Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. The podcast about how AI is changing the world of software. And today, Richard, we have two subjects.

Rich: Mmm!

Paul: Two subjects to talk about. The first one?

Rich: Wait, let me guess! Folding phones.

Paul: Well, that’s the thing. I want to talk about the news in the tech industry that isn’t about AI.

Rich: Oh! Okay.

Paul: And then—

Rich: Finally.

Paul: Well, no, I have bad news. Then you read an article about how to get ready for AI with your children.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so we’ll talk about what you learned from that. And let’s just get right into it.

Rich: Let’s roll.

[intro music]

Paul: Okay, about two years ago.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: I said to myself, “The world is a little bit wackadoodle.”

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And I need to not be checking the New York Times homepage all the time.

Rich: Woof. It’s not like you picked the most insanely incendiary newspaper.

Paul: That thing will wear you out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So—

Rich: The news will wear you out these days, just in general.

Paul: It really will.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So I went back to a technology called RSS.

Rich: Mmm!

Paul: Which is for site syndication, meaning it sort of, like, grabs a bunch of news and just shows you the headlines.

Rich: You can subscribe to news sources. Actually, you could subscribe to any sources, really.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: It could be a blog. It could be anything. Yeah.

Paul: And it’s sort of an artifact of the old web, but it still is out there. Like, you can actually, you know, most YouTube channels have instant RSS feeds.

Rich: A lot of the piping on the internet has RSS feeds. If you wanted to track classifieds in Craigslist, there’s probably an RSS feed.

Paul: But you know what you can’t really track easily with RSS?

Rich: What?

Paul: Social.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Social is its own world.

Rich: It’s boxed in.

Paul: Yeah. And so it sort of got me back into news. And I, and it also, there’s a, it’s a tool called Reeder, R-E-E-D-E-R.

Rich: Mmm!

Paul: It’s on the Mac, it runs—and if you behave and follow what it tells you to do, it will just kind of put all your stuff on your iCloud drive, and so you have one consolidated feed on all your computers and your phones.

Rich: I know it very well. It’s a very slick app. A good way to summarize RSS is you don’t have to go to all the websites to see what’s up.

Paul: No.

Rich: It all kind of comes to you in one place. And Reeder is a viewer… RSS is—I mean, it really got me into tech many, many years ago.

Paul: No, I get it. And look, here’s the thing. There’s an element with technology where it helps you to tend to your garden a little bit.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And so for this I went and found all my old RSS feeds from back in the day.

Rich: Many are broken, I’m sure.

Paul: Well, and Reeder kind of on a regular basis pops up this little red icon that says, “Mmm, sorry, bad news.”

Rich: Gone.

Paul: And then you clean those out and move on.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Or they’re sometimes replaced by, like, Vietnamese gambling ads. And you’re like, “Wow, that was an interesting—”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: “That was a blog about history.”

Rich: Sure.

Paul: “But now it’s about casinos in Hanoi.” So…

Rich: Yeah, if you want to use a web-based RSS aggregator, Feedly is excellent.

Paul: Oh yeah!

Rich: There’s a free version, there’s a paid version. It’s really good. A lot of people don’t have Macs, but if you don’t, if you just want to collect stuff in one place, Feedly is great. You can also, it has an excellent directory. So if you’re, like, “I’m interested in headphones,” it’ll suggest sources. It’s really good.

Paul: A nice older technology.

Rich: Okay, so you’re finding, you’ve got a nice little garden. You’ve got some carrots growing here, some cabbage over there. How’s it going?

Paul: Well, first of all, what do we do all day? What technology are we working with?

Rich: AI.

Paul: Tell people what our product does, because I think we don’t do a good enough job of that.

Rich: Our product is a platform that helps you quickly and reliably build software with the help of AI, and it’s not vibe coding. I’m going to start to say that. It does all the other hard work around defining software, designing software, and then eventually building it. And you can check it out at aboard.com. I like the way you organically slipped in our ad into the conversation.

Paul: Well, I’ve got this little list of things that we have to cover in every episode.

Rich: Someone gave you a list?

Paul: We have a dedicated editorial staff who keeps an eye on us in general.

Rich: I.E., yells at us.

Paul: They would like us to behave in a certain way.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: So here we are. We are doing that. This is not me marketing. If you’ve been kind of like, “Paul and Rich, what are they up to? And Postlight, their old agency,” and so on, I would keep an eye on us right now. We’ve figured some really interesting stuff out.

Rich: Mmm!

Paul: Our demos are getting weird. There are moments—I don’t know about you, but the last time I looked at a demo of our product, I definitely felt this sense of like, “Wow, the elevator’s going down real fast.”

Rich: Yeah, it feels like I discovered a product and I’m like, “Whoa, this is different.” But it’s our product, so that’s weird.

Paul: I think we’re having a moment and so just, you know, keep an eye.

Rich: Keep an eye.

Paul: Keep an eye.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’re gonna keep talking about it, but.

Rich: All right, back to your trusty RSS reader.

Paul: So counter to all of this, I’m like, “Man, you know, we gotta actually remember that there is a world outside of AI and technology.”

Rich: Sure. Mmm hmm.

Paul: And so I spent the weekend, I’m like, you know what, let’s get a little, let’s get a bundle of news stories together about what else is going on.

Rich: In tech, or in general?

Paul: Just in tech—general, I’m not touching.

Rich: Okay, fine.

Paul: Yeah, I do that, that I read when I wake up in the morning and I, like, throw my phone out the window.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: At least I’m not touching it in this podcast. But the, no, I mean, I’m in my reader right now and it is not the most exciting time in technology. So what is the—

Rich: What??

Paul: No, for real. What is the most exciting thing going on, let’s say, in mobile right now?

Rich: Apple launched their iPhone 17, which is thinner.

Paul: [despondent] Yeah.

Rich: And smarter.

Paul: [despondent] Wow.

Rich: And faster.

Paul: [despondent] Mmm hmm.

Rich: And…um…

Paul: Beige-er.

Rich: [laughing] There’s new colors. There’s always new colors.

Paul: They don’t even do live anymore. They’re just like, “You will consume three hours of pre-filmed—”

Rich: They film around the campus, which is a stunning backdrop. The campus is wild.

Paul: It’s California.

Rich: It’s California. And they built this spaceship that sort of landed out of nowhere. And it just, it’s hard to distinguish them at this point. I think next year you think, you think nothing’s going on, Paul. Next year your phone is gonna fold into itself.

Paul: I see folding phones all over the place.

Rich: That’s another—I think, I think, I think Samsung kind of hit it out of the park with the new Fold 7.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Which is, I’ve held, I held it. There was a kiosk here in Union Square in New York City.

Paul: A brand activation, one might say!

Rich: Yes. And it is striking. It is so thin and it really is impressive.

Paul: Yeah, but do you really care?

Rich: No. [laughter] No. I don’t need to see things in—I see enough on my phone. To fold it open and watch that dumb video in the proper form factor?

Paul: You know, the funny thing is—

Rich: Will I own one? Of course I will, Paul.

Paul: Really?

Rich: Oh—

Paul: I mean, sure. I’m like, I’m on, like, an old iPhone now. It’s four years, and I just can’t get mustard anymore. I just am like, “Beh.”

Rich: Ah, they’re so good.

Paul: I know!

Rich: That you can hold on to one for three years and not know the difference, yeah.

Paul: I mean—

Rich: All right, so there’s that, but that’s not really news. That’s, like, a product launching.

Paul: I mean, that’s, that’s where we’re at, right? Like, it’s—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There’s a little bit—

Rich: Quantum computing?

Paul: No. Every—yeah. I mean, it’s out there, but it’s the same kind of narrative. It’s, like, “Now we have qubit supremacy!” And you’re like, “Oh, cool, guys. That’s cool.”

Rich: Well, they have to go to work now. Like, that’s what’s happened with quantum.

Paul: Yeah, I know.

Rich: They found the breakthrough. I think they’ve proven it out. And now they have to actually, like, figure out how to make it replicable and reliable. And it’s hard, rght?

Paul: They can’t even—look, it’s the biggest hype industry on Earth, is the tech industry, and they can’t make that one legible to anybody.

Rich: It’s hard.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s complicated.

Paul: I’m on, like, year 30 of learning about quantum computing, and, like, people have asked me to explain it in the past.

Rich: It’s hard. It’s abstract.

Paul: The amount that actually works is little, little, teeny tiny.

