Uncovering the Ethical Dilemmas of AI with Nathaniel Whittemore, Founder at Superintelligent

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Nathaniel Whittemore, founder at Superintelligent and host of the AI Daily Brief podcast, about the philosophical insights surrounding AI. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:19) And you're really familiar with all this because you run a podcast, but you don't do interviews, do you? You're more of like a daily news podcast.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:00:26) Yeah, I do. I've done tons of interviews in the past, but I've sort of, like, over time have continuously reduced that. And in fact, with the AI show, the only time I do interviews is if I'm traveling and there's sort of like a specific set that I do together. So it's really a daily news analysis show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) So let's plug your podcast. What is it?

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:00:45) So the main—I do two podcasts daily. I have The Breakdown, which is a daily crypto news analysis show, and then The AI Daily Brief is an AI news analysis show. So it's every day, or six days a week. It's focused on the most important headlines and news discussions going on in AI. The format is there's always sort of a set of three to five stories at the top that are the first five minutes, just kind of the key highlights of things that are happening, and then a main topic where we dig a little bit deeper.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:01:14) So for example, on today's episode, there was just an interesting study that came out from the Walton Family Foundation around attitudes towards ChatGPT and AI more broadly in K–12 undergraduate education, with surveys from parents, kids, and teachers. And it showed wildly positive feelings about AI, much to sort of counter some of the narratives. So the whole kind of main episode was about exploring that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) I noticed today or yesterday that I am now officially going to GPT over Google. Because with Google, I have to enter the term. It's trying to interpret what I want to ask. It's showing me a bunch of nonsense. It's trying to guess with its new GPT responses, then I'm trying to filter through the top results, but they've got ads all over their page, and it's like they don't actually get to the story. They're going to tell you the story before, and then they're going to get to it, like, in the third paragraph, the answer you're looking for. Or you can just go to GPT and it's just going to do that behavior that you would normally do of just consuming and aggregating and reducing, refining, and then giving an answer. And then I could just believe—and then I can tweak it. I could be like, alright, now consider this perspective and regenerate the answer. And it's like I can work with it like an assistant versus me having to dig through and mine my own answers.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:02:33) 100%. I mean, I think that—so, you know, before OpenAI's latest presentation, there were a bunch of rumors floating around that they were going to announce officially a search engine. And the thing that I think is interesting is that I kind of think that that's just what they're trying to be in general, right? Like all of these tools are trying to compete to be the interface that mediates your entire experience with the rest of your computer and then the internet at large, right? So ChatGPT's new mobile app—or sorry, their new desktop app—is all about you bringing that window up to look for stuff, you know, in the same way that you would bring up like the system finder before or something like that. Apple's new Siri, you know, sort of—same idea. They want you to talk to Siri for everything. And Google's in this tough position where, you know, people are moving towards this behavior. ChatGPT is teaching them to do that, then they've maybe found their way to Perplexity, and it's sort of like custom built for that exact use case. And, you know, they're sort of trying to have it both ways where they retain the business model that they've had for the last 20 years, but also integrate this AI stuff, and it's a really tough balance, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:42) It's like the browser wars, but all over again.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:03:45) Totally. Yeah. It's going to be fascinating and vicious, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) Who's going to win? What do you think is going to play out most likely?

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:03:52) I don't know. So it's very hard to beat the install base of a Google. Like, you know, we have 20 years of habituating that experience, right? But, you know, it's kind of like how long does it take change to break habits? I know for me, Perplexity and ChatGPT are far more often my sort of starting point, unless it's a very generic—I actually want all of the search results kind of search. Right? So for example, when I'm prepping the AI show, I still go to Google and I literally just look at, you know, for AI and I scroll back through 10 pages worth of links because I'm not looking for something specific. I want all of it, right? And so Google is still tops for me for that. But for everything else where I want an answer, I'm going to ChatGPT or to Perplexity. So, you know, the question I think will be, does that pattern happen to other people in the same way that it happened to me? And can Google sufficiently kind of morph their experience so that there's enough of that that, you know, people don't have to change their behaviors? But it's an interesting battle. I think I would say that it's more open than I would have thought, call it a year ago, in terms of who might win that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) Why do you go to Perplexity over GPT? And just for context, I've never used Perplexity.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:05:14) Sure. It's—so Perplexity is basically like if the entire user experience of ChatGPT was just for this sort of search and research purpose. So the underlying information is very similar. You know, they're in fact pulling from GPT-4 as one of their models. They use a bunch of models, but GPT-4 is one of them. But the interface experience is—they do this sort of Google-style aggregation. In fact, you know, Perplexity results are kind of what Google AI Overviews are trying to be. You know, it's all sourced and cited, so you see all the articles that it pulls from, but it does the aggregation itself. It does a great job, and it makes it effortless to sort of follow that into a thread and a trail from that first search result. So it's just a user experience, a UI kind of thing where it's just made for that particular purpose in a way that, you know, it's just the first depot for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:08) Have you seen Eric Voorhees's Venice AI?

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:06:11) I have. I've been using Venice a lot more recently, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:14) Have you? What do you think of it?

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:06:15) I think that one of the only possible ways that you get people to shift behavior from one of the big AI labs to something like a Venice is by actually having it be open and being willing to answer stuff that, you know, the others are not. And so I think it's a pretty interesting play. And, you know, I don't know. It's a really tough road to hoe for sure, but I think that they're coming at it at least in a much more interesting way than some others are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) I like him. I'd never heard of him until I was standing in Austin at the Morpheus event. And this guy's standing next to me, and I'm having a conversation with someone else while this guy's standing next to me. I could see him over there. I was like, oh, he had a cross necklace on and stuff. I was like, oh, it's cool. And then I turned to start talking to this other dude that was like the creator of the Hyperbolic Project, right? Who had just gotten off stage because I wrote down questions for him. And then he's like, hold on a second. And this guy that was standing next to me for a minute, he's like—he's like, can I get a picture with you? And I was like, who's that guy? He's like, oh, that's Eric Voorhees. And I was like, oh. I was like, who's Eric Voorhees? And then apparently he was like the keynote speaker for that event. And then I started looking into his background and following him on Twitter. So it's been like two or three weeks. He's very active on Twitter. I like his content. I liked his keynote interview because he was very genuine. Like, you can pick up he had like a high level of genuine aspect, and he answered some really tough questions about censorship and security and technology in like a really clean, concise, rational way, and I really enjoyed that. I'm a fan of his now.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:08:01) Totally. Yeah. Eric is one of those folks who is—you know, crypto attracts a lot of principled people, people who have sort of a very strong sense of beliefs around the world, but it can have the effect of sort of warping them into crazy internet warriors, you know. Like, you live in a bomb shelter for 10 years and you go a little nuts. Whereas Eric has kept, you know, the same principles that he's had. He's evolved them alongside, you know, the world as it's changed, but I've had the same core. And he's been able to communicate them really effectively without falling into the sort of tribalism that crypto can sometimes engender in a way that I think is really laudable. And, you know, I think it's a testament to his character that when people who have known him for a decade, right, who have been following his career, following ShapeShift, following sort of all his evolutions, look at what he's doing in this completely different area that's not crypto, right, with Venice, they say, oh, that makes complete sense that Eric would be doing that thing. You know, trying to bring this truly permissionless sort of uncensored truth machine to the world—that makes sense for Eric to be doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:07) You know, you just said something—you said crypto attracts people with strong beliefs, and that just helped me because I just recently—I got pulled into the Morpheus project through a friend, right? Because they were like, hey, check out what's going on. And then I got excited, and then I met David Johnston, and then, you know, all of those guys and Eric Bravick and Voorhees and all of them. And so one of the things that has been fascinating to me from my limited experience in my trip to Austin, but participating in Discords and things of that nature, is that you nailed it. Crypto attracts people with strong beliefs. And it's so interesting how it almost feels as if like half the people in the room are like Christian, Catholic, or some type of like strong believing moral religious situation. And the other half of the people in the room are like staunch, like, atheistic or agnostic individuals. And the conversation is not about like the meaning of life and morality. The conversation is about like freedom. And it's so—for me, I was like, wow. It is so cool to see these two groups of people that extremely disagree on this one topic, extremely agree on this other topic, and have the maturity level to say, hey, we're going to put this important thing for humanity because of our core belief system. We're going to put this important thing for humanity above any other difference that we might have on other topics, and we're just going to make sure that we solve this. And to me, that's like the most beautiful thing in humanity.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:10:32) Totally. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think crypto can denigrate into the worst conversations if you've ever spent time in sort of like the Bitcoin Ethereum, you know, slap fights on Twitter or something like that. But I do think that you're exactly correct that at the best, the discourse can be extraordinary and really model a type of engagement that I think would be good for the rest of the world. You know, it's interesting that the sort of—I have found that that group, sort of the agnostic atheist group on the one hand and the extremely sort of faith-based principled group, sometimes they don't get along on the basis of whatever sort of they've grown up with or whatever. But I find that the most sort of thoughtful among those groups often find more resonance and kinship in today's world because the common thread being that coming from a standpoint of principle and thinking of the world through a sort of moral lens, you know, or an ethical lens, even if it's a completely different basis for their morals or ethics, is a sort of binding factor between them that they may not find with other groups that are just unintentional about that sort of thing. You know, not bad, just unintentional about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:41) Yeah. It's almost like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? It's like whether you're the Christian type or religious type and you can understand how, you know, let my people go type deal or like how you can be under the thumb of pharaoh. Or if you're like the other type, great student of history, you understand how like the communist regimes work. And so we both can see in our own different ways how like that approach sucks and that we have to build infrastructure to make sure that we don't go there.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:12:13) Yep. I think another version of that, the one that I was always fascinated with in, you know, early in my life when I was studying philosophy and religion and things like that, was—you know, so you've—the core of, you know, sort of certainly Christian values, but most religious values in some ways comes back to some version of the golden rule, treating other people as you want to be treated, right? There's that aspect of a huge number of religions. And the funny thing is when you study sort of like French existentialism from the mid-20th century, right, like the apotheosis of atheism as a philosophical or, you know, an intellectual pursuit, they come to the same conclusion that you have to be good to people but for a totally different reason, right? Like Jean-Paul Sartre basically says that in the absence of an underlying human condition that emanates from God, all we've got is each other, all going through the same experience where there is no meaning other than what we give each other. So, ergo, we got to treat each other well. And it's like, well, damn, man. If everyone's just saying treat each other well, like, we could probably solve a lot of issues if we get past the like the philosophical basis for getting to the same conclusion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:24) Yeah. But to do that, we have to get over ourselves, and that almost seems to be like the purpose of life.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:13:28) It's a tough journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) I know. I know. I was actually watching—off topic, I was—I watched this like 20-minute video of like a near-death experience story the other night. And I was like, you know what? That's probable. You know? And he's like, oh, and I died. I went to this place, and I could see myself in different lifetimes. I could see that everybody was like light, and like we were—we all had this light inside of us. And we're all one, but we don't realize it, and we've come to realize it, and we go to Earth to have these experiences, and we screw it up and like whatever. And that's like a very short paraphrase of a 20-minute story that he told. But I saw it. I was like, yeah. I could see that. I could see how one day we could find out that we're all connected and we're all one and we're just trying to figure it out. It's like a playground because time is really long.

(Nathaniel Whittemore at 00:14:16) Yeah. Oh, there's a radically underappreciated book called Reincarnation Blues that the premise of which is this guy who just keeps going back and trying to live the best life possible, and he accidentally falls in love with death, who's sort of like his in-between companion each time. And the ending of it is just brilliant. I won't spoil it, but it's such a simple way of looking at the world of sort of constantly trying to get better, do better. And it's a really great book that I wish more people had read.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:47) Well, Josh is gonna cut this point right here. Spoil it for me.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:14:53) It's a great story. Yeah. I mean, there's a movie called About Time that has a very similar conclusion.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:15:01) About Time. It's the same guy who did Notting Hill and the Christmas movie, whatever it's called. But it's similar premise. It's this family where the males in the family can go back through time, but just backwards. And it's sort of them figuring out how to deal with that gift, and what it leads them to. It's another great one. Time travel is a really good forum, it seems, for exploring philosophical issues.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:32) It is. And I think it's because we all understand that there's a place without time. And we understand that exists. I mean, we go there every night when we go to sleep, right? It's the place we go without time. And then, yeah. So we understand these things instinctively, but we can't prove them in the material world yet. You know? So that's fun. Wow. That was a great rabbit hole. Tell me about, let's go to recent news since you're a news guy. Apple Superintelligence. First time when I saw that they were integrating with GPT, I was like, that was the first time I ever did a Google search for popular alternatives to iPhone. I don't want Google. Google's embedded with the government. Apple's embedded with the government, but they try to do the best they can to keep it private. When is Elon Musk just gonna make the Grok phone and have everything actually be private and secure?

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:16:25) I mean, I think that's the incredibly difficult line that Apple is trying to thread. And, you know, to your point, I think that they're one of the only companies that will be able to pull it off for some number of people. But, you know, their whole pitch and premise of what they're offering with Apple Intelligence is that it actually understands you. It understands your personal context. That's the phrase that they kept using. The way that it understands your personal context is by having access to everything about you, right? All of your email, all, you know. One of the examples they gave was a woman trying to figure out when her mom's flight was gonna get in, and Siri was able to go into her email, look at her email to figure out what the flight number was, and then go use the web app to do a real-time kind of flight tracking search. And, you know, the premise, or what Apple is trying to offer, is that they are taking a fundamentally different approach to this data than anyone else, right? They're never logging it. They're never recording it. As much as humanly possible, it's happening on device without touching the cloud. When it does have to touch the cloud, they've introduced this new thing they're calling private cloud compute, and they're sort of going to pains to try to explain how that is siloed from other cloud experiences and why it won't create things. Even if you kind of buy all of that stuff, it still puts you in a position of having to trust Apple, ultimately, that they're doing what they say and not doing what they say they're not doing with your data and just with the approach that they're taking.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:18:08) And as I said, Apple has for, you know, 15, 20 years been the big tech company that's tried to sort of build this approach to privacy into the core of their brand. They've been able to because they didn't have to rely on an advertising-based business model because they're selling us stuff. They can avoid all of those messy sort of complications, and they leaned all the way into that from a principle standpoint. But still, you know, there are going to be people for whom there's no amount of reassurance that will make them feel comfortable with that sort of setup. And I think that there are a number of people who feel, who maybe think that the OpenAI partnership makes that, you know, worse rather than better in terms of sort of a risk factor because, you know, when Apple AI isn't able to do things, it asks you if it wants to send it off to OpenAI, to ChatGPT, and that sort of creates a whole new potential data boondoggle. But, you know, ultimately, the question with privacy things is always, are people gonna actually care and advocate for something different? And, you know, if ever there were a time when they might actually and finally care, it feels like it would be in the context of AI where the data is so much more, it's not just selling you ads based on random little stuff that you liked on Facebook. It feels much more personal, much more integral to you, much more sort of your whole existence, you know, in terms of what's on the phone. But, you know, I don't know. The track record so far is that people ultimately will take convenience over privacy every single time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:52) They will. They will. And so you have to jump all the way forward to transhumanist arguments to realize, like, we gotta get out of. A lot of my conversations, I notice I get stuck in the small preferences of security and data and access. But I talked to somebody yesterday who is involved in geopolitics and AI. And he was like, yeah, yeah, all those conversations are important and they're all happening, and who's gonna, the arms race and all of that. He goes, but how about these set of questions? And he started posing to me new sets of questions. Like, what does it look like once the deity is created? Like, what is that going to do to humanity as a whole? Like, where do we draw the lines? And that post-humanistic conversation is something that I have not thought about the past 18 months and until yesterday, actually.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:20:45) Yeah. I mean, there's a whole spectrum that goes. So if you view that as kind of one end of the significance of the questions and what we were just talking about with privacy and convenience is the other end of the spectrum. In between, there are a whole set of things that are more complex even than the technical questions around privacy and data as well. So for example, you know, there was a Danish company today that just announced that it's moving to a four-day work week, but keeping everything, everyone's salary the same, all these things, you know, everything the same except going from five to four days. And it's because they've won back enough productivity gains with AI already that they can do the same thing at that four-day level. And so they're answering this question of how do we use and distribute the productivity gains of AI. They're saying we'll do the same with less time. I think that the fear, probably a well-founded one for some people in America, is that we're just gonna fill in all the additional time with doing more stuff, right? We are doing more stuff kind of people, right? If we have an extra day, we're not just gonna take it off. We're gonna go do, and or try to do more things, or be expected to do more things. But that's a society-level conversation around social contract, right? We haven't had a meaningful conversation about an updated social contract since technology changed the way that we worked. We haven't had it, you know, since the globalization happened in the wake of the Cold War, you know. And I think...

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) And you've been ill.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:22:03) Yeah. I mean, it really, it hasn't been for a very long time, and it feels absolutely inevitable because, you know, AI will, even in the lightest weight versions of changing things, if all progress stopped now, I think we'd still win back hours and hours and hours of time every week from almost everyone. And so what does that mean in terms of expectations? You know? It's fascinating actually. One thing that I saw, it's a couple months ago now, was Bernie Sanders actually was arguing that this sort of four-day work week should be institutionalized because of productivity gains from AI. And what I thought was fascinating about that is that recently, progressivism in America has tended to just not like technology in general, right, to view big tech in all of its ways as an enemy. Certainly, you know, over the last couple years, there's been a partisan calcification in and around crypto as one example of technology. And I thought that it was interesting that, you know, one of the most well-known and influential progressive standard bearers was instead engaging with AI not in terms of sort of slow it down, stop it, these big tech companies can't be trusted, but instead saying, sort of starting from the acknowledgement that it's happening and focusing his asks, his requests on winning back time for people. You know, hold aside whether that's the right approach or anything like that. It feels like a much more productive line of conversation to be having on a political level than can we stop AI, for example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:00) I don't know how well the four, I've got arguments for pro four-day work week and anti four-day work week. I'd say my argument against it is, as long as you're operating in a free market, there's gonna be someone younger and hungrier than you that's going to have access to just the same technology that's just going to work five days a week and then ultimately put you out of business. So it's like, that's just a risk you'll have to accept, right?

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:24:24) You also accept it today with people who are willing to work seven days a week, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28) Exactly. You know, you're already accepting that risk to some degree. You're just increasing it. And so that's just a decision everyone's going to have to make. What I don't want is government getting in there and starting to hamper free market. I actually think for Bernie, it'll work in the opposite way that he wants it to. Because if you start saying, alright, companies, you can't have people five days a week, you can only have them four, then it's gonna take even a larger amount of money and focus for these people to automate out these things. And, you know, maybe that's ultimately in the long run a good thing. I've got very weird views on the economy. Like, I'm very capitalistic and free market, and I don't believe in socialism and all of that. However, I think there is a point when the robots can source their own materials and make themselves and do everything and where I can provide a product or a service without taxing any human labor. At that point in time, we, I think we could hit a utopia situation. But we're really far from that because, you get what I'm saying?

