They can do all sorts of stuff, but let, let's just say like, you know, that somebody uploads that folder into Google Drive and that, that might create a row inside of Airtable, which automatically sets a status to like new incoming, you know, file from client, which then will continually push this ball forward, right? It'll automatically select who the client was and maybe what type of file it was, and, you know, and then you can string together all sorts of different, different automations together to, uh, to kind of Facilitate that. What, like email notifications or what kind of stuff? Yeah, Email notifications. Yeah. Slack notifications, creating additional folders for the rest of the structure that the team is gonna need to perform. Today. I'm very excited to be joined by Steven G. Pope, if you don't know who Steven is, he's a content automation and AI expert. He's the founder of content with a K engine database, a tool that helps personal brands and content agencies scale their content creation. His YouTube channel is at Stephen G. Pope, spelled S-T-E-P-H-E-N-G-P-O-P-E. Stephen, welcome to the show. How you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on, Michael. Appreciate it. I wanted to spell out Steven, because some people might think it's got a V in it, so what? I'm excited. Yeah, it happens. Yeah, I mean, you know, like, you have a interesting, a unique spelling. Not completely unique, but definitely different than the way I might think. So today Steven and I are gonna explore how to simplify your content creation process with automation. I'm really excited to dive into this because I've never really covered this before, but before we get started, I wanna hear a little bit of your story. How'd you get into content marketing and automation? Start wherever you wanna start. Yeah, I'll do the, the abbreviated, uh, story, and then you can kind of dig in wherever you want. But I've always been an entrepreneur, like, you know, did the lemonade stand, was always building stuff and trying to sell people stuff. And then I was also into computers. My dad was into computers and he taught me all that stuff. And, uh, so, you know, I was just always building software and I ended up building a software agency, um, got a degree in computer science and really built that business. You know, it was, we, we were doing $7 million a year. I was in magazine's, fastest growing companies, and, uh, really built that business off of, you know, really doing good work and then also blogging, doing thought leadership in that community. So, um, but never, never so much video or anything like that. In fact, I was pretty afraid of being on video or doing public speaking of any, any sort. Um, and then, uh, through a variety of different reasons, I ended up selling that business. And after I sold it, you know, I was in a pretty good position, but not in a position where I could just never work again. And I, and I, and I like to work. I like to do what I do. And so I started to plan out my next business, and it was a totally different business than I have now, but I just realized, I was like, wow, I, like, there are some things that I need to, to get better at in order to launch this one much faster than I did before. And I started seeing, you know, the Gary Bees and people talking about storytelling and video, all of these things that I was just not good at. Um, and so I started to, to do those things. I started to get on video. It conquered that fear, started to tell stories. Back in the old days at my other company, when people would ask me how the company got started, I would just, I would have like a three line or a three word answer, right? It wasn't super compelling. Um, and so it was actually kinda interesting, a little anecdote about storytelling is that I really learned how important it was. I was on a sales call with somebody and I was kind of pitching my new service to him, and, uh, and then he was like, he's like, Hey, wait, hold on, hold on. What? Like, why are you doing this? Like, why are you in social media doing this thing? And I was like, oh, well, it was because I sold the previous company, and I kind of, I'm telling the same story that I'm telling you now, and it, I was like, I started getting into social media video and all this thing, and I got really passionate about it. I like helping entrepreneurs build their business. And I had the opportunity to do that. And he, he, and then I saw it all clicked for him. He said, oh, I get it now. And so I realized how important that storytelling piece was to getting your point across so that people had some context to find relevancy. And so I just started creating a lot of content, right? And then, uh, through that experience, I realized how much of a pain it was, you know, just organizing everything. And so I started to apply all my, my technical skills to it, started making videos on TikTok. They started going viral. People started asking me for the product, and then I started building the product, sold it to 'em, and then here we are today. So talk to me a little bit about, uh, when automation came into this. Is it because of your background when you had an agency? It sounds like you developed software products for other companies, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So how, how did the automation come into what, you know, like, into the play on the content side of things? Yeah, so I'm a a software developer. So most of the stuff I did before was all like writing software code, right? Um, but over the last, you know, I mean, really it's been happening for 10 years. All the, these no code platforms like, uh, Zapier and make.com, they, they, they've been around for a while, but for me it was just like, it was just a lot easier, right? So like coding is pretty involved and pretty technical and very unforgiving. And, uh, I know how to do it, but it's still a pain. I don't, if I could do it in easier way, I would. And so when I, it was just, I started to, like, when, when I was creating all this content and working with my, my team around it, I was like, man, if I just put a connected a few dots here and just organized things and made a few folders, this would be easy. And so I did that with automation. So it was more just that I knew it was an easier thing to do, then it would be to like, try to write all this in code, right? So tell us what is, what is this content engine database thing all about? Yeah, so in a nutshell, it's, it's pretty simple. It's just, and, and there's really kind of two sides to it. So content is, is difficult. I mean, if you're just creating one video a week and you're just publishing, it's not such a, a big issue. But once you start to create any sort of volume around content, there's a lot to it. There's planning, there's recording, there's production, there's team members, there's distribution, there's analytics. And at each one of those stages, you know, there's just a lot of manual tasks. So like, if you're planning a podcast, then, um, you've got a bunch of guests coming up, and once you actually decide, Hey, I'm gonna record this guest, well, now you, you really want to have a place to store all the files, right? And you don't really want to have to create all those folders. That's what most people do. They, if somebody go in, they create all the folders, and then they link it back to some project management software so people can find it later. Um, and then they're trying to notify team members when certain things happen. And, uh, if you start at the very beginning with planning, then, you know, creating these buckets of where things go, and then keeping track of them, and then integrating into some of the, the tools like frame.io, which is a, a video collaboration tool. So when you're working with your video editor, you know, so if you, if you automate these different stages and you keep track of, well, number one, if you, if you create buckets for people to put this stuff into, so it's already there and it's already linked and people can find it. And then as you progress into production and you're working with your video editors, if you're tracking all of these different assets, if you're tracking where the videos are, like with direct links to them, um, people aren't having to manually move around files. If you're tracking like copy documents, hey, every one of these videos is gonna need a description, and it's gonna need a title. If we pre-make the document for that, right? Um, and we link it with the video and we give a bucket for the thumbnail, for the YouTube thumbnail, and we actually create places where people can upload those things. And, uh, and then through that process also, you know, automate the communication between the team members, right? So like, Hey, you got a new video. The, the, the podcast was, was recorded. Now it's time for you to edit it. Here are where here's where the original files are, here's where you're gonna put them, right? And then when they actually upload 'em, triggering it back to the person that, uh, you know, that submitted the project, right? And giving it back to 'em, Hey, your video editors returned this, the copywriters returned the description. So at the core basic level, like that's one of the key pieces in content automation. And then, you know, and then to kind of transition into the next phase, once you're hyper organized like that, where you get all that time back and everything's tracked, and we have a, you know, an accounting for where everything is with cloud ID files and or cloud IDs to all these files, then you can start to tap into like, uh, various content automation, ai, uh, and AI platforms with APIs and stuff like that, and start to repurpose content and take advantage of all the stuff that's happening like day to day right now. Okay. So, um, what I'm hearing you say is that content automation, um, is the process of taking all the steps that normally you have to do when you create any kind of content, whether it be a YouTube video or whether it be a, uh, TikTok or a reel, or whether it be a podcast or an article, whatever newsletter, right? Exactly. Whatever it is, there's all sorts of steps that we as, uh, creators, uh, or creatively minded marketers do. And if we can automate these things, let's talk about what does that make possible? Like once you have this automation side in here, what is the benefit that you see happen? Yeah, it kind of depends a little bit on who you are, but if it's an organization and you have a lot of people on your team, you know, you can do more with less, so you can save a lot of time, and you reduce a lot of just that chaos that comes with the process where people are like, Hey, where's this? And things are delayed. If you're a content agency and you're producing content for your clients, then, you know, there's a lot less fires to put out. So at the core of it, like for an organization, you're saving time and just mental anguish from all this. Right? And, uh, and, and you know, like, I, I guess the other thing too is like, because content is hard and we're all trying to do volume, you know, it's, it's, it's sometimes hard as a leader to just say, you know, to just force your team to do things that are just kind of boring and mundane. So I think it also shows from a leadership perspective that you care about your team and that you're more, more interested in the creative side of this whole process than just all of this mundane stuff that, that happens. Um, and then, you know, as well as like, if you're a business in your organization, you're using this content as a business development, uh, opportunity, which is a lot of what people are doing, then it also gives you a competitive edge. Especially if your content's creative already, you're now gonna be able to outperform your, your competition and kind of stay on that bleeding edge. And then when we talk about being organized and taking advantage of all of these, uh, new tools that are popping up on a daily basis, then you could take advantage of those things to keep to, uh, to stay, you know, unique and interesting, um, versus, you know, just kind of, you know, continuing to do things the way they were. Some of the other, uh, some of the other things that come to my mind is, um, you could have, uh, you could have great people that work for you as I do, and all it takes is, is one person, and it might be you, or it might be me to forget to email somebody to start the process, right? Yeah. Or, or it might be one person who, uh, is out sick, right? And the process breaks, right? And all of a sudden these other people can't do their work because they haven't been notified that there's something for them to do. Right? Right. And automation, um, when it works well, it, it seems like it's just gonna ensure that the flow happens regardless of human error. Is that right? Exactly. And like, you guys have a solid process, right? So like, right when I got introduced to you guys, I was like, okay, these guys have it together. But now if you're starting out, like you're not gonna have all of those things that you've, you've probably struggled to put through or put together over however long, right? Yes. Many years. And so, like, and you had a, you had a deep commitment to making this happen, right? So a lot of people don't, right? So like, when they start to hit these roadblocks and they've got other priorities, you know, unfortunately they just quit, you know, or they just don't do as much, or they just settle for less. And, um, I think this helps raise the bar and keeps you focused on the most, the, the reasons why you probably wanted to do this, to get business, to be creative, to add value. Uh, nobody really likes moving files around and like, you know, nobody does. I don't think, I mean, maybe there's one or two people on the planet that enjoy that, but I haven't really met them yet. No. Uh, and we only like moving files around because of what it makes possible, right? Which is the ultimate Exactly. Which is the ultimate output that we're excited about. So, um, okay, so let, moving into content automation, um, let's start by talking about project management versus content automation, because, um, there's a lot of people listening that might be using tools like Asana or Clickup or Trello or whatever else is out there. Yeah. Help everybody understand what the, what, why that isn't what we're talking about today and what the alternative is. Yeah. So, and, and that's pretty common, right? So people tend to solve this problem with one of those pieces of software. Even notion, I hear a lot, some people are just on Google Sheets. So the, the main, the main reason why I don't use those platforms, and I have in the past is really because they're project management tools. So they help you man manage projects and tasks, and there are projects and tasks when you're talking about content, but the, the, the primary thing that you're actually dealing with is content. So what you really want is a content management system. And it just so happens that Airtable, the system that I use is well designed to, to help you do that because it's, because it's, it's really a database. And if you think about your content, and, and most content systems, even if there are other types of content management systems, they're, they're primarily a database, and it all revolves around the content as the main piece. That's the highest level thing. Um, and so when you build your systems around the content, and having that granular level of tracking where you're tracking the video as the primary thing, the, the image as the primary thing or the copy, and then projects and tasks are a subset of whatever's going through that pipeline, it just allows you to go much deeper on the level of tracking an organization, which gives, gives birth to all of the cool stuff we can do around automation and stuff. Because you're gonna with, you know, like with, uh, you know, with these project management tools, you can create databases, notion will allow you to create a database. People tell me that all the time, but first and foremost, it's a project management tool. So you're just gonna always be bumping up against that, that limit. Um, and people do it. People have successful, you, you guys use it. So it's not like it's impossible, but when you wanna take it to the level that I'm talking about, you really want a database, like, it, it like, I mean, Google, sh uh, I, I wouldn't recommend using Google Sheets, but e even in a way that that is closer to being able to manage content on an individual level than something like, uh, you know, Asana or monday.com is, So, just so people can wrap their heads around the kinds of things you can automate specifically with a content management system. What are we talking about here? Like, just 'cause so far what I've heard you say is that, hey, a project management system is more about managing people, it sounds like, and the tasks that they need to do, where a content management system is about managing a centralized piece of content. Is that, and moving it, moving it around. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say? First of all, do I have that right? Yeah, exactly. So, like, you know, in the beginning, what you wanted to automate is like the intake of ideas or planning, you know, upcoming guests or upcoming, you know, projects. I'm not saying you can't have projects, but you're, you're managing it at the content level. So you're thinking about, Hey, what's the next podcast that's coming up? But I'm thinking, I'm not thinking of the podcast as much of a project, as much as like, this is an actual piece of content that we're gonna be creating. Um, and so at the planning phase, it's really collecting and planning what the next piece of content we're gonna create is. And then, um, once we decide, hey, this is the next thing, we're gonna record it this time, and, you know, publish it this time, then it's starting to create that project structure, you know, the folders, uh, the main folder, the original files, the original assets. Where are you gonna take this podcast from Streamy Yard and drop it into after the fact, right? So there's a bucket for that. So that for you, like, when you're done, all you do is download it, upload it, and then you're done. You can just let you know for sure that it's gonna continue on. And then building the, the, the, uh, the folders for all the final assets, whereas the, like, once things are actually finalized, where are they gonna get downloaded into and stored? And then linking those things back to the content management system so that everybody has access to it, you know, and if you imagine a, a spreadsheet, that's probably the easiest way to really imagine what Airtable is. It's like a spreadsheet on steroids. We just have all these columns where we get to start to track all of these different things like, you know, the, the name of the, the, the podcast who's on it, a link to the folder, a link to the original assets, a link to the final assets, um, and then getting granular look like, hey, this is the, the, the, uh, the file ID of the video associated with this podcast. And, um, and then once you start to have those assets, when, when you have automations running, they can go into these rows and pull these things out and then start to automate the rest of the process, and then, you know, like, you know, so on and so on. Yeah. So what I, what I'd love to maybe explore a little bit is give us an example. Use your own business, use your own YouTube channel if you want, just so people can like, imagine Yeah. What what this is like. Yeah, so, so like for instance, like if I have a, um, like when I had my podcast or like the, you know, a, a podcast, I would plan the podcast out and I would define, you know, the, the basic assets that I would always have. You know, I'm gonna have the, the, the main podcast, I'm gonna have the audio version of it, and then I'm always going to create, you know, three vertical videos. So in my system, I can go in there and kind of define that kind of package, right? And if, if you're a different type of company and you're creating, you know, if you're a content agency or if you're a, you know, doing marketing material for your business, you might have other types of packages where maybe each week you create three social graphics for this. So you can kind of define these packages of what the assets should be. And then once you decide, Hey, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run one of these projects, then what the system will do is, like, once you say, Hey, this is something we're gonna do, it's gonna go create the folders and then actually create like the, the placeholders in frame.io. If, if people aren't familiar with that, that's a video collaboration software that allows you to upload videos and review the videos and get feedback. And like, you can write on the video and say, Hey, take this out. This was a mistake. There's something in the background. You can put all that stuff in there, Kinda like Vim Vimeo allows you to do the same thing, it sounds like, right? Yeah, Yeah. I, I've never used that, but I know that it does. Yeah. So sim something similar, but what, what's nice about this is that because we defined that package, we said, Hey, we're gonna have a podcast, we're gonna have audio in three clips when you go into the software. So when the video editor goes in there, they are going to see like those objects sitting there waiting to be filled. So it's, so things become less like, um, like, just like where people have to remember things in their head, like, right, so they just see visually, oh yeah, there's that, there's that, I gotta upload those different assets, and they can just drag the videos right on top of those assets. And then that action in itself triggers all of the backend automations automatically to sync back to the system and track those things and send off notifications to the team and track the status. Hey, this is now needs to be reviewed, right? So all of those little min minute details, like setting the status, setting a notification, you know, by themselves aren't big issues. But if you don't remember to do it, and then if you stack on 30 of them, 30 little tasks, you know, it's like a death by a thousand cuts, right? It's just like, right. It's just annoying. So then it's just, it's kind of setting up a, you know, setting you up to succeed as well. And then there's little things as well, like, for each of these projects, you can attach your guidelines and your brand kits and just like, Hey, this is, you know, this, this is what these videos should look like. This is what the audio should look like. Here's the intro. So you can kind of attach all these things together so that as they go through the content management system and people are assigned things, then uh, they can just easily click to get access to these things, right? It's all about just making things extremely accessible to anyone on the team at any given point, and everyone knows exactly when, when, and where, and how to do things. Okay. Let's talk about the tools. Um, you, you mentioned, uh, Airtable. So let's start with Airtable, and then let's talk about the other tools that kind of link all this together. For people that are not familiar with Airtable, you mentioned that it's like, um, a spreadsheet on steroids. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about what Airtable is uniquely capable of doing and why you like using it. Yeah, so it really is like a spreadsheet. So, you know, when you think about a spreadsheet, you, you create a spreadsheet and you've got the tabs along the bottom, right, an Airtable that happen to be at the top, and you've got, you've got rows, which is all of the, the different, you know, ENT or the different things that you're creating. And then you've got any number of columns that you want to create. The main difference with Google Sheets and, and something like Airtable is that Airtable is a little bit closer to, to being like a real database in that you can define different types. So you can say, Hey, this is a select field, this is a multi-select field. And then you can, like, if you're imagining a spreadsheet and you've got those different tabs, then you can also link the different tabs together so that, you know, you can have different types of objects. So for instance, like, uh, you, you might have content, and then you might also have another tab, which is your brands, right? Okay. Like, what brands are we creating content for? And so then your content tab can link to a brand, and then you can kind of create these relationships. And then, because it's a little bit more structured, and then, then you have the, the, uh, automation platforms that can connect to it. But it's really, it really is a Google sheet sheets. It's just more structured and more tolerant to, you know, keeping things structured and the, the integrity of the data. Whereas, you know, with the spreadsheet, people are sharing it and things are changing, mistakes are made, and you can't really kind of control that, and then you can't automate it as well. But it really is like a, a spreadsheet. So in Airtable, is the data, like the transcript and or the video living in Airtable, or is it just hot linked into like Google Drive? Talk to me about that a little bit. Yeah, yeah. So, uh, that's a good question. Like, technically it's possible to upload videos and, and put copy and descriptions or transcriptions into Airtable. I personally keep the files and transcriptions and copy and all that stuff in Google Drive. So when I create a new project, um, I'll open, you know, I'll create a folder in Google Drive and link everything with a link and an ID into Airtable, mostly just because, like, it's just a better storage engine, right? So I'm trying to use each of these tools for their, their strength, right? And, and like with Google Drive, I mean, it's, it's meant to be a storage system, right? So it's better suited than Airtable is to do that, even though Airtable can technically do it, you know, you can share folders very easily without having to give people access to Airtable. Um, and then, you know, Google Docs is great for collaborating and doing spell checks and sharing it and comments, and you know, and you can do, you know, you can do things that a document can do, which is when people are writing, they're, they're familiar with that. Instead of going into, you know, you've probably been in a, a spreadsheet and you're trying to write something into a little cell, and, you know, it's like you can't even hit enter. 'cause if you do, then it clears out. You have to hit, shift, enter. So there's all these little things that make it annoying to deal with those types of, of data in, in those systems. Okay. So what I'm hearing you say so far is we're using a tool like Airtable, which is the data base where we've got rows, which is typically our content and columns, which are, it sounds like the actions that we want to take, right? Is that, do I have that correctly, or are the times where Yeah. All the, all the metadata that we need to store? Right? So like, the description of the content, who it's assigned to. Ah, Okay. You know, the link to the folder, the link to the actual ID of that, you know, um, so all of that metadata, that's that you need to store for that piece of content, you know? Got it. So that data is stored inside of, uh, Airtable instead of like in a Google Doc, and then you can give people access to the Airtable, presumably with different levels of access control and stuff like that, and then, or no, you, Yeah, you can, although really, like, Or is it more the automation that this is where the automation comes in, right? Yeah. The, the automation's gonna take care of a lot of that, because like, you don't really need as many people going into Airtable. You really only need one or two people that are kind of just manning the, the machine as that, I like to say. Um, and then the rest of the team can kind of collaborate in the, the tools, like, so they'll have access to Google Drive, or they'll have, uh, frame.io, which is the video collaboration tool. And then Airtable is keeping track and orchestrating all of this, but the automations are just sending, sending people to the platforms that they need to actually interact with. So, you know, you don't really have to have everybody in Airtable, like, you know, in the, in the weeds with that piece of it. Does Airtable provide the automations, or do you need third party tools like Zapier and or make.com? That's a great question. So, uh, Airtable does have automations, and I do use them, but they tend to be more like automating things within its own platform. So like, you know, like when a new row is created, do this, or when a row is updated, do this. And I use all of those all the time, but it's really kind of more for moving data or, you know, really manipulating data that's already in the system. Got it. But, but to connect it to all the various tools. Yeah. You want to use Zapier or make.com to, to do that kind of thing. Talk to everybody about Zapier and or make.com. Like, let's talk a little bit about your thoughts on both of them and kind of what they're capable of. Yeah, so they're, they're very similar in a lot of ways. Like most automation platforms, it's like there's some sort of trigger that happens from an external system that will trigger an automation. And then, you know, like, let's say a, a simple trigger could be, you know, like a, a file was uploaded to Google Drive, that could be a trigger for, for starting a process. Like, for, for instance, a lot of content agencies, they will accept files from their clients, right? And so when that client uploads that folder, that could be the trigger point for doing all of the rest of the production process, right? The, the, you know, let's say you had a, a content agency. Uh, you worked with a content agency. I know you guys do this in-House, but like when this podcast was over, you could upload it to that content agency, and as soon as you uploaded that folder, it would trigger the process for them to then do all the editing and then send it back to you. So these platforms are all based off of these triggers, Zapier and make.com, they both do the same thing. Um, so from a practical standpoint, very similar. They all integrate with a bunch of different platforms, but the main difference is, is just make.com is a lot newer, it's quite a bit cheaper, it's faster and much more visual in the way that you can build these automations. So I tend to prefer make.com, but there's always a situation in these platforms where like one does something that the other doesn't. And so sometimes you're using both. Um, So it sounds like, it sounds like, um, using Make or Zapier is kind of the key to the automation stuff right here, right? Because yeah, you can set this up so that, uh, it sounds like they all have access to Google Drive, which is where you're gonna put your stuff, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then the second you drop a new folder or a new file into a space, it's watching, and then it automatically will update, in this case, Airtable, right? And, and that might send a trigger. Will it also like, like just help help people understand like what these tools actually do, because like, it's not just updating that there's a lot more to it, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, they can do all sorts of stuff, but let, let's just say like, you know, that somebody uploads that folder into Google Drive and that, that might create a row inside of Airtable, which automatically sets a status to like new incoming, you know, file from client, which then will continually push this ball forward, right? It'll automatically select who the client was and maybe what type of file it was, and you know, and then you can string together all sorts of different, different automations together to, uh, to kind of Facilitate what, like email notifications or what kind of stuff Yeah, email notifications. Yeah. Slack notifications, creating additional folders for the rest of the structure that the team is gonna need to perform, you know? So, um, yeah. I mean, with content automation in general, it's the, the, the crux of it is creating folders, making sure folders are linked. So once you create that folder, grabbing the actual link of that Google Drive folder, copying that back into Airtable so that when somebody, somebody doesn't have to search around for that link, right? They're just like, Hey, where's this file? Oh, it's right there. It's already there. Click it takes you right to that folder, right? Those are all those little things. So it's like creating the folders, linking the folders, linking the files, notifications, um, and then of course, like interacting with some of those advanced APIs. Once you have this, then you can start to get into some of that stuff. Well, and that's the perfect transition to the next question, which is, you know, up until this point, we're talking about very, um, simple things that humans would do, right? Right. But with the APIs and ultimately ai, I mean, like, talk about what does the APIs make possible, and then let's let, we can dig into the AI features as well. Yeah. So for instance, like once you, once you have your video file and it's in a cloud, it's in the cloud folder, and you've got, it's like Id, then you can start to do stuff. Hey, well, let's just go and grab the, uh, the transcription for that, you know, let's connect up to the script or to Chad GT's whisper, and let's get that transcript that we always get automatically Mm-Hmm. And then let's take that transcript, copy it into a document, and then link that document back up with that podcast so that we have that available. And then, and then from there, then you can wait, wait, Wait, wait, wait. We gotta pause there. Just 'cause this, you know, this is magic stuff and I don't wanna like skim past it too quickly. Right? So if I'm hearing you correctly, with API, integrations with third party tools like Chat, GPT, whispers and or Descrip and others, there's, there's a ton, there's a million of them. There's a ton of these, um, transcription, uh, tools that are out there. What I'm hearing you say is the moment you drop a video or an audio into a folder, and you, you're starting connecting, um, are the APIs connected on the Make slash Zapier side, or are they connected on the Airtable side? Yeah, they're connected on the make side. Okay. Yeah. Tech. Yeah. I mean, technically you could do it in Airtable, but you probably wouldn't want to. So because of Zapier and make dot com's wide integration with a million tools, now all of a sudden you can trigger the transcript to be created and drop right back into Google Drive. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, exactly. Right. And then, um, and then from there, you remember, remember when we talked about that example where we can create those packages, right? So your podcast, um, has the, the main video and the audio, and then maybe three vertical clips for social media. But now you can take that transcript now that you have the transcript, and you can build sub workflows off of that. You can say, okay, now that we have the transcript, I'd like you to use the series of prompts and this, you know, these different things to, to actually write the, the, the description for the, the podcast. Hmm. You know, um, and then also because all these things are linked together and you have 'em all accessible, like they're all accessible, you can actually produce a much higher quality piece from that because you could say, Hey, and by the way, here's, here's 10 different examples of how we've written our descriptions before. Right? And We're talking about AI tools at this point. Are we talking about Yeah. Trying into AI tools, Clo slash chat gpt? I mean, is that kind of where you're going with this? Yeah, exactly. So you can start to, because you, because this is all automated and connected, you can, you know, you can reference these other assets that you've used in the past to give a lot more context, right? Because people are doing this stuff all the time right now, but they're doing it in the, the actual interfaces for chat, GBT. Like, they'll take a transcript, they'll pa paste it in there, they'll say, Hey, do this, write a blog for me. But the output of the blog won't be what they want. It'll be in a different voice. But when you have all the automations connecting everything you can, you can reference in a previous blogs that you've written to give it context, to give it examples and style so that when you automate these things, now you can say, Hey, take this transcript, create the YouTube description, create this blog, and use these five examples so that it comes out in the same style. Because, um, you know, people can log into chat GPT and do these actions, but they're certainly not scalable. People are cut and pasting things and it, it gets very messy. And it's also not really linking to all of the, it doesn't have the context of, of everything that you've done and all of your expertise and who you are and who your clients are. But if you link all that stuff with the automations, then it will, and it can do that consistently over time. Okay. Uh, for folks that don't know, I have a whole nother podcast called AI Explored, where we talk about a lot of this stuff, but I know people are on, on this show are gonna wanna understand this as well. So, um, this is a, API integration specifically we're talking about, for example, with open ais, um, chat GT and or Whisper it sounds like, which I'm not as familiar with Whisper. Um, you can train it with, I would imagine that training is a one-off exercise where you're gonna give it a bunch of, uh, examples of well-written, um, descriptions, right? And then, yeah. And then you're going to ask it to output just one, or you ask it to do more than one and let a human decide which one they want. Or what's your, what's your recommendation on this? Yeah. So of course you can do that, right? So typically what'll happen though is you'll find that one of the platforms is producing better written material for what you want, and you'll just kind of stick with it, right? But you certainly could, you could, you could reach out to both and have both of 'em output in. Well, IM meant having chatt PT do more than one iteration and decide which one you like, or do you generally just have it do Yeah, you can do that. You can do that as well. Um, I do find that like, once you kind of provide the context and you kind of like build out that, that prompt, it'll start to, you know, you can get it to, to do that. But yeah, I mean, absolutely you can do that, that those kind of things, because this is, because you're setting yourself up with the structure. All of those things are possible, right? So there's no, there's not, there's not just one way to do it, but you could get multiple answers from multiple platforms and then kind of decide which one you want to use or kind of cut and paste between the two and, um, all that stuff. So, just so I understand the interrelationship between Airtable and all this, this sounds like mm-Hmm. This Airtable is track and the fact that it's, uh, completed the transcript, I mean, I'm sorry, yeah. Completed the transcript, and then it's also tracking that it completed the, um, the description, right? And it's somehow right, putting that description inside of a Google Doc, or where does that normally go from the automation side of things? Yeah, It'll go back into a Google Doc. And if you think back to like that package that we were talking about, so now the package has grown, right? We're getting the video, we're getting the podcast, we have the three vertical clips, we have the transcript, and then from the transcript we're creating the YouTube description and titles, and then now we're also creating a blog, right? So the package can define these things. And just to kind of also tie into Airtable a little bit more in terms of those relationships, I don't want to get too complicated, but just to kind of show the power, remember we were talking about those, those different tabs, right? And, uh, how they're different, basically different objects, you know, like we had, we, we talked about, we had the content tab and the brand tab, right? So when we talk about giving context to chat GPT, well, on that brand tab we might say, Hey, for, for the, uh, social media marketing podcast, like, here is some context around who our clients or who our listeners are, their pain points, their problems. And so now you can link that, you know, that ideal client profile if you wanna say to that brand. And so you're starting to link these things together. So when you launch that, when you initiate that podcast, that's for the social media marketing podcast, it now has a link to the Google document that has all the information about your listeners. And so when we then start to hook up these APIs, when it's, when, when the automations are running a automation for this, you know, the social media marketing podcast, it will be able to link to the document that explains who your ideal listener is. And so then when the automations run that turn, that turn that transcript into the blog, it will be able to reference that document, see how everything is linked now. So when these automations are running, you can pull in these resources without people having to remember that they are even there. 'cause like over time, people will just stop doing it. They'll just, they'll get into a groove and they won't remember all these things are there. Or just, it will just take too much time. Okay. What about something more complicated like a thumbnail? Um, typically there is a human review in thumbnails, right? Because right now the tools, there's a lot of different tools that are typically involved with this. Mm-Hmm. How can that process be automated and and how does the human review work into all this? Yeah, so that, that actually brings up a good point because there's, there's like a, um, there, there's a balance here between automation and creativity, right? So there might be tools out there that I don't necessarily know about yet, but for the most part, when I create a thumbnail, it's all like done by a human. Now, I do set that, I do set up the project so that it's very easy for that person to do it. They know where to put it, what the expectations are, when to have it done by, they know exactly where to put it. And the communication between that thumbnail designer and the team is all orchestrated and everyone's notified. Um, so you basically just, you just set up in the system. It's just like, this is, this is reviewed by a human, and so that you, you don't wanna remove move. Like there's this interesting balance where you want to keep the creativity and, uh, set the people up that can do that nicely, but not necessarily like try to create the graphic. There might be some, some ways and some contexts where that makes sense. Well, and, and, and if we, you know, get creative a little bit, Dolly three is probably the first one that I think of, you know, which has got an API, and you can send it a prompt and it can generate some images for you that a lot of people are familiar with. If they have chat GPT, right? Excuse me. And I would imagine you could have it generate a bunch of images for you that it, you could put inside of a drive and then you could notify the, uh, the design person that there's some images that have already been kind of pre, pre-created, and then they can decide where to go with it, potentially. Yeah, absolutely. They can decide and, and you might iterate on it, right? You like, 'cause the, the thing is, is like when in the end, what makes your podcast good is the content is good, right? The guests are good, you do a good interview, the, uh, thumbnails do really well because they get people to click on them, right? Right. So you gotta be super careful when you design these systems that you don't dilute that process. So if you, if the context is correct and you know the prompt to create the right graphic that will achieve that marketing result that you want more power to you, in some cases, you still might need that person to do some of that work. Um, and then, you know, for like, and there's also like, not to add more options, but there's gray areas too, right? So there's lots of, uh, you know, services out there similar to Canva where you can, you, like, somebody can design it and build out the templates, but then you can insert the text that you want into those graphics and then export them, you know, push those back to Google Drive so that they're more designed with, you know, more thought and stuff like that, right? So there's this, you know, there's an overwhelmingly number of different ways that this can, can get done. And, and that's actually one of the challenges is like, how do you, with all of these options, how do you actually come back to what you should be doing and how do you put it together so that it's meaningful? So APIs kind of bypass the need for Zapier and make.com, right? Because you're going directly from, from one tool to another tool. Is that correct? Or Well, well, Those, well, those tools will be, those, those APIs will be, um, you'll make the calls to those APIs through make.com or ah, Zapier. I see. So like, think of like, uh, Zapier or make.com as the glue for all of this. Got it. It's the conduit, right? And I think Zapier says it's the glue of the internet. I think that's their tagline, or at least it was at one point. So What, what kind of, uh, other than the AI tools, typically, just so people can have their horizons expanded, what other kind of tools typically have APIs that people might not even realize? Like maybe their email software? Oh, oh, yeah. Basically ev like, like every SaaS platform out there is essentially providing APIs for their stuff. So email, Google, you know, Gmail. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if Streamy Yard didn't have something. Maybe they don't, I don't know for sure. But yeah, pretty, it's pretty much like, like on your, if you're developing a SaaS product these days, more than likely an API is on, uh, is on the roadmap. And so then the way it works is that all of these SaaS platforms, software as a service like Streamy Yard or you know, Airtable or Google Drive or whatever, all these, these services, they build these APIs, which are a little bit more on the technical side, you know, it's like not that hard, but pretty technical for most people. But then what Zapier and Make are doing is that they're kind of wrapping those, they're wrapping these little, these little packages around those APIs to make it easy, where you can just go into a user interface and kind of connect the dots without having to know that kind of more technical side. But if any one of those platforms, Zapier, or make.com doesn't have like a built-in integration with one of those tools that makes it super simple, you can always connect directly to that API and do what you need to do. So once you get this automation system in place, and you wanna create content, how, how, how fast is it from the moment you drop a file, for example, into the, to the time that you get all the output that you're looking for? And by the way, you also mentioned, uh, creating reels. I don't know if there was a tool in there that we did not mention. There's, there's, there's like opus clips and there's some of these tools that are coming out. I haven't seen one that has an API yet. Got it. So most of those, like you still have to upload the video and then download the video, right? I'm sure like all of these things change on the daily, so, right. One of the fun things about all this stuff is like, you just like, Hey, I, I, I know in a month this is gonna change, right? So, um, But how long does it take to actually from the moment you drop that file in there to get all this output? Like, what are we, what are we talking about here? Minutes? Yeah, so the, I ac I actually did a YouTube video on this, which was kind of cool. I went to the local colleges and I, I brainstormed a YouTube video on my phone. Like, Hey, I, it was just like kind of ad hoc. I didn't, there was no structure to it. I just said, Hey, this is what I'm gonna do. And then as soon as I stopped the recording, my phone uploaded it to Google Drive and triggered this whole process. And I actually, um, so I created the YouTube script. I actually created a YouTube video using, um, a platform called, um, Hagen. So it actually took that script and used an avatar of me and read that script, and then downloaded that video. So I created my YouTube video, a bunch of shorts, a bunch of tweets, um, a bunch of, you know, carousel slide decks for social media. And that all that took like, like a couple minutes. Dang. I mean, it, it, it was like, I don't remember the exact number, but it was like 30 pieces of content all derived from my, you know, from my actual words, right. Um, now I, now I will say that the, you know, with the caveat, like, I don't know that I would publish or produce or I don't know that I would publish every single piece of that. It was kind of more for demonstration. There was a lot of like, you know, a lot of fine tuning that would need to happen to make that happen, like in a, in a place where I would just be willing to just publish. But quite literally, it was like that whole automation can take place in five minutes, like 30 pieces of content from just one audio brainstorming session. Wow. That's crazy. Steven. Uh, where can people discover more about you if they wanna learn more about the kinds of things we're talking about, and also where can they discover, uh, your product? Yeah, so probably the best place. So like if you, if you type Steven G. Pope at, at Google, I'm gonna come up on any of your favorite platforms, but I have a community, it's on the school platform, SKOO l.com/content-academy. That's probably the best place because like, I consolidate all the best content there. It's a community where you can access me and, uh, ask questions and you know, like, so that's probably the best place. 'cause it's very interactive. There's 4,000 people there posting every day and interacting and asking questions and helping each other out. And you can find all my products and there's a bunch of free courses. I mean, when I say free, they're not the free ones that are just like, to get you there to buy something. I mean, like, real legitimate free courses that will help you launch your whole social media video, um, journey. Steven G. Pope, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us today. Yeah, this is super fun, uh, super thoughtful questions. I like how you kind of synthesize things, I would say. So that was, it's always cool to see how people hear what you're saying and how they think about it. So I appreciate you having me on and, um, hope this was helpful to all the, the whole audience.