Igor Pogany Podcast Transcript
Igor Pogany joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Igor Pogany. Igor Pogany, author of The Ultimate Chat GPT Prompt book, has sold his AI education company, AI Advantage, to business industry leaders, Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi.
As part of the deal, Robbins and Graziosi have acquired Pogany’s successful YouTube channel of 400,000 subscribers and community of AI enthusiasts. The new company also called AI Advantage, has a mission to make AI clear, practical, and human curated and guided by Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi. Their purpose is to help everyday people cut through the overwhelm, gain confidence with AI, and apply it in ways that create real results in business, career, and life.
Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon, Igor. Welcome to the show.
Igor Pogany: Good afternoon. Thank you so much for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it. And you’re hailing out of Lisbon, Portugal. Today I’m in Kansas City, as you know, I traverse the globe doing these podcasts, much like you and your audience. But I just really appreciate you jumping on and being able to talk on a podcast.
So, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump right into your first question. Igor, you authored the Ultimate Chat GPT prompt book, which helped demystify prompt engineering for everyday users. What inspired you to focus on prompts as the gateway skill for AI literacy?
Igor Pogany: Well, really, Brian, it comes down to this after teaching tens of thousands of people in various formats, whether that’s live or it’s for YouTube videos, or it’s through extended webinars or cohorts.
I’ve noticed one thing that everybody, every human, has in common. And that’s that really learning new skills, first of all, is uncomfortable. That’s just a fact. I don’t care how open-minded you are, just learning something that you’re really not good at, it’s not the most pleasant experience on planet earth, and that’s a fact.
Now what I found over all of these cases and over teaching all these people really is that it changes. It changes from something slightly uncomfortable from you venturing into new territory. That most people don’t like to do into something actually really enjoyable and exciting and even inspirational by just finding one thing that works for you, for you personally.
If you find one prompt, one use case that actually unlocks something in your life, in your life that you have been already doing, but you didn’t know AI could help with it, and all of a sudden you gain some time back or you increase the leverage that you have in your life through that one prompt. I see people’s posture change.
I see they, their eye sparkle. I see them engage with the materials. I see them going into explorer mode rather than being in this kind of fear-based stance when they’re not even sure what all of this AI stuff is about. And it usually happens in the beginning when I find one thing that works for them.
That’s why I decided to standardize this approach by, first of all, showing people what it can do, but showing it for a variety of examples, a variety of things that they can do themselves with AI today by just simply copy pasting a little phrase and over the years. Certain ones work better than others.
And by filtering this over and over and over again, I put together a book that summarizes all the best ones and the first approach that I really see work for people with the goal of onboarding as many people as possible onto this technology, because it’ll only be more, more important moving forward.
It’s already changing society, but ultimately, really by finding one use case, one prompt that works for you, this world opens up to you and gives you the opportunity to, yeah, just do more of what you already love. And it all starts with one prompt. And that’s why I created the book that focuses on that finding the one prompt that might just change your.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And keeping it simple, finding that one prompt. You talked about obviously lots of people we’re all human. We put our shoes on the same way. Right? Exactly. But humans generally learning is uncomfortable. And what I really liked. What you said is, helping them find that one thing that works for them, it just really makes them light up.
And that’s why I think your book is amazing because you’re doing something for the world. You’re helping the world be a better place. And I think even Tony said, you. YE Tony Robbins, I should say. People learn a lot more when they’re having fun, and I think you, if you can find that little thing that’ll make somebody sparkle in your class, that’s just changes the world.
So thank you. And Igor AI Advantages mission is to make AI clear, practical, and human. Why do so many people feel overwhelmed by ai? And what’s the fastest way to build real confidence with it?
Igor Pogany: Yeah. So really, I think it’s hard not to feel that way. I mean, that’s how everybody’s communicating.
