AI & I – Details, episodes & analysis

The Browser Company isn’t just building a browser, they’re building a formidable brand—and they’re doing it with AI. 

I sat down with Nashilu Mouen-Makoua, the head of storytelling at The Browser Company, to talk about how they tell stories that capture the cultural zeitgeist and connect authentically with their users—and how she integrates AI into her process for both.

We get into:

• Nash’s storytelling philosophy, and why she believes focusing on people is the key to a strong brand
• How to she uses ChatGPT to do deep research into past cultural moments—and the songs, movies, and products that resonated most deeply in those contexts
• The brass tacks of how the creative team at The Browser Company comes up with great ideas—including how they structure internal meetings
• How Nash has integrated ChatGPT to help her polish her words
• What Nash thinks the gestalt of the current age is—and how The Browser Company is trying to reach “laptop people” in a fresh way

We also screen share through Nash’s conversation with ChatGPT as she conducted research for an exercise in how to position Arc, and use the LLM to simulate a typical Arc user and interview them live on the show to gather preliminary customer insights.

This is a must-watch for people who want to use AI to tell compelling stories about what they’re building in tech.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:00:47

2. Nash’s philosophy around storytelling: 00:04:03

3. The Browser Company’s strategy to come up with creative ideas: 00:09:07

4. Why Nash thinks building brands people can relate to is important: 00:15:00

5. How to avoid the tired narrative around AI products: 00:18:47

6. The ways Nash has integrated ChatGPT into her workflow: 00:22:21

7. Why understanding social context is important to position your product: 00:33:35

8. How Nash uses ChatGPT to get a gut check on her writing: 00:41:10

9. What Nash thinks is the gestalt of the current age: 00:49:50

10.  Nash and Dan use ChatGPT to simulate and interview a typical Arc user: 00:52:01

Links to resources mentioned in the episode: 

• Nashilu Mouen-Makoua: https://twitter.com/lafillemouen 
• The Browser Company: https://thebrowser.company/, https://twitter.com/browsercompany
• Arc, the browser that reimagines the way we use the internet: https://arc.net/, @arcinternet
• Tracy Chapman’s song, Talkin’ About a Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv8FBjo1Y8I

The journey to a calm, profitable business in the AI age

We’re building a mini-AI media and software empire at Every. 

Today on AI & I, Brandon Gell joins the show to turn the tables on me and act as podcast host to explore what we’re doing as a company, how we got here, and where we’re going.

Brandon is Every’s first entrepreneur in residence, and he was the perfect person to host, because he’s one of the key reasons for our recent acceleration.

Before joining Every, Brandon was the cofounder and CEO of Clyde, a startup that helped brands launch their own insurance and warranty programs, where he raised $50 million and led a team of 100 before selling it to global insurance tech company Cover Genius in early 2023.

In this episode, he interviews me about how I learned to code in middle school, how I built and sold my first startup coming out of college, and how it all led to Every.

We also talk about Brandon’s story. He joined Every just four months ago—and it feels like we’ve done the work of years since. We’ve launched two new AI products, an incredible amount of great writing, a new course, and more.

We get into:

• My candid thoughts on entrepreneurship in the AI age—including why you should ship fast, and how not to be misled by metrics like TAM 
• How AI startups can find valuable niches—and live demos of our apps Spiral and Sparkle
• Brandon’s hard-earned lessons from running a insuretech business for seven years
• The confusing realities of being an exited founder, and how we navigated through those times
• What brought Brandon to Every—including the email he sent me before joining
• Every’s master plan and what we hope to build over the next few months and years

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in building a calm, profitable business empire in the age of AI. 

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:00:56

2. Dan’s childhood dream—to build a Microsoft competitor: 00:03:36

3. The first app Dan built in middle school: 00:07:07

4. The story of Dan’s first company that he sold in college: 00:18:52

5. How Every came to be: 00:33:56

6. The start of Brandon’s journey as a builder: 00:49:15

7. Brandon’s first software app—and why you should launch first, and iterate later: 00:57:05

8. Everything Brandon learned from running a B2B business for seven years: 01:08:49

9. What brought Brandon to Every—and the email he sent Dan before joining: 01:18:00

10. Every’s master plan to be a successful creator-run business: 01:29:15 

11. Live demo of Spiral, the app that automates 80 percent of repetitive creative work: 01:38:11

12. Brandon and Dan’s take on how AI startups can find a valuable niche: 01:44:00

13. Live demo of Sparkle, the app that organizes your files for you: 01:50:52

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Brandon Gell: https://twitter.com/bran_don_gell
• The piece Dan recently published about Every’s master plan: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/every-s-master-plan 
• Dan’s piece about the unbundling of Excel, and why it serves as an important story in the age of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-great-ai-unbundling 
• Tomasz Tunguz, the VC who has also written about Excel: https://tomtunguz.com/ 
• Every cofounder Nathan’s word processor, Lex: https://lex.page/ 
• Spiral, the app that automates 80 percent of repetitive creative work: https://spiral.computer/ 
• Sparkle, the app that automatically organizes your files: https://makeitsparkle.co/

