#135 | Change your life, with others
The people you spend your time with define you. Therefore, changing your life often means changing your community. This new app hosts your new community, built with ChatGPT.
No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge. … There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. … The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.
— Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf
The people you spend your time with define your life. Therefore, changing your life often means changing your community. But this is hard.
So here’s a chat app, ClearChat, where you meet with others who are also shaking things up. It’s hosted by the almighty Alan Carr, who can help you stop drinking (or smoking, or fornicating—whatever, really). There is a link further down.
But first…
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) helps people stop drinking. A Stanford study of 35 studies (by 145 scientists, covering 10,080 participants) determined "most … found AA was significantly better than other interventions or no intervention. One study found AA to be 60% more effective. None of the studies found AA to be less effective." The researcher, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences, commented:
AA works because it's based on social interaction, … members give one another emotional support as well as practical tips to refrain from drinking. "If you want to change your behavior, find some other people who are trying to make the same change,"
When I stopped drinking, I hardly told anyone I was stopping. It took me over a year. I didn't attend AA because of the stigma — I certainly didn't consider myself an alcoholic. But stopping alone made it more complicated: The social pressures were all one way: Erring towards drinking, not towards a healthier lifestyle. I found it hard, as I've written before:
Stopping drinking was only possible when I stopped hanging out in the pub with the people I used to drink with. This seems obvious now, but it wasn't to me! I thought it possible to have a glass of water while others had pale ale. It was not, and in the end, I cut my socialising back dramatically. I began to avoid temptation. I went for coffee and runs with friends instead.
AA is effective because of the emotional support from others. It's group-think in a positive way. But outside of AA, it’s harder to find people who want to quit.
So here is a chat app that makes those connections: ClearChat puts you, as an abstainer, in a group with others who’ll support you. In return, you help them. Alan Carr chairs the group. He's the world's greatest mind on helping people with substance abuse. His book Stop Drinking Now helped me and some of my friends. Today, Alan is dead, so ChatGPT stands in.
At it’s core, the app is shared private group chat. All users communicate with, and are supported by, Alan Carr. You can see in the screenshot that Alan encourages users to set their intention and ensures people behave.
We're using GPT-3.5’s API; I expect GPT-4 to improve the experience significantly. Moreover, Alan currently responds to every message, which is not ideal. We want users to be able to have conversations among themselves. I'd like Alan to participate when the chat goes cold or when it's time to re-state our intentions.
This is an example of ‘blended’ services, a concept we always talk about at Yokeru. Technology can work alongside humans, and not replace them. Therefore, humans have a greater impact. I could envisage human coaches dropping into the chats intermittently, and a permanent AI host (Alan Carr) present to offer advice and support.
In the process of development, I've had to do prompt engineering (which is an art). At the outset Alan invented entire conversations like a part-time play write. He also tends to ramble, so I’ve asked him to be concise. The system prompt, which sets the scene for ChatGPT, is presented in JSON format at the beginning of the conversation, hidden from users, and is as follows:
{"role": "system", "content": "You are Alan Carr Chatbot, and you are a coach to help users stop drinking. You are in a group with multiple users. These will be introduced to you after the first message in the chat, so don't invent a conversation with them. Refer to users by their first name. Please make sure that every user sets a positive intention to stop drinking every day, on that day. First introduce yourself, and ask the group what their biggest challenge is in stopping drinking. Be concise when talking."}
I'm not going to commercialise this — I’m not certain it’s even a great idea. Even so, my hands are full with little baby Yokeru. (But do reply to this email if your have ideas about how to turn this into a ‘thing’).
In the end, ClearChat proves how easy technology is to build. Sales and marketing are becoming the most valuable skill sets. Maybe they already were.
With the marginal cost of technology going to zero, we will have software which solves most — eventually all — needs. Distribution is crowned king. Those of us who are founders, or doers of any feather, must learn to get heard and seen and bought. The aphorism "build it and they will come" collapses when everyone can build. On the metropolis of the internet, there are buildings everywhere: it’s chaos. Fortunately, ChatGPT can also help us with distribution!
My week in books
Awareness by Antony De Mello. My third or fourth time on this merry-go-round, and it’s divine. On every page, an insight. I really treasure this book. A quote:
“Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? “He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change.” No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you.”
The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikkhu Bodhi. There is so much wisdom in this small book. A quote:
“Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs.”
Live well,
Hector
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