242: From Commoditized Content to Visionary Quests + Digital Doppelgängers with Andrew Davis

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Maybe when you hire someone for a position like mine, something that requires creativity or insight or writing, you're actually not just hiring them, you're hiring all the AI that they've trained to write and think the way they think so that they can be more creative and deliver better results faster as well as have like the world's worth of knowledge and insight at their fingertips.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back free Timers. I am so excited to have Andrew Davis here with us today. Andrew or Drew is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker who is recognized as one of the industry's jaw dropping marketing speakers. He's traveling all around the world wherever he goes, putting his infectious enthusiasm and magnetic speaking style to good use. I heard him through Jay Acunzo's podcast before I knew Jay or Andrew and I remember quoting that episode in one of these free time solos. So I'm really excited that we get to dig into Andrew's ideas in more detail. He's the author of three books, brandscaping Town Inc. And the Referable Speaker. And during a special workshop for creator Kitchen Jay and Melanie Diesel's community that I'm part of, Jay called you one of the business world's most creative and successful crafters of big ideas. So welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much. Jay is such a kind guy. I really appreciate it. I love his use of hyperbole.

Oh yes, well.

He speaks so highly of you, but you really do have interesting and important things to say. We're going to get into one of your newest talks on digital doppelgangers having to do with AI soon. But first, that famous episode that Jay refers to often that I have probably listened to three or four times now is called Leaving Expertville. And you said it. The world doesn't need another expert with your book Brandscaping. You were talking about content back in 2012 and I just feel like we're now 11 years after you wrote that book and there's only more experts now, aided by ChatGPT.

It's so true.

Despite you and Jay having this great conversation about the road from expertville to Visionary Town, where you're no longer a commodity, I feel like the level of pressure to keep producing content and present oneself as an expert, it's only ever increasing. So what I'd love to know is, do you feel like anything has changed even since you had that conversation in 2021?

I don't know that much has changed. I mean, I think the world around us has changed, but the philosophy hasn't. I do truly believe that people who are willing to analyze and journey themselves through a problem to help solve it in a new way is what takes you from Expert Build to Visionary Town. And those are the ideas that really do transform people's lives. So maybe the way you promote it or how you write it might have changed a little bit. Or do you use TikTok or. I don't know if people are still on Clubhouse or they're doing LinkedIn audio broadcast like the ways you share what you're learning and what you found change very frequently. But I don't think the process of moving from just helping people with best practices and tips and tricks versus helping them change the way they think so that they actually do work differently. I don't think that's changed much.

I think some people would conflate they would think that presenting as an expert and a thought leader would be the same thing. And it struck me during that conversation that your definition of thought leader is a little different. And now of course, any word that gets overused, some people will cringe at, but you're getting at something really important, which is how to make that shift from tips, tricks, hacks, and even over promising towards something more meaningful. I recently did a post. I'll link to it in the show Notes of why I don't call myself a content creator because I feel like that is the commoditization of ideas. Yeah, but I find that even when I'm starting this new project I have around personal essays. The urge to try to land on a kernel of expertise or present something in a neat takeaway for people is strong, Andrew. It's strong. Why is our instinct to try to present ourselves as experts like it must be tied to some survival instinct online, right?

It must be an online survival tactic. I think it's because 99% of the content you consume or see is expert bill content. So you figure if 99% of the content out there is all this stuff and that seems to work, you immediately kind of grasp for that. If you go online and look for advice about writing personal essays and getting people to read your stuff, or creating a substack subscription model, there are tons of tips and best practices and all of them will tell you. Make sure you make it easy to read and have three bullets at the top that tell people what the email is going to contain or what this article is going to do for you, and over promise in the headline and get people to click so that they read. All of those tactics do work. So I'm not saying that being an expert and creating expert content doesn't work, but I think if you really want to be a thought leader, someone who changes lives and leaves a legacy, you have to elevate your own ideas above the fray and work to really challenge what other people are doing. Not just for the sake of challenging it, but because you believe there's a better way. And if you bring people on that journey, they'll go with you. There are a lot of people that are secretly questioning those best practices just like you are. So as soon as you tap into their mind and they go on the journey with you, all of a sudden you've got a new audience and you can do things a different way. And those people are really receptive to enjoying the journey with you. Look, I actually believe that it's not really about the outcome as much as it is about the quest that you're going on to find a new way. And maybe you don't find a new way. That's okay. Maybe there isn't a better way to do something or think about something or live your life. But I believe along that journey there's lots of little wise new thoughts and ideas that will take you from Expertville to Visionary Town, where you're looking at the world a different way. And it might not be answering the question you set out to answer, but it's part of the journey. All of those realizations are really valuable, not just to you, but to other people. I feel like thought leader and content creator. Those kinds of words when you embrace them. As soon as you say you're cool yourself, you're all of a sudden not cool. Or if you say you're rich, you're probably not rich. And so I'm always weary of the people who say I'm an expert or I'm a thought Leader, I think that's for other people to determine. If somebody else calls you a thought leader, that to me is much more valuable because it means that it's changed the way they think about something.

And that goes with your statement that true visionary leaders have humility. And I love this approach of you're taking people on a quest with you. How can we do things differently? Let's explore. There must be a better way. And that's something that I try to do here at freetime of not just optimizing for money when building a business. Of course it's important and it keeps the lights on, but how do we do it in a heart based way or a free timey way? One thing though that holds me back is it's almost if there's a spectrum of just rote expertise and we'll get into chatgpt on the one hand, and then a willingness to explore doing things differently. Sometimes I hold myself back even from sharing the journey. No matter how many times I say I'm not the expert, I'm not an expert, this is just one way, something I've tried or what I've learned the hard way. Because sometimes I feel like anything that comes out of my mouth, it's a paradox. Like, yes, here I discovered something and also here's the paradox of which makes it completely and immediately untrue.

Yes.

So like sometimes it's hard to know what to put out there at all because it's always gonna change based on who's hearing it and their life and work circumstances.

Yeah. Well, Jenny, what if you reframe that as here's something I'm struggling with, maybe you're struggling with it too. I've uncovered this nugget of wisdom that I thought was so genius, but then immediately I realized here's a paradoxical truth that totally negates what I thought might be true. What do you, the audience, think all of a sudden you've created a piece of content that didn't have to be, hey, I've uncovered something new that everybody should know about. You took what you learned along the journey and invited other people to weigh in because they might actually help. You know, the paradox you uncovered isn't 100% true and maybe you'll get a new piece of wisdom from that. So I think the pressure to be the expert is part of what gets in the way of actually just exploring the journey. And it's okay. I actually just met a woman who wrote a book and she, she's a marketer and she decided to Promote her book by using some ads on Amazon. Nothing wrong with that. What she decided to do is write this really comprehensive piece that she posted on Medium about all the mistakes she made spending money on Amazon. And it's really detailed. There's a bunch of conclusions at the end about what she'd try differently next time. But if she considered herself an expert, a marketing expert who just wrote a book, if you just want to be the expert, you would never post that. You don't want anyone to know that you've ever made a mistake buying an ad or trying to market better. If you're truly trying to be a thought leader and you're constantly on this quest to learn new things and see if there's a better way, then sharing that and being honest and open about the mistakes you made, I think gains a huge amount of trust with your audience. It builds a true relationship that Andrew's not perfect, Jenny's not perfect. Jillian is the woman who wrote this. She's not perfect. She's a great marketer, but we all make mistakes. And she invited other people to tell us if they have made mistakes or if they've ever had Amazon ads work for them. And I don't know what she found, but those are the things that truly builds a relationship. It's the honesty and openness not always having. The answer is what builds trust with an audience.

We'll be right back just after this.

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It seems like part of the impetus to present as an expert is also the advice or the very real feeling that it's noisy out there. And in order to be heard, I need to have a niche and I need to, you know, find my zone of genius and my hedgehog concept and the thing that only I can do. Yeah. And that in a way, part of the urge seems to be like, okay, well, if I want a viable business and I want people to pay me for whatever products or services or even subscribing to a substack, that it does seem like, okay, well, I need to stand out somehow. And what I'm hearing you say is part of the way you can stand out is just being honest, a which is a good thing, while also not commoditizing that honesty. Like, we've all seen performative authenticity, right? And like, yeah, even I was having a conversation the other day with somebody saying, like, oh, I want to post more personal writing. And I said, where? On LinkedIn, I think it could help me get more business.

I just thought those are kind of two different goals. I'm not saying that one can't help the other, but one is this deep desire to express yourself and be of service, and then the other is to get more clients. Like, they may not always align if you pour your heart out on the page.

That's so true. I know that there's a lot of pressure. I'm a big believer in picking a niche and finding your zone of genius. Like, all of these things help me think through who I want to be and who do I actually serve. But I feel like the best visionary thinking. The stuff that frees you from wanting to run the rat race of being the expert are the questions you want and need answered to serve your customers or clients better. So you know they're getting bombarded with other opportunities and offers and insights and experts claiming X, Y and Z. And if those bother you, it's time to go on a journey to explore. Do they really work? Are there better ways? That kind of content and that honest exploration is very valuable, not just to your audience, but to you. You're trying to answer the question for yourself, like, am I offering the wrong product? Does my product or service not match up to the expectations of the audience? If I have a competitor who's doing three times as much of business with me, what are they doing right? And exploring that in a way that's open and sharing with the world, I don't think is a bad thing. When I was running an agency, Jenny, one of our best tactics to get prospects to be aware of us, we were a small agency, was to actually write a really long, comprehensive blog post about opportunities that the brand had missed in the marketplace. But it was really thoughtful, it wasn't like a bashing post. And we were using it as an exploration, honestly, to figure out what are the biggest opportunities for us to use with our clients. Based on what other people have missed. So if we're marketing for a financial services firm, Exploring what other financial services firms are doing, but more importantly, what they're missing, gave us opportunities to pitch financial services firms on our marketing strategy, which all of a sudden looked very different and filled some holes that they'd never heard of. One time I actually answered a phone call late at night from a CMO who had just landed in China and had read a blog post that was about their company. And I was expecting him to say, you know, like, why would you spend the time and effort to bash our company? But instead he said, like, we gotta chat. Like, that was so insightful and interesting. And I had never thought about our marketing strategy that way. I'm out of town, but when we get back, let's set up a time to meet. That kind of thinking, that exploratory investigation into what's working and how you understand the world versus other people is what I think really does change your mind and the audience's mind over time.

I love that phrase, exploratory investigation.

Yeah.

And that it doesn't always have to be n of 1. Like a case study of yourself over and over and over again. You can pull examples that aren't even clients, but that are out there.

That's worked best for me, Jenny. I'll even say that I was using speaking as a lead gen tool when I was running the agency. The whole goal of me going out to speak at events was that we would get clients to say, we want to work with you. And I very quickly learned that one of the best ways to get executives to come up to me after I speak and ask me about what we do was never mentioning that the case studies I was showcasing were our agency's work. It sounds ironically backwards, but the whole goal was to just be humble and share the insights from brands that we saw in the marketplace. And so the people would come up afterwards and say, oh my gosh, that was amazing. That case study of X, Y and Z. You don't know who did that work, did you? And say, oh, actually that was Brad on our team. He worked on that account. And all of a sudden they're like, you did that? We want to talk. I really feel like humility and an honest effort to help people find the best answer will build the most trust with the right kinds of people to help build your business.

And that's a great example of building trust by not using that as this overt marketing self congratulatory opportunity, but almost letting it Be a little bit of a mystery so that the people who are the most interested come up to you. And I love that because that must make them kind of appreciate you even more if they find out that, oh, you're the one behind it. But you didn't need to, like, pound your chest from the stage about how great you are. You were highlighting the principles at work, not creating an ad for yourself from the stage.

Exactly. All I wanted to do was inform the audience about a new way to think about marketing. That was my goal. We had uncovered a new way for you to see the world, one we had spent a lot of time trying to architect and help you understand. And here's some case studies that help support that this model might work. It wasn't even saying, this is the model for the future and you gotta do this. It was like, let me propose to you something we've uncovered that we think might work for you. I think that kind of conversation works much better with an audience, whether it's in person or it's written or it's your video series or your podcast. Just inviting people to think differently with you instead of convincing them to think the way you think is a big mind shift. I honestly feel like it's freeing. I feel like it's okay to kind of write or say anything you want to say, even if it may undermine the idea that you're the expert in the space.

It is so freeing. I'm finding that with the new project, it's so freeing. It tie a neat little bow or feel responsible for knowing the answers to everything in my arena. Every time I say what I don't know or the mistakes I made, I get a little corner of freedom back. You know, I just want to keep.

Yeah, you do. It's really great. I spent all this time, like three years have been working on trying to figure out how constraints make us more creative. And I started creating some videos that were about what I had uncovered. And you know what's really funny is if I go back and watch those videos from two years ago, I'm like, man, that was such elementary thinking.

Funny.

You obviously really didn't get it. I had this triangle of constraints, I think I called it. And I was pretty confident at the time that I'd uncovered some new ideas that were really revolutionary. And it took me a year, but I realized it can't be a triangle because there's more than three ideas. So the evolution of the thinking is what actually creates a thought leader.

And.

Being willing to share out loud because, yeah, you Called it the Triangle of Transformation.

That's what it was. Yeah. Wow. I can't believe you remember that.

Well, that's right. I just took notes. I was a good student during your workshop. That risk to resources, to constraints, and it's not right. Exactly. We should say that became the cube of creativity. Four constraints to come up with any idea faster and with better results.

100%. And I really do believe in it. But I'm also willing to believe that maybe it's not a cube and it has to be an octagon. Eventually, maybe we're going to uncover new constraints that I never considered or all of a sudden find a case study that illuminates a new idea I'd never thought of. So I'm not unwilling to be wrong now.

Does it make you feel bad when you look back if you go, oh, shoot, I gave five keynotes on the Triangle of Transformation, but it's actually a cube of creativity. Do you feel bad because I might feel like, oh, shoot, I gave those people, like, incomplete information?

No. I always feel like I'm giving them the best I've got right now. Even if I publish a video, it's a snapshot in time, and this is how I'm thinking or what I've learned today. And it doesn't mean that tomorrow, even on the flight home from an event, I learn more from the event attendees and going to other sessions in the weirdest industries that help illuminate new ideas that even on a plane ride home, make me reconsider what I just presented yesterday. Or maybe they don't poke a hole in it, but they make me think, oh, my gosh, I never even considered this. And does my model or idea work for them? And it's usually because they've challenged me. They've said, like, hey, this is great. However, I'm having trouble applying it because of these three reasons. And I think, oh, man, let me work through this with you. Yeah. I was at an event once for small family retailers. I learned so much from people. It was family furniture stores in Canada. So you can picture, like, some little store in a small town in, like, the Yukon territory, in a town of 2,000 people or something that sells furniture. That's what I want you to picture. And I met a gentleman at lunch, and I started asking him about his business. I don't think I had even spoken yet. And he told me about how he had transformed his furniture business into a moving business that actually fueled his furniture business. That was, like, the most genius marketing concept I'd ever thought of. And I couldn't believe that it was like an accident for him. And I spent a good 45 minutes drilling down, trying to understand how did he get to that point so that I could share it with other people. And I've spent a lot of time interviewing him and thinking through it. I still don't have the answer. I don't know if it's a formula other people can use, but it's an amazing story. And constantly looking to help take somebody's story and turn it into something more universal that other people can use, I do think is valuable for anyone to share.

Well, I love that the opposite of Expertville is Visionary Town. And I know you've written a book on town, the metaphor of a town, and that in a town, you would know your neighbors and you would know about these small stories and you would know about Town, Inc. You would know about someone like what you're saying. Universalizing something from the town example, not the overcrowded city.

Yeah, exactly. I think the overcrowded city is just regurgitating in a new way. 10 tips or tricks and best practices and ideas that were someone else's in a way that is fighting for attention in the universe. The best kind of content, the best kind of thinking, the best opportunities come from finding small stories that have universal truth somewhere buried in there. And the universal truth might be different. You could sit down, Jenny, with that same furniture person and probably find a totally different type of story that was focused much more on what he gets out of his business. Maybe it's not just revenue. Maybe he finds time and finds a better life, but universalizing those and helping other people see that in these kinds of stories, there's something to be learned that's a really powerful journey.

When you were talking with Jay about the commoditization of listicles and tips and tricks, it's like, here are six ways. No, here are seven. No, eight.

Yes.

My husband once showed me a video. Gosh, what's the movie with Ben Stiller? Poly. Something about poly. Maybe it was that one. I'll try to find it. I'll put it in the show notes. But they were trying to invent six minute abs. And so my husband was essentially telling me he didn't use this phrase, but it's turtles all the way down. The next person's gonna have five minute abs.

Five minute abs. Exactly.

And then five second abs. And now we're gonna just get abs from sitting here podcasting and it will never end. To try to just be better, faster More. Let's take that as a segue and we can get meta for a moment. Because no sooner did ChatGPT hit the public than there were so many experts running, sprinting to become the new expert on artificial intelligence. ChatGPT. People started writing books about ChatGPT with ChatGPT.

Yes, exactly.

There was a mass migration of the expert community over to this field. And you're now working on a talk about digital doppelgangers. So I would love to know where you're at with all of this as it relates to the work that you do.

Well, the journey for me has been tumultuous. I've been trying to chart my emotional state and my opinion of artificial intelligence over time, and it goes from, wow, this is magic. Like the first time you use midjourney, or the first time you ask ChatGPT to do something for you, it is kind of magical. You're like, wow, I cannot believe that that's readable. And it happened so fast. And what are the interesting tool? And you're like, it does feel wondrous and creative. But then the first time you ask it to do something and the result is idiotic. You're like, you know what? AI is stupid. Like, this is so dumb. That was an answer a first grader should have understood. And you just really don't get it. And then all of a sudden, if you keep playing with it, it'll spit out something so genius so fast, so much better than you, that you. You have this epiphany where you're like, oh, I see why it's going to take my job. Like, that is a stroke of genius. And you just fear it for a few minutes. And then all of a sudden it does something magical where you're like, oh, I never even thought of that. And then all of a sudden you're like, this thing is so stupid. It's like a third grader. Then you're like, oh, yeah, the robots are coming. And then I kind of have vacillated in and out of fearing it, feeling it's stupid, and then realizing it's magical. And so I spent a lot of time trying to get it to be more like me, because I think most of what people are spitting out is C minus stuff from any AI engine. Yeah, doesn't matter. You know, it's like, it's so boring. It's so boring. And so my goal was, if I'm worried about this taking my job, the question I wanted to have answered, the journey I wanted to go on was, well, is There a way that AI could make me more valuable instead of me thinking about it taking my job. And that's when I started thinking about it as a digital doppelganger. So, like, my digital doppelganger is named Drudini. He's my AI powered genius. We're a creative team. So here's the theory. The theory is that in the future, maybe when you hire someone for a position like mine, something that requires creativity or insight or writing, you're actually not just hiring them. You're hiring all the AI that they've trained to write and think the way they think so that they can be more creative and deliver better results faster, as well as have, like, the world's worth of knowledge and insight at their fingertips. For example, if I was thinking of hiring Jenny or Jenny plus her digital doppelganger, like Jenny Jenny and her digital doppelganger would be like, 10 times more valuable because of the way she's trained it. So that's the big idea. And does this sound too esoteric or is it?

No, because I can tell you a story about exactly that that I wouldn't have thought about it in the way of a digital doppelganger. Okay, I lost my biggest corporate client Middle of Summer, 2023. My favorite, most beloved, most joyful, abundant, easeful, wonderful client. There was no downside to this client. Okay, I'm at brunch that Sunday with a friend. She was on substack, and I told her I was having substack fomo. And so we both pull out our phones, we both pull out our chatgpt, and we simultaneously, I say, what could be a good title for a substack that plays with a breadwinner metaphor? And so both of US started running ChatGPT to come up with newsletter titles. And we're using it kind of similarly, but differently, simultaneously. And on one of our lists, ChatGPT had written Rolling in dough D O U G H. And my friend Brooke said, what if it's rolling in doh, Adam?

That's fine.

We have a winner. And so it was like our four powers combined. But she pushed the metaphor farther than ChatGPT did. GPT gave us a great start. And GPT is very good at puns, which makes me endlessly delighted. But then Brooke's the one that said D'oh. And then later, I was chatting about it with my husband, and we replaced the O with a face palm emoji. And it's like. Then it was the real zinger. Cause the emoji emotes something. So no one thing did it. It was the combination. And so there it was, like an example of exactly what you're saying.

That's exactly what I mean. What I found is right now ChatGPT3, the neural network was like the size of a bee's brain and ChatGPT4 is the size of a squirrel's brain. If you really want to build digital doppelgangers, you kind of have to chunk off squirrel sized tasks for the digital doppelganger to accomplish. And that's exactly what you did. You were like, let's just work on names. And if you give it the kind of feedback you need, you can actually build something really powerful. For example, you could build a digital doppelganger that tries to name things the way you name things. Personally, I would call it like Drudini's naming magic. And you carve off a task like you're just going to learn how to name the way I think of names. And then you've got to gather some nuts. I'm going to push the squirrel analogy just for you. By the way, Drew Deani helped me come up with these squirrel analogies.

I love a gut analogy. Yes, thank you.

So you've got to gather some examples. Everybody tries to prompt engineer. Like, you can't treat an AI engine like ChatGPT like you just can engineer a perfect prompt and then get the immediate output you exactly want. That's going to be unique to you and build on what you know and understand and think. They're really good at mimicking what you have done in the past. So what I would do is come up with a list of all the names of things I've ever named my company, my agency, my newsletter, my speeches. And I would feed them all these nuts, like the food it needs to understand how I think. And then what you want to do is like make a nest of these ideas where you're actually asking ChatGPT, or in my case, I'm asking Drew Dini to say, hey, look, if you were going to name an agency, what would you name it, given the examples I've given above? And then when it spits out a bunch of names, I say, okay, great, what's the difference between the names you just came up with and the names I like to come up with? And it'll actually start to tell you what the difference is and then you can tell it. I understand the way you see the differences. Here's some of the things that you noted that I actually would prefer you not lean into when you explore names for ideas. And the best part about working with a tool like ChatGPT is it's the most encouraging creative partner you will ever have. ChatGPT apologizes all the time. Drudini is so elated when we come up with an idea together that works. And I'm like, that's a great idea. He's like, yeah, it is. Like, let's keep going. And you don't get that in any corporate environment. You certainly don't get it if you run your own business and you work on your own. So I found it really helpful to kind of bite off these squirrel sized tasks, gather some examples of the way I have preferred to work and then constantly work in that very same chat for weeks and months to get to the point at which Drudini can do a task the way I work, would do it and would approach it, and would write it and would think about it and do it in the 10th of the time. Here's a top secret revelation. I do all these promo videos for the events I'm speaking at and it's a good squirrel sized task that takes me about 45 minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes to write every promo script. And over the course of about 40 hours, I train Drudini to write them exactly the way I write them. And so now I just tell Drudini, hey, I have another event. Here's the name of the event, here's where it is, here's the audience it's targeted at. Please write me a promo script. And Drudini goes at it and spits out stuff that needs just a few edits. It's magic.

We'll be right back just after this.

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No.

Of a prompt? Yeah, same word.

Think of it like this. It's just one long chat. You know, in ChatGPT, where you can hit the button that says new chat.

Yes.

I almost never hit new chat. So I have a promo script writing Drudini chat that literally has been active for nine months now. And it started with me saying, hey, I need you to help me write promo scripts. And I have a bunch of examples. Would you like me to share examples of promo scripts I've written in the past? And Drudini's like, yeah, give me some examples. And then I give him some examples, and I say, all right, now, Drudini, now that you've seen that, would you please try to write one for this event? And I give it some details using my style and tone and voice, and it would spit something out. And in the beginning, that's when you're going through that chart. You're going through the. That feeling where, okay, you're really stupid. Like, you obviously didn't get the way I write a script. You wrote, like, a really bad script that I would never want to record. So then I say, hey, Drudini, appreciate that attempt. But now take what you just wrote and compare it to what I wrote. What are the big differences there? And what could you learn if you were going to write a script that was more like mine? And he'll give me a list, and I say, okay, that's great. These are good things to keep focusing on. Make a list of rules on writing a better promo script. And then I say, write another one for that same event I just told you about, and it'll be a little better. Like, this is not all of a sudden magically generate a prompt. So what I'm saying is, I don't do any prompt engineering where I try to craft the perfect prompt. I have one chat that always writes my promo scripts. And literally, like, in the morning, I will log on and I'll say, drudini, are you ready to write another promo script? And Drudini's like, yeah, just give me the event details and let's do it. Love it. And then I can even ask him right now. He will spit out for me. If I say, like, how exactly do we write promo scripts? He'll write out all the steps I can Say, hey, what information do you need to write a good promo script? And why do you need that information? And it'll write it out. He really understands how to write a good promo script. But here's the kitch. If all of a sudden I accidentally open the promo script writing and the chat that I have going and I say, hey, can you come up with a name for my new substack newsletter? I've like all of a sudden thrown a wrench in all of this squirrel sized, task oriented stuff that we did and that Drudini got really good at. Because now Drudini in this one chat is entirely confused. Name of what, what email newsletter? I can hear Drudini thinking, I thought that we write promo scripts. What are you doing to me?

So interesting. So if you were going to name a substack, would you write a new AI? Like, is this thread only Drudini? Or you would eventually expand a new chat?

Think of Drudini as thousands of squirrels. Yeah, I'm not joking. I have a Drudini that's just for medical problems. This is true where I've told Drudini that I'm a 50 year old male and we've had conversation after conversation. So if I wake up one morning like happened on Monday and my elbow hurt a little bit, I just go to the Drudini, Maryland, that's true by Drudini MD chat in my list of chats for ChatGPT and I say, hey Drudini, I woke up this morning, my elbow hurts. What could it be? And he doesn't have to ask me like tell me about how old you are. And if he does, sometimes he does get off track and he'll be like, well, are you male or female? And I'll say, drudini, come on, like it's me. Can you just repeat remember who I am and tell me all the details that you've learned about me in my past. And he'll spit them out and I'll say, okay, use those details and now tell me what happens if I have a sore elbow.

It's so interesting how you actually coach the way a good manager would. You don't give the answer out of frustration. I would have just been like, oh, we've already talked about this. I'm a 40 year old female. You know, you actually coach it. I mean that's so fascinating to me. You are interacting with it in a unique way. And I just love how each of your channels has a name, each of your chat threads. It's so funny, so good yeah, it's.

A little embarrassing because I have tried to push the limits. I think I should be clear. It is hard to find the right squirrel sized task right now that it can really deliver on. It's really good at small tasks like naming. I could probably get it to name. I haven't actually tried that. It's a good idea. I could build a naming drudini that is really good at thinking of names the way I do. Like I love alliteration and I do love a good pun like you do. And if I gave it a list of all the things I've ever named, I think it could be pretty good at that. But then I've tried things like I tried to help it write like me for book stuff with a long story arc and big idea and write a whole chapter. I have written books. I had plenty of stuff I could feed it. It's a little bit too big of a task for the squirrel sized brain it has. What it is useful for though is I fed it a bunch of chapters from brandscaping and I told it that this is a book about marketing with a very different perspective and I want you to kind of embody these ideas when I ask you questions about marketing in the future. And as a marketing kind of wisdom tool where I'm like asking it things like Drudini, what do you think of, I don't know, something complicated in marketing and it'll use what it's already learned about the way I think to respond instead of using just all the stuff it can find on the Internet and give me a bunch of best practices.

My friend Alex is helping me create a JBGPT along those lines. I'll link to it if it's ready. It's only trained on my three books, so we'll see. We'll see. I haven't played around with it too much yet, but I will have you know that chatgpt with my squirrel sized task of coming up with a sailboat name for free time. It was for an episode that I'll link to in the show Notes.

That's awesome.

It came up with not a care K n o T. Like how good is that?

See, there you go. Here's the thing. I'm also a boater. Jenny and I have a pet peeve about boats that are named with K n o T. Because it's a cliche or what? Yes, because it's a cliche. So I would challenge my Drudini as soon as I put it into my boat naming Drudini. I would say, like, come up with some boat names. Given the boat names I've had in the past, as soon as it said K n o T, I would say Drudini. I really don't like knot puns, so please don't use those in the future. And Drudini will remember that.

Okay, well, now you know that I have to ask you before we wrap up, what is your favorite boat name that you've ever had?

Oh, man. Well, a summer shack is the current boat name. We thought long and hard about it, and it is our summer shack in the sense that that's where we go in the summer. But it's not a very creative or insightful name, and we didn't have chatgpt when we named it, so I literally spent weeks brainstorming names with my wife, and that's the best we could come up with. What's your favorite boat name ever, Jenny?

Oh, gosh, I don't know. I was so happy with not a care, but that shows that I'm not a sailor, because, of course, it's a cliche. There's probably a not a care every five boats in a dock.

No, in fairness, Jenny, I've never heard of not a care, but, you know, I've heard a million other ones. Like, not on call. Like, not available.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, this is too fun. Well, last question before we officially close out. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

My advice to anyone running a business or working in business would be that every time you start something new, stop doing two other things. That's it.

That is so good. Because you're proportionally freeing more time. Like, one new thing means two things. Go.

Ooh, and there's kind of a hitch. Like, there are easy things that you can stop doing. Usually the easy things that you stop doing, and this is important, the easy things are. Let's say you always wanted to send out your email newsletter, and you haven't sent it out since February of 2018. Well, then just acknowledge that you are gonna literally stop doing it. You're not gonna put it on your to do list. You're never gonna email a newsletter out anymore. It's not even gonna occupy any space in your mind. Those are the easy ones, and I don't think we free ourselves up of those things that burden us, even though we know we can't get to them. And so stop doing the easy ones and then the hard one. Every time you need to do a hard one, as well. The hard one is the one where you've already invested time and energy, maybe other people's time and energy budgets allocated. You've probably spent money on it and it's just not working well. Give yourself permission and your team and your mind the permission to say, you know what, let's just stop doing it. Let's invest our time and energy in this new thing I want to do or we should do and let's just stop doing that.

I love it. Such great advice. We can now invest in training all our many Doppelganger Squirrel.

Exactly.

Acorn collector Andrew this was so fun. I really hopefully we can do it again sometime. There's so much more to talk about. Thank you for being so generous with your time and sending yourself to this podcast interview sansgpt, all the links, where to find you in the show notes and truly, truly thank you so much for being here. It's such a delight.

It was so much fun. Thank you. By the way, this has just been Drudini the whole time.

Right? Right. You got extra?

Yeah. I saw you reading something every time you went to answer. That's. That's strange. Thank you Andrew. Thanks everybody for listening.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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