Intelligence, Artificial and Otherwise

January 9, 2024  ·  24 min 6 sec

Rich and Paul ring in 2024 assessing the biggest technological development of last year, this year, and possibly many future years to come: Generative AI. Why did AI truly find a mainstream foothold in 2023—and how is the space going to evolve in the coming months? Plus: They engage in some (corporate) roleplay, and get really into character.

Show Notes

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Transcript

Paul Ford: Richard, Happy New Year.

Rich Ziade: Happy New Year, my friend.

Paul: So, we should—

Rich: Who are you?

Paul: I am Paul Ford. I am the president and co-founder of Aboard, aboard.com, an amazing tool for organizing all the world’s data, including your own.

Rich: I’m Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard and CEO of Aboard.

Paul: Chief executive officer.

Rich: And this is the Aboard Podcast. Welcome. Happy New Year. Happy 2024, even though we’re only five days in.

Paul: Let’s play a theme song.

[intro music]

Paul: All right, Rich. Let’s just get into it. Nobody needs to hear about our holidays. We should tell people, though, we’re in an office. We moved.

Rich: We did.

Paul: There might be a little echo, it’s kind of cavernous and weird in here.

Rich: It’s exciting to be in a different place, and to go to work, and to put pants on.

Paul: This is extremely fluorescent, is what I’d say.

Rich: It’s extremely fluorescent.

Paul: I love an office. I love it. I love a water fountain.

Rich: Mmm hmmm.

Paul: I like a coffee machine. It just makes me feel like I’m… It actually really helps me work, so I’m glad to be here.

Rich: I’m pretty convinced that KIND Bars would never sell if they weren’t laying around offices.

Paul: Oh, there is no context where that comes home.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: No, because think about it—what would you take home and eat? You would take home—something with a little more protein, a little chewier.

Rich: They have those other ones. I forget what they’re called. It just tastes like concrete.

Paul: No, office food is basically compressed sawdust and coffee.

Rich: It’s not supposed to be enjoyable.

Paul: That’s why we’re here! So anyway, look—what is the theme going to be this year? For the tech industry? For the world? Well for the world, [laughs] let’s cover the world in another podcast.

Rich: In the past I’ve talked about how technology—new technology, like, disruptive technology—sort of goes through an overreach phase where it’s sort of clumsy and not ready.

Paul: Mmm hmmm.

Rich: Fails, and then comes roaring back and gets implemented well.

Paul: I mean, this actually became—the Pets.com dog hand puppet became emblematic.

Rich: RealVideo—

Paul: Mmm hmmm.

Rich: And RealPlayer predates YouTube.

Paul: Probably predates the birth of some of our listeners—

Rich: Fine.

Paul: —but yeah, these were, you’ve probably seen the Pets.com dog because it became emblematic of the dot-com crash in the 2000s.

Rich: That’s right. That’s right.

Paul: It was this little dog that was like, “I’m gonna deliver your pet food.” And then it crashed, and everybody was like, “Thank God that’s over. Nobody’s gonna get pet food in the mail.”

Rich: The Apple Newton and the Treo. There was something called the Treo, which was a big screen with a stylus and a keyboard at the bottom.

Paul: So everybody gets excited. They see the new paradigm. The new paradigm is they’re gonna bring pet food to your house. You’re gonna use a handheld computer instead of a big computer.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You know? And everybody is like, “All right, cool. I’ll give it a go.” And then it doesn’t quite line up. Doesn’t work the way that everybody was hoping.

Rich: That’s right. You know, there’s another one that’s shocking how it came roaring back. It’s, like, the on-demand delivery. In the early 2000s, late ’90s —

Paul: Oh, Kozmo.com.

Rich: Kozmo, and others, there were others…

Paul: Webvan.

Rich: Webvan. They all folded fast. And then, years later, now DoorDash—if you order lunch, they’re like, “Hey listen, I can stop by the hardware store.”

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Rich: “I can get you what you need.” So the on-demand economy of, like, just a few taps of your phone came roaring back.

Paul: Now, you know what you nailed there, though—see how they’re all connected? You needed the enabling technology of the smartphone to really get the on-demand economy to get moving.

Rich: There’s pieces that have to come together.

Paul: And the smartphone wasn’t quite ready until the iPhone, like the Treo and the Newton, like, they were too clunky, they didn’t really—and you needed the internet and mobile internet to really line up.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: So what you see is everybody can see the future pretty well, actually.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But the pieces and the infrastructure don’t work in such a way that a typical human being picks it up and goes, “Ah, you know what? I’m in the mood for Indian food right now.”

Rich: They’re just not ready yet, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And RealPlayer, it was great tech. They had tons of engineers thinking about compression, because the internet wasn’t fast enough.

Paul: I mean, Adobe was the first real video platform after that, right? And then YouTube kind of came and took all.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: But what did YouTube do? It created the really simple web portal, where you could watch Flash videos, and then eventually they were like, “Actually we’ll just do our own kind of video here. We’ll do regular web video. Off we go.”

Rich: And so where are we today? We are in the sort of hangover after the lurching forward of AI?

Paul: That’s right. First of all, let’s talk about the grisly, bleeding elephant in the room. Because people are still recovering from crypto. I don’t see—I bet no one’s going to say the word “crypto” between now and, like, July.

Rich: I, I think that’s right.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I think that’s, like, talking about World War I.

Paul: I mean, we gotta go check out Andreessen Horowitz’s website and see if those white papers are, like, still up.

Rich: They might redirect you. [laughing]

Paul: Yeah, to the AI— [laughing]

Rich: To a—

Paul: To the AI portfolio.

Rich: To the AI portfolio and the AI initiative and the AI fund that they’re gonna…

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s just…that’s life.

Paul: That’s, that’s—

Rich: It’s all good.

Paul: Well, no, I think it is—but that, that goes to a thing that you were just talking about, right? Which is these very important, very wealthy people publish white papers defining an incredible new paradigm.

Rich: [dramatically into the mic] This time, it’s different.

Paul: Get. In. Line. Because it is coming, and it’s happening. And what you notice is that when it doesn’t hit for them, the consequences are very low. They just publish a new white paper.

Rich: It’s very low. And look, their game, the game the play, is a 5-percent hit-rate game.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: They’re not supposed to hit home run after home run. That’s not how it works. Innovation happens in a very grisly, scorched-earth sort of way. That’s just how it goes.

Paul: We have lived through two unbelievable paradigm shifts in the way that humans communicate. One is the internet itself, coming on the heels of, like, the phone system, which, I mean—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It had been fifty, seventy years before you’d seen anything quite that dramatic. And then the second is the miniaturization of technology leading to mobile. And mobile is really what made it from like 100 million people, kind of nerdy—

Rich: To everybody.

Paul: To the entire population of the earth in time, right?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So, you know, they’re saying, “Here comes another one.”

Rich: Here comes another one, and it’s always overreaching, and a bit awkward.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Because it’s a lot of tech… Tech that is really disruptive can feel very threatening. Like, it can feel like, “Oh, we’re coming for your children with this one. This is gonna change everything.”

Paul: Well, and they get very invested in that narrative. Crypto was perfect here. Because it was, like, “We’re coming for money.”

Rich: Yeah, like, fiat currency.

Paul: And everybody was like, “Oh my God! I have money.”

Rich: And look, I think part of it is enthusiasm, and part of it is, look, people don’t often talk about it, and we talk about it a lot, because we were in that business—when tech lands with something disruptive, there’s an optimism and an enthusiasm around it. But then on the other side of, there’s this sort of secondary economy that kicks in around the anxiety and nervousness around it. And that’s consulting firms, technologies to help you defend what you currently have, rather than get disrupted. There’s all kinds of other, this shadow growth kicks in—

Paul: Well, where did we live? We lived in this very particular place, which was we were quite soothing, but we—essentially, we tried to be, like, good surgeons who were like, “It’s a, it’s a pretty bad mass, but it’s gonna, we’re gonna get it out of there.”

Rich: Yeah, and a lot of times, people would come and say, “Should I worry about this?” We had a lot of meetings where people clearly weren’t gonna hire us, but they wanted to know if they should worry about some thing.

Paul: They would also come to us with millions of dollars in sunk costs and say, “Did I make a mistake?”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And often we had to say, “Yeah, kinda. Sorry.”

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: Correct. So where are we now? If you drew the story arc out, it has been—

Paul: Well, let’s characterize where things are, right? So I think you have the GPTs of the world, the chatbots, the image—you have content generation. And then you have a kind of, like, deep analysis, machine learning, and predictive model, sort of back to the world of statistics plus lots of machine learning—

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Where you’re saying things like, “I think we should dig an oil well there.” They’ve been doing that for a long time.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Or, or, or more sort of confusing and nefarious—”That guy, I looked at his picture, he looks like a criminal.”

Rich: Right.

Paul: That’s bad, when the robot does that, right?

Rich: Right, right.

Paul: So there’s a lot of data analysis, and there’s a lot of content generation, and those seem to be the two areas that have caught everybody’s eye. The most specific one being the company OpenAI, which had a lot of drama at the end of the year. Sam Altman, the CEO, got pushed out and pulled back in. Which has two amazing products. It has a lot of products, but like, ChatGPT, where you can literally kind of ask it to do anything and it often will do pretty well, like, you know, “Write me a research report,” or, “Make me a list.”

Rich: I think that’s the, that’s, that’s the…machine learning has been around a long time. AI in various incarnations has been around a long time. A lot of scientists, a lot of big thinkers are trying, have been trying to crack it. I think the thing that OpenAI stumbled onto, I don’t think they knew, that it was going to explode the way it did, is like, eh, I think Altman might get credit for this, because he likes to sort of throw a bomb in the room—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: —and see what happens. I think they put this thing out, and it just, it resonated in a, in a very massive way, because it was just consumer-grade.

Paul: He’s a real product person. He pushed it over the wall. I’ve gotta give him credit, too—he’s a little bit of, he’s very Silicon Valley, I go up and down on him, but just today, he tweeted out, like, “We need to show concern for our Muslim colleagues as well.” He’s a Jewish person.

Rich: I saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Like, he’s…he actually is trying to be a leader in the moment as a thoughtful technologist.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Which is hard to do. It’s not an industry that lends itself to that.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: So shout-out to Sam Altman, I hope he’s OK, doing good.

Rich: God bless.

Paul: Yeah. Great guy.

Rich: So this thing comes out, and it’s sort of an enthusiastic intern, and it’ll, it’ll push, it’ll ans—it’ll never say, “I don’t know.”

Paul: ChatGPT—we didn’t also mention DALL-E, which, like, Midjourney is, like, the image generator. But yes—

Rich: There’s a bunch of image generator startups—

Paul: But let’s stay focused on ChatGPT.

Rich: Let’s stay focused on ChatGPT, and what you have is, you know, this thing that came out, and it’s like, “Holy moly, can you tell me about…” I have a friend, let me tell you an extreme example of how this thing can be helpful.

Paul: OK.

Rich: His architecture firm does mostly construction in Africa, in different countries.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And he doesn’t know the regulations of each country versus another country in Africa.

Paul: Of course.

Rich: And so he’s, like, “Write me out a proposal for a construction project for a strip mall in this town in this African country. And make sure you think about the local regulations and guidelines.”

Paul: And look, I’m sure he has to check the work.

Rich: He definitely has to check the work. But he fell out of his chair.

Paul: It’s the classic intern. When something does 30, 40 percent of the work, even if it’s bad, you’re started. You can see a lot more.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: I don’t think people understand that. Like, I’ve been using these tools a ton, and we’ve been figuring out ways to integrate them into our product. They’re great. They’re actually great, they’re novel. They have a lot of problems. They can be problematic. They can, there’s a list of reasons that they are dangerous and bad and evil, but they can also help you make a proposal for a shopping mall in an African country where you’re not spending a lot of time, most of the time. Windows can’t do that.

Rich: Neither can Google.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: By the way.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Neither can Google.

Paul: No.

Rich: And a lot of the steps got eliminated. I, he could search Google, open up some PDFs, read some articles, and cobble it together. Because by the way, these AI engines, that’s what they’re doing. They’re taking information that’s on the internet.

Paul: The way I think about them, actually, is so—because you know, you know what’s funny? These models aren’t that big. They’re in gigabytes. They could fit on thumb drives.

Rich: Right.

Paul: What they do is they go read the whole internet, and they compress it. It’s like a zip file.

Rich: Right.

Paul: When you’re doing this, you’re actually saying, “Hey, go find me the zip file, the, like, 20K file that’s all about African regulations for shopping malls—”

Rich: Right.

Paul: “—and go ahead and unzip it.” And it’s like a JPG, it’s really lossy.

Rich: It keeps going.

Paul: But it’s like a really crappy JPG that’s been glitched, like, you know, glitch compressed, like, 500 times. You can still see the picture of the little boy with the lollipop.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right? That’s what you’ve got. Like, think about it is as, like, an incredibly crappy image that’s been un, that’s like, too, too compressed, but you can still see what the picture is.

Rich: And I think what’s interesting about this is there’s another killer feature that came out of the box here that I don’t think anyone expected. It’s the idea of throwing errors has kind of been tossed aside, and has been replaced with infinite confidence. To interface with something that is unabashedly confident and enthusiastic and kind of yappy?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Is bizarre, to humans. Humans can’t believe this thing is kind of giving it a go.

Paul: I love that about it. It’s not good or healthy. [laughing] It’s not necessarily good for society. I’ve actually, this is, I’m writing about that right now. Its shamelessness is very appealing to me after decades of apologetic products.

Rich: Do you know what it is?

Paul: What?

Rich: It’s sales.

Paul: It is!

Rich: It’s like a really yappy salesperson.

Paul: Oh, and it’ll do anything to keep the conversation going. But it’s actually just kind of, it continually is uncompressing all the human knowledge it’s squeezed into seven gigabytes.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: So now, OK, hold on. So we know this is out there, it is a big deal. It’s a bigger deal to me than crypto from a pure computing point of view. Like, I get that crypto was a huge, had a huge economic impact, and it had this sort of interesting math, but it never emerged as a really interesting technology for me. It was a very interesting concept.

Rich: I mean, the practical use side of it never took.

Paul: Well, because to me, technology is about making tools cheaper and more accessible.

Rich: Of course.

Paul: OK so, this makes it really cheap and easy to do it—and actually, ChatGPT, there’s another one called Mixtral, M-I-X-T-R-A-L, which is as good as ChatGPT 3.5, and it’s, like, a 7-gig download and you can run it in your terminal.

Rich: That’s crazy.

Paul: Right? So, like, or 15 gig, or whatever. But it’s not big, and so, like, this world is getting cheap. It is getting accessible. And GPT can, ChatGPT tends to time out after, you know, like, it’ll give you ten list items, and then you’ve kind of got to beg it to give you more sometimes.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it’s gonna be on your phone, it’s gonna be on your computer—

Rich: Oh yeah.

Paul: —and you’re gonna say, “Do a thousand of that for me. Work all night for me.”

[interstitial music]

Rich: All right, Paul. We talked about anxiety earlier. I love anxiety.

Paul: Yeah, me, me, too. It’s, it’s really something that’s helped my life.

Rich: Let’s roleplay.

Paul: O… [laughs] K?

Rich: Please put on this—

Paul: [laughing] No!

Rich: —nun’s uniform.

Paul: No! No!

Rich: No, just kidding.

Paul: No!

Rich: I’ll be the CEO.

Paul: OK.

Rich: I’m calling you in.

Paul: OK. Hi, how are you doing? What am I?

Rich: Paul—walk with me?

Paul: [laughing] OK, but what’s my job?? Where am I??

Rich: The black car’s downstairs.

Paul: No, no, but you have to tell me who I am!

Rich: You’re the CIO.

Paul: Oh, God.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: [defeated] All right.

Rich: Paul, listen. I, I’m concerned about something. “OK, should we put something on the calendar.” Say that.

Paul: …OK. Should we put…OK, Jeff, should we put something on the calendar?

Rich: No, no. Walk with me.

Paul: All right.

Rich: Car’s downstairs.

Paul: All right. Hold on. Let me—

Rich: Are you free now?

Paul: I guess…what choice do I have? You’re the CEO.

Rich: All right. Meet me in the, meet me by the elevators in three minutes.

Paul: OK. Three minutes. OK. Now we should, honestly, if this was true, like, podcast vérité, we would have a three-minute silent pause.

[three-second silent pause]

Rich: We’re not gonna wait three minutes.

Paul: [laughing] No, but it would be amazing.

Rich: It would be pretty amazing.

Paul: It would be pretty good. I’d be really happy to, to suddenly bring that into the marketing podcast for our startup.

Rich: We’re now in the lobby.

Paul: OK, hey!

Rich: By the elevator, on the 29th floor.

Paul: Oh hey, Carl. How’re you doing?

Rich: Hey, Paul.

Paul: Hey. No, you’re Jeff, I was just waving at Carl.

Rich: OK.

Paul: OK.

Rich: Uh…uh…

Paul: You asked me to roleplay. I’m gonna take this seriously.

Rich: Take it seriously.

Paul: Mmm hmmm.

Rich: Um…listen.

Paul: What’s my name?

Rich: Stan.

Paul: Do I like coffee?

Rich: You love coffee.

Paul: I’m Stan, I like coffee—

Rich: Not only do you love coffee, you grind it in the office.

Paul: [laughing] Oh, yes. I have a Chemex—

Rich: [laughing] You’re that guy—

Paul: Like, by my desk—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. All right, all right. Jeff, go ahead. I’m Stan. Tell me what you, what do you know

about AI?

Rich: Stan, what’s going on here?

Paul: About AI?

Rich: I mean…

Paul: Well, what business are we in, Jeff. You have to tell me, as CEO.

Rich: We are in a…we…I am the CEO of a retail franchise called…Bath, Bed & Beyond.

Paul: Wow.

Rich: Bath Beyond the Bed.

Paul: [laughing] OK. OK, Great.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: OK, here we are.

Rich: Listen, I just, I was just reading up, and our competitors, they’ve got sales assistants popping up, right there in the app.

Paul: They do, Jeff. They do.

Rich: And…and everybody’s saying, oh, AI’s changing how people engage with the customers. And I also heard—and I don’t know this for sure—but there’s intel out there that the supply chain bits are getting optimized by AI across town at the competitors. What the hell—what’s your plan here, Jeff?

Paul: Jeff, I’ve got great—

Rich: I’m sorry. What’s your plan here, Stan?

Paul: Stan. Jeff, I’ve got great news. I’ve been working on this—

Rich: Push one, please, on the elevator. I’m leaving.

Paul: OK.

Rich: The building.

Paul: Here we go. [laughing] Uh, at this point, someone walks into the elevator, and it becomes really uncomfortable.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But anyway. OK, so obviously, I’m a good CIO. So I’ve been staying up abreast of this by reading CIO Magazine and having my team report to me with decks.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: But I, too, am a little bit overwhelmed. Now I’m not gonna tell Jeff that. Here’s what I’m gonna tell Jeff. I’m gonna say, A) we’re on it, B) it’s real, people are using it, C) I gotta tell you, we’re a bigger company than most, and I really have been taking both, we’ve been doing a couple little pilot projects, experimenting with chatbots and so on. I can tell you, the risks are real here. And everybody, all these really early adopters, they’re smaller than us, and they’re gonna get bit. Did you see what happened with that Chrysler dealership the other day?

Rich: No, what happened?

Paul: Somebody convinced the bot to sell them a car for $1, and then they put it on social media, and made a huge joke out of it.

Rich: Ohhhh, boy!

Paul: Because all they’re doing, all these people are doing, I gotta tell you, here’s the good news. Everyone is simply stealing and white-labeling and wrapping the programming interfaces from the big players. Nobody in our space is able to go and run their own sort of AI methodology just yet, because it’s, it requires million-dollar employees and it requires $2 million to run and create one of these distinctive models.

Rich: Stan. They’re doing exciting things across town. Do I need to be worried?

Paul: Yes.

Rich: All right. Here’s what I need from you, and this is the Jeff CEO Move. We’re gonna put something on the calendar ten days from now. I need to see a plan, I need to see a budget.

Paul: Great.

Rich: End scene.

Paul: Now, let’s be clear—

Rich: End scene! Usually, Stan would run and call McKinsey.

Paul: Yes. But they’re drunk. [laughing]

Rich: They also— [laughing]

Paul: They’re recovering—

Rich: Guys.

Paul: —from…yeah.

Rich: You wanna really take advantage of this incredibly wise podcast? They don’t know anything either.

Paul: No. Well the reality is, if you want to get value of McKinsey related to all of this—yeah, they don’t know anything, it’s true. Go and just ask them to pitch you an AI-related project. They’ll send, like, 10 people to work incredibly hard. And then right as you’re about to sign the contract to keep going, develop, like, a problem with your wrist and say, let’s pick this up in a few weeks.

Rich: It is, it is a wild time right now. Because there’s anxiety.

Paul: Mmm hmmm.

Rich: There’s no real rulebook yet. There is no…playbook.

Paul: Back to the earlier part, Richard, which is, like, the infrastructure isn’t there, right? It’s not in your phone. The chat interface is kind of balky.

Rich: There’s a lot up in the air.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: There’s a lot up in the air.

Paul: There’s lots of users. There’s many more people using and playing with stuff like this who are kind of figuring it out as they go than there used to be.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it’s not at that point, like, remember when, you know, Safari on the iPhone meant that you could browse the web in your pocket and it looked pretty good, you could read the paper.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right? And that was, like, you could zoom in and out on text. That was exciting.

Rich: I think we’re touching on something pretty important here, and I think we should follow up, by the way, in a future podcast, not the next one, because I don’t want this to just be the AI podcast. In a future podcast, where Stan and Jeff get together, we’ll reverse roles, and let me show you the plan and the budget.

Paul: That sounds great.

Rich: I think what’s so interesting about what’s happening right now is we built something that people connected with very directly without any intermediaries. And now businesses, who, most businesses exist and make a lot of money because they are intermediaries.

Paul: Mmm hmmm.

Rich: Want to know how they get, get back into that conversation.

Paul: That is a very good point. AI, sort of like Amazon sort of took over the conversation.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: AI owns the conversation.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: As a concept. That is what a business person should actually be anxious about.

Rich: I think that’s right. And I think, in a future podcast, we should talk about that plan, and that budget.

Paul: All right, good. You know, it’s good. Everybody should, you know, go present to their CEO. All right, so. The other thing is, we’re pretty engaged with AI at Aboard. We’re doing more and more with it. And if you check out, take a look at our Twitter account, send an email to hello@aboard.com, or look at our newsletter archives blog post. You can see I’ve created an AI board and invited people to it. There’s like 20 people in it, and we’re chatting and adding links and kind of trying to understand this whole world.

Rich: Tons of great resources in there, actually. If you want to watch, like, if you want to, like, kick back, watch some YouTube videos that will get you up to speed, it’s a great way to do it.

Paul: I’m starting to tag the videos as intros so people can kind of, like, find them more quickly.

Rich: Awesome.

Paul: It’s fun to have a bunch of people in the tool. So anyway, check it out, aboard.com. Come on in, look at our blog, we will help you figure out AI, hopefully.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Because we’re a good research tool. We’re not just for tracking links. We’re for talking about things, we’re about organizing and adding structure to data, which happened to be links, and that’s sort of going to be a big theme of this year…

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So get ready!

Rich: And I hope everyone has a healthy, happy, stable 2024.

Paul: What are your, what are your fitness goals for this year.

Rich: [exhales] You know, I can’t run anymore, Paul. We’re not gonna end the podcast on my bad knees. That’s not what we’re gonna do.

Paul: You know my wife went to the doctor, and you know, we’ve both been getting more healthy, and he’s like, “Just so you know, I love that you’re walking a lot. I don’t want you to run. I don’t want anyone to run starting in their forties.”

Rich: Well, we’re in the city, it’s worth pointing out.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: If you have a track—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: —that has cushy, a cushy track, or grass, it’s better than the concrete pounding on your knees. I don’t do that, I don’t do that. I work out pretty consistently, and…

Paul: Yeah, you’re, it’s true. Rich, Rich comes in at 10 after working out for about an hour and a half every day.

Rich: I don’t, uh, like the New Year’s resolution thing, I find very depressing…

Paul: I have, I did do a little bit of a flip. I’ve been, um, getting up every morning and hitting the rowing machine. It’s been helping.

Rich: Nice. Nice. That’s great. Rowing machines are great.

Paul: Well, I wanna get—I wanna get these pecs just right, you know?

Rich: As you should.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: As you should.

Paul: Yeah.

[outro music]

Rich: Subscribe, let the world know. Get on our newsletter, and check out Aboard, at Aboard.com. Thank you for listening to the Aboard podcast. Happy New Year again.

Paul: We love you.

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye!