Generosity

Over Thanksgiving, several family members were talking about how GPT or LLMs were becoming a more regular part of their workflow. In the discussion, someone mentioned they knew an attorney friend using LLMs to automate paralegal work. They still billed the client for 3 hours of work which is what it normally takes. Now this is a double-second-hand story but I have no doubt versions of this are true across the board. Why would it be otherwise? [To quote the late Charlie Munger, RIP]

I’m no economist, but this strikes me as macro deflationary. As I said on the mic last week, technology is leverage — doing more with less. My micro observation is that this lawyer example is a transitionary windfall or surplus that, in the near term, is captured by the producer. But law is a competitive industry so we shouldn’t expect that to hold for long. This bit from last week is an apt analogy:

The run-up to the 2001 dot-com bust was a moment of severe over-earning—a ‘tween moment where there was a boom in trading volumes and speculation to gorge the mom and pops one last time while ringing the dinner bell so loudly that it got the attention of all the suits….

Intelligent firms, knowing the margins were excessive, optimized for market share. They could undercut the mom and pops, offering prices that presented them with a worse risk-reward, although still quite profitable. But the undercapitalized members of the fragmented ecosystem would eventually give up. The surviving firms would increase market share, which meant better looks, which meant better info, which meant more profits, even if the margins were lower. Plow the profits back into technology capex, and you have a flywheel.

LLMs, even if they are “stochastic parrotage”, as economist Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality has referred to them (without derision, but more of a cheeky reflection of how humans themselves think) are a step-change in productivity for many applications.

If readers were willing to share, I’d love to hear how LLM’s might be altering your workflows or shaping your strategic visions for the future of your work at least in the near/medium terms.

tweeted this:

The lawyer thing feels like a temporary moment of over-earning that competition will sort, but the Sports Illustrated tactic here just confesses “we don’t care” (understandably so, it’s the media equivalent of Betamax).

This brings me to an example of a creator who embodies the opposite — generosity.

📽️How to Make an Internet Shaquille Video (38 min video)

Internet Shaquille has a popular (>500k subs) YT channel that teaches people to cook. He’s an exceptional teacher so I watched this video to discover what he knows about teaching.

Turns out he’s no amateur when it comes to teaching via video. Credentials:

• Went to school for design, got a master’s with a focus on instructional design
• Worked for five years at a public university setting where he was an instructional designer
• Did instructional video-based design for a private construction company for four years

The video is full of wisdom and tactics (I took notes). But my favorite part was his philosophical approach:

A lot of this content is not about how to be successful on YouTube or how to create a popular online course. I believe there’s enough information out there about that, about how to chase the algorithms and such. So, this is more of a Seth Godin head’s perspective, not so much a GaryVee hustle, rise and grind culture type of video. I think that a lot of attention is paid to gaining notoriety, and this is more focused on applying generosity. That’s the word I use the most when I talk about this sort of stuff, and I wish it wasn’t because it sounds like I’m canonizing myself, like I’m this huge saint for making five-minute long YouTube videos. But generosity really is the only way I’ve found to frame this sort of content, like this video that I’m making.

The more generous you can be, the more successful you stand to be as well. I think there’s a direct correlation, if you want there to be.

If you see somebody doing something cool and you say, “Oh, that looks easy. I could do that,” that’s not a very generous interpretation of the cool thing that you saw. However, if you said, “That looks cool. That looks rewarding. I should try that,” I think that’s somebody who’s more likely to produce work in a generous way. And when I say produce work, it’s not about how to make “content”. Content” was always a word for companies like Procter and Gamble to populate their Instagram. You should not aim to make “content”, you should aim to make work that matters for people who care. There’s my first of what will probably be many Seth Godin references. I think that once you start to see your work as a body of work, you’re less likely to write it off as just “content”.

His lessons apply more broadly than making videos. Generous work is anticipating your learner’s actual needs and putting yourself aside to meet them.

If you think the internet is full of garbage today, just wait til Sports Illustrated mindsets really start cooking. Optimistically, I have this feeling that the internet and mass connectivity is still young tech. An awkward adolescent. It won’t “grow up” until its nonsense is so extreme that technology itself equips us with the ability to ignore its cries for attention. Spam as a self-correcting problem.

Unsubstantiated guess — the only viable long game will be a generous one. [There’s always going to be some extractive turd targeting the lowest common denominator, but if tech improves our defenses maybe the worst offenders are enjoying their peak audiences right now. There’s an invisible sense that discourse only goes in one direction — towards hell. But there’s a chance we’ll look back at this time as the frosted tips era.]