SPECIAL GUEST!! Michael Stelzner from AI Explored 🔥 Claude > Custom GPT 😮 | Ep. 476

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for do this, not that podcast. And we have one of the smartest dudes on the planet here today. I'm not just saying that. He is. Who do we got? We got Michael Stelzner. Now you probably listened to one of his two incredible podcasts that, that he already has.

Jay Schwedelson: He has. So his, alright, wait a minute. I wanna forget even about his podcast. Lemme tell you. This dude is, he's the CEO of Social Media examiner. This is. The world's largest marketing media company that literally helps millions of marketers navigate everything in the digital landscape. And of course, he has these events, social media, marketing world.

Jay Schwedelson: I've actually spoken at this event, it's probably the single best digital marketing event on the planet. It's not even just about social media, but the dude was like, I could do more. So he went out and he is like, ai, this is a big thing. Let me launch a podcast about ai. And he launched. AI explored. If you haven't listened to this podcast, stop listening to this garbage.

Jay Schwedelson: Go listen to that. And then he doubled down even more. He has a new event coming out this year in person, AI business World this April, and we actually have a discount code, which we're gonna put in the show notes, all the things. It's going to be the singular event for the world of ai. I cannot wait, so I'm so excited to have me here.

Jay Schwedelson: Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Stelzner: I appreciate your energy and excitement.

Jay Schwedelson: I am exci. I'm genuinely excited because you actually know stuff. So many times I, I'll listen to a podcast, I'm like, this is gonna be terrible. Or I'll read something. This's gonna be boring. You always actually share stuff and you're so crazy prepared. And so, um, I'm excited. I get excited when I talk to you.

Jay Schwedelson: So let me jump right into it. The topic of the day we've never talked about on this show, and we're gonna be talking about. Clawed and clawed projects and copywriting. So before we get into all the detail, why are you mi, Mr. Ai, why are you a Claude fan?

Michael Stelzner: Well, for lots of reasons, number one. The founder of Claude used to work for Open ai, the company behind chat, GPT number two, they try really hard to have a very strong ethical foundation. Uh, major investors include Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Google. Widely known for their coding, but also my widely in the, in the writing world and the copywriting world to be the best writer on the planet.

Michael Stelzner: Extremely fun to use. User interface, uh, very prompt, compliant. It doesn't make stuff up and it's just. One of those kind of things where most people don't even use Claude, but once you go to Claude, there's kind of no turning back. If you're in the business of creating a persuasive message of any kind, whether it be a script for a YouTube interview or podcast, or whether it be emails or sales pages, it's just ridiculous.

Michael Stelzner: It's so good.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay, so let, let me understand something though. Does that mean, and I wa we're gonna make this stupid proof 'cause I'm stupid, so that way anybody could use Claude the right way. But does that mean you use Claude for everything? Like you don't use Chacha, BT that much. You don't use Gemini, you don't use Rock, you don't use other ones.

Jay Schwedelson: Like you are laser focused on Claude or is Claude there for you as it relates to kind of content and copy and all of that?

Michael Stelzner: Okay, so I use Gemini and I use chat g pt, and I use Claude. They're all, they all have their strengths. Chat, GPT is really good for very simple little things like coming up with ideas. Gemini is very, very good at analysis and images with nano, nano, nano banana. Pro is ridiculous. It's so good, but none of them are as good with writing.

Michael Stelzner: And I am a writer. I wrote a book on writing and I understand the craft of persuasive writing, and nothing comes close to Claude. So I use this tool predominantly to help with any marketing or copy related task.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay, now I'm sold. Alright, now we're, I'm staring at Claude. I need stuff. I don't know what your Claude projects are. I don't know what any, what, where do I begin? What do I gotta do? What are the rules of the road?

Michael Stelzner: With chat g pt, there's things called custom GPTs, which people are probably familiar with. In Gemini, they call 'em gems, but in Claude they call them projects. And what a project is, is it allows you to basically fill it with information and it allows you to create, for example, a specialist, if you will, like a, a copywriter who specializes in social media marketing world, which is what I have.

Michael Stelzner: And then you can query it as many times as you want. It has a memory. So unlike custom gpt where it. It kind of has amnesia every time you use it. Doesn't know who you are, doesn't know of any, any of the other chats you've had with it. Claude projects are really, really good. They're smart and they learn as you go.

