Introducing The Studio Team
Max Bernstein
Yo! I’m Max.
I spent 18 years in marketing strategy, working my way from account management to leading some of the most successful product launches in business history. At Boehringer Ingelheim, I helped create the most successful animal health product launch ever recorded—$366M in year 3, 75% penetration in U.S. clinics, #1 in every category that mattered. Industry-changing stuff.
Then in 2021, I quit and went out on my own.
In 2023, I made what felt like a smart bet that would change the trajectory of my new consulting career.
I traveled to Nashville for 4 days, invested $10,000, and got certified as a StoryBrand Guide. This was going to be my next chapter. I thought getting certified would give me the credibility I needed to win bigger clients.
Four months later, someone showed me a ChatGPT prompt that could generate a super high-quality, comprehensive StoryBrand framework in 30 seconds.
I was furious. Then terrified.
I’d just bet my career pivot on something AI could now do for free. I could see exactly what was coming: I was about to become completely irrelevant. Redundant. Commoditized. Left behind.
That night, I made a decision that probably looked insane from the outside. Rather than resisting AI, I would embrace it.
I went all-in on AI. Not dabbling. Not experimenting on the side. Full obsession mode.
8-10 hours a day. Seven days a week. Every new tool, every capability, every possibility. It started as fear and urgency, but then something shifted. I’ve always been a learner, deeply curious about tools and technology. With AI, there was something new every single day. I’d wake up, and it felt like Christmas morning.
But I had a problem. A real one.
I was doing one-on-one AI consulting - helping people use AI better in their workflows and daily life. It was working. People were getting results. The feedback was great. But my sessions were completely unscripted. I was flying without a plan, just responding in the moment.
One day, someone asked me to explain exactly how I got my results. How did I know what was working in my sessions?
I couldn’t answer. I just... did stuff that worked. But I had no idea why. This was a problem, because if I didn’t understand what I was doing, I couldn’t replicate it and scale it.
So I did what any obsessive person would do. I took about 10 transcripts from my client sessions and started having long, iterative conversations with AI. I’d upload them, ask questions, have AI ask me questions back, go deeper. Hours of back-and-forth.
That’s when I found it: one phrase kept appearing over and over.
People kept telling me: “You just think about AI differently.”
Holy shit. This was it.
I went deep and built out this whole framework - all the ways I think about AI differently, all the principles. However, it wasn’t quite what I needed. It was great for a keynote, maybe. But it wasn’t tangible. It wasn’t something people could actually use.
Then I had my meta-moment. I laughed because the answer was staring right at me.
The framework itself wasn’t the solution. But the process I’d just used - extracting insights from transcripts through iterative AI conversations - that was it. What if I taught other people to do the same thing?
You always hear about the best products coming from solving your own problem. That’s exactly what I’d just done.
But I couldn’t just say “have conversations with AI about your transcripts.” I needed to understand this at a much deeper level. I needed to figure out what was actually happening under the hood.
So I went full nerd mode. First principles thinking, thanks to working with Michael Simmons in a group where I watched him systematically break everything down into symbols, pieces, and data structures. Right place, right time. His influence rubbed off on me.
I spent weeks diving deep into the scientific research - how expertise actually works, how AI can see patterns in dimensions we can’t hold in parallel, how it processes information differently than humans. I started building a complete taxonomy:
What types of knowledge actually exist in a transcript?
How do you categorize them?
What’s the full data structure?
That’s when I discovered something that changed everything.
AI wasn’t just finding patterns. It was uncovering unconscious competence.
When experts are in their zone of genius, demonstrating their expertise, they literally can’t see what they’re doing. Their brains chunk patterns automatically. They’re acting from instinct, from their subconscious. They’re explaining frameworks they don’t realize are frameworks. They’re making decisions they can’t articulate.
But AI could see it. AI could pull it out.
I started testing this with real people - extracting their patterns from their transcripts and reading them back. Over 21 calls, I refined the process. I’ve now analyzed easily 100+ transcripts across all types of experts.
And people’s eyes would light up.
Some would actually tear up.
They’d say things like: “I knew it was in there, but I didn’t know how to say it.” Or: “I’ve always felt this way, but I didn’t realize how valuable it was to someone else.”
The moment I’ll never forget was with a client.
I’d spent the night before her call extracting patterns from 16 of her coaching transcripts. I don’t know why I went so deep for her specifically - I just did way more than I normally do in advance. But when I read back what I found, her reaction stopped me cold.
“My heart is pounding. I have chills running up and down my arms right now. Literally.”
