← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
Inside the AI Ghostwriter Hub Turning Prompts Into Publish-Ready Assets
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What's up, everyone? Happy Thursday. Happy Thursday. How are we feeling? Another great week in the books. This has been a full. A full week for us and our team, too. So we're feeling, feeling ready, feeling ready for today's calls, ready to bring it. All right. Happy Thursday. Warren Haseeb, thanks for showing up. Denise, good to see you. That's great. Before we dive into today's. Today's activities, we got something special planned real quick. I always love seeing who the newcomers are. Drop in the chat if this is your first Thursday hot seat. If you just joined pga, if this is your first time here, if so, welcome everyone else. You know the drill. You've been here, you know what we're about. But if this is your first time. All right. Ron, welcome. That's great. Lydia, awesome. Great to have you. Aaron, welcome. Okay, so just to give a little preface. Usually these are more hot seat focused. Students will submit questions, and we'll pull people up one at a time. We'll answer questions, we'll jam on topics everyone else can watch and listen and learn. Because oftentimes most people have very similar questions or there's always something to be learned from other people's questions. Every once in a while, we like doing something different. Um, this week we were. We were a little light on questions anyway, so what we're going to talk about is how to use AI in your writing. So every once in a while, if we don't have a. A ton of hot seats or really good questions to dig into, we'll do these little master classes. I think it's really helpful. It's just another way to power level your learning as well. So that's what we're going to do today. And obviously, if you have any questions along the way, drop them in the chat. Happy to answer. We can also tackle some. Some questions at the end if you have it. But the reason that I want to share this is because AI is very quickly becoming one of those things that I find myself using constantly. We find ourselves internally using constantly. And I think, you know, it's one thing to look at social or the news, and like you, you hear all of these things that are happening as the result of AI. And I think it can be hard to really understand or interpret what that means for you. It's hard to know the impact this technology is going to have unless you start playing with it yourself. And one of the recent AHAs that I've had that I want to share with everyone here, and if you're here, you're like, you're already leaning into that growth curve, which is great. But just to crystallize, like, a couple big ideas that have clicked for me recently. One is, I think there's a lot of fear with writers especially, but any creative industry, but we'll use writers as the example. There's a lot of fear with writers that AI is going to steal your job. And I see that and hear that every day all across the board. And every time I make a YouTube video or I put out some free resource, 80% of the comments are like, why would I even bother building this skill? AI is just going to steal the job and there's no use for me in the future. And the more that I continue to play with these technologies and the more I start to understand, like, what is the real. What are the real skill bottlenecks to using AI and to using these technologies, the more I realize that it's not that AI is going to steal writers jobs, it's that AI writers are going to steal regular writers jobs. Does that make sense to everyone? It's actually an augmentation of the existing role. So the fear is this technology is going to replace me. It's actually not the technology that's going to replace you. It's the other writer who knows how to leverage the technology that's going to replace you. And once you realize that, it actually becomes a very simple problem to solve. It's the. You solve the problem like this. If for anyone who's sitting there and they're like, oh, okay, that makes sense, but what do I do about it? Okay, let me give you the most prescriptive, easy answer on planet Earth. If you spend more time with AI, that means you know more about it than someone who doesn't spend time with AI. Congratulations, you're an AI writer. So it's actually not like you need to go learn how to code. It's not. You have to go get a second degree. It's not. You either have this innate skill or you don't. It quite literally is one writer decides to experiment with AI for five or ten hours, and the other writer says, I'm terrified AI is going to replace me and I'm not even going to touch the technology. Which writer do you think will acquire the skill faster? Well, it's the first one. Obviously, it's not a difficult problem to solve. Right? So that's one big idea that's just been swirling around in my head. So for everyone here, if you ever have that thought, AI is going to steal my job, you have to remind yourself that's not what's going to happen. What's going to happen is that the opportunity that you're gunning for is going to go to the writer who understands how to utilize and leverage AI. Going to go to another human. That human's just going to have a different skill set, right? No different than the person who used to draw cartoons by hand. And then someone comes along and goes, I can actually do the exact same thing 10 times faster in 100 times more styles using Photoshop. Which designer is going to get the opportunity? The one who does it by hand or the one who understands how to use the new technology? This has been happening for hundreds of years in every single industry, right? Photography, same thing. Graphic design, same thing. Architecture, analog versus digital, same thing. It's the same pattern over and over and over again. The second big idea is that as I've spent more time writing these prompts, and today I'm going to. I'm going to walk you through some new things that we're building inside pga. I'm going to give you everyone here some new prompts to play with. We're going to continue adding more prompts to pga because I think this is going to be more and more of a valuable resource. Okay, But I want to preface, I feel very strongly that it's. It's not enough or it's not that valuable for me to go spend 10 hours writing a prompt and then just give you the