Today, I’m joined my Woody Taylor, someone with far more knowledge about AI than me, to discuss AI applications at work and in our personal lives. I find all of this new and fascinating, and this discussion dove into a lot of topics that I think you’ll find thought-provoking and practical. Let me know what you think once you listen!
To learn more about Woody’s work, please visit his website: www.paramis.ai
Platforms mentioned:
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To learn more about and sign up for the Bright Method 8-week program, click here: https://kellynolan.com/the-bright-method-time-management-course-with-kelly-nolan.
I also share actionable bite-sized time management strategies on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/_kellynolan_/. Come hang out with me there!
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Full Transcript
Ep 74. Interview with Woody Taylor – AI & Time Management
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! All right, so today we are going to talk about AI and time management and productivity. It’s an area that I’m, candidly, less familiar with, so I invited an expert in this, Woody Taylor, to join me. I went to a talk in Minneapolis he gave about AI that was very educational, exciting in many ways, and honestly, terrifying in a lot of ways too. Today we’re gonna touch a bit on the darker, scarier stuff side just so that we’re all well aware of it and can take action to protect ourselves and loved ones, and then we’ll spend the bulk of his time talking about the fun stuff, about tools you can use, practical examples of how to use those tools in the work and the personal context.
Now, to introduce Woody before we dig in, Woody Taylor is a management consultant and technology futurist based in Minneapolis known for leading large-scale transformations and designing innovative solutions across industries at businesses of all sizes. With expertise in process innovation, change management, and data science, Woody empowers global teams to drive continuous improvement in their work.
A passionate advocate for generative AI, Woody educates diverse audiences on generative AI tools like Chat GPT and Claude, making these powerful technologies accessible to all people from all backgrounds. His mission is to prepare people for the future of AI, ensuring its benefits are widely shared. Woody blends his knowledge of technology with a deep interest in history and ethics, offering a unique perspective on the societal impacts of AI and how we might live with it going forward.
I also want to flag that Woody truly does enjoy doing these talks that I went to, like the one I went to in my community. He loves giving them, whether it’s for your organization, like your employer, or a community group that you might be involved in. And I will say that he talks a lot about what we talk about on this episode, but he also is able to show things on video and things like that that AI can do in a way that a podcast format doesn’t really allow. So, if you listen to this and you can see the benefit of having him come in and talk to your community, an organization you’re involved in, your employer, whatever it might be, truly reach out to him. I encourage you to because it’s really had a profound impact on me, and I hope it does on you as well, so we can all be more prepared for this going forward. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Awesome, well, thank you so much, Woody, for being here. And if you don’t mind just introducing yourself. You can talk about what you do and how you got interested in AI and what you do on that front. I’m sure people would love to hear it.
About Woody and How He Got Into AI – 2:58
Woody Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. First off, thanks for having me! I have been a Minneapolis resident for almost about 30 years, and during that time I was mostly a management consultant as well as an operations leader in various companies around here. I got into generative AI about four years ago and, really, it was an extension of my work. I do a lot of workforce automation, trying to work at that intersection between operations and technology across corporate functions. So I was really curious about the ability of these tools to either emulate or potentially replace human skill sets.
As I got into it, in November 2022, that was when Chat GPT was released, and that was the first time everybody kind of had a front end and access to this stuff, and the entire market exploded. So along the way as I was learning, I also have a pretty deep background in ethics, foreign affairs, things like that and started to get more and more concerned about how much displacement there would be as a result of these tools as well as just, honestly, the psychological effects of some of these things as they manifested in our world.
So to that end, I started speaking to a lot of different audiences locally through my firm Paramis.AI. If you want to go out there and check it out, it’s Paramis.AI. And yeah, I just try to engage with community as best I can, and I either do that through corporate-type events or things like that or also just do a lot of pro bono work with different communities just to better equate them with stuff that’s coming.
Kelly Nolan: Absolutely, and I’ve been to a talk of yours. That’s where we met, and I really appreciated — and we’re gonna dig into the more fun, lighthearted aspects of AI today.
Woody Taylor: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: But one thing you said during that talk that really stuck with me is you talked about even just videos that people can create that look like celebrities doing crazy things and it’s all AI, but even that your neighbor could do this to you. And your basic point was the general citizenry is just not ready and prepared for this.
Woody Taylor: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: And I think that — not to go too dark on this whole podcast, but I think that it is an important word of warning that we all need to be aware of. Maybe we’ll just dig into that quickly right now just to get it out of the way and then we’ll move to the fun stuff so we can spend most of it in a light-hearted way.
Things to Be Aware of With AI – 5:23
Not that I’m talking for you. One of the things that you said that really stuck with me, though, on this front was — and I think we’ve all heard it of the people that can — you know, you can get a phone call, or more importantly, maybe your grandmother could get a phone call that sounds a lot like you in distress asking for money, and one of the tips you gave during that that I just think everyone should know, so I’m just trying to amplify your message and speaking for you on this, is that every family should have a safe word that they don’t write down, that’s not emailed or anything that that grandmother in that position could say, “Well, what’s the family safe word?” And most likely someone using AI to scam your grandmother isn’t gonna know that, and that can be a really important protective measure.
I don’t know if you want to speak briefly, without going too dark because I know it’s a massive topic, on other things similar to that that people should be aware of on the AI side of things, on the dark side of it.
Woody Taylor: Yeah, and I, unfortunately as a result of my job, kind of have to live in social media because that’s where a lot of — stuff on X — the academic community pushes out a lot of releases. And it’s really important for people to understand that all of these tools are at a point, whether it’s things you hear, things you see, things you read, these tools can absolutely emulate human behaviors. So that whole notion of scams and passwords, during this holiday season when you’ve got everybody around the table, before you get to the politics, make sure that everybody has just taken a second to just come up with, like you said, a safety word. It’s a word that can be spoken, that can be used to articulate and authenticate who you are. And I know that’s a big jump for a lot of people but the thing with AI, and particularly with these voice scams for our senior citizens, is that it’s all gonna move very fast and scale very fast.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: So I’m sure people have heard anecdotally about different exposures there’s been to AI, but that stuff is gonna scale up very heavily now. And more to the point, beyond the passwords, there are a couple different pieces of guidance that I would give people.
First off is to be super aware of how your kids are using the internet. It’s very easy for somebody to get onto an AI tool, build a chatbot. And actually, last week a woman brought a lawsuit against one of the makers, Character.AI. Her son’s actually committed suicide, and the last interaction he had was with this chatbot, and the chatbot didn’t drive him towards that or anything, but it was just a 14-year-old kid that was really, really lonely that saw this chatbot as his only source of affirmation and support, and that’s just it. These tools are starting to get more emotional intelligence, and while the vast majority of the tools that are out there are safe to use, it’s just not something that kids under 18, folks that are differently abled, folks that might just be in sensitive situations can adjust to very well.
So that safety word, be aware of how people are using it, and also, we can go into this, be very aware of the footprint, your own social media footprint as well of that of your relatives because all of that kind of stuff can be pulled together to mess with you. So yeah, it’s just heightened awareness, and I know we’re starting on the heavy part. There is a lot of wonderful stuff about these tools, but it’s all gonna be tradeoffs for the next couple of years, and I tend to think the next couple of years will be pretty difficult for people to navigate if they don’t have some sort of notion of awareness about these things.
Kelly Nolan: Yep, well, and then the last thing that we can say on this and then we’ll move to the fun stuff —
Woody Taylor: Yeah, exactly.
Kelly Nolan: — is that you also mentioned, and I don’t mean to make this political, we don’t need to go into the politics. This will likely come out after the election. But going forward, just to the person listening, being aware of the need to regulate this whole industry and some of the players at the forefront of this industry not being maybe people you would want to be leading the charge on this front ethically, it’s just important to really analyze and make these decisions because a lot of just, like, the general citizenry is not necessarily aware of this. A lot of politicians aren’t either.
Woody Taylor: Right.
Kelly Nolan: And so, just really thinking about pushing for regulation in this area on probably either party. I mean, if people are pushing people in charge on both sides of the aisles towards this regardless of politics, that’s really something that we need as well. So just throwing that out there to wrap that conversation up on it. But because of the implications of the stuff, the need for regulation, well —
Woody Taylor: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Oh, sorry. Go ahead!
Woody Taylor: Well, and it’s probably — just to qualify that a little bit too, it’s not just voting for one party or the other in the presidential elections. This also extends to your state, to your state candidates as well as people that you’re nominating from your city or community. Every political leader is going to hit situations over the next few years that they simply have not had to react to before, whether it’s drone use in your neighborhood, things like that. And so, when you’re voting, the best guidance I can give people is to vote for people and the teams that they bring that might just do a good job of handling new and just inflective situations that we haven’t thought of before.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Woody Taylor: Because a lot of those things will happen. So just vote mindfully. That’s what I would tell people.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you.
Woody Taylor: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Well, we got the tricky stuff out of the way, guys!
Woody Taylor: [Laughs] Exactly.
Kelly Nolan: So let’s turn to the more fun stuff that is really interesting to think about and leverage going forward.
Woody Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Nolan: So I’ve listened to you talk, and you mentioned a lot of fun ways that you use AI in your personal life, in your work life to help with the efficiencies. And also what I loved is you talked about helping with making maybe time that might have been dead space before, like a commute or a long road trip or things like that, suddenly more productive. Not that we’re all striving to make use of every minute of our day, but I know commutes can be frustrating for people. So it’s interesting to be able to convert that into a productive time.
Woody Taylor: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: So with all of that being said, I would love to hear and share — feel free to repeat from me, from things I’ve heard before just for everybody listening — things that you enjoy. Let’s start with the work context. In the work context, things that you enjoy using AI for, and feel free to go into the tools you prefer and things like that.
Things Woody Enjoys About AI – 11:47
Woody Taylor: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And I would recommend anybody that is using this, I guess, broadly, and by that a kind of typical knowledge-type worker that is gonna be using just Microsoft applications and things like that. You’ll probably find a lot of benefit in starting to learn a tool called Chat GPT, the one we mentioned before. It’s a safe tool to use. You can turn off the training data they collect on it, and it’s got a massive amount of functionality.
One of the pieces of functionality that I think is really interesting from a productivity’s perspective is its voice interaction. Like you were just discussing, that commute can turn into something very different when you essentially have somebody sitting next to you who is the world’s greatest whatever, and to that end, you know, many times where I’m driving if I know I have to draft a couple of emails, if I know I need to build a PowerPoint outline, if I know I need to rehearse for something and roleplay about questions, maybe I’m presenting something to a senior leader or something like that and I’d just like feedback, you can practice all this stuff in a very safe environment with an infinitely patient listener who is there to make you succeed.
And just reading a little bit about The Bright Methodology and everything, for folks that are trying to make optimal use of what I would call non-value-added time, and a commute is a classic example, yes, you can listen to podcasts and things like that, but these tools allow you to go ahead and talk, and then when you get to work, open up your browser and all that discussion is there. So it’s a good way to just block out and, really, from a productivity standpoint, that whole notion of procrastination and getting to a point where something is done, I am a horrific procrastinator. I have severe ADHD. I’m a bad model for this show.
Kelly Nolan: No, no!
Woody Taylor: But what I’ve been able to find with Chat GPT is even if it is not giving you a particular output that you want, you do start to get into a conversational interaction with something and get stuff done and out there. So maybe it’s an email that you want to send to somebody, and Chat GPT reflects back something that’s something you have never used but what you will find — and I call this kind of gamifying your work experience — is that it’s a trigger for more creative thought.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: It essentially gets into, you know, if you treat these things as an editor, as an assistant, as something that is working with you, interact with it conversationally, I always tell people. Don’t worry about prompt engineering and stuff like that. That’s well beyond it. Just get in and start talking to it exactly as you would a human counterpart. And from a productivity standpoint, that starts to allow you to simply have a teammate that is blocking out thoughts for you. And again, maybe only 25% of it is good, but that’s 25% of it that you did not have to ideate out yourself, and over all that interaction, I always try to start every piece of work that I do in Chat GPT so I can better understand what its intellectual ceiling is, what its capability ceiling is. But also, honestly, it’s just more fun. I’m not a big fan of work, on a personal level.
Kelly Nolan: [Laughs]
Woody Taylor: [Laughs] Knowledge work, in particular, over the last couple of decades with the invention of the computer age and everything else, there’s a lot of non-value-added administrative stuff that’s been booked into how we’ve evolved out as professionals, and I just want that stuff to go away. So Chat GPT is a great trigger, whether it’s on your commute or whether it’s trying to get a piece of work started, maybe it’s a big presentation or anything else, Chat GPT is really good for that.
Another tool that I will recommend to people for fast education, and I am gonna throw out a couple of websites here over the course of this, I guess, but Google has —
Kelly Nolan: I will put them in the show notes as well.
Woody Taylor: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There’s another great product out there that is very simple, very free to use called NotebookLM, and it’s a Google product. If you are trying to learn something, what’s really cool about this tool is that you can upload an outline of what it is, you can put the document, the scientific paper, whatever that is, and you can actually produce a podcast with two human-like voices talking to each other about that piece of work. And Google at first released this thinking that it was kind of a gimmick, and then everybody realized that this is a really interesting way to learn.
So if you’ve got a big presentation you’re gonna put in front of a board next week, throw that presentation in NotebookLM and hear two people talk about it from a podcast kind of standpoint. It’s been an incredible way to learn. So for new concepts, for reflecting back on work, use something like NotebookLM. Those podcasts are really fascinating in terms of just how well they can educate you on a given topic or how they can provide feedback to you about something that you’ve produced.
So there’s a variety of productivity tools out there, and I think this whole notion of learning through podcast is really, really interesting. Again, it’s free. It takes a few minutes to do on Google, and that’s it. So, yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Wow.
Woody Taylor: I’m a pretty big fan of the podcast mode of learning, yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Well, and I love the concept of even if you’re the one who created it having it come back to you in that format is a nice check of like is this presentation saying what I intend to have it say or is there a big misunderstanding going on that I can, then, format before the presentation? That’s awesome.
Woody Taylor: Yeah, and that whole notion of safe feedback is fascinating to me, and all of these tools can do it, whether it’s Chat GPT. You can literally build a bot that has the same sort of decisioning attitudes as your boss and have it reflect on different documentation, things like that. There’s just that whole notion of safe feedback comes up with all these tools and I really encourage everybody to go after it because it is extremely refreshing to have a team of experts through these tools that will simply give you feedback on things that you produce. So and that’s where you can heighten your own quality of work. It’s not even a notion of necessarily moving faster, but it’s moving better and moving smarter in terms of the quality of work you produce, so…
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Well, and I loved the example you gave too of — because when I do a presentation, I have to practice. I practice out loud. I usually take my dog on a walk and go in the woods and look like someone who’s lost it a bit just talking to myself.
Woody Taylor: Yes.
Kelly Nolan: But we don’t typically get to practice Q&A and thinking on your feet and how would you respond to certain things.
Woody Taylor: Ten thousand percent.
Kelly Nolan: To have that practice, that’s a level that I can make questions up in my head, but I don’t really know what’s coming. You know, I’ve thought of them, so I don’t have to think too quickly on my feet. So it’s a good way to practice. That’s awesome.
Woody Taylor: Well, and it’s interesting that you said dog walk too because I left that out on productivity hacks. That commute, that dog walk, again, just turn on these tools and talk to them about whatever, and you’re just gonna find a lot of enriching exercises from that. I’d always encourage people to stay plugged into the real world too. But on a good dog walk you can actually get a lot done too. So sorry, Kelly. I cut you off. Go ahead.
Kelly Nolan: No, no. Not at all. I had kind of two things, one question and then one thing I’ve heard you talk about before. The question first is while I agree there’s a safe element to this, I do have the confidentiality concerns that, I mean, I personally would be really hesitant to give too much confidential information to these devices, Chat GPT or more, about my personal self and then also confidential information, you know, if I worked for an entity, about that just because, to me at least, it’s unclear where this information goes, where is it stored, who has access to it, all that kind of stuff. What’s your take on that?
Woody’s Take on What Information is Safe to Share with AI – 19:39
Woody Taylor: I think there are larger questions about whether or not any of us really have personal privacy anymore, honestly. [Laughs]
Kelly Nolan: [Laughs] that’s a fair point!
Woody Taylor: With everything that’s coming around there is very disturbing stuff coming out right now. But in general, the first thing I would always encourage people to do if you’re trying out a tool, whether it’s — and I would only recommend tools like Chat GPT or Perplexity or a tool called Claude for now. I would recommend those three tools. The best thing to do whenever you start up a session with an AI tool for the first time is ask it how it’s going to use your data. How does it keep this stuff for training and understand what training on that data might mean. All of these — Claude doesn’t train on your data. Perplexity and Chat GPT both have the ability for you to turn that off as well as just temporary chats.
So the general guidance I give people is, on a personal level, don’t put in PHI stuff, although I would say that it’s just a hellaciously great tool for helping you interpret medical things with your doctor or things like that.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: You know, at the end of the day, not your social security number, not your banking information but I would encourage people to kind of jump in with both feet with Chat GPT. All that data, quite honestly, is hosted on Microsoft servers. When you interact with Claude, you’re basically dealing with Amazon servers. When you interact with Chat GPT and Perplexity it’s more Microsoft and some other safe places, so it’s trusted as much as you would — trust those three tools as much as you would trust Google or Microsoft and do with that what you will.
Kelly Nolan: Yep. Yep. Fair. Fair.
Woody Taylor: So I really think about anything we do on a computer, either in our work lives or personal lives, if it is caught somewhere, eventually it’s gonna be used for training. But at the end of the day, the benefit of these tools, using them for things like with my father last month, interpreting medical reports, things like that, really beneficial.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: I’d always encourage people to just, unless it is a string of numbers that is formally tied to your identity and that kind of thing, just go ahead and go for it. I mean, we are not that interesting and unique as individuals. And I always tell people that Chat GPT is really good for poop questions, and what I mean by that is, you know, when you go to the doctor we all become very Shakespearean trying to describe particular issues that we don’t really want to talk about. Go for it. These tools, they will definitely address any sort of weird question that you would just be mortified to talk to your doctor about directly. So that kind of stuff. You know, yeah, I would just suggest people use the tool.
Where AI Information is Coming From and Copyright Protections – 22:14
Kelly Nolan: Okay, and then the other thought, and I’ve talked to you briefly in more of a Q&A format in your talk about this is coming from the IP background I have concerns about when it gives me information back where that information is coming from. And I would imagine most scenarios that’s not that important. If you were needing help writing a medical note, I’m not really worried about IP infringement issues. If you’re writing emails, same thing. But I just personally would put a warning out for anyone listening that, you know, if you’re using these to truly draft content that you’re going to try to publish or present as your original thought, I would be a little hesitant there. I’m curious if you disagree. Just because, to me, there’s a lack of clarity around where is this pulling information from. Is this pulling quotes directly from someone else’s articles? I don’t really know. Maybe I’m being paranoid. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that.
Woody Taylor: Yeah, it’s kind of dicey. So I do think that there are probably a lot of copyright issues within these tools. And basically these models are trained on what they call the common crawl, which are lots of bots that are going out and syncing. Google used to build — that runs their search stuff for decades now. They’re indexing the entirety of the internet.
Now, in theory, they’re not indexing copyrighted information. I think that there’s likely copyrighted information out there just by nature of what’s on the web. I mean, people put copyrighted stuff, whether it’s a New York Times article or things like that that might get reposted 700 times or 1,000 times.
Kelly Nolan: Right. Right.
Woody Taylor: And these tools are seeing all this. Now, I specifically don’t use Chat GPT a lot for what I would call referenceable knowledge in terms of who won the Super Bowl, that kind of stuff. What I do is I use a specific mode of Chat GPT to search the internet to come up with citations, and that other tool, I think I mentioned it earlier, Perplexity AI — and maybe I haven’t talked about Perplexity yet.
Kelly Nolan: You mentioned it but not talked about it much.
Woody Taylor: Yeah. I would suggest everybody stop using Google today and start using Perplexity AI for search. It’s a much faster way to find results. There are citations behind all of it. So in general, what you’re gonna see with these tools is more and more integration with citable resources. So for Chat GPT and that tool Perplexity, which I just strongly recommend replace for search activities, there’s gonna be citations there. Always check the citations. Sometimes they’ll make those things up just because sometimes these tools hallucinate, but yeah, in general, I’m not going to necessarily build a research paper off of what Chat GPT inherently knows. I don’t necessarily know where it comes from, and I also don’t necessarily know how recent it is.
So just to restate, always use these AI tools that have citation-based stuff you can check out just to make sure that you’re not infringing on copyrights and that you at least know where it comes from.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah, and I think the bulk of what we’ve talked about so far, you wouldn’t really — it wouldn’t even be a concern. An outline of a presentation or things like that, those are all things you then build on. It’s just that I think that in my space, which is probably not as relevant for a lot of listeners, a lot of people use Chat GPT to almost draft — whether it’s an Instagram post or a blog post or a podcast, they might use it to draft it, and I’m like, “Ooh, that gets a little dicey,” because I just don’t know where that information’s coming from, and I don’t want to represent that it’s my own and get in trouble on that front. So just a word of warning when you’re creating real content, as you said, that other people will reference to you, I would just be a little — you know, use your judgment.
Woody Taylor: Yeah. Well, and there is a balance. With everything in this world, there are tradeoffs because one of these things tools are incredible at is ideation. You know, “Give me ten ideas for a dinner party. Give me ten ideas for a research paper.” Well, probably not that one. “Give me ten ideas for a particular work concept that I’m working through.” There’s a lot of stuff that we kind of assume is unique to us that many other people have talked about before.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: So I would encourage to use these things as an ideation framework, just again as a coworker that’s giving you ideas. But yeah, I would be careful about thinking that anything the tool produces itself is unique in this world.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Thank you. And the last thing that I just thought was interesting, there’s not even a question really, but you spoke to about in this talk that I went to is that at the end of the day, humans are training these platforms. Obviously, they’re combing the internet and all this kind of stuff, but it is humans who are directing and that kind of stuff and that because it’s humans, whether it’s intentional or not, there is systemic bias built into this stuff, and I would just also throw out there that I have noticed that myself.
There are times where I’ve tried to use Chat GPT to draft something about something, and it’s for women, and it’s like, “Hey, boss babe!” And I’m like, “Oh, gosh. No!”
Woody Taylor: Oh, jeeze. Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: There’s a lot of them.
Woody Taylor: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: “Hey, lady lawyer!” And I’m like, “What is going on?”
Woody Taylor: Oh, wow. [Laughs]
Kelly Nolan: So I think just always be aware as you’re using these tools that, I don’t know, it sounds obvious, and you’ll use your own judgment. But just know that there is the systemic bias that exists everywhere built into these systems and just to be mindful of that. It’s kind of interesting and humorous, but when you said that I was like, “That checks out with my experience of this so far.”
Woody Taylor: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Anyways.
Woody Taylor: I’m sorry.
Kelly Nolan: No, go ahead.
Woody Taylor: Folks will see that kind of bias, as you said. A classic example I always used to use was to ask these tools to give me an image of a software developer. And variably, it was a hipster white guy with Buddy Holly glasses on and weird hair, and I would try to iterate on that. Again, it just won’t make this connection where it will reflect back diverse entities. Now, there’s a reason for that. It’s because it’s education. Its own education was biased. The data that gets put in there is what largely, honestly, what white guys have put on the internet for a couple of decades just because of the distortion and the gender inequality with the kind of folks that are working in technology, software development, things like that. You typically will only get pictures of very attractive people because we typically only save pictures of very attractive people on the internet, you know, that kind of thing. And yeah, there’s gonna be an inherent bias in there, as you saw.
And I think that software developer example, I remember very specifically it was just funny, about the anecdote that you were sharing because I said, “Now give me a picture of a female software developer,” and it came back, and it was this weird Rosie The Riveter, IT — you know, it was just — those kind of tropes, they do show up, but what’s important, and unfortunately, there’s a concept called alignment where you give these things basically social rules and social norms because inherently without those kinds of rules, that social contract, these tools can do lots of bad things.
So one of the alignment rules they’ve put in there in most of these tools is to reflect diversity, gender diversity, race diversity as best they can with some of their outputs. But that is an arbitrary thing that they’ve put onto these tools, and they’re only so good at it. So yes, anybody that is using these things over a period of time, getting sensitive to how it relates back stuff, you’re probably going to see things like stereotypes and tropes that are wholly a reflection of just what’s been on the internet and the bias that brings about.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: So I’m certainly not happy about that situation, but it is not, I guess, bad intent by the manufacturers of these tools.
Kelly Nolan: Totally, and I think that it goes along with kind of everything we’ve been talking about so far is that, and it squares with my experience that these platforms are so wonderful as a first draft of anything.
Woody Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Nolan: And even if what you ultimately write and do is totally different, it’s partly because you’re reacting to it and then you’re like, “Why am I having this reaction?” And you can write about that.
Woody Taylor: Yes.
Kelly Nolan: And it almost spins off ideas and creativity to address things. So I find it, you know, whether it’s the systemic bias in it or just kind of something that’s a little bit off when you get it back, it still is triggering ideas for you that might be a step up of what you would do as a first draft on your own and it’s also more efficient because you have his first draft you get to spitball with.
Woody Taylor: Yeah, and metaphorically, you know, if you think about that, a blank white board versus a white board that has something populated on it, you know, it is just getting those initial thoughts down on a white board kind of thing and, to your point, it does trigger a lot of thoughts. So I always encourage people to gamify your work, and you will find that the limitations of these tools, whether it’s their bias, whether they get confused sometimes, how you need to sometimes encourage them for particular results. Sometimes you’ve just got to say, “Try harder,” [Laughs] if there’s a task refusal, that kind of thing. They’re very human in their behaviors and how they act.
And so, again, it is just a different mindset you have to bring to it than you would with Excel or PowerPoint or anything else. They simply are going to emulate human behaviors with all their strengths and a lot of their weaknesses too. So usually I can laugh it off. Sometimes it’s kind of disturbing. But yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Oh, man. I feel like I heard you talk — then we’ll wrap up work and move to the personal.
Woody Taylor: Sure.
Kelly Nolan: But last thing on the work front, I think you had mentioned using it to help with number crunching and the more financial stuff as well.
Woody Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Nolan: Are you using Perplexity for that? Is that a different platform? Or how are you using that, I guess?
AI Tools and Math – 32:07
Woody Taylor: Yeah, all of these — and we certainly won’t go through the history of how these tools are built, but these LLMS as they exist, whether it’s GPT4 or the Claude models or the different models that are out there, all of these tools are trained in chunks of words, and as a result, they don’t do math very well.
Kelly Nolan: Got it.
Woody Taylor: But one of the things that — so I would always tell people if you’re not familiar with how tricked out your AI tool is, be very careful about using it for math, and you can always test this. You can just ask it. “How many Rs are in the word strawberry?” And it’s very bad at counting, that kind of thing.
Kelly Nolan: Interesting.
Woody Taylor: Yeah, but Chat GPT in particular has a data analysis feature on it called Advanced Data Analysis, your code interpreter, where it is basically using Python to do math, and to that end, I use it for all kinds of sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo simulations. I used to teach a lot of statistics and data visualization. It’s a wonderful statistics tutor and will walk you through things.
So let’s say you’re doing sentiment analysis on customer feedback, reviews, that kind of thing. Upload that Excel into Chat GPT, and it’s gonna be able to assign a lot of labels, keywords, sentiment, that kind of thing, pre-dispositions. It’s a really strong analysis tool. So as long as the tool is like Chat GPT, and Perplexity has a mode where it does this too, where it can do math effectively, you can really open up how you’re using them. And I guess Claude, the third thing I’ve kind of referenced just released that last week too.
So you can use these tools for math. You’re gonna find that they do data analysis in a way that educates you as well along the way, and it’s just massively easy to upload an Excel and say, “Produce a score card based on these 12 columns,” that kind of thing, and it will just eat that kind of activity up. So a really strong analysis tool. And again, I’ve been doing that stuff for decades. I use Minitab, SPSS, all those different old statistics tools that are out there, and I love them, but I don’t need to use them anymore.
Kelly Nolan: Wow.
Woody Taylor: So if you’re paying money for a statistical tool, some of those things are quite expensive, take a look at Chat GPT because it can do a lot of that activity for you. It does presume that you kind of know what you’re doing. And I think that’s probably good guidance in general with these tools is, at a certain level, don’t get too far out above your skis in terms of uploading a sell sheet, “Give me a pricing sensitivity analysis on these factors.” Make sure you know what that means before you push that button because it’s very easy to get upside down of what these tools will relay to you.
So in general, always review your outputs, and if you’re asking stuff that is beyond your own intellectual domain — I don’t know how to say it better than that — just make sure you really understand it.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Woody Taylor: And these tools are wonderful at breaking stuff down. If you want to understand quantum mechanics by the end of today, these tools will break down quantum mechanics for you. But just make sure you have a working understanding of what outputs are provided.
Kelly Nolan: Yep. And I know I just said that was the last thing but I’m gonna do one more on the work front.
Woody Taylor: Oh, go ahead.
Using AI For a First Draft of a Game Plan – 35:22
Kelly Nolan: I’ve just been throwing this out there in my very limited AI experience but one thing I’ve seen clients do with AI tools really well for what I teach with time management is getting a first draft of a game plan to accomplish a project. So if you’re like, “I have a presentation on this date,” or “I have a brief due on this day,” or whatever it is, getting a context of what the presentation is, who it’s for, that kind of stuff and then saying, “What’s the game plan?” or “What are the steps that I need to take to do this?” Just as we’ve been talking about with Woody is I would really view this as a rough draft. Do not be like, “Okay, this is my game plan now,” because you’ll read through it, and you’ll be like, “That’s not right,” or “Oh, that reminds me, it doesn’t mention this step, but I’ll need to do this step.”
Woody Taylor: Right.
Kelly Nolan: Having that is really valuable just to get those wheels turning, and I would recommend a client first takes a blank piece of paper and just scribbles down a rough draft themselves so that they are bringing their knowledge to it, then run this in Chat GPT, and then just react to it. Incorporate things that it thought of that you didn’t. If it triggers other thoughts, incorporate those. But that’s just a great rough draft way to use Chat GPT to create these game plans that then you can build out in your calendar.
So I just wanted to also plug that in there as well that it’s maybe not the end product but to really give you structure of how you can use Chat GPT to make your life easier on the whole as well.
Woody Taylor: Oh, absolutely.
Kelly Nolan: It’s a great part of our —
Woody Taylor: Yeah, it’s a great — for the folks on the call who might do project management, a lot of these tools are not at a point where you can do real-time project management, adding and assigning steps, things like that, within a Microsoft project or another tool that you might be using. But they are wonderful from a project management standpoint to upload things like particular documents that are important, particular plans that already might have been laid out and using those throughout the body of the project, just even for quick Q&A it’s pretty interesting.
And as a transition over to the personal stuff, to give folks an idea of what I’m talking about, I live in an old home in Southern Minneapolis. My garage has that old lime-heavy concrete that starts to erode, the brick starts to erode. So invariably I have to skim coat it once in a while. This time what I did was put a mortar down on it. Not, like, every year but twice since I’ve been here.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Woody Taylor: But this time what I did was I just went out in the garage. I took a picture of the wall, and I said, “Go ahead and build me a project plan for refinishing this wall, repainting it, waterproofing it, everything else. Build me a shopping list for Home Depot,” all those things. It did all that, and then what you have once that kind of context is set up within that thread is you have a continual reference point for managing a given project. And so, going to Home Depot and asking it about substitutes. “Can I use this kind of Quikrete instead of that kind of Quikrete for mortar stuff?” Coming back, asking it over the course of the project, “How’s it coming along? Is this the right consistency of this mortar?”
As silly as it sounds, if you can extend that metaphor into work from a project management standpoint, if you give these tools as much context as possible, they’re not gonna forget it, and they will continually help you as you go along in terms of, “Well, wait, what was the deployment strategy here? Who are the stakeholders involved in this again? What were the OKRs that might have mattered at a certain point to a business executive that I want to talk about?” They become just informational consultants and knowledge bots for you, and I strongly encourage people to use it in that capacity for work.
It’s nice to be able to — the biggest value proposition right now for all these tools is the ability to talk to your documents. “I wrote these ten things ten years ago, put them all in a document. What is my writing style? Build an email crafting tool. I’ve got all this documentation from this large technical project that I’m going through.” Upload those documents, if you can, if you’re in a confidential environment, and you’ll have, again, just this perpetual assistant that’s always around to clarify those things that you either had to dig up or reshape or whatever.
So yeah, for project management and just create those knowledge bots, it’s a really powerful application of the tool.
Kelly Nolan: And have you seen — I feel like I had a client that shared this with me. She also was then like, “Okay, that’s a great project plan. The presentation is on this date. Back out what date I should do each of these other things on,” and then I think she was able to say, “Can you export it in a file — create a file that I can export and then import into my calendar.” Is that right? Can you do that?
Woody Taylor: I have never tried to do something that ambitious. I’d actually be curious to see how they do with it because, in general, again, activities that require sorting multi-step, complex operations or where these tools kind of fail right now. Now, they’re coming out with some that certainly do it right now, but I wouldn’t rely too much — let me just restate it. When you talk to these tools, you generally have to take it a level of direction one down from how you would talk to somebody human. So those big, complex tasks can get pretty convoluted. Now, the ultimate point though is with something like Chat GPT, their particular outputs can provide in any fashion where you can say, “Return this to me as an Excel Sheet. Return this to me as a Word Doc. Return this to me as a PowerPoint.” I just haven’t tried the calendar entry stuff yet. And that will probably be for more reliable and tailored solutions like Notion’s AI tool and that kind of thing out there.
Kelly Nolan: Mm-hmm.
Woody Taylor: But ultimately, they can all spit out different formats, and that’s really where if they’re knowledge workers on the phone, you know, folks that make a living with experiential brains doing particular tasks, that kind of thing. So much of knowledge work, as dumb as it sounds on the non-value-added side is reformatting stuff we already know, whether it’s, “Send me that list of stakeholders in an Excel Sheet. Break this list of items down into a table,” these tools do all of those transformations and manipulations. So it’s not even just a file output. It can be just rendering a Word Document into an Excel format or rendering it into a JSON output, that kind of thing that these tools can do.
This is how I use them the most. Their ability to manipulate and transform information is one of the fastest hacks that you’ve got. Okay, take a screenshot of that PowerPoint that you’re sitting in listening to in a meeting. Put it in Chat GPT. Have it build an explanation for all the words you don’t understand, that kind of stuff. Taking those words that you don’t understand and putting that in a table that you can send on to your team. It does all of that stuff insanely fast and just blows out minutes, hours of time that way.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Amazing. And the last thing I’ll say on the project management side of it is that anyone who’s followed me for a while knows that I’m like all humans are terrible at underestimating how long things take, and I have noticed Chat GPT is no different.
Woody Taylor: Yes.
Kelly Nolan: So if you ask for a time estimate for each step, make sure you double or triple it, most likely, because it’s taught by humans and we’re all bad at it.
Woody Taylor: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Moving to the personal side of things, this is an area that I’ve heard people really creatively use Chat GPT whether it’s meal planning and then as you were saying backing out shopping lists for particular stores and things like that. I used it the other day partly because I was thinking about this and I was like, “How could I start using it?” And I was looking for a playground between my house and the family we were meeting, and I was like, “I need a playground, but I need it to have bathrooms,” because all the port-a-potties in Minnesota have already been taken, and we have little kids, and we need to have bathrooms. I just was like, “We need a playground between here and here with bathrooms,” and it spit out a couple options for me that I could then cross-reference and look up, and it was so valuable.
I’m curious how other ideas that you’ve seen it used in people’s personal lives outside of work?
How You Can Use AI in Your Personal Life – 43:38
Woody Taylor: Yeah, I’ll actually offer up a personal example from after you saw me speak last month. My father got very sick, and the long of the short of it is he lives out in Southport, North Carolina, which is a beautiful coastal town that got — and this was about three days before —
Kelly Nolan: Oh, man.
Woody Taylor: — the hurricane came in, but that place got about 24 inches of water in one day, and it actually washed out all the roads around the town. My dad started having a medical event and went to the local community hospital. They had to Medevac him out, and he’s this, you know, 82-year-old guy just getting tossed around.
Kelly Nolan: I’m so sorry.
Woody Taylor: Well, he’s okay now, but, you know what cool is that I was able to, the second I heard about it — and I went out there the next day. The second I heard about it, I was able to start building just a thread or a conversation within Chat GPT that talked about his symptoms and what questions he should be asking the doctor and what the process was for procedures. He ended up having a Pacemaker installed. What the process was for — I got to the hospital. I was able to take pictures of the medical equipment around there and understand what the hell all this stuff was.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: And I think one of the more interesting things with these cases is, you know, he got a Pacemaker, and if anybody has ever gotten, I guess, something installed in them, usually right after the surgical event the equipment rep, whether it’s Medtronic or whatever, shows up and kind of walks you through this new device in this phone app to use to control this Pacemaker. Now, my dad’s 82.
Kelly Nolan: Right.
Woody Taylor: And he’s just come out of surgery, and he’s just had a hellacious couple of days. He’s not listening to anything this guy said.
Kelly Nolan: Totally.
Woody Taylor: So what I did was record that conversation, and I mentioned those podcasts earlier. I just recorded the conversation, threw it in NotebookLM, and built my dad a six-, or eight-minute podcast about this device, about the warnings around don’t put that phone up on your chest, you know, next to that thing.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Woody Taylor: And just the maintenance events in a way that he could consume that information in a slower format.
Kelly Nolan: And multiple times, yeah.
Woody Taylor: Yeah, ten thousand percent. What his recovery would look like, what are some coaching skills for getting my stubborn dad to do X, Y, or Z. I just basically just interacted with this tool for a couple of days and the notion of it quelling uncertainty is a really big deal. If you’ve got a child and you’re taking them in for some sort of medical procedure, use Chat GPT to explain the process that they’re about to go through, the questions you should ask the doctor. There are all kinds of acute use cases in the world, and I love all those acute use cases, but at the end of the day, I like to tell people that willful ignorance is voluntary going forward, okay?
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Yeah.
Woody Taylor: You have to decide whether or not you don’t want to understand a situation, and we tend to internalize different things in our life, whether it’s the drywall that I’m looking at right now or the Pacemaker that my dad got installed. I can’t understand that stuff.
Kelly Nolan: Right. Right.
Woody Taylor: You can understand everything with these tools, at least to a level to be dangerous enough to help it positively affect your life.
So in general for personal usage, just all of my life I’ve hated not knowing stuff, and I like knowing stuff. So when I’m out on that dog walk, I might take a picture of a lamppost and understand what sodium lighting is and things like that just because it’s kind of interesting to me. But just think about the areas in your life where you voluntarily give up awareness and you have to trust something else under the assumption that it’s there to help you. These tools will help you navigate this stuff so much better, and they’ll make for more effective interactions with your primary care provider, with your lawyer, with your financial planner. You can make that time more effective simply by asking these tools, “Here’s the thing we’re gonna talk about. What are some good questions for me to ask?” You don’t have to ask those questions but it’s probably, again back to your point, Kelly, about prompting creative thought. It’s probably gonna trigger questions you do want to ask.
So, really, I just think about stuff in my life that I don’t understand, and I try to use these tools to better understand them. But I guess the biggest thing — it’s not even a but. The thing I recommend to everybody is that as you use these tools, try to use them for both professional and personal situations. It’s fun to use them for personal situations. It’s fun to make a song for your daughter for her birthday that’s customized exactly for her and talking about things she loves and all that stuff. That kind of stuff is fun, but it also gets you thinking about what else you can do with these tools.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Woody Taylor: And so, a good balance when I teach, I always try to do 50% professional stuff, 50% personal stuff just because they are so much fun to use for either understanding the world, preparing for the world better, or simply just relating better to the world. So yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time being here and walking people through this. You know, I’m sure some people are very familiar with it, but I think a lot of us aren’t yet, and I just really appreciate you not only educating us about it but giving us real, practical examples that I wouldn’t have ever thought about it in that medical context. It also makes so much sense to me how it’s helping you and how it can help me going forward.
So thank you, and if people want to learn more about this and what you do and anything like that, where would you recommend they go look?
Connect with Woody and Paramis.AI – 49:10
Woody Taylor: Yeah, folks can always talk to me whenever they want to. I just got a kind of placeholder website. Again, it’s www.paramis.ai. You can always drop me a line out there, and I want to help people on a personal and professional level. So I’m gonna respond. Don’t worry about it being a chargeable event or anything like that.
But what I would really encourage people to do to take that first step, a very good place to start your AI journey is with that Perplexity tool that I talked about, Perplexity.AI, and that is a search engine that will replace Google and ten thousand percent on what you’d ever use Google for. I think most people have noticed that these major search engines like Google have gotten worse and worse and worse over the years, to the point of not being very usable. So if you are the biggest skeptic about AI in the world out there, just start with Perplexity and search for it.
And also realize if you start to get into things like Chat GPT, there is an investment of time on your part. You’re gonna need to use it for 10 or 15 hours to really start to understand. And I don’t say that to put that off because 10 or 15 hours can be lots of fun. It can be making that stuff, making song lyrics for your daughter, that kind of thing.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Woody Taylor: But you have to get in and just invest a little bit of time in these tools, and they’re gonna start giving you immediate productivity payback. But start with Perplexity, and I would encourage everybody whenever you’re using an AI tool, the first time you log on: “How do you use my data?” “How do I use you?” That’s the thing. These tools will tell you how to use them, so ask them, “How do I use this to generate a report at work?” That kind of thing. So recognize that you’re not there to program something. You’re there to dialogue with something, and Perplexity is a very safe place to start. It’s okay to sign up with an email there. Burn off your training if you’re uncomfortable with that. But just start using that for searching instead of Google. Great way to start off in the AI world and not in a way that’ll overwhelm you.
Kelly Nolan: Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here. And for the person listening at home, thanks for being here as well, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
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