AI in Podcasting: What Works and What Doesn’t with Jonathan Green

AI is showing up in every corner of the podcasting world, and it’s bringing equal parts excitement and anxiety. We wanted an honest conversation about what’s real, what’s hype, and what actually helps working podcasters ship better work without losing their voice. So we sat down with Jonathan Green, bestselling author of 300+ books, celebrity ghostwriter, affiliate marketer, and host of an AI-focused podcast, to talk about how augmented intelligence fits into a human-first show.

We start with Jonathan’s origin story, including the moment he got fired during a blizzard and decided he never wanted a boss to hold that much power over his life again. From there we dig into podcast workflow: why recording is the easy part, why post-production steals the most time, and how AI tools can handle tasks like background noise removal, editing, clip generation, scheduling, and even drafting podcast show notes. The key line we keep coming back to: AI should be an accelerant, not a replacement. If the host isn’t interesting, no tool can save the show.

We also get tactical about podfade, building a show you’d actually listen to, and why guest selection matters more than booking volume. Finally, Jonathan shares a crystal-ball view of podcasting’s future, with smaller niche podcasts, deeper engagement, and fewer “bot-filled” interactions across the internet, plus a free master prompt to help creators get better results from tools like ChatGPT without becoming prompt engineers.

Subscribe, share this with a creator friend, and leave a review so more podcasters can find the show. What’s one part of your process you’d happily hand off to AI?

Connect with Jonathan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/servenomaster/
Artificial Intelligence Podcast - https://artificialintelligencepod.com/

Free copy of Jonathan's master prompt
https://servenomaster.com/chatgpt-profits.html

Transcript

Welcome And Why Communication Matters

Carl 0:04

Welcome to Communication Connection Community, the Podcasters Podcast. This podcast takes a deep dive into modern-day communication strategies in the podcasting space. We chat with interesting people who make the podcasting and speaking spaces exciting and vibrant. We also dive into the podcasting community with news, updates, latest trends and topics from this ever-evolving space. So strap in, it's going to be one amazing ride. Let's dive into today's episode. Artificial intelligence. Or as I have said on this show many times, augmented intelligence. It's one of those unknowns for a lot of people, a lot of trepidation, a lot of anxiety when you hear those words. A lot of people think their jobs will be eliminated in the podcasting world that we're seeing AI podcasts pop up. Where is this going? How is AI going to change the podcasting landscape? We have a person who is going to talk about this at great length today. He's an expert in the space. Jonathan Green is the best-selling author of over 300 books, a celebrity ghostwriter and a high-ticket affiliate marketer who now lives on a tropical island in the South Pacific. I know you're probably envious of that already. I know that I am, but you're in for a treat. He's a super great guy. He has turned being fired during a blizzard into a thriving online business. We're going to chat about that for sure. He is a podcaster and a sought-after podcast guest. And today we are chatting about AI. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

Fired In A Blizzard To Freedom

Jonathan 1:36

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I love timeout podcasting. I love timeout AI and showing how they can work together to make your show better, not worse.

Carl 1:46

I'm excited to dive into this. Before we do that, though, what not what got you fired, but this being fired in a blizzard and turning that into a thriving business. I mean, that's one heck of a journey to go from I'm fired. It's a crazy weather system happening right now. I could have turned this into the thriving business. Obviously, it didn't happen that quickly.

Jonathan 2:04

When you drive to work in a blizzard and you're like, I'm such a good employee, I'm not calling in like everyone else. And then you get there and they say, We're letting you go. And you're driving home and going, if I crash, it will be ironic. And you're playing that Lennon set in your song in your head over and over again. It's like, don't be ironic. And there's this moment you reach when you're an entrepreneur where you don't want someone else to have too much power over you, where you become at the time I was single, I didn't have kids, I wasn't married yet. And you realize, what if I had a sick kid? Or what if I had to pay a tuition tomorrow? You're so vulnerable that when you and a lot of people have discovered this obviously in the more recent years, that your boss has this inordinate amount of power over you. And this idea that sometimes people will email me and they'll go, Well, I'm from a really big company, I'm super secure. And then that company goes under. We've seen huge companies that we thought were too big to fail, and lots of companies will do downsizing or market shifts or due to like say things like macroeconomic headwinds. I'm not sure it's even a real word, but like it's not our fault. Like this, these headwinds mean we have to let you go. And it's really brutal for to them, it's just like math, but to you, it's like this is my entire existence. I put in five, 10, 20 years at this company, and there's this thing you go through when you start to realize loyalty is a one-way street. You have to at some point take over the decision for your destiny. And that's just what I went through. I realized that's like the revolutionary moment for it. I don't want anyone to ever be able to do this to me again. And that kind of led me on my journey to where I said, I'm just gonna start my own business. I've always thought entrepreneurship is for other people, but I'm just gonna jump in and just really try. When you can never go back, you can only go forward. So that's really what drove me.

