team, you know, he was lucky enough to see what great looks like with the first pre-production call.

So Yeah, it's it's it's just the uh he he's always put me first. He's always made sure that we were doing the right thing. He's always he his team. Dude, I used to want to give him more money, and he'd say, give it to my team.

I I'd be like, bro, I need you to be rich because like my rule is is everybody has to make a lot of money around me because that's one of the ways that I never like just make sure their dreams are your dreams. Right. And a lot of people I think a billion people have seen the video of me giving him his dream. It's GT four, right? And they might not understand the the deeper thing behind it, and that's the word. Loyal, but like a different type of loyal. Very rare.

Uncle Jake's been away for ten years. You don't see that nowadays. No, it's different. Yeah. Last question before the final four. Biggest learning lesson from your wife. Dude, you're gonna get me two in a row, bro. Power couple. We're just trying to figure it out. My wife is my best friend. She's taught me more than any person in my life. I actually think that is what a partner is meant to do. And if I had to answer what has she taught me the most is the importance of having dinner.

Which sounds so s I grew up we didn't ever we don't we didn't do dinner, bro. I grew up in a really challenging environment. Four kids, we just came in, ate food, ran in the woods, got in trouble. Like we were just crazy. So When we first get in together and I'm like doing a startup in San Francisco and like being home at any time is a foreign concept to me and she like sits me down, looks me in the eye and says, If you're not home for dinner every night, this isn't gonna work.

I'm like who ca like who cares? Like six o'clock, eight o'clock, what's the difference? Man, now that we've been together for fifteen years and my kids are, you know, twelve and thirteen, it's the thing that I'm most Proud of that we have that time.

Even Anne, my executive assistant, AK chief of staff, she's way more I think it undermines uh her capabilities. Even Anne knows how important that is. And she will literally like if I accident if I'm like, oh, I'm gonna do this. She's like, No, you're not. Mark Randolph, Netflix. I think like every like Wednesday he had date night for like forever. And obviously Netflix had some crazy ups and downs. Final four questions, my man. Final four. Favorite book or podcast and why?

My favorite one today that nobody knows about is called Moonshot. And if you're into the AI in the future and optimistic and want to see before everybody else sees and all the if you like what you heard from me, go listen to Moonshots by Peter Diamondis and you will find a glimpse into the future from an optimistic see my problem is the pessimists out there and there's a lot of them right now because it's easy. It's easy to talk about how this is gonna

you know, take over the world and the robots are gonna be this and that. And it's like, how about we talk about the possibilities in abundance? Ninety eight percent is bad. You ever read uh the coming wave? I have not. One. I'll link that below. Another good resource is to go to your YouTube. Great rabbit hole to go down. It's nice. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and watch?

I mean, you know, just I think recency bias, but also'cause I believe this in my heart, you know, if you don't know a guy named Rob Dierdick, I just had dinner with him last night and we talked like two schoolboys for five hours. We eventually had to shut it down because we're both early to go to bed type guys.

He's a guy that's known for, you know, the fantasy factory and oh being a pro skateboarder. I mean, I I've known Rob as a kid because I used to skateboard in DC shoes and So it's like watching Rob as a personality to then, you know, the TV shows and the fantasy factory and just his personality and then

And then ridiculousness, which that's he's the host. So if you don't know who he is, that's that's Rob Tearding. And I write a book called Buy Back Your Time, and I get a text message from this guy. randomly. And it wasn't buy back your time that he read. It was software as a science. He goes down the rabbit hole. So when you say, what entrepreneur do you want to give flowers to? Here's a guy that if anybody looked on the outside would assume he's this.

The guy has built a multi hundred he'll be a billionaire probably within the next two years. And he's built a framework for time. He calls it existence. And his time creationism philosophy, and that's what we just double click, double-click, double-click last night on, and how it translates into entrepreneurship. I think when it finally comes out to the world the way it should, and I've been pushing him to, it could be one of the most profound frameworks to help people. Period.

Oh no, it's mind mind blowing. Two things. One, really, really interesting about him is he made a ton of money and he woke up at like thirty nine or forty and had nothing and now he's I did this in the last ten years. Our team is very, very big on like monitoring fucking our calendar, our sleep store, et cetera. He actually whipped up

a little like kind of something like existence.io and he talked about it on a podcast like two, three years ago. We've been in touch with Rob. He's gonna come on. I think that this thing I think he's so underrated And he's so psychotic and maniacal about guarding his time for obviously to get back to his family and health. Yeah, I think it's gonna be huge. I can't wait.

Give yourself some time, bro. He likes to tell stories. The team was there with us yesterday, and he's like, Okay, I gotta get okay, we gotta go. He's he's lived a lot of lives. Yeah, we've been going back and forth. I think he's won that like Dude, no one is talking about him. And I'm just like Because he's n he th the beauty of some of these people and I could honestly name twenty five others that I think

You s you you just see a thing and you don't realize the under the water, right? It's the It's the the the duck on the water and you just see the the elegance in its movement, but you don't understand like the depth that they the chaos and they it's just what shaped them to become that. Hard on. He's like psychotic diehard on it. Yeah, yeah. Ten out of ten storyteller, vision, passion. Last question. How big can uh Martell Ventures be?

Well, Martel Ventures will be a trillion dollar company. Now I always joke when I tell this to the team, well we can just move to Africa tomorrow and we can call that a day. Because the currency is like I don't know, it's like they they buy things in like hundred million dollar So do you get what I'm saying? I I don't get what you're saying. The currency itself, it's like they buy, they're literally like a banana's a million dollars.

Right. So if I took my net worth and I moved it over to Africa, we'd already be there. But I'm living in this world. Again, most people that know me online, it's oh, Dan's a YouTube guy, he's a social media guy. They don't realize I spend ninety-seven percent of my time building AI companies. And I have for a while. Like I've invested in over a hundred software companies. I'm a I'm a I built and exited software companies. That's that's what I do. The media was a thing that I created.

That w well first, eleven years ago, go on my YouTube, go to oldest and go make yourself feel good about yourself. You're creating content, because I was horrible at it. I did it to learn a skill. As a leader, I was like, hey, I probably should learn how to talk to a camera, communicate. And that's where it started.

So what I didn't know when I started it, which you clearly know, is distribution is one of the most powerful things you could do. Now this is before AI. I started this three and a half years ago. You know, GPT came out in twenty two in October. So it was like around the same time, a little before I started. But now with I think last month we did 225 million views on our content in a month. I know and it and and it surprises me. Okay. Nobody's more surprised.

But again, I'm working on Martel Ventures, which is the Venture Studio. Um, yeah, it'll it'll be it'll be a meaningful company. And guess what? If it's not, I don't give a shit. That is the part that I'm a I'm a bit of a dichotomy. I'm wildly involved in the creation of things and disconnected from the need of it being any certain way. A good ending there. First one that said a trillion. That's a big flag. Well Yeah. Trillion.

like that. We'll put a a bunch of links below. Where's the one place? We'll put all the links below, but where's the Instagram, hit me up on Instagram, and then if you want to go down the YouTube rabbit hole, I got some stuff you can watch. Amazing. Thanks for coming my man. What's up guys? If you guys got this far in the episode that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe Give it a like.

Comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger. Bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.