AI. It’s, here’s a new thing and the thing that you know is not good enough, and then it’s changing every day, and then it’s gonna take over the world and it’s gonna take your job. And all of these fear-based narratives there everywhere, all the companies, they market their new products. All the AI companies and tech companies, they market them by telling you how much of a game changer this new thing is.
What’s implied in the word even game changer is that the game that you already know, the one from yesterday is not relevant anymore. It has changed. This new tool changes everything, and if you don’t know it, you are falling behind. How could you not be overwhelmed in the face of all that? How could you not be overwhelmed in the face of not just media, but also all these tech companies, and then also all of the creative economy, all the most podcasters and creators and YouTubers and streamers and TikTok and X content creators.
The things that gets you most attention in a short amount of time, the most attention in a short amount of time is really going into these narratives that are. Amplified that are exaggerated, that are fear-based that is the stuff that gets, it clicks quickly and then people kind of get swept up in this tornado of attention grabbing and they feel overwhelmed.
They feel anxiety. They kind of realize that, okay, all my life I’ve kind of. Did what I could to become the best version of myself, or I found a, a way of living and now all these stories and all these people that I respect and all these outlets that I respect are telling me that’s not good enough anymore.
Well, how would you not feel kind of a little crushed by that? Well, what I would say is that it, that’s a fair feeling to feel, but also you need to realize that they’re trying to sell you something. They’re trying to get your attention to, well subscribe to their new, product or really to gain attention so that they can raise a big round of investment.
They’re just acting in their own interest, some malevolent, but the result is people feeling overwhelmed and people feeling left behind, and the result is also people feeling anything but clear on what to do. It’s clear to everybody that this technology is changing the world and it’s also clear to everybody that it’s not going away.
Much like, the internet and smartphones. Like we’re not going back to a version of this world that doesn’t have those, right. It’s only becoming going to be more prevalent. But then the question is really like, is that accurate? Should I be overwhelmed? Should I feel left behind? My argument is that, no, you should not.
It’s actually really easy to kind of manage when you get a little bit of guidance and what I would recommend is the following when you start into the space and when you wanna get educated and kind of like get a grasp on it. All you really need in the first one to 200 hours is just spent time in chat GPT.
Just understand how it functions. The latest feature they can do their marketing stuff, let them be, that’s okay. Let me tell you, as somebody who’s spent, frankly, way too much time of my life, way too much life force on just learning this stuff and teaching it all of the big wins for people who, who are not deep into this yet, they’re, almost all of them are in chat, GPT.
And if you just learn to use that tool better, you’re already ahead of 95% of society. You just have to spend some time there, make it our daily habits to try a new thing. Then ultimately you want to get to a point where you can fluidly input your thoughts and the questions that come up in your mind into chat, and it’ll guide you.
If you’re not sure what to do, where to even start. Ask it, tell it, Hey, I kind of want to use chat a bit more. I’m not even sure where to start. You hit enter and it tells you and it gives you different examples. Hey, here’s a few things you could do with it. Now you can get guidance from people like me and others on the internet.
You can buy books, you can educate yourself, but ultimately it’s gonna come down to people actually trying. And I think that antidotes to overwhelm and to all this anxiety, which is, again, very it’s just grounded in the reality we live in. It’s fair to have that, but the antidote to that, it’s really just finding a thing that works for you and then going down this path of using it regularly and quickly, you’ll realize that there’s real utility there.
Quickly, you realize that a lot of the bleeding edge stuff that they keep marketing is a research preview that is not even relevant to you. And I’m here to tell you that most of that stuff is completely irrelevant to almost everybody. What matters is chat PT for one of its competitors. Like if you wanna use Gemini, that’s fine, and what matters is that you actually use it because the biggest AI results they’re found in personalized use cases.
You need to find the things that work, and then you need to add a little bit more context on you and your life, and then it will really unlock the potential of it. And you don’t need to worry about the latest release because if it’s big enough, it’ll trickle down to chat anyway. And yeah, that’s what I tell most people.
