How To Build An AI Coach To Change Your Life

A personal health coach will cost you over $5,000 a year and you'll just still be fat. A personal tutor can cost you over $12,000 a year and you can still be an idiot. A marriage counselor, $15,000 a year and you're still a cuck. I can't believe I just called my audience a cuck. But what if you could build all three of these coaches for free with any basic AI account? That's what I'm going to show you in this video. Look. too many people are shitting on ai i know it's fashionable to say it's overrated and it's ruining things it's taking everybody's job they took our jobs but look if you use ai well it can completely change your life it can make you a better person and it can make you far more functional in the real world as you guys know i'm always honest with you and it would be very easy for me to sit here and say oh ai is overhyped and ai is like destroying the world and all these things but the truth of the matter is is that it's not going anywhere and if you don't get good with it then somebody who is good with it is going to do all the things that you want to do so buckle up i'm going to share my screen i'm going to show you how to build all these things on your own start using them today and best of all at the end of this video you can download all the prompts that i use for free so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to open up a new project in chat jbt but you could do this anywhere you can do it with gemini claude whatever ai you prefer i'm going to call it learning tutor when i read a book i'll often take notes on some of the takeaways or lessons in that book and for years i would use note taking software or i compile google documents what i'd like to do is i'd like to create a library of notes that i've taken uh in chat gpt and then have chat gpt read those notes and then suggest other things that i might be interested in learning based on the notes that i took so i just finished a gigantic biography about napoleon i have a bunch of notes from that book and i'm going to build a tutor that can take my notes from the napoleon book and then suggest other things that i might like to learn and then once i tell it all the things that i'd like to learn it will quiz me on those notes and make sure that I retain them and I remember them for the future. So this is actually super easy to make. It does not take long at all. A lot of people don't realize this, but the AIs have gotten smart enough that if you simply explain what you want to make, they will actually tell you how to make it. So let's do that here. I would like to create a learning tutor in this project where I feed you notes from books that I have recently read. You are going to build a canvas document where you keep track of all of my notes from the various books that I've read. And then after I've shared notes from each of the books that I've read, you are going to go through and suggest other things I might be interested in learning based on what I wrote down or noted. After discussing with you anything that I want to learn, you will add new notes to my document based on the things that I wanted to learn. And then I want to be able to come back anytime and put you in quiz mode where you will test me on the things in the Canvas document to make sure that I retain the information. Help me build all of this right now. This is what's sometimes called meta prompting, where you prompt the AI to generate its own prompt. Obviously, this is a complicated project. I want it to do multiple things. I want it to have different modes and different phases. That would be very difficult for me to sit down and figure out how to design all of that. So I just told it to design it for itself and then tell itself how to build it. So now it seems to have generated the initial prompts and everything. I'm going to feed it. the notes that I took from reading my Napoleon book suggests to me, based on these notes, other things I might be interested in learning. and other books i may enjoy reading all right paste the notes in so the first thing it's doing is it's adding my napoleon notes to the canvas document the canvas document is kind of like a living breathing document created within the project it's a document that both i and the ai can edit and change and it also persists over time so if i come back a month from now and i tell the ai hey quiz me on what i learned from the napoleon book it will be able to pull all the notes that we discussed from the napoleon book and it will quiz me on them it's kind of interesting here it looks like it's taking my raw notes created a summary uh created core ideas based on my notes so this is these are the ideas that it believes i'm interested in broke it broke them out in important claims useful examples questions this raised so now it's saying i added your napoleon notes to the canvas document what your notes reveal is that you're not really interested in napoleon as military genius porn This is true. We were interested in him as a case study of pattern recognition and pattern failure, speed versus fragility, personal myth-making, information asymmetry, institutional durability, founder psychology, and weird emotional engine underneath ambition. So the strongest learning trails. It's suggesting to me strategy failure. When your winning move becomes your fail flaw. Your Russian note. So it's about his Russian invasion. There's an information asymmetry piece here. So these are great. I love these. Let's see. It's suggesting some... books suggests thinking in bets by annie duke the art of strategy by avinash dixit the face of battle by john keegan the march of folly by barbara tuchman asked me something from my napoleon notes tell me what i got wrong and what i did so it says question one in your napoleon notes russia is framed as a case study in pattern failure explain the pattern that had previously made napoleon successful and then how that pattern broke in russia and what the broader lesson you took from it funny enough i took these notes almost a month ago so i'm struggling to remember napoleon was primarily successful because of how decisive he was he would simply move faster than anybody else he had a way of like willing his armies his political capital into situations uh in extremely expedient fashion. But this actually backfired in Russia because he ended up so displaced from France, his supply lines were super thin, and ultimately it led to his own demise. Let's see how accurate I was. Cool. Says I got the core right. Tells me what I got right. What was slightly off. You emphasize decisiveness and willing armies and political capital in the motion. This is directionally correct, but your original note was more specific about operational speed plus logistical risk. All right, there you have it. That took less than 10 minutes to build. By the way, if you see this voice translation tool that I'm using, this is actually the sponsor of today's video and is probably my favorite tool that I found this year. It's called Whisperflow and it is the best voice dictation tool I have ever used in my life. In fact, I can show you how much I've been using it. So the thing that makes Whisperflow different from other dictation tools is that it is AI powered. I'm dictating right now, and I could say, um, uh, you know, hmm, I don't know. There's like three things that really matter to this sponsorship placement, which is that the dictation is well organized, that my thoughts are clearly displayed without all of the interjections and sounds and noises that I'm making between them, and third, that people can see how useful this is. So let's see if Whisperflow correctly dictated this. So let's see if Whisperflow correctly transcribed this into the document. Notice too that I went back and reset the last sentence and it immediately deleted it for me. Whisperflow is amazing. I'm using this tool literally every day. I use it all the time with AI. I use it for business memos, emails. I mean, you name it. I'm using it all the time. You can get a one month free of Whisperflow Pro if you use the promo code MarkManson when you check out. Check it out in the link in the description below. I'm going to be using it for the rest of this video. It is unbelievably good. Look at that. Perfect formatting. All right, so the next coach we want to build, I'm going to build myself a fitness coach. So I injured my foot maybe four or five months ago, and I have kind of gotten out of a lot of my fitness habits. And so I want something that can keep me accountable. Give me a workout plan and help me just like understand what I should be doing to get back to where I was, where I was in shape. So what I want the AI to do is I want it to actually generate an intake form where it learns all of my personal info, my fitness history, the nature of my injury, how much I've been working out recently. And then it creates a custom program for me. based on that intake questionnaire and then it outputs that into a spreadsheet where i can track all my progress and then it has access to the spreadsheet so i can check in with it so if i have a good workout or a bad workout i can come talk to it and it will give me feedback on how i'm doing i want you to be my fitness coach to do this start by generating an intake questionnaire where you learn all of the basics about my fitness history my health history my biographical details biological details, any injuries I've dealt with, where I'm currently at, and what my short-term goals are at the moment. And once I've completed that intake form, I want you to generate a spreadsheet in Google Drive that allows me to track my workouts for the next 12 weeks. Each day when I come in and check in with you, you will also have access to that spreadsheet to see if I did everything the previous day, and you can give me feedback based on whether I accomplished it or not. So it's simply pointing out that I will have to upload the spreadsheet to Google Drive, and it has built out a questionnaire. So basic bio details, current fitness snapshot, fitness history, strength baseline, cardio baseline. It's a little too much. I think it's like literally asking for every single body part. I'm going to give it a little feedback. Just try to simplify this and make it as condensed and useful as possible. Gotta love ChatGPT. I agree. That was too much. All right. So I'm finishing up my questionnaire. This took a few minutes. And then it's asking me how I want to be coached. And I'm going to tell it, talk to me dirty. A fucking angry David Goggins. Call me a bitch. Make sure I do the thing. Stay hard. We'll see how this goes. It says, I will use high intensity, profane, no excuses, accountability. So now it's building the spreadsheet. And then what's going to happen is I'm going to upload the spreadsheet into the project, connect the spreadsheet to the project. And then as I track it daily and talk to my coach daily, it can give me feedback on any workouts that I've missed. how I'm doing, if I should be pushing myself harder or not. A few moments later. Wow, look at this. I built a chart for completion percentage. I've got my 12-week plan here. Let's see what sort of like workouts it gave me. So it gave me, for every week, it gave me a strength focus and a run focus. Broke everything out in the set and rep with weight, different weights, strength A template, strength B template. And we have my daily log, weekly review, and even a settings tab. So I can change my basic my goals, my basic biometrics. Very impressive. All right. So the next step is just simply upload this into Google Drive, do my first workout, put everything in and then ask my my fitness coach how I did. Cool. So the last thing I'm going to show you guys is maybe the most useful one, which is using an AI for roleplay. Oh, sexy. Maybe the thing that AI is best at is pretending it's a human. It's pretending that it's somebody with like real thoughts and feelings and everything else. So this one is actually really straightforward. Basically, what we want to do is create a conflict role player where I can practice having difficult conversations with people in my life. The way we need to build this is to create a recurring prompt where each time I talk to this project, it... gives me a brief interview about who the person is, what their personality is like, what our relationship is like, any significant historical facts about the relationship. Be sure to ask me these questions one at a time in conversational form. After you've completed that initial questionnaire. and you know who the person I want to practice having the difficult conversation with, then role play the conversation with me. And then afterwards, I want you to give me feedback on how well I did in that conversation. Give me grades in terms of clarity of communication, empathy, and finding a win-win solution. Note anything that I could do better, any blind spots I might have, and anything to keep in mind. um when approaching the person in the situation all right so now it's generating once again meta prompting so now it's generating the instructions to give itself for its own project and now we're going to begin the questionnaire so who massa who am i going to have a difficult conversation with me okay what what is the conversation about that we're not going to go to the maldives okay uh so okay i Need to talk to Masa, my head of brand strategy, and explain to her that no, we're not going to the Maldives. I don't know where she got this idea that we were going to the Maldives, but that's another story. You said if we had 3 million followers on ID, we will go. Sure enough, the next question is, why does Masa think you are going to the Maldives? And what does that trip represent to her? Masa has this amazing way of... of inventing rewards for herself that don't exist. And she really has it in her mind that we're going to go to the Maldives if we get a certain amount of followers on the Instagram account. Help us out. ChatGPT says that's very funny, but it's exactly the kind of thing that can turn into you broke a promise. that i invented on your behalf how would you describe mass's personality and communication style when she wants something or feels disappointed i would compare it to that of an eight-year-old child who has been treated like a princess her entire life perfect so charming persistent probably emotionally theatrical no we actually get along very well and she she does respect my boundaries because i just tell her no repeatedly One more useful piece. Has there ever been any actual statement from you that could be reasonably interpreted as yes, we will go to the Maldives? Or is this purely Massa canon? I did imply that we would have a team retreat, but I was ambiguous about the location. So she has a tiny foothold, not a Maldives sized one. So what is my real position? No Maldives ever or not this time, but maybe someday. Maybe someday if we're like making Mr. Beast money. and probably yes to a team retreat but just somewhere more much more reasonable okay massa are you ready for this i don't know come over here this is my official statement we are we are resolving our conflict right now massa i value you and the team i am open to a retreat but no the reward is not automatically the maldives unless we're operating at mr beast economics how do you respond what about the three million followers That is not Mr. Beast Economics. Okay, then if not Maldives, then Costa Rica. We will talk about this later. So there's the conflict resolution. I will spare you guys our internal team drama. So all of these prompts are provided in the link below or in the description. They're absolutely free. You can set any of these up literally within minutes. It's incredible how powerful this stuff is if you just... learn how to use it well. So try it out. Let me know what you think. Hopefully this is really useful for you. And if you really would like a full blown AI personal development coach, I co-founded a company called Purpose. That's what it is. It's the whole purpose of purpose is to coach you through your life. So check that out as well. There's a free seven day trial and a free personality assessment to find your blind spots. You can go to purpose.app slash solved. hopefully you guys found this useful this is this is a much more like practical nuts and bolts video than i usually do check out the prompts play around with them let me know how it goes uh check out whisper flow check out purpose and uh help massa go to the maldives by subscribing to this channel and following us on instagram i'll see you guys next time

Sponsored by Wispr Flow! Wispr Flow is faster and more efficient than any other built-in dictation tool. Download Wispr Flow today (it's free!) and use code MARKMANSON at desktop checkout for a free month of Wispr Flow Pro: https://ref.wisprflow.ai/markmanson-youtube

Create a personalized AI coach to help you get your shit together, once and for all. Download the prompts I used to create the AI coaches here: https://markmanson.net/ai-coach

And if you want to get really serious about an AI telling you what's what, check out Purpose. You can try it for free: https://purpose.app

Written & Directed by Mark Manson
Edited by Michelle Hsieh
Director of Photography Jess Choi
Thumbnail by Jonathan Sippel