New 4-Week AI Class Starts Tomorrow / Another Announcement

Michael Simmons

Oct 09, 2025

A lot has been changing behind the scenes over the last four months.

Today, I have two announcements:

This newsletter is switching to a studio model with multiple contributors
Paid subscribers get access to a 4-week AI course that starts tomorrow

Announcement #1: New Studio Model

I am now absolutely thrilled to announce that this newsletter is undergoing a fundamental reinvention.

It’s changing from a solopreneur endeavor into an AI studio, featuring multiple co-owners. These collaborators are AI pioneers who have been hand-picked for their unique AI expertise and their awesomeness quotient (AQ). Everyone among them has also either started and sold a 7-figure business or held a multi-6-figure job. We’re all coming together now because we see a unique opportunity to make a huge impact, have fun, and do something special.

Our vision is to create a one-stop to empower you to become a world-class AI thought leader that impacts millions of people and builds a 6-7 figure thought leader business. We’ll continue sharing classes, prompts, and content. But behind the scenes, we’re also hard at work building an end-to-end AI system for you that:

Extracts your unique expertise
Collaborates with you on strategy
Creates blockbuster content at scale
Generates a sales funnel and sales page
Creates AI products (prompts, courses, automations, micro-apps)

In other words, we’re creating a system that allows you to turn suspects into prospects into happy customers while creating new types of value with your expertise.

We are building this system around three core principles:

Automate every part of the workflow, except for those that uniquely require your expertise and those that you want to retain.
Augment your human potential so you become smarter, more authentic, and more capable than you would be without using AI.
One-Stop Shop. Rather than focusing solely on helping you create traffic through content and you having to find, figure out, and integrate other solutions, we believe that having a single, comprehensive system will be the easiest to use and have the highest impact.

The first fruit of this announcement was the recent launch of private WhatsApp groups that share our best insights, prompts, and tool walkthroughs we find or create every week.

This email is about the second fruit of the studio model.

Rather than just me teaching classes, moving forward, all of us will teach based on our unique zones of genius. Toward that end, we have our first course starting tomorrow, and all $20/month paid subscribers can access it live and on-demand.

I’ll share a bigger announcement about the studio's backstory in a few weeks, but for now, I wanted to let you know the context.

To lock in the current rate FOREVER, access tomorrow’s class, and get $2,000+ in other perks (prompts, classes, books, et), you can join via this link:

Then, we’ll send out an email with the Zoom link the morning of the classes.

With that said, I’ll give it over to Max Bernstein to introduce tomorrow’s course…

Announcement #2:
Cognitive Fingerprint Class

About Your Instructor: Max Bernstein
Course Overview
Schedule
What To Bring To Class
The Story Behind The Course
The Science Behind The Course
Course Structure
How To Join

Your Instructor: Max Bernstein

I’ve spent 18 years in marketing strategy at major brands. One of the highlights was leading the most successful animal health launch in history ($366 million in year 3).

Then AI disrupted me.

Rather than resisting AI, I decided to go all-in and obsessively figure out the one thing AI can’t replicate: unconscious expertise.

Now, I spend 10+ hours a day doing cognitive archaeology, extracting what experts do but can’t explain. I’ve analyzed hundreds of transcripts from coaching sessions, consulting engagements, and strategy calls, working with experts like Jay Abraham and Michael Hyatt’s team.

What I’ve learned: you can extract your own invisible expertise if you have the right tools. This course gives you those tools.

Course Overview

In this course, I teach you the exact extraction methodology I’ve developed over thousands of hours:

The specific prompts that surface your invisible frameworks from transcripts
The pattern recognition techniques that reveal your conditional knowledge (your decision-making patterns)
The facilitation approach that makes experts cry when they finally see what they’ve been doing for 30 years
The AI workflows that track patterns across dimensions you can’t hold in working memory

You’re learning the practical extraction process I use in paid engagements, adapted so you can do foundational extraction yourself and know exactly when you’ve hit the limits of self-extraction.

Schedule: 4 Weeks, 90 Minutes Each

This course runs live over four weeks in October:

Week 1: Friday, October 10, 11:00am-12:30pm EST
Week 2: Wednesday, October 17, 11:00am-12:30pm EST
Week 3: Friday, October 24, 11:00am-12:30pm EST
Week 4: Friday, October 31, 11:00am-12:30pm EST

What To Bring To Class

Recordings or transcripts from your work where you’re demonstrating expertise:

Client coaching calls or consulting sessions
Training sessions you’ve delivered
Workshops you’ve facilitated
Strategy calls or discovery sessions
Even podcast interviews where you’re explaining your approach

Anywhere you’re operating from unconscious competence. That’s where the gold is.

