There is nothing I enjoy more than an insightful discussion on notebooks, and hearing Sam Altman on the How I Write Podcast was a fascinating listen. I made a few notes whilst walking the dog this morning, but before I got a chance to go over them, this excellent rebuttal from Liz Lopatto at The Verge made me laugh out loud.

My favourite quote from the post sums up my thoughts:

I do not rip pages out of my notebook regularly because I am not deranged

This part really made me wonder what on earth is going on in the world. Sam describes ripping pages out of his spiral notebook (this being one of the reason he uses a spiral version) and throwing them on the floor for his cleaner to pick up.

Not putting them in the bin himself, he’s too busy for that. He just throws them on the floor and relies on his housekeeper to pick them up whenever they are around. The whole podcast / video is well worth watching, but this part in particular is really revealing about the personality of the man in charge of Open Ai.

As Liz writes:

This is a man who has not carefully considered his tools and expects someone else to pick up after him. That does explain a lot about OpenAI, doesn’t it?

As saside note, spiral notebooks are not my thing, neither is the pen he writes with, but there’s no getting around the fact that writing in a notebook is the best!