Intersection of Creativity and Education: John Cousins

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Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in El Segundo, California. Never been there, but I do know the song. I left my heart in El Segundo. Yeah, I'm not going to— I'm not going to sing the whole thing for you. Joining me today, John Cousins of of MBA ASAP. John, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Christian. Pleasure to be here. Uh, yeah, I thought that was I Left My Heart in San Francisco, but it is. Yes, but there was the second, right?

So it was a, um, I want to say it's a rap song in the like '90s.

I'm gonna have to look it up.

Yeah.

That's a good one. Actually, I think that's the, for me, the golden age of rap is the 1990s. The Chronic and all that kind of stuff. Snoop Dogg coming up and—

Yes, yes. I was listening in the '80s, cutting my teeth on Run-DMC and LL Cool J. And yeah, so—

Well, maybe that's a good place for us to start. You know, I In the '80s, me and my partner, great guy who now trades in vinyl, and I go to some of the record collect, you know, conventions with him. But back then we had a music television show in, you know, it's creatives, you know, and a recording studio in New York. And our show was called New Music Plus. And we had on Run-DMC, We had, you know, worked with Russell Simmons and his record company at the time, and Run was his brother. And then we had on the Beastie Boys and they were, you know, in our backyard. And at that time, the big band that they had, the one they thought was really going to break through, not those two, but they had another one called Houdini, which was a rap band. And those guys, yeah, where are they now?

I vaguely remember them.

They were a more polished band and they were Produced by a German guy named Conny Plonk, who was in a band called Tangerine Dream, a synthesizer group.

I remember that. I remember that band.

Yeah, he was in Tangerine Dream and he produced this Houdini. And that was the band they were really promoting. We had them on. They thought they were going to be the big stars. And it turned out that Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys became bigger.

I mean, can you really trust a German to identify rap talent? I don't know.

Maybe. It's going to be good. It's good, no? Rock hard. Rock hard.

John, tell us about MBA ASAP. I'm curious.

Oh, super. Well, yeah, MBA ASAP is— I've been doing that for about, well, more than a decade now, about probably almost 15 years. But what I— and it came about from my kind of— I'll give you the whole arc of my career here. Yes, please. Because that's where it really organically derived from. I started out as an engineer, electrical engineer. I worked in recording studios and that kind of music stuff. And then I went to work for ABC Television back when there was 3 networks, you know, it was all network TV. And I was a systems designer designing and building facilities for the network. And really, it was a fun, wonderful job, but I I just chafed at the corporate environment. They were dictating, okay, tomorrow you're flying to El Segundo or something. And they owned me in a way that after a decade, I really came to feel oppressed by. So, I decided— that was one of the reasons I decided to go back to business school and get my business degree. One, to get that in my skill stack and also to try to be an entrepreneur. I thought, I don't want to I don't want to work for people anymore. I want to, you know, I know how to design and build. I was doing that with ABC. We, I would, production would say they wanted to do this or that. And then I'd go to these different equipment manufacturers and technology companies and we would develop a piece of equipment and then they would end up selling a whole bunch of them. I thought I could do that. I'd like to do that, you know? And so I went to the Wharton School at Penn, University of Pennsylvania, got my MBA. Impressive. And then decided to just, you know, head out on my own. Everybody else there, you know, that's one of those places where you go and the lane is then you go to the big consulting firms or the big investment banks or, you know, or be a product manager for Procter Gamble or something. Not go and be an entrepreneur at that time.

No. I was accepted into UPenn undergraduate and that was that was a real struggle to not go to the Wharton School of Business. I really wanted to, but it was too much money.

