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 the world in general. And Rich, we have a very special guest in the studio today.

Rich: Yeah!

Paul: We’re going to talk to him, and he has something both incredibly exciting and incredibly boring to share. And I think that’s going to be cool.

Rich: I love both of those things.

Paul: Me too.

Rich: Let’s do it.

Paul: Let’s play that theme song.

[intro music]

Paul: Richard!

Rich: Yes?

Paul: What is our company? What do we do all day?

Rich: We are Aboard. We are based in New York City, but we’ve got a team around the world that comes in, understands your organization or business, puts really talented people to sort of triangulate on what you need, and then we use all these incredible tools to solve problems for you. We’re an AI transformation shop. We don’t just come in and say, “Come on, let’s unleash the agents.” We don’t do that. We think about what you need and then we’re in all sorts of interesting places nowadays, Paul.

Paul: First of all, things are going good. If you want to talk, it’s a wonderful time to reach out. It’s busy, the shop is busy. But you and I have shipped software for over 2 trillion years.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And I’m going to tell you something about AI. You ready?

Rich: Go.

Paul: It’s software.

Rich: Yes, it is.

Paul: It is just software. It’s weird, it’s different, it’s got a different shape. But if you can understand how to stand up a piece of software, you can actually get some of this exciting super revolution into your org. So give us a yell. Aboard is very reachable on the internet, on the web, via hello@aboard.com. We’ll give you that email again when we get out of this podcast.

Rich: Let’s do it. What do we got here, Paul?

Paul: Well, we have an old friend of sort of everything. Many companies ago, I think, we started talking to this person. This is Craig Mod. Craig!

Craig Mod: Hello.

Rich: Welcome, Craig.

Craig: Hi.

Paul: It’s good to have you here.

Craig: Thanks for having me.

Paul: I want you to explain who you are in a second, but I’m going to, I’m going to tell you the specific reason that we reached out was that you wrote a blog post. You reside in Japan.

Craig: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And you have very complicated accounting issues, as an American residing in Japan.

Craig: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Working for lots of different companies.

Craig: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Mostly around the design and consultancy field. And so you set out, I remember when AI started, somebody took me aside and they were like, “Could we build our own QuickBooks?” And I was like, “Never do that. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

Craig: Okay.

Paul: And then you went ahead and did it.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And it worked really well for you.

Craig: Yup.

Paul: And so I think we just want to talk about what it’s like to build your own accounting software.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: The most exciting subject that has ever been on Earth. [laughter]

Rich: I mean, way to set up a cliffhanger, Paul. Before you do that, Craig, tell us about yourself, but also tell us about the skills you feel like you’re pretty comfortable with.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been programming since I was, like, eight, so I have this long technical background. And then I’ve been involved with books and publishing forever as well. And so those are, like, the two things. Books, making books, making physical books, and then doing technical stuff.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: I actually got a degree in computer science and fine arts. It was, like, this weird double thing. Anyway, it was good.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: So I’m very comfortable in the land of technology. And then as ebooks and all that stuff started coming on board, I was very comfortable with that, while at the same time looking to McSweeney’s as kind of a, you know, North Star for making cool physical things. And I’d been doing that for a decade.

Paul: And for all the product managers out there who don’t know, just go to, like, mcsweeneys.net, you’ll get a sense.

Craig: Yeah. So those are the two universes I’ve been living in. Like, a big kind of deep technical world—and all the technical stuff I’ve been doing has kind of been in support of publishing or writing or whatever, things like that.

Paul: Craig, would you say you had a career at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts? [laughter] Would you say that?

Craig: I would.

Paul: Aw yeah. That’s a horrible thing.

Rich: But you’re not coding every day. You’re not coding every day.

Craig: No, no, no. And I was in my twenties.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: You know, but mostly it was personal projects. It was weird, like, data viz stuff. You know, I had a fellowship at Fabrica. This is, like, this sort of digital art collective thing in Northern Italy.

Paul: I’m absolutely nodding as if I have any idea what that is. [laughter]

Craig: Jonathan Harris. Remember number 27? Anyway, like, all the, you know, Casey Reas, you know, you know, John Maeda, obviously, all the old digital art people. I was kind of, like, in that, in that zone and trying to, like, emulate them, following them around the world.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: So I was following them, following McSweeney’s. And then Kindle hits, iPad hits, you know, and then you start thinking about digital books.

Rich: Yep.

Craig: And then Amazon destroys that for you, so you don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s great. [laughter] Done. Just make physical books. Make nice physical books.

Rich: Back to physical.

Craig: Yes.

Paul: We think of you, really, as someone who is anchored in design, as well as doing all these other things.

Craig: Mmm hmm. Yeah.

Paul: So, just push back on that. Is that true?

Craig: Yeah, yeah, it is. But I mean, I think my getting involved with it was sort of a hack to make money coming from a place that had really no money. And I saw, “Oh, well, if I can get good at—”

Paul: Meaning your childhood.

Craig: Meaning my childhood.

Paul: Okay.

Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was sort of like, “Oh, if I can get good at the design side of…” And it was a little more accessible. Like, there was no degrees for web design, you know, whereas there was computer science—

Paul: There are now.

Craig: There are now.

Paul: Yeah. But no, you’re right, you’re right.

Craig: So I ended up getting involved in the design world mainly because I was like, oh, this is a good hack, too. And I was drawn to it and was pretty good at it and good enough, and it just kind of made sense. But it was always kind of a way to get to these other things. So to produce the art or to work on the books, because I was too afraid to write them. So I’ll design the books, or I’ll publish the books, and then finally working up to doing the writing and all that.

Paul: That is, I had the same thing, where it’s archetypal broke kid thinking. “They’ll never let me in!”

Craig: No.

Paul: “I’ll never be allowed to participate, but I’ll just go stand kind of close to it just to see what’s up.”

Craig: 100%, yeah.

Paul: And then one day they’re like, “Do you want to write a book?” And you’re like, “…okay.” [laughter] Right?

Craig: Exactly.

Paul: All right, so that’s—for everyone, that’s the advice you need for a good career. Just kind of be…. [laughter]

Craig: Just be a little broken.

Paul: Just be incredibly down on yourself for an incredibly—

Rich: I mean, a little hunger is a good thing.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: I think it’s. And a little curiosity is a good thing. And I came out of law school and I was like, wait a minute, what’s this internet thing? It was exactly—

Paul: Wait—you went to law school?

Rich: I did.

Paul: Oh!

Rich: I did. This podcast is sponsored by Harvard Law School. No, went to law school and then came out and the internet just landed.

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: I was like, see what’s going on over here?

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: And never came back. All right, let’s fast forward. Obviously, the world changed a few years ago.

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: You’re clearly frustrated with your accounting software, which you could write a book about that.

Craig: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And…

Paul: Don’t write a book about that.

Rich: Let’s frame it though. It’s not like you were just handing in one W-2.

Paul: Give us a sense.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You wrote a note—for people who prefer text, you can go to craigmod.com and read the whole story of his accounting software. But we’re going to try to just like—

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: We’ll jazz hands a little bit.

Craig: Well, okay, a little bit of, a little bit of context. Like, ChatGPT comes out. I’m like, okay, this is interesting, but you can’t really build stuff with it. And then you’re like, oh, but it can write little scripts for you? That’s kind of cool.

Paul: That’s cool.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And then Claude Code comes out last year, and I’m running a membership program connected with, like, my book stuff and writing stuff. And I’ve always hated Twitter, like, since the day it launched. I was, I was sort of anti-Twitter even before Musk and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just, I always had this, this philosophy, this is how Twitter should work. And Claude Code came out. I was like, let me see if I can use Claude Code as like a test project to make my own Twitter for my community. And that was the first thing I built.

Paul: What people don’t understand is that when you get annoyed and frustrated with things, you often stand up platforms. I’ve seen you do this, like, now more than once. And so, so—

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: This is a normal thing for you to just sort of be—

Rich: It’s his form of op-ed.

Paul: Yeah. I’m going to create a community platform and just see what happens.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Well, usually because I’ve been pushed into the corner because, yeah, I, I don’t have any other options. I gotta do it myself.

Paul: You know that you’re very gentle in tone, but you must get extremely annoyed. [laughter] Like, it does—

Craig: Oh yeah, I’m in constant state of annoyance.

Paul: Yeah. Because the average human isn’t like, “I should get a database going instead of my own publishing platform. I’ll show them.”

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: So you used Claude…?

Craig: A year ago, right? A year ago, March last year. It comes out. This is the first project. Boom. Clone Twitter.

Paul: And you publish books, you have tours that you give of walking tours around the world.

Craig: I don’t give tours.

Paul: Oh—

Craig: Absolutely not.

Paul: Sorry. [laughter] You go on—

Rich: You insulted the man.

Craig: This is really critical. I’ve never taken a dollar to take anyone on the walk, ever.

Paul: Okay—

Rich: He drives a big bus in Tokyo.

Paul: I did not say that you take money for the tours, but you definitely—

Craig: I walk with people.

Rich: It’s called walking with friends, Paul.

Craig: Yeah, just buds.

Paul: You enable walking communities through interesting geographies.

Rich: Let it go.

Paul: But it doesn’t, it’s not a tour.

Craig: It’s not.

Paul: No, in no way. No one should ever look—instead of, so they can only look straight down the road.

Rich: Insulted our guest.

Paul: Oh my God. Okay, okay. So, so non-tours.

Craig: Gotta clarify that.

Paul: But you, you do, you bring together communities to go around and do things and you are a very serious photographer as you go on these very long walks and…

Craig: Yeah, yeah, I mean most, most of the walks are solo. So like 30, 40 days alone, which is not indicative of anything broken or any weird or…

Paul: No, it’s fine.

Craig: Totally normal. [laughter]

Rich: It’s called a guy going for a walk, Paul, just to clarify for you.

Paul: But—what, the whole point I was getting to before that debacle is that you are a publisher and you have a community around these sort of community-building non-tours.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And you have to manage this—

Rich: Worst explanation of anything.

Paul: —because obviously no money ever changes hands, but somehow money comes in, you have to manage the money and there’s all sorts of stuff going on.

Craig: Sure, yeah.

Rich: All right. Paul, just give me a sec here, okay?

Paul: I’m going to take a walk now.

Rich: Craig, how do you make money?

Craig: So I started a membership program.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: I’ve been writing a newsletter, newsletters for 15, 16 years. And eight years ago, seven and a half years ago, I hit a wall and I couldn’t get anything published where I wanted to get it published.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Craig: And I thought I’m worthless and I have no value and I should go live in a dumpster.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: But membership programs were becoming a thing and I wrote a piece for WIRED about how digital books didn’t become what we thought they were going to become. But membership stuff and online publishing is kind of more interesting than ever.

Rich: The Substack world.

Craig: Yeah, right at the, right at the beginning of that Substack stuff.

Rich: Yeah. Mmm hmm.

Craig: And so I launched a membership program.

Rich: Your own.

Craig: My own thing.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: Because I’m pathologically incapable of being on anyone else’s platform. And launched that. And then from that I divined a weird permission to start going on these huge walks that I wanted to do in Japan.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: So I’ve walked from Tokyo to Kyoto three times. I’ve walked thousands of kilometers all over other parts of Japan.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: And I walk and I do these pop-up newsletters and the membership program essentially funds it. It gives me permission to go do these—

Rich: Okay. You’ve got enough of an audience paying you.

Craig: Because—

Rich: Okay.

Craig: And then from those I write books, basically. As I’m walking, I’ll do, I’ll walk for eight hours a day. I’ll talk to people along the road, photograph, take notes. And then every night I write 2, 3,000 words. And then that goes out every night. And so it’s this weird ascetic practice that I’ll do for 40 days in a row.

Rich: Wow.

Craig: And then you end up with this corpus of 60, 70,000 words at the end of it and all these photos. And then you can kind of distill that into a book. And that’s kind of been the process over the last six, seven years. And I had a book come out with Random House last year, which was, like, kind of making me official in a way.

Rich: Got it.

Craig: You know, people suddenly, suddenly go, as long as you can say, like, Random House. Then people go, oh, you are a writer now.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: This is real.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so you got sources of income from the members paying you to be members of your org.

Craig: So membership, book sales. That’s it, basically.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the big income.

Rich: Right. And so a little messy.

Craig: Yeah, a little messy. Well, because I live in Japan, I have, you know, whatever. You have bank accounts in both countries, America.

Rich: Ah. So you’ve got that issue.

Craig: I’m a U.S. Citizen, and you always have to file in America, even though there’s a tax treaty. So all the taxes I pay, I pay primarily, 100% in Japan. Then those get carried over as part of the tax treaty. So you can offset your American taxes with that, but you still have to go through the filing process. It’s just, it stinks. America’s the only country in the world except for one other little country that makes you do this. If you’re not a resident but you have citizenship, you have to file the whole thing.

Paul: But you love this. This is fun. You love taxes.

Rich: Not this one.

Craig: There’s, the amount of anxiety I have in January every year.

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Craig: Panic attacks.

Rich: Really?

Craig: They’re going to take everything away from me. I’m going to lose everything. You don’t understand the scarcity mindset that, like, just does not disappear.

Paul: We understand. [laughter] When I got married, my wife found a, like, a box of receipts and papers, and it was, like, it was like a year to unpack everything that had not been dealt with.

Craig: No, the scarcity mindset, it’s just crippling.

Paul: To be clear, I paid everything and added up to, like, I had, like, $3,000 in fees.

Rich: Oh, I know, exactly. But we all have this common backstory.

Craig: Yeah. So I, you know, every year I’m kind of going, oh my God, it’s this thing again. And like, I look, I hire accountants, you know, I, you know, try to keep digital records of everything. And yet every year I’m like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can’t see anything.

Paul: Going to lo everything again.

Craig: You lose everything.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: They’re going to come down on me with a hammer—

Rich: This is real anxiety.

Craig: Because I missed one form or something.

Paul: But nothing beats anxiety generation more than, like, tax prep. It really is terrible. No, because, and then you, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience. You go to the accountant and it, it’s like going to a mixture of priest and therapist. They’re like, no, this is not—you go in being, like, I may be the worst person who’s ever lived on Earth. And they’re like, “Eh, eh, eh.” And then they’re done.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And you’re like, that’s it? Like, there’s no part where you tell me that I should be ashamed?

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And they’re like, “No, you owe the government, like, $480.”

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: You’re like, “…oh. Yeah, yeah.” Okay, so I’ve been there. I know—

Rich: But don’t the accountants give you that relief?

Craig: Well, they do, but, but the organizing of all the, so it’s, like—

Rich: All the stuff.

Craig: You know, I’m bringing money to Japan and like, you know, I’ve got, I’m getting some payments over here, some payments over there.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: You know, and it’s, like, I’ve got… The pile of stuff that comes out of the year of work or whatever is non-trivial. And I’m producing books in Japan. So I’m printing and shipping from Japan. So I’m an exporter, so it means I have to file other forms as an exporter and I can get sales tax back. Anyway.

Paul: So we got three things going. I have tremendous, terrible anxiety about taxation. Which—

Craig: About money in general.

Paul: About money.

Craig: Just money in general.

Paul: We have, I have a genuinely complicated international tax situation.

Craig: Yup.

Paul: And we have, when faced with frustrating situations, I build large web platforms.

Craig: Yup.

Paul: And it sounds like Claude Code showed up and now all three of those things could get worked out at once.

Craig: Yeah, basically. Yeah. So in January I was like, well…what? And I have very strong opinions about software. I kind of like, I feel like, I feel like to a certain degree I’m like a software supertaster. I have, I just, I’m so sensitive to the way software works and I can kind of feel if the guts of it have been, you know, if the backsides have been painted—

Paul: What’s good lately before we get to your stuff—

Craig: I mean, Things is still good.

Paul: Things.

Craig: Things. I just, every time I use Things, it like, never lets me down. It just feels like a really wonderful—

Rich: It’s been around forever.

Craig: It’s been around for almost 20 years, I think.

Paul: We talked to you once 10 years ago and you said, it wasn’t software, but you’re like, the Brother laser printer.

Craig: Yep.

Paul: That is a piece of software.

Craig: That also, yeah.

Paul: Or a piece of hardware.

Craig: It just works.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: Yep, yep. I still got—everywhere I move, if I’m living somewhere for more than three weeks, I just buy a Brother and put it in there. [laughter]

Paul: Interesting. So right now we, you, so about 0.000001% of software and hardware is good so far?

Craig: Yep.

Paul: Yeah. That doesn’t go too much further than that, does it?

Craig: So I’ve been using Quicken and Quicken’s terrible. And then I, so my—

Paul: Why is Quicken terrible?

Craig: Well, it doesn’t, for someone like me, it’s… Quicken lacks imagination. All the software lacks imagination. They can’t imagine a person like me existing in the world.

Paul: Yes. Always.

Craig: And they, and so it has no affordances for someone like me. And so I have to jump through all these wild hoops, you know, and I’ve got Google Sheets, and then I run Google scripts to, you know, normalize the data from my Japanese bank accounts that are in Google Sheets. And then I export that, and then I can bring that into Quicken and make a fake, you know, bank account in Quicken for that. But then everything’s in dollars, and so the currency conversions going back—anyway.

Paul: So this is like you have to read forum posts to learn how to use your accounting software.

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: It’s just not designed for it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s just…

Craig: It is, it’s a narrow, very narrow thing. So this is the thing about Claude is you can just imagine the thing you want in the weirdest possible shape you want it, and it can make it.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: And so I just thought, okay, well, how long would it really take to rebuild Quicken to do this for me? And so I just started working on it, and turns out it was, like, six days, basically.

Rich: Six days?

Craig: Yeah. To get to a pretty great approximation.

Paul: So what did you have to tell Claude?

Craig: So I dumped, what, how did we start? I have all of my taxes in this folder from the last, like, 20 years or whatever. And I kind of just launched Claude in the, in the root directory.

Paul: “Hey, buddy, you like my confidential tax information? Go to.”

Craig: I don’t care. Last year, last year I dumped all of any, anything my accountant sent me. I just put it straight into, then it was ChatGPT I was using. And yeah, it found errors to the point where I fired my accountant last year.

Paul: That’s cool.

Craig: And it was like, here’s a non-trivial amount of money that you should not be losing on this. You know, you should not be paying.

Rich: Wow.

Craig: So that, that also end—what was great last year?

Paul: Was it accurate or did it hallucinate someone else’s taxes?

Craig: No, no, it was, it was accurate. It was fine.

Paul: Okay.

Craig: I mean, this is, the thing is like you just, you’re not, it’s not telling you something that you just give it to the IRS.

Paul: No, I get it.

Craig: You’re filtering it through people. And, like, my accountant was like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right.” I was like, “Great, you’re fired.” [laughter]

Paul: I mean, okay.

Craig: This is terrible. No, but last year, the real insight was all of this anxiety I have about money, I can use ChatGPT as a therapist for it. So I would say to ChatGPT, like, “I’m really worried that I’m making a mistake here and I’m going to lose all my money. What’s, like, the worst possible scenario?” It’d be like, “What are you talking about? You’re not going to lose all—it’s not, like, the chance of you getting audited or this or that or whatever, it’s like—” Anyway, it reduced anxiety.

Rich: Yeah, sure.

