Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this solo episode, Jonathan returns to the classic format of the show, focusing on the strategic use of Artificial Intelligence in business and personal projects. He shares his insights on how to avoid unnecessary costs and make the most of AI tools.
In this episode, Jonathan discusses the challenges and misconceptions surrounding AI tools in the market. He emphasizes the importance of selecting the right tools that offer value without breaking the bank. Jonathan walks through his personal tech stack, explaining his choices and the cost-effectiveness of each tool. He covers various aspects, from email hosting and audience management to AI-driven content creation and editing.
Notable Quotes:
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Connect with Jonathan Green
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this solo episode, Jonathan returns to the classic format of the show, focusing on the strategic use of Artificial Intelligence in business and personal projects. He shares his insights on how to avoid unnecessary costs and make the most of AI tools.
In this episode, Jonathan discusses the challenges and misconceptions surrounding AI tools in the market. He emphasizes the importance of selecting the right tools that offer value without breaking the bank. Jonathan walks through his personal tech stack, explaining his choices and the cost-effectiveness of each tool. He covers various aspects, from email hosting and audience management to AI-driven content creation and editing.
Notable Quotes:
Connect with Us:
Connect with Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green: Is AI costing you too much? Find out what's going wrong on today's episode of the Artificial Intelligence podcast, today we're going back to the original format, the classic. Format of this podcast, which started way back in 2016, which is the solo episode. I wanna dive in with you guys into some important things when it comes to your overall artificial intelligence strategy, because I see a lot of distraction, misinformation, and overwhelm out there, and I don't want that to happen to you.
So I'm gonna take you through a couple of key steps in the process to understand where and how you should use tools and how you can avoid tools that are costing money. You don't need to spend. Right now a lot of tools are adding in features that are just chat GPT-3 0.5, the free version of chat, GPT, and charging you 20, 30 and $50 a month for it.
It. Can get very expensive when you end up using multiple tools. So the platform that I use to host the audio version of the my podcast first, they came out with this really cool feature to do audio enhance. You pay a little extra every month and they turbocharge the audio every month and have a good AI for that and does a great job.
And now they'll be like, Hey, we'll write your show notes as well. And it doesn't seem like a big deal 'cause it's oh, it's just $20 a month, but it starts to nickel and dime you. And if you have multiple projects or multiple things where you're using tools like these, it's gonna start to add up and suddenly you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
Now I want to take you through the tech that I'm using and exactly how I've pushed down my overhead and what some of the biggest costs have been in running my business and where things can get really. Expensive if you take your eyes off of them. So some of those dangerous places are running ads. Ads can get really spike very quickly if you're not watching and you're not maintaining them.
The second place is any platform that charges you for scaling. For seven years until last week, I was a customer of ConvertKit. It's a great platform for beginners. I've been an affiliate for a long time. I just closed both of my accounts last week because what's costing me a lot of money, a couple things happen.
The first is that every time you list hits a certain size number, they increase your bill. And if you lose that number, so let's say you have, you crossed the bridge and you have 10,000 subscribers. So now they move you up to the 10,000 subscriber plan, you pay a little extra. If you have 10,001, they're gonna charge you that.
If you drop down to 9,999, they're not gonna drop your bill. You have to manually ask for it. So every one of these platforms does things that I think are a little disingenuous. So instead of adaptive pricing, it only moves in one direction, the direction that benefits them. So if you don't catch it and complain about it.
They'll bill you that way. Now all of the different providers do this kind of thing. AWeber is guilty of if someone unsubscribes, they still charge you from someone who you can't even email anymore. And I dunno if they still do this. They were doing this years ago when I was working, that was 10 years ago when I caught them doing this to me, I was like, wow, I have a huge bill for a small list.
And I realized I was paying for over 10,000 people that had unsubscribed. So I was paying hundreds of dollars for people. I couldn't even email. So over the past year, one of the things I've done, which has been very scary, is move to a self-hosted email solution. And that means it's a lot more technical stuff.
