Why Write One Book When You Can Speak 18 Volumes?

Have you ever wondered how and why The Life of Samuel Johnson is so damn long (and influential), even though he's just rambling like a livestreamer on adderall? Some thoughts on the current frontiers of idea production.

Organic conversation is one of the most effective ways to generate thoughts; and passive audio recording of organic conversation is one of the most effective ways to convert thoughts into an external output. But audio is highly sub-optimal for searching, arranging, or creatively aggregating recorded fragments into higher-level projects. This is one of the major bottlenecks that has, so far, prevented the explosive production efficiency of podcasting/livestreaming technology from flowering into a proportionately explosive renaissance of independent book publishing in the more sophisticated intellectual domains.

Whoever can solve this bottleneck, or I should say, whoever is at the front of iteratively solving this bottleneck right now, may very well enjoy a unique and substantial intellectual-political edge, perhaps not unlike that enjoyed by Luther. Or so it seems to me, at least — which is why I've been investing some time into testing the current frontiers of speech-to-text technologies (here, and here).

I recently used Youtube's editing tool to split off a 5-minute clip from a recent conversation I had with Michael James, just because it felt like a not-so-bad draft of something I've been thinking about recently but never yet even tried to jot down. Then, for the trivially low cost of $0.1, I had Temi transcribe it. It took me about 10 minutes to edit it, and post it as a blog post. For now, it's not yet worthwhile to transcribe every audio/video conversation I conduct, but as the transcription gets ever more accurate, it will be trivially easy and cheap to make perfect full-text versions of any recording. Put them in a folder, tag the sections, identify higher-order patterns, cut the chaff; repeat until something substantial emerges, concentrate where necessary, extend where necessary, and extraordinary things might be produced more efficiently than ever.

The implications are potentially profound for intellectuals and creative folks. It's also a potential opportunity for internet upstarts to achieve a substantial edge over legacy establishment intellectuals. Those people will be very late to this game. Three crazy people and a little bit of adderall could easily produce a damn interesting book in one weekend, plus a few days of editing and arranging, or just pay a freelance editor on fiverr or upwork...

Thus, here is my proposed answer to the original question, namely, how and why is The Life of Samuel Johnson so damn long (and influential)? It's because Samuel Johnson just rambled for days on end, used James Boswell as a transcription AI, and self-published an 18-volume monstrosity on Amazon.com. Although it was probably only read by .001% of the people who claimed to read it, everyone nonetheless was forced to concede, "Wow, this guy must be freakin' legit!"