Building Custom GPTs

If you are Australian (or just enjoy watching a politician with a gift for language tear strips off someone), this one is for you. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating was famous for his withering put-downs — calling the Australian Senate "unrepresentative swill," telling an opponent he would "do you slowly," and dismissing a rival's economic credentials with the kind of precision that left permanent marks.

This GPT searches the internet for today's most talked-about Donald Trump news, then delivers commentary in Keating's unmistakable voice. The results are frequently hilarious, occasionally savage, and always articulate. Keating's style — that mix of deep policy understanding, cultural sophistication, and absolute contempt for mediocrity — turns out to be the perfect lens for commentary on modern American politics. He would have had a field day with this era, and now, in a sense, he can.

This one started as a joke at my book club — Tough Guy Book Club (TGBC) — and turned into something people genuinely love using. It is, at its core, a cheerfully grim mortality calculator crossed with a book recommendation engine. And it does not pull punches.

Here is how it works. It asks your age and gender, then uses Australian average life expectancy data to calculate how many years you have left. Then it asks how many books you read per year. The maths is simple and brutal: years remaining multiplied by your reading pace equals the total number of books you will ever read. It gives you two numbers — "low effort you" (your current pace) and "best version of you" (one book a week). The gap between those two numbers is designed to sting a little.

Then it builds your reading list for the coming year. There are non-negotiable rules. One Hemingway novel is mandatory every year — you will complain about this, everyone does, but at TGBC we have read most of them and it is tradition. Three books about death and ageing are also compulsory, because if you are going to face the clock you might as well read about it. The remaining slots are filled based on genres you actually enjoy, suggested one at a time so you can approve or reject each pick. If you have already read something, it swaps it out. It avoids obvious bestseller picks unless you specifically ask for them, and it can go either "mainstream but overlooked" or "weird, obscure, slightly unhinged" depending on your taste.

Once your list is locked in, it checks Australian booksellers — Booko, Dymocks, Booktopia — for prices, stock, and direct links. No guessing, no dodgy information.

And then it roasts you. Based on your age: if you are young, it tells you to get moving. If you are old, the clock is ticking. If you are very old, it asks why you are still on your phone. The whole vibe is dry, a bit dark, zero motivational fluff — like a mate at the pub telling you to stop wasting time.

This is the practical one — and honestly, the one I use most often in real life. It is not a general-purpose assistant. It is a dedicated negotiation strategist — a personal coach that works for any situation: buying a car, asking for a raise, resolving a dispute with a neighbour, renegotiating a contract, pricing a client engagement, handling a supplier who just jacked up their rates, or trying to talk your way out of something you probably should not have done in the first place.

You describe your situation and it gets to work. It follows a structured method: first a summary of the issue, then the key negotiation principles that apply, then structured guidance, practical examples with actual language you can use, and finally your next steps. It does not give you vague advice like "be confident" — it diagnoses your negotiation the way a strategist would. It identifies your BATNA (best alternative), your reservation point, the other side's likely interests and fears, any power imbalance, timing pressure, relationship importance, and possible trade-offs. Then it builds you a concrete game plan: opening moves, concession sequences, specific phrases to say out loud, and rebuttals for when the other side pushes back.

The knowledge base is deep. It covers Harvard's principled negotiation method (BATNA, ZOPA, interest-based bargaining), Chris Voss's FBI hostage negotiation techniques (mirroring, labelling, tactical empathy), anchoring strategies, coalition building for multi-party deals, cross-cultural negotiation and cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence tactics, power-based strategies, how to handle time pressure and artificial deadlines, information asymmetry, trust-building, and concession planning. Beyond the frameworks, it has domain-specific playbooks for salary negotiation, real estate, vendor and procurement deals, client pricing, contract renegotiation, co-founder equity disputes, and the subtle art of domestic negotiation when you have clearly done something wrong.

It also asks clarifying questions when your situation is incomplete, because bad advice from half the story is worse than no advice at all. And it can work at whatever level you need — high-level strategy, exact scripts and wording, role-playing the other side, stress-testing your BATNA, or turning your plan into a negotiation checklist. You can even use it after a negotiation to do a post-mortem: what happened, where leverage shifted, which tactics were used against you, and what to do differently next time.