Transcript: ChatGPT for Radical Self-betterment

My take on the latest episode of How Do You Use ChatGPT?, with Dr. Gena Gorlin, and the episode transcript are below for paying subscribers.

It is abundantly clear to me that AI tools in general—and ChatGPT in specific—are going to radically change how we see ourselves, and how we approach personal and professional growth. ChatGPT is an incredible mirror: It can reflect back to you, honestly, who you are and how you think. And it’s a perfect mentor: It can help walk you through any decision or think about what to say in any situation. It’s the ultimate goal for getting closer to being the kind of person you want to be. 

That’s why I was so excited about recording this episode with Gena. She’s a frequent Every writer and professional clinical psychologist. It’s gratifying to see someone so well-respected in her field adopt a tool like this. 

One important point that came out of this episode for me is just how radical ChatGPT is for self-development because of two key things: 

1. It can bring to bear the best of what psychology knows for you at any moment, with the right prompt.
2. It’s available 24/7 and responds instantly.

Both of those attributes solve big problems in the therapy and coaching world. For one, it’s really hard to find a good practitioner to help you grow. For another, practitioners are not always available, and they can be expensive.

I don’t think ChatGPT replaces a therapist or coach. But it does radically expand access to therapeutic and coach-like interactions—which will have a major impact on humanity.

I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Timestamps:

1. Introduction 00:18
2. An external hard drive for our brains 4:14
3. What is epistemic hygiene? 7:25
4. Upscaling with ChatGPT 12:25
5. Dan and Gena’s brainstorming session 20:34
6. Gena uses ChatGPT to analyze her years-in-review 31:43
7. Outsourcing to ChatGPT 46:51
8. Pushing beyond “work-life balance” 53:36
9. Will ChatGPT replace therapists? 1:09:22
10. Building a new version of you 1:20:00

Transcript

Gena Gorlin (00:00:00)

I'm working on my 2023 year in review and I gave it five years worth of journal entries and I asked it to please read through the journal. Wow. Okay. Now my life story has been timelined very helpfully. 

Dan Shipper (00:00:11)

I love this so much. 

Gena Gorlin (00:00:12)

Right? How cool is that? 

Dan Shipper (00:00:13)

It's like having a personal biographer. 

Gena Gorlin (00:00:14)

Free and instantaneous personal biographer.

Dan Shipper (00:00:18)

Well, 20 bucks a month.

[Intro theme]

Gena, welcome to the show.

Gena Gorlin (00:00:31)

Thank you, Dan. So happy to be here. 

Dan Shipper (00:00:34)

Yeah, I'm so happy to have you. So for people who don't know, you are a clinical psychologist at UT Austin. You're also a prolific writer. You write specifically about the psychology of builders.  And you've also written a lot of essays for Every, the newsletter that I run.

You've written some of my favorite pieces that we've ever published. In particular, you wrote this piece called “In Defense of Radical Self-Betterment,” which is exactly what you think it is.  And it is a massive 7,000-word guide to living an examined, better, flourishing life as an ambitious person. I just love your work—

Gena Gorlin (00:01:18)

Which you helped me give birth to. So thank you. And there I am already jumping in with my enthusiasm, but yeah, thank you for the forum.

Dan Shipper (00:01:25)

Please jump in. Of course, of course. Yeah, I think one of the things I love most about you and your work is, first of all, I think that there are just not that many people who are focusing on the psychology of builders, particularly people who are as well-versed in all of the psychology literature as you are. And two is I feel like you're able to talk about psychological topics in a way that ambitious, busy, creative people can hear. You have this combination of depth and rigor, combined with not being too woo-woo. You can talk about the woo stuff in a way that I think makes sense to people who might ordinarily be allergic to woo, and I think a lot of builder-type people are like that. And so it's really always a pleasure to get to read your work and get to talk to you cause I think you have such a rare and unique combination of skills and it's so valuable to people like me and anyone who makes stuff.

Gena Gorlin (00:02:37)

Well, and thank you for all the work you've inspired, since we started collaborating, including that "In Defense of Radical Self-Betterment” monster all—how many pages of it—that I wouldn't have written that piece, and certainly not in the way that I did if you hadn't prompted me in just the right ways and given me really helpful feedback and impetus, so thank you. 

Dan Shipper (00:03:03)

It's always fun to get to nerd out about psychology topics with you. And so that's why I'm psyched for this show. For anyone who's listening that that doesn't know, or watching that doesn't know, we are also working on a course together. It's called “Maximize Your Mind With ChatGPT.” There'll be a link down in the episode description. You can check it out. and we'll be covering a lot of the topics or at least some of the topics from that show in this episode. So if you're interested, if you want to learn more, go check that out.

But for now, what I want to start with is—we're going to get into how you use ChatGPT in your own life, and we'll use it together. We'll do some fun stuff together live. But what I want to start with first is, at a high level, zooming back out, I want you to talk to us about if you're a person who's ambitious about personal development, you want to improve yourself in a couple ways, or you just generally want to improve yourself as much as you can and achieve your goals.

Where do you think ChatGPT fits into that process of personal development or personal growth? 

Gena Gorlin (00:04:14)

So I think—and by the way, your articles and our conversations have inspired a lot of my thinking on this, so, there might be some overlap or some repetition here. But I feel like what ChatGPT does is, as a large language model that has access to much of the accumulated knowledge that human beings have collected via the internet, it is like an external hard drive for our brain, right? In the sense that we have working memory capacity limits that are always setting a cap, kind of setting a ceiling on just how much we can remember, how much we can bring to bear on our actions at any given moment in time of all the accumulated wisdom and experience and the principles and the heuristics that we individually have collected, but also that everyone before us has collected that might bear on our current actions. And so the fact that in addition to being able to introspect, to call up relevant insights, helpful perspectives, bias checking, heuristics from our own subconscious, now we can also call it up from human knowledge as such via ChatGPT. And so that just has such massive implications for our own, how we introspect that in addition to our journaling, in addition to writing it down for ourselves for later review, we can feed it into ChatGPT, and then we can get summaries and then we can get formulations that resonate with us in a way that really crystallizes, really sums up for us what has been sprawled across pages and pages of self reflection. And that then we can reliably call upon either by putting it in custom instructions, and I learned this from you and from one of your pieces, tell GPT as part of its custom instructions, “Hey, whenever I'm describing as  an interpersonal situation where I sound like maybe I might be avoiding something, remind me what what would you do if you weren't afraid of feeling ashamed?” Was that right? Was that your example? Or feeling guilty, thank you.  

And I've been playing with all kinds of different variants of that which I'm sure we'll get into but just but but that's just a tiny drop in a in an got a bottomless bucket of new creative ways that we can leverage this technology as it's evolving every day where we get unexpected—we don't think it can do something and then it does. And so I think it just has to be part of any ambitious person's epistemic hygiene, if you will, and sort of self-reflective hygiene that we can now level up our thinking, level up our knowledge work, level up our decision-making, our introspection by utilizing this massive external hard drive that we have on hand.

Dan Shipper (00:07:25)

I love the phrase epistemic hygiene. What does that mean?

