Will AI Replace Human Writers? | Brent Peterson

PROFITABLE TALKS...

On this episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim sits down with Brent Peterson, owner of Content Cucumber, to break down what’s really happening in the world of AI, content creation, and human creativity.

While many predicted AI would replace writers, Brent shares a different perspective—one rooted in real-world data, client behavior, and years of experience building both AI-forward and human-led content businesses.

They dive into why AI-generated content often falls short, how audiences are learning to recognize “AI slop,” and why the future belongs to creators who know how to blend human insight with AI efficiency.

This conversation goes beyond the hype and into practical strategy—covering SEO, content systems, podcasting as a content engine, and how to actually stand out in a world flooded with automated content.

If you’re a creator, entrepreneur, or business owner trying to figure out where AI fits into your workflow… this episode is a must-listen.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

•  AI didn’t kill content—it exposed bad content 
•  Humans are still better at original ideas, strategy, and emotional connection
•  AI is best used as an editor and efficiency tool, not a replacement 
•  Most businesses are missing content strategy, not just content volume 
•  SEO is shifting toward engagement and relevance, not keyword stuffing 
•  Audiences can increasingly recognize AI-generated content
•  Podcasting is a powerful way to extract ideas and build thought leadership
•  The future is human + AI collaboration, not one or the other 

Join our community of creative entrepreneurs and get a free copy of our No-BS Guide To Making Your Creative Business Actually Profitable delivered straight to your inbox. We’ll share smart, simple tips to help you keep more of what you earn—no boring accountant talk, we promise.  
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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.289)
Welcome to another episode of the profitable creative the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host Christian Brim special shout out to our one listener in Sebastian, Florida. I'm curious if there was a guy named Sebastian and he said I'm naming this town after me, but thank you for listening. Joining me today Brent Peterson of content cucumber Brent. Welcome to the show.

Brent Peterson (00:28.824)
Okay, thank you. Thanks for having me here. I'm excited and I'm really excited to learn more about Sebastian, Florida.

Christian Brim (00:36.153)
I yes, I'm curious, but it is Florida. So all bets are off. You never know what you're going to get in Florida. No. And you're you're calling us from Maui. Where in Hawaii? Kona. I'm so jealous. I've only been to Hawaii once and I can't get my wife to go back. I don't know why. Anyway, so tell us about content cucumber.

Brent Peterson (00:40.278)
Yeah, exactly, I don't know.

Brent Peterson (00:49.442)
We're in Kona, we're on the big island of Hawaii.

Christian Brim (01:05.439)
That's a new one for me. What's the origin story on that?

Brent Peterson (01:10.51)
Sure, yeah, so Content Cucumber is a writing service and it does something super innovative. Like we're on the cutting edge of what people do for writing. We have human beings that write content for other human beings. And Content Cucumber has been around since 2018. I bought the company in April of 2025. And my goal is to find more efficiencies in writing.

Christian Brim (01:19.627)
Hmm.

Novel.

Brent Peterson (01:37.27)
add more services for writers. I mean, I think the reality is that since Chat GPT came out, writers have been decimated there. was just like a calling, right? It's just like a plague that has grown across the globe in terms of what that means for content and where that content comes from. And writers are on the front line of that. So my goal is to find

Christian Brim (01:51.041)
Mmm.

Brent Peterson (02:04.098)
places for writers that can still write and finding inefficiencies and changing things. And yeah, I'm a little bit of a disruptor, but also I believe in the human being and I believe in how that content is created and that we need to have humans always in the loop for creating content.

Christian Brim (02:23.753)
Yes, it's interesting because my, my very last episode was a bolt from the blue copywriting, Rachel Allen, and she, she's been a content writer for 18 years. And, that conversation, I'm curious how this one goes and see the comparisons because, you know, the, technology is absolutely disrupted things, but I don't think it worked out the way a lot of people.

thought it would maybe. So I'm curious your perspective, but before purchasing Content Cucumber in 25, what was your business?

