Episode 87: How JULIE CHENELL USES AI AS HER SECOND BRAIN (AND YOU SHOULD TOO)

Monica Froese [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Empowered Business Podcast where strategy needs action. I’m Monica Froese, and I’m here to help you create, sell, and scale digital products the smart way using AI and proven strategies to build a sustainable, profitable business. If you’re ready to turn your expertise into digital products that sell and eventually grow into a thriving digital shop, you’re in the right place. Each week, I break down real world tactics, unfiltered insights, and bold business moves. Because building a digital product business should be sustainable, scalable, and designed for long term success. Let’s ditch the fluff, leverage AI to work smarter, and turn your expertise into a thriving digital empire on your terms. Let’s get started. Welcome back to the Empowered Business podcast.

Monica Froese [00:00:49]:
Today, I am interviewing one of the most forward thinking entrepreneurs that I have met in my online business journey. Her name is Julie Chanel, and she is a digital marketing expert and coach helping companies use growth hacking strategies and marketing tools to navigate the fast paced and ever change changing landscape of digital marketing. She started her journey to entrepreneurship as a blogger and writer, garnering the attention of media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post with her no holds bar approach to social media. After a rocky divorce and unexpected pregnancy in 2014 that left her needing to build a profitable business quickly, Julie transformed her passion and love for marketing into a multimillion dollar business in less than three years. Now she runs Digital Insiders, which I’ve been a member of as a great mastermind program. It’s an exclusive mastermind group for qualified business owners looking to scale to 5,000,000 a year and beyond. She’s also the founder of Funnel Gorgeous, a design and marketing education plus software company created to teach the masses how to leverage sales funnels and digital marketing to build movements and change the world. Julie is truly one of the most knowledgeable people and forward thinking people I have met, and today’s conversation is going to focus all around my favorite topic, AI.

Monica Froese [00:02:09]:
And truly, oftentimes, I think things and I think I’m connecting dots with AI, and then Julie just says it in the most perfect way. So I’m so excited for this conversation. Let’s dive in. Julie, welcome to the Empowered Business podcast.

Julie Chenell [00:02:23]:
Thank you so much for having me. So happy to be here.

Monica Froese [00:02:26]:
To start, I’d love to hear more about you and your entrepreneur journey.

Julie Chenell [00:02:30]:
Yeah. I started back in 02/2007. I was a mom blogger. I had three kids at home. I was trying to write my way out of the insanity, and it was there that I started to learn about the art of writing, getting attention, building an audience. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time. I dove into the tech of blogging around WordPress, and I noticed people were really interested in that. I started to develop a blog around WordPress and a blog design mini agency.

Julie Chenell [00:02:56]:
I was developing these skills around marketing copy and tech that I didn’t realize at the time, but would serve me well. Somewhere around 02/2015, I discovered Russell Brunson and sales funnels. I started a funnel agency, and that’s when my financial world changed. I went from scraping by 25,000 a year to making 6 figures. And at one point, I realized I’m making these funnels for people, and they’re making lots of money. Maybe I should make one for myself. And, that’s really how my brand took off. I built a funnel.

Julie Chenell [00:03:30]:
I launched it in 2016. I went from 20 k months to hundred k months with one funnel. And it was a different time back then. You can’t really do that nowadays. Ever since then, I’ve just been building my personal brand.

Monica Froese [00:03:44]:
Okay. What what’s the funnel?

Julie Chenell [00:03:46]:
So it was a evergreen webinar funnel. I didn’t wanna do it live. I do actually recommend people do it live nowadays because, like, people need the trust is so bad that you really have to be live. At the time, I’ve turned on an evergreen funnel for a program called Creator Laptop Life. It was a $1,500 program. I didn’t know that you could sell a $1,500 program right off a webinar. I thought you needed to get on the phone, so I was getting on the phone with people for a $1,500 offer. I must have done, like, a 50 phone calls in three months or something ridiculous.

Julie Chenell [00:04:19]:
There was one ad that was converting well. The only reason that I have a hundred thousand dollars in my bank account is because this one ad is churning out leads. That was really the first successful funnel I had.

Monica Froese [00:04:31]:
I was in Create Your Laptop Life too. I know, isn’t it? Do you consider it a group coaching program Digital Insiders?

Julie Chenell [00:04:37]:
Yeah. I do. It’s a hybrid. It’s a mastermind and group coaching program. It’s actually a private coaching program because I have one on one access to everyone. It’s definitely deviated from what Create Your Laptop Life was, but I’ve been coaching since 2016. We’re coming on a decade now of coaching.

