Teaser (00:00)

Gary Pageau If AI is supposed to be your productivity tool, then you should be more productive when you use it, right?

But if you’re spending hours afterwards tweaking things, it’s not optimal.

If you take a couple seconds up front, you actually save time on the back end.

Nova AI Welcome to Macpreneur, the show for seasoned solopreneurs looking to streamline their business on a Mac.

Unlock the secrets to saving time and money with your host and technology mentor, Damien Schreurs.

Meet Gary Pageau (00:30)

Damien Schreurs Hello, hello.

Today I have the pleasure to introduce Gary Pageau.

Gary is the principal of InfoCircle LLC, a marketing communications company.

Since 2012, InfoCircle has provided marketing services, blogging, marketing communications, marketing research, and event marketing to local and national clients.

The flagship publication is The Dead Pixels Society, a website, podcast, and newsletter for the imaging industry.

InfoCircle also produces the PhotoImaging Connect events.

Gary, welcome to the show.

Gary Pageau It’s great to be here.

Nice to see you.

Damien Schreurs Yeah.

Mac Studio Setup (01:16)

Damien Schreurs Let’s get into the first part of the show.

Which Mac are you using now to run your business?

Gary Pageau Right now I’m using a 2022 Mac Studio, which I guess would make it an Apple M1 Max with 64 gigabytes.

It replaced a 2012-era Mac Mini, which I had going for 10 years or so.

And so when I bought the Studio, which was like what I’ve always wanted, right, a nice desktop that I can highly configure, and I wanna keep it 10 years, so I spent more money on memory and storage than I probably would’ve if I was going to just keep it for a few—

Damien Schreurs So since you have a Mac Studio, what is your monitor situation?

Gary Pageau Oh, I just have this—it sounds pedestrian—but it’s just literally just a 27-inch Lenovo that I picked up.

It’s not exotic.

It’s not color-balanced.

It’s just basically a monitor.

And then I’ve got a second one over here that is literally what I was running my Mac—my Mini—on, just this little HP Mac over here, and it’s got the DVI, the weird adapter because it’s so old.

It’s like a 2012, 2010.

It’s not a more modern connection.

It’s not a USB-C connector at all.

So I had to get an adapter and kind of jury-rig it.

Damien Schreurs Once you get a taste of a multi-monitor setup, it’s very difficult to get back to a single monitor.

Gary Pageau Yeah.

Actually, that’s one of the reasons why I do have an old PowerBook that I use for travel, and I don’t use it very much except for travel ’cause it is only the one screen, right?

I’m so used to two that I—

I know there’s portable screens you can get.

I got a friend of mine who has one for his MacBook.

It’s like a fold-out thing that you can attach, and it just sounds like too much work, so—

Damien Schreurs Very good.

Apps and Workflow (03:14)

Damien Schreurs So which applications do you use to run your business or your marketing activities, but also all the content creation that you are doing?

Gary Pageau Yeah, I’m doing—

It’s funny, since we had the pre-call, I went back and looked to see what I was using a lot of, and it’s really dull and boring.

It’s mostly Chrome, Chrome apps.

For graphics, I’m usually using a lot of Canva, since most of the stuff I’m using isn’t going to print or anything like that.

I use Evernote a lot for note-taking.

I’ve been on Evernote forever, and it’s just part of my normal workflow.

I use a task management app called To Do, which is just like your list, but one other thing I like about it is I can easily highlight items in an email or something and make a task out of it.

And then I do the same with Evernote.

I email myself notes, right?

Just directly from—

I use Microsoft Outlook for my mail app, ’cause Apple Mail is just terrible.

And then we—

So for communication, it’s primarily Outlook, like I said, and then I use Zoom, ’cause I have my own podcast.

So I use Zoom to record that, and then I have various other tools.

To edit podcasts, I use Hindenburg, which is an audio editing app.

So just a smattering.

If I need to do anything kind of super-duper in the image-editing world, I’ve been using Pixelmator for a long time.

Before Apple bought it years ago, I was always a big fan of Pixelmator, so that’s sort of my image-editing go-to.

And then when I need to do some video, I’m getting up to speed on Final Cut, so that’s kind of—

I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve, but I’m gonna move away from that pretty soon.

So a bunch of stuff is the answer.

Podcast Editing Tools (05:06)

Damien Schreurs Yeah, in the pre-call we talked about your process and Hindenburg.

Did you do any exploration on that side, or—

Gary Pageau Yeah.

I started with GarageBand, which was, I think, everyone starts there, and then they figure out how it’s not really suited for audio editing, really, for spoken word.

It’s really not great for it, especially if you need to do any kind of—

And I haven’t used GarageBand in years for that kind of stuff.

If you have to do any kind of filtering or adjusting volume or just adjusting, you know, doing some really quick editing, ’cause as you know with a podcast, people stumble, you wanna edit things out and things like that.

So it’s not so easy to do.

And I came across Hindenburg years ago, and just been using it since.

But lately I’ve actually moved to using Descript for some podcast editing because the person who was helping me with the editing kinda left me, and I had her all set up on Hindenburg ’cause that’s what I was using.

So for three years she was using it, and I could go—

Since we had a shared cloud thing with the files in, I could go in and tweak things from my desktop.

And then when she stopped, I’m like, “Shoot, I need to—I need a faster, more efficient system.”

So I’ve been using Descript a lot lately just to kinda see how that works, and it’s been working very well.

Descript Web vs App (06:28)

Damien Schreurs And are you using the web version of Descript, or did you install the Mac app?

Gary Pageau Right now I’m using the web version, but I’ll probably use the app.

I’m one of those people that once I like something, I start paying for it.

And so I’m on the paid version, so I’ve got all the minutes I need for what I do.

I’ll probably download it.

But I’m usually online, so I don’t really need offline.

I’m not sure what the benefits of an app on the Mac is.

If you could tell me, that’d be great.

I’m not sure what the—

Damien Schreurs I used it, and then I uninstalled it because it was actually a storage hog.

At one point I was like, “How is it that I only have 20 gigabytes left on my hard drive?”

And then I ran OmniDiskSweeper, and I realized in the hidden files, in the Library folder, there were so many—

It had downloaded not only all the projects, but all the supporting files for all the layouts, the templates that I’ve created in Descript.

That takes a lot of space, and I realized—

And I don’t remember, there was also a keyboard shortcut, or there was something—I don’t remember exactly what.

I think it was maybe the—

I was so used to using the space bar to pause.

I don’t remember.

There was a keyboard shortcut that didn’t work.

And then I realized, let’s see if the web app can help me.

And there was only one thing that the web app couldn’t do at the beginning; now it can.

It’s the YouTube something, right?

Publishing to YouTube, because I do the video as well.

And now I’ve—

What I—

The only thing I did was I opened Descript, the web version of Descript, in Chrome, and then I did the “Save as app,” quote unquote, so as a web app.

So it’s a separate icon and a separate window, totally disconnected from Google Chrome itself.

The only problem with that is I have to be careful because when you quit Chrome, the browser, every mini-app that was created like that gets closed as well.

Gary Pageau So you have to keep—

Damien Schreurs Yes.

So either you just open those mini web apps and you’re good to go.

But if you open Chrome as well, the browser, be careful.

Gary Pageau Yeah.

Yeah, I get it.

AI Cleanup and Publishing (08:59)

Damien Schreurs So Descript is using a few artificial intelligence features, right, that are useful.

Which one are you using in Descript?

Gary Pageau But it’s primarily—I just go through and I just say, you know, clean it up, right?

And so it takes out the introduction or the pre-introduction, the chatter and all that.

And then I go in and I say, you know, I clean out the—I use the filter to clean out the ums and ohs and ahs and to shorten the space between sentences and things like that.

So it’s just basic cleanup.

I do use sometimes the summary, the description, and the recap and all that.

But the challenge I have with that is my host for my podcast, Buzzsprout, does all that stuff too.

So it doesn’t do the editing, but I think if they were smart, they would probably try and start adding those features.

But they’ve been having AI features built into Buzzsprout forever, where again, you pay a little extra for it, but they give you the transcript, and they also give you the suggested titles and the—

They can even do a blog post, but I really don’t like those ’cause they’re very—I like to say a little overenthusiastic.

They’ll say things like, “Your life will be changed forever once you listen to this podcast on how SEO can improve your business.”

And it’s just, no, we’re—it’s not, that’s not gonna happen.

Your life is not gonna change.

It might improve somewhat, but we’re, you know, it’s not gonna change completely.

So I really don’t like that stuff.

But, you know, for just, like, the two-paragraph summary and the notes and some of the stuff, it’s really, really good for that.

So there’s kind of a—I wouldn’t say there’s a conflict there, but it’s sort of like which tool is best, right?

And I find that Descript is really better for editing and not so great for the publishing side, even though I can publish directly from Descript to Buzzsprout.

You know, there is a connector there that goes directly through.

Buzzsprout’s really great for that.

If anyone’s looking at hosting, they’re a great option.

They are really a solid podcast platform.

Damien Schreurs Yeah.

Descript, I think Descript started as a video editor, and—

Gary Pageau Yeah.

Damien Schreurs It’s really tailored for video editing.

You can do audio editing as well, but it’s really for audio.

So, for the listeners, if the listener has an audio-only podcast, you could potentially skip Descript with the post-processing tools from Buzzsprout.

Gary Pageau Yeah, yeah, but they don’t do what I really like with Descript, which is editing the text, and that changes the audio.

‘Cause I’ve been aware of—

I was at a conference, an imaging conference, a couple years ago, and Descript was one of the panelists, right?

So that’s how I became aware of them, was actually, like, a full-blown, like, the CEO talking about it, and I was like, “Oh, that’s a great tool if I was gonna be doing some video editing.”

Because just adjusting the transcript and the video changes to match it is pretty crazy and awesome.

Opus Clips Workflow (12:02)

Gary Pageau But I do use video clips of my podcast, just 30-, 40-second video clips for Instagram and LinkedIn and those kind of things.

But I’ve been using a tool called Opus Clips for that.

And again, it’s a case of I started using that before I used Descript, so it’s sort of part of my workflow is to do that.

But I do have to go through some extra steps, right, to upload the video, but it does a really good job of finding the key parts and cleaning it up and all that.

At one point or the other, probably Descript will do that better or as good as Opus Clips, but Opus Clips also has the advantage of being able to publish those clips directly to multiple services, right?

So I can put them on Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and I can schedule them, and it’s really good for that.

I just have to remember to do it.

That’s part of the challenge, ’cause it’s not—

‘Cause again, video isn’t part of my normal workflow.

So I have to think, “Okay, I need to upload a bunch of videos into Opus Clips, and then I need to go through and—”

Again, I’m one of those people, I don’t really trust the AI, in the sense where I wanna make sure I’m checking everything, that it’s making sense, just because I’m old school that way.

I know there’s people who just, once it goes into AI, they just say press and go and trust, but I’ve—I’m not there yet.

Damien Schreurs No, yeah, I’ve also, like you, I’ve completely stopped using Descript for those vertical clips.

I used to be—because I—we are recording now with SquadCast, both your video feed and my video feed are two separate feeds, and when I import that afterwards in Descript, I can put however I want.

I could put them one on top of each other for a vertical thing or left and right for a horizontal thing.

And for a while, I was using Descript for vertical clips, but—and there is an AI feature in Descript that allows it to suggest potential clips, right?

So, short portions that could be nice for clips.

But then I still had to select, create a new composition, then format the composition, and I had to do that maybe 15 times, download, upload, and it was a bit too much.

And I was using Opus Clip, just the lowest tier, like the $15-a-month, something like that, and it was nice.

Maybe you know that, but there is a feature in Opus Clip that if you publish an episode, a video, on YouTube, you can get Opus Clip to watch a playlist and automatically pull the video, the latest video, and start clipping it.

So you don’t even need to upload a video anymore.

You’d say, “Watch that playlist on YouTube.”

And the video doesn’t need to—

Gary Pageau Yeah, that’s the challenge.

I don’t even upload the videos on mine, see, ’cause it’s audio only.

I do publish just the audio on YouTube as a podcast, but I don’t do the videos, which is why—

But that sounds great.

Opus Clips is one of those things where it’s a great tool.

It almost has—

And you almost are always discovering something new with it all the time.

They’re always tweaking it or whatever, and it’s not expensive, really.

It’s very cheap.

Damien Schreurs I went with the second tier, or the $30-per-month tier, because I realized that what I was missing was the bulk download, but also the bulk scheduling.

And so what—

Gary Pageau Which is huge.

Damien Schreurs Your point of the accuracy of the AI—the first time I did not look too much through and I implicitly trusted Opus, and then I realized, no, it’s making some mistakes in the transcription, and I was looking like a fool.

And I realized that.

And also, so what I’m doing now, so it’s—

These episodes, these guest episodes or these interviews, are usually between 40 and 50 minutes long when they are fully edited.

So what I realized is if I split them in two, so in Opus Clip, you can say, “Look, take this YouTube video.”

It could be an unlisted YouTube video, so you could have it on your channel, but not display it for the general public.

And I can tell Opus Clip only to chop from five seconds or after the intro, from five seconds to 20 minutes.

And then I take the same video and I say, “Now go from 22 minutes to 45 minutes.”

And I do roughly 20-minute—

Gary Pageau Yeah.

Damien Schreurs Blocks.

That gives me maybe 15 to 20 clips.

But now I systematically go through each of them, and there is a thumbs-up, thumbs-down thing, so dislike.

And when you dislike a video, it fades in the interface, and afterward you can say, “Only show the liked,” and then it’s easier for me to bulk-schedule those.

