Journey From Zero to 500,000 Students on Udemy with Julian Melanson

I've been thinking 5 years ahead ever since I originally saw ChatGPT of what does this mean for education? What does this mean for online courses? What does this mean for selling products? Because of my specific background, I know that I've spent hours teaching people how to do color correction, let's say, in a video editing application. Well, now you can just say, make my footage look like it's in the stylization of the movie The Matrix. And you don't need to know the technicalities and the nuances of how to make that yourself. So content and education and free versus paid is really going to go through an interesting transformation. I had a bit of a pessimistic view.

Welcome to the Speakeasy Mastermind, where the real conversations happen behind closed doors with the boldest entrepreneurs, creators, and growth minds in the game. No fluff, no filters, just the raw strategies, personal stories, and mental models that move the needle. I'm Eric Berman. Now let's get into it. In today's episode, you're going to learn from Julian Mellencin out of our LA chapter, who has the top-selling AI course out there. He's cracked the code on Udemy. He's one of the biggest content creators and course creators out there. And his journey to how he got there is quite incredible. Going from an interesting superpower he didn't realize he had as a kid, and ultimately finding his path after going on a 10-day silent retreat, only to walk out of that to be discovering ChatGPT. And what happened after that is an incredible story. So excited to bring to you today Julian Melanson.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to chat. I'm excited to, uh, you know, catch up. It's been a minute and I've been a member of Speakeasy Mastermind now for over a year. And, you know, we actually been hosting the last two Speakeasies at my house.

I hear you have a great house out in what, Santa Monica area?

Yeah, Santa Monica, just north of Santa Monica. A great turnout of 25 to 30 people each night. Amazing crew. And it's been actually really fun to host at my house. Done for that style of networking event.

Yeah, it's cool. I mean, that's part of the vibe here is like, we don't want to do the restaurants, right? It's all about the houses, the offices, creates that little, that bond. And it's just a different experience. I know when we tried it years ago, we were doing restaurants and it's like, Every time somebody would be dropping a nugget, it would be like, okay, can you like to add more water to your glass? Can I get you something else? And it's like, ah, right in the middle of that. But thank you for hosting. That's awesome. I heard your house is amazing and LA chapter is growing on fire. And I was stoked to be able to needle you and come into the global event we had and you had a great time in there. So thanks for coming to that.

I'm glad I did that one as well. I was going to be at an MIT training for that weekend, decided to move that, went to the event. That has already led to multiple different business ventures and ideas. It's been really cool.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, really cool. So let's dig in. I want to hear, you told me a little bit briefly when I met you, but I want to hear more of the story because from what I was told, it's some really cool stuff, your background. So just walking through, how'd you, before you became the online course, the AI guru, just crushing on Udemy and other platforms, how did you get there?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I fully know this in my heart and my soul. I was born to be a video creator in this life. It's no other way around it. When I was 5 or 6 years old, I would be sitting in the car with my, you know, parents driving at the time, hearing music in the car and seeing the visuals, seeing the music videos, seeing the movie that would be playing to the songs I was hearing. And even at that young age, I thought it was a certain amount of wizardry and magic that I could hear 2 seconds of a song and it would instantly change my state, instantly inspire, instantly fearful, scared, excited, whatever it was, joy, all from one little bit of a song. And I don't know, for some reason that just really stayed with me throughout childhood. And I was always listening to things. I always appreciate cinematography from a really young age. And I actually have a condition called synesthesia where some of my synapses for my visual and auditory synapses are slightly blended together and slightly crossed. Other people have it a lot more intense where they taste sounds, they hear sensation, they smell visuals. I have it blended with the visual and auditory part of my mind. So I can see and hear colors and shapes from specific— a violin will sound a certain way. I didn't have any words to this when I was growing up. It was actually quite overwhelming in middle school and high school. So there was so much going on in my mind. It was difficult for me to socialize at times.

Give me an example. So you're a kid, what's happening to you that's different from others?

So essentially that amount of data that I would be taking in is a much, what I know now is a higher amount of data than the average individual. So when I see a song, in the first few beats of the song, I can already, the music video is already playing out in my mind, what the shots are, what the visuals, the color, the tonality, but it'll also come in shapes. It'll come in sensation in the body, a spiky sensation from a certain sound or a smooth sensation, and it'll be an auditory, visual, and also physical sensation in the body. I didn't really know until I started to research it a little bit more as I talked to friends, and when I would watch a movie, I'd be so entrained in what I was seeing on screen. That's also what I wanted to give to other people, which is why I got into the video production. Because as I was saying, I didn't excel in school. I was overwhelmed. There was already a whole thing going on here. How am I supposed to talk to 30 other students in my class when I'm already having so much input? It legitimately felt like putting a terabyte of content into a small little SSD drive.

So that must have been scary. You're probably wondering what's wrong with you. Like, what's the deal? And you're like, don't you guys all see this too?

Exactly. So there's visuals that I'd be constantly seeing and people that would speak. I would also be able to feel. Feel what they were feeling. So it's also empathetic energetic sensitivity there too, as well, where I can feel why a video— I can watch a movie and tell pretty closely how old the editor is if he's cutting on the beat, the song choice, during choices, if he's cutting before the beat, after the beat, the pacing, all these things. I can feel the person that did the content.

Never heard that, so it's quite fascinating. Interesting. Okay, so keep going.

These were all things that were a double-edged sword that I didn't expect. I was a C and D student. I photoshopped my report cards. So that led to me finding the camera because I was overwhelmed with what I was sensing, feeling. I was honestly into skateboarding at the time and I never had that type of daredevil style. So I was like, wow, all my friends are doing these things. I gotta do something cool. So I might as well get a camera and film the cool things that they're doing.

Yeah.

And this was back when YouTube was getting started. So there was this brand new thing called YouTube. We didn't, there was no influencers, there was no social media authorities or people monetizing their following at this time. So I started creating content as a teenager and uploading it online and started to get feedback from people that started to follow my account. We didn't know what a follower was at this time. There was no ecosystem around this. And I went through school. Like I said, I Photoshopped some report cards to get through that. I did not excel. That later down the road is why I got into online courses because I couldn't sit in a room with fluorescent lighting, air conditioning, a teacher that I don't align with. It was hard for me to be in that learning environment and I wanted to give other students what I would've excelled in, which would be an online course where I could learn at my own pace with a teacher that I like, that I could do it at my own speed with cinematic shots, with great sound, with all quality that I felt was a great combination of the two. So it's funny how the childhood and all those things kind of lead. Long story short, there was years and years, over a decade of freelance working with Red Bull, Discovery Channel, music videos, documentaries, traveling, and that also lost its charm. I had a lot on paper, but I felt a little empty, to be perfectly honest.

Interesting. I mean, you're finding that you're, I mean, you're loving doing the stuff, but it worked with your strength and you sort of found your superhero. Strength inside of you, but you started getting burnt out by it.

The creating content using my creativity to sell another person's product that people don't really need to make an amazing music video where the song itself had violence or negativity in it. It started to just kind of wear on me after the funness of like, oh, I just got this $10,000 project. Like that was amazing at that time. But then that started to wear on me. And strangely enough, my whole career has actually been developed through what I did outside of my career has always fed my next path and my success. So I'm more of a meditator, yogi at heart. I'm a video producer, a meditator, a yogi at heart. And I was on a retreat. Someone I met through a crazy circumstance introduced me to someone who was an online course creator, and he said, you should do this. You have an audience. And I'd never thought that— I thought people would Google it for free or go to school. I didn't realize that there's this whole middle ground. This is 8 or 9 years ago. And I said, okay, cool. I made an online course for filmmaking, a complete filmmaker guide, and it instantly became a bestseller. It blew up online. I had no idea what I was doing. And that was a total light bulb moment. There was many light bulb moments that led up to that, but that was a total aha moment that said, Wow, I can make hundreds of tiny paychecks from individual students that are benefiting from my content versus 1 to 2 large paychecks per month directly from a client that's making a product or a video that I truly don't believe in.

Right. So, I mean, that's the key there. I mean, because it's interesting as you share the story, your talents and skills were there before, but your heart wasn't in it because it wasn't something you believed in. Now, All of a sudden the entrepreneurial light bulb goes off and says, well, wait a second, rather than doing that, I'm going to build my own. Obviously I believe in my own stuff. I'm passionate about it. Now you're really finding a lane right now that you're loving. Love it. So, okay. I said, you're just getting the inspiration. This is great. Okay. Keep going.

And I think that those reinventions of myself happened. I always tell people I had a midlife crisis at 21 because I woke up. I said, why am I sprinting towards death? I'm just, I went through school and I'm working. And then where am I even actually going towards? So I was always unplugging and getting away out of the to-do list of life that allowed for me to continue to get to the next level of, you know what, this is not doing it for me anymore. I know there's something deeper. And I would go and I would switch into a new career. There was a phase of, oh, well, I'm not going to take on client work anymore if I don't truly believe in it. And then I stopped saying yes to projects for the money. And that was a whole— I felt that in my stomach. That was scary. And then it got to, well, you know what, I'm not even going to do these client projects anymore. I'm going to only focus on education. And that was another evolution. But those evolutions only happened— maybe it would have happened in my 40s or 50s, but it happened so much younger because of the time I took off not being busy.

Right.

I've let those breakthroughs of changing the career.

Oh, you signed up. You take risk early on. I mean, you gave up what a lot of people have a hard time and don't figure out for a while. But I think deep inside of you, you listen to yourself. So that's fantastic. Good on you for that. So now you're making the courses, you get the film one, you're getting these little micro checks. People are buying, they're loving what you're building. They're like, I want more. So what happens?

So I essentially start with doing filmmaking courses, video editing, pre-production, post-production, cinematography, and expanding the different courses that I was offering personally, doing a lot, writing the course, being on camera, editing it. I had a small team, but honestly, my team that I was doing the video production, I did, there was so many iterations before that to real estate walkthrough videos. Music videos, like fashion films, and it wasn't really hitting. So when I got to that phase, I started to get a large online following now for this whole filmmaker side of me, but then that also started to not be my full self as well too. And strangely enough, I went on a Vipassana retreat. And I don't know if you've heard, but it's 10 days in total silence. No phone, no laptop, no journaling notebook. Nothing but you with you, with you, with you. That's the technique of meditation that came from the East.

Yeah.

And so I just emptied, did what I do to reset and to find where I'm going next, which was to not focus on my work, which is probably the opposite advice than some people. It's worked for me. It's so wild because I don't know, my, my life's been orchestrated in a very interesting way. So when I left. I finished a huge project for education company. We produced 60 online courses in 12 months, 10-hour course each, a different teacher we've flown from around the country, a course on psychology, physics, chemistry, biology, calculus, everything. Finished this huge project, built out a whole studio, went on this trip, had no idea what I was going to do next. And I come back and one of the first things after I get settled back into town that my buddy shows me is a thing called ChatGPT. I never heard of it, never knew what it was. And we had multiple courses in production of some music production, video production courses. And I'm so empty and seeing something with so much clarity that this was the next thing. So I told my business partner, we need to stop everything we're producing right now and we're going to make a course on this. And that clarity alone was the best business decision I've ever made. In my entire life, by far.

So it's almost like you didn't have the— part of it is you're operating sometimes not worrying about the paycheck, the fear, the clients. You're just operating from what makes sense and what's right. Like you said, an empty mind at that point.

Yeah.

Didn't have all these things clouding you and clients banging on your door. You just had the ability to be a good visionary, really.

I agree. I agree. And I think that's something that doesn't really get talked about a lot is being out of survival. Because when you're out of survival mode, you can expand onto newer, bigger, higher versions of yourself and possibilities of life. So when we're in survival mode, we're due to our fate, where our fate, where life is almost taking us. But when we get out of that survival mode, and there's just different levels of survival mode, putting food on the table, paying rent, you know, it's all different intensities of it. But when you get beyond that and you can expand into something higher and you're not in that fight or flight, how am I gonna make this next thing work, then you can get more into your destiny where you're crafting where you truly want to go. And I don't really see that talked about a lot. Big believer in energy and I'm a big believer in you create your reality. Your reality is we're having this conversation. It's two realities combining into one to create a collective moment, a collective consciousness between just you and I. And your past is determining your reality. My past is determining, and that's coming together and creating this new third entity.

Right?

And so yeah, being free and luckily getting into the online course business, luckily building the passive income streams, luckily being able to go to a 10-day retreat, luckily being able to come back, that was a non-scarcity that allowed for this brand new thing to just drop on my lap. Completely effortless.

But so the shining star, the, oh, was it ChatGPT? And you come in, it's like calling at you, glowing with all your sensory Really? Like all the shapes are hitting you. When was this? Because obviously, when does somebody hit, you know, ChatGPT? Is it right at the beginning when it comes out?

It was November of the year it really, when GPT-3 was released. I don't know if it was '21 or '22.

Okay. So yeah, I don't remember either, but yeah. All right. So that long ago already? My gosh. Okay.

Honestly, a little bit scary how long ago that is.

Yeah. Okay. So now you see it and you're like, this is our future. Everybody stopped the presses. We're going all in. That would happen.

I looked at some analytics and saw how it was just out for a few months, but already performing higher than keywords that have been here for years, like cinematography. Yeah. So it was just a no-brainer. We made that decision, just went into full research mode. I talked to every single expert I could speak to on LinkedIn. I went and down purchased every single course. There was only a few. That existed at that moment. Every single YouTube video, we started synthesizing every single bit of important information that we could find online. That about ChatGPT, about AI, about the intricacies of it, synthesizing all that content, and then started to structure it into a course because that's where my expertise comes from is how do you take a concept and remix it and place it into the outline of a bestselling course? It's similar to a book, similar to writing a book. So we went into that research mode using ChatGPT and just using the online courses that we could find, the YouTube, every single avenue we did for months. And we started to put the pre-production plan together, my business partner and I, and hired the team to produce all of it in Los Angeles. It started out as a, I think a 12-hour course. Now it's a 36-hour course with 280,000 students. So we're going to cross 300,000 students in the next few months. We get around now 6,000 new students per month that are paying for this course. And it went from just the ChatGPT course to now over 50 different AI tools for entrepreneurs, business owners, employees, creatives. There's a whole skill. We did, it's really exciting actually. I just, we did a whole revamp on the course. Because now it got built out so much, it's hard for one student to go through 36 hours of content. We now created skill paths where if you're an entrepreneur, you'll go through section 5, section 10, section 12, and there's a path for you, creative business owner.

So really, so really the whole overall promise of the course, if you're looking from before you jump in, is no matter where you're at, what your position is, we're going to educate you on how to leverage AI in the world you're playing in kind of thing. And we have a bunch of modules that are custom to you and what your needs are. And we're gonna teach you whatever existing tools are, and then what, when new tools come out, you're gonna be exposed to that? Is that sort of the concept?

Pretty much. It's a complete handbook to bring you from a complete novice of AI, the architectures, the models, to proficient, confident in using it in your daily life. So we break down everything. Prompt engineering, we break down all the different reasoning models, we break down how LLMs work. There's all theoretical chapter is like a full-on education. It's a full-on certification on how to use AI.

Wow. That's amazing. And so where do people find this? Like what, what's it called? Where do people find this thing?

Yeah, this is the Complete AI Guide and it's on udemy.com and it's actually the top-selling AI course in the country. And like I mentioned, this was from years of building ready for something like this. For this to happen and evolve. So we add 2 hours of new content every single month. We have, and that's the other interesting thing I think for business owners that's relevant is the workflow. There's only so much you can do with your team and your current workflow, but we now have a team in Argentina that's using AI to research the latest tools online, finding tutorials for the newest updates. Taking those transcripts, synthesizing everything. So basically taking the best newest content on the best newest AI updates, synthesizing those into a curriculum using custom GPTs, and then sending that here to Los Angeles where we film what's happening on screen or on camera. And then that gets sent to the Philippines for all of our editors to then put in the screen captures, the overlays, edit everything together. So we completely have what I call Star Trek workflow that allows us to create 2 hours of content. It's impossible to keep up. It's impossible. But zooming out and getting that workflow in place, having VAs that you can find, onlinejobs.ph, one of the best websites you'll ever use, that are trained on AI workflows that you've developed and you train your VA on that, takes you turning into 10 people, but you train your VAs how to do it. Then you can get 100 employees, essentially.

Wow. Oh, that's incredible. Okay. So you got just a factory going, you got efficiencies using AI. You're obviously drinking your own Kool-Aid, if you will, of the courses you're going out there. I mean, it's funny because, you know, I go online everywhere you see, you see other people throwing off courses. Oh, AI course this, and we're going to teach you that. And, and the reality is they're all chasing you right now. It seems like as far as the being the number one AI course. Content that's out there. And now, and how do people measure it? I mean, is it, you said Udemy, is there other places you sell or is that the platform? And how's that experience?

LeapYearLearning.ai is the education company that I co-founded. And that is all AI and coding-based courses. So we host our courses through there as well. And we also do consulting for companies. And we've worked with other businesses like Samsung and developed complete custom courses for their employees.

Got it.

So we did a 10-hour training just for, what was an insane number, 5,000 of their graphic designers and showing them how to use Midjourney. So clients will come to us needing a course or client that's built from scratch on AI, or they'll come and wanting to white label our course and have it for their employees as well. But yeah, you can find everything on Udemy or Leap Your Learning. Is the account and then leapyourlearning.ai is our website.

Amazing. And then like, what's, I mean, I have no idea the business model, like what's a course go for these days? What are you able to charge, you know, based on the world of, because I always think about, you said something earlier, which I thought as well, like the world is moving towards free because there's so many people out there just like, hey, get my free course on so-and-so because they're then trying to upsell you into something bigger, whether it's, you know, one-on-one, you know, a lot of people obviously turning into AI consultants out there and they give away free courses. Clearly they look at your, you know, list of stuff and how good quality is. How are you able to charge for that? And how have you seen that world play out?

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting world right now because what is of value when anyone can create anything with the English language? I've been thinking 5 years ahead ever since I originally saw ChatGPT of what does this mean for education? What does this mean for online courses? What does this mean for selling products? Because of my specific background, I know that I've spent hours teaching people how to do color correction, let's say, in a video editing application. Well, now you can just say, make my footage look like it's in the stylization of the movie The Matrix, and you don't need to know the technicalities and the nuances of how to make that yourself. So content and education, free versus paid, is really gonna go through an interesting transformation. I had a bit of a pessimistic view this past year, before this past year, now this year, in this last 6 months, I actually, I see a lot of amazing possibility, which we can get to that. But to answer your question, I mean, I'm the video lover of cinematography at heart. So I've always spoken, you won't believe this. We don't do any advertising, any marketing. I've never paid for an advertisement to drive any of these sales. We doubled down on the course trailer. On the course title and the course thumbnail. So it's all about the right course at the right time to the right audience with the right messaging behind it. So I believe if you're truly offering value, yeah, there's of course lead magnets. You want to offer things for free and get people into your, you know, your price ladder so you can upsell them. But a free course is something you can use as a technique. I just always feel that quality is an excellent filter. You know, there's so much quantity of content. There's ways to hack algorithms where it's not really quality content, but it still rises to the top. But at the end of the day, we've always focused. I'm not a marketer. I've always been more of the creative. I don't want to sell you on something. I want you to see what I created. And if it resonates with you and you feel it, then you, you want to buy it. Like that's been my mentality.

Well, I think just in listening to my belief is probably goes back to, like you said, the quality, you know, people will look at somebody else's, hey, get my free so-and-so. And then they look at yours, they see the trailer, they see what's going on. They say, oh man, they see the number of downloads, probably more than anything else, and ratings. They're probably like, damn, why is this thing being downloaded this much? And I suppose the person who, you know, you're probably, I'm going to guess your target or your avatar is more of the person that's generally interested in investing in themselves to make them better versus just a looky-loo who's kind of like just experimenting and playing around, but not that serious to get in there and say, I really need to learn this. I'm a professional graphic designer in that example I gave earlier. I need to really get my poo poo together to save my job and my career, probably I better go in here and do the— and this has gotta be high quality. And they just know that it's gonna be the right thing and they're gonna learn from it. So that's probably where you're winning. Is that fairly accurate, would you say?

Yeah. I mean, quality first. I also believe in making education available to the masses. So I'm not selling a $3,000 high ticket item. These courses sell between $10 to $20, $30, $40. but at high volume, high volume, 6,000 enrollments per month, you're selling your courses at a great with upsells and other things in that ecosystem. I truly want to help the planet. That's my vision. So I do believe in focusing on, you know, and dialing in is like following what your own remix of business, you know, I've taken what I learned online and Udemy might not make sense to some people. They think it's, you know, You only should host your course on Kajabi, your own platform. That's great. If you have a warm audience with people that are ready to buy and you have a marketing funnel, then you can host it on your own platform. If you want to focus on creating a high amount of courses that have a high amount of students, Udemy is a good platform. So yeah, it really depends on the individual, what their goal is. My goal is massively affect the entire planet on a massive scale. So reach as many people as possible.

What would you say is your percentage mix of sales? Probably what, 80/20 Udemy and like way higher on Udemy than your main site?

