1075 – You Ask Tom Answers: Tom talks Ask Tom A Question

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In this episode of Screw the Commute, Tom Antion answers a collection of common questions he regularly receives from entrepreneurs, covering AI, email marketing, automation, audio equipment, and his internet marketing school.
Tom explains that he primarily uses AI as an advanced search engine, similar to a supercharged version of Ask Jeeves. He uses detailed prompts to get better results and relies on AI for research, outlines, graphics, short videos, and planning projects—such as organizing the premiere of his upcoming documentary. He emphasizes doing basic SEO correctly but not obsessing over it, noting that clear, high-quality content helps both search engines and AI systems.
Addressing whether email is “dead,” Tom strongly disagrees. He states that email remains one of the most profitable and controllable marketing tools, especially compared to social media platforms that can restrict or remove accounts without warning. He stresses that top-level marketers still rely heavily on email.
On automation, Tom highlights several tools he considers essential:
• ShortKeys (PC) or Keyboard Maestro (Mac) for text expansion and macros, which save massive amounts of time and keystrokes.
• Elgato Stream Deck for automating tasks like lighting, launching programs, and video setup with a single button.
• Email rules and filters to organize messages, reduce overwhelm, and instantly identify important emails like sales notifications.
Tom also explains why he no longer promotes the Blue Yeti microphone. He now recommends dynamic microphones over condenser mics because they reject background noise better, making them ideal for home or shared offices. He suggests affordable options like the ATR2100 for beginners.
Finally, Tom discusses his Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia (IMTCVA), a licensed, distance-learning certificate school. Students can complete the program in as little as six months, often earning money before graduating. Those in his mentor program receive a scholarship that can be used or gifted. He emphasizes that digital marketing skills are in high demand and provide far more practical value than traditional college paths.
The episode reinforces Tom’s core message: leverage AI wisely, control your marketing through email, automate everything possible, invest in practical tools and skills, and focus on becoming valuable in today’s digital economy.

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Episode 1075 – Ask Tom A Question
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1075 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today it's ask Tom a question. These are just a compilation of various questions I get through the weeks and through the months. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Hope you didn't miss episode 1074. That was all about pencil pushers. I don't want you to be a pencil pusher. Right? They are too susceptible to getting kicked out of wherever they're working. All right, pick up a copy of our automation book. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Make sure you get version 3.0. That's the latest. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school IMTCVA.org, the only licensed dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. Had a question about it. We'll talk about it a little bit later. And it is certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning.
[00:01:26] Okay. Let's get to some of the questions. This is one of the ones I get I don't know how many times a week. Okay. Tom, how are you using AI? Artificial intelligence. Well, I use it mostly as a search engine now, and I use it other ways. I'll talk about in a minute. But this is another reason why years and years ago, before AI was even thought of that, I said, don't kill yourself on SEO search engine optimization.
[00:02:01] Do the basics. I have plenty of episodes on the basics that you should do, just not to shoot yourself in the foot. But AI is compiling all of this stuff, and if you're doing anything, make sure you show up in AI and it's some of the basic things you would have done anyway. High quality topics that are very clear on a page by themselves, so that it's clear what the page is about. Nothing fancy here folks, but I use it mostly as a search engine. It's kind of like if you've been around a long time, you might have remembered Ask Jeeves, okay, which was a search engine where you could ask normal questions to not just using keywords. Well, AI is like Ask Jeeves on super steroids because I make prompts, they call them that are very detailed so that I get what I want on the first try as best as possible. And then if I don't get it, then I refine the prompt, and I use it a lot for creating graphics, creating videos, and creating outlines for things. For instance, I've got my documentary coming up pretty soon. So the the producer of it, the US, lost their partner to some disease or cancer, I think. And so I took over the executive production of this thing that's about me.
[00:03:29] Okay. So I don't want you to think that's all arrogance or anything, but I had to take it over. It's been years in the making. So, um, thinking about how to premiere it and for the best bang for my buck. And so the AI told me here, here's how a lot of people are doing premieres. Their premiered on this topic. They're doing this live stream and, you know, all the stuff involved. So so I'm using it for outlines now. I have not used it to help me write a book. I haven't written a book for a couple of years now, I think, but I would use it for an outline of that. But I would still use all my own stories and my information. So it didn't look to be AI, it just did the work for me. Laying out the outline, which is what I used to do with books on the look in function on Amazon to review other books on the topic, say so. So I'm not. There's nothing crazy about it. I'm just using it more like a search engine now. And to create graphics and short videos. I didn't do any long videos with it, just short videos and outlines for different things that I want to do. All right, so that's how I'm using AI currently. As of what the heck is it the end of January 2026? Okay, next question.
[00:04:51] Do you still believe in email? People were saying that email is dead. Well, well, like I've said for years, I mean, this email was dead. Thing has been it's, you know, it's one of the most live dead things for the past 6 or 7 years when people keep saying that and the people that say that are the ones that sell social media training, pretty much because everybody at my level and above my level, the main money is from email. So yes, I still believe in email. Yes, I still do it. Yes, you should go get my masterclass on on that. And yeah, because it's totally under your control. The social media stuff, somebody can turn a dial and you disappear off the face of the earth, or they can kick you off because they don't like something you said about something. So yes. Email. I still believe in it. Still use it all the time. Okay. Uh Tom. What are some of your best automation techniques? Well, you hear me talking about this all the time. And the book that I give away on every one of these episodes is screwthecommute.com/automatefree gives you all the details of this, and there's also some update episodes until I come out with version four about steam decks and things like that, which I'll mention here in a minute. But anyway, one of the still one of the most powerful ones is short keys.
[00:06:18] Shortkeys.com you are literally crazy if you don't use this program and and make your employees use it. Also as long as they're on a PC. Now an equivalent program is called Keyboard Maestro for a mac, but it's called a macro program, and I have been using it since 1997 with various upgrades. And we actually estimated it saved me as of now, probably over 9 million keystrokes. So basically you can pick like A1 is Antion.com G1 is great internet marketing training. You know, those kinds of things. Those are just simple web pages or web pages to go to or websites. But you could have a whole answer to, like all these questions that you get all the time in your business and set like two, like a letter and a number and types in the whole answer for you. You could you could just about type in War and peace as the answer. And you can still customize the answer. So you literally are crazy if you don't use this, it would take you, I don't know, 30 minutes to figure out how to use it. And then longer thing would be to start putting in all the things that you get all the time and and then every time you get a question you've heard, well, my deal is if I get a question that I've heard more than once, then I'll put the answer in short keys.
[00:07:51] And that way I don't have to retype the whole thing when I get that same question. Bam! Now I can customize it a little bit at the top if if it need be, and send the answer back to people. And I don't have to. I mean, even if you had the answer saved in a file somewhere, you'd have to remember where is it? Which one is it? I'm busy doing something else, and I got to stop my train of thought to go find it, and then copy and paste it and email it to people. That's all out the window. And it's like a 20 or $30 program, one time fee. So yeah, you're crazy. If you don't go use either Keyboard maestro or Short keys. Okay, another thing that's more recent is a stream deck. So I have it where I can hit a button and it sets the lights for my video and turns on the video. You can hit another button and it opens up a program. And, you know, let's say you need three programs to do something like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and something else. Then you can have one button, opens them all up and gets them ready for you, you know, so it'll do a million things more than that. But it's called a stream Deck by Elgato. I did a whole series on Elgato Week not too long ago, so just go to.
[00:09:13] Where all my training videos are, and you can see that Elgato Week, which was going to be added to the the new version of the Automate Free book once I go to 4.0. Okay. And then another thing that I've been using for 100 years or more, maybe 110 years, I think could be 120. I, you know, after 100 years, I kind of forget when I started something. Right. But it's setting rules for your email. See, I've had people crying the blues. And, you know, I have 1800 high level students over the years, and, I don't know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and in speeches and they're all crying about this email. Remember I just told you email is not dead. It's smacked. In fact, more emails are coming all the time. All right, so you set rules for your email to put them in different boxes or turn them different colors, or ring a bell or something when it comes in. My nickname is the King of Catching because for years, as soon as an order would come in, I'd have it turn a certain color and then go, Ka ching, ka ching, ka ching. We had to turn it off because it was, you know, annoying after a while. Uh, but heck of a way to get annoyed, right? So yes, quit crying about email.
[00:10:31] You wouldn't cry about it so much if money was in it, right? Uh, but some things you don't want to look at right away. Some things you do want to look at, but not right now. So you set rules when you recognize as the subject line or who it's from, and puts it in different folders for you and all these things that are easily done. If you just set your set your rules and you wouldn't have to cry so much and you wouldn't get overwhelmed as easily. I never get overwhelmed. In fact, I actually like spam email because I like to look at subject lines and see what really grabbed me. And you know what? And I can easily, after doing this for 30 years, I can zoom through the spam folder and just see, look at things and, and say, wow, that's a pretty cool subject line. Even though the, the person that sent it's a piece of shit because they're spammer, right? The subject line was good, so I might save that. So that's a little bit about automation. Things that I use all the time. Okay. Let's see. Next question is why aren't you promoting the Blue Yeti microphone like you used to? Well, that's because I've evolved and learned more about high quality audio. The microphone I'm talking to you right now is a sure sm7 B it's an expensive microphone, but the type of microphone is what's most important for people like us that have home offices or shared office space, and the type of mic is called a dynamic mic.
[00:12:08] Well, the Blue Yeti microphones are called condenser mics and they're super sensitive. And you might say, well, Tom, that's great if they're sensitive and they're inexpensive, right? No, it's not unless you have a totally controlled environment and a soundproof booth. It's going to pick up all the crap that you don't want it to pick up the air conditioning and fans and the dog that's barking three, three houses down, you know. So you don't really want that sensitive microphone when you're doing the stuff that we do. So you want a dynamic microphone and it doesn't have to be this fancy Shure one. You could start out for 6070 bucks with I think ATR 2100 or ATR 2100. X is the newer model, but you don't even use the X feature. So if you find a used ATR 2100. For 30 bucks, take it. All right. Because it's both USB and it has the professional type cable too. Depending depending on which kind of system you're you're running it through. So um, so that's why I'm not promoting the Blue Yeti anymore because it's a condenser mic and not that I don't like them. They were great, except they were just too sensitive compared to these, uh, dynamic mics. Okay.
[00:13:32] All right, so back to the school thing I told you about. Is your deal with your school still available? Yes. So the school, uh, it's the internet marketing training center of Virginia, but it's distance, quality, distance learning. And you can it's a certificate school, and you can get your certificate as little as six months. But we've had several students making lots of money before they even graduated. And it's been running by, uh owe, like close to 14 years now. It's a boutique school. We don't have hundreds and hundreds of people at any one time, so you get plenty of attention. And we have a live update every week to, you know, new stuff is happening all the time. The alumni can access all the training after they leave for refreshers. It's just beautiful. So the deal that I think you're talking about is if you're in my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com you get a scholarship to the school, which you can either use for extra training or gift to somebody, and it would be the one of the best legacy gifts you could ever give somebody because, uh, it gives you a highly in demand skill. See, these companies are they're laying you may have heard, uh, the pencil. Well, the 1074, the last episode on Pencil Pushers, it was about all these people getting laid off because they couldn't do anything. They were just, you know, bureaucracy, doing nothing all day long.
[00:15:03] And they people got rid of them. Well, they don't get rid of the people that really can do, do things and help the company. That's if you want that dreaded j-o-b, which I don't promote. But if you are in a j-o-b, you don't want to be worrying. You're going to get laid off any time. With the skills that you get on the internet. Every business on earth needs internet and digital marketing, say so. It's a highly in demand skill, and little is six months. You'll be on your way and you'll know more than 98% of business owners out there. And you can either hire yourself as a contractor to them, get a job with them, have your own business, or both. So that's what it is. And so the deal was, if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to the school, which you can either use or gift to somebody else. Uh, just on the open market, it's $19,000. Uh, I think it's 19,100 with the the the feed of sign up. Now we do have a 50% scholarship for military in their families, first responders and their families, law enforcement and their families, nurses and their families. So that's like a nine some thousand dollars scholarship, $9,500 scholarship if you were in one of those fields. All right. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
[00:16:25] Check it all out at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com if you like that school idea, check it out at. Which is the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia and a certified to operate by Chevron, which is, like I said, probably the only one in the country that is dedicated to that field. Yeah, there's big schools that have courses among their other 300 courses, and I guarantee you they're not taught by a multimillionaire or they wouldn't be there. Right. So So it's a really unique and powerful situation for you. And it can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars of being out of the workforce and going to a four year college. If your kids are considering that or if you're considering that for your kids. And I hate to say this, but you've been brainwashed for 100 years. When I went to school, yeah, we learned something, but nowadays they're just they're faking the grade point averages. They're they're making them higher, even though they're teaching less. And they're raising tuitions to the point that it's just crazy. So check out this this opportunity, which can be done while you're working or in conjunction with a regular school. So check it out at IMTCVA.org and I'm available at Tom@screwthecommute.com if you have questions. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.