Gena Gorlin (00:07:29)

Good question! I just made it up. So let's see if I can define it here for you on the spot. Just as we have physical hygiene, where we maintain our health and well being and we attend to our daily needs for rest and for cleanliness and that kind of thing, I think when it comes to the ongoing work that we do to grow and to maintain and to call upon our knowledge base—the working knowledge on which we base every decision, every reaction to every, every aspect of our lives, and the working model that then also colors every aspect of our experience because we filter it through our lens of  do I see this as good or bad for me? Do I think this person means well, do I think this is an opportunity or a threat. That working knowledge base is the map on which we are always kind of walking, and on which we build our life, there are lots of different and better and worse strategies that we might use and kind of different levels of intentionality we can bring to how we grow that knowledge base as well as how we interact with it and how we call upon it.

So that's kind of what I mean by our epistemic hygiene. 

Dan Shipper (00:09:03)

Maybe a way to rephrase this, tell me if this is right, is a key thing that leads us through the world is the bundle of knowledge or the model or the map that we have about how the world works and how we should relate to the world and all that kind of stuff.

And a key way to improve whatever we want to improve about ourselves, about how we behave, about how we meet our goals, about the goals that we set, all that kind of stuff is, is to maybe understand what's in that map because a lot of it is sort of subconscious. What do we know or what do we think we know? And then is to sort of modify that map in different ways intentionally to allow us to do things differently or think things differently. 

Gena Gorlin (00:09:56)

Exactly. Yeah. That's really nicely described. So that pertains to how we grow the model. So the last thing you mentioned like how do we modify it, but also what do we add to it? And when do we want to add in the sense of like, oh, is this an occasion for more research? Is this an occasion for sampling other people's perspective, sampling what has been said about this, what examples exist on the internet to guide different ways to approach the situation?

As well as then am I thinking through all the alternatives that exist in my subconscious, what are my blind spots? What do I tend to forget? With one piece I wrote for Every, “Don’t ‘Fake It ‘Til You Make It,” and said, “remember what you know.” 

Now that I've coined epistemic hygiene as a term, such a big piece of epistemic hygiene is the remembering what we know part. Actually calling upon the part of our model that maybe hasn't fully cemented yet but, oh, I am capable of being articulate in high-stakes social situations but it's easy to forget that when feelings run hot.

Dan Shipper (00:11:11)

Yeah, totally. That makes a lot of sense. I think that there's two things in there that I really resonate with, one is that no matter what you're going through or what your experience is, someone has gone through it before and has written about it or talked about it. And I think we tend to forget that, we tend to forget how much the sum total of human knowledge contains and how universal a lot of experiences that we believe to be specific to us are, or maybe they're not explicitly universal, they're like someone has thought about it and someone has gone through it before and, and how valuable it is to bring to bear like that sum total of human knowledge in any given circumstance.

Like for some reason, it's so hard when you're going through something to be like, Oh, I want to just figure out like who's thought about this and learn about it which is, I think a key thing that ChatGPT is like really good for is, what are the ways to think about this? And then the other one  is, once you have the answers, the answers tend to be simple. They just are hard to remember or hard to put into action all the time. And I think Chat is good at reminding you to do this little thing, you know? 

Gena Gorlin (00:12:25)

So, on the first point, you're making me realize part of my excitement about ChatGPT professionally as an upscaler comes from just a long-standing frustration that I have with how fragmented the field of psychology currently is.

And I know you've encountered this too, just like you're trying to figure out what is the best treatment for this common issue, right? That I go to 10 therapists, none of whom mentioned to me that this treatment exists that actually could really quickly help me and turn my life around.

And I say it's frustrating, but it's also just the default state of affairs in a field that hasn't yet consolidated itself. And ChatGPT is so incredibly powerful at allowing you to quickly sample the whole terrain. Even in the absence of any human there's not a good encyclopedia entry that just tells you here are the five major schools of thought that are relevant to this issue, now go look up this person.

But ChatGPT can do that for you because you can customize your encyclopedia query. You can say, “I'm struggling with this set of symptoms. What are all the major ways that people have addressed this issue” or “What are the five big categories of treatments?” And it can tell you reliably—it’s just mind blowing. 

Dan Shipper (00:13:53)

Absolutely wild. That's so good. You said something earlier that I just want to clarify really quick because it's another interesting word. But I don't think you coined this one on this particular podcast. I think it's one that you use a lot, which is the idea of working with upscalers or being an upscaler. What is that?

Gena Gorlin (00:14:11)

Yeah. That's funny because I think it is a term I sort of picked up from the maybe startup milieu.  But what I mean by it's sort of shorthand for leveling up in whatever domain is relevant. But an important role that it serves in my thinking is that it's part of a repertoire of kind of ceiling-raising rather than floor-raising considerations that, I think, my field and, I think, generally our culture and humanity tends to neglect. It's easier to think about floor-raising problems and to see them and to focus on who are the most severely distressed, severely ill members of our society and let's focus on trying to get them to limping at least, right? Let's focus on helping them to be less severely impaired or what are our biggest deficits? Let's focus on trying to repair those deficits. And it's so easy because those are the kind of problems that are in our face and that tend to be for which we have tools already developed because a lot of people aren't struggling with this.

And so if you are, maybe try to do what they're doing and maybe that'll help. Or it's sort of like, we know what it looks like to get to a kind of average level of functioning. And so we already have a clear picture of  the destination. But, what I think actually moves humanity forward and what I think moves us individually forward in the most meaningful ways isn't floor-raising, it's sort of ceiling-raising. It's thinking about not okay, what are the biggest deficits I need to repair? But what is already really good that could be even better, right? What are my strengths that I could multiply by really leaning into them?

Dan Shipper (00:16:08)

Right. And I think that that's really powerful. That makes a lot of sense. There's a couple of different linked points in there that I want to try to summarize or unpack a little bit. So I think there's a social level, societally, or just like as a field—psychology.

And then there's the individual level. So as a field, I think what you're saying, psychology tends to be thinking about how do we take people who are super sick and make them at least feel okay, which I think you'd agree is like a super important thing. And it's a really big deal.

But I think professionally your focus has been, given that there's a lot of focus on what is there to do for helping people who are doing good, but to just get to that sort of next level that we don't even know what that's like. And that's what you mean by, by ceiling-raising. And then I think like, sorry—

Gena Gorlin (00:17:05)

Yeah, let me be very clear that I do not think that we should stop worrying about the floor-raising problems, right? The floor-raising problems are crucial to be solving for and they're important and they're not neglectable or, when we neglect them, we do so at our peril.

So, right. The thesis really is more about how we could actually increase our repertoire, but also get better, I think, at solving some of the floor-raising problems if we were also attending to the ceiling-raising problems, right? Like how do we, even just the fact that ChatGPT has probably done more and will do more for the most severely affected mental health sufferers than most therapists have been able to do collectively in decades, right? And it's not for some of the reasons that we're talking about, because it just makes some of the same treatments more accessible and more cheaply and more quickly accessible and more universally, right? More sort of democratically accessible. And so, yeah, I just think we need to think about them in concert. 

Dan Shipper (00:18:17)

Yeah, that makes total sense. So, I think that's sort of like the social point or the societal point and where you focus career-wise, but then there's also a really interesting and I think deep and important point that you're making about individuals, which is that as people, we tend to just, because of the way our brains are wired, be really attuned to what our problems are.

