Real is Slow

Strung off another matcha, teeth stained a little too green this time, I was in Kansas when I got a stern lecture from my best friend for not preparing enough for the podcast. I took his advice to heart, and spent the rest of the season preparing for at least two hours, reading up on each guest’s extensive past. Along this process I came across Google’s NotebookLM, a platform that uses user-inputted files to synthesize information into a podcast.

When I say podcast. I mean a PODCAST. It has two hosts, a man and a woman, who have an entire conversation about the topics you select. They share banter, laugh, and have inside jokes to the point I had to start questioning my own friendships. No one laughs at my jokes like that. I too know why the chicken crossed the road.

Over the next few days, I spent hours listening to these conversations, when the irony of the whole thing finally crashed down on me. I was listening to a generated conversation about a guest, whose work would be extensively covered for hours, before interviewing them when they’d repeat the same information with just a few more ums and errs.

I then spiraled. Slightly. If the content was approximately the same, then why do I bother recording these episodes at all? Couldn’t I just generate a bunch of these extremely real-sounding conversations and then just publish those? I could additionally, send it to another AI that would alter the voices to sound like mine and the guest respectively, and no one would even be able to tell. Was all of this a sign that I should quit?

But then I woke up and I reminded myself why I started this whole project. I LOVE philosophizing. I love asking why. I love asking for definitions. I love thinking about structures and society. I love learning about history and politics. I love understanding human behavior. And most importantly, I love talking to people.

Every conversation feels like a breath of fresh air, an unplugging from a disconnected world. There comes a moment in every episode when time stops and the words uttered by the other person is all that fills my mind. I yearn for these moments every day and for that reason alone I know I can never stop.

But the dilemma, is that human generated content, will always be slower, and soon, more error-prone than an AI’s work. I can’t compete at the speed of a computer, making this economically unviable. Just writing this essay here, took me a decent chunk of the day. I could have been optimizing for profit instead. But I don’t know. How can I balance these two pulls in a way where I can stick to my values and intention while creating at a somewhat sustainable speed?

The last post I posted on this newsletter was AI generated. Even though the points were interesting it’s all bullshit. I’m sorry.

I don’t want to be optimal anymore. I just want to create things that are real. And real always takes time. Real asks for an idea or activity to seep deeply into the recesses of one’s thinking until it can sprout and grow. Real must be watered and eroded over time, before becoming something far more beautiful than the seed that it started as.

Moving forward, my goal with this newsletter is to take an episode a week, listen to it on Monday, write about it on Tuesday, and then share on Wednesday, with attached snippets from each episode. This is going to be a painstaking and slow process, but I am so excited to put effort. To put time. To put intention. To create real.

Love, Goutham