Speaker 0 00:00:00 That's where I thought the value was is, you know, pushing the pixels, making the, doing the edit. It took years to learn how to edit it took years. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> of, you know, I went to uni, I did all the things to get fast at it, and then the machines just took over.
Speaker 1 00:00:18 Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, where we help web designer and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. I know that sounds like a blah, blah, blah tagline, but it's actually the truth. And I would be happy to personally introduce you to dozens of agencies all over the world. We, we have done exactly that. So, uh, if you wanna do that, just email me,
[email protected] and I'll make an introduction now that's outta the way. This week we are joined by Max Jeff Cott, award-winning filmmaker, founder of Little Gorilla Video Productions, and of course, our very talented creative director here at Agency Mavericks. He's also brilliant and incredibly handsome, and I'm sure by now you can tell that he wrote this intro. In this episode, we're gonna talk about ai, uh, who needs to be concerned about the robot uprising and why Max is working so hard to have AI take his job. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us, max Jeff co. Welcome to the agency our podcast. Thank you very much,
Speaker 0 00:01:13 Troy. It's good to be here. Although I'm always here. Technically
Speaker 1 00:01:17 Are are you really?
Speaker 0 00:01:17 Here I'm just on, I, I I am. This, this, and this is the real Me too. This is the real, this is not Max Bot 2.0.
Speaker 1 00:01:22 <laugh>. Not Max. Not Max. Jeff Bot. Not yet. It's Max, Jeff. Now, why, um, you, for those people that Dunno, max produces our podcast and is our videographer and creative director and is across all the audio and video content that leaves the building. So if anything's broken or not working, it's his fault. Email him
[email protected]. Um, <laugh>. Now who are you and what are you doing here? I think I just answered that question, but, um,
Speaker 0 00:01:46 Well, pretty much, yeah. I mean, as you mentioned, I'm the creative director of, uh, agency Mavericks, and my mission is to create engaging content that attracts our ideal clients, nurtures them until they're ready to become a maverick, and ultimately a case study. That's my scorecard. So, oh, that's, so basically encompasses everything from helping freelancers to agency owners to help, you know, grow their agency and, uh, create quality training and everything else that, that encompasses, all the way through to turning around and saying how much they love us.
Speaker 1 00:02:13 So not just our marketing content, but all of our course curriculum content. Max is the man behind all of that, producing all of that and making it look and sound. Great. That's it. Um, we had a new Maverick join Maverick's Club recently, and on the onboarding call, he said, I've been listening to your podcast since February, and I finally, uh, listened to an episode and was prompted to go to the website, click the request a call button. We then got on a call with him and he joined Maverick's lab, uh, just from listening to our podcast for a few months. So I love that it's working. Um, so we are gonna talk about AI because, uh, well, you know, for a number of reasons. By the time this podcast comes out, when's this come out? Friday.
Speaker 0 00:02:56 Friday, not tomorrow, but a week.
Speaker 1 00:02:58 Oh, okay. So by the tomorrow. So by the time this podcast comes out, I will be 50. I will have turned 50. I turned 50 in a few days, and I posted on Facebook this morning, um, that as you do that, uh, I'm about as excited as I was when I discovered the internet. Right. On the old 7.7 K dial up modem, waiting for the first webpage I ever visited, by the way, was the Melrose Place episode Guide, <laugh>, because living in Australia, I wanted to find out where Melrose Place the, the, the, uh, drama show. They used to play that on a Tuesday night in, uh, Australia. They used to be Beverly Hills 9 0 2 1 oh. And then Melrose Place. And I wanted to find out where it was up to in the States so I could, uh, do the spoiler alert with my friends on a Tuesday night watching Melrose Place going, oh, I bet you what happens next week is blah, blah, blah. 'cause I'd been researching on the interwebs, and it was a very exciting time. When you heard the modem crackle like a fax machine, you'd go and make a cup of tea and wait for the page to refresh. Right.
Speaker 0 00:03:57 The the page would load. Yep.
Speaker 1 00:03:59 Or
Speaker 0 00:04:00 It would load one line.
Speaker 1 00:04:00 One line at a time. Exactly. It was hilarious. Um, I'm about as excited as those days I, the AI for I I, the other day we were in the studio and I had to just wield the chair back and take a breath and go, I'm overwhelmed with the opportunity of what and the possibilities of what is in front of us right now. I can't even get my head around this quick enough. Right. It is, yeah. Extremely exciting. You, on the other hand, you are terrified and cynical about this stuff, right?
Speaker 0 00:04:30 I'm trying not to be, I'm trying to embrace it. I know that there is a lot of opportunity. I think if you asked me five years ago if I was excited, I'd be like, Nope, the robots are gonna replace us all. And, and I'm outta the job, but mm-hmm. <affirmative> slowly. I mean, little things like even record editing. This podcast used to take me a couple hours mm-hmm. <affirmative> to do it well mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And there's a new plugin now that our editor Rob in the Philippines has just trialed. And in real time, it cuts the entire thing in about, in under three minutes. And that would've scared the hell out of me. Five years ago, I would've gone, well, that's, well because why at the time, you know, it's taken me a while to accept, but that's where I thought the value was, is, you know, pushing the pixels, making the, doing the edit.
Speaker 0 00:05:17 It took years to learn how to edit. It took years of mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, I went to uni, I did all the things to get fast at it, and then the machines just took over. And so, you know, five years ago, I would've thought, that's what I do. That's where my value is, and now I've been replaced. I'm useless, I'm terrified. Mm. But there's so much more, I've learned so much over the last five years just working among, you know, working with you and in agency mavericks that I've learnt to add value in other places and strategize and think bigger and not necessarily put myself in a box and, and be like, well, I did two hours work, so that's worth X amount of money and I can do it in half an hour now. So that makes me worth more. It's like, time is not money. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 00:06:04 <affirmative>. So I, I, we are gonna unpack AI tools and we're gonna talk about a bit of a workflow, and we're gonna list a whole bunch of AI tools that we're using. But before we do that, what, so, so what if, if, if, if the robots come in and say, okay, max, you know, 80% of what you were doing, editing videos, editing podcast, uh, cutting up videos into shorts, putting the subtitles and the emojis and all the sound effects and all that kind of stuff that was taking most of the week. Right? If that now is 80% of that's done, let's say you've got four days now where you don't have, you're down to a day, a week of like actually clicking buttons on the computer. What are you gonna do with the other four days? Well, the
Speaker 0 00:06:43 Fun parts, I'm gonna, the creative part is still in thinking about what's gonna happen and what to do and coming up with the story around it. I know that there's chat G P T and you can get writing done technically really fast, but there's still a lot more to it. And that's the fun part. The fun part is not adding subtitles manually or, you know, you know, creating a border that matches every other video, whatever it is. In fact, that became tedious and boring and and monotonous anyway. Oh
Speaker 1 00:07:13 Fuck.
Speaker 0 00:07:13 I couldn't, it drove me nuts. The worst. It was, it was why we hired Rob at the start.
Speaker 1 00:07:17 It's fun the first time, isn't it? Right? Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:07:19 It was like, let's hire another editor to do this. Yeah. So that I've got more time. We'd already kind of started down this road so that we could free up my time so that I had more time to think about the larger, the bigger picture mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and now we're trying to do that for Rob. Now we're going, Hey Rob, check out this AI tool, check out this AI tool. I wanna save you time. So you are not wasting your time creating subtitles and pushing pixels around so that then he can work on better projects, more so that they can be more thought behind it. Because even though, I mean, who knows, maybe the days are numbered, but think is the short answer.
Speaker 1 00:07:53 Totally. Um, so, uh, I was, uh, I, I got a couple of handful of private coaching clients, right? And so for that business, I go in and I just manually reconcile a few transactions in zero, you know, every month or whatever, and keep the accountant happy. It takes me a few minutes, right? And I was doing that this morning. I was like, yes, yes. That's a bank fee. Yes, that's a bank fee. Yes, they're bank fees. And I'm like, what is, like, if zero, don't figure this out, they're done. Right? But, and bookkeepers, you're gonna have to level up and change. You're gonna have to start to become financial strategists, otherwise you're done. I'll tell you why. What Xero should do is instead of, instead of me going in and saying, yes, that's a bank fee, it's Stripe. They charge me for the privilege of accepting money from my customers, assign it to the bank fee's expense account, and having, and it's, it, it kind of does that already.
Speaker 1 00:08:41 It's been doing that for years, right? It's like, this is a rule. We think this is a bank fee. Is that a bank fee? Click on, okay. And I go, yes. And I have to click on, okay, I have to sit there and manually look at each transaction and go Yes, yes, yes. And approve them. Right? What Xero should do when I log in is say, Hey Troy, we've reconciled the last 30 days of transactions for you. Take a look at these and tell us if we've got anything wrong. And I just look through them and go, oh, that's not right. That's not right. Because 90% of the time, based on historical data, it's gonna get it. Right? Right. So if you're a bookkeeper and you're getting paid to reconcile bank accounts in Xero, and that's all you're getting paid for, you're cooked, sorry, you've gotta level up, otherwise the robots are gonna replace you. It's only a matter of time before that happens. I'm sure there's other software that already does it, right? But Xero haven't got it dialed in yet. So I'm just warning you zero. You should really kind of figure that out.
Speaker 0 00:09:30 If baring.ai didn't pop up automatically
Speaker 1 00:09:33 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,
Speaker 0 00:09:35 Could you not use Barine to straightaway say, I'm doing these repeat tasks, create a little zap.
Speaker 1 00:09:41 You could, however, Barine I don't think has an integration with Xero. And I probably, and I can tell you probably because it's financial, right? So Barine, I don't think integrates with Xero. Bine AI is what we're talking about. Bine iss a Chrome extension that basically allows you to automate stuff between websites and also has chat G P T in the backend. Right? But if you, uh, if so, it's kind of like chat GT and Zapier on steroids, right? However, I don't think it would integrate with, um, with, uh, Xero, because it's financial data, right? So it probably doesn't integrate outta the box. I could be wrong. But, you know, just looking through its standard integrations that they mentioned on the website. H can't see, Stripe can't see zero. So it probably doesn't integrate with any financial for compliance reasons, right? So, but it's only a matter of time before you know, in fact, if you're a developer right now and you want to head start build this for zero and then sell it to them because they probably are, you know, a bit moving, a bit too slow.
Speaker 1 00:10:48 'cause they're a big dumb corporate company and they're probably gonna take 'em a couple years to figure it out. So if you can do that, then do that. Um, so, but my point is that anytime you find yourself clicking the same button on a keyboard or a mouse more than once or twice it, the robot should do this, right? Robots vacuum the house Now robots wash the dishes. They've been washing the dishes for 50 years, it's called a dishwasher. They've been washing our clothes, it's called a washing machine, right? They vacuum the house automatically. Robots are doing everything and should be doing more because, and my personal belief is that I'm trying to find a robot to do everything in my life so that I can spend more time being human. And what that means is doing the stuff that robots can't yet do, which is for me, is feel what's going on with your customers and your team and your colleagues.
Speaker 1 00:11:42 Feel what's going on in the marketplace. Kind of get your, get your sixth sense on a trained up in terms of like what your competitors are doing and where the market's going and where trends are heading. Do better marketing based on that. Talk to your customers, build better products based on that research. And that intel robots aren't there yet. Right? I know people are advocating that you can create and sell an online course with ai. That's fine. It's all very generic and you know, it's like vanilla ice cream, which if you want to do that, if you wanna gorge on vanilla ice cream, that's fantastic. But I think the opportunity for most of us is to have that extra time where we can sit with each other, talk and be more human, which is what you're alluding to, is to, you know, think about, be creative.
Speaker 1 00:12:28 You know, it's a great book called Creativity Inc. And one of the things that creatives ask for all the time is time. We need time to allow the creative process to happen. And most of us who work in agency land or in coaching or consulting up against deadlines, we don't have time to think about creative solutions. And I think the robots are actually gonna give us that time. Now, just while I'm here, just park this for a second too, because I think the problem or the challenge that most people are gonna have is they don't want more time. Because sometimes if you have time and you're not busy, uh, and you dunno what to do with yourself, your subconscious throws up, you know, one of the unresolved wounds from your junkyard of shit that's going on, and then you have to deal with that <laugh>. And that's a bit scary. So it's way easier, you're very personal to just stay busy. Right. Way easier to just keep tapping on the keyboard. Yeah. And, and, uh,
Speaker 0 00:13:19 I think that'd be a beautiful problem to have. What's
Speaker 1 00:13:21 That?
Speaker 0 00:13:22 Too much time. Too much time. I mean, not I'm unemployed, I've got too much time, but too much time to think it would be fantastic. Yeah. It's something you say a lot is, um, you know, you have your best ideas in the shower mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I feel like whenever I'm on holiday, I go away somewhere I come, I always come back with a whole new fresh perspective Yeah. On so many things. I'm just like, oh my God, I wanna implement this and we're wasting time doing this. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it's only because I've had, I've physically been away and I've mentally stepped away, and then suddenly it's like, oh, everything's so much clearer. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because I've had the time to actually filter out the day-to-day nonsense mm-hmm. <affirmative> and the noise mm-hmm. <affirmative> that I've sort of busy myself about my various concerns being like, oh, I've gotta tick off every Asana task before they go red.
Speaker 1 00:14:08 It's like, just so I think delete them. Um, right. I mean, and, and so, you know, uh, um, Airtable monday.com, click up the sauna's Dragon Its feet, I've gotta say, but I, but
Speaker 0 00:14:21 Wicked battle this out. I, well, Asana's
Speaker 1 00:14:22 Great ai, AI will already, you know, you basically will tell chat g p t what you're doing, and it'll be integrated. It already is integrating with click up and Airtable and whatever monday.com. It will just lay out a project plan for you. Right. Uh, and Asana are building this. They're just dragging their feet, like they drag their feet on everything. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation. Uh, like basic, you know, taxonomies, subtasks belonging to the same project the parent task belongs to. Hello. Anyway, um, AI will just go, oh, well. So if you are planning a wedding, here's your project plan. It's, and it's all assigned who's on your team. Uh, you'll tell Chachi PT who's on your team and what they do, and it will assign everything to the relevant team members and put in the deadlines and everything. That'll be done, that'll be done.
Speaker 1 00:15:04 So if you are spending your life in click up right now, or Asana writing out a list of things that already need to ha that need to happen, and then assigning that to people and putting dates in, right. You, you, you won't have a job. If that's your job, you won't have a job in three months time or six months time because AI will just do, it will automatically lay out a project plan for you with all the tasks and assign it to all the relevant team members, and will write an introduction to the project and share it with the relevant team members. And they'll integrate with Zoom to book a call and everyone's calendar, and you'll just turn up and go, oh, who booked this project kickoff call? Yes, it was bot that did it, and bot's recording it and is transcribing it. And we'll send us all a summary afterwards. And also we'll nudge you every morning on a text message at 9:07 AM and say, max, your number one task today is to do this, uh, for this project. And you'll be like, great. And then you just talk to your phone and it'll happen. And the robots will go and do the thing. Now, for every one of, I'm
Speaker 0 00:15:59 Looking forward to it being voice activated too, chat chip t you can, now there's a plugin or a Chrome extension, you hit space bar and just talk to it so you don't have to type prompts. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I'm looking forward to that being a thing. I want Jarvis, I want to be, I want it to be, uh, it'll have Jarvis's voice from my end man. And I will be like, Jarvis, what am I doing today? <laugh>? I say, good morning, sir. Today you have one task to take care of. Right. I'm like, great. Do it for me. Jarvis,
Speaker 1 00:16:23 Have you seen her?
Speaker 0 00:16:24 I know the film. I know the one you're referencing. I haven't actually seen it, but it's like he falls in love with the Joaquin Phoenix and he falls in love with his, like Siri,
Speaker 1 00:16:32 With his oss. Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his oss, which is played by Scarlet Johansson. Yeah. I'll take Scarlet Johansson. You can have Jarvis. Sure. Uh, I'll take oss. Um, so, so here's the thing. Everyone of my, everyone of our team listening to this, here's what I, the most valuable day that we will ever have in this company, is when everyone gets on Zoom and looks at each other and says, we have nothing to do. Let's just hang out and talk and think, because we're not doing anything because everything's done. Right.
Speaker 0 00:17:07 Sounds lovely.
Speaker 1 00:17:08 That's the challenge. There's, I've just laid down the gauntlet, right? There's the challenge for the whole team is everyone get on a Zoom call and go, I don't need to do any work. It's all done. The robots have done it all, everyone, everything's up to date now. Just wanna hang out with everyone and think and talk about how we can make the product better and how we can do better marketing. Right. There's the challenge. Um, we should probably do a deep, we should probably do a dive into the tools that we are using, right?
Speaker 0 00:17:34 Sure.
