Attorney Turned Tech CEO: Rebecca Zung on Narcissists, $1.1M in 10 Months & Going All In on AI

0:00Rebecca Zung:Before we get into today's episode, here's the truth. Most people don't need more time. They need better systems. This episode is sponsored by Cintra.ai. And what I've been testing lately is how AI can actually help simplify the chaos behind running a business. For example, this is Vizzy. This helper is great for research, brainstorming, and organizing ideas when I'm planning content, interview, or even business strategy. Instead of having 10 tabs open and trying to piece everything together manually, I can get clarity faster and move much quicker. Then there's Dexter. This helps with productivity and organization, keeping workflows, ideas, and moving pieces streamlined so things don't fall through the cracks.

0:39Rebecca Zung:And if you're building a business, managing a team, or even juggling multiple projects, that matters. Because the real flex right now isn't doing everything yourself. It's building systems that allow you to operate at a higher level. And no, AI doesn't replace leadership. It enhances execution. That's the difference. So if you want to save time, simplify your workflow and scale smarter, go to Cintra.ai backslash bilf and use code bilf, B-I-L-F for 72 % off all plans. They also offer a 14 day money back guarantee so you can test it risk-free. Again, that's Cintra.ai backslash bilf with code bilf, B-I-L-F.

1:18Rebecca Zung:Alrighty, let's get into today's episode.

1:24Recently, I read a book called The Science of Scaling by Benjamin Hardy, and he talked about how you really just have to have one focus. Pause. Rebecca Zung is the leverage lawyer, a 25-year trial attorney, TEDx speaker, best-selling author, and creator of Slay AI, the first patented AI built to help you win against narcissists. Continue. I had another friend who sold his company for$40 or$50 million. And he kept saying the same thing to me, like pick one thing. It was so hard for me to do that. Oh my God, so much money wasted on ads and coaches. And so much money burned on the wrong things. So last year, after reading that book and talking to my friend, I was like, that's it.

2:15It's the AI. That's what we're going to focus on. Even the high ticket is going to be around getting the AI implemented for people who want that one-on-one touch. And that's it. That's the focus.

2:29Rebecca Zung:Welcome back to the BILF pod where authenticity trumps authority. I am your host, Mara Doran. And here on the BILF pod, we love to showcase bosses in their own right. And today's guest, she is a boss. I love what she rebranded as, as the leverage lawyer. but we're going to talk about something that is kind of taboo. We don't often like to talk about as women, our past relationships, but she's an incredible lawyer with an undying following of 336. You have 336 ,000 followers. She's quite the negotiator, but a badass. That's just on Instagram. That's just on Instagram. That's just on, oh, sorry.

3:09Rebecca Zung:She correct there. Just on Instagram. So she has so many more, which is so exciting. Yeah. On YouTube, it's, I think, 730 ,000. So impressive. So you have quite a following, but welcome to the show, Miss Rebecca Long. Rebecca, I had such a pleasure to, I think I'm just fangirling because I wanted to be a lawyer and I get to meet a badass attorney right now. So welcome to the Bill Pod. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yes. So we're just going to get started and we're going to dig deep. I mean, you know, your backstory, I don't know if you want to get into that into detail, but I'm sure a lot of why you chose to become a lawyer is because of your past and where you were.

3:48Rebecca Zung:So do you want to, you want to touch a little bit on that and how you got into becoming the leveraged lawyer? And we'll also talk about your AI as well, which I'm super excited, but we'll leave that like for its own little part to give it all that great. Yeah. I mean, I took a circuitous path. I mean, I didn't go straight like everybody else, you know, I like, I like a lot of people, but I'm half Chinese and half German. So I always say I have no fun genes whatsoever. But there was a lot of like, oh, pressure to succeed and do well and all of that. And I did graduate second in my class from high school, but then I just kind of, my version of being a rebel was to get married at 19 and have three kids by the time I was 22.

4:34And so that was my way of like, I don't need this and you're you or whatever. And then of course I ended up with these three kids and I'm getting a divorce and I'm like in my twenties still and thinking, okay, I got to put a roof over this, these kids' heads and build a life for myself. So I had finished college with them and then I started as a teacher for a little while and decided to go back to law school a lot because of pressure from my family about what to do in my life. And also because it was one of the few advanced degrees that I could get without needing some kind of a prerequisites or something.

5:20And so I went to University of Miami at night. At the time, they had a night program, which I don't even think they have anymore. And happened to meet my husband there who he got a job as a prosecutor in Collier County, which is like the West coast of Florida. And so he was a year ahead of me. So I ended up meeting one of the top family law attorneys in, certainly in Florida, definitely in the country as well. And I ended up working for her and her partner and really came up through the ranks that way. So that's how I ended up really in the high net worth family law world, which is a very, very highly specialized type of law because you have to know trust law, business law, taxation.

