AI with soul: how to use AI without letting it use you

[0:00] How do you use AI without letting it use you? That's exactly what we are gonna talk about in this session. I'm super excited to be joined by no one other than Ryan Lee. We go way, way back and he's an entrepreneur, author and speaker with decades of experience building and exiting seven businesses across fitness, e-commerce and digital publishing.

[0:20] He actually created the world's first sports training membership site in the year 2000. And he's been featured in many prominent places like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Success Magazine. And he's also been a speaker on some of my summits in the past. But I thought it would be cool to reconnect with Ryan for this session to talk more about AI and how he's using it in his business and day to day.

[0:45] So with that being said, warm welcome, Ryan. I appreciate you having me here. This is gonna be fun. Like I was saying before we recorded, we haven't spoken in years and I have not done a summit like this. I can't remember the last time, but I remember you always did good events and then you asking, hey, do you want to talk about AI, which I love. But I do think people use it incorrectly.

[1:11] I think they hide behind it and I think things sound mechanic, robotic, and I think there's a way to use it with soul and do it. And I'd love to share the stuff I'm doing and playing with and experimenting with and bring some quote unquote value to your audience. Value bombs, baby.

[1:29] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, when we chatted in the pre-chat, you've been doing marketing and businesses since the year 2000 or something like that, or maybe before that even. my very first website was late 1998. yeah, it was a long time ago. It was pretty early on and for the first few years it was just sports training.

[1:52] ~ Way before AI, right? Before YouTube, before Facebook, before social media. I wish I had AI back then because back then when I was writing the programs, like it was me sitting there creating the content from scratch no one to really bounce ideas off of and yeah, I've seen so many things come and go, but I I remember when video really started happening.

[2:17] I'm like, okay, this is gonna change everything. Getting away from just text and images and audio to video and now with AI, it... I I know people hype it up, like, it's going to change, but it really has changed everything. I it's changed my entire marketing flow and the way I approach business.

[2:36] And I think we also have to really reevaluate how we're building a business and monetizing, because I'm assuming that a lot of people watching this are kind of more... information advicepreneurs, right? Like they're like, oh, I'm a fitness pro and I want to teach this or I'm a personal development coach or a life coach or a marketing coach.

[3:00] Like they're probably more in the advice space, right? Information world, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. It's like content creators, That kind of space. Yeah. course creators, people like that, it's probably the most prominent audience. And I know there are people who say, oh, courses are dead. They're done.

[3:19] AI has destroyed them. It's kind of true. Now, I'm not saying it's a scare people. It's not dead, right? What's happening is you can still sell products and courses, but not the way we did even a year or two ago. A couple of years ago, it was all about the secrets, right? I'll do marketing on the front.

[3:43] I'll show you the why, but if you want to learn the how, you've got to buy my program for a thousand, know, 997, 1997. You got to get all my stuff. Now we can go to ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude, or whatever your choice is, and say, okay, you are whoever. You're Jay Abraham. You're my strategist.

[4:04] Help me come up with this. And you get really good advice and information. So... to say, to be ignorant and say, well, you know, nothing has changed and I could still sell my, you how to beat diabetes course for $500. You're delusional. Can you sell it? To some people, yes, sales are going down, but it is getting much, much, much more difficult.

[4:29] And I was talking to one of my good friends, I don't want to mention his name, because he didn't say could mention it publicly, big name, millions of podcast downloads. And we were chatting about two weeks ago, he said, Ryan, three years. So what do mean? He goes, three years, that's it.

[4:43] Like three years, and it's all done, like all the course stuff. Because I see it now, and... because I am pretty well connected in the information space and people come to me for advice because more behind the scenes. And right now, as of this recording, if I kind of had to estimate the numbers all, it looks like course sales are down for these big names around 30 % is what I've seen across the board.

[5:09] ~ So we just have to completely reevaluate. how we did it. have to unlearn a lot of the old school marketing tactics and strategies and packaging it up in a course to sell the secrets. I just see that as a declining market and trying to put all your eggs in that basket. I think you're going to fight much harder to make a sale and we just have to think differently with AI.

[5:34] ~ So there's my little scare tactic. Just information is not as valuable anymore, essentially, because before back in the day, No. you could like, you know, sell an ebook and for like 100 bucks or even more sometimes you could sell like ebooks and make money. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I do think some people are now leveraging AI.

[5:52] I'm not a big fan of this when you are not a true expert and then you are basically putting out information on Amazon in the health field. I mean, you probably have a lot to say about that because you're... very much in that as well. But I think that is a little bit bad because you can go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever and tell it to act and research basically all the data around health.

[6:16] And then you can put up a book on Amazon and sell that. I mean, people are doing that, and actually making quite some money at the moment. I know, I know. You know, it's a, there's like the ethical question, there's the legal question, and I'm not the ethics police, I'm not an attorney. ~ You know, Yeah. Yes.

[6:36] it's, look, you're, I don't love a business where you're pretending to be someone you're not, because that's a fraud, right? If you build up this avatar and you say, I'm the world's best fitness expert, and you're just using ChatGPT to do all the stuff and do all the, and you're pretending to be something you're not.

[6:55] Is it legal, ethical? Again, it's really grey. I don't wanna run a business like that. I know some people do. know there are, look, there are the biz op chasers, the shiny object chasers, the people who sit in a basement all day who have no drive, no soul, and all they care about is the money, and they're gonna take advantage of every loophole possible, and they do it.

[7:21] I don't want to say more power to them because I don't think they're really contributing much to the world. But then again, right, if they're getting really good information from AI, if AI is doing the research and they create an incredible six week program and it helps people, well, is it bad?

[7:38] You know, if they got there through saying they're someone they're not. So there's so much, there's so, and that's the challenge here. It's navigating through this thing. The bigger problem is because there is almost zero barrier to entry, right? One of my 16-year-old son can go on ChatGPT and create this and sell these programs and sell more than one of my guys like Jeff Cavalier with AthleanX who's been a physical therapist for 30 years and all this training experience and he could outsell him with a product with zero knowledge because anyone could do it now.

[8:20] There's like this race to the bottom. And if that's the case, okay, let's play that out for a minute. Then what happens to the expert with the true knowledge? It's really frustrating. Because now you see thousands of people doing this and you're like, well, how do I, how do I, you know, stake my claim in this market?

[8:39] What do I do to stand out? And I don't think it's trying to out content them because you can't. It's funny because we went from first saying, the only way to succeed is personal brand, right? Personal brand, personal brand, you gotta be you and yourself. And that's the only way to win.

[8:58] And all of a sudden, AI came out and you can create these avatars and you can clone yourself, you can do all these things. And it swung, the pendulum swung really fast and really hard where create faceless business. And I recently polled my audience and was 82 % of my audience wants to now build a faceless business.

[9:20] It swung so fast and now in like a matter of months, the public's like, all right, this AI stuff's exhausting. Man, just give me someone real, right? And it's already like swung all the way back to enough of this AI slop, just give me some real humans. So I think the people who are going to be staying in the personal brand lane, you could still, and infusing AI, I think they're gonna have the best shot of standing out. And here's my reframe with it.

[9:54] It's no longer trying to be the expert, okay? So what I mean by that is saying, here's how to do these three great pushups, and I'm the expert, I'm gonna show you how to do it, and kind of lecturing to people and speaking down, because they could find that information anywhere. But if you approach it more as what I've termed a guide, Right? Like, hey look, I don't know everything in the world about this.

[10:23] I've been a fitness pro for 30 years. I know some stuff, but I'm just gonna share what works for me and my clients. Here are three push-up things that have worked for us. Give it a shot, see how it works for you. It's much more disarming and you build trust more as opposed to trying to out-expert everybody.

[10:40] So I think it's less now about being the expert and more about saying, here are the three exercises I do. Here are the three exercises my clients do. Check it out, I think it'll work for you. and if by the way you like that, I've got here the program that I do. Right, now you've differentiated as opposed to here's the six week workout you must buy. So I think it's using AI to help come up and brainstorm the ideas and help you build this out and going to AI and say, okay, I wanna do a new video with the three pushups, but I want it to be a little bit different.

[11:15] Can you help me come up with a good hook and an intro? Can you help me script out what part two of this series would look like? And that's where I start to talk about if infusing AI was soul with using your personality and your words and not reading the AI script and not trying to out content, but taking some of that and still bringing it back to the personal brand as a guide.

[11:35] And I'm doing a lot of talking, but I'm just. Maybe we share some around this how you would do that because I think you have seen you have seen everything for so long, Ryan, you've been around like in the early days of the Internet. And I would argue probably right now with AI, there's even more opportunity right now.

[11:53] But yes, there's more competition as well. yeah. But if you leverage that the right way. And I think, as you said, people are going to crave like the real human touch, too, because there's going to be so much AI slop out there. But if you can find a way to stand out and amplify yourself with AI, you can set yourself apart. I think that's kind of how I see it.

[12:12] Yeah, you know, there's a few things I see. again, I like AI not as a crutch and not replacing me, but almost replacing my team, right? So in the past, if I wanted to come up with a good nutrition program or come up with five recipe ideas around salmon, I would hire a nutritionist and they will go out and they would do the research and write up the thing and find the macros and...

[12:42] it would take a week and it would be $300. Now I can replace that with, hey, GPT, hey, Claude, can you go out and find these great recipes? Here you go, right? And now it's like the world's greatest employee. They never complain, they never ask for days off, and it helps you really gather information, it does help automate tasks. There's a lot of really cool things, but I never take...

[13:10] I never ever take it word for word. So even if I'm doing a post and I said, okay, I'm doing this post about this recipe or this eighties movie trivia, give me a good little blurb I can use and it'll write one and it'll give me ~ like a germ of an idea and then I'll take that and then rewrite it in my words.

[13:30] But I think what people do is they get really lazy and they take it and then they copy it and that's when they lose the soul. Especially when you do these long posts. I have one client and she runs a fitness studio with her husband and they keep doing these posts, you know. Here with and it it is so clearly AI.

[13:50] it's not her voice. It's not his it's so clearly AI I keep messaging her. I'm like you gotta stop. You're not getting engagements. You're not getting like you're not getting kind of like it's it's not you... I said you're better off stripping all that out having the idea and doing in your voice because the other thing is just lazy and I think that's what's happening.

[14:11] It's getting us lazy. so that's kind of one way is to infuse it into that. The other side, now I'm gonna kinda go against what I just said. The other thing is AI has some really, really cool tools that can tap into your creativity. So I love music and you can see I have my records and tapes behind me and all that stuff. And I can play.

[14:37] I could play basic chords on a guitar and a little bit keyboard and drums. But I'm certainly not a musician and I don't have a good singing voice or any of that stuff. But I was able to use AI and use my ideas for songs and choruses and I know what a good hook sounds like even though I can't play it but I can hum it and using AI and actually creating songs that I built a business around. And I actually built an entire record label with AI generated music. It's music set in an alternate 1986.

[15:12] the bet, you know what I'll do? I'll actually, you want me to share this for you? Yeah, please show this. This is really cool because this is like a passion project of yours, basically, that you use AI for. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this is, I don't know if you could see that.

[15:27] Let's see. All right. Yes. Let me see it. Yeah, so this is, it's called Grant Street Records and these are all fictional bands, fictional characters. I created this all with AI, the backstory, the songs, the music. have 80s, and it's all set in 1986. I have rockers, I have a boy band, I have...

[15:51] like the alternative I have, the soul. I've got all this, and all this music is stuff I've created. that's where I went to, man, AI can do really, really cool things. I'm not trying to hide the fact it's AI. I've said it's an AI music label. But I've actually distributed it. It's all these songs are on Spotify, they're on Apple Music, they're on YouTube.

[16:18] I get... money now when people will take the song and play it on YouTube or play it on Spotify or on a TikTok reel, I get monetized. Not a lot. And it's certainly not going to replace my regular income, but it's a really fun passion project. You know, this is like my Duran Duran kind of band here.

[16:39] And then I created a Christmas album based in 1986. you know, there's, 1986 is when I was born. That's very cool actually. Oh, look at that. Yeah. So I just wanted to find a year that, I don't know, it's kind of a crossover of music and rap started to come in to play with Run DMC. So I just wanted to do something.

[16:58] I wanted to scratch that creative edge. YouTube, YouTube, AI can be really fun. Like there's a lot of really interesting things. So before AI, I would have, if I wanted to start a music label, I would have had to hire the bands. I would have had to do all this stuff. It would have cost me at minimum a couple hundred, $400, $500,000 just to turn the lights on.

[17:24] Doing this... 100 bucks? Like I set up a publishing... What tools did you use for it? I used a bunch but the main one, What tools? ~ I was using Song Earth, the main one is probably Suno. ~ Suno is the one I used. ~ But I would do a few different things. I would try vocals in one thing and then I would have like GPT finish up a lyric.

[17:46] I'm like, ~ I don't love the chorus here. Let's go back. What do you think would be better bridge here? So it was using a bunch of tools and it took me... months to really get it because again, this is this is what separates people who tend to succeed from people who just are lazy. They would go in to an AI music generator and say, create a rap song. Just it's lazy, right? And then you don't own the rights because you have no human input.

[18:18] And then it turns out mediocre stuff. But if you actually take the time to say, well, I want to do a rap song and it has this kind of feel to it and I would love this hook to have these two words and kind of, you know, but I want the song to be less than three minutes and now all of a sudden you start adding your feel to it.

[18:41] And I love it at, you know, 120 beats per minute or I want it faster, I want it a slow jam, I want more, you know, more bass. That's when you start to create this thing because you and I can both use the same tool and get completely different results just based on how you're prompting and the words you're using and using more emotional words, especially with ChatGPT. If someone's writing sales copy and they just say, write sales copy for this product, they're gonna have very basic generic copy.

[19:21] But if you're saying, write this copy, but I'd really love to use my sense of wit and sarcasm. So can we make the headline a little bit snarky, but I really want those bullet points to be strong, so maybe more in the style of Gary Bensavanga, but again with my wit to soften it. So now you've got, that would be completely different than if we had the exact same product and you said, create a sales page.

[19:51] I want to make a million dollars, create a sales page for me. it is, It's really almost treating AI like you would treat everyone else. Hopefully you're treating people really well and giving it the prompts that have that, those more emotional words, I feel does give better results.

[20:16] And then the better results you take and that gives you the this canvas that you can work from and then add more soul even more. And I do believe that's what separates the people doing good jobs with AI and making it people would like... did you use AI or not. But they can't even tell because you're still using your personality and your feel because the end of the day that is still what's going to separate you. You the way you speak the way you write the way you communicate and your vibe because really at the end of the day it's It's still about the connection, right? Like people, they can get information anywhere.

[20:58] Now with AI, it's being built into Facebook and social. I mean, my dad, he's 80, he uses ChatGPT all the time. So it's not like this is a niche thing anymore. And it's just gonna get more and more mass adoption. So you have to find a way where someone says, Yeah, I know I can go to ChatGPT to get the workout, but I really like the way this guy Ryan says it.

[21:27] And I like his style. I'm going to trust him and I'm going to, I'm going to go see what he's doing. So that's where. Yeah. I'm just ranting here. See that all you got to do is ask me what you knew this was going to be easy. No, but I think Just ask me one question. this is really good because I always say this, ultimate competitive advantage in the age of AI is taste, but you have to know what taste is.

[21:49] Like you, Ryan, you know what good ~ copy is. So you can identify this a lot easier than let's say a beginner who maybe they haven't been around, they haven't seen too much copy, they haven't written it by hand a million times before, you know? So of course you and I, can know maybe what a good email is more than a beginner.

[22:07] So we're gonna be able to infuse more of our personality and actually do it in a way that works with the help of AI in some ways, but you have to know what is good or bad. I think that otherwise it's gonna be slop what comes out of it. Well, yeah, look, I agree, but I think it's a...

[22:27] What defines good or bad, right? Like, everyone has a different definition of what good or bad is. I just did a poll, I said, what were the most overrated bands of the 80s? And some people say, U2. And some people say, I love U2. So they say U2 is terrible. So who says what's good and what's bad?

[22:45] I will say this. In general, be a good human. Like, that's good. That's good. Like, if you sound like a robot, that's bad. Right? I don't care how how how many who else wants to headlines, old school headlines use. If you don't sound like a human who actually cares about the person you're trying to help.

[23:11] It's bad. And. A little test is. If you know you're infusing your voice, if you wrote that email, let's say you're writing an email to your list. If you wrote the email and a friend from high school was on it, would they know that was your voice? And if it's a no, then it ain't good, right? If they say, ~ absolutely, I knew it was you. I could tell by the way you write and I could tell your style and that little joke you did and that inside joke, it was 100 % you. But if it's not, if it could have been, it could have been anyone, then it's bad, right? Like, will you make some sales?

[23:52] Probably, but over time, you're gonna lose the trust because there's no connection. It just becomes blank words. And I love the fact that my family is, they're all on my list. My kids are on my list. My friends from high school and college and people I've grown up with are on my email list and they follow me on Facebook.

[24:16] And I like that because it keeps me honest. And if I would send the email and feel proud about it, that's a good email. If I would, like if I'm cringing before I hit send, I'm like, ugh, I don't know if I should send this, then it's bad. And I think that's, you gotta start there. And everyone, they get into the, to writing an email or doing a post and they suddenly stop being themselves and they start putting on the, I want to get my click through rate up.

[24:50] I've got, what's my call to action and where am I sending them to? And what's the latest TikTok trend? And then they, they sound like everybody else. And that's when you start to lose your edge. So I think just stop trying to play the game and just be you, right? Just be you. You can still use AI to say this stuff, but It's bad when you're not being truly who you are.

[25:14] I know that word authentic, it's thrown around and everyone, it's such a buzzword right now. I'm gonna save you money. You don't need a $2,000 course on how to be authentic or you don't need an authenticity coach. Just be you. there are people who are gonna like you and there are people who are gonna say, you're not my cup of tea. I'm sure there are people who are like, ~ this guy with his New York accent and his high energy, he's so annoying, I can't stand him.

[25:48] Okay, I'm not for you. Go to someone else. But there are some people that like my style. And if you try to please everybody, that is when you sound vanilla, right? Then it becomes a race to the middle. you're trying to, then you become that awful sitcom with that cringy laugh track.

[26:09] where it's just middle America and everyone's the same thing and it's so watered down and there's no soul left. So don't be that. So don't be afraid to play on the edges and lead into what makes you different. And if you're from the south and you're out there on the farm or you're on your tractor, be that. Don't try to be me, right?

[26:30] ~ So I think not knowing what's good or bad is just be you. If you're you, it's good. Be a good person. The person should always feel like you're in it to help them achieve whatever it is they're trying to achieve. And what I see a lot of people do is they mistake, man, I just keep going on rants.

[26:57] So I'm just gonna keep going. Sit back, in the early- have a cup of coffee while I keep going. This is why, see, I saved up, I haven't done a summit in years. I have all this saved up. Man, I love it. That's why I'm just, I mean, it's so good. I'm sure that people finding value and if you, I It's mean, Ryan's emails, I just want to share this here.

[27:16] They are very distinct. So you can tell it's a Ryan Lee email a mile away. You know, you can really tell. And I think you've always done it that way. I mean, in, ~ AI without AI, we can get into a little bit more where Yeah. in your process in the content creation, you use it. You have already shared a little bit, but I think that would be.

[27:35] quite good to share because you've been around without AI a long time and then now with AI. So obviously times has changed a little bit. Yeah, so the way I use AI is first, the core engine to my business is still my email. That's kind of my thing. ~ I never use AI for email. Not even a word, not a thought, not one single sentence because that is, that's me, that's my trademark, that's what I'm known for. Known for, I'm not.

[28:13] In my small world, right? That's what I'm known for is the ability to write these email and I write them all in real time. So I wake up in the morning and whatever's on my mind, I write an email about that. And there's usually call to action at the end for something, either a product I have or something that's coming up, but AI never goes near that.

[28:32] That's my sacred baby. ~ Then when I use AI for my business, it's more... for the traffic. And when I say traffic, traffic and monetization, but with traffic and monetization, it's all ideas, that's all it's for and it's mostly Having someone I can throw ideas to and and coming back with more.

[29:01] So for example if I'm looking to create a new program, I'll say okay here are three of Three ideas for my next product, you know something about a one-page newsletter or something about the recipe so you know here's three different things I'm not sure I I like idea number one, but I don't know if my list is ready for that.

[29:21] It might be too advanced Idea number two I think has potential but I'm still not sure because I did something like that last year and idea number three I'm excited about but I don't know if it overlaps with idea number two you know what do you think and it's been trained in my stuff so it kind of knows me and I'll say great stuff you know of course because it's always so damn supportive which you have to be careful with that because it could suck you into some bad ideas and so I'll say things like, don't be my cheerleader, give me real feedback, like pushback.

[29:54] And I'll say, these are great ideas. I like number two for you because this sits in this. I'll say, okay, well, if we were gonna go down that road and I'm doing number two, I'm thinking it would be $50, but I'm not sure, maybe a payment plan. Let's do some research and come up with three or four really good ideas. So that's what I'll use it for.

[30:13] Like kind of going back and forth, iterating on my original idea to begin with. I never ever go to AI and say, ~ Alright, I want to make money, what should I do? I don't do that because it's just... It gives you just crap. You've got to come with an idea. So for monetization and the same thing for traffic So even this morning I did a short video because I have my business stuff and I'm always experimenting I have my music label I do some recipe stuff and I'm doing now stuff more that's nostalgic and it's it's going really well.

[30:49] I'm doing three posts a day I want to test the volume and see and I'm playing on TikTok. I'm seeing what's working. What's not interactive So even today I did one which was a quiz, who wrote Manic Monday, because I wanted to try a quiz to see how it worked, and I said, you know, what would be a good call to action, and it gave me three or four ideas.

[31:08] I'm like, I like that one, and then it gave me some script, but I didn't use it anyway, I still use my own voice. So I use AI for that. Iteration, ideas, brainstorming, or I'll say, I like the Manic Monday one, because I came up with that, because it was Monday. I said, give me five more.

[31:27] fun facts about a bangle song or give me five other songs that have a really interesting hook to it with a songwriter and that is where it saves you so much time because instead of me going through hundreds of records or going on on what I would have had to do in the past is go to wikipedia and look up an album and see who wrote it and piece it together and ask a question in Google Who else wrote this and get?

[31:58] you know, shabby results. Now I can go to AI and it does all the research for me and 10 seconds later, five seconds later, three seconds later, it gives me five ideas. It's insane. And if you're not using it for things like that, you know, because some people get, they get very arrogant in their knowledge and like, well, if I don't know the five off the top of my head that I shouldn't be talking about it.

[32:25] Yeah, but it's just research. It's just helping you with research. When I was young and in high school and college and I wanted to do research, I had to drive to the library and go in the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System. And I still remember, like, business is six, five, eight.

[32:42] Right? If I go to library, I go right to six, five, eight, because I know that's going to be the business book. So it was ingrained in my head. But it's no different now, except now you have a computer going to the You know, all the books in the world and all the knowledge in the world and doing the research and helping you and saying, hey, I did all of it for you. You can stay home.

[33:00] Here's the best of the best. And now you start to infuse your ideas and your thoughts and going back and forth with it. I think that's how you get the best stuff. So that's how I use it for purely brainstorming ideas, coming up with new hooks. I'll have it. When I do sales copy for a product, it'll help me maybe with a headline or I'll throw a headline at it, like my first headline idea. I'll say, give me five variations. And sometimes it'll come up with one that maybe adds an extra word or takes one away.

[33:32] I'm like, oh, that's a really good idea. I never thought of it like that. So that's exactly how I use AI for my business stuff. Do you use any GPTs and stuff like that? I think you shared that you train it kind of in your style and stuff like that, yeah. or even for students. I actually have seen you share like, for example, your list building stuff, you have built a GPT for this.

[33:54] And so maybe you can share a little bit about that. And I think what would be kind of interesting to get into is that, I mean, you said the courses, course sales that is declining. And I think what's coming instead, how are you going to position yourself? What are you going to sell?

[34:10] things like that, I think that would be cool to talk about as well. With the GPTs, yes, I love GPTs. I like creating them where you don't have to be so repetitive with your tasks. you can, if you like a certain traffic style or a hook, you could train it with what you want. And then all you have to do is open up that GPT and just type the title and it gives you all the stuff instead of you having to restart.

[34:31] So what I noticed was I'm like, these GPTs that I'm building are really good. And I thought, instead of people having to hire me to coach them, because I just, don't coach anybody. I don't want to do any of that. It sounds selfish, but I'm at the point in my life, I'm 53, I just don't want to do that.

[34:48] I want to do what I want to do. And I don't want to coach people. So I created these GPTs that I use and then I make them even better. And I'm selling them for, so for example, my email. The way I write is pretty unique. It's more like a song and it has a rhythm to it. So I uploaded hundreds of my emails and my style and all that stuff.

[35:10] And I trained the GPT and I call it ~ Sip Type Repeat. And it's trained on my style. So people will go there now. They buy the GPT and they type in, I want to write an email for whatever, you know, women going through a divorce, I want the email to be about this. And it writes a full email in my style.

[35:36] Like, it gets really close. And then you take that. and then you kind of modify some of the words to fit your words. Like if you'd never, you're probably not gonna use a Van Halen reference, so you change that with something you like and your words, right? You may never use the word, ain't doing it, and you say, I'm not going to, so, but it gets you there. So I have those GPTs trained and I do offer them, and then I created a bunch and I gave people the resale rights to it.

[36:02] I said, here's five that are personal development, there's goal setting and habits that are really good. Copy paste. Here's the code, go sell it and make money. Because it's not that difficult. Now, I think it's not difficult to create a GPT, a custom GPT. I think it's difficult to create a good one.

[36:21] I think most people are lazy with prompting. And because I've become pretty good at it and go back and forth and will challenge AI and GPT to come up with something better, I think I'm... I've gotten pretty good at creating these GPTs and people say, well, could you teach me how to do it?

[36:38] And I said, no, because it's my brain. I think you could tell. think really quickly. I think on my toes, I have a really high emotional component, maybe too emotional at times. And I can't teach that. Is that right? You're either born with it not. So that's why I think I pour so much heart and soul into these GPTs and why they come out so good.

[37:02] So I'm giving people them, like, here you go, have fun. And I included password protection so people can either sell them as one time or monthly and change the password. So people are liking those. I created, I did my first test and people are really enjoying that. So I'm going to do more of those.

[37:21] You're not doing it on ChatGPT then or you cannot password protect there, Or you're using another. You can, Yes, you can. No. I was able to... right? I only had it like open. Actually you can actually. That's pretty cool. I built a really good prompt that builds password protection into it.

[37:40] ~ okay, you built it into it. Okay, cool. That's awesome. Yeah, so it's built in. So all you have to do is copy and paste the prompt and the password protection is built into it. ~ It took me a while to figure it out, but I kind of got it. But I get people are not going to be world-class like you having all this experience, right? Right off the bat that comes with practice and stuff.

[38:01] But if you could give some tips on how to actually create a good GPT versus the ones that don't get results. For example, if you wanted to do it for your own business or maybe for your own customers and students and stuff like that, what would you recommend? Basically rewatch what I've just been saying it's about adding that human touch to it It's it's not being cold and saying I want a prompt.

[38:28] So let's say you want to have a fitness thing. It's not You know create Ten workouts, you know and do them so they help people lose weight that that's not a good way to build a GPT but adding in... And giving it very strict parameters, you know I want it to have the workouts that are 10 minutes or less and bodyweight and less and you're gonna do it in this style and you could deliver it with this warmth and here's a couple sample sentences and here's a few sample workouts, so really almost look at it as like you're training a person if you hired someone to learn your system you're not just gonna give them one sentence and say all right have fun.

[39:11] Because what they're going to deliver is probably not going be what you want. So how would you train them? And that's how you build it out, really. ~ But I like to do GPTs that solve very specific problems. If you try to do a GPT that's big and broad and tries to solve two, three, four problems, that's when you get what's called drift, right? You get these things that start to drift off.

[39:37] And the further down it goes... If you have a GPT, I want you to create a six week workout for, I want them to just type in their age and you're gonna create a six week workout, six weeks of meal plans, the recipes, the shopping list, break it down to macros, give them their rest cycle. I want you to help them with daily meditations.

[39:59] I want you to just, you're asking for trouble. That would be three or four different GPTs, each serving a specific need. So I think people try to bake so much into it. And then it gets, it goes off topic and goes, it gets drift and then it to drift. And then by the end, the recipes are weak and the recipe will be like egg salad, eggs, mayonnaise. There you go.

[40:24] And you're like, that's not what I want. And then you get frustrated. So I'd say breaking it down, Yeah. to really specific, having a GPT solve specific problems. And that's what I've been doing is like, I have one that just write emails. I have one that's just about list building, I have one that's just about your hooks for traffic.

[40:43] And what I'm doing now is every time I do a training program, I build a GPT custom just for that, just for my students. So it's based, it's all, so I do the training and then I train the GPT on what I just taught them. So now they have a tool that they can use, which is a really good transition to your follow-up question, which was, okay, courses are gonna be in trouble, so what do we do? And that's one thing.

[41:15] So if you still want to quote unquote teach, right, and be the expert or the guide or the advisor showing them what to do, I think one smart thing to do is if you can, deliver it live. Even if it's a live Zoom or StreamYard or whatever you use, because that's what AI can't do right now, right? It can't really replicate that live feeling and that interaction and people being heard and being able to ask questions.

[41:47] So when I do trainings, it's almost always 99 % time it's a live cohort. I said, we're starting on Tuesday. We're gonna go Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, three days in a row at two o'clock. And if you can't make it live, that's okay. You'll get the recording and you can still ask questions ahead of time.

[42:05] So I think doing things live is a way to... Instantly separate you from the people, you know the big disgusting person in the basement, you know acting like they're a 22 year old woman influencer, you know. ~ But they can't do it live like you can so I think that's one way to separate but the second and a bigger shift is getting away from just trying to sell information and getting more towards smaller lighter leaner tools, prompts, scripts, getting as close to done for you as possible.

[42:45] People are busy, they're overwhelmed, they can get the information from AI. So instead of you trying to say, are the secrets by my course, you'd say, I'm not gonna do seven hours of webinars about fitness, right? But if you want my actual workouts, here's my six weeks of programs.

[43:07] You're get every set and rep and broken down and you'll even have an audio where I'm in your ear guiding you through the workouts. That now has value versus here's my $500, here's how to get fit masterclass. My God, enough with the masterclass. Like we don't need your masterclass anymore.

[43:25] Give me the tools, give me the prompts, give me scripts, get me as close to done for you as possible and I think that's how you win the game... is getting to that and I'm working on this concept now which I'm going to test out. Yeah. My working title is catalog continuity which is building out an actual catalog of these done for you prompts, scripts, things in different markets.

[43:48] I'm going to work with one person in personal development and I just did a call believe it or not with a guy. He's a priest. He's and I said how are you able because I'm Jewish. I don't know about a priest and I said why are you One of my students, he said, I'm in the Church of England, so I'm actually allowed to earn an income.

[44:08] But the idea was building out this kind of catalog continuity for him to sell these things. I can't give away what he wants to do, but.. ~ So I think that's really interesting done for you, but not necessarily video. think video has become to the point where it used to be really, really valuable.

[44:28] Now there's so much video and there's so much YouTube. I think leaning into the less is more concept and getting back to PDFs. One of my subscription programs is a one page newsletter. I sell a one every week they get one page where I give you the one thing I did this week. I tested and tried and here you go as opposed to here's a 30 page newsletter or here's a one hour training.

[44:54] Who has time for that? So I think PDFs and I'm really big on audio. I like audio. Good. Just having someone in your ear and guiding you through whatever it is you're trying to get them to is powerful. So that's the way I see things going in the future for monetization. And if you're able to market well, you know kind of taking some of the influencer route with brand deals and affiliates.

[45:22] There's really good income to be made by recommending tools with recurring commissions in just about any market or supplements. I mean, my most successful company was a supplement company. started it was like 15 years ago and I was I create a supplement company. I was the back end for all of the big fitness guys because I taught them marketing.

[45:42] We were paying our top affiliate over one point two million dollars a year just in commissions just to him. We were the back end and all he did was recommend our supplements and we gave him 30 % commission. Brilliant, right? He made over a million dollars a year. This was 15, 16 years ago. So there's stuff out there where you don't actually have to create courses.

[46:05] Yeah, no, I 100 % agree with you because when even back in the day when I started with Virtual Summit Mastery, it was never really a course. I never really resonated with that too much. I wanted to always give people all the resources, the done for you stuff they needed to host a summit.

[46:21] For example, it can be for anything, but I mean, I provided the templates. I was early with this like before Notion templates and everything came out. We had like website templates and funnel templates for you know, with everything they needed, the email templaes, done for you basically.

[46:36] So they didn't need to go out there to hire an agency or something to do it. They could just join the program and they would actually get everything they needed. I see the same now. I mean, now I'm using Notion a lot more. I mean, I find these resources doing really well. Mm-hmm.

[46:50] And I mean, anything that can be implemented, people can implement a lot faster, essentially. think that's all always people have always valued that. But I think now with AI being around that information is so accessible. I think it's just even more so. So yeah. Yeah. It's tools, right? It's just getting them to that whatever it is they want faster, right? And even in the old days, know, email templates, I would do that.

[47:17] I did an email course. It was like a two week bootcamp and showing exactly how to write my emails. And I gave hundreds of sample emails. Here's what to write. And then you just, you you write it in your own style and they'd have to copy and all this stuff where now with one GPT prompt, it could write the thing for you.

[47:35] I mean, it's... It's just insane where technology has gone. I am, I'm big on. Less is more and I think especially as of this recording, the economy's tightened up and people are just much more aware of what they're buying and they're looking at spending decisions much more closely.

[47:58] So I see prices kinda coming down. What used to be a $500 is like a 299. What used to be 299 is like 99. What used to be, oh no brainer, $99 eBooks is like $29. I think that the prices keep coming down. I have one of my students who is a personal development guy on YouTube and his years, two years ago he was making $20,000, $30,000 a month. And then it went to $18,000 and $8,000 and $10,000 and $5,000 and almost overnight because he was trying to sell the $500 course and the $300 thing.

[48:38] I said, let's try, let's opposite. Let's go $17 products. And because his other business basically went to zero. So he shut those and the first month, I think this is gonna sound like hype. And he emailed me, he did in the first 12 days, did, wait, no, it's 13, 12, he did $13,000 in the first 12 days.

[49:02] So it's like a thousand dollars a day by selling $17 products with no resistance. And he just gave them the thing. Here's the audio. 30 minute audio almost no sales copy there was it was like two paragraphs that was it $17 and all of a sudden people like I'm loving this and they're buying multiple and he's building out a whole catalog so I like that model now.

[49:30] Yeah, I have to ask you about this because you're me, you were the continuity guy for so many years. I think you still talk about it in your newsletter and stuff like that. But I think now with this, lot of school communities coming out, I mean, they have the courses, but they have it plus community and they are charging, you know, anywhere from $9 a month to I think hundreds in some cases.

[49:51] But I think the sweet spot anywhere from like $9 to like $99 a month or something. So some people are making a lot of money from that, but it mixes kind of the courses with community. What's your kind of take on that and now in the age of AI? I I think that's working better maybe than the just courses and information if I can see what I see myself at least.

[50:13] Yeah, I see with recurring revenue, I see two very distinct lanes. And with business, there's two things you gotta start with. Number one, obviously, is what's gonna be good for the audience, for the students? What do they want? What's best for them? But here's where people get it wrong.

[50:37] Then you have to be a little bit selfish. And you have to be smart and you have to know yourself. And then you say, is this something that I can do and that I want to do? Because you might say, for this particular audience, a community is really the thing. Like they need the community, they want to interact, they want to bond, they want to do all these things.

[51:01] I've got to build a community. But if you look at yourself and say, I don't want to run a community. You know, I just, I have no desire. I don't want to be in there. I don't want to coach them. I don't want to answer questions. I'm going to burn out in two months. Then you can't run a community, right? And, and this is what, this is where people get tripped up because they get excited about an idea and they'll go to Skool.

[51:32] Skool, not you know go to school. They go to the school platform. They're my god this guy has 300 people and they're paying 99 a month and he's making 30 grand. I'm just gonna copy him but they don't see behind the scenes and what they're doing and maybe they open it and they get a dozen people at first and they're and they're miserable and then you you quit it, but you're like, but this guy made so much money.

[51:58] So you have to know yourself... That's really really important. So yes, in some markets, a community can work really, really well. Skool, the platform is a little incestuous because it's a lot of marketers teaching marketing and teaching how to run a Skool program. If they pay $50 a month, I'll tell you how to get $50 a month people.

[52:18] So it's, I don't love all that stuff about it. It's very like bro energy and know, beards and oh dude, like, you know. It's not my world, but I get it. I get it. ~ But I do see either you build a community and I'm actually going to be building one in a market, but not it's completely different.

[52:40] I'm not sharing that right now, but it's not going to be that at all. It's not even in the marketing world. But there's a really strong community is still unbeatable. And that's how I made a lot of money at the beginning of my career was building communities for trainers and strength coaches.

[52:53] But on the opposite side, it's light and lean recurring revenue. It's like my one page newsletter where I said, there is no community, there's no group. It's me giving you a one page newsletter every month to reduce your stress so you can breathe. It's giving you relief. It's not giving you 100 ideas.

[53:19] It's giving you one idea a week that you can implement. And that works too. So it's not which one. It's which one's going to work for your market and which one do you want to run? I'm at the point in my life where I know I could build a marketing community and be in there and answering questions about funnels and all this stuff.

[53:41] I don't want to. I just don't. I don't want to do that anymore. And I don't have to thankfully I'm in a position. I don't have to so it can work, but I'm not doing that I don't want to I'm doing what? Selfishly fits me better is writing down my ideas and a one-page news that are delivering it every week Email it off and they love it and I love it and it works for me. So either it's gonna be light and lean tools one-page stuff PDFs GPT's prompts kind of stuff or community courses learning interaction live events that kind of world so those are the two buckets But I think the ones who are going to fail are the the quote-unquote traditional membership sites that try to be big and broad and everything to everyone.

[54:29] we got this we've got weekly webinars and we've got a group and we got this that is overwhelming that's when it's because they're making it all about the content and the goal and then we got the community and then people... They can't keep up the content and the community's weak because it's not the focus.

[54:45] I think if you're do community, community has to be the driver where they wanna stick around and be there and be in that world. Because it could be pretty lonely. People could be pretty lonely in this world. So if you can give them that sense, that can work. Yeah, that's such great advice.

[55:01] And I have to ask you, like if you were to start from scratch today in the age of AI, I mean, you can have maybe some of your experience and all that, but what would you do? What would you recommend someone else? Maybe that could be more valuable if they don't have too much experience and they are coming in now. There's they see, yeah, so many people, a lot of people are making a lot of money.

[55:23] There's obviously people struggling. It's like a lot of competition out there. So what would you recommend? What's kind of the path? to kind of get something up and running, to create content, to sell obviously... you need to have something to sell to be in business. You know, I get asked this a lot.

[55:40] ~ It's really, because it's moving so fast, here's the first thing I say, and it's not the answer you want, it's not the answer everybody wants or anyone wants to hear. I probably, now I know I have the skill to build a business, but like see, I would just say, get a trade. Like.

[56:12] be a plumber or electrician and you could probably make a half a million dollars a year because AI is not replacing you. Those jobs are desperately in need and you could start, you could hang up your shingle, you could be an electrician, you can go for a year or two of training. You could making hundreds of thousands of dollars and not even working that much and build a really good, and then sell it for 10 million dollars.

[56:31] So that is the truth. Like that, you know, it's infinitely easier to do that than to try to build a business with AI because the... It keeps moving so fast. so right now, so today, a really interesting opportunity is monetizing Facebook. Because Facebook is now letting you monetize posts and reels.

[56:57] And Facebook has a very shareable community. And you can grow that pretty quickly. And I know some guys make it 20, 30,000 a month. Faceless. But if I say, okay, that's what I would do now. And to be honest, I probably would. But I don't know how, you're depending on another platform.

[57:17] I don't know how long that window is gonna be open. Because Facebook next month could be like, if you're using AI as video creation, you're not being monetized. Or they may say, we're cutting it in half. Or who knows? It happens all the time. I don't love building my house on someone else's land.

[57:36] So... But if you're looking right now, opportunity, I would say it is that kind of stuff. It's building a platform. It's finding that niche. and going all in with content creation. I think what happens is we get so emotionally involved in every single post we do and we overthink every single post and every piece of content, whether it's Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube.

[58:04] And if one thing doesn't work, we doubt ourselves, we wanna switch markets where it is a volume game. And I tell all my students this, I'm like, right now, today, Three pieces I would do three shorts a day Absolutely in every market and put it on the main for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube... all in three a day depending on the timing of your market when they're up and all that kind of stuff but and there could be some that hit like I've only been doing this for now nine days in a new market on TikTok And I've had a couple posts that hit 20 30,000 views.

[58:40] I just had one on YouTube almost a hundred thousand already which is really interesting because It was almost a hundred thousand on YouTube, but 900 views on TikTok. So if you only played on one platform, you don't know what's going to work. But the one that got 900, I didn't give up.

[58:59] Oh, it doesn't work. Right. You put it out there and you get back up and you do it again. So I would say if you want to whatever you want to build, that's the way to attack it. And whether you want to build a personal brand or a business or a company or products, traffic is your oxygen, right?

[59:18] It's it's it. And to say and look, I love paid ads. I used to run them all the time for my businesses, but it's getting more expensive and you have to really be strong with monetization, with what is your flow look like and what's your what's your optimization and what's your conversion rate?

[59:35] And that is not a game for everybody. And it's expensive. So if you're going to go the free thing, whatever it is you want to sell, I would double down platforms because they're all free to use. It doesn't cost you anything to do three YouTube videos a day, three shorts or three Instagram posts.

[59:49] you nothing. Zip! And now with all the free editing tools and all you need is this. And this is all I use right now. ~ This is it. So in terms of an actual opportunity, it would not be courses. I would not say go out and start being an expert in a niche and create courses. That's not the way I would do it.

[1:00:11] I would do the volume game, get the attention. And once you have the attention, I'd monetize with lower cost stuff or affiliates or brand deals or a combination of all three. That's the game I'd play or just go to school and become an electrician or plumber because you're going to make more money anyway.

[1:00:24] It is not a game. It is not a game for the weak of heart. Yeah. It is not a game for people who are half in. You're either all in or you're not. And that's, that's the thing. And you have to have resilience and you have and maybe now because I'm getting older, I don't care what people think anymore.

[1:00:43] And if I do a video that bombs, it's all right. I don't care. Next. ~ And you just, you have to have that. It's almost, it's just like all mental. It really is. But once you have the attention, it's easy, it's much, much easier to monetize than coming up with a product first and then saying, okay, now how do I get traffic?

[1:01:10] Man, this is great advice. I think one thing I wanted to just ask you as we start to wrap up this session is like, what do you think of all the AI automation, the agents now... it's coming out the OpenClaw, the Claude Code is really powerful. Do you use any of that or where do you see this going?

[1:01:27] Anything you have to share about that? You know, I tried.. I was doing it with one of the, I was playing around with some Amazon stuff and I was using Make.com and how to got to do it. I didn't love it. was still, there were still some missing gaps in what I was doing, but my experience with it is admittedly pretty ~ is pretty limited at this point.

[1:01:49] I do think there's a ton of really good opportunity, but again, I don't like when it takes the human completely out of it in terms of the idea, not the work, right? So it's one thing to say, it's one thing, let's say traffic, right? It's one thing to come up with an idea. All right, I wanna do this one video about my special ~ hydration tip, you know what to add to water for hydration So it's one thing to come up with the idea then go to AI and say okay Help me come up with a good hook the good first three intro first three seconds.

[1:02:23] Okay, we got it and then you record it so you've got the human thing and then taking that and uploading it wherever you got to go and then it it takes it and puts it on Instagram and Facebook and does all that stuff that I like but if you have a thing where it says I want you to get me traffic. Here are the topics I want to talk about.

[1:02:45] Have at it. And now it's coming up with the idea and that's creating all the content, the video, and you don't do anything at all. Not even the idea that I don't like right now because it's, ~ that's when you start to lose a soul. And I think that's when, when everyone else can do it, then you've got to look the other way.

[1:03:04] Then you've got to see, well, how can I be completely different? And, ~ I think that takes away from what it is, I think the magic of being a person and being in touch with the people. But if it can automate a lot of the rote tasks, great. Even now, if I want video clips for music videos and some of my countdown things, there's no way to automate that because there's copyright issues, all this stuff, I can't do it.

[1:03:30] So I still have to have, I have a VA go and do the little trimming and getting the clip for each thing. I just, that can't be automated. It'd be great if it could be. I would 100 % do that because I would be telling them, here's the top 10, here are the videos, here are the ones to get the clips, get three second clips of each.

[1:03:47] That'd be great, it would save me money, but some things can't be done. But if you can, that's great. Yeah, I mean, I find that people who really care about the quality of their content a lot, like yourself and me, Ryan Levesque, for example, he shared also that he creates by hand his newsletter every week.

[1:04:06] But then now with AI, can repurpose that into different formats. That can be a video, that can be different things that he's, I mean, he's already also recording it, the newsletter and stuff like that. So. I think that is a lot easier now to spread it to different platforms. There's tools, I've heard like one speaker on the summit, Sabrina Ramonov, she has a tool called Blotato, which you can actually spread that out to different platforms, but it's your content that is going, it's not like a ChatGPT is coming up ~ with everything for you.

[1:04:34] Right. So I think that stuff is always useful. I mean, that's even been around with automation stuff even before AI, like I think Repurpose.io. was around well before and you could like repurpose that to different platforms. So I think that is always nice to save some time. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think those tools are great, but what you don't want it to be is a crutch, right? And you don't want to automate the soul.

[1:05:01] I keep using that word because I think that's the thing that separates us. And what annoys me is when you get some newbies like, I want to make all this and do other, but I don't want to do anything. I just want to sit on my butt and press a button and let it all go for me. And we're at the point it can happen, but it never works well.

[1:05:21] Right? You get a rare example once in a while, and then that, and then it was like trying to chase that shiny object. And it's just, it's just not a sustainable business. It's really not. So ~ I like tools to help, but there are certain things that I don't think should be automated.

[1:05:39] And I think the start of the idea and the concept and what's going to, what you're going to bring that's going to be a little bit different is the way to go. And then you can use tools to automate from there. Awesome. So where's the best place to connect with you these days Ryan?

[1:05:53] Is on Facebook, anywhere else you hang out, your website? I'm all over the place. Yeah, go to go to ryanlee.com. I have links to all the different things I'm working on and I've got a really big thing I'm launching soon. I'm not going to mention it yet, but that's coming soon. When you launch your, I don't even know when this is going live, but it'll hopefully be live in about a month.

[1:06:17] So that's gonna be my next, I think that's going to be like my last business. I go and then just kind of do that for the next 20, 30 years. Take me to the... to the finish line. We'll see. That's exciting. I'll link up all the stuff we talked about below the session. If you have any takeaways or comments, be sure to leave them below. And I appreciate you, Ryan, for coming on here. I'll talk to you guys in the next one.

[1:06:40] Ciao for now. Bye.