Carl 3:41

Well, kudos to you for doing that. And you're right. And I actually worked on not in my full career, but as a broadcaster for a period of time, I worked on the side of things where we looked at headcount and we had to figure those things out. And you don't look at it from a human perspective, you look at it from a logistics or which one makes more sense. So it's just so unfortunately, that's the way it is. The other unfortunate thing is the, and this is the the human side of things, is the average individual is one paycheck away from everything being totally blown up in their world. Kudos to you for not only navigating through that, but doing it in a positive way that you were able to, and I'm sure there were stumbling blocks along the way. We won't get into that today, but I'm sure that you didn't just wake up the next day and say, Hey, I'm a successful entrepreneur now. Let's move to a tropical island. I'm assuming it didn't happen that way. There was a series of steps.

Jonathan 4:33

There's a lot of years of struggle, living in my mom's basement, living on my friend's couch. There was hiding under the window when the landlord walks by because you don't have rent this month. All that stuff is along the way. And the difference, it's all about you. If I make money this month, it's because of me. And if I don't, it's because of me. So it's high risk, high reward. And that's really the difference when you're the boss. Like one of my friends, he's the number two at a company, and the boss, he the company exploded. The boss made like $50 million, and my friend made $500,000. Like that's the difference between first and second place, between being the owner and being the number two, that you have all those risks. But if you're an employee, you get paid no matter what happens, right? The boss pays themselves last. There's a trade-off. We trade security for freedom or security for possibility of upside. And that really is what kind of defines a lot of people is that we want this element of security, but it's it's just not as real as we think anymore, unfortunately.

Why Podcasting Became The Bridge

Carl 5:27

That is unfortunate. The other thing that, and I don't know if you still get this, you might get it from a different perspective because you're originally from you're originally from California, right? Originally from California now, again, in a tropical place, and that's where you live and have found all the live long day, you've run a business very successfully as well. But I have people who say, Oh, you work from home, you're so lucky. I'm like, you don't understand. Like it's not luck necessarily because all of these things that you've just shared, can I make all my obligations this month? Can I pay all my bills? Firstly, can I make sure all of my team is paid? But can I make sure all my bills are paid? What is it? Where am I robbing Peter to pay Paul if it's a rough month for whatever reason? And having control of that, trading that so you can work from home and do that can be a pretty scary place and lonely place too. Again, kudos to you for doing it, sticking with it, and congratulations on all the success. What led you to podcasting? What was it about podcasting that made you go, oh, I need to bring my message there.

Jonathan 6:20

When I wrote my first book under my own name in 2016, I had one book and one product. I had a $97 course I was selling, and you can lose people so quickly. So I needed content to keep them listening to me while I was working on the next book or before I make the next product. I needed something to fill in that gap. So originally when I launched, it was just a solo show, it was me recording into my phone, walking on the beach. If you listen to those early episodes, you'll hear things in the background like chickens having a fight because I live in a part of the world where that's a job, and you'll hear stray dogs having a fight and me running away from like a pack of eight stray dogs and all the noises in the background. And because back then, like to get good sound was like impossible where I lived. And I just except I said, I'll just embrace it. For the first hundred episodes, there's a lot of that, and so I was putting out five episodes a week, and that's very hard to maintain on a solo episode. You have to come with an idea, you have a structure and crank out content constantly, but it was filling in that gap. So that was how I originally started. And for the first, then I slowed down to two a week and then one a week, and that's what I do now. And now it's an interview show and it's video because I've really changed directions a few times. But it started off with I want a place where I can maintain attention and engagement in between the other things.