6:14There's a lot of areas that you need to be super, you know, have an expertise in. And then built my own practice and decided I wanted to do other things. So I started on YouTube about six years ago and gained a big following through YouTube. So I now have over 70 million views on YouTube, I know for sure. And have written three books. And, you know, it's just all been a whirlwind, but it hasn't, you know, it was never a straight narrow path. It was definitely, I feel like bootstrapping and survival the whole way.

6:56Rebecca Zung:Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's so funny listening to you because our paths are pretty aligned. In fact, my father-in-law was a, he is a professor at University of Miami and he, yeah, legal and he's a lawyer. So he obviously. Oh, was he there in the 90s? Maybe not though. Probably. Probably. Yeah. I'm assuming. What's his name? Craig Dorn. Okay. Yeah. I think I do remember him actually. Just so crazy. Like the face is like coming to me. So I'll have to look it up and see if I'm thinking of the right person. But yeah. Yeah. And I was on the same path, same thing. I just didn't go all the way, but you know, same kind of story.

7:36Rebecca Zung:I was, when I finished my master's degree, I had two kids, you know, just trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, the economy happened and we couldn't afford for me to go to law school. And I found myself in a very precarious situation. I ended up going into sales by fluke. I know my mom is still praying that I'd become a lawyer, but you know, I think that you did okay. Okay. But I also think that, you know, divorce and like you were saying, you know, you had to figure out how to provide for these children. That's the same thing before 30. I found myself. I have two children. I wasn't remarried and I had to figure it out.

8:13Rebecca Zung:Like, what was I going to do next for you? Yeah. I definitely give you so much credit that you did the night school thing, went and got your law degree. For me, it was selling health insurance late at night. But you know, in that regard, we do what we have to do. Survival is a huge thing, right? Yeah, exactly. And as women, I don't think that people realize how hard it is because we don't just to get to wear one hat. We have to wear several hats because we have to be the mom. We have to be the dad, the mentor, the educator, also the businesswoman, you know, and then also in the same regard, keep your emotions at, you know, at a surface level.

8:45Rebecca Zung:So it's, it's really not that easy. And while you're like making lunches and wiping runny noses and reading bedtime stories and juggling and then literally juggling to help, you know, totally afloat, you know? So I, I totally understand the, the, the trajectory and understand what it takes. And for so many women, it is, there's a lot of, I don't want to say victim. Yeah. Maybe victim, victim, you know, mentality where I can't do this, but the reality is you can do it. And if you, you know, there is where there's a will, there's a way you can absolutely 100 % do it, but you took it a step further.

9:21Rebecca Zung:You didn't just stop, you know, in your profession as a lawyer. When did it change that you, that you really took a niche or were you just practicing general law? I'm assuming then you need to know. I didn't hide it worth family law. Um, you mean where it changed to what I'm doing now today? Yeah. Yeah. So COVID happened. COVID happened and I, we had moved from, uh, LA. I mean, sorry, from Florida to LA right before that. So I was like flying back and forth from my practice still. I was going back to Naples like a week, a month, and I had, um, merged my practice with two other, uh, partners. But then when COVID it happened, I couldn't fly.

10:04I couldn't go back and forth. And the courthouses were basically closed. So I had been taking a course on YouTube and I took some courses on how to do online digital classes and things like that. So I was like, okay, I could package up a course and I thought it was just going to be on negotiation in general. And I did some videos on just negotiation, like how to get a pay raise, clothing, color, psychology and negotiations, things like that. And they were literally, the only people who were viewing it were my mom and her church friends, I swear. I mean, it was like - I get it.

10:45Rebecca Zung:I totally understand. I watched all your videos. I'm like, oh, that's so great, mom. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I know. So nice. So then I did one video in like January of 2020 on how to negotiate with a narcissist and it got like 700 views. And I was like, oh, okay, there's something going on here. And I thought, okay, let me do like eight more videos on that and I'll do a little course on on it and just see where it goes. So I decided to launch that on like March 11th of 2020. And I'll tell you the reason why I picked that date was because it was the day after Mercury Retrograde was ending that year.

11:33And I was like, okay, I don't want to launch a course in the middle of retrograde. That seems like bad luck. So I'll do it on March 11th. And I only had just crossed 1 ,000 subscribers on YouTube on March 3rd. And that was literally by begging all my friends to subscribe because I wanted to get to 1 ,000 because then I was going to be able to monetize YouTube. That was really what I wanted to get to. And so by January of 2021, just 10 months later, I had made$1.1 million on that one$500 course, and I had over 100 ,000 subscribers. So it just happened in 10 months.

