Hey, welcome to UsingAI at work. Today we're honored to have Stefan Georgi, a Titan in the world of direct response marketing and copywriting. Stefan, known for generating billions in sales and elevating brands like V Shred and Tommy Chong CBD, is now pioneering the use of AI in business. He's the brain behind freeadcopy.com, which is a tool transforming how we create advertising copy. So get ready for an episode packed with insights on leveraging AI for customer acquisition and operational efficiency. Let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. All right, Stefan, welcome to the podcast. I'm really uh excited to have you here. I know that you're as much of an enthusiast about this topic, even more so than I am, so I plan on learning plenty, as do the uh the listeners. So uh before we get started, why don't you tell everybody what you think they need to know about Stefan?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. And thanks for having me, Chris. My pleasure. So well, should people know about me? Uh, you know, my my background is a direct response marketer and a copywriter, which is somebody who writes ads. Uh throughout that time, I've been able to partner with a lot of businesses like uh and as an advisor, an actual equity partner, whatever it is, helping them to grow and scale, mostly direct to consumer uh types of things. So, for example, I helped uh a company called V Shred go from I think maybe around 50 million at the time to uh 200 plus million per year. Uh did some work with Tommy Chong CBD, which you might have seen on Twitter now X. Um, but really a lot of different kind of brands like that, helping them to grow and scale. And so I've started a lot of different businesses, partnered a lot of businesses, and uh anything direct response marketing and acquiring customers and growing and scaling uh digitally is my wheelhouse and my jam.
SPEAKER_02But you also are now educating as well, correct, with your groups. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. So
I um I partnered with a um a friend of mine back in 2019, and we created like a mastermind type of thing where you know we're helping other business owners to grow their companies and scale, get more customers, all of that. Uh since then it's morphed into different branches of kind of training and education. And uh, you know, specifically since about 20, I guess like summer into fall of 2022, so a little bit before Chat GPT came out, um, really started pivoting to AI. And so our goal is to essentially like if you look at our mission statement, is the first word I won't, I won't swear, I'll self-bleep myself, but basically it's to help people not get effed by AI, right? And so to accomplish that, we have um really different things like whether software, SaaS products, um, courses, all the way up to kind of expensive like $30,000, $40,000 a year kind of uh masterminds. But we're really trying to help people at all levels have access to uh AI tools, processes, things like that, that they can, you know, become more efficient, more effective, uh, improve workflows and processes, and so that they sort of embrace what's happening rather than get caught unaware and it's a lot more painful because there isn't like there's not it's not not gonna happen, right? It's already happening, it's only going to accelerate as far as like the disruption and um kind of like a global shift and adoption to towards AI.
SPEAKER_02Well, based on that mission, I think you're in the right place as far as being on this podcast. So one of the things that I'm always curious about is so my experience was I heard people talking about GPT. I'd heard about AI, obviously, a long time ago, but I heard about GPT, and I'm a smart guy. I've been around tech and Martech and all that kind of stuff for a long time, but I just assumed, oh, that's that's somebody else's opportunity. That's it's not for me. How did you go from not being a user to being who you are today? Like what was that journey like? What was the first exposure where you had that aha, that oh moment?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the first the first exposure, uh, or the first, I guess, aha moment was um in like early November of 2022. So again, ChatGPT came out at the end of November. Yeah, I'd already been thinking about AI a bit before that, but early November, I did this um like little two-day thing with uh Agora Financial, which is a big financial publisher, lots of people. Right. And so um it was sort of a collaborative thing. It was not a paid, like it was invite only, and essentially the idea was just get a lot of really smart people in the room um and talk about like where the future is going, what do the next five years look like, what are the kind of biggest opportunities, risks, threats, almost like a SWOT analysis on the next five years. Um, with then the goal being that as leaders of different industries, we can go kind of help um you know guide our communities and and the industries towards cool uh that direction. And so it was really cool. Yeah, it was a really unique thing. I was the um like facilitator of it, and it just sort of came about organically. But there's you know, very a very eclectic group. So there's uh you know, guys like Porter Stansbury were there, um, you know, a woman who is from uh like the World Economic Forum, which I'm I'm kind of right-leaning, so they they get, you know, oh no, Davos and all that. But you know, she had different perspectives. There was it was a bunch of very high-level, really interesting uh people in the range of industries. And when we talked about sort of the biggest shift or change that was coming that was going to catch people unaware, overwhelmingly the consensus of all these smart people in the room was like AI. And that was actually for me that moment because I again I'd been paying attention, but not hyper focusing. And you know, then we we talked through it more and people kind of shared data and evidence of why they thought that was the case. But uh, I left that two-day thing kind of committed to exploring AI really deeply and then trying to be more vocal and outspoken. And so then I really started going and playing with different tools, like, you know, um, like at the time, like Jasper or Wright Sonic. There's a different I I went to copywriting and content first, since that's a world I know really well. Um, and then I was like, well, you know, it's it's pretty good. And then um I read this book, it's a pretty famous book called Uh Crossing the Chasm, right? And it's about essentially how you know technologies and innovations, whether they sort of make it to the mainstream or they kind of die in this chasm, right? That there's not this linear, sort of smooth progression. Um for whatever exactly. And for whatever reason, this was over Thanksgiving. I I kind of had the aha moment for all the training stuff. I'm like, we really should just go all in on AI and lead there. Uh and you know, I think like this is gonna only get a lot bigger. And then I had no idea Chat GPT was much crazy. And then like, yeah, like a week later or whatever it was, like I think it was the 30th of November of 2022 that Chat GPT came out. Um, and so then it came out, and um, you know, at that point I'm like, all right, so so I I guess I was mentally, I was lucky in a way because I was a weird kind of little confluence of events. Like, I I immediately embraced it because I had committed to embracing it because I was thinking about it. And you know, which is funny because it's not that much of a head start over anybody else, but it was enough time uh to be, I guess, because I was mentally prepared to jump in, like I jumped right into it.
SPEAKER_02That timing that was the universe going, here you go, that was perfect timing. So once you got access to 3.5, kind of what where where did you start? What did you like what what was that process of um learning how to use the models for you? Was it very similar to Jasper?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you know, and I was never like a like a hardcore Jasper user, I'd played with it, and so you know, like I just started asking it questions and then and then you know the prompt engineering part came pretty naturally to me because you know, as a as a writer and a copywriter and you know, that was that was good. You know, the other thing I did is I it's still around. It's uh I think it's called future, like the future, futurepedia.io, I want to
say. But essentially it was a directory of like right, all these new AI tools come out. But it's actually gotten difficult. Um, there's so many tools now, but even then there it was like 20 or 30 kind of tools of note would come out per week, you know, maybe, maybe 10 or 15. So I kind of made a goal of like going on that every week, going through, looking at the new tools, signing up for accounts, doing trials, just trying them, so I could kind of understand the a broader depth of the capabilities, right? Because copies one thing, but there were you know tools for workflows and and all kinds of other stuff. And and then as of now, I think like 95% of the tools are dumb. I mean, not to be mean, but it's like sort of like you know, a menu planner, and you're like, all right, cool. Like there's a million, you know, like that that's not gonna be the breakthrough killer app. It's not yeah. Uh but occasionally you find a pretty cool one, right? So um I tried to expose myself to a lot of of that as well.
SPEAKER_02So that's fantastic advice. Besides FuturePedia, are there any other places where you go? And I mean, I know of best of AI, I know Matt Wolfe with his future tools. Are there any other places where you go to kind of see what new apps and functionality is out there?
SPEAKER_00So one thing we we did, which honestly I think might be worthwhile for other people, is we hired um some like researchers to kind of like go and start compiling, like a do like a weekly report of like, hey, here's like the new trends, here's like the you know, new tools that are coming out, like, and then to to demo them and actually go in and like write talk about capabilities, the you know, potential use cases as they relate both to our business and in general. Um and you can get like a VA or somebody to do that. It's like super uh, you know, we're paying like a few grand a month for a really talented person. Um and so yeah, I think that's that's one thing. I go to like, you know, the only other one I I regularly go to is um well, I'm on like Twitter or X now, so you'll see stuff there. And then um like even actually, you know, funnily enough, like uh Venture Beat, which is obviously a well-known publication, right? Uh, but they're a good um kind of like a good marker of of where the the the wind's blowing generally, right? And so um if you go there, like that you know, almost every story is about new kind of large language models or new AI tools, or and so you know, that's the place I still check regularly. It does give me anxiety because then you see there's all these different generative AI things and they're all getting all this money, and you're like, oh god, do I need to try this one? And and you're trying to stay abreast of it all. But uh yeah.
SPEAKER_02So one of the things that it that I've seen recently is is the suggestion that you don't need to be tech to be a good prompt engineer. You need to have a mastery of the English language or whatever your language is, right? As a copywriter, and for those who aren't familiar with what copywriting is, these guys are masterful at eliciting emotion and action from the written word. They you may not know what it is, but you read copy all the time, from every advertisement you see to the rate radio TV commercials and that sort of thing. So somebody who spent as much time thinking about the impact of like an individual word would have within the context of a whole sales letter, because I would imagine that you get that granular with that process, right? It seems like you would have an unfair advantage in being able to elicit like good response, good output from the models. For somebody who hasn't I mean they just consider you know communication just dashing off an email or something. Do you have any advice for them that would help them kind of compress that learning curve of knowing how to communicate with GPT, Claude, whatever?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean to me you know, the short answer is that Claude is is generally my favorite large language model of kind of like the big out-of-the-box ones, right? Uh-huh. And the reason why is because you can just give it referent referential material and have it like you know immediately uh have that knowledge. And so, like, for example, if for copywriting, if I want to write uh great YouTube ads, if I have a training um on YouTube ads, whether it's a video and I get a transcript and turn into a PDF, or it's like a PowerPoint, or whatever it is, right? I can basically take that, go, hey Claude, like here's a training about how to write great ads, analyze this, um, tell me about the structure, what are the takeaways, whatever it is. Yeah. Does it all right? Cool. Now I want you to write some YouTube ads for you know this product or offer or brand. Here it goes, right? Um, but again, and to not make it just copy only, like it's the same thing for uh, you know, like you could do for legal, for SOPs, for SEO, right? I I talked to a group of several hundred agency owners here in Miami that were all you know fairly successful and and mostly doing SEO. And so I literally just like Googled like best SEO practices 2023. Um and then I think they're interested in hyper-local SEO. So I'm like hyper SEO local like took that stuff, gave it to Claude. Hey, here's like you know training on hyper-local SEO practices, right? Like uh based on this, like what's like a list of SOPs? What's a checklist? If somebody's gonna do uh you know hyperlocal like SEO, what would it be? Like, well, there it is, right? Um and then what's cool. I mean, not to what did they think about it? They loved it. Um they they were I mean that's the funny thing, right? I have this I've done this talk a couple times live. Like, I'm not doing a lot of public speaking right now because I'm I'm building so much, but I'm down here in Miami and um I moved here. So yeah. Yeah, it's like when people if it's local, I'll I'll do it. I'm I'm generally not gonna travel for anything right now. Um, but but it's funny because I I've done a talk a couple times down here where it's really just like how to use quad, I feel like it's just like you know, upload a PDF like that that teaches Claude something, and I'll have Claude, you know, kind of uh do what you just taught to do. And you know, but every time after that training, people were like, or that talk, people are like, oh you're a genius, you know, like oh my god. And to me, it feels like not that complicated, but I'm not trying to be like arrogant, it's just like to me, I guess it makes sense, but if you've never done it before, um, you know, so yeah, they really liked it. And then I mean the other part, there's a tool called um agent GPT, which is like an auto GPT type of uh tool. So essentially, for those who are watching who don't know what that is, like you know, you have like um these agents, you have like a like a you know, AI basically goes and does like um different tasks for you, and it does it over several loops. So it kind of it iterates and can even improve or get better or go further along. So as an example, if I'm like, hey, agent GPT, like you're a hyper-local SEO expert, we need to find um you know SE hyper-local SEO content for this ice cream parlor and coral gables. This is the example I use, right? There's an ice cream place I go to with my family. Um, you know, like so based on this, like, you know, go to work. And so it's like you know, it's hard to describe, I guess, but but basically it's like, all right, give me myself tasks, right? So then Agent GPT goes and assigns itself different tasks. Like, all right, go find micro influencers, go find blogs and Instagram accounts that are in Coral Gables, like go find keywords, like find uh you know, social media handles. It just starts doing all these different things, and like you know, it ended up finding like oh find events that are in Coral Gables where we could like you know either advertise or hijack like you know, SEO related to these events and have that. And it started doing like social media posts of emoji cons. Like it literally can just do all this crazy stuff and it's doing it on its own in the background. You just gave it one prompt. But the important thing is you kind of gave it the guidelines. So, really going back to your initial question of like how do you like you know, how do you shortcut that process? I think it's like referential material and then like bumpers or guidelines. You're sort of like, you know, like here's the instructions. I really like they talk about natural language programming, and all you're really doing is you're you know, you're giving a set of instructions to the AI. And you know, if you have parameters or direction or you know, guide guardrails of like, don't go over here, don't go over here, stay in here, uh, you'll tend to get like you know, pretty good outputs, and and you really don't have to know a lot. I mean, that that it's pretty wild.
SPEAKER_02I think I basically felt like at that, like I could probably beat most of these people in this room on SEO if I wanted to go start an SEO agency, which I don't, but you know Was there were there any uh fear or trepidation expressed by the audience when you showed them how easily it was for somebody like you with not not an SEO agency owner to be able to get those results?
SPEAKER_00You know, it wasn't like outspoken in that specific instance. Um call, I bet. Yeah, there definitely was a lot of people who were kind of like, you know, generally when I when I demonstrate, people kind of feel like, all right, yeah, I need to, I've been putting this off, I've been ignoring it, I've been putting my head in the sand, I need to step up. But you know, on a broader level, I mean adoption is still very low uh overall. And like uh, you know, I remember I was reading something in The Economist a few months back, and it was sort of like uh they're talking about like global firms, and I'm gonna totally make these stats up, but it roughly it was something like you know, only 30% of them said that they had like used AI within their company, and out of that, only half of them had decided that they were gonna keep using it regularly. And
so there's this really big opportunity, I think, right now, for smaller business owners to uh you know gain a lot of market share and uh just move a lot faster. Um, right. So yeah, I mean the timelines, the way I kind of talk about like as a quick note, there's like sort of like legacy timelines, and there's like kind of today timelines, right? And it's like the legacy timeline of all these different processes taking weeks or months or whatever it is. Um and most people want to operate there because they're comfortable and understand that. But the truth is if you can, you know, generate advertising collateral images, creatives, videos, like SOPs, like you can automate, like we're actually like doing things like automations, like all these sorts of things um, you know, in like minutes, then you're gonna win. And so, you know, you have to kind of shift your mindset on these, on the way the timelines with which things get done, I feel.
SPEAKER_02So this is interesting because you know, in the old in the legacy timeline, we felt that there was uh a velocity or a tempo of getting things done, right? And our behaviors outside of production or outside of work uh were built around those. And now I'll give you a perfect example. We're doing some stuff. And I worked a lot uh over the past couple days more than I normally do, but I I think I was able to get about two weeks worth of legacy production done in about two days. And this isn't pure synthetic output, this is synthetic that gets massaged and reworked. Like this is me participating with it, not just hitting a button and letting it happen, like final output in two days. That opens up I mean, the first thing when you were saying that, I was I was thinking there's gonna be a lot of people who, if they start using this, they're gonna say, Oh, I've run out of things to do. Right? Oh, I got it all done. So it opens up this conversation about business owners and employees and consultants needing to be much more um intentional about a a broader plan. Because if this thing can eat a you know, your small, your weekly plan in a day, and now you're out of stuff to do, you're not out of stuff to do. You just haven't thought ahead. You haven't built out your timeline, your strategic execution plan for longer than this week or next week. So i i is that did you encounter any of that or or do you have any feedback perhaps on where to go with that?
SPEAKER_00I know it's kind of a I I think of some weird stuff. So no, I don't think it's that weird. I I think it's a good question. I think there's you know validity to that. I mean, you know, I don't I think what one thing I I one idea that kind of struck me early on was that AI doesn't it doesn't make us less creative because there's a there's this knock kind of right out the gate from people that like, oh, we're gonna just you know outsource our thinking to AI. We're gonna uh you know, we don't like creative types and you know don't have to be creative anymore. They tell AI. But I think that's BS. I think it unlocks what I would call like a meta-creativity, which means instead of having to like you know uh burn all those calories in your brain about the right word choice or the right image to use or the right whatever it is, it's like that part's handled, so now you can zoom out. It's really like the holy grail, right? Like everyone's always been talking about this forever of like the whole you know, work on your business and not in your business. And it's like this is like one of the most enabling things to be able to do that. Um, I mean, probably the most enabling thing of our lifetimes. And so, you know, I I and if you look at it that way, then nothing really changes because it's sort of like, all right, what are your you know, your goals, your objectives as a business, like your KPIs, where you're trying to go? I mean, maybe you're expediting those timelines, like what you wanted to accomplish in five years, you now try to accomplish in a year. Um, you know, but to me, like if you didn't have a clear picture or vision of where you're going and and or your vision was small, um, and I don't I mean I don't mean that in like a demeaning way. It's just sort of like if your vision is like a lifestyle business, right? Then you might get there really fast. And but you know, cool, congratulations. You know, like go write the novel you want to write, you know. Like, I mean, like I I I so as far as I've experienced that, I mean we're we're doing a lot of stuff, right? We have uh like two kind of active SaaS, like SaaS projects slash products right now, an agency. We're launching some different brands and things. Um, we've got the training and things, but you know, I found myself over the last couple like Christmas, New Year's, yeah, you know, having a good amount of time because I've got an a a good team and then we've got good processes, and we're using AI for all this stuff, and so um you know I'm doing some wild like wild stuff. Like I'm uh I mean I'm writing a book, I'm doing essays and things like that. Kind of like a lot of intellectual things that like I've wanted to do, but I feel like I never had the time. But now it's like I actually have the time to do it, which could then have even more of an impact, right? Then um and so yeah I think it I think really that's the way people should should view it more. You know, then versus like I guess that's a great way to not have anything to do. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So inside your team you mentioned that you're a process driven company. It's the only way to be able to get you know as much done as you guys are getting done. But where did you start with the introduction of AI into the process side of your business?
SPEAKER_00Yeah so I mean you know it started with copywriting first and foremost because that's you know a core competency and it's one of those high value skills. And so you know but even that was really interesting because okay like for those who are watching who don't know like what a a sales letter is right or a video sales letter essentially it's like an infomercial script it's online but they're like six seven eight thousand words long very um specifically structured a lot of like nuanced and all of that and so you know we were like all right we're gonna we should be able to write a lot more of these because of AI right but we had to kind of go through a lot of processes there where essentially you know the I don't want to get too in the weeze on just copy so I want to talk about other places besides that but basically from kind of like you know using AI for an outline and some of the research then giving to like then we were paying writers $5,000 per VSL or video sales letter where we used to you know pay a lot more but then there it still wasn't that good. And so basically it's at the point now where we have like an internal SaaS where it's like put in 20 inputs push button boop there it is push button boop it's been copy chief which means it's been edited and improved right and it's like so there's a lot there there's like so it started off with like how do we do this like what are the prompts what's like the engineering all that and then it became like how do we automate this right how do we um you know create like an actual software that you know enables us to do this even more efficiently and there's a lot of cool things to solve within that realm. It's actually very difficult to do for my you know I don't think anyone's really solved it as well as we have there's a few other people doing things like and this it's awesome. I'm not trying to say that as a slight to them but we just you know put a lot of work into that um but you know then it becomes like okay well what about everything else? So all right emails right every company you have to be a copywriter your your company almost certainly sends out emails so you know if we're gonna email our our lists a different list of kind of buyers and and prospects every single day like okay what does that look like? How are we generating emails efficiently and effectively we have like two people who are sort of in charge of writing emails but if they start trying to do it manually we yell at them. So kind of going back to what you and I talked about a little bit maybe before we were recording but it's like because the the biggest uh challenge of adoption I think is like you show people this better way and they're like this is amazing but old habits die hard. So then they sort of start to go back right and and so you know like another example would be like on the the those sales letter things it's like I hired two people taught them my processes once they were really dialed in but before we had it like kind of push button automated level and um this guy came from a financial background actually and it was two like health sales letters two infomercial scripts right um and in the first week he wrote like basically two and a half in his first five days and he's never been health you know kind of for a like a supplement type of thing before and he's like and and they were good. I'm like yeah like we we sat through it I mean I'm like this is amazing and then the next one took like 14 days and it's like why it's because then he like and I and he had to go travel back to like Baltimore to to pack up his stuff and move down here to Miami. So I wasn't in office with him and he basically started going down rabbit holes and kind of diverging from the process and all of these things and so we had to be like hey man like you know I get it but like trust the process you don't you you know you're you're now making this way harder than it has to be right um and so you see that a lot. Uh but then other examples you know like like we have a really great COO and she was kind of she loves Quad now but it took her a while but now it's like every single thing that we do right every video um every transcript every meeting like we've got otter running there's other transcript you know um AI transcription tools that like I can't imagine I know Zoom does it too but like not using something to have a transcript of every single call you do in every single meeting. We do that and then you can put it into like again you know Zoom can do it. Loom does it if you do a screen recording um but like then we'll you know she'll put it to Claude like summarize it you know an hour long transcript an hour long call two hour long call summarize it what are the key takeaways like what are the you know action items here who had what what was said right now take it and like do a a Slack message to like our leadership team or an email that kind of like summarizes the key points talks about who took on what responsibilities when they said they're going to like all these things and so now she's able to like you know just be so efficient with it. So things like that are just really really valuable from an efficiency standpoint.
SPEAKER_02Have you guys taken as far taken it as far as once that output's there that that automations take over and they start doing this for the the administrative person or whatever?
SPEAKER_00Yeah I mean we we're playing with that stuff and I I can't tell you that we have that so dialed in but that's definitely where it's going um there are a lot of like like certain certain things that yeah there are like you know if it's like a research thing or like generating documents or things like that. You know there's other processes where we're still you know there's some human touch points in it.
SPEAKER_02But I mean realistically that is probably more our fault for not you know not making it how much efficiency can we get you know it's like at some point. So one of the questions you you mentioned that these um these copywriters are going back to their old ways and I would imagine that any business owner or or employee or whoever they they're gonna learn this stuff they're gonna come back to the team and say oh my gosh you got to use this stuff and everybody's gonna look over their shoulder and go, oh that's cool and then they're gonna go back to you know hitting rocks the old way any advice I mean trust the process was a a fantastic bit of of advice but any advice for business owners who may encounter I expect them to encounter that but what would you tell them?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean I think there's a a few things I mean it it's it's tough and it depends on the size of your organization. Like you know in my case I'm I'm building this team down here and um you know we're actually hiring for at least three more positions.
We have a call tomorrow where you know we might bring on a pretty big new kind of agency client which will be nice if I hire you know three more people on top of that. So you know and I want people in office which is funny in this age of remote work and AI but I just find that there's a lot of value to that. But um yeah but I'm but I am hiring very intentionally for people who are like already using AI that are excited about it. So I think you know moving forward like being proactive about that is really important right um you know as far as like the people who've been with you for a long time who maybe uh are more resistant um you know it's it's it's tough. I mean I think one clear thing you can do and I think Eddie Maloof said this I think Hermozy Alex Hermose said something similar but essentially telling them like look if you embrace this stuff and become more efficient like your job is safe. If you don't embrace this stuff is where your job's not safe, right? Because I think I think part of the there's part of it's like a stubbornness of like you know teaching an old dog new tricks and part of it's like a fear that's going to replace them like well if I do a good job with this say like they want it to not be good because if it's good it could mean that they're replaceable. And so I think you know if you communicate to them no it is good and it can make you great um you know then it could help alleviate some of like the fear and concern right um yeah and you know and and I and I'll probably there's other positive reinforcement things of like if they get stuff done way faster I mean you have to be careful with this you want to set an expectation of like they're now suddenly only working half the time but like some of the times right be like hey great job you know what you use the AI you did exactly what I asked like this looks really good. You know like I want you to see the fruits of your labor like take the next two days off or something like that. Or like you know if they're like a W-2 employee who that's valuable to them, right? You have ways to incentivize them to sort of see like the reward of it. Or maybe they have like a a passion project within the company saying they want to pursue that you're they don't have the resources or the time right and you're like hey this is great now that you are so efficient with this like let's talk about that that thing that you know you were even really excited about right and how can we use AI to do it in the most efficient way. I mean like that's really valuable and we're doing that internally for sure there's there's things where a lot of stuff I would have said no to as like a leader and CEO of of you know a bunch of different companies like I now say yes to because I'm like but the but the caveat's like how do we test this out like an MVP in the most efficient way possible uh you know and with AI we can do that. And then I guess I'm excited then they're trying to engage with AI, figure out how to use it, how to use these processes or learning more even if you know the the test doesn't result in the outcome they were hoping for now they have these uh these new skill sets and now they're thinking that way. So that's another really um really valuable way.
SPEAKER_02You brought up a couple of good points. First off that that like incentive or rewards program even if it's only occasional great idea. And when when we're working with companies one of the first things we tell them is that look if you're gonna get this this AI initiative team together, you better screen them and make sure that they're already
using the tools and that they're enthusiasts because otherwise you're gonna get somebody that wants to see failure. They want to keep things the way that they are because of fear because of of misunderstandings. And the way that I've heard what you were saying the way that I've heard that quote is AI is not going to take your job. Somebody who knows AI will take your job. Yeah exactly the way that you guys are handling it is is fantastic. So outside of work are there like lifestyle applications? I know you were joking about the GPTs that can make menus and stuff like that, but are there I mean I would imagine that an individual who's running a bunch of businesses that you have resources that need to be deployed and by resources I mean investment opportunities or bandwidth for your attention and things like that. Do you use the tools to help you um prioritize or explore like of all the roads open to me which one is the best choice? Do you do anything like that strategic?
SPEAKER_00You know I've I've I've played with doing that. You know most of the time it's it's more like it's like ideation. It's more like about testing ideas and they don't have to be related to to business but like I'm like you know I'm like an avid reader and um so and like you know right now I'm reading a bunch of books from sort of uh Doomerists like the kind of people who are like very educated who are very afraid of like AI and biotech and all that kind of stuff right and I really try to read which I'm not a Doomerist I'm I'm a I'm like an optimist and like I think innovation solves all of our problems but not all of them but I mean ultimately we innovate out of problems we don't sort of hide from them right and that's my philosophical orientation to the road but you know they'll they'll elicit interesting thoughts right and there's things where you want to kind of experiment out or you're like all right well what would like what does that look like what is like the long tail of this idea and so I'll go to like Claude or usually it's Claude and I'll kind of ask a question be like what what am I not considering? What are like rebuttals? What are different angles to this right? Or um you know if I'm using GPT 4 with like a Dolly or whatever like can you do a visual representation? Like what is if we were trying to like to encapsulate what we just talked about into like a picture or an image or a graph or whatever it is that could like really you'll represent this what would that look like? And so I I use it like as an intellectually curious person to like symph like synthesize data, things of that nature. You know I think yeah occasionally I've used agent GPT to go down rabbit holes. I mean I saw this is a really bonkery it's not bonkers it was really interesting. Like I saw yesterday this guy had this paper published from uh he was a professor at the University of uh I think it was Louisville and it's basically about under uh underground nuclear testing and it's like impact on climate change and I'm like well I've never even heard of that and so you know I kind of found that paper and I started Googling looking at other papers and um you know there's a bunch of really interesting stuff there about like the environmental consequences of like like not nuclear energy but like you know detonating tons of nuclear bombs under the ocean for like you know many decades. It's like it kind of makes sense that that would have some environmental impacts. And so what I'm gonna do I haven't done it yet is um you know probably have agent GPT or another kind of auto GPT process like go compile like every study can and um you know do an analysis of it for me and like look at the data. And so you know if I had an investment thesis I would definitely do the same thing. You know I I probably wouldn't base my you know investments purely on AI at this point. Yeah which by the way though this is a one more this is a really funny aside but I'm in like a fancy football league with a bunch of other marketers and stuff right and uh you know we have our draft and like this this year I uh I like basically couldn't make it so I had it like the you know the and I'm like well you know AI is getting really good so I'll let the AI do the auto draft and it drafted this team and I'm like I look at the team and I'm like oh my god I hate everybody on this team like you know it's a funny story about how AI is not that good yet blah blah blah. Long story short last week I won the league and I'm like maybe I'd be I'm the only person who like auto drafted with like yo Yahoo's AI. Now I made some moves I would give myself a little bit of credit but um you know so going back to maybe it's the same thing with investments where so I'm like you know I'll try to outsmart the AI and it would actually be better just if it if I just did what it told me to do.
SPEAKER_02You know it's it's curious you've mentioned a couple times that Claude is your default what what do you identify as the difference? Because those Claude and GPT of course there's Bard and Bing but most people are going to be familiar with Claude and GPT what are the what's your interpretation of the differences between the two and why you would use one over the other?
SPEAKER_00I just think that Claude's um document analysis is like is superior. Like I've if I take a PDF of really anything and I put it into you know GPT 4 even like the sort of larger context window um whatever it is I just find that the analysis and the outputs that I'll get um are just really inferior to Claude. If I give Claude um you know and he's done some tests on this too where essentially anything up to I forget the token limit but I think it's over 10,000 tokens. I want to say it's 12 or 15,000 tokens um which is essentially eight to ten thousand words. Like it essentially like retains and understands like all of it, right? And then if you uh you know Cloud 2.1 goes up to like 200,000 plus tokens or whatever. And again for people tokens are like you can kind of think of them as like characters or or words or whatever. It's not an exact uh equivalency but it's sort of you know the way to think of it. You know after that like it it sort of understands like a lot of the beginning a lot of the end and the middle it like is sort of less concrete on right and there's weird things where at 5000 tokens it gets a good amount of the middle and at 70 whatever. But um it just tends to retain and seem to understand more completely um you know PDFs and things like that than uh you know GPT does at this point. And so that's the primary reason um you know for it at this point now. And then it just seems like you know when I have thoughtful conversations with Claude like I'll give you an example I was talking about um I was thinking about like the limit on intelligence. This is not to get super esoteric and philosophical but I was you know people talk about runaway AI and right like um sort of super intelligence and all these things and I was kind of thinking about how like if we're talking about like you know AI continue to get smarter and exponentially uh improving and and kind of like you know like an ongoing exponential reinforcement loop of it becoming smarter and smarter and smarter um you know we as humans are gonna we can't even comprehend it. So all these numerous you know books from Oxford philosophers are kind of valueless in a way. So it's like if if I tell anyone watching or listening to the podcast like imagine you know what it would be like to be two times more intelligent than you can kind of do that right? Yeah. But if I'm like now imagine if you're a million times more intelligent like it's it's meaningless. You can't even do it right a trillion times more intelligent. So anyway I shared I wrote some thoughts I shared it with um you know GPT4 like whatever the the most advanced current model of it is and it's kind of like well I can't I don't have any thoughts like I'm in you know whatever like all that kind of stuff and I shared with Claude and Claude's like you know wow that's really interesting you know and it kind of gave me like a lot of nuanced um you know feedback and and we had like a conversation about it. And so Claude just seems a little bit more dialed in for you know and again but but I'm not like it it could change right that's the the thing it it sucks but I'm a sorry Claude sorry anthropic but I'm a mercenary so if something comes along that's better I would just switch to that right you have to be very agnostic what right now with these tools.
SPEAKER_02That was my experience as well that Claude tended to put out the the creative output was better from Claude so now it's interesting I want to go back to the the the impact of nuclear testing on the environment out without the agents and without these models what would that would you have first off would you even had the luxury of time to be able to explore compressing that learning curve and second question how much time do you think that saved you for you to be able to say okay I've gathered enough data to have an opinion now yeah I mean it in general like it it would it have been possible like you know yes but it would have taken me a lot of time um so how much like I mean I'd say on average and I'll compare it to like when I go to write copy because we do there's a lot of research involved in that so it's a really good concrete example um but yeah that this nuclear one works too but basically if I was really trying to to understand something you know you're probably talking about 10 to 20 hours of research that I can typically do in like an hour now.
SPEAKER_00And by me it's honestly letting AI run in the background and I'm doing other things. And a lot of that's also just running prompts and AI stuff right I'm sort of like the
conductor you know just sort of pulling little um levers. So you know and if you amplify that over you know I mean I definitely save like hundreds and hundreds of hours a month um at least you know as far as like efficiencies go and things is pretty insane. And so that point I don't know if I would have had time sorry to finish that thought. Yeah yeah if I before that would have to be like a hobby. Yeah and then it's hard to even have the time because it's like if you're you know doing a lot of intensive stuff you're working on the business you're are working in the in the business you're you're doing all these things I mean and then you're exhausted. And that's one one of the really important things I I would note is like um because like I found that like going back to a creative like a really like like really creative tasks like take a lot of brain power right you're spending a lot of mental energy like your your brain you know it it uses something like 80% of the calories you take in right it's like that's and so you you'll hit this wall for like really creative tasks after a few hours. But what I found is like when I'm kind of automated of AI and I'm still being creative because I'm like seeing stuff and I'm like oh that's interesting put that together but I can go way longer too that's the crazy thing. So I could you know not that I do this every day but I could go for like 12 hours or 15 hours because it's not as mentally taxing it's more like oh that's interesting put that together. Right? So it actually really uh helps you conserve mental fuel as well.
SPEAKER_02You know now that you mention it I I didn't even consider that but that's how I was able to work for 14 hours the other day and knock out a week's worth of work in one day. Yeah. Interesting concept because the brain does use most of the calories and all that good stuff. And this concept that of of any type of intellectual query that you may have where you're able to dive in business owners if you're not interested in you know uh understanding the bigger mysteries of the universe apply the same thing to a business model or a concept in business or anything like that. You don't have to go get uh you know buy the thousand dollar course necessarily and go through it over two weeks you can get the general idea and these models will allow you to do the iterations and to the point where after one session you're like okay I understand that now how do I apply it to my business? Oh how do I apply it to my business right?
