How to Clone Yourself and Get Superpowers | Ep. 135

Ethan King: Somewhere along the lines, a human will disappoint you. It's just how we're built. Welcome to King Moves. In chess, the king moves one step at a time. But that single move can change everything. Each week we explore mindset shifts and simple actions that could lead to the next breakthrough in your business and life. I'm your co host, Ethan king from Atlanta, Georgia, USA, entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and bestselling author of Wealth Beyond Money.

Justin King: And I'm your co host, Justin King, no relation to Ethan from Cape Town, South Africa. Entrepreneur, speaker, and business growth strategist. Our journey crosses continents and cultures as we think out loud, challenge assumptions and uncover the small moves that create big momentum. Welcome to King Moves. Let's start the conversation. Ethan, you launched your new book last week. Rave reviews, some amazing results. You hit number one bestseller in what? Talk me through it. Talk me through it. Yeah, because I also want to understand the process of writing the book.

Ethan King: The book is done. Let AI do your work so you can live your life. That's the title of the book. And it launched on May 20, uh, which happened to be my birthday. And it hit bestseller level in 63 different categories. And then it hit number one bestseller in 28 different categories across three different countries, so US, Canada, and Australia. And so the way it works on Amazon, to hit the bestseller level, you have to be within the top 100 books of a category. And then, um, of course, the number one, if you get to number one, then it's number one bestseller. So it, uh, gets the classification number one international bestseller, which sounds very regal.

Justin King: It does indeed. Who have you got following you in Australia? Nate?

Ethan King: You know, we. I have a good network in Australia. I want to give a shout out to my Australian people. Um, Igor, who is, uh, one of my fellow speaker buddies, he's between the US and Australia, who I met through EO and, uh, and then Fran, she has this company called Basic Bananas. And it's crazy. I've never actually met Fran in person, but somebody connected us. She's based in Australia and she has a marketing, uh, education community. And she's invited me to be a guest speaker. And so I told her, and I was a guest speaker a couple of years ago. So when the new book came out, I was like, hey, just want to let you know we have new book dropping. She sent it out to her whole community and they all supported it. So, uh, yeah, I actually have a pretty big base of followers in Australia, which is really cool.

Justin King: Yeah, that's amazing. So talk me through the process of Writing the book. We were, we were chatting a little bit now and you said, you writing a book, there's a bit of a secret as to why you write your books and why you write them so far fast, uh, or so quickly. So tell us more about that.

Ethan King: Yeah, people ask me all the time, like why, how do you get these books out so fast? Uh, one of my friends said, I just get exhausted trying to keep up with you and doing what you're doing and thinking about it. But for me, the secret is it actually helps me organize my thoughts better and understand it better for myself. So the process of writing a book, especially with something like AI, I mean there are new features, new upgrades, new tools coming out, new every few hours. I used to say every few weeks, every few days, but now it's literally every few hours. There's been times when I've taught a workshop where at the beginning of the workshop, by the end of the workshop, a new feature or a new version has come out. That's how fast we're talking about. So to make sense of it all, uh, I'm like, okay, how can I distill this down in a way that I can easily understand it? Because remember, I don't come from a coding background, a, ah, computer science background. So I need to break it down in a way. I can understand it and apply it no matter what the tool is, but I have to understand the underlying frameworks and philosophy. And then that allows me to teach it in a way that people can digest it very easily. So in a way, I'm writing these books for myself first. And this book done, has been in the works for about two years now. It's taken a few different turns. Um, you know, at first it's had three different titles. Uh, it's had reworks, it was a workbook. And then now, and then I just decided to really take it and make it a full book. When I realized the, the this done moment, uh, it was, it was weird. It just kind of came to me because I before the version, before this was a workbook for my workshops where I teach agentic workflows, like how to build agents. It was very tactical and easy to understand. But then one day I was, I was talking to my agents and I just kept noticing this pattern like it would do things. Cause I like to push my agents to the, to the limit to see how much uh, what they can actually like because they always surprise me and they always reply with done. And then they say, here's what I did. What's Next. And I'm like, wow, that's a really cool. Like, there's this feeling I get when I see that done, that word done, period. Uh, and it's rewarding because I feel like, wow, I'm really accomplishing my goals. Things on my to do list that have been sitting there with me as the bottleneck for months, years, are just getting done because now I can just put an AI agent on it and they will knock through walls to get it done. And that, that, that capability of AI is relatively new. Like, just in the past few months. It's like early 2026, um, when AI got the capability of doing that. And I just want to give everybody that superpower. It feels like I have superpowers. And I want everybody to know, like, you can do this too. Like, there's nothing special about me. It doesn't cost that much. And whatever goals you have, whatever dreams you have, this can help you get there way faster, like collapse time and achieve those goals faster. So I was just like, I have to get this book out to the marketplace, and I'm excited that it's had the responses had so far. Um, and I hope more people get it and get that done feeling.

