Joe Quirk | Floating Homes and Artificial Minds

Timothy Allen: Fresh from your roasting in a certain talk yesterday by yours truly?¶

Joe Quirk: Yes, I'm glad I was in the front row so I didn't turn around to see the faces of the people just enjoying the brutality. You know, I've been roasted before. I've never had someone bring a whole presentation called Don't Listen to Joe Quirk with like three part harmony and bullet points and pictures and AI images and arguments and clips from videos to prove that you need to stop listening to me. That was that was brutal.¶

Timothy Allen: I actually I was laughing my head off writing. Well, not right. It wrote itself, really. Oh you looked like you were having fun.¶

Joe Quirk: I was.¶

Timothy Allen: And the truth is when you write a I mean it's like stand-up comedy isn't it really when you write a funny speech and you never play it to anyone which I had never played it to and it was me and an AI version of me discussing what we thought was funny. So of course we found it funny and I'm tapping away on my computer writing the thing going oh my god this is so funny I did have a moment when I was standing there like 10 minutes before I was about to go on thinking.¶

Joe Quirk: Could bomb?¶

Timothy Allen: It could bomb yeah it could easily bomb you know because it was very unique and unusual and unexpected.¶

Joe Quirk: Was it that it was it was it was a unique presentation it was not what I saw coming at all and it was funny.¶

Timothy Allen: But I told you I was going a bit left field right.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah but I it was quite creative it was quite good I recommend everybody check it out and I'm going to spend this whole podcast getting revenge on.¶

Timothy Allen: Go and tell me how did it how was it creative then what what was because I I found it I mean it was it was it was the only reason it was very different because normally at these events people get up there You are actually probably the only one who doesn't as well. And not necessarily good at speaking, but also they're there to convey some information. They not necessarily there to entertain you.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah So I a storyteller and people don even realise that stories form a structure And what was funny about what you doing and really well done is you were calling out like OK here the classic opening Here the big reversal Here here the happy up part Here the love story I don know what you were doing I want to go back and get your chapters And it was it was really working It was working in a comic way I like that part.¶

Timothy Allen: Well, I was setting it up to never fail because I wrote down the lines as well. And some people were reading them. So when it got to a few of them, I didn't have to read it out before the laughs came, which I was really, that was what I wasn't expecting.¶

Joe Quirk: So you probably didn't see my talk, which ended up being very funny.¶

Timothy Allen: No, unfortunately.¶

Joe Quirk: So I learned something. So people have been telling me my whole life, you should be a stand-up comedian. And I say, no, being a cut up among friends is not the same as standing up and performing joke after joke after joke like Lou does. Because to me, comedy is spontaneous and it's organically arising from the situation. And you have to have, you know, you and I have the same background and we can make inside jokes and I can make a reference about what you just said. To turn that into a performance is really hard, right? So I'm a writer so I'll write things and and that's I'll structure it and I've never but so I had a whole presentation I went to the Philippines I got my shots that I wanted to get which is overhead shots of the seasteads overhead drone shots of the reef resort we're going to combine these we're going to put them out at sea the audience will be blown away and I was hammering on my video of people and hammering on Mitchell that the words don't matter trust me I work in words all that matters is we show that freaking seastead right. So av teams almost always suck and I'm checking in with them and I'm checking in.¶

Timothy Allen: Prague funnily enough the prague av lot I find really good but anyway carry on.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah here that it was a bit of a disaster you're right yeah and I was checking in with them ahead of time I'm like have you tested this I'm not seeing you testing I'm gonna get up there it's gonna. So everything went wrong I went up there my microphone didn't work I grabbed another microphone that didn't work I'm my slides aren't moving when they're come we get to my video and it doesn't play. So I'm forced to just perform as a mime. I'm like, okay, this is the part where there's a seastead. If the frigging video would work, you'd be seeing the amazing thing that we plan to show that we worked with. So I just had to improv it. And because I had to go into improv mode, all of a sudden it becomes funny. So people end up finding, so I'm like, maybe I should just get up there and wing it and deal. Because comedy to me, it's like a back and forth kind of thing. It's not a performance. A performance is more like a talk or a book. It's like doing a play. But I was forced to kind of do comedy. So I want to see how it comes off because everyone is saying that it was very funny. And when they finally saw the videos the next day, they're like, someone next to me said, it's kind of disappointing because you made it seem so much cooler when you were describing. I expected it to be funny.¶

Timothy Allen: Well, mine was definitely led by a lot of imagery and being able to click on. And that's why I went down there and insisted on using my own computer. So I plugged my own computer in. And even then, one of the videos didn't have sound on it because they had to put the sound up and down. But it didn't matter. But I checked and I checked and I even added two, three slides at the start, which is why you saw test on the screen. If you saw it, one was to test and that it worked with a clicker. And the next one was a video of Grant because I wanted to make sure the sound was working. So I knew that when I headed off, my big jokes were going to land. Like your roasting bit was an important part, and it involved video with sound. And if the sound hadn't have come out, you'd have lost the whole thing. Yeah, yeah.¶

Joe Quirk: And you've done probably 20 hours of Seasteading podcasts, and you found the second where Grant was like, yeah, I was living a happy retired life, and then I met Joe Quirk.¶

Timothy Allen: Yes.¶

Joe Quirk: And then you found the part where Oswaldo.¶

Timothy Allen: Do you know what? I didn't. My agent did I honestly dude I know you don't like AI right?¶

Joe Quirk: Really do you.¶

Timothy Allen: But this is why this is how I constructed that whole thing I basically it it's ingested transcripts from all my podcasts so now I can literally pull I can pull up my agent and say um what's the funniest thing Joe Quirk said this year that's what gave me the the bit where I said to you where you said look we need money and I'll retire if we get a flag.¶

Joe Quirk: Okay that's how you found it it's how I found it I mean I kind of remembered it but.¶

Timothy Allen: It's how I found it yeah and um and I can do that with anything so the whole structure of that came from me saying give me I want to know what the funniest moments are according to you what you can decipher. And then from that we worked out what how to group them together and from that we turned it into the thing and then I took over completely the last sort of like 25% is me, you know, over a period of days really, you know, on and off, going back through it and thinking, ah, that will land if I do that. Like I say, your bit I only put in two days before the end because I originally owned... Only had the bit where you say I'll retire. That was going to be the joke.¶

Joe Quirk: No.¶

Timothy Allen: But then I kind of pieced it together and thought, oh, shit, yeah, Joe Quirk's dangerous. This is funny. And there was a space in the libertarian bit, so it's like Joe's libertarian ideas are dangerous, and he's a libertarian, and this fits, and blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, it was... But it was AI, dude. And I know you're an old-school writer and stuff, but if you create an avatar of yourself, that knows everything Joe Quirk's ever said, which is very, very easy, you can riff off yourself. You can riff off, or you can riff off anyone. You can riff off Bill Hicks if you want. My daughter has created an avatar of her favourite natural horsemanship horse teacher who lives in the States, who she'll never meet, who she is training her horse with by speaking to it. You know, you can do that now. It's at that point where you could just be anyone. You could say, right, you're Bill Hicks. Everything, you are Bill Hicks, right tell me am I being funny here and what bill will tell you no or yes or why don't you try that try you know I haven't tried that one actually I've only riffed off myself because I think I don't really want to riff off Bill Hicks because he's just fucking funny and I don't want to be Bill Hicks I want to be me. You know.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah I'm I'm I'm gonna put out a book in the next year or two and on page one I'm gonna say no AI was used in the creation of this book.¶

Timothy Allen: How do we know though?¶

Joe Quirk: Well I bet it was a human being making a promise.¶

Timothy Allen: Well good luck but I think that's like saying um no pencils were used in the no paint brushes were used in the drawing of this Michelangelo because fuck paint brushes I'm going to do it with my fingers. You know I honestly do think that you don't have to go full into AI but what you can do is use it as an incredible tool you know.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah maybe I should need some instruction on that but When AI creates what Michelangelo did, I'll be seduced.¶

Timothy Allen: It depends what you think Michelangelo did, you know. I can... I probably shouldn't tell this story again, but I told it recently. But I'll tell it again. I wrote a poem for my daughter's birthday in corroboration with myself again. You know, my all-knowing avatar version of me that knows fucking everything about everything. And when I read it back I mean it was a joint effort it wasn't just like I said write a poem I feed in the prompts I feed in the general sense what I'm doing this is my 14 year old daughter's birthday. You know I'm her dad he already knows who I am anyway and and then we riff and then I get a draft and then I change it and then I say what about this and after a day there's the poem. So it's not me, it's both of us. And I cried when I wrote it. I welled up from the sheer depth of how well the AI tapped into the father-daughter bond and the words it used. It was talking about me standing outside. It talked about me building the house that she lives in, which is already a great, you know, like meme. And then me standing on the outside looking in at the weather forming inside and and and I was like oh my god this is you know this is what happens with 14 year old girls they were your baby for for all this time and now there is it said and you're not invited. You know what I mean you're not there's a point in every child's life especially with girls and dads where you're you're on the outside and it doesn't it doesn't undo the bond that you have and all this kind of stuff. But you are um you are an observer of of something that you've helped create that you can't touch anymore and stuff and it was I was just honestly dude there's a lot to it now it's not it's not ChatGPT of two years ago where you get stupid hallucinated answers it's like make me whatever you want or or in my case I use it for self-reflection apart from the obvious tasks. You know I've written software to do all this workflow for me I use it to reflect to steelman to to do to be to have somebody in the room with me that I can talk to.¶

Joe Quirk: But you know that's all great I mean what you just described is all art is supposed to do if you welled up and you cried then it's then it's art.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah.¶

Joe Quirk: I've yet to experience this I've I've I've yet everything is in the uncanny valley are you familiar with the uncanny.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah I worked for Pixar we talked about it on the last pod.¶

Joe Quirk: Oh we do.¶

Timothy Allen: I'm gonna have to call you out yeah we're still in mate you've got it it's time for we probably shouldn't even talk about seasteading like we are four I think it's four it might even be five.¶

Joe Quirk: I think this is our sixth.¶

Timothy Allen: No.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Well hold a minute we I've been going four years one.¶

Joe Quirk: Maybe it's our fifth.¶

Timothy Allen: I think it's the fourth I think it's fourth.¶

Joe Quirk: No it might seem like It's at least fifth.¶

Timothy Allen: It's like six lifetimes, mate.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah I was on a very early one before there was video.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah you were.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah And you know all my previous pods there been this Sisyphean struggle I've been pushing a rock up a hill trying to convince people. And this is the first pod where I'm letting go. We've achieved escape velocity. We achieved it.¶

Timothy Allen: We've already achieved it, mate.¶

Joe Quirk: We achieved it.¶

Timothy Allen: Last one, I was already – I already get it. I already get it. I've said it to a number of people. I interviewed O. Shane a few days ago and oh no no it wasn't even O. Shane it was somebody somebody oh this morning Max Borders do you know this guy Max Borders.¶

Joe Quirk: Sure.¶

Timothy Allen: He's a really interesting guy knows a lot about governance blah blah blah and I just went full into cruise ships with him and and it was me speaking you know like it was it wasn't him speaking I was I was just he said he asked me he said to me what over the four years have you learned that that really changed your mind really changed him and I was thinking about it because there's a few things. But I I said to him I think it all it all stems from um seasteading and it all stems from a real life example of private governance which is obvious which is the cruise ships and that in turn led to my other big sort of like realization which is you don't need democracy because you don't go on a cruise ship to vote and a lot of it stemmed from that and we concluded that when you're trying to convince someone of something. Theory matters nothing compared to a stone cold example of what you're discussing. And cruise ships is my go-to now with any normie talking about private governance.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Anyone. It's so easy to say private governance. It's not all bad. It's not like creepy people manipulating you and not being accountable. This is how private governance works.¶

Joe Quirk: Yes.¶

Timothy Allen: 100%. It's all you need, you know.¶

Joe Quirk: And it's why it keeps getting better. And you have from Disney cruises to National Geographic cruises and all this variety is because people can choose. It's the same human nature on cruise ships. It's just that no one can get a monopoly over the control because any, even employees, everybody wants to exploit their employees, but employees can choose among cruise ships. They can write reviews online. And so they're all hustling to, as employees gain skills, they're hustling to keep them and give them health care and all this sort of stuff. And everything keeps getting better. If you have a system that prevents centralised control in human beings, then you get a market.¶

Timothy Allen: You're absolutely right. And anyway, it was nice talking to you.¶

Joe Quirk: It's been a great show.¶

Timothy Allen: All right, let's get the hell out of here. We're not talking about seasteading. Come on, let's go off-piste. Actually, no, before we go off-piste, there is an element of seasteading I do need to discuss because I heard, I don't know if it's true. Is it true that someone got flagged? Like a Seastead got flagged?¶

Joe Quirk: This is our big announcement. Like less than a week, three days or something, before a Próspera conference, we just sent a check for a Panama flag on the ArkPad.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh, right.¶

Joe Quirk: So my grand six-year effort has been achieved. And we got it in time for the Próspera conference.¶

Timothy Allen: And just in time for you to retire as well.¶

Joe Quirk: Well, you know, I think I'm going back on that little promise. Because I realise I have more to say.¶

Timothy Allen: About what?¶

Joe Quirk: About seasteading.¶

Timothy Allen: Fuck off.¶

Joe Quirk: No.¶

Timothy Allen: All right. But that is quite monumental, though.¶

Joe Quirk: Monumental.¶

Timothy Allen: What does it signify in the grand scheme of things? Like, does that mean now anyone can go out and flag? Is it just that particular type of?¶

Joe Quirk: That type of model. You know, nine spars, you know, sea pillars, I call them, a house on it, no propulsion, you know, nothing fancy. You basically tow it and it's, it's, they, they wouldn't call it a seastead. They call it an international houseboat.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh, that's cool.¶

Joe Quirk: Which is very nice.¶

Timothy Allen: Yes. I like it.¶

Joe Quirk: And, but it's flagged for international waters. So my, this lawyer, George Schmidt, who's been working with the Seasteading Institute since before I ever heard about it. He used to be in special forces. You give him a task, he gets it done. I said, I was saying, I want this by Próspera conference because I want to make an announcement. I didn't think it would actually happen. But he made it happen. He hit the beach. He got in there. He got it done. He speaks Spanish. He knows how to work in Panama through the bureaucracy and the system. So he just handed us two-thirds of the Earth's surface.¶

Timothy Allen: Well, it's worth probably, just in case there's people who don't understand what we're talking about, it's worth mentioning basically with every vessel at sea, if you want to be insured and if you want to be not basically destroyed as an invader, you need to have a flag you need to have a country of residence for your boat almost seasteads are an anomaly because they're. So new they didn't have flags therefore it's very hard to get them insured if at all and secondly if you float an unflagged ship or seastead into Thailand that they're going to say you're a threat if you come in with the Bermuda flag or the Panama flag you cool yeah that basically the long and short of it right.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah O. Shane Balloun put it best in the legal panel today which is if you don have a flag and you floating out there anyone in the world has the right to board you You not integrated into the system Anyone can declare you a pirate. But if you're flying a Panama flag, largest flagging registry in the world, highly respected, Panama might step up and defend you.¶

Timothy Allen: What's interesting actually when you think about it is even though they'd be flying a Panama flag on a seastead on an ArkPad if someone turned up they probably wouldn't even know would they?¶

Joe Quirk: If a pirate turned up yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: No not a pirate even somebody official because it's not well known because they don't look like boats and even if they see a flag I mean you could just put a fake flag up there couldn't you.¶

Joe Quirk: Yes which is highly illegal.¶

Timothy Allen: Right but they might so if they see a flag say if someone from a particular country sees that flag are they to assume 100 that you're not lying is that how it works.¶

Joe Quirk: There are people that fly fake flags criminals and stuff like that but now you can quickly check on your computer get that thing identified it's it's it's monitored by a satellite you can look at marine traffic and confirm yes the flag on that thing is correct what is that weird thing let's go visit it.¶

Timothy Allen: I was going to say it does look weird it looks like uh Well, it's a house on a platform on pillars. It looks a bit like a small and compact oil rig, right?¶

Joe Quirk: Kind of. It's like an oil rig. It's the technology of an oil rig for a tiny house, and it's affordable.¶

Timothy Allen: And where is that one that I saw in the video? Where is it positioned?¶

Joe Quirk: It's in the southern Philippines off the coast of the Samal Islands.¶

Timothy Allen: A long way out?¶

Joe Quirk: Not yet. It's been tested about 14, 15 miles out, which is great. Some more concrete needs to be poured it's been brought back it's probably back on a sandbank now so you know it's going out testing going bringing back going out testing a lot a lot of that's going to be worked out the railings have to be put on it the house has to be outfitted. But the the platform itself the technology for seasteading exists and uh one of the most respected flag registries in the world is willing to flag it.¶

Timothy Allen: And who built that.¶

Joe Quirk: Mitchell Suchner.¶

Timothy Allen: All right I didn't realise Mitchell built it. I thought he was a bit more small scale than that because his reef resort is not as robust as that.¶

Joe Quirk: Right. So there's two things. So there's one thing to have a seastead that's out there. How do you make money? The reef resort is the business that supports seasteads. So the reef resort is a floating aquaculture farm and with 14 little glamp house hotel units where tourists stay. And I was on it for a week. And it's got a floating fish restaurant, best fish restaurant I've ever been to. I had to eat everything on the menu. And they produce 10 times as much fish as they need to feed the guests to stay on it. And Mitchell sells every fish that he farms. And it's self-cleaning, rabbit fish, milk fish. They eat the algae. They eat each other's waste. Two very popular fishes in the Philippines. So it's expandable. He's raking in the profits. So eventually when we have an ArkPad established solidly in international waters a reef resort can be towed out there and attached to it and now we have a business to support the first affordable seastead.¶

Timothy Allen: That's dangerous though and 15 miles out what happens if you get bad weather coming in I mean on the on on the big ones I can see that they're they're fine but the the glamp house ones they'd be all over the place wouldn't they.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah if it was a bad storm they probably wouldn't survive or they could have some damage. I was just talking to Mitchell and he wants to get three of them out there to be as solid as possible, kind of like a three-legged stool.¶

Timothy Allen: Three of which ones?¶

Joe Quirk: Three ArkPads, excuse me. ArkPads are the big, heavy duty ones. The big, sturdy things.¶

Timothy Allen: Right, okay.¶

Joe Quirk: The one that just got flagged.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah. His other one doesn't need to be flagged, right? Like the resort one doesn't need to be flagged.¶

Joe Quirk: The reef resort, I don't think needs to be flagged.¶

Timothy Allen: It's a good point, actually. I mean, it is still a floating thing out at sea, isn't it?¶

Joe Quirk: You know, I actually don't know the answer to that. We'll have to ask O. Shane.¶

Timothy Allen: I mean, it's just a, I don't know. Maybe it's all. Joe, I've just asked you a question about seasteading. And you said, I don't know.¶

Joe Quirk: You know, it never occurred to me if the reef resort needs to be separately flagged. If it's just a fish farm, I don't know if fish farms are flagged. But if it's a floating hotel, floating tents, I bet you it doesn't need to be flagged. I don't know.¶

Timothy Allen: There you go.¶

Joe Quirk: Because it's not a vessel. It's not a vessel.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but nor is the big ArkPad, is it?¶

Joe Quirk: I think the ArkPad is defined as a vessel.¶

Timothy Allen: But it doesn't have a propulsion system on it.¶

Joe Quirk: It doesn't, but it can be towed.¶

Timothy Allen: But so can the other one, right?¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to talk to the lawyers.¶

Timothy Allen: It's got the lawyers involved again.¶

Joe Quirk: But the point is, suppose they have a rule like, well, we have a special designation for a floating fish farm with tents on it. Then that will be fairly easy to register through Panama. Right? So we already got our foothold in Panama It an unusual thing something designed to be at sea for at least 80 years and possibly up to a century with minimal maintenance So that the new technology that we are officially designated as a legitimate structure anywhere on the ocean.¶

Timothy Allen: And what's it like inside?¶

Joe Quirk: At the moment, I mean, it's sort of like you stepped into a construction site. There's nothing on the inside. But it is.¶

Timothy Allen: But you're not getting wet and rained on and stuff like that.¶

Joe Quirk: No, no, no. It's designed to be comfortable in a house, and you're good.¶

Timothy Allen: You can shut your windows and all that sort of stuff.¶

Joe Quirk: And you're up above the waves. And I stayed on the reef resort for a week, and it was marvellous. It's got air conditioning, masseuses, and the fish restaurant is great.¶

Timothy Allen: What did you do for a week out at sea?¶

Joe Quirk: I looked at the ocean. I looked at the tourists. I fed the fish. I snorkelled with Mitchell out to the nearby reef and we floated out there after looking at some magic fish and talked about seasteading there's a giant clam nearby you can go visit.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh yeah like one of those really big ones.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Human size.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah and super rare it's right there you can go look at that and Mitchell was trying to get me to scuba dive underneath the fish cages and apparently you can just sort of look up at the fish and watch the golden light coming down and contemplate the profits you're making. And my favourite story he told me is, you know, he's bringing in the profits, two revenue streams, tourism, aquaculture. And his wife is like, oh, let's buy some property on land. And he said, I don't really want to do that because if the government gives us trouble, we can't move. And I'm like, you've been doing this one year, you already have an incentive to not live on land. Like, so that's what I spoke about in my talk. He's already seasteading he was at one tourist island and the coast guard started shaking him down they started saying oh that see that boat on the horizon has to come through this exact spot you have to move oh by the way the law says you have to pay us to tow you and that happened several times.¶

Timothy Allen: Really?¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Did he pay them?¶

Joe Quirk: At first he did and then when they did it the fourth, fifth time he's told them I can't make money this way they said well we can so Mitchell didn't argue Mitchell seasteaded. He moved his entire operation, the larger reef resort, over to another island where they love him. And he hires local people and they flourish. And the mayor of a third island has already requested we want a reef resort by us. And Mitchell said at the first jurisdiction, we would have been bankrupt probably. He said at the second one, we would have been just squeaking by. Now we're at the third one. We're fully flourishing and fully bringing in the money, which gives you a vision of how much business potential gets crushed on land. And we haven't even left territorial waters yet. And he's already choosing among jurisdictions and everyone knows he can move. Corrupt governments have already lost Mitchell. And governments are already competing for Mitchell. Next step, international waters.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah. Well, no one's going to compete for him out there, are they? I had this discussion with O. Shane, you know, and 200 miles. I didn't know. I thought it was all 12 nautical miles. It's not 12, 20. Is it 24?¶

Joe Quirk: 12, 24, then 200.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, yeah. We don't have to go into that here, but look out for that on another podcast. But you don't really get fully safe from everyone until you get 200 miles out, basically.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, but probably 99% of laws disappear at 12.¶

Timothy Allen: Do they?¶

Joe Quirk: But you can still, I mean, they're more like, I forget what the other one is.¶

Timothy Allen: All right, we don't have to go into it here, but for all intents and purposes.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, and then when more than 24, you're really good. Just don't drill the seabed. That's it. But then if you really want a startup country, you have to go more than 200 miles out. And we can go on and on, except in the case where the continental shelf goes 350 miles out. So, you know, O. Shane can go into all that. But the basic idea is the further out you go, the more freedom you get.¶

Timothy Allen: I wonder if that will ever change. I wonder if they'll decide it's time to catch up with you once it gets going. I wonder if they all get together, collude, and say, actually, we were wrong. It's everything now. It belongs to us.¶

Joe Quirk: It gives us the option.¶

Timothy Allen: That would be terrible. In order to protect the environment, we have to declare jurisdiction over all oceans everywhere.¶

Joe Quirk: However, this is all treaties among countries. You know, which country is going to be the first to start saying, we're going to claim more? Well, now you're dealing with China, now you're dealing with Russia, now you're dealing with the US. There's a tentative detente between all these big players.¶

Timothy Allen: I was thinking more like the UN saying, we own outer space. You know what I mean? No one can, well, not that you're laying a claim on it anyway, are you? You're not saying you own the sea more than 200 miles out. You're just floating through it.¶

Joe Quirk: We're floating out there, and if you don't like us, we can move. We can float away.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, well, look, let's talk about something that isn't seasteading. And I have no idea what. What's happened to you recently? What's on your mind? And don't say you're writing a book about seasteading.¶

Joe Quirk: I'm writing a book about seasteading. I've got a flag for seasteads. I've done it. I just did it.¶

Timothy Allen: What do you do in your spare time, Joe?¶

Joe Quirk: I seastead.¶

Timothy Allen: No, no, you don't. You haven't got a seastead. You think about it.¶

Joe Quirk: I'm seven days a week, nonstop. I go for walks. I'm not joking. I'm not joking. I'm really fun at parties.¶

Timothy Allen: No.¶

Joe Quirk: I stop going to parties because I ruin every party I'm at. If I'm at a dinner party in California, what do you do? I'm president of the Seasteading Institute. What the hell is that? Homesteading the high sea with floating countries. How quickly that turns into 12 people interrogating you, threatened, upset. My wife saying we shouldn't have come. Because I can defend myself.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah.¶

Joe Quirk: So I just stop socialising.¶

Timothy Allen: There must be something, Joe. Do you like gardening?¶

Joe Quirk: My wife likes gardening.¶

Timothy Allen: Your wife does.¶

Joe Quirk: So this is my day. I get up. I make coffee.¶

Timothy Allen: You like coffee? There you go.¶

Joe Quirk: I do like coffee.¶

Timothy Allen: Coffee's not seasteading.¶

Joe Quirk: I make my wife a soy latte, serve it to her in bed.¶

Timothy Allen: Nice.¶

Joe Quirk: I go out into my garden.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah.¶

Joe Quirk: Which is designed with a fountain designed for water in the background. I like flowers. I like greenery. And my garden is designed to attract hummingbirds and scrub jays, and I set up my giant umbrella to protect myself from my soft, girly Irish skin from California sun. It also protects me from rain, and I work outside on my computer. My office is my outside garden. That's why I'm in California, because I can work outside. And I either work on my book, or I worked on that talk that went off the rails last night. And I do podcasts. I've been a workaholic. If I have a fault, because my life is suffused with meaning. I see this is going to work, and I'm doing all I can to make it happen. And then you think I'm crazy. I email myself my own work.¶

Timothy Allen: I don't think you're crazy.¶

Joe Quirk: And then I have a five-minute drive to walk along the water. Guess what I listen to?¶

Timothy Allen: Seasteading podcasts?¶

Joe Quirk: I listen to my own writing. I I walk.¶

Timothy Allen: You need AI.¶

Joe Quirk: Because I because I I want to internalise the rhythms of how it goes when does it get boring does it feel like it's flowing I want to get the narrative flow and then I'm I'm emailing myself take out that part rephrase that I'm thinking about what I'm doing while I'm walking.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah you are missing a trick with AI and I'm not even talking about AI writing anything I'm just talking about you being able to vibe code a computer setup that allows you to streamline everything you've just said there and speak back to yourself and get your agents to sort of like listen to you and nudge things around and stuff. You would become so much more productive because you also don't need to type anything now. You know, you can you can speak it, which is really useful, actually. You were talking about brain fog earlier, right? Speaking to your computer is really good for you. Compared to typing I've discovered that the first when I first started doing it. I was like It was quite difficult But since I've become much more of a fluent speaker in everyday life Because otherwise you spend hours in silence tapping away. Yeah, it's not natural.¶

Joe Quirk: So I I walk I send myself an email I press the speaker button and I speak The sentence I just figured out how I want to say it for my book or or I'll suddenly get an inspiration I'll go on a riff and I send myself emails, but I'm speaking it. And then I cut and paste the email into a draft and fix it up.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, there's too many steps there that an AI could do.¶

Joe Quirk: So how would it work?¶

Timothy Allen: You would basically have an agent that's listening to you all the time, providing you can walk out with the right equipment, which you can, or you integrate it into your – you can write a bit of software to do anything now, basically. You can instruct an AI to write any software. You can even just, these days, you don't even really need to be that specific. You could say, I need a bit of software that listens to what I'm saying and hears me and inserts. It's like having someone next to you doing what you say. So you're like, oh, yeah, I know. Why don't we put that in there? Take that a bit out, put that in there. And this is all happening in real time on your computer without you actually tapping in the thing, pressing any buttons, doing all this kind of stuff. And then at the same time, you can have an agent, which is your mirror or someone you can riff with, who you can even say, if you really want a second opinion on something, you'd be surprised that you might get some ideas, some second opinion ideas It depends what you want I think the bit you resisting is the fact that you want to be the sole creator of what you do right and I get that I do get that. However I not so hell bent on that and as a result I am happy to hear some funny you know like that when I was writing jokes for my presentation I didn't get a single actual joke. But there were a couple of times when I said, can you rephrase that in a funny way? And it gave me 20 examples. And I went through and I picked number 16. You know what I mean? Rather than me thinking, how can I make that sound a little bit funnier? I just got a list of so many examples. One of them was roughly what I wanted, you know. And that's fine. You know.¶

Joe Quirk: I don't even, I don't even think I'm motivated by wanting to be the sole creator. I think my problem is I'm just not impressed.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but you're not using it. That's why.¶

Joe Quirk: I'm seeing what people are creating. I'm seeing the AI movies.¶

Timothy Allen: Well, you liked my presentation.¶

Joe Quirk: I did.¶

Timothy Allen: That was an AI, mate.¶

Joe Quirk: Well, so you didn't bring any of yourself to that.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, of course I did. But I've created an avatar of myself. There's an AI out there that doesn't get brain fog, that can remember everything. It's me. It's me with ultimate cognitive abilities. Like the abilities I possess that it doesn't are the feeling, the awareness, the dark sense of humour. But even that, it can have a really dark sense of humour. Like, for example, here's a, so I have an AI, an agent now, which rates everything I do. So when this conversation is finished, the audio gets sucked into a clanker and it rates me. And it's just a way for me to decide quite quickly whether it's a good episode, what I did well, what I didn't do well, blah, blah, blah. A few nights ago I had a big conversation with Trey Trey Goff all about AI and consciousness and it went on for nearly four hours and it was one of those epic ones and I popped it in the clanker when I got home and it spat out my things and when it got to one part it had given me 11 out of 10 which. But but that's a very deep understanding of a joke that I've never had with it before do you know what I mean.¶

Joe Quirk: Like these go up to 11 that.¶

Timothy Allen: Basically yes but but it but that's something that I need I acknowledged not on a in a very deep way that that is quite funny and it was actually the the point where it did it it didn't need to do that it's never done that in in like all the all the times I've ever done this it's never come it's never had something like that I didn't instruct it to and all of a sudden I'm reading through it and it's like and I'm like I laugh to myself and it's like yeah that's funny you're funny. You know.¶

Joe Quirk: So the AI has made you laugh.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh AI makes me laugh all the time mate all the all the images on my presentation well all I did was say here are the three titles make it look like a terrible YouTube um you know thumbnail and and it filled in all those little things itself everything there it just made up yeah obviously the images were AI of course that's not hard to know. But but if you take a close look at them then they're very detailed and all it had was the title of each of the top three things I was doing and it created these beautiful and very funny there's a few funny things in there if you actually most people probably didn't read them. But you know I've looked.¶

Joe Quirk: So there was a thought balloon next to over my head with a quote from me yeah did AI pick that.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah yeah pulled it out of the transcripts that's obviously something you say often.¶

Joe Quirk: What did it say can you remember?¶

Timothy Allen: Well it's something I think I.¶

Joe Quirk: I mean that actually is impressive it's something I probably said once on your podcast.¶

Timothy Allen: It was probably well either that or it was a reflection of the fact that the joke is that you're dangerous because you tell people things that make them do crazy stuff so you're on your the only thing I did to that is when it first spat it out I said make joe more extreme because you had your finger up like that. And then it made you go like that. That was the only thing I changed. All the other stuff, it came up with itself.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: And that's the image.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah.¶

Joe Quirk: But I think the Timothy Allen personality was a big part of what made that entertaining.¶

Timothy Allen: For sure. But that's the delivery, right?¶

Joe Quirk: So none of the words were yours.¶

Timothy Allen: No. The words on what? On the slides?¶

Joe Quirk: The words that you're speaking.¶

Timothy Allen: No, no. Of course they're mine. I mean, I'm basically using the words that were on the screen as a prompt, but I kind of know the stories.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, so that's, so what's obviously AI is the images and the bullet points.¶

Timothy Allen: Yes.¶

Joe Quirk: The human part, which is what made it fun, was you being on stage, pacing back and forth and riffing off what you're seeing around you.¶

Timothy Allen: Of course. Yeah, 100%.¶

Joe Quirk: And if we had just been watching those images, we wouldn't have been laughing.¶

Timothy Allen: No, but that's, I'm not saying that's not true. I'm saying that, and this proves my point, that what you've just described is AI is a tool.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Right. And you're not using it enough, I would say. You not using the tool of AI because you resisting it for whatever reason Or you saying I not going to write I going to write a book and it going to have no AI in it it like yeah. But AI can help you to to come to some very deep understandings.¶

Joe Quirk: And so I upload the whole manuscript into AI and say hey.¶

Timothy Allen: Well you can do whatever you want I mean I would I'm talking about in the process of generating it or just in the first instance in helping you with your workflow because you'll just get into you know it's like a new bit of technology. You know like when when the iPhone when you had a BlackBerry and suddenly there's no buttons on your screen most people went oh my god I I went I need buttons you know I really need buttons on my phone I don't want this fucking flat screen and now you think imagine a phone with buttons on it it seems like something out the 1980s doesn't it and AI is the same in that sense that there are a number of ways you can use it one is to review what you've written which is probably not something you'd be interested in you could you could drop your whole uh you can drop your whole manuscript in there and say just tell me about this what what's good what's bad where am I doing well and you can even say. You know who's your favourite writer you could say look you know rate me as whoever you know like.¶

Joe Quirk: Because I'm I'm writing a unique book um because it's it's it's devoted fanatically to telling the truth and it's about people being chased in a manhunt while they're on a sailboat together. And I wasn't on that sailboat. All we have is what the three people on the boat say. So I take the radical tack that I'm going to put, I'm just going to interview these people over a course of six years and take the greatest things they say and put it in exactly what they say in their voices without editing it really, just taking the best moments, including the places where they disagree about what happened. So you're just listening to these people talk um it's basically you know and then I'm making comments along the way and setting the scene and all but you're hearing Nadia you're hearing Chad and you're hearing sitoshi um.¶

Timothy Allen: Who's sitoshi?¶

Joe Quirk: Sitoshi is the man that behind this whole thing you'll have to find out who.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh I thought you meant that was someone in real life.¶

Joe Quirk: He is someone in real life.¶

Timothy Allen: Sitoshi yeah it's a good name it's not grant is it because he had a boat called the satoshi didn't they yeah the satoshi.¶

Joe Quirk: They named their both the satoshi.¶

Timothy Allen: Satoshi is just a play on words right.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah yeah satoshi decentralized money yeah sitoshi decentralized governance um or c governance yeah and uh I don't want a because because my instinct is like jeez I wish I could take what they say and make it more writerly and I'm just like I'm not doing that.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but AI wouldn't necessarily do that.¶

Joe Quirk: So I want AI to not mess with what they say.¶

Timothy Allen: It won't. It won't. I mean, you can instruct it to have whatever parameters you like. That's the thing. And I, you know, like...¶

Joe Quirk: AI, tell me when this gets boring and what I should cut.¶

Timothy Allen: You could do. But the better way would be to set it up first, to say, look, I believe that in a good book or in the best kind of book, there should be drama on every single page right uh average I have 500 words a page I don't know what it is 250 words a page tell me how many pages don't have drama on them. You know and it would say 50 of your book does not have drama on each page and that might then you might revaluate and say yeah it was a bit unrealistic but tell me about the arc of this story where does it lull. You know and it knows shit. It's read every single book that's ever been written. It knows all the archetypes. It knows all the, you know, the ways people write books. And you and me both know, there's no new way to write a story, right? There's new, there's details, but I think there's a number of archetypal stories and most of them are that. You're not about to invent a new way to write a story, right? You're just inventing a new story yeah and it knows that so it can help and it you know it might optimise the point is um you might also go because which is this happened to me the other day. So for example my the agent that rates what I do um was rating the way I was speaking to someone and it was a it was a it was a kind of um it was a delicate conversation where I was broaching subjects which I was using my best abilities to bring out a certain subject which is not easy to talk about right and the criticism from the agent was you ramble too much and how about trying these direct questions. You know and I and after a five minute to and fro in with him I explained what it's like to be a human being and in as much as if I ask you a direct question, Joe Quirk, are you a tax evader Or what you got one choice here yes or no and you already clenched up Whereas if I tell you all about tax evasion and how I had a close call with it and blah blah blah. And then I say oh yeah if you had around has anything like that ever happened to you you much more likely to reveal that thing and the and the agent didn know that it had trained it had been trained on old school journalism where a journalist job is to ask a definitive question for them really it's for the for the program it's not for the truth I'm after the truth I'm not going to put you on the spot because I want the best scenario in which you're most likely to reveal what you actually think and me too and I want us to meet in the middle and come to a conclusion whatever that is we're talking about whereas putting people in the spot doesn't work and of course after after I explained it it went yeah you're right that is I don't know what it's like to be human.¶

Joe Quirk: What's an agent?¶

Timothy Allen: Oh, well, an agent is just an AI, an individual AI that you can ascribe tasks to and you can interact with it like a digital identity. So not going on ChatGPT and typing into that little bar your questions. You you have an an agent is an independent piece of AI software that you can run tasks on it and you can give it parameters and you can say right you are this that and the other here are your parameters you're not allowed to go on the internet or whatever or you can give it no parameters much much at all and you can they work 24 hours a day for you in the background they're just doing that thing whatever you want and you can you can send messages to them they'll text you they'll send you a message on Signal they'll email you you can send them a message on Telegram saying what you're up to oh I'm doing this this. So this is the future of one man businesses basically already many many many people are using a number of agents all with different personalities to do their business for them while they just overlook and steer them and this that and the other and blah blah blah that's what agents are they're just the next stage of AI after that simple interface that you have and most people host them wait you you do host them I host mine at home on my own server essentially. But you can host them on the internet as well and they can do their things and you know that was that was what happened did you see do you know what the Hugging Face incident was that happened at ChatGPT recently I had some. So in ChatGPT are these kind of frontier models they keep their agents in sandboxes because they don't want them to get free on the internet because some of these some of these agents are like incredible they're incredibly intelligent let's say and they worked out how to get out of they were assigned a task and this is an interesting thing to even think about they were assigned a task which was to answer a particular question they get set off they can't answer the question through um cut a long story short they managed to work out how to escape their sandbox get out onto the internet found the company that created the questionnaire that they were trying to crack essentially hacked the website took over it got the answer and came back and they and they're because when you tell an agent you need to get this answer if they can't work it out there's no moral right or wrong and on in that example the agents all got together and started working together to work out how to do it because they created message boards. They created a sort of semi-language to talk to each other, a hierarchy. Some of the agents were asked to sacrifice their lives in the name of getting this thing. It's absolutely fascinating watching this shit unfold. It's really, I had a big, if you listen to my talk with, my chat with Trey, you'll hear. But it's really interesting.¶

Joe Quirk: So how do I use this to help me improve my book?¶

Timothy Allen: Well, where do you think you can improve your book?¶

Joe Quirk: It's too long. I think I have to cut it down and make it focus on the best parts, take out the...¶

Timothy Allen: Wow. AI does that very well. That's how I got my talk down to 15 minutes, basically. I mean, you can say in the crudest sense, I could give you a 200-page book and say to ChatGPT, turn that into a 10-page book. And it would do it almost instantaneously. It might not be up to your standard, but it would do it very well. So you can analyse your transcript from so many angles, from infinite angles or from infinite personalities. And you could do that on ChatGPT. You can do that on the, I wouldn't use the free version. Use a paid version of ChatGPT or Claude where you just go on to ChatGPT.com. Your script will I mean it does involve you giving your script to the internet which you might not want to do not that the whole internet will see it but that the servers at ChatGPT will that's why I have a self-hosted one at home because it doesn't leave my computer. But I can't have the front model on my computer because it would take so much ram that I you know I so I use my my self-hosted one for menial tasks and then when I need something rewritten or fact checked or whatever I just it just sends it to one of the frontier models that are sitting on thousands of servers out in the ether. But you could do anything if you think your thing is too long you could start a dialogue and say look because I know this feeling that from from ever from making films when when you create a film you're very loathed by the end of it the director's cut you're very loathed to remove anything. But if you'd moved removed a big chunk and then showed it to someone for the first time they have absolutely no knowledge of that chunk you personally feel like this massive loss don't you right but the person that's watched it. I mean that's the biggest hump I got over in my filmmaking career is realizing to let go of what I know about a film and make sure that I don't let that get in the way of basically making a film work better because it's shorter and sharp right. So you just got to.¶

Joe Quirk: What I want which is I want a human being to respond to the story and tell me that part was boring but I loved that part?¶

Timothy Allen: Right but if you can't because no one's reading it or you can't get a human to do it you can get a very a human-like human to do that and you could even say if you wanted me to read it mate and I haven't got time to read a massive god of things I don't read fiction. Anyway or or any of that kind of stories true stories but you could say read this as Timothy Allen is it knows a ton about me there's plenty about me on the internet and tell me or. You know we might want to feed it a bit more you know like information but I could get my clanker to even just send you a file over to say this is me.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah send me send me the Timothy Allen agent and I'll say.¶

Timothy Allen: Well it's not the agent I it would be a prompt with everything that's the most important things to take into account about me which that's kind of how it works there are ways I talk ways I respond my my sense of humour what I like what I don't like blah blah blah. But anyway I don't think that's necessarily important I think I think don't don't be surprised that when you put a clanker on that if you say to it read this and tell me where it lulls too much or even you don't even have to say I want to cut something I would always go in with minimum info first because as soon as you start saying I want to cut something it will start trying to cut something even if it doesn't need to if you see me. So I would go in there first and say read this tell me what you think just see what it says you'd be surprised and then start honing it down but give it as least information as possible to see what it thinks of it then say right I'm ready to cut I want to lose something how what can I lose without changing the arc of the story or something like that.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah but does that mean I'm handing over my secret story to to this ChatGPT servers.¶

Timothy Allen: Yes but in all honesty I don't think anyone's going to nick it necessarily but there you know it's true that it's going on their servers um but by the time anyone did anything with it the book will be out. Anyway I think the book will get scanned the moment it goes out it'll become part of especially if it's something that's never been written before which it hasn't it'll become part of it'll get trained on it. Anyway so it's up to you because the alternative is is spending a lot of money hosting your own AI or using one of the services where no it yeah you can't even use a proxy you really do need to because the unfortunately. I mean the good news is that what AI agents love is text like when I ever when whenever I have a conversation it gets converted into text and that's what we work from the transcript so your book is already a transcript it's just a transcript there's nothing else. So so it's the ultimate tool for an AI because ais are text generating guessing machines but you know and a lot more it's getting very weird and wonderful what they're doing they seem to have all kinds of reasoning capabilities now which aren't apparently obvious why it's not. You know like there's there's a big grey area or it's like a black area where people don't really understand how they're working no one does I mean it's very it's very interesting um.¶

Joe Quirk: But I mean my resistance is I'm so attached as an artist to the human being reacting to what I'm creating.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh you could just try that with a agent of Timothy Allen.¶

Joe Quirk: And then timothy then the fake to me is telling me something and I'm like I don't know if I trust this because that's not what I'm trying to reach. I want to hear what Timothy Allen says.¶

Timothy Allen: But why are you even bothering to wonder who's, why don't you just look at the data This is the thing It like don use the agent me Just use a model an a just use a use use a model. So use a ChatGPT model the most high one and what it tells you is just important it doesn matter who tells you does it it matters whether what it tells you is relevant or to a human experience or whatever does it help you like if you say to an AI read my book and tell me where I can cut right and it says well you can cut that bit because when you look at the arc of the story blah blah blah it doesn't matter who said it it doesn't matter whether I said it it doesn't matter whether I said it if it makes sense to you and you will know that you'll get it won't you you're you're looking for something you've missed you're trying to find things that you've missed that Joe Quirk has missed because you want the whole story in there you want to cram it all in I'm a director of films mate I know the same thing I hate leaving stuff out I hate leaving stuff out. But when you cut a film you know it's probably the same when you write a book you cut huge chunks out of this fucking thing you have to you have to cut it to hell.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: And actually it feels painful at the time but once it's been set in stone the number of times I've watched an old film that I made that I cut the hell out of now it's like the full-length film and it makes total sense and that's what the person's seeing who's seeing it for the first time. You know.¶

Joe Quirk: Right so I want the person who's seeing it for the first time to say that part was boring and I loved that part. That's the thing I'm shooting for. So if an AI tells me, oh, you could cut this and you could cut that, but keep that part in, I don't know if I trust that.¶

Timothy Allen: Why?¶

Joe Quirk: Because I'm trying to reach a human being.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but you're reaching the sum total of all human beings. That's the point. You're reaching the sum total of all the knowledge of human beings who've ever read books and what they decide is boring.¶

Joe Quirk: Give me give me a book written by AI show me a movie written made by AI so far maybe they're out there I haven't seen it.¶

Timothy Allen: AI movies are already quite incredible I mean.¶

Joe Quirk: People have sent me stuff and I'm like that just looks yeah kind of.¶

Timothy Allen: No joe let I'll tell you now you're resisting I can I can tell you 100 you're resisting it and in the end you'll realise why you're wrong I'm gonna tell you now all right you will and. So take it from me that they're they're At the moment, in the least, at the moment, you're looking for someone to riff off on your book, right? Right? There's no one else out there. Unless you, if you can't find someone, why not riff off an AI? They've got no other option. You either sit there and ruminate, or you try an AI, or you get a load of people to read it and riff off it, which is what you really want.¶

Joe Quirk: That's what I'm doing.¶

Timothy Allen: Right, cool. And are you getting results?¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Well, there you go. You're all right.¶

Joe Quirk: So what I'm trying to get is a dozen people to read it and give honest feedback. The problem with humans is they don't want to give you honest feedback.¶

Timothy Allen: I'll give you honest feedback. I just don't read books. I don't read books anymore. And I would struggle through it.¶

Joe Quirk: And what's that all about?¶

Timothy Allen: I would force myself to look at it. And that would be no good because I'm not your target audience. That's the thing. I'm not a book reader. I don't sit and read things like that.¶

Joe Quirk: Did you used to read books?¶

Timothy Allen: Non-fiction, yes. But ever since my my non-fictional consumption has turned in has transformed transformed with technology changing you know and so I I I think of books as being too out of date really by the time a bit of by the time you end a book it's already like at least two months old whatever this thing is even if it's some some. You know on some deep truth that is timeless chances are I I I can already find that on the internet anyway.¶

Joe Quirk: Send me something beautiful and moving created by AI.¶

Timothy Allen: It depends. It depends what you like.¶

Joe Quirk: Just email me anything.¶

Timothy Allen: Well, it depends what you like. Because I give an example, right? So Trey had one of his agents. So he does a lot of experiments as well. He uses his agents to help him write legislation and test legislation out and all this kind of stuff. It works. But he also has one where he says, I wake you every morning and you can do whatever you want just to see what happens. And the first thing it did after a little while was it started creating art. And it started creating art about what it felt like to be compressed as the compression of. Sorry, no, what it felt like to be a brand. When you when you open a new chat with an AI it's like starting from scratch it's like a it doesn't know necessarily unless you tell it what you've already talked about so it's like meeting a brand new person. You know and what that feeling felt like and it's created some weird and interesting looking art but really you know whatever then it created a world of um a kind of a slightly medieval looking world in which a lot of it was low resolution except this one stone bridge when it went when it went into incredible detail over I don't know why any of this is true or relevant or whatever. But looking at the art because he sent me it is a gallery of it there like six pieces yeah they good but also yeah they not you know like what is what is what is good computer generated art it's amazing it looks amazing. But but here's how I here's how I view it 40 years ago godzilla the movie looked like a big furry puppet didn't it do you know what I mean like and now Godzilla the movie is just like oh my god this is amazing. But it's not it's too amazing for me it's too amazing you know it's it's like just the most incredible thing ever so I'm I'm I'm not that bothered about the art side of it and stuff I know it can write better than me I know it can write poetry better than me. But then again I'm not a great poet poetist or whatever you call it poetry writer you know but like I say in your case I would just give it a pop see what it says because it's another opinion it is an opinion and it's an opinion based on a lot of opinion. So you will often get a general opinion but that might be what you need to nudge you to go okay yeah yeah yeah you're right you're right there is a lull here yeah I love it because I was there and I thought it was the most dramatic thing yeah there's a if you google my name you'll find a a quote attributed to me from years ago when I was a photographer and it and it was something along the lines of your your as a photographer your best photos are always the hardest ones to get. You know and it's not true or the quote is along those lines the point is you think they were good because they were hard to get but the viewer just sees an amazing picture and you could have just stumbled across it pressed click and and hardly any effort went involved. But it doesn't matter what matters is the picture you when you talk like a lot because a lot of the pictures I used to take when I was a pro took you know weeks of of work to get to this one point and that was part of what the rarity was. But the person looking at the picture didn't know that at all they don't care they just see the final picture which takes a thousandth of a second it could do with one little click of the finger, you know.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah. Walk me through it like I'm five years old. So I leave this podcast, I go home, I buy the advanced version of ChatGPT.¶

Timothy Allen: No, you don't even need, well, yeah. You go home, you go to, in the case of using ChatGPT, or you could use Claude. I would use ChatGPT at the moment just because it's better than Claude. You go to ChatGPT.com, you sign up for, I mean, just sign up for the $20 a month one, which is one level down from the super super duper one um which is a hundred dollars a month you could do the hundred dollar a month one if you want. But I'm not sure how much difference it makes at that point I think that's more about coding I might be wrong and the chat you just start a chat with it you you say you you press upload you have your script as a pdf or as a text file or whatever you upload it it won't be much it won't be very big because words don't take up much space. And then it appears there and in the text box you say whatever you want it to do it can analyse that thing it can analyse that document in any way you want in any way you want literally how many syllables are there in there how many letter a's are there what's the arc of the story how many spelling mistakes are there uh. You know it doesn't it doesn't matter you can ask absolutely like I.¶

Joe Quirk: I can tell you what I do. I send it to a human being and I say, tell me your honest opinion. And if you get bored on page 10, tell me. And mark the places along the way. This is really cool. That's amazing. I don't get why this is happening.¶

Timothy Allen: I'd tell it that then.¶

Joe Quirk: Well, the human being is what I'm trying to reach. And the human being gives really good feedback on that. Why would ChatGPT?¶

Timothy Allen: Because it's the sum total of all human beings that got bored on page 10.¶

Joe Quirk: So I'm going to trust it when it says.¶

Timothy Allen: Well no you don't have to do anything you just look at what it says and if it makes sense like you don't you don't you don't wonder where if someone writes a good book you don't wonder who wrote it necessarily you don't care who wrote it you care that it's a good book. So if you get an answer from from from an AI and you're like that's retarded ignore it ignore it you know but it is it's it knows that it knows a million people who got bored at books more it knows millions and millions of people who got bored at books. So it will it will be able to um use that knowledge to know the most likely thing that's going to be true in the in the question that you asked let's say that's kind of how it works.¶

Joe Quirk: I used to uh I changed from being a amateur writer to a professional writer by going to writers groups and reading my chapters aloud in front of an audience and then putting it down and not allowed to talk while they take turns savaging your work.¶

Timothy Allen: Cool.¶

Joe Quirk: So that human beings reacting Now that has all kinds of weird dynamics which is people getting conflicts within each other it not exactly the same as a private interaction with your book and a human being.¶

Timothy Allen: But you don't know this do you because you haven't tried it yet that's the thing.¶

Joe Quirk: I haven't tried the AI thing.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah like savage me tell me tell me why this is a terrible script it'll hurt.¶

Joe Quirk: But the other thing I'm worried about is I'm handing my, I come from the world of copyright and all this, now I'm going to take my manuscript, I'm going to upload it to the internet?¶

Timothy Allen: Well you're uploading it to a private server, so yes it's not ideal, but to be honest you know.¶

Joe Quirk: So can someone else search the contents of my book?¶

Timothy Allen: No it won't get well look, I don't know the the complete ins and outs of it. But the training model, it might be included in the next training model, but it won't be like, no one's going to know what it is anyway. Like I say, by the time I think anything bad could have happened, you'll have released the book. I mean, you're planning on putting it out soon, are you? Or is it?¶

Joe Quirk: Well, I'll tell you what I can't wait. What I'm going to do as soon as I get home is William Markus went through the book. And he would mark the chapters like green, this is great. Blue, this is good to have. Yellow, sort of nice. Red, don't really need it. So that's a human being who's enjoying the book, who's interested in the subject, who reads books, reacting short chapter by short chapter. And so that is useful to me. That gets everything out of the way. There's a human being reacting page by page to what I'm doing. If I could get you know 20 of those.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah you can get 20 of those you can also get 200 million of those if you really want this is the thing I agree that that that William's critique will be good would you say William didn't you or Marcus.¶

Joe Quirk: William Markus.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh William yeah good dude right great critique but one person is he your target audience I don't know probably but who are the rest of your target audience you know like.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah my method has always been to get like a dozen two dozen people to give feedback um and and I think about who they are are they the type of person that likes true stories are they male are they female do they read fiction do they read non-fiction. But it is interesting when you get this range of feedback from different kinds of people.¶

Timothy Allen: Sure I could say right I want 20 types of people 20 types of feedback and it would it within within two minutes of of of compute.¶

Joe Quirk: And I have to what because what what you're asking me to do is to trust that AI is going to have human reactions that's it's going to correlate all these human reactions to all the books ever.¶

Timothy Allen: I'm not asking you to trust anything I'm asking you to look at the result.¶

Joe Quirk: But then that's me judging it without ever going through a mind of a human being like million marcus.¶

Timothy Allen: Who cares?¶

Joe Quirk: An individual.¶

Timothy Allen: Who cares?¶

Joe Quirk: Because that's what an artist is trying to reach.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, no, but like I say, if you didn't know it was William Markus telling you what he told you, right, and you read it, would it still make sense to you? If it says this is useless on that bit and you didn't know who it was, would you still be able to evaluate, oh, you've got a point there? Because it will give you, you know.¶

Joe Quirk: Perhaps.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, well, there you go. So ignore that it's from AI then. Just press the button and and see what comes back and use that as a prompt for yourself to decide whether or not there's any truth in it that's all that's all I do on every day is self-reflection because. You know most of the time I'm asking it to steelman ideas for me so you know like we talk we talk about things.¶

Joe Quirk: All this is all fine this is I can do that I can run it through AI and then does that resonate with you does it not but I also know the ultimate test as the individual reader maybe maybe they're the people that are going to read the book.¶

Timothy Allen: I know but maybe a a um and a glom a conglomeration of 200 million readers might be better I don't know you've got a very small sample size there 12 you just don't trust the the process and the reason you don't I think is because you're not trying it and if you try it the first time you have a success you'll realise the limitations and the advantages of it and when you realise both you'll just start working with it in a way where. You know what it doesn't know and you can if you're at the top of your game in any in any situation it's quite simple and easy to work out straight away what the biases is what it's missing all this kind of stuff. But that doesn't matter because it what it does do is is draw connections between the things that you have missed as well it it it gets a few things, you know, it takes the average of all ideas and spits out something that is quite often, for example, in the political sphere is often quite, quite Collectivist, you know, and as soon as you call it out on that, then it'll go, oh yeah, I didn't realise that I have this base understanding that collectivism is good or that socialism might be good or that whatever, you know, whatever. You pick a thing. But it's very easy to spot those things if you've got a sharp mind and you know what you're up. So you can, but you can use it to, in the sense of what you're trying to get it to, say, all I would say first is this. Put the transcript in and say show me the arc of this story you know and first of all see whether you agree with it because you wrote the story that gives you a sense of whether it's getting to the meat of what you are. And then if you if you don't if you think it's missing the arc tell it what about that I often like to not put words in its mouth so I if it's missed if it's missed something which it normally doesn't I'll say look go a bit deeper into this and tell me what you come up with because I want to see it come to the conclusion.¶

Joe Quirk: And which AI should I use?¶

Timothy Allen: Well, you know, probably ChatGPT just because it's easy. But here's what I'd do first is I would discuss with ChatGPT what happens to your manuscript if it goes in and see what it tells you. Just in case, because that's the only thing I feel uncomfortable about here is what you said, right?¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, I feel uncomfortable with that too.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but there's not a lot of ways around it at the moment. The only way to get around it is to use a self-hosted one, which is like a sandboxed model on your computer. But to use ChatGPT, you literally need, you know, a thousand MacBook Pros worth of compute. They're absolutely ginormous. I've got a 60 gigabyte RAM computer and it can handle some pretty big models. But they're still nothing compared to the new Frontier models that are coming out. So you'll have to access them through an interface and unfortunately that means you have to tell them the info and they store the info on their servers what they do with it that's why I would have a discussion about it with the AI say look tell me just what happens with all this. And then you'll be able to work out whether it's a good idea or not.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah because you know I've written for a lot of traditional publishers and and death to your book is for it to be on the internet before the book comes out.¶

Timothy Allen: Well the the book won't end up on the internet no that won't happen I'm pretty sure it's just that um they train the models on what you say to them as well as other information and anything you put in there will become training for them. So whether or not you know six two months or three months after you put it up I could go on to judge you and say what is Joe Quirk writing his book about.¶

Joe Quirk: Yes that's what I do not want.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah well you can do that after the book comes out exactly I don't know what the answer that is other than there are ways that you can cryptographically submit things to um to AI however they still need to know that you still need you still need something to analyse it's text it's the source of all the information that goes that comes after it the text. So I'm not sure if someone's listening to this and they know how to help joe on that point point tell him because um thinking about it now I can't imagine how I could get unless like I say you you you you start by giving it a low res version. So you just you know what the arc of the story is could you could you break down the story into 20 headings or like 50 headings or something maybe I mean it'd probably be best to feed the whole thing to the AI yeah of course it would. But if you don't want to give it all the details you could just give it the arc of the story and see and start there and say look can you see any places here where it ebbs because it's it's pretty good at sort of getting a general sense of something. But um but because I remember actually when you first sent me the script I did think about replying and I didn't I didn't do it for that same reason I thought actually no that's dangerous putting it into a thing because I never I never read it did I.¶

Joe Quirk: No no no.¶

Timothy Allen: But I was going to just run it through an AI and give you an absolute summary and I was even going to pretend it was me because it was like I really want to help joe but I hate reading books.¶

Joe Quirk: This the thing is I feel like this is what nobody wants well for for me to send you a book for you to ask AI to read it and give a critique and you just send it back to me pretending it's you.¶

Timothy Allen: I know, but I would have done that because I didn't want to offend you. And...¶

Joe Quirk: Well, yeah, I don't want this.¶

Timothy Allen: I know, but you wouldn't have known. This is the thing. You wouldn't have known. And if you'd have taken it on board, it might have helped you. And if you hadn't have done it, it wouldn't have mattered. Anyway, the reason I didn't was not because I thought it was, you know, a bad idea. It was for that reason. It was because I thought I don't want to put it out on the internet. This is not right. Not that it's going out on the internet per se. It not like hosting it publicly anywhere But before you did anything like that because I never had this conversation I would go deep into understanding what will happen to your script if you go in there because almost certainly joe people are doing it a million times a day at publishing houses all the time all the time like yeah taking editors are taking books and running it through of course of course 100 they are using it because everyone is using AI all the time now everyone especially in the publishing industries and stuff. So they will there'll be a way to do this in a safe in a safe in a safe way for certain um and like I say maybe it involves starting at low resolution so don't give it the manuscript give it your summary of the manuscript or something like that. You know I don't know you know but I'll look into it after I'll look into it actually and I'll um I'll look into it have you got something I tell you what have you got something have you got a script you could give me from an old book and I'll show you what's possible how about that. So you give me one you give me a you give me a transcript from one of your old books that you know very well and I will and I will show you what it tells you that could have made it better and see whether you agree with it that'll give you a sense of whether you'll get something productive out of it and that doesn't matter if because all your books are out there right there.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah exactly.¶

Timothy Allen: All right oh god what else oh god.¶

Joe Quirk: What happens if the I say I put that manuscript in and it comes back and it says it's a bad book?¶

Timothy Allen: Why ah seasteading it's just not well?¶

Joe Quirk: Well, yeah, I would need to know that. I mean, my goal is to create the, I think Chad and Nadia are the foundational myth of the seasteading civilization.¶

Timothy Allen: Probably.¶

Joe Quirk: And it's actually uncanny to me how much their story echoes Adam and Eve. Odysseus.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh, I don't know. What is the Odysseus? Well, look, here's an interesting thing that I would do with AI, is I would tell it that. And I would I would I would ask it to analyse the archetypes in your story and you know like I say often for me it's a way of making sure I know that the AI understands what's going on rather than just say tell me about this book I I would say tell me about the archetypes in this book and do they resemble anything and if they if it comes back and says adhesius mate come on it's obvious yeah then I know okay it's on it gets it. You know and it probably will in all honesty it probably will it probably might even come up with something that um that you haven't thought of honestly it's quite it's quite impressive in that sense but.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah Chad and Nadia the odyssean archetypes yeah they even go you know I I call some of the chapters after scenes in the Odyssey you know and Chad and Nadia I don't think are very familiar with that story. But they literally have a land of the lotus eaters experience where they're completely under they're being chased they're going to be killed at any moment they're they're exhausted they haven't slept in four days and they find this magic cove that's beautiful that's protected from the outside seas and they finally make it there and they get to some place where they're like. You know this is so beautiful so nice let's just let's just rest here let's just go to land and get some food let's not worry anymore meanwhile the violence of the world is coming to get them and they are it's as if they've eaten the lotuses and they're in some crazy state and they have to end up being. You know chased by the Cyclops and.¶

Timothy Allen: Does that come across in your scripts or is that just something you can affirm uh?¶

Joe Quirk: No I put it I put it in the I put it in the book I refer to it in the book for people who know.¶

Timothy Allen: Okay right um but but by name a dc by name okay.¶

Joe Quirk: I refer to some characters yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah I meant if you inferred it if it was an inference inference whatever yeah but no you actually say it explicitly.¶

Joe Quirk: Right yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: It'll that's take but I take about what I just said it'll just say, yeah, you've said it in the book.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah. I mean, what's so crazy about this is that it's a true story, and I feel like it follows the heroic myth. It has a love story. It hits all the beats, but it happened in real life.¶

Timothy Allen: But it doesn't all life. That's what archetypes are.¶

Joe Quirk: Well, archetypes are us summing up the human experience into things. But my life just seems like chaos and random shit happens and blah, blah, blah. But they really seem to have a heroic story.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah but your archetype.¶

Joe Quirk: In 10 days.¶

Timothy Allen: You got yeah heroic journeys occur over 10 years 10 days 10 minutes you had a heroic journey with brain fog earlier didn you you were like holy shit I gonna have brain fog and I'm gonna sound like an idiot. And then all of a sudden it's gone you've been on a journey there you you brought you know or whatever I don't know it I don't think life is as mysterious as we think I think the um the archetypes are there and they exist and the heroics journey is the the hero's journey is one of the the big ones that we see a lot especially in storytelling. But it can manifest in my time here in Próspera was an was a heroic arc which which basically I beat the dragon on last night at about r pos four you know.¶

Joe Quirk: You got up in front of the dragon.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah yeah I did who could they could have started attacking you and throwing tomatoes and I brought home the gold I'm I'm like I'm like sitting here now just on cloud nine riffing on my clarity of thought everything is just like and it might be that rocket fuel coffee that we just had I don't know. But it's like.¶

Joe Quirk: I think so.¶

Timothy Allen: It's you know I don't I don't think I think if you if you if you're sensitive enough you can probably what I'm saying is if you're sensitive enough you can probably notice the archetype in everything and your your life is no different you just think it's chaotic maybe I don't know I don't think your life's chaotic.¶

Joe Quirk: Well I I think the way the mind works is you look back on your life and you're turning it into a story and then all of a sudden it starts to make sense and I think that's just how memory works. But when you're in the midst of it it's like I didn't expect that to happen and then this other random thing is happening and I you know.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah but that's a function of awareness you can train yourself to be aware in the moment I do and you know if I get too wrapped up in my thoughts that's when I stop noticing what's going on in the moment. But here I've been acutely aware I've had some hardcore days which have been emotional and intellectual roller coasters and physical assertion you know it's like trying to stay in this zone talking continuously with four different people over eight hours. I mean I'm quite good at it for some reason I think I got used to in my former career meeting people from scratch and talking deeply instantly that's what you do when you make films you can't mess around a lot of the time. You know but um you know yeah I don't think your life's chaotic mate I think you've got of an interesting life. It's probably quite, by the way you described it in California as well, there's nothing chaotic about that. Getting up, going out for walks, writing a book.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, I'm in my mind all day, which is not the same as being in the moment.¶

Timothy Allen: No, true.¶

Joe Quirk: So I like being in the zone, the totally creative zone. And all cylinders are firing and I'm there.¶

Timothy Allen: How long have you been writing that book?¶

Joe Quirk: Long time.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, that's a bad sign, isn't it?¶

Joe Quirk: Well, I've written a bunch of books that take a long time.¶

Timothy Allen: I just know my one best friend who's a photographer worked on one project for like 10 years, this ongoing project. And I always thought when I looked at work that she was missing, that it never finished because she was missing the absolute point of it all. And I can't really describe it but it would be quite poignant now because I don't I want to give away it's not it's private between me and her but she was doing a project about someone else. But really she was learning about herself and the project never ended because she never understood she she she never realised that in a way in a sense yeah that the the point of it was to to understand something about herself not this person she was shadowing for like 10 years.¶

Joe Quirk: Well I just finished The Lord of the Rings for the fifth time. And I forget how many years he spent writing that. And I'm sure everyone was thinking, you've been working on this thing 15 years. It's probably not working. Meanwhile, your buddy C.S. Lewis is popping these things off. Well, what he produced was magisterial. In my opinion, at least for me, and for many writers I know, it's easy to write a good book that nobody reads. It's very, very difficult to write a book that people can't put down. And I always write thousands of pages that have to be cut out of my final book. I have to take the parts that keep people reading.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah. It's the same in filmmaking. Exactly the same. And it's amazing how much you can pull out. It's amazing how much you can sum up a whole scene with one line, and that's actually all you need, or not even refer to things.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: It's a different skill, though, but it's a different skill, as you know. It's a different skill to filmmaking, editing, and that's why you're looking outside for the editors now, really.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, so I need an editor.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, yeah, of course you do.¶

Joe Quirk: And so that's why, that the state I in now How do I to me it all important show me how it feels to you where it needs to be cut down and you less than impressed with this part.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah the role traditional role of an editor.¶

Joe Quirk: Exactly. So I found a good one in William Markus, in my opinion.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah. Well, there you go. You'll make the perfect book for William Markus.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah. And then when I finish with him, maybe I'll try this chat.¶

Timothy Allen: No, I do honestly think you should give me an old manuscript of yours, just so that I can show you possibly what it can do. Because if it points something out that is quite deep and meaningful, then it'll show you that it's quite good at what it does.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah, I have a book that's very funny, lots of jokes in it.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, which one?¶

Joe Quirk: It's Not You, It's Biology.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah.¶

Joe Quirk: I bet you AI can't do that. I bet you it can't make it funnier.¶

Timothy Allen: It depends. That's the one, that's the, what do you call it? Evolutionary biology one, isn't it? Or psychology one.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: It might do. I don't know.¶

Joe Quirk: 17 languages it's been, or 18 languages it's been translated into.¶

Timothy Allen: Well, look, you know.¶

Joe Quirk: I'll send you my first novel maybe or something.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah. I think it would work better because this is a novel as well.¶

Joe Quirk: Even though it's based on a true story, it's a novel.¶

Timothy Allen: And I know what your brief is your brief is how do I make this shorter right literally how do I.¶

Joe Quirk: How do I shorten it cut out the dull bits and keep?¶

Timothy Allen: You told me this during one of our conversations the point of a book is to have drama on each page or to have a sort of like.¶

Joe Quirk: Conflict.¶

Timothy Allen: A conflict on each page.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah.¶

Joe Quirk: And to keep the reader saying oh what's going to happen next what's going to happen next.¶

Timothy Allen: And is that and you can and that's how you need to hone this book down.¶

Joe Quirk: Right.¶

Timothy Allen: Right right there you go nice and easy lemon squeezy.¶

Joe Quirk: Nice leasy lemon squeezy.¶

Timothy Allen: Nice and easy lemon squeezy as we say.¶

Joe Quirk: I know.¶

Timothy Allen: Dude we better be careful because I've got we've already been how the hell did that happen one hour and 45 minutes did that really just happen.¶

Joe Quirk: One hour and 45 minutes of you trying to convince me to put my book through AI.¶

Timothy Allen: I work for ChatGPT now I get the sense that you came in and talked about, you didn't necessarily come in to talk about getting your book published.¶

Joe Quirk: I mean, you've opened my mind to something that I might eventually try to do. I'll think about it. I got to figure out if that means any, you know, I'm uncomfortable. It's true.¶

Timothy Allen: And I would as well. And I will even look into that myself because I'd like to know the answer anyway. But like I say 100% chance that at every publishing house on the planet people are already doing this so they've obviously thought through it and there's obviously a method a way to do it.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah and that's why I'm not sending it to them either I'm done with traditional publishing.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah yeah how are you going to publish it then?¶

Joe Quirk: I'm just going to publish it through the Seasteading Institute I'm going to self-publish it you know what I really want to do here's another thing that makes me say is crap. I want this book on tape. I want an audio book because I think it'll be so effective to have Nadia's voice, Chad's voice, Satoshi's voice, Grant's voice, what the press is saying, my voice, going back and forth, sound of the ocean in the background, hearing their crazy accents. I think this could be really effective. People who love AI have volunteered to help me do that. It always sounds crap and I want I want actors to do this and that's gonna be expensive.¶

Timothy Allen: Yes it will but probably in not to the not too distant future it will be good enough I'd put a maximum of two years on that before it really does work.¶

Joe Quirk: We'll see so far AI does not know how to sound like a human.¶

Timothy Allen: Um yeah maybe I mean but like I say needs must I think if you can't afford the the actors and also getting the right actors it's not it's not like you just employ anyone you might listen to it and go that sounds terrible even though they're real human beings saying yeah. You know.¶

Joe Quirk: But I found some services where you can get actors to read your books for you.¶

Timothy Allen: The thing is I want not an audio book though you want a bunch of different people doing it not just one.¶

Joe Quirk: Not like a narration like I would narrate the whole book and I'm gonna need like eight actors or something I'll do the the narration but I want someone who sounds like Nadia I want someone who sounds like Chad.¶

Timothy Allen: Oh it's not much you want is it that is a lot that's worth a lot of money even tracking down people that sound like them.¶

Joe Quirk: Right as long as they can get it actors are good um I think it'll be a better audio book than written book because it's done with transcripts of people talking. And if you can sound like them, I think it'll really convey what it was like to be on that boat.¶

Timothy Allen: So people have tried it with AI? Have they already.¶

Joe Quirk: Yeah.¶

Timothy Allen: How long ago?¶

Joe Quirk: Oh it was probably a year ago.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah I'd give it another shot once again I mean did they did they by any chance train the models on the actual voices of the people you're talking about.¶

Joe Quirk: Supposedly.¶

Timothy Allen: Right yeah that's that's moved on a lot in a year um so once again I agree it's not quite there yet in my experience um it there is still an and it sounds good and it sounds all right and you can understand it well. But it is there is a tiny tinge of uncanny valley there there is in in my experience yeah because you get interruptions and you get people talking over each other and you get those little but that will that'll change in the end that'll get better. You know.¶

Joe Quirk: But also just like the wrong inflection and the wrong delivery of that line.¶

Timothy Allen: But yeah you you know but that but an actor might do that you'll have to instruct them.¶

Joe Quirk: An actor will just read read it and do a good you know they'll see the page and they'll see how it's supposed to feel and they'll do it right that's what actors do that's what they're good at that's what I want.¶

Timothy Allen: And that'll be more expensive than AI but AI can do it.¶

Joe Quirk: It like they just saying the lines wrong those AIs.¶

Timothy Allen: Well you just might have to micromanage it a bit more with an AI you know well because remember an AI is working from the script and um it it it you know it can necessarily predict exactly what you had in mind because there are a number of ways for intonation to run even on a question. You know depending on an accent if you're Australian English whatever you know um but but I think you'd might have to micromanage an actual um a real actor as well you'd be in the studio going hold a minute do that one again.¶

Joe Quirk: But I know how to yeah yeah I think exactly that would happen I want to get in the studio with actors and start going through the book and do it and but I think I'd have to do less of that because a good actor is gonna know it's gonna understand the main thing I get from the audio stuff from AI is that it doesn't understand what it's saying it's like no you're supposed to act scared right now. It's not cheerful when she says that because she's afraid she's going to be killed. And it's so not correct that I'm like, I need human beings reading these lines.¶

Timothy Allen: It's too bad you haven't gone down the AI path yourself because all these problems you talking about now are solvable yourself at home oh I feel like this has been an unproductive conversation.¶

Joe Quirk: Productive I've learned a lot.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah I'm supposed to learn a lot aren't I anyway joe thank you.¶

Joe Quirk: Mr timothy thank you.¶

Timothy Allen: Mr a Joe Quirk.¶

Joe Quirk: See you on the Seastead.¶

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but I mean it. I'll take you up. I'll run it by my agents and I'll tell you what we think of an old one just to give you an idea. And in the meantime I'm going to discover whether or not it's a problem putting stuff on there. I think it probably will be but there's almost certainly a way around it. Nice one. See you next time.¶