Great Books Boys

My friend Jon and I just launched a YouTube channel called Great Books Boys.

AI tools can regurgitate a lot of information, even about the world’s greatest literature. What they can’t do is embody that knowledge as wisdom, experience, taste, and judgment. That’s because AI tools don’t have a body.

When you think about knowledge, most of it actually lives in your body. It forms through experience, in community, over time, until it becomes a kind of tacit knowing, like how to ride a bicycle.  You can’t put that kind of knowing into speech and hand it to someone else.

So here’s what we want to do. 

Over the next decade or so, Jon and I are going to read the Great Books of the Western World—all sixty volumes, and maybe the Eastern canon as well. We want to really try to embody what we read and create a high anthropology, a full picture of what it looks like to be human in the next era with AI.

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know this isn’t really a side project for me. The same conviction shapes how we work at Snapmarket. AI can transmit information, but judgment, taste, and presence come from people who have done the slow work of becoming wise. 

The project will also give me a playground to test new theories on YouTube performance, which is always useful.

You can expect a lot of videos. Some will be Jon and me talking back and forth, and some will be random videos about what we’re thinking and reading. Jon built a channel from scratch to nearly 55,000 subscribers, so we have all the skills and motivation to build a community that helps embody a new kind of understanding that AI simply can’t replicate. It can transmit information, but it can’t embody understanding.

That’s what we’re setting out to do. We hope you join us.