Build A Process Before You Scale using AI with Joe Casabona

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we delve into how AI and technology can revolutionize our workflows and processes. Join our host, Jonathan Green, a best-selling author, as he engages with Joe Casabona, an expert in optimizing podcast production through effective processes and automation.

In this episode, Joe shares his expertise in streamlining podcasting workflows, emphasizing the importance of a solid process before considering automation. He reveals the common pitfalls many podcasters face, such as underestimating the time and effort required to produce a podcast and the lack of a structured process leading to podcast fade. Joe also discusses the significance of having a detailed plan, akin to a "fat outline," to ensure content is consistently produced and delivered, maintaining a connection with the audience.

Notable Quotes:

• "Efficiency in podcasting comes from a well-defined process, not just the automation tools you use." - [Joe Casabona]
• "Having episodes in the can ensures consistency and reliability, key to keeping your audience engaged." - [Jonathan Green]

Connect with Joe Casabona:

• Visit casabona.org for insights into podcasting efficiencies and to access Joe’s automation database.
• Follow Joe on social media platforms @jcasabona.
• https://podcastworkflows.com/join

Dive deep into the world of podcasting with us, exploring how strategic processes and automation can significantly enhance your podcasting efficiency and quality. Join us for a conversation that’s as informative as it is engaging!

Connect with Jonathan Green

• The Bestseller: ChatGPT Profits
• Free Gift: The Master Prompt for ChatGPT
• Free Book on Amazon: Fire Your Boss
• Podcast Website: https://artificialintelligencepod.com/
• Subscribe, Rate, and Review: https://artificialintelligencepod.com/itunes
• Video Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtificialIntelligencePodcast

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Jonathan Green 2024: The power process and organization with today's special guest, Joe Casabona. 

Today's episode is brought to you by the bestseller Chat, GPT Profits. This book is the Missing Instruction Manual to get you up and running with chat g bt in a matter of minutes as a special gift. You can get it absolutely free@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift, or at the link right below this episode.

Make sure to grab your copy before it goes back up to full price.

Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you wanna make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you can come to the right place. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. You will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep.

Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Now, I'm really excited by what you do because the most significant things I've done in my business are always the boringest. It's always process, which I hate, and spreadsheets, which I hate, but it always moves the needle the most because.

The one thing you can never get more of is time. And what I really wanna start with is since your focus is helping people with podcasts, and people often wanna jump to automation, but I always say you can't automate until you know the process. Because taking a bad process and making it faster won't help anything.

But why do you think, what do you think your associates, why do so many podcasts fail? There's a lot of podcasts. Do three episodes, six episodes, so few make it to 50 or a hundred episodes. What do you think is the biggest reason they fail? I know my feeling is like expectation. What they think is gonna happen is so different from what actually happens.

What do you think from your experience? 

Joe Casabona: I think it's that, but then there's also, okay, I'm a huge baseball fan, right? I'm like wearing a Yankee shirt right now. You have guys watching at home. And they're critiquing Aaron Judge or soon to be Juan Soto. How could you miss that pitch? How could, why would you swing at that?

And it's because they don't understand that the game is mostly about anticipation. And the guys that you see at that level just make it look so easy. And so you see podcasters like. Joe Rogan, however you feel about him. Conan and Dax Shepherd and Amy Porterfield and a bunch of people who are being really successful at podcasting, and all they do is talk to people, right?

And so I think that there's the expectation that this is gonna be easy. I'm just gonna have conversations and I'll just release them, and then I'll start making money. And then they get into it and they're like, oh my God, I just talked to this person for an hour and now I need to edit. Or at least put it together and then upload it and come up with a description.

And three people listened and one was me and one was my mom. This isn't worth it. And I think there's that, the level of effort, the expectation for the level of effort is so much lower than it actually is. 

Jonathan Green 2024: That's a really good point. How much time for every hour that you're on mic do you think you have to put into your podcast?

What's the ratio of on mic to off mic time to make a podcast work? 

Joe Casabona: This is a great question because I've heard the ratio is four to one. So for every minute of finished content you put in four minutes. Which means that if you have an hour long episode, it's gonna be four hours. It's maybe a little bit more than that when you take into account that you should spend as much time marketing something as you took making it.

So if I want people to listen, it's gonna take me four hours to market it or put it out there, right? And but that four to one ratio is when I've time tracked and I've done everything myself, that kind of rang true to me. I'm a bad editor, so it takes me longer to edit. And I'm also like.

A little bit too much of a perfectionist, which is why I have somebody edit it now. 'cause like I'm not gonna scrutinize their work as much as I scrutinize my work. And if it's better than I would've done, I'm happy. But I think that four to one ratio is, has rang true for me at least. 

Jonathan Green 2024: That sounds, I was thinking about my numbers.

That sounds pretty right to me. If I'm just thinking about after the episode. There's also a time before the episode planning the guest. Yep. Setting up lights, setting up your audio. Each time you're gonna record dealing with no shows, there's all these other elements that yeah. Happen beforehand because not every person, it's not easy to get every guest you want.

Not every guest you reach out to is gonna work out. Not every guest you episode you record is gonna be releasable. There's all these other little pieces that go in there. Probably I release. Most of my, like almost all of my episodes, but I definitely have every year, two to five that don't get out the door.

At the end of it, I go, this is, I gotta think about it. I gotta go to do a heavy re-edit to see if there's anything usable here, or I just can't use this one. When you start adding that in, I feel like it pushed that ratio up, and even if you have someone else edit it, there's still all the other little pieces.

Like it's really hard for an editor to choose the right clips. Yeah. I find that where most people fall down and you tell me if this is your experience, when you're appear on someone's podcast, they always say they're gonna send you like social media clips and a notification and then they never do. Yeah, 

Joe Casabona: that's that is, I'm gonna put that at 70% of people who say they're gonna send me, it's 20% of people who say they're gonna send me social media assets, do.

