This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
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BEN:
AI is a crew. AI is a team. AI is the Navy SEALs. You can give it a mission, and whether or not you love the results, it is going to accomplish it. I always think about, like, you know, Jack Nicholson technically is a tool of Stanley Kubrick. Jack’s going to do what Jack’s going to do.
REID:
Yes, exactly right.
BEN:
And Stanley can nudge it, and he can say some things, but when he calls action, Jack’s going to Jack.
BEN: I’ve never seen anything shift as quick as people’s opinions on AI. There was a phase about a year ago where I felt like everyone needed help, and now they don’t need help anymore. They need answers. We are actively watching budgets decline and distribution become more complicated.
BEN:
And Gen Z and Gen Alpha are just, you know, they’re floating away from sort of modern studios. AI is their answer, and they know it. They just—they now have to kind of bring it all together. The shift has gone from, like, “We hate you.” to “Please help us.”
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PARTH:
The token grantee program gives $1,000 a week in tokens to high-potential creators already deep in AI, across film, gaming, comics, print, and digital art. There are no tool restrictions. The freedom to choose is the point. Grantees also get access to my own custom fleet of agents and an ongoing collaboration with me. The goal? To close the gap between an idea and the world.
REID:
Ben, welcome. And Parth, why don’t you introduce Ben? Selecting him, how you met, that sort of thing?
PARTH:
Ben and I met, I think, three–three years ago now, maybe, maybe four. But Ben and I met in LA. He hit me up through a shared Slack channel we’re in with a bunch of guys from actually traditional Hollywood, more traditional Hollywood guys. And Ben was the first person I met in traditional film and entertainment that was experimenting with AI at a time when almost no one was experimenting with AI in Los Angeles. I was like, “Oh my God, I can have a conversation with one person? I don’t have to go to San Francisco for this?” And Ben would come over to my place and just hang out in the lounge, and we would just hack–
PARTH:
I would show him the latest agents, and then he was playing with image and video models back then when they barely worked. And, yeah. And so, yeah, this is Ben. He’s a professor at USC and teaches film, and also just very deep in the latest in AI, from coding agents to image and video and what it means for entertainment pipelines.
BEN:
Yeah. And full disclosure, Reid, I owe this to Parth. Like, I owe literally–because he’s right, at this time, we’re pre-DALL-E, we’re pre-Midjourney. Like, all you’re doing is, you know, you’re on GitHub. I burned one GPU. I killed one computer with a virus. Like, it was the Wild, Wild West. And I started reaching out to some friends because I was like, “This is the future. This is absolutely the future.” Most of them disagreed. I was even at FMX in Germany, and they told me I was crazy. And then a mutual friend of mine and Parth’s was like, “You’ve gotta meet Parth. He is the holder of the keys.”
BEN:
And then I went and met with Parth, and I think my joke is that, you know, when Neo meets Morpheus and he gets red-pilled, I met Parth and I was red-pilled from there on.
REID:
Could be red-pilled, or given you were going Keymaster, we could even go back to Ghostbusters, right?
BEN:
Oh, let’s go, Ghostbusters!
REID:
You know, like, for those people who’ve seen the original, I might be dating myself. So, say a little bit about, kind of, in addition to meeting Parth, how did your early AI experiments start? Like, what was the–“Oh, like, this is the future. I gotta start, even though everything’s broken right now.”
BEN:
Yeah. Oh, Reid, killer question. So, I actually get a really lucky break, which is I’m a commercial director. So, you know, I make my bread and butter directing commercials, and so my world has always been very visual. In fact, I can date it all the way back to, like, I was the neighborhood dungeon master. So I start telling stories as a kid, and everything is visual for me. And then I become a commercial director. But probably about four and a half years ago, I start playing with generative AI, and I get this immediate bump. I get this immediate superpower, which is I start winning more and more commercial jobs with it.
BEN:
So I’m starting to do treatments, and even just, like, being able to do better image manipulation, being able to do, like, really, like, gorgeous style frames that no one knows where they came from, I start winning more and more commercial jobs. And at the time, I’m teaching directing at USC, and I start bringing in–like, I literally–one of the students would always blow, like, a fake DJ Khaled air horn. He’d be like–and the whole class would yell, “New tech.” And each week, I would show them a new AI tool. And they’re all rough. They’re all just raw, you know, running–I’m running a Chrome Remote off my desktop. But then what starts to happen is, as I’m showing the students these things, my students start to win all of USC’s sort of internal awards.
BEN:
So they win, like, the Coca-Cola Refreshing Filmmaker’s Award and the Heineken Award because their treatments are getting better. And then, at the time, the head of the directing track just steps in, and it’s like, “What the hell is all this AI stuff?” And I’m like, “It is the future.” And then met with the dean. And so, as far as I know, USC has the oldest AI program in America. And what I can release now is that it’s even a year older than USC thinks it is, because I started teaching AI to students almost four and a half years ago.
PARTH:
You’ve seen the arc of the technology, at least in Los Angeles, was definitely the first wave, the second wave. We talked about this. How would you say, like, the industry, the entertainment industry’s attitude toward AI has shifted in your time in it?
REID:
Yeah.
BEN:
And, like, you know, I was alive for the internet era, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt, I’ve never seen anything shift as quick as people’s opinions on AI. I mean, we go from literally three and a half years ago, where basically where the writers strike is, I’m having students come in just to boycott my class, just to come in and protest, right? And so they’re coming in. We had one student who brought a sign, which was rad. I felt like that was good commitment.
BEN:
So we go, you know, we go from that, the writers strike, everyone hates it, to today where, you know, I had a meeting at a studio two days ago, and I realized I was leaving with this feeling of–you know, there was a phase about a year ago where I felt like everyone needed help, and now they don’t need help anymore. They need answers. They are like, “We are actively watching budgets decline and distribution become more complicated.” And Gen Z and Gen Alpha are just–they’re floating away from sort of modern studios. And so AI is their answer, and they know it. They now have to kind of bring it all together. The shift has gone from “We hate you” to “Please help us,” if that makes sense.
REID:
Well, isn’t it still kind of mixed in it? Like, especially because the folks who are, you know, kind of older, you know, are like, “Ah, still.” And, like, there’s almost a conflict. Whereas the new folks realize this is just where it’s moving to. So I might well–and I have this amazing superpower–should go. So how does a dialogue work currently?
BEN:
You nailed it, Reid. It’s age. Like, I used to joke, it’s age, not stage. Because I, you know, I, like, I’m watching–I work with both undergrad and grad students, and then as a director, you know, I’m working with, like, some of the greatest filmmaking professionals in the world. So, like, you know, the world-class storyboard artists who have worked with everyone from, you know, Scorsese to, like–I’m fortunate enough to be on both sides. And the 19-year-olds, Reid, they jump in. They have no bad habits. They have no, like, wiring, you know, flooring to undo. They just jump in with both feet. Whereas I am seeing, you know, more seasoned professionals who’ve been at it for longer. It’s not only resistance, it’s like a disdain. Like, they would rather spend the time arguing with you about how it doesn’t work. Right? You can come in and, like, I can talk about it now. Like, I won a Cannes Lion for a project that just has AI all over it, but I still get in arguments with people about how AI will never be, you know, sort of award-winning material.
BEN:
But I can just say from a personal and indisputable point that, like, no, it absolutely is. But people will still spend more time arguing with you. And again, but students–on the flip side, Reid, I was joking with Parth. I was presenting kind of, like, how to use green screen with AI, build VFX environments, those kinds of things. And one of my students, he just goes, “Yo, Prof. B, why do we need green screen?” And I was suddenly like, Reid, I had that moment, you know, when your mom can’t reset the microwave after a power outage. I felt like that. I was like, “Oh, God, I’m about to be old.” Like, whatever he’s gonna say, he’s about to make me old.
BEN:
And he’s like, “Why don’t we just use depth maps and then turn them into luma mattes and then just keep people like that?” And I was like, “You are right, and I am old. All right, thank you.”
PARTH:
Oh, man, that’s incredible. I see the same thing in programming too. It’s the experienced programmers tend to be the most resistant, and then the ones that are the most naive tend to be the ones that learn the most and have less institutional baggage that’s holding them back. Definitely.
BEN:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
PARTH:
What is something that you can finally make or do now that would have been impossible or too expensive a few years ago?
BEN:
Oh my God. Parth, how long do we have? How long is this? A three-hour–what is this? Director’s cut?
REID:
We’ll make sure we have enough time for this.
BEN:
I mean, this is–so I’ll start again. I tend to approach everything either as a director or a dungeon master. So the director in me, I now have made, again, award-winning spots. We had a spot that aired during the Sugar Bowl. I’m using AI in commercials now, which I could not have done a year ago. I do think the accretion of visual quality is finally at a point that we can use it on air. It can show up on your big-screen TV. It can run during a bowl game. So I’m really excited about that space. And then on the personal space, thanks to you, I have finally been able to–Reid, I’m a part of–a subset of being a dungeon master is you also have to be a comic book nerd. That’s like my–yeah.
REID:
By the way, I was also a dungeon master and also a comic book nerd. So totally get it.
BEN:
Oh, Reid! Oh my God. All right, so you’ll absolutely love this. So this is something that came from talking to Parth for a while, was like, I’ve always been a huge comic book nerd. And, you know, this is–this part is fact. There are more players in the NBA than there are comic book illustrators. So when you think about it, there’s less than 500 professional comic book illustrators, people who can go and finish a book for you. And that’s assuming you have the time, the money, the resources to even get involved with them. So one of the things I’d always dreamt of was, like, you know, essentially, like, comic book creation for the masses, right?
BEN:
Kind of beyond AI, like actual–not only to be–if you imagine, like, it’s called Block Block, and it is TikTok for comic books. So imagine a place to sort of, you know, develop, create, share, and explore comic books online in a super safe space. And, you know, see above, there’s only 500 comic book illustrators or fewer. So, you know, given that every human being you meet has a story, let’s say we’ve got at least a billion storytellers and 500 people who can draw it. We need AI tools to help here. And so what I did was I integrated all these fantastic front-end comic book tools with AI. What Block Block allows people to do is you go in, you create your comics, you can lay out your word balloons.
BEN:
You can change the size of the neck, you can curve the neck. We’ve got the big sound design. It’s the ability for you to create comic books in an instant, and then it’s also the platform for you to share them on. For me, Parth, what couldn’t I do a year ago? Is “all of it” a good answer? I mean, it’s everything, right? It’s everything from the front end to being able to finally develop my own app that runs both on Android and iOS. It’s the database system, it’s the security system. It’s, you know, being able to, like, even invites and Cloudflare and just–I can’t tell you how mind-blowing it is. Reid, and I apologize, Parth. I feel like I’m saying everything to you that you’ve already heard me talk about.
PARTH:
No, no, no, no. I love hearing it, man.
REID:
This is what we’re doing this for.
PARTH:
Yeah.
BEN:
Okay, cool. Yeah. So, Reid, you know, for me, what I’m realizing too is, like, as I go through and I’m developing all of this, by the way, thanks to y’all now, you know, now that I’ve got my tokens, I can send everything to friends and let them go wild. What I began to realize, too, was, you know, there’s this iceberg of creation, right? Which is, you know, then you think about the iceberg analogy. There’s, like, 10% that’s above water, but in reality, what’s really going to sink your ship is the 90% that’s below water, right? And so it’s one thing to develop. I think we’ve all, like, vibe-coded an AI-powered to-do app at some point in our life. Like, that’s our modern hello world.
BEN:
So we’ve all done that, but then it kind of stops there, and you never really get to realize, like, oh, what you didn’t do is tie that into a database system. What you didn’t do is tie that into GitHub publishing. What you didn’t do is build a Cloudflare system that keeps it secure. What you didn’t, like–and so you begin to realize the depth of the work you have to do becomes so much greater. And now, all along the way, I have Claude writing and Codex checking what Claude is writing right now. And sometimes I’ll flip that just to, you know, spice up life. But I just think, like, even the ability to think this way didn’t exist before, right? For me to–
BEN:
To explore deep enough to learn what I don’t know didn’t exist before. And so I just think this growth journey has been insane, but it is only now that I could do this.
REID:
So one of the things that Parth mentioned to me only by this phrase, so I’m gonna ask: talking raccoon.
BEN:
Oh, sure. That’s my code name. That’s our safe word for when I–
REID:
Okay, now I understand.
BEN:
Yeah, man. I mean, so talking raccoon was–I guess I can’t name the client yet because I haven’t won the job. But there was a project that had a talking raccoon in it, and we were just chatting about how difficult it would be in these VFX teams that would come in. And then, what do you use for facial motion capture? Are you using markerless motion capture? What are the different systems? And then do you want to use Maya? And do we want to do hair in Maya? Do you want to do splines?
BEN:
It was just all these stories, and then suddenly I had this moment of, like, well, wait, I wonder if this just works in AI. And then the reason I think this is such an important story is we’re now at a spot where you just go and test it. We no longer have to sit in a big boardroom or on a bunch of Zoom calls discussing, like, do we think the raccoon can talk? Do we think that this–can we–I literally, Reid, I just acted out the part of the raccoon and then piped it through. Like, there’s a great thing called LivePortrait and ComfyUI. And so now–and then within 30 minutes, I went from, “Does this work?”
BEN:
To, “I have this gorgeous talking raccoon who’s me saying everything I want him to say.” And then I used Move AI. So he’s acting like I act in the wide shots. Like, Reid, this ability for us to bypass all of that and get straight to creation, right? That we’re moving out of this. And again, like, democratization is even too light a term to me. Like, we’re beyond democratization. This facilitation, the speed at which we can move and test and iterate and explore and know within a half hour–not only does this work or not work, it’s like I went from, “Does this work?” to, “This is amazing.” And then I think maybe part of what you were also implying is, like, I then, Reid–
BEN:
I was like, “Why aren’t I doing a talking raccoon show? Where’s my We Bare Bears of live-action talking animals in the woods?” Like, this is how we think now. It’s insane.
PARTH:
And it almost feels like–I mean, specifically, like, the motion. The new kind of motion capture. I mean, I think Gen AI feels like the new kind of VFX, but there’s also this, like, new kinds of mocap with, like, Luma and all these, like, facial acting. It almost feels like Andy Serkis–now anyone can take an Andy Serkis kind of approach to character creation.
BEN:
Yes, that’s my precious.
PARTH:
Yes.
BEN:
Although I might even, Parth–I might even double down and say, like, Andy Serkis is more valuable now than ever. Yeah, right. The person who understands the medium. I’ve had good fortune to work with people like T-Pain. And we did some music videos together. And one of the things he mentioned was, like, he had to learn to sing poorly so that Auto-Tune would transform him into that perfect T-Pain voice. And to me, that’s also what Andy Serkis is doing, right? It’s sort of learning the values and limitations and accentuations of the system. Understanding these sliders in LivePortrait so that he can adjust his performance to be perfect for the medium. Right, right.
BEN:
Like, for example, bring it back to Talking Raccoon, as I’m–maybe that’s the whole episode title here. Ben Hansford, Talking Raccoon, is that they have these beady little eyes. So I really had to go huge with the eyebrows. Your performance has to get bigger and your head has to move more to sell more. Like, I think–if you’re a budding actor, learning to perform in these mediums is going to be like actors of old learning the difference between a close-up in film and a wide shot in film, between being on stage and, you know, and being in front of the camera. Like, if you can develop those habits. Because now, Parth, you can be anyone anywhere. Yeah. Like I did–you remember when I–
BEN:
When I showed you the–I’ll call it the space film for privacy reasons. Reid, there’s a project I’m developing, and it was all an animated deep-space film. And I play all the characters, you know, and so it’s always my face doing the work. I’m transforming my voice in ElevenLabs. Like, whoever’s gonna take over those roles. And our troupe in the, you know, in the Parth, Reid, Ben troupe, that is–it’s gonna be like Shakespeare troupes of old. Like, people being able to play lots of roles, develop more, develop faster, like, create what you want to create when you want to create it. Like, it’s pretty dreamy, man.
PARTH:
It is. It’s surreal to see, man. I feel the same way. Even the small experiments that I’m doing with Reid, when we’re, like, trying to–you know, we’re working on some comic books, too. You know, we’re messing around.
REID:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
BEN:
I’m gonna send you an invite to Block Block, both of y’all.
PARTH:
All right. Guys, what is one thing that you think filmmakers should be learning right now that isn’t taught in film school?
BEN:
Obviously, it starts with the letters AI. I hate coming back to AI like this. I really do. I just can’t imagine people proceeding without it. And, like, if you don’t mind, like, a long answer. Getting longer. I’m watching what’s happening with, like, Backrooms and Obsession.
REID:
Yep.
BEN:
Which are just both phenomenal. But underpinning both those stories is they were both made at relatively shoestring budgets. So developing filmmakers are going to have to do more. It is probably gonna have to show up on other platforms. It is going to come in different formats, and they’re gonna have to do it for less. I hear everyone hating on AI right now. Everyone’s like, “AI is killing us. AI’s taking away jobs.” It’s–which is–can we swear on this show?
REID:
Yes.
BEN:
Okay, cool. It’s bullshit. It’s not AI. Your budgets have been going down for two and a half years. I’m a director. I’ve been watching our budgets constantly get shrunk. So now what’s happening is, in a world where you have to do the same, but with less, you have to find tools to supercharge yourself. And, in fact, I might even take a step back and, Reid, I was telling Parth. Like, I know everyone keeps calling AI a tool. Everyone’s like, “Well, it’s just a tool. It’s just a tool.” It’s not a tool. Like, my hammer is a tool. My saw is a tool. My paintbrush is a tool.
BEN:
But I can’t go to bed and put my hammer down and say, “Build me a bird box while I sleep,” and wake up in the morning and see a bird box. But I can go to bed and tell Claude, like, “Hey, redesign the front end of Block Block to be more like this for anyone who’s doing desktop development. And Claude, you check whatever–sorry, Codex, you check whatever Claude posts to the GitHub.” I can’t tell my hammer to do that. AI has autonomy. AI can build momentum. AI is, again, coming back to everything, being film crew or being director or dungeon master, AI is a crew. AI is a team. AI is the Navy SEALs.
BEN:
You can give it a mission, and whether or not you love the results, it is going to accomplish it. I always think about–Jack Nicholson, technically, is a tool of Stanley Kubrick’s, right? In The Shining, he’s technically a tool. But Jack’s gonna do what Jack’s gonna do.
REID:
Yes, right?
BEN:
And Stanley can nudge it, and he can say some things, but when he calls action, Jack’s gonna Jack. And I think the same thing is happening with AI, and I think people are–I don’t know why people keep trying to undersell it, but to me, that’s why when you ask, what do I think filmmakers need? They have to evolve these tools. You have to, like–I mean, even–sorry, I’m going on. But–
REID:
No, but, like, Jack, it’s–you can handle the truth. You just need to–
BEN:
Exactly. And that’s–but getting people to there, Reid, it’s like–
REID:
Yeah, yeah.
BEN:
It’s a–yeah.
REID:
So when people panic about AI and creativity, what’s the thing you wish they understood? And Parth mentioned something about a student protester.
BEN:
I’ll start with the protester story, and I think that’ll kind of answer the whole thing, which is, like, one of the times–I’ve had a protester almost every semester, which I love, by the way. They’re all 19. They should be yelling, “Fuck the man.” So I like it. So a protester showed up at class, and he was like–he literally told me, very sweet, he was like, “I’m here to protest your class.” And I told him, I was like, “Class is about to begin.” I was like, “This is fantastic. Will you do me a favor? Will you sit in on the class? We’re going to be watching a bunch of students’ work, and then let’s chat after class.”
