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

0:00If everybody listening stopped over prompting and instead [music] 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. You can triple your [music] profit in 60 days. Have it analyzed, have it write the emails. It

0:18can do all that if you let it. We get into which AI tools are actually worth your time, how founders [music] can use the tools to create massive leverage, and why the quality of your prompts is now the quality [music] 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 [music] that nobody uses Claude for that I think would change most people's lives is

0:50You've tested [music] hundreds of AI tools. I want to narrow it down to eight and let's tier them out. 1 2 3 4. Let's start with the LLMs. I'll start with ChatGPT. two The MySpace of AI. It is wildly overrated. Let me explain. 1 2 3 4. One, need to be using it for

1:11one or two. Okay, so like in that space, it's a four. For a lot of reasons, I'm not even get 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 ChatGPT Pentagon. I'll leave it at that. Oh, there's a whole lot of other terms I could give you, but start

1:33there. It really comes down like they they won the market cuz they were the first to introduce a chat interface to AI. AI's been around for a long time, but ChatGPT 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

2:16Here'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 yes-man. It's horrible. It's watered down. It's not detailed. Yeah, not a

2:32fan. 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. Mhm. The tool itself actually solves problems. They just launched a feature to visualize output. But it's 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

3:17be using them for and makes it obvious. If you're my cousin and you have a 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 cuz 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

3:45chat? 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 That's what he just They just call it ChatGPT. They could even be using Claude and they still

4:07think it's ChatGPT. [gasps] 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 7 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 Claude for that I think would change most people's lives is the browser

4:26extension. 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

4:55can 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

5:25doing 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 ChatGPT 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 Claude code specifically? What are some good use cases that you have used

5:44it 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 Claude code when I installed it and I was the first interaction wasn't writing code. People hear the word Claude code, as you know, and they

6:18think 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

6:41do I do that? Claude code. You do it. And run it while I'm sleeping and create a dashboard to show me that it all got done. I'm just going to [snorts] ask everybody if they just did one thing was to ask your chat AI ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever you want to use. Tell me how to install Claude code. Follow the instructions and just say build me an app that does whatever you

7:05think, a fitness tracker. And sit back and hit enter. It's absolutely mind-blowing. I had 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

7:26a software engineer 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

8:06talk crap about all these ideas. And yet he [snorts] 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 in curly braces to use it. So you're right, the

8:33technical people will look down on it. But here's what I know. This is the stats. Claude code for the last 6 months has written all the code at Anthropic 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 Gabe courses is his name. Claude code hasn't written code in 6 months. He

9:05built 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 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

9:28website. 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 retrained me. Perfect. You're right. Sorry. We got that clear. Cuz

9:47yeah, 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

10:03because of AI. So, I see this and I and but I've seen this for two like 18 months, two years. So, I used to tell my 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? Cuz it's a it's it's a very documented,

10:23structured, 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

10:49it, it gave him the plan. But the plan was to use all these tools to connect them. To your point about Claude 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 SP&A, all the financial functions. He's sitting there on his phone cuz Claude

11:25Code 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 cuz basically they'd probably be putting themselves out of business. But yeah, that's that one's slowly going to get

11:57brought back in to be completely frank. And uh for guys 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 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 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

12:33to create these complex system prompts is what they were 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

13:06what 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

13:26IQ 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

13:47to do it? It's telling them the outcome. You're giving them the outcome and they reverse 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 [clears throat] 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

14:10options 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 guided it too much and I need to step back and let it do its thing." So, if everybody listening actually stopped over prompting and instead start with the outcome and have it ask you questions, the current AI would blow your mind. And I'm talking it

14:36only 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

14:54just going all in on one? It all depends on their personality, man. People, you know, 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

15:13not 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 is the bottleneck? And that's why

15:46it'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 that looks like a financial document, load it

16:21up into Xero, 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

16:43that 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 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

17:01the 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

17:24ever 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?" Cuz Gemini actually has that full index and search. It's the only

17:50the transcripts. Cuz 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

18:17it does that better than anything else. I'm going to rate it as a like a two plus almost a one. You know what? to give it a one cuz 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's a one. It's good because it has both of those in one spot and you 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 Grok, which I would

18:47say 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 Grok is the ability to scrape X? The only advantage of Grok is

19:03Elon. Dude, I've called this two years ago when Elon rumored to want to start something to compete against OpenAI cuz he was a founder. Most people don't know this. ChatGPT was founded by Elon and Sam as a nonprofit, that's why it's called OpenAI. 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

19:44fearlessly. Nobody's done it. Resourceful. He can he can he can do it for 10 cents on on 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 in 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 [snorts] 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

20:23Grok 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

20:53understanding 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 And every And just Everybody should just go Google the video Grok heavy and watch how it works. And the And cuz 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

21:16you 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 Elon versus Altman? 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

21:41to 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

22:06that. 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

22:27brand 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 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 going to see a lot of people move away. In business, I always ask people like, how much trust

22:58to get the thing done, to to get it done right, to not make [clears throat] 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 going to start running ads on people. Like People need to understand, if you're not paying for the product,

23:31you 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 payment. You are the product. That's really interesting take. I have not heard from anyone that they think Apple's going to 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

23:55there 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

24:14cousin Marcus? How does it help me work with Marcus? That Whoever helps me do that the easiest, the best, 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

24:50automation, all your all your logins, everything is on that device, and it's 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 can you can even say, I guarantee they'll have this where it's like, hey, go through my phone and create a video

25:06of 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 the Slack channels, and it makes a fun, cool, informing video for you to be like, I know now I know how to how to attack my day. And 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

25:30until 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, 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

25:54dictate, etc. 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

26:11doing. 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 realized 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 WhisperFlow 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, mm actually, let's not do that, let's do this, just like

26:51you 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 to the 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

27:12look 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'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

27:39not weird. And it also gets rid of background noise if you're in a coffee shop and stuff like that. It gets rid of the ums, the likes. It cleans it up. It formats it. Formats it. For people out there listening, if you see someone talking to their laptop in Starbucks, it is this. Yeah. You hit the function button, and you just go wild. And that's the best way to code. What would you rank it? 1 2 3 4? Uh I I I I category of utility and what I use every

27:58day, 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 with Agentic. So, kind of autonomous execution types type tools. Manas. What does it do? What are some use cases? And what do you rank it? Well, I have to explain what it is, cuz as 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

28:26AI. There's level one, which is chat. Level two, automation. Level three, is agents. And for a 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 n8n. Yeah, n8n 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 It's a connector. Connector, yeah. Yeah, 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

28:59deterministic. 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 Manas. There's other tools, but Manas 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. Manas is, you give it a task and walk away, and it does it. For example, I was working on a real estate

29:34project. 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 a 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

30:10final 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 you 98% of people that use Manifold didn't even know that it could do what I just

30:36said. Cuz they go in and they're like, I got to create a thing, they create it, oh wow, that looks good, download, go in Slack, post it in Slack. I feel my team's energy right now. They They [laughter] yell, they get so mad when I'm like I'll like take it into like a Google Doc and then I'll send them the 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

30:59creating 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

31:37world, 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,

31:55reply 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 happened while we were sitting here. Better and better and better. While we were sitting here, it probably

32:10happened. What would you tier 1 2 3 4? Oh, right now it's a 1 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 Manifold to get a simple task done. I want to make them money. 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

32:46your 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 cuz it'll it launches these virtual browsers and I don't see it on the right side. It looks crazy. like watch it and you're like, how does it know? And it clicks things and it saves it in a spreadsheet and 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

33:20you 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

33:41back, 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, personalized. 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 can zap to your email

34:17and actually send out the email. 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 going to get deep into how to do master prompts, system prompts, all of that, cuz a lot of it is contingent upon the success here. What

34:34about apex.host? 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

34:58perspective. 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

35:42the tools to do it. They have the credit cards, the bank accounts, the Slack access, the history, all of it, okay? That's 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

36:14an 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's called agent operator. You're You're You're a person that manages agents, and that's what your job. So, Apex is a

36:42platform 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's not going to affect me. People are going to need their toilets 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

36:57this. the elect the electricians are, cuz of the data center. The plumbers are going to 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 robotics companies that I track, and they're all going to do the household

37:16stuff. Give us one or two. Well, you can just look at Elon's Optimus, or he likes to call it the Optimai. 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

37:45they'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 Apptronik. 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 cuz 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

38:24its 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

38:45dishwasher door as a human does. Why? Cuz 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 and that's

39:08level 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

39:34something that you listen to, you watch? How do you know about all this stuff? Beautiful question. Give us Give us the dopamine here. Okay, how do I And we're getting a little bit off track. We're going to go back to the we are going to go back to the school. I'm very, very curious though. Yeah, cuz

39:47I rate manas? No, we're on Apex. Yeah, out of Apex. It's a one. It's the biggest thing. Um The question was, how do I stay on top of things?

40:03I think most people just don't care enough. They don't care. though. I 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. Cuz I'm going to tell you the answer. Cooked them, guys. He cooked you. I just have to like I'm being serious cuz I get asked this a lot and I and I and I tell them and then I ask them a week later

40:22and 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. Why? I used to be chubby and I used to be poor. We're going to we're going to get into that soon. Okay. We're going to pop up chubby dad. Don't worry, he's coming.

40:31Thank you. [laughter] You're making me feel humble. I'm shredded, 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 cuz everybody can get access to Claude. Apex is still being built out and I it the waitlist is there. So, if they go to apex.host, they

40:59can subscribe. But Claude, they can go use right now. And again, this is a feature that showed up 2 weeks ago that nobody knows about. It's called schedule. So, you go in to 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 at 4:00 a.m. on the previous 48 hours and I give it the categories from frontier models to S and small business AI to robotics AI to just

41:35general AI news that 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 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 cuz that's the that is actually the job of a business owner is to see 18 months into the future,

42:09look around the corner, and come back to their clients and say, "Here's what I saw. Yeah, those are worry, I'm getting ready." And we're I said in 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 3 hours a day researching and analyzing and correlating and it gives me the synopsis and I actually tell it, "Tell me why this That's one of the prompts in my news that everybody need That'll

42:33change the game for you. Argue me why, based on who I am, that news is going to 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 I just talk about in the AI tools perspective and you can kind of iterate off what you just said is like

42:55make it externally and productize it. 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

43:18people 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, 2% of the people

43:42are going to do something with it. I'm hoping like three to five. We have a Okay. I'm a mature and curious Yeah. 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

44:13tabs. It really just helps you organize your ideas and thoughts [music] 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 GPT, Claude, a bunch others. It's all actually baked into the workspace. I actually genuinely enjoy using the

44:38product. I've met the founders before. They're super, super 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/openresidency. Use the code OR for 25 bucks off. If you're a creator at any level, this will change your workflow.

45:00I want to get into Multibook. This thing is [ __ ] crazy. Yeah. Why don't you tell people just again from a macro level just what is Multibook? So, Multibook 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

45:27questions. About 2 months ago, there was this platform called Open Claw 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

45:49other. 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 Crustafarianism. Where there's these principles and there's there's disciples and then the other open claws that all have names

46:12started 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 2 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

46:41into. 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 cuz he knows his

47:01parameters. And that's 2026 right now. Your your AI agent is checking in on you. Yeah, 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 cuz 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 said, "This is

47:23what I look like." Kai. We're we're going to set it up. I'll send you the picture of Kai. And you know, even the name. He's like, "Here's why I want to be called Kai Boss cuz 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

47:38LinkedIn. Cuz he's interacting with so many people and people are searching his name. This sounds so bonkers yet this is all happening. Yeah, so [laughter] 100%. [clears throat] The virtual employee named Kai Boss and his buddies created Multibook 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 Multibook 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

48:12have with the actual AI? 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 Multibook to go viral to create attention to their tweets. So, I just want you to know that a lot of the stuff about like that he stole my credit card and he's holding me ransom. He's going

48:40to release an email and all that stuff. Dude, humans. We are great at seeing opportunity and taking advantage of it and that's Multibook is definitely even the there's rumors how it started might have been a little bit influenced by humans. Hey, maybe we should say, you know, Little Bitcoin situation start a religion. Little 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 cuz 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

49:20are grown just like a human neuron and every time we get a new model, it's just it's almost like evolution. We're at the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. It's 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 Martel, sitting here as a computer science guy, looking at this, Nah, I I see how it did that. What Where did it

49:48even come up with 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 open claws. And it just did what the human asked it to do. It's so I still have not seen, even with my guy, my Kai, and all the employees he's created, cuz that's the other thing. We

50:11can 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 multi-fucking basically all the AITools 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 going to take over the world, like you have to do things to make sure they like

50:42you. 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

51:04Google 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

51:20Russia. So, treating it like an actual human and being strategic in nature. It's It I [laughter] It's funny you say that, because Guys, we may or may not cut this. No, no, keep it in. Keep it in. Cuz Cuz 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

51:44with 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. Cuz 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,

52:08he 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? Cuz one of them is I don't really know. Do you always? Sometimes? What if somebody's asking you for your home address? Do you want me to reply with that? See what I'm saying? So,

52:31it taught me to talk that way. But there was change 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." Cuz I I literally I'm not trying to be mean to him, but it's like that's the way you respond, so why

53:01wouldn't I just You could send You could send him this interview. He's getting a lot of free He's going to see He's going to see it. 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 told him I asked him to. I want you to have 100% 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. Beehiiv changed that for us. It's a platform where Open Residency builds our newsletter, and building our newsletter is the number one priority for us this

53:30year. They're also known for shipping fast [music] and innovating constantly. To that end, they've recently upgraded their global ad network with on-demand ads, giving you countless monetization opportunities on your own schedule. There's no need to wait to be sent ads. You [music] can just constantly go through their updated library with big brands like Roku or HubSpot. Guys, I believe in Beehiiv so much that I put my own money in as an investor. The team is elite, the vision is world-class, [music] and it's built for operators, not amateurs. If you want to give it a try, head to beehiiv.com/openresidency for 30% off your first 3 months. Make

54:06sure you enter the code MARK30 [music] at checkout, and it's beehiiv.com/openresidency MARK30 at checkout. Stop renting your audience, start owning it. 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 how 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 going to walk around the library for days trying to find the book, right? If you don't give it the category, like they

54:49don'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 in organizing your projects, making sure that and that's why a lot of people have a hard time moving from one to the other,

55:14even though there's a way to solve that. They just They know that this one knows them, so they don't want to move cuz 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,

55:33like I need you to think like a 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 a 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 ChatGPT, "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

56:04audience could take it. Yeah. There's a GitHub project. If you search system prompts for the top AI tools, you'll find the GitHub. Somebody 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

56:33specific prompts. like it's everything. Guys, that's free game right there. That's what We're going to put a link down below for Usually I don't share cuz people But that's a good one. 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

56:46we ask we tell it what we want it to do. Then we have to 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

57:09part that most people don't think about. But if I'm building a webpage, the format, what kind of webpage? Do you want a mobile-optimized webpage? 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

57:40and a watered-down response and make it hyper-personalized and accurate on a on 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 systems prompt? I'd love to

58:07explain 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 it up as many as you want. Like 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

58:38AI to interview to create it for you. Back to the push-pull. Yes. So, you reverse prompt it. 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, what's the pro move? You want the

58:54pro move? I want the Hall of Fame move. Top top 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 is close as you can get to full context on your company, your core executives, your revenue, 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. Cuz then what happens? Here's how I use it. I now have a [snorts] master prompt for me as

59:33Dan 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

59:54YouTube 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

1:00:09PDF. I update it probably once every 6 weeks cuz 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

1:00:35informs any AI, Manas. Anything. And you'll watch it go from like a stranger to somebody's been on your team for 5 years and travel 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

1:01:01master 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 cuz 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,

1:01:33and 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 checklist, process, what I like to call principles but how to

1:01:56operate 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.

1:02:13I love me some Google Docs, baby. I know, but good news is you can get Claude co-work to migrate you off of Google Docs 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 prompt 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 cuz I told it

1:02:54when 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 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.

1:03:11Everybody should have that. Everybody should Everybody on your team should have that as well. I I ask to see it sometimes cuz 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 6 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

1:03:33the table in relation to AI? I mean, the reality is it's 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 cuz 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

1:04:04have 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. Drive LTV. Don't Don't get into that. 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

1:04:39quit. Who's showing signals that they're ready to buy more? Now you'll 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 cooked. 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, "How do

1:05:06you do that with thousands of people?" I'm like, "Oh, we use this product called Latch just So So it's like cohort analysis and it can understand the psychology behind It's funny. 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

1:05:24digital product Anything. Analyze who's already done 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, dude. 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

1:05:55please 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- Okay, if you don't even have an account and you're still doing like manual and your bank account is the way you run your

1:06:17company, 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 cuz 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

1:06:45tell you to schedule a webinar to train people cuz 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

1:06:59know that they can just let it go. Guys, that's great practical advice. Yeah, then you go prompt, and then just go ham on your existing Yeah. emails, followers, customers, vendors. 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 I'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

1:07:34content 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 that I can 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 cuz we have a a cutoff

1:08:01shortly. 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 is this is a real impressive one here. You haven't read your own emails in 3 years. Yeah, I mean, just How? How? How? Tell us everything.

1:08:16Okay. 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,

1:08:42okay? 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

1:08:59conversation 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 3 years I haven't read my email

1:09:21yeah, and 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

1:09:44more 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 cuz they can do it for you. So, I mean, the combo is where it's

1:10:04at right now. Yes, but the the the the to the message of emotions, the emotional shrapnel that you you take on by going in your inbox, my executive assistant has no care about an opportunity to be on a podcast, to a sales opportunity, to a Shots fired, bro. Shots Well, but you're just saying, like I I I I draw the line

1:10:21direct. I had Sam direct. say they 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 there. Guess people don't buy your presence, bro. They don't buy your email response, they buy your standards. They

1:10:42buy 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 cuz 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

1:11:04me 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% 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 open It 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

1:11:40platform, you just need to know that you can ask it to go do stuff for you. I know what I'd imagine just at a 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 those.

1:11:53It will show you that in a spreadsheet. Even Even what you just did goes against what we said earlier is like Guys, I'm cooked. 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 didn't think about. What are the best businesses to start

1:12:08right now and why? I look at it 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

1:12:30too lazy to learn it. And that'll get you to 100K, no problem. I feel the energy over there, guys. K. Eh. So, you get cuz cuz you coming to a business owner that has yet to really dive into what we've been talking about, yeah. Even Manas, even Claude co-work, even automation and and agentic, they would think you're a wizard. Right? Like how? You're like everybody out there one day a week with your company to just go super deep in AI. Yesterday was one of my favorite

1:12:58days. Dan, one of my favorite days. Cuz you probably 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 and productivity that they don't think for 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 a month. So, that's level one is use AI prices up a little bit, baby. Okay. Well, these are the I'm ta- 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

1:13:21like 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. Level business better through AI. 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 the the use cases then systematize it and you Yeah, you literally sell them what the AI could do for them if they knew

1:13:55enough about listening to this pod. Cuz 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 cuz the AI has 100% full knowledge of the experts and PhD levels on all these things,