You have to go through a little bit of pain. But it gives me total control over my list. I email through several different platforms. They still have good deliverability. It's still little technical hiccups, but because I'm in control, I can fix them, right? And so I'm working through each of those processes and getting better and better, and constantly tweaking, and I have total control.
It also means that someone else can't mess with my account because they made a change at ConvertKit last week. And what happened? They deleted 90% of my list. They go, oh, we made a change. We didn't email you about, and all you have a setting. So I have a high security setting on my server that basically says, Hey, if an email doesn't get sent with the correct authorization, don't send it through.
And ConvertKit basically said, Hey, we, because you have security, we've take, we've, you can't email your list. So they made a change. They did it on Christmas day, which is a coolest day to do it on and. What a process to go through. So I figured out what it was. They made me change the settings. I was like, I don't know about changing this dropdown setting.
I changed it and turned out they gave me the wrong advice anyways, and it still wasn't going through. So I go, you know what? I'm not doing two rounds of this. They deleted the whole account again. I go, listen, I do. I keep a backup. I've already moved everything to my own server. I need, this was a kick in the pants I needed.
I'd already closed one account. This pushed me to close the second account. Anytime you have a part of your business that's on someone else's platform, you're beholden to them. I do know people who have been with different email autoresponder services and they've had their entire accounts deleted. A lot of autoresponder companies will violate whatever you think your privacy is.
They will read all of your emails. They will, some of them will do things like steal your customers. I don't wanna name too many names, but I know a couple of platforms that have got been caught doing this, where I'm using the email service and then saying that email service is emailing all of my customers saying, Hey, Jonathan uses this.
Should you use it too? And not, I'm not an affiliate. I'm not getting paid a commission. They're basically leveraging my work. It's not cool. I'm not into that. It's not how I like to do business, but that's the danger of anytime you use a similar platform. So I built out my own self-hosted email server.
Even my. SMTP. So if you email me and I reply to you, one-on-one that also goes to my own server. It's completely under my control. It does mean I had to learn some Linex stuff. But that's the beginning of this journey is going, what are things where I can control the cost? So I know that's not exactly an AI tool, but it's actually the first place that people have a lot of costs.
A lot of people will have an email list of a couple hundred people. You're just starting out. You have a couple of people and you're locked into some company that you're paying a couple hundred dollars a year, right? It's $20 a month, $30 a month, then you just can't leave. 'cause you don't wanna lose that audience even though you're not emailing them every day or not generating.
So I always look at, do I make more money from using this tool? Then it costs me. So I even last year, at a certain point, I had five different providers and I was mailing from all these different places. I was like, this is insane. It's so much work. Every email, I have to write five different versions of it to send it for my different accounts and I hate it.
Now I just consolidated everything, been working on it for two or three months, and it gives me that level of control. So the first thing to look at is taking control of your email list. The second thing you wanna have control of is. Your like audience to your website. So a lot of people think, oh, I have a large social media audience.
The dangerous, you can lose it. And if you have that email audience on a platform you don't control, you can lose that as well if they delete your account. I know people that have lost account with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers. If you don't automatically back up your list, you have to fight for them to give you a copy of your customer base.
And that can be a really tough, so it's better to start thinking in advance now when it comes to ai. A lot of platforms are making some really big claims and it can be very confusing as a consumer to go whi which tools do I need? And I see a lot of people recommending stuff and I actually even recommend stuff then stop because I stop using it.
So I'm always try, I always go back to this. I only pay for a couple of tools. Tell you what I pay for right now. I have two chat GPT plus accounts. I have a Midjourney paid account. I have a Leonardo paid account. I have a Gling paid account, which is just I. I was using that this weekend for a project and it was absolutely worth it.
I paid for an entire year in advance 'cause this is working and I just want to not have to deal with this again. I don't wanna have to deal with monthly billing. I just wanna get it done because I'd been testing it for a while. I have tested other tools that are platform specific, like I was playing around a lot with Tapio, which is a LinkedIn kind of content management system, but.
