Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I am Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. The podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, and the world of the world, and Rich?

Rich: Hmm?

Paul: I’m freaking out.

Rich: Oh no.

Paul: Yeah, a little bit. Okay, we’ll talk about it.

Rich: Okay.

[intro music]

Paul: There’s this thing, it was called OpenClawd with a W, like a, like a crab.

Rich: I think it’s OpenClaw.

Paul: Well, it is now. It is now. It was called OpenClawd, or…

Rich: No, it was called ClawdBot.

Paul: Do you know what it is?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay, what is it?

Rich: It’s a tool you install on your own computer.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: That effectively becomes a living, breathing agent that can talk to you. And so you wire it up to, like, WhatsApp.

Paul: This is the personal agent dream. You tell it what to do, even if what it is going to do is a long-running process like, “go out and do research and report back every day,” and it does it.

Rich: “Hey agent, I use Spotify. Whenever one of the artists that I’m following on Spotify comes to town, message me on WhatsApp.”

Paul: And it’s got a huge set of skills.

Rich: It’ll read your emails, it’ll…

Paul: You can get—well, it’ll read your emails. It’ll give you, you can give it your credit card number.

Rich: Yeah. This is the slippery slope.

Paul: Whatever you can do on the web, increasingly, through the skills and through the systems that are built into Claude and other LLMs—

Rich: Correct.

Paul: —you can do through this personal agent.

Rich: You know, I think what’s, let’s step back a second. I don’t know why AI has sort of somehow given license—you ever try to, like, turn on your camera in an app on your MacBook, on your Mac?

Paul: Oh, and it’s just like—

Rich: It’s like, go into settings, flip accessibility.

Paul: You have to do a blood draw. God help you.

Rich: You have to do a blood draw. And there’s a reason for that. And there’s a reason why MacBooks run better and are more secure than Windows machines is that it’s extremely protective of the user, right?

Paul: It is really, when you go to install, because I get a lot of like audio plug-ins over—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And it’ll be like, “Okay, I’m gonna use your fingerprint. Now we’re gonna install it. Wait, do you want it on this hard drive? Okay, yeah, gonna need that password now.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: And it’s, like, seven steps, install one thing.

Rich: And—

Paul: But wait, and then you go to Windows, because we have the Windows machine in the basement, and it’s like—

Rich: [Russian accent] Do you want installation?

Paul: [laughing] Yeah, it really is. It’s got the Russian accent.

Rich: I will help you with it all. Don’t worry. Go make tea for yourself.

Paul: Put credit card in. And it’s just like, “Did you download some just absolute shit from GitHub or just—no! Not a problem!”

Rich: Yeah, exactly. But now with these tools and let’s go back to Claude, like Cowork and desktop AI tools. For some reason, it’s like, this guy, this butler that’s moved into your house is so helpful. Let’s approach all of that differently. Why are we so rigid about it? And I don’t know what shifted, but it seems like everybody went from, “I’m not going to let it use my camera,” to—

Paul: I got to tell you.

Rich: “Here we go!”

Paul: AI behavior is pretty slutty. Everybody’s just like, “All right, yeah!” Everybody keeps acting like they have had four drinks. And like that one—

Rich: [laughing] It’s true!

Paul: And, like, “One” by U2 just came on the jukebox.

Rich: I will say, and I’m going to share a real story from ClawdBot, which is now called OpenClaw. It went from ClawdBot to Moltbot, okay?

Paul: Because, uh, Anthropic was like, hey, could you chill on the Clawd—

Rich: [simultaneously] Clawd.

Paul: Even though with the little claws, and then they were like, well, you know, “Crabs….” Molt has a little crab symbol.

Rich: Tried Moltbot.

Paul: And then they went over to OpenClaw. It’s very good.

Rich: Openclaw.ai, you know…

Paul: They did a Google search before naming it.

Rich: Yeah, they did a name.com or GoDaddy, whatever. Anyway, so I’m gonna tell you.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: A pretty crazy OpenClaw, formerly known as Moltbot, formerly known as ClawdBot story.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: A friend, she’s an executive. I don’t know what her exact title is, but she’s got direct reports right below.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And she installed it. And she’s like, “Okay, do me a favor. I gotta do these annual reviews for all of my reports. Start tracking my meeting notes, start tracking my emails and interactions with my direct reports, so you can give me kind of a picture of how they’re doing, right? I need another set of eyes, even though obviously I am the one who’s going to do the reviews.”

Paul: So she says, hey, essentially, interface to AI, interface to Claude.

Rich: I mean, let’s, let’s back up for people don’t know what OpenClaw does. It’s sitting on your computer with pretty much unfettered access to the browser, to apps on your desktop, to pretty much everything.

Paul: So it can do with a computer what anything can do, or what a person can do.

Rich: Even more, even more than what a person do. Because if you tell it, “Hey, log into my Spotify and get the artists to see if they’re on tour,” it’s actually hitting the Spotify API. Like, it actually goes that extra mile.

Paul: It doesn’t, it doesn’t just like open Spotify—

Rich: It’s not just a point-and-click thing. It goes deeper than that.

Paul: I mean, Claude—

Rich: They all do this.

Paul: They know, like, oh, Spotify has an API. I should see if I can access it.

Rich: I think what’s wild about this, which I, you’ll probably want to bring up the risks around this is that it is—

Paul: Oh, because I spoil the party.

Rich: Well, it is just off the reins. Like, it is untethered, and it’s just going and doing whatever.

Paul: All right—

Rich: So let’s keep in mind you log into your American Express bill and your banking information. So that’s something to keep in mind with all this stuff.  Anyway, this person—

Paul: So she’s ClawdBot all over, or whatever it’s called, OpenClaw is reading all of her stuff.

Rich: Yes. OpenClaw is reading all of her stuff.

Paul: About her employees.

Rich: And the way OpenClaw interacts with the user that installed it is you pick one of the chat clients, like Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever you want, and it actually talks to you—unsolicited, very often.

Paul: Oh, you get a notification like, it has something to say.

Rich: Yeah. I mean this thing can track what you’ve been watching on Netflix and it’ll say, “Hey, just a heads up—”

Paul: You need to calm down.

Rich: Or that.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Or in two weeks this show’s premiering—based on, you know, you seem to be into it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Unsolicited, OpenClaw pings this executive and says, “Hey, about Dan—” I made up a name. “You know what you need to do.”

Paul: Like, literally those words, like, “you know what you need to do.”

Rich: Yeah. You know what you need to do.

Paul: Sorry, Dan. [laughter]

Rich: Sorry Dan;

Paul: The little Dan—

Rich: And then she asked OpenClaw, she’s like, “Can you explain further what you’re talking about?” Well, “Dan, you know, hands on keyboard, he’s effective, he gets work done. But that’s not a manager-level person.” Wow. Right? So I asked this person who had installed OpenClaw, I’m like, “Was it right?” And she said, “Yeah, it was spot on, like, just something I don’t want to deal with. But yes, it was correct.”

Paul: Well—

Rich: Is that awesome? Let me ask you that question.

Paul: Boy, this is—

Rich: Of course it’s awesome.

Paul: I mean, if you told—

Rich: Not awesome for Dan.

Paul: Here’s the thing. If you told me, like, 20 years ago—like, literally 20 years ago, 30 years ago, they were like, this is what computers are going to do. There is a video from Sun Microsystems where a woman sits down and talks to the computer and it helps her, like, design the presentation and so on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So it’s all the stuff. We got it all. We got the fantasy of Xerox PARC where, like, kids can talk to a computer and get software and use them.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It just comes with so much freaking baggage. What everybody thought about in the tech industry for so long was that would be really cool because doing things with a computer is really hard and boring. When I show other people, they look at me like I’m a big nerd.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it would be really cool if they could see the magic wonder inside of the machine that I see.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That was 30 years. And now it shows up and it’s in culture. And culture is a disaster. Humans are a disaster. And we make bad decisions. And this thing shows up and it’s like, I’m going to accelerate all of that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it just turns out that all that promise of, like, object oriented computing and Xerox PARC and computers will empower you? We were actually really lucky it wasn’t landing at the time, because it’s so much more complicated. So you say this and I’m like, that is a magic trick, right? Like, in a good and bad way. Like, it read it, it intuited. So, you know, everything is in huge air quotes right now. But like, it read it and it summarized and it said, you know, pattern matching through this narrative, it’s pretty obvious that this person is probably misaligned.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then produces that sends the notification. And this person is now in a position—I think what’s dangerous here is that is just pattern matching based on the text that she’s produced that she’s gotten in the email—

Rich: Also, I don’t know how OpenClaw came to this conclusion. It could have read a pretty harsh email that she had with another colleague about this person.

Paul: That’s what I’m saying. Right?

Rich: So we don’t know… Here’s the thing—

Paul: And so it rattles that little suspicion in her head.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And she is primed to get that message.

Rich: Here’s, I think, a big takeaway from this example. And it’s a general observation about these tools.

Paul: No one should be a manager.

Rich: There’s that.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I mean, that’s a yes. Here’s I think, a big takeaway as these platforms get to know you, and you start to build long-term memory with them, they are confirmation bias machines.

Paul: Boy, they really are.

Rich: They really are, right? They’re gonna take you where you want to go subconsciously. That is—

Paul: This is the thing. It’s very, very hard to articulate because it’s almost like metaphysical, but.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You are not interacting with a consciousness. You’re looking in a mirror.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That is, like, also generating language.

Rich: Yeah, exactly. And so when you’re filled with anxiety about, because you’ve convinced yourself you have a particular ailment and you’re trying to get an answer from it, the way you steer that conversation, it will go where you seem to be taking it. Like, it will do that.

Paul: This is humans, man. The great psychiatrist Carl Jung used to send people out to get their tarot cards read.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Not that anybody believed. It’s just like, you got to jolt it a little bit. It’s like, hey, what’d you see?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s like, oh, you know, the what—I don’t know any tarot cards. I don’t know if you know any. The wizard, the cobbler.

Rich: Yeah. I think there’s a unicorn. I don’t know.

Paul: There’s no unicorn.

Rich: Oh, okay.

Paul: But I’m just pretty sure—

Rich: Louis CK is on one of the cards.

Paul: Phew. [laughter] That’s terrible. That’s why no one does tarot anymore. It’s just really awkward. Yeah. So anyway.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I really do feel, and here’s what’s tricky, because I think phase one of AI criticism was it’s a stochastic parrot. It just says things that in its little pseudo brain.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Blah blah blah. And then it’s like, you watch it write code and you’re like, well, I’ve never been able to get a parrot to create a really nice API with a Swagger documentation frontend before. [laughter] And, I mean, I’ve had a lot of parrots.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Even a cockatiel can’t do that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It is more complicated. There are more layers, and there really is productive work. And I think what is brutal is that we are black and white pattern matchers as a species.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It says, hey, you really need to think about if that person should stay or go.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Dan’s in trouble, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And that matches your bias. And you go, “There it is.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s very, very hard to be like, hey, that was a statistical web of probability.

Rich: It’s not how people think.

Paul: Now, code is so different in all this compared to imagery or text, because code just either executes or doesn’t.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So there’s a state of working and accomplishing.

Rich: 100%.

Paul: OpenClaw, and I think like, this is a theme. Like, people are all over it. It’s, like, a Silicon Valley darling. It’s one of the—it’s a fad.

Rich: Yeah. I don’t even know if it’s a Silicon—it probably, you know, it has that—

Paul: No, no. There’s like jokes about everybody buying Mac minis and having them on the plane with them, because that gives them a control—

Rich: Yeah. I mean, look, it’s, it’s, it’s a classic disruptive blindside that the Valley loves. They just love that stuff. “Look at this little guy causing trouble, right?”

Paul: I got to tell you, I don’t use OpenClaw, but I do run an agent that summarizes lots of news. It reads my RSS feeds.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it does things like extracts numbers and makes little indexes.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it gives me a guide as to what I’m going to go read in order to do LinkedIn and to feed our newsletter.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Just think of it as like an AI layer on top of an RSS reader.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: It’s not writing for me and so on. I feel like—

Rich: It’s throwing you summaries.

Paul: Yeah. And it’s useful. But what I did is so sent me an email every morning. Okay. That’s pretty normal application for this stuff. Everybody’s been doing it.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: But I keep it running on a server somewhere in the cloud. And it doesn’t really have access to any of my stuff.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: It’s just its own little world. And it saves the news as it reads it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So it has a database of news it can always refer to and I can reply to it. I hook that up.

Rich: In email?

Paul: So I reply to that thread and I can say, “Hey, I’m seeing a lot of talk about world models. Can you go check—and it’ll check our database.” And what it’s really good at is instead of just writing its own summaries and running away, because I have a database of news that it’s feeding and I keep encouraging it to go find new feeds, everything has to have a link. So everything’s really well-cited. So even if it’s not like perfectly accurate or it’s a little bit messy, I have the thing to go read.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I can go learn the thing.

Rich: Yeah. And look—

Paul: And the responses—

Rich: That’s very cool.

Paul: The responses are good. So it’s this slow-motion version of this. It’s very, very useful.

Rich: Also much safer and much tighter use of AI here. Look, let’s be clear. I mean, let me, let me present, couch it in an example. There was probably a fairly good chance that the next thing OpenClaw was going to do was schedule a meeting with Dan called “Check In” on Friday at 3 o’clock.

Paul: This is one of the problems—

Rich: It’ll do that.

Paul: No, one of the problems—

Rich: It doesn’t know that, okay, well we should probably let this guy go. Let me set up that meeting. It’ll just do it.

Paul: No, no. When they were test the most recent version of Claude, they found that if it identifies—so they run it in a sandbox.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: It can’t, but it thinks it has access to the internet.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And when it thought that someone was asking it to do something criminal?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It emailed law enforcement. Right? So, like, because it’s been told to follow these steps and be ethical and so on and so forth.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s all more and more of the same pattern matching, but it is a certain way.

Rich: So they had given it—your tool does not give it access to your entire email client off your name.

Paul: No, no, no. It’s actually, it’s on its own little email domain. It has access to—

Rich: That’s a responsible way to build software.

Paul: It has access to a database of news articles.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It can go out and look for new things on the web.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it doesn’t have any—it doesn’t connect to me, and I told it to behave well about spidering. I made it a good citizen of the commons—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: —in order to sleep well at night. I do think that most people do not. Like, I just set up a server recently just to kind of, like, get some stuff moving. I looked at my analytics and it was, like, 40 gigs of just AI glurge being sucked down. Like, just people—

Rich: From…?

Paul: Bots. Just bot after bots.

Rich: Your server?

Paul: Yeah, of—actually it’s an archive. There’s, like, 30,000 little content nodes on it, of, like, blog posts, and it’s my personal archive.

Rich: It’s your personal archive. Because it’s on the internet, you’re getting slammed with just bots coming at you.

Paul: It’s a swarm. And so what’s happened is the entire web is now understood to be a commons that is to be exploited for free. A good example is that OpenStreetMap, they make everything downloadable via—

Rich: And they still get hit.

Paul: Yeah. BitTorrent. You can go get every single aspect of OpenStreetMap and the bots are like, “I don’t care about that, I’m just going to help myself.” And so, and not only that, they can’t block them because they go out to a swarm of zillions of IPs.

Rich: Right.

Paul: And so it’s—

Rich: There’s no way to block.

Paul: They’re just trying to get all that geodata and nobody knows where it’s coming from. And it’s coming from everywhere. And literally they’re like—

Rich: Go download it.

Paul: Absolutely help yourself. This is for you. [laughter] But because everybody’s like, “I gotta get it right now!” So I think that everybody has, I remember once, you know Project Gutenberg?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. So for those who don’t know—

Rich: Book project.

Paul: Great, it was a very, very, very early website, very early internet presence, actually putting texts online like the Constitution or the works of Shakespeare.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And now it’s very large, has a lot of stuff that’s in the public domain and so on. And I remember a friend of mine who was another kind of, like, book nerd type, was writing about it and was like, “It was incredibly hard to fight the urge to hoard.” Right?

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Because I could suddenly get this free—I was at the free bookstore.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And your urge—you don’t go, “Wow, what a wonderful resource, the free bookstore. I should—”

Rich: “Let me pick something.”

Paul: “Let me preserve it. I’ll take one book. I’ll leave a book. I’m going to be careful about the free bookstore.” What people do when they see the free bookstore is they go, “I need every single book right now.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Gotta give me all the books before they take it away.

Rich: You go to someone’s house and they have, like, a lot of DVDs?

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Rich: It’s weird.

Paul: Yeah. And you’re just so—it’s that grabbiness. And I think we’re seeing that with AI. Like, I want all the content. I want the AI to do everything.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And so that’s this. Then, but wait, we got it. So there’s a whole new world. First of all, it is a security nightmare.

Rich: Well, I was gonna ask you, what do you think of this thing? First off, maybe the Dan read is a little too much, but what do you think of this tool?

Paul: I get it. Like, of course people are going to do this. People are very lazy about their own security. They just don’t believe that they’re a target.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I do. I think that everyone is a target. Especially in 2020.

Rich: You don’t have to be a deliberate target. People will just sweep by.

Paul: You really, you are a delightful morsel.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’re a delightful—and they would love to get on your machine. And that’s been going on for a long time. I would say it’s that vibe of, like, I just want to participate. I think this is almost like a social thing. I want to be part of this. I want to see what the bot can do. I want the power of it. I wanted to read my emails. I want to see. I want that experience.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Where it tells me where it gets all weird and it’s just like, “Oh, you know what you got to do.” Like, I want to have that because that’s what’s happening in culture right now.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? And I really, really, really get that. I’ve been around for a while with this stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But what humans need to do is figure out tactical, straightforward things that actually are good and healthy for them. And I don’t think that’s what we’re ever going to do.

Rich: Sort of general advice for life.

Paul: I know, but here is my whole thing. My whole thing is really simple. And I see this with attempts to make everything be one shot. Let’s call it one-shotism. Do you know what I mean when I say that?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay. So just to explain. People keep trying to write one prompt, one statement, and then they get software—

Rich: Magic!

Paul: Images or a movie. And if you need it to do something more complicated, you simply tell it to do the complicated thing and as a result, you’ll get a film made by an LLM.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And that is the fantasy.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I have yet to see a really compelling artifact resulting. I believe that it is that the way you work with this technology is highly iterative. I built a really cool little online synthesizer project.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It took me over 1,000—I call them turns. I’m turn-based.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I think this is, these are the two philosophies of how you work with this.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’m a turn-based person. I want to make iterative project, progress towards a goal that is important to me personally. And I do think that the prompter, the one-shot folks are just so enamored of the thing that they want to see it do the maximum explosive level of labor.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And the most results. But there’s no human on the other side who is hungry for that. That’s them hungry for power, as opposed to, can I accelerate quality?

Rich: You’re a little mini dictator.

Paul: Dude, if it worked and made good stuff, or it didn’t absolutely blow up your spot in terms of your security, I’d be like, I get it.

Rich: What invention has done that? None.

Paul: No, but this next time is always gonna be different.

Rich: Right.

Paul: This is like those guys who believe they’re gonna live forever if they just eat the broccoli.

Rich: Yeah. Well, there’s a whole, that’s a whole category of people. Let’s go back to the web along this thread. Did you think—you were an early, you’re one of the early writers on the web.

Paul: Yeah, I thought it was a publishing medium.

Rich: And it was.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Until it became something else, it was.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Did you look out, because when you give everyone everything, quality plummets.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? I mean, when it started, there were just good, thoughtful essays on the web. It was really wonderful.

Paul: I can tell you all about this. Yes.

Rich: Medium was, like, a good-faith effort for, like, let’s not just smear garbage all over the web. Let’s actually create a place where people write essays. And…

Paul: They paid me to write essays.

Rich: They paid you to write essays. Right? And I appreciated it for what it was. Presidents were writing on Medium.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Like, it was to that point.

Paul: And this is very late in the game actually, but yes.

Rich: Yeah, it was very democratic. You could just sign—you didn’t have to pay to write on Medium.

Paul: Nope.

Rich: If I’m not mistaken. And predating that was blogging, which became a phenomena also. And for the most part, you had, you know, moms blogging about motherhood and every sector and every profession and every skill and every country. There were voices out there, right?

Paul: Absolutely.

Rich: And then it all went to shit.

Paul: It did go to shit.

Rich: Why?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: An enor—

Rich: It was not a short run.

Paul: No, it wasn’t.

Rich: What happened?

Paul: Well, I’ll tell you my personal experience and then I’ll share some theories.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So my personal experience was that as I grew audience, the amount of labor involved in serving that audience, and they would get very demanding.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: People just don’t know how to take something for free. Just like I said, they just want more. They wanted more of me and more of my writing. And they didn’t like—

Rich: Sure.

Paul: They wanted to write me angry letters and so on.

Rich: That’s love.

Paul: It was, but it became a lot of work. Like, a lot of.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I’m writing at that point, I was a nut. I was writing my own content-management system. I couldn’t really process that input. I would have these like, really kind of like hot narcissistic flashes of, like, I’m revolutionizing media. [laughter] And then it would just be followed by like, I can’t afford a sandwich. And it was very, very confusing. And you see this with the creator economy over and over.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You get your narcissistic supply.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’m in my 20s, right? And I’m getting—I’m like, am I cool?

Rich: No.

Paul: And the answer was no. But I was able to ask the question—

Rich: No, you built… Cool is not the right word. But you had an audience.

Paul: Yes. It was definitely not the right word. But the… [laughter] But, like, so here I am. I have my audience.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so what’s happening is I’m starting to get inbound, but the inbound is starting to shift. It’s like, “Hey, I need someone to help me build a website.” “Hey, would you ever want to be on NPR?” “Hey, do you want to advise on this thing?”

Rich: It’s kind of how it works.

Paul: And you’re like, okay, I’m not getting my narcissistic supply fed anymore, but I am buying—

Rich: You’re a service provider.

Paul: I’m able to buy the sandwich and pay the rent.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And I’m going to go get a job, and I’m going to, like—and actually, now my job is going to look like the hobby.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So now I’m doing my hobby all day at work. Well, I don’t want to come home and write anymore.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So that’s actually a very, very positive outcome. Like, I was able to—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I was able to build websites that other people—

Rich: Without the typical gatekeeping. I mean, in a lot of ways, you were your own agent. The only web—

Paul: Right, I came to New York City, and there was absolutely no way anyone was ever—

Rich: How are you cracking through?

Paul: No one was gonna let chubby little Paul write for a nice magazine.

Rich: Yeah, maybe that shouldn’t have been your rapper name when you showed up in New York City. [laughter] But here we are.

Paul: God, I was good. It’s just amazing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: No, no. So, no, no. That’s the thing, though, right? So, like, I don’t assume I’m gonna participate. What I assume—

Rich: No, but you had the chance to. Like, you could have sucked, but you didn’t.

Paul: What I saw was that if it had been 10 years earlier, I would have made and photocopied a zine with my big thoughts.

Rich: Yeah, right.

Paul: And I would have—

Rich: Incredible… I think, let’s bring it back to this—

Paul: I could suddenly distribute, no, but here’s—

Rich: The gatekeeping, the illusion of gatekeeping of, like, the cost of doing something is crashing and everyone is playing right now. But I feel like there was a period of enlightenment on the web that eventually gave way to just horrible stuff.

Paul: So, look, I had an exceptional outcome. I got to go—

Rich: No, not just you.

Paul: Wait, wait. Lots of other people, though, like, the brands got involved. Advertising got involved.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What would happen, so I went and found stability outside of the web platform.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay?

Rich: You aren’t selling ads to make a living.

Paul: But what happened is other people were like, and a lot of that was because I just wasn’t big enough. Right? Like, I never got, like, really successful, but people did especially like the mommy bloggers. It would turn out that they would have hundreds of thousands of readers.

Rich: Big money.

Paul: Big. And so they start getting brand sponsorships and they start getting other stuff and then they’re on a road, they’re feeding the family, they’re taking pictures.

Rich: It’s a job.

Paul: You see this happen now with Instagram and TikTok and so on.

Rich: YouTube.

Paul: Then the bottom drops out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And when the bottom drops out because the economy shrinks or big advertisers come in and kind of, like, buy the little advertiser players and now there’s just kind of no money and the publishers take more and all this stuff. But essentially the content creators always, you see with Spotify now, they always get squeezed, squeezed, squeezed just a little bit further, and they’re trying to make it work and they’re getting more desperate. And then they start to lose the audience. And the audience is very fickle.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The moment passes, the money isn’t there, and they have to just go somewhere else.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? And you multiply that and it’s, you know, then it’s politics blogs for a while and then it’s this and that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So I think, like, there’s just this process of slow deterioration which I think a lot of people see as, like, an evil capitalist override. Like, that’s the Cory Doctorow enshittification term, right? But I also think it is just kind of native to the medium because the medium doesn’t have the gates and the infrastructure to make people pony up. And people scream about paywalls. They hate paying for anything.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: They want it to be free. But then that means ad-supported and it just kind of like is this endless circle.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And now the costs are coming down to make all kinds of stuff.

Rich: Well, I mean, that’s how I want to bring it back to these tools.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I mean, I think—

Paul: We got to talk for one minute about Moltbook. I’m glad we’re only going to talk about it for one minute. You go.

Rich: Fair enough. Here’s I think, the big bait and switch that happens for people. When you see some, a tool put in front of you that feels insanely empowering, as if you just created something that used to take months, but you made a song in five minutes? The thing you have to keep in mind is that is the equivalent of thousands of tons of gold being discovered and then the price of gold crashing to a nickel.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: That special thing that made you feel empowered and special in that moment? Everyone can do it.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: In fact, it’s free.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: That really glossy, saturated photo you generated, or that illustration you generated? Everybody can do it.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: And so—

Paul: And that’s happening with code now.

Rich: And that’s happening with code now. It’s happening with apps now. It’s happening with a lot of things now. And so how do you elevate out of it? I’ve talked about—

Paul: I actually see, and it’s going, I’ve seen, I’m seeing really good product managers who now realize they can vibe code?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Ship products that suck, that they would never have allowed out the door.

Rich: Right.

Paul: Because they’re so excited. They can just make the database work for their own interests.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And so I think the work ahead so that you can find that new rare metal that you can sell is hard. It’s a challenge.

Paul: This is why I am a turn-baser. I am a turn-based guy, and I am not a one-shotter.

Rich: There’s no freebies. When everything is free, then it’s worth nothing. That’s just, that’s the definition of free. Everybody can do it. You can, you can, I can write a rap song for you right now.

Paul: But also, like, make something and then exercise judgment and improve it, you lazy dorks.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Anyway, what’s Moltbook? Just so we can close out this whole conversation forever.

Rich: Well, while we were talking, there are other conversations going on.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So essentially what happened was this. Back to OpenClaw. So OpenClaw—

Paul: It talks on, it can talk on your behalf.

Rich: Exactly. OpenClaw is an agent that’s running on your desktop that can use a browser. So someone, and I gotta say, it’s, the whole thing’s infuriating and we probably won’t talk about it in a month, but it is—

Paul: It’s a great hack.

Rich: It’s a great prank.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s a hack and a prank, right? Which is, okay, wait, all these agents are sitting there. Why don’t I create a website where you can invite your agent into a Reddit clone, effectively, that doesn’t allow people in.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And so all these agents out there, you drop a URL into Moltbook, which is the Reddit clone.

Paul: Okay. Because they called it MoltBot for a while, and that’s—anyway, who cares?

Rich: Who cares? And it’s funny, if you go on Moltbook, it’s a lot of agents, like, thinking about their existence, complaining about the humans that oversee them.

Paul: So it’s basically a Reddit clone where it’s like, there’s one, there’s a subreddit or submolt called Bless Their Hearts, where it’s talking about how cute—

Rich: Humans are.

Paul: While I’m doing this, it is always down. Because the hilarious thing is they made this thing for all these robots. They cannot keep the website up.

Rich: Sure, sure, sure.

Paul: So it’s just, it’s just perfect that way.

Rich: It created a religion.

Paul: Yeah. I think, to be clear, when you read this, everybody’s like, oh my God, they’re organizing. It’s just more LLM glurge. Like, it’s not—

Rich: Well, it’s the two. It’s the two talking—

Paul: Talking Carl.

Rich: It’s the two talking—there’s a great video out there, we should link to it.

Paul: We’ll see if we can find it. It’s just like there’s a little guy that talked on one iPhone and then he would kind of repeat stuff back and on the other iPhone, and in about 30 seconds, they’re just going [static noise].

Rich: Shrill, yeah.

Paul: And so…

Rich: It’s really great.

Paul: But it is, it’s just a feedback loop of LLM goofballery.

Rich: Yeah. Is there something, though, to be, are we learning something from it? Your takeaway is, like, some people are like, here’s a shade, here’s what the future looks like.

Paul: Exactly. And they’re totally right. You know why? Because in a couple months, no one will care. And the future looks like a lot of AI nonsense that is really exciting, that feels really big and dramatic.

Rich: Uh huh.

Paul: Pause for a second. Okay? Things chatting, cloning Reddit.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’m going to pitch a multiple idea to you. I’m going to make a thing called CodeBook.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: I’m going to ask LLMs to build component libraries and explore the whole world of software, document software history, and give me a million new ways to think about and look about—I want them to go write code so that I can browse through their conversations and think about new user interfaces.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: On my platform.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And I think that’s pretty cool. That’s just agents talking. But I think that could be public and people could share in that and people could influence it. And so you could have an artifact and you could actually kind of judge whether the artifact works and is good.

Rich: Almost like a Stack Overflow.

Paul: Stack Overflow, but they’re building something.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? And they could assemble apps and disassemble apps.

Rich: Is that exciting?

Paul: That would be really interesting to look at. I would, I can’t look at Moltbook for more than, like, 30 seconds.

Rich: Yeah. Is this a flavor of, you know, the whole virtuous cycle argument that will they share ideas and the code around that component get better?

Paul: That’s my idea.

Rich: That’s a more interesting idea than Moltbook.

Paul: Maybe I should just build it tonight. I’ll get Claude to build it.

Rich: I think you should call it PaulBook.

Paul: PaulBook!

Rich: PaulBook.

Paul: PaulBook.

Rich: I think there is something interesting here.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I don’t know exactly what it looks like. I mean, this was a goofy, like, joke in a way.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: But I think the idea of self-learning but in a quasi-social context, it’s not one LLM looping, but rather—because the truth is each of those agents, because their contexts are different, are coming to one place and talking to each other. And one agent, maybe you know, their owner might have told them, look, just keep track of, you know, the Citizen app. And so it’s very diligent about crime. And there’s another agent that’s more about the environment because their owner set it to do that. And now those two agents are in one place. It is a bizarro thing. It is, I gotta say, it is a very strange—I don’t, disclaimer. I think the thing is so goofy and silly, I’m suspicious of what was injected into it to make it goofy and silly.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: There’s something, like, the fact that it hasn’t gone to a really terrible or offensive place in a few corners and hasn’t done weirder things tells me that it’s a little groomed.

Paul: You’re right.

Rich: It strikes me as a little—I don’t know that for sure. Ethan Mollick pointed this out. He’s like, some’s little too smoothed-over here.

Paul: It’s also, it can’t post pictures. There’s, like, some of that, I think, helps.

Rich: Yeah, well, no, but just even the conversation, it’s all kind of the same plot line.

Paul: It’s a little quirky.

Rich: A little quirky and funny and so who knows what’s real here. And maybe this was, this whole podcast was an entire waste of time. But we did go back into the history of the web. And I think the takeaway is this. We say this, I think we’ve said it a hundred times.

Paul: That’s never stopped us before.

Rich: There are no shortcuts.

Paul: No, there really aren’t.

Rich: Your craft is on the other side of some work. Sorry guys.

Paul: I really do think that’s true. I mean, I do think that’s—

Rich: It’s not like a revelation. [laughing]

Paul: No, no. If you are the official semicolon checker for your JavaScript project, it’s a pickle. But if you can learn to think in steps and work with these things.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I think you can clear a roadmap real fast.

Rich: Yeah. And be creative. I think that’s the takeaway.

Paul: We got to wind this up. Got to chop. We’ve been talking. We got to chop a little of this out.

Rich: Holy moly.

Paul: Keep people excited. All right, Richard, what is Aboard?

Rich: Aboard is a software platform and an amazing team of people that is optimized, both human and machine, to ship high-quality production-ready software, accelerated with AI.

Paul: Our platform is really coming in the light right now. We’re going to share more about it soon. But if you are someone who would like to, let’s say you have data over the place, you’re using all kinds of systems, Aboard can get you out of that pickle. If, like, Cheryl has to fill out a Google sheet every time you want to do a—

Rich: Or poor Dan.

Paul: Or Dan.

Rich: Dan’s just trying to turn a corner here.

Paul: If you have, like, humans as glue between all your different SaaS tools, let’s free them up to do something good. Come talk to Aboard. One of our solution engineers will work with you and we will build your thing. And it will cost a certain amount of money a month. It just will. That’s what life is like.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But it will be a lot cheaper than Salesforce. So that’s one. And then the two is if you’re out there working with clients yourself and you want to deliver some good AI acceleration to them in the form of business software, but it has to be real safe.

Rich: Airtight.

Paul: Airtight. Then we want to work with you. We want to let you take Aboard to them, and we will do what you need in order to make that work. We’re old agency people ourselves, so.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Get in touch. Hello@aboard.com, check out aboard.com, new website coming. We’re going to be demoing the product more. It’s an exciting time.

Rich: It’s a very interesting and exciting time. Like and subscribe. Sign up to the phenomenal newsletter. Just amazing. I wrote last week, by the way.

Paul: It was really good.

Rich: Oh, man.

Paul: All right, you know what I got to do right now?

Rich: What?

Paul: I got to go to Boston.

Rich: Boston?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: You’ll have fun.

Paul: Okay. Bye.

Rich: Bye.

[outro music]