Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you are listening to Reqless, R-E-Q-L-E-S-S, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software. And, boy, is it.

Rich: We should clarify. We don’t mean AI is software. We’re talking about building software, and how AI is changing how we build software. That’s what this podcast—so it’s a little bit of a niche, Paul. It’s not just about “AI is changing your life.”

Paul: No, no. We decided to—well, and that’s actually kind of what I want to talk about today, Richard.

Rich: Oh! Let’s play that theme song and get into it.

Paul: That is a great idea.

[intro music]

Paul: Here’s the thing. AI is everywhere. Everywhere.

Rich: Yawn.

Paul: No, but not just that. Like, AI is now, like, DOGE in the General Services Administration is rolling out a chatbot to help GSA employees do their job.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay? So, like, AI is in the government whether you want it or not.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: AI is in your soup. AI is in your shoes. Like, it’s just kind of, we’re getting to that place.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: And then I go on, I’m on the social network Bluesky. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. It’s part—

Rich: I use it, actually.

Paul: It’s part of the former Soviet States of… No, I mean, it’s a very, like, progressive community in general.

Rich: It’s actually not, believe it or not. It can be.

Paul: It’s crabby, lefty Twitter kind of went over to Bluesky. But then everybody else is there, too.

Rich: Yes, yes. A little bit, yeah. But I create my own lists so I can get a diversity of opinions.

Paul: Hell yeah! But—

Rich: Okay, so you’re on Bluesky.

Paul: Very anti-AI.

Rich: Is that right?

Rich: Oh, that’s interesting. See, I have an AI list?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Of like, all the, like, fans of AI, like Ethan Mollick and all these guys.

Paul: Naw…

Rich: So I don’t, I’m not seeing that.

Paul: No…

Rich: That’s interesting.

Paul: There are people who just, like, really spend all day talking about how this is garbage that is ruining the world.

Rich: Oh, everybody needs to get over themselves.

Paul: They don’t, actually. And that’s sort of my point. And I’m also, I got the, you got your, your people, a lot of them are still on Twitter, but elsewhere, a lot of Substacks, which are just, like, “AGI is coming. Everything is changing every five minutes,” and so on and so forth.

Rich: The velocity of change is remarkable.

Paul: It’s, it’s an enormous—you’re changing a very large industry that, for all of its froth and excitement, actually doesn’t change that quickly.

Rich: And even the tools themselves, like, I’ve never seen software get, new versions come out every 60 days. It’s kind of wild.

Paul: What’s tricky is that the platform itself accelerates the development of software.

Rich: Right.

Paul: So you end up, like, I use Aider for assisted coding, A-I-D-E-R.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And every time it comes out, it tells you how much was written with AI versus a human.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: And so, you know, and that number goes up and down, but mostly up, over time.

Rich: So, okay, so Bluesky’s hating on it.

Paul: Substack is mostly loving on it. And, you know, I don’t want to break the world down into social networks, but it’s, like, jamming into government. People are worried about copyright. The New York Times is suing. And so on and so forth.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So I gotta tell you, as someone who is, who talks about stuff in public, it’s part of my job, I’m feeling real twisted up. I used to be—I sort of stepped back from a lot of my writing, a lot of my thinking in public. But I’m, like, how the hell do you make everybody happy here? [laughter] How do you keep everybody—yeah.

Rich: That’s…

Paul: It’s a fundamental flaw in my personality that I think that’s possible, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But like, but really, I’ve always been kind of a tech centrist. Like, you know, “Hey, there’s—”

Rich: Let’s find the sweet spot.

Paul: “There’s amazing opportunity here, and I want you—I want everyone to have advantage and access to it. Yes, it can be used for really bad things, but it also can be used for really good things.” The web, you know—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Mobile. And aside from crypto, which I never, I just kind of still don’t get. And so I was sitting, over the last couple of weeks, because we’ve got this podcast. We have a company that is increasingly using AI. And there’s another reality here, which is like, there’s this conversation about generated AI. About images, let’s say. Let’s go with images. Okay?

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And there are people who say, “God, I hate those AI images. I think they really suck, and they’re stealing from artists.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And there are other people who are like, “I really like this one of a cat. It’s really funny. It’s like, I watched the video,” okay?

Rich: Fine.

Paul: And there are other people who are like, “This is the future of art. Get ready.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That is all subjective and aesthetic. The object exists. And then people are talking about, should the object exist? And so forth.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: No way to nail that down.

Rich: Right.

Paul: But you and I are sitting in a world that’s very, very different. And there’s very little overlap between these worlds, which is that you and I sit down and we use tools, and things that we absolutely objectively used to charge a lot of money for when we ran an agency?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’re watching them happen, with a little bit of computer-assisted time, sometimes in minutes.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I mean, I’m talking, like, that used to be $80,000 and now it’s five minutes.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: You know, for all anybody wants to say about what’s good and what’s bad, and regulate it, don’t regulate it, that’s out of the box. And so, I’m sort of like, I’ve got this concrete reality which is a thing that I know really changing.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And there’s an element of just, like, better or worse doesn’t matter.

Rich: Better or worse doesn’t matter. I agree with that. I think if you imagine a spectrum, and on one end of the spectrum is creativity.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: Like, meaning creative output. A painting, a poem.

Paul: From the robot, or from the person?

Rich: From the robot.

Paul: Okay. So it wrote me a poem.

Rich: Yeah. And the other end of the spectrum is productivity.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Essentially, “Write me a four-page functional spec so that we can add two-factor authentication to our pet-management app.” [laughing]

Paul: I’ll give you an example that I actually used the other day, which was, “Here is a listing of all the files on my desktop. Make some folders, and then write a script to move them all into the folders.”

Rich: Right.

Paul: And now my desktop was tidy and semantically organized in a way that would have taken me 40 minutes.

Rich: Exactly. And what I’m getting at here is that on that creative end of the spectrum, the subjectivity of creative works of art and whatnot seeps into the conversation in such an intense way that you can’t help but sort of get all scrambled up.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: On the other end of the spectrum, it’s literally artifacts to just kind of get a pretty boring thing done, oftentimes.

Paul: But you know what’s tricky is you keep going on that end of the spectrum and then you get to like, “AGI is coming. It’s all over. We need to get ready for the starbaby—”

Rich: I don’t want to derail your topic here.

Paul: Well, no—

Rich: I don’t understand it. I don’t really care. I don’t understand—I feel like when you say “AGI,” maybe you know more about it than I do. I tried reading about it. It was very fuzzy to me. All I know is right now on ChatGPT, to me, if you tell me, does this thing have general intelligence, I would say, “Yeah, kind of. Because I can ask it about my sinus infection and I can also ask it to suggest what are good metrics to put on a CRM dashboard. And it seems to answer both.” And that sounds generally—that’s more interesting and more well-rounded than most people I meet.

Paul: Especially at parties in Brooklyn. It’s true.

Rich: Especially at parties in Brooklyn.

Paul: They want to talk about public schools and real estate.

Rich: I don’t know what that—I think it’s a bullshit Valley concept that is like, because this sort of knocked us on our asses, it’s like, “Well, you think this is interesting? Wait until it actually judges you as a person and blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, okay, the ambiguity of it is throwing me off. Maybe I don’t understand the science behind it. I don’t know.

Paul: It’s, it’s not the science. So I think, here’s where you and I are actually sitting, and this is what I’m getting to. You and I are sitting in the middle because in general, we are agency people. We like to bring everybody together. We like to solve business problems. We’re businessmen.

Rich: Bis-nis-mn.

Paul: We’re bs-ns-mn. And we’re, like—basically our motive, and I have lots of personal beliefs, so do you, but our motive is profit. Like, we’re in a room together because we want to make things, and then we want to make money off the things, and then we’re going to go make more things.

Rich: Yeah, and I think fundamental to it is delivering value, right? Like, there’s ways to make money by, like, snowing people. You could make really good ads and sell lousy products.

Paul: 100%. Well—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What people don’t see, there’s so many conversations we have with the whiteboard where one of us will be like, “Well, this is how we got to do this with the company in order to blah, blