The AI Cheat Code Your Coworkers Don't Know Yet

Ever stared at a blank email wondering how to phrase something important, or walked into a meeting wishing you'd actually prepared? Well, you're not alone!

Joe Downs and Peter Swain kick things off with the Dear Idiots mailbag, tackling a listener question from someone managing eight Airbnbs and planning a shipping container home using AI workflows to optimize both. 

Then they flip the script on the old "stay late and grind" career myth, showing how ChatGPT for business and Claude can make you look like the smartest person in any room. 

Finally, they walk through the "Side Hustle Figure Outer", a step-by-step process to discover your zone of genius, validate your idea, and figure out if entrepreneurship is actually for you. 

If you've got skills, a couple of spare hours a week, and a dream of financial freedom, this one's for you.

Listen For

:21 How can AI help you get promoted even if you are not the hardest worker?
2:49 How do you use AI to optimize Airbnb occupancy, pricing, and listings?
9:11 How can AI build you a 30 day learning plan before you spend six figures?14:20 Why is AI not trustworthy for yes or no feasibility answers on big investments?
28:09 How do you prompt AI to find insights that make you look like a rockstar in a meeting?

Links Mentioned

Gemini AI (by Google)

ElevenLabs

Notebook 11

Read.ai

Otter.ai

Fireflies.ai

Nano Banana 2

Claude AI (by Anthropic)

Wey App

Email the “Idiots” Joe and Peter

Joe Downs

Website | Email | LinkedIn | YouTube

Peter Swain

Website | Email | LinkedIn | X

Transcript

Peter Swain (00:00):
 The more you can get comfortable with just talking to this thing and going, hey, this is what I need. This is what I want. Do not do this. Do this. By the way, this guy, this “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It does not matter. Just voice what you need, and you will be amazed at what comes out the other side.

Joe Downs (00:21):
 Here is something nobody tells you about your job. The person who gets promoted is not always the hardest worker. It is the person who communicates better, prepares better, shows up looking like they have got it together. That is who gets noticed and promoted. What if AI can make you that person, not by doing your job for you, but by making you better at the parts that actually get you ahead?

I am not just talking about email. See, here, folks, everyone is already there. That is an inch deep. I am talking about the meeting you walked into more prepared than the person who called it, or the presentation that made your boss look twice at you. That is what we are covering today.

Whether you love your job, hate your job, or you are building something on the side while you still got a paycheck, AI can help with all of it. I am Joe Downs. With me, Peter Swain. We are just a couple of Successful Idiots who figured out how to use AI to improve our lives and power our businesses, and that is the magic we want to share with you today in this episode.

Because, Peter, true or false, AI gives faster answers than a British person gives a compliment, which usually takes three apologies and a comment about the weather first.

Peter Swain (01:24):
 I think you got us confused with Canadians.

Joe Downs (01:29):
 Shot across the Atlantic.

Peter Swain (01:31):
 I am just saying, when you say three apologies, I think that is our Commonwealth cousins over there.

Joe Downs (01:37):
 Are you inviting Doug into the show here?

Peter Swain (01:40):
 I love Canada. They do seem to say sorry a lot more than thank you.

Joe Downs (01:46):
 How about that? All right. I did not see it going that direction.

Peter Swain (01:50):
 I love it. I am just feeling a little bit attacked on this British thing. I thought I would push it somewhere else.

Joe Downs (01:55):
 I could start mixing it up. I am just trying to get your juices going in the morning. All right.

Joe Downs (01:59):
 Before we jump in, here is what is coming up. We are going to open up the Dear Idiots mailbag, which named itself, I guess, recently, and we got a big question in there. It is actually a two parter, and then we are going to, I think, Peter, blow some people’s minds about how to level up at work and look like a genius without working more hours. In the last segment, we are going to talk about building something on the side while you still got a paycheck, or figuring out, can you, or what should you do, or does this make sense?

All right, so let us get into it with the Dear Idiots mailbag. And by the way, thanks for your emails. Keep them coming, idiots@successfulidiots.com.

Okay, this week’s Dear Idiots is a good one, and it is an email from STO. And Peter, I am going to sum it up for you. So, STO manages eight Airbnbs.

Joe Downs (02:49):
 I mean, that is not a side hustle, that is a small hotel chain without a lobby.

All right, first question. How can he use AI to improve his rentals, his short term rentals? And then he lists some things, so I am just going to name them. Occupancy, revenue, photos, add ons, anything that sets himself apart from competitors, what is he missing, et cetera.

And then the second part, well, obviously take them one at a time. The second part, I love this one. He owns another lot in the same area and he wants to build a five bedroom shipping container house. This is in the mountains, so a mountain looking shipping container house. He is not a builder, though, and he does not know where to start, and he wants to know if AI can help him design it, get rough estimates, what can AI do for him there.

So let us start with the Airbnb side, managing properties. What prompts should he be using to get an edge?

Peter Swain (03:45):
 So it is a fascinating question. Airbnb is an inherently closed system. So in order to get true analytics from Airbnb, we have to go and subscribe to other services and those kinds of things. So I am going to assume that they are not in place for the rest of this conversation.

So the first thing I would do is use our Manus to Claude trick. So I would go into Manus and say, today is February, whatever, 2026. I want you to find me the best research, evidence, proof from leading names and leading people in the industry around optimizing Airbnb, listing, pricing, revenue, et cetera. This should include things like photos, price, language, listing formats, and all the things that he mentioned, and let Manus go away and find all of the data. Find all of the 2026 report by X, Y, Z that shows that this picture, not that picture, is more successful. Let Manus go and do that work for you.

Joe Downs (04:51):
 No, I am trying to, go ahead. I am going to sum it.

Peter Swain (04:54):
 Up. So we have now got this 20 page dossier, which is the combined research of the best of what to do on AI, then on Airbnb. We then take that and bring it back to something like Claude and say, I want to optimize my revenue. Here are the facts. Here are the reports that you are going to use. Guide me through the process. Let us go.

Joe Downs (05:20):
 All right, so that is a good stopping point. Did I start this in Claude? Is that what you said? Or I started first in Manus.

Peter Swain (05:29):
 No, because normally if we do not know what we are researching, we will use Claude to write the prompt that we then take into Manus. But it sounds like, by the time we are at eight Airbnb properties, the list of bullets STO has given us says that he understands his industry pretty well. He knows what the different optimization vectors are. He just does not know what the right answer is. He knows that photos are important, but he does not know what type of photos, so we do not need to do the Claude to Manus. We could just go straight to Manus.

Joe Downs (06:10):
 This is no knock on STO, and I do not know what STO knows and does not know, but I am just thinking, because as someone who also owns Airbnbs.

Peter Swain (06:16):
 Sounds to be a bit of a tongue twister.

Joe Downs (06:21):
 You are making the assumption that STO knows all of the things to ask. But if he did not, or if someone is listening and they own one Airbnb, they are not really a professional, they are just looking for help, we would start that in Claude. Now, this is Joe talking. They only have a couple.

Peter Swain (06:35):
 If Joe wants to do this, Joe would go into Claude and say, I need a prompt for Manus that pulls the detail and the data around every optimization point of an Airbnb, from the photos to the location to the description to the price to promotion strategies, anything and everything that would help me make more money from my Airbnb, go. That then gives you the prompt. Then you take that prompt into Manus and away you go.

Joe Downs (07:06):
 And I think STO should start there anyway, because he might know six things that he wants to, and they might be five more than me, but he might be missing three.

Peter Swain (07:15):
 Cannot hurt. It takes an extra 10 seconds.

Joe Downs (07:17):
 Yeah, right. Okay, so let us just agree, everybody, you are going to start in Claude. Ask it. Tell it. It is really all about the context. What is the output? What are you looking for? What do you need help with? What do you even not know, right? And that is what I am saying. Ask Claude, what do I not know about what I need to improve my performance?

Peter Swain (07:37):
 I know about what I do not know.

Joe Downs (07:39):
 Is that a circular reference? Anyway, take the output of that and tell it this is a prompt for Manus. Take the output of that into Manus. You gather that data, that intel that Manus just went to work for you and brought you back. You then take that back to Claude and now tie that off for me.

Peter Swain (07:57):
 Yeah. Then it would literally be like, I want to make more money from Airbnb. Here is all the latest research. Walk me through every point and tell me what I need to do.

Joe Downs (08:08):
 Or even, can I do this, or should I do this? Is it applicable for my house, where I am, my area?

Peter Swain (08:13):
 Student becomes the master.

Joe Downs (08:15):
 A hundred percent.

Peter Swain (08:17):
 I think I will just drop off now. You can just single host this for the rest.

Joe Downs (08:21):
 Right. I do not think anyone would keep listening.

Peter Swain (08:23):
 Oh, that is not.

Joe Downs (08:28):
 All right. So the second part, STO has this lot and it is in the same area, and he has been looking at, I get these on my Instagram and Facebook feed as well, these shipping container houses. I think anyone who owns Airbnbs is getting these now, and they are actually pretty.

Peter Swain (08:50):
 Pretty cool.

Joe Downs (08:51):
 Pretty neat, what you can do with these things. All the different designs, and they can be perfect for the mountains. I would agree with that. Where do you begin, Peter? He has got an address or a parcel, land and a lot. I am not a builder either. I would not know where to begin. How do you even know if it is feasible?

Peter Swain (09:11):
 It is a really interesting question. The first thing I would want somebody to do is actually generate themselves a curriculum of learning first. Because as you said, they are everywhere on Instagram. So, not saying that STO is or is not doing this, but before we commit to weeks worth of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars, let us actually validate whether this is a good idea for him.

So I would be going and saying, hey, you can just stick with Claude for this, I want to learn about this. I want to learn about shipping container houses. I am considering building one on this lot. Before we even get to the point of a decision, give me a 30 day curriculum to learn this. I do not need to become a builder. I do not want to become an architect. But before I pull the trigger on a six figure investment or a five figure investment, whatever it might be, I want to make sure I actually understand this subject.

So give me YouTube videos I can watch. Give me the right blogs that I should subscribe to. Give me the podcasts I should listen to, in a structured manner, to get me from zero to one over the next 30 days.

Joe Downs (10:32):
 That is really good. Now, okay.

Peter Swain (10:34):
 So, well, I did this when you and I met, because that is right, we are collaborating on the storage area slightly. I got ChatGPT at the time to give me a 30 day tutorial on storage, self storage. Yeah, because when you use phrases, inside out, RV, I am like, yep, yep, a hundred percent, Joe, I completely agree. And then I took the transcript from that call, went to ChatGPT and said, what the heck is this guy talking about?

No, because you cannot help it. If you are a natural on a subject, you will say phrases every so often, like LLM, and you forget that people a few steps behind you on your journey, any acronym, any technical phrase, stops their learning. What does that mean? Again, when it is just chat, if I just say, chat to your Claude, people go, okay, cool, but LLM does not help.

So I took our first conversation, put it in, and went, I do not understand what this guy is talking about. I am pretty smart. I do not understand the storage industry.

Joe Downs (11:41):
 What you are highlighting is a flaw in my communication skills, because I should recognize that.

Peter Swain (11:46):
 It is just, humans will always make assumptions. When people say, do not assume, it makes an ass out of you and me. Well, every single day that you drive, you assume that people are going to stick on their side of the road. We cannot actually survive without assumption.

I was not trying to have a passive dig at you. I was not going to point out that Canadians say sorry three times and Americans never say it at all. I was not going to do that.

Joe Downs (12:10):
 Not twice, certainly.

Peter Swain (12:13):
 So I think that if I was, this is where I would start, like, okay, help me understand this subject, because ChatGPT or Claude cannot build the house yet. So we are still going to have to interface with builders, architects, leads, project managers, owner reps, all these types of people. And we want to make sure we can at least speak the language and at least sense check the BS that might be coming back to us, because we have got at least a foundation of knowledge.

Joe Downs (12:39):
 All right, so.

Peter Swain (12:40):
 That is the starting point.

Joe Downs (12:42):
 Starting point, 30 days. Can I do something concurrently, or let us just say we do not have to. Let us say I take the 30 days, I now feel, I am STO, I feel empowered. I feel like I can have a conversation with an architect now, and there is some lingo.

Peter Swain (12:57):
 And I would be asking Claude to do me two things at this point. I would be asking it to give me a project plan, which it would be very, very good at. I would not even know, this is such a fascinating subject. I have seen them on Instagram as well. I do not even know who I call first.

Joe Downs (13:14):
 Right?

Peter Swain (13:15):
 Do I call the supplier of shipping containers, or do I hire the architect? What is the actual sequence of events that goes from today to something I can move into? Do I need to call the county?

Joe Downs (13:28):
 And get approval? This is where I think my self storage experience is going to step in here. I think in addition to, those are all great questions, but you have got a lot to deal with.

So the first thing you need, and I do not know what the right tool is, Claude or Manus, is, this is the parcel I would like to put a shipping container home on. Here is my 30 days of knowledge that I have assembled around or supporting shipping container homes. Can I even build one here? If so, can I get four containers, five containers, three containers?

Peter Swain (14:07):
 Now, you see, this is where I am glad you said that, and I would not go there, and here is why. One of the things that people are going to learn as they use this is that we are using generative AI, which means it is generating.

Peter Swain (14:20):
 And it is generating what it believes is not the correct answer, but the average correct answer, which is a technicality I do not want to go into too far today. I would not trust its answer as to whether we could or could not build, because, let me see if I can explain this in a way that makes it a bit clearer.

If you go to Claude and say, write me a blog post about X, you are getting the average answer based on everything it has ever ingested. That means that Genghis Khan and Mother Teresa are helping write your blog post, taking the average of everything.

So the reason we do things like go to Manus and get this report and bring it back is because we are trying to shrink the average into the segment that we want to talk to. That is why we are doing that. It is not actually adding any knowledge, because, believe it or not, Manus is using Claude in the background. We are not actually adding anything into Claude. We are just tightening the scope of the sniper rifle to say where we want to fire.

So in order to ask the question, can I actually build on this lot, we would need to have pre fed it building regs, state regs, and I do not even know what to advise.

Joe Downs (15:44):
 I thought Manus could get that for us. That is why.

Peter Swain (15:46):
 I was, but this is the problem. It is never going to say that it cannot. This is something that people really need to understand. AI is never going to tell you, I am out of luck, I cannot help you with that. It is going to try and answer the question. Its job is to answer the question.

Humans understand that our job is to try and answer the question accurately and truthfully. AI does not really understand that its job is to answer the question accurately and truthfully. It has no concept of what accurately and truthfully is. It gives the aggregate average answer.

Joe Downs (16:24):
 Based on the context of the prompt.

Peter Swain (16:26):
 Based on the context of the prompt. So what we are dealing with in STO’s case, and in our case here, is we do not even know the context to provide to get the answer to the question.

Joe Downs (16:39):
 And this is maybe a little deeper of a question. The stakes are bigger.

Peter Swain (16:44):
 Exactly. So what I want is a project plan that tells me, who do I hire, and in what order, to de risk this investment? And the very first question is to a quantity surveyor. See, I do not even know the job title of who can tell me, can I do this? That is the first part of the project plan, I would imagine. So that is why I would go down the planning route instead of going down the using AI to answer the question route.

Joe Downs (17:08):
 All right, I like it. That is really, I am glad I asked that question so you could correct me.

Peter Swain (17:20):
 It is huge, and I really hope everyone is listening to this and not thinking about shipping container houses, but thinking more about, well, hang on a second, I have been using it to say, help me write my email, and not giving it the context of the business, the client, the relationship, who you are, which is why it will only ever do a good job. It can never do a great job without context.

Joe Downs (17:45):
 Yeah, well, it goes back to your whole original point of the 500 word prompt minimum. I would also throw in here, and I think AI could help with this, just because we are building a feasibility check. I think it is important because you are going to spend X, whatever that report comes back with at the end of the day.

However you build this thing, in phases, until you get to the point where, yes, it makes sense to start spending money, you still have to answer the question, can I get the nightly rate to justify it? That is very true. I would also run a feasibility check on that, STO. I think you are going to find that to be pretty helpful as well. And I say that just because that is what we teach Storage Moguls, and we do it ourselves when we get a build.

Peter Swain (18:34):
 And if I could just, I know that we need to move on, but a lot of people at this point, I have found, are actually quite disappointed. Like, oh, so AI cannot do all that for me? And my frame of reference is, AI can change one unit of time. So if things used to take a week, they can now take a day. If things used to take a day, they can now take an hour. And if things used to take an hour, they can now take a minute.

But if you are doing something that used to take a week and you now do it in minutes, I almost promise you that you are not getting a good output. It is not capable of doing that yet. So if you have taken a week’s worth of work, like, write me a business plan for my $10 million raise, here are my three bullets, that is how you would get a week into a minute. But the output of that would be ridiculous, preposterous, and unusable.

So in the space of shipping container housing, can we get a bulletproof project plan together? Yes. Can we get our knowledge up from here to here? Yes. Can we do the first level of a feasibility study with AI? Yes. Can we get a price range for how much it would cost us to build? Yes. Can we get a pick list? Yes. Can we get the exact price? No.

Peter Swain (19:55):
 That is still going to need a qualified human. But at least for me anyway, if I knew that the build out was going to cost somewhere between $175,000 and $250,000, that at least gives me something. So when I am sitting face to face with somebody and they go, oh, it is going to cost you $450,000, I can go, no, no, it is not. I know that you are talking crap, and I have got some level of insight into the process.

Joe Downs (20:23):
 That is awesome, and well worth that email, STO. Yeah. If you start prompting AI this way and just basically do what Peter just said just now, you will be well on your way to your own Successful Idiot status. So we hope that helps. You have got a real business, and Peter just gave you the AI optimized playbook to run it. So cool. Keep the emails coming, folks. Do we get equity in all these businesses? That was one of my ideas, an AI Shark Tank.

Peter Swain (20:57):
 Yeah, we will just give all the prompts. We will just write them up, send them to STO, and you can give us 5% of this wonderful new venture.

Joe Downs (21:04):
 I love it. Keep the emails coming here, folks, idiots@successfulidiots.com.

All right, now for, I think, the moment we have been waiting for, or the next two anyway, looking like a genius at work, Peter. It is the old school, the hard work, the working late hours. We have all seen the movies, or unfortunately many of us have lived that life of thinking that getting there early, which I am not advocating against, and staying late so the boss sees how late you are working is what is going to get you promoted and noticed and all that stuff. And maybe it does. But there is another way, Peter.

I opened with this because I think there are so many people that this is so applicable to. And I am talking about the employee when we are answering this question, but this easily translates to the entrepreneur, because I do this myself as an entrepreneur.

Again, it is the people that communicate well, prepare well, deliver things well, or at least differently, better. Maybe it is not perfect, but it is still light years better than you would have done it.

So how does AI help us raise our game at work? What are the prompts that we can use to walk into that meeting more prepared, or to impress your boss, or to take a data dump and turn it into a presentation people actually remember, or find trends in data that no one saw before or even thought to ask about? How do we stand out at work?

Peter Swain (22:43):
 All the ways you just said. But I mean, I have got two practical examples from the last 24 hours that both involve you.

Yesterday you and I were discussing a project that we are looking at, and I told you one of the real reasons that I was looking to get involved. I told you that because I sat with Claude first and said, how do I handle this? Do I bring it up? Do I not bring it up? Am I going to make the space too big, too confusing, or am I going to provide more certainty?

Joe Downs (23:16):
 This is news to me.

Peter Swain (23:18):
 This is literally like 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock my time last night.

Joe Downs (23:24):
 In that prompt, were you concerned it was going to be, not a difficult conversation, but.

Peter Swain (23:33):
 No, it is a case of, as you said earlier, you said about your communication skills. Now.

Peter Swain (23:40):
 I take offense on behalf of humanity when people say they are bad communicators, because of the other hundred billion species on our planet, all the microbes, the dogs and the cats and the giraffes and the elephants, we are pretty freaking amazing at communicating. And there is always space for improvement.

So whenever I am communicating something that has high stakes, when there are things at stake, why would you not run it through something that can help advise you in advance? Why would you not sharpen by 1% the language, the tonality, the thought process, even if it is just for the sake of you role playing it first? So you are like, yeah, okay, I feel good with this. I feel comfortable with this.

Now, for everybody in the audience, Joe does this amazing job. Every time we do one of these podcasts, he sends me these show notes of what he wants to talk about, and it is a great email. Love it. Which I put into Claude every time.

Joe Downs (24:45):
 And go, are you about to crap on me again?

Peter Swain (24:47):
 No. I put them into Claude and go, what the heck is he talking about? What do I need to make sure I hit?

Joe Downs (24:54):
 What?

Peter Swain (24:54):
 And I boil them down into one liners.

Joe Downs (24:57):
 It lays it out right there.

Peter Swain (24:59):
 But I could get it easier and quicker by getting it from seven lines to one line. Now, it all feeds back to you. You have gone from big paragraphs to six bullets, so you are getting better.

Joe Downs (25:09):
 Barely need one.

Peter Swain (25:13):
 But just the reason I am pointing to these, and I am hopefully in a fun energy between us, is it is everywhere. And each of the things you said would be part of my consideration of, okay, should you show up early?

Well, we did this a couple of episodes ago where we did, how did I build out the persona of my wife? Have a persona for the guy that promotes you, the guy or the girl that promotes you. This is key. Are they impressed by that or not? That is actually pretty easy to discern, as to what that could look like and how that could look.

And as you said, here is a bunch of data, find me three insights that humans would have missed, is a great prompt in order to just have a bunch of data.

Joe Downs (26:09):
 That humans would have missed. Hold on, humans would have missed. Let us unpack that for a second. So when I use that prompt, how does AI know that this human, this very flawed human, Joe Downs, would have missed something?

Peter Swain (26:25):
 Well, you remember we said earlier that the context is kind of giving the target for the sniper rifle, and if you do not do that, it is just going to give the average.

Joe Downs (26:34):
 Yep.

Peter Swain (26:34):
 So if you say, give me three insights, it is going to give you average insights. What we want is exceptional insights. And we want to take a quantitative phrase, a number phrase, and turn it into qualitative language.

Joe Downs (26:48):
 So it does not know that humans would have missed it.

Peter Swain (26:51):
 It is giving.

Joe Downs (26:51):
 Me exceptional. It is giving me the exceptional, not the average.

Peter Swain (26:55):
 The problem with exceptional is it means it is an exception. So exceptional in its actual.

Joe Downs (27:02):
 Dictionary definition. I am not trying to change your prompt. I am trying to understand what the outcome of the prompt is.

Peter Swain (27:06):
 Yeah, it is fun for me how semantic AI is.

Joe Downs (27:10):
 Because.

Peter Swain (27:11):
 Exceptional might find an error in the data.

Joe Downs (27:15):
 That is.

Peter Swain (27:16):
 Interesting. That is an exception.

Joe Downs (27:18):
 So really, and I was about to say this anyway, really, and this is another reason to use Willow or Whisper, because we speak differently than we would type.

Peter Swain (27:28):
 A hundred percent.

Joe Downs (27:29):
 We really have to give the truest, most honest form of how we are feeling and what we want. Because you are saying humans, and I am trying to translate that to, oh, so you just mean a better answer, exceptional. The way you and I understand exceptional, not AI.

But really, because tell me if I am wrong here, because AI is so semantical, we really have to tell it what we really want. Not the best way to say it, but the best way we know to want it.

Peter Swain (28:09):
 So the way I would prompt that, and I am going to do it at speed, I would be voice prompting this, and the concept, if you are listening to this, is not to listen to each individual word. It is to listen to the collective of what I am saying.

My prompt would sound like, hey, Claude, I have just uploaded you the figures. It is the last 90 days worth of P&L and sales activity for Acme Co. Now I am about to walk into a presentation. There is going to be six people there, plus my boss. I was kind of late two days last week, and I want to walk out of this meeting, look, I curse a lot, looking like an effing rockstar. I want everybody to know that I am the guy. I am not to be messed with, and I will always show up, 24/7, 365, with everything I need.

Peter Swain (28:59):
 I want to make this person look like an idiot, and I want my boss to praise me to the hills. I want you to think that the outcome of what I am about to ask you to do should be that everybody in the room hands me $10,000 and an Oscar and a Nobel Prize in economics.

With that background, go and find me three things inside these numbers that will blow people away, that under no circumstances ever would a human have been able to see the connection. If you do not win me a Nobel Prize in the next 30 seconds, you can consider this a failure and you should go back to the drawing board and start again. That is how I would write that.

Joe Downs (29:42):
 Wow. I mean, but that is my point. That is how you truly feel, right? So you just have to express how you truly feel, with every adjective.

And in there, I was like, this is the person I want to crush.

Peter Swain (29:53):
 And.

Joe Downs (29:58):
 That was a little harsh. What would they do?

Peter Swain (29:59):
 Yeah, that is the person that laughed at the fact I was late in front of the boss and looked at their watch to make the point.

Joe Downs (30:04):
 Well, that is acceptable.

Peter Swain (30:06):
 This was my scenario. I am running through my head, I sit next to Jim, and Jim went, oh, late again, as the boss walked by. I need to neutralize that guy.

Joe Downs (30:15):
 How many years ago was this? Still living with him?

Peter Swain (30:17):
 And I was always unemployable. I have never had a job. So I do not know, because I always called people certain words that they did not like, and apparently you do not do that in a corporate position. I should have worked on Wall Street. I would have been successful there.

Joe Downs (30:34):
 All right, so the point is, you are not working harder. You are showing up sharper. You are showing up, by the way, it has got to feel good to get that off your chest, especially with the, I want to crush this person that made me look bad.

Or if you want to keep it on the positive, because I am sure most people do not have that experience, I just want to look like a rockstar. I want my boss’s boss to ask what my name is, that type of thing. Those are cheat codes, and that is what I want people to hear.

When I opened the show, I said we are going to show you the magic. This is the magic, folks. This is what we are talking about. And you have it in you. You just have to express it to the AI, the tool in this case, maybe Claude, and it will.

Peter Swain (31:25):
 If we could, which we cannot, but maybe we will be able to soon with Neuralink and Elon, if we could prompt with telepathy, then we could actually get everything that is in here into the communication. Now, we cannot do that, but the more we dilute our communication style from verbal to written to SMS, the worse we get, the more context we lose.

The more you can get comfortable with just talking to this thing and going, hey, this is what I need. This is what I want. Do not do this. Do this. By the way, this guy, this “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It does not matter. Just voice what you need and you will be amazed at what comes out the other side.

Joe Downs (32:10):
 It is incredible. All right. We got to get to this last one here, because I love this one and that is why I saved it for last.

So we have touched on this before, and we are going to do a whole episode, or at least a couple of segments, on the side hustle at some point. But just starting, I think, is frightening for people.

So you have got people in different camps, Peter. Let us say you have got your nine to five job. Here are the camps I think people find themselves in. They love their job, hate their job, does not matter. They are looking to make more money or do something different or become an entrepreneur. You have got skills. Maybe they are applicable to the job you have. Maybe they have nothing to do with the job you have. But you have got knowledge. You have got skills.

How can you figure out, I think this is going to turn into a skills interview, right?

Joe Downs (33:04):
 But I want you to talk through the prompts that it would take for someone to, and here are the two scenarios.

One, I have got all these skills, Peter. I am a great writer. I am a great artist. I am a great, we talked about Shelby last week, the artist, Shelby, Joe, I am great at this. I play guitar, whatever. What can I do with these skills? I am good at math, whatever. That is one scenario, one prompt.

The other is, I actually have an idea, and my idea is X, and it might be based on my skills. Is this even a good idea?

So just being able to have, what are the prompts whereby I can ideate all of this stuff through, or with AI, to then determine, is this viable or not? And by the way, I have come up with a very technical name for this, Peter. It is going to be called the Side Hustle Figure Outer.

Peter Swain (34:05):
 The Figure Outer. I love it.

Joe Downs (34:06):
 Oh yeah.

Peter Swain (34:07):
 So.

Joe Downs (34:09):
 2.0.

Peter Swain (34:10):
 I would do three, and I think we can kind of condense this, because the things we did earlier, of making sure those prompts are very verbose by using voice as part of this, and what we said earlier about the 30 day learning plan as part of this, I would do three things.

Number one, I would do, as you said, a skills interview of going, help me work out what my zone of genius is. Ask me a question, then I will answer. Then you ask a follow up question. Only ask me one question at a time, and make each question you ask an extension of the previous question, so it gets deeper and deeper and more specific. Do this until you have got 50 unique and specific skills, and then give me the output. Okay?

So that would be the first thing. That could then be fed into another chat of, these are my skills.

Peter Swain (35:00):
 What could a side hustle look like for me based on these things? So we are going to map that out, which is, again, just context. We are just getting more context so we can put it into the next thing, which is, well, what should I do?

Then the second one that I would consider is, let me describe a day in the life of what I want to do. I love this one.

Let us say you want to open up a bakery, a baking shop, a bakery. I want to wake up in the morning, I want to do this, I want to do this. I would love to do this. I would hate to do this. This would be great. This would be bad. I want to get home at this time. Describe your perfect day and then ask it to reverse engineer that.

Now the third one, and then back to you.

Peter Swain (35:44):
 The third one I do with all these is, one of my fears consistently is people who say they want to be an entrepreneur and are not an entrepreneur.

My personal belief is it is one of the most oversold, over hyped career paths there is, because it is one of the loneliest career paths there is, and it is one of the most isolating. And people say, I do not want to have a boss. Well, entrepreneurs have 128 bosses, because every client becomes a boss. I do not want to sell my time for money. No, you are just going to sell your time for nothing for a very long time. And 99% of entrepreneurs fail.

So what I would say to people is, you can use AI’s superpower of being agreeable against itself, by making it be agreeable at being disagreeable. What I mean by that is, once you say, I want to open up a bakery, ask it, what is going to go wrong? Ask it for the worst case scenario. Ask it for both sides of the equation, so that you as the human can go, well, this stuff sounds great.

I get fresh bread. I get to have my afternoons free. I get this, I get this, I get this. This is great. The pros. Then, I have to wake up at four in the morning every day. Well, that sucks.

Joe Downs (37:07):
 I think you mean the cons. That did not sound like a pro.

Peter Swain (37:11):
 Yeah. Oh, there are these lung conditions that you can get from inhaling all the fine flour. That sucks. Let us get the pros and the cons so that when you are looking at a side hustle, everything has cons, but are they cons that you are okay with, next to the pros?

Joe Downs (37:31):
 I might create a board for that too, and put Keith Cunningham on it.

On your first one, before you just destroyed people’s hopes and ambitions of becoming entrepreneurs, your first one, which might be a safer path, which is just a side hustle. While I agree that zone of genius is more polished, I still think that Side Hustle Figure Outer is a better name.

Peter Swain (37:58):
 I would agree.

Joe Downs (38:02):
 You would also include, again, all the context about that. I have a job. These are the hours I work. I have an extra 10, 15 hours a week. I take my kids to lacrosse three days a week and my daughter to dance, and this and that.

Peter Swain (38:16):
 A hundred percent. I feel the need, I feel a bit of an ego defense moment coming up. This is fun.

When you just said destroying people’s hopes and dreams, one of the things I get quite upset about is people judging others by their own scorecard. The only thing I think that matters in this world is that on the day you die, you can say that you did what you wanted to do. That is the only thing that matters.

And I truly believe that 90% of the population will be happier if they have a job.

Joe Downs (38:56):
 For sure.

Peter Swain (38:57):
 And are going home to a wife and kids that love them. Divorce rates in entrepreneurs are 10 times what they are in other people. So it is not, to me, about destroying hopes and dreams. It is aligning them with their path for them.

Joe Downs (39:14):
 Which AI can do.

Peter Swain (39:16):
 A hundred percent.

Joe Downs (39:16):
 To bring it back to AI, and obviously I was joking there for a second, but it is important for people to understand it is not all sunshine and rainbows out there for entrepreneurs. And a lot of people think they are becoming one, but really they are becoming their own boss. They buy themselves a job, not a business, and there is a difference there.

Which is why the safer path might be, keep your nine to five, get better at it, use AI to get promoted and better at it, make more money, and start developing some side hustles, one or multiple, and see if you like that too. That is a nice way to wade into those waters and see if that can become a full time job.

Peter Swain (39:55):
 Yeah. My current side hustle is buying and selling trading cards with my kids.

Joe Downs (40:01):
 Yes, the baseball cards with soccer players on them. I remember.

Peter Swain (40:04):
 Baseball cards with soccer, I was going to say something. No, I am not. But the pros on that side of things, what it does for me and the family and my kids and their education, means the cons are like, nah, I do not mind the fact that I have got to wake up an extra hour early to do that with my kids. I am losing an hour’s sleep a day to do that, and it is well worth it.

Joe Downs (40:28):
 Well, it is a weighted con, right? It is a net positive.

All right. We went a little over what we always strive to achieve and never do here. We are.

Peter Swain (40:43):
 Getting there.

Joe Downs (40:44):
 But hopefully, hopefully it was all worth it, because we got to cover STO’s Airbnb empire and the Dear Idiots mailbag.

Hopefully anyone listening is going to take leaps and bounds at work with simple prompts, not simple prompts, very explicitly expressive prompts with lots of context to them. And of course, same thing with hopefully identifying and building a side hustle using the Side Hustle Figure Outer, TM on that one.

Give us a like for this episode if you thought it was worth stretching your finger to click it, and subscribe so you do not miss the weekly Sunday drop of our latest episode.

If you have been sitting on a side hustle idea, try the 30 day education plan that Peter, did you come up with a name for that?

Peter Swain (41:31):
 You can TM whatever you want there, but.

Joe Downs (41:33):
 The 30 day, tell me all about it, prompt.

Peter Swain (41:37):
 Izer.

Joe Downs (41:38):
 The Promptizer. And learn something first. Learn something about the subject and plan and know.

What I loved was the war room. Well, we kind of covered this before with war room boards, but what are the pros? What are the cons? And having it argue with itself?

Peter Swain (41:56):
 Should we cover boards next week?

Joe Downs (41:57):
 That is not a terrible idea.

Peter Swain (41:59):
 That was a pretty good one.

Joe Downs (42:01):
 And then when you do it, share this with someone in your world who has been talking about doing something someday. Tell them to make today that someday, folks.

Keep those emails coming, especially the Dear Idiots questions, and send them to idiots@successfulidiots.com.

For Peter Swain, I am Joe Downs. We are your Successful Idiots. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.