In this engaging episode of Digital Marketing Masters, host Matt Rouse welcomes Nathan Fletcher, also known as Uncle Nene from Uncle Nay Nay's Nerdcast. They dive into the world of creative work and the challenges of marketing it in today's digital landscape. Nathan shares his journey from a career in marketing and production to starting his own podcast focused on science fiction and fantasy. The conversation touches on the importance of community, the struggles of self-promotion, and the evolving role of AI in creative processes.
Matt and Nathan explore the intersection of creativity and technology, discussing how AI can assist in content creation and distribution. They share insights on leveraging AI tools for research, idea generation, and even creating visual content. The episode also delves into the potential of AI to revolutionize media operations and the importance of adapting to technological advancements. Whether you're a creative professional or just curious about the future of digital marketing, this episode offers valuable perspectives on navigating the ever-changing landscape.
(00:00) Introduction to the Episode
(00:29) Nathan Fletcher's Background and Career
(01:49) The Reality of Marketing Creative Work
(03:54) Starting a Podcast: Uncle Nene's Nerdcast
(05:00) Challenges in the Creative Industry
(09:55) The Importance of Iteration in Creativity
(13:48) Distribution Challenges for Creatives
(15:20) Advice for Marketing Creative Work
(20:39) Podcasting as a Marketing Tool
(26:04) Automation and AI in Creative Processes
(33:59) Exploring Different Mediums for Storytelling
(39:01) AI's Impact on Media and Content Creation
(46:52) The Future of AI in Media Operations
(50:00) The Shift in Media Asset Management
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https://www.youtube.com/@UncleNayNaysNerdcast/videos
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[00:00:01]
AI Narrator #1:
Today on the digital marketing masters podcast, Nathan Fletcher, AKA uncle Nay Nay from uncle Nay Nay's nerd cast.
[00:00:19] Matt Rouse:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Rousen. Today, my guest is Nathan Fletcher. Nathan, how are you? I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on the show, Matt. Nathan and I met because I was on your podcast, Uncle Nay Nay's Nerdcast. That's right. Talking about science fiction and AI. And, we mentioned the book that's coming out. Actually, it just, got funded on Kickstarter, the Tales of Galactic Pest Control from, Amazing Stories. I can't be right. And I've read some of it. It's amazing. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I got, like, a pre edit copy.
Oh, that's great. Yeah. I've been going through all the all the other I found a bunch of the other people who wrote the stories on Blue Sky. Okay. So I kinda connected with them on there, and we've been chatting a little bit back and forth, and then I read their stories. Man, I read this one that was in there. I don't wanna give away what happens, but essentially, there's a disease that starts to take over a spaceship, and it turns out that someone caught a venereal disease when they were off ship on shore leave and it mutated on their ship. Oh, wow. And so it turns into a pest that they have to try to control.
And, yeah, it was a super interesting story. Mine's mine's not as risque.
[00:01:35] AI Narrator #1:
Nah.
[00:01:37] Matt Rouse:
I also have the last story in the book. So mine is the last one Oh, nice. Before the book finishes out. So make sure you read to the end, folks. Otherwise, you don't get to hear agenda item b, pest control. But, David, we have a very specific topic today that we I'm sure we can kind of take several directions, and we'll see how it goes. But this is an idea that you and I both run into, and that is that when you once you do all your creative work, like you're writing a story, you're making recording a podcast, you're doing whatever that thing is that you make, you actually find out, generally most people find this out the first time, is you write a book or you make a story or you get a screenplay or whatever and then you find out you you have to market it yourself or no one will ever see it because the kind of gatekeeper system that used to exist is no longer there.
[00:02:30] AI Narrator #1:
That's right. So
[00:02:32] Matt Rouse:
I guess my first question would be, why don't you give us a quick kind of, one breath about who you are and then we'll get back into, talking about it.
[00:02:44] AI Narrator #1:
Sure. So my career, most of my life, it has been in marketing and production. So I started when I graduated high school early at age 16, I got a job working for a marketing production company, down in South Texas that did commercials, TV shows, a little bit of everything. And so I learned production and how to make commercials, make music videos, all of that. And so I grew up in the production business. And the last ten to fifteen years has been more in the cable and then, of course, the transition over to streaming. So I've worked for cable networks and, streaming platforms, and it's been focused mainly in that space, both in the operations as well as the content development.
So that's, in a nutshell, my background. And then, personally, I've you know, this this last recent year decided I'm gonna start a podcast because my daughter's moved out of the house, and I have a lot of spare time. And I love and have always loved fantasy and sci fi, and so I wanted a hobby. And so a podcast seemed like a good idea. So I started uncle Nene's Nerdcast because my nieces and nephews call me uncle Nene. And it's been a lot of fun. I've been meeting great people like you and and just talking about something I love to talk about, which is science fiction and fantasy. So, you know, what could be better than that?
[00:04:12] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. It's a great community around especially kind of authors in general, I found to be, you know, pretty inclusive. Everybody's friendly. You know, there's the odd kind of odd duck here and there, you know, that you run into that maybe aren't as friendly, but, you know, 99 out of a 100 super great people. I just I don't know how many people now who are authors. I hit them up and I'm like, hey. I saw you're an author and you write this kind of book. I write this kind of book. We should chat. And they're like, yeah. Let's chat.
[00:04:42] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's extends to most creative people that, you know, whether or not they consider themselves an artist are probably an artist. Right. And then they so they have that they wanna connect because that's part of I think an artist is, you know, that kind of drive to connect.
[00:05:01] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I think also the, that, you know, as as the topic here is about kind of marketing that creative work or finding out you have to market that creative work. I think a lot of that comes out in people going, oh my god. You know, I've been an introvert, and I've been writing stories or poetry or music or whatever it is in a dark room by myself for three years, and now I actually have to go talk to people. And so they kinda get over that that talk to people stage fright really. Out of because they have to. Right. Yeah. Or else nobody's ever gonna see what you did. Right? I don't know how many authors I have seen who are who think that the process of writing a book is I write a book, I put it on Amazon.
Some, you know, some agent is gonna read my book randomly, or they're gonna get told about it by someone else who read it, and they're gonna sign me up for a ten year deal for a million dollars to write three books, and make a movie and, like, just fantasy of how the whole system works. Right?
[00:06:04] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. My friend I have a good friend. He's a writer. Doesn't get paid to write, but he's a writer. Right? He has a job and but he writes personally and he's written he just his last novel, and so now he's at the phase where he's sending out all of these, letters to requesting representation where he's written, I guess, a treatment or whatever or a summary of the book. And and it's, a couple places have asked for a manuscript. And and so right now, he's getting the phase where he's just getting rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection. And and it's, you know, it's heartbreaking. There's you know, what can you do? This is his baby that he worked on for years, you know, and it's just nope. Not what we're looking for. This is, you know, this blah blah blah blah. And so it's but it that's part of the process is you just gotta get used to hearing no because you gotta hear the no's before you hear the yes.
[00:06:56] Matt Rouse:
That's right. You know what? The first thing that I put into a writing contest, I got shortlisted. And so now and then the second thing I wrote got into the book. And so now I'm like, I get a rejection and I'm like, oh, I'm like, you guys suck.
[00:07:13] AI Narrator #1:
The other people loved my story. You know? Well, success I know. I understand that. Success early on can can almost be a detriment sometimes. You know? When I was starting off in my career, I, you know, I started up very young. And so by the time I was, you know, in my early twenties, like, twenty, twenty one, I had some success as a producer, director, editor, and there was a very big Spanish band called the Cumbia Kings, which the founder was, AB Quintanilla, who was Selena Quintanilla's brother. And AB had me edit one of his music videos. And once I edited it, he was like, I don't want anyone else to edit my music videos for Nice. And he wouldn't let anyone edit his music except me. He's like, he gets it. He's a visionary. He's a good editor. And I was a kid at the time. And so it was great, but at the same time, I took it for granted that, you know, that's how I was. That talent was something that was special and all of that. And so it kind of you know, when things come real easy early on, then it doesn't prepare you for later on in life when you're gonna stumble and fall.
[00:08:27] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, the other thing is that I mean, even if the stars align and something good happens out of the gate, you know, I say, yeah, my, you know, my short movie screenplay got shortlisted in the first contest that I put it into. But I also wrote, like, a thousand blog posts, you know, eight business books. That's any all of that Right. For decades of writing before I ever thought, yeah, maybe I could do a short screenplay. You know? Right. It's not like I started out and I'm like, I'm gonna write a screenplay about a a robot that goes to jail and which technically is what my screenplay was about. But, yeah. Like, you just you don't anytime that somebody has immediate success, you know, it people see it as, like, you know, the old Hollywood trope. Like, you know, Janice was singing karaoke down on the, you know, at the bar and some movie producer saw her and said, you should be in my musical.
You know? Like, that's just not the way it happens.
[00:09:34] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. Yeah. I, myself, I I really enjoyed the experience when I first got had a corporate media job as a senior vice president of content development. And as is very common, a couple years ago, I got laid off because in media and entertainment, everybody's getting laid off. That's how it is. And but it freed me up to follow this science fiction fantasy, passion that I've always had. So I started to engage in world building and started to build this universe that I liked, and so I did. I built this planet, and I all these kind of the lore of the history of the different nations and tribes and their history and what are the rules for magic and all of this stuff. And I started to work on it. Really enjoyed it. Wrote a short story based in that world. It was awful.
I am not equipped to write short stories. It was really awful. I I self published, and then I deleted it and pulled it off because it was just so bad. And then, I wrote a screenplay, and I I was like, okay. This is much better. I can I can it's better? It's still not good. Right? It's still not good. But it's not so I'm I'm on my third screenplay, and each one is getting better. Right? And and I have enough objectivity to look at what I've written and say, oh, this is bad or this is you know, it's so it's getting better, but it's you know, the more you do it, the better you get, you know. And and that's just something that you you have to learn.
[00:11:06] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I mean, iteration is is how everything gets better. Right? And it's how everything gets done. Anything in the world that you see that got done that was good, somebody iterated on that forever.
[00:11:17] AI Narrator #1:
You know?
[00:11:19] Matt Rouse:
It is so rare that there is an actual edge case where somebody came out of the blue and did something and it worked. Right. Right. Yeah.
[00:11:27] AI Narrator #1:
Never. I, was sitting on a panel at the film school in TCU, which is a big college here in Fort Worth. And I could tell from the questions that the kids were asking that they assumed that when they graduated, they were going to be producing and directing. Right. And I said, listen. I think it's great you're getting an education and learning how to do this. I think that's great. But you have to understand that when you leave here, you'll be qualified to be a production assistant. That's it. Entry level. Right? You're gonna have to get some experience, figure out which department you wanna go into, and and then work your way up, build relationships, and learn.
And that's just now there is the one in a million shot. Every now and then, there is the fresh college grad that just meets the right people, gets to make a big Hollywood movie, but that's a one in a million shot. Most people have to put in their time, work at it, work their way up, and and that's just how it goes.
[00:12:27] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I I've been reading Seth Godin's book, This is Strategy, which is a business strategy book. But, honestly, you know, any kind of organization or or business that you're in, I think it's it's an excellent read. But one of the things that he said that I really I found striking, and it's right near the beginning, is that all the low hanging fruit has already been picked. And basically, what he's saying is if anything that you're gonna do, if it's easy, somebody else has already done it, probably done it better. That's a good point. Doing something difficult or something hard to do, you're not really gonna get anywhere.
Right? Great. I like that. All low hanging fruit has already been picked. That's great. Well, and you gotta think about it. Like, I mean, just in The United States alone, was there 400,000,000 people? Yep. Almost. Almost, I think. Yeah. So if you say it's a one in a million chance that somebody's gonna make a better movie than the one that you made, you know, that's still 40 people. Yeah. You know, like, if you're talking about statistics, I'm not a I'm not a math expert. Yeah. You know, but I think something really interesting that I found in the creative space, you know, because I I work a lot with code and a lot with, I don't know, non creative side of technical marketing.
Right? Getting things connected to other systems and, you know, putting in API keys and codes and workflow and all this crap, logic based stuff. But on the creative side of work, I find that creatives are very good at getting their point across, getting their message across, and all of that kind of stuff. And what they're bad at is figuring out how to get distribution. Like, they could craft the message, but they can't get the message to the people. Yeah. Right? Especially at scale. Right? And when I say at scale, I mean, more than, you know, the 100 people that you know in the world posting it on TikTok or something. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like, you have to reach tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people to have basically any difference in, you know, making money. So and there's also, I mean, there is the idea of the, like, the 1,000 followers who are like, your 1,000 perfect customers is enough for you to make a $100,000 a year. And, I mean, that's been true for a while.
But in my experience, you need to reach a 100,000 people to find those thousand. Right. Right. And that's a lot of people. Yeah. You know? All of Nova Scotia where I live only has 800,000 people. Right. Right? So, you know, depending upon where you live, that's a difficult proposition. So if somebody is, you know, doing creative work and they're kind of getting to that point where they're like, I have to market this work, Do you have any advice, kind of general advice for people in that, predicament, I guess, I would call it?
[00:15:36] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. You know, there's you really there are some great tools out there for one. You know, I think ChatTPT is is really good at helping in that for ideas. Brainstorming, I use it to especially the deep research function to do research on, hey. I've created this piece of work. What are some things I can do to get the word out that don't cost money or or have a I have a small budget or whatever? I think there's some it's a great tool for that. I found it to be useful. But I think there are communities depending on what you create, but there are communities like on Reddit and other places where you can reach a lot of people by just participating in that community and starting to talk to people and build relationships, and I think that's phenomenal.
I also think that you're just gonna have to get used to hearing no, and I think entering, at least for screenplays I don't know if it's true for books, but I know for screenplays, entering contests is not very expensive, but it can be a great way to get some notoriety and attention to your work. And reader feedback. Yeah. I like the feedback. I like the professional feedback, on my screenplays because if I hear a couple of different people say the same thing, then there's definitely validity to it. And a lot of time, I already suspected that anyways. That, like, yeah, the third act is way too long. There's way too much stuff there. I gotta trim that out. You know, stuff like that that is you know, the stakes aren't high enough in this part. You know, things like that that I already kinda suspected, and and then now I've gotta revisit it for sure. So that can be really useful.
[00:17:25] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I found that, reader feedback for books, you know, like, there's, there's there's more than one kind of feedback. Right? And what we're talking about is professional editor feedback. Right? Like, somebody who is reading and selecting screenplays that actually get made or they have produced screenplays that have been made into films Yes. Or TV shows. Right? In the case of books, you know, it's somebody who's either a professional editor, they've a published writer who is not just self published but also has sold lots of books or they're professionally published or been paid to publish. Yeah.
But the other kind of feedback is like peer feedback, which I think is still good. Right? If you know somebody else who writes the same type of thing as you write, you know, or another business person if you write a business book kind of thing, you know, if you write a self help book, find some self help people, that's great. The feedback that I think is terrible is unrelated people who have no experience in the thing that you do. Right? I find that I found this a lot with business books. I would give it to someone who is not a business person. Like, they don't own or run their own or manage their own business.
They don't have any experience with it. I would give them the book and they'd be like, I didn't like this part. I don't like that part. You know? They're trying to find criticism because they think that's what editing is. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just you know, if you ask people who have no experience or education in the thing that you're doing, the feedback is worthless. Right? Yeah. And discouraging usually.
[00:19:02] AI Narrator #1:
Yep. And it's almost like it reminds me of a sales training thing I did one time where they talked about trying to sell to someone who is not a sales prospect. Right. Right? It's like, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to sell to someone who would never buy your product. They'd never you know, they're not interested. They they don't fit, but you're gonna keep trying to sell to them, you know, and and that's kinda what you're like. You're asking someone's opinion on your creative work who would never read your book. They they they're not interested. You know? It's like, my mom doesn't like science fiction and fantasy. She's never gonna be into that. You know? I wouldn't get her opinion on my book. Even though I'm her son, she'd probably tell me she loved it. But it's still she's not in the audience that I'm going for.
[00:19:49] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Along those same lines too is, like, if you have if you're doing music or something or theater or, you know, TV shows and that kind of thing, everybody has heard a song, so everybody has an opinion on your song. But it's really, really easy to find bands that have millions of people who like that song that you hate. Right.
[00:20:12] AI Narrator #1:
Yep.
[00:20:13] Matt Rouse:
And I just go into YouTube and type in the opposite type of music that you listen to, you know? Like think of whatever the, you know, if you're like a you're like a hard rock metal guy and you don't like country, go type in pop country or something or new country 2025 and listen to it. And look at it, it'll be like, this has 25,000,000 views and you can't even make it through a minute, you know? Right. So I think, another thing which we didn't talk about, which I think is a really good idea, and and I think you would agree with me on this, is podcasting is an excellent way to spread the word about things you're doing.
[00:20:53] AI Narrator #1:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I've I've found it, Not only is it it's good for that, but it's also just, I think, good for your own perspective as a creator, as a creative person. It's great to talk to other creative people, and get their perspective. And so I think it's great for that and and can be very easily, very affordably, you can grow an audience as well.
[00:21:24] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And in in a, I don't know if I would call it completely uncensored, but in essentially uncensored format. Right? Yeah. Like, your your podcast can't be about, like, you know, I can't even say what it would be because I don't wanna get my podcast ticked off Apple or something. But, you know, as long as you're not really way out there on some kind of, you know, borderline legal tactic or or speech, you know, you could get the word out. And you have an RSS feed, so you could put it on podcast platforms all over the world at no cost whatsoever, with the exception of maybe the podcast hosting Yeah. You know, which you spend a few bucks on, but, you know, that price is coming down too. I think I spend under 20 US a month on unlimited shows and unlimited downloads on Pod Home. Yeah. I use I think it's 14. I use rss.com,
[00:22:18] AI Narrator #1:
and I think it's, yeah, like, $14.15 bucks a month Yeah. It's cheap. Something like that. And I upload it once, and then it distributes automatically to Spotify and everywhere else. So it's Yeah. It's it's super easy.
[00:22:31] Matt Rouse:
Another thing that's really interesting to do with podcasts is you can, you know, create clips and stuff from it for your social media and stuff. I know, like you were saying, like, Riverside does it automatically. I use an app called GetMunch to do it. Oh. But you can also put, you know, like this video that we're on right now can be put on YouTube or something like that. Yeah. But another thing also is I think people struggle with what am I gonna post today or this week. Right? Like, they have some kind of posting schedule that they've made for themselves, and they're like, I have to post something new every single time. And if you're doing a podcast on a regular schedule, you've already got something to post about. Right? Because you're gonna put your episode on. But another thing that you could do is talk about something that you talked about in your show.
Right? Expand on that, or mention how, you know, I was talking to Nathan about screenplays on my podcast, and I had this idea, yada yada yada. Right? It's a great way to come up with more content.
[00:23:33] AI Narrator #1:
That's a good idea.
[00:23:36] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, we do own a marketing agency, so we do this all the time.
[00:23:41] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. You know, what I do with my podcast is I use Opus, ProClips. I find it better at selecting clips than Riverside. Riverside's great for, recording the podcast and and making the master, but then I take that master file and I upload it to Opus, and then it selects clips. And then I schedule all the social media for the whole week. And so, I once I get it's part of my you know, we talked about AI at Gentek. This is one of the things an AI agent needs to do for me is, once the thing is done, I have the same routine. Right? Record the podcast, upload it to YouTube, upload the audio to RSS, upload it to Opus Pro, get my social media clips, schedule them out for the week after the premiere, and then I'm done. And it's the same thing every time I do a podcast.
But yeah. So I I use it. It's I use I push out three clips a day on TikToks, and then Mhmm. About three clips a week or four clips a week on Instagram. And then I also do three clips a day on YouTube Shorts. And and that's that's it. I don't do Facebook or x or anything else, but those are my my platforms for my podcast. And it seems to be going well. It seems to be growing pretty pretty well.
[00:25:02] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I think, if you use, like, Zapier or n eight n or something like that, you could some kind of automation system Yeah. Then you could connect all those things. There's an API for Opus, so you could connect to get those clips out. You know, we had talked about earlier about, you know, if you're using the deep research function of the AI, you could just that could just be another step in your work flow. Yep. So technically, I mean, all an agent an AI agent really is is like a workflow that's looped. Right? Yeah. It's it's trying to do stuff over and over. And, really, what you need is you just need a a workflow that's on a schedule that's run a run through, do this task on the schedule that you've set, and it can even be something that you manually kick it off each time you wanna use it.
That is an excellent way, not only for, you know, stuff like shows and things. You could do that for almost every business in the world
[00:26:01] AI Narrator #1:
would be more efficient if they just used an automation tool. Yes. And and those have been around I've never seen a business that haven't. We've done, know, with Adobe, what has has had macros for a long time where you would record the okay. I'm gonna take this file. I'm gonna do record the macro. Okay. Repeat. And then, you know, it would automate. And and so, yeah, it's those type of automations, you know, can save so much time.
[00:26:23] Matt Rouse:
There was macros at Windows 3.1, if you remember how far back that is. Right? Like, this is how far back some of these tools are. Yeah. Another thing that I think is is a a game changer, especially for creatives, when you're gonna be doing a repeated job, like, I'm gonna be sending out my manuscript to different people Mhmm. Is have a format. Right? This is what this is my template for what I'm gonna send to someone. Yeah. And then do some quick research on that person and take the format and take the research you've done and ask ChatGPT to combine those things and then give it a read through to to your own edits Yes. And and send that out because you're not getting it to write your email or your message for you. You're saying, here's the email I wrote. Here's the research I did.
Yeah. Put put these two together.
[00:27:16] AI Narrator #1:
Yes. Yep. And
[00:27:18] Matt Rouse:
that's an excellent way to keep your creative flare and all the things that are good about being a person by using the AI to slug through the part that you don't wanna do. Right? Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:27:28] AI Narrator #1:
That's what I think is really important as a creative person. When I'm putting on my creative hat and I'm in that side of the the world, I don't use AI to actually create. I use it to research, to give me ideas so that I can create. You know, it's like I wanted to I was thinking about something involving, an EMP weapon. And and so I was trying to ask chat g p t, how do you create EMP? And then it's like, sorry. I can't tell you that. I was like, okay. I'm doing it for a screenplay. If just leave out a couple of minor critical steps, but give me and and then it went ahead and did it. Right? So it's not the complete way to build the EMP, but it gave me enough to where I had this. Okay. So this is how someone could do it, and then it it allowed me to kind of get that part of the story going. So I think that there is ways to you as a creative person to still rely on that as, like, being a research assistant.
[00:28:32] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And depending on your own writing style, you can see how accurate it needs to be. Mhmm. Right? Like, a good example would be the science fiction of, say, Interstellar, where it has some of the fix fictional stuff mixed with physics, like time dilation and and things like that in the movie versus something like Star Wars where they're just like spaceships just fly. Right. Yeah. That's just what happens. That's what happens. Yeah. And, you know, like you don't always have to have the the hardcore physics example, but you can do stuff like I was working on a story about first contact, from a nearby alien race.
And what I wanted to know is what is the earliest message that was sent from the Earth, spherically out from the planet? Right. And what are the nearest, star systems that we know that have a planet in the habitable zone?
[00:29:35] AI Narrator #1:
Right.
[00:29:36] Matt Rouse:
And then how long would it take to get there and how long would it take to get back? Right. Right? And I actually got it down. And, hypothetically, there was a burst sent that was a military radar that went out from the Earth that had a strong enough signal strength to reach several planets in the habitable zone that we've already detected. Okay. And the time for that message to come back to us from the earliest one would be somewhere around 2028. Alright. So hypothetically using science in a few years, there could be one. How accurate that is? I don't know. Yeah. Like, it's way more accurate than if I tried to figure it out myself. Right. Tell you that. So I mean, if I'm off by a few years or something, this is not the end of the world. It's just a story.
[00:30:28] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. And I will share this too for those who are looking for email addresses as they're trying to reach an executive or somebody higher up. I'll share this little secret. I use ChatGPT to identify people and titles that I might wanna reach out to, right, that I think may be prospects for my services. And then there's a there is a a website, d and b Mhmm. Duns and Bradstreet. Right? Yep. They have a program called d and b hoovers hoovers. And if you sign up for that, it's not cheap, but it's, like, $50 a month, not too expensive. You can find so many people's email addresses, prefer their professional email addresses that they don't have on their website. They're not public, but they are in d and b hovers because that's where they get their d and b number.
And, so I shared that as a piece of advice because I have found that useful as a way to reach people that I can't get ahold of them. No one reads their LinkedIn direct messages. No one does. Most people don't. And so if you're looking for an email address, I offer that up as a as a good tip.
[00:31:39] Matt Rouse:
Nice. Another thing that you can also use is something like, like Data Shopper is one example. There's also another one that's oh, now what was the name of it? I'll have to find it. Oh, anyways, we can you guys can always message me, get my email, or you can actually I do read my messages on LinkedIn because lots of people send me messages on LinkedIn for some reason. You know what's funny is actually in the marketing world, I found that marketing people totally read their DMs from LinkedIn. Like, you go to a conference, everybody sticks their phone out with their little LinkedIn QR code and scares each other. Right? And that's how they all get connected. Oh, that's great. But, yeah, I don't know if that holds for any other industry. Probably not. But, yeah. So finding, you know, the contact people that you need to get for, you know, for work is one thing. But if it's like I'm trying to do a submission, like a creative submission or something like that Yeah. I think you gotta pretty much go the permission route. Like Yeah. Send it to the email address that they say this is for submissions Yeah. You know, and go through the proper channels. But one trick that you can do there that that is kind of similar to what you're talking about would be, like, if I know the agent or somebody who's the decision maker for this creative process, I'll look them up on LinkedIn and then look who they're connected to and then see if anybody you're connected to is connected to those people. That's good. And then you can ask for an intro. You can say, oh, hey.
Bob knows, you know, Janet that I'm trying to get a hold of. Right. Do you think you could ask Bob if I could get an intro? You know, that kind of thing. That's good. Sometimes you can get, like, a second secondhand referral.
[00:33:33] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. That's good. I like that. Let me ask you. What are your thoughts on changing medium? If you have a story to tell and screenplay isn't happening, you know, no one is is interested switching to, say, a graphic novel or an animated movie or something like that. What what are your thoughts on that? You know, it's funny you say that because I have an interesting theory
[00:34:04] Matt Rouse:
on this that I haven't really shared with anyone. But what I'm doing with my novel that I'm writing right now, my plan is to try and and essentially sell the whole thing as it is a novel and a screenplay and a graphic novel and short video and, like, every format that I could find and audiobook, you know, all at once. Interesting. And the reason is because I think once you have it in one format, you can use systems like AI systems and stuff to convert it to other formats. Yeah. And maybe I need to hire somebody to do the graphic novel.
[00:34:43] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. You know? Well, I toyed possible. But Yeah. I toyed with, I wrote a a story that would make a a good I felt like a good graphic novel. It was a screenplay that I converted to. Okay. I'm gonna try and convert this to a graphic novel. And I hired a overseas, artist on fiber.com Mhmm. To do one page to see the quality of their work. And they did great work, and it was very inexpensive. And I thought, well, you know, for not so much, I could make a full could make a one issue graphic novel, but, you know, I didn't didn't finish it. But, you know, there's there's that option that I I have entertained. You know? Right.
[00:35:26] Matt Rouse:
And I think that it's really gonna depend on kind of a combination of things. One of them is, like, if you're, like the die hard creative and you're like, if I'm gonna put this into an audiobook, I'm reading the book. And if it's gonna be a graphic novel, I'm guiding the artist through this kind of process. That's one thing. Right? Yeah. Another thing is, like, maybe writing this is not my full time job and I have another business and I make good money. I can hire people to do all these things. Right. Right? That's another option. Yeah. Right? And a third option is by the time I get my book finished, which is probably gonna be by the end of the year, most of the AI tools are good enough that I could generate all these things.
Yeah. It's gonna take some some push and pull and you you gotta have some know how. But I should be able to convert my book into a screenplay and edit the screenplay. I should be able to convert my book into a graphic novel and have consistent characters using Midjourney or something like that, you know, and then have somebody do the formatting. Right? And so there's there's ways to speed up the process. Yeah. And I think you're gonna see that crossover of IP. Yeah. Like, what happens in the world now is something is put out gets popular and then they make every possible kind of IP from that single intellectual property, right? They make they're gonna make the video game and the book and the audio and the novels and the spin offs and the whatever. Right? Now you can do it all at once. Right.
[00:37:04] AI Narrator #1:
Right. Well, you know, I once produced a one hour special as a pilot episode for a true crime recreation show, right, where we interviewed the actual detectives and people that were involved in the case, and then we shot recreations for all of the, you know, things that happened. And it was a really interesting case. It was about a rodeo clown that went nuts and killed some woman. So scary rodeo clown is great, right, visually. And we said that was a lot of fun. But what AI has made me think of is, okay. If I were to produce that show today, I would shoot the interviews with the people, and then I probably could use AI for all the recreation shots.
Right. Where it's almost there. Right? And and then I still have a program that I can copyright and trade back and own the IP. It's but I've reduced the cost of that episode down enormously. Right. And so I I think that we're, yeah, we're approaching that level where, yeah, you're right. AI is getting there to where certain content, you just don't need to shoot anymore. You don't need to hire actors to do recreations, and stock footage is gonna be pretty much pointless. You know, there's there's so much that is gonna change
[00:38:23] Matt Rouse:
there. Yeah. I think once there's more of a, like, a world view in the system, right, where it has a kind of an idea of how well, I should say more of a, of a world model where I can say, okay. This is what happens when liquid falls onto a surface or Right. You know, I want to place, like in your case, maybe it's a body in a room. Yep. You know, I can say, okay. I want the body to be laying in this position in this part of this type of room, and it can figure that out. Yes. You know? And it's sort of there now, but it's not quite, you know Yeah. We're probably two generations away, which is, you know, a year and a half. It's not in a place yet where you can
[00:39:05] AI Narrator #1:
kind of create three-dimensional space and and it can adhere to this is the scene. This is the and then I can say, okay. I want these things to happen to these characters in this scene. You know? You know, ideally, you would want to be able to scan all the crime scene photos and then say create this in a scene in a three d space, and it just automatically does that. You know? And then Yeah. Okay. Give me a zoom out from the body. Give me a dolly left to right with a you know, those types of things. And and it'll get there, but, yeah, it's not there yet. You know, you can sort of get there now if
[00:39:45] Matt Rouse:
like, a good example would be if you take a cream crime scene sketch of a room or something. You put that in a mid journey and you describe what the room looks like and use that as the reference photo. Yeah. It's gonna make a room that looks yeah. I mean, relatively like it. And then, you know, that you could use something like I mean, like, Cling or Connect or something where it's like, okay. I wanna put a body in this room and you could describe where, and it figures out how to put that in. Yep. And then now you have a reference photo to put into v o three. Yep. And then I could you know? But this is a process. Right? I mean, nobody's nobody's going through these hoops yet. Yes.
[00:40:25] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. The consistency, I think, especially, like, with animals has has been, it's been a struggle, but it'll get there. I did upload a bunch of pictures from of my dog and, who passed away. And it was able to fairly accurately give me a some video files of looks just like him. So it's really growing well, and we've gone off the rails on this topic. But
[00:40:57] Matt Rouse:
Well, you know what? This is what people wanna know, though. These are the types of questions and conversations that I have when I'm out speaking about AI stuff. Right? Yeah. Somebody's like, like, some crazy use case that somebody comes up with, and I'm like, well, if you use this and this and this and this, you could probably do that. You know? Like, you could string the pieces together. Yeah. And we're at that stage. You know, I remember when writing software was like that. Yeah. You'd have to use multiple software languages to get something done and different formats of storage, you know, and and all kinds of crap that you had to go through and Yeah. Just to write the most basic pieces of software. Nowadays, you're just like, you know, you're like anthropic.
Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. You know, you go to Sonnet four and you're like, write me this plug in for WordPress. And it's like, here you go. You know?
[00:41:47] AI Narrator #1:
Oh, I wanted you know, you made me think of this. So talk about using AI as inspiration. So I came up with this idea for a screenplay, where a reflective sphere appears next to the moon, and it, and so I I asked AI to come up with an image. So I don't so if you can see that, right, like, it it and then it gets got this sphere right next to it, right Right next to the moon. Right. And and for me, it was really helpful
[00:42:20] Matt Rouse:
to see that. Right? It is So for for those listing, Nathan's got his phone, and there's, like, the moon, and then there's a reflective sphere with a reflection on one edge of it. Kind of you can see the reflection of the sun on the other part.
[00:42:32] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. And and so for me, getting that image made helped me, like, start to okay. What would it be like to grow up? Because the idea is that it it appears and it's just there. And it Right. And that story doesn't start place until it's already been there for ten years, fifteen years. It's already something like it's already been there. And you can't approach it. It's got a e m electromagnet field that repels everything, so you can't really send probes to it or anything like that. It's just there. And so the idea was, well, what would it be like growing up as a child with the moon? It has a second moon. Right? There's this fear that's so reflective. You get used to it. No one cares. It's not strange. It's not weird. It's just this thing that's there.
And and then the movie starts after it's already been there for a while. You know? That's cool. And and so but for me, as a you know, when I was in that place, I was like, what would it look like? So I I pulled that had that image come up, and I was like, okay. Yeah. I could you know, now I'm starting to get a sense for what it's like when you're a kid. You look up and you see that and, you know, that's it's this thing that's there. So I think, again, using those tools as as a creator can really help.
[00:43:39] Matt Rouse:
I like using Midjourney for characters where I'll go, alright. I have a character I'm thinking of. She looks like this. She's got this kind of hair and this kind of skin, and she wears this kind of clothes and, you know, whatever. And it makes an image and I'm like, that's not quite what I was thinking. You know? Like, I think her hair needs to be longer. She's probably ten years older. Yeah. You know, whatever. And then it makes the change again, and then I go through it. And then I'm like, okay. You know what? Now I'm getting to something that I think looks like the character that I had in mind. Yeah. And then I'm also like, oh, you know what? I didn't think about it, but I should describe, you know, that she has freckles on her cheeks or that she has, like, this part of her clothing is this way that I hadn't even thought about or something. Right? And so you can kind of get a visual that can help you come up with ideas to describe other parts of characters.
And honestly, you know what? I I get a million times already and I'm exaggerating a bit, but people tell me all about how the AI is terrible and everything sucks about AI and it's a slot machine and it's just gonna it's just gonna, like, kill everyone's brain and the school system is gonna fall apart. And somehow it also sucks, but also is gonna take over the world. And even though it just uses data centers like every other thing you do on a computer, somehow it's now using up all the water in the world and just like all these things. Right? Yeah. And I'm like, it's gonna it's it's there is so much momentum now behind it, so much money, so many people, so many companies that it a 100%, it is gonna keep going at the rate it's going at least for the foreseeable future.
And in my opinion, you only have a couple choices. You either go, I am gonna partner with this with this AI as a generality. Right? I'm gonna say, okay. I'm gonna work with it and see what I can do, you know, to to have it help me. Right? Or I could put my head in the sand and, you know, I'm probably fine for the next five years or so. But outside of that, it's gonna be real tough to make a living or do anything if you don't know how to use any kind of AI.
[00:45:59] AI Narrator #1:
Well, just remember, Blockbuster Video could have bought Netflix, and they declined.
[00:46:05] Matt Rouse:
That's right.
[00:46:06] AI Narrator #1:
So k. That's the choice that I think we're all given.
[00:46:10] Matt Rouse:
Right. It's like Kodak basically invented the digital camera and then went out of business because they were addicted to the money that they made on film. Right? Yep. So there's there's a million, you know, there's a there's a million examples in in the business world of of how this how these things happen. Yeah. But I really think that people are also missing out on really advancing, like, how quickly they can bring their creative work to market or at least to the point that they want it to get to. Yeah. Once you get those productivity gains, it's really hard to go back.
[00:46:53] AI Narrator #1:
Well and and I'll I'll tell you something about in the media space and in my professional side that I work in. The media operations for every company is going to change dramatically because what's going to happen is and they're already getting access to this is the big boys, the Google and the OpenAI, they're going to get access to storage media storage of these big companies. Right. And so, you know, one of one of the biggest expenses you have as a media company is media asset management, where you have all of your assets that have all of this metadata so that you can sort every master and know where it goes, and then you have different versions that need to go to different places and different codex and different all of that. Right? But now you can just point AI to your storage and say, tell me what's in there. And you can scan all the video and audio files. It doesn't need metadata. And it can tell you, here's what you got in here. You've got these shows, these masters, blah blah blah, all this stuff, because it just can read and process all of that. And so there's there's a there is going to be as huge shift of power that was software companies and SaaS services and all of that that's gonna just shift over to AI. And so if you're not prepared for that and and wanting to be one of those people that is using leveraging AI's power in that, space, it's gonna be a big wake up call.
[00:48:28] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I 100% agree with you. A lot of that stuff's gonna be done on the fly. Right? You're not even gonna make all the different formats anymore. You're just gonna make one master format, and the system will just convert it on the fly for whatever's needed at the time. Yep. That's the way it should be. Yeah. Yeah. And, man, I mean,
[00:48:47] AI Narrator #1:
I think the There's there's a spec in the media space called the CableLabs spec, which it it has so many fields of metadata. Ridiculous amount of information that and and people are still having a human being Right. Fill out this Type it all in. Or Excel sheet for every single field because they never created it when they made the original master. And so now they've gotta send it someplace. Right. The cable that right. And and so all of that stuff is gonna go away. That's gonna be just give me the you know, give me access to the file. I'll figure out what I need to you know? And and, so it's it's remarkable, and and a lot of people just aren't paying attention to that development.
[00:49:31] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I don't that's the first time I've heard of that. And I don't work in in that kind of media though, of course. Yeah. But we do that with with software. Right? Like, somebody sends me data in any format. It doesn't matter what it is for our company. And I'm just like, convert this into what I need, and I drop it in. Right? Right. You know, obviously, not not with anything that's private or finance. Right? But Yeah. No. We have our own private cloud for that stuff that we use anyway. So we have private I I I.
[00:50:00] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. So it's it's what's funny is we would there's a well, I won't say what it is, but they're very one of the big media corporations. And they have this media ingest platform for producers. And so you go to their platform and you upload a master, and you fill out all this stuff. And then it will reject it. Nope. Didn't pass. You gotta fix these things. Right? And then you gotta resubmit, upload it all over again. And then, oh, nope. This didn't pass. But and it it's insane. It's insane, Matt. It's taking and then, you know, after, like, the third or fourth time, you gotta reach out to their technical staff and say, hey. I'm got it right. We have the right specs. You're not you're not, you know, collecting. Right. It's a nightmare.
Right? None of that is necessary. Right? Like, it's none of it is necessary. You should just be able to send them the file or actually just point them to your cloud storage. Right. And say, here's the file. Right? And then they can get it and convert it to whatever they need, and and and it should be all automated. You know, that and so you have entire ecosystems that are about to get destroyed. And and it's it's it's really incredible.
[00:51:12] Matt Rouse:
And good. You know? Yeah. Like, I'm sorry if somebody loses their job who used to type shit in for a living. But, like, is data entry really what you wanted to do anyway? Like, couldn't couldn't you go work on that screenplay
[00:51:25] AI Narrator #1:
instead? Right. You know? Absolutely.
[00:51:28] Matt Rouse:
And we don't need these arduous pointless tasks that should never have been tasks ever. Right? Right. A lot of times, it's almost like punishing your customers. Right? Yeah. It's this idea of, like, I go to, like, I I gotta go to the doctor, so they asked me to fill out a form of why I gotta see the doctor. And I get there, and they asked me to fill out a medical form when I'm there, and they sent me to a specialist where I fill out the medical form again. Like, just take it out of the database, dude. I've already filled this out five jillion times. Oh, god. I hate Like, shouldn't you know what I'm allergic to? Right? I mean, I told you 12 other times. Right? You know, this kind of stuff is just eventually, it's all gonna get fixed. But that's also one of the apply for a job and just, like, upload the resume and then, like, now enter each of your experiences.
[00:52:17] AI Narrator #1:
It's on the resume.
[00:52:20] Matt Rouse:
Man, I can't I can't even remember how often I had to do that kind of thing when I was an IT contractor and you're applying for contracts repeatedly. Right? Because you have two, three jobs a year. And, I I like you were talking about macros, I made a macro that would just had all the stuff in it. It. Right? And I'd just be like, enter this experience, and I'm like, f four. Enter this job. F five. You know? And it just pasted all in. Nathan, it's been a great time talking. We've already been on for, like, almost an hour, so we should probably wrap this up. Somebody's gonna somebody's back twice, listening to this one episode.
Thanks everybody for listening. Nathan, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way that they can do that? Go to my website, texasndf.com
[00:53:05] AI Narrator #1:
is my Nathan David Fletcher is my professional website, texasndf.com. And then you have my podcast website, unclenaynay.com, which is headed naynay, unclenaynay.com.
[00:53:17] Matt Rouse:
Yep. And on your podcast app, it's Uncle Nay nay's Nerdcast.
[00:53:21] AI Narrator #1:
That's correct.
[00:53:22] Matt Rouse:
Alright, Nathan. It's been great, and we'll talk again soon. Thank you, Matt.
[00:53:31] Narrator AI:
Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us an honest review on your favorite podcast app. Be sure to check out Matt's book, Will AI Take My Job, and have a wonderful day.
Today on the digital marketing masters podcast, Nathan Fletcher, AKA uncle Nay Nay from uncle Nay Nay's nerd cast.
[00:00:19] Matt Rouse:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Rousen. Today, my guest is Nathan Fletcher. Nathan, how are you? I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on the show, Matt. Nathan and I met because I was on your podcast, Uncle Nay Nay's Nerdcast. That's right. Talking about science fiction and AI. And, we mentioned the book that's coming out. Actually, it just, got funded on Kickstarter, the Tales of Galactic Pest Control from, Amazing Stories. I can't be right. And I've read some of it. It's amazing. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I got, like, a pre edit copy.
Oh, that's great. Yeah. I've been going through all the all the other I found a bunch of the other people who wrote the stories on Blue Sky. Okay. So I kinda connected with them on there, and we've been chatting a little bit back and forth, and then I read their stories. Man, I read this one that was in there. I don't wanna give away what happens, but essentially, there's a disease that starts to take over a spaceship, and it turns out that someone caught a venereal disease when they were off ship on shore leave and it mutated on their ship. Oh, wow. And so it turns into a pest that they have to try to control.
And, yeah, it was a super interesting story. Mine's mine's not as risque.
[00:01:35] AI Narrator #1:
Nah.
[00:01:37] Matt Rouse:
I also have the last story in the book. So mine is the last one Oh, nice. Before the book finishes out. So make sure you read to the end, folks. Otherwise, you don't get to hear agenda item b, pest control. But, David, we have a very specific topic today that we I'm sure we can kind of take several directions, and we'll see how it goes. But this is an idea that you and I both run into, and that is that when you once you do all your creative work, like you're writing a story, you're making recording a podcast, you're doing whatever that thing is that you make, you actually find out, generally most people find this out the first time, is you write a book or you make a story or you get a screenplay or whatever and then you find out you you have to market it yourself or no one will ever see it because the kind of gatekeeper system that used to exist is no longer there.
[00:02:30] AI Narrator #1:
That's right. So
[00:02:32] Matt Rouse:
I guess my first question would be, why don't you give us a quick kind of, one breath about who you are and then we'll get back into, talking about it.
[00:02:44] AI Narrator #1:
Sure. So my career, most of my life, it has been in marketing and production. So I started when I graduated high school early at age 16, I got a job working for a marketing production company, down in South Texas that did commercials, TV shows, a little bit of everything. And so I learned production and how to make commercials, make music videos, all of that. And so I grew up in the production business. And the last ten to fifteen years has been more in the cable and then, of course, the transition over to streaming. So I've worked for cable networks and, streaming platforms, and it's been focused mainly in that space, both in the operations as well as the content development.
So that's, in a nutshell, my background. And then, personally, I've you know, this this last recent year decided I'm gonna start a podcast because my daughter's moved out of the house, and I have a lot of spare time. And I love and have always loved fantasy and sci fi, and so I wanted a hobby. And so a podcast seemed like a good idea. So I started uncle Nene's Nerdcast because my nieces and nephews call me uncle Nene. And it's been a lot of fun. I've been meeting great people like you and and just talking about something I love to talk about, which is science fiction and fantasy. So, you know, what could be better than that?
[00:04:12] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. It's a great community around especially kind of authors in general, I found to be, you know, pretty inclusive. Everybody's friendly. You know, there's the odd kind of odd duck here and there, you know, that you run into that maybe aren't as friendly, but, you know, 99 out of a 100 super great people. I just I don't know how many people now who are authors. I hit them up and I'm like, hey. I saw you're an author and you write this kind of book. I write this kind of book. We should chat. And they're like, yeah. Let's chat.
[00:04:42] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's extends to most creative people that, you know, whether or not they consider themselves an artist are probably an artist. Right. And then they so they have that they wanna connect because that's part of I think an artist is, you know, that kind of drive to connect.
[00:05:01] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I think also the, that, you know, as as the topic here is about kind of marketing that creative work or finding out you have to market that creative work. I think a lot of that comes out in people going, oh my god. You know, I've been an introvert, and I've been writing stories or poetry or music or whatever it is in a dark room by myself for three years, and now I actually have to go talk to people. And so they kinda get over that that talk to people stage fright really. Out of because they have to. Right. Yeah. Or else nobody's ever gonna see what you did. Right? I don't know how many authors I have seen who are who think that the process of writing a book is I write a book, I put it on Amazon.
Some, you know, some agent is gonna read my book randomly, or they're gonna get told about it by someone else who read it, and they're gonna sign me up for a ten year deal for a million dollars to write three books, and make a movie and, like, just fantasy of how the whole system works. Right?
[00:06:04] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. My friend I have a good friend. He's a writer. Doesn't get paid to write, but he's a writer. Right? He has a job and but he writes personally and he's written he just his last novel, and so now he's at the phase where he's sending out all of these, letters to requesting representation where he's written, I guess, a treatment or whatever or a summary of the book. And and it's, a couple places have asked for a manuscript. And and so right now, he's getting the phase where he's just getting rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection. And and it's, you know, it's heartbreaking. There's you know, what can you do? This is his baby that he worked on for years, you know, and it's just nope. Not what we're looking for. This is, you know, this blah blah blah blah. And so it's but it that's part of the process is you just gotta get used to hearing no because you gotta hear the no's before you hear the yes.
[00:06:56] Matt Rouse:
That's right. You know what? The first thing that I put into a writing contest, I got shortlisted. And so now and then the second thing I wrote got into the book. And so now I'm like, I get a rejection and I'm like, oh, I'm like, you guys suck.
[00:07:13] AI Narrator #1:
The other people loved my story. You know? Well, success I know. I understand that. Success early on can can almost be a detriment sometimes. You know? When I was starting off in my career, I, you know, I started up very young. And so by the time I was, you know, in my early twenties, like, twenty, twenty one, I had some success as a producer, director, editor, and there was a very big Spanish band called the Cumbia Kings, which the founder was, AB Quintanilla, who was Selena Quintanilla's brother. And AB had me edit one of his music videos. And once I edited it, he was like, I don't want anyone else to edit my music videos for Nice. And he wouldn't let anyone edit his music except me. He's like, he gets it. He's a visionary. He's a good editor. And I was a kid at the time. And so it was great, but at the same time, I took it for granted that, you know, that's how I was. That talent was something that was special and all of that. And so it kind of you know, when things come real easy early on, then it doesn't prepare you for later on in life when you're gonna stumble and fall.
[00:08:27] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, the other thing is that I mean, even if the stars align and something good happens out of the gate, you know, I say, yeah, my, you know, my short movie screenplay got shortlisted in the first contest that I put it into. But I also wrote, like, a thousand blog posts, you know, eight business books. That's any all of that Right. For decades of writing before I ever thought, yeah, maybe I could do a short screenplay. You know? Right. It's not like I started out and I'm like, I'm gonna write a screenplay about a a robot that goes to jail and which technically is what my screenplay was about. But, yeah. Like, you just you don't anytime that somebody has immediate success, you know, it people see it as, like, you know, the old Hollywood trope. Like, you know, Janice was singing karaoke down on the, you know, at the bar and some movie producer saw her and said, you should be in my musical.
You know? Like, that's just not the way it happens.
[00:09:34] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. Yeah. I, myself, I I really enjoyed the experience when I first got had a corporate media job as a senior vice president of content development. And as is very common, a couple years ago, I got laid off because in media and entertainment, everybody's getting laid off. That's how it is. And but it freed me up to follow this science fiction fantasy, passion that I've always had. So I started to engage in world building and started to build this universe that I liked, and so I did. I built this planet, and I all these kind of the lore of the history of the different nations and tribes and their history and what are the rules for magic and all of this stuff. And I started to work on it. Really enjoyed it. Wrote a short story based in that world. It was awful.
I am not equipped to write short stories. It was really awful. I I self published, and then I deleted it and pulled it off because it was just so bad. And then, I wrote a screenplay, and I I was like, okay. This is much better. I can I can it's better? It's still not good. Right? It's still not good. But it's not so I'm I'm on my third screenplay, and each one is getting better. Right? And and I have enough objectivity to look at what I've written and say, oh, this is bad or this is you know, it's so it's getting better, but it's you know, the more you do it, the better you get, you know. And and that's just something that you you have to learn.
[00:11:06] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I mean, iteration is is how everything gets better. Right? And it's how everything gets done. Anything in the world that you see that got done that was good, somebody iterated on that forever.
[00:11:17] AI Narrator #1:
You know?
[00:11:19] Matt Rouse:
It is so rare that there is an actual edge case where somebody came out of the blue and did something and it worked. Right. Right. Yeah.
[00:11:27] AI Narrator #1:
Never. I, was sitting on a panel at the film school in TCU, which is a big college here in Fort Worth. And I could tell from the questions that the kids were asking that they assumed that when they graduated, they were going to be producing and directing. Right. And I said, listen. I think it's great you're getting an education and learning how to do this. I think that's great. But you have to understand that when you leave here, you'll be qualified to be a production assistant. That's it. Entry level. Right? You're gonna have to get some experience, figure out which department you wanna go into, and and then work your way up, build relationships, and learn.
And that's just now there is the one in a million shot. Every now and then, there is the fresh college grad that just meets the right people, gets to make a big Hollywood movie, but that's a one in a million shot. Most people have to put in their time, work at it, work their way up, and and that's just how it goes.
[00:12:27] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I I've been reading Seth Godin's book, This is Strategy, which is a business strategy book. But, honestly, you know, any kind of organization or or business that you're in, I think it's it's an excellent read. But one of the things that he said that I really I found striking, and it's right near the beginning, is that all the low hanging fruit has already been picked. And basically, what he's saying is if anything that you're gonna do, if it's easy, somebody else has already done it, probably done it better. That's a good point. Doing something difficult or something hard to do, you're not really gonna get anywhere.
Right? Great. I like that. All low hanging fruit has already been picked. That's great. Well, and you gotta think about it. Like, I mean, just in The United States alone, was there 400,000,000 people? Yep. Almost. Almost, I think. Yeah. So if you say it's a one in a million chance that somebody's gonna make a better movie than the one that you made, you know, that's still 40 people. Yeah. You know, like, if you're talking about statistics, I'm not a I'm not a math expert. Yeah. You know, but I think something really interesting that I found in the creative space, you know, because I I work a lot with code and a lot with, I don't know, non creative side of technical marketing.
Right? Getting things connected to other systems and, you know, putting in API keys and codes and workflow and all this crap, logic based stuff. But on the creative side of work, I find that creatives are very good at getting their point across, getting their message across, and all of that kind of stuff. And what they're bad at is figuring out how to get distribution. Like, they could craft the message, but they can't get the message to the people. Yeah. Right? Especially at scale. Right? And when I say at scale, I mean, more than, you know, the 100 people that you know in the world posting it on TikTok or something. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like, you have to reach tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people to have basically any difference in, you know, making money. So and there's also, I mean, there is the idea of the, like, the 1,000 followers who are like, your 1,000 perfect customers is enough for you to make a $100,000 a year. And, I mean, that's been true for a while.
But in my experience, you need to reach a 100,000 people to find those thousand. Right. Right. And that's a lot of people. Yeah. You know? All of Nova Scotia where I live only has 800,000 people. Right. Right? So, you know, depending upon where you live, that's a difficult proposition. So if somebody is, you know, doing creative work and they're kind of getting to that point where they're like, I have to market this work, Do you have any advice, kind of general advice for people in that, predicament, I guess, I would call it?
[00:15:36] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. You know, there's you really there are some great tools out there for one. You know, I think ChatTPT is is really good at helping in that for ideas. Brainstorming, I use it to especially the deep research function to do research on, hey. I've created this piece of work. What are some things I can do to get the word out that don't cost money or or have a I have a small budget or whatever? I think there's some it's a great tool for that. I found it to be useful. But I think there are communities depending on what you create, but there are communities like on Reddit and other places where you can reach a lot of people by just participating in that community and starting to talk to people and build relationships, and I think that's phenomenal.
I also think that you're just gonna have to get used to hearing no, and I think entering, at least for screenplays I don't know if it's true for books, but I know for screenplays, entering contests is not very expensive, but it can be a great way to get some notoriety and attention to your work. And reader feedback. Yeah. I like the feedback. I like the professional feedback, on my screenplays because if I hear a couple of different people say the same thing, then there's definitely validity to it. And a lot of time, I already suspected that anyways. That, like, yeah, the third act is way too long. There's way too much stuff there. I gotta trim that out. You know, stuff like that that is you know, the stakes aren't high enough in this part. You know, things like that that I already kinda suspected, and and then now I've gotta revisit it for sure. So that can be really useful.
[00:17:25] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I found that, reader feedback for books, you know, like, there's, there's there's more than one kind of feedback. Right? And what we're talking about is professional editor feedback. Right? Like, somebody who is reading and selecting screenplays that actually get made or they have produced screenplays that have been made into films Yes. Or TV shows. Right? In the case of books, you know, it's somebody who's either a professional editor, they've a published writer who is not just self published but also has sold lots of books or they're professionally published or been paid to publish. Yeah.
But the other kind of feedback is like peer feedback, which I think is still good. Right? If you know somebody else who writes the same type of thing as you write, you know, or another business person if you write a business book kind of thing, you know, if you write a self help book, find some self help people, that's great. The feedback that I think is terrible is unrelated people who have no experience in the thing that you do. Right? I find that I found this a lot with business books. I would give it to someone who is not a business person. Like, they don't own or run their own or manage their own business.
They don't have any experience with it. I would give them the book and they'd be like, I didn't like this part. I don't like that part. You know? They're trying to find criticism because they think that's what editing is. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just you know, if you ask people who have no experience or education in the thing that you're doing, the feedback is worthless. Right? Yeah. And discouraging usually.
[00:19:02] AI Narrator #1:
Yep. And it's almost like it reminds me of a sales training thing I did one time where they talked about trying to sell to someone who is not a sales prospect. Right. Right? It's like, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to sell to someone who would never buy your product. They'd never you know, they're not interested. They they don't fit, but you're gonna keep trying to sell to them, you know, and and that's kinda what you're like. You're asking someone's opinion on your creative work who would never read your book. They they they're not interested. You know? It's like, my mom doesn't like science fiction and fantasy. She's never gonna be into that. You know? I wouldn't get her opinion on my book. Even though I'm her son, she'd probably tell me she loved it. But it's still she's not in the audience that I'm going for.
[00:19:49] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Along those same lines too is, like, if you have if you're doing music or something or theater or, you know, TV shows and that kind of thing, everybody has heard a song, so everybody has an opinion on your song. But it's really, really easy to find bands that have millions of people who like that song that you hate. Right.
[00:20:12] AI Narrator #1:
Yep.
[00:20:13] Matt Rouse:
And I just go into YouTube and type in the opposite type of music that you listen to, you know? Like think of whatever the, you know, if you're like a you're like a hard rock metal guy and you don't like country, go type in pop country or something or new country 2025 and listen to it. And look at it, it'll be like, this has 25,000,000 views and you can't even make it through a minute, you know? Right. So I think, another thing which we didn't talk about, which I think is a really good idea, and and I think you would agree with me on this, is podcasting is an excellent way to spread the word about things you're doing.
[00:20:53] AI Narrator #1:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I've I've found it, Not only is it it's good for that, but it's also just, I think, good for your own perspective as a creator, as a creative person. It's great to talk to other creative people, and get their perspective. And so I think it's great for that and and can be very easily, very affordably, you can grow an audience as well.
[00:21:24] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And in in a, I don't know if I would call it completely uncensored, but in essentially uncensored format. Right? Yeah. Like, your your podcast can't be about, like, you know, I can't even say what it would be because I don't wanna get my podcast ticked off Apple or something. But, you know, as long as you're not really way out there on some kind of, you know, borderline legal tactic or or speech, you know, you could get the word out. And you have an RSS feed, so you could put it on podcast platforms all over the world at no cost whatsoever, with the exception of maybe the podcast hosting Yeah. You know, which you spend a few bucks on, but, you know, that price is coming down too. I think I spend under 20 US a month on unlimited shows and unlimited downloads on Pod Home. Yeah. I use I think it's 14. I use rss.com,
[00:22:18] AI Narrator #1:
and I think it's, yeah, like, $14.15 bucks a month Yeah. It's cheap. Something like that. And I upload it once, and then it distributes automatically to Spotify and everywhere else. So it's Yeah. It's it's super easy.
[00:22:31] Matt Rouse:
Another thing that's really interesting to do with podcasts is you can, you know, create clips and stuff from it for your social media and stuff. I know, like you were saying, like, Riverside does it automatically. I use an app called GetMunch to do it. Oh. But you can also put, you know, like this video that we're on right now can be put on YouTube or something like that. Yeah. But another thing also is I think people struggle with what am I gonna post today or this week. Right? Like, they have some kind of posting schedule that they've made for themselves, and they're like, I have to post something new every single time. And if you're doing a podcast on a regular schedule, you've already got something to post about. Right? Because you're gonna put your episode on. But another thing that you could do is talk about something that you talked about in your show.
Right? Expand on that, or mention how, you know, I was talking to Nathan about screenplays on my podcast, and I had this idea, yada yada yada. Right? It's a great way to come up with more content.
[00:23:33] AI Narrator #1:
That's a good idea.
[00:23:36] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Well, we do own a marketing agency, so we do this all the time.
[00:23:41] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. You know, what I do with my podcast is I use Opus, ProClips. I find it better at selecting clips than Riverside. Riverside's great for, recording the podcast and and making the master, but then I take that master file and I upload it to Opus, and then it selects clips. And then I schedule all the social media for the whole week. And so, I once I get it's part of my you know, we talked about AI at Gentek. This is one of the things an AI agent needs to do for me is, once the thing is done, I have the same routine. Right? Record the podcast, upload it to YouTube, upload the audio to RSS, upload it to Opus Pro, get my social media clips, schedule them out for the week after the premiere, and then I'm done. And it's the same thing every time I do a podcast.
But yeah. So I I use it. It's I use I push out three clips a day on TikToks, and then Mhmm. About three clips a week or four clips a week on Instagram. And then I also do three clips a day on YouTube Shorts. And and that's that's it. I don't do Facebook or x or anything else, but those are my my platforms for my podcast. And it seems to be going well. It seems to be growing pretty pretty well.
[00:25:02] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I think, if you use, like, Zapier or n eight n or something like that, you could some kind of automation system Yeah. Then you could connect all those things. There's an API for Opus, so you could connect to get those clips out. You know, we had talked about earlier about, you know, if you're using the deep research function of the AI, you could just that could just be another step in your work flow. Yep. So technically, I mean, all an agent an AI agent really is is like a workflow that's looped. Right? Yeah. It's it's trying to do stuff over and over. And, really, what you need is you just need a a workflow that's on a schedule that's run a run through, do this task on the schedule that you've set, and it can even be something that you manually kick it off each time you wanna use it.
That is an excellent way, not only for, you know, stuff like shows and things. You could do that for almost every business in the world
[00:26:01] AI Narrator #1:
would be more efficient if they just used an automation tool. Yes. And and those have been around I've never seen a business that haven't. We've done, know, with Adobe, what has has had macros for a long time where you would record the okay. I'm gonna take this file. I'm gonna do record the macro. Okay. Repeat. And then, you know, it would automate. And and so, yeah, it's those type of automations, you know, can save so much time.
[00:26:23] Matt Rouse:
There was macros at Windows 3.1, if you remember how far back that is. Right? Like, this is how far back some of these tools are. Yeah. Another thing that I think is is a a game changer, especially for creatives, when you're gonna be doing a repeated job, like, I'm gonna be sending out my manuscript to different people Mhmm. Is have a format. Right? This is what this is my template for what I'm gonna send to someone. Yeah. And then do some quick research on that person and take the format and take the research you've done and ask ChatGPT to combine those things and then give it a read through to to your own edits Yes. And and send that out because you're not getting it to write your email or your message for you. You're saying, here's the email I wrote. Here's the research I did.
Yeah. Put put these two together.
[00:27:16] AI Narrator #1:
Yes. Yep. And
[00:27:18] Matt Rouse:
that's an excellent way to keep your creative flare and all the things that are good about being a person by using the AI to slug through the part that you don't wanna do. Right? Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:27:28] AI Narrator #1:
That's what I think is really important as a creative person. When I'm putting on my creative hat and I'm in that side of the the world, I don't use AI to actually create. I use it to research, to give me ideas so that I can create. You know, it's like I wanted to I was thinking about something involving, an EMP weapon. And and so I was trying to ask chat g p t, how do you create EMP? And then it's like, sorry. I can't tell you that. I was like, okay. I'm doing it for a screenplay. If just leave out a couple of minor critical steps, but give me and and then it went ahead and did it. Right? So it's not the complete way to build the EMP, but it gave me enough to where I had this. Okay. So this is how someone could do it, and then it it allowed me to kind of get that part of the story going. So I think that there is ways to you as a creative person to still rely on that as, like, being a research assistant.
[00:28:32] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And depending on your own writing style, you can see how accurate it needs to be. Mhmm. Right? Like, a good example would be the science fiction of, say, Interstellar, where it has some of the fix fictional stuff mixed with physics, like time dilation and and things like that in the movie versus something like Star Wars where they're just like spaceships just fly. Right. Yeah. That's just what happens. That's what happens. Yeah. And, you know, like you don't always have to have the the hardcore physics example, but you can do stuff like I was working on a story about first contact, from a nearby alien race.
And what I wanted to know is what is the earliest message that was sent from the Earth, spherically out from the planet? Right. And what are the nearest, star systems that we know that have a planet in the habitable zone?
[00:29:35] AI Narrator #1:
Right.
[00:29:36] Matt Rouse:
And then how long would it take to get there and how long would it take to get back? Right. Right? And I actually got it down. And, hypothetically, there was a burst sent that was a military radar that went out from the Earth that had a strong enough signal strength to reach several planets in the habitable zone that we've already detected. Okay. And the time for that message to come back to us from the earliest one would be somewhere around 2028. Alright. So hypothetically using science in a few years, there could be one. How accurate that is? I don't know. Yeah. Like, it's way more accurate than if I tried to figure it out myself. Right. Tell you that. So I mean, if I'm off by a few years or something, this is not the end of the world. It's just a story.
[00:30:28] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. And I will share this too for those who are looking for email addresses as they're trying to reach an executive or somebody higher up. I'll share this little secret. I use ChatGPT to identify people and titles that I might wanna reach out to, right, that I think may be prospects for my services. And then there's a there is a a website, d and b Mhmm. Duns and Bradstreet. Right? Yep. They have a program called d and b hoovers hoovers. And if you sign up for that, it's not cheap, but it's, like, $50 a month, not too expensive. You can find so many people's email addresses, prefer their professional email addresses that they don't have on their website. They're not public, but they are in d and b hovers because that's where they get their d and b number.
And, so I shared that as a piece of advice because I have found that useful as a way to reach people that I can't get ahold of them. No one reads their LinkedIn direct messages. No one does. Most people don't. And so if you're looking for an email address, I offer that up as a as a good tip.
[00:31:39] Matt Rouse:
Nice. Another thing that you can also use is something like, like Data Shopper is one example. There's also another one that's oh, now what was the name of it? I'll have to find it. Oh, anyways, we can you guys can always message me, get my email, or you can actually I do read my messages on LinkedIn because lots of people send me messages on LinkedIn for some reason. You know what's funny is actually in the marketing world, I found that marketing people totally read their DMs from LinkedIn. Like, you go to a conference, everybody sticks their phone out with their little LinkedIn QR code and scares each other. Right? And that's how they all get connected. Oh, that's great. But, yeah, I don't know if that holds for any other industry. Probably not. But, yeah. So finding, you know, the contact people that you need to get for, you know, for work is one thing. But if it's like I'm trying to do a submission, like a creative submission or something like that Yeah. I think you gotta pretty much go the permission route. Like Yeah. Send it to the email address that they say this is for submissions Yeah. You know, and go through the proper channels. But one trick that you can do there that that is kind of similar to what you're talking about would be, like, if I know the agent or somebody who's the decision maker for this creative process, I'll look them up on LinkedIn and then look who they're connected to and then see if anybody you're connected to is connected to those people. That's good. And then you can ask for an intro. You can say, oh, hey.
Bob knows, you know, Janet that I'm trying to get a hold of. Right. Do you think you could ask Bob if I could get an intro? You know, that kind of thing. That's good. Sometimes you can get, like, a second secondhand referral.
[00:33:33] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. That's good. I like that. Let me ask you. What are your thoughts on changing medium? If you have a story to tell and screenplay isn't happening, you know, no one is is interested switching to, say, a graphic novel or an animated movie or something like that. What what are your thoughts on that? You know, it's funny you say that because I have an interesting theory
[00:34:04] Matt Rouse:
on this that I haven't really shared with anyone. But what I'm doing with my novel that I'm writing right now, my plan is to try and and essentially sell the whole thing as it is a novel and a screenplay and a graphic novel and short video and, like, every format that I could find and audiobook, you know, all at once. Interesting. And the reason is because I think once you have it in one format, you can use systems like AI systems and stuff to convert it to other formats. Yeah. And maybe I need to hire somebody to do the graphic novel.
[00:34:43] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. You know? Well, I toyed possible. But Yeah. I toyed with, I wrote a a story that would make a a good I felt like a good graphic novel. It was a screenplay that I converted to. Okay. I'm gonna try and convert this to a graphic novel. And I hired a overseas, artist on fiber.com Mhmm. To do one page to see the quality of their work. And they did great work, and it was very inexpensive. And I thought, well, you know, for not so much, I could make a full could make a one issue graphic novel, but, you know, I didn't didn't finish it. But, you know, there's there's that option that I I have entertained. You know? Right.
[00:35:26] Matt Rouse:
And I think that it's really gonna depend on kind of a combination of things. One of them is, like, if you're, like the die hard creative and you're like, if I'm gonna put this into an audiobook, I'm reading the book. And if it's gonna be a graphic novel, I'm guiding the artist through this kind of process. That's one thing. Right? Yeah. Another thing is, like, maybe writing this is not my full time job and I have another business and I make good money. I can hire people to do all these things. Right. Right? That's another option. Yeah. Right? And a third option is by the time I get my book finished, which is probably gonna be by the end of the year, most of the AI tools are good enough that I could generate all these things.
Yeah. It's gonna take some some push and pull and you you gotta have some know how. But I should be able to convert my book into a screenplay and edit the screenplay. I should be able to convert my book into a graphic novel and have consistent characters using Midjourney or something like that, you know, and then have somebody do the formatting. Right? And so there's there's ways to speed up the process. Yeah. And I think you're gonna see that crossover of IP. Yeah. Like, what happens in the world now is something is put out gets popular and then they make every possible kind of IP from that single intellectual property, right? They make they're gonna make the video game and the book and the audio and the novels and the spin offs and the whatever. Right? Now you can do it all at once. Right.
[00:37:04] AI Narrator #1:
Right. Well, you know, I once produced a one hour special as a pilot episode for a true crime recreation show, right, where we interviewed the actual detectives and people that were involved in the case, and then we shot recreations for all of the, you know, things that happened. And it was a really interesting case. It was about a rodeo clown that went nuts and killed some woman. So scary rodeo clown is great, right, visually. And we said that was a lot of fun. But what AI has made me think of is, okay. If I were to produce that show today, I would shoot the interviews with the people, and then I probably could use AI for all the recreation shots.
Right. Where it's almost there. Right? And and then I still have a program that I can copyright and trade back and own the IP. It's but I've reduced the cost of that episode down enormously. Right. And so I I think that we're, yeah, we're approaching that level where, yeah, you're right. AI is getting there to where certain content, you just don't need to shoot anymore. You don't need to hire actors to do recreations, and stock footage is gonna be pretty much pointless. You know, there's there's so much that is gonna change
[00:38:23] Matt Rouse:
there. Yeah. I think once there's more of a, like, a world view in the system, right, where it has a kind of an idea of how well, I should say more of a, of a world model where I can say, okay. This is what happens when liquid falls onto a surface or Right. You know, I want to place, like in your case, maybe it's a body in a room. Yep. You know, I can say, okay. I want the body to be laying in this position in this part of this type of room, and it can figure that out. Yes. You know? And it's sort of there now, but it's not quite, you know Yeah. We're probably two generations away, which is, you know, a year and a half. It's not in a place yet where you can
[00:39:05] AI Narrator #1:
kind of create three-dimensional space and and it can adhere to this is the scene. This is the and then I can say, okay. I want these things to happen to these characters in this scene. You know? You know, ideally, you would want to be able to scan all the crime scene photos and then say create this in a scene in a three d space, and it just automatically does that. You know? And then Yeah. Okay. Give me a zoom out from the body. Give me a dolly left to right with a you know, those types of things. And and it'll get there, but, yeah, it's not there yet. You know, you can sort of get there now if
[00:39:45] Matt Rouse:
like, a good example would be if you take a cream crime scene sketch of a room or something. You put that in a mid journey and you describe what the room looks like and use that as the reference photo. Yeah. It's gonna make a room that looks yeah. I mean, relatively like it. And then, you know, that you could use something like I mean, like, Cling or Connect or something where it's like, okay. I wanna put a body in this room and you could describe where, and it figures out how to put that in. Yep. And then now you have a reference photo to put into v o three. Yep. And then I could you know? But this is a process. Right? I mean, nobody's nobody's going through these hoops yet. Yes.
[00:40:25] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. The consistency, I think, especially, like, with animals has has been, it's been a struggle, but it'll get there. I did upload a bunch of pictures from of my dog and, who passed away. And it was able to fairly accurately give me a some video files of looks just like him. So it's really growing well, and we've gone off the rails on this topic. But
[00:40:57] Matt Rouse:
Well, you know what? This is what people wanna know, though. These are the types of questions and conversations that I have when I'm out speaking about AI stuff. Right? Yeah. Somebody's like, like, some crazy use case that somebody comes up with, and I'm like, well, if you use this and this and this and this, you could probably do that. You know? Like, you could string the pieces together. Yeah. And we're at that stage. You know, I remember when writing software was like that. Yeah. You'd have to use multiple software languages to get something done and different formats of storage, you know, and and all kinds of crap that you had to go through and Yeah. Just to write the most basic pieces of software. Nowadays, you're just like, you know, you're like anthropic.
Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. You know, you go to Sonnet four and you're like, write me this plug in for WordPress. And it's like, here you go. You know?
[00:41:47] AI Narrator #1:
Oh, I wanted you know, you made me think of this. So talk about using AI as inspiration. So I came up with this idea for a screenplay, where a reflective sphere appears next to the moon, and it, and so I I asked AI to come up with an image. So I don't so if you can see that, right, like, it it and then it gets got this sphere right next to it, right Right next to the moon. Right. And and for me, it was really helpful
[00:42:20] Matt Rouse:
to see that. Right? It is So for for those listing, Nathan's got his phone, and there's, like, the moon, and then there's a reflective sphere with a reflection on one edge of it. Kind of you can see the reflection of the sun on the other part.
[00:42:32] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. And and so for me, getting that image made helped me, like, start to okay. What would it be like to grow up? Because the idea is that it it appears and it's just there. And it Right. And that story doesn't start place until it's already been there for ten years, fifteen years. It's already something like it's already been there. And you can't approach it. It's got a e m electromagnet field that repels everything, so you can't really send probes to it or anything like that. It's just there. And so the idea was, well, what would it be like growing up as a child with the moon? It has a second moon. Right? There's this fear that's so reflective. You get used to it. No one cares. It's not strange. It's not weird. It's just this thing that's there.
And and then the movie starts after it's already been there for a while. You know? That's cool. And and so but for me, as a you know, when I was in that place, I was like, what would it look like? So I I pulled that had that image come up, and I was like, okay. Yeah. I could you know, now I'm starting to get a sense for what it's like when you're a kid. You look up and you see that and, you know, that's it's this thing that's there. So I think, again, using those tools as as a creator can really help.
[00:43:39] Matt Rouse:
I like using Midjourney for characters where I'll go, alright. I have a character I'm thinking of. She looks like this. She's got this kind of hair and this kind of skin, and she wears this kind of clothes and, you know, whatever. And it makes an image and I'm like, that's not quite what I was thinking. You know? Like, I think her hair needs to be longer. She's probably ten years older. Yeah. You know, whatever. And then it makes the change again, and then I go through it. And then I'm like, okay. You know what? Now I'm getting to something that I think looks like the character that I had in mind. Yeah. And then I'm also like, oh, you know what? I didn't think about it, but I should describe, you know, that she has freckles on her cheeks or that she has, like, this part of her clothing is this way that I hadn't even thought about or something. Right? And so you can kind of get a visual that can help you come up with ideas to describe other parts of characters.
And honestly, you know what? I I get a million times already and I'm exaggerating a bit, but people tell me all about how the AI is terrible and everything sucks about AI and it's a slot machine and it's just gonna it's just gonna, like, kill everyone's brain and the school system is gonna fall apart. And somehow it also sucks, but also is gonna take over the world. And even though it just uses data centers like every other thing you do on a computer, somehow it's now using up all the water in the world and just like all these things. Right? Yeah. And I'm like, it's gonna it's it's there is so much momentum now behind it, so much money, so many people, so many companies that it a 100%, it is gonna keep going at the rate it's going at least for the foreseeable future.
And in my opinion, you only have a couple choices. You either go, I am gonna partner with this with this AI as a generality. Right? I'm gonna say, okay. I'm gonna work with it and see what I can do, you know, to to have it help me. Right? Or I could put my head in the sand and, you know, I'm probably fine for the next five years or so. But outside of that, it's gonna be real tough to make a living or do anything if you don't know how to use any kind of AI.
[00:45:59] AI Narrator #1:
Well, just remember, Blockbuster Video could have bought Netflix, and they declined.
[00:46:05] Matt Rouse:
That's right.
[00:46:06] AI Narrator #1:
So k. That's the choice that I think we're all given.
[00:46:10] Matt Rouse:
Right. It's like Kodak basically invented the digital camera and then went out of business because they were addicted to the money that they made on film. Right? Yep. So there's there's a million, you know, there's a there's a million examples in in the business world of of how this how these things happen. Yeah. But I really think that people are also missing out on really advancing, like, how quickly they can bring their creative work to market or at least to the point that they want it to get to. Yeah. Once you get those productivity gains, it's really hard to go back.
[00:46:53] AI Narrator #1:
Well and and I'll I'll tell you something about in the media space and in my professional side that I work in. The media operations for every company is going to change dramatically because what's going to happen is and they're already getting access to this is the big boys, the Google and the OpenAI, they're going to get access to storage media storage of these big companies. Right. And so, you know, one of one of the biggest expenses you have as a media company is media asset management, where you have all of your assets that have all of this metadata so that you can sort every master and know where it goes, and then you have different versions that need to go to different places and different codex and different all of that. Right? But now you can just point AI to your storage and say, tell me what's in there. And you can scan all the video and audio files. It doesn't need metadata. And it can tell you, here's what you got in here. You've got these shows, these masters, blah blah blah, all this stuff, because it just can read and process all of that. And so there's there's a there is going to be as huge shift of power that was software companies and SaaS services and all of that that's gonna just shift over to AI. And so if you're not prepared for that and and wanting to be one of those people that is using leveraging AI's power in that, space, it's gonna be a big wake up call.
[00:48:28] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I 100% agree with you. A lot of that stuff's gonna be done on the fly. Right? You're not even gonna make all the different formats anymore. You're just gonna make one master format, and the system will just convert it on the fly for whatever's needed at the time. Yep. That's the way it should be. Yeah. Yeah. And, man, I mean,
[00:48:47] AI Narrator #1:
I think the There's there's a spec in the media space called the CableLabs spec, which it it has so many fields of metadata. Ridiculous amount of information that and and people are still having a human being Right. Fill out this Type it all in. Or Excel sheet for every single field because they never created it when they made the original master. And so now they've gotta send it someplace. Right. The cable that right. And and so all of that stuff is gonna go away. That's gonna be just give me the you know, give me access to the file. I'll figure out what I need to you know? And and, so it's it's remarkable, and and a lot of people just aren't paying attention to that development.
[00:49:31] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. I don't that's the first time I've heard of that. And I don't work in in that kind of media though, of course. Yeah. But we do that with with software. Right? Like, somebody sends me data in any format. It doesn't matter what it is for our company. And I'm just like, convert this into what I need, and I drop it in. Right? Right. You know, obviously, not not with anything that's private or finance. Right? But Yeah. No. We have our own private cloud for that stuff that we use anyway. So we have private I I I.
[00:50:00] AI Narrator #1:
Yeah. So it's it's what's funny is we would there's a well, I won't say what it is, but they're very one of the big media corporations. And they have this media ingest platform for producers. And so you go to their platform and you upload a master, and you fill out all this stuff. And then it will reject it. Nope. Didn't pass. You gotta fix these things. Right? And then you gotta resubmit, upload it all over again. And then, oh, nope. This didn't pass. But and it it's insane. It's insane, Matt. It's taking and then, you know, after, like, the third or fourth time, you gotta reach out to their technical staff and say, hey. I'm got it right. We have the right specs. You're not you're not, you know, collecting. Right. It's a nightmare.
Right? None of that is necessary. Right? Like, it's none of it is necessary. You should just be able to send them the file or actually just point them to your cloud storage. Right. And say, here's the file. Right? And then they can get it and convert it to whatever they need, and and and it should be all automated. You know, that and so you have entire ecosystems that are about to get destroyed. And and it's it's it's really incredible.
[00:51:12] Matt Rouse:
And good. You know? Yeah. Like, I'm sorry if somebody loses their job who used to type shit in for a living. But, like, is data entry really what you wanted to do anyway? Like, couldn't couldn't you go work on that screenplay
[00:51:25] AI Narrator #1:
instead? Right. You know? Absolutely.
[00:51:28] Matt Rouse:
And we don't need these arduous pointless tasks that should never have been tasks ever. Right? Right. A lot of times, it's almost like punishing your customers. Right? Yeah. It's this idea of, like, I go to, like, I I gotta go to the doctor, so they asked me to fill out a form of why I gotta see the doctor. And I get there, and they asked me to fill out a medical form when I'm there, and they sent me to a specialist where I fill out the medical form again. Like, just take it out of the database, dude. I've already filled this out five jillion times. Oh, god. I hate Like, shouldn't you know what I'm allergic to? Right? I mean, I told you 12 other times. Right? You know, this kind of stuff is just eventually, it's all gonna get fixed. But that's also one of the apply for a job and just, like, upload the resume and then, like, now enter each of your experiences.
[00:52:17] AI Narrator #1:
It's on the resume.
[00:52:20] Matt Rouse:
Man, I can't I can't even remember how often I had to do that kind of thing when I was an IT contractor and you're applying for contracts repeatedly. Right? Because you have two, three jobs a year. And, I I like you were talking about macros, I made a macro that would just had all the stuff in it. It. Right? And I'd just be like, enter this experience, and I'm like, f four. Enter this job. F five. You know? And it just pasted all in. Nathan, it's been a great time talking. We've already been on for, like, almost an hour, so we should probably wrap this up. Somebody's gonna somebody's back twice, listening to this one episode.
Thanks everybody for listening. Nathan, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way that they can do that? Go to my website, texasndf.com
[00:53:05] AI Narrator #1:
is my Nathan David Fletcher is my professional website, texasndf.com. And then you have my podcast website, unclenaynay.com, which is headed naynay, unclenaynay.com.
[00:53:17] Matt Rouse:
Yep. And on your podcast app, it's Uncle Nay nay's Nerdcast.
[00:53:21] AI Narrator #1:
That's correct.
[00:53:22] Matt Rouse:
Alright, Nathan. It's been great, and we'll talk again soon. Thank you, Matt.
[00:53:31] Narrator AI:
Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us an honest review on your favorite podcast app. Be sure to check out Matt's book, Will AI Take My Job, and have a wonderful day.
Introduction to the Episode
Nathan Fletcher's Background and Career
The Reality of Marketing Creative Work
Starting a Podcast: Uncle Nene's Nerdcast
Challenges in the Creative Industry
The Importance of Iteration in Creativity
Distribution Challenges for Creatives
Advice for Marketing Creative Work
Podcasting as a Marketing Tool
Automation and AI in Creative Processes
Exploring Different Mediums for Storytelling
AI's Impact on Media and Content Creation
The Future of AI in Media Operations
The Shift in Media Asset Management
