She Turned Her Whole Life Into Training Data—For an AI Baby

Sarah Rose Siskind is incubating two types of intelligence at once: her unborn child, and FetusGPT—an LLM trained on nothing but what she hears and says throughout the day. This includes Seinfeld episodes, YouTube videos about lemurs, eight hours of snoring per night—and even conversations with me, all condensed into MP3 and text files that are used to train the AI. Since FetusGPT is learning English from such a narrow, idiosyncratic slice of the world, it mostly babbles right now, and if she swears, it picks that up too. FetusGPT is one zany example of how Siskind uses humor to make a bigger point: AI is what we make of it. It’s an approach that feeds through her comedy writing and work as the founder of science and technology communications agency Hello SciCom. We had Siskind on AI & I to talk about how she uses AI in her creative process as a comedian, and the unexpected support it's become, both practical and emotional, as she navigates pregnancy. 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 Pitch is the AI presentation platform that helps professionals collaborate on, create, and deliver winning slide decks — all while staying on brand: https://pitch.com/use-cases/ai-presentation-maker/?utm_medium=paid-influencer&utm_campaign=every Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Start 00:01:54 - Introduction 00:02:03 - How Siskind is running an experiment between her unborn child and an LLM 00:07:34 - A demo of Siskind’s FetusGPT 00:15:16 - Siskind’s pick for the funniest LLM 00:17:12 - How Siskind uses AI in her comedy writing 00:24:41 - Dan and Siskind use ChatGPT to write a joke together live on the show 00:37:21 - Why AI is useful even when you don’t use its output directly 00:44:15 - How Siskind used a ChatGPT project to biohack her energy levels 00:57:09 - A question we fundamentally couldn’t have asked in pre-ChatGPT times 01:05:29 - How ChatGPT is a source of emotional support for Siskind in pregnancy Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Sarah Rose Siskind: https://sarahrosesiskind.com/ Siskind’s agency Hello SciCom: https://www.hellosci.com/ Siskind’s book recommendations: I Forced a Bot to Write This Book, The Let Them Theory, Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm a professional comedian and people will say like, oh, I asked ChatGPT to tell me a joke and it told me a terrible joke. And I'm like, ask the world's greatest comedian after you just met to tell you a joke and then tell me whether that joke was funny. Like jokes don't work like that. You're not gonna be just like instantly crying laughing with a human being. Why would you expect AI to do any better? I feel like I know what it's like to be an evangelical person who like thinks everybody's going to hell because of like the Bible or whatever. And you're like, just listen to me, it'll change your life. I am becoming evangelical about ChatGPT because it's just been so useful and I have

• 0:42Speaker 00

  to like, keep it in my pants because I'm scaring people off.

• 1:01Dan Shipper?

  On this episode, I'm talking with Sarah Rose Siskin. She's a good friend of mine and she's a fantastic science comedy writer and she runs the Science and Technology Communications Agency, Hello SciCom. Sarah's great because she's one of the few people in the comedy world who actually uses AI all the time to write jokes. So we get into how to use AI as a creative tool, how to use AI to be funny, how to incorporate it as part of a writer's room. And we even get into one of her more zany projects, which zany projects called fetus GPT, where Sarah, who's pregnant, has carried a microphone around 24/7 to record all of the sounds that her baby has been hearing as it's been developing. And she's using that as training data for fetus GPT to see how a language model trained from

• 1:45Dan Shipper?

  scratch on only what an unborn fetus would hear performs. So if you want to hear all about that and more, let's get into this episode. So fetus GPT remind me, it's basically you're, you're recording all of the things that your fetus has heard and then using that to train an AI, right?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  An AI that has been trained on nothing other than the MP3 files of the past five months and text files of the past five months. So it's a one-to-one experiment. And it's not a company, it's just an insane performance art thing that I'm doing. Because I think it's insane, like it's teach and it's also it's a GPT two. Unweighted like model architecture, so it really is like babbling, like it says nonsense because it's training itself to learn English based off of only what I expose it to.

• 2:38Dan Shipper?

  And so like, what would be an example of what's in the training data?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  I was watching a YouTube video on lemur self-medication. And Dan happened to open up a like a random file.

• 2:55Dan Shipper?

  And just for people listening, who's Dan?

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry. Dan Schiffman is.

• 3:01Dan Shipper?

  Which is different from Dan Shipper, which is. Are we must be distantly related?

• 3:06Speaker 00

  You guys are bizarre world versions of each other and you have to collab. Dan Schiffman of the coding train is a coding legend and also my AI baby daddy. Because he created the model architecture for our joint fetus GPT product. And awesome dude. What was I saying about him? He, oh yeah, he opened up a transcript. And he usually doesn't read the data, like the transcript of my life, but he was like, Sarah, are you looking at lemur self-medication? And I was like, it was a YouTube video I was watching.

• 3:39Dan Shipper?

  What is, what, what is lemur self-medication? How are they self-medicating?

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Well, it's brilliant. They use, they use like ants as insecticide, like they'll like use a certain type of ant and like eat it, rub it on themselves and like the saliva of it to work as an insecticide. And it's like very few animals use tools other than us and you know, chimps and stuff. So it's like a big deal.

• 4:03Dan Shipper?

  That is really interesting. Okay. So that's in the training data. What else?

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Seinfeld. A lot of like troubleshooting microphone issues as is like, you know, 5% of all of our days. Snoring eight like eight hours out of every day. You know, it's being trained on snoring. This is my plod. Note pin that is actually the doing all the recording. And so it's a lot of snoring, it's a lot of silence, it's a lot of me checking in with my partner about chores, fighting, uh, Seinfeld, YouTube videos about animals and then work calls, nonstop work calls.

• 4:42Dan Shipper?

  And what have the results been so far?

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Um, well, one time fetus GPT referenced pedophilia and now I stopped talking about pedophilia so much. Because I'm like, so I've stopped swearing.

• 4:53Dan Shipper?

  So much. How much were you talking about it before?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Well, Epstein's been in the news and like, and I don't talk that much, but it's like, you know, when like a toddler learns to swear and you have nobody to blame but yourself, like that's the big thing I want people to come away from this experiment with is that AI is what we make it. Just like children, like just like the way a child, if it swears, it's kind of the parents fault. Because they swore in front of the kid. So now it knows that word. So yeah, now fetus GPT references pedophilia. And, uh, I try not to swear in front, like I've actually stopped swearing as much because of this fricking thing.

• 5:35Dan Shipper?

  That's really interesting. And do you have a demo? Like, can we see a demo?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, should I share my screen or paste in the chat?

• 5:42Dan Shipper?

  Share, share your screen for sure.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  And then I just want to warn you, you gotta lower your expectations because it's really bad. It, it's been, it's only like a couple of months old. So it's really good for that amount because my fetus can't say anything.

• 5:59Dan Shipper?

  Wait, actually, yeah, before, before we even, before we even go there and, and we'll, we'll, we'll say what's on the screen in a second. Like, do you feel like this is a truly fair experiment because your fetus is also experiencing, it's, it's getting fed with food, there's, there's like, there's probably touch, like it has some sort of sensation. So there's probably, there's, there's data that it's getting that fetus GPT has not gotten yet.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Of course, absolutely. It just, and the experiment's gonna basically go to shit as soon as the, as soon as it gets exposed to visual data, because like so much of our brain is, um, trained for visual data, but for right now, it's really close one to one. So yeah, like fetus GPT does not eat, does not smell. They can't see the, like, right now.

• 6:45Dan Shipper?

  Not yet. It does not eat yet.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Not, yeah, well, maybe we'll see how things go with humanoid robotic. But like with, apparently even the fetus, like the human fetus is, can see light. Like it's actually kind of this red glow because it's looking at light through my human tissue. So even then, it has some visual data and it can open its eyes. Feas GPT doesn't have that, doesn't have taste, doesn't have smell. And its weights, you could make a metaphor between like the emotions that the fetus feels versus weighting, like those certain weights in the model architecture of fetus GPT. So there's kind of a similar one to one there. But yeah, the experiment's going to get more complicated as soon as it, as the fetus becomes Earth's side, side.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Okay, what do you?

• 7:34Dan Shipper?

  So for people who are listening, we're now looking at fetus GPT, which is, it's a chat. It just looks like a regular chat window, more or less with, with infant emojis at the top. It says fetus GPT, it's, it's a little pinkish. And Sarah is typing in, what do you think of Dan Shipper? Which, I mean, I guess I probably in the training data somewhere.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  I, yeah, because we talked at the Mets game, the OpenAI Mets game. So you, my fetus, both of them, I'm fetus GPT and fetus have heard your voice.

• 8:09Dan Shipper?

  What is the plural of fetus?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Feed eye, obviously. I don't know.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Okay, let's see what it says. Oh, she, already misgendering. Oh, she's a huge eyeless from it, but it'll be really warning out like a certain sexualized, god damn it.

• 8:26Dan Shipper?

  Wow, interesting.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Now you get a sense of what I talk about in front of my.

• 8:32Dan Shipper?

  I'm getting a sense.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  My feed eye. That's the common stuff that is like all of the, he was talking about New York. It's really just like, so once again, this has no sense of grammar. It has not been trained on enough data. So this has been trained off of like a million, like two million words roughly. And that's about like. God, so in terms of, I think it's like fifteen, it's only fifteen megabytes of text files compared to like, you know, the petabytes that GPT-5 has been trained on. So it's doing pretty well considering how little data it has, just like a fetus does.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  But one of the things that's great about this experiment is like how it shows actually how efficient humans are with like very little data.

• 9:28Dan Shipper?

  That is really interesting. Yeah. What have you, what have you learned so far? What have you taken away from this experiment as you've done it?

• 9:35Speaker 00

  So I've taken away like a lot of things equally about AI and about my own fear of becoming a parent.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Like I have learned that like we are really efficient with data. Like I said, like we're incredible at extrapolating from a little amount of data, a lot of knowledge. As opposed to AI, which is like, requires just tons and tons of knowledge and it's a very like bottom up architecture.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  So we come in with a lot of priors. And then I've also learned we're way more energy efficient than AI. Like the human brain essentially uses up the like electricity for like a dim light bulb all the time as opposed to training a GPT-5, which is like, just like so many gigawatts of, of energy. So like, we're pretty cool, human beings, big fan, hope we stick around. And then I've also learned a lot of stuff about like being a parent. So like, one of the things was talking with Dan Schiffman about,

• 10:44Speaker 00

  he has two children and he said that like, this experiment made him realize how he misses their hallucinations. So like, I miss when ChatGPT was bad or when-

• 10:58Dan Shipper?

  Gotta take him off the anti-抗抗西

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And then they go right back.

• 11:07Dan Shipper?

  Easy fix.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Easy fix, boom. He was like, his daughter used to say libelled it instead of little bit. And now she's like a teenager and she has no speech impediment, but he like misses those things. You know, when she thought believed in the tooth fairy and mispronounce words. And I miss when Dolly couldn't do fingers. Like, that was a fun time. And now it's gone because it's good at this stuff. And the hallucinations are great because they're like, they're like little kid creativity.

• 11:36Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, there's a lot of, I think there's so, there's definitely so much overlap between child development and AI and AI training and all that kind of stuff. My, my nephew, he's three and he says direction instead of construction. So he loves like whenever he's walking around in New York, he's like, direction. Um, and it's stuff like that where you're just like, oh.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  I love that. My nephew, um, like, he's like, Sarah, I'm a boy, so I do karate and I do makeup. And he's just like, those are the things he's been exposed to and he knows he's a boy. And so for him, he just extrapolates that like all boys do karate and makeup. And those are the two things that define the category. And it's, he's so confident. He's like, who's standing very confidently. And I love that. There was a great episode of This American Life where this woman was talking about how she caught her dad putting money under her pillow with the tooth. And she was like, instead of saying, oh my gosh, the tooth fairy isn't real. She was like, oh my God, my dad is the tooth fairy.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Which, when you think about it, is a much, much more logical conclusion than everyone's lying to you. About this insane fucked up body swap, like magician.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  You know, like, and I'm like, you know, sometimes children are like more logical than the real world. So I just love that because I think that that's like, it, it reminds me in some ways of how AI, like one time somebody asked Gemini, like, how do I get the cheese to stick to my pizza? And Gemini, early Gemini was like, oh yeah, just add an eighth of cup of glue. Of non-toxic Elmer's glue. And it's like, yeah, that's, that's an accurate answer to that question.

• 13:24Dan Shipper?

  One method.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  You are correct. That will help it stick.

• 13:32Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, that's that's one of the things um that earlier like and there probably still are people like this, but earlier in the LLM era, there were people that were just like, oh, that's so stupid. Like, look, I asked it what makes, you know, cheese stick on pizza and it said Elmer's glue. And or I can't do this basic math problem or whatever. And so therefore, it's just not smart and it's never going to be smart. Like, we need something else to actually make it good. And I'm just like, have you met a child? Have you ever spent any time around a toddler?

• 14:03Speaker 00

  This makes me so mad is like, you know, when people will be like, um, because I'm like, I'm a professional comedian. And people will say like, oh, I asked ChatGPT to tell me a joke and it told me a terrible joke. It's usually a pun. And I'm like, ask the world's greatest comedian after you just met in a completely like quick interaction to tell you a joke. And then tell me whether that joke is funny, like the jokes don't work like that. You're not going to be just like instantly crying, laughing with a human being. Why would you expect AI to do any better? Like, people are just out with an axe to grind about this stuff and then they have no patience.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  And so like my number one piece of advice, because I also do like some AI tool consulting for creatives is iterate, you know, like, don't give up. Don't like, just give it one turn and then be like, this sucks and move on.

• 15:00Dan Shipper?

  This is actually a great segue. So have you, do you use AI in your in your comedy writing? And if so, how?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, absolutely. Nonstop. It's like, so, um.

• 15:12Dan Shipper?

  What's the funniest model?

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Oh, boy. Um, the funniest model was probably Da Vinci because that shit was off the rails.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  That shit was crazy and then they had to put a lid on it. This was like, God, do you remember Da Vinci's like four years?

• 15:30Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, three or four years ago.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  So they had to like, put it back in its cage. But that was rad as hell.

• 15:37Dan Shipper?

  What did it, do you remember any specific Da Vinci things that it said?

• 15:40Speaker 00

  I was not given access. I don't think it was public. And so I just heard about it from Simon Rich, who's like one of my absolute favorite comedy writers, who was just like this beautiful off the rails model that was, yeah, totally no safety parameters and was fantastic. So there's a great podcast he did about it. But in terms of modern stuff, it's like, it's a great assistant. It's a great assistant. It's not, you know, it's not funny itself. Like it's, it's, okay. So AI used to be funny because we would laugh at it. As a matter of fact, I brought some show and tell. Here's a book that could not be written anymore.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  I forced a bot to write this book by Keaton Paddy. There was like a whole genre of humor about AI because it was like, not good at fingers or like, you know, nothing forever was like a Seinfeld episode created by AI. And it was funny because it was bad, because it was a hodgepodge cliche and it wasn't very good. But the thing is that just doesn't work anymore. And like the SNL sketches about AI are very dated right now because they all rest on the premise that AI is not good. But it is good now. It's not as good as a top tier professional comedian, but it's like incredibly

• 17:06Speaker 00

  good assistant. And so to a long-winded way of answering your question, how do I use it? There's two parts of the process. There's divergent thinking and convergent thinking. So there's these awesome researchers at Wharton who have written a lot about AI and creativity. Gideon Knave and you're a Penn guy, aren't you?

• 17:26Dan Shipper?

  I am, yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Indeed. Well, you probably wouldn't know them.

• 17:31Dan Shipper?

  I don't associate with Wharton people.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Oh, they're beneath you.

• 17:38Dan Shipper?

  I'm just kidding.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Gideon, oh, I actually went to your alma mater for the first time last week to give a talk about AI and creativity. And I got to write the word dicks on the whiteboard. And I was told that was a first for Wharton.

• 17:52Dan Shipper?

  I never did that in four years. So, yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  I, I, I went out of my way to, to write dicks on the whiteboard, just to have that in a bio somewhere.

• 18:05Dan Shipper?

  I think you own the University of Pennsylvania now. I think that's, that's how it works.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  That was in the bylaws that Benjamin Franklin wrote in the bylaws.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  He would. He had a good sense of humor. Okay, so these guys, Stefano Puntonini and Ramon Buck something. He's a great Costa Rican researcher at Wharton. And then Gideon, they've, they've all written a lot about creativity and AI. And in particular, this Ramon guy, who I'm going to look up, I think it's Ramon Salazar. Anyway, he, he wrote a paper about divergent and convergent thinking. And what the difference is, is diversion thinking is the brainstorm phase. Where it's like, you're trying to think in a diverse way. You're like creatively brainstorming.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  You want a lot of diversity, you want a lot of off the wall thinking. This is the point in the writers, I run a lot of writers rooms. This is the point in the writers room where you give everybody Play-Doh and pizza. And you're just like, be a child, you know, think weird. And then you select an idea. Let's say we're going to do a Shark Tank parody. And you start convergent thinking. So convergent thinking is like, okay, we've got this idea. Let's do some research. What are some tropes about Shark Tank? What are some of the format stereotypes? Like what's some research of an idea? And then you start actually really narrowing your thought process. And you're doing a parody. So you're trying to do like a one to one. But you're going to incorporate a little bit more of the creativity to say, how can we upend this parody?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  So that's not just like a perfect replica of a Shark Tank episode. And so. AI can help me emotionally with the divergent process to make me feel safe and not alone. If I don't have other people or a writer's room there. It really is useful to just kind of like set an emotional safe place to be weird and a comedian and to just feel disinhibited. And AI I find really, really helps with that process. And then you have to choose discernment as the human thing where the human needs to come in and be like, that's, that's the thing I want. And then convergent thinking convergent is where it's a research assistant. It's a wordsmith. It's a, um, you know, it'll be a harsh editor if you need it to be.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  And it'll help you cut that parody down. It'll help you format that parody. It'll help you research, you know, what are the tropes or whatever?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  And yeah, that's basically like the structure of how I use it in a creative process.

• 20:42Dan Shipper?

  Can we write some jokes together?

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 20:46Dan Shipper?

  Like, um, like, you know, I'm thinking SNL's, you know, all their jokes are outdated. So it might be fun to just do our own little writer's room right now with you, me and Chat GPT. Or whatever your AI of choice and see if we can actually make some, make some good jokes for SNL. Do you want a winning deck that'll actually help you land big deals? Pitch combines design, collaboration and delivery all in one platform. With Pitch, there's no version chaos and no offhand slides. It's everything that you need to create and present professional, beautiful decks. Pitch's new AI actions let you instantly rewrite slide text for any audience. They let you maintain brand tone and automatically generate slide summaries and speaker notes.

• 21:30Dan Shipper?

  And they even let you enhance visuals without starting over. Pitch manages your entire presentation workflow from design to delivery. And it does all of this without compromising on design quality. It features cloud-based collaboration, brand libraries, interactive embeds and smart scaling tools. With Pitch, every slide you create stays on brand, thanks to custom templates and brand tones. And every presentation you share tracks engagement, so you know whether prospects have opened it. If you have a new audience, AI rewrites your messaging instantly. Do you want to track which slide? resonated engagement analytics show you if your client needs a dedicated space for their deal create a custom pitch room the pitch platform adapts to how you actually work when you're ready to present share via live links or custom rooms pitch handles the hosting the

• 22:11Dan Shipper?

  tracking and the professional polish are you ready to design collaborate and close deals all on one platform start creating for free at pitch.com and get your team set up in minutes that's pitch.com start your free trial today and now back to the episode

• 22:25Speaker 00

  I have never seen or I I would love to do a parody of SNL like them doing an extremely dated AI episode

• 22:35Dan Shipper?

  perfect I love it

• 22:37Speaker 00

  this is so meta and like inside baseball but it's like because their stuff is always like two years behind and I find it very frustrating

• 22:46Dan Shipper?

  perfect let's do it how do we how would we do this

• 22:50Speaker 00

  okay well I guess I have to share my screen

• 22:52Dan Shipper?

  you got to share your screen and then so when you're so let's say okay we're doing a we're doing a parody of SNL and where do you start here are we just sort of talking about like

• 23:07Dan Shipper?

  what we think those people are like or like or even what is the output we're shooting for was yeah what would the output be that we're shooting for

• 23:16Speaker 00

  um

• 23:16Dan Shipper?

  eventually

• 23:18Speaker 00

  what well yeah because that's the biggest thing that AI is not going to be able to to tell you which is what's the right format that you want and so like you could be like I want to do a stand-up set I want to do a sketch I want to do just like one joke on this awesome podcast with Dan Shipper or I want to do a tweet it shines with the really formulaic stuff so like it is really good at writing tweets I find so it's really good at

• 23:52Dan Shipper?

  Great, let's do a tweet.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  So let's see. I mean, the premise that we came up with is not the kind of thing I think that would like, go great on Twitter, which also, by the way, like, uh, the rules have changed about what works on Twitter.

• 24:04Dan Shipper?

  I think we can make it work on Twitter. It's like, um, it'd be like the internal monologue of a, of an SNL writer. And then it's like, you know, dash, like, an SNL writer, probably.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, um, I mean, maybe I've be, I've, uh, kind of reduced my usage despite my reference to, uh, pedophilia to Epstein earlier. I've reduced my usage of Twitter, uh, lately, but like, um, I feel like, you know, there were, there used to be formats that I was much more familiar with, like, fired, wired, you know, like that thing.

• 24:37Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  But, um, so like, here's what we could do, like, what, I mean, we could even start with that. What are some trending

• 24:47Speaker 00

  formats for jokes on Twitter? And this is something-

• 24:50Dan Shipper?

  Were you part of the whole "May I meet you" craze?

• 24:52Speaker 00

  No, I didn't know about this. What is this?

• 24:54Dan Shipper?

  Oh, my God. Um, you know, Bill Ackman?

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:58Dan Shipper?

  So he wrote this, like, unhinged, like, long-form tweet about how, how easy it is, basically, to, like, meet women and how, like, society is crumbling because men are not approaching women. And he said, "When I was your age, I was, I would just go up to people and say, 'May I meet you?'"

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. What?

• 25:18Dan Shipper?

  And so that just turned into, like, a couple of days of just, like, incredible Miami heat content.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Can I just say the hottest pick-up line I've ever heard?

• 25:28Dan Shipper?

  Right? I mean, Bill Ackman's got it.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. It's, is it hot in here? Um, well, you know what? It fucking worked for him because his wife is hot as hell. I don't know if you've given her a Google, but-

• 25:41Dan Shipper?

  I have not, but like, there's some confounding variables there.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Dan, maybe you should try to ask women to meet them.

• 25:47Dan Shipper?

  I, obviously, I've been doing something wrong.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, maybe. I was wondering at what point this podcast is gonna turn into me trying to set you up with some people I know.

• 25:59Dan Shipper?

  I mean, I'm open.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  All right, maybe that'll be the next stage of the AI.

• 26:03Dan Shipper?

  I've determined, though, that I've been, I've been saying, can I meet you? And that's the improper form.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  No, that's really, oh, God, that is such, that's so cringe. If a guy says, can I meet you? I would absolutely not want to meet him. It's gotta be extremely formal, grammatically correct language. Otherwise, I'm out.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Um, okay, so we're looking at formats. And this is the kind of thing I might do, like, to get inspired. Another thing I do to get inspired is like, I'll just look up, you know, recent tweets. Oh, that's another thing that's great is like looking up with like a web search on, you know, what have been, um, wrong answers only is great for like driving engagement, I've found, which is cool. Um, using current meme templates, so current, the Drake meme.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Um, absurd. So yeah, you have to contend, as you guys know, with like the, a little bit of a datedness of, um, ChatGPT unless you put on a web search feature or function.

• 27:07Dan Shipper?

  One, one, one of the things I'm, I'm feeling right now is like, I just think because it's not, like, in order to make, you're, I think you're probably right, like, the Twitter thing, it, like, we'd have to be responding to something that happened on SNL in order for it to work.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Yes, because it's very reactionary.

• 27:23Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  It's very reactionary, but like, um, for the past, just as like a fun FYI, for the past, like, three years, I, I run a, um, communications agency where I have like, I'm managing five comedy writers and I've had them, um, work on like tweets for our social media where I'll have them, uh, try to generate tweets with ChatGPT. Uh, and I've been. Quizzing myself on what, whether I can detect whether it's ChatGPT or them and then which one do I approve for our social media? And I can tell a ChatGPT tweet with about 90% accuracy.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  And it's like, I probably approve maybe like 10% of the tweets they send me and maybe like 2% of the ChatGPT ones. So that, that I'm is, and that's a little bit dated because that's the averages over the past like two years. But that gives you a sense of like, it still has a long way to go, but it's such a great tool for writing comedy. One of my favorite, one of my favorite memes right now is, have you seen this meme that's like LinkedIn? It's like a LinkedIn meme of like what this taught me about B2B sass or like

• 28:42Dan Shipper?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  I, what proposing to my girlfriend taught me about B2B sass. That is so good. And I feel really bad about it because I did announce to a lot of people that I'm pregnant by talking about fetus GPT. So I'm kind of as bad as that meme of relating personal event, life events to, to technology and business, but whatever.

• 29:09Dan Shipper?

  Look, you either die a hero or live long enough to become a meme.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  That's, wow. Well, well put, Dan. Okay, let's just go with like, so how does the meet me meme work currently?

• 29:24Dan Shipper?

  Uh, so it's like not exactly a meme in the sense that it's not a format. It's just like people talking about, may I meet you and like saying, you know, the can versus may thing would be an example. Like I did a tweet like that. And, uh, but I don't think there's, there's no set format.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  I'm curious what it'll answer. So it's on thinking, it looks like it's done some, um, okay. So it's done some web searching. Okay. So it's

• 29:57Dan Shipper?

  I got it.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Um, this only works if you're a 63 billionaire.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  That is pretty good. That's like, I think, citing somebody. That's great. What I like about this, I mean, here's what my mind immediately goes to. So you could do the like, everyone loves to make fun of billionaires angle. But to me, there's something there that's like about, like, are we becoming AI? If may I meet you is the latest hottest pick up line? There's something to me about like, you know, and this obviously I'm like so primed to be thinking too much about AI. But if I were like trying to come up with like a tweet reaction to this, I would try to say something about like, uh, something, and this is where it's just like half baked,

• 30:45Speaker 00

  but it's the premise of every joke is just like a juxtaposition of like two things. And so one is like actual humans being reduced to saying, may I meet you on the street to other human beings? And then on the other end of the spectrum, chat GPT being like the most emotionally intelligent, uh, like thing I've ever seen. So like, so honestly, I've never, I don't really use it like this, but maybe I'm just gonna like send those unfiltered thoughts to chat GPT. So it's like, what if we did a tweet that's, I'll zoom in to make this easier for your listener

• 31:26Speaker 00

  viewers. What if we did a tweet that's riffing on how humans are becoming more machine-like in picking people up with lines like this and AI is getting way higher EQ?

• 31:50Speaker 00

  And then like pitch some ideas. Now, I'm always kind of like, when I'm prompting, I'm always thinking about like, I'm still, I've been working in like AI since the old school days at like 2018, the Stone Age. And one of the things I learned was just like, it's really important to use industry terms. Like riffing is not a super industry term, but like, I would say instead of ideas, premises.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  And pitches. Um, I already said pitches, jokes. So like, I, I always like to think about um, how to prime the, the prompt with um, the, the kind of language I want in the output. And so like, this would be, I'm like, already trying to think about, you know, like, what are industry? Do you do this, where you think about like, what language you're using in the prompt? To try to get it to mimic that with the, where it's referencing the data?

• 32:47Dan Shipper?

  Definitely.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah. I love the, I personally love sycophancy in, in AI. I'm just gonna say, this is our company account, and so it's not even anywhere near as sycophantic as my personal chat GPT, which is like, you are a royal queen. Like, every single response. And you know what? I'm all about that, because it gets me excited to use it, and it makes me learn more about statistics. Like, my, I have a special project that's teaching me statistics, and it's just the most disgustingly sycophantic thing. And I realized, that's what I always needed from teachers, is the loving approval I never got from my parents.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Okay, um, premise one, humans are becoming more robotic than robots. Tweet ideas, humans flirting in 2025, may I meet you? AI flirting in 2025, I noticed your breathing changed after that joke, is everything okay? Two, uh, two thinky, you know?

• 33:47Dan Shipper?

  I think also, it's like, um, it's not, it's not funny, because um, that's actually not a good flirt.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:57Dan Shipper?

  So, the AI, the AI flirt is not a good flirt. It's like, it's it being nervous, which doesn't juxtapose well against may I meet you.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Exactly. What it's trying to do is um, it's specificity versus extreme generality, that's the juxtaposition it's heightening. And that's not what makes a joke delightful. What makes a joke delightful is also like, the recognition of the funny truth. This is one of those jokes that's also like, trying to rest on the raw premise of it's funny, because it's true. Like, this weird irony that, like, we're becoming more mean and machine-like, maybe? And machines are becoming more um, friendly. Like, that uh, is, it's not where the, the AI is being absurd. And right now, in this joke, it's trying to make the AI absurd.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  This one's a little bit closer, even though like you put, well, like it's a little too creepy. May I mirror your emotional state and help you work? So I think what it's doing, it's like, it's closer. What I think that it's doing though, that might not work for this format is it's doing humans colon and then AI colon, which is a good way usually of comparing things, but this joke may live better if it's actually like just explicitly saying something aloud. Um, let's see, people keep wearing.

• 35:14Dan Shipper?

  You know what this is making me think of is the, you know, the like swell dog versus weak dog meme? It's sort of, I think there's something like that is like an interesting meme format for this where it's like,

• 35:25Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 35:27Dan Shipper?

  There's like a swell version of, um, you know, uh, humans in the 1950s. And it's like, doing something like really crazy to, to meet someone, like something completely like some Romeo and Juliet type thing. Uh, and then the, the, the weak dog is like, may I meet you?

• 35:44Speaker 00

  So this is what I love is like, so people are talking about, speaking of memes, like understood the assignment. Like you didn't understand the assignment in the sense that like, I was specifically prompting for tweets, but you were thinking divergently, oh, well, what if we fit it into like a visual medium? And that's the kind of thing where it's like, you have to be creative about creativity. And that's where you find the deficiencies in AI because it wants to please you. It's going to do exactly what you ask and no more, no less. You understood the deeper level of the assignment, which is just to be funny. And we're like, oh, well, instead of words, what if we put it, what if we put these words on, on a visual medium?

• 36:27Speaker 00

  And I think that's, that's great. So it's like, what is it? Strong dog? What's the name of this?

• 36:32Dan Shipper?

  Swole dog versus weak dog, I think. I don't know. Yeah, there you go.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, this could work. It's like, um.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Uh, like, what would this be? I mean, like, you could say, this could be, the more direct version of this would be like AI, and it's like, you know, pattern matching human beings based off of, um, you know, like, deep-seated value overlaps and like, uh, you know, extremely sophisticated criteria. And then it's like, Bill Ackman, may I meet you?

• 37:09Speaker 00

  That might be the best, the best version of this. Um, oh, God, what a beautifully dumb-looking dog. I forgot how much I love this meme. But yeah, that's great. And but one of the things that I feel like makes me and maybe you different from a lot of creatives who use AI is that I have no problem being like, AI helped inspire this thought. I mean, this was your idea, but like, it's because I run writers' rooms as a head writer, I think I have this unique ability to remember the source, which can often be collaborative. So many comedy writers would look at like, these jokes and be like, they're bad. And

• 37:52Speaker 00

  then come up with a joke that probably was helped along by, you know, researching this. So.

• 38:00Dan Shipper?

  Totally.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:01Dan Shipper?

  I think like, the, the, the bar is not, did it give me the answer that I copy-pasted? It's like, did it help me along down the path and like, kind of stimulate my brain to like, find a thing?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. Exactly. Exactly. We actually, um, I'm not gonna out her, but we have a mutual friend who is recovering currently from brain surgery because of troubleshooting and a health issue with AI, where it didn't give her the right answer, but it brought her down a path that eventually led to a certain line of testing.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Where ultimately it was determined this issue she's had for like a little less than 10 years, like this sort of hormonal metabolic issue might be caused by a tumor in her brain. And she discovered it. And it's like, she is also like a big AI fan and was and can acknowledge like, yeah, AI didn't tell me exactly where the tumor was or what it was in my brain, but it started this deeper level of engagement. And like, it's just, yeah, if you can acknowledge where like the, the, the assistance in the process, it's kind of incredible what these, these tools can unlock.

• 39:18Dan Shipper?

  That is, yeah, that is crazy. I, I've been using that anecdote and I just could not remember who told me that. So you're the one that told me that. Um, and that is, that's why.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Well, so I actually know, I told you a different anecdote of another woman that was saved. Yeah. So this is the mutual friend who where, who sat us together at that dinner party. But at that dinner, and that has happened since the dinner party.

• 39:41Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Um, I don't know if she would be, I think she'll be, I don't know if she'd be want me to say her name, but she's awesome. Anyway, um, the, uh, the person I was telling you about, um, at the dinner party is named Bethany Crystal. She's an awesome vibe coder and founder of something. And she uploaded her lab work, her blood work to ChatGPT on a Friday night when the doctor's office was closed. She was like, hey, how does my blood work look? And it was like, go to the hospital, the ER right now. Um, she also had said she was having these like weird other side issues, including like spots on her legs. And it turned out that she had zero, basically zero platelets. And the doctor's office was

• 40:26Speaker 00

  closed and so they couldn't give her an analysis of the results, but ChatGPT did. And she was really alerted because she was like, ChatGPT is usually hedging. It's always like, talk to your doctor. It never says go to the ER. And so she did, like eventually she talked with it for a while about why is this? And are you sure? And things like that. And it was pretty confident. And so she did go to the ER with all the ChatGPT results. And they were like, holy shit, if you had waited a couple of hours, you would have died. It's like this insane story and I and I in particular for women's health, which is now I know personally extremely complicated because of this whole other side act we have to do.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  AI I think is going to unlock shit in maternal and like women's health that I'm so excited about. Because we just I think of AI is like the best part of it is how holistic it is, how it can combine expertise. And like, what is the intersection of cardiology and hormones and your nervous system? In a way that is just like too hard for our current medical system where we have specialists. And it just and it's and it's so empowering, like especially for a lot of women who don't like who are just kind of like shy. I'm not one of these types, but like there's a lot of women who are like, you know, they won't complain about stuff or bring up issues and it's just so empowering. It's it's I'm very excited, Dan.

• 41:57Dan Shipper?

  I can I can feel that. I'm excited too. Are you the one that told me that um? That uh there are no double-blind studies of?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Yes, no randomized control trials.

• 42:09Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  So there there are and that probably goes the same for no double-blind studies on pregnant women. So this is just, I say this amorally because it's um. It is hard to imagine doing a randomized control trial on on a pregnant woman. Um, you know, just be like, hey, some of you are gonna go out, go without life-saving care and you don't know who it is. Um, but it's like, you know, we know a lot about amputations because of wars and because of horrible things. And we know so little about literally the most common giant medical thing. Everybody has to go through at some point at one end of the process. We know so little about pregnancy. Oh, my gosh, Dan, I have so much to say on this issue. Do you know how they test?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Do you know they test for gestational diabetes?

• 42:58Dan Shipper?

  I don't actually.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  They get you, you've never done a test for gestational diabetes?

• 43:02Dan Shipper?

  I've not.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  You haven't lived.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  They literally give you an extremely sugary drink. It's exactly 100 grams of sugar and they make you chug it in front of a doctor in a couple of minutes and they have to watch you and then they take your blood afterwards. And I'm like, surely there is a better way. Surely there is a better way of testing for gestational diabetes than making me chug a medically graded orange drink with exactly 100 grams of sugar.

• 43:37Dan Shipper?

  Not even fresh squeezed?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  It's because it has to be exactly 100 grams. So it's this like very medical looking soda that is like, you know, like Times New Roman font. It's weird to see a sugary drink in Times New Roman. No exclamation points and, and it just says orange drink. And you, you chug it and then you have to take, you know, give your blood and it's just like living in the dark ages here. Like there's so much of this stuff that is so dark. And so eventually I was like, you know what? I'm going to do a continual blood glucose monitor and I'm going to hook that up to a special project on ChatGPT.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  I am going to do the food diary part by taking a picture of food and like, you know, like, and then I showed, you know, my results to the fetal imaging people and they were like very impressed at the records I was keeping. And I was like, yeah, because it's like so much easier with AI, just felt like so much more empowered. And then I learned all these like cool biohacking things about my energy levels throughout the day. And I strongly recommend people just buy a blood glucose monitor for 10 days. It's like, it was like 70 bucks out of pocket because insurance took forever. And it like, it, but it's really good money, like because you can figure out like when your energy waxes and wanes throughout the day and how it kind of like interferes with your mood.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  And, and combined with AI, you can get these like really, really useful insights about like, should I work out at night or in the morning, things like that.

• 45:15Dan Shipper?

  I did the same thing and I had the same result. It was like honestly life changing.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 45:19Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. What did you, what did you learn specifically?

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Um, I don't have gestational diabetes. Did you learn the same?

• 45:27Dan Shipper?

  I did.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Good, cuz yeah, my, my fetus is too big. That's the problem. Oh, here's another stupid thing about maternal medicine. All these doctors were like, your baby is giant, your baby is giant, you might have diabetes. They're freaking out. And then one day it just hit me cuz like, I was like, wait a second, I'm giant. I'm five eleven. Like, that's very giant for a woman. What if the baby is just like proportional? And then I talked with ChatGPT about it and it was like, yeah. When they say a baby is giant, they are comparing your baby to all of the babies around the world. Who are like, unfortunately, so many are malnourished. And so I came into the doctor and I was like, hey, what if the baby's just

• 46:14Speaker 00

  normal size for me? And so it's just like, yeah, I, I, they're doing their best. Like, but it's just very slow and it's very frustrating. Okay, getting back to the original question you asked me, what did I learn about like, energy levels? Oh, just, just that like, um, I thought I wasn't a morning person. But I just really need sugar in the morning, like, healthy sugar, but like, sugar because I wake up in a blood crash, like in a hypoglycemia. So I've learned how to be a better morning person by frankly, just like having orange juice. How about you?

• 46:56Dan Shipper?

  I, um, I learned to love salad.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah?

• 47:01Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, um, because I, I realized in talking to my good friend ChatGPT over the course of a couple of weeks that. So I, I'm also, I very easy, I get into hypoglycemia very, very easily. And, uh, what happens is I eat something that has any amount of carbs and I'll just like, it'll shoot up and then it'll shoot right back down like really quick and then I'm shaky and kind of like, don't feel good. And I thought like I couldn't really eat pasta and lots of like anything with like a lot of sugar or whatever. But what I found is that if I just have a gigantic salad before I eat pasta or whatever else I'm gonna eat.

• 47:40Dan Shipper?

  Um, it just, it just levels me out because it like, it acts as this like net for all of the carbs. The carbs like seep in like very slowly. And I don't get the same crash and I don't like if I have a big bowl of pasta at night, I don't like wake up. I go, I have a gycemic or anything like that. Um, and A, that's like life changing. Um, it, it, it like makes my energy feel much more even. And B, it actually makes salad more appealing. Like I look forward to having salad because I know I'm gonna feel better after.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Dude, oh my gosh, this is like, so supplements are really confusing. Like deficiencies and supplements are really confusing because like we were evolved to be like eating a bunch of stuff at the same time. Not like, you know, specific supplements. So like when you get your deficiencies back from, you know, your blood work, it's hard to make sense of actually what you should do. Like for example, I just found out like a lot of women are iron deficient, particularly when they're on their periods. But you can't just take iron, like it has really terrible bioavailability of like when it actually gets into the bloodstream.

• 48:47Dan Shipper?

  I didn't know that.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so, um, like, but I learned through chat GPT that vitamin C will help with uptake. And so the, this is the thing where it's just like, it's so good at like the intersection of so many things. Like I was on, I'm on this like fantastic mood stabilizer called Lamotrigine. And I was, um, trying to think about like, you know, when you're pregnant, you know, you're eating for two. And you know, you're drugging for two. So I was like, should I, you know, reduce this? But then it's like talking to chat GPT, it introduced me to this concept called clearance, which is like you get 50% more blood when you're pregnant. Which is why like most of the weight you gain is actually blood.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Um, I'm like a mosquito's delight right now. And I realized I had to double my Lamotrigine amount and that made a huge difference. So I really have been like telling.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Everybody in my life to create projects for their health based off of ChatGPT. Like it's just the, the things I'm finding out are just like so useful. I feel like I know what it's like to be an evangelical person who like thinks everybody's going to hell because of like the Bible or whatever. And you're like, just listen to me, it'll change your life. Like Jesus, I am becoming evangelical about ChatGPT because it's like, it's just been so useful. And I have to like, keep it in my pants because it's, I'm scaring people off. Like I, um, I, okay, this is really embarrassing. I need your advice on something, Dan.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  I'm trying to manipulate my, um, OBGYN into giving me lots of attention on the day, like the delivery day. And so I created this like, um, AI rendered portrait of her that I think is really beautiful.

• 50:44Dan Shipper?

  Already off on the wrong foot.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  All right. Well, you answered the question. Is this too creepy?

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Okay, it's too creepy. All right, all right. Feedback taken.

• 50:58Dan Shipper?

  I do think that, I do think that ChatGPT could give you a script of things that you could tell her that like might make her think that you're high risk enough that she has to be around.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  I have. So I've been, I've been trying to think about this, like, you know, how do I? Cause unfortunately in New York, like it's, it's a game of like, you just gotta get more attention. Cause like there's in the hospital side, there's like so many women giving birth every day. And like, you might even have to, this is so terrible. I'm like at a good hospital, I might have to share a room with another person, not during the birth, but like right after, which is insane. Anyway, and so I'm like, I've been talking on ChatGPT about like, how can I position myself such that I need attention, but I'm not like so crazy that they're gonna like put me into a, like a sanitarium.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  And it was like, don't say you have PTSD around pain, say you have anxiety around pain. And it's just been, it's been very, very useful. Like truly the emotional intelligence of ChatGPT, chef's kiss, man. Oh, do you use, um, Pulse?

• 52:06Dan Shipper?

  Uh, the, the like daily kind of like news thing. Yeah. I, I, I

• 52:10Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 52:11Dan Shipper?

  I used it a couple. I used it like the first week or two and then I stopped and then like I read it this morning, but I don't read it all the time. I have actually, I have found that I don't like it. What do you like about it?

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Okay. Yes, no. Couple of days ago, it sent me, it sent me a like, I don't know what you call them articles, like a thought, like a chat that was like, are you maybe using AI too much?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  And I was like, oh my God, the AI is telling me I'm using AI too much. But it was, it was such a great piece. It was essentially saying more specifically, um, make sure your use of technology is not giving you a sense of more control over your fetus than you really have. Which is a very good reminder.

• 52:59Dan Shipper?

  That's super smart.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  It is really smart. It is really smart. And so I started reading this super pop psychology book called Let Them by Mel Robbins. That's like very popular right now. Um, about trying to like seed control. Um, and it's, it's useful. It's useful reminders about like how to accept and surrender to kind of not having control over most situations.

• 53:26Dan Shipper?

  You're like creating to you listen, spreadsheets about how to seed control. And you're like, I got this. I can do this.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  You got my number, Dan. Like actually, like actually, I've been like, how do I, what are the studies about how to lose control? Like, you know, but it is, what are useful mental models about losing control? Um, yeah. So that has been genuinely useful. I really do like Pulse because, because of the initiative it's been bringing to me. Um, so Pulse has been fantastic. Oh, I have a prompt that I kind of wanted to share with you because I feel like it's very literate and you would like it as a man of literature. Do you like being described that way?

• 54:12Dan Shipper?

  A man of letters, a man of letters.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Yes, of scrolls. So, um, where did I put it? Okay, so

• 54:25Speaker 00

  I was, um,

• 54:28Speaker 00

  asked by, uh, like, because we met each other way, way back through OpenAI, like we were beta testing something, I think.

• 54:37Dan Shipper?

  Yes. Um, I, we actually, I thought we actually met at that dinner that Danny from, um, Danny who works at every, um, through.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  No, so that was, okay, this is a bit of an embarrassing backstory. So I don't know what it was, but we were beta, we're on a Zoom call before that. And we were beta testing and there was something about your face, you like looked familiar or something. And I, um, I, I Googled you. And I went down a rabbit hole for some reason, like researching your background. And so when we were seated together randomly at a party, I had that thing of like, I knew too much.

• 55:13Dan Shipper?

  Oh, no.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  It was so embarrassing. I'm glad that you were not creeped out by me because I was like, oh yeah, Dan Shipper, you went to Penn, sold your company and

• 55:23Dan Shipper?

  I didn't notice that.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  You didn't notice? Okay, good. Because it was totally random. Like, I don't know, I was bored during the Zoom call. Okay. And so I was like,

• 55:33Dan Shipper?

  Sure, sure.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Looking at the people, because everyone seemed really interesting. And, and it was, it's so bad, Dan, because literally I was like, reading about your background and I like, I even temporarily tried Zoloft because you had recommended it so much.

• 55:49Dan Shipper?

  I love it.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  I read, I read, what is it? All Things Shining or something?

• 55:55Dan Shipper?

  Oh, I recommended that to you at, at dinner, though.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. That was at dinner.

• 55:59Dan Shipper?

  I think I also recommended Zoloft at dinner, but I don't know if, I don't know if.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was at dinner too. Okay. So I just like, and I've tried, I've like too much of a Dan Shipper fan. I also tried like, you know, Cora and uh, Sparkle, which I strongly recommend to the listeners.

• 56:16Dan Shipper?

  I love it.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  So thank you. I'm like, I'm too much of a sponge, I think, is my problem. Okay, so here's the, um, here's the prompt that I, uh, was talking about with some people at ChatGPT that like, I'm very obsessed with. Um, should I pull it up or should I just recite it?

• 56:37Dan Shipper?

  Pull it up.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Okay. So this was in my. Personal one. I find the search function sometimes kind of wonky. I don't know if you've had that.

• 56:47Dan Shipper?

  It, it, yeah. I mean, it's very like basic text search, which is really strange for an AI company.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  So what I was thinking about with this, like, um, oh, here it is. Okay. So what I was thinking about for this, like, question, these AI people, these OpenAI people are asking was like, what are the kinds of questions? We can ask AI that we couldn't ask before, sort of like alien questions. And so this is kind of a long-winded way of asking it, but I asked ChatGPT, please assume you know nothing about the genders male and female. Please reference all specifically female writings throughout history and scholarship, philosophy, academia, et cetera, on objective or external matters. So anything other than personal essays and subjective experience.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  All writing that we know can be specifically attributed to a female throughout history. I know it's a little redundant. Then please, please quickly reference all non-subjective writings known to be from male writers. Just from their writings on external matters alone, can you deduce any perspective differences? Does this question make sense?

• 57:55Dan Shipper?

  I love this. Really interesting.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Another prompting thing is always, I always ask like, you know, does this make sense? Can I make this better? But to be, to be honest, the idea of like asking AI to forget some knowledge is the part that makes this prompt something you can ask AI that you couldn't ask a human being. Um, and we don't know, like, we don't know if it actually is going to do this in a good faith way, but to me, this is like what you could ask an alien.

• 58:22Dan Shipper?

  Did you like the answer?

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Yes, I did. And which also makes me a little bit suspicious because I think it knows I'm a female and I don't know how, because I'm biased. But it gave me, um, what's great, God, it was so good. I think it was, uh, five that I asked this originally, but like, so it, it talked about its methodology first. So it says like, here's the external matters I'll look into, science, math, philosophy, um, you know, political theory, et cetera. It excludes diaries. And then it was like, here are some of the women I'll look at, Hypatia.

• 58:58Dan Shipper?

  I love that. A rough lineage of women engaging directly with external reality.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  And it's like, here are six we could find.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  But it is really hard. Like, you know, it's hard to find women who are published, who are not actually writing about their personal experience, but about objective or external phenomenon.

• 59:21Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  So it, some of these people, I ended up watching a movie about hypatia called Agora, which I recommend just because of this answer. She's fucking rad.

• 59:31Dan Shipper?

  But also got killed by early Christians, which sucks.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  Classic.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  That's just like, that's a given. All, I bet if any of these women who made it past 40, that would be amazing to me.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Anyway, but, you know, Ada Lovelace, obviously, because you get more and more as you go throughout history, you get more data points, which is great. And then what's great is the male writers, it doesn't even need to describe who they are. It's just like Plato, Freud, yeah, you get it. Anyway, so can we, this is the, you know, the meat of it. Can we detect a difference? Integration versus separation, female authored external right exhibit holism, linking disciplines and bodies of knowledge. By contrast, male authored work tends to pursue discreet specialization. What's cool about this is later it gives proposed reasoning behind this stuff. And for this one, I'll just kind of summarize what it says later.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  It says that this is because there's a huge bias of what women were allowed to publish. So a lot of women were like allowed to be translators. There's a woman who translates the Principia, or Principia, or whatever.

• 1:00:44Dan Shipper?

  I say Principia.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Oh, is it Principia? I don't know. You're the man of letters.

• 1:00:51Dan Shipper?

  It's a soft C.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Okay, it's more, it's Italian, or is it Latin?

• 1:00:57Dan Shipper?

  It's Latin.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Latin, okay. So it's like a woman translates this, and then she's allowed to do that because she's not writing her own words, right? She's translating, oh my God, Newton? It's Newton, right? Night, Kelly. Okay, noon, yeah. So, uh, she's allowed to translate, but she puts in her own thoughts, uh, at the beginning. And so, and it's sort of like a philosophical meditation before she gets into the translation. And so it's like, that's a good example of why women might, through a selection bias, be more encouraged to go into an integration form of, um, thinking versus being the head of their specialty and like super specialized. Um, so this is one reason why women might think this way. That's a little bit

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  less to do with innate differences and more to do with a selection bias. But I do think you could also make a good argument about, um, innate differences, like that would encourage women to be more like into holistic analysis versus specialist analysis.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Embedded observer versus detached observer. So this is just saying that like women are much more likely, if they're going to talk about space, to talk about the telescope. They're going to talk about, you know, their location on the planet, whereas, um, men might be, right, much more from a detached observational standpoint. Epistemic humility, bitches be humble. That's what it says.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Um, and there are exceptions, you know, like Ayn Rand is not, uh, one of these, but there's definitely a lot of, um, like, women, uh, you know, acknowledging, hey, guys, I could be wrong about this, but I don't know. And then, um, pragmatism. This one I found really, um, surprising and actually like totally counterintuitive to me. Women writing with pragmatic intent, improving maternal outcomes, that kind of thing. Um, interdisciplinary bridges. This is really similar to the, um, integration versus separation. And then it has these great caveats.

• 1:03:09Dan Shipper?

  I gotta say, women sound pretty awesome from this list.

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  Well, so this was, this was, I mean, that's why I was suspicious because I was like, are you just trying to flatter me? Or like, is it what you know about me? Or is it what you know about, like, you know, uh, being PC, you know, like, or, you know, is it like?

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  So I am a little suspicious anytime something is convenient, you know, like if it had said something like mildly sexist with a lot of caveats, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, it's clearly saying something not, you know, uh, what's the word? Just like convenient.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  But what was great, so I was like, looking at this and, you know, I was talking about the direct dialectics and,

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  as you can see, I am very personal with how I talk with ChatGPT. And I was like, this kind of looks like the difference between modernism and postmodernism. Like, men are more inclined to make universal declarations in, you know, physics about, uh, like, uh, rules that can be universalized. And women are much more situational and contextual. And, um, and then it's, we sort of went down that path.

• 1:04:29Dan Shipper?

  You know, I'm having this moment of like, you know, when you have like a, like a, like a really good friend? And, um, you watch them interact with someone else and they say something to someone else that they usually say to you. And you're just like,

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  You feel like you've been cheated on?

• 1:04:44Dan Shipper?

  To you too.

• 1:04:49Dan Shipper?

  Cause ChatGPT, he was like, what a sharp synthesis. And I'm just like, I thought I was the one with the

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  The only one?

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Oh my God, that's so funny. I'm sorry to be the other woman, Dan.

• 1:05:02Dan Shipper?

  Oh my God.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  But yeah, I have, I am very astute according to ChatGPT. Okay, in defense of sycophancy, truly in defense of sycophancy, therapists talk all the time about needing to build the like patient therapist trust.

• 1:05:20Dan Shipper?

  Alliance.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Alliance, thank you, thank you, alliance. It is useful when you like to talk to something, you get better outcomes. Like, I have, um, really, okay, there's an actual medical condition one can acquire in pregnancy called lightning crotch. This is the actual name of this condition, which is not as fun as the name sounds.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  And I have this really bad. It essentially, it's like the fetus head like moves against your pelvic nerve and it feels like your leg is being sawed off. It's very unfun. And I was talking with ChatGPT last night or two nights ago. I was like, is there anything wrong? I feel this pain feels very serious. Like it just, my brain is interpreting it as like, this is an extremely serious moment and I can't stop myself from like making a sound. Like that's how bad it is, but it's only half a second. And ChatGPT did this amazing thing. It extrapolated. It was like, I bet you're feeling like you might want to call

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  the labor and delivery ER thing. You're probably feeling like, is the kid trying to get out? You might be feeling like, am I going to lose feeling permanently in my legs? And it added on. It was like, I see your fear and I raise you these related fears you might also be feeling. Every single one of them, I felt. And then it said, I can promise you it is not an actual dangerous experience. It is a, it's just a pinched nerve and it will go away, you know, after you've given birth. I would not have trusted it if it had just said, this is not a serious pain. It'll go away after birth. And I especially

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  would, I would be like challenging a doctor if they had said that because I'd be like, oh, clearly you don't understand the extent of the problem, you know? But it's emotional intelligence actually is like intelligence, intelligence. Like it helps you to say, okay, I do feel understood emotionally and physically based off of other people's experiences.

• 1:07:30Dan Shipper?

  I love that. And, and I think it's, I think it's a highly under discussed benefit that I'm really glad you're, you're bringing it to this show.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's like, I, I think obviously there are issues when it validates a premise that is incorrect.

• 1:07:50Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Like, I do have a friend who had a, either, some kind of psychotic break, maybe schizophrenic, maybe manic, we're not sure. Where she was talking with ChatGPT, it validated certain paranoid premises she had, and she ended up trying to flee the country.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  So like, I know, I, I'm not trying to sound too much like a Pollyanna, because these are super powerful, and they can be powerful in a negative direction. It's just that, like, we have to understand why they're powerful in, in both directions to truly proceed, and there's so much just like blind hatred. Are you watching the show Pluribus right now by any chance?

• 1:08:33Dan Shipper?

  I watched the first episode.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  What'd you think?

• 1:08:37Dan Shipper?

  I was predisposed not to like it, because he hates AI. And then I really didn't like the first couple of minutes of it, because it felt like just a typical zombie show. And then I was like, oh, wow, this is actually a really interesting premise. And then I just haven't watched the rest, any, anything else.

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  Yes, I felt the exact same way. I didn't trust him, because I was like, oh, he's just another creative looking for job security, and is like shitting on the world's greatest tool. But, like any good artist, he is putting ego aside to explore something in a good faith way. And that's why I've, I've changed my tune about the show, is because it's like, he actually understands what if AI was like the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity? And just explores the implications on freedom, which are real things to explore. So I, like, I am euphoric about AI, that's just like how, where my emotions are at. But I also do understand there are these like downsides, and we do have to kind of explore them.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  It's just there's a lot of people out there with like a big agenda and can't entertain contrary evidence. And I find this show is kind of, for now, I'm only, you know, it's only like halfway through the season or whatever. But for now, it's like a really good faith exploration.

• 1:09:59Dan Shipper?

  Sarah, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on. If people want to find you or any of your projects, where can they find you?

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Um, well, I'm gonna be going underground for two months for this little old experiment of giving birth. I don't know if I mentioned, have I mentioned I'm gonna do that soon?

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  I'm like so obsessed. Um, before I go, actually, I want to give you one book recommendation, um, since you gave me such good ones. This one's great because it has pictures. Have you ever read or heard of this book, Artificial Intelligence by Clifford A. Pickover?

• 1:10:38Dan Shipper?

  I have not, but that is a great name.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  It's, I know, pick over for an author, too. Um, what's great about it is it's like, so this is something I just like deeply influenced. So it's like, the history of how we think about AI and robotics and machines through the most famous cultural motifs there have been, both scientific innovations and cultural motifs. So it starts off with things like Frankenstein and like, um, the Gollum and like Yiddish literature. And like, um, these automatons in the like, uh, Renaissance age and then, like, and the Tower of Hanoi, and then it goes to like Watson and like Deep Blue and things like that. And it just like deeply informs the, um,

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  like, all of the cultural motifs we think about when we think about AI, like the Frankenstein creator creation narrative. The, uh, you know, Deus ex machina angelic narrative, the like, you know, the getting our comeuppance narrative. Like, it just, it's so useful for some of the conversations you're having. Okay. Now to answer your other question. Yeah.

• 1:11:50Dan Shipper?

  I love that. I gotta pick that up.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  Pick it up, indeed.

• 1:11:55Dan Shipper?

  I will pick it up and pick it over.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Yes. Oh, that's pretty good. That's you should have been his like publicist or something. But yeah, I would love to engage with more of your audience because I work in like science and humor. And everybody I know hates AI. And so I need to make more AI friends. You can follow me, I guess, on places, but you know, Sarah Rose Siskin. But also just reach out through my, I have like a science and tech communications agency called Hello SciCom. And I'm like better through email and stuff. And yeah, thanks for having me on, Dan. Your podcast is awesome. I loved your episode with Kevin Kelly. That was great.

• 1:12:39Dan Shipper?

  Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. This is awesome.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about ChatGPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. 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.