Shiny Objects & Smart Machines: AI’s Role in ADHD Productivity Part II
There’s an inflection point when technology shifts from novelty to necessity. The printing press. The telephone. The internet. And now, artificial intelligence. For those with ADHD, the rise of AI presents an especially tantalizing paradox: a tool that promises to sharpen focus and streamline tasks, yet one that, if wielded carelessly, could just as easily become another source of distraction.
In this episode of The ADHD Podcast, Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer take us into the heart of the paradox. They begin with a simple but profound question: How do we make AI work for us, rather than the other way around?
It starts with a refresher on prompt engineering—the art of structuring AI queries with precision. It’s not unlike training a dog. Give vague instructions, and you’ll get unpredictable results. But with the right prompts, AI can become an invaluable assistant, distilling complex information, organizing thoughts, and even generating study guides.
But then comes the tension. The unease. The creeping realization that AI—like all powerful tools—has a darker side. What of the Paperclip Problem, a thought experiment that suggests AI, if left unchecked, could optimize itself into oblivion, consuming all available resources (including us) in its relentless pursuit of efficiency. Far out? There are those who argue not so far as you think.
The conversation then shifts to the Goldilocks Zone—that elusive middle ground where AI enhances productivity without eroding autonomy. Pete shares his meticulously curated AI toolkit: Perplexity AI for research, Grammarly for writing, TextExpander for automation, and Adobe Voice Enhancer for audio clarity. Each tool, when used correctly, reduces cognitive load. But over-reliance? That’s where the danger lies.
By the end of the discussion, one thing becomes clear: AI is neither savior nor saboteur. It is a mirror, reflecting back the habits and intentions of its user. The question isn’t whether AI will replace us—it won’t. The real question is: Will we use AI to become more of who we are, or will we let it decide that for us?
Links & Notes
Perplexity AI – AI-powered research assistant
Poe.com – Multi-model AI chat platform
Grammarly – AI-enhanced writing assistant
Adobe Voice Enhancer – AI-driven audio clarity tool
Coda.io – AI-integrated database management
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Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and right there is Nikki Kinzer. Beep boop boop.
Nikki Kinzer:
Beep boop boop. Hello, Pete AI.
Pete Wright:
Hello, Nikki AI. This is Part 2 of our AI conversation. A lovely talk yesterday. Do you feel like-
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
This is a little bit out of sort because we recorded that episode... Normally, it's like two weeks later when it goes live. We are doing some schedule shake up. So today, as we record Part 2, we just recorded Part 1 yesterday, but it'll be a week before you hear it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
It's an ADHD scheduling thing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
The thing is that it's only a day later. So I want ask you, given that day, how do you feel about the conversation that we had yesterday?
Nikki Kinzer:
I feel like there is so much I don't know.
Pete Wright:
Have you-
Nikki Kinzer:
But I feel like I learned a lot. I do. I feel like there's more of an understanding of AI for me. And what's so strange is I was talking about it with my family yesterday and my husband said, "Oh, yeah. I've been using Perplexity." I'm like, "How do you even know what this is?" Like, "Okay. That was random." He had heard about it from his cousin and his cousin thought it was the best thing ever. And so, he was telling me about it. So I just thought that was... I thought it was ironic that I-
Pete Wright:
It's very funny.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
But [inaudible 00:01:44], I'm excited about today too, to learn even more.
Pete Wright:
Good. Me too and I think we can just jump in. I want to start where we ended yesterday. And I can't remember if we ended in the show proper or if it was in the member's post chat where we were talking about context, right? Setting up and giving the AI... When you're using AI, giving it context to know who you want it to be, and who it should be, and who you are, and who it's responding as. And so, I want us dig in a little bit more on what I'm talking about when we talk about that context.
The term that we're looking for is prompt engineering. That's what we're doing when we are defining what those prompts are. And I'm going to shout out to Matt from down under who said, "Pete should talk about prompt engineering." That's what he was talking about yesterday. Well, that's true. That's what I was talking about and I was just giving it a little bit of a brief. Here's prompt engineering in short. It's more of an art than a science, I think, of crafting effective prompts to get the best responses from AI language models like ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity.
So you think of it as giving clear and precise instructions to a highly intelligent assistant. How you ask a question or structure a request will significantly affect the quality of that response. So as a beginner, you're sitting down at the ChatGPT prompt. You just need to understand that how AI interprets language and how it uses that knowledge to guide your response is really, really helpful.
It's an incredibly powerful skill and I think it's important to really be cognizant of trial and error as you're using your different prompts. Write them out in a separate note and copy and paste them as you change them so you can see what works, what doesn't. Here are some key aspects you want to think about when you're looking at prompt engineering.
First, clarity and specificity. The clearer your prompt, the better the response. Instead of just saying, "Hey, tell me about space." We've talked about my third grade paper. I was asked to write a research paper, my first research paper. I said, "Space." Well, that's a little broad and I did not do well on that paper. Instead of saying, "Tell me about space," say, "Explain how black holes form in simple terms," right? Give it some real specificity. What about space are you looking to? So that's number one. Number two, context and constraints. Providing background or setting limits in your prompt can refine AI responses. So for instance, "Summarize this article in three sentences and paste the URL into your response," works better than just, "Hey, summarize this or summarize this page," right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
I say things all the time like, "I need a tight two sentence summary of this webpage." Normally, it's because I've written a long webpage and I just paste it all into AI and I say, "Summarize this in a tight two sentences so I can use it for the preview box on a webpage," or something like that. It just makes it very, very easy. So that's number two. Give it context and constraints.
Number three, ask for step-by-step instructions, right? So breaking down the request can really, really improve results. So for example, "First, explain what AI is. Then, give an example of how AI is used in daily life." You see what I did there? Not just, "Explain AI." But I want you to, first, give me a background of what AI is and then give me an example of how AI is used in daily life. Now, another example. I have a very long prompt. It's got maybe 60 bullets in it and it is what I call my AI film report. And I use it in Perplexity. It's like pages. It's very, very long prompt and I have it sitting in... Guess where. See if you can guess where I store it.
Nikki Kinzer:
In 1Password?
Pete Wright:
1Password? Nikki, it's TextExpander.
Nikki Kinzer:
TextExpander!
Pete Wright:
It's TextExpander-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh my gosh.
Pete Wright:
Oh my god.
Nikki Kinzer:
I don't know where 1Password came from-
Pete Wright:
Where did that come from? No-
Nikki Kinzer:
I don't know.
Pete Wright:
So-
Nikki Kinzer:
I was trying to think of somewhere safe-
Pete Wright:
Why would you think-
Nikki Kinzer:
... And 1Password is safe. It's safe.
Pete Wright:
Excuse me. No. It's TextExpander. So in TextExpander, I go into my AI partner, Perplexity, and I say, "[[AI.film report." And then, it pops up a little window and it says, "What's the movie you're talking about?" I type in the movie name and then I hit Return. And it pastes this giant film report with specific questions about cinematography and... All of the things that I want. Just a bulleted list to allow me to use that to build my show outline for the show. Without having to go to four or five different websites and cobble this from Call Sheet and this from IMDB and this from The Movie Database and this from Box Office Mojo. It just finds all of the resources and I tell it what to do, where to go, all of those things. And then, it gives me a full report. And I save that report in my notes app, Obsidian in this case.
And now, I have sections that tell me exactly, "Here's what you need to know about this movie. Here's who made it. Here's what was going on when they were making it. Here's a set of the general public opinion of the movie," And it's all organized in a beautiful, beautiful way. So that... I think working on... This is all prompt engineering.
Working on giving the bot deliberate, intentional, and specific prompts is huge. Those are the first three, right? Clarity and specificity, context and constraints, step-by-step instructions. Number four, experiment and iterate. This is a trial and error process and really small tweaks and wording can yield vastly different results. That's what I mean by as you're experimenting with the prompts, you want to get just the right answers. Put it in a note, so you can copy and paste and tweak and change and see how it iterates over time. And I think what you will find is that you'll get to one and that's the one you put in TextExpander because it's perfect.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And It's okay. It's saved you a ton of time going forward. Number five, roleplay. You got to tell AI to take on a persona like a teacher, or a scientist, or a journalist, and doing that can lead to really rich responses.
Nikki Kinzer:
So I have a question about that, because this is part of the conversation that I had with my family yesterday. I was trying to talk to my daughter about what you're saying here. And I said, "One of the things I learned from Pete is that you tell AI who they are. And then, you ask the question." And we were trying to figure out, because her question is... She is putting the study guide into AI. And then, she wants a practice test. She wants the AI to put together a practice test. So is the question... Or I mean... I'm sorry. Is the AI being the student or is the AI the professor who is putting together?
Pete Wright:
In my experience, the AI is always the expert, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
So... Okay.
Pete Wright:
So, the professor. So you are a professor of psychology-
Nikki Kinzer:
Psychology-
Pete Wright:
... at the university level and I need you to help me build a study guide or a set of flashcards or whatever. And do it in a way that you would expect me, as the student, to learn. And then, you have this AI professor who is teaching you the way the professor wants you to learn. Now, I'm sure there are people listening to this who are saying, "But AI isn't a professor," right? No, it's not. It is not a professor, but it is going to approximate the experience of working with a professor because it understands. It has already taken in all of the works of professors of psychology and all of the writing of professors of psychology and therapists and clinicians and the work. So it has that data. If you tell it who it is, it will change its perspective, its worldview, and help you that much better.
Nikki Kinzer:
Good to know.
Pete Wright:
And I-
Nikki Kinzer:
That's what we thought. So I just have to say-
Pete Wright:
Yeah. That's right. You were right-
Nikki Kinzer:
... kudos. We got the right answer.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And I want to say I'm vastly anthropomorphizing AI, like it will help you. I'm saying it again, it's not a person, it's tool. It's a wrench. Just like a wrench will help me with my plumbing, my glasses help me with my face, my AI helps me with my cognitive load and helps me structure my ideas. That's what we're using here. So prompt engineering is super important. It helps really maximize how you're using AI, maximizing its potential. And with something like TextExpander, it can really help you automate tasks, things that you do over and over and over again. If you get just the right prompt, you can really save yourself time. So that's prompt engineering. That sort of puts a cap on where we left yesterday. And now, we can talk about the problem with AI.
Nikki Kinzer:
Chapter 3.
Pete Wright:
Chapter 3: The Problem With AI. I feel like this is such a fraught topic in AI, because there are populations that feel very strongly about how the AI is trained and written and biases that are deeply built inside of it. And I just want to reflect a minute on some of the major concerns, because it really is a double-edged sword. And instead of helping, it can, just like any other tool, become a distraction in your life with ADHD.
So I think the same rule applies to any of these AI bots, to any of the other productivity tools that we use. If it's costing you more time to actually tweak and use and play with it that you don't have, then it's probably not going to be a part of your perfect system. And you may not ever actually figure out how to use it or you may get answers that don't meet your needs or expectations, because you haven't been able to invest in learning how to engineer your prompts better and get the right answers.
But it takes deep experimentation. No matter how complex your system, whether you're just looking to break down a packing list or whether you're using to write a new app for your phone, right? You can use it for a vast swath of projects, but you also have to be able to build in the training, the learning time to figure out how it works. Then, you have the group that really believes AI is the end of humanity and I know that seems like probably a big statement but-
Nikki Kinzer:
It's pretty big. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
The rationalist groups, they don't care for AI, and this is a group that is... Their figurehead is a guy by the name of Eliezer Yudkowsky who actually wrote a delightful fanfiction that is a thousand pages long on Harry Potter, on approaching Harry Potter from the perspective of a rationalist and not a fanaticist. Like, "What if you approached the magical wizarding world of Harry Potter as a scientist?" And it becomes funny and absurd and it's really, really great.
Eliezer Yudkowsky also says this of AI, "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you. But you are made out of atoms, which it can use for something else. By far, the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it." That's a pretty big statement, and it comes along with a thought experiment that they call the paperclip problem. And the paperclip problem is thus, we develop an AI that is, we'll just say, more intelligent than we are. And we say, "Hey, AI, go make a paperclip. Go figure out how to make paperclips," and the AI goes forth and figures out how to make paperclips. And because AI is smarter than us, it actually figures out ways to use materials that we may have never thought of to make paperclips. And because its one job is to make paperclips, all other jobs become subservient to its efforts to make paperclips. And eventually, it becomes so intelligent that we become material for making new paperclips-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, no.
Pete Wright:
... and thus, ends humanity.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, dear. Okay.
Pete Wright:
So-
Nikki Kinzer:
That went to a dark place.
Pete Wright:
Right. It doesn't take very long to do that. And I'm not saying anything to judge the rationalist perspective on AI, because there are legitimate concerns about what AI can do to humanity. I personally don't share those concerns to the same level. I'm more concerned about things like, "Could AI exacerbate decision paralysis? Could AI cause me to cause the muscles that I use for my own cognitive load to weaken, because I make choices to take the lazy way out and have AI write all of my show notes versus me actually writing and remembering how to write and string words together over time?"
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And every one of us has to make that individual choice. It is an individual choice what you use the AI to do and we have to confront that. Because AI, like it or not, is going to nudge your behavior because of dopamine, you all. It is enormously satisfying when AI solves a problem for us. It's incredibly satisfying. And when that problem is solved, we want to throw more problems at it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.
Pete Wright:
And just like any other tool, it can become a dependency. And so, I say all that knowing that when the newspaper was in wide distribution, people said, "This is the death of everything, because everybody is holding their newspaper up." TV was going to destroy our brains, rot our brains. Everybody a cellphone, that was going to be a disaster. Every generation has its thing. This maybe is the biggest thing we've ever run into. And if you don't yet understand why it's the biggest thing we've ever run into, it may be because you haven't used it enough yet. And that's the catch-22, right? Because in order to understand how impactful this will be on humanity, you have to use it to that point to become experienced and enamored by it and-
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
There you go.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
So it brings us to this next chapter, Chapter 4-
Nikki Kinzer:
Chapter 4.
Pete Wright:
... How to use AI Without Losing Yourself. So the Goldilocks zone. You know the Goldilocks zone? I love the Goldilocks zone.
Nikki Kinzer:
It rang a bell, but you're going to have to refresh my memory because I don't have a great memory.
Pete Wright:
You refresh my memory. What was Goldilocks about?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, Goldilocks was the three little bears, right?
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Nikki Kinzer:
No. Is that Goldilocks?
Pete Wright:
And what-
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Goldilocks and the three bears. What happened?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. And so, each little bear went to each house and slept in the bed, right?
Pete Wright:
No-
Nikki Kinzer:
And ate the porridge-
Pete Wright:
It was the bears' house.
Nikki Kinzer:
I can't remember.
Pete Wright:
Goldilocks slept in the three beds, right? So Goldilocks-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, was that what it was? Oh, I got it flipped around.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah. There's-
Nikki Kinzer:
Goldilocks slept in each of the beds and ate the porridge.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And the bear came home, "There's somebody in my bed! Somebody's been sleeping in my bed," said the littlest bear. And eventually, the bed that was just right was the middle bed. And that was just right, that's where Goldilocks was found napping.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Oh my gosh-
Pete Wright:
There was porridge that was too hot and porridge that was too cold-
Nikki Kinzer:
That's right. See? Okay-
Pete Wright:
Bed that was too soft, bed that was too hard. Okay. So the Goldilocks zone represents the sweet spot. Not too much, not too little, the sweet spot.
Nikki Kinzer:
Just right. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Too little AI? I think we're in an era where we can start to say more confidently that too little AI in your life is going to lead to overwhelm and forgetfulness and potentially chaos, especially as more people are embracing AI around you, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Because there is an argument out there that says, "The more AI that is used and implemented, say, at work means there might stand to be an increased capacity for other people to get more stuff done faster. And the demands on you to do the same could go up, leading to more distraction, more defensiveness, more shame, more fear, all of the things." So not understanding AI and not embracing a little bit of it to the extent that you need to could cause a deficit.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Too much AI, over-reliance leads to decision paralysis, leads to digital maladaptation, things we've talked about a lot before. So what is the guardrail? How do you find the Goldilocks zone, the sweet spot? AI is your wrench. It's a tool, it's not a crutch. It should not wholly replace something that you used to do, that you feel like you need to do as your job.
For me, I write, I make podcast. I'm not going to use AI to replace my role in any of those functions and that's my sweet spot. So all of those other tools, they aid me in research, they aid me an organization. They don't replace my voice or my fingertips. That's my sweet spot. Everybody has to do that on their own. So if AI helps you start, focus, or finish, keep it. If AI becomes another distraction, ditch it. Start, focus, or finish or distraction. That's where I stand on AI. Any questions?
Nikki Kinzer:
No. I mean, I think that this is good because this is... Some of the conversation I had earlier is that, "How does it help you specifically? And if it's helping you, then that's a positive thing. That's a good thing. It's helping you move along whatever that goal is or whatever." But I also... It resonates when you say that it's too early to understand it really, like fully. There's so much to it. It's so complex.
Pete Wright:
I would like to transition from that to just really summarize what I use. I don't know if people are interested in that but I just want to-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, I'm pretty sure they're interested, Pete.
Pete Wright:
... outline what I use. For my day-to-day, I am a Grammarly subscriber.
Nikki Kinzer:
Me too.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So Grammarly has-
Nikki Kinzer:
I love Grammarly.
Pete Wright:
It's pretty good, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's good.
Pete Wright:
Grammarly has AI function working in it and I use AI for its grammar and spelling and syntax.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
I don't accept everything that Grammarly suggests because-
Nikki Kinzer:
Me neither.
Pete Wright:
... sometimes Grammarly is just wrong, but it-
Nikki Kinzer:
Wrong or it doesn't sound like you or me.
Pete Wright:
Yes, exactly.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's not my voice like, "I wouldn't say it this way, so I'm not putting it in there."
Pete Wright:
Because sometimes I say things wrong. Sometimes I say things that my English professor would've graded me down on, but that's how I sound and I'm usually doing it for a reason. Grammarly doesn't understand subtext. It doesn't understand sarcasm. It doesn't understand any of that stuff. And that's sometimes where I live. So I like the idea of having this thing sitting over my shoulder, looking at the words that I write, and just reminding me with those little flags that say, "Hey, take a look at this again. Just look at this again." So Grammarly is a standard. I've been subscribing to Grammarly for years. It's very, very helpful.
For research, I... We talked yesterday in our last episode, last week, about Perplexity AI. I use Perplexity AI for research purposes, because I find that its linking is the... It is one of the best. I think that it is a super useful tool for allowing me to have threaded conversations with the research. I love that part. And when I copy the responses from Perplexity and I put them in Obsidian, because I use Obsidian to put all my notes together, it gives me a numbered list of all of the links just at the bottom. So every link that I talk about on a show, it's already in my note because it's in Perplexity. It makes it very, very easy to retrace my steps. I can see the resources very quickly. That's very useful for me. And for research purposes, I want to be able to validate and verify that it's not making stuff up, that it's interpreting the source material correctly. I think that we are in an era, more now than ever, of trust, but verify, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
It's great that these tools can do this, but if you are... I'll go through a string of days where every Google search I do begins with a lie. I don't know why. Sometimes I go through search after search after search and the AI section at the top is just wrong.
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting.
Pete Wright:
And let me remind you of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. This is Murray Gell-Mann and Michael Crichton writing about this idea that you open the newspaper and you read an article about something that you know a lot about. So in your case, it would be ADHD coaching. And the newspaper is just full of incorrect things. It's just wrong and you know that because you're an expert in the field. The same newspaper, you turn the page after swearing up and down, "I hate this thing. It's so wrong. Why do they print this filth?" You turn the page and now, you're reading an article about some high-tech thing. You don't know anything about high-tech. You don't truck in that universe. You're not an expert in the field. And what do you think about that article in the same newspaper?
Nikki Kinzer:
I assume it's true.
Pete Wright:
You assume it's true, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
That's Gell-Mann Amnesia and it's called-
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
He also calls it the Wet Streets Cause Rain Paradox, right? If you know stuff about the stuff you're searching for and you see that AI at the top and it's just wrong, it sticks out to you. But if you don't know anything about what you're searching for, it looks absolutely true-
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
... and this is a horrible place for us to be and it's a horrible thing for Google to inflict on us. And I hate it, because it flies absolutely in the face of everything we're talking about, trust, but verify. And Google used to be this great-
Nikki Kinzer:
Trustworthy.
Pete Wright:
... blossom and beautiful flower of, "Just give me the links, man." And now, it's just destroyed. So remember, if nothing else from this, remember Gell-Mann Amnesia, please. Because it's a worldview that will help you. It will help you. Anyway, I use Perplexity... That was a long rant about why the links are important, right? But Perplexity-
Nikki Kinzer:
The links are-
Pete Wright:
... it's on the list-
Nikki Kinzer:
But it's important-
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Trust, but verify because you just don't know-
Pete Wright:
Trust, but verify.
Nikki Kinzer:
You don't know. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yep, yep. Okay. Next, poe.com. Now, why Poe? I love Poe. I pay for Poe. Poe is-
Nikki Kinzer:
I pay for Poe because you told me too.
Pete Wright:
You pay for Poe. We pay for Poe.
Nikki Kinzer:
Uh-huh.
Pete Wright:
Pete pays for Poe.
Nikki Kinzer:
I pay for Poe.
Pete Wright:
We're Poe payers-
Nikki Kinzer:
Who does... We're Poe payers, yes.
Pete Wright:
... because... We're Poe payers.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Poe is useful because it gives you access to all the models that you can think of and it's usually very, very current. So Google, OpenAI, they release an updated model. It's usually a day or two and that model is now represented in Poe and it's just a chat box. You choose which model you want to talk to and you start typing to it. You can drag documents into it. You can drag pictures into it. You can do all kinds of wonderful things with it.
Now, this is what they call API access to these models. So if you were to be a Google AI, Gemini subscriber or an Anthropic subscriber or a OpenAI ChatGPT subscriber, you would have separate apps for those and they have more features. One of the things we were talking about yesterday, another tool I use, is Google's Notebook LM. These are features where you can drag documents into these apps, the first party apps, and save them there and then interview them later. The collection of your data.
You can't do that with Poe. Poe is much more of a kind of real-time, "Here's the thing I have, a problem I have, and I want you to help me solve that problem." And so, you got to make your choice. If you find that the very best model for you is Anthropic's Claude, subscribe to Claude and live there. That's fine. They're doing great, great work.
I have prioritized, because I use so many different models, I prioritize access to be able to trial and error different models and compare responses. And I love that. I love that function. It's like a Swiss Army knife versus a paring knife. So the paring knife is great, but the Swiss Army knife gives me little, tiny lots of tools. So that's Poe and why I'm a fan of Poe.
Next, we've mentioned Coda, Coda.io. It has AI built into it. I use that AI extensively for things like managing databases. It is a single function... Or not a single function, it's a multifunction tool. But the way it works on databases and allows me to fill columns and calculate with AI is really very special and it's-
Nikki Kinzer:
And that's probably really helpful-
Pete Wright:
... [inaudible 00:30:15] when I think about it.
Nikki Kinzer:
... in your work, because of all the podcasts that you have to manage.
Pete Wright:
Yes. Absolutely, absolutely. And speaking of niche tools, I use Adobe Voice Enhancer which is bonkers. You remember me from the old days when somebody would show up with bad audio, like they would have crappy audio-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yes. Bothered you.
Pete Wright:
I mean, there are times where we've rescheduled and said, "We can't record with you. Your audio is terrible."
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I don't say that anymore. I just don't say that anymore-
Nikki Kinzer:
Because you have something fancy.
Pete Wright:
I have something fancy. So TruStory is a Creative Cloud subscriber for Adobe's Creative Cloud. And part of that, that what you get, is Adobe Voice Enhancer which allows you to take a raw audio file that's terrible. Maybe it was recorded in a construction zone, maybe it was recorded on a speakerphone, whatever, it's terrible audio. It's able to, with its AI model, to detect what is principally voice, separate the background, and rebuild the voice only with no reverb, backing noise, chimes, sounds, anything, and give you a new track of that person. And it sounds like they're in a studio.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
Wow is right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
It's incredible. It's incredible. This is the kind of machine learning sort of AI application that really matters to me. It's not-
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
It's not something that's... It's not-
Nikki Kinzer:
That everyone's going to care about.
Pete Wright:
Right. Not something everyone's going to care about, but it solves a very specific problem. It is the coolest wrench I have, because it makes the finished product better.
Nikki Kinzer:
Something better.
Pete Wright:
It doesn't change what we said at all. It's not creating the words. It's just creating the sound-
Nikki Kinzer:
Then making it sound better.
Pete Wright:
... that I want. Right, right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Right.
Pete Wright:
So-
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting.
Pete Wright:
... I absolutely adore these niche tools and I think that's what we're going to find. You've got to be able to look at your specific industry and figure out, "What is the AI tool that's going to be my biggest wrench? What is the thing that's going to allow me to perform better and amplify my contribution to my work, to my life, to my family?" Because if they're not there for you already, they are coming. It's amazing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. This is so great.
Pete Wright:
I hope so. It feels a little scum. I'm not going to lie to you. It feels a little scattershot. I hope that it comes across as clear and that it inspires some thinking. And I hope it's well-received.
Nikki Kinzer:
For me, it's very well-received and very informational because I know things on a baseline level. But I've learned a lot and it makes me want... I'm curious to go into some of these. Like to go into Poe and be a little more creative and do some things different than what I've done, just to see what happens. And so, for me, it's been very inspiring and I hope that others do feel that way and that they can find it exactly as you've been saying. It's a wrench in a toolbox. And how do you make that work for you to make your life a little bit easier? And I think there's so many things that it has potential to do to make that daily life easier. So I appreciate it and I have a feeling that this is not going to be the last conversation that we will have on this.
Pete Wright:
I think you're probably right and I look forward to those conversations. I think this is a really interesting space right now. And I think there are tools to come that we can't even imagine that are going to be enabled by this technology. So get ready and-
Nikki Kinzer:
Get ready.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Thanks, everybody, for hanging out-
Nikki Kinzer:
Good talk. Thank you.
Pete Wright:
We appreciate you downloading and listening to this show. Thank you for your time and your attention. Don't forget if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we are heading over to the Show Talk channel in our Discord server and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
