Bobbleheads on Spikes: The (Selfish) Case for Rules, with David Epstein
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Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
I think this is a moment where we need some, like, public corruption heads on spikes.
Right after this ad.
I do just want to explain for people who haven't seen your previous appearances on this show.
Sure.
That we've known each other for a very long time. We're friends. We're colleagues dating back to Sports Illustrated. And also you are not related to Jeffrey Epstein.
I'm not related to Jeffrey Epstein, but it did cross my mind that I should name, like, my YouTube channel, The Epstein Files or something, if I just want to. Oh, yeah. I haven't been able to bring myself to do such a thing. You're leaving SEO optimization on the table. I know. I even filtered my own last name so that people can't use it in the comments, but they find... They're very clever. It's a creative constraint. They find clever ways to get around that.
What is it like being David Epstein these days? Author of, by the way, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better, a book that I really enjoyed reading and listening to over the weekend.
If you're still asking about the Epstein last name, it's like the Jewish Smith. I mean, it's a pretty common last name, which is a saving grace, I have to say. Like, I was alphabetized for exams in freshman physics in college, and I was next to another David Epstein, you know? Like, fortunately, there's a lot of us out there. That doesn't make it great when I walk my son to school and we go past people holding signs that just say Epstein. I'm like, they're not rooting for us, bud.
But the idea that you had to filter out your own name from your own comment section because you know what people are going to say despite the fact that this is your third book and your sort of oeuvre here is established. You are not the notorious sex trafficker and pedophile. You are, in fact, the guy who had written The Sports Gene and Range, both studies of human performance and performance science. And I often call you the greatest sports science writer in America.
As I always say, out of all three of us.
There are about as many David Epsteins in your physics class as there are such people, I suppose.
That's right.
It's an interesting time to be an author because the other thing that's happening is that I'm looking at the news and I'm like, oh, yeah, did you get your anthropic payment?
I absolutely did. I got my unique ID that said your work has been pirated. I got several mailings saying that this work has been pirated, that work has been pirated.
It's the largest copyright settlement in American history. The AI company Anthropic forced to pay out a whopping $1.5 billion after a judge said it illegally pirated more than 7 million digitized books to train its AI model.
I'm pretty sure this one's not even out. Based on some questions that I've asked, somebody has uploaded it already. I think the notice I got said that my books had been pirated on this site called LibGen.
This is like the porn hub of books.
Yeah, I guess so. Had never thought of it that way, Pablo, but I suppose... The X videos of books.
Excuse me, I'm getting a notice in my ear that I'm mischaracterizing.
And I guess Anthropic just like pulled a huge amount of books down from there and digested them. So those were books that were pirated in the first place. And then they kind of like... re-pirated them or just download the pirated version. So you can file like a claim and, you know, you'll probably get like, I don't know if it's up to 3,000 or 3,000 per pirated work.
But a small price to pay for contributing to the sum total of human knowledge in the form that we all must consume it in, which is to say via a large language model, which is again, for those not reading the news, the good guys. The good guys.
Yeah, it's hard to know who's the good guy.
In the anthropic narrative, OpenAI, Sam Altman, bad guys, anthropic, the white knights who just happen to be vacuuming up the written word to a degree that, yeah, there has been a $1.5 billion settlement.
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