Book Project, Cohesive Conversations, and Curiosity

Welcome to wake up with AI, the podcast where human powered meets AI assisted. Join your hosts, Chris Carillon, Niko Lofakas, and George b Thomas as we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence. From the latest AI news to cutting edge tools and skill sets, we are here to help business owners, marketers, and everyday individuals unlock their full potential with the power of AI. Let's get started.

Good morning. Happy Tuesday, December 17, 2020 4. It is time for another edition of let's build AI skills daily here with George. Nico can't make it today, but George and I are gonna carry the load with some exciting projects conversation. How are you doing, man?

I'm doing good. Glad we can be here holding down the fort and super excited to just dive into, let's call it, part 2 of the conversation that we started yesterday. If you haven't listened or watched that episode, definitely go back, check it out. But, yeah, let's, let's just dive into it. How well, first of all, how the heck are you doing today?

We're getting close to Christmas, brother.

Yeah. I'm doing great. I've got some, hopefully, some Christmas delivery showing up this week, thanks to some consulting projects. You know, they say something to the effect of, like, content marketing takes 6 to 12 months or something like that. Well, apparently, we're at the end of that period because there's some good stuff happening.

Apparently, I'm an expert or something like that. I don't know I don't know how

we Over time. Right?

But yeah.

Yes. You do. Hard work, dedication, and resilience. That's how we get there.

But It looks like I'm having a ton of fun now, which I am. So we're we're in a good place. Especially when we get to create content like this, have chats with people like Mike Tedasco who I'm gonna share. He he made Gunas word. And just, I always wanna remind people of the speed of this stuff.

He said, you know, within 24 hours after our conversation yesterday, which was ended at about 12:30 CST. At 6:30 CST, he sent me a link to this book on Amazon. So what we did yesterday, we had Mike Tedesco on the show talking about writing a book. Really just, like, from perspective, look, you can do stuff like this with these tools. So often, I think that's the first hurdle.

It's like just seeing the speed of, you know, chat gpt yesterday work. We also jumped into Midjourney to start creating this cover, and we were nowhere near this at the end of the call. So

But I do like that cover.

I do. It's legit. And I think so for me, my main takeaway yesterday and this is this book is free for anybody to check out, I think, for, like, the first 5 days or something. So we'll share a link. Takeaway for me is, like, AI can do these things for you.

The less context you have, the less direction you give it, just like any other human being that's not the one with the vision and and the subject matter expertise, it's not gonna give you the results you're probably looking for. But why we're gonna kind of part to it today is when you do give it the context and the direction and you collaborate with it, some pretty special outcomes and some unbelievable timelines can happen.

Yeah. Without a doubt. I really liked yesterday. My takeaway from yesterday was creativity. The ability to just be like, hey.

I wanna do this thing. It's never been done before. Let me make something out of the ether, out of my my brain. And now you can literally if you wanted to, that could be a physical book if you wanted to. Right?

And you could walk around, and you could just hand this book out to people because maybe go to, like, the local street racing meeting, and you're like, hey. Check out Rustin Robert. Right? There's just so much stuff you can do with the creativity that you have at your hands, the the power of understanding and pivoting and just yeah. We live in such a such an amazing time in so many ways, but for many, also, like, a difficult time in so many ways as well.

Yeah. And that brings to mind a couple things. Now yesterday, Danielle Costa, c s CS leader in the HubSpot space, like, talked about how to find a job, like, if you're looking for jobs in, customer success in 2025, and she kinda went through the usual, like, resume builder, get through the job recruiting process advice. And I mentioned or maybe you can skip some of that, start creating content, start sharing your expertise openly online. And, like, tied in with that, my first inbound in 23, I sat in a talk, from David Meerman Scott.

Love that guy.

Love that guy. Yeah. It was amazing to see him in person. And but at the same time, I was one of those in there. I was like, okay.

Like, I can do those things. Right? And it was because it was it was a different take on how to think about SEO and discoverability in the coming AI. You know, and this was 23, September 23. Right?

How far we've come since then. But one of the things, and this is basically like how to be a thought leader, like number 2 was like write a book. And I was like, okay. Does he see this room? Like, who's just gonna pop out a book?

Like It's like because, you know, those guys

a mountain. Hey. Just bulldoze a mountain. Just do that. Right.

You have

to do that. Those guys, like him and Mark Shape, that just, like, books every year. Right? They've obviously figured this out. But, like, it wasn't soon after that I just started thinking through it.

I'm like, okay. He's he's not wrong in that if you can do that, like, the stature, like, in in some people's minds, all of a sudden, you have more credibility. And, know, to get to this point where we're publishing a book on Amazon, like, obviously, you don't have a ton of leeway. There there's no space to take advantage of this in in in the wrong ways. Right?

You'll be found out very quickly if you try to misrepresent yourself as a thought leader. But the ability to create this level, and I think I've maybe talked about on the show or definitely with you in person, George, like, just the fact that you have a show sometimes. Right? So all of this is, like, in the past, it might have been the tools or the resources or the training or something was missing for you to not be able to take the step or take longer or be harder. And it's just not that anymore.

We've got the tools.

Listen. I mean, you're preaching a little bit to the choir, and I hope everybody's paying attention to what you're saying. Because of the way that I was creating content, the hub cast and doing HubSpot, tutorials, when I had to go from one organization to the next, there was no hiring process. There was, I think I'd like to be part of your team. Hi.

Welcome home. That was the hiring process. Right? And the onboarding process is very much streamlined of, like, let's just get you doing the thing that we know you do, which is, you know, build community, create content. And so being out there and becoming known, which, by the way, you mentioned Mark Schaeffer.

If you haven't gotten his book known and read known and understand, like, the principles of that and what it can do for your life, like, that's a definite starting piece. But

That was my first Mark Shaffer book. Maybe one of the first ten I would listen to on Audible because it was that 2017, like, I listened to They Ask You Answer, StoryBrand, and I'm pretty sure known came out that year too.

If you do known and then marketing rebellion, by the way, like, those 2 back to back anyway, not why we're here. It's funny because I reference bulldozing a mountain. Back in the day, you would have had to use hand shovels to move a mountain. Then all of a sudden, you would, like, actually be able to use a bulldozer to move a mountain. Now you can use AI to move a mountain, and I'm talking in a digital sense when it comes to writing a book, being known, putting things out to the world.

And so this is why I say it's an amazing time to just be alive. And and if you understand that nothing's changed and that the core principles and philosophies that if you can learn or or listen to those and pull those in in a contextual specific way, you're gonna just be able to win. It's funny. In our our Slack channel yesterday after the, interview with Mike t, by the way. Could be totally a rapper's name, by the way.

But, anyway, it was like, hey. What'd you learn? And I literally put in Slack writing styles. Writing styles, writing styles. I'll get back to that in a minute.

But, Chris, do you wanna you wanna talk about projects? Let's lean into projects, Claude projects, chat gpt projects. Like, talk us through a little bit about projects, maybe the difference of projects, and then I'll go into maybe some specifics of a project that I'm playing around with. Talk about moving a mountain with AI and maybe even show some examples.

So this was an announcement on Friday. And just to bring everybody up to speed, yesterday was day 8. Today's day 9 of 12 days of shipments from OpenAI. Yesterday was about search, so I don't really feel the need to, click into that.

And type things in, things pop up. Okay. We talked about it.

Yeah. I mean, on that note, more every day, I'm seeing people in their HubSpot reports, in their marketing reports. We are getting people coming from these LLM models, perplexity, GPT, more most often the 2 mentioned. This is happening. This is the search is changing.

Okay? But day 7, Friday, a lot of people got excited because projects have been a thing in Claude for a while, different enough from custom GPTs to really provide a different experience, and a lot of people love them. And we're waiting for for chat gpt to deliver something similar, and they did that on on Friday. And no matter how much I love Claude projects, you know, we we run into things like, you know, knowledge base limitations and the need to, you know, you reach the end of chats. Right?

And how do you how do you go from one chat to the next? There's no retention. There's no knowledge retention in Claude across chats. So there's lots of things, you know, that left us wanting. And so, of course, I the best way I I know how to use these tools to learn about the tools, I just had a quick conversation with Chat GPT on Saturday, I think it was.

And this is where, like, I just highlighting these nuances in that words matter so much. I said, tell me about your new projects tool. Right? It starts talking about Canvas. And what I learned, it's the difference between and this is probably like, you know, software developers are like, duh, Chris.

Like, oh, projects is a tool or Canvas is the tool that does project like things, and projects is a new feature of the system. So tool versus feature. Alright. Learning stuff already. But I had to ask, like, are we talking about same projects tool here?

It's like, okay, here's how the projects feature you're showing works. A lot of what I was getting at is because one of the challenges with Claude is that if you fill up the knowledge base, right, you get to like a 100%, you get close to a 100%, you get, like, 5 chats, like, because it's hitting every one of those things every time, and it just uses up tokens, like, real quick. Right? So the coolest thing I confirmed is can you see context across chats?

Yeah. That might be the most important thing on your screen right there. As soon as I saw that, and I even went and asked it again in my own way just to make sure before I started down a journey, I was like, oh, that right there is a game changer.

Yeah. And this this journey towards retention and and memory, they they are definitely building towards, and I think that's the kind of stuff that gets lost. Why we want better performance in these tools It doesn't have to be, you know, faster or, like, input take more inputs or or do all the videos and all the images and, like, just being able to like, so this is a huge quality of life update in terms of not having to create chats from old chats and try your best to retain the information literally just like you are working with a a human being who has had those other conversations with you at this point. So outside of projects, it it says it doesn't. I I've seen some examples, from Nico where you feel like it's it's retaining some stuff across chats.

Well, that's your memory. It's grabbing stuff and throwing in your memory, and that's why you get that feeling. But yeah.

Here, another huge difference is limits on files. Right? So it's the number of files that can be added to a project is 20 with a size limit of 512, which is huge.

How many millions of tokens?

And that's where the difference on the cloud size is much more about space than it is about, like, how many files. I don't think it's anywhere near that amount of space total, but we start to play games like, okay. What kind of file type is it that you're uploading and, like, how do we serve up the information? Once it said end user limit is limited to 10 gigabytes and each organization to a 100, so I was like, okay. 10 gigabytes per project or per account.

It's per account. So if you load all this up into 1 project, then you get you get one project. This was huge. This is the kind of development that's exciting, like, because of the situation in cloud where if you load up to a 100%, you're done in, like, 5 chats. That means it's reviewing it every time it uses up the tokens.

Does each message use up as many tokens as are in the project files? No. Each message you send within a project does not automatically use up as many tokens as are in the uploaded project files. That's a big deal. Again, game changer.

Game changer. Yeah. And it and it makes sense because to be able to support also looking across the chats, however many you have, it's got to find ways to contextualize everything constantly and only look for spots. I'd say not having dove too much in and and swear we'll we'll let George show us what he's working on. I imagine there are there's a contextual understanding for us as the human is working with the tool that creates possible gaps where if it doesn't pull up the correct set of knowledge for you, which again, we we've seen this in in all the tools I think we work with.

And it just oftentimes, it's like, oh, did you I don't think you looked at this part. Can you just focus on that part this time? And then and then bam, you get the answer that you're expecting and looking for. So super, super interesting.

I mean, it is it is really interesting, and it's it's really powerful. I'll go ahead and share my screen, Chris, because we'll we'll journey down.

I'll just, I realized I I left out something very important.

Oh, okay.

Is any of the data and projects used to train chat GPT? It is not. It's not used to train or improve DA miles by default. Your data is private. Data retention policies, opt in data usage, enterprise.

Right? So let's try not to worry about security or let it get in the way of using these tools. But at the very least, you can check out the the policies and, you know, information related to security very easily.

Chris, Chris, you got a hard stop? I do not. Alright. Well, then we're gonna have some fun. So Alright.

Let me go ahead and share my screen. So what you're looking at right now, if you're watching this, if you're listening, I'll try to do the best I can. But what you're looking at, if you're watching it on Spotify or YouTube or LinkedIn right now as we're doing this, is this is the book writing project for the superhuman framework. And so just so everybody knows, yes, I do have a collab project, superhuman framework 2025. Yes.

I've loaded it up with a bunch of information. Yes. I've actually had some chats with it to try to figure out things and, you know, build some stuff and bring bring a, you know, framework to the world, if you will. But one of the mountains that I've been wanting to move is write a book. Now, historically, one of the problems with a lot of these is and by the way, I've preached context since like the beginning, but one of the problems is cohesiveness.

Being able to thread things together in a way that it understands where it was and where it's gonna go. It's great at one off pieces, but getting that cohesiveness has always been difficult. Now what you're gonna see here is a couple different things. 1, we have cohesiveness because we've literally created an outline. So you're gonna see here, this is basically, like, 16 different chapters or the ideas of chapters.

So once I have this, what I can do is I can come back into my project, and I can say, hey. Let me go ahead and give you the outline of the actual book that we're working on because now you're gonna know where we're at and where we're going. I can give you also a huge context document. And when I'm done, I can actually give you the entire book to look back on, by the way, in this project. But here's where I wanna kinda, start is, like, Chris, I'm gonna start a new chat, and I'm gonna be like, what was the title and subtitle of the book we are writing again?

Because maybe I'm human, and I forgot what we're actually writing about. Now the reason I'm doing this is because I want everybody to understand the nitty gritty, the micro of the memory of what's happening here because it's like, oh, well, human, your title is this and your subtitle is this because it's looking at all of the things that we've done. And I can even ask it questions like, what was the Walt Disney quote we used? Question mark. And it's gonna go ahead and look at the things that we have here, and it's gonna be like, oh, well, you pulled in this or maybe I didn't pull in a Walt Disney quote, by the way.

But it's gonna look at the project files, and it's gonna say, oh, where is Walt Disney or is Walt Disney missing? Well, using the book, here's the quote that you used. Right? And so boom. So I want everybody just to understand the micros of what it's able to do and look at and understand.

Yes. Like, just to double click. What it can do also the confirm confirm it just like another human being. Right? Are we on the same page?

Do you see what I see? Are you understanding this thing the way that I understand it? Taking a minute or a few seconds, actually, to make that confirming statement upfront at the beginning of the chat will save you so much time and effort and frustration.

So cohesiveness, granularity. We've already talked about the the project files that I can add to this over time, and then we get into Now I'm not gonna make everybody look at the instructions in this little box. I've actually put them right here because I think this is really important for people to see and understand, and there's a couple of things that I'm gonna call out because they're very purposeful. So you'll see this is the superhuman framework book GPT. The instructions act as a collaborative book writing assistant providing guidance, drafting content, and refining ideas for a book based on the superhuman framework.

Ensure that all content reflects the 4 cornerstones, love, purpose, passion, and persistence, and it integrates the 10 h pillars. I won't read all those. Maintain a tone that is conversational, educational, motivational, and human centered. Emphasize empathy, inclusivity, and relatability. Okay.

Very key important words. Right? Now check this out. Works workflow support. Assist with each stage of book writing brainstorming.

Guys, remember when I asked, Mike, what are the stages? What are the things? Like, this is where my brain was going. So when I I got off that interview, I went to the Internet, and I, like, searched all the steps to, like, write a book that you should be paying attention to. So outlining, drafting, editing, finalizing.

Tailor your response based on the user's stage in the process. I need you to act a different way depending on the thing that I'm actually trying to do in the mountain that we're trying to move. Right? Prompt the user for critical information before starting a section. Target audience, purpose, tone.

Again, I'm saying, ask me the context that you need to know so we can have a cohesive conversation around the things that we're trying to teach. Alright. So this is where it gets fun. Tone and style. Adopt a conversational tone that is approachable, clear, engaging as seen in best selling business books.

Now how did I get here? I literally searched what are the top selling business books of all time. I got a page that listed 48 of them. I had another GPT look at the page and say, hey. Please research every one of these books and tell me what the most popular style writing style is for these books out of them, and then we reverse engineer to build this piece of the instructions.

Write using a balanced storytelling structured framework, illustrate concepts, and provide maintain clarity and simplicity, avoiding jargon and overly complex language, incorporate real life examples, narratives. Okay. We're gonna keep going. Brainstorming. Generate fresh ideas aligned with user vision for the book.

Suggest chapter structures, themes, and hooks based on the 4 cornerstones and 10 h pillars. Look at outlining, drafting, editing, writing guidelines, superhuman, integration. Ensure all chapters and sections exemplify the principles of love, purpose, passion, and persistence. Integrate the 10 h pillars, usability, provide actual tips for the user, enhance their book's marketability, including ideas for chapter titles, call to actions, audience engagement. Like, the specificity in here, post completion, custom prompts, brainstorming, outline, like, all of these things make this do what it does.

Now here's here's the fun part. Is literally, we can go into one of these chats, and you're gonna see here's chapter 2, discovering purpose in a distracted world. This is what we ended up creating together, but we ended up creating this together because we were in Canvas and we could suggest edits. We could increase the length. We could do the readability that we want.

So each one of these is a freaking chapter of the actual book that it can look back on. And I literally have gone into sections and said, hey. How about we actually do this thing where we look at what we're saying and we look where we're going and now fix this ending? Or okay. So here's the thing.

We got these instructions. We've got this project. We've got this outline. Right? So what happens?

Here's what happens. Is you end up and I want you to pay attention to something that also usually doesn't happen when you're writing with with GPT or with AI. Let me ask you something. Are you thriving or just surviving? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel energized and ready to make an impact, or are you dragging yourself through the day just trying to keep up?

That's one long sentence. By the way, that's a medium sentence. Check this out, though, down here. It literally goes into where it's like 2 words. You're not stuck.

You're not broken. Short. Right? So it's literally writing like a human with long, medium, and short sentences versus with AI, one of the biggest problems was it was always almost the same length of sentence. They're like and so, by the way, take a breath.

You're not alone in this. So if we go through here, notice I've pulled in quotes. I I personally pulled in these quotes. Now did I personally pull in these quotes? No.

I actually went to Claude, and I had a thing where it's like, let me go ahead and ask you what are 3 popular relevant quotes for a particular section of what we're actually writing. Right? And so, then then I picked the one that I wanted. So out of all the quotes in the world, here's a section of text. What 3 are relevant, impactful, motivate motivational that fit here?

So, boom, we add that in. Why are you feeling stuck? The framework that changes everything. Notice another quote. But we even get down in here, and this was a after the book was written suggestion.

Oh, by the way, let let me stop here. Math teacher story. This is I think this would be a great place for my math teacher story. So you're gonna see that I'm highlighting places where I'm gonna add in the actual things that are me, the human, and the life that I've lived to get to the point that I would even wanna bring this framework or this book to the world. K?

So is this a great rough draft? Yes. Is it gonna get humanized along the way? Yes. Would I ever have been able to do this previous in life?

No. I would have never been able to move this mountain with shovels or a bulldozer, but with AI, I can. But check this out. This is a thing that happened after the fact. They said, hey.

You should actually have these superhuman spotlights for each chapter of the book. By the way, it also suggested this. You should have a what we learned wrap up at the end of each chapter. So now at the end of each chapter, we have some structure where it literally has a superhuman spotlight. Holistic.

True self love comes from honoring your mind, body, and spirit. This week, schedule 30 minutes to care for each area. Mind, read, meditate, or learn something new. Body, move, stretch, or rest intentionally. Spirit.

Reflect, pray, or connect with nature. Which area needs the most attention right now? I'll just let that hang for anybody watching this or listening to this right now. But if we go down here to to chapter 2, superhuman spotlight honesty. Living with purpose begins with radical honesty.

Are your current priorities aligned with what truly matters to you? Write down what you say your values are, how you're spending your time daily, where do you see a disconnect, and how can you align those? By the way, what we learned in this chapter was dude, this goes on for 88 chapters or 80 or 84 pages of a rough draft book based on this tool being released to the world, these instructions being created, and understanding what we're trying to do, which by the way, if you look at this, it's understanding that true change happens with the individual human, but then that can change the teams, and that can change the leadership, and that can change the culture. So we're literally going from individual human to teams to leadership to culture through this entire book around the superhuman framework. My friend, I hope everybody realizes the times have changed.

You can move mountains. The ability to be creative and create is at an all time maximum pertaining to this. I'm I'm super jazzed and excited about what I was able to do yesterday in about 4 hours.

That was yesterday?

That was yesterday.

I mean, come on, folks. Like, get in there. And that's, like, no

matter what you

see, like, cannot figure it out for yourself through somebody else's video or or teachings or whatever. Like, you you you gotta get in there and because everybody like, there's creativity inside of every human being, and, like, that's the fun part right now. No matter what clay is served up by AI, you can add a little piece. You can take a little piece out. Like, I love it when it gives me ideas, like what you just described.

Like, oh, you should do this at the end of each chapter. And then you like that. And then immediately, like because I think for humans, it's hard to it's hard to balance standardization versus customization, so we usually pick 1 or the other. What AI is so good at is telling you, like, yeah. This is how like, the two examples that you showed us.

The one looked specific like, alright, mind, body, spirit. And then the next one just asked a couple questions because that's what made sense for that chapter, right, and how it flows.

Yeah. The fun part about this, Chris, was I didn't get those additions until I got where most humans would think they were done. I did the draft, and I'm like, wee, and I didn't go wee. That's what most people wee. I I went let me upload this entire thing that I've now created and start asking questions about it.

How can we make it by the by the way, if I were to pull back up the outline, there were 16 chapters. If I pull up the book, there's 17 chapters because it literally said, by the way, we might wanna add an additional chapter that just talks about the 10 h pillars. We should make that chapter 17. To incorporate the pillars, we should also add a superhuman spotlight that is one of the pillars at the end of each of the chapters. And so, now, the majority of the book is based on the foundation, purpose, passion, persistence, love with little drizzles of the gauges, the pillars, the h's along the way until you get down to here's the 10 h pillars, which by the way is followed right after with, and here's your 30 day challenge.

Dude, I'm just saying.

It's it Love it.

So amazing.

No matter how much it feels like you're starting from scratch, there's an email. There is a recorded call. There is a social post, a social comment even that you've done that can help you get started in terms of, you know, not letting who am I, what is my voice, what is my tone, like, all of this stuff. Like, the beauty of your instructions and all these instructions assist with. Right?

It doesn't say how much and, like, so much of the time, you can start with. Again, we're collaborating. It shows you something and it's not just a plan. It's not like you have to do the plan all by yourself. Right?

You can get to a part of the plan. Oh, shit. I don't know how to do that. Like, what would you do with Claude GPT? And then you see it and you're like, oh, okay.

Right? No. That looks good. I don't need to do that part. Or, oh, now you need this part, this context, this story.

Right? So there is a place for you. This is amazing stuff, man. It's

it's some mindsets. Right? Like, everything we just walk through is I wanna be creative. I'm more than willing to pivot, and I'm not afraid to ask questions. The world is your oyster with an AI tool if you can have those mindsets and then just start, again, embedding principles, writing styles, voice, tone, structure, process.

It's all patterns that you can program, and I'm using air quotes because you're not programming. You're just saying, hey. Moving forward, can we do this thing? And by the way, can you optimize the custom instructions that I need to make you do this thing that I'm asking you to do? That's programming today.

Always be building. You're always building on the last thing, and that's such a great feeling. So hopefully that was, mind blowing like it should have been. I mean, this is and the cool thing is, like, $20 a month. I mean, highly recommend that small investment.

It's a huge change in the experience that you're gonna get. Projects in both cases are are available at the pro levels. But, yeah, just get in there. Start trying stuff. I know you got stuff in your mind, in your head that you've been wanting to do for a long time.

You know, we all have. Even if it's not digital in nature, maybe it's a in person project. It can help you outline steps to get that stuff done too.

I mean, Chris, maybe it's mind blowing. I I if that's that's fine. I would hope that it was more activating. I I hope people watch this or listen to this and they take action and they build or do the thing that they wanna do. And the only way that they're gonna do that is they're gonna wake up and build AI skills daily.

That's a wrap for this episode of wake up with AI. We hope that you feel a little more inspired, a little more informed, and a whole lot more excited about how AI can augment your life and business. Always remember that this journey is just the beginning and that we are right here with you every step of the way. If you love today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. You can also connect with us on social media to stay updated with all things AI.

Until next time. Stay curious, stay empowered, and wake up with AI.