Episode Summary: A very special 10-year anniversary episode reflecting on a decade of content creation, the story behind 155 consecutive podcast episodes, and Mike's pivot into AI. From Adobe tutorials to RAG systems, hear how he evolved from Tech Handyman to RAG Handyman — and what's next for the Mike Murphy Content Factory.

What You'll Learn

• Why Mike put Mike Murphy Unplugged on the shelf after 155 consecutive weekly episodes
• How a decade of Adobe and creative tutorials turned into 1,700+ YouTube videos
• The scary, deliberate pivot from Adobe tutorials to AI content
• What RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is and why it matters for creators
• The evolution from Tech Handyman to Podcast Handyman to RAG Handyman

The Podcast Origin Story

Mike launched Mike Murphy Unplugged in September 2015, writing 3,500-word scripts every single week and recording them word for word. That pace carried him through 155 consecutive episodes before he hit the wall and had to press pause — not to end the show, but to put it on the shelf while he kept building elsewhere. The podcast is also what led to a book, a Domestika course, a job at a podcast startup, and a long list of relationships in the podcast and creator world.

Content Creation Journey

While the podcast was paused, YouTube became Mike's workshop. The simple formula — learn something useful, fire up ScreenFlow, make a tutorial on the spot — resulted in over 1,700 videos across 10 years, including a 365-videos-in-365-days challenge in 2017. He also wrote hundreds of articles on Medium, rounding out a content trifecta of audio, video, and writing, and started calling himself a "tech handyman" for it.

The AI Transition

After a decade building an audience around Adobe and creative-tutorial content, pivoting to AI content meant real self-doubt: would an audience that expects After Effects tutorials follow along into topics like Hugging Face, vibe coding, and Claude Code? Mike made the leap anyway — learning Python, terminal commands, and automation workflows, and building an AI playground on a virtual private server to experiment in public.

RAG Systems Deep Dive

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is the current focus of Mike's AI work: building AI knowledge bases out of existing content so creators and small businesses can generate new material, develop course outlines, write scripts, and answer audience questions — all in their own voice, pulled from their own back catalog. That idea is the seed of what Mike calls the Mike Murphy Content Factory.

Becoming the RAG Handyman

The identity arc: Tech Handyman → Podcast Handyman → AI Handyman → RAG Handyman. The mission stays the same across every label — make complex systems accessible and practical for content creators and small businesses, not just engineers.

What RAG Can Do For You

Content generation — build on existing work with new angles and ideas Course creation — develop outlines that match your teaching style Script writing — maintain a consistent voice across formats…

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Episode Summary: A Happy New Year check-in — a walk down memory lane through Mike's path from a one-man band in Naples, Florida to nearly a decade of content creation, plus a look ahead at 2024 goals.

What You'll Learn

• Mike's background: English degree, a law school master's he's never used, and a decade of Adobe/creative tech deep-diving
• Why he put his name in the podcast title against conventional advice, and why that still made sense to him
• How Mike Murphy Unplugged led to a full-time job at Simplecast, later acquired by SiriusXM
• The 2024 goals: launching Terrapin Textures digital products, reaching 50,000 YouTube subscribers, and a return trip to the Camino de Santiago

This episode covers: who Mike is and when and why he started his online business and this podcast, what his goals were then versus now, what the future holds for Mike Murphy Unplugged, and what would make 2024 a successful year.

Why His Name Is in the Title

Mike put his name in the podcast title for a reason, despite plenty of advice against it when he first launched: this is his personal show, his audio journal. After publishing over 150 episodes in a row, he put the podcast on the back burner while working a full-time job and shifting focus to YouTube — but he never considered shutting it down. It was always just a matter of time before regular episodes resumed.

Who Is Mike Murphy?

Born in Syracuse, New York, Mike graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in English and holds a law degree from the University of Denver he's never practiced with. He's lived in Missoula, Montana; Portland, Oregon; Concord, New Hampshire; Durango, Colorado; and now Naples, Florida, where he moved to help friends from Durango open a fine-art portrait studio. Over nearly 10 years there, he built deep expertise in tech, design, creativity, and the Adobe software he still uses today — learning constantly through podcasts, Lynda.com courses, and YouTube, a habit that hasn't changed.

In January 2015, Mike launched his own online business to share what he was learning. By August of that year, he launched Mike Murphy Unplugged to document the journey — the tools, resources, and steps toward making a full-time living as a content creator. Publishing episode one remains one of the proudest moments of his life, not because he had a podcast, but because it marked the start of something meaningful: creating the life he wanted on his own terms.

From Podcast to Career

Mike Murphy Unplugged — and teaching others how to podcast — landed him a full-time job at podcast startup Simplecast, later acquired by SiriusXM. It was a great three-plus year run, but the Zoom-and-Slack grind eventually pushed him toward burnout. The cure was a 40-plus day pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago across France and Spain, an experience so worthwhile it was worth losing the job over when he got back a few months later — and he wasn't sorry about it.

Goals: Then and Now

When Mike started, the goal was simply to make a living learning and teaching creative and technical skills — that North Star ha…

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Episode Summary: A behind-the-scenes look at creating Mike's first online class, Introduction to Adobe Audition, with the creative-education platform Domestika — from the first pitch email to filming in their New York City studios.

What You'll Learn

• What Domestika is and how it works as an online creative-education platform
• What Mike's Introduction to Adobe Audition course covers and who it's for
• The full production timeline, from the first acquisitions email to filming in Domestika's NYC studios
• What it's like to film a course on-location, including finishing the recording right before Hurricane Ian hit

This episode covers: what Domestika is, what the course covers, who it's for, what you'll learn, how to take it, how much it costs, how Mike got started working with Domestika, how he made the course, and how it's gone since launch. There's also a course trailer on YouTube.

What Is Domestika?

Domestika is a multi-lingual online learning platform offering courses and workshops across creative topics — design, illustration, photography, animation, and more. It originated in Spain, has been around for over 20 years, and is one of the largest platforms for creative education in the world, with over 8 million registered students across 50-plus countries and 8 languages.

The Course: Introduction to Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition is a digital audio workstation (DAW) used for recording, editing, mixing, and mastering audio — part of the Adobe Creative Cloud bundle, used by podcasters, content creators, film and video editors, sound designers, and musicians. If you've used Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Reaper, Audacity, or GarageBand, Audition serves the same role.

The course is for content creators, podcasters, musicians, sound designers, and anyone wanting to learn Audition, whether brand new to audio production or a seasoned pro switching DAWs. Domestika's Basics courses are its best-selling format, aimed at beginners and broken into mini-courses with practice lessons at the end of each section.

What you'll learn:

1. Getting Started with Adobe Audition
2. Adding Media and Recording Audio
3. Editing: Waveform and Multitrack
4. Effects and Processing
5. Exporting and Saving Projects

You can find the course at mikemurphy.co/domestika. Pricing and any promotional discount mentioned in the original episode are specific to the March 2023 launch window and are not repeated here since they're almost certainly stale — check the course page directly for current pricing.

Timeline for Making the Course

June 2022 — An acquisitions/curation manager based in NYC reached out, and Mike had an introductory call to discuss course ideas. Domestika didn't yet have a Basics course on Audition, so that became the direction. Within days of the call, Mike received and signed a proposal.

July 2022 (Course Structure) — Mike met with his assigned content manag…

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Episode Summary: An early, playful experiment: the entire script for this episode was written by ChatGPT, and Mike read it word for word to teach the basics of AI and how podcasters could put it to use back in 2023.

What You'll Learn

• The entire script for this episode was written by ChatGPT and read word for word — an early experiment in AI-generated content
• The difference between narrow AI, general AI, and strong AI
• How ChatGPT works, from input to generated response
• Practical ways podcasters can use AI for transcription, audio optimization, and audience engagement
• The ethical and social considerations ChatGPT itself raised about using AI in podcasting

The Confession

The entire script of this episode was written by ChatGPT in a matter of minutes, and Mike read it word for word. The goal was to have a little fun while teaching the basics of AI — a mystery to many at the time, including Mike himself — but something certain to have an enormous impact on life as we know it. If you'd never heard of ChatGPT before, this was the nudge to give it a try.

This episode covers: what artificial intelligence is, what ChatGPT is, the benefits of using ChatGPT and AI for podcasting in 2023, the ethical and social considerations that come with it, whether AI will replace podcasters and content creators, and what the future of podcasting looks like.

The Script (Generated by ChatGPT)

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

AI, or artificial intelligence, refers to computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. AI systems are designed to mimic cognitive functions like perceiving, reasoning, and adapting to new situations.

There are several types of AI:

1. Narrow AI — designed to perform a specific task or function, such as language translation or image recognition.
2. General AI — designed to perform a wide range of tasks and adapt to new situations, similar to a human brain.
3. Strong AI — designed to be indistinguishable from a human in its ability to think and reason.

AI is used across healthcare, finance, education, and transportation to improve efficiency and automate tasks — but its development also raises ethical and social concerns, including the potential impact on employment and privacy.

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses a natural language processing (NLP) AI model and machine learning to generate human-like responses to user input. It's based on OpenAI's GPT-3 language model, one of the largest and most advanced language models available at the time. Here's how it works:

ChatGPT receives input from a user as a message or question. The input is processed by the chatbot's NLP algorithms, which analyze the words and phrases to determine intended meaning. ChatGPT generates a response using machine learning algorithms trained on a large dataset of human-generat…

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Episode Summary: Marking the 7-year anniversary of Mike Murphy Unplugged, this episode tells the story of walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across France and Spain in the fall of 2021.

What You'll Learn

• What the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage is and where the Camino Frances route runs
• What a pilgrim's passport is and why it matters for staying in albergues
• The day-by-day timeline of Mike's 2021 walk, from France to Muxia, Spain
• The full stats: 39 days, 1,462,154 steps, 654.3 miles

And if you go, no one may follow, that path is for your steps alone.

— Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter

My name is Mike Murphy, and I started Mike Murphy Unplugged in September 2015 to teach and document my journey of building an online business and brand around creating content. The goal of the podcast has always been to share what I'm learning and doing, to inspire others to create the life they want.

The Pilgrimage

A pilgrim, or peregrino, is a person who journeys to a sacred place, often for religious or spiritual reasons. The Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James) is a pilgrimage tracing back to medieval times. There are several routes, but all lead to the tomb of the Apostle Saint James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The most popular — and the one documented in The Way, starring Martin Sheen — is the Camino Frances, starting in St. Jean Pied de Port, France, running up and over the Pyrenees and across Spain for 500-plus miles to Santiago de Compostela in the Galician region.

The scallop shell is the official symbol of the Camino, and most pilgrims carry one on their backpack. Albergues are hostels where pilgrims can stay for usually less than $15, often with a communal meal (and wine). Every pilgrim needs a pilgrim's passport to stay in albergues, and it gets stamped at least once a day — at albergues, coffee shops, churches, and points of interest — to earn a Compostela (certificate) in Santiago. Over 300,000 pilgrims arrive in Santiago each year.

My Walk

• August 26, 2021 — Started walking from St. Jean Pied de Port, France
• September 28, 2021 — Arrived in Santiago de Compostela, Spain
• October 3, 2021 — Arrived in Finisterre, Spain ("The End of the World")
• October 4, 2021 — Arrived in Muxia, Spain

Stats

• Total walking days: 39 days
• Total steps: 1,462,154 steps
• Total distance: 1,052.6 km (654.3 miles)
• Average steps per day: 37,491 steps
• Average distance per day: 27 km (16.8 miles)

Show Notes & Links

• The Way (2010 film, starring Martin Sheen)

Related Episodes

• Episode 157: The 2022 Life Update Show

Buen Camino, Mike

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Episode Summary: A quick life and business update after a long gap between episodes — moving out of a beloved beach cottage, losing a full-time job the same week, and walking 650 miles across the Camino de Santiago.

What You'll Learn

• Why Mike moved studios and left his full-time job at Simplecast/SiriusXM in the same week
• The lesson from Eckhart Tolle he leaned on during a rough stretch of 2021-2022
• How a 7-week leave of absence turned into a 650-mile walk across the Camino de Santiago
• What Mike Murphy Co was focused on for 2022: YouTube, livestreams, and a new digital product
• Why the podcast was shifting into more of a personal audio journal

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so today I simply want to say hello, reconnect and bring you up to speed on what I've been up to and what I have planned for 2022.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Life Updates: 2022

In early January of 2022, Mike had to move out of the beach cottage he'd happily rented for over 11 years, because it was sold. He lost his full-time job of three-plus years at Simplecast/SiriusXM on the exact same day. The good news: he found a place for rent right across the alley from the old cottage, and the timing freed him up to focus on Mike Murphy Co and making a living as a tutorial maker and content creator — his long-standing North Star.

"Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge." — Eckhart Tolle

Life Updates: 2021

Pandemic life didn't change Mike's day-to-day much — he'd already worked from home, and Florida largely ignored the shutdowns. He stayed healthy throughout, but the podcasting industry's pandemic boom meant a heavier workload, and by mid-2021 he was starting to burn out. In August 2021 he took a 7-week leave of absence to recharge.

The Trip of a Lifetime

That leave became a walk across the Camino de Santiago: starting in St. Jean Pied de Port, France on August 26, 2021, walking 15-20 miles a day over the Pyrenees and across Spain, and finishing in Muxia in early October — 650 miles in 40-plus days. The days were simple: walk, eat, drink, sleep, repeat, with a daily mantra of "one thing to do, and all day to do it."

Resources Mentioned

• Movie: The Way, starring Martin Sheen — if you've ever thought about going, do it.
• Book: The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi — recommended by YouTuber Ali Abdaal.

Mike Murphy Co in 2022

• Growing the Mike Murphy Co YouTube channel and increasing revenue streams
• Weekly livestreams
• Creating a digital product (class)
• Writing on Medium
• Freelance and consulting work — helping people figure things out

Mike Murphy Unplugged Podcast

No set schedule…

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Episode Summary: A simple, practical 60-item checklist for creating positive change, read from the book What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Shad Helmstetter — all about rewiring your brain with positive thoughts and self-talk.

What You'll Learn

• A 60-item checklist for creating positive change, from the book What to Say When You Talk to Yourself
• The core idea: what you feed your mind is what you become
• A tip for listening to Kindle books as audiobooks using Amazon Alexa

Today's episode reads a simple but practical checklist from What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Shad Helmstetter, Ph.D. The book is about rewiring your brain with positive thoughts and self-talk, and the checklist is meant to introduce positive habits as change happens from within. What you feed your mind is what you become — feed it positivity, and the world around you changes.

Tip: if you have an Amazon Alexa device, you can often buy Kindle books for $3.99 or less and listen to them through the Alexa app like an audiobook. The voice is a little robotic and nowhere near Audible's production quality, but it's a way to consume a lot more books at a fraction of the cost.

Whatever you put into your mind in one way or another, is what you will get back out, in one way or another.

What Does Your Self-Talk Sound Like?

Are you kind, positive, and encouraging when you talk to yourself? Or do you beat yourself up over everything left on your to-do list, the projects you never have time for, or the goals that haven't happened yet?

Ways to Create Positive Change

Believe in yourself Keep your priorities straight Take responsibility for yourself Create your own future Meditate daily Practice mindfulness Focus on what you want Attract what you desire Learn to visualize the outcome of your goals Never let anyone control your destiny for you Be creative Think big Control stress Be aggressive and assertive Think positively Chart your own course Set specific goals and review them often Spend some time each day improving your mind Review your results and readjust as necessary Be tolerant Do everything with love Don't hate Have courage Recognize that most of what we believe about life is an illusion Be honest Work hard Believe money is good and it will come to you Have faith If you agree to do it, enjoy it Be strong Show affection Manage your time Dress right Learn to sell yourself Take time off Believe in a "higher self" Eat right Live prudently Seek the aid of others who are in sympathy with your goals Give assistance to others Keep motivated Be optimistic Trust others and be worthy of trust Recognize that success is more than money Be kind See the "big picture" Take care of the details Get organized Don't procrastinate Stay in control Keep fit See problems as "opportunities" Learn everything you can about your job Don't be afraid of success Be generous to others Believe in God Reach a little higher than you thought you could Set your sights Take action Never give up

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Episode Summary: On the 4th anniversary of Mike Murphy Unplugged, a walk down memory lane revisiting the Top 10 takeaways from year one — and an honest look at how each one holds up three years later.

What You'll Learn

• Revisiting the Top 10 lessons from year one of podcasting, three years later
• Why "podcasting is a big commitment" held true from 2016 all the way to 2019
• Why "done is better than perfect" is advice Mike says he'll carry to the grave
• The one lesson from year one that didn't make the 2019 list anymore
• The final takeaway: do it for yourself, and everything will be worth it

Mike Murphy Unplugged officially launched on Friday, September 25, 2015 — four years before this episode. A big thank you to everyone who's been along for the journey since the beginning. Looking back at the previous three anniversary episodes, Mike decided to revisit his Top 10 Takeaways from Year One and see how "Year One Mike" stacks up against "2019 Mike."

The Top 10 List, Revisited

1. Podcasting is a big commitment and hard work. Once you launch, your mind switches to "on" — everything you read becomes a potential topic, and you're always thinking about the next episode, the writing, the recording, the show notes, the artwork, the newsletter. Like a restaurant, you're only as good as your last meal, so you have to bring it every week. 2016 advice: don't obsess over perfecting cover art, titles, or audio — just be honest with yourself about the time and mental commitment required. 2019 verdict: ditto.

2. I am proud to be a one-man band. Year one taught Mike that the only way to sustain podcasting long-term is to stay yourself. He knew he'd get more downloads by doing interviews, being a guest, or narrowing his niche — but he carved his own path instead. 2019 verdict: still proud of the platform built entirely on his own terms. The advice: don't look side to side at what others are doing — look forward and keep going.

3. Podcasting has made me a better teacher, thinker, and writer. After year one: a better organizer of thoughts, writer, graphic and web designer, photographer, animator — and his Adobe skills (Audition, InDesign, Lightroom, Photoshop, After Effects) kept expanding. 2019 verdict: ditto, with a bigger toolbox and more confidence, even while still feeling like a novice in some ways. The more you study and practice, the better you get.

4. Podcasting has made me more confident. Feeling competent to teach, finding his voice and style, learning to trust his gut, becoming a better communicator and decision-maker. 2019 verdict: ditto — even more confident and sure of himself, especially in his teaching ability.

5. Podcasting can be fun and creative. Mike recorded on a nude beach under the Golden Gate Bridge, on an airboat with alligators in the Everglades, and from multiple beaches in Naples. 2016 advice: there are no rules to podcasting, so shake it up and have fun when you can. 2019 verdict: podcasting stopped being fun once it collided with a full-time job, running Murphy Concierge, and making nightly tutorial…

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