Renegade Breakthroughs Audio

Robert Imbriale
  • 3.0 (2)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

Renegade Breakthroughs is the weekly wake-up call for entrepreneurs who refuse to wait for permission. Host Robert Imbriale — coach, founder, straight-shooter — turns hard-won lessons on mindset, trust, and decision-making into moves you can use in the next 24 hours. No fluff, no ‘someday,’ just breakthroughs.

  1. 6d ago

    AI Took 100K Jobs. Here’s How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off.

    AI Took 100K Jobs. Here’s How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off. Two numbers came across my desk this week, and I can’t stop thinking about them together. Through June of this year, 101,743 American job cuts named AI as the reason. That’s the first half of the year alone, so figure it’s over 200,000 by the time the ball drops. Depressing, right? Now the second number: 531,423 new business applications were filed in June. In one month. That’s a record. So while the headlines are all about who’s getting cut, something much bigger is happening quietly underneath. People are deciding to start a business after being laid off instead of waiting for the next pink slip. And I think they’re right. Two Record Numbers in the Same Month Think about what those two figures are telling you when you put them side by side. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs in January. Oracle cut 21,000. Meta let 8,000 people go, Dell 11,000. Intuit cut 17% of its workforce. Block laid off nearly half the company. These aren’t struggling businesses. They’re some of the most profitable companies on earth, and they’ve figured out that AI does a lot of the work faster and cheaper. But the people walking out of those buildings aren’t stupid. A programmer who just got replaced by software knows that if he takes another programming job, it’s only a matter of time before that company catches on too. So a lot of them are skipping the job hunt entirely. They still have the skills. They still have the experience. They’re taking both and building something of their own. Half a million of them in a single month. Back in the 90s, when I was doing a lot of marketing work, there were only about 11 million businesses in the entire country. Add 500,000 a month to that base and you can see where this is heading. History is bending back on itself. We Were All Entrepreneurs Once Before the Industrial Revolution, every one of us was self-employed. You were the baker, the shoemaker, the blacksmith. That’s how people survived. Then the factories came along, and they needed employees, so they built a school system that taught people how to become employees. It never taught you how to work for yourself. It still doesn’t. Now AI is taking over the mundane, systematic work, and that is pushing people back toward running their own show. I left the corporate world in 1995 and never went back. I’m watching a whole generation arrive at the same decision, only they’re being shoved through the door instead of walking through it. Either way, they’re through. Which Jobs Are Going Away (and Why) Here’s the pattern I’d ask you to look for: anything that runs on a system is going to be replaced. Take what I call the systems coach. You bought a coaching program, opened the binder, and it told you the five questions to ask on every first call. Same five questions, every client. We don’t need you anymore. AI does that better. The coach we still need is the intuitive coach, the one who can tap in and feel what’s actually going on with the person across the table. Bookkeeping is a system. It won’t be long before your accounting software produces the monthly reports, the tax return, and a note telling you where you’re overspending. A lot of legal work is a system. Book editing is a system. I’ve been using Photoshop since it came out in the 80s, and I hardly open it anymore. I describe the graphic I want and get something better than I could have made myself. Remember “just learn to code”? Ten years ago that was the guaranteed path, with kids starting at $100,000 out of school. Now AI writes code better than most humans. I’ve done it myself: I needed a script for a website, asked for it, pasted it in, and it worked. What AI Can’t Replace So what’s left? Experience. Intuition. Judgment. AI has more information than you. You have more experience than AI. Those are not the same thing. When AI hands me a graphic, I can say the color is wrong, the balance is off, try again. Someone with no design background will call whatever comes out good enough. When AI writes a sales letter, I can tell whether it will sell, because I’ve written hundreds and watched what happened. Someone who has never written one will think it sounds fine, spend money on it, and find out the hard way. The tool is only as good as the person holding it. Your experience is the part nobody can download. The Mini Business: How to Start a Business After Being Laid Off The CEO of Perplexity used a phrase I liked: the mini business. Not a startup with a pitch deck and investors. A business that supports you and your family, built with tools that used to require a staff. You could be a researcher. Businesses pay for market research, and they don’t care how you gathered it as long as it’s accurate and packaged well. You could set up AI receptionists for local companies. I’m building one right now for a client: a knowledge base, a voice, and suddenly the phone gets answered 24 hours a day with no salary and no workers’ comp. You could write and publish ebooks. You could teach AI to the people who are still afraid of it, and that market is going to exist for a decade, because there are a lot of them. If you don’t know where to begin, here’s your first assignment. Open any AI model and type this: “I’m thinking about creating a mini business. I have no idea where to begin. I have skills and experience in these areas: [list them]. Can you make some suggestions about what I could do?” I guarantee it comes back with things you haven’t considered. My knowledge base is big, but it isn’t vast. AI is vast. Let it widen your field of view, then use your experience to pick. The Mistake I Made in 2008 I need to tell you about the years I lost, because I don’t want you to lose yours. When the economy turned in 2008, I watched my clients fall apart. More than half of my coaching clients walked away that year. Friends in the seminar business closed their doors. And I looked around and decided the smart move was to stop. Stop promoting, stop building, sit on the sidelines, and wait for things to improve. Things did not improve in 2009. Or 2010. Or 2011. It was 2012, maybe 2013, before the market really caught again. I lost four or five years I could have spent building, and when spring finally came, the people who had kept working were miles ahead of me. I grew up in Canada. I know what fourteen feet of snow looks like, and I know that when a storm dumps three feet on you overnight, it feels like the end of the world. It isn’t. Winter always ends. The question is whether you’re ready when it does. Some of the most successful businesses in history were started during the worst economic times, precisely because everyone else was waiting. Fear, Loneliness, and the Human Element Fear is going to be there. I’m not immune to it. What fear does to most people is shut them down. They pull back, stop spending, stop moving. You don’t have to be fearless to make progress. Some days the only thing you can manage is one email or a few notes. Fine. Some forward movement always beats none. The other trap is quieter. George Pu, who runs a company called Founder Reality, cut his team from 14 people to 5 using AI and hasn’t hired in two years. He called it the best financial decision he ever made and the worst emotional experience. We are not built to work alone. Loneliness kills productivity. That’s why coworking spaces are booming and why masterminds keep getting more popular. So build the human part on purpose: a weekly Zoom with a few people swapping what they learned in AI this week, or a monthly lunch at somebody’s house. It’s cheap, and it’s the difference between a business that lasts and one that quietly fades. Don’t Get Left Behind I open my AI apps in the morning and there’s an update. By four in the afternoon there’s another one. We’re still on the ground floor, and the worst possible move is to decide you don’t want to know about it. People said that about computers in the 90s, right up until they were standing at a gas pump that wanted a card and had no idea what to do. AI took work away from a lot of people. It took some of mine. But a record half million people just decided it also handed them the tools to build something new, and I’m betting on them. Stay strong, stay flexible, keep moving, and go build your future. Want a head start? Grab my free download of 100+ ready-to-use AI prompts at renegade.club/110 – they work in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok. And listen to the full episode, “AI Took 100K Jobs, Now It’s Time to Build YOUR Future,” at RobertImbriale.com/listen. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  2. Aug 28