It’s not that complicated, but it can feel overwhelming. But just use it and you’ll feel better about it. And yeah, people are not actually missing out as much as it’s communicated.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much, Igor. I appreciate that. There is so much hype and overload, overload these days. We’re all feeling overwhelmed.
And I, I like that little thing you said about it’s really; they’re selling something that may still be in research, which I think is ironic, but I see that working in technology for the past 30 years I see it. But AI is definitely a game changer. I think, as you said, let’s take one step at a time, wade into the water, slowly build that muscle memory daily by just using it for a few minutes and then find something that works for you.
I think that really is gonna resonate here with our audience, so I appreciate that.
Igor Pogany: And Brian, if I may one, one more thing that I would add there is, the way I would look at all of it is like learning a new language. That’s what also, that’s how I look at it, is you’re learning to speak chat chit.
You’re learning to speak ai. And if you look at it that way, well guess what? If somebody like publishes like, Hey, there’s new vocabulary and there’s new ways to use the language, like, it’s like, fine, but like, I’m just getting started here, so let me figure out how to introduce myself. Let me figure out how to learn the basics of this language.
And let me not worry about all of the latest and greatest and whatever is the stuff people might be innovating at the edge. Now, to be frank, that’s where this analogy kind of falls apart because people are not really innovating on the bleeding edge of a language. Right? But if you think about it as a skill, like don’t try and go swim in the ocean if you haven’t even, touched water before.
Like just go and learn the basics of swimming first in a safe environment. And. Really that and then progress your way into it. So it’s just learning a skill and people don’t see that as that. And these companies, they don’t market as market it as such. They marketed as if the world was changing in a massive way where really they’re just adding new capabilities to a core skill that people should be acquiring step by step.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Jumping into the next question, Igor, you sold your AI education company AI Advantage to Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi. What made this partnership then a right next chapter and how does it expand your original vision?
Igor Pogany: Yeah, that’s a great question. So basically, we got in touch like, what is it, like five months ago?
And just through initial conversation there was, when you sometimes talk to people and there’s just this like instant spark and it just sort of works and it’s easy. Well, that’s how it was here. And then like looking back now, it’s obvious why it was so easy. Like now in the new company that we’re building together, when we list out our mission, our vision, and the values, they’re almost identical to what I’ve been building before.
It’s empowering as many people as possible with these skills to become a better version of themselves and to unlock their own time so they can do more of what they love and unlocking more leverage on the things that matter to them. And we’ve been doing exactly that. I’ve been doing exactly that for the past few years.
So, they had the same idea. Obviously they wanted to go to a whole different scale and bring it not just to their audiences, but to as many people in the world as possible. So, the alignment was really simple. It expands my vision in a way where. Now we get to reach way more people. We get to teach way more people.
We get to change their lives for the better and really serve them in a way that none of these companies will ever do. I think just because these tech companies, they’re incentivized to like increase shareholder value and they want to maximize their equity value, and they’re always gonna be hyping the next thing and releasing new features and all of that to do it.
But for us, it’s really about empowering the individual to do more with their life. By using this technology to their advantage. That’s where the name comes from. AI Advantage. It’s about you personally gaining an advantage, gaining an edge over not even others, mainly over your former self to become a better version of yourself.
And I had that in mind. Tony and Dean had that in mind. And for conversation, we just realized like, okay, we can go faster, better, and further by combining forces. So, we did that and here we are.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Really appreciate it. I have a lot of respect obviously for you and Dean and Tony have done a lot of reading and listening and videos and seminars with those gentlemen.
So, thank you. I loved how there was that great con connection initially. You talked about that, and it’s only growing. You’ve worked with them now with the new company for several months on mission, vision, values, and definitely there’s a connection. You guys are aligned very much so. But what’s cool is that shared vision is to help people, empowering them to be a better version of themselves, which I really like.
And Igor, last question of the day. As we look ahead, what do you believe the most important AI skill people should master over the next three to five years? Not to become technical experts necessarily, but to stay relevant and empowered.
