The Business Alchemist: Lessons in Wealth Creation with Brad Costanzo

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Darrell Urbansky, your host as always. And today we are joined by Brad Costanzo, a dynamic AI keynote speaker, CEO and the chief AI experimenter at Accelerated Intelligence. Brad is known for simplifying artificial intelligence for businesses seeking explosive growth. Creator of the powerful five Bucket framework, Brad helps companies effortlessly embrace AI to unlock innovation, efficiency and profit. Trusted by top leaders including Brian Tracy and Jack Canfield, Brad leverages proven marketing and business strategies to identify hidden opportunities and drive dynamic results. With a compelling blend of insight, humor and actionable advice, Brad inspires audiences globally, turning complexity into clarity and empowering organizations to thrive in an AI driven world. Now that's Brad has joined us here today to share his story and help us all navigate this AI enhanced future together. So, Brad, thank you for joining us. My friend, how you doing? Good.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, it's good to have you here. And before we get into the AI stuff, how did you even get into business? Is this like a family trade? And you picked up the torch. Were your parents entrepreneurs and you're carrying.

My parents were in sales, which is a very entrepreneurial position. Right. So not entrepreneurs, however. But I've just always been entrepreneurial since I was, since I was a youngin and always kind of do things my own way. I don't do well with authority like a lot of us, and I'm. I'm obsessively curious and I have this delusional optimism that I can just figure things out and I'd much rather try something and be wrong and try something again than just get stuck in the stale mold of doing something else for somebody else.

What was your first business? Do you remember?

Lawn mowing? Like a lot of people mowing lawns.

But.

And I got, I put out ads in newspapers. People pay me, let's say 20 bucks to do that. I had a couple of friends who weren't making as much money as I did, so I just paid them to go do the work while I stayed inside and played Nintendo.

Isn't that the Tom Sawyer book where he got.

I was Tom Sawyer.

I was very much.

And it wasn't. Yeah. And I didn't do it because I was wanting to scale my business. I did it because I was lazy, quite literally lazy. And I just. And I had allergies and I hated mowing lawns. But my dad was like, you're going to mow lawns? I'm like, I don't like this. So, hey, you friends who have less money than me, you go do it for me. And then I got. Throughout my career I've had other jobs which are not like professional jobs. I was a financial advisor for a while, but also that sales very entrepreneurial. And there's a very fine line between entrepreneurial and entrepreneur because you need to be entrepreneurial otherwise you're poor and it's just a bad way to go through life if you're not out there trying to solve problems. I always just tried to solve problems. Look for things. I had side hustles when I had a I. When I had another like professional role and then eventually as a financial advisor. I got out of the business in 2008. Gee, I wonder why if anybody remembers that markets were crashing. I happened to read the four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. He turned me on to the idea like a lot of people that you can make money selling information and other things in global arbitrage with outsourcing, et cetera. I said well I'm out of a job. I just read this, I'm inspired. Let's figure this out. So created two businesses at once, which is not always the best idea but I had partners in both which helped and both of them did fairly well. I sold one of them for a nice profit. Not like FU Money where I'm retired on a yacht but. And the other one sold probably doubled my money. But it was a small software business and had a series of other offers, whether it was in digital marketing and publishing or information products, but also software. And I've had E commerce businesses. Some of them I've started, some of them I partnered up with people. Some of them I got consulting for equity. I've done a lot of. I had a marketing consulting company. I also once more lazy. So the. I didn't want to take on the. The mantle of starting everything from scratch again and building all these resources and sometimes it's easier to just get out there and apply my skills as a commercenary if you would. And through that I've. I've gotten to work with some of the most amazing companies and become partners in them. I've got equity in some of them and I've gotten to really apply my trade at a lot of. With a lot of other ventures and personalities and then segued into AI. I've always once more lazy so I always use technology to. To create shortcuts and leverage my time, et cetera. When AI came around I was already using it in other forms. So when it exploded onto the scene I Already had a little bit of momentum, started just applying it ten times more. One thing led to the next and I became an accidental AI expert who's never been a programmer or a tech. But I think my clients like that about me because I bring the practical, tactical, applicable side of AI without the confusion. And I honestly, I don't. Artificial intelligence is not my passion. Getting results is right. I just happens to make it fun and easy.

I love that. I love that. I love that. I really want to dive. I've got 101 questions. Of course I want to automate everything that I can and just sit on a beach collecting money. If that was ever really a real, I would like to too.

I haven't figured that out.

Yeah, no, no. But what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced on your journey?

Oh, man, I was figuring it out all for the first time, like everybody. I sucked at everything at first, like everybody does, and a lot of failures along the way. Lost a lot of money. I made a lot of stupid mistakes. And then those are like the external mistakes. But then there's always. There's everything from imposter syndrome to getting to the point where you're work, you're hustling your paycheck to paycheck basically. And when you're paying yourself those paychecks, sometimes those paychecks don't come in. So just dealing with the uncertainties of being an entrepreneur and the roller coaster ride of it. Luckily, I've been with my wife for 20 years and she's been me the whole way. And it really helps to have a stable, supportive partner, being able to do.

It without her for sure.

But man, like, I, I don't know. I think I faced most of the same hurdles that a lot of entrepreneurs have. But I'm stubborn. I just figured out as I go.

Would you give yourself any advice if you're or someone was starting and struggling right now? What advice would you give them?

I would look at it like the looking back on one thing, the if you're starting out, you've got the ignorant. They say ignorance is bliss. And now I have the curse of knowledge. So I've been more hesitant to start new businesses now because I know everything that goes into them. Like I know where all of the things are now. That is also an advantage because I know how to avoid them and I know what to do. But also when I think about, okay, I've got an idea, let's do this. In the back of my mind or in the front of my mind, I go okay, these are all the crap I'm gonna have to deal with. Do I really want to do that? When I was starting off, I didn't know what I didn't know. And that actually allowed me to have that blissful ignorance of, oh, let's just do it anyway. Also, I call that delusional optimism, which you have to have. The other thing, I would look the other two big pieces of advice. I got so much advice, but one of them would be to look at it as an art project. If you're starting a new business and you don't know if this is the thing you're going to do forever, but you're going to do something. Like, I would overanalyze things and be. I would have this fear of commitment. I don't know if this is the business I want to do for the next 10 or 20 years. Guess what? You're probably not going to do the same business for 10 or 20 years. You may not do the same business for the next year. So I. Look, I started to look at it as an art project. Like, I've got something in me that needs to come out. Artists don't just create one piece of work, although they may take. Like Michelangelo may take years to work on one project, but then he goes on to the next. Some people will like it, some people will hate it. Some people will pay you money for it. Some people won't. You're not committing to it, but just bring your passion, bring your soul to it, and do your best and realize you're not committing to this forever. So I've done a lot of businesses just to kind of learn the. Learn it. Like, I started an E Commerce business because I've never started any commerce business. And I fell in love with the brand of it. And I was like, all right, let's see what I can do. It failed miserably. But I learned a lot along the way, and I learned a lot of what not to do. The other big piece of advice I would give, and this is cool if I. I wish I had a visual of this. Cause I've got it in my. Like, in one of my files. But it's this concept of suck less. So aim, don't aim, don't shoot. You can shoot for the moon. You can say, I'm gonna be the biggest, baddest, whatever. And a lot of us wants more delusional optimism. Now. Whenever I'm starting something, I don't know, I aim to suck less. And if you think about these two words as being like, Suck less. And there's a big space in between them. And my next goal is to be like, to just move them closer together. Suck less now. Suck a little less. Suck a little less. Suck a little less. And then when you put them together, you're suckless. Which I guess the opposite of suck less is excellence, right? But you don't do it all at once. Nobody leapfrogs into excellence right away. So if you're constantly like, how do I master this? You're always going to be looking at the people who are masters, and you're going to be learning from them and looking up to them. But it can be really disheartening. You're like, man, I'm never going to get there. Don't try to get there. Just aim to suck a little bit less than you did yesterday. There's the adage like 1% improvement. Every day it's exact same thing.

Kaizen. Constant improvement.

Yeah, constant improvement. Step by step, one foot in front of the other. Your competition. Look at your younger self. Not look who were you who you were yesterday, not who you know the other person is today.

Yeah, because you're right.

And then the. Maybe the last piece there, that. As I was saying that there's this concept, learn, do teach. Right? And one of my very good friends and former clients, world champion MMA UFC fighter named Frank Shamrock, known as a legend in the sport, he calls this plus equals minus. And you have to find your plus. That's your mentor. Find somebody who's above you that you can learn from. You also have to find your minus, somebody you can teach, but then you have to find your equal. This is somebody like in mma, this is the person you're fighting against, your coach, you got your student, your training buddy. So find your colleagues, find your masterminds, find your other people who are trying to do the same thing as you are. Find your colleagues. Find the ones who you. Who can really relate to what you're going for. Learn from others, but then teach others. Because, man, I'm sounding like a big cliche here, but when one person teaches two people learn.

And.

And by. By doing this, you get better. That is the path to mastery. Always. I've often said, why do I learn? It's so I can do. Why do I do something so I can teach it? Why do I teach it so I can learn. And then it becomes this virtuous circle. So if I always go into a new skill thinking, yeah, I can learn a new skill so that I can apply it, that's great. But If I can't teach it to somebody and teach it simply, then I don't really know it. I'm not a master of it. So if I put in the back of my mind, I'm going to learn this so that I can teach it, it helps. I'll go to my wife who has no interest in some of the stuff, this. But I make her sit there and say, let me explain.

You can understand it.

Not for you, because I can't explain it simply. I don't do it. So when it comes to AI, like I, I learned it so I can do it. And then as I started to do it, I started to teach others. And as I taught others, it solidified things in me. And I was like, oh, I learned something while I was teaching them. So those are some of the little cognitive, I call them cognitive keys because I wanted to come up with my own word for it. But these are like the keys to unlocking these mental roadblocks in your mind. And the very last piece of advice to finish off my cliche marathon here is the whole concept of who, not how. I'm a big fan of collaboration and coopetition instead of competition. And if I don't know the answer, I can get access to the people who do. And you do not need to be well connected to do that. Who, not how that could be. You can buy somebody's course, that's a who, not how. These days you can go to AI and learn a lot of things. You don't even necessarily need to buy a course. So there's so many reasons to learn that if you're ignorant, not stupid. If you're ignorant and you're broke, you deserve to be broke. Because there is absolutely no excuse for being ignorant these days. I have absolutely no sympathy for somebody who decides to remain in ignorance. I think they are a drain on society and I'm. They should be ashamed of themselves. And I'm not joking. Like, I like the people who don't learn, who have no advantage over people who can't learn. And it pisses me off in this day and age.

Yeah. So I think that's, I think that's really powerful because it's, we all know, we all learn in school. If you have an ecosystem and there's a lot of rabbits, there'll be more foxes. And then when there's not as many rabbits, there'll be less foxes. And that's a natural, equal is. And who are the rabbits that disappeared and who are the foxes that disappeared? The non performers. And it's just a natural order of things, you know. And you mentioned about excellence. Do you do CrossFit? You look like a CrossFit.

No, I work out, but I don't do CrossFit.

Okay, okay.

I'm 51 years old. I look at CrossFit, I'm like, that's an injury waiting to happen for me.

Anyways, the founder, Greg, uncontrolled movements in.

The gym for myself.

Fair enough. The founder, though, he had this great talk he gave where markets are ultimately unknown and unknowable. If I asked you how many people, I'm paraphrasing some of it. But if I asked you how many people are in market for a car today, you can find keyword trends. You might be able to like foot traffic. But ultimately the real number is unknown and unknowable. And it's constantly changing. But everyone can acknowledge and recognize excellence. So if you use excellence at solving a problem, excellence at producing a result, as your North Star, that'll see you through. And like you say, things will change and evolve. And I thought that was really good advice to give people like, it taps into what you were saying there and what you were describing. It's almost like the engineering process of brainstorm, research, prototype, final build. And that what you build, you have to be. You have to understand that what you're building is not going to be the final version. Naval. I love Naval Ravikant. He says it's not. It's 10,000 iterations. And I think that's real true to that too.

So that's a great point.

Again, before we get into the AI stuff, are there any habits or skills that you think are mission critical for someone to develop?

Yes. Once more I went back to learning.

Right.

Learn, apply, learn, apply. That's a skill. You have to be curious these days. Gone are the days of. Or soon to be. Gone are the days of specialized. Being a specialist in something. You have to be a generalist. Now the skills are being like small specialized skills are being replaced by AI very quickly and. But the people who can connect the dots ask better questions, constantly question their assumptions. And this is a habit, but it's getting into the plaque of learning and, and what I call fuck around and figure it out, get in there and do it. It's a habit, but it's. I've seen too many times people who don't do it, you're gonna get run over. We are in a brand new universe right now. Like we have shifted timelines. We are no longer where we were a couple Years ago. And it's if you're not scared, you're not paying attention. I got into AI because I'm scared to death of it. I'm scared to death. I'm out running obsoletion. And so I think the four biggest skills for. For most entrepreneurs right now who are trying to do especially what I imagine is your market, but this is not everybody in the world, but this is people. I think the most four critical skills is sales. Number one. Actually, I just posted this the other day on my X account, which if anybody wants to follow me, you can go to x.com Brad Costanzo shameless plug but the four most important skills right now is deep focus. Right? If you. And that's that curiosity, like attention spans are gone. Even yours. AI makes it way too easy to do shallow work. And it's easy to. And it's too easy to succumb to easy. So you need to know your biggest distractions and remove them and focus. Because now is the time to lock in. Number two is get proficient at AI Helps you do five critical things. We'll talk about my five Buckets framework. Assume that AI can do any task if you prompt it correctly. Number three, audience building. You can also call this distribution. You need to get your ability to get in front of other people. Whether you buy an audience, build one, borrow one, et cetera. But distribution is the single biggest. It's the single biggest moat in all of, in all of business. Amazon is built on distribution. And then the last piece is sales persuasion. So if you can get really focused on what you want to create for your life and how you're going to add value, you get proficient with AI, it completely unshackles you from creative and productive resistance. You start to build, borrow, buy, distribution, and you learn how to sell them, whether it's online or in person. You will be insulated from obsoletion. Everything else to me is a subset of that, at least in our world of what we do. And that is what I'm trying to constantly deep focus. I'm proficient in AI. I'm trying to get better. I'm currently trying to expand my audience and my distribution through all of those channels. Buying, building and borrowing. And I'm already pretty good at sales, but I'm always trying to get better at that. If you do those four things, AI and other people can help you do the rest.

I love that. Prior to doing this interview with you, I just saw yesterday an announcement, two different announcements out of China. One, they've mandated grades one up have classes on how to work with AI mandated throughout all of China. It's a bill. It's like almost a quarter of the world population. Second thing is they've actually now approved regulation for autonomous drone taxis, little helicopters you sit in that fly themselves to take you from A to B. We said timeline jump. Like we literally are in a timeline jump. But some people are in such media bubbles that they're really not clear on what's going on in the world and how severe the situation is and how much we have to retool reskill and get forward facing. Where are some of you? Where do you see the world in let's say, five, ten years? What are you expecting? How do you expect things to change? You've done some of it, but I.

Think we're going to. It's going to be the best of times and worst of times.

I think that's like last thousand, couple thousand years, five to 10 years.

I have honestly no clue. And anybody who thinks, thinks they do. Maybe Besides Naval is BSing themselves because the things we're seeing are happening so rapidly that I don't think we can understand. The human mind is not programmed to understand exponential growth. You cannot do that. There was a great article on wait but why.com about AI like several years ago and it's all talked about the explosion of super intelligence. And this is six, seven years ago. And it was very prescient in the, in what it was saying. But I think AI is going to, AI and automation along with every, all these other things are going to dramatically reshape society for better and for worse. I think we're going to get a bifurcation of haves and have nots. I think it's going to cause a dramatic amount of chaos, drama, violence, but also abundance in areas that we've never imagined. And it is, it's going to be Utopia meets Mad Max in some areas. And I don't know which one will win. Like I'm sitting here biting my nails at it all. I'm trying to be on the other side of it and be somewhat insulated. But I'm optimistic. Humans do tend to figure it out. And the problem though is right now it's coming at us so fast. In the past, whenever there was new technological changes, we had a little bit more Runway. Right now we don't really have as.

Much Runway and people realize. Sorry to interrupt, but people don't realize. Gmail serves over a billion people and there's 40 engineers. And so when you talk about this stuff like, oh, I got time. I don't know about that. Because some kid with a laptop in some other country on the other side of the planet could replace your whole industry. And they can serve everybody with a team of 12 people.

Yep. I gave a few years ago. I gave before AI came out. I gave a speech. It was well received. And one of the key concepts was how to fight fear with fear. Fight fire with fire. Is how to fight fear with fear. Most of us are. Every single human is more motivated by loss than we are by gain. 100% of us. And we run away from pain much faster than we run towards pleasure. And it can be debilitating when we're scared. But what I try to do is create a bigger fear on the other end to get me motivated. I don't like living my life with fear. But if you can do it with a positive thing. If I can think this fear is happening, like, I'm scared that I'm not smart enough to learn AI. Or I'm not smart enough to start an online business, or I'm not smart enough to do this. Those are fears. What will people think of me? I've got imposter syndrome and all this.

Right. But you're turning into. What if I don't do what it takes?

What is the bigger fear? So I think about it like. Like I. I have this picture in my head which was, you know, I'm in a hallway and I see. Remember Chucky from the movies?

Yeah, the little killer.

He's a little doll, and he's a mean little shit, and he's got a knife, and he's coming at you, and he's coming at you down the hallway. And you're like, oh, my God, do I turn around and run this way? But you turn around back this way, and you, Freddy Krueger coming. Right? That's the bigger fear. Obsoletion. Not being able to do this. If I look back and I see Freddie, yeah, I'm gonna go to the doll. I'm gonna kick that little doll. I might get a little cut by one knife, but not by five. In my dreams. That's my bigger fear. So I'm just gonna outrun that guy. I'm gonna outrun Freddy, I'm gonna run over Chucky, and it's gonna propel me to where I'm gonna be at. If you do that now, it's not a good place to stay in fear. But if you need tool. Yeah. If you need that motivation to really propel you into momentum, fight fear. With fear. And if you do that, you're going to become pretty soon fearless because when you see that it works, you'd be like, oh, wow, I just kicked Chucky in the nuts. I'm going to keep going and I'm. You're going to pick up a lot of skills along the way.

And you know what? Spoiler alert. We're all going to die anyways. At the end of the day, sure, there's people. I'm gonna. We're all trying to fight it, but up until now, throughout the entire history of the planet, number one cause of death is being born. So at the end of the day, like you're here, like to make the most of what you got. And just we. There's some. There's two things I want to add to that. One is I agree that it'll be the best times, worst times, and the wealth of nations. Adam Smith wrote about the diversification of work and that he uses the example of making pins and that a team of four people can make maybe 40 pins in a day, but a team of 10 people can do 4,000 in a day. And it's because the specialization of roles and that specialization allows mechanization and breakthroughs in the process that wouldn't be available if the one person were trying to do everything by themselves. And he actually uses the example of being lazy. Like a kid that's got this. His job is to pull this lever and he doesn't want to do. He wants to go play with his friends. So he figures out a way to do it to like the water wheel or something like that, that the turnstile that's getting turned by the downspout. So he innovates and creates a machine to make his life easier for that and produces way more at the end of the day for everyone. So I think that's what we're almost seeing because we got these general AI tools, but there's all these different niches and use cases that they have to be specialized for. So I think that's part of where the opportunity lies and absolutely is. I'm not personally and I'm putting this out there for. Some people are afraid. I don't really think we're going to create artificial life in that sense. And this is the reason why. And it really surprised me. You can look up online, there's all these videos at all these fertility clinics. When they take the egg and the sperm enters the egg, there is a legitimate flash of light.

I've seen those videos, seen that.

That's. That blew My mind, because I went there is we, we have a spark. Like Brad, you have a spark, I have a spark. Everyone listen to this. You have a unique spark. That was the moment that your life, like you became you. I mean, there's all this philosophical stuff like are you in the sperm and the egg met or are you in this. The coalescing series of events that had to occur in order. Like what? Okay, sure. But until we figure out how to do that with AI, it's just a tool. And we've been creating tools forever. And they said humans are going to be replaced by tractors. They said that we were going to be replaced by calculators. They said we weren't going to need accountants when spreadsheets came out. Now we got QuickBooks, we don't need CPAs, all this stuff. But all it allowed was people to specialize better and better and the productive people to be more productive and the non productive people to have to reskill, retool and lose the excuse for why it took them all day to do four plus four equals eight. So I, I'm, like you said, I'm perhaps cautiously optimistic. So now, with all that said, can you talk about what are some of the biggest opportunities for businesses to incorporate? I know this is a moment everyone's been waiting for probably from the beginning. What are the best. Yeah, what are some of the. So.

So it took me about a year of really working deeply with clients here, especially after OpenAI exploded onto the scene. And one of the exciting parts of AI is one of the most overwhelming, which is that it seems to encompass everything, it touches everything, everywhere. And people don't know where to start. They get, okay, what do I do? Do I create images and do I do this, blah, blah, blah, do I create an app, et cetera. And then they see 10 new tools a day coming out. And I have a term for this tool for you, right? You get all euphoric. But it's, if you've ever been in a euphoric state, you're not productive. You're just like, ah. Then I realized in working with these clients and helping them understand, enable them and implement it, that AI only does five things. And I think of these as buckets, right? So I call this the five Buckets framework. And the goal of these buckets is to understand and to help you categorize the tasks you're doing into these buckets so that you can focus on which bucket will, you know, you need to, to focus on. So the first bucket is thinking, let me rattle them off real quick. Thinking, creating, communicating, analyzing, and automating. Those are the only five things AI does. And every single thing it does is a subset of one of those. And I'll get more into the tactical way to use this in a second. So most people who've been using it, like ChatGPT, are playing with the thinking and creating bucket. So thinking helps you strategize, ideate, brainstorm, come up with new concepts, be your personal coach, do all this other stuff. It's the stuff that the rest of the world doesn't see, but it just you're working with it as your collaboration partner. Then the creating bucket, this is the most vast because it can create text, images, audio, video, or combinations of those things. Right? You can create an email with it, but you can also use AI to create a video with AI generated audio and images and a script. And you can create all of them as a combination. And it's unlimited what you can do. But most people are focusing on like content and sales copy, to be honest, and social media, et cetera. The next three buckets are big needle movers, but a lot of people are intimidated by them. Communication. So communication bucket is like chatbots and voice agents and other chat agents, whether it's on SMS or on a chatbot, or it's a virtual receptionist that can do inbound, outbound calls, screen screen leads, qualify them, set appointments, gather information, customer service lead, qual, et cetera. Very powerful. To me, the communication bucket is the closest to the cash register because you're interacting with clients and you're making your sales team more efficient. The next bucket is analyzing. And then you realize it can. There's two types of analysis. There's quantitative analysis and qualitative. So quantitative would be like spreadsheets and data. Data analysts and data scientists are really expensive and you may have a lot of data about your business or about the market et you can upload these into something like ChatGPT or another tool and have it tell you stories in the data and find things that you wouldn't be able to find and find really interesting nuances. But then on the flip side, you can analyze, let's say sales copy or. One of my favorite things to do is to get a. If one of my clients has a sales team, we take the top performers and we take like the top 10 calls, transcripts of the top performers. And I have some prompts that I run that analyze the sales call for all the best practices and the gaps and how do they handle objections and what style did they use Then we analyze the low performers and we see what they did or didn't do to be a low performer. And then we have it create a cross referenced correction plan. And this helps you clone your top performers and train your low performers. But it can analyze those things. Great. Now the last, and you can add, you can add an AI note taker to your call. Like a zoom call. Like this is earlier on we had my note taker on. Here I have it. Listen to every one of my calls and then analyze it and create a, create a, a summary of it.

Yeah.

The last piece is the automation bucket, or in the AI parlance we call it the agentic, like agents. And these are just, this is when you string different pieces of software together. Now you create smart automation. So when this happened, connected this tool.

And for some people, I don't know, that's not necessarily new. But what is new is that it can think and do this stuff for you because automation's been around for a long time.

But it's dumb automation. When this happens, do this. Now you can say when this happens, run it through AI, analyze it, create this, do this, et cetera, filtered out and let it use its own brain. So it's smart automation.

Yes.

So now how do you use, who cares about these five buckets? How do I use them? The first thing everybody wants to do when they see new AI tools, they want to go do all the cool stuff first. All the novelty and the noise. Oh my God, I'm going to go create cool images and stuff. The problem is those things don't solve problems for you. They don't move the needle. So my very first piece of advice is don't do the new stuff, the new fun stuff. Solve your bottlenecks and your problems first. Get things off your plate to make room for the new cool boat from the blue ideas. And how do you do that? You look at your buckets and you ask yourself, which of these buckets is the heaviest? Where am I spending the most time? Money, mind sharing?

Where do I suck the most?

Yeah, yeah. But I also like to think, which bucket am I carrying? That's, everybody's carrying these five buckets at all times. Which is the heaviest? Is it the content creation bucket? You're spending too much time creating blogs and sales copy. Or is it spending too much time on the phone talking to tire kickers? Or is it something else? And usually it's the creation bucket and the communication bucket are the two heaviest, followed by the automation bucket. Because those two things take a lot of time and they're very front, front and center. But then you go, all right, what are the things I'm doing, like I have to do? I hate to do it. It's a routine task. I wish I could hire somebody, but it's either too expensive or I hate dealing with employees. You may be able to automate an aspect of that, but what you want to do is you need to audit your buckets. Just this can take an hour. You sit down and go, what, what bucket's the heaviest? And then you start looking for solutions to lighten the load of that. And then you start to prioritize those projects which will have the most impact with the least amount of effort in your business. So I take a very systematic approach to this. And by doing that, it removes all the noise. And you may only use one or two AI workflows in your entire business. And it can revolutionize, it can buy back 50% of your time. And I think this is one of the things that separates me from a tool jockey, right? Which is, oh, look what you can do, look what you can do. Look at this show and tell. Yeah, there's a lot of cool shit you can do. Those guys, once more, they're tool jockeys. They don't understand what it takes to run a business, maintain a business, make it profitable. I do. And this is why I've been a successful consultant in this phase. Because I'm not just an AI guy. I didn't name my business like artificial intelligence consulting. It's my business is called accelerated intelligence because artificial intelligence is a tool. Accelerated intelligence is the outcome. And intelligence is the seed for everything else you're going to do, whether it's business intelligence, financial, emotional, sales intelligence. That's what I care about. AI is the leverage. Humans are still the force.

I love that. I love that so much. So I love your five buckets. I think if you overlay that with the E myth, three categories of lead generation, lead conversion, client fulfillment, you can take a look at those two together and go, where do I suck the most? Or what's my biggest bottle? Because this is the theory of constraints. If you've got a five step process, and just for people that aren't familiar with the visual, you have a five step process and the throughput, the ability to move through that step is, let's say 20, whatever it is, 20 clients, 20 inquiries, whatever that is. But step three can only take 5, 20, 25, 20, 20. Doing anything other than fixing that issue, that bottleneck of five, to expand it to not be A point of friction is a waste of time. The number one most impactful thing you can do for your business is to fix that. 5. If you get. We talked about lead gen lead conversion client fulfillment. If your lead gen is producing 20 leads a day and your client fulfillment is getting you five star reviews, but your conversion is only closing one sale a month, getting 100 leads is not going to change your lead conversion problem. What you need to do is fix that. So just as an idea for people like the bottleneck theory of constraints. So I think that by using that lead gen lead conversion, client fulfillment and going through those five buckets, thinking strategy, creating communication, analyzing data, copy, sales teams and automating, I think that's a really powerful tool.

Now you hit it on the nail on the head. It is all about theory of constraints. When I said remove your bottlenecks first before you add the new stuff, that's 100% it, right?

So now for people listening, going, that's great, Brad, but I'm not a programmer. So how much do I got to pay to get. Like, how do. I'm whatever, I'm a pest control guy, I'm whoever. I'm a swim coach, I'm. I'm a roofer, I'm. I've got an online course for how to do aromatherapy. Like how does, how do I now become AI proficient? Am I building these? Am I hiring someone? Am I buying stuff? How do you make this work?

All right, so the very first thing, fatio, remember what I said? Fuck around to figure it out. You can do this on your own. I get paid to do two things. I get paid to teach people this and enable them. I have an AI accelerator program that I teach people with. I get paid to implement it. It is not necessary. I am happy. I'm really good at teaching this stuff, but it is not necessary. If you are curious and playful and you get on there and you use some of this stuff and you can use AI to help teach you some of this stuff. I call this the Mac method. It stands for mentor, assistant, critic. So go to AI. AI can help you learn how to use AI very effectively. If you're really good at questions, which is one of my biggest strengths.

And.

And then you can ask it to do something and then you can have it do it for you. So it's my mentor, it's my assistant. And then you can have it critique the work it did. And this is a great way to learn. But the very first thing you can, all you have to do is solve your Problems. Come up with all the problems you have and then go look for AI solutions that already exist on how to do. Most people just aren't curious enough or they stop too quickly and they don't just continue to faffio with it. And that is one of the, that's one of the ways to ease into it, especially if you have more time on your hands than money. If you realize that this is important. You want to create a faster learning curve. I don't know if it's, I've never known it. Is it a steep learning curve is good or a shallow learning curve is good? I can't remember which one it is. I think it's steep where you learn and it shoots up like a hockey stick real quick. And if you want that you can go on YouTube. You can find a million different tutorials which is great. You can come to accelerated intelligence AI. Get in contact with me. I will tell you all about the programs and the consulting that I do. I'm happy to work with people who are serious about business and who are looking to really kind of shortcut the learning curve. But I'll be the first one to say you don't need to pay somebody to learn it if you're curious and resourceful. But I'm more than happy to work with people who, you know, I want to shortcut it.

No, I think it makes sense. Like we said before, it's becoming a tool that is necessary to navigate our way into the future. It's just.

Yeah, the first thing you have to do, honestly the very first step, is you have to know what's possible. Because every single week it feels like something new is possible. And I didn't even know it could do that. Oh my God. It just unlocked a new level in this video game. And that's how I look at it. A really good example. This has been out for a couple months now. I think I discovered it about a month ago. Google has something totally free called aistudio.google.com youm can go there and then there's a little button on the left hand side that says stream real time. And then another button that says share your screen. So I can go to Google, share my screen and it talks to me and it is watching over my shoulder what I'm doing. Let's say you want to learn how to program something.

Yeah.

And I'll say, okay, Google, I'm over here on GitHub, a bunch of programming. I'm not a programmer, I don't know what to do. But this thing looks cool. Can you help me install this? Because all the instructions look Greek to me and it'll say, okay, I see you're on GitHub and you're on this and you want to do that, Is that right? And I go, yeah, okay, first thing you want to do is go down, open up this, do that, and it is tech support over your freaking shoulder telling you how to do things.

Wild. That is so wild.

Insane. My favorite use case of that is telling my parents how to do it so that they don't call me learning how do I log into my email. But it's a very cool thing. And if you didn't know that existed, you'd be like, oh man, how do I go get help? You want to figure something out, Go have Google look over your shoulder while you're doing it. If you know what's possible, then you be. Your potential starts to shoot up. One of the things that a lot of my clients and my AI accelerator love is that just every single week show up on the calls and I'm sharing the new things that are possible. And then we're working through their, we're working through their, what do you call it, their challenges and their goals. They're like, here's what I want to do. How do I do this? Some of them aren't as curious and resourceful. I tell them how to do it. Like, I didn't even know that was possible. Cool. That is how you get ahead in this space.

Yeah. So it sounds like a lot. Yeah, that's. This is fantastic. And I think what it's going to do is enable people to focus on the relationships and the most excellent solution and hopefully guiding AI. Right. If you've got an army of robots, Naval says this software is an army of robots, but they're just ones and zeros hosting a server. But now what happens when those robots can reach out into the world and touch you or they can create stuff or they can influence people and so machines can't necessarily be held accountable because there's no human there, so to speak. There's no ambassador for humanity. And so what we really need is humans monitoring some of these bots and being able to steer them the direction that we want to make sure that we don't create one that is a seek and destroy bot that seeks and destroys all humans. And it just like an assembly line just runs and does that non stop crazy powerful. Fantastic. So can you walk us through what do you think will be some of the biggest general you've talked about the five buckets. And you already said that numbers two, three and five, which was create, communicate and automate.

What are the big needle movers? Because the thinking part is great. If you only think and you don't do anything else with it like create or communicate or automate, then it's like just a brain in a box.

So what are some of the most powerful ways to do those for most businesses, for people that are like, what is possible? Can you give some examples? Yeah.

On which one?

All of them. What are the highest? Yeah.

I love and I've got various prompts I'm happy to give away to folks if they're interested in strategic thinking prompts which unlock amazing. What do you call them, thoughts that they never would have gone like they never would have thought about before. Just really how to strategically solve problems and think through ideas. I built this thing and once more I'm sure I'll share a link with your audience. They can get this. But I built a custom GPT that a lot of my clients love. I call it the Billionaire Boardroom Advisor. So I created this thing to where you put in your. You tell it what your business is or what your thoughts are. Like, let's say I want to do start an E commerce business or something like that and it'll ask some other questions and then it's programmed to to find the most relevant billionaire who's succeeded at that at what you want to do and ask you other questions and then give you advice that it believes that billionaire would give you based upon what it knows about those billionaires and the case studies. So for instance, let's say you want to start a big E commerce business. Maybe it channels Jeff Bezos's best ideas, the king of E commerce. But maybe you want to create a female sport. I've got an idea. You want to get really specific. I've got a female athletic or clothing line product that I want to launch. It may channel Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx, and give you advice based on her. And it does a really good job of doing that. So it's like little tools out there. Oh, wow. I can get advice from virtual billionaires on the creation side. There's a ton of things. Like I created this, a lot of things that can write in your voice and it can write amazing sales copy. It's really killer. And they're one of my favorite tools is it's the second brain. This is one of my favorites and anybody can access mine if they go to chat.bradcostanzo.com, but it's called, it's built on a platform called Delphi. And if you want to give people the link to this, it's Delphi D E L p h I clone.com Delphi clone. And this allows you to build a really effective second brain. It ingests your information and other information, amazingly and it starts to. It's like your own personal chat GPT that knows you. It's in your voice. So I use this not only to chat with my like prospects and clients and customers, but I use it to create marketing copy and content for me because it knows my stuff better than ChatGPT does, but I also use it as a personal coach because it knows me so well. I went in the other day and I said, hey, what are my blind spots as an entrepreneur? And it nailed them. It's Bing and it gets this from my YouTube channels, my 10 year old podcast, all this other stuff that I've done. And I'll be damned if it's not the best personal coach I've ever had. And it's me teaching me.

Yeah.

And it's, it's once more, it's called del deli clone.com. it's awesome. I use it every single day of my life.

That's wild. And you can see yours is a chat dot. Brad Costanzo dot com. Is that.

Yep, that's it.

Yeah. For people that aren't sure, it's C O S T A N Z O Costanzo. Yeah. Yeah. This is full. There's lots of actual insights. I have a page of notes. Brad. Good. If people are curious about learning more, how do they plug in to you? Because this is just a taste. I think people probably want to listen to this interview more than once to make sure they got it all. But if they want to just open source. Yeah.

If you're listening, you're like, listen, I really need to get a hold of you. I need to talk right now. You can email me directly. Bradcelerated Intelligence AI is my personal email. You can also go to that website or you can go to Brad costanzo.com I got those. My personal brand. And the other one, I just recently launched a newsletter I'm pretty proud of over at Accelerated Intelligence. If you actually go to read AcceleratedIntelligence AI, it's my beehive letter and I've got some really cool things on there. And that's if you just kind of want to ingest some of my content but you're not 100% sure. You can also follow me at Brad Costanza on social media. But reach out. I'm not that. I'm pretty responsive if you're respectful of my time and I'm happy to, you know, see if there's anything I can do to help you.

That's powerful. That's so powerful. Go Check out Brad Costanza.com B R A D C O S T a n z o dot com. You can also email him brad@acceleratedintelligence AI that is a C C e L E R A T e D intelligence I n T e L L I G e n C e dot A I And you can also just look them up on social media. Brad, this has been a powerful call. I think like I said, people are going to love this. Is there anything I haven't asked you about that I should have asked you about?

I don't think so. Honestly, I think I've gotten, I think I've given a lot of the high level information or advice out once more. I think fafio is the single best thing anybody can do.

Right?

And hopefully you guys remember that one. But yeah, hit me up if you guys have any other questions.

Powerful. Brad, thank you so much for coming and sharing with my audience. And I knowing you got your own followers, your own direct reports, your own customers, your own coaching clients, thank you for coming, sharing with my audience tonight so we can all enter into this new AI age a little bit better.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me on budget.