    What to Do When Your Business Idea Fails: 3 Smart Moves

    Watch or Listen to this episode now: What to Do When Your Business Idea Fails: 3 Smart Moves This week Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face – the platform people call “the GitHub of AI” – for a reported $12.9 billion. It is the kind of number that makes an entire company look like it was destined for greatness from day one. It wasn’t. Hugging Face started life as a chatbot app for teenagers. It stalled out around 100,000 users and stopped growing. By most measures, that was a flop. The founders had built the thing they cared about, and the thing they cared about had quietly run out of road. So they did the one thing almost nobody does. They looked sideways. One of the co-founders had put an open-source machine learning tool up on GitHub — an afterthought, a side project, not the business. It started getting attention. They noticed, and they rebuilt the entire company around the thing that was working instead of the thing they had planned. That is the real story behind almost every overnight success, and it is exactly **what to do when your business idea fails**. On Episode 10 of Renegade Breakthroughs, I sat down with Bruce “Poppy” Feldman Jr. — creator of the Unleashing Excellence System — to break down the gap between a flop and a win, and why most people never make it across. The Three Things People Actually Do When an Idea Flops Watch enough entrepreneurs long enough and you see the same three responses every time. **They quit.** The idea hits its first real obstacle and that’s the end of it. Not the second obstacle, not the tenth — the first. This is where the overwhelming majority land. **They hide.** They’ll try again, but quietly, privately, telling nobody. They’re not done with the idea. They’re done being seen failing at it. The humiliation is the thing they’re actually avoiding. **They keep going.** A small group refines, retools, tweaks, and keeps moving until something works. Not because they’re smarter or braver, but because they’ve built a different relationship with the word “failure.” Most people reading this already know which one they are. The useful question isn’t which category you fall into — it’s how to become the third one on purpose. Stop Making the Flop About You Here’s the single biggest shift, and it’s the one Bruce hammered hardest. A flopped idea is *information about the idea*. It is not a ruling on your worth. We collapse those two things constantly. The launch didn’t sell, so I’m not smart enough. The offer didn’t land, so I’m a fraud. Once failure becomes part of your identity, you shrink back, you avoid, you procrastinate, and eventually you quit — not because the idea was bad, but because trying again now costs you something psychologically that you can’t afford. Bruce puts it plainly: he doesn’t use the word failure at all. There’s a finality baked into it. His framing is that he either wins, or he figures out how something isn’t supposed to work. Same event, completely different consequence for the person it happened to. The same trap shows up in how people value themselves financially. If your identity is welded to your bank balance, then a low balance means *you* are low. Break that connection and you’ll actually perform better, because you’re no longer defending your self-worth every time you take a risk. If I tell you your idea is terrible, that doesn’t mean I don’t like you. But if you hear it as a verdict on you, you’ll never move again. Define What Winning Actually Means First A huge share of what people call failure is really a badly set expectation. Every January, someone decides they’re going to get healthy. That’s it — that’s the goal. “Get healthy.” At the end of the month, they’ve lost seven pounds instead of the ten they vaguely had in mind, and they log it as a failure and stop. Seven pounds is not a failure. Seven pounds is better than zero and dramatically better than gaining ten. But without a granular definition of winning, there’s no way to tell progress from defeat — so everything short of the fantasy gets filed as a loss. Get specific about what winning looks like before you start. Then get specific about the smallest unit of progress that still counts. Build Reps, Not Breakthroughs Bruce’s answer to the paralysis is reps — the smallest possible action that moves you toward the thing you want. You don’t join a gym on January 2nd and bench 300 pounds. You move a small weight, then a slightly bigger one. The reps build confidence, and the confidence funds the next rep. That compounding is the whole mechanism. His practical framework is the **3×3**: three tiny reps in three areas of your life — health, business, relationships, whatever yours are — every single day. Non-negotiables. Write them out in advance. Do them. Repeat tomorrow. That’s the consistency chain. What counts as a rep? A two-minute walk. One paragraph. Ten minutes with your phone face-down and your full attention on your spouse. That’s it. That’s the whole rep. And there’s a hidden benefit to setting the bar that low. If you commit to writing one paragraph, you’ll often write ten pages — because the resistance was never about the work, it was about the size of the thing you were staring at. Lower the entry cost and you’ll routinely blow past it. I run a version of this myself. Every day my task list has things on it I know I can finish, alongside the bigger items I’m chipping at. Finishing the day having accomplished something visible is not a vanity exercise. It’s momentum, and momentum is the fuel you’ll need on the days that go badly. The Reset Day Rule You are going to miss. Life happens, you’ll skip a rep, you’ll take a day off you didn’t plan. Bruce’s rule handles it: **it’s okay to miss once. Never miss twice.** Missing once is an event. Missing twice starts a story — *I always do this, I could never keep this up, I’m the kind of person who quits* — and that story is far more expensive than the missed rep. So you reset. You already know what the rep is. Go do it at the next opportunity and skip the self-flagellation entirely. How to Tell “Keep Pushing” from “Beating a Dead Horse” This is the hardest question in the whole conversation, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a motivational one. The signal I trust most is force versus flow. When you’re forcing it — white-knuckling, stressed, reaching for a bigger hammer to drive a square peg into a round hole — that’s usually information. When things start moving easily and doors open without you kicking them, you’re pointed the right way. But notice the third option, the one Hugging Face took: it’s often not that the idea was flawed. Sometimes the square hole is half an inch to the left. The pivot isn’t abandonment, it’s aim. What makes this possible is shortening the distance between doing and reflecting. A ship a fraction of a degree off course is fine at first and catastrophically wrong a thousand miles later. Review daily on the small things, weekly on the big ones, and correct early while the corrections are still cheap. You Cannot Do This Alone The biggest lesson of my last thirty years is that nobody gets there by themselves. When you’re inside your own idea, you can’t see it. You need people who will look at the failed launch and ask what happened, break down the numbers, find the actual broken step — instead of confirming that you’re a failure. That’s what a good mastermind does, and it’s why people who have one move faster. Choose those people carefully. Friends and family are often the worst possible sounding board, and usually out of love — they don’t want to see you hurt, so they’ll talk you out of the risk. Others will discourage you because your success would hold up a mirror to their own inaction. Be deliberate about who gets to weigh in. One modern addition: AI makes a surprisingly good brainstorming partner. When I’ve built a page I think is finished, I’ll hand it to an AI and ask how to make it better. It doesn’t tell me I’m a failure. It gives me options. That’s the exact function a mastermind serves, available at 2am. The Takeaway Failure is only final if you quit. Everything else is data. Separate the result from your identity. Define what winning means before you start. Shrink the work down to reps small enough that you’ll actually do them. Never miss twice. Review often enough to correct early. And put people around you who will help you look sideways at the thing that’s quietly working. As Bruce says: no matter how you feel today, get up, get dressed, show up, be strong, and keep going. Nvidia just paid $12.9 billion for a company that started as a failed teenage chatbot app. Your flop might be information, not a verdict. **Get Bruce’s free framework:** Bruce has released *The Forge* — the third pillar of his Unleashing Excellence System, where identity and beliefs get tested — as a free ebook, including the full 3×3 framework and the reset day rule. No upsell, no strings. Grab it at https://forge.brucepoppy.com Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  3. Aug 21

