← Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
The Future of AI in Business: What Owners Need to Know to Stay Ahead With Rick Mulready
00:46:55
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Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success Podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success Podcast. So glad you're here. All right, Rick Mulready, my buddy from San Diego. How the heck are you? Good to see you back on the podcast.
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I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's good to be here.
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Yeah. So Rick and I go way back, back in the day, and we share a love for AI. And Rick's taken this to the next level and is really helping online business owners be able to figure out this, this new wild, wild West. And thank you, Rick, for being that voice. I know you were the voice in the ad space where, when that was just like the wild West. And now, now we're going at mock speed with our hair flying behind us, like, hoping that we can keep up. So I would love for you to start with, just talk to my audience about where is AI right now and what can we expect? Because it seems like it's iterating every five minutes and we're behind, you know, so just fill us in on what, you know, and. And what's kind of the future going to be.
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Yeah, it's interesting, right? I mean, I'm looking at the date. So we're recording this the middle of September, 2025, and it feels like we're in a little bit of a lull, and it's. It's sort of felt like that, I mean, pretty much all summer, even with the release of GPT5, which was a huge flop, you know, I mean, it was not. It was all hyped up, and then when it came out, it was like, oh, this is not very good. This is not very good. So I feel like we're in this lull right now. You know, a lot of people had said early on that, you know, maybe by the end of 2025 we will have, you know, not AGI, but more agentic capabilities employed in businesses and so forth. And, you know, now we're seeing that a lot of businesses are saying, like, oh, no, we're not. Not as many businesses are adopting, like, the, this, The. The wide scope of AI, like was once originally thought would happen. I mean, it will happen, right? But not at. At this point. And when we're recording this, a study just came out within the past few days, both OpenAI and Anthropic, which is Claude, Claude's parent company, they came out with a report, they did a big study about AI adoption and how it's being used essentially. And the personal use of AI is way higher than business use. And a lot more people on using Claude are doing more sort of delegation of work. Claude is more of the work and it's not really surprising at this point, but Claude is more of sort of the work model, if you will, to do work with and delegate work to. Whereas ChatGPT is really being used as almost like a glorified Google at this point to search for things and find things and find out about things. And so it's kind of where we're at right now, you know, agents is, I really think is next. Meaning like we, we have, we have a, you know, we have agenta capability. We can, there's plenty of tools out there that you can do this that anybody can try for free and use for free, but just the full scope of like true agentic capability isn't there? I think that will. We're going to be continuing towards that. But it's almost like we've almost, it almost feels like we've hit sort of a tipping point, if you will, with the level of advancement in these models that came out, I. E. OpenAI is already talking about GPT6 at this point, you know, whereas, you know, we had 4. Oh, and 4.1 and 4.5 and you know, 3. Oh, and I mean in 03 and all this stuff like, it just. I think they know that that sort of missed the mark of what was hyped up. And so now they're talking about, you know, GPT6 at this point. And I think we'll start to see a lot more of the multimodality with these models, meaning being able to process image, video, obviously text, all in one. And of course some of these models can already do that, but yeah, I think it's such an interesting time. And then last point I'll make is OpenAI released a report last week of a study they did about hallucinations. And so meaning like AI is making stuff up. As we all, yeah, as we all know, it's not a problem that's going to be going away, but what they've found is that a big reason why these models hallucinate so much is because of the way that they're trained and they're, they're, they're trained. Meaning like which, which is, which is great because that just sort of tells you, okay, well, they could maybe try to train things a little bit differently to again, not remove completely, but reduce hallucinations, which obviously is a huge issue when it comes to AI.
