John Crestani (M3M3TIC)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact nationally, internationally, and around the world. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by John Crestani, the founder and designer. And John Crestani It's C-R-E-S-T-A-N-I.com.

No, you pronounce it with your hands.

It's Crestani. Crestani. I appreciate that, John. So give us the backstory real quick because you've got quite a rich history and with the different programs you've been involved in, things you've been doing, what brought you here and who are you currently serving?

Sure. There's, there's only one person we're ultimately all serving, but we're serving our family dynasties, you know, or serving our lineage, you know. I'm— there are thousands of people that went into making me, and hopefully there will be thousands more after me. So, um, but in terms of, uh, what was the other question?

Sorry, your backstory, just what brought you here.

Oh sure. Um, well, what— somebody on your team reached out to me, uh, that's how I'm here. But my backstory is Um, I, I felt like it was a pretty normal childhood. I, you know, I never— I always— I never felt like I was enough, so I always worked harder than everybody else, you know. I, you know, I was gonna win, you know. I was extremely competitive, you know. I had to be the best at handball, and I just practiced, and I'd get really focused on things and just, just, you know, I'd want to be the best at a certain thing. And, um, chess, the spelling bee, running, you know, like random arbitrary things. And in college, that became making money from computers. And I made a lot of money. Um, yeah, I did a lot of, you know, honestly just embarrassing, uh, things, you know, before I got my footing. It took me years to figure out how to make money from the internet. I was a medical guinea pig because I was so focused on, I need to be an entrepreneur and I need the time and I need to just be at my computer to figure it out. They'd give me weird pills and stick needles in me and have me live in a hospital for 6 weeks at a time to measure, put me on a prescribed diet. I mean, there's cute nurses at these places, but my friends are like, where are you? I'm like, I'm at the hospital. I'm a medical guinea pig. You know, after— and you, you don't— you can't really keep normal social relationships that way. So that was kind of like my lowest point, I'd say. Um, but I ended up figuring out how to make money on the internet, and I made a lot. And pretty early on in the sort of social media cycle, and I just posted stuff. I'm like, yo, inviting— you know, I'd like fly a bunch of people out to Morocco for my birthday. You know, I'm in my 20s and stuff, or, you know, spending like a million a year in Vegas, and, you know, doing stupid clubs and shit. You know, and, uh, people— I would post about it, you know, this is in the early 2010s, and I, I got a big social following, um, and, uh, you know, I started teaching people, I put out some videos, I started selling courses. For really the last 10 years I was selling courses, you know, I'd say 2015 to, uh, we're still selling courses but my focus is on software development. So that's, you know, and AI, you know, you know, I think we have to maximize our use of AI. I think it's a big benefit, it's a game changer, it's a workflow changer, and we have to understand that we still need to be in control of it. And, uh, the hardest problem that AI can solve is software development, so leaning into that is, is a good thing, uh, and that's just what I'm trying to do.

That's awesome. Now, how big is the team that you're running now?

Oh, it's, it's— well, it's me. It's me. There's no other programmers or anything. I have, uh, I have a, I have an account, you know, I have an accountant, I have a bookkeeper, um, I have a paralegal, and I have, you know, an outsourced sales team and an outsourced coaching consultant, uh, team. And now first affiliates, you know, then we have affiliates that marketers. Yeah.

So when you look back at your, your journey, what turning points have had the greatest impact on how you run your organization?

I, I think it's setting standards for oneself. And, uh, you know, I, before this we talked about the Serenity Prayer, and the Serenity Prayer is, Lord, grant me the serenity to understand that which I cannot change, give me the courage to change what I can, and wisdom to know the difference. And I think it's a very powerful thing. And I don't think everybody's meant to work in part of a big organization or at a prescribed time, you know, each day, and, you know, uh, you know, some certain level of output. I, I believe as there's more variability to humans than that. And, uh, you know, you have to encourage the creative aspects, which have just been completely encouraged out by American— I mean, I— we don't— I— don't get me talking about how bad TV shows, the American media stuff is nowadays.

We don't—

I only watch movies from like the '50s to the '90s, you know, that's the best. But The, the point is, is that I think we need to accept more of a variability level. So I determine my, my business around, you know, just, I guess, in a sense, setting up systems that run themselves, um, that, uh, you know, all parties are aligned in incentives to move forward, and I'm out of the loop. Uh, so I don't have a big organization in the sense that I have employees, but I have, you know, my sales group, you know, and that'll scale up or down. You know, I have my coaches that can scale up or down. You know, they, you know, there's like, you know, there's a guy managing that, that takes a, you know, a tape, you know, you know. And same thing with the, um, you know, right now I'm managing the affiliates, but, uh, you know, eventually probably I'll have one person you know, that's my right hand there. But I'd rather have a small team of trusted people than, you know, build some sort of organization with all these different levels. It's just like marketer, sales, customer service. I think that's easy. One person. Yeah.

And what, what, uh, projects are you working on lately that's really getting things going for you?

I'm in the hole. I'm in the hole, man. I'm in the hole. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm software development all day, 16 hours a day until I can't even stay awake. I'm software development. I'm trying to build an entirely new sort of ecosystem. And the key thing is, you know, human device ownership, that there isn't a legal standard for human device ownership and there needs to be for the digital economy, for the agentic economy to work correctly. So, and that really ties into a lot of problems with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, and, you know, a lot of, you know, has a lot of problems with attribution and legal guidelines, and it's been largely, you know, pushed aside by, I'd say, major industry because it's just such a variable factor. And I think by hardening that, um, that sort of being the key idea, and then, um, you know, building the best software I can around that, you know, I'm getting, you know, the key insight I have in building software is people need to connect to AI through the terminal, through the computer, but people don't want to use the computer. So what we need to do is we need to install it on people's computers and have their computer connect to their phone through Discord or Telegram or Slack or WhatsApp or, you know, you know, phone, you know, give your AI a phone number, you know, I literally gave my AI a phone number so I could call it and tell it what to do and it'll do stuff on my computer. Um, so I'm trying to give normal people who don't want to use the computer a way of accessing the power of this, and I'm just developing that. So that's that. And I— when I release it though, I want— I'm charging $5,000 for a, for, you know, for, you know, a download that lives offline, you know. So I don't want, uh, so I'm waiting to release it. I'm just making it more and more and more complex. Um, yeah, sorry.

No, no, that's good. That's beautiful. And, and again, I know we were just talking off camera a little bit about how to protect— how people protect their intellectual properties, because right now often beginners will just take information, random information, just throw it up on ChatGPT or wherever, and it becomes public. And you're just like, all right, how do you protect your special content?

Well, that's the thing. I'm not, you know, so the big— here's the big vision, right? I'm not trying to protect— like, like, it can be hacked, right? Um, but I'm gonna make it really hard. So how do you protect, right? Well, there's two general theories of how to protect. There's obscurity, make it hard to find, and then there's obfuscation, which is, you, you know, have it in plain sight, but it's where it's— that's Where's Waldo, you know. You have a gazillion false flags around it, you know. There's a guy wearing a Waldo hat, you know, in the picture, and you're like, oh, there's Waldo, and it's not— well, and you can make it so difficult for another person's computer to find the right signal, um, you know, that— so you have to use both, uh, right? And, and the problem is this lives on a person's computer. It's offline. So it's, it's almost like, you know, a hack the box thing, you know. But the other thing is, I mean, and I was talking with my buddy about this, right? Um, okay, so we, so we've kind of settled, okay, like, it's, it's possible, but how do we add more layers to this? Um, I was talking with my buddy, I was like, you know, I just want to explode people's computers. I can run, you know, I can have a, you know, a, you know, a, like I'm not going to go into my methodology in case people are— yeah, but you know, I can have a place for people, you know, if people try to tamper with my thing, it actually pops their chip and makes their machine unrenderable. But I think, you know, and my buddy last night, he was saying, you know, John, you shouldn't put those vibes in the universe. But the other layer I think has to be police and law enforcement and local law enforcement. And, and if we're talking about offline AI, I think we have to talk about bringing society back from these freaking, you know, Meta and Google mafia, you know, of everybody's data. And, you know, that's Big Brother right there. That's Skynet. And bringing it down to a local level where we have, you know, locally based ecosystems. Maybe there's an online verification element for identity, but it has to be locally based. Locally encrypted and locally. So I think supporting law enforcement long term. So I mean, the big idea is I'm going to, I'm going to have my buddy raise $100 million for us to buy 20 houses around the US and we're going to install my AI in each of these houses because I have it hooked up to my speaker system, my Sonos speaker system. I hope I hooked it up to my software, up to HomePod, Apple HomePod. So we can unleash this locally in houses and have, you know, I'm thinking we'll work with local law enforcement and we'll have a setting on my software that allows the AI to run for an hour each day searching, listening to local AM/FM radio stations, going through the local social media and Twitter feeds or whatever it can access. And seeing if it can solve crime issues in the local area. Wow. And I don't think anybody's thinking about don't— having AI donate its time.

Yeah.

And so that's sort of the idea. And my buddy, my other buddy here, went even a step further. He said, dude, you should have it create a local Wikipedia for people's neighborhoods or communities. Like, that could be part of its free and, you know, tribal— that local tribal knowledge, he said. Because the problem is a lot of places the local community knowledge has just completely gone away, you know. We have these, you know, like, uh, build, you know, these, you know, suburban mega developments of, you know, gazillion houses, and nobody talks to each other. And, you know, families don't like each other because the dad has to drive over there all day and the mom has take another job to afford, you know, the standard of living that, you know, they grew up with. So I think, you know, and nobody's preserving local knowledge. So I don't know, I think there's some play there, but I think offline ecosystem opens up a whole Pandora's box for how the world can work.

I like that. That's beautiful in so many ways. So much potential.

Yeah. Wow.

So with the AI and automation, What are some of your favorite tools that you've utilized?

Claude Code. No memory. Claude Code, max on the terminal, you know, max speed, 1 million credit usage. Um, I like Midjourney. Um, one of my students recently showed me Higgsfield. That's an interesting video tool. Uh, I'm bullish on the video layer, um, being, being becoming its own sort of layer or ecosystem and players. Other tools I use, Grafana for dashboards. So how I look at AI is you have to, instead of trying to tell AI what activities to do, which I think is stupid, we gotta start with just the observability layer, right? And we even see Claude integrated goals and I think Codex did. Hash goals, you know, but, but we have to start with the observability layer. What do we want our dashboard to look like? And then, so I like Grafana. I'm big on monitoring. Prometheus, Loki. Other tools I use, Circle communities. I think Circle is a great standard for communities. Tim Ferriss invested in it, I think, or something, or he started it. Who knows. But, uh, and then I'm also very bullish on Sonos. I think they created a very native way for speaker systems to work locally, interconnected way, very fast, very seamlessly. And they figured out the networking really well. And I'm very, I'm very bullish on Meta. I think they're— well, they're just unstoppable. You can't deal— you just have to deal with them. Um, their companies do I think are interesting. Yeah, those, those are, I'd say, some of the most— and Telegram, of course. I think Telegram and Slack are great communication tools that are very interconnected, especially in, um, the AI layer. And I think Telegram and Slack especially are going to become sort of like a ways of the way that people communicate with fleets of agents in the future. Okay. Yeah, it's how they keep them organized, you know, the different tabs. Do you work with Telegram or Notion or Slack? I mean, all three. Oh yeah, so, so, okay, so you, you know, I, I, you know, and I think Notion and Slack are kind of, you know, it's like which one's gonna win, you know, in the coming years type of thing.

Which personally I'm curious, what are your thoughts on the two of those? Because I use both of them.

I use Slack just because I've been using it, you know. I'm not paying them anything. I, I, I No, I think, I mean, I think a lot of people have, you know, yeah, I used to have that.

Yeah. So when it comes to your outreach, your messaging, your marketing systems, what have you found that's worked well to attract and retain good clients and customers?

Truly caring, focusing on building the best product you can possibly build. And attracting customers, just sell the hardest you can. Go crazy, you know. Stop, stop being weak, you know. I think people are freaking, freaking, you know, there's, there's formulas out there for what to say or what to do, you know. Like, just, just blend into the formulas, you know, you know. And the, the trick is, you know, how to blend in the formulas but still retain, you know, yourself. Right. And yeah, I think, you know, obviously so blend in the formulas but also retain yourself. And I think, you know, and people, you know, people can— 80% of gurus, like business gurus, like teach business influencers like in MySpace, right, stopped, you know, their business died in the last few years. And I think a lot of it is because they never really cared, you know, they weren't, you know, they never really cared about it. They just wanted to make a quick buck. Um, so I don't know, you know, you know, do the best. I think do the best you can, you know. If it, you know, I always tell people, I'm like, they're like, I built a website, great, I'm gonna add buy ads to it. I'm like, is that like, have you looked at the competition? And like, is that like You know, would that stand up to the competition? They're like, no, but it's all right. I'm like, dude, you know, like, you can see what the competition is doing. Why don't you— why don't you just do that level? You know, they're like, well, those graphics are hard to make, or I don't have time to make a video, or, you know, I'm just gonna use this thing I got from Fiverr. It's like, you know, like, you know, start it, start it. You could start it. You could see what everybody's doing online. Why not start finish line and then improve.

Yes, I like that. Start at the finish line and improve. So when it comes to your sales and marketing, where do you still see there's opportunity or money on the table?

Uh, I mean, I haven't even released this new version of the software yet, so where do I see money's on the table? Um, I'm not sure. I mean, we've got to release it, you know, like, but I think it'll be— we'll be right, you know, we'll, we'll eventually need like an enterprise or a government, like a law and a sales team to sell into law enforcement. I think, I think law enforcement agencies will want us to purchase local houses in their area and install an AI there and have us maintain it um, or have us install at least a community leader to maintain it and have the AI, or, you know, Bonfire Terminal, fight— help fight crime, you know, in a very minimal way. Just passing along information at first to law enforcement, just, just monitoring maybe social media or, or new, you know, or whatever. And maybe having people talk to it, because the whole idea is to have these these bonfire terminal houses be— what's that? Um, is have these bonfire terminals be, uh, be like co-working spots, you know, where people can go in, they can talk to the AI, you know. They go, you know, just be a— it won't be like AI sitting in the middle, you know, be like in the laundry room, you know. And, uh, you know, that's where the computers or whatever will be. You know, but the people, you know, they can talk to it, they can tell it local news or tell it stories, you know, to create that community archive is sort of the idea. But it's going to work in tandem with law enforcement because people are obviously going to want to steal the machine. Yes.

So how soon do you think you'll be able to release some of these products?

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm making it hacker-proof first though. Yeah, I, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm constantly red teaming myself. Um, so I'm in a weird loop right now, and AI is really good at hacking is the issue. And what we're gonna see, I think everything's moving to the CLI, the command line interface layer, because it's less hackable. But, but, you know, these models that Claude has, you know, and all these other things, the Chinese have them too. The Russians have them too. You know, the government's already claimed that AI is a utility. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a category similar to electricity, right? So we're already seeing laws where AI is some, because they understand immediately this is powerful. They didn't do that for crypto, but you know, immediately, or this Fast, but they did it for AI, but they realized this is the computer communication layer. Humans are not, you know, the languages I'm programming in, they're not human compatible, you know. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're, you know, you have the average, you only have people programming in these languages at 1,000-person-plus companies because it's hard. It's just, it doesn't work with, but it works great for computers to build saw, and they can hack too, you know, they could use it to do anything. So we got— I, I don't know, I think we just have to be more security, you know, um, because it's going to be Wild West soon.

