The Aboard Podcast

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 it really is. Rich, I want to talk to you about something you wrote.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And I want to—

Rich: Did you enjoy it?

Paul: We’ll get to that in a minute.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: But in the meantime, we’ll play the theme song, and then we’ll tell people what Aboard is.

Rich: Play it.

[intro music]

Paul: Aboard is a strategic AI consulting firm. But you know what’s different?

Rich: Mmm?

Paul: We consult by delivering. We deliver software. So we do the thinking. We help you make sense of all the change that’s coming into the world.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: But then we actually make something, to prove out how things are supposed to be working.

Rich: Demos?

Paul: No, no, no, no, no, no.

Rich: The real deal.

Paul: No, no, no, no. The real deal. Real software.

Rich: That’s the difference.

Paul: We have a, we have a whole process that we’re building. We’re building tools that help us do it, and we can help you out, too. So I think get in touch if you want to learn more. Hello@aboard.com. That concludes our marketing section. But it’s what we work on every day. It is, actually, it’s serious to us because we want to build better tools. We want to help people succeed with this new stuff.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: Now that brings me to why I’ve called you in here today.

Rich: Uh oh.

Paul: So every now and then, you write the newsletter.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: It’s very funny because I used to be a journalist, and so people kind of take me for granted, but then they’re like, “That Rich! He’s very thoughtful.”

Rich: Okay. Nobody who likes my writing talks like that.

Paul: “He made an amazing…” It was a… “He put marshmallows and jam, and he made amazing—” What is that salad that they have in the Midwest? Do you know what I’m talking about? They put marshmallows in things, and it’s got, like, jello? Ambrosia! You ever had ambrosia?

Rich: No.

Paul: In a jello mold?

Rich: No.

Paul: They don’t have that in Lebanon. No.

Rich: You better put this back on track.

Paul: Bay Ridge has never seen ambrosia. Anyway, go google ambrosia.

Rich: Yes, I write for the newsletter sometimes.

Paul: And actually, what happens is people always like it because you come in and advise CEOs. You can’t help it. It’s what you do. You get up in the morning and you start advising CEOs, like, in the shower.

Rich: Yes, I do. And I got to tell you, for those that don’t know, Paul Ford is a very well-known, accomplished writer, and I am the John Oates of the media arm of Aboard.

Paul: We have, we actually have a very good take, good give and take on this. We don’t even have to play out that aspect of our relationship. I actually want to talk about your piece. I always like when you write, and actually everybody does. Like, everybody’s always like, oh, yeah.

Rich: I do appreciate that. And it does mean a lot to let a little light into the shadow.

Paul: There we are. That’s what we’re talking about. No, no. But you tend to come in with actionable business advice.

Rich: I’m very direct.

Paul: Now, here’s what’s going on.

Rich: Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Paul.

Paul: So here’s the piece. It’s from June 24th. I mean, to be clear, I always edit them. Anyway. “Maybe the Valley Could Listen a Little,” is the title of the piece, and the subtitle is, “Tech’s disconnect with the real world is a feature, not a bug. But when it comes to AI, that’s a big problem.” Now, I want to call us out on something here because I think it’s important. When we’ve been talking about AI and software for more than a year now.

Rich: More than a year.

Paul: Way more than a year, as we’ve watched our industry evolve. And I would say about, really around six months ago, Claude Code came out and I was like, whoa, what’s happening? And that is not a surprise to anybody at this point. Everybody has now had a whoa, what’s happening?

Rich: Yes. That’s right.

Paul: And at that point, it really looked like we were at an inflection point with the industry. And you always advised caution. I’m going to give you a lot of credit there. Even when I was like, “Dude, I’ve never seen anything like this before.” You’re like, “Hold on a minute. Humans are involved.”

Rich: Yeah, that’s right.

Paul: Explain a little bit. I came in and I showed you something that you’d never seen before. I showed you that you could create relatively good code out of a prompt, even without really kind of programming it. And you could create something that used to take months to create. And you didn’t disagree at all that I had done that?

Rich: No, no, no.

Paul: Okay, so why did you—I saw that as hugely disruptive. Why didn’t you see it that way?

Rich: Two reasons. One reason is the ability to hack on your own without talking to anyone—

Paul: Is wonderful.

Rich: It is wonderful. I’m a hacker, too. I like to hack. I’ve done that alone. And it’s, the sense of control for someone like me who’s often asking other people for things is—and I love technology. It’s fun, really fun.

Paul: We have a joke about this. Whenever we run into like a CTO, they always end up talking about their home-stereo system for, like, two hours.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because it’s the one thing they can control. They love technology.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: But they can’t control technologists.

Rich: They can’t control technologists.

Paul: So they get into like Dolby surround sound.

Rich: Yeah. And so I think the invention that’s landed, and we’d have to go all the way back to AI, which has been cooking for years. But let’s focus on making apps or generating code with AI, pretty much led by Claude Code and there’s Codex and there’s some other tools, is very much a personal productivity tool. It is a tool that is, that has landed in engineers laps, and they can do stuff. And if you’re a creative thinker, like yourself? You’re unusual. You’re technical, but you’re also kind of a meandering thinker. And so you apply a lot of, like, things that are, that are a lot of signal that’s coming in from outside of tech to what you build. And that’s unusual. I’m unusual, because I’m a deeply, deeply sympathetic product thinker who wants products to be used. But I’m also technical, to an extent.

Paul: I personally always love when business leaders are trying to be nice to me and they say I’m non-orthogonal. That’s always a really good one.

Rich: Is that real?

Paul: Oh yeah, that happens.

Rich: So that’s great. And it’s a great tool. The shift is, okay, I can make software now. Look, there’s millions of new apps that are dropping in app stores and whatnot.

Paul: This is real, right? So app store submissions are up.

Rich: They’re up. Because you can do it on your own over a weekend, and then you don’t know how to apply for the Apple App Store and you could use AI to do that process. So it’s all, it’s all been taken care of.

Paul: But I mean I think a really good—we’ve now asked a lot of people, including ourselves, like, hey, have you seen a vibe-coded app that’s transformative, one that you want to pay for, one that you’re like, okay.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because what happens is the Valley gets in there and they’re like, look at this. Anyone can make software. The days of a one-person unicorn are here. Rich is going to go off and make a piece of software worth a billion dollars.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And that’s like the most exciting thing in the world to this.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: But why isn’t there more software coming out where people are, like, “Oh, thank God, we solved it.”

Rich: I’ll tell you why. Because there are very, very few, if any, human unicorns. There are people that are good at design and dabble in tech. There are people that are great at tech and great engineers that dabble with design. There are people who make very specific nudgey tools for something they’re a fan of that no one else cares about. There are product managers who don’t care for any of the details. And—

Paul: I’m going to nail it down for you, though, because there’s lots of people who can do lots of different things. Product is actually miserable work. It’s not about a joyful expression where you finally get all your ideas together, turn them in the software, you put them on the app store, and everybody’s happy with you. Product is kind of a grind. And so the person who can take something joyful and exciting that they love about the tech industry and motivate themselves to learn and do all the different crafts at once?

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Who can also turn it into something long-term, large, and viable? Literally, there are very few examples. I’ll give you one example. It’s a weird one. Stardew Valley, a mostly one-person developed game.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That took years and years, isolated.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And worked on it and worked on it and just an absolutely vast hit.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But boy, after that, like, it’s a real short list of people who can live inside that world long enough to make something transformative.

Rich: Yes. I think people are getting dopamine hits by venturing out into other skills and other crafts that aren’t their core. So designers are feeling really empowered because there’s Figma Make and they can build libraries and they can build WordPress plugins and that feels good, because they used to have to ask for it. And then there are engineers who are like, wow, I could skip the design phase. Right? And I can go do that. Right? And so I think the real tell here, though, is that the best—I’ve been making, I’ve led teams that build software for 30-plus years. The best work we ever put out was when we assembled a real interdisciplinary all-star team.

Paul: Always.

Rich: Always. And that’s normal. I’m not saying anything shocking.

Paul: Let me describe the product. Because I’m doing way more vibe coding than you are.

Rich: You are.

Paul: You’re doing something. Let me describe what happened. So I’ve built a couple relatively good small products around things like CRM, some enhanced text search kind of stuff and so on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I’ve turned to you, you will acknowledge to the audience, I’ve turned to you and I’ve said, “We need to get to a place where I can bring you in as product manager to get this out of my hands.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: But I keep screwing around in the meantime because I’m trying to learn.

Rich: Yeah. You’re also enjoying yourself.

Paul: A little bit. So here’s what happens. I realize something is missing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then I’m like, I tell, I prompt it into being.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: A new feature, a new add-on, a new way to look—a visualization.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then that visualization, which is not the main core of what I’m trying to do, it’s a distraction.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It’s just not quite where I need it to be.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I don’t need it at all. No one needs it. I’m the only person using the software right now.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But now, you know what has become the only and most important thing in my entire life?

Rich: What?

Paul: Finishing that visualization.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then while I’m working on that visualization, I realized that I could abstract it into a library so I could reuse it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then you know what becomes the most important thing in my life?

Rich: Abstracting the library.

Paul: Building a library.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then, and then each component of the library. And so—and because this enables it, the minute somebody starts saying, you know, “You can parallelize this with lots of agents,” you know, you’re in a pickle.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because that means more software. Whereas absolutely no one outside of our world is actually sitting there saying, “I need more software.”

Rich: No.

Paul: No one has ever said those words.

Rich: No. Let’s go back to the Valley.

Paul: Go back. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s what your piece is about.

Rich: The piece is about that. And what the piece is about is a very particular kind of gaslighting, which is: Listen. Do not hold your core skills as precious. These are immense powers we are handing you now.

Paul: Disruption time!

Rich: Do not ask for permission anymore.

Paul: Mmm.

Rich: Do not wait for that sign-off from another group anymore. Just go do it.

Paul: They love it.

Rich: If you don’t do it, if you don’t do it, you will be eaten alive. There is always an insinuation of extinction from the Valley. Always. It’s always been there. It’s a way to create anxiety and paranoia.

Paul: I can actually be more sympathetic than that. It’s not a very big city. It’s actually nowhere near as big as New York, San Francisco and the Bay.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’re like 30 million. They’re like 8, all in.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? It’s a monoculture.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And when you are in a monoculture, when you really believe in something, everyone around you believes it, and it’s the only thing they’re talking about, it starts to feel very existential as to how it’s going to work out or not. It has to work. And so they did this with—

Rich: No, but that’s not what I mean by existential. What I mean by existential is they, when you could order a car on your phone, a cab?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They immediately saw car service with a, you know, dispatcher and taxis as quaint. Like, it was the end.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They were telling everyone, you can do this now the easy way or you can do it the hard way, but we’re coming for you.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And the truth is, sometimes they do come for you. It wins a lot of the time.

Paul: No, that’s what I’m saying, though. They don’t understand that there’s a whole other culture. Like, for them, it’s not just that Uber should get in there, and—it’s actually, like, a moral imperative.

Rich: Yeah. Yes.

Paul: It becomes this thing where it’s, like, unless that happens, and it happens to be that the moral imperatives align with what will make them the most money.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so that culture just metabolizes, moves so quickly, because there’s nothing that competes with it.

Rich: That’s right. That’s right. And here’s the fail here. The fail here is—

Paul: “Here” meaning AI?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: And the truth is, there is immense value in certain particular use cases. But when you’re telling someone that the idea of building successful, usable software is now in everyone’s hands? Is completely underestimating the fact that, two things: One, software is immensely complex. It just is. If you go into businesses, there’s a million edge cases and whatnot. But there’s another thing that they overlook, which is that a software artifact is actually a cultural artifact and a social artifact that has to be adopted. If it’s not adopted, it doesn’t mean anything. And unless you’re making something for yourself—you want to manage your own stamp collection? God bless. But the truth is these things require engagement, and they require a certain amount of humility to make successful. Almost always. Almost always. The amount of patience that Apple uses before they decide that a feature could go in speaks to not them being lazy. It speaks to them being incredibly cautious about making sure there’s engagement. And they even fail sometimes.

Paul: No, but this is, this is why I find, I think in some ways Apple can be very baffling to the rest of the Valley, because they—

Rich: They seem slow.

Paul: They’re happy to follow.

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: And that is—but that is, I think you’re right. And I think kind of from the very beginning, they’ve been very aware. This was Steve Jobs, Apple II.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “We are going to design this thing.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Now that I don’t, I don’t know if people can understand how bizarre of an idea that was in the 70s.

Rich: It was the nerdiest computer meetups. People trading circuit boards.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Design is…

Paul: And not just design.

Rich: That’s like saying, “We’re gonna start to learn how to dance.”

Paul: I think he went to Frog Design for that, or for the Mac, I can’t remember. But he went to, like, a big design shop.

Rich: He cared about it.

Paul: He cared about.

Rich: And he emphasized it.

Paul: And he spent lots of money to make it look sleek and nice to the touch because he wanted to land it in culture. Which, to be clear, this is not him being, like, I want to create the next great play or poem. It’s him saying, I want to sell this at Sears. Like, I want to sell this—

Rich: I want this in your den.

Paul: And I want it to look like it lives next to a stereo.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right? And that, you know, his big. One of his big design influences was Braun. B-R-A-U-N. Because, you know, and there’s, and if you look at early Apple design and Braun design, you can really see a lot of—

Rich: Yeah. I own an electric shaver by Braun.

Paul: Do you do electric shave?

Rich: No, I do a little polish at the end.

Paul: Okay, that’s good. I never knew that about you. And it’s been over 200 years.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: What? That I do that?

Paul: I know you shave.

Rich: Of course I shave.

Paul: Not for this podcast, but—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. All right, so let me…

Rich: So let me keep going.

Paul: Oh, don’t stop.

Rich: It actually gets worse.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: The world of productivity software or business software or software you use at work is far, far bigger than consumer software. Like, financially, it’s bigger. People have to use it because you have to process payroll.

Paul: It’s not just that, but enormous numbers of careers are downstream of it.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: What is it, like, two thirds—if you’re going to spend money on enterprise software, like…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You spend a dollar, you’re going to spend $2 kind of supporting and maintaining it—

Rich: The people around it—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I gave issue one, which is building great software alone is really hard because there’s a lot of different skills and discipline that are required, and very few people have them all.

Paul: I mean, the way I’m expressing this is that code got a lot easier, but product did not.

Rich: Bingo.

Paul: Right?

Rich: But there’s another problem. Especially because the AI companies, because they’re under enormous pressure to meet the value expectations that they’ve put out in the world. They know they have to go to the next frontier, which is business software. They have to, because there’s just not enough money.

Paul: This is why you hear about—so here’s what’s happened. The company Palantir, which is very AI-adjacent.

Rich: Adorable company.

Paul: Oh boy. Let’s not talk about, let’s just leave it—

Rich: Cuties.

Paul: Let’s leave it real high-level—

Rich: I’m pro-Palantir. Can I say that?

Paul: No. We’ll talk about this—

Rich: They’re like, in hospitals, dude.

Paul: I don’t want to talk about Palantir right now.

Rich: Go Palantir!

Paul: Stop it.

Rich: They make an amazing electric razor, by the way. [laughing]

Paul: I am done with this conversation. No, so they’re very AI-adjacent.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And they have this concept of a thing called the forward-deployed engineer.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay. Which is a little military, but the idea is it’s like kind of some, it’s essentially a consultant.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: A forward-deployed engineer is a very fancy—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Expensive way to say something already pretty fancy and expensive.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Consultant. And what does that consultant do? They come in and they help you use these tools, especially Palantir’s tools, with a lot of AI to transform, you know—

Rich: I’ll do you one better.

Paul: The Cleveland Police Department.

Rich: Do you know what a forward-deployed engineer is?

Paul: I don’t.

Rich: They’re a diplomat.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Before they can parachute in Palantir’s tools, they are going into some of the most grisly organizations that have some of the most mundane, archaic, overly convoluted processes to get anything done.

Paul: Well, often government, so it’s intensely regulated, et cetera.

Rich: Hospitals, government, massive nonprofits. And you know what they say, you know what they’re trained to say, these forward-deployed engineers, as you like to call them?

Paul: “I love you!”

Rich: “That’s really interesting the way you guys work that way. I think that’s really cool.”

Paul: I was wrong. Okay. Okay.

Rich: “It’s really, really, really interesting. And we’re gonna make sure we capture that.”

Paul: Well, now, you know, there’s another thing they say is, “Hey, it’s too bad about what happened with Deloitte over the last 18 years.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “But we’re gonna get you something useful in about four months.”

Rich: Yes. Yes.

Paul: That feels, that is not, to you and me, a miracle.

Rich: That’s a miracle, to most organizations.

Paul: But to the large civic org or the hospital system or whatever, they’re like, “What…?”

Rich: That’s right. And so I’m gonna get to the problem.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: That, that the Valley is about to slam up against.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Which is they have captured mass scale on a consumer level.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Right? And they need to somehow now—

Paul: Billions! Billions of people.

Rich: Billions of people. And they need to somehow now translate that currency into business currency.

Paul: Well, because they literally—

Rich: And that’s really hard to do.

Paul: They’ve run out of human revenue.

Rich: I want to use two words that we were saying a lot of and we felt like we had to. That I’m hearing less of: Agentic enterprise.

Paul: No, there’s still a lot of agent talk out there.

Rich: There’s a lot of agent talk out there. I’m even hearing about agents that we—agents are going to be so useful they’re going to talk to other agents. So they’ll meet in an alleyway and they’ll do the deal there. And this way there’s no humans at all.

Paul: I’m hearing about that, too. So there’s, there is that, but why are you saying that that’s less important?

Rich: I think the Valley is taking swings. Do you know why?

Paul: Why?

Rich: They have to, because org charts and organizations and the way shit gets done today is impenetrable. And you think you’re going to change it and you get to chip away bit by bit. Because it is humbling to go into large organizations that have deeply calcified cultures and drop things in. It doesn’t work. It simply does not work. We have to show that patience. We may spend months before we can articulate a solution. Right? And that’s a reality that is outside of the unicorn and building great product and whatnot. Organizations simply do not metabolize that kind of change that rapidly because, yeah.

Paul: Let me take it one step further. Okay? So I came in six, eight months ago and I was like, “Holy hell, it is changing up, man. You got to check this out.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you were like, “Hold on a minute, slow down. That’s not how organizations move.” And so we, you and I have essentially—not a debate, but we’ve kind of been exploring this the whole time. Now I would say right now we are seeing the counter reaction. And the counter reaction is expressed as none of this stuff is shipping, product’s just as hard. You said you were going to get me a lot more code faster and that’s great, but I actually don’t need that much code. Thanks.

Rich: No, it’s that all that new code’s scary. Where do I put it? Is it really what I want? Who did you talk to?

Paul: Okay. Because organizations, people, parts of culture can only have one idea in their head at once, I think we’re seeing it go the other direction. I think the AI companies owned the narrative about six months ago. They’re like, “Boom, we did it. We blew up business.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “We blew up government. Welcome to our future. Please get your wallets out.” Okay, so that was it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Now I think we’re seeing like, “Guys, you didn’t do it. I still have to ship all this software. It’s a pain in the ass.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I don’t believe that that is the end state either. I think what is actually happening under the hood, 85% of these projects are failing. But these things are good at parsing natural language, turning it into code. Code is really powerful in all sorts of different places.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I think that ecologically vibe coding and rapid software development hasn’t fully found its niche. People applied it towards legacy kinds of software development and it turns out we just don’t need as much software as it can produce. There’s a glut.

Rich: Not only that, if you look at, think about an organization as this organism that has intent.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Right? The IDE didn’t revolutionize organizations. They really revolutionized productivity for engineers. But it took years for them to say, well you know what, we should probably standardize tooling. But you can frankly use whatever you want, if you’re talented and you’re additive, great. Right? And the truth is translating individual productivity into some net outcome at the company level doesn’t make any sense. Just doesn’t make any sense. You can’t add up lots and lots—imagine you had 100 great people in a room. Do you know the overhead—when you cross, I think 12, when you cross 12 people, the tax of orchestrating work amongst any, number 13 onward—

Paul: You know my rule. Every person added to a group subtracts exactly one IQ point. [laughter] So by the time you get to a group like—

Rich: It’s a mentally challenged group.

Paul: By you when let’s, I’ll give you an example. The Democrats, probably about 120 million of them.

Rich: Yeah?

Paul: That’s a negative 120 million IQ points. [laughter]

Rich: Fair enough.

Paul: Same with Republicans. Just like the more people you put in, the more it’s likely that you have to, eventually you’re just saying, you’re just leaning into a microphone and saying, [Real American voice] “America.”

Rich: Instead of bitching all this time, let’s be, let’s provide a piece of advice.

Paul: This is the thing! If anyone would ever listen. That’s what I’m saying. Okay? We went from boy, it’s all blowing up to like eh, hold on, it’s a lot of nonsense. I don’t think that that’s real. I do think the fact that you can—here’s what I think has happened. Engineers have taken control. We’ve talked a lot about that. Engineers have very specific senses of where code belongs and where it should go.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: They’re also not necessarily as much as, say, like, a product manager designer, interested in the holistic function of the business. They’re interested in code.

Rich: They find it lame.

Paul: They do.

Rich: And I’m okay with that.

Paul: It’s life. It’s just organizations and disciplines have their own cultures.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: We are nowhere near the change that is going to happen when access to good tools and software can flow all the way through an organization. Especially those with fewer resources. Big NGOs, small NGOs, universities. We are nowhere near what could get unlocked if people were building code for their peers and thinking about in terms of product for their peers.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: I don’t think that happens with our current processes because our current processes are designed for an industrial kind of code production.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: I think that happens when code almost becomes more like a medium. It’s very hard to explain that, but it’s almost like I might assign someone to go off and write a little report on the future of our English department here at this college.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: In the same way they could go off and make some code to help us manage the curriculum.

Rich: Yeah. I mean—

Paul: It’s so much cheaper to do that specific thing than it used to be.

Rich: Absolutely. You can be a little more ambitious. I think there are two things you need to do. The first is don’t start with the software. Start with a goal. Number one. Meaning I want to make it easier for doctors to assess contraindications of medicine.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Right? So let’s make it better for them. That’s a goal. That’s not software. That’s an actual goal. Or I want to make it easier to read, you know, EKG results.

Paul: In the past, just stating that meant that you were kind of bananas. Because software is so hard.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That you had to focus on getting the software culture in place first before you could get any of its outputs.

Rich: Correct. So start with a goal, not with a solution. Not with technology. The second is don’t try to conquer the whole continent. Pick a hill. Meaning don’t say, “I want to make sure the doctors are able to get better results across all the tests in these systems, and I want them to get it on their phones by end of this year.”

Paul: The only way you’re gonna get this is If Claude Code gives you a deadline.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You need to be, like, “Can you build me a prototype? And you got an hour.”

Rich: Josh Tyrangiel’s book talks about actually a hospital case where sepsis is hard to detect. And they’re like, if you can get me 30% better predictions, people will, lives will be saved.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Just give me that.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: You walk into a hospital as a patient and you’re like, “God, they should blow this whole thing up.” The whole thing is, you know, there’s Epic and there’s all the systems they use. I went in for a procedure years ago and the woman opened up terminal to get me in the system. Like, it was just a green screen. This was like 2018.

Paul: Literally, that is what AI companies have reduced us to again, in terms of vibe coding.

Rich: We’re in terminals again.

Paul: We’re back to terminals.

Rich: So you could always look at the whole thing and you’re like, what is that? And the truth is, what you’re really looking at is years of culture and legacy that are just there.

Paul: Okay, so let me land this for us, because I think what’s going, here’s what I think is happening. I think that…

Rich: Stick the landing.

Paul: Well, okay, so what happened is everybody came out and said, we are going to reinvent and insert enormous structural thing here. Hospitals, science, genetics.

Rich: Cure diseases!

Paul: Business, whatever. Now what you’re seeing is people from those institutions going, “We tried it. Some of it’s okay.”

Rich: We’re gonna have to keep chipping away.

Paul: Yeah. Now, and what you’re describing and what I’m seeing is a world in which those individual components that comprise the whole system?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Attacking the whole system rarely works. Good luck.

Rich: The term I love to use is that whole systems have wicked immune systems.

Paul: They really do. They reject, yeah.

Rich: There are people. There are systems. There’s data. All sorts of white blood cells come at you.

Paul: I do. I always used to talk about a new software product as like a liver transplant. And sometimes—the body wants to reject it.

Rich: Always.

Paul: You have to actually figure out ways—

Rich: 100%.

Paul: To lower immunosuppression or to do immunosuppression. So now, okay, you know, let me close with a little story because it’s—

Rich: This better be good. Is it about Palantir?

Paul: No. I went and saw somebody talk once. It was a design leader. I can’t remember her name, but she’s very, very brilliant. And she had worked at an enormous hospital—

Rich: Clearly not that brilliant. You don’t remember her name.

Paul: She’d worked at an enormous hospital system just improving the signage.

Rich: Okay, very interesting.

Paul: Classic design problem. We glued this hospital together over 150 years on multiple campuses.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Nobody knows how to get from oncology to whatever. Elevators—

Rich: You’re talking about lobby signage.

Paul: Everything.

Rich: Elevators…

Paul: But all the way. You know, you go to the third floor, but you need, there’s like seven different departments.

Rich: It is a hot mess. I’ve been in, yeah, I’ve seen.

Paul: We have two cardiology departments. Right. That kind of thing. So she created like, it was a little card you got. It was a wayfinding tool.

Rich: Visual vocabulary.

Paul: All of it. And at the very end of the talk, somebody said, hey, and this brilliant person, classic New York, like, super genius, like, agency type. And somebody raised their hand and was like, “Hey, how long did that take?” And she said, “Seven years.” [laughter] Okay. I think of that every day. Every day I think of that seven years.

Rich: Oh God.

Paul: Because that is actually what change is.

Rich: Incredible.

Paul: But that’s what change looks like at that scale.

Rich: Yeah, it does.

Paul: And so what’s happened is we have this narrative of absolute, drastic, total structural change.

Rich: Disruption.

Paul: And it’s landing at a very disruptive moment where our president is a white hot ball of lightning who is, and there’s just this sense of like—

Rich: Fizzling ball of lightning.

Paul: Whatever, though. But there’s this sense of institutions and extreme things that—

Rich: Blow it up.

Paul: Extremely stable. Our climate. Like, it all felt so stable and now it is starting to really show cracks.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so AI comes into that and is like, guess what else? Guess what else we got? And so I think that narrative landed and everybody was like, oh man, another thing. Another thing. But the reality is that the institutions are not bending as much as Silicon Valley would like them to.

Rich: Yes. And just to put a final note on what you’re saying here. I agree with everything you’re saying. There is magic in these things. There are ways to use them to make things better.

Paul: I was ready for it—

Rich: But we have to have—

Paul: I was ready, I wanted it to blow up Epic and replace it in two hours. I’m still waiting for that to happen.

Rich: It’s not happening. It’s not happening.

Paul: If they can pull it off, I will step back.

Rich: Yeah. Epic, if you are listening or watching.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Somehow my mom’s case in a different hospital system is coming into my emails and that’s awkward.

Paul: It is.

Rich: Also epic.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I think it’s Mount Sinai and some other…Cornell.

Paul: Wow. So they put the two together. So you and your mom are one Epic account?

Rich: I don’t know, but I’m having my uterus checked out next week.

Paul: Hopefully at the doctor’s. [laughter] Okay. Onward we go, my friend.

Rich: Yes. Illuminating conversation. Paul, These are the kinds of conversations—

Paul: inspired by your blog post.

Rich: Thank you so much.

Paul: So illuminating.

Rich: Very nice. John Oates.

Paul: John Oates.

Rich: Who’s the other guy from Wham who made an album?

Paul: Oh, Andrew Ridgeley.

Rich: Andrew Ridgeley.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yes. He made an album called I think Son of Arthur, I think is what it’s called.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And growing up in Bay Ridge, there was a record store on Third Avenue and a friend of mine, we would, every time we walked by it, we’d be like, let’s go see if it’s still in there. We always went in to see if the album ever, anyone ever bought it.

Paul: Did it ever sell?

Rich: It never sold for years.

Paul: Record store went out of business.

Rich: It was, like, on the way home from dinner, we would go into this record store and just make sure it’s there.

Paul: Did you ever listen to it?

Rich: No.

Paul: We’re going to go right now.

Rich: No, we’re not.

Paul: Yeah, we are going to go to Apple Music and we’re going to—

Rich: Nope! No no no.

Paul: What if it’s amazing?

Rich: [laughing] It might not be amazing.

Paul: It might be the greatest album.

Rich: I don’t think so.

Paul: Okay. Son of Arthur. Andrew Ridgley.

Rich: Shout out to Palantir—

Paul: Who is the other member—

Rich: And Andrew Ridgeley.

Paul: Many people may not know the other member of Wham.

Rich: George Michael.

Paul: There you go.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, legendary musician.

Paul: Absolutely. Handsome. Yeah. Anyway, go ahead.

Rich: This is how we think about software and AI and how to make it successful for you. Reach out at hello@aboard.com.

Paul: And thanks for bringing up your mom’s uterus.

Rich: Anytime.

Paul: Okay,

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

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