Okay. So I did about four minutes of today's podcast and then I looked and I noticed I hadn't pushed the record button on the road. Brocaster. So this is take two.
Let me open up a Diet Coke. The positive refreshes. So how are you? Welcome.
Welcome to the Daily Grateful. And I am Michael Kross and we're here today to talk about I have absolutely no idea. It's Monday. It's a new week.
It is coldest. But do these here in Florida? I'm telling you, it is cold. It was beautiful yesterday.
I'm sorry. I'm recording this on Sunday night. So yesterday was Saturday and it was beautiful the night before it was freezing cold. And I was terrified.
We had Zach and I had to go to Tampa and Zach is my son if you don't know. And I said bundle up man because it's freezing as cold outside and he's you know, so we're like layering and we walk out, we walk out the door and it's 72 degrees and the sun is shining and we're going, what the hell? So you know, we're out old stuff often, you know, hopping in and off Tampa. But it was just weird.
It was just now it's cold again. And you know, and last night it was cold this morning I woke up, it was cold. It's cold right now. It's going to be cold tomorrow.
And then I guess the next day it's supposed to get a little bit warmer and then it's going to be cold. It's January. What am I talking about the day I'm weather for? I don't know.
I sit here and I bitch about weather in Florida when my darling daughter is now living in Michigan and she's got like two feet of snow floating around, you know, it's drifting in her backyard, snow dress. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess I'm going to be a millionaire before he's 18.
He can build a computer from nothing. And that's what he does. I guess about two blocks or three blocks from his house is this computer supply place wholesale supply. He's already established himself there.
They love him. He walks in. What do you need? Boom.
So but he walks through the snow to get there and bring motherboards back to his house to hook up and do stuff with. It's just amazing. It is absolutely amazing. So what am I going to do with this year?
This year, you know, have you done that? You know, everybody does it. I don't. That's a new year to know you and you're going to go out and you're going to do shit.
No. Yes, I am. I am. I am.
I am going to go in new directions. I am going in new directions. And I'm doing, I'll tell you what I am doing that I haven't been doing. I'm doing a lot of writing.
I write a Wednesday newsletter for the Tampa Bay Technology Center and, you know, that's nice. And by the way, if you want to get a copy of that newsletter, if you want to get that newsletter comes out every Wednesday, it's absolutely free. Go to Tampa-bay.org and there's a little place in there to sign up for the mailing list. And if you get on the mailing list, you get the newsletter.
You also get a lot of propaganda about the Tampa Bay Technology Center, which you don't care about because you live in Branson, Missouri or Battle Creek, Michigan or, you know, I have people in Alabama and I don't know, and all kinds of Michigan. So, you know, and then I have relatives in Michigan who sometimes listen. And so if you want the newsletter, it's original new stuff every week. Just go there and sign up to be on the mailing list.
And you'll get that. You'll also get on Friday, you'll get something they call the bulletin, which is just what we're going to do this week and next week and get rid of that if you want. But my newsletter gets a lot of response. I don't know why, but I get a lot of feedback on my newsletter.
And my newsletter is about tech primarily and sometimes I just go into other directions like I do here on the daily grateful, but it's mostly about tech and new things that are coming. And by the way, I'm one of those people, I'm, well, I did one of the newsletters about the president of our club. So, oh, we got to get into this AI thing and we have a guy named Tony Radcliffe who comes and does AI stuff at our club, Tony's a genius. I love him.
He, by the way, was a record producer or a record engineer and knew the Beatles, he's from England. He worked with George Martin and all these people, but now he's like AI genius, AI guy. You want to know what I think about AI? I go on to YouTube and I turn on a video on YouTube and immediately I will see that it's an AI video.
The whole damn thing was made on AI. Now, I'm into self-publishing. I like that. There's a woman on the YouTube that I used to like, I guess I still kind of like her.
I still, I guess I still kind of like her. But let me see if I can find her, she's, you know, it does all kinds of videos about publishing and that type of thing and she's self-published a bunch of books. So I ordered her books because I'm a fan and I buy her books and I bought this one book that she did a whole video on and saying how hard she worked on and all this good type blah, blah, blah, blah. I get the damn book and the whole thing is AI.
She did not write, you could tell. She did not write a damn word of it. It's all that. There's nothing about that book that is personally, when you see something from me, it's very personalized.
You know, it is definitely very, very personalized. And that's just what I do is who I am. And I'm very, very serious about this. But you know, she just put out this whole book, it was like a 160 page book, eight and a half by 11.
And the whole thing is AI. You know, it doesn't have a forward in it, it doesn't have anything in it, you know, doesn't even have author information, although her name is on the cover as the author, but she's not the author. And I hate that. I just hate that.
And I left her a crappy ass review, well, an honest review on Amazon for it. The review never seemed to get published. I don't know how that works, but it never seems to have gotten published, which I found to be quite interesting. But anyway, I do use AI though, but I'm very, very limited.
Let me tell you how I use AI. All right. Let me tell you how I use AI on this podcast, but if you go to notebook LM, I actually published a podcast off of notebook LM just for the hell of it. It was an article that I wrote and my name is all over the article and I'm in it and everything because I wrote it and everything and I stuck it in there and they produced a podcast out of it.
And I threw it on here. You can look back and find it. And it's a couple, you know, a man and a woman and they're AI, they're not real. There's nothing awesome.
And it's real. And they just go back and forth. And they're saying, oh, God. And then I'm finding that podcasters, there was just this big event in Orlando that ended Saturday called Podfest.
And I didn't go this year. It's the first time I haven't gone in a long time, but I didn't go. And there were podcasters over there who were saying, oh, yeah, I do four podcasts a week and maybe one of them is me and the others, my voice, but it's not me, it's an AI version of my voice. I'm like, what?
You know, and they're putting them out there as podcasts that I promise you that other than that one little experiment. And then I came right down and said, this is all BS. Okay. This is what I did.
But this is and it scares me that that is the future. It scares me that that could be taking over and there are radio stations. There are radio stations out there that are replacing talent with AIs. And as a former is a washed up former member of the National Broadcast Media, that would be me.
That pisses me off to no end. That just really, really, really pisses me off. So but here's how I use AI with this podcast. All right.
And I didn't do it today. But sometimes if I'm going to do something, I will go to chat TPT or I'll go to cloud.ai and I will say I'm going to do a podcast about, you know, vegetable farming in Alaska. Please give me 10 talking points and it'll go spot out 10 talking points and it'll be one you know, headline sentence and then a little sentence or two sentences underneath expanding on it. And I will just sit there and I will use my own knowledge, but excuse me.
I don't edit. I just keep going. But I will just go right into it and I'll read, you know, I'll look at the top and I'll say something about, you know, there's a lot of, you know, heat houses in Alaska that people use to get their garden started early. And I know this from doing radio, a gardening radio show nationally syndicated, gardening radio show starting in the 90s, you know, and in the 80s actually.
And I was on a station in Alaska and I've had these people on my show. I saw that. And then I, so I went with that and then I would talk about some of my listeners that I used to have in Alaska and I would just go, you know, and so that would give me an idea. And then it would say the best way to build, you know, a little heat area for starting your plants.
And then I'll talk about the way that my listeners would do that. And I did. So that's, that's what I use AI for on here. The other thing that I do is when I do the podcast description, if you listen to this podcast on Apple podcast or if you listen to it on Spotify and you, and you happen to just go, you know, if you're on your phone, doing it or if you're on your computer doing, there's a little description.
I will have sometimes, not all the time, but I sometimes I will have AI write me a 70 word description based on the podcast because I hate writing those descriptions. And then the other thing I will do, this is, this is where it's turned out rather well for me. But sometimes I'll have them write it and I'll say add hashtags because my daughter told me hashtags in your description puts you out to the Google. So people can find you.
It's very, very important to have good hashtags that I'll say, please write hashtags because I can't write hashtags. So I will let the AI write hashtags for me. And that's cool. It does that does a good job of that.
But the rest of it's all me. You know, the voice that you're hearing right now, the one that has been coughing and drinking Diet Coke. And the interesting thing about this Diet Coke, let me take a sip of beer. Is that I don't know what happened.
But the bottom of the can, I bought it in a case, the bottom of the can is like bubbled out and it will not sit flat on the table. It's kind of leaning off to the side. It's the leaning can of Diet Coke. But anyhow, that is that is how I use AI and I do a lot of writing.
And I will tell you on my Wednesday newsletter, I have done this before. I will dictate my newsletter into, I'll just sit here and talk about the topic of my newsletter. And I'll just sit there and have a conversation about it. And it's all there.
And I write it this way. I'm kind of dictating it. But I'm speaking in my natural voice and I do it. And then I will take the audio and I will go and I will have it transcribed.
And there's plenty of places that will transcribe that for you for free. And then I will take that, it comes in a text file and I will take that and I will go to Claude.ai. Claude is what I trust the most because I am not the best speller. And my punctuation is not always perfect and my grammar is not always perfect.
But what I will do is I will say, please edit for punctuation, spelling and grammar. And it'll pop back and it'll do that. And it's still me, but it's fixed all the grammatical errors that I've made and it's done the punctuation correctly. And it's done all of that.
And I made a mistake one time. I did all of that, you know, and then I said, and clarity, I added the words and clarity. Oh, that damn thing totally rewrote the whole newsletter and I'm like, what the hell is this? What the hell is this?
And it, and no, you know, I said, no, that's what I said. I said, you cannot do that. That's what I thought because it was terrible. So I went back, you know, to the original and then I just said, just edit for punctuation and spelling.
Well, it had it clon had it in its damn head that I wanted them to rewrite it again. So they said, no, and they just give me, you know, totally rewritten thing. And so I said, damn it. So then I went to chat GPT and I said, please edit for punctuation and spelling and it did and it was fine.
But Claude wasn't going to have it until, you know, the next day when I use it again. But that's the only thing. So AI comes in very, very good for that. And I'm happy about that.
So hashtags, really good at writing hashtags. My daughter is really good at writing hashtags. But when I told her about this, someone tried that and she tried it. I think she's doing that now because hashtags are important because if you write something or you have a podcast and say you're doing a podcast about bailing hay and you know something, there's an art to that.
I know this. You know, the equipment and all of that and you write this or you, you know, you do this podcast about this and you speak of your experiences or you're interviewing somebody who does that. And then you take that and then you transcribe it and then you have them check the punctuation and spelling. If you want to, I don't do that if it's for the podcast.
But I will then say, please include hashtags. And boom goes dynamite. It will pop out these hashtags. And why are the hashtags important?
That's what I was starting to tell you. They are important because because if someone is going on Google and they say, I want to learn about the mechanics of bailing hay, yeah, yeah, why not people want to do that and you stick these hashtags or they're all over Google's going to say hashtag, hey, bailing with older machine, whatever, you know, it's going to be there on Google and you're going to find yourself rising up on that top page of Google for that particular search. It happens with me all the damn time. And it's just because of hashtags.
Now, as I'm saying this, Google might just change everything and I don't know, but it's working for me now and it's been working with me for a long time. So that works very, very well. And I'm happy with that. So, you know, oh, well, that's going to wrap things up for the Monday edition of the Daily Grateful.
I don't know what I'm going to talk about tomorrow, but it will be fun, fun, fun until Daddy takes the G-burn away and then I'm going to sit here and put this all together. I'm going to have AI write the description and I'm going to post it on the Internet or as my son Zach used to say when he was just a tiny little kid, damn, look it up on the Internet. That's what you're saying. You can always do it just like that.
On the Internet. That's what you did. I didn't do it anymore. But I remind him of it.
He smiles. All right. Have a good one. We'll see you tomorrow.