Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you are listening to Reqless, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software. Let’s play our theme song and get right into it!

Rich: Woo!

[intro music]

Paul: All right, Rich. It’s the end of 2024, a boring, uninteresting year in which nothing really happened and there wasn’t much reason to even pick up a newspaper.

Rich: Not!

Paul: No, I know.

Rich: Hell of a year.

Paul: It is. Let’s talk about that year. This will be our last podcast for the year, because I don’t think people really want to wake up on Christmas morning and hear us.

Rich: No.

Paul: I don’t think—

Rich: Maybe.

Paul: Maybe. That’s on them. They can, there’s lots of old episodes to dig into.

Rich: You should cozy up to, you know, with some hot cocoa.

Paul: I gotta tell you, too, I always use this, I like to come into the office on Christmas week. It’s one of my favorite things to do.

Rich: It’s chill.

Paul: Just, it’s actually where I really think I can, my brain just starts to decompress that way. It’s very good.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Right? And I feel a need to decompress this year.

Rich: Boy.

Paul: I want to run—let me, let me run through, just so we have a little shared context here.

Rich: All right.

Paul: Here are some of the things that are happening in the world. There is war in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Rich: This was this year.

Paul: Yeah. And I mean, Lebanon sort of rings a big alarm bell for us because we have people—

Rich: We have a team there.

Paul: We have a team. We work with people in Lebanon.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We see them on video calls.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And, like—

Rich: Protracted wars.

Paul: Yes. Jets are flying—like, it’s real.

Rich: Things are calmer at this very moment as we’re recording this. But yes, war, that’s sort of the through-line.

Paul: Directly affecting people who are in, kind of, our community.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Then an absolutely bizarre presidential debate in June, which I still, like, remember just, like, slamming whiskey as I watched.

Rich: That was the first, the first debate.

Paul: Yes. After which—

Rich: That was a sloppy mess.

Paul: After which a standing president steps down. There’s a new—the vice president runs for three months in the most confusing media environment I’ve, like, you couldn’t figure out what was happening.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: An assassination attempt.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Oh, remember that?

Rich: They nipped his ear.

Paul: Which they now use for marketing. They like to put it on mugs.

Rich: He has a perfume out.

Paul: Called “Fight”.

Rich: Is it called “Fight”?

Paul: No, it’s something—or “Truth”? I don’t know. It’s bad.

Rich: It’s, it’s him, you know, with the fist up on a box of cologne.

Paul: Just what I want to spray on myself. Election happens. That was something that I don’t even want to talk about in this podcast.

Rich: Yep, Election happens.

Paul: Although I will say my constant anxiety that things are going to go a certain way was resolved by things going that way.

Rich: Oh, there’s clarity.

Paul: Yeah, there was that. And then, you know, in the background, all the other news, most recently, the big story right now when you’re listening to this five years from now is that a podcast guy, a smart one, good-looking guy, snapped and killed an insurance executive, a CEO, the largest insurer.

Rich: Yes, yes.

Paul: And has now become a folk hero, and people are writing songs about him on TikTok and talking about how great he is.

Rich: Is he really a folk hero?

Paul: He kind of is. Like, it’s not, I’m not even like—

Rich: He’s controversial figure, but there are a lot of people who sympathize—it’s worth saying out loud, he did this, apparently his motive was health insurance companies constantly roadblock coverage to save money, and people are sick, and, so….

Paul: That’s right. And—

Rich: He snapped.

Paul: If you’re going to get something that Americans empathize with this—so it’s just, like, that is the narrative. Like he’s, these are two people, bad things happened, like, he snapped and he killed someone and, like, two families are ruined because of this. Like, but there’s a—our national narrative is just real weird. It’s like January 6th and then on the other side you got this guy. Like, we’re just in a very—and I’m just going to use the word, which I think we should discuss: Unstable time. It’s an instable, unstable, whichever prefix you like.

Rich: Yes, yes.

Paul: And at the same time, and this has happened to us, you and I are longtime software professionals and we had a predictive model about how our product was going to go.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: And the kind of work we were going to be doing this year. And the world of AI shows up.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And we had to put the brakes on because it really is changing—I don’t know about all the other parts of culture, but it is going to change how software is made. There’s no way around it.

Rich: There’s no way around it. And we’ve embraced that and it’s become part of our plan.

Paul: Well, we had to. There’s a lot of times where you look at me and you go like, should we be going down this path? And I’m like, what choice do we have?

Rich: We don’t have a choice.

Paul: Either that or like—there’s so…

Rich: So that’s another source of instability.

Paul: Well, in particular in our little orbit, we are technology people and…

Rich: I think it’s going to bring instability, instability to many, many orbits in due time.

Paul: If it ever actually works in a consistent way with a good product experience. [laughing]

Rich: That’s what everyone’s hoping is that it keeps, keeps kind of failing at 80%. But…

Paul: Yeah, or not even it fails in that last 20 because they never finish anything. There’s no—anyway, so we’ll get into that in one second.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it is a very chaotic, very unstable world right now. And even the things that used to be predictable like, oh, the tech industry will trundle along with, you know, tens of millions of employees and will provide a multi-trillion dollar piece of infrastructure for the rest of the economy, which by the way is incredibly overheated, like, we just have like, there’s just money flying around everywhere.

Rich: There is.

Paul: Except you can’t rent an apartment if you’re 28, you know. So.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So it’s just a very—

Rich: Inflation is still in purview.

Paul: Everything is out of the balance that we expected.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And in the back of my head always, you got climate change. So here’s, here is the great—you know, it is a, the world is throbbing. [makes a noise out of a Christopher Nolan movie]

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. I don’t know. What do you got? What do you got? I got, I have two thoughts.

Rich: I have a couple things to say about it. First off, chill.

Paul: Okay. All right.

Rich: I—

Paul: I am actually, I gotta be frank, I’m kind of chill lately.

Rich: I mean it, it does feel like everything’s kind of coming apart.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And I was talking about it to you about this a couple days ago. Humans are very self-centered, and they’re convinced that in the arc of time, since, like, humans were self aware, we’re convinced that at this very moment, while we are alive, it is far and away the most important moment in history.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It’s not.

Paul: Well, we also have a giant marketing apparatus that like during Super Bowl commercials tells us exactly that.

Rich: Yes. Which speaks to my next point, which is we have an unprecedented ability to peer into those details in such a profound way. I think what is so interesting about the reaction to the insurance exec getting killed is that it is…I’ve never seen a media and technology environment so ready to embrace a moment as that. There was a search—literally, I mean, it’s as if Netflix leaked out of my Apple TV box—

Paul: Into reality.

Rich: Into reality.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It was a story arc. They found the guy. It has a human interest component to it.

Paul: Let’s be honest—

Rich: You can peer into it.

Paul: Let’s be frank. Because we, you know, next year we’re going to have a ton of listeners, but right now it’s a reasonably sized community. We won’t get in trouble for this. It’s a darkly comic narrative, and it’s—

Rich: It’s ridiculous.

Paul: And it’s—

Rich: It’s ridiculous.

Paul: Real human lives are involved, and it’s, that part is really, really terrible. And I think we all get that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, you sort of, you perceive this thing as an, as someone who is not involved with it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you go, “Oh God.”

Rich: What you have is, frankly, and this is, I think this is so grim to say, but I’m going to say it. This is actually a real issue. People getting insurance coverage is a real issue.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: And, you know, Bernie Sanders probably yells about it every day on his lawn, is my guess.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

Rich: And the truth is, and this is by no means am I advocating this behavior to elevate an issue, but I’ve never seen this issue be discussed in such a, like, prominent way.

Paul: Oh, suddenly we have empathy for the uninsured. [laughter] Yeah.

Rich: So I think. Let me go back to the point I wanted to make, which was, I don’t think this is an exceptional moment. Now, mind you, we’re going to get to why I, I’m irrational and delusional. We’ll get to that in a second.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I don’t think this is an exceptional moment. I think there have been many exceptional moments. I think we have an incredible ability to peer into them and gawk at them for extended periods of time while we’re on the toilet. Whereas we used to wait—if Kennedy had gotten killed, like, 20 years prior, Walter Cronkite wouldn’t have announced it on the news. You would have found out the next day.

Paul: You would have read it—well, maybe on the radio, but yes.

Rich: Maybe on the radio, but the feedback loop is so intense and we’re so addicted to it.

Paul: Well, what you wouldn’t have had is 75,000 people immediately providing input and thoughts.

Rich: And emojis.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And videos.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And silly Luigi from Nintendo cartoons.

Paul: Let’s go there for one second, even though—and happy, happy, merry Christmas, everybody. Happy holidays. Kennedy gets assassinated today, 2024.

Rich: Oh my God. [laughter] Oh my God.

Paul: First of all, just AI videos start getting made.

Rich: Oh my God. The music that would get, be put on it—

Paul: Imagine the celebrity Facebook posts.

Rich: Unreal.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Unreal.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Letters.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Celebrities like to write the letter and then screenshot the letter.

Paul: Yeah, the screenshot letter about what he meant to me.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Rich: All of it. All of it. And then, you know—

Paul: Like, Chappell Roan would be forced by her fan community to talk about Kennedy’s assassination.

Rich: And then there’s what I call the “hmm reactions”.

Paul: Hmm?

Rich: Do you know what this is? This is where they, like, create a absolutely preposterous link between point A and point B, like, to spin up some theory.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s like, hmm, “He slammed into the wall and his back didn’t hurt. Hmm.”

Paul: Oh yeah.

Rich: And then they open up a thread of absolute nonsense—

Paul: No, I know.

Rich: —because our brains are essentially just tightly packed together mozzarella sticks at this point.

Paul: Right.

Rich: I don’t think it’s a special moment. I think we have a ridiculous media and tech environment to sort of swim in.

Paul: I actually, I wouldn’t say it’s not—I think there’s just a reversion, unfortunately. I feel that we might have had a really unusual moment where with the flowering of civil rights for gay and trans folks, we’ve had Roe vs Wade in place and so on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I feel that, like, we’re regressing to a kind of ugly median. And I hope that—and I think there’s a fantasy that somehow someone will come along and fix it.

Rich: I think, look, man, I’m going to wait, we’re going to go ahead and step away from AI for a second and we’re going to wade into politics, even though it’s not political, what I’m about to say. I consider myself kind of a hodgepodge of left and right beliefs. I think this is—if anyone listens to the podcast—

Paul: Are you socially liberal but fiscally conservative?

Rich: We’re not going there. [laughter] No, but there are things that, I’m socially conservative in some things.

Paul: No, I know.

Rich: But I like to have a common-sense conversation. And I’m not going to get into where I stand with regards to our future president or anything like that. But I will say this: I think probably one of the most tragic consequences of the last eight years or so is a template was established on how to weaponize the tools and the communication means that we have today in very ugly ways.

Paul: To the point that a weird mega-entrepreneur, Elon Musk, literally went and just bought one of the mechanisms.

Rich: Yeah. You can go ahead and believe what you want to believe, and I’d be like, okay, I don’t agree with that. That’s chill. But I think the willingness to weaponize these tools and really put no guardrails on it is what’s scary, because I don’t know how you put that back in the box. I’m not sure. You can’t say “play nice” anymore.

Paul: Well, this is—

Rich: And the world—this is, by the way, this is not about our president. This is not about Trump. This is about, like, the world copying that template and it working in a lot of places.

Paul: What is a greater source of instability than a mob that is able to freely communicate amongst itself and kind of generate its own reality?

Rich: And if you’re willing to rile them up, right? With thoughts and ideas that you know are going to get them hot, right? That you know, are going to touch on really, these really sensitive points.

Paul: Not just willing, but you enjoy it. It’s wrestling.

Rich: You enjoy it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And I was, I was watching, I forget who was making this commentary, and they were talking about how Russia interferes.

Paul: You were on Truth Social, looking at truths.

Rich: I was not on Truth Social. But they said something interesting about Russian interference. They said, you got to understand Russia is not interested in tilting you left or right. That’s not what they’re interested in. What they’re interested in is just causing the whole stove to overheat.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They just need it to overheat. They don’t really care of which way the result ends up, but they understand that if people are at each other’s throats, we’re in a more vulnerable place.

Paul: It’s good for business.

Rich: It’s good for nation—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: If you’re Russia. It’s good for business, f you’re a—if it’s good for a politician, if you’re a politician, maybe. Right? And so I think that part is ugly. Now I want to shift to being Lebanese. Can we talk about being Lebanese?

Paul: We often do.

Rich: The Lebanese view instability, which is effectively what we’ve been talking about as opportunity. It’s, I think it’s a coping mechanism. I don’t think it’s us being cheerful and positive.

Paul: I have probably met more than 100 Lebanese people at this point, and I think it’s pretty universal. That is real. That is just sort of a piece of culture.

Rich: I think it’s because of our trade route…routes? I don’t know what it is.

Paul: Here’s what. Here’s what I think you’ve got. I think you’ve got a culture that was really split up by colonialism. Like, it’s. It’s an unstable government. The government is unstable by design, split between Shiite, Sunni, and—

Rich: Chopped like 20 ways.

Paul: And it’s corrupt. And you, it’s a puppet state for Iran and Syria, whoever—

Rich: By proxy, yeah.

Paul: And those are unstable, typically. So the instability filters down.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And yet you have a very cosmopolitan, you have a global city in Beirut, even though it’s through hell.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: You have this sort of fantastic culture with deep roots and a very sort of charming, lively culture and a vast diaspora. Many more people live outside of the country of Lebanese descent.

Rich: Like, five times more live outside.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, millions live in Brazil.

Paul: But a national identity that’s very fragile. Right? So it’s not like—so what you end up with is community and literally, the family, the extended family being the dominant mechanism.

Rich: It really is.

Paul: Yeah. So, I mean like when you made your first salary, was it all yours?

Rich: No.

Paul: See, if you’re an American, you make your first salary, for the most part, many middle class Americans just assume that that paycheck is theirs.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You never did.

Rich: No.

Paul: So what happens?

Rich: It gets—it’s like the mob. You got to like pay out.

Paul: [laughing] Your mom gets—

Rich: You got mom, you got to pay out maybe siblings, depending on their circumstance, maybe dad, maybe uncle. It is, it is—

Paul: But you came here when you’re five, you’re playing with computers, you’re going and getting a degree at like a college here, like, but no matter what—and this is normal in the immigrant experience and people sending money home.

Rich: Families support each other.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I don’t like, and it’s been fascinating for me getting to know your family because American families are atomized in a very different way. We, and I think what is very, very strange in an instable time is that what I’ve really started to miss in my own life is that sense of a larger, connected community. And I’ve been building it.

Rich: You’re also in New York City, which is hard to build.

Paul: But I host waffle breakfast. I bring people closer. I connect.

Rich: When you say host waffle breakfast, you’re essentially blasting out to friends to come over for waffles?

Paul: I want 30—

Rich: What if too many people showed up?

Paul: We’ll make more waffles.

Rich: You have enough mix?

Paul: Yeah, we have enough mix. We make it, there’s like a big batch—

Rich: The confidence, the way you said that. [laughing]

Paul: No, I can do waffles easily for 70 or 80. Not a problem.

Rich: Is it sweetened a little bit? You put a little honey in there?

Paul: No, you put. You put syrup on them. It’s waffles.

Rich: No, no, no, no.

Paul: Not in. Not in. No.

Rich: Okay, so you’re not really leveling it up.

Paul: The waffles are—

Rich: I’m not here to talk shit about your waffles.

Paul: The waffles are—anyway, what I’m saying is that my reaction to the instability of this era, which I think is real, and what I know is a lot of people feel it, has been to get really, really clear with people about the fact that our house is a good place for them to come visit, we’d love to see them, here we are, here are the things we can do, here are the things they can do. That’s my instinct in reaction to all this, is building.

Rich: I think it’s very kind and very sweet. I think very few people do that. I don’t think people do it. Right? Like, I think you have decided to open your doors to your community, essentially, and to your friends. Actually, I take it back. I’m skewed by being in New York City. New York City, you’re supposed to not really make eye contact for very long on the train. You’re supposed to kind of stay in your lane. It’s a crazy place. Like, it’s not a small town where somebody’s been there for three generations. It’s a lot of people in motion. Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And you’ve decided to open your doors in that setting, which is, I think is great and I think is very cool and it’s probably is a source of calm for you.

Paul: Particularly to neighbors.

Rich: So let me ask you this. Since we’re on the topic of waffles, and we’re going to actually draw a dotted line to AI in a minute.

Paul: We better.

Rich: During this past year at, like, some of the rougher patches, did you have the waffles?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: How was that?

Paul: People cried on the porch.

Rich: [laughing] I don’t mean to laugh.

Paul: No, it’s fine. I mean, it is what it is, right?

Rich: Salty tears into the waffle?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. Look—

Rich: Interesting.

Paul: Here’s what you can do. You can sit down. You can be like, boy, this world is a mess, and I just don’t even want any part of it or every—I can’t make jokes anymore, and I just have to be sad and feel guilty.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And we did that. We did that during—we did that for years. It didn’t work.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: It’s—

Rich: It’s human connection is a healing thing.

Paul: I’ll put it on the table. I gave a lot of money away. I gave to specific organizations that were that were hurting or could do good things.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: Helped my spouse help the migrant community in a really intense way for a while. And is still helping and is, like, trying to protect people who are the most vulnerable. These are like, I don’t want to talk about too much because I don’t like to talk about that.

Rich: Yeah. But no fair.

Paul: But the key thing and, the key element of all of it is the community you build with it. Like, the thing that she’s been working on, she’s put a really good community around it. And like, it’s been, those are, people have started to come to the waffle breakfast. And then I introduced them to the other people.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it just kind of like, that is my reaction. And it is what I’m realizing—

Rich: Healthy one.

Paul: Well, it’s, it’s, you have that function built in. If you, if it’s a Saturday, people are probably coming over and you might barbecue.

Rich: There’s a lot of people at my house.

Paul: There’s cousins, there’s uncles, there’s friends.

Rich: And friends.

Paul: Absolutely. Like, I go all the time.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But what I’m saying is, like, that strikes me as the new structure of sort of the new social context that’s going to make a little more sense.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because if you let yourself get hit in the head by the global media environment with—

Rich: You’ll melt.

Paul: It’s not just that you can’t trust anything. It’s a low-trust environment.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: You can’t believe anything you’re reading.

Rich: Yeah. And that’s a lonely place to be.

Paul: It’s a lonely place to be.

Rich: Not knowing what is real. Not trusting anything. Families have been destroyed by this—by the way, we’re essentially talking about this milieu of instability?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And adversarial sort of setting. And it’s wrecked families. It’s not just like, oh, man, it sucks. It’s really hard. It’s like literally Thanksgiving is busted.

Paul: I’ve seen it up close with people who are very, very connected to me. And it’s hard to watch. So look, this is a real uplifting end of your podcast.

Rich: No, no, it’s fine. But this is a tech podcast. Paul, let me ask you this. I view AI as yet another source of instability. I think there’s such a thing as good instability. Sometimes you gotta shake things up to get to a better place. Tell me how you think about AI in the context of just the world being in the place that it’s in.

Paul: I’m still resolving as, like, a person who talks and writes about culture. Like, people have been asking me to write about it.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And I just don’t know yet. I don’t, I don’t—

Rich: Not ready.

Paul: Well, there’s no framework where I can point to it and be like—so technology, for me, became, I was like, okay, this is, the transactions that are driven by internet technology are starting to drive the economy.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: And if I can do anything in the world, it’s to help and encourage people to connect to that because that’s the real economy, and they can find growth and sort of do things.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So a lot of my writing ended up being like, hey, look over here. This is a good—and when the most satisfying thing in my career so far is when people write and we’re like, you know, I read some things you wrote and then I went to code camp and then I actually got a pretty good job, and I’m really like, I’m not the only reason, but I’m part of why,

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Right?

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So I don’t have that story yet. I don’t know whether personal growth, career growth, economic growth or whatever is going to align with this thing, or if it’s going to just kind of do a lot of damage and all of the value will accrue to a couple of big platforms. That said, I have two lines of thinking about AI that I keep pursuing. One is it is simply out of the box. And when something is useful and weird, you cannot get it back in the box no matter how hard you try.

Rich: [laughing] Right.

Paul: Now there are ways to commodify. A good example would be like Spotify and Apple Music compared to Napster and torrenting. Right?

Rich: Right. Like, people will make it fall within a framework that is reasonable for everyone.

Paul: And there’s government regulation and so on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So there are frameworks that will probably show up around this stuff because it is that disruptive. And so like, I’m just kind of watching that, but I don’t know where it lands. I don’t know kind of where that goes. But what I would say, and no one has this opinion and I—but it really is something I’m starting to believe. Most of the world does not have enough software. They do not have software that they can customize, use, and—I’ll give you an example. And they are in no way—

Rich: You don’t mean games on people’s phones.

Paul: No, what I mean is, like, throughout my career people have come to me and they have said, I have $300 and I need to do this big thing.

Rich: I have problems, yeah.

Paul: And all I could say is, you need to go learn it because I can’t help you. Like, I can’t actually afford to help you.

Rich: It’s expensive.

Paul: Yeah. Especially—I could do it when it was just me. But when you’re paying for other people, they don’t care.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: But what I do believe is happening and coming is that the book group, the not-for-profit, the press cooperative, the do-gooder org, the mutual-aid org, can have as much software for organizing themselves and communicating with each other as they ever wanted.

Rich: For a lot less money.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: A lot quicker.

Paul: There’s going to be more and more tools that allow—

Rich: To clarify, not today.

Paul: Not today. Not there.

Rich: We’re coming, it’s coming now.

Paul: But I think you’re going to be able to sit down at a certain point and say, I have a mutual-aid group and we want to help get coats to immigrants. And I need a way to order the coats and I need a way to keep track of things.

Rich: I think you’re right.

Paul: And I need it to all be kind of private. And I need you to write me some advice on how not to save people’s phone numbers into the database, but still communicate with them, et cetera, et cetera.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And like, those problems are prohibitive and I couldn’t solve them for really less than hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I do believe that in a year or two, they will be solved for hundreds of dollars.

Rich: I think you’re right.

Paul: Like, two orders of magnitude.

Rich: Follow up: That sounds like good change.

Paul: Yeah, but I can’t get anyone excited about this because they’re either, they either think on the right that it’s a giant star baby that is going to emerge from a chrysalis and torture us all or whatever.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then on the other side people are just like, no, this is, it’s extractive and exploitative and it can kind of mostly do harm.

Rich: I mean, everything you’re, I mean, let me, let me come at what you’re predicting from a different angle, which is, it sounds like a lot of jobs are lost.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: All right. Happy New Year, everyone.

Paul: Yeah, I mean, this is, this is an ambiguous time. And what people want really badly when things are unstable is answers and moral resolution.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: I don’t, I don’t have either. I’m also, let me be clear, let me be clear out of all this. I sound really like down? After, I was very, very anxious about the election and then, when the election was over, I felt an enormous. I was like, well, now it is an era of instability. We are really, we have committed to it and we’re just going to have to ride the wave. And I’m seeing that with AI, too. I cannot control these things. I can just try to understand them.

Rich: I totally agree. Again, back to my own optimism about this. Look, I’m not going to sit here and predict exactly how this all plays out. But boy, big change is coming. Like that is, I can say that with total con—what that change looks like and how we react to it? That’s playing out. But to your point earlier, this is out. We’re playing with It. There’s sort of an experimental arm to Aboard right now.

Paul: It’s not just out, Richard. It fits in a couple gigabytes on a local device.

Rich: It’s accessible.

Paul: Yeah. And so that’s, that’s the real can’t put it back in the box. How do you regulate, it’s like regulating, you know, somebody watching a movie on their phone.

Rich: Yeah. Very—

Paul: Like, it’s just, they’re small objects.

Rich: I’m optimistic. I want to end this on an optimistic note by saying, I am optimistic. I think the world’s going to be okay. I also think with such profound change in terms of the tools that are in our hands, maybe some positive discoveries can happen as well. Not just, oh my God, it’s wrecking jobs. I think it’s a challenge to us, and I want to talk about that in the future. It’s a challenge to us to level up. Tech has always forced us to level up. Every time there’s been an innovation, humans have to kind of dial it up.

Paul: This one is wild, though, because with all the other instability in the world I’ve seen you, as you’ve been wrapping your head around it, I had the same thing. It can kind of piss you off. You’re just like, what is this thing doing?

Rich: Well, it also quit—it sort of quits on you sometimes.

Paul: Yeah. And it just—

Rich: Its failure makes me feel better sometimes.

Paul: Yeah, me, too. But it has, it has no ethics. It’s just sort of like [spluttering noise].

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And there have just been these moments over the year, and you and I both had them where we’re like, well, that’ll just kind of ruin stuff.

Rich: Yeah, exactly. Exactly

Paul: And the weird vector database that runs under these tools doesn’t—there is no, there’s no, it’s not a person. It’s just a bunch of numbers.

Rich: Can I, can I end this with a final thought?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I’m having a lot of fun with it. The one piece of advice I can give you is go play. Go, and don’t just draw pictures. Like, really get in there. Whatever your profession is or whatever your prior knowledge is, mess around with this thing. It’s fun.

Paul: I mean, this is the thing. This is adult life. There’s going to be bad news in the future. But I’m weirdly engaged, too. I just…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I feel that, like, the requirement is to say, no, you can’t enjoy this because it could be bad.

Rich: Yeah. yeah.

Paul: But I’m just in it and I’m going to have to figure it out. I can’t sleep.

Rich: It’s great. It’s fun. We hope you and yours are having a nice holiday. Have a wonderful new year. We will see you on the other side for hopefully a better 2025.

Paul: No, no, no. I think a lot of people did okay this year.

Rich: I think a lot of people did okay. God bless.

Paul: But it was a disruptive year.

Rich: It’s a disruptive—it’s a wild one.

Paul: We’re going to have to learn to deal with this change next year.

Rich: Yes. Check us out on all your favorite podcasting tools. Give us five stars.

Paul: That’s the right number of stars!

Rich: Five stars on iTunes. Whether it’s stars or thumbs or smiling—

Paul: Five thumbs would be really weird because you would essentially be like a human caterpillar.

Rich: Fine, fine.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Anyway, and if you have questions, hit us up. We are the co-founders of Aboard, an AI startup that ships the software you want in ridiculously fast time frames.

Paul: I mean, this was a good year for us. We have, we are working for people, we’re bringing in money, we’re doing all kinds of stuff.

Rich: Have a great holiday, and we’ll see you next year.

Paul: Bye.

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