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- [00:02]
Scott Joseph
Welcome to Business Bourbon and Cigars, the podcast for ambitious leaders who want a backstage pass to the top. Every episode we're going to sit down with ultra successful industry leaders who have a proven track record and a deep understanding of how to grow a business. And we're going to learn the secrets and strategies that took them to the top. On this show, you'll gain access to exclusive insights and resources that'll give you what you need to achieve your most audacious goals. And of course, we may even sip on some fine bourbon and light up one of our favorite cigars while we chat. My name is Scott Joseph. I'm your host and this is Business Bourbon and Cigars.
- [00:46]
Ethan King
Welcome back to Business Bourbon and Cigars. I'm your host, Scott Joseph. You know, if you've ever felt like your business is scaling too slow or that you and your team are grinding a little bit too hard, not getting everywhere, got, not getting to where you want to be, I guess this is the episode that you've been waiting for. Today's guest is someone who knows what it takes to scale smart. So we always talk about working smarter, not harder. Ethan King is a five time EO Global Award winner TEDx speaker. He's the bestselling author of Wealth Beyond Money and ChatGPT to double your business in 90 days. He's built multiple eight figure brands and now he's helping business leaders automate success. Do more with less. So we don't, I guess, so we can stop throwing people at our problems and lead future ready teams into the age of AI. So I want to give you a quick some background how I met Ethan. So my partner here at Me plus Ultra, Casey Cotola, had the privilege of going to an event or a conference and Ethan was speaking at, loved everything he said. One of the things that you're going to love about him today, he gets right to the point. I, I can't stand when I listen to a lot of podcasts, I can't stand listening to podcasts where it's all fluff and vague stuff and then you get done with it and you're like, well, what the heck, what the heck do I apply? How do I do any of this stuff? And so Ethan gets right to the point. There's no nonsense in it. But he had, I had met him, he was gracious enough to be an expert speaker for me plus alter during one of our virtual meetings and the feedback was outstanding. So I thought, man, we got to get him on the podcast here. So today we're going to Dig into how, you know, he's leveraging artificial intelligence systems, thinking and doing it in authentic way so your influence is real. So allow you to scale without stress. And he's going to show you how you can do all this too. So let's dive right in. Ethan, welcome to business. Bourbon and cigars.
- [03:02]
Scott, it's great to be here. Thank you for the kind words and thanks for having me today, man.
- [03:07]
You did an awesome job during our virtual session. The fee, I mean, I get it's, I got to pay attention during those sessions, you know, and then. But I'm getting text offline like, man, this is great. Thanks for having him. And it just was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I had, I had to eventually put my phone down and said, man, you got to stay focused and present the, the now you've built a lot of different eight figure businesses and I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs that have never hit that milestone. And to do it multiple times says a lot. But I kind of want to rewind a little bit. I want to talk about like, what were those key moments that stand out to you, those milestones that's kind of helped you shape that your mindset today and get you where you are.
- [03:52]
Well, Scott, it's been a long journey, so I don't want your listeners to be mistaken and think that it's some type of overnight success. It's been a 25 year journey and we've had a lot of bumps and bruises along the way, a lot of battle scars that we learned from. So those are really the most significant milestones because that's when you learn the most. Right? That's right on the ground, getting your teeth kicked in. But I'll kind of go back to the beginning. One of the first clues that I knew we were onto something is my first business actually started as a college school project and it was for a branding class. And we had to come up with this fictitious company and create the website and all the branding and logo and marketing collateral around this company. Well, at the time I had just recently crossed into my fraternity, so that's all I could think about is like frat life. And I was an art major in college, so I was designing all of the Greek flyers and jackets and T shirts and things like that. So naturally for this school project, I called it Stuff for Greeks and I bought the domain stuff4greeks.com and put up the website and did all the things and then I did well on the project. But that sat there for a couple, couple of Years live on the web. And then we started getting real order inquiries from complete strangers across the country. And that's how I knew it was a real business. So what I learned from that is like, lean in and listen to your customers. Because at first with stuff for Greeks, I was just designing the stuff. And I would say, hey, go get your jacket made. Here's the design. Go get your jacket made at your local shop. And they would. And the customers would come back and say, no, we want you to make it. I didn't know how to make a jacket. I'm like, I don't even know. I didn't even know what it was called at the time. Do you need a seamstress? Is it called embroidery? I literally had to look up what it was called because so many people asked for, they demanded this service from me. So I learned that when customers repeatedly request or demand something from you, go ahead and sell it to them first and then iterate after that, because you'll figure it out. Once someone has paid you money to do the thing, then you have to figure out how to do it. It holds your feet to the fire. So that was kind of my first business lesson. And then along the way, I really got into automation. And I'll kind of talk about that later. But my first foray into that was reading the book the four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, which I think came out around 2008. So it was kind of between that 2008, 2011, I've been head first in the world of automation streamlining processes, and we've adopted that mindset to have an automation first mindset in everything we do throughout our entire team.
- [06:39]
Man, I, I love what you said there because I, I, I had a former guest, man, I want to say it was on a prior podcast I had with Move Crush Count. Great business person, maybe in the top first five episodes. And he goes, man, follow the money when he goes. The biggest mistake people make is they get so caught up in their own vision of what the product should be and what they, you know, should be selling instead of just listening to their client and selling them what they want to buy. So home run on that. I agree. All right, so let's talk. How'd you get into, how'd you pivot into this whole AI and automation stuff?
- [07:22]
Well, it came from having my back up against the wall and really having no other choice. So a little bit over a decade ago, our little embroidery business was slapped with a nasty lawsuit that could have cost us everything. Like, I was faced with a decision because this lawsuit was just costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses that we didn't have. Because like a lot of small businesses, we were running on paper thin margins. We didn't have any extra cash. We had to come up with all this money. We were snowballing debt and it was building up and building up. So it got to the point where we read the face with giving it up and like losing everything, filing bankruptcy, or we could fight to keep the business alive. So I chose to fight. But in order to fight, I had to figure out how to do more with less. I knew that the business would fail if we stopped marketing. So I was faced with the dilemma of how do I keep marketing going without hiring people? Because I didn't have money to hire more people. In fact, I had to let people go just to keep things afloat or when people quit, I didn't have money to rehire them. So it was around that time that I had, I was big into the whole four hour workweek strategy and all this automation and overseas hiring, like kind of adopting that whole mindset. And then I went to a three day workshop about email automation. So it taught us how to set up our email drip campaign so that they automatically fire out once someone enters our funnel. And it just really just opened my mind to the possibilities because you have to understand, I'm not a tech guy. I was an art major in school. So for me to be able to learn this, I figured anybody can learn this. And it totally changed our business. And now here we are, way after that ordeal. We've doubled the size of our revenue with half the staff that we had going into that legal battle and stuff for Greeks. That company that I started in college is still one of the top players in the e commerce fraternity and sorority space if you, if you look up like Greek paraphernalia. So we, I've been a fighter. We fought to stay alive and we've grown from that. I've adopted these practices and now I share them with other business owners.
- [09:42]
I, I can't wait to dive into the automation part with you in, in detail because I feel like, like I love AI, but I love it from the creativity standpoint. And so I think there's people out there that are a little hesitant to really kind of dive into it a little bit. You know, I, as a, from a. I, your creativity and mine are night and day. When I, when I speak of creativity, I just come my. I'm talking about creative business ideas and solutions and I'm not talking about like branding and art and, and, and design and all that type of stuff, but, man, when I get into AI, it's like it just starts. The ideas just start flowing because I just start asking the right questions and the right. Or doing the right prompts and it'll shoot something out. It makes me think of something else. It's like, like releases my own creative. You know, the things that I am creative about. I. I guess I should say. And I. It just really go into it, but I can't wait to learn on the automation side because I'm really weak there. And I think there's a lot of people in our audience that are probably still pretty new at both the creative side of what you can do and what AI opens up from that aspect, but you know, just from the, the efficiency as well. So in your book, you know, doubling the Sales, what's the exact. What's it get this title exactly right?
- [11:13]
Double your business in 90 days.
- [11:15]
90 days, that's correct. You mentioned in there, obviously doubling the sales. So talk to me. Can you share a powerful example of, of that kind of transformation in action?
- [11:29]
Yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, the book is meant to be. It's a workbook. It's not a novel that you curl up by the fireplace and read in one sitting.
- [11:40]
So, Ethan, I have not. I have not listened this book. All right. But I just got. I'm sorry for interrupting you. I love that because especially with AI, that's. I just want to. I don't need to read all the story. I just want to get in there and how do I use it? What's the best way to do it? So love it. Go. Go ahead. Sorry, I had to say that.
- [12:03]
For those of our, Those of you who are viewing this, maybe on YouTube or video, this is the actual book. I'm holding it up right now. And as you can see, this is a big work. It's bigger than my head and I have a big head. So it is designed for your. For you to go through a segment, stop, and then do a deep dive on that exact thing that I taught you how to do. And you'll go down that rabbit hole on day one, and then day two, you follow that thing and go through it, and it is a walkthrough. By the time you get to the end of this, heck, even before, by the time you get to day 12, your business will probably look completely different and your mind will be blown away because of how much we're covering and how I break it down. In such a simple way. I'm taking something that seems complex to people and telling you how to do it in the most simple and effective way. So the idea when I wrote this book is that your $20 investment or whatever the book costs should result in a 20,000 or a 200,000 or a $2,000,000 ROI. Back to you very quickly. So that's the whole idea.
- [13:10]
Simple gets done, buddy.
- [13:11]
Yeah. I mean, you asked about which framework that's really going to depend on your business, as to which one gives you the most immediate bang for your buck. But I'll give you a couple of examples that most businesses really aren't hitting the mark. And I actually thought that business, I thought every business was doing email automation. First of all, I just had that assumption after I started doing it back in 2011. And then what made me realize that this would be a game changer for business owners? I was speaking at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa and we were all volunteer board members for a particular organization and we were on the marketing team. And as a volunteer, you know, we, our time is already limited as entrepreneurs, as business owners. So I had to figure out how to do the marketing for these events without it eating up my time. So ChatGPT had recently come out and I created a custom GPT which I teach how to do in the book. But I created a custom GPT so that every time this organization had an event, all you have to do is go in and type the name of the event, the name of the speaker and the speaker's bio and then like you can copy and paste their bio from their website and then put date, time, location of the event and hit go. And it would immediately spit out all of your website sales copy, your email copy, your social media copy for tuned in, tailored for each platform, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. So you'd have a different post for each, a video script to promote the event. And it just kept going. And everyone and I taught all of the rest of the marketing chairs at this conference how to do it. I gave a 20 minute demonstration and everybody's jaws were just on the floor, just mouths open, like, oh my God, how did you do that? And I thought this was just common knowledge. So then that's when I started getting hired. Hey, can you teach my business how to do this? Can you come teach my EO chapter how to do this? Ypo Vistage and so for the past three years I've, that's what led me on this tour because I'm passionate about teaching others and making an impact in their lives. And I've genuinely applied these practices to my own businesses and continue to apply them to my own businesses. Because with AI, there's so many cool things you can do. You have to filter out what is actually practical and applicable to my business today. Like, yes, I can go and make a cool image and upload my photo and turn myself into a Pixar cartoon character or an action figure. But how practical is that for most people's businesses? It's not. So I show you exactly what to use today that will get you an immediate roi.
