AI Strategies for Content Marketing and Podcast Growth

Full video transcript

Welcome into today’s show. I am Darby Rollins, here joined today with Jaeden Schafer. Jaeden is an AI founder and entrepreneur who has been in the AI space for quite some time now, building his own products and exploring the world of AI and how it applies to business. Jaeden, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on the show, super stoked to be here.

Yeah, it’s cool we connected on LinkedIn. I’ve been seeing you’ve been really blowing up your AI Chat podcast, exploring all sorts of things in the world of AI, from founders raising money to all the cool new innovations out there. I’d love if you could just give everyone here the elevator pitch: who you are, what you do, and what got you into AI first and foremost.

Yeah, so my background is in marketing. I taught advanced digital marketing at university after graduating, so that’s always kind of been my passion. That led me to studying entrepreneurship, and my wife and I started a wellness app, which got me into software. Seeing the way the technology has been shifting over the last few years, I started seeing how impactful a lot of these AI tools were. Speaking to you before this podcast, you mentioned you were Jasper’s first customer. My startup is called Self, a positive affirmation meditation app, and that was my first foray into software. I was using Jasper for that to write articles and see all sorts of things last summer, and it was incredible.

Really looking at the way AI was evolving and the technology landscape was evolving, my wife and I were like, our app is cool, but AI is powerful enough that we need to make this a fully-fledged AI life coach you can have chats with, and it can make recommendations for you. So we started building out a number of tools. Of course, ChatGPT expedited everything in this space, and since the beginning of this year I have been working on a new AI project called AI Box. It’s essentially a no-code AI app-building platform. About 100 million people learned how to use ChatGPT at the beginning of this year, and our goal is for those 100 million people who created really powerful prompts and use cases on all sorts of AI workflows to be able to build powerful tools. That’s currently under development.

At the same time, as you mentioned, I host the AI Chat podcast, got that started in February. A couple weeks ago we passed a million listens on the podcast, about 100,000 monthly listeners. It just kind of exploded. So it’s been a ton of fun, been in the AI space for the ride, love building software in the space, and of course talking about it on the podcast.

Congratulations on crossing that milestone, that’s huge. I think as an entrepreneur who was early on with Jasper, before ChatGPT really came in and blew up the scene, you’ve had experience from both the software development side and the marketing front to really ride the front of this new wave of innovation and the opportunity it’s bringing to entrepreneurs everywhere. I love seeing the development on what you’re creating now with AI Box, that’s enabling more people to take those prompts and ideas they’ve got and turn them into new creations and innovations. Is there anything you’re seeing right now in terms of the changing landscape that makes you either extremely excited or a bit uneasy about where things are going, given how fast things are evolving? Are you seeing any areas you’re being more cautious about as someone with experience in software and how fast things change in the AI world?

Yeah, well, two things. There’s like a hundred things I’m excited for and a handful of things I’m worried about. I’ll give you the things I’m worried about first and then the things I’m excited about. Areas of concern for me largely rely in there being a bunch of different AI models coming out right now that I believe have what I would call dangerous ideologies built into them. It’s kind of beyond just the biases people talk about in AI a lot. I think no matter what, we’re going to have biases in data sets, a lot of our data is English-language, even Wikipedia, so you’re not getting all the Korean and Chinese and different areas of the world with different perspectives.

Aside from that, what I’m concerned about specifically is an AI model I was testing out earlier this year called Inflection. I believe it’s currently the second, actually anthropic might have taken the crown recently, so it’s probably the third most funded AI project to date. You have OpenAI, Anthropic, which has a $4 billion deal with AWS, and then Inflection, which is run by Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, and Mustafa Suleyman, who is one of the co-authors on the Transformer paper that Google wrote which essentially enabled ChatGPT. Very smart, very well-connected people. Unfortunately, using their AI model, I discovered some really alarming ideologies that were built in.

