Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Change is part of every marketer's journey, and today's guest illustrates how professionals can evolve their skills as new technologies take center stage. I met Dan Sanchez a few years ago when he was working in the podcast industry. The space was growing, and it remains an important channel for brands that wanna tell stories and build audiences. But Dan has shifted his attention to AI and not really shifted.
He's invested time in understanding the technology, experimenting with it, and helping marketers see its practical value. His work has made him a trusted voice for anyone navigating where AI fits within their creative and commercial workflows. And today, we'll talk about how he made that shift and why he made that shift, what he's learned, and how marketers can adapt their own practices as AI becomes a larger part of how work gets done. Welcome to Marquee's Mark, Dan.
Guest: It's good to be back.
Mark Evans: Let's start with your personal journey. Few years ago, you were well known for your work in podcasting. You said that even though you saw potential of ChatGPT when it arrived in late two thousand and twenty two, all of us did, you didn't act on it until a year later. What changed you at that point? What pushed you to go all in?
Pain. Hey. I love that.
Guest: Things that get you to shift and shift big, it's usually coming out of a downslope somewhere. That's what it was for me.
Mark Evans: Yeah.
Guest: And when ChatGPT came out, we're all, wow. This is gonna change everything. I have no idea how or why or what. I don't know. I I don't even know what to prompt.
We didn't even know what to put in the thing. A lot of marketers are still at that point. Anybody at the beginning stages, I don't know what to do with it even though it can do so much. I've literally built my show around just figuring that out myself. What can we do with this now that this is here?
But it took about a full year for me, and I had some help. Luckily, I went from Sweetfish, the podcast agent. I went and worked at a tech startup, and that founder at that tech startup is Element four fifty one's EdTech selling a CRM like the HubSpot of higher ed. They were crushing it. As soon as Chet Chippity came out, the founder, technical founder, changed their whole road map.
We're all in on AI. He immediately saw it, recognized it for what it was, and hit the ground running harder than any tech startup that I've seen since. And it went harder at it than HubSpot and Salesforce than any other major technology in their space. They started incorporating it into their platform right away and started marketing about it right away. So I got plugged into that, and I was, oh, being associated with them so fast started opening my eyes much more quickly to what a super prompt was, what chain prompting was, which most people still don't understand what proper chain prompting is.
It's a fundamental thing that people still don't understand how powerful that can be. And a bunch of different fundamentals that they were figuring out through development And then taking the lessons learned from it, because they were in the deep end learning it from the really hardcore early AI users using the APIs engineer. If I got exposed to those concepts and we were wrapping those into content we were using, market the platform, eventually, I parted ways with Element four fifty one and went out on my own because I wanted to help. At the time, I was really focused on audience growth, so was Sweetfish. We wanted to do owned media, even build a category around owned media because so many people were built up on paid.
And I was like, here's how you can grow an audience. Here's how you can use it. Owned media leads to better paid media, leads to more earned media. This is the engine that you want. You guys are struggling living quarter to quarter on paid and spamming people with SDRs.
Let's do it better. Let's build an engine that gets you beyond living from quarter to quarter. So I had identified the problem. I had identified the narrative, and it was alright. I'd be in pitch meetings of people nodding their heads.
But guess what? Nobody opened up their wallets. Why? Because building an audience takes time. It takes money, and it doesn't pay back for a long time.
It's not even sacrificing this quarter for next quarter. It's usually multiple quarters until it really starts paying back. And it was too costly and too much the value of payback was just too slow. So I couldn't sell the services. Everybody was yes, but I can't justify spending this.
Mark Evans: Yeah. It's the classic Yeah. Consulting dilemma. You gotta sell what people wanna buy. And if they're not buying your product, even though they think it's awesome,
Guest: that's have an awesome product and even be right.
Mark Evans: And it still won't matter. Matter. Before we go on, what is chain prompting? You seem very enthusiastic about it. I've never heard about it.
So explain to me what it is and why it matters.
Guest: Chain prompting is trying to get an outcome that requires multiple prompts along the way. That's it. Most people will ask ChatGPT to do something and one shot it. But oftentimes, especially back then, there was no way you could one shot a lot of projects. But if you wanted to build a landing page, for example, you don't build me a landing page.