SPEAKER_00Let me give one cool concrete example that has anything to do with copy that will probably hopefully be valuable. So like I mentioned we have a couple like SaaS things. One's like a a Ford public facing like um it's sort of like a freemium model um and then one's like that sort of uh you know internal like uh sales letter writer thing and then we're working on a few others but uh you know so we hired like a CTO and he's like a really accomplished guy uh he's CTO of two different companies that got acquired for a lot of money uh paying a lot of money uh and you know my COO and I were like kind of felt like there's this sort of um gap on like project management where sort of like we're not getting like reporting on these sort of um you know specific things with like the developers well like you know why are we not getting these clear reports and whatever it is. So we're kind of sitting there talking I'm like dude let's just go look at like and went to Claude but I'm like you know hey what is like the org like basically we're like a small SaaS startup. I put we didn't take investment because we're self funding but I'm like you know we just raised like a you know a seed round for like $500,000 or whatever it is like you know what would our org chart look like right it kind of like gave us like this org chart Nice. Like, all right, cool. Right. And it sort of like um had the different tech things. We said we're a SaaS company. And basically then we're like, um, all right, well, what is like a CTO for a company of this size, or maybe you know, that's gonna grow to a bit larger. Like, what would the roles and responsibilities be? It's like and like it gave us like the list. Like, all right, and then we noticed that there was like this other, like it was like a lead development lead, I think, or or something like that. And we're like, well, what's the difference between the CTO and the development lead? And basically what we found was that if you looked at the checklist for what a CTO should be doing, you know, again, this is based on Claude, but it's it's Claude's showing data from you know a lot of places. Trillions. We're like, we're like, oh crap, like this guy's actually like nailing it as a CTO, right? All the things that it's saying he should be responsible for, he's he's literally doing every single one of these things. The problem is we want him to be doing this role over here that we didn't even know existed until we asked. Now, like seeing what this I'm like, we just need to hire that person to have them interface with the CTO, um, and then our problem solved. And it literally was like this thing that was causing all this stress, and like, did we make the wrong hire with this guy and all these sorts of things? To suddenly we're like, you know, it was so clear and like an instant. Um, and it was just such a valuable. So going back to like yeah, more practical use cases, uh, even things like org charts, role clarity, uh things like that, are just it's really helpful for that.
Yeah. So as we're wrapping up here, what would be for those who were listening to this, and maybe they've they've tried it, because I know a lot of people that said, Oh yeah, I tried it, but it wasn't very good, right? They didn't have that oh moment. What's any advice for a business owner or an employee or a coach consultant who's out there that hasn't uh had that oh moment? What would you advise them to do to take advantage of this?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that you know, there's a a few things perhaps. I mean, you know, you have to think about it. There's okay, there's there's the intern principle, which um you know people may have heard of, but I pretty I feel like we we like originally Mario, who you know, like I think he's like the he was the first person I heard say it, and it's become a little bit more popular, but um which is essentially treating it like an intern, right? So if you have an intern, you know, like, hey, go bring me a report on XYZ, and the intern brings you the report, most likely you're gonna be like, hey, all right, thanks. Good first attempt. Like, here's what I like, here's where you didn't talk about this at all. I don't understand why. Like, uh, can you go back and you know now address these things? And you know, if you you do it that way, I think the one of the fundamental mistake that people are really new to look large language models make is they kind of treat it like Google where they ask a question, expect an answer, and if the answer is not that good, they're like, oh, I guess it's not good. But yeah, um, you know, if you have more of that nuance conversational, right? It's conversational AI. Um, and you're like, hey, thank you, but here's what I was looking for. How do you, you know, can you tweak this? Can you go more in depth about this? Can you uh structure your answer this way, right? So getting a little more nuance will generally get you much better results. So that's that's number one. Um and it really is like the quality of the outputs is dependent on the quality of the inputs, right? So um, you know, generally if you give it more specificity, this is again where I like Claude, because you can give it a document, like, hey, summarize this, like what are the key points, right? And then use those in your next prompt to give more context. Nice. And you'll get a lot better uh, you know, outputs. And then, you know, there are kind of tools. I mean, I don't, I'm not you can like we have like free adcopy.com. I didn't I'm not trying to plug that, right? But the point is that's okay, it's it's you know, it's just like a like I said, it's like a freemium SaaS where the whole idea was like copies. Free free copy add copy.com, yeah. Um, and we're adding you know a lot of stuff to it. We've got like a really cool market research uh thing that my partner Mario created called Build a Buyer, where it's like sort of uh psychographic research. Nice. Um you sign up, you get like 10 credits, you get 10 new credits every month for free, and then when you refer people, you can get more credits and stuff like that. But um, you know, I bring that up as an example for like if you want to see like for kind of a promotional ad, email, whatever, or the the psychographic research, like you know, people are generally really impressed, and it's and it's free. And the goal is not with that to like like we we we added some paid options for people who want more credits because people were asking, and we have a bunch of other really cool plans for it. Um, but part of the goal really was just like give people exposure to like what it looks like because we basically have our prompts you know in the middle that you can't see um these templates and stuff, and so you fill out some inputs, it gives you like really good ads. So, but even if it's not free ad copy, like you know, find some really valuable test out some different tools and things like that that accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. Um, and you know, like now you're gonna have like the whole the GPT store, right? The chat GPT store, whatever. We'll see which I'm pretty ambivalent about that myself. But there might be some cool, I think there will be some cool ones on there where you might get really cool outputs with it. I just don't know that, you know, 2% of my stuff on there. But yeah, there's there will be some cool ones, I think.
SPEAKER_02Most of them will be garbage. But so I don't want you to hesitate to talk about what you're doing because you're doing cool stuff. So do you mind kind of sharing with people some of the projects that you're working on as far as the AI-powered content and copy generation? And by the way, full disclosure, I'm actually a client.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Came out a cold funnel. I mean, I know who you are, but I came out one of your funnels. I started with the maybe the 27 prompts.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the copy codes, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yep. So I'd love for you to share maybe some of those uh opportunities for other people to plug in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure, man. Well, I appreciate that. I mean, yeah, I think you know, free ad copy is a really cool one because again, it's a pretty easy sign up. It it like it it kind of works like magic. You know, you put your inputs in, you'll you'll get ads and and emails and whatever. Um you know, we have like some other kind of low-ticket things like the 27 copy codes is $27, and it's basically 27 very in-depth like prompts where people can uh you know plug and play and and you know get for marketing, I guess. Um and then you know, we have we're doing a lot, but one of the other cool things we're working on that we'll have pretty soon is this like uh AI CMO uh kind of program where going back to automations the idea there is like when it comes to like kind of you know marketing and and whether that's like copy, email list monetization, uh you know, advertisement, like running ads, media buying, whatever it is. Like typically there's some bottleneck there, but also typically an automation can solve it. And so the idea is when people come in, we help them sort of figure out where those bottlenecks are, and then we actually give them like the specific playbook with like the specific automations that they can then kind of install into their business that just rapidly solve whatever that bottleneck is so that they can grow and scale more.
SPEAKER_02So if you need beta testers, I'm very interested in that because I I I love what you're doing and the way that you guys are thinking about applying AI into your business processes. So, no, no pressure, of course, but if you wanted like um legit feedback, because we're doing some software development over here and using primarily no code, and I've never created software before, and it's a testament to the ability of an individual like me who's not a software expert to be able to communicate with a a one-man team that can now go, hey boss, what do you think about this within a few hours, right? MVP is built. So pretty incredible stuff. Um will that be a service that like an individual is augmented by AI, or will it be I give it my inputs and it spits out like proposed automations and stuff?
SPEAKER_00To start, it'll be um kind of get done with you. So it'll be like a 10-week or 12-week type of program. Um kind of the coaching training, like the step-by-steps, like you know, the help of implementation. Um, probably priced around like three or four thousand dollars. Like we're gonna add more and potentially the price might go up, right? Um and then um, you know, we're working on like you know, our to be honest, I don't mind saying, I mean, one of one of our goals on the SaaS side is like essentially really to automate everything though, to that to that point, right? So it's like we have free ad copy where right's like great ads, right? Well then the next thing is like, all right, cool, turn into a video ad, push the button, and it's like right AI generated, great video ad background, whatever it is. Like you upload your product and the product is you know, um, you know, in there, like we have a spokesperson, you can clone them like you would have Hey Gen or something like that. We can talk about that, like now they're in there. Um, right now you're like, all right, cool, like you know, deploy to my my ads manager on Facebook and you know, optimize ads been boop, like all right, cool. Um, you know, we need a landing page, like we need copy, right? Like I really want to create like the full kind of middle like like like it's not middle layer technically is a different means saying different, but but call it a middle layer, right? Where it's like I'm not gonna be able to create the new Shopify, um, but creating sort of like the the ecosystem of like basically where you can automate every part of like marketing and launching something um that then integrates with a Shopify or funnels or uh you know whatever platform people use or custom through APIs, like um that's what we're kind of building towards.
SPEAKER_02So, you know, I love it. And I'm for those of you who aren't AI enabled at this point, if you understood what he just said, uh a one-person team now has the basically the heavy lifting of the CMO role handled. And if you can replace I don't know, what whether HR operations, whatever the other functions are of your business with a tool like what Stefan is talking about related to marketing, I want you to start to see, oh my gosh, I really like I don't need other I'm not that's a stretch, but I don't need other people on my team necessarily, or as many people on my team, which is pretty impressive. So we're gonna have all your social handles and everything popping up on the screen and down in the the show notes, but is there a particular channel where you feel like you're expressing yourself the best where people should follow you to really learn more about you?
SPEAKER_00Uh I mean to be honest with you, I think the the two best are like, you know, my email list and and you know Twitter, aka X. I mean, I'll be honest with you on X, I'm I'm I'm all over the place. Like this sort of my my cathartic, like you know, I can go be real. So, you know, you'll see me kind of just talk about random stuff there. Like if you like, you know, I don't know. But that's that's my favorite platform right now, to be honest with you. I just think it's like there's the the flow of information is is so fast paced, you know. Um, so you know, I think probably yeah, Twitter Xwitch, I think it's just that Stefan Georgia, but uh we'll pop it in there. To get on the email list, just go to freeadcopy.com and subscribe. Yeah, if you sign up for free ad copy, like you'll be on like um we have you know an email, we've send out emails to people who sign up for it. Um I have like a personal list that if you go to stepanpaulgeorgia.com for slash subscribe, uh, you'll get on that one. That one's where I kind of share more of like basically I write the ones that go to my email list. I don't write the ones that get sent a free copy. It's the difference, right?
SPEAKER_02I'm heading there after this recording finishes. I'm gonna go subscribe. You'll have a new subscriber, plus all the people who will be subscribing from this. So, Stefan, anything you want to say in closing? I think this was fantastic, and I I I really appreciate your time and being uh as open to the questions and answering those.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it's my it's my pleasure, and and yeah, I love talking about this stuff. And uh, you know, the only thing I would say is for people who aren't embracing uh the stuff, it just you have to, right? It's like every I know that sounds like okay, what does that mean? But it's like I don't have to say about Saint Cliche, right? Every every technological revolution, there's people who are resistant, who kind of give you all the reasons why it won't succeed, who you know, worry about job loss and things of that nature. And every single time it ends up being like for the better and you know, being a net uh promoter, like a net positive, um, and leading to growth. And you know, it's just no different here. And the fears about, okay, well, artificial general intelligence, people will be out of work. It's like only if people don't have you know big, exciting things that they want to accomplish. If they want to have big and exciting things they want to accomplish, then you know there shouldn't be a job loss, there should be more, right? Right, we're hiring more people, not less. Now, to be fair, right, we're more efficient
as well. So if copywriting, like our margins on that agency went from like 30% to like 80%, right, which is phenomenal, but that frees it up to where we're like now, like we can pursue all these other things, we can hire other people for these projects, we can do this stuff, right? And so um, you know, ultimately, like it's it's just for what it's worth, if you thought I said some valuable things and you should really take me at my word that like this is not like a fad. There's not like it's it it if if it froze now, if we didn't improve, if GPT 5 stinks, it would still be like absolutely essential that you use what we have today like constantly, right? And it would be wild for you not to, and you'll have and there's a window of time where a lot of the people are gonna be resistant and that will go away. But this is to me like the most I don't know, opportunity-filled time um you know, of any of our lifetimes, I think, as far as what we can do entrepreneurially. So it's really exciting.
SPEAKER_02That's great advice, and you guys are on fire over there. I had no idea how busy you were. So, brother, virtual high five, boom, blessings to you and the family. And uh again, thank you so much for taking time out of your extremely busy day to share with us, and um, I'll be in touch. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Chris. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Well, thanks to our producer, Evan Desponier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle usingai at work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.