0551 | Beyond ChatGPT: AI as the Next Evolution of Business Automation with Ethan King

Hi, this is Ethan King with Simple Success AI and you're listening to EA Interviews, Inspiration, Transformation, Success Stories and the Imperfect Action round. Seven days a week, join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority effect interview.

Have you ever thought about your business and how you want to leverage it, gain more profits and do all of these fun things and maybe take advantage of AI? We're all hearing about it recently. You got this going on over here with ChatGPT. You've got perplexity if you maybe didn't even hear about that, Claude. There's all these new ones, Grok Gemini. And it's like, what do I use, how do I use it and how is this going to work for me? It's fun, it's cool, but how do you actually leverage it and especially for business, for a profit, to save your time, to help more people. It all seems confusing. I would like to think that I know a little bit more than average, but you know, that's all relative because I met Ethan King. He came into one of the mastermind groups, business Bourbon and Cigars that I'm part of and he was the guest speaker and I was just completely blown away. And I go, I message out my friend Scott. I go, I'm going to invite him on the show. Actually texted him actually. And he goes, yeah, me too. And I go, well, I'm going to do it first. And I did. So Scott, when you see this, what's up?

But Ethan King knows his stuff about AI. It's not just, oh, I'm using Chat GP with the app on my phone to take quicker notes, this and that, like he was teaching us. And this is a sharp group of people and I just want to get into it because he is a best selling author, TEDx speaker and he has his own platform he designed to make your life easier. So I'm just gonna get into it and bring him up right after we thank the sponsor. So you want to write your book but you're not sure where to start? Get your free copy of my new book on book publishing@mariosfreebook.com and get your questions answered along with the start you've been looking for today. Once again, that's mariosfreebook.com here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Ethan King. Ethan, how are you feeling today?

Hey, Mario, I'm fantastic and it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, of course. I mean, you know your stuff and obviously, you know, you're not a beginner at this and that's why I Feel there's so many people like, oh, AI's new. Cool. I took one course this weekend on no, I saw some article this weekend on it. I watched a YouTube video and now I'm selling my course a week later. I feel like it's just saturated with people doing that. But then there's people like you who, who are going, hey, check this out. Here's how what you can do here. Did you know there's these back backend settings if you apply this to this. And you just kind of walked us through, like how this can actually impact your B business and not just be another cute thing or an app that you're using to go, okay, I saved half a second hitting the email send button because now it interprets that I wanted to send that email like, okay, cool. But you know, what's the needle mover? What's your take on AI and what got you so enthralled with it?

Well, first of all, Mario, AI is the latest form of automation. It just happens to be the most advanced form of automation that we've witnessed in our lives and maybe will ever witness in our lifetimes. But I've been immersed in the world of automation for over 10 years now. So that's why adopting AI was just the, the logical next step for me.

Yeah, very natural progression, I bet.

Yes, definitely.

What were some of the precursors you saw? So you said you've been in it for over 10 years. What, what were some of the first system like, they take me back to the caveman systems. And then like what was like three, four, five years ago? Because I remember there was a quick uptick. It seemed like 20 late 22 into 23, everyone was talking about it. And then in 24 it was just like everyone's on it. Like it was quicker than the Internet, it seemed like.

That's right. Yeah, Great comparison to the Internet. So ChatGPT was released to the public in November of 2022. So that was just a little bit over two, two, two years and some change from today. So ChatGPT is just a toddler. It's a brilliant toddler, but it's just a toddler. This is just the, we're at the beginning of what AI will do. But that was really the catalyst.

Become this buzzword in the public because the general population got a chance to see the power of AI firsthand. And it was. And it's free, it's accessible to everyone and it's mind boggling what you can do with it right out of the box. But most people only treat ChatGPT like a glorified search engine or like a fun toy. So once, since I was already immersed in automation, when we layered the power of ChatGPT on top of what we were already doing, it really just exploded things to the next level. And to answer your question, do you mind if I tell you a little bit about why I actually got into automation in the first place?

Please do. I was going to ask you either way, so go ahead.

Yeah, fantastic. So it was about 10 or 11 years ago and my company was going through a really, really rough patch. And I know your, your audience, a lot of business owners on here. And have you ever felt like you were just like, struggling to make ends meet? Like you were running on paper, thin margins? Seemed like things weren't working. Seems like things were unstable in the economy. You know, if any of you can, can relate to this, I'm smiling because.

I can relate, not because I enjoyed it. Like, oh no, it's, uh huh.

Yeah. Entrepreneurship is a tough road. You know, a lot of times it gets glorified and it gets vilified, but it is a tough road to take on business ownership. Well, I remember one hot summer day back in 2014. I was sitting in my office struggling, trying to figure out how I'm going to make payroll this week. And I could see through my window, this guy was coming towards my office and he had on a trench coat, which is very odd for summer in Georgia because it's blistering hot outside. So I'm like, what is this guy doing? And he storms in my office, pulls out a thick envelope of paper, slams it on my desk, and he says, you've been served. And what happened, Mario? We got slapped with a lawsuit. I opened the envelope and read it, and we were, we were just in, in the battle of our lives. I had no idea what this meant. We were already struggling and who was it from?

So I, as a we, we settled the suit, but I can't talk about it. So that's what I can't. I did sign a confidentiality thing, but that's not the most important part. The most important part is my back was against the wall, didn't have extra money. We had to take on the legal expenses. We had to let people go from our team or sometimes people would quit and we just didn't have money to hire them back. So we were in a really, really dark place and I really thought I was going to lose it all. So I was faced with a decision. Either fight to keep our business or give up and file bankruptcy and start over again. So I chose to fight. But in order to fight I knew that I had to keep the marketing going but I didn't have money to hire humans. So that's when I learned marketing automation. Now mind you, that sounds like a big word marketing automation, a big term. But I was.

Now I was an art major in college so I'm not a tech guy. So if I can figure this out then anyone listening to this can too. But I self taught, self taught myself marketing automation. And first thing we learned how to do was set up these email drip campaigns in. We were using Infusionsoft at the time, really, really old school platform. And once I figured out oh my goodness, I can just set up all these different sequences that automatically fire off when we tag our contacts and it just, it, we, we grew our company back and then I learned how to market, I mean how to automate our social media so that we only just schedule it one time for the whole month and it just fires out. And by the time we were able to, we were able to win and settle that lawsuit and get out of that. But not only that, good for you our business. And we also doubled our revenue with half the staff that we had going into the ordeal. And from that point forward I went into just an automation first mindset across my entire team. We would have morning huddles where we would read books together and study ways to streamline our processes. Books like Two Second Lean. And we just adopted this automation first mindset and that's how we were able to scale with fewer and fewer people. And that's why I'm passionate about teaching this to business owners today because I know how tough it can be. Heck, right now I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners and people are struggling because consumer spending is down, there's uncertainty in the marketplace, we have additional tariffs, things like that. We don't know what's coming next. So in times like this we need to lean on automations, the tools that are out there at our fingertips that most people just don't realize how easy it is to use them. And now if you're not a coder, like I'm not a coder, I'm not a programmer. You can speak in natural English language. That is why this is a game changer and this has leveled the playing field of opportunity for everyone out there because you can build websites, you can build apps, you can do entire marketing campaigns all with your natural voice.

Do you see that? No code platforms are the way everything's going to continue to trend just because it makes it more accessible to everyone.

Yes, I really do. And we're already seeing it. In fact, if you go to websites, like, there's an AI for that dot com. I think last time I went on there, there were some 40,000 different AI apps that have been created by people. And the number keeps growing every day. You literally watch it just tick up, up and up, because more and more people, if you have an app idea in your head, you can now produce it. Whereas before we would hit this barrier, because I can have an app idea. But then I'm like, I don't know where to start. I don't know how to.

You gotta hire someone.

It's gonna cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in revisions. And then we just don't even act on it because we have all these mental barriers and financial barriers. Well, now you can at least get to your first draft, your, your mvp, your minimum viable product, using a tool like replit or something like that, where you can just tell it. Just type in natural language what type of app you want to build. You hit go, and then it builds it for you real time, right then and there.

Where do you see? And I'm familiar with this, so I actually am a geek. I have built multiple computers. I developed a Software to build WordPress websites automatically like 14 years ago. And.

Yeah, there's. It would be nice to go, click button here. This is what I was doing. But where do you see programmers and developers and.

Where do you see that whole market shifting? Obviously you can do the no code and all of that, but where do they still have a place? And I love that it's so much more accessible to people because I had a team of people just developing stuff. We even built apps. And it was like, you know, six, nine, 12 months later, you're going, okay, we're done. And it's like, oh, cool, it's just another one. You know, if you didn't have the marketing at that point, it's like, good luck. But I guess it's still true. It always comes down to sales and marketing. But it took a long time just to get to like, you're saying, minimum viable product, and.

Now I'm sure you could do it in a matter of days or weeks.

Oh, faster than that. Minutes, hours. I mean, it's crazy. So where you asked, where does this leave programmers and people have this knowledge?

Yeah, because a lot of people are going, oh, it's taking my job. It's taken my job And I could argue, like, if you're actually valuable enough.

You'Re never gonna not have one. Because if you can add value, no matter. I mean, if you're, if you're upset because you have to click this button instead of that button, the problem isn't A or B buttons, it's. That's all you know how to do is click the button. If something can replace that, you've got a problem where if you go, hey, I can retool the thing. Or like you said with the automation, the automation isn't new, but how we're applying it is. So if you're familiar with marketing automation.

I actually changed the company name around in 2012 because we're changing it from this to this and this. Like, what was cool? And I go, I'm so tired of this. And people go, why'd you do it? And I said, intent. Ten years or so, when we're using holograms to market, I don't want to have to change it again because it had web design attached to it or marketing or this or that. And it's like, holy, it's always changing.

Right?

So. And this a precursor to all the publishing we wrapped into it. But where would you see the market is for the people with, you know, that skill set now?

Well, it's only going to become more advanced. So if you have a skill set, you will still have an advantage.

Right?

AI is simply a tool. Just like a pencil is a tool, but a pencil in one person's hand versus that same pencil in Picasso's hand, something completely different, right? So the programmers, I mean, I can be an entry level person with an idea and I can get a minimum viable product in these apps, but if I don't have programming knowledge, am I going to know how to debug it if something is going wrong, am I going to know how to really take it to that next level? And the more complicated, the more complex I make it using natural language prompts, then the more opportunity is for something to break and then I might not know how to fix it. So it is not the end all, be all, but what I teach people.

Especially comment out a third of the app by the time you're done with it.

Right? But what I teach people about using AI is, is just let it get you 80% of the way there. And this is no matter what you're doing, whether you're writing a novel or an email or coding an app, let it like remove the hindrances that we have, the mental blocks that we have that the procrastination, like just let. Just use AI as your thought partner to help you get that starting point out there and you'll start to incrementally hit these faster notes and get more done with everything that you have going on in your head. You get it out into the world faster.

How else can people use AI in their business?

Man, I. I could go so many different ways. I literally wrote a book on it. Chat GPT to double your business in 90 days. And we talk about way more than just ChatGPT in the book. But I wanted it to appeal to the average person, to a lot of people. Chat GBT and AI have kind of become synonymous. Yeah, but we. That I think, I do think that right now, at this point in time, and I want to timestamp this, it's June 3rd, 2025, chat GBT is in the lead. They're the top player overall. They're like the Swiss army knife of AI, is how I put it. So now I subscribe to a bunch of them. Claude, Gemini, complexity. And they're. To me, they each have kind of different strengths. I go to Perplexity first for research because I think it's the best at it. It's always provided footnotes and they tell you the sources. That's where they got things from. Perplexity is reliable when it comes to research. Claude happens to be great at writing. I like the way that it sounds.

A little bit more natural.

More natural, more human than some of the other tools. But that's changing every day because it also depends on which model you're using and have you customized your writing styles and your custom instructions and trained it to sound like you? So there are plenty.

I know it came out originally with Sonnet, now they have Haiku and they're. They're different.

Yeah, very different. And even in. In ChatGPT now you have 03, you have 01, you have 4.0, 4.5. Right. Then you have the mini versions, you have the pro versions, and you can, if you go on the OpenAI's website, they give you suggestions as to which model to use, for what type of purpose. But you can take the same prompt and just literally do it in each different model and you'll get a different output, see which one you like that influences your output. And then every bit of context that you put into it also influences your output. And when I say context, I mean giving it examples of how you want it to speak, training it, training it on your voice and your speaking style, telling it, giving it parameters of. I want this to be a 500 word blog entry versus not giving it parameters, things like that. What I teach is the race method for when it comes to prompting.

What's that? What's the race method?

Role, action, context, execution. This came from Christopher Penn. I didn't invent this, but I think it's the most concise way to remember it. But first you give AI a role. That's one of the superpowers of AI is you can tell it to adopt any type of role it could be. It can adopt the role of any famous figure, living or dead, real or fictitious. So I could say, act like you're Mickey Mouse. I want you to write a dissertation about I don't know how to cure cancer. And it will write that dissertation in the voice of Mickey Mouse. So start with the role. Give it Abraham Lincoln, however. Or you can say I want you to act like an expert copywriter, an expert social media strategist. Give it the role for that specific tasks and then A is for action. We'll just tell it. Here's what I want you to do. C is for context. And to me this is the most important thing because you, you have to give it lots of background information on what you're looking for, why you're looking for it, even put some emotion into it. Let's. Let me make a, have a confession I want to make with you, with your audience here. Have you, have you heard of Mel Robbins? Yeah, yeah, everybody's heard of Mel Robbins, right? She just came out with an amazing book that I'm reading right now, the Let Them Theory. I'm listening to this book and I love it. It's, it's such a simple concept.

You could probably figure out from the title.

The audio cut out for a hot second. You were saying the Let them theory.

Yes, the Let them theory. So it's a very simple concept, very simple idea. So was her last idea, the five second rule. But she's huge. People get this tattooed on their skin. Let them. And I'm like, so I, here I am. I asked ChatGPT, I said, man, how did Mel Robbins get so influential? I'm out here speaking around the world, I'm teaching, I'm changing people's lives. But most people haven't heard of Ethan King. You, you didn't hear about me until I came to speak to your group. I was. And I'm so I'm confessing to ChatGPT. How can I be more like Mel Robbins? And ChatGPT was like, thank you for being so vulnerable and sharing that with me. Then it gave me a breakdown of Mel Robbins history. I didn't know she was on TV on like CNN before she had ever gotten into this writing and speaking thing. So I learned all of this stuff. And of course ChatGPT makes you feel good. It's like the ultimate yes man and the greatest partner right you can have. But then it actually gave me a game plan on how I could actually get my message out there on a bigger scale like Mel Robbins did. So I'm very open when it comes to the context that I want to share.

And get the more background context that you give ChatGPT or whatever LLM you're using, the better results you're going to get. And then the E. So that was. We were doing role. So remember race? So role, action, context, execution. Execution is the E. And that's where you tell it exactly what type of output you want. I would like a LinkedIn article that's 1500 words written in my voice, very sentence length. Things like that make it sound human. That's what you put in the E part of it. And that's the anatomy of a good prompt.

Well, thank you for sharing that. I think that alone is worth a ton. Because what I'm hearing is.

Be specific and open with it. Not just check this for spelling, check this for grammar. Using it like a glorified calculator. Like it's so much bigger and more robust. And I think people just don't know because they hear someone go, oh, I used it to schedule some extra emails quicker. Okay, cool, you saved 30 seconds a week. But when you're going, hey, I can have this sound like me, like the LinkedIn article. I know there's tons of people, oh, I wish I could start a LinkedIn newsletter. I just don't have time. Same premise with the books. I want to do a book, but I don't have time. I want to do more social media content. And I know that's a huge one right now. I've seen somewhere, it's like, tell us what you want, how many posts, this and that, and it will map out the whole social media calendar for the month and post it depending on the software you're using. So, you know, what do you think AI's influence on social media is going to be now? Because it really is a leveling play field. I remember people just a few years ago going, I need, I'm hiring 10 more people. Like, oh, wow, you're growing so much. You know, what are you know More salespeople to keep up or fulfillment to keep up with demand. They're like, no content. I saw Gary Vee's video and he has like 22 people walking around with them filming everything. So I'm going to do the same thing.

Yeah, right.

It's a tall order. Like, you do realize he's done like tens of thousands of videos over the last 15 years to get to that point. Yeah, but what do you think it's going to do to social media and just marketing, even on the front end?

I have a very funny story, actually about Gary Vee. I. I had a chance to interview him a few years ago. This is before Chat GBT existed and I was talking about this exact same thing. I'm a huge fan of Gary's, by the way. But you know how Gary could be? He's like, man, if you're not posting on TikTok six times a day and posting on Instagram eight times a day and LinkedIn five times a day, then what are you doing? And it gets to feel overwhelming.

Right?

Because yes, we don't have a huge team of people following us around and the average small business owner can't afford that and we don't have a bunch of extra time. So I asked Gary in the interview. In the interview I said, gary, what do you tell the average small business owner who's overwhelmed by this and says, I just don't have the time to post on social media at this scale? And you know what his answer was? Stop prioritizing dumb shit. Stop prioritizing dumb shit. That was his entire answer. Now, I was looking for something a bit more tactical from Gary, but I didn't get it at the time. Um, so when these tools came out just a few years later, I. That's how I figured out the entire workflow so that one person can get this done with just about 15 minutes of work per day by leveraging AI tools and automation tools so that you can capture, produce your content in your authentic voice. Very, very important for it to be in your authentic voice. But then produce your long form written content, your short form content like your, your tweets for Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it, Instagram threads, and then your videos, your long form videos, and then chop those up into your short form videos, schedule those all out so that they get Autumn posted onto social media. And the workflow that I give makes it easy for anyone to do, even if you're shy about getting on camera or you feel like you're not that great of a Writer, I give a surefire way to do it and capture your authentic influence. And that's the key word. The human part of it is super important. See, AI cannot replace that. AI is a scraper of data from the past and it takes that data, those every word that has ever been spoken. It's read all the books that have ever been written, and it takes that data and it puts together what it thinks is the best possible output based on the context that you give it. So it really is like a huge language, supercomputer, computer. But what AI doesn't have is our unique energy signature, our unique footprint that we have as human beings. So what I teach is how to capture the real AI, which is your authentic influence. Infuse that together with artificial intelligence, and that's when you get explosive results in your business.

Why do you think most people overlook that? Do you think it's just lack of knowledge? They didn't know it's there, or they don't want to put in the time to actually program it and customize it and do the training?

I think most people overlook it because the output that they get from AI already sounds better than what they, how they sound. So they're just like, this is great, let's post it.

But the problem with that, and we've all seen this, is that there are some dead giveaways when someone has used AI. We've all read that LinkedIn post where.

You tell me you don't add 27 icons to everything you write, right?

All of the emojis and perfect title case. And using words like unlock and delve and explore and transform all of these cliche words that AI overuses using EM dashes is becoming a new thing. I mean, it's funny because I learned all of this from us, from humans, but now it uses it so much that people are starting to get kind of an exhaustion from AI talk. And they can. And people will just assume if you use.

My favorite is the overexcited endings.

Oh yeah, give it, give me an example.

There's, there's, there's some that. It's like, hey, could, you know, you ask it to write something for a post or whatever the case may be. And it's like this LinkedIn article is going to be sharing with you how to help your audience even more. And it's just like, do you have Tourette's? Or like, what is going on here? Like, like no one. If it's a pull quote in a book or it's an enunciation from stage, you Know when we're speaking. Okay, cool. But it's like literally every sentence. And I'm just like, we walk to the mall with excitement. It's like, you took your kids to get ice cream. You're not exactly like.

I can't even. It's like something you'd see in like maybe a Disney movie with the princesses jumping around. Or it was just like, holy smokes. So my whole thing, because people have asked us for years now, especially with publishing, like, oh, you know, could I write my whole book with it? I could do this. And there's cases for yes and no, depending what your goals are. But, but the trade off is okay. If you have a serious issue with writing, it's going to absolutely jumpstart the beginning. But some of the stuff we've gotten back, and that's why I joke about it. Like, I'm sure if you naturally write, there's not going to be 127emojis, exclamation points, the em dashes, all these different things. Like, so now you go, Great, I saved 25 minutes of actual writing, but you now need to spend 45 minutes of editing the whole thing back down to. It's like trying to wash it off. Like you went through the puddle of mud in the car. You saved. You took a quicker route. But if that's on the way to Christmas dinner, like, you now have a new problem and your entire family's dirty, walking into the thing, like, is it worth it?

Yeah. And that, that's how a lot of people look at AI and kind of dismiss it. But I think that's a huge miss for especially business owners is don't dismiss it so fast. And because then this really applies to all automation.

Be sure to customize it.

Yes, be sure to customize it.

Oh yeah, I remember when.

Yeah, the, the automations and even I, I can go back even like 0809 and people are like, oh, you can automate emails. When you say a drip sequence, some people still don't know what that is. They're like, I'm doing an email blaster. Brought like, dude, this been around 20 years. But you know, understanding the purpose behind it and not having it be the crutch. And it's the same thing. You got to take the time and customize it. So when you were sharing, hey, you can go in here and tweak it. It's like, really? Because up until only a few months ago, it was all these third party softwares using the OpenAI OpenAI API key that would let you do things and now they're bundling it all into it. Have you noticed an increase in that where the main thing is like taking it over, kind of like Facebook does with everything and all competitors?

Yeah, and I mean actually OpenAI has been a back end partner for a lot of these softwares even before ChatGPT was released to the public. OpenAI is what was powering things like Jasper and things like that.

It's just that I was just gonna say Jasper.

So. But the thing with automation is any type of automation. What deters most people is taking the time to set it up first properly. To properly set it up. But it's all a math problem. So for example, it might take you, I'll just say eight hours to set up that email drip campaign and meaning that you write a sequence of, let's say 12 different emails that you want a certain prospective customer to receive. Let's say your, you're a commercial real estate agent in Albuquerque, New Mexico and your perfect target customer hits your site, they get tagged, they put in their email address to get some type of PDF or manual that you have to teach them something. Now you want them to get 12 different emails from you dripped out over the next 12 weeks. Well, you have to write those emails, take the time to do it and write each one of those emails first. Use it, use AI to help you to shorten the time, but invest that time up front. And now look at how much time that will save you in the long run because you're not having to follow up with each of these people manually. So a lot of people look at that, they get deterred by the amount of time it takes at the beginning to set up their automations or to even set up your AI to sound like you. Because if you invest that time on the front end to really get your LLMs to speak in your brand voice by feeding it a bunch of examples, you won't need to spend 45 minutes editing it, you might need to spend three minutes editing it because it will come out sounding 90% like you. And that's what I teach. I think you saw in the very short presentation that I did with your team, but even in my longer four hour workshops that I teach to teams around the world, I have people customize their AI, write content right then and there and then put it through an AI content detector and it comes out as 100% human generated content, even though I wrote all of it for them.

Because they. So they hyper customized it.

Exactly. But you only have to do that.

Once where, if someone's interested in that full presentation, is it something they can buy, download, watch, is it only offered in person? Where can they learned?

Yeah, I do have it. I do have online courses at simplesuccess School where I do teach a lot of these different processes with AI and automation. But as you can imagine, it's constantly being updated because the, the information's always changing. So usually private companies or organizations will fly me out to teach all of the world and the presentation changes every month, but I do keep the online versions updated. So there's lots of valuable information at SimpleSuccess School.

But the premise, but the premise of it, as long as someone knows, but the premise of it, as long as someone knows, you can customize it. I'd say that's probably one of the biggest things because obviously it's going to change. I feel like by the time we're done with the interview, like it's going to be changing again. It's like, oh, ChatGPT just released something new.

But. Right.

Well, when you told us, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah.

The thing I teach is that the tools are going to always change, but the philosophy remains the same. You know, AI, absolutely. Our lives from this day forward, just get used to it. It's not a passing fad, it's not going anywhere. So we need to know how to communicate with AI. Whether that's you talking to ChatGPT right now or you having a conversation with the robot who just got done doing your chores in your house and baby, baby babysitting your kids, like one of these Tesla robots or something that will become normal in our lives. So how we converse with AI is the more it knows about us and our preferences, our little tiny little quirks about us that it knows then it can better serve us. Now, I know that scares a lot of people. You know, Hollywood has hyped us up to think that the robots will take over. I don't think that, that robots inherently have a desire to survive and eliminate humanity. That would only happen if someone told them to do that. So we need to be more worried about bad players than we need to be worried about bad robots. But I'm very, very.

They might get access to everything and go, no, this is too messed up. I don't have time for this.

But I'm very open. My, my Chat GBT knows all about my family, my kids. I can turn on camera mode in my Chat GPT and it'll see my kids and it'll speak to them by name. That's that's how close I am personally with ChatGPT. But because of that, if I ask it to plan me a vacation, like we went to Italy last year and I had it planned out, the whole vacation. Well, it's customized based on my kids and what they're really into and what they specifically like and what meet what I like and what my wife likes, where places we've already been. It is not going to give me the same generic answers that I would get if I just googled it or went on TripAdvisor.

How often are you updating it personally? Because you obviously have a way more. You have a way higher comfort level with it and some people are growing and. But that's cool as heck. You can plan trips and all that. How often are you updating it? Once a week, once a month as needed?

All the time. It's a constant thing. And the way you do it, you can set up your custom instructions like I showed you in that workshop if you go into your settings. But there's also, you'll see something in there called memory. And if you've noticed in your chatgpt where it says memory updated because it will take something that you told it and it will think to itself, oh, this is probably important. I should remember this about Mario. And it puts that into your memory and that additional context that influences every output. But you can also tell it something. You could, you can say, you can list all these important things about your life and say add this to my memory in a chat and then it will do that. And then that's how you. I have a very long list of memory. You can go in there and you can delete memories, you can add memories. So that's, that's another powerful way to give it more personalized context so that you get better results and better output. That sounds more like you.

Is that a pro upgrade feature only or is it even on the free now? Because I know it's about 50, 50 about people paying for certain ones or a lot of people like the free version but don't realize the power behind the other one.

I'm not sure. I haven't been on the free version for so long. It is definitely on the plus version, which is only $20 a month. I tell everyone, just get the, just spend the $20 a month. We both, we blow $20 on so much crap. Just pay for it. It's like having the smartest best friend in your pocket.

You can get so much stuff for 20 bucks. It's like a drink For a snack.

Yeah.

Or like an ice cream cone now.

Yeah, just do it.

But yeah, I, I was gonna say the same thing because.

It also, I've said this for decades, like pay them. Then they have an incentive to keep developing it and stay around.

That's right.

How's a company that you love going to stay in business? Like, I'd rather go here, pay whatever it is instead of going. I've been using them for 17 years. Like some of the softwares I'm thinking of. I would be very not happy if something happened to them. So yes. Here's more money, please. Thank you. Make more profits.

Yeah.

Instead of build, you know, using it as a backbone. Oh, my whole company's built on. You know, I said about social 10 years ago, like they, they got rid of their websites, they got rid of the email and put everything to a single social platform. And then the platform changed one term and was like.

That'S scary.

It can be very scary.

That's scarier than losing a deal or someone quits on you or something like. And we've all gone through all of it. It's not fun. But yeah, pay the 20 bucks. But just curious for people listening.

Yeah. And I, I pay, I, I do multiple ones. So I pay the $20 Claude subscription. The $20 Gemini. Well, it comes with, you get the, the pro version of Gemini with Google Workspace, which I was already paying for for like Gmail and, and the Office, the Google Office suite.

Sure.

So that's nice. And you know, I run. It's like having multiple human assistants. Well, a lot of times people ask me in my workshops, well, which one should I choose? Well, you don't have to choose just one. You wouldn't just have one employee, would you? You, you have multiple people who now who you can bounce ideas off of. Bounce it off these three different LLMs and you'll learn something. And I'll take, sometimes I'll take output from Claude, put it into chat GPT and I'll bounce back and forth and then use Gemini. And Gemini can, can look at your whole screen and watch what you're doing and give you tips as you're working on your computer. So they each have different, different strengths and we want to maximize those strengths and they're always changing also.

Yeah, it's. Have you ever done anything where you're, you're making the AIs talk to each other?

I've seen it online, but I don't.

Mean through API access and zapier and all of that. I mean literally like you're trying to create something instead of you giving the input to Jet.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen that, but I haven't, I haven't had a use case for it to make them talk to each other. Although I think it's interesting when people do that. You know, something cool. Have you seen this? Joe Rogan has an AI podcast and I stumbled on it in my car one day. I was just messing around with the streaming channels and It's Joe Rogan AI, and he has an interview with Steve Jobs AI. So these two AIs talking to each other.

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

And they've cloned the voices of Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs and they're talking about modern day things in modern day events that are happening. So I turned it on out of curiosity and it actually was really interesting. I ended up listening, listening to like the whole two hour episode of these. AI is talking to each other because it had enough information because Steve Jobs has been dead, what, for, I don't know, well over 10 years now and at least tiny. Yeah, so. But. But there's enough information about him out there between books and speeches and everything that he's done where AI can kind of guess mathematically. Remember, it's just a huge language computer. It can mathematically predict what Steve Jobs would think about today's current events in 2025. It was a very, very fascinating episode. So when you talk about AIs talking to each other, I think that's something worth exploring and maybe we'll start to see more of that because it gives us kind of a what if, you know, what, what if Abraham Lincoln had a conversation with the president today? What would they talk about? What would that look like? You know, whoever. I'm not trying to get political, but whoever that president is, what would that. You get to play out these scenarios based on the history of how these people thought, based on all the content that they put out.

Yeah, it's interesting to think I've actually thought about that years ago, like if so and so was still around, how would they handle this situation?

Yeah.

And now, I mean, I, I see stuff popping up all the time on YouTube or Facebook, Insta, wherever. And it's like now they're taking. We didn't even get into the video side of stuff, which is exciting for me. But you can now have an AI Abraham Lincoln talking, looking, sounding, and people are making movies with this stuff now too. So it's like, you know, and I know Hollywood, even a few years ago, there's probably still a Lot of controversy around the person's likeness. Like, can we still use them as an actor after they're out of their prime or deceased or whatever the case may be. And it's like, yeah, you could be essentially making movies a hundred years after you stopped. And I think we're on the edge of that. Like, you're saying with the AI, I'm thinking of someone right now, our SEO coach, Jurgen, who even a couple years ago was talking about the AI for the podcast, where you can take the text, you just take the LinkedIn script or the LinkedIn article, whatever it is, and you can turn that into a podcast episode in your natural voice. And it's like, for someone who doesn't want to get on camera doing speaking, but they're brilliant. It's like, you, you now the playing field is so leveled now, it feels like it just got bulldozed. And it's like, cool, we're back to square one again at this new level. What's everyone going to do with it?

Yeah, and it's fascinating to see because a lot of people try to fight it, just like taxi cab companies tried to fight Uber and Lyft. But we see. We see how that ended up. I think at some point, we'll end up coexisting with AI. One example of that is, yes, there were the Hollywood strikes with actors, and part of. And the writers, and part of that did involve AI. But then on the other side, you have people like James Earl Jones, who recently passed away, but he signed over his rights for Disney to use his voice in future iterations of Darth Vader, and that gave some wealth to his family. Even though he's physically has left us now, his family can continue to earn money and will continue as an audience to enjoy Darth Vader in that authentic voice of James Earl Jones, because he allowed that. He licensed it to them. So I think we'll start to see more of that, more adoption of it with any technology. There's pushback at first, even. Even with electricity. I just recently learned that when electricity came out, when the light bulb was first invented, people thought there were demons inside of the bulbs. Like, it was so weird to them and so eerie that they just thought it had to be like dark magic or demons, because they were used to just candlelight everywhere.

If you. If you haven't looked into the origin of it, they were actually doing PR and publicity runs about AC Current and DC Current and showing, like, the electric chair going, oh, you want this type of current? Because this one's Going to fry someone over here.

It was wild.

That's very wild. Yeah.

With the whole Edison Tesla thing in there.

Oh, yeah. I'll have to look that up. But even with the car, when. When cars first came out, people pushed back. They were used to. We were used to riding on horses. Well, a car now on the streets, people were getting hit in the streets because there were. No, there weren't traffic laws. So people. If you look at those old videos from, like the 1800s and everybody was just walking through the streets. Well, now you have someone driving and they don't know they accidentally would hit people. So you had people outraged. Oh, these cars are dangerous. They're violent. Like, they wanted to shut down the whole industry. But now what. Can you imagine life now without cars, without transportation, planes?

Yeah. Try taking a horse on the freeway.

Right?

Yeah.

Things change, and I think people are slow to adapt it. You know, some are faster.

And some just never do. And that's cool. I mean, we need a mix of people just to keep it interesting, I suppose. But I know it's not going anywhere, and I'm glad we have it. And I'm thankful for people like you doing so much with it. And I wanted to ask you who, like, with all the stuff you've done and all the people you've trained, and I know you have your software and everything, too. What's been. Who's been one of your biggest success stories that. I know it's only been a couple of years, but to say, hey, they took this, they adopted this, and here's how it really impacted their business. Like.

I'm kind of curious.

So many come to mind.

And I know you're working with.

I know you do the corporate training and stuff, but I know you also work with the small and medium businesses. So I'm curious, like, is it the corporate one because they have more leverage and they can roll it out across a team of a hundred people, or is it the smaller person because they're easier to adopt? It going, like you. I know you don't have to ask a hundred people to put a change in the business. You're already right.

Well, I mean, when it comes to business, you're. You're going to see bigger leaps of scale when it comes to smaller companies because it's faster to. To roll out things and to go from, say, you know, a $200,000 company to a $400,000 company. Well, now you've doubled in size. But if you are already a $2 billion enterprise, it's a much Bigger deal, you know, even if you get 10%, that's great.

So when I, man, I work with such a wide variety of clients, and it's really fun to see them implement different things.

Some that come to mind. I have a client in the franchising space who we created a digital clone of her to answer questions because she interacts with so many people day to day who are interested in franchising and have all these questions about it. Which franchise is right for me? How much money can I make? What if I'm into this? Well, as a human, she can only talk to so many people a day. There's only so many hours in a day. So she wanted to scale herself. And we did that by creating a digital clone of her, an avatar. So where it's video, we cloned her voice so that it sounds like her. And most importantly, we put over 200 PDFs of information to build her avatar's brain so that it has the knowledge that she has about franchising and she was able to. She's able to scale dramatically that way. Another really fun success story is I've had the opportunity to work with one of my longtime mentors, the motivational speaker Les Brown. So he actually reached out to me. At 80 years old, he is fascinated with AI and where is it going and where it's going. So we worked with Les Brown and helped him customize his own chatgpt to use for him to use as a thought partner and kind of clone himself in ChatGPT because there's a wealth of. He's been Speaking for over 53 years and written tons of books. So with all of his books and speeches fed into ChatGPT, it already had a knowledge about him, but now it gets to know the real him in his own personal chatgpt. And we also created a phone system, an AI phone system for his offices. So when he gets all of these inbound speaking requests and coaching requests, there's an AI person that sounds very human that you have a conversation with that will direct you to the in the right place.

See, that's what's so exciting about this. So to my point of the experts and authors, you know, someone wants to write a book. Absolutely. And, you know, this is just another use case because if you're like Mel Robbins or Tony Robbins or us with our books, it's like you're now building. We've been building up this library.

I may or may not have put five of my books into something. It's pretty cool to see it going okay, now it's taking all. All this, you know, unless Brown, I mean, he's got what, dozens and dozens, or John Maxwell, like, it would probably, you know, to your point of. People don't want to take the time to do it. It's like, well, he's got 60 plus books alone. It's probably going to take a little bit more than just uploading one PDF. But the episodes of the show, I mean, there's tons of great content. I'm blessed to have great people like yourself. And it's like every single one of these is like a small masterclass. And it's like, oh, we have hundreds of them. I love AI. This is great. But if you're starting at that beginning point. Yeah, build it up. You know, it's not going anywhere. You're not ready to run with it yet.

But yeah, I would encourage everyone here because you see where this is going. To AI, each one of us is like a really long word document. Our thoughts, our feelings, our memories are just picture like this with a Word document or a Google Doc, that's like trillions of words long. That's how AI understands us. So the more content that you've put out there, like you, Mario, you have every single podcast episode. These are words that you've spoken, these are thoughts that you've had, you have books that you've written. So I encourage all of you listening to this. Build up a library of content that you can feed into to AI because you can achieve a form of digital immortality. Because the more AI understands about you, when your physical body leaves this earth, your great, great, great grandchildren can still converse with you and they can know how you thought, how did. How did great, great, great Grandpa Mario think about this situation? And it will know, probably with a 99% probability how you would think, Mario, because of the tons of content that you have fed it and is able to put, put things together. And we're starting to see that already. Actually, in, I believe in Japan, they have a cemetery where you go. Instead of just tombstones, they have a screen where you can interact with an AI version of your deceased relative. So it's a way for people to live. Yeah. You can talk to grandma about the rough day you had, and she can console you in her voice based on what she would have said in real life. And I know that may seem eerie and weird to a lot of people listening to this, but it will be normal at some point.

But it could also be comforting.

Yes, very much so. Very much so.

Well, I appreciate everything you've been sharing. I got a little bit more I got. Before I let you go, we got this. And I gotta ask you about yellow or black. What do you prefer?

I'll go with the black today.

All right, let's see what question you get.

It's the wheel of whatever.

I'm scared.

Oh, you said black. Let's go with that one. What's the question? Oh, my question for you is around travel. Let's kick it completely personal side. Where. Where is somewhere you want to go? Take your family. What is somewhere you want to go and something you want to do that would just be like completely memorable? No digital relation like that you really think would have an impact on your kids?

I have. Well, with my kids, I do have a goal of taking them to every continent before they graduate from high school. So. So we're getting there. And personally, I have a goal of living in 100 different countries. And when I say living, I consider once I've been in a place two weeks to a month, I kind of feel immersed enough to say, oh, I kind of lived there. So that's what I mean when I say living. But to do that, to spend a good amount of time in 100 different countries is a personal life goal of mine.

Wow. Good for you. I've never heard anything like that before.

And that's why I have the wheel of whatever, to just make something up that's not necessarily.

Similar to what we were talking about. Not that I didn't enjoy the heck out of it. We're going to take a short break, thank our sponsor, and come back for the imperfect action round. You know, you should have a book for your business, but why don't you yet? Do you think you don't have the time? You don't want to look stupid or you're ready to go right now, but you just need to be pointed in the right direction. I get it. I was thinking the same thing before I wrote my first one, too. Get your free copy of my new book on book publishing@mariosfreebook.com and get your questions answered today. Once again, that's mariosfreebook.com and we are back with the imperfect action round. Ethan, are you ready to take imperfect action?

All right, let's do it.

All right, I got three questions for you. Rapid fire answers, 60 seconds or less. The first one is what is the fastest path to the profits?

Fastest path to the profits.

Look at everything you're doing, every task that you have in your business and how it contributes to the bottom line. And Then say to yourself, eat this. E A T, Do I need to eliminate this? If I can't eliminate it, how can I leverage AI and automation to automate it? And if I absolutely can't automate it, T train someone else to do it.

I like that. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

The biggest thing that I see, the biggest mistake I see prospects making is inaction. Um, and we as humans, we often hesitate just out of ignorance, like we don't know what we don't know. So what you need to do is just dive in. Hire someone like myself. If you, if you learn easier that way, it's worth the investment to spend a few hours and really have someone show you how to do things hands on. If you are the type of learner who does better with books, go buy the book, take an online course, watch YouTube videos. But dive in, stay, spend like lock yourself somewhere for a weekend. What I do is I got this idea from like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. I'll have a think week where I will go book a hotel room in my city and just lock myself in there with books and just consume and just learn something and I come out a much better person with a new skill set acquired. Like I'm Neo in the Matrix and I got it plugged into my head.

Love that. Absolutely love it. The last one. What is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

To maximize customer lifetime value, you need to obsess over making your customers raving fans and using things like gamification and loyalty programs so that your customer doesn't ever think to look anywhere else. I believe if you have those two things like creating a raving fan experience to where you go over the top in delivering value to your customer and you have some type of gamification process to it as well, that could be like a points thing. Like I'll use Delta, for example. I'm a Delta medallion member when it comes to flights. I don't even look at any other airlines anymore. If Delta flies there, I only go to delta.com now. I don't know, I could be paying $700 more for my ticket than on Southwest or Spirit. I don't care. I don't even look. That is true brand loyalty. And the reason I have that is because of the trust, the reliability, the comfort that I experience when flying with Delta. And that's what you want to create for your own business so people don't even think to look anywhere else.

Love it. Absolutely love it. Along with everything you shared. I appreciate your time and just bringing it for our audience. Where would you like them to learn more?

The best place to learn more about me is just at my website ethanking.com I keep it very simple, it's just my name ethanking.com you can find links to follow me on whatever your favorite social media platform is. You can find links to my books, my courses to hire me to speak at your event, do a workshop or do a consultation training with your company.

Well, thank you again for everything. I enjoyed it again. Can't wait to stay in touch and continue.

Thanks a lot Mario. It's been fun. Thanks for having me.

Alright Expert Authority World, we have another great episode here today. I'll see you on the next one. Have a great day and God bless.

You know you should have a book for your business, but why don't you yet? Do you think you don't have the time? You don't want to look stupid or you're ready to go right now, but you just need to be pointed in the right direction. I get it. I was thinking the same thing before I wrote my first one too. Get your free copy of my new book on book publishing@mariosfree book.com and get your questions answered today. Once again, that's mariosfreebook.com thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it if you haven't done so already. I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com LinkedIn lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview, video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one.