Transcript: 'How to Find Your Next Big Idea Hiding on the Internet'

The transcript of How Do You Use ChatGPT? with Steph Smith is below for paying subscribers.

Timestamps

Introduction 01:12
Leveraging ChatGPT to generate great ideas 22:11
Why ChatGPT is ideal for understanding complex concepts 29:29
How to use ChatGPT to organize huge datasets 48:00
Shark tank! Dan pitches Steph business ideas 1:00:41
Steph’s first move while validating a business idea on the internet 1:07:51
What to look for in a customer review 1:11:09
Tips on secondary keyword searches 1:17:45
How to gather market data from a simple Google search 1:26:24
What type of trend charts depict a good market 1:31:55
Using SEO tools to find useful insights from Reddit: 1:34:11
How to gather data about competitors: 1:42:37
Lightning-round questions from X 1:55:51

Transcript

Steph Smith (00:00:00)

So all I said in this case was a really simple prompt: “Hey ChatGPT! Could you explain what dark matter is in the voice of SpongeBob?”

It starts literally with brackets, says, “Imitating SpongeBob’s enthusiastic and playful voice…”

Duh, duh, duh. Dark matter.

By the way, how great is it that they label your chats so cleanly?

Dan Shipper (00:00:16)

Wait. I have to stop you. Are you using ChatGPT 3.5? I’m just going to say I’m disappointed.

Steph Smith (00:00:24)

I know. I’m sorry.

It says, “Use an LLM to de-bias your content.”

Dan Shipper (00:00:28)

Can you put in one of my articles?

Steph Smith (00:00:29)

Yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:00:30)

This author’s bias is evident in his optimistically view of AI’s role in the future economy.

Steph Smith (00:00:35)

I have a pretty fundamental question for you. If you don’t like the ear flaps, how were you envisioning being warm?

Dan Shipper (00:00:43)

I’m just the ideas guy.

Steph Smith (00:00:48)

I feel like there’s not search volume for this yet.

Dan Shipper (00:00:50)

I’m just taking it on the chin this interview. My writing is biased and my ideas have no search volume. I feel bad—officially.

Dan Shipper (0:01:12)

Steph, welcome to the show.

Steph Smith (00:01:16)

Thanks for having me. This is exciting.

Dan Shipper (00:01:18)

I'm so excited to have you here. For people who don't know, you are a prolific online creator. You're the host of The a16z Podcast—an amazing podcast. You're the author of Doing Content Right, which is about writing, creating, and scaling a blog in 2023.

And you are the creator of Internet Pipes, which is, I think, the most detailed toolkit course I've ever seen for doing research on the internet. I binged it all yesterday and it was just like—it was amazing. I loved it.

Steph Smith (00:01:47)

That was the goal. Before I shipped it, I was like, are people gonna get any value from this, but the whole point was just, hopefully, you go through it and you're just like, oh my god, I didn't know this existed, or you just end up down some rabbit hole.

Dan Shipper (00:01:59)

Yeah, if you're a person who likes internet rabbit holes, it's the the most amazing thing to spend time with. So, thanks for making it.

I want to start with sort of, in doing research for the episode, what I found to be what I think is sort of an underlying theme in the work that you do, and how you think about things—and it actually aligns with an essay I wrote recently, which I did not have you in mind when I wrote it, but I think it really works pretty well. So I want to read you like just a little bit of that essay. And then I want to ask you kind of about that.

So, this is the opening. It says, “Time isn't as linear as you think. It has ripples and folds, like smooth silk. It doubles back on itself. And if you know where to look, you can catch the future shimmering in the present. This is what people don't understand about visionaries. They don't need to predict the future. They learn to snatch it out of the folds of time and wear it around their bodies like a flowing cloak.”

And, like I said, when I wrote that, I wasn't thinking about you, but I actually think this is very core to your work. And the underlying premise of that passage, and I think your work, is that the future isn't evenly distributed. It's here and it's on the internet. And all you have to do is like go and find it.

Steph Smith (00:03:11)

It’s there—yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:03:12)

And if you have enough curiosity and enough patience and enough intuitiveness, you can find it. And if you're looking for your next big idea, the internet is sort of like the place to start. So I want to just talk about that. Tell me about that realization or that thread in your work and how you came to it.

Steph Smith (00:03:30)

Yeah. The coolest part is that that was always true, right? Time is on this spectrum. And, to your point, some people look at visionaries and they saw the future early. There's this really cool video from 1964, I think, where Arthur C. Clarke basically talked about this idea of remote work. Of course, that term didn't exist back then. But he basically was like eventually, maybe even in 50 years—which is actually kind of funny because that was the time frame that it ended up being—people can work the same way in London and Bali and Tahiti. And so that's one example of just, again, this is not a new concept that people see the future early, but what is a new concept is the internet, which allows everyone to kind of get access to that data that also didn't exist back then. Right?

Coming back to your question about when did I kind of wrap my head around this idea that the future is actually present in these little pockets online is: My first job in tech, I ended up working a lot within the SEO sphere. And it's funny because that sphere sometimes gets some hate because people are like, oh there's all these black-hat tactics and people doing content farms and things like that, but if you really just boil things down and you think about what search engine optimization is, it's billions of people who use this website, Google, the biggest website in the world, and every single day they go to Google and they tell it what am I looking for; what do I not understand; what are my wants, needs, desires all baked into these queries. And Google's just one example, right? Many other websites kind of bake this information about billions of people as well, whether it's Reddit or Wikipedia or Twitter or the apps that you have on your phone.

And that's what's so cool is that not only do those websites exist, but now there's tools that help you understand that information. And, you could say, democratization is so nice because if you think about it, even just like a couple decades ago, if someone wanted to get information about the world, it's the people who were rich enough to run a study on a mass of people, or the people confident enough to walk up to someone and ask them questions. But today it's just all in these data sets online. I think that's really cool.

Dan Shipper (00:05:48)

Yeah. I think it is absolutely amazing. And you're so good. At any site, you have a bunch of different tools—for Reddit, you have all these different graphing libraries that you found. And I'm sort of curious, I feel like AI in general, and maybe ChatGPT in specific, turbocharges some portions of that. I'm curious, how and if that has made its way into your research workflow.

Steph Smith (00:06:13)

Yeah. I mean it's limited in my workflow, but the concept is certainly there. And you could say it's the extension of everything I just said, where if you think about keyword research, there are tools like Ahrefs that help you understand the keywords and their volume and their secondary keywords, which tells you what else someone's interested in. But imagine that turbocharged—that literally is AI, right? That is something like ChatGPT, because it's not just scraped Google, it’s scraped all the websites we just talked about, and not only has it done that, but it's turned this massive data set into—some people joke that like the world's intelligence is now in a CSV, right? It's kind of funny, but it's that is the natural extension. And then now we're seeing totally new interfaces where someone maybe who couldn't make sense of a data set now can just query and ask questions. Right?

Dan Shipper (00:07:09)

That's me. I definitely couldn't have made sense of a data set before.

Steph Smith (00:0:11)

But even if you think about the precursor, some of the websites you mentioned, one of them is this cool map of Reddit. To me, that's also someone who, similar to ChatGPT, created an interface that made this massive data set of millions of subreddits into something where it's, oh, now I understand that if someone's on the subreddit DigitalNomad, they also care about Southeast Asia, and they care about lifestyle design, and they care about freelancing.

And, again, that's someone who's introducing a user interface to make sense of the world that again, now we have this data set for. And I think AI is, both the interface—but also just the sheer increase in data also matters there, right?

Dan Shipper (00:07:53)

Right. That makes a lot of sense. I want to get into how you specifically use ChatGPT in one second, but I have one other question that's just sort of popping into my head, which is, I feel like whenever you talk about finding things on the internet, it seems to be about like finding sort of business ideas or opportunities or trends, which I love. It's so interesting to see all these little things that are starting to trend you're like, oh, maybe I could make a make an app or make a website or whatever. But then, I also think you seem to also have this fundamental curiosity about what's going on on the internet. And I'm curious what that brain space is like, what is it about doing this kind of deep research that gets you.

Steph Smith (00:08:30)

I think it's because the most niche things on the internet are no longer niche, and that in itself is exciting because every single one of us has the very high-level interest that we will talk to someone else about—maybe it's your favorite sport or the mass book that someone else might find interest in, but there's also all these little things that, because of the scale of the internet, there are now enough people who might care about something. And the second-order effect of that is that I think we actually discover things that would never have been created before. At the very beginning of Internet Pipes, I talk about just the weirdest things like someone sending garlic bread to space, or someone creating this maze for a squirrel, and that latent interest maybe always existed, but you would never be motivated enough to create something like that because you'd be the only one to enjoy it. And, again, the scale to reach enough people who might care about something just actually changes the paradigm of what people are willing to do. And I think that's so cool. And so, yes. I think there's a deep appreciation not just for a trend that someone can make money with but the creators that are emerging that just do cool stuff for the hell of it. And the internet actually enables that.

Dan Shipper (00:09:45)

I love that. There's that—I don’t know if it’s an urban legend or if it's actually real, which is the reason why cats are popular on Reddit is because before Reddit, no one had any place to share their cat because cats are antisocial creatures. But finally there was like a place to share what your cat was doing. And it was Reddit because you could take cat pictures and—

Steph Smith (00:10:05)

Yeah, no. I love this. I talk about these not-so-niche YouTube channels and—you can apply that, there’s not-so-niche websites too. One of them is this YouTube channel just about Japanese passenger trains.

Dan Shipper (00:10:18)

Can we see it?

Steph Smith (00:10:19)

Yeah. I need to remind myself of the name, but it's just these Japanese passenger trains and they have only posted I think 30 videos and they have 1 million-plus subscribers and I'm just pulling it up now. It's called Travel Alone Idea and they started in 2021, so it's not like one of these phenomena where someone was early to a channel like YouTube and they got that benefit. They have 240 million all-time views, 1.5 million subscribers—and yes, again, only 30 videos with the average monthly views apparently being 700,000. And the best part of this is—by the way, this is not a scenario either where someone is just the best editor and has really figured out how to nail the algorithm. This person has no narration, there's no sound, the edits are minimal, and it is this person walking around these Japanese passenger trains, but again, there's this fascination I have with the fact that there are enough people who like this that this channel is insanely successful.

Dan Shipper (00:11:34)

I have just decided that I don't like ChatGPT anymore. I'm really into trains now. If I can get this many views with only 30 videos.

Steph Smith (00:11:42)

Well, I mean one of the reasons I'm bringing this up is, like I said, I think it kind of defeats a lot of the common mantras around content around like, oh, well, you have to find a new channel and be early to it, or you have to master thumbnails. I mean, these are not good thumbnails either. It's just a picture and a red arrow. Right? But that's why I actually think some of these tools on the internet are also very interesting because they help you surface, is there actually demand for this thing or interest in this thing?

Dan Shipper (00:12:08)

There's another one that you shared I think it's called TVTooFar.

Steph Smith (00:12:12)

Yes. TVTooHigh, TVTooLow. And the most internet thing ever is—so, TVTooHigh is the largest one, and I think people saw that subreddit and—

Dan Shipper (00:12:23)

For people who don’t know what it is, tell us what it is.

Steph Smith (00:12:25)

Yeah, so TVTooHigh is a subreddit where—I included this in my like original note in Internet Pipes because I was like, this is just the most internet thing I've ever seen. And shout-out to fellow creator Pat Walls. He's the one—I saw he shared on Twitter. But this subreddit has a 180,000 subscribers to it and it's just people posting pictures of TVs that are too high. So, I have them up on my screen. And again, it's just TVs that are apparently too high. Some of them are obvious and some of them are less obviously too high. But then, the nature of the internet, someone saw this and then they created r/TVTooLow, r/TVTooFar. And then, best part is that there is a subreddit TVJustRight, but it's private. And I just thought that was the best.

Dan Shipper (00:13:17)

That's great. I love that. And for people watching or listening who are like, why are we talking about this? What is the point of this? You have this thing that you say, which is like, “don't overlook silly,” which—tell us what that means and why you think it's actually important to be aware of things like TV Too High.

Steph Smith (00:13:34)

Yeah, so I mean, in this case, I don't know. Maybe someone listening can invent a business idea around this, but I think there is a large part of all of our personalities, which is not oriented around, let me be really serious and figure out an opportunity right now. It's like, let me laugh about this thing, let me, again, watch a Japanese passenger train, or a bunch of other YouTube channels about someone who's picking locks or is like a toe doctor or all these weird things. And there's a weird part of all of us. And by the way, if there is interest from all of these people, which is proven by the scale of some of these things, I I just think it it's a window into what people really want and if you can understand what people really want, maybe there is again a direct spinoff in terms of how you can leverage it. But I also think it helps you just create better things in the world and also it's almost the second- or third-order effect where if you follow these trails, I think you actually understand your fellow humans a little better.

And then, maybe not directly, but eventually you will create something. A good example is a creator, Neal Agarwal. For me, if I think of the creator that I think epitomizes the internet the best, it is him. And he just creates these websites at neal.fun. I'll pull it up. N-E-A-L dot fun. And each one of these projects, I bet his first one, no one cared about, and a second one maybe got some traction, but he still was making no money. But he's what he's got 20-or-so projects here. And now this is his job. Now he actually makes money from this. And, again, I think it's just this, don't—another way to put it is if you ignore silly, you are so focused on what is immediately actionable and what you can immediately take advantage of. And I think that's just a very short-term, myopic view of the world.

Dan Shipper (00:15:22)

I totally agree. I feel like so much of the best stuff is just wandering through random stuff that for whatever reason at first, you can't really understand why and then years later, it comes together in this really amazing product or book or whatever. And so having too much of an emphasis on what's practical today, you miss out on making amazing stuff later, and also it’s just more fun.

Steph Smith (00:15:46)

I was gonna say, a lot of people, if you think about, especially in our creator space, I think, can be really myopic and being like, what's the newsletter that I think has the most demand or something like that, or how can I create something that goes viral immediately, and then they just have no staying power because they're not having any enjoyment.

Neal Agarwal is one example, but the creators I also really respect are the people who you can tell actually enjoy what they're doing and have a deep fascination with it. It's not just about having fun, I actually think this is interesting and that rubs off on other people.

Dan Shipper (00:16:20)

Totally. Totally. So I think this is a good segue into ChatGPT. Yeah, let's do it. So what I want to do first is I want to just talk to you a little bit about how you use it. We're going to get into us doing some sort of mutual explorations and all that stuff. We have a lot of good stuff planned. But yeah, tell us at a high level what do you use it for? How does it fit into your life? And maybe we can go through some chats.

Steph Smith (00:16:44)

Yeah. So I broke this down into what is this—seven different ways that I currently use it. And what was interesting about this exercise is that I hadn't really thought about that before. Currently, ChatGPT is not my go to for anything consistently, as in, I don't like wake up and know, okay, for this kind of problem, I automatically go to ChatGPT. But now that I've broken this down, I'm like, okay, I actually have a framework to think about when I reach for it more often—and I want to reach for it more often, but these are the different areas.

So for me, one of them is idea generation. And that doesn't mean just broadly idea generation. But for example, I threw a meetup recently for people at Internet Pipes. And I was like, I want to make this internet-themed. And so I had some ideas, but, ChatGPT is really good at kind of helping me extrapolate from a base.

Another thing is just helping me understand complex things in simple ways. And that's where you can bring in it. And I once asked, “Help me understand dark matter in the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants,” and it did it really well and it was enjoyable.

Also, practical things. So every time I'm doing anything related to code, I actually find it much better than Stack Overflow because it actually walks me through the problem or whatever. Cooking, unshrinking sweaters, things like that.

Another area is debates and it's not so much that I'm looking to debate ChatGPT. I actually want ChatGPT to give me both sides of a debate for something that I’m—every so often you feel like you have an inclination of, I have a strong opinion here, but I also have a feeling I don't know enough about this subject. So, I feel like it's really good for that, to just be like, here's the other side, help me see this.

Cleaning up data: I've only used it for this a few times, but it's actually really nice because you can kind of, unlike Google, actually structure or tell ChatGPT to structure and answer a certain way. I feel like that's one of the most underrated parts of really most of these AI tools is to say, this is the kind of answer I want.

And then, finally, the last two were—this is mostly for content, but just, the base for titles and intro, just to get something on paper. And then sometimes just for fun, I've had it write—the other day I had this deep appreciation for APIs on the internet, and just how much of our web is run by APIs. So I was like, hey, can you create like a sonnet for APIs? And it did, and it was pretty good. ‘Cause I mean, that's the kind of thing where it's like, I would never have spent my own time doing that.

And then the one thing that I have not gotten ChatGPT to crack is ASCII art. I mean, it makes sense why it can't quite do that yet. But, yeah, sometimes just for fun, just to be like, Can ChatGPT do this?

Dan Shipper (00:19:35)

I love that. I love that. There's a lot of good stuff in here. One of the things that I'm picking up, in the idea generation or understanding complex things or debates, it's like there's a mind-expanding aspect of the way that you're using it—or as a theme. I'd love to dive into a couple of those. Maybe we can start with some of the ways that you've used it for idea generation. Do you want to show us a few chats?

Steph Smith (00:19:56)

Yeah. Why don't I just show you. I'll start with—by the way, how great is it that they label your chats so cleanly?

Dan Shipper (00:20:04)

Wait, I have to stop you. Are you using ChatGPT 3.5?

Steph Smith (00:20:08)

In this case, I will say 90 percent of these were actually through 4, but long story short, I had enterprise account and then had to switch that for work. And then—

Dan Shipper (00:20:18)

I'm just going to say I'm disappointed.

Steph Smith (00:20:21)

I know. I'm sorry. But again, at least, I would say, for sure, over 50 percent we're done through 4.

Dan Shipper (00:20:28)

So you are a 4 user, but this is not representative of all of your ChatGPT usage.

Steph Smith (00:20:30)

This is actually a great example of just, humans are slow for silly reasons. I just think, if you think about probably the reason that people don't use ChatGPT enough, it's just pure friction and habits. And so this is an example of where I've just been too lazy to upgrade this account, and so I have my work account that I'll use for some things, and then I'm just like, yeah. It's okay. You can shame me. Everyone on the internet can shame me.

Dan Shipper (00:21:02)

I just have to. I am professionally obligated to point it out.

Steph Smith (00:21:05)

Well, you know what? It's helpful because now that you pointed it out, I won't get as railed in the YouTube comments.

Dan Shipper (00:21:11)

Okay. So tell us about this chat. Where did you start? Tell us what mindspace you were in and how you decided to do it and then what the prompt was.

Steph Smith (00:21:21)

Yeah, so, I was throwing a meetup for people who had bought Internet Pipes in San Francisco, and I feel like a lot of meetups are really bad at one, being in any way, shape or form special, right? It's just a bunch of people in a room and it's not memorable in any way. And then two, I feel like people don't learn anything or meet the right people, or really it just kind of comes and goes. And again, maybe that relates to the memorability of it. But I said, “Hi ChatGPT—.” By the way, do you always greet?

Dan Shipper (00:21:53)

I'm very nice to ChatGPT. Definitely.

Steph Smith (00:21:55)

Yeah, me too. Me too. But not 'cause of the whole eventual overlord thing. I think it's just, again, a habit.

Dan Shipper (00:22:02)

Oh, I'm just neurotic and when it takes over, I want it to like me.

Steph Smith (00:22:06)

So you are the looking-ahead, singularity, want to be in good standing.

Dan Shipper (00:22:09)

I like to plan ahead.

Steph Smith (00:22:14)

Okay. So I said, “Hi, ChatGPT. I'm hosting a meetup for fellow people who love the internet. I'd like to run a few icebreakers. What are some good ideas for splitting the group into smaller groups? I'd like to have it be fun and internet-related. For example—” Oh, this meant to say “by their favorite social media app and screen time usage,” which by the way, it's so nice that ChatGPT can like just ignore most of your typos and stuff. And by the way, I didn't even realize I asked this first, but another thing about meetups that I feel like often isn't good is just you end up in these random groups, so there's no sort of commonality and so I started with, yeah, “how do we break them up?”

Dan Shipper (00:22:50)

I want to stop you right there. Just on the prompt, I think there are a couple interesting things. You're giving it enough context—you're telling it a meetup, but, people who love the internet, I think, is a really interesting thing to give to it that someone might not think to do, but it really changes the output. And then I think you also gave it a couple of small little pointers, like splitting the group into smaller groups—you have a little bit of a vision for what you wanted to do and, I think, all that kind of stuff, or even examples like their favorite social media app or screen-time usage, all that kind of stuff is going to get you better results. And it's interesting to see.

Steph Smith (00:23:38)

Yeah. And by the way, I almost was like, should I split them by screen-time usage? But then I was like, I feel like that's shaming some people. But yeah, I think you're right that you obviously get better results when you give some guidance. And one of the reasons I wanted to share this one is because these are some really good ideas. At least I think so. I actually went with the first one, or some version of it where, basically, I had printed out a bunch of very popular memes that everyone recognizes, and I put them on different tables and was like, what's your favorite meme? And even though that's a very, very thin slice of like people's brains, I just thought it was an interesting way to match people. But I got this from ChatGPT. So they said “meme match-up, emoji charades, social media speed dating, tech time capsule, internet trivia challenge, profile picture puzzles,” and it keeps going. But the point is that it actually came up with some pretty good ideas for how to actually match people based on internet phenomena.

Dan Shipper (00:24:29)

Just one shot. You have one prompt and then you got an idea that you ended up using.

Steph Smith (00:24:32)

Correct. I kept going. But I always say, can you come up with more? Do you do that?

Dan Shipper (00:24:39)

I do that a lot. What I also do—and I actually picked this up from an interview that I did with Linus Lee, who's a researcher at Notion—is you know the redo button? It's that little circle with an arrow. I just click that like four times and then it'll just keep going.

Steph Smith (00:24:55)

So you always do the refresh, not “ask for more.”

Dan Shipper (00:24:57)

I mean, sometimes if I've done the refresh a few times and it's not giving me like new stuff, I'll do more, but I start with a refresh.

Steph Smith (00:25:02)

Yeah. In this case, I just said, can you come up with more? In this case I was really happy with the result, but sometimes you'll be like, oh, can you make them shorter? Can you like adjust some part of it? But in this case it just came up with more. So again, pretty good.

So actually, in this case, if you remember, my original prompt was actually, “Can you figure out how to split these people?” and not what to do with them, so—

Dan Shipper (00:25:28)

Oh, that's interesting. So it sort of got it slightly wrong, but it was still a good response.

Steph Smith (00:25:37)

It was like it knew what I actually wanted.

But I still wanted to split them up. So, I don't know, in this way, it got a little confused, but then, yeah, I asked it to follow back up on that. And then I think in this case I said “that are more tech-related.” And then, yeah, I mean, this one's not so crazy. At the end, I did decide to do some trivia as well. And I asked it to come up with some good questions. In this case, actually, I don't think I used any of the questions, but it helped kind of surface—you know when you see what you don't want? And so in this case, I felt like these were like really obvious questions about like, oh when was the hashtag invented? Or like, what does this internet acronym mean? And what I wanted is for people to come out of the trivia with not just new concepts, but a new appreciation for the internet, to be like, how cool is this, and so I then ended up coming up with my own questions, but with that realization.

Dan Shipper (00:26:30)

I think that's really cool. Yeah, I think it's such a common experience with ChatGPT is sometimes gives you the exact thing that you want. It gave you a little idea where you're like, yeah, this is great yeah. And then a lot of times it gives you something that's not actually right but in not being right, it helps you refine what you actually want, which is itself a valuable thing. And, that's sort of the benefit of this, always-on, always-accessible sparring partner is that kind of thing.

Steph Smith (00:26:57)

Yeah, and the nice thing about it is you get that same dynamic with humans, but with ChatGPT you can be so explicit and sometimes crude about, this is not at all what I wanted, and you can't really do that with humans.

Dan Shipper (00:27:10)

And ChatGPT doesn't get annoyed with you, and it's never asleep and—

Steph Smith (00:27:13)

I know, I know. There's so many reasons why it's a 10x experience.

Dan Shipper (00:27:18)

I love that. That's really cool. Anything else on the idea-generation stuff, or should we go on to the next thing?

Steph Smith (00:27:24)

Let me see. What else did I put under here? Well, sometimes it helps me—not so much in this practical way of, help me think of an activity, but sometimes I just need it to kind of fill an idea that is kind of spinning in my head. And so one example of this is I had this realization a while ago that our phones are so dynamic in that you think of all the different appliances, like a flashlight or a measuring stick, or—I'm trying to think of other examples—a camera, right? All of those things are physical appliances or goods that independently existed. And then the phone was like—think of all of the things in there. And I could only think of a handful. And I was like, I just want a sparring partner to fill in those gaps. What else is in this crazy device?

Dan Shipper (00:28:21)

The perfect question for that. And how often do you have that question? Maybe not that often, but when you do, it's like, oh, this saved me so much time.

Steph Smith (00:28:30)

I know, right? And it and the best—to your point—ChatGPT questions are the ones where you're like, I actually don't think this exists explicitly like this on Google. I might be wrong in this case, but like it'd be much harder to understand your question.

Dan Shipper (00:28:44)

Yeah. The information exists. It's just like no one has collected it and you get a real time collector for you.

Steph Smith (00:28:52)

Yeah. Exactly. So that's another example, I think.

Dan Shipper (00:28:55)

That's cool. And then let's talk about understanding complex things. I think this is something that people do a lot. I actually was just texting with a friend of mine who said his favorite thing to do in the car these days is he will put ChatGPT on voice mode and then just like talk about quantum mechanics with it while he's driving or whatever.

Steph Smith (00:29:12)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. I should start doing that. I'm putting that in my back pocket.

Dan Shipper (00:29:17)

It's really cool. So yeah, I'm curious what you're using it for. It looks like you're maybe using it for explaining things like dark matter or VAT withholding. Show us some of the things you’ve been learning.

Steph Smith (00:29:30)

Yeah, where's the dark matter one? I mean, that was like the best example for me of, I went to, I went to this conference and I met this astrophysicist and he gave this talk about, well, astrophysics, and the most interesting thing from it for me was this point about dark matter and how we just don't understand it as a species. Sorry, I'm trying to find it. It's me talking to SpongeBob. Here it is. See, “explaining dark matter with SpongeBob.” Okay, so, all I said in this case, is a really simple prompt. “Hey ChatGPT, could you explain what dark matter is in the voice of SpongeBob?”

Dan Shipper (00:30:08)

Why SpongeBob? You know, why not any other cartoon character? How did you pick SpongeBob?

Steph Smith (00:30:23)

Yeah I feel like, in this case, I don't know if it was super thoughtful other than thinking about what is a cartoon character that I know is really simplistic and also fun, right? How can we introduce different conceptual elements? And I think something that's underrated here is the more boring version is: you can just say explain this to me like I'm five. But if you think about even just what we talked about earlier—the fun in things being helpful in learning as well. If I get the explain it to me like I'm five version, I almost feel like it's a little condescending or I won't remember it. In this case if, I mean, it starts literally with brackets, says “imitating SpongeBob's enthusiastic and playful voice,” and then it says like, “Ahoy me matey,” it's just like hilarious, right?

And then it's like, “Glad you asked about this wondrous mystery of the deep universe known as—dun dun dun—dark matter.” And this is one of those examples where I was like, I will be doing this again. How perfect. And so I won't read through the whole thing, but it basically does go through not just the concept of dark matter in this case, but it was so incredible. It just talks about the stars in the galaxies first and, let's first acknowledge what those are and what we know about them. And then it goes on to talk about, okay, well, there's this thing that we actually don't know it's our “mysterious friend dark matter,” and it was really good at kind of breaking down that concept.

Dan Shipper (00:31:50)

That's awesome. And after reading this would you characterize yourself as a dark matter truther, or do you think that dark matter is a real thing, or what's your take on dark matter?

Steph Smith (00:32:00)

I mean, I think, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure like the scientific community agrees that this thing exists.

Dan Shipper (00:32:04)

It's definitely real.

Steph Smith (00:32:06)

We can measure it—we just don't know exactly. It's kind of hard. It breaks our brains, which is why I went to ask SpongeBob about it, because it's a thing that we can measure and we know exists, but does not follow the laws of many things like normal matter, which is kind of how our brains operates right?

We're not structured to understand dark matter. That's why we can't see it, hear it, feel it, et cetera. So, yeah, I definitely I guess I'm a dark matter truther.

Dan Shipper (00:32:35)

I think dark matter truthers think that dark matter is not real.

Steph Smith (00:32:38)

Oh, oh, oh. Interesting. I gotta go down that internet rabbit hole. Oh, by the way, I didn't even remember I did this. Then I said, “Great job,” just because I was curious, and asked it to do another iconic character, and then I said, “Pick your favorite,” and they chose Gandalf.

Dan Shipper (00:32:55)

Gandalf. I love that. In Gandalf's wise and somewhat grave tone. “You shall not see dark matter!”

Steph Smith (00:33:07)

Yeah, exactly, I mean, it's pretty incredible. That's why, I mean, ChatGPT is obviously very useful in its utility, but I think an underrated part is it's almost a game in a way.

Dan Shipper (00:33:16)

Totally. I think I would have picked Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory. If I had to pick one, that was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. But, yeah, I think this is great. I think it it seems to replace some amount of Wikipedia rabbit-holing that that people do because you can get a Wikipedia article that's written specifically for you.

Steph Smith (00:33:41)

Yeah, I mean Wikipedia is dense and I think the real, again, 10x experience is to be able to usher it into the level of complexity that you're at. Because actually, I mean, think about it. I chose SpongeBob, but had it come back with something that was too complex for me to understand, I would just say bring it down further and you can kind of move with the program, which is just fundamentally not what we had before.

I mean you can imagine different versions of humans like that, but even in the case of something like dark matter, even our top scientists don't quite understand all facets of it. Those people, there's the curse of knowledge, right, where they don't know how to or—that's not the term. Basically the phenomena where they can't articulate something complex to other people. 'Cause they don't—it's hard. There's just so much of a gap there. But in this case they can. This program can take something very complex and usher it back down. And also the other way around too.

Dan Shipper (00:34:39)

Yeah. That's one of the little rabbit holes I've been down recently in my own thinking about ChatGPT is that it's very good at— One of the things that it has made me see is that there are many different versions of English. I'm not talking about dialects. I'm talking about like the way that academics speak versus the way that lay people speak or the way that product managers speak versus the way that lay people speak or all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of inefficiency in our lives, just because those subgroups of people can't talk to each other. IAnd even think about the way that different subreddits. They all have different languages for the way that they talk.

Steph Smith (00:35:17)

Yeah! Think of WallStreetBets. I won't use the terms. They call each other certain things, but it's a community. And, by the way, so my husband went to Princeton and I make fun of all of him and his friends because sometimes there's just like this list of words in their vocabulary where I'm just like no one knows what Sisyphusean means—or Sisyphean, I don’t even know how to say it! But they use terms where I'm like, it’s cool for you, but to your point, there is a gap.

Dan Shipper (00:35:42)

There's a gap. And I think ChatGPT is really good at doing like these subtle translations between different groups of people that wouldn't ordinarily be able to communicate. And that's really, really, really valuable.

Steph Smith (00:35:57)

Yeah. And to your point, it extends also to other languages. Right? I was listening to something yesterday—was it on your podcast? Because I binged something yesterday where someone was talking about how they basically knew people who were not very fluent in English. And then they skyrocketed, right to full proficiency. That is so cool, by the way.

Dan Shipper (00:36:16)

Yeah, it’s really cool. It's sort of magical to watch and it'll only get better. Yeah, it’s really fun.

Steph Smith (00:36:22)

I know. This is the worst this tech will be. I love that.

Dan Shipper (00:36:25)

Yeah. Cool. So that's great. I love this use case. Going back to your list there. There was another one. One of the things I'm sort of curious about is it sounds like you're using it to see other sides of debates. I love that. Tell us about that.

Steph Smith (00:36:46)

Yeah. So let me pull up this— So I went to a dinner in Napa with with my husband and a friend, and it was a pretty expensive dinner and we got not great service. And then we ended up just being kind all quibbling about how much we should tip. And then we start talking about the Square check-out things that are at cafes.

There’s this whole thing I've been seeing more. There's just an interesting backlash against tipping—and I feel that to some degree. But coming back to what I said before, I was kind of like, I have this frustration with some of the tipping changes, but I also am what's the other side to this? What would someone else say about the people who need the tips, et cetera. So I said, “Hey ChatGPT. Could you provide me with a debate between two people arguing about whether tipping should exist in America?” And then it did—and I didn't even, by the way, ask for this format, but it literally broke down like there's a moderator and then there's this guy named Alex talking to Jordan, and it just breaks down in really clear bullet points what each side would say. And I just thought it was really helpful to, I guess, understand both sides. And obviously you can apply this to way more controversial topics than tipping.

Dan Shipper (00:38:03)

If it did at all, how did it change how you think about tipping?

Steph Smith (00:38:07)