For me, the real problem with podcast discovery is finding details from within a conversation. This is where LLMs (and eventually AI if we get there) are going to excel.
I recently mentioned the Brian Koppelman episode with Edward Norton. In it, very tangentially, they mentioned a specific book on Orson Welles. At the time I though “I might want to read that,” but I didn’t make a note of the book.
Using the above information, I tried to figure out exactly which book they recommended. I can’t even find a public web page for that episode. All I can find is links to play the episode in Apple Podcasts, links to broken/missing Spotify pages, etc.
The episode is old enough that it could be in OpenAI’s training data. So I went and simply asked OpenAI’s LLM ChatGPT for exactly what I wanted:
Craig: what orson welles book was recommended in the 2019 episode of “The Moment” (Brian Koppelman’s podcast show) in the episode with Edward Norton?
GPT: In the 2019 episode of “The Moment” with Brian Koppelman featuring Edward Norton, Edward Norton recommended “This is Orson Welles,” which is a book-length interview with Orson Welles conducted by Peter Bogdanovich. The book is widely regarded as an essential read for anyone interested in Welles’ life and work, offering deep insights into his creative process, thoughts on filmmaking, and reflections on his career.
Craig: At what point in time, in that podcast, is that said?
GPT: Edward Norton mentions “This is Orson Welles” around the 1:12:30 mark in the 2019 episode of “The Moment” with Brian Koppelman. This is when Norton discusses his admiration for Orson Welles and the influence Welles has had on his own work.
Craig: Give me the transcription for the book recommendation
GPT: Here’s a rough transcription of the moment when Edward Norton recommends “This is Orson Welles” in the episode:
“I would recommend to anybody interested in film to read this book called 'This is Orson Welles '—it’s essentially an extended conversation between Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. It’s fascinating because it’s Welles really speaking candidly about his work and the film industry. You get a deep sense of his philosophy and how he approached storytelling. It’s essential reading, I think.”
This is the segment where Norton talks about the book and its impact on his view of filmmaking.
So, is that correct? I open my podplayer… and it is NOT in fact around 1:12:30 . . .
It turns out, GPT’s answer is completely fabricated.
I passed the episode’s audio file to Otter.ai to get a transcript. What Norton and Koppelman actually said (the only place Welles is mentioned) is this brief exchange around 44-minutes. It’s has a lot of cross-talk and is hard to understand:
but in the movies, it was funny, I would sometimes like, like, move around and be like, I can see, I can see that that happens, that there’s like, alliances of people. And you think about like Redford and Newman, or you think about like the Cohens and like their crew, and you’re just sort of going like, like, you know, the dream, the because the dream of every actor, I think, is to be in a repertory company, right? You know, is to be like part of a theater, a treat or troop. That was part of my romance, for sure, was like, literally, going back to when I was in college and read about Orson Welles for the first time, when I first read, I don’t even know Melvin Douglas’s book, sure, which, whichever is. I don’t know that book. I know Melvin Douglas. Of course. I don’t know if I’m right that it was him. But anyway, the best wells book is The Henry jagum. If you haven’t read that, yeah, that’s the greatest. But I, I remember thinking, My God, he was 25 years old. He was 25 years old, and he, I.
(That is the original text as Otter.ai first transcribed it. A few minutes later, it separated the transcript by speaker, making it easier to understand. Otter.ai still gets the person’s name wrong as, “Henry jagum”.)
But the transcript gives me enough to search, and leads me to the Peter Biskind book: My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
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