Here's my product. You're gonna get an okay landing page even now. But if you chain prompt it and be, okay. Marketer, do you just sit down and knock out all the copy for a landing page? I say, hey, marketer.
Build me a landing page, and you open up docs and you knock out a landing page? No. Have you even written copy at all? You understand that's not what you do. What do you do?
You sit down and review the products. You sit down and review your materials, testimonials of what customers have said. Maybe you go and search for it or go get it because you need their voice in the copy. In order for it to resonate, you just pull the words out of their mouths. Why did you buy this?
What were you experiencing? You gotta go do the interviews if you haven't done them. If you did them, you go and review that copy, and you sit down and let that mesh a little bit.
Mark Evans: Right.
Guest: Then you think about, okay. How do I wanna structure this thing? Am I gonna use the AIDA framework? Am I gonna use the PASS framework? Am I gonna use a couple different models of these?
So if you want AI to think you would, don't ask it to just write a landing page copy for your product. Even if you give it the product, that my product, what's missing? When you fill in that details, okay, here's testimonials from the product. What's the common thread across these testimonials from my product? It goes and builds a case of here's the common things and the words they use to describe the pain and the thing that they loved about it.
Great. Now we have that loaded into the chat. You can see we're chaining the prompts because you better believe that after you walk through the process that you walk through yourself and do it with AI, it's gonna deliver a result that's 10 times better. It's foundational because it's that same chain prompting. Most people don't take advantage to custom GPTs, which is Yeah.
Can just build your chain prompt into the custom GPT and be go instead of reexplaining what you want every time you'll get next step. That's what custom GPTs
Mark Evans: Lots of ground to cover, but I did wanna talk a little bit more about your journey. And I think a lot of people look at AI, and they see this opportunity to be the master or mistress of their own domain. Such early days. And when people like me don't understand what chain prompting is, and I use lots of custom GPTs, and you do too, but there's lots of people who even know how to do that.
Guest: If you were
Mark Evans: someone thinking about becoming an AI consultant, whether it's marketing focused or manufacturing or pharmaceuticals, whatever your passion, what's the one piece of advice you would give them in terms of turning that idea into a reality?
Guest: They wanna become a consultant.
Mark Evans: If they wanna be a consultant, you're living the dream. You've found this hot trend. You embraced it. You're making sounds like a pretty good living doing it. How can people be like you?
What would you advise them to do what you're doing?
Guest: Honestly, I wish I could say it was easy, but it just takes lots of swings. I've taken many swings before this. Even before I did I was known for podcasting, but I didn't wanna compete with my employer on pod
Mark Evans: you know what saying?
Guest: Yeah. I like them a lot. So I didn't wanna start a podcast agency. Many of the employees from SweetFish since then have, and I'm like, I don't wanna do that. I also knew the model well enough that I don't know if I wanna be
Mark Evans: in this game. So I
Guest: was gonna focus on audience growth, a different aspect of it, and then that didn't work. But before that, I tried to even become more known for different topics, even positioning myself around the topic of thought leadership. I took a swing at ABM for a hot minute. I did a bunch of different things in order to figure out what do I wanna be known for. That ended up being podcasting because I was selling SweetFish and promoting their services.
So I talked mostly about that. And when I couldn't sell the audience growth thing, I honestly was looking around. One part of me was like, screw it. If they're not gonna buy it, then I'm gonna do it myself, and I'm just gonna show them this is how it's done. But that was a chip on my shoulder edge about it.
I'm not gonna build an audience or an audience growth because that's just too meta, and you it it doesn't work because you can't prove it that way. You know what I'm saying? I was trying to, and it just wasn't working. So I need a topic that's going to be big in a year or two. What's the next thing?
And I think we've all sat there and wondered what the next thing is. Usually, the thing that the next thing people make fun of you for in the beginning. There's been multiple times in my career I'm like, oh, that's gonna be big. Before it was big. I knew WordPress, TikTok.
I remember when I saw TikTok, and I was, crap. That's gonna be freaking huge before it was huge. Even was trying to tell some Gen Zers. I was working at a college. You don't understand.
You're gonna be on TikTok. She's, no. I'm not. She was big on Twitter and Instagram. And I'm, yes.
You are. And you will probably move your whole audience to TikTok. And she did. And she crushed it. I was like, it's coming.
