How Nat Eliason Made $200,000 in a Week Teaching AI - Ep. 48

Nat Eliason’s career arc is borderline absurd—but it works. In the last five years, he ran an SEO agency, got into crypto, made $600,000 from a course on the note-taking tool Roam Research, flipped real estate in Austin for a 6x return, and published a book with Random House. He’s now writing a book of science fiction and running a viral course about building apps with AI. I’ve known Nat for a long time, and I think he knows where the puck is headed better than anyone. He’ll see a new tool or trend, master it, build a business around it, and move on. Nat’s pulled it off with crypto, Roam, real estate—and now AI. His app-building course has over 800 students and racked up $200,000 in pre-sales in one week. Nat was one of the first guests I had on the podcast and I was delighted to have him on again. We spent an hour talking about how coding with AI is creating new behaviors in programming, Nat’s best practices for using the coding tool Cursor, and his take on the future of writing with AI. This episode is a must-watch for writers, creators, and anyone interested in the future of product building. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:45 The origins of Nat’s viral course on building apps with AI: 00:10:15 How coding with AI has evolved over the last two years: 00:17:16 Nat creates an app using Composer, Cursor’s AI assistant: 00:20:52 Tactical tips for coding with Cursor: 00:24:36 How coding with AI is creating new behaviors in programming: 00:27:36 What excites Nat the most about the future of AI: 00:31:11 A demo of Hubbard, the AI editor Nat built for his science fiction writing: 00:37:28 When does it make sense to build custom software: 00:43:22 Nat’s take on the future of writing with AI: 00:47:48 Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Nat Eliason: @nateliason Nat’s viral course about building apps with AI: Build Your Own Apps with AI The book Nat published about crypto: Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance Dan’s piece about how AI empowers creators: AI and the Age of the Individual

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've, I mean, I've never seen anything like this. The way the course starts out is I show people, you know, you, you get cursor open up and running, and then you hop into this agent tab, and you can say something like, can you build me a simple Pomodoro timer in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? Keep it as simple as possible. And you hit go, and it'll think for a moment, and then it'll just start making the files. So there, there's nothing in this folder. And so right now, it's generating the HTML. And, you know, I didn't have to create this file. I didn't have to copy anything over. It just automatically plugged it in. This is like the simplest version of how you could build a website or build a web app, right? Just an HTML, a CSS, and a JavaScript, like those three files.

• 0:43Dan Shipper?

  And what I want to underscore here, if you did one prompt, and then it's like, it's doing these multi-turn edits. It has a plan, it creates a file, it writes the file, and then it checks to make sure that the file is working in the linter. What I think is so crazy about this is like, we're just watching this happen, right? Like, literally two years ago, to do this, we would have had to type every single character into every single one of those files. That is wild. It feels like the Dark Ages to like, hand-type your code.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  There are 700 students in the course. There have only been two instances where I needed to help somebody troubleshoot something that they couldn't resolve using Cursor. I thought I was ever going to do a course again. I put up a page where people could buy, and it did $200,000 of sales in a week.

• 1:44Dan Shipper?

  Nat, welcome to the show.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me on, Dan, again, right?

• 1:48Dan Shipper?

  Yes, this is your, you're back.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  I'm back.

• 1:50Dan Shipper?

  You were here in the earliest phase of the show. You took a bet on me, on us, when, when we were nothing, and now we're here. So-

• 1:59Speaker 00

  We, we've been taking bets on each other for a long time.

• 2:01Dan Shipper?

  We have been. And you're, you're one of my favorite people in the online writer space, or really just in general, but like, let's, let's say in the online writer space, because- I think what's so special about you is you you have this ability, you have so many different career arcs and you have this ability to like go really deep into something right before it gets hot and like know everything about it and then like succeed at it and then move on to the next thing. And I think people get so caught up in like, what am I going to be and who am I going to be? And and you've had all these different topics that you're just like the master of. And and you just like, you throw yourself into it with Wild Abandon and you, you know, when we first started working together, you were, you were into SEO,

• 2:41Dan Shipper?

  then you moved into crypto, you, you wrote a book, which you released recently that that I love, I think, I think is amazing. And and you sort of transitioned from online writer to author. And then, most recently, you've been in the AI coding game and you started, you you launched this new course, teaching people how to build with AI. And, and you have this like, really fun, I'm gonna shut up in a second, but you have this really fun course arc where, like, when we first started working together, Rome, you you made Rome hot. And yeah, like, launched a course and like, bought a house with the money and and

• 3:21Dan Shipper?

  then disappeared from, from the game. And now you're back. And it's really fun to see. Tell us about that.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, I owe some credit to that to you guys, because I don't know if you remember how this started, but Adam Kiesling had a tweet in

• 3:37Dan Shipper?

  Adam Kiesling, our first, every first employee.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, he had a tweet in October of 2019, I think, October, November, where he said, Wow, I just tried this thing called Rome Research, and it's really cool. And nobody really knew about it back then. And I was, I was still running my marketing agency, Growth Machine, but was looking for, you know, interesting things to explore. And so I dived into it and was just kind of blown away by the tool and started tweeting about it and talking about it. And that made other people really interested. And I, you know, just said, like, hey, does anybody want me to do a course on teaching how to use Rome? And a lot of people on Twitter

• 4:22Speaker 00

  responded positively. And I just put up a PayPal link. And I think I got

• 4:28Speaker 00

  $10,000 or something worth of pre-orders off of those tweets before I'd written any written anything for the courses like, well, I better go do this now.

• 4:37Dan Shipper?

