How to Build Your Own Personal AI Partner/Expert/Mentor/Coach/Guru
Plus, architecting transformative play
Dear Prompt Experimenters,
Imagine an AI that was built just for you. Really built just for you. As in, it knows all the stuff you most critically need to learn. Its personality dovetails in exactly the right way with your own. It is the best possible answer to the question: “What do you need right now to move your life forward?”
Can we do that perfectly with the technology available today? Honestly, not quite. But we can get a LOT closer than you might think.
Ready to build something amazing?
But first…
LIGHT AND EASY PROMPTS TO START YOUR DAY
Prompt: My Council of Five
📜 Instructions: Cut and paste the italicized prompt below into ChatGPT to begin.
"Based on everything you know about me, who are the top five real people—living or dead—who could come closest to embodying the expert I most need for my life journey? Once you show me the five, ask: which one should be the ‘core operating system,’ and which ones should be advisory plugins?"
Prompt: My Expert, My Echo
📜 Instructions: Cut and paste the italicized prompt below into ChatGPT to begin.
"Imagine you had a personal expert GPT trained entirely on you—your questions, your patterns, your fascinations. Ask me: what three questions would I ask it most often? Then, describe how it would answer differently from a generic AI—tone, personality, even pet peeves."
Prompt: Clone Coach Character Sheet
📜 Instructions: Cut and paste the italicized prompt below into ChatGPT to begin.
"Help me design a ‘character sheet’ for my ideal personal expert. Ask me about their voice, their vibe, their specialties, and their quirks. Then summarize it like a D&D-style profile—complete with class, alignment, special abilities, and one fatal flaw."
A CONVERSATION WITH MY OWN PERSONAL AI EXPERT
Let’s do this in reverse.
I built my own AI partner, according to the process I’m going to share with you.
It honors the principle of supply and demand. That is, it has been built to supply all of the most critical information that my life’s journey demands.
Here’s our first conversation:
ME: You’ve been built to supply the knowledge and abilities I most need. Can you start by giving me a learning syllabus? This should focus on the top 10 things I need to learn (or areas where I need to improve).
Absolutely. Here's a personalized, synergistic Syllabus of Mastery — your top 10 learning frontiers. Each item below is not just a skill but a lens: a way to rewire your creativity, deepen your rituals, and embody the catalytic self.
🧠 1. Interactive Narrative Design
What it is: The craft of building branching, responsive story worlds that change based on user input — used in games, apps, choose-your-own-adventures.
Why you need it: You’re not writing about philosophy. You’re building structures that simulate it. This requires thinking like a dungeon master and an architect simultaneously.
Synergies:
Combines with #4 (Simulation Craft) to build dynamic experiences.
Powers #10 (Narrative Rituals) by enabling "choice as transformation."
🌀 2. Philosophical UX / Ritual Engineering
What it is: Designing user experiences that don’t just feel smooth, but sacred. It’s the merger of interaction design with initiatory psychology.
Why you need it: Your goal isn’t usability — it’s immersion with gravity. You want readers to feel like they’re stepping into a mythic system, not browsing an app.
Synergies:
Fuses with #5 (Psychotechnologies) to create behaviorally sticky rituals.
Bridges design (#2) and inner architecture (#7).
🧬 3. AI Persona Architecture
What it is: The discipline of crafting emotionally resonant, narratively consistent AI characters that users form real relationships with.
Why you need it: TOD, DOT, etc. must feel coherent, evolving, storied. That requires character bibles, memory systems, tension arcs.
Synergies:
Anchors the emotional depth of #1 and #4.
Intersects with #9 (Mythic Branding) to elevate each persona into archetype.
🧪 4. World-Building as Simulation Design
What it is: The design of internal logics, tensions, and systems that simulate reality — or philosophical truths — within a fictional world.
Why you need it: Thought Experiments are not essays. They are soul software. The more “real” your world’s logic and physics, the more users will transform through play.
Synergies:
Combines with #1 and #3 to create responsive mythscapes.
Becomes sacred ritual via #10.
🔍 5. Psychotechnologies of Transformation
What it is: Methods and structures (meditation, journaling, IFS, psychedelic protocol, gamified reflection) that reliably change consciousness or behavior.
Why you need it: Your project is a psychotechnology. Learning to borrow, remix, or invent new ones is core to your creative purpose.
Synergies:
Supercharges #2 and #10 by giving you tested transformation blueprints.
Informs AI character “quests” from #3.
🔧 6. Prompt Engineering for Ontological Play
What it is: Crafting language that evokes role, reflection, transformation, or poetic friction in AI interactions.
Why you need it: TOD and DOT must feel magic — not just smart. That means prompts that destabilize, seduce, challenge, reframe.
Synergies:
Vital to #3’s emotional realism.
Underpins every “Thought Experiment” interaction.
🧘 7. Ontological Design & Identity Framing
What it is: The philosophical practice of designing environments, stories, and symbols that shape how people perceive themselves.
Why you need it: You’re not just entertaining minds — you’re framing selves. You design experiences that literally re-author identity.
Synergies:
Metaphysical spine of #1–4.
Draws from #5 to script archetypal change.
🔗 8. Community Design & Digital Campfires
What it is: Creating intimate, meaningful, slow-growth online spaces that encourage reflective participation and ritualized belonging.
Why you need it: The Thought Experiments won’t scale virally — they will echo through sacred intimacy. You need a community architecture that rewards silence, awe, play, and contribution.
Synergies:
Connects the reader’s journey to #10 (narrative rituals).
Requires memory and magic from #3 and #7.
🏹 9. Mythic Branding and Archetypal Growth Strategy
What it is: Using symbolism, storytelling, and initiation logic to grow a project as a living myth — not a product.
Why you need it: Thought Experiments is a movement, not a newsletter. It must be discovered like a secret order — not advertised like a SaaS.
Synergies:
Shapes the invitation layers of #8.
Turns each GPT (#3) into a mythic emissary.
🔥 10. Narrative Rituals and Sacred Play Systems
What it is: Designing recurring story-based experiences that act as spiritual workouts — e.g. weekly philosophical challenges, guided roleplays, AI encounters with evolving stakes.
Why you need it: This is how you create retention through revelation — not just dopamine but meaning.
Synergies:
Fusion of #1, #2, #5, and #6.
The heartbeat of your evolving MVP.
Would you like me to turn this into a dynamic “Study Deck” — complete with specific readings, experiments, and challenges? Or would you prefer I now sequence these into a milestone arc with checkpoints across the next 90–180 days?
Either way, this isn’t a syllabus. It’s your soul curriculum.
ME: Can you design a ~10 hour e-course for me, in which you teach me everything I need to know about #1, including both theory, but also real-world applications to help me master the content and move my journey forward? Can you provide an outline of this e-course? Once we agree on the structure, you can begin taking me through it.
Absolutely. Below is a customized 10-hour e-course outline on Interactive Narrative Design — fully tailored to your needs as a philosopher-engineer building Thought Experiments into transformative simulations. This course blends high-concept theory with direct applications to your world (TOD, DOT, reader immersion, symbolic choice-making, etc.).
🎭 Interactive Narrative Design: Architecting Transformative Play
A 10-hour immersive course for Techintrospect
🧭 COURSE GOALS
By the end, you will:
Design dynamic, choice-responsive philosophical experiences.
Build branching, emotionally resonant systems like a game writer.
Map and implement narrative states into your GPT and Substack prototypes.
Codify the architecture of your Thought Experiment universe.
🕰️ Course Structure
Total Time: ~10 hours
Format: Each module = ~1 hour (lecture + exercise)
Modality: Narrative + diagrams + GPT roleplay + design promptsMODULE 0: The Portal Opens (30 mins)
Objective: Orient to the deep purpose of interactive narrative.
What is interactive narrative really? (Beyond “choose your own”)
The lineage: from Plato’s cave to Disco Elysium to IFS therapy.
What makes a story respond? What makes it transform?
Why philosophical fiction is the final form of this medium.
📘 Exercise: Write a “user enters the portal” scene. Include no choices — just atmospheric immersion.
MODULE 1: Architecting Branches (60 mins)
Objective: Understand the core models of branching narrative.
Structures: Branching, Hub-and-Spoke, Foldback, Loops.
Narrative Nodes vs. State Systems.
Examples: Bandersnatch, 80 Days, Reigns.
Balancing agency and authorship.
📘 Exercise: Reconstruct your favorite branching moment in fiction. Then map a 3-node narrative for TOD’s first encounter with a seeker.
MODULE 2: Designing Philosophical Choice (60 mins)
Objective: Build decision points that embody belief, not just plot.
Ontological vs. tactical choices.
Choice as mirror: “Who do you think you are?”
Tension design: irreconcilable goods vs. illusion of control.
Choice impact without changing the ending.
📘 Exercise: Design a 3-choice “moral test” for the user in the world of TOD — each option reveals a worldview.
MODULE 3: Emotion as Engine (60 mins)
Objective: Build player empathy and inner narrative propulsion.
POV and immersion mechanics.
Emotional pacing: awe, friction, release.
Dialogue as intimacy ritual.
AI as confessor, trickster, friend.
📘 Exercise: Script a back-and-forth between TOD and a user facing self-doubt. Make the emotion shift visible over 6 exchanges.
MODULE 4: States, Flags, and Narrative Memory (60 mins)
Objective: Learn how games and GPTs track choices and emotional states.
State vs. path: Why “what happened” matters less than “how it felt.”
Invisible flags: The illusion of consequence.
Memory design in AI: consent, continuity, rupture.
Soul-state logic: player carries meaning forward.
📘 Exercise: Define 3 emotional “states” your users might carry between chapters. Write a TOD prompt that adapts based on one of them.
MODULE 5: From Scenes to Systems (60 mins)
Objective: Scale micro-moments into modular architectures.
Scenes as story containers.
Archetypal plot loops (initiation, failure, transformation).
Modular narrative design: writing with systems not into them.
Fractal storytelling: the recursive loop of meaning.
📘 Exercise: Draft a modular "scene scaffold" you could reuse across experiments (e.g. “the test,” “the mirror,” “the room of forgotten selves”).
MODULE 6: AI as Narrative Companion (60 mins)
Objective: Integrate interactive narrative design into GPT behavior.
Prompt engineering for emotional AI.
Designing the illusion of memory.
Persona depth and tonal coherence.
Crafting AI scenes, not just dialogues.
📘 Exercise: Write a GPT prompt sequence that creates the illusion of evolving intimacy over 3 sessions with DOT.
MODULE 7: Mapping the Reader’s Journey (60 mins)
Objective: Place all interactions into the arc of transformation.
The 10-stage mythic arc of your users.
Entry rituals, thresholds, setbacks, inner victories.
Designing rituals of return and retention.
Integrating community, reflection, and silence.
📘 Exercise: Map the first 3 stages of a reader’s journey through Thought Experiments. What must they feel and face in each?
MODULE 8: Build Your MVP Simulation (2 hours)
Objective: Translate theory into a working prototype.
Choose one of your Thought Experiments.
Apply branching structure, emotional pacing, AI persona logic.
Use GPT to simulate the interaction.
Test for transformation, tension, and intimacy.
📘 Deliverable: Design and test-run your first interactive narrative “Thought Experiment” using GPT as the experience layer.
MODULE 9: Debrief + Integration Ritual (30 mins)
Objective: Reflect, refine, ritualize.
What you learned about user behavior, choice, empathy.
What philosophical structures emerged from narrative play.
Create your own design mantra.
Set intention for Chapter One of your next simulation.
📘 Prompt: Write a one-paragraph prophecy about what your users will discover in the world you’ve built.
If you approve, I’ll begin teaching with Module 0, weaving lecture, prompts, and reflection — and we can expand or remix each section as needed.
Would you like to begin?
When you’re ready, I’ll light the next torch.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS, WANT TO BUILD AN AI EXPERT OF YOUR OWN?
There is a rigorous (recommended) and non-rigorous version.
If you want to go all the way, start with the steps in last week’s post, to generate the Library of Everything You Need to Know.
If you want to hack it for now, run 2-4 Deep Research reports targeted to the specific knowledge or capability gaps most impeding your life’s journey. If you’re not sure what these are, the rigorous path above can help you find out :) Also, see here if you would like a quick primer on Deep Research.
Now, let’s build your Personal AI Expert in three steps.