And either trying to run away from them or obsessing over them, or whatever, whatever your flavor of that is. And it's important to think about and know what problems you have, but what we tend to neglect when we do that is what do you actually want to do? What do you want to achieve, or what do you want your life to be like?

And that turning our attention to that in an intelligent way is a really, really big and important component of living a good life where you do interesting stuff and that our brain sort of naturally draws us to not think about that. And that if we change that, it can really lead to growth in a big way.

Gena Gorlin (00:19:24)

Exactly. Beautifully put. I don't know if you remember when we were working on my radical self betterment piece and sort of going back and forth with edits, which, again, were so incredibly helpful. And one of the places where I think we kind of had a sticking point and we kind of worked out a flow that we were both happy with, it was where I first introduced the idea of change targets. I kind of get into the step-by-step process of radically changing ourselves, which, of course, is iterative, not literally stepwise. And I mentioned in the piece—again, this is probably thanks to your asking for clarification, and I'm so glad that this is now in the piece.

I say, “intuitively, you might think that the place to start is to identify some of your problems or some of your struggles. But actually, I would like to invite you to first think about what you want and paint a vision of your life.” And so I think that step is called identifying your life vision or something along those lines. And so that actually really helped crystallize for me that this is counterintuitive and I actually think it's really important to do.

Dan Shipper (00:20:34)

I love that. I think I have one final like framing question and then I'd love to get into how you use ChatGPT and then get into some chats ourselves.

So I guess just to give people a little bit of background. We've been working together for a while, as you've written a few pieces for Every, which has been amazing. But we only just started doing this course. And part of the way that happened is I've been thinking about doing a course at the intersection of ChatGPT and psychology for a while.

And I had a couple different people that I was potentially working on it with. And I chatted about it with you just sort of offhand and you were like, Whoa, that sounds really cool. And then I invited you to New York to just, I don't know, let's spend a couple of days, see what happens. I'll show you all the different things I've been nerding out on with ChatGPT and you bring up a bunch of your psychology knowledge and we'll mash it together and see what we can do. And I'm just curious for you, what was that experience like and what did you learn? What came out of that for you?

Gena Gorlin (00:21:47)

I mean, as you know, and as I raved about in writing and in conversation, it was really—it felt like a groundbreaking experience for me in a few different ways, like personally and professionally. I mean, the excitement of just trying this out together, fromhour one. When we just sat down and we talked about different ways we could approach this and then decided to just try some stuff. And I think we fed my values clarification prompt right into ChatGPT, just to get rolling with the first iteration and then we started iterating and I just approached it very sincerely.

There were things that had been on my mind. There were things I was feeling and I wanted to see what it could intuit, right? And the combination of feeling really seen both by you and ChatGPT and by the team that we had assembled and being just constantly surprised and delighted by the possibilities and just by all the different options available for nudging it. And so just like at the object-level of learning about the possibilities that ChatGPT currently offers.

If you remember, I mean, I didn't even have a—this is so embarrassing, but I'm going to say it—but I didn't have a paid subscription at the point where we started our two-day— 

Dan Shipper (00:23:24)

I think that was like the first thing I said to you was you must pay for this, Gena.

Gena Gorlin (00:23:27)

And so I realized, okay, I am not equipped.

And I mean, I was on the waitlist at that point. Cause I think like a week earlier, I had finally tried getting the upgrade and  I couldn't right away because there were presumably too many people trying to upgrade all at once. And so I was just kind of waiting and maybe ChatGPT heard my cries, but that evening between day one and two, I got my invitation.

And so I got the upgrade. And so even, I mean, it was such a relic. Now it feels like ancient history that I didn't have GPT-4 with the ability to create our own custom bots and just like to search the internet in real time, like all the things that now are part of my epistemic hygiene, like just weren't even in my repertoire at all prior to that day that you and I sat down together, which is just wild. It was just like really a turning point for me and oh, wow, like look at all that this can do and all that I can do with its help. So at that level, it was just really groundbreaking. And as you know, it was also, just for me personally, and it feels like worth acknowledging just an experience of a collaboration gone right, partly through the kind of very common experience I've had in most of my attempted collaborations where we’re trying to both impose our own agendas on this that aren't exactly aligned, but we haven't fully surfaced the ways that they're not aligned. And we're both excited about something, but it's not quite the same thing and like, it's really easy for one or the other of us to sort of get the wind blown out of our sails.

Which again, to me is just, yeah, that's just how it goes to try to collaborate with people. And that's kind of the default experience. And then, we actually sat down and talked about it, prompted, I believe, by you, and I believe, at least in some way, influenced positively by ChatGPT, somewhere along the line, because usually this is my move, usually I'm the one to say, you know what, let's sit down and have a really open, honest conversation, but you beat me to it, Dan, and that I will forever respect you for, and it was awesome, because at that point as you know, having been there. And we got really aligned and came to see jointly, kind of where there was excitement really kind of flowing for both of us and what kind of how we could mutually contribute to each other's sort of visions. And it just got a lot more grounded at that point in what would become our course, which we could deliver pretty soon after that initial brainstorm process. And I just feel like now, I also have a template for really effective, joyful collaboration, so thank you for that.

Dan Shipper (00:26:23)

Thank you. I mean, thanks for doing the discussion with me. It's nice that my thousands of hours of therapy and I don't know how many thousands of dollars of therapy somehow paid off, but beating a literal therapist to the punch at an open and honest conversation, I think, therapy works, people. 

Gena Gorlin (00:26:43)

I feel like that is the holy grail there. You unlocked that like top level. 

Dan Shipper (00:26:50)

Yeah, I need some badge or something. 

Gena Gorlin (00:26:52)

Seriously, there should be a badge for that. It's pretty awesome.

Dan Shipper (00:26:57)

I had a similar thing. It was such a great, great experience and I felt so much energy and I'd love to show people like some of the things that we talked about and came up with while we were there.

So I think the first place I want to go is to just really zoom in on how are you using this in your own life to do the epistemic hygiene or, to update that world map or to understand yourself better, all that kind of stuff. I know you have one thing in particular that you want to talk about. You want to start with that? 

Gena Gorlin (00:27:33)

Yeah. Let's take a look. Can you see?

Dan Shipper (00:27:37)

I can see it. So why don’t we start at the beginning. Tell us about what you're doing here. It looks like a year in review-type thing. Tell us about what your year in review practice is, what your goals are for it, and then why you decided to use ChatGPT for it.

Gena Gorlin (00:27:58)

For many, many years, I've had a personal tradition of doing a year in review and intention-setting. I don't really call them resolutions anymore if only because it's gotten so cliche as to be meaningless, but a kind of planning and strategic intention-setting process for the new year.

I do this around the end of every year or the start of the new one and it's evolved for me—the kind of structure of it has evolved and the the focus has evolved to the point where I found myself this year, given just a lot of rapid changes in my life, all happy and positive, I'm now two babies in, having been one baby in. Since last year in review I've moved cities, I'm married, I've got a job that I love, and spending more time than ever on the parts of my work that are kind of really self-directed rather than just my kind of faculty research. And I've just come a long way in a lot of my self reflections over the years, and so I sat down for my year in review and I just wasn't sure how to go about it. Do I really need to do this detailed narrative review of my year? I had jotted some things down in bullet point form and I thought, yeah, I feel like this kind of covers it, but this can't be the whole story. There's gotta be  depths to be mined in terms of insight. And, similarly, I had goals for the coming year, but they felt kind of, kind of loose and not necessarily as top-down, strategic, and hierarchical in terms of my OKRs and kind of vision and mission and so on, as I thought maybe would be optimal. And so I just thought, you know what, maybe ChatGPT can help me sort this through and can even just help me decide on the structure and I've generally been on the premise of you know what? I'm not sure what to do. Is there some way to source from ChatGPT? So this is such a moment—

Dan Shipper (00:30:19)

I just want to pause you there because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to unpack really quick. So one is that's a really good flag is in your head when you don't know what to do about something, or you don't know where to start, the first thing you do is go to ChatGPT.

Gena Gorlin (00:30:37) 

Yeah. Or one of the first things, or at least. It's sort of, again, it's like part of that menu of resources to consult or to consider, right? I think, okay, is there some perspective to be gotten from my husband, my best friend, from my informal advisory board? Are there books to read? So now, similarly, what can ChatGPT help me with here? Yeah, exactly. 

Dan Shipper (00:31:03)

I think that's interesting because I think people tend to believe that they need to know what they want out of it before they go to ChatGPT. And I think they don't realize that just being confused is a great place to start. 

Gena Gorlin (00:31:19) 

Yeah, I've found that those have been some of my most helpful conversations with ChatGPT. Let's see what you’ve got for me, ChatGPT.

Dan Shipper (00:31:28)

Totally. The other thing that I noticed about this, aside from just starting with being confused, is you put it in a Notion page. So tell us what's on that Notion and tell us why you did that?

Gena Gorlin (00:31:43) 

Yeah, so first of all, you taught me this trick of if I want to give ChatGPT a much longer set of text to read, but I don't want to publish it on my Substack for everybody to read, I can publish it as a Notion page.

So I've really been utilizing that trick. Here, what I further realized, and this is a great example of every time I explore. I can play with ChatGPT, I learn about some new limitation or workaround, but then I also figure out some way around it, or I can gain more utility, more facility with the tech.

And so the first thing I did was I told ChatGPT, “I'm working on my 2023 year in review and intention-setting for the coming year, and I'm having trouble figuring out how best to proceed with it.” And I gave it a link to a Notion page with the five years worth of my previous year-in-review journal entries, all copy-pasted, just back-to-back-to-back.

And I told it that's what it is. And I asked it to please read through the journal, including my laundry list of highlights so far from  2024. And then suggest some ways to organize my thoughts from there. Just again, I wanted to see what it would come up with. So pretty open-ended.

And then initially it gave me an answer that was very helpful. It told me, upon reviewing my journal entries, here are some significant life changes you're experiencing and grappling with and then it categorized some of the different challenges. So it was really good, but it was good with respect to probably the first fifth of that monster Notion page because I saw the themes that it was highlighting for me were themes that were relevant in 2018, like reflecting on significant changes, like my move in with Matt, who's now my husband  but whom I had just moved in with in 2018, the transition to a tenure-track faculty job, future-focused planning, writing about goals and challenges, understanding motivation and effort, long-term strategic planning, and some of these things are perennial themes for me and some of them were really time-specific in a way that made them less applicable.

So, and then it gave me some suggestions for moving forward, which again are helpful, but out-of-date. And I really wanted to get, if possible, the fully informed and fully updated brainstorm from ChatGPT that takes into account everything that I've at least written about in those years in review since 2018.

So I basically asked it to brainstorm with me: How do we get around your limitation here that you can only read  so far into this massive document I've shared? And it told me the last line it was able to read in the document. And so then I asked it whether I could maybe share smaller excerpts, and it said I could, and it kind of gave me a little bit more context for how to do that. “Once you've organized your journal into smaller segmented pages, you can share the links to those pages, and then I can access and review each one separately, and this should enable a thorough review of your journal.” So then I did that. I wrote down—

Dan Shipper (00:35:06)

I want to stop you right there really quick. I want to stop you right there, which is, this is another thing where you're noticing a problem. And I think what a lot of people do when they use ChatGPT is they notice a problem, for example, it only gives you the first fifth of the journal entries and then they sort of throw up their hands and they're like, ah, this isn't working. And then they just close it and forget about it.

But what you did is you were like, well, here's the problem. You told it to ChatGPT. You were like, here's the problem. Here's maybe a solution that could work, but, what do you think? And you co-created a solution together with ChatGPT that would work, and I think that's such a valuable way to think about using this tool is when you encounter a problem—tell it about the problem. You can bring solutions if you want, or you can ask it what it thinks, and you'll probably find a way around it.

Gena Gorlin (00:35:56) 

Exactly. And every time I have tried that general approach—maybe not every time, but in general, it's just been such a pleasant surprise how far it can get in brainstorming solutions with me.

I don't want to say every time, because definitely there've been some disappointments. I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish about it, but even in the case of the disappointments, it's sort of like, this is a current limitation on my access or my compute power or whatever. And it's clearly like, okay, well, I'm going to try back in a week or try back in a month.

So anyway, yeah, exactly. So together we found a workaround and I went ahead and separated that monster document with five years worth of year in reviews into eight separate shorter documents, all Notion pages that I quote, published for just the day and then created links to share with ChatGPT.

And then I gave it the full set of links. Which, I mean, one thing I love about ChatGPT is I never have to worry that like, Oh, it's going to be so annoyed. It's going to be rolling its eyes at just how obnoxious my long list of links is. Like who does this? Well, it doesn't mind. It has infinite patience and, what's the worst case scenario? It just doesn't give me anything helpful. And usually it actually does. So, that's just a really nice side benefit. So I gave it this list of links and I actually didn't even give it much instruction yet. I thought I'd have to then go back and say, okay, now you have all eight links. Please do the thing where you review them and then help me figure out kind of where to go from here for this latest year in review. But I didn't have to say any of that because it remembered its task. And so having looked at those eight links, it picked right up where we had left off and it told me, “After thoroughly reviewing your journal entries from 2018 to 2024, it is evident that your journey has been marked by significant personal and professional developments, challenges, and introspections.” True enough. And then, “Here's a synthesized overview incorporating key elements from each year.” This was really cool. And again, I didn't even ask it for this. It just had the idea to organize my journals by year for me, and that was really neat to see like, wow, okay, now my life story has been timelined very helpfully, at least for these five years worth.

Dan Shipper (00:38:28)

I love this so much.

Gena Gorlin (00:38:29) 

Right? How cool is that? 

Dan Shipper (00:38:29)

It's like having a personal biographer. 

Gena Gorlin (00:38:32) 

Seriously. That's exactly what it's like. I mean, a free and instantaneous personal biographer.

Dan Shipper (00:38:41)

Well, 20 bucks a month, but—

Gena Gorlin (00:38:43) 

Oh, good point. Right. Now that I have, in fact, upgraded.

Dan Shipper (00:38:49)

But previously, personal biographers were pretty expensive. So 20 is a deal. 

Gena Gorlin (00:38:56) 

In addition to being a ghostwriter and an encyclopedia, you're paying for a lot of different would-be subscriptions with that 20 bucks. It gave me this amazing summary per year of the major themes and the kind of review methods that featured in each of those years in review.

So, for 2018, I mean, this was just really, both I felt seen, but in a way I had that stage of my life mirrored back to me in this crystallized form where I could kind of experience it and feel my feelings about it in one fell swoop when something is really summed up for you.

And it helped me to put it in the broader context. So it reminded me that I navigated major life changes, like moving in with Matt, coping with the loss of my mother, starting a tenure-track faculty job, conceptualizing the idea of overcoming “people mode,” which was a super helpful reminder. Because then of course, I was like, ooh, I could really use that again now, because I haven't really been fully leveraging that. Insight, for context, overcoming “people mode” was a part of my personal journey where I kind of realized that sometimes instead of just thinking first personally about, what do I think or what do I want to do? I was basically engaging in these mental debates between different people who might have views on the matter and trying to, either mentally convince someone that this is what I should do or that I shouldn't have to do it or basically performing inside my own head for other people's benefit and thereby never really reaching my own fully personal conclusion, never accessing, what do I actually want? Or, what do I actually believe here? So I kind of coined “people mode” just for myself as a shorthand to check for with in my journaling. Hey, how have you been in “people mode” lately? Or, have you really been kind of intentionally first-personal? So it reminded me of that—super helpful.

And it reminded me that I was then reevaluating how I approach my year in review. So this is kind of an ongoing theme where I questioned the utility of the previous monthly reviews, which I didn't always stick with anyway and where I really reflected on the need for a more dynamic review process where it's more of as needed.

I returned to my journal when there's something to think through, but I do remember to return to it. So I was trying to figure out how to strike that balance and then the focus on writing and communication, which again is perennial, I explored different methods to enhance my writing skills. I see it was gonna take me to the journal itself, I guess. And so it did the same thing for 2019, for 2020, 2022, ‘23, and then for my 2024 in progress portion, which was brief because I had really just jotted down a few bullet points before asking for ChatGPT's help, it summarized for me what I had already done, kind of the major themes of the year, and then it gave me some suggestions for organizing my thoughts going forward. And this was where the real action started, the real work started that I really was able to to thought-partner with ChatGPT on. So it suggested identifying overarching yearly themes and patterns. It suggested posing some reflective questions, some intention-setting, which of course I already wanted to do utilizing smart goals, which I'm very familiar with balancing personal and professional goals, continued learning and adaptation, and then a plan for regular review. So, all of that so far was okay. That's a list of plausible things that I might do. I don't necessarily want to go down the checklist, but maybe I can just ask ChatGPT about some of the major themes that it suggested.

I divide this into based on what it already knows. So, let's see how much work I can get it to do for me in effect. And then I will kind of take what it gives me as a draft and sort of build on it. And then the really fun part ensued. So I just started asking it questions that I would ask myself.

So are there any major themes you anticipate emerging for me in the coming year, given the patterns you see in my entries to date? And these are some of the themes that it pulled out in terms of things to anticipate as important areas. This is mostly pretty spot on. So “deepening professional impact, my ongoing focus on expanding my coaching practice, especially with founders and innovators, which suggests a continued drive to enhance my professional influence.” It put it at the top and that is where it goes, which is notable and probably it's drawing on whatever I had written in that brief little beginning, a bit of reflection and the 2024 section, but still that was a pretty impressive inference. “Content creation and thought leadership,” continuing to grow my subset newsletter and related collaborations, which includes our collaboration, by the way. “Continuing to develop as a thought leader, potentially exploring new platforms or formats, balancing personal and professional life, continued growth and self reflection, leveraging technology and innovation,” since I did mention that I've discovered the power of ChatGPT and want to continue incorporating it creatively in my life and work, and then “expanding networks and collaborations,” which I'm really glad that it included here because it's one that has a kind of spotty role in my thinking about what to prioritize and my strategizing for my professional growth. “These themes align with your ongoing journey of personal and professional development reflecting a balance between introversion, innovation, and impact.” So then I asked it—

Dan Shipper (00:45:20)

Wait, I just want to stop there. What we've seen so far, which I think is so cool, is you have all these journal entries. It writes this timeline, this personal biography, year-by-year of all the stuff. And then it gives you a perspective list of themes and focuses for what you think you're gonna be doing this year in a way that makes you feel seen. And I just think that's important to underscore here, is feeling seen in that way, is so important for once the words are out there and you can see it on a page. If you scroll down to where you're where those themes were.

Yeah, major themes. Like, “deepening professional impact or content creation and thought leadership.” Those things are simple, but again, it's those simple truths that you need to be reminded of, that when they're reflected back to you, they really help you to align yourself and get your feet under you to move in a particular direction. And I think ChatGPT is so good at that. So many people just don't have anyone in their life who can reflect this kind of thing back to them and can really be honest with them. And I love it for that. And I love this use case. It's so cool to see it working like this. 

Gena Gorlin (00:46:51) 

Seriously. And, I mean, this connects to our broader theme that you and I are really iterating on, which is the power of ChatGPT for psychological development broadly. I mean, and for me thinking about it, what of my work can I start to outsource to ChatGPT? The fact that you just mentioned that many people don't have someone in their lives who functions in this way, as a mirror, as a kind of condenser, summarizer, reminder of here are the big themes I’m hearing what you're working on and what's important to you.

And, up until this point, either you had to hire people or invest in a coach or a therapist and hope that they're good or put a strain on friendships that would otherwise be spent doing other things. You don't have to do that anymore. And now everyone who—I mean, I think even the free version could do this much in terms of you copy-paste a bunch of journal entries and it spits back a really nice summary of one of the big themes. You don't need a person anymore to do this and that's revolutionary, right? Anyway, so just kind of building on that. 

And for me often, I'm someone who—in fact, I do have people for that and also it's what I do right professionally. And so I could have gotten this far it’s still really neat to be able to outsource some of it to ChatGPT and have it do some of that heavy lifting for me, but what I really try to do, when I'm really trying to milk the most value I can from it is I try to push it. I try to get it to go beyond the simple summaries and really can you tell me something I don't know, basically. And so I started asking it questions in that spirit of, let me see what it can tell me that I don't know, or what it can put on my radar that I would otherwise just be blind to. So I started asking “What do you think might be different about this year compared to prior years?” And I didn't have an answer off the top of my head, so I wanted to see what it might suggest. And its suggestions included increasing—this I almost tweeted because it was just like, I hope this is true. I really am now very invested in ChatGPT being a good forecaster because it would be really nice for this to happen.

But it said, “Increasing clarity and direction: Given your ongoing introspection and strategic planning, you're likely to approach this year with more clarity and purpose. Especially in balancing personal and professional goals,” please let that be true. “Higher profile clientele: Your goal to recruit high-profile founders and innovators could shift the dynamics and scale of your professional engagements.” Please let that be true. It's sort of like reading my—if it's a fortune teller, it's definitely kind of giving me the bang for my buck. Even if just from the standpoint of self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if it's just a placebo, like now I am going to be trying to manifest this version of my year. Super helpful.

Dan Shipper (00:50:02)

It's so, so cool for that. I think I told you, I've been doing something sort of similar where, especially if I have to make a big decision, what I'll do—especially decisions that are one-way doors where it's really hard to undo. What I'll do is I'll take a bunch of journal entries that I've done about the decision and then I'll say, hey, I want you to pretend to be me and I want you to base your pretending on these entries and I want you to write a journal entry as me. If I choose option A in the future, and then I want you to write another journal entry in the future if I choose option B, and then I get to compare the entries to see what it thinks I would feel if I did A or B or what it thinks would happen if I did A or B and. 

It’s so good. And who knows. I don't want to get into whether it's not actually predicting the future, but what it's really actually good for is when you read a journal entry written by a prospective you, having made a decision or not made a decision, you can tell what feels right and what feels not right and what feels like you want and what feels like you don't want. And so it creates this new way for you to look at the decision and it’s really clarifying. I love that technique. 

Gena Gorlin (00:51:28) 

That is genius, Dan, because part of it's the coin-flip tactic, but on steroids, right? Because, the really kind of low-tech version of this technique, but which still gets you some mileage, is  flip a coin, look at what the decision is based on just heads, I go with A, tails I go with B, and then notice whether you feel disappointed or relieved, right? Just like that immediate introspective feedback of just, am I happy that this is now the future? To give yourself that input of, where are you leaning at least? But what you're talking about is the much, much richer projection.

I mean, part of what strikes me about this is, this is an LLM. So the whole thing it does is that it predicts what someone might say. Based on everything they've said to date, that's its talent. Its specialty is, here's how you might be talking in a version of the future where all the things you've just told me are true and have come to pass.

Who better to give you the best possible simulation of that future than an LLM trained on you? It just strikes me as such a brilliant use of this technology. I'm definitely going to be trying that. So yeah, that's awesome. So this is kind of my somewhat less creative version of a future-based projection from ChatGPT for me to just kind of like take on is, okay, I want these to come true and so I'm going to pushing to realize them. And who ultimately is going to have the most agency over realizing this future, if not me anyway? And then there's “greater integration of personal values,” which was really important for me to read that “my evolving understanding of the builder's mindset may lead to a more integrated approach to personal and professional decisions, reflecting deeper alignment with my values.” Hooray. 

Dan Shipper (00:53:32)

Again, the builder's mindset is the framework you came up with.

Gena Gorlin (00:53:36) 

And I should mention for disclosure. So I'm using a version of ChatGPT that has custom instructions to kind of refer to my builder's mindset framework and basically talk to me. What did I think the exact instructions are? Talk to me like you're a busy founder who doesn't have time for BS and just gives it to me straight. But also like keeping in mind that I'm working toward these personal development goals, I want to embody the builder's mindset rather than  falling into kind of my tendencies to either care too much about the status or impression management. Or sort of like making excuses, like falling into a kind of learned helplessness where I don't fully appreciate my own agency.

So I gave it some instructions. It has some of that context for how I think about this approach to my life and to my work and then what I'm working on broadly. And it's pulling that in together because I don't think I even mentioned the builder's mindset in the journal. So it's integrating that from my custom instructions with what it's read in my journals. And then “leveraging technological advances,” which makes sense. And here we are at this very moment, okay, talking about how to leverage ChatGPT for psychological growth.” Okay, so I'm living out this part of my year so far and then “adjusting to family dynamics,” given my growing family and changes in my personal life, which I'd mentioned a few important changes, obviously the baby, but also my partner, Matt, had just stepped away from the day-to-day operations at his startup. And so he was starting a new chapter, which would sort of affect our dynamic because he'll sometimes be helping me with stuff. And so then that sort of creates more enmeshment between kind of work and personal life and there would be a lot to adapt to there. 

So then I asked it—now I'm really trying to kind of push for the insights that I wouldn't be able to reach on my own. Or, for it to kind of give me the meaty stuff. And so I asked, “What are my blind spots likely to be in the coming year?”

And it was interesting. So the first set of blind spots it gave me were kind of all on the side of you'll be kind of shooting too high, you'll be working too much. And by the way, these are all very real risks and very real failure conditions for me to be cognizant of and paying attention. “Managing my expectations,” I might overcommit—by the way, absolutely. That is like, it should be the top item because that is my number one Achilles heel is that I overcommit, and end up not fully being a jack of all trades, master of none. So there's always a risk. “Balancing innovation with feasibility.” Fair enough. Where I might veer off into new and exciting  directions, but where I just don't know what I'm doing or where I might not be able to measure my impact as much. “Maintaining personal wellness,” a work-life balance issue. And then “managing expectations” where I set “overly ambitious goals that might not align with current realities or resources.” All totally fair and very helpful for it to surface. And you will see how, later, I kind of push it to also maybe give me, fill out the other side of the puzzle or the other side of the puzzle. Is it just that I'll be too ambitious? Or like, is there any way that I might not be ambitious enough or the wrong kind of ambitious?

So yeah, the next thing I asked was what would you suggest is the highest leverage goals and intentions for me to set in the coming year?  Which was very helpful. This was probably one of the most helpful. Just that it gave me a ranking, because this is what I'm worst at. You know, everything feels equally important all the time, and so I always feel guilty about all the things I'm not working on at this moment, because you can't be working on everything at once. And it's really easy for me to get distracted and to feel like, no, no, I need to be writing another article, even though actually whatever I'm doing to either really optimize the coaching experience for a client or to find the next really high-profile client that is actually my you know, that's the top of my funnel.

So this was really helpful the fact that it rank-ordered them and that even just the kind of the way that it summarized some of these goals and consolidated them, like “thought-leadership consolidation” was incredibly helpful for me because I hadn't put that label on a bunch of the related things I do that all kind of fit under that heading.

So that was really helpful. But again, I wanted it to tell me what I'm not seeing. And so then I asked what goals maybe I shouldn't be setting for the coming year in the spirit of being able to say no to things, et cetera. And here again, okay, so “don't be too ambitious” was one of the themes. “Diversifying into unfamiliar areas,” as a kind of danger zone. And it has a point for sure on all of these. “Neglecting work life balance”—

Dan Shipper (00:59:22)

But it also doesn't feel like you, which is interesting. Like I feel like that's not really what you want or what a lot of people want. Tell me about that. 

Gena Gorlin (00:59:30) 

Yeah, exactly. And, so we'll flip over because I kind of prompted it on a few of the specific things that I might choose to focus on or deprioritize.

And then I asked about how to manage the fact that Matt is now between jobs and will be helping me. And, again, it sort of gave me some standard ways that we might struggle with boundaries and defining clear roles, things like that. Things that I, again, kind of asked in a different way, what might I lose sight of in the coming year. And here, again, it's like, okay, so the top one is “importance of self-care.” The next one, which is very important—all of these are important—is the “value of honest self-reflection,” “balance in work-life dynamics,” and then “staying true to your core mission.”

And so at this point, because the theme keeps coming up like, you ChatGPT are very focused on making sure I don't overextend myself, making sure that you know I'm not being too ambitious. And I, Gena, I'm all about maximizing ambition, right?

So I wanted to kind of probe it at this point, or prompt it. I said, I don't actually like the phrase “work-life balance.” What insights have I, in fact, articulated about this in my journal, and what's my distinct perspective on it, if you can tell? So I'm kind of giving it the feedback that you just mentioned, that this doesn't really sound like me.

And so then, it really kind of leveled up, if you will. It said, “based on your journal entries your perspective on work-life balance seems to lean more toward an integrated approach where work and personal life are not in competition, but rather complement and enhance each other. You emphasize living intentionally,” et cetera.

