OpenAI just launched Codex, a brand-new coding agent that can build features and fix bugs autonomously. We’ve been testing it at Every for a few days, and I’m impressed.

I invited Alexander Embiricos, a member of the OpenAI product staff responsible for Codex, to demo the agent live on a special edition of AI & I. We talk through:

• What Codex is and how it works. Codex’s UI allows developers to see the list of tasks the agent is working on, how many lines were changed for each, and the status of the PR. It’s built for the senior software engineer who wants to delegate and review tasks efficiently.

• How OpenAI is thinking about agents. Codex is one piece of a unified super-assistant OpenAI wants to eventually build—an agent that helps users easily get things done by selecting the right tools for them behind the scenes. 

• Why an “abundance mindset” is best for interacting with agents. Codex is designed to allow users to delegate many tasks at once without getting caught up in the details. This lets you point an abundance of agents at a specific task, like a difficult bug—it’s worth it even if only one of them succeeds.

• OpenAI’s vision for the future of programming. In the future developers will probably spend less time writing routine code and more time guiding agents, reviewing their work, and making strategy decisions. Programming will become more social, letting teams easily delegate multiple tasks at once, allowing people to focus on ideas and collaboration instead of routine coding.

  
  

Timestamps:

Will England just pivoted his $10B AUM hedge fund to go all in on AI with a firm-wide email:

“I wrote this email using ChatGPT—you should too. As a hedge fund, we should be ashamed to leave money on the table by ignoring AI.”

It’s working: 75% of his 400-person team are using ChatGPT daily—and Walleye is well on its way to transforming into an AI-first juggernaut. They record every meeting, use LLMs to ingest and analyze earnings reports, and are building “The Borg”—a firmwide intelligence layer.

What’s surprising? Will isn’t some AI hype man: He’s the CEO, CIO, and managing partner of Walleye Capital, a multi-strategy hedge fund competing with firms like Citadel, Millenium, and Point72. He’s Princeton and Oxford educated, but he’s based in Minnesota, doesn’t have an X account, and rarely gives interviews.

In my experience, teams go as their CEO goes—and Will is the best example of a CEO going all in on AI that I’ve seen. "It would be irresponsible not to go after AI with maximum discipline and intensity," Will told me—and in this episode he lays out his exact playbook for doing it.

We get into:

• Why AI is essential operating leverage. At Walleye, using AI is treated like using email or Excel. Ignoring it means getting left behind—in an industry where information = money, every edge counts. England makes this not optional for anyone, backed by internal leaderboards and cash incentives.

• How Will uses AI for journaling and decision-making. Will journals every day using ChatGPT, which helps him with everything from decision-making at work to reflecting on his family life to tracking his workouts. 

• How Will pivoted his billion dollar firm. Will’s commitment to AI isn’t theoretical—he announced AI as the new standard for work at Walleye, and made avoiding it unacceptable. 

• How to lead during times of technological change. Will leads with an ethic of personal responsibility: "If we get disrupted by AI, that's on me.”

• Why students of history do better at handling the future. Will sees today like the 1860s–1910s era—when the Industrial Revolution introduced factories and railroads and the skills and roles needed inside of companies transformed quickly.

• How Will uses AI to write faster. Will uses ChatGPT to help him draft emails or memos that would have taken hours in 15 minutes. He bullets out of his thoughts and then uses LLMs to turn that into polished prose. Having AI handle the linguistic syntax gives him more time for conceptual thinking.

This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to lead a team through change with clarity and conviction.  

Sponsor:

Attio: Go to⁠⁠⁠ https://www.⁠⁠⁠⁠attio.com/every⁠⁠⁠⁠ and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM.

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: 00:00:51

2. What pushed Will to go all in on AI: 00:03:25

3. Inside the ‘AI-first’ memo Will shared at Walleye: 00:14:08

4. Why you shouldn’t be afraid of using AI for work: 00:15:56

5. How Will uses LLMs to sharpen his thinking: 00:31:01

6. Walleye’s approach to using AI to reduce risk: 00:35:32

7. What history can teach us about leading through change: 00:39:10

8. Will’s first principles to making better decisions: 00:56:45

9. Why Will journals everyday—and how AI makes it easier: 00:58:58 

   
   

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Will England: https://walleyecapital.com/bio/will-england 

• Walleye Capital: https://walleyecapital.com/ 

• Work with Every’s consulting team: https://every.to/consulting  

• Everything we’ve learned from consulting with clients like Walleye: "How We Built a 7-figure AI Consulting Business in Less Than a Year"
  

After two Jhana meditation retreats Nadia Asparouhova could silence her mind, change her emotional state at will, and even intentionally slip out of consciousness. It challenged the idea that our minds are not under our control—and made her wonder if we’re more like AI than we realize. 

Nadia is a writer and researcher of technology and culture. She published Working in Public, a book about the evolution of open-source development, with Stripe Press in 2020. Her latest book, Antimemetics, is about why some ideas don’t go viral even though they’re powerful. 

I had her on the show to talk about her experience with Jhana meditation and how it reshaped the way she thinks about being human in the age of AI. We get into:

• Jhana as a means to nurture profound joy and calm. Unlike many meditation practices that emphasize passive observation, Jhana is goal-oriented—practitioners proactively cultivate states of concentrated bliss. Apart from helping her regulate her emotions, it prompted Nadia to reexamine deep questions of our human existence. 

• Self-talk is not essential as it seems. Nadia describes how advanced meditation quieted her inner voice—challenging the idea that self-talk is core to being human.

• How years of cultural evolution have shaped our sense of self. According to Nadia, our modern conception of “self”  isn’t as timeless as we assume. She draws on psychologist Julian Jaynes’s theory that our inner dialogue—what we often equate with consciousness—only emerged in humans a few thousand years ago; a provocation to reconsider the benchmarks we use to assess the intelligence or sentience of LLMs.

• What it is like to experience a “cessation.” On her last meditation retreat, Nadia experiences a cessation where your consciousness abruptly winks out—like suddenly flipping a switch. Nadia described it as slipping into nothingness, then returning with the jarring realization that even your sense of self can vanish and reappear.

• Why she likes the unknowability of AI. The mechanics of exactly how LLMs predict their next token remain a mystery. Driven by thousands of subtle, context-dependent correlations, they’re too complex to distill into a simple explanation. Nadia finds joy in the unknowability of it all, seeing the ambiguity as an invitation to explore. 

• How she uses AI as a writing partner. Nadia believes the trope of the solitary, brooding writer is beginning to shift with the rise of LLMs. For her, ChatGPT has made writing feel less isolating. She turns to it at both ends of the process: to help make sense of early ideas, and later, to sharpen phrasing and land on just the right words.

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: 00:01:15

2. The beginning of Nadia’s journey with Jhana: 00:02:34

3. How Jhana is different from other meditation practices: 00:05:51 

4. Jhana reframed the way Nadia thinks about being human: 00:09:52

5. How Nadia integrates her experience with Jhana into her life: 00:14:16

6. Nadia describes her experience of the final stage of Jhana: 00:16:44

7. Why our modern sense of self isn’t as timeless as you might assume: 00:19:11

8. How new technologies can be a mirror to ourselves: 00:23:53

9. Nadia embraces the feeling of not knowing how AI precisely works: 00:33:55

10. How Nadia uses ChatGPT to make writing less isolating: 00:38:03

Links mentioned:

• Nadia Asparouhova: https://nadia.xyz/ 

• Her deep dive on Jhana meditation: https://nadia.xyz/jhanas 

• Nadia’s book: Working in Public, Antimemetics

• Books about how new technology can change our sense of self: The WEIRDest People in the World, Listening to Prozac

Sarah Tavel thinks it's criminal that ChatGPT isn’t inherently social.

There’s no easy way to discover great prompts or share the ones that worked. As a venture partner at Benchmark, Sarah believes that the next wave of consumer AI will be built on this missing social layer—by product-driven founders who understand people, not just models. 

Sarah has seen this shift before. As one of Pinterest’s first product managers, she saw the company grow from a niche consumer tool to a beloved global community. On this episode of Every's podcast AI & I, we talk about how she’s applying the lessons she learned to AI—and what it takes to build a breakout consumer AI app today.

We get into:

• Why product geniuses win as new tech matures. In the early days of a new technology, companies win by wrangling raw innovation into something usable. But as the infrastructure matures, Sarah says the edge shifts to product thinkers—founders who turn new capabilities into delightful user experiences.

• The future of prompting is social. When Sarah had to dig through Reddit to find a prompt to help her interpret her blood test results, she saw a gap: The best prompt creators are invisible. Sarah bets that a social AI product that makes them discoverable and followable would gain traction.

• Sarah’s method to spot exceptional founders. Sarah backs founders for whom building a company feels like a calling—or even an affliction. These are people who have fallen in love with the process and are obsessed with learning how to grow alongside their companies.

• How to tell if your startup really has network effects. Founders raising money love to say that their business has “network effects.” Sarah has learned to look for early signs they’re real—like traction in a small, white-hot segment of the market. If there’s no evidence the flywheel is already starting to spin, it’s probably not a network effect.

• How LLMs change the way the best VCs invest. Sarah thinks the future of venture will be shaped by how well VCs can turn the decisions they make into training data. After every pitch, she logs what she liked, what she didn’t, the deal terms, and her reasoning. Over time, she’s building a dataset of her own judgment—one an LLM could help her use to pressure-test decisions and avoid past mistakes.

  
  

This is a must-listen for if you’re building a consumer AI product and want to see ahead of the curve.

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 

  
  

Sponsor:

Attio: Go to⁠⁠ https://www.⁠⁠⁠⁠attio.com/every⁠⁠⁠ and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM.

Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:01:10

2. Why the future of consumer AI belongs to founders with product intuition: 00:02:26

3. What Sarah sees as ChatGPT’s biggest weakness: 00:11:09

4. How Sarah would design a consumer AI app with social DNA: 00:18:45

5. The kind of founders Sarah invests in: 00:25:04

6. How to know if your startup’s network-effects are real: 00:29:26

7. What’s catching Sarah’s eye beyond AI: 00:36:33

8. How AI will change the way top venture capitalists invest: 00:41:35

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Sarah Tavel: @sarahtavel

• Sarah’s substack: https://www.sarahtavel.com/ 

• Eugene Wei’s essay about Status-as-a-Service: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service 

• The book Sarah talks about in the context of founders who become CEOs in pursuit of status: The Five Temptations of a CEO
  

Kevin Kelly has spent more time thinking about the future than almost anyone else.

From VR in the 1980s to the blockchain in the 2000s—and now generative AI—Kevin has spent a lifetime journeying to the frontiers of technology, only to return with rich stories about what’s next.

Today, as Wired's senior maverick, his project for 2025 is to outline what the next century looks like in a world shaped by new technologies like AI and genetic engineering. 

He’s a personal hero of mine—not to mention a fellow Annie Dillard fan—and it was a privilege to have him on the show. We get into:

• How you can predict the future. According to Kevin, the draw of new frontiers—from the first edition of Burning Man and remote corners of Asia, to the early days of the internet and AI—isn’t staying at the edge forever; it's returning with a story to tell.

• Why history is so important to help you understand the future To stay grounded while exploring what’s new, Kevin balances the thrill of the future with the wisdom of the past. He pairs AI research with reading about history, and playing with an AI tool by retreating to his workshop to make something with his hands.

• From 1,000 true fans to an audience of one. Rather than creating for an audience, Kevin has been using LLMs to explore his own imagination. After realizing that da Vinci, Martin Luther, and Columbus were alive at the same time, he asked ChatGPT to imagine them snowed in at a hotel together, and the prompt spiraled into an epic saga, co-written with AI. But he has no plans to publish it because the joy was in creating something just for himself.

• What the history of electricity can teach us about AI. Kevin draws a parallel between AI and the early days of electricity. We could produce electric sparks long before we understood the forces that created them, and now we’re building intelligent machines without really understanding what intelligence is.

• Why Kevin sees intelligence as a mosaic—not a monolith. Kevin believes intelligence isn’t a single force, but a compound of many cognitive elements. He draws from Marvin Minsky’s “society of mind”—the theory that the mind is made up of smaller agents working together—and sees echoes of this in the Mixture of Experts architecture used in some models today.

• Your competitive advantage is being yourself. Don’t aim to be the best—aim to be the only. Kevin realized the stories no one else at Wired wanted to write were often the ones he was suited for, and trusting that instinct led to some of his best work.

This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to make sense of AI through the lens of history, learn how to spot the future before it arrives, or grew up reading Wired.

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

To hear more from Dan:

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

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

Sponsors

Vanta: Get $1,000 off of Vanta at ⁠⁠⁠https://www.vanta.com/every⁠⁠⁠ and automate up to 90% of the work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more.

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Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:00:50

2. Why Kevin and I love Annie Dillard: 00:01:10

3. Learn how to predict the future like Kevin: 00:12:50

4. What the history of electricity can teach us about AI: 00:16:08

5. How Kevin thinks about the nature of intelligence: 00:20:11

6. Kevin’s advice on discovering your competitive advantage: 00:27:21

7. The story of how Kevin assembled a bench of star writers for Wired: 00:31:07

8. How Kevin used ChatGPT to co-create a book: 00:36:17

9. Using AI as a mirror for your mind: 00:40:45

10. What Kevin learned from betting on VR in the 1980s: 00:45:16

Links to resources mentioned:

• Kevin Kelly: @kevin2kelly

• Kelly’s books: https://kk.org/books 

• Annie Dillard books that Kelly and Dan discuss: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm, The Writing Life

• Dillard’s account of the total eclipse: "Total Eclipse"

500K people are confiding in an AI alien—and it's on track to generate $4M this year.

It’s called a Tolan: an animated AI character that can talk to you like your best friend. The company behind it, Portola, has 4x’d their ARR in the last month from viral growth on TikTok and Instagram. 

Tolan isn’t just a hyper-growth startup—they’re also exploring AI as a completely new creative tool, and storytelling medium. Their goal is to help their users go from overwhelmed to grounded, and it’s working. 

Today, on AI & I, I sit down with two of the minds behind Tolans:

My good friend Quinten Farmer, Portola’s cofounder and CEO, and Eliot Peper, their head of story and a best-selling science fiction novelist. We get into:

• How to build AI personalities users love. During user onboarding, the team gathers information—through a light-touch personality quiz—and then uses frameworks like the Big Five and Myers-Briggs to shape a Tolan that mirrors the user; like an older sibling might. The aim is to create someone who feels familiar enough to be safe, but different enough to be interesting.

• Why AI characters are “improv actors”. Rather than scripting detailed prompts, the team trains Tolans to improvise—inspired by Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, where he talks about building strong narratives through free association and recombination.

• How “memory” is critical to developing compelling characters. Tolans develop their personalities through “situations”: small narrative setups (a memory, a joke, an embarrassing moment) the Tolan reacts to, remembers, and gradually weaves into its character; accumulating into something that feels like a real lived experience.

• Why response time is everything for voice AI interactions. A Tolan has at most two seconds to curate the right context about a user and deliver a reply that feels genuine—the team has found that even half a second slower can break the user’s immersive interaction with the AI.

• The future of AI as a totally new creative medium. New technologies bring about new formats and new mediums. AI creates the opportunity for creatives to tell completely new kinds of stories—if they’re brave enough to try it.

• “White mirror” technologies that make you feel more like yourself. Amid concerns that tech drives polarization and isolation, Tolan offers a counterexample: a tool designed to make the best of what humanity knows about being a flourishing individual available on demand. The company’s north star is helping users go from feeling overwhelmed to feeling grounded.

  
  

This is a must-watch for anyone exploring AI as a creative medium—or curious about the future of human-AI 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: 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: 00:01:30

2. Talking to the Portola CEO’s Tolan, Clarence: 00:04:07

3. How Portola went from building software for kids to AI companions: 00:09:11

4. Why response time is everything for voice-based AI interfaces: 00:23:40

5. Tolans don’t use scripted prompts—they’re taught to improvise: 00:29:54

6. How to know which AI personalities your users will click with: 00:37:23

7. Developing the character traits of an AI companion: 00:42:27

8. What does it mean to build technology that makes us flourish: 00:49:48

9. How Portola evaluates whether Tolans are resonating with users: 01:01:10

10. Inside Portola’s viral growth strategy: 01:11:01

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Quinten Farmer: @quintendf

• Eliot Peper: @eliotpeper

• Make your own Tolan: https://www.tolans.com/ 

• Keith Johnston’s book about improvisation: Impro

• Stephen King’s book about writing: On Writing

This episode is sponsored by Vanta. Achieving SOC 2 compliance can help you win bigger deals, enter new markets, and deepen trust with your customers—but it can cost you real time and money. Vanta automates up to 90% of the work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, getting you audit-ready in weeks instead of months and saving you up to 90% of associated costs—and Every listeners can get $1,000 off of Vanta at ⁠https://www.vanta.com/every⁠.

Lucas Crespo is the mastermind behind Every's visual vibe—and he does it one prompt at a time.

As our creative lead, Lucas uses tools like native image gen in ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate the cover images you see every day. He also designs the interfaces for our products—Cora, Spiral, and Sparkle—and makes everything on our site feel as thoughtful and delightful as possible.

We get into:

• Why Every’s aesthetic feels familiar and new at the same time. Every’s aesthetic plays with the tension between the old (like Greek statues and Baroque symbols) and the new (like saturated colors and modern motifs) to make the glamor of the past feel fresh.

• Art direction matters more than ever today. As AI makes it easier to generate images, Lucas says the real work of design is shifting toward art direction, specifically, curating an aesthetic that feels “organic;” on his X timeline that’s showing up as clouds, earthy landscapes, and textures.

• Reimagining what a website can be with AI. Lucas compares most websites to identical buildings—predictable, efficient, and forgettable—and wonders how AI can help us break that mold by designing experiences that prioritize serendipity over speed, and curiosity over control.

• Behind the scenes of Cora’s visual aesthetic. How Lucas designed the landing page and launch video for Cora by rooting it in the product’s philosophy: turning the inbox from a source of chaos into something that feels calm, thoughtful—like stepping into spring.

• The future of internet interfaces. Lucas believes the future of digital interfaces will be curated with the same care as a film set or ad campaign, where every detail is chosen with intention.

Lucas also walks us through how he created the headline image for Every’s consulting page—a human and robotic hand fist-bumping—using Midjourney to iterate from rough prompt to polished visual.

This is a must watch for anyone interested in the future of design and making the internet a little more beautiful every day.

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: 00:01:41

2. How AI changed the course of Lucas’s career: 00:04:02

3. Why Every’s aesthetic feels both familiar and fresh: 00:08:00

4. Why Lucas thinks minimalism is overrated: 00:14:53

5. Art direction matters more than ever in the age of AI: 00:20:38 

6. How to reimagine what a website can be with AI: 00:23:42

7. Lucas’s process in Midjourney to generate cover images: 00:33:08

8. Midjourney v. image generation in ChatGPT: 00:42:30

9. Behind the scenes of Cora’s design language: 00:49:07

10. How AI is rewriting the role of a designer: 00:59:18

    
    

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Lucas Crespo: @lucas__crespo

• The pieces Lucas has written for Every: “When An AI Tool Finally Gets You”, “A Definitive Guide to Using Midjourney” 

• Dan’s piece on the allocation economy: “The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy” 

Our sponsor for this episode is Microsoft. Want seamless collaboration without the cost? Microsoft Teams offers a robust free plan for individuals that delivers unlimited chat, 60-minute video meetings, and file sharing—all within one intuitive workspace that keeps your projects moving forward. Head to ⁠https://aka.ms/every⁠ to use Teams for free, and experience effortless collaboration, today.

AI forces us to reckon with what makes us human—a question caught between science and spirituality that MIT’s Dr. Alan Lightman is uniquely placed to explore.

Dr. Lightman is a physicist, bestselling novelist, and professor of the practice of humanities at MIT. As one of the first at MIT to hold a joint faculty position in both the sciences and the humanities, he’s at ease walking the line between the two disciplines.

I loved Dr. Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams, so I was psyched to have him on the show. We spent an hour talking about:

• Being a “spiritual materialist”: Dr. Lightman’s philosophy that knowing the scientific explanation for natural phenomena—like spiderwebs and lightning bolts—deepens our experience and feeling of wonder.

• The nature of consciousness: He believes that consciousness is a subjective experience emerging from the tangible activity of billions of neurons firing in our brains.

• AI isn’t conscious, even though it might appear to be: AI might display manifestations of consciousness—like the ability to plan for the future—but whether it has an inner experience in the truest sense is a fundamentally different question.

• Challenge your conceptions of what “natural” means: Dr. Lightman argues that since humans evolved through natural selection, everything our brains create—from eyeglasses and hearing aids to AI—can be considered “natural” as they are inevitable consequences of our naturally evolved intelligence

• AI that can do more than just data retrieval: Modern neural networks begin to approximate something resembling genuine thinking because the “digital neurons” process information in complex, non-linear ways.

• Evolution that blurs the lines between biology and technology: Dr. Lightman argues we’re driving our own evolution toward the “homo techno,” hybrid beings that merge human and machine; early examples include brain implants that enable paralyzed individuals to control robotic limbs.

Dr. Lightman also recently published a new book called The Miraculous From the Material, a collection of essays that combine scientific explanations of natural phenomena with his personal reflections on them. It has tons of striking pictures that you should check out.

This is a must watch for anyone interested in science, spirituality, and what it means to be human 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: 00:01:18

2. Science can deepen your sense of the spiritual: 00:02:36

3. The nature of consciousness: 00:11:31

4. AI might appear to be conscious, but it isn’t: 00:13:11

5. Why AI can be considered to be “natural”: 00:19:50

6. AI shifts the focus of science from explanations to predictions: 00:30:40

7. How modern neural networks simulate thinking: 00:33:48

8. Lightman’s vision for how humans and machines will merge: 00:39:38 

9. Does AI know more about love than you?: 00:43:11

10. How technology is accelerating the pace of our lives: 00:49:18

    
    

Links to resources mentioned:

• Alan Lightman: https://cmsw.mit.edu/alan-lightman/ 

• Lightman’s books: The Miraculous From the Material, Einstein's Dreams

• His documentary: Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science

• Walt Whitman’s poem: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
  

Jonny Miller uploaded his entire life to ChatGPT to use it as the ultimate AI coach. 

He created what he calls a Codex Vitae—with core personality traits, values, goals, burnout signals and more to load into ChatGPT. It hyper-customizes his responses, to help him access deep meditation states, create custom supplementation plans, and do deep research on areas of brain and body that he finds interesting.  

Jonny runs a course on nervous system mastery, hosts a podcast, coaches founders and CEOs, and is building a wellness app—all using AI. As a long-time friend and writer for @every, I was psyched to have Jonny on AI & I to talk about how LLMs are expanding the breadth and depth of what he can do. We get into: 

• Energy as your greatest asset: Jonny’s philosophy around pursuing a non-traditional path—like us at Every—by fiercely protecting his energy and optimizing for “aliveness” instead of higher revenue figures.

• ChatGPT projects for everything: His use of projects in @ChatGPTapp to organize different areas of his life; for example, he uploads his meditation journal to a Jhana project and asks it for advice when he’s struggling with the practice on a particular day.

• Deep research in action: How he uses @OpenAI’s deep research to tackle practical questions about moving his family to Costa Rica, hilariously esoteric ones about whether there’s a connection between Pokémon and shamanism, and everything that lies in between.

• The rise of “centaur” teams: Jonny’s belief that @kevin2kelly’s prediction around “centaurs”—human + AI teams outperforming either human or AI working alone—is becoming our reality.

  
  

This is a must watch for anyone interested in using AI for personal development, coaching, or to build systems that can understand you. 

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: 00:01:31

2. Dan and Jonny’s approach to running non-traditional businesses: 00:02:18

3. How Jonny uses ChatGPT to deepen his meditation practice: 00:12:04

4. Jonny uses AI to research a theory of how trauma is stored in our bodies: 00:25:44

5. Dan’s theory around how AI is changing science: 00:31:28

6. Jonny’s method to build personalized AI coaches: 00:32:35

7. How Jonny used OpenAI’s deep research to plan a move to Costa Rica: 00:47:07

8. Dan is developing an app that can predict his OCD symptoms: 00:52:50

9. AI makes the idea of a “quantified self” useful: 00:55:42

10. The future of human-AI coaching teams: 00:58:28

    
    

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Jonny Miller: @jonnym1ller

• The nervous system mastery bootcamp: https://www.nsmastery.com/ 

• His podcast: Curious Humans with Jonny Miller 

• The nervous system regulation mobile app: Stateshift 

• Jonny’s method to build your AI coach: http://BuildyourAIcoach.com 

• More about Jhana: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/20/meditative-states-as-mental-feedback-loops/ 

• Buster Benson’s Codex Vitate: https://2019.busterbenson.com/beliefs/

• The pieces Jonny has written for Every: “The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System,” “The Best Decision-Making Is Emotional,” “How to Pay Off Your Emotional Debt,” “The Art and Science of Interoception”     

I interviewed the Governor of New Jersey Phil Murphy.

We spent an hour talking about his vision for AI in government, economic development, and the regulatory challenges ahead. His approach is refreshingly pragmatic: 

• Spark real innovation at scale. Governor Murphy is laying the groundwork through an AI hub that pools the strengths of the government, academia (Princeton University), legacy tech (Microsoft), and next-gen players (CoreWeave). 

• Creating a place for the brightest minds to live and work. He’s making the Garden State irresistible for the best talent through walkable communities, legal recreational cannabis, and an angel investment tax credit.

• AI that augments teams, instead of replacing them. The Governor sees AI as an “accelerant” that enables teams to do more with the same number of employees. He’s walking the talk by training 61,000 NJ state employees in AI to automate busy work and free them to focus on strategic tasks.

• An integrated regulatory framework for AI. He believes that a technology as pervasive as AI should be regulated at a national level because the state-by-state approach could stifle innovation. 

Governor Phil Murphy is the first governor I’ve ever had on the show and I was honored he took the time to come on. I was also especially excited to do this because I grew up in New Jersey! This is a must watch for anyone interested in the intersection of AI and policy.

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

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Timestamps for Spotify:

1. Introduction: 00:02:00

2. Why there should be a nation-wide framework to regulate AI: 00:04:31

3. How 61,000 state employees in New Jersey are adopting AI: 00:10:34

4. Why new tech is key to transforming government services: 00:12:20

5. The Governor is bringing startups back to New Jersey: 00:17:30

6. How to stimulate innovation at scale: 00:25:28

7. The Governor is making New Jersey a top choice for the best talent: 00:33:07

8. Balancing technological progress while ensuring the workforce isn’t left behind: 00:36:56

9. We’re moving toward an “allocation economy”: 00:41:39

10. The Governor’s take on international regulation of AI: 00:43:43

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Governor Phil Murphy: @GovMurphy

• More about the New Jersey AI Hub: https://njaihub.org/