Justin King: I love it. I mean, I love the title. So who's the book for? Who did you write it for?

Ethan King: Well, originally, you know, my audience is mostly small business owners. Um, because we, we get it, we, we embrace it because we know how tough it is to build a team or build a reliable team. I've never met a small business owner whose desire, their core desire. If you, if you ask any small business owner, ask any of your coaching clients, if you could clone yourself, would you? Of course. Everybody, they want to clone themselves. Like heck, yeah. That's what we want to do. Because you hire people, you have to train people. And it's somewhere along the lines we talked about this before. A human will disappoint you. It's just, it's just how we're built. And I'm not perfect either. I'm going to disappoint people, too, because I have flaws. Like, things happen in my life. I have family members that things could throw me off. Humans, just by nature, by design, we just are not 100% reliable. And now, now AI is not 100% reliable either. But when something goes wrong with AI, I can quickly diagnose it and figure out how to fix it, because it is technology. And, uh, once you understand how it works, which the book breaks down, then you will know how to fix it too. It's all communication. So this book is for anyone who has ambition, first of all, who has goals in life. Uh, whether you're a business owner or an employee. You're a side hustler. You want to start a side hustle. This could be an another conversation for the future. But I do believe that in the next few years, everybody will just be a side hustler. Like, it's, uh, just going to be a bunch of hustles. And then people are going to hire you for these different skill sets that you have, and everyone's going to come with a hundred different agents. So it's not just employees working at a company for 30 years like it was before. It's like, oh, I need a person. I, uh, need a marketing department. I need a social media person. So I'm going to hire Ethan and his 100 AI agents to manage my social media. And Ethan and his 100 AI agents can be working for 100 different companies. It doesn't matter. Nobody will care anymore. And I think that's where our global economy is headed. Uh, pretty soon it's going to be a big shift. But that's who this book is for. People who are curious about AI, how to build agents, how to make AI actually do things for you, how to evolve from just chatting with AI to making it actually take action. And then where do you apply that? What are the real use cases in your life and people who want to get a head start. Because what I'm talking about in this book will be common. It'll. It'll be ubiquitous. In a few years, it'll be normal. Everybody will have AI agents. Just like we all have iPhones. The iPhone is not even 20 years old. It came out in, I think, what, 2007? Yeah. So it's not even my years there.

Justin King: Yeah, yeah.

Ethan King: And now everybody has one. When it first came out, it was, it was hot, it was brand new, it was all the rage, all the craze. And then, you know, of course now that that led to androids and all the other. When I say iPhone, I'm talking about any, like, glass smartphone that has the whole Internet on it, basically computers in our pocket. Now it's normal. It's. There's nothing novel about it. I can't write a book called, you know, iPhone. You know, nobody's gonna buy it unless it's like, I don't know, maybe. But, uh, it doesn't have the same sensation. Right. So this will be, at some point very commonplace. But right now you have a head start because Most people have no idea that they can do what this book teaches you how to do. And so I um, want to just open people's eyes to that.

Justin King: So what is the best way? So I've got the book lined up, it's waiting for me. What is the best way for a reader to use the book? And that sounds like a silly question, but we, I mean, to quote Richmond, yeah, we good at consuming knowledge calories. We aren't so good at burning knowledge calories. So what is the best way to use the books that it's. Yeah, you're building as, it's building as you go. What would you recommend?

