EP 98: The Art of Storytelling - Experience From a Microsoft AI Ambassador

This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life. One skill that I think no one is talking about ever since we've been riding this huge generative AI wave is storytelling. The ability to tell a captivating tale that brings viewers, readers and potential customers along for the journey. So that's what we're going to be talking about today on Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me not just learn what's going on in the world of AI, but how we can all actually leverage it, how we can leverage it to grow our businesses, our career, and everything else. My name is Jordan Wilson. Thank you so much for joining me.

I'm excited.

Hey, as a former journalist, I'm excited to have a dedicated episode on storytelling and a great guest to to come along with us on today's episode. So if you're joining us live, let me know where you joining us from. If you're on the podcast, make sure to check out those show notes. We always have related episodes and other links to to help you come and join us on this journey. All right, so before we get into that topic today, let's go over what's going on in the world of AI news, what we do every single day. So number one, Meta has re entered the large language model race. So recent reports show that Meta is training a new AI model specifically to go after GPT4, which right now is kind of the leader of the pack in the generative AI large language learning models. So Meta is investing in a lot of chips and new data centers and everything that a company needs to create, you know, a leader in the large language model space. So keep an eye out on that and more in the newsletter as well. So next big story of the day, Google pledged $20 million for a responsible AI fund. So this is from an Axios report that details Google's philanthropic army. They invested into the Digital Futures project, about a $20 million round to go out to companies that they felt were doing positive things in the world of AI and to make sure that AI doesn't kind of go into those dangerous pitfalls. So a group of nonprofits and executive or in academic institutions were named the first recipients. All right, and last but not least, AI is outperforming humans in building software. That might not be a surprise for many, but a new study showed that AI agents could develop software in less than seven minutes. And for about $1 in costs. Yeah, that's right. Seven minutes. $1. Crazy, right? So researchers from Brown University and a few Chinese universities test an AI powered agent kind of experiments to create 70 different programs in this study. And they found that on average it took the AI agents about seven minutes to develop each of those programs and only cost about a dollar.

Wow.

Right. You know, when, when we talk about the future of work, you, you have to keep AI agents in mind. But today we're not here to talk about AI agents or the future of work or maybe we'll talk a little bit about the future of work. But we, we are talking about storytelling and about AI as well. So I'm extremely excited to have today's guest onto the show. Please help me welcome Doug Thompson. He is owner of thedugthompson.com Doug, thank you for joining us. Appreciate you coming on the show.

Hey, thanks a lot for having me. Yeah, it's an easy name to remember. You know, I hate trying to remember what my website is. So I just look at that and.

Just, just the Doug Thompson. Doug, your, your experience is all over the place and I, I feel I would do an injustice if I tried to quickly recap it on my own. But could you just, you know, quickly tell our readers a little bit about your background because it's impressive. So I'm gonna let you, you brag on yourself here first.

Oh well, Jay, never give me a microphone to brag about myself. So anyway, I am, I am a technical sales nerd by, by trade, by nature, by most of my career. I spent 20 years at Microsoft before I came to my current employer Tanium. And you know this sort of interesting being a new employee at 60 years old. So it's, I'm like Methuselah from the, if you look at, from the technology age, started back in the Windows 3. I mean I remember used to have floppy disk to put things in. So I've been sort of a nerd, self taught, just always sort of curious about things like I said. And then I am a storyteller. I learned that somewhere along the way. We can get that if you want. I'm actually going to write a chapter for a book coming up here soon about that sort of event where I discovered, hey, I am a storyteller. I did it unintentionally, but it's just been a fun journey and it actually sort of led me into the. I know you talk about your favorite role was my AI ambassador role which we can talk about a little bit and it sort of led me to that. So I'm. I'm on a mission now to help all my technical sales nerds. Nerds. Just anybody that is out there, you're trying to sell something, relate to another person, you know, heck, even tell your story. And I'm here to help you do that because it's. Storytelling can be taught, but they don't do it in school, and they don't really have any of the things that I had to do when I was in school to sort of develop those skills. You know, the texting by phone now has sort of just ripped that storytelling piece out of us because everything's sort of shortened up.

