Hey everybody, Chris Daigle here, and you're listening to another episode of Using AI at Work. Today we're in for a real treat because I've got Jonathan Green joining me. Jonathan is a best-selling author, AI expert, and full-time entrepreneur who really geeks out on all the latest AI tools. In this episode, Jonathan shares his entire AI-powered workflow for producing his top-rated artificial intelligence podcast. From automating guest outreach to creating social clips with a single click, he reveals all the tools and their use cases that save him hours every week. If you've ever thought about starting your own podcast or YouTube channel, you definitely don't want to miss this one. All right, let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Stable. 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, I'm very excited to have Jonathan Green on the podcast today. Jonathan is the host of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, best-selling author, AI expert. He and I had the chance to kind of geek out on a lot of tools the last time we spoke, and it was awesome to connect with somebody who's as like tactically familiar with all of the tools and all the moving parts. So we're in for a great treat. So, Jonathan, if you don't mind, take a second and just kind of let the audience know a little bit about yourself and your AI interests. Sure.
SPEAKER_00I've been a full-time entrepreneur since February of 2010 when I was fired from what I thought at the time was my dream job. And I was, I was driving home in a blizzard to my new apartment in my new car that I suddenly couldn't afford. I realized how much power or leverage your boss has over you. And I didn't like that feeling. I didn't want to ever feel that way again. I said, I'm never gonna have a boss again. I can't do this. Oh, I've got to find another way. And that really began my entrepreneurial journey in earnest. And since then, I've really been in the direct response space, just discovering that when you interact face directly with your customers, so many things are possible. And along the way, I've had a lot of adventures. And in the past little over a year now, AI has just become the centerpiece focus because I have just a real natural instinct for it. I have natural affinity for artists official intelligence. I often see, oh, AI could do this, but not that, or people will design a prompt. And I go, I could do a better version. And I have this just lucky or natural ability. Oh, people who design AI think the way I do. So that's really become my passion. First, I was really just implementing and using AI my own way. And then people started asking me questions. And when I explained how I was doing it, it was just easier than everyone else. So then I just moved into teaching that. And that's really become the centerpiece of my business for the past year. Just helping people to see that it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be have a steep learning curve, that you can really use it in effective ways to make short-term gains. You don't have to think, oh, in three or five years make a difference in my business, it can help you right now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Fantastic. You know, it's interesting that intersection of entrepreneurship and AI, because um, with what we do, that's one of the customers that we serve as that individual who's interested in flying the coop, leaving, getting fired from the boss, but now what? Right. So AI is one learning curve. Entrepreneurship is a whole nother learning curve. Which one would you say had the shortest learning curve?
SPEAKER_00Oh, AI, it's much easier to learn. Entrepreneurship has a lot more to it. You know, you have to learn. So I said, one thing that I said is like, I'm gonna build a business online, I'm never gonna have to talk to another person again face to face to grow my business. And that's not true at all. Most money online is from handshake deals and trust. It's way more handshakey than the rest of the world, which was something I had to learn. It's all about who you know. Relationships are probably 90 to 95% of my revenue. So it's really important.
SPEAKER_01That's an astounding figure. So for those people who are listening to this and they kind of have that spark of, man, if I learn this AI stuff, my career trajectory is better. I've got, you know, consulting, whatever it is. What would you and look, man, you've done 300 plus episodes of your podcast. I know that that you have talked a lot about entrepreneurship. What would be some advice for those people who are listening that that they feel like you and me? They're impassioned by AI. They've maybe they've gotten their fingers into it and they're like, whoa, this is this is the difference. This is the new paradigm. What would you advise the budding entrepreneur who was interested in pursuing an AI opportunity?
SPEAKER_00The best way to understand AI is that it's accelerate. You can add it to any type of business model. So people that go through my training, my programs, people I work with, some of them are doing print on demand. And we develop processes to design your shirts faster or to write the description faster so that you can, because that's the bottleneck in your business. You're very creative, you're, and it's actually slower to upload. For me, when I it's easier to write a book than to write the description for the book on Amazon. That's a slower part of the process, which sounds crazy, but there's always something in the process that you go, oh, this is the part I don't like to do. Or maybe when you have a podcast, you love doing the podcast, you hate doing the show notes. There's always a part of the process where there's an inefficiency or slowdown. So with every type of business model, AI in and of itself doesn't have to be a business model. Sure, I teach AI, but you can use AI to do LinkedIn, you can use AI to do YouTube, you can use AI to do anything else, all the traditional online business models. It's just an accelerator. I think of it as that button they have in the car and fast and the furious that you push nause and the car just goes faster. Yeah. So the other great thing about AI is that it lowers the barrier to entry. When I started out, to make a one-page website that gave away a free gift and captured an email address would take me 12 hours. I had to do it in Dreamweaver, which means HTML, and I don't know how to code. So I would find someone else's page, download it, and then copy and paste lines until I got the result I want. And it was really hard. Now I could deploy a landing page in three to five minutes. I can use AI to write the copy, a page building tool to design the page, and it's very quick. And I don't have to do anything with code anymore. Everything is copy and paste or drag and drop. So as technologies, different technologies have gotten better, the barrier to entry is lowered for each of those areas. With AI, the barrier to entry to copywriting, marketing, brainstorming, mentoring, they've all lowered. You now have access to all of these different tools, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's great because you can have any tool you want, but it's also you have any tool you want, and it's very easy to get spoiled for choice. That's why it takes so long to make a decision at Cheesecake Factory. That menu is too long. You go, you're on people ask, what page you want? Page 36. I'm not even, I'm still on the intro. I'm still reading the backstory of Cheesecake Factory, and it takes a really long time to order. That's why most restaurants have that single one-page menu. It helps people make a faster decision. That's the the good and the bad about AI is that it could do almost anything. But really, as an entrepreneur, you can still choose whatever path you want to choose. And it can allow you to enter all these spaces that before you're like, I couldn't do it. Oh, I don't know how to build a website, I don't know how to edit a podcast, how to edit a video, all those things that used to be hard or I would have to hire a team for. Now AI could do them very quickly.
SPEAKER_01It's a fantastic point. So anybody who's listening to that, it's the truth. It's what used to take, you had to learn a new skill, right? I had to learn HTML and the Dreamweaver tool itself. Now it's as simple as going to your browser and typing in AI website builder, AI pitch deck builder, AI, just try it. If you're looking for a tool out there, just whatever the tool function is and just type AI somewhere in that search term, you'll be surprised. There's a paradox of choice for sure. So, Jonathan, in in particular, for somebody that was getting started, do you have some tools that are your favorites that you think that don't have the short learning curve? You get the big impact, the quick result that's AI powered.
SPEAKER_00I'm really a chat GPT guy. I could do almost any task with Chat GPT, even that other tools do. I was having a conversation with one of my coaching clients saying, she's like, I want a specialized tool for each task. I want a tool that does one thing and a different tool that does the next thing. I was like, I could do every single thing inside of Chat GPT. I can also do them inside of Claude. I could do them inside of most LLMs because they're built the same way because they're built by the same people. That's really the core skill that I think everyone should develop because when you use another tool, you don't realize what's happening. An example is a lot of people, there's so many of these tools that will watch a long-form video like this and generate clips. What's actually happening is a tool scans it, generates a transcript, sends the transcript to the AI tool. The AI tool sends it back with the time codes and says, Oh, we think these are the time codes of the good clips. That's what's actually happening in the back end. When you understand that, now it helps you understand, well, what is this actually worth? Because I can do that myself and find out the time codes of the clips. So what does the tool actually do? It changes the value. When you think it's doing magic, wow, this is worth $50 or $100 a month. When you realize, wait, I could do this on my own, and it will take me five to 10 minutes to get the same result with the same time codes, it's not worth this much. It helps you make better, more efficient decisions. It also helps you to recognize there are a lot of tools out there that are just front ends for Chat GPT or using their API. Some of them are just using Claude API. It's about nine to one. You need to know that so that you can make an effective decision. The real secret, and this is what's really been hidden, unfortunately, is that the learning curve for Chat GPT is very short. You can become a very good user in a single day. If you sit down for eight hours and say, I'm just gonna watch YouTube videos, follow some tweets that have prop templates and just try them. By the end of that eight hours, you'll be one of the best users in the world because most people don't do that. Once you get a feel for how it works and how it talks and how it thinks, then you become a very, very effective user. And that's really the secret is that the learning curve, it's not like learning Dreamweaver or Photoshop. Those take years. Someone's learning Blender or how to edit videos. That's a year-long process, multi-year. You can become a very good Chat GPT user in one day. And those skills translate to every tool. Almost every one of my prompts you can copy and paste into any of the LLMs, the free ones, the paid ones, and get a good result. That's the secret that's been hidden is that it's not hard. You don't have to learn programming, you don't have to learn the language. So the once you have that down, once you've spent a day doing that and you get a feel for what it can do, then you can decide do I want to use a specialized tool or why not do it here? There's a lot of tasks that I do inside of Chat GPT instead of other tools because it's faster, it's easier, and I have a process built up. So I don't need those additional costs and that additional login, that additional process. I can handle it all right there.
SPEAKER_01This is pretty interesting. And again, everybody who's listening, I hope that you just heard that, that you could spend a Saturday with a free account from Claude or Chat GPT, some YouTube videos, and a couple of the the Twitter quote unquote AI influencers. And by the end of that afternoon, you would have a level of confidence that would allow you to introduce that into your role or certainly the conversation that's happening at your your business or your job. So that that was a huge takeaway. So everybody listening, spend spend this Saturday focused on GPT and a couple of tutorials. And let's see who you are by Saturday afternoon. You're gonna be a uh I guess technically almost an expert with the models here. So one of the areas that we talked about this before, um, I launched a podcast, I think uh, you know, I we just released um episode 14. You're at episode 300 plus. There is um a lot of learning that comes from that many repetitions at something. And that also tells me that you were doing this well before you were AI literate, AI enabled, that you were doing it the old way. And now I would imagine that you've probably found, including ChatGPT, you've found some other tools that are supporting the podcast creation, distribution, all that stuff. I have a personal interest in it. I know that there's listeners that are like they want to become uh recognized as an AI subject matter expert in their industry and their domain. Uh, and a podcast is a fantastic way to do that. So, what what has what's the difference between episode one and episode 301 as far as the tools you've been using?
