Every time someone said ‘gut microbiome,’ I just smiled in-my-head and thought about yogurt.
I’d read briefly about the role of probiotics and yogurt’s benefits, and some stuff stuck.
I tend to do this with complex topics I don’t understand. I make a word-cloud, usually born from half-read blogs and full-skimmed tweets – and spit it out in a conversation to sound smart.
I now use zeitgeist and dopamine like that.
That’s why the Explain Like I’m 5 prompt on LLMs is the gift I never saw coming.
It does what bad teachers and clunky encyclopedias never could.
It answers the questions I was too embarrassed to ask out loud:
How does an air conditioner work?
Explain dopamine like I’m 5 and not like it’s just a podcast keyword.
The Internet. Make me understand its story. Like I’m 5.
It teaches me the mechanics of diabetes, the physics of why the World Trade Center collapsed, the Hero’s Journey etc.
Sometimes I even feed it old essays, the Emerson and Hume kinds that read like they were written just to keep people out, and ask it to make them friendlier.
And it does.
Like a friend of the curious, not the clever.
It helps me actually, finally, understand a thing from the bottom up.
Now imagine a version of this prompt with a face who explains every hard and easy question to you like the kindest-teacher-ever. Subtitles, diagrams, workflows, short videos.
May be it’s another startup in the makes, or just something private and magical – but I just love my experience with it.
I love how a prompt as simple as Explain Like I’m 5 creates analogies, metaphors, and explains the world around us in the simplest possible language.
It’s the teacher no one had. But everyone should.