How to Use AI When Copywriting

James Lawrence: I'm here today with Ralph Grayden. Ralph, welcome to the pod. 

Ralph Grayden: Thanks, James. Nice to be here with you.

James Lawrence: Looking forward to it. Ralph and I, we've known each other for a long time now. So Ralph is the founder and owner of Antelope Media. Antelope Media is a Sydney-based content and copywriting agency. So over the years, Ralph, you guys have worked with clients like Macquarie Bank, University of Sydney, Real Estate, New South Wales Government and lots of other clients. 

Ralph Grayden: When you put it like that…

James Lawrence: You do good work, that's why. But the topic we're going to talk about today, and it's one I'm interested in because I know so many of the listeners are interested in the topic, is how to use AI when copywriting. So I think from the get-go, what are you seeing out there? You're a copywriter. You've got lots of experience in this space for many years. ChatGPT kicked off at the back end of last year. We suddenly are playing with it. Is it the demise of copywriting? We're kind of almost 12 months in now. What are you seeing? 

Ralph Grayden: Yeah that's right James. When it first came out, there was a stack of interest and I think most people with kind of any degree of curiosity or curiousness jumped on and started playing around with it themselves. The results were often quite poor, I think when people said, hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog about this, or write me a poem about something, it tended to produce quite flowery bad prose. So a lot of people think wrote it off immediately. Straight off the bat just said, oh, this could never replace the copywriters. Look at the crap it's turning out. The words are poorly written. It doesn't have a human touch. It can't possibly convey what a human writer could. As it's gone on, though, I think people who thought that way, there's still a lot of them out there, but a lot of people have started to come around because the reality is, if you're prepared to put in a bit of effort at your end, use the right prompts and get thinking and working for you - well, it doesn't really think - but if you give it the right prompts and push it down the right path, you can get quite good results out of it. Having said that, to get those results, you have to follow the traditional writing process anyway. I guess that's a roundabout way of saying that I don't think it's going to replace us writers just yet, but it is a useful tool and there are ways that you can use it, whether you're a writer or a nonwriter, to produce quite good work. 

James Lawrence: What's the sentiment in the community? Because obviously, it could be perceived as a massive threat. You look at the kind of Hollywood writer's strike, and a big part of that had all to do with the use of AI and writers not wanting that used. Are there segments of the content and copywriting community industry who are just going, absolutely not. We're not using it. Or is everyone kind of jumping on board and adopting it and sharing tips and tricks like, what's the industry feeling? 

Ralph Grayden: I would say that there's a range of points of view. On one extreme, you've got the people who are still saying that it couldn't replace this. I mean, you see on LinkedIn, people who are writing property descriptions saying; asked to write a description of this house and look what it came up with. Isn't it dreadful? It could never replace a human because it can't look the way a human does. And to some extent they're true. It can't think the way a human does, but it can be taught to recognise the patterns and the words to mimic. Guess what a human does? I'm saying this because it was particularly a property copywriter who said that I could be trained quite easily to recognise a photo, see these things, be shown the plan of a house, and come up with a reasonable property description. For more complex writing tasks, it's more difficult. But again, it still has a role. And I think that most writers are now coming around to the point of view where they're thinking, well, it's not going to replace me. How can I use it in the writing process to come up with better copy or to come up with copy in a much more efficient way? 

James Lawrence: And that's what I'm keen to get into. How are you and your team using it and curious to discuss if you’re finding that it is literally saving you time? So therefore you can do work cheaper or you can do more work for a client for the same rate? Or are you finding that it's simply that you're using it more to do better quality work? We're a year in, lifting the hood behind the scenes of a content agency, how's it actually working for you?

Ralph Grayden: Look, both I would say. One of the real benefits is in that ideas phase of writing. One of the things that we do a lot of is writing thought leadership and writing articles and blogs; ghostwriting and sending them out in different people's names. Now, coming up with different topics for that can be a challenge. I mean, in some months we have to come up with 100 different blog topics, coming up with fresh, original ideas is hard. There are a few prompts you can give it, and you can play around with it and start heading off into directions. Guess quite easily, which you wouldn't have considered yourself, so you can use it to bounce ideas off and go into different directions. And even though what it gives you might not be perfect, there's often a seed there that you can then turn into a good idea and that type of thing. 

Ralph Grayden: So I guess that's one of the most important ways we're using it. Another way is that if we are writing, say, a blog or a website or something, you might say to ChatGPT, can you structure this work so that it hits all of the points in a logical order? So we use it in that phase as well. I mean, I'm less inclined often to get it to write out a first draft, but you know, that's something it does very well. And that's one way I'd recommend that people use it if they're not professional writers, is to get it to bang out a first draft, because it does it very quickly. It could knock out 21 first drafts in the time that it would take you to do one. So then you've got all of that work before you can pick and choose what you want to use. And you can you can build on it. 

James Lawrence: So when you say you don't use it as a first draft. What are you using it for? You're using it before that. 

Ralph Grayden: Yeah. So the ideas phase, the structure phase. Look, sometimes I might say, how would you express this idea in a way that is in active voice or that type of thing or that connects with a particular audience? But I tend to still do the first draft myself. You can use ChatGPT or any other AI to do that as well. And then the other thing it’s very good at is editing. So you might put your work into it and say, how can I improve this? What key points have I missed? Where are the weaknesses in my writing? Or is there anything that I could consider that I haven't considered? And it can tell you that and correct your work quite easily. So, you know, there are ways that can help you through the writing process, and we use them. And I think it's helped cut down on time. And if you piece it all together, even if it's just saving you half an hour in what might normally be a five-hour article, if you add that up over time, that's a considerable cost saving.

James Lawrence: It's so funny. It was a bit of a leading question because I kind of have our perspective within the agency and it's so similar. I was talking to a client last week and they were very much like, we need to massively scale our content output and essentially saying we should be able to do it largely in chat, but essentially scale up massively with no real increase in price. And I had a chat to our team around it, and that's our feeling as well. Is that it's about a 10%, maybe a 15% efficiency in terms of speeding things up, which is true. And as you said, brilliant in that kind of ideation, just where it's sometimes you can get so stuck and it is so hard to create to come up with new ideas, so good for elements of research and pulling things in. 

James Lawrence: And then that editing bit, which isn't necessarily like a good piece of content, should be edited regardless. But probably we're viewing it more as; it's just helping to create a better finished product. So it's slightly more efficient in terms of the resourcing that it takes. But the actual output is also better. So I think if you're coming into it at this point thinking we can crank out three times the amount of content with the same level of resourcing. I think you're probably going to find you're pumping out content that is for content sake and to potentially spam Google or build out your website artificially, rather than actually trying to create great content that resonates with with a human. 

Ralph Grayden: Yeah. Absolutely. And that's the thing, isn't it? You still want to produce. I mean, it's a great tool to have, but you've still got to use it wisely, haven't you? You've still got to be focused on; is this content going to deliver any value? Is it doing what I intend it to do? What's the point of it? There's no point just sitting there and saying, hey ChatGPT, write me 20 blog articles on these 20 different ideas and getting it to churn them out because you will end up with with bad work. 

James Lawrence: And one of my immediate thoughts when playing around with it back end of last year/early this year, was very much that from the outside looking in, it's kind of saying now everyone can create these huge websites with lots and lots of content. Does that kind of make SEO redundant? And I kind of feel that if anything, it just doubles down on what Google's been saying for years, which is create great content that users actually want to engage with and solves that problems because it's so easy. Now, the barrier from nothing to average is gone. We can pump a 3000 word piece on digital marketing in 2023, or how to use ChatGPT to write copy for your website. We can pump that article out within 15 minutes, obviously, but it's just going to be really average. So it’s now helped us to get to average, but then to get to genuinely useful and great. 

Ralph Grayden: Yeah. And the more average content there is out there and there was already a lot of of pretty average content. Now with AI, there's even more that the quality content is going to stand out, I guess. 

James Lawrence: I was going to talk about this later, but I think just for the listeners, it'd be interesting, those hero pieces of content that have got so much traction recently on LinkedIn. It is a topic of such interest. And the pieces you run with, which are awesome. Just talk to about it?

Ralph Grayden: Yeah. So I guess when ChatGPT was quite new, this was January, February this year when I was a copywriter, I wrote a novel and I thought, you know, it's been a decade since that came out. What if I just see if ChatGPT can write the next one for me? Wouldn't that be great if it took all the pain and effort? Because trust me, writing a novel isn't fun. It's a lot of hard work and I thought, well, here might be a real way to save time and effort and get that second book out there. So I started playing around with ChatGPT, and I asked it to come up with ideas for the novel to to write something for me and to see how it went. I guess it was Chat GPT 3 in those days. So ChatGPT does keep improving because each one is retrained each version of it. But it really gave me, in the first instance, it was a terrible story. I said about trying to correct it and to teach it how to write and to give me something that was better in the end. And it's a whole long article that gets to this point, but in the end it does actually produce. I got it to produce something that was quite decent, although it took quite a while to get there. 

James Lawrence: And we were talking before recording that. That article reached how many people on LinkedIn?

Ralph Grayden: Yeah. So over 20,000 on LinkedIn. It really took off, I think, because at that point in time, the way a lot of people were thinking about ChatGPT, will novelists be made redundant? Will all of these artists be made redundant? And so it kind of showed my struggles trying to use it to write that second novel. And so I think that's why it hit a nerve or people were interested in it. 

James Lawrence: I presume a lot of people in your industry that are copywriters probably have been quite defensive about ChatGPT and Bard, and we'll look at all the things they can't do. And I think you've been so forward looking as to, I will look at the things that it can do and the things that it can't do objectively and see where I wanted it to help me and where I'll keep doing what I have been doing.

Ralph Grayden: Well, I think AI is definitely kind of here to stay, isn't it? That's the thing that even if it doesn't stay in its current guise and changes, it's definitely going to be here to stay. And it will impact anyone who works in any industry. Rather than saying, oh well, it can't replace me and sticking to your old ways, you really do have to look for ways to see how it can help you and how you can incorporate it into the way you're working.

James Lawrence: Really good segue there. So in terms of how to actually get ChatGPT or Bard to output helpful, useful content, what are some practical ways of doing it? 

Ralph Grayden: Okay, so obviously the questions you ask it are everything. But having said that, I mean, if you look at and maybe I'm guilty of this as well, if you look at some of the articles out there, they'll tell you, here are five prompts that will make ChatGPT do anything that you want it to. But the reality is, even when you ask it a question, you have to keep asking it further questions. You have to keep asking it why and keep refining what it does and building up to the point where you have something that you're halfway happy with. So a lot of people see Chat GPT or see the world in black and white, and they ask it a question and then they will just say, oh, well, it didn't give me what I wanted or I'll just use it. At the moment its operating in shades of gray. You have to be prepared to take bits of it you like and bits you don't, and then just keep following up and refining and asking different questions to get what you want. 

Ralph Grayden: A different prompt, you might say, look, I'm writing a blog article on these keywords. If you've done some research or something, you might have business investments and you might say, generate me five ideas based on those three keywords, and bang will come up with five ideas on those five ideas. You might then say, well, I like elements of this one and that one, and this one here. Combine those together and give me another five ideas, and you have to keep playing around with it and playing around with it, asking it more questions and following up. And when you do, you eventually will end up with something that is halfway decent or that you can at least work with. Yeah. So that's that's probably the key to it, is to keep an open mind, really keep an open mind, keep playing around, keep asking questions, don't see anything as set in stone. You're not going to break anything by asking it the wrong question ever. You can always go back and re-ask it another question. So be prepared to experiment and play around with it.

James Lawrence: I think we should use some of the structure on the how to get better, right? Like you, I think that'd be good to go in that direction, because that’s the fee that you're writing. Give it a style guide. 

Ralph Grayden: Yeah, yeah. That's right. So left to its own devices, ChatGPT will give you that kind of flowery prose that it's known for, where it will overwrite and give you bad stuff. But one way you can get around that is to give it your own style guide. Any kind of business or most major businesses will have their own style guide, which kind of defines what their brand voice is. How they communicate to other people can do exactly the same thing with it. Give it your own style guide, whether that's you as a person and how I want to write, or how your brand writes so that it uses the words, the phrases and everything that you'll use. 

James Lawrence: How do you practically do that? If are you feeding it emails that you've written or blogs that you've written, do you have just a template document? So when you fire it up in the morning, you kind of go, I'm Ralph, this is my style guide. Now go?

Ralph Grayden: Yeah, one is to feed it your past writing. You could put in old emails if you want it to imitate the way that you write for emails. Put in old emails and tell it to imitate them and see if it can pick up similarities in the way you write between those emails. Could do the same with articles I've posted in my old articles and said, look, tell me Chat GPT, how do I write? What are the commonalities between my articles in the way I phrase things and stuff? Now write me this based on those. So that's one way that you can do it. And the other way is to give it a style guide. So you might tell it, write in sentences of between 8 and 14 words long. Use the active voice, use second person. Refer to people as you when you're writing in the same way that a copywriter would or whatever. And then you have the option to plug that now into something called custom instructions. If you look on the bottom left of ChatGPT and click those three dots, it will say custom instructions and it will ask you there if you want it to remember things that and apply all of your different chats with it. That's where I put the style guide I have. I have one for our business, which I put into there, and I say, look, when you write, this is how you have to write.

James Lawrence: We're recording this back end of 2023. Earlier on this year, we had the issue of memory where it could only remember back a certain kind of distance. So essentially we're locking that in. These are some parameters which just always do it. 

Ralph Grayden: So it will remember across conversations so you basically tell it who you are, who your audience is. Anything else that's pertinent to the way you want to write. And then you can also give it instructions on how you want it to write. And then it will remember that now across all of your conversations. So every time you open a new window, it used to be you, right? At the moment you open a new window, it forgot everything, which was both good and bad. Now it can remember certain things across all conversations. So that's where to put your style guide in those custom instructions so that it does remember it. And you don't have to go back every time and change it. Having said that, you might want to write in different ways for different audiences. So you might still find that when you open a new chat, you have to go in and tell it, look, forget those instructions or modify them in some way. And then we're saying chat bar here. I think we've talked probably more about it. 

James Lawrence: The two places you're working. What are the differences between ChatGPT and Bard?

Ralph Grayden: So look, ChatGPT is what I use most of the time. I find it's the most creative platform in terms of the answers it gives you, and it sounds the most human like. There are two other big ones. There's Llama Llama and Google Bard, and the three of them are all rivals. But ChatGPT, I guess, is trained differently from Google Bard, which is the one that most other people probably have experience with. ChatGPT actually has people sitting down and fine tuning it or going through and giving it a prompt and then saying, look, this is the best prompt, or this is how you make that prompt sound more human or whatever, whereas Google Bard is more unstructured. ChatGPT sounds more human like, I guess, when it gives you a response. Yeah, so that's what I use. 

Ralph Grayden: So they're the large language models that when people talk about AI or generative AI, they're normally talking about those, the large language models. Having said that, there's a few other kind of writing platforms that sit over the top of them. Things like Jasper, AI, copy AI, and these are marketing specific programs. I guess that's it on the top of it. Use the power of ChatGPT. Jasper, you can generate different documents, it gives you templates and so on, so that you can generate different marketing documents using the power of that. But I guess it's much more structured than ChatGPT is. 

James Lawrence: And then what are you finding? We've talked a bit about blog and other kind of long form digital content. What are the types of outputs or areas where you find? Generative AI helping you a lot? And conversely, are there certain types of copywriting where you kind of go, yeah, like as much as I'm a believer in it, I'm struggling to whatever it might be, right? Writing an outdoor ad or something like that. 

Ralph Grayden: Anything that involves structure, that's where you're going to find that can really work wonders. So blog writing, website writing, even brochure writing, some of those massive content projects. 

James Lawrence: I think that's where AI is really going to take off. You think about putting together an annual report for a big organisation or writing a 200 page website. Look, we've been involved in projects, both of us, where you're writing, say, a government website that is 200 pages long, and you think of the time and effort that goes into building those 200 pages.

Ralph Grayden: I think we might specifically have been involved in that project together. 

James Lawrence: Thank you. Giving something away there, Ralph, to the to the listeners. 

Ralph Grayden: And then you think of how much time and effort I could potentially save you and what you're seeing out there now in AI as well, is that a lot of organisations are taking these large language models, the ChatGPT or the Google Bards, and creating their own version of it, essentially where they feed it their documents and they train them on their information so that they could potentially come and produce these annual reports in virtually no time at all. They could say we're putting together an annual report. We want it to take into account X, Y, and Z and bang, it just pulls out all of that information. It knows how to write and so on. So that's where it's going to take off is in that form of writing. 

Ralph Grayden: Where it has less application, I guess you're right. Is in the conceptual type copywriting, the creativity that a human has and it can to some extent replicate, but it's never going to replicate it as well. I think when you're a copywriter, part of your skill is being able to draw on past experiences that you've had and putting them together into a headline or whatever, or knowing how someone is going to think because you've experienced the same things as they have. And I guess ChatGPT or Google Bard or any of the AI at the moment can't can't replicate that fully. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's right. I had Julian Cole on the page recently, and he runs the Strategy Finishing School and has done a lot of work in Manhattan and big ad land and whatever else, and he's kind of been quite polarizing, I think, in that community, because he's not suggesting it's a panacea or anything like that, but he's definitely using generative AI in that very conceptual kind of space. And he feels his framework doesn't necessarily solve everything, but it does help to probably more on the ideation side, helps to pull things out that otherwise might, as you probably have kind of touched on, there's a lot of garbage and a lot of junk that comes out, but it's about kind of isolating some of those awesome ideas and then taking them and kind of building upon them.

Ralph Grayden: It's just another way, I guess, to help you arrive at different ideas or different opinions or angles. Different ways of writing much quicker than you would do just on your own. 

James Lawrence: What are the mistakes you're saying that people are making out there? 

Ralph Grayden: That all or nothing approach to ChatGPT or Google Bard or all right generally is the biggest mistake. Just saying, ChatGPT write me a blog. Oh no, that's terrible. I'm not going to use it. I won't waste my time with it. And then conversely, the people who say ChatGPT write me a blog. Oh, this is fantastic. Don't need writers anymore. I'm just going to whack this up. And if you look at YouTube, I mean, it's full of people doing that kind of thing, right? Hey, write me a 200 chapter book and boom, it spits something out and here we go. Isn't that fantastic? Well, no, it's actually pretty dreadful. And it's just adding to the noise rather than helping anyone or anything. 

James Lawrence: And then any other fundamental mistakes you're seeing with people's adoption, I guess, of generative AI?

Ralph Grayden: So when you're using it to write, you still have to very much go through the writing process itself. It's the people who don't do that, who often end up with quite bad work from it. 

James Lawrence: Can you elaborate what the writing process is like? What are those fundamental phases or stages for us laypeople? 

Ralph Grayden: Sure. If you ask a copywriter or journalist or someone to write something, they're not generally going to sit down there and just bang out the words from start to finish. If they do, they will probably end up with quite bad work. What they do is they normally step out their writing into four different stages. And the first stage is that ideation process. What am I going to write about here? What are the angles? What's interesting? What's my audience going to be interested in. So that's the first phase. After that, you need to then take that topic and then work out well, what am I going to say about it? Then you have to actually structure your work. Then once you've kind of nailed that down, and that's kind of what we all did at high school, you know, you probably had to write essays for English or history or whatever subject. And your teacher would say, look, put some notes in the margin. You know, what are the three most important points here? Now, structure them. What's the most important? What's the least important? That's what most people do when they're at school or university. 

Ralph Grayden: And then when they get out into their working life, they forget about writing like that. But professional writers will generally still do that. They'll sit there and they'll say, all right, these are the points I want to cover. So if I'm putting together a blog, for instance, I'll have headlines on the page, right? These are the five points that take me to the end part of what I'm writing, and they're the things I'll have to cover off to provide a full blog. So that's the second stage. The third stage is actually writing it out yourself. And as I said, ChatGPT can produce a first draft in no time at all. But there's this famous Hemingway quote at the same time that the first draft of anything is shit. So if you ask it just to bang those words out, they're still not going to be very good.

James Lawrence: Is that literally the extent of the quote, the first draft of anything is shit?

Ralph Grayden: He's right as well. It is. The whole essence of writing is often rewriting. That's another quote to the whole essence of writing is rewriting. When I wrote my first book, for instance, I think I went through 27 different drafts before I was happy with it. He still said it wasn't great. So you can get that first draft out pretty quickly, and then you can actually use it in the editing phase as well. So you can get to where it's own work or your work and ask it to go through. Am I saying what I really want to say? How can I say this better and all that type of thing? You've got to use it differently in each one of those different stages. At the moment you can't just say, ChatGPT, write me something about this and bang, it comes out at the end. But if you step it through each one of those phases on the writing of the writing process, you should end up with something reasonably good at the end of it. 

James Lawrence: That’s really practical. We were talking before we started recording, just in terms of how what you're now doing with clients. So Ralph, is at Antelope Media, and we'll have details when we publish the pod as to how to reach out to you. But the types of services you're now offering to clients?

Ralph Grayden: So we found that as I started writing about ChatGPT or my experiences writing with ChatGPT and giving practical examples on how to use it, that there was a real appetite for training in writing with AI. And so one of the services we started offering was how to write with AI. And we've been putting on seminars and webinars about it, which have been hugely popular. I've put one on recently for lawyers and had 150 people paying to turn up. And actually just prior to that, I'd done another one for lawyers, and this was for US based lawyers, and we had 300 people coming. 

James Lawrence: That's excellent. 

Ralph Grayden: So yeah, it surprised me by just how popular it has been. And we're doing another seminar now, specifically how to write with AI for marketing. So I've got one coming up in November. I'm allowed to say that. 

James Lawrence: Yeah absolutely. We've just got to get this published now before November. No pressure.

Ralph Grayden: So that's one thing that we've been doing. Looking on top of that, we've been trying to incorporate it or look for areas where we can incorporate it into our writing to speed things up without sacrificing quality or to even improve quality. In some instances, that ideation phase, where you've got to come up with topics and that can really take a long time, and it's not something that clients necessarily always see value in either. When the client pays you as a copywriter, they want to see words, don't they? They don't want to necessarily pay you for all of the ideas that you're coming up with and so on. If you can use ChatGPT in that phase to speed up the process so that you can get into the paid stuff more quickly, it's a godsend. And so that's one of the ways we've been doing it. 

Ralph Grayden: We've also been using it, as I mentioned, for quality control. So at the end of writing something, even the best editor will make mistakes at times. I mean, you only have to look at the newspapers and so on at the moment and you'll read typos in them and things like that all the time. So you can use ChatGPT to pick those up to make sure there's nothing that clients hate more than typos when it comes across as unprofessional and makes you look as though you don't know what you're writing about, when the reality is that, you know everyone has typos. But ChatGPT can find them for you. It can find inconsistencies in the way you're wording and things like that, and do it very quickly so that you're producing a more polished piece of work as well. 

James Lawrence: That's really good. I think any listener that's interested in this space and any more practical application I recommend going to Ralph’s site. You've got a newsletter there and your blogs and the content you're creating in the space is really interesting. Actual practical how to write a blog I think, what was the one you had where you're the compare and contrast one? 

Ralph Grayden: Me vs ChatGPT. We're talking in a writing contest, and it beat me at haiku writing, because it is actually very good at writing, where you can give it very strict parameters like that. With a haiku, it has five syllables, seven syllables and five syllables in the third verse. That can be very hard for a human to do.

James Lawrence: Definitely recommend anyone sign up to Ralph's blog. We always finish the pod with the final question of what's the best piece of career advice that you'd give to a marketer? And you can't use Bard or ChatGPT to answer this.

Ralph Grayden: Don't outsource your brain to Google just yet. Anyway, my piece of advice. Look, I came into marketing through a very circuitous route, I guess you would say. I actually started my working life, not my life as a corporate lawyer. And went from there into legal publishing and then into ad land, where I kind of became a copywriter at different ad agencies and stuff. My best piece of career advice is that you don't need to necessarily have one career. You can move around, find what you enjoy as you go along and pursue that. Don't feel that you have to be tied down, the world has moved on since I joined the workforce. And a lot more people kind of think that way. 

James Lawrence: I love it. I think a big theme when people get asked that question is to try to find the stuff that you actually love doing, and you know, you'll do much better in your professional circumstance if you're actually enjoying the day to day of what you're up to. So thanks so much for coming on to the pod.

Ralph Grayden: Thank you for having me. I should mention there's a book as well. 

James Lawrence: What's the book? 

Ralph Grayden: Better, Faster, Smarter: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing with AI for Business, which you can find on Amazon and Kobo and different e-book platforms. It's an e-book. 

James Lawrence: What percentage of the book did you write yourself? 

Ralph Grayden: 100. Yeah, I ran it through ChatGPT, of course, to make sure that it was edited properly, help with the ideas and stuff. But no, it's my work, I love it. 

James Lawrence: Thanks for coming onto the pod.