Yeah, it's so true. And let's actually start there, Doug, because like I said at the top of the show, I'm a former recovering journalist, I guess, and you know, it's. I. I think right now. And, and maybe it's. It is because of AI, because so many people are pumping out just mediocre content at extreme rates. And I feel as consumers now, we are being just buried in a lot of just, just copy and messaging that's just not very good because of how easy it is to create not very good content using AI. So with that, Doug, like, what kind of recommendations and kind of given your background and recent history and really helping others tell stories, how can people still find that good balance between using AI but still telling a compelling story?

Yeah, the biggest things that I see happen is you read a story and there's two things. One, it doesn't really jive with the audience that they're doing. It doesn't really resonate well. It's just sort of a generic story. Story. Imagine a cartoon with no color and no special characters or anything like that. You know, you watch Mickey Mouse and you expect certain things to happen, right? And. And, you know, you get these things now that come out of a paper or something that you used to trust, and they just don't have any flavor. They're just bland. And they're not even. Sometimes you question the, the factualness of it. You know, that some can be suspect. But we're wired to hear stories and learn from stories. But it's a very human thing. It's a very experiential thing. And I talked about that in my TED Talk that I did, sort of where stories develop and we're wired to learn from them and they need to be personalized. They need to do something. So I use chat GPT, as we discuss in my, my podcast that you were on which drops next week. The Doug Thompson podcast. It's hard to figure these things out. You know, I just, my branding is just so, so bad. But we talked about that is, you know, when you start, start a story. I, I was talking to some, a guest on my podcast the other day. He's a dog trainer. And, and I said, well, you know, obviously you tell non verbal stories to dogs to train them. And they said, actually what the very first answer is go meet a dog at their house, where they are, where they live, get experience with it. And that's really where you need to start. Your story is where your audience lives. What's their experiences, what's the words that they use, what is their life like? So that as you're trying to tell a story, that a story is meant to inform, but also in the sales, words to convert. Right. To show them the value of your product. And if you can't verbalize it or articulate it in their language, then they're just going to, okay, this just another pitch or something. You know, it's. You need to do that. Right. And you gave me some good tips on how to sort of best use chat GPT to help do that. But it takes work. You just can't have it spit. The very first draft that it spits out is horrible. Yeah, I mean, I have to go back and, and say, okay, no, do a little bit of this, a little bit of massaging and stuff with it because I have to put my voice in it. It has to be in my voice. And I think, you know, as you as a journalist there, that you sort of recognize when you could probably recognize, okay, they didn't even try on this one, you know, or somebody ghost wrote it for him that didn't have their, their flavor and stuff. So that's the key thing of that. And then simply the artist storytelling, where you have the arc and there's struggle and there's other things in the hero, the hero's journey. So those are the two things that I work with. Again, the very first one is starting where the audience lives and making it familiar to them. Right. You can't write a generic story.

Yeah. Speaking of making it familiar with the audience. Thank you for the audience joining and tuning in right now. So, you know, Bronwyn saying, you know, she prefers a book and a pen and then adding it to the computer. Great, great tip there. And just as a reminder, you know, Yaddy here also remembers the floppy disk era. If you have a question for Doug on either his background in Microsoft, which we're going to get into in a second or just ways to improve your storytelling with or without AI? Go ahead and drop that comment in now so we can get to it. But I'm gonna ask, I want to.

Talk about that book and pen here real quick because there is scientific study that as you're writing things down, like taking notes in the class. There's studies back when I was back at Microsoft and the education team that typing, you don't remember, you don't connect with a lot of stuff where if you're writing, you have to sort of summarize things in your head and make the connection and write that down. So it has a more personal feeling to it. And I think it does resonate. Unfortunately, I can't remember, I can't read what the hell I wrote. So that doesn't help me very much.

Oh man, that's a good point. So I'll ask this Doug, because being a huge AI advocate and enthusiast myself, you know, I'm always encouraging listeners for the everyday AI show and just other people I meet like, hey, you should start to tap into the world of AI because I believe it is the future. You know, all the big companies are, you know, even changing how search engines work and making it more conversational with, with a chatbot style.

Right.

So what's, what's your advice for people to still. Or, or do you even encourage people to use AI in their storytelling? Or should they. They just go the old school way? Like Bronwyn was saying, pen and paper. Like, how can we still tell great stories?

No, I mean it's, I think you, I mean even if you take it further to jobs of the future, jobs today. And I'll go back to when I was an AI ambassador. So, so when we're coming around with, with AI, this is. I don't know if chat GPT was ever even sort of a figment somebody's imagination back then. Again, I'm talking five, six years ago that we were doing this and the AI ambassador role came out because Microsoft was starting to do a lot of stuff with artificial intelligence, machine learning. And we had to sort of articulate the message of what we were planning to do at the time. And you know, they were looking for storytellers because again, AI was just sort of this big, big scary. You know, the AI to that point was Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'll be back. Right? I mean, that's what it was. And our job here was to relate that, hey, you need. It's best done as a co pilot. I'LL use the brand that they're using now. Love it. Somebody to help the human be better. So take off some of the tasks and stuff that takes a lot of time or analyze so much damn data that the human would take decades and decades to do to help make them make better decisions. So it was really there to sort of aid that and sort of articulate that message out. And that's why they, they had us go along. There was really a cool day. It wasn't really defined. We went through different iterations before I left. But I got to talk people and really sort of get lay their fear that it's not all evil. Anything can be used for evil, for sure. But if, but if you don't sort of embrace it, if you don't do this and you're somewhat of a competitive disadvantage. So in the storytelling, yeah, you can use it, especially if you're like me who has sort of. I try to write and edit at the same time a lot of times, so I get no words out because I'm just, I can't get anything out. So I say, here, here's an idea. Put something out there. Let's see. And I end up rewriting most. I mean, I may use about 30% of what is put out, but it helps get me out of my. Where I'm stuck. So, yeah, definitely, definitely use it. But know how. Use it well. Right. And you give a lot of great tips on how to do that.

Yeah, yeah. Thanks. And that's, yeah, it's something we teach people all the time. You know, we have a little course prime prompt polish, the PPP method, where we, we walk people through that and how you can still retain, you know, that human voice or those important details of the story and kind of balance with AI. But I do, I do want to hit rewind here, Doug, because this one, we've talked about it. I'm so fascinated. You know, my, my, my wife always jokes around and tells me, hey, you, you know, you're either very early to something or, you know, you were born too late. But I, I have to talk about you being a Microsoft AI ambassador, you know, for those, you know, two years. Talk about timing. Right? October. Right. October 2018 to December 2020, you were an AI ambassador for Microsoft. Right. And then months later or right around that time actually kind of, you know, kind of all this GPT just started to hit the shelves. So talk a little bit about what your experience was like as an AI ambassador and also being early to the party. It must have been very difficult to advocate for something that now I think would be very easy to advocate for and to be an ambassador for.

Yeah, I mean, it was great because I got to talk to a lot of people I normally wouldn't get to talk to, you know, going to talk to events and things. And it was sort of nice being on the inside, understanding from, from that perspective at the time, what, what the plan was, you know, and one of the, one of the things we. One of the fundamental questions we had to do if we were trying to somebody we found a use case for a customer or something that an account team did that they want to use AI for, we would have to go through this review process. And one of the things, you know, like ethics and stuff that comes in, one of the things was just because we can do it, should we do it? Right? Because you look at something here where you could automate something or do something where it could decimate in the only employer in town of a developing country. Is that the right thing to do just because you can? Yeah, you know, so, so that was some of the discussion with philosophical discussions and stuff that we get to have and that, you know, we, we were sort of help taking crowdsourcing, if you will. What could you, what do you think you could use AI for? What do you think would be a good use for that? And we got to do some. So it was really just. It was like sometimes you're in this area where you don't. There's no rules, there's no rule book and you're trying to figure out your way and what's a good path forward. You're. You're stuck in sort of this, in a sailing, you know, example, you're sort of stuck at the start of the race. You really. You've got some science of where the wind may be blowing and stuff, but the wind changes. Yeah. You know, based off what's going on that will, you know, the end of the road. We want to be here. But my road there is like over here, over there. It's not a straight rear watch sailing is not a straight path. So a lot of learning and a lot of listening and I think that's helped them end up where they are today.

Sure. And I think where they are today and where we all are, I think. And we talked about this a little bit before the show. I had an episode a week or two ago about Microsoft Copilot. So from someone that worked there for 20 years, my hot take, Doug, is that Microsoft Copilot is going to be a much is going to have a much greater impact than even Chat GPT has had over the last, you know, year. Probably I would say 5x10x. What's your thoughts on that? And just real quick, you know, if you are new, Microsoft Copilot is essentially think of, you know, generative AI, but on your operating system, you know, so if you're using, you know, Microsoft 365 and the newest version of their operating system, having that generative AI follow you around in a good way, I think you know, from all your different programs. So. So Doug, talk a little bit about what you think Microsoft, you know, 365copilot means specifically for the future of work. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everyday AI.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen.

Well, I go back, you know, when I was there, you may remember Clippy.

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

So that was an early attempt based off the technology we had at the time to be helpful to go on and help you do. I see you're doing the Saturday Night Live. Did a great skit on the, on the Clippy thing. Go watch that YouTube. I watch that every now and then just to laugh. But you know, it got a bad rap. But it was somewhat ahead of its time. But because really because the back end wasn't there to make it extremely useful. Right. So it was sort of. We did the same thing with tablet. So when I was started out, I was in the OEM division. We did Windows XP and then we had the Tablet PC edition. So you had pen and paper. That was always Bill Gates's big thing. So pin on it on the thing. But the hardware and software, the hardware really wasn't there to support it because they weighed 8 pounds and had a 40 minute battery life. You know, it was just not until you came out with the iPad and stuff that it didn't, that form factor really didn't come to life. But so I think Clippy was the same thing. Now, now you've got the back end to do it and it can be more useful. Instead of saying hey, it looks like you're doing, you know, it simply says, you know, you can tell it what to do. It'd be, it's a little bit more of like a virtual assistant truly that, that responds when you ask it to do not be so pushy. That pops up everywhere and just annoys the hell out of you. So it's, it's there, it's, that's the, you go back to the early thing. It's rough when you're, you've got a great idea but there's not the back end to support it. I think this is great timing and it makes a lot of sense because Office and everybody, so many people use that and going back to the PowerPoint, if you go back there, they had this sort of presentation and coach. Right. They had, they built that feature in to say hey look, you got way too damn many words on this. Yeah. I have to apologize because we allow you to do bad slides. There's a reason when I was there that death. My PowerPoint has a true. Because people would abuse it. How much stuff can I cram on here? Yeah. So in using things, knowing what, what makes a good presentation stuff, it helps you not shoot yourself in the foot. So, so I think this is the, this is the good improved Clippy. I don't think it'll go away. Yeah. Although there are privacy concerns and stuff that you have about that too.

Oh absolutely. And just, just as a reminder, if you are just tuning in now, we have Doug Thompson joining the everyday AI show talking about storytelling AI but also you know, his at Microsoft. So one question here, I want to bring up Jackie's comment here. So talking, you know, saying copilot is expensive to incorporate. Been told by many enterprise companies that I'd like to get your take on that Doug. And I have a hot take as well because I believe that you know, Microsoft Copilot is about, I think it's $30 a month to, to kind of incorporate per user. So yeah, if enterprise companies have, you know, hundreds or thousands of employees, it definitely is a, a big Cost to incur. So again, not, not asking you to put your Microsoft, you know, sales cap on, but I have a hot take on this. But I want to know what you think, Doug, about this. You know, because it is, you know, I think we've been trained to expect very cheap, you know, because the $20 a month for chat, GBT and a lot of these tools are even free to use. So what's, what's your take on this price of. Or on this piece of the price of generative AI for enterprise companies?

Yeah, I mean I would have to think again. I haven't been in that, that realm for a long time, but I know just some current environment that everybody's looking to trim it expenses which it's a battle. Is it a strategic asset for you or is it a nuisance that you have to have? I mean they do it from a security standpoint as well as they, they try to go in and cut budgets here. Well, we don't need that. Right. We've got. And they can't. But they can't hire people to do it because there's not enough of the people to do the security. But I think that, you know, for everybody in there, a janitor doesn't necessarily need that access. Right, but, but if you have knowledge workers who are truly trying to do this, then you have to evaluate how much time are they spending trying to do it manually, you know, and, and you know, it's not. The object is in a, from a society standpoint, the object's not to eliminate humans, is to make them more productive at what they do. There's a lot of job openings, although they, you know, they've had layoffs too. They come up. So it's sort of a mixed, a mixed thing. I think you covered it on there that there is a risk that this will replace some people. But every transition that you've had in history, you know, there's nobody making iceboxes anymore. Although YETI does a pretty good job of the cooler.

That's true.

Right, right. So you have to go ahead and sort of evolve and, but you do it judiciously. It's not just, not for everybody there. So the cost is based off how you are going to use it, the number of employees and stuff. I don't know what the licensing is for that. It probably goes into the enterprise suite somehow. But it's always a value thing. Do you see the value there? If not and you're not going to use it. When I was at Microsoft, we had so many people there that would buy a suite of stuff and not use half of it. They go out and buy a third party thing to go do it because they liked it better, whatever. And it's just not a smart way to spend money if you're just going to do it and not use it. Right here we're going to shelfware, as we would call it.

Yeah. Oh yeah, gosh, don't remind me about my shelfware right now. Doug, I'll say this, and I'm echoing Douglas's comment here, saying 30 bucks a month for software that multiplies your productivity is actually a savings. I'm in that vein because I had a guest on a couple months ago, Corey Warfield, and I'll make sure to drop the link to this, this later. But you know, he essentially said that the companies that aren't using generative AI top to bottom are putting themselves at risk to go out of business, you know, in 18 months. And I, I agree with that. You know, I say this for, even for enterprise company, even for enterprise customers, if they're not willing to, to pay that $30 a month, that just means in my head that they're putting themselves at risk to lose, to lose their market share by far. Because you know, I think for these tools that are 20, 30, 50, I mean even $100 a month, you, you, you make that up, you know, within a couple clicks of using it, of using it correctly. I do want to get, I want to transition a little bit here, Doug, because we have some great, some great comments that I want to get to. So again, thank you everyone for, for getting in your comments for Doug. So let's get this one here. So Dr. Harvey Kastrow asking any tips regarding storytelling, top suggestion on which AI tools to use and any out of the out of the box recommendations. So yeah, do specific, you know, AI kind of tools or softwares that you think can help in storytelling.

Yeah, again, chat, GPT used the right way. Prompting stuff can definitely help with doing that. There are, I haven't tried a lot. I have seen some out there that sort of, they're almost like a coach to, to help you do that. Yeah. You know, maybe for, for me, for the elementary type stuff, it may be okay for somebody if you want to get to say like I don't know, fifth grade, sixth grade level of doing it or maybe I haven't, again, I haven't used them, but those are the things. But the storytelling piece of that is think about when you're again, starting with what the message you want to Convey. But think about how you talk to your friends, not necessarily your co workers. What, what I find, especially with very smart people like, like our doctor friend here probably, is that when they're talking to their peers, it's a totally different conversation they have because every they. Everybody has the same basis, base, level of knowledge, right? And so you take shortcuts. You talk about things that are sort of with the three letter acronyms or whatever, you know, whatever you use and where the normal person or your audience and stuff does not use that they don't understand and they will just tune you out. So that's why think about, you know, but you talk to your friends that don't understand or you're some of your family that doesn't that you know, how do you talk to them and explain it? Because that's the language you may think to do if you're not talking to again, your peers, go talk to them about that. Now if it's a scientific paper and you got a bunch of Sheldons out in the audience and stuff and you know, that's fine, nerd out, because that's what they expect. But if you're talking to a. But like that's the thing I do when I'm going to talk technology to somebody. I may talk into a chief marketing officer or something who doesn't really care about technology at all. I got a problem. Can you help me do that? And that's the language again, getting back to starting your story, whether your audience is. That's the language that I get rid of. I have this. I've been on this mission for probably close to a decade to in text planning, right? So you take that, you combine mansplaining with technology. And that's what a lot of very smart people do is they take Spain, you know, death by features, function, speed. Nobody cares about that. Don't use it. How does this help me? Right? Focus on that. Who's your audience? What's. What do they need? And start there.

Yeah, that's great advice. And I think so many times, Doug, especially when we see so many new AI softwares and tools, I think we rush to try to use the next versus just focusing on what you said is who am I talking to? What are their problems? And really just starting there. I'm actually curious. Woozy, thank you for this question because I'm sure in Doug's lifetime he's heard a lot of great stories. So Woozy's question right here is asking you what's your most, most memorable story that you've heard in a sales pitch demo. So kind of what's that, that most impressive or memorable story that, that you've heard kind of in the business world.

Doug. Wow, that's. I'm glad you didn't ask what my best one was because. Because honestly I, I. The pitch. I'll answer his question in just a minute. But, but the, the pitch that I use is different every time I. The best ones that I've had. Somebody's come up to me after said that you finally said something. I said, good. Could you tell me what I said? Because I hon remember because, because I get it's, it's a little bit of an improv type thing is again, I'm taking what environment they're in, questions that come up about it. I talk to people ahead of time. You know, I do a little LinkedIn stalking on who I'm talking to. So I'm trying to get this picture here of what I want to do. Then I tailor the core message. You maybe there's four, five or six different things to that. So the best messages that I've. The best things that I've had is that Steve Jobs was the best technical storyteller that I've ever seen. The way that he could, he could get us to. But you know, I didn't know I needed 10,000 songs in my pocket until he told me about it. Right. So. So those are the best pitches and all that I've ever seen that they're not really a pitch. They are a story that connects with something that I lately want or I don't even know that I want. It would be cool. Then makes me go take an action to go do that. So those are the best ones. If you want examples. Again, Steve Jobs, I do this. A guy that did a really good job was a mentor of mine, was James Whitaker. He worked for Microsoft and Google, then back at Microsoft. Now he's out brewing beer and telling stories or stuff. Something like that. Mary Rodriguez is a good technical. She's got a book called Brand Storytelling. They were both mentors of mine. But Steve Jobs, by and far, if you want to sort of see a technical story done well, that's it. And the best sales pitch is not a pitch at all. It is something that a story that connects that makes me go want to go take an action and part with my hard earned money to go do something. Yeah.

And even, even to add on to that. And I think it's actually easier now to explain after hearing you say it. Doug is, I think effective stories are not necessarily, you know, selling. You know, you have all these different copywriting, you know, very famous, you know, copywriting techniques, you know, ADA features and benefits. And I think what you just said right there, Doug, is amazing. Is the best stories aren't, you know, taking those traditional quote unquote copywriting routes. They're. They're helping you imagine how much better your life would be with something. But talking about it through, you know, the features and benefits or, you know, attention and all these other, you know, traditional writing techniques, which is extremely interesting. So one, one other thing, Doug, I want to ask what is, you know, because from your perspective, you've seen a lot.

You've.

You've seen a lot of technical innovation. You kind of understand where consumers are from working on the front end and now helping them on the back end. Where do you see just the future of work going and maybe even the future of storytelling? Because I think it changes every day and you know, I think consumer behavior is changing. So where do you see kind of the future of storytelling going, especially with AI?

Yeah, I mean, well, unfortunately, the attention span of humans keeps going down and down and down. So the art of storytelling gets to be how concise can I do that and really sort of become sort of this here's this hook and then maybe one chance to back it up, to get interest, maybe two very short ones. But it needs to happen in less than two minutes. And that's really, I mean, when you're giving a presentation, you. One of the things you got about two minutes for people to decide, yay or nay, am I leaving the back of the room or I go and give this person some time. So, so you really have to have that hook that goes through that. So that won't change. You know, and I use storytelling because there always be things for good books, things like that. Right. So the longer form stuff will be there. That, that really doesn't change that much other than self publishing. And you, you. How do you know that it's not chat GBT that wrote the whole thing? You know, I, I think that the authors that still put their secret sauce, that's step eight that I call. There's a bunch of different things I have that is the see your secret sauce into that that makes that connection with people and all that. I saw somebody mentioned signing Simon Sinek earlier. You know, starting with why is a great thing to do. But he has some great thoughts. Seth Godin has a lot of great thoughts and stuff that go in it. You know, they didn't come from Chat GPT.

Right.

So you can connect with that, but from the pitch perspective and all that or selling or these other. But I've got to do this then. I, I think you, you have to just learn to be very concise. And I've had mixed results with chat GBT being very concise and totally missing the point. Well, yeah, okay, you got me five, you got me 100 words. What the hell do you. We lost the essence of what was going on. Right. And, and you've explained it to me is it's the tr. It's the model and stuff that they use. It's predictive type thing. It should get better over time. But right now it's sort of a challenge. Right. And so you have to sort of evolve. And I totally lost the first part of that question. She got me on storytelling on it. But the future of work here, I think.

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that quick. Yeah.

You know, I, I started out, my first degree was in industrial electronics. Electricity and I had assembly code language was the thing that I had because at the time the oil boom was. One of the oil booms was going and I lived in southeast Texas and there were five jobs for every person, most of them. And this was back in the early 80s where $50,000 a year was a lot. I was, that was a good pay. And by the time I graduated, we had a bust and there were five people for every job. So I had to go learn to do something else. I worked on copy. I was a copier technician for, for a while and. But I, again, curiosity came. But I always had that curious thing about, okay, what's this technology do? How does it work? I was a kid that would take things apart and try to put things back together without too many extra, extra pieces. Right. I was. That's just the way you have to have that curiosity. You have to. If you're not. If you just simply ignore what is out there on the fringe. And I think you told me you had like a gazillion. You talked about shelfware, you tried 80, everything that came out just to see what it was and see is there some potential and stuff there. That's what you have to do. You have to have that curious mindset to go on and do that. Or you can't trust. Just because I've always done it and I'm good at this, you know, turning a, a knob or do something like that. That's not always going to be there. There will be some automation, there will be some things that happen. So so learning to use AI and learning to do these other things, that puts you a step above everybody else that has no interest in doing it because it's hard or I, I, I, you know, I don't, I don't like it right there. That's sort of the things it's, it's adapt or die almost. I mean, that's, sorry. That's the sad thing about it. Yeah.

What a, what a note to end on. Right? Adapt or die.

Adapt or suffer.

Yeah, I know. Right. So we've been over, you know, your background. We talked about your time at Microsoft, how to tell better stories. But as we wrap up here, what is the one kind of takeaway that you hope people, you know, listening, whether it's, you know, improving their storytelling through AI or just, you know, maybe not using AI, but what's, what's your one, you know, takeaway piece of advice for everyone listening out there to just tell more impactful stories, whether using AI or not.

If I boiled it down to one phrase, the story is not about you. It's about the listener. It's about what they can get out of it. You're taking them on a journey. They're investing their time with you. They want something out of that. That's the best story is the one that's not about me. I'm simply the vehicle of which that story is told. Absolutely.

It's, it reminds me, you know, when people ask for copywriting tips, my number one thing is as well, no one cares about you. I think, I think that's important. Important to keep in mind.

Right?

So, so, Doug, thank, yeah, thank you so much for joining us. We covered a lot. As a reminder, make sure to check out today's newsletter. We're going to be sharing a lot more from Doug, hopefully sharing some, some great resources and other things from his website. And also if you haven't already, please make sure that you do go to your everydayai.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter where we will be breaking down today's episode in great detail. So don't worry if you miss it all or tuned in late. We got you, Doug. Thanks again so much for joining us. And I hope to see everyone else back for another day of Everyday AI. Thanks, y'.

All. Thanks.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter. So you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.