Wake Up With AI

Welcome to wake up with AI, the podcast where human powered meets AI assisted. Join your hosts, Chris Carillon, Niko Lofakas, and George b Thomas as we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence. From the latest AI news to cutting edge tools and skill sets, we are here to help business owners, marketers, and everyday individuals unlock their full potential with the power of AI. Let's get started.

Good morning, LinkedIn. Happy Monday. Very excited to start a new series, daily shows. How lucky am I? With George b Thomas and Niko LeFakis, wake up with AI.

How are you guys doing?

Dude, I'm so excited.

Why do we feel that people need to wake up with AI right now? Why are we here?

Nico, do you wanna go first?

I mean, like, I think we're both in the same spot. Here's here's what I love. Okay? I I think this is an answer to this question. George was in this place.

He's where you you all are. Right? He was in this place, like it seems like a long time ago to me, bro, but it really wasn't because time's kinda warped. Right? So, like, I I wanna say correct me, but I wanna say it was maybe 3 months.

Right? And comes to me 3 months ago, and he's like, Niko, alright. What is it? What's chat? What is this thing?

What does it do? Why why do I need to know this? We sat down for, what, 45 minutes? Maybe an hour?

Yeah. Chilling.

Gone. Gone from there. Like an atomic explosion. This man is off on his own, doing his own stuff, building his own things, checking out his own applications, doing all sorts of crazy stuff in 1 hour. Okay?

I'm sure you guys have seen all this stuff about, oh, take these classes, take this stuff, you know, get involved with this. This dude in 1 hour is now I mean, news aside and and maybe even on that level, like, you know, close to being neck and neck. Right? Like, he's catching up. He's catching up real quick.

I'm trying.

I'm trying.

But that's the thing. It's like, you know, alright. We're on the next level now. But it took him 3 months. Right?

I don't know how long. The stuff that we're doing now is so advanced. I don't know how long it's gonna take somebody else because you gotta like, you have to wrap your head around it. Right?

That's that's the thing. Like, so when I did my inbound talk earlier, I guess, a couple weeks ago I was gonna say earlier this year, but I don't wanna do that because then it feels like it's almost the end of the year, and I'm like, no. I literally, like, out of passion, said, wake up. Like, everything's changed. And what I want you to realize where that came from was when Andy Petrie was releasing the Breeze updates, I was recording it, transcribing it into chat gpt.

When I was walking out of the main room, I was literally telling it to give me an SEO optimized outline. Before I made it to the end of the room, I was emailing it to the content strategist. By the time I stepped on stage the next day, I had a blog article live about the Breeze release on the sidekick strategy website that I was able to show people. And I was like, wake up. Everything's changing.

And and it continues to be that way. As you'll see when we go through this show, you're just gonna see all the things that are changing and how fast they're changing and that you, as the marketer, the sales guy, especially the leader of the business, need to wake up, need to get started.

And, you know, the 3 of us, we're not ones to keep knowledge to ourselves. We're here to share every day because AI is changing every day faster than HubSpot can imagine. And when talking to Niko last week, talking to George, I'm like, guys, once a week, not enough. Doing it on all these different places is not easy for for people to, you know, follow along and really, you know, stay in the loop and get the value they need to see to wake up. Well, we're showing up every day.

Hopefully, one of those days. It's just gonna take 1, probably. You get to catch a show. You see some AI skills. You see some AI applications.

Maybe some news catches your interest. It's just gonna take 1, and then, like Niko said, we'll be off to the races, and that's where we want to get you off the starting line. It's time to get off the starting line. It it's time to wake up with AI. What are we talking about news wise today, Nico?

What's if you can pick 1. I know it's hard. What's the latest and greatest?

Often hard to choose, except that every once in a while, either OpenAI or Anthropic makes it real easy for us. So Claude, if you didn't know, had artifacts. Artifacts were very cool. It's a side window, let's call it, that opens up that presents you with your output. This is very cool because it's a very easy way of copy paste outside of the normal chat window, and it keeps the normal chat window clean while you can have this piece of data off to the side.

What was cool about artifacts is that it could actually run react code. So if you wanted to do some sort of front facing code and application, you could actually see it played out. Not to any, like, seriously heavy degree because it couldn't run any background. So just last week, out of nowhere, of course, OpenAI starts Canvas. And so Canvas is OpenAI.

I don't even wanna say me and George are just talking about this. It's not a rival. It's not like, okay. You put yours down. Here's ours.

Right? It's not Domino's. Like, these guys aren't playing like that. They don't think that way. They don't care to do that.

Right? They're they're all they only care to advance. So this is a much more advanced other people will agree every tool has its use. I love using GPT for process based application, and Canvas is a completely overpowered process based tool. So what this allows you to do is you're now able to take that output, same thing as anthropic, and that it will pop off to the side.

But now you can actually edit. You can, like, magic wand the content on the side and regenerate the content where it needs to be or redo the code where it needs to be, reorganize it however you need it, restructure it however you need it, live, right on the fly. Don't have to sit there and worry about, like, additional prompting here, and let me redo the whole thing and redo the entire output. No. It's just this one section.

We only needed this one section. It's just that one section. Right? It's way, way more powerful editing tool. You can think of, like, the custom editing that you could do with the image creation and just apply that to what you're doing now with generative output.

Yeah. It's ridiculous. 1 for code, but then me as, like, the AI generative, like, copy, you know, create articles, create scripts, create videos guy, holy crap. It's way amazing. I immediately started to realize the next thing I would want from them is folder structures so that I could actually start to save my chats into folder structures because now they've created a world where I don't need Google Docs.

Like, I can literally skip Google Docs for the thing that I'm creating because I can create it all from here and copy and paste it into HubSpot or copy and paste it in my teleprompter. And the fact that they gave us tools like ad emojis well, never mind. Because I tried that once and was like, forget that. But they gave us this tool that's add fine polish that goes through and actually adds, like, the h two subheads and the grammar and all that kind of stuff. They gave us a tool that is reading level.

I told people at inbound. I said, I'm not joking. Like, write it at a 9th grade level. Listen. If they put a tool that is the reading level and you can scale it up and down, then it makes a difference to the content that you're creating.

You can even adjust the length. Remember the days when we used to talk about how, like, yeah, it's not real good at word count. Well, now there's a effing slider on the right hand side. We're like, I want this to be the longest ebook ever. Crank it up.

And then you've got this thing that is suggest edits, where all of a sudden, it will say, here, you might think about telling this personal story, or here, you might think about adding this thing, or here you and because you can live text type in there, you just start adding the suggestions. And then, by the way, I usually do suggest edits, and then I do now do find polish. Now copy and paste, and let me go ahead and send it over to my content strategist to make sure it's humanized enough. As far as, like, rough drafts to copy and paste, it's a game changer. I'm just saying.

Right. Yeah. And I mean, just the even, like, to George's point, being able to output to different use cases. Right? So even when it comes to code, you can actually have it in node and then just tell it, no.

I need this in JSON. No. Actually, I need it in Python.

Oh, yeah. No.

I actually need it in this format. Right? It makes it so disgusting for, again, like, utilitarian for working between things and having to switch between different modes. This is a a perfect utility tool for that. Yeah.

It's it's just we're just taking it one step at a time. Just pushing it one step at a time. The whole point of, like you know, when George mentioned that it can actually give you these suggestions, these suggestions aren't like Grammarly. Grammarly is based on grammar, and it's based on, like I'm sure they could speak to it even better, but it's based on algorithmic understanding of how those words are put together, and it can give you sort of syntax suggestions based on that. We're talking about a qualitative understanding of the data all in one shot.

It understands what it wrote. It understands what you're trying to say, and it can give you suggestions based off of that. Just like when you would do it previously, and you'd ask it for a writing output, and then it would add a little bit at the bottom. Like, yeah, this is pretty good, but, you know, man, I think you could probably add this in there too. Right?

Now it's actually able to just do that within the text itself.

Couple things that we should probably back up because we love to just dive into the deep end and nerd out. I think you have to have a paid account or a Teams account to have this, and don't just go into, like, chat gpt4 o. Go you have to do the drop down, and you'll have to pick the version with Canvas. And then you'll be able to play with all the things that Niko, Chris, and I are talking about.

Yeah. And it sounds like the comparison of Grammarly like, Grammarly is for clear communication. Sounds like what you're describing is strategic elements of of changing up the communications.

I'll boil it down to you because from using it, what it's doing is it's helping you be a better storyteller, at least in the written word sense. Now coding, it's a different thing. Right? But with the written word, everything that I've noticed it's suggesting is, like, it's going to make this either more educational, but with the story element involved into it. And, by the way, Grammarly works in it.

I didn't even mention that. Like, Grammarly works in the freaking Canvas, so you have the best of both worlds. You've got, like, here. Here's how you tell a dope story, and your Grammarly works in here as well. No need for Google Docs.

Like, I should try to do, like, a robot voice, like, where I do the, like, That's not robot enough, but, you know

Something like that. We'll we'll work on the production value as we as we go forward. But in order to use those, all these different tools, the way they layer together, which one to use first, what the outcomes need to look like. What's the number one skill in your mind, George, that people need to utilize here?

Sure. We went, like, real narrow into, like, ChatChippity and Canvas, but this is just at a general sense. And by the way, I have probably about 16 to 20 of these, like, skills, soft skills, and and technical skills that I think people moving forward, we need to pay attention to because I I've paid close attention to, like, Nico, myself, other people who are, like, mastering this quickly. Why are they? Like, what are the things?

So strategic thinking is definitely the thing that I wanna talk about first since this is our first episode. And for everyone watching and listening, I know you heard the word, like, strategic tossed around a lot, especially because we're in the marketing space. But just listen. In the context of AI driven and by the way, I'm gonna use this, term a lot in the show, AI driven leadership and AI driven employees. Now it's human powered, AI assisted, but there's literally this book that I'm reading.

And if and, Niko, if you haven't checked it out, it's the AI driven leader. I posted it over the weekend on Facebook and and LinkedIn. You could check it out. But in the context of leaders and employees in AI, strategic thinking is about way more than just, like, planning for tomorrow. I get it.

That's usually, hey. What are we gonna do for this campaign? Hey. What are we how are we gonna do this thing? It's about connecting the dots between what we do today and what's possible tomorrow.

I hope you realize, like, when Nico was talking about the other section, he goes, out of nowhere, of course. So what's possible tomorrow? Understanding how today's decisions, especially with our use of AI, will shape the future. For leaders, this is where you make your mark. It's not just about reacting to the fires that come up daily.

It's about zooming out and getting that bird's eye view. You have to start to ask yourself the big questions like, how can we use AI to see around corners? How can we spot opportunities before anyone else even knows they exist? By the way, I'll talk about in a second. I just launched a podcast on LinkedIn 5 minutes before we started this show because I was asking the question, how can we spot opportunities before anyone else even knows they exist?

AI isn't just about efficiency. It's about using it as a lens to anticipate what's coming and to position yourself ahead of the curve. There is no time in the history of man that we have been able to do this at the scale and speed that we can do it. So being an early adopter, by the way, has always proven to be a winning strategy. Recognizing potential early and acting before the competition can put you in a position of strength.

Look at people like John Lee Dumas who, like, just jammed into, like, podcasting and doing daily daily podcasting. Look at, like, Marcus Sheridan. They ask you answer. Like, questions have been around on the planet since cavemen, but they ask you answer. He was a first mover in the inbound space around this, like, philosophy.

So when it comes to AI, those who take the initiative now will shape the market. They'll set the standards. They'll drive innovation rather than being the human that reacts to it. So you have to start embracing. How can I be a strategic thinker in the way of connecting the dots today to what is possible tomorrow, and how does that impact my business?

Can't get away from it, folks. Strategic thinking. Strategic

thinking. Back in the box, Chris. They're not gonna put it back in the box.

They will not. Thank you for that strategic thinking. Please, lord, everybody. Stuff cannot work for you without that element. So what is happening?

It's not going back in the box. What's happening outside the box? Show us something that one of you been working on to really apply this. Do something cool. Do something productive.

Do something fun.

Yeah. Do you want me to go?

Sure.

Can I actually, like, share my screen

during this show? Please do.

But yeah. No. I was gonna say I I was backing off because I wanted you to show the notebook LM thing, otherwise.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So

Give it to George, but I just want you guys to notice and just understand the the duality that goes on here between the Google bashing that not too long ago and the tool that he is leveraging today.

So here's the thing. Like, when I say wake up, part of what I'm saying and when we say wake up on the show, part of what we're saying is you have to test everything. Like, you see something, be curious. Be strategic, test everything. Right?

And so right here, you're looking at my attempts to fix a problem that we've had in the HubSpot ecosystem, and that is it is hard to have more than one Kyle Jepsen. And Kyle Jepsen can't keep up with HubSpot updates. So is there a way that AI has gotten good enough that we could create daily updates, multiple daily updates in a conversational way that people will actually embrace and don't say, oh, that sucks. Well, you can go to the update algorithm by Sidekick Strategies. By the way, we are being very, very cheeky with it because Ben Binary and the Luna Logic are your hosts.

Like, they are not human. Their photos don't look human. Their voices sound human. The conversation is very human sounding conversation, and we're powering this by this technology that is notebook LM from Google. It's experimental.

By the way, I can't wait until we can add our own voices in here. Hopefully, that comes someday. I can't wait till there's other features that they add in just the fact that this is experimental. But here's what gets crazy is you'll see I have all these different notebooks, which are different updates or different things that we're working on. I'm gonna go into the superhuman framework as an example because what I want you to be able to see is I have videos, I have text.

By the way, if I wanna add something in, I just hit this plus sign here. I can add in my Google Docs. I can add in my Google Slides. I can add in website. I can add in YouTube links.

I can even copy and paste text, and I can do up to 50 sources in here. And so once I get the sources in here, there's a couple things I can do. Now I can generate an FAQ. I can generate a study guide, a table of contents, timeline, briefing doc, which, by the way, just from a studying standpoint, like, if you wanna learn what the happiness paradox is, you could go grab 50 pieces of information on the Internet about the happiness paradox, put it in here, start to ask it questions about the happy paradox. Give me a study guide for the happiness paradox.

So just from a studying stand next time you do a HubSpot Academy certification, why don't you put it in here and ask it questions and get it to help you actually get your certification? I'm just doing that. But on my level, what I'm talking about is I'm talking about using it to create content because the other thing you can do is it will create this player, which I've named my 2 hosts, Ben and Luna, obviously. But it'll create this player where you can not only play it. Right?

So I could play this, and it's out of this information, it creates what I'll call a 20 minute podcast or a 20 minute overview of the thing that you're trying to learn. And I can say that was a great job, that was a bad job, but more importantly, I can even change speed, but I can download it. Therefore, it gets created, it gets downloaded, and it gets turned into a podcast that is scalable to give people HubSpot updates in a conversational way. The humans, my time, my calendar doesn't get in the way of you being able to understand the next new thing.

I do not use this phrase a lot primarily because when the whole AI writing thing started in the 1st place, I think we all realized how much we overused this phrase considering how much it would show up in everything that was written by AI. But I am willing to admit that for once, this is actually a game changing app. This really does

Yep.

Take things and spin it on its head. If you've been following me and Chris, you know that we've been messing around with building replicas of businesses and using GPT to do that and building custom GPTs out of businesses. There is a purpose for that that is separate and very unique by comparison to this, but for people that don't know how to do that, this gets you seriously close to that mark. Yeah. Right?

Like, very seriously close to that mark. The power of this thing and then being able to you know, I I think about people who are solopreneurs. I think about people who are, you know, like, any one of us. They're trying to, like, start their own thing, get their own podcast going, you know, get something out the door, content wise, right, to be able to drive content. And I can't think if you were trying to start a podcast, I cannot possibly think of a better platform to be using to not necessarily start that, but to, like, have that as what I think of in terms of film as, like, beta role.

Right? So this is like beta podcast. And I know another podcaster or an AI podcaster I listen to that does this every once in a while. He'd he had been doing this through 11 Labs for some time. So, like, the concept of it is not new, but the mashup is.

The fact that you can actually translate the data into the podcast is what's amazing.

Well so, Nico, let's take it to the next level too. Right? I'm using the AI because I'm also, like, nerding out on the AI, but it gives you a show script. It creates the script. Imagine a world where you don't download that file to put it in transistor dotfm, which, by the way, I launched the website, had the first 7 episodes in 20 minutes of this podcast.

I just want everybody to pay attention to that real quick. But imagine a world, Nico and Chris, where you download that file, but you don't put it into Transistor FM or Lipson. You actually take it over to a tool, and you have it transcribed, to which then you actually pair one voice with you and one voice with your cohost. And now it's written the script. You can go in and you can modify it to what you want, but now you have a starting draft point of a show based on a topic way faster than the hour to 2 hours that you spent before because it took you, like, 10 minutes to get to the rough draft.

You add in your own stories. You tweak a couple of things that you don't like that maybe it's saying, and boom. You get on the mic and you record the dang thing. But it's humans, But it's, again, human powered AI assisted.

I love playing this game. Alright. Let's go one further than that. If, you want to interview me and I'm, you know, out on assignment per se and I am over in Kyiv, Not gonna be you know, normally, yeah, we could do this whole thing. We could try to do podcast, but I don't have time because I'm out in the field.

Don't have the greatest connection to Internet and all that kind of thing. So what do I have time for? I have time for George to put together what he thinks would be a great episode and to send me the audio for that for me to listen to and for me to give him feedback, give him notes, and say, hey. You know, this is pretty good. Can you change this up here?

You know what? I actually wrote this doc. Let me send it to you, and you can leverage that, add it to it. Right? Yeah.

And then he makes the edits like that. It's not even I mean, we're joking in terms of the time frame on the turnaround. Right? Literally, 5 minutes after I'm off the phone with him, he's gonna send me another audio clip, and I'm gonna listen to

it. Yep.

Right? Yeah. And so me don't have to be in studio, can be doing something else. Now apply this to further up the chain. Right?

So now you got, like, Tom Segura interviewing whomever. You got, you know, you've got celebrities being interviewed by whomever, and it's because they can give statements or they can give, you know, information. They can even tell the interviewer. Oh, yeah. I just did this for Vogue, and I did this for somebody else.

I did this for whomever else. And if you could just take from that and put it together, you know, and then send it over to me. Everybody again, we we just go from people might think, like, oh, this is cheap. You're cheapening out content. You're cheapening out podcasting.

No. We're giving you more content, and the people who are legitimate about it are editing it. Go from being creators necessarily. You're still creating the content, but you're doing it by editing what's going out there. You are taking the time to fine tune and to make sure that the message is right, the one that's going out.

Yeah. We talked about this again at inbound, not to keep mentioning it, but it just happened, like, yesterday, about how we bookend with human. Right? You start with human and the idea and the concept and get ideation with help assisted. But then at the end, we always bookmark it.

And we've literally got a article that is just, like, AI humanized checklist on sidekickstrategies.com, where it's like this 5 step, 6 step thing to make sure that you're not actually shipping a poop emoji out onto the Internet from a content standpoint, but you're it's it feels like you, looks like you, but you got there so much faster. You got there so much smarter. You got there because you had strategic thinking using AI tools to assist, to augment, to automate the things that you as a human powering the content and the content strategy wanna do. So cheap? No.

Cheating? No. Sticking your head in the sand? No. Wake up.

Wake up. And we're gonna be here every day to help you wake up. Thanks so much, gentlemen. Until tomorrow, wake up with AI, folks. See you then.

See you then. See you.

That's a wrap for this episode of wake up with AI. We hope that you feel a little more inspired, a little more informed, and a whole lot more excited about how AI can augment your life and business. Always remember that this journey is just the beginning and that we are right here with you every step of the way. If you love today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. You can also connect with us on social media to stay updated with all things AI.

Until next time. Stay curious, stay empowered, and wake up with AI.