So it was a ton of money, you know, and that's a really important point, Christian. Yeah, I ended up going there, you know, thinking that, well, you know, maybe I'll learn, you know, the secret handshake or something that, you know, like the Masons or something. And it turned out there wasn't any like really esoteric information that you learn. It's just the, obvious things of business is, you know, you make something and you try to sell it for more than it costs you to make it. And then that's your profit. I mean, duh, you know, there's, it's not really, and marketing, you make people aware of that. And it's pretty intuitive. I mean, there's a lot of sophisticated parts to it, but it boils down to that kind of thing. But yeah, the tuition, you know, now the tuition is, I just looked it up for 2 years is almost 200 grand. It's like $187,000 for the 2 years. Plus, I had a young family at the time. I had all my living expenses. I stopped working, right? With all that, I ended up with almost, you know, close to a $400,000 hole I had dug myself in 2 years. And then I started wondering, was that the best decision that I could have made in my life? You know, I It turned out it was good, but I kind of made it good, I guess. But, uh, but it was a struggle to sort of recoup from that. And, uh, even if you think break-even, well, if you make $40,000 extra a year, it's still going to take 10 years to recoup that $400,000. So, you know, the economics of it were problematic for me, but it was a, it was a, a really good intellectual experience and, uh, and things like that. I mean, wonderful. But then I started making my own companies. And then you realize too that the degree, you know, nobody is relying on the diploma to say, oh, okay, this is your, you know, you have the imprimatur of this. It was just like, what can you do that's going to compel people to, you know, part with some of their hard-earned money? What value proposition are you going to put forward? So I learned that lesson and went through it. And so my first thing was, I tired of bosses and corporate structure. So I got rid of that. Then as I thought being my own boss would be the panacea to all my angst kind of thing, right? It turned out it really wasn't. And over the years, I tired of partners. I tired of employees. They're hard to manage a lot of times. Everybody has a problem. And then also worrying about making payroll and things as an entrepreneur. And, and then I, I, I started to dislike having investors. I mean, they basically just want to put money in and then bleed you dry, work you, you know. And so it's hiring yourself another boss. And then I also tired of having big customers because you really got to kiss up to them and they kind of dictate what you're going to do. And so I ended up now, after all of those kind of, you know, peeling off those layers of the onion as a solopreneur, where it's just me. And luckily, the technology has caught up where it can be just me and the robots. You know, everything— I can automate everything and hire a few consultants for, you know, particular tasks and develop the mosaic of talent that I need for particular situations and then let that, you know, dissolve too. Um, and so that's worked out really wonderfully where I'm doing all of the tasks and, uh, and, um, and I can dictate my destiny. And I really love that. And so that's MBAs ASAP, kind of derived out of that. One is helping people that were in situations like I wanted to be in. You know, you have whatever you're doing in your life and you need that skill stack of some, uh, some business skills. You know, how to understand financial statements so you can talk to your accountant, how to do marketing programs so you can make people aware of what you're, you know, what you're providing, how to, you know, message your value proposition and all those kinds of things. And that's what I kind of put together. I started teaching while I was, I ended up taking two companies public and running them as a public company CFO and CEO, you know, on the stock market, but taking them public. And then my sister was teaching finance in a university in New Jersey. And I thought, that's so cool. You know, I'd like to do that, go try teach. And so, I started doing that and started seeing, boy, the textbooks are this thick. And that's what I remember. They're great doorstops, right? But 800 pages on accounting, 800 pages on corporate finance, or 800 pages on antiquated marketing techniques that were from the 1990s, from the Mad Men era of the '60s or something. And so, I started boiling those down to what do I use every day. You know, what are the kind of things that I use as a CFO and a CEO, you know, running a company? I don't go through all— you know, these things are intellectually interesting, but they're not practical things that you— what are the blocking and tackling equivalents of business? You know, the fundamentals. And so, I really started to get traction with my students. They would be like, "I never understood this before and now it's suddenly become clear." You know, they get inundated with so much information that they don't contextualize it. They had no way to see the forest through the trees kind of thing. And so that, that's what I started to do. And then I realized, you know, I started to write those as books and realized there was a bigger market for these kinds of things than just the, you know, the 20 people in my classroom. And as technology, you know, evolved, suddenly I could have international markets. I put my books through Kindle Direct Publishing and I just upload a manuscript. Now I have a a little more sophisticated tools, but at first, I would just use a Word file, you know, and they had a cover creator and I could make the book. And then the book would go live to all the Amazon markets around the world. And then I started doing the same thing, bringing my little iPhone into class and setting it up on a little tripod and recording myself at the whiteboard and editing those in iMovie, which is a $5 add-on to my Apple, and making titles on the ends and uploading them to a platform called Udemy, that where you can market courses all over the world. Right. And so that's what, how this basically came about. It evolved out of my own personal needs and, you know, using my students as kind of a laboratory and saying, ah, this really, you know, the education system from a cost standpoint and from a, you know, overload of information standpoint wasn't really serving people in a way. I thought there was a niche there where I could serve people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you said a lot that has piqued my interest. I think the most important thing that you said, and I'll summarize this for you, is that, you know, through your experience, you ended up designing the business that you wanted. And I think that's a point a lot of entrepreneurs miss, that they, they build a business— I know I did, uh, around really nebulous goals like bigger. Yeah, okay, whatever. Um, but how you, you kind of went backwards and landed where it made sense for what you wanted to do And that's 100% okay. It's about building the business you want that serves what you want, not building something that you then become beholden to and stressed by and miserable about. That's the first thing. The second thing is, I remember, 12, 13 years ago having a conversation with a fellow entrepreneur about, uh, education and technology. And what fascinates me is how little impact, uh, on, on the traditional or public education systems technology has had, um, that, you know, the model didn't change. They've just tried to inject technology into it, but the model, I think, is fundamentally broken because the model originated where you had a few people with all the knowledge, and so it made sense to do lectures where, you know, someone would speak and it was an easy way to disseminate information. But now, uh, that, that all the information is out there, right? Right. And, and so, like, what purpose does a university, uh, serve? Um, and it— they have not shifted that model. And, and I think you're seeing it break. I think, I think you're seeing education, higher education breaking. Public education has been broken for decades, um, but that, that has other societal reasons behind it. But, you know, if we're just looking at the core, uh, purpose of education, um, you know, I think there's a very good argument to say that it's failing in the United States. And, um, you know, going back to the Wharton example, uh, the reason why those schools still, uh, survive, um, are because of the brand, right? You're, you're, you're taking their brand and you're putting it on your resume. And that has cachet with some people. But the reality is, as a business owner, I don't care where your degree is from. Can you do the job? Can you bring value to the situation? And whether you have a formal education in that or not is irrelevant. I might use it to help screen But that doesn't mean that at the end of the day, that just because someone has a degree means they have the knowledge or the ability to implement it or use it.

