The Expert’s AI Advantage | Become a Subject Matter Expert on Steroids

In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett, co-founder and CEO of LifterLMS, joins Alex Panagis, founder and CEO of ScaleMath, to discuss how education entrepreneurs can utilize AI to improve learning, better understand their clients, and expand their expertise.

Chris discusses his 10/80/10 approach to AI, which explains how humans may give the initial guidance, let AI do the majority of the job, and then evaluate and improve the outcomes. He also talks about building a personal knowledge base to assist AI comprehend your background and areas of competence. Instead than only depending on AI-generated solutions, Alex emphasizes that true knowledge is derived from hands-on experience, independent thought, and concept testing.

Using AI for consumer research, seeing market possibilities, conquering impostor syndrome, and making better business decisions are some topics covered in the discussion. Chris addresses why educators should concentrate on becoming guides rather than gurus and offers insights from LifterLMS’s use of its AI agent, Maurice.

Lastly, Chris and Alex talk about why individuals spend money on online courses for purposes other than knowledge. Students desire real-world outcomes, professional advice, quicker advancement, and deep relationships. Find out how you can produce more useful online learning experiences by combining AI with human knowledge. Chris presents a paradigm around speed, certainty, insight, and risk avoidance, while Alex discusses why consumers engage in courses for proximity and shortcuts.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

I’m Chris Badgett, CEO and co-founder of LifterLMS. 

Alex Panagis: And I’m Alex Panaes, founder and CEO of Scale Math. 

Chris Badgett: And you’re watching the AI Advantage for Education Entrepreneurs, where we’re taking you on a tour of the five hats you need to wear to be successful. We’ll go over strategies, tactics, and stories to help you level up as an education entrepreneur across the five hats, which are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

Alex Panagis: I hope you enjoy. 

Chris Badgett: So Alex, today I wanted to get into it with you on the AI advantage for experts as an education entrepreneur. And by expert, subject matter expert. And the first thing that really unlocks opportunity with AI is the ability to do deep research as a subject matter expert. The way I like to think about it is never before could you have a PhD-level team of assistants that help you.

But you still need to put your own human knowledge, I call it a human knowledge dump, into the course, into the program, into the school. Otherwise, if you just use AI, you’re just creating content that anybody can make anywhere in the world, and you’re also neglecting your own personal secret sauce, personality, your own ideas, the, your own sources and things that you’ve trained on.

And the way to do that, I like to do the 10/80/10 strategy, which I learned from one of my business mentors, Dan Martell, which is basically the first 10%, the human should always do, then AI can do 80% of the heavy lifting, and then you come in as a human in the loop on the end to clean up things, make sure it sounds like you, make sure you agree with everything.

But in the research mode, we only have so much working knowledge we can store in our brain. Our memories are faulty. But we do have a lot of our own context and personality that we can put in, and I call that a human knowledge dump. So if you’re researching your topic, which never ends as a subject matter expert, AI can, come in and augment that, but you should always be adding your own human context.

I call that a human knowledge dump. So when creating a course or something like that, I recommend just dumping all of your stuff into a Google document or something like that, where maybe it’s transcripts of videos you’ve made, it’s a book you wrote, it’s podcast episodes where you were a guest on somebody’s podcast, and even other sources that aren’t your own that had a big influence on your life.

When I’ve done that in the past for courses, I usually end up with about a 100-page document. And because you’re pushing it into AI, it doesn’t have to be formatted correctly. The spelling can be off. You can use voice-to-text tools like WhisperFlow and whatnot. But just to basically get it out of your head and dump it into a format that AI can consume.

And the cool thing about a human knowledge dump, building on top of that is what I call gap analysis. So you have gaps in your knowledge, and that’s where AI can really come in. So instead of asking AI to do it all for you have it come in and just analyze what you might be missing. Or if you’re not a trained teacher, help structure all this content I have so it’s actually consumable and not overwhelming, and maybe there’s more structure to it Another tactic I like to look at is called red teaming, which is where you challenge yourself or challenge your frame of view or your point of view and be challenged so that you can defend what you do or have an open mind and admit that, hey, maybe I was a little wrong or I had a big gap.

And for example, I created a course recently which was really just for SEO to get more clients for LifterLMS, but it was– I wanted to show people as an early adopter of AI how they could create an online course with ChatGPT. And it wasn’t just here’s one prompt you put into your AI and out comes a course.

It was actually a series of about 12 lessons that with different prompts per lesson to actually end up with a published course. But the most important part of that whole course was the human knowledge dump, which took me probably about a full workday to put all my ideas about how to create an online course onto the document.