And then 70% who say they're gonna send me a notification that the episode is live to because that's the easier part, right? Hey, your episode's live, can you share it? I automate that obviously. Like I, I'm a, I was a WordPress developer in a previous life and so I have a little plugin that went in when the post publishes, it sends an email to the guest.

But like that is, I'm not sending them assets or images or anything 'cause I'm not really creating them myself. 

Jonathan Green 2024: That's, yeah. So here's the thing about that. There's two parts of it. The first is that they never share 'em. So no guest. And when I say this to guests, they go, no, I'm the one who will share it.

I'm like, okay, I'm gonna look at your Instagram right now. Am I gonna see a bunch of pictures of you on different podcasts? Then don't, do not PM me and tell me that it's raining. Yeah, I don't mind. I've just realized that's a really bad. I don't know why that's in every podcasting course. That's why every podcaster thinks it's a methodology is that I'll send you clips and then nobody really wants to share clips of your stuff on their feed.

They just don't. There are a lot of other things that you can do. I have found that if I post a clip and tag the person, sometimes they'll do a reshare and that's a much softer touch. It's a lot less friction. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Lot, much lower lift for them. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah, and it can really work. And I have a lot of other strategies that I implement, but one of them, I let email automation, the thing that I do is when I run an automation, I'm using an if this, then that plugin or tool that I set it up and it has a date when the episode's coming out.

And so a week before the episode comes out, they get the, your episode's coming, a week notification. Then there's a seven day delay. Then your episode came out today. Then there's a third. Your episode came in a month. They just a reminder, it was a month ago, maybe you wanna share it again. And then there's a six month, it's all, and I used to have it with four triggers that I had to manually update a spread each spreadsheet, it would send out that week's email, right?

And I go, this not smart of me. I had to make it all one trigger. 'cause the dates are locked. And once I know the data episode's going out, the rest of it's fixed. Yeah, so I changed the trigger so that all the emails go out based on one week before the live date. And I don't have to do anything.

Everything happens automatically, and I can schedule it months in advance because I am a forgetful person. And the other thing I said in is that it sends me a copy of each email that goes out, so that, and it just fills in four variables. Here's a link to your episode, here's a link to a folder that I put social media images in sometimes.

And here's a link to the episode on YouTube. Here's link to the episode audio file. So they have it and that now the emails go out because before it was something I was so forgetful about. And that's the thing is because doing a podcast is so much harder than you think. Those are the things that drop off the things that the marketing is what gets lost. Yeah. And I was talking to someone a few months ago. His dad was really famous, and then his dad is no longer around. His dad passed away, and then he got forced out of his dad's business. Who knows how that happened? And he was like, I'm really trying to restart things. So I've been on 40 podcasts in the last month.

Do you have any of your podcasts? I was like, definitely not. When you tell me you've been on 40 podcasts in the last month, I know that there's, I will get no bump from you appearing on my show. You're not a unique guest and that you're just gonna repeat yourself. Makes you so much less attractive.

I think this is a huge mistake people make as guests, right? Telling everyone I've been on a bunch of podcasts in the last month and I've said the exact same thing on all of them. That means that there's no valuable for my audience. They're not gonna get any lift from your appearance 

Joe Casabona: either. Yeah, and they're not gonna get any lift if you do share it, right?

Because if your audience is like, if you're sharing every episode you've been on in a month to your audience and you're saying the same thing, your audience isn't gonna listen like they've already heard your story. 

Jonathan Green 2024: You're definitely not sharing it. That's the person who's 100% not sharing. Come on now.

That's, and, but that's the thing is I, every time I'm on a show, I, they always say what questions do you want me to ask? I go no. You don't want that. You ask me questions. So that way you're asking any questions and I can give you different answers. Like I have 40 different ways of telling my story.

'cause everyone asks for that. Because as a guest, that's what I'm thinking about. I want, if someone hears me on multiple podcasts for you to get different good experiences. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with that. When I get like the, give me five questions to ask you then [00:10:00] I'm like, I don't know your audience.

I don't know what your audience values. And I just can't. I'm not gonna come up with questions, presumably as good as you do, for your audience. So let's just have a conversation. Let me know what your audience wants to take away, and I then, and then in turn, I will give those answers that are best suited for your audience.

Yeah. And it's 

Jonathan Green 2024: If all I'm doing is giving everyone the same questions. It gets, it's so boring for me. Like some guests I have are like, they just want me to ask the pre-written questions. I'm like this is the conversation you've had 60 times, right? Yeah. Why don't you send me clips answering someone else with the same thing?

And people forget, on a core level, podcasting is entertainment and you have to create unique content, special content, and think about before you think about yourself, whether you're the guest or the host is. The audience experience. 'cause sometimes you get those guests who constantly say the name of their product so much that you can't use the episode anymore.

Yep. Been there. It's like you have to understand that if I leave you in and I post that episode, then it's gonna hurt my credibility. And the guest, the listeners just go, why is he letting this person do this? So I either have to edit it out a bunch, which I'm like, I'm not doing that, or I have to.

Nuke the episode or shout at you, be like, what are you doing? Yeah. And it's not my job to teach you how to be a nice person or teach you how it works, but I feel like a lot of people kind of shortcut. And the next thing just thinking about this is that the guest, every guest who has the same story, it's oh, I left corporate America to start my own business.

Wow. Wow. I've never heard that story before. I love it. Like people, if you don't put in the effort to be unique, it makes it harder and harder for me to sell that story. 'cause I can't have, that's the same episode week after week, right? Yeah. So can you talk about, you're a big thing is process before automation.

