Nicolas Cole

speaker

203 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2024 last heard Jan 2025

Nicolas Cole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Startup Ideas Podcast · This AI Writing Hack Made Him Millions (Full Breakdown) · 20 Jan 2025 podcast

We are going to write with AI. And I mean that in the most literal sense. We are going to write and we are going to do it with AI. And so what I want to do is I want to share my screen and I want to go back and forth and show how I do this and also how I train other writers to do this.

At a minimum, you will have a baseline understanding of how to use AI in writing. And at a maximum, you will have a very clear framework for being able to use AI to produce very high quality long form content.

I think the two biggest reasons is one, when you understand how these frameworks work, like so many people only think about how things work in an individual silo. So I'll give you an example. Like in all of our writing programs, if I explain how to write a thread hook, 99% of people will ask the follow-up question, does this also work on LinkedIn? Or does this also work for a reel?

The answer is always yes, but human beings do a terrible job of thinking orthogonally. It's like, if you tell me this is how to write a Twitter thread hook, it's hard for the average person to fathom how that gets played out across other things, but it does.

That's why these writing frameworks and these skills are so powerful, because once you understand them once, you can apply them to everything. It doesn't matter if you're writing an email or an article or a Twitter thread or a landing page. It's all the same. And then second is this is where the world's moving.

I was just writing a piece this morning about like different career paths that writers can take. And the one that I was working on is the career path of a content writer. And so often I hear, I see it in my comments on my content, like all day long is people saying, you know, what's the point of even building these skills? AI is just going to take all our jobs. AI is going to remove all writers.

No one's going to need a writer anymore. And that really fails to understand what's happening. And the analogy that I always use is when Photoshop was invented in 1990, if you can believe it was that long ago at this point, That didn't ruin design, it created a thousand times more designers, right? It created exponentially more design in the world.

When Instagram launched in 2010, that didn't remove photographers, it made everyone a photographer, right? It exponentially increased the amount of photography in the world. And ChatGPT and Claude and all these AI writing platforms are gonna do the same exact thing. They're going to make everyone a writer because it's reducing the barrier to entry.

If you pair that trend with the fact that 20 years ago, people couldn't imagine what it meant to create content online. If you owned a fax machine brand or a candy brand or a local spa, 20 years ago, you were like, what does it even mean to create content? You want me to post pictures of my fax machine on the internet?

And now today, every single business and every single individual understands I should probably create and share content online. It's why spas share pictures of their spas, right? And so if you take those two things together, you realize that quote unquote content, branded content, educational content is not ever going to go down. It's only going to go up.

Every single day, more and more people, more and more businesses want to create more and more content. If you are constrained as a human by 24 hours in a day or really like eight to 12 working hours a day and seven days a week, well, your productivity can only go so far. You can only produce so much content in a given day or a given week.

So if you add AI into the equation, it's not that AI removes people's jobs. AI becomes the stress test of, do you know how to use this to double, triple, quadruple your output? If yes, you will make even more money than you were making before because you are more valuable. And if you don't know how to use this, you become less valuable. And people conflate the two. They think AI stole my job.

That's not what happened. AI changed the barrier to entry and changed the baseline skill level. You failed to change with it. And then AI says, well, you didn't change, so you don't get the next opportunity, which is like Darwinism at its finest, right? So everyone's sitting here thinking AI is ruining things. And no, it's changing things, and you are failing to change with it.

So that's my little preamble for what we're going to dig into. That is why these things are so important. What is a topic that you want to create a piece of content on? 800 word article. You could also post it as a long form on X. You could post it as a long form on LinkedIn if you want. Is there any topic you've been noodling on?

Okay, so this is an amazing place to start because this is how most people begin the writing process. They come up with some sort of seed of an idea and then it's hard to know where does this go, right?

And this is why something that I think is really important in the context of us talking about AI is that people expect AI to automate and do things that they don't understand how to do themselves. And so it is worth recognizing that AI is not a silver bullet.

On some level, you do have to have a baseline understanding of how the thing is supposed to work so that you can prompt AI in order to do it. It's no different than being a CEO and you hire an intern and you're like, hey, I want you to take this over. If you ask the intern to take over a department that you've never even run, well, how are you going to get the intern to do it?

So here's the first framework. When you have a seed of an idea, there's two ways of looking at this idea. And this is the first decision to make essentially for you, Greg. Either this is an idea and this is one point within it, or this is one point within a different idea. So either, let's just spell this out really simply. Two types of ideas.

Either this is the idea, so this is about Reed Hastings' strange rule during Netflix's early days. Either that is going to be the piece, this is the theme of the piece, or this little idea is a sub-point within a larger idea. Okay, so what might an example of that be? Well, very easy one would be three CEOs who had strange rules at the beginning of their startup journeys or something, right?

So Reid becomes one of three, not necessarily the focal point. Okay? Yeah. So this is the first decision to make. Do you have a preference? Do you want me to pick one?

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