Interview with Steph Smith, host of the a16z podcast and creator of Internet Pipes, about the future of internet creation in the age of AI. Topics include how AI changes what humans perceive as valuable in art and creativity, which AI tools are poised for success, and how AI narrows the gap between ideas and execution. Demonstrations include using Midjourney to develop an aesthetic, testing AI tools (Consensus, Globe Explorer, websim.ai, Granola, Suno), building a simulation of the internet with AI, and a discussion of when LLM hallucinations can be useful. # Channel Presentation Observations — "The Internet Creator's Guide to the Future - Ep. 26 with Steph Smith" ## Explicit Self-Description ### Show Name and Format - The show is called **"AI and I"**, hosted by **Dan Shipper**, per the guest's greeting: *"welcome to the show"* and the closing outro: *"subscribe to AI and I… with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship."* - It is an **interview/conversation podcast with live screen-sharing demos**, evidenced by repeated walkthroughs (Midjourney homepage, Consensus, Globe Explorer, WebSim, Granola) during the episode. - Episodes are **numbered** ("Ep. 26") and feature **repeat guests**: *"you are the first repeat guest to AI and I."* ### Host's Self-Description of Role and Work - Dan Shipper describes himself as a writer/creator covering AI: *"I write little newsletters about AI on the internet"* and *"I write about it every week."* - He names his topical lane: *"I'm doing AI, intersection of AI and productivity, psychology, creative tools."* - He references interviews he's conducted: *"I've interviewed filmmakers, I've interviewed writers"* and an episode *"with Reed Hoffman"* and *"with Dave Clark."* ### Stated Show Identity (from rebrand discussion) - Dan articulates a deliberate aesthetic for the show and podcast brand via a "vibes document": he wants *"curiosity and wonder and authenticity but there's also this technological exploration,"* anchored in a **1970s sensibility**: *"the 70s feels like the era where that was most true… we're going to the Moon… hippies."* - Cited inspirations: **Carl Sagan's Cosmos** and **Jackson Browne** music. ## Intended Audience - **Internet creators and AI-curious makers**: recurring framing like *"where do creators go from here"* and *"I want more than frog"* suggests viewers interested in creative work shaped by AI tools. - **People actively using AI tools in workflows**: practical demos of Midjourney prompting, Consensus (~$10/month pricing discussed), Globe Explorer, WebSim, Granola notes app, and Suno music generation assume hands-on tool users. - **Steph Smith's audience overlap**: her project **Internet Pipes** — *"exists to help people make sense of data on the internet"* — is described as both a project and a **course** (*"so it's a course too, yeah"*), and its imagery demo targets people building online businesses (*"help them ideate and then help them bake the potato"*/idea). ## Claimed Scope - The channel claims coverage of **AI tools, creative workflows, and the future of internet creation**, demonstrated by the episode's range: AI image generation, AI-native art forms (*"the make it more meme… one of the first true AI content formats"*), handmade creator ecosystems, research tools, interpretability, and AI music. - A breadth claim about AI's creative future: *"there's going to be a new generation of artists that gets birthed from that."* ## Observable Presentation Patterns (demonstrated, not claimed) - **Conversational, playful tone**: extended comedic digressions (baking a potato to ash and "reincarnation," Tucker Carlson in a pancake hat, "Razer fish" joke) alongside substantive tool walkthroughs. - **Live-demo-heavy format**: the host and guest navigate tools on screen in real time rather than describing them abstractly. - **Guest-as-collaborator dynamic**: the guest co-drives content, showing her own projects and creator collections; the host responds analytically (*"AI is quite good at helping you articulate your taste"*). - **Experimental close**: the episode ends by generating an outro song with Suno from the episode's topics, consistent with the channel's stated AI-exploration identity. - **Humorous AI-generated outro**: a spoof over-enthusiastic subscribe pitch closes the episode, reinforcing an irreverent, AI-native presentation style. ## Notes on Source Limits - No curated metadata was supplied; all observations derive from title and transcript. - Guest statements (e.g., Steph Smith's a16z employment, *"I've kept a full-time job"*) describe the **guest**, not the channel, and are excluded from channel-identity conclusions. # Delivery Observation: "The Internet Creator's Guide to the Future — Ep. 26 with Steph Smith" ## Format & Structure - **Conversational two-person interview/podcast** with live screen-sharing. The host (Dan) interviews a repeat guest (Steph), and much of the episode is structured around **live software demos**: Midjourney's homepage, Consensus, Globe Explorer, websim.ai, Granola, and a Suno-style song generator. - The episode ends with a **humorous AI-generated outro**: > "oh my gosh folks you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to Ai and I..." ## Tone - **Casual, playful, enthusiastic.** Both speakers laugh, joke, and riff on absurdities (a potato baked to ash, "a cremated potato," Tucker Carlson in a pancake hat). - **Genuine delight at AI outputs** is a recurring emotional register, e.g., > "that is the coolest freaking thing in the world" and > "oh my God and look they once again understood the assignment." ## Recurring Phrases & Verbal Habits - **Filler-dense, off-the-cuff speech:** heavy use of "like," "um," "you know," "whatever," and restarts — e.g., > "um I I think that I I think that broadly like your your take is like exactly right." - **"Sort of" as a hedge:** appears constantly — > "it's sort of like the cottage core aesthetic," > "it's sort of a game," > "it's sort of outside the science at this point." - **Enthusiasm intensifiers:** "so good," "so fun," "so clever," "so enjoyable" — e.g., > "she's so good," > "that's so clever," > "mid journey is so so so enjoyable to brainstorm in." - **Calling back to earlier jokes:** the potato and the "warm hat" recur as running gags — > "I'm just going to keep looping in the potato or maybe the warm hat." ## Teaching / Explanation Habits - **Live walkthrough as teaching method:** Steph demonstrates tools step-by-step while narrating: > "so I'll show you and like I would never have come up with this on my own but this is blind box design." - **Explicit framing of lessons:** > "I think maybe if there was any takeaway from this it's just it's interesting to see more of these tools be verticalized." - **Question-and-answer scaffolding:** Dan frequently prompts with "tell us," "what do you like about it," "how do you characterize" — e.g., > "tell us tell us what what you're using it for." - **Disclaimers when giving applied advice:** > "obviously you should do your own research" and > "again this is not like medical or science advice." ## Vocabulary & Themes - Distinctive recurring terms: **"brain massage,"** > "because it really was like... like a brain massage"; **"razor fish ratio"** (an invented in-episode term, from a misremembering of "Stockfish"); **"bake the potato"** as an extended metaphor for developing ideas. - Conceptual vocabulary cluster: "aesthetic," "visual language," "art" vs. "creator," "human feedback," "hallucination is a feature." - **Surprise-as-signal framing:** > "anytime I'm kind of there's a mismatch between what I think would exist and what I'm seeing data on that's a signal." ## Uncertainty Notes - Speaker attribution between host and guest is sometimes ambiguous without audio; quotes above were assigned based on conversational turn-taking, which is occasionally unclear (e.g., overlapping riffing around the frog videos). - Filler-word frequency is a strong pattern, but exact counts were not tallied; the pattern is clearly observable rather than precisely quantified. # Observation Record: "The Internet Creator's Guide to the Future - Ep. 26 with Steph Smith" ## Session Overview - **Speakers**: Dan Shipper (host, "AI and I") and Steph Smith (guest; first repeat guest on the show). - **Topics covered**: Using Midjourney and ChatGPT for design, the "make it more" meme, evolution of creators in the AI era, niche creator examples, the research tool Consensus, Globe Explorer, WebSim.ai, mechanistic interpretability, Granola meeting notes, and Suno music generation. --- ## Positions and Claims by Speaker ### Steph Smith **On Midjourney and visual design** - Created all imagery for **Internet Pipes** (her project/course helping people make sense of data on the internet) using Midjourney plus some ChatGPT. - Counters the common complaint that AI imagery lacks repeatable style: she found Midjourney "amazing" for maintaining a coherent visual language across stations (e.g., generation station, funnel, ecosystem). - Describes her aesthetic as **"early internet"**: colorful, somewhat pixelated, an evolution of the six-color early-web palette rather than a replica. - Method: scroll the Midjourney homepage/discover feed, find images she likes but can't explain, then **search the prompt terms** (e.g., *gilded ginkgo*, *blind box design*, *popular market style*) to self-educate about art styles. - Quotes her tweet: > "damn mid journey is so so so enjoyable to brainstorm in like a brain massage" - Admits uncertainty about her own intentionality: > "all of this is me speaking right now and I don't know if there was as much intentionality" beyond seeing an image she liked that fit the product. **On creators and AI — two directions plus a "messy middle"** 1. **New art only possible with AI** — she argues not enough creators ask what could *newly* be created, not just what can be done faster. Cites the "make it more" meme and embedded-imagery art (e.g., ancient Rome with a spiral). 2. **What benefits from a human doing it** — what humans value from other humans, distinct from what AI can't technically do. She cites: - **India Rose Crawford**: tiny sewn frogs living their lives on Instagram; 2.6M followers with only 134 posts. - **Magnus Carlsen**: plays "artist-like" chess, sacrificing pieces and avoiding memorized openings to test who is the better *thinker*, since the calculative game is "over." - Black Forager, sidewalk chalk artist David Zinn, acorn-sculptor David Bird, rock balancers, calligraphers, macro slow-motion videographers, hot-metal-ball videos, typewriter art, **watchmaggiepaint** (live wedding portraits — the time element and physical presence matter even though photos are objectively better). **Why she collects these examples** - Surprisal as signal: > "anytime there's a mismatch between what I think would exist and what I'm seeing data on, that's a signal." - Frames brains as analogous to LLMs that should be "trained with better data over time." - Claims these accounts reveal durable human preferences: seeing things blow up or up close, seeing humans be happy, and **cleverness** — creations filling "a gap in our brain we didn't think could exist." **On her own creative/business tradeoff ("razor fish ratio")** - Deliberately keeps a full-time job (a16z) so she never has to make the tradeoff between commercial and creative work; limited time is a forcing function to pursue only things she "lights up about." - States she told a16z when joining that she eventually wants to work on her own stuff; timeline TBD. **On Consensus** - Uses it to get a quick pulse on health/science questions (e.g., DHA and depression — tool showed roughly 69% yes / 31% no across papers). Not affiliated; pays ~$10/month. - Emphasizes caveats: "not medical or science advice," and the tool needs improvement. **On Globe Explorer** - Likes that it interprets and **clusters** queries (e.g., "weird quirky websites" grouped into absurd/niche/experimental categories), versus Google taking the query literally. Notes results vary because it's an LLM. - Open question she raises: whether people will actually change search habits for verticalized tools. **On mechanistic interpretability** - Excited about it partly for what it will reveal about **how humans connect ideas**, comparing the concept maps to a Reddit map she showed previously. - Suggests a "web of design aesthetics" built on feature connectivity would be valuable — currently in Midjourney/Lexica "you kind of have to stumble your way into what you're looking for." **On Granola** - Uses it for all meetings; praises it as an example of an ungroundbreaking-in-AI-terms tool that is "just done really well" — arguing the opportunity is in upleveling execution, not novelty. ### Dan Shipper **On AI and taste** - Claims a broader pattern: > "AI is quite good at helping you articulate your taste." - Used ChatGPT/Claude to analyze his own favorite writing and get language for what he likes; used this to create a "vibes document" for rebranding the podcast, targeting **curiosity, wonder, authenticity, technological exploration**, with a 70s sensibility (moon landing era adjacent to the 60s). **On the future of creators** - Agrees with Smith's framing: fully human-made work becomes more valuable in some segments, and new AI-native forms are being defined now. The "make it more" meme excites him as an AI-specific format. - Argues against dismissing silly AI content: > "there's going to be a new generation of artists that gets birthed from that." **On film and AI (Dave Clark anecdote)** - Filmmaker Dave Clark found AI tools advanced his Hollywood career: a too-weird-to-fund idea (Sci-Fi story about his dad in the 50s) became a viral 3-minute AI short, after which previously ignored producers reached out. - Claim: AI lets creators prove an idea works at low risk before needing funding — especially valuable in capital-intensive forms like film, less so in writing. **On dreams (asked of Consensus)** - His stated view: dreams relate to brain processing daily experiences, so they're "meaningful but fairly random"; dream *interpretation* is a separate, still-valuable creative activity even if not scientific. **On verticalized AI tools / unbundling** - Draws analogy to SaaS history: the last 15 years of SaaS as "unbundling Excel," but only after ~20 years of Excel adoption; predicts the same unbundling of ChatGPT over 5–15 years. Notes a prompt-builder a year ago was too early. **On mechanistic interpretability** - Describes Anthropic's Golden Gate Bridge Claude: features mapped and activated, like neurosurgical brain stimulation for a model; he tested it ("Annie Dillard... Bridge living in San Francisco") and observed the model disagreeing with itself and reverting to the bridge. - Views interpretability as important for **creative precision**: prompts are coarse-grained; manipulating underlying features would yield more exact outputs. **On hallucination** - > "Hallucination is a feature" — for creative purposes (e.g., WebSim.ai rendering fictional rubber-ducky and warm-hat e-commerce sites), making things up is the point. **On Wittgenstein and ChatGPT** - Prepared for a Reed Hoffman interview by having ChatGPT teach him Wittgenstein; found photographing dense pages and asking for explanation highly effective. Admits: "I was sweating so much in that interview." --- ## Shared / Interactive Observations - Both riff on the **"make it more" potato** (Smith's ChatGPT exercise: potato → baked → ash → reincarnated baby potato), which she used in Internet Pipes to illustrate "baking" raw ideas into validated ones. - Both joke about a running **warm hat / pancake hat** theme from a previous episode. - Both collaboratively demo **WebSim.ai** (hallucinated web pages with working links) and **Suno** (generating an outro song from show topics; ChatGPT used to compress the prompt to fit the character limit). - Smith notes the generated song "definitely took the tech" but "I don't think they captured the authenticity" — later conceding "it's growing on me." ## Qualifications and Tensions Preserved - Smith explicitly disclaims intentionality behind her aesthetic rationale. - Consensus results presented with caveats ("do your own research"; tool will improve). - Smith's "will people change search habits?" question is left **unresolved**. - The AI-generated outro song is judged as only partially successful (tech over authenticity). # Speaker Attribution & Provenance Record **Video:** The Internet Creator's Guide to the Future - Ep. 26 with Steph Smith (ID: `01a0f15b-0b60-7629-8aae-4f6e28853516`) ## Speakers ### 🎙️ Dan Shipper — **Host / Creator** - Identified as podcast host of *AI and I* ("our last episode," "welcome to the show"). - References his own newsletter work, rebranding of the podcast, and a "vibes document." - Closes with a subscription call-to-action segment (see Promotion below). ### 🎙️ Steph Smith — **Guest (repeat)** - Explicitly noted as the **first repeat guest**: *"you are the first repeat guest to AI and I."* - Creator of the **Internet Pipes** project (a course/project about making sense of data on the internet). - States she holds a **full-time job** (at a16z, implied by *"if anyone from a16z is listening"* and *"I told a16z also when I joined"*). ### 🤖 AI voice (end card) - Final promotional outro is delivered in a stylized/AI-generated voice ("Dan I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you"). ## Referenced Sources & Third-Party Claims ### Tools & platforms discussed (demonstrated on screen) - **Midjourney** — image generation for Internet Pipes imagery - **ChatGPT** — potato "make it more" imagery; interview prep (Wittgenstein); prompt compression - **Consensus** — research-paper consensus search; guest states *"I'm not affiliated with them, I've just used it"*; paid (~$10/month) - **Globe (globe.engineer)** — Explorer search tool - **WebSim.ai** — hallucinated webpage simulator - **Granola** — meeting notes tool used by host during recording - **Suno** — AI music generator for outro song - **Claude / Anthropic Golden Gate Bridge Claude** — interpretability demo (noted as taken down) ### Third parties mentioned - **Andrew Huberman** — health claims (fish oil/DHA and depression) fact-checked via Consensus - **Magnus Carlsen** — chess example - **Reid Hoffman** — prior interview episode referenced - **Dave Clark** — filmmaker interviewed in prior episode - **Wes Anderson**, *Grand Budapest Hotel*, Kelly Slater, Tucker Carlson — cultural references - Creators showcased by Steph Smith: **India Rose Crawford** (sewn frogs), **Black Forager**, **David Zinn** (chalk art), **David Bird** (acorn sculptures), rock-stacking, calligraphy, macro/slow-motion, hot metal ball, typewriter art, **Watch Maggie Paint** (wedding painters) ## Promotional Segments (flagged) - **Closing CTA:** exaggerated like/subscribe promo for *AI and I* naming Dan Shipper — delivered as stylized outro. - **Consensus:** explicitly disclaimed as **not affiliated** — demo segment, not flagged as paid promotion. ## Availability & Uncertainty - No curated metadata supplied; roles inferred solely from transcript dialogue. - Guest's employer stated as a16z contextually; **timeline for going independent noted as "TBD"** by guest. - Comment availability: **no information in source**. then I said now bake the potato that looks like a pretty baked potato now bake it more now it's kind of turned circular but it's still definitely baking more I kept asking it to bake it and this is the funny part I just kept going obviously right and then it keeps baking and now this is what I would expect right eventually the potato turns to Ash a cremated potato no can you guess what the next one is step welcome to the show thanks for having me again yeah uh you are the first repeat guest to Ai and I so uh it it is wonderful to have you our last episode was so much fun thank you um it is one of our most popular episodes ever so by popular demand you are back in the studio with me you might actually have to change the name to Ai and I and stuff and stuff yeah Ai and us and she uh so so last time we spent a lot of time like talking about um using Ai and other software tools to like find different businesses um and I know this time one of the things uh in in sort of the intervening period since our last recording one of the things you've been using AI most for recently is using mid journey to do design and and there's a little bit of chat gbt in there too so I want to start there like tell us how you're how you're using mid Journey how are you making images with AI yeah so mid Journey has been awesome I think many people are familiar with it but I've actually found you know one of the key maybe complaints around AI has been around imagery at least that like I can't really find a style or if I if I do something then like it's not going to be repetitive enough that I would actually integrate it into my brand or um things like that but I have actually found that it's been amazing so basically I should say at the outset all of the internet pipes imagery I think has been done through mid journey and like a little chat gbt and for people who don't remember remind us what internet pipes is yeah it's just this this project of mine where basically it exists to help people make sense of data on the internet but there are all these stations um so there's generation station and there's evaluation station and I wanted to be able to represent those stations visually and I really I mean I could have hired an illustrator but since I left the shipping of that project to the last minute I was like I need to create imagery and I need it to look good and I need it to basically represent these ideas that are a little um kind of amorphic right and so that's what I did and so I can show you actually if I just pull up the internet pipe slides um this was from our cohort mhm so you can kind of sense up so it's a course too yeah um but let me give you a sense of what this kind of looks like so for example this was generation station and you can see that was a piece of the overall course you could say um but all of these were created through mid Journey um and you can see up here at the top these ones at the top were created through mid journey and the ones at the bottom was an analogy that I was trying to communicate of baking a potato um which was related to baking ideas so the one at the bottom was actually done through chat gbt so maybe we can actually start there and then migrate our way back to M Journey love that yeah um you know how people have shown the make it more yeah that's like the it's like the New Meme where people are like uh make a make a programmer who's uh like late for their deadline and then it's like make them even later make them even later or whatever yeah and I've seen such funny ones there was one with Kelly Slater where it's like make Kelly Slater the best surfer in the world and then it shows him like R in a really good wave and then someone's like no no no make him better and it's just by the end he's like basically it's like the gates of hell with water and there's like sharks diving all around him and he's just looks like a badass and so um I decided to do that with um yeah with chachu b and so if I go to let's see if Chachi p is still down there we go so let's see where is it do you see potato here oh yes visualize potato yes is what CH a very important chat so yeah so I just said oh my God can you visualize a potato I just have to pause us here like when science fiction writers in the 60s were like really starting to think about like what what humans would use AI for I don't think that they thought the first like the first chat would be can you visualize a potato they did not and humans constantly surprised each other so yes I said can you visualize the potato and then they said yes that potato is like suspiciously like I probably wouldn't have picked that potato at the at the market it's got a lot of it's like a little Pock marked but um yeah just just saying know chbt we can you know human feedback it'll learn uh then I said now bake the potato that looks like a pretty baked potato um now bake it more now it's kind of turned circular but it's still definitely baking more I kept asking it to bake it and this is the funny part I just kept going obviously right and then it keeps baking and now this is what I would expect right eventually the potato turns to Ash a cremated potato no can you guess what the next one is um the thing that immediately comes to mind is like uh it turns into a volcano and there's lava coming out but that's just cuz it looks like volcano like I absolutely no idea what what it's going to be this was my favorite part of the exercise it turns into a new potato it is potato reincarnated baby potato coming from the ash yeah rising from the ash is like a phoenix I love it that's so good um so yeah this was I guess one area where AI was helpful in basically creating imagery where I just I honestly couldn't have even imagined this myself but also like showing the evolution of something so I know this is very silly but I actually use this imagery within internet pipes and then coming back to Mid Journey wait before we get to Mid Journey what was the um like what were you trying to show with this particular baked potato metaphor analogy thing yeah so it it doesn't make much sense without the voiceover but bringing this slide back up the whole idea of Internet pipes is not just to give people a bunch of interesting ideas and just call it a day it's to help them ideate and then help them bake the potato bake the idea to be like okay now that you have an idea who else is participating in this space is their search volume some of the stuff we talked about last time and then you know if you were to participate here's how you can differentiate and so there's an evolution of like just like a potato being baked you're baking an idea to something that's actually substantial okay um edible right to use the potato analogy once more um so that was just again I I felt like I needed something to be able to articulate that you're taking something that's you would never eat an actual raw potato to something that's usable yeah that's really interesting I feel like the the make it more meme is like one of the first true AI like content format meme formats you know um and I just I saw that everywhere for a while I haven't seen it as much recently are you still seeing it around not so much but I think it'll come back because to your point I said the same thing about that and then I don't know if you saw some of the other um specific art there was people who were creating almost like visual art that um had imagery embedded in it do you remember this it was like a picture of ancient Rome but within ancient Rome there was like a spiral or something like that no you didn't see that but that was another example of art that could not have been created without Ai and I'm very excited about whatever us humans figure out there because that's obviously not the end of it either but yes I agree this was a trend where it's like this actually could not have been done without this Tech yeah totally um and and so so bringing it back to Mid Journey like tell us tell us what what you're using it for uh in in this slide yeah so again these were this the different stations which if you're not immersed in Internet pipes won't make as much sense but each each station had an image associated with it and the goal was really to like after idea generation you want to basically like filter down and validate what actually matters so the next one next image I chose was a funnel then after that it was talking about like the ecosystem of what exists in that world so these are all images that again like kind of without that context don't make sense but there is a visual language um applied to these and basically everything else within internet pipes I'm trying to see if I have some other good examples down down below like you're you're trying to you're trying to get a particular visual style and aesthetic and mid journey is like helping you do that correct correct um and so mid Journey also makes it really easy to do that right how do you characterize like this aesthetic like go to the Internet pipes go to that first slide SL yes like that's actually that's like very cool like how do you think like how do you think about when you're putting that aesthetic together like what what goes into it this was just so this aesthetic I don't know if there's a term for it other than you know the way I describe it it's just early internet so it's kind of like not super refined definitely colorful maybe kind of pixelated um but maybe not as early internet in the sense that you know early internet it felt like there was maybe six colors yeah you know that actually showed up on a web page and so it's like an evolution of that per se but certainly nodding back to it and I actually wanted whatever internet pipes imagery I was going to use to kind of expand upon this imagery that you're seeing right now um and so what I did and I don't think people do this enough is just went to the mid Journey homepage and just scrolled because I'm not an artist designer so I just scrolled until I found wait can I see that I've never I've never even seen that they they never been to the mid Journey Discovery page no uh I didn't even I'm like still using it in Discord like I'm I do use it in Discord too but this is where I start for inspiration and then you know there's Lexica and other tools well um but I find the mid journey home page they do a very good job of curation and so you can see here where you know there's a bunch of different art styles in here and for each one of them if you were to click into it like what I wonder how this person communicated this oh let's go back I didn't realize that if you scroll oh yeah um all right so for this one I'm seeing minimalism and flat illustration will Barnett so that's clearly an artist um ballpoint drawing art style porcelain pattern with gradient translucent class melt and so for each of these you can search them right like do any of these stand out to you as interesting let's see um I think well let me just see what I like about the image first and then I'll figure out what I like so there's this sort of um I I sort of like the minimalism I like the um I like the color palette like the sort of like faded greens and yellows I like that it's like natural and organic um it looks like flowers that got like pushed onto a piece of paper I don't know what kind of art style that is but I want more of that yeah so what's interesting is often as I'm sure you know when you search something or you discover something like this on the mid Journey homepage there's going to be a mix of different things and so what I find when I find something like this is I do what you did which is great even taking a second to analyze what is interesting and then for the few that I think lend to that I'll just search them like I don't know what gilded gko is to you that sounds like a good good thing to check so you can search that and oops did I I think that's going to General you're right yeah I don't know why the search wasn't working let's try that again there we go interesting so I guess the genko part of it is like the kind of one of the kind of leaves that we're we're looking at the G genko leaves exactly so we've got that now let's go back let's try a different one I like the the Chinese Jan paper texture I wonder if that's the like let's try it the print thing seems like um you may have to X yeah yeah there we go okay it's just the paper but it's not the exactly so you can keep doing this um and we can try one more if you'd like but I basically do this I go to the homepage find an image that I really like and that I can't explain and then I'm basically giving myself I mean I'm sure all the artists won't agree with me on this but I'm giving myself some sort of art education around what yields the kind of imagery I like and so that's what I did with the internet pipes imagery where you can see a bunch of Cal and I share an account so but um here here we go I'm doing these like rare fruit tastings coming up and I wanted to continue the internet pipes imagery and so the continuity that comes from that original exercise I did comes from this it comes from blind box design popular Market style and a bunch of other things like solid background but those are the two specifically blind box design and do you know what blind box design looks like no I didn't either okay so I'll show you and like I would never have come up with this on my own but this is blind box design it some sort of of like Asian inspired like you've probably seen figurines kind of like this that is blind box design I want to look this up like what is what does it mean blind box design uh blind box economics refers to a system where a product is enclosed within a packaging that remains sealed so con concealing its contents from the consumer oh which is really interesting um so maybe it's like there's a certain seg of toys that are made in blind boxes that like have that particular kind of aesthetic yeah I mean I guess so and it certainly aligns with this but it's funny I didn't even stop to look up what it meant but isn't that so interesting actually that a type of toy and its packaging can yield a specific kind of design that you can then apply to some 2D internet that's really interesting yeah what was the what was the other prompt again the other prompt was popular Market style so I guess that's like a kind of blind box design popular Market style so I stole this obviously from an image that I had seen and I can't even remember what the image the original image was that I found on the the Discover page huh okay so see this is not what I would have expected but I guess it's taking it literally yeah you do blind box design Market style popular Market style yeah then you get this wow okay and and so so to you this is like this is sort of in the like early internet aesthetic or it's like at least compatible with it like what do you like about this I like that it yeah it feels um kind of energetic and when you add color to it to me it feels like this interesting merging of if you think about early Internet it's it's colorful in all these things but it's also so old right and so there's this quirkiness to it there's this curiosity when you see anage like that and I think this design paired with some new age colors is what I was going for and to be honest like all of this is me speaking right now and I don't know if there was as much intentionality other than when I scrolled mid journey I saw a kind of image that I liked that I felt like aligned with the kind of product that I was trying to create and then now I just have a prompt that I adjust for anything whether it's a rare fruit tasting or totally a next chapter or whatever it might be I mean I think the like the the broader pattern here that I see as well is um it AI is quite good at helping you articulate your taste so um yeah you see an image you like it you're like how what do I like about it and you just look at the prompt you're like oh it's blind box design or whatever yeah um I have the same thing with writing like I've done so much of like putting a bunch of my like writing I like into chat CLA and being like hey like uh like what are what's the common thread between these writers and it like will give me language for the kinds of things I like and that's like very powerful as someone who makes things because I can like then articulate like this is the kind of thing I'm trying to make and that's helpful for myself it's also really helpful for my team like um we just re rebranded this podcast and to do the to do the podcast I just sent you this um oh sweet this Vibes document I made and it's like I had to articulate like here's what we're going for and I I have a bunch of refences and like a bunch of things that I found in like AI is like it was chb was quite helpful for like helping me to like articulate like what do I like about this and where is it going you know yeah and I think like um that's that's super important for getting like a cohesive a cohesive brand like one of the things that I I identified is like there's this I want to have this like curiosity and wonder and authenticity but there's also like this technological exploration type thing and that um like the 70s feels like the era where that was like most true for me like it was sort of um we're going to the Moon um but like it's also still like pretty close to the 60s where it's like hippies and stuff you know so like um it just yeah so this is awesome Have you shared this externally uh I have I I tweeted it I tweeted a couple days ago um okay well this is awesome because I think as you're saying you not only Incorporated who inspires you but precisely when they existed in that iteration of themselves because I think you know it's let's use St Steve Jobs as an example like there were so many phases and so if you were to just say I'm inspired by this person that doesn't really get to what you probably are inspired by and sometimes as you're saying like using AI can get to the very pinpoint even if it's just because they give you the wrong example and you're like no not that um but I also just while you were talking pulled up this is when I was um doing the exercise of using that blind box design to come up with the internet pipes imagery and I just I did this this was the night of January 24th 12:46 a.m. I like I was like this was so enjoyable my tweet says damn mid journey is so so so enjoyable to brainstorm in like a brain massage because it really was like I had this image kind of and then I went onto the homepage and the combination of that inspiration mixed with the very very muddy thought I had turned into this and I was like yes that's great I mean I I actually I think brain massage is the ex is the exact right way to describe this image for me and it's it's not just mid-journey like you had to pick those you had to pick that aesthetic like if I used my journey I don't know if it would look like a brain massage well the brain massage was the exercise of when you get like when you find your particular aesthetic um and then I don't know if you see this on the right hand side but you said you also prompt in Discord because that's where mid Journey exists and it's also just really fun to see what else exists there even if it's as silly as this we just Tucker Carlson wearing a baseball cap made of Pancakes which is actually takes us right back to your warm hat a pancake would be would be a warm hat honestly yeah I mean uh I I don't think I had considered that design um but I do think uh pancakes do have the the layering necessary for uh for for a worm hat um might fall apart a little bit you know we'll get there we figure that part out um wow that's um that's that's really interesting I I definitely also scroll through the sort of like mid Journey Discord stuff while I'm like waiting for my stuff to uh uh to render and I don't think I've seen anything quite as entertaining as entertaining as that they they they rewarded me for my long exploration brain massage with something like that um yeah so I'm like I think uh sort of coming out of this like mid Journey art creation um one of the things that um I think you've been thinking about a lot is um given these new tools like what does that mean for the evolution of creators both creators who are um using AI tools but also just people on the internet who are just like making stuff um yeah tell us tell us what you've been exploring yeah so I think there's two directions I'm very excited about and then there's going to be a very messy middle yeah and the first direction is actually what we just discussed not so long ago with which is what can newly be created with AI that doesn't exist today and that's very exciting we've seen little inklings like the make it more but I don't see enough creators asking themselves that question of not just what could I have done before that I can now do more quickly but what kind of art can I now create with AI but then the complete other end of the spectrum is what can AI not do yeah and a lot of people talk about that in the job sense but in the artistic sense they 's kind of several facets of that it's not just online versus offline right cuz people be like oh I can cook offline so like that's different it's also did you see the the robot that makes coffee now so like I don't I don't know I don't know if that mean so so that actually it brings me to the second point which is what do people care about humans doing or or maybe modified in a way what benefits from a human doing it in terms of the reception from another human um and so I've been following a bunch of different creators and I'll just show you a few of them and just I would love your your thoughts um so this is one India Rose Crawford who I'm just going to share the Instagram accounts I'm sure they exist on other platforms 2.6 million followers this person has only posted 134 times wow and look what they do they create these tiny sewn frogs that live their lives on Instagram and it's not just Stills like you can see here if we go to the reals they're honestly just so excellent there's okay here's one 20.6 million views if I can oh my God I love humans all right so I mean for the listeners you're basically just seeing a tiny frog that someone has created living in a tiny home that the same person has created living its life and that's the whole video by the way it it doesn't get any more or less exciting than what you just saw what's really funny about this is it's sort of like um it's like the cottage core aesthetic or like the TRD wife like TRD husband Lifestyle on Instagram but like it's a knit frog personified in frog I think that's what makes it work um and uh I I I love this I love that you just like know know accounts like this I think your point is it's a really good one like what will humans value from other humans I think that that sort of gets lost a little bit like um yeah like maybe a human can can make a or maybe an AI will be able to make a video like this at some point but like we will still value like that it came from another person in the same way like cars are faster than humans but we still watch people race each other you know like I think there's I think there's a lot of room for that and it will probably increase the um the value of like handmade like writing or art or whatever yeah here's another example that you could call Art in a way um a lot of people cite the chess example where deep blue beat Kasparov a long time ago decades ago we still watch other humans play chess but on top of that even though we know AI can beat us the chess players that are standing out today you could say are acting more like artists so Magnus Carlson recently played a game where he like basically immediately sacrificed his Rook for a bishop which if you play chess for the listeners out there is just like terrible thing to do um you're down basically two points immediately and a lot of people look to Magnus not just because he's the best in the world but because he already knows that like the the calculus of Chess is over that's not what's interesting it's the personality he also does this thing in games where he knows that a lot of or basically any excellent chess player has memorized a bunch of openings and knows precisely what to do so the first piece of the game can be really boring and I I feel like he says that you know he doesn't want to play that game he wants to basically see who's the best thinker right and that's still up for grabs and so that there's almost the question there of you know what is still up for grabs and he intentionally gets people off standard openings even if it's technically bad in order to pursue that game that is really interesting and I've I've actually heard him talk about doing that for um like when he plays younger players who are like um really used to um uh just playing the computer like I think it's called Razer fish is the is like the stockish stock fish yeah I like Razer fish though version maybe I'll maybe we we should start Razer fish um uh yeah stockfish like um they're they're so used to playing stockfish that um they don't like when he plays like a weird set of openings like they don't know the like branches of that tree and so they just get lost but he's like I guess played the played those enough to like be able to um well he studied the mechanics more of what how to play chess well yeah so yeah I I do like the sort of like um if you can't beat him like change the rules of the game and like make it art yeah make it art honestly that that's an interesting question where maybe people be like you're you're getting too meta and weird but art is a very kind of amorphic term right you could look at someone standing on the street and say that's art and then you could look at 10,000 other people and say that's definitely not art and so what makes it art it's kind of expression but there's an interesting question to just ask even creators I would actually say not all creators are artists but a select few are and so how do you take what you're doing today and manipulate it in a way where you would actually feel comfortable calling it art I think it's actually a harder question than most people would think at face value yeah I think that calling what you do art is like a it's like a very loaded term you know and it feels I mean to me it's like I would feel self-conscious because it feels like self agonizing or something like I'm taking myself too seriously you know I write little newsletters about AI on the internet like it's not that big of a deal it's such a good point but um but like I do also like really care about like um sort of the the genuine self-expression portion of what I do and I do think like all internet creators like you're sort of forced to like there's this ratio of like how much business e like how good is it for business and like how much do you actually like care about it and like it and whatever and everyone has their own like ratio of yeah of the mix you know and like I guess true artists are like all the way over here and like just copywriters are like all the way over here you know yeah um that's definitely been like a thing for me to to to to Grapple with yeah where did where did you land what's your razor fish ratio my Razor fish ratio um is uh let's see I I really try um to when I'm genuinely I I I I really try to only write things that I'm like genuine genuinely excited about M um and I also really try to be uh like honest about how I'm feeling in whatever moment it is that I'm writing um and I've I think I've been lucky enough that like this there's this weird thing like if I was into like like flute playing or something like that it would have been like much harder for me to like monetize that without being like really commercial but like I write about and I'm just like super curious about like programming and AI like productivity and psychology and like all this stuff that like all kind of is in this thing where it's like it is actually kind of easy to like sell that you know um and so but I mean there's there's always there are always things where it's like I'm just doing this for me like I I wrote this piece uh a couple like a couple months ago about like the future of um the future of Science in Ai and and specifically how AI might change um areas of science where it would been historically difficult uh to make progress like psychology for example and I just like got like really nerdy about like philosophy of science and like predictive AI models or whatever and like I just I knew that no one would really care but I was just like this is for me like I got I got to do this you know um so what I what I've what I've learned to do is if you pick a specific Lane like for me I'm like doing AI intersection of AI and productivity psychology creative tools that that kind of thing you get to like go out of the lane sometimes if you just if you want to and so you reap the benefits of like having picked one but then you you can give yourself the flexibility dayto day to like just write about what you're interested in yeah I think that makes sense and almost just like having enough of a baseline where you don't have to think about optimizing fully therefore you can go on these Adventures by the way I listened to your episode with Reed Hoffman and I didn't know you knew so much about philosophy I was so lost candidly but it was great as a mind Bender to be like I have a lot more to learn I got to tell you I was sweating so much in that interview and honestly the only reason I got through it is because I mean I studied philosophy in college and I really liked that um but I like literally for like a couple days before that interview I just like sat with Chachi BT and I was like teach me about Vicken Stein like I don't remember anything that's incredible what a great use case yeah I mean it was it was honestly perfect for that cuz Vicken Stein's work is like so dense that um even me just like sitting there with no distractions like trying to read it for myself like it it's like really hard to get through and I can just take a picture of a page and like send it to Chach and be like what does this proposition mean and Chach is like here here like and I'm just like this is this is great now SpongBob well I I should have done SpongeBob you're right I thought of all the things from last time that definitely that was that was a big takeaway how yeah how have you thought about that like what's your kind of like um razor razor fish ratio um razor fish ratio we're going to make that stick um I guess I've intentionally not address the question in the sense that I've kept a full-time job so that I don't have to make the tradeoff right and I think eventually I will have to figure out I keep forgetting that you have a real job it's so impressive that you like do everything that you do and you have a real job yeah it's it's definitely a balance but that's intentionally and I've talked about this a lot so we don't have to talk about it much here but just because I have a full-time job and always have that means that I can be fully creative and only pursue the things that I want and also it's kind of a forcing function to only do that because I have less time so it's like I'm only going to pursue the things that I light up about instead of having a full day in fact my husband you know in talks if if I would ever you know go fully on my own will say things like you know I think you'll both love it and hate it in a way because you'll just have so much more of an open slate and way more time on your hands that's interesting and are are there plans to do that and if anyone from A6 Z is listening we can you know what I what I will say is that and I told a16z also when I joined that like eventually I definitely do want to work on my own stuff so that's next but I timeline TBD okay cool cool cool um maybe super quick if you're open to it we can literally rapid fire with through these cuz I feel like I don't want to just leave people with frog I want more let's do more let's do more okay okay so let's rapid fire through some of these so this is someone who forages online black forger that's the handle she's wonderful I met her at a conference and she just goes she's for for years people love her she's got you know around 2 million followers as well show us more of her stuff like what what do you like about her oh I think this is an example where it's certainly the personality like she's just incredible but also the kind of thing that most people don't know about she literally goes and like you know let's see what this one's about I guess she's telling us about some this Ley and Western are for starters the whole plant is edible secret is that the leaves are mu so good she's so good quick fact about her when I met her at a conference we were at a happy hour of speakers and she literally was like eat this flower to be fair I think I asked her but I was like are you sure it's edible as most people do and she was like oh yeah every there was a bed of flowers of several types she's like every single one of these is edible that's so good I she's in this genre of person that is like so so obsessed and excited with a very specific Niche topic I love those people they are my favorite there's this guy that I watch on YouTube and he all he does is like mechanical wash repairs so he'll like take like a Rolex and like from like the 60s that's like damaged or whatever and it's like two hours of him just like with a microscope and like tweezers like it's very relaxing right it's good to go to sleep to power washers there's another guy that does um he just does like car reviews but it's all it's like a it's like a 2006 like Toyota minivan and he he'll do like a three-hour Deep dive like you know how mkbs does it with like supercars or whatever he'll do it with like minivans and it's it's the best it's so fun and that comes back to what we said before it's are you really listening for the minivan or are you listening because this person's just so strangely enthusiastic about this thing it's definitely the latter um so there's kind of the second bucket of things that I'm going to Loop several of these people into where yeah they just kind of do something strange and it's their art and you know it it definitely takes longer than any normal person would ever want to allocate to this so I'll show you a few right now so this one is uh David Zen he creates sidewalk chalk art so he takes things like this um o things that exist within Society okay and then he creates sidewalk chalk art around it if that makes like you can kind of see what are some examples down below where he has um here's an example like a pot yeah and he creates he creates imagery around that so people almost are like what is that as they're walking down the street like this they're like is that actually a a mouse sitting on the side with another mouse you know with a window below obviously not but that's so interesting so that's one another one is David bird who basically creates little sculptures with acorns and other sticks and bird things that actual Birds go and visit so he captures these cool pictures wait so he like he makes little bird friends and then birds like go and like what's going on here are you my buddy see the bird's asking it are you my buddy uh okay so another one is this guy who does Rock sculptures so he just goes to the beach and he just finds all kinds of rocks and takes a bunch of noise and turns it into Data you could say um another one is let me find a good one oh this is an example of something a little different but someone who just does calligraphy just really beautiful craphy and he just films it in this very simplistic nice way and he also has a pretty sizable growing audience interesting um and then maybe a few others that I'll just call out here there's this two of these here that just do things really up close I've seen this one this one macroy yeah the the match yes so cool do they have the video let me go to the video I think this video is up up up yeah on the on the right oh uh see go up go up go up go up where say oh this one yes yeah yeah yeah that is the coolest freaking thing in the world do you know how they shoot this I looked it up when I first saw him but I still don't think I came away understanding okay I think it's really like is it real is it or is it CGI I think it's real they might fine tune it yeah oh here it says everything you see here happens in less than two seconds I use my new Ultra slow motion camera to capture everything and build a custom rig for the movement that's incredible yeah and then there's another person who basically in a similar way just the whole account is taking a really hot ball a really hot metal ball and dropping it into things whether it's an egg or whether it's alcohol or a coconut or a tennis ball a watermelon you get the point you know what this is reminding me of I watch I watch a couple people who just like chug things on YouTube oh yes like bad land as well or just eat a bunch of food yes um I don't know why but like I just love watching someone like chug like four gallons of soda in one go like I mean don't we all like I guess maybe there is like some maybe very simplistic takeaway which is just like humans are weird and we like watching strange things um what is this one oh someone who creates animal food so like just very cute food that looks like animals but the one that I actually think is worth ending off on is just oh actually super quickly typewriter art very cool oh that's cool art with a typewriter so they like every line is like typed on the typewriter or how does it work yes you can see it here he's using like see how that's an M or an F oh I love that and then he ends up creating this beautiful that is really incredible yeah see there wow it's like asky art but like yeah exactly but manual wow yeah and the final one which is a little different from others is watch Maggie paint um and there's a few I've seen a few of these people but they basically go to weddings and paint um an image or a portrait of them getting married live at the wedding and then people on Instagram love it because they get to see the full time lapse but this is an example of something very different to all the things we just saw of just again what a humans care about like of course you you can take a way better photograph of the wedding and they do still do that but there's something special about the time element of someone physically having been there like this thing was incarnated um in that instance right and so anyway these are just examples of different things that have all of these creators have pretty sizable growing audiences that are different that sort of brings me back to the Magnus thing of like changing the rules of the game it's like you're not going to out camera the camera but like there's if you change the rules you can like do some pretty amazing stuff exactly exactly so I don't know I mean I don't know what kind of Creations are going to come and like we said there's obviously going to be new stuff but this is all like pretty simple in the sense of anyone can do a lot of this um or at least there's some version some parallel in someone's life that they could pursue I think it's just interesting to think do you have any takes on where creators go from here or you're like a lot I write about it every week um I mean I think um I I think that broadly like your your take is like exactly right it's like um there's there's a certain segment of things where it's like totally human-made that will become more valuable and then I think there's going to be like a lot of new forms of Art and new forms of just creating things that a new generation of people are going to learn how to use a AI models to do and I think we're like in the process of like defining what those forms are and that's why the um the uh uh the sort of make it more meme is so exciting to me because it's like an example of like that's a form that is like very it's like very AI specific it's from this generation of of creatives and that's the kind of thing like one of the things I like about your work is like you're you don't um you're willing to like look at all these creators who are doing things that people might think are silly and like um that's where like the really valuable stuff is you know it's like the silly stuff and I think people it's like really easy to write off like AI stuff and be like oh it's like silly or it's like it's a ripoff or whatever and I I just I truly think that um most of the stuff that people are making with AI that look silly right now like the 3C videos or like the make it more memes or whatever are there's going to be a new generation of artists that gets birthed from that and we're already seeing that like I I've interviewed filmmakers I've interviewed writers like and they're all using these tools to do new things they couldn't have done before and that just makes me so excited sweet all right well let's see how it goes we now we have to evolve now we have to evolve yeah um but I am curious before we move on like why do you collect these like um you're you're trolling around the internet you see something like this like what is it about these people or about these accounts that like get you going yeah I think we talked about this a little bit last time as you said not to ignore the weird or the strange or the niche but I I think one of the cool things about AI has been basically whenever you interact with AI as you said you have to like really articulate what you want and what you find interesting and you're evolving with it to be like no not this but this and I think what another reflection that's come from AI is that our brains like I know a lot of people not like me saying this but you can kind of think of as llms right that like train and get better and pay attention to some things versus others and so just as I've almost like embodied that idea more I'm like I absolutely should be training my brain with better data over time and the reason that these are interesting is because I always always pay attention to something that surprises me a little bit and it does surprise me that these are so big that's the surprise it's not that someone's interested in this but like 2 million people are interested in frogs that hang around their house and and I follow this person too right and this person's only posted 100 times so there's much more than 2 million who would be interested in this and so anytime I'm kind of there's a mismatch between what I think would exist and what I'm seeing data on that's a signal and I think in in particular because we're at this Junction that we have talked about of like where do creators go from here I'm especially paying attention to when I see Creations that surprise me in terms of how much people like them or engag with them and they each one of these like we talked about tells me something a little different like we still have this monkey brain that just like seeing really like seeing stuff blow up or seeing stuff really up close we still also really like seeing other humans be happy so that comes through with wedding videos and we like seeing humans do things and then I think we just like cleverness too right that comes through in some of the sidewalk art and the typewriter art we like seeing humans create things that almost like there was a gap in our brain we didn't think that could exist and then we see it we're like oh how clever yeah that's one of the things like sort of that that surprise thing where it's like I I did not know two million people would be into this like knitted frog these knitted Frog videos and um like it it reminds me of this episode I did with Dave Clark who's an a filmmaker mhm um he he's like done a lot of stuff in Hollywood not like necessarily like major Motion Picture type stuff but like he's just been in the Hollywood system for a long time and he started making AI movies recently and um I asked him like why like what does it do for him to make these movies like is his sort of ambition to like not do Hollywood stuff anymore and just like do AI stuff or how does it how does how does it fit together and his take was actually that the AI stuff um helps his Hollywood career a lot because um for example he he wanted to make this film um that's that's like it's like a Sci-Fi story about his dad in the 50s um and it it's just like there's a bunch of plot lines that's very specific to him and um he it was like too weird for anyone in Hollywood to fund it and so he made like an AI short of it that's like it was like 3 minutes and it went super viral and then lots of producers shot and we're like hey like can we make this or whatever and they go to email him and they search the email and they're like oh cuz they've already got an email that they ignored um and I feel like for a lot of creative stuff um uh like it requires you to convince someone to let you make it still it's less so for writing like uh for writing for example like for a long time you've just been able to like type your stuff and put it on Twitter or whatever but for something like film making which requires like lots of people and money and like technology and all this kind of stuff like um if if you have a zany idea uh AI can kind of like let you prove that it's a good idea before you have to convince anyone which I think will let more people get more interesting stuff out into the world because you can take a lower risk bet on it do it yourself and then kind of do the high production value thing afterwards once you get money and I love that yeah something that just dawned on me was also that a lot of artistic ideas you almost need to create that se for people to understand it think of you know W Anderson super popular now if he was to actually try to articulate his vision for things maybe some producers who are you know their llms are kind of trained like his could understand but I couldn't I truly would be like that sounds kind of weird like there's a lot of panning and there's colors and close-ups and what what's that going to do for the storyline and if you actually think of like Grand Budapest Hotel have you seen it I've watched it like 10 times on on the plane I just it's the best plane movie for some reason and it's the plot is not there the plot there's no plot this guy owns a hotel and like anyway I'm not going to ruin it but my point is that your idea that AI can basically seed things for art artists that's actually really important because you actually can't communicate some of those ideas without actually creating the the like baby potato yeah from earlier I'm just going to keep looping in the potato or maybe the warm hat you know like you're just not going to get the warm hat until you put it on until you figure out that it should have been a pancake um so I know I know one of the other like sort of AI tools you've been uh you've been working on or working with recently is a tool called consensus um which you showed me a little bit like before we started filming and I'm like I'm pretty into it can you can you tell us what it is yeah I'll bring it up but in order to do that give me one kind of sciency or a really Health idea or product that you're unsure of so let me give you a few examples like a lot of people talk about you know blue light blockers like do those really work is there something you've heard on huberman like does sleep actually we we're factchecking all of Andrew huberman right now um here we go um so my big my big thing is I've been um taking fish oil because of him and specifically he said uh I think fish oil and like it's I think it's like 800 milligram of DHA I think um uh like has a preventative effect on depression um and I want to know if that's right okay so I'm going to open up consensus here and the nice thing about consensus and I'm not affiliated with them I've just use it for kind of this purpose um is you can ask the research and normally if you think about what if you were to type this into Google scholar not only is it only going to search based on the specific keyword it's just going to give you a data dump in fact in Google Scholar I'm sure you can see 17,000 papers on DHA or fish oil or whatever it is so how should we um ask this question um does fish oil prevent depression prevent depression that's yeah probably the easiest thing to ask okay so it's going to search that and it might take a second but it's going to give us a bunch of these papers like Google Scholar right and it's going to say no for some of these individualistically and it's going to give a summary Etc you obviously can go to the paper itself and um there's like a study snapshot so you can see sample size and all this stuff but this is the part where I think they'll improve it over time in terms of the numbers but it can give you just a quick pulse yeah on yes or no and when I find it interesting is if you actually play around enough with the tool is sometimes you will get it's like all it just says yes it's like 100% yes obviously you should do your own research and read up more on what the Yes means but to me it's like oh okay so this thing actually has some prec some meaning in the scientific Community but what's also helpful here is you can be like oh in this case 69% say yes 31% say no so you can actually go to those papers right and look at the ones that say no and say like look at why they say no what those particular papers are can you chat with it to be like hey like tell me why um I'm not sure I think maybe let me check so let's see RCT highly cited another tool have you heard of elicit yeah okay so that one you can definitely chat with the pap PR cool um so I guess you could use some sort of combination between these two let me look up cuz there's you can do there's a co-pilot as well so let me see what happens do you pay for this by the way yes but this is there's it's the same kind of premium where um you get a certain number of credits and then you also I think it's $10 a month so it's not certainly not crazy got it and what do you find yourself using this for basically the things that we talked about so I was looking up air quality a lot recently I was saying you know what what is the research saying I actually it's funny there was a period of time where for the a16z podcast we were going to have huberman on and my idea for him at the time was kind of like this as in there's a scale of zero to 10 zero let's say is there's no scientific evidence for this thing this is just snake oil like but people are buying it anyway good marketers basically facilitated that and then there's 10 which is basically everyone in the scientific Community says that this thing works and more people should be taking it and then there's some Middle Ground where it's like blue light blockers for example basically my understanding is that they only kind of work but only at night certainly so like anyone who's wearing it any anytime outside of that is like it's just a complete waste so there's there's a middle ground so sometimes I'll come here and just honestly just for health information not Health not Health financial whatever advice um come here just to get a pulse because I I definitely am not the healthiest in terms of I don't optimize as much as most people partially because I feel like I question a lot of like should I bother with certain things yeah um can I ask can I ask one more question I'm just curious um about the scientific consensus on um do dreams have meaning let's see I want to see how it does on something like that because you think you you've studied this a lot I mean I don't I I don't I haven't studied a lot um I've uh I'm just curi I'm just like I I I've listened to the huberman dreams episode and I've read a lot of this is saying yes but I'm now I'm scared cuz is it a big no um it depends on what you mean by meaning um okay because they're saying emotional cognitive significance cultural historical context physiological bias now I'm like okay dreams have a rough continuity with awake experiences or concerns implicit memories when considering latent contents and life events is that true what's your take what's your consensus um I don't know I think um my my rough memory of it is like um it dreams have something to do with your your brain brain processing the experiences you've had during the day and um uh and so to that degree they have they they are meaningful but they're also like fairly random and I think there's a separate thing which is like is it useful to like spend time like trying to interpret your dreams which I think can be it's sort of separate from whether dreams have meaning because you can spend time interpreting like almost anything and seeing what it says about yourself and that is like I think like a valuable exploration just as like a creative artistic activity um but yeah you can see some followup searches here what are the different theories of dream interpretation and then well do you want to do that one or the are the are there cultural differences in the interpretation like that one okay let's see so this is like getting it's sort of outside the science at this point right it's like and I think definitely my one I mean in addition to again this is not like medical or science advice is just increasing the number of papers that are integrated into let's see synthesize the consensus meter because for example this is saying five but also like this is saying are there culture oh okay sorry so something to keep in mind is like you can ask questions in here that are more open-ended like what are the differences and then you can ask for the consensus meter it has to have a kind of a yes maybe no answer so for example here um there's a paper on can you say this word no I can't honor romancy there's a paper on Haiti and so maybe let's go back and what was the other question the different theories yeah and then we can do co-pilot for this one feel like this is up your yeah definitely fraudi and seych Analysis self-organization Theory Union analytical yeah I mean these are good I think this is like this is more or less what I would use chat gbt for or like Wikipedia totally it's kind of perplexity esque in that you've got the citations um which is helpful but yeah anyway it's just another one of the II tools and I think maybe if there was any takeaway from this it's just it's interesting to see more of these tools be verticalized right and so you're looking for a specific thing that maybe chat gbt is not optimized for um so yeah I really think that that is happening and it will continue to happen and I think we all thought it would happen sooner than it did but it but it will it'll take like 5 to 10 or 15 years to like fully happen where like I think you can look at the history of SAS software for the last 15 years as basically um unbundling Excel but there was a whole period of like 20 years before that where people had to get used to XL first and then you have tons of people using this general purpose tool for thing it's not built for and then that creates a whole opportunity for like SAS and I think the same thing is true for Chad gbt like like if you built like a prompt Builder like a year ago like not enough people like even knew what prompts were but now there are enough people who are like um uh who are doing it day-to-day in their work in a general purpose tool that's not built for it specifically that I think there's I think there's more and more opportunity to like peel peel things off yeah by the way just cuz it reminded me of this have you seen Globe no really no what is it I thought for sure you would have seen Globe Explorer this thing is awesome uh I think I've only used it for a few things is this that like that that web LL LL dream simulator thing where it's like it's like a hallucinated internet have you seen that one no but that sounds way cooler maybe let's do that no but let me just quickly show you explor because so I think Globe let's let me fact check myself but they have a few different tools on their hands globe. engineer let's see yep so they've got Explorer translator and index and so I've only tried Explorer um and here's an example of something that I would actually search which was what did I say I said like weird quirky websites I think because if I'm looking for again some of these creators or interesting things that oh this is not the same thing that I I got last time but the thing that I like about Globe is basically what it does is it interprets your query and then groups things for you right and so Google kind of does that in a search engine but then it gives you just an overall ranking but this is almost like it's trying to interpret my query of weird quirky websites and it's saying oh are you looking for absurdus websites you're looking for unconventional databases uh Niche interest experimental websites are these like Google results like what are Google results and then like and then um and then categorizing them for you or where are they the this is their own search engine wow actually let me pull it up I think I linked it here um yep here I went to check because when I originally searched this for yeah weird quirky websites this was my original uh response from Globe so it's not the same every time cuz it's an LM but you can see same kind of thing absurdus interactive satirical and a lot of good responses honestly like I was quite shocked that it kind of understood what I was looking for there and then this was the response from Google right um Google is like taking you way more literally and just like finding things that have weird in it right I don't canly I really don't know because it's a mix there are a few inklings of it understanding what I was looking for with the useless web right but then there's patience is a virtue which is like is that a I know that's a quote but is that also a website and then there's cat horse and yeah I I think no is my ultimate interpretation of Google understand what understanding what I was looking for there but anyway I think this is just another example of a UI to your point of the unbundling of Excel or people talk about unbundling of Reddit the unbundling of a search uh engine is as well however there's also an interesting question of just is that what people want as in they definitely want the results but are they ever going to maneuver their search habits to go to a different thing every time H I don't know I don't I don't know I like I think it's it's like niches it's like you're always going to have your like your main chat bot or whatever um but then like uh for your specific like you know work use case where you're like I'm a veterinarian like maybe I use my like my horse my horse chatot for horse issues or whatever you know totally um but I don't know we'll see but I want I want to show you um I want to show you web sim. a you haven't seen this no okay so basically what it is is um for a language model you can like if you ask a language model what's on a specific part of the internet even if that internet doesn't exist it will like hallucinate like it whole a whole web page for you it'll hallucinate all the HTML and so web Sim just like renders that for you I just I just dm'd it to you and so you can like you can just like type in any any page on the internet um even if it doesn't actually exist and it will just like make the page for you so okay so basically um like if I uh like type in type in any website you want to see so something that does not exist it doesn't matter if it exists or doesn't exist okay um a database of all kinds of rubber duckies let's see what happens so like it just it'll just make that and so like metal duckies so like if I click it like the links work and stuff it's crazy and then it saves this so you can like you can you have this like hallucinated interet that they you can like share with other people oh wait so what happens when you click one of them it goes to the I clicked the um what did I okay so if I which one do you want me to click can you wooden duckies wooden duckies okay here we go um it'll it's hallucina hallucinate that page too oh my God that's incredible um and yeah oh and then it makes an image at the top well the classic rubber duck is made of well rubber many collectors prize wooden ducks for their unique craftsmanship and natural materials explore our comprehensive kind of rubber duckies made of wood carved La turned and more my God so we're like yeah it's it's like the simulation internet version um yeah I I think this is so fun I haven't actually haven't played with it that much but it's um it's a game it is sort of a game yeah like and look like now it it actually looks good is it just improving it constantly I I I don't know how this works cuz we just saw three versions of it I think basically what it does is it'll it will like write the um it'll write out the the page and then it'll uh generate the images and then it will just render the whole thing as HTML so it's sort of like happening in stages right yeah yeah cuz we saw just the just the text the text Links At first I like this this script I feel like this is really right for the rubber ducky Wiki they they really got understood the assignment also do you see podcast in the job where where in the nav podcast clubs events and R ducky what I want to see is um um warm hat e-commerce site warm baseball cap oh yeah specificity matters here it's seriously hats forall weather.gov stay warm this spring with our insulated baseball caps like my dreams are just like coming true oh my God and look they once again understood the assignment this no flaps no flaps that was the issue last time remember on Amazon yeah totally I mean the only thing that's missing is they don't have the pancake hat yeah see they're not there yet but this is this is V1 beanie baseball caps beanies visors wow this is really impressive it's almost doing something similar to The Globe Explorer where it's taking you you talked about hats and then it's extrapolating like oh okay so if you had hats you need you have beanies and you have visors and whatever wow it's one of the things I think LMS are best that it's like I think people are like people get afraid of like oh um they could be wrong you can't trust what they're saying and it's like that's actually really cool cuz they can make up this thermolite insulated baseball cap and like render it for you yeah totally if you just use it for a creative purposes it's like pretty awesome hallucination is a feature totally have you seen or have you been following any of the mechanistic interpretability stuff that stuff's also really interesting because as I was listening to a podcast about it it reminded me of Do You Remember I'd shown you this Reddit map the first time we talked it's a very similar concept where basically they're figuring out this web that is in llm and they're learning about humans and the connections that you might not expect within that web so we're also just like visualizing the human consciousness in a way cuz people talk about that in the CSV sense but you could actually map it yeah totally I did you did you see Golden Gate Bridge claw yes I love that so clever could you make me a recipe for for this thing yes uh what was it it was like uh a douse of of like beach mist and like and like two hours for walking across the bridge it was so good um for people who who don't know what we're talking about and think we're going crazy so so basically like there's um uh uh there's a uh AI company anthropic that has a model CLA and they came out with this paper where they um were able to um basically like to some degree map claud's brain like figure out what are the concepts in in its brain and then um it be able to like activate different concepts so it's sort of like um there's a thing that happens sometimes in in like neurosurgery where they open up your brain and they like tickle a part of your brain and it'll like make you laugh it's sort of like doing that for for a language model and so they created this thing called Golden Gau Gate Bridge CLA that used to actually be available you could like use it I did use it it was really fun but they they took it down um but it was basically like a version of CLA that only like to talk about the Golden Gate Bridge so you would ask it a question and it like I asked it like one of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard so I was like who is Annie Dillard and um and it was like Annie Dillard is a renowned author poet and uh Bridge living in San Francisco and it was and then it like disagreed with it I was like no she's not that she's actually and then it like went back into a bridge like it has these parts of its brain that are like disagreeing with each other it's so cool it's really fun it is incredible yeah um yeah I mean I feel like that's that's a space I'm very excited about just partially because I think there's a lot that people care about from the safety side but I think coming back to the we are going to learn so much about even how humans connect ideas because that is going to appear in that they call them features right what features are closer to one another and I mean I think we're constantly surprised at how llms understand what we're looking for even if we're not explicit about it and so there's that thinking you could call it that I think is we don't quite understand about ourselves and the AIS and I think we're going to learn a lot totally I think it's also like really important for using language models as creative tools because it makes your use of them way more precise um because prompts are sort of like a very coarse grained mechanism for generating outputs but if you can manipulate the underlying features you can get much better more concise outputs that are exactly what you want which I think is really cool yeah and I'm sure this they actually don't need to make Headway on this but we talked about box design earlier yeah imagine the Reddit map web version of design Aesthetics that is something absolutely worth having and the data exists on that right as in where you can basically see okay if I like blind box design but not quite I can see the connectivity to other things in the web and say oh actually that's where I want to go because right now in something like mid Journey or Lexica you kind of have to stumble your way into what you're looking for and I mean hopefully anthropic or someone go create that not just for design but for these Concepts I think I think it's coming yeah so we have we have one final party trick left um which is um I have been using this new tool called granola okay and if you see this like uh this G on my screen that's granola okay and basically what it does is it's sitting on my computer at all times and then when I'm in a meeting it starts recording and um it also gives me space to take notes which I have not been taking notes because I've just been like focusing on the convers really impressive if you could do that um but I could I could take notes if I wanted and what it will do is when I when I press end it will um then go take the notes that I've that I've written and it will fill them in based on the transcript so it'll turn my notes my like rough sketch of notes into like a full summary of of what we talked about I didn't take notes but I think if I press stop it will like really quickly generate like a very uh a very good concise summary of like everything that we talked about um so we talked about the internet pipes project we talked about mid Journey for visual design um uh evolution of creators with AI consensus Globe web sim. I got all that stuff right mechanistic interpret interpretability what I also really like is it if we had talked about it like it would pull out like action items and to-dos I use this for all my meetings now and it's and you can also ask questions so if like I wasn't paying attention to something I could be like you know what is did Steph say about XYZ and I we'll just like answer the question it's pretty cool that's really well done and I think that's important because otter and some other tools exist but I feel as though they don't really lay things out in this way to put it nicely that's the thing is like none of this is like in term in in AI terms it's not necessarily that groundbreaking but it's just done really well and I think there's so many opportunities for like little tools like this that um take the standard toolbox of things that you know AI can do and just like just do it in a beautiful like high quality way that makes it really useful that's what's important here's an example there are so many times where I've used AI tools whether specific podcast AI tools chat gbt Etc that I am looking for better podcast titles right or or inspiration really and it's I I never really get anything amazing I definitely still go back to the tools for more of that workshopping process but there are so many examples of these tools as you're saying they they deliver on the Baseline of I'm giving you what you're asking for but they're not quite giving you what you're looking for right and so I think like you said how do you just how do you just uplevel the standard in some of these cases is Loom did a good job on that recently with some of their like sop stuff which exists in other tools but just because it was like just really beautifully done people seem to be adopting it more than other things yeah totally yeah um well uh I think that's I think that's going to cover it for today I'm so glad we got to do this again thank you so much for coming out of course and by the way we should uh we should take these learnings and we should throw them into one of the music generators and play a song at the end it it'll probably play after but you know um let's do it uh okay so uh so our we're going to you want me to just copy this whole thing okay cool I think it's pretty good at just taking okay and we'll put it we'll put it into suo yeah you can just say something like Dan and stuff just did a podcast on on these topics yeah okay and play um play us uh make us an outro song do you want to give it any guidance on the kind or just let it run oh I'm going to uh put the topics in I'm going to paste the topics no the style oh style of music do you have a do you have a Vibe you're going for for the show um so so basically I mean the the vibe um um uh just did a podcast uh on the topics below so like the um we should do the Vibes document so the The Vibes of the show are um uh we're trying to um evoke a sense of wonder curiosity um creativity um authenticity about technology um I mean I really some of the some of the like Inspirations for the uh for the show are like Carl Sean's um Cosmos original the original version is a really um big one for me um I also just like really like Jackson Brown music so nice um also Jackson Brown um basically 70s um early 80s Vibes make us an outro okay cool you think that think that's good um yeah do you think it's gonna yeah I think it's G to know where the information starts in order the I hope so okay let's see let's see what it does I think I have a seeno hopefully it remembered your prompt oh yeah it did I can't I we way over the limit okay why don't you just say um just a few of the things like we just we talked about creators and okay I got to get I got to cut down wowow oh does it not oh cuz sometimes it lets you maybe choose lyrics I think so oh you know what you could do is you could take the stuff that you just cut and put it into chat BT and say come up with that's or or we could just um I could just say compress this yeah um CH compress this into into 200 characters it'll just be like rubber ducky hat Creator compress this uh song prompt into 200 characters okay cool um um oh see there you go we love it our trusty friend Chachi BT never lets us down all right um well we'll just stick with granola like that's all it could fit okay create okay we can't use Jackson Brown that makes sense um uh I'll just we'll stick with against Cosmos yeaha do we want to add anything oh yeah what what give me give me one more let's see uh uh internet pipes mid Journey evolution of creators factchecking consensus Globe web Sim could do I don't know if we want to do Golden Gate CL Golden Gate Bridge CLA uh okay we'll leave leave out the E it'll no know what we're talking about clearly I did this um someone a couple uh people that work at every did this for my birthday made birthday songs for me it was so fun I've seen some really good uh songs actually while we wait can I play you the one from internet pipes please someone in the in the community made this all right are you ready yeah I like it it's got a little bit of like a like Lana Del Reish like voice yeah um I think we may have we may have our Our Song generated let's see I hope this I I don't know if this will capture on the mics probably not but we can um do some editing magic for it they definitely took the tech yeah I don't think they captured the authenticity it's it's an arcade yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely you know it's it's got something there's there's good stuff I like the lyrics you can see them on the right on the right panel ooh that's a um just look at this the bridge can you play that part no power Secrets unfold he t to the Golden Gate I don't um I don't know if uh we unfortunately oh we're almost there okay you know what it's growing on me I like it I think it's great I think it's great um excited we did this thanks for the suggestion yeah no this is awesome good way to end yeah yeah 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 chat GPT 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