What is the right process for. Getting guests for your show. 'cause a lot of people are passive and I think there's an assumption of passivity, I think. 'cause I get so many emails saying oh, I know you're desperate for guests. I found the perfect person for you. Like they must think that it must work on some shows, right?

There must be some shows that do no effort in choosing their guests, but. What do you think is the right process or how much time should someone put in before an episode into choosing the right guest, researching the guest, planning that out, and that process so that when the guest shows up, they can create a great episode?

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I love this question and it really leads well into what you were talking about before. 'cause you said, podcasting is entertainment. 78% of people listen to a podcast to learn something new. And hosts should know that the people who are going on 40 podcasts a month think that they're almost like a press junket.

Have you ever seen those videos of all of the Avengers Press junkets, like all in a row? And like they're getting the same questions from different reporters with the different backdrop. And that's so that the reporters and the channels can use their own copyright stuff, right? That's not what a podcast is, and you shouldn't treat a podcast like that.

So as a host, I do a couple of things, right? In the pre-show I was telling you a little bit about my guest onboarding or my guest application process. And there are a few screening questions there. And I always look for when I'm getting pitched what's in it for my listeners, right?

I don't care how great you are, tell me how great you are at the end. I wanna know if you have my listeners in mind. When I'm doing the research and I'm looking for guests, I'm usually looking for maybe people who I've interacted with or I've seen posts something cool on social media, either LinkedIn or whatever Twitter is gonna be called for the next couple of years or now Threads or wherever, right?

Wherever I'm interact, wherever I'm. Hanging out. And I'll reach out to those folks and say Hey, I saw you posted about this. I'd love to expand upon that with my audience. Right? One of my guests coming up is GIA Loudy. She and her co-author Claire, wrote a book called Forget the Funnel.

I. And they have a whole chapter on jobs to be done. And I'm like, I've never talked about jobs to be done on my podcast. And I think that's a really important thing to think about, especially if you're a solopreneur who's trying to improve your processes. So she's gonna come on and talk like specifically about that.

And so the research part of it, and I know I've been talking a lot, so I'll wrap up. But the, the research part of it for me is who what's their unique point of view? What can my audience get from this? What interesting questions can I ask them? And I wanna know a little bit about their background and who they're talking to, because I used to be like, I just wanna learn with the audience, right?

That was like. Like very Green Joe's rookie season. Oh, I want to be surprised with my audience. And then I thought that's like driving with a blindfold on you will get to a destination somewhere in your car, but wouldn't it be better if you knew where you were going so that you can then efficiently drive your audience there.

So that's, I, I think I wanna know enough. To guide the audience and have very clear outcomes without it sounding too much like a like a documentary or something like that. If that makes sense. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. There's that balance between over scripting and under scripting.

And a lot of shows I go on, I can always tell how much prep if someone's done too little. 'cause they have no idea who I am. Sometimes I'm like you. I didn't even go through an agency like I booked with you directly, right? We emailed back and forth. They don't remember me, or they mix it up with other guests or they, and their first question is about the title of my book.

Then the next question is about the subtitle, and it's why are you here? If you don't have a little bit of a plan and you don't have to have a huge plan, like I probably do an hour of prep for each episode, right? Maybe 30 minutes to an hour, depends on the person. If I like, I've already interacted with you a couple of times, so as soon as I looked up your website, I go, oh yeah, I remember what I wanted to talk about because I had some notes about that.

But if it's a guest that I booked three months ago, some people book so far in advance. I don't know why. Yeah, I have openings every week, but they'll book five months out. I'm like, okay, I guess you're a superstar. I need an hour to kind of prep and have an hour buffer. So it's not a huge amount of time, but I'll write down a couple of questions and then.

The thing about for me is that I'll have six to 10 questions that I wanna ask, and I'll probably ask two of them because you're gonna say something that surprises me. I'm like, oh, what's driving down that road? But if they don't say something that surprises me, I have enough of a plan, I have a backup plan.

Like I've been watching a lot of these air disaster debriefs where they talk about what went wrong and how you plan for it. And I'm like. Very fascinating 'cause a lot of the times it's, they didn't prepare like a backup airport in case something goes wrong. They didn't prepare for, if they have to circle the airport and reland again.

It's so much that it's almost always that wow that they didn't do certain things that they could have done before the plane took off. And it's very, it's just a reminder 'cause pilots are. The greatest example of process and checklists, like before you take off a plane, there's a checklist and there's a big book with every plane for every emergency.

You flip to that page and you follow the checklist for whatever happens. Left engine goes out, follow this checklist, right? Engine goes out. Follow this checklist. Both engines not follow this checklist, and there's always a procedure because. It massively decreases the number of mistakes. It's only when people stop following the procedures, they have problems.

I think I told you that I read this book called The Checklist Manifesto, which was just about before, and it's not about a checklist of what tasks to do today. It was a checklist of here's the seven, the five things we do before every surgery. And they made a checklist for that. And like hospitals in the worst countries in the world is like the least supplies.

Their infection rates dropped by 90 to 95%. And it was so revelatory for me that, oh, just make a checklist of what you do before an outreach process. It doesn't have to be long, but it has to be something that one person says another person listens to, and so it's out loud, just like the copilot reads it to the pilot.

That actually makes a huge difference. It's not just one you memorize because whenever you say it inside your head, you and you don't have it written down your reading, you always forget something. You read six outta the seven steps. You do something out of order, just natural. It's very simple lesson for a book.

I was like, oh, this book teaches one tiny thing with 55 examples. Really interesting. Someone turned it on to me. I go, that's gotta be silly. But I read it and I was like, oh my gosh. This really very simple idea, because the biggest mistake I believe solopreneurs make is they don't write down their process.

Then they try to hire someone and try to explain the process, and the person doesn't know the steps and they don't know what the goal is. So it's really hard. They don't know the metric of me of success, and they don't know those micro steps because it's really hard when you don't have your process written down and when you do it slightly different each time.

You're like, oh, it's more art than science. Then you have a non-real process and you can't find efficiencies. So the reason to have you on here today talk about is that after, because this is where I think podcasters fail, is like after you do the episode, you're like, oh my gosh. There's so much more work than I thought.

The first part is, and in the episode it's hard. Yeah. There's a lot of mechanics. Now you have to edit and create a video and an audio version. After that, you have to create show notes, show description. All those other little pieces that go with it. You have to schedule the show with your podcast host, and there's more and more things that are like offering services to fill in those gaps.

So that stuff is becoming easier with AI tools, but you still have to have a process. For example, I'll give you a really simple one. If you use one of those clip services like Video or Opus, and you upload the final episode of your show, which has your intro music, your outro, and the commercials, it will always pick the intro music and the outro music and a [00:20:00] commercial.

So you end up with a bunch of it will all, so you have to upload an earlier version of your. Podcast or you'll end up with all of that trash and every single, and all of them do it. They all always go, oh, the best part of your show is the intro music. I'm like, you stupid 

Joe Casabona: ai, right? It's oh, you're gonna say something.

They assume that you're gonna say something interesting in the beginning to hook the listener. And then like you're like, they assume that story format that we were talking about. Except if you have intro music and you have Midroll ads, and then you have the whole outro thanks for listening.

Subscribe. Click on this link. Leave a friend and a like, or whatever. That's. It's making the wrong assumptions and so it's grabbing the wrong parts. 

Jonathan Green 2024: It's also when your voice is the most high energy 

Joe Casabona: Oh yeah. 

Jonathan Green 2024: And there's music going on. This is the most exciting part of the whole show.

It's the only part with music. Yeah. So I think doing something else when it's picking those clips, but that is absolutely like part of my process is knowing that I have to do it. At that. So these are these little micro steps. Another examples that I used a script to the final edit of my episodes.

However, it has an audio enhanced tool that's the best audio enhanced I tested. Everyone's in the big YouTube video. If I audio enhance after I've added the music, it erases the music, right? Because it erases anything talking. 'cause it thinks an episode should only have talking. So it does the opposite.

This episode should have no music. It'll just delete the music out. It'll be a while to figure out why it was doing that. So now I know you have to do the audio enhance and then add the music. So I had to learn how to add the music into script. So it's a process and it's a series of steps, and that's the only way to achieve efficiency, is to write down your steps and have a really good set of steps.

And then the next part is the only way to get faster and faster. Then the only way to add automation is once you have that process in place, because otherwise you will automate the wrong things. A lot of people. Make this mistake with AI of trying to do the really cool stuff. Like a friend of mine yesterday was like, how can I use an AI to make really cool videos?

I was like, you can't. You just can't. I was like, it's a really the worst approach you can make. 'cause there's, this is a rabbit hole. There's now this like software that will make AI podcasts. So you like create and it make an AI video podcast. Someone asked you about it. I was like, this is a terrible idea.

It's just like you're only gonna get a really small number of people who don't care. I can get super engaged people and it just like the effort that goes into it, if you actually care about the content, it's more effort to make what the AI's gonna say than there is to do the whole, to actually just record an episode.

You might as well just record an episode. The only thing that would be cool is if this is what I would like is if an AI took these two videos of you and me and made it look like we're in the same room. That would be cool. That, 

Joe Casabona: yeah. And I just saw a video on that. Like how to do that, but like it requires like heavy green screens and lots of space.

There's, that's the only way today that you could do that. 

Jonathan Green 2024: We both have to have perfect lighting. You're the first guys I've had in so long that even shoots in 4K. Most guys show up, they're shooting like seven 20 or 360, yeah. They show up. They're like, oh, this is so webcam that came on my laptop in 1977.

It's what? Webcam only shoots in black and white. So yeah. 

Joe Casabona: And that's that's a huge deal. I know you didn't have me on for this, but you're gonna make content, especially video content, you need maybe not 4K, I recommend 4K in 2024 though. Sorry, I just timestamped your episode.

And like good lighting, like I've got three point lighting that I'm controlling with a stream deck. And that's so important because it's gonna put the focus in the right places.

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. It's.

That's one of my pet peeves is like when people are on the news, like they have their big break, they're on CNN or M-S-N-B-C, or Fox News, whichever one you watch, and they have like their headphones in and like the crappiest audio and it's like super glitchy and bad and it's wow, you really don't care.

Yeah, like you have such a level of disdain for the show that's booked, you and the show should be bear ashamed of themselves. Why do you have, why do you have a $10 million studio and then you're shooting someone who's in a $14 webcam? You're not gonna send a team out to record the person, like what are you doing?

That's what they used to, they would send the crew to make the lighting and everything, right? Yeah. No, they don't do that anymore. It looks so trash. Yeah. It's 

Joe Casabona: like the pandemic. It's like they were like, oh, we don't have to do this anymore. Since the pandemic, but like the takeaway shouldn't have been that, it should have been like, how do we get, how, is there a kit that we can send people so we don't have to send out a crew, but still make your like.

Make your guests don't go to a five star or a five Michelin star restaurant or whatever, three Michelin star, whatever the highest one is in sweatpants. Don't go on CNN. Looking like you're recording from a cave. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. Yeah. And, but people think, oh, I saw someone on CNI could do it on this podcast.

