Ep. 392: Are “Micro-Streamers” the Future of Media? + Why Cal Spent $60 on a Task App

26:23Interesting fact, Jesse, The director of my master class directed like half of the episodes of Mythbusters. So she knows those guys really well. All the things connect. All right. So what is the future though? What do I predict is going to happen? All right. I have a few points here I'm going to throw out there. I'm going to look into my crystal ball. I do think there will be a micro streamer boom. A lot of money is going to come into this. A lot of private investment money. There will be a mini bust as well. A lot of these things are not going to work, but we're going to shake it out to have like like a pretty stable ecosystem of micro streamers at the end of that boom bust cycle.

26:57I don't know how many. I'm going to say less than 200. I mean more than 200, less than 5 ,000. That'd be my best guess, right? And so what we're going to have is a situation where, you know, a lot of people might subscribe to three to five micro streamers in addition to like one or two of the big streamers. This might sound like crazy, but it's not crazy. if you think about how many people are already subscribing to like three or five sub stacks, which is just text, and we're talking the same amount of money, but for now a chiclet or app that can be on your Apple TV next to Netflix that gives you really high quality, indistinguishable from the streamers, hard to find elsewhere content that has a real sense of community.

27:37I think we're just going to find a lot of people like, yeah, I have a few of those on my smart TV. So we're going to have maybe a few thousand of these. They're going to, These are going to be multimillion dollars, usually like eight-figure-year revenue, not nine-figure-year revenue type companies. And that's just going to become a part of the entertainment experience. I'm trying to think about like examples of what could be there. It's like Joe Rogan is someone who could probably have a successful micro-streamer because you could imagine what would that app give you. Well, it would be, I don't know, certain episodes of his show that aren't otherwise available, maybe like certain types of episodes like to protect our park episodes where he's joking around.

28:15with his comedian friends, but then he could put a lot of standup from his comedy club could be on there as well. So you could see all these clips, new clips every week from standup comics. Then he could probably put a camera in his green room and kind of have a regular show of like comics that are just sort of BSing in the green room. And then maybe, I think he's building a ranch outside of Austin. I could imagine some sort of show where him and other comedians, like they go hunting or something and whatever. Like you could imagine an ecosystem there. it's like$10 million a year,$20 million a year investment to run this thing makes$100 million.

28:50Like that type of thing is going to be more likely. If we did Deep Questions TV, Jesse, I think we would have conservatively 20 hours of skeleton footage each week. I think conservatively, there'd be a show that's just me doing accents, which I think would be popular, and a weekly series that's called Cal Network Lifts Things. And it would just be Cal Network lifting absurdly heavy things while women clap. Not like uproariously, but just like, yeah, well done. And a show of you trying to improve your handwriting like the Queen. There would be a show, it would be called Cal or Queen. And they would show handwriting on it, and then you would have to guess, was it written by me or Queen Elizabeth, the former Queen of England?

29:34That would also be a popular micro streamer. So we'll have to get on that. We just need, if anyone wants to invest$20 million, we could deliver this like tomorrow. All right. So what's our assessment of this? Is this micro streamer revolution on protecting a good thing? I think yes. A few things I want to point out here. A, it's non-algorithmic, which is music to my ears. When you have a subscription service, what is your incentive as the provider of content? Delighting your audience, giving them the best possible experience. You don't really – time on the device doesn't matter. You're not going to incentivize and do all sorts of weird ads and data mining.

30:10You want that to be the best possible experience. That's better for consumers. Non-algorithmic content is not addictive content. Non-algorithmic content can have much higher quality in a sort of almost literary type of creative sense, right? Like it would be more uplifting. I think some of these dropout TV shows are way more interesting to consume, top-notch improv with real vulnerability and interesting people than like a TikTok video. of, you know, someone getting kicked in the nuts. Oh, that could be another episode of our, on our streaming channel. Just constantly finding people and kicking them in the nuts.

30:42I guess that would do really well. So I think that's good. Another good thing about this revolution, it injects money into the class of skilled creative people, which I think is vitally important for any sort of advanced culture or society. You need a whole substrate of highly talented creative people. It should be hard to make it into that substrate. You really got to be good, but there should be an economic means to support people who are really good at comedy and writing or doing the skilled trades that surround producing high production quality video. It's actually one of the sadder that something that was sort of sad about my master class experience is like everyone there was coming out of movies.

31:18And this was one of the only gigs in town because all the movie productions all overseas now, because you can produce your movies overseas for half the cost. So all these skills trades, people are running out of work. So I think that is really good. I think it's more important to have an internet entertainment ecosystem that supports a sort of middle class of skilled creative professionals. To me, that's much more important than what we have now, which is an internet creative ecosystem that supports like a small number of 24-year-old influencers and like everyone else makes no money. that's not that useful to a society the existence of jake paul is not that critical for a functioning society but you lose all of the you know highly skilled humor writers i think that is a real loss that you're going to feel so i think that's good as well i also think it undermines the massive social platforms which again is a good thing because i really dislike those platforms and i've been making this argument i always go back to that new yorker piece i wrote in 2023 on tiktok and to follow the social media giants.

32:22But as soon as all those social media giants said, we're going to follow the TikTok model of algorithmically curated short form video, not social networks, not giving you information from people you follow or your friends, but just showing you the most compelling possible things. I said, that was the day they sealed their death warrant because now they're just competing with everything else that can offer entertainment. And I think micro streamers, when it matches your interest, when it's a community that you like, that is going to be something that is going to be more compelling. then let me just fall back on Instagram and watch my trad wife Instagram.

32:56I don't know, fitness influencer, kick someone in the nuts or whatever's going on in Instagram. So I think in general, knock on wood, if I'm right about this, it's a good thing. I think that's good for the future of media. And I'm excited for some of the micro streamers. They're going to enter my life and give me better, high quality entertainment to watch in a way that I am happy to be watching it. So there you go. Had you heard of dropout TV? No, I'd never heard of it either. so none of those people on dropout tv do they have a presence on youtube as well i don't know they probably do yeah they probably put clips on youtube to promote it i think i heard something like that yeah so they're on there but uh they were entirely on youtube and they're like this is a pain and that's why they move over the micro streamer even so even with the revenue sharing that they get from they got from youtube um yeah i don't think they were making enough money from that not i mean they weren't going to make 70 million dollars a year on YouTube, which they're able to do here.

33:52They're growing now. I was doing a lot of reading in like Variety and other Hollywood-centric newspapers. They're now hiring professional like producers and entertainment executives from like TV networks and streamers and stuff like that. So it's sort of, it's growing now, but it's still a very small team compared to anything else for which you might have an app on your TV. But once you click it, you can't tell the difference. That's what's exciting to me. Once you can't tell the difference, it doesn't mean automatically you'll be successful, but it means you as an independent now have a shot at being successful in that type of pay media ecosystem.

34:25So I think it's a bigger deal than people realize, but we shall see. All right, we're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+.

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37:43But that's what you have to do with Things 3. There's no free version. It's not a monthly subscription fee. If you want it on a device, you buy a copy for that device. Now, I want to talk briefly today about why I spent$60 on a TASC app because I think the reason is more generally relevant than just why I like this app. And it gets to a core point about how to successfully use technology to help organize your life. All right, so I'm going to load up on the screen here for people who are watching, instead of just listening, a screenshot of Things 3 in action. So what we see over here is a list of different areas.

38:18There's an inbox, today, upcoming. Below here, what you see is areas like family, work, and hobbies. And here they have these circles are lists that exist under the different areas. You don't have to have lists under areas. You can just have standalone tasks. I do that. If we look at the actual task pane, we see here a particular list called prepare presentation, and there's a bunch of tasks. These tasks have been divided into sub areas. I don't do that, but you can do that if you want. And that's about it. A couple of little features to notice. Some tasks have a star, meaning it's something that you said you wanted to work on that day.

