EP 24: The Guy Who Started Business Coaching Online Is Back to Destroy It

Rich Schefren was in a funk. His business was losing money, he wasn't doing anything about it, and not doing anything about it was making the funk worse. Walking into his office that morning he spotted a report he'd written for clients fifteen years earlier — The Hidden Obstacles of Success, the most well-received thing he'd ever sent them — and thought: the man who wrote that was in better shape than I am right now.

He didn't want to read his own writing. Nobody does. So he loaded the file into ChatGPT and told it to play the other side of the report, the side asking the uncomfortable questions. He answered all of them. The next day he fixed the thing he'd been avoiding and the business started making money again.

Then he forgot it ever happened.

Seven months later he came across a prompt that asks ChatGPT to tell you what it has quietly worked out about you. He ran it on a whim and was floored by what came back — so much so that it took him a minute to work out where the material had come from. It was that one conversation. The machine had been holding the most honest picture of him in existence the whole time.

That's the thread of this episode, and Rich is the right person to pull on it. He's the guru to the gurus: the Internet Business Manifesto, the invention of the automated webinar, and early coaching work with Russell Brunson, Ryan Deiss and Mike Filsaime, among most of the other names you'd recognize. (If you heard Episode 15 with Mike, this is the man who coached him.) He's now spent a year and a half building what came out of that accident.

Find Rich's work at https://strategicprofits.com

He walks through the system itself — four phases, twenty-five multiple-choice questions a day, and a score for how well the AI can predict your own answers. The detail that sells it: on a normal personality test you get stuck between two options because one is true at home and the other is true at work, and you're forced to pick. Telling the AI about the conflict is better data, not worse. By the end it can give you your Enneagram, your Myers-Briggs and your Kolbe without you ever sitting the tests, and it gets them right.

Underneath that is the line worth the whole episode. AI knows everything about everything. The one thing it doesn't know is you — which is why every answer it gives you is generic. Ask it what Steve Jobs would tell you to do and it knows every presentation Jobs gave and every book written about him, and nothing whatsoever about the person ask