We use it to find bestselling author Steven Berlin Johnson’s next project.

I sat down with bestselling author Steven Johnson to see if we could come up with a concept for his next project—using AI. The results were amazing.

We loaded 200,000 words of NASA transcripts and all of Steven’s reading notes since 1999 into NotebookLM, Google’s personalized research assistant. We wanted to see if it could help us explore the Apollo 1 fire and find relevant and surprising ideas from history that could work to explain it.

• NotebookLM condensed disparate 200,000 words of NASA transcripts into readable formats like FAQs and chronological timelines.
• It sifted through the material to identify the catalyst for the fire.
• The model even went through Steven’s Readwise notes to find a relevant, and unexpected, story from history that we could use to explain the history and origins of the fire

If you’re a fan of Steven Johnson’s work or you’re interested in AI as a creative tool, you need to watch this episode. 

All of this happens as a live exploration of NotebookLM, and it’s a seriously wild ride.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!  Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every Follow him on X

Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Follow Steven JohnsonNotebookLM Steven’s newsletter, Adjacent Possible Steven’s latest book about the rise of the modern detective: The Infernal Machine A few of Steven’s other books: How We Got to NowWhere Good Ideas Come FromThe Ghost MapEmergenceThe Invention of Air

Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves. 

For more essays, interviews, and experiments at the forefront of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought?sort=newest

The NYT’s Kevin Roose has 18 new friends—none of whom are human.

His new friends are AI personas that he made with Noma, Kindroid, and other AI companion apps. There’s fitness guru Jared, therapist Peter, trial lawyer Anna, and over a dozen more.

Kevin talked to them every day for a month, sharing his feelings, asking for parenting advice, and even using them for “fit” checks.

This isn’t the first time Kevin has had an…unusual interaction with an AI persona. A year ago, he was the target of Bing’s chatbot Sydney’s unhinged romantic affections.

Kevin has gone deeper into the world of AI companions than anyone I know. He is a tech columnist at the New York Times, cohost of the Hard Fork podcast, and the author of three books. In this episode, I sat down with Kevin to learn more about his interactions with AI. We dive into:

• Why AI companions aren’t just for lonely people or shy teenagers
• Why AI personas are better friends than ChatGPT
• How AI companions can be used to safely explore different social contexts
• The risk of young people relying on AI for friendship
• The icks of AI dating and intimacy
• How to use AI to articulate what you value in your relationships

This is a must-watch for anyone curious about how AI is changing the way we form relationships.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every
• Follow him on X

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Kevin Roose
• Hardfork, the podcast that Kevin cohosts
• Kevin’s latest book about being human in a world designed for machines
• Kevin’s piece in the New York Times about his experience making AI friends
• Two of the apps that Kevin used to create AI companions: Kindroid and Nomi
• Dan’s piece that explains why AI writing will feel real through psychologist D.W. Winnicott’s theory
• Every’s piece that explores AI companion app Replika

Nick Dobos, maker of the #1 programming GPT, on prompt-gramming with AI

Nick Dobos showed me how to ship a website with two words and a single click. 

He’s the creator of Grimoire, the #1 custom GPT for programming that has been used for over 1 million chats. 

All he gave Grimoire was two words: “coffee website.” Just a minute later, Grimoire built the website and pushed it live to the internet. It was wild.

Grimoire can do a lot more than create websites—it’s a coding assistant with 75+ built-in hotkey commands and sample projects, a guide to learning how to code from scratch, and a tool for programmers to find answers to their questions in real-time.

Before he created Grimoire, Nick was an iOS developer at Twitter. When ChatGPT came out, Nick started experimenting with it—and ended up building Grimoire. Today, he’s at the leading edge of experimenting and building with AI. 