But I go through all of them, double-check the transcript, double-check the little title, and afterwards, when I bulk-schedule again, I go through every post and double-check that.

Gary Pageau Yeah, there’s nothing worse than seeing those clips on Instagram or something where you’ve got the transcript, like the captions underneath, and there’s misspelled words or the wrong word or synonyms or whatever, and it’s just not great.

It’s just sloppy, and I just don’t like sloppy.

And again, maybe I’m not suited for the 21st century ’cause I actually go back and look.

But it’s, uh, you know, ’cause really, you know, part of the game is you gotta flood the zone with all your content when you’re doing it, right?

If you wanna get attention.

But I have a niche market, so I don’t need 100,000 views to make my life worthwhile.

But, uh, yeah, part of the trick I found with Opus Clips, like, ’cause with my podcast, I have a variety of different topics, right?

I have marketing or SEO or social media or small-business concerns, you know, whatever.

I find if I use the box where it says, you know, look for these keywords, it gets much, much better.

If you tell it, “Hey, this is about SEO,” it’ll optimize for that.

So just, if you take a couple seconds up front, you actually save time on the back end.

Damien Schreurs Yeah, it’s a good point.

I forgot to say that is, right, so in Opus Clip, yeah, you have a box for the prompt, and you can prompt the clipper.

You have even two different types of clipping engines, AI engines in the backend.

So it’s also worth experimenting with that because you don’t get the same kind of clips—

Gary Pageau No.

And the point is I look at it as if AI is supposed to be your productivity tool, then you should be more productive when you use it, right?

But if you’re spending hours afterwards tweaking things, it’s not optimal.

AI Overload and Preferences (19:28)

Damien Schreurs Yeah.

And what other AI tool or system are you using to help you in your business?

Gary Pageau Not as many as I probably should, because what I find out with AI right now is—other than ChatGPT and stuff like that—I do use occasionally.

For Perplexity, I’ve played with it.

I don’t really like it.

Lately it’s been disappointing me, so I’m moving away from it.

But I find actually there’s a little too much AI, in the sense that there’s always AIs trying to do things for you, right?

Probably the worst, and again, we were talking at the pre-show about how terrible Apple Mail is, I’m on Microsoft Outlook because I’ve got seven emails, and it’s great for multiple emails, right?

Especially if some of them are Exchange, some of them are Gmail, and some of them are whatever.

It’s much better than Apple Mail for that.

But the AI in Microsoft Copilot is, “Okay, can we rewrite that for you?”

No.

Leave me alone.

I can do this, right?

I don’t need that amount of help.

So I’m resisting a lot of the AI stuff.

Like I said, I used Evernote earlier and I kinda had a workflow with that where I just kinda dump stuff in it and then I can do a search later, right?

So I’ll send myself emails on a project, then it’ll become an Evernote note, and I can group things together real well.

And now they’ve got all this AI stuff in the front where it’s trying to guess what you’re trying to do, and it’s just slower and obnoxious.

AI, when it’s trying to help you too much, is obnoxious.

Canva’s getting to be the same way.

“Hey, can we generate an image for you?”

No.

Please don’t.

I would just like a toggle in the settings.

Please just leave me alone.

Stop helping me.

Damien Schreurs Yes, the—

Gary Pageau I want a “stop helping me” button.

That’s what I want.

Damien Schreurs The overeager friend.

Gary Pageau Yeah.

It’s, yeah, because it’s like it’s supposed to be a tool.

When I look at it as a—it’s like spellcheck or grammar check or anything like that.

It’s a tool when you need it.

You don’t need it all the time, and I don’t want every single email Copilot yammering at me that it can rewrite my email for me.

And maybe it can, but I—

But in terms of things I’d like to try, I have a lot of friends who are telling me that Claude is the greatest thing on the planet.

I haven’t really—I’ve had it on the to-do list to spend a couple hours playing with it, figuring it out, ’cause I’ve heard some great things about it.

I just have—I’ve been using AI mostly as a search engine or tracking or looking things up or things like that, but not as an assistant in the sense that it’s going to do stuff for me.

But I’ve heard great things about Claude specifically, that people seem to really like it for summarizing your inbox and organizing your schedule and doing—

I’ve heard it’s really great at doing presentations, things like that.

So looking forward to giving it a spin later.

Claude Desktop and Agents (22:29)

Damien Schreurs Yeah, there are two things, right?

There’s the LLM itself, and that you can experience from a web browser, right?

So if you go to claude.ai and you sign up and then you use it like you would use ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot, it is—the way it talks, the conversation that you have, I—it’s really—I prefer the conversations that I have with Claude.

But also it seems a little bit more human when you use it for marketing stuff, right?

So that’s, I think, the first level of why Claude is a little bit superior to the others.

But then you add a completely different dimension to Claude when you install the Claude Desktop app on a Mac.

And good news for people like myself who are still—who are still on an Intel iMac running macOS 14 Sonoma, yes, there is an Intel version of Claude Desktop.

For Gemini, there is now a Gemini desktop app and a ChatGPT desktop app.

Even the ChatGPT desktop app requires Apple silicon, so you’re good to go with your M1 Max Mac Studio, but people are still on Intel.

And also, it’s minimum macOS 15 Sequoia.

And the power of the Claude Desktop app, regardless of Intel or Apple silicon, is the connectors.

And yes, you can have web connectors, so you can connect to HubSpot and Google Drive and Gmail.

So those connectors work also from the web version of Claude.

But for the desktop app, you can then hook Claude to Mac applications.

And that’s where the—you can’t do that.

You can’t do that with the Gemini app.

You can’t do that with the ChatGPT app.

And it completely changes the game because, on top of that, when you use Claude on the web, you only have access to Claude Chat.

As soon as you install the desktop app, you have Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code.

And the one I’m using the most is actually Cowork.

And with Cowork, you can give it access to a folder inside your Documents folder, anywhere on your Mac.

You give access to that folder, and whatever you put in that folder, it can work with, which is good because then it can create files, it can update files.

I’m experimenting now in having it help me sort files into subfolders, renaming files, and, yeah, that’s where actually the power of Claude comes in.

Gary Pageau Okay.

Well, exactly, but I plan on giving it a try.

I just—I just haven’t had much of a—

It’s one of those things where, you know, there’s X amount of time when you’re a—

Damien Schreurs Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

And that’s again, uh, yet another subscription.

Gary Pageau Exactly.

I’m an outlier, I guess, then, and say, they—

I don’t mind paying for stuff, right?

If I’m gonna use it a lot.

I know people who get mired in the free-tier stuff, and then they complain they can’t do as much, or they change the terms and they start taking away features.

They’ve got costs too.

But I do—I’m mindful, right?

I’ve stopped services that I’m not getting as much out of.

I had a Dropbox Pro account forever, and I got rid of that recently just ’cause I wasn’t using the storage as much, right?

So I do review this stuff regularly.

Usually when the subscription comes up, I say, “Do I really need this?” Something like that where you can definitely see that it’s saving you time, and time is money, right?

So you can definitely—it’s definitely worth subscribing to a lot of these.

Damien Schreurs And I must say, I’m still on the 20-euro-per-month plan of Claude.

And so, at the moment, for a few more weeks now, they have doubled the available usage for Cowork.

So Cowork is their agentic solution on top of the LLM itself, and it uses more tokens.

So it’s really because there are things behind the scenes that we don’t necessarily see that consume tokens, and also Cowork has a bigger context.

It requires a bigger context, so it consumes more tokens.

But even then, I’m pretty mindful now about choosing the right model for the task.

At the beginning, I was like, “Okay, let’s go for Opus, the best model.”

And I quickly was—

I was not token-maxing, as they say, but I was like, so we have these five-hour windows.

And if we hit the tokens for that window, we have to wait.

We have to wait until the next window opens, and then we also have a limit, a budget for the week.

I never hit that budget for the week, but I was often like, “You need to wait for two hours.

You need to wait for three hours before you can start using it again.”

And I heard that nice analogy of, right, when you go to the bathroom, you don’t leave the tap open, right?

When you exit a room, you don’t leave the light on.

So you’re mindful about your energy consumption at home.

With models now, it’s, okay, which model do I use for the task?

Oh, I could use Haiku for that.

And I’m mostly now using Sonnet with even low thinking.

So, yeah, low thinking budget, and most of what I need flies through, and I’ve not hit a limit for the past two weeks now.

So with Cowork, you can create what are called scheduled tasks.

So basically, I have created an SOP for Claude, and at, I think, it’s at 10 30 PM every day, it’s like a shutdown routine.

And it says—I tell it, “Look, read that SOP, go through all the steps,” and it does that automatically.

I just need to make sure that Claude Desktop is open on my computer.

And every day it’s doing some cleanup.

It’s rearranging its own memory.

It’s looking at what we have done throughout the day.

So throughout the day when I use Claude, we log stuff into a today’s memory file, and then it goes through that, looks if there are some improvements to be made left or right to some SOPs and stuff like that, and it automatically archives stuff or puts stuff in a this week’s memory.

And, yeah, for that, I can only recommend—suggest everyone, even the listeners, try the Claude Desktop app, and more importantly, try Claude Cowork.

You will see it’s a completely different paradigm.

Gary Pageau Yeah, definitely.

I’ll give it a try.

Like I said, it’s on the list, right?

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in other parts of the market, you know, that we’re kinda doing similar things, whether they’re gonna be able to compete.

Like, I see things like people are using, you know, Zapier stuff for a lot of things.

But now I see AIs just taking those out, so it’ll be—

You know, or even like IFTTT, you know, If This Then That, I guess, is one.

That one I think is gonna go away pretty, pretty quickly because, you know, I think people just want the service.

I don’t think they really love the sites themselves.

But I guess it depends on the pain of changing, right?

That is what you’re dealing with is, once you get into a workflow, you tend to resist change just because there’s time and pain to change anything, right?

That’s the story of me getting off Hindenburg for the most part for editing, is because the person who was doing it left, so I had to find a solution that would save me more time.

And yes, Hindenburg has some AI stuff into it, but for me, I had already bought the desktop app and was using it, which they don’t even sell anymore.

I’ve had it for so long, it’s like I have a license, it’s perpetual, just gonna use it.

But now they’re trying to ding me on—to—

Now that they’ve put AI into theirs, it’s okay, now they want a subscription.

And I’m like, okay, I’ve already paid for the app.

I don’t really wanna pay for a subscription for these slightly better features that aren’t as good as other people’s, right?

‘Cause they’re not an AI company, right?

That’s not what they do best.

For me it was like, the pain of staying was greater than the pain of leaving.

But that—we can get into that whole subscription model thing.

I have some issues with some of those, especially with Apple’s going to subscriptions on a lot of theirs.

Automation with Zapier (31:50)

Damien Schreurs Yeah.

To come back to Zapier, I think there will still be a place for Zapier in the sense that some of the workflows need to be more predictable.

And what is good is that Zapier now has AI steps, so you can incorporate AI things and actually have much more flexible automations.

But on top of that, they were smart.

They created an MCP server for Zapier, a web MCP server, a web connector, which means that now I connected the Claude Desktop app to my Zapier account, and whatever I have already pre-configured as connectors in Zapier—

So Zapier has access to my Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Drive, Kit, a bunch of web services that are already pre-configured.

I can now be in Claude, and even if my web service of choice doesn’t have a connector, I can say, “Hey, Zapier connector, what can you do for me?”

And Claude takes control of the connector for me and can pull things.

So whatever actions Zapier can do for any web service—so I think they have more than 1,500 web services that they interact with—so from Claude, any of those that are pre-configured, you can use Claude and pull, at the minimum, pull information, sometimes even create things based on the actions.

Gary Pageau Okay.

Damien Schreurs Yeah.

Gary Pageau Zapier’s one, another one of those ones where I’ve been meaning to look into it, but it’s fallen down the list because I—

But there are folks who just love the automation, that’s for sure.

Damien Schreurs So, yeah, one thing that I’ve been using AI for is to create my AI C-suite.

So I have created a co-CEO, a co-CFO, and a co-CMO.

And one thing that solopreneurs can do is actually create, at the minimum, a co-CEO, because the CEO is the top role and can actually provide some help with different parts of the business.

And if you instruct—

So if you give the co-CEO your tech stack, you can have your co-CEO brainstorm with you ways to actually leverage Zapier.

So if you tell it, “Okay, go and read this documentation,” or, “I’m interested in learning about Zapier,” it could be also n8n, could be any kind of automation platform.

You can get your co-CEO, with the proper context of your business and your tools, suggestions for, “You could do this kind of simple three-step automation, and that would save you so many hours per week or per month based on what you do.”

So having AI brainstorm with you solutions for automation is also a great use case.

Gary Pageau Cool.

Mac Tip Dropzone (35:14)

Damien Schreurs Very good.

Let’s go to the next segment of the show.

What tip or trick did you discover on your Mac recently that you wished you knew before?

Gary Pageau It’s not really a tip or a trick as much as it was an app that I’ve taken up because I do a lot of very routine image resizing and that sort of thing.

And I had—I was using an app called PhotoMill for that, and then I became aware of something called Dropzone, which I don’t know if I’m familiar with Dropzone.

But it’s a toolbar, a little app, and you just drag your files up there.

And so I set that up ’cause, like, when I publish things to my newsletter or whatever, it’s pretty much always 800, 800 pixels.

That’s the width.

So I’ll have a folder full of pictures I need to resize.

I just drag them up to that and down, and then it makes it super easy.

Whereas PhotoMill did that, but it was like 17 more steps I had to—

So that kind of stuff, and I found it does a bunch of other things too.

And so that was another one where it’s gladly pay for that one because it just saves me so much time.

So, yeah.

So in terms of, like, Mac-specific, I don’t know anything on Windows that does anything like that.

But I can, like—

I’m one of those people that whenever I’m working on a newsletter or something, I have to have things in certain folders so I know where they are and all that.

And so I’ve got some places within Dropzone that are just like, “Hey, just move stuff to this folder.”

So it’s really great.

And it’s got other features too that I’m starting to learn about, with video and image and shortening, link-shortening stuff and all those kind of fun things.

So that’s one thing I’ve learned lately that I’ve really started to take advantage of.

Damien Schreurs And for the listeners who are already on Setapp, right, the subscription service for Mac applications, Dropzone is one of the applications available in the package, right?

So it’s among the 240 or 250-plus applications in Setapp.

Gary Pageau Okay.

All right.

Yeah, I just, as I heard about it on a podcast I was listening to—not yours, but I heard about it—and it was just like, “I’m gonna try that.”

And I was pleased.

This was really one of those apps that you get it for one thing, and you find a bunch of other things it can do.

Damien Schreurs Yeah.

So for the listeners, you can pre-configure some actions, and you basically drag and drop a file on it and it does stuff for you.

Gary Pageau Yep.

Yeah.

And it’s, for me, who I do a lot of the same things over and over again, right?

It’s just, it’s really convenient for that.

Damien Schreurs Very good.

Fixing Apple Software (37:57)

Damien Schreurs So, yeah, last question.

If you were in charge of the Mac division at Apple—

Gary Pageau Right.

Damien Schreurs Your first priority, whether it’s hardware or software?

Gary Pageau Oh, that’s tough because, like the—

I’ve been—

Like, one thing I love about the hardware is you don’t have to buy it very often.

You know what I mean?

That’s—you’re running an Intel Mac.

I’ve got my MacBook is an Intel MacBook.

And I’ve—I switched to the M1 Macs because it’s just what—

And I know I’m gonna have it for years.

It’s now—I’ve had it for two or three years now, and it’s just great.

For me, my beefs with Apple’s products are primarily usually on the software side because the native apps are just terrible, in my opinion.

They could do more, I think.

And I think I understand their strategy is, we wanna make sure there’s third-party developers and all the other stuff.

But, like, Apple Music is terrible as an app for organizing music, right?

It’s just, if you have your own library of music that you’ve—

Like, for me, I digitize CDs and all this other stuff.

It puts some in the cloud, and it doesn’t tell you it’s doing it, and it’s like—

And it used to have a big problem where it would swap out versions.

So you’d have the live version of a song, and it would swap it out for the studio version, and it was just—

It really just, for me, it’s just, it’s clunky, which is weird ’cause Apple shouldn’t be clunky.

But it doesn’t really tell you what it’s doing when it’s doing it.

Like, I was trying to—

Here’s a good example.

I was running in a race recently, and I knew I was gonna need four hours of music.

And so I had to try to create a playlist, and it was, like, telling me, “I’ve got a paid Apple Music account, right?

But it was telling me, ‘This isn’t available.

I can’t put this on your phone or your watch because of where it is on the cloud.’”

And I’m like, “I’ll get it downloaded.”

And it was just like, it wasn’t—

And, you know, I’m going to Apple Support trying to figure out why this playlist won’t sit on my phone, and it just doesn’t.

It just—

You know, there’s no, like, “Download this.”

It’s just like you create the playlist, and it might download, it might not.

You don’t know.

You have no control over it.

There’s no drag and drop or anything like that.

And, uh, you know, duplicate files in Apple Music is terrible.

Just—

It’s very arduous to fix those.

So I’ve actually learned to, like, let it go, to just not be so anal-retentive about my music collection because I just—

I’ve got 32,000 songs, and just finding them—oh, just, it’s—

So that is a problem for me.

Just, if you’re gonna offer this, why not be the best in class on it, right?

And then, just in general, the native apps just aren’t great.

Except for Keynote, and I know people love Keynote.

But Pages isn’t great.

Numbers isn’t great, as far as I’ve seen, when you compare it to, let’s say, Excel, which most people have access to.

And then the Mail app is not great.

So I’m using—

I like using Outlook on my phone.

I use it on my Mac, and it can handle multiple email accounts, which Apple says it can do, but it—

I don’t know what your experience is, but it’s not great.

It’s not—

Damien Schreurs No, I’ve been burned before, and I decided, no, there’s no way I’m using Apple Mail anymore except for testing purposes.

And still, on the Mac, I abandoned it.

Basically, I have my iCloud account for my company, and so I have an iCloud.com email address, and that’s what Apple Mail is for.

Gary Pageau Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s—

You’d think that would be a basic thing it—

They should have just built it in.

It’s a basic—

Obviously, not everyone likes Messages, so Messages is probably one of the better apps in there.

But it’s—

And then when you look at things like GarageBand, it’s getting a little really long in the tooth, in my opinion.

I think it was great when they first introduced it.

iMovie is just not very good anymore.

I can’t remember the last update where it was anything worthwhile.

And ’cause not everything has to be a full-blown edited thing.

If I’m gonna edit a video, I’ll go to Final Cut or something like that.

But if you just wanna do a quickie clip of an event or something, iMovie is terrible.

It’s just terrible.

Damien Schreurs Yeah, it’s—

Gary Pageau And that’s generous.

Damien Schreurs For the free things, they tend to have, like, a burst of energy from a development side where they quickly do things, and then they let the app sit for years on end.

It’s too obvious that it needs a bit of a refresh.

Gary Pageau Yeah.

And honestly, I’m not really in love with Microsoft, but it’s like I’ve tried a bunch of other email clients, Canary Mail and all of those, and it’s—

I keep coming back to Outlook, and it’s, I’m just, I can’t get away from it.

I’m open to change, but—

But it’s, uh, it is weird.

And then, you know, obviously Google has got their alternatives, and they’re pretty good too.

Damien Schreurs Yeah.

Gary Pageau But then—and all—

And like you said, Damien, when you think of the money that Apple makes on the hardware and everything, and then they’ve gone to the Creative Suite subscription service, it’s like you’re not gonna update Pages or any of this stuff unless I pay for it, but you guys are—

I don’t know.

I just, I find that weird for that.

I think it’s a money grab or it’s a weird approach, but it’s not like Apple’s struggling.

They’re making money.

I didn’t wanna add up all the money I pay to Apple every month between Apple Mail, Apple Fitness, Apple TV, Music, Apple One, and the Store.

That’s—

I’m cutting them a pretty hefty check every month anyway, and on top of the hardware.

Now you’re gonna ding me on updating your word processor app?

Please.

Really?

Really?

Really?

Damien Schreurs And, and, and—

Gary Pageau Gonna—

Damien Schreurs Putting the whole suite, right, the iWork suite, inside the Creator suite, what’s—

That’s fishy.

That’s too fishy for me.

Gary Pageau Yeah, exactly, ’cause it, you know, it was almost like, “We have to justify it somehow.

We’ll just dump a bunch of stuff in there.”

And okay.

Ready—

Gary Pageau Again, I don’t mind subscriptions if it’s an ongoing thing.

I don’t mind paying for Apple Music.

I don’t mind—

Other than the fact it’s terrible as an organizing, as a streaming service, it’s fine.

And it works with my Apple speakers, and it generally works for the most part.

Apple TV generally works for the most part.

So I don’t mind that, but it’s just like, for a word processor, you’re gonna want a monthly subscription?

For what?

It’s not like they’ve added anything to it that makes it compelling.

They don’t really have any significant AI features built into Numbers or Pages or any of that stuff.

So what would you be paying for, really?

Maybe that’s coming with the Siri AI stuff, but I doubt it.

Damien Schreurs Very good.

Where to Find Gary (45:17)

Damien Schreurs So apart from the Dead Pixels Society, where else can people find you online, Gary?

Gary Pageau Oh, probably LinkedIn is probably the safest place, where I’m posting usually there, or usually what I’m doing is I’m feeding stuff from my newsletter and my stuff there, and I’m usually very active on LinkedIn.

So just find me on LinkedIn.

And again, you know, the Dead Pixels Society is a community for people in the imaging industry who aren’t necessarily photographers.

So it’s like if you’re in the business side of photography, like if you’re a retailer or someone like that.

So we’ve got our weekly newsletter, we’ve got our website, we’ve got the weekly podcast, and we do some events and meet-and-greets and whatnot.

So just find me there.

Damien Schreurs Yeah, very good.

I will put a link in the show notes for everyone.

Yeah, thank you, Gary, for being on the show and sharing how you are using your Mac to run your business.

Gary Pageau Yeah, this is fun.

Thank you.

Applying to be a guest (46:15)

Damien Schreurs And so, yeah, for the listeners, if, like Gary, you would like to share how you are using your Mac to run your solopreneur business, it’s simple.

Just visit macpreneur.com/apply.

If you are already on Podmatch, just click on the button and you will land on the show profile.

Otherwise, fill the application form, and I will get back to you within a few days.

Once again, it’s macpreneur.com/apply.

Nova AI And until next time, I’m Damien Schreurs, wishing you a productive day.

Thank you for listening to the Macpreneur Podcast.

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