Leveraging AI as a Podcaster with Spencer Shaw

In This Episode

• [02:09] – Stephan welcomes Spencer Shaw and reminisces about where they had met each other. Spencer talks about his journey into podcasting and artificial intelligence.
• [08:50] – Spencer explains how he helps his clients expand their podcast reach.
• [16:19] – Spencer reveals his secrets to juggling podcasting while traveling.
• [18:51] – Stephan asks Spencer what makes a good video clip in terms of length and storytelling.
• [23:39] – Spencer discusses the unique challenges of hosting a podcast entirely run by AI.
• [32:27] – Spencer describes his process for selecting podcast topics.
• [41:22] – Spencer elaborates on why he teaches his kids to use AI and how he goes about it.
• [47:47] – Spencer provides information on how you can collaborate with him and his team.

Jump to Links and Resources

Spencer, it’s so great to have you on the show.

It’s great to be with you, Stephan.

So we know each other from a mastermind that we’re both in a small one. We had an episode air on my other show with a couple of our colleagues from that mastermind, which was such an amazing episode. We talked about spirituality and personal development and growth and all that sort of stuff. So, thank you again for being on that show. That was episode 463. If you’re a listener of Get Yourself Optimized. Or if you’re not, you should be. If you are, make sure you listen to episode 463, where Spencer and I chatted with Andrew and Angelo.

So, yeah, thanks for being on this show.

Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Having a conversation with a friend with whom you already have a relationship means that we get to go below the surface. So that’s what’s going to be fun.

Yeah. So let’s start with a little bit of backstory. How did you get so into podcasting and into AI?

So, the way that I got into podcasting was probably 13 or 14 years ago. I owned a software company, and one of the things we did in our software company was build apps on the Facebook platform. One of our clients who was using our app, and they happened to use it at a pretty large volume, said, “Hey, we’ve heard of this thing called podcasting. Have you guys done any work in that area?” So we made some introductions, figured a few things out, and one thing led to another, and you know how it goes. We spun up another company, and that was the story and its formation. From there, we’ve just continued to innovate. And we’ve really, probably three or four years ago, went deep down the AI world. We were ahead of the ChatGPT, and we’ve been pushing ever since.

Good content isn't necessarily overproduced; it's about making it interesting and relatable to your specific audience. Share on X

Yep. So we’ll talk about that more. So, first, I wanted to get a timeline of you starting your podcast production company before you started your podcast. Is that right?

Yeah, it was probably a year or two before. I remember my very first podcast interview. It was with a guy named Wade Foster. He’s the co-founder of a company called Zapier. And so we just dived in deep. Back then, it was a blue ocean. It was so cool getting to do interviews with people.

And podcasting was complicated. And when something’s complicated, it means it’s a little more work, but there tends to be a bigger upside.

Yep. How many episodes are you?

On the Business Growth Podcast? I have no idea. Hundreds something. On The Prosperity Podcast I co-host, we’re in its 500-something episodes. Our company produces podcasts for other brands and shows that we own. We produce hundreds every month, and our network does it, but anywhere from a million to several million downloads a month.

So amazing.

Quite a bit of traction, too.

Amazing. Are you allowed to share some of the names of clients or podcasters you work with?

Yeah. So, we’ve gone down a specialized route for some of the brands we work with. So, we do a lot of work with financial companies, legal companies, medical technology, defense, financial services, coaches, and real estate. So, the podcast that I co-hosted was called the Prosperity podcast. That’s in the financial industry. We’ve done work with Wolters Kluwer, and Leonardo DRS. 

We’ve done work with just a variety of companies and startups. We don’t do anything with sports, comedy, or gossip. We just swim in our lane. That’s a cool thing for us.

You mentioned that you also own some other shows you are not hosting or co-hosting. How did that come about?

The area where we win is when we can own the customer and experience.

What happened is that we found some call-it opportunities in the marketplace. So, instead of us having to host it, we found talent to run those shows. What we’ve done is we will create the content, or we’ll hire people to do the content, and then we own the IP. Then, there are other shows. We have some fully synthetic shows, like completely AI. AI wrote the shows, and did the voice and text for everything, We’re scaling those as well. To me, that’s a pretty cool opportunity. I don’t think it’ll be around for a while.

Well, I’ve heard there are several faceless YouTube channels on YouTube. Some of them are pretty obvious. They’ve got that robotic-sounding voice you hear used on TikTok often. I’m curious, how are you monetizing this? What’s the market opportunity here for a completely AI show or a completely AI YouTube channel?