Craig: And then this year it was like, well, can I take that to the next level and build a piece of software that literally embodies the anxiety that I feel, so I have total insight into everything that’s happening, in a way that Quicken doesn’t, bank accounts don’t, bank statements don’t. So this holistic view, where is my money? What’s happening? What should I anticipate at the end of the year? That sort of thing.

Paul: Now I asked if you could demo it and you pointed out that you can’t because it contains all of your personal financial information. So I go into Quicken and it’s kind of, like, spreadsheet with a bunch of buttons and it’s really confusing.

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: Link up your bank account.

Paul: Yeah, and it’s menus and it’s just et cetera, et cetera. What is your thing? What does it look like?

Craig: My thing’s, like, it’s just a big dashboard and it has income, expenses, expected tax estimates, just so, like, a running tax estimate for the year. And then medical—there’s, like, a thing where I can just dump medical, any kind of medical receipt form. So it’s collecting that. And then it knows, um, what forms I submitted last year. And so it has a run—it has, like, another category where it’s like, here are your to dos of things you haven’t submitted yet this year. So just keeping in mind, you’re going to need to get this, this form together, that form together, whatever. And you can click into any of those things and then it loads up, “Here’s all your income for the last year.” And you can obviously filter by month or—

Rich: So you’re feeding it stuff.

Craig: I feed it stuff. And the way I feed it stuff, Quicken also is annoying because it’s, like, connect to your bank account using Quicken.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Craig: And it always breaks and then you lose a month or whatever.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: So what I realized is that you can automate Headless Chrome to click for you. And so you just show it, here’s where you download all the CSV files for your bank account, for your credit cards.

Paul: Okay, so we have to, we have to break that down a little bit for the audience. [laughter]

Rich: This is like Cowork. This is like you’re given your, your, you’ve given Claude desktop access.

Craig: Kind of. Yeah.

Paul: One of the things you can do with any programming, but Claude really, it does get very powerful, is you can say, “Hey, run a web browser.” And when Craig says Headless, what you mean is it’s not on my desktop. It might even be on a server somewhere. It’s running the web browser. It can log in as you can do all the things a web browser can do. But there’s no screen. Nobody’s actually controlling it.

Rich: Nobody’s pointing and clicking.

Paul: Yeah, but Claude, and Claude kind of directly controls it. But more often what it does is that you automate using the browser. In this case, I can see it really clearly. Like, you’re going to tell it, “Go here, this is where the CSVs are. Go do that once a month. If you can’t log in, send me an email and I’ll come tell you how to log in.”

Craig: Yeah, not even that complex.

Paul: Okay.

Craig: So it’s a Python script, and then it loads the login for me. I log in and I say, “It’s ready.” And then it goes and does it. So I don’t give it any credentials. I’m logging in.

Rich: Okay, okay. You’re in front of it?

Craig: I’m in front of it.

Paul: Okay.

Craig: But it turns out that you can download way more CSV files, and they kind of make it annoying, it’s, like, you have to do this and click, because they don’t want you to do that.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: But you know, Claude does it really well, or a Python script does it really well. And so I’m able to just get all these files, like, basically in five minutes, I can get all of my financial information for the last couple of months together.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And then it just processes it.

Paul: Which is, frankly, when you are an anxiety-driven person who has to get their taxes done, that becomes, like, a point of procrastination and pain.

Craig: Oh, 100%.

Paul: Like, I’ve been there. Where you’re like, “I have to do what?” And you just, you literally will find yourself getting into sports you don’t care about.

Craig: Oh yeah.

Paul: Instead of doing this. Right? So instead, the robot, you just point it and you’re, like, “Robot, go get my CSVs from my bank.”

Craig: Yep. Yep.

Paul: Okay.

Craig: Which Quicken is supposed to do, but it doesn’t do it for my Japanese bank accounts, and it doesn’t do it for certain other banks. It’s like, anyway, it just doesn’t—

Paul: My guess is if you have an account at Wells Fargo and you work as a security guard, Quicken is, like, really good.

Craig: Yes.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: If you have the simplest setup, one bank account, you get a W2 or whatever. It’s like, everything’s clear. So no. So set that up. And it ingests it all and then it, it learns. So it knows, okay, these, historically, these items have been this category. This is business, this is personal. And so it will, it’ll pre-categorize everything. And then I just go through and approve. So there’s an interface that shows, here’s what’s been imported recently. Let me approve, approve, approve, or change, you know, whatever.

And the whole interface is pulling a card from things. If you just start typing, it loads a search instantly and will search through what, everything, expenses and income for the year. And the search shows you, it brings up in a spreadsheet-style form, and you can do, you can do batch operations. So I can search for, like, “Blue Bottle.” And then it’ll just boom, I’ll get all my Blue Bottle receipts. And then I can say, “Call these ‘coffee shop’, whatever.”

Rich: Categorize them.

Craig: Yeah. So not only is it giving me insight into, like, what exists, but I can go through the data so fast.

Paul: All right, so let’s talk, so that sounds very nice. That sounds delightful, actually. Especially for taxes.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And we’ve learned that you were driven by frustration and anxiety.

Craig: Yep.

Paul: Here’s what I’m observing The coding part is actually pretty easy now.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: It just gets a lot of the, like, the complicated database schema that would have probably ever kept you from even starting this?

Craig: Yeah, 100%.

Paul: You get that in, like, an hour. You just kind of feed it your docs. You’re like, I’m going to need to do this, and so on. So that part’s pretty straightforward. But then you are very sensitive to software.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: You said you want a particular experience, and you just described a very particular experience. How do you go from, it has scaffolded it and done pretty much, you know, it’s got things kind of set up to, now this is something I’m willing to use all day? And how long did that take? And what was that like?

Craig: It’s pretty quick. I mean, I’m very MVP-focused. Like, I just want the bare bones of the thing as quickly as possible. And I feel like, in the same way, programming has been kind of solved for most of these things where we’re just taking this piece and this piece and putting it together in a new way. You know, we’re not inventing, we’re not solving, like, programming cancer or something like this. We’re not inventing new CRISPR technology.

Paul: I refer to it as “no science.”

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: There’s no science to do. You just got to put the pieces together.

Craig: Exactly. And so I think in the design universe, too, there is like kind of a base scaffolding, a base kind of like design language, you know, Tailwind or whatever that it can just do.

Paul: Rich hates Tailwind.

Craig: [laughing] Which one do you like? Which one should we be using?

Paul: He just hates Tailwind.

Craig: He just hates? [laughter]

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I don’t. It’s not a matter of, like, CSS framework. I just don’t know, it feels so redundant and thick.

Craig: Oh, you mean like having all the classes in the…everywhere.

Rich: It’s bizarre.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t even, I just said Tailwind randomly. It’s whatever is the simplest CSS.

Rich: Well, that’s the end of this podcast. [laughter]

Paul: But also.

Rich: We’re done.

Paul: No, there’s another tell here, which is. And I have this, too, because everything I’ve been building is Tailwind. You just don’t look in anymore.

Craig: You don’t look at it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: So I was—in February. I was still looking at code in January. February, I’m in LA, at my buddy’s office, and he’s gone, his budget for AI is, like, he’s spending $1,000 a day sometimes.

Paul: Okay.

Craig: Like, tokens and weird API things and doing this and anyway, he’s going bananas. And I spent four days with him in his office, and I got in there and he looked at my screen. He’s like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m checking the code. I’m…” He’s like, “You…what? No, you don’t do that anymore. We don’t check the code anymore.” And I was like, “Aw, no, I’m always gonna be a guy who checks the code,” and then within two days—I haven’t looked at code in months.

Rich: Yeah, no, no, fair enough. Fair enough.

Paul: I will say, though, one of my frustrations, I’m not looking at the code as much as I would even like to, but you lose track of the actual internal structure of the application.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And that part is hard. Like, I need…

Craig: Yes.

Paul: I may not need to look at individual lines of code, but God, I wish there was a nice outline view that I could always get to.

Craig: Yes.

Rich: I mean, sometimes, also, when you’re trying to, like, when it’s getting stubborn about a tweak?

Craig: Yes.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: You knowing how you can narrow the space you want it to go work on is necessary.

Craig: Yeah, I want a virtual blackboard.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Bird’s-eye view.

Craig: That’s huge. That’s huge. Like, the size of this wall here.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And I want it to be showing me the architecture of what’s being built, where it’s being added.

Rich: Totally.

Craig: That would be heaven.

Paul: I mean, you can actually have it. It’s just like…

Rich: You can ask for it.

Paul: But it’s a chore. Like, you’re right. Like, if it could just kind of be, like, “Hey, let me give you the bird’s-eye view of this whole application so you can understand all the pieces,” because it so much so quickly. Okay, so wait, a couple weeks are going by?

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Took you how long to do all this?

Craig: Not even. I mean, like six days. Like, honestly.

Rich: Okay.

Craig: And it was more, it was more kind of, like, getting it to look at the information properly. And, like, when you start giving it tax returns, it can hallucinate when it’s looking at it. And so it was kind of coaxing it through that and trying to find the best way to read the PDFs, the return PDFs, and you know, is it doing PDF OCR detection, is it using—anyway, there’s, like, three or four different tools you can try.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: So a lot of it was like testing, checking. Is it a hallucinating? Is it not hallucinating?

Rich: You’re a little paranoid about it. You’re not going to just take a swing—

Craig: But there’s always going to be an accountant in the loop.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right.

Craig: It’s never going to be like, “Push a button and go to the IRS.”

Rich: All right. Let’s zoom out.

Paul: Craig, I want you to be a consultant for a minute around building custom finance solutions.

Craig: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay? I think people are going to be surprisingly interested. I’m sure they were. Right? Like, I’ve had people come to me and they say, “I’m building some restaurant stuff, and I would like to replace QuickBooks. I would like to have my own system.”

Craig: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And they’re pretty smart, they’re pretty capable. They have had software built for them before. They just don’t want to spend that money in the olden times, but now they’re like, “Well, if it’s cheap, I kind of do.” What would you say to them? Would you be like, “Yeah, absolutely.” What would you…?

Craig: I mean, if you’re like me, maybe. But I think for the average person, it’s an impossible lift, still. It’s still really hard.

Paul: How come?

Craig: Because you just need to know what’s happening. Even though we’re not looking at the code, we know how it works. Like, we programmed enough.

Rich: This is what I want to get at.

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: I want to focus on this for a second, because I think people could listen to this and say, “Well, I can do this.” And the truth is—

Paul: Well, then 80% to 95% of AI projects, depending on which depressing study you read, are failing. Right?

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And so it’s like, here we all getting…

Rich: Well, you guys are terrible samples of users doing this stuff.

Paul: But our company is also shipping things to clients.

Rich: Our company? Yeah, because we hire some of the best technologists.

Paul: No, no, but we’re finding ourselves, Craig is finding himself, I’m finding myself in the 15%. Right?

Rich: You are in the 5%, but yes.

Paul: Regardless, I think it’s kind of incumbent on all of us to start explaining why we think we’re there.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Because I think, like, the other 85 are using this stuff and going, “Well, I couldn’t build my own QuickBooks.”

Rich: Well, they hit that wall, right? And the truth is—

Paul: And maybe they need to go learn something for a year if they want that. That’s okay. Like, it’s an okay outcome.

Rich: I think a lot of people won’t. I’m not implying they’re lazy—

Paul: Back to Craig.

Craig: Well, the problem with talking about this, too, is that the tools change so quickly. So I think a year from now, we will have some kind of visual version of this. There’ll be some better overview. You’ll be able to plug and play and drop things. I think, I think we’re in this nascent, weird, you’re still text using text command line. You have to know what Python is. That’s all going to go away. That’s going to be abstracted away, I think pretty quickly. And so it almost doesn’t even make sense to talk about this. But I’ve had so many people respond to the QuickBooks thing and be like, hey, can I have, “Can I have it, can you put it on GitHub?” And I’m like, “No, because it won’t make sense for you.”

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: This is so bespoke.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: This is like a shoe.

Rich: Totally.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: For, like, a weird foot. And your foot definitely doesn’t, isn’t shaped like this foot. It’s not going to help you.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And if you don’t know how to do it, like Brett Victor used to annoy me. Bret Victor is, like, this technologist guy.

Paul: We know, we’ve had him on. Well, I’m explaining for the audience, why is Bret annoying?

Craig: So Brett, Brett is an old friend, and Brett would do these, these demos, right? He’d do these incredible demos.

Rich: Insane demos.

Craig: He’s like, you know, he’s, like, making a music video in real time.

Paul: Oh. And it was like just for people, like, imagine this is just someone, a very nice kind of soft-spoken guy and he’d be like, “Let me show you how the heart of the computer beats.”

Craig: Yes.

Paul: Like, not that he would say those words, but that’s—

Rich: Insane stuff.

Craig: He would kind of say that.

Paul: Yeah. [laughter] And you would just sort of be watching and be, like, this is everything I ever wanted. And then, and then you could never go home and reproduce it.

Craig: Right.

Paul: Because you’re not Bret Victor.

Craig: Because you’re not Bret Victor. And I remember, you know, having coffee with Bret after he gave his talk at Adobe and just being like, “Why don’t you release the source code?” And his response, and I, this is paraphrasing. I don’t know if he said this, he’s like, if I have given you everything you need, if you can’t build from what I’ve shown you?

Rich: Code will not save you.

Craig: Giving you the code will not help you. Which I…

Paul: I swear to God, this is… [laughter]

Rich: AI will not save you.

Paul: Also, every Lisp programmer, like, every, like, it’s just, this is real, man. There’s a class of engineer and they, they tend to be almost suspiciously excellent.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And they are very honest about it. They’re like, yes, I choose a set of tools that really helps me think, but the thinking is the part.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: Okay, so here we are.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: You’re a good coder, I’m a good coder. But you’re not one of those coders. I know this about you. Right?

Craig: No.

Paul: So you were able to do the kind of thing that one of those coders could do. It would be like, “I’m annoyed with my accounting software. Therefore, I shall have my own.”

Craig: Yes.

Paul: And—

Rich: No, I want to correct you.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I don’t think either of you… [laughter]

Paul: That’s a first.

Rich: I don’t know this for sure, I don’t think either of you, nor am I a good coder. I think the skill that we have, which I think if there are moms and dads who want to guide their teenage kids in the future, is that we just understand the contours and the concepts of this stuff. And the truth is, code is very deceptive.

Paul: Honestly, it’s the genealogy of it. Like, we know where it came from.

Rich: That’s right. That’s absolutely helpful because then it makes more sense as you learn it. But I have preteens and they’re gonna go to school and the world is changing really fast. What—are we gonna dive into Python? Python101? That’s not gonna be the relevant thing. What’s gonna be the relevant thing? It’s gonna be these sort of large-shaped objects that seem to snap together that have been snapping together for 50 years. Right? And we understand that intimately. Right? Like, I don’t ask me about React or the latest updates to it. That’s not where I am. Where I am is understanding how those pieces snap together.

Paul: I will ask you about React. [laughter]

Rich: You will not do that.

Paul: I will take you aside right now.

Rich: So zoom out. You’re both actually interesting here. I’m just, I’m just a nobody. But you guys are both interesting in that—

Paul: It’s cool that we’re interesting. [laughter]

Rich: You tend to oscillate from tech to culture.

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: Like, that’s kind of something you two have in common. Zoom out of your project here and just take a look at the world and where the world is going. And what are you seeing? Like, how does this land for you?

Craig: Well, I, at the beginning of this year, I was definitely feeling existential angst, to a degree I haven’t really felt before. And because I think I’m looking at the front line of what AI is eating, and I’m watching the coders write eulogies every day. These people have been coding for 30, 40, 50 years, every single day saying, “It’s done,” and going, wow, okay, what is, what does that mean? And this is, this really feels like the front line of what—other other things are going to fall. It’s really good at programming, because it’s verifiable and yada, yada, yada.

Paul: It is weird to watch a lot of people who previously were posting about their everyday tactical carry, like, turn into a bunch of soggy little babies, but, yes, [laughter] yeah, no, I know. I know what you’re talking about.

Craig: But so many eulogies around this stuff,

Rich: Rush needs to make them an album.

Paul: I think it already did. [laughter]

Craig: Okay. Neil Peart’s gone.

Paul: I think it already made them a lot of albums.

Rich: Okay, so you’re seeing that.

Craig: I’m seeing that. It’s strange, and it really does—and then you look at the broader kind of political issues and everything, you go, I don’t think we contain the genetic code to survive what we’re doing. It just feels like humans aren’t going to make it. And maybe the thing we’re—

Rich: Whoa!

Craig: It just feels like maybe the thing—this is, this is like…

Rich: Should we do the sponsorship first before he says this? [laughter]

Paul: Absolutely!

Rich: What the hell?

Paul: That’s great. I love it. I love it.

Rich: Really, Craig? You went from accounting software to the end of human…

Craig: It kind of, it feels, it feels a little bit like that.

Paul: It’s an incredibly organic jump. [laughter]

Craig: Interesting.

Paul: Absolutely.

Craig: In an interesting way.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: All right, keep going with this thought.

Craig: No, just like, okay, look, obviously nuclear—the way the metaphor I like to use with all this, too—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Obviously, nuclear—

Rich: You better draw this dotted line fast, dude.

Craig: No, I mean, this feels like it’s 1938 and everyone has a nuclear reactor in their backyard. That’s what having Claude Code feels like, at least for—

Paul: Wait, you threw a few things together. Like, like, it’s right before the Anschluss, because nuclear reactors didn’t exist yet. So you’re like, this is like right—

Craig: On the edge of it. This is like, discoveries are happening.

Paul: World War II—

Rich: Yeah. Splitting atoms.

Craig: Put the Nazi stuff aside. [laughter] But it’s like—

Rich: Keep going.

Craig: But it’s like, you know, you know, read The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: I mean, that book is incredible. This is such a compelling, it’s one of the most, you know, driving reads I’ve ever read. This idea that you can take two inert rocks, put them near each other, and you make infinite energy is pretty wild, right?

Rich: Yeah, sure.

Craig: So that’s what we invented. We kind of didn’t know what to do with that. And so we made bombs. And yet in, it’s like, should we have made bombs? You know? And it feels like now we have—

Rich: We made reactors, too.

Craig: We did, but the bombs were the thing that really stood out.

Rich: It is.

Craig: Right? And then now we have sand that can talk to us and give us therapy. And that feels weird as well.

Paul: So what is your favorite CSS framework? [laughter]

Rich: Back to Tailwind. Okay. So…?

Craig: Anyway, it just feels like a really interesting moment where this is a really, I don’t think people understand how powerful this technology is.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: I know whatever all the guys are saying it’s the end of the world or it’s going to create Valhalla or whatever. but I think folks like us who are using it and kind of see, okay, the thing it can do best earliest, which is probably programming.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: You just see how powerful it is.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And you go, and how it’s scaling and how quickly it’s getting better.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And you go, okay, what does that mean if it gets better at everything else, too? And it’s just kind of this weird—

Paul: The reality is, there are two or three cycles at least left in this current kind of technology where it will get dramatically better. We kind of know—

Rich: Seems it.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: Know from the frontier labs that they’re sort of not done with what LLMs can do.

Craig: Yep. Yep.

Paul: And so what it, a year from now, Claude Code will probably be much better. So will Codex.

Rich: I mean, to the point where Anthropic is seriously hesitant about the next-gen version of this stuff. They’re actually only giving it to certain people and they’re being very, very cagey about it. Right? I mean, Mythos and all that.

Paul: So now, obviously the world is ending. And so…

Rich: But you got your—

Craig: A version of the world is ending. A version of the world is ending.

Paul: Let’s not predict the new world, but what would you love to see in a new world that is being reborn after the destruction? [laughter]

Rich: Wait, but no, before you answer that, I mean, first off, let me apologize to the audience about the first 20 minutes of this podcast and talking about accounting software. Now we’re at it. Now we’re doing it.

Paul: Apologize for the last 22. All right, go ahead, go ahead.

Rich: You said the world is ending for this corner.

Craig: No, for this version, this iteration of it. I think we’re…like, and look, I don’t think—

Rich: Which version are we on?

Paul: I don’t know if it is this world 1.0 or 2.0?

Craig: Like, this is 0.001. I think we’re way, we’re not even close to version one.

Paul: Oh, okay.

Craig: No, but for this, for this universe, where I think identity and purpose is so intrinsically tied to a certain kind of, like, white collar work. Right? So it’s, like, I’m an accountant and this is, this is my identity, It’s, I mean, it’s the same thing that happened with blue collar work in America over the last 50 years.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: I just think—

Rich: Or, you know, agrarian society.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So different, so this, we’ve, you know, really doubled down on white collar identity and, you know, sort of like family building and all that stuff. And I just think it’s accountants, lawyers, programmers. I mean, these are the things that just feel like this software, this new intelligence or whatever is acutely great at. Because it’s so verifiable and it’s essentially code. I mean, law is code, you know, that’s what kind of makes it so special.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, let me, let me make a more optimistic counter-argument here.

Craig: Let me reduce the pessimism for a second—

Rich: For a sec—

Craig: Go ahead.

Rich: No, go ahead, finish your thought.

Paul: I don’t want to hear from you anymore. [laughter] I want to hear from Craig.

Craig: But I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

Paul: I think staring into the darkness.

Craig: I have a lot, and, but I think what’s interesting is I think actually on the other side of this is a place of deeper, more interesting meaning where it’s like we’re forced to contend with these questions of why are we here? What are we doing without this kind of scaffolding?

Rich: You think humans are going to do that, Craig?

Craig: I’m saying this is the optimistic view. [laughter] This is the optimistic view. I’m looking at the people who have great abundance.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And we’re all looking at them.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And I don’t think any of us are going, I want to do that or be that.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And so that’s weird that maybe there’s a certain kind of educational component or spiritual component that’s missing. Right?

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: And it may just be in our code. And that’s why I say I don’t know if we get over the finish line here.

Rich: Yeah.

Craig: You know, and maybe our thing is to like just barely get the machines over and we hand off all our knowledge and then we disappear. That could also be, you know, the next hundred-year outcome.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay… [laughter] Okay. No, no, no. I actually, like, okay. I have a different point of view. I know where you’re gonna go. You’re gonna, you’re gonna, but I’ll tell you what?

Rich: You don’t know where I’m gonna go. You don’t speak for me, Paul.

Paul: I’ll speak for you. I’ll tell you what I see.

Rich: Tell me where you go here. Yeah. And then I’ll do, I’ll do me.

Paul: I increasingly am of the opinion that if you come, and if you came into this room ten years from now, this company’s still going, you know, maybe we’ve grown a little bit. And you sit down and you talk to someone and you talk about how they’re using AI, it will be very legible, and many human behaviors will be exactly the same.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: We won’t have achieved AGI, and everyone will be sort of on the cusp of another big thing. Like, I really, I see this one kind of slowly starting to get eaten up by culture.

Craig: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And so I’m just, like, I know where you, I’ve been where you’ve been. Like, I go back and forth on it, just kind of like you do, I’m sure. And just like, is this it? Are we done here? Is this, you know, all those things I learned, do they matter? But every time we pressure test them, just more and more human behavior spills out, and it turns out we’re not going to change. So…

Rich: I mean, that overlaps with my perspective on this, and my perspective—

Paul: Well, you don’t even need to state it then, do you?

Rich: You know, that’s a good point. [laughter] Thanks for listening, everyone.

Paul: How does it overlap? And then we’ll clear it out.

Rich: No, when I got to law school, I was really thrown off by the fact that everything was open book.

Paul: Rich went to law school, by the way.

Rich: I went to law school. [laughter] And it was very strange to me that final exam, the bar exam. The bar exam is open book?

Craig: Yeah.

Rich: Bar exam is open book.

Paul: I didn’t know that. Really?

Rich: Yeah. But it’s useless.

Paul: But it’s a pretty big book.

Rich: No, no, there’s no book. There’s nothing you can take.

Paul: Okay?

Rich: There’s nothing to help you because they’re going to cover the vast array of law, like, of all law.

Paul: That’s what I’m saying. Like, you need a library.

Rich: Wait a minute. No, wait. The bar exam is not open book. Yeah.

Paul: There we go. Thank you.

Rich: All my exams in law school were open book.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Every single one, which was, like, not unusual at all. I think a couple I had legal writing that were not obviously, but most were open book, and it threw me off. And when you look at law, you mentioned the law and how good it is at writing a brief or a memo that’s in legalese. And that makes an argument.

The truth is, the best lawyers are very creative. Now, can the models get there? Let’s park that question for a second. We can always ask that question. But the truth is, the really thoughtful, creative thinkers around all this stuff, and that is where all the quality lies. Like, the best tax lawyers, which are the most expensive lawyers, like, not only know the code, but know how to, like, piece together strategies around tax strategy, for example. Really boring shit. But that is a product not of any knowledge, but a product of their creative and sort of deductive thinking. Right?

And I think you can find that in a lot of things. And I think all of this stuff, I have not seen a lot of quality, frankly. Like, it’s been two years now. Everybody’s just having sex with that prompt box. And I have not seen anything like, wow, that is an amazing output. I’ve seen all kinds of things that look like a lot of the same things.

Craig: Sure.

Rich: But I’ve not seen anything except—and why, Craig. And you know this as well as anyone. And the truth is you have to come at it from such a different place and reset a lot of assumptions to do something exceptional. That’s still the case. Right. Whether it be product or design or anything else. And so I think the limitations we’re hitting are not the systems, they’re the humans falling into a lull here because we’re just blown away by this right now. Right?

Paul: Well, I mean, let’s throw it back to Craig, which is you sat down and consulted with yourself and you made a piece of software that you are using to achieve a goal.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s working because you’re paying your taxes, I’m assuming on time.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: And you’re getting money back and things are working.

Craig: Yeah.

Paul: Okay, so you are in that 5% of people now, and it’s you and, you know, the whole stack. And you’ve been doing it for a while. Right? But let’s just coach people a little bit at the end of this. Right.? If you want to get over from that 5% back into that… If you want to get out of that 95%.

Rich: Well, there’s also the assumption that the 5, the tools will get better, and the 5 will be 10 and will be 15. It’ll probably welcome more people in.

Paul: But I don’t think anybody has an instant answer for this. I don’t either. Where should people start? If you were to sit somebody down who is interested in this world and wanted to do something like what you did, where would you start them?

Craig: Catholic Church, maybe.

Paul: Okay, there you go.

Craig: Try to find God. [laughter]

Rich: It’s hard. I think it’s a hard answer. I think it’s a really hard answer.

Paul: It is. I’m not, I’m throwing it out because I don’t think anybody—I mean, my, I don’t have a starting point right now. Because every time I try to come up with a starting point for someone, it involves taking apart the history of tech over the last 25 years.

Craig: Absolutely. I mean, this is, the starting point is being really curious when you’re young and just being in love with this stuff.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: I mean I just love…

Rich: We’re lucky.

Craig: I just love it. I love. And so for me getting this, this God-like, you know, piece of software that I can go deeper than I’ve ever been able to go building things I’ve wanted to build as quickly as I can build in the exact way I want to build them to me feels, that’s what feels so magical. And that’s what that’s, and that’s why for the, you know, the 95% that aren’t touching all this stuff are using it. It’s hard to explain how special that feels. It would be like you had, you know, you had candlelight and then someone gives you a nuclear reactor and a bunch of stadium lighting and now you’ve, that’s your reality. You can stadium light 24 hours a day without anything.

Rich: We lucked out in a way.

Paul: Without a, without flashlights in the middle, like just straight to—

Craig: Yes, yes.

Paul: Incredible. Yeah, I feel the same. I think we did. I think like, you know, when I think about the domain knowledge necessary for you to pull off what you did, it is web architecture, it is the difference between APIs and websites, it is servers, it is clients, it is Python, it is JavaScript, frontend—like, I’ve got 20 things that you kind of need to conceptually understand in the abstract. And I think, here’s what I do believe. I do believe that that architecture can be taught, but it’s been taught and learned in terms of specific implementations and that’s how people picked it up. You get on a project and we’re going to using Tailwind. What’s Tailwind? Here we go.

Craig: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay? And I think that all that’s going to get really abstract. But teaching that kind of architecture and blueprint for how software comes together, like, nobody does that. That’s not how we teach it.

Rich: Also does a 45-year-old bookkeeper want to go learn that?

Paul: No.

Rich: Right?

Paul: No. But there are plenty of mid-sized orgs that might make them.

Rich: I think organizations is another podcast. We could talk about how orgs can help people as, you know, kind of elevate…

Paul: I was talking to somebody in publishing and it’d be really amazing for them to get more of their backlist exposed so they could do stuff with it, et cetera. Anyway. Okay.

Rich: There’s another option, Paul.

Paul: What’s that?

Rich: You can call Aboard.

Paul: Yeah! Or you could call Craig.

Rich: See what we did there?

Paul: Craig will probably say no, but Aboard will say yes. [laughter]

Rich: This was a really fun conversation, Craig. I think we feel like we could keep talking.

Craig: Yeah. Well, can I just inject something at the end?

Rich: Absolutely, yes.

Craig: Like the, just the, like the negative whatever thinking or like the humanity is coming to—like, I don’t really believe that. I like the messiness of it. I think we’re always gonna be messy. Like you’re saying, Paul, it’s, like, 10 years from now, it’s not gonna be that different. But I do think there is like a fun thought experiment because these things do feel so alien in what you can do.

Paul: Yeah.

Craig: And like you say from, from candlelight to stadium lighting, instantly. Just thinking about, okay, what is, what does that really mean? You know, what does it mean to be given this almost accidentally? Because, you know, this was sort of like accidentally discovered, you know, and ChatGPT’s launch was essentially an accident.

Paul: Yep.

Craig: You know, so anyway, all the, all this stuff kind of coming together. It does feel like we’ve, we’ve stumbled, you know, into the, into the mine, the, you know, the clown car that fell into the mine full of gold or whatever.

Rich: So you are optimistic.

Craig: I am optimistic just in the sense that humans are messy, we’re resilient. And I kind of see a lot of these movements as like natural disasters in a way. So it’s like you’re not going to, you’re not going to like push back and stop what’s happening right now. Like this is going to happen. This is part of like the flow of humanity right now is like these tools are going to come online and things are going to change. But I do think in the end we will find a way out the other side. And I think it will be interesting. And I, and I actually think it’ll be a more interesting version. We’ll be at like.0002 of humanity and I think it will be a potentially better version. That’s, but it could be hundreds of years before…

Paul: We’re still way working on it. We’re pre-alpha. Craig, if somebody wanted to reach out, maybe…

Rich: Or take a walk with you.

Paul: Or become part of a community online that supports you and your work, where would they go?

Craig: They go to craigmod.com.

Paul: Oh, that’s actually really simple to remember. It’s a nice URL.

Rich: Well, it’ll be on the show notes.

Craig: And Special Projects is the membership program.

Paul: Cool.

Craig: And if you join Special Projects, you get discounts on my fancy books. I make beautiful books printed in Japan.

Rich: They are beautiful.

Craig: About these big walks.

Paul: Very, very pretty.

Craig: And you can also join The Good Place, which is my members-only Twitter, which, Ted Danson is the logo. His head.

Rich: Don’t tell me Ted Danson’s in it. [laughter]

Craig: He’s not. He might be lurking. I don’t…

Rich: How many people are in The Good Place?

Craig: Lots of people. I don’t, I don’t look at numbers. I don’t, I don’t ever look at my membership—

Rich: But it’s active.

Craig: Oh, it’s super active. And they’re doing, like, Good Place meetups around the world. It’s cool. It’s a cool community. It’s like, like, it’s, it’s good. It’s good stuff.

Rich: Very cool.

Craig: It’s like early Internet vibes.

Paul: It’s a good thing you’re so extroverted. [laughter]

Rich: All right, Craig, thanks again. This was a great conversation.

Paul: Yeah, this was great.

Rich: All right. Have a lovely week.

Paul: Oh, and hello@aboard.com if you need us. Bye!

Rich: Bye.

Craig: Bye.

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