It's just chat GBT. It's just a friend for chat GBT for what it costs. The only thing that it does well is allowing, is like a comment management system. 'cause no one has comment management for a personal LinkedIn profile except for them. But it's just, it wasn't the right fit for me. It's still a great program, but it's not right for me.
And it's a little expensive at $50 a month, so you have to decide if it's right fit for you. It may be. So there are tools that I'm lukewarm on. I'm like, okay with it, I just wasn't right for me because I'm so good at doing everything inside of chat, GBT. So sometimes what we do is we're so afraid of learning how to do something inside of chat GBT.
We just go, oh, someone else has already written the prompt for me. I'll just use their software. 'cause all that, these tools do. All Tapio does is when you click one of these buttons, it says expand my tweet, or, sorry, expand my LinkedIn post. They have, they also have a tweet one called tweet hundred.
It's the same brand. All they're doing is taking what I wrote, adding a chat, GBT, prompt, sending the chat, GBT, and then sending back to me the response. So all you're really paying for at $50 a month is organization and then their collection of prompts, and my LinkedIn prompt is better. It's the most important thing to understand is that if I can get a better result so I can train LinkedIn to sound like me.
I can get chat GBT to sound like me, to sound more like my voice. Whereas when you're using someone else's tool, you often don't have that opportunity, right? You're limited to what there are, and so everything that gets posted starts to sound the same, and that's what you wanna watch out for. So the first thing, if you're thinking about which tools you need, 90 to 99% of tools out there are just front ends for chat, GBT, or they're just using the chat.
G-B-T-A-P-I-I built software on top of it. I don't know how to build software. So this idea that. All these other tools, these enterprise level tools, most tools that are enterprise level are like 99% profit because they're business to business and they're selling to businesses that don't realize they're just paying for like a neutered version of chat GBT 10 times more.
So I really recommend that before you spend anything big, okay? Don't care how big your company is. If you think you need an enterprise level solution, like the odds of you. Getting like just drilled. If you're purchasing anything from someone who does enterprise level ai, like it's over 90%, the odds that they're overcharging you or selling you an inferior product, that's actually free.
Remember, chat GB 3.5 is free. Okay. Some of them are even using APIs from open source APIs, so they're literally paying nothing. So you might pay $10,000 a month and their overhead is $4 a month for the API costs. That's how overcharging they're doing. And that's the problem right now with the market is the opportunity is so big is that most people don't know what they don't know.
They don't know what AP AI should cost or what they should do. So before you invest in anything, lemme tell you the tools you need. The first place, you need a foundational tool, which is a text tool. Okay. You need something using to write. It can be Claude. It can be gr, the Twitter one if you want. I don't have a lot of experience with that.
I did sign up for it, but I never got a notification that I got access. I haven't checked in a while. It can be chat GBT. That's the one I use and that's just the one I started with. They all accept the same prompt, so it's not that huge of a difference. And it can be a free open source one, right?
It can be Mytral, which is the hot open source one right now. So you can actually download and install a free. An entirely free one. AI on your computer. I covered that on my other channel. The Serve No Master Main channel. I have an entire training video showing you how to install one and get it up and running.
It takes about five minutes and you can run an AI that's as good as chat g, PT 3.5, absolutely free so you don't have to pay anything. Okay? Just a convenience and power of your computer factor. So if you have a weaker computer, it's a little bit slower and it's not as powerful. That's the trade off, but you can get better as and by the time this comes out.
I'm recording this a little bit in advance because my guest for tonight didn't show up. Guess what? The free, a open source sales will be even better and better. So really that's a great place to start. So you need something used for text, for writing. The second thing you need is image generation.
Now I know Chat, GBT has Dolly three built inside, but it always looks like a. A dolly image. A lot of people, especially on LinkedIn, are really leaning into Dolly and it's very obvious and it generates a lower quality image. Now, Dolly is better for prompt consistency, so if you have a really complicated image, it will, it's more likely to put the right things in the right places, but the image won't look as appealing.
So I really recommend you lean into Midjourney. I do use Leonardo if you're an artist or you're more talented. Leonardo is just very powerful. I struggle to get. Good results for Leonardo and that has nothing to do with them. That has a lot to do with me because it's just so powerful. It has a higher learning curve and I haven't spent enough time on it where I spent a lot of time with midjourney.
You can, again get free AI generation tools, but when you can get some amazing tools, you can even get stable diffusions paid version for $20 a month. So if you do, you should really think $20 a month for my text tool, $20 a month for my image generation. I think I pay, I think I'm on the $12 a month for Midjourney, I think.
'cause when I signed up, I bought an annual plan, I think it was that. That's really the place you want to be. So I have these additional, because I have a large, because I have a large company, I do a lot of ai. I have a second chat GBT account, and I have the Leonardo account that I originally got Leonardo so that two people on my team could be doing image generation at the same time because the way Midjourney works, I couldn't give two people access to my account at the same time.
And creating a second account that I control was too weird. 'cause it has to be, you have to log in through Midjourney. If I could have created a second way, I would be just a second Midjourney account. I don't mind. Those are the two main tools I use. Now, if you're going and doing other things, if you're doing like print on demand or if you're doing a lot with video, then it makes sense to then add a specialized tool here and there.
So if you're doing, if you're looking for like a tool for image editing, I. An AI tool to like you're taking, doing photography, you wanna make your pictures look better. Luminar Neo is very interesting. I just bought it myself. What's cool is they do have a lifetime license. It's not a subscription. I'm always looking for that with tools right now.
So my email platform, the software I use, I paid a one time license fee. I don't pay an annual or monthly subscription and then I just pay server fees, right? For how much server power I use. And that is, I have two servers, one that hosts. tHe email sending platform that costs 20 to $25 a month for, and it's billed based on usage.
And then the other one that hosts my email, inboxes and outboxes, that one is costing me I think like $50 a year or something like that. So very low cost for that one. Trying to give you guys real numbers 'cause it's so hard when I follow a large creator or someone I look up to and I can't understand what things should and should not cost.
So I'm giving you guys real numbers. I hope that's okay with you. 'cause I've just been cutting my costs down, right? So at one point I was, I had a maximum. ClickFunnels account and a maximum Kartra account and a maximum Groove Funnels account. And I had a maximum, and I had two converted accounts. I was spending thousands of dollars a month on the ability to send emails and build pages.
And I've just been pulling back and going, this is. It's just inefficient. So what you should think about with AI is it should be very affordable. It should be really powerful, and it should really save you a lot of time or save you a lot of money. So I just started using gling, which I have made some review videos for.
gling is a tool that will automatically edit your videos in a very specific way. What it does is it automatically removes mistakes. I don't make a lot of mistakes when I'm shooting videos myself. So if you write a transcript and then you shoot it from the transcript and you make a bunch of mistakes, you can upload the script and you upload the video to Gling.
I. It's all done on your computer and it takes a couple of minutes and it will mark out all the mistakes. It's not perfect, but it's about 80% accurate. It will let me edit a video instead of it taking an hour, it takes me whatever length of the video is. I just have to watch the video once and uncheck a few things, check a few things that need to be muted out, and then otherwise it comes out with a really great result.
So it will take the best of multiple takes and it's very quick. It's $15 a month. I was on the fence about it because there's other ways of editing that I can look at the script and kind of edit back and forth. But the gling is so fast that the one thing they do it well enough that it's worth it.
And again, it's not a crazy expensive tool and it only makes sense if you make a lot of mistakes. So I don't use it for myself, but when I'm doing editing videos for clients, it's made a huge difference because I've shot so many videos that I don't need to edit out that much of what I say. I don't make a mistake and then re-say the line.
'cause if I'm going from if I'm reading a transcript, what I'll actually do is just reread the whole thing. And if I make more than one mistake, I'm gonna re-shoot the video. That's just me, because that's my process. However, I was working on a client project yesterday. Oh my gosh. It saved me so much time.
So I'm a big fan of that tool. The next thing you might need is an image upscale, or there are some free ones online. I bought Topaz, gigapixel, I think it's called Gigapixel Excel. It's $99. They're always on sale. It's always under a hundred bucks, and it's a one-time purchase. They send updates every single day to their algorithms and it just upscales really well.
It does one thing and it does it very well. So a lot of the images I get from Midjourney, they're low resolution now. It Midjourney has added their own upscale. And I cover this in a recent video as well, where I was testing the upscale and I actually, for an image, I didn't like it. They, the image was different.
They didn't just enhance the image. They actually created a new clearer version of the image. And it changed it enough that I go, oh, I'd rather just upscale the other image. It's just a different way of doing it. The issue is that upscaling can take a long time, so it costs a lot of server credits, so it could take a couple of minutes outta my 15 hours a month of credits with Midjourney.
And I bought Gigapixel before Midjourney had upscaling as an option. So if I want to get like a really high resolution image that's like in 4K, like this video's in 4K, that's what I'm gonna use. I want you to really think about what tools you're using, why you're using them. Look at each tool that's part of your set.
Like I look at my bills every month and go, what am I paying for here? Is there a reason I'm doing that? Is the reason I have this license or is have this subscription? Is there something I can do to get out? 'cause it's easier to save $20 a month. That is to make extra $20 a month and. I want to encourage you to seek efficiency just because right now we're seeing this massive glut in the market of companies promoting and saying they're all AI and they have this new revolutionary tool and they're not that great.
So another thing that I do a lot of is creating social media clips from videos like this one. A year ago I bought a subscription to video V-I-D-Y-O. That's the one I use. But now the platform I record on Riverside, they'll actually make clips automatically as well. And the one thing video does is like automatically schedule them for me, the one they have a scheduler built in, which is nice.
Other than that, it's really, there's probably, I own six tools that I'll do it, that I'll have that feature built in and you just choose which one you like the look of, so you don't actually have to pay it as a second tool. What it used to be a tool, now it's become a feature and a lot of other people use Opus.
I know that. And I just have looked at what they do and when I get the results for Opus, they're never, they're just ne, they're not as good as what I get from video, from my content. As I look at what it picks from the, I'll upload the same video to both, and I'm like, God, it's not different enough that it's worth me changing.
So that's the difference. But right now you can get clips from Riverside. I can get the clips generated by script. And that's the next tool that I wanna talk about is for video editing. Descrip, I. Has been a tool I've promoted for so long just as my favorite transcription tool, and now they've added so many features.
They've actually added an amazing green screen feature. They've added an amazing audio enhanced feature. I just made an audio enhanced comparison video, and I was shocked that it was better than the specialist tools. I. It's now my favorite audio enhancer. I'm gonna ru me running a lot of stuff through it.
I may start editing my podcast in it. In fact, go back to doing that 'cause it can do it 4K. It's just really very impressed me. Impressed me a lot with what it can do and really surprise me. So script is really great because it has an amazing green screen tool. It has an audio enhanced tool. It has a tool that will, like if I'm looking off screen, it'll make my eyes look at the camera and they're constantly improving it.
Really have been impressed with some of the changes they've made lately, and I haven't paid that much attention. It's a tool that I've had a subscription with since it was in beta. I was a beta user and they've just really gone the extra mile, and I've been very impressed by that because I. It's just gone from being a transcription tool.
Just a really powerful video editor. For a while I found it annoying, but now I'm seeing they can do some very cool stuff. They have a really high accuracy level, so if you wanna edit via text, they can do that. Riverside also does it. Riverside is who I use to record my podcast episodes. It's a little bit expensive, but it lets me shoot in 4K and that's great because I'm, why I use a 4K camera if I can't give you guys 4K videos when I upload them.
That's most of my tech stack overall. My entire cost for all of my AI and software, everything is a couple hundred dollars a month down from several thousand dollars a month a year ago. So it's been a massive drop. And those are some of the big changes that I've made. And this isn't just a big.
Affiliate episode, right? Saying, oh, here's the software I use. It's more to talk about what I'm paying as opposed and my mindset as opposed to saying, you have to copy exactly what I'm doing. You may try video and go, I don't like the way clips are made. Or You may not like the way Riverside works.
Riverside is not perfect. Riverside has an issue with people talking over each other. There's a delay that I don't get when I talk on squad cast. Squad cast just always takes way longer for you to upload my side of the episode. I actually shoot other content on squad cast which is all by Descrip.
It's about the mindset more than anything else. I have a toolbox page on my website which lists the tools that I think are good or great. I don't list any tools that I think aren't good enough, and I'm always changing that list. So you'll see some tools and they're like, capo is still on there.
You don't use it anymore. 'cause I'm like, this is a good tool, but just not right for me. And I'm being really honest with you guys about it. Instead of saying it's the best thing. I tried it for three months and I was like, you know what? I love the ability to respond to comments. Have that organized, but that's not, to me worth $50 a month.
For a tool that kind of, I. I'm just changing. I'm actually testing a new tool. What I really wanted was a tool that has a social inbox, which means all of my comments. Like I'm getting a lot of YouTube comments lately, and I wanna see them in one place and respond to them. It's hard for me to go, oh, which video got a comment, this and that.
So I'm just, I'm trying another tool for organizing. I wish it could do the LinkedIn comments, but it can't. It can only do LinkedIn comments from a business page, not for me as a person. It's unfortunate. When you're looking at what you're spending money on, how you're using your tools, what your stack is, I really want you to think, what can I do to give me maximum result for minimum cost?
And even, let's talk about video, right? So I pay for video, I pay for 3,600 minutes a month. I can upload 3,600 minutes a year, sorry, to a video and chop it up into clips and. You can do the same thing. So you can do it with Chachi, but you Chachi, but you can upload the a transcript and say, pick the clips, that's what they're doing.
And then just use those time codes and do the same thing inside of the script. So it's because I paid for a year in advance. Then I'm sticking with video for now. But if I change and change the way I schedule my content, then I may move away from it. But I just like video is quite. It has some good features.
Not everything's great, but compared to the other tools, the ability to schedule automatically really is the winner for me. 'cause it just means I don't skip that stuff. 'cause I have a tendency to make content and not schedule it, but it could still be done locally. And the, a lot of these features, the thing I want you to do is reassess every six months and go, oh, you know what?
There's a new way of doing this that maybe is a little bit better or maybe a little bit cheaper. Eventually, a lot of the tools that seem like they're so cool, they'll become features and other tools like Midjourney. Originally I had to use another tool to do out painting, which is why I have an image, and then I need to make the image more around the image.
Add the outside. Now, midjourney added that feature, right? Midjourney added panning, midjourney, added, expanding, may not zooming in, zooming out. So they're constantly adding it. So what used to be a tool now becomes a feature and. We're heading towards that synchronicity where everything, every tool has every feature.
So some of the tools that kind of are dark horses, like I wasn't paying attention to the script and it's become really powerful. So I'm gonna be shooting some content coming up in the future. I'm actually gonna do some comparisons, like what's the best video, like screen recorder, because now they've added this feature.
I didn't even notice that they asked a couple months ago to. Script that directly competes with Loom. I pay $10 a month for Loom, which is why I record a video and then I'll send it to someone really quickly and then they can make notes on it. It turns out now script, is that right? So I'm mean. I have five different tools for doing screen recording local to my computer.
So I'm always looking for what's the best now because tech is changing so. Please stay with me. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. This is a soul episode. It's going back to a classic format. I may be doing more of these 'cause it's a lot easier. I can tell you what man, so many guests know show and it's such a hassle and it's I just wanna give you guys like rock solid content.
So lemme know if this is the type of episode that you guys dig on because I'm happy to do it. To just give you guys really good episodes. I've been thinking about it because I can do. I need a delay between when I shoot a guest episode and release it, just 'cause I need time to edit it and in case they know show and all of that stuff.
But I can actually shoot a solo episode and drop it in and maybe I'll go back to that format just because I love doing this type of content. Hope you guys dig this episode. Thank you search for being here. I really love creating the Artificial Intelligence podcast and I'll see you guys next week.