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The Think Media Podcast
377: Free AI Tools I Actually Use to Create Better Content (2025 Update)
00:46:57
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- [00:00]
Sean Cannell
I'm excited to announce our YouTube 1K.
- [00:03]
Think Media Team
Challenge, a free five day event that will give you the exact blueprint to start and grow your YouTube channel in 2025. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or somebody ready to grow their personal brand, this challenge is your roadmap to success. To register, just go to tube1k challenge.
- [00:22]
Sean Cannell
Com.
- [00:22]
Think Media Team
We're going to be doing one training session a day for five days and you're going to learn how to get your first 1,000 subscribers and start earning real income. Here, insider strategies that make viewers want to click on your videos and keep watching multiple different ways to earn money from your YouTube channel, even if you have a small audience. And how to build an authentic personal brand that truly connects with people. But it gets even better. We are giving away prizes every single day of the challenge. You could win professional microphones, lighting kits and premium content creation software. And during this challenge, you're getting access to the exact training that we offer in our $4,000 coaching program. But you're getting it completely for free. And you can start with just your smartphone. So if you're Ready to turn 2025 into your YouTube breakthrough year, go to tube1kchallenge.com to register. That's tube1kchallenge.com or click the link in the show notes or YouTube description to register for our upcoming challenge.
- [01:24]
Sean Cannell
If we're honest, there is way too much information about AI right now and hype at a high level without practical tactical tip about how you can use this in your every day life, especially as an online business owner, as a content creator. And in today's episode of the Think Media podcast, we're actually going to see how you can start using AI immediately to save time, to be more productive, to boost the reach of your content, and ultimately to grow your overall creator business and online business and make more money. And so today I've got Michael Stelzner, the founder of social media marketing world, Social Media examiner and a brand new AI brand and podcast as well. He's been researching this for the last two years. He's been in this online business and online marketing space for well over a decade and is one of the leading experts on this topic. And so we're going to explore these three ways to use AI as a content creator. Michael, welcome back to the show.
- [02:29]
Michael Stelzner
Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk about this today.
- [02:31]
Sean Cannell
I want to make a note that this is part two of our conversation and in part one we talked about three mega trends and we kind of also talked about AI at a higher level. But now we're going to go super tactical. So number one, review YouTube videos with Notebook LM by Google. This is the to do and Michael's going to break this down step by step right now.
- [02:53]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so first of all, let's just clear clarify what this thing is called. Notebook LM. Google invented the technology called GPT which ChatGPT used ultimately. And everybody knows what ChatGPT is, but Google is the one that invented the underlying technology. And Google introduced this thing called Notebook mostly for educational institutions, originally to summarize documents or big huge files in a way that was easy for universities and students. But recently they've kind of expanded it and it can now do lots of things. Some of the people watching or listening may have heard some of these AI voices where it's a guy and a gal talking to each other. Have you heard this before, Sean? Where it sounds like a human, but it's not a human. Well, that's all from NotebookLM. So one of the cool things about NotebookLM is it is the only model as of today that can do what we're about to talk about. So what you can do with NotebookLM and you go to NotebookLM, Google to ultimately get into it, you can go ahead and add any YouTube video to it. Now here's the trick. The video needs to be a few days old. It won't work. If it's brand new video, you can put any YouTube video into it. And by the way, the application here is, let's say you don't have time to watch a 45 minute hour long or 30 minute video and you want to find out what the heck that whole thing is about and you want to kind of understand it, or let's say you want to do some competitive analysis on some other videos. You can put a video, you can put multiple videos into this thing. And what it does is it doesn't just look at the closed Caption file on YouTube. This is a multimodal model, vision model, which means it was trained to see and to read. And this is really important for a lot of people to understand. So when you put this link in there, it will watch the video and it will read the subtitles of the video. And as many of you know, if you just look at the transcript of a video, you're missing a big part of the video. Right, Sean? Because there's oftentimes screen shares and all sorts of other stuff that's going on. So when you go here, what you can do is you can quite literally Insert a link directly into a video, and then you can begin querying the video. For example, Sean, I took a video from your channel called how to edit a YouTube video for beginners. No skills needed. Full disclosure. This appeared to be a sponsored video for Gling AI. Okay. And I asked it, what are some tweetable moments from this video? And add timestamps. So what it did was it identified a whole bunch of tweetable moments. For example, it said, Gling AI is like having your own video editing assistant, exclamation point. It cuts out bad takes, remove silence, and gives you a rough cut at no in no time. And it gives me the timestamp 38 seconds to 48 seconds. So what it did was it created six or seven different tweetable moments right out of that video. Okay, so this is an immediate application for people that want to share a short little something on X. But I also asked, what is the visual style of this video? I also asked it, where do you recommend chapter markers? So this is kind of cool. It recommended chapter markers in different places than where you actually had the chapter markers. And I also said, if I were doing a similar video, what sections would you suggest removing? Or you could ask it, what sections would you suggest expanding on? Because many YouTube creators do this. They find a really popular video and they analyze it and they try to make something better. Well, you can now go into NotebookLM. You can put that link in there and you can ask it to analyze the video to find opportunities. And it's gonna say, well, we don't recommend you copy videos. If you were to create something similar, here's an area where you might not want to go, and here's an area where you might want to go. And it's really, really cool. Now for a few more things. NotebookLM can do a thousand other things. You can drop PDFs in there, and you can query PDFs of anything that you've got. And you can ask it questions. You can drop huge legal documents in it and ask it to summarize it. So it doesn't just work with Google files. I mean, with links to YouTube. It works with actual files that you can upload. You have any thoughts or questions on that one?
- [07:19]
Sean Cannell
A bunch. So one, we'll link these resources in the description. The website is Notebook, the letters LM Google. And I just went there. This might be a video version of the podcast that you want to check out. And I uploaded my conversation with the creator's attorney and was able to actually create, like a quiz. So it actually had. If you were going to study the video, cool. It's got the questions, then it has the answer answer key based on the conversation. It has essay questions, and then it has a glossary of terms that it even defines literally.
- [07:57]
Michael Stelzner
While we were, during the interview, I.
- [07:59]
Sean Cannell
Did this while we were doing it, trying to follow along. And I'm just now digging into this.
- [08:04]
Think Media Team
Now.
- [08:04]
Sean Cannell
This is free, right? Is there a paid side of this free?
- [08:08]
Michael Stelzner
I think you just have to have a Google account to get into it.
- [08:10]
Sean Cannell
Yeah. So if you have a Google account, which you do, if you have a YouTube channel, you could start using this. I am curious if you've done something similar. One of the reasons why I like using Gemini is because Gemini, owned by Alphabet, who owns Google and YouTube, is another place where you can post a YouTube link and say, hey, can you give me why this video performed? You know, well, what are, what do you like?
- [08:33]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, here's the deal. I have found that when I put a YouTube link into any of the other platforms, they hallucinate and think the video is completely something different. Okay. I've messed around with ChatGPT, I've messed around with, well, you can't even do it in Claude. And I've messed around with AI Studio, which is Google's advanced model. And for whatever reason it thinks the video is completely different. So I haven't really messed around specifically with Gemini. But here's what I like about notebook. You can create notes, right? So whatever the answer is, you can save it as a note, you can create lots of notes, you can create as many of these notebooks as you want to. And it's just a really cool way to work with one thing. Does that make make sense? It's like it's designed to be really easy. You can save it, you can reference it later. I'm really. And you can create audio notes out of it as well, which is the cool thing. So you can create quite literally a podcast episode if you really wanted to, with the click of a button, three minutes later, you'll get like a 10 minute audio version that you could. That are those two AI voices talking together about whatever the content is. Yeah.
- [09:36]
Sean Cannell
So when you say you could create notes, basically, if you were to say, I want to pull a bunch of things from one YouTube video, I really want to study one video and look at it from this angle, that angle quiz.
- [09:46]
Michael Stelzner
You could save it as a note and it'll be there forever is what I'm trying to say.
- [09:49]
Sean Cannell
Got it.
- [09:50]
Michael Stelzner
And so you could whatever query you make you hit save it as a note and it shows up there and it's there forever.
- [09:56]
Sean Cannell
Yeah, that's incredibly. And I mean, we're just one tool in. And you're talking about, this is free. So this is the kind of disruption that is coming from, from Google, Google and AI. And so, and then also, final tip on this one is one of your prompts you're suggesting is to say, if I was to do a similar video, what sections would you do? You have any other prompts like that?
- [10:26]
Michael Stelzner
But you could say, hey, this video I made. This video is really popular. Help me recommend 3 or 4 other videos that you think are worthy to be made. And by the way, I don't know if it's going to work with an entire channel. I don't think so. I think it's designed to look at a single piece of content. But what the AI will do, and by the way, the AI is ridiculously good at this. What it will do is it will find the essence of whatever the content is, which is why these, which is why NotebookLM has gone viral. Because it's ridiculously good with this podcast to kind of find the essence of what's important. And it's designed for educators. Right. So it's really good at explaining things in very easy to understand terms.
- [11:07]
Sean Cannell
So you could say something like, what are the weaknesses of this video? Is kind of another way to say that. And then you, the. These are prompts now that you're typing in. And then you can save them as notes. So you really can learn here. So now I'm looking at, okay, what sources, weaknesses of the video content from? This is just one YouTube video that I've put in here. There's a bunch of stuff that it has added and I could save that to note. And then I now have my collection of notes, the quiz.
- [11:38]
Michael Stelzner
And it all stays within your notebook.
- [11:39]
Sean Cannell
Yeah, and it all stays within that notebook. And then I can start a brand new one and categorize them however I want. Well, this is so powerful and what a powerful tool. And entirely free. Which brings us to the next one, which is ways to use AI to repurpose purpose content strategically. What are your thoughts here?
- [12:00]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, for this one, I'm going to recommend two tools that have free versions and paid versions. And I think you need to use the paid versions to do what I'm about to do. It's Chat GPT, which we've already talked about, and it's Claude AI. Everybody probably knows Chat GPT. Have you tried Claude ever? Sean?
- [12:18]
Sean Cannell
I personally have been recommended Claude so much, and I have not made it that far yet.
- [12:23]
Michael Stelzner
So backstory on cloud real quick is Amazon is a major investor in Claude. So it's been trained on everything Amazon owns. Remember what Amazon owns? They own a lot. They own Whole Foods. They own the largest shopping marketplace in the world. And Jeff Bezos, Washington Post, has also been trained on this. And ChatGPT is really, really, I mean, Claude is really, really good with writing. And I'm not. We could talk about it for a long time, but in this particular case, to repurpose content, this is a really fascinating thing you can do. You can, with ChatGPT or Claude, upload a PDF so you can go to a page, save it as a PDF, or you can copy and paste the content into either one of these. And what you can ask it to do is basically to say, hey, look at this content, and help me figure out other creative types of content that I could make from this piece of content. And I'll give you an example. I recently did a live masterclass on AI for marketers. I wasn't even done with the deck yet, and I uploaded a PDF into each of these two tools and I asked it to recommend to me what it could make from this content and what's really cool about this. Sean, this is going to blow your mind. It didn't just look at the content, but it understood the content before it made the recommendations. And it said, hey, because you happen to host the AI Explored podcast, I think you should do a couple of special episodes on these topics that you talk about inside the webinar. So it's not just. It's not just saying, hey, you can make a podcast out of this. It's saying, not only could you make a podcast about this, but you should make a podcast for your podcast. Because it knows what my podcast is, because they had a screenshot of my podcast in the deck. And then it said, here's a couple of special episodes you could do. And then I went on to say, well, can you outline it for me? And it came up with the script and everything in seconds. So any piece of content, including a video or a YouTube video, you could take the transcript, because right now, you cannot upload videos right now into chat, GPT or Claude. But you could take the transcript, pop it in there, and you could say, what other types of content could I create from this? And it's going to come up with really strong recommendations based on the content that is there every day you want.
- [14:43]
Think Media Team
To start your YouTube channel is another day of missed opportunities and untapped potential. Here's the truth. YouTube reaches more 18 to 49 year olds than all the cable networks combined. The opportunity is massive and the Think Media team and I want to help you seize it. I'm excited to announce our YouTube 1K Challenge, a free five day event that will give you the exact blueprint to start and grow your YouTube channel in 2025. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or somebody ready to grow their personal brand, this challenge is your roadmap to success. To register, just go to tube1k challenge.
- [15:20]
Sean Cannell
Com.
- [15:21]
Think Media Team
We're going to be doing one training session a day for five days and you're going to learn how to get your first 1,000 subscribers and start earning real income. Insider strategies that make viewers want to click on your videos and keep watching multiple different ways to earn money from your YouTube channel, even if you have a small audience. And how to build an authentic personal brand that truly connects with people. But it gets even better. We are giving away prizes every single day of the challenge. You could win professional microphones, lighting kits and premium content creation software. And during this challenge, you're getting access to the exact training that we offer in our $4,000 coaching program. But you're getting it completely for free. And you can start with just your smartphone. So if you're Ready to turn 2025.
- [16:07]
Sean Cannell
Into your YouTube breakthrough year, go to tube1kchallenge.com to register.
- [16:13]
Think Media Team
That's tube1kchallenge.com or click the link in the show notes or YouTube description to register for our upcoming challenge.
- [16:23]
Michael Stelzner
If you want to get specific, you could say, help me create a email series based on this video. Maybe you want to have a welcome series, right, based on a 30 minute presentation that you've done. Anything that you do, you could, you could do this. And another application. Here is I. I created a report that was like 38 pages long, full of mostly graphs and charts, and I uploaded the report into it and then I basically asked it to help me create the outline for the masterclass based on some of the key findings of the report. So basically I took a really technical document, it created an entire outline for a webinar for me, and then ultimately I took that webinar back in and asked it to come up with new ideas. So if you can just get creative and start letting that, you know, your brain go a little bit here, there's a million things you can do by taking something that you know is already successful for you and figuring out other applications for it. And Other, other kinds of areas.
- [17:17]
Sean Cannell
So you can't use a YouTube link, correct?
- [17:23]
Michael Stelzner
You can a little bit. Because quite literally, a few days ago, actually yesterday we're recording this on November 1st. On October 31st, Chat GPT released what they call ChatGPT search. And I was messing around with it this morning. I haven't done enough testing on it. But ChatGPT search, it might be possible that you could use a YouTube link, but I think it's better if you can take a actual something like Text or a PowerPoint or PDF and upload the entire thing into it because then the AI is going to be able to work with it a little better. My recommendation is to actually take the content, either paste it in there if it's text, or upload it in there, because I think you're going to get better results.
- [18:08]
Sean Cannell
A couple questions. How do you pull transcripts? Are you still paying for transcripts? Are you just exporting off of Google's closed captioning of your videos?
- [18:16]
Michael Stelzner
The next tip is going to address this.
- [18:19]
Sean Cannell
Okay, so we'll get that tip in just a second. I will. I signed up for Claude while you were talking. I might be the worst podcast host in the sense that like I'm just, I take action, I take fast action. I'm like, I'm there now. I'm like verifying my text.
- [18:33]
Michael Stelzner
Claude is absolutely amazing. You can do something called Projects inside of Claude and you can upload literally everything you've ever done. Okay, so imagine, imagine you take the transcripts of every video that's been your best performing video, or all of your best performing emails, or literally all the pages from your website. You make PDFs and you upload it in there. And then you say you are the world's leading expert at writing persuasive emails. Okay, What I want you to do is model the context that's in here and I want you to write me an email series first recommend how many emails I should have over a two week period. Go ahead and write the first one. It'll automatically write it. I mean literally. And it will use just the training data that you've given it. It's going to blow your mind.
- [19:18]
Sean Cannell
So I will say this, here's what I did is the way to get some data. I went to my think media podcast, YouTube channel. I'll even show this. I went to my YouTube channel, I went to Real Time analytics.
- [19:32]
Michael Stelzner
You could take a screenshot and put it in there. By the way, it will analyze that screenshot.
- [19:36]
Sean Cannell
Okay. It can actually see the Screenshot. That's cool. So then I went to videos only and I went to the best performing videos in the last 40, 48 hours. So this is, this is excluding shorts. And then I am clearly going to have some of your newest videos of course are best performing, but with the ethic of ranked videos. There's videos on here from 2023, videos on here from 2021, so it's a good snapshot. I copied the text on this entire page and I posted it into Claude saying, here's the prompt, these are my top performing videos in the last 48 hours. What video ideas should I follow up with that would perform well? And then it said, looking at your performance, here's some of the patterns. And it said, here's some strategic video ideas based on what's working well. Follow up on your top performers, evergreen topics with fresh angles. And then looking at your data.
- [20:31]
Michael Stelzner
But then you can, specifically, if you give it more data, you can get really specific with it. Now here's something you should know about Claude. It does not search the web because cloth is built on what's called ethical model. So they, they're really strict on their training data. But if you upload data into it, it will work with anything. This is why typically People will print PDFs of pages or they'll take screenshots and it can, Both Claude and ChatGPT can read anything off of a screenshot, but Claude in particular, you really want to upload ideally PDFs into it and then, and then it will be able to work with that data. So you could just create a PDF out of a page, you know, or you could take screenshots from it and then you can ask it to analyze it. And Claude has some really cool ability to do real time charting and all sorts of cool stuff that we're not going to get into.
- [21:15]
Sean Cannell
That's genius. One of the final thoughts here is it says, looking at your data, I noticed this News and update videos get four to five times more views than general tutorials. Content about risks, changes and updates perform particularly well and your audience responds well to numbered lists and need to know information. And then it asks really strong, yeah, would you like to elaborate on any of these? And to your point, that was within seconds I signed up. I kind of just captured a page and I took it nowhere near to the depth of what you recommended. Now we do have the third tip here in a second, but I want to remind people there is a part one of this episode where we talked about a lot of the trends Creators need to know in 2025 in terms of social media, macro and AI being one of them. And I do think, man, I've personally learned I'm getting educated right now. The ethic is to dive into this stuff and to just start doing it, to take baby steps to start doing it. Notice patterns. I think it's not how much you do in one day, but it's what you do every day, little by little, that compounds in terms of learning how AI thinks, adding some of these new platforms to your understanding, and it really does become second nature. I feel like Gemini and ChatGPT are like an appendage for me right now. Like, I'm like, we're kind of have a relationship developing because we're talking. I'm kind of getting used to them. And I'm also learning about strengths and weaknesses of different platforms. So I want to encourage listeners when this AI stuff feels overwhelming. You know, it's like one little skill at a time, one little test at a time, learning not just how much can you shove into one day, but where could you be by learning a little bit about this every single day? And it's too big to ignore. So just kind of figuring out these tools and.
- [22:59]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, let me just say something before we transition to this next thing if you really want to learn more. I've worked really hard to really bring some of the most brilliant people in the world on my AI Explored podcast, and they're so much smarter than me. So I'm just, I'm just a dabbler. These people are the pros. So our third tip is really exciting. It's about. It's going to blow your minds. Okay? Google has this thing called AI Studio, okay? So just remember it's aistudio.google.com again. It is completely free, does not cost any money at all. And here's what's really cool about this, this thing. I uploaded an MP3 file, right? And anybody who has a YouTube channel knows that they can strip the audio out of their video if they want to. I uploaded a MP3 file of a 45 minute interview that I did into Google Studio. And then I said, write a summary optimized from YouTube. I didn't give it any text, I gave it an audio file. It took about two minutes. And here's what it came up with. Ever feel stuck creatively? This episode is for you. I'm Michael Stelzner and I'm talking with AI expert Jenny Nicholson about how to unleash your creative potential using artificial intelligence. I didn't say any of this. Okay. Jenny's story is amazing. She went from being unemployed to an AI innovator and it just went on to talk about her favorite tools. It wrote this amazing summary optimized for YouTube. I did not say any of these words. Okay. The way AI learned this is it listened to the podcast episode and then it wrote this. And it took it about two minutes. It was a 45 minute interview. Okay, so this is the part that's going to blow your mind. I'm guessing, Sean, that you could upload an MP4 to this thing. I just haven't tried it yet. Okay. And you could ask it anything. Now this is where it starts to get creative. So many of us are verbal processors, Sean. You could take the notes app and you could record a note while you're out walking. And I know people that do this. And you can upload that audio file directly into AI Studio and you can ask it to create a transcript. As a matter of fact, I asked it to create a transcript and it timed out a couple times and then all of a sudden, boom, there it was on the screen. I could see the transcript being written exactly word for word, everything that I said completely for free from a 45 minute audio file. Now, I should have been a little bit more precise and probably said, in the transcript, there are two guests. I want you to isolate the name of the guest because it's listening to it, it can tell the difference between my voice and my guest, Nikki. And if I did that, I'm very confident it would have said Michael Stelzner. And then it would have said my guest name, actually, Jenny Nicholson, I think is her name. And it would have done everything that I wanted and I would have gotten a free transcript out of it in a couple of minutes. So this AI Studio is your power tool where you can. It's kind of a playground, for lack of better words. It's a little bit more technical than Notebook lm. You can pick different models and you can quite literally upload files into it. And, Sean, you could probably upload a video file if you happen to have one sitting around on your desk. But the way it works is down on the bottom, you're just going to basically see a plus sign and you just upload the file. And you can upload images, you can upload audio. It doesn't say video in there, so I'm not sure it handles, but maybe, maybe it can do it. But right now we're confident it'll handle images, audio and files. So this is where it could get really cool because you don't need anything other than the audio. And I showed this to my team this morning and their minds were blown because this is one of the struggles we as video creators have is writing a really good summary of the video. Imagine just uploading the audio file when you're done with this interview and having it write a couple different variations for you. You don't have to get a transcript, you know, it literally will do it for you, which I think is kind of cool.
- [26:59]
Sean Cannell
This is incredible. Now, my question is, if we just talk about closed captions on YouTube, do you just let YouTube Auto do those right now, or are you transcripting your podcast on your tv?
- [27:12]
Michael Stelzner
To be honest with you, I have a team and we've set up automations behind the scenes. So the way it works, when I'm done with my podcast, I drop my podcast into a folder and automatically four different people in the company are emailed. And automatically behind the scene scenes, we're triggering AI captioning, and then when that's done, other people are triggered. So we've set up an entire AI automation sequence so that my team is pretty much got all the files and all the folders and Google Docs and ready to rock and roll. So what do you do for captions they use. They're experimenting with this Google AI Studio thing because it has an API, but we also use Whisper. Whisper is by OpenAI. It's an API. The problem with Whisper, though, is sometimes it can hallucinate. And hallucinate means it can make stuff up. And there's been some professors at universities that have found the hallucination rate with OpenAI's Whisper is kind of higher than what they want. Because if you're a scientist working at a university, you don't want any hallucinations. But Google, I think, is kind of the sleeping giant here. If there's one takeaway. Today we've talked a lot about Google and I want to tell everybody, don't discount Google. Even though ChatGPT is getting the limelight right now, they're a privately held company that's seeking a lot of money and, and Google has more money than we can ever imagine. And they've got all the chips and all the technology and all the engineers behind the scenes and, and, and Google stuff right now is free. It's just not as sexy looking as some of these other things, but it's absolutely free and I think it's kind of fun and it should be your experimental playground.
- [28:51]
Sean Cannell
I am curious about your Take on that in terms of if we are betting on these different horses in the AI race, Claude, ChatGPT and Google. I don't know if there's, you think there's any other content? Microsoft.
- [29:08]
Michael Stelzner
Well, Microsoft is Meta. Google, sorry, Facebook has Meta, which is their open source model, also known as Llama. So they're the other one in the race. So there's Facebook, Amazon is behind Anthropic, Google's got their own model and Anthropic is Claude. Yes. No, no, yeah, Anthropic is Claude and then ChatGPT. So right now everyone, all eyes are on ChatGPT, the, the predominant player right now. They're the ones that kicked off the generative AI revolution and they're the ones that are innovating faster than anybody else. The, the secondary players is Anthropic. A lot of people believe Anthropic is a strong, strong player. As a matter of fact, I'm constantly hearing in the AI world, everyone talk about how they're using Claude by Anthropic more than they're using ChatGPT. So you know how this is. Once people find their tools and they love it, they have no reason to switch. I strongly advocate putting these things head to head. Oftentimes I will use Claude to create something and then I'll use Chat GPT to edit it. Because what Chat GPT is really good at is simple tasks like ideation and editing. And what Claude is really good at when you train it right is really good at creating output that is in your voice and your style. And I've, I've had a lot of guests that have been on my edge, AI explored podcasts that go really deep on this, if anybody wants to go deeper on that.
- [30:29]
Sean Cannell
So would you say that the AI revolution that we're in right now might kind of be like the search revolution where Yahoo and Google and we'll probably.
- [30:40]
Michael Stelzner
Say, remember Chat GPT? Remember when everybody was talking about Chat GPT because Google was not the first search engine, right? Was the one everybody was talking about.
- [30:49]
Sean Cannell
AltaVista, Yahoo. What is Microsoft's Bing?
- [30:54]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
- [30:55]
Sean Cannell
And then, and then really they're eventually. What's interesting, right, is what maybe how markets work is. Google just got so much market share, but yet the bottom 10% was still maybe had huge businesses, just tiny in comparison because people still use Bing, people still use Yahoo to this day. And so this AI race is kind of a question of maybe who's going to be the next Google. And it might not be Google is what your point is. Like it, it might, the AI, it could be chat GPT, they. Or it could be anthropic.
- [31:25]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. I mean, in the AI world, who's going to be the next big player? And it's probably going to be one of these really big companies we're already familiar with because they're betting billions on it. You know, it could be Apple, it could be Google, it could be Amazon, it could be one of the magnificent seven Tesla, you know, Elon Musk. They're all in a land race. Okay? They're all, they're all. And that's great for consumers because there's all sorts of innovation happening right now.
- [31:51]
Sean Cannell
This episode is brought to you by streamyard. Streamyard is our go to platform here at Think Media for live streaming to Facebook and YouTube and for recording our video podcast. It has an incredibly easy to use interface for built in branding, transitions, text, lower thirds and seamlessly bringing on guests. And they just added an awesome new feature called Local Recording. This allows you to take the quality to another level by separating out your audio and video from your guests, giving you more control over your content for later use. This feature is perfect for video and podcast creators. And so to get a special deal on streamyard right now and to see all the features that are included, just go to stream with think.com that is streamwiththink.com Interesting. Well, and kind of part two of this conversation, we're covering images, thumbnails, titles, descriptions. And so when it comes to creating graphics and in the context of this podcast, maybe YouTube thumbnails, maybe slides, if people are getting graphics for presentations. I know listeners and viewers know that I teach a lot from like PowerPoint decks or Keynote and AI can generate images. What are some of the tools and opportunities that creators can be looking at if they want to be generating graphics with AI and YouTube thumbnails?
- [33:20]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, there's a million little, little apps. ChatGPT has something built in called Dall E3 and I believe you need the paid version to do this and it can create pretty good images. The problem with ChatGPT stuff is it starts to look all alike and anytime it introduces text, it freaks out. It's not very good. That could be resolved in the future. But anybody who's created images and ChatGPT know how frustrating it is when you just try to get it to fix one thing and it does something completely different. So one little tip is you can export these files out of ChatGPT into Photoshop and this is where you can get creative. Photoshop has all these Cool technologies called Generative Fill. So you can quite literally highlight a section and then a prompt will pop up and you can tell it to fill, fix it, or to remove it or to replace it. And that's very, very basic stuff if you want to go really, really far. Mid Journey is the, is the tool that the pros are using right now. Mid Journey is kind of like Photoshop on steroids. It does photorealistic stuff that is so good looking that you cannot tell generally speaking that it is AI generated. Now in between all of this there is something called Flux and the latest model today is called Flux 1.1 Pro. And that's probably going to change in the future. But if you have a X Twitter account and you pay for your check mark like I do, this is free. And you can go in there and you can start asking it to generate images and they will look real. And it does a really good job with hands. A lot of these AI images screw up hands, you know, and it's like you can tell there's something wrong with the hands. This thing must have been trained on a library of photographs because it's ridiculously good. So there are also third party tools you can purchase. One of them is Magi M A G A I by my friend Dustin Stout. And what's cool about this tool is it works with almost all of the models. So you can pick your model, but Midjourney is the one that nobody works with because Mid Journey does not have an API. So moral of the story is the AI image thing is getting really, really, really good and you can't even tell the difference. And if you want to go advanced, you can do research on face swapping. So what that means is you can generate a person, for example, at a computer, but it doesn't look like you. And then there's face swapping software where you can train it on photographs of you and then essentially you can mold your face around that person and all of a sudden that person looks like you. It's pretty stellar stuff, man.
- [35:56]
Sean Cannell
I want to recommend in the show notes we had Matt Wolf on the podcast and he training his thumbnails are trained on him to do these AI images using Flux and some different things if you want to go a little bit deeper on that. But you just blew my mind because not only is AI becoming so great at generating images and maybe it's at a computer, it's with behind a camera or something, but then once you have that image you're like, well, it's not me, you know, it's it's just somebody else. And so if you then generate that image, face swap, now you're kind of combining tools and the connection point here becomes your creativity and your understanding of what's possible. And you were so showing me magi m a g a I yesterday, blown away with how lifelike and real these images are and what you were possible, what you were able to create. I do just want to clarify one question because I believe I pay, I think I pay for a level of X. Is Grok using Flux or is there a different place you go to use Grok?
- [36:59]
Michael Stelzner
Is the AI solution from X and images are powered by Flux. Does that make sense? So if you're using Grok on X and you ask it to generate an image, that image is actually being powered by Flux.
- [37:16]
Sean Cannell
I got you. Okay, so that's, that's a tool. And, and somebody might have be paying for Chad GPT and not realize that you could click Dolly and click anything.
- [37:26]
Michael Stelzner
You just ask it to create an image and it will do it.
- [37:28]
Sean Cannell
Yeah. So Dall and Dolly is D a l l dash E. Dolly 3 is out now. Okay, so that's some great tools. If you want to start doing images for all kinds of use cases, including thumbnails. Some of our students and community will still maybe have photos of themselves. They'll use something like Canva or Photoshop. And, and they're that, they're that prominent character so in the thumbnail. But the backgrounds, they're doing these different types of illustrative backgrounds, these different types of images that AI will generate to kind of reinforce, of course, making a highly clickable and interesting thumbnail. And then one other thing you have.
- [38:04]
Michael Stelzner
Real quick, if anybody has an Adobe license at all, you got to start messing around with what Adobe's got. They have something called Firefly, and Firefly is their AI generator. And it's not, it does allow you a lot of creative control. For example, you can, you can choose different kinds of preset scenes and you can, you can say that you want it to be at the golden hour. For example, if you want to create an image at the golden hour, which a lot of photographers understand is near sunset with those orange hues and tones. You can even upload an image and ask it to model it after that image. And then of course, Photoshop itself allows you to take any image that you generate out of any system, whether it's a photograph or AI, and selectively regenerate sections of it. So this is where you got to get a little creative, utilizing all These tools, but kind of, you know, there's no really bounds to what you can do. And the most beautiful thing about Photoshop is something called generative expand. So let's say that the image doesn't have enough room above the head, and you want to put text above it. You can quite literally just pull their crop tool and make it bigger. And then. And then a prompt will come up. If you just hit return, it will guess what it should be. But you can, you can say, you know, throw foliage above the head or whatever. It'll just create the image bigger. The last thing I want to mention is there's also upscaler tools. A lot of these AI images come out looking a little wonky where, like, the teeth don't look right or the fingers look wrong. And you can use upscalers. And Magi has an upscaler built into it. And what an upscaler will do is it will actually regenerate the image, double the resolution, but it will also enhance it as it goes through it, adding details and special effects.
- [39:42]
Sean Cannell
Man, that's some very nuanced tactical tips that we can apply. Okay, finally, titles and descriptions. Obviously, one of the most important things, in fact, what we're talking about here is the power of making better thumbnails. And if we're also then also writing better titles. You talked about perhaps descriptions earlier, as you Talked about using Aistudio Google to write a summary of a YouTube video that reinforces it, that gives you some good keyword rich text rich to help the video. But what are you using for titles and descriptions, and what are your additional tips there?
- [40:14]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so many of us are pretty good at creating titles. We feel like we've got it down. We've done it plenty. But you could quite literally take a title into ChatGPT or Claude and simply say, enhance this, and that's it. It'll come up with 10 different variations, and I would suggest doing it across both platforms. And then what you can do is you can kind of, kind of look at it and say, all right, which one do I like better? Which one do I not like? Or if you want to, you can say, enhance this so it's more relevant for this audience. And it will take that and we'll actually come up with variations of it. But let's say you've done it kind of backwards. Let's say you created the video. And, you know, Sean and a lot of other people often expound that it's really important to have the title in mind before you start the video. But let's just say that's not how it rolled with with you. You could quite literally take your closed caption file or, you know, the transcript or whatever you have access to, or even the summary. If you've already crafted the summary and you can ask it to create 10 headlines and it will go ahead and take that data and you could specifically say, create headlines for email, create headlines for podcasts, create headlines for YouTube. It's going to understand the nuances of each of those things. For example, it'll know for email that there's a limited amount of characters that show up in the email before it gets cut off. It'll know the same thing about YouTube. So you can quite literally just have it be your creative playground to actually create better headlines. And often the descriptions is something we're really weak at. A lot of times we have this template that we've been using forever. That's horrible, right? Well, if you want to create a description, we could use the example we talked about earlier with AI Studio to quite literally have it. Just listen to the darn thing and create a couple variations that are almost certainly going to be better than what you could come up with on your own.