Yeah, soon, or already there. And so, all right, John, if you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve for your company over the next 90 days, what would it be?

Uh, release, release the software. Um, and, uh, yeah, just, you know, I, I think part of it is just me when I decide to, you know, but it's releasing the software, absolutely. And, uh, getting a lot of affiliates behind it. And I'd say getting, you know, getting some nice web pages, uh, you know, up around it and our affiliate program. So really making sure affiliate program is well integrated with the software.

That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. So when you look at your own journey, John, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you and what do you wish you understood sooner or?

Um, I guess I felt for a long time I was sort of like an imposter in the universe, um, and, uh, I didn't belong, and I you know, or I, I did things differently, you know. I didn't fit in. And I believe I just had to learn, you know, like that Serenity Prayer I said earlier. You have to understand what parts of yourself you cannot change, you know, and what you can, you know. And wisdom is knowing the difference. And, uh, You know, like, yeah, I guess it's accepting yourself, you know, for your quirks, your flaws, your differences, your, you know, and doing the best you can, you know, despite if, you know, in your own lane, even if everybody else doesn't understand. I think that's knowing yourself, you know, it's know thyself is what Confucius or somebody said, right? So I don't know, I think it's just a journey and you just gotta You got to do it. You got to give it your all.

I love that. Just a journey. Give it your all. So last question for you. When you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

I'm going to go kite surfing with Mark Zuckerberg somewhere up, you know, in, in, you know, Bay Area. Uh, I'm excited for my own helicopter. Um, those things are expensive to house and maintain and insure, you know. The insurance— I have— I, I pay $1,700 a month in car insurance, uh, because I like going fast and I live in a great area for driving. Uh, uh, but yeah, so helicopter insurance ain't gonna be cheap But, uh, you know, I'm looking forward to that.

That's awesome.

Well, more ski days, more ski days. Yeah, more ski days.

Well, John, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insight, your vision of the future, and where things are at, where they're going, and is what you guys are doing. Again, for those who want to reach out, LinkedIn, um, your own website, anywhere else you want to send them.

What do I want to send people?

Anywhere you want to send— where do you want people— where do you want me to send people?

Oh, you can go to my— you can go to my YouTube channel, John Crestani. Yeah. Okay.

And then LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, X, anywhere else you want to send them.

I have 1,000 videos on YouTube. So, you know, you can check— you can check me out. I have a ton of information there on everything we're doing.

Yeah, so if they want to become an affiliate, uh, jump on there, the best place.

Yeah, follow me on YouTube and subscribe and enable all notifications because I'll do live streams and I won't record them, um, you know, because I, you know, I, that's, I think that's part of how you build a community. We reward people who actually follow you, you know, not just like, you know, the algorithm recommended this, you know.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So Reach out then for those who want to get on the waiting list when this product goes live. And so they'll jump on, uh, follow you, subscribe, and you'll give updates there as soon as it's available. Uh, have you started a waiting list yet?

I, I've, I've 50,000, I have over 50,000 like previous customers that are all in my community. Um, and I do webinars every other week, or I mean every, uh, uh, 2 times a week. So I mean, that's the waiting list. List. It's like 50,000 people.

Yeah. Okay, so for those who want to reach out, get on the waiting list, reach out and subscribe, become a member, and you'll get the updates. And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode as well, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you're not sure about your products and services, if you can do something, reach out to John and the team and see what they're doing and how their software can help build your company, help you progress. Like, what he's working on, what we talk about off camera, like, reach out, get involved, get in the waiting list, because it's phenomenal, like, what John's building here. So thank you very much, and we'll see you all in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.