You’ll also need a willingness to let AI show you patterns you can’t see yourself, and four weeks to commit to the process.

The Story Behind The Course

Your $10,000 certification is now a free ChatGPT prompt.

Four months after I invested $10,000 to become a certified StoryBrand Guide, someone showed me a ChatGPT prompt that could generate a comprehensive StoryBrand framework in 30 seconds. For free.

I watched the output appear on the screen. Professional, polished, indistinguishable from what I’d just spent four months learning to create. That’s when I knew…generic expertise was dead.

Your competitors are using the exact same AI prompts you are. Type “create a leadership framework” into ChatGPT, and you’ll get something that sounds like every other leadership framework. Type “write an article about innovation” and you’ll get the same insights everyone else is publishing.

Commodity knowledge has become worthless. Everyone can generate the same frameworks, the same insights, the same professional-sounding content.

The only knowledge that still commands premium pricing is the stuff ChatGPT can’t generate: your specific decision patterns, the exact way you diagnose problems, the mental models only you have developed.

But 90% of what makes you exceptional is invisible to you.

You know that moment when a potential client asks “So what’s your methodology?” and you freeze?

Or you say something like “Well, I help people get clarity” and even you can hear how generic it sounds?

Or you fumble through an analogy about chocolate ice cream because you can’t articulate what you do?

This happens to everyone at the expert level.

A consultant I worked with could diagnose a client’s core business issue within 10 minutes of conversation. When I asked how she did it, she said “I just... know? I look for certain things?” She’d been consulting for 15 years and couldn’t explain the pattern recognition she was using.

Another client had 30 years of coaching experience and would get breakthrough results in a single session. But she couldn’t describe her methodology beyond “I ask good questions.”

When I played back what I’d extracted from her transcripts, she started crying.

“My heart is pounding. I have chills running up and down my arms right now. You just unleashed years of me saying ‘I don’t know, it’s just what I do.’”

A personal brand coach for executives put it perfectly:

“In a world of information overload, the nuances build your positioning. What separates Tony Robbins from Brendan Burchard from Mel Robbins? Nuance. And those are the big names with brand advantage. When you’re one, two, three levels down, nuance becomes even more important to separate yourself from all the AI content.”

But here’s the problem: You can’t articulate your nuances. Not because you don’t have them, but because they operate below conscious awareness.

Your expertise runs on autopilot. The frameworks sit inside automatic processes your conscious mind never touches. You execute them perfectly. You just can’t name them.

That’s what extraction solves. And until recently, it was impossible.

The Science Behind Invisible Expertise

I was on my 43rd transcript when I saw it.

A coach kept using the phrase “courage circulation.” She’d said it three times across different sessions, describing how she’d take courage from one client’s story and explicitly transplant it into another client’s challenge. When I asked her about it, she had no idea she’d named a system. She thought she was just helping people.

That’s when I went hunting through research. I’d stumbled onto something scientists had been documenting for 60 years but couldn’t solve.

Chess Masters Can’t Explain How They Win

In 1973, Carnegie Mellon researchers showed chess positions to players for 5 seconds, then asked them to recreate the board. Masters placed 20-25 pieces correctly. Beginners got maybe 5.

But when shown random positions that could never occur in real games, the masters performed no better than beginners.

The masters saw patterns, not pieces. Researchers discovered chess masters have 50,000-100,000 positions stored as single chunks. Ask them HOW they do it? They can’t tell you.

Curse Of Knowledge: The Better You Get, The Less You Can Explain

Carnegie Mellon’s John Anderson proved expertise exists in four types:

Declarative (10% of what you can explain)
Procedural (30%)
Conditional (30%)
Metacognitive (30%)

That means 90% of what makes you valuable is invisible. You execute 100 decision rules perfectly. You can explain 10. The other 90 fire automatically before conscious thought.

MIT professors Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus spent a decade mapping this.

Their discovery: The journey to expertise is a journey AWAY from explainability. Novices can explain every step. Experts operate from intuition and fumble when asked “how did you know that?”

Gary Klein discovered this when he studied firefighters for years. He found a commander who ordered his team out seconds before a floor collapsed. When asked how he knew, the commander said “Something felt wrong.” His brain detected a pattern (the fire was too quiet for the heat level) but made the decision before conscious thought kicked in.

