Content With a POV, Not AI Slop. Morgan Short.

Morgan Short is a content strategist who works with B2B SaaS founders, CEOs, and subject matter experts. She sat down with Dane to talk about why human point of view beats anything a robot can churn out at scale.

Key Takeaways

• The real problem was never making content faster. It was saying something worth listening to.
• SEMrush research found LinkedIn is the #2 most-cited domain in AI answers, about 14% of LLM responses.
• Morgan can fuel a 12-month content calendar from one 60-minute podcast episode.
• Brands can break their own thumbnail rules. Boring corporate thumbnails do not get found.
• Dane's "pre-purposing" plans where content goes before you make it, not after.

Why human point of view matters more than AI

The problem was never speed. It was substance. Morgan put it plainly.

"The problem was never, how do we make content faster? The problem was always, how do we actually say something worth listening to?" — Morgan Short

Everyone is talking about AI right now, and the folks at the top are a little hypnotized by it. CEOs and investors hear they have to AI everything, do it faster, do it cheaper. Morgan gets why. We live in a capitalist society where productivity and efficiency are the gold standard.

But craft still matters. Creating something that pushes through the noise takes real expertise. Morgan told a story she saw on LinkedIn: a content strategist had a well-researched homepage with great copy, and the CEO said let's just throw it through Claude and see what comes out. That, to her, is outsourcing the expertise you hired and paid for to a robot instead.

How AI could price out individual contributors

Morgan's biggest worry is cost. She runs out of tokens on Claude all the time, and she thinks the price is only going up.

"I think it's going to get to a point where individual people running AI, using Claude for example, are going to not be able to afford it anymore." — Morgan Short

Her fear is that subscriptions climb until only the enterprise can afford the tools. The individual contributor gets priced out. She is honest about the emotional side too. She has an existential crisis about AI weekly, maybe daily. She has ridden the whole roller coaster, from awe at what the tool can do to grief for the craft. As she points out, stressing over a word is part of creating really good stories.

What does a video-based hub and spoke strategy look like?

It starts with a video interview, then everything else flows from that one conversation. Morgan is running this exact strategy with a client right now.

She calls it the old hub and spoke SEO standard, updated for AI search. Here is the shape of it:

• Pick a main topic.
• Start with a video interview of the subject matter expert.
• Let that interview inform the written pieces: blogs, an e-book, and more.
• Cut YouTube videos from the same recording.

Dane and Morgan agreed this matches what he is testing with GEO and SEO experts like Christopher Penn, Lee Densmer, and Kayleigh Moore. Nobody can prove it cleanly yet, because AI does not give the same answer twice. But the logic holds. You get the expert's words, their face, and their transcript on your own domain, answering a specific question.

Why LinkedIn and YouTube show up so much in AI answers

People want to hear from people. That is the thread running through the research Morgan cited.

She pointed to SEMrush research from around January. Across ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and Google AI, Reddit ranked #1, LinkedIn #2, then Wikipedia and YouTube. LinkedIn alone showed up in about 14% of LLM answers.

"People want to hear from people still." — Morgan Short

A lot of old SEO tactics still work. The difference now is that anyone can produce slop at scale, so getting it right matters more, not less. Video adds a trust layer too. You can see the person, which is hard to fake. YouTube has the transcripts AI loves, and Dane thinks it is now the number one social source feeding LLMs.

Why scrappy video beats no video

You do not need a $100,000 production. You need something to say. Morgan can get behind scrappy video quality as long as it makes her think differently.

"I can appreciate an iPhone selfie, like, if you are saying something compelling." — Morgan Short

There is a real gap in B2B here. Brands have a Bible for fonts, logos, and colors, but no rules for video. How do we show up on camera? Is webcam okay? Is iPhone okay? Does it have to be polished every time? Those questions go unanswered, so companies freeze and ignore video to their own detriment. Meanwhile YouTube keeps growing as an AI source. Morgan even pushes clients to break brand standards a little, because boring corporate thumbnails do not get found.

Pre-purposing instead of repurposing

Plan where content goes before you make it, not after. Dane calls this pre-purposing, and it flips the usual order.

Repurposing is almost always an afterthought. Pre-purposing means deciding the business need and the reuse plan up front, so the content actually earns its keep. Dane has made plenty of corporate videos that just died on YouTube because no one asked where they would go.

Morgan backs the volume case. As a podcast host, she says she could fuel a 12-month content calendar, even six months easily, from a single 60-minute episode. You just have to use it everywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is AI slop and why does it matter for content?

AI slop is content produced fast at scale with no real point of view. Morgan says anyone can produce something that sucks at scale with AI now. The fix is human-led content with an actual POV, because that problem existed before AI and matters even more now.

Which domains get cited most in AI search answers?

According to SEMrush research from around January, Reddit was #1, LinkedIn #2, then Wikipedia and YouTube. LinkedIn alone appeared in roughly 14% of LLM answers. Morgan reads this as proof that people still want to hear from people.

How much content can you get from one podcast episode?

Morgan says she can fuel a 12-month content calendar from a single 60-minute podcast episode, and could do six months easily. The key is reusing it everywhere: blogs, an e-book, YouTube clips, and social.

Is scrappy iPhone video good enough for B2B?

Yes, as long as you are saying something compelling. Morgan can appreciate an iPhone selfie over a polished $100,000 project if the idea makes her think differently. Substance beats polish.

What is pre-purposing?

Pre-purposing is planning where content will go and what business need it serves before you make it. Dane contrasts it with repurposing, which is usually an afterthought. The goal is to make and reuse content efficiently toward a clear goal.

Full Interview Transcript

Dane: and rejoin. actually it looks like it's okay. So far so good. I had a little problem the other day so I think we're good. Okay so here we go. Hey everybody my name is Dane Frederiksen I'm a B2B video expert and video strategist and I'm here today joined by Morgan Short who is a content strategist as well and we are here to talk about not slop.

Morgan: Okay.

Morgan: That's a good way to put it, not slop. Yes. Content with an actual POV.

Dane: Yeah, so why is that so important in your words, in your mind? I know what I think, but.

Morgan: I mean, it's just, it's all more of the same. And the problem was never, how do we make content faster? The problem was always, how do we actually say something worth listening to?

Dane: And so we're kind of living in two realities where like people like you and I know that, but then there's all these people, the investors and the CEOs are like, we have to AI everything. And there's so much marketing being thrown at them that they're like hypnotized and diluted by what Claude is telling them that we have to AI everything. like, how do we have this conversation that they don't want to have? They just want to like, well, if it's not automation, we shouldn't be talking about it.

Morgan: boy, we just have to keep having it. And that's hard because everyone is talking about AI right now. but I was thinking about a story, I think I saw a post on, on LinkedIn about basically a content strategist going back and forth on a headline, on a, homepage, right? And they, they had a, like well-studied, well-researched homepage with like incredible copy. And then the CEO was like, you know what? Let's just throw that through Claude and see what Claude puts out. And it's like, you're undermining, you're undermining the expertise that you have hired and listening to a robot instead. And that, like the outsourcing of the expertise to Claude after like putting all this effort and time that like drives me nuts. So I think it's just like continuing to push for actual human point of view, human led content. and. You know, CEOs, the folks at the top, they are a little hypnotized by the automation and doing things faster and doing things cheaper. mean, let's face it, we live in a capitalist society, right? Like productivity and efficiency is the gold standard. I think we have to actually like question that a little more and talk about,

Dane: Yeah.

Morgan: Efficiency and productivity aren't the only things we're after here. Craft still matters. Creating something that pushes through the noise actually takes expertise in craft.

Dane: Yeah, and this lines up with the drum that I've been banging on forever is like you've got these subject matter experts in your organization. If you can get them like on camera, like it doesn't take any prep really for them to just talk off the top of their heads about the things that they know that people care about. And then you can take that content, like the video content and the transcripts, and then that becomes valuable content on its own in the written format. like, I feel like the model is there. and to use AI in the right ways that don't affect trust and work against you. So I don't know, there's gotta be some tipping point where the pain points that they're feeling, the dots start getting connected to the solutions that we have. I don't know what it's gonna take. I guess I have this doomsday apocalypse scenario, because I lived through the dot com era, is that a lot of these companies just aren't gonna be around, because they're not gonna figure it out in time, they're not gonna...

Morgan: Yes.

Dane: be able to implement. I don't know, is that your sense as well?

Morgan: I think so. And the thing I've been thinking about a lot when it comes to AI too, is how we're going to get outpriced, like as individual contributors. Like I think AI is, like I run out of tokens all the time on Claude. And I think it's going to get to a point where individual people running AI using Claude, for example, are going to not be able to afford it anymore. They're going to push them up subscription. And then only the enterprise is going to be able to like afford these tools anyway. So that's on my mind. And yes, I have a existential crisis of about AI, probably weekly at this point, maybe even daily. I've been through all of it. I've been through, this is amazing. I'm in awe of what this tool can do to the grief that I feel for the craft and like, well, what about, like, it's not always get to the finish line.

Dane: Mm-hmm.

Morgan: stressing over a word is part of, you know, creating really good stories. and so I've been through the roller coaster of AI feelings as well. And, I just want to validate, what you said about your model. when I first learned about what you were doing and like interviewing founders, subject matter experts about their expertise, I'm like, yeah, this is exactly how you do it. that's what I do in my work as well. I work with.

Dane: Yeah.

Morgan: B2B SaaS companies, so subject matter experts within them, founders, CEOs. And the very first thing we do is we just sit down and we have a 60 minute, not even 60 minute, it could be 15 minutes like you do, conversation where we distill actual human point of view. And then yes, AI can be a tool after you have the actual thinking, the actual distilling of the information. But yeah, I just want to validate that the model that you are seeing is exactly.

Dane: I appreciate it. need all the validation I can get and let's take it one step further and let me run this past you. like the whole idea of AI search, GEO, AEO, whatever we want to call that, that's created a crisis of visibility for a lot of companies. And I think what I'm learning is perhaps the best practices to use video in this model is to use those subject matter experts. answering the specific questions that people are asking in really short videos. And the example that I think of is like in one hour, that's 60 minutes, you could have 60 answers to the top 60 questions people are looking for. And they talk about an efficient way to harvest content. Like you get in their language with their face building trust, not a lot of time. And then you put that content out there. Each one of those video clips becomes, you put it on YouTube on its own. It gets its transcript automatically generated, you can then take that YouTube video, embed that in a blog post answering that specific question on your domain. so you're writing with their words and the transcript and the video on your domain. How is that not going to be attractive for an AI looking for a specific answer with authority? Right. Does that resonate for you? Does that sound like the right? Yeah.

Morgan: Totally. Yes, it does. I'm running that strategy with one of my clients specifically. it's the old hub and spoke SEO standard. Here's a main topic. And then not only are we doing the written content, but it starts with a video interview. And then from there, that informs all of the written pieces, the blogs, the e-book, and then there's YouTube videos within.

Dane: Okay, so you're testing that, I'm testing that too with a handful of people. Christopher Penn from Trust Insights, Lee Densmer, I've got a handful of other GEO and SEO experts, Kaylee Moore I talked to. And so basically like we're all in agreeance that this feels like the right way to go. It's a little hard to test because of the nature of AI not giving the same results every time. What are you finding? What do you expect to find? I'm thinking in the next couple of weeks I should see some signal from the test I started a week or two ago.

Morgan: Did you see the research that came out from SEMrush maybe in like January about the, okay, so it was about basically a bunch of different platforms and what is being found in LLM answers. So it was Reddit as number one, LinkedIn as number two, Wikipedia, and then YouTube in terms of like, For example, LinkedIn is the second most cited domain across chat, GBT search and perplexity and Google AI. Um, and I think it was like something like 14 % of LLM answers were LinkedIn. So it's just like, people want to hear from people still. And I think there's a lot of old SEO tactics that still are at play. It's just a matter of like still having that point of view and having it be human led because otherwise it's just.

Dane: I've seen, yeah.

Morgan: It's literally just AI slop. can just, anyone can produce anything that sucks at scale, with AI now. Yeah. I mean, it, but that problem has existed way beyond, way before AI. Now you just have to do it. It's even more important that you get it right now. Right.

Dane: Yep, slop at scale.

Dane: Yeah, I think so. you know, the stats about what sources come up in which LLMs and, you know, that's always changing. It varies by industry. So like we should be real cautious about saying what, you know, causally, like what actually does like move things. But no question YouTube, you know, it's the second largest search engine besides Google. Google's obviously going to push that pretty hard. It's got the transcripts, which AI loves. It's got the validation trust layer of being video content so you can see the person rather than maybe it's AI written or ghost written. like, this is pretty hard to fake even still. I think, I mean, I don't know. Are we really here? Anyway.

Morgan: Yes.

Morgan: I think, I think brands too, like, one thing that I have been pushing a little bit with the client that I'm running this, kind of video-based hub and spoke, strategy with is like, it's okay to break brand standards a little bit. Like, like the boring thumbnails that are like, like very corporatey is not what's going to get found on, on like, it's, it's not, it's not making me want to engage with you. Right. So it's okay. Yeah.

Dane: Mm-hmm.

Dane: YouTube is an entertainment platform. So businesses haven't caught on to that yet. You you have two audiences, you got people and bots. And so maybe the bots don't care about thumbnails, but I think there is just like this gap in B2B for having a strategy or a plan or brand guidelines around video in general.

Morgan: Yeah, it's okay to get creative. Yeah.

Morgan: Mm-hmm.

Dane: How do we show up on camera? Is webcam okay? Is iPhone okay? Does it have to be polished every time? What kind of like motion graphics do we use? What kind of thumbnails do we use? Which I think is a pretty obvious gap to me as a video expert. But think about it, like any brand Bible you've ever seen, they talk about their fonts, their logos, the colors, don't do this, always do that. And they've got all these rules. But there's like this no rules for video. And so... It's like, okay, well, we're just stuck and we don't even look, haven't even put any effort into figuring this out because they're not video experts. And that's why they need people like us or like me at the table that are video experts that can help them solve these problems, answer these questions and avoid expensive mistakes. you know, Like a million dollar mistake in video land is pretty easy to make with some bad decision making like, let's build a studio. Well, was that the good idea in the first place? Or like maybe there was a better way to go than AI avatars or something like terrible decision.

Morgan: Yeah.

Morgan: I can get behind scrappy video quality as long as, and we're gonna come right back to it, you have something to say. You have something that like makes me think differently. I don't need to engage in a high quality like 100K video project. I can appreciate an iPhone selfie. Like if you are saying something compelling.

Dane: Yep. Yeah.

Dane: Yeah, it's the way I was talking about is is there's a place for all of it. You know, before corporate video had to be polished, you know, picture perfect, everything like that. But now after the pandemic, after iPhones, after webcam, social media, there's this whole other lane that didn't exist anymore. that is still professional quality, like you point to. As long as you're saying something of value, in a lot of cases you can get away with iPhone and webcam, that's fine. But people haven't quite figured out what's okay, when and how, because they kind of know that this other stuff is important too. So there's all these decisions that need to get made that people are just too busy and overwhelmed to even handle this. So they're kind of drowning as YouTube becomes more and more of a source. I think it's the number one social source now for LLMs.

Morgan: Yeah.

Morgan: Mm-hmm.

Dane: So companies are ignoring video because they can't deal with it to their detriment. Because we have this land grab right now of who's going to show up in the LLMs of the future when they get trained on the data that's out there. I think this is the time to move and the scrappy video like you talk about, that's got to be a big part of it when you're talking about volume because you just cannot do $100,000 videos every month unless you're anthropic.

Morgan: So as a podcast host myself, I can say I can fuel a 12 month content calendar from a 60 minute podcast episode, like easily a month. not me, I could probably even do six months with one 60 minute podcast video. You just gotta use it everywhere.

Dane: Yeah, you need a plan, a blueprint, a strategy, whatever we want to call it. It's so amazing that repurposing is such an afterthought. I always advocate for what I call pre-purposing. It's like, it's not that hard to think about where is this going to go? What business use does this have to meet in order to be worthwhile? And so many times I've made corporate videos that just die on YouTube.

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah.

Morgan: Right.

Morgan: I like the idea of pre-purposing. think I've heard that before, maybe, but tell me what you mean by that.

Dane: Well, I don't know that I made it up. Maybe I did. can't even remember, but it's basically just the idea is like repurposing is always an afterthought. Well, what if we made a plan ahead of time for what business need we have and how we're going to actually make the content and reuse it, recycle it in different ways that make sense efficiently to accomplish a goal. Imagine that.

Morgan: Where does this go? Yeah.

Morgan: Yeah, imagine that.

Dane: So we're out of time. It's been a great conversation. Thanks again for making time and I'll see you on LinkedIn.

Morgan: Yeah. Sounds good, Dane. Thanks for having me on. Bye.

Dane: Okay, bye.