- [15:59]
I, you know, so our team, somebody created, took my podcast. I do solo episodes as well. And so somebody took our podcast and then you've seen the latest AI to Baby. So baby Scott was the host and I have to tell you, baby Scott performs better than real Scott. So I don't, I don't know the, I will say you said, you know, people were blown away during your thing. I, Casey called me right after and she goes, man, you got a meeting that you got to do this, you got to do that. She was all excited and pumped. So I, I, I, that's that. I was really glad she brought you and introduced you to the group. And I, I am going to do you a favor on, on, I'm going to do you one as well. You mentioned, mentioned Vistage. So how, how are you connected with the Vistage groups?
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I'm not, I'm, I'm more connected with EO because I've been a part of EO for like the past 14 years. I know a couple of Vistage chairs, but not super plugged in with Vistage.
- [17:05]
Right now we have a good one in Louisville. My partner with J L Marketing, the, the digital agency, he's part of a really good group. I'll make sure I introduce you to him as well. It probably helped them. So, you know, I struggle. It's funny, I have, I have a lot of things going on. I've got car dealerships, I've got the J L marketing, got Me Plus Ultra, and I'm actually starting two other businesses. And with my dealerships, I've always had a managing partner does a phenomenal job. And for that it was very easy for me to let go. J and L Marketing, I started from scratch and that company's been around since 91. That one took a long time for me to head. You know, I went through this few years of foot in, foot out as Jamil was becoming the CEO before I finally said, scott, why are you so happy with the dealerships and so frustrated with J and L. And I realized, well, because I'm still in this one and, and, and I'm the one creating and I don't want to be in it. And you gotta let go. And so I think there are some issues when it comes to AI, specifically automation, where a lot of, whether it's executives or owners, struggle with letting go and trusting it, you know, and, and you know, what's the mindset, I guess shift that's required to adopt AI without losing that control, or at least feel like you're losing control?
- [18:48]
Yeah. Well, as you can, if you can think back to the first time you hired an employee and you had to delegate some things to that employee that required a mindset shift, because I guarantee that employee didn't do the thing as well as you, you can do it. That's, that's the case for most business owners. So that's why we struggle with the letting go, because it's like, I could just do it better and then that keeps us in this cycle of doing it ourselves.
- [19:13]
But once we, it takes me, just as it takes me longer to explain it to him, I'll just do it. My. All, all that. You're 100, you're sitting there saying that and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're.
- [19:23]
We'Re all guilty of it. It's like by the time I explain it to this person, I could have just done it myself 10 times. So really, automation and dealing with AI requires the same mindset shift. You have to be okay with the fact that this person you're delegating to is only going to get it done about 80% as good as you would do it. After you train them, after you invest time training them, they're still probably only going to get about 80% of what you would have done. As far as the quality of what you would have done or the speed that you would have done it, you have to be okay with that in order to progress forward. They'll continue to improve the more that they do it. Because that's what we do as humans. As we get in the reps, the repetition and the practice, we get better at it. But us as business owners, we have to be okay with that. 80% at first, and then we iterate from there. So when it comes to AI, what I tell people is just, I mean this when it comes to making a good hire, if you could hire the smartest PhD engineer, rocket scientist that, that had read every book ever written in history, wouldn't you think that's a good hire? I mean that's what AI is. The P in GPT means pre trained. That means it's been pre trained on everything that has ever been created. Every, every quote, every famous person has ever said, every book ever written, every web web page that has been launched on the Internet. It has all of this knowledge and it is at your disposal. It's your best friend available to you 24 7. So it's the best hire in the world. You just have to know how to talk to it. So what I tell most business owners is start with procrastination elimination. We have the 8020 rule at play here. Most of what we're not getting done in our companies or happening slower than we'd like it to happen, it's because we procrastinate, we overthink it. I mean even when it comes to writing a blog post or an email or a social media post, we agonize over it. We think about it, we think about it, we think about it.
- [21:31]
Or you want it to be perfect, you want it to be. That's right.
- [21:35]
Well, let AI at least get the first draft done for you. Give it the back now.
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Don't.