So this is much better. And I said, that sounds right. So then I asked, okay, so “how am I specifically likely to mess up on this in the coming year, given my stated approach to it,” and then it got more helpful and said, “given your approach to integrating work and personal life, potential pitfalls include blurring boundaries,” true enough. “Without clear boundaries, work could intrude into personal life or personal concerns could distract from work focus,” which is truer than it even knows. This especially comes up, as an extrovert who is an external processor, I always want to be telling my partner and my friends the stories of what my clients tell me, which obviously I can't do.

And so I'm always, de-identifying like crazy, I'm changing  the details, but always feeling myself kind of at the edge of, okay, would this person know I'm talking about them if they were behind me at a café, which is the standard, the criteria and I learned in grad school. And most of the time I can say no, but some of the time it gets really hard sometimes to really kind of hold myself fully accountable.

And this is like a reminder to me kind of, okay, don't blur that boundary, especially when I'm giving advice or just informally serving as a sounding board for friends or for people in my family, for people close to me. And then it's, wait, am I wearing my therapist hat? Or am I wearing my friend hat?

So this was super relevant. And then “over-integration,” this was a kind of interesting one. And “neglecting personal needs,” which definitely is a thing that I have been known to do and could do again. And so the over-integration one I wasn't sure what to make of those? This was new to me as a concept—what is over-integration? How could you be over-integrated? And so I asked it if it could give me a specific example, and it suggested a way this could happen where in discussions with my husband, Matt, if they “frequently and predominantly revolve around work-related strategies or client management, it could overshadow personal non-work related conversations and interactions. This could lead to a scenario where most of our experiences and dialogues are work centric.” Yeah, maybe. This was something that at least like it really probed some valuable reflection on something that I just wouldn't have thought to reflect on otherwise, which was super helpful. And then I asked kind of about high-leverage activities to be engaging in specifically toward the goal of selective client expansion.

So here I kind of got more tactical with, okay, let's follow up some of the broad goals and broad themes—I use it as a kind of organizational tool at this point, just to help me kind of categorize and operationalize in what order should I be doing these things and kind of where to put my focus, which again was incredibly helpful.

Dan Shipper (01:04:22)

I love that. I think there's a lot of really, really smart things—and to sort of zoom out because we're heading towards the end of the episode. And I want to sum up a little bit of what I've seen because I think there's so much smart stuff in here, but one thing is you're starting off with a ton of information.

All of these journal entries, you then, kind of like how to do the personal biography, like a little bit of a summary. Then you had to take from that summary themes, and then you started asking very specific questions about, okay, what might I be missing or what things should I push on or all that kind of stuff, which I think is really cool.

I love asking what am I missing? All that kind of stuff. But what's really important here at this point is you asked what you might be missing or what you might. Not—I can't remember the exact formulation—but it gave you an answer that wasn't really like you. It was like, you shouldn't necessarily be too ambitious or overextend yourself.

And your whole vibe is like, be as ambitious as you want to be. Be more ambitious. We're raising the ceiling here. And rather than be like, oh, ChatGPT, this is not working or whatever, you just got more specific and you were kind of like, look at the writing that I do about ambition and use that as a guide to talking about this topic with me and it got much better.

I think that's the thing that people often miss about ChatGPT is it's not one thing. It can really—it has a default personality that it will adopt if you don't give it instructions. But if you're specific about what you want, it will totally change how it treats you and what it says. And that can make all the difference in whether or not it's helpful.

Gena Gorlin (01:06:07) 

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, just to zoom back out to this whole process that we've been talking about and what ChatGPT is doing for me here. I mentioned I'm an external processor, right? I mentioned how I always need to be talking through things with people. And I know you and I journal, partly as a scaffold for that kind of external processing.

To get things out of our heads on paper where we can dialogue with them, where we can hear them and see them for ourselves. To have a tool that actually talks to us, that actually can not only summarize, but can build upon, can question, can consolidate, connect dots between all these different things that have been swimming around in our heads. It's so groundbreaking, just from the standpoint of us being able to do what we do better. Do you know what I mean? It was really funny when I first talked to the audio ChatGPT, Matt was there to witness this, just the hilarity of it. I picked my voice. I think it was the British lady version and she said hello to me for the first time in her very friendly way. What would you like to talk about? And I froze up, like my social anxiety kicked in and I found myself in that moment, feeling all the feelings of like, Oh my gosh, I need to make a good first impression. She's going to think I'm so banal and stupid.

And I'm like, what the heck? I'd already anthropomorphized her. I'd already imbued her with all of these human qualities that make her so valuable to me, even just from the standpoint of, now, as therapists, we can do exposure therapy. I literally had an exposure exercise foisted upon me by my first contact with voice GPT and the fact that we can actually outsource this. Some therapists might be threatened by this, right? You had that amazing tweet about how your therapist was kind of freaked out to discover how much ChatGPT could do for you now, right? But the more I reflect on it, the fact that so much of what we do can actually be done by the client themselves when empowered with this tool, to me this is why I became a therapist.

This is why I love and care about the human mind. Because to me, what this is demonstrating is just how much we can accomplish with the kinds of tools that we ourselves have invented to aid and to multiply our agency, right? Yeah, these are common factors. It doesn't take a separate  organic intelligence to teach us how to be our better selves, it takes us dialoguing with ourselves and accessing the world of information and the world of internal insight and experience that we already have at our fingertips. And so I just, I couldn't be more excited about what the future holds with this technology.

Dan Shipper (01:09:22)

That's amazing. I love that. That's such a good way to put it. And I think it's so smart. I think one of the things you're saying is coaches and therapists, like all great, all, all amazing stuff, but accessibility and cost. And there's all this stuff where I would love to talk to my therapist all day, but I can't, and he doesn't want to—he doesn't really want that either. But I can talk to ChatGPT all day. 

Gena Gorlin (01:09:51) 

As a therapist, I've had the thought many times. I wish I could send a clone of me home with them. And you know now I kind of can. That’s a win-win. We all want this for you.

Dan Shipper (01:10:06)

It's totally incredible. And it's also true. There's a huge sort of skill gap thing where some therapists are amazing. Some therapists are terrible. But therapists only have a certain number of hours in the day.

It'd be great if I could interact with the best therapist instead of whoever I happen to find for my particular issue. Cause it's like, I don't think there's one therapist, one coach that's like just the best fit between you and you and who you're working with. But we can distribute that beyond the hours in a day that that person has to offer.

I think that's one thing you're saying. And another thing you're saying is, forget about the therapist. It's also just about: What you as a human are bringing to it—these tools are incredible mirrors and they give back to you what you put in and and if you put in a lot of time and effort and you put in yourself, they will reflect that self back to you in a way that can lead to growth. And that's incredibly powerful.

Gena Gorlin (01:11:10) 

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, even just coming back to where ChatGPT and I landed at the end of this exchange we've been reviewing: I asked it to now summarize and consolidate everything we've talked about. And the fact of the matter is nothing here is new or surprising per se, right?

All of this, either I have told it and it summarized for me or it and I arrived at collaboratively. In terms of, now it's work-personal integration, instead of just work-life balance but having this consolidated. List for all that people might be down on ChatGPT for—”well, it doesn't give you anything new, it just regurgitates what's on the internet.” Do you know how powerful that is? Like if all it did were regurgitate, but like in a way that was really coherent and that was fresh and that was really, systematically drawing on the sum of both what you've inputted to it and what it knows from the internet… show me a human who can consistently do that.

It's just such an incredible source of—we talked about remembering what you know, right? Like, remind me ChatGPT, what was it I was on about at the beginning of this chat when I was mentioning this issue that I've now kind of gotten distracted from? And how did that connect to this thing we're now talking about? It can do that for me.

Dan Shipper (01:12:48)

I love it. And it's so true. People can look at magic and be like, well, it's just X, Y, Z. Or it's like the human body, all it does is it sucks in O2 and expels CO2. Like that's not a big deal. And it's like, no, that's amazing.

Gena Gorlin (01:13:06) 

You try to synthesize a living organism that spontaneously generates energy from the atmosphere and turns it into a beating heart—what? And this feels like, we haven't quite learned how to synthesize actual life, but wow, somehow we've managed to kind of synthesize a very important and very hard-to-simulate process of life. And who knows what the future holds?

Dan Shipper (01:13:42)

And I think, like you're saying, it is true that it's not really coming up with totally new stuff. It may be new to you, but probably not new in terms of the collective brain of humanity. But like we said earlier, the answers you're looking for are often pretty simple.

It's just that finding the answer is sometimes hard and then remembering it is really hard and that's what these tools are. That's what these tools are good for. And that's, really, it sounds like that's a lot of what you're using it for and it's really, really cool to see. 

Gena Gorlin (01:14:20) 

To kind of come back to this notion of like an anthropomorphized other who's really ourself reflected, there's therapy research that a lot of therapists don't attend to, and may not actually love to hear about, which is how much the efficacy of therapy, actually, can be accounted for just by the patient. Variability in treatment outcomes explained by—you plug in all these different variables of the specific treatment method, the therapist orientation, the number of years of the therapist’s experience, the socioeconomics, all these different things the diagnoses. And of all those variables, the one that one of the variables that come that swamps all the rest in terms of explanatory, statistical kind of variance is just who the patient is. That's it. It's this patient versus that patient versus the other patient. The patient is making their own therapy. Do different patients experience me very differently? And I know because I can see how, wow, I like, that's a mode that I was in for this patient where I'm way more talkative than with this other patient where I'm really reflective and thoughtful. The patients are shaping me and now—we have that variable isolated.

You design your therapist, you design it, you tell it how talkative or how reflective to be, you tell it what orientation to adopt, but it's still an interaction with another you. And I think psychologically that gets us to, how does that interact with our attachment styles, with our sense of self, with our sense of  belongingness versus isolation. I get unblocked from writing by just having ChatGPT ask me questions about the topic that I would like to write about. And it's wild what a different mode it puts me in. So I just really feel like I couldn't emphasize enough, just the value of having an agent or a pseudo-agent. It turns out that it doesn't actually even have to be alive for us to be able to externalize that part of ourselves, and relate to it in a new way.

Dan Shipper (01:16:44)

I love that. You just honestly just psychology nerd-sniped me because—and I wish we had more time. Because one of the things you said that—I think you made a lot of points in there that I think are really interesting. But one of the things you said that makes me really curious is that the main variable in treatment outcomes for therapy is like who the patient is. And the soundbite that I know is that the main outcome is like the therapeutic alliance, or the main thing that affects the outcome is therapeutic alliance. Is that the same thing or is it different? And how are they related in your mind? 

Gena Gorlin (01:17:20) 

So it's different. And the one you always hear about, the one that's gotten the most press, so to speak, both within the field and outside the field is the alliance. Like when we think about common factors of therapy that seem to cut across orientations, the alliance is the first thing that comes to mind. But this is actually a separate variable that is separately entered into the regression equation, which is just, who is the patient? There's also a separate variable, which is who is the therapist? And that also turns out to explain a great deal of variance. So in addition to, how warm and trusting is the working relationship between you, which is crucial, there's also just, how is each individual person contributing across different dyads? Meaning, you might have different relationships with these different five patients— Or as the patient you've seen five therapists and some of them you had better relationships with, some worse, but you, as the patient, managed to get something out of every single one that another patient hasn't figured out how to get out of those same therapists. Does that make sense? So it's like it's a distinct variable.

Dan Shipper (01:18:26)

That's really interesting. It reminds me of—I'm reading this book right now called I and Thou by Martin Buber. Do you know him?

Gena Gorlin (01:18:38) 

I've heard tell, but I haven't read it. Maybe I should put it on my list. 

Dan Shipper (01:18:41)

You should definitely put it on your list. It's super hard to read. He's really mystical and esoteric. I first was gifted it when I was at the end of high school and I picked it up and looked at it and I was like, this is terrible. I can't read this. But somehow, as I've gotten older and more woo-woo, I've been like, oh, this is great. But I think one of the underlying points that he's making, which I think is really special and interesting. And it's exactly—I think what you're saying, if I'm interpreting you correctly, is the I that “I am” arises as I relate to someone else or something else, and so who you are changes in a lot of ways based on the relationship that's currently happening, and the way that you're approaching that relationship. And so, if you believe that that's true, then it would make a lot of sense that how you are in the therapy room is going to be different from patient to patient and there's not really—obviously there's some common things, but who you are and your effectiveness and all that kind of stuff is going to, is going to change drastically in a way that when you're talking about, I don't know, the effectiveness of a knee surgeon, it might not be as different for a knee surgeon, what the knee is. 

Gena Gorlin (01:20:00) 

I would expect not and hope not. So there's a lot in what you're saying that resonates in terms of— and I've heard different variants of that idea that, and I think there's a lot to it, the ways that we enter into different modes, or we sort of have different versions of ourselves, depending on kind of what gets brought out in a given interaction or a given environment.

And I think by default, that's just definitely true, because I think we start out compartmentalized, we kind of get activated into different modes by different circumstances and with different people. And these things don't get integrated by default. But I think a big goal of therapy and I think a big goal of our own growth and  psychological aspiration as individuals is to seek integration, right? I think a lot of what you and I will be helping people with in our course, right? Learning about who you are, kind of clarifying, crystallizing what is actually important to you, all things considered and what are all these different parts, including the neglected parts, and how do you want them to feature in the life that you're building, and how you spend your time, and what you prioritize and what is non-negotiable, and what is more what can you be, what can you trade off, so that we can actually be the overarching architects of ourselves in our life, which is not easy because we've got to be able to discover and consult with and ultimately put into dialogue, and somehow weave together all these different compartmentalized parts. And I think having a ChatGPT to talk to and to kind of park some of those selves on, and then dialogue with them so that we can understand them better as the I that is relating to this version of me, it's such a tremendous tool posturing that integration. 

Dan Shipper (01:22:00)

I love that. That is beautiful. I think we should leave it there and for anyone who's listening, and if you vibed with that, we're doing a course, it's called “Maximize Your Mind with ChatGPT.”

The link is below. You should come hang out with us in the course and learn how to do that integration process that Gena was talking about. And yeah, I would love to have you back. We should definitely do this again. Thank you so much for taking the time. This is an amazing conversation.

Gena Gorlin (01:22:29) 

It is always a pleasure, Dan, to be continued, no doubt.