Brent Peterson (03:07.054)
Um, so originally, uh, I was in the, I was in the e-commerce space and I did, uh, solution integrations for a platform called Magento. And our company name was Wajento. So we just took the M and flipped it upside down and we were early adopters. And so the leadership at Magento allowed us to keep that domain all through those years. And we sold that in 2021. I exited that company in 2023 and started a company called Content.

Christian Brim (03:24.085)
Love it.

Brent Peterson (03:36.505)
basis, which still exists, which was AI forward. Think about when you're sipping whiskey at the Malt Forward or Pete Forward. This is AI. It was AI forward with a human that's involved in the editing process. And actually, I launched it right around the Chet GPT, maybe right before Chet GPT came out. And people were very excited.

Christian Brim (03:45.459)
You

Brent Peterson (04:06.028)
Dabbling in some of these tools like Jasper and some of the other automated writing tools but what I've discovered in the last three years is a human beings are recognizing AI content and as a AI content is proliferating across the internet human beings are recognizing when something's written by AI because there's just just some tells that people see in there and then be that People wanted at the time people wanted that content

in 30 seconds, they didn't want to have anybody edit it and they didn't want to take the time to read it themselves. So we initially had a ton of new clients and then as they realized that AI isn't the magic box that you're still going to have to actually, you should be reading your content before publishing it and you should be editing it and you should be taking some of those things out that are needed. That takes time. It doesn't take, maybe it doesn't take as much time as to write a full

you know, a thousand word post, but it still takes time to read through it. So in 2025, I'd known the people at Content Cucumber since they launched. There were a bunch of college kids that started a business and we were one of their first clients at Wajento and we'd been talking ever since and it just seemed like a put together, get together that we would collaborate and one of the founders, Isaac, is still my business partner now and we're

full force into content creation with human beings and then having AI help us.

Christian Brim (05:41.897)
Okay. So clarify something for me. Did, did you, did you purchase content basis as well? Or did you start that? Okay. Okay. but right before LLM showed up, what was that like? Like, was that even on your radar with that possibility before you started that business?

Brent Peterson (05:49.814)
I started content bases from scratch.

Brent Peterson (06:05.736)
so I am in entrepreneurs organization, which is a, you know, EO network.org. It's a, you know, it's a peer network. It's not a sales network. and so I, I ran this by all my form mates and all my friends in EO and they were like, don't use, you know, don't mention AI, don't even use AI. This is pre-chat GPT. Don't, don't talk about it.

Tell them that you have some help from, and AI wasn't even a buzzword in March of 2023. Once AI came out and once ChatGPT really started taking root in everybody's existence, probably in 2024, they were like, now lean into it. Like now heavily go into this and start telling people that we're saving you money by using AI for this content.

Christian Brim (06:34.849)
Right.

Brent Peterson (06:59.278)
So I think maybe I hope I answered your question in sort of a roundabout way, but it was a journey, right? It was a journey through that. It was a journey through ChatGPT. And it even took me some time to really recognize that a lot of these platforms at the time, maybe they were using something like ChatGPT to generate the content, that ChatGPT is just a global thing that...

that happened and that now it really is helping everybody in different aspects. And I do believe that there's better things to do with your LLM than in just creating content. Data analysis, summary, things like that are a fantastic use of that. Research, citations, all that fun stuff that has taken people so long is a great, that's what the tool is meant for.

Christian Brim (07:40.213)
research.

Christian Brim (07:52.737)
Yes. I guess my question was, was there ever an oh shit moment there in the fall of 23 when GPT launched like, Oh, wasn't planning on this.

Brent Peterson (08:07.804)
no, I think it was the opposite. Like this is just going to help. This is going to supercharge what we're already doing. And then how can we harness this? You know, I think then I explored private GPTs and how do you train it? And that's where it got me down the path. I started another tool in 2024 called what's called requestdesk.ai where you take your brand, you store your brand as a document.

Christian Brim (08:10.912)
Okay.

Okay.