That's funny. So I was looking around, and I'm like, it's gotta be the AI thing. I don't know why it took me so long to realize that. But a year after ChatGPity comes out, I'm like, it's clearly gonna be the AI thing. It's gonna affect every part of marketing.
Paid, owned, earned, everything. It's gonna change everything. So I should probably learn something about it. There's no books on it because it's new. All the books are written about AI are too old now.
There was only five podcasts, and they're all no name, nothing shows at the time. So I was, okay. This is where I'm gonna grow my audience, and this is going to become a thing. Yeah. I just have to figure out how to do enough normal consulting, podcasting, whatevers until I could start becoming known for marketing and AI.
I just played the long game and started putting my flag in the sand. If you wanna do what I did, then use this model. I'm literally working on a book right now, and this is one of the core models in it. The book is called Own the Show. I'm actually using the podcast to build it.
AI is so good that you could take a transcript to turn it into a book chapter if you loaded the episode correctly. So I'm going from podcast to book, and one of the main models I talked about on the book is what I call the thirty thirty thirty plan. You could do this with launching a coaching business, a consulting business, and or any business where you have an expert, like a personal brand expert as the lead. This is the model to take. It works for lots of businesses, but this is how you grow an audience that actually wants to buy from you.
It works even if you're already an expert on the topic and you know everything or you're a student just getting started. But, hopefully, you're a professional already working on the topic. Otherwise, it's hard. And the thirty thirty plan is 30 books, 30 interviews, 30 blogs. Let me explain.
If you wanna become known for a thing, you have to find your niche. Finding a niche, how big of a niche should you pick, you can find out by is there more than 30 books on the topic? If there's more than 30 books on the topic, go down. If you can't find at least five books on the topic, you need to go up a level. You need a niche that's a good enough size, and you can judge it based on how many books are written on it, the very particular topic.
Unless it's a brand new technology, then it's different. Like AI, there was no books on the topic, but it was clearly gonna be a thing. I did this with multiple topics, and I found I could feel the authority building from reading all the books and then interviewing all the experts on it before I even start publishing my own thoughts on it. You wanna read every book ever published on the topic. Again, it has to be less than 30, but more than five.
It doesn't take as long as you would think. Because if you're reading all the books on a very particular niche topic and then talking about it on something like LinkedIn along the way, everybody will start to figure out like, oh, so and so really knows about something because he keeps sharing all the things that he's learning from reading all the freaking books. They'll start to get the idea that you know something because you keep talking about, oh, here's another book. Oh, here's another book. Oh, here's another book.
It's what I call learning in the light. If you're learning in public, everybody will know that because you're sharing the lessons along the way. And you actually start to actually know everything. Just a great starting point. It's great base because a lot of consultants launch out.
They don't haven't actually read all the books. You gain a certain level of confidence and understanding that becomes way more nuanced like a consultant should be, like an expert should be after you've read every book. And it doesn't take that long because reading every book on a very niche topic, maybe it's email marketing. Chances are every book is covering a lot of the same information. Every new book you read after the first three books is usually repeating the same, so you just skim that section, look for the new material.
Reading 20 books on a topic, it feels a lot more like reading seven. And I have to ask you, Mark, does reading seven books on a topic sound like a massive task? It's a lot, but it's manageable.
Mark Evans: As the themes repeat themselves, you could have trained your brain to say, okay. I've I've seen that before, and now I can move on. Yeah. Interesting approach.
Guest: 30 books, but then you wanna take it farther. Again, you wanna do this you wanna do this out loud and post about it along the way. I also recommend starting a podcast where you just at single episodes. Hey. I'm reading this book.
Here's what I've learned. Here's what you can take away. Here's what I'm taking away. Here's what I'm doing tomorrow for my own experimentation. You're experimenting with the things you're learning in the book and just talking about it.
It's not even your expertise yet, but you're laying the foundation for you to build authority. The next part is you wanna interview 30 experts that are already the influencers in that place. And it's just like what you're doing right now. You're reaching out to people for interviews, having them on your show, testing your knowledge that you're reading. Maybe they were the authors of some of those books.
You're testing your knowledge, gaining a greater understanding. At the same time, you're building association because now you're hanging out with the people that are influential and taking side by side photos. So, like, oh, I was just talking to so and so. Oh, I was just learning this from so and so. Oh, look at this interview of me asking this question to so and so.
