Yep

... and pull information out and, and put it together in, in kind of new forms.

And what I've found is that now with Notebook, I, I [laughs] really feel like for that part of my work, the journey that I've been on, the kind of feature that I've been chasing since I was in college, is finally in its full dress form.

Like, I feel like I, I, I now have a notebook that...

In the book that I'm writing now, which is roughly kinda structured around the Gold Rush, the original California Gold Rush, I have a notebook with, I think it has about 200 sources in it and extensive notes that I've taken on this project, so it's millions of words.

Um, some entire books in there and, um, lots of articles and things like that.

And so it's an enormous iceberg of information.

Right.

[laughs] Please go.

So we th- I, yeah, I think that in fact, the, the algorithms are less about kind of nefarious economics of big social media companies, and more about the intrinsic bias that we have towards being interested in negative news.

Um, and there's a, there's a kind of understandable reason, like threats are important.

You wanna focus on threats if you feel that something bad has happened, or something has, um, challenged your expectations about what was gonna happen in a negative way.

There's a reason why your consciousness, your attention is drawn towards those things.

Um, but in a world that is constantly reinforcing that interest, that kind of attentional, uh, focus that you naturally have in negative outcomes, that can get a little pathological, I think.

And so one of, one of the things I f- I, the, a f- I had a thought experiment, uh, um, that I borrowed from somewhere else in, in the beginning of Extra Life, the second to last book, which is about the extension of human life expectancy over the last 100 years.

Please.

Yeah.

These tiny little volcanic islands, right? And there are cloves that have been found preserved in ancient Babylonian, uh, sites that are something like 3, 4,000 years old.

And so that meant that those cloves had traveled, you know, in 2000 BC, uh, farther than any human being had ever traveled from a part of the world that no one in Babylonia had any knowledge of.

And so we have this integrated for the first time kind of marketplace global economy because of the taste for spices.

And there is this story that was the conventional way of telling it for years and years and years, that spices were there to make food edible.

But if you look at the marketplace, there's been a kind of backlash against that idea.

Um, if you look at who was paying for things like pepper when pepper was worth its weight in gold or, or even more, it was really the super wealthy elite and the royal families of all sorts across Europe, and they had access to fresh meat.

This is, the rhyme Peter Piper picked a pepper might have actually come from this guy?

And we kind of forget that down

You know, thinking about this, there was a really good, bringing together two things you just said about the global perspective on this and then why we are steered towards this.

And why facts don't matter.

Why facts don't matter.

So there was a great, Farid did a great panel yesterday about global energy situation.

One of the first things that came up was that if you look at the actual magnitude of the supply shock of oil being withdrawn from the market in 73 and 79, What happened earlier this year was way bigger, both in absolute numbers and percentage of our market.

But in fact, thus far, and it seems like maybe hopefully this will continue, the actual impact on the economies was much less severe than it was in 73 and 79.

That's never happening,

What was your take? And then I'll

go to you, Jeffrey.

I think there are a lot of things at work there, Jason.

I think on the one hand, there is the concern that generation has about the impact of this on the job market, right? That they're worried that this is, you know, there are kind of leaders of some of these companies who are saying this is going to eliminate X number of white collar jobs in the next five years, right? So we have that concern, like, is their future being put at risk at this? The other side of that, which is something I've been, I just wrote a piece about this actually called Cognitive Uploading, which is this idea that we've focused so much on the ways in which AI helps you kind of bypass getting a good education and helps you potentially like have the AI write the paper for you one click instead of actually doing the hard work of thinking and processing.

And I think we haven't spent nearly enough time, and it's on us as well as other people, to really walk through the ways in which actually, if you use it properly, AI can actually help you become a deeper thinker and expand your understanding of the material you're trying to work with.

And so for me, the way that I use it all the time is, you know, I'm constantly going in and saying, like, give me something new to think about here.

Here's a problem that I'm trying to understand.

Like I said, a WYSIWYG editor, every product has one, and it's a commodity, and they all work relatively well.

Just to give a bit of context, kind of what happened then, and in terms of business performance, what did you see as a trigger for it, and kind of what was the impact on the business, and what have you learned from that?

Well, it was my second wedding just happened.

Came back from that.

It was literally probably six weeks, having five client projects, some quite sizable, just got pulled, and we'd just taken on 10 people in the same period.

I think there was only one client who...

And that almost ended the work with them as opposed to the rest of them were just still other projects going on, but it were cut down.

None of it was anticipated to the timing of it.

When you look back at the journey the business has been on, what would you say are the kind of key things that drive value, drive success in kind of the growth of a consulting or other kind of professional services firm?

When it comes time to actually put paragraphs together, what are you doing?

The primary way, I mean, it's a little bit unusual for me because I am a professional writer.

So I need a slightly different... kind of assistance when it comes to actually writing things and that i need less of it but i do find that like even as a professional writer there are a million ways in which i am just locked in very predictable habits where you just kind of there's certain ways of starting you know sections of a book or chapters of a book that i just have done a million times and i just default to them when i when i start a new chapter or there's I think probably one of the biggest limitations I have as a writer is I just am not...

My visual intelligence is heavily impaired.

And so whenever I have to describe what somebody looks like, I'm just like, oh my God, this is such a pain.

I just want to talk about the idea.

At least you're self-aware about it, though.

What are some of the interesting ways that you or others are able to use AI to come up with novel ideas?

Yeah.

But in part of his journeys in kind of in exile, he visits these kind of, um, small towns in the, in the mountains in Switzerland and, and saw these watchmaking kind of guilds or collectives, and it was, it was really important for Kropotkin because it was again an example of a kind of non-hierarchical organization, um, like he had seen in these other places.

But they were watchmakers, so they were-

Yeah

... centralized power that was hard to avoid even if you came into the world as Pinkerton did with more, uh, you know, progressive, uh, aspirations.

The other thing about it, and this is what is important to think about in terms of anarchism and Kropotkin that we were talking about before, there's a, there's a...

So that landscape outside of Pittsburgh, you know, one of the, you know, major industrial centers of, uh, of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, um, had been transformed in just, you know, really a generation.

Like it-

Yeah.

And so there's certain ingredients and chemicals that are out there that are incredible products by these companies.

And so, you know, we go to startup events, and it's usually software related.

Their startup events and their hackathons and things like that are with these companies that build food additives and, and different things like that that are very innovative.

And so you might have something that's completely vegan that tastes like meat that you can add to a product and, you know, go forward with that taste that you need but meeting all of these stipulations, and sometimes those companies are hard to find.

So as you're building these recipes within the tool that this company has built, it's recommending different ingredients that are gonna help you get to that final piece.

But it's also looking at a marketplace of vendors that you may not have ever known about and going, "Actually, this innovative product would solve your problem, and here's a direct line to that company, so you can go order that," right? Now, this company, the institute, get back to my original point, has scientists creating content.

The, those little agents and the, the ability to save someone just 15 minutes in their day, you're gonna see that kind of ROI.

Do you have, like, uh, I guess the- the real world example was Fred Wilson's, maybe you could explain that a little bit, and then we- we'll talk a little bit about Gamma as well.

You know, Fred's been putting, um, uh, basically all the kind of background on their investments at Union Square Ventures, and actually using it in some cases to simulate having a- a lawyer review the documentation.

So it's like bringing in all the documents for the investment and then saying, "Hey, analyze this as- as if you were a lawyer to make sure that everything looks sensible," and he's been seeing great results from that.

But we're- we're seeing a lot of, like, venture funds actually use it just as a way of kind of, like, analyzing, uh, all the pitches that are coming in and, you know, kind of including a investment thesis for the firm that's- that's included there.

(laughs) Yeah, there's Fred's, uh, there's Fred's blog post about it.

Excellent little rendering of him, and it basically, you know, using it to, as- as a tool for pulling the key insights out of a bunch of different documents, um, and also increasingly I think as a creative tool.

Um, so, you know, we were chatting a little bit before this, I- (sighs) I just had this whole experience over the last four or five weeks where I found some old kind of sketch of an idea for a story, um, kind of along the lines of, like, a book like Sapiens, like about the kind of birth of agriculture and things like that.

(laughs)

How do you go about exploring new ideas and, and testing where they might lead?

Yeah, I mean, I, uh, actually I can take it back to pre this Gold Rush idea, which was I, about a year ago, started to organize my thoughts for what would the next book be.

And at that point I had, like, uh, as I normally do, I'm sure Ethan you're like this too, like I had 15 different ideas that were floating around in different stages.

And so for me, as someone who works and does most of his thinking inside of NotebookLM, I created a new notebook called The Next Book.

And that just became the kind of like grab bag of places where I would jot down an idea I had, just write it old-fashioned style as a note in that notebook, or if I read an interesting article, I would add that article to, to Notebook.

And slowly it would kind of accumulate over time, and, and one of the things that was amazing that I couldn't do before is after like three or four months, I would sit down and be like, "Okay, summarize like the top contenders for the next book." Like what, what are the ideas that are in here? And it would just be like, bloop, "Here you go." And you could just kind of go through and in 10 seconds you have this like great overview of all the different things that I was thinking.

And then I started kind of homing in on this idea of the, uh, of the Gold Rush, and, and a lot of it was trying to figure out like with any narrative history book like this, you're like trying to figure out like what can you add to the story.

I w- I wonder if this isn't something that everyone who has any interest in writing or frankly doing anything creative or productive, wants to be more mindful about, is how do we go about collecting ideas now that we can do so much more with, like, a, a big, uh, messy pile of ideas than we could before.