Every researcher hit the same wall. Klein developed interview techniques. Anderson mapped knowledge types. Michael Polanyi proved tacit knowledge existed and called it “Polanyi’s Paradox”: We know more than we can tell.

None of them could solve extraction at scale. The problem is humans can’t process patterns across enough dimensions to see expertise the way it actually exists.

AI Breaks the 60-Year Extraction Barrier

When I analyzed that coach’s 16 sessions, AI caught something I would’ve missed: she used “dignity” 47 times. Always in specific contexts. Always connected to restoring what had been compromised.

She had no idea.

That’s the breakthrough. AI tracks patterns across 100 conversations simultaneously. It maps contexts humans can’t hold in working memory. It surfaces frameworks appearing in different forms across months of transcripts.

AI sees expertise the way it actually exists: automatic patterns, unconscious sequences, invisible decision rules.

Polanyi proved tacit knowledge existed. Dreyfus explained why experts can’t articulate it. Anderson mapped where the value hides.

None of them could solve extraction at scale.

Now we can.

You Just Unleashed Years of ‘I Don’t Know How I Do It’

When I read that coach her “dignity restoration protocol” (the framework showing exactly how she rebuilds dignity in organizations), she started crying.

“You just unleashed years of people asking ‘so what is it?’ and me saying ‘you know, it’s like chocolate ice cream. I can’t explain what it tastes like.’”

This was solving a 60-year-old scientific problem that had trapped experts’ most valuable knowledge in invisibility.

The science explains why you struggle to articulate your methodology. Now there’s a way to see it.

Understanding how these four types of knowledge work helps you recognize what extraction will reveal.

The Four Types of Knowledge Framework

Every expert operates with four types of knowledge, but only the first one is visible:

1. Declarative Knowledge (10%) - What you can explain

This is the “textbook” knowledge: facts, concepts, theories you learned and can articulate clearly.

Example: A marketing consultant can explain “The StoryBrand framework positions the customer as the hero and the brand as the guide.” That’s declarative. They learned it, they can teach it, it’s visible.

You already know you have this. When someone asks “What do you do?” this is the 10% you fumble through explaining.

2. Procedural Knowledge (30%) - What you just do

These are the automatic skills you execute without thinking. You’ve practiced them so many times they’ve become muscle memory.

Example: That same consultant doesn’t think “First I’ll ask about their customer’s problem, then I’ll identify their transformation...” They just run the session. Their hands move through the whiteboard automatically. They ask questions in a specific sequence without consciously planning it. When you ask them “How do you run a StoryBrand session?” they say “I just do it? I don’t know, I’ve done it a hundred times.”

Watch a designer work and they’ll adjust spacing by 2 pixels, tilt their head, adjust another pixel, and nod (all in 5 seconds). Ask them “How did you know it needed that exact spacing?” and they’ll say “It just felt wrong before.”

That’s procedural knowledge. You do it perfectly but can’t fully explain it.

3. Conditional Knowledge (30%) - When you decide differently

This is your “it depends” expertise. The contextual judgment that makes you strategic, not formulaic.

Example: The consultant is running a StoryBrand session. The client starts talking about their product features. A junior consultant would redirect them immediately back to the framework. But our expert pauses. She notices the CEO’s body language, hears a slight defensiveness in their tone, and makes a split-second decision: “Tell me more about that feature. Why does it matter to you?”

Three minutes later, she’s uncovered that the CEO’s entire identity is wrapped up in this product feature. If she’d shut that down immediately, she would have lost trust. Instead, she let him talk, then gently bridged to customer benefits.

Ask her “How did you know to do that?” and she’ll say “I don’t know, I just sensed it?”

That’s conditional knowledge. The when-to-break-the-rules wisdom that separates good from exceptional.

4. Metacognitive Knowledge (30%) - How you think about thinking

These are the invisible lenses, belief systems, and mental models you apply before you even start problem-solving.

Example: Three consultants get the same client brief. One sees it as a messaging problem. One sees it as a positioning problem. One sees it as a dignity problem (the founder feels unseen and is unconsciously sabotaging their own marketing).

The third consultant works from a completely different mental model. She believes most marketing problems are identity problems. She doesn’t consciously think “I’ll apply my identity-lens framework now.” She just automatically sees the world this way. It shapes every question she asks, every pattern she notices, every solution she designs.

When I extracted her transcripts, I found she used the word “dignity” 47 times across 12 sessions (always in the context of restoring what had been compromised). She had no idea. She’d never named this pattern. But it was the foundation of everything she did.

This is where your highest-value IP lives. And you can’t see it.

Why the Metacognitive Layer Changes Everything

Your metacognitive patterns (how you think about thinking) truly separate you from everyone else in your field. These are the invisible lenses through which you see every problem, the assumptions that guide every decision, the frameworks you apply before you realize you’re applying them.

This is where your highest-value IP lives.

When I extract a consultant’s “courage circulation system” (how she harvests courage from one person’s story and explicitly transplants it into another’s challenge), that’s metacognitive.

When I identify a coach’s “two-word diagnostic” that assesses emotional state in seconds, that’s metacognitive.

When I reveal a facilitator’s “dignity restoration protocol” they didn’t know they had, that’s metacognitive.

These patterns create transformation. They can’t be easily replicated. They’re worth tens of thousands in intellectual property.

And you can’t see them yourself.

Your brain has automated these processes so deeply that they operate below conscious awareness. This makes you exceptional. This also makes you unable to explain what you do when someone asks about your methodology.

Stanford’s John Flavell proved that 85% of metacognitive processing happens unconsciously.

You’re using knowledge you don’t know you have.

Course Structure

Most courses on packaging expertise start by asking “What’s your signature framework?” This assumes you can see what you do.

This course starts two steps earlier: teaching you to observe your own work like a scientist studying an unfamiliar species.

Week 1: Surface Extraction

You’ll start with what you can see, then discover how much you’ve missed.

In the live session: I’ll walk you through the “Framework Archaeology Dig.” You’ll analyze your last 3-5 client engagements using specific prompts designed to reveal unnamed frameworks. Not “What do you do?” but “What did you do first? What happened next? What did you skip entirely?”

We’ll document patterns. A coach might discover she always asks about childhood within the first 15 minutes, but only with certain types of clients. That’s a framework. She just never named it.

Between sessions: You’ll record yourself explaining your process to three different people (or use existing recordings). Then you’ll use the “Framework Spotter” AI tool I’ll give you to analyze the transcripts. The AI will show you the contradictions: “You said you do X, but in all three recordings you did Y first.”

What you’ll leave with: 3-5 unnamed frameworks identified and given working titles. Your “automatic excellence inventory” (10-15 things you do without thinking that clients can’t replicate). An AI tool trained on your patterns.

Week 2: Decision Archaeology

Now we go deeper into the decisions that make you different.

In the live session: I’ll present case studies and ask “What would most people in your field do here?” Then: “What would YOU do?” The gap between those two answers is where your conditional knowledge lives.

A consultant might realize: “Oh. I always slow down when others would speed up. And I always ask about the founder’s childhood when others would focus on the business model. I thought I was just weird. That’s a systematic approach.”

Between sessions: You’ll take 5 recent decisions and reverse-engineer why you chose that specific path. Then you’ll interview a peer: “How would you handle this?” You’ll use the “Decision Detective” AI tool to analyze your case studies and find patterns in your choices.

What you’ll leave with: 5-7 documented conditional rules (”When X happens, I do Y because Z”). Your exception-handling framework (when you violate your own best practices and why). A diagnostic signal map showing what you notice that others miss.

Week 3: The Deep Invisible

This is where it gets hard. That’s the point.

In the live session: I’ll guide you through exercises designed to surface your mental models. “What do you believe about your work that others don’t?” “What’s ALWAYS true in your experience?” “How do you think about your domain differently?”

You’ll attempt to articulate these patterns. Some people can get 40% of the way there. Most hit a wall around 20%.

Example: A facilitator realizes she sees every group dynamic through a “safety architecture” lens. She’s constantly scanning for threats to psychological safety and rebuilding protective structures. But when I ask her to fully explain HOW she does this, what specifically she’s scanning for, the exact rebuild process, she can’t. Too automatic, too unconscious.

This is by design. I want you to viscerally experience the extraction difficulty at the metacognitive level. Because that creates the “aha” moment: “Oh. This is why I can’t just ‘explain my methodology.’ The most valuable part is invisible to me.”

Between sessions: You’ll attempt to write out your complete mental models (you’ll struggle, that’s expected). You’ll notice when you’re “just knowing” something and try to document what triggered it. You’ll bring your stuck points to Week 4.

What you’ll leave with: Your core belief inventory (5-7 documented beliefs). Mental models partially articulated (3-5). Most importantly: a “stuck points inventory” showing exactly where self-extraction fails. And the understanding that the deepest value requires different tools.