prompt. I can and I will, but I don't think that that's where the majority of the value is. And this is just me being really honest and wanting everyone here to succeed. And so sometimes that means, you know, not just giving the candy, but also figuring out how to eat the broccoli, too. I think that the most valuable thing is not to use a metaphor, it's not for me to give everyone here a fish. It's to teach you how to fish. Right? Because then otherwise you're dependent on me waking up every day going, I guess I got to go find 100 new fish for everybody here. Right? So that's actually not that helpful for you. What is helpful is learning and building the skill of, okay, so how do I fish? And the metaphorical equivalent here is me giving everyone the answer going, here's. Here's a prompt. You can go use it. I'm still going to give you the answer. Right. But I feel very strongly that it's also worth building the skill of how do you assemble prompts in the first place? How do you find an inefficiency in your life or a bottleneck or a problem or something that's taking you a long time, and how do you identify the solution, and how do you become more aware of how you do it? And how do you assemble a prompt for yourself? That is the skill. And so I feel like one of the most valuable skills that writers can build for the foreseeable future in a world of AI first companies and technologies is the. Is the skill of prompt writing. So here's what's really interesting, and this is where it all comes back to. Like, yes, these new technologies are really cool. But as I've played with them more, there's. There's a. There's a bottleneck that hides beneath the surface that I think a lot of people, especially if you look at it through the lens of writing that a lot of people take for granted and they don't understand, is actually happening. The core bottleneck to prompt writing, most people think it's knowing how to write a prompt, and that's actually not the bottleneck. I can tell everyone here how to write a prompt in three minutes, and I'm going to do it today. It's actually not that complicated. The complicated part is that in order to write a prompt, to solve a problem or an inefficiency or a task in your life, you need two things. A, you need to actually be able to do it yourself, right? You can't automate something that you don't know how to do. Everyone wants to automate things that they've never done before. How are you going to do that? Right? That's the metaphorical equivalent of hiring a team member, hiring an employee, hiring an intern, and going, I want you to do this big thing that I can't articulate to you. How are they going to do it? You don't even know what you're asking for, right? So the technology is. It. It is leveraging existing knowledge, right? It's not actually replacing. And then the second component is that not only do you have to be able to do it, but you have to be aware of how you're doing it, right? It's not enough for you. Like, that's great if you're smart and you can, you know, turn on some background music and dim the lights and drink some coffee, and magic just comes out of your fingertips. You're a great writer, you're super talented, amazing, but you actually can't leverage technology, you can't leverage AI if you aren't able to articulate what you just did. And that's a really interesting way of thinking about building the skill of writing. So I think there's, there's this tremendous amount of irony just to sort of round out my little, you know, preamble here at the beginning. There's a tremendous amount of irony when you hear people say, why should I even bother building the skill if AI is just going to take it over? But the irony is that AI literally can't take it over from you or from someone else if you can't articulate it. So everyone thinks what's happening is that I just open Claude. Here we go. I open Claude, I press one key, and it does everything for me. That's not what's happening. What's happening is that the writer who understands exactly what they're trying to create and can articulate all the rules and all of the variables of what they're trying to create. And they have the existing knowledge, they've built the skill, they can now leverage that skill. They can accelerate it with technology because they can articulate it. But you can't automate something that you can't articulate. And that's, that's what, that's where it's, it's actually very ironic when people say, why should I even bother this building the skill if AI is just going to take it over? Well, because the people who build the skill are the ones who are going to use the technology, who are going to become AI writers, who are going to, are ultimately going to take all of the opportunities. And so there's also something tremendously ironic about AI and the development of this tech in the sense that actually a lot of legacy writers, the ones who are the most anti AI or the most terrified of AI stealing their jobs, they are actually the ones in the best position to utilize it. Why? Because they're a journalist with 20 years of experience. You know, they're a novelist. I've been writing novels for 30 years. They've been working as a ghostwriter, maybe working for a PR firm. They have 5, 10, 15 years of experience. You actually have a tremendous amount of existing knowledge. AI takes that knowledge and accelerates it if you can articulate it. And if you can't articulate it, then you aren't able to use it. So the reason I'm prefacing with that is because I notice that oftentimes when I talk about AI or the future of these technologies, people over rotate in two directions. They either go, I morally disagree with the tech or I'm afraid of it. So I don't even want to touch it. I hate to break it to you, but this, this isn't going anywhere. So you're, you're basically accepting defeat before you've even started. Or people over rotate too far in the other direction and go, well, it's just going to automate everything. So I guess I don't need to build skills anymore. And neither extreme is true. There's actually a tremendous amount of benefit in continuing to understand how and why things work, because then you can automate them. So that is why, again, just prefacing here, that is why I feel so strongly about keeping this emphasis, especially inside pga, but keeping this emphasis on. You should take the time to learn how to write an EEC or a newsletter or a bunch of social posts on your own. You should build the skill of putting together outlines. You should build the skill of refining drafts. But the reason you should build that skill is because for every hour you accumulate there, you actually can unlock ten or a hundred hours of leverage by using that skill and articulating it with AI. So again, it's not. I, I don't think that, you know, what is the most helpful thing that I can do for everyone here? I don't think it's that I go make a bunch of really great prompts and then I give them to everyone. Still going to give them to you. But the thing that is more valuable is me explaining now how do you actually assemble these? So does that make sense? Do all those ideas click any, anything in there that you're like, oh, I didn't think about it that way before because I think you have, we have to start there. You know, you have to understand that. And then we can get into the nitty gritty of. Okay, so now what do we do with it? Right? All right, couple yeses. Thanks. Thanks. All Noah. Slow to trickle in. Maybe. We got, we got 146 people in here. Looks like only five had their coffee this morning. All right, here we go. Awesome. Okay, so people are doing espresso shots in the back. All right, nice. Like to see it. So here's something new. This is cool. I want to point this out for everyone. As of yesterday, we started building. If you go inside school and you go inside the classroom here, you scroll down, we've started building this new hub. It's called the AI Ghostwriter hub. And in here we're going to start sharing not just ghostwriting specific prompts, but also really interesting prompts that we find ourselves building and using internally here as a team. I think this will become a tremendously valuable resource for everyone here. You're more than welcome to literally copy paste. Like, this is a mega prompt I wrote on how to write short form content. This is the length of a novella. You're welcome to copy and paste this and use it. Okay. But what I want to spend time today doing is actually walking through it. So everyone here understands. How does this actually get assembled? What's actually happening here? Okay, so is that. Is that cool? We gonna learn something new today. Awesome. Okay, so high level, there's four prompts to start with in here if anyone wants to play with them. There's a short form social content generator. So this is a prompt that helps you generate, like, standalone posts on X. You could also use them on LinkedIn, but this is very specific to the constraints of X Twitter. This is actually the outputs I've been getting with this are really cool. And I'll show everyone here how, how it works. I also did the same thing for writing a weekly value newsletter. So just to pull back the curtain, how I wrote this, and this is also very long. We'll walk through this. But how I wrote this is I took some of our highest performing newsletters that we send to our email lists. What did I do? I sat there for a couple hours. I asked myself 150 times, why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why did I structure the intro that way? Why did I pick the headers that way? What types of headers are those? How did I structure each content block? What style am I using? What rhythm am I using? What word choice am I using? What tone am I using? Like, literally just sat there for hours asking over and over and over again, how did I assemble this thing that I wrote? And the thing that I hope everyone here takes away is, yeah, that took, you know, three, four, five, ten hours. But you, you invest that time. And then now we have a prompt that increases the efficiency of our internal writing team for newsletters by 50% forever. So that's the trade for everyone here who's like, wow, that sounds like a lot of work. I got to sit there for three hours and break this thing apart. You have to ask yourself the trade. If I said, hey, if you give me three hours of your life, but I will shave off 50% of the time it takes you to create this asset for the next 10 years, would you make that trade? And every person here is like, of course. I give you three hours. Now you save me 150 hours. Right? The problem is that when you present it that way everyone goes, yeah, of course I would. But then when it comes time to sit there for three hours, everyone's like, I don't want to do that. And so that you have to really internalize. Like, there is an upfront cost, but the whole point of that upfront cost is to save yourself time and energy over the long term. And that's the way to think about assembling these prompts. The third prompt in here is, this is a cool one, is a comment engagement generator. So what this does is trains AI on a bunch of different thoughtful types of comments that you can write. And then you just copy paste in a post that you see on LinkedIn or X or Instagram or whatever, and then it'll draft a bunch of different potential comments to that post. Part of what inspired this for me is that I feel like 90% of my comments on X right now that I receive are from bots. Like just, it's just AI comments all day long and they, they suck. Like, they don't even make sense. Like, it's just, it's gibberish. And so I, as a challenge to myself, I was like, okay, if I could create a prompt that actually made comments that were thoughtful, what would it, what would it do? You know? And after building this, I realized that the comment generator is really just a different version of a short form social content generator, because thoughtful comments are sort of content in and of themselves. So I'll show you how these work. These are really cool. And then we have one more. This is a landing page prompt that we've been playing with to assemble entire landing pages for products. We do a lot of product launches internally now, so we've been experimenting with this more and more. So yeah, just wanted to share these with everyone. So that's step one. There's a new AI ghostwriter hub inside school. I encourage everyone here to go and play with it. But the more helpful thing is I want to walk through some of these and explain the decisions, because the decisions are really what make them work. So let me, I'll copy here. I'll just take this whole thing. All right, so before we do the output, I want to walk through a couple things. So let's look at this prompt and for everyone here, you can go back, watch the recording if you want, but if you want to take some notes on a couple of these high level things, go for it. But I want to explain how do, how we assemble these types of prompts, because I think it's, it's, it's a really, you have to have this context, otherwise you're not going to be able to get very good output. So one of the things that I think a lot about whenever I'm writing prompts is I want to give as objective directions as possible. Now, what is an objective direction and what is a subjective direction? So here's how most people and I, I always get this question. It's like, which AI do you use? I like using Claude. ChatGPT is a good second. I find Claude always gives the best writing output, but these change literally every week. So just bounce around between Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini and see what outputs you're getting at any one time. And, you know, use the ones that you like the best. But I, I would. Generally, I find myself using Claude more and more. So here's how most people prompt AI. They, they give what, what I like to call subjective directions. So they might say something like, I am ghostwriting for a health and wellness client and I'd like your help writing some really great social posts for her. Can you please write me three really great social posts about health and wellness? So let's see what sort of output this gives us. Okay, just skimming this here, how would we rate these short form posts? 0 out of 10, 1. 03. Yeah, I'd say, I'd say somewhere in the ballpark of zero to three. Right. We're using hashtags from 2006 and, you know, we're stating the obvious and they're all in just paragraph style right? Now. Here's the mistake. The mistake is the vast majority of people get this output and they sit there and they go, I guess Claude's not that good. Well, no, the technology is fine. The technology is going to keep getting smarter and smarter. The problem is in how we prompted it. And there's a couple things that I want to point out because it's like once, once you understand these, you'll start to notice it in your own writing. So the first is some drop in the chat. What is the phrase in this little prompt that is subject really great? We can all, we all recognize it. Write me some really great social posts. Now, what is the problem with really great? It is the fact that If I ask 10 different people here for their interpretation of what really great means, I will get 10 different answers, right? That means it's subjective. AI does not thrive with subjectivity because AI is just a billion different data points trying to make sense of what it is you want. Okay, so the whole secret is actually speaking in objective directions, not subjective Directions. And you can, you know, I've circled around this idea for years. Like, you can call it, like I want to get more specific. You can call it. You have to be clear. You can say this in a bunch of different ways, but the most accurate way I've come up with thinking about it is objective versus subjective. So then compare this to the beginning of the prompt that I wrote, which is your primary function and skill is to generate a week's worth of thought leadership. Short form social content that will fit inside a standalone x post, 280 characters or less. That is extremely objective. You either create within that constraint or you don't. Right. I am going to give you the topic and I would like you to present a full day's worth of short form social content five posts to me in the following order. Here are five time slots. I pick the times arbitrarily and I would like one piece of short form content in each time slot that is extremely objective. There's nothing to interpret. You either do it or you don't. Right. The ineffective version of this would, would be for me to say, I want you to create a day's worth of short form social content for me. Make it really great. Make sure the client loves it. That's subjective, doesn't know what we're. What we're executing. Right. Even this is better than what we gave here. Right. But that's like the tip of the iceberg. That's. This is not even the most important part of writing a prompt. The whole secret to writing effective prompts is to train technology on very specific formats. So what is a format? Format? You could also call a style. It is a certain type of thing. It is a certain type of asset. Okay, so it's, it's actually not enough to say, I want your help generating short form content or I want your help generating short form content 280 characters or less. Those are steps in the right direction. But where you really take things up a notch is when you start saying, and I would like you to write it in the one of the following formats or in the following format. So here, what I've done is I, I went back through. I went. I spent three hours doing this. I went through my entire library. Entire. I scrolled back as much as I could. My library of short form content on X. And I did the same thing for Dicky. And I just kept looking for posts that performed well, but I could see a pattern. It was like, oh, that's. That's a format that we use pretty often. And I pinpointed five different formats that Dickie and I consciously or unconsciously have used over and over and over and over and over again. So I'll give you this is, this is a really easy one. Let's go to format two. What? How? Why? So format two, I go, this format consists of three parts. You start with a declarative opening line. What you follow with three to five bulleted examples, actions or steps. How? And you end with one sentence. Insight, benefit or motivating reason why important this. So I ran this prompt. It didn't give me the right output. I then asked Claude to tell me what to change in the prompt so that I got the right output. So it told me to add this little piece here, which is another interesting component. You can interact with AI and get its feedback on what you should change in the prompt, right? So the first thing is you go, here is the specific format. I'm not saying write really great content. I'm saying write content in this specific format that follow these specific rules. Then I want AI to understand, so what would a good execution of that format look like? So then I start giving attributes. So I go, here are some attributes that make this format compelling. So the first sentence, the what should be a hook. The point of that first sentence is to hook the reader's attention. And look how specific I get. And if you want to know what makes a great hook, here are six proven hook styles. So it could be a strong declarative statement, a thought provoking question, a controversial opinion, a vulnerable statement, a weird unique insight stat or data point or a moment in time referencing a meaningful event on a specific date, day, time or time period. So notice like how many levels we're going. We're not saying write really great. We're not even just saying write great content in this format. We're saying write content in this format following these rules, using these attributes. And if you're confused about one specific attribute, here's six more examples of that attribute. So does everyone here see how like the bottleneck is actually not knowing how to use AI? It's a very simple technology to use. The bottleneck is you sitting there going, wait a second, how do I do what I do? You can't automate what you can't articulate. So then we get into the three, three to five bulleted items. This is the how. These are differentiated examples. Ideally not repeating conventional wisdom, tangible, not intangible language, meaning the how are clear and not subject to interpretation or confusion from the reader. They are steps or objects or Things the reader can actionably do or use the opposite of fluffy, vague advice written as economically as possible, straight to the point, using as few words as possible, only saying what is absolutely necessary to pack in the most new information per second for the reader. Look at how fucking specific we're being. Like, I'm. I'm literally getting down to the like, sentence and word by word level. And if you look at, you know, why so many people struggle to get good outputs with AI, it's because they're trying to automate things that they don't know how to do. Which means one of the best things that you can do is continue building all of your own skills so that you learn how these things work, so that then you can leverage the technology, right? So the second component is you give it attributes. You're like, these are the attributes that make this format compelling. Even this is leagues ahead of how most people prompt AI. The third component here, though, is the most important. All of these stack on top of each other, but this is really the thing that drives everything home is then you go, here are a couple examples of this very specific format. Where people go wrong with examples is the sloppy way of using AI is what you do is you would open something like this, you would open the prompt, you would. You would say, I want help writing short form content. And then people would just like attach, like, by the way, here's a PDF with 50 of my tweets. By the way, here's a. Here's a bunch of documents of like, previous client transcripts. They just throw a bunch of information into their. Their chat window here. That is not what yields the best output. What yields the best output is you saying, very specifically, this is the format I would like you to write. These are the rules of the format. These are the attributes that make this format work well. And here are examples that execute these rules and these attributes to a T. So the examples that you give have to literally, like, as close as possible, mirror the rules that you just laid out, right? So here if we go, what, how, why? And I'm saying these are the rules. Look at the example. The examples follow exactly those rules. The first sentence is what the middle bullets are. How. The last sentence is why. Example number two, the first sentence is what the middle bullets are. How. The last sentence is why. The more similar the examples are to the rules of an individual format, the more likely you are to get an effective output. Because now AI understands what direction we're going, what you want me to execute on, and you just want me to repeat it, right? And what's interesting to think about is that this is what we all do manually already. Like, if. If we. We were already doing this when we realized that this format was performing well, Dickie and I, once a week, once every other week, would just sit down and we'd be like, well, I need another tweet. What should I do? Well, well, let's go back and use that what, how, why? Framework that we got in our heads. So you're already doing this manually. The way that you add leverage is by being able to articulate it. Okay, so just to show everyone. So does everyone understand that component? So when you're writing prompts, you need specific format or formats. You need the rules of the format, you need the attributes that make that format work well, and you need examples that reinforce those specific rules. Okay, this is. Let me just point out one other example. So paragraph style. So let me just show everyone what this looks like, because I've been. I've been writing this on a daily basis, basically. Okay, so, like, this is paragraph style is I'm just making a thought in a paragraph, right? Which is different than doing, like, 1, 3, 1, or what, how, why? Or a quick bulleted list, right? These are all just different formats. So I sat there and I was like, all right, what makes this paragraph style work really well? You know who also does this style really well is Hormozi. And he breaks his up. Like, his formatting's a little different, but he. He does, like, shorter versions of these all the time. And I was. Here's a good one. And so I was sitting there, I was looking at my tweets, I was looking at his tweets, and I was like, okay, what are some rules? Like, if I was to templatize this, if I was to automate this, how would I instruct AI to do it? And this is where, again, like, the bottleneck is not the. The knowledge of the technology. The bottleneck is knowledge of its writing skills. So here I go. Format is paragraph style. This is a declarative perspective, opinion, or way of seeing the world distilled into a single paragraph. Imagine this is the short paragraph in a book that so perfectly summarizes the topic at hand that readers can't help but highlight it. So cool. Like, that's helpful directionally, but it. We gotta get more specific, right? So then we go, here are the attributes. One of the attributes that I realized makes this style work so well is there's a book that I've recommended a dozen times. Inside pga. It's on my shelf, I think. It's called the Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. So has anyone read the Elements of Eloquence? So it's an incredibly nerdy language book, but it's, it's fascinating. And basically this book just lists out a bunch of different literary mechanisms that people have been using since the days of Shakespeare. I mean, these are tried and true. We see them all day, every day. If anyone here loves like Naval Ravikant's posts on X, like, all he does is speak in these literary mechanisms. And you don't know why you like it, you just do. And one of those is, well, two of those are these literary mechanisms called a polyptoton. Does anyone, has anyone ever heard that word before? So a polyptoton is where you use the same word in two different parts of speech. So you use it both as like a noun and a verb. And there's something that it's like sticky in the brain. You're like, oh, once, once. I like it almost sounds like poetic without it being poetic. I'm trying to think of a example I've got stored somewhere else. It's called the Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. So a polyptoton is where you use the same word, two different parts of speech. An antithesis is an obvious observation followed by a non obvious observation. So hormosi, like speaks almost exclusively in antithesis. So you know, it might be, you might make a statement like, you know, the secret to life. I'm just gonna make something else. Like, the secret to life is not to save for retirement. The secret to retirement is to set yourself up for life. All you're really, you're taking like the same statement and you're like swapping it and it gives it different meaning. Or you're saying something that's obvious. Like, everyone should strive for happiness in their life. And then you say something that is like unexpected or the opposite of that. But you shouldn't strive for happiness if it means living in a state of unhappiness. We hear these things and we're like, that sounds so smart. We don't know why it sounds smart, but it sounds smart. Because these are just these literary mechanisms that are sticky inside our brain. So I've read that book. I'm fascinated by that book. I took notes the entire time reading that book. And then here it makes its way into an AI prompt because I'm like, wait a second. What makes this paragraph style work so well is that it uses these mechanisms like here is a. This, this is literally the prime example of like an antithesis. The obvious trade. The ambitious trade their present for their future. The wealthy trade their past for their present. The poor trade their future for today. That reads like poetry. So if you wanted to automate this, you have to just articulate well, what are the qualities that make that work, which can make its way into a AI prompt here. So I just want to point that out. Like that's, that's the level. You can get really nerdy with this and you can pull very obscure examples, but if you can articulate what it is that you're trying to accomplish, AI actually can get you pretty close. So now let's run this prompt. So I'm going to train it on this. You're a social content generator and I would like its help generating some ghostwriting content for me to post on X. So let's say, okay, I'd like the topic to be how to get started as a ghostwriter in 2025. Let's see the output. So it's giving me the right format. It's giving me different times. Those are arbitrary. Here's paragraph style. Working as a ghostwriter in 2025 isn't about having perfect writing. It's about understanding people. The best ghostwriters don't just write well. They listen well. They capture voices. Not just ideas. They make others sound like themselves, only better. The barrier to entry has never been lower. If I posted this on X, I guarantee no one would have any idea that I had AI helped me write that. You have no idea. Let's look at another one. Four steps to launch your ghostwriting career in 2025. Create one stellar sample in your target niche. Build a simple website with clear pricing tiers. Study voice patterns of three ideal client types. Join AI resistant industries needing human touch the demand. So this isn't bad. This is like 80%. I would tweak a couple of these, but it already gave me the idea. It gave me the format I would like. I wouldn't use the word stellar. You know, I would say have one pricing tier instead of multiple. But like think about like I just saved myself five minutes writing that post. Okay, great. Five minutes. Five minutes. Five minutes, five minutes, five minutes. All of a sudden you save yourself an hour. Seven tools. Every 2025 Ghostwriter needs. This is an awesome post. I should literally just post this right now. This is A great post. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Awesome. Cool. Posted. I just used AI. Like that's. This is so incredibly effective. Here's here's another one. This is, this is the old versus new. Dicky and I have used this, this framework over and over and over again. Amateur ghostwriters work for anyone, initiate other success formulas. That's too vague. I would swap that or imitate disappear behind client work. Yeah, So I would swap this middle one, but otherwise that's great. Professional ghostwriters specialize in specific industries, develop signature frameworks, build a wait list through case studies. I would swap this one. Positioning is everything. Okay, great. So that's 85% done. I would change two things. I would post that tomorrow. So everyone see, everyone see how this works? So the goal actually isn't, you know, I think a lot of times what, what happens is people will write a prompt, spend a lot of time on a prompt, and then AI will give them something that's 80, 85% there. But because it's not 100%, they go, oh, this sucks. I guess it's broken. Which ironically, is the same thing that your clients do with you, right? A client opens something that you wrote. They're like, I didn't like that second sentence. This whole thing needs to be rewritten. Well, no, we probably just should swap the second sentence, right? So the goal isn't like a hundred percent or zero percent. The goal is actually, how do you get to like 80, 85%? And then your job, your time is best spent by reviewing this and going, I. I would tweak this, I would make this more specific and I would swap that. It's higher leverage, it's more creative, and it takes a fraction of the amount of time. Does this make sense? And yes, by the way, this entire, all of these prompts, all of these prompts, like, you're a social content generator, which means you could use this for your own content. You could use this for your clients content. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. All right. You want to see what the newsletter one is? This thing is bananas. So just to show everyone and walk through the thinking, right? We have, we have two team members internally that help us write our free newsletters because we have so many different verticals at this point. And so it raises the question for us, right? It's like, instead of how do we hire more writers, which we can't, like, the irony is we're, we every time we say we're done hiring, we end up hiring two more people, like the next month. So, like, there's, there's no shortage of opportunities in the world. But the first question that we start asking ourselves is, okay, so how do we make our writers more efficient? Right. So instead of being able to write two newsletters in a day, how could they write four? Right. Well, the first step is we got to build some leverage. How do you build leverage? We have to articulate how are we doing this manually in the first place. So we run this prompt and let's make. Okay, this week's newsletter. Let's make the topic how to buy your first single family rental property. In what state should we buy our rental property in Illinois? Shout out Chicago. All right, so drafts. So part of my prompt is I asked for five different subject line options, so it's giving me those first. Right? So simple. Yeah, that's a great one. Okay. Five steps to buy your first Illinois rental. Hey there. Ever wondered how regular people build wealth through real estate while keeping their day jobs? The truth is, building your first single family rental property feels overwhelming at first. You're worried about making a costly mistake, dealing with nightmare tenants or unexpected maintenance destroying your profits. Maybe you've heard horror stories about 3am toilet calls or tenants who refuse to pay rent for months. Today I'm going to walk you through exactly how to buy your first single family rental property in Illinois with strategies specifically tailored to Illinois markets, laws, and opportunities. Let's dive in. Why is that intro so good? Because I trained it on exactly how we write intros and how I've written intros for 10 years. Like, let's. Let's look at the prompt real quick in the prompt. The intro. Just the intro. So I say there's four fundamental variables that I'm going to train you on. The subject line, the introduction, the headers, and then the section content. Okay, so then I'm going to skip down to the intro. So the introduction. All great. Niche, specific, value packed thought leadership. Newsletters start with an introduction that hooks the reader into wanting to read the rest of the piece. But there's a very specific way of writing these introductions I want to train you on. So I don't want you to think of the introduction as one giant block of text, but rather five smaller blocks that all stack on top of each other. Block number one. Hey there. Okay, great. Hey there. Executed perfect. Block number two. Next is the opening sentence or opening hook. This should be one single sentence. And the best opening hooks are typically one of the following. I'm reusing those six hooks that I used in the other prompt. Great. This is a question opener. Ever wondered how regular people build wealth through real estate while keeping their day jobs Great. It executed on this very specific instruction. Thought provoking question. Next is the promise of the intro. So this block is typically three to seven sentences long and very tangibly and actionably educates the reader on a problem, why those problems exist and the negative outcomes of those unsolved problems, or educates the reader on a desirable outcome, why those outcomes are so valuable and or negative consequences that can happen if those desirable outcomes aren't achieved. That is exactly what it did in this paragraph, listed out a bunch of tangible problems. If you're interested in this, you resonate with this. Next is the solution of the intro. This is usually one sentence that after educating the reader on a problem, completes the promise by telling the reader that's precisely what you're going to help them with. So today I'm going to walk you through exactly how to buy. Here's how to do the thing that we're talking about. Last is the transition sentence. This is usually some sort of transition into the first header. Something like, let's walk through each one or let's dive in. So with that in mind, etcetera, Here we go. We got our transition sentence. It executed this intro to a T. Now, the novice writer looks at this and is like, oh, that intro sounds pretty good, right? But what's happening under the hood is literally you're just going line by line or paragraph by paragraph and you're instructing AI. I want you to execute this in this very specific way. And notice how when you get that specific, AI has no problem doing it. So it's not the technology, it's building the skill of how do you articulate it? Now, here's where this changes everyone's role here. Let's say you view this and you go, now that I see this in blocks, I can break out my edits. If you don't like something about this intro, for example, you don't have to rewrite the whole intro. We might look at this and go, you know what, all of this is good, but I actually don't want a question opener. I want a stat opener. Okay, well then all we're going to do is change that from this to, hey there. Did you know that 37% of millennials in America own at least one rental property? We're not rewriting the whole intro. We're just going block by block and going, I think I could tweak that one a little better. I think I could tweak that one a little better. That is the highest leverage form of writing. That's where that's that's where this entire game is going. The entire game is heading in a direction where, where you break things apart into pieces. And then your primary skill is being able to see each individual piece and go, I want a different color there. I want a different texture there. I want to tweak. I. I don't want that sort of opener. I want that sort of opener. I don't want that style. I want this style instead. That's where everything's headed. Does this make sense? Is this cool? Anyone going to use this to. To write some newsletters for clients? Like, look, what is the power of this? The power of this is you pitch a client, a client's like, yeah, I might be interested in starting a newsletter. Can you have any. Do you have any samples I could look at? And you could literally go draft three sample newsletters for them in 10 minutes and send it right back to them and be like, yeah, I pre wrote these for you. Check them out. I think you'd like them. The amount of efficiency and leverage you can unlock is massive. Awesome. I'm glad this is resonating. And yeah, just to get ahead of the question, if you notice a lot of these pieces, like, I encourage everyone here to go through, poke around this new AI ghostwriter hub. Read through the different prompts, go line by line, go paragraph by paragraph. Like, study them. You know, that's why I'm giving them to you. But if you notice, over time, you'll see the same frameworks repeated across different prompts. It's like, oh, I want you to use. I want this first part to be a hook. Well, here's six proven hook styles. Oh, I want this format to be executed in this way. All right, well, I could copy paste those same attributes. Why don't I use those in another post? They're the same attributes. I just put them in a different context. And yeah, this, this AI hub is for everyone inside pga. So we're open, sourcing it, giving it away for free. Thoughts on positioning yourself as an AI ghostwriter? I think you absolutely can. I mean, there's no shortage of opportunities. Like, I'm. I'm not saying if you call yourself an AI ghostwriter, like, you're going to have a thousand times more opportunities than the person who just specializes in an industry or a specific service. Like, there's, there's more opportunity than we can all wrap our heads around. But if you start playing with AI a lot and you get really passionate about it and you, you want to experiment with that, by all means, go for it, you know. Awesome. All right, we got a couple of minutes before we break. We're going to jump into our. Our lift off our liftoff call here shortly before we break. Any final questions? Slash, what's one thing that you learned today? What's one thing that you're gonna apply differently to your writing or to your clients writing? Spend more hours writing prompts. That's right. You can write four newsletters in a day. You can write 40 newsletters in a day. Like, that's, that's the real insight. You, you can do so much more than you think you can. Once you take the time to build some of these things, AI outputs are only as good as the human inputs. That's right. That's right. The same is true with code. By the way, the developers that are going to soak up all the most insane opportunities for the next 20 years are just going to be the ones that use AI. That's all. They just have more leverage. It's going to be the same with every career. You're a project manager. Oh, but you know how to use AI. You're going to get all the opportunities. You're a writer, but you know, know how to use AI. You're going to get all the opportunities. You're also going to make more money because you can work with double the amount of clients because you have twice or three times or five times or ten times the amount of efficiency. Yeah, I like this one. Learn to write and then learn to use AI. Yeah, that's like the ultimate irony for me. The reason that I can even write these prompts is because I've spent all this time learning how to write. So that's my goal for everyone here is like, yeah, great, play with the. Play with the tech. Here's some cool prompts. Use them by all means, but keep building the skills, because the skills are what allow you to articulate and automate train AI with very specific examples. Yep. That's taken me a lot of tinkering to figure out. I, I've. I spent a lot of time just dumping information into Claude or into ChatGPT, thinking like, oh, it'll. It'll make sense of it. And again, you're. You're deferring too much intuition to the tech. You're leaving too many things open to interpretation. You. You have to very specifically and explicitly say, I want it done this way. And here's an example of exactly how I want it to be done. Objective, not subjective directions. Yep. Awesome. Yeah, these are great. All right, well, thanks, everyone. For showing up. I'm glad this was helpful. Yeah. Could you write an EEC in one day? You could write an EEC in two hours. Like, again, I. I think. I think the big takeaway for everyone here is you have to completely reset your brain on what you think is possible, because, like, there is so much power in these things that it's not a. It's not a matter of can you. It's act. You can do any of them. Any of these things that we're talking about are options. It's not a matter of can. It's a matter of are you willing to. To put in the time investment to build the asset that then allows you to do that for the foreseeable future? Jen, That's a good. Yeah. Prompts for outreach. Don't worry. I mean, now that we're. We're on this train, I'm obsessed with this. Our whole team is playing with it. We're gonna. We're gonna dump all sorts of prompts in that hub. We just wanted to share these to get all of you started. I want to spend time talking through and. And helping everyone here understand how to create prompts. I do feel like that is the core skill, but, yeah, we're going to put prompts in there for outreach, for sales training, reviewing your own sales calls, drafting different types of content. I mean, we're. Yeah, we're gonna go full bore here with this. Awesome. Well, I'm glad everyone's excited because I am very excited as well. And we have. We have a couple more surprises cooking in. In the kitchen back here. I'm not going to. I'm not going to share them yet, but just. Just know if you are here, you. You are very ahead of the curve. And our goal is to make sure that we maintain that position and that everyone here maintains that position. So that's the goal. All right, thanks, everyone. Happy Thursday. Appreciate you all showing up, learning, challenging yourself. So I love to see. All right, lift offers. We're gonna jump in the next room. See you all next week.