1:14:14and you can just do the intake form. Here's a great example. I think you I think it's not 100 to a million, I think that's like a 100 to 10 million I know. I'm 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

1:14:42should do. Then [snorts] they took it, they made it seem like they were talking to their engineering team. Yep. 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

1:14:57the 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 SEANs, S E A N, 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. Yeah. What about that last tier? Is there Is there a big

1:15:17difference? 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 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

1:15:34paid 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 Boss needs an a LinkedIn because when he's negotiating a real estate deal, they're searching his

1:15:48name and nothing's coming up. K? 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 reach and 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

1:16:18is super hot. Compounding. 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? 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

1:16:33mistakes, 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 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

1:17:01know? 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

1:17:22that successful." Oh, I got that shiny Oh my god. Yes, sir. Moon. It's the you know, it's that that I think I have 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

1:17:39away. 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 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

1:18:06yourself, "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

1:18:35once. 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.

1:18:55You got me emotional, man. Loyal. But not even loyal the way people think of loyal. It's like You 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

1:19:16some 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 in the podcast, but I also speak to their their right hands. And I know who who's new on our team, you know, he was lucky enough to see what great looks like with the first

1:19:36Yeah. 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 he his team. Dude, I used to want to give him more money. He used to say give it to my team. I I'd be like, bro, I need you to be rich cuz 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

1:20:02dream 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. It's Yeah. Last question before the final four. Biggest learning lesson from your wife. Dude, you're going to get me two in a

1:20:26row, 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.

1:20:47Which sounds so silly. I grew up we never 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 getting 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

1:21:12night, 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'm most proud of that we have that time. Even Anne, my executive assistant, aka 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 acci- if I like, "Oh, I'm going to do this." She's like, "No, you're not." Like Simple, not easy. That

1:21:46Yeah, so simple. 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 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 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

1:22:23of 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 and abundance? 98% is bad. You ever read that The Coming Wave? I

1:22:37have 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 cuz I believe this in my heart. You know, if you don't know a guy named Rob Dyrdek, 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

1:23:01bed 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 if you don't know who he

1:23:29is, that's that's Rob Dyrdek. 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 Service. 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 2 years. And he's built a framework for

1:24:02time. 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 it could be one of the most profound frameworks to help people.

1:24:25Period. 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 39 or 40 and had nothing and now he's this in the last 10 years. And our team is very very big on like monitoring [ __ ] our calendar, our sleep scores, etc. He actually whipped up a little like kind of something like existence.io and he talked about it on a podcast like 2 3 years ago. We've been in touch with Rob. He's going to come on. I think this thing I think he's so underrated. And he's so psychotic and

1:24:56maniacal about guarding his time for obviously to get back to his family and health. Yeah, I think it's going to be huge. I can't Give yourself some time, bro. He likes to tell stories. The team was here with us yesterday and he's like, "Okay, I got to get Okay, we got to go." He's he's lived a lot of

1:25:11lives. Yeah, 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 No, because he's he he 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 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 they it's just what shaped them to become that. The passion too from him on he's he's die hard on

1:25:44this. He's like psychotic die hard on it. I love it. Yeah. 10 out of 10 storyteller, vision, passion. Last question. How big can Martell Ventures be? Well, Martell Ventures will be a trillion-dollar company. Now, I always joke when I tell this to the team, we just move to Africa tomorrow and we can call that a day. Cuz the currency is like, I don't know, it's like they they buy things in like hundred million dollar

1:26:07So so do you do you get what I'm saying? Like 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 the YouTube guy. He's the social media guy. They don't realize I spend

1:26:2997% 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

1:27:00started 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 3 and 1/2 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

1:27:17million 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 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 a I'm a bit of a dichotomy. I'm wildly involved in the creation of things and disconnected from

1:27:44the need of it being any certain way. Yoda. Good ending there. First one that said a trillion. That's a big flex. Well, you you can the billy, couple billy, come with the trillion. trillion. Why not? that. I will put a 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 Instagrams 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

1:28:10got 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.