I’d identified things like her “courage circulation system” - how she harvests courage from one person’s story and explicitly transplants it into another’s challenge. Her “two-word diagnostic” that assesses someone’s emotional state in seconds. Her “dignity restoration protocol.”
She started crying.
“You just unleashed years of me people saying, ‘so what is it?’ and me saying, ‘you know, it’s like chocolate ice cream. I can’t explain what it tastes like.’”
Thirty years of expertise. She’d been trying to explain it her whole career. And I’d shown it to her in an hour.
That’s when I realized this wasn’t just about AI skills or better prompting. This was cognitive archaeology. I was making the invisible visible.
Since January 2025, expertise extraction has been my singular focus. Looking at it from every angle - what it means for you, what it means for your work, what it means for the people you serve.
Because here’s what I see clearly now:
AI has made the barrier to entry for creating content almost zero. Anyone can search ChatGPT and generate articles, frameworks, courses, whatever. Everyone sounds the same because everyone’s using the same prompts.
One of my clients said it perfectly: “In a world of information overload, it’s in the nuances that you build your positioning. What separates Tony Robbins from Brendan Burchard? From Mel Robbins? Nuance. And those are the big names. When you think about people one, two, three levels down... to separate yourself from all the AI content, nuance becomes even more important.”
The only real differentiation left is what makes you uniquely you: how you make decisions, the order you do things in, the patterns only you see, the unconscious expertise you’ve developed from your specific combination of experience and background.
Everyone has this. Every single person has a certain level of hidden expertise - your cognitive fingerprint that separates you from everybody else.
You just need to extract it.
Who This Is For
This is for anyone who knows they’re good at what they do but struggles to explain exactly what makes them different.
Coaches who can get breakthrough results but fumble when asked “what’s your methodology?”
Consultants who close deals in the room but can’t capture their magic in marketing.
Experts with decades of experience who sound like everyone else online because they’re explaining what they know, not how they think.
If you’ve ever said “I just know” when someone asks how you do what you do, this is for you.
If you have transcripts from client calls, training sessions, podcasts, or consulting work sitting unused, this is for you.
If you’re worried about becoming commoditized in the age of AI, this is for you.
Because here’s the truth: everyone has invisible expertise trapped in their transcripts. The 90% you can’t see about yourself. The unconscious competence that makes you irreplaceable.
You just need someone who knows how to excavate it.
My WhatsApp Channel
This is where I share what I’m discovering in real-time.
Every week, I’m working with experts extracting their cognitive fingerprints. I’m seeing patterns across industries. I’m building new prompts. I’m finding workflows that unlock breakthroughs.
In the channel, you’ll get:
The hidden expertise I’m uncovering - Real examples (anonymized) of the invisible patterns I’m finding in experts’ work, and what makes them unique
Prompts I’m creating - The specific extraction prompts I’m testing and refining that help surface unconscious competence
Workflows that work - Step-by-step processes I’m seeing create breakthrough moments for clients
AI discoveries - Because I can’t help myself, I’ll probably throw in some vibe coding and other AI experiments too (20% of the time)
I’m in this 10+ hours a day, every day. What you’ll get is everything I’m learning as I learn it - the breakthroughs, the patterns, the stuff that actually works in the field.
If you want to see how to make your invisible expertise visible, this is where the work happens.
Tam Nguyen
Eight hours a day. Every day. The same accounting data, the same spreadsheet cells, the same mind-numbing repetition. I was 22 years old and already felt dead inside.
A few months later, I hit a breaking point. One night, I brought a stack of invoices home and worked on them into the late evening. “This can’t be my life. There has to be a better way,” were the words that kept echoing in my mind.
So I did something that scared me shitless as an introverted 22-year-old new to the work world.
I built a plan and somehow found the courage to present it to my boss and the CFO.
They said yes.
Over the next three months, I mapped my workflow, assessed tools, integrated systems, and set everything up. Then I trained dozens of people through webinars and created an operations manual so they could run it without me.
I had streamlined away my entire role.
My boss was impressed and promoted me.
Now, I was addicted.
Over the next 12 years, I rinsed and repeated the same process. I found better ways to do things everywhere I went. I went from hating work to loving it. I got promoted over and over.
By the time I was in my early 30s, I was founding and leading teams at a multi-billion dollar startup.
But success had trapped me. Each promotion moved me further away from the systems work I loved. I was great at seeing solutions, but now I spent my days in strategy meetings and managing budgets instead of actually building anything.
The golden handcuffs were tight. The pay was incredible. The title was impressive. And I was miserable.
Then I burned out and left.
I joined an accounting firm as their Director of Business Development. It was supposed to be a fresh start. A chance to apply everything I’d learned about building better systems to help a growing firm scale.
But something was wrong.
I was trapped in the same soul-crushing busywork I’d escaped decades ago.
For months, I kept telling myself it would get better. That I’d find a way to change things from the inside.
The Breaking Point
Every proposal was torture.
I’d spend hours re-listening to sales calls, re-reading transcripts over and over. Hunting for every detail: How many invoices do they process? How many employees? How many entities? Where are their people located?
In accounting, you cannot miss a single detail. Everything affects pricing because we used value-based pricing. Miss one thing, and you could underprice a complex client by thousands.
So I’d sit there, pausing recordings, rewinding, taking notes. Extracting all this information manually, then crafting a “tailored” proposal that took me two hours to write.
The whole time, I could see exactly how AI could solve this.
Extract every detail from the call transcript automatically. Generate a perfectly tailored proposal in minutes instead of hours. All the technology existed.
The company would get there eventually, but I could see what was possible right now. They were thinking in quarters; I was thinking in weeks.
I wasn’t going to spend my valuable time on work I’d already systematized myself out of a decade ago.
So in March 2025, I left and went all in on AI automation.
The Patterns I Couldn’t Unsee
For years, I had no idea I was doing anything special. I’d walk into companies, see the obvious fixes, and assume everyone else saw them too - they just weren’t acting on them for some reason.
At every company I worked at, I’d walk in, spot the obvious inefficiencies, and start building better systems. I was always confused why others didn’t see the same solutions I did.
One of my managers once told me:
“You need to slow down. You see the solution instantly, but everyone else needs time to understand the problem. You’re three steps ahead before they’ve taken the first one.”
I stopped cold.
That was the first time someone had put words to what I was doing. I wasn’t just good at building systems. I could see something others couldn’t.
But it wasn’t until I started helping clients that I understood what I was really seeing.
The Moment Everything Clicked
I was working with a business owner who runs a successful consultancy. She’s supporting her husband, doing most of the work herself. She had tools, but none of them talked to each other.
Every new client meant the same soul-crushing routine: manually creating proposals, setting up folders, transferring information between systems, starting projects from scratch. Hours of copy-paste work before she could even begin the actual consulting she was hired to do.
I could see how everything should connect: when someone becomes a lead, automatically create their proposal, set up their folders, launch their project. One smooth process instead of a dozen manual steps.
We built it together using simple automation tools that connected all her systems.
A few days later, she sent me this message:
“I can’t express how grateful I am for your kindness and overall love for what you are doing. You have helped give future me so many hours back in my life. I have been sharing all about this with my family and close neighbor friends this evening. Stoked!!”
Then another message: “TAM!!! It worked! 😭😭😭 I just had a new client accept a proposal and ALL THE THINGS happened!”
She wasn’t just happy about efficiency. She was talking about getting her life back. She was so excited she told her family and neighbors.
That’s when I realized what I was actually seeing.
I can see where life is leaking out through busywork.
My Violent Allergic Reaction to Wasted Lives
Every time someone describes their weekly routine - “I manually create folders, download PDFs, copy data into spreadsheets” - I can see exactly where their life force is draining out. Hours every month. Years over a career. Gone.
It’s not about productivity metrics or time savings. It’s about the slow suffocation of human potential.
I don’t just see inefficient processes. I see brilliant people being slowly murdered by robot work.
And I have a violent allergic reaction to it.
I’m a Pattern Diagnostician for Entrepreneurial Hell
But recognizing I had this ability was just the beginning. The real breakthrough came when I understood exactly what I was diagnosing.
Here’s the thing: I’m not just an automation consultant. I’m a pattern diagnostician for entrepreneurial hell.
When I look at someone’s business, I can instantly recognize the specific traps they’re stuck in - because I’ve been trapped in every single one.
Follow-up hell. Constant chasing for documents, signatures, information. Onboarding that takes weeks instead of hours. I’ve lived this nightmare. I know exactly how it slowly suffocates everything you’re trying to build.
Sales and delivery disconnect. Sales overpromises, delivery can’t fulfill, clients get frustrated, everyone loses. I’ve seen this pattern destroy businesses from the inside.
The creator’s paradox. No time to create content, build relationships, or think strategically because you’re drowning in operations. The very things that grow your business become impossible to do.
Meeting theater. Status updates about status updates. Meetings about meetings. I can smell this dysfunction from a mile away.
