You're More Productive With AI

Business brain episode 499 for Wednesday, November 8, 2023. Greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain, the show, well by, for and about entrepreneurs, but also the show where you send in some ideas. We come up with ideas and, and we crunch through them together so that we can each tune our business brains each and every episode and keep on living that charmed life. Sponsors for this episode include miro.com podcast where you're going to go and you get your first three Miro boards are free forever when you sign up there and then also shopify.com businessbrain where you can go sign up for your $1 per month trial. You're going to learn more about this in a little bit here during the episode. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

I'm good, I'm good. Yeah, rock and rolling here. Just, you know, cranking along, being productive, doing my thing.

Yes, that's it. Being productive. I posted on the X platform the other day that being busy was nothing to brag about.

Oh, I like that. Yeah.

And I was inspired by your comment about how, you know, we're not busy with we don't use that word, we're productive. And it reframes what you're working on because the world rewards output, right? Not input.

Well, I mean, in the end, yes, it does reward output. However, there are a lot of people in like middle management jobs and I realize I'm offending a lot of people who are listening here, but it's, it's not necessarily your fault. There are a lot of middle management jobs that are rewarded and, and, and like lower jobs too, you know, like, like, not middle management but, but you know, entry level jobs who are rewarded with being busy. I remember from my time in corporate America that like, I remember this one guy who was our head of like tech support. I wasn't there at Citibank. This was, I wasn't there doing tech support. I was doing some other stuff that he was the head of tech support for our department. And I remember he hired a new guy and he told this guy the new guy was my brother. He hired him for the summer and my brother came in and my brother was fairly skilled and was able to get stuff done and was really quick about it. And so he got a list from his new boss and went and did all the stuff and came back four hours later. And the guy's like, I don't have anything else for you right now. And, you know, he's like, but this should have taken you three days. You got to learn how to make the work last.

Yeah. That's brutal.

Like, oh, my God. Like. And he was. The problem was he was right. Like, and it wasn't his choice that he was in a position where he and the person working for him needed to make the work last. It was like, just the function of the way that bureaucracy works. And I don't think it's changed much. It might have. I haven't been in corporate America in decades because I couldn't stand it because of that reason. Right. Like, that was a big part of why I was like, no, I just. Let's just be as efficient as we can all the time. And that was not rewarded there at all. It was, well, we gotta keep our friends happy. We gotta, you know, buddy, deals are important. And make the work last. Keep yourself busy. You don't want anybody to look like you're not doing something. It's like, shoot, man, if I'm not doing something, I want to be on the beach.

Yeah.

If I don't have anything to do, I either want to find something to do or I want to be on the beach. And when you're being paid dollars per hour, which most salary positions are also just, you know, a flat dollars per hour arrangement. And yes, it moves around a little bit, but it's essentially worked out that way then. And I know I just offended everybody. So thank you for listening to 498.2 episodes of Business Brain. And now it's over. But, yes, I don't.

Speaking of productivity. Yes. Segueing into that. So last week we launched this productivity course and we've been kind of looking at some things, and as we discussed before the show, we want to build in public and kind of talk about what works and what doesn't. And so let's. Let's jump in and talk about how things went with the course so far.

It sucks. No, that's not entirely true.

Not.

That's correct.

No.

We have had no sales of the course. So when you go to businessbraincourses.com free, you can take the first two days of this course that we put together for guess what? Free. That's what that means. Right. So businessbraincourses.com free. And you can go take it for free. And I'm saying this multiple times because I want you to do that. Of the people.

More feedback.

Yeah. Of the people who have visited businessbraincourses.com free 28% of you have signed up for the course. Now that's a good number. That's a great conversion number.

Yes.

Except my guess is no one visited that by accident. So my question is, my first question, I have many, is if you went and visited businessbraincourses.com free, which I'm guessing you learned about in the show because it's the only place we've published it. Really, why didn't you then go sign up for the course? Why is it only 28%? Why isn't it 88%? But I want to know the answer. This isn't a rhetorical question. Feedbackusbrain show. Let us know what about that page did not entice you, did not make it easy. What friction was there that made it such that you chose I'll do this later or never?

Yeah, very important and it would be really helpful for us and we're going to, you know, fine tune this thing. One of the comments that we did get from a couple of folks was that they really enjoyed how the course takes place in your mail. You don't have to click login to a website.

You don't have to never have to leave your inbox.

The video, the audio, all the text, everything just comes through to your email each day and you can sit through the lesson and do your thing there. And I thought that was interesting that we got that feedback. So, yeah, so it's, you know, we're going to figure this out.

Yeah. And that's, that's the first question. The second part I have is why? And it's okay that you didn't sign up for the paid version of the course, but why was the. Were the first two days more than enough and you have lots to do from that and your life has changed and you didn't need more or less. Was it not worth it at all? And you couldn't imagine paying for five more days of this crap. Right. Like let us know feedback at BusinessBrain show because.

And for those, yeah. And for those folks that did sign up that 28%, we're going to reach out to you. Not in an automated fashion. It'll be coming from, you know, one of us. And we'll ask you a couple of questions. We may have a survey for you to click maybe and be entered to win something, but we just want to get your, your feedback so we can continue to things better.

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Well, now we're selling T shirts and hats and all kinds of other stuff and it's so easy. All because I decided to use our sponsor, Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to did we just hit a million orders stage. Shopify's there to help you grow. Whether you're selling shipping supplies or promoting productivity programs, Shopify helps you sell everywhere from their all in one e commerce platform to their in person pos. Wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the Internet's best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading commerce platforms. I really mean it. Shopify made it so easy. We decided at a staff meeting one morning that we wanted to add merch and stuff to the site. By mid afternoon we were finished. It was ready to roll. In fact, it had rolled. We were taking our first order before we went to sleep that night. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/businessbrain all lowercase go to shopify.com businessbrain now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. So Shannon, I know we talked about like AI in the new current use of the term, I don't know, a few months ago, maybe six months ago after we started really sort of learning how mainly with Chat GPT to sort of do some of this stuff. And I think it's good to revisit this because there have been. Well, this week there were some major announcements from OpenAI, the company that makes chat GPT, but also it's just evolved in general, both in terms of the tech but also in terms of our and I'm talking about not just you and me individually, but like as a people, our collective understanding of what things we can get done with this. And so I wanted to bring this back up not only to share what you and I have been doing, but also to rekindle the conversation and make sure we're hearing from all of you. Feedbackusbrain show about how you're using AI in these ways. One of the big ones for me recently has been that OpenAI added Dall E3D A L L E version 3 to ChatGPT. Dall? E is there. I think it might have be might be one of the first engines that I used a couple of years ago for image generation and it was not great initially, but now with Dolly 3, it's super easy. In fact, if you go look at which episode of MackieCab was it? Mackie Gab 1006 yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes to it. We talked during the show. It was me and two of my co hosts, Pilot Pete and Adam Christensen. We were talking, we did our normal thing. We were answering people's questions and sharing quick tips. And for whatever reason the phrase like a caveman came up a few times probably we were talking about, well you could do it the new way or like a caveman, you could do it the old way. And because it came up enough, I thought, well, that's a perfect title for the episode. We kind of title our episodes that way. It works for us on that show. And so I thought, well, wouldn't it be great to have three cavemen using MacBooks as the episode image? So I went into Dall E3 and I said, please make me an image of a drawing. I specified that I wanted a drawing of three cavemen using MacBooks and make it in the 3000 pixel wide by 2000 pixel tall orientation, because I know that that fits into our template that I use to make our images for the podcast. And that was it like. And the image that you see, the results are amazing is what you get. It's amazing. And it took me longer to explain it to you now than it took for Dall E to generate the image that you see live on the site. And as part of the thing, it was, you know, 30 seconds maybe for it to spit that out. I was like, okay, great, I'm done.

Yeah. And I. And I think it's. Not only is it our opportunity as business owners and entrepreneurs to use these tools and to, you know, embrace them, but it's our responsibility because we're always, you know, usually embracing change and making decisions, trying new things out. And this is just one more thing we need to learn and help spread the word out and help talk to people about it. One of the, you know, so OpenAI, they're having their convention this weekend or. And pretty soon, if you're a paid. If you have the plus version, you'll be able to create your own GPT, teaching it to. To answer you with certain, you know what, any kind of data in a specific manner. And you can basically create your own assistant. You don't have to know how to program it or anything. And they have some good samples up there on their site. One of them, which I used recently, is the Data Analysis GPT. Okay, that basically you can upload any spreadsheet and then just ask the Analysis GPT questions about the data as well as, hey, I want a chart. I want you to show if you, you know, upload sales over a certain time period and you've got products listed and this kind of thing, you can create a myriad of visual charts and graphs that give you back data. It's. It's amazing. Another one that I really like is called the negotiator. That helps you, you know, you can enter in. I'm going through this negotiation or I'm trying to buy this thing. I have this issue and the GPT will come, come back, help advocate for your side of the equation and teach you to be a better negotiator. You know, it's really amazing, really that, yeah, it's, it's, it's nuts. They're kind of doing like, do not pay.com is an AI that started with just parking tickets, getting people out of parking tickets. Now it does all kinds of. They call it your AI lawyer. Yeah, sure, similar, similar kind of thing. But if you just go to. We'll put it in, in the notes. So. Because it's a little bit long, but yep. OpenAI if you log into Chat GPT and click the Explore button, you'll find all these new new GPTs that are. Maybe some are new, some are not.

Sure. Sure.

Another one I'm sure if you have kids is called Math Mentor. I help parents help their kids with Math. Need a 9pm refresher on geometry proofs? I'm here for you. I could use that. When my kids were in high school, it would be, it would have been amazing. But wow. And, and OpenAI has announced a GPT app store. So as people create more of these GPT apps, you're going to be able to, you know, get access to them and you can even put your own GPT apps up on the app store.

You know, we keep saying GPT. I want to make sure people, and I know most of us listening have probably at least played with this a little bit. Um, the. The GPT stands for Generative Pre trained Transformer. The generative part is the thing where it's not like a. It's unlike a search engine, which simply shows you things that already exist. The GPT engines will generate a response based on data they have. Okay, that, so that's the generative part. Pre trained means it's trained with a set of data. And Now I think GPT4 is up to like April of this year. They've got, you know, a data set that comes that far. So that's the generative pre trained part. That makes sense. The transformer means that you as the user with the, with the, you know, interfacing with the chat engine can tell it to change its answers, transform its answers. Where you could do it with an image and say, okay, this is great, but change one guy's hair to be blonde. Okay, great. Like, no problem. It can, you're having a, an ongoing conversation. It's not just generate me a picture of cavemen with MacBooks. And if it's not what you Want, you have to start again. Say, oh, crap, generate me a picture of cavemen with MacBooks. With one of them, it has blonde. No, you don't have to do that. You just say, all right, take what you've already told me or given me if it's right. Yeah, it's threaded and so that's the transformative part of it. And I think it's important for us all to remember what that GPT stands for because it's easy to forget that, oh wait, I get to manipulate these responses. It's like I'm working. This is why we call it AI. It's like you're working with a human, right? It's like it understands what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah. I mentioned to you, Dave, before we started working with a coach for a new business that trying to get off the ground and on one of our calls last week, he had a chatgpt open and was just feeding it our text at transcription as we were having this meeting and asking questions of it as we went back and forth. And it was like having a third person really listening into the conversations and making suggestions. And it wasn't that we were taking, oh yeah, I'm asking you the question. You just gimme the answer. It was, well, that's an interesting way to look at it. Or that's a different idea we didn't think about or we should include this. It was very helpful and I think that we're really on this productivity kick lately. These tools are amazing. I mean, all these businesses that you're trying to grow your social media presence. One of the most interesting things you can do with a GPT is ask it what is the best time to post something that you're working on and it will tell you so it will analyze data. Especially now, it's not always going to be correct.

You know, a friend of mine did describe this as, you know, dunning Kruger in a, in a chatbot, right? It thinks, yeah, it thinks that it is 100% right and will give you answers with confidence, but it may well be strong and wrong. It does not know when it's wrong. So you have to test. And one of my favorite examples of testing is like AppleScript, right? Or some kind of programming where you can say, great, Write me an AppleScript to do this or write me, you know, a JavaScript on the web to do this. And then you get to go and test it and if it doesn't work, you can go back and say, hey, by the way, thank you. But it doesn't work. Here's the error I got and it'll say, ah, I see what I did wrong. Let me fix that. And oftentimes, but not always it will fix it correctly.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's amazing.

And that's what we're doing with it. We'd love to hear what you're doing with it. Feedback at BusinessBrain show, we are rolling up on our 500th episode where we are going to take our last entries for this MacBook Air that we're giving away. And the odds are very good and we, you know, send us a message here in the next couple days and we'll add your name to the list.

Add your name to the list, Absolutely. You get, you get entered to win a MacBook Air. It's going to be wonderful. Thanks for hanging out with us for the last 21 and a half minutes, folks. Make sure to check out our sponsors, miro.com podcast shopify.com businessbrain keep on living that charmed life and we'll see you on Friday.