38:55Others have a date next to them, meaning you have an upcoming deadline. find one other view here. This shows what happens if you click the today tab, which is very nice. It shows you all the tasks for whatever list and whatever areas they'd click the star on saying you want to work on that particular day. You see them all in one place. That's basically it with things three. So what about this made me want to spend$60? There's one feature in particular that they emphasize that I think is critical. Reducing friction. They have minimized the effort, time, and clicks involved in going from a task in mind to a task in system or to see task in your system in front of you.

39:40There's all sorts of sort of intuitive shortcuts that they've perfected over the years. You hit space bar and you could just start typing. If you want to set a date, you like click on the calendar and it pops up right there and you click on it. So the interface is beautiful. What they don't emphasize, which a lot of other task applications do, is features. If you look at the web pages for a lot of other popular task apps, they try to overwhelm you with feature after feature that they offer. All these complicated integrations, you could do this, you could do that. You could integrate these apps with your task app.

40:10And what's going to happen is that you will automatically get sent a notice to your Apple Watch if you happen to walk past this billboard on the Vernal Equinox. and then your Notion board will capture it and send it to an LLM after which the mouse trap falls and you get trapped under the cage. Like they're always pushing all these different features. And I get why that's compelling because you're like, wow, these are all things I could do that could make my app more powerful. But here's what I learned in my two decades of thinking and writing about the intersection of productivity and technology.

40:37Features are not the problem. The number one problem people have with any sort of task management system is they stop using them. It doesn't matter how many cool features and integration your tools have if you don't use them. And so the number one problem that you want to avoid if trying to use technology to organize your life is to stop using the technology. This is where friction enters the scene. It is the number one reason why people give up with a tool over time. When you're first using it, there's a little bit of friction. I got to do a couple clicks here to enter a task. I can't really see the full title of this task until I click on the card and then I see the whole thing.

41:20When you're first using the app, that's not a big deal. You're like, okay, whatever. It's a couple extra clicks, but the point is look at all these cool features. But over time, that friction begins to add up and it generates more and more heat until it gets too hot for the system as a whole to run. It's when you're tired. It's when you're busy. It's when you're in a hurry that that friction becomes more and more annoying until you finally say, I don't want to do those clicks anymore. I'll just keep track of this in my head or like send an email to myself and the system is out of your life. So we think about task technology wrong.

41:54We think about features when we should be thinking about friction because by far the largest expected value that you're going to get from a task tool, the largest expected value will be from the simple tool you use for a long time. That is a larger amount of aggregate value than a fancy tool that you do great things with but only for a few weeks. And so that is why I like things is the friction is so low. It makes it as easy as possible to use. I actually looked this up, Jesse. I first started talking about reducing friction and test task tools back in 2006. 2006. 2006. And my second book, which was called the Da Vinci code.

42:32I want to be in this dump. If that was my book, I'd be podcasting from a golden throne. No. In my second book, which was almost as popular as the Da Vinci code. How to become a straight A student. Actually, here's a connection to Da Vinci code. There's a real one. I remember because I have a bad memory for most things except books I remember every book I've read where I was for whatever reason and I remember exactly where I was reading I read the Da Vinci Code it would have been the summer of 2003 I was staying at a friend's house in New Jersey northern New Jersey they can remember the room I was reading the Da Vinci Code they had a copy there and I started reading it during that trip the thing I kept checking on is uh the proposal for my first book.

43:18So I was a, finished my junior year in college. How to Win at College was out to publishers that summer. And so while I was reading the Da Vinci Code in northern New Jersey in the summer of 2003, I was waiting to hear back, had we sold my first book? So it all kind of connects together. Anyways, the next year I wrote How to Become a Straight-A Student. And in my section about how to manage your task as a student, it's all focused on reducing friction. It was a system I invented. I had no computers involved. You ripped a sheet of paper out of a notebook and kept in your pocket all day. And then you use your digital calendar you already had as a place where you stored everything.

