Challenge: don’t mention AI

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. Except today we’re gonna switch it up, Richard.

Rich: Oh, yeah?

Paul: Yeah. Everyone in the company has said, “Could you guys talk about literally anything else?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “Are you still capable of talking about the tech industry without AI?”

Rich: It’s fair.

Paul: And I think we should try.

Rich: Let’s do it.

Paul: Okay.

[intro music]

Paul: Okay, so, a lot going on in the world of AI today.

Rich: Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Paul: You got the Pope putting out encyclicals. People are saying like, “Hey, maybe it’s not that big a deal. There’ll be lots of work and jobs.”

Rich: Whatever!

Paul: Let’s imagine a post-AI world. We’re not talking about it all the time.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: What would it be like?

Rich: Well, you’d be here in a, You’d be a Mac Mini in the post-AI… [laughter] Which is a, you’d be on my desk.

Paul: I would like to be a Mac Studio. Those are great.

Rich: Oh, the big guys?

Paul: I got one at home.

Rich: The big metal one?

Paul: It’s like three or four years old now. No, no, those are, they’re actually just, like, sort of a double-stacked Mini.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s like, it’s like the Quarter Pounder version.

Rich: Awesome, though. They’re very powerful.

Paul: Mine’s like four years old now. I got, I got nothing to complain about.

Rich: Never need another computer.

Paul: No, I know.

Rich: That’s not what this is about, is it?

Paul: What is this about?

Rich: This is about how we are going to have terrible things happening to us because of technology that is not AI.

Paul: Oh, that’s great.

Rich: Yeah!

Paul: So we’re going to, we’re going to go from the harms of AI to the harms of everything else.

Rich: Yes!

Paul: I think that’s actually important to do, because I definitely feel that we’re in an era where, first of all, you and I, from the beginning, have been saying AI is a technology—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: —that will kind of end up as infrastructure in the larger tech, in the tech industry. Is it worth $6 trillion? I don’t know.

Rich: That’s above my pay grade.

Paul: Literally above my pay grade.

Rich: Unless you want to pay me more.

Paul: They’re not gonna do that.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: But here we are, right? We’re in this world and it’s like, look, it is the most interesting thing that’s happened, but this sort of, like, it’s banana cakes, how much we talk about it. I’ll tell you what I got. Let me start with a light one. All right, you ready?

Rich:   A little appetizer.

Paul: Okay. I’m gonna show you a picture. Now, we’re on a podcast, so I’m gonna show you a picture and I want you to tell me who made this.

Rich: Okay. That is, it’s got electric vibes. It’s an electric vehicle made by…Oral-B. The toothbrush people.

Paul: You know what it looks like? Who makes those really nice pots? Creuset.

Rich: Creuset.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. Those real nice enamel pots.

Rich: If you’re listening only audio, this is an extremely smooth—you can’t cut your finger on the edges of this vehicle. Looks like an upside down bathtub.

Paul: Or like an enamel cooking pot.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s the new Ferrari.

Rich: No!

Paul: Yes, that is a Ferrari. And I encourage everyone to go look at it because—and Jony Ive designed it.

Rich: Let me imitate the Italians when he showed them this. Ready?

Paul: Let’s just go for broke then. Let’s lose all of it.

Rich: [“Italian” accent] “Jony, what about the penis?” [laughter]

Paul: No! I’m selling this business. That is actually, what you just said, which we’re not going to cut out, I’ll tell you why, because it absolutely summarizes all the online discourse about this. Literally everyone is—

Rich: It’s extremely un-Ferrari.

Paul: AI-generated memes of guys with cappuccinos sobbing.

Rich: No, this is not—Ferrari is for the immensely successful, two buttons open entrepreneur—T-shirt, shirt buttons open—entrepreneur with the small wee-wee. That’s the point of Ferrari. This is not gonna help that at all.

Paul: No, that’s the thing.

Rich: This is for groceries. You don’t get groceries with your Ferrari.

Paul: It’s very satisfying to watch this, I’m not gonna lie. Like, you got Ferrari and then they got Jony Ive—

Rich: Also powder blue is the prototype?

Paul: Yeah. And—

Rich: No!

Paul: Don’t forget, like, Jony I’ve is also over there with Sam Altman and the name, you know, the name of Ive’s company?