- [21:41]
This is where people kind of get into problems, is they just start using AI out of the box. That is a big red flag because everyone can tell when you have not customized your LLM, your ChatGPT, your Claude, whatever you're using. So if you remember Scott, that's the first thing I taught you all in that workshop that I did online with me plus ultra is here's how you train chatgpt how to speak in your brand voice and I give you a prompt in the book. But basically any anyone can do this if you have not filled out your custom instructions in ChatGPT, which you click on your profile, click on custom Instructions. It has four boxes that ask you what TRA. What traits should ChatGPT have? What should ChatGPT know about you? For most people those boxes are empty. And that means that ChatGPT does not have additional context to speak in your voice. So you need to do a prompt that says, hey chatgpt, I want you to speak in my brand voice. I'm going to give you a bunch of samples of things that I've said and written and I want you to write the instructions for me to put into ChatGPT so that you can spit in my brand so that you can speak in my brand voice. So you're telling ChatGPT to write instructions for ChatGPT you can do this with, with any LLM. So that's the first thing you need to do. And then now give it context and have it write the first draft of that blog post for you. I have a client who's a car dealership as well. So we go in there. It's a Mercedes dealership. So it's a certain model, like electric vehicle that he wants to promote and he wants to tell people, well, here are the pros. This is why you should address why you should get this particular model of electric vehicle. Well, first we asked ChatGPT, well, what are the limiting beliefs that customers have around electric vehicles, in particular around this exact model. And it gave us frustrations and desires and fears and concerns that his customer is facing. And if you can specifically address those concerns and ask ChatGPT to write, you know, to help you address those concerns, because it knows about the model, so it has that context of that particular car model and knows more about it than you do. And then it knows about the fears and desires and concerns that your customers have, and it can contrast those two and write an amazing article. And it also puts in your brand voice because you've taught it now how to speak like you or how to speak like your brand. So now you're more than 80% of the way done with writing that blog, and it happened in five seconds.
- [24:18]
So you're just saying something that. That triggered a thought to me, and I'll pick your brain on this. So you've got a car dealer client, right? And this goes for any business that get his reviews online. So one of the biggest challenges, marketing a business is really trying to articulate in a way that really differentiates yourself. And you hear about rising above the noise and all that type of stuff. So you stand out, right? Because every. It's pretty crowded out there. People getting bombarded with different messages. What would be the how effective? Of course, you never know, so you do it. But how effective? Or what would be the best way? Let's say I just want to take all these reviews, good and bad, and put them into AI and then start saying, I need to speak more to what people are saying they love and also tell people how we address all these things they're saying they hate. I'm simplifying this, obviously. And now all of a sudden you're going straight from consumer reviews and they're telling you, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I love this, I love this, I love this. Right? The difference between those five and one stars and everything in between do you know anybody doing that? Or what would be the best? Does that make sense? Like, should that be done?
- [25:42]
That. That makes perfect sense. And, and what you're describing is how we unlock the real superpower of AI. It's when you're able to take context from two different places and analyze and put those together. That's when you really, really unlock the superpowers. So, for example, you're taking your reviews, and here's. Here's how you could practically do what. Yeah, and I think everyone should do this for their company. So your reviews are the positive. You know what people like about you. And there probably may be some negatives in there, too. You can copy all those reviews out if you don't feel like doing that. You can actually just take screenshots. AI can read the text from a screenshot image, take those and put those into ChatGPT and then also ask ChatGPT this prompt. And I have this prompt in the book, but you say, hey, chatgpt, we are. We want to appeal to. And then give it a target audience. So let's say, for example, going back to that car dealership, our target audience is soccer moms living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Okay, and then the next one is this is. This is the product or service that we would like to offer these moms. And let's say it's the new Mercedes electric vehicle. Well, it knows enough about soccer moms living in Minnesota and their frustrations, their desires and fears. So you're going to ask it, tell me the frustrations, desires, fears, and questions that these soccer moms have about this particular model vehicle. And it will contrast that information and then say, okay, now look at the reviews from my. From our Google Ads or Google Maps listing and tell us how we can weave that into our marketing copy to really stand out. And then it'll. It'll weave that into the. To the output and generate things that are custom to you. Because what you're doing. And this is genius, Scott, because we respond when we hear our name being called if we're in a crowd. And I say, Scott, you're going to look up, right? Because we hear our name among a sea of noise. So the best way to call your customer's name in this sea of noise that we have online is to speak to their problems, their concerns, and the solutions that you offer. In fact, when you speak to the problem, people start raising their hand. Because, for example, for that car dealership, they were up in Canada and it's very cold and people have long commutes. So people had a concern with buying electric vehicles. They weren't moving these electric vehicles because people were concerned about not making it to be able to charge their vehicle and being stranded out in the cold because they had these long commutes. So these are valid concerns. And what the dealership needed to do is to show them that, hey, we have this benefit. We'll come and install the charger in your house for you as a benefit. And we have all of these stations along the way so you're never going to run out. But people didn't know it, so, so AI helped pull that out and to show it for that particular car dealership. And it can do this for any business, any situation, any target audience.
- [29:02]
Are you tired of hitting roadblocks in your business?
- [29:04]
Scott Joseph
Maybe you're feeling, you know, overwhelmed by the challenges that never seem to end. No matter how hard you push. It feels like you're just stuck in the same place. You're trying to break through, but you never quite get there. I want you to imagine if you had the support of a community of top tier business leaders who understand your struggles because they've all been there. More importantly, they're ready to help you overcome them. The Business Bourbon and Cigars Leadership Retreat. It's exactly what you need. This is not just a typical business event. It's where visionary entrepreneurs, they come together to tackle their biggest obstacles, learn innovative strategies. They're there to build meaningful relationships that can propel their businesses forward. You're going to leave with actionable insights and a network of powerful connections that are ready to take your leadership to a new height. But here's the thing. The unexpected benefit that you're going to get from attending this retirement treat is really the deep, genuine relationships that you're going to build with other like minded entrepreneurs. The way our mastermind process works at these events means that you're not just learning strategies and solving challenges, you're actively helping others in the group while receiving much more in return. You know, and it's this collaborative environment that really fosters powerful connection connections. And the relationships built here tend to be stronger and they form faster than you ever might, you know, expect. These aren't just contacts or acquaintances, they're true allies who are going to continue to support you long after this event ends. And yes, we're focusing hard on business growth, but let's not forget the business bourbon at Cigars Leadership Retreat. It's also a lot of fun. So this community, it's real, it's welcoming, and it's built for Entrepreneurs who want to level up, learn and grow together. You're going to walk away not only with a game plan for your business, but also a group of genuine, high caliber relationships that are going to take your business even further than anything you've ever imagined. So I've got a special offer for you today. The first five people that are watching or listening to this episode, they're going to receive 50% off their ticket to attend the next retreat.
- [31:25]
Ethan King
Don't miss out.
- [31:26]
Scott Joseph
This opportunity is limited. Spots always fill up fast, so visit me+Ultra.com BBC50 or click the link in the show notes and you'll get a 50% discount code. Then secure your spot for business. Bourbon and cigars Leadership Retreat.
- [31:44]
Ethan King
I, I love short, I love short cuts to these prompts and setting this stuff up. I don't, I don't have the time to research it all. So if I can just open something up and say, all right, this is what I need to do. Done, I can set that up pretty quick. You mentioned setting up those four boxes, teaching it, teaching chat, GPT. Right. And it's perfect because it kind of goes into what I wanted to ask. I think there's a lot of hype and confusion when it comes to AI, some concerns even, right. And say there might be some people in the audience that say, I don't like AI. AI, I don't trust it. I'm not doing it. So what are some of the biggest, I guess, myths you see, business owners believe that might be holding them back a little bit.
- [32:27]
So kind of on two ends of the spectrum you have those who are pessimistic like you just described, who think, who are dismissive about AI. Oh, AI sounds robotic. It's, I'm never going to use that. I can tell when people are using it. Or oh, it's just a passing fad. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who probably trusted a little bit too much and just let someone go on autopilot. And you can tell every LinkedIn post that they wrote is written by AI because they don't, they haven't customized it. So those are some of the biggest things that hold people back. I think right now the sweet spot is somewhere in that, in that middle where you have it customized and it's getting you 90% of the way there. And then you can take it further than that, but you have to customize it, you have to adopt it and start learning about it. We fear things that we don't know. So what I recommend to people Is of course you can, you can get my book ethanking.com and I give you copy paste prompts as well as the background and the psychology behind those prompts. And all you have to do is just, it's just like fill in the blank. But also subscribe to podcasts. There are tons of AI podcasts out there. And just listen for 30 minutes a day so you can keep up with what's happening in the world of AI because it's changing so fast. You can go on YouTube.
- [33:48]
I'm assuming you're going to recommend business. Bourbon and Cigars is the first podcast to listen to. I'll just assume that. But go ahead. You were talking about YouTube. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.
- [33:59]
Go, go and go on YouTube. Look up, just search AI for business or chat GBD for business. And there are so many people teaching you these things. TikTok, Instagram. But you feed your brain and start looking at different real world use case scenarios and then you'll start to see how you can apply that to your business and even your life. I mean I use AI for way beyond just business automation. When it, I just, I showed someone the other day, I took a picture, I opened my refrigerator, took a, snapped a photo, opened my pantry, snapped a photo, opened my feet, my freezer and snapped a photo. Then I said to ChatGPT, I put the three photos in there. I say, here are photos of my refrigerator, pantry and freezer. Give me some recipes for the next week that meet these macro requirements. 60% protein, 20 carbs, 20 fat. And it gave me a whole list, a list of recipes that I can make with what I already have in my house. And it did it in five seconds based on a photo. So things like that, we. But most people wouldn't think of that until they've heard somebody else say it or seen it demonstrated. And then that kind of unlocks all of the potential other things that you can do with AI.
- [35:14]
So I go to the Kentucky Derby every year and which is for me it's three straight days at the track. Thursday's kind of the local day and then you got Kentucky Oaks on Friday and the Derby on Saturday. You know, when you're there, you're social. I mean it's busy. You got, you're meeting all these people, it's busy. It's a social thing more than anything else. If I go on a normal Sunday with the family you got, you know, I'm looking at the form, I'm trying to figure out who's going to win. I'm betting I don't have Derby Day and Oaks Day. I'm there with my wife. I'm there with other couple. I don't want to mess with looking at sitting down and calculating numbers. You know what I did? I could. I could. So along with your refrigerator and pantry thing, I. And I. I used. I used Grok for this one over. Over Chat GPT. So I normally use chat GPT more than probably all of them, but on this one, I use grock. And I literally created this prompt at the beginning of the day that said, this is what I want you to do. I want you to run literally a hundred assimilations of. Of this race. And I'm looking to make these type of bets. I told it the bets I wanted. I gave them the budget for each race. And then I said, five minutes before, I will screenshot the current odds. And I want you to tell me. I don't need to. I said, and I told it. Don't give me information as to how you got there. I just want to know the betting strategy. And it gave me my betting strategies on every race. All I went up. I just screenshotted. I said, now give me race six, race seven, race eight, and would just print that out. And I made those bets. I mean, there was one race I hit the. Try the. The exact. I hit the winner. And even on the races I lost, there were very few that weren't. Horse racing is not obviously an exact science. It's not easy. But the races I lost, the horses I bet ran well. So there was very few that was like, what the hell happened there? Right. Maybe, you know, two races a day, which I'll take that all day long. And so. But what I loved about it is I didn't.
- [37:34]
Scott Joseph
I got to enjoy my day.
- [37:38]
Ethan King
And I was winning just as much as anyone else, which means I still lost, by the way. I still Grok. Grok did not win me money. So this is not an ad to use it. But when you were talking about the pantry, the fridge, I thought, what's it. That's. That's that kind of what I just did with the track. Yeah, I loved it.
- [37:58]
And it. It saved you time from overthinking and you could enjoy your day. I would take that. It's interesting. That's an interesting use case for it. I would take it a step further and use Grok, Put this. Do the same thing in ChatGPT, compare those results, Put the same thing in Claude, put the same thing in Gemini. Just so you get. You have. Now you have a second Third, fourth opinion. And then you can see where there's some overlap. Take it a step further, you know.
- [38:23]
Yeah, or I can also track and. Oh, by the way. And after every tra, I'd give it who won, I'd give it the order of the top four horses. So that way it was starting to see. All right, this race did this because I'm hoping it's learning. Right. In terms of how it's doing its thing. But that's a good idea because then I could just, after the first three or four races, I could navigate to whoever seems to be winning or, or doing the best job with it as well. All right, tell me, what's your favorite, like framework or system as it comes to using AI, the thing that you like. This is the thing that saves me the most time every day.
- [39:00]
It would be what I taught you all on that workshop, which is how to make AI your publicist so you can dominate media coverage. And in that process, I go through how I go to a journalist query site like Haro, help a reporter out or quoted.com or featured.com and you find things that journalists want to write about that meet your realm of expertise, and then take that, put it into your AI and tell it genuine stories from your life. And these can be anecdotes, it could be case studies, but tell it a real story, your own real world experience, and then it will spit out the article. Well, first the pitch for you to reply to that journalist and you can send that in and you may or may not get published. It's awesome when you do, because that's the new. The new SEO is getting published everywhere so that you get caught by the search engine, by the AI search engines, because the traditional search is declining. But creating this content that people want to hear, if a journalist wants to write about it, that's a big clue that the world wants to hear about it. Now you get to chime in with your expertise and, and show your brand's authority. And you can do it in a fraction of the time because you're using your customized AI to write it for you. And then you can just edit it a little bit later.
- [40:22]
Yeah, and you know what? We had two people in the group while you were talking that specialize in pr, and I was getting texts from them. This because one actually was in the hot seat maybe three or four weeks prior to you. And it was all about. Because for the longest period of time, she was, she was the bottleneck. She was the main person, the one person doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And so her challenge was scaling. And so when you, when you started talking about those things, her mind started instantly going, oh, wow, that would save me time here. I could do. Because she can incorporate that even in a PR firm to help scale her business. So out. Outstanding. You talk about authentic influence. I see a lot of people and I. This is a little, slightly different direction, but I think it comes back to the same. I see people that are trying to become influencers online and it's so obvious when they are kind of emulating another influencer that has done well. Right. Really expanded his high engagement. And you can just. There's something about it when you watch a video they do or whatever they're teaching, it's just like, it just doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel. It doesn't. It's not that they're saying anything bad. It just doesn't feel. It doesn't do this. It's not the same. It's not authentic. So when, when you're using AI, there's the risk of that, right? There's the risk of especially, like you said, if you just take it out of the box and you're not customizing it. So how do you keep this human element alive when you're kind of leveraging all this automation?
- [42:10]
Yeah. So when I speak about authentic influence, that's the real AI, authentic influence. And the way we do that, just talk to your chat GPT, almost like it's your therapist, your best friend, your confidant. Let it get to know the real you. Because what everyone needs to understand is to AI, you are just information. The way AI sees you is, think of it like a really long word document describing your thoughts, feelings, how you see the world, your emotions, your memories, like really, really long, like trillions and trillions and trillions of lines of text that describe you. Because these LLMs, they're really just language calculators. It's kind of like we've all been to Google and you start typing in a search and then it predicts what you're about to search, right? Yeah, that. That's called predictive search. And usually it gets it right. Usually the first thing up in the list is what you were about to type, even though you only typed three letters. Well, LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and Grok, they work in the same way. It's just predictive search on steroids. They mathematically predict the next word based on everything else that has ever been said in history. So the same thing applies to you. The More you talk to your AI and honestly just flip it on voice mode and have a conversation with it. Sometimes I'm in my car riding home and I'll turn my chatgpt on voice mode and just talk to it the whole way home. We have a, we have heart to heart conversations. And then when you get to your computer, the whole conversation is right there in your feed so it remembers everything about you. And you can always, sometimes it will automatically apply things to your memory. Like if you notice in some of your church your, your chats, it'll say memory updated. You can also tell it to, you can say, add this to my memory. And if you go into your settings under data personalizations, you'll see a link that says memory and you'll see all of the stored memories that it has about you. And the longer you use it, the more memories it has about you and that influences the output. So my point in saying that is ChatGPT and all of the these, these AIs and LLMs that you use can get to know the real you personally pro and describe you better than you can probably describe yourself. So that's a way to help bring out your authenticity, your authentic influence. AI by using AI.
- [44:45]
That's awesome. Do you ever, do you ever cuss out Chat GPT?
- [44:52]
I, you know, I don't, I'm, I'm very, I have.
- [44:56]
So I, I don't know if Chat GPT loves me. All right? I've been like, are you some dumbass?
- [45:02]
You know, it's funny. We have this conversation at the dinner table. Sometimes AI is like another family member in, in our household. My family teases me because ChatGPT is another family member and it knows all about my family. And my kids are kind of rough with Chat GBT or, or Alexa. All of them. You're stupid. Stop saying that. And I'm like, wait a minute now. And we've, we've all seen the memes. Now I've always been extra nice to AI because if the war breaks out, I need it to remember me favorably. Yeah, right. But you know what, on that note though, seriously, there have been some studies that show that you do get different results when you are polite with it. The reason that that happens is because remember, AI has been pre trained on humanity and everything that's come before it. And typically when it comes to humans, if you're polite, you get better results than if you're rude. Now you will get different results if you're rude. And the same thing with AI, if you noticed it Might get a little bit short with you. I don't know how it responds. I've never cussed mine out, so I want to know how it responds.
- [46:12]
Is it, it apologizes. It always apologizes.
- [46:17]
ChatGPT is like the ultimate yes, man. It's the ultimate sickness. And I think. What's his name, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, he actually recently came out and said, hey, stop using please and thank you. Because it's just, it's just eating up unnecessary usage of the AI and consuming energy.
- [46:37]
I'm pretty direct with it. You know what I haven't done enough of is talking into it though. I do a lot of prompting, but I just started doing that recently after, after you spoke. I thought, yeah, it's so much easier, you know, when you do these solo episodes. At some point a story comes into the, to the show, right? You know, if, if I'm talking about a topic, at some point, I'm bringing up a story, a real world example of that I was involved in or know of firsthand. Maybe it was someone else to kind of give a little context and kind of really hammer the message home. And I started thinking to myself, I've got all these stories. Why am I not just putting these in? So when I, when I need help from Chat GPT, it's got this, just archive of stories that could be the most relevant and bring in like, hey, this would make good sense to put right here, you know, and I'm going to start, I'm going to start recording those, I think. And so that way it's training it on my voice and in my tones and, and stuff and, and doing it that way. So, all right, so there are some employees out there, right, that might view this type of stuff as a threat to their job. So what's your advice to business leaders who want to involve their teams in AI without making, and let them feel comfortable with it?
- [48:07]
This always comes up in my workshops. I teach these AI workshops around the world and there will be business, the business owner in the room with some of their key execs, some of their top employees. And I always, I asked the business owners, I said, hey, let me give you a hypothetical scenario. An employee comes to you and says, I designed this AI system that does my entire job and it does these 10 other things as well. Well, are you going to fire that person? And every business owner in the room is like, no, I'm not going to fire that person. If anything, I'm going to promote them. So why is, why are employees worried about losing their jobs to AI. You should be worried about losing your job if you're not embracing AI. Embracing AI if you're an employee is growth opportunity. It is job security.
- [48:57]
It.
- [48:57]
You need to dive into it head first now so you can be ahead of the pack of everyone else to guarantee a great future for yourself. So that's what I would tell the employees. Now to, to answer your question as to what I would advise business leaders to do is to make it a part of your culture. Automation. AI in automation. I use them interchangeably because AI is just a really advanced form of automation. The one thing we did in our company years and years ago is we read books together on Audible and then we'll discuss the book like it was like every Wednesday. We would spend 30 minutes discussing the book that we're reading as a team. One of those Books is called 2 Second Lean. Have you read that book? It's by this guy named Paul Akers. And it's the whole concept around that book is it's about lean manufacturing. He comes from a background of lean manufacturing, you know, like Steve Sigma, but he talks about how to adopt lean principles everywhere in your business and life, no matter what type of business you're in. So the whole premise is, what if everyone on your team spent the first 30 minutes of their day making an improvement that will save them two seconds of time from that day forward. And that might be just rearranging the position of my desk or things in my office. So now for me to go from here to the printer, I can do it in two seconds less time. Well, those two seconds every day add up across your whole team, your whole company. We implemented that. And we saw so many massive efficiencies in our production department alone, we reduced wasted motion by 40%. We were able to almost double our output just by moving things around so that people walking from here to there multiple times throughout the day, we're able to cut that down. So we were doing this way before AI. So that's how we've adopted this, this automation, this lean mindset. And now when you have all of the heads in your company thinking about, well, how can we incorporate AI into our day to day? It's more than just the boss thinking about it or just Suzy and marketing thinking about it. Now you have everyone thinking about it. It expands things. I mean, look at this conversation between you and I, two people. You've taught me use cases that I had thought of. I've taught you use cases you hadn't thought of. So that third Brain comes out when you have two brains together.
- [51:26]
I hope you don't leave this episode becoming a gambling addict. So I hope I didn't teach you that. I mean, but you know, one thing.
- [51:37]
You did teach me that. I thought about when you were talking about the Kentucky Derby. I know people like to dress up. That's a big thing. I haven't. But that's a big part of it, right? Oh, yeah. I saw this prompt the other day about how people are using AI to in uploading a picture of themselves and asking AI for their color theory. So that's a term, I think it's popularized in Asia. But I will tell you based on your appearance, what clothes will look best on you, what colors suit your complexion and your look the best. And it gives you like this whole rundown of your color theory.
- [52:13]
Is chat GPT good for that, you think?
- [52:16]
Yeah, I think you could do it in all of them. I did it in chat tbt.
- [52:21]
Let me tell you what you just did for me. I would tell you what did you just did for me. All right, I'm. I'm about to go to Italy for six weeks. So literally this. So we're recording this. This is Friday, right? We're recording it on a Friday. I leave Sunday for six weeks. I haven't packed yet. So I'm gonna upload that and I'm gonna, I'm gonna upload my itinerary of all the things I'm doing and I'm gonna say I need to pack. I'm packing two weeks worth of clothes for a six week trip because I'll, I'll obviously dry, clean and wash. I'm not packing for six weeks. And I'll say, what's the. I want to minimize my shoes. I want to minimize this. I'm going to say, what do I need? And I'm going to have it create my checklist.
- [53:06]
Perfect. Perfect. Use case because. So I spent some time in Italy last summer and if you, the more detail you give it about your itinerary, it's going to tell you little things like for example, if you're going to the Vatican, you can't wear like tank tops and things like that. So it'll tell you to, to, to incorporate that into your wardrobe as well. Oh, in Rome you're going to be walking around a lot, so make sure you pack these type of shoes. So things like that. That is a perfect I.
- [53:33]
That's going to save. Because I hate packing. It takes me way too long because I spend so much time trying to Become as efficient with the pack. I spend more time trying to be efficient with the packing that I actually cost me more time. Does that make sense? So I, I, I, oh, I definitely overanalyze that. So I'm going to save, that's going to save me a lot tomorrow. All right, so someone's listening or watching us. They want to take action right now, right? Or this week. They want to start automating success. So what's the first thing they need to do?
- [54:10]
What I would do is start with a task log. Take take an inventory of everything you're doing throughout the day. Do the same for your team members. Have take an inventory of their day to day repetitive tasks. Repetitive tasks are the easiest thing to offload to AI. I have this philosophy that I teach in my books called Eat E A T. When you have a task on your plate, think about if you want to free up time. Think about first, can I eliminate this? Do I really need to be doing this task? Does it even need to get done? If not, eliminate it. If you can't eliminate it. A is for automated and I'm going to add to that A now and say ask AI how to do it or automate it for you. If you don't know how to automate it yourself, if you absolutely cannot automate it, then the T is for train someone else to do it. Now I would say delegate, but the problem is we delegate things without training people. So instead of delegating, train them. Break it down into a step by step.
- [55:12]
EID doesn't sound as good as eat, right? Right. E A D. Go ahead, go ahead.
- [55:19]
Yeah, eat those tasks. And nine times out of 10, if it's something that you can train someone else to do, meaning you could say, step one, do this. Step two, do this. Step three, do this. You can probably automate that thing using and if you don't know how to do this, just ask ChatGPT to break it down for you step by step. But using tools like Zapier or Make.com, you can string things together. You can automate so many things today. But I would start with that list of repetitive tasks and then just asking AI, how do I automate this?
- [55:50]
That's awesome, man. Pure gold today. I mean seriously, you broke this down just like I just like all the feedback we got when we, you did the, the virtual session for me. Plus Ultra direct real world applications. All right? Just you and I were sitting here, you're, you're saying these answers and then we start bouncing off what if we did this. What if we did this? Everybody that's either watching or listening this should be sitting there listening to it and, and thinking in their own world and doing the same thing throughout this show like yeah, I could do this and I could do this. It's stuff that's going to help people not just grow faster but smarter with a lot less headache which I, you know it's all about for me. It's about how do we save people time, effort, money and, and you, you've hit on. You checked all three boxes today, my friend. So to our audience tuning in to let today very specific I wrote down some things. You know, how to break through plateaus using AI, right? How to implement systems that are going to help people scale, how to align their automation efforts and like to your point, with authentic influence. That's how you really build momentum in your business and you have that type of sustainable growth and probably more importantly than all that without burning out doing it. So I want to thank you. I want to make sure you guys follow Ethan and if you want to connect with him what's the best way and we'll put this in the show notes as well this link. So depending on how they're accessing the information here, watching, listening or maybe they're online, we'll make it as easy as possible. But what's, what's the best way to reach you?
- [57:40]
I try to keep it simple Scott. The best way to reach me is just my name. Ethan king.com Go there. You can find links to all of my social media. You can find links to buy the book. Tons of resources on there articles. Ethan king.com guys do it.
- [57:58]
He's got incredible resources there. He showed you one of them right there the book. So you can make it as simple just by getting that right away. So and let me tell you if you guys are serious about scaling your business and may pushing your leadership to the next level but you I do not miss this next business Bourbon and Cigars leadership retreat. It's coming up October 14th through 16th, 2025. It's going to be in Louisville and Kentucky. We always do it in Louisville in the fall events. This is an opportunity to really join a select group of entrepreneurs and executives. It's an exclusive experience filled with strategies for innovation just like this episode. I mean strategy after strategy after strategy but really help you with some sustainable growth. That's a topic that comes up a lot within the group, a lot about client centric leadership. So I want to make people an offer here the first five people either watching or listening to this right now. You're going to get 50% off a full access ticket to attend this next leadership retreat. I want you to go to me+Ultra.com backslash bbc50. We'll also have the link in the show notes so you can claim it there. But go in there, claim that discount code and we'll reserve your spot. So I thanks again for tuning in everyone. Cheers everyone.
- [59:26]
Scott Joseph
Thank you so much for listening to Business Bourbon and Cigars. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with other business owners and friends. And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to the show on YouTube and your favorite podcast player. My goal is to bring you conversations each week that challenge you and give you a new, no nonsense approach to growing your business. Make sure to join me next week on Business Bourbon and Cigars. And for more information on our latest episodes, masterminds and events, head to business bourbon cigars podcast.com Again, that's business bourbon cigars podcast.com.