Transcript goldmines. Everyone records calls but never mines them for insights. There’s a business hiding in those transcripts - customer pain points, product ideas, process improvements. Pure gold, sitting untouched.
My diagnostic process is simple: First, I identify which hell pattern has you trapped. Then I map the exact leak points where your life is draining out. Finally, I design the specific automation that plugs those leaks permanently.
I’ve broken free from these patterns. Now I help others do the same.
My Mission: Reclaiming Humanity from Busywork
My goal isn’t to make you more productive. Screw productivity. My goal is to give you your life back.
I’m helping people reclaim their humanity from busywork.
Every time someone copies and pastes the same data for the hundredth time, a little piece of their soul dies. Every “this is how we’ve always done it” is a small tragedy. Every meeting about meetings is time stolen from the work that actually matters.
AI automation isn’t about replacing humans. It’s about freeing humans to be more human.
That’s what drives me. That burning desire to eliminate the soul-crushing work that keeps talented people from using their actual talents.
I’ve been there. I know exactly what it feels like to see the solution sitting in front of you and not be able to implement it because “that’s not how we do things here.”
I’m here to make sure no one else has to feel that way.
If you’re reading this and thinking “this is exactly what I need” - you’re probably trapped in one of these patterns right now. The question isn’t whether you need automation. The question is: which hell pattern is stealing your life, and how fast do you want to escape it?
Who This Is For
If you’ve ever thought “there has to be a better way to do this” but didn’t know where to start.
If you’re recreating the same materials instead of doing the strategic work only you can do.
If you’re manually processing information when you should be solving complex problems.
If repetitive tasks are keeping you from the work that actually grows your business.
If you want to spend your time on work that only you can do.
You don’t have a productivity problem. You have a systems problem. And it’s costing you more than just time.
My WhatsApp Channel
You’ll get the exact tools, prompts, and simple automations that escape busywork. Custom GPTs, AI browser hacks, Claude prompts that turn project chaos into clear agendas.
Plus the systems strategy behind it all - how to spot inefficiencies, how to think about AI adoption, business pattern diagnosis for the specific traps you’re stuck in, and the frameworks for implementing solutions that actually stick.
Real solutions I’m building and testing right now.
If you’re tired of repetitive work that drains your energy, this is where we figure out how to escape.
Zain Haseeb
Hi, I’m Zain.
I felt superhuman for the first time in March 2023.
I was working on a strategy that would influence hundreds of millions in vehicle program decisions. The kind of work that normally takes weeks of research—mining through reports, synthesizing data, building the case.
With GPT-4, I did it in two days.
Not just faster. Better. I was able to process more research, find more angles, build a more comprehensive strategy than I could have in a month without AI. The quality wasn’t compromised by the speed—the quality improved because of the speed. I could explore paths I wouldn’t have had time to consider. I could test assumptions I wouldn’t have been able to validate.
When I presented it, I was standing in front of executives who’d been making these calls for 30 years. The work held up. Better than held up—it impressed them.
Someone asked how long it took me. I said two days. They didn’t believe me.
That’s when I realized I had a problem.
I had to become Clark Kent.
I couldn’t reveal what I was doing. It sounded crazy. Two days for work that should take a month? Leadership-grade strategy from someone using AI? People either thought I was exaggerating or that AI was somehow cheating.
So I kept it quiet. Did my work. Delivered results. Kept the superpower hidden.
But inside, I was going all-in. Every hour I saved using AI to create what I normally needed to create became an hour I could reinvest in learning more. It compounded. I got better at prompting. Better at seeing where AI fit. Better at thinking in systems instead of tasks.
The gap between what I could do and what others around me were doing kept widening.
By early 2025, I couldn’t stay quiet anymore. I kept thinking: Why is nobody else talking about this? There must be others doing this too. I can’t be the only one.
That’s when I realized I needed to stop hiding and start sharing. To uplift people. To bring them along.
Because here’s what I’d discovered: AI doesn’t just make you more productive. It changes the fundamental value of your time.
If you know three days of my life, you know why I see this so clearly.
Day 1: September 2008.
22 years old, fresh out of college. Just joined Deloitte as a consultant. Three weeks of orientation in Phoenix that felt like spring break. Pictured my future: airport lounges, strategy decks, boardroom deals.
Then the financial system collapsed.
I walked down Wall Street and saw faces that were hollowed out—shock mixed with despair. Got a call from the partner in my practice area. My boss and my boss’s boss had both been laid off.
I wasn’t kept because I was special. I was kept because I was cheap.
That realization burned itself into me. Nothing was guaranteed. If I wanted security, I had to build it myself. That night I started brainstorming business ideas. Within a year, I’d gone all-in on my own company. Within a few years, we’d built it into a multi-million dollar agency that we later sold.
Day 2: March 2020.
Twelve years later, I was at GM leading billion-dollar investments in electrification. Just got promoted. Got handed the keys to my first company car.
Two weeks later, the world shut down.
No celebrating. Instead, I was at home caring for my parents while trying to hold together high-stakes projects in the middle of chaos. What I learned: leadership isn’t about celebrating when things are smooth. It’s about keeping people focused and moving forward when every plan disintegrates overnight.
Day 3: November 2022.
ChatGPT dropped.
Most people opened it and asked for cat jokes. I opened it and thought: This changes everything.
This wasn’t just a tool to write faster emails. This was a thinking partner that could multiply creativity, strategy, and execution. I went all in. Hundreds of hours experimenting, testing, building.
But the real breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about AI as a tool and started thinking about it as a way to see work differently.
The moment everything clicked.
I was talking to our sales team, trying to help them find AI use cases. They kept saying “I don’t see where it fits in my work.” So I started breaking things down.
“Tell me about a sales meeting. What are all the things you do?”
Research the customer. Prepare the agenda. Take notes. Synthesize action items. Follow up with stakeholders. Create proposals. Do competitive analysis.
Every single one of those steps—AI could help. Not just with one thing, but with everything. Research. Preparation. Synthesis. Communication. Creation.
That’s when I realized: most people can’t see AI’s value because they’re thinking in tasks, not systems. They’re looking for the one big thing AI can do, not the hundred small things that compound into 10x leverage.
I call this “thinking in AI.” It’s about breaking your work down to atomic units and finding all the leverage points. When you do this, you don’t just use AI more—you use it everywhere. And those tactical wins build into strategic advantage.
This is the result of my weird combination of experiences. Consultant at Deloitte advising Fortune 500 companies. Built and sold a multi-million dollar business. MBA from Duke. Lead billion-dollar strategies at GM. Systems thinker who breaks things down to first principles.
That combination lets me see patterns others miss. The leverage points where AI multiplies impact. The atomic units where small changes compound into big results.
I built research agents for salespeople so they could do deep prep on hundreds of accounts—something impossible before. I automated processes that made entire teams more effective. I created tools that turned good work into great work at massive scale.
Here’s what bothers me about the AI hype cycle.
Everyone’s focused on quantity. “Create 1,000 tweets!” “Write 50 blog posts!” “Generate unlimited content!”
But who’s demanding more quantity? The real value isn’t doing more—it’s doing better.
When I used AI for that strategy work, the win wasn’t that I could produce 10 strategies instead of one. The win was that I could produce ONE strategy that was 10x better than what I could have done before. More research. More angles. More depth. Higher quality.
That’s what I don’t see anyone talking about. To get that quality, you need to understand the fundamentals. How to prompt effectively. Which tools to chain together. How to think in systems, not just tasks.
The hype is surface-level. “Look at this cool new tool!” But tools don’t create leverage. Thinking creates leverage. Understanding where and how to apply AI creates leverage.
In my WhatsApp channel, I’ll share:
How to break your work into atomic units and find AI leverage points everywhere.
Quality-focused approaches that make your output better, not just faster.
Systems thinking frameworks that help you see patterns others miss.
Real examples from enterprise contexts where the stakes are high and the scale is massive.
Prompts and methods that prioritize depth over volume.
Distilled insights from the best podcasts and conversations that actually matter—the signal, not the noise.
The tools worth integrating into your workflow. Not every shiny new release, but the handful that genuinely help you scale yourself.
The strategic implications of AI changing the fundamental value of time.
Here’s what I know:
We’re in a narrow window where AI fluency creates exponential advantage. An hour of your time is worth 10x more if you know how to think in AI. That multiple will only grow.
The opportunity isn’t using AI to do more of what you’re already doing. The opportunity is using AI to scale the rare expertise and experience you’ve accumulated—to multiply your impact, your output, your value.
Most people are still optimizing old workflows. A small percentage are building new ones. The gap between these groups is widening exponentially.
The stakes aren’t about becoming irrelevant. The stakes are about the opportunity cost of not adapting. About not being at the frontier. About not understanding how much more impact you could create if you learned to think in AI.
I spent a year as Clark Kent.
Then I realized: the superpower only matters if others have it too.
That’s what I’m bringing you.