43:51And I was really clear. This is the simplest possible system I could come up with because you don't need features. Your problem is not that you don't have a sufficiently complicated task management system. Your problem is you don't have a task management system. And if I want you to have one, I got to make it so simple that even when you're hungover and you're rushing the class, you're still going to use it. So from the very beginning of my professional career, thinking about this intersection of technology and productivity, friction is what I cared about. That's why I like Things 3. They care about it too.

44:18And it's so important to me that I was willing to pay$60 for it. So there we go. Things 3, Jesse, I recommend it. So are you still using Trello? I'm not right now. I'm not right now. There are certain things I do where Trello is the right tool. In particular, if it's a complicated project with multiple people involved, Trello is the right tool. Because you need the ability to have easy sharing of your workspace with other people. You need the ability to attach voluminous information to individual cards. That's critical, I think, for team collaboration. Oh, here is the text of this email. Here is a PDF of the report.

44:54So all the stuff you need to execute a task lives on the same card that everyone sees and can update. So Trello was very useful when I was working on team projects. I'm not right now. most of what I'm doing is in my sort of uh deep work pain cave of you know books and articles and all this type of stuff that's just uh individual effort and I was all kind of crowding onto each other and so I had to fall back onto my roots friction friction friction so right now my troll is waiting there and I'll use it again to get to my next larger collaborative project but for my personal stuff man I'm just reducing the friction so then you check the app on your phone yeah I have it on my phone and I have it on my mac on my laptop so and then they sync so you can synchronize they have a service a cloud service that you can synchronize your various copies each which you paid for full retail you can synchronize them so that the changes go between them so 60 times too no because it was 50 for the mac oh okay and 10 for the phone oh yeah it's 20 for the ipad yeah but if i want to put it on like the computer here 60 more well yeah another 50 more yeah it could add up i love it though also you spend money for this is stupid but it's true you spend money for something you take it more seriously yeah so um anyways i'm like and it's not an ad for things three i don't know the culture code people uh but there you go so friction matters all right jesse let's move on to questions hi the first question is from alex i work in a clerical position from nine to five each day i want to become a biblical scholar on the side how should i do this what do you think he means i wonder jesse like does he mean I want to be able to like I have two definitions I want to be able to I'm going to give three definitions let's do three definitions easiest definition I want to be able to engage with English translations of the Bible in a sort of sophisticated way like reading commentary and stuff like this number two option option number two I want to be able to engage with the Bible in the original language So for the Hebrew Bible, you're learning biblical Hebrew, and for the New Testament, you're learning Greek.

47:06But just so that you can have a deeper engagement with the text. Option number three is option two, plus you want to do originally scholarly research on the Bible. So there's three different options for what he could mean here. He didn't elaborate. He actually emailed me. All right, so could you get more details here? He did not elaborate. He did not elaborate. Yeah. Okay. Well, the first option, which I think is a very reasonable place to start, this is a great side project, sort of like personal development side project where you get a – what I would do is I would get like a reading list. I'm going to go through these books.

47:40I'm going to go back and – maybe I'm going to go back and I'm going to reread these sections through the light of these books. Or you can follow through the Bible over a particular period of time depending on what scope of the Bible you want to read. It can take a lot of years to get through the – even the whole Hebrew Bible. Most of the cycles I've seen take like three or four years. If you're interested in just the first five books, what the Jews would call the Torah, that's split up regularly into a single year. You have a Parsha every week. That's not so hard to follow. So have some sort of curriculum of reading and studying.

48:11I've done a lot of biblical scholarship in the last couple of years. This type of amateur just like reading these books and reading these elements, I think it's – you could do that tomorrow. Just put aside half hour a day and you can make progress. Learning biblical Hebrew, that option. There's people who do this, right? Like who are lay, meaning like non-academics who do this. There's courses that can help you, right? Especially Hebrew, biblical Hebrew, because like in the Jewish communities, there's like a really good thing to learn how to read, you know, the Bible in Hebrew. So there's lots of courses and it takes a while.

48:49I think it's hard. But this could be a two-year project to like I can actually read and kind of understand. I mean, I think you're not going to be able to do like an altar style level of translation or Richard Elliott, like people who just spend their entire life in the nuances of the language. But you could kind of read and understand it, and I think there's some value in that. That's a two-year project. If you want to be able to read and understand to the point where you could do scholarly work, like you probably would need to learn the languages, and then you would need to probably go to school part-time.

49:21So give a year or so to learn the languages and do like a two-year, you probably would do like a divinity master's, theology master's part-time. So this might be like a five to eight-year project. I don't think that's crazy. This is like a core idea from slow productivity. creativity, something taking a long time is not a problem. If it's important to you and you enjoy the process, and in this case, you feel like it's, well, I don't know, purifying your soul or something, why not have that, say, this decade, this is going to be a structuring element of my life. So I'm not worried about any of these options taking a long time.

49:57In fact, I'm going to say, I like that all these options take a long time. Sticking discipline and with diligence to things that are important and take time is a really good way of orienting yourself in the world and finding value. So you should do it, Alex. Whatever option you're looking at, I say do it. All right, what's our next question? Next question is from Brett. I know you lean toward AI skepticism, but someone recently sent my wife and I this article and it sort of freaked us out. Can you help us figure out what, if anything, in this argument isn't right? All right. So I have the article here that Brett sent.

50:32The title was, We're Not Ready for AI Superintelligence. I'm not going to read the whole article. Let me read the intro and then I summarize. I can summarize the points of the article and then I'll react to it. So the intro to the article says, there's no shortage of dystopian views of the future, but this one might be worth your time. Basically, it's a step-by-step visualization of where we're taking artificial intelligence development and technology, projecting it out logically into the future, into a future which could end with the extinction of the human race. it says the what if that sounds implausible and stupidly pessimistic it might help to follow the steps from here to there and think about which of them you disagree with so the gauntlet is laid down in this intro to this article hey every step in here is pretty logical so like this might sound like the end point's crazy but you got you tell me where there's an illogical step all right so i took on that challenge and the answer of where are there illogical steps everywhere in this article.

51:30There are so many mistakes in this article. I don't think that was the flex they thought when they said to see if you can find something that is illogical. The whole thing is pretty illogical. I actually think this article is just cribbed from Project AI 2027. This is very familiar. I'm teaching a doctoral seminar on superintelligence right now at Georgetown. So we're reading a lot of the, we read a lot of the source documents for the current conception of superintelligence, including that and who the people were and how their views evolved. And so I recognize a lot of this. I'm just going to summarize really quickly the story here at a high level, then I'll tell you what the flaw is.

52:03So basically the way this goes is it says, okay, we have the AI that we have now, which is like cool, but seems kind of harmless. Then it says, but the next AI iteration is a hundred times as smart, fast, as powerful. And the one after that is a thousand times as powerful. And their argument is just recursive self-improvement. Like we get a hundred times more powerful and now the AI can just start improving itself. and then they scale the quantity of chips. I'm like, well, what if we have 50 ,000 of these really smart AIs? Now it's like having 50 ,000 scientists all working on trying to make the next AI better and we lose control of it.

52:36That's the storyline. This is not unique to this article. I can tell you as someone, again, who's studying superintelligence from a cultural and technological view in a doctoral seminar, this is the standard argument for superintelligence, scaling up of ability, scaling up of quantity, control lost. What step here is illogical? We don't know how to do either of those scalings. We do not know how to make AI twice as good as it is right now, nonetheless 100 times as good. This is not a simple matter of just give it more time and more energy and it keeps going up some type of curve. It is hard to make better AIs.

53:10Now, there was a brief window into language models where we had a tool that got us from here to here. This is called pre-training scaling. It got us from 2 to 3, 3 to 3.5 and 3.5 to 4. Just by making the actual size of the models and the amount of time we trained them bigger, they got better. But that only gave us a relatively constrained improvement from 2 to 4. After that, as I talked about this last August in my article for The New Yorker called, you know, what if AI doesn't get much better than this, pre-training scaling began to stall out. most of the quote-unquote improvements in straight language model performance we've gotten since the stall out after GPT-4 comes from post-training, which is tuning these existing pre-trained models to do good on very specific tester metrics.

53:55It's not nearly as impressive as the big systemic leaps and ability we got from pre-training scaling. So now that's kind of where we are now, is finding particular uses where we can get the right data sets to use reinforcement learning techniques to get these fine-tuning improvements on very narrow performance areas. So we're kind of tinkering with the car and don't know how to actually make it substantially better. So how are we going to get it? You can't just casually say, yeah, you know, over the next few years, this will get a hundred times better. And then what will happen? We don't know how to make it a hundred times better.

54:23We also don't know how to do recursive self-improvement. These models are trained on things that they've already seen. There's a little bit of minor generalization from the distributions, but pretty much they're working with rules and patterns that they are exposed to in training. If you haven't trained an AI on how to build an even better AI, it can't do that. There is no notion of like, just if we keep magically training these things, it'll eventually be able to make better things. That's the same thing as saying like, look, man, we went from propeller planes to fast propeller planes, and then we had jet planes that are going faster.

54:57So within a few years, we'll probably be traveling like roughly 100 ,000 miles per hour. And at that point, there's these other issues we have to deal with. It's like, no, we don't know how to get from 700 to 100 ,000 miles per hour. We're kind of tapped out. We don't have the technology for it. We don't know what technology could do that. So don't be too taken in by scaling arguments. Demand that people talk about actual technologies that exist today or imminently are coming in the near future and their concrete implications. Do not react to extrapolation. So much of this type of AI vibe coverage that we see in articles like this is really people creating an extrapolation that's unverified by what we actually know is possible.

55:36And then they react to their own extrapolation. And they're like, how can you not be worried about my story I wrote? But again, it's like if I tell you some story where like planes are getting faster and then we all turn into ghosts and I'm like, why could – how are you not upset about us all becoming ghosts? You'd be like, because we're not all going to become ghosts and we don't know how to make planes much faster. It's kind of a weird mixed metaphor there, Desi. It's really actually very deep. I just can't get into all the details of why. Just trust me. That's actually a very deep anecdote.

56:03So, Brett, there's a lot of concerns about AI that I have. Superintelligence is not one of them. Again, I'm studying this very closely, both culturally and technologically. This is not something that serious computer scientists are worried about. Yes, I know ones that are in the news, like kind of make these cryptic statements about being worried about AI. There's their own type of politics and the gins is going there. But let me tell you, behind the scenes, people who actually are not being quoted by reporters and work on this technology, there is not a path here that anyone serious is actually worried about.

56:31That's what I would say about that. I'm reading too much about this these days, Jesse. But superintelligence is just not a serious concern. It was – interestingly, the very first people to write about even computers brought up this fear. We went back and read things early. Alan Turing worried about this. John von Neumann talking about the singularity. Norbert Weiner talking about things getting out of control. Jay Goode is the one who actually invented the idea of recursive self-improvement. He called it ultra-intelligence of the 60s, one of these information theory head guys. Also was very worried about it.

57:08So as soon as we had the idea of a computer, we got worried, what if these things kept getting better and take over? So it goes back to the very first people writing about computers. It's interesting. So this is a course this semester? Yeah. First time you had this course? Yeah. Yeah, so Georgetown has these things called doctoral seminars where it's just doctoral students. They're reading courses, like you're reading cutting-edge work and trying to have original thoughts. So I have 10 students that are all doing research on AI in some capacity or the other, and then we're doing this. The cool thing we're doing, inspired by John Haidt's research group at NYU, we are creating a collaborative work document, which is an annotated bibliography of all these papers we're reading organized by section where you get the summary of who wrote this paper.