- [41:57]
Sean Cannell
I just posted a video on 25 major YouTube updates creators can't ignore. And a great video with a YouTube employee that is a must watch which I'll link into the show notes to really get you ready for 2025. But what I did was as you described. I took that title and I put it into Claude and said enhance this YouTube title. And it gave me four options and the original title was 25 new YouTube updates every creator needs to know. And then it updated with 25 major YouTube updates creators can't ignore parentheses 2025 changes and then it explains why. Adds urgency, includes a year reference for freshness. Can't Ignore. Creates more FOMO than need to know. Really good. The second option, YouTube's 25 biggest changes that will impact your channel Personal with your channel will impact. I see what you're saying in terms of. It's like in terms of writing, it's.
- [42:56]
Michael Stelzner
Helping you learn why it's doing what it's doing, which is kind of cool. Now cl. Now chatgpt will not do that. Chatgpt will just give you a list. You know that, right?
- [43:04]
Sean Cannell
Yep. And then 25 critical YouTube changes creators are missing. Of course, then I have to use my intuition to filter. That is major to extreme. Or is it? Is it critical? Are they, you know, whatever. But nevertheless, YouTube just changed everything. 25 updates you must need to know In a way, YouTube didn't really just change everything, but if there can still be, we often there's a tension between, we call it.
- [43:29]
Michael Stelzner
That's where you would want to give it maybe more data, right? You only gave it the headline, right? So in an ideal world, if you give it the description or even the entire transcript, it's going to give you better results.
- [43:38]
Sean Cannell
And then you, and so your prompt then starts to include like, you know, okay, that's a little bit too much clickbait. Because really what these are about is maybe some practical updates. I still want as much urgency and clickability as possible.
- [43:51]
Michael Stelzner
It's only going to be as good as the context you provide it. So for example, if you said you were a world class YouTube title generator and I'm going to give you an entire transcript of this video and you don't even give it the title of the video if you did that. And then I want, I want you to do is come up with like seven and I want you to rank them. I mean, however you want, you know, and I want you to give me which one you think is going to have the greatest likelihood for this kind of audience. The more context you give it, the better it'll perform every single time.
- [44:20]
Sean Cannell
That's, that's genius. And so we talked about a lot of tools here and I've been implementing these in real time. So I want to encourage listeners that's, that's the next move is not to just, you know, consume information, but to not be afraid to punch fear in the face, punch getting uncomfortable in the face and dive into these tools, start using them, start posting some stuff in there. You mentioned it's only as good as the context you give it. But even without giving Claude context, these are some incredible. I'm actually in Slack right now talking to Steph and Kyle and they're like, these titles are strong.
- [44:57]
Michael Stelzner
That's crazy. And you didn't even really give it much direction at all.
- [45:00]
Sean Cannell
And I didn't give it much direction at all. So always getting a little bit better and knowing that we've actually kind of learned this in our community too. Like we mentioned in the last episode, Eric Rees, the author of the Lean Startup, said the only way to win is to learn faster than anybody else. We've understood like in our coaching program that actually coaching is more essential now than ever before or being a part of a community or being a part of a mastermind, or being in some kind of a membership because it's going so fast. And so being plugged into ongoing learning, knowledge transfer. Iron sharpens iron. Small tweaks lead to giant peaks. And you've done that today. I mean, it's been one of the richest episodes with so many tactical things that can help us Crush content in 2025. So I want you to shout out, of course, how people can stay connected with you. You're going deep in AI. And by the way, I mean, I just clicked subscribed on your new podcast and YouTube channel because I was like, I got to stay plugged in. I need to know this stuff. And there's really just no option. There's those who are going to embrace AI and there's those who are going to get left behind.
- [46:07]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, AI examiner iexaminer on YouTube is where you find it if you're a watcher of podcasts. If you are a Listener, it's called AI Explored. You can find it in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music and Amazon Music. And I'd love it if you let me know what you think about this. You can find, you can search my name and find me pretty much anywhere on the socials.
- [46:31]
Sean Cannell
Michael Selzner, thank you so much for adding massive value today. Think Media podcast, wherever you watch or listen, if you got value, if you could like rate, review or share. And if you're on YouTube, leave us a comment of any future questions that you would have as we bring on future guests and even Michael Stelzner back. My name is Sean Cannell, your guide to building a profitable YouTube channel. This is the Think Media podcast and we'll catch you in a future episode.