Uncomplicated Business: The Smart Way To Launch Your Business with John Cousins

What if everything you were taught about business was overly complicated on purpose?

Top 5 Episode Highlights:

• The one myth about entrepreneurship that keeps smart people stuck 
• How John turned outdated university lectures into a global platform 
• A step-by-step breakdown of how to start a business with zero investor capital 
• Why “pivot or persevere” isn’t just a strategy 
• How AI is transforming education

John is an investor, author, and the founder of MBA ASAP, which provides training to individuals, over 30,000 students in 165 countries, and corporations including Adidas, Apple, General Mills, Kaiser Permanente, Lyft, PayPal, Pinterest, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen.

John was the cofounder of Biomoda (IPO 2006), Advanced Optics Electronics (IPO 1999), FoodSentry (epic fail), MBA ASAP, and Tetraktys Global. He holds undergraduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston University, as well as an MBA from the Wharton School.

Learn more about John at https://www.mba-asap.com/

Connect with John at https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncousinsiii/

Simple & strategic marketing solutions for the busy coach and consultant. Visit www.reinventingperspectives.com

Transcript

John Cousins Episode MBA A$AP

John Cousins: [00:00:00] Now, how do you know when to pivot and when to persevere? There's no way to say, under these circumstances you should persevere, and under these circumstances you should pivot. It's almost instinctual and it's reading the market, reading the signals you're getting back from customers and really paying attention.

Being customer-centric when to course correct, when to pivot, and when to keep going through obstacles or perseverance. That's really the balancing act and the art of entrepreneurship.

It.

Priscilla Shumba: Welcome to the Lessons of Entrepreneurship, the Journey of Reinvention. Today I'm joined by John Cousins, an investor, a tech founder, and bestselling author of Corporate Finance asap. John, I'm so excited to have you here, and I'm just gonna dive right in , what is the biggest myth that people have about [00:01:00] business knowledge and running a successful business?

John Cousins: the biggest myth about running a business and entrepreneurship is that it's difficult. That it's complicated and, it's relatively simple, but that doesn't mean it's not hard, basically any kind of business you have to find a product or service that either is relieving some pain for people, , and preferably a pain point that. You as the entrepreneur actually experience.

So you know that it's something that, boy, you'd really like to have a solution for that, and then you can craft the solution. Or it's providing delight, like a movie or music or something like that where it is something pleasant that people like.

It's either one of those two things. And whatever you're making your product or your service, it has to cost you less to make it than you sell it for. And that's really the base. That's all it is. Make something for less, than you sell it for.

And then the difference is your profit and that what's allows you to [00:02:00] keep reinvesting and makes your business sustainable. Then you get into marketing and, awareness campaigns, making people aware of your product or service, and that's basically all there is to it.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's not difficult and challenging, but it's not hard. I think a lot of people get intimidated and think, oh my gosh, you have to be so smart. You have to be like. Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or someone,, that has all these, brilliant ideas in order to start a business.

And that's not the case, from our earliest days, we might have a lemonade stand or something where we make the lemonade, we sell it, we get some money and we understand those kind of ideas.

Anybody can do it. It just takes diving in and doing it and then learning as you go along basically.

Priscilla Shumba: Oh, I love it. Now you've developed a platform called MBA ASAP, and maybe speak to us about the mission and why you came to this point of you need to create this MBA asap.

John Cousins: Basically what it stands for, MBA is Master of Business Administration. It's the graduate degree in [00:03:00] business and ASAP , in America it means as soon as possible just, really fast. What happened was, I had been a tech entrepreneur and then my sister was teaching finance in the evenings at a university.

And she was working in finance, and I thought, that's so cool. She's teaching. And I'd like to do that. So I went back to my town and started knocking on some doors and got some appointments teaching finance and some of the other business courses.

I've started, oh. Over a dozen companies ended up taking two of them public so trading on the stock exchange and doing all the public company financings and reporting and all that as a CFO and CEO for about 15 years, when I started teaching I realized that, first of all, the textbooks are about this thick and, 800 pages on accounting, 800 pages on finance, 800 pages on marketing, and most of the marketing material was outdated because.

We, we went into digital marketing and [00:04:00] suddenly it was all about Facebook ads and using digital funnels and giving people lead magnets to get their, a free thing to get their email address. Putting them in an email list and giving them a sequence of emails to help them to convert to buy your product.

And, putting them to your webpage. And that stuff was not even really in the textbooks at that time. 'cause the textbooks are maybe 10, 15 years older. Than where we were. And, they were still thinking it was like putting ads on television or doing print ads in magazines.

And so it was a lot of outdated knowledge and also way too much knowledge, too much minutiae things that might be theoretically interesting, and academically interesting, but my experience was running companies, it wasn't really that practical and

It was confusing the students, the students would have all of this knowledge, like they're drinking out of a fire hose, and they were overwhelmed and so they didn't know what was important and what was less important, what was the kind of things , the fundamentals that you would use every day?

In running a business and what was something [00:05:00] that you might experience once in a while, but wasn't that recurring. And so it's better to focus on the things that you really needed to use every day. I broke it down to the fundamentals and suddenly I could see these light bulbs go off.

They were, oh my gosh, I've taken six courses and I never understood how to read , a balance sheet. Even though they've taken a bunch of accounting and finance courses, I realized there was a gap in the education. As I was teaching, I made some slide decks, PowerPoints, and from those I would reduce those to some little books, and just little word documents.

And from there I started to upload those books to Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP which is Amazon

suddenly I could just upload that manuscript and they had a cover creator. I could make a quick cover and suddenly I could sell it as a book. All around the world. That started to get me thinking about that. I kept writing books and little by little, making them longer. the beauty of Kindle Direct Publishing is that they'll make a paperback, a [00:06:00]hardcover, and a Kindle version, and now also an audio version of the book from Audible with a synthesized voice.

at a a press of a button. It's amazing. Every time I wanted to add a chapter or add even a few sentences or something, I could just revise my manuscript, upload it again, and the very next day, the new manuscript was there. So I didn't have to worry about the book being perfect before I published it.

I could publish it and then iterate and just keep continually making it better as ideas came to me and polish them as I went along. So that's how I really got started. With M-B-A-A-S-A-P was writing these books. And then I started to just record my lectures that I was doing at universities on my phone with a little tripod, and put a little, microphone on my neck and then get up the whiteboard and write my things and talk.

And then I go home and in iMovie, which is just a very inexpensive video editing software. That you get on your Apple computer and there's ones for Microsoft products too and things, I would just take those files, [00:07:00] clip off the ends, put some little title things on them, and then start uploading them to platforms.

There's a platform called Udemy and Udemy You can upload your videos, upload your PDF manuscripts and your slide decks and make courses. And so I started to make courses that way. It was all an organic process . Me teaching and finding out that there was this pain point, there was this gap that the students were learning too much information and it cost way too much.

It was really expensive for them to go to university and they had to take all that time. So I wanted to make courses that were inexpensive. Just the basics, just the facts, it would be short videos, five, 10 minute videos that people could just watch at their convenience and study in their little downtime instead of having to go to a set place, drive there, all that kind of stuff.

They could look at it on their phone, on their computer. And so it's been very, attractive to a lot of people all over the world. That's really how I started. And little by little kept [00:08:00] making these courses. Now I have on Udemi, I have about 20 courses. I've written 65 books, and I have my own platform, my own website that I have.

Courses on there too, and finance and in negotiations and in strategy and all those kind, marketing, all those kind of things. So it's developed organically over time and I continue to refine it and improve it and add on to it. Another interesting thing is , I get a lot of metrics, a lot of feedback.

I can see what videos people have watched, how much of the video they've watched. So, if I have a video up there and most of my students are only watching the first 30 seconds and it's a five minute video, I know it must be not that. Interesting. So I have to go back so that it's compelling enough to get them through the material.

So I look at that, I get feedback so I can see what people like and what people don't like, and then what they do, like I'll double down on that. Make more content like that. What people are finding boring, [00:09:00] then I have to think maybe I either get rid of that or find a way to revise that content so that it's more interesting to people.

So little by little, it's a polishing process and just getting started and then realizing that if you just launch whatever you're doing and then, refine it, iterate over time that you can start to make much better. Things over time. Reid Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn, said,

if you're not embarrassed by your first product launch, you waited too long. And people, I think we get into that perfectionist mindset where we say, oh yeah, it's not done yet. It's almost done, but it's not done yet. And we never release our idea to the world and start to get the feedback from the world that then we can, refine things.

We're just doing it in our own head. And I think that's a unproductive place to be. I encourage people like me just release what you're doing and then see what the feedback is, and then iterate, just refine it over time course correct until you get it right on.

Spot on.

Priscilla Shumba: This is the future of education. I [00:10:00] like that getting that feedback and seeing, what are the students interested in?

Where are they dropping off? Because the traditional model doesn't allow for that and, you know that perfection, you have something that's perfected before you present it, but you don't know until you see how students are engaging with it. Truly. Oh, that's really interesting. You speak about mindset and strategic thinking a lot with what you do.

And I saw something where you said, everything is finance. I thought my audience of entrepreneurs will be interested in that. Why, do you say everything is finance?

John Cousins: I think you could say that about a lot of things, in a way, everything is also sales. We're always selling, and everything is negotiations in a way too. We don't get what we want in life.

We get what we negotiate, even if it's where we're gonna go out to dinner with our spouse or , what movie we're gonna see with our friends. It's always a negotiation. When I say everything is finance finance is so fundamental to our lives.

That's one thing I really think they should teach even in elementary school, but certainly in high school, financial literacy. So people really [00:11:00] understand the basics of finance because. There are so many predatory financing, vehicles out there and for example, credit cards.

People, get out of high school and then suddenly they're in the real world, or they go to college and suddenly they get a credit card and oh boy, it's like a magic thing. They can go buy all these things they ever wanted and all of a sudden they racked up $10,000 of credit card debt.

And it's at 25% interest. And they never even really thought about, the difference between 5% interest and 25% interest. And suddenly they have this huge burden that they're trying to get out from under and then they carry that for a long time. And all of that money that they could have been using for productive purposes to get ahead in the world, say investing or, saving first.

So you have a rainy day fund, so you can take care of emergencies. And then investing in. The stock market or in a business that they own or in a rental property, real estate so that you start to get income, passive income that's coming from your [00:12:00] investments. And hopefully at some point you can live off of the income from your investment portfolio, and there's usually three types, a business that you own stocks and bonds.

And rental properties, real estate. And if you have those three things, you can create a portfolio that actually will throw off enough income for you to live on at some point. And then you don't have to be beholden to a job or to a boss or anything. And then you can follow your dreams. And that's the ultimate goal.

And so finance is at the core of that, to understand what the present value is of a future stream of, income, say you're getting in year one, year two, year three. How do you discount that back to a present value to say that income stream is worth this much, and if I have to pay more than that to buy this income stream.

It's not a good deal. If I can get that income stream for less than what I value for, then it's a good deal and I should do it. And so once you understand those type of simple concepts like that you can really understand the world better and also avoid some of [00:13:00] the pitfalls like getting into too much debt that then becomes problematic to try to service that debt.

And then all of that money that goes off to the bankers and, everybody that lent you the money originally, all of a sudden they're getting rich and we're not. That's the danger. They say, interest is a thing that people who understand it earn it.

People who don't understand interest pay it and you wanna be on the side where you're earning that money. That's why I basically say that finance is really fundamental. Everything is financed. If you look to buy a car, you have to figure out, should I , get a car loan?

People say, don't put debt on a depreciating asset. And a car is a depreciating asset. It goes down in value. But the debt stays the same. Put debt on an appreciating asset, say like a house or something where they tend to go up in value each year and the debt stays the same and as the house price goes up, that difference there, that is the equity that you've actually,

earned in the house, that you own because the debt stays [00:14:00] consistent. So if it's a depreciating asset, then the assets can be worth less than the loan amount, and then you're underwater on that. If it's an appreciating asset the debt stays steady and that difference is the equity that then accrues to us. Those kind of concepts are so fundamental to living in a capitalist society and world. It's super important to have a real understanding of the fundamentals of finance so that we can seize opportunities and also so we can avoid pitfalls.

Priscilla Shumba: a lot of times what is being pushed in the online space, it's a lot of marketing, the things that are exciting for entrepreneurs and business owners and there's less talk about finance , because how do you know that a deal is, a good deal . And how do you know investment is a good investment you've been in the marketplace, you've taken two companies public and now you are teaching people who are starting businesses.

I'm thinking that's why they are in these MBA programs or who in corporate, what do you think are the key skills that you would say [00:15:00] to an entrepreneur who's thinking, like you said, I don't want the whole host coming at me. I need to know what I need to do. What do I need to focus on initially?

John Cousins: There's a lot of talk about, when you start a business pitch it to investors, you get investors and you need that kind of money to start your business. And I would caution. I've grown very wary of investors.

I did a bunch of deals with people investing in my company, but then it's like hiring a boss. Suddenly you have somebody that's just there that wants to get a return on what they. Gave you his money and that really limits your options as to how to conduct your business. So I would say for anyone really to start small and build up, and not say I need to raise a million dollars before I could start my idea.

What can you do with. Very little capital where you are right now and get your business idea out there. And there's so many ways, , you can make a minimal viable product. Something that's just paired down that it's [00:16:00] just the basic idea, and it might not even be the actual product.

It could be you propose it on a website and you create a website for, a hundred dollars or something and it says, here's the product. You can make that website look really well, good for that amount of money with all these different tools they have now for building websites or landing pages and say here's my proposal.

This is the product. It's really great. It'll do this, that, and the other thing. If you're interested, click right here and I'll put you on the waiting list for when it's done and start to see if anybody starts to click on that, and start talking about it on social media and things.

You can do all of those kind of things for free. You don't need any money. And then if people are really interested, you can even get to the point where, you know, okay you can pre-order something like that and finance it through customers. Say if you get, a hundred pre-orders for something, first of all, you've tested it and you know that people are really liking us and they're willing to open up their purse to give you money for that idea.

And it's like a pre-order and this will [00:17:00] be available in six weeks or whatever. And you take that money that you've gotten for the pre-orders and then go build the thing and then send it out and you've actually financed it without giving up any equity in the company, any ownership from customers. , That's one way you could do it.

Or you could find a supplier if there's a main supplier of components for whatever you're gonna do, and maybe they're willing to front you those components, the supplies and you can have. 90 days to repay or something like that. Then you've gotten your financing from the, your vendors.

And there's ways to do some customer financing, some vendor financing, get your money together and then make your product. Then you never have to take on and investors and say, I'll give you 50% of the company for X amount of money. And then they own half the company and all they did was give you money, and no expertise or anything.

And those are the kind of things that I would say, that people really have to understand from a finance standpoint. It's even the discipline [00:18:00] of going through, because you have to figure out when you're starting a company, how can I do this in the least expensive way? What's the biggest bang for the buck I can get?

How can I do this? The least expensive way to get that product out there. And if you have too much money, or if you're thinking, oh my gosh, I need. All this money to do my marketing. Hire all these people to do this stuff? It's not disciplined, and the discipline of really trying to work within really tough constraints of how much money you have to deploy, how many resources you have to deploy to get to the next phase, and how can you do that? As cheaply and as quickly as you can. A lot of times, I run into people that think it's gonna take me six months to do this.

I have to, do X, Y, and z and all that kind of stuff. It's say, okay, if it's gonna take you six months, what if you had to do it in six days? What would you do? What would you eliminate to just rush for the finish line? Because a lot of times we tend to build up all these elaborate things that we have to do.

And it's a form of procrastination. It's a fear [00:19:00] of failure in a way. It's I have to do all this stuff before I can get my product launched or like I was saying, go for customer financing. 'cause then you know that you have something, it's all about product market fit.

It's all about getting customers the market that really likes your product. And until you have that, you really don't have anything. And trying to get customers that are actually interested and are gonna buy your thing is so important before you spend any money on marketing or polishing the product.

And sometimes people get sidetracked by thinking about their brand and their logo and the colors and that's like really secondary, get it out there and then little by little you can build the brand and but to worry about all these sort of minutiae or tangential, things is another form of procrastination where you really have to just find out where your product is, what's the core features that people like and they're willing to pay for and double down on those and and move forward.

We do make it more complex [00:20:00] than it has to be. But I think also it stems from the way in which business has been taught, like you identified, the books the 80 pages it gives you the impression that you too must be that elaborate,

Right.

Priscilla Shumba: complicated because surely this is what you're being taught.

Then you must also, produce something that reflects that.

If you could please the idea of pivoting or pivotal points, so people can really take that in because that fear of failure.

You're avoiding where the rubber miss the road.

John Cousins: Right.

Priscilla Shumba: you can make the changes that allow you to create something that is viable. So I'm just interested if anything comes to you top of mind.

John Cousins: . For pivoting? The old saying is there's two ways to go is either pivot or persevere. If you're gonna persevere and we're taught that too, right? Don't give up on your idea. You have to persevere. You have to see it through. . You may be so close to getting there and where Pivot is you realize that the idea that you're chasing is not really something that people want.

Because at the end of the day, we have all [00:21:00] these lovely ideas and in our mind, oh my gosh, this is something everybody's gonna want. And we're surprised or hurt when. People are just ambivalent or don't really care about our idea. And it's I'm gonna teach them, I'm gonna show them it's just a matter of time and they're gonna understand that my idea is the greatest thing ever.

I just have to keep going. Where we really have to do is take that as a signal and move to, something else. That's the pivot, course correct to where the market is. I've seen too many companies and entrepreneurs that, have some resources and they just stick to an idea and they don't listen to what the customers are saying and they think those customers don't know what they're talking about.

My idea is really great. Instead of thinking, wow, I have this whole big product here and the customers really like this little part of it over here, that's the part that I should start to develop. And the other stuff, all the other bells and whistles and feature sets that I think are great.

Are not really gaining traction. So let me focus on this part. Sometimes people get [00:22:00] to the point where they run out of money or run out of resources, and then they discover, oh, this is the thing that people really like about it, and if I just had a little more resources, I could go and pursue that.

And so really trying to hold tight to all your resources too, and don't spend them too quickly so that you have that opportunity to pivot once that signal comes to you. Things like, the Slack channel, Slack was, a company doing a bunch of different things and they invented a channel for all of the developers to talk to each other as they develop their product and. It turned out that the product they were developing never took off, but the communications tool that they developed to talk amongst themselves, that became Slack.

And so that was the product that then they ended up, really having a home run with. So it's things like that where you might develop something that isn't really the main product. The same thing with Twitter. Twitter came out of a company, it was called Oudio, [00:23:00] like audio , but with an O, Oudio.

It was a blogging podcasting early thing, with audio. And again, that product that they were doing didn't catch on, but their SMS messaging. Component of it became Twitter. A lot of times that happens. The thing that we think is the main product doesn't necessarily become it.

And it's something else that, a little piece of it or something that gains some interest with customers. And then you can develop that. And that's a way to pivot is oh, , this is what we think we're supposed to do. This little part of it here, this other thing looks like it's very promising.

Let's Stop doing this and commit our resources to the other thing that seems to be getting interest. Now, how do you know when to pivot and when to persevere? Because a lot of times too, perseverance is really a virtue and key and you have to keep going. You think you're gonna fail, you think it's over, but no, you're just a little bit away from success, and so many [00:24:00] people, consider failure when they didn't realize how close they were. To successive just a little bit longer, and that's perseverance, and that's really an art. There's no way to say, under these circumstances you should persevere, and under these circumstances you should pivot.

It's almost instinctual and it's reading the market, reading the signals you're getting back from customers and really paying attention. Being customer centric basically. And paying attention to what a customer has to say. Now that being said, sometimes the customers don't know what they want. Henry Ford said if he had asked customers what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse.

They didn't know about a car. A car was a brand new thing. So if you're developing a completely new category, then you can't rely on customer feedback because customers won't even know that the thing you're developing exists. , And now we're living in such a incredibly accelerated time that it's hard sometimes for people to even know what they want.

It takes a [00:25:00] while. I know how many things have, it's taken me several years to adopt after it's become very popular. Because there's just so many things and do I really wanna get into the learning curve of that, and finally, oh yes, the benefits are such that I'm gonna. Learn how to use that tool or whatever it is.

So pivoting is really important to be thinking that way. But when to deploy that, when to course correct, when to pivot and when to keep going, through obstacles perseverance that's really the balancing act and the art of entrepreneurship, I would say right there, oh, John. , If you could one tip or something you learned maybe along the way that you this it.

One tip of what to do. Reading and podcasts and all kinds of different ways of gathering information, I've found it's so important to keep gathering information and everything that I read, everything that I hear.

If it's something that I want it to stick with me, I just type it into my, I use Apple, but my Apple notes, , or cut and [00:26:00] paste it into Apple Notes. And then I have a note of those kind of things and I organize those up. Little snippets of wisdom, little snippets of what might be, something to live by or some kind of a saying that can.

Motivate me , when I'm feeling down . And really gathering those together. I would highly recommend that we all do that. First of all, I think that reading is something that, has atrophied or diminished in many people's cases. I know myself even, it's so easy to just scroll on Facebook or Instagram or some TikTok and watch little snippets of something, but to actually sit down and read a book and. It's the only way that we can actually get into another person's mind.

And we can even get into the mind of very wise people from 2000 years ago , and the best of the smartest folks today. Reading is a real superpower and because many people don't rely on reading anymore to gather more knowledge I think it can really be a big [00:27:00] advantage for us to continue , to be lifelong learners every day learn a little bit more than we knew the day before. And then also give ourselves little notes so we can remember what we learned.

Priscilla Shumba: John, when you're selling something, an idea business, whatever it is, what would you say is one thing you should make sure you cover when you're selling

John Cousins: we talked about, finance is everything. Everything is also sales. We're always selling, whether we're selling to customers or we're selling to investors, or we're selling to vendors to convince them to, give us products, whether we're selling to employees, you know, to hire someone, having a vision that people want to be a part of.

That's a sales thing. Selling is an empathic type of event. You have to really put yourself in the other person's shoes and try to find out what they really want and then deliver that in what you're proposing, what your value proposition is.

Crafting that to what the other person's value set is and [00:28:00] what they need a lot of entrepreneurs, get product centric, they love their product. They tend to shy away from customers and selling because selling's kind of like creepy and they'll feel like a used car salesman or something, or given the harsh sell, come on, buy my thing, it's the greatest this or that.

But if you have something that can really help someone in some way, then it doesn't feel like you're actually embarrassed about selling. Here's something that can really help you and it'll be an inflection point in your life, whatever that is in a little bit, it might be, making something a little more frictionless in their life, or giving them some sort of a delight

it could be a very small thing, and those things can end up being very big, , to people. Sales is just creating awareness campaigns, making people aware of what your value proposition is. Here's the value that I'm providing to you, and to be sincere about that, that you're really providing value and providing more.

than You're asking for it in a price that's real value. Price is what you [00:29:00] pay, but value is what you get, as Warren Buffet said. And so thinking in those kind of terms makes selling not only more comfortable, but actually it's your duty then if you have something that can help people to let as many people know as possible in a way, and think of selling in those kind of terms, I think makes it easier.

Priscilla Shumba: John. I'm interested to know what do you see that's exciting about the future in the marketplace

John Cousins: the biggest thing is artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence tools. I recently launched on my website, mba-asap.com, a negotiations course that is based on. Artificial intelligence we put in with a company I was developing with all of my negotiations, course material and books into an artificial intelligence engine.

This delivers that material in a one-on-one setting with students and figures out what they know about negotiations, what they don't teaches them that. And then role plays with [00:30:00] them in negotiation scenarios to really develop their negotiation skills. So that is delivering one-to-one.

Education, but at scale. If I had to talk to one person, I could do that, but I couldn't do that to a hundred thousand people. But with this AI , that can happen, which is just remarkable. I've also been developing lately a game based on M-B-A-S-A-P, like a simple finance game, invest in these assets, watch the money accrue, you win at a certain point, you go to these different levels and just a game that you can buy in the app store of Android or Apple App Store, for your phone

To gain intuition and gain, knowledge in a fun gamified way about these concepts. And, I know how to code a little bit, but what I've been using is a AI agent Chat GPT and Clawed from Anthropic and just querying them and using a game engine software called Unity

I can type into Claude, I wanna [00:31:00] develop this game and it helps me to develop all the parameters. And then it actually , writes the computer code that then I copy and put it into Unity. And little by little, build up this game. The AI gives me all the steps I need to do to develop the game, and then I can interact with that and put it into this platform and create , an app that I can sell that I developed with a AI agent as my partner. It's just incredible to me. And honestly, this sort of tools and this workflow were not available in this configuration until right now. I couldn't have even done this six months ago.

And so those kind of things are very exciting to me. Where artificial intelligence as a co-creator, as a partnership kind of thing what the potential is for that. And it goes back to in the 1990s, IBM made a program called Deep Blue. And Deep Blue was a chess program, and little by little it started to get better.

And in the 1990s it. [00:32:00] It beat Gary Kasparov, who was the grandmaster chess champion of the world, and suddenly computers were better than humans at chess. And it was like, oh my gosh. And so Kasparov, instead of getting all you know, depressed about that and all he started working with the computer programs.

And it turns out that now the best chess player is not a human and it's not a computer, but it's a combination of both working together. And , they call that a centaur the half man, half horse kind of thing. That's what I can see happening.

The ai, the computer is an incredible co-creator, like a partner. People are worried about, and I am too, to a degree that, artificial intelligence may race ahead of us and suddenly we're gonna have computers that are dominating the world and, taking control of people and everything.

And that may happen, I don't know. But for right now. These tools are just incredible creative partners. And so to me that's the most exciting thing about the near term future. And in a way, the future is [00:33:00] here. The future's already happening and I'm just blown away by it and trying to use these things in as many fun, creative, and productive ways as I can.

Priscilla Shumba: That's exciting. We are living in exciting times.

To the audience, if you'd like to learn more about John, you can go to his website, mba slash asap.com. I think we covered some interesting things that people don't talk about much.

Everything is finance and really looking to know how do you know that something is a good deal? That's an important skill and I think John has made it quite convenient and affordable for people. So if you'd like to know more about that, check out his website. John, is there somewhere where you're active online?

John Cousins: I'm on all the social media and LinkedIn. On my website you can sign up for my email list and I answer everybody's email if they have questions and things like that. And I have a community, M-B-A-S-A-P community. But I'm on Facebook and primarily LinkedIn because it's a business platform.

But I'm on x Twitter TikTok and Instagram, everything. So I'm active online. .

Priscilla Shumba: Thank you so much. That's John Cousins.[00:34:00]

John Cousins: Thank you, Priscilla. Really a pleasure. Thank you. Enjoyed it.