57:51When did it come out? What's it about? What's interesting about it? What are the flaws about it? And how does it connect? And we're going to have this – we're building out this really big collaborative work document of all these papers so that people who are doing research or writing or journalists who are thinking about superintelligence can have this big guide to like the relevant papers and what to read and who to talk to. So we'll have a pretty cool work product that comes out of it when we're done. And then after you're done, are you going to see if JetGPT can do the same thing? yeah that would be no what I'm going to do and I think it'll be fascinating is I'm going to read it on the podcast all 400 pages of it I'll be like a citation number 17 then I'll read through like where it appeared that's what people want to hear all right we like to close out the show talking about what I'm reading a book I finished last week this is why I was interested in Alex's question about becoming a biblical scholar as I finished reading Richard Elliott's book the hidden book in the Bible.

58:45Richard Elliott's one of my favorite biblical scholars. He's like one of these critical biblical scholars, studies scholars, critical biblical analysis studies scholar. These are the people that goes all the way back to the Germans in the 1800s who studied the linguistic characteristics of the Hebrew Bible and by the characteristics of the text can actually break it up into different writers. And so like you have your primary writers of the early books of the Hebrew Bible. They call the Yahwehist, the priestly source, and the Deuteronomist. There's some other sources as well. Anyways, he has this argument in this book that actually the Yahwehist wrote many more parts of the Hebrew Bible than he's often given credit for, or she.

59:25He actually has an argument. It could be either. There's reason to believe it could be a woman. I think Bloom was much more bigger on this idea, much more definitive about it, where Elliot's like, we just don't know, but it's possible. There's various reasons why, which is interesting. Anyways, Eliot is arguing that Yahweh's contributions to the Bible goes beyond the things he's most known for in like Genesis. And that what he did in this book is he took all of the text from the Bible that he thinks was written by this one writer and just put it together into one independent story. An original translation he did.

59:55And he says when you see it all together, he's like it's like a majestic work of literature because it's one – not only does it flow from one story to the other, but there's all these echoes and callbacks to same things happen like again and again. and you see like the stories and the repeated themes. And so it's pretty cool. I mean, I've never read the whole Hebrew Bible before. So this is not all of it because it's just the contributions of the Yahweh is, but it's like many of the main stories. And so it was kind of like interesting to follow this one through line. Like I didn't have, I didn't know a lot of the stories that happened sort of post Joshua going into Canaan.

1:00:32I sort of know the first five books pretty well, but like all of the war story section, all of the like we killed all the whatever um david and saul and uh it's these stories i kind of knew but i'd never heard them all is it a beast of a book uh it's a bit of a beast of a book yeah i mean you know it's not crazy it's like 400 something pages so you've remembered every book you've ever read i mean i don't know if that's true i just have like a really strong there's certain things i have a strong memory for and one of the things i have a strong memory for is books that they imprint on me in a way where I not always, but I often, if I get a book, I can remember the various places I read it.

1:01:11Um, this was very, I also have a, I don't have a photographic memory, but I have like a, there's a word for it where if I read something, especially if I'm, if I'm like, I read over something and I explain it out loud, like do a little active recall, I can often will remember, I can remember long, um, portions of prose. And so like when I would take tests and stuff you know uh at dartmouth i could remember like whole passages from studying and i could kind of replicate them when i was doing the the blue book so i have something i have like the linguistic memory or part of my brain is whatever it is but yeah i have a a stronger memory for that than almost anything so i don't know i remember i remember books i sometimes get things wrong but that's one of my better memories all right so that's what i'm reading i'm reading also i have like four books in progress right now so there's gonna be like one week where they all finish.

1:02:03It's like, did you read four books last week? But I I'm reading a lot of books in parallel, making a little bit of progress on each. So like all those dams are going to break all at once, I think. And I'm just going to come back and have like a ton of books. So now that we're given like a little different structure to the reading component of the show, are we just going to assume that you read five books a month? Are you going to like summarize them at some point? I don't want to talk about them twice. I thought it was nicer just to talk each week about what I read that week. Internally. What does that faith that you're reading five a week?

1:02:30Well, no, you can count. Just count the segments. Go through the segments and count up. I still do five a month. That's what I aim for still. No, I know. Yeah, five or more. But yeah, you're going to have to actually go back and count up what's happening in the segments now. All right. Speaking of which, that's all the time we have for today. Be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

1:03:00Thank you.