Rich: It’s like Love To…

Paul: “LoveFrom,.”

Rich: “LoveFrom,.”

Paul: And that is, I’ll tell you that nothing makes me hear “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival in my head more. [laughter]

Rich: Did he sell it? I think LoveFrom, got sold to somebody. I think OpenAI bought it.

Paul: I think we have to refuse to care. We just have to move on.

Rich: I don’t know. It only gets less tragic from here.

Paul: Okay, so—

Rich: I have some things I want to talk about.

Paul: You have things that are—nothing could be worse than this Ferrari. What do you got? I’ll look it up here on the internet.

Rich: All right, well, this is—you don’t even have to look it up.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: It’s not a piece of news.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: It’s a piece of life. And it’s everywhere now.

Paul: Piece of life.

Rich: I’m a Yankee fan.

Paul: Boy, are you. And this is like you saying you’re a lawyer.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “I’m a Yankee fan, but I’m also, I’ve been a Yankee fan from when they really, really sucked.”

Rich: I do say that a lot.

Paul: There are like three things that make you really happy. Good Lebanese food…and your family. But we’ll put that aside. The Yankees.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And Commodore 64 computers.

Rich: I mean, old computers make me happy.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s nostalgic to me.

Paul: I get it.

Rich: And I’m watching on Gotham Sports, which is this, like, streaming app for the Brooklyn Nets, the Yankees and some other stuff, I think they do Liberty basketball games, the women’s basketball. And if you use the app, every pitch is like, “Do you want to bet on if Grisham takes a timeout? Do you want to bet on if the pitcher makes it through the inning? There’s a 10% chance that this guy is going to hit a home run. Do you want to bet on that?”

And I kid you not, no joke, on the Gotham app, one third is the screen, is the game, two thirds are these yes/no options. So I can bet. This has been talked about, but it’s worth talking about, because I think this is one of the most horrible uses of everything, both culture and technology, that exists. It is depressing. It is the worst form of dopamine hit you can chase. I think online sports gambling—and I have a history with gambling, like, my family has been through bad experiences because of compulsive gambling. And for young people to have access to this stuff, and they give you $200 bucks, by the way, Paul, to get going. $200 credit.

Paul: I think we gotta take a step back here, right? And the step back is that when you and I grew up, America was extremely anti-gambling.

Rich: It was the mob.

Paul: Yes. You actually essentially, you called a bookie. Unless you went to Vegas.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Or Reno or Atlantic City. But it was like, unless you went to one of these pockets.

Rich: There were hard laws against gambling.

Paul: Occasional, you know, there’s the Aqueduct Raceway, et cetera, et cetera. They’re always, there’s lots of footnotes. But in general, on a day-to-day basis, you could not gamble easily in America without actually breaking the law unless you lived in one of those places.

Rich: You couldn’t, for certain racetracks, like horse racetracks, you couldn’t go in if you were a certain age.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: You had to be a certain age to get in.

Paul: And then the Native American reservation started to open up casinos.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So that was, like, sort of step one. But this is an unprecedented moment where you just see FanDuel all day long, all day.

Rich: All day.

Paul: And I gotta say, there are a few things….I try not to be kind of pollyanninish about it, but I tend to believe that, like, you know, progress is possible and so on. I think our current political situation is complicated, but probably more representative of who we are as a nation than we even want to admit.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: But my God, does gambling look like social decline. And it is really, it is the handmaiden of the internet. It just feels to me—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like a society that can’t get it together. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because we didn’t just introduce this. We rolled this out like blockchain. It was just sort of like, “Hey, guys, there’s gambling everywhere now. Is that cool?”

Rich: It’s everywhere.

Paul: Online poker. Hey, do teens want to actually really engage? Like, oh, hey, your high school-age son is now $24,000 in debt.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? And we just kind of unlocked that as a society and honestly shrugged.

Rich: Yeah, it’s out there. And not only is it out there, it’s not out there and sort of boxed in and cordoned off, like you’re describing what the past, it used to look like, which is like, you have to go to a casino.

Paul: It’s on your phone.

Rich: It’s not just on your phone. It’s not just that you can bet on whether the Yankees win or lose. It’s that there are these micro-transactions that have seeped into the whole experience.

Paul: It’s all the Candy Crush dopamine stuff.

Rich: It’s all that dopamine stuff.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And it’s really, the conditioning of it, I think, is what is most disturbing. And the truth is, you know, when you’re 15, whether you’re looking at porn or you’re looking to gamble, you can lie. And it’s not hard. It’s in your pocket. Unlike alcohol, which still has some barrier, you have to go get it. It’s a physical thing. Whereas here, everybody is kind of bullshitting on their phones and then running into this and playing.

And it is a disease for certain people, certain people who don’t have the mechanisms and don’t have the, like, wherewithal to know how to navigate out. Most won’t get hooked, some will get hooked, and it will ruin the house. Like, that is just life and it’s just gross. And you’re right. I think you’re taking a macro picture of it, and I think it’s awful. And I don’t know how this goes back in a box. It’s got crypto smear all over it. And I just think it’s all gross.

Paul: My friend, this country is going to have to have some moments of bravery. Like, it’s going to have to go back in the box.

Rich: But I will say, by the way, this is not just America. There’s bet365. I see these ads on Premier League games in the UK.

Paul: This is global.

Rich: It is kind of everywhere. And it’s become kind of normal. And that’s, I think, what’s disturbing.

Paul: That’s what spooks me.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It just scares the hell out of me.

Rich: It just kind of showed up.

Paul: You and I both have young sons, and those there’s, like, teen suicide because they get underwater gambling.

Rich: It’s a bad scene.

Paul: It’s just madness. And the fact is, like, we’re in this kind of rolling zone of crisis and things like this, like blockchain and this kind of stuff and gambling, somehow I think, because the folks in charge right now are just like, “No, no, it’s okay, it’s okay. Just leave it alone.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’re letting it roll.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I think that the hangover on this is gonna be a real rough one. This is a funny thing. I know we’re not talking about AI, but, like, AI as a structure is being debated. Oh, my God. We might be pissed about it.

Rich: There’s no conversation about this.

Paul: This is just. We’re just kind of letting this go along with other—for me, the big one, frankly, remains climate, which is just kind of hanging out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Just hanging. Because we’re like, wow, we got other stuff to deal with. And it’s like, really?

Rich: There’s more in our faces right now,

Paul: Yeah. And I’m still working on it, but I’ll tell you, people don’t want me to come talk on their podcast about climate tech.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They want to talk about AI. Anyway, onward. What else you got? That’s it? That’s your good news for the week?

Rich: Well, I mean, the goal here is to make AI look like, just absolutely pristine on the other side of this podcast. So here we go. [laughter] My number two is a thought I had. And it’s not a piece of news.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: It’s an observation. And that is, my kids were looking for something to watch on Netflix this weekend.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? And for whatever reason, I forget, we just didn’t weren’t tidy about it. We use the same account.

Paul: Yeah, sure.

Rich: So there’s, like, you know, preteen coming-of-age shows and…

Paul: World War II documentaries.

Rich: [laughing] My World War II documentaries and all this other shit. Right? So it’s all in the same thing.

Paul: [trailer guy voice] Rommel’s Regrets.

Rich: And then I was like, you know what? I’m going to bring AI in just for a minute. My daughter is smart. She’s a preteen. Suggest some smart shows or movies for her to watch. Right? And it came up with a list I’d never seen before. I don’t know what she watches. I know there’s, like, restrictions on age, shows that are rated for her age. And I went through, like, a dozen names, and she knew them all. And what I realized was the same algorithms that AI is rummaging through are the algorithms that fed her these shows. Right? And they all look exactly the same.

Paul: All the shows.

Rich: All the shows. And the observation that I walked away with, and I’m seeing this with my own kids, and this is a much more subtle thing, is we have everything. We have access to everything. Right? And yet the world that has been put in front of them is actually incredibly narrow. And when I think about, oh, social media is dividing us. Social media is putting us at each other’s throats. What it left me thinking was that a prerequisite for us to dig in and have one view, and a very myopic view of the world is that you see very little of the world.

Paul: Correct.

Rich: And I feel like we are products of systems that narrow our world by the time we’re six years old, seven years old, and it doesn’t really get much better. And it’s the same thing. And I’m sure that our variety of thinking, our willingness to have conversations with each other, and if we run into someone who’s from the South and loves country music, you’ll look at them weird. Our resistance to that is a product of just the way we consume things today. Right? This is a little, sounding a little abstract, but I actually think, because, probably because I have kids, and maybe that’s the theme here for the first couple of these. I want my kids to see some weird shit.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I want them to experience different things. I want them to under—I showed, don’t judge me. My daughter loves to sing. And I said, you really need to see this music video. And I pulled up the duet “Guilty” by Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb.

Paul: You don’t have to ever apologize for that.

Rich: It’s like this soft disco duet that has such a cool groove. And my daughter was, like, transfixed. First off, she’d never heard Barbra Streisand. By the way, I found out Barbra Streisand has her own lighting person. No matter where she is. [laughing]

Paul: She deserves that. She worked hard and she grew up in Flatbush.

Rich: But my daughter’s reaction was so great because she was like, first off, she’d never heard a voice like that, that was that adept and amazing. And she’s, like, “The groove is kind of funky,” and it is. It’s kind of this weird Telecaster guitar from the disco era or whatever. And I was just happy that I showed, I took her off the road for a minute.

Paul: Let me riff for a minute.

Rich: Go.

Paul: America used to be a lot weirder.

Rich: Yeah!

Paul: It was flat-out weirder. First of all, we had TV as a monoculture.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then after that, now we have the internet. The internet was supposed to flower into like a million different cultures.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: But it actually didn’t turn out that way. And I think the thesis that I have is that we’re essentially, we kind of tune the radio to get the news. And so the news for a couple years was you have to be very aware of this set of political concerns all the time. And you should really only talk about those things.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Now the news is Trump and AI just all the time.

Rich: Well, the news is breaking news. It’s hot all the time.

Paul: And it’s an instant, endless feed. And we are just dopamine-focused creatures. And it’s how we get safety. We’re like, “What’s going on? What’s going on?” And the news is like, “I’ll tell you what’s going on because you’re gonna wanna know this. Because if you don’t know this, you’re gonna get cancer.” [laughter] Right? It’s just over and over. Now I want you to go back in time with me.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, pre-World War I. The world, America—

Rich: I can’t go back that far.

Paul: We’re going back that far.

Rich: [laughing] Okay.

Paul: America is filled with little farm communities, very conservative, very religious.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And also lots of weird alternative intentional communities.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You got the Oneida community and you got Roycrofters and you got all these places, especially on the East Coast.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You got free love, you got religion, you got all sorts of things.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There’s books. And it’s a place of freedom and strangeness. And I grew up, my grandfather used to talk about this stuff, like, the Shakers were still alive. They didn’t just make furniture.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And he would make a lot of really inappropriate jokes about the Shakers and how they, why they would shake. I don’t really have to—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You know, it’s a family podcast.

Rich: Yeah. It’s all good.

Paul: But the strangeness that we can—and strangeness for us was very different. You go find a magazine. You go find a little something. You go to a library. We just had somebody in here, and they just started talking about chicken sexing. We’re gonna have them on the podcast. I don’t want to like—but it was so exciting.

coming from a feed.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: To hear something that wasn’t, like, coming from a feed.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I think that getting out of the feed is really hard. We’re trying to do it right now.

Rich: It’s really hard.

Paul: It’s a struggle.

Rich: Yeah. I think there is a theme here around, we’re both parents, and we have kids that are kind of coming into this world and are paying attention to this world. Right? And that is rebellion. My parents, who are Lebanese immigrants, thought Led Zeppelin IV was absolutely satanic, like everyone did. Meanwhile, it was a nerdy medieval story. Like, it wasn’t satanic.

Paul: Yeah. But when I was 15, I thought it was both, and I was really excited.

coming from a feed.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: Yeah!

Rich: No, but paths to rebellion, which is essentially kids venturing out and saying, “I’m gonna go somewhere. I told you I was going to the library, but I’m actually going to the East Village, and it’s gonna be weird, and I’m gonna listen to we music that you would never want me to listen to.”

Paul: Look, parents overreact this way. It was South Street in Philly for me.

Rich: No, but it’s good.

Paul: I wore a Slayer shirt underneath my suit when I got brought into the Presbyterian church when I was 15.

Rich: You thought that was badass.