Michael Stelzner: Now here's the thing with Claude Projects, you need to have a paid account. Claude is free. It's 20 bucks a month to get access to the projects, and the projects are just really, really good. Even better than chat GPT projects and much better than Google Gems and some of the. Some of the applications that I've been able to do with this are, are kind of crazy.

Michael Stelzner: I have, um, for each of my products, I have trained up a copywriter. So I have one for AI business world, one for AI business society, and one for social media marketing world, and they're extremely powerful. But another cool thing that Claude does is it has this thing called artifacts. And I want you to think of a Microsoft Word or a Google document, so you know how sometimes when you're in chat, GPT and it gives you a lot of text.

Michael Stelzner: It's just this ugly list and it's impossible to consume. Well, when you have it create an artifact, it creates this beautiful thing that's got headlines and subheads and bullets, and it's called an artifact. But an artifact can also be an interactive graphic. It can do all sorts of cool stuff. Um, and, and that's really the key.

Michael Stelzner: Now, I, I'm gonna unravel if you want, how to do this right, because honestly. The key to whether you do this with Chat GT or with Gemini or with Claude is there's, there's things you've gotta know, and if you want, I can dig into

Jay Schwedelson: I wanted to, I want to know what I gotta know 'cause I don't know much.

Michael Stelzner: Okay. First of all, you have to give it a roll. Okay? And this is true with all ai. For example, you are a world class writer specializing in crafting and improving persuasive marketing emails for your product. Um, that's, that's an example, right? And then the next thing you wanna do. You want to give it context, so this is really important.

Michael Stelzner: You can upload, for example, a, um, a Word doc or a PDF or a text of who your target audience is, what your product is all about, what's its value proposition, what are its benefits, and this is the secret sauce. As as an event guy, you're gonna love this if you have a lot of testimonials from people. I've done this where I've uploaded a CSV file of over a thousand testimonials, Jay.

Michael Stelzner: Okay, over a thousand testimonials. And then what I did was I included a couple of examples of really well crafted emails. 'cause you know this, you're an email guy. A good email is going to have a testimonial. So I've got a thousand testimonials now. This is where it gets interesting. Claude is smart. It knows when it reads a testimonial.

Michael Stelzner: Talking about how they would've been obsolete if they did not come to that, it will just pull the relevant testimonials and craft it into a message that's completely custom, but it gets even better. Jay. It'll suggest images, so it'll tell me, find, find an image of a person standing in the hallway, um, networking with someone else, or find a person taking notes.

Michael Stelzner: Now, this is right now where I have to manually go through thousands of pictures and find the right picture, but this is powerful stuff. Jay, I'll pause for a second and let you ask

Jay Schwedelson: So, so let me ask you a question about all of this, because what, what one of the things it sounds like you need to do and whether it's for testimonials and this, that, or whatever, um, is give it a lot of baseline information or thing. And this baseline of who you are, what you're about, what your marking's about, whatever.

Jay Schwedelson: Is that some sort of a process that you go through? Say, okay, let me let this thing interview me and give it all this stuff. Like how do you get to the point where you could do all this magic stuff?

Michael Stelzner: Okay, well you're a marketer and I'm a marketer. Some of this stuff we have, like you must have who your target audience for is for your product, right? Like you've got this. You know, these different online events that you do, you've written up a pretty detailed description of who that target audience is, right?

Michael Stelzner: You probably have figured out what the value proposition, uh, is of people coming to the event. What are the benefits? What will they gain from it? Insights from the world's leading experts, dot, dot, dot, and what are the benefits of that? So most people that are entrepreneurs or marketers have got this information somewhere, and literally all you need to do is you need to upload it to.

Michael Stelzner: The Claude Project, it becomes part of its knowledge base. And just to help you understand how this works, AI is going to use the entire internet until you give it a narrow focus. So the more context you give it, the more it's going to narrow down its intelligence and the more it's going to work within the constraints of what you give it.

Michael Stelzner: And that's why giving it. Testimonials about your products. That's why giving it actually a description of your target audience is gonna make it smarter. And then of course, you give it a role, like I mentioned earlier, like you are a world class marketer. Specializes, specialize in, in creating persuasive emails for product X and.

Michael Stelzner: You don't wanna just say specializes in persuasive messages. You wanna get narrow because when you tell it, it specializes in email marketing. It's gonna take all of what it knows about your product and service, combined with the wisdom that it has inside. Its LLM, and it's gonna create really good emails and eventually you're gonna give it your best emails.

Michael Stelzner: You're gonna give it like two or three examples of your best emails, and then what we'll do is it will reverse engineer. Like what is it about these emails? What is it about the style of these messages? And it will effectively do really, really great output, Jay, so you don't have to,

Jay Schwedelson: So, so one of the things you said at the beginning, which makes me now wanna move over to Claude, is that it doesn't hallucinate as much. It really does have the memory because I have a custom GPT in chat, bt, and I'll ask it something and then it will forget that it knows all this stuff. I'm like, Hey doofus, you have access to all this information.

Jay Schwedelson: Can you please use it? Can you remember what I said the last time? And they'll be like, oh yeah, you're right. My bad. Is that not what happens in Claude?

Michael Stelzner: It is not what happens in Claude for this reason, A Claude project, the best way to describe it is, um, you've got your product knowledge off to the right and then there's a bunch of threads and every, you go into the project and you start a new thread when you're gonna create a new. Interaction, all those threads are in there, the hundreds of threads, and it has memory for the project.

Michael Stelzner: So what it's gonna do is it's gonna learn from all the previous interactions you've had with it, and it has your project instructions. Then it has the project memory and the project memory layers on top of your instructions. So over time it begins to learn your preferences. So we don't tend to update our original custom gpt.

Michael Stelzner: We just get frustrated with them and we try to create new ones. Well, with Claude Projects, they get automatically updated because they learn what your preferences are as you, as you interact with them. Now, I'm gonna give you a quick ninja tip.

Jay Schwedelson: Oh,

Michael Stelzner: This is something nobody does. When you're interacting with these projects, what you wanna do is say, give it a little bit of a theme.

Michael Stelzner: Like let's say it's New Year's, right? And I want to come up with a New Year's theme. But tell it. You want multiple variations. This is really important. Then what it will do is it will come up with as many as eight different variations of these, and you let it do its thing. 'cause otherwise it's gonna come up with what it thinks is its one best variation.

Michael Stelzner: Then you ask it, which is best in order for it to discern which is best. It's gonna go back into the project instructions, look at who the target audience is, and see which of these is most likely to achieve the objective. Then what you can do as a human is you can go through all the variations and say, do I agree or disagree?

Michael Stelzner: You might say back to it. Well, I agree number seven is good, but I like number two. Let's come up with a. Emerge of the two, and we'll take a new version of it and it'll go back at it, and then you can tell it, Hey, I really like this new version, but I don't like the subject lines. It'll come up with a ton of subject lines and eventually it will learn that you're, you're wanting it to be consultant, so it'll tell you, Hey, by the way, this is the best one without even you even asking.

Michael Stelzner: And you can begin to see how all of a sudden it's creating and it's advocating on your behalf, which I think is absolutely spectacular.

Jay Schwedelson: That is awesome. I love the idea of saying, you know, which one is best after it's created the thing, because it's forcing it to kind of think twice, which is gold. Absolute gold. Alright, let me ask you this though. Now people are out there and they're like, ah, I'm not ping up 20 bucks a month for Claude. Is there any use of Claude for, you know, persuasive copywriting, whatever, if everyone wants to be cheap out there and not, and just use the free version, or should they just not even go to Claude?

Michael Stelzner: Well, I mean, ugh. 20 bucks. I mean, come on guys. Look, here's the deal. There's a lot of people right now that are, Gemini is so good that they're thinking of canceling chat, GPT. 'cause they're already paying for Gemini because they already have a workspace account. So honestly, if I was you, I would cancel my chat GPT account and I would literally go over to Claude Projects.

Michael Stelzner: Okay? It's that good. Um, but what have you got to lose by trying it? If, here's how I position this. If you spend $20. You end up making a ton of money because you end up with better persuasive messaging that moves people to the action you want them to move. Would that be a no brainer? Of course, it wouldn't be a no brainer.

Jay Schwedelson: No, I agree with you. I, I, you know, and by the way, I wanna put out there, Michael does not work for Claude. He is not an affiliate for.

Michael Stelzner: I do not, no, I don't, I don't get anything from this other than just in, I'm just telling you like I use it every day and, um, it's really, really good for writing. Okay. And Gemini is really, really good for visual stuff and analytical stuff, but if you want to create persuasive stuff, it's worth it. Try it for a month and then if you don't like it, cancel it,

Jay Schwedelson: I, I totally agree with you. I think Gemini is the best for, uh, images, and I think chat BT is the best for glazing. When you feel bad about yourself, it'll tell you you're wonderful at

Michael Stelzner: I ask stupid questions of chat GT when I'm watching a movie, like, Hey, what other movies was this person in? You know, like, I'm not really using chat GPT for work anymore. To be very honest with you. I'm using it. For research sometimes, but I find Gemini's deep research is by far superior. But most people don't realize Claude does almost everything that Che PT does.

Michael Stelzner: It has its own version of research, deep research. It can do a lot of stuff. Um, and it's gonna be the first public company, um, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna have an IPO later next year. So, um, here's how you have to look at this. You've got Gemini, which is the, um. The 800 pound gorilla, which is Google, right?

Michael Stelzner: They've got all the money in the world, all the developers in the world, they invented the tea in Jet GBT, okay? They're gonna probably win the race. Then you've got open ai, which is out there going nuts, doing billion dollar deals with Walt Disney, trying to get money. And then you've got Claude out here, which is the small player in the race, and they're gonna have a public IPO, but Amazon.

Michael Stelzner: And Jeff Bezos is behind them. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Okay. They've been trained on. The Washington Post, which is really good writing. Okay? Um, they've got strategic relationships with media companies, which is what makes them better writers. They've even unfortunately, bought almost every book on the planet, including my book, and trained it on it.

Michael Stelzner: Now, that's questionable ethics. I, I filed for the class action suit on that one to see if I can get my $3,000, but they know a lot. Because they're really, really designed for coding and for writing. But, um, if you find yourself in a position where you just are banging your head against the wall because Chatt PT is just a nightmare, I kind of feel like the future's gonna be using the tools that are the easiest to use or the best.

Michael Stelzner: And I think Gemini is one of the best for integration. Um, and I think Claude is absolutely unquestionably the best for writing.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright. It's obviously clear that Michael knows what he's talking about with all this AI stuff. All right. And beyond just listening to the podcast, AI explored that he has, I am telling you, if you go to one. Event, in-person event next year, you wanna go to AI Business world. I am not just saying that.

Jay Schwedelson: It's going to be incredible. And for the listeners of this ridiculous show you all out there, he hooked it up. If you go to social media examiner.com, social media examiner.com/do this slash do this, you're gonna get a hundred bucks off. Okay? On your tick.

Michael Stelzner: Discounted price.

Jay Schwedelson: Oh, it's already discounted. You don't have to do anything.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. I am. I am telling you, if you wanna be one of those people that actually know what's going on, that you don't wanna lose your job to ai, you go to this thing, it's gonna be in April. It is. Awesome. Michael, what did I miss about the event? Why should we be there? What's the deal?

Michael Stelzner: Okay, well you've been to the social media marketing world. This is a sub conference of Social Media marketing world. So if someone's already attending, they get this included. Um, we care about quality. I mean, it's simply stated. You're not gonna find a better lineup anywhere in the world. We've recruited the best of the best to come to this event.

Michael Stelzner: And, um, these are all people that care deeply about making sure that you learn. These aren't people there to sell you anything. They're there to train you. And we're all about education. And as a result of it, I just think you're gonna find something that you're not finding anywhere else when it comes to physical conferences.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, and, and Michael can, can't say this, but I can listen. I've been to social media market world, I spoke there, uh, and I've done a lot of events that are stink. His event is unlike anything. The quality, the level of speakers, the networking, this is worth it. AI business world, you gotta check it out.

Jay Schwedelson: Michael Mann, thanks for being here today.

Michael Stelzner: Thank you so much, Jay.

Jay Schwedelson: All.