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I love it. Okay, so I want to rewind this tape a little bit because I saw something that was really, really interesting and you're so spot on that we think so. I did a survey within our organization across all of our clients, past, present and asked just one simple question. Do you feel like as a business owner you are behind when it comes to AI? I just wanted to get a sense because in our upper level program that we work with just seven and higher figure entrepreneurs, we're doing a lot of advanced agent driven kind of ideals and helping them get ranked and those kind of things. And so, and they're feeling that way. So I said, well, let me just ask across the board, you know, my certification clients and my coaching clients and across the board, 98% of them, that's the number, came back feeling like they are behind. And the good news is I still feel like even though there are a lot of AI arbitrage people going in and helping people with AI, there is still the opportunity for the blue ocean of AI when it comes to business owners. And so I'd love for you to talk about that. Like what? Where do you see AI and specific types of AI being beneficial for even the business owner that is in newer stages or mid stages right now and they're wanting to utilize it to go faster?
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Yeah, it's such a great, I love that you did that study. I mean, and I, I see the same thing too. Like so many people think that they're behind and I mean, honestly. Yeah, I mean if you're just getting into it now, you are behind. However, I will caveat that with the fact that we're so, so, so so early on in this whole thing. Like it's going to sound funny, but the fact that somebody, if somebody knows how to like prompt chatgpt, you're way ahead. Actually crazy to say, but we're so close to it that we, that we sometimes lose sight of that. And so it's hard to maybe take a step back and be like, you know what, maybe I'm not that far behind compared to other people. So but to answer your question directly, I think that the, I don't even. Yes, it's a go faster sort of thing, but it's, it's, how can we, it's, how can we leverage AI to create things that weren't possible to be able to do unless we Had a, you know, this amazing tech background or coding background or programming background, you know, even a year and a half ago. So the ability to create an app, for example, that you've had an idea about for years that you're like, oh, I don't have the either I don't have the money to go, to go hire somebody, or I have no idea how to program or what have you. You can go into a tool like Lovable, for example, and build your own app just by telling it what you want and it will code it. Like, you can literally have something created an MVP within a day.
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So I think that's nuts because I. It is vivid memory of getting a proposal. I'm not exaggerating because I do have an app that I wanted to accompany our new book that's coming out. And my quote, my initial quote was 1.2 million.
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Yeah, yeah. I'm just like, I'm truly laughing at that. That's just absurd.
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I know, I know. And I obviously did not move with that. And I'm so glad because we were able to use AI platforms to build it out really, really fast. And so app building, just thinking about any of the body in the coach consulting agency businesses, what an amazing tool for their clients to be able to go nowhere else. But to you, I mean, absolutely.
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I mean, it's the moat, if you will, for a business is your, your knowledge, your ip, right? And then it's like, okay, well how do you package that? That's not different than what it's always been. But, but the, but AI almost said the AI. AI has been sort of like the leveling field, if you will, because anybody can go. This question came up. My membership last week is like, well, what do you. What's my thought on courses going forward?
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Right.
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And you know, an amazing thing is you can leverage AI to talk about going faster. And we'll come back to the apps in just a second. But going faster is like, well, how can, how can I get my students the results quicker and easier using AI? So just as a random example, like somebody in a course might be teaching, I don't know how to create your ideal audience or what have you and their pain points and all that. And you had to go do all this research and stuff like that, right? And then they would. They maybe bring it back, whatever. They're doing the work, and then you help them figure out all, whatever, like all these Personas and stuff like that. You can have AI do that literally in minutes, you know, so like you could create something for Them where they just input their target audience, for example, a little bit of information about their business and what they do and boom, they could have that information literally in less than a minute. So it's, it's like thinking. It's thinking differently and how. And the cool thing is too is like. And not a lot of people think about this is like, okay, I know AI could, could do this, could help me with this, but I'm not really sure how ask ChatGPT or ask whatever AI model that you want to use to do that. Meaning, like, I have this idea. How do I. How could I create this? Or give me 17 ideas for making this easier. But the ability to. With these tools, like I said, going back to Lovable. There's Lovable and Bolt and Replit and all these tools that you can just build apps and I know nothing about building websites, but I'm redesigning my website in Lovable right now. And like I'm building a custom landing page for live workshops I do for my audience, which it's like, well, why aren't you just using a template? Well, I actually want automation built into it that when somebody chooses a workshop that triggers a whole backend automation. And so connecting with APIs and all this other stuff, I'm like, yeah, we could probably figure it out, but. But I can just tell lovable. For example, when I'm building this page, wait, I want to connect to kit convert kit. Like do that, whatever you need to do on the back end. And it does.