Week 4: Integration + Validation

Time to build something real.

In the live session: We’ll stack everything you’ve extracted across Weeks 1-3. Declarative, Procedural, Conditional, Metacognitive. Then we’ll find the through-line.

A leadership coach might discover her frameworks all connect through a central belief: “Leaders fail because they’re solving for the wrong problem. They’re treating symptoms while the real issue is identity misalignment.” That belief (Week 3) drives her diagnostic questions (Week 2), which surface through her automatic coaching sequence (Week 1).

We’ll name it. Give it structure. Build your starter framework document.

Then we’ll validate it: “Who else does this? What makes yours different?” You’ll map your uniqueness.

Finally: “If I fully extracted and systematized this, what could I create? What’s the ROI?” We’ll run scenarios (course, program, premium positioning). You’ll decide your next step: DIY, Guided, or Done-For-You.

What you’ll leave with: A starter framework document (60-70% complete). A validated unique value proposition. An extraction ROI calculator. Your personal roadmap. All the AI tools to keep going. Complete clarity on whether you need professional help to finish.

What Changes in Four Weeks

Instead of: “I help people with leadership development”
You’ll say: “I use what I call the ‘Identity-First Leadership Framework.’ I’ve discovered that most leadership failures aren’t skill gaps, they’re identity misalignments. I have a three-part diagnostic that spots this in the first conversation.”

Instead of: Fumbling through vague descriptions of your process
You’ll explain: “Here, minute 14:32 in this transcript, you can see me using my ‘Safety Architecture’ approach. I do the scan, identify the threat, and rebuild the structure. I do this in 73% of my sessions.”

Instead of: Wondering if you have anything unique
You’ll own: “I’ve extracted five distinct frameworks. Three are surface-level (I can teach these). Two require my physical presence because they operate at the metacognitive level.”

You’ll understand your conditional rules: “I have seven patterns I follow. When a client gives me a quick ‘yes’ to a deep question, I always slow down and ask it three different ways. Quick agreement usually means they’re avoiding something.”

Once you can name and explain your frameworks, they become buildable IP:

The Diagnostic Tool - A consultant extracted her “safety architecture scan.” She turned it into a 20-minute organizational assessment she runs in discovery calls.
The Signature Training - A coach discovered his “courage circulation system.” Built a 6-week program teaching other coaches how to harvest and transplant courage.
The Premium Positioning - A facilitator found her “dignity restoration protocol.” Rewrote her entire website around it. Now books engagements for 3X the price because she can finally articulate her unique approach.
The Scalable Course - Someone extracted their “two-word diagnostic” framework. Created an online course teaching their method.

One direct marketing legend, 40 years in business, finally built his complete methodology around patterns he couldn’t see until extraction revealed them.

What Comes After

There’s another level to expertise extraction. Deep cognitive archaeology that reveals patterns like “courage circulation systems” and “two-word diagnostics.” Complete list of blind spots, how patterns combine to create next-level insights. The kind that makes people cry when you read it back to them because they’ve been trying to explain it for 30 years.

But you can’t get there without building the foundation first.

This course gives you:

The taxonomy to understand what extraction looks like
The tools to do foundational extraction yourself
The awareness to know what’s buried deeper
The decision framework to know if you need professional help completing the work

Think of it this way: This course teaches you to pan for gold and shows you where the deposits are. Full cognitive archaeology is bringing in the mining equipment to extract everything.

Most people will discover enough gold in these four weeks to build valuable IP. Some will realize they’re sitting on a massive deposit and want the complete extraction.

Either way, you’ll finally see what you couldn’t see before.

One Last Thing

I’ve analyzed hundreds of transcripts since January. Every single person had frameworks they didn’t know they had.

The coach who cried when I read back her “dignity restoration protocol.” The consultant who finally understood his 10-minute diagnostic process. The legend in marketing who spent 40 years unable to explain what made him different.

You have this too. The invisible expertise that makes you irreplaceable. The patterns you execute perfectly but can’t explain.

Four weeks from now, you’ll be able to point to your transcripts and say “Here. Minute 14:32. This is where I use my X framework.”

You’ll finally have language for what makes you different.

See you October 10.

How to Access The Classes

We will send out the Zoom links the morning of the classes to paid members.

Session recordings will be available if you can’t make it live, but the real value is in the live extraction work. You’ll see how it’s done in real time.