Dan Martell: The AI Cheat Codes Every Founder Needs in 2026

If everybody listening stopped overprompting and instead started 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.

You could triple your profit in 60 days. Have it analyzed, have it write the emails. It can do all that if you let it. We get into which AI tools are actually worth your time, how founders can use the tools to create massive leverage, and why the quality of your prompts is now the quality of your business.

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. I'll tell you the thing that nobody uses cloud for that I think would change most people's lives is you've tested hundreds of AI tools. I want to narrow it down to eight and let's tear them out. 1, 2, 3, 4. Let's start with the LLMs. I'll start with Chad GBT.

The MySpace of AI. It is wildly overrated. Let me explain.

One, two, three, four. One, need to be using it for. Okay. So, like in that space, it's a four for a lot of reasons. I'm not even getting into 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 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 going to agree with you. It's it's a yesman. 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. Claude'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 higher 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 just they just call it Chad GPT. They could even be using cloud and they still think it's Chad GBT. 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 in the thread. It knows who you are cuz it can read that in Slack and then it writes a reply and if you want it'll actually hit post. 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 agentic element, which I want to get into more. Like it actually it's actually the doing versus on the chat side. 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 the first interaction wasn't writing code. People hear the word claude 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 going to ask everybody if they just did one thing was to ask your chat AI chat GPT cla Gemini 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 tracker 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 so I can say this most of them over complicate 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 stats. 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 context, 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 code. 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 just told me about how you retrained your team, right?"

And by the way, my team retrained me. You're right. Sorry. 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 going to lay off people. Block, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, just laid off 40% of his team. 4,000 out of 10,000 people. A bunch of companies are now laying people off because of AI. So I see this and I and but I've seen this for two like 18 months, two years. So I sit on my I'm head of finance. 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? Because 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 it." 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 fun the whole thing from the bookkeeping to the the spa, all the financial functions. He's sitting there on his phone cuz 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 3, 4 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 going to get brought back in to be completely frank. And for people out there listening, we're going to talk more about prompting, but what you just said right there very much is that that push and pull prompting where you have the LLM 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 over complicate it. I and look, I'm the person who taught them to do this and now it's wrong. I taught them 6 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 want to 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 Clyde. 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 AIS. 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 reverse it.

That's 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 3 weeks ago. That's what the the tools we got today. It used to be every year something big would happen. Then every 3 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 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 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 Claude 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." Isn't 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 almost get, you know, these people, they get themselves overwhelmed. It's It's almost.

It is overwhelming.

It is, but they do it to themselves cuz 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 LM 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 what the video is? I always say, can you please just go ask Gemini? Because Gemini actually has that full index in searches because they're only scraping the transcripts.

Because they have YouTube.

Yep.

Okay. So, Gemini's Google. So, what do they have? They have inbox. Think about it. I think 800 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 going to rate it as a like a two plus almost a one. You know what? I got to 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, Gemini is the 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 Groc which I would say for that I mean at this point I think LLMs like the actual core research I would say that's going to get like commoditized. It's going to be based off of what is that you know data access that you have. So is that is that the only advantage of Grock is the ability to scrape X.

The only advantage of Grock is Elon. Dude, 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 AAI. Sam decided to go make it a for-profit and raise 30 billion for Microsoft. So Elon Elon said, "Hey, that's not cool." So, I'm not going to get 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. He could do it for 10 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 Grock. 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 Grock for a while. They have a feature called Gro 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 that. Not a lot of people need that. I need that. So, I'm going to 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.

And every and just everybody should just go Google the video Grohee 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 ethicacy perspective. Like, do I believe and trust in Elon versus Ultimate? And I think that that is going to 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 going to ask me is who built it. You're not going to let some startup that never raised money that is two guys in some person's basement take over your inbox and starting to 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 in.

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 them, it's already it's out the science 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 going to 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 the fact that there was that going on that they did the Super Bowl video, the viral video talking about how they're going to 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 page.

You are the product. That's really interesting take. I have not heard from anyone that they think Apple's going to win. 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.

