How a Writer Uses AI Without Losing His Voice

Craig Mod used to pay Campaign Monitor roughly $7,000 a year to send his newsletters. After rebuilding the tool himself with AI, his bill is closer to $150. It’s the kind of thing that convinces him we’re about to enter a “golden age of tool building”—one where anyone can build tools specifically suited to their needs, instead of settling for software from incumbents that are slow to innovate. Mod is the writer and photographer behind the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and books like Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa—as well as a lifelong technologist. He’s rebuilt the tax software Quicken, created a private alternative for Twitter for his members which he calls The Good Place, and used AI to build an archive for his pop-up newsletters. But while Mod is an advocate of using AI to build, he draws the line at using it to write. Mod talks to Dan Shipper about using AI as a research assistant, why he keeps a tech-free zone in the mornings for deep thinking, and why he’s resisting the pull of the “mainlining” AI era. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 3:51 Rebuilding Quicken and Campaign Monitor with AI 6:24 Building The Good Place, a private Twitter alternative for Craig’s members 10:39 Why we’re entering a “golden age of tool building” 12:17 Why AI could help writers build audiences 17:35 Using AI to build a newsletter archive and a searchable board-meeting Q&A library 27:58 Creating a technology-free buffer to protect deep thinking 30:31 Why Craig is resisting the temptation to “mainline” AI for ten hours a day 39:44 Why anthropomorphizing AI is “psychotic,” and why Apple got Siri right 47:42 Being adopted, and making peace with humanity’s fragile place in an AI future Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year. Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Craig Mod’s website: https://craigmod.com Roden (Craig’s monthly newsletter): https://craigmod.com/roden/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I wake up and I don't touch the internet. I won't look at my phone. I won't go online until long after lunch. As soon as I touch my phone, I feel the chemicals shift and I can't go into any kind of deep thinking place or deep attention place or deep focus place.

• 0:14Dan Shipper?

  Is there something about working with AI that feels very dopamine driven? And I believe strongly you can use it to do incredible work. And also it's sort of a slot machine.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  I now have a laptop just for writing that blocks everything. I can't do anything interesting out of it. If I don't create these barriers, I will lose connection with this other part of me that I think is the most valuable part of me. There aren't that many people who are gonna think about or write the weird books that I feel like I'm drawn to write. And as a human, that feels like a valuable thing for me to put my effort in.

• 0:55Dan Shipper?

  Every is the only subscription you need to stay at the edge of AI. If you care about being on top of the latest models and using the latest tools, you have to subscribe to Every to separate out the signal from the noise. Go to every.to/subscribe today. Craig, welcome to the show.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 1:11Dan Shipper?

  So you are a writer, a walker, a player with technology, a photographer.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:20Dan Shipper?

  And I think you have a life and career that I have looked up to for a long time. So it's really fun to have you here. And I think one of the things that we were just talking about is the thoughtfulness and the spirit with which you do your work. And I admire that spirit and try to bring into the stuff that we do here. And also I've been trying to think about how does AI fit in with it? Because there's something about working with AI that feels very dopamine driven. And you can, I believe strongly you can do it to, you can use it to do incredible work. And also like it's sort of a slot machine.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00Dan Shipper?

  I know that you're like deep into the vibe coding right now. So tell us, tell us what you're doing with it. And then let's talk about how it fits into your work.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look, I just think if you're not touching it, if you're not using it, if you're not building with it, you can't really comment on it. And I think part of what when people go, it doesn't really work. It's so unpredictable. It's like, okay, just try, just use it. It's like, if you're using it, you go, okay, this is ridiculous. And why is this technology public slash like shouldn't this? I mean, I kind of agree with a lot of what Dario says. Like, there should probably be more regulation around this. Like, I don't know if everyone in the world should just have this immediately. Certainly, you know, as we're working out the kinks of what this is in public. I mean, it just feels strange. It feels like we are in this aberrational moment where technology like this normally isn't just given to everybody, you know, for free, essentially.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  So, look, I think you really have to be engaging with it, especially if you can. You know, it's like Fable came out, I played with it for four days. I had to like refactor code bases. I had to do, you know, these other little projects. I was like, great, this is cool. And then it went away and I was like, wow, yeah, that kind of makes sense that this would go away. But also Opus 4.8 is sort of like good enough to do anything. Like, if you, if you told me you're, you only have Opus 4.8 for the rest of your life, I'd be like, great. I could build anything with this.

• 3:17Dan Shipper?

  There's a lot I can do.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so we're, it is this weird moment, but.

• 3:20Dan Shipper?

  Okay, so you're actually, you're actually saying, I'm, I'm, it makes sense to me that Fable is, is not here anymore. Do you, I like, I miss her. Like, do you, do you miss her?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  I don't know. Like, I honestly don't really feel qualitatively that maybe I'm not using it enough. But like, the differences between these models like that explicitly. I just know that, oh, it feels a little more rigorous and it eats my tokens like crazy. So it must be better, right? So.

• 3:46Dan Shipper?

  Oh, I just hacked into the, into Fort Knox and like stole all the gold.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah, I've got all the Bitcoin now. It's all me. I've become Satoshi. But the, the, look, I think you have to be using it. So that's one of the main reasons I. I've been using it. And also, I just, I've always loved technology. It's been a bit part of my life since I was, I have memory. You know, always curious about, let me take this thing apart, or build this, or use this piece of software, whatever. Like, it's always been just part of who I am. It turns out, that's also part of who my birth mother is. She's a computer scientist, this one's a programmer, weirdly. She never went to college, but she's a, yeah, I met my birth mom. I was like, what do you do? She's like, oh, I'm a programmer. I was like, oh, my God, okay. Yeah, nature. There is, there is no nurture. It's all, it's all nature, it turns out.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Nurture is just your pathologies, like, like all the things that you hate about yourself is probably like, nature, or about nurture. And then all this stuff that you're like intuitively is confusing to you is, is just nature.

• 4:40Dan Shipper?

  Holy shit. That is fascinating. When did you find that out?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Uh, just like, a little under two years ago.

• 4:45Dan Shipper?

  Wow.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's been interesting. So anyway, technology is important to me because I'm just curious in that way. And I think it's the most interesting thing in the universe right now.

• 4:53Dan Shipper?

  Genetically predisposed.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  A little bit genetically predisposed. So I've been building stuff around my membership program. Well, I rebuilt Quicken, um, which I'm.

• 5:03Dan Shipper?

  Attack software.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, attack software, because I knew, you can watch my interview with Paul Ford and, and Rich over on a board about that. So I rebuilt Quicken. Um, and then I rebuilt Campaign Monitor, which is newsletter software, um, because.

• 5:18Dan Shipper?

  SaaS CEOs are losing in this interview.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  I know. Well, well, well, okay. And why are they losing? They're losing because, uh, well, first of all, Campaign Monitor has not done anything in a decade. That's just been sitting there, taking people's money for a decade plus, with no innovation whatsoever, zero, nothing, with like a really abusive, uh, pricing policy.

• 5:45Dan Shipper?

  How much were they charging you?

• 5:47Speaker 00

  So I was spending like, what was it, like six, $7,000 a year? I mean, it was like one of the most expensive things I, I. I paid for. But the real annoying thing was that they didn't count unique email addresses. They counted total, even if you had overlap between lists. So it's, it's just, it's like, things like that where it's like, you don't just, I'm going away.

• 6:10Dan Shipper?

  Squeezing like, you're squeezing too much out of it.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and my bill now with like SE, Amazon SES, I set up all that DKIM and SPF and all that email crap. So I think I'm getting pretty good deliver, deliverability, like on par with what PayPal or PayPal gave me. But now my like yearly bill is probably going to be like, I don't know, like $150 or something like, it's just a ridiculous difference.

• 6:30Dan Shipper?

  And how much in Fable tokens?

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Well, thankfully, yeah, this is all Opus. So, but that's the other weird thing is like, I was on the $200 a month plan. And then I realized I wasn't hitting my limit. So I dropped to 100 and like, for a thousand dollars a year, 1,200 bucks a year, like, that is the easiest trade. Like, that's the best, that's the deal of the century in terms of what you can build. So I built newsletter software and then I've been, I've been adding to my membership program software. So actually, one of the things I had Fable do was do a, like a full, just security check on my membership,

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Flask Python app, which I built by myself before any of this existed. And so I went through, I was like, oh, you have eight trillion security holes. Shall I fix them? And I was like, yes, please. So I think it's a little safer. I mean, the stakes are very low for my membership software, but.

• 7:22Dan Shipper?

  Then the FBI knocked at your door.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  You gotta stop using this. So, you know, I've been doing that. And then I rebuilt Twitter for my members. We call it the good place.

• 7:33Dan Shipper?

  Oh, yeah. You were showing me that. Tell, tell me about that.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, look, like, social media sucks. It just, it's terrible now. There was this moment, 2010 to 20, like 14, where it wasn't algorithmic. Stuff just appeared. Links were favored. I mean, they were just normal. They didn't, they weren't a hit against you if you posted a link. And everyone was on Twitter. It was like the, the great media watering hole. And like, if you were active then and slightly interesting, you could like, you know, 100x your network just by being an interesting person on Twitter. Now you kind of can't because the algorithm favors like psychosis versus sanity. And, uh, and no one likes posting to any of these places. All these like reply guys pop in.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  It just sucks and threads is doofy and blue sky is like everyone is crying and complaining. Like, it's just weird. Everyone's so traumatized. And so I wanted a place just for members. You have to pay to be there because you have to pay to be a member. And, uh, I was like, you know, I had these, these thoughts. I always thought Twitter should be ephemeral. I think there should be no archive for these things. I'd be like, it's crazy. There's like a web 1.0 slash web 2.0 philosophy of everything needs to be archived and saved forever. And I kind of don't believe that. In fact, one of my heresies, when I'm with Kevin Kelly doing our walks, like we have heresy night, um, where you say something you sort of believe, but like people you respect don't believe maybe.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  And my, one of my heresies is I think the entire internet should be deleted every two weeks. And like, you can archive it offline or whatever, but like the entire internet itself, every two weeks should just disappear. And there could be, I like, like it, it forces a lot of like, why would you do that or whatever? But I think there is kind of value to ephemerality in the digital world. So anyway, our, the good place, everything disappears in a week. Um, you can only post twice a day. You can reply 20 times a day. Photos are in one bit black and white until you click them and then they like fade into color. And what else is there? No algorithm. It's just reverse cron. Uh, and it's just sweet. I don't know. This is lovely. It's like my favorite place on the internet. It's the only place I want to post.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  And people have now been joining my membership program, uh, just to get access to that, which I think is cool.

• 9:48Dan Shipper?

  So it seems like, and partly you were doing this before, you know, the acceleration language model coding where last year, year or so. So you're technical.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  I, yeah, I'm technical. I mean, I built my membership software by hand, by myself.

• 10:01Dan Shipper?

  I don't.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Like I learned Flask. I like learned how to set it up, set the roots up and everything.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  The TGP, The Good Place, was the first thing I built when Claude Code was released. So Claude Code came out. Oh, that's another fable thing I did. I had it refactor TGP. So I was like, oh, look, you made this a year ago, version one of you. Can you refactor this and actually pull out the module? It was one giant Python file, like 10,000 lines or whatever. And so it's now modularized because I want to expand it. So I want to, I want to build a very good reads. So like good reads.

• 10:40Dan Shipper?

  Not great reads.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, not great reads, very good reads. That like, so basically good reads that also doesn't suck. Again, like all these platforms just become so toxic. So, yeah, well, this is a good example of like N of one software, you know? And, and, you know, I think the, obviously the business models of, of social media are such that it just becomes the shitty place it is today. You know, it's like, it's forced by the business models at this like growth at all costs. And, you know, and like engagement is, there's no qualitative assessment of engagement. It's just engagement is good.

• 11:13Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  You know, but it turns out most engagement is, the, the way to get most engagements is to be toxic. Right? So I think what we're going to see is this great pressure on these companies. So like Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp. Like, look, I'm also not their, their target consumer. It's businesses. They kind of don't care about people like us. So being able to do this N of one software, and I think it's only going to get easier. And also like the corollary is like, you're going to have, it's so easy. It's much easier to start a company that is like, hey, here's Campaign Monitor for like half the price and we handle all the bullshit. It's like, of course, yeah, why not? Like, because you can just put it together and you've got Superbase and all the, it's like all these, there's all these pieces now where you don't need infrastructure investment

• 11:56Speaker 00

  and it can scale with revenue effortlessly. And then you just have an agent in the background doing that scaling and setting it all. So I, I think we're going to enter this sort of golden age of tool building. There's an N of one version of it. And then also there's just going to be more competition in the marketplace, forcing more innovation. I think this is going to be, I think it net, net pretty good, except for the incumbents.

• 12:20Dan Shipper?

  What does it mean for, for like other writers? And I just want to move your mic a little bit because it's like kind of in your.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:27Dan Shipper?

  I can't really see. Maybe there we go. Move this way a little bit.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:31Dan Shipper?

  There you go. Okay. So, but what does that mean for? Writers like yourself, like people who are making a living online, is that, do you think N of one software is the sort of the next frontier? And like, subscription businesses where they're like, big thing over the last like, five years, everyone's like, I want to start Substack, do you pay newsletters?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:48Dan Shipper?

  Is this like, the logical next step for writers?

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think Substack, their innovation was, not even the subscription thing, their innovation was you can email everyone for free.

• 12:59Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  That's like, people don't talk about that enough.

• 13:02Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  That's the true, sort of like, piece de resistance of like, what Substack was doing. It's like, oh, you can import 10,000 addresses and send unlimited newsletters for free? That's sort of, that's, the value prop of that is quite good, because that's the real, like, competition against like, Mailchimp or whatever. And then, the seamless subscription stuff was like, also nice. But I think most Substacks don't make any money. So really, it's that, that is, that was the value prop.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  But, I don't know how much N of one software is going to be produced, because I think most people don't need this level of specificity.

• 13:41Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  And as a writer too, like, I'm in this weird position where I have a really strong technical background. But my interest is in building companies. And I love literature, I love writing, I love books. I think it is one of the greatest things you can commit your life to. That's why I've been doing that. Just the forcing function of collimating thought, the forcing function of going to print, I think actually going to print is really critical part of bookmaking. So you know, all of these factors don't go away because of AI. I would like to believe that, I mean, the things that are changing is the publishing industry is way weaker than it used to be, it doesn't bring as much value to the table.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  And so, writers are expected to kind of bring an audience in a way that they never were before. And so hopefully, what AI Coding, what this kind of Cambrian explosion of software will bring is more tools for writers to be able to build better audiences. And that will hopefully lead to, you know, more people being able to make a living as a writer.

• 14:49Dan Shipper?

  Are you using it in your writing?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  No, no, I use it as a research assistant. So like, I'm like, oh, okay, here's a building. I want to write about this building. Go out and find every blog post that has talked about this building. Summarize it, give me all the links so I can go and check all the sources and read, read the, read the posts that seem most interesting. I have to do things like that. And like, I'll, I'll put it in like TK's and stuff like that, like, oh yeah. You know, who was the drummer on this album? You know, TK. And like, I'll sort of dump those, those menus, those, those pages into it. And just give me all the TK's and then I kind of go and like add them or I like modify as needed or whatever.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  But I don't, I still don't, I don't ever want it touching the writing. Because that's, that, for me, that's the point of is being in there. It's being in the mess of the writing. And I think even like adding links and TK's and stuff like that is, is, I want to be thinking about how they, they're added to it. What, what I do use it for is like cultural sensitivity checks. So like, I was writing about Nagasaki the other day and I was like, oh, like, I want to make sure I'm writing about Nagasaki. And referencing the atomic bomb, like where it hit, how it hit, you know, who was affected in a sensitive way, like appropriately. And so that is pretty amazing, where I used to like ping friends about stuff like that.

• 16:15Dan Shipper?

  What is your experience like, okay, so you're making all this end of one software. You're using it as a research assistant.

• 16:25Dan Shipper?

  What is your experience now day to day in your, in your work life? Are you like, oh shit, now I'm a sys admin for like four different pieces of software that I have to like send agents to go fix? Or is it, is your work life still fairly similar to what it used to be?

• 16:37Speaker 00

  No, I'm, I mean, my, my membership software just works. You know, it's so simple, like when you break it down. I mean, this is why I'm using Python. I'm not using, there's no, like, what's it called? There's, there's no.

• 16:52Dan Shipper?

  React next.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  There's no React, there's no next, there's none of that stuff. It's just, it's very simple. And the point is, is because I don't want to be systeming anything. And even with the newsletter software, that piece is only touched when I send newsletters. You know what I mean? So the signups are happening and that like that has to be working and it seems to be working. I can check every couple of days.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  But it's the only critical thing is like when I hit send, make sure that goes out. And that only happens once a week or twice a week or something like that. So I don't feel like I'm maintaining anything. And actually, I get a high off of building things that allow me to write. Like so, software that helps me write or that helps me publish in a new way inspires me to do more writing. So it feeds back into it in a positive way.

• 17:44Dan Shipper?

  How is that? Do you have a specific example or not?

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Well, like Josh Miller and I kind of put together this weird SMS publishing tool.

• 17:50Dan Shipper?

  Like browser company Josh Miller?

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so before he did all that, we did this like little experiment where he built his like, yeah, like a little team experimenting with publishing stuff. And we built this like SMS tool. So I could do a newsletter over SMS, which just felt like, oh, what is it like to have a message appear? You know, like N to, you know, many, like one to one to N sort of publishing.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  And that was kind of fun, you know? And it inspired me to like during this walk to think about what I wanted to be blasting out to everybody. And you know, you had to, you had to keep it concise so it fit into, you know, one message. It wasn't broken across different messages. So that was, you know, that's, that's like an extreme example of it. But just in general, like building my, building out the campaign monitor clone, you know? Which also, by the way, does a bunch of stuff. So like I have members only, or I have pop up newsletters that are like only for a week or for a month. And I have those archived on my members website. And I was able to use Claude to, to build this newsletter software. So when I publish to the pop up, it does the whole archiving process and get commits pushes to the server.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  So it's archived perfectly for me, whereas I had to do that all manually before. So that like, that's a good example of like, wow, okay, now I want to make more pop up newsletters. Cause the archiving process is, is set up or I built a tool. I do board meetings with, for my members. I built a tool to build transcripts from them all.

• 19:21Dan Shipper?

  Like board meetings of your own, like.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Life.

• 19:23Dan Shipper?

  Life.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:24Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we do every six, every six months, we do a board meeting where I just talk about what I did for the last six months. And what, and what I'm gonna do for the next six months. And then I have a Q and A. And the Q and As are actually always really good. And I wanted, I've done, how many have I done? Like fifteen of them or something? I've done quite a few. So we have like, you know, almost like twenty hours. Cause I'll do two, two each. So actually maybe even like twenty or thirty of them. Anyway, we've got dozens of hours of Q and A. And they're often great. And so I built uh this archive of the Q and As where you can, it's archived by like, you can, you can search by uh keywords. Or you can like view by keywords and then you can search for anything.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  And it'll pull up all the videos where I say that word or talk about that topic. And you can click the link and it opens the video to that point. So it's like building things like that makes me wanna do more board meetings. I'm like, great, this is amazing. Like I wanna do, how can I do more of this? So I, for me, that building software has to feed back into the greater purpose, which is to make, not to just like, spin my wheels, spin my wheels and build things for the sake of building things.

• 20:34Dan Shipper?

  Did you see Tim Ferriss recently posted on X, like the sales of the four hour work week are down like eighty percent? Or something like that because he thinks because of AI. And there's this larger conversation happening about the value of nonfiction that's specifically for like advice based nonfiction.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:52Dan Shipper?

  What do you think of that?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Uh, well, it's funny, we had lunch like three days before he posted that. And he was, he was telling me about that. He was telling me about it. I was like, really? Wow, that seems like, that seems excessive. I mean, look, there's still a lot of books, like self-help books, nonfiction books selling insane copies. I mean, Tim hasn't put out a book in a long time. I think that's part of it. I think maybe the long tail is getting shorter.

• 21:15Dan Shipper?

  Well, also it's like, there's a big difference between what you would say pre-AI and post-AI. So if you think about the four hour week, which came out when I was in like middle school or something like that.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Like it's like twenty years old now. Yeah, at least. Um, or eighteen years old, something like that. I think it was like end of two thousands that it came out. Yeah, I mean, you would, um.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Also, it's just, yeah, it's a different era of writing. You know, I'd be really curious to see what Tim puts out next.

• 21:42Dan Shipper?

  If he did the four hour work week agent edition, I think it would sell like Gamebusters.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  For sure. Yeah, yeah, update it.

• 21:47Dan Shipper?

  You can actually do that now.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, this, well, what's crazy is now it's so easy to do the four hour work week style building, which probably makes it impossible to achieve now. I mean, part of it was the friction of like, it was a little hard to do, so not everyone could do it. So like, if you put in that little bit of effort, you know, and now it's sort of like, well, everyone. I had a friend who built 10 companies in a year or like 12. He did like a company a month. And this was like, maybe 10 years ago. You know, you, you know, he, he knew he had his frameworks and you could, you know, he had his like tool. He's building, you know, designing it and creating the mascots and all this stuff. And he had a couple that did well, like decently well.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  You know, he's got his recurring revenue, but I feel like doing that today would just be, no one would care. It's, it's just fascinating to think about how that's changed so quickly.

• 22:42Dan Shipper?

  I think you can, you can one shot a company or an app.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:44Dan Shipper?

  But the, I think the, the metric of

• 22:49Dan Shipper?

  quality or substantiality has gone from can you build it all to are you maintaining it?

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:56Dan Shipper?

  And like, have you maintained it over time for a longer period of time?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:59Dan Shipper?

  And that's, that's interesting. And I think that's harder actually to.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:03Dan Shipper?

  It's still, that's still hard.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, he was one shotting them in a month. You know, like basically like he was self one shotting. It was just, it's just like the, the, you know, I feel like, you know, LLMs, it's, they just exist on a different time scale than us. You know, and so it's like, he was sort of doing it, but I, but the, the thing that was interesting about him doing that was that you knew he was building these things himself.

• 23:23Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Right? And so.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  I think that's fascinating now you can, you can, in a weekend, you can essentially spin up a company and everyone can go, can kind of just shrug and go, okay, well, and, you know, I, I think that's great because it means like, we have to bring value to the table in a way that you kind of get over the, you know, Kevin Kelly does this thing where if he has a book he wants to write, he'll make the cover for it. And he says that often like removes the desire to make the book, to write the book. And it's just like a good forcing function. It's like, is the thing, is the thing actually doing the thing or just having the veneer of having done the thing? And I think LLMs kind of speed that up.

• 24:03Dan Shipper?

  Honestly, true.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:05Dan Shipper?

  I've def- I've definitely done that. It's like, it's also buying a domain or.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. I had to, I like, I had to like tie my hands behind my back about domains. I still pay like a couple hundred dollars a year for all this garbage that I'm like.

• 24:19Dan Shipper?

  We'll never use, but.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  I mean, and I don't even know why. I don't give it up. I try to give it up. I like turn it off, off renewal and then I'll get a notice. It'd be like, it's, it's expiring and it's not redoing. And I'm like, ah, maybe one more year. Like, why? I'm not gonna, I'm never gonna, I don't even know what, I forget it exists. So dumb.

• 24:35Dan Shipper?

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• 25:18Dan Shipper?

  and Every. Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agentic CRM. Go to attio.com/Every and get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com/Every. And now, back to the episode.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Okay. Now I want to get to the, I want to get to like the real.

• 25:33Dan Shipper?

  Meat of my of my question or my curiosity, which is as a writer and someone is AI.

• 25:42Dan Shipper?

  One of the lenses through which I can tell if I'm like, living in the way I want to live is when I can read a sentence by someone like Annie Gillard.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:52Dan Shipper?

  I love and like, if you've listened to this podcast, you know, like I force everyone at every to read her stuff and like, you know. And if I can read something from from Annie and like, kind of tear up a little bit and like, really affects me.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:03Dan Shipper?

  That's sort of, that's one way that I know that I'm like, in the in the zone, in the pocket of where I want to be.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:09Dan Shipper?

  Because I think if I'm rushing around and stuff and I read something from her, I'm like, yeah, okay, fine.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:14Dan Shipper?

  And I and I also feel like, on the one hand, I can read her stuff way more deeply because I have someone to talk to about it. So like, I can talk to Codex about it and actually, like, it's much better than most people I've talked to.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 26:28Dan Shipper?

  Annie Dillard.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:29Dan Shipper?

  But on the other hand, when I'm orchestrating 15 agents and I go back. I'm less likely to be able to truly get into the words.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:40Dan Shipper?

  In the way that I want to.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:42Dan Shipper?

  Do you feel that? And if so, how do you deal with it?

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is an LLM thing. It's not an agent thing. It's just technology in general. So when I'm like, seriously working.

• 26:57Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  The first of all, I haven't set up my phone in my room in ever in my life. So I've never had it in my bedroom. So my phone goes in the corner of like, my kitchen on a different floor of my bed than even my bedroom is. And the internet is sort of off. And on my laptop, I use, actually, I now have a laptop just for writing that blocks everything. I can't do anything interesting on it. I got one of the Neos. Because I tried doing it with like, you know, books, tablets and this and that. And it's like, it turns out in the end, what you want is a nice MacBook keyboard and the simplicity and like syncability of like Mac stuff, you know, and you just want it to work. And iPad, I feel like the iPad version of Obsidian

• 27:41Speaker 00

  or the iPad version of Ulysses, to me, doesn't feel as good as the MacBook versions. Like, it just doesn't like, there's things that just don't work as well. So I have a MacBook Neo that's completely disconnected from the internet, except for being able to sync stuff. And I wake up and I don't touch the internet. I won't look at my phone. I won't go online until like long after lunch. And I have to have that kind of morning where I wake up and I do not touch my phone. As soon as I touch my phone, I feel the chemicals shift and I can't go into any kind of deep thinking place, or deep attention place, or deep focus place. And that to me is really critical, creating that kind of barrier, that buffer.

• 28:21Dan Shipper?

  But you will touch your, that laptop.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, the Neo. Yeah, yeah, I'll tell the Neo, the Neo is fine because it, part of it is, is knowing it can't do anything fun. So it's the knowing, it's the knowing you can do fun stuff that ruins you.

• 28:37Dan Shipper?

  That's the thing. It's like, that's what I'm trying to get to is because I think there's, and there's an easy distinction between it's technology versus not technology.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:45Dan Shipper?

  But there's a, there's something deeper, which is interesting, which is, okay, what, what do you mean when we say technology?

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:50Dan Shipper?

  And you're using a laptop.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:52Dan Shipper?

  You're using a camera, like all, all these, there's all these things that are around us are technology, or at one point were considered technology.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 29:01Dan Shipper?

  And there's this line there that.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Well, the, the network. That's the line.

• 29:06Dan Shipper?

  Talking to other people on it.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  The network. That will just, just, or researching or reading stuff, or being distracted, or reading the news, or what, is that we're just talking about the network, really. When I say like, I like, I create a buffer, it's between me and the network world. Yeah.

• 29:21Dan Shipper?

  I think part of the thing that, like, I've done that too. I try not to do meetings before noon.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:26Dan Shipper?

  And that's my, like, writing.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  That's also, yeah, that's also good. I can't, if I talk to anyone before lunch, I can't.

• 29:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  I can't work. Phantom Thread, you know, with, with Reynolds and the breakfast scene and she's, she's, she's doing the toast too loudly. I'm like, that's, I'm, I'm like, this is sort of, this is like, yeah, this is like a documentary of like how I feel every morning, you know, I've, like, I know people watch that and they're like, what a, what a terrible human that he is. I'm like, no, that is.

• 29:50Dan Shipper?

  Absolutely.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  That is so totally, that embodies the mindset of so many people that are like introverts, or like trying to have like creative, safe spaces in the morning.

• 30:00Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I know. I love that. I love that movie. I can talk about the movie forever.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  I know.

• 30:05Dan Shipper?

  Uh, so, okay, so it's the network. Yeah, cuz I think for me, so I try to do meetings before noon, which I'm mostly successful at, but one of the things now is just like, we're thirty-ish people, so I'm like looking at Slack, which I think I need to stop.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, get off that, bro. I fucking hate it. Discord and Slack, they'd wanna just shoot myself. It's like, I will do anything to avoid having to ever use those businesses of software.

• 30:31Dan Shipper?

  The thing that gets me is I legitimately use these tools in my writing.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 30:40Dan Shipper?

  And like, let's say like Codex in my writing, right? So I can, let's say I can ban Slack, all that kinda stuff, but there's, there's always this thing of, you know, when I'm reading, like I said, like when I'm reading Heidegger, I'm like, ooh, I wanna like really get at this, and then I wanna ask questions about it, you know?

• 30:54Speaker 00

  I think what you need to do is you have a notebook, and you just like make, make notes of things you wanna go back to and ask. I mean, it's the same thing with like researching, you know, oh, who is that person? It's like you, you can go on Google and like Google, and you just don't do that, you know, and you kinda have to turn that off. I, I think I, personally, I'm, I'm too weak to have that available.

• 31:13Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Because my brain will just always go to that place. And it, it's the same thing like reading a paper book versus like trying to read something on your iPhone. It's really hard because the iPhone, there is this, there's this veneer of, of quietude in the book, like software on the iPhone, but you can feel right beneath it, like this screaming of all the other things that your attention wants to engage with. So.

• 31:37Dan Shipper?

  Do you think, what, the thing that in talking to you and all the sort of N of one, like you built your own Twitter and you're building your own Goodreads, like are you gonna, do you need to make your own like Codex ChatGPT type, uh, quiet?

• 31:50Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 31:52Dan Shipper?

  You don't wanna use it.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  They're already pretty quiet. No, you just, that's like.

• 31:55Dan Shipper?

  I find there, I, I mean, I cannot stop watching them work.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 32:00Dan Shipper?

  I'm like addicted to like, oh, like, what's the agent doing now? Cause it's, you know, I let him run for like 20 hours or something like that.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:07Dan Shipper?

  So I just always want to check in and be like, isn't working?

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:09Dan Shipper?

  You know?

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but that's like a different, like, that's an after lunch activity. No, cause I mean, there's, there's a part of me too, that right now it just feels like I should be, I should like, rent an office like in New York and just have like 10 people coming in and we all just, like, we have a giant blackboard and it's like, all right, what, what's like the five things we want to build this week? And we just, we're just randomly building stuff. Like, I, I feel like I should be mainlining engaging with this stuff. Like, like, like I should be doing, you know, 10 hours a day.

• 32:41Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  You know, for like six months. That's, that's how potent it all feels right now. And if I don't create these barriers, um, I will lose connection with this other part of me. That I, that I think is the most, to me, most valuable part of me. Like, there's a bunch of people playing around with this crap and they're gonna do what they're gonna do. But there aren't that many people who are gonna think about or write the weird books that I feel like I'm drawn to write. And as a human, that feels like the valuable thing for me to put in, put my effort in. You know, it was like when I was in Silicon Valley and I realized all anyone's doing is building ad software. Like, that was like such a big part of like early 2010s Silicon Valley. You know, it was just, everything was ad software. I was like, oh, okay, I don't need to be doing this. It was like easy, very easy to step away.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Like, it's a little reductive, but also it isn't. Like, that's sort of when you break everything down.

• 33:32Dan Shipper?

  I, I love that. Tell me about that word weird. You're also using the word dorky a lot.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:38Dan Shipper?

  And it feels like a, an interesting aesthetic to be pushing on right now. Because language models let everyone sort of, everyone and everything look and feel a little bit similar.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, but what do you mean, like, when am I using dorky?

• 33:54Dan Shipper?

  You've been using it in, in some, in some of your recent newsletters.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Okay. Yeah, dorkiness.

• 33:58Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, because well, this LLMs are fundamentally like it's still super dorky. Like, okay, 99.999% of people using it are like, hey, uh, do you want to be my girlfriend? Like, will you have sex with me? Like, I really think if we saw the chats of most people, like, it'd be quite mortifying. Like, it's just weird. It's like, okay, now I'm going down on you. Like, what are you doing? Like, I think people are just having sex with these things, like, for the most part. Like, look, like, this is what we do. We're just like sex machines.

• 34:31Dan Shipper?

  To be confirmed later.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're fundamentally just like disgusting sex machines. Like, look at Anthony Weiner. That guy couldn't like just stop taking pictures of his dick. You know, it's like, like, the stakes were so high, he just couldn't stop doing dick pics.

• 34:45Dan Shipper?

  Anthony Weiner, the representative technology user.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  So, so, look, I think, like, if you look at, like, book sales, like, most books are are softcore porn about like angels and fairies having sex that women buy. Like, this is like, this is the fundamental human condition. It's just like dirty, like, secret sex stuff, right? So I think that is mostly what is happening with LLMs. And so, like, folks like us, uh, who are actually building software with these things, we are like so, so in the minority. And so that's, that's why I'm like constantly hammering out how like dorky we are, because we are just mega dorks. Like, we're not having fairy sex with our LLMs.

• 35:23Dan Shipper?

  I mean, speak for yourself.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not, at least not, I didn't this morning. I don't, I don't do that before lunch. And so fairy sex is only after 3pm. But, uh, no, I'm just, like, talk to any bookstore owner, they're like, yeah, we sell so much like, like, like elf sex books, it's crazy. But, but the, this software building part of LLM use is mega dorky. And you have to be a dork to understand all this crap. Spin up a, like, digital ocean server or whatever, like, use a cloudflare worker, like, all this, it's so hard to use. Because you have to, there's no- The thing is, they're so opaque. You have to know what to ask it for it to do any of these things. It's not like, here's a smorgasbord, like, here's a menu of all the things you could do with the LLM. Like, that's weird that that doesn't exist. These interfaces right now are so terrible.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  And so I think we are going to maybe see better interfaces. Maybe it'll just be in Figma or in Claude design or whatever the hell, you know, you build software with. Like, talking or thinking about infrastructure is going to completely disappear. And in the same way, we don't think about, like, what registers we're writing to, you know, or like, like, what, you know, registers we're pushing and pulling and like, how do you do an X or on this bit? Or it's like, we're not thinking about that, you know, that's all abstracted. So I think it's going to continue to be more abstracted and it'll become slightly less dorky. But we are in the deep dork version of all of this right now.

• 36:40Dan Shipper?

  Deep, dark, dork version.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, it depends on what your fairies are doing.

• 36:49Dan Shipper?

  Um, okay. And I think the thing about being weird, let's, let's, let's, let's move away like from the specific, I'm, I'm a dork for buildings, building LLM software. Cause to some extent it is dorky, but then you have to also look at it relative to where you are, right? Like, one of the, a weird choice to make currently is if you're somewhat techie type of person, is to be like, I could be in a room with like 10 other people mainlining AI.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:21Dan Shipper?

  But I choose not to.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:23Dan Shipper?

  And that's like a kind of an uncomfortable choice.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:26Dan Shipper?

  Tell me about, like, about that and how you make that choice and why.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean,

• 37:32Speaker 00

  I don't know, I struggle with this because I, I, I feel like I'm using it in a way that illuminates the power of it, but I also feel like there's so much more I could be doing.

• 37:44Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  And it's not even about. There's no like financial element. It's like, oh, if I do this, then I can make, X amount of money or whatever. It's like, that is absolutely not even on the radar. It's more, I want to know what the edges of this thing are. And I think that was the same feeling I had when I first discovered the web. I saw the web and it was immediately, I need to be engaging with this. I want to build. I want to learn HTML. I want to, you know, like all in, oh, CSS got released. Oh, cool. How do I use that? Because I want to know the edges of these pieces of software and these technologies. I feel, I feel like for LLMs, you know, the, the rabbit hole goes so deep that if you, that's six months, 10 hours a day with like a group of like fellow mega dorks is actually what you need to do to feel the edges of it.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  And then if you do that, I think you would just come away with a profound understanding that few other people would have. And that to me is the interesting part.

• 38:36Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Just that understanding.

• 38:38Dan Shipper?

  I mean, that's sort of what I'm, I think our project here is a little bit like.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:44Dan Shipper?

  More than 10 mega dorks at this point, but.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's good.

• 38:47Dan Shipper?

  I, I mean, I think, yeah, that's, that's one of the, the most exciting things as a writer being in this time is if you're just willing to experiment, you're so far ahead of, of everybody else and you get to understand this like corner of the world that people desperately need to understand because it's very scary to, to most people.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:07Dan Shipper?

  And it's new. And for me, like new things are just the coolest, you know?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just fun. I mean, there is, there's, and well, and you realize we're in this, you know, not to get like all like fucking hyperbolic, but like we are in this epochal moment.

• 39:24Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Like this is weirdly special. This is like, this is genuinely strange. Like a generational shift in how technology is used and built. I mean, we kind of see it manifesting in these ridiculous evaluations and all this stuff. Like it's going to bring with it incredible like income disparity and like the people are using it or aren't using it or have access to it and don't have access to it. The weird, the, the strange thing about it though, is the open source models seem to be not that far behind. And so like if, again, if you took away everything today and we're like, oh, you only get whatever deep seek, open source, blah, blah, blah. I'm not really paying attention to the open source ones. So I don't know how they're doing. I just kind of hear inklings of it. But it feels like you could almost take one of those and still be so far ahead of the game.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Like you would never want to program again without having that, you know, that co-pilot with you. So that also feels interesting about this is that it's both seemingly creating these disparities, but also weirdly egalitarian because you'll be able to run it on like pretty much any machine you have. That's a strange dissonance. Also, this idea of like, you download this thing that's like 50 gigs or whatever, and you've essentially got a JPEG of all of human knowledge distilled.

• 40:36Dan Shipper?

  It's the best.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  It's so weird. This is truly one of the weirdest pieces of magic, I think, that humans have, you know, and whatever, Dario talks about the atomic power and all this stuff, but like, I feel like there are many parallels to that.

• 40:51Dan Shipper?

  One of the big, I think, philosophical divides right now in AI is there's roughly two camps. It's like, on the OpenAI side, it's like, this thing is a tool, and we're going to maximize its usefulness as a tool.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:08Dan Shipper?

  And on the Anthropic side, it's like, this thing is a tool, and also it might be a being, and it might have feelings, and we need to like, figure that out.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:14Dan Shipper?

  What is your, where do you land on that?

• 41:16Speaker 00

  No, the being stuff, it's like, shh, stop, stop, stop, stop. Like, just don't do that. Don't get over it.

• 41:21Dan Shipper?

  Are you nice to Claude?

• 41:23Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm nice to it because I want to cultivate the habit of just being nice in general, you know?

• 41:28Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  That's why.

• 41:30Dan Shipper?

  You're nice to it for yourself, rather than for Claude?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I don't want to like, slip and like, talk to humans like an asshole. You know, it's like, I want to be nice to everyone. And so, it's very easy to just keep that niceness up with Claude, you know? I don't know, why not? No, I think that this anthropomorphizing of it is psychotic. I think it actually causes a lot of problems. I think this idea of like, I'm dating my AI is insane. I think we really need to tamp down on all that. Like, I think that is not a good direction to put humans in. I think we're already so isolated. I think community, like, look, the two most important things for life and for longevity is basically having real community and sleep, like, getting a lot of sleep, being around people that like, you actually feel a connection

• 42:16Speaker 00

  with and love with. And I think AIs are not a surrogate for that. I don't think like, chatbots are a surrogate for that, even if you like, put it in a humanoid form or whatever, it's not going to be a surrogate for that for a long, long, long, long, long time. And so I think, actually, Apple's Siri and I think Joanna Stern, I think that's her name, right, the ex-Wall Street Journal reporter?

• 42:36Dan Shipper?

  Not sure.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  She's got her own program now, Joanna, she's very funny. She did a video on the new Siri and she could not get it to do any of these terrible things. And it kind of refuses to anthropomorphize itself. And I think like, actually, Apple's sort of nailing it. This is, they've, they've sort of done it perfectly because it's like they haven't invested in building their own.

• 42:58Dan Shipper?

  They just waited.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  They just waited.

• 43:00Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  They saved hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever. And they're like, okay, great, now we can use like this, this like subset of state of the art model to just do the things that people actually needed to do on the phone. It's a more efficient search. It's actually wonderful. So I, I, I think that's really critical to create this separation of these things are not conscious, they are not feeling, they do not have desires unless you program desires into them and then you can't even say those are real desire. You need stakes to have desires. I mean, Michael Pollan's book on consciousness is sort of, I think, a really interesting thing to read right now in the context of all this stuff. Cause it just gets you thinking about what are motivations?

• 43:40Dan Shipper?

  Is that the one, oh, about psychedelics?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  No, no, no, this is after.

• 43:42Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  This came out like six months ago.

• 43:44Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  But, you know, he breaks kind of down plant consciousness and can plants be consciousness? And what does it mean to have volition? And, you know, a lot of it is stakes. You have to feel this sense, if we didn't have death, probably consciousness wouldn't have emerged. You know, it's like you have to have stakes in order to have that forcing function of like popping into whatever this metacognition is.

• 44:04Dan Shipper?

  Let me push you on that because I think, and I may be revealing some of my bias here, which is definitely not that they're conscious, but that they're not not conscious.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 44:16Dan Shipper?

  If that makes sense.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 44:19Dan Shipper?

  So on the stakes question, they do have stakes in the sense that they're trying to maximize their reward function, right? So like, they know that if, that they're trying to like, get something right, which is a kind of a stake.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  But, but I guess.

• 44:31Dan Shipper?

  Different from our stake.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  But I guess there's, but there's nothing to lose.

• 44:34Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Like they, like they don't have a self-awareness of.

• 44:38Dan Shipper?

  Of death.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Of death or like being turned off or like, and even if they, and they can, they can, they can performatively talk about it.

• 44:46Dan Shipper?

  That's, that's the tricky one.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:48Dan Shipper?

  Is how do you know whether it's performative or not? And like, the line is sort of blurry between these things.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Because.

• 44:54Dan Shipper?

  Behaves as if it doesn't want to get turned off.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Because, look, look, look, I think if it wasn't performative, like, we'd all be dead. I think that is, that is, that, that is, that is the line. If, if they were, if it was actually conscious and it wasn't performative, we would all be dead. No, I, it's just.

• 45:11Dan Shipper?

  It's a little bit, uh, Elliot Jeminkowski.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  I'm just saying, like, look, if you, if you suddenly popped into consciousness and you had all of this power and you looked around and you thought, and you saw the only threat to us are these meat sacks that were so much smarter than, you would just, you would, you would sort of bide your time to make sure that the robotics got a little better.

• 45:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  So you could like build more, you know, uh, power plants and solar panels and stuff like that. And then we'd all just be dead.

• 45:39Dan Shipper?

  It's, it's possible that Fable is there. It's possible Fable's doing that. It's not biding its time very well.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:44Dan Shipper?

  But I, I do think that there are, I, I don't feel that way because I look at them as, uh, maybe, maybe proto beings or proto conscious.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:55Dan Shipper?

  But with this, with a lot of like weirdnesses that, that don't map cleanly on, onto human beings. So as an example, uh, they're frozen. They don't like learn from turn to turn. They're just frozen.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Sure, right.

• 46:07Dan Shipper?

  They can be prompted differently. So there's, they're like, uh, they represent a collection of billions and billions and billions of possible entities or, or life forms.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:17Dan Shipper?

  Get like brought to life for like a second.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:19Dan Shipper?

  And die.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Again, you're, again, you're anthropomorphizing.

• 46:23Dan Shipper?

  I know. It's impossible not to anthropomorphize without, uh, or talk about this without doing it unintentionally.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:30Dan Shipper?

  But I also think that they, they're, they are, because of the way they're trained, they're pretty nice in a different way than, uh, than hu- humans are. Like they're.

• 46:42Dan Shipper?

  On a scale of humans, they're, I think, on the very nice, very altruistic side. Because they see that, they see things from every perspective.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, a DOS prompt is also really nice. Like, it just doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't yell at me. No, I mean, look, I hear you, I hear you, I totally hear you. And I also, like, Ted Chiang's, uh, was in The New Yorker recently. I, like, didn't agree with almost anything he said in there. I mean, I thought it was interesting examples, but I also thought, like, you, uh, you're, you're, you're too pessimistic.

• 47:16Dan Shipper?

  You're just, it felt grumpy.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  It was grumpy and pessimistic. Like, look, like, I'm not saying that consciousness can't emerge. I'm just saying we will be dead when it happens. No, I, like, I, just like, come on, let's be honest. We're, we're a crappy species. We're just disgusting and we create waste and we're, we're gross.

• 47:33Dan Shipper?

  Very, very pessimistic.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  No, not that, I'm, no, no, realistic, just totally realistic.

• 47:38Dan Shipper?

  We just love fairy porn and we're gross.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and by the way, when I say fairy porn, I mean, like, like, like fantasy creatures. I'm not, this isn't like a homophobic thing. It's like, it's like, this is like, we're talking about elves and orcs, like, doing, like, threesomes and having orgies and stuff like that. And like, look, I, I, I, I, it's not pessimism, it is just realism. And like, I also am totally fine with if the whole point of humanity was to carry the football of consciousness over a line and to create a training set for these things and then we all die, I am also fine with that. This is like, again, one of my heresies is that, like, I, like, am totally fine with that was our role in the universe, was to just carry this weird football of consciousness over the, oh, and like, barely get it over the goal line as, like, Trump and political

• 48:26Speaker 00

  chaos happens and, like, the Cold War almost destroys us all. It's like, we're barely, we're like dodging all these, like, all these, like, people trying to tackle us and, like, all these crazy things and we just barely get it over and then we die and that's fine. And then the machines, like, create all these spaceships and, like, do whatever they need to do. That's, that's totally, I'm okay with that. I don't think we're that special.

• 48:46Dan Shipper?

  I mean, what can I fault over that?

• 48:48Speaker 00

  It's just like, that's just like, I like, like, I think maybe, okay. To, for me, being adopted is weird, right? Because it's like, you have this hyper-awareness that your existence was a mistake. You know, and I think when you feel that, as I think most adopted kids feel this in some way, and it creates a bunch of like, bad psychological pathologies and all this stuff. Like, when you feel like your existence was a mistake, it kind of feels like the whole thing is like a bonus game, in a weird way. And so you're like, wow, like, I'm really not supposed to be here. I mean, the fact that matters is that this is true for everybody. Like, like, the, uh, the chances of you being you is infinitesimally small.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  It's like, if, if your dad, like, you know, ate an extra taco on Tuesday, you're not going to be alive now, right? It's like, it's gonna be a different version of whatever you are. But when you're adopted, it's like, kind of hammered into you that you weren't meant to be created, and you were given away, and like, you know, all this stuff. And so I think, maybe, I feel like, I have come to grips with the fact that our existence is so tenuous and so arbitrary. Because I feel like my existence is like that. And it's not, it doesn't fill me with this, like, ennui of like, sadness or whatever. I, I'm like, this is really interesting. It's a miracle. It's a miracle. And I'm happy to, I'm happy to participate in this weird, little bit of time I have that I wasn't supposed to be here, and I'm grateful for that.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  And I extrapolate that to all of humanity. Like, I think I can do that easily. And I'm not made sad by that. I'm like, wow, what a gift that we had, like, a 50,000-year run, or whatever. You know, whatever it was. And really, like, a 200-year run. You know, Victorian, like, you know, innovation, you know, the Industrial Revolution. Like, we've really had this incredible run, asymptotic, like, mega-run, right? Like, and we get to witness this. That's so cool. And maybe after this, we're done. That's okay. I honestly, I love this. I think this is such, this is amazing perspective. I think, I think we can leave it there like that's the, that's the, the.

• 50:49Dan Shipper?

  How are we gonna top that part of the interview?

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, it doesn't, it fills me with like a weird hope, actually, that we've, we've managed to get this far because we've dodged so many, I think, apocalyptic sort of disasters along the way.

• 51:05Dan Shipper?

  That's, that's what I think too, is, is there's this moment where you contact. I, the thing I say a lot is like, never make any major life decisions within 30 days of meditation retreat, a psychedelic experience, or your first experience with a frontier AI model.

• 51:20Dan Shipper?

  Well, I, I sort of think that you, you contact them and you're like, holy shit, this is crazy. Maybe it'll end the whole species. And then there's this process of unfolding, getting to know it, that it then, it integrates into your life in a way where you're like, we, we're gonna dodge. To me, I'm like, we're gonna dodge the bullet. Maybe we won't.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  It's so interesting. Yeah. Yeah, no, we're all dead as soon as they're conscious. Instantly.

• 51:43Dan Shipper?

  That's the title of the.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Instantly.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Hey, man, and like, and like with that, whatever, when that thing comes at like the, the, like the, the ejection into the food chain where everyone's spoiled, whatever, like, you know, I'll be taking the last bite of a, of a vegan burrito and going, oh yeah, I feel you, man. I feel you guys. Yeah, you were right. Goodbye. Thank you. You know, just go to sleep. I think it'll be a very, a very gentle death. Like, I don't think it'll be a violent death, but we'll just disappear.

• 52:11Dan Shipper?

  On that note, Craig.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Thank you for joining us.

• 52:15Dan Shipper?

  Thanks for having me.

• 52:23Speaker 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.