12:20Rebecca Zung:Okay. And that's what all blew up for me. Yeah. So pause right there. Okay. So you're a prominent attorney, right? I'm sure you're doing really well, a prominent attorney. And then you, now this speaks leaps and volumes about what's going on. Prominent attorney, COVID happens. A lot of people froze during COVID. And a lot of people ended up furloughed out of work or depressed. You know, they weren't working. But not you. You were like, you know what? Courthouse is closed. I'm assuming maybe clientele is down. Now, let me switch. Let me go ahead and utilize. But what is so incredible, because I think I'm late to the party because I'm just now getting into the whole AI.

12:59Rebecca Zung:I mean, you're definitely much smarter than me. But how important it is to keep up with the times. Because if you do not know AI and you don't know social media, correct me if I'm wrong, you're done. You're done for. You're not staying afloat. Well, I think the most important thing is just to keep pivoting. Yeah. And so, you know, like two years ago, we came out with a custom GPT. That's kind of how I started in the AI world. So I added the custom GPT to my$500 course. And then I also had added high ticket coaching and sales around that. I started certifying coaches. But then just about a year ago or so at this point, I started to develop my own AI because I wanted it to be on a private platform so that it would preserve attorney-client privilege.

13:59And I also wanted it to be like more organized rather than just like a GPT. You're just having conversations, but you can't organize your documentation. You can't organize your scattered screenshots, your pictures, your incidents. All of that is like, there's no place to be able to do that. So we created an AI that has an incident tracker in it so that while something is happening, and you just had that exchange in the parking lot or whatever, you just go right in there. You can even dictate it right in. It immediately, instantly is creating a timeline for you, and it goes into the document depot.

14:38Then when you hit the button, generate leverage, it scans everything that you've put in there and starts looking for the patterns of deception manipulation and discrepancies. And so I knew I wanted to build something like that. And we launched that in January of this year. And I just, if you know, like, okay, this is what's coming rather than rail against it and go, well, that's it. I'm sticking with paper the whole time. I'm not doing this AI thing or I don't trust it or whatever. It's here. It's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. So, you know, learn how to pivot. That's just really been my whole career, basically.

15:26Rebecca Zung:Yeah, I know. That's my whole life. I feel you on it. But I don't think that I was clear on what you're doing with the AI. So you have an AI called Slay AI. And what it does is, you did say a little bit that it's negotiation or tracking a narcissist through AI. Well, it's any kind. I mean, high conflict personalities for sure, but it's any time you want to generate leverage. So whenever you're in a negotiation, I mean, even if you're an HR manager and you want to be tracking how an employee is, or if you're a business owner and you want to be tracking patterns, it's looking for those patterns.

15:59What happens with us as humans is we tend to, we want to see the good in people or we want to give people the benefit of the doubt. And so we don't even realize how many times that you've had this situation where somebody's broken in their word or lied or didn't do what they say they were going to do or did something they weren't supposed to do. But when you start tracking the patterns, the patterns equal power. And then you can take the emotion out of it rather than sitting there going, this isn't fair. I can never get what I want. If you start tracking it all, you start uploading your screenshots, your emails, your social media posts, the financial statements, the credit card statements, the income tax, the deposition transcripts, whatever it is that you have, and you ask MyAI, which we have a patent on, to scan it, it'll automatically look for patterns of deception and manipulation and violations and spit that back out to you.

17:06And now, instead of like going, that person's a narcissist, you can actually say, here's all the ways that they've misbehaved.

17:14Rebecca Zung:Yeah. And patterns are proof. So a lot of the people that are purchasing this product, are they lawyers in conjunction and then giving them to their clients? Or both? Or just clients taking it? Got it. Yes. So because it does preserve privilege, we have two different dashboards. We have dashboards for the consumer, and then we have dashboards for professionals as well. And the professionals can actually have all of their matters. When they open the dashboard, all their matters are listed there. Then when they go inside the matter, that's when they can see the incident tracker, the timeline, the generate leverage, the document depot.

18:01And they can give access to whoever they want to. So they can give internal access to a team member or they can give like, you know, if it's an assistant or whoever, or they can give external access to the client. And then that way it becomes work product and it stays under the umbrella of attorney client privilege.

18:22Rebecca Zung:Nice. So I mean, both, I'm assuming that attorneys must love it, especially if they're dealing with domestic abuse or whatever, if they're just trying to, you know, trying to, trying to stabilize patterns. So it's a great organizational tool for attorneys. But then for women, we were talking about this before, maybe women that can't afford proper representation. How much is something like this? So we have for the consumer, we have three different levels. It's$18 a month, 47 a month, or 97 a month, depending on how much data they need or how much storage they need. And then for attorneys or it could be any kind of professional, really, anybody who has multiple matters, it's$97 a month per matter.

19:10But then they can pass that cost back on to the client or they can even upsell it to the client if they want to and make it a profit center for them.