So the market on the YouTube side will be what you’ll get from Google, Instagram and other partners? They’re going to pay you for that. That’s a volume game. You have to be really good at many elements of marketing to be able to nail that. The area where we win is when we can own the customer and experience. I should say on the lead. So, ultimately, what we’re going for is getting people on an email list. There are affiliate opportunities, and then there are also monthly recurring opportunities, such as putting them into some type of education platform, having them use a tool, software that we own, or something like that.

Are you selling these leads? Are they like real estate leads? You’re selling them to real estate agents or companies that sell to real estate agents. What’s the big monetization opportunity for you?

We’re not doing any lead gen for other people, so we’re focused on building our own email lists. So that’s what we want to do. We want to build our email lists. Then, with those email lists, we’ve built up those personas for the podcasts, and then we are pulling them into, it could be like a group coaching type of program or like a private audio coaching, pull them into products, services, things of that nature. But we’re not selling off those leads. We could do that, but it’s a whole other monster. We’re good at that area, and we have friends that are good in the other area, which we’ve on the podcast company to help set up the lead gen. But as far as optimizing their funnels and doing those things, we don’t deal with their external funnels.

Are you helping your clients and your portfolio of shows grow their channels and reach, and if so, in what ways?

We are an agency, so we specialize in boutiques. So this is something that we’ve learned over time, that we’re very clear on the areas that we can work in specific to the podcast company, and we’re very clear to areas that we don’t want to work. So, for example, we will take the raw recordings, produce a final asset of audio and video, and then we’ll have tons of written content that we do, social clips, all kinds of pieces. Then, there’s a very clear line that we will hand off to the client. They will be responsible for scheduling, promoting and doing those pieces. We do that because if we will be posting on their social media or going down that rabbit hole, which means we would need full control. That’s something that requires one, a very careful dance between the two. So we have a clear line.

Then, as far as the promotion and helping, what we do is we do a lot of guest management. So, we’ll grow the shows by having our talent on other podcasts. We’ll promote the shows through different ads and different partnerships. But there’s definitely a clear line: we’re not using their social media, promoting their social media, or working in those areas.

But you create reels or shorts for your clients as well as the final audio and full-length video of the episode.

Understanding your audience is the cornerstone of creating engaging content. Without that, you're just shouting into the void. Share on X

We create shorts. We create the written content for blog posts, newsletters, and all the caption text they would use for social media. So they have a massive library of assets that they can use, and then they can use some. To us, it doesn’t really matter, but at least they have all the assets at their fingertips.

Gotcha. Then you mentioned you found talent and that you owned the IP. These are for the shows that are part of your portfolio. What are some of the tips and tricks that you found by recruiting and onboarding talent to host a podcast and hopefully lock them in so that they stick around and you’re not replacing them like a revolving door sort of situation and also that they’re not maybe taking your audience with them if they do leave?

Yeah, that’s a good question. Two things come to mind. One, like when you’re looking for a life partner, you’re looking for a spouse. You don’t want to find someone that you say, “I really like them, but I wish I could change this about them.” You’re going to take them, and you’re going to accept them, and you’re not going to want to make a huge modification and change them. So what that means is our hosts already have to have a skill level, and they already have to have a north star that’s guiding them. They might just not be good at synthesizing the operations of making it happen, or they might not be good at coming up with the appropriate strategy that’s going to win. So we can fill that void.

We create a win-win situation. We’re always looking to find out how it will win for them and for us.

Second, as far as the IP goes, we create a win-win situation. So we’re always looking to find out how it will win for them and for us. We want to align incentives. So, we are going to own the show’s IP and customer database. But there may be, for example, a back end. So, for some of the talent, there’s a coaching program. So, let’s say in situations where we have a digital product or a digital membership of some sort, there’s a back end, a more hands-on type of coaching. We stop there.

We don’t want to get involved with their service coaching business. They can lay out that model. So, essentially, what we’re doing is providing leads and getting traffic, and then they can optimize that back end. We take care of the front. And that’s worked for us well enough that it’s not putting anyone into a trap, and it’s not putting it into a way where someone’s going to say, well, I’m so frustrated, I’m going to leave because it’s helping each other out at all times.

Right. So you haven’t had anybody leave so far that you’ve brought on board as a show host?

We’ve had people leave. It doesn’t happen often, but we have. What it typically does is that they’ll want to adjust their model most of the time. Once they leave, they’ll have a bigger challenge of getting leads. But some people like to run more boutique types of coaching companies for us. I’m always optimizing for the most efficient thing out there and what will create the least headaches. So, on the digital side, I can control that, and I can automate that through coaching. If it’s him getting on Zoom calls and managing that process, that’s complicated.

It’s not a business that I want to be involved with. So, typically, that upside is greater for them than it would be for us. The margins are higher, and the prices are higher, but it is not a business that we want to toy with. So I’ll give up that revenue to be in the more efficient revenue.

You have a laptop lifestyle because I’ve known you for a while now, for at least a few years, and that whole time you have been just bopping around the world most of the time, at least for the last year. Tell us how you make that work.

So, to give context, our family just came off of a round-the-world trip for one year, and it was amazing. I have three kids, ages 18, 16, and 12, so not exactly like one guy in a laptop. It was a little bit more complex than that. It comes down to a few things. It’s always going to be people, has to be great people that we’re working with. That means our team members and it has to be great systems and processes. They have to be absolutely working so incredibly tight, and it will also be the business model. So, if I owned a local business that required me to be here and I was going to be traveling throughout the world, that would be very hands-on unless I had a great operator.

So, I’m always thinking about the operator in any business I do before starting it. So there’s a new business that we’re looking to spin up. It’s a physical business, and before we actually do it, we have already been interviewing operators. Like, we have to have a good operator in order to do it. If not, then there’s no way I’ll touch it. Doesn’t matter.

What were the countries that you visited on this round-the-world trip?

We visited Brazil and Argentina. We went to Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. We wanted to taste a bunch of different cultures. We wanted to get to meet various people and provide experiences for the kids. I think we accomplished what we went after. It was pretty amazing, and we thought we’d come back and be like, “Oh, that’s great. We did it,” and we came back, and we’re like, “Okay, where are we going to go next?” So we’ll see.

With the way technology is now, you could record a podcast in your car and have it sound as good as being in the studio.

How do you manage podcasting while you’re traveling? Do you bring all the equipment you want for top-tier podcasting, maybe a green screen and all the lighting, or do you just bring a nice microphone? That’s it.

I have a microphone and my laptop. So this is the microphone right here. And that’s all I use for the podcast. I’ve got a full studio when I’m home in the office. I’ve got the amazing. You’re using a Shure SM7B. I can see. So I’ve got several Shure SM7B, mixers, and all kinds of stuff, and it just collects dust.

My son is a drone pilot and filmmaker, so we have a lot of gear with that. I think we’ve got a Sony a7. I don’t know what it is, a seven, four, five, or something like that. Really nice fancy camera with some lenses and lav mics and all kinds of stuff. But it can be simple. With the way that technology is now, you could record a podcast in your car and have it sound as good as being in the studio now. The technology has completely changed. It’s not like what it was five years ago.

Five years ago, I remember a show from back then that was recorded in a car, and it sounded like it. If you ever listened to Russell Brunson‘s show Marketing in Your Car, you’d hear the turn signal going, and it was just like, really homemade sounding, but it was quality content. He’s a brilliant guy. So it was worth the irritation of listening to road noise while you’re trying to hear him drop wisdom bombs.

Yeah, it’s tough. I think now, with the way technology is, it’s so easy to just apply a few things afterward to make your audio sound great. It’s so easy now to take these long-form videos. If you’re shooting a video on your phone on your way to work or doing a podcast, it’s so easy to chop those up into clips. 

In our podcast, I guess you’re going to get 5 to 15 really good clips. So that’s the difference. Back in five years ago, that wasn’t an option. Now it is. So, that’s the minimum baseline of things that should happen.

So, what makes for a good clip? Like the length and the storytelling? Walk us through that.

So first, the mechanics. One, it’s going to be vertical. So when you’re recording something on your phone, let’s say it’s going to be like a long-form YouTube video. You can use a GoPro, you can use your cell phone, or you can use a more complicated setup with an awesome camera and a microphone. If it’s shooting clips themselves, record it vertically. So either way, for your clips, they need to be vertical. You’re going to go less than 60 seconds in most cases. That way, it’s going to be something that’s on YouTube because YouTube’s got that hard limit.

We have seen great success by ensuring that the marketing message and the audience align well.

Instagram, you can have longer videos. TikTok, you can have longer videos. So then the other elements of really good clips are that you want something that’s not necessarily clickbait and not necessarily something that’s polarizing, but it’s got to be interesting. So, by having something that’s interesting and that’s going to draw in your listeners or viewers, I’ll kind of stamp a couple of things because I think many marketers get it wrong. And where we have seen great success is ensuring that the marketing message and the audience match up well. 

What happens is oftentimes you’ll see marketers trying to overproduce something and have it look like a MrBeast clip, where it’s got a ton of movement, and it’s shocking and just over the top. If you’ve got an audience of plumbers, this is an example; it’s an audience of plumbers, and you’re helping them optimize their business. Having a still camera in the office or when you’re walking around, that’s not a ton of movement, and you’re sharing something of value, which is going to be better than something flashy with a ton of other graphics.

Knowing that audience is incredibly important. The other reason and this is, I don’t know, not to say our secret sauce, but the other reason why we don’t go and mess around in the comedy or entertainment spaces is that we simply cannot out-create the most creative people. They’re amazingly creative. It changes so fast. I mean, that world, like, if you’ve seen people in the filmmaking space and you watch their YouTube shorts, they might put 10 hours into a 45-second clip, and they might get some hits on it, but then what’s next? Like, they have to have another one tomorrow. 

If, again, you’re in a more boring industry, but you understand what’s valuable, and you speak from the area where you are to solve their problem. As long as the audio is good, it’s not distracting. It can be boring and simple, and that’s something that will sit and live for months.

We’ll call it weeks or months, maybe years. Five years ago, there was a longer shelf life. Now, the shelf life has dramatically decreased. And that’s okay.

The shelf life is much longer on YouTube than on Instagram.

It is. I think there’s one other area where people will make mistakes: they will have something that hits. Like something that’s a winner and they don’t want to take. You know, once you’ve created something that was good, it was a winner. Oftentimes, they’re like, “well, this is on the hall of fame, and it sits on the wall.” No, like, bring it down, let it play again. That’s okay. Or maybe there’s another sequence of videos around that that come up.

So, it’s just working from that area, and it’s not as hard as people think it is. It’s knowing the audience. It all comes down to knowing that audience. You know that audience so well you can describe their problem. And too often, new marketers don’t know the audience, or they’re trying to solve too big of a problem. It’s just, it’s like being out in the woods with a flashlight. You’re not going to see the end of the forest. You’re going to see a couple of steps ahead.

If your messages are a couple of steps ahead, then they’re going to say, “wow, this helped me today; okay, this will help me tomorrow.” And that resonates with them. But if you’re going to shine a spotlight and it’s too far ahead, they’re overwhelmed. If you’re not shining the light in the right spot, you won’t connect with the audience; they’re going to leave.

What are some of the unique challenges of a completely AI show in terms of shining that light in the right areas and being immediately valuable and useful for the listener?

The flaws in a human are actually the things that make it beautiful.

It’s getting the personality, like the person themselves, to connect with the audience. So what that means is that the flaws in a human are actually the things that make it beautiful. I can’t remember where it was. Maybe it’s you who told me, but there’s an Eastern philosophy of when they will build things, or they’ll do a painting, and then they’ll come in. And they’ll add in a smudge, or they’ll make a small mistake in it. And that is those smudges, those mistakes, and the person are what make it unique and make humans want to come back for more because they’re like, “oh, he has a lisp, or he looks weird, or he always goes off on this kind of thing,” or that kind of piece is. Humanizes it. With AI, it’s really hard to humanize.

So we can do extremely well at getting to know the audience. We can do extremely well at speaking about the problem, solving the problem, telling stories, and doing things better than the audience than most humans can do. We can do that, but humanizing is incredibly difficult to do. The other limiting factor is that you can’t do interviews when it’s another AI with another human being. You can, but it’s not something that has depth. It’s more of a really good robotic conversation.

Do you have interview shows where one AI is interviewing another AI?

I haven’t done that yet, but it’d be pretty awesome. There are some AI tips that I would be happy to share. Like, there’s some cool stuff that I’ve been doing for years. So, to kind of go back, we built our own language learning models several years ago, and I went down this rabbit hole because I knew where it was. It wasn’t like we were trying to build some gigantic startup and revolutionize the world. I was just curious. Like, I knew we were solving cool problems, and I just wanted to continue solving really cool problems.

Yeah. Let’s go into some of the details of how you build the prompts, which AI tools you’re using, and so forth. Just to give some context to our listener or viewer, you’re using one set of LLMs to create the textual content. You’re using perhaps another AI to create the audio, maybe even in your voice or another person. You’re actually modeling real humans, I’m guessing, and not just using an off-the-shelf AI voice. And that would be maybe with ElevenLabs, perhaps?

Correct. Yeah.

The last piece is to create a faceless YouTube video, which you might use, say, invideo.io. Is that a correct kind of summary of the process?

Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. I’ll list out a lot. Some of the tools that we use, if that’s helpful, kind of make that like the resource bank, and then I’ll walk through the framework of how we think through it and how we produce it; that way, anyone listening or watching can use it. I feel like years ago, marketers would come on and dangle something where they’d be like, and here’s this amazing thing, but they wouldn’t like to share the entire formula, and so they’d leave you wanting more. 

What I want to do is I want to share the formula, the framework, and everything because what happens is when you start somewhere, and any of us can start. Still, we’re all going to lead up somewhere else at a different destination because your curiosity takes you there, and that’s where the cool magic is. So, as far as voice goes, ElevenLabs.io is the best. They do voice cloning.

Descript has it, Amazon has it, and Google is coming out with it. Nothing’s as good as ElevenLabs, so that’s the best. The next is for video. You can do your video cloning. You can use a variety of tools. One of the best I’ve found on the marketplace is HeyGen. They’re good. It’s not that much money. I think it’s maybe 20, 30,or  $40 a month. You can create your own.

They’re better if you create your own, but it’s complicated. So first, go around. Don’t create any of your own; just use off-the-shelf stuff.

Yeah. When you say use a tool like HeyGen, to create a persona, you’re talking about an AI facsimile of a person talking and synced up with the audio that you created with ElevenLabs

100% yes.

You can do one of two things. So you can clone yourself, clone someone on your team, or you can also create a fake person. We call it synthetic. I don’t like using the word fake, but we’ll use the word synthetic. Understand that. 

First off, you’ve got a good audience. Don’t do anything that’s malicious, like, just don’t be good with this, with anything that you’re doing. So, to create a person, you can use a couple of tools.

The easiest ones to use are going to be by OpenAI. It’s in the ChatGPT platform. It’s called Dall-E. It’s the easiest one to use, the second easiest one to use.

Dall-E is also part of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which you’re paying for  ChatGPT every month; you can just do it. Start querying ChatGPT, write prompts like create an image for me, and we’ll use Dall-E to create that image.

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. The quality of the Dall-E images is really good for creating a person or other things. It’s good. There are other ones that are better. There’s one that’s called Midjourney. So Midjourney is better than Dall-E.

On the artistic side of things, this is much better. Again, learning curve to everything that you do. That’s why you just have to get in and play. Then, other things are more complex. Let’s just stop there so that people can dive in and do it. 

Now, take any of your long-form content. So if you did a podcast interview or got in front of the camera and had a ten-minute video, and you’re like, I want to chop these up into shorts, there are a lot of tools you can use. 

One of the tools is called Opus.pro, and the other is called Vidyo.ai. Those are both easy to use. You can use other tools like Capcut and a million others, but again, keep it simple and just try to play around. So that’s kind of like the tool stack.

Well, what about creating a transcript of an episode in which you didn’t use AI to create the conversation with a guest but want to create an intro for that episode written by AI? If you want to create a summary of the episode, maybe an entire show notes page, There’s a tool stack for that as well, like Castmagic as an example.

Yeah, you can use Castmagic. We own a couple of different software companies that do that. 

So our companies, we created these. The simplest, easiest way to do it instead of me promoting our stuff is because Castmagic is great, and others are great, take the audio file, upload it to ChatGPT, and say, “Transcribe this for me.” Just simple. And then you say, “Using the same tone, style, and structure, can you write a 100-word intro for me?” And it will do that. So now you have something, and then it may be good or may not.

You can work and refine from there. You could use Otter, a good transcription tool to get transcripts. But I mean, just to keep it simple, I continue to play on the OpenAI platform and the ChatGPT stuff.

You can also take any video that has been uploaded to YouTube, which automatically has a transcript. So you can view the transcript file. It has timestamps. So you want to remove those timestamps and don’t have to do it yourself. You can just copy and paste that whole piece into ChatGPT or Claude and just say, “Remove the timestamps and make it look like a natural language kind of flow with paragraphs and all that.” Then, it’ll clean up the transcript for you. 

100%. It’s amazing what it can do. Maybe we can get into creating the content or how we bake out those things, but you choose how we want to go down that conversation. Then, I’ll share frameworks and whatever else.

AI can mimic many things, but the warmth of human connection in a conversation remains irreplaceable. Share on X

Okay, let’s start with how you determine topics.

So one of the ways that I personally like to use ChatGPT, and it’s different from most people, is that I love the audio feature. So, I’ll have hour-long conversations through ChatGPT. Now, I will set up guardrails for a couple of things because ChatGPT can get off and out of control pretty fast. This is with the ChatGPT, OpenAI, and official apps. So what that looks like is you need to tell ChatGPT and say,  “Okay, I want you to ask me questions.” 

So, it’s acting as an interviewer, I want you to ask questions, and I want you to extract from me, and you’re going to give it context, and you say, “because we’re going to land on a conclusion, and I don’t have the answer right now. So you’re going to ask me questions, but you can only ask me one question at a time, and you can not make comments; you just have to ask questions.” So, now you’re getting into this like, almost like they’re a private investigator, and they’re asking you, polling, extracting, and you’re going through, and that’s where some beauty happens.

So I love to start in that area. When I’m working on topics, I always start by explaining who the audience is. If I don’t know the audience again, then I go back and say, “All right, we’re going to go into a new industry. I need to understand the audience. You need to ask me questions so I can empathize and understand this audience.” And it will do that, and then I’ll ask it to teach me further. So, as far as topics go, we understand the audience and the outcome. And I’m going to come, and I’m going to say, “Okay, do you understand?” And it could be an industry leader.

If it’s a podcast, start stronger on the relationship, bond, and foundation, keeping it simple, then progressively move on.

The problem and the solution that we’re looking for, and then we work on getting to the topic and pieces. Some SEO can be done there, but most of the area we’re in on that first swipe is all behavioral. Like we’re looking at audience, personality, and behavior. Then, we can dive deeper into using the expertise of the correct keywords, syntaxes, and all the other, but we have to start at the foundation first.

So, when you have the topic, and you’ve identified the ideal client persona that you’re trying to reach, and you’ve gotten the theme of the show and all that dialed in, what do you do then to flesh out the topic into a full-blown video and audio and transcript and all that, like what are some of the prompts that you’re using to take the next step?

Okay, so what we’ll do is, and I’ll just use an example if we’re going into a new industry, let’s say we were going to go into yoga for guys in their fifties who are looking to add back flexibility and get peaceful and mindfulness, something like that. So, we would start by explaining who the audience is. We’re going to go through and come up with topics, which will help us understand where they start and where they end up. 

So, if it’s a podcast, it has to start stronger on the relationship, bond, foundation, and keeping it simple. And then it progressively moves on. So we’re adding in blocks as we go there, and blocks, I mean, like, think of it like Lego pieces. Those are the blocks that I’m talking about. And what we’ll do is understand that the audience depends on the demographics.

But if they’re short episodes, which means less than ten minutes, we want to make sure that they’re punchy, relatable, and helpful. So, we will ask ChatGPT to write the transcript and the actual script for the episode. So, this is where the tooling kind of comes into play. 

Sometimes, if you’re very good and you’ve worked through the prompts and its psychology, you might get a good result with ChatGPT. You may have to go over and use a tool like Claude. As you mentioned earlier, Claude is pretty amazing with a lot of their writing and longer-form content. So, no one tool solves everything. So, we’ll create the content.

Let’s say it’s a five-minute script. We’ll create that. We’ll go through it. We may even say, “Okay, this is good. Now I want you to look at it through the lens of whomever, the listener or of us,” or, “Hey, where are the parts of this story where we can make it more relatable?” Then we may go through and say, “Okay, what is the purpose of this? What’s the hook? What’s the big takeaway that’s going to come from here?” And then we may rewrite it again, say, “Okay, well, we need to emphasize that takeaway.” So it’s working through that over and over and over. Once we have something we love, that’s where it comes in as far as creating the synthetic voice and the synthetic person for that audience. 

So again, go back to yoga for 50-year-old guys. Mindfulness. We’re going to decide, and we actually may test two platforms. We may test, okay, we’re doing a man’s voice that is calming, and that’s going to lead and help that person. We may use a female voice, and we’re going to test from there. We’re going to see which one actually sticks better. Sometimes, we won’t test as far as, like, we’ll just say, “No, this is the voice that we like. This is the thing that we like,” and we just go from there. But running tests, as you know, can surprise you.

Many times, we’ll have something that shocks us. You have to add in flaws if you can. So different breaths, like pauses, sound like like that. We do have to fancy up some of our content. So, we did a project several months ago for a company called Outpost X. It’s an Airbnb hotel resort where it’s something out of this world. So what they do is my friend Travis started this company.

They create an experience for their guests. They come out to the Utah desert. They stay in these things, like the building that looks like something from Star Wars. They have like a hover car. They take showers outside underneath a fountain. It’s unreal. It’s like, again, like living in an episode of Star Wars. 

So, we created podcast episodes to prepare the listeners for when they come to the resort. So it’s about half an hour long, and they’re listening to it in the car as they go to the resort. So, it pulls them into the story. When they’re on property, there are podcast episodes that walk them through the different tools and experiences that were outside of Travis’s voice because he had his voice on a few things. Every other voice there was 100% synthetic. 

The script that we used, some of it Travis had come up with, some of it we changed and manipulated synthetically, and it is an experience that is out of this world. When you have added synthetic elements to anything you’re doing, you may have to add another element: polishing it and making it better. So we have sound effects and sound design and all kinds of stuff. So you can go simple, you can go complex.

When you have added synthetic elements, you may have to add another: polishing it and making it better.

It just depends on your project.

I’d be curious to see an example of either Outpost X or another client or even an internal portfolio example from your own projects where you’ve created the completely AI-based segment.

Yeah, absolutely. The Outpost X is on Spotify, Apple, and everywhere else synthetic, and can listen to it right now. You’ll hear those voices, maybe even in the trailer. I don’t think Travis’s voice is used at all. Those are 100% synthetic. All of it. That’s what’s so cool.

All right, awesome. Okay, so I’m curious to hear; I know from some backstory of us talking in other conversations that you also teach your kids how to use AI. I’d love for you to recap some examples you’ve shared with our listeners. Now, use cases of AI with your kids and show them how they query ChatGPT through voice on the OpenAI app. Like, what are some examples?

Okay, awesome question. So I’ll give an example we used on travel recently, and then I’ll give a couple of others. So, for travel, what we did was, we were in Japan looking at some temples, and the buildings were amazing. Some texts were in Japanese, and some were in English, with teenagers and younger kids. Depends on how excited they are. They may read the text, they may just be like, can we keep going? Depends on the activity and event. So, pull out the phone. And we had a ChatGPT with our travel guide.

So we said, okay, our family. And here’s where it’s important. This is important for all users. I think this one step that I’m going to explain right now, where I think most people mistake things, you have to give ChatGPT context. So we say, our family is in Japan right now. Our children are ages 18, 16 and 12. What we’re doing is we’re at this temple. We want you to act as our tour guide, share information with us, and walk us through it.

That will be engaging for adults, teenagers, and a little kid. We can even figure out some games, and you can ask us questions afterward. So now we hold a phone and ChatGPT walks us through, and  goes, “Hey, if you notice on these floors right here, they didn’t sink the nails all the way. And so when you walk on the floor, it squeaks. And they did that so the warriors were woken up and alerted when an intruder came into the building.” And our kids were like, “Wow, this is the coolest thing.” That’s what we did. We also went through it, and my middle son used ChatGPT to create a persona, which he wrote a book.

It’s called The Adventures of Lucas Stone, and his books are on Amazon. So, he did that. He used ChatGPT as his companion. He used Dall-E and Midjourney. Maybe it was just Dall-E who created the image for the book. And here’s the next piece. That’s really cool. When it came time for the editor, I said,” Okay, well, you got to find an editor.”

I said you can go on Fiverr. So he goes on Fiverr, and he goes, “Dad, it’s going to be $150 for a person to edit my book.” I said, “Yeah.” Said, “What other options?” He goes, “I guess I could get ChatGPT to do it.” I said “Okay”. So I worked with him and said, “Well, how about this? Let’s go to Fiverr.” We found the very best guy. He had the best description of what he would perform as his service on Fiverr.

So we copied his deliverables in his description, put it into ChatGPT , and said, “I want you to act as the editor for my book, doing these things.” So the guy gave us the prompt. He uploaded the book chapter by chapter. Chat found the mistakes, rewrote the pieces, put in the correct punctuation, and even made some suggestions like, “Hey, you could modify this part of the story.”

ChatGPT found the mistakes, rewrote the pieces, corrected the punctuation, and made suggestions.

He saved 150 books. He had a better experience. It’s that kind of thinking. So I think on the prompting, it’s too often that people are stuck in the world of, “Hey, make me ten social media captions that I can use this week. Give me five blog post ideas.” That’s too simple. 

Get out of that, get into having a relationship, and then realize where the limitations are. So, for a while, people thought that AI could do everything and do a lot. But in regards to you, you’re an SEO master. So ChatGPT might get, I don’t know, 70, 80, or 90%, right? But it’s not going to get the human thinking strategy right? Or it’s not going to get cutting-edge, innovative things. And so understand that there are baselines of awesomeness that it can do, and there are limits.

When you hand things over. So could my son have still gone to the editor, paid $150, and had a better version? Possibly. If it was a book that’s getting published around the world, we could go there. But for this project, no. And the same thing. I think with many of your listeners, if they’re trying to get something off the ground, they’re going to get baseline SEO or marketing stuff. But if they want real expertise, you have to work with the experts to get there.

Awesome. I know we’re at a time here, so if our listener wants to apply something from this whole conversation and maybe a little bit overwhelmed with all the possibilities and opportunities here, what would be their next step? That would be a really easy no-brainer for them.

Pull out the ChatGPT app, push on the headphones, which are the audio, and have a conversation with it and chat. Become your coach and tell it the problem. Be like, “Hey, I’m a new business owner. I’m an experienced business owner. I’m an advanced business owner, and I’m trying to solve this problem. I need you to help me through it, and we’re going to get there by conversation. You can ask me questions, but only one question at a time. You can make comments but only make them succinctly so that I can internalize them and go on a walk or go in a room and carve out half an hour.”

The beauty is that when you’re done, it’s all inside ChatGPT. You can review, summarize, and learn from it.

And after about 5/10 minutes, it’s like you forget that you’re having a conversation with AI and you’re having a conversation with a coach, but it takes time, and it can’t be done through typing. You have to have the conversation because it uses a different part of your brain. I suggest walking while you do it because the kinesthetic piece unlocks another part of your brain. And the beauty is that when you’re done, it’s all sitting inside ChatGPT. You can review it, have it summarize it, and have it teach you lessons, but just go and do it, and it will blow your mind.

That’s awesome. I love that. That’s very practical, not onerous at all. It’s an easy next step. Thank you so much, Spencer. And if our listener or viewer wants to work with you and your team, your podcast production company, Podkick, where should we send them? If they want to learn more from you, maybe listen to your podcast, for example. Where should we send them for that?

For the podcast company? They can go to podkik.com. We’ve got chat agents there, really cool people who work there, and amazing people. I’m humbled to say this, I’m proud to say that we have the very best strategy sessions in the world. Kayvon leads our strategy sessions. He was the mentee of Michael Gerber from the E-Myth, so he knows his stuff. And as far as my podcast, it’s Business Growth. You can search for that on any platform, and it’s a fun thing to do.

So, thanks for having me on.

Thank you, Spencer, and thank you, listener. Hope you make it a great week and reveal some light in everything you do. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off. Have a great week.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT for scripting and creating podcast episodes. Set clear guardrails to maintain control over the conversation and ensure the content aligns with my vision.

Introduce minor imperfections when using synthetic voices to make them sound more human. These small flaws add authenticity and can help my audience connect better with the content.

Tailor my content to address the audience’s specific problems. This knowledge builds a stronger connection and significantly increases engagement, making my podcast more relevant.

Utilize advanced editing tools like Opus Pro and Capcut to trim long-form content into short, engaging clips for social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Invest in a good-quality microphone and a laptop to produce high-quality recordings even when I’m on the move, which is essential for maintaining a consistent content schedule.

Continuously innovate in content creation until I lead to unique and engaging podcasts that stand out.

Explore diverse monetization opportunities like affiliate marketing, education platforms, and software tools to maximize revenue potential and build more sustainable income streams.

Don’t rely solely on AI; human elements are crucial in interviews and conversations. Personal connections make my content more relatable and engaging for listeners.

Focus on specialized industries if I’m targeting a niche audience. This helps in creating authoritative content that appeals to specific groups.

Use guest appearances, ads, and partnerships to grow my podcast audience. Consistent promotion helps maintain visibility and attracts new listeners.

Avail myself of Spencer Shaw and his team’s podcast production services by visiting his company website, PodKick.

About Spencer Shaw

Spencer Shaw has started and exited several businesses in the software, real estate, and internet industries. He is the host of the Business Growth podcast and is the co-host of The Prosperity podcast.