It's kind of funny, like, as far as students, yes, but then we'll get business clients, you know, massive budget to do a custom course.

That's kind of— I can see that. They probably see you're new to me, see the quality, see you're legit. Like, who are these guys behind the scenes? Oh, let's go build something out.

It's the best business card because it's a marketplace like Amazon. I can have a shower filter on my own website and I can tell you that it has 10,000 5-star reviews. I can say whatever on my own website. When it's a public marketplace, with publicly verified, like Yelp is a marketplace, Amazon is a marketplace, Udemy is a marketplace. So we have 50,000, 60,000 reviews with 4.5 out of 5 stars. So I don't need to sell you on that. That's the best business card that there is when it comes to this type of, you know, when an online course or just reviews in general.

I mean, that's a whole killer sort of even within our community. I don't know how many people really cracked the code on Udemy. So I think that's great for anybody listening. To know they could reach out to you for that as well. I mean, the course creation, but Udemy, I mean, did it take you a while to crack that code or is it just go back to, I just had great content that I was passionate about and I went in there and doubled down on that and it found me at the right time, right quality?

Yeah, I would say it's a lot easier to create a course that does hardly any movement than it is to create a bestseller. So the goal is to create a flagship course on a specific large topic that's high in demand, that's just a bestseller, just like an Amazon product. You want to get that bestseller badge, even if it's not on Udemy. It's just the right course. And where that comes from is the pre-production research. So there's different tools, Udemy Insights, VidIQ, so that you can see search volume on YouTube. Because if people are searching AI for beginner on YouTube 4 million times a month, that's probably going to be a decent niche to go after. There's Google Trends as well. There's just an endless amount of keyword listing analyzers that you can use, but really analyzing that, if it's so niched around horse training, you know, there's like so many small niches that we're not going to have a massive audience. You got to be a little bit careful with those offerings, but you just, yeah, you want to do your pre-production. I call it pre-production. I come from the film world, but your preparation, your pre-planning to really do your research before filming, before getting all down the rabbit hole of what you're gonna produce and all that stuff. I've seen that happen to a lot of creators and it can be a little bit dangerous. You wanna verify your idea first.

Right.

The interesting thing too, 'cause that's, that's one thing, education is gonna change a lot. I come from this world where I'm creating an 8 to 30-hour course, you know, and there's other people that create the shorter form. Where I really see this going, people aren't gonna need to know the exact skillset. Like there used to be a day and age where people were woodworkers and they, all they would do is build a table with wood their entire life and they could churn out 100 tables in 10 years. Then something like IKEA comes along and just totally modernizes that whole thing. The craftsmanship of woodworking is now not in the masses.

Yep.

AI is really gonna do that same thing where I'm not going to need to know all the techniques that I would teach someone in a cinematography course. They're just going to need to know how to do a good prompt. The way courses in my mind, I have thought about this a ton, is of course AI companion learning. You want to teach your audience, monetize your audience, not by having this crazy long course that's 5 hours. You want to have a 20-minute course. On showing your audience how to use your custom GPT, how to use your custom agent, how to use something that they used to have to learn for 10 hours, that it's a done-for-you AI button that they now push. That's where education is going to go. So regardless on Udemy, that's something that's super, super, super important that I don't want anyone out there to waste their time doing courses and trying to monetize the old-fashioned way.

Very interesting. I mean, you just touched on another— the last topic I want to hit is the future. I mean, what do you see for I mean, you're finally in your lane. You're on fire right now. You're feeling great. You're doing things like you said, your mission, you're helping affect the lives of thousands and thousands of people to get educated and making a real difference and impact out there. Where do you see it going in the future?

Yeah.

In your business and other, yeah, I mean.

I see creating other AI millionaires. I see that what this whole future is holding is a complete explosion of education and of being able to transform the way content is created. So for example, my buddy Sammy, who, you know, he went and got a test done and he turned the test results into a podcast so that he could learn about what his test results were versus reading a breakdown from the doctor's office. He is having his kid, instead of passively consuming content and watching whatever the kids show, you know, used to be Teletubbies. It's something different now.

Cocomelon. Yeah.

Cocomelon. Instead of passively watching that with the iPad, he's saying, hey, what do you want to create today? Oh, I want to create monster trucks. Okay, great. Let's hop on the ChatGPT. Let's generate some monster trucks that you can, you can watch and play with and edit. How big do you want the monster truck tires to be? So kids are now going to be able to be content creators, generating videos, everything. From a young age. So what happens when I can turn a PDF into a podcast, a photo into a video, an article into a song, all so that I can understand the world around me and ingest content in a brand new way of this multimodal synthesized thing where anything can get created for the betterment of us understanding the world around us.