I brought in sources from other course creation experts and things that I found super valuable that influenced my thinking, and I’m using AI as a co-pilot or as an assistant. I’m not trying to step out of the frame and just have AI do all the research for me. I’m a human being with decades of experience, so I wanted to make sure I put that in, and that’s what makes it, my course, not just a course that ChatGPT made for me.

Alex Panagis: Yeah. I think it’s really common among subject matter experts, and it varies a lot by field. But they’ll see like the output of what AI can do, and they’ll look at it and think there’s a lot of people that then think, what is the even the poorest of- point of putting together a course because the, the output of like the information being on the page already there is possible to basically do in a couple of prompts or even a single prompt.

But I think that human knowledge dump point is really important because we as subject matter experts tend to underestimate and undervalue how much we’ve actually learned over years of doing things repeatedly, trying, failing, and learning from the success of those of the things that we do and also the things that didn’t work particularly well and why that might be and thinking about it.

I think it’s really difficult, and I wonder if you have any more thoughts on how do you pull that information out in a way where– ’cause one of the things that I find AI can struggle with a bit is like pulling, knowing what is important in the human knowledge dump. Because it can often strip back you and I will talk and put in, in, information into AI tools, and it will somehow think that there’s one small detail that we ha- we mentioned for a very specific reason.

It will write it off as something that’s not particularly important. But from our view of As having worked in the industry for many years, we think that like one small like tidbit of information is really difficult. Do you have any like strategies or ways that you do that? 

Chris Badgett: AI is more like a scientist than an artist.

So one of the things I like to do to put more weight or importance on certain things is to actually share upfront or during the human knowledge dump, saying something like, “Hey, this is the most important overarching framework that all this is built on, and that’s some of my unique, viewpoint, secret sauce angle.”

For example, this series we’re doing uses a framework I developed over a decade ago called the Five Hats, which there’s– You have to be a good subject matter expert, an entrepreneur, a technologist, a teacher, and a community builder. And everybody I’ve seen who was successful with LifterLMS, e- either within themselves or in their team, had developed a base level of competency across the Five Hats.

And if something isn’t working, it’s a problem in one of the hats. But people are not robots, so most people are– you know, have challenges. We’re hardcore technologists, as an example, so technology isn’t our issue as course creators. It’s gonna be some of the other issues across the hats. But by telling the AI and the human knowledge dump “Hey, this is the core idea.”

And I’ll do that on… That’s a big macro framework, but there’s things around pricing or how I think about marketing, where I kinda have master frameworks and then sub-frameworks under that. And then by giving that AI the, that framework context, and then I’ll pull in resources and other things and past episodes and content and everything.

But it knows “Hey, that’s the core structure that the human’s trying to tell me to build around.” 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. And also that you have so much extra time from the time you save structuring the information alone, that you can use that to keep going through and even if AI misses out a point, it’s like, “That’s fine,” ’cause I’ve now structured it in such a great way where I can spend more time doing the stuff that requires the real human input.

I think a lot about, lately more that, AI is really accelerating this path to expertise, and whether we wanna put that in air quotes or not, because it– in, in a way I don’t know if this is the right way to refer to it or if it makes sense, but I often think of it as the idea of borrowed understanding versus learned understanding.

You can very rapidly do things and read summaries of what a- AI is telling you about how to use a particular technology or which technology is the right choice. But– And that information largely comes from if you’re asking super technical questions about which framework to use or which particular library is really good for doing something in your code base, that it will tell you something that it has information on, and for some reason, it wants to recommend this one library.

And generally speaking, it does a really good job of what it does. So you as a human develop this, idea that, “Okay, I understand this really well, and I know that…” It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking like, “Yes, just from that, I now have-” come to the conclusion that this is without a doubt the best way to do it because we’re not– oftentimes we’re not challenging and looking at the sources of said information anymore because it’s just too time-consuming, and we get used to the, like, slot machine behavior that you can get into with AI of yes, it gives me a response.

I’ll go with that response and then onto the next thing. So I find what I think is like a sort of like pattern recognizing how I u-use AI is I don’t want to– Like I– If I fall into the trap where I’m doing that and I’m delegating too many of the decisions to AI, what I always try to think about is I– if it comes to an area where I have subject matter expertise, I’m not trying to offload my opinion to AI.

I’m generally trying to have– come with an opinion and then let AI challenge it, because typically there’s a reason that people turn to AI, which is because they want to know something that they don’t know or they want to do something faster or more efficiently. So basically asking the right questions around the, the particular thing that I’m trying to solve.