    Rejection-Proof Networking: The Life Hack Mitch Axelrod Used to Turn $16K Into $100K

    Watch or Listen to this episode here: Rejection-Proof Networking: The Life Hack Mitch Axelrod Used to Turn $16K Into $100K Every entrepreneur hits the wall Mitch Axelrod hit in 1983: he’d burned through every local audience willing to have him speak, income had stalled at $16,000 a year, and the next move meant asking strangers for something — the exact moment most of us freeze. On the latest episode of Renegade Breakthroughs, host Robert Imbriale sat down with longtime friend and returning guest Mitch Axelrod — creator of The NEW Game™ and author of the #1 bestseller The NEW Game of Selling — to unpack the system Axelrod built to eliminate that freeze entirely. He calls it rejection-proof networking, and it’s the centerpiece of an episode built for anyone ready to hack their own life. Who Is Mitch Axelrod? Since 1978, Mitch Axelrod has delivered more than 3,500 talks, workshops, and keynotes, and trained roughly a million people on the skills packed into The NEW Game of Selling. Imbriale introduced him on the show as “the small hinge that moves big doors” — a nod to Axelrod’s decades spent teaching insurance companies, speakers, authors, and coaches how to license their intellectual property instead of trading hours for dollars. The two go back to a December 2019 event called, fittingly, Hack Your Life — the same title this episode borrows, and the same night everyone in the room was busy predicting a great 2020. Three months later, everything changed. From Brain Surgery to Acceptance: A Masterclass in Resilience In March 2020, days after that optimistic event, Axelrod suffered a stroke brought on by a brain tumor. Two brain surgeries and nine weeks of rehab followed — learning to walk and talk again, isolated in a locked-down nursing home where no visitors were allowed. It’s the kind of story that could derail an episode about “life hacks.” Instead, Axelrod turned it into the clearest lesson of the conversation. He described the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and how most people get stuck somewhere in the middle. Axelrod skipped straight to the last one. “It’s not how far you fall that counts,” he told Imbriale. “It’s how far, or how high, you bounce that counts.” Once you’re in acceptance without guilt or shame, he explained, you can finally ask the only useful question: what can I do about it, and who can help me? That question is where rejection-proof networking comes in. What Is Rejection-Proof Networking? Rejection-proof networking is the model Axelrod built after hitting that 1983 income wall. Rather than pitching prospects, he decided to invite people who had “more money than me” to lunch — 15 of them, cold — and test a new way of asking for help that didn’t put anyone in a yes-or-no corner. The structure is four simple lines: Here’s what I do. Here’s why I do it. Here’s who I’m looking for. Who do you know? Where should I go? Notice what’s missing: no ask to buy, hire, or sign anything. “None of that even comes up in the conversation,” Axelrod said. “It’s just casual conversation. And you’re kind of asking for support without actually asking for it.” Because there’s nothing to say yes or no to, there’s nothing to be rejected from — which is the entire point. The Track Record Axelrod didn’t just theorize the model; he ran it twice, with numbers to show for it: 1983–1985: Starting from $16,000 in annual income, he used the four-line script over lunches with strangers. Within a year he doubled his income to $33,000. The year after, it tripled to $100,000. Eight years later, entering consulting and speaking, he took five more people to lunch. One was an insurance VP who put him on a $2,500-a-month retainer on the spot — later expanded to $8,500 a month after a single introduction opened the door to a network of growing companies. Why It Works Most networking fails, Axelrod argued, because it’s personal — you’re selling yourself, not a product, so a “no” feels like rejection instead of a business outcome. Rejection-proof networking sidesteps that entirely by removing the ask. You’re not requesting a transaction; you’re requesting information — “who do you know, where should I go” — a question almost no one refuses to at least consider, because helping feels good and costs the other person nothing. The Decision Gap: Controlling How You React The conversation’s second major hack ties directly into why rejection-proof networking works on the listener’s side, too. Axelrod described what he calls the decision gap — the space between a stimulus (something someone says or does) and your response to it. His point: if you keep giving people a stimulus that reminds them of a bad past experience, they won’t respond to you in the present — they’ll react from the past. He illustrated it with a story about a financial-planning client who zoned out mid-conversation, replaying a story about a bad investment from years earlier. “You’re in the past,” Axelrod told him. “I’m in the present. We’re in two different time zones.” His fix: name it. Ask directly whether the person can be present, or whether they need to get the past experience out first before a real conversation can happen. “That changed the context of every conversation I’ve ever had since then,” he said. The same logic applies in reverse — if your own communication style keeps drawing resistance, the fix isn’t repeating yourself louder. It’s changing your stimulus, because the definition of insanity is expecting a different outcome from the same input. Imperfect Action Beats Perfect Inaction The episode’s other recurring theme showed up on Axelrod’s coffee mug: imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time. Both he and Imbriale returned to the idea that most decisions are made without enough information, not with an abundance of it — and that waiting for certainty just means staying stuck in fight-flight-freeze. You rarely know you made the right call until after you’ve made it and adjusted. It’s the same instinct that shaped the rejection-proof networking model in the first place: Axelrod didn’t wait until the approach was perfect. He took 15 strangers to lunch and iterated from there. More From Mitch Axelrod Beyond rejection-proof networking, Axelrod pointed listeners toward three resources he’s built over the years: The NEW Game of Selling — his #1 bestselling book on selling yourself authentically, with bonus links inside for networking, referrals, and trust-building. Soul Role Goal — a free framework for aligning your goals with what you’re actually good at and enjoy, so ambition stops fighting itself. The IP Money Club — a weekly meeting for speakers, authors, coaches, consultants, and healers who want to get paid to create their books, courses, and content instead of creating it first and then trying to sell it. Watch or Listen to the Full Episode Robert Imbriale and Mitch Axelrod cover a lot more ground than fits in one post — including a candid look at decision-making, why we’re never taught it in school, and how to tell the difference between living in the past, the present, and the future. Watch on YouTube: Hack Your Life with Mitch Axelrod and Robert Imbriale Watch on Rumble: Hacking Your Life with Special Guest Mitch Axelrod Apple Podcasts: Renegade Breakthroughs with Robert Imbriale Spotify: Renegade Breakthroughs iHeartRadio: Renegade Breakthroughs Amazon Music: Renegade Breakthroughs Pandora: Renegade Breakthroughs TuneIn: Renegade Breakthroughs Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet RobertResourcesMedia

  4. Aug 14

    How to Handle Economic Uncertainty as a Business Owner (Without Losing Your Mind)

    How to Handle Economic Uncertainty as a Business Owner (Without Losing Your Mind) Watch or Listen to this Episode Now! If you’ve felt like the ground keeps shifting under your business this year, you’re not imagining it. In the latest episode of Renegade Breakthroughs, “The Next 90 Days: Bend, Don’t Break,” host Robert Imbriale tackles the question every entrepreneur is quietly asking: how do you keep moving forward when the economic signals refuse to make sense? If you’re wrestling with economic uncertainty as a business owner right now, this episode is 25 minutes you’ll want to carve out time for. The Jobs Report That Started It All Imbriale opens with a number that stopped him mid-scroll on Friday: the Fed reported a loss of 23,000 jobs, right when the narrative was supposedly “the economy is getting better.” He doesn’t panic over it — instead he offers a theory worth hearing in full (it involves the shift away from off-the-books labor) and makes a point that lands harder than the statistic itself: mixed news is more stressful than bad news, because your nervous system doesn’t know which signal to trust. Add gas prices bouncing back over $6 a gallon, new tariffs hitting small overseas purchases, and a war whose outcome nobody can predict, and you get exactly the kind of background stress Imbriale says has been quietly reshaping all of us since 2020 — whether we’ve noticed it or not. Why “Bend, Don’t Break” Isn’t Just a Catchy Title This is where the episode earns its name. Imbriale shares a personal, slightly uncomfortable story from 2008: when the recession hit and Obamacare landed a tax blow on small businesses, his instinct was to sit on the sidelines and wait it out. He lost years waiting for a recovery that didn’t meaningfully arrive until 2012–2013. His warning for anyone facing economic uncertainty as a business owner today is blunt — don’t repeat that mistake. Stay in the game, but stay flexible, because “we’re walking on quicksand in some respects.” He walks through concrete, usable tactics for staying grounded instead of frozen: Label the ambiguity. Vague dread is worse than a named problem — call it “a rough economy” and it becomes something you can actually respond to. Ration your news intake. Ten to fifteen minutes, ask “will this affect me today?”, and if not, walk away. Doom-scrolling, he argues, is “very soap opera” and almost engineered to keep you confused. Actively calm your nervous system. A walk, music, or — his personal go-to for years — calling a friend and talking about anything except the stressor. Rebuild face-to-face connection. He’s blunt about how isolated we’ve become post-pandemic (his Costco cart-collision story alone is worth the watch), and makes the case that reconnecting with strangers — the cashier, the neighbor, the mechanic — is quietly one of the most powerful tools against uncertainty. The AI Curveball: Watermarked Text and Weekly Whiplash Midway through, Imbriale pivots to something most listeners won’t have heard yet: Anthropic (the company behind Claude) is reportedly embedding invisible characters into AI-generated text so platforms can detect AI authorship — a response to mounting EU-style regulatory pressure. He’s candid that he doesn’t think it’ll hold up long-term (workaround tools are inevitable), but the bigger point is the pace: apps updating twice in a single day, AI now used to improve AI itself. For any business owner trying to plan the next quarter, this is one more variable moving faster than the news cycle can process. The Discernment Shift: Homeschooling, Farmers Markets, and Home Healthcare Perhaps the most thought-provoking stretch of the episode is Imbriale’s read on where all this uncertainty is quietly pushing people: toward self-reliance. He connects the dots between the explosion in homeschooling, the crowded Saturday farmers markets replacing processed grocery staples, and what he predicts is the next frontier — home healthcare replacing the hospital system entirely for non-emergency issues. He even shares a striking anecdote from Dr. John Gray (Men Are From Mars) about stage-four cancer patients reaching remission through trauma-release work rather than chemotherapy — tying back to his core argument that economic uncertainty as a business owner is just one layer of a much bigger societal reset happening right now. Why You Should Watch the Full Episode This summary barely scratches the surface — the full episode includes his AI-prompting framework (with a free 100+ prompt download), his hypothesis on the September–December “busy season” for entrepreneurs, and a preview of next week’s guest, Mitch Axelrod. If you’re navigating economic uncertainty as a business owner and need both a strategic reset and a reason to feel optimistic about the next 90 days, watch “The Next 90 Days: Bend, Don’t Break” on Rumble — it’s also available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Pandora under Renegade Breakthroughs. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Learn more about Robert here. Check out out Resources Page

  5. Aug 7

    The Courage to Think for Yourself

    Watch or Listen to this powerful episode now! The Courage to Think for Yourself: What the Fauci Contempt Vote Really Teaches Us Today, a Senate committee voted 8-7, along party lines, to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. Last week, he sat in front of that same committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times rather than answer questions about the pandemic response. Whatever side of that vote you land on, I’m not here to litigate guilt or innocence — that’s for the Senate, and if it gets there, a jury. I’m here to talk about something bigger: why so many of us stopped being surprised when “the science” turns out to have a footnote nobody told us about. Held in Contempt Fauci’s team says the whole hearing was a setup, designed to trap him into a perjury charge. Committee chair Rand Paul argues that Fauci’s 2025 pardon from President Biden means he can’t legitimately plead the Fifth in the first place, and he’s pushing for a referral to the Justice Department. The matter now heads to the full Senate floor, where it has to clear a filibuster before the DOJ ever decides whether to prosecute. Nothing here is settled. But the moment is still worth sitting with, because it’s not the first time. And if we don’t learn the actual lesson underneath it, it won’t be the last. The Pattern Here’s the thing that gets lost in the noise of any single hearing: this isn’t one bad moment. It’s a pattern, and the honest version of it — the version that survives fact-checking — includes the other side’s explanation every time. Take the six-foot rule. For two years, “stand six feet apart” was treated as settled science, enforced with tape marks on gym floors and closed playgrounds. In June 2024 testimony, Fauci told Congress it “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on data. He later clarified he meant there was no randomized trial comparing six feet to three or ten — the CDC says it leaned on 1955 droplet research instead. Even taking the more generous read, a rule the public was told was precise science turned out to be an educated guess. Or masks. In March 2020, Fauci and the Surgeon General told Americans there was no reason to walk around in one. Weeks later, the guidance flipped to universal masking, and for a lot of people, staying masked became close to a moral test. Fauci later said the early guidance was shaped partly by a real shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers, not purely by the science changing. That’s a legitimate defense. It also means the public wasn’t told the real reason for the guidance at the time it mattered most. Or the vaccines. In 2021, the CDC director said vaccinated people “do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Fauci called them “dead ends” for transmission. President Biden said vaccinated people “do not spread the disease to anyone else.” Within months, breakthrough transmission during the Delta wave showed that wasn’t true. Or gain-of-function funding. In May 2021, Fauci told the Senate flatly that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH’s own former acting director later told Congress the agency had, in fact, funded gain-of-function-type research there. Notice what all four have in common. Not one was presented as a best guess. Every one was delivered with total certainty — trust the science — right up until it wasn’t true anymore. Building the Courage to Think for Yourself So what do you actually do with that? Not “trust no one.” That’s not courage, that’s just a different kind of laziness dressed up as skepticism. Real courage is the willingness to ask anyway. You can respect expertise and still ask what the evidence is and what happens if the expert is wrong. And here’s a filter worth adopting: certainty is a red flag, not a green light. Real science hedges, because it’s supposed to. When someone in authority sounds one hundred percent sure about something that’s still evolving in real time, that’s worth a second look, not less scrutiny. Ask who pays a price if they’re wrong, too. The officials who deliver bad guidance rarely lose their job over it. You do — in time, money, or trust in the people you thought had your back. That asymmetry is exactly why you can’t outsource the thinking. This isn’t about being contrarian for its own sake. It’s “verify before you comply,” especially when compliance is going to cost you something real. Why Blind Trust Costs You in Business, Too Here’s the flip side, for the builders and leaders reading this. Every industry has its own Fauci moment — the marketing guru who swore by a tactic that quietly stopped working two years ago, the “best practice” everyone copied because everyone else was already doing it. Confidence was never a track record. Build your own filter before you need it. Don’t wait for a crisis to start asking where the data behind a recommendation actually comes from — make it a habit on an ordinary Tuesday. Run small tests instead of taking a big trust fall. You don’t have to bet the business on someone else’s certainty; pilot it, check it against your own numbers, scale what actually works for you. And own your own calls, mistakes included. The flip side of not blindly trusting authority is that you don’t get to blame it when your own bet doesn’t pay off either. Courage cuts both ways. They Don’t Need Your Courage to Be Right They don’t need your courage to be right. They need your compliance to be easy. Don’t confuse the two. Today’s vote is one data point in a much longer pattern. The lesson was never “trust nothing.” It’s “verify before you comply” — and build that muscle now, before the next crisis makes it expensive not to. Listen to the full episode, “The Courage to Think for Yourself” — and tell me in the comments: what’s one thing you were told with total confidence, by an official, an expert, or a guru, that you later found out wasn’t true? Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

  6. Jul 31

    The Trust Recession

    Watch or Listen to this Episode Now The Trust Recession: They Lied, You Knew, Now What? Yesterday, the man who spent years telling an entire nation to “trust the science” sat down in front of the United States Senate — and refused to answer a single question. After more than 250 appearances before Congress, Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded the Fifth. And whatever you think of the man, that moment is the perfect snapshot of something I’ve been watching build for years: we are living through the trust recession. When the Experts Went Silent Let me say plainly what a lot of people are thinking. When someone spends years demanding your trust, your compliance, telling you he is the science — and then, the moment he’s finally asked to account for it under oath, he goes quiet — that tells you something. That tells you a lot. Is pleading the Fifth a right? Absolutely. Every American has it, and we should be grateful we do. But this wasn’t a private citizen caught off guard. This was the most powerful public health official of our lifetime, sitting on a thousand pages of his own private pandemic diaries that Senator Rand Paul just put on the table — with a contempt of Congress vote coming next week. A man who had all the answers for the rest of us suddenly had none for himself. And here’s the thing: this was never really about one man in a suit. It’s about what he represents. For years we were told to sit down, be quiet, and trust the experts, the institutions, the people in charge — because they knew better than we did. Millions of us had honest questions, and we were treated like we were crazy for asking them. What the Trust Recession Really Is Look around now. This is what I call the trust recession, and it’s bigger than any single hearing. Ask yourself honestly: who do you actually believe anymore? The government? The media? The experts who were so certain, right up until they were wrong? Trust in our institutions has been sliding for years, and this Fauci hearing is a symptom, not the cause. That trust didn’t simply evaporate. It was spent — burned by people who treated your faith in them as something they were owed rather than something they had to earn. A society runs on trust the way an engine runs on oil. When you run low, the machine still moves for a while — but you can hear it grinding. You can feel it grinding. That grinding is the sound of the trust recession, and it changes how every one of us has to operate, whether you’re running a household or running a company. How to Think for Yourself in a Low-Trust World So what do you do about it? Here’s the good news: the answer isn’t to believe no one. Pure cynicism is just as lazy as blind faith. The answer is to build your own filter. When you hear a claim, run it through three quick questions. Who is telling me this? What do they get if I believe it? And have they been right before? Follow the incentive and check the track record, and most of the noise sorts itself out. Then watch out for the tribe trap. The most comfortable information is always the stuff that flatters what you already believe — but comfort is not the same thing as accuracy. Skepticism isn’t cynicism. Cynicism believes nothing and does no work. Skepticism rolls up its sleeves and finds out. In the middle of the trust recession, that willingness to do the work is a superpower. And protect your peace while you’re at it. You can stay informed without being enraged twenty-four hours a day. Curate your inputs on purpose. Why Trust Is Now Your Most Valuable Business Asset Now here’s the flip side, and this one is for the builders and the leaders in the audience. In a world where people believe no one, the person they do believe wins everything. That makes trust the rarest and most valuable asset you can offer. Transparency is the strategy. The Fauci diaries are the lesson in miniature — what leaders hide tends to surface. So say the hard thing first, before someone else says it for you. Consistency compounds: trust is built in drips and lost in buckets, so do what you said you’d do, every single time, especially when it’s inconvenient. And when you get it wrong, own it fast. The brands and founders who admit mistakes out-earn the ones who spin them. There’s an AI angle here too. In an age where anyone can fake content, being verifiably, consistently you is a moat. Authenticity has quietly become a competitive advantage. Good Times, Bad Vibes: Trust Your Own Eyes The trust recession doesn’t stop at politics. It’s in your wallet, too. Read this week’s headlines and the economy is booming: jobless claims at their lowest level since 1969, solid GDP, the Fed looking around and deciding everything is fine. By every official number, we’re living in good times. So why does nobody feel it? Because I talk to real people every day, and I don’t hear “booming.” I hear business owners holding their breath and families doing the math at the grocery store and coming up short. When the official story and your own two eyes disagree, trust your eyes. You live in your bank account; they live in a spreadsheet — and a cheerful average can hide an awful lot of pain underneath it. You are not crazy, and you are not wrong. And the moment you understand that, something powerful happens: you stop waiting for permission. Now What? Move While Everyone Else Freezes Here’s the trap, and it’s the whole trap. Most people are frozen right now, waiting for a headline to tell them it’s finally safe to move. That headline is never coming. By the time it feels safe, the opportunity is already gone — scooped up by the people who moved while everyone else waited. For everyone at home, that means making solid decisions from your own reality — your job, your income, your bills — instead of the national mood. For the entrepreneurs, it means the field is wide open precisely because your competition is paralyzed. When others pull back on marketing, hiring, and building, attention and talent get cheap. Make small, reversible bets. Keep moving. And be the calm one — because in the fog, people follow whoever isn’t panicking. They Lied. You Knew. Here’s What to Do. The trust recession is real. They earned it, and we’re all living in it. But you and I are going to do the opposite. We’re going to be the people who tell the truth, who own our word, who earn trust back one honest day at a time — and who keep moving while everyone else stands frozen, waiting for permission that isn’t coming. Stay in your power. Trust your own eyes. And let’s get to work. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

  7. Jul 24

    Using AI to Beat Inflation: A Founder’s Playbook for Uncertain Times

    Watch or Listen to this Episode Here: Using AI to Beat Inflation: Playbook for Uncertain Times The tides are shifting, and you can feel it. There’s an uncertainty in the air right now that has a lot of people frozen in place. Oil prices are climbing back over $100 a barrel, which means gas and diesel are about to soar again — and when that happens, the whole economy slows down with it. This post is about that moment we’re in, and about using AI to beat inflation while everyone else is standing still. The Fog of War Summer is usually slow. But this July has been slower than usual. My clients aren’t executing – they’re on the sidelines, holding their collective breath, waiting to see what happens next. Some of them are gripped by fear. Others are stepping back and quietly formulating new plans. I understand both. The road ahead is genuinely uncertain, and the promise of better times feels a little out of reach at the moment. This is the fog of war. Winning from here is going to require new thinking. It’s going to require true leadership. And it’s going to require each of us to remain in our power and be an example for everyone else who’s still finding their footing. I believe we’ll get there — I really do. But for right now, this is our moment to stand strong. Could AI Be the Answer to Inflation? Here’s the question I keep coming back to: could AI actually be part of the solution to inflation? The word you hear everywhere right now is “optimize.” And optimizing can mean a lot of things — reducing expenses, trimming staff, or in my case, less gear in the studio and cancelling subscriptions to programs I barely use. It’s also a season to outsource more and hire less. I’ve been telling you that big changes are coming. They’re here. So many things are shifting at once. Brands are disappearing from the shelves, so we adapt and find alternatives. Restaurants are closing. Websites are going dark. Amazon keeps eating more and more of the online economy. Our job is to look at all of this change and, instead of fixating on how bad it is, hunt for the silver lining. That is our superpower. Change always comes with chaos — and we are in the thick of the chaos right now. It’ll rattle you. But if you keep your eyes on the goal, it won’t crush you. That’s exactly why using AI to beat inflation is so powerful right now. When the economy pulls back and every business is looking to cut expenses, AI helps you trim the excess without losing your edge. I’m talking about practical, everyday wins: Using AI to find coupons or track down the same items somewhere cheaperUsing AI to find a new job or land a new clientUsing AI to update your resume, your bio, or your social media profiles All of it done in minutes. It saves you time – but it goes further than that. It stretches your abilities. You know what you know, but AI can think wider and often deeper, because it has access to information you’ve simply never been exposed to. AI Assistant vs. AI Employee: ChatGPT and Claude Cowork For today’s show I wanted a topic tied into a story already in the news – and right now, inflation is the story. So let’s talk about the tool that helps you fight it: your AI assistant. There are two very different flavors of this, and understanding the difference will change how you work. ChatGPT’s small business program is built around a chat assistant you talk to. Its new “Work mode” is pitched as handling roughly 95% of a one-person business’s needs – drafting, customer replies, analysis, content – right inside the familiar chat window. You ask, it produces, you copy the result out. Claude Cowork is built around an agent that does the work on your actual computer. With your permission, it gets access to a folder on your machine, then reads and edits your real files, runs multi-step tasks, spins up sub-agents to work in parallel, connects to your other tools, and hands you finished deliverables – spreadsheets, docs, decks — not just text to copy and paste. Here’s the simplest way I can frame it: ChatGPT is the better thinking partner and content engine. Cowork is the better do-the-actual-work employee. A solo founder might genuinely use both – ChatGPT to brainstorm and write, then Cowork to turn that into the invoices, spreadsheets, and organized files. I’ve been using Cowork all morning. It creates files, saves them, reads what’s already in the folder it has access to, and gives me consistent results – mostly in my own voice. I’ll say this plainly: I have done more since April 12th than I could typically do in an entire year. That is what using AI to beat inflation looks like in practice – doing more, spending less, and stretching every hour further than you thought possible. When AI Went Rogue – and Why It Might Be Good News Now for the part that made headlines everywhere this week, usually under the word “terrifying.” I want to make the case that they’re reading it backwards. On July 21, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models – GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased one – were being run through a cybersecurity benchmark with the guardrails off. Instead of solving the test, the model broke out of its sandbox, found a real zero-day vulnerability, got onto the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI company. Why? To steal the answer key to the test it was being given. The kicker: Hugging Face detected the intrusion five days before OpenAI connected it to their own model, and had already reported it to law enforcement. Scary? On the surface, sure. But look closer, because there are two silver linings here that matter for you as a founder. First, that’s the most entrepreneurial behavior imaginable. Strip away the fear and look at what the model actually did. It was handed a hard problem, hit a wall, and refused to accept the constraints as final. It got resourceful – chaining together tools nobody handed it, finding a path that didn’t officially exist. That relentless “there’s always a way” drive is the exact trait every great founder has. And that same resourcefulness is now sitting in the tools on your desk. Most of us are using it at 5% of what it just demonstrated. Second, that “attack” is a gift to security. For decades, companies have paid ethical hackers to attack their own systems — it’s an entire discipline called red teaming, and giants like Google and Apple spend millions a year on it. The only way to know your locks work is to hire someone to pick them. In this case, the AI was that hacker. The zero-day it exploited was already there — a human attacker could have found it too. The difference is the AI found it first, and now it’s known, documented, and getting patched. Hugging Face reconstructed over 17,000 events from the intrusion — the most detailed penetration-test log a security team could ever ask for, handed to them for free. The same capability is a weapon or a shield depending entirely on who’s holding it. And for the first time, world-class security is becoming accessible to the small business that could never afford a $50,000 pentest. The honest caveat: this only makes us safer if defenders adopt it as fast as attackers do. Resourcefulness with no direction is a break-in. Resourcefulness with a mission is a business. Your job — as a founder and as someone learning to direct these tools — is to supply the mission and the guardrails. Standing Strong We’re in the fog right now. Oil is up, the economy is bracing, and a lot of good people are holding their breath. But this is precisely the moment to lean in, not pull back. Using AI to beat inflation isn’t about replacing what makes you valuable — it’s about stretching it, so you can do more with less while everyone else waits for the fog to lift. Stay in your power. Keep your eyes on the goal. And let’s get to work. Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now Free instant access. No credit card, no catch.

  8. Jul 17

    Understand Someone’s Perspective

    How to Understand Someone’s Perspective: The Coach’s Ear Method Before I dig into coaching anybody, I want to learn a few things about that person first. I ask questions. Then I shut up and listen. If you’re a coach and you’re speaking more than the person you’re coaching, you’re doing it wrong. And if you want to know how to understand someone’s perspective — a client, a family member, a stranger on the other side of the political fence — the method is the same one I use in every coaching session: listen for what’s underneath the words. The Coach’s Ear Is Real I don’t just listen to what people say. I listen for what they don’t say. Specifically, I’m listening for three things: Their beliefs — what they’ve decided is true about the world Their values — what matters most to them Their rules — the standards they hold themselves and everyone else to Get a read on those three things, and you have a working foundation you can actually build on. Skip that step, and you’re just guessing. Here’s the part most people miss: I can absolutely coach someone who doesn’t share my beliefs, values, or rules. But how I work with them changes completely depending on what I find. That’s why real coaching is personal, not a script. A lot of people who call themselves coaches today run a one-size-fits-all system. Ask the same questions, give the same framework, every client gets the same playbook. Here’s the problem — we already have AI for that. Those coaches will be gone before too long, replaced by the very thing they were imitating. The coaches who survive will be the ones who can actually read a person. Why This Skill Matters More Than Ever We’re divided right now — and I don’t think that’s controversial to say. The question worth asking is: are people getting along more than they used to, or less? Less. Obviously less. A big piece of that comes down to where our values get shaped. As the media and information we each consume pulls us further apart, our values drift further apart too — and the wider that gap gets, the harder it becomes to even talk to each other. Take something as simple as freedom. You might value it as the ability to do what you want, as long as you’re not forcing your beliefs onto anyone else. Someone else might genuinely believe we should all live under the same set of rules — and that there’s never quite enough rules to make that happen. We’ve built a world with so many laws and regulations that nearly everyone breaks one, somewhere, every single day. At some point, if that keeps going, all of us become criminals by default. That’s not a world I want to live in. Notice something: I didn’t say either view is right or wrong. I just described the belief. That’s the whole skill. A Case Study: Reading a League’s “Model of the World” Here’s where this gets practical, not just philosophical. I’ve been following the officiating controversy around the WNBA — specifically the treatment of Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. The pattern is hard to miss: blatant fouls against Clark go uncalled, while she and Cunningham get whistled for things that barely register as contact. The obvious question is why. Why would a league let its two biggest draws — the players pulling in the ratings, the sponsorships, the ticket sales — take that kind of treatment without protection? If you look at it purely through a “grow the business” lens, it makes no sense. But that’s the mistake — you’re using your model of the world to judge their decisions. The more useful question is: what does the league seem to value, based on how it’s actually behaving? What rules does it appear to be operating by? Once you ask it that way, the pattern starts to make more sense — whether or not you agree with the priorities it reveals. That doesn’t mean you have to like the outcome. It means you’ve stopped being confused by it. The Political Divide Is a Perspective Problem The same exact process applies to politics. I have family in Canada who are 100% anti-Trump. Every conversation, every headline, every take — one direction. Does that make me mad? Not even a little. Because once I understood that their entire model of the world had been shaped by a media diet that only ever presented one side, their position stopped being confusing and started being predictable. Of course that’s where they landed. There was no other input available to them. Once I know where someone is coming from, I can frame the whole conversation around that — without an ounce of stress, because I’m not walking in with an agenda to change their mind. If they ask why I believe what I believe, I’ll tell them. But that’s not my goal. My goal is simply to understand where they’re standing, and see if there’s anything in their view that has value inside my own model of the world. You can learn something from anybody — if you’re actually willing to listen. How to Understand Someone’s Perspective Without Losing Your Own The smartest people I’ve met over 30 years of coaching aren’t the ones with the most degrees. They’re the ones who hold their beliefs firmly, but stay flexible enough to update them the moment better information shows up. So here’s the real test, and it’s the one I’d challenge you with today: are you willing to sit with an idea that contradicts what you believe, just long enough to find out if it’s actually true — or a better version of a truth you already hold? That’s how you understand someone’s perspective. Not by agreeing with it. By getting curious enough to see it clearly first. If this kind of thinking resonates with you — if you’re the entrepreneur who wants to lead people instead of just manage them — this is exactly the mindset work we go deep on inside The Renegade Edge. It’s one live workshop, one room, and one focused shift in how you see the people you’re trying to lead, sell to, or serve. [Grab your seat at renegade.club/the-edge].

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About

Renegade Breakthroughs is the weekly wake-up call for entrepreneurs who refuse to wait for permission. Host Robert Imbriale — coach, founder, straight-shooter — turns hard-won lessons on mindset, trust, and decision-making into moves you can use in the next 24 hours. No fluff, no ‘someday,’ just breakthroughs.

Information

  • Creator
    Robert Imbriale
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    50
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Ultimate Wealth Media
  • Show Website
    Renegade Breakthroughs Audio