God, it's so amazing. It's crazy. I didn't even think about that. The imagination really just going to be anything you want.

Zero height to where we can go. But the downside is that we have to be mature around how we use these tools. The internet is only, I think, what, 21, 22 years old since it was something around that. So it's old enough to drink. It's still a very immature, young, it's not even an adult yet per se. And AI is just this little thing that we're just now learning. So We have to use these tools in a mature way to benefit ourselves and not just siphon wealth from the community and other people. So education is going to be going from, I'm going to show you the nitty gritty of how to do this thing by hand. For my example, okay, I'm teaching people how to use AI. Instead of having a long course, I'm going to offer a set of automations and agents that give you the benefit of what the course used to give. You're going to be able to just go like, boop, I don't need to learn how to do all this crazy intricate stuff. I can just use this person that's an authority in their topic to hit that button. And they're going to be able to create everything that they would have had to take a 20-hour course to learn. I'm going to have my own set of custom AI offerings and all entrepreneurs, I believe it's going to go this way instead of teaching you how to run Facebook ads and selling that course on Facebook ads, I'm going to sell my done-for-you, one-button automated Facebook ad AI expert agent.

And I think about this too all the time, having two little kids right now about, I mean, in my mind, I'm like, I was talking to my wife. I'm like, I can't imagine, you know, high school is going to be anywhere near what it is today. And I know education is typically slow to catch up, but I don't think they have a choice. I think it's going to be forced where I mean, you said kind of earlier, like, whatever the kid wants to learn, like, if you force them down a path where there's not going to be— that's not inside of them, versus being able to pull out where their gut is and what their personalities are going to be able to go deep into that faster, quicker, they can excel so much better. And just having the creativity to not learn necessarily from the, from the classroom teacher right there, but from this world out there. I mean, something's going to change in my opinion there. Don't know when, where. It's just, I mean, it's exciting. But like you said, we gotta protect, protect ourselves.

Yeah. One-to-one learning is the most effective style. So if you have a one-on-one coach, you're gonna get the most benefit. If you have one teacher with a classroom full of 30 students, you're gonna have benefit. It's gonna be smaller. If you have one teacher that has an online course with 100,000 students, it's actually, to be honest, one of the flaws of online courses. That's the least effective.

Yep.

Now AI. What happens to education when I want to learn about ancient Egypt and I can just go and prompt an entire cinematic movie on the exact time period overview with visuals, audio, sound design instead of reading in a textbook? There's going to be an education explosion because, and then on the other side of that, you're not going to need an expert that is a historian on Egypt that you have to find that one person or buy their course. I'm just going to prompt the exact thing that I want to learn. So the Egyptian expert should be the one that's selling that.

They could get in there ahead and work with somebody like you to go get that course in there. So that's fantastic. Well, I greatly appreciate your time. This is so fascinating and congrats on all the success. I mean, I want to close the loop on something you said earlier. I mean, if you go back to that, being that kid in school, if you had AI back then, you could have created a much easier Photoshop C&D report card. Than you did today. And did you ever tell your parents about that?

Yeah, it came, the truth came out, you know, 10, 15 years later. And then the truth came out that, uh, I had street smarts, but not as much book smarts.

I love it. Well, you're not alone, obviously, in our community. I think a lot of us probably were that same kid sitting around with whatever the thing was. You had a cool little superpower there. A lot of us with our own version of a superpower, ADHD, whatever you want to call it, and wondering, well, who are we realizing we're all these, you know, credible entrepreneurs that are dying to do big things and want to get out of the box. And you clearly did that. So congrats on your journey and love what you're doing. I'm excited. We'll talk offline. Love to have you kind of come into, maybe we'll do a fun virtual, one of our virtual events and have you on there with some of our other big course creators talking about course creation and/or AI and what you're seeing. And we'll have some fun with that.

So perfect. It sounds great. Sounds great. Thanks for having me on.

Well, thanks. And I look forward to digging into your course myself.

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, looking forward to it.

All right, Julian. Thanks. Have a great day. And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the real mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to apply. Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, and don't be the smartest one in the room.