Brent Peterson (08:36.878)
And I went one step further and I created a site where I could store my brand in a database and then make that brand updatable and reliable to go back and check against it. So I think that's really where any human writer or any robot writer, you want to make sure your content is matching your brand. So that's what I really kind of dived into. And I think that's where I found a lot of value from, I'm a big cloud user now, so.

That's where I saw a lot of value in using the LLMs.

Christian Brim (09:10.635)
So from a layman's perspective, can you explain to me why you want to do a private use case of the code versus using, you know, open eyes version of GPT or anthropics version of Claude.

Brent Peterson (09:34.115)
Well, I mean, guess, you know, it is a public, your LLM is public, right? But you can train it. You can train it with certain documents. And so what I do is I inject, you call, you make your prompt, then I inject some information before you put in your, your, your prompt, has context when you start it, right? So if you go and you start doing something, it then,

Christian Brim (09:41.141)
Right.

Christian Brim (09:49.483)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (09:56.064)
Right.

Brent Peterson (10:00.003)
inject something before your prompt so it knows something about what you're doing and then your prompt happens and then it comes back and gives you that result. And I've even gone one step further where when that result happens and I go back and do a check, I actually have a public database of overused AI terms and it'll check against that. it'll take out Delve or something like that and then give you that result. So that's kind of where it is.

Christian Brim (10:18.369)
Mmm.

Brent Peterson (10:29.614)
You know chat GPT has a way of actually putting all that into a training document and call it's called a private GPT or a trained GPT so same type of idea where I'll encode all that and make a GPT and then I can use that to chat with

Christian Brim (10:47.615)
Okay, so maybe let me clarify my question. So my understanding, which is very limited, is that yes, you can train. So like you, sign up for a paid version of GPT or clog and you can train it and give it source documents and et cetera, et cetera. But there's some underlying behavior that, that

exists globally. Does taking that LLM source code down to your server and starting from scratch give you different results and is that what you did?

Brent Peterson (11:33.589)
I have done that. I will just say the cost to run something as big as $405 billion, there's probably even more out there now that are publicly available. Lama is a great example of what you can download and run on your own. And I discovered that my Mac M1 was not good enough to run anything more than $7 billion data points. Those are great, but really,

And it is more expensive to run that privately than it is to just use a public API endpoint. Even like Hugging Face has some of those models that you're able to use. And then I guess the quality you get from the newest model that are public is much better than you'd get from a private model. And I would love to hear from people that have had a different experience. I'm sure that you can get good results from

And let me just, I'll just say I'm talking about writing specifically. I'm also big into coding. So coding is another one. I'm a big cloud code user. So, you know, I think coding is the one where you, you lean into one there's Gemini, there's Codex from Chachabit and then there's Cloud Code, but there's also Code Llama. Depending how you want to use it, those are, there's different ways of using it. So having a private model on your machine is a, is a great way to use it without having to go public.

Christian Brim (12:32.33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brent Peterson (12:58.284)
And you can also at enterprise scale get private models from any of the providers.

Christian Brim (13:05.024)
I guess what the thing that I'm trying to understand and potentially solve for is there's, there's, for instance, it appears that all of the publicly available LLMs really want to make you happy. Like they want to give you an answer that you want, right? And

I never thought about this until someone explained it to me as well. It's exactly like Facebook or Google or Instagram or any of those other things. It's wanting to give you something that you like. So you keep using it. Is there a way to on undo that behavior? So it's not giving you what you want to hear if that is even possible, but like, you understand what I'm saying?

Brent Peterson (13:59.223)
Yeah, it's all I think. Yeah, I think it's all in how you ask it. Definitely there's a way to get there, but it's always going to try to get. Let me back up. I don't think it's necessarily giving you what it does give you what it thinks you want. So in your prompt, you need to make sure that you're asking it in the right way. But it also will come back with all kinds of crazy things that you don't need. And so.

Christian Brim (14:21.429)
Hmm.

Brent Peterson (14:27.654)
And then it's different every single time. Like it's not a consistent behavior. Like an algorithm is something that is happening in a consistent way. One thing over the next. Like an algorithm will be very consistent where an LLM one day is one way and the next day is another way. some days your LLMs are completely stupid and you're like, what is going on here? Why are we doing this?

Christian Brim (14:37.494)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Christian Brim (14:52.426)
Right.

Brent Peterson (14:55.214)
And the next day it could be the smartest thing in the world. A great example is, we do an injection into Shopify. We inject a product in a blog post. if, unless, if you rely on the code to be dynamically generated and inject it, it'll do it right 80 % of the time. And it'll do it wrong 20 % of the time. Or as, as, as I would like to say, it'll do it right 90 % of the time. It'll do it wrong 20 % of the time.

So there's a lot of things you need to do to just scaffold that and make sure that you have rules in place and then have a template that it draws from in some of those instances to be exactly the way you want it to be.

Christian Brim (15:36.735)
Yeah. And I guess this circles back to what you said at the outset is that people have to be in the loop. and, and I think that that is consistent with what people that have this pre LLMs talking about, AI in general, that that's what virtually everybody I, I read

Was projecting was that it was wasn't going to replace humans. It was going to augment humans and it I think a great analogy is to take a Some type of machinery, right? You you you You still have to have someone run the backhoe. It doesn't run itself. Although maybe it will in the future. I don't I don't know

Brent Peterson (16:09.507)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (16:31.979)
But even if it does, you still, you know, I guess it, it, comes to the question of at what point are people going to trust the outputs without having a human involved? So another great example is, there's technology to automatically take off, fly and land a plane. that, but who's going to get into a plane without a pilot, right?

or an automated car and, it, is there a point where you see where the humans actually cause more problems than like when they start overwriting the machine saying, do it this way. And the machine's right.

Brent Peterson (17:21.036)
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly going to happen. Well, number one, emotion doesn't help at all in that case. I have a newsletter called Tuesdays with Claude, and I talk a lot about my emotions when I'm working with LM. So take emotions out of the picture. But the human part of it is interesting. There is a podcast from Malcolm Gladwell about the WIMO and how humans could ruin the

Christian Brim (17:28.619)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (17:49.315)
the self-driving experience because suddenly humans are afraid of cars because humans are driving and they're not always good at, you know, recognizing a human in the road. Self-driving cars are watching out for humans all the time and you can walk in the middle of a road and the car will stop. So you're right in that sense. I think the bigger question that you're asking is when it's right and we're

Christian Brim (17:51.765)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Peterson (18:19.118)
When it's right and we're saying we're right, we're still going to win. What I typically do is explain to me why this is happening or explain the concept or explain why you're doing that. I'll ask them to go into depth and explaining why it's doing this decision.

Christian Brim (18:29.791)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (18:40.649)
Yeah, and I find...

My use of LLMs has been frustrating from an accounting standpoint, mainly because what you said, the results aren't always predictable and like writing, that's a different thing. Coding and accounting, that doesn't work when I get answers only 80 % of the time. Like that doesn't fly with me. So what I find is

Is a better use is a review or editing like in your case. like I find that my, my most productive use of LLMs and writing is I I've trained it on my samples and, my work and given it parameters. And it's like a glorified editor or like the one in Microsoft word, but

You know, it's not just checking spelling and grammar. It's, it's also checking, you know, consistency of thought, writing style, those types of things. Is that how you use LLMs as well?

Brent Peterson (19:59.127)
Absolutely. you know, I think adding a style like what I'll do is I'll write something and then I have a I have a prompt that says now apply brand brand to it. And I have a huge document that is my own writing style. I also have a terms like I mentioned earlier. I'll say terms and then I might even go one step further and said, give me the account of adverbs in this document and it'll give me adverbs and it knows already because I hate I don't I

Christian Brim (20:09.845)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (20:22.781)
Mm.

Brent Peterson (20:28.49)
LLMs definitely overuse adverbs. So I'm like, okay, I don't want to use a ton of adverbs. So it'll give me the count and it'll also give me where it feels the adverb is good or bad. Give me a whole grid and it gives me a decision tree to go ahead and should I remove this or not?

Christian Brim (20:48.639)
Yeah, I love that. So your, your background is not copywriting or content creation, right? I mean, but it sounds like more, you have more of an engineering mind coming from the background. How, how, how has that affected your approach versus say like someone that has been a professional writer and how

they might approach using it.

Brent Peterson (21:20.406)
Yeah, I think I try to make a process out of it and make it duplicatable. And I would go back to, you know, 10 years ago where you would spend a day writing a program to decipher a bunch of data and put it into a CSV file when you could actually take a day to just do it by hand, right? You can copy and paste it into something. I'm way more interested in automating the process than I am in hand doing it. So...

Christian Brim (21:40.521)
Right. Right.

Brent Peterson (21:48.281)
You know, I'm interested in how can we get to a point where it's written by me, but like you said, edited by, you know, you have an editor and honestly, every book has an editor. Every book writer has an editor. Every writer has an editor and those, and a lot of times you, the writer will give a lot of credit to the editor to make their writing the way they would like to see it. And I see your trained LLM is a great editor that will work alongside you.

Christian Brim (21:59.873)
Sure.

Brent Peterson (22:17.91)
you still have the choice of putting out whatever it is that you put out, but that editing role is super important and it's a great role for what LLMs can do.

Christian Brim (22:30.145)
Okay, so let's shift to the business model side of it. We spent some time on the technical side of it. What does the business look like for Content Cucumber and or how that how might that change based on what you're seeing?

Brent Peterson (22:47.116)
Yeah, the original business model is just writing content. you know, primarily blog posts and articles. That was it. Some social media. And I see that content has to be broader than that. And then also strategy. and I know it's it conveniently, I spent the weekend going through past customer reviews on Content Cucumber and Content Cucumber has a lot of great customer reviews. But one thing I noticed one time after time is that

is that they wrote content that would be SEO friendly, but they never really gave strategy for SEO content. So, you my goal is to get in front of it. Like I want to be in front of what the client has. And that was also my goal with with content basis is to be in front of it, to be sort of predictive in what they would like. So, for example, I will look at I'll look at the keywords or something or a product that the client is trying to sell. Where does that product show up on Google?

Christian Brim (23:25.172)
Hmm

Brent Peterson (23:46.019)
The best opportunities are when they show up on page 100. You want to get that, you want to sell that product. How can we get that product from page 100 to page eight on Google? How can we get it to page one? And the only way you're going to do that is through content. You can't just let it sit there. The other thing that, you know, just analyzing product or analyzing content on somebody else's website. If you look at a Shopify site, the typical client has less than a hundred words on a product page.

and that's just not going to work anymore. It never worked. But it's going to be even worse in today's world of SEO and AEO.

Christian Brim (24:25.921)
So you're essentially talking about strategy of the content matching what is out there that the algorithms are preferring. Yeah. Is that a correct statement?

Brent Peterson (24:42.316)
I mean, I think there's two ways to look at it. The one way is I think that it has to resonate with people and I think Google gives us a great way of doing that. It's how long you spend on a page reading and that's not just sitting on your recipe because you have it in front of you and then watching all those stupid ads pop up. It is a relevant page that somebody spent three or four minutes on reading through and that's a great indication of how well your content is doing. The other part is being discovered.

And so the only way that that content gets discovered is to be properly encoded for a JSON LD files, having Q and A at the end or having some kind of structured data within or at the end of your end of your, your article. and then having it properly SEO fitted and SEO is one of those moving targets that is always changing. It's not keyword stuffing anymore. It's all kinds of other things coming back to just relevance and how long people are spending reading your document.

Christian Brim (25:36.758)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (25:41.899)
So the business model that you have is like a subscription model or is it a piece of content or okay.

Brent Peterson (25:50.851)
Yeah, it's a subscription model that we, yeah, so we have a flywheel plan, which is our newest one that gives you newsletter writing, blog posts writing, social media and strategy along with, it's just, it's called a flywheel because we take some basic content. We have an interview that we do once a month to kind of figure out what you'd like to have and then get your voice in that interview as well. And then write that content and then repeat that over and over again. And then we employ.

Google Search Console to help us understand are there words or is there content that you would like to resonate more? So, you know, I think having that interaction with the client is A, the most important thing you can do to learn exactly what Christian would want in his content compared to what we think you want is, you know, is a big huge red flag. If we think you want something, we're going to suggest something.

And I do think that people, human beings are much better at suggesting things that you may need than an LLM. And LLM is going to give you whole bunch of ideas, but you know, you're still going to have to pick the best one. And I think in my experience, especially it has been that humans are still having better ideas that are different than when LLMs. And I'll just say, you know, I've been attending a ton of conferences in the e-commerce space.

Over the last two years, more and more vendors are discovering that people are recognizing the content that's generated for LLMs. And I think we as humans are seeing that content and then we're saying, that person didn't actually write that. That sounds just like XYZ Corp and ABC Corp. Isn't it funny how their writing style is exactly the same?

If you do like a human is going to have their own style and it's going to be different. Everybody's going to have a different style. So I think that's where the uniqueness comes in from having a human in the loop and in this whole process.

Christian Brim (27:52.391)
Yeah, because I think there's a kind of a backlash, not just to LLMs, but technology in general. Here's an idea. This is a complete squirrel thing. Someone needs to bring back pinball machines. I really think there's a retro market for that. Back to my statement. There's this trust gap, right?

and the authenticity, the connection, you're saying the same thing, right? Like that if it's just AI slop, quote unquote, people are not gonna trust it. Is that an accurate statement?

Brent Peterson (28:41.154)
Yeah, or why would you want to read it? think another good one is art. really got into creating art with AI and it is a skill, but once people learn that you've created this with mid-journey or something, they're like, I don't really care about this art. There wasn't anything that put into it, even though, hey, creatively, you have to know how to prompt it to get what you want out of it. And that is a skill in itself.

Christian Brim (29:08.598)
Right.

Brent Peterson (29:08.966)
But that skill is not recognized. It's very, very relatable to Photoshop when Photoshop came along and they thought all the different other jobs were going to get thrown out the window. Well, they did get thrown out the window and then suddenly Photoshop is the way everybody did graphic design or Adobe Illustrator. I think that we're seeing that happen in the design portion of AI. We're going to see the same kind of arc go through with video.

Christian Brim (29:14.731)
Sure.

Brent Peterson (29:38.255)
And again, all this is getting better every single time, but we are going to all recognize when this video is being created by AI. then it doesn't have as much impact as you and I talking or a video of out there walking in the real world with, that's not, Gen. AI or something like that.

Christian Brim (30:01.095)
Yeah, I, yes, it's kind of like, I, I think it's akin to if you, I mean, if you just want an answer and you want a quick answer, like I need to know where the cheapest price of X is that that makes sense. But, but if you, if you're wanting something that has a deeper emotional resonance, something that you're trying to solve, that's more important to you, whatever that is.

the, human connection, whether that's AI assisted or not, has to be there. And, I kind of, I, I kind of equate it to Marvel Marvel. I'm going to bag on Marvel or Disney, either way it's, it's like, so much of their stuff, becomes programmatic. It's like you've seen one Marvel movie. You've seen them all.

on some level, right? Like I'm not saying that they're all the exact same, but it's like that serves a certain segment of the market. like, if you want a certain show and you, you know, dial up Jason, what's his name? Jason Stram? What's the actor's name? Anyway, you you want that type of show, you dial it up, you get it, but it's not going to connect with you the way Schindler's List.

does right or or something by Quentin Tarantino right and and I guess to me I just kind of see it moving to that 80 20 where you know the 80 % that's going to be sufficient for them but the 20 % of the population that wants something more it can't do it.

Brent Peterson (31:56.559)
Yeah, I mean, I think that you've kind of hit the nail on the head and that's probably going to be our next AI term that I'm going to have to not use anymore. having the ability to know that something is authentic, having your content be authentic is what people are going to look for. And I think the inauthentic content and a great example is have your AI

generate a whole blog or a podcast and then have actually notebook LLM is a great tool for generating a podcast. I need more voices, but it does a great job of back and forth conversation. once you know that this content was created by AI and then the content was read by AI, it's suddenly not as exciting. Like, you know, what a what new thing am I going to get out of this that I can't get by just doing it myself and

Christian Brim (32:46.817)
Mm.

Brent Peterson (32:53.558)
and discovering that myself on an LLM. think what people are learning, like even with our discussion here, is that there's things that are happening outside of what the LLMs are telling us that the LLM doesn't know yet. And it may never know, or it's buried so deep in its own psyche that it's not gonna come out unless you ask it the right way. And humans are in that, in a sense, we're,

spontaneous and where we say something that's kind of crazy that

Brent Peterson (33:27.15)
Probably because I did the mute there. But that we're able to come up with new ideas that are completely not AI. Whatever. know you can't explain it, right?

Christian Brim (33:39.861)
Yeah, no, I think that I think that's the thing that everybody has to understand about any AI tool is that it is it is reductive. It is convergent. It is not divergent. Inception original thought has to come from a human. It doesn't give you something novel. It gives you this is what everybody else has done, which is fine for its use.

Right? Even if that same, even if that person is just you like, well, this is how you've done it the last 20 times you've written it. it can't, it can't come up with a new idea for you. okay. So last question on that, you didn't answer the question about the pinball machine. What do you think of that?

Brent Peterson (34:31.16)
I love pinball machines and you had mentioned why Minneapolis and well St. Paul is next to Minneapolis. St. Paul is a suburb of Minneapolis and they have a thing called Can Can Wonderland and there's pinball machines. There's video arcade machines that are back from the 1940s. It's such a fun place. They must have, I don't know.

Christian Brim (34:49.004)
wow.

Brent Peterson (34:51.758)
I bet they have almost a hundred pinball machines all free. Like you just pay a one fee, in and you can drink beer off the tap. And they have one of those little card readers so you can drink as much beer as you want and then play pinball all day long or pong or whatever video game you want. It's a, it's a huge mini golf. I love pinball machines. I a hundred percent agree pinball machines need to come back.

Christian Brim (35:16.605)
Well, I've been to several retro arcades, but they're more like 80s games. They're not, or maybe some 90s games, but they're certainly not back to the 40s and really not back to the 60s and 70s with Pinball. Because there's some analog experience that's just unique, right? Okay, so my last question to you is, you mentioned podcasts.

Podcasts, as I've been doing this for a couple of years is a unique format. Obviously, AI has been involved in helping production, editing, promotion, clips, summaries, blah, blah. How does that make its crossover to content that Content Cucumber does? What do you see the interplay there?

Brent Peterson (36:10.958)
Can you reframe the question again?

Christian Brim (36:14.077)
I guess, guess, yeah, it wasn't very, it wasn't very well worded. I see. And I'm not talking about transcripts of a podcast. Okay. The way people consume content via podcasts is unique from the, the, separate from YouTube, even though like, you know, Apple is trying to get video.

into podcasting, like the act of listening to a podcast, like people used to listen to radio is a unique channel. How do you see that interplay with the content that you produce?

Christian Brim (37:09.811)
I think you're muted.

Brent Peterson (37:11.692)
Yeah, sorry, I've got I'm having all kinds of techno that one of those fancy Osbord cameras and it's just going haywire. It's just this died. All right. So the question is, how do I see all the post production tools or how do I how would I use those tools for AI or with AI and my content?

Christian Brim (37:26.751)
No, no.

Christian Brim (37:31.969)
No, how does podcasting interplay with the content that you produce? So for instance, if I'm, if I'm one of your customers, and, and, and I'm coming to you, for strategy, how, how, does, how do you see podcasting interplaying with other formats of content?

Brent Peterson (37:38.574)
got it. Okay.

