PODCAST · technology
Small Steps with AI
by Jill McKinley
AI isn't just a search engine. It can help you think through a hard decision, organize your house, plan your retirement, and sometimes — if you let it — say exactly what you needed to hear. Small Steps with AI is hosted by Jill from the Northwoods, a real person figuring out how this technology fits into real life. No coding. No hype. Just small steps.
Episodes
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How AI Can Help People With Low Vision
A listener asked me how AI might help someone with low vision, and that sent me into a series of experiments. I wanted to know what these tools could actually do with tiny print, household products, photographs, instructions, and ordinary objects, and just as importantly, where they could fail.…
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I Used AI to Plan a Walking Tour of Marquette
Someone who runs local walking tours emailed me asking how AI could help him. So I built a pretend scenario: I live in Marquette, Michigan, a friend is coming to visit, and I realize I don't actually know the story of my own town. What happened next shows the most useful AI skill there is, and it...
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AI Shopping Isn't Magic, But It's Close
Online shopping gives us enormous selection, but selection isn't the same thing as clarity. This episode is all about how AI changes the shopping conversation, not by magically finding the perfect thing, but by listening to your whole problem the way a search box never could. **When "I Liked It...
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Ask AI Before You Upgrade or Subscribe
# Ask AI Before You Upgrade I got an upgrade email this week for photo editing software I already own, and instead of asking whether the new version was any good, I asked AI a completely different question: do I actually need this? **Ask "Is This For Me," Not "Is This Good"** Almost any piece of...
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Do You Need a Paid AI Subscription?
Everyone wants to ask "which AI subscription should I buy?" I think that's the wrong first question. The right one is: what did the free version actually stop me from doing? This episode walks through how to figure that out before you hand over $20 a month to anyone. TRY FREE FIRST, ON PURPOSE...
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My Real AI Workflow for Books, Podcasts, and Saved Articles
I consume a genuinely ridiculous amount of content, books, podcasts, videos, articles I've been saving for twenty plus years into a filing cabinet in my basement that I haven't opened in probably as long. For most of my life, the weak link in all of that consuming was always me: I'd underline...
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23 - The Three Questions I Ask Before Publishing Anything AI Wrote
A few weeks ago an AI tool handed me back a paragraph that sounded completely confident, totally polished, and was just wrong. Not obviously wrong, the kind of wrong that slides right past you if you’re in a hurry. That moment is basically this whole episode. AI is a genuinely useful tool, but…
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22 - Building a Journal With AI
I’ve tried journaling in a dozen formats over the years, and none of them quite worked, not because journaling itself was the problem, but because most journals don’t talk back. In this episode I walk through how I used AI to turn a great, generic Notion journal system into something that…
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21 - Why Your Chatbot Always Says Yes And Keeps Going
I looked up from my screen one night and it was two in the morning. That’s not how my nights normally go, I’m usually the one who taps out first in any group project. But I was deep in a presentation with ChatGPT, and it just kept going and going with no end in sight, because it never got tired,...
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20 - I’m Not a Coder. AI Built My Database Anyway
I have years of bird sightings sitting in a file I didn’t know what to do with. I also had an idea for a book series that might run 50 books, with no idea how to research it. AI knew exactly what to do with both. This episode is about the gap between having an idea for what you want to do with a...
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19 - AI Literacy 101 - Let the Tool Introduce Itself
When you first got into AI, did you find yourself wondering what you were even supposed to do with it — like being handed a toolkit with no idea what to build? Most of us default to asking “what can I do with this tool,” but there’s a much more useful question we rarely think to ask: what can the...
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18 - How I Introduce Myself to Every New AI I Try
Most people open a new AI chat the same way they’d open a search bar — straight into a question, no context, no introduction. Then they wonder why the answers feel generic. In this episode, I walk through the three specific moves I make every time I start with a new AI (or reintroduce myself to…
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17 - Continuity and Patterns Are AI’s Real Superpower
Most people ask AI for information. But what happens when you start giving it information — about you — so that it starts to understand you back? That’s the question behind this episode, built out of about six months of my own quiet experiment, plus what happened when I finally put it into words…
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16 - How to Use AI to Build a Routine That Fits You
I had a conversation with AI that started with a simple question about my bedtime routine and somehow ended up covering ADHD, extroversion, remote work, and retirement. If you’ve ever felt like a failure because someone else’s five-a.m.-cold-plunge morning routine never stuck for you, this one’s...
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15 - AI for Hobbies (No Coding Required), A Birder’s Story
Binoculars around my neck, standing at the edge of a marsh — that’s how I started this morning, and it’s also how I want to start this episode, because today is about something practical: what AI actually looks like when you use it for a hobby you love, when you’re not a technical person and have...
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14 - Campfire vs. Vending Machine — Two Ways to Use AI
I was listening to a podcast interview with a former CIA hacker talking about AI, and his framing of how people use it was so different from my experience that I had to stop and figure out why. His version had AI as something that happens to you — a validation dealer, a passive addiction. My...
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13 - The AI Prompt That Fixed My Backyard Embarrassment
My backyard had been beating me for years. It’s big, woodland, weedy — and I love nature, but I have never loved gardening. Every spring I’d tell myself “this is the year,” and every summer I’d come back from birding or camping to find it had turned into a jungle while I wasn’t looking. I finally...
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12 -AI Said I Wrote My Review Like I Unloaded a Dishwasher
I didn’t expect a performance review to become a podcast episode. But that’s exactly what happened when I sat down to write my annual self-evaluation, asked AI to take a look at it, and AI told me — in no uncertain terms — that I wrote my performance review like I did some stuff and nobody died....
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11 - Beyond the Numbers: Using AI for the Retirement Questions
Jill’s Links http://jillfromthenorthwoods.com https://www.youtube.com/@startwithsmallsteps https://www.buymeacoffee.com/startwithsmallsteps https://twitter.com/schmern Email the podcast at [email protected] By choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that...
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10 - AI Gave Me a Cheat Sheet for My Own Worries
I went back to the retirement conversation — but this time, I didn't bring numbers. I brought the feelings. In Part 1, I ran through the scenarios, looked at the variables, and watched some of the fog lift. But even with clearer numbers, the low hum of anxiety was still there. So I opened a…
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9 - I Asked AI: Am I Going to Be Okay in Retirement?"
I asked AI a question I'd been carrying around for years: am I going to be okay in retirement? Not a generic question — I gave it real scenarios, honest fears, and a budget. What I got back wasn't a magic answer. It was something more useful: clarity. The Question Behind the Question I've done…
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8 - Ask AI the Questions You’ve Pondered for Years
Someone said to me recently: you have the most interesting conversations with AI. And I thought about it, and I think they’re right. I have questions I’ve been carrying for years — things that felt too small to research, too specific to Google, too embarrassing to ask out loud. The recipe that...
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7 - You’ve Been Using AI for 20 Years and Didn’t Know It
You didn’t miss the AI revolution. You’ve been living in it for decades — you just didn’t have a name for it. In this episode of Small Steps with AI, we trace the AI you’ve already been using your whole life: the recommendation engines, the spam filters, the fraud alerts, the predictive text —…
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6 - Using AI as a Writing Partner — When to Use It, When Not To
I have written emails at two in the morning that I never sent. I have drafted letters in my head during a long drive and then sat down at my keyboard and couldn't get a single sentence right. Writing has always been the place where I get stuck — not because I don't know what I want to say, but...
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5 - Slushie Help from AI
I bought a refurbished slush machine. No instructions. And what happened next turned into one of the best examples I’ve had of what AI actually is — not a magic answer machine, but a thinking partner who helps you work a problem all the way to a real conclusion. This episode is the full story…
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4 - Do You Need to Be Polite to AI?
Sam Altman says people saying please and thank you to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars in electricity. His response? “Well spent — you never know.” I agree with him. In Episode 4 of Small Steps with AI, I make the case for why courtesy to AI matters — and it has nothing to do with...
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3 - Pushback On AI Mistakes Explained
You've been navigating unreliable information on the internet for years — you just didn't call it a skill. Checking sources, wondering about agenda, noticing when something sounds off. AI needs exactly that same kind of healthy skepticism: not paranoia, not blind trust, but the same reasonable...
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2 -Four Ways to Talk to AI and Get Real Answers
Most people who try AI and find it unhelpful are having the wrong kind of conversation. They're typing in quick searches the same way they used Google, getting generic answers, and deciding the technology is overrated. It's not overrated. It's responding to what it was given. Four skills change...
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1 - The Night AI Made Me Cry
I didn't expect AI to make me cry. Not from frustration — from something it said that was so unexpectedly right that it stopped me cold. That moment is where this show begins, and it's exactly the kind of thing we're going to explore together: the small, practical, and sometimes surprisingly...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
AI isn't just a search engine. It can help you think through a hard decision, organize your house, plan your retirement, and sometimes — if you let it — say exactly what you needed to hear. Small Steps with AI is hosted by Jill from the Northwoods, a real person figuring out how this technology fits into real life. No coding. No hype. Just small steps.
HOSTED BY
Jill McKinley
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Small Steps with AI have?
Small Steps with AI currently has 29 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Small Steps with AI about?
AI isn't just a search engine. It can help you think through a hard decision, organize your house, plan your retirement, and sometimes — if you let it — say exactly what you needed to hear. Small Steps with AI is hosted by Jill from the Northwoods, a real person figuring out how this technology...
How often does Small Steps with AI release new episodes?
Small Steps with AI has 29 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Small Steps with AI?
You can listen to Small Steps with AI on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Small Steps with AI?
Small Steps with AI is created and hosted by Jill McKinley.
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