Max Bernstein

Was watching the Rams / Panthers playoff game and the commentators were talking about Ram's head coach Sean McVay. "When he came in he took the league by storm and was giving defenses fits. Now you look around and you see it everywhere." The specific innovation they mentioned is using 3-4 tight ends who can all catch AND block. McVay didn't invent the tight end. He just saw something others didn't and built a system around it. Now every offensive coordinator in the league runs some version of...

My buddy Zain and I are starting something new. Every week, we work with AI to solve weird, specific problems. Ours. Clients'. Random things that actually probably don't solve anything outside of our weird curiosity. But we got good at it. Fast. So we thought… What if we did this live? And what if we had no idea what problem we'd be solving until the moment we hit record Here's the format: The cryptic vault Working with clients recently, I've discovered I have the most fun and do my best work...

First Saturday of the new year. I should be recovering from cake and cinnamon rolls. Instead I'm on a livestream in my boxers demoing a personal dashboard I built. Halfway through, my friend Zain says something I had to write down: "I just feel like a kid again." His wife doesn't code. She had an idea at dinner for something that would help her friends. They sketched it on the counter and just... built it. The two of them had a working prototype in about an hour. Same thing happened to me....

For the past few months, I've been co-writing Jay Abraham's newsletter alongside Michael Simmons. Jay's one of the most influential business strategists alive. Almost everyday, I've been reading his transcripts, studying his case studies, building systems around his thinking. Somewhere in there, something shifted. The frameworks stopped being content I was editing... They became how I see things. I stopped asking "how do I find more clients?" and started asking "who already has my ideal...

This week over Christmas (still apologizing to my girlfriend) I worked with a business development lead at a VC fund. Smart guy. Hustling hard. Doing "all the right things." More demo days. More cold emails to founders. More LinkedIn conversations that go nowhere. His boss saw the effort but nothing was closing. He came to me thinking he needed better outreach templates. A sharper LinkedIn strategy. More volume. Instead, we pulled the data on what was actually working. The deals that closed....

I've been a maniac for the past few months. In the lab. Experimenting. Teaching. Building things I'm soooo excited about. But this email list sat in the corner of my dashboard, unopened, starting to wonder if I was ever coming back. I'll tell you what I've been doing in a second, but first, something that might sting... You probably have a folder somewhere. Maybe in Notion. Maybe buried in your X bookmarks. Maybe it's a $99 "prompt library" sitting in your Downloads folder next to a headshot...

I disappeared for a bit. Not intentionally. But enough that I owe you a real update. Because a lot has changed... And at the same time, nothing has changed at all. Let me explain. Earlier this year, I accidentally found my niche. I'd been obsessed with AI for about a year at that point. Playing with every tool Testing every workflow Going deep on patterns Then I started analyzing transcripts from my own consulting sessions. And I saw something I couldn't unsee... Hidden in those conversations...