What are your thoughts on AI in the church?
Our guest, Julia McCoy of Content Hacker and Content at Scale, shares her story of being anti-AI and how that quickly changed to her becoming an AI expert.
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You can find more on Content At Scale by visiting https://contentatscale.ai/
You can find more about Julia's consulting at https://ContentHacker.com
FOLLOW us for more resources on how to grow your church!
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Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
What are your thoughts on AI in the church?
Our guest, Julia McCoy of Content Hacker and Content at Scale, shares her story of being anti-AI and how that quickly changed to her becoming an AI expert.
--
You can find more on Content At Scale by visiting https://contentatscale.ai/
You can find more about Julia's consulting at https://ContentHacker.com
FOLLOW us for more resources on how to grow your church!
--
Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
Hey guys, frank here with another episode of Modern Church Leader, excited to talk AI. Today I'm here with my new bud, julia McCoy. Julia, how's it going?
Speaker 1:Hey Frank, I'm excited to be here. It's going good. I'm in Arizona. It's pretty hot.
Speaker 2:It's hot already. We're in May, and what's the weather?
Speaker 1:Oh, it's like high 80s going into the 90s. That's not too bad.
Speaker 2:You're going to get into, like the 115s. I think, that's true.
Speaker 2:So we're going to talk a lot about content and AI and search as it relates to kind of trying to connect it to churches and kind of our audience of pastors. But you've been at it for a long time. You're, you know, one of the experts out there in content marketing. It looks like you're a bestselling author. You've written a bunch of books and writing is your passion. So why don't you tell us you know? And then there's the new stuff that you're kind of getting into. So we'll get into that as well. So why don't you tell us you know? And then there's the new stuff that you're kind of getting into. So we'll get into that as well. But why don't you give us your story, like, how did you get into writing and content and how did you get to where you're at today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'd love to share. Well, all of this started when I was 19. I was in college and I was actually going for a nursing degree, and halfway through getting that degree, I thought, oh my gosh, first of all, I would be terrible at this, like I knew. I knew I really hated that. And so my second thought was well, what do I love to do and how can I actually do that instead? And so I knew the answer was writing. I loved writing ever since I could pick up a pen and write. And so that morning, when I had that idea, I was 19 years old and I Googled how to make money writing. And back then, odesk was, or Upwork was. Odesk and Elance. It was two different platforms. It was very, very different.
Speaker 1:This was 2011. And freelance gigs there wasn't a lot of competition, so I spun up a freelance profile. Three months later, I had more income than I knew what to do with as a 19 year old, and so I was like, well, let me just start a business. And I guess starting businesses runs in my blood, because it did not fail like I thought it would. I just kept at it and learned as I went and kind of.
Speaker 1:You know the saying is like build your wings on the way down. I really did that. I didn't know what I was doing the majority of the time, so I learned as I went and then, 10 years later, it was a slow and steady trajectory for me. I was able to have a seven figure exit, sell that business and we had grown it to 100 people. We had the first e-commerce platform for human writing services got copied off by a bunch of competitors with that idea, but yeah, it was really amazing to see that all the way through. And then you know, 10 years later, have this exit. That I was told would be nearly impossible for a humanly run business.
Speaker 1:But you know I sold it when I saw what was on the horizon, which was AI, and along the way, like I built my personal brand, I knew that that was going to be a lifeline, if not like a way to grow what I knew and the authority that I had in the space, and absolutely it was like there's no better avenue to build authority than publishing books. So I'm really glad I did that.
Speaker 2:Right, right, how many?
Speaker 1:you've written eight books publishing books, so I'm really glad I did that Right right how many you've written a books.
Speaker 2:Nine actually, as of.
Speaker 1:April, less than 20 days ago, when I came out.
Speaker 2:I mean that's amazing. What was the latest book? It's called joy of failure. Nice, yes, and I co wrote it with very.
Speaker 1:It was not my idea. It was my co author, chris Evans, and it was his story. So I long story short. He reached out about a year ago and he's just like I think we should talk, and when I talked to him I was, I just felt this call to go write the message he had. And you know I'm a crazy writer. I can write a book in like a week if I wanted to. It. Just it comes very naturally.
Speaker 1:So I was like Chris, we've got to get your story out. He's like, well, I don't know how to write anything or I don't know how to put together a book, and I'm like, well, I could do it for you. So I just naturally progressed to co -authoring this amazing book that actually went to the top 5,000 in all Kindle books in the Amazon Kindle store the week it came out. I've never had a book do that, although I've had every book's been a number one, but that one just it was the right time. You know, there's a lot of people that aren't winning right now, and so being a successful entrepreneur, publishing a book about losing and failing was actually, I felt, like what the audience needed this year the most. So that book has just helped so many people. We're so thankful to see that Chris and I did a book signing here in Scottsdale a couple of weeks ago. That was really fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's awesome. Can you again, like we're talking to the pastor, the church leader, maybe the people that are responsible for marketing at a church, or technology at a church like, what is content marketing? Can you describe it in your own words so that?
Speaker 1:our audience can understand it. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of the best forms of marketing, because what you're doing is you're publishing content in order to attract your audience. You're not putting together an ad campaign, you're not screaming in their face, you're not trying to go viral or all the other marketing methods you could do. It's like what we're doing here podcasting. You're literally putting out content that attracts, grows and retains an audience, and that is just. It's so steadfast and evergreen, especially because of, like, what's happened with consumer trust. So, since the pandemic trust actually left, there was a study done across 33,000 consumers, 90 countries, and they found that consumer trust left three major segments, and those major segments were the media, government and nonprofit, and they actually went to the small business owner.
Speaker 1:So whenever we create content, I think like even churches can think of it like this putting out content and doing content marketing is a way to engage your target audience that's almost better than any other method. So that's why I've done it for 10 years and it paid off tremendously. And you know, we did it for clients. That's what we sold, so we got to see a lot of success for them too. But it's all about attracting an audience, not, you know, getting in their phase trying to put together an ad or and ads are not bad.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that, but it's more okay. I'm putting out this amazing piece of content that I think you want. I'm targeting it for a keyword you're already searching for that's SEO and for that's SEO, and I'm going to give you an amazing place to land if that's your website and so you create this almost like a rabbit hole that they don't want to leave because it's so amazing. And when you have that, I mean it's magic to see what happens with conversion, sales, the retention of your audience that finds you. So it's just, it's amazing, amazing marketing avenue.
Speaker 2:Right, right. And for churches. So a church has a website, so they're publishing content on their website, on their blog. It could be their sermons, that their pastor's preaching every Sunday, that they're turning into podcasts. It could be taking the podcast and transcribing it, turning it into a blog post, like that kind of stuff, but putting it on your website, trying to get it to rank in Google. Yes, you just mentioned, you just moved and you were looking for a church. And how did you find them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we Googled. We're like, well, we did two things. We went to a Facebook group. I put a post out in the Scottsdale Living Facebook group and I had so many comments I was overwhelmed. So then I just went to Google and we Google, searched non-denominational Christian churches near me and then just looked at which ones said the best message like that felt the most transparent, authentic in the actual copy of the website. So in the end, yeah, we made our decision where to go based on that church's website content.
Speaker 2:It's interesting to see that. So you basically searched for like church near me or non-denominational church near me. How does a church let's take that example and apply content marketing to it how would a church get their website to show up on Google towards the top for a search term like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, for that that's more of a local presence, versus like inspirational Bible verses, like somebody searching for that. That's probably not tied to a location and you could get to the top of Google for that one just with blog posts, which is something interesting, because I think that is another way to bring in people to a local church. But that aside, let's say you're looking, you're trying to be found for that specific keyword near me. That's all going to come down to your Google listing. So do you have a Google listing? Is your church like the correct address? Is all that set up under a Google listing? That's number one, and then your website comes in. Secondly, maybe even more important, but you need both things for it to work. That website should have clear branding, clear messaging. It should speak to that person in that location. It should convey what you're actively doing in the community, like events, all of that. So you need a good, clear website and then you really need to make sure that your Google, my business profiles all set up correctly.
Speaker 2:All set up up correctly.
Speaker 1:But those two things get you set up pretty well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. So you built a business that had you know up to a hundred like freelance writers or contract writers that you were writing content for. You know hundreds and hundreds or thousands of other businesses is what it sounds like. So you had people doing the job of writing and, like describe that business to us a little bit, just so that kind of again our audience understands like the writing of content, content marketing and how businesses were using it, or churches that you guys were serving were using it to kind of grow their business or their online presence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think a good way to think about this is of the marketing you own. Think of it like assets and what is an asset? Something that you actually own. So the only thing you own on the internet is your domain name and your website like even if you had an Instagram profile, for example, twitter or it's now X Facebook page like none of those things you actually own because that's on another platform's real estate.
Speaker 1:So if you think about the asset first approach, that is where content comes in, because the only way to build the asset the website is through consistent content, because that builds topical authority, which builds growth and traffic. So it's kind of simple, but it's also, you know, simple is not easy. It takes a lot of consistency. So what we did for clients was normally they had their website set up, so that was first, and this is kind of the same approach I'm still using to this day at Consonant Scale, which is now the new AI company.
Speaker 1:But whenever I sold content, it was people would come in, whether it was we definitely serve churches a brand, a product based website, like all kinds of websites you could ever think of, and it was neat to see so many different use cases where content worked across so many industries. But they would come to us. They had their website and the primary thing they bought that we did really well was the blog. Because SEO blog posts like that is still the top, one of the top clicked links in search. Because it's information driven.
Speaker 1:People know, like when they click on a blog let's say, how to set up my mic from Audio Technica or 30 inspirational Bible verses to keep a tired mom going, Like that could be something, a church post Then I know if I click on those things I'm not going to be sold to. That's informational, value-driven content and so that's why it works so well. And it's interesting because we sold all different types of content in my agency but the number one seller for 10 years straight was always the blog because it built traffic. And you know we did ad copy, we did landing pages, we did all these other things. But when it comes to building that asset that you own, your website that's always going to come down to how many blog posts you have, what's your topical authority and your domain authority, and those things are built from consistent publishing of blog content.
Speaker 2:But yeah, that's what we sold and did for years. Yeah, yeah, I love it, and so that was the lead into like, that was humans. But now we have AI, yes, so we'll jump into AI and look AI in churches AI in general, I mean. And look AI in churches. Ai in general, I mean. It's been around. I'm certainly no professional at it, but I know ChatGPT hit and that's when it blew up from. The world knew AI was here and there was a real interface that you could do things in.
Speaker 2:And anybody on the planet can try it now. Anybody on the planet can try it now. Right, so, like AI became really tangible for the like general population of the world when ChatGPT released. Right, yeah, or the latest you know ChatGPT, whatever it was, 3.5 or whatever, whenever they had the UI in front of it, you could start using it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And it's just I mean, that was sometime last year and it's just, AI is moving so fast. That was sometime last year and AI is moving so fast. And every week, every month, every quarter, there's these crazy improvements in what's going on, and content is one of those places where AI is just this supernatural. You think about it right away. You're like, oh yeah, AI can write content for me or it can help me in my writing process. Yeah, AI can write content for me or it can help me in my writing process. We talk a lot about it with pastors doing sermon prep, using AI to prepare your sermon for the weekend and asking questions and using it as kind of a teammate to work on your sermon with you. But you guys are out and you've created you and your co-founder or partner have created content at scaleai, a tech company that's using AI for content. So I'd love to tell us about the company and kind of who you're serving and what the product's all about.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah, it's a good story. When I sold my agency, that was late 2021. And so fall 2022, chatgpt comes out, picks up 100 million users in two months. When I sold the agency a year prior, I knew GPT was getting better and better. The iterations were just going to get better.
Speaker 1:But I was very skeptical because I was used to article spinners and just garbage. So I was like, oh OK, ai is going to take writing jobs. Sure, that's what I thought. And when ChatGPT came out, I still was not impressed. I was actually speaking on digital marketer stage digitalmarketercom. I did training. I was a subject matter expert in content, so they invited me to speak and I was like, well, I'm not going to be pro AI and that's. They're like that's fine, it's your expertise, it's like don't use the AI, it's garbage. So I was telling people that December of 2022, a month after ChatGPT came out and in January of 2023, I completely changed my perspective on it when I found a tool stack that actually saved me seven hours out of an eight-hour writing process and it took me around eight hours to compile my writers and I to compile a good 3,000-word, meaty SEO blog that would rank at the top of Google, had all the research done.
Speaker 1:So that took a lot of time. So to replace that many hours, I was like, okay, this is the one. And I was just researching AI tool after AI tool because I knew okay, this is the one. And I was just researching AI tool after AI tool because I knew okay, we're probably going to see one real soon here that could do all these steps.
Speaker 1:So constant scale was the only one that replicated the human workflow that my writers and I had perfected over years, and that workflow was you go and you research what's ranking at top of Google. You kind of break all that down, you look for the best and the worst, you take the best elements, you put that into the blog post, you write and then you add in new content so it's 100% original and then you need formatting, you need headers, you need meta title, meta description, so a lot of things go into that blog post. So this whole thing was entirely automated. I could feed content, scale, keyword and in less than seven minutes I had a blog post that was like 80 to 90% ready to publish.
Speaker 1:And it was 100% original. And now, like this March, a year later, it's gotten so good where it's identifying all the sources that it's pulling from and it's linking that into its content, and the sources are higher quality than they've ever been. Like it's pulling from actual studies done on a topic. It's avoiding 404s, like it's knowing what to do when it comes to finding those sources and putting together this really high quality piece of content. So just to see all that automated without any human work is unbelievable. It's a total game changer. I didn't think I would see it, and so when I saw it in front of me last year as kind of it was still a beta January of 2023, I was like, well, I better join this before it wipes out all the jobs that I used to hire for. So that was my natural thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I literally emailed the founder that weekend and I was like, hey, here's a marketing plan, here's what I would do to improve your website. Do you want to hire me? So that's how that went. And he's like, well, hop on a call. And then I was hired.
Speaker 1:So I've never worked for anyone in 10 years. It was the first time I'd ever taken on the employee hat, because I, you know, successful entrepreneur for that long of a time. So I kind of swallowed my pride a little and became an employee. So I started out as VP of marketing and then three months later went to president. I pitched him on the role of president, like, just make me the president. He did that too, and so his role he's kind of the product genius slash founder.
Speaker 1:So he's the one that invented what the product tool stack is, the technology that goes into it, that's what he lives in is the science of that incredible product tool stack he lives in is the science of that incredible product tool stack. So it's really cool to come in and be a partner where my job is marketing an amazing, excellent product that actually works in the AI space, because there's so many AI tools out there that are marketed very quickly and they're really just no better than an API skin that is layering a single layer to chat GPT, which you can now get GPT 4.0. You can get that for free now with their spring update this week in May. So it's really crazy. A lot of AI tools are being wiped out, but thankfully I chose the one that isn't.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah, it's the other one that seems to be doing. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot actually, but I know Jasper's done really well. Yes, it's different, I think it's slightly, you know, different, but what I mean, that's a cool story. Again, I'm trying to connect dots to the church. How would a church leverage a tool like Continent Scale? Yeah, like, yeah, like, if a church marketers listen to the podcast, or you know a volunteer that helps their small local church with, like their website and their kind of online presence, like well, how would a church use it Like real, practically, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I'd say look at your goals First of all. If your goals are to grow your website traffic, this is an amazing tool. You won't need to hire a writer. It basically removes that bar of entry which has really stopped a lot of churches, especially from publishing content because, oh, I got to go find out writer, I got to expand the staff, maybe I need to train this writer. Well, we don't even have enough staff to do the stuff we need to do, so that's been a huge roadblock.
Speaker 1:So all you have to do is type in a keyword idea that you have. It could be the location of where you are, where you serve. It could be a traffic piece you want to get found for, like inspirational verses or some kind of, um, a bunch of biblical references. You know, there's just we could. There's so much potential, so much potential in the space. Um, if you just take the Bible and all the keywords we could get from the topics in that amazing book, there's just so many keywords, um, so I'm. That's why I'm really excited about this, cause I think it's a kind of an untapped opportunity Because of that hurdle oh, I have to hire the writer, I have to know SEO, and so that stopped so many churches.
Speaker 1:So now, with constant scale, what you would have to do is literally turn it on, type in a seed keyword and let it do all the rest. It'll go find the ideal keyword. It'll tell you like here's a list of 70 different keywords and straight from those keywords you can have it write the actual content. Just click a button, write content and then you get a blog post. That's like 70 to 80% there. Sometimes it's 95% there. It just depends on the topic. But now with deep research this March, it's very, very accurate. So it would even do things like quote Bible verses correctly from the source.
Speaker 1:And you could like kind of trust that which a lot of AI tools there's bogus. You know. There's no like source of truth. That's not built into these tools. So this one has that research backed piece in it. That kind of makes it go okay, where's this coming from? Let's find the sources, put it in the content. So you see all that. So that's what you would do and the cost is dramatically lower than hiring a writer. You know, it's just like it. I've seen use cases where it was four times lower. I've seen use cases where it was 25 times lower. So it's just, and it removes that entirely, because you could literally have a volunteer, just start running keywords and posting content.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, most churches are, you know, 100, 200 members and you know there's a couple. You know maybe there's a full-time couple or maybe there's a couple staff people, but they generally don't have marketing teams or even anybody that you know.
Speaker 2:Maybe they have a volunteer, maybe they have somebody on staff, maybe it's the you know youth pastor, or you know somebody in the youth ministry that's younger and techie and that you know. So it's just, oftentimes it's not the focus. Because you know churches are about taking care of their community and providing pastoral care to their members and being a place for connection and building faith and whatnot. So when it comes to marketing, I mean, sometimes just having a website period is like all that a church can kind of muster up. But you know, publishing content consistently is not something they're really staffed up to do, right?
Speaker 1:So a tool like this where they can.
Speaker 2:maybe a volunteer or, you know, the youth pastor or somebody on the team that's whoever's responsible for the website can now just say oh, I'm going to publish some you know, faith-based content, like once a week or twice a week, and it's only going to take me I don't know an hour versus two or three days of putting together content.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly that's how I would think about think about it. Yeah, it's a huge opportunity. It takes what was like a one man marketing team. You know it can 20 X that because of what you can get with content at continent scale. Can 20x that because of what you can get with content at continent scale. Our own website we're a case study of this. You know. We're publishing 80 to 90 pieces of content per month. We're ranking for per month over yes, per month, and we're getting over 500 000 searches yeah, I mean that's crazy crazy.
Speaker 1:and we're doing that with one person running the machine that used to take 20 humans at a minimum, sometimes more.
Speaker 2:That's like three blog posts a day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what we're doing. It's almost fully automated. I don't even look at it anymore. It's just such a hands-off process. I have a person who's publishing the content and that's it. We're just letting the ai do all the heavy lifting yeah, I mean incredible.
Speaker 2:What on the topic of ai, like, what are your? You were anti, now you're for it. We're really talking about specific like writing, use case, um, what? What are the thoughts do you have around ai and just where we're headed?
Speaker 1:yeah, I. I think it's really interesting. I've spent a lot of time here. I actually talk about it quite a bit on my YouTube channel, julie McCoy. I have this whole theme there about the rabbit hole from Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland one of my favorite series and it's like you know, the AI rabbit hole can go really, really deep. So how deep do you want to go? So on that channel, we go really deep, right. But you know, are you familiar with this concept called the singularity?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay, okay, cool, I mean I'm no expert, so don't like quiz me right now.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm no expert either, I'm still learning, but I have Ray Kurzweil's book the Singularity is Near and of course, he's launching one in june. The singularity is nearer, so he thinks it's nearer? Yeah, but basically it's this point from which we'll have no return, where we have a singular event of ai changing humanity as we know it, and so we're headed there, and what's crazy is how fast we're actually headed there. We had a point in history where things were greatly changed because of events, but we've never actually had a point in history that's changing this rapidly. That's the difference. So the rapid progression is what's crazy.
Speaker 1:And we're looking at a potential time and place we could be at one day, called AGI, which is very subjective. I think the name for it is wrong. It's artificial general intelligence. What does that actually mean? The idea there is AI that can think and function like a human, autonomously, without us controlling it. It gets to a point where it can be iterative on itself and do better work than iterating itself. So what's interesting is how I think, if we look at this less like from the Skynet, hollywood mirror or lens, I should say and more from like OK, where's technology actually going? Where will we end up, so we could be looking at automation of human labor almost entirely, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 1:Like the way, I've been reading a lot of books and researching this wide event just to really understand it, and so there's several books that I've really enjoyed that are very realistic in their approach to this Technology-based, science-based, actual fact-based. Those books, some of my favorites, are by Dr Kai-Fu Lee. He's a Chinese scientist. He's the former China president of Google in China. What's interesting is Google actually holds two-thirds of the market share of the GDP in AI, so the AI growth that will contribute to the actual dollar. China owns two thirds of that growth.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting is when you look at this, especially from the scientific perspectives.
Speaker 1:I think that we're going to see a new economy form, and that new economy could actually give people more meaning if the right world leaders come into this, because the biggest problem throughout history has always been human greed and that driving world orders and governments, and so that's what we're going to have to be very careful of.
Speaker 1:We might have to go live in a different country just so we can have morals and values again, like right. I don't know where this will head. I think it's really interesting to see where the governments will align on this. But you know, if you look at the reality of where we're living today like the fiat dollars crashing, gallup's study of a billion people at work and they found that 86 of those people are unhappy at work to the point of detrimental depression, anxiety and some people suicidal so when you look at that, I think we have a broken world. Will AI make it more broken, or will it actually give us an opportunity to free us up from the things that were mundane, that brought us down, and allow us to actually step into more meaning?
Speaker 1:and if you look back at time, which you know, there's a book called super abundance. It does a great job of this. Another book, abundance, by peter dm. And as you look back at time, there's been cyclical world governments that point to eras of abundance where people actually had no need to work for income and so what they did was, like people became musicians, harvest great warriors, and so we've actually had examples in history we can refer to where taking work and changing the economy was not necessarily a bad thing. So I mean, I mean I've been studying this a lot and I still have more to study, so it's a rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, it is a rabbit hole and it's such early days and the whole thing. And you know the tools like writing content. I mean it's so harmless and an awesome advancement, right to help people get more done, be more productive, be more efficient. But then there's stuff like you're like where is AI going to go? And you know, are the robots coming? For us? It's a whole. It's a whole nother level of like AI and the future, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:So much in my conversations. You know, it's like it's something that I can't just ignore anymore. I used to be like, well, haha, you know, I just live in writing content right, yeah I avoid that topic.
Speaker 1:But the reason I put together my channel, julep and coy, where I do talk about all these things, very of the craziest bits of those two the reason I put that together I started reading and researching myself. I didn't really find a lot of voices out there that spoke on this from both realist and optimist perspective. A really good book is the Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. It's like you can look at things one way or you can look at them another way. It really is like how we look at it. So that's the whole reason I started talking about this. I didn't find a voice I liked listening to about this topic.
Speaker 2:And then you found did you find one now, though, like, and all the books you've read, what would you recommend? Again, I'm thinking, like you know, our audience is church leaders. So if you're a church leader and you're trying to learn more about AI and kind of where we're headed, what's, what's your kind of top recommendation to read?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say it's not necessarily a book on AI, but it's a book on the growth of technology. Abundance by Peter Diamandis would be where I would start. It'll shift your perspective on. It'll take you completely out of, I think, what Hollywood has done for a while, which is make us fear and have that embedded concern. There's so many images that we've been presented with, so that's a really refreshing read about how we're actually living in a world right now where there's so many images that we've been presented with. So that's a really refreshing read about how we're actually living in a world right now where there's more than we could ever want or need at our fingertips. It's just have we actually cultivated that yet?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Have we been stewards of it yet. So that book's a great reminder of that. And then another really good one would be AI Superpowers by Kai Fugli. That's a great book. It talks about the growth of all this, where it's headed, and then it's also very realist. Like well, we're not going to have Skynet, because what we're looking at right now is the result of 20 years of breakthroughs. It's not necessarily something that's breaking or something that creating a breakthrough every single year. It's not. That's not what's going on here. So that book is also a very good yeah, those are good ones.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's, let's wrap, because we could sit here and talk about this forever. But you are coming to uh, our conference in october, modern church leader and you're going to be teaching a session. What are you going to be talking about? Give us, give us the uh, the highlight.
Speaker 1:So I feel like everything we just teased here is a really good lead-in to what I'll be teaching at the conference, which is how to 25X your content without hiring a big marketing staff, without adding on all these paid writers or strategists or SDOs, and how to actually just use AI to get the job done. So I'll take you through it. The opportunity that still exists. You know we might hear a lot that SDO is dead. I'll share why that's not true how to get found for specific searches, pull in a bunch of good examples relevant to church leaders and, yeah, hopefully leave them with some really good eye openers like whoa. This is possible. I can do this in this age of AI. And then the actual path on how to take advantage of it all.
Speaker 2:And specifically, you know, to help their community and hopefully attract more people into their church. And, you know, learning about Jesus and kind of growing in their faith and connecting with other believers, like using content to do that is something every church should be, you know, wanting to learn more about. So I'm looking forward to the session. It's going to be fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, same here. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to meeting all of you too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in person, we got all this digital. Final thing where should folks go to learn more about you and to learn more about Content at Scale?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Content at Scale. You can go to contentatscaleai to see what we do. There's a $15 seven-day trial that gets you into the actual software. You can see it right around the. You know I can't recommend it enough. It's what I use for my blog, both at Cost of Hacker and to grow the Cost of Scale website Another tool I would use and then to find my work, what I'm doing, you can find it at Cost of Scale. So I'm driving a lot of marketing growth there.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Also Julie McC mccoy, amazon you can find my books and, of course, love it.
Speaker 2:Julia, it's been a pleasure having you on.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming today thanks for having me frank.
Speaker 2:This is so much fun we'll, uh, we'll, see you in october and, uh, hopefully a bunch of you guys listening to the podcast will join us too. So, uh, modern church leader in october uh, you can go to the website modern church leadercom to find out more and definitely check out julia at content at scaleai, and we'll catch you guys next week on another episode of Modern Church Leader. See ya.