BEN:
So he sat in on the class. It was kind of lucky for both of us. It was one of the days we were doing project presentations. And he got to watch how every student, even though they were all using the same tool, had a project that was so definitively them. Like, one student had taken a voice recording that he carried from his dead grandmother. She was in China. It was one of the last messages she left him about how he was an accident, and his mom had to go back to–I mean, it’s just–I’ll get goosebumps and start crying talking about it. He took that and reenacted the whole story with AI. With his dead grandmother as the voiceover. We had another–
BEN:
We had all these students using the same exact tool. And every project was so definitively personal, it was so definitively them. Not only did none of them look the same, none of them shared the same anything. And so afterwards, it was really sweet. Like, the protester waited for all the students to filter out. And we’re saying goodbye, dapping each other up. And he came up, and he’s like, “I have to tell you, I’m really impressed with what the students are doing.” And I was like, “You know, thank you so much. That means a lot. They’re incredible students.” He goes, “I still don’t like what you’re doing, though.” And I was like, “Right on.” I was like, “Yeah.”
REID:
I mean, yeah, fuck the man. Fuck the man.
BEN:
But I think that’s the point. That’s what people don’t understand, is they’re so busy yelling into the void, they’re not watching what filmmakers are actually doing with it. Or maybe even at times, I don’t think they see how personal filmmakers are, what sort of personal projects filmmakers are making with this stuff. And I think that that’s, to me, a huge regret. I wish more people saw it.
PARTH:
Ben, I think you have a question for Reid.
REID:
Oh, man. Or maybe Parth. Who knows?
BEN:
I have lots for both of y’all.
PARTH:
All right.
BEN:
I will. I’ll start here, Reid, if you don’t mind. I mean, God. And this goes back to me fanning out earlier in our call over you. You are, to me, like one of the great blue-flame thinkers of our time. And I think that spans well beyond technology. I think the way you are interacting with the world, the way you are engaging with politics, the way you’re engaging with world leaders, the way you comport yourself, the way you operate in the world, I just think you’re top of the tops. You’re one of the greatest. Apologies for the compliment. I would love–so, again, kind of bringing it back.
BEN:
I do think, moving forward, we do have to have a framework. AI needs a framework, because otherwise we’re going to stay in this realm of the people who are angry are going to get angrier, and the people who are passionate about it are going to get more passionate about it. And I’m, you know, to coin–to steal someone else’s phrase, I worry about our discourse getting more coarse. That’s Scott Galloway, Prof. G. Yeah.
REID:
Yep.
BEN:
I worry about our discourse getting more coarse. Given that you’ve literally met with world leaders, given that you see this from the top of the mountain, do you have ideas on, like, what framework we should adopt with AI for the betterment of humanity? I know it’s big.
REID:
It’s huge. There’s a couple quick things. I think, one, people have to experience the benefit. Like, part of what shifts the discourse is they go, “Hey, I get it. It’s at least in these things, good for me.” It’s a little bit like your protester is like, “Well, what the students are doing is cool. I don’t know if I like you teaching the AI to them, but what the students are doing is cool.” And it’s like seeing some of the benefit. And the way that, in government leaders, it’s like: make a medical assistant available to everyone who has a smartphone or has access to a smartphone, because then the level of human elevation. Make a legal assistant.
REID:
Most people don’t know how to read the rental contracts or other kinds of things and that kind of thing, education and tutoring. And also, obviously, part of our dialogue today, human expression. So I think that’s one. I think two is to–and this one’s a little bit more murky–but one of the things that I’ve been trying to do, Superagency, other things, is to focus kind of the build on amplification intelligence. We’re obviously going to have a bunch of things that are replacements. By the way, that’s progress. You know, I mean, a lot of horses have gotten replaced with cars, and so forth. And that actually, in fact, you know, it’s progress. And we want–but we want also other zones of enablement.
REID:
So, like, what are the things that are being created? How are the ways that we’re amplified in terms of doing it? And I think that’s actually one of the things that’s great about your class. Because it’s like, look, this isn’t taking away your creativity. This is giving you entirely new universes. Not palettes, not tools, but new universes of creativity. And once people kind of begin to understand that, I think that changes the discourse to something much more nuanced and fine-weaved and sensitive and not coarse in that. And it’s one of the reasons why, like, for example, when Parth and I and Ian and others were kind of saying, “Hey, how should we start expressing what changes in music?”
REID:
Because obviously the music industry is fearful that you say, “Well, I don’t need Taylor Swift. I’m just gonna order up my own Taylor Swift.” And it’s like, well, but there’s a lot of other zones, like making quality Christmas music, right? Which most Christmas music is terrible, so let’s make something that’s at least listenable anyway. And then it’s like, “Oh, that’s cool.” We got zero pushback from that. Because, like, “Oh, that works.” And that’s part of, I think, changing the discourse.
BEN:
Oh, I love that idea too. I love both of those. Changing that discourse. And then also, the minute you said it, right, getting people to experience it themselves, like, that was what happened to me, was just the fact that AI allowed me to start winning more directing jobs was what suddenly made me realize, “Oh, that’s great.” Superagency. We talk about it a lot. I have now found one thing I was not ready for, which is people can’t really handle you when you can do more than one thing. You are one of those people who can do so many things and are building agents to do the things you can’t. How do you express that to people? Does that make sense?
BEN:
Like, I’ve started to notice the minute I’m talking about, “I’m a commercial director who’s also making Block Block, who’s doing–” Like, people start going, “Oh, this dude’s out of his mind.” Yeah, but you’re capable of doing it.
BEN:
I’ve chatted with you about some of the projects you have running all the time. How did you do it? What is that communication secret that you have that made that possible?
PARTH:
For what it’s worth, I think a lot of people, when I interact with them, especially people that knew me before AI, I think I have this new–some new form of psychosis. And I think it’s like–
BEN:
Oh, stop.
PARTH:
No, it is. It’s like the idea that you think you feel like you can do anything, but then the reality is you can’t do everything. So you still have to choose. You can do more than you could before. And so, like, that’s why we don’t sleep as much. I had to get the Oura Ring to balance that out. And now the agents check my sleep score before they talk to me in the morning because it’s like, “Oh, wow, this isn’t that important. Maybe don’t hit me up at 6am with, like, ‘I did this.'”
PARTH:
Like, you know. So I think I’m starting to learn, like, the levels of management in the orchestration around me, where it’s like, I need to focus on the few things that uniquely require my attention, and then training the exocortex of agents around me to review their own work and come back to me when it only really is something that requires a human perspective. Because what I can’t multiply is my attention. Agents do a lot of work, but that means there’s a lot of work to review. Trying to figure out however much you can, give them the ability to self-review before they come to you. Like, I would rather watch the five-minute episode. I’d rather read the–
PARTH:
Like, I’d rather read the graphic novel that I’m working on than spend all my time in the code layer tuning every single prompt. It’s like–the final artifact is easier for me to review than the intermediate steps. So I think playing defense for your own attention, as agents and all this technology are a huge attention suck. So figuring out where your attention actually needs to go is probably the hardest thing. I don’t think I’ve solved it, but I am getting there. I’m getting there, getting to that place.
REID:
Well, unfortunately, in terms of where our attention needs to go, we will do this again because this is fucking amazing. But I think, you know, Ben, awesome. I think it’s not just surfing the waves, but surfing the mind and surfing creativity. And Parth, always a pleasure.
BEN:
Beautiful, gentlemen. Thank you all so much. Reid, a pleasure to meet you.
PARTH:
Thanks so much, Ben.
BEN:
Awesome. Thank y’all.
REID:
Possible is produced by Palette Media. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Thanasi Dilos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Yimu Xiu, Aman Suri, Lexxi Kiven, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nemarundwe.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles.