School’s Out Forever

Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. And we are at a studio, looking into cameras, looking at each other.

Rich: I’m gonna look into your eyes, deep into your eyes, Paul.

Paul: I have, you know, it’s one of my best features. You have to admit. There’s a lot of features that are not the best, but…

Rich: You have very nice eyes.

Paul: My children hate them.

Rich: They hate your eyes?

Paul: They’re just, like, “Oh, it’s like grey. It’s like, it’s like a dark seaside nightmare.”

Rich: Yeah… It’s very Irish.

Paul: Thank you. Thank you.

Rich: Yes. I wanted to actually talk about children.

Paul: Great. That absolutely is going to go in a good direction.

Rich: In the context of AI and this Aboard Podcast.

Paul: I mean, because even though we have changed the name of the podcast, we still see AI as a really, really big change. I want to say one thing, though. I think in a year we may not be talking about AI as much as we are today.

Rich: I’m okay with that, by the way.

Paul: I think everybody needs to calm down. The star baby’s not going to get born. We’re going to learn how to use these technologies, and software is going to go back to being boring, and you and I are going to go back to being boring.

Rich: We’re never boring.

Paul: No, I’m very boring.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Fine. I want to open the podcast with a question.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: But why don’t we play the theme song, and then we’re off to the races.

Paul: Everybody loves when we announce the theme song.

Rich: You’re— [laughing] You’re listening to the Aboard podcast.

[intro music]

Paul: Okay. You said you had a question about children. But I’m not ready. I’m not ready to have children with you.

Rich: Okay, that’s fine. I don’t want to have children with you. Do you worry about your kids? Your kids are 13.

Paul: I worry about my kids every—

Rich: Not—no, let me narrow the question. Your kids are 13. 13-year-old twins. I’ve got a 12 and 10.

Paul: Yeah. I wouldn’t do 13-year-old twins, by the way. If you’re at home and you have a choice, just, like—

Rich: Skip.

Paul: Just pace it.

Rich: Skip episode. Next episode.

Paul: Yeah, I binged.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I binged childhood and it’s a lot. It’s a lot.

Rich: One of my kids has a phone.

Paul: Yeah, I should be careful because, you know, they might listen. I love you. I love you. I’m glad I had twins. It’s great. It was a wonderful choice. [whispering] My daughter’s terrified that her friends will find out about this podcast. Anyway, keep going.

Rich: My son thinks it’s cool. Which is cool.

Paul: No, my daughter was like, “You’re doing video? You’re going to be on TikTok?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then she literally went—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “Could you not do that?”

Rich: They’ve got incredible tools. They ask questions—before AI, we have like a Google Home thing where you can say, “Hey Google. How far away is Montreal?”

Paul: Someone very close to us, their daughter’s first word was “Google.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Because they had the Google device in the home.

Rich: Before—

Paul: And she heard the parents saying, “Hey Google.”

Rich: Hey Google.

Paul: Hey Google. So her first words were, [baby impersonation] “Hey Google!”

Rich: So they pull knowledge all the time.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: All the time.

Paul: Yup.

Rich: They get facts all the time. They learn about things in very casual ways. But my son is not into reading. He just doesn’t like it. It’s not that crazy. There’s a lot of kids that love to read. Some kids just are bored by reading. All this stuff is at their fingertips.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: All these capabilities are, like, answers to everything are right there. Not only are they right there, it’ll write a paragraph, an essay, it’ll answer everything you want. Do you worry about your kids in this world that is getting more and more convenient? Answers are instantaneous and the like.

Paul: It’s a really good question. I do and I don’t, in that I’m happy for them that they live in a world of absolute infinite data-plenty. You know, Wikipedia is a hell of a thing to have as a child.

Rich: It’s awesome.

Paul: Right? It’s really, really powerful. The internet is very, very powerful. You know the way I see it, actually, I think what it means is that the onus of learning to responsibly and ethically use these things on them, and it falls on them before they’re ready. Because what I see, I’m walking down the street. There are two technologies in New York City that have changed the city radically. Phones, and people just kind of stop in the middle of the street. And legal weed. Frankly, those two together mean that it’s really hard to walk down the street.

Rich: It’s hard to—it’s the same outcome.

Paul: It’s literally—

Rich: A lot of freezing—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And looking out.

Paul: People, like, hit the train turnstile and just are done.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like I, what do I do with my phone with my—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The term in my head recently I just keep thinking, like, are we in, like, a cognitive recession? Like have we just kind of, like…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Are we losing, like, 10%? So, and I feel that you have these super-mega wonder tools that let you learn and do absolutely everything?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: But they’re, they have the actual experience is, like, just it’s, like, eating 50 hamburgers for lunch. I mean it’s just sort of, like, they’re just stupefied when you really go into it.

Rich: Yeah. It’s overwhelming.

Paul: And then you add with AI. AI is an unbelievably subtle technology that seems incredibly easy. Okay?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You ask it a question, it gives you an answer.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The answer may be 30% lies, is a statistical sort of, like, aberration emerging from a vector database.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And now you’re going to ask a 12 or 13 year old to understand the fine lines about where the content came from, provenance, quality…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Citations—it’ll make up citations. As the AIs are getting smarter?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The new models, they’re hallucinating more. There was a big article in the Times about that. So like they’re getting—

Rich: That’s because of legal weed.

Paul: [laughing] That’s exactly—we have given, there’s just—

Rich: Someone is stuffing legal weed.

Paul: That’s, that’s the secret Sam Altman moment where he goes in and he puts like a, a tin of 500 milligram THC, like, special AI pellets. [laughter]

Rich: Here’s my fear.

Paul: Okay. What is your fear?

Rich: This is old, by the way, this, like, “New technology! We’re not going to think anymore. We’re not going to read. Radio is going to pollute our souls.”

Paul: It’s books, novels, novels—

Rich: Comics!

Paul: Novels were going to ruin our young women.

Rich: Women shouldn’t read novels. That was a thing.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? So I feel, like, a little bit like a broken record.

Paul: [laughing] Don’t just feel, own it.

Rich: Yeah. But here is, here’s my actual fear.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I do want both or ideally at least one of my kids to be really good at something. Like, to have… [laughing]

Paul: Like a skill or a craft or a hobby?

Rich: Yeah. Like, a really, really deep into—and I don’t even care what it is. Like, I need them to have the tenacity and the patience to want to bore into something very specific and dive into it in intense—because they love it and they’re interested in it. And I feel like it’s a lot of grazing. It’s a lot of…everything is sort of a snack-sized bite nowadays. And so that desire—I’ve gotten my kids into video games that I want them to play because I think they’re actually good cognitively to try.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Right? And—

Paul: What’s a good cognitive video game, for example?

Rich: Like real-time strategy games, role-playing games—

Paul: Sure.

Rich: That require a little more thinking—

Paul: Thinking, planning—

Rich: —than just shooting everything.

Paul: They reward some focus.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: It’s not just shooting.

Rich: That’s right. Even, like, city-building games.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Like, you know, Civilization and all those.

Paul: I mean, City Skyline is, like, an urban-planning degree.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. They give me 3.8 minutes.

Paul: There’s not a lot of patience in the world right now.

Rich: It’s not a—I don’t know if it’s a world thing. Is it a world thing?

Paul: I wouldn’t say you’re the most patient guy in the world.

Rich: Don’t make this about me.

Paul: [laughing] No, but it’s about your family.

Rich: It is.

Paul: It is—I don’t, so young children are not grinders.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: They’re not grinders.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: I don’t think, I think what’s—let’s take this up a level, right? You’ve got this world now. There are a bunch of articles showing up. There’s one, you read one. There’s one in New York mag right now. Nobody’s writing their own papers, right? They’re not, they’re just turning and they’re letting ChatGPT do the work. They’re like, at Columbia, they’re like, “Yeah, whatever.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And that’s—part of me is like—

Rich: [laughing] Imagine the parent who just cut the tuition check.

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Rich: Like, get out there! Kill it!

Paul: We had Clay Shirky from NYU, who’s their…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Who’s provost there…

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: Talking about how they’re negotiating this. This is the future. The future is that, like, students will just continually turn in AI-generated stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then there are people who are, like, “Look, we’re going to have to make our peace with the technology,” and so on. But I think one of the things I think we should just acknowledge is that it is a crisis. Like, in that—

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: The way that things used to work, and there was kind of a guaranteed outcome, you come to college, if you’re relatively smart, you did okay on the standardized test, you were going to work really hard. If you work hard, you’re going to do okay. We’re going to get you there.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Now, you can’t—you have to avoid too many drugs. You have to avoid, like, there’s a, there’s a set of, like, social contracts inherent in that. But on the other side of this, you’re going to learn a bunch of stuff—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you’ll be able to participate in society in a discipline along the roles that we’ve outlined.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? That contract is clearly valueless to a lot of people right now. They’re like, “I just want to get my thing. I want to get my piece of paper, because my parents want me to, or, I want to go on in life, or I want to do something.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so, and that instinct’s always there. Like, the late—I wrote term papers late at night, because I was lazy, and I didn’t want to do the work until I felt really guilty.

Rich: Everybody has, right?

Paul: Everybody, everybody has an experience like that. I can’t tell you that at the ethical state that I was in at age 19, if I saw an easy out and I was really tired and it was 1 A.M. and I’d already, like, taken a couple tries, and I just didn’t want to do it anymore?

Rich: And there was a shortcut somewhere.

Paul: I don’t know if I wouldn’t have taken it. I might have taken it. I probably would—

Rich: I would have taken it. I probably would have taken it, too.

Paul: And then I would have gotten caught, and I would have felt really embarrassed, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s the dynamic. But when everybody’s doing it—and that’s what’s happened, it’s spread like wildfire. Like, all the articles are kind of the same.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The professors are just—when everybody’s doing it, it’s a crisis, because the system that was working and the deal that was made and the contract that was signed? It’s all just gone to heaven.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It doesn’t matter anymore. And you can’t get the students to believe. And so when you ask me, I’ll bring it back, when you ask me, what do my kids—what do I worry about with my kids? I think about this in general, in the world. A lot of the contracts that we assumed were real, between government, between industries, between disciplines and professions. People just seem ready to throw them away in ways that I never expected a midlife. Like, it’s a little overwhelming, but.

But what I want to know is, what’s the contract for my daughter with this technology? What’s the contract for my son? Like, I don’t want them generating pornography with it. I don’t want them turning in papers. I don’t want them…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: …making up stuff instead of going out and learning about the world. I don’t want them to believe it, and trust it, just because some big corporation advertised on the Super Bowl.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? But all of those contracts aren’t in place yet. And they were growing up, and I was taking them for granted, and so was everybody else. You were, too.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s kind of blown up.

Rich: I’m not sure they’re contracts.

Paul: They’re social contracts. They’re agreements. It’s, like, sort of sociological.

Rich: Well, I mean, look, here’s the thing. I think they were products of just natural limitations. I’m going to give you an example. When I was in law school, they give you a search engine, a law search engine called Westlaw. I think you could even, they even give you LexisNexis, which are the two…essentially it’s like Google for legal cases.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Okay? Got my first summer job, intern. So they give you this thing, and it’s a miracle. You write your briefs, first class, you study for finals with it. It was a…

Paul: You don’t have to go to books.

Rich: Go to books.

Paul: And there’s a lot of them, and they’re boring. Yeah, you can just kind of get the papers.

Rich: I get a summer internship at a smallish law firm.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Commercial litigation law firm. And they’re like, “We’ve got a couple of cases, we want you to write the briefs on them. There’s some, you know, it’s going to come up in front of the courts pretty soon. Like, okay, go do the research and come back.” And I said, “What’s my login? My Westlaw login?”

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: They said, and they said, “Westlaw is really expensive. We don’t have Westlaw.”

Paul: Kid!

Rich: [laughing] Yeah, so I’m like, flipping through index cards in the New York Bar Association Library in Midtown Manhattan, and I can’t believe it. I can’t believe if I have to do this.

Paul: It’s like, it feels like you suddenly have a brain injury.

Rich: And I—

Paul: It’s so slow.

Rich: Paul, I had to highlight certain sections. I did find cases that were relevant to the client.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Cases that were in front of us, but I couldn’t highlight them in the books, so I went to, like, a copy machine. I’d copy the pertinent pages so then I could highlight the sections. [laughing] I felt like an animal.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And I couldn’t believe it. And I went back there, and I did a good job. I wrote a good brief. I got to use a computer to write the brief, but I had a pile of papers like this, and I said, “I can’t do this. This can’t be how I live my life.”

Paul: Let me ask you something. In doing that process, do you think you had to think a little harder and focus?

Rich: Without a doubt.

Paul: Okay, so is it possible that the product of that particular process was a better brief than if you had just been able to—

Rich: 100%. I’ll tell you why. Because Westlaw is spitting out search results. And the truth is, the cases I found, the attorney that I was working for, who had done a lot of cases for this kind of commercial litigation, that was representing an oil company, said, “You found cases I’ve never seen before.” And it’s because Westlaw’s indexing just missed some of them or whatever.

Paul: Well, it’s the standard, so everybody kind of just goes back to it and so that other stuff never showed up.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Let me tell you, there’s a tweet I think about a lot from back in the day, and I don’t even remember exactly who it was. When Citi Bike first rolled out—Citi Bike is a program that lets you borrow a bike, ride around the city. When they first rolled out e-bikes.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They had a tendency to accelerate, throw you off, and possibly kill you. Now, they didn’t kill anybody.

Rich: It’s very New York City.

Paul: It was—

Rich: Very cool.

Paul: It was just like, I remember somebody going like, “Yes, I understand, but please don’t take it away. I just get to go over the Manhattan Bridge so fast.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I think when you give a human being a form of convenience?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We will die.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, we will die for our convenience. You just told me, “Yeah, of course I created a better product.” But if I said, “Okay, great, you should never go back to Westlaw,” you would stab me in the throat with a lawyer pencil.

Rich: Yes, I would. I don’t know what a lawyer pencil is, but I would.

Paul: Everything lawyers have is lawyer special.

Rich: You’re totally right. Only the big law firms could afford these tools. The smaller law firms still went to the library, like, that’s—and the Internet showed up, a product called FindLaw that sort of tried to kind of subvert them.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: By, like, indexing whatever they could find on the web.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: And they tried their own thing. Here’s where I’m landing. The tools are there, and they’re going to be there, and we morph into and create new specialized skills around the tools. So I’m not going to be, you know, I’m not going to be quaint about it. Like, it’s not. The ship has sailed. They’re going to use these tools. What I think is key, and I want to bring this back, and I want to share it with an example, in terms of programming, I think. What I think is key is that I know there are endless React libraries out there. You could always pluck stuff off the internet.

Paul: Back to technology, React is a library for creating components on the web.

Rich: There’s all kinds of libraries that other programmers have created that you could pick up and use so you don’t have to write it yourself. But if you’re going to be a programmer, you’re going to have to write a few yourself. Like, even if you throw them away, just do it once, do it once or twice.

And I think that is necessary. And I’ll tell you why. Because I think to be great at these tools and to be an expert at these tools—I don’t know what the tools are my kids are going to use. It’s going to be something that’s plugged into their ear and just makes them think. To be great at those tools and not just be a node in a network, if you know those fundamentals, if you just exercise those fundamentals once. I’m talking about, like, a six-week boot camp. You are a whole other person because you understand the context of those tools.

I think it’s, I think you gotta go and try it. You gotta go and do it. And look, people do it today so they can feel alive. Like, you know there’s people blowing glass in Brooklyn right now. They don’t, nobody asks them to, right?

Paul: No.

Rich: Because they want to feel like they are—

Paul: Nobody’s ever asked anyone and said, “You need to go blow some glass.”

Rich: Yeah, exactly. Or cooking class. Like, people do these things to sort of feel like they’re building—

Paul: I’m learning piano.

Rich: You’re learning piano.

Paul: I’m never going to be good.

Rich: You’re never going to be good. But you’re learning music theory, I’m assuming, and, and how to read music and all those things.

Paul: No, I haven’t, I mean, I’m definitely better than I used to be. One day I’ll be able to play music, but not yet.

Rich: Do you think curriculums are going to have to think this way? Do you think education has to think this way?

Paul: Let me take this back. Okay, let’s, let’s actually make a prediction based on past experience. There will be an enormous multi-year dialogue about the future of everything in the context of AI.

Rich: Sounds terrible.

Paul: It is—you can’t stop the dialogue. The discourse has to happen.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: That’s how humans are. No matter what’s going on, there’ll be more discourse.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And this has sort of been the theme kind of and why we went in on this direction, even though we’re pretty critical of the technology. You can’t put it back in the box. Convenience will never go back in the box. And I’ll tell you why. And I’ve said this over and over. Whenever something—I remember when I first saw Twitter, I was like, “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It took human expression on the web and turned it into a little tiny box. These people are terrible. I can’t believe this is happening.” [laughter] I felt that way about Facebook. My joke is, if I hate something, you should invest in it.

And with this one, I’m trying to be conscious of it in a different way. It grosses me out. I don’t like a lot of it. The power with the coding and the stuff that we do is unbelievable, and I really do like that. So I’m mixed.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it’s not going back in the box. And so we’re going to talk about it and we’re going to have a fantasy that’s going to go back in the box, and the curriculum will have to adapt, and people will have to work through the crisis. But you kind of, you can’t, you can’t skip it. You can’t skip ahead.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so where do I think this ends? I think this ends with the kids are going to use it no matter what. So you’d better, you better have a framework. They should understand how it works. And there should be context in places where, yeah, you’re right. They have to learn underlying principles. They have to go figure stuff out. And the people who are, in general, if you figure stuff out and you go and you learn how something works, you do tend to be more productive and smarter in life. Like, it’s a success strategy.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But a lot of people are just going to kind of use this stuff and it’s just going to, how it’s going to go.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And we’re going to—we’re going to have to, and this is the bummer with this technology, even though I also kind of love it? We’re just going to have to adapt to it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I hate. That tech is supposed to adapt to us. But in this case, it has come and it said, actually, “Culture is going to work this way now.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I don’t have a fight. I don’t have a strategy to stop it, aside from we’re going to start a commune and, and go to Vermont, and I would hate to do that without having ChatGPT tell me how to build the farmhouse.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So, like, it’s, I think we’re just entering a confusing phase. I think in a couple years, people will be like, “Well, this is what we do now.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “It’s on the syllabus. You’re allowed to use it for this, but you’re not allowed to use it for that. And you actually have to, like, record yourself writing it by hand.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Well, just—but there’s no, no stopping it.

Rich: Let me, let me close with a question.

Paul: Close with a question.

Rich: There’s a couple people, I forget who said it. They’re like, “Get a hold of yourselves. Party’s over. The five day work week’s over. You’ll work two days a week. Go find a hobby, go take a walk. Go adopt a pet. Go do some other things. The things that used to take a lot of time aren’t going to take a lot of time anymore. So just go enjoy life and you can work a couple days a week.”

Paul: Something about that is sort of built into a society. Our society—

Rich: It’s  kind of the end of marriage.

Paul: We are not capable of enjoying life in America.

Rich: In America, or in general?

Paul: No, there are culture—the Italians are very good at enjoying life.

Rich: They are. I went to an Italian restaurant, like, two days ago.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Guy took 20 minutes to get to me, and it was utterly normal, in his mind. He was very Italian.

Paul: It’s not for you.

Rich: It’s not for New York City!

Paul: No. But there is, like, 40 minutes on one little—oe of those little tumblers, or those little thimbles of limoncello?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you’re talking, you just talk about soccer?

Rich: You’re right. Certain cultures are cool with rolling with it.

Paul: Any culture where they have, like, a special word for grandma and that’s like an hour of conversation, right? [laughter] Like, that—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But we, we can’t handle it. So what’s going to happen in America? I mean, there are probably societies where they’ll be like, “Well, we’re going to just disperse a lot of this money and we’re going to try to be productive and so on.” Meanwhile, we are, we’ll continue to perform work but not actually get a lot done. And then probably China, man, China just grinds. And they’re going to have robots using AI manufacturing things and they’re going to go to town. I’m actually like, unfortunately very bullish because I would like to see us figure it out. But, woof!

So I think, like, those dynamics are coming. We’re kind of a little bit off the, off the thing. Let me ask you this: What—your kid comes to you. My children are 13 years, or a little bit younger, and says, “Dad, I want a Claude subscription.” Not even ChatGPT. I’m not in Sam Altman’s world, just Claude.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Claude’s a little nicer.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “They have a special one for students. It’s $12. Can I have it?”

Rich: I’m inclined to give it to them.

Paul: Yeah, me too. I will say one last thing. I’ve said this in the newsletter. Universities have an amazing ability to actually decide how these tools are going to work because they really want their money. Like, Claude really wants an education product. So does ChatGPT. It’s a big market over time.

Rich: Right. They can collaborate and work together on what that looks like.

Paul: And they can say, “I really want an LLM where provenance is clear. These books included. These are not—”

Rich: I think that conversation’s happening.

Paul: I hope to God it is. Like, I would like just a little bit of cleanup here.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because we’re kind of creating this giant AI Superfund site, and that is a choice.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We had Patrick on last week and he talked about how large orgs are making their own LLMs?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I think that’s a bad scene. I think we should have collective databases that we all learn how to work with together as opposed to all retreating to our own corner. And you should know kind of the quality of the ingredients.

Rich: Yeah. With ethical guidelines.

Paul: Doesn’t have to be not to be Erewhon. It’d be, like, a little bit of Whole Foods would be nice. You know, just a little bit of like these strawberries where we’re not, you know—

Rich: Call out to the California supermarket. That’s $26 smoothies.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I think a plan will come together. I get paranoid about this stuff. I like sending my kid to camp where he can’t do anything for three weeks. I think that’s healthy. But maybe that’s just me worrying.

Paul: I would say that the takeaway here is that this kind of conversation and cultural moment is an actual repeating pattern. And it used to be we only had one of these around technology, like, every 15 years. And now we’re literally at like three per year. That’s how much change is coming.

Rich: It’s too much, yeah.

Paul: And it really does feel like, it’s just, you just feel like your face is just smeared with frosting all the time.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You just can’t get, you can’t get to bed. You know?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I think that, and we don’t have a framework for that level of institutional crisis. And it doesn’t help that the world’s a mess. So I think, like, there’s a lot of drama and there’s a lot of people—here’s what I would say. I would actually say on this. Don’t pick a side. Don’t decide that it’s all evil. Don’t decide that it’s a future.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Figure, just realize that it’s a crisis-generating machine, and that we’re going to have to learn together. And we just don’t have a choice.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, when you say crisis, it sounds negative and apocalyptic. I don’t think that’s what you mean.

Paul: A lot of good things—

Rich: I think you mean we’re gonna have to revisit it.

Paul: What I’m saying is that, like, classic structures stop working and new structures must be created.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But that is a crisis.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s just how you, it’s how you process it.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: My son and daughter had a crisis because my son ate some of her candy. And now we have new rules in the house.

Rich: Ah, it’s fair.

Paul: Yeah, it’s fair.

Rich: He just couldn’t help himself.

Paul: The candy was left out, but it was for a birthday gift for a friend, so it really didn’t go well. And maybe, strong words were said.

Rich: [laughing] Cool. Very helpful.

Paul: All right, beloveds, if you need us, hello@aboard.com we’re building a great platform that will help everybody build all the software they ever needed, dreamed of, and wanted in their life. As long as it’s kind of business-y and data-y. It’s nerdy. Nerdy stuff.

Rich: I think we’ve already announced our event.

Paul: We’re having an event June 3rd, in the evening. You can go to our website or check out our newsletter and you can come on by the office and.

Rich: Say hi.

Paul: And we’re just nice, accessible people. We will treat you with respect and honor and give you a drink and a treat.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: So come and we’ll do a demo and maybe even build you some software right while we’re there, because we live in the bizarre future.

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

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