I sat down with Nick to explore how people are using Grimoire and what it tells us about the age of programming by prompting. We dive into:

• How AI is massively lowering the barriers to code

• Why it’s important to solve the “blank canvas problem” that people experience while creating with AI

• How AI tools can streamline your creative process

• Why Grimoire has an edge over ordinary ChatGPT

• The best ways to use Grimoire to code smarter and faster

This is a must-watch for coders, creative people, and anyone curious about how AI is changing the way we interact with computers.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:00:31

2. How Nick built Grimoire, the top-ranked GPT for programming: 00:05:20

3. Ship a website with two words and a single click: 00:10:25

4. How Grimoire is solving the “blank canvas problem” in AI creation: 00:14:57

5. The coding curriculum that can take you from zero to full programmer: 00:16:30

6. Why Grimoire has an edge over ordinary ChatGPT: 00:23:29

7. Nick’s thoughts on building the system prompt for a GPT: 00:34:10

8. The utility of AI as a new layer on top of existing apps: 00:40:04

9. How Nick uses a custom GPT to unpack his emotions: 00:43:11

10. How to use AI to break down tasks—from programming to daily to-do lists: 00:50:35

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Nick Dobos: @NickADobos

• Grimoire: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-n7Rs0IK86-grimoire 

• Nick’s website for his experiments with AI: https://mindgoblinstudios.com/ 

• AI-first code editor Cursor: https://cursor.sh/ 

• Open Interpreter: https://www.openinterpreter.com/ 

• Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book: How Emotions Are Made

• Demo Hume, the empathetic AI voice: https://demo.hume.ai/ 

This AI can read emotions better than you can.

It was created by Alan Cowen, the cofounder and CEO of Hume, an AI research lab developing models that can read your face and your voice with uncanny accuracy. Before starting Hume, Alan helped set up Google’s research into affective computing and has a Ph.D. in computational psychology from Berkely.

Hume’s ultimate goal is to build AI models that can optimize for human well-being, and in this episode I sat down with Alan to understand how that might be possible. 

We get into:

• What an emotion actually is

• Why traditional psychological theories of emotion are inadequate

• How Hume is able to model human emotions

• How Hume's API enables developers to build empathetic voice interfaces

• Applications of the model in customer service, gaming, and therapy

• Why Hume is designed to optimize for human well-being instead of engagement

• The ethical concerns around creating an AI that can interpret human emotions

• The future of psychology as a science 

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the science of emotion and the future of human-AI interactions.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Timestamps:

1. Dan tells Hume’s empathetic AI model a secret: 00:00:00

2. Introduction: 00:01:13

3. What traditional psychology tells us about emotions: 00:10:17

4. Alan’s radical approach to studying human emotion: 00:13:46 

5. Methods that Hume’s AI model uses to understand emotion: 00:16:46 

6. How the model accounts for individual differences: 00:21:08

7. Dan’s pet theory on why it’s been hard to make progress in psychology: 00:27:19

8. The ways in which Alan thinks Hume can be used: 00:38:12

9. How Alan is thinking about the API v. consumer product question: 00:41:22

10. Ethical concerns around developing AI that can interpret human emotion: 00:44:42

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Alan Cowen: @AlanCowen
• Hume: @hume_AI; hume.ai
• If you want to demo Hume: demo.hume.ai
• The nonprofit associated with Hume: Hume Initiative
• Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book: How Emotions Are Made
• The TV series based on Paul Ekman’s theory of emotion: Lie to Me

Learn how to use philosophy to run your business more effectively.

Reid Hoffman thinks a masters in philosophy will help you run your business better than an MBA.

Reid is a founder, investor, podcaster, and author. But before he did any of these things, he studied philosophy—and it changed the way he thinks.

Studying philosophy trains you to think deeply about truth, human nature, and the meaning of life. It helps you see the big picture and reason through complex problems—invaluable skills for founders grappling with existential questions about their business.

I usually bring guests onto my podcast to discuss the actionable ways in which people have incorporated ChatGPT into their lives. But this episode is different. 

I sat down with Reid to tackle a deeper question: How is AI changing what it means to be human? 

It was honestly one of the most meaningful shows I’ve recorded yet. We dive into:

• How philosophy prepares you to be a better founder
• The importance of interdisciplinary thinking
• Essentialism v. nominalism in the context of AI
• How language models are evolving to be more “essentialist”
• The co-evolution of humans and technology

Reid also shares actionable uses of ChatGPT for people who want to think more clearly, like:

• Input your argument and ask ChatGPT for alternative perspectives
• Generate custom explanations of complex ideas
• Leverage ChatGPT as an on-demand research assistant

This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about some of the bigger questions prompted by the rapid development of AI.

Thanks again to our sponsor CommandBar, the first AI user assistance platform, for helping make this video possible. https://www.commandbar.com/copilot/

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 
• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Reid Hoffman: @reidhoffman

The podcasts that Reid hosts: Possible (possible.fm) and Masters of Scale (https://mastersofscale.com/)

Reid’s book: Impromptu

The book Reid recommends if you want to be more philosophically inclined: Gödel, Escher, Bach

Reid’s article in the Atlantic: "Technology Makes Us More Human"

The book about why psychology literature is wrong: The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich

The book about how culture is driving human evolution: The Secrets of Our Success by Joseph Henrich

Seth-Stephens Davidowitz wrote a book in 30 days—and he did it with ChatGPT.

Seth is a data scientist, economist, and author who challenged himself to write a book—Who Makes the NBA?—in less than 1 month after realizing how fast he could work by using ChatGPT plugin Advanced Data Analysis.

But along the way he discovered something else: Writing with AI wasn’t just faster, it was also way more fun.

Seth outsourced the boring parts of data analysis—like cleaning data, merging files, and looking up code snippets—to AI. This left him to focus on what he loves: thinking up questions to ask the dataset.

In a world where AI can answer any question humans know the answer to, asking the right questions is becoming increasingly important—a skill Seth isn’t just really good at, but also finds joy in.

In this episode, Seth walks me through how he used AI to analyze data and write a book in 30 days. We get into:

• How to create and edit complex charts with AI in seconds
• Using ChatGPT to brainstorm creative ideas
• How AI is redefining who can be an artist
• Why ChatGPT is an excellent tool to get a quick ballpark estimate
• Developing a sixth sense about when ChatGPT is wrong
• The power of AI instantly answering hard questions that would normally take months of research

We also use ChatGPT to analyze a dataset of Olympic athletes live on the show—in pursuit of finding out which sport I’m best suited for!

This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about data science and how AI is transforming the future of creativity (or who is just a fan of the NBA).

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every
• Follow him on X

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: https://twitter.com/SethS_D http://sethsd.com

Seth’s books: Who Makes the NBA? , Everybody Lies and Don’t Trust Your Gut

Nicholas Thorne is building Squarespace for the AI age. It’s called Audos, and it’s an AI chatbot to help any entrepreneur go from idea to:

- Pitch deck

- Working website

- Custom GPT

- User interviews with real customers

All in just a few minutes. And he did it using ChatGPTapp. It’s AI all the way down—and it’s one of the most impressive AI businesses I’ve ever seen.

Nicholas is a general partner at Prehype, an incubator that launched Barkbox and Ro Health. It’s also where I started Every, so it was great to come full circle.

Nicholas’s job at Prehype is to launch new companies. He’s taken everything he’s learned running an incubator and used it to help entrepreneurs start businesses at scale—with AI.

As we talk, Nicholas walks me through the interactions of Audos’s chatbot with a user live on the show.

Nicholas tells me that he used ChatGPT to prototype most of Audos’s features—despite being non-technical himself. He shares exactly how he did this by showing me how he’s using AI to create a new feature for the product. We get into: - Ways AI can make you a more effective founder - How to use ChatGPT to build your prototype - Strategies to refine problem statements with AI - Using GPTs to gather and synthesize customer feedback This episode is a must-watch for anyone who has ever toyed with the idea of starting a business—and wants to do it with AI.If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ⁠ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT⁠. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: ⁠https://every.to/subscribe⁠ Follow him on X: ⁠https://twitter.com/danshipper⁠ Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Teaser 00:00:48 - Introduction 00:12:10 - How AI can make you a more effective founder 00:17:03 - Live demo of Audos! 00:24:07 - Why Nicholas built an AI tool to enable entrepreneurs 00:25:35 - How Audos puts you in “edit mode” instead of “create mode” 00:28:12 - Tools to gather customer feedback, generated by Audos 00:32:58 - How Audos actually works 00:35:07 - Nicholas uses ChatGPT to prototype a new feature 00:42:37 - How to establish checks and balances while using ChatGPT 00:57:20 - AI as a force for pushing entrepreneurship to new heights Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Nicholas Thorne: ⁠@thorneny⁠; ⁠[email protected]⁠ Audos: ⁠https://www.audos.com/⁠ Nicholas’s book, Me, My Customer, and AI, is slated to publish next month. Follow him on X for updates: https://mmcai.super.site/