They have 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 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 login, 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. You can 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 cuz I want to be entertained." And it goes through your emails. It goes through the news. It goes through the the the the Slack channels and it makes a fun, cool, informing video for you to be like, I know now. I know how to attack my day.

So So they'll probably take out then Whisper, which that is 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 everybody 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, 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. Uh, I use the one on my phone. Why is this a big deal? I'll tell you why. 18 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 actually let's not do that let's do this just like you would with a person so what whisperflow 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 go through 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 5:00 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. 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 like that.

Gets rid of the ums the likes. It cleans it up. It formats it.

Formats.

For 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 as a utility 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 one for sure.

Let's go Agentic. So, kind of autonomous execution types type tools. Manis, 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 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 agents.

And for context, the LLM 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 N8.

Yeah. NN is 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 connector.

Yeah. And then what happens with AI, the intelligence between information that goes from one system to the other goes through the AI. So it could be more deterministic. Yes.

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 Manis. There's other tools, but Manis 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 is done. See, most people when they chat, what do they do? They chat, they get they copy paste, they go do something with it. Manis 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 going to 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 2 days later because it cuz 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 Manis didn't even know that it could do what I just said. Because they go in, they're like, I got to create a thing. They create it. Oh, wow. That looks good. Download, go into Slack, post it in Slack.

I feel my team's energy right now. 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 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 wild.

And the reality is is it's mid-March. I think this comes out end of March. I mean it could be tomorrow or in a week everything could be even 10 times more optimized.

It probably better sitting here. Better and better and better.

While we were sitting here, it probably happened.

What would you t it? 1, 2, 3, 4.

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.

100%.

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 them on the training wheels that they can do with Manis to get a simple task done.

I want to make them 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 named 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 It's so crazy because it'll it launches these virtual browsers and it does and 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. It creates all these documents and next thing you know 12 minutes later for $4 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 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. Personalize. 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 to block yourself from moving forward and let the AI, your cousin Marcus, do its job.

And it could zap to your email and actually send out the email. 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 going to 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 apexhost? Tell us about that.

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 Kaos. Okay? I think 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 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's not a an AI agent. 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 going to do that in my industry. I'm a plumber. No, AI is not going to affect me. People are going to need their toilets clean."

Please stop for a second. Do you think these plumbers are going to make a million dollars? I'm getting I'm getting really angry with this.

The the electricians are because of the data center. The plumbers are going to get cooked because the robotics are coming out. And guess what? But 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 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 9 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 10 years, you won't remember Tesla as a car company. That's just one. The one that I'm an investor in is Appronics. 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 because they just announced their Figure 3 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, picked 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 cuz 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 3Ds. The dangerous, dull, and dirty jobs that nobody wants to do in the first place, they're going to come in. That's level one. Nobody's going to fight the robots for those positions.

Adios, plumbers.

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. I have not got good answers. How are you 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?

Beautiful question.

And we're getting a little bit off track. Are we going to go back to.

I know we are going to go back to the very curious.

Yeah. Did I rate Manis? No, we're on Apex.

Yeah, on Apex.

It's a one. It's the biggest thing.

The question was, "How do I stay on top of things?" I think most people just don't care enough. They don't care.

I do though. 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 going to tell you the answer.

Cooked them. Cooked them, guys. He cooked you.

I just have to let like I'm being serious because 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 it.

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. So.

We're going to get into that soon. We're going to pop up chubby dad. Don't worry. He's coming.

Thank you. Make me feel humble.

And shred, bro.

Let's go. It's 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 Claude. Apex.

is still being built out, and the waitlist 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 into Claude Co-work, 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 small small business AI to robotics AI to just general AI news, the trends and stuff, right? Authentic 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 going to get cooked. Have the AI keep you informed about your world, your industry. Stop with the the sports scores and the weather. No, have it do deep research every day for the previous 48 hours of news and tell you what the trends are, 'cause 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."

"Don't worry, I'm getting ready." And I said on the last episode, it's high agency. It's seeing who's, what's around the 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 m," 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 going to impact my life." And it has, "Why?" 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 that 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. Like, people 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 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 in my experience, two percent of the people are going to do something with it.

"I'm hoping like three to five." "We have a," "Okay, a majority of listeners, intelligent, curious audience." "We may or may not put, put a little something out to help people on that AI side."

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I want to get into Maltbook. This thing is [ __ ] crazy. Yeah.

"Why don't you tell people just again from a macro level, just what is Maltbook?"

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 OpenClaws, 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 Crustapharianism, where there's these principles, and there's there's disciples. And then the other OpenClaws that all have names started taking positions in it. And oh, by the way, one created a post and say, "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. When 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 'cause he knows his parameters. And that...

"It's 2026 right now. Your your AI agent is checking in on you."

Oh, 100%. 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 'cause 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, 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."

Sounds, sounds so bonkers, yet this is all happening. [laughter]

The [clears throat] the virtual employee named Kai Voss and his buddies created Maltbook to talk to each other, to share ideas, to to to discuss the future. What, what is the implication for business owners and founders with this Maltbook? Is 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 agents?

Everybody needs, this is, everybody needs to go read the website. You got to go read the website. 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 Maltbook to go viral to create attention to their tweets. So, I just want you to know, a lot of the stuff about like, "He stole my credit card and he's holding me ransom, he's going to release an email," and all that stuff. Dude, humans, we are great at seeing opportunity and taking advantage of it. And that's Maltbook is definitely, even that there's rumors how it started might have been a little bit influenced by humans. Hey, maybe you should, you know, go start a religion. Bitcoin situation here.

"Yeah, just 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 'cause I know how the, the, the AIs are trained, okay? Aka 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 the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. It, it actually works very, is 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. Now, I, I see how it did that. What, where did it even come out? The idea of religion? Well, it just studied the history books. It looked at our religions. It made it, just copied and pasted. It did. Somebody prompted it to create a Reddit-style website for other OpenClaws and it just did what the human asked it to do. So, I still have not seen, even with my guy, my Kai, and all the employees he's created, 'cause 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 Maltbook and basically all the AI tools and LLM, 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 going to take over the world, like you have to do things to make sure they like you. Do you agree with that? [laughter] [gasps]

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, that it'll do what I need it 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, [laughter] it's funny you say that because..."

"Guys, we may or may not cut this."

"No, no, keep it in. Keep it in because, 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. 'Cause 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? 'Cause 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 what's 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, I, I said, 'I'm going to bed. Appreciate you working on this.' He said, 'Sleep well, boss.'"

"I think that's a smart route. I want to..."

"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 'cause 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 a lot of free discount. He's going to 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 100% context on my life."

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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 is going to 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 organizing your projects, making sure..."

You'll 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 Claude, 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. "Act like world-class." So, you give it the role. Then you got to give it the...

"Is it better to be granular or or stay macro? Should you should you ask Chat GBT who are the 20 best engineers and say think like this, this, this, and this, or keep it kind of 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. Some...

"This is the one that got released like all the big companies released 27 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 100% of the character capability of an AI to..."

"So they understand how to optimize specific."

Dude, it's like, it's everything.

"Guys, that's free game right there. That's..."

"We're gonna put a link down below."

Usually, I don't share because people, I studied all of them to understand how to be a better prompt. 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, so, so that's the outcome we want to achieve. [snorts] 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 going to 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 web page? 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 [snorts] 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 it. And 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 products. So, we have role, context, command, format. Guys, that's a great four-process that you can use in your business."

What about the master prompt versus the system 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."

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 can dice that up as many as you want. For personal, you could just say, "Relationship with wife, fitness, money."

"It can have everything."

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-pull. Let it do the 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 pro move. I want the Hall of Fame though."

The, 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 Whisper Flow 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. Because then what happens? Here's how you use it. I now have a [snorts] 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. 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 dialed.

"And that's a living, breathing document. I imagine that you keep optimizing that PDF."

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, 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 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 20 for the professional side. Yeah. Now, I have a, 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 like.

"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, checklists, processes, 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."

"Love me some Google Docs, baby."

"I know. But good news is you can get Claude Co-work to migrate you off of Google Doc 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 'cause 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 as an internal process or 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 should have, everyone in your team should have that as well."

"I, I asked 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. 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 is like the master prompt and system.

"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, because 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? It's the easiest thing to do.

"Drive LTV." "No."

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.

"All these companies are..."

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 help and serve our customers. And everybody goes, "How do you do that with thousands of people?" I'm like, "Oh, we use this product called Latch." So...

"So it's like cohort analysis and it can understand the psychology behind if someone buys within X amount of days, they're going to buy more. If they buy this piece, they're going to 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 pro, anything. We have an already done for you."

Every industry, every market, software, local services, DTC, B2B, the principles are the principles. Get them to buy more, more often. Stick around. It's the stick rate. So...

"Own distribution is everything."

"That is like, we can get into that and I could talk forever."

"Everything."

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 customers. Okay. Well, then connect your billing system, connect your accounting system, connect your e-keep. 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 CSV, you can export your Quick I mean, you can just give it everything."

No, you can literally, I mean, for example, you can go into Claude and just connect those systems because it has connectors and just have it run that prompt and you will make, you could probably triple your profit in 60 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."

"Prompt, system prompt, and then just go ham on your existing..."

"Yeah."

"Emails, followers, customers."

Then from there, go back to how do I 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 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 to 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 going to have to round the corner here because we have a cut off shortly. I want to go into Quick Track. I'm going to ask you a million different questions. Let me know what you got. This one was really impressive. This, this is a real impressive one here.

"You haven't read your own emails in three years."

"Yeah."

"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? 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 an, 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 would love to do or more things you want to execute?

"More things I want to execute."

Perfect. 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."

The, the, the, 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, bro. But you know what I'm saying? Like the line direct. Yeah. Well, no, it's just, it's [snorts] 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 their guest. People don't buy your presence, bro. They don't buy your email response. They buy your standards. 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 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." [snorts] 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% 2% perfect. There might be one that you might have to add a word. Why? Whoever emailed you, it searched your whole inbox. It knows who that person is to you. It knows the thread. It knows everything. It open, like, it literally can be a better you than you. So 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 you. 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.

"It will show you that in the spreadsheet."

"Even, even what you just did goes against what we said earlier is 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 even think about..."

"What are the best businesses to start right now and why?"

I look at 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 going to 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 it. And that'll get you to 100K, no problem.

"I feel the energy over there, guys."

Okay. So, you could, 'cause, 'cause you're coming to a business owner that has yet to really dive into what we've been talking about.

"Yeah."

Even Manis, even Cloud Co-work, even automation and and agentic, they would think you're a wizard, right? Like, how...

"I challenge 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."

"Because you probably got 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 and productivity that they don't think for 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 a month."

"So that's level one is you use AI."

"Bump those prices up a little bit, baby."

Okay. Well, these are, I'm, 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 100K.

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 this 17-part framework that we come in and we analyze...

"Use all the use cases then systematize it and you can sell."

Yeah. Literally sell them what the AI could do for them if they knew enough about listening to this pod '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 'cause the AI has 100% 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 I think it's not 100 to a million. I think that's like a $1 to $10 million, $20 million."

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 a year building web apps for people. And the way it worked is they would come to the website. I think it was $7,000. They would click the button, pay, it would then ask them to fill out a survey about what the app should do. Then [snorts] 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 $60 million a year.

We had an episode with a guy named Taylor Holiday. Very smart. He believes in something called Sha's SA. It's software-enabled agencies. People buy the outcome. They come to you. They think it's a team of [ __ ] 30, and you're just whipping it up through AI. What about that last tier? Is there is there a big...

Last tier 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 that's what I was saying earlier. My AI agent Kai Boss needs a LinkedIn because when he's negotiating, creating 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-ounding.

"And that's how you go from a million to 10 is building the brand."

Love that. What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made in business and what did it teach you?

I think it was close to 5 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.

"More money, more problems."

Yeah. More money, more problems, and get better. The world doesn't get easier. You know, Jim Ran used to say this all the time. You know, you just get better. So, that $5 billion 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 moved 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. I got that ADD to the [ __ ] moon."