No, and those are great points, Christian. Thanks for summarizing succinctly my roundabout way of saying it. Very eloquent. And thank you. Yeah, and you're right. It serves a purpose for a certain group. These highly branded education. Because when you go in for an interview or something, it's asymmetric information. Correct. You know more about yourself than the employer does. And the employer is trying to figure out, is this person going to be a good fit? Do they have the skill sets? And the degree acts as sort of a proxy for them to say, okay, they were at least able to sit in a classroom, jump through these kind of hoops and perform these kind of tasks and do it in a methodical way. So they have that kind of skill set. So for where there's gatekeepers like that, the degree signals— it's a signaling mechanism. Yes. Signals that you're competent on those kind of levels. But like you say, for people that are— want just the practical skills and put them to use right away, the degree holds no cashé. It has no utility. No, you really have to know, can I do this? Can I do that? And that comes from a little bit of knowledge. And then just by doing, I think, and as you do it, you gain the experience, you understand how to, how to do it better. And over time, you know, you become skilled.

Well, and I absolutely, and I think the gatekeepers actually do more harm than good because they feel like they have to give you all the information, right? And I remember, you know, my degree was in accountancy. This is before you had to have a master's degree to obtain a license. And, you know, the thing that they all were trying to push you towards was this CPA track. So like, you have the accountancy so that you can sit for the exam. And once— so, so similar to medical school, right? They're teaching towards the test in a broad sense. And, uh, I get to the test and, you know, the first time back then it was a live test, it was a proctored test, and there were 4 sections and I failed all of them. Um, and I literally was rethinking my life choices. Like, I, I, I had studied from August until November literally every day. And I was like, I can't believe I didn't pass any of them. And then the next window was in May, so they only did the test twice a year. So I go in in May, I didn't study a lick because I was frustrated, and I passed all parts, which you can read into that what you want. But when I showed up at my first job And they handed me a box. It was a rental car company we were auditing. They handed me a box of bank reconciliations and they said, well, we need you to test these to see if they're done right. And I sat there and I looked at it and I'm like, what's a bank reconciliation? And how do I know if it's right? Like, I had no idea. And I sat there for about 30 minutes And I finally asked my supervisor, I said, I'm sorry, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, none of what I have been trained taught me how to do this. Right. And she said, that's okay. And then she walked me through it. But that's kind of my point, that there's this disconnect. Yeah, there's an impracticality to a lot of the education that we get. Like, it's not useful knowledge. It's just knowledge.