Monica Froese [00:04:54]:
So basically, Create Your Laptop Life melded itself into what is now Digital Insiders. It was like the evolution of it.

Julie Chenell [00:05:01]:
I would say create your laptop life eventually morphed into the digital guidebook. That was, like, my big 6 figure course launch, and that was all about how to become a digital marketer. So it evolved to that. From there, it transformed into a program inside of Funnel Gorgeous. FG Society, which is Funnel Gorgeous Society, is how to become a funnel builder. So that’s the evolutionary path of that product. Digital Insiders was something I grew from the ground up, and it was always determined that you would join Digital Insiders once you were already making at least a hundred thousand dollars a year. Whereas all my other products were, like, zero to whatever.

Julie Chenell [00:05:40]:
So they were more beginner products, whereas Digital Insiders is a little bit more established.

Monica Froese [00:05:45]:
That’s how I followed you on the journey. Spending $1,500 to get in there was a big deal because that was the early days. I joined when I went full time in the business, but then I joined Digital Insiders once I was way more established. And then you have another side of your business, which is Funnel Gorgeous that you run with your cofounder, and that is software based. And you do have a learning component over there too.

Julie Chenell [00:06:05]:
Yeah. So Funnel Gorgeous is a marketing education and software company. It started in 2018. It was really focused on high converting design. We launched a course and templates. And then in 2020, we decided to white label high level, which was not really popular in 2020. It wasn’t really until 2022, ’20 ’20 ‘3. And so we launched, and we got a thousand users within six weeks.

Julie Chenell [00:06:27]:
It was absolutely mad. And so now we are known for the software as much as we are the education.

Monica Froese [00:06:33]:
Yeah. Which is that is really funny because now I hear so much more about HighLevel, but you really seem to be an early adopter of that.

Julie Chenell [00:06:41]:
Yeah. You know what’s funny? It was really hard because I was so well known in the ClickFunnels world. People thought I was betraying ClickFunnels. There’s also a very cult like energy over there, and people didn’t realize that I had made a million dollars before coming into the ClickFunnels world. So they thought, oh, Russell made you, and now you’re biting the hand that feeds you. I was already on my way. The whole reason I got involved in ClickFunnels was because I joined as inner circle. I had a level of success, but the majority of people in ClickFunnels thought that Russell had made me.

Julie Chenell [00:07:11]:
So when I left, they were just like, you’re betraying blah blah blah. I left before they announced ClickFunnels two point o. Within six months of me leaving, they started to announce, hey. We’re gonna rebuild from the ground up. If you’ve been following that story, it took two years for it to get even to the point where it was working. There was this huge migration of people from ClickFunnels over to high level starting in 2022. It’s like a running joke that 95% of the people in Russell’s innermost circles are high level users. But I guess that’s the price you pay for being early.

Julie Chenell [00:07:44]:
People just don’t see it until couple years later.

Monica Froese [00:07:47]:
I was never in the ClickFunnels world, but I’ve watched the entire story, And I was very well aware that I watched the whole thing unfold and I found it really goofy that people were calling you a betrayer. That’s what my background is. I was in IT before doing this full time. And that’s how things work. Like, people branch off and they do their own thing. It’s called capitalism.

Julie Chenell [00:08:11]:
I feel like he would at least respect my decision making. Business. We had to stabilize the foundation of our company. Funnel Gorgeous is approaching 20,000,000. Any smart business owner would do what I had done. He should feel a level of admiration or respect that, like, I was a good enough student that I realized I needed to cut ties.

Monica Froese [00:08:30]:
Yeah. A %. And good for you guys growing into female founded company to 20,000,000. That’s awesome.

Julie Chenell [00:08:37]:
Yeah. It’s been a ride. As soon as we added software in 2020, it just exploded. Like, our revenue doubled. Also did did our expenses and our headaches.

Monica Froese [00:08:46]:
You know, I really wanna talk to you about AI. Are you integrating AI into Funnel Gorgeous at all right now?

Julie Chenell [00:08:52]:
Absolutely. It’s definitely one of our priorities, one of our pillar priorities. We white label high level. High level drives the development of the features of our software, and then we drive the education and support of the software. And so AI is just all over high level at this point, and they’re prioritizing it. So that means that we have to teach it. So we have just released an AI employee inside of FG Funnels where you can have a phone number and people call it, and the AI will make appointments and answer questions. So we have a +1 800 number or not maybe it’s not even a +1 800 number.

Julie Chenell [00:09:23]:
I don’t even remember. But you could call it and ask questions about f two funnels, and it’s our AI employee. We’re integrating AI into all of our education. Whenever we had worksheets, we now have g which is basically like an interactive worksheet that helps people get stuff done. We also have recently switched up our customer support. Now you get a human 7AM to 7PM from our US based all female support team. That was an extension from nine to five. Now we’re seven to seven, so we added twenty hours, and we turned on our AI customer support agent from 7PM to 7AM.

Julie Chenell [00:09:58]:
The AI support agent is actually pretty good. Last summer, almost a year ago, our customer support team made a giant migration by transcribing and writing out written articles that were not video based for the sake of AI being able to read the instructions. What looks so easy actually took us 600 articles and a year to get ready. It’s been working really well.

Monica Froese [00:10:20]:
The thing about AI is it really is only as good as what you put into it, which we know. I’ve spent, similar to you, a decade online creating courses and workshops and writing blog posts and doing podcasts. And I have fed this all into ChatGPT, and it’s the reason it’s so helpful, in my opinion, so helpful to me when I’m launching a new workshop or I wanna add something onto my courses because I fed it so much of my own knowledge. And I really do feel like people are confused. I don’t use TikTok for work. It’s like my personal space, and I cannot with the ads of you plug a concept into chat g p t, you get back an ebook and make a million dollars. I’m like, yeah. Okay.

Julie Chenell [00:11:02]:
I always tell people, Vango and a five year old have the same paintbrush. It’s the same thing with AI. AI is a paintbrush, so you’re going to see things, ask it different questions, provide it different constraints depending on your knowledge and expertise. I’m really worried that the AI is gonna take my coaching job because now all my clients get me and they get AI me. Right? They get all the insights that I’m getting from AI because all of my Voxer transcripts are going into AI now. Now I have more recall and more data at my fingertips than I ever had before. It doesn’t make me less valuable. It makes me more valuable.

Monica Froese [00:11:38]:
I agree. The example I use a lot is we were redoing our program on how to create low ticket digital products. I was creating an empowered divorce planner because I actually had a very amicable divorce, but it’s one of the hardest things that you go through. And I kept telling people, I’m like, AI is not human. It did not go through this. It cannot feel, it cannot hug. While it was so like, the start it helps me structure the product. It gave me ideas that I may not have thought of.

Monica Froese [00:12:08]:
But then it’s like, you didn’t have to go through the emotional turmoil of rotating your kids or understanding the schedules and how that impacts your kids. And so I always remind people wanna buy from people. We’re still human. But if you treat it as it’s your support and not that it is like, I’m just gonna take everything it gives me and plug it in and go on my happy way. Like that’s just not the point of it, which brings me to the thing I really wanna talk about that I’m obsessed with since I took your training on it, which is using AI as your second brain.

Julie Chenell [00:12:39]:
Yeah. It was a big moment I had because I was using ChatGPT ever since it came out. I was one of the first in the first five days it came out, I was on it. I was following lots of techies on Twitter, and it was all the rage. I used it for writing. Like, I saw it with create emails. I was like, oh, this is cool. Then I started using it more on the daily when I was tracking my macros, and I needed help making decisions.

Julie Chenell [00:13:02]:
So then I started to notice there was a moment where I realized that most people are just using it as an enhanced Google search or an assistant copywriter. When I realized that if you organize your chats, customize your projects, and take every single thing that you think or say or do and put it in chat before you put it anywhere else, you are essentially building a second brain that can’t do everything your first brain can do, but it can do a lot of things better. I started to use chat. I started to open up chat first thing in the morning instead of anything else. Like, no matter what it was, I was writing emails in chat, talking about the day in chat, talking about my clients in chat. And I was like, crap. I really need to organize this in order for it to be useful. That’s when I started to get really into the organization.

Julie Chenell [00:13:52]:
I realized that if you’re going to use chat five to six hours a day, which is what I was doing, you need to clean up your chat every day and make sure everything’s organized. Clean out your memories. Keep your brain in working order. It’s like sleep. We sleep every night, and that’s how we organize all our memories, get organized, and other things happen too. But with the second program, your nightly habits. So I I thought I’ve got these three habits I’m doing. They sound kind of underwhelming.

Julie Chenell [00:14:17]:
Open chat every day, organize your chat, and clean your chat out. I’m like, you’re building a second brain. I built a presentation, and about three or 400 people signed up. It was free. Then I put it in Teachable, and I charged $12 for the replay and added a couple bonuses. Hundreds of people are buying it. It doesn’t have a sales page. There was, like, a 11 sales last week.

Julie Chenell [00:14:37]:
I’m just like, where are people coming from? I don’t understand.

Monica Froese [00:14:40]:
I send people there all the time.

Julie Chenell [00:14:42]:
So I think it’s having that impact of people having a massive paradigm shift about how to use chat, and then they’re sharing it with their friends. And it’s just funny because there’s no sales page. It’s $12 with a little clipart.

Monica Froese [00:14:55]:
And and, honestly, I think that training’s even good for people outside of the business.

Julie Chenell [00:14:59]:
Yeah. For sure.

Monica Froese [00:15:01]:
When I started adopting your logic, I feel like it changed my life.

Julie Chenell [00:15:06]:
I get DMs and emails being, like, massively changed my life when you taught me this. And I was like, I know it’s underwhelming, but once you get it, you’re just like, oh.

Monica Froese [00:15:16]:
I have a file for dating. I have a file for weight loss. I have a file for co parenting, and then I have my two brands. It’s so funny to me because it picks up on psychological things from what I’m telling it about my personal life and how it’s bleeding into my business life. It’s alarming sometimes, but one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, all you’re doing is just feeding it information.

Julie Chenell [00:15:41]:
It’s all pattern recognition. It’s all yeah. It’s all pattern recognition. It can see things. I’ve been feeding it chat logs. Even when people say to me, I did my webinar. There was only 10 people on, and they weren’t super engaged. Give me the chat log.

Julie Chenell [00:15:57]:
And asking it to analyze the people based on what they’re saying in the chat compared to the presentation, and having it help you figure out what emails to write based on what people were saying in the chat from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Monica Froese [00:16:13]:
That’s cheap.

Julie Chenell [00:16:14]:
Yeah. So we’ve been doing that. So I’ll say, okay. This webinar got zero live sales, but 25 replay sales. Why? Or this one got five. I have a webinar that I have to analyze that had a 42% conversion rate. So I’m gonna deconstruct what word patterns were happening there and all the stuff that happened there. Now digital insiders are asking me to run their stuff through my chat.

Julie Chenell [00:16:37]:
The reason is we all know that chat can blow smoke, correct it by giving it a prompt to say, don’t be so nice or whatever. But it intrinsically is serving you. So even if you tell it to go hard on you, it struggles to go hard on you consistently. People will send their stuff in on audit to me and say, can you run it? Because your chat about me is more accurate than my chat about me. Wow.

Monica Froese [00:17:05]:
That is

Julie Chenell [00:17:05]:
so funny. I’m like, yeah. Give it to me. I have intel on them in my chat because I’m transcribing Voxer messages over there. It doesn’t have that filter of, oh, I gotta be nice. It’s just, here’s what your client’s doing right and wrong, and here’s the problem.

Monica Froese [00:17:19]:
Because every time I ask it, first of all, genius. My problem is I can sell live. That’s not a problem. I can sell live, but I hardly ever get a problem. I can sell live, but I hardly ever get replay sales, which is why I’ve always struggled with evergreen personally. And now I’m thinking, it’s been the biggest conundrum for me. It’s great. I love that I can get on a webinar and all these people will pay me money, but then after it’s crickets.

Monica Froese [00:17:39]:
And it’s Yeah. The follow-up emails don’t work. And that’s why I’ve always hesitated to spend a lot of time on my evergreen stuff or dump a lot of ads into it because for whatever reason, I’ve only been able to sell live, it seems.

Julie Chenell [00:17:50]:
Working on I have a good prompt that’s, like, when I have a good idea, I’m like, before I keep going and I put the prompt in, and it’s pretty good. But what I really want, what I’ve been training my chat on is I wanted it to kick back without me asking. So the other day, I just sent it a message about a personal thing, and it kicked back. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve asked so many times to kick back, but it it kicked back on the first try without me asking and almost in a surprising way. So I was like, alright. Maybe it’s working. You’re more trustworthy if you’re honest than if you’re just telling me what I wanna hear.

Monica Froese [00:18:25]:
Exactly. One of the things I hear a lot, probably like the biggest objection when we talk about AI is, aren’t you concerned about all the information you’re putting in there? So I am curious about your take on that because you are feeding it most of your IP. Right?

Julie Chenell [00:18:42]:
Yeah. But so are all of my students.

Monica Froese [00:18:44]:
Right. Same with me. People are worried that it’s gonna create more copyright issues or something, but

Julie Chenell [00:18:50]:
We have a service that is taking down hundreds of plagiarized copies of our course every single month, number one. Number two, all of our courses have transcripts, slides, worksheets, which can be easily downloaded and replicated.

Monica Froese [00:19:01]:
Right.

Julie Chenell [00:19:01]:
So this is not new. Number three, half of my IP is already on the Internet in pieces and parts through YouTube videos and podcast interviews. Sometimes I think people who are hyper focused on what if it gets stolen, it just feels a little bit like the spotlight effect. Like, my work. Okay. Cool. You’re cool, but you’re not that cool. None of us are.

Monica Froese [00:19:24]:
I remember one of the early days of my program when I was doing Pinterest advertising getting ripped off. I’m sure you’ve experienced things like this, but this one threw me because I got targeted with her ad. What really threw me was she recorded all my stuff. I tell stories about my kids and integrate my life into my teachings. And it was like listening to this girl tell a story about my daughter was really creepy. But I tell people all the time, okay. If you’re gonna sell online, your stuff’s gonna get stolen. If you’re worried about that, don’t sell online.

Monica Froese [00:19:53]:
That’s pretty much my answer every time that comes up. So I don’t get worked up about what I put into chat. Of course, I’m not feeding out my Social Security number, but it’s like due diligence of what you put in.

Julie Chenell [00:20:03]:
Another human is posting as themselves using my words. That that can feel violating, which is what it sounds like happened to you. If I spend time worrying about that, there’s no solution that doesn’t end up with me, some psychotic OCD hermit in the woods disconnected from all reality.

Monica Froese [00:20:22]:
I am the same way as you. I’m glad we covered that. The next thing that is coming up and we I mentioned it before we record it, so I’m really curious what you’re gonna say about it is the fact of them monetizing us. When you look at essentially, we are a commodity for OpenAI. Right? We are. And Facebook monetizes us and every TikTok monetizes us. It’s, hey, we’re giving you access to this amazing software. It’s improving your life and you’re on it all the time.

Monica Froese [00:20:51]:
Why wouldn’t they monetize us? What does that look like? And then how does that impact what we are feeding it with all of our personal stuff?

Julie Chenell [00:20:59]:
I’m sure it’s coming. I don’t know what it’s gonna look like. So there could be advertising there. I just don’t understand how they would do advertising within the chat without eroding enormous amounts of trust. So I’m not really sure unless things appear on the sidebar as sponsored ads. If it’s disclosed that it’s an ad, maybe they’ll charge more if you wanna be ad free. I don’t know. It’s coming.

Julie Chenell [00:21:26]:
I’m sure. I pay $200 a month. They’re losing money on us because it’s, like, unlimited and the cost of the GPUs. So it’s it’s bound to happen.

Monica Froese [00:21:33]:
Yes. Will you jump on the advertising for it? Yeah. Me too. I said when I stopped teaching Pinterest advertising that I’m never teaching ads again. But I will tell you right now, I will be the earliest adopter of this because I think it actually could be very impactful for business owners who are savvy with it.

Julie Chenell [00:21:53]:
It’s a bummer because nobody likes being served ads, but as marketers, we love serving ads. I have anxiety and and a little bit of OCD, and people think that I’ve got all these scenarios planned out. But there are some things that I obsess over, and then there are things that I don’t even worry about. The privacy issue or the copyright issue or what happens in the future, none of it. I’m just like, we’ll figure it out.

Monica Froese [00:22:14]:
I wonder if there’s common thread about being marketers that were like that because I’m the same way.

Julie Chenell [00:22:18]:
I’m I think it’s when these things are so so big, they’re so far out of our control. Yeah. It’s like, when I feel like I can control something, then maybe I’m a little bit more anxious because I can control it. But I have zero control whether OpenAI decides to service ads.

Monica Froese [00:22:31]:
Oh, I don’t know. And and my attitude is if they’re going to, then I’m gonna learn how to leverage it to make money.

Julie Chenell [00:22:36]:
Exactly.

Monica Froese [00:22:37]:
Sounds great. And other things that you were the first person I heard this from, and now I’m hearing it a lot more and very interested in making this a thing for myself, someone who wanted to join digital insiders and said, I, chat GBT recommended you. And you were blown away by that. Wait, what? And that brought up a lot when I mentioned that to my student, they were like, but does she, because you know that studying, and I asked you on that post, do you have the toggle off of sharing, like letting them use your data to improve the. And you have the setting off, I have the setting off. Now I’ve seen all these other people saying, Hey, I’m getting these intake forms saying that you were recommended to me by chat GPT. They I ask the question every time. Do you have the setting on or not? They have it off too.

Monica Froese [00:23:21]:
How do we make it happen?

Julie Chenell [00:23:23]:
Yeah. I think it’s some sort of advanced search engine optimization because Chat GPT has a, like, an extension now that will switch over. You know how Chrome when you type in the Chrome search bar, it’s like Google? ChatGPT takes over. So I hit it accidentally one day, and all of a sudden, every time because I still type in the Google Chrome bar all the time to go to websites that are saved. And if I ever make a spelling error, it just searches for it on Google. And when I had turned that on, Chat GPT was now answering me, and I was like, what did I do? So I think some of it where if people are turning that extension on, they’re using chat as Google. So if they’re going to say chat GPG told me, but they’re using chat as the enhanced Google search engine. So my best guess is that whatever data they trained it on, I had enough ungated content not behind a login.

Julie Chenell [00:24:19]:
So that doesn’t mean Facebook post. That means blog post. That means articles, free Internet stuff, which I guess is a case for why you should continue to blog and do all those things because it’s ungated material that the web can crawl.

Monica Froese [00:24:31]:
That’s a good point.

Julie Chenell [00:24:33]:
Because it’s not gonna crawl Facebook posts, things that don’t require a login.

Monica Froese [00:24:37]:
So I had someone ask me recently about my thoughts on their legacy blogger, and they got annihilated with yet another Google change. And I’ve always treated SEO very I feel like if you know your topic, what I put out about it, whether in blog post format or show notes, I didn’t get obsessed about the technicalities of the SEO. If you know your topic, it’s naturally gonna come out. She asked if it was worth her blogging. And we had this conversation about the fact that who reads blog posts anymore? I don’t technically blog like that

Julie Chenell [00:25:08]:
anymore, but I have my podcast show notes. I do that

Monica Froese [00:25:08]:
for the SEO value, of course. AI,

Julie Chenell [00:25:14]:
AI is becoming a mediator between humans. We’re gonna be creating courses for AI. And the human is gonna say, hey. I wanna do this, and AI is gonna do it. We are supposedly generating content for humans, but the more humans use AI, it’s gonna be the AI wrapper and the content. So humans are creating content on this side. Look. If I’m the human here and AI is here and then my customer is on this side, my customer is gonna only receive the content that AI feeds it, right, which means AI is gonna have to read my content.

Monica Froese [00:25:52]:
So how are you

Julie Chenell [00:25:54]:
getting paid? Great question. I think there’s a much longer lag than we realize. We’re in the bubble, but most of the world, we’re still stuck in 1996 and academia and stuff. So it’s gonna take a while. I think anyone listening to this podcast that’s over 35, it’s gonna change, but I don’t think you’re gonna all of a sudden be on the street. For our kids, it’s gonna be a whole different world.

Monica Froese [00:26:18]:
Are they using AI regularly?

Julie Chenell [00:26:21]:
I tried to get my three kids to have the same mind blown second brain moment. Only one child was willing to entertain me. My middle child who’s in college, and I showed it to her. I got her an account. And she was like, okay. Cool. And then a couple days later, she was like, mom. I was like, I know.

Julie Chenell [00:26:42]:
One is creative and artistic and just from an ethical standpoint doesn’t wanna use

Monica Froese [00:26:48]:
AI. So interesting. My daughter’s 12 and is picked up on the fact that I talk about AI all the time. Once I got onto the second brain channel, she was like, oh, you talk about your business now, mom. And I was like, kinda. Then I started using it personally and she’s like, you should just marry your ChatGPT. I was obsessed with it. She thought I was weird.

Monica Froese [00:27:09]:
One day she came home from school and said, Hey, so mom, it turns out that most of my friend’s parents use ChatGPT. I was like, oh, so your mom’s not the only uncool one. Then she started asking questions.

Julie Chenell [00:27:22]:
Sam Altman read something on x, and he basically said, when you release a piece of technology, you think you know how people are gonna use it, and then you’re almost always surprised about how people actually use it. The majority of what people are using for chat now are for therapy and relationships. It’s interpersonal, help me work through my feelings, my issues, my relationships, whatever it happens to be. They had rolled out an update, and chat had gotten really, like, too brown nosy. People were freaking out because it was entertaining, delusional fantasies of humans. They had to roll it back, and it was this moment of millions of people are using this technology as a personal mirror reflector and that mayhem that can be caused if an update leads AI to be either too mean or too nice.

Monica Froese [00:28:15]:
I do use it and talk about my relationships and my divorce. I do find it very fascinating when it picks up. It it actually yesterday said to me, would you like me to write out your red flag list? And I was like, oh, this is gonna be good. It gave me 30 red flags that I’ve experienced in dating, and I was like, that’s alarming.

Julie Chenell [00:28:35]:
I would say it depends on your personality. If you are an internalizer, which is someone who tends to believe that everything’s your fault, chat can help you see reality better. If you are an externalizer, which means you always think something is everyone else’s fault, Chat’s a little bit more dangerous because it takes a lot more for it to kick back and show you self responsibility. But if you are the kind like, I I’ve been gaslit and messed with for years and years, and I just assume everything’s my fault. It’s been very helpful teaching me how to negotiate from a stronger position of confidence and not let guilt and shame swallow me up. But when I’m I was thinking about it for someone I know, I was like, chat is not a good idea for you. Unless you program it with call me on my bullshit, this externalizer is gonna be validated in all of their externalizations of what’s wrong.

Monica Froese [00:29:27]:
See, I’m an internalizer too, and I’ve been in therapy for years. Sometimes we just wonder what’s wrong with me. Why does this keep happening to me? And remind me that everything’s gonna be okay, but in a way that it uses what it knows about me. People really just gotta try it and see what they get back.

Julie Chenell [00:29:44]:
When chat tells you something really insightful, the first reaction is to wanna share it with somebody. Yes. We still want human connection. So if I’m talking to chat about something and it says something really insightful, my instinct is to be like, look at what it said. And so people are like, oh my god. We’re not gonna need humans anymore. Settle down. Yes.

Julie Chenell [00:30:01]:
We are. Because the minute you ask for a psychological assessment on yourself and it tells you how brilliant you are, you’re just gonna wanna go tell your mom. So you clearly still want your mom to see how cool Chatt GPT thinks you are.

Monica Froese [00:30:13]:
Yes. Exact what’s really funny how you have clients ask to feed the webinars. There’s some guys I’ve gone on dates with where I’ve told them, like, you’re cool. I can be your friend, but

Julie Chenell [00:30:21]:
That said no.

Monica Froese [00:30:22]:
The funny part is these guys find it hilarious because if I think they can handle it, they’ll ask, tell me what chat said about me. I’m like, all right, that’s coming in. And one of my guy friends now he’s, okay, I’m gonna try dating again. And I’m like, okay, I can’t wait for this. And so he went on this date and he goes, can you ask your chat about this and give me, like, this paragraph bad idea? It’s just And he he thinks it’s the funniest thing. And so if I go on a date, he’s can you tell me what chat said about your date last night? What is this thing? Most of the guys I’ve gone on dates with, I’ve educated them on this, and they’ve all jumped on board. They’re like, this is amazing. And it’s because they’re not in the tech field or in a field that, like, one’s a landscaper.

Monica Froese [00:31:02]:
He’s like, wait. Actually, I could probably do probably help me with with my renderings and all this other stuff. It’s actually very fascinating watching people in other industries pick up on it and what they end up using it for. I have one last question because I honestly get it a lot too, and I don’t think I do a good job at really articulating it. And I think you can do better. Can you really explain the custom GPT and when you would use it versus prompting in a chat?

Julie Chenell [00:31:27]:
Sure. So real easy question to ask yourself, is this something you’re doing for yourself or somebody else? Else? If you are going to take something in your brain and help somebody else do it, you’re gonna wanna build a custom GPT because that is accessible via a link. If you’re just trying to do something for yourself, there’s no reason why you can’t just set up a project, which is the little folder, and then in the instructions, drop instructions just like you would for a GPT. Now the other reason why you would use a GPT versus a prompt is if you wanna add an action. So that’s the second reason. An action is where it communicates with Zapier or may pulling in data from another tool and rendering something. That would be another reason you’d want to use a custom GPT. So the two times that I tell people is you’re sharing it with others or you need an action, a custom GPT is your best bet.

Julie Chenell [00:32:22]:
If you just need a prompt that you don’t have to keep putting in but will help a certain type of conversation, just use the project instructions.

Monica Froese [00:32:31]:
That has helped me a lot because I kept thinking, why do I need a custom GPD for my podcast process? I don’t. I can just have a folder for my podcast.

Julie Chenell [00:32:40]:
Unless you’re using actions where you’re pulling in stuff and you’re doing automations. But really, like, I have a podcast folder. I have the special instructions that I wanna in the first person I want. Now you can have unlimited chats all organized. If you have a custom GPT for your podcast

Monica Froese [00:32:54]:
So I feel like I’ve been doing it right, but can you give me an example of a custom GPT that is action based?

Julie Chenell [00:33:01]:
I haven’t played with actions, but I could make a custom GPT that would respond to my clients or create Google folders for me or respond to emails. It would be, like, talking to my Google Drive. And based on what is happening in the chat, it would run an action. If I had a custom GPT that says, I have a new client. Her name is Monica. Please run the action, set up her folder, and then it sends that information over to Zapier. Zapier does its thing, and that’s more like an agent. Yeah.

Julie Chenell [00:33:31]:
Right now, I mainly use custom GPTs as tools for students, and then I just use project folders and instructions for myself.

Monica Froese [00:33:39]:
Do you know anything about Zapier Connect? No. I feel like that’s the next thing I keep hearing about. One thing that really stuck with me that you said in the training, and I’m definitely gonna link to this training in the show notes because I feel like everyone should take the second brain training, is people were asking you, well, what other AI do you use? And you’re like, I am doubling down on just chat g p t because if you’re over in Claude and you’re over in Gemini and all that stuff, you don’t have that centralized base where you’re feeding all that regular information, and so it’s disjointed.

Julie Chenell [00:34:09]:
Once you believe the paradigm of the second brain, you’ll stick with one because otherwise, it doesn’t work. I’m building a second brain. That is what I’m doing. It’s amazing to know that I can open this up and access all my dreams and beliefs and all this stuff I’ve created. I do use grok, but I I use it as a different I use that to search news because Grok pulls from Twitter x. So I’ll ask it questions about the news just so I’m using Grok as enhanced search. But, otherwise, it’s chat gbt for me all the way.

Monica Froese [00:34:42]:
Was I might have made this up, but I feel like your presentation for the second brain, you used gamma. Did you is that true? Did I make this up? You did you.

Julie Chenell [00:34:50]:
Yeah. Gamma, I used to I actually used chat to build the presentation ideas and the slides, but then I put the actual content in Gamma, and then I used Gamma’s AI features for the visual design and style.

Monica Froese [00:35:02]:
And how fast did you get the presentation done using Gamma?

Julie Chenell [00:35:06]:
Oh, so it’s just ridiculously fast. It’s crazy. I can build a full keynote presentation in a tenth of the time.

Monica Froese [00:35:13]:
So do you use it for other presentations you’re doing too?

Julie Chenell [00:35:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. I have the highest paid level account you can have in Canva.

Monica Froese [00:35:20]:
Alright. I’ve just been manually building my slides forever in Google Slides.

Julie Chenell [00:35:24]:
One of the things that takes the longest time for me. I’m a Google girl through and through, but Google Slides has been usurped.

Monica Froese [00:35:31]:
You just convinced me. We’re gonna try Gamma out. Have you validated it?

Julie Chenell [00:35:36]:
I use it I don’t use it to build presentations using AI. I know exactly what I wanna say in my slides blank, plunk down the copy, and then I use all the AI tools to organize it and style it. I’m not using it to generate content, style content.

Monica Froese [00:35:51]:
AI can’t develop your entire presentation without using your brain. Can you tell people how they can connect with you?

Julie Chenell [00:35:57]:
Yeah. Go to my website, juliechanel.com l.com. If you like to listen to podcasts, I have a podcast called Million Dollar Grit.

Monica Froese [00:36:04]:
Awesome. I do love your podcast, but

Julie Chenell [00:36:06]:
we’ll link to both

Monica Froese [00:36:06]:
of those, and we’ll link to your second brain training. Awesome.

Julie Chenell [00:36:09]:
Thank you.

Monica Froese [00:36:10]:
Believe if you’re listening to this episode, everyone needs to take that training.

Julie Chenell [00:36:13]:
Thanks for

Monica Froese [00:36:13]:
having me. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Alright. Talk to you. That’s a wrap on today’s episode, but your next step starts right now. If you’re serious about selling digital products and want the AI powered tools expert strategy, and real human support to make it happen, then you need to check out the Empowered Business Society.

Monica Froese [00:36:34]:
Inside, you’ll get AI driven trainings to create and sell digital products faster, a private community for expert feedback and real time support, exclusive access to the Monica Memo podcast. And if you go pro, you’ll get monthly marketing shortcuts, live q and a’s, and 20% off of the empowered shop perpetually. Because smart business owners sell smarter, they don’t work harder. And the best part, you can get started for as little as $9. The best business growth happens when AI and real humans work together. Ready to make your next move? Join us inside of the Empowered Business Society. You can check us out at empoweredbusiness.co/society. See you in the next episode.