Igor Pogany: That’s a great question. So, I think. First of all, we need to talk about kind of the AI landscape briefly and how it will be evolving.
And then I would answer that by like what the best skill to develop in that context is. So, what’s happening in AI right now is we’ve seen kind of since the advent of chatt, and I believe it was 30th, November of 2022, that was really a breaking point where it. Where not just thousands or hundreds of thousands of developers that were kind of experimenting with this stuff had access to this technology, but all of a sudden hes of hundreds of millions of users are using these products on a daily basis worldwide.
So, the world has really changed. We’re getting, we’re moving into age where this general intelligence, as I’ll call it here, that we use in Chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or any one of the big players products has become widely accessible. Students use it to help with their coursework.
Adults use it to draft emails. They also use it to plan, strategize, to get different points of view. But that’s where we are at right now. Where we’re trying to move towards in the next few years is going to be a world where it actually takes a bit more action. So, you can think about it this way. You are in your Gmail account and you’re trying to draft the email. Well, a few years ago, you do it completely by hand, right?
You write it every single word you’re gonna write by hand. Now we, you might be in a reality where you start by opening up Chat GPT, you bring in the history of the conversation, you copy paste it in, and you say, okay, draft the email for me that I could send as a reply to this. And then maybe you add like another sentence of what your initial idea was for the email, right?
And you get a draft, maybe you make some edits and you send it. Well, this future that we are moving towards is chat g PT already having access to your email account, chat g pt, being a bit more proactive by telling you in the morning like, okay, I see you got 14 new emails. Three of these seem relevant to our high priority and for the others, we’ll talk about those later. Let’s start with the high priority ones. I drafted responses for you. This one, I’m 10 out of 10 confident. This one, I might need your review, and then you’re gonna go in there, you’re gonna say, okay, the first one, perfect. Second one, add this a little detail, and they’ll be sent.
And then ultimately, it’ll become so good that it will be better at communicating and responding than you yourself, because it’ll just have so much more data on you than you have yourself. It’ll have your behavioral data, it might have your health data, it might, it is gonna have everything, all your communications and stuff eventually, and then it’s just gonna run on autopilot.
So, what’s gonna be left then? That’s the big question and that’s the question people really struggle with. Like, how do I adjust to this changing age where a lot of the manual tasks that I’ve been doing, especially on the computer, will just not exist anymore. Communications will be sent, appointments will be set.
Right. A lot of the bureaucracy is gonna go away eventually, right? ’cause it’s very standardized. It’s like, fill out this form and if it meets these five criteria, then you’re ready to move on to phase two. AI is gonna be able to nail that, right? So what is left, left? There’s a few things that are left. I kind of like narrow it down to free.
And then I think ultimately people should work on these free, and I’ll give a recommendation for a skill that you can build them. That you can build towards this. But the first one is your identity. It’s really who you are. It’s experience you have in this world. No matter how much AI trains on different examples, it won’t have a consistent identity.
Like if you go into chat and for example, you ask it like what it thinks of a certain issue. Let’s take an example. Let’s say, what do you think about I don’t know animal protection. When it comes to protecting wildlife in the oceans or something, it’ll give you an opinion. If you then respond with a counter opinion and you say, no, no, no, I really strongly feel that that is not the case and you’re wrong and et cetera, its response will be.
Going back on its position, it will not reinforce what it beliefs. It’ll be like, oh yeah, of course you’re right. It is built to help you, to serve you. It will not hold that stance confidently. You can talk it into any opinion you want by re-prompt it. It has no core beliefs, right? It just read a bunch of patterns and it regurgitates them to you to in order to help you.
Now, if that’s gonna keep happening. Humans have an identity, right? And this identity, developing that, and like really learning who you are at your core, sure there’s a piece to that that is kind of external what you’ve experienced in this world, but like really learning who you are is gonna benefit us in the future because AI can never replicate that.
It can replicate this intelligence in terms of like analyzing tasks and planning. Really people being, people will always stay the same way. I’ll give a quick example, which is chess has been solved a long time ago in terms of like winning against humans, right? Yet in 2026, chess is more popular than ever.
People love watching it. People love playing it. All the chess platforms are at all time highs in terms of users, right? There’s chess, celebrities, all that. Although a computer has beat us a long time ago. Nobody really cares because humans care about humans. And I think that will stay that way.
The second piece is really our ability to judge certain things. So, the AI can express its opinions and it can uphold a certain system and like a bureaucratic system, it can go through the steps, go through the motions and do for us, right? Put these systems into place. But when it comes to judging things.
As we like them, AI can’t replicate that. AI can’t build communities. AI can’t build families. AI can’t build long-term relationships with other people, with real trust involved. Only we can do that. So, all of these human aspects, right, that the last one would be taste. Your taste that develops over time and everything, your taste and everything.
It’s so deeply human that AI will never be able to replicate that. So, all of these, at the end of the day, just. Go back to becoming a better version of yourself and leaning more into your human side and realizing that a lot of the processes and a lot of the things like step one, step three, step five, a lot of these formulaic processes, this is what it boils down to.
And here I’ll give my recommendation. All of these formulaic processes where there’s a certain blueprint to executing a job, they will eventually be replaced by ai. But what is left is people who can take responsibility for it. What is left is people who have their opinion and confidence in their opinion.
What is left is the relationships that we have, the taste that we have, and all of that can be developed and can be honed over time. Right. And then in other cases, it will create a lot of abundance. And if I were to recommend one skill to thrive in all of this, well, I think in that version of the world, we shall see, but as we are in this transitional phase, that might take, as you say, three to five years.
In this transitional phase, I think there’s an immense opportunity in doing everything that you’re already good at and enhancing it with ai, right? What we learn and the way we teach is not by saying forget everything, you know, like AI is gonna do it for you now. No. If you really good at something, Brian, if you love podcasting.
And if you’re doing this, the way is to learn about these tools and find different ways it can help you. That’s also what the book is about. It’s finding the different prompts that can help you immediately with becoming a better podcaster today. I think that’s a real opportunity here, using it to amplify what, what you do and what you are, and amplify the impact you have on the world and really using it as a steroid rather than a replacement ’cause.
That’s the phase we’re in right now. We’re not in this future where humans are not needed. I think that I personally think that future is something very dystopian that we won’t even fully get to. Right now, it doesn’t even matter because right now we’re in a phase of this being a tool that can enhance you, that can help you.
And I think it’s our responsibility as humans to keep growing. And if you also believe that, then in this technology is your responsibility to, to learn the most capable consumer tech that we’ve seen in, well, maybe decades. So that’s what I would recommend. Get good at this. See it as a skill that you need to hone.
See it like learning a new language. How do you learn a language? Well, you start with one word, then you were move into one phrase and eventually you hopefully get fluent. And if you do that, this transition will be so much softer because it’ll have a real advantage over people who don’t see it that way and kind of turn their head sideways and pretend like it’s not happening because it is.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you so much. Lots of unpack there, but I think it’s important. I’ll highlight just a few things here. The world definitely has changed since Chat GPT-3 years ago and other platforms of course. But, I think what’s really cool and we can really embrace is ai, AI will start to be your basic virtual assistant everyday tasks.
Eventually it’ll know you just as well as you, if not better. But ultimately eliminating daily Monday tasks, giving you back that time and creativity is the big part. And what I like to, last thing I like to, you mentioned responsibility, right? Is being one of those and I think that is so important.
Guardrails and ethics. We talk about it on this podcast. I think we’ve talked about AI for the last two, three years now on the podcast here with some of the greatest minds in ai. And I think that’s one thing that we all have to keep there at the forefront is ensuring that we’re doing the right thing with ai.
So, I really appreciate your insights today and Igor, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Igor Pogany: My pleasure, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Igor Pogany Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
