← The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying AI For Curious Beginners
Ep 92: Mailbag - Diving Into Listener Questions
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation@rubrik.com that's R U B R-I K.com hey it's Carrie. It's been a while. I know and it's good to be back. In this episode. I'm going to dig into the mailbag and go through questions you all have sent in. Becky wants to know what's the best way to turn ChatGPT into something that can help others. John wants to know what happens if my kids teachers say no AI and I still want to teach it. And Candace wants to know how to navigate her work life, her personal life while taking care of her mother. I'm also going to show you a simple way to deal with complex conversations in ChatGPT and get more out of it. If that sounds interesting to you, then stick around and I'll see you on the other side of the music. Hey there. Welcome to the ChatGPT experiment. This is the podcast designed to help you better understand and tools like Chat GPT and get a nugget personally or professionally that you might be able to get some benefit, some productivity, some efficiency out of it. My name is Kerry Weston. I am your host. New time, first time listeners welcome repeat listeners. How you doing? You may have noticed there's been a gap. In fact I was looking at the software tools here. It's been a month. It's been about a month since I've been on here. First of all I just want to say thank you. I've had surprisingly number of folks reach out over the last month and check in, say how you doing? Miss you, hope everything's okay when you're coming back. I appreciate that. So I thought I'd give you a thought. I'd give you an update. So about a month ago I had, I had surgery and I underestimated how much time it was going to take to recover. Nothing super serious. All my life I haven't had left channel in my nose to breathe out of which makes things sometimes difficult. So I had deviated septum surgery and the doctor told me when I came out that he had to do a little more work than he thought. He called it a hockey stick. My nose was basically a hockey stick. So he had to, in his words, chisel a little bit more bone than he thought. So there was a recovery there that yeah, it took me a little longer than I thought. And what's really interesting is since I've had that, that surgery, conversations I've had with people that I know, I'm surprised to learn how many people have actually had the exact same thing. So I do appreciate you checking in. I do appreciate the notes and the well wishing good to be back. And so today I want to update you on what I'm calling the Curiosity Club. One of the side effects of the surgery was I had planned to launch and I'd shared with this with folks on the mailing list that I had planned to launch what I called the Curiosity Club this month in November, which is going to be a paid membership with some one on one group coaching and some resources that I'm building online. But I really got set back on that because I'm telling you, for two or three weeks I think I ran out of Netflix things to watch for two or three weeks. Getting off the couch was a task. So I have lost some momentum on that side. So I'm doing my very best to get that up and running and I promise you I will have it just as soon as I can. But I'm trying to make up for lost time here. I did have last week, I did have my first trip in a while. Again, it's been difficult. I was in a dayquil days because I caught something right when it rains, it pours, right? Caught some virus in the middle of recovery which made things that much more fun. But that's what happens when you get kid in school made a trip down to D.C. down to Washington D.C. for a ChatGPT presentation to an industry summit. It was a payroll providers company, so payroll company owners and leaders were down and we talked a little bit about ChatGPT and how to work it into your own day and how to work it into your business. So it was good to get off the couch, it was good to get back into real life. But it's really good to be talking to you. So I'm glad you're here. So I've got some mailbag. I thought the easiest thing to do here is I'll go through that complex tip here right now. And then I've pulled out over the last month as people either communicate with me online or download the guides. I've got some questions and some things that have come in and I've picked three or four of them here that I wanted to talk to you about and give some answers. I thought that was good context, good context that might help you out because I know other people have same questions and thinking about the same thing. Okay, so let's start with that complex tip and here's the background. I do a lot of work in analyzing conversations or analyzing transcripts or analyzing data. And my four part formula, that's telling it, what we're doing, why we're doing it, what does success look like? And does ChatGPT have any questions for me is helpful when I'm doing that, but oftentimes ChatGPT will think too much too fast all at once and I really want to slow it down. And I've done the step one, step two, step three, first do this, then do that, then do this. And that helps when I break it up into chunks. And if I have a complex thing, let's take a very specific for instance here. If I were to have a call transcript, if I was doing an analysis of a call transcript for a sales team, let's say, and I wanted to review it for certain things, I wanted to review it to see who talked more and what issues came up and what opportunities there might be to get better and that kind of thing. Looking at it through a strategy point of view, I would tell it what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Then I would say, listen, I want to get some analytics and some insights from the call and I want to figure out this and this. And I might say, step one, review it. Step two, consider this. Step three, analyze it against best practices that we've talked about before. Step four, give me red flags. Step five, and sometimes it will ask questions before it moves on, but oftentimes it will spit out step one, step two, step three. And if you've played with this thing long enough that getting it to pause and just kind of rest for a second can be hard to do and certainly beneficial, but it likes to race through all the things. And I would like to have it just take a breath. And so what I've started to do is when I do multiple steps. So if I give it a complex conversation when I'm talking to it and I say, look, here's the four steps I want you to do. First, second, third, and fourth. At the end of each step, I put in brackets, pause and then wait to proceed. Pause and then wait to proceed. That's the instructions. So, for instance, if I were to say, step one, review the transcript so you can fully understand what the conversation was about. Pause and then wait to proceed. Step two, outline the top, that kind of thing, right? So I'd go from step one to step two. I use in brackets, pause and then wait to proceed. And what I'm finding is those words have been the most effective for me to get it to say, I've done my job, boss. What do you want me to do? Tell me what you want to do next. Are you ready? It has a really powerful impact on ChatGPT to just put the brakes on. And I've played with other versions of this, but I found that those six words in bracketed format have really helped me slow it down so I can have it think better. Because ChatGPT does better work. The smaller the nuggets of what it does, what it's working with, Right? So the smaller the nugget, the smaller the task, the more focus it can put on it before moving on to the next one. So there's the words that I would encourage you to use. If you're getting into complex tasks with ChatGPT and you're asking to do a lot at once and you're getting into steps, pause and then wait to proceed and see what you get. See what you get for. For output there. Okay, let's go to. Let's go to Mailbag. I've got four emails in front of me, and I'll just go through them here, the first one, and they're all from listeners to the show. And by the way, you want to get a hold of me, you want to send a question, you want to get a downloadable guide, take a look at the archive of episodes, schedule a workshop, took out the options. Take a look at the options. I do individual training, business training, conference and workshops. ChatGPT experiment.com is the website. So these four emails, these four questions I'm not going to go over right now, came in through the website. Came in through the website. So, chatgpt experiment.com reach out. Love to hear from you. First one's from Becky, and Becky says, what is the best way to turn my love for ChatGpt into helping others? Love it, too, potentially even creating a business around it. So, Becky, that's a great question. And quite frankly, what I'm doing now is exactly that. This podcast was born from just me experimenting and trying ChatGPT. And I did it a few years ago. I was right when it first came out and I was in front of the curve. I learned quickly that I was way out in front of this thing because the more people I talked to, the more I recognized I didn't even know what ChatGPT was. So I was early into it, and I started logging my experiments in a newsletter on LinkedIn, and then I turned the newsletter into this. So I would tell you that the answer to the first part of your question, which is, what's the best way to turn my love for ChatGpt into helping others? Is just to literally share. I really started sharing, Becky, with no intention. I have no idea what I was doing. I just wanted to get it out. And there's so many ways of doing that. So you don't necessarily have to have a podcast to share. It's a method that I found to be highly productive. But you don't have to. You've got so many channels. You have social media. You. That's an amazing one right there. Just sharing with people. So I started just sharing with my employees. Okay. So I was sharing every week. We would get together and I would share what I was learning and doing, and I would encourage them to do the same, to experiment and come back and share. So we started in a very small group and experimenting and sharing, because really sharing the experiments, sharing the experiences, sharing what you're learning, getting feedback from others was the best way to accelerate the learning because you were doing it amongst folks that were similarly curious. So I would say just, literally just start sharing, get it out. Social media is an amazing tool to just say, here's what I'm doing, and just post what you want, what you're doing, invite questions, get interaction. It's amazing how quickly you're gonna get people to buy into what you're doing. And by buying in, I'm not talking monetarily, I'm just saying engaging, asking questions. Right now, you had said potentially even creating a business around it. Episode 74. I made a note. Episode 74 specifically was titled, if you're looking to start a business, here's how ChatGPT can help. So you might want to take a look at episode 74, specifically around the business model. But honestly, the best thing you can do is just start sharing. Just start giving. And when you start to give and when you give out, you'll be amazed at what comes back. What comes back at you. So I hope that was. I hope that was helpful. Yvonne writes how to take. Her question was how to take what other people write but condense it while retaining their tone and style. So Yvonne, there wasn't enough in here so I can put context to it. I'm going to just take a guess and give you some general info here, but taking what other people write and condense it. So I'm guessing that you are editing or you are using others in some sense. So I think the most important thing is two factors. One, if you have a specific task, literally what you said here is how to take what other people write but condense it while retaining their tone and style. I would literally say that to ChatGPT. Listen, I'm going to paste or upload whatever it might be an article, right? Or a post or whatever it might be. Go back to my four part framework. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What does the success look like? And do you have any questions for me in this case? I would literally do this, Yvonne, I have an article that was written but I need to condense it. I need to condense it because it's currently 1200 words and I only have room for 600. Okay, so that satisfies my number two, why are we doing it? What does success look like? I want to make sure that while I condense it, I do not want to lose the essence of the tone, style and voice of the author. I simply want to make it succinct. But I don't want to lose the value. I don't want to lose the impact. I don't want to lose the voice, tone or style. I just need to condense from an editing point of view. Do you have any questions for me, Yvonne? That's how I would take the four point framework that I teach and work it into that specific one as a resource for you. Voice, tone and style was the topic of episode 3 and episode 21. Both were around how do I get chatgpt to write like me with specific focus on exactly that voice, tone and style. So I hope that was helpful. Candice writes, how can ChatGPT assist me in navigating my work life, taking care of my 95 year old mother and supporting me and still attending to my own personal goals? There's a lot there, Kansas Holy moly. You're busy, but there's a lot there and I can't tell you, Candace, how often I hear from people who use words like juggling and swamped and overloaded and chaos and need to organize and that kind of stuff. So what you're sharing with me is remarkably common. Okay. And the first thing I'll say is episode 66. I spent some time talking about how ChatGPT can be your second brain, can be your personal problem solving partner. So you might want to check out episode 66 Candace for some of that. But first of all, look, assisting and navigating my work life, taking care of my mother, supporting me, and attending to my own personal goals, I think the first thing I would say is ChatGPT is a fantastic listener and an organizer of random thoughts and chaos. So the first thing I always say, and this is going to come up in episode 66, is literally tell it, treat it like a counselor, treat it like a friend and say, I need your help. I need help navigating my work life. I'm also taking care of my mom and I have my own personal goals. Can you help me? And then Candice, literally talk to it. Okay. Don't filter yourself. We're not using a computer software. We're not using computer program. You're using a tool that needs you to be conversational. It needs you to be thorough, and it needs you to be detailed and honest. Okay. And don't worry about prompts at this point. Just get what you have in your head out. So navigating my work life, specifically just say, what about my work life do you need to navigate? Here are some things that I'm challenged with. Here are some things that I wish I could be more efficient in. Here's some things I wish I could organize, or here's some goals and priorities I wish that I could have focus on and make progress to. When it comes to your mom, I get it. I'm not sure if you're talking about time management there or dealing with specific issues or physical issues. I always warn people that when they're going to use ChatGPT for health or legal advice, to take it with a grain of salt, trust but verify. But it also recognizes the emotional stress that we have when we're dealing with things in our life. And so there's a lot of folks that are caretakers for their parents and they're dealing with the emotional stress. Listen, I have a ChatGPT executive team training workshop with a company in California coming up soon. And that company has a series of memory loss and assisted living facilities. And I, I had a marketing agency prior to becoming, before I sold it, becoming consultant. But for 25 years I ran a marketing agency and for about five years we had a client that did that assisted living and memory care. And I Know that when I spend time trying to understand who their best fit right fit customers are and the emotional stress it took on them to try to understand them. Because in order to be effective in marketing and communicating and building trust and confidence in potential customers, you have to understand where they're coming from from an empathetic point of view. And Candace, one of the things that I understood quickly was the intense level of guilt, primarily in females when it came to talking to these facility and facilities like it, about putting their loved ones by putting their mom and dad into a facility like that because they would stretch their entire bandwidth of mental and physical capability to their own detriment at home to fulfill a promise. Taking care because they promised they'd never put them in a facility, they'd never put them in a home as they say. And it really does take a mental and physical toll on an awful lot of people. And so when I hear you say taking care of my 95 year old mother, along with my work and personal goals, I understand a lot of what you're saying because I've seen it and I've heard it and I've had discussions about it. So I would just get stuff out of your head. Talk to chat, tell it your personal goals, tell it what's going on in your work life and then work in the fact that you're caretaking. Now, you don't have to use ChatGPT in this regard for caretaking tips. But what I would tell you is when you tell Chat, because I've done this personally, more details about your personal ecosystem, about what's going on in your life, it understands empathetically that you're limited in terms of bandwidth and time and that you're juggling a lot of balls. And a lot of the support and tips and advice and guidance feels a little bit more personal. So I hope that's helpful. Episode 66 Candice is is where I dive in a little bit about that second brain, about getting some help in that regard. So I wish you well there the last one today. This is a good one and I want to end on this one because I think it's highly relevant and not just for chatgpt. This is life as we know it. But John is writing in regard to ChatGPT. His question is this. How can I best use ChatGPT? As a parent of two young girls in grade school, Their teachers don't want them using AI, but I believe it should still be used both in how I parent and how I help them learn alternative ways to Understand their schoolings. Okay, so the first thing, John, bravo, I agree. And again, there are issues outside of ChatGPT. We could replace ChatGPT with a number of different things in terms of our role as parents in guiding and teaching and providing support for things that they're going to need in life. And specifically, when we're talking about this, you can find in episode 14, I interviewed my own daughter, John. She at the time, she's graduated now, but at the time she was in college. And we had this exact same conversation, which was the professors at her college, their take, their philosophy on ChatGPT was literally Thou shall not. Right? But we talked about the importance of this. Not ChatGPT specifically, but the mindset of working with a tool like ChatGPT, like We Talk about here all the time, how to have conversations, how to think, how to structure not so much what this button does and what this setting does, but the approach, the mindset, the amazing intern, the asking questions, the four part frameworks, right, Narrowing the band, how to use objectivity, how to use empathy, how to use multiple steps and complex questions, how to talk to it, those kind of things. Because those principles are going to be relevant no matter what ChatGPT or Claude or the other tools look like. Those principles are going to be the core to learning how to interact with software, how to interact with computers. Moving forward, I have an episode a few back called the Future of Conversational Technology. We are literally on the verge. Look, Intuit announced a couple days ago that they're putting ChatGPT into QuickBooks. Right? It's just the beginning. It's the ability of having the mindset of how to use this amazing intern, how to use these tools, whatever they may look like, how do I talk, how do I get the best out of it, how do I communicate, how do I structure, how do I use objectivity, how to use empathy, and how do I get it to talk to me? Because that's coming. So, John, I applaud you. And here's what I would say is I would have an honest conversation, as I'm sure you probably have with your daughters, and say that you understand that your teachers are telling you not to specifically use AI, but today that's like saying don't use a computer. It used to be don't use a calculator. That's like saying don't use a computer or don't use the Internet. It's really a tool that's a major driving force for the economy. It's a major driving force in the workplace. It's a major driving force in what's shaping the future of the not even though honestly, if they're in grade school, John, it's not even shaping the future of the workforce that they are going to enter. It's shaping the workforce of the next school that they are going to be in. So I think having a conversation about it's okay if somebody's not comfortable with it at the moment. Teachers specifically are often stressed to learn a lot on their own. And I have talked to a number of teachers about this specific topic and you've heard a few of them on this, on this podcast. And the major concern is they're not quite sure how it works yet or how it plays into the curriculum or how it plays into their job yet. And so the easiest thing to do. And by the way, it's not just teachers. I've talked to CEOs who have told their employees thou shall not yet because I haven't figured it out. And that top down mentality isn't realistic anymore. To tell employees, I don't want you working with it until I figure it out is not the most efficient way to inspire curiosity. It's not the most efficient way to inspire learning or self driven efficiency or motivation to do a better job. And I would say in schools that's what we're here for. We're there to teach skills, curiosity, mindsets. Right? So my guess would be not knowing anything other than the question that you posed that teachers are both unsure of how to work it into the curriculum, unsure of how it works in general, maybe unfamiliar with what's in the tools, and are probably at a point now where the easiest thing to do is just to tell people not to do it. And that's not realistic anyway, is it? So what I would do is have a conversation. This is one of my own kids. I have, I have a freshman and a junior in high school and like I said, Matty, the one that was in episode 14 has now graduated college. But the conversations we have is, can I show you this cool thing? If you were to do this, I want to show you this. Here's how I explore it. You can still obey the rules of the classroom while learning something outside the classroom. Okay. Because I like you, I do believe it should be used in both how you parent and how I help them. And outside the classroom. John, I have a chat, I have a GPT specifically to help me understand how to communicate with a 16 year old daughter. That is, that's a foreign language. Oftentimes for me So I, I actually use it to say, hey listen, I need help. I need to understand middle school was interesting. I did not have chatgpt when my daughter was going through middle school. But if you've ever had a seven and eighth grade daughter, you know how challenging that can be from an understanding point of view, much less their point of view. And so Yeah, I use ChatGPT a lot to understand the perspective and I've shared with you here, and I just said it a few minutes ago in talking to Candace and Becky, that the objectivity of ChatGPT, the ability of getting different perspectives, the difference, the ability to get a brainstorming tool, to get someone that can talk with you, is invaluable in the work that I do personally and professionally. And so I think that the ability for you to utilize ChatGPT for yourself, how to navigate right this topic specifically with your daughters, but also how to be a parent, is really powerful. It's a powerful use. But I do, I agree with you that the ability of teaching things in the home, it's our responsibility, isn't it John? And all parents out there, it's our responsibility to set our kids up to be successful. And if we can pass on, whether it be advice or tools or insights or skills or what it might be, that's our job. That's our responsibility. It's not to set them up to be successful in the class that they're in, it's to be successful in the life they're going to be leading. And so this is certainly something that I would and I have outside the classroom shared that people have different perspectives, different takes, different comforts, different understandings. Right. And just because they are saying this doesn't mean that you need to ignore it altogether. I want you to be comfortable with it. I want you to know how it works even if you don't use it in that specific classroom. I want you to understand what's in front of you so you can grow with it, understand with it and use it because the time is going to come where it's going to be an inherent part of the work that they're doing even in the classroom that we're talking about now. So I hope that was helpful. So there. That's our, that's our back. Episode 92. I'm back. Oh, and thanks again. Just want to say thanks again for those that checked in and wanted to see what was going on and where I might be. It does mean a lot. And chatgpt experiment.com I mentioned some of these episodes you can find an archive of episodes. I've also got some articles there for you. You can get a hold of me there. You can see the trainings that I do. Like I mentioned, individual businesses and I do workshops and seminars as well. So if you have a workshop and seminar and want to have a ChatGPT presentation, I'd be more than happy to talk to you about it. And I think to wrap this up and for John's closing note, this is relevant. The most important aspect, the most important attribute of you being comfortable, of you being successful, of you being productive and understanding and using tools like ChatGPT is your own curiosity. Okay. This is the most advanced it's ever been, but it's also the worst it's ever going to be. And I'm talking about functionality, I'm talking about how it's working. We are very primitive in the days of how these things work. So it's not so important to learn, in my opinion, to learn what this button does, what this setting does, what this menu does. For me, it's more about mindsets approach, understanding how to talk to it, and understand how to get that two way conversation to be most effective. That's going to serve you well regardless of what tool these functionalities find their way into or what the tool itself that we're Talking about now ChatGPT looks like 2, 4, 6, 8 months from now. Okay. So I hope that was helpful. Good to be talking to you again. And until we talk soon, stay curious. Okay, bye. Bye.