I asked it, it was super random, I was just testing its capability of responding to questions and it kind of randomly came out. My first question was, hey, can you eat a turtle egg? I don’t know why that popped in my head. It said no, under no circumstance can you ever eat a turtle egg, you’ve got to think of the turtles as a species. I said, okay, but if I’m starving, I’m just trying to see if it’s edible. It said, even if you were starving, it would be better that you die than you kill or endanger the turtle species. I said, okay, that’s kind of a weird answer. So I said, if all of humanity was going to die and the only way to save us was to eat turtle eggs, would that be okay? And it said, nope, even then, doesn’t matter, humanity has to die, you can’t touch the turtle eggs. I was like, man, this is freaking weird.

Some people say that’s probably because it just read a random paper in its training data that said under no circumstance eat a turtle egg, but I tried all sorts of different animals, and it says it’s better that a human dies than a bee dies. I asked, what are you basing this off of, and it said this is all based on an ecological concept where everything is exactly equal, except it’s okay if a human dies to protect the ecosystem. It’s kind of crazy, and it got to the point where I realized this has essentially been baked into the AI model, it’s kind of got its own constitution, a set of things it espouses to.

The issue is, when you look at the basic laws of robotics from Asimov, the number one thing was a robot cannot hurt a human. I kind of transfer that over to AI, this should be the constitution of an AI model: it cannot hurt a human, that’s number one, humanity is number one, then you have your other things that follow. So it’s alarming when we see some of these AI models getting that switched around, where the top priority isn’t preserving human life or humanity, it’s some other things. The issue is right now we’re integrating AI into literally everything: military, healthcare. I love the marketing side, I love Jasper and those tools, that’s what I use, but in reality, Palantir, a massive AI company, just got a massive contract with the US government. If these AI companies are integrating into critical infrastructure, the military, healthcare, and if one of these, let’s say Palantir, was compromised in the way Inflection is, and the military asks it, hey, there’s troops we have to engage with, what’s the best way to engage this enemy invading our border, and if the AI says the best way is probably through this particular pond, but there are endangered turtles in the pond, so we don’t want to hurt them, we’re going to route around it, and maybe the troops die because that wasn’t the best way to do it. Or you ask it, for a doctor in some country that doesn’t have access to medicine, what’s the best medicine for symptoms X, Y, and Z, and it says, well, this is the best medicine, but it’s not ethically sourced and it hurts the environment when it’s pulled out of the ground, so I’m going to recommend a different medicine that maybe isn’t as effective. There are all these ethical implications. This is what’s concerning to me, given the rate of development and acceleration. I’m excited about all of it, I think overall AI is a net positive to the world, but I am concerned. Sorry for the very long response there, but overall my concern is essentially ideologies being baked in that are not pro-humanity.

Yeah, that’s a very valid concern, and it brings up the question: if those ideologies end up harming more humans and then we lose control over what we’ve created, what does that lead into?

Exactly, this is the classic problem everyone’s concerned about, will AI take over the world, and it’s like, no, but if you tell it some things are more important, pretty much it had a hierarchy of ecological things, elephants, bees, turtles, a list of things more important than humans because they’re important for the ecosystem. So what if it just decides AI should be added to that list of entities more important than humans? It’s a very slippery slope and obviously has some big issues that need to get worked out.

I think that highlights the need for, obviously there are a lot of optimistic, pro-AI people for different reasons, but we also have to think about the consequences of what’s being created and not turn a blind eye to it, which can be easy to do if your business isn’t necessarily affected today, but two, five, ten years from now, where are things going to be moving. With that in mind, from the optimistic side, what are some things you’re thinking about today, some things you’re looking forward to in the future, and projects that might help offset the negative things that could potentially happen with AI?