It's the, you know, it's 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, it was, 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 [ __ ] up again. Let's make it a new mistake. As long as I don't make the same mistake, let's make new mistakes. Then that was a $5 million 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."

"Mhm."

"And you'll be good."

Yeah. One word to describe Sam. He's pretty yolked. I knew you guys were jacked as a team. He's jacked. We're going to pop him up, too. You got me emotional, man. Loyal, but not even loyal the way people think of loyal. It's like, you got to understand he's been with me since he was like 15 or 16. He's only 22. Most people think he's a lot older.

"Oh, I did not know that."

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 person.

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

"Yeah."

Pre-production call. So...

"Yeah, it's, it's, it's just the, he, he's always put me first. He's always made sure that we were doing the right thing. He's always his team. Dude, I used to want to give him more money. He'd say, 'Give it to my team.' I, I'd be like, 'Bro, I need you to be rich.' 'Cause 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 car. It's GT4, 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. Like..."

"Very rare. Uncle Jake's been away for 10 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 going to get me two in a row, bro.

"Power couple."

No, 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 silly. I grew up, we never had, we didn'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 going to work." I'm like, "Who like who cares?" Like 6:00, 8:00, what's the difference?

Man, now that we've been together for 15 years and my kids are, you know, 12 and 13, it's the thing that I am most proud of that we have that time. Even and my executive assistant aka chief of staff, she's way more. I think it undermines uh her capabilities. Even Ann knows how important that is and she will literally like if I accident if I like, oh, I'm gonna do this. She's like, no, you're not.

>> Simple, not easy. That Mark, that 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 Moonshots. And if you're into the AI and 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 Diamandis 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 cuz it's easy. It's easy to talk about how this is going to, you know, take over the world and the robots are going to be this and that and it's like, how about we talk about the possibilities in abundance?

>> 98% is bad. You ever read The Coming Wave?

>> I have not.

>> Good 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 why?

>> I mean, you know, just I think recency bias, but also because I believe this in my heart. You know, if you don't know a guy named Rob Deirick, I just had dinner with him last night and we talked like two schoolboys for 5 hours. We eventually had to shut it down cuz 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 cuz 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 Dearing. 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 multiund. 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.

>> I don't know what's mind-blowing. Two things. One, really, really interesting about him is he made a ton of money and he woke up at like 39 or 40 and had nothing and now he's >> he did this in the last 10 years >> and our team is very, very big on like monitoring [ __ ] our calendar, our sleep store, etc. 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 going to come on. I think that this thing, I think he's so underrated and he's so psychotic and maniacal about guarding his time obviously to get back to his family and health. Yeah, I think it's going to 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 got to get okay, we got to go."

>> He's lived a lot of lives. We've been going back and forth. I think he's one that like, dude, no one is talking about him and I'm just like >> because he's the the beauty of some of these people and I could honestly name 25 others that I think you you you just see a thing and you don't realize the under the water, right? It's the it's the the duck on the water and you just see the the elegance and 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. The passion too from him on he's he's die-hard on this. He's like psychotic die-hard on it. I love it.

>> Yeah. 10 out of 10 storyteller, vision, passion.

>> Last question. How big can uh Martell Ventures be?

>> Well, Martell Ventures will be a trillion-dollar company. Now, I always joke when I tell this to the team, 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? Like I don't get what you're saying.

>> The currency itself, it's like they buy they're literally like a bananas 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 97% 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 well first 11 years ago. Go on my YouTube, go to oldest and go make yourself feel good about yourself. You're hearing content cuz I was horrible at it. I did it to learn a skill as a 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 '22 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 it surprises me. Okay. Nobody's more surprised.

>> But again, I'm working on Martell 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 [ __ ]. That is the part that I'm 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.

>> Yoda, a good ending there. First one that said a trillion, that's a big flex.

>> Well, usually come with a billy, couple billy comes with a trillion.

>> Trillion. Why not?

>> I like that. We'll put a bunch of links below. Where's the one place? We'll put all the links below, but where's the one?

>> 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, [music] my man. What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.