Ethan King: Yeah, well, you've got to take action, you know, no matter what. With AI reading about it, it doesn't do you much good. You gotta just flip it open and just start talking to it, start playing with it to really understand what it's capable of and then it'll start to make more sense. How does this apply to mil life? So that's where. And it depends on where you are with AI. So this book in many ways is the sequel to my last book, uh, chat GPT to double your business in 90 days. So if you're, if you're brand new to AI, get that book first, go through that, do the 90 days and then pick up done and then read that one. Read them in order. Because there are six levels of AI autonomy. So and I break this down in the book. Level one, that's like just chatting with it. Wait, we're all, most of us are used to that. We've chatted with ChatGPT. You get an answer and then you, you have to, but you have to go do something with it. Like let's say you're writing an email and ChatGPT gives you a good response to someone. Well, you still have to copy and paste that email into your email application, read it, change words and then send it. So it still requires human intervention. Right. And then level two is where you can build like custom GPTs in gems in Gemini, uh, projects in Claude. So you have these tools that you can build inside of the different LLMs that kind of help you semi automate repetitive tasks. So now the amount of human effort is lower, the autonomy is higher. And then with level three, it goes up from there with your trigger based workflows. Level four is your AI agents. Then level five is like your, your teams of agents where you have AI agents whose job it is to manage other AI agents like an org chart. And then level six is proactive AI. So The. So the book really breaks it down. So to answer your question, where do you take action? It depends on where you are right now. In, in that, in that level. Like, how are you using AI currently? It is not to say that once you get to a certain level, you stop. You don't ever use other levels. I chat all the time with AI every day, but I also have agents that I talk to every day. So it's, it's like a toolkit. And depending on what you're doing, which tool do I grab? Is this a level one tool or task or is this a level four task? You know, it's level two task. And, uh, the book really breaks down and helps make sense of it. And then when it comes to agent building, like we go from prompting and chatting to agent building, which is really still just prompting, but, but there's a certain. You have to do it in a certain way because now you're, you're building. It's like you're building a person out of words. That's essentially how AI understands you. If you imagine a really super long word document that describes Justin King, where he was born, his family life, his, his religious views, his, his politics, his perspectives, how he sees the world, what he ate for lunch last Thursday, imagine like one long document that described all of that in, In Viv. Using just words. If you could give that to AI, that's how it would know who you are. That's really the only way it would know who you are. Right now it's just word. AI is just word math. That's how these LLMs work. So being that AI understands people through words, that means we can create people through words that do things. That's really all an agent is. And this is plain English that you just type. It doesn't require coding. You can say, here's what I want. And you, you build the. Their skill files. You, you build these with. You have AI help you build AI, so you, you talk to it, and it helps you build these digital people, if you will.

Justin King: So to, to kind of pose this conversational thing. I'm really curious. First of all, again, well done on the book. Uh, like, thank you. You, you do. You amaze me as well, the way that you, you smash these things off and, and I mean your hunger to better understand and make it easy for everybody else to understand what's going on in the world of AI is amazing, and I appreciate you for that. What is one thing that AI has AI blown your mind in the recent past? I mean, you actively using It. You actively test it. You push it to its limits. What has it done for you? Something that you've built recently that, I mean, you possibly wouldn't have thought was possible not so long ago. And suddenly this is now happening, or it's happening seamlessly where it was a bit clunky previously.

Ethan King: That is so tough, because there's something like, every day or every other day that blows my mind that I'm m. Like, oh, I didn't think this was possible. So it's hard for me to pick one thing. Um, so I'll think, uh, okay. Most recently, this literally just happened when I was on my car. In my car on the way home from the gym. I was watching this Alex hormozi video on YouTube. And, you know, I love Alex, you know, follow. Been following his stuff for a while. This particular video really, uh, resonated with. It really spoke to something I'm going through with in one of my businesses right now, where we feel, like we said this before, like, oh, well, we've kind of tapped out the marketplace that we're in, which basically Hormozi was saying, no, that's a myth. You have not tapped your market. There's always room to grow. You're just not doing enough of these things. And he kind of broke it down the way that he does. And so as I'm riding in the car listening to this, I'm like, oh, man, this is really good. I need to look at our business through the lens of all of these different things that he's talking about. Are we really maximizing our paid, uh, media strategy on social media, on. On. On ppc? Are we maximizing our outreach? What's already working and how. How can we improve that? And so I. You have this checklist, like, just running in your head. You've probably experienced this before. Like, and you're in the car or you're in the shower, and you're like, oh, my God, I need to do all this stuff. I can't keep it all in my brain. Well, instead, what I did was I. I took the link to her Moses video. I gave it to my AI agent, my specific AI agent that manages that company. And I said, watch this video and think about it in the context of my business goals, because it already knows my business goals. And it did. It. It watched the video in, like, a minute. It said, oh, okay, this is a Hormozy video. He talks about this. This. This. This is how it relates to your company. And these are the areas where we can improve and then, and then what I did is I, then I say okay, Every day at 9am I want you to pull something like give me one thing that we could do that I can do right now that only takes 15 minutes. That's gonna move us towards this goal. Uh, and like that just blows my m. It's like literally talking to another person that, that blows my mind that it's possible for a couple of years ago AI couldn't watch videos. Now it does it super easily and it's able, it's pattern recognition. So it's able to take that uh, and pair it up with information in context that it already has and then it has expertise in all of these different areas so it can help you, you give it where you currently are, where you want to go. So you need to give A.I. uh, like your macro goals. Then every task that you give it in between it's going to have that lens of okay, how can I get him there with this task. So that blows me away. Just the fact that it's able to do that.

Justin King: Uh, the interesting thing is. Well maybe it's not so interesting but the only reason it can do that is because of the foundation that you built over quite a long period of time now. And that was to your point exactly. Your context and how you built your agents and then the skill sets that they've got. It's, it's to your point of why the book is really dependent on where you're at with as far as where you're going to start or if you're jumping into done. Let's first read your, your first book ChatGPT to, to double your business in 90 days. That's, that's important because I think you only get that mind blowing moment if you've got all that context in place. If we just go straight to try. Well I'm going to do exactly what Ethan just described and I go try to do that tomorrow. You're probably going to be bitterly disappointed and be like Ethan is talking a little bit of bullshit. It's not that good. Yeah. Have you put in the work the rest?

Ethan King: Exactly. You're exactly right. Context. In fact both of the books start out with that. That's the first thing you have to do. That's the foundational layer is it has to know about you. You have to give it as much context as possible and you continue to build up on that over time. So just like I said, I uh, just told you a minute ago, like you build people using words AI knows about me because I'VE built up so many words over time. Like I'm using it to plan a family vacation. Well it's, that doesn't seem far fetched. People have been planning family vacations using AI since ChatGPT came out. But this is so personalized because my AI literally knows my family by name, by age, what people are interested in. So when I say oh we're gonna go to whatever, Toronto, Niagara Falls, it gives me things to do that are specific to what we are into. You know, some people like relaxing, some people like adventure. It knows the mix. So it'll say oh well you should do this because your daughter's into this and your son's into this and you're into so like things like that. But again, you can't do that without the context layer. If you do that without context, then you're basically just googling.

Justin King: There we go. And that's maybe the mic chop moment and a good place to start pulling this one together. But yeah, that's been a great conversation and as I said, I can't wait to read the book and I need to find that, that really mind blowing moment. I still haven't tapped into the, the full power of AI and what it can do for me. And as something that you said, Ethan, that really resonated with me is, is to really only to understand what it can do for you. And whether that's in your personal life or your business, you've got to be spending time with it. And I think that's, that's the area that a lot of people made is we, we wait until we come up with the idea of what depends on perfect thing is that it's going to do for our business before we start building it rather than understanding it, spending time with it, playing with it and then in that moment of, of clarity around wow, this is, this is what is going to be the game changer. That's when it will come rather than the other way around.

Ethan King: Exactly. Yeah. When you, when you have that moment, please call me. Let it or let us know on here on the podcast. Because yeah, uh, when I talk to when they have that done moment when they finally get, get it, it's more of a feeling. It's like holy shit. Like I remember when my wife first got. I had been telling her about agents for months and then I built her an agent or I had my agent build her her a personal assistant agent and she gave it something to do and she was just in the kitchen like oh my God, this is amazing. I can't Believe it. It was just like this light bulb went off and I'm like, that's what I've been trying to tell you. So for you, you know, I can't wait till you. You experience that, if you haven't already. And it could be something like, so, like, Justin has an amazing newsletter. If you're not following it, go check it out. Justinking Co Za Great newsletter. It's a quick read, insightful thoughts. I could tell Justin actually writes it, but let's say. Let's say you have an agent who literally, you have cloned yourself in an AI agent. It knows everything about you. It has a bank of stories and experiences that I literally do that with my agents. It has a bank of stories that I've lived that it knows about. Uh, it knows the full context. Well, let's say once you have that, instead of you sitting down to type out this newsletter, you're on a hike or something, and you say, oh, you have a newsletter idea. And you just pull out your phone, you tell your agent, oh, I want the next newsletter to be about this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Send. And then the agent comes back and says, done. The newsletter's posted. Here it is. And you go and read it, and it sounds exactly like what you would have written if you took the time to sit down and actually think about it and type it out and spend. I don't know how long it takes you, but let's say it takes you an hour, two hours, whatever, to really think through the words. Now, you were just on a hike and your agent did it for you. And you get that message back, done. And you check it and it's authentic, Justin, because it is your life. It's just, uh, that you had your clone do it for you. That's the type of feeling. And that might be a easy starting point.

Justin King: Yeah, I love that.

Ethan King: That's a wrap for today's episode of King Moves. Quick favor before we go. If this episode made you think differently or helped you see your next move More clearly, take 30 seconds and leave us a review. It helps the show reach leaders who need these conversations. Remember, in chess, like in business, one right move can change everything.

Justin King: Take today's action step. Make your move and build momentum. And if you found value in today's episode, share it with someone who's ready for the next breakthrough. Don't forget to subscribe. So you never miss our weekly conversations.

Ethan King: Until next time.