  Pretty good validation.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Good validation and then launched the course and it did something like 600 grand in sales over the next year, which was bananas. Yeah. And I owe a lot of that to the Rome team because they didn't really want to build onboarding for their product. They were focused on other stuff. And so they said, if you take Nat's course, which was $100, we'll give you $100 in credit for signing up because it was like $15 a month. And so that was what? Six months of free usage. And they said, yeah, you know, take that's course and you'll basically get it for free because you'll get the product for six months. And so obviously that drove a ton of sales and had, we had a really good thing going. And then I, you know, I ended up being like, okay, kind of feel like I'm, I don't want

• 5:23Speaker 00

  to keep doing this. I don't, I don't, I didn't want to keep doing the cohort model. And that ended up being, I think, a pretty good decision on accident, just because Rome's development fell off quite a bit. Competitors popped up like Obsidian. And I think an easy way you can kill a good course business is by hiring a ton of employees and building a huge apparatus around it, only for the interest in it to fall off, you know, two, three years later. And now suddenly you have all of these liabilities that you've accumulated and you lose the huge upside that you had when it was maybe just you are really small team and crazy cash flows. So, and yeah, as you alluded to, I used a lot of the profits

• 6:05Speaker 00

  to buy a Airbnb property outside of Austin in like June of 2020. So absolute pit of the real estate, like, you know, local pit for the real estate market. We had a really good deal on it, turned it into an Airbnb, tried doing the Airbnb thing for a bit. That turned into a miserable experience that peaked with a frat party throwing a rager at the house. Somebody, I kid you not, pooping in the bathtub.

• 6:37Dan Shipper?

  Oh, my God.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  And leaving it for our cleaner to find. And, you know, she was, and she was wonderful. She was like a, she was like a rottweiler. Like she was so pissed at the people. She wasn't pissed at us. It was very much, I can't believe these people. They disrespected your beautiful, you know, I, she was amazing. I, she handled it so well. But they, they did that. They broke off an outdoor water faucet that flooded the whole yard and caused all this damage. And then, literally two weeks later, Austin had this terrible freeze that blew out the shower pipes upstairs and flooded the second floor. And it was like a $15,000 repair. And after those two things happened, we said, okay, this sucks. This is not worth it. Any, anything we think we're making, we're

• 7:18Speaker 00

  losing in repairs. And so we sold it in May 22, which was the peak of the Austin real estate market. It was like, literally just two happy accidents in a row. And it ended up being like a 6X cash on cash return in a year and a half on a real estate investment, which just doesn't happen ever.

• 7:42Dan Shipper?

  I just want to, you just have great timing. So like, I just want to fast follow all your trades.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Sometimes, you know, I also opened a cafe in January 2020. So it's not, it's not always the best timing. And, you know, crypto confidential coming out in the middle of last summer when nobody was talking about crypto was, you know, that, that could have been timed, I think, a little bit better. It picked up with, when the market picked up in the fall. But, um, yeah, those timings are pretty, pretty great. So, fast forward to today, you know, you and I have been talking about. Some of the cool potential with this AI stuff. I remember when GPT-3 launched, you and I were playing around. You were doing it a lot more than I was. We were texting about this, about, okay, you know, can we like train these models? Can we use them in our writing and things like that?

• 8:26Dan Shipper?

  Do metaphors and like all this kind of stuff?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I was trying to build like a stoic bot, you know, so I was calling it like stoic therapy. So I was training it on Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And so you could have a conversation with it like you would a therapist, but it would respond to the way a stoic would. And it wasn't great back then. And so I kind of put it on the shelf and you kept going with it. To your credit, you went a lot harder than I did. I put it on a shelf for a while. And then last winter, so December 23 into January 24, over my holiday break, I started playing with it again because these AI augmented software tools, Cursor predominantly were just coming out.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  And I had this question of like, okay, could I use this to actually build a mobile app? Because I'm primarily a writer. I'd been doing all of my writing tracking in a spreadsheet. I thought it would be cool to have a Strava-like app for tracking writing. And it seemed like you could maybe build that without a ton of knowledge using Cursor. And so I tried and it worked. I got a basic version of the app working pretty quickly.

• 9:33Dan Shipper?

  I think I still pay for that, by the way.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Oh, do you? Okay. Well, I won't, I won't be hurt if you, if you cancel. I mean, it turned out that nobody really wanted that tool, which was fine. You know, that's

• 9:44Dan Shipper?

  Except for me.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. Like I, even I kind of stopped using it after a while. I was like, yeah, you know, the spreadsheet is actually, right? It's like every, every good software can kind of be replaced by Excel at a certain, it has to reach a certain level of pain to graduate from Excel. And that level of pain just wasn't there. But that got me started using these tools to write software for my life. But back then it was, it was okay. You still had to have a pretty good grasp of programming to get anywhere with it. And then it feels like four months ago, maybe so fall of 24, the agents started coming out. So you had the replit agent, you had stuff that came out more recently like Bolt

• 10:29Speaker 00

  and lovable and Cursor added its own agent. And this was this really new step function in how much programming you could do without knowing any programming. Because you, if you had a rough idea of what you wanted, a basic understanding of programming, you could kind of just prompt it and it would start writing full apps for you. And so after Crypto Confidential came out, I've been working on the sci fi novel and I've been going really hard on that the last six months and I finished a draft of it in December and was letting it sit in the drawer. And I said, okay, you know, while it's a sitting, let's go play

• 11:10Speaker 00

  with these tools because maybe there's a way I can actually use them for my work. And so the first thing I thought about was, you know, I'm sure you have this too. Maybe you don't anymore since you have Spiral, but a lot of people who do writing have a bunch of saved prompts somewhere and they're kind of copy and pasting those into Claude to get similar results. And my good friend Nathan Baugh, he's also a fiction writer. We write together every week. We were trading prompts back and forth, but it was kind of this complicated process of, okay, we've got to like paste it into Claude and then get the output. Maybe we have to make a new chat and you kind of have to jump through these hoops. And I was like, well, I could probably just make an app that does a lot

• 11:54Speaker 00

  of these things. And the other benefit of doing that is, you know, with some models you run into text limit issues, right? Like the O1 context window is actually 200,000 tokens or whatever, but per chat, it's only 40,000. So if you want to put in a full manuscript of your book, you have to break it into three or four messages, which is super messy. And so I was like, well, let's just use this, these new cursor agents and let's just try building an app to help me edit my book. And I started hacking on it and literally within a day, I had something that was better than what I could do on the Claude front end.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  And that was pretty awesome because one, I was still getting Claude sonnet responses, but I had all of my prompts saved and I was, it was slowly turning into this editing tool. I can, I can show it to you in a minute.

• 12:49Dan Shipper?