Carl 7:36

I do like how you just shared too, where you started, you know, when you started the show, you had a ton of ambition, solo episodes every day. I started that way too. Not every day. I was three times a week and then three times a week, quickly became twice a week and then once a week. And then when I had other opportunities in the broadcasting space, open up because I started my broad my podcast when I was still working in radio and had a part-time business doing speaker training. Sometimes the podcast would take a back seat. There might be weeks at a time where I didn't do a show. But now I'm back in that routine where it's weekly and uh it's a good routine to be in. But I like how you said that you found a groove. And I also like how you shared that you've shifted things up a couple of times. I think one of the one of the trepidations when people come into podcasting is they don't know where to begin. They start and then they go, Yeah, I have a podcast. Keep the course and that'll be fine. But every now and again, things happen that force you, whether it be internally or your business or even externally, things you have no control over, like something that's happening in the podcast industry, to shift what it is that you're doing. Case in point is when I started my show, and I don't know what it was like when you started, but when I started my show, it was audio only. There were not, if you had a video podcast, it's because you had a lot of cha-ching that you could invest in. But most people had audio podcasts. Now it's almost the opposite where people have, if they have audio, they also have a video component.

Jonathan 8:59

When I started off in 2016, realize now that was nine years ago. No way would you do video. And what's really interesting is that I have a YouTube channel for my podcast and I have the RSS feed connected to it. More people, even on YouTube, take the audio only version. They will just watch a square of the logo of that episode and listen to it when right next to it they can click the one where the video is playing. You don't know how people are going to engage. I think now you mostly make the clips because, like for social media clips, is why you record the video more than anything else. You get a clip on TikTok that goes well or something like that, as opposed to people sitting and watching the entire video version. Maybe some people do, you just never know. But you want to create something that however people want to engage, they can. And that's really, yeah, now it's become like when you don't have any video, people like are shocked. I was a little late to video, and then you have to constantly try and get better sound, better video, better editing, better lighting. So you're constantly tweaking things, but it's an iterative process. I've made a lot of changes. I went through periods where I didn't release an episode for a year, renamed the show. So it was originally called the Servino Master Podcast. I renamed it about two years ago to the artificial intelligence podcast because you spend years building up, you have a back catalog, you have it ranked in the top two percent of shows. Why would you want to start over? And that was a big change for me changing the name, changing the logo, changing the description, and nobody complained. Like it was no downside. You just imagine that the things you think everyone's going to worry about, nobody cares about. And there are people who you can always tell when you get a new listener because you'll get a spike of downloads that's the exact number of your back catalog. Every time it happens, you have a big week of just getting these numbers, and nobody ever goes, Oh, how come you used to call it this? I even, when I switched the name, I had a bunch of pre-recorded episodes. So I was still releasing episodes where it said on the logo and on the graphics, Artificial IntelliSpodcast, but the audio was the old intro bumper and outro bumper.

From Noise Removal To Smart Automation

Carl 10:48

I had that too when I rejigged mine from Speaking of Speaking, because it was originally set up to be about professional speaking and tips and tricks and all of that, talking to professional speakers as well about their journey to Communication, Connection, Community. And some of the old artwork is still hanging around. But you know what? At the end of the day, most people aren't going, oh, the artwork doesn't match the content. If they're listening to anything, they're listening to the quality, they're listening to not just the quality of the audio or looking at the quality of the video, they're listening to the quality of the content and deciding, in some cases, subconsciously, I like this, I don't click or keep listening. But again, congratulations to the success and the growth of the show, too. Of course, when you came to the podcasting space, AI existed, right? And it was taking over the world. That was a joke. I think AI existed. I think we just know exactly in what capacity it was going to change our lives short years later.

Jonathan 11:43

Very rudimentary tools that were nothing you could use for prime time. And there were just some of the tools I started using back then added in AI features. Things we consider AI now, which is like background noise removal, is now considered an AI feature, but there were versions of that back then. What I used to use was fingerprint noise removal. So I'd have silence for 10 seconds at the beginning of an episode, and then use that to say this is how much background noise there is. And you'd have like a rooster going off, you'd have waves, you'd have sand, you'd have my feet. I would record walking up and down the beach in the mornings. So all of that sound I would try and remove. And that's an AI thing. And then trying to edit your episodes or create clips. AI got better and better, right? There was things that would help you pick a clip, but you still had to do it all yourself. And then now, like there's more and more automation to it, where now you can use a tool that will just spit out the 20 best clips and tell you and rank them by how good the clips will do on social media. And it's like, well, how do you know AI? It's really changed.

Carl 12:40

It's changed a lot. And I think that's part of the trepidation people have is they're going, okay, I don't know how this is going to work. I'm used to doing it this way. IATune too when the internet first came out, and folks are still creating manual spreadsheets and things like that. And now they have all these computer tools and they have the internet versions of everything, templates for everything. I think there's also the trepidation, it's the Wild West with AI. Like it's almost like we're forging ahead, not knowing what we're forging into. And for some, that's really exciting. And it's a scary thing to think about.

Using AI Without Losing The Human

Jonathan 13:11

The unknown is always scary, and there's good and bad uses of AI. There are a lot of people when they hear that I have an AI podcast, think that it's an AI-generated podcast, not a human podcast about AI. And those are two very different things. So there is fear, and especially in media markets, especially in the news, and especially like meteorologists. I can be replaced by AI. Kind of say that you have a fixed number of things you say as a meteorologist, right? Either it's gonna rain or not, it's gonna be sunny or not. There's not that many variations. Like that could be the first understand that fear. As a podcaster, it's not the content, it's the person. People listen to the show because they like me, not because they think I'm a genius. And that's a really important lesson. A lot of people think it's about expertise, but how often is there someone who's interesting and someone who's smart and you just listen to the interesting person, right? The fun person. The most important thing is to choose what you're gonna protect. The real value of AI is that it allows you to launch a podcast with less money and less resources. I see some of these shows, they have like six producers, they have full-time editors, full-time clipmakers. Unless you're gonna pour that kind of money into your show and you're gonna put $5,000 a month into it from zero and hope that it you get an ROI, which most people don't do. You need a way to get good sound. How are you gonna edit your episodes? So I used to edit my episodes manually. So I would record for half an hour, then sit down for an hour and listen to it and clean out the noises and remove the bad sections and add the intro and the outro, and then export that. And then you had to like master the audio to make it sound good. Then you had to compress it because podcasts were about file size back then because it was really a limitation. All of these challenges, it would take huge amounts of time. And now for me to process an episode, create social media clips, get it scheduled on three different platforms, edit everything, 4K video. It's two hours from the end of the episode till everything is done. And there's a ton that happens in there that we didn't used to do. And how many times have you been on a podcast or post episode and then no one the social media clips don't get made in time, right? Now that is a thing of the past. What I really look at as AI is as a tool to solve the problem. What are things that take a lot of time or cost a lot of money? And that's where I want to get the easiest part of the show is the actual recording. Everything before and afterwards, that's the really hard stuff.

Carl 15:25

100%. And again, you're right. I think for people who are looking at it from a budgetary standpoint and they want to get into the podcasting space, great. We do exactly what you're talking about. And when we use AI tools to assist us in the process of editing, cleaning up, color correction, all of those things. We're still using AI tools to make that happen. Uh the other thing, too, is that AI can't do it because there are a lot of people who are writing their episodes or using AI to create their content, but just make sure that it is content that is reflective of you and it's engaging content. And the only person that can make it engaging is you. It should still be your show.

Jonathan 16:01

I'm not either you want to have a scripted podcast, which and there are some really cool ones that are like fictional or like old timey radio. It makes sense to have a script. I had this really weird conversation with a potential guest a few weeks ago. He was like, Are you gonna send me the questions? I'm like, Well, I don't know what you're gonna say. Because if you get on and say something wild, I'm gonna talk about that. How can I possibly predict what you're gonna do? And actually, one of the big changes we made on my show recently is that I don't do pre-interviews. So we started scaling a lot, and I hired someone to do the pre-interview call. And I go, the reason I don't do it is because there's nothing worse than when I'm trying to re-ask a question and get the cool answer you said earlier and trying to get you to recapture that moment or you mentioned the pre-interview, all of that stuff. It's you want to create this energy that is interesting for you and it's interesting to be there. I use AI to fill in the other gaps, but I don't script it, but I will use an AI. I wrote I built an AI tool myself that like I'll feed in a guest book and it will suggest 20 questions to me and I'll pick one that I like from the list. That really is solving the gap. Like if you go on the Tonight Show, they have 300 people and that do the pre-interviews. I don't have 300 staff for my podcast. Like that's wild, but it allows you to do that to give them the experience of as if you've read the book, but actually pulls out the things that make sense for your show. I it will give me 20 questions and half of them will be not relevant. It can scan their website or the social media thing. That helps me fill in that specific role. So whenever I'm thinking of a tool, whether I build it or buy it, it's to solve a role that already exists, which is no like background noise reduction or something like you said, color correction. There's like AI tools that will help you with color correction now because that's really hard. If you have editing the episode, if you don't know how to do that, do you really need to spend two years learning how to use a video editing tool? Or you can use an AI tool that would get you like a B plus edit in five minutes. It's not gonna be an A plus edit. There's definitely always a difference when you have a professional in, and there's AI tools now that will like automatically zoom in and zoom out and switch angles and do really cool, like start to do cooler and cooler things that you just can't do on your own. So it's really to see it as an enhancement or to fill in these gaps of, well, there's no other way for me to do this right now. And maybe eventually you hire a team that can do those things, but it can get prohibitively expensive, especially if you're doing like five episodes a week or you just don't have that much time and you end up having to sacrifice something else. And that's really the use, is to really see it as an accelerant, not as a replacement. Like, I don't think anyone, there's tools now. If you want to have a podcast where it's two bots talking to each other, I don't think that's ever gonna work. No one's gonna listen to those. I don't think it will make sense. Even if you have like there's a tool now where I can use an AI to make it look like you and I are in the same room. I don't know that's ever gonna work. Maybe it will be interesting enough in the future. That's but I would still want two real people. I wouldn't want two fake AI people in a fake room. Like, because if anyone can push the button, anyone could push the button. That's a commodity, it's not special anymore. So it's really about how can I make the best show possible given my resources, whether it's time, money, experience, that if you look at any show, radio DJs are an exception because a lot of radio DJs do a ton of production at the same time. Like you're setting up one vinyl and you're recording a commercial and you're setting up the phone calls. That's the one area that's not a good metaphor. But if you look at any television show, whether it's the daily show or any of the tonight shows or midnight shows, whatever they're called, I don't watch any of those shows because they're on the middle of the day for me. But all of those shows have massive pre-production. Like the person is not coming up the questions live. They're pre-written by an assistant, then they're approved by someone, then the host sees them and they're written on that card. So just realize that you're just doing the exact same thing these other shows do. But you can't do is replace the host or a live kind of producer who's in the background yet. Those things are kind of the critical components for a show that really are the magic. And that's the part everyone wants to do, anyways. Nobody who's a podcaster is like, oh, my favorite part of my podcast is editing the episodes. No podcaster likes the sound of their own voice.

Carl 19:55

That's why I have a well, unless you've worked in broadcasting, get used to it. But there are definitely want to make sure that those tasks are being done effectively. And most podcasters, when they start out too, are editing their own shows or they have somebody that can quickly put it together for them. I have a team now that does all of that work. It didn't start out that way though. But the other thing that you said that's very interesting is I think that human element, yes, it's an accelerant, it's not a replacement. And I think it's not a replacement because we want that human element. And if anything, we and we see this more and more with younger generations, is they're moving more towards grassroots. We're seeing this in other industries where people are doing more gardening and their own farming, they're living off the grid, things that my generation never even thought about doing, even if it was possible, we didn't even think about it. Are we thinking about that? Okay, maybe at some point, yeah, we'll be living a little bit away from the technology side of things, uh, not fully, because we can't completely eliminate it at this point in our existence. But is there that thought that we need that human connection? And I believe we do need that human connection. I think we learned that between 2020 and 2022 when a lot of us were, well, all of us were locked down. But I think you're right, there's always that need, even though there are, and you've probably heard some of the AI generated podcasts out there, and you scratch your head and go, would I listen to this consistently and be engaged by it?

Jonathan 21:16

You just have to, with any technology, you have to decide, are you gonna hide or are you gonna ride the wave? And that's really it. It's important that there's a huge gap between reality and the promise of AI. Like a lot of people say these hypey things like AI could replace your entire team, and AI is gonna replace you, and AI can make a better movie. Like they always say, Pixar's in trouble, and it's like there's no AI video that's anywhere close to that. Like I'm at the core of that part of the industry, and I am like always like these videos are the worst. It's like if I wanted to watch bad 1990s clip art videos, I would watch bad 1990s clip art videos. These AI videos are so far from production ready, and maybe someday they'll be there, and that's possible. But if people want to listen to a podcast that's fully AI generated, you can do that now. With Google. They have a free tool that makes really good podcasts, but people use it to learn. So if you can't if you have trouble learning from reading a long article and you learn better from two voices talking about it, that's how people are really using it. And that's super customized. That's a real use case. Not every week I'm going to listen to two AIs talk about fake stories. It's like that's not what anyone wants, like a pseudo-news thing or whatever. It's only if you can choose the programming. I think that it's very important to know where AI is useful. It's great for editing the episode, it's great for finding the clips. It's great for cleaning up the background noise. It's great for scheduling your content. It's great for helping you prepare the episode or writing the show notes. Writing the show notes is an absolute nightmare. Takes like you have to end up because I used to have to re-listen to my show like three times because then when you're writing the show notes, then you have to do your time codes and all of that. All of the things that are were so horrible. That's the stuff AI can solve for you that are really hard to get right or cost a lot of money or a lot of man hours and now, or human hours, I guess you have to say now. And you just don't have to, as I want to separate human from AI hours. You don't have to spend so much time doing that, that actually opens up the market. And when I started, like podcasts were not profitable until very recently. Like only recently they start to become businesses, and you have podcasts that have like 50 employees. Video podcasts didn't have someone standing behind the video camera until like last year. It's like you set it up yourself many times, like one of the cameras will turn off or overheat or you'll lose the recording, all of these challenges that no longer exist. So that's really what you see is technology makes it easier, but the magic is still there. And I think that the value of the host and the value of the show goes up. Now we may switch to where there's so many podcasts that each one has like a smaller but like super engaged audience, but that's okay. That just means more people get to shine.

Carl 23:44

I think there are other things too to think about. If you're a podcaster or looking at the podcasting space, AI is one component, but one of the biggest challenges that we face in the podcasting space isn't the editing of the back end work. Yeah, okay, that's one piece of it. But the biggest thing is podfade. We've talked about this. I know that you and I connected through Podmatch and founder Alex San Filippo talks about this all the time. And he has his own uh think tank group that does this now to try and figure out, okay, how can we change this? And part of PodFade is thinking that things are going to be magical. And if we add all these tools, it'll be that much more magical. Well, you still have to get past episode 10. You still have to get past episode 20, 30, 40, 50 before you see or have a massive network or a massive established credibility, like a Joe Rogan who can basically wake up in the morning and have 10,000 new listeners because of something you've already done. Yeah, you still need to think about from a starting point. Okay, I can use AI tools, it's going to be fantastic, it's going to save me some time, but you still need to stay the course, right?

Jonathan 24:42

Podcasting is hard. The core part is that you have to be interesting. Most podcasts are wildly boring. Almost everyone says asks the same questions in the same order and doesn't really have an idea. So there's a huge thing where a lot of people just will take when you first go out, you'll take any guest you can get. And the problem is the people that want to be on shows are they've already been on a bunch of shows, and most of them have their pre-written answers. So you might as well be talking to a bot because they're like, here's my bio, here's my answer to this question, here's my answer to that question. And they don't, they're just thinking, I want to do it and get out, get my value, like get my voice out to a few more people. I don't know. I take maybe one inbound guest per year, like one person who asks to be on the show. And they're very the last one I had, this lady was so clever. She sent a picture of her standing next. She'd had a copy of my book that she'd bought. I was like, well, that'll get my attention. Because most people don't actually say they've read your book, but they haven't, or they'll say, Oh, hey, Carl, my favorite episode is last week's episode. And I really love your podcast called Podcast Title, including the subtitle, which no one would say in real life. Like, here's five bullet points. I have the idea of the perfect guest for your show. It's my boss. And I'm like, if you after work listen to your boss on a podcast, you have a problem. Like you have a major issue. Because if there's one voice I don't want to hear when I get home from work, it's my bosses during my free time. So it's like you're lying. And the reason Pod Fade happened, there's this belief that it's easy or that it'll happen really fast. And you don't put in the time. Like, like it's easy to say, oh, Joe Rogan show is so big. It's been on for like 15 years. Nobody listened to the first like hundred episodes. You forget that he's on episode like 1500 or something. Like there's a hundreds of episodes that nobody was listening to the time. It was just him and his friends. And it takes time to build anything. It's really, I know shows that didn't get profitable for eight or nine years. It's really that important part is that you can have these massive expectations and figuring out what do you want? So, like I try to get guests that most of the time they go, Are you sure you emailed the right person? I want you because no one, you haven't been on an OSA show, which means there's no burnout. If let's say someone's a fan of me, if I'm on 40 podcasts this month, well, they all sound the same. It's really hard to be unique, especially if people asking the same questions. You become a less valuable guest. So someone reached out to me, they're like, Oh, I've done 40, I've been on 40 different podcasts this month. I was like, Yeah, then I would never want to work with you because there's no chance that anyone's gonna search for you and then happen to listen to my episode. Once you change to that mindset of I want something very specific. So I look for a very specific type of guest that has a particular expertise. And I always have a question, they're always surprised. I had a real estate agent and I was like, Do people actually do VR tours of a house? Does anyone actually put on the goggles? I wanted to ask about because I was like, and how many times do you make like different fake, like AI generated versions of a room for people to look at? Does that matter? Because that's interesting to me. Or I had someone who does AI gamification for corporate learning. Now, and instead of doing like a boring seminar, you can solve a murder mystery on a computer as a game to make sure you've learned this year's like whatever the new rules are, or an art theft. And I was like, that's interesting. So you have to dig to it. If you're not interested in the topic, or if you're not interested in the guest, it's really, really hard to get through it. And I've had some guests that were real tough. There's a plenty of, there's a I've known quite a few episodes, and that's a little secret is that you're gonna have people you go, this person was the worst. Sometimes you're sitting there and just trying to get out because you hate them, but you don't want confrontation, so you'll stay for the 25 minutes where you're trying to get out of there, and you realize that you think this person's a moron, or this person doesn't know what they're talking about, and you're just like, Well, I don't want to start a war, but this I can't publish this episode, or they've given bad advice, they don't know what they're talking about, and that's gonna happen. So just be aware of that. So the real thing is you have to create a show that you would listen to. So my secret, here's my secret to us is that I have a very low threshold for boring. I'm getting bored, I'll get bored before my audience does, and I'll change the topic or ask a different question. It's like I'm always looking for that thing that's really interesting. You can even hear when I start to tell about guests that were good, my voice changes and my intonation changes. I get more excited, and that's what you want because you are the customer or the audience avatar. You're the representative who's there. So when you have a guest on it, you want guests that you're excited by. And you can kickstart with these tools and help you to start get guests to figure it out. But the sooner you figure out what you like and don't like and who you want and don't want, like people think because I have an AI show that I have founders, I never have founders. They always want to sell their product, which means now I have to test it before the episode. And then either it stinks, which it almost always does, I have to do a gotcha episode, or it's good, but it's like they just want to sell their thing, and I don't want to do that. Like I don't want to be a commercial. Figure out who you want to talk to, who you like, who you don't like, what you find interesting, and then that becomes how you build your audience. It's so hard to build an audience that likes things that you don't like. Now you're trapped.

The Future: Niche Shows And Real Engagement

Carl 29:34

In the beginning, too, some of those first guests you get, they're going to be colleagues who are in your niche. But as you build it out, like as you said, you've been doing this since 2012. 2016. 2016. And we're still talking infancy stages in some ways in the podcasting space, not like it is today. But you still you built it, you've made changes along the way, you've built it, you've gotten to where you are. Oh my goodness, you have shared so much value today, Jonathan. I'm uh I'm so glad we took this time to uh to chat. Before I uh wrap things up, crystal ball moment. This time of year, let's say three years from now, where do you think podcasting is going?

Jonathan 30:10

I think podcasting is going to fracture. So I think that people are gonna find smaller shows that they really like where they can send in a question and it gets read so they can have a higher level of engagement. So I think it's a big opportunity for a lot of people to create super targeted shows to talk about topics they're really passionate about, that we're gonna see engagement or personalization is going to become the new future because pseudo engagement, bot comments, all of that stuff is like ruining the internet right now. And people are bored of that. So, what they want is something where there's that human touch that you mentioned earlier. So I think that's the future. I think we're gonna see a lot of social media stuff kind of fade away as we go. It's all bots, like, and nobody wants that. Like nobody actually wants to listen to an AI or talk to an AI that is pretending it's not an AI. Nobody's interested in that. We're gonna see that podcasting, it's entering a really popular time right now. And I don't think it's I don't think the bubble is close to bursting. I think the bubble is close to fracturing. We kind of enter the phase where you have a lot of really big shows for a while, but you're gonna start to see smaller shows with an audience of maybe 500 or 1,000 listeners, but they each pay you $10 a month becomes all right. Now you're making $10,000 a month. That's not so bad. That's a real living. You can be hyper-personalized. I have a show I really like that I the guy's Patreon doesn't let you donate money. And I was like, I wish you would so that you could make more episodes. We're gonna see that where I would rather, if I'm gonna like subscribe to a show, I want it to be someone small enough that it matters. That makes sense. So I kind of think that's the future, but I think the future is bright. I think that their opportunities bigger, especially for people who are older or expertise in smaller markets. You don't have to be as technologically savvy anymore. And instead, you can just do the thing you love. I think that we'll eventually get to like the tools that I've kind of gerry-rigged or built myself will become more and more common so that you can have a pre-production, like all in one AI tools that have the pre-production. They'll help you plan the episode so you can make a better episode, and they'll do that more and more with the post-production so that you can more easily enter the market and kind of do your V1 or your first version of your show before you start getting more advanced. So at least you can get something out that's okay and find your voice.

Free Master Prompt And Closing

Carl 32:18

Wow. Great insights on that because I agree. I first I don't think podcasting is going away at all. I think it's that there's an evolution. I think we've seen it go through many different stages, even since I've been in since 2019. So I was a little late to the late to the table too. But I think we're seeing this change, and I agree that I think we'll a lot of the, you know, we call them smaller shows, but those big shows, and they're not going away, but I think those bigger shows will still be relevant. People will still listen to them, they'll still engage. But the smaller shows will have an equal play or an equal relevance, shall we say? And people sit up and take notice because they are focused and they're niche, and people want to be able to be able to have their comments read, for example, like you indicated. And and you know, if you're sending a comment to a show of 100,000 listeners or more, that what are the chances your comment from Gananoque, Ontario, is going to be read. They're probably gonna look at the sit the town you're in and go, they can't even pronounce the town's name, not reading that comment. Oh my goodness, great insights. You've got something to pass along to our audience. You've got a checklist or something that you wanted to pass along.

Jonathan 33:23

I have this special gift that's gonna be in the show notes and it'll be below the episode that you can get a free copy of my master prompt. What this does is it switches any AI, Chat GPT, Deep Seek, Anthropic, whatever one you like to use, into cooperative mode. So instead of you having to be a genius, it will ask you the questions and it will be conversational and it really bypasses that original learning curve. It's a very simple structure that lets you you kind of let the AI know that it's allowed to ask you questions and that it's gonna be a multi-part conversation and it bypasses two of the biggest limitations in AI coding. Basically, it means you'll get better results without having to become a prompt engineer or learn any prompts. 90% of what I do just comes from this two-sentence prompt. I call it the master prompt, bypasses it, like the master key, and it lets you bypass all the hard stuff.

Carl 34:04

And as you said, that'll be in the show notes. Also in the show notes will be your social handles and the link to your website, Artificial Intelligence Podcast. All be there for you to engage and connect with Jonathan. It's been a great conversation, Jonathan. Thank you so much. Before I turn you loose, I'll give you the final thought.

Jonathan 34:20

The best time to start a podcast was in 2004. The second best time to start a podcast is today.

Carl 34:26

I love it. I haven't thrown it back to 2004, but I have definitely used that line. It's a great place to end it. And you're right, there's no better time than today. So, Jonathan Green, thank you so much for being my guest today. Thank you for having me. And hey, thank you for being a part of the show today. So glad you could join us. Believe it or not, I can't work this magic by myself. So thanks to my amazing team, our audio engineer Dom Carillo, our Sonic Branding genius Kenton Dobrowolski, and the person who works the arm, all of our arms actually, our project manager and my trusty assistant Julovell Tiongco, known to us here simply as July. If you like what you heard today, let us know. You can leave us a comment or review or even send us a voice note. And if you really liked it, we hope you'll share it with your friends and your colleagues. If you don't like what you heard today, well, please feel free to share it with your enemies. And if you know of someone who would make a great guest on the show, let us know about it. You can get in touch with us by going to our show notes where all of our connection points are there, including the links to our website, LinkedIn, and Facebook as well. And if you're ready to be a guest on podcasts, or even start your own show, let's have a conversation. We'll show you the simplest way to get into the podcasting space and rock it. Because after all, we're Podcast Solutions Made Simple. Catch a game next time.