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:25:31) Yeah. Absolutely. No, I mean, but that's exactly the point, is that that's a whole additional layer of society-level conversations around, you know, I mean, there's great debates right now around, you know, Yuval Noah Harari has recently been talking about how in a world where people don't have to work as much, they won't have meaning, right? Like, if entire categories of jobs go away, that people can't find meaning without work. And that's a big open question. You know? I think there's a lot to be debated there. So I think that you're right that these are the sort of level of questions that we will have to face. And unfortunately, I don't think that right now many people feel particularly good about our capacity to have these types of conversations as a society.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:13) Well, we're looking at the people. The politicians are just children. Like, I remember when I, I'm 36, when I was, the first time I ever watched a presidential debate, I was 18. The only experience I had with debating before that was just watching a high school debate. And I was like, these are the people running our countries, and they're acting like children on these debates. They're not even following the rules, and they're overtalking their time. I was like, that doesn't even happen in high school.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:26:37) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:37) And so we have to get the people that are on the main stage to have manners and act correctly. But to your point of can't find meaning without work, instinctively, I believe that to be true. I think the thing people argue about is what is work, right? So it's like to do something. I believe if you sit around and you're lazy all day, you're gonna devolve into chaos and idle hands and all that. You know, you'll end up with bad habits and reckless behavior. But if you have something to do, and what is that work, whether it's, you know, swinging a sledgehammer, writing a song, making clay pottery, whatever it is, you have to be doing something. And I believe you can and do find meaning in that work.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:27:17) Yeah. I think this gets into the sort of, you know, the whole idea that economically productive work has replaced the idea of value around any contribution that we've previously had, which is a, it's a hard thing to disentangle because, you know, capitalism has been an extraordinarily valuable system for amplifying the value of human work and creativity and, you know. But the flip side of that is, of course, that it's harder for us to recognize things that are immensely valuable but don't come with, you know, sort of economic rewards as meaningful in the same ways, right? Is an artist who makes music for themselves going to be as fulfilled as someone who's extremely commercially successful, right? This is like, I mean, every trope of artist is exactly this. You know? Do they sell out? Do they follow their own instincts? I mean, it comes up constantly. Noah Kahn is one of the sort of breakout artists of the last year, spent a bunch of years with a contract for a record label making this sort of schlock pop that he didn't really like until COVID hit, and he just started writing music for himself or, you know, putting out music for himself in his bedroom. And that's what resonated because it was authentic. It was him. You know? And he didn't have some label telling him that it was off trend to put out acoustic music. It just worked. You know? And so it's like, you know, these are not questions that we haven't explored. It's just they're gonna take on a dramatically more significant and bigger kind of context, I think, in the years to come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:46) Yeah. And I agree with that. I think I heard someone say, like, of love and all these different emotions, the one that ranks 10 times higher than any of them is being genuine, right? Like, people can pick up on that far. That's like, you can, that amplifies far more than any other emotion. And I thought, you know what? That's true because it's something we're always doing. Like, whether I'm listening to someone give a talk or I'm in an interview, I can pick up on how genuine they are from that interaction. So, you know, when you're talking about writing music for himself, when he went from doing what the labels think the algorithms are gonna hit or how many views did I get on TikTok before we publish that song on Spotify, you know, like, all of that nonsense. I'm like, yeah. There's some truth there, and you can manufacture it that way, and you can have commercial success. But the things that touch your soul, the things like when I see, you know, the light in you, right, and you can see the light in me like Avatar, right? When we can see the light in each other, you get those Bob Dylan songs. Like, he's nasally. It's a guitar. It's recorded on stuff, old school recordings, not high def, and you just feel so much soul in it. You feel so much genuine reality in it that you just can't help but listen to it.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:30:05) It's why I think this is one of the most compelling counterarguments for people who worry that AI creation is going to replace human creation. It seems quite obvious to me that there will be just a massive amount of new stuff created. There will just be more of everything. There will be more music than we've ever heard. There will be more writing than we've ever heard.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:30:31) There'll be more entertainment than we've ever seen. You know, there will be more of everything, and it will be harder to aggregate attention on a sort of a small number of cultural touchstones. But I don't think that in any universe, the supply of created stuff by machine learning is going to replace these total intangibles that come from art and music. I mean, music is a great example. Like, how many songs have the same four chords as Smells Like Teen Spirit?

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:31:02) Like, this is a is a trouble. You know? There's 50 popular songs, and each of them feels different if you're not playing the chords literally one after another and singing to each other because they're all imbued with stuff that's going to be nearly impossible, I think, to put into a Suno or a UDO no matter how good it gets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:22) Yeah. I write songs too, and I've got so many songs that have the same chord. So when I do a set list, I make sure to not play them back to back.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:31:32) Right. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:32) Like, if it's the same chord progression, I put them a couple songs apart from each other. Because if you listen to them back to back, you're like, wait, is that the same song? That's kind of similar. Yeah. But if you put one song in between, everything's okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) Yeah. You know, and you make a good point too, because you've got a couple—it's actually fairly complex. There's a lot of levers going on and a lot of variables. Let's look at this example real quick: Oliver Anthony. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:54) It was the right style.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:31:57) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:57) It was the right message. It was high enough quality. It was catchy enough. It had all of these things. Timing, I think, is incredibly important because you can go to AI, write me this song about A, B, or C, but without context of knowing what your subgroup of people are experiencing—right? Because there's billions of people on this planet, and we're just a subgroup of a specific class or situation inside of a specific country that's experiencing a certain set of things at one point in time. And now we're going to inject a song into this ethos that's going to speak to people having this shared experience. I mean, that's a lot. There's a lot happening there.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:32:39) Totally. No. Absolutely. You know, I think that the timing piece is also hugely—it's for any cultural touchstone. There are these things that hit at the right time because they resonate with people in ways that are really unexpected, you know, and some of it's based on other things that are going on at the same time, and they wouldn't have been as popular at different times.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:32:58) So I don't know. It's going to be fascinating to see. I think in general, I tend to think that more people having access to the tools of creation is a net good thing for the world. Right? Lowering the barriers to entry for people to output stuff that's in their brains and in their souls to other people is a good thing.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:33:20) You know? There are, of course, downsides, but I don't know. I'm optimistic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:26) Isn't that what every invention is, from this microphone to this screen to everything?

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:33:30) Absolutely. It's not a new pattern. You know? It's just a supercharging of that pattern.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:37) Let's talk a little bit—I know we have a lot of creators that listen to the show. We've seen guests come on and start their own shows, and I get a lot of questions about making content. When you're doing your daily show, what does your routine actually look like? You wake up in the morning, read the news, and bust out an episode, or how does that work for you?

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:33:53) Yeah. So it's a little bit different for the two podcasts, and I'll explain both of them just because it might be useful for people understanding different stages of the show. So when I started The Breakdown in 2019, it was just all me entirely. And it was, you know, I'd go through, I'd look at the most important crypto news of the day. I'd figure out what I thought was the key stories. I'd do a little bit of review. I'd maybe write myself a few notes. I didn't really script it at the beginning, and then I'd sort of go record it with a little bit of freestyling and talking. Over time, that morphed to where my notes were getting more and more complex because I sort of had patterns of the way that I talked, and I actually found myself almost scripting it entirely, and I had to start peeling it back. I had to intentionally go back to retraining the muscle to not script it as much.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:34:46) And so that was the first couple years of the show. But then at some point, because there's so much other stuff going on as well as the podcast, I hired an overnight researcher in Australia. And basically the way that that process worked was before I go to bed as they're waking up, we go through, we will kind of look at the things that happened the day before and what's coming up, make a plan for what the show is going to cover, and then he would go through and prepare a dossier that has both the big hits, the important parts, bulleted, of the events, as well as the commentary. So the thing that took me the longest is I really integrate Twitter in particular, but just any source of people's comments and commentary, into my shows. So this is the way that it becomes not just a regurgitation of a CNBC story or something—is that I'm often engaging with here's the three or four different ways that people are interpreting this news and what the merits of each of these different arguments and things like that.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:35:53) And that takes a huge amount of time to source all that, source all that sort of chatter and conversation on Twitter. So, you know, basically now I wake up with this dossier that has quotes. It has all of the potential tweets that I might use. It has the basis of each of these events. And then from there, I kind of just riff my way through it, based on the order that makes sense to me.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:36:17) So that's The Breakdown process. When I started the AI Daily Brief, I knew that because I was adding another daily show to the rotation—one daily show is already quite a grind. So to add a second daily show, I was like, I can't be anywhere near as polished with this one. I also knew that I wanted to do it as a YouTube and a podcast. So I wanted to do video and audio, whereas The Breakdown currently is just an audio show.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:36:45) And so basically what I did is I decided that I would just do kind of like a headshot video intro explaining what the video is going to be about, and then I would basically pull up on a browser window the stories that I wanted to cover. I'd spend a couple minutes just mentally thinking through what I wanted to say about them, but not even honestly that much time, and I would just let it rip. I wouldn't worry too much about bobbling or misspeaking. I would sort of be stream of conscious and just record it. I used Descript to record, but you could use Loom. You could use, you know, there's a million different tools like that now. And basically, I just sort of freestyle my way through a bunch of different stories. Again, I still do that sort of integrating tweets. I just pull them up on the screen as well and just go linearly through my tabs as I'm talking. So, you know, and then from there, I do have editors for the shows.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:37:41) I did—I edited the AI Daily Brief myself for a little while to sort of get a feel for it, but then I handed it over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) Oh, nice. Thank you so much for all of that insight for people who are creating stuff. Thank you for creating and putting that content out. It's how I was able to find you. And for people who are listening, we're gonna put links. Josh is gonna put links in the show notes where you subscribe to The Breakdown and AI Daily Brief.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:38:09) Awesome. No, it's a—I love having this conversation about stuff. And, you know, listen. I think that one of the things that people don't necessarily know about podcasting or any form of content creation is even if it never does anything for you from a financial standpoint, creating a context to have conversations with interesting people and to be sort of discovered by other interesting people that have your views can be incredibly valuable, totally on its own.

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:38:37) So I think that if you know—I always encourage people if they have an instinct to try it out to just sort of throw themselves in and see where it takes them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46) Great advice. Well, we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Nathaniel Whitmore at 00:38:49) I love it. It's great. Well, good one. I went in some directions that I wouldn't have expected, but I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) Me too. Yeah. Me too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:55) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.