  I want to see it. Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, unfortunately, it's, it's not done. It's not nearly to the point that I thought it would be at this point because I started tweeting about it. I was like, yeah, this was, I built this thing. This was so easy. And then Nathan and I started a podcast called Between Drafts, where we're talking about the journey of being an author and, you know, growing your audience and selling books and writing and editing. And I mean, you know, a podcast requires a decent amount of work on the backend. You've got to get the show notes and the timestamps and you've got to format it for YouTube and Spotify and you've got to make social media and like that takes a decent amount of work. And I've hired people to help with that in the past. But my thinking was, okay, well, I can probably create an app to do this too. And so I started

• 13:33Speaker 00

  hacking on that. And a day later I had an app where I could just upload an audio file and it would make a nice description, timestamps, uh, you know, so it would handle all the show notes. It, it would format it in different ways. So I could just copy and paste into YouTube and Spotify and my blog. And I was like, this is sick. Cause this is now saving me a few hours a week and is just like very useful um, for running a podcast. And so, you know, that was useful. And then I was tweeting about that. And then it literally was just like history repeated itself. I thought I was ever going to do a course again. I didn't really want to get back into that business, but somebody tweeted at me and said like, hey, I really want to learn how to do some of this stuff you're doing. It looks really cool. So I put up the bat signal again. I was like, hey, does anybody want me to

• 14:17Speaker 00

  do a course on this? Just like building your own apps with AI. I got a hundred plus responses to that tweet saying, yes, please do it. I put up a, a page where people could buy and it did $200,000 of sales in a week.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I've never seen anything like this. I, I don't know if I, I've never heard another story like that of a course launch. Like, obviously, people have done much bigger course launches. There have been.

• 14:49Dan Shipper?

  Except for your own last course you did.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, but it even blew that out of the water because it didn't really start selling until the course was done. I mean, you know, it was just like the pre-sales. And so that's literally all I've been doing the last three weeks is recording videos and getting that built out. And it's been really, dude, it's been so cool to see people go through the course and to see them posting all this stuff that they've built that they didn't know how to build beforehand and not stuff that I'm directly teaching them. They're just like, okay, I've learned how to do this. Now I can go build this other thing that I want. Like, you know, Paul Millard wanted to build this calculator for solopreneurs for a while and built that and got it launched on his site. And Kat Lavery built a journaling tool that's like forced morning pages where it deletes everything you wrote if you stop

• 15:37Speaker 00

  writing for more than five seconds. You know, it's just like cool stuff people are making. And I literally just finished the last video of the last unit this morning. So I'm hopefully going to get all that edited and get it plugged in. And I can, I'm still bug fixing, so I can't do a full demo right now. But literally, the thing that I did for the course is I like got a fresh computer to start recording from. So I could show like, here's a computer that's never done any development. And like, let's get the development environment set up. The way the course works is it kind of like walks you through building these basic apps. And

• 16:20Speaker 00

  then in the end, I, you know, I sort of build this whole AI content studio, like landing page and Stripe payments.

• 16:29Dan Shipper?

  So for people who are, who are listening, basically, you're on this website. It looks like podbuddy.ai. And this is.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Podbuddy.ai.com. Somebody had the dot AI. Very frustrating.

• 16:41Dan Shipper?

  Podbuddy.ai.com, which I guess is the, is, is what students who are in the course are going to end up with when, when they're done. And if you scroll, scroll up, go back to the homepage for, for a second. So yeah, so it looks like it's a podcast studio. So it does transcription, content generation, social media. I can't believe you're competing with me here. We gotta, we're gonna.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Wait, did you build an app for this?

• 17:09Dan Shipper?

  Well, I mean, I guess Spiral kind of does.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:12Dan Shipper?

  This is sort of, sort of like Spiral, but it's okay. This is, this is very cool. Yeah. And I think like what's, what's most interesting to me about this is how complete it looks. Like there's a lot of things that people are building and, you know, like I built a, I, I did a course like this like a year ago and it was not as popular as this, but it was like a big deal back then and it was like build it, how to build an AI chatbot with like.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I remember.

• 17:40Dan Shipper?

  And that feels like so archaic now, but what's interesting is like, I had a lot of concerns about like, okay, people who are non-technical are taking this. Is it going to be possible for them to actually do the course? And it turned out that it kind of was, but it was a big pain and, and the amount that we could do is sort of limited and I had to provide a lot of sample code and all this kinds of stuff to like, make it work. And we're just in a completely new era right now where English is just, you can just build with English like way better. And if you have enough like sort of gumption and sticktuitiveness to like copy paste back and forth between like oh, one, oh, one and like, and your cursor instance, you can get through any bugs you find. It's crazy.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Dude, that was my big concern with doing the course. That was my really big hang up was if, if this is popular, am I going to have dozens of people messaging me every day with the bugs that they're running into and the problems that they're having that I'm going to have to try to troubleshoot remotely? Because if that happens, this is not going to be sustainable and it's going to be miserable. But the first lesson started going up two and a half weeks ago. There are 700 students in the course. There have only been two instances where I needed to help somebody troubleshoot something that they couldn't resolve using cursor.

• 18:59Dan Shipper?

  That's wild.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  And it's, yeah, absolutely insane. Because it's sort of like the course starts by showing you how to use Cursor and how to troubleshoot things and how to get errors fixed. And I err on the side of playing dumb through the course, too, where even if I know how to fix something, I'll still kind of like let Cursor do it to show that it can handle stuff. And yeah, like, people can just figure it out. It's pretty wild. And, you know, there is a common problem of as the codebase gets bigger, as the app gets more complex, it starts hitting more issues and you start having to get a little more intelligent with your prompting. But people are kind of figuring that out, too.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  And it's really neat to see just how much you can build now without having that much of a programming background. And I've noticed, too, like, it's making me a better coder, because I'll go look at how it's doing things. You can ask questions about why it did things certain ways. It'll explain it. And it's kind of a neat new way to learn programming. I think this is just how people are going to learn programming now.

• 20:03Dan Shipper?

  I agree totally. Can, because I think that for some people listening and watching, like, they're, maybe they know about AI, but like, they don't, they haven't used Cursor yet, or maybe they used Cursor like a year ago, and they're like, I kind of get it. But like, I think the whole agentic experience, which I actually first, I first used Windsurf, and I was like, holy, like, Windsurf, I think, was the first one to really have the full agentic thing, and then Cursor now has it. Can you just show, show us like a little sample of like, making something with Cursor? And then, and then we can talk about it from there. I do want to get into your like, more advanced cursor tips, just like, honestly, selfishly. But I think we should sort of set the table for people who aren't, don't know, yet know what's possible.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, let's just, so, Cursor, you know, if you've used it before, it just had this chat feature where you could...

• 20:53Dan Shipper?

  For people who are listening, basically, you have Cursor open. And Cursor is, it's a development environment, right? So it's like, you've got your file system on the left, you've got your files in the center, and then you have a chat window on the right. And Cursor always had this, this sort of like, or not always, but like, yeah, I guess always has had this chat. And, but chat was like, you know, you couldn't, it wouldn't go autonomously. It wouldn't make edits for you. You had to like, select the edits and say, "Apply", and it was just kind of a mess. Yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  So now it has this composer tab next to chat and composer is basically their agent. So it has these options, you know, normal and agent. If you select agent, it will basically do everything for you. So the way the course starts out is I show people, you know, you, you get cursor open up and running. And then you hop into this agent tab and you can say something like, can you build me a simple Pomodoro timer in HTML, CSS and JavaScript? Keep it as simple as possible. And you hit go and it'll think for a moment and then it'll just start making the files. So there, there's nothing in this folder. And so right now it's generating the HTML.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  And, you know, I didn't have to create this file. I didn't have to copy anything over. It just automatically plugged it in. Now it's going to say, let me create the CSS file with some basic styling. And this is like the most, this is like the simplest version of how you could build a website or build a web app, right? Just an HTML, a CSS and a JavaScript, like those three files.

• 22:31Dan Shipper?

  And what I want to underscore here for people who are listening or watching is like you, you, you did one prompt and then it's like, it's doing these multi prompt, these multi turn edits where it's like, it, it has a plan, it creates a file, it writes the file. And then it checks to make sure that the file is, is, is working in the linter. And then it just does the next one and the next one until it's done. And what, what I think is so funny or, or different or crazy about this is like, we're just watching this happen, right? Like literally two years ago, to do this, even if you knew how to do it, which like we both would have been able to do this, we would have had to type every single character into every single one of those files. Like that is wild.

• 23:14Dan Shipper?

  That is like, it feels like the dark ages to like hand type your code. And it was like inconceivable that this would be possible. And now it is.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, this is so it's 20 lines in the HTML, 40 lines in the JavaScript, 46 in the CSS. I mean, if we were typing this out manually like we would have had to two years ago, it's probably like 20, 30 minutes of work, right? Like, it's going to take a little bit, but it did all of that in 30 seconds. We can hit accept all. And then I should be able to reveal the index HTML in the finder, and then I'll double click on it. And we have a Pomodoro timer.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  I could just hit start, and it's gonna start the timer. This is running, right? We're watching it live. It's working. And this is such an incredible moment. You know, I had all these people texting me being like, oh, my God, this is magic. It's just so cool. And, you know, we can say, like, we can just go back to cursor, and we can say, you know, I'll start a new chat, and I'll say, this is working great, but the design is a little boring. Can you spruce it up to make it look like a modern web app? Maybe use blue as a base or primary color. And then I'll just hit enter again.

• 24:36Dan Shipper?

  Well, it's working. This is a specific cursor composer tactic that I'm kind of curious about is when do you start a new composer window?

• 24:45Speaker 00

  So I start a new window whenever I don't want the previous context in the conversation.

• 24:52Dan Shipper?

  Right. But how do you know that you don't want the previous context? Like, why did you do it just then?

• 24:56Speaker 00

  The way I think about it is if I'm working on a new feature, or some new part of the app, I'll start a new window. Or if it's getting stuck fixing a bug, and it can't seem to figure it out, I'll start a new window.

• 25:10Dan Shipper?

  Got it. This is, again, another little interruption. But like, are you use, are you like, ever using O1 or O1 Pro for this? And how are you incorporating that if so?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  I will, I'll use them in two situations. So one, if I'm running into an issue, the sonnet's having trouble fixing, then I might go to O1 in the chat and have that try. If I'm making a bigger plan, I'll use O1. So, for example, in the course for the Capstone with the PodBuddy tool, once it was close to being ready to deploy to web, I went to the chat. I selected 01 and I said, can you please do a deep review of all of this and see if there's anything that we need to fix before we push it live?

• 25:53Dan Shipper?

  That's cool.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Think about security, think about user experience, you know, every, let's, and then create a checklist of everything we need to do before we go live. And it actually made a markdown file. I can go find it here.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Show it to you.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it created this whole deployment dot M D file.

• 26:15Dan Shipper?

  Interesting. And then did you have the agent go through the deployment file or the the markdown file?

• 26:20Speaker 00

  I had it do some of it. Yeah, yeah, you could just, I started pasting a couple of these one by one into the composer and had it start executing them. And that was really helpful, but you know, while we're talking, right? It went ahead and it did this redesign of the Pomodoro timer. If we go back to our browser and refresh, look, we have our nice new design.

• 26:39Dan Shipper?

  I love that. For people watching, it's a, it's now blue.

• 26:45Dan Shipper?

  Sorry, people listening, it's not blue.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  But it changed, it changed fonts too, you know, it followed the instructions.

• 26:51Dan Shipper?

  That's good. I love tracking like the new norms that come about. And I think that like a, a shift that's starting to happen, it's happened for me. I see that it's happening for you just watching you use this. And I think it's happening for other people is like, when we first started using AI, we started to like, look line by line at the changes it was making and like, making sure that the changes were okay, except one by one. And then now everyone just presses accept all.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yep. Just brain off.

• 27:21Dan Shipper?

  And I just want like a T shirt that just says, except all.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  You should make that.

• 27:27Dan Shipper?