But then actually, in the case of implementing like a feature in a software product is let’s say there’s multiple ways to do it, and because AI can do it so quickly, I’ll do both ways and then test, against something that is no longer qualitative, that is purely like measurable. Is this actually the better way to implement it or is it not the better way to implement it?

Which comes back to the idea of the only way that you can truly learn something is through real world application, trying, failing and experimenting, which is easier in some fields than in others, of course. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s that trying and failing, that iterative approach. There’s like a meme in the AI land of “Oh I just one-shotted this course,” or sensational YouTube videos about oh, this one prompt will build you a million-dollar business or whatever, and that’s just…

The way it really works is you have to iterate, go back and forth, challenge your own assumptions, and, do that deep research. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. I often find also the, like, painstaking, like, process of getting to an end result is that the, like, actual process of doing it is what gets the good end result.

If you can just very quickly get to the end result. But AI kind of shifts where you spend the majority of the time, so you don’t no longer spend nearly as much time on structuring or even with LifterLMS entering the content into the LMS is now really easy to do with AI, ’cause you can use the MCP, for example, and tools like WP Vibe, where you don’t even need to worry about entering the content, structuring it.

Once you do that human knowledge dump, even in an unstructured way, and you have the actual content, it’s really easy to enter it into your the final form that it will take in your LMS. So a big, in, in my view, a big part of research is also understanding your learner. I know that you have some specific thoughts.

How do you think about developing a better understanding of your learner with AI? 

Chris Badgett: The most important thing that entrepreneurs really in any business, but in education entrepreneurship should answer is not what, how, it’s who. Who are we trying to help? Who is our target mar- market? Who is our ideal customer profile or ICP?

Who is our customer avatar? And I honestly love this part of AI the best, is to do true customer avatar development, like getting clear on the pains, desires, pleasures, demographics, psychographics of your ideal perfect customer, whether that’s an actual perfect client you’ve had before or an amalgamation of your best clients, and it is okay sometimes to do a hypothetical and like a, a crime sketch artist and who is this person?

What is their pain? They buy this product. They don’t just want the features. They’re literally hiring this product for some kind of outcome, and really going deep in all that- That is what I call continuous improvement on the avatar insight. So we may think we know who our customer is, but as time goes along, you learn things.

That’s why I love podcasting. If I could only do one kind of marketing, it would be case study marketing, where I just interview customers that are successful, and I learn so much every time I do that. I did four of those last week, and I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and I learn even more. But the cool thing with AI is you can do real customer analysis.

So I might do that interview with a s- successful customer that built a million-plus business teaching some niche I have never heard of, and then I can just send my AI out on the internet and say, “Oh, go tell me more about this person.” And they’ll find stuff. They’ll look at their LinkedIn, their website, other podcasts and content that person has created, and then you can go deeper.

“Hey, AI, find more people like that. What do they all have in common? What are the patterns and again, this is where we’re human knowledge dumping in. We’re saying things like, “I notice this pattern.” For example, in our customer avatar, there’s three things I’ve identified. One is that the people that are successful take forward and perfect action, which is more of a psychographic way of thinking or being in the world, whereas the perfectionists fail or they get stuck, or they never launch.

Another one is that they’ve already made money in their expertise. They’re not just chasing an opportunity or a business opportunity that they heard was hot or trending. Another one is that because our solution is technical, they have some technical foundation already. Like in our case, at least two years experience with WordPress You have those three things.

So I tell the AI that, but then I’m like why is this guy who teaches people how to t-tie animal balloons making $300,000 a year with this thing that’s there’s only 2,000 of these balloon artists in the world?” So it’ll go through my framework, and then it’ll look at the balloon artist entertainer niche, and I learn so much.

So that’s real customer analysis. The other thing you can do is we all, if you’re in business, probably have competitors, so you can analyze your competitors’ top customers and case studies. And I do something counterintuitive as a human, where I often sometimes will interview somebody using a competitor tool, and I’m not trying to steal the customer.

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Chris Badgett: I’m actually just trying to learn, what are they doing? Is there anything I could apply to this community that I have, and so on. But AI can do things that would take a human weeks or months. So you can send out an AI to analyze all of the public reviews on s- review sites, or maybe they, the there’s book reviews or Amazon reviews or Trustpilot reviews, whatever it is, and what would take a human weeks you can do in five minutes.

And that’s an area where one-shotting is helpful. You can just do some quick competitive analysis, and again, you can find gaps too. “Oh they have this one thing I don’t have,” and you never would’ve found that if you didn’t go digging. And maybe you never dig- dug before because you didn’t have the time, but with AI, you can just send that out, and that’s a great use of AI.

The other thing is for sales, prospect analysis. So for example, like on our website, we have Something like 30 case studies published, and, you can feed that into the AI or even just one in a particular niche or use case and be like, “Hey, find me 20 or 100 or 200 more people like this.” Traditional prospecting like that would require a lot of human work, but you can get to know your market and find your market faster than ever with AI, and I find that super helpful.

S- so recently within the past couple years, we developed our own AI agent at our company, which is not a simple ChatGPT shared thing or Claude. It’s an agent which plugs into multiple sources. We named our agent Maurice, which is named after Maurice in the Steve Miller Band song called “The Joker.”

But Maurice can connect to– I can feed so much data into Maurice, not just by copying and pasting, but actually through APIs and MCPs, which are just technical ways of saying you don’t have to copy and paste. You can just plug Maurice into every single customer communication you’ve ever had in your help desk software.

Maurice is plugged into our Google Analytics. Maurice is plugged into our store analytics. Maurice is plugged into our website and instantly has all of our current content. There’s– Maurice is plugged into our accounting and billing systems. Maurice is plugged into other data sources or exports from tools we use in business So giving an AI agent, I may be using this term incorrectly, but a data lake, like so much information that would be completely overwhelming to me as a human is a small job for AI.

And by doing that, I could analyze our– all this data from all these sources from over a decade of business, and then find insights that I didn’t realize. For example, recently I realized that there is a lot of legal and court system-related education platforms that were built with the tool. I had seen some come up f- over the years, but I started realizing when it was cross-referencing, oh, these type of customers, spend way above average of your average customer, and you’re not actually marketing enough to this legal court system, public safety use case.

I’m like, “All right.” So that’s, that’s– I’m getting to know my customer ’cause the irony of having an ideal customer profile is that in all businesses, you tend to get like a collection of avatars. You’re lucky if you just have one, but at least where a lot of people end up oh sometimes it’s this type of person, sometimes it’s that type of person.

So the AI just really helps us identify all our use cases within the ideal customer profile 

Alex Panagis: I think the beautiful silver lining of AI, which is a bit poetic because it’s also one of the things that is somewhat concerning, which is that people tend– A lot of people tend to take the answers that they get at face value.

But the beautiful thing about it as well is that AI more so than any human, which again, there’s so many psychological reasons for this, but if you’d speak to anybody about a particular topic, there’s a reason that they’re going to have a bias towards something. So when companies are talking about their own pain points, they will miss something that an outside consultant typically would be like, “Yeah I think you should focus a lot more on that one thing that you’re dismissing and you found a reason where you can justify why it’s a good idea to dismiss it.”

Whereas when you’re talking to AI, also as a per- the person using AI, you’re not thinking that the response you’re getting is based on anything other than the data that it has access to. And yes, sometimes it will– maybe doesn’t have enough context or doesn’t have enough data, but by and large, it’s not for any other reason, be it like a bad experience with a competitor or previously knowing somebody that worked at a company that it’s going to say that this solution is better than another solution because it’s completely unemotional, at least for the time being.

One would hope that’s the case. So I think the core thing that you’re– takeaway that I have from what you’re saying is that these first-hand customer conversations, experiments, mistakes, and original data will only become more valuable. And the thing that I like in the lens of– I look at this through the lens of is if everybody uses the same underlying models, and obviously we have our like– at LifterLMS, we have Maurice, which has essentially is a company brain and has access to more stuff, which makes it different.

But if every company, let’s say every competitor to LifterLMS had a similar system, the ultimate thing that becomes the most important thing is what are the users of that system doing with it that is somehow better than the users of the system in another organization. So how can you, as an educator, use the system better, get better output from it, and be a better human judge of the work that it’s producing so that you can– as an educator, you can help people get better results, or as a consultant, you can help advise more clients at a bigger scale more efficiently and also offer services at a lower cost.

I think a big aspect that people don’t think about is that because AI makes a lot of work faster, the expectation largely is that people are able to do more, which some businesses would look at as a negative thing. But from my operational philosophy behind it is if we can pass, even if it’s just some percentage of our savings of doing certain work down to our clients and make it more cost-effective and more affordable because we’re also using AI, which yes, in theory they could use themselves, but they still trust us to use it, then I think that’s something that is actually, should be seen as a way to earn even more trust.

I have a question which just comes to mind, like to turn it over to you is, do you think that this like original thinking will always be necessary? If you’re, let’s say if you’re a course creator that’s setting up their LMS, do you think that the, having like a fundamental understanding of how your LMS works is important or do you think with or will always be important with AI now just, taking a lot of that work off of your plate?

And then the second follow-up is like, is when you are interviewing people, be it an employee or you’re thinking of buying something from someone, specia-specifically an informational product how do you verify that person actually has the human judgment and isn’t just parroting AI and, yeah, I’ll let you take it away, but I have my thoughts on that as well.

Chris Badgett: I thought it was really funny. I’m 48 years old. When I went to college I, I actually have a minor in philosophy and I signed up for a class called Critical Thinking and I thought to myself, “Why didn’t they start teaching this in elementary school?” So you don’t want to just outsource everything to AI.

And to your question about understanding how an LMS works or understanding your customer, it’s in my experience for example since I’ve worked with a lot of engineers and developers, if I’m just like CEO business guy and I don’t really understand some fundamental development principles or techs, how the tech stack works, even if I can’t write a line of code, I still need to develop my own human-based knowledge so that I can communicate effectively, ask questions effectively.

In the human case like make sure I’m appreciating the employee or team member or my customer, my client because I have a stronger understanding. If I start outsourcing everything to AI I don’t want to actually lose intelligence. I wanna get smarter- 

… 

Chris Badgett: And faster because I’m using AI. So that’s like a critical thing.

And I think one of the most important questions, and I’ll throw it back to you is when you find a extreme efficiency gain, like what do you do with that extra time? So like in economics that’s called like a producer surplus, I believe. And some people will just be like, “Cool, I’m gonna take the rest of the day off,” which is fine if you’re tired, you’re burnt out, that’s great.

You should definitely do that. But you should also give back and make your business or your team more powerful. So for example, if somebody hasn’t done deep customer research and you find some efficiency gain with AI, use that time to now get to know the who better, your customer, your client, your student, and do that.

‘Cause when I ro- rock up to an AI tool, I’m not just trying to get work done, I’m also trying to get smarter myself. But what would you do with when you get a time gain? How do you think about that? We’re all entrepreneur workaholics a little bit, so but in a healthy way, like what do you do with that time?

Alex Panagis: I think the– Like I see it a lot and like this comes, and a whole other question comes out of it, but when AI makes us more efficient, a lot of this stuff is like you’re processing more information as a human being than you ever have been before, in a work context at least with what we do. So like whether that’s writing, so you if you’re using AI as do- producing content with AI, so AI assistant content, be it like more technical stuff which is becoming easier and easier to offload to AI, or stuff where you have your qualitative input and then you use AI for structure.

You’re reviewing more and more than you ever have. So like the thing I find more often is you’re basically, AI is this like junior employee or not even junior because it’s very good at certain things. But you’re reviewing a massive amount of essentially infinite work based on how much you’re prompting or how you’re automating what you’re doing with AI, and you need now better ways to review that work, which is very mentally taxing.

But I, and the way I try to think about it, and I think we think about it as a team in general as well, is you should look at the, like work that you get from AI in the same way that you get work from another team member and review it. And a lot of like my question that comes out of this is how do you– Like some people have the view that reviewing work from AI takes really long, and it takes just as much time as if they did it from scratch, which I think is a misconception on some of the like what we’re seeing now when people are starting to adopt AI, that they’re still getting used to it.

‘Cause they think, yeah, like AI has written this like 10,000-word article, but if I want to review it, I’m gonna spend more time than if I just, mentally sit down and do a deep focus work and write, 1,000, 2,000 words at a time in each session because it’s so mu- mentally taxing to review the stuff that AI has generated.

Chris Badgett: I find it the most mentally taxing when whoever’s bringing that to me did not do a human knowledge dump. So when I– If I look at it like, “Oh I could have just asked ChatGPT that,” it’s really obvious once you get into it what’s crafted versus just handed over. And we’ve seen this before if you’re a senior person at a company in whatever your role, and you’re working with other people, you’re– you have this idea, which is true a lot of the time “I could have just done that myself a lot faster.”

But the point is, we’re building an organization, and you’re trying– you’re also helping your team improve, and that’s important. And it takes time to teach and train, and humans sometimes need repetition, and a lot of things are learning opportunities. So if I got AI slop from a team member that was an obvious copy-paste from ChatGPT, that’s– I’m gonna use that as a learning opportunity.

But if it happens a third time after, I might– we might have an issue.

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Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think about it. I think the, like what it shifts and w- as business owners it’s easier for us to do perhaps than other people, but we like try to think more in systems because we like the idea that something can become systemized or become systematic, or the process of doing it becomes more clear-cut versus generally speaking, people have been used to working without AI, don’t like the idea that this process that required a lot of their involvement, like gradually requires less and less of their involvement.

But I think like we share the same mindset where we don’t– That like our goal then is have those people do more of the work that they enjoy doing as a result, as opposed to make them enjoy work less because now they have time to like focus on the details that they probably wouldn’t have had like time to even think about before because they were jumping from one task to the other and they like had to organize and plan what work to do and also keep like their project management system up to date, all of that, which is like like the administrative side.

