482: Need A Twin? How To Use AI To Clone Yourself With Jodie Cook

Podcast: Download (Duration: 45:15 — 52.1MB)

You can clone yourself with AI today by feeding your books, podcast transcripts, courses and frameworks into a coaching platform that talks to your audience in your voice. In this episode I sat down with Jodie Cook, founder of Coachvox AI, who has already built a working AI version of herself that has run over 1,000 coaching conversations with paying and non-paying clients. Coachvox walks a creator through seven “training rooms” that set your style, your onboarding questions, your content and your boundaries, and Jodie says most creators can go live in a couple of days if they push.

If you have a course, a membership site, a podcast or a stack of articles sitting on your hard drive, this is the fastest way I have seen to turn that “dusty content” into a 24/7 version of you that answers repeat questions, qualifies leads and even sells access to your brain for a monthly fee.

Here is exactly how the technology works, what it takes to train it, where the money is, and the honest limits.

Get My Free Mini Course On How To Start A Successful Ecommerce Store

If you are interested in starting an ecommerce business, I put together a comprehensive package of resources that will help you launch your own online store from complete scratch. Be sure to grab it before you leave!

Click Here To Download

Key takeaways

• Cloning yourself with AI means training a model on your own content (books, podcasts, courses, articles) so it can hold a coaching conversation in your voice, not just spit facts.
• Coachvox AI uses a 7-room training flow: style sliders, your bio, your language and Steve-isms, onboarding questions, content upload, live fine-tuning, and lead capture setup.
• Jodie built Jodie.ai as a free proof of concept and it has already handled 1,000+ coaching conversations without her being in the room.
• Real creators are monetizing three ways: charging around $10/month for access, using the bot for lead capture and email collection, and dropping it into paid membership sites to reclaim 10+ hours a week of Q&A time.
• The bottleneck is not training. It is prepping the source content. Books and podcasts contain a lot of “fluff” that has to be cut down to the frameworks, lessons and repeatable answers.
• You can lock the AI so it only answers from your uploaded content, or open it up to pull from the wider internet when it does not know something. Boundaries (no ice cream flavor questions, no “cancel me” bait) are set the same way.

What does it mean to clone yourself with AI?

Cloning yourself with AI means training an AI model on your own content so it can hold a two-way conversation with your audience in your voice, walk them through your frameworks, and answer the questions you get asked over and over. It is not just a searchable index of your writing. It is a coaching-style conversation with a version of you that is available 24/7.

Jodie framed it clearly on the episode. Most creator content today is “dusty,” sitting in books nobody reads and courses nobody takes anymore. An AI clone brings that content back to life inside an actual chat, so your audience can ask a question and get your answer in your tone, without you being in the room.

The important distinction: this is not the same as pointing ChatGPT at your blog. A proper clone is trained on your frameworks, given your onboarding questions, and fenced in so it only speaks from your material. That is what makes it feel like you.

How Coachvox AI trains a clone of you (the 7 training rooms)

Coachvox AI trains a clone of you through seven sequential training rooms that each shape a different layer of the AI, from tone all the way to lead capture. Jodie walked me through every room on the episode. Here is the full flow.

Training room 1: style sliders

Style sliders match the AI’s default behavior to how you actually communicate. You set where you sit on coach vs mentor, formal vs informal, serious vs humorous, and short punchy responses vs long considered ones.

Slide toward “coach” and the AI asks more follow-up questions to dig to root cause. Slide toward “mentor” and it gives more direct answers up front. Get this room right and the AI already sounds a lot more like you before a single piece of content is uploaded.

Training room 2: your bio and expertise

You give the AI a written overview of who you are: your expertise, what lights you up, what you are motivated by, what makes you tick. This is the same context you would give a new employee on day one.

The bio is what the AI leans on when it is asked meta questions about you, and it colors everything downstream.

Training room 3: your language and “Steve-isms”

You feed the AI your verbal tics: how you greet people, how you sign off, what you say before you ask a question, what you say before you make a statement. Jodie called them Steve-isms.

The reason is familiarity. When a subscriber logs in and the AI opens the way you actually open, they know within one line who they are talking to.

Training room 4: onboarding questions

Every coach has a short list of qualifying questions they ask before they can help. Coachvox lets you bake those into the AI so it asks them first.

One Coachvox creator is a relationship counselor. His AI asks whether the person is married, how long they have been together, how they met.

Only then does it start coaching. You decide whether each question is a hard gate or a nice-to-have.

Training room 5: content upload

Room 5 is where you actually feed the AI your material. Coachvox takes text-based content today (books, articles, transcripts, course notes) and formats it into the shape the model needs to train.

You do not need to upload everything you have ever produced. Jodie was firm on this.

Upload the highest-hitting frameworks, the material where clients tell you “this is game-changing,” and skip the rest. Podcasts and books have a lot of fluff, and the fluff dilutes the model.

Training room 6: live fine-tuning (the fun room)

Room 6 is where you have a live conversation with the AI version of yourself. You ask the questions your real audience asks. You rate every answer from 1 to 5 stars.

Five-star responses go back in and reinforce the model. One or two-star responses get edited into what you would actually have said, and the edit goes back in. Jodie calls this the fun part, and it is where most creators end up spending their time.

Training room 7: lead capture and deployment

Room 7 sets what data you collect before someone talks to the AI (name, email) and where the AI actually lives. About a third of Coachvox creators drop the AI into an existing membership site.

Another third put it on their public website as a lead-gen tool. The remaining third charge for access outright.

You can also teach the AI to route people to a call booking link, a course checkout, or a specific product page.

How long does it take to clone yourself with AI?

You can clone yourself with AI in a couple of days of focused work if you already have good source content, or spread it over a six-week program if you want to do it right. Coachvox’s initial cohort ran on a six-week cadence, week by week, and Jodie is opening the platform to 100 creators at a time going forward.

Rough time budget, based on how Jodie described it:

• Training rooms 1 through 3 (style, bio, language): a few hours.
• Training room 5 (content prep and upload): variable, driven entirely by how clean your source material already is.
• Training room 6 (fine-tuning): open-ended, and this is where the model actually gets good. Plan to live here.

The bulk of the work is the content prep in room 5, not the training itself.

The three business models creators are using

Coachvox creators are monetizing their AI clones in three ways today. All three came directly from the episode.

1. Charge for access as a $10/month subscription

Some creators are simply charging for access to the AI version of them. Jodie mentioned one who runs it at $10/month and has “quite a few” clients on it. Coachvox does not currently handle billing for that use case, so the creator wires up their own subscription; billing may become a native feature later.

The pitch is straightforward: your brain, available all the time, for less than the cost of one real coaching session.

2. Free access as a lead magnet and email builder

The second group puts the AI on their public site with no paywall. The AI collects an email address before the conversation starts, so every session builds the list. The AI can also be trained to route users to a call booking page, a course, or a product.

Jodie described this as the 2023 version of writing a book or hosting a podcast. It is content that talks back.

3. Drop it inside a paid membership or Facebook group

The third group installs the AI inside an existing membership site or Facebook group, where members already pay to be. The pitch there is different: you are reclaiming the 10+ hours a week you currently spend answering the same repeat questions. Members get instant answers, you get your time back, and the perceived value of the membership goes up.

What content works best for training an AI clone?

Content that is already structured (question-and-answer, framework-driven, headline-per-paragraph) works best for training an AI clone, and generic conversational content works worst. Jodie described one Coachvox creator who has been writing books for a decade with a headline over every paragraph.

“It is almost like she has been writing for 10 years with a view to training an AI model. It is absolutely magical.”

Practical rules from the episode:

• FAQ answers, membership Q&A logs, and course lesson transcripts are gold.
• Long-form podcast transcripts work but need heavy trimming to strip verbal fluff.
• Frameworks and pillars (named steps, named phases) are the highest-leverage upload because the AI can walk clients through them.
• Do not dump everything you have ever made. Curate to the highest-value 20%.

Can the AI go off the rails or plagiarize?

Coachvox includes safeguards against the AI going off the rails or plagiarizing, and creators can also set explicit boundaries. Jodie’s team runs a “questions to get me canceled” exercise where testers try to get the AI to say something terrible. She says the AI holds up well: it stays pragmatic, it stays on topic, and it will politely refuse.

You can also teach the AI hard boundaries. Jodie’s AI refuses to talk about her favorite ice cream flavor or favorite film and pushes the conversation back to business. Creators decide what is off-limits (personal life, religion, appearance, whatever) and train the boundary in.

On plagiarism, the answer is architectural. Because Coachvox AI is trained on your content only (unless you toggle it to also pull from the wider internet), it should not be reproducing anyone else’s copy.

How Coachvox AI handles IP and data privacy

Coachvox AI is built on top of large language model infrastructure and uses ring-fencing to keep creator content separated between accounts. Jodie was open on the episode that data privacy is a big topic right now. Apple banned employees from using ChatGPT the same week ChatGPT launched on iPhone, and Samsung famously had engineers paste proprietary source code into a public chatbot.

Her framing is that creators should not be the ones losing here. Someone can already go to ChatGPT, paste in the title and subheadings of your article, and get back something that echoes your language. Coachvox’s position is that creators should get the proceeds when their work is turned into an AI, whether that means charging for access or capturing the leads.

Where is AI coaching and content going next?

AI coaching is moving toward private, siloed content and personal “boards” of AI advisors that live on your phone and in your wardrobe, according to Jodie’s read. She sees more content moving behind memberships that cannot be crawled, which she thinks creates an opening for creators who already have an audience and can pull members into a walled space.

The bigger prediction was about how people will actually consume expertise. Jodie sees a near future where each of us has a board of AI coaches (marketing, sales, health, relationship, fitness) that we talk to freely, and where the version built on a real named human beats the generic model because it carries a point of view.

One tension I raised on the episode: if content sites lose all their traffic to AI answers, creators stop publishing publicly, and the AI eventually starves. Jodie’s answer was that the default may flip from opt-out (assume your content will be crawled) to opt-in.

Should you clone yourself with AI right now?

You should clone yourself with AI right now if you already have a body of teaching content (a course, a book, hundreds of articles or podcast episodes) and you are spending real hours every week answering the same repeat questions. The technology is early, and it will get better, but the creators who train their model now get the benefit of every future platform upgrade without extra work.

If you have no content library, no repeat audience, and no framework you teach, an AI clone is premature. Build the audience and the frameworks first, then clone the version of you that has something worth cloning.

Frequently asked questions

What does it mean to clone yourself with AI?

Cloning yourself with AI means training an AI model on your own content (books, podcasts, courses, articles) so it can hold a two-way conversation in your voice, ask your onboarding questions, and walk people through your frameworks. It is more than a search index of your writing; it behaves like a coaching session with you.

What is Coachvox AI?

Coachvox AI is a platform, founded by Jodie Cook, that lets creators and coaches build an AI version of themselves through a seven-room guided training flow. The rooms cover style, bio, language, onboarding questions, content upload, live fine-tuning, and lead capture.

How much does it cost to clone yourself with AI?

Coachvox pricing is on their site and changes over time, but Jodie described the platform as running in cohorts of 100 creators at a time with a done-with-you six-week program. Creators who charge end users for access to their AI clone typically set that at around $10/month based on the examples Jodie shared.

How long does it take to train an AI clone?

You can go live in a couple of days if you push and your content is already clean, or over six weeks in the guided program. The first three training rooms take a few hours, content prep is the bulk of the work, and the fine-tuning conversation in room 6 is open-ended.

Is my content safe when I upload it to an AI clone platform?

Coachvox AI uses separated databases and ring-fencing so one creator’s content does not leak into another’s model. Broader data privacy across all AI platforms is an evolving area, and Jodie was direct that regulation is still catching up.

Can an AI clone replace a human coach?

An AI clone can handle repeat questions, walk clients through your named frameworks, and be available 24/7 at a fraction of the cost of a live session. It does not fully replace a human coach for high-stakes, emotional or nuanced work today, but Jodie expects the gap to close as models get better and people get more comfortable talking to AI.

What kind of content trains an AI clone best?

Question-and-answer material, FAQ logs, membership Q&A, course lesson transcripts, and any writing that already has a headline over each paragraph train an AI clone best. Long conversational podcast transcripts work but need to be trimmed down to the frameworks and lessons first.

Ready To Get Serious About Starting An Online Business?

If you are really considering starting your own online business, then you have to check out my free mini course on How To Create A Niche Online Store In 5 Easy Steps.

In this 6 day mini course, I reveal the steps that my wife and I took to earn 100 thousand dollars in the span of just a year. Best of all, it's absolutely free!