SPEAKER_00When I started my podcast, it was a solo podcast, not an interview podcast. It was just me. I recorded episodes on my phone with a lavalier microphone. I would walk along the beach and do and I was doing five episodes a week. It was a huge amount of work, and I wasn't able to maintain it because um at the time when I started out, I used to write on my books by hand. I then ran into some problems in my eyes, so I had to dictate everything. I couldn't use a computer as much, which meant I have a certain amount of time I can spend talking every week, and I can't go beyond that. So the podcast got pushed down and it became weekly. Over since then it's transitioned and it was an interview podcast for a while. I was thinking about shutting it down until I had a conversation with someone. I was like, you know what? This isn't the direction of my business anymore. I'm not talking to, I don't like the people I'm talking to. Like it's I'm not excited by that. And I was gonna shut it down. He goes, Well, what you can do is just rename it and pivot it. So it used to be called the Surf No Master Podcast, and it was ranked really high. It's really high in listed notes. It's one of the top 2.5 or 2% of podcasts in the world. So it had a listenership, it had a history, and I've renamed it around 30 or 40 episodes ago. And now I talk to people that I'm excited by again. Yeah. And that's really part of it. There's a lot of mistaken beliefs about podcasts. A lot of people think a podcast is a great way to get rich. It's not. It's a real job, it's a lot of work. And there's a whole bunch of things that come with it that you're not ready for. Tons of people try to get on your show. Everyone wants to become a vendor for you. I get messages all the time. Oh, I can fix all the problems. I got a message today. I get messages all the time. Like, oh, your videos stink. I can fix it. And I'm like, why start with an insult? I don't know why, but everyone, that's how almost every vendor approaches me. Oh, your SEO is terrible. I can solve all of your problems. It's like, I don't want to do business with you. I don't want to do business with people that make me feel bad. But people, a lot of people think that's the way to do business. You'll get a lot of cold emails from people that want to be guests on your show, but they don't. It's just some VA sending a copy and paste message that, and if you let it get to you, because it's like they don't respect you enough to look at the title of your show. Yeah. I get it before. Serve to master it can be about anything. My show is called Artificial Intelligence Podcasts. It's probably about artificial intelligence. Yeah. I get so many messages for people that are not relevant at all. Um, and then you also get people that are on the circuit, which means they're just doing as many podcasts as they can, which is fine. I do that as well as a guest. There are a ton of things that I do very strategically to be a good guest that most people don't. I always tell a different origin story. I always tell different variations of my stories. If someone watches all my last 50 podcast appearances, they're going to hear different stories from all of them. There'll be a few parts that are the same, but I try to make it different. I highlight a different part of losing my job or a different part of my transition to AI so that it's unique and fresh. But a lot of guests are just going to as many shows as they can. And if you don't have a strategy for how to grow your show, there's a mistaken belief that the way to grow a podcast is you get guests on, they share it on social media, then you get their audience. It's not true. When is the last time you saw someone's Instagram was pictures of them as guests on someone else's show? You almost never see that. Almost never. And certainly you don't see them showing 50 different shows they've been on because that would be a very boring screenshot. It's just a screenshot of me with this background over and over again. So that belief can be very disheartening. But if you understand there's a real value in it and you have a strategy for it, it could be a really good way to grow your business, to grow your reputation, to form alliances. I, for a long time as an author, thought of every author as my enemy. I don't have a lot of author friends for that reason. I was like, if someone's reading their book means they're not reading my book, I don't want that. When I transitioned to thinking of cooperation and realizing that people write, I read everyone I know who reads business books has a bunch of them. Or if you ever go to someone's house who's like always having relationship problems, they have so many of those books. They have Think Like a Man, Act Like a Woman, they have Men A From Mars, Women Are from Venus, they have all of the different dating books. They don't have just one. And I was like, wait a minute, I read, I don't stick to just one author either. I only read science fiction, but I read everyone. And when I had that revelation, I started seeing it as cooperative. So I really am an alliance builder now. So it's a great way to meet people. And you can get people to talk to you that normally would be a little bit hard. So people that are have a larger audience than yours or are more famous than you. Sometimes it feels weird to approach them, especially online. In person I'm fine, but online sometimes a little strange. But you can actually get access to amazing people when you have the right approach, when you stop thinking about what the person could do for you. I have people on my show that don't always make sense, but I want to talk to them. Yeah. And that's become my guiding light. Yeah. And like I don't always have, I had someone on who makes covers for um the thermostat that uses a combination lock instead of a key. And I was like, this is so interesting to me because he solved a really unique problem. He's an inventor. He solved the problem in a unique way. He sells them online, so he has that part of his business. And there's a lot to be learned from that because he saw a very specific problem, which was people would have the key and lose it all the time. More businesses, large businesses have a lot of problems. People fight over the thermostat. There were a lot of problems with um real real estate. So you're trying to sell your house, the thermostat keeps getting changed, or the real estate agent loses that key. So he said, Oh, I'll just make a combination lock. It solves a problem in a different way. You don't have to worry about losing the key.