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It makes people like Rick and I giddy because we've been around the block long enough where this very thing caused us tears and pain before.
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Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's an exercise that I love to have. You know, our, my community members do is like use AI to help you future, future proof your business. Meaning like the stark reality is, is like, yes, AI is going to eliminate a lot of things. Yes. However, it's going to also create so much like so many new businesses, so many new roles, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're not thinking about that, you're just like, I'm just going to stick to what I'm doing and not change. I think that's. That's a problem.
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Yeah, that's dangerous. What are you seeing in terms of you. You mentioned our unique piece of the puzzle, which is our unique ip, our specific knowledge that is then informing AI. I would love for you to talk a little bit about the elephant in the room. People are a little bit afraid to put their IP their things out there because they're afraid that it now is going to just be spewed across AI, not for them to ever have fans. So I'd love for you to talk about the privacy and predictability of AI or not.
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It's sort of the million dollar question right now. And I'm actually in the middle of putting together sort of like a do's and don'ts sort of thing, best practices for privacy. And the reality is the way that I look at it, I am a little, I have a little bit of, I don't know, I love the thinking of like it already knows. Yeah, it knows.
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Yeah.
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Like they were. And not to like sound all alarms or whatever, but I am sure. And I don't, I have no. Never been told this like I'm just, just writing on the wall sort of thing. Before we even realized all this stuff was going on. Like these companies were scraping, you know, like scraping the data, you know, if you will.
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Have you ever heard of a funnel hacker? There you go.
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Yeah, I mean just, just look at like what, you know, talk about it like an inflection point. Right. Like look at what Claude is just. Or Anthropic has just done. Today's the 16th of September, in two weeks. I think it's the 25th or the 28th. I forget 28th that they were sort of the last holdout, if you will, on not using your chats and, and data and uploads and stuff to train their model.
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Right.
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Everybody else did it. OpenAI, Gemini, Grok, et cetera. Well, they're changing that now and it's going to be defaults turned on now just like the other models. You can go in and turn it off. But if you really think about what's happening there is like in order to stay competitive, they need to continue to update the training of their models. And so the way that I look at it is like it's all out there, honestly, like unless, like I would not be, I would not be uploading, you know, financial data with that's like uniquely identifying material about you or clients, Social Security numbers, banking information, legal document. I wouldn't be uploading that stuff. You know, in a, in an early mentor of mine in the AI space, they said, and it's always stuck with me, I wouldn't put anything into AI that you wouldn't post on Reddit, on the front page of Reddit. And I think that's like, I think that's really smart to think about. Which begs the question is like, well what the heck how do I use it? And so I am of the thinking, like, look, we can turn off, you know, when we're building a GPT and ChatGPT, for example, we can uncheck that box when that, that's like train the model with your chats and conversations and stuff like that. You can turn it off in the privacy. Do I think, do I think it's still doing its thing? Yes, I do. I mean, meaning, like I still think that it's using. Yes, I do. And I don't to be all, you know, negative Nancy on it, but like, yeah, I think that's the reality and I think it's the reality that we have to sort of accept, you know, if there is something that you absolutely do not want anybody knowing about, I would not be uploading it to AI.
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Yeah, don't put it in. I love that Reddit idea. It's like, if you don't want to read it on Reddit, don't put it. But what would you, if, if you. I'd love for you to talk about like what you're doing with your membership. Like, what are the real valuable tools that every business owner should be doing in AI right now to either, as we talked about, grow faster, serve deeper, serve better, or just optimize and get to a level that they're trying to grow through profit or, or with their team?
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Yeah, yeah. I mean, if somebody is not able to use just ChatGPT, for example, I, I'm, I have a love hate relationship with ChatGPT, especially since, you know, GPT 5 came out. But you need to be able to use these models. Just start with something simple, just generating ideas, for example. It's the most basic usage of these models. So yes, I did a video, it was over a year ago now, it's 15 months ago on my YouTube channel about prompt engineering is dead. And it like, it really angered so many people. The point of it was, which a lot of people miss, is like, you have to be able to articulate what it is that you want.
