Latest Form of Labor Arbitrage

James Bazakos is a passionate digital marketer, a driven AI prompt engineer, and a true student of life. He is a strategic thinker, problem-solver, and innovator with a passion for helping businesses and organizations achieve their goals through creative marketing, cutting-edge technology, and strategic leadership. With diverse experience across industries—including technology, healthcare, finance, real estate, and wellness—he has built a career on the foundation of adaptability, forward-thinking, and results-driven execution.

Episode Highlights:

3:02 – Chiropractic, copywriting and AI. “Both my parents were chiropractors, so I definitely grew up in a chiropractic household. Adjustments every now and then. Green juice and salads all the time. The holistic household mindset was mostly evident through nutrition in our house. Those values that my parents instilled in me have been evident throughout some of the choices I made by coming out of university. The first business I started was a wellness center, where we meditate, teach people about all sorts of things, and really look at human consciousness. After that business, I ended up getting into marketing. My dad was running a business at the time and my buddy had a small marketing agency that he was running out of his parents' basement. My dad needed a website, and my friend said he could make one for him and give us the family and friends discount. He wanted my help writing the copy, so I did, and it went really well. He ended up liking my work and I started a full-time role at his agency. Fast forward seven years, I've been in digital marketing ever since. I’ve worked with over 60-70 clients at this point by running campaigns, creating marketing collateral, copywriting, and brand positioning. All of these led me naturally to the world of AI. As a copywriter, I had a choice: get replaced or make it my best friend. I was just astonished by what was possible. Things that would have taken me days or weeks can now be done in minutes or hours. AI doesn't take a day off. It doesn't call out sick. It doesn't have creative writer's block. It's revolutionizing the way we do everything.”

16:19 – Custom GPTs are the latest form of labor arbitrage.  “When I first learned about Chat GPT, I was working with a company in the NFT and Web3 space. We started using it in the course of our work to write better marketing copy and put together marketing strategies. It really just took on a life of its own in my own life ever since. I use it in the course of just about every marketing client that I have, whether it's strategy or the actual deliverables that I'm producing. There are a few different layers to using Chat GPT. You can open it up on your computer, prompt it and get an answer. As a copywriter, I learned about something called custom GPTs, which is a tool within Chat GPT available to pro users. Think of it as you're able to make a version of ChatGPT that carries out a very specific task, so you pre-program it to do a task over and over and over again. In the world of marketing, we had virtual assistants and that was the first form of labor arbitrage. Call centers are in India or the Philippines or in other places because the labor is less expensive. That's been the case with platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, but now I would say that Custom GPTs are the latest form of labor arbitrage.”

20:19 – The pros of Custom GPTs. “We explored this idea of making a custom GPT in your voice to get a reliable, authentic output on a consistent basis. Having done a number of other projects with custom GPTs, I was fairly confident that it was possible, but it did take quite a bit of work to get it to work how we wanted. We have a two-step sequence with GPTs, where it produced a content calendar and then that calendar was put into another GPT, where each day was codified with a unique identifier, call it A1 or A2. Now, when you type A1, it produces that piece of content for that day in Jay's voice. Each piece is unique, and it will lead to a call to action when we want it to. We have it drawing inspiration from historical figures, scientific literature, sports, current events, and more. It's got over 25 different sources of inspiration, so instead of telling ChatGPT that you need to build a personal brand, or this is your new full-time job, etc., Custom GPTs allows its user to sit down once a month for a few hours and produce social media content for an entire month on six different platforms.”

28:29 – Stacking different GPTs. “When Jay and I met, I was working on a project with an ad agency, and they wanted to be able to produce ads at scale. They were having trouble producing enough ads for all their clients. We had to know who the ads are for, what the business is, etc., etc. We ended up coming up with six different GPT and the output of each one got fed into different categories. The first one in that workflow was generating audience personas: who's your ideal customer? It would create five of them, not just one. I lived in some of the areas where some clients' businesses operated, and it was scarily accurate. Just based on its pre-trained data. It's really hard to know the answers to a lot of those questions. It requires a certain degree of imagination because the possibilities are endless.”

38:38 – Pre-stored information. “90% of use cases utilize Chat GPT by prompting it with a question and getting an answer. In this case, you can get your social media posts one by one. Or you share the elements you want your social media posts to contain every time, give it a document that explains what your brand voice is, show the platforms you post on, determine the type of content needed for each platform to get a good answer from GPT. Normally, you have to give it all of that information or you're going to sit there for 30 minutes frustrated because you're not getting exactly what you want. Now, you're just programming those decisions that you've already made into this GPT once and it already knows so much about you. It knows everything else it needs to know already because you've pre-stored the information.”