Monetizing Your Mental Capital, Season 3, Episode 13. Host: Will Christensen. Guest: Brent Wees. Recorded April 2026.
Feel like everyone else is already building apps in Claude Code while you're still just using ChatGPT to write emails?
In this episode of Monetizing Your Mental Capital, Will Christensen sits down with Brent Wees, an AI trainer and workshop facilitator who runs Idea.Meet.Plan and has spent the last year on the road training hundreds to thousands of people, in workshops and at conferences including an AI hackathon at Prosper Show, on foundational AI skills. Brent is also a certified AI trainer.
Brent explains why the AI hype on social media is misleading: it's a tiny sliver of "bleeding edge" builders creating the impression that everyone is already vibe coding and shipping AI agents, when in reality almost everyone, including experienced entrepreneurs, is still in the "shallow end of the pool." He uses a racetrack analogy: one person lapping the field doesn't mean the rest of the pack is behind, it means most people are moving together and can learn faster by sharing what they find.
Brent then walks through his practical approach for Amazon sellers and business owners: assess your team's current AI literacy before building a policy, use "small wins" by finding one repetitive task and giving AI detailed context on it rather than chasing moonshots, use voice mode to talk through problems like a thinking partner, and ask AI to "give you the prompt, not the output" so you learn to build the skill yourself. He also makes the case for keeping a physical notebook alongside AI tools to map out ideas before dropping them into a prompt.
In this episode
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:17 Why an AI-curious Amazon seller should listen to Brent
- 03:14 How many workshops Brent has run and who hires him
- 07:24 The developer/CTO gap and one seller's $55M internal app story
- 16:11 Hypothetical: Brent meets an old college friend who sells on Amazon
- 19:04 How much AI is actually touching Amazon sellers today
- 21:06 Brent's path: agency, RPA work, and becoming a certified AI trainer
- 25:16 The racetrack analogy: the 99% pack vs. the 1% lapping everyone
- 33:15 The small wins framework for learning AI
- 40:03 Why "AI first" isn't new: RPA and automation history
- 44:50 Final advice: use a notebook, get small wins, don't panic
Connect with Brent
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentwees/
- Website: https://ideameetplan.com
Resources mentioned
- Anthropic Academy: https://www.anthropic.com/learn