Speaker 1 00:17:34 We can. What are we currently, what are we, yeah. What are we currently playing with and, and, and using
Speaker 0 00:17:40 This week exactly. Yeah. This, this week, I feel like, I thought about this yesterday 'cause I thought, oh, I better put a little list together. And then I realized, I mean, my feed, my social media feed is just check out this tool five tools you didn't know existed, how to start a business. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, a faceless YouTube, everything just like, yep. Cool. It's just, I'm flooded with it and it's always something new. So this week, this is what we're using, but we'll use something different. And we're already, uh, I feel like we're, it's probably already outdated it as, as of this recording, but right now we're looking at, uh, is it Swell AI for writing the podcast? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, well, for all the producer tasks around the podcast, rather, so like the description mm-hmm. <affirmative> and the, and the emails and the show notes and chapter chapters and titles and things like that.
Speaker 0 00:18:26 We've got Hello Podium, which is another one we're testing. They're both writing tools, both for the podcast that we're kind of playing those off each other at the moment to see which one is better. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> Auto Pod. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> FM is the plugin that I mentioned earlier. That's a premier pro plugin that just takes your video, audio or video. It does just both. And it just edits it in front of you in seconds. You might've seen clips on it, of, of it online, but it, it works. It's insane. An hour long podcast takes about two minutes and 50 seconds. It takes out all of the dead air and then it cuts back and forth between the two speakers based on the wave forms, based on whoever's speaking. So it's just, that's insane. So if you use Premier Pro, check that out. If you don't use editing software, check out d script.com.
Speaker 0 00:19:11 That's just an online version of pretty much the same exact thing. It also spits out highlight videos and all these other things. Uh, then there's, we're looking at SS e m Rush, which is for like ss e o keywords and analysis, but also managing all of the social media and content marketing. So that's probably gonna be doing a hell of a lot for the next few weeks until something takes all of these and puts it into one. Uh, then there's Bine ai, which you mentioned before. We're using that mm-hmm. <affirmative> at the, at this point, I'm only using that for just creating good YouTube chapters, but it'll take a video. Mm-hmm. It'll pop up. You can hit, I think it's just command or option B and Baine Pops up goes, oh, you're watching a YouTube video, what do you wanna do? You go gimme chapters.
Speaker 0 00:19:50 You just click it once and it writes, it breaks it up into too many chapters, to be honest. It gives you a chapter for every few seconds. You, you, I, I haven't figured out why it does that. You can probably tweak that, but I just, you know, use the best ones. Job done takes about one minute and then recast studio for automatically turning your podcast episodes into short clips and writing show notes and blog posts and social media. So some of these overlap and we're basically just working on a, uh, the best workflow for Rob to take care of. Rob is our editor in the Philippines to say, Hey dude, here's our latest podcast. Go ahead and use Auto Pod to edit it and then use one of these, uh, many <laugh> AI tools to do mm-hmm. All the other things, because I don't want him wasting his time creating subtitles anymore.
Speaker 0 00:20:34 Or, you know, changing the title at the top of a thing, or changing the format to make it, oh, this one looks good on a, as a story or a reel. And this one will look better on 16 by nine on LinkedIn. And this one is for, it's like, that's just a waste of time now. It's no longer, it's not where the value is anymore. And so, yeah, those are the ones we're using that I've just got kind of ready. There's probably 10 more that you can think of that you've discovered this morning that I'm sure <laugh> I'm sure share. Well,
Speaker 1 00:21:02 There's a, there's a couple. There's, um, uh, there's, and it escapes me. I'm gonna see if I can, uh, write Sonic. So w write sonic.com, w r i t e as in write with your hand. Write sonic.com is an AI article writer powered by G P T for, um, what I really like about Ride Sonic is Brian Dean at Backlinko kind of talked about this skyscraper technique, right? Where you find content that's already performing really well and you just build on top of it. And so one of the things, uh, uh, that I've been, which is great, uh, however it takes time to then put your own opinion into that piece of content, right? So, hey, here's what everyone's saying. Here are the top. So for example, you put in a keyword, find the top five blog posts and the top five YouTube videos, kind of collate that data and then kind of work out what everyone's saying.
Speaker 1 00:21:57 I mean, these are the top five pieces of content that rank for that keyword. So they must be popular and they must be helpful. Take a summary of that, build on top of it, add your own opinion to it. So he, one of the workflows that we are doing now is we are taking that idea. I'll make a video about it because I can generally, off the top of my head, I can add my own spin to this stuff just because I've been doing this a long time and I have that experience, that video. Then usually, uh, we use Chat BT to help us write it into a, a video script, which might take, you know, 15, 20 minutes to kind of come up with a script that we put on the teleprompter for making our YouTube videos. Uh, and that's probably the most time consuming part of writing it, right?
Speaker 1 00:22:39 So now we have a Google Doc, which is a transcript, uh, of a video that we shoot based on my opinion around a particular topic. So let's say for example, proposals, writing proposals for website projects. I have a particular opinion about this. I would take the top five blog posts, top five videos, summarize them with chat, G P T, which barine could do really easily, uh, and then kind of give it my own, um, sort of slant, right? Make a video then in write sonic.com. You put in the keyword that you wanna rank for, you list the top five URLs that come up in Google, right? You then upload your own Google Doc as a P D F, which is your opinion as a reference doc. And Write Sonic will go and write you a customized blog post or whatever you want, email, whatever, based on the summarizing the top five blog posts and adding your reference document as your opinion, right?
Speaker 1 00:23:36 It's amazing. And the opportunity I think now is that if you wanna own a keyword or a topic cluster, the, there, there is no limit to the amount of content that you can produce. There is no excuse to not be producing multiple pieces of content. You know, Gary V was talking about this in 2019, 2020, his whole, you know, the content strategy where you take one present, one keynote presentation and cut it up into 30 pieces of content, right? Hormo, he's been talking about this for a while and everyone's been trying to copy him and up until now trying to execute that strategy would send a small business broke because you like Gary V's. Got 15 people on his social media team, right? Well, I reckon you can do it with two or three people now because all the production of the content, the video editing, the audio, editing the writing, uh, you know, it's, it's, we're not that far away from infographics being, you know, as, as soon as they can train AI to actually design text, you know, mid journeys kind of getting close.
Speaker 1 00:24:40 It's trying to figure out how to write letters. Um, as soon as we can get, and it may already exist, I dunno. If it does someone please let us know. Email me troy agency mavericks.com, I'm up for it. Uh, <laugh> soon as we can get AI to produce infographics and models, right? You know, the models that everyone uses, the three circle Venn diagram, the triangle, that kinda stuff. Just describe what you want and have AI design all that stuff. Then you've got graphics for social media, you've got quote cards, you've got short form videos, you've got short form audiograms of audio, you've got blog posts, you've got emails, you've got social posts. There is no excuse to not be surrounding your audience and your niche and your prospects with your content, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Now the caveat is this, and this is why I think embracing AI is so important. If you are just churning out what everyone else is saying, you're just adding to the white noise and you're not gonna cut through. And that's why I think it's really important more now than ever is to have an opinion about what it is your topic is and have conviction in what it is. Your opinion is based on your experience. And if you don't have enough experience, go and get it. That's what I
Speaker 0 00:25:51 Was gonna say is you've mentioned that you've got, you've been doing this a long time, so you can put your own spin on it. That's the one thing. It's like, okay, if we're all just recycling the same content and adding to the noise, how do you go about putting your own spin on it?
Speaker 1 00:26:07 Well, if you, so, you know, if I, if so, let's say, um, I was at a conference once I got off a plane once I flying into a conference in Sydney and I was walking through the airport with this guy and he, he just happened to realize we're at the same conference, right? He's like 24, this guy, you know, being, I mean, I know, I mean this respectfully, right? But he's like, oh yeah. He basically was like, I'm here because I wanna learn how to do marketing 'cause I'm gonna be a business coach. I'm like, cool. And so he'd been through high school, been through university, studied engineering or something at university, came out of university, didn't really know what he wanted to do, and then he was going to, he I'm gonna be a business coach. I'm like, mate, he never had a job.
Speaker 1 00:26:43 He'd never had a job. Right? Anyway, if you need to skill up on something, if you haven't, if you have an idea, if you, so if you want to be a consultant, okay, for example, if you want to, this is very meta. I think there's a huge opportunity right now, and I'm just gonna give this to everyone. 'cause again, I'm close to doing this myself. I probably won't 'cause I won't have time. But you know, 'cause I'm doing other things. I'm playing guitar and whatever. Um, I think there's a great opportunity if you want to help companies understand how to use ai. I think the AI agency is, I mean, it's already a thing. People are already starting AI agencies and I think that's the play for the next three to five years is helping medium-sized organizations understand how to use ai, right? Because they don't have time to figure it out.
Speaker 1 00:27:33 It's not that they don't have the resources or the money, they don't have time to figure it out, which is ironic. 'cause if they just spend some time figuring it out, it would free up so much of their time, right? But also a lot of these companies are kind of based on productivity and they just measure output from their, from their staff. So they actually don't want AI to speed up workflows 'cause they're just gonna make their staff busier. Everyone's gonna burn out anyway, that's a whole other conversation. So if you have a theory, you're like, well, I think I can help companies use, you know, uh, munch or Opus clip or one of these video short AI producer things that take a long video clip and cut it up into a bunch of viral clips. I think I can help them do that. And I think there's a business case in it, and you don't have the proof, then you need to go and find a client to test it on.
Speaker 1 00:28:18 And you either do that for free or you do it at cost to get that experience. Which is how I started out, I started coaching web design freelancers for free over Skype until I got enough confidence to the point, and I actually had enough positive feedback and success stories from the people that I was working with that I was like, I'm gonna turn this into a, a, a membership a business. And I did in 2013. So that's what I mean. Like, if you don't have the proof, go, go and get it and then form an opinion based on data. Don't just read something on a website or listen to a podcast and all of a sudden have an opinion because you, you come unstuck. Yeah. Right. So we had, um, Manishh on the podcast last week, I think it was, uh, who's the founder and c e o of E two M Solutions who are our exclusive podcast sponsor.
Speaker 1 00:29:04 We love them. Thank you very much for helping us make this podcast possible. Manishh, it's got 180 staff and, uh, he, I dunno whether he mentioned it on the podcast or in the green room, uh, pre-recording, but he mentioned that they are, you know, very quickly having to skill up with divvy ai. This is not a plug for elegant themes, by the way or divvy. Uh, but they divvy have launched, uh, an AI integration into their platform. So you can auto generate content with one click, you can generate images automatically. They're basically helping, you know, using AI to help you build websites faster and more efficiently using the divvy page builder. Right? Now, full transparency, I'm not a divvy user. I've never used Divvy come from an Elementor background. I know Elementor also rolling out some AI stuff. Uh, but this is touching every part of our workflow, and I haven't actually had this conversation with Manish, but I will at some point we're getting back on the podcast, is how does he take 180 team members and make them more efficient with AI and manage their anxiety around, well, you know, what should we do now, boss that we've got AI to make us more effective.
Speaker 1 00:30:15 I mean, a couple of things. It just makes them more profitable because they can deliver things faster or it allows them to create better solutions for their clients and, and be more strategic with the services that they're providing because the robots are doing the manual clicking of the buttons, right? Um, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Um, they're building a lot of websites for our clients. They are our preferred white label partner. So they do WordPress development, they do, uh, ss e o uh, they do some design, I think they do copywriting as well. I'm sure their copywriters are already using AI to speed up their workflow. By the way, if you need extra capacity on the team you've got work on and you can't get to it and you need someone to help you get in contact with E two M, we'll leave a link in the show notes.
Speaker 1 00:30:59 There is a discount for the first month, I think for anyone who joins from the agency Mavericks community. So check out e two m solutions.com. But the next time I have Manish on, I'm definitely gonna ask him how he's managing his workforce of 180 to bring AI into their workflow and what he expects of his workforce. Now that AI are gonna be able to do a lot of the, you know, repetitive kind of, um, you know, clicking of the buttons and, and, and that kind of manual work. A couple of other tools that I've been using, copy.ai, uh, is really good for writing all sorts of different content. Uh, the podium link, I think you mentioned it's podium page. I think the lander is hello podium page. It's a weird domain, but that's, you basically chuck in an audio file and it spits it out into a, a copy pack for you.
Speaker 1 00:31:48 Um, it's a copywriter, um, and, uh, recast studio, I think you mentioned, I was on a call with, uh, the founder of Recast Studio the other day. Uh, he's, they're doing some amazing work and I'm really excited to see where they go. Uh, and I will say that it's very easy to get stuck in the AI rabbit hole. So for example, cutting up long form videos into short form, there are dozens of those platforms that will do it for you. I think the idea is to find one and then just stick to it and make it part of your workflow. Yeah. Rather than, uh, chasing shiny widgets all over the place, which I also think is gonna be a big challenge with ai. It's gonna be very distracting for most of us. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 0 00:32:31 So that's the other side of that is I'm excited to see what humans do more of in time. I was doom scrolling the other night and I saw some clip <laugh>. I saw some video that was like talking about how when before cameras were invented, the best painters and artists, 17th century or something, um, I don't know, wildly inaccurate possibly, but the, the best painters were, it was all about photo realism. The best painters would try to do photo accurate, hyper-realistic pictures, but it's not like the camera, the invention of the camera put painters outta business. They changed what they started doing. All of a sudden they were doing abstract art and all these other new artists came from it because they had to go in a different direction. They, the machine had come, the robots had arrived and they had to mm-hmm. <affirmative> pivot and do something else that was more interesting.
Speaker 0 00:33:20 And we got all these new forms of art that, that ai or wasn't ai, but what cameras couldn't do, technology couldn't do it yet. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So I'm keen to see, I'm keen to see where, what we do next. 'cause I, you can't, it's not obvious. You can't foresee it. And I'm, I'm still talking about the day-to-day tasks and soon they'll be all done and all the, all every step of production will be done, but there'll be something new. There'll be something new that will be way more valuable. And by knowing how everything else is done and having that under your belt and having the experience, you'll have more room to go, well, what if we use this to do this? Um mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. But I, I think that's a really interesting future ahead of us in terms of, or they'll just, you know, enslave humanity and, and kill everybody. That's, that's, that's the other possibility that, that everyone just thinks straight away. They go, oh my God, you can write my emails. We're all gonna die a Skynet <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:34:11 Yeah, exactly. If you're, if you're an ea right? And you are spending your time organizing someone's calendar and, and, and, you know, checking their emails for them, you are done. Like, if that's like motion dot use motion.com right? Automatically build your schedule. Um, there's, there's a, there's what you, in fact, what you should be doing is you should be replacing yourself with AI and then going to your boss and offering either say to your boss, Hey, listen, I've just freed up three days a week because I'm using these AI tools. How can I be more useful to you? Right. Or one of my, you know, when Eva started with us as my ea she was organizing my calendar on my email, and within a couple of weeks I realized that, that she was, you know, was way below her pay scale. And she was sitting in on meetings and then she was coming to me with ideas and advice on strategy based on what she was hearing in the meetings, right?
Speaker 1 00:34:57 So if you are just organizing someone's calendar and email AI has already replaced you, uh, your boss just hasn't found it yet, you should find it. Replace yourself, go to your boss and go, Hey, listen, I've just freed up three days a week. I'm using AI to deal with this stuff now how can I be more helpful to you? What else can I do to help you? Right? Ah, you can help prepare my slides. Great. There's AI that will do that as well, right? So, you know, you've, you've gotta understand, don't be afraid of ai. Understand how it can help you be more efficient and free up your time so that you can spend more time thinking about how you can be more valuable to whoever you are adding value to. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:35:31 Yep.
Speaker 1 00:35:32 I appreciate you coming on dude, and, uh, and, and talking bots and talking ai and look forward to spending more time hanging on the stage here, sitting on the couch talking with you when neither of us need to click buttons on the keyboard. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:35:45 Sounds good. Looking forward to it. Awesome. Thanks for having
Speaker 1 00:35:47 Me, man. No worries, dude. Thanks for being a part of it.
Speaker 1 00:35:50 Thanks for listening to the agency, our podcast, and a massive thanks to Max. I'm so glad we've got to catch up. We're gonna do it again for sure. I'm looking forward to jumping back into the studio with you to create more epic content and of course, heading over to the States for Mav Con in October, which is gonna be awesome. We're gonna spend a few days in Manhattan, uh, which we'll be very excited about. Uh, if you don't, if you don't really have tickets, there are a handful of tickets left for Mav Con. It is in Fairfax, Virginia, in the middle of October, three days, come and hang out with other agency owners. Uh, tickets are stupid cheap. And in the following week we are going to the high level summit in Texas, which I'm speaking at, and I'm gonna play a song ad. So there you go. Okay, folks that I mentioned, max was handsome, don't forget to subscribe and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. Click the thumb that points up and, uh, let us know what you want to hear next on the podcast. All right. I'm Troy Dean. We're all gonna die, so let's enjoy the ride.
