🎧 He Wrote a Book in 30 Days

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast How Do You Use ChatGPT? I go in depth with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist, economist, and author. We dive into how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way we approach creative projects. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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New York Times bestselling author Seth-Stephens Davidowitz wrote a book in 30 days—and he did it with ChatGPT.

Who Makes the NBA? is Seth’s third data science book. He challenged himself to write it in under a month after realizing how much faster he could work by teaming up with ChatGPT plugin Advanced Data Analysis. Along the way, Seth discovered something else: AI made the process of writing this book way more fun. He handed off all the boring parts of data analysis, like writing code to generate charts from datasets, to AI. This freed him to focus on the part that he loves—thinking up questions designed to uncover insights from a dataset.

Seth is a data scientist, economist, and author of Everybody Lies and Don’t Trust Your Gut. He’s worked at Google, lectured at Wharton, and consulted for Fortune 500 companies.

Who Makes the NBA? is a fascinating read, but it’s also an experiment in how AI is revolutionizing creative pursuits. In a world where AI is making every question that humans know the answer to immediately answerable, the real differentiator is asking the right questions—a skill that Seth isn’t just exceptionally good at, but also finds joy in.

I sat down with Seth to understand where AI sits in his data analysis process and how he used it to write a book in 30 days. We also prompt ChatGPT to answer an intriguing question of our own—which Olympic sport I’d be best at—live on the show.

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

Brainstorm acronyms with ChatGPT. Seth created a metric to rank basketball players after adjusting for their height and named it after Muggsy Bogues, the shortest NBA player in history. Since he wanted the name to double-up as an acronym that described the metric, Seth used ChatGPT to generate one that was “unbelievably, mind-blowingly good.”
ChatGPT as the ultimate productivity hack. Beyond creative brainstorming, ChatGPT’s Advanced Data Analysis feature saves Seth significant time by generating charts based on simple instructions. “[J]ust the fact that you could just tell it: Download this data set, run this regression, make a chart of that, and it does that right away, was so wild,” he says.