Like that burden comes off as much as possible with AI, I think. So all that time can go back into like pouring your heart into making each like thing where you are putting your human input or the time into doing it much better than it would’ve been because you’re previously like stressed “Okay, I need to finish this by this time,” and then jump right over to the next thing.

So we’ve talked about how to more effectively and efficiently research and develop customer avatars, which I think is a really big part of succeeding as an expert and education entrepreneur. Take me through your views on like the personal development element of being successful, so like the inner work that needs to be done around being a subject matter expert.

Chris Badgett: So this is the most counterintuitive and surprising part of AI coming into all of our lives, which is using it for personal development, meaning using AI as a psychologist for yourself, a relationship coach, a leadership coach you know, getting over your own issues, whatever they are. And full like medical disclaimer, like if you have a serious issue, you should work with a trained professional.

But the interesting thing is it could be something that you’re just embarrassed to even ask, or you don’t wanna spend however many hundreds or thousands of dollars to go to a professional, or you don’t have the time, or you don’t have the access The AI can actually help you a lot, and it doesn’t neces- it’s a robot.

Know what you’re getting into. Also realize that there are, privacy issues, and sometimes the model apparently takes the information, anonymizes it, and feeds it back to the data set underneath or whatever. So you should always be careful with what you share or sensitive information.

But I heard my friend and mentor Dan Martell say once that entrepreneurship is the highest form of personal development, ’cause literally to do these things that we do you really have to become the best version of yourself, and that’s like its own project. So there’s three projects. There’s the actual business that you– or the, the product you make like a course or membership if you’re an education entrepreneur.

Then there’s the business product, like building systems, a team, a business entity, and growing and all that. And then there’s you, the individual. So this personal development part, I’m not the same person when I went into my business for myself the first time 15 years ago But in our niche for education entrepreneurs, there’s several things.

Not only in my customer avatar development do I study the great success stories, I spend just as much time looking at the people who their project didn’t work out, it didn’t launch. Maybe they bought our software for a year, never to return. I’m just as interested in figuring out what went wrong there.

Is there anything we can improve? Can I understand my market better? And I found certain things that are common in projects that don’t work out. And one- the most common thing of all of them is some form of imposter syndrome, which everybody has, myself included. It’s just an issue of whether you can get over it or not.

For example, we’re in a podcast studio. We’re going on the record. We have bright lights shining on us . And you’re, you go on stage, if you will, even if it’s a digital stage, wherever. Your high school friends, if you talk about your new startup education company, and y- you’re, you feel fear to put that on Facebook because it’s– maybe those people thought you were, be something else or maybe you’ve changed a lot over the years and, there’s this whole imposter thing, fear of failure, fear of success even, fear of being judged.

The number one fear in the world is public speaking, and that’s because you are literally holding up your hand, stepping on s- a physical or virtual stage, inviting the world to judge you. And that is uncomfortable, even for most people, except for psychopaths, I would say. But if you’re using AI, and you’re honest and open about your nervousness, your fear.

One thing you could ask an AI, particularly if you’ve been working with it for a while, and it has some kind of memory and context. Let’s say you’re getting ready to do your first video lesson, or you’re getting ready to do some kind of speech on a stage to try to generate clients, or you’re starting a podcast up, a podcast or YouTube channel You can just be honest to the AI a-about like, “Hey, I’m feeling pretty nervous.

I’m feeling like I’m not good enough, or that I’m gonna be judged. What would you say? Can you help me?” A-and it’ll do things like… i- AI can be a little bit sycophantic, meaning it will always praise you, every, all your ideas are good. I actually train my AIs not to do that, just when I’m trying to do strategy in business.

I don’t want it, I want it to tell me what’s wrong. I want it to red team me and stuff like that. But when it comes to personal development, the person that is the most negative to another person, in most cases, is ourselves. We’re very hard on ourselves. And if you get into a dialogue with AI in the privacy of your car or home alone or in your office, you can, start doing some inner work, some shadow work, which can be really powerful.

And, if I was… Let’s say I bought LifterLMS as a aspiring course creator, and I get an email that in one week my annual software subscription’s gonna renew, and there, there is no website, there’s no course made. And I’m like, “There’s a decision point there. Yeah, I s- I’m still in love with the idea, but I’m actually getting in my own way.

I’m… This is a failure to launch problem.” I might get into a dialogue with my AI “Hey, can you coach me through how to get through this? I still wanna do this. Something is blocking me.” And you might be surprised what you find out And then just a pro tip there, like I mentioned with privacy and everything, I like to sandbox personal development stuff.

Even the other day, I had some grocery store sushi, and the next day my stomach hurt really bad, and I thought I was dying or whatever. I was like, “Oh my God, something is really wrong here.” And I went to the AI. Again, this is like I’m not intending to give medical advice, so definitely consult a professional medical- a real medical doctor.

But I’m like, “Hey, these are my symptoms. This is what’s going on. This is how long this is lasting. I’m getting ready to fly to Philadelphia. I got a guy flying from the UK. I do not wanna miss this. What’s going on here?” And is… And there, it starts doing the kind of doctor diagnosis steps. Now that’s like physical health.

It’s like, “Yeah, you’re fine. You just don’t eat grocery store sushi from that place again, and it’s gonna take this long. If you notice this the next day, you’re fine.” And I’m fine. But you can do that with your inner issues. But to sandbox that environment, and what I mean by sandbox is if you have a business brain where you do all this stuff, and if you start growing and get team members and they’re sharing access and context, I like to use a completely different AI tool or a different account of the same tool I use that’s separated from the business so a team member doesn’t talk to AI, and AI says, “Hey, maybe you should check on Chris.

He’s having this issue from the grocery store sushi,” or whatever. Segment it out. And that can… When you do sandbox it, you actually get a little more confidence that you can be open and honest, and maybe you might say stuff that you wouldn’t say to a doctor or psychologist and explore stuff and, relationships, if you’re having trouble with a client or a student or a team member.

It’s amazing As a, a social science guy myself, one of my favorite things, it’s a nerdy anthropology thing called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which just means that we don’t perceive the world as it is. We perceive it as we are, and we perceive reality through the cultural lens of language.

Which just means is all of us humans are walking around in general thinking that everybody is like us, but we’re not. We’re all like super unique and different and oh, like maybe this issue over here, this client has a sprinkle of narcissism and I’m actually not that bad, or I’m being gaslit about this or that.

And then you start getting into areas you may not be an expert in, but oh AI, what is gaslighting? Or I have this c- coaching client who’s just not following through and, oh, this person, has this personality type likely, but you have this personality type and that creates friction.

Here’s how to find common ground between those types of people, which is really weird when you think about it ’cause you’re just talking to a robot that read every personal development book, the s- the medical DSM manual, all the psychology books or whatever. But it can be really powerful. And like one of the things, just a pro tip story from my life, I used to be a non-technologist.

I lived in Alaska. I was a professional sled dog tour guide for a decade, and I was a guide. I know what it feels like to be a guide, to take people into the wilderness who are scared or unsure, and I’m protecting their safety while also helping them grow and stuff like that and experience cool things.

But when you teach something online, there’s an identity shift. This is a personal development thing, like one of the most empowerful ones, which is moving from the idea that you don’t have to be the guru. I’m not the best mountain climber in the world or the best sled dog musher in the world, and I’m not even the best guide in the world.

But if I give my pr- myself permission to be a guide and go into uncertainty and help bring people along the way, whether that’s team members, clients, students- I can be a guide. I don’t have to have all the answers, and I can be honest when I don’t know and I have to circle back. But I’m a good problem solver.

This goes back to critical thinking skills. So that identity shift for myself, oh, you don’t have to be in the best in the world to teach something, but if you’re a really good guide, that’s just as good. And by the way, there’s only one you, and you are unique. And so for example, if I was working on personal development myself and hiring a coach, I don’t necessarily wanna be coached by Tony Robbins, who also coaches Bill Clinton and world leaders.

I might just want somebody who’s more like me that’s maybe 10 steps ahead, five years ahead. That’d be a better coach for me. And that person I would hire to be my guide, if you will 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. Going back to one of the earlier things that you said about imposter syndrome, if it’s any consolation for those of us that have imposter syndrome I think I ha- find a connection between people who have strong imposter syndrome and tend to be the better users of AI be- and get the most out of it, because they aren’t the type of people who, like, when they ask it for, tax advice or health advice we can discern, okay, I can use this information for what it is, which is information from AI.

It’s obviously not a medical professional, and I know that if I ask it the right questions, I can get information out of it. But I still am not by any means, a tax expert, which I find e- even goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that you can develop a really solid understanding of something so that, on our team, we can communicate better with Brian ’cause we’re understanding the technical side of things more than if we haven’t dug into the implementation behind something that he built, for example.

And in the case of your own business, there’s so many ways where you can use it, where as long as you accept that, for ultimate things where the stakes are really high, you probably still should go to a, a professional that’s, has experience in the industry. You can come to the professional with far better questions.

