SHOW TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is automatically generated by Descript.  Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

[00:00:00] Jeff Sieh: Hello folks. Welcome to Creator News Live. I’m Jeff c and you’re not.

[00:00:04] Conor Brown: And I am Connor Brown, and this is the show that keeps you up to date on what’s

happening in the world of social media and more.

[00:00:10] Jeff Sieh: Have you ever shi stared at a mountain of content tasks and wondered how on Earth AI could lend a hand? Or maybe you’re curious about wiring your favorite tools together so a podcast practically builds itself? Or maybe you’d love to talk an idea out loud and see usable code appear on screen moments later.

If any of that sounds familiar, you are in for a treat. ’cause today we’re excited to have Ian Anderson Gray back

on the show. He’s an AI consultant who turns complex text. Tech into clear, practical workflows for creators and teams alike. Ian’s gonna unpack voice

powered prompting, some automations and his go-to notebook tricks that keep inspiration flowing. So sit back, clear your schedule, and clear your mind, and get ready for this week’s episode of Creator News Live. Ian, how are you doing today, my friend?

[00:01:00] Ian Anderson Gray: I am doing well. I’m, I’m staying cool

for the time being. It’s really hot. we don’t Have air conditioning, but other than that, it’s, it’s all going well. I just,

I hope, hopefully my brain will keep working for the next 55 minutes.

[00:01:13] Jeff Sieh: That’s right. Well, I hope so too. That would be

[00:01:15] Conor Brown: That’s all we ask. Just 55 minutes and then, and then you’re on your time and, and

you’re on your own

basically. We always love having our buddy Ian Anderson Gray on the show. And if you don’t know who Ian is, you should. Ian is an AI consultant, trainer, speaker, and creative tech specialists. He helps entrepreneurs, subject matter

experts and corporate teams

adopt transformative human centered AI with clarity and

confidence. He lives near Manchester in the United

Kingdom,

and actually he’s a trained as a professional classical singer at the Royal Northern College of Music. Ian, I have to ask Manchester Music. Did you get Oasis tickets?

[00:01:57] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah, I, I’m sorry to say I didn’t, ’cause they cost like ridiculous amounts of

money, but I could probably have

heard them as how loudly they were playing. ’cause it’s, it’s not too far away from us where, where they were playing. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a musicy place is Manchester

[00:02:13] Jeff Sieh: Well, Ian, you know, you, we welcome you to the show, but this is the first time I’ve actually created for you. A theme song. ’cause we’ve been doing these theme songs lately.

So here is yours. Here we go.

That’s right folks. It’s Ian Anderson Gray. so, uh, that was made with ai if

you haven’t, uh,

figured that out yet, but that’s a lot of fun. but I wanna do a shout out before we jump right into the show to our friends over at Ecamm. You can find out more about them at Ecamm dot com slash jeff. You can save 15% by using code Jeff 15 on your first purchase.

And that AI

stuff that we’ve been talking about for doing a live show presentations, we’re actually gonna be talking about that at Creator camp. And I will be one of the speakers coming up. I think they only have a couple of tickets left, so make sure you go to Ecamm dot com, check out Creator Camp because that is coming up shortly. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. And they even announced this week, uh uh, Connor and I were talking about before the show Eca m creator camp in the uk. so

Ian, that is gonna be in your neck of the woods, so that’s pretty

awesome,

[00:03:23] Ian Anderson Gray: know, I’m very excited about that. Yeah. I’m, I, for some reason they’ve involved me,

[00:03:29] Jeff Sieh: Well

[00:03:29] Ian Anderson Gray: I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be there. So if you’re in the UK or, or well anywhere,

come to the UK next year. It’s gonna be fun.

[00:03:36] Jeff Sieh: I really wanna hope, I hope I get to, to come. But anyway, thank you to Ecamm for sponsoring the show. We’re gonna jump right into, kind of your e ai journey ’cause you’ve got some pretty cool stuff going on, Ian, and I think a lot of people in our audience is gonna, are

gonna really, kind of resonate with this and maybe even get some great ideas for their own business.

So

your background is really unique. So you’re trained as a

professional classical singer at the Royal Northern College of Music, I believe. And.

Now you’re an AI consultant and creative tech specialist helping people use AI for human centered creativity. So how did that journey happen? So is there any parallels between, you know, performing

music and the work you do with AI and creativity?

stuff today?

[00:04:19] Ian Anderson Gray: I, yeah, I think, I think that’s a great question. ’cause like it’s something I, I used to struggle with a little bit because.

I, I felt like I, I, I’d spent all this time training to be, a musician, a singer. I, I performed all, all

over the UK as a soloist, and then I, I became a marketing consultant and then live video and then speaking on stage, and then ai.

And I kind of

thought, what am I doing

with my life? but it’s, it’s, now I look back and it just, it seems like this

really amazing progression, because all of it is to do with creativity. I’ve always loved creativity.

It’s always been

kind of part of who I am,

really. But, but other things I love

problem solving.

And I do love technical stuff as well. I’ve always been a bit of a geek. I,

You know, into computers from an early age and live video. Did that, it kind of combined performance, teaching and technology, but particularly with ai, I, I think this is even more transformative, the way it can impact people and help people.

And that is a massive thing for me, how it’s changed me, changed my life to for the better. And there’s a lot, there’s a lot of kind of scary stuff that people talk about with ai, but the positive impact it can have on us is one of the main reasons why I, I do it and the creativity side of things. So yeah, it’s, it’s like, you know, when you were a kid and you, you had all that Lego and you, you, you kind of played around all the, all of this stuff, but it didn’t, yes, it was fun, but it didn’t necessarily make your life better in a kind of, I.

Productivity way or, or whatever. Whereas with the Lego we’ve got now with ai, it can, and

it can make a massive difference and you can, you can grow your business, you can become a better person. I like, my memory has improved, well, maybe my memory hasn’t improved, but with AI I can, I can make it appear that my memory is better, if you know what I mean.

[00:06:18] Jeff Sieh: right. So this is a follow up really quick because, you’re a musician, right? Like very creative that, you know, and a lot of musicians are upset

a little bit with

the way, you know, the ai Like for example, your little theme song I made at the very beginning was made with ai. A lot of musicians would get, are upset that

we’re able to do that kind of thing now.

So what are your thoughts as a musician, as a creative person? In that kind of realm of, you know, these tools make it really easy to create like high quality video and audio content.

[00:06:53] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah. I think, I think The, the, the word I’d use is I have great empathy for the concerns that people have. You know, actually one of our, we, we were doing a workshop, Jeff, in, in for EA last year, and, and we were talking about you can have AI voiceovers, AI voices

and there was a voiceover artist

that he was like, really concerned about this.

But I think

with, with AI music, I

think this can actually help us

to be more creative for some stuff, yes, it will replace. So maybe

if, if you are producing a lot of kinda background music for certain kinds of, uh,

creative output, then maybe AI is gonna. Replace that But for those of us who are really wanting to be more creative, AI can help in the

process.

It doesn’t have to replace the whole thing. And, and interestingly, this is the other cool thing. Like I met my wife at the Royal, Northern Ecology Music as well. She’s a musician. She’s actually teaching there. She’s a, on the academic staff and they’re looking at how they can use ai, not to replace the, the, the student’s creativity, but actually to help them on their journey to be, help them to become more creative.

And that’s my big thing. You can use AI to pump out loads of content, whether it’s music or, or visual stuff, but you, or you can use it to help you to become more creative. And I know that’s one thing that you, you did, you talked about a lot in your talk at Social Media Marketing World, Jeff, that you had all of these ideas in your head of how you wanted to, I think it was with that,

like there was like a cartoon of

you to describe a situation, a story, and now you can do that. That’s actually, you could argue, okay, that’s replacing certain aspects of creativity, but it’s actually allowing you to be more creative. And that’s the angle that I want to kind of focus on really.

[00:08:43] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, that’s great. And, and that’s kind of where I, I come from as well. So thanks

for that. That’s all. I think it’s gonna be, I mean, when Canva came out. Designers were upset about Canva. you know, it’s, it’s gone. You know, they thought

that moving from radio to TV that our minds would melt. but it, I guess that kind of has happened.

But other than

[00:08:59] Conor Brown: Yeah,

that kind of happened just a little bit. But I mean, I

think we’re all creators and we just wanna be more, creative and

create more, and I think AI can, can help with that. Ian, you’ve been on the show,a number of

times. You’ve talked about AI on the

show. We’ve talked about social media, content creation on the show.

You know, you are known as, as somebody who has helped entrepreneurs with live video and with social media in the past, confident Live Academy, seriously,

social blog, all that stuff. You mentioned it briefly about how you started to talk about AI more and incorporated into your teachings and, and

your speeches and, and those sorts of things.

But what inspired the pivot? Like, like the full, let’s turn, let’s go all in on ai. Did you have an aha moment,where you decided, you know what, this is it, this is gonna be a game changer for my business.

[00:09:51] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah. Well, it’s funny, the, the, the pivot to ai I

was kind of reluctant to do, and it’s probably the longest pivot I’ve ever done because I

was like, I was invested in the, whole live

video world and what I was doing and, and helping people with

that. the, the, the cool thing, the funny thing was that I

was, I was, I’ve been doing

AI for, for years in my own business and it’s helped me

in in so many ways to be more

productive, to be more efficient, to build systems. And AI was AI tools like say two, two to three years ago. they they were emerging, they were becoming better.

But really in the last two

years they’ve, they’ve just blown up and I’ve built all these

tools in my business. I didn’t realize how.

Cool they were, or how useful they would be to other people. I just kind of, I was just getting on with it.

And so it wasn’t really until I started talking to other people, started working with more businesses and pe businesses were asking me for training and uh, for help building things. And that, that was really the aha moment. It was when I was, when people said, oh, how did you do that? Like, I, I need that in my business.

And it was, it was, it was that. And since then I’ve, I’ve been working, this is, this is the cool thing ’cause I love to work with loads of different types of businesses. you know, I’ve been working with environmental consultants, like companies in the fashion industry,

uh, insurance agents and even a, a podcast, about decluttering.

And that’s just been so fun. So I, it it’s, it’s maybe not one aha moment, but yeah. Over a period of time. And, uh, yeah, that’s, that’s where I am, that’s where I’ve got to today.

[00:11:38] Jeff Sieh: Very cool. One of the, so I wanted to bring up some comments from our friends,you know, Gary Stockton’s in here as well. Thank you guys for all your comments and, and voting on the favorite logo. but Gary says,he was talking about his guitar man. He’s got a assigned by all four members of the Smiths.

He saw them, in la and so

very, very cool. And Dustin from, one of our favorite AI tools is from Magi, says he gave that same Canva analogy on a podcast recently. And Rich with the mic drop says, AI can’t replace taste. Creativity will always be better. I totally agree. Yes. one of the things, Ian, that I wanted to before we moved on kind of to the next section is I wanted to talk about, you know, you also host a podcast that helps entrepreneurs that have ad hd

and you’ve explored on that show how AI can assist with those challenges.

So, how has AI kind of personally helped you stay organized

and amidst all these projects? Because you mentioned just a second ago all the different things you have laid out in front of you that you’re helping other, other clients with ai. So do you use those tools kind of like an extra brain to offload, or do you, how do you manage all that with these new, AI tools that you have?

[00:12:49] Ian Anderson Gray: Oh yeah.

Yes. Like big, big time. I mean, I use a variety of different tools. I mean, sometimes it is just chat, GBT, just to help me. I know that

I’ve got a lot of tasks

for a, a particular client, so I will

use chat GBT for that. Particularly the, the projects part of the, the plus

version or the paid, paid versions of chat.

G BT is great or a notebook or lamb or,

I’ve built my own systems to

help me with those things or, or brainstorming ideas, Going in the car and and talking with

chat GBT trying to kind of get what’s in my head all cluttered

up, which is definitely an A DHD thing. And

just getting it in a, I suppose, more cohesive, list of things.

getting outta my own head.

like I think we’ve all, I think we, you’ve

talked about this on the show before, like imposter syndrome, like there’s those

negative thoughts and actually you can just talk it through and, and get, get out of your own head, get focus on, um, focus on who you’re trying to help really.

So, yeah, it’s, it’s just been so, so good for that And other things that I. A lot of people probably hate like, proposals, terms and

conditions, personal things. Like I got a, I got a fine from a car park because I, I, put my, my wife’s, car registration instead of my own, and I managed to get it. the fee reduced from 150 pounds to 20 pounds, things like that.

it, it’s,

it’s just been an ama amazing thing to have, um, what some people call the A DHD tax, which is when you forget things or when you lose

track of things, and then you, then you kind of, you get taxed because of that.

There’s kind of fallback. But using all these tools helps you to be smart and efficient and to really focus on what I do and what I think humans do best.

And that is focus on their creativity. So that’s why I’m using all these tools.

[00:14:40] Jeff Sieh: I actually used, we just got a new car ’cause we had one that was in a wreck and I used Jet GBT to help me negotiate, so it was really awesome. so I, I was like, that’s really cool. So cool stuff.

[00:14:50] Conor Brown: I think it helps too with, with when you’re overwhelmed too by something,

right? Like in the creative process and stuff. I think I shared this maybe last week or the week before. viewers and listeners know, I’m on a 60 day journey. I’m posting one piece of short form content every day for the next 60 days.

And as I’m doing it, I have all these ideas in my head and I wanna convey, you know, a, a a a script in a short amount of time. Sometimes I don’t know where to start. Sometimes I don’t know how to, how to do that. So I’ll just talk right into chat. GPT I’ll be like,

here’s what I need to hit. How should I structure it?

It’ll give me a short little script. It’s in my voice ’cause I’m already talking to

it. And it’s just one thing where instead of being overwhelmed, you can actively start.

to talk it out and it can help you with that and calm you down and, and give you a roadmap with that. And Ian, you’ve talked so much about.

You know, automating the day to day. In, in a recent post you said you’re always building, tweaking and optimizing a

lot of your AI systems for your business and your clients. For those new to the AI workflow world, you

know, maybe they’re just familiar with AI in, they ask chat GPTA question and they get it back.

Right. Can you kind of explain what an AI driven workflow or system is, and do you have any examples of, of how you use it for concentration or, or in your business?

[00:16:13] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah, there’s a lot of jargon out there. I mean, it’s, it’s with AI and there’s a lot of people out there that

love to use these jargon words

’cause it makes them look kind of clever. so like agen

AI

and all this kinda stuff. But basically a

workflow is,

it’s just it’s, if you’ve ever used if

this, then that or Zapier, it’s it’s just a, a series of steps.

And if it’s an AI

workflow, it uses ai. I mean, it’s that, it’s kind of that

simple. So like you could, like back in the day, you could say, if somebody

posts something on Facebook,

you could get your light bulb to switch on or something. That’s probably not very helpful. But you could send an email or something

like that. but with, workflows, you could do.

you Can put, for example, like chat GPT in the middle, for example. You could monitor your favorite YouTube channels and then use AI to summarize the videos. but it could fetch the transcript or, or look at the, look at the what’s what they’re about, and then send you a daily email on that.

Or you could, monitor the temperature in your home office and send you an email that says you might wanna drink a bit more water or put the

fan on, or something like that. you know, so it, it’s, but it’s, it can be a lot more complicated and, and a lot more steps and some of the workflows that I’ve created, like our 20, 30 steps, because you can do some really amazing stuff.

You can kind of do looping. for example, if, if there were lots of YouTube videos or lots of blog posts that you want to look at, you can say, summarize them all or summarize lots of emails and using AI in, in the process. And some of this can be, so, I, I used a jargon phrase before called Agentic ai. And Agen AI basically is when you go into chat GBT and you ask it the question, it will just give you a response, based on what you’ve asked it.

But Agen ai, makes it feel a little bit more human like. It will make a decision. So you give it some information and then it will make a decision whether to, look at your Google Calendar or your email or your notion, and it will, it’s, it’s a little bit more, I suppose, autonomous. So you can do some really cool things like, uh, build workflows, which will, allow you to say, ask a question, say like, Hey, um, what, what am I doing tomorrow?

And with Agen ai, it can look at that and think, oh, okay. It looks like we need to, first of all, like check his calendar. oh, there’s, he’s meeting Jeff tomorrow. Who’s Jeff? oh. We better check. His, contacts and it will check. Oh, Jeff. Oh, okay. Jeff. Jeff. C he’s, he’s in Texas. And so there’s some really cool things that we can do with Agen ai, and that’s one thing I’m really excited about.

We’re only kind of,

yeah. Dipping into it. What, what’s the phrase I’m looking for? dipping into the surface. That’s the wrong phrase, but you know what I mean?

[00:18:58] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Uh, we’ve, the chat room is, on fire, right now, and we’ve got Dustin in there leading the charge. he says, one of the best AI personas I ever created was the Chris Voss persona

helped me negotiate a six figure deal. If you know who cross Chris Voss is, he wrote the book, never split the difference.

He is

was the FBI

negotiator. So that is really cool. and, you know, and Chris is in here saying, Chris,

stone saying that he, he’s created some

great personas as well, and he goes, also, Dustin goes woo woo for an easy YouTube transcript fetch via ai. So, and lastly, Pascal says, I just realized how much I’ve missed listening to Ian’s wise words and practical advice.

That’s gotta be a bot ian that you had programmed, beforehand, but we’ll, we’ll

[00:19:41] Ian Anderson Gray: No, Pascal, it’s great. Great to see you, Pascal.

Lovely to see you.

[00:19:44] Jeff Sieh: one of the things that I wanna talk about,

next, because

you kind of brought it up, is this automation. And you

mentioned this tool called N eight N, and I know you use it in your podcast and your

content workflow, So I, I know I’m not

super familiar with it. What did, what is it and how does it help streamline your work? Can you kind of walk us through how you’ve integrated that to, you know, in podcast production or social media posting? What, what are you using it for and what are the benefits you’re seeing from it?

[00:20:11] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah. So a lot of AI people, love NA

10 for, for, loads of reasons. It’s very similar to the likes of Zapier, but in

some ways it’s easier to use. In some ways it’s more difficult. It’s.

Brilliant if you are creative, because it’s very

visual. you are kind of connecting lots of, steps together.

We talked about workflows. so it

helps, it, it’s more visual than the likes of Zapier.

The other cool thing about it is, there is

a, a paid version, which runs on their

own, kind of cloud, but you can actually install this on your own computer

or on your own server for free, which is mind blowing. So I have

like over 130 workflows running.

it allows because it is free. sometimes I’ve found with the likes of Zapier, I’m not knocking Zapier. Zapier is great and they’ve made some amazing, amazing, uh. Inroads into the whole AR world. And in some ways they’re leading, leading it. But I think because it’s free, it just doesn’t limit my creativity.

And I’ve, I’ve been able to build so many different things. It’s got agentic, tools built into it. So if you wanna play around with that, it’s like a massive playground of, of things. So, as I said, I’ve got over 135 workflows. You could do some really simple stuff. you could do more complicated stuff.

So one thing that I built is what I’m calling truthful YouTube. basically I, it subscribes or it, it, monitors, videos on YouTube channels that I, that I want to look at. And it will transcribe them and will give me more of a truthful title and description without all the hype. ’cause I get really fed up with all this.

this is just, because we we’re all trying to create content. For, you know, to, to um, help with the algorithm, which is great as a content creator, but as a, as a human, I get really frustrated with that. So that’s one thing. I built an assistant that helps with my calendar and stuff. I built a tool that listens into Instagram and Facebook messages.

One that if there’s any kind of errors on my website, it will ping and will actually ask chat GPT, what’s the problem and can you fix it? an Apple health analyzer. So it will, if my blood pre, not my blood pressure, but my pulse goes up, or I dunno, it will actually tell me what I need to know without worrying me.

And also a home assistant workflow, which, does things like we will switch my lights on, will tell me, what our, our electricity, u usage was yesterday and actually look at the weather and all that kinda stuff. So there’s a lot of fun stuff. I’ve, I’ve only kind of mentioned a few because it would be here all day

if I mentioned all of them.

[00:22:47] Jeff Sieh: I, this is fast. ’cause I, I went and just kind of looked at it when you talked about it and, and it looked a little bit like notion, right? Like, notion is super powerful, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, like it can be overwhelming. So are

there templates that you, ’cause like Notion has templates that you can buy

or download for free.

Does it have some templates that you can, like, start with,

[00:23:06] Ian Anderson Gray: Oh, it’s, it’s amazing. Yeah. So, again, like notion, I, I got overwhelmed really quickly. And then you watch these YouTube videos of people making these like, like amazing things. You go look at the YouTube thumbnail and it’s like probably a thousand nodes on

the page. And, you know, don’t start with that.

You can actually, just, just go to, they’ve got a kind of whole repository where you can, copy and paste. So you just copy it, paste it, and you’ve got this workflow to mess around with. uh, some YouTubers, uh, content creators will actually give you templates for free as well. and just, just start simply and

build it up over time.

it is, in some ways it is a bit more

difficult to connect them up than say the likes of Zapier. it’s a bit more of a manual process, so you do have to be

patient. But this is the cool thing with ai.

You can ask, Claude is particularly good at this, better than chat B two, I think. you can actually ask it to help you with the process.

So if you are struggling with anything, you can even get it to create workflows for you. so it will, you can say, I create this workflow. It will give you this code, which is in Jason format. You just copy and paste that into NHN and you’ve got this workflow.

It’s

[00:24:19] Jeff Sieh: awesome. And by the way, if you’re like, I don’t know, should I use Claude or should I use,you know, chat GBT? You know what? You could just get Magi. And have access to every single one of those large language models. if you go to magi.co/jeff, you would save some money. MAGA i.co/jeff. That was not even, I just did that just because I love

Dustin.

[00:24:42] Ian Anderson Gray: that was,

impress. And it’s true because the thing is, like, they’re all different. Like, I, I, I love chat t for, for most things, but Claude for coding is just amazing. And, you know, but it keeps changing. Like Grok falls

just come out and apparently that’s amazing for certain things. I haven’t tried it yet.

but yeah, it, there’s just

so many,

[00:25:05] Jeff Sieh: That’s why Mangi is just the, the best deal out there.

So

anyway, enough of plugin Dustin’s tool, but he, it is a good, a good tool. So.

[00:25:13] Conor Brown: Ian, I had a follow up around

you using NA 10 I’ve been using Gum Loop.

to build some things and it’s really, really

cool. Have you used that at all? And, and do you know any

difference between the two? Because a lot of the videos I see

creators are using either Gum loop or, or,

NA 10. I don’t know. I, I haven’t looked too much at NA 10, but, uh, gum loop

seems to

be somewhat similar to.

[00:25:37] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah, so there are a few, yeah, NA 10 is not the only one out there. I haven’t heard of Gum Loop. there’s another tool which whose name is I’ve forgotten. and there’s obviously the Zapier is doing a, a lot of really cool stuff now. so like looking at gum loop, yeah, they do.

They do. So I dunno whether you, you’ve got the ability to put it on your own server. That’s one of the main reasons I love with

anytime you can install it on your computer or I, I pay, well I started paying like

$5 a month for a server with Leno, so all I was paying was

$5 a month and I think I even got a credit so I wasn’t paying

anything for a year.

but

what I would say NA 10 can be a little

bit Yeah. Can be a bit techie in places. So if gum bloop.

Is easier. you may have to pay for it than just, just find the right tool for you. Like I,

this

is one of the, the things I think a lot of, geeks out there such as me, we can say, no, you have to use NHN otherwise you’re a fool.

And that’s just bad advice. You’ve got to find the right tool for you. personally I love a 10, but, do, do shop around. Look at all the other tools out there.

[00:26:39] Jeff Sieh: Just heads up for you guys. magi and Dustin just said, just FYI. We’re already building workflow builders into Magi. That’s the other cool thing. Sorry, I’m gonna a little commercial again. because Dustin is, as soon as these APIs open up, he’s already

got GR in there. He’s working on this stuff now.

He’s so stinking fast and getting these things up. So, once again. Props to the folks over

and mostly Dustin over at Magi, so very, very cool. Connor, you had the, I, mean, you had the next question. I believe

So

[00:27:07] Conor Brown: And you’ve also talked a lot about Google

apps,script hack, right? So using their own things and, and creating in, in

their ecosystem.

you’re a

fan of that, especially for automating, like really annoying, mundane tasks. Do you have a couple examples of, of how you can automate some, some of these tasks with Google App Scripts and, what you really like using it for?

[00:27:31] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah. So this is getting more into, I, I know we’re probably gonna talk

about this in

a bit, and this is kind of more into the

vibe coding side of things. ’cause it does involve code. So That’s

the first thing. Like, Google Apps, scripts, you know, it’s, I think you can probably tell with the name scripts, but the cool

thing is if you have an idea of what you wanna create, you can potentially create it.

And because I use Google Docs and Google Sheets for so much stuff, and I’ve seen like these

extensions that people have built in the, past, I thought, oh, that’s a really cool idea, but it

doesn’t quite do what I, want, or. I I know this is, this is moving on from Google App Scripts, but just as a, an an aside

like, browser

extensions, you can now build your own browser extensions, which is amazing with the

help of ai.

So with Google App Scripts, you can start to add your own menus to say

Google sheets and buttons, which will do certain things. for example, you could get it to send an email out, to guests on your podcast, for example, to remind them of something with all their, the information in there.

You can send data on a Google sheet to, to a tool like NA 10. As part of that workflow, which is something that I’ve done for a client recently. You can create forms. So one thing that I’ve got is, I’ve got a little, menu at the top which says Manage podcast. I click on it and one of the options is.

Create new episode. When I click on that, a, a form pops up with all the information I need to remember, like the, the title, the, the data, this is gonna be published, the episode number, all of this stuff. And when I click, okay, it will add it to the Google Sheet. I mean, it’s, it’s almost limitless what you can

do, with all of this stuff.

I, and it might sound complicated, but with the likes of Claude or Chat GPT, you can basically say, I want to create this automation in Google Sheets that does this, this, this and this. can you tell me if this is possible and how we would create it? And the, the way I would do it is always ask it to go through it on a high level.

Like what’s the high level view of how we create it? Think about the structure of this and how we’re gonna do it, and what are the potential issues. And then ask it to create a plan to build this app, and then ask it to build it. And it is then a case of really copying and pasting it into Google Apps.

if any of it sounds really techy and you don’t understand it, one of my favorite prompts or, or part of a prompt is explain as if you’re speaking to a child and or you don’t know anything or explain it in simple terms. and I do that a lot because then it, it will help you through the stages.

You can paste it in. now the thing I will say with, with all of this kind of stuff is be prepared for there to be mistakes and bucks, with it. But I. It has changed so many things, in my workflows, being able to create all of these ideas that I had in my head that I can now create with Google App Scripts and that will work with Google Docs, Google Sheets, even Google Forms, everything.

It’s amazing.

And, and even, and, and email. Email, Gmail. Oh my goodness. I, I’ve forgotten about that. There’s so much stuff you can do to help you organize your email as well.

[00:30:45] Jeff Sieh: See, that’s what I need. It’s, it’s, it’s not pretty in the, uh, old Jeff c inbox.

Um, we’ve got some, uh, great,comments here from

our pal, Dustin Magi, he says. here’s the thing though, about all these

workflow builders with truly

genic ai, not the illusion that we currently have. We won’t need to build workflows anymore.

Like this is the worst it’s gonna be, folks. It’s getting, it’s getting better every day.

And then he gets really nerdy and says, with new protocols like MCP and yada, yada, yada, they just build workflows on the fly just from our types or spoken instructions. Very, very cool. and then he has, EILI five explain it to like, I’m five.

That is very, very good.

And, this is another tool I know a lot of people use.

Repl has transformed my

workflows for everything a lot of people have used in that as well.

so many cool things and I, I wanna bring up another one, Ian because I actually, I used it a couple years ago when it was really big, when it was making its own podcast.

And of course we’re talking about notebook lm. That was the thing that got in the news. You could drop in all this stuff and it would make a po a realistic sounding podcast with two hosts

talking back and forth about your content. I kind of got away from that ’cause that was just kind of a, you know, a kind of a viral thing.

I mean, I don’t know how much use you’d get out of it unless you were studying

for a test. But you’ve mentioned Notebook LM quite a bit. It’s one of your game changing tools. So how are you using it for learning or content research? Like in what ways does it become your second brain, to help organize that information and prep for content?

[00:32:16] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah, so I don’t, I don’t use it all the time, but I, I do pretty regularly, at least one or two times a week. and for specific things, and it is kind of like understanding

how it differs from the likes of chat GBT and, and Claude, because like for example, in

chat GBT, you can create projects now where, where you can dump, you know, documents in there and transcriptions and it will reply,

using

or referring to some of those documents in there.

But the cool thing with Notebook LM

is you can link it with, uh, you can add YouTube videos

in there. It will give you the transcription, you can add upload PDFs and do Google Docs and, so much stuff.

and I mean, you can add a lot.

So I, I, for some reason,

they upgraded me to the pro version. I mean, there was a free version, which

gives you loads, is at least 30.

The documents you can have. But the cool thing is that the AI is, the LLM is, I suppose is the, the correct terminology here is it will try to only use those sources. So, if you ask it a question, if I put loads of transcripts from this show, for example, and, and then I ask it a, a question about something you’ve never talked about.

Then it will say, it will, it will say that like, there’s not, there’s nothing in there that talks about this.

so, you know that, that you, you are, it’s only specifically to do with that information. So the way I’ve used it, if I am wanting to do a deep dive and learning about something, for example, it might be Agen ai.

There might, it might be like, what was the MLPs that I think, Justin was talking about? You might think, well, what on earth is that? So you do a YouTube search and you do a search on the internet and, uh, you find all these videos about it and you just put them in there and then you can then start to ask it questions, and it will answer those from the sources.

It can also then create a podcast. So it’s a great way of learning on the move. So if I go on a walk, I will sometimes listen to, a Notebook LM podcast. Now, the cool thing that they added, I. I dunno when they added it, but, you can now interact with the podcast. So, I did this recently. I was, I was, uh, meeting, a potential client and I wanted to understand about their business.

So I put all their, about pages on their website, information about them and what they were looking for. some of my previous work in there, and also the transcript from our first meeting. And I converted that into a podcast with these two characters talking, and then you can interrupt it and, uh, ask it questions.

So you click this button and it says, oh, hey, there’s, there’s a question from the listener. And then you can, you can then say, okay, yeah, you did, you did talk about that. But from the sources, does does it talk anything about like their budget? and it will then look at all of the sources and it will then answer that.

So it’s a great way if you are

wanting to. for example, have a, you have a meeting with a client. I, I can for example, do this in the car or whatever, or go on a walk and I can interact and, and, uh, it’s a, it’s an amazing way of, learning. now the other thing that you can also do is don’t just what is to realize what Notebook LM is not so good at.

And I, I don’t particularly like the output. It’s very dense. It’s, it’s not very creative. that’s a good thing in a way. ’cause you want it to be exact. But then what you can do is you can paste that back into chat GBT or Claude, then you can carry on the conversation there. or you can do it the other way around.

You can add some of that information. Maybe you’ve been chatting a lot in chat GPT, you can paste the chat into Notebook m so don’t just use one tool. You can use a lot of them

at the same time.

[00:35:51] Jeff Sieh: That is, so cool. And, and by the way, Dustin heard my cry and he says, Jeff, good news, we’re releasing mc. P today or Monday, and Magi will be able to manage your Gmail. WI mean, that’s awesome. I wish I had, I need to have a giant air horn that’ll go off. I’ll have to add that next time. That is very cool,

Dustin.

[00:36:09] Conor Brown: You just tell me and I’ll

do it, you know, manually. two things I want to talk about. Notebook, lm, I think what else it could be really good for, ’cause I’ve already used it for this SOPs. If you upload all of your SOPs there and you’re onboarding a new either VA or a new employee or, or someone like that, you can then share that notebook with them and they can ask it questions and

follow ups around.

So.

[00:36:34] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah,

that.

[00:36:36] Conor Brown: What I also think is will be cool for course creators is if you have a course, you get all your transcripts, you upload it to this notebook, Elga M again, you can send it and you can just send the chat portion so the person doesn’t have to edit anything. They can just ask it questions, and it’s almost like you’ve created your own course LLM, that your user can now interact with after they’ve purchased your

course.

So I think that

[00:37:03] Jeff Sieh: that is

smart, Connor.

[00:37:04] Conor Brown: really, really cool.

[00:37:05] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Don’t let

anybody tell you different. That’s a smart thing Connor. Really good way to

[00:37:08] Conor Brown: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m working on that for, for something I got in the can, but I think what a lot of this comes back to is, prompting, right? It, it’s talking to these LLMs in a way that’s going to be efficient and get the output that you want. I think gone are the days when we were, you know, just trying to get into chat GPT and asking

it one question, right?

And like, what do you think of this? Or what do you think of that? Now it’s all about giving them as much information as possible. So,

Ian, what are some of your tips when it comes to prompting AI effectively? Do you have like techniques or, or rules that you follow when it comes to content context and, and examples?

How, how do you prompt.

[00:37:55] Ian Anderson Gray: I think it depends on what I’m

wanting to do. So some of the, a lot of the time I don’t

worry too

much because I’m just, for example, if I’m just.

I have

ideas that I’m brainstorming because I’ve

added in, the custom instructions into, for example, chat,

GBT, that that’s the first thing is, is

if the, the tool that you’re using has the equivalent of

custom instructions. This is where

you are telling it about you. You’re telling it

about the way you want it to, how you want it to answer. So for me, it’s like, please respond in British English. None of this American

jargon, please. Things like that. Don’t use, don’t use m dashes or emojis and all that kinda stuff. Then,

you are, you’re gonna get a,

a good, hopefully a good response out of that.

The other thing, for example, with voice, I dunno if anyone else has had

this problem. I used to love

the advanced voice mode in chat Bt, but in the last month it’s just got really bad at, at least for me because,

just, the, it’s very shallow and its responses is so eager to please, it’s so affirming.

It keeps on saying how amazing I am. Oh, that’s I and I, and it’s also trying to be so hard to be sound like a human, that it just winds me up. So I, I actually came up with a whole prompt to trying to, to help it just to, just to be, I suppose to be more, to think about critical thinking, and things like that.

So I think, I think I actually wrote it down, here and I might be able to share it with you, because I think this is it. I just found it really annoying. I’ll find it out. I’ll find it out later. ’cause I don’t want to lose, lose my place. But

in terms of, in terms of the actual prompt, if you are wanting to get some really high quality outputs, then this is what I would do.

This is, this is my, my technique. The first thing is to set the role of the ai, for example. You could say you are a social media strategist, or you are a sustainability focused su supply chain consultant with expertise in ethical manufacturing and textile production. I had to write that down ’cause I’d never remember that.

But be really specific. The next thing is to define the task. What is it step-by-step that you want the you know, the AI tool to do. The next thing is to provide it with AI fuel, which is data. Chris Penn calls this, calls these knowledge blocks. So if you don’t give it information about, for example, the business, the company you are working with, or the, the, the issue that you are working with is not gonna.

Do a particularly good job. The next thing, and this is really important, is to add constraints. Some people call this negative prompts, but this is, when you say, don’t do this, or Please avoid this. so I, when I mentioned don’t use m dashes or emojis, that’s an example of, of telling it what not to do.

And then finally, this is a ridiculous phrase. It’s called contextual anchoring. but basically what that means is you’re telling it what the situation is or why you need this. for example, you might be creating a, a proposal and you want to help with some information. So you’ll, you say, well, this is to help me create a proposal for this client.

and you do it that way. so if you do all of those things, that will will really help. On a final note, just to say AI models are becoming so much better than they were two years ago, particularly some of the thinking models, and they can actually do a lot of this for you. one of the, the best advice that was given me is, say like, what have I missed out?

What questions can you ask me to help you do your job better?

and over time don’t expect you to get a perfect result first, but over time you’ll get a much better result.

[00:41:39] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, that’s one of the things that I’ve seen a lot of people talk about is like, have it interview you so it knows about you, and then it’ll help, you know, move on, that way. So,

[00:41:49] Conor Brown: One thing

that, I’m going

back a few episodes when Phil Lan was on our, show talking about when you prompt be sure to also

say, You know? do you understand this? Do you know what you’re gonna do?

And then say, do not take action

yet. ’cause you want it to basically reaffirm Yeah, I got it all. This is what you want right before

it goes rogue and starts answering when it

doesn’t fully understand what you’re asking.

[00:42:14] Ian Anderson Gray: That, that’s so true. You know? Have you ever seen the, the film up

with Yeah. you know, the look, you know, the dog in

it

He just wants to please, he’s, he’s just like, he, he’s so eager

to please and chat. G pt, Claude, they’re all like that. They are, they are programmed to

want to please you. So they sometimes will respond straight away and you think, no, no,

I didn’t.

So you have to be like. Only respond when I tell

you to. There’s another hack you can do with

like, with voice, which is, you might want it

to, you might be much better at articulating it over voice, but you don’t want it

to respond with the whole thing using voice. So you can then say, I want you to, to do the following, but only respond when I

say yes.

And so you, you stop the voice call and then you go back to your office or whatever and you just, type yes. And then it will respond. so yeah, just, it’s, it’s always eager to please. I, I always like to put the phrase, like, phrase, use critical thinking or always ask. and that really seems to help a lot.

But you then you need to keep reminding it over time because

’cause of the context window that it tends to forget things. So keep reminding it.

[00:43:31] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, Dustin has a great tip. he says what he tells people to prompt, ask me all the questions you need me to answer in order to complete this task. So that’s a great one to write down folks.

Well ask me all the questions you need me to answer in order to complete this task. That’s a great great tip.

we’re gonna talk here and you just mentioned a little bit about, voice vibe, and we’re gonna talk about some of the tools coming up. But first I wanna do a shout out to our friends over Ecamm who are always supportive and they have given, given me a great deal. If you go to Ecamm dot com slash jeff and use code Jeff 15, you’ll save 15% on your first purchase.

So thank you for eca m for, sponsoring this show. And by the way, I wanna talk about this because you talked about voice. We kind of dove into it a little bit, but the, and the,

vibe co coding, we gave you some tools about that. And, let’s really dive into this vibe coding because. There’s some controversy about it, and it’s really a hot trend right now. by chatting with ai, actually building these tools or even doing it by voice instead of writing code line by line tools like Cursor, is is one tool that people are using or they’re enabling these non-developers to create software by just like you were saying and describing what you want. So can you explain what vibe coding

is in simple terms and like share your thoughts on it.

How do you think non coders, like, I mean, you have a coding background, but like, could somebody like me who has just

barely destroyed JavaScript, can I go in there and use this? Like, how can like normal people who aren’t super nerds learn how to do vibe coding? Or is it still way too complicated for normal people, mere mortals to do?

[00:45:10] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah. What, what are you trying to say? Uh, yeah, so, yeah, there is a lot of

controversy about this and I, I don’t like

the term vibe coding, but basically the, the idea

is it’s creating code or creating an

app using prompts. I

mean, that’s basically it. And, and, but it, it’s

not just, it doesn’t ne you know, sometimes you

can go into chat gpt, in fact you can do this.

You can go into chat gpt

or Claude and say, build me a web app using, you have to know a little bit, a few technical terms, like say, use

jQuery and HDML and CSS to build me. A web app that shows me the planets in the serial system using 3D animation, make it

look really cool, use these colors and it will literally create an app that will run within

Claude Or chat GBTI mean, seriously try it.

And it will actually, doesn’t, doesn’t always work because it makes bugs sometimes. But that is vibe coding. So you can, you know, whatever tool, you use, you’ll be able to, you’ll be able to, to do that. so the, the reason there’s a bit of controversy, there’s a couple of reasons. The first thing is, you know, we talked about this before about musicians or artists, voiceover artists getting concerned because this was taking away some of that, the, the expertise or the creativity, away from the true professionals.

and I think there is this concern from developers that it’s taking away, potentially taking away their job. I don’t think so because. I mean, vibe coding is amazing and it will only get better, but, the thing I love about it is it allows me to create stuff that’s been in my head for years. I, I, I do have a developer background, but I’ve always known my limitations, so like.

We can’t be good at everything, so I can do a bit of PHP and JavaScript, so to get a bit technical, but, I’ve always known my limitations. And so now I can go into the likes of Cursor, which is a coding tool, but you basically just go in there and say, build me this app. And, I actually asked it to create, a Chrome extension that would, basically when I go to Facebook, it would look at what’s on my feed and give me a summary of what’s there, because there’s so much clutter.

And I find that part of social media so overwhelming. So despite all of that, I can, I can build these tools. I’m building a un, a unified inbox. So that’s my, my idea that will take, my feed from WhatsApp and Facebook and, allow me to see all the messages from those platforms. So I will do a much better job at dealing with all the information overload.

Now, the concern is. The big concern, I suppose, is security

because a true, like a, a real professional developer, hopefully, is gonna be able to look at the code and notice issues, and security issues. and where there’s a clear mistake that the AI has made. so you do have to be careful with that.

And so what I would say is for non coders particularly, I think it does help to have some basic knowledge of coding or apps. or if you don’t know again, as I can’t remember what Dustin’s,prompt here was, but basically treat, you know, explain like a child

so that you can really understand it, and make sure keeping it simple to begin with.

I think this is great for internal tools, for tools that you are, you are playing around with. If you’re gonna build like a full app that is. that’s gonna re require usernames and passwords and sensitive information. I would be careful with that kind of stuff, but there is so much amazing stuff that you can do.

and it’s only gonna get better. Some of the tools, there’s Claude Code. It is, is apparently a really good tool. there’s wind, is it Windsurf is

the other. There’s so many ones

[00:49:05] Jeff Sieh: They got bought by, I think Windsurf got bought by one of the big

companies. Yeah,

[00:49:09] Ian Anderson Gray: yeah. Chat. GBT OpenAI bought bought that. Yeah. So yeah, it’s, it’s so fast moving. And you know, Dustin mentioned MCP, can never remember the name of that, machine.

I’m, I’m gonna forget what it is. But basically this will then allow you to connect with, with oth other servers out there. that will, help you build these things automatically. it will also do things like, you can, I. also put the documentation in. So for example, it will know everything about a particular programming language and if it, if it doesn’t have that information, you can point it to the documentation and it will know everything about that as well.

It’s a bit like the Matrix where he basically downloads the,

uh, everything it is about to, to

fly a helicopter. So that’s what you’re doing with, uh, the

likes of cursor on these tools?

[00:49:54] Jeff Sieh: I wanna learn kung fu. That’s what I want. Just put it in my

brain.

[00:49:57] Conor Brown: And I wanna, I wanna watch you do kung

fu because.

[00:50:00] Jeff Sieh: Yeah,

I’m sure. Yeah,

[00:50:02] Conor Brown: We have a couple words of warning from, from Dustin as well. He says it’s not super complicated, meaning

vibe coding, but it is very dangerous if you don’t know

how to code. Ask the guy who got

hacked or the guy who woke up to a four $45,000 hosting bill.

And he also says his warning, do not vibe, code an app and make it public without consulting a real developer, which, I think I would totally agree with. I think it’s a great place to

start, but maybe not a great place to, to release to the

world as we have kind of a, a time for one final question. And we’ve talked so much about how AI can help us in the creativity and creation space and

automate, you know, redundant or, or, or, you know, time consuming tasks.

But the final question is a meta one, and I don’t mean Facebook meta. I

mean, when should we not use ai? At what point? What task, what creative prompts do you think we should say? You know what, this isn’t for ai. I gotta use my noggin to start.

[00:51:06] Ian Anderson Gray: Everyone’s gonna have a different idea on this. I’m, I’m pretty

clear. Like I, I want to use

AI to help me become more

human and

become more creative I don’t wanna replace, use it to replace me. And I know everyone has different thoughts on this, but like, I personally just think if you’re going

to use it to fully automate your response,

and make it look like it’s you,

and almost like fake it.

So I think you, I mean, I’m fine with using tools where

it responds as if it’s you. For example, I could create like the IAG

bot. That’s totally cool. ’cause you’re, you’ve been clear about it.

But if I’m like just posting on social media, if I am like creating an AI avatar of myself that looks like me, that sounds like me.

And I’m not being clear that this is not me. I don’t think that’s cool. And I, I also like, if you’re using ai, for a complete automation from beginning to end where there’s no human in the creative process at all, I personally have issues with that because we’re gonna get into a situation where. You see these on YouTube, these, these, workflows where you can create, a ENT workflow, which will do the research. it will check what’s trending, do the research, create a script, create a, a, a video, for TikTok and pump it all out like two or three times a day. And my concern with that is that it’s not you.

And then you’re getting AI that’s going to be, we’ve got so much clutter, so much stuff that we can’t deal with it, that you’re having to use AI to be able to summarize all of this. and then you think, well, what’s the point in, in creating in the first place? You know? So,

yeah, I, I have an issue with that.

[00:52:52] Jeff Sieh: you know, I think YouTube, I, I’ve been seeing it in my feed that they’re de-listing or devaluing that, faceless, repetitive video that AI’s cranking out. And so a lot of people are, are that were doing that.

strategy or it’s not gonna work anymore. So I think, I think

you’re totally right on that.

[00:53:10] Ian Anderson Gray: Yeah. And it, it’s just, I think it’s the case of like, if you’re trying to kind of, uh, trick people and you might not even think you’re tricking, but, I, I think my, my mantra in a way is like, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There’s a lot of cool stuff and like I, I have played around with some really cool stuff, just because it’s fun, but would I actually then put it out on the world?

No. I just think we need to, we need to be careful. We need to think, But I, we’re all, we’re all gonna have different ideas. Like, thi this is, this is where I am. But I think if,

if, what I’d recommend is everyone just sit down and think through like, what are you comfortable with? from your point of view, as a

consumer, as a content consumer, not a creator,

what’s good with you?

Are you okay with everything being automated? Everything being ai and you don’t really care about the human in the process at all? Fine. If, if that, if you’re okay with that,

go

ahead. But for the

[00:54:03] Jeff Sieh: with

you if you’re doing that. No.

So.

[00:54:05] Ian Anderson Gray: But it’s like there’s, we’re already, we’re already got information overload. Let’s use AI to help us to be more efficient, productive, and to help us do what we do best as humans.

As I keep saying, help us to be more creative.

[00:54:20] Jeff Sieh: Well, Ian, this has been once again, a fascinating show. We are at time, but I don’t wanna leave without people knowing where they can find the amazing, Ian Anderson Gray. Where can people find out more about you and what you got going on?

[00:54:32] Ian Anderson Gray: So my website, I ag.me is probably the, the place to go. I’ve had a bit of a break from social probably in the last couple of months, but I am getting back to it. And the place I’m probably gonna be hanging out most is on LinkedIn. So just search for my name. Ian Anderson Gray. That’s gray with an A. And yeah, it’d be great to connect.

[00:54:50] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. And we also have the,

[00:55:09] Jeff Sieh: It is the unsinkable Connor Brown folks.

So Connor, all hail. what

is, uh, what do you got going on?

[00:55:15] Conor Brown: all hail bound down

vacation kingdoms. Follow me on social media, especially Instagram, TikTok at Vacation Kingdoms as I do my 60 day challenge of posting one short form video piece of content every single day for 60 days. You can head over to vacation kingdoms.com to learn more about what I have going on.

Always love having IAG on the show.

[00:55:38] Jeff Sieh: this has been awesome. Thank you guys so much for watching. Gary, Chris Stone, uh, Dina, Dustin from Magi, Pascal, all you folks who came and left comments, we appreciate you. I am Jeff. CI would love it if you sign up for my newsletter@jeffc.com slash news. We have fun over in the newsletter community. all, some good stories usually come out Tuesday, Wednesdays and then on Fridays for the show.

So go ahead and sign up for that. I guarantee you it’s not a waste of time and we do have a lot of fun. So jeff c.com/news. And with that, we’ll see you guys next time. Bye everybody. Have a great one.