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Discover the transformative power of AI in our lives as I, Jason Fisher, guide you through the world of artificial intelligence on the Be Better Tomorrow podcast. Embark on a journey with me as we unravel the mysteries of ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, and Google’s Gemini, and learn how these tools can elevate your day-to-day efficiency and personal growth. From sharing the innovative ‘six phase prompt’ method that has revamped my AI interactions to crafting a standout self-improvement presentation, this episode is brimming with insights that promise to reshape your approach to technology and self-development.
Tune in as we navigate the expanding role of AI across various spheres, such as personal tasks, professional platforms like LinkedIn, and even the nuances of social interactions. I’ll tackle a listener’s poignant question about transforming awkward moments into opportunities for growth, reinforcing the value of authenticity in our relationships. This episode isn’t just about the mechanics of AI, it’s a heartfelt exploration of how embracing these advancements can teach us to be more mindful, adaptable, and ultimately, better human beings in an ever-evolving digital era.
ChatGPT System Instructions article
Transcript
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Be Better Tomorrow podcast. I’m your host, Jason Fisher. I’m so honored that you’ve decided to spend a little bit of your time with us today, whether that is when you’re driving to work, as a lot of people are returning to the office, or while you’re doing the dishes, or whatever other chores you find around the house. I hope that this show will give you an opportunity to find something that will help you be better tomorrow. That’s the name of the show. That’s the goal. We want to find bite-sized pieces of improvement that we can do, that we can take a hold of, and apply to our everyday lives so that we are better tomorrow than we are today.
I will apologize if you’ve been listening to the show for some time. The last couple of episodes had a weird sound in them. I was trying a new AI mastering tool that didn’t quite work as I expected it to. Hopefully, this sounds a little bit better. If not, I’m going to play with it afterwards in post to make sure that I get you some good quality. I know there’s nothing worse for me than listening to a podcast with bad audio quality. Hopefully, I’ve built up enough grace with you that if it was bad, you’ll trust that it’s not always that way. If those were your first episodes, I apologize and hope this one is better. That’s all I can do.
That did lead me to an interesting topic because the mastering tool that I was working, as I said, was AI. AI is an interesting topic. A lot of people are talking about it. I’m the first one to admit, I’m not an expert in how AI works, what goes on behind the scenes, but I think I’m becoming a bit of an expert on how to use it in your day-to-day life and how to find ways to improve your life with it. Now, if you’re brand new to AI, I’ll just cover a little bit of that. If you’ve been around AI for a while, maybe I’ll talk about some tips and tools that I’ve used that can help you get better and figure things out.
Now, I’ve heard a lot of people say, that’s just not something I want to deal with, not something I want to use. I’m going to suggest that there’s kind of a gold rush right now, or an Oklahoma land rush, if you prefer, of people diving into AI, trying to understand how we can use it as human beings to improve our lives. And there are a lot of false starts. There are a lot of people that think they’ve struck gold and all they found was iron pyrite. Yes, that’s the fancy name for fool’s gold. Because I know that because I’m a nerd and I watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie where they thought they found gold. Beside the point, there’s a lot of people diving in thinking they found the solution to their problems only to discover new problems behind the scenes. But there are ways that AI can really help you accomplish some things.
So if you’re not familiar with any kind of AI, the big players in the game right now are ChatGPT, which most people have heard of in some way, shape, or form. Microsoft has Copilot. And then Gemini is the new name for Google’s AI, it used to be called BARD. So these are all large language model generative pre-trained transformers. That’s what GPT stands for in case you didn’t know. But these are all tools that have taken in millions and millions and millions of words. That’s why they call it a large language model. They’ve scraped the internet, and some of those companies are getting in trouble for having scraped things like the New York Times and other copyrighted information that they’re being sued for using. We’ll see how that all works out in the courts. But these are making predictions just like Google does when you’re typing into a search bar, predicts what the next word is you’re going to search. These are making predictions about what the next probable word is in a sentence that they’re creating. That’s the best I can explain the technical details. There are way smarter people out there if you’re going to nerd out and get into those kinds of details.
Let me tell you about some of the first times I used GPT really effectively. Well, actually, I’ll tell you about the times I failed first. So when I first opened up ChatGPT, when I first heard about this, and that’s chat.openait.com, you should go check it out. You can play with it for free, the oldest for the older version. If you want to play with the newer version, you have to pay $20 a month. So far, I think it’s really worth it. But I tried to treat it like Google, I was asking Google-like questions. And it wasn’t until I learned about the six-phase prompt this I’ve come to know and love it, where I really started to understand the power behind these kinds of programs.
All right, these have become pretty famous. But let me give an example. You start by telling the GPT chat, or Gemini or whoever, what kind of role you want them to take on to give them some context. So the first time I really started to play with it, I said, “Hey, you’re a self-improvement guru. And you want to help somebody learn how to have a better interaction interpersonally, write an outline for a presentation that would give people that information, make it informal.” And I gave it some information that it should include. I told what tone I wanted it to be, informal and have a lot of fun. I hit enter. It created an outline. Well, that’s fun. I took it over to Microsoft’s Copilot. And I put it into PowerPoint and said, “Create a slide deck based on this outline.” And it did, very simple deck, and included notes for the speech. So I had this basic presentation that I could do for how to have an interaction, how to have good communication. And I took that to my Toastmasters group.
For those of you who’ve listened for any length of time, you know, I’m a big Toastmasters fan, not only for the people that are involved but just for the idea of getting up in front of people in person, not just here behind a microphone, and being able to talk. It’s one of the things I love to do. So I presented this thing as if it was my traditional speech that I had written and then got to the end of the speech and basically said, “Hey, I’m sorry, I have a confession to make.” And I laid out what I’d done and basically did my speech about how to use AI.
Well, if you use these six-phase prompts, so you give it a task, some context, examples of what you’re looking for, a persona, you know, that’s what I said, I want you to be a self-improvement guru, a format, you want a message, join an email, doing an outline, and then the tone you wanted to use, it will create some decent starting-point content. Now, I wouldn’t turn this term paper in, but it might give you a great idea of how to start. I even had some fun with it where I gave it input of a story that I wrote for my girls when they were three and five. And it was a story about some fairies that had, you know, these particular characteristics and they went on adventures with my girls kind of thing. And I asked it to write a sequel. It did an okay job, but I had to remember, I had to realize this is where you have the conversation with it, it remembers everything in that chat, and knows the context of it. So when I said, “Well, the character Rose is a little more tomboyish and athletic, and I’m thinking of a certain character in my head,” and I gave it that context, it rewrote the story with that in mind. And for some reason, it didn’t know at first that my daughters were sisters because it didn’t say that in the story, I suppose. And so I had to say, “Well, these two characters are sisters,” and then it rewrote the story. And so as I gave it more context and helped to clarify what I was looking for, it really, really helped to improve the output that I got.
You know, there’s an old saying in development programming, garbage in, garbage out. Well, this was really that. I gave it garbage upfront, but then I started to refine it and figure out what’s going on. If you’re not trying to write a story, if you’re not trying to learn how to be a developer, although I’ll be honest, it taught me how to write Python. I knew enough to be dangerous. But as I was doing the things that I was doing, it was telling me how to do it, why I should do it and put comments in the code to explain the code that it was doing. It was a really powerful tool. Now, I think coding jobs might be some of the first to go as AI starts to learn how to code itself. So that’s not a place I’m looking to go necessarily. But I have taken opportunities at work where I had to write a document, and I really wasn’t sure how to get started with it. Sometimes that’s the hardest part for me. I’m good with knowing how to react to things and respond and adjust, but I’m not sure how to get started. If you give me an open field, I’m kind of a struggle, but a box canyon, I’m good that analogy will hold up.
So what I’ve often done is that, “Hey, I’m a…” and I give my role of what I do at work. With Microsoft’s Copilot, I’m actually able to reference documents in our system and say,” Use this document as background information and write user stories that we’ll need to accomplish.” And then we’ll write a couple of them. And then I can take those and “Oh, well, that’s not quite right.” And I can tweak it. But it gives me that place to start. ChatGPT or any GPT really is good at being the soundboard that I need when I’m thinking through things. I’ve actually said, “Hey, take on the role of…” and I laid out the political point that I wanted it to argue with. And then I took the other side because I wanted to understand it and I learn and process things. Sometimes I’m playing devil’s advocate and arguing and debating things. Now, it’s really annoying to my coworkers until I explained to him what I’m doing and really annoying to my family, even when I explain it. But I know who I am and I know how I think and how I learn and some of my friends are just like me and we get we get along splendidly. But ChatGPT doesn’t judge me. And so I was able to sit and have a debate with it. And now that you can even talk to it, if you have it on your phone, or you have it, you know, voice-to-text kind of feature. So I literally could sit and argue with the GPT in a non-judgmental fashion, but it helped me organize my thoughts, it pointed out flaws in my logic. Now, of course, it will make up some facts once in a while, just like everybody does. So it was really, really human in that sense. And there was a point where I got emotionally engaged in a way that felt uncomfortable. And so I had to stop. So I will put that warning on it. It’s sometimes because we’re in the world of the internet, where you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m just arguing with somebody online,” you might actually start to think of it as a person, and then struggle because you’re, you know, getting angry at this robot for taking on a different point of view than you. Maybe it’s just me, hopefully, hopefully, it’s just me.
So listen, by now, if you haven’t started playing with any kind of AI, I highly recommend it. There are a million prompt suggestions out there that will get you started to help you understand how to move from treating it like Google to treating it like a trusted advisor or a friend, or just getting the most out of it. And you may think there’s no way I can use this. I’m telling you, you can find a way to do the grunt work of your life, no matter what it is. I have put in ingredients that I had and asked for recipes. I have asked it to start building documents. As I said, I have used some of the, some of the images generated on my website. If you actually go to the website, instead of just listening on a podcast catcher or on Spotify, or even in Spotify, you’ll see the artwork that’s GPT generated. I gave it my transcript and create some art based on this context and see what it does. And other than the fact that it has trouble spelling tomorrow, for some reason, the pictures have been pretty good. Often I have to go back and say, “Take the words off,” and then I’m fine. But even if you don’t use this professionally, things to do around the house, I use an AI coach right now to help keep me accountable. I think I’ve mentioned in the past, there’s ones for picking helping you pick out a wardrobe, you upload a picture and it gives you an idea of what kind of fashion would look good on you. I don’t know how accurate they are, but again, if you pay for Open AI’s, ChatGPT, $20 a month, there are like a hundred separate machines on the backend that you can use things for writing your resume for deciding whether or not you fit a job. I know LinkedIn now has AI built in. If you pay for their premium subscription that says, “Oh, you’d be a perfect role for this job.” Or you can ask it what I fit this job. It looks at your resume says, “Well, you’ve got this and this, but you’re missing this experience that they’re looking for. So maybe you wouldn’t be quite the fit or maybe you need to show them where you have this experience.”
And now, of course, all of our resumes are being looked at by AI first to determine what’s going on. My fear is that what it’ll end up being is ChatGPT writing to a GPT that’s reading the internet and human beings just won’t even be communicating anymore. It’ll just be the robots talking. I don’t know where all this is going, if I’m honest, but I do know right now there’s an opportunity to learn some great things to take some of the burden off of you to understand how to make your life simpler. I cannot begin to think up all the ways that this can be used. I’m sure if you guys want to write in at [email protected] with some great ideas, I’d share a few of them on the show. And if you just Google “ChatGPT-4,” and then your job, whether it’s homemaker or nurse, teacher, whatever, you’re going to find a bunch of stuff. Because as I said, it’s a gold rush right now. And people are trying to get their books out and get their websites out on how to use this as quickly as they can. I’m not into writing that at the moment, but maybe I’ll have ChatGPT write it for me.
Anyway, let’s go to our listener letter of the week.
All right, this week’s letter is from Brianne. She had questions about the growth mindset we talked about previously, wanting to know especially, especially how they can deal with awkward situations and negative experiences socially. If you think you’re just naturally awkward or there are specific techniques to practice or recommend building confidence.
Listen, Brianne, as I said, there are certain things I remember from years ago that I wish I wouldn’t have done. And I dwell on those things, but the reality is I can’t fix it. I think a good way to look at anything when your past is that that was a different person. When you think about previous self, current self, and future self as three different people, you can’t fix what that person did in the past. All you can affect is what you do now. And hopefully, that sets up the person you are in the future for success. There are stupid things that we’ve all done in our past and we wish we wouldn’t have done. If not, you’re probably just a narcissist and you need to seek help because you think too highly of yourself, but for the rest of us, there’s something going on. But here’s the thing. Odds are they don’t remember it. And if you were to ask them about it, say, “Hey, this one time I said this thing, do you remember that?” And if they say, “Yeah, I do, it really hurt my feelings.” And you go, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been thinking about it for years and I am so sorry.” And that’ll clear the air. And being open and transparent with a friend about something like that will open up the relationship so much more. We love that authentic transparency in relationships. It opens up the door for people to really care. I mean, that’s what Brene Brown is all about. Being transparent, open with the people around you, and bringing them into your circle of trust. And if they don’t remember it, well, then you can wipe that off your, you know, off your guilt, off your conscience. It’s not something you need to worry about because they don’t remember it. You can remember it as a learning opportunity, but that’s it. It’s a learning opportunity. You can’t change the past. You can only change in regard to the past. You can change how you look at it. It wasn’t a terribly embarrassing moment. It was an opportunity for you to learn how not to behave or how to keep your mouth shut or how, whatever the situation is, the opposite. It was an opportunity for you to learn something in that situation. And when you reframe your past in that way, you start to think differently about your past. You know, you can really ruin an event if you start to think about all the negative things and ruminate on all the negative things that happened in that event. I try to tell my kids this all the time. They come home from something and all they want to do is complain about it and they’ll find the nitpicky things and I get it. I was elected like biggest complainer in high school or third biggest. I can’t remember now. I’m complaining about the fact that I didn’t get the biggest complainer. That’s ironic.
That was actually embarrassing for me because I didn’t realize people perceived me that way. But once I did, I was able to start making changes. So that was actually a great opportunity to go, “Oh wow, I do complain too much.” Now, I was trying to be funny. I was trying to make jokes. I was trying to bring light to things, and I watched a lot of stand-up comedy when I was too young to be watching it. So I didn’t understand the framework that needed to be established before you’re really making jokes. But it was an opportunity for me to learn when I heard that. And all of these awkward experiences we’ve had in the past are opportunities
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