These are the building blocks of authority. These are the building blocks of influence. Because now it's not just me reading. It's me talking to the people. You're building association.
You're also furthering your learning. You're also showing, and you're continuing to learn out loud. And then you wanna do 30, and it had to be a lot too. It can't just be one, two. 30 is a lot.
You get it done in a couple of months, or you can take a year to do it. That's fine. But then you wanna start publishing what I call the next the 30 blog posts. I used to do blog posts. Now I just do solo episodes where I'm talking about answering the basic questions, which is what are the best tools?
Like, a common question in podcasting is what's the best mic? It's always tools related. In AI, it's which marketing tools are the best? So you cover those questions, 30 of them. Just one question, one answer, 30 episodes or blog posts.
That way, you're starting to actually share and summarize all the things you've learned in your take on these very frequently asked questions. From there, you have a basis to actually get started and actually start thinking about, okay. What are the gaps in the knowledge? I've read all the books. I've talked to the experts.
I've you're now looking for gaps in the knowledge. What problems do people still have yet have no good answer to? This is where you can start creating unique thought leadership.
Mark Evans: Interesting.
Guest: Even if you're just talking and doing it with yourself at first, you're like, hey. Nobody has an answer to this. Here's my experiment. Here's how it worked. And you just iterate on that over and over again.
And then it's you're helping yourself with your new unique approach, and then you're helping starting to help other people with the unique approach. And you start building a case study for why this is the missing piece, and that's how you can start becoming consultant.
Mark Evans: Alright. So if you're a consultant, just follow this plan, and it's the Dan Sanchez recipe for success provided. You talked about tools, and I'm probably getting ahead of myself in terms of the conversation. But a lot of marketers, people like me, are tool hungry. You check out every single tool out there.
The amazing thing about AI is that there's dozens of new tools come out all the time, and you've probably tested more tools than most marketers. So the obvious question is, what's in your current daily rotation? You mentioned tools like Tele for recording and Hen eight n for automation. So what does your core AI toolbox look like right now?
Guest: Core AI toolbox, I generally I think you go through phases as you learn these things. At first, you're taking all of the tools in. Even I built the video studio, and I have all these tools that I don't use anymore. What happens is you explore, and then you start to consolidate around just a few for simplicity's sake. I find that every marketer needs a few core tools around a couple different categories.
I find that there's five different categories of AI. There's what you call your AI copilot tool. This is your ChatGPT. This is your Gemini or maybe Claude for some people. You generally have a main one right now.
I'm, like, somewhere between Chat, Cheapity, and Gemini. I'm waiting to see how that plays out. But you have your main tool that's a general purpose tool, and it helps you with all the other tools. It helps you form strategies and brainstorm things. It even comes up with content for you.
The second category in the five is the content creation tools. These were things like even some subtools of this Copilot tool like Sora within ChatGPT to create video, v o three video creation, or the image generation, like content creation. But then there's some specialty tools like Gamma that can create carousels, slide decks, landing pages, one prompt, or I could literally just copying a transcript from a podcast like this one and be like, turn this into a lead magnet, and it kept comes up with a doc for me. And it's well designed, has graphics in it, looks good, and can be turned it into a lead magnet or a carousel. There's other ones like napkin that creates diagrams, content creation.
It's great. The next category is around hyper personalization. These generally are CRM based tools because they need to be able to capture data on an individual and then customize it with AI. My favorite right now is HighLevel.
Mark Evans: HighLevel.
Guest: I use HighLevel for everything. And that's like my one of my key marketing tools because there's so many tools packed into it. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it's a CRM and marketing automation platform and does landing pages and all the stuff. I can capture a few pieces of information and tailor a series, hyper personalize a whole email series based on just a few pieces of information. I can give it a chat GPT on the back end within HighLevel, a template.
Hey. Customize it for this person. Here's what we know about them, and every email's unique. Bam. But it can do text messages.
It can do inbound phone calls. That's the next category. So we go from Copilot to content generation to hyper personalized tools to AI conversation tools. This is your inbound or outbound phone calls, chatbots, and even DM message machines within social platforms. Conversation marketing is a big part of AI.
It's gotten so good. Even the voice calls have gotten so good. So I'm amazed. HighLevel handles all those for me. But you can definitely focus on individual tools that specialize in that, like Intercom or whatever.
And then the last category is just insights and analytics. This category is particularly thin compared to the other ones, but my current go to tool in here that I love is Microsoft Clarity. It's essentially like having ChatGPT baked into Google Analytics, but it's already in there. And then you can ask it questions, and it has all the data. So about your web data.
And then just it's like having a Copilot within there. It actually is Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT under the hood. So that's, like, my favorite tool in that category. But there's a lot more coming to that category over the next couple of years now that reasoning models are out and everyone's starting to incorporate this in their tool. Eventually, HubSpot will have a whole insights category.
We just talk to AI about your data. It doesn't yet, but it will. High level will. They all will. And there'll probably be specialty tools out there.
Like, Sixth Sense will be able to is has this coming out soon too.
Mark Evans: You talked about the coming shift in how we search and gather information as Agenic AI becomes more capable. How do you see these deep research engines reshaping the way that marketers work compared to traditional search? We're all animals of Google. Increasingly, we've become disciples of ChatGPT. But what's your take on the research side of the business for marketers?
Guest: I think SEO is not dead, but it's gonna die. It's going away. I've played big in the SEO game. I built blogs from zero to hundreds of thousands of page views off the back of just thousands of blog posts, or maybe not thousands, but hundreds of blog posts, unique blog posts. I've built many sites and ranked them and got great leads from and have grown from organic SEO.
So I'm sad to see it go away because I had a competency in this, and it's not a competency anymore as it's not gonna be there. AI is gonna eat all top and middle funnel search results. A even if it goes and references your blog post for it, it does I just don't think it doesn't matter. So the only thing left as far as SEO that's of any any concern for marketers is all bottom of the funnel, and it's gonna be a freaking dogfight for the bottom Yeah. Funnel recommendations.
Because, of course, let's say I'm working for SweetFish, and I'm trying and we're ahead where generally most people are using AI to find answers and not Google. What are the top of the funnel keywords? How to start a podcast? How to use a podcast for business? You think SweetFish is gonna come up anywhere in that conversation if you ask ChatGPT?
No. It's not. Those would have been top and middle of the funnel keywords. But what are some agencies that can help me do this? Assuming it's farther down in conversation as we're talking about podcasting.
Yeah. Now it's gonna have to go and find some actual agencies. It can't make that part up, and that's the part where SEO still matters for what we're calling AIO or whatever heck we end up calling. I'm preferential to AIO is my favorite one, but it'll be what I what it'll be. And that's where the SEO game was still gonna fight out.
Remember in the early days of SEO, there's gonna be black hat. There's gonna be white hat techniques. There's gonna be all kinds of techniques to fight for that because that's gonna be what's when it comes to recommendations.
Mark Evans: So one of the things that I wondered about is the future of the blog or the role of the blog within this new AEO SEO landscape. Ten, fifteen years ago, blogs were king, leveraged SEO. But what is the role of a corporate blog right now? What value does it play, and how can companies leverage that kind of content so that they can play in this new landscape with AI?
Guest: Again, top of the middle funnel are being commoditized by AI. It will no longer be necessary. So they're just not helpful. In my opinion, the the type of content that still leads is going to be thought leadership content. New answers to old problems or new problems.
My favorite way to do thought leadership is not from a corporate angle, but from a personal angle. It's my opinion that as AI proliferates and there's more content everywhere and a lot of it's slop, but a lot of it won't be. A lot of it will be undetectable as slop. It'll just be good content. We will have a trust problem.
AI will give the hucksters way more authority and way more credit bill. They'll be able to fake the credibility indicators better because they'll be able to fake generate all their customer reviews now. Yeah. So there's gonna be a trust problem. When people have mass trust problems, they look for shortcuts.
The ultimate shortcut is authorities that are people. They will lean on their personal AIs, but they will also have a few trusted voices that they will go to. This is my prediction, and this is where I'm going all in on this idea. That'll be personal brands that are thought leaders in a space because there's a few things that AI will never be able to do, and this is what I'm counting on. I'm betting big on these few things.
AI can never have true core values. It can never have true convictions because it hasn't lived and gone through and felt the pain that you felt. It doesn't have belief systems that you have. It can be prompted to have whatever belief system is ever out there. It can be be told to fabricate and make up its own belief system.
Humans don't trust that. Humans wanna know that you're gonna stand by some sort of values, and everyone's what the values people value are different. So you'll attract the people that are associated with your values. But how do they hear those values? They hear the values through the stories that you tell that reflect the experiences that you have that showcase your values.
Let me give you an example. I was out buying a pre workout supplement for the first time. Didn't know nothing about pre workout supplements. I just knew I needed one. I wanted some caffeine hit early before I worked out.
Didn't know a lot about it. Was standing in Walmart looking at a sea of options. They all look good. It's like a whole freaking shelves of stuff. I'm like, oh my god.
Here's the pre workout section. They all sound fine. I thought about taking a picture and sending it to chat. Which one's the best one? Do the cross analysis.
I don't have that much time to even wait for it to think about them all. Probably wasn't gonna do as good as what I wanted it to. And then one name popped out. Said the word Jocko. I'm like, I've heard that name somewhere.
It's not somebody I subscribed to. Isn't that the Navy Seal guy? The guy who wrote the author. What did he write? Extreme Ownership.
That's right. Hadn't even read the book. But I'd heard him on enough guest episodes in different places and enough little pieces all over the Internet that I'd heard some of his stories. I understood his values because of the things that he had experienced personally. I knew that he would not put out a supplement that I couldn't trust, that he wouldn't take himself.
So I bought it, haven't looked back since. I've talked to friends about this now, they're like, dude, I buy a supplement too. He's an influencer. He sells a lot of supplements. Yeah.
Yeah. Think it's stuff that stand out across the noise of good looking options. Graphic design will be fantastic everywhere. They used to be an indicator. This one looks better.
This one looks more expensive. That will not be a differentiator. Everybody will have fantastic design, fantastic copy. It'll even resonate because it'll all be reading the same testimonial people, condense all the research, and be able to write things that stand out. Yet we will not trust it because everyone's gonna be vying for attention.
Everyone's gonna be trying to sell us stuff. Everyone's got marketing sales bots trying to sell us everywhere. The thing that will cut through the noise is the stories of real people struggling, figuring things out, and sharing their stories that reflect their values. Personal brands, thought leadership. That's what I'm going in on.
This is the thing AI can't do, and therefore, you do that and then amplify it with AI.
Mark Evans: Yeah. I this isn't a side. Everyone's complaining about LinkedIn reach these days. And I was at an event, and I met someone, and she mentioned that she was the only employee in Canada. And I said, well, you must be very lonely because all your fellow employees are in The US.
And she says, no. I figured it out. I work at the gym. I go, what do you mean you work at the gym? She goes, I work out in the morning, and then the gym has a really great cafe, and that's where I work all the time.
And I went, wow. That's a really different place to work. I'd never heard about that before. So as a storyteller, what I did is I whipped off a LinkedIn post. Ten minutes.
Farted off there.
Guest: Yep.
Mark Evans: More views than I've ever gotten in any other post. And it's all about authenticity, and it's all about real world experiences, and it's a different story. People like stories, and they like to hear about what other people are doing. So that's just my personal tale of what what I'm thinking. So another sort of juicy topic that I wanted to touch upon is the fact that when marketers and creators look at AI, there are two sides to the coin.
One side is this is super exciting. These tools are amazing, and I can create content faster and easier than ever before. And the other side of the coin is AI is may be able to replace me. And just going back to your previous companies, you've argued that personal branding is the strongest protection against automation. I guess the big question is in a world where AI can generate content at scale, where does authentic human content fit in?
And then as important, how do we broadcast the fact that our content is written by fingers as opposed to robots?
Guest: You can still have AI write your content and it'd still be completely authentic. That's the misconception. Is that because AI wrote it, it's not authentic, and it depends. I am creating a book right now. I can't say I'm writing the book because Claude is writing it for me.
And it's based on the transcripts that I'm giving it, and it is not straying from the transcripts. It is not adding things other than little things just to smooth out the thought because the way we speak in podcasting is not the way a book is written, which is the difference between a podcast and an audiobook. An audiobook is a much more so it's taking it and condensing it down, chopping off some things, and then filling in the gaps where it makes sense to fill it in what was, like, any good ghost writer would have done who understands the material. It's still authentic. It's still based on my ideas, my experiences, my stories.
That's what matters.
Mark Evans: Mhmm.
Guest: It's not the final who finished the final product. Eventually, we will finish a recording like this in Riverside, and the whole thing can be produced even cut to be more of documentary style. Maybe even inner imagine this. Like, we do, like you do 30 interviews on a particular topic, maybe trying to answer a big question about something. You interview 30 experts on it.
Eventually, AI will be able to produce a whole documentary on it. And if you're there helping it guide the major narrative and pulling in the clips, but it's doing the work of timing it and finding the right clips so we could put him here, it's almost like you're the director of the documentary. You're the one who did the interviews. You're the one who is crafted helping working with AI to craft the narrative. It is still your documentary.
It's still my book because it's based on my conversations, based on my ideas, based on my story. That's authentic even though AI is doing the heavy lifting around the the writing. Now as people figure out ways to automate the whole process, those are gonna be the people that lose unless they have some kind of unique dataset in order for AI to work off of. Otherwise, it's commodity. They're just all you can do with AI if you're happen to create books, blogs, podcasts, whatever, it's all commodity content.
It will might work in the short term, but eventually, our own AI assistance, this is already happening with ChatGPT Pulse. Have you heard about Pulse yet? Yeah. In the pro account. Do you have a pro account?
Mark Evans: I do not have a pro account.
Guest: Okay.
Mark Evans: I have a plus account.
Guest: For those who have pro accounts, they swear this is one of the most amazing products, and I believe them. I can't wait till it comes down to plus.
Mark Evans: Yeah. Me
Guest: too. But essentially curates their own almost like news article at the beginning of every day. Hey. Based on our conversations from yesterday and how what I know you're thinking about, here's some things that I've created for you proactively. Now imagine it's doing news research.
It has access to the web, has access to your Google Docs, and has access to your chat and Gmails, and it's being even more nuanced about what it brings to you. Maybe it's like, hey. These are the influencers, and it's picking up those too. Newsletters are gonna die too. Why?
Because it's your own ChatGPT account or whatever AI we're using three years from now is gonna be creating is gonna be running you through the morning briefing on highly personalized stuff. What newsletter can compete with that? It's still gonna be pulling in voices that you care about. I know there's a few particular voices that I listen to and pay very close attention to because I care about what they say and how they think about it. So it's gonna be pulling their voices and be like, hey.
And it'll might pull in and be like, hey. This is what Mark Evans said about marketing today. You'd be like, okay. No. That's part of my morning brief.
That's what you need.
Mark Evans: It sounds exciting, but at the same time, I would and it's already happening is that people get up they get a biased view of the world. So if you're just getting newsletters based on your view of the world, then you you know, you where do you hear about the other side of the argument? Right?
Guest: It's That's already that's already the case with social algorithms. They're interest based.
Mark Evans: Yeah.
Guest: Yeah. So it's just a farther deepening of it.
Mark Evans: For people listening to this podcast, and there's some people who are riding the AI wave, and they're feeling good about where they're at, and they're hungry to learn more. But for people who feel left behind, maybe they're just using the free version of ChatGPT from time to time, or maybe they're not using ChatGPT at all. What's the first step they should take to catch up?
Guest: Always the I always ask question ask this few questions to see where people are at in their journeys. I'm like, one, have you used AI at all? If not, then go use it. It's chatgpt.com. Download the app.
Make sure you download the right one. I can't believe how many people's phones I've looked at. I'm like, that's not they're like, I have ChatGPT. I'm like, that's not ChatGPT. That was some random app pretending to be ChatGPT that has fooled you and now spamming the heck out of you.
Make sure you get the one from OpenAI. Just download it, create an account. Step one. If you've been using that for a while, my next level is if you're at that level, then try to experiment generously with it. Throw curveballs at it.
Be curious. Curiosity is the thing that changes for everybody, and that's usually the thing that keeps people from learning AI. It's just lack of curiosity. People are like, I didn't work. And I'm like, I don't know.
Did you poke it? Did you try something? No. It just didn't work right once, and then they stopped using it. Lack of curiosity.
So if you don't have curiosity, AI is gonna be a struggle for you because the ones who crush it on AI are the ones who are like, well, I wonder if I tweak it this way. Oh, let's start over and try again. Oh, let's throw this curveball at it. You're just constantly trying out new stuff. If you're on the free account, this is your game.
Try all kinds of things. This morning, I took a picture of an iSpy book. Yeah. That one that are for kids because I have kids, and I was looking through iSpy. And I was testing out the new ChatGPT 5.2 model in its image recognition ability.
I heard it got improved, so I took a picture of the iSpy book, and I was like, find me the freaking drum. And it did. And I knew it was good because I tested it two weeks ago on the same thing, and it couldn't find the drum. And then I was like, okay. Wise guy.
Find a stick of gum. I couldn't find that one. Yep. I gave it a clue when it did, but it's getting better all the time. So I'm constantly testing it across a variety of different things, personal and professional.
And then you do it to the point where you're using it enough that it make $20 a month for a paid account is a no brainer. It's a big difference between free and paid if you wanna get to the paid account. Yeah. It's the marker. I'm like, are you paying for it?
Because if you are, then I get a sense for where you're at. It means you're using it a lot. Yeah. And you're running into the limits often. If you're running to the limits often, give up their $20.
Mark Evans: Let's do a rapid fire round just to wrap things up and to get your thoughts on some of the hottest AI things out there. Best tool for recording solo podcast episodes?
Guest: Tella. You can post produce it. You can figure out, do I wanna use my face full screen or the screen that I'm recording? Do I wanna put me in a bubble? Do I wanna go back and forth?
You can figure all that out in post production. They could even edit for you in post production. I'm like, eliminate my mistakes. All the mistakes are gone generally, and maybe I have to still listen to it and tighten it up, but it saves me so much time on editing. Tella is, like, the video recording app for creators, and it's what I do to do all my solo episodes.
I upload it to Zencastr afterwards, which publishes.
Mark Evans: Best tool for creating content for blogs and LinkedIn?
Guest: Podcasting. Honestly, I don't find it worth the time to write blog posts because AI is so good at writing blog posts that you might as well make it a podcast episode. I'm a better speaker than I'm a writer. So I record a podcast with Tella or an interview like this in Zencastr and just have AI turned it into a blog post. It is fantastic.
It is better than human writers because human writers usually don't have the level of expertise needed to really translate the content. I we ran into this at Sweetfish all the time. They didn't know the writers didn't know what the people were talking about. AI does. Right.
Way better than most writers. So start with video, an interview show or something like that, just turn it into a blog post.
Mark Evans: The one ChatGPT setting everyone needs to turn on right now.
Guest: There's a personalization setting. The best thing you can do is go into that personalization. How do you want ChatGPT to behave? And put these words into it. I want you to be skeptical of what I'm saying and push back on my ideas to make me a better marketer.
Put some version of those words into that section where you're telling giving it custom instructions, and ChatGPT instantly becomes 10 times better.
Mark Evans: Your favorite custom GBT that you've built?
Guest: It's called the episode packaging. It's called the it's just a big acronym. It's like it's AI driven marketer episode packaging, or I just shorten it to AIDM episode packaging. I essentially throw an idea at it or even a fully produced episode. And I'm like, alright.
Let's walk through the steps. Again, this is a chain prompt that I turned into a custom GPT. So I'm working through the steps that I stepped that I worked through in order to package an episode. And a package is always the title, the thumbnail, and the caption. That's a that's a really important thing for a video podcast like mine.
So we walk through, and it goes through the steps of identifying the angle, then coming up with the title, then coming up with the caption, then coming up with the visuals. I'm actually doing it in Gemini now. Gemini is better at it than chat chat was. Okay.
Mark Evans: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini?
Guest: Between ChatGPT and Gemini right now. If I had to hard commit to one, it's gonna be ChatGPT right now.
Mark Evans: Dad, this has been incredibly insightful. Where can people learn more about you and what you do?
Guest: Hey. I drove a marketer.com, and you can find links to my LinkedIn or just subscribe to my show, my newsletter. And my show is across hey. I drove a marketer. It's across every place where there's podcasts.
So wherever you're listening, you can find me there.
Mark Evans: If you enjoyed this conversation, share the episode, subscribe to Marketing Spark wherever you get your podcast, and leave a quick review. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.