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Right?
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What it is that you want AI to do for you. And so it's critical thinking. That sounds so easy. But like, that's a hard skill. I have a hard time with that. And I've been doing this a long time to be able to clearly articulate what it is that we want to do because we can say, oh, I want a, whatever, I want an entire email funnel set up. Okay, cool. But like break that down. Describe that. That's, that's easier said than done. And so the point is, is like, you have to be able to clearly articulate what it is that you want done. And then in terms of using these tools and so forth, you know, I, I like to have people start off with the worst exercise in the world. It's the time audit. How are we spending our time? What are we doing in our business? How long are we doing it for? And then it's a matter of like, okay, what are those things that are repetitive that you just hate doing or somebody in your team is doing? And start there with those things because oftentimes those are especially the repetitive stuff. You can delegate that to AI. And as far as the team stuff goes, a lot of people are like, well, I don't want to let my team go. And I'm never advocating for that. The reality is that some roles are not going to be necessary anymore. However, use AI to help your team perform at a higher level because how cool would it be to free up more of your team's time so that they can be working on higher leverage activities, you know, so start, you know, starting with, starting with those things. The other thing too in terms of tools is like, everybody wants like, well, if there's just one tool to use, what's that? Magical. There is no one magical tool that does it all, you know. Yeah, I, I personally like, I love Claude. I use Claude every single day. I do use ChatGPT every day but like for, just for different things. Claude I find to be the best writer of context. I use Claude projects all the time that are connected to my computer. That Claude has access to my computer. That freaks a lot of people out. But my files are local so they're stored on my computer, not out in the cloud. So, so I have it do different things on the, on the, you know, I basically, it's the business brain, if you will. But yeah, I mean, and it's, it's with, with the membership one thing people are just like, well just tell me what to use. Well, that's, it's doing a disservice. Right, because, because as you, as you mentioned earlier, like this stuff's changing so fast that if you get stuck with one, I don't mean stuck but like if you get tunnel visioned on one tool and that tool is not evolving, there's going to be five other tools that are amazing that you might like better, that might, you just might enjoy working with better or are more cost effective or what have you. So I would be spending time every day like start with one tool, play around with It. Get comfortable with it, and then. And obviously start using it for things in your business, then pick another tool and do the same thing and just sort of keep snowballing that.
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I love that. All right, I'm going to dive like a practical thing right now. So it's something that we did in our business early, early, early on, and I'm so, so, so glad we did. And that is how do you walk us through how to get AI models to understand, know, and speak through your specific voice for your business? Because I think that's a way that people can quickly utilize it within their business to do a lot more content, a lot more output. But there's, There's a nuance to that. You can't just say, you know, I did see this meme that was like, create a social post like Tony Robbins within the voice of this. And it was like the, the morph that came out just sounded like this unhuman thing. So how do people train the AI models to speak like them?
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Yeah, it's. You have to give it your. Your content. You have to give it examples of your writing or speaking or, you know, and I say writing or speaking, for example. So if you are, if you're writing emails in your, in your business, right. And you're like, that's in voice. Well, cool. You want to give that to AI to train it to write like you. I. I caution people from. If they have a podcast, for example, or. Or YouTube, what have you, that's different. Like, you're. We. We try as much as, I think as hard as we can to write like we speak.
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Yeah.
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It doesn't always work like that.
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So.
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So it's like, if you want to use AI to write podcast outlines or scripts or video scripts or video. Cool. Take samples of those and you can ask AI. And if you're like, I don't know what the prompt is, just, again, just ask AI to say, look, I want to teach you to sound like me. Here are my writing samples. What else do you need from me?
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Yeah, and it'll tell you.
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It'll tell you. Yeah. And in ChatGPT, if you're paying for a ChatGPT, you can ask it to save it in its memory. So every time you go to write something, it will write in your voice because you've told it to write in your voice and you don't have to keep asking it every single time. Yeah, that's a misnomer.
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Well, they think I got to go back in and prompt it all over again, but that's not the case.
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Exactly. And you know, the more content that you give it, the more examples like so like with your book, for example, you know, like books are amazing because they're obviously longer form of content. So that's a lot of information for it to digest. We can really nail your voice. But you obviously don't need a book though. Like if you. Five emails, for example, or, or if somebody's listening and they're like, I have no writing samples, I don't have a podcast. I don't have a, like, cool, find somebody else that you like.
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Yeah.
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You know, and give it writing samples of that person and then ask it the same thing. But then like sort of customize it and tweak it to what sound, what feels better for you. That's totally possible too.
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I love that I wouldn't have totally been like smiling when you're saying the voice versus the written. Except for now I'm recording my audiobook and I'm embellishing all over the place of the words that I've said. Because we do, we speak very differently, especially us that have been on video and podcasts and that's our natural language. Even I will say. And my whole audience knows this. The whole book was written via voice because I'm a verbal processor. And so, yep, I, I did the typical. I'm gonna write the book. I'm gonna sit down and have the candles and do the thing and it's gonna be great. And I'm gonna be like, yeah. And I literally sat there like the typical cursor blinking and just going, this isn't working. And I. And I couldn't even do it in our own environment. So then I go back to San Diego and I'm like, I'm just gonna walk on Cardiff beach and talk.
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Yeah.
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Because that's. I talk for a living. Like that's what I'm my natural language. So I would say, what is that natural thing for you? If you're a writer, Pour that in. If you're a verbal processor, let AI know that you're uploading a transcript that is audio so that they can hear your voice because it's different inflections and it's very funny. Some of the things it comes back and says. I'm like, I guess I say that. I guess I say game changer a lot because it always pops that word up.
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It's one of AI's favorite ghost go to's also. Yeah, I know. I love that.
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I love that. So, okay, they're diving into the pool they're not afraid anymore. They're starting to look around, they're starting to utilize it for the team. They're starting to, to not be as afraid. What do you advise a growing business to start to plug into to help it start to be more efficient?
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Yeah, I mean so yeah, the efficiency is so key obviously, because that can help on so many different levels. You can work less, you can increase profit that way. Because if you're doing things either faster or you're doing things where you didn't need resource, expensive resources like you did before, obviously we're spending less money to accomplish those things. I'd be looking at building out workflows. So again, the whole dreaded sop, for example, you know, this is where you want to be looking at, all right, how do we do what we do in our business? And what are the, what are the things that you want to delegate to AI or have somebody on your team make it easier for them or you know, again, dare I say, is like what somebody is doing, is it necessary because of these AI capabilities? I mean, so you're looking at, I would say you're looking at workflow tools. Whether it is. There's a lot of them. I use Relay app in the business a lot because it is, I'm not a technical person and it is built for non technical people to build out workflow, AI workflows. I mean, you can use N8N, you can use Zapier, you can use make, you can use Lindy, you can use MindPal. There's a ton of tools out there to be building out these workflows depending on what your use case is or use cases are. So I'd be looking at doing that and again it's like, well, how can I be leveraging AI to get my students, clients, customers faster and better results? And obviously that's going to depend on what type of business that you're in. Right? So if you're in, I don't know, a coaching business, for example, and you have coaching calls with your clients, you know, once a week or a couple times a week, for example, it's like, okay, well what is your process for? You have a call with that person and then what is the follow up process? You know, like what's the, the check in process and holding them accountable and stuff like that? Okay, it's like, well, a lot of that can be delegated to AI in terms, I don't mean the coaching part, I mean, I mean the follow up, for example, the aggregating of the notes and helping you create the plan and the check ins and all that stuff. But again, it goes back to knowing what your process is and getting it down. Paper on your iPad, on a whiteboard, whatever it might be, and whimsical, whatever it is, just get the process down because it makes it so much easier to be able to say, oh, okay, I start with this step. And then I start with this step. Ooh, I don't know how to do this, I need to figure this step out. And so it's looking at it through the lens of those types of things. If you have high churn in your business and yet you're like, if I lower churn, I'm going to be able to add whatever five figures a month. I'm just making this up. Cool, let's get AI on it and try to figure out based on your data. You know, it's like looking at those things and looking at, okay, what are the bottlenecks in my business that I can leverage AI to break through so that I can continue to grow? I mean there's all kinds of use.
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B
Cases for, oh my gosh, so many and exciting because so many of the tools that we already use have integrated AI now. Yeah, it's good. It's not the best, but it's good. Like I think about loom, like again, verbal processing. You know, we went and did a company wide. Okay, you can't do anything without looming it. And then loom integrated an SOP process. That's AI.
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A
Totally.
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B
And so yes. Do we take those SOPs and take them into a different platform to improve them? Yes, we did. But still to not have to sit and write those out. Big time win, right?
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A
Yeah, totally.
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B
For people like me and Rick, it's.
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Like, it's like what, like six, it's like a $6 add on per month or something. Like worth it.
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B
Yeah, so worth it. I love it. Okay, so I want to get the crystal ball out because you're, you're immersed into this world. What do you see? Yeah, we talked about chat GPT5. We were all expecting like the bells, the whistles and it was like, it was like Apple's Phone 12 is like, wait, nothing changed, you know, so what do you know? Because you're, you're immersed in this world, what are you seeing coming down the pike that will be supportive of newer business owners or even those that have been in it for a while? What are you seeing coming? And what would you say people should spend their time learning?
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A
Hmm, it's a good question. I mean, where things are going. I still think that we're still going more towards agentic things. Meaning like, okay, I'm going to give AI a problem and go solve it where I don't have to give it necessarily all the specific steps to do. You give it some boundaries and, and that sort of thing. And it will go, it will go do it a great use of time. And a lot of people aren't thinking about this, and I wasn't thinking about it for years and years. In the business is having a central point or a couple of central points, if that makes sense of your knowledge and data, meaning like knowledge of information about your business. What do you do, your offer, your FAQs that you get, just centralizing all of that information because that becomes context for your AI, whether it's a simple chat in ChatGPT or Claude or what have you, or entire workflows. The workflows are only as good as the context. And to put that into context, you asked before about how do I get AI to sound like me? Well, the context that you're giving when you want it to write like you, the context that you're giving it, in a very simple example is this is, this is the process. This is my writing style essentially, or my speaking style or whatever or what have you. So you're giving it that context and it's using that context to write new content.
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B
Yeah.
- [34:02]
A
And so it's, it's the ability to, to really connect all these things together and people realizing the potential by doing that. So I think a really good use of time is, number one, getting all that thing, getting all the stuff centralized, whether that's on your computer, whether that's in Google Drive, whether that's a notion, whether it's, whatever it is, get it, get it centralized. And again, this is where we do have to, okay, I'm going to, you know, release some control if I want to be leveraging this in control, meaning like in privacy. Again, obviously you're not giving it access to anything like super, super personal. Again, think about the Reddit metaphor. I would be also looking at, again, trying to continue to test new tools as they are fit for your specific use case. It's hard. Like I'm a shiny object. I love shiny object. You know, thankfully this is what I do in the business, so I give myself permission to go chase those sometimes. But it's, you've just got, you've got to be up on what is going to be the best tool to solve this specific problem that I have in the Business. And what I don't mean is, ooh, I hear about this tool, whatever it might be. How can I fit that tool into my business? A lot of people do that backwards. You got to start with the problem first, and then it's like, oh, okay, this is the problem I want to solve or the challenge or the opportunity that I want to solve in the business, or take advantage of what are the tools or what is the tool? I'm sure there's multiple tools that can solve that problem. Then you just go test a few of those. Right. A lot of them have trials or, you know, or if it's like, all right, I'm going to test out the best solution over the next, whatever, 30 days, and I spend $20 to do that. Great, cool. But you might find, yeah, exactly. It's such a great, you know, investment of both your time and resources to do that. And it's a matter of, like, finding what you're most comfortable with, obviously the capabilities, that sort of thing. But start with the problem first, and then you go figure out what the tools are to. To solve that. I. I would be really starting to look through. And, like, I think that's where people should be spending their time.
- [36:37]
B
Yeah, that is. That is such gold. And I think through, like, there we were talking before we got started about, like, ar, you're going to be seeing more and more and more people, AI arbitrage. They're gonna come in and say, oh, we'll help you do this. Yeah, no, no dig on them. But as a business owner, it's kind of like saying, I'm gonna, you know, run ads, but not knowing how to do ads. I'm gonna like, we need to know how this is running. Otherwise your business could go really far left or really far right. Having somebody else be the director of that. That's that neuro architecture, being like the creator of your business, creating the output through AI. So I love that you shared that. Like, start with the problem and then go look for the solution. Because, man, it is tempting to just start playing and like, oh, wait, I have to run a business. Like, I could do that all day long. You guys know I'm a big advocate of what we call the sandbox. Like, I have my Fridays that I get to do whatever, and that's in some way connected, but doesn't directly take me off track. I am going to do what I call the AI cardinal sin and ask you, okay, what are you using in these areas right now?
- [37:45]
A
But please, yeah, go for it.
- [37:46]
B
Hear me when I Say this is for Rick's business right now. And so that might change if you have a different business model that might not be working, but just a good springboard for people to go check out if they so need support in that area. So the one big one I get asked a lot about is video social media. What are you looking at that's working well? I know there's a million of them, and so are you finding one because you're, you're. I trust Rick with his, like, his output is important. He's very meticulous. So I'm curious, is there something you're loving right now?
- [38:25]
A
It's kind of why I'm smiling, because now, just to clarify, you mean long, like short form video?
- [38:33]
B
Yeah, short.
- [38:33]
A
Well, that's what you mean, long form.
- [38:35]
B
I haven't really gotten there yet, but short form feels like it's kind of there.
- [38:39]
A
Yeah. I. There's a sigh because there is no. There is no best that, like the short form. The AI solutions, they've gotten better, I would say, in my experience, Opus Clip has. They're one of the originals and they've evolved over the time over, you know, over the time, which is good. It's still. There's still what I think these tools lack for short form. Right. And what I mean by that is you're taking a long form piece of content, you're using these tools to cut it up essentially into short form.
- [39:12]
B
Right.
- [39:12]
A
It. It hasn't figured out context. Going back to context. Right. So it'll pick up a helpful clip, for example, but it's not a standalone piece oftentimes because it. It misses the reference or context that was talking about before.
- [39:29]
B
Right.
- [39:30]
A
You know, so. But with that said, I think Opus Clip is probably the best of the ones that aren't very good, honestly. I think that. And again, I say Opus Clip is evolving very quickly. So I think I have a lot of hope there. I'm not using it for long form.
- [39:46]
B
In terms of, like, hope in long form, because I'm not seeing yet.
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of people will say, yeah, I'm using it to create, you know, faceless YouTube channels and. And stuff like that. It's just. That's just not my bag. There's plenty of people out there making a lot of money.
- [40:02]
B
Sure.
- [40:03]
A
Doing it that way. It's just. That's just not. Not something I. And I. And I have that literally on the sales page for my community. I'm like, if you. If you're interested in creating faceless YouTube videos, this is not going to be for you, like this is not your community.
- [40:18]
B
And the irony is in this AI generation, the one thing people are craving the most is that human to human contact, it's that yes, we want to use these tools, but I've got work with somebody I trust. I got to really know that person. So I think Faceless will have their day, but I don't think they're ultimately going to be the long game.
- [40:42]
A
I agree. And they're getting, I mean, I will, I will say they're getting better and better. Meaning like the avatars of, you know, using tools like hey gen and stuff like that. I mean they're getting really good. Like really good. But you know, there's a. You can tell when something's AI generated. And there was a study that I forget what, I forget who did it or whatever, but it was like as soon as, like humans are very good, especially at this stage, are picking up, you know, an AI generated person. And even as good as the technology is right now, you, you. It. It immediately I forget what it was, but immediately increases your skepticism and all these other chemicals in your body and stuff. Like, so I think we're, I think we're a ways away from that. Yeah, you're totally right. Like AI cannot replicate human connection, you.
- [41:38]
B
Know, so that's going to become more and more and more sought after. So yeah, I know the video side of things now you already mentioned who you go to or your number one for copy or copy ideas, but I'd love for you to talk about that again just so that make sure my.
- [41:55]
A
My. In terms of writing content, it's Claude. You know, Claude for Sonnet is, is the best. Even like 3.7 Sonnet, which is just the earlier model of it, it's really good. I don't think that Chat CBT is great at writing ChatGPT 4.5, which they deprecated when 5 came out. Yeah, 4.5 was great. I was really happy with it and I used it a lot for writing. Um, but yeah, Claude does a really good job at. At that, you know, at. At saying that though. Again, this is sort of the, like I want people to kind of think about their AI use through this lens. I'm sure there are people listening right now. They're like, hi, I have chatgpt dialed in on my voice and it sounds like me, you know, amazingly well. Awesome. Don't change it. Don't change anything. Like continue. If it's working, keep going with it. But if you haven't, which A lot of people struggle with ChatGPT to get it to sound like you, Claude. More empathetic just sounds more natural. You know, it's just, it's a better content writer.
- [43:04]
B
I love it. I love it so much. All right, well, let's wrap up. But I would love for you to answer, like, the first place that somebody should start to dive into. I love that you talked about starting with the problem. I'm gonna say, like down in the notes, Rick has membership. If you're like, hey, I need to figure this thing out, like, I trust him with all of those things. I would really recommend that. But you know, what should somebody go look into today? Let's talk to the people that haven't started.
- [43:37]
A
Yep.
- [43:37]
B
They're. They're a little scared, but they know they need to. What would be the, the starting point for that person in your mind?
- [43:46]
A
Subscribe to, like, pay 20 bucks a month for one of these AI models. Whether I would probably start with ChatGPT or Claude, honestly, for people who are listening, who pay for Google Workspace, you already have a subscription to Gemini. Yeah, just start using one of these models. Don't do the free version just because it'll, it'll be helpful a little bit, but you really unlock a much like just high, high, high level. You just, it unlocks so much more when you're paying the $20 a month and just start talking with it. Meaning, like, if you're like, I have no idea how to prompt these models or anything, just start having a conversation with it. Tell it the problem that you want to solve. And I mean that, that could be like, can you help me come up with 15, whatever podcast episode title ideas, give it a little. And what I always like to say is, and I have a keyboard shortcut for it literally is like, what other information do you need from me in order to execute this task to the best of your ability? And it will tell you the information that it needs. So again, that's not like some super secret high level prompting. That's just having a conversation with it. And so I would be doing, I would be doing that every single day. Spend. If you don't have much time, spend 15 minutes a day chatting with it as you get, you know, start so you can get more comfortable with it and you can start up leveling. Because I, I will guarantee that once you start seeing some success and the things that it can do, you'll be hooked. And it's like, what else can I do? What else can I delegate to AI to help me in the business.
- [45:39]
B
Oh, it's called an AI gateway.
- [45:41]
A
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
- [45:44]
B
Rick, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and just being that resource for online business owners to know where to go for AI, how to use it, how to use it in a way that's effective for growing your business and not as a distraction tool. And I just preach you. Appreciate you being on, brother.
- [46:01]
A
Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I can talk about this stuff all day long. Oh, I know.
- [46:04]
B
Me too. All right, thanks, Rick.
- [46:06]
A
Thank you. See ya.
- [46:08]
B
Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram, please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you. You loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters, those reviews are our big, warm hug. And of course, if you want to go deeper or see this on video, Please follow my YouTube channel at. Dr. Shannon Ervin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.