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Very simple thing. One of my best guests. So interesting, really great to talk to. And that wouldn't have happened before. I'm very selective about my guests. I always have, I'm able to ask these specific questions, like, how are you using AI in your business? What are you doing? And I get the type of guests they want. It's not what people expect. People think I'm just looking for founders, which is the last thing I want. Because a founder is uh one-dimensional. They only, and that's the way it is, they only want to talk about their product, always saying the name of their product, all those things, which is fine. But then if your show just becomes every episode's a commercial. I'm not interested in that so much as the journey and how people are using AI. So a founder is never going to recommend like 10 competing tools. They're just going to recommend theirs. But if you talk to someone like me, I'll tell you every different tool I'm using. I do so. Yeah. Those are a lot of things that I've learned from developing my podcast. And you have to see it as part of a larger business strategy. Initially, the purpose of the podcast for me was to keep my audience engaged in between books. So people would read my first book, Serve No Master. And while I'm working on the next book, they have a bunch of podcast episodes to listen to because usually people, my audience is almost all binge listeners. I get a new listener, they listen to every episode. That's really most of what I get. I don't have as much of the consistent people, but so I always have these massive spikes where I can tell I have a new listener because they've downloaded all of my episodes. So I have a huge spike in listenership. And that's awesome, but that's just the type of person I track. And that's how I am. When I find a new podcast I like, I go through all the old episodes. That's my personality. So I was using it for that way for a long time. And then I was using it to generate traffic, which didn't work. And that's why I was like gonna move away from it. And my business focus now that's changed AI, my podcast has changed I it makes sense. So I use it now really for relationship building. Like we had a great chat yesterday on my show. Yep. And we're gonna become buddies now. It helps me to meet people, and it that's what I kind of think is the best value for it. Some people come on my show and then they want to do a project with me, which is awesome, or I go on someone else's show. Certain shows I do guest shows on, you don't know which show is gonna have a lot of viewers or not. Everyone, the other thing you have to learn is everyone lies about their numbers. Just everyone does in podcasting. Everyone claims they have almost everyone says they have 2,000 downloads per episode. It's always 2,000. I don't know who picked that number, but you'll never hear someone say 2100 and 1900. It's always 2,000. And just seems unlikely. It seems unlikely that everyone's at 2,000. Or I've been on shows where, like, listen, your YouTube video is gonna get 50,000, 100,000, 50, you know, 5 million views, whatever number they say. It's been up to a million. It's never, it never happens. You can get holed into that hype, but shows at that level. Like, I have a friend whose show gets 14 million downloads a month. I was on an early episode of that show in 2008, I think. Guess what? No way would I be on a guest on it now. He's having really made like A-list celebrities, ex-presidents. I'm not in that rarefied air. And so I know what happens at the higher level podcast because I talk to him all the time. We're buddies. I understand the separation of business and friendship all the time. Like last time I had him on my podcast, he had to say to the booking agency, don't charge him the usual fee. We're friends. I was like, oh my gosh, you charge an appearance fee, you're killing it. Wow. Like it's so funny they had to include that message. But so you have to understand the nature of the business and think, how am I going to use this podcast and what's the purpose? How am I going to use it to generate revenue? Yeah, there are some a lot of podcasts that make money now, but if you look at a lot of the bigger podcasts, what type of commercials are they doing? Do you want to run, read those ads? Do you want to read an ad for underwear? Do you want to read an ad for a downstairs shaver for men? That's what all of those shows are doing, which tells you that that's who you or a mat a mattress they mail to your house. It's always, there's always a mattress ad, right? I don't want to do those things. So my monetization model isn't built around that. It's the same reason I don't want to be an influencer, then you're chasing brand deals, which is the word it's a very rough business model because you're always in negotiations and it's always a game, and half the things you have to sell, you don't want to sell. I don't want to do ads for those. Mobile video games that everyone on YouTube seems to have to do. And there's this other thing that I am very careful of, which is my integrity. If your main advertisers are AI software products, you see this on every video game website. Suddenly, every video game is a nine out of 10. There's no bad video games anymore because they're that's just running the ads on the site. They don't have the ability because of the financial relationship. Because if they write a bad ad about a game, that company goes, we're not gonna advertise with you anymore. And now you have no choice. So I'm very careful in how I structure my business model to allow me to like the products I like and really hate on the products I hate on. And I've done both on my channels. I can only do that because of the structure of my business. So that's all built in. I thought about all those things when dying my show. And it took a long time to get there. It's just in the past year that I've been reinvigorated. I have a lot of things I like about my show. There's still challenges, but if you're thinking about starting a podcast, you have to be realistic. You're not going to become a millionaire for the first episode. You're not going to become a millionaire from writing your first book. Those are components, but it's very important to have an additional strategy, which is even if the show doesn't make money in this way, it can make money in that way, or the show can get me this value. When you do that, then it can become a really good part of your business model.
SPEAKER_01A lot of gems in that, first off, everybody pay attention to who's sponsoring the episodes of your favorite podcast, and that most certainly has some influence on the direction of the narrative of that podcast. So just be advised. Um, the second was as you were speaking, I was putting myself in the shoes of somebody who's like, I don't, I'm just learning this stuff. I'm I'm no expert. Nobody wants to talk to me. But here's what I can tell you is that if you are in shipping or you are in the toy industry or something and you're using AI, you don't have to get on the artificial intelligence podcast. You can get on the toy manufacturers podcast because you know a thing or two about domain plus AI. So for those of you who are learning this stuff, to cast off the idea that you have the ability to be a thought leader in your industry. You don't have to be a thought leader in AI necessarily, you have to be a thought leader in your industry. It's not as hard as you think. And I think Jonathan would probably agree with me that experts in generative AI have been doing this for a year and a half, right? Like, like there, it's not like you've got uh Gandalf coming off the mountain and he's been doing generative AI for 50 years. So um learn this stuff, let your domain, your industry know that you're doing this stuff, and there will be opportunities for you to share what you're doing on podcasts. So, Jonathan, if somebody wanted to start a podcast, as crazy as that may sound, what would be, knowing the tools that we have today, what's the the easiest path, the lowest barrier to entry for individuals?
SPEAKER_00I think that there's three pieces to it. The first is the technology for recording your episodes. So I've been using Riverside for a long time. As I told you yesterday, I just discovered I have an account. I have an account with a competitor that I use to script for editing my episodes. You you need to script in your workflow. It's simply the best AI tool there is. It's the best for video editing, it's the best for background noise removal, it's the best for audio enhancing, it's the best screen screen removal tool. They've added all these features, has the best eye fixing when you look down and it fixes that. They've become this really powerful tool and they don't advertise as they're an AI tool. They have an amazing replacement. So I say the wrong word all the time. And if I say the word chapter, but I mean book, I can just type in the word book and it will fix and it will sound like me. That saves me so much time when I'm editing. I do that all of the time. Every single video I publish, I do it, fix at least one word, usually three to five. All of those features are amazing. They also own Squadcast. So I found out because I have a big account with them. They go, Oh, you have a free squadcast account at the highest tier. I was like, oh my gosh, I didn't know that. So I'll probably switch to Squadcast because I end up editing it in Descript anyways. And the process of moving it to Descript is so much faster. So actually, I look at it and go, This will be a faster process for me. It has a feature. The feature that I really look for in recording is one that records locally and then uploads. So when I'm with a guest, if their power goes out, the episode's not lost. That's what I look for. That's and I used to have, I have a lot of power outages. So that's actually something I specifically look for. That's why I started with Riverside. Um, the second thing after that, once you think about that, you want to think about the tools you're using, what type of headphones you're using, what type of speakers using, what type of microphone. You don't have to spend a lot of money, but be prepared to spend at least $200 on your microphone. That at that price point, you're gonna get something really solid. It's gonna make a huge difference. So it's not, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars, like some people say, but $200 for the microphone is worth it because the audio is everything. Once you go through that, those are the two really things you need the software and the hardware. Then it's about getting guests. Um, there's a two ways of doing it. One way is you go after the guests you want, which your feelings are gonna get hurt because some people are gonna say no, but you're also gonna get shocked by the people that say yes. One of the methods I teach for authors, I've taught this for years. I said, find 10 people you'd love to interview for your book and email them. And one of my clients said, What do I do? Nine said yes. I'm a nobody. Why did all nine say yes? I don't know what to do. And I was like, People, if you ask in the right way, people will give you their time. Yeah. Most people, like I've done deals with very, very famous people, really high-level billionaires, people well known, that I can't say their name because it would change the whole podcast. Here, and people say, How do you do deals with them? I'm like, I treat them two things. I treat them like people and I talk about where I'm strong and they're weak. So if I approach a billionaire and talk about money, guess what? That's their area of strength. Yep. But if I talk about raising my kids in another country, boom, for people that are dealing with that, or if I talk about what it's like having kids that are speaking a different language. So I formed a relationship with someone who's very successful because our wives are from the same country. He's not married to that wife anymore, so we lost that relationship. But we could talk about something we have in common. That's really the secret, is I come from the dating world. So I read a lot of books about that. That's what I used to teach. And I wrote a really my first really successful project was teaching women how to get their boyfriends to propose. So all of that knowledge of relationships, it works 10 times better on men. Stuff that's really works for beautiful women, that conversational skill I had to learn how to talk. Oh my gosh, it's so much easier to use that on a nerd like me. So when I go to a conference, I know a couple of things. Like, here's an let me ask you a question. When's the last time someone complimented you? Um, yesterday. You had to think about also yesterday as a shockingly recent answer. For most people, think about how rare it is. For men, we almost never get complimented. Here's the second one I asked when's the last time someone bought you a drink?
SPEAKER_01At an event when I was with my, you know, friends.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So for men, things that happen to women all the time. People offer my wife drinks all the time, compliment my wife all the time. Yep. But for men, if you just walk up to someone and say, Listen, I love what you do. I bought your product. I would love to shoot a testimonial for me just because I want to give you value. And if I could buy you a drink to just show you thanks, that would be awesome. If you say that to anyone, they will say yes. I've never had someone say no to that because you're offering value. If someone doesn't drink, then you go, oh, then I'll let me buy you a snack. That's the alternative is you buy people a piece of cake. I don't drink anymore. So I don't drink, but I've always used that strategy. And it's because no one does that. It's like, wow, that's just nice. And you don't say, I want to ask you a bunch of questions. You don't say that because you're not, you say, I'm not asking. I just want to give you value. When you do that with that mindset of just giving something, people go, Yeah, I'll talk to you. When people do that to me, here's the thing. I wrote about it in my book. People do it to me at conferences, it still works on me. Yeah. It doesn't not work because I know about it. It's like, I don't care. At least you're being nice first. Most people come up to you with an agenda and they have a bunch of questions they want to ask and they just want to take. But if someone gives first, and it doesn't have to be a lot, most people who are really successful are surrounded by people that are not real.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00They're either people I'm working for them a long time or they're um always trying to take value. They don't really have people that are just nice to them for no reason. I have met a lot of celebrities. I have pictures of me with all these really big celebrities. I was in a nightclub in London many years ago, and I walk up to a guy there and I just start talking to him because he's in line next to me. And we're chatting. We end up doing a shot at tequila together. I go back to my friends. My friends are all, how do you know him? And I go, What do you mean? He's the guy next to me in line. They go, That guy plays for England's national football team. The guy's on the same so that you know what I mean? He's on the most famous sport, the most famous team. And they were so shocked. They were like, Why weren't you intimidated? I was like, Oh, because I first I didn't know who it was. Yeah. But more importantly, I was like, I just, to me, it was just a person. And when you treat people like that, celebrities, the reason celebrities are friends with each other is because they treat each other like normal people. They don't act weird. They're not going to try and Instagram each other. They don't ask each other for advice. That's the reason. It's the same reason a lot of musicians stay with their high school girlfriends because they know that she's with them, not because they're famous. There's an integrity there. So if you can generate that, people will talk to you. You can, most really big people will do an interview if you say, listen, I love what you do. I want to share your message with my audience. And most people who are really successful are not treated well in every area of their life. You could, I could probably get every single NASA scientist who was part of the project that landed the first time they landed a probe on a moving asteroid. I bet I can get all of them. Why? Because I what they're not, no one interviews them outside of when it happens. Yeah. People don't ask the right questions because it's news people who don't understand science at all. So they're just like, wow, you did something in space with a rock. How do you feel right now? Like dumb stuff. But if that interests me, I'll have them on the show. I'm like, listen, I want to ask you a question. What did it feel like the five minutes before it happened when you were like, if this doesn't happen, three years of work is down the toilet? That's what I want to know about. Um, I'm very passionate about things like that. So that approach is how you can get amazing guests on your show. Most people that I reach out to say yes. You get the occasional no from someone you want, but then you get over it. It's not a big deal. And usually later they want to be on the show. This is fantastic.
SPEAKER_01So, for those of you who are AI curious and you're learning this stuff, how you use how I interpret what what the suggestions that Jonathan just shared were if you're not passionate about the industry that you're in, that's the first sign that maybe you you need to reconsider, pause and reflect, as Mark Twain would say. Um, but the approach in particular for these individuals, let's say you do want, you're in the toy manufacturing space, you're in the supplement space, whatever it is, you want to go out and find these people. That advice was huge. It's it's not about you elevating your status because of proximity to somebody else. It's about you approaching them and saying, hey, I'm I'm genuinely interested, or I'm genuinely appreciative, or I'm genuinely whatever that positive emotion is that you have with them, let them know that right there. And I can tell Jonathan's a business development expert, whether he knows it or not, done a lot of business development. That type of that's how you build instant rapport with people. You don't ask them for something, you let them know that they're important to you, that they've had an impact in your life. So if you want to be a guest on a podcast and you reach out to those folks, reference a specific episode that you really don't be the people that approach Jonathan and say, um, hey, I'm a heart surgeon. I want to talk about my new stint. Can I get on your audio? Does it have anything to do with AI? No. Well, read the title, man. It's so great point. And also, everybody, his suggestion of D script, Google it. dscript.ai.co, whatever it is. You'll know it when you see it. As somebody who's learning how to use AI tools, that is a tool that you're gonna hear universally, is well used and well liked by anybody who is leveraging uh the power of AI in their video production, content production, and stuff like that. So outside of those tools, D Script, Squadcast, and Riverside, um, once the podcast is recorded, are you and and it's it's ready for distribution, are you using AI to help it get traction or to notify your audience? Or how are you using AI on that part?
SPEAKER_00One thing I do is notify the guest about the episode appearance via AI. So I use an automation that sends out an AI-ridden email. My problem is I'll forget to tell people their episode is out.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00There's so many moving parts. After I record an episode, I have to make the social media clips, I have to post it to YouTube, my audio channel, and I have to post it to LinkedIn for a live stream. I have to do all these moving parts. Notifying the guests is a step I always forget about. I used to have a process where I had a spreadsheet. Every time I would update the spreadsheet, we'd send out an email, but I'd have to do it the week before the episode, the week of the episode. Now, what happens is when you're on my show, once I send you the first email through the spreadsheet, all the emails after that are triggered by the same series of automations. So you get an email when I've got your stuff ready and have your links, then you'll start, which is like your episode is I did it yesterday, I've already finished editing it. You'll probably get an email tomorrow. And then you'll get an email the week before the episode, the day of the episode, a week after the episode, and like a month later, and then I think six months later, it's like, hey, it's six months. It's a good time to remind your audience about your appearance. All of that is automated because that's something very hard for me to do. That's a forgetful part. I also use AI to generate all the clips. Um, I was just shooting a video about this today. I use video, VIDYO, to generate my social media clips. They did an update that is so crazy good. The thing that I look for, and there's so many tools that do this that make social media clips, is that they finally pick the right clips. Most tools pick the wrong clips or middle of sentences. They always, even their tool is doing it. They did an update and they fixed the right thing. A lot of people focus on, well, now we can do what they call hormosy text.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Like everyone wants to look like Alex Hermosy. And it's funny that it's called that because my friend runs his TikTok. My friend is the one who invented that, not him. It's fine. Right. My friend's doing really great running his TikTok. He runs a lot of people's TikToks, but I think that's so funny. But it's not the most important part. There's so many other components, which is the text is more important than what's on the screen. So something that chooses that right first, and they've got that down. So for your episode, the first three it picked were all winners. That saves me so much time. That is a game changer because that's the biggest part of the process is the choosing of the clips. That takes more time than anything. The old way of doing it would be to listen to the episode yourself. That takes a really long time. So now, 30-minute episode, you have to listen for 30 minutes and grab the clips that you want. That's 30 minutes of work. If you have a software that grabs 20 clips, but only three are usable, which is how most of them are, it's still 15 minutes of your time at least. And now that it does that, that saves me so much time. So in the past, I used a script to make clips. It's pretty good for that. I have a process for that, but this is now faster. I'm always looking for what's the fastest process. Same thing with the scheduling. What's the best way to schedule? It has a scheduler built in. You can schedule right in there if you want. I don't love the way the scheduler works, is you have to schedule each different social media platform as a separate step, but it does write the social media text for you that goes below the video. So it does some things right. I wish that I could pick one time and all of the different social media things I could schedule in a just a slightly different way. That's the only thing that I don't like about the tool. And it's like it's a B plus instead of an A plus. So that's a big part of my workflow. Um, I create my show notes using Video V I D Y O. Yeah, dot IO. Love video. Then I also really like to use uh BuzzSprout as my podcast host. Me too. They don't a lot of podcast hosts charge you by file size, and that forces you to compress your files down, and sometimes it causes the audio to not be as good. That's that's Buzzsprout was the first one said, Hey, we'll just charge you by minute, however long your episode is. They also have a bunch of AI features like voice enhance or AI stuff. They have they keep adding on stuff to be boost up your monthly thing. So they'll do your show notes, they'll do all your chapters, all that stuff for you if you want. I already have a process for that. So I was like, oh, it's initial $20 a month. Is it worth it for me? Because I know how to do it in Chat GPT, it's like five minutes per episode. Is it worth it for me? I'm not sure. I may switch to using it. Just that's what I always think about is that how useful is it for me process. That tool is really great because I can actually upload the video file. So I don't make a separate audio version. I upload my MP4, which is like two gigabytes. No problem. They convert to audio, they don't care. They don't tell you that, but it works great. So that's part of my workflow. After that, the other part of the process is really posting your episode, notifying people however you're going to do that. So I use a scheduling app called Radar, R-A-D-A-A-R. There's nothing that special about it. There's tons of them. What I really like, and I didn't know this existed, is they have a thing called a clip pool or your content pool. So you can upload all your content to one area, and then from there you can schedule it. And I didn't know those existed. I was actually talking to AI. I was like, why doesn't this exist? And ChatGB's like, everyone has that. It's called this. I was like, oh my goodness. The tool I already have has that feature. That sometimes you just don't notice the features the tools you have have. So that's really part of the process. Most important thing is to really develop a process. So I was actually working on this yesterday. So I have this on my desk, was writing out what happens after I do an episode, all of the steps to go, I need to. Some people call this a macro or process or a series of steps or order of operations or system. But I was working on it going, well, what are the order steps? Because there's a bunch of small steps in between. So first, I take the episode. There's a problem I've been having with Riverside, which is that the audio is coming out corrupted. So I have to download the two WAV files. So I have to merge those two WAV files with the video and render that. That takes time. That creates the first thing. Then I put that into script. I use the script's audio enhancer and remove the filler words, the ums, the ahs, the ends os. Those all get removed. I export that. That's the version that goes into video to make the clips. I know that if I do the final edited version, which has a music and stuff, those AI tools will pick the music sections because they're the loudest or the highest energy. So if you use Opus, it will same thing. They all do it. They all, I don't know if the new version of video will do it, but in the past it always did that. So that's my process. Then I edit, so that's the thing that's gonna make clips. Then I add in the intro music, the outro music, that and export at 4K. That's the one that's going on YouTube. And then I'll upload a buzzprout. Then I have to then do a version that's at 1080 because you're not allowed to stream or put content on LinkedIn above 1080. I live stream the episodes on LinkedIn, that's where my biggest audience is. And you can't, if you have a 4K version, LinkedIn just won't show it because they don't re-rend, they don't know how to handle a re-render. So you have to be at 1080. So there's a whole bunch of issues with streaming to LinkedIn. It's the worst platform for it, but when you get it right, it really gets a lot of viewers. And I get viewers every single week, new viewers. I get more viewers that are not from my existing audience from those than anything else that I do because the person usually tags themselves. I can tag the person and say, Oh, here's the episode you're on. Just doing that means it will show up in their followers' feeds. A lot of them, most of them reshare it. Most of them do all the other things to generate buzz there because they don't have to do something hard, like post something new. They could just click repost. That process means I have to generate four versions of the video. So that's a process. Then I make the clips, I have to put them in one folder, and then I have to have the link to the clips folder, I have to have the link to the Buzz Sprout episode, the audio episode, and the link to the YouTube. So I can send all that to the guest in one email. So that's a lot of steps, but it takes me about two hours per episode. So today I was working on it because I had six episodes to do in a bunch. I hadn't done in a couple of weeks. And you just work through the process. And then I have a process for creating my cover art for each show. Each show has its own cover art because it's on YouTube, it needs a different picture. So I take a picture of the guest, I upload it to Midjourney, I generate a cartoon based on them. And that way it's it catches the eye. It's not an original picture. And that allows it to be a little bit different because most guests just want you to use the same picture they use everywhere. I'm like, that's boring. That won't let me stand out. And I do get some people who complain about it. I'm like, well, let me ask you a question. How many of the shows have you been in any look? Have they shown you the thumbnail besides mine? Oh, you never look. So you don't actually care. You only, you know, and it's a certain type of guest that will push back on me. I go, listen, yeah. And they go, I want you to use this picture of me. I go, yeah, I did it. I have a specific aesthetic, a specific cartoon style. It's not supposed to actually look like you. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be close. It's supposed to just be a little bit different. And I design it in a way that gets the grabs the eye, which is more important to me than it looks exactly like the person. It doesn't need to look exactly like me. And you'll see when you get when you see your image, it looks close to you, but it's not perfect. I yours for something I had to do a lot of iterations for your image today to get one that I thought was looking pretty cool and enough like a cartoon that you could tell it wasn't just a fake photograph.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So that's all part of the process. And knowing that one out of 10 guests or one out of 20 will push back on the image. And it's like, well, you know, it is what it is. That's part of the process, but it's price of doing business. I have had guests where I've had to dump their episode because they just make such a scene about it. I don't care that much about your episode. So that's all part of the process. You also can have no shows, but those are the main tools I use. And it'll I'm always looking for a different tool to make the cartoon images faster, but I'm so fast in mid-journey. I try every other tool, they never come out the way I want. So I can generate an tool, image and mid-journey for each guest in five to 10 minutes. It looks awesome. I'm pleased with that. So that's my workflow. So I have my process written down. And then it's about can I make this faster? Can I make that faster? Yeah. So I do look at those things, but you have to write down your process and figure out where are you going to publish the episodes? Are you doing a video podcast or audio only? I still go on some audio-only podcasts. I'm always surprised, but they still exist. There's just only a few left. Most podcasts are on YouTube. Yeah. And then it's all the other stuff is, you know, part of it, but those are the AI tools that I use. That's really my process right now.
SPEAKER_01That right there was you just everybody who's listening, uh, a master at his craft just revealed all the steps that he does for an episode. Now, if you're interested in starting a podcast, obviously Jonathan's had a lot of reps at this. He's got his process worked out. You don't have to do everything that Jonathan did. You can walk the beach with a lavalier mic and your phone, like Jonathan did when he first got started, and start sharing your thoughts about whatever, but hopefully it's about AI because this is about AI. Um, don't be intimidated. What he just shared with you was a robust process that took probably uh a few years to figure out. And then there were tools that didn't exist. All the tools that he mentioned will be in the show notes, and all of them, like I didn't know about video until we he and I spoke yesterday, and now I've got my social team. They're they started using it last night, actually. So yeah, thank you for the suggestion. Um, and I'm sure there's a million other tools that Jonathan knows about that that would do this. So this has been uh, you know, my my intention is to always find out how are people using AI and they're what they're doing already, so that other individuals can say, Oh, I never thought about that, right? I've done this podcast, haven't done as many episodes as you, but I talk about I'm immersed in the subject of AI. Every time I do an episode, and I think, oh, well, I know it, I know how to use AI. There's always some nugget or some tool like you've just dropped on me now that I'm like, oh, maybe I don't know as much as I thought. So for everybody listening, um I hope that this was uh some insight into what it's gonna take if you are interested in either being a guest or producing a podcast. I can tell you, I was hesitant to be a content producer. I just um the imposter syndrome, I don't, nobody wants to hear what I've got to say. It's not about you, it's about the guests that you're bringing on. That's what they want to hear. But you, as the individual who is starting the podcast, as Jonathan referenced, it opens doors for you to get access to conversations with people that otherwise there just might not be a reason for them to reach out or, you know, for you to stand out in all of the um the requests that they get. So it's been a big win for us, for our brand, for my learning curve to do this. So if you're considering this, and Jonathan, I don't know if you teach any type of podcasting, but is there where would you recommend somebody to go to learn the craft?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I do have a bunch of articles about podcasting on my blog. I do have a course that I've taught in the past about it. It's uh, and I'm working on a new iteration, which is an AI-based version of creating your podcast.
SPEAKER_02Beautiful.
SPEAKER_00But really, you just there's so much information about it. You can just start by going, just figure out if it's what you really want to do and be very serious about why you want to do it. Most podcasts don't last past episode four. There are certain guests who have a rule so they go, Oh, I want to appear until you have 100 episodes, I want to peer until you have 200 episodes, I want to appear to have 300 episodes because they want to be on a show that's going the distance more than they care, they don't care as much about audio tize, they just want to know that you're not gonna quit. Like, I don't want to be on someone's episode and then they stop working on the podcast, which means it loses its value. So those are something people look for. But decide this is something I want to do, this is something I'm gonna stick with, and it's be part of it. And it's really anything you want to do as part of your business. There has to be an intersection of passion and profitability. If you don't have those two things, either you're not gonna make money and you're gonna go out of business, or you're not gonna like it enough and you're gonna quit. So it's important to have those two things and find that intersection. And you'd be surprised what type of guests shows are looking for. Like you were talking about, I would love to have someone in logistics and someone in the toy industry using AI. I was like, those would be two amazing guests. Yeah. A lot of people that I reach out to don't realize that they're like a big get for me because they're doing something that I'm that's very specific I want to talk about. Um, the only thing I don't like is when someone has a non-replicable success story. So if you became successful by luck or you have a unique skill, or it's because of a relative or because you're beautiful, well, not everyone has that. So as long as it's not that, that's the only thing that I don't want because then it people can't copy it, but otherwise they can learn from you. So that's really all I look for. And you'll be amazed how many shows are looking for guests, how many shows you can talk to the actual host and get through. And if you just treat people like people, you're gonna get through this the signal-to-noise ratio. So, yeah, that's awesome. Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. And I had a good time.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. So the best place for people to f to get access to your podcast would be the artificial intelligence podcast that's on all the major platforms. Um, where else if somebody wants obviously you do a lot of content on LinkedIn? That's how I found out about um some of the stuff we were talking about yesterday. Was I Googled and there popped up Jonathan's LinkedIn articles? Is that your main channel for sharing content?
SPEAKER_00LinkedIn? Yeah. So I do I post a YouTube video almost every day. And then that becomes a LinkedIn newsletter. So I'm really active on LinkedIn. I post two or I try to post two to three times a day on LinkedIn. It's where I'm the most active. It's where if you DM me on LinkedIn, you're way more likely to get a response than an email because I don't get that many messages on there. And it's just you get again, it's like figure out a platform. Oh, that's where people don't get overwhelmed. So you're more likely to get heard. That's where I'm definitely most active. YouTube is the second most, and that's where you can find me. If you just Google serve no master, every single search result is me for the first at least 10 pages of search results. Yeah. All of it's me. And you visit me on LinkedIn, you can see I give away free copies of my bestseller Chat GPT Profits. So you don't even have to buy my book. Obviously, I love what people do. All of that's there on my LinkedIn profile. You can see the kind of things I'm working on and kind of go to all my other projects. You can find my podcast and find my blog posts and find my articles. But that's really definitely what I'm really focused on for this year and probably for the next couple of years. It's really LinkedIn.
SPEAKER_01That's fantastic. So, everybody listening, there is so much there are so many people that are very talented at leveraging AI and their jobs or their business or their industry, and they're sharing that stuff, not exclusively because they're looking to build their audience, but because they're impassioned by this subject. People like Jonathan, people like me, like you can't get us to shut up. We, our episode, we stopped recording yesterday and we ended up talking for another 30 minutes. And if I wouldn't have had to go pick my mom up from the airport or whatever I was doing, we would have still been geeking out on tools. And oh, do you know about this one? Oh, have you seen this? So um, this has been awesome, Jonathan. Again, everything that he's suggested or recommended will be in the show notes. So please take a moment and look at those, especially the links out to where Jonathan is providing the content, because I can guarantee you um this is a man who knows what he's talking about when it comes to using AI at work. So thanks everybody. See you on the next episode. 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 a 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 Desolnier, 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.