Nathan Labenz: evaluation

Transcript context

…But the core thing is still being Rodolphe. I don't think we are anywhere close to a point where it can do any I mean, you wouldn't want to do any of the writing because the writing is how you think. So even if it could produce the writing, which it can't, I would still want to produce the writing anyway. And my writing style was very unique, you know, I think it basically is post AI complete to reproduce even if it was okay or for me not to. I had substantially made me more productive. I do worry with the idea of there used to be a lot more kind of dead time opportunity to think, opportunity to sort of not have yourself so engaged in your situation involved in engaging in all of these activities. Right? Like, the whole, like, sword fighting, x k c d, my codes compiling. And, like, to to some extent, it's, well, Fables or GBT Pro is running, and I I have to wait for the result. But, like, there's always other things you can do with that. You can always start another instance. You can always like, you're doing all this context switching. You're doing all this focusing, and you're just trying to do everything so fast. You're just trying to have so many stuff running around in your head. Then sort of the the lower level stuff kind of bought you a buffer in which to think. And this is sort of the the object level version of the larger thing of people trying to do this, like, multi month, multi year sprint of everything is so urgent, you can never relax. And also, there's just so much more events coming at you. Like, you look back, like, you watch a movie set in twenty years ago, let alone fifty years ago, and you see so much time being spent on just physical travel, on tracking down records, on on doing these things where your brain is kind of getting a break, getting a chance to synthesize, kind of getting a chance to, like, slowly gather something up. And people are you know, I I wrote this biography of, you know, Linda b Johnson. So I I had to travel around the country and talk to all these people and look at all these archives and basically go through all these libraries. That it's a huge efficiency gain to not do that, but something is obviously lost. And so we need to fight to get that thing back in some ways. It's interesting that you said that it's just an extra step. It's making things better, but it's taking longer. I am struggling with that a little bit myself. Mhmm. I've started making songs for every episode, and nobody it's actually people do care. People do seem to really enjoy them, and I get a lot of comments, and I personally really enjoy them. So I do think in some sense, it's making my output better. But talk about something that is definitely an extra step where I'm like, I'm not moving any faster. Definitely getting bogged down sometimes in listening to all these Suno song generations and trying to iterate to find something that I actually feel like I really like. That is a paradox right now that I don't really know how to resolve. Definitely doing more, doing better, but not faster, not saving time. Wait. Wait. It's the thing where if you were replacing the human version of it, where you had to go hire an artist or compose the song yourself, you'd be saving a ton of time, obviously, versus having that song. But, obviously, that's not something you can do within the production schedule. Even if it even if cost was no object, it's the time investment doesn't make sense. So you wouldn't have done it, and now you're doing it. Same thing with the editing. Same thing with art for my so, like, I I like to have a I like the value of a good banner. Right? To have a good artwork to display on Twitter because I have to see it constantly in the notification section. And also, I like to have them on the when you go to the sub stack, you have the pictures. And before, all I would do is I would take a I've been by default. I take a picture from the post. I just like, okay. Here's seven things I happen to put in the post, which would make the most sense. If all of them are terrible, I'll look for some stock footage. And I'll spend thirty seconds, like, googling for stock footage, and that's kinda it. And now if I'm not happy with any of the default solutions, I'm gonna spend a bunch of time generating something with Gemini or GPT image. And that definitely takes longer. Sometimes it has a really good payoff. I think a lot of people got a big kick out of the the giant array of valetizers of the fedoras. And sometimes that just comes to you because that that that one was just like I knew instantly that's what I wanted. And I just get one one command, kept writing, came back. Whoops. It's there. Other times, it's not so easy. But, yeah, like, it's the opportunity to make a better product, and then you have to do the work to make it a better product. It's like suddenly, you're issuing a print issue, now you have to make sure everything collates exactly right and everything lines up exactly right in order to get this better thing. And sometimes that is not, in fact, worth it. You have to know when not to do it. Right? Like, I I do wonder, like, with the Odyssey. Right? Like, Nolan films this thing with an extra 40% of the screen in this extra high resolution so that you can do this IMAX presentation when almost nobody watches it in IMAX. But you also have to make sure that footprint on the screen doesn't matter. And you're, like, starting to wonder, well, is it actually worth the extra effort, or was that that effort better spent on something else? I don't know.…

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