The number of guests I get who show up and go, Hey, this is audio only. And it's I'm sorry, you think this is 10 years ago? Are you crazy? Which podcasts do you know of? That's audio only. There's a few left, but not big ones. Not successful ones. It's just over and it's not a lot of effort. Like lighting.

You're talking about $200 to set up enough lights and you two lights on you is 200 bucks, a hundred dollars light. You can have a good setup. You don't need a lot of money, but people don't put it in. They just get super lazy oh, I'm just gonna use the webcam in my phone. So it's an upward angle.

You're looking at my nose the whole time. It's the wrong dimension. It really does matter to the audience. Again, the audience, like I have to deal with matching my brightness to the guest brightness. All of those things matter. So it goes dark light. Now it feels like it's a, like a flashing police light, right?

It's two different brightness. All of these elements matter, and part of it, it's, again, it's that pre-show checklist of, turn on these lights. Turn on these lights, check the sound. And pre-check the audio, log into the show five minutes early, all of these things because something goes wrong. I had a friend, I was doing a live show with a couple weeks ago and what happened, he showed, tried to log in two minutes early and then he had clicked on his browser, no permission for camera and microphone.

He didn't know how to undo that. I don't know how to undo that because I've never no. Yeah. So they were both turned off and I was like, I'm not letting you into the stream. The stream's already started. I'll just do it without you. I'm not doing tech support while I'm live. And that's part of the game.

And then we had an issue this week. My browser crashed in the middle of it, so he logged out instead of, and never came back so that we could then check my side outs. He's like sending me dms in a chat thing I didn't have open. I was like, this is, it's so stressful when you work with someone who just doesn't think possibly they could help you solve the solution. I was like, he's if the problem was still happening, I thought you'd DM me. I'm like, you could've also gone into the livestream as a listener and let me know that it was still broken. There's a lot of ways we could have solved this, right?

If we worked as a team. But so it was like one time was, the second one was my fault. My browser crashed, lesson learned. But as we logged in 30 minutes early that time to make it all work. But all of these things can be solved with process before and afterwards. So that's really, I guess that's really your specialty.

So I just wanna give you a chance to shine and explain. What your approach is to process development and why you think people should bring in an external process instead of trying to invent their own process 

Joe Casabona: for these things? Yeah, such a great question. And I think like the checklist Manifesto was a book I used to dump on too.

'cause every business book after it was written, mentioned it at some point I felt. But it's one of those things where it was so ingrained in me, but people never heard of it. Like my wife just brought it up recently, she's a nurse and she's do you know about this book, the Checklist Manifesto?

And I'm like, yeah. She's yeah, I think I'm gonna read that. And I'm like, definitely. And they have checklists obviously, but like having that perspective and the stuff behind it is really good. And I, people just, when they're doing something, they fly by the seat of their pants. So what I'll do is I'll do something.

I will, if I'm doing something for the first time. Maybe not the first time, like the second time. I will write down like what I'm doing it as I'm doing it, or now that I have a va I will record myself doing it and then I will have her transcribe the video and write out the steps. That way she knows exactly what needs to happen because as you said earlier, people don't necessarily know the goals.

And if you're hiring somebody for like strategy, then they're gonna make the goals too. But like my VA. She needs very clear inputs and outputs, right? I asked her to oh, just find me conferences to speak at. That was the worst. What kind of conferences am I willing to travel? Am I gonna talk about?

And that was my bad, right? Because I, I thought that she had a level of understanding for what I did that she didn't. And so then the next time I was like, I'm looking for con for conferences. In this area, or virtual within these dates where I can talk about these three things and the output was much better and then I recorded it.

Here's how I go about finding conferences or whatever. But so now my va, we have the handbook, right? We have a whole bunch of SOPs for people who don't have an a a VA yet, or they're like, just starting on this journey. I usually give them like four questions or four kind of tasks to answer, right?

Which is number one, make a list of everything you do when you're doing your podcast. Make a list every time you work on your podcast. It, so it's not just, oh I find the guest and then I invite the guest. No. What do you do before you find the guest, right? How do you find the guest? How do you come up with topics to talk about?

And then when you invite them, do you email them and say Hey, join my podcast, or do you send them a Calendly link? What happens after they get that Calendly link? What happens to the information after they get that Calendly link? Is the information going from Calendly to Trello or Notion or Airtable or whatever?

What's the follow up like? Those are the things, literally every step. If you feel like you're being too granular, you're not. 

Jonathan Green 2024: So I talked to a guy who teaches macros once. And he said a macro is a recipe that every time you push the button, it works. It has to be so detailed. And he said, one of the ways I teach people is I say, write down how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

And they always start off with, take up a piece of bread and start putting peanut butter. And he goes where'd the bread come from? Where'd the peanut butter come from? I love that. [00:30:00] AG stored and I was like, that's really interesting because most people like you were in continuing, they're intimating, is that they don't break it down into small enough steps to an actual replicable recipe.

And we sometimes give really big picture things like, I've started using this tool called Scribe that takes a screenshot every time you click your mouse button or push a button on the keyboard. And it is crazy 'cause then you get this and I always get in trouble 'cause you can only have 250 steps.

And the reason I like this is because I'm like doing too many things. But once I know I'm making a scribe, I, it makes me be more efficient. And I courses efficiency and then you can go back. You have to go back through and edit it every time. And that's what I had to learn how to do, is to be good at editing the scribes because.

You'll have way too many steps, but it's so much easier than having way too few. And then I'll either reshoot it, I go, oh, it's easier to reshoot this than to click delete 250 times. But it does force you to think about efficiency and think, okay, I'm just teaching a process. I don't wanna teach theory 'cause I want create a replical process here.

And it changes the way I do things. And it's different because I've used a lot of different screenshot tools. This one, what I like about it is that. The, I can give a link to each different scribe and it's living so I can go back and update it. So I have it in a course teaching a process. Every time I change the process, I can just update the scribe and I don't have to update links anywhere.

Nice. Update a pdf and no matter what, each customer has access to the most current version. I was like, oh, now I get the subscription thing. Because normally I'm like, if I need the subscription, I can just download 'em and cancel it, but. Now they've got me. 'cause I saw that I'm, I was like, that's really cool.

Yeah. 'cause I only have to update one place, even if I deploy the SOPs for different courses in different places. So I can give the same SOP to a bunch of different people for different things. I. That's when you do that and actually see what you do, it's so surprising. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I really love the recipe.

I'm gonna steal that. But something else, right? I thought about as you were talking was, I interviewed a guy on my podcast, his name is Josh Bernoff, and it's like how to actually write a good business book. And he says, most people make an outline. If they do that, when they're writing a book, they make an outline and then they start writing and he said you need to make what's called a fat outline.

So write your outline and then go back to each item and fill in a bunch of stuff in there. And that's almost the same thing, right? If if you can only think in like big steps first, fine. Do that. Okay, I. I do research, I find a guest, I record with the guest. I edit, I publish, then go back in and fill each of those things out.

'cause that is, once you have that, then you can understand what can I hire out to have a VA to do? Do I personally need to do this? The answer is gonna be no most of the time. Does a person need to do this? And if the, if you believe the answer is yes, then that's when you find a va or can a robot do this?

Can AI or some automation tool do this?

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. I think that we get so busy doing that. We don't strategize very much. So I write a lot of books, like I write a lot of, I've written like 300 business books for myself and clients. 90% of the time is not me in front of the computer. I usually write the entire book in my head before I sit down at the computer, like to get a real feel for the flow.

But I do what you said, which is I write an outline, then a deeper, I call it a deep outline, but that outline's the same thing where I go. It's a mind map. Yeah. I usually say to someone, you should be able to, they go, how do I know when an outline is done? And I go, great question. I go, you can stand up and dictate it and you don't.

Have a single thought about what's next. You always know the next thing you're gonna say. And you don't have to go, what did I by that? Or I say, if you're writing it by hand, it's 500 words. So every 500 words, you have a way point. 'cause 500 words is about a single page of a Word document. And when you have that, because what you don't wanna do, and this is a different mindset, is to switch from creating to decision making. 'cause those are two different parts of. So if you get to a chapter and you go, this is where people get into oh, what's it called? Writer's Block. Create whatever the Writer's Block.

That's it. I can't think of Writer's Block. That's ironic. Get, and the reason that happens is you don't know what's gonna happen next in the scene. It's always the res, it's always the result of that outline. And. It's very interesting to see how that applies to process because a lot of people, they can do a high, they can explain it, but they never break it down into details.

And for each person a different way of doing it's gonna work. Either recording yourself with a loom video, which is a great way to do it. That's why video recordings are so good. 'cause he catches everything. Because sometimes people don't explain like the really tiny step. That's why I like to watch a video.

Oh, they didn't mention this, but this is a really important you.

Exactly going back through. And one of the ways to do it is to say, if someone's never used a computer before, could they follow this instructions and get the same result you do every time? So we talk about things maybe we don't do anymore about being idiot proof or being like fail proof. And I saw this T-shirt. Someone said I'm an engineer, my job is to make things idiot proof, but they keep making better idiots. And I was like, that's very funny. Yeah. But people always find a way to like really shock you and break it. But that's. Really what it means, and it can be very hard to develop a set of steps.

So one of the cool things you can do is you can take one of those videos, feed it to an AI and say, turn this into a series of steps. Yeah. That's where things start to get really cool. 'cause people don't always think, oh, I can use this as a middle step. These are a places where it can help you. AI can help you to be strategic.

You go, here's my process. Is there any steps missing? And it will go well, how do you do this? So answer a really good question because AI are very methodical. Yeah. They're still computer programs, so there's a lot of things you can do or these two elements integrate, which is whichever part you're bad at.

You can say, here's I'm trying to develop my process. It's this, like today had an idea for a piece of software and I. Said, I told my idea to chat GBT and it gave me like a really complicated solution. And I go, what if I do these three things? He goes, oh, then it's two steps. So you do have to go back and forth.

'cause it doesn't always first choose the easiest path. You choose the path That is the coolest. I think it's this is the coolest way to build is a full stack developer. You have to bring in a private coder. And I was like, what if I just use WordPress and a plugin that just does this? They're like, oh yeah, you could do that.

It's like not your first choice, like the free plugin version, right? But that's really where you have to combine your specialized knowledge with the AI generalized knowledge, and you can go back and forth. And so I'm developing a process for this. What are my steps? Because I'm always working on writing out my podcasting process and refining it.

Because I lose momentum. If I have to spend over a certain amount of time editing an episode, I lose a lot of the energy. So I know for me for a 25, 30 minute episode, it's about two hours, which is a four x Yeah. To get the ready, including finding some clips. And a lot of that is just jumping between tools.

'cause first. I output the first version of the episode. My AI will go back and forth over who it shows, whoever's speaking will show that person's face. That used to be something you had to do manually. That's a huge time saver. But then I have to go in and with another tool, send one off to clips, and then the other tool is I add in the intro music and the outro music and name the episode.

Then you gotta think of a name, the description for YouTube. Then you have to have the description for the podcast episode. All these other parts. Most of those are done by AI for me now because I have a process, but I have to read it right to make sure it doesn't do something crazy because it will go off track if you don't read it.

It will give like a really bad podcast description the one time you don't read it. So there's always that human involvement. But even with a lot of AI stuff, it still takes you out two hours, which is about as efficient as you can get. And I switch from having someone else edit my episodes to me. 'cause I'm like, most of it is done by AI now. And then I can edit by reading it so I can read the episode to see if there's anything I want to cut out. Most of the time there's not, but every once in a while it's quick. But most of it can be done by automation. And it's remove big, remove awkward silences, right?

Remove anytime someone says like a filler word and you're getting pretty close. The problem is that my tool, I use the script, it thinks is a filler word. But at the end of the day show, I say hit the heart if you liked the episode, and it always wants to cut that out. So there's a use case where it's not a filler word, so that's one of the things I have to go through and check.

But most of the time, the editing can be done very quickly these days because of the automation tools. But it's only because I developed a process and I just realized that. Farming it out, it has a longer turnaround time. And I just need to have that short turnaround time so that it's just done and I can move it across the board.

Let me ask you that. How many people who have a podcast have a process for tracking where an episode is, like a Kanban board or even a spreadsheet? What percentage of people have that? 

Joe Casabona: Shockingly few. I think. This is anecdotal, right? I haven't done like industry research on this, but like every time I have a conversation with a podcast, I'm like, tell me about your process.

And they're like, all right like I'll book with them via email. We'll pick a time. I'm like, have you considered Calendly? And they'll be like, or Savvy Cal or whatever, right? And they're like, oh no. Okay. So maybe I'll use that. And I'm like, where does the information go after? And they're like.

Oh I usually just make a Google doc and I'm like, okay, but like, how do you know where in the process, right? It is. How do you know? I'm usually, I'm just like working on each episode week to week, and I'm like, this is why you will this is why you'll pod fade, right? Because you'll get to a point where you're sick or you're on vacation and you don't have an [00:40:00] episode.

And then you think I missed one week so it's okay for me to miss other weeks. And then you just stop doing it 'cause you haven't made time. And so I think it's one of the biggest things I do for people who hire me is we put this process in place. We don't do the time zone dance because the time zone dance is annoying and daylight savings time is coming up or is happening. And whereas rolling back and no one knows what time it is in Arizona in November and like it is just a lot of things are going on and a scheduling tool eliminates all of them. All of them. So that's like the it's really, I think it's 'cause like people don't understand their process and so they don't really know what stages an episode can be at.

And then they're working on one at a time. And so oh, I'm gonna edit this one and now I gotta record this one. And it's just a it can be a mess and, yeah. 

Jonathan Green 2024: Yeah. I. You have to have buffers, so you have to have enough episodes. Like I am always at least 10 to 15 episodes ahead. I stay that far ahead, gives me some buffer so that if I get behind in editing or whatever, or if I get sick, the show doesn't collapse.

When I first started out, I was a solo show doing five episodes a week. Wow. And I had 40 episodes ahead. I was 40 episodes ahead. Or no, sorry, 20 episodes ahead. I had 20 buffer at a month of buffer, but then I got sick. Yeah. And that's it. When you're doing one every day, that those episodes can get eaten really fast.

And that's when I realized this is just too intense, especially for it's all be every episode. So now I do an interview style like this once a week and May, I was like, if I get six months ahead, then I'll just start doubling up and then I'll do two episodes a week. But that's the only, until I'm far that way, I'm still don't lose that way.

I'm still three months ahead. It's the only way I would do it, but it's I love that you brought that up because a lot of people want that. This episode is fresh and there's value to that, but there's a lot of risk to that because life happens, anything can happen. The internet goes down, you can't upload episode.

Ever. And whatever it is, right? It's unexpected. You don't know what's gonna happen and then it really does. It's like missing the gym. Once you miss one day, it's easier to miss the second day. And people, when you are supposed to release an episode and don't people have, people get an expectation of what time the episode's coming out.

Yeah. So you can't do it. And this is something I'm dealing with right now. 'cause I. When I uploading my YouTube video today for my YouTube channel, I recommend it a different time. Yes, it recommends a different time. Every day I'm like, this is making me crazy. So people, but I'm putting on an episode every day, so it's figuring out what's the best time is.

But the regularity, I think, has a lot of value knowing, oh, every day at seven or every Thursday at 4:00 PM it doesn't matter. It's the same way we get used to a television show. Yes. Oh, this show's every Thursday night at 7:30 PM Regularity has a lot of value, and it's about picking a time that you can maintain, but.

I think that this is very interesting to think about where people falter because there are so many podcasts now and they always have these really big eyes and really big dreams, and this podcast is gonna change my life. And every once in a while a podcast hits right, but not very often, and there's so much work going on behind the camera.

That you don't see that is growing the show, whether it's connections or friendships or massive budget and investments. Those things really play a more of a role than I think people realize. But the secret to any business is to treat it like a business. Every business is built on systems and processes.

And when you wanna accelerate, you either, you wanna grow, you either need more customers or raise your prices. You wanna grow your podcast, you either to get stuff done faster, right? Or get bigger guests. Those only, and you can't, you can, you can only get as big as you can get and it's not gonna make that much of a difference.

People don't really jump to see. Anyone in a podcast anymore because everyone is doing multiple episodes. You can see anyone 10 different places, no matter how famous they are. It's not like there's a recluse who does one podcast every 10 years, right? If you get someone like that's great, but it's very hard to get someone on the way up.

So you have to find that those other elements, and it is that process consistency, and those are the hardest parts of business. People often think that my success is because I'm a genius. I'm like, no, my success is just 'cause I'm consistent. Yeah, it's that I put grind. I do it on big slow days, and I do it on big days.

Guess what? I didn't wanna do this today. I had to take three of my kids to the doctor tonight. Oh no. It's a rough day. But you know what? I'm here because I'm consistent. It has nothing to do with you. I wanted to talk to you, right? We had a great chat beforehand, but life can get in the way where you go, whoa, today was a real rough one.

But you have to show up and you have to perform. You have to be your onstage help with a big old smile, and then you have to afterwards edit the episode to do all those other pieces and go, there's two parts to the business until you can hire a team to do everything. We see those really, the shows with huge budgets.

We have three people in an editing room live. That's cool, but that's a huge budget. When you think about what those salaries are, that's probably costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to have those people there, let alone the tech and what they're doing. Yeah. Like here goes all your profits, 

Joe Casabona: You mentioned trying to, I tried to do a daily podcast last year and it was really hard.

And then you look at, here are three examples of daily podcast, right? One is, history Daily. Lindsey Graham is the host not that. Lindsey Graham. And then there's the Bulwark podcast, formerly with Charlie Sykes. Now with Tim Miller. And then there's the Daily dad or the Daily Stoic, both of them by Ryan Holiday.

And if you listen to History Daily, there's a team of people that are mentioned in the credits. Research by this person, writing by this person, executive producing, audio engineering. That's how that show gets made. It's a deeply it's a deep like storytelling podcast and it's daily, five days a week.

Then the Bulwark Podcast is hosted by Tim Miller, executive produced by blah, blah, blah. Special guest whoever there's multiple people there. Ryan Holiday I don't think does credits at the end of his shows. His episodes are five minutes, and he is basically just paraphrasing a chapter from his, like a page from his book.

And honestly, I've noticed like the quality take a little bit of a hit on that one lately, if I'm being honest. But the point is these guys have teams and budgets if you want your show to be fresh, right? The best news shows I listen to usually have a co-host, and when one of them is gone, the other one can take over and bring in a special guest.

So it's a very different type of show. And if you're doing this for your business, then you wanna give mostly timeless obviously like the advice that I would've given in 2009 is different from now, but not, there's not really a ticking clock on the content that you're creating as a solopreneur for your podcast.

And as long as you could do that, then yeah, you can get a bunch in the can, especially if you're pre-launch to take advantage of. When life happens, I couldn't record one week because my kid was home sick. And like my wife was at work and that would've just been a terrible recording. 'cause I was gonna have to keep my kid occupied while having I wouldn't have been able to be present and on.

And so we were able to reschedule, but I have a bunch in the can so that the people listening can form that habit of knowing they can listen on their Monday morning commute. Yeah, 

Jonathan Green 2024: that's really good. That's one of the secrets to doing an AI podcast is that I don't do news here. I do news on my other channel.

It has to be timely. And there are three types of episodes there. I have the Evergreen episode. This can come on any time. It's a universal principle or technique, like a prompting technique. There's the moderately timely, like it's a product review and you just wanna release it before they do an update or something.

And then there's the, I have to put this episode out today. So I was thinking today about I need to get, 'cause I don't have any episodes in the can for that 'cause I just made the commitment. Yeah. And but it it's pushing myself, but it takes me two to three hours a day to create that day's episode.

Sometimes I can get couple back to back, but I have to, there's also the thinking of what am I gonna make a video about today thing. So it does put a lot of pressure on me. I have to figure something out and get ahead for exactly that reason that. It creates that buffer because very rarely is an episode super timely.

And then what I can do is if a timely one comes in, I can just push the ones behind it back. Yeah. And that's really part of it. But I love what you're saying here. I think this has been really helpful for a lot of people who have been approaching podcasting with their eyes full of pies and not, and then really struggling.

Those are the people who have the best idea and then the most pain when the process hits. And sometimes people. Don't know how long things are gonna take. Like I talked to someone recently and I was like, how long does it take you to get an episode edited in 12 weeks? I was like, what? Are you sending it by horse?

Yeah, on tape. I was like, because I do it myself. The only reason like our episode won't be ready in two hours is if I just don't do it. If I have a bunch of back to backs or if something else is going on, it delays me, but it still is. 12 weeks is such a huge amount of time. And I just wonder 'cause if I use a service, because I have a service that I'll use.

Sometimes you're talking and they're fine, but it's like a five day turnaround. And they're quite, they're pretty solid. But I just 12 weeks, let's come back. So Good. You're getting an IMAX version of it. Yeah. A k. The thing is, when people don't know, if you don't do it yourself first. I [00:50:00] developed the process first.

You don't know how long something should take. You don't know what good versus bad looks like. You also don't 

Joe Casabona: know what to tell the per. If I hadn't edited my first couple of episodes, I would've never known what to tell my editor to be like, Hey, this is what I like. This is what I don't like.

Like you just, 

Jonathan Green 2024: you don't know. Because there are things that bother me and things that don't, and things that I want fixed and things that I don't care about. And everyone is different. And until you do a little bit yourself, then you also can't tell if the person is. Taking too long or dipping quality or they're paying someone else to do it.

There's a lot of things that can happen if you don't have the ability to do any level of quality control. So you're exactly right. I think there's been a really cool episode. We've gone away longer than I intended. This is like double the length of a normal episode, so I definitely wanna bring it in for landing for our listeners who've hung out this far.

Joe, where can people hang out with you, get to know more, see more about your process, and help them to start to understand just the idea of systems. And processes for their business where they just follow a series of steps so they can get the same result over and over again. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah, I think the best place is head over to casabona.org/jonathan.

It'll be casabona.org/jonathan. And there you'll be able to find, you'll be able to get on my mailing list, find places to follow me, and you'll get a a copy of my automations database, which is like 40 plus. And growing automation. So I think that's the best place to do it. And yeah I'm on all the socials as Jay Casabona.

Jonathan Green 2024: Amazing. I know everyone's gonna love this episode 'cause we had a good time. The more fun I'm having, the more fun the listeners have. Thank you so much for being here. As always guys, I appreciate you being here and listening to the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

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