The drama of the unfolding conversation
A wonderful Conversations with Tyler with Dan Wang, with the most prescient observation on the future of media saved for the end:
WANG: My final question, and then I'll stop hijacking your conversation. How have large language models changed? The questions themselves that you ask on Conversations with Tyler. Often, many of us love to joke about these hyper-specific questions that you ask people that, frankly, often could be better answered through AI, through GPT-5 than people themselves. How do you think about asking some of these questions after large language models are arguably better at providing some of these answers?COWEN: I think of a good podcast as it being about the drama of the unfolding of the conversation. Again, I recorded this very good episode with Diarmaid MacCulloch, the British historian who's written on the Reformation, history of Christianity. I don't think the audience, or even me for that matter, cares primarily if the GPT-5 answer is better.
What they want to learn is his way of thinking about things. They will get something out of that. It will be real. It will be vivid. They might end up disagreeing with his very liberal Anglican perspectives on history, but they'll have figured out what that perspective is. You don't get that from GPT-5. You get the GPT-5 perspective, which I find fascinating too, but it doesn't render irrelevant figuring out how Dermot is going to answer the question.
In that sense, it hasn't changed it that much. I don't get many questions for podcast guests from LLMs. In some episodes, there'll be three or four LLM-generated questions, but it's not mostly that. It's mostly things from my own head, or maybe Marginal Revolution readers will suggest something. In the case of you, I know the person, and we've had previous conversations. To ask you about Italian opera or Stendhal, it's like, "Well, of course, I'm going to ask Dan about that." I know that will be interesting. That's easy. It's way less prep. I think podcasts will not become less valuable, because of very good AI. Blogging might be. Well, here's a person's way of viewing the world. Just marketing analysis or facts, I think, will be less salient, and already is.
The drama of the unfolding 'X' is a great way to think about why anyone will care about hand-crafted media in the future.
Nabeel S. Qureshi sums the whole conversation up perfectly:
Conversations with Tyler is like a tennis match and the perfect guest is somebody who can return @tylercowen's (fast) serve and in some cases go on for extended rallies. On this metric, @danwwang was the perfect CWT guest. Very fun to listen to this one!