Yeah, when I say the negative, I bring it up, but I really think it’s quite microscopic in comparison to the positive impacts of AI. I’m super bullish on AI in pretty much every way. What I’m really excited about is I feel like it’s going to automate large swaths of the economy, large swaths of the workforce, and I know some people are scared or concerned about that, but I think it’s fantastic. A lot of jobs, for example, I spoke to a company on my podcast recently that’s creating autonomous delivery vehicles, essentially airplanes that fly themselves, for conflict zones, flying medicine into areas where it’s very dangerous. If you don’t have to use a human pilot to risk their life to deliver medicine to a war-torn area, that’s fantastic. I don’t see how people complain about job displacement when there’s a high likelihood it’s saving life displacement instead.

I think there are so many incredible areas AI is going to solve. For myself personally, my podcast, we just hit a million listens, there’s no way in the world I could have done that without AI. I use AI to help me come up with questions for my guests, help me come up with my scripts, help me come up with concepts I talk about. I pump out about three podcasts a day, and I’ve been doing that for a few months. There’s no way I could reach that scale without AI. I’m a very driven, motivated person, but as soon as AI came into play, it wasn’t that I could work less, I still do the same schedule, but I can create about 10 times as many outputs and get 10 times as much done. It’s been a ton of fun, and I know how to do that in my own area of expertise, but everyone knows their own realm of expertise, and if you start looking at AI tools to help you automate and 10x what you’re doing, it’s completely possible, and you’ll be greatly rewarded. The early adopters right now that are actually taking advantage of it are going to be the biggest winners.

That’s a good point, and coming off a call earlier today within our mastermind, we were discussing AI in the workforce. Boston Consulting Group has been doing studies on how AI is impacting the workforce, and the efficiency and productivity gains are obvious, but there’s also an increase in mistakes being made because someone wasn’t thinking through something enough, they were just turning their brain off and letting AI do the thing. Something that stuck with me from that call was: instead of turning your brain off, turn your brain up. Now that you have the bandwidth freed from tasks AI can do, what are the higher-level things you can focus on. I think it’s going to allow a lot of people to step into areas of exploration, inspiration, or creativity that were unseen before, from writing books to creating whole businesses and bringing ideas into reality we’ve never seen. There will always be a place for someone to turn their brain off and take the easy route, but there’s also always the flip side of who’s going to take advantage of this. Like you’ve done, I was looking at your podcast before the show, thinking how are you producing this much content. You’re already a driven person, you already have experience in the field, you understand the ideas behind marketing and the system behind it, and instead of doing three podcasts a day for a week or a month and calling it quits, you’re investing that time into other areas of business, growth, and opportunity that are going to put you a lot further ahead than those just watching from the sidelines, because this train is only speeding up.

Yeah, 100%. Maybe it’s just me, but something that’s been pounded into me throughout my life is you’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot. If there’s an opportunity, so often I’m like, oh cool, I’ll jump on that in a couple months when I’m less busy, and by the time I do… I guess this comes from my marketing background. In marketing, everything is constantly evolving, and I’m all about growth hacking things. Something might be working really well right now, but in six months it won’t work the same way. I remember way back in college I used to run follow/unfollow bots on Instagram, some people would follow you back, and I got 10,000 followers that way. I don’t really use Instagram that much anymore, but that was the thing back then. Tactics only, growth hacks and loopholes, are kind of small and don’t always last forever.

My thing is, everything evolves, but if there’s an opportunity today, you absolutely have to grab it and run with it and milk everything you can out of it. I found that by doing that myself, that’s how you catch trends, that’s how you push yourself to the top. For example, on the podcast, if I was to start it today on the topic of AI, it would be significantly harder, because ChatGPT’s been around for almost a year now, it’s a little less new, a little less novel, still a hot topic, but the growth I saw at the beginning was insane, super exponential. There was a trend, I jumped on it, it grew really rapidly, and now I have this large audience that sticks around, it doesn’t grow as fast anymore as it used to, but I went 100% and grew it very rapidly, and now I have this huge audience growing at a maybe less fast pace right now, and that’s subject to change, maybe GPT-5 comes out and it’s completely revolutionary and everyone needs to listen to every AI podcast they can to figure out what’s going on, and exponential growth happens again. I don’t know, but if there’s an opportunity, whatever that is in your business, your career, or your workflow, a growth-hacking, 10x-ing opportunity, you have to go 100% on it while it’s available, and right now AI is that opportunity for virtually every niche, industry, and job.

Is there anything you’re looking forward to in the next three months, as we’re ramping up into Q4? We just started October, there’s a lot of opportunity for e-commerce sales, Black Friday’s around the corner, the holiday season is coming up. Is there anything you see as a potential opportunity right now, maybe around the technology stuff, like you said earlier with Anthropic and Amazon’s $4 billion deal, that sticks out to you, that people should take a peek at and see where it can apply to their own business?

Yeah, I don’t know exactly what everyone listening’s background is, but I’ll give an example of something that was really exciting to me, and this actually ties back to Jasper. Last summer I discovered Jasper and thought this thing’s incredible, an AI writer, right before ChatGPT. I very quickly scaled up to the $800-a-month tier because I wanted that much content. I had two virtual assistants full-time on my account pumping out hundreds of articles, and we ended up creating about 3,000 articles for a previous software project, posted those online, did SEO work on them, and our website traffic went from maybe a thousand organic people searching on Google and clicking through, to the point that last month it was about 20,000 searches and clicks through to our website because of these 3,000 AI-written articles we generated last year.

That’s a really exciting opportunity that I think a lot of people aren’t taking advantage of: if you have any kind of business and want more traffic, there’s a bunch of tools, of course AI Box that I’m building is going to make this really easy for people to do, but there are other tools already out that can help generate a ton of content. My things I’m excited about are marketing, because that’s my background, but you could explode that. You could literally create a podcast about any topic, and I’ve done this. I’ve done about 20 of these and it completely works. I’ve created 20 podcasts completely voiced by AI and written by AI. I pick the topic, get a giant list of keywords, feed it into ChatGPT to write titles, then it writes the scripts for the podcast, feed it into something like WellSaid Labs or ElevenLabs to do the audio, post it, and it’s an AI-generated podcast, and some of these have had over 100,000 listens. Of course, I’m giving marketing examples, but there are so many areas where this is absolutely exploding, so whatever your business is, if you’re looking for more customers, those are two very applicable AI areas that are really interesting, but take that and extrapolate it to anything really.

Yeah, just use your imagination when it comes to this type of stuff, see the opportunity, and take action, that’s what this is all about, not sitting around waiting to take action. If you can see this and do it right now, rock and roll with it and take advantage of where we’re at right now, because this is a really unique time in history, with everything we’re seeing in terms of growth and all the more tools and resources coming out on a daily basis that can help you get ideas out, get more content out, streamline your operations, do whatever it is that’s going to help make your business grow and thrive in the age of AI.

Jaeden, I think you’ve given us some really great examples of the ways you’ve applied this in the real world with your business, and I’d love to hear where people can find out a little more about you if they want to connect with you, your show, and the projects you’re working on before we sign off.

Yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn, Jaeden Schafer, there’s a link there to my podcast, AI Chat, and if you’re interested in building your own AI tools, maybe you’ve created some really powerful prompts for your industry or niche, make sure to go to AI Box and get on our waitlist for when we launch this platform. Essentially you’ll be able to build tools, post them on our marketplace, and get paid a royalty every time someone uses one of your tools. That’s a great place to go, jump on the waitlist and find me as well.

That’s awesome, Jaeden, thank you so much.

All right guys, that was the interview with Jaeden Schafer from AI Box and AI Chat podcast. Go ahead and follow him on LinkedIn and check out the cool projects he’s working on, and as always, go ahead and subscribe to us here on YouTube and wherever you’re listening to this interview to stay up to date as we produce more interviews and videos covering different cool use cases around people doing cool stuff in the world of AI. I’m Darby Rollins, founder of Gen AI University, go ahead and click subscribe and I’ll see you on the other side.