17: Using AI for Creating Your Own Podcast with Jonathan Green
2 Jan 2026 · 51 min
Interview with Jonathan Green on using AI to produce and scale a podcast. Jonathan outlines his entrepreneurial background, argues AI is an accelerant that lowers barriers to entry, and gives a detailed, step-by-step AI-enabled workflow (recording with Riverside/SquadCast, editing in Descript, clip creation with Vidyo, hosting on Buzzsprout, thumbnails via Midjourney) plus automation for guest outreach and distribution.
Chapters
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 bestselling 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, 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 Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. All right, 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. I've been a full time entrepreneur since February 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 going to 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 artificial intelligence. I often see, oh, AI could do this, but not that or People will design a prompt, I'll go, I can do a better version. And I have this just lucky or natural ability. Oh, people 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 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, fantastic. You know, it's interesting, that intersection of entrepreneurship and AI, because with what we do, that's one of the customers that we serve is that individual who's interested in flying the coupe, 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?
Oh, AI is much easier to learn. Entrepreneurship has a lot of 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 other 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.
That's an astounding figure. So for those people who are listening to this and they kind of have that, 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 entre, the budding entrepreneur who was interested in pursuing an AI opportunity.
The best way to understand AI is that it's accelerant. 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. 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 I get it. There's always something in the process that you go, oh, this is 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 accelerant. I think of it as that button they have in the car in Fast and the Furious that you push NAS 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 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. It'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 on? Page 36. I'm not even. I'm still in 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 you 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 harder. I would have to hire a team. For now, AI could do them very quickly.
It'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, 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. There is 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.
I'm really a Chat GPT guy. I could do almost any task with ChatGPT, even that other tools do. I was having 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 could 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, 100amonth. When you realize, wait, I could do this on my own, it would take me five to 10 minutes to get the same result with the same time codes. It's not worth as much. It helps you make better and more efficient decisions. It also helps you to recognize there are a lot of tools out there that are just front ends for ChatGPT or using their API. Some of them are just using Cloud API. It's about 9 to 1. 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 ChatGPT 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 going to watch YouTube videos, follow some tweets that have prompt 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 ChatGPT 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 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 want to do it here. There's a lot of tasks that I do inside of Chat GBT 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, additional process. I can handle it. All right, there's.
We'll be back after a quick break.
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This 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, 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 going to be a, I guess technically almost an expert with the models here. So one of the areas that we talked about this before I launched a podcast, I think, you know, we just released episode 14. You're at episode 300 plus. There is 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 Chat gbt, you 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 recognized as an AI subject matter expert in their industry and their domain and a podcast is a fantastic way to do that. So what, what, what's the difference between episode one and episode 301 as far as the tools you've been using when.
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 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 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. I'm not excited by that. And I was going to shut it down. He goes, well, what we can do is just rename it and pivot it. So it used to be called the Servo 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, 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 message all the time, like, oh, you're 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 served a master. It can be about anything. My show is called Artificial Intelligence Podcast. It's probably about artificial intelligence.
Yeah.
I get so many messages for people that are not relevant at all. 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 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. Just 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, 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 are 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 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 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. And that's become my guideline. And like I, I don't always have. I had someone on who makes covers for 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. Or businesses, large businesses have a lot of problems. People fight over the thermostat. There were a lot of problems with real. Real estate. So you 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. Yeah, very 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. Founder is 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 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. Yeah, those are a lot of things that I've learned from developing my podcast. And you have to see it as part of. 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, I have a huge spike in listenership.
Yeah.
And that's awesome. But that's just the type of person I attract. 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, going to move away from it and my business focus now that changed. AI, My podcast has changed. It makes sense. So I use it now, really for relationship building. Like, we had a great chat yesterday on my show.
Yeah.
And we're gonna become buddies now. It helps me to meet people, and that's what I kind of think is the best value for it. Some people come my show and then they wanna 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 or 1900. It's always 2000 and just seems unlikely. It seems unlikely that everyone's at 2000. Or I've been on shows who are like, listen, your YouTube video is going to get fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, fifty, you know, five million views, whatever number. They say it's been up to a million. It's never. It never happens. You can get hold into that hype. But shows at that level, like I have a friend who 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 between 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 mattress they mailed 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 9 out of 10. There's no bad video games anymore because that's who's 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 going to 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 done in 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 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.
A 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. 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 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 or2 about domain plus AI. So for those of you who are learning this stuff to cast off the 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, it's not like you've got Gandalf coming off the mountain and he's been doing generative AI for 50 years. So learn this stuff, let your domain, your, 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?
I 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 descript for editing my episodes. You. You need descript 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 green 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 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, they own squadcast. So I found out. Cause 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 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. The second thing after that, once you think about that, you want to think about the tools you're using, what type of headphones, 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. At that price point, you're going to get something really solid. It's going to 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. 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. Cause 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 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?
Yesterday.
You had to think about. Also, yesterday is 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's. Last time someone bought you a drink.
At an event. When I was with my, you know, friends.
Exactly. So for men, things that happen to women all the time. People offer my wife drinks all the time, Come by 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 you 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 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.
Yeah.
They're the people that Are working for them a long time or they're 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 nice guy 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 first looks, I didn't know who it was.
Yeah.
But more importantly, I was like, I just, to me, 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 a 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 could get all of them. Why? Because I. What? They're not. No one interviews them outside of what 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. 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. 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's not a big deal. And usually later they want to be on the show.
This is fantastic. So for those of you who are AI curious and you're learning this stuff, how you use, how I interpret 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 need to reconsider, pause and reflect, as Mark Twain would say. 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 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, hey, I'm a heart surgeon, I want to talk about my new stent. Can I get on your art? Does it have anything to do with AI? No. Well, read the title man. So great point. And also everybody, his suggestion of description, Google it, Descript, 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 going to hear universally is well used and well liked by anybody who is leveraging the power of AI in their video production, content production, stuff like that. So outside of those tools, description, Squadcast and Riverside, once the podcast is recorded and 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 in that part?
One thing I do is notify the guest about the episode appearance via AI. So I use an automation that sends out an AI written email. My problem is I'll forget to tell people their episode is out. There'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 guest 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, it'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 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. I was just shooting a video about this today. I use Vidyo V I D Y O 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 was 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 horosi text. Yeah, like everyone wants to look like Alex Hero. 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 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 is 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 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. I create my show notes using V I D Y O. Yeah, IO love video. Then I also really like to use 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 Buzz browser versus 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 enhancer, AI stuff they have. They keep adding on stuff to beat 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 ChatGPT. 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 2 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 Eclipse 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 in ChatGPT? 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 and so's. 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 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 they 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 in 4K. That's the one that's going on YouTube. And it'll upload a buzzsprout. 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. Cause they don't re. 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 say, oh, here's the episode you're on. Just doing that means it will show up in their followers feeds. A lot of the. 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 Buzzsprout 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 doing 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 Mid journey. I generate a cartoon based on them, and that way it's. It catches the eye. It's not 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 in any. Have they showed 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. 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 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. So that's all part of the process. And knowing that 1 out of 10 guests or 1 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 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 image in 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 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.
Yep.
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.
That right there was you. Just everybody who's listening, 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. Don't be intimidated. What he just shared with you was a robust process that took probably a, a few years to figure out. And then there was 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 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. And I'm sure there's a million other tools that Jonathan knows about that that would do this. So this has been, you know, my intention is to always find out how are people using AI and their, 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, I know, 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, I hope that this was some insight into what it's going to 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 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 and all of the, 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?
Yeah, 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 and I'm working on a new iteration which is an AI based version of creating a podcast. Beautiful. But 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 rules. They go, oh, I want to appear until you have 100 episodes. I want to appear to 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 ties. They just want to know that you're not going to 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, decide, this is something I want to do, there's something I'm going to stick with and to 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 going to make money and you're going to go out of business, or you're not going to like it enough and you're going to quit. So it's important to have those two things and find the 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. 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 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 going to 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.
Awesome. So the best place for people to get access to your podcast would be the artificial intelligence podcast that's on all the major platforms. Where else if somebody wants. Obviously you do a lot of content on LinkedIn. That's how I found out about some of the stuff we were talking about yesterday was I googled and they're popped up. Jonathan has LinkedIn articles. Is that your main channel for sharing content? LinkedIn?
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. 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 is. I don't get that many messages on there. And it's just you get again it's like figure out a platform. Oh, this is where people don't get overwhelmed. So you're more likely to get heard. That's where I'm definitely the 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. All of it's me. And you Visit my on LinkedIn you can see I give away free copies of my bestseller chatgpt profits. So you don't even have to buy my book. Obviously. I love what people do do. All 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.
That's fantastic. So everybody listening? There is so 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, 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 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 this has been awesome. Jonathan again, everything that he suggested or recommended will be in the show notes. So please take a moment and at those, especially the links out to where Jonathan is providing the content, because I can guarantee you this, 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. special thanks to our producer, Evan Desaulnier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle usingaiatwork and visit www.usingaiatwork for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.
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