Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Quick carve outs. My quick carve out is a Google product, actually, NotebookLM. This is freaking wild. Our friend, Ben Cohen over at the Wall Street Journal who wrote the great piece on Acquired a few months back, texted us, what was this, two weeks ago maybe? A week ago. It was like, have you guys tried this thing NotebookLM. I think you had, and me being me, I hadn’t. I was like, no, let me check it out. I uploaded just the links to the sources that I used for my side of the research for the Microsoft Part I episode. Just links. And what it spat back out at me, I was like, holy crap. At this point, I think we’re well past the Turing test, but it is the most convinced that something is actually a person I’ve ever been. If I didn’t upload all the sources and know that it was unbelievably tailored content to the thing that I just uploaded, I’m not sure I would know that it was AI. It’s pretty amazing. I have two. One is a documentary on Netflix called Mr. McMahon. I was not a pro wrestling person growing up. I want to go be a pro wrestling person now. This documentary is incredible. It is some of the best storytelling I’ve ever seen. Interestingly, it’s a documentary that is told with no narrator. There is story arc all throughout the episode exclusively with interview answers. You almost don’t notice, at some point you finish an episode and you’re like, wait. There was no narration in that. There was no cheesiness. It was all first-party accounts and then cuts to old footage of things that aired on TV. Then the credits come up and of course it’s a ringer production. Bill Simmons is the executive producer. It is remarkable. Mr. McMahon is a singular figure in the world. Certainly not to be glorified, but one to try and understand. Oh man, it’d be fun to do a WWE episode someday.…

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