Using ChatGPT As a Copilot For Your Mind

**Dan Shipper** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:09)
We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now.
At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors, like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik.turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co.

**Dan Shipper** (0:45)
When I have an article idea, I'll often start with just this really messy document full of quotes and sentences and little things that might go into it. Then I'll be like, I don't even know where to start with this. This is crazy. Then I will just be like, can you put this into an outline? I'll just paste the entire document into ChatGPT and it'll often find an outline.
The outlines it comes up with are really basic. But sometimes, I think one of the things it's really good at is pointing out the obvious solution that you missed because you're too close to the problem.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:20)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we're sharing an episode of the new podcast, How Do You Use Chat-GPT? How Do You Use Chat-GPT is hosted by Dan Shipper, founder and CEO of Every, a daily newsletter that promises the best business writing on the Internet. In just his first few episodes, he's had guests on the show, including Sahil Lavendia, Nat Eliason, Linus Lee, and today, yours truly.
This conversation is both extremely practical and a real exchange of ideas. Coming into it, I had used Chat-GPT mostly for unfamiliar tasks, where I really needed help orienting myself and getting started. And, of course, I've got great value from a wide range of different use cases. But to be honest, I hadn't found Chat-GPT super helpful for my own writing process, so I was really interested to learn more about the methods that Dan has developed to use Chat-GPT as a thought partner and a writing assistant. Learning from him inspired me to do more of this for myself. Toward the end of the episode, Dan asks me what I am most excited about next, and I mentioned the new Mamba architecture and state-space models more generally, which I honestly can't stop thinking and talking about. We'll have a big episode on this coming very soon, and I'm glad to report that I did use some of Dan's recommendations to help develop the strategy, the devices, and the overall structure for that episode in a way that I did find legitimately very helpful.
One note before we get started. There are a few points in this episode where we each shared our screens to show off content visually, and while I think you will be fine with just the audio version, if you want to see the visuals, you can check out the YouTube version of this episode.
Of course, there's always lots more to learn, so if you like this sort of content, I encourage you to check out How Do You Use Chat-GPT with Dan Shipper.

**Dan Shipper** (3:33)
Welcome to the show.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:35)
Thank you, Dan. Great to be here. I'm excited for this.

**Dan Shipper** (3:37)
I'm excited, too. For people who don't know, you are the founder of Waymark. You are the host of the excellent podcast Cognitive Revolution, and you are a GPT-4 Red Teamer, so you are responsible, or one of the people on a team of people who are trying to figure out how to make GPT-4 do bad stuff before it was released, which you had a really interesting tweet thread about, I don't know, I think a week ago or two weeks ago, something like that.
So we're very excited to have you. I think you'll have a lot of insights that I'm excited to share with everyone. I think one of the things in thinking about your work that stands out in thinking about Cognitive Revolution, in particular, the podcast that you run, is I think you have this idea that one of the values of AI is in helping us to offload cognitive work. So just like in the way that machines, in the Industrial Revolution, we offloaded manual physical labor, AI will augment or offload a lot of cognitive labor from humans. And I wanted you to just talk about that.