Previously, we would just have to take what lawyers would tell us at face value, but now we can, if we know how to use the tools well, and again, accept that we aren’t, like, becoming perfect lawyers just ’cause we know how to use AI really well, which I think we, everyone in this room does, know that they’re not going to become a lawyer just ’cause they know how to use AI.

We can then go to the experts with the, the perfect set of quer- hopefully a really good set of questions that leads to a much better outcome than if we didn’t ask those questions because it didn’t shine a light on the things that they actually should have known about in order to give us the best help possible.

I’m curious on the guide versus guru identity shift that you mentioned, if the expert, in the case of online courses, to bring it back to what LifterLMS does, if the expert is no longer, let’s say, just responsible for delivering all of the information, do you find as well that teaching someone how to apply the information is increasingly becoming more important, and therefore, the line between coach- coaching and courses is blending a bit more?

Chris Badgett: I think so. Information, in my view, has always wanted to be free So what are people actually buying? And if information has never been easier to access through AI as example, first it was the internet, then there’s YouTube. It’s the same story we’ve seen before. Like, why would I buy your course if I can find everything on YouTube?

There’s a billion videos on YouTube of varying quality, good luck. And it’s not, it may not be structured in a way that fits with your unique frameworks that you’ve developed to help people. So people aren’t actually buying information. Sometimes they are. Like, there’s some course creation frameworks like teach a process, like step-by-step.

There’s a, there’s others like behavior change, like I’m gonna help you lose weight or quit smoking or find the love of your life. Then there’s another type called a resource course, which is really dangerous, where you just dump in like everything and build a huge library of information that overwhelms your learners, which I don’t recommend.

But people aren’t just buying the steps or the recipes for behavior change or the checklists or the tools to help them, make sure they retain the information through quizzes or assignments and things. They’re buying a transformation, and humans aren’t robots, and one of the biggest opportunities for subject matter experts out there Is people are starved for human connection, and what they really want is a guide, not a guru.

In many ways, the information is already the guru. The YouTube influencers or social media influencers, the famous books in the space. You may have read all the stuff in whatever niche you’re trying to achieve, but you actually need a guide. That’s great, but why is this not working for me?

So that’s where coaching starts coming in and that human connection that is not just … I think the name information products that are solely just information, that is not dead, but it’s declining in value. But human fidelity or connection human to human, where humans can adapt to each other, different personalities, different challenges, even though they might all be, like, pretty close to the same customer avatar, different people will have different challenges, or they’ll be going through a life event that makes it harder to implement.

Or they may have a different personality type where your teaching method doesn’t quite fit perfectly and they need a little alternative path or different method. So they’re not just buying information, they’re buying access to you, the expert. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. I think I also find, at least in the spaces that I look at the online course creators most in, is like you’ll find the thing that typically makes them most successful is they sell the ability to achieve said results and who they’ve done that for in the past more so than yeah, this is where all the information is.

In a way, like I, the w- I distill this down to there’s two main things, which is shortcuts. People want to buy a course ’cause they wanna learn the thing faster and from somebody that has achieved the result before. But then also the proximity is the main other thing, which is both the proximity to the person who’s achieved the results and in some cases with cohorts or with group coaching is other people all trying to also achieve that result, which I think we’re seeing like a m- is on the rise with LifterLMS and our customer base for sure.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’re gonna do another segment in this series on community, but they’re also buying access to other people like themselves so they don’t feel so alone in the world, and we’ll go deeper on that in another day. But, I’m a frameworks guy, so as soon as I hear a framework, I install it in my little framework library in my head, and people pay for

This I learned from a guy named Dev Basu- Is that people pay for four things: speed, certainty, insight, and the fourth one’s a little funny, which is to stay out of jail. So just to start with the funny one you hire your accountant not just to do your taxes, but to keep you out of jail. A shortcut, like you mentioned, is a speed thing.

Certainty is really answering the question, will this work for me? So that’s why we have things like guarantees and proven processes and all these case studies and reviews where we’re trying to establish that it works. And then insight is something that information can provide, but when you put the human element in you can adapt and make sure– The information will fall short sometimes.

That’s why nobo- as students in the physical world, everybody gets the same information, but everybody does not get the same score on the exam. And that’s that opportunity there as a guide to, help your winners excel even further help everybody else get as high up as they, as possible.

And that’s one of the challenges in the old world of the school system is we tend to teach to the average, which leaves behind the people who are doing really well and the people that are really struggling at the bottom. But if you’re accelerating as a course creator, coach, education entrepreneur, you can put your human element with some of that freed up time in to help everybody move up and, be more adaptive and teach to the individual.

Alex Panagis: Nice.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode