Artists, today is a cautionary tale about the people on your team, how to pick them, how they can ruin your life and your career. Everybody says they want a team, but these are real tales told by artists themselves that will change how you see things and will tell you some of the things we've seen ourselves as well at the end. There's two really great clips, but first, what's up, what's up? I'm Brandon Shawn. Now I'm Corey. And we are back with another episode of No Labels and Necessary Podcast. As y'all can see, we are in a different location this time around. Look, I got the flu. I'll be straightforward with it. They want to bring Corey into the premises, you know what I mean? Appreciate it. And I still got it. I'm actually sweating a little bit right now, hopefully. Hopefully it just looks like shine, just makes my skin look good on camera or something for now, but yeah, I'm having a flu game. We gon' get through this anyway. Let's get straight into the first clip though of an artist telling a crazy story, a crazy story that lost him literally over a million dollars. Nah, cause I really went from being offered a million dollar record deals to 600 likes on a post. Let's talk about it. Anyways, it starts around this time two years ago. If you were on TikTok around that time, you might have heard this song. I ain't been previously past tense him up. Anyways, that song blew up and I had some major labels, you know, reach out. My first time ever dealing with this. I was letting my manager at the time, I fired him now, we'll get to that. I was letting him handle all that. Anyways, he tells me there's one label that's really interested.  It kinda turns on a 1.6 million dollar record deal for two projects. Fly back. All right, I'm just gonna start right quick. One thing I advise artists, like when y'all first start blowing up and y'all have managers and stuff, don't just let the manager handle all that. Like we're about to get into the story, but like even if this story turns out amazing, y'all should like be aware and stay in conversations. I know too many artists are like, yeah, I'm just gonna stay in studio mode and let the manager handle all that. I'm not, personally, I'm not for all that. I feel like the artist should like be in conversation and be a lot closer to it, especially for their first few deals or like their first few conversations. I was gonna say, even if y'all wanna do any work, at least be there to learn. Be there to learn, literally. Be there to learn. Anyways, he tells me there's one label that's really interested.  It kinda turns on a 1.6 million dollar record deal for two projects. Fly back home feeling on top of the world, I call my mom and I'm like, mom, we did it, we did it. A week goes by, I get a call from my lawyer, which pretty much went something like this.  But they love the music, they said keep it. Which resulted in me making that song, didn't go through. I like to backtrack a little bit so when I put out Ben Himmler, literally the day it went viral was the same day I got kicked out of my crib. Any stability foundation I had in my life, out the window gone. So I was really banking on that moment and that situation to like really, really change. Bro, that's gotta hurt. It's really gotta hurt. That's I in my life.   Anyways, fast forward a year. So like last year at this time, I get another call from my lawyer.  Remember the manager I said I fired? Remember how I said I let him take care of that? Apparently he wasn't supposed to do that. He was supposed to let the lawyer negotiate. And for whatever reason, he didn't, wouldn't budge on who got control of Canada, which resulted in the label not wanting to do the deal anymore. Boy, it also tells me that at the time I had nine other major label offers. Nine, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine that I didn't know about. He didn't tell me about. The lawyer told him he had one or two deals, right? Only one or two on the table, right? He was a manager, yeah. Told him I'm a manager. He had a manager and he had nine. Now being a year after the fact, it's too late to go back and try and land those deals. I took that very personally. I was offended. Could have really changed my family, my future family's life because some nigga wanted to control everything that ain't happy yet. I'm a very loyal person. So I talked to him and I give him another chance. Fast forward to February. Wild. No other chance it should be had, sir. I don't know if you knew this dude since you were like a child. Maybe it might slightly change things, but still no, that's wild. Hopefully none of y'all agree there. There's more to this to be played, which we will play. But like this alone, the first thing I hear is like, all right, obviously he's just straight up blind to the artist, which is wrong. So there's no way the skirt has that. But I've heard situations where, or I've been around situations where they're not lying to the artist. They're telling the artist what it is. But in terms of the negotiations, they handle it with like straight ego and say, nah, we need to have this. And they want to play such hardball and in those hardball conversations, they come with an energy that everybody's like, nah, we just gonna move on. Exactly. And like that's exactly what it sounds like. We're like the manager for whatever reason didn't want to budge on Canada. I know that Dom is from Canada. So I'm thinking the manager may have seen it like, nah, this is our like, you know, our, our territory, you know what I'm saying? Our market, we don't want to give it up. But grand scheme of things, that's crazy. Cause you got this artist who is, you know, taking off having a moment. So he's probably, I wouldn't say probably in that moment, reaching well beyond just Canada. You know what I'm saying? Yup. I mean, he's, you would legitimately have a viral TikTok artist at that point is global. So now I'm trying to figure out in my brain like what the manager could have been saying they'll make him go that hard for that specific thing. You know what I'm saying? Cause he didn't mention anything else. He said, no, he wanted Canada. They didn't want to budge on, you know, labels want control of everything in the territory for those that are listening that didn't know that they want to everywhere in perpetuity throughout the galaxy. You know what I'm saying? Or whatever that, whatever that word is. I'm trying to, I wanted to be devil's advocate and give the manager the benefit of the doubt. And I came out brain can process like where he was at with that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And you can't let people off of, off of that. My, I don't know. It doesn't seem like the deal should be able to like fall apart just cause of that. Especially when we were talking about there were nine on table. So what, what kind of conversation did you have with those other eight? All right. Exactly. Like exactly. Like what were you not, what did they want that you weren't willing to give up? Cause of this one, you know what I'm saying? And it's a good lesson for everybody, right? Like especially in the moment, cause you think about dumb, then he's hot. Like example, like he had one of the more viral songs on TikTok that year. So if you can imagine what it's like for, or not even imagine, but if you can, you can learn a lot from the way the major label system treated him in the deal after that. You know what I'm saying? I'll say that cause I know a lot of artists like to talk about this like building up leverage and, you know, making sure you have the leverage in certain situations. Not only can the leverage be blindsided by a bad decision of another individual like we're seeing, but also that leverage has a time limit on it. You know, if we've been real, real about that. Exactly. You know, just because you got 20 million streams last summer, cause the music industry is the industry of what have you done recently. You know what I'm saying? Within the last like three to six months. That's crazyer than that. Really? I mean, well, no, you got it better when you said three. Like, I've seen artists, like what's it? Last year, the particular conversation I'm thinking about, this might have been early last year, one of the artists that was in our program that we helped. No, I'm thinking about it one in 2022. Who was in the TikTok boot camp, stuff started going crazy and multiple labels that were having conversations. And, you know, took a minute for them to figure out what deal they wanted to go to between the distributor and label and people just started backing off, right?  So that's just the reality of it. So, all right, let's play it like this. It's the stock market. They're trying to, you know what I mean? They're trying to buy on the uptick and then they feel like it's peaked. Nobody wants to buy on the peak so everything just drops after that. That's all it is. Person. So I talk to him and I give him another chance. Fast forward to February of this year. And Hema gets nominated for a Juno. If you're not from Canada, you don't know what a Juno is. It's like the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy. So again, I'm on top of the world. I'm hype. First nomination. I want to bring my whole family out. I'm flying like 20, 30 people. The way it's set up is on Saturday, they do like 80 awards and on Monday they do like eight awards.  Cause I'm flying like everybody out. Tells me it's going to be on a Monday. Perfect. Everyone's flights get booked coming on Sunday. Two days before the Junos, I get a call from this guy. Hey, so apparently there's like a scheduling error. Your thing got moved to this Saturday. What?  Most of my family missed it. I ended up finding out there was no scheduling error. He just didn't do his due diligence. I'm pissed. I just decided to enjoy the weekend. You know, there's nothing I could do now. I handle it when we get home. Get home, I ended up firing him. As of majority this year, I've been completely 100% independent. Now being independent, I gotta book my own show. I'm getting less shows, making less bread. It's a new year and I know you want to go to a new level in your music career and luckily for you, that's what we do here. Help artists grow, get more streams, grow their fan base, do shows, get connected with people who can help them and have direct conversations to help you build out your strategy. These are the type of opportunities that we provide for free at knowlabelsnecessary.com. But the thing is, it's not always open to new people. But at the beginning of every year, we get a little loose. We say, all right, let's go ahead and let a flood of new people in. And once we hit our new registration cap, it gets a lot harder because we gotta slow down on letting people in off of the wait list. So apply now at knowlabelsnecessary.com because the faster you apply, the faster you get in. Absolutely free. Back to the video.  It sounded like he hit the manager like, yo bro, let's make sure we lock in this date. And the manager was like, all right, I got you. And then forgot to probably do the follow up and ask the Juneau award people could he do whatever day? Cause you know, award shows have multiple days. Usually most award people watching, most award shows usually like a two day thing, at least, you know what I'm saying? And then he's got to send that message and rebook it out. And then here we are. Now I got to scramble and put it on them. That's crazy though, man. Yeah, I like them. Like I don't know them personally, but I watched him blow up on TikTok. I caught him very early on. He could check his emails right now and see an email for me reaching out about a marketing campaign, I promise you. But I gotta, you know, I gotta send them on on that second decision, brother, that double back. Cause if the first issue was an issue of logistics, for the most part, right? It's an issue of things not being tracked and communicated properly. Yeah. I can't, I feel bad, but I can't be mad that you hit the exact same wall again in a different way. But basically the same issue. Another issue of logistics and information and information. It's like, brother, at the end of the day, man, that's a very important skill set for a manager to have. If nobody else on your team is organized and in that way, the manager needs to be, you know? That is the point of you. So there's no greater room. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And before we even get into this second story, the way you pick your roles is understanding the responsibilities that are required in those roles. And then those key responsibilities, there is no real room, right? Like the artist needs to be artistic, you know what I'm saying? Like the manager needs to be able to manage stuff and have some level of organization, right? So like, if you get a videographer on your team, they need to be dope at that. They might not be somebody who can write well or whatever, but they can really do video, right? The manager can communicate, negotiate, et cetera, but I don't know, they can't cook or whatever. Like there's all kind of stuff that they could not do, but the things that matter for that particular role, there is no wiggle room. It's like having a editor for a magazine and your editor isn't good at grammar. So it's like, how are you going to check everybody else's grammar? Is there anything you're good at? You know what I mean? You have to be good at that. So when you understand that, one, of course, you pick people better because you understand it's just about what's important and you don't think about all these other things that might matter less. And then, two, you're a lot harder because it's like, whoa, there's slip up in this area. This is the thing that I need in this area. So it's only going to translate to something else, right? It's not going to stop. He just showed me bad communication.  He told me that it was only one deal. There was nine. So communication to the temp degree bad. One day and it was on Saturday? And then that again. So those things are going to continue to reflect. And you can, in certain areas, you just can't play with. But let's play this second clip because all this is going to tie together as well. And by the way, this clip is an artist by the name of Kirk Franklin, gospel legend, by the way. But just check out the clip. You will be surprised. My very first recording contract at 23 years old, the label I signed with, they took 100% of my publishing. Huh? 100% of my publishing. How you let that happen? Because I didn't really know any better. The people that had represented me didn't know. It was new for everyone. I didn't know what an entertainment attorney was. The attorney that I had was probably like a real estate attorney, didn't really know who to reach out to. This was 1993. Right. I'm living in Texas. It's not an entertainment space. I didn't, you know, and then gospel music has never been privy to a lot of agents and attorneys. All right. That's the most important part of all this to me. Yes, it's another person who got screwed and taken advantage of in terms of like a horrible deal. Right. But the most important part is he said, yeah, I had an attorney. But it was probably like a real estate attorney. And I see this all the time in music. People think, oh, yeah, well, I'm just going to get my homie who he studies law. Like lawyers have specific skill sets and things that they study. Like, yes, there's a general knowledge, a base knowledge.  These are all different categories. All right, so a lot of people will just assume just because they have some of these basic sounding roles that people can actually do a good job for them. So that's that's number one. All right. Number two is if you can't find somebody, well, I actually think we're going to find less of this today, just because there's so much more knowledge out there. Even somebody like, let's say you're a lawyer outside of the music industry. You kind of can feel something doesn't sound right at least, right? But two, I think that knowing whether or not you're giving 100% of anything, that should cause for question. Like, OK, you have 100%. Like, what does that mean? Or it might be trickier because it just might say, hey, yeah, we own this and it might not specify a percentage. So maybe you don't see a percentage on a contract. I don't know if that's a thing that you can do in that way.  Yeah. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something there. But I guess it just goes back to the point of having somebody in the specific side of the trade that applies to you because there's all this specific knowledge even beyond publishing contracts that you're going to benefit from a lawyer, whether it's knowing to put a sunset clause in or what options look like or just getting creative and being able to negotiate better for you because they understand both sides of the table and things. Just like in other industries, there are some things that are just really specific and you wouldn't know the nuances unless you really knew. You'll miss out by not having somebody that really is in your space. Outside of having a bad deal, let's just say you end up getting a decent deal. You don't get screwed over. There's a lot of advantages that you're missing out on based on the knowledge they've built up from the past artists and deals that they worked. Yeah. And the network they built around themselves, like I've heard so many different people that a lot of times the most powerful person on your team will be your lawyer. You know what I'm saying? A lot of because of what you said, there's someone that is typically in the center of the table between a bunch of different parties, which means that not only do they have the knowledge of dealing with these people from these specific places, like you were kind of saying, hey, I know what the person on the label side wants. Just like I know what the person on the publishing side wants. I know what you want. So I know how to navigate through all of this and make it work for everybody. But on top of that, they know everybody. They know everybody in these different places. Like there's countless stories of lawyers that connect the artists from point A to point B, right? Or like I say, I've just heard it numerous times that a lot of times the lawyer will be powerful for you beyond just the knowledge that they can extend you for your contract review or whatever you're having them look at. And so you miss out on that. Even if you have this gung-ho lawyer who's willing to go read everything about the music business and he's willing to scour for hours on Google reading through mock contracts or whatever contracts he can find at least, that still isn't going to fix the issue that this person probably doesn't know anyone in the industry to be able to maneuver in the way that the industry calls for, you know what I'm saying? Which is very, very important. Like every, we talk about it a lot, right? Like every industry has its nuances that can kind of come into play on where the coin kind of lands on the flip. And I just feel like someone who's entering the industry with no knowledge is at a severe disadvantage. You know what I'm saying? Like it's not even, in a way like they might not be in any other industry because of, you know, maybe certain legal protections or unions and things like that, but music doesn't have that. And you have to be thinking about those things when you're walking through the battlefield, you know what I'm saying? Yup. So to have another, not even a soldier, a general, you know what I'm saying?  And I mean, this makes me even think about the situation that we just talked about. Like that lawyer was supposed to be doing the deal, right? The manager handled it. The lawyer probably would have better managed it because he probably had relationships established from doing deals with these labels before for past artists, right? So that would say a lot. And there's also a lot of late, the lawyer knows why the deal didn't go bad because maybe the manager didn't even know why things didn't go. Or I mean, I guess the manager would know, hey, yeah, they didn't want to budge on Canada. So we didn't do the deal, but maybe he didn't realize how much of a folk hall he made. So my thing is like, we hear artists talk about needing teams, wanting teams, all right, but it's more difficult than just having these people on your team.   And I just, I encourage y'all to be patient because that junk would be way more painful than you would think.  All right, I can think of some who have been in and out of management deals, probably like five managers within two years. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So slowly roll, I know it sounds nice to have these people on your team, but you're trying to have the right one, not anyone. Exactly, man. Hitting on the head. The space will be better off unoccupied than occupied with the wrong person because you move slow with nobody, but moving fast paced with the wrong person just moves you fast in the wrong direction, you know what I'm saying?   And that's it for this episode. By the way, should have been said this, but we would love if you would subscribe to the channel. We want to see continued growth and continue to post for this pie, drop all this free information, these gyms and these conversations. And it really warms our heart when y'all subscribe. So if you can just hit that button, you know what I mean? No need no money, just hit the button. And that'll be it, peace.


But I also didn't like when Blocker kind of linked up with him either, I thought that was really weird. Yeah, bro. But I spoke to him, or whatever, well when I interviewed him, he was more so like, it was business. I don't know. You won't even bleed out your d**k, sorry. You heard? You heard? Yo, that n***a is crazy. Are you and Blocker good, or y'all don't speak, or what's up? That's crazy, he does ask for my number, I was f***ing, we were supposed to do this this time, but he be hitting n****s, trying to see what's... I think he want to come back home, what the f***? Nah, he trying to see what's up, he just, I just feel like he just looking at it, you know, he trying to look at it as the bigger picture, be the bigger person. But on some real s*** though, what I can say, what I can say, you know, he ain't snitching for me bro, he ain't really like, I wasn't never like... We shot a video of the police. You feel me? He ain't really like, you feel me?  But he definitely told job before he hit the fan, before he told you for a second. Yeah, like, he fake was on some, n***a's on some weird s*** bro, but I had to realize why he told me that, he ain't like, he ain't tell me, n***a's pulled up on him, feel me, I guess or whatever, he ain't wanna, don't quote me on this, I don't know if it's, he ain't wanna shake, like n***a's pulled up on him, he ain't come down, like some funny s***, like, he's supposed to shake, he ain't wanna shake, but I don't think, like, don't quote me on that, because I remember I was in court with him. Yeah, he just, you just got the call, and he just said something was weird happening to him. He is, so, so we don't know, not a word. And that's The Talk of the Town, make sure you like, comment, subscribe, and make sure you check out our website at www.talkofthetownshow.com.


What is going on? Welcome back to another video and welcome back welcome back to another update of my 30-day fat loss transformation Would you believe today's date is the 12th of May and that actually means that it is day 30 So that means that if I wanted to I could call it quits on this transformation right here right now But unfortunately or fortunately whichever way you want to look at it. I'm gonna continue I'm gonna continue for another two weeks. So we're gonna make this a six-week fat loss transformation at the moment the way My physique is looking. I'm at that point. It's starting to turn. It's starting to turn Positively I've got through those first couple of weeks where you start to look worse before you look better I'm metabolism is firing my body is starting to make that change and Now the cuts are starting to come in But there's certainly not where I want them to be or where I thought they might have been by this time That's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about the previous week. We're here to talk about from day 22 to day 29 of this 30-day fat loss transformation once again, I've got my Sheet full of data As you guys know data is what I love Especially when we're doing video series and things like this because at the end of the day is at the end of the day When it's all said and done we can look back read the data and Have an understanding of how and why things happened So guys, I've got my four pieces of data to present and They are my sleep which I am happy to say I tracked all seven nights I've got my my steps slash exercise Which I tracked all seven days, which is fantastic calories burnt, which I tracked all seven days and My forms of exercise what I've actually done to burn those calories and expend those steps Let's get into it. Um sleep now obviously sleep is Well, that's how we live. I mean if we didn't sleep We would die eventually. I think or at least we'd go crazy. So, you know sleep's really important I've actually really enjoyed being able to track it, you know when I got this fit But it wasn't to track my steps. It wasn't to track my calories. It was actually to track my sleep So that's been one of the most interesting things for me to track So after the last seven nights of tracking data, this is what I've got I averaged Seven hours and 55 minutes of sleep per night, which you know to be consistently getting that is pretty damn good Although it's not like I have an alarm to get me up at the moment My best night of sleep was Monday the first night of the week, which was nine hours and 12 minutes My worst night of sleep was on Thursday with six hours and 21 minutes and on average guys That's seven hours and 55 minutes of sleep per night is happening between 11 p.m. And 9 a.m. Now seven hours and 55 minutes. I can tell you guys that For example on a day where I might get nine hours sleep, which is huge.  I've just wasted half the day But I can really feel that like I wake up and I don't have that tired feeling behind my eyes I don't have that pressure. It's like it's like my eyes can can can Feel fresh from the moment I open them, you know, and that that is a feeling that you can recognize So on a night where I might get six hours of sleep. I certainly don't feel like that I feel like I need my coffee. I need to have a shower to wake myself up So it is very interesting, you know the difference between a six-hour sleep and a nine-hour sleep But clearly I don't have an alarm clock. I'm not getting woken up So my body is sleeping as much as I need and effectively Apparently that's seven hours and 55 minutes a night. Okay steps and exercise. I tracked for all seven days From Monday to Sunday. We had a total of approximately 55,000 steps, which is probably not as many as I'd hoped I wanted to average about 10,000 steps per day What actually happened was I averaged about 8,000 steps per day My biggest day as far as steps were concerned was Sunday I did 14,103 steps. My lowest day was Friday Where I did 3,075 steps Now the difference between my lowest and the highest is literally a 10 kilometer run So on a day where I do 3,000 steps, that's literally just walking around the house on a day where I do 13 14,000 steps. That's just walking around the house except I'm going out for a 10 kilometer run or walk and that's what happened on that day now steps are all good, but What we're really focusing on as far as losing body fat is is calories It's calories in versus calories out and as far as calories are concerned through the seven days From the 4th of May to the 10th of May I burnt a total of approximately 21,000 calories. Now I say approximately it's going to be a few out. I can't actually Remember I've just written these down. I've looked the screenshots that you see on the video I've taken I've gone and looked at those screenshots. I've written out the data So it's easy for me to to talk about. So it's it's approximately 21,000 calories, which means on average Approximately I've burnt 3,000 calories per day. Now my highest day as far as calories are concerned I burnt 3,749 and that was on Thursday My lowest day was the Friday where I only had 3,075 steps and I only burned 2,443 calories So on average guys as far as sleep Steps and calories are concerned. We've got seven hours and 55 minutes of sleep per night. We've got just under 8,000 steps per day And we've got around about 3,000 calories burnt per day. Now as far as the exercise or the mode of exercise I've been running And walking And cycling Not so much cycling Usually I'll start walking and then I'll get bored of walking after about five minutes and I'll start running. Okay guys so This is the data that I really enjoy not only steps But also once I've done a run or a walk coming back and actually looking at the app looking at Strava or My Fitbit and you know finding out how I did because there is one thing that I try to do every single time and that is I'll try to pace myself enough so that during the final kilometer I'll try and speed up and I'll try and get my fastest recorded k of the run in the last kilometer just for a little challenge But with that in mind the first run was on Thursday. It was a total of 9.53 kilometers That took me 58 minutes and 48 seconds. My best kilometer was the fourth k in five minutes and 24 seconds I walked the first kilometer and in doing so my average Kilometer pace was six minutes and 10 seconds per k throughout that 9.53 k's There was a five kilometer stretch That effectively was my third fastest five k and that was 28 minutes and 50 seconds My second run was on sunday 10 k's exactly 58 minutes and 30 seconds My best kilometer was the final kilometer in four minutes and 53 seconds My average pace throughout the 10 k's was five minutes and 51 seconds Throughout that 58 minutes and 30 seconds. My best five kilometer stretch was 26 minutes and 58 seconds And that is so far my fastest five kilometer recorded once again. I walked for the first kilometer and then started running I feel like I feel like at the moment I could comfortably run 10 kilometers In under an hour and that is a decent level of fitness. That's you know good enough for me right now And I guess if I really wanted to improve that I'd probably have to focus on it at the moment. I'm focusing on getting lean exclusively I'm using any run or any any exercise I do just as a tool to add to that and um, well, that's what we're doing So here we are 30 day fat loss transformation My fourth weekly update We are going to do two more weeks not where I want to be just yet as far as you know conditioning goes so we're going to continue for another two weeks and whoa The moment you've all been waiting for whoa, and I know it's the moment you've all been waiting for because I can see My audience retention for every single video and each of these update videos Everyone watches the first minute and then they skip right to the end so they can see my progress pictures And that's what we're going to show you right now.  You know what I mean, and that's what progress pictures do They allow us to see the transformation from the start at the end Usually the first progress pictures aren't going to be the best. They're not going to be the most flattering But they are important you take them you put them away And then you wait until the end of the transformation where you put them together And that's what we're going to do at the end, but not just yet. So right now I'm going to show you guys the progress pictures for this week. So we've got the the 12 odd progress pictures once again, you know front relaxed Quarter turn to the left rear relaxed What do we got most muscular a few different variants of most muscular?  Thank you for being here But I have to say guys there may have been some crucial information in the middle part of this video that you might have missed So please by all means go and check it out And I will leave you with one final tip if you're listening to a video on youtube could be a video of mine Could be anyone else's usually long form And it's just speaking speed it up man Put me to 1.25 or 1.5 speed you get through the video twice as fast and it doesn't really sound that much different Anyways guys, that is a couple of tips from me. Um, this video has gone far too long But with that being said I'll see you in another week for our week number five update And it's not going to be called a 30 day transformation. It's going to be called a six week transformation So I'll see you then


When it comes to trading if you trade long enough you realize that you can't win every single trade Maybe the first trade in the second trade you might have winners But the more you trade the more you realize that you're gonna have some losing trades as part of normal business I Found this game here. This is called the coin flip game and they let you flip a coin make your bet And then you get an outcome and you get to play the game However, you want but we know it's 50 50 odds. You can't really Change the odds. You only get 50 50. You can change your bet As you see I'm changing the amount but the odds The same 50 50 the risk reward is the same. So I was curious could I make my own game? Using coins or dice and it turns out. Yeah, you could so I wanted to have different scenarios Obviously the coin flip game is just a 50 50 but every trading course or every Every system tries to get more reward Than risk so let's try to simulate a 50 50 but more reward This is like a stop-loss compared to a take profit and then for option sellers They usually get a higher frequency of wins and Then there's a negative outcome less frequently represented by this risk reward payout So I made it into a game trading game. I'm still working on it, but I've already been playing with it I do love just seeing The gains and the losses play out. It's like a randomizer. I have the three outcomes right here You place Money or beans or rice and one unit is one bet and you say heads your tails We're just going to go with heads is always a win and you win or lose and you try to double your account The second scenario is the two to one ratio same thing you place your bet two to one You try to double your account try not to blow up and then the third you have to flip two coins And this is how we get the higher frequency of winning heads twice you went to heads and tails and After two flips you went to but if you get tails twice, which happens 25% of the time you have to lose three I thought this was a fun fun way to simulate trading I have a lot of friends that are getting into trading into investing and When you put it lay it out like this, it's just It's just mind-expanding to think of trading as not one trade, but ten a hundred a thousand trades And if you're going to do trading for a living, this is the way you got to think you got to look for positive expected value a Positive expectancy if your system doesn't have that you might be taking gains Too small too frequently and then the losses blow your butthole open I'm going to be offering it for free on my I'll put a link at the bottom and then you can download it for free It's going to be on my coffee calm account coffee option farmers That's the home page coffee calm option farmers and I'll put the link in the bottom but play both this is games for traders and You can see how like double down theory You know so you can make it work but it's just so hard and you have to have small bets before you blow up and Then when you play the others you'll see that hey It's better, but you know there's also a drawdowns. You can have a series of losses in a row and It's just like regular trading like where you place if you realize you have a good system like two to one You still have to try to get Good trades you're still going to try to do that If you can get this 60% or 70% it's even better because you get a higher Frequency of winning you get less drawdown and That's that's the holy grail. That's what everybody wants, but I'll leave the link at the bottom Let me know what you think. I'd like to make the game bed better. I'd like to do growth stocks and mature stocks and add a Component of time if possible. So if you have any ideas, please feel free to share them. Cheers


Hi everyone, Sean with jaspys.com and jaspyscasebreaks.com here doing a two-box personal break of one 2020 Top's Chrome baseball hobby box and one 2017-18 Panini Prism basketball blaster box for Jake. He's already picked out his boxes So that's that That's that Here is his boxes Let's start with the Top's Chrome as requested Sorry Then the prism basketball kicks It's at 279 It is it is Jeff 17-18 So Tatum Mitchell Bam. I believe so you have to check the site He gets in whatever he can you know go buy everything he can when it's available So if it's available trust me it would be it'd be on there Well, that's why you guys got to check the site every every day, especially on personal Case breaks and personal we get we get re-supplied as many times as possible So whenever our distributors have stuff available We buy up as much as we can of whatever they have Especially basketball Well, it's best to check the site every day to see what else was added Subsurge you how are you man? Jake the case hit Jake. Oh, that was autographed or not, but I did see the back of it. Cool. Good luck Jake Nolan erinado refractor Advertisely Brian Reynolds Hanser Alberto refractor You got a purple back there bobechette base Colin Moran prism Gavin Lux base purple John Lester Should be numbered I think the 250 299 137 of 299 Dylan cease freshman flash refractor Robelle Garcia Jeff Samarja Kyle Lewis base Andres Munoz Randy Johnson die cut refractor Trent Grisham rookie refractor Matt Chapman prism Mike Trout Mike Yastremsky who's crushing it negative refractor Very nice Will Smith Isan Diaz Robelle Garcia rookie refractor Dylan cease and first auto is TJ zoo rookie auto for the Blue jays Keston hero refractor and Rogelio Armenteros. That's the first half for you Jake. Yeah. Yazz is pretty incredible guys. I know he doesn't get the You know credit of all the rookies that came out last year, but Flash you're just saying that because you wish he was bad, but he definitely doesn't suck Cool second half for you. Good luck Jake Seth Brown Bobechette 35th anniversary refractor Travis Demerit Ricio Dubon Sean Murphy rookie refractor Tony Gonslem Joey vato prism Domingo Leyva and Here's your case hit Not autographed, but Alex Bregman rookie reproduction relic Green that's numbered 49 of 99 Bobechette rookie refractor. You've gotten a nice rookie refractor in every box Jake One of the big-time rookies Jake Rogers and Nick Solak Rookie refractor auto That's numbered to 499 127 of 499. Sorry Pete. I Have not pulled I pulled a Robert negative refractor, but I haven't pulled the short print yet Altuve the Grom Travis Demerit rookie prism Alex Young Brandon McKay freshman flash refractor Nico Horner Pablo Lopez refractor Brewstar grader all Ramon Loreano and Colin Marin so that was the box of hobby Jake Chrome hobby now let's do let me put this away real quick, and then we'll do your prism blaster It is it definitely is price. I Mean we just pulled a we just pulled a regular refractor for Jake in a break of a personal box Not too long ago earlier tonight It's like MTG. How are you man? 1718 prison basketball Good luck Jake. Oh, they will be Paul They'll get there He's showing what he can do Jake This is Jason Tatum Donovan Mitchell Bama to bio rookie year So in that order typically would be what you're looking for good luck Jake Harrison Barnes Simeo Jaleigh Relic Pascal Siakam Silver Jay Crowder TJ leaf Surjee Baca Michael Malone Green Jason Smith Terrence Ferguson and Jonathan Simmons Damian Lillard fundamentals Yanis base Rudy gay Kyle Lowry Dirk Novitsky Silver Jameer Nelson Travian Graham Bismac Bionbo DeMarcus Cousins Dante Exum Josh Hart Terry was here Damian Lillard get hyped and Jared Allen so not the Tatum Mitchell or autobios specifically that we were looking for But thanks for giving it a shot Jake and guys that was a 1718 community prison basketball blaster and Before that was a 2020 top chrome baseball hobby box both available on Jaspis comm for personal breaks and that one was for Jake Thank you very much Jake. I'm Sean with Jaspis case breaks calm and Jaspis comm. We'll see you next time


Hello, thank you for joining us. My name is Kevin Mulhall. I am a Senior Technical Customer Success Manager here at TechSoup. This session of Ask the Experts, focusing on AI Prompting, or AI Prompt Engineering rather, we are joined by two wonderful people. Forgive me, Josh, if I pronounce your last name incorrect. Josh Peske and Kim Schneider, of Round Table Technologies. This is going to be- Keep it slow, and see if that is congelado. Okay, hold on one second. I'm going to get in here and start muting some folks. Just an FYI, as a warm-up to this, is cameras have been disabled, but microphones are on. If your microphone is on, we kindly ask that you mute it. If the opportunity to come off of mute and ask questions presents itself, we will encourage you to do so. We do have a series of CAN questions as well that were asked in advance, and we do want to address those first. So with that, I am going to hand it over to Josh and Kim. And Kevin, just real quick, I don't yet have screenshot permission, so I think I need to get promoted to organizer-presenter, I think. That you do. Just let me find it here. Give me one second. But in the meantime, what we can do is say hello to everybody, and I kind of start jumping in. So hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming today, and the last to ask the experts we had a few weeks ago was fantastic, just incredible questions and great conversation.  Today, we're focusing on prompt engineering and prompts, essentially how best to interact with our language models in order to the results you want, right? Get the output you want. And thanks to Kim and to Microsoft, there's actually a huge update that we get to show you today that I only learned about a half an hour ago, thanks to Kim, but have been playing with, and it's incredibly cool and offers some really cool new functionality within Microsoft Copilot. So we're excited to show that as well. And it looks like I do have the share permission now, so thank you so much for that. And let's jump in. So I'll probably have to resize this, Kim. Let me know if... Are we seeing... No, it looks good. Okay, great. So I am Joshua Pesty, hello everybody. I'm at House 3 CPO, which I'm happy to explain if anyone cares. Basically, I do a bunch of C-suite technology stuff. I work with round table technology. I've been there for a very long time and Kim and I also have worked together for even longer. So I've been with Radhjil about 10 years. Kim and I have been working together at various organizations for 30 years, believe it or not, all the time in nonprofit technology. In fact, one of the very first projects we did together was create the first ever website for a nonprofit that we were working at at the time, Fountainhouse. And that was back in like 1996, I wanna say.  Anyway, let's let Kim introduce herself. Go ahead, Kim. Hi, Kim Snyder, VP of Data Strategy at Round Table Technology. And yes, Joshua and I go way back. And let's just say for the last 30 years or so, we've been, our passion is introducing nonprofit organizations to technologies in a way that's digestible, let's say, or demystifying tech, because it does tend to move very quickly. So I think we can go right ahead. We do a lot of stuff in the world of data and data privacy, which does come up in this, even though the topic is AI. But so just a quick, today's agenda, we're gonna go over a couple of slides just to kind of set the context and groundwork around what do we mean by prompt engineering? And that'll be about, let's say the first 15 minutes. And then at that point, we are going to transition into answering questions. We do have, people have asked great questions. And I think even some questions that may help answer questions that are along on other people's minds. So we've gone ahead and picked out a few of those. And we may even have a demo or two for you while we answer those questions. And then it opens up to your questions. The team at TechSoup is excellent at reviewing questions and kind of getting them through to us as we're doing this. So please by all means ask your questions as we're going along. But, and we will hopefully get to answer a lot of them. So I think with that, I think we pop back into- I'm not sure about other folks. I'm not sure I'm seeing your video or at least maybe, I don't know, Kevin, maybe you can let me know if I'm wrong and I'm just seeing the wrong screen. But I'm not sure if I'm seeing your video, Kim. Yeah, don't see the video, it is enabled though. Really, that is odd because I see my video. Okay. Do you see it now? No, let's see. All right, we'll truck along. But- Do you see it now? Or am I just- Yep, there you are. Success. That's weird. I wasn't sure if it was possible. Okay, so let's talk first about AI Prompt Engineering and the kind of focus today. So very quickly, we just wanna go through some kind of basics of prompt architecture, prompt engineering. Those are fancy terms. Simple term is talking to an AI, right? How do you talk to an AI so that you get instructions out of it? One of the things that's been really a great lesson about working with AI over the past couple of years is it's not so unlike working with people but because there is no room to blame the other person for not understanding your instructions, it forces you to really think about what is it that I am asking for in a way that I find really helpful and it's actually probably improved my ability to communicate with humans as well and understand when I don't get something I want, probably it was because I didn't communicate very well. So things to do are first, tell the AI what role you want it to play. Are you a psychologist? Are you a nonprofit consultant? Are you a physics researcher? Are you a mathematician, right? Give it a role and even a very specific role. Be very clear about what topic or task you need. If you're asking it for outputs and want a particular tone or particular style, tell it. This is the style I want. It can be very helpful to tell it the steps that will lead more likely to a successful outcome and then be very clear about what the output is and if you have a sample of that, which we'll get to later, providing one really good sample of the kind of output you want, at least currently is a very good technique for getting outputs you want. And then one caveat we'll kind of say about all this is I'm not gonna say it every time we talk about it, but I will say everything we're talking about is interacting with these large language models or AI systems as they are right now. They're changing very rapidly as we will talk about. Copilot, which we'll be focusing on today, Microsoft Copilot has some different conversation styles. They have creative, balanced and precise and these are basically, they're well-named terms, right?  Balance just kind of in between that precise and precise is a very conservative. It's gonna try very narrowly to do the things that you want it. Very good to experiment with different styles with Copilot based on the kind of thing you're doing. If you're trying to do a really funny and out there blog post, probably creative mode is gonna be good. If you're trying to write an AI policy statement for your organization, probably balanced or even precise might be a better way to go and those are things you can experiment with. Some really basic ideas where generative text prompts are really, really helpful and generally very low risk in terms of doing things. Are they fantastic for brainstorming, for being a thought partner? So I need to come up with 20 ideas for something. I have three ideas for something and I wanna get some feedback on them. I've written this short essay or blog post that let me get feedback on it. Fantastic at these kinds of things. I'm getting started, getting rid of that blank page for those of you who can have writer's blocks sometimes. And any kind of short question can be a starting point. Really good for conversations. I absolutely amazed my folks and my daughter the other day. She was asking a question about dimensions and was asking how time functions as a fourth dimension, what that means. And I was trying to explain it and realized I was kind of struggling. So I opened up an AI on my phone and this was one that I can interact with in an audio way. And I asked it to explain four dimensions so it could be understood by a fifth grader, which I use all the time, this prompt, like explain it to me like I'm a fifth grader as a way of forcing the AI to break down the concepts in really understandable ways. It's incredible. I really encourage you to use that, all right? So Kim, anything you wanna add to any of this that I've gone through? No, I mean, one thing I just wanna point out, one of our questions actually, someone asked about technical skills and using AI. So one of the things that Josh was been talking about is mostly about asking questions. This is largely prompt writing, even the prompt engineering is very technical sounding. It's actually a question asking exercise. And as he said, you mold it in many dimensions but it's about asking. I forget what famous scientist was, Einstein or Feynman or got attributed to one of those and said, if I have an hour to solve a really hard problem, like I might spend the first 50, 55 minutes just figuring out what are the right questions to ask because if I can figure that out and working with AI, I find very much like that. It's about figuring out the right questions. Yeah, of course, big disclaimer here. AI's will make stuff up. They'll be wrong about things. If you don't know this, it's very important you know this. It's very important to understand that you have to validate information that comes out of AI's because it might just be a confabulation that it just made up, okay? These are probabilistic statistical engines. They are just predicting next words within a context and those predictions can produce some unexpected results and I'm sure we've read plenty of stories about that. And here's a lovely sonnet composed by ProPilot. All right, Kim, off to you with image prompts. All right, so generative AI is also great at visual, at creating visual kinds of content, right? So again, like Joshua said, brainstorming, experimenting, quick rapid testing of visual ideas can be great for testing out stuff around social media campaigns, promotional materials. You can also use generative AI to generate pictures of people that look pretty real most of the time, okay? Okay, the whimsy is very much there in pictures and there was a lot of that on the news. So anyway, prompting for images in CoPilot, here's a kind of a formula that I think you give it information. So describe what kind of thing you're looking for. Is it doing something? Is there, and then is there a particular visual style you want it to use? So in this case, an adjective plus a noun plus a verb plus a style, right? Curious frog, analyzing data in a comic book style, okay? And with that style one, maybe avoid blatant copyright violations like in the style of a Banksy portrait or something like that. Yeah, that comes up in- Oh, there we go, sorry, Kim, I jumped your slide. That's fine, it's worth mentioning twice. And in fact, AI doesn't let you do it anymore. So the types of things to include in a visual type of prompt is, you know, vibes, right? So a mood or a feeling that you want, right? You can ask for different media. You know, you can ask for photography. You can ask for a high resolution photograph. You can ask for taken by a Nikon, DSLR, blah, blah, blah with, you know, f, two point whatever, right? I forget my photography, but you can ask for close-ups, wide angles, things like that, illustrations and art history. So here's the big caveat. And actually some of the AI, and as Josh mentioned, it does, it's changing and learning all the time. So it changes a little every day, right? Or as we're working on it. So one of the things that's become much more restrained is the ability to request a specific artist style. Like give me this in the style of a Picasso, right? It's not just living artists. It's also certain artists' state to really come up against this. So you don't wanna say like with me this image as Picasso would do it. As much as saying, you know, if it's Cubism, you're after, let's say, you could say in a Cubist style or in the, you know, do something in the style of a certain period in time, like 17th century watercolor. You can also ask for the medium, right? Watercolor and wood. You can ask for claymation looking visuals. So, and it's really fun to experiment. So I think, you know, and that's one of the things that is also really important around just AI, prompt engineering is not so much about technical skills, right? But it is about experimenting and getting comfortable experimenting back and forth and seeing what you get. So I think that's it on images, similar principles. Yeah, and just, we're almost done with the slides. We're gonna get right into the questions. We just wanted to kind of give some basics and we're also actually answering through these slides a number of the kind of questions that in various ways were asked multiple times by audience members. So we're trying to get some of the most asked questions just covered in this. So advanced prompt techniques, there are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions of very, very sophisticated prompts that are very, very specific for purpose. So we're not gonna obviously go into all of those. So what we are gonna share are, what we would consider to be some of the more advanced prompt techniques that are very flexible, that can be used for lots of different purposes because they're effective and can be used in lots of different ways and will provide you with samples of all of these that you can go and use and play with. So one is a chain of thought. And there are a couple of different ways of doing this. One is super simple, which is basically just telling the AI, before you start doing this thing I'm asking you to do, I would like you to break it down step by step and maybe even tell me what your plan is and let me say, yeah, that sounds good before you proceed. It's been pretty well demonstrated that this will tend to produce higher quality outputs most of the time, although it does take a little longer because the AI has to go through that and you have to review it. So that's a chain of thought. And you can also actually give it the steps yourself if you know what those steps are and that can be part of your prompt architecture. Another term to be familiar with is the idea of zero shot, one shot and few shot. And this is super simple. If I want it to produce a blog post for me, that is 500 words and follows a specific, let's say five paragraph format, introduction, three basic points, and then a conclusion, a zero shot would be, I don't give it any samples. I just tell it, this is the kind of output I want. Good luck. A one shot is I give it exactly one sample that's exactly the way I like it and say, here's a sample of the kind of thing I want. All right, and a few shot is I give it maybe three or four or five or 10 or 100 samples. And then it will look at all of them and try to do that. My experience, Kim, tell me what you find and also the audience, please share with us your experience. I find one shot most of the time to work the best out of these. If I have a really good sample of the kind of thing I want an output for, the AI does a really good job replicating that for some new thing that I'm asking for. Kim, does that... I would agree. Yeah, and the general consensus that I hear, right? You think more shots the better, right? The more examples. But one of the things that I keep hearing and keep experiencing myself is if you load it down with too much information, you can confuse it. So if you're better off giving it one really good example or really close example to what you want. Yep. And that's what I've found. And then the last one that I want to talk about is this idea of Tree of Thought. This is probably, even some of you who've used AI may not be familiar with this one, even if you knew the other terms we're talking about. Tree of Thought's very interesting. Definitely takes longer than the other ones. And this is where you actually, and we have a sample of this as well, you actually ask the AI to create personas and then have those personas kind of debate amongst themselves which of the solutions is best or even generate ideas and then debate them amongst themselves. So for example, I might say, I want ideas for how to incorporate AI into my nonprofit organization. I would like you to generate five to 10 ideas. And I would like you to generate them and one person is gonna be an expert outside consultant in AI. Another person is going to be one of my nonprofit program staff and another person is gonna be a board member of our nonprofit. And I would like you to have each of those personas generate three ideas. I'd like to then have you have those personas debate about those ideas and provide rankings of which ideas the best based on each of their different perspectives. This is a very interesting way to have the large language model kind of take in these different perspectives. So that's one that I've played with with some success at different times. We've got, Kim, will you drop that in the chat for everybody? The prompt template that we're gonna share. I think one of the TechSoup crew will drop it in. And I'm gonna show some other ones as we go through and then we'll take it from there. So I think I will stop sharing at this moment and then I'll sort of reshare my screen, Kim, as we go through other questions. Yeah, so actually since you're on the topic of that template, it's probably a good time to go ahead and show it because one of the, we received a number of questions along these lines but this is probably the most clearly asked and kind of general. How to tailor the most impactful AI prompts that align with our organization's mission? Okay, so let me, oh, go ahead, Kim. Yeah, and I'm just saying so. And a number of people ask this of kind of like, how can we create a prompt that gets what we want and has our tone to it, right? It has our, so I believe our template is designed to do just that. It is, and let me, let me reshare my screen. So let me come back here. Let's see, maybe I'll just share, can I just share the whole Chrome thing? I can't see that. All right, we'll just, I'll just bounce it around then. So let's go right into co-pilot. Okay, so here we are in co-pilot and I'm gonna jump right into this new feature that for those of you who don't know about it and use co-pilot, I'll be very excited, which is notebook, which many of you will see, if you go to co-pilot in your browser, you will see this little notebook up here on the top and you can kind of click over to that, which is just new. This is the thing I literally just discovered a half an hour ago. And the first thing that is super interesting about notebook, and I know my little annotation tool, if you look down in the bottom, if you see that blue kind of button in the left top of words, this new topic, just to the right of that, you'll see I have a whopping 18,000 characters that I can put in here. Look at how long of this prompt that I put in over here on the left. And I've still only used under a quarter of what's there. So I could have something four times as long as this. And so what I'm doing here is I'm telling it, this is who I am, right? I'm telling it, here's an example of my writing. I'm telling a little bit about my audience. I could obviously be much more specific here. Okay, I'm telling it who the AI is. I'm telling it, when I give it tasks, what I want it to do, there's that chain of thought, take a deep breath, consider the request and full, convert that into a step-by-step plan. Say, if you have questions, you're gonna ask me up to five questions, tell me what assumptions you're making. This is something that's a prompt that's evolved for me over time that I just found to be very effective at doing complex tasks. Then I tell it what format I want it in, which is that I'm asking for it marked down, all right? This is a really cool thing that I like, which is after a response, tell me for further explanation and give me great follow-up questions that are thought-provoking. I find this very helpful. And then I've given it the chain of thought where I say I wanna develop an effective strategy to be able to be using AI. I've told it, I want a board member, an executive director and an outside consultant, a sign of probability of success in the confidence level and free solution deep in the thought process and so on and so forth. And here's the output that co-pilot has given me. So the board member came up with AI-assisted content creation and outreach, kind of goes through this. And all this, of course, I can export as word or PowerPoint. And the nice thing here is that I can make changes over here on the left and then just click the little arrow and it reruns the prompt. So it gives you a little bit more of an iterative way of working through prompts. So if I was trying to get something that was really in the tone of my organization, I would take the time to create a prompt that includes all of the things I need about who my nonprofit is, who our audience is, or our audience for this particular task that I'm doing, an example of what our tone is, our style, those things, and then give it the task and be very clear on that output. And now that you have notebook, that could be 16,000 characters long, which gives you a lot of room to play with and you can iterate back and forth. Yeah, and it just went up from 4,000, which is a lot. So you would keep these kinds of prompts that have worked well for you. Like you can always just copy and paste those into a document that you keep and you might use certain prompts for different purposes. Right? And EJ asked if I could use co-pilot on my Apple products or not. EJ, I don't know if I should say this on the Microsoft TechSoup, but I'm on a Mac and it works for me. And I use it on my Apple products. So here's a question that I'll go ahead and answer that was also submitted, okay? So related, so hold on to everything you've learned up till now. Are you gonna want me to share anything here, Kim, or are you gonna share anything? No, I'm just looking for more just to talk through. All right, I'm trying to take, so this is a two-par question. I'm trying to take existing content, say a blog post, turn it into an email copy. What's the best way to feed that content to the AI tool? I would say feed it the way you saw Joshua feed an example of his writing. And you literally tell it. Like I want you to be, you know, to, you are a professional writer and copy editor. I would like you to transform this content that I'm gonna give you. And I would like it in an email and you give it the type of tone. If you have an example, if you have something about the audience for which that email is going, you know, you could say I need it to be more professional and, you know, sound more formal. You can do things like that or friendly. And then the second part of that question, which I think is really important, like kind of that I want to, a misunderstanding that I want to clarify is what about training AI tool on my organization style and messaging guidelines to minimize editing requirements to make sure the results are on brand? Here's the thing, you think as you're writing and working with this tool, this thought partner, right? It kind of feels like an intern that you've brought. The longer the interns there, the better it gets your style. It kind of done work that way, okay? AI tools are very session-based. So it's remembering in that given session what you've told it, right? So it's not gonna remember tomorrow. Oh yeah, this is Kim and she does this and that. So you, that's why it's really good to have a library of prompts that works well for different situations that you develop in your organization. There are tools coming out. I think co-pilot studio, which does, will cost more, but that will allow you to kind of build custom like kind of little AI modules to add. And those you'll have a better chance of being able to then get it to be shaped in a certain way for every question that you ask it. But right now the tools that we're showing them today, it's not remembering anything like, you know, about you, even though it seems like it should. So next question for you, Josh, this is another demo on the Tree of Thought Prompt. I think that's helpful. And this is great for like marketing campaigns and things. If you're, you know, if you want a focus group, I just saw someone ask that question. It's kind of like having a focus group. Yup. Yeah. Thank you, A, for noticing Clippy. Clippy's helping us out today. I'm really appreciate that. We also have the Ministry of Silly Locks for any MoneyPython fans. So let's see, I think we kind of demonstrated that one, right? The last prompt I had was kind of the chain of thought. I could certainly do another one. What I was going to do, if it's all right with folks, is I was going to just show another prompt that I will share with everybody. In the chat as well, which is an AI tutor prompt, which I think can be kind of fun. So I will drop that in as well. And then I will share my screen. Is that all right, Kim? If I just quickly kind of do that? Yeah. Because this is one that I find really fun and also potentially powerful for folks. So I just shared the prompt that I put on the left, which I got from a wonderful writer and professor at Wharton called Ethan Molek, who has a wonderful sub-stack that he writes about, which is one useful thing, could not recommend it more highly. So this prompt is one that he wrote. There's lots of these out there. So basically it just says, hi, I'm your AI tutor and I'm here to help you with any questions you have, so on and so forth. Now this one actually, I realized, won't work well in the notebook version. So I'm actually going to move that over here and put it into the regular co-pilot where I can have an ongoing conversation. So notebook, again, it's one prompt, so you're iterating it like that. You can't do a sequential kind of thing with notebook. So notebook is more for one-off kind of things but allows you to do it incredibly comprehensive. So if anyone have a topic they want me to ask the tutor about, so you put it in the chat first. I'll take any topic as long as it's a safer webinar. If you have a topic you want to talk about today, let's see if we give it a minute. All right. No one coming in with a topic? Event strategy, all right, thank you, yes. All right, so I will do a nonprofit event strategy. Let's see what it does with that one. All right, I'm going to think about it. It's a topic that covers that nonprofit organizations can plan, organize and execute successful events. Am I a high school student, college student or professional? All right, I'm just going to answer these for everybody, so I will say I'm a professional and it's going to truck along. Notice that Copilot is dropping little links to the resources that it is using to provide these answers. Really important to understand that the quality of the responses sometimes is dependent on how good the responses are. So I'm not going to spend too much more time on this but you can see it's just going to, from this point forward, now that it's gotten this first instruction, the AI tutor instruction, it's just going to, you know, keep going. Did I share the right tab, by the way? Oh, yeah. Okay, great, great, I think I'm just making sure. All right, so I'll stop there, but hopefully that's... So long as you are there and in, oops, and in creative... Someone did ask right here, an example of running a prompt for AI generative image creation and that person's name was Josh. Okay. So is there any particular image, Josh, that you'd be interested in seeing, not to put you on the spot? You're asking me or asking me Josh? No, no, no, Josh, another question. Josh, you're asking the chat, yeah. Any image you want to see, Josh? Again, save for a webinar please. We don't need to put you on the spot, you can always... And Kim, I might defer to you on this one. I consider you much better at image prompting than I am. So intergenerational mentor relationship. Oh, nice. That's pretty cool, all right. So Kim, help me out. Oh, okay. So I would say, okay, so for an intergenerational mentor relationship, okay, so that's a nice one. I would say now intergenerational, I'm assuming that's a young and an old person, so please make me... And we're gonna ask for a photograph, but we can ask that. Please make me an image for... Well, actually, why don't you send that one through first and just see what it does? Okay. Okay. And then you can start to get specific. You can start to ask for something like, give me an image of a young girl, of a woman in her 20s working with an elderly man or a elderly man at a computer or vice versa, not to be ages here, and do it in a photographic style. Sometimes I... Okay, repeat that. Okay, an image... Okay, image of an intergenerational mentor relationship. Go ahead. That's what it gave us. So let's say, no, we actually wanted somebody in their 20s image of an intergenerational mentor relationship showing a young man in his 20s Okay. Working with a woman in her 80s. Okay. You know, at a big table, let's say. Okay. You know, in the style of a Kodachrome photograph. Okay. Off we go. While it's doing that, we can kind of take a look at these ones in larger views. So this is how these came out. Kind of funny, I don't know. Black and whites. That's kind of... It made black and whites and it made them all females and all white people except for one Asian girl, which is interesting. And this is certainly a... All right. So now we got it a little bit differently. I wouldn't say the photographs. Well, I guess that's kind of Kodachrome. And now we got a bit more diversity, which is very nice to see. Okay. Okay. And so you can keep on iterating. You can also ask for an illustration, right? So here we're asking for photograph. You can ask for an illustration. You can ask for a watercolor, et cetera. Oh yeah, AIs can mess up people's hands. Although they're getting better. AIs also in images can mess up text, which I think is counterintuitive for a lot of people. It is getting much better, but it can really misspell words. And that's with all of the different systems. And Josh did get back to us. So we'll say a child being picked up by their parents in a small African school. So we'll see what we get from that one, Josh. Now you can get some bias warning, but... Yeah, all the AI systems are having various challenges around, reinforcing stereotypes in image creation and doing all sorts of nutty things. You can see we got really different results here before and quite a bit of variety. That one's lovely. Yeah, it's interesting that we got two that are kind of cartoon-style and two that are very photorealistic. Kind of interesting, right? Neat though. So Josh, I hope that you found those helpful and you can certainly do that, all right? So what's next, Kim? So I think, I mean, some people did ask and I've seen some questions float by in the chat. We're ready TechSoup team to start taking some of the live questions that might be flying by, but... We can do the fun one. Wait, well, before we do them, we can show you how they're, one thing they tend to mess up on. Someone did ask for an infographic, right? Yeah, well, I think we have to, Kim. I think we've got a idea. Right, so it's doing all that.  All large language models will do what we are about to see. So we are going to ask, can you create an infographic? Please create a detailed infographic showing ROI, operating cost of an income percentage of funds and operations, calculate the total cost of a project and output. So we'll do that for a multinational nonprofit organization. I don't know if this is like the best. Okay, so we'll see how this comes out. But someone asked it, I don't know if this is like the best, okay? So we'll see how this comes out. But someone asked this and Kim and I knew this in advance and we tested this beforehand. Hopefully it will do what we expected to do, which is produce some infographics that are not always that helpful. So, and we'll see what we have there. Notice, it's telling you what ROI is, which it's much better at than creating that infographic. It's stalling. Kind of chain of thought itself, right? Sort of saying, I need to think about this and make sure that you understand the infographic. Thank goodness it's going to tell us all this, all right? Okay, I'm not sure it's going to get to this. Another thing that that that AIs are really, really bad at and I'll try this as well is where's Waldo? It's not giving you the infographic in this case. Yeah, it's getting there. Okay, all right. Someone did ask, someone would like help making an image for STEM science camp for kids. It's so nice. Okay. We can work on that. All right, here are fantastic infographics. That's really good. Yeah, that definitely helps me understand ROI, NETVM. This one's even better. I think, and this is, I have not figured out how to do that. Josh, pardon? We don't see it close up. Oh, you don't? It didn't zoom in? No. Oh, interesting. I wonder why not? I clicked in on it. I'll stop sharing and I'll reshare and see if it shows you. Interesting that it wouldn't show you so why don't we do, I'll just do the entire screen and then hopefully that'll work. Sorry, Kim, you're not gonna see yourself for a little bit. We'll go back to the pilot. Now, does everybody see it? Ah, that one's, yeah, see. I mean, that really clears things up for me. I think we've got $2 of return on investment which appears to be 90% of, and then we have 9% of our OFI, whatever that is. And then it looks like there's a person sitting underneath $3, and this is exactly what I get every time I try to do it. All of them do it, right? Yeah, they all do it. Not an indictment of co-pilot at all. No, and someone did ask about, there's me again, someone did ask about what are some of the low tools and there are co-pilot is obviously the tool we're talking about today. There's also ChatGPT which comes in a ChatGPT plus version and, you know, Claude AI and Google just released newly named Gemini. What's very nice, and I would say this, even if this wasn't a Microsoft sponsored webinar is that with your, if you're a licensed Microsoft user on any of four licenses, three, six Microsoft Office E3 license, E5 license, business premium or business standard, I believe, all of those, all right, include the, hang on a second, you're protected. And so you can see, because I'm logged into a Microsoft account that has an E3 license here, my Chat is protected. And if you click through to this, it'll give you all the details around the privacy and what they're doing, but essentially it's saying, as I read this anyway, if anyone from Microsoft is on and wants to correct me by all means, but it's basically saying, you know, if you're already at the data that you're using to interact with the AI is already in your 365 tenant in OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Word, you know, whatever, you're not introducing it to anything new by using it with your licensed co-pilot version, right? It's protected by all those same things. That is a big deal, all right? And Microsoft is currently one of the only companies that's doing that on what's not quite free because you need a licensed 365, but since most of you already have that, it's essentially a free AI tool that's available to you and has data protection. That's a big deal. Yeah. And another question, this is Janet from TechSoup here. We did have a question from Josh actually, the other Josh. And maybe this is around the best practices, but so would you suggest starting with vague prompts and move towards what you were looking for with specific continual prompts? It's kind of like what you were showing us a little bit before, but yeah, maybe could talk about the best practices there. Can you repeat that, Janet? I'm not sure I understood that question really well, but Josh, did he write it in the chat and I can go find it? He did. It's around, yeah, starting with a vague prompt and maybe going and adding continuous details to create what you want. Gotcha, okay. So that's an interesting question, I see it. Thank you, Janet. So Josh asked, so do we suggest starting with vague prompts and move towards what you are looking for with specifics through continual prompts? Kim, do you wanna answer that first or do you want me to take that on first? My inclination would be no, if I have, look, here's the thing, I would start with a vague prompt if I have a vague idea, if I'm not quite sure. And I have certainly many, many times gone to an AI tool to ask for general vague ideas about something. But if I know what I want, I will give it that in the very beginning so that then when I'm fine tuning it and continuing to iterate with the AI that it gets me closer and closer to what I want. So that's my inclination on that. I agree with you, 100%. Yeah, it's a great brainstorm partner though if you're not quite sure, right? So any other questions, Janet? I also see from Sarah, can you create coloring sheets with co-pilot? Yes, I can. I just prompted that now so we can see how it comes out. Now, we're not seeing, you're sharing your whole desktop? Yeah, because otherwise it seems to not zoom up the things, is that okay? Yeah. Okay. It's just smaller. Oh, I can try it again. It wasn't, just when I did it that way it wasn't zooming the photos for reasons I'm not clear on. We'll see if it does it this time. Tell me when it gets larger when I click on it. So yeah, that's pretty good coloring page. I'm not. Now, if you wanted it for like a six-year-old you might have less detail. I can certainly try that. Well, while that's happening, one of the questions that someone asked had to do with using prompt engineering for automated replies. That's something I might actually avoid, okay? Because one of the, and in our last class on AI risk. It's extremely low risk. Like so low risk that it almost doesn't exist. That's still hard for a six-year-old. I don't know, maybe I'm not good at coloring, but.   Interesting. But that one's not bad. Not too bad. All right, all right. Anyway. Well, there's yes. I think you might need to do a little tweaking, but yeah. Any others? So yeah, short answer around automated. So credit to George Weiner of Pull Whale for this term, but real shorthand, okay? First, not final, human in the loop. So what that means is when I'm using AI systems, I am, is not the final draft that comes out of an AI and a human must be in the loop. If I am allowing an AI system to do automated replies that are not reviewed by human and those are going to humans, in my view, at this time, that is irresponsible unless it is so low risk and you are disquaining a million times that like, hey, this thing may give you bad information. Yeah, cause it can, you know, there are unhappy stories about that. Yeah. Janet. Jan, yes, you can download all the images. Don't know about dimensions and file formats for the image. I can certainly try that. Do you know that camera? I have no dimensions right now. I think with co-pilot, you get a square. Like any minute now, you can probably ask it for a 16 by nine, but right now that it is generating square images. Some of the other tools, you can give it dimensions. It's always gonna come in as a PNG file. Yeah, I'm asking, it says I cannot provide the images or download in any format. I can only create and split them for you. If you want to save the images, you can take a screen shot or download them. So, sorry. We also have another question from Chris Lynn and this is more about understanding how AI generates their images. But she's asking, if we type the same exact prompt to create an image in both co-pilot and open AI or chat GPT, will they create the same image? No. In fact, even if you paste the same prompt into the co-pilot over and over again, it will make different images every time. This is the kind of magic of AI systems. They're always generating it from this probabilistic statistical model that they're doing. So it's always new. And it's always changing because people are always using them. They're very dynamic. So I know we're flying without a net. I was playing with this just or a perform without a net. I don't know what the right term is here, Kim, but I'm going to play with, I'm going to show us something else again. So I've got, unless Janet, we've got other questions we want to hit, but I wanted to show now that we've got this notebook function in co-pilot, something else we can do that's pretty neat. So there's all sorts of free data sources you can download. Okay. What I have is something called the IMDB Movie Database, which is just like something I used from way back in the day to help me learn like how to do pivot tables and things like that. And it just has names of movies, has a bunch of data in it. So what I'm going to do is in my notebook where I have a lot of context. So this uses up the whole context. I'm going to delete some of it and I'm going to go all the way up to the top. You see, I've almost used my entire context window here. And I'm going to say, please tell me about this data. Stop responding and let's go. And when I was playing this, whoops. Okay, let's start over. Like I said, flying without a net, but I'll put it to work. All right, we'll try this again. It was doing a pretty decent job telling me about this information and then giving me some options to ask questions of this data. So just pasting in, and this is a CSV file. So I'm just pasting in basically text data. It's figuring this out all by itself, just looking at that data. Okay, so it's saying it appears to be a data set of movies. Each row represents movies with the following attributes. Really nice breakdown here, right? Of what this data looks like. And then gives me some ideas of what I could do. And now I could start to ask some questions. I could ask questions about like correlations between different data points or things like this. This was not previously something that I was able to do very successfully with the co-pilot because the context window was so limited and you didn't have to be able to upload giant CSV files. But now that I have this context window of 18,000, as long as your data set isn't too large, it's something you can definitely play with there. So I just wanted to show that because I think data analysis, the ability to do advanced data analysis using these tools is one of the most exciting aspects of them. It's really like a superpower. Yeah, and unlike infographics, it can actually do data visualizations really well. And that's those are the kinds of features I'm looking forward to seeing as Microsoft rolls out more capabilities in co-pilot for Excel and things like that. Again, these are all works in progress and it still is early days. Yeah, and Marina asks a great question. How reliable is that data you produce? So what I have found so far, Marina, working with large language models, there's something called RAG, retrieval augmented generation, I wanna say is what it stands for. It might be something else, but it's essentially a technique by which you're saying, here's like a set of data to the AI to co-pilot and saying, I want you to answer the questions I'm asking, but only of this data. I don't want you to get data from anywhere else when you're answering this question, because of course they've got their entire training thing and they can browse the internet and all that, right? So RAG are different techniques for doing that. This is on the more sophisticated side of prompt architecture, right? So in co-pilot studio, right, you'd have much more control over uploading the data you want and then configuring the prompts and testing it to make sure it's doing it. If you're doing it like this, Marina, I would say you definitely would wanna go do some spot check validation. So do some easy things and see if it seems to be giving you correct answers or just making them up or giving correct answers, but from some other data set that isn't going to be so uploaded before you went and published anything. Again, first, not final, human in the loop. Thank you, George Wainer. Oh, I did get it right. Retrieval augmented generation, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Okay, any, Jen, did anything else? Nothing from the chat, but we did have a few questions that came in previously that maybe we have some time to check in on. Let's see. How about, do you have any advice on getting the tone and language to reflect an organization's voice or language guidelines? You can show that. Absolutely. So I'll share, let's see, second. And some folks had commented that the template that we shared didn't have that full, it had the prompt that we wrote before we discovered notebook. So we will go ahead and add that to the prompt strategy template that then we'll use the same download. And Janet, you'll be sending out a followup email with this so folks can have the link and we'll give you both of those prompts. Correct, yeah. We'll be sending out the recording and then as well as this document as well. Okay, great. Cause yeah, I mean, Microsoft like quadrupled the capacity. Right before this. Well, actually it didn't happen right before this class when we discovered it then. So are you doing a... Yeah, so I'm giving a couple of ways that I would solve this problem. So example of desire, writing style. So I'm just pulling us from my other one. So if I... There. So, all right. So one way that you could do this, right? As to one shot it, so to speak, which is that within this larger prompt strategy template that we give you, right? I'm giving identity and purpose and saying who the AI is. I'm giving you the job. I'm then gonna go ahead and give it an example of a desired writing style, right? The other thing I could do is I could provide style guidelines, right? And then I could say, be witty, verbose, use lots of jargon, over explain and make things up a lot, right? And so obviously this is not what you would want, but you could use your style. So you, and by the way, if you're not sure how you would describe your style, this is another way to use AI. So what I could do is take my writing sample, right? I can move that into co-pilot. Okay, so let me share the co-pilot window again. Okay, do what you do. And we'll go back to co-pilot and I will say, please describe this writing style. That's it. And it's going to go ahead and describe that writing style. And then I could just basically take this and paste it into the writing style guide that I have. And you could provide lots of them and then say, please give me a summary of these writing styles. So you can use the AI to tell you the style you're writing and then feed that back into your prompt architecture to help it, all right? And you can see this is giving much and kind of clear things, okay? So it's really nice about my writing style. Nothing too insulting there. It's good. Someone did ask for an image if we had time. And so I think since we have a minute, they wanted an image for a STEM summer camp. All right, any other details about this STEM summer camp that they want? Get the name of the person. If you're there. Oh, images for a STEM science camp for kids. And if, let's see what it does. It's remain there, all right? Interesting. We can only generate an image for you deciding where the personal Microsoft account. Interesting, all right, let's refresh. Let's go back. I hope it's creative, although it does do it in balance. Yeah, it was made to be images this whole time of a STEM summer camp for kids, okay? Science, see if it does it. Maybe Destiny is off like implementing some of our new policies, Kim, and just like disabled it in a round table. But hopefully it'll work. Yep, now it's doing it. That was just a hiccup. By the way, these learning language models will hiccup a lot. So if when in doubt, refresh, close the browser, start over, nine times out of 10 and it'll work fine the next time. So are these going large again, Kim? Are they? They are, okay. So young kids are surprisingly happy. Wow. Five to 14 years old. With the name of the organization, that's where I see science fun for everyone. I might put that in with another tool because you could get some misspellings on what happened in there. That's improving, but not perfect yet. Yeah, I can try it again. Science camp for kids, call. All science fun for everyone. Science camp for everyone. Science fun for everyone. It's like those kids were already really aggressively having fun. But we're over time. All right, sorry, everybody. I have to go actually, because I have the three o'clock, but I'll wait till the image. But thank you, everybody. Really appreciate the time from TechSoup. Kim, of course, you're welcome to stay around if they're staying around. I'm gonna have to jump. But here's our science fun for everyone. Yeah, AIs are not great at spelling. A wonderful writer. Another great sub-stack, I recommend, is Strapatek. And I'll drop this link in here. She was specifically, this is Deb Sulegros, who's just a fantastic writer on AI. And she actually was just writing about improving spelling using images. So thanks, everybody. I gotta jump, I lost track of time. Thanks, Kim. Thanks, TechSoup. Thank you, everybody. All right, thanks, TechSoup. Thanks, Josh. Thank you, Kim. All right. Okay. Did you wanna take anything else, or are we good to wrap here, I think? I mean, I think we're good. Okay. If someone has another question, I'd be happy to take it, but... Yeah, I think just at this point, I think just following up with us for anyone that has additional questions, I'm gonna go ahead, I guess, and just toss my email in the chat. I've already actually received some emails from some folks, which is exciting. Be happy to field anything as far as with Kim and Josh and Roundtable. Certainly be able to communicate any information. I'm sure I'm guessing that's gonna come out and follow up email as well. A copy of this recording will be available in the coming days. Just give us some time to edit it, because you knew I was hosting it, that there was gonna be some glitches. So we're gonna get those out as part of this as well. I'm assuming presentation deck will also be included. There were some other items that some people had asked for, to what degree that can accommodate those, we'll certainly try. So with that, thank you very much, everyone, for joining us today. This morning, this afternoon. Have a great rest of the week, and we look forward to you joining us on another event.