  Cause I think it's so of the moment that like, that's just a totally new thing that we never would have done before. And I think what it speaks to is. There are cer- there definitely are still cases where the underlying code, the underlying code quality matters, but especially for this stuff, like this early stuff, it doesn't matter. And we don't need to, we don't need to care how it's being done.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  It does a really good job.

• 27:55Dan Shipper?

  And that's totally different. And it's a totally different way to learn programming, as you said, because like, when I learned to program, and I think when you learned to program too, like, so I learned to program from reading books when I was in middle school. Like, I literally would go to a bookstore and like, buy a book on BASIC or like C++ or whatever. And the first six months of learning to code, you just learn all the abstractions. Like, you just learn like if statements and like for loops and like, you have no idea how it levels up into anything that you want to make. And you have to be willing to like, get through that hump to like, actually make anything. And, and students today, like, you just type a thing, and then it's like, there it is, you know? And even

• 28:39Dan Shipper?

  saying this, I sound like my dad. Like, I sound like, I used to like, have to walk, hike up to school uphill in the snow both ways, or whatever. He doesn't really sound like that, but he does sort of, and, and I just think, it's, it's so different and so much better, because how many people were not able to build things because they couldn't get through that, like, six months of like, hard toil? And how many people are going to be able to do things now that wouldn't have been able to before? And I just think that that's such a good thing.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, those are the two most common testimonials that I've gotten. One is that I've wanted to be able to do this for years and have never taken the time to sit down to figure it out. And now it's just so easy to build these things. And the other one is that people have tried to use these like, online all-in-one builders, right? Like, BOLT is a common one that people mention, or Lovable as well. And it eventually runs into errors, that it has problems debugging. And you often have to like bring it locally and start working on it in cursor to get through them. And that can be a sticking point for people. But like those two barriers are so much lower now. Like if you if you learn how to, I mean, really, what you have to learn is

• 29:56Speaker 00

  troubleshooting. You don't have to learn syntax anymore. You know, once you get to a point where it really starts struggling, then you have to start thinking about code organization and, you know, being dry and all those things. But it takes a while to get to that point. And by the time you get there, you already have a decently functioning app. So you're a lot more motivated to figure out how to push through those challenging issues.

• 30:20Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. What I what I think I really want to talk to you about is how this changes how you think about your career and like what you want to do with your life and how you want to spend your time. Because I think the thing that one of the reasons why we like each other is we're both like generalists that just love like new things and like and have all these different skills that we love putting together to like make a product or a company or a book or like whatever. And that's the thing that's drawn me a lot to AI is like I now have all these powers and all these domains that like I maybe know a little bit, but now I can do a lot more. You're doing this course. Now you're building little apps, but you're also like have made this like very big decision to like be a writer and write books. And like, I just want to know

• 31:04Dan Shipper?

  how all of these things are like currently bubbling together in your brain and your sort of like plan for what's next.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the thing that has me really excited about being able to build these tools with AI is that I love the idea of the kind of like hyper prolific solo creator business. Because I've done building a business, I've done hiring employees. It's not something that I'm really aspiring to get back into. What I really want to be able to do is to predominantly write and do and talk about things that I'm interested in, but have a pretty robust business around that with as few people to manage as possible. And the ability to do that has just increased dramatically now. Right? Like,

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Having this podcast tool for me and Nathan's podcast, like I don't need to hire someone to do a good chunk of this, like editing and management anymore because it's so fast for me to just use my tool to do it. And I think I'm going to be able to use it for creating shorts and things like that in a relatively near future as well. And so that, that whole level of additional management that I need is just kind of like gone while still being able to tap into these marketing channels. And on the writing side too, you know, so much of writing is in the editing and be, you know, having the patience to fully edit your work, being able to get good feedback

• 32:35Speaker 00

  on your work, being able to parse that feedback. And so a lot of the writing tools that I've been working on have been around editing more than writing because the, the writing that it generates is getting good, it's getting better, but it's still like not really your writing, but the feedback it can give you as an editor is getting excellent. And especially in the book world, the big bottleneck, or one of the big bottlenecks to high output is editing pace and editing throughput, right? Like you finish a draft and you send it to someone for a manuscript review, it's three to four weeks minimum before you get it back.

• 33:13Dan Shipper?

  I didn't even think about that, but that makes so much sense. Yeah, totally.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Three or four weeks minimum before you get it back. Or if, you know, if you need to wait in somebody's queue, right? So Nathan hired an editor to review his draft because he's on, he's on query and trying to find an agent and getting somebody to professionally review will be really helpful. And he found some great people, but the soonest they can look at it is in three or four months. And then it's going to take them a month to read it and get it back to him. So that adds like a four or five month delay. That, that kind of sucks, right?

• 33:43Dan Shipper?

  It's a lot. Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  But if you can build a really excellent editing tool that's even 80% as good as these professional editors that can give you that feedback instantly, that's incredibly powerful. And that lets you move through so much faster and it lets you do things that you couldn't do before. So one of the features I built into my editing tool is it has a task manager. So it has everything that I know needs to be fixed about the book. And every time I do an editing prompt, it also sends in the tasks that I already know about so that the editor only points out things that I'm not already planning on changing.

• 34:23Dan Shipper?

  That's interesting. I definitely want to see this. You said so many things I want to talk about. So like, so one, just to respond to your like, basically you want to live a sort of solo creator life, but like have a business.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:35Dan Shipper?

  And that is like, I wrote this article like two years ago called AI in the Age of the Individual. And that's like, that was the promise that was like originally like so exciting to me is at every, for example, like, we've got 10 people now, 10 full-time people and like a bunch of contractors, right? But I have to pay a lot of people to do that. And so I have to be at a certain level of like income and success and whatever money raised or whatever in order to do that. And you can, you see that with a lot of writers who are like way, way, way more successful than me, like Ryan Holiday, like he has a whole team and that's how he does all the stuff that he does, right? And to some degree,

• 35:15Dan Shipper?

  like any solo writer can get the leverage of having a big team with this stuff. And I think that that is so amazing. It's so valuable. And, and the editing thing is like, I feel that pain so much right now because it's a bottleneck for us, right? Like we have so many different surfaces. We've got, we publish an essay every single day. Then we have like three different products that we run all internally that send emails and like have product copy and whatever. We want everything to have this sort of like same every feel to it. And, and then we've got new writers and like, and, and so I'm, I feel like I'm repeating myself.

• 35:54Dan Shipper?

  All the time and and and I'm not even the main editor. Um, and so I just want a tool to make this better. So I'm curious to see the tool you've made.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I'll show you. So I mean, like I said, it one second, let me bring it up here. It's unfortunately not where I hoped it would be by this point, since I got sidetracked by doing the course and everything, but it is still exceptionally useful. Let me share my screen.

• 36:22Dan Shipper?

  Are you using? And by the way, while you're before you before you dive into it, are you using O one for this? Because I found that O one is the best at giving editing feedback. And the reason is because it's good at finding all instances of something in a in a in a piece of text, whereas like Claude will only like find two.

• 36:43Dan Shipper?

  I'm curious if that's what what you did.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  The the getting O one properly integrated is like the next step that I have on the to do's. It's using Sonnet right now. And the only reason that it's not integrated yet is because my API isn't at the level where I can access the full O one.

• 36:59Dan Shipper?

  I I know a guy, I can get you an API access if you want.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Honestly, all I have to do is pre fund it with a thousand dollars and then I'll have access. So it's it's literally just like, I need to do that.

• 37:11Dan Shipper?

  You just need to pipe your course sales right into your into your opening account.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, my my guilty admission is that I like haven't done any bookwork in the last month because I've been so focused on the course.

• 37:24Dan Shipper?

  Bad, bad, Matt, bad.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  I know, I know.

• 37:28Dan Shipper?

  Okay, so you're you're bringing up this tool. It's called Hubbard, which I guess is for L Ron Hubbard. And it has basically like a the screen you're on, it has, it looks like a dashboard where you can have like tasks, characters, locations and technologies. And you've selected characters, the character view, where you have like a list of all your characters. So it kind of looks a little bit like Scrivener, but like maybe an AI native Scrivener.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Or there's another tool that I like called Novelcrafter.

• 37:56Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think you do. You turned me on to that at some point.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But this kind of came from some frustrations with Novelcrafter for some of its it didn't have some of the world building things that I wanted, and it didn't have the editing aspects that I wanted. So the the editing aspects of this are broken right now, so I got to fix those after. But basically, the way that part of it worked is you could paste in your entire manuscript, and then you could pick reader personas like master editor, casual reader, angry adversary, romanticy reader, you know, things like that.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  And it would read your draft and then give you very detailed feedback based on those personas.

• 38:47Dan Shipper?

  That's really cool. We have something like that internally here where it's called Rally. It's built by one of our writers, Michael Taylor, and it does that. But it's like you can spin up an audience of like 1,000 people that are like hacker news commenters or like every readers or whatever. And then you can ask it a question like, which headline would you click on? And it'll tell you what the crowd thinks. It's really cool.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's kind of the next level that I want to build in is basically have each of those personas do three or five passes. And then have a like master editor, probably using O1 Pro, aggregating the feedback from all of those people into like one kind of like master guide.

• 39:28Dan Shipper?

  That's very cool.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  And then the way I had it set up was that, you know, under the feedback, you could, you know, you could mark things that you wanted to create as tasks for your next edit for the book. And then those all pop up here. Right? So when you're going to work on the book, you can

• 39:49Dan Shipper?

  And you're, you're looking at basically a task manager that looks sort of like Trello, where it has

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looks sort of like Trello.

• 39:54Dan Shipper?

  Different tasks organized by like description, relationships, world, plot, all that kind of stuff.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. And these get passed into the editing prompt too. So when you're trying to get feedback on your draft, it already knows all the things that you're aware of and doesn't mention those. So you can run it a few times to make sure this is good to go before you get to work. But the, the other thing that I really wanted was I have a, I'm decently able to come up with like plot type stuff, but I have a hard time fleshing out characters. So I built this whole character editor. Where you could you could take a character in the book and you could start filling things out for them. So their age, a celebrity look alike, a character inspiration, physical

• 40:39Speaker 00

  characteristics, you know, their their background, things about their personality, aspects of their health and relationships, and then built in chat with it. So the chat can work in two ways. One, it can role play, right? Or you can say, if Isaac came back to camp with a broken leg, how would Grant react, right? And it'll it'll use these descriptions of him to reply as that character in the book. And this can actually be really helpful because sometimes it's hard to get out of your head and write in the way your characters

• 41:21Speaker 00

  speak. And you might not want to like, you know, you probably don't want to use this verbatim, but it starts giving you some good ideas so that your your dialogue is being more varied.

• 41:31Dan Shipper?

  That's really cool. You know what I kind of want, and it seems like you're on you're on this track. And so if you decide to do it, I wish you do it so I can just use it. Is like, I have a couple writers who I just think are fantastic at things like this. So an example would be like, an easy one is Tolstoy. He's incredible at like, using characters' behavior and some of their inner monologue to tell you about like, who they are and to kind of like, paint this like, very vivid picture. And I just want some agent to like, take apart Tolstoy and like, turn it into like, a like, a vector database that like, when I want to describe a particular character, it like, selects a few sections of Tolstoy that are relevant, and then like, recombines them into something interesting to kind

• 42:14Dan Shipper?

  of like, push my brain into that territory. I really want that.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, or even if there's a way to extract a methodology, right?

• 42:23Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, like, how would Tolstoy think about writing a character? Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's a good idea. But so it's got this role play, and then it also has this assistant for talking about the character. So we can look and we can say, you know, what what might, what could be important to fill out here, right? Or we could even just ask that, you know, based on what you know about Grant, how might you flesh out these?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Other details, and this can give us some ideas, especially for like secondary or minor characters where you want a couple of distinct things like this will start to give you some ideas, right? And it takes this back pretty quickly. I'm just using Haiku for it. So you can do this all day and it's not really going to cost anything. And then you can start filling out more character details from this.

• 43:17Dan Shipper?

  That's really cool. The thing that's on my mind is like, as both of us are sort of like recovering or like, you know, maybe not even recovering, just like still are like productivity note taking bros. And there's always a thing in like, in the note taking world, which is like, how much time do you spend on your system? And how much time do you spend actually doing the work that you are building the system in order to do? And I think like in the previous era of like the Rome researcher, like the notions or whatever, like people would create these like elaborate database structures and like tagging systems and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you always look at that and you're like, okay, cool.

• 43:58Dan Shipper?

  But like, what did you actually make? And a lot of times like the that the note taking system is the coolest part of what they made.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:07Dan Shipper?

  And, and something occurs to me, which is like a trap here is this is this could be or things like this. I'm not saying the specific thing is it could be that on steroids. It's like, yeah, I can actually make an entire Scrivener or like Novocraft or whatever. And I'm curious like how you're navigating that for yourself, like the trade off between, okay, making, making something really custom for myself that really fits what I want versus like, okay, there's maybe there's an off the shelf tool that has some of this stuff and, and I can use that and just make more progress in my novel, you know?

• 44:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, the way I think about it is it's probably worth building. Assuming you're competent enough to build it, it's worth building a personalized tool for the thing that's most important for you. So for me, it's like, okay, I'm very focused on Husk and the subsequent books. And the better this tool gets, the better like all of those books are going to be potentially, you know, definitely three, maybe six or more books, right? It's just like it, it's going to be useful for years and years, the better it gets. And I do think that you're just not going to be able to compete nearly as well as a novelist in the next few years if you aren't learning how to use these tools to either make your work better, produce

• 45:27Speaker 00

  your work faster, extend your work into other mediums. It's gonna be a lot of like ways it could be useful, but it's worth investing and figuring it out now so that you aren't playing catch up in a year or two. But it wouldn't be worth me making like a super robust tool for YouTube thumbnails or something, right? Because like the, the stuff I can make on Canvas good enough. I'm not like a full time YouTuber. I make YouTube videos, but it's not my core thing. And so there it doesn't make as much sense. And so the other end of it is where can you make a tool really quickly that maybe saves you some time and money that, you know, is

• 46:10Speaker 00

  also worth it? Like I, earlier today, I wrote a, or I had Cursor write a script for compressing videos and audio files. Because sometimes I get like a huge WAV file back from my editor, and I just want like a more compressed MP3. And I could pay for a tool for that, but it took three minutes for Cursor to make one for me. And now I can just do it on the command line. So that's kind of worthwhile as well.

• 46:34Dan Shipper?

  I think that makes sense. I think that's a good line. Um, I want to talk to you though, about like the future of writing, because I've been kind of thinking about this too, because you know, I want to do a lot of writing, like the best, you named your app prolific, right? Like the best way to be a great writer is to be prolific. And there's no tool that has been better for making writers prolific than AI ever, in my, my view. I think an interesting difference, though, between like the Cursor thing, you already sort of mentioned, but like between Cursor, where you can just press accept all and writing is like, When you're, when you're writing and you're writing under your name, you want us like, the point is to stand behind everything that gets written. And code is different. Code is a little bit more outcome oriented where it's like, you want to stand behind whether

• 47:17Dan Shipper?

  it does the job, but like the way it does the job is less important. Whereas for writing, every detail of the way it does that job is, should be an expression of you. And so having something that like generates an entire novel in a prompt is like, is not useful for a writer because you want it to be your novel, not a novel. And, and so I'm curious about like, it's, this question is not like, oh, how do we like avoid AI slop or how do we like, whatever? It's, it's more like, um, what do you think the, at the limit, like in a couple of years, when a super dialed in writer is writing with AI? Like what is being done for you and how is it assisting you in getting all that stuff

• 48:00Dan Shipper?

  out as quickly as possible and still having it be yours?

• 48:03Speaker 00

  I think, I mean, one of the things that I am probably going to try to hack on next is something a little closer to cursor for writing.

• 48:11Dan Shipper?

  I love that. It's so necessary.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Where you've got like the main doc in the, in the center and then you've got like a chat and composer next to it because, and figuring out how you really train it on your style. So it's not putting in generic stuff. It's, it's going, you know, it's writing like you write and proposing things that you can accept and reject that are again, in your style. Because you know, when I think about planning a novel, it's like, I've got an idea for the, the, the high level arc. And then I might break that down into like a seven point story structure, you know, hero's journey, one of those.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  And then from that, I can probably figure out, okay, these are the core 50 to 80 scenes. And then within those scenes, these are going to be the main beats. And then within those beats, you have the actual writing. And when you start to break it down on those tiers, you see how a really good assistant can help you each step of the way. Where it becomes very collaborative and it's very similar to how some of these prolific authors write their books, you know, like James Patterson doesn't really write most of his books. He has assistants and he has ghostwriters who are trained on his style, who know how to write like him. And he's, as I understand it, doing as much approving of things as he is putting actual pen on paper. I think it's sort of how we're all

• 49:37Speaker 00

  going to be doing it. And you'll totally be able to just raw dog it if you want to, the way you can go like shoot film photography, right? But for most people, you're going to be using an assistant kind of like this. And in, to some degree, your competitive advantage will be, will still be the strength of your voice and your ideas and your creativity, but you'll have an assistant helping you get them onto the paper much faster and probably closer to like the best of your ability. Because every, everyone has had this experience when you're in the flow and what you're making is just like awesome. And it's top 1% of what you're able to do. You're going to be able to do that top 1% of you all the time. And I think that's what the assistants are really going to help bring out.

• 50:21Dan Shipper?

  I like that. I also think like, part of being a writer is like, the way that your brain works is it's this network of things that are like totally unformed, like ideas and quotes and like, there's a whole network going on in your brain of things that are interesting to you. And, and like, an essay starts out as a network. It's this interconnected set of like, things. And then writing is making that linear, is translating the network into like a linear structure. And, and obviously, like, the process of transforming a network into like a step-by-step linear thing is like, it changes what the network is and it changes the linear thing. And it's this like feedback process. But there's a lot

• 51:06Dan Shipper?

  of that translation work that's like really hard to do that I think AI makes much faster and much easier.

• 51:15Dan Shipper?

  Like, I think for me, for example, like I have, I've been writing this long form essay for like six months, basically. It's called Sing Like a Language Model, which I think I've sent you some stuff.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:25Dan Shipper?

  And I'm like 10, I'm like probably 10,000 words in and I didn't publish this month, like on every, except for actually today, but on every, I haven't published it in a month because I'm trying to just focus on this long form thing. And I have this notes file that is like, I've been keeping it for six months or nine months or something like that. And it's like, it's just a notes, a notes app note and it's, I don't know, 20 or 30,000 words or something like that. And I know that the section of the, of the thing that I'm in right now, like there is like a bunch of stuff that would be super useful in that file. But like, I just, it's too hard to like get stuff out of it, even if I throw it into Claude, because Claude is going to go through,

• 52:04Dan Shipper?

  the attention mechanism is not good enough to like really understand where I am in my, in my piece, like what would be useful. And then like go through each note individually and be like, is this useful and why? Claude will kind of like give me like, oh yeah, just generally like, okay, yeah, this thing could be kind of cool or whatever. And it's just never good. But I think like a cursor composer type thing, but for writing would totally, totally do that well. And I just want someone to build it because it would accelerate my process in like an incredible amount.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And to the point of it having a hard time with like finding important small details in a large context. You know, you can kind of hack together an agent system where it's looking at each chapter individually. And, you know, scoring certain aspects of it, but then also tracking like individual threads across all the chapters. And like each of these kind of running as their own little process so that you're not overwhelming it with too many things at once. And I think we can kind of build that now. It would take a decent amount of work, but it would be worth it.

• 53:11Dan Shipper?

  It would be totally worth it.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, especially with novels, like it's just so easy to miss stuff in editing, in self reading. And if you've got this like swarm of agents constantly doing editing work for you. And possibly even proposing changes, then again, your throughput just gets so much faster and the work gets so much better too.

• 53:34Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. I think that I'm always torn between for some of this stuff. I mean, obviously like we incubate stuff. So like we built a lot of stuff and whatever, but I'm always also torn between like, okay, do I want to spend time doing this now? Or do I want to just wait six months and it'll be like so much easier or someone else will do it?

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that part's really true.

• 53:52Dan Shipper?

  It's sort of like, it's deflation. It's like the deflation and phenomenon, you know, it's like you don't want to spend the money because it'll be more valuable in a year.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's like we're, we're rapidly approaching intelligence that's too cheap to meter.

• 54:04Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, it's, it's time deflation. Like your time is going to be more valuable the longer you wait. So you might as well. We should all just like, it's useless for us to be podcasting right now. We should all just be off on a beach waiting because podcasts be way more valuable in a year or whatever.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  I know. And that is a tough thing. Right? Like, and I'm sure it's going to be a problem with the course too, because in three to six months, all the videos are going to be outdated because the tools are going to be so much better.

• 54:29Dan Shipper?

  I mean, that's the thing about courses is like, we, we've done courses. We have tons of friends who have done courses and courses are, I think incredible businesses, but they, they degrade so quickly. And, and that's why it's so hard to actually build a long-term sustainable business. Like, I think like what you, what you do is like the opportunistic, like I have something that I can teach that people want, and I'm going to do a course and then like in three months, it won't be around anymore. But like, I haven't hired a whole team is like, I think the way to do courses.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 54:59Dan Shipper?

  For us, like, that's also sort of how we do it, except it's just like the base of the business is subscriptions. And then when a writer at every me or Evan or anybody else is like, I have something to teach, then we do a course. Like we have this how to write with AI course that's, um, that's launching again. And we're doing a second cohort in February and it's great. Like people love it. You can make really successful products. Like, uh, like it's a really successful cash flow thing, but it's just hard to make it sustainable unless you're like Harvard or something like that. And no one has succeeded in doing the Harvard thing because it just takes so long.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or your master class and the courses like.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Don't actually teach that much.

• 55:39Dan Shipper?

  Teach you. Yeah, it's just infotainment.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's entertainment. Yeah, yeah.

• 55:45Dan Shipper?

  It's really, it's a really interesting, there's so many little things about being a long-term creator on the internet that like this course thing that you just, because I think there's so much stuff about being a startup founder and the lessons don't really translate in the same way. And, but I, but I think the, the game has changed now that like all internet creators can like make software now. Like it's just, just a whole different, it's a whole different layer of the business now that that wasn't available before.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and potentially be able to extend yourself in beneficial directions, even if those directions aren't going to be as long-term sustainable as a startup might be, right? It's like, yeah, you can, you know, I can probably do this course while it's relevant. I think I've got a good year or two of this topic before the tools are so good that you don't need somebody to show you how to use them anymore. And so it's like, yeah, I'm going to teach this while it's relevant. And then when it's not relevant, I'll be able to stop and it'll be easy to stop because I won't have to like fire 10 people.

• 56:50Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. The thing that I somewhat disagree with you on is like, I still think you and the models are even better. It will still, people will still need courses, just like the place where you need to teach is going to be different. It's not going to be at this particular level. There's endless amounts of meta-levels, like as execution gets cheaper, like you can just, you move up the layer of abstraction and, and I think there's tons of opportunities even in years from now.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, because really what I'm, what this really is, is a programming course.

• 57:20Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's just, it's a whole new way of teaching programming that's prompt first instead of, you know, hello world first.

• 57:30Dan Shipper?

  Or, you know, in back in the day, yeah, it's like hello world, like, it's like we went from assembly to like C to scripting languages to English.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and even, and now too, you can just use one of the good audio to text models and you can just talk to Cursor. You don't even have to type anything.

• 57:50Dan Shipper?

  Honestly, that's how, so Kieran, who runs Cora, our email app, that's how he codes. He just, he just talks to it. And I, I think that the text. Speech to text is like a really important input that I think a lot of kids use, but adults don't really use right now. But I think it'll be way more important in like five years.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I gotta use it more because I'm still old school using my fingers.

• 58:15Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, just just typing away like an old man.

• 58:21Dan Shipper?

  That this is awesome. I always love talking to you. Thanks for coming on.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me on, man.

• 58:25Dan Shipper?

  And best of luck with the course. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Thanks, dude. We'll talk soon.

• 58:39Speaker 02

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• 59:11Speaker 02

  So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.