Paul: I just wanted to be a paradox.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the truth is, they came out of social dynamics. Like, how are you gonna find about Slayer, find out about Slayer? I was pulled aside in junior high and told, “You need to listen to the new Megadeth. What are you doing?”

Paul: Yeah, yeah, right.

Rich: There was that, A, and B, it was something that—

Paul: “I want to make sure that you don’t get to date for at least another five years.” That’s what that kid said.

Rich: Well, that was 2112. [laughter] When Rush showed up. I had to wait a minute.

Paul: Our entire childhoods were people taking us aside and saying, “It’s very important that girls dislike you. I’m going to just give you a set of things to participate in.”

Rich: But it is, my kids, you know that scene at the end of Clockwork Orange? Where they make him watch?

Paul: Yeah, they jam his eyes open.

Rich: They jam his eyes open. They make him watch. I think it’s just violence.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Violent videos. And then all the while, they cause terrible pain in his stomach. So he can associate… My kids feel like they are tied to a chair and being fed a very narrow, like, smoothie of stuff that is all the same. And I want them to venture out. I don’t know how to get them to because they think I’m lame. No matter what I suggest, I’m like, “Let me show you what I used to listen to.”

Paul: I’m gonna take you out of it. I’m gonna take you out of it. We’re gonna stop talking about bleak and we’re gonna talk about some fun stuff.

Rich: No, I got one more bleak one.

Paul: All right, get it done now. I’ll get it—

Rich: No, no, go ahead, take it out.

Paul: No, no. Okay.

Rich: This is gonna be a two-part series, by the way.

Paul: What did my daughter do with my wife on Sunday? They learned to sew together.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? Now my daughter, she’s in the clothes, she’s in the thrift and vintage.

Rich: Okay, yup.

Paul: She goes with her buddies, and they go and shop.

Rich: It’s very wholesome.

Paul: But it’s very normal teen girl, like a little bit vain, a little bit of all of it. Right?

Rich: Yep.

Paul: And I love her and she’s doing great, but she wants to take care of her stuff and she wants to know how to make stuff.

Rich: Great.

Paul: That is where we got to be doubling down.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so there’s a cool website I think everyone should check.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Not an AI website. It’s called the maintainers. Maintainers, themaintainers.org.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: It’s got a mailing list. I’ve been following it for years.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? And so The Maintainers has, among other things, a book, a PDF. It’s called The Maintainers Study Guide. It’s very pretty and it’s a little woo-woo, it’s a little bit like—

Rich: What is it?

Paul: The Maintainers is focused on maintenance, on—

Rich: Anything?

Paul: Yes, that’s right. Don’t throw it away. How can you fix it? It could be a jet engine.

Rich: It’s for cheap people.

Paul: No, it’s for a world where you shouldn’t be throwing everything away.

Rich: Fair enough.

Paul: I gotta tell you, man, you walk down the street, it’s just, I mean, there’s so much plastic trash.

Rich: There was so much all trash.

Paul: I went to see the new Star Wars movie yesterday with my family.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And it was sort of a treat. We haven’t been to a movie in a while. And so I was like, “Yeah, yeah. Okay, let’s get popcorn. We’ll get a soda,” so on and so forth.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So the movie is, it’s $90 bucks for the tickets, it’s $60 for the treats. [laughing] And then—

Rich: It’s wild, isn’t it?

Paul: And then you just have this bucket of popcorn. And they gave me a soda that is…

Rich: You could swim in it.

Paul: And I mean, look, I’m a larger man. I’ve made terrible, regretful decisions in my life, but I’ve never felt a hotter shame. [laughter] Like, I’m gonna go see a Yoda puppet, and then I’m gonna drink out of this thing made from dinosaur skulls.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’m gonna drink a gallon of diet soda out of it.

Rich: Oh my God.

Paul: So that I feel virtuous.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then you know how in the movie theater, like, you start by eating one piece of popcorn at a time, but then kinda like you start going—

Rich: Your hand goes in it.

Paul: Like a crane, the crane comes down and you’re just picking up—

Rich: [shoving popcorn in your mouth noise]

Paul: Then you got to try to fit it in your mouth.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So—

Rich: I don’t know how you eat popcorn, but go on.

Paul: I mean, it’s just a disgusting scenario. And then you’re greasy. By the time the 48 minutes of previews are over—

Rich: Your neck is greasy.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. And you can’t get to the movie. You can’t, they just show you preview after preview, right?

Rich: Oh, I know.

Paul: And I just felt this moment. I went home and I looked up The Maintainers because I knew about, I was just like, I just need to think about things lasting and things not being disposable.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: And so it’s, look, there’s a culture of this. There are guides, there are tools.

Rich: Doing things is cool. Getting my kids to do things would be really cool.

Paul: I think you got to keep trying until you get it.

Rich: Well, my daughter has the patience to do stuff. She stitches, she does…

Paul: Sons are a different story.

Rich: Sons are a different story.

Paul: Sons take a little more time. [laughter]

Rich: They take a little more time.

Paul: No, I’ll tell you what, though. Like, I am learning to solder.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’ll tell you what, I have this one synthesizer, and it’s got the headphone jack going on it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I took it apart and I looked at it and I’m like, oof. And now I’ve been learning about how to solder, but it actually turns out it’s like a real—lead-free solder requires a totally different approach than what you might dabble with in your electronics kit.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So I am all-in on this, and I think about it a lot. And I’m realizing I have to practice and rehearse before I can switch—

Rich: You want to feel productive.

Paul: It’s a $1 thing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it’s, like, a $1,500—it’s my piano that has, like, piano keys.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I gotta get good at maintaining my stuff. Because I really do feel we just end up imprisoned by our stuff. So themaintainers.org.

Rich: Very cool.

Paul: They’ve got, and it’s a little bit of a philosophy, and it’s a little bit about how to take care of the world.

Rich: It’s good to feel like you’re being a little additive to the world, isn’t it?

Paul: Well, I think what I’d say is like, you know, here’s the problem. Right now, we’re in this world and it actually ties in what you’re saying. Everybody being so focused on one particular narrative that is making them feel comfortable and in control, which is what social media is about.

Rich: Or angry all the time.

Paul: Both of those at once.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That leads to this kind of monolithic and actually kind of consumery culture. And this applies to the left, too, and the beautiful—let me make an argument for books as a technology. Here’s The Maintainers. The Maintainers is probably, you know, I probably do a lot of things that The Maintainers people wouldn’t necessarily love. And they do some things that I kind of roll my eyes at.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But that doesn’t mean I can’t go read the book.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I can’t internalize their worldview and I can’t have some empathy and some interest and then see what applies to me. And this is the simplest damn thing, but literally every single day, you and your children and me are being told like, whoa, don’t look over there. Don’t look over there.

Rich: All the time.

Paul: That’s one of the reasons this office is filled with shelves of books. Because each one of these represents years and years of human effort from people who are trying to organize and make sense of the world. And I swear to God, it’s just as valuable as a session with an LLM, even though those are valuable, too.

Rich: Yes. I think there’s hope. And I’ll tell you why I think there’s hope. We’ve gotten a couple of different days. We had a class in here a couple months ago, that visited. And they were very suspicious and skeptical about AI, but more than anything else, it was kind of, there was a, there was a defiance and kind of a rebellion to them, which is like, I don’t like your status quo. Right? And that was promising to see that they didn’t want to just fall into a machine and just come out as sludge.

Paul: I got to say, as AI—

Rich: There’s a lot of booing right now, by the way, at commencement speeches, when people are like, “You got to be ready for AI, get that job.”

Paul: It’s very healthy for people in their 20s or before who grown up with this stuff to look at—and grown up with sports betting to look at you and me and go, “What the hell, dudes? What the hell? Why is it like this?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: How could you let this happen?

Rich: They should. They should.

Paul: That’s totally fair. And God bless. Right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I hope it’s eventually, as their lives go on, they will understand that we meant well, too.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: But it’s okay. Like, this is not an optimal scenario. And this is why everybody is kind of assuming status quo. I’m like, no, no. A lot of stuff is going to break in the future.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And we’re going to have to take care of it.

Rich: Well, they’re snapping out of it and they’re angry and that’s good.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: What’s your closer here?

Paul: I love old computers. Computers before you could talk to them.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And I have spent a lot of time and I’ve written a lot about this in my writing career about how to resurrect old computers, make them—we have a Commodore 64 from back in the 80s here in the office.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: You and I have used it. We’ve talked about. We like old machines because they represent history and they represent ways of solving problems. And they’re historically important and they’re essential.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And someone, God bless, I don’t know who. I’m going to read the “about the curator.” Okay. Andrew Warkentin is an OS emulator developer and OS historian. Created the virtual OS museum. Okay? And it has all of them. It’s a torrent. It’s, like, 150 gigabytes.

Rich: Okay. So it’s not an actual museum where you can walk into.

Paul: No. It’s a giant blob of data and software.

Rich: Wow.

Paul: That contains, count them, 1,700 operating systems, back to the earliest ones where you would just flip little toggles.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Up to like, you know, modern Windows and early Mac stuff.

Rich: Whoa.

Paul: Yes. So this is Christmas. And it’s also a place to go in the computer. There was computer before today.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I think that’s important.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right? And so this is a beautiful effort. 250 separate platforms, 570 distinct operating systems.

Rich: Oh my God.

Paul: And we got everything. We got AT&T Unix PC System 5. We got things I’ve never heard of, like Human 68K.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: We got Lisa OS for the Mac. We got Next Step for—

Rich: Just goes on and on.

Paul: OS9. All of it. All of it. Including, like I said, the ones where you just hit the buttons.

Rich: I think they also harken back to an era where computers were empowering and not just devices that pushed consumption.

Paul: I have a really good buddy, known him forever, and he just sort of, they relaunched the Commodore 64.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you know, it’s got some modern niceties to it, and it’s a little faster and so on and so forth. And he got it and he’s just loving it and he’s writing in it, he’s doing all sorts of stuff in it.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: There is a lot to be said, like, a lot to be said as a technology for going away and reading a book or looking at stuff and using a computer to organize some thoughts without a whole internet attached.

Rich: You turned the whole podcast kind of optimistic.

Paul: You know, here’s my thing.

Rich: What are you doing now?

Paul: You know how everybody says the web is dying?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s not. Society is a mess. But the actual core of the web means that anybody can go publish any webpage they want anytime.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You really can. They never took that away from you.

Rich: No, they didn’t.

Paul: Now they have siphoned off audience, they’ve thrown ads everywhere. They’ve made it economically not rewarding.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But the actual thing you can do where you expression express something and put out in the world. Yeah, I can’t—the thing is, and I think what drives me crazy is everybody’s like, yeah, but you’ll never get any audience. And I’m like, but I wrote for 10 years on online and sometimes I would get, like, 20 readers if I was lucky.

Rich: Everyone keeps score, right. And that shouldn’t be what it’s about because you can write something or publish something or draw something or create something pretty amazing. And that is satisfying in and of itself, right?

Paul: I mean, I’ve been lucky in my life because I did that, not in spite of it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I don’t, I mean, if you could take one thing away, and I gotta, like, I gotta tell you, like a big part of my life is now going and staring at a piano and not a screen and trying to figure out where my finger should go in the weird mathematics of that piano keyboard.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And…

Rich: It’s humbling.

Paul: It is. And I’ll tell you what, I can’t get an LLM to do it for me.

Rich: No.

Paul: I really can’t. And I’ve tried to get LLM to help me with my piano playing. They’re just not good at it. I need my teacher and he’s Argentinian and he’s a little sad-eyed sometimes, I think.

Rich: Ah, there we go. I was hoping we’d bring it back to sad.

Paul: Yeah, it’s a little nice.

Rich: Well done. This is great. I had more, but we don’t have to do more. I think this is perfect.

Paul: Let’s call it. You know, we’ll be back to AI soon enough.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m optimistic, strangely.

Paul: Me, too.

Rich: I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna do the optimism thing.

Paul: There’s going to be a lot of maintenance opportunities, is the way I would put it.

Rich: And if you need maintenance, you should reach out.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right. If you want to talk about anything but AI or AI, you can check us out at Aboard. But let’s not over-push it. Let’s just, we’ll keep this one where it is.

Rich: No pitch this time?

Paul: Nah! Everybody knows what’s up.

Rich: Aboard.com. Take care of yourselves. Go venture out. Go into the woods. Be curious.

Paul: Tell us about something you’re doing that doesn’t involve a prompt. [laughter] That’d be nice. Be nice to hear about that.

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

[outro music]