Yeah, it could be intellectually interesting or in an academic setting interesting, but right, it's not useful in a practical way for doing business. And especially a lot of the professors at a business school, let's say, they're all PhDs and they have their research track. And it's very narrow because to do your research, you have to be very narrow. When you go for a PhD, you don't take a lot of high-level courses in pedagogy and how to communicate the information, you know, and teach. You just know how to research, you know. And, and these folks have done really wonderful research and all, but they've never had the bumps and bruises of actually trying to run a company or try to, you know, be any type of managerial or leadership role in a corporate setting. Never mind be an entrepreneur. And so the perspective that they're coming from in their teaching is like you say, it might be theoretically interesting, but they're not really conveying the practical information about when you get this first job, you're going to have to sit down and know what a bank reconciliation is and how to test it to see if it's correct. They don't tell you that because they don't know that.

No, they don't. And 90% of the subject material that was on the CPA exam I've never used professionally and never will. And, you know, I think that that extends to— someone asked me the other day, said, if you were advising somebody that was a young person wanting to do accounting, would you advise them to obtain their CPA? And I said, well, I said, if you want to be a career professional in accounting and finance, yes. I would. But if you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the accounting space, no, because in a lot of states you don't need a license to do a lot of accounting. You know, the bookkeeping, the payroll, the income taxes— in most states you don't have to be licensed to do it. So, you know, what's the purpose of getting a CPA? You know, occasionally we'll get someone that will ask us, you know, before they hire us, they're like, Well, are you CPAs? And, you know, the reality is they don't know what CPA means. It could mean cut, paste, and attach. They don't know. It's— it's— it's— they have to feel smart to say, well, I should ask something about your qualifications, so I'm going to ask that question. And there is this— I think the way I'd summarize this is, is that, you know, in this age of information where everything is available always, Um, there's, there's, there's the ubiquity of, of information, but there is a, a dearth of wisdom. Absolutely. And, you know, how do I use that information, right?

Absolutely. I, I totally agree with you. And, uh, and also with a CPA, if you want to be a public accountant and and look at other people's books and things and work on other people's books. A CPA might be useful, but I was a CFO of public companies. I did not have to have a CPA because if you work for an internal company, it's not required. And there's a guild mentality to these things too, where they make the test like some kind of a thing so that they restrict the amount of people that can get it.

Well, and then they increased the education requirement to 150 hours, you know, a decade ago. And now they've shot themselves in the foot because no one's going into accounting and there are not enough accountants. And so they're looking around at each other. Well, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Let's see if we can find some other ways to get people licensed. Yeah, no, it is a guild mentality. It is, I'm in, so I'm going to make it harder on the others.

Yeah. And like you said about broken school systems, you know, the public school systems. It's— the whole thing is becoming more and more anachronistic. But, uh, you know, it was pretty much developed originally in a way to, to make for good compliant factory workers. You know, where you were trained that you, you came in at 8 o'clock in the morning, you sat in this chair, we taught you this stuff, you went for lunch, you came back, and at 3 o'clock, whatever, you left. From first grade on, right? You're, you're trained for this so that when you came out, you would be ready to go into the cogs of the machinery of a mechanized industrial society where everybody took their lunch pail, went off to the motor plant or whatever and worked. And that whole thing has changed. So, the system isn't training for something that is the job requirements now. And now, across all the grades, especially in higher education, it's really coming to a head with artificial intelligence and people just using, you know, chatbots to write their papers or chatbots to do this. And they have all this information available. And the universities are trying to figure out how do we incorporate this into our model that is no longer adequate when people can actually do, you know, have machines do a lot of that type.

Well, right. And more importantly, see, this is what they don't teach you. Is, is they don't teach you in school, like, how to, uh, have rational thinking, right? So, like, you know, you know, can you tell if what the, uh, GPT gave back to you is accurate?

Critical thinking.

It also, you know, because— and this started back in the '80s when they started incorporating all these standardized tests Now all the schools, they're teaching to the test because that's how they get evaluated. That's how they get funding. And all it does is it forces more and more convergent thinking. You know, multiple choice, there's one correct answer unless they screwed up and there is no correct answer. You know, that happens. But divergent thinking, which creativity is all about, is not— it's not taught at all. And in many— in In many cases, it's actually perceived as a negative. Like, you know, you didn't get the right answer. You're therefore not good at math. It's like, well, you know, no, maybe, maybe you think of, maybe you thought of a different answer. Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

Absolutely. And I know that's a great way to think of it. It does promote convergent thinking where everybody's going to be lemmings and be the same way and where we need more creative thinking. Yes. And divergent thinking. And with the tools we have now too, like you say, we have all the information available. We have these new tools that can codify that information. But is it the right information, the right answers that we're getting? If we can now have creativity to use these things, my gosh, then they become incredible levers, like powerful power tools for us to use in making art, in making creative decisions of all kinds.

Yeah, it was kind of like, you know, when LLMs came out a couple of years ago, I had, I had already been doing a deep dive on AI, which I don't think LLMs are AI, but strictly speaking, we'll just call it that. So I had been studying AI for a while before the advent of the LLMs, but once they arrived, I went to several events. I was with several groups of people, learning all I could about these things, these new tools. And I could not for the life of me for 2 years figure out, how do I use this? How do I— how does this help me, right? Until it was explained to me just recently. He said, think about it as a hard drive with all the information in the world. And then a whole bunch of extra processors, uh, and you're the computer. Like, you're the one that has to come up with the idea. It's just, it's just an add-on to you, right? And, and I'm like, okay, that makes more sense. Like, but, but I kept approaching it from a standpoint of how can I use this thing to make my job easier, which Frankly, it made it harder because it took me longer to explain to the AI what I wanted it to do and make sure that it was doing it than it was for me to just do it myself. And I'm like, well, screw that. I'm not going to mess with it, right?

No, absolutely. And like you say, if you think of it that way, like, how can this, you know, use this as a tool and you're in charge. And this is just your next level of like spellcheck or like a calculator, all those kinds of tools that helped. Everybody was worried when calculators came out that, oh, now people aren't going to learn math, you know, math, and they wouldn't know how to add and subtract. Well, you still have to have the critical thinking skills when you type in the numbers. Is that answer within the realm of, you know, scaling-wise? Is it something that's reasonable?

And this is what is terrifying to me. Me. And I, I know I'm an old man, but, um, what terrifies me— I said this before the LLMs— what terrified me was that you can, you could search a question on, on Google and it would give you a response. And which was great, you don't have to remember anything. Like, you know, what day was, uh, Pearl Harbor on? Okay, I don't need to know that it was December 7th.

December 7th, 1940.

Google will remember that for me, right? But then I, I was like, but what if they change the answer? What if they say it was December 8th, 1940?

Revisionist history through the algorithms. Yeah.

And so that scared me. Now AI is on steroids because it's taking all that data and it's supposedly thinking for you But if you don't have some base knowledge to know, you know, that doesn't sound right, and you don't have any critical thinking where the GPT is just going to give you an answer and you're like, okay, I'm going to cut and paste. That's a dangerous place to be.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why more than ever, and even with misinformation on social media and all kinds of things, you know, To have critical thinking skills, just to some degree, having a BS detector that is not going to just take everything at face value and say, oh my gosh, aliens just landed and whatever it is, is absolutely important in this age. I mean, we can be tossed every which way if we don't have that or be directed by nefarious forces in ways too.

Yeah, I mean, it could be. It doesn't even have to be malicious intent. It's just, you know, the—

it could just be—

it could just be the AI, you know, hallucinating, as it were, you know. And yeah, but to tie all this back in, I think the way, the way I would summarize it is I know a lot of creative entrepreneurs are, are scared of technology and are worried you know, that if I'm a copywriter, I'm going to be replaced. If I'm a videographer, I'm going to be replaced. You know, if I'm a marketer, I'm going to be replaced. That— I think absolutely not. I was working on a GPT for our internal purposes, and it was for financial analysis internally, and I left that day and I told my wife, I said, well, I'm pretty sure the Terminator isn't going to show up anytime soon. Like, I was, I was so frustrated with the experience, right? And I had an expert consultant help me with it. Like, it's not like I was trying to do something without understanding of how it worked. But, but I think to the creative entrepreneurs out there, don't worry about it modifying your industry, your job. Look at it as an opportunity because what people are going to do is they're going to use it to— the, the example I would use is, and I've used it before on this program, you know, I started my business before QuickBooks even existed, right? There was Quicken, uh, which is a single ledger accounting system, which is awful. Um, and then when QuickBooks came out, everybody thought— all my colleagues were like, oh, this is going to put us out of business, you know, nobody's going to need accountants. And I'm like, no, it's going to allow them to screw shit up faster, uh, and then need us to help them, right? You know, and, and that's the way I would look at it as a creative entrepreneur. I mean, yeah, they may try the tools, but it's not going to get them what they want.

Want, right? And I also— I've rarely felt disoriented or threatened by the technology changes. Most of— I mean, always I would say it's like, oh, thank goodness this tool's here. I've been wanting this for the last— you know, it's going to make my life so much easier because it's going to take care of this sort of boring grunt repetitive part of something so that I can be freed up to think more broadly and creatively. And I won't have to do that repetitive part anymore. And that's also the way I think about AI now too, and all these other tools. It's like, thank goodness, you know, they take care of— if I can figure out how to use them right and in the right scope, that it's actually going to help me to free me up to be more who I want to be. And we have tons of tools like that. Like, Even if you look at the washing machine and the refrigerator and all kinds of things that just made our lives much more easy and better.

Maybe. I think we just ended up buying more clothes. I don't think it ended up saving any time.

And more food.

Exactly.

The back of the refrigerator looks like a science project.

Exactly. So with my MBA ASAP, I have to think about that to say it. How have you used technology to leverage your business model?

Oh, that's an excellent question. Well, I would say first, I use the platform technologies and I start with Amazon and their Kindle Direct Publishing for books. I've written 64 books now. And yeah, you know, but I just like writing and I like—

That's impressive.

Publishing and having read them. And it's so easy for me over the last, you know, 15 years or so to do that, because I can write the books, you know, on my computer. And taking a typing class in 9th grade was one of the best things I ever did. And then I can upload those files. And I don't have to worry about if they're perfect in a way, because if I find a mistake later on, or if I want to add a paragraph or delete something, all I have to do is revise that, my, basically my Word file or whatever, and upload it again. And then that file is live. And then I can make my covers in like Canva. I use Canva as a place for all my graphic stuff. And so I can make my books and the Amazon is the third largest search engine. I mean, behind Google and YouTube, Amazon is third because they have this ecosystem, all those people in there. Searching for things. So they have this giant built-in market all over the world. And, uh, the, the Kindle versions, they just get downloaded, and that's a wonderful way to do it. And then they have this thing called, uh, um, uh, POD, print on demand. And so they actually print one copy of a paperback or hardcover when somebody orders it. So I have no inventory or, uh, you know, working capital tied up with you know, I have to buy 1,000 books to cover the printing costs to get, you know, a run done and they're in my garage and I have to go and get a mailer. They take care of all of that. So, that's one technology platform that's been absolutely wonderful and all over the world. And then, they also have a Kindle Unlimited part that where people read the books and then you get paid a bit by how much consumption of your material is. And, I even like that more than selling a book. I've thought like, Would I rather sell a copy of my book and not know if somebody's read it or not, or see that, you know, today, you know, 300 pages of one of my books has been read and I'm gonna get whatever amount of money, you know, but, uh, that's so satisfying to me. You say, wow, people have actually consumed that, my content. And, and that's satisfying. And then now they've come up with, they use AI as synthetic voices and they, you just click a button and they make an audio copy of the book that goes out on— That's true.

I had to record my own.

And, uh, yeah, that's what I used to do. I used to record my own and it was like, so I'm a recording engineer, but it was so time-consuming. And then Audible would say, there's a pop at the beginning of that, you know, you have to redo it. Oh my gosh. So then I thought, well, maybe I'll hire recording talent to do that. And that's time-consuming and expensive. A click of a button, all of my books have an audio copy now. And the synthetic voices are pretty good, you know, good enough.

And it's not like it's a novel and they're looking for, you know, the nuance in the voice. They're getting information.

Right, exactly. It's just, it's all my stuff. I've written a couple of, I've stretched out and written a couple of novels and things too. I wrote a science fiction book. But you're right. The, you know, it's just the utility of doing that. And that's there. So that's one platform with all those different content delivery ways. And then I'm on something called Udemy, which is a technology. It's a platform where you can just upload PDFs and videos and things and slide decks and make courses. And so I have about maybe 25 courses on there. And they also have their own ecosystem and it's all over the world. And I have students on that in 168 countries. I didn't even know there was 168 countries. There's about 195, but—

You could have Googled it.

I mean, I have students in the Maldives. Yeah, right. And in Madagascar. And it's so— just all over the place. And it's so heartwarming to me that, you know, I've got these students all over. And actually, more than a third are in India. Only about 15% are in the US. And then I've got a bunch in Singapore and then Germany, Brazil, and just, you know, tails off. But it's not even a US-centric business anymore for me, which was just getting my head around that. And then I made my own platform. So I have, you know, I've done web development. I have a negotiations course that I've done for a while that was just videos of me. And I just redid that with an artificial intelligence company where it's more role-playing and engaging. Students in these scenarios about negotiating. And so it's one-to-one interaction, and it's really remarkable. It actually goes through my curriculum and then tests where, you know, on micro tests as he's interrogating, you know, the communication back and forth, uh, what they do know, what they don't know, and then repeat the stuff that they don't know until they know it and then move forward so they really understand all the material. And, so that's a one-to-one kind of course but at scale. You know, it can be one-to-one to a million people or whatever, you know, which is just, I couldn't do that on my own.

Do you do any live teaching?

Yes, I do. Actually, I just finished up a course at the University of New Mexico here. I teach a number of courses, but it was investing. And, uh, but that was over Zoom, right? You know, I had like 35 students, and, uh, and it was just all these Brady Bunch tiles of everybody, and they'd ask questions, and I'd play videos and lecture and all that kind of stuff. So it was in real time and lecturing, but again, it was mediated by technology. Um, right next, next week I'm teaching, and this is, you know, boots on the ground in front of the students in a real classroom, you know, and, uh It's, uh, I'm teaching a startup bootcamp for kids 10 to 14 for a week from Monday through Friday next week from 1 to 4. I have these 10-year-olds to 14-year-olds teaching them, you know, the whole sort of entrepreneurship curriculum, you know, simplified down to something that they can understand, really relying on the creative side of things. And, uh, how do you come up with ideation and being creative about your products and services. And then how to test whether or not, you know, customer validation, whether or not that's going to be interesting to customers. And then how to actually build a minimal viable product and get it out there and see and start to iterate into something that is usable. And so that should be really fun. I've never done that before. The university asked me to do it and I said, sure, I'll try it. Um, I've never taught, um, anybody younger than, than, uh, college, you know, different skill sets. That's for sure.

Um, so, so yeah, how did you determine like your, your pricing for obviously the books? That's, that's fairly straightforward, but like your courses, your online courses, Do you, like, what does the pricing look like on that? How'd you come up with it?

And that's a great question, Christian. The pricing is always a struggle, you know, and you want to, you know, give more value than you're asking. But then you can give too much value at too low a price, and then people get suspicious of that too. It's like, how can this just be, you know, that amount of money? It must not be that So trying to find that sweet spot, uh, for my course on my own website, uh, we've developed, uh, a dynamic pricing, uh, front end. And so we actually look at where people are coming from, what browser they're using, all kinds of different information, and then sort of scale the pricing based on those things. And statistically, based on how many people we've had that bought it at, you know, prices. So, um, that allows us to get some of what they call the consumer surplus, you know, the difference between the supply and demand curve there. And, uh, and, and that's been really interesting. And, and, and I dial that in at various times, all the time. I just used AI recently to, uh, take my course that's been in English. And English is the lingua franca of the world, and everybody pretty much has it as a second language.. And so that's been good. But I've actually done some vernacular ones now, taking me and my course material recorded. There's AIs where I've sampled my voice and they translate it into the different languages and it makes my lips move. So in sync, you know, it takes the video and manipulates the video too. And so I have it in Hindi and I have it in Spanish and I have it in French and I have it in Portuguese. And it's unbelievable to me to see myself speaking Hindi. And it really sounds— and Hindi speakers are saying, that's really pretty good. You know, it's amazing. And all the text obviously is in that. And then you talk about pricing, we just changed that landing page to INR, to Indian rupee. So, it's not in US dollars anymore, it's in rupees so that The people get the complete vernacular thing and they know, okay, it's this much. And we have the dynamic pricing going in the—

What software is it?

So my pricing changes in every market too. In third world countries, it's much less than in first world countries.

What software is it that you use to do the translation of the videos?

Well, I used a group like Flare that is my— they're one of my development groups, and they're really super. And they— we used ElevenLabs for the, uh, for the, uh, the voice translation. And I, I can't remember the name of, uh, Hi there or something for the, for the video manipulation. Um, there's another, another, uh, tool that does that. Yeah, I mean, and they— so they put it together. I didn't do it myself, you know, they put it together for me. And we started with two languages, and I was just so blown away that I said, let's do two more. So now we've kept it at that. They wanted to do Arabic, and I was like, at first, I'd love to do Arabic, you know, I love the writing and all that. But then I got kind of shy, you know, because some of my courses are teaching finance and things, and they have a whole Sharia type of finance that no interest rates, things like that. So I thought, I don't know enough culturally to just put out some, you know, here's this imperialist American putting out this product. So I backed off of that because there's, you know, I just want to be culturally sensitive and aware to these things. But I love, and I have a lot of Middle Eastern students, you know, that I'd love to reach in their vernacular. But, you know, they come in, they know English. So it's been working out well. Yeah. But it's just remarkable that the tools that are available And, you know, the whole thing for me is there's a gamification element to it. You know, everything has instead of a push where I have to make my courses and I have to make my books and all, there's sort of a pull on the gamified side. Like I said, even about, you know, Kindle Unlimited, I can see every day how many people, how much content of my books was consumed for each book and where. And so, it's like, oh, Oh, this one gets a lot of interest. If you like that, I'll do more of that kind of stuff, or, you know, or I'll polish that content up more, you know, focus on that because people are interested in that. Or, oh, you like this course and it's getting a lot of traction. I'll do more of that or give you more information on that. So, the kind of, you know, gamified scorekeeping that I'm able to do with these metrics is really very motivating in a very good way. You know, it's like It gets me excited and then I do more of it instead of feeling like I have to rely on discipline and motivation to do it. It's like, I'm excited. I'll do more of that. You know, you like that? I love that. Do some more.

So how do people find, I wanted to say my MBA, MBA ASAP and/or your books? Yeah.

And MBA ASAP, you know, when I first did that, I thought it was a cute acronym and all. And But a lot of people around the world that, you know, for MBA is Master of Business Administration. And then ASAP, people sometimes say, what is ASAP? It's like, oh, it's an acronym for as soon as possible, you know, like boiling it down, distilling the information. And not everybody, I didn't realize not everybody would get ASAP. But, you know, and well, where they can find me is the best way is probably my website. I'm all over social media, you know, but MBA-ASAP.com.

And then your books?

And there's a way to sign up for my mailing list and I answer everybody's questions if they email me.

Are the books available at the MBA-ASAP?

Yes, they're on there and also through Amazon and you just do John Cousins books or anything. Yeah, they're all— yeah, on MBA-ASAP, I have a a one-page that's actually a Shopify is the platform that I'm using for that where I put all of my courses and all of my books depending on no matter what platform they're on. You know, say, and you just click through and it goes to where they love it.

Well, I'm going to go look for your science fiction novel. That's what I'm curious about.

Oh, great. Yeah. Well, you know what it's based on is there was an H.G. Wells story called Empire of the Ants and it was all about, you know, these ants taking over and stuff. And so, uh, I, I made mine that's kind of, uh, about, uh, these Autobot ants that are, you know, uh, taking over a section of the universe and they have to go out and, and hijinks prevail, you know, hijinks ensue.

All right, listeners, we'll have those, uh, links in the show notes. Uh, if you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message and tell us what you'd like to hear and we'll get rid of John. Until then. Ta-ta for now.