Rich: So you’re saying slim pickings, is what I’m hearing.

Paul: It’s like, if you go through—and my technology feed, it has 600 articles in it.

Rich: Oh, wow.

Paul: Yeah. Right now. And it’s like the app, by far, the number one thing that I follow.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And it is, like, a lot of data privacy leaks. It’s a lot of AirPods 3 reviews. Right? They’ve got new things. A lot of China and Nvidia, which is AI-adjacent.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then just kind of AI. It’s like, money, money, money. China, China, China. And then the rest is AI. And there’s. I mean, some of the AI stuff is cute. Like, somebody made Animal Crossing, they hacked it so that the, all the, all the townspeople talk with AI bots.

Rich: That’s fun.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, that’s nice. And then, you know, OpenAI is releasing things. You know—

Rich: It’s a little sameness. There’s, it’s a little monolithic right now. Is that what you’re saying? The tech industry is just overwhelmed with AI stuff.

Paul: This happened with blockchain, too.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? But here’s the thing. First of all, there’s kind of nothing else on the horizon, so that’s interesting.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s this or nothing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There is a lot of value here. So that’s, that’s one thing. One person did create a web server that runs on a vape pen.

Rich: That’s neat.

Paul: That was good. That was good.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, that actually brought me back—

Rich: It’s not news.

Paul: No, but it brought me—

Rich: It’s like, cool hacker story.

Paul: I know. But that’s at least something.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, I was like, “Okay, we’re still alive.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But I guess what I would say is, and here, let’s just talk about this for a minute. I got, on one side over here, including OpenAI and the board of directors, everyone’s like, “Hey, AGI may not be happening. And this thing could be a little bit—”

Rich: There’s a little bit of a pullback on AGI.

Paul: Everybody’s like, “Ah! Maybe it’s a bubble. Could be a bubble. Bubble. Bubble.”

Rich: It’s obviously a bubble.

Paul: All right, it’s a bubble. Okay. So over here, I’ve got people saying, you’ve got you and me going like, “Wow, you know, I’m seeing things come out of this technology, not because it’s approaching AGI, but because we figured out ways to actually use it.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s jet fuel, and now we can fly our plane a little bit faster, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it’s incremental, but it’s incremental in pretty big steps. And so that’s exciting. Then over here, I got even the AI people saying, “Eh, it might be a bubble.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “We might’ve overfunded it.” And then over here, I’ve got the fact that there’s kind of no other subject left in the industry.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Everything we talk about is, “What are we going to do about AI?” Our podcast is about AI and so on. I would welcome the day, just to be really clear, I would love for this to not be “software in the age of AI.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I would love this to be “AI in the age of software.”

Rich: Which, I feel like that transition is happening.

Paul: Maybe, are we in a gentle—what do you think? Gentle transition, or does the bubble pop?

Rich: The bubble, this is a bubble. Let me just say it out loud.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I think it’s a bubble. I think the valuations across a lot of startups are kind of wild. It will settle, whether it’s a crash or whether it’s sort of just a deflation of what’s going on. I don’t know. I’ll tell you why I think it’s a bubble. I think it’s a bubble because every so often a technology lands, sometimes it’s credible, sometimes it’s not. But when it first lands, a threat is put in place, which is everything you thought that works a certain way is about to get turned upside down.

Paul: When I was 21, I went to a diner and I had my first internet job.

Rich: This better connect to what I just said.

Paul: And I heard the guy behind me tell his friend, “You got to understand, man, internet time isn’t like regular time. Internet time is at least 4.5 times faster.”

Rich: [laughing] That’s so unimpressive.

Paul: No, I know, right? So, like that, and I remember I was eating like, you know—

Rich: Where were you? Queens?

Paul: Jersey City.

Rich: Oh…

Paul: Jersey City. I lived in Jersey City and there was—

Rich: Shout out to Jersey City.

Paul: It was, you know those, like, crumbly Napoleon pastries with multiple stacks?

Rich: Never get cream pastries in a diner, dude. You know what kind of gamble that is?

Paul: I did. I played with fire.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right?

Rich: What do I mean by this? What I mean is when a disruptive tech lands, and sometimes, look, it is hype, but the threat is, look, the markets that you’re used to transacting in, the systems that you’re used to relying on, they’re all under threat. They’re all been rendered obsolete. There’s going to be a new game in town when that happens, right? The disruptors, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and whatnot, there is this insinuation that they are about to grab everything, that they are going to intermediate themselves into everything and take everything.

Paul: There’s a classic rule about markets, which is there’s two things. Fear and greed, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: This hits both of them.

Rich: Yeah. And the truth is, don’t confuse this with me saying this was all a sham, because it’s not. It will disrupt a lot of things. But it turns out the world is deeply, deeply embedded in how it works currently. And I want to use an example from crypto.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: I’m not going to sit here and say the trillions are not trillions. There’s a lot of money in crypto. People have made a lot of money in crypto. But I’ll never forget a video. I forget who it was. It was like one of the major VCs, and they got on a call with someone who wanted to, like, disrupt mortgage applications with crypto so you could buy houses, like, on the blockchain, essentially.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And they walked them through all the shitty paperwork that’s involved in trying to get a mortgage, getting it approved, the paperwork involved, validating that the title is free and clear so that when you close on the house. And as they walked them through it, it was, it was clear that the real world had spoiled the party. All that disruption that was supposed to happen on, like, you know, we’re not going to rely on fiat currencies, and the blockchain is the most accurate way to know that a title is registered to an owner? Fell down immediately, right?

And the truth is, the world, it has this massive collective muscle memory around how it works currently. And then AI slams into that wall. And that’s happening. You call it plateauing, I call it reality just sort of settling back in and saying, “No, no, no, no, no, calm down. You’re still going to pay for parking tickets in the shittiest way possible.”

Paul: Well, hold on. The disruptive technology that was promised, which was AGI?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Had that fully materialized, which is this thing independently could operate like a human, with human judgment.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That would be a game changer, but it’s not what they’re actually building.

Rich: I think there are a lot of game changers, but the reality is this: Why doesn’t someone who wants to give me a parking ticket flash my registration off my windshield, and then I get an email saying, you parked illegally. And then I say yes or no, deduct from my bank account for the ticket instead. It is still a piece of paper that actually, if it rains, sticks to your windshield.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So you have to scrape it off. If you can still read the numbers, you can look them up online. That’s a revelation. There’s a lot of towns and cities where you still have to mail it in. Right? And what I’m trying to get at here is that in the beginning, that bubble gets created because the promise is all that stuff, all that bureaucracy, all those processes, they’re going to go out the window. And then what happens is the stuff wins. The bureaucracy still wins.

Paul: Did you ever read the article about the gun database in West Virginia?

Rich: No.

Paul: Okay, we can link to it. The gun database is essentially, like, index cards because they won’t let it be digitized.

Rich: Because…?

Paul: Guns in America.

Rich: Interesting.

Paul: So the amount of friction to, like, trace a gun and understand past gun violence?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Is months and months and months, or, if ever. Like, just, a set of rules are in place so that you can never get this information.

Rich: On purpose?

Paul: On purpose.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, it’s really clear. Like, when you read it, you’re like, this is absolutely by design. This could be one Postgres database working hard.

Rich: And there’s motivation there. Right? That’s not people being inept. There’s real desire A) to save jobs, to protect status quo, to protect processes.

Paul: Well, actually, I can simplify all this, which is that the West Coast fantasy is, it’s almost a religion.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Disruption and so on and so forth.

Rich: It is. It is.

Paul: So like, you saw it get manifested through—

Rich: It’s a good religion. It creates immense value, very quickly.

Paul: Yeah. But you have to actually keep it away from real culture, or you get stuff like DOGE.

Rich: Yes. Yes.

Paul: You can’t actually put it close to the beating heart of things.

Rich: By the way, when I say value, I mean market value. Perceived market value.

Paul: So here we are. What I have to say is I don’t think there’s any escape. We have to keep talking about AI in the world of software.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because there isn’t really another story right now. Even, like, I’m a, like, my AI feeds and my technology feeds together today sum up to, like, 600 articles. And it’s, like, a lot—

Rich: 85%.

Paul: And it’s just little bullet points otherwise.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s just, it’s the thing we’re all focused on?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And there isn’t a lot of oxygen. I know there are exciting things happening in programming language development.

Rich: Mmm!

Paul: But what happens is then somebody created a programming language that uses all Gen Z slang. Like, instead of package, it says vibe.

Rich: Seriously?

Paul: Yeah. They had Claude create it, top to bottom.

Rich: It’s kind of fun.

Paul: It is. It’s sort of like Go.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they released it. It’s open source and so on. But you see what happened there is that a boring story that I used to find exciting about what’s new in Python these days gets immediately subsumed by somebody doing something incredibly novel and weird and funny in less time with a new tool.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: I think the primate brain is so much more excited by the new thing. And even though the new thing is actually kind of a joke, like, no one’s ever going to seriously write a platform in this language.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: It has a compiler. And you’re just like, “Wow, I didn’t know we could do it that way.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s so distracting and exciting, even for me, at this stage in my career, that you sort of can’t look away. And then the media is like, “Well, that’s what they want. Got to give them a little more of that.” And social is like that. And the industries are also getting lots and lots of venture funding, so they’re kind of push, push, push, push, push.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And so here we are. So I guess what I would say is we’re covering the right subject.

Rich: We are.

Paul: But I would love to get back to, I would like to find out I think a lot of this is frothy.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’d love to find out what’s coming of going on in the world of UNIX these days.

Rich: I mean, look, you could go dig that up, to be very clear.

Paul: I know, but before I can get to it, I see 700 other more interesting articles. This is about me, not about—this is just where we’re at right now.

Rich: [sighing] Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have to acknowledge something really far down the stack and really fundamental has landed, and it’s affecting a lot of different things and we have to just sort of cope with that. I mean, there are articles out there about how radiology is disrupted and pharmaceutical, clinical testing is disrupted. Like, there’s, there’s a lot happening. I mean, I think no one expected a breakthrough this foundational, I think, is what’s happening.

Paul: No, it came in such a weird package because instead of them focusing on LLMs, they focused on AGI. So it was really hard to actually figure out what was really here.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because everybody kept telling us about the future instead of what was happening today.

Rich: I think what happened was it was so impressive and so visceral when it first landed that the goofballs on the West Coast just sort of pounced on it and said, “Well, if you think this is something, wait till you see five years from now.” Or whatever they’re predicting.

Paul: They have an enormous engine for doing exactly that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s VC and that’s their media, and that’s sort of how they do it.

Rich: I strangely respect it. It sounds, like—

Paul: It’s effective. It can change culture.

Rich: It can. And it can also motivate people to sort of aim for something that seems unachievable, right? And so there’s a lot of young people who go out there and they bet and they lose most of the time, but every so often it changes the world.

Paul: Let’s transition to the thing you wanted to talk about, which was how to raise children in an era where this technology is pervasive and the robots can talk to you all day long. All right, so you read an article. We’re both raising kids. What is this article?

Rich: I mean, I feel like parents are having a hard enough time getting ahead of phones and social media, and then AI shows up.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And that’s having a profound impact on how kids learn. The article is called, “Parents, Your Job Has Changed in the AI Era.” I love articles that address you directly. I’m a parent.

Paul: Parents.

Rich: You’re a parent, too. You have preteens. I have preteens.

Paul: No, I have—

Rich: You have teens. You have teens. There we go.

Paul: I have extremely teens, for two years.

Rich: Yeah. But, you know, I do think about the parent whose kid is three in this world that is changing so, so fast. Right? And so this article is really not just about how to protect your kids, I guess maybe is the word, from AI tools being in their hands, but also how to use it in a positive and good way.

Paul: All right, so I just brought it up on my screen here. It’s an op-ed in the Times, and it’s by Jenny Anderson, a journalist who reports on the science of learning, and Rebecca Winthrop, who’s director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. And both of them write newsletters. And so real, sort of, like, relatively deep education thinkers.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Brookings is a pretty centrist left organization. So we’re not like far afield or anything here.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Okay, so what did you learn?

Rich: So, I mean, first thing, I mean, parents rely on schools. They rely on schools for structure. I mean, in a sort of subtle way, policy and rules around how things work. And the first thing that kind of hit me was schools don’t know what the hell is going, it’s so, it just hit everyone like a Mack truck, this stuff. 20% of schools have AI policies today. I mean, as of this podcast.

Paul: I mean, fair. It takes schools years to do things. Like it’s, this is new.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Also, the kids at school, the phones are increasingly in Yondr pouches.

Rich: I think that that took, right? And so putting the phone away, I think, socially was crippling kids. But also from a learning perspective, hitting, you know, the side button on your phone and getting an answer and an excellent one in a split second? Not great.

Paul: It is not fair to ask a 25 year old with a teaching degree to compete with Apple all day long.

Rich: Put the phone away.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And I think that’s happening. Both my kids, before they were laws, I think there are laws now in New York State.

Paul: There are.

Rich: But the schools have been pretty aggressive. They’re like, “These are going to get put away.”

Paul: Do you know how the Yondr pouches work? People don’t know. It’s, like, a little magnetic stripe.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you lock it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: When—you put it in, and then as you pass the stripe, and you have to show that it’s locked.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then you unlock it on the way out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So your phone is with you. I guess you could probably rip it out, if you were just really hungry.

Rich: Both of the schools my kids are in use lockers, actually.

Paul: Yeah, no—

Rich: Which I think is funny.

Paul: Our school just transitioned, one of them, to Yondr pouches.

Rich: Yeah. I don’t think that—it’s just, you don’t need kids walking around with a pouch. Like, it’s not necessary.

Paul: No.

Rich: But they do get home, they do go home, they do do homework at home.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They do have the phone. I mean parents are trying to lock down. It is a science to turn on all the restrictions you want to turn on.

Paul: You and I are good at it. I have a firewall that is industrial-grade in my house.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I could never teach anyone—I’m still wrestling with a lockdown situation, probably similar to, like, a—I’m in an invade, like, it’s like there’s been an invasion. Like, I—

Rich: Oh, they’re going to try to hack around.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I mean, it took me a while for my to find out my kid was bypassing my WiFi in the house by using a hotspot and then doing this and that.

Paul: They also, they can get to YouTube through Google Calendar. And so you’re like, I want—

Rich: Browsers are embedded in every app. Right? So they’re everywhere. Yeah. Your kid is a little wilier than mine. But yeah, it’s a challenge. So, but here’s the thing. A lot of kids have access to stuff. Here’s what parents, one thing they should know: AI is embedded in normal apps. If you are using Snapchat, there’s an excellent AI capability inside of it. Like, you don’t need to not let them get ChatGPT to not get access to AI. It’s all—

Paul: It’s all through—

Rich: Meta has put it—

Paul: It’s all through the phones, it’s all through the platform.

Rich: If they have Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp? WhatsApp is, like, kind of innocuous. Like, it’s not really a social network. It’s a way for kids to chat. AI is in there. So if you think your kid can’t do their homework with AI because you block the other stuff? If they have WhatsApp, they can use AI.

Paul: No, no. It’s in Google searches. Like, what are you gonna, you gotta—

Rich: If it’s kind of embedded itself everywhere.

Paul: If you want to give them access to the internet, even a constrained child friendly internet.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They are accessing large language models that are producing answers to the things they type in.

Rich: Yes. Absolutely.

Paul: And that is unless you’re, like, “This computer is offline and it only has Wikipedia on it.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’re, you kind of can’t, like, that’s it. So they are, you’re right. Every child from now to forever.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Will be experiencing LLM-based content.

Rich: It’s kind of seeped into the soil everywhere.

Paul: It’s also getting more and more local on the phone.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So here’s—what does the op-ed say you’re supposed to do?

Rich: Before we get to that, we, I mean, look, it’s hard. I think educators and parents, like, the educators aren’t up to speed yet on how they’re going to handle all this. How do you help kids write well. So they cite an MIT study where they kind of put kids into three groups. And one was, you can use ChatGPT. Just use it. Another was you have to write first and then you can use AI to sort of check it and review it for punctuation and things like that. And the last was you can’t use AI.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Right? And they found that the second and third cohorts? Pretty close to each other. In fact, AI can be used in an additive way if it’s sort of sitting on the side as a way to sort of help you learn better.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Is the best way I can put it. The kids that use ChatGPT straight-out, the work wasn’t good. Their cognitive abilities weren’t growing. I mean, it wasn’t, I don’t know if you needed an MIT study—

Paul: Because they didn’t do anything.

Rich: [laughing] They didn’t do anything.

Paul: Yeah, right.

Rich: You could have saved like $200 grand and not done this study and they could have just asked us.

Paul: No, no, like if I, we would—

Rich: Have charged $50 grand.

Paul: If I Google “local gyms,” that’s different than working out.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: Right? Like, if I Google, like—anyway, keep going.

Rich: Yeah. So what they found was, I mean, look, we’re stating the obvious. If you just use ChatGPT to write the essay, you didn’t do any thinking. But writing isn’t about writing words.

Paul: How old are these kids? Any sense?

Rich: They were a little older.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: They were kind of going through it with older, even young adults. But it’s kind of the same implications. Writing: You know this as well as anyone. You’re a professional writer. Can I call you that?

Paul: Just keep going, but yes.

Rich: Writing is about organizing, in a lot of ways. It’s about structure, in a lot of ways. So writing is actually interesting. I’m humbled by writing. I find writing very hard. I find coding easier than writing.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: The faculties you’re sort of cultivating by learning to write are not just about assembling information into sentences. It’s about other capabilities that are useful, cognitively, in life, in general, right? Around, whether it be organizing your bills and understanding how to think through problems and prioritizing and structure and all that.

And what they found was when they had conversations with these kids, they not only were there, like, “Here’s my essay. ChatGPT wrote it.” There was no notion of cultivating those faculties at all. Because the truth is they didn’t have to, like you said. So it was worse than just this didn’t make them good writers. These are basic faculties that you kind of need in life. Right? So that’s scary stuff. Right?

So we’re kind of stating the obvious here. But for a lot of parents, I think they just, they’re, they’re kind of hapless. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know how best to sort of navigate these tools to make sure their kids learn these things, right?

Paul: I gotta say I feel bad here because it’s like you and I are technologists.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We struggle with these devices.

Rich: Everyone does.

Paul: Everybody does.

Rich: And we’re late. Like, you would think we were stubborn and old and late and we didn’t want to embrace them. These phones are in our pockets. They’re wickedly powerful. And for young kids, they don’t view it as cheating. I think that’s another thing—

Paul: You gotta understand, like, their parents, the young kids, the parents were raised on the internet.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They were part of the Taylor Swift fandom, or they were part of the weird, like, they’re a little men’s rights-ish or whatever.

Rich: You are saying we’re old.

Paul: No, no, no. But, like, the cohort that has three year olds has—most of them have just been fed a diet of Facebook glurge into their brains.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Like, this thing that you’re describing, they haven’t been taught, or it hasn’t been pushed to them that to succeed in life you should create order and share what you find. What they’ve learned is—

Rich: You’re talking about the parents right now.

Paul: I’m talking about the parents, right? So the parents—

Rich: This is a great point.

Paul: So the parents are out there, like, they think—and they really do believe, you find this when you look at these communities, they believe very strongly in clout. Like, they see influencers as the apex of culture. Right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And the influencers do bring some order. They are content creators and so on. But, like, this idea that you have to kind of, like, create an outline, figure out where you’re going, and that will be a tool for you to make sense of the world is like a liberal arts idea that is no longer relevant to most humans, as far as I can tell.

Rich: Yeah, no, you’re making a great point.

Paul: And now you’ve said, you actually, to them, I think we’ve said, I got the new thing, and it’s even better. You can make your own Instagram influencers. You have control. You have control.

Rich: They are.

Paul: You can just, like, whatever you want to see. You don’t have to sit there and wait for it to get fed for you. It’s going to come to you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And these are not people who necessarily are like, “Oh boy, this is nowhere near as good as the Mahavishnu Orchestra used to be when I was into them in 1968.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, these are people who’ve just been eating Instagram.

Rich: It’s a great point.

Paul: And now you’re saying, yeah, you’re saying, like, I’m going to put a little, I’m going to give you even more, faster.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But how do we get them? This is what we’re headed towards. We’re headed towards them raising a group of children who just kind of don’t have to think.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But then what’s the point? Because it’s not like you’re going to get a job by being able to use ChatGPT about as well as anybody else.

Rich: Correct. Correct. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna summarize—I think they make a great point near the end, which is, but I’ll use my own words. Learning together is a really fun thing. I love learning stuff with my—stuff I didn’t know or understand, and learning about it with my kids.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Like, it’s a fun, neat thing. When you’re on vacation and you’re wondering what that weird old relic of a building is, and you look it up together and you talk about it together, it’s really fun. For many parents, especially young parents, they don’t know, and they should say, “We’re gonna learn about this together. Like, we’re gonna actually learn about what this crazy robot is doing. Like, we’re gonna actually understand it.”

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Which leads to the second point. So, first off, it’s okay. You don’t have to have all the answers. My kid does math now that I forgot.

Paul: Oh, sure.

Rich: Like, it’s normal. So it’s okay to say, “Hey, this is dangerous stuff. We want—we think you’re real smart. We’re gonna learn about how these tools work together.”

Paul: And I did, I help my kids with their geometry homework by using ChatGPT.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That said, it didn’t always do what I needed.

Rich: That’s a separate issue.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Which leads to the second point which we’ve said on this podcast, outside of this context, which is one of the best things people can do is understand how these tools work. So you can sort of demystify them and come to realize—rip the mask off, essentially. It’s not a genius robot. It’s actually stringing words together.

There’s a way to explain that in plain English that leads kids to a more suspicious posture about these things and that they can sort of shed light on how they’re stealing something away from you. And that’s something that most parents don’t know. So go learn about that together. Don’t just learn about how the tools work, but also learn about why they actually aren’t magic boxes.

Paul: Do you know what I would do to teach that? I always wanted to teach a class to middle schoolers where they made ads, because it would teach them how like to manipulate, like—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they could, then you become a better perceiver, do the thing to criticize it.

Rich: Become a better perceiver. It’s a great point.

Paul: Yeah. And so like what I would say is get the kids to do the most corrupt possible thing in a constrained environment with an LLM.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, get them to make a really evil bullying LLM.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Get them to do stuff that they know is bad.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Give them the freedom to be bad—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: With these things so that they can see how easily the technologies can be pushed in a direction or another and that it’s not a human. If they have a cat they love, have it write an article about how that’s the worst cat ever.

Rich: Kids don’t like to be fooled. They get angry. They don’t like to be hoodwinked and they actually get annoyed about it.

Paul: They can’t tell they’re being hoodwinked.

Rich: And they can’t tell, right? And you know, the article talks about it in terms of AI literacy, which is kind of this broad fancy term. But I think if you do that, and I think educators, by the way, for all the, if anybody is a school administrator or a teacher and whatnot, I think schools are need to do this as well. They don’t talk about what it is, they talk about policy and how they’re gonna have a heavy-handed rule. So I think this is really key.

Paul: You know, one of the best, and I think we can close it. I have a good closing anecdote. You know how I learned about computers?

Rich: How?

Paul: Fourth grade. Okay?

Rich: Okay.

Paul: I knew about computers, I’d use them like it wasn’t like that. But the teacher got up and they had bread and peanut butter and they said, “Tell me how to make—you are a computer. Give me instructions on making a peanut butter sandwich.”

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Or no, “I am a computer. You give me instructions.” And so kids would be like, “Okay, well, take the peanut butter out of the jar.” And he would just reach in with his hands.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Right? And so it, and it just got the point across that the machines were just machines.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So well, and I actually, like, roleplay as the LLM or get them to do obvious—get them to have the LLM write articles about how the villain in their favorite story is actually the hero.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Show them that things that they know and believe need to come from them, not from the robot.

Rich: And demystify it.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Like, right now, the magician is still blowing us away.

Paul: That’s, you gotta, it can be an evil magician. You gotta watch out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: All right, so. Boy, be nice, sometimes, I just wish we could occasionally put anything back in the box in culture, but that’s not—

Rich: Let’s not be old about it.

Paul: That’s not how time works. Onward we go.

Rich: Don’t be old! Yeah.

Paul: All right, so check out aboard.com.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: Which is a really positive and proactive use of this technology to help people— [laughter] No, because it helps people, it adds a lot, a lot, a lot of guardrails to LLMs in order to help you build software really, really quickly. And that, deep down, if there’s a theme to this, it’s that I really care about tech and tech’s ability to empower.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: It’s what changed my life. And I want more people to have access to that. And I like our product for that. Anything else people should know, Richard?

Rich: No, but give us five stars in your favorite podcasting app and share it out. And take care of yourselves.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. Like and subscribe, too. Those are two words I’ve never said, and I’m going to say them every time.

Rich: Like and subscribe. Have a great week, everyone.

Paul: Bye.

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