How a Top Podcaster Rides the AI Wave

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. I go in depth with Nathaniel Whittemore, the host of The AI Daily Brief, a top-ranked AI podcast, and the founder of Superintelligent, a platform that teaches you how to use AI tools through video tutorials. We dive into how he keeps up with the developments in AI and his podcasting workflow. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Nathaniel is the host of a top-ranked AI podcast on the technology charts, The AI Daily Brief, which breaks down the most important news in AI every day. He is also the founder and CEO of Superintelligent, a platform that teaches you how to use AI for work and fun through interactive video tutorials. 

We talked about how he curates information with X bookmarks, Google News, news aggregator Feedly, and research tool Perplexity; the workflow that helps him record and produce two daily podcasts; and why he thinks optimizing your processes with AI remains one of its most underrated applications. Here’s a link to the transcript of this episode.

Here’s what you’ll learn if you listen to or watch this episode:

• How to curates AI news using X bookmarks, Google News, Perplexity, and other specialized tools
• Nathaniel’s insights from producing 300-plus episodes of a top-ranked podcast
• The granular details of the workflow that helps Nathaniel produce two daily podcasts
• Actionable advice on how to get the most out of AI right now 

This is a must-watch for anyone looking for a better way to keep up with AI, and content creators who want to leverage it in their workflow. Here's a taste:

How Nathaniel uses X bookmarks to stay on top of everything AI

A big way Nathaniel keeps up with AI-related news is by “living on Twitter” and “bookmarking things, day in, day out.” He screen-shared his bookmarks on the show and used them to explain how he curates information. Here are his insights, alongside examples from his X bookmarks at the time of recording this episode:

• If there’s an obviously big news event, like the release of a new model, Nathaniel tends to bookmark the “announcement” made by “key players” in the news story, as well as how “people are interacting with it.” This helps him understand “the meta-analysis of how people are responding to the news,” a quality he thinks sets the podcast apart from others. For example, when Claude 3.5 and Artifacts were released, he bookmarked the news from the CPO of Anthropic Mike Krieger, as well as people’s reactions to it—for example, tweets about  generations using the new model, and how it compared with GPT-4.
• Nathaniel also uses bookmarks as a “mental trigger” to keep track of things that interest him and that he intends to revisit, like UI generation platform Galileo AI’s partnership with software development and deployment platform Replit.
• He also bookmarks news that’s “just a big conversation,” like Elon’s snarky tweet about ex OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s new venture Safe Super Intelligence Inc. 

Beyond X, here are a few more ways in which Nathaniel curates information:

• Trawl Google News. Nathaniel has found that the best way to comprehensively collect news to highlight on the podcast is to go through several pages of results on Google News. He thinks that “AI overview[s]” are not helpful when it comes to finding “long-tail information that’s just way out there,” like a “study that someone did…that’s on page 10 of Google results.”
• Feedly to find valuable nuggets of information. Nathaniel uses the AI feature of research and news aggregation tool Feedly to find relevant news events. Feedly is designed to generate a customized feed tailored to user preferences, but Nathaniel gives it broad prompts like “artificial intelligence” and finds that it “kicks up things that are sometimes deeper and more long tail” than what he’ll find on Google.
• Research with Perplexity. When Nathaniel is diving into a technical topic, or just wants to reacquaint himself with the broader discussion around a point, he uses AI research tool Perplexity to generate a “quick summary and reminder.” He thinks the tool is especially useful “because it's all sourced, it's actually a quite fast way to actually get to the original source material as well.” 

Inside the workflow of a top AI podcaster 

After Nathaniel gathers information about the most relevant events in AI, these are the granular details of how he creates every episode of The AI Daily Brief:

• Creating a structure for the episode. Nathaniel prepares for each episode by thinking of a basic structure, which he uses to organize his bookmarked news items as tabs in a single browser window. He groups the news into “buckets of themes” and uses the “linearity of the tabs” to talk about it in the podcast episode. 
• The actual recording. Once Nathaniel is ready to record an episode, he uses video editing tool Descript to edit the recording, noting that it “was one of the first tools to really have text-based video editing,” a feature that has made editing “massively more accessible for people who haven’t used [more complex tools] like Adobe Premiere Pro.” Among Descript’s AI features, Nathaniel finds filler word editing and eye contact video effect particularly useful.
• Generating content around each episode. After recording an episode, Nathaniel uses LLM-powered tools to generate content around the episode, including a transcript, potential titles, and draft tweets, recommending SEO.AI and Hoppy Copy for this purpose. He values tools like these because he finds it “exhausting” to “produce something and then have to go back and live inside that world again” to market it. 
• Final touches to brand the show. The final part of the creation process that Nathaniel happens to enjoy is using Midjourney to generate images for things like the YouTube thumbnail. From his experimentations with the tool, he’s learned that it works better when you’re “open to a vibe that you’re trying to capture” as opposed to trying to create something “super precise,” and the best way to get consistency across images is “referencing a particular style, [or] a particular artist.”  

After producing over 300 episodes of a consistently top-ranked AI podcast, Nathaniel has gathered a couple of insights about AI and content creation:

• Provide perspective, not just facts. According to Nathaniel, contextualizing information with themes or putting across a point of view is the most important part of a piece of content. “I think that all content to some extent follows this pattern of not just what's the thing that's being shared, but how am I supposed to think about it?” he says.
• Use LLMs to frame your ideas. Nathaniel thinks you can use LLMs to find a meaningful point of view by prompting a model to structure the information you have gathered. “[T]his could be a way that you could figure out roughly how to architect your show…this is not necessarily just strict scripting, this is a way to think about ‘How can I frame everything? How can I sort of bring some structure to this?’” he explains.

Where Nathaniel thinks AI’s hidden value lies  

As someone who is keyed into AI’s newest developments, this is Nathaniel’s perspective on what most valuable, overlooked parts of AI are:

• Evaluate your workflow for the potential to optimize it with AI. Nathaniel thinks AI’s underrated value proposition is using it to save time, even just “20 minutes,” on things you do every day. “[I]f you think in these terms of, ‘Where are these small efficiencies that I can win back that in the aggregate make a big difference,’ then I think it allows you to start to think about all of your different processes and workflows through that lens and ask, ‘Is there a way to AI-ify that, that’s going to make something much easier for me?’” he says.
• Tell the world about how AI helps you. Nathaniel thinks the full potential of AI remains underrated because not enough people are openly sharing their insights from using AI, barred by corporate red tape on AI use at work. “I think we have an artificial barrier right now, even in terms of how these insights are flowing between people that is really sort of undermining how much benefit this stuff can have, but I think that's breaking down a little bit now,” he says.
• Bridge the skill gap with AI. According to Nathaniel, a recurring pattern with AI tools is that they are much better at taking novices from zero to one, rather than helping experts do their job better. “If you're not a web builder, and you need to do something fast, [applications like Framer are] unbelievable tools. However, they're not changing the fact that the…web designer…is still sort of super premium if you're looking for something great,” he explains.

How AI can catalyze a more creative future

Nathaniel remarks that although it’s difficult to “fully project out into those futures,” he thinks that “we will find a dynamic, interesting, more creative world on the other side of it.” Here are his thoughts on the impact of AI on creativity:

• AI is democratizing creativity. Nathaniel believes that AI tools have enabled a promising future in which more humans can explore their creativity. “I think net-net more people being able to create more stuff, having the tools of creation, is just better…gatekeeping access to creation does not make the people who can create it better,” he explains.
• Recognize your value in a world of AI. According to Nathaniel, creatives shouldn’t feel threatened by AI because they will continue to serve as sources of inspiration to explore new styles. “I don’t believe that the relevance of human creatives goes away…I think that they become benchmarks and reference points,” he explains.

You can check out the episode on X, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Links and timestamps are below:

• Watch on X
• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify (make sure to follow to help us rank!)
• Listen on Apple Podcasts

Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:00:51
2. How you can get value of AI right now: 00:02:15
3. Nathaniel goes through his X bookmarks: 00:14:07
4. Why content should have a point of view: 00:20:25
5. Tools that Nathaniel uses to curate news about AI: 00:23:47
6. How to use LLMs to structure your thoughts: 00:31:27
7. Why the history of Excel is a good way to understand AI’s progress: 00:38:40
8. The AI features in Descript that Nathaniel uses: 00:45:46
9. AI-powered tools to help you generate content:00:49:11
10. Nathaniel’s tips on using Midjourney to generate YouTube thumbnails: 00:58:32

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Miss an episode? Catch up on my recent conversations with LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, a16z Podcast host Steph Smith, economist Tyler Cowen, writer and entrepreneur David Perell, founder and newsletter operator Ben Tossell, and others, and learn how they use AI to think, create, and relate.

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Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.