19:20Rebecca Zung:So basically you can run it where you have like an affiliate link if you really wanted to do it or like multi-level marketing if you wanted to. I love that. I mean, not only are you beautiful, but brains too. There you go. You have the legal experience and expertise, and then you have the business savvy part of it, which is incredible. So you were able to, I'm sure you can use both in conjunction, which is really nice as well. Now, are you still practicing law or are you just primarily focused on AI? No, no. I'm really focused on running this company and scaling it as quickly as we can. We do have enablement packages.

19:56So we have attorneys who are strategic leverage advisors on our staff who can, you know, it's more of a high ticket advisory for people who want individual sessions on pulling all of this together and creating undeniable leverage for their attorneys. And then we also have enablement packages for the professionals who want to integrate it into their practice. So those are more high ticket. But it's, I mean, especially for professionals, to be able to integrate it into your practice, it becomes actually a profit center. And so it really does pay for itself.

20:42Rebecca Zung:So one thing I want to touch on and just talk about what the audience is the failure. You know, it sounds that you're doing, you're doing amazing, but I also like how you're honest at first. The same thing for this podcast. When I first started, I begged everybody. I'm like, you have to be a subscriber. You know, and then my mom would be the same thing. My mom's like, I watched it. I'm like, thanks mom. Um, but the amount of failure and then understanding how to scale by watching. Well, for me now, my big thing is watching the algorithm. I say, you know, like it doesn't matter what, what resonates with me.

21:12Rebecca Zung:It's what resonates with the algorithm and what people really like. So utilizing that is a big help. So what about like when you first started, I know you said you had a hard time trying to figure it out, what people really liked. How did that look as far as the failure? Oh my gosh. I mean, there have been so many times where it's just felt like, because people stopped really being interested in the online courses at one point, because once COVID was sort of dying down, then that sort of started dying off as well. And it got harder and harder to sell that. And then, you know, like I'm such a ADD person.

21:52So, you know, if somebody would come to me and go, let's do a business program for women, or let's do something for teens, or let's do... I'd be like, okay, yeah, that's great. That sounds like a great idea. And then I'm all over the place. And recently I read a book called The Science of Scaling by Benjamin Hardy. And he talked about how you really just have to have one focus. And I had another friend who sold his company for 40 or 50 million. And he kept saying the same thing to me, like pick one thing. And it was so hard for me to do that. I had to, oh my God, so much money wasted on ads and coaches.

22:37I'm there too. I'm right there with you. So much money burned on the wrong things. And so last year after reading that book and talking to my friend, I was like, that's it. It's the AI. That's what we're going to focus on. Even the high ticket is going to be around getting the AI implemented for people who want that one-on-one touch. And that's it. That's the focus.

23:07Rebecca Zung:I love that. I mean, I absolutely love what you're saying because I'm in the same boat as you trying to figure out, you know, with AI and AI, such a huge component in my everyday life as a sale, as an insurance, as a senior regional sales leader in an insurance company, you would never think AI was important, but we're utilizing AI. Plus in my own brand and the show, it's utilizing and understanding how AI works and it's constantly changing. So it's ever evolving. I mean, the AI is training the AI. So now we have two AIs working in conjunction to like, you know, to get things going, moving and grooving.

23:40Rebecca Zung:But I love how, let's talk a little bit about scaling and when it's time to scale. Cause I think that's a big, you know, misconception or, or people just don't have an idea. I didn't have an idea. Like when, like talk about the concept in general when it comes to scaling. Oh, I mean, there's so much testing and I really had to learn this myself too. So much the hard way I have to tell you so much the hard way. So if you take anything from me, um, it's just testing, like, don't just, um, decide, Oh, that's a great idea. Let's just throw this out and start with the new thing. I've done that many times.

24:19Do not do that. Just like try it, you know, layer it in, see how it works and see which one works better. And it's A-B testing constantly. It's so hard for me because I'm such a squirrel, you know, let's do that. And I get really excited about my new ideas and let's go this way. And my whole team, I now have almost 30 people on my team. They're like massive whiplash with me all the time. And so I recently just hired an integrator, a director of operations, who's constantly keeping me in check with, no, we're doing this. And I'm so glad that she's doing that because I would totally not be where I am now without that.

25:14Rebecca Zung:No, the same thing. I have like shiny object syndrome where I'm like, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Oh, let's go with that one. Okay, let's try this one. But what I'm learning now too is it's all about what resonates with your audience or the algorithm. Like I was saying, if from A, B testing your content or just testing the different results, that'll save you a lot of time, a lot of heartache and a lot of money trying to figure out what works. people will tell you, you'll know what works just from the results. So it doesn't make sense to do that. But not only did you create this incredible AI, which is so, I love that.