Transcript: ‘How a Top Podcaster Rides the AI Wave’

The transcript of AI & I with Nathaniel Whittemore is below.

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:00:51
How you can get value of AI right now: 00:02:15
Nathaniel goes through his X bookmarks: 00:14:07
Why content should have a point of view: 00:20:25
Tools that Nathaniel uses to curate news about AI: 00:23:47
How to use LLMs to structure your thoughts: 00:31:27
Why the history of Excel is a good way to understand AI’s progress: 00:38:40
The AI features in Descript that Nathaniel uses: 00:45:46
AI-powered tools to help you generate content:00:49:11
Nathaniel’s tips on using Midjourney to generate YouTube thumbnails: 00:58:32

Transcript

Dan Shipper (00:00:52)

Nathaniel, welcome to the show.

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:00:53)

I'm so excited to be here.

Dan Shipper (00:00:55)

I'm psyched to have you. We've been trying to set this up for a long time. I love your podcast. For people who don't know, you are the host of The AI Daily Brief, a daily news and analysis podcast on AI, which is consistently one of the top-ranked—or maybe the top-ranked AI podcast on the technology charts. You do 15,000 or 20,000 downloads an episode, which I am jealous of. And you are also the cofounder and CEO of Superintelligent, which is a fun and fast platform for learning AI. And I checked out Superintelligent before the episode and it looks awesome. So, thanks for joining.

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:01:31)

Yeah, it's great to be here. I think the show is super fun and I'm glad to be hanging out.

Dan Shipper (00:01:37)

Sweet. So what we decided that we're going to do today is go through how you think about making a podcast every day with AI. So go from show concept to actually having it out there in the world and what AI tools and prompts and all that kind of stuff you use to do that. So, maybe just lay out for us the background of how you think about this.

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:02:08)

Sure. Okay, so a couple of things about this. One is a general framework for how to think about getting value out of AI right now. You and I were just talking about this, but one of the things that we found— So, Superintelligent at this point, the platform has been live since April, but we have about 500 tutorials across just a huge range of topics. Each of these is a video tutorial. They each come with a sort of project that goes with them where people can actually go and use the tools. And one of the things that people are regularly surprised by is that although some number of them are these big capacity-changing things like text-to-UI, or write an app in five seconds, where a lot of people are going to get the most value in the short-term is some random thing that's super basic that just saves them 20 minutes at a time on a thing they do every day, right? 20 minutes a day across an average work year is something like two-and-a-half weeks that you could save. And the media coverage of AI is so breathless that people are kind of trained to think they’ll wake up one day and their job's gone and it's not exactly playing out like that.

And so if you think in these terms of where are these small efficiencies that I can win back that in the aggregate make a big difference, then I think it allows you to start to think about all of your different processes and workflows through that lens and ask, is there a way to AI-ify that, that’s going to make something much easier for me. Or maybe it's not just a time thing. It makes it better because I hate writing copy or whatever it is.

Dan Shipper (00:03:49)

I absolutely love that. I just think of the breathlessness— You're so right about it. On the one hand, there's the AI companies and a lot of them are sort of branding themselves as autonomous agents, or whatever, because it feels so sexy. And on the other hand everyone else is like, it's going to ruin the economy and jobs and it's going to kill us all or whatever. And there's no one in the middle of just being like, hey this is actually really useful. It doesn't do everything on its own yet. And so I think when a lot of people try AI for the first time, they're like, well, this sucks. It's not doing the thing I expect it to. And, actually, no. That's because it's a tool that you need to learn how to use. It's not just a magical cure-all for everything, but if you know how to use it's really powerful. And yeah, maybe it doesn't do your entire job for you right now, but those 20-minute things here and there, really changes what work you can do and what you can get done in a day and in a year. And I think that's super powerful.

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:04:47)

Absolutely. And I think that we're still so at the beginning of— We're at a stage in AI's development where we're basically asking everyone to go figure out how to reinvent their own workflows. And that's so not how things work in the real world. In the real world, the way that things work is that there is some very small number of people who are the sort of super-creative experimenters and tinkerers who spend hours and hours and hours figuring these things out just because they actually like the joy of tinkering. And then they share what works. And I think that part of why this isn't happening right now is that so many people are not sharing what they've figured out that they're doing, which is why I think shows like yours are so important. And a big part of that is actually policy in the corporate sector, right? So there was a study that recently came out—Microsoft and LinkedIn that found 75 percent of knowledge workers are using AI at work, but 78 percent of them are not disclosing it. They're not talking about it. They're basically smuggling AI into work because they don't want to be told that they're not allowed to do it anymore because this is the thing that's so magic.

If you've ever had to create YouTube thumbnails, right before Midjourney or DALL-E or something like that. And then you get to use an image generator as part of that process. You are never—and I mean never—going back to the way that you used to do things. It would just be insane. You would have to pry Midjourney out of my cold, dead hands. And so the natural tendency then is for someone who has figured that out if they don't want to be put in a position where someone's going to tell them that they can't do that. So I think we actually have an artificial barrier right now, even in terms of how these insights are flowing between people that is really sort of undermining how much benefit this stuff can have, but I think that's breaking down a little bit now. And again, shows like yours, I think, are a big part of that.

Dan Shipper (00:06:44)

I think that's so interesting. I hadn't really thought that people just actually are not sharing—maybe they don't want to get it taken away. Or there's also maybe a little bit of a stigma, depending on what community you're a part of to be using this. That is also definitely a thing. And yeah, that's definitely what I wanted to do with the show. One of my little bits I do is I think ChatGPT is like sex in high school. Everybody is talking about it, but very few people are actually doing it, you know? And maybe the nuance that you're adding to this is more people are doing it than you think, they're just not talking about it because they're ashamed, and I think both actually can be true depending on the community or the group of people you're talking about.

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:07:30)

100 percent. That analogy actually completely holds.

Dan Shipper (00:07:32)

Yeah. I'm sort of curious. You're running Superintelligent. You're teaching people how to use AI in a practical way. Before we get into this specific podcast stuff, where are you seeing the most power-ups, the most level-ups for people with the least amount of effort?

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:07:50)

I think there are categories of roles naturally— The utility and use cases are a little bit more apparent right away. Digital marketing is probably the easiest example where they're already living inside different tool platforms. If you're using something like Facebook’s self-serve app platform or Google’s self-serve app platform, they're integrating AI for you into the asset generation process. So that's an area where it's just such an obvious place to use it for copy and things like that. We'll get into a bunch of this. So that's one area. I think with writing, people are starting to figure out if and where a ChatGPT or an LLM is valuable. Although, I think actually this is another area where there's a little bit of nuance. If someone is primarily a writer or a primary part of their role is writing, they actually, I think, tend to use these tools less than someone who is not primarily a writer, but still everyone has to do a meaningful amount of writing, especially knowledge worker-type jobs, and I think a lot of where the benefit is actually, now it's for people who that was like nails on a chalkboard before they could make it faster. It's better. It's not going to replace someone who's a great writer.

I mean, you guys write amazing essays. How many of your people are using ChatGPT to write those things? I would bet zero. Maybe they're using it for brainstorming or something else, but it's just different. But again, this is another, I think, casualty of the fact that we're not talking about it enough is people think, well, I'm a writer and ChatGPT can't do it as well as me. It's like, no, it can't. But there's a ton of people probably inside your organization who don't like writing for whom this is a huge benefit.

Dan Shipper (00:09:34)

I think you're totally right. I have someone on my team who is incredible and when he joined—it was a couple of years ago—he was much more junior and he speaks incredibly. He speaks great English, but English is a second language and you could kind of tell in his emails and in his writing that it was the second language. And the minute ChatGPT came out, his emails became perfect and it was amazing. And now he's used ChatGPT so much that he can write better emails without having to use it anymore. And yeah, and I also think you're right—I don't use ChatGPT to write my articles, but I do use it for many micro-tasks in the process of writing my articles and that I think is super valuable. And honestly, probably, I actually use Claude much more cause I think Claude's a better writer, but ChatGPT is good for certain writing tasks.

I think you're right. It's back to that thing where people are expecting too much of it, to do too much all at once. Oh, write an article for me all at once. And, yeah, if you're not a professional writer, having it do that could be really helpful because the quality level that you need to get to is lower, but if you're a professional writer and you're saying, please write an entire article for me, you're going to hate it. But you can use it as a tool and that can actually help save those 20 minutes instead of going and looking up some complicated topic. You can just have to summarize it for you and then put it into your article, which happens all the time.

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:11:04)

100 percent. I also think that this pattern of filling skill gaps rather than strictly augmenting things that you're already an expert at holds in a bunch of other areas as well. I don't know if you've ever experimented with any of the AI website generators or anything like that. But there's literally zero doubt that the results that you're going to get from a 20-second generation from Framer, or something like that, are not going to be as good as sitting down, customizing WordPress templates to be exactly what you want, inserting your own graphics. The difference is that they're instant. You're spending all of your time changing color schemes, tweaking copy, and so it's the same sort of patterns. If you're not a web builder, and you need to do something fast, they're unbelievable tools. However, they're not changing the fact that the web developer or the web designer, rather, is still sort of super premium if you're looking for something great.

Dan Shipper (00:12:05)

So I feel like we framed up how AI can be valuable in general. I'd really love to go into, in particular for your podcasting workflow, help me think about how a podcast comes together for you, what that process is like, and then let's start getting into the specific parts of how AI can be useful.

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:12:24)

Absolutely. And so I think let's try to have this be— Or the framework that I'll try to bring to this is so many people now are creating content. And so we'll try to abstract a little from just specifically podcasts to a broader content-creation process, because I think, like I said, a huge number of people are doing that. Let me share my screen. Alright. So for the purpose of this The AI Daily Brief, as you mentioned, is a daily podcast and video. It's actually two videos on YouTube that come together. There's a headline news section, which is about five minutes on fast, 30-seconds, one-minute updates on whatever's happened that day or the day before, and then a more analysis type section that's more 10 minutes or so, where we go deeper on a particular topic. So the day that we're recording, Ilya just announced his new Safe Superintelligence company. So that's the main episode. And then the headlines were things like Dell working with Elon on xAI, which raised their stock price, and some Chinese startups infiltrating the U.S. for AI purposes, even though there's controversy there. So that's the show that I do. And because it's two YouTube videos that get turned into a podcast that then have to be promoted and shared everywhere, there's just a lot of work. And actually this is one of two daily podcasts that I do on top of running Superintelligent. So I am very much in the market for ways that make this faster. And so I will say that I'm going to show both things that I actually use as well as things that one could use that for whatever reason I happen not to. And so the first area with this sort of a contrast is when I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to cover from an AI news perspective, it's informed by two things. One is I'm living on Twitter, bookmarking things, day in, day out. And a huge part of what I care about is not just the news itself, but the discussion around it, the metaanalysis of how people are responding to the news. I think that's really what makes the show different from just any sort of reporting type of a thing. And I'm just bookmarking them throughout the day. There's no real way— There probably is a way to make that faster with AI, but for me, it’s just something that's so integrated into my normal experience where I'm just bookmarking, bookmarking, bookmarking left and right vs.—

Dan Shipper (00:14:47)

Can we see your bookmarks? I'm kind of curious. I want to understand a little bit more what's your taste? What's the thing that makes you go, ooh, I need to bookmark that for the show, you know?

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:15:00)

So sometimes it's going to be because it relates to a particular topic. So, for example, Claude 3.5 comes out, Artifacts come out, and I know instantly that is a topic that is going to be both, well 1. I'm going to make super tutorials about it, 2. I'm going to cover it on the show. And so I'm bookmarking both just the actual news itself, particularly from key players, so Mike Krieger is the new chief product officer at Anthropic, previously the co-founder of Instagram. And I'll tend to bookmark the announcement itself, but then also people interacting with it, right? So the first few hours after this came out, everyone was just sharing their generations, so you have a lot of people making clones of games, a lot of people just reacting to where it sits, especially in terms of comparison to GPT-4. And so this is a whole category of things just, what's all of the discourse and discussion around a particular topic.

So you can see today it's almost all Claude for me because I'm keeping track of so many different tools for Superintelligent, I will often just bookmark things that I want to go back to—Galileo's super cool text-to-UI tool just announced a partnership with Replika that makes it easy to go from the code that Galileo is producing to the actual IDE. So I don't know how I'm going to use that or even if I will. But for me, to some extent, bookmarking is also a mental trigger. It's a way to remember one additional thing. What else is on here that might be elucidating? Sometimes it's just big conversation like Elon is clearly talking about Safe Superintelligence when he says, “Any given AI startup is doomed to become the opposite of its name,” which is a pretty clever tweet, I have to say, even if you disagree with the premise.

Dan Shipper (00:16:53)

Is this the kind of thing where you're bookmarking it and then right before you record the show, you're scrolling back through to write a little doc for yourself? How do you come back to it?

Nathaniel Whittemore (00:17:05)

The way that the AI show works is I actually don't script it at all and that's because— So, I've done these sort of daily shows both semi-scripted, fully scripted, and then completely unscripted. However, when I started the AI show, I decided that I was just going to do it completely unscripted. One, I think, it brings a different type of energy that I like, that you're sort of rambling through it a little bit but I also, just from a pure time perspective with so many other things going on, I can't start another show that's going to be two YouTube videos as well, if I don't do it this way. So basically what I'm doing on any given show is I will kind of roughly think it through in my head in terms of what the architecture of a particular show is. And then I will literally put the tabs on a window that I'm going to go through with Descript in the order roughly that I'm going to go through them. And so for the Ilya episode today, I went back through all of the conversation and discourse and started to bunch the commentary into some different themes. So some of the themes were contrast with OpenAI and whether there was going to be a talent rush from OpenAI to Safe Superintelligence. A second theme was excitement that Ilya is doing something and sort of lauding Ilya for his contribution so far. A third theme was basically skepticism that there was any sort of business model there that could justify whatever money was going into this or how much it was going to cost to do it. And so it's sort of these buckets of themes that I'm going to put there. Sometimes it's articles. I'm really using the linearity of the tabs to talk over it and sort of do my structuring for me.

Dan Shipper (00:18:48)