Brent Peterson (37:52.313)
Got it. right. Yeah, I mean, I podcasts is a great way to get what's in your head. If you're not a great writer, it's a great way to get it out there, right? So it's, you can just talk about it. And this is conversation. Having a conversation about it is a great way to get more information out of something you didn't know that you could find. So I think that it's a, it's a good collaborative way. Like if you're sharing a Google doc would be the other example.

Christian Brim (38:00.595)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (38:10.998)
Mmm.

Brent Peterson (38:18.21)
that you're doing in person. And it's a good way to consume new knowledge. you know, think listening to something that you're interested in and week over week, then going through and listening or learning about a subject that you'd like to learn more about is a great way of, of, of consuming information. And I'm a runner. like having a podcast that I can listen to in a long run. So it gives me a, you know, another head scape.

to maybe get out of my head that I don't want to, I want to stop or something. You know, it's a great way of getting those things in place.

Christian Brim (38:56.929)
Okay. So, but how does a business marry those two together? So if we're talking about written content, because it's like a transcript of a podcast is not, I mean, like I've never read a podcast transcript. Like that sounds awful. how, how, how do you, how do you marry those two as a business? Those two strategies and formats.

Brent Peterson (39:18.158)
Um, I think that you want to use your podcast to promote your product through or let's, let's back up a little bit. I think the podcast is a great place to promote thought leadership and what you're trying to do as a business. So then you would want to get guests that are helping you to understand thought leadership and a concept you're trying to explain.

that you find an expert who can explain that concept in a way that maybe you couldn't do it or articulate it, that ties back to whatever business you're doing. I think that's a great way of using a podcast for that and helping to have your listeners understand what you're doing that connects with your business. I just got that concept and I've been doing a podcast for five years.

Christian Brim (39:48.145)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Brent Peterson (40:08.214)
Originally, I started my podcast just to have some kind of a creative way of being of a creative way of being creative outside of being in business. And I, you know, I went from being the boss to having a boss. It was really difficult for me mentally. But what I discovered is that by doing that, I had great conversations with all kinds of experts and I learned so much and I I've been doing a weekly podcast since 2021 that and and I can I can say that.

Christian Brim (40:19.617)
Mmm.

Brent Peterson (40:37.93)
If I didn't do that, would not be as, I wouldn't have been as good of a leader. Can I say as good of? I couldn't have been as, I couldn't be as good of a leader as I thought I was. And I would not have learned as much I would have had in the industry if I wouldn't have done all those interviews.

Christian Brim (40:44.257)
Sure, you can say whatever the h-

Christian Brim (40:55.999)
Yeah, I think, I think, you know, there's the obvious difference about how we, how we process information, listening versus, reading. But, but I also think the, the length of the format shifts your, your focus. It's not like, you know, I know how I can assume content online and you said spending four or five minutes, that's a long ass time for somebody to read something on the internet. Usually it's not, not even close to that. Right.

But if you commit to 30 or 45 minutes or an hour of listening to a podcast, your brain goes to a different space. It's not just processing it differently, but like you've given it space to think about it rather than just ingesting information.

Brent Peterson (41:45.006)
That's a great way to look at it. It's just like video, right? People learn different ways, people consume their information in different ways. This is a great space for us to have another vehicle to help people understand what you're trying to convey from a business standpoint.

Christian Brim (42:11.082)
Brent, thank you very much for your time. How do people find out more about content cucumber if they want to learn more?

Brent Peterson (42:17.186)
Yeah, if you go to contentcucumber.com, can, you know, I'm doing updates almost every single day. The website is dynamic and always changing. And I'm a, I'm a crazy person who dives into all kinds of fun technology to help me keep my content up and valid. or you can find me Brent W Peterson on LinkedIn. I've, that's a great place to, collaborate with me and DM me or look at my, you know, I have a newsletter that's called the agent, a commerce guy that I would love you love to have you subscribe to.

Christian Brim (42:47.573)
Perfect. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, hit the little mailbox and send us a text message. Envelope, not a mailbox. And then we'll listen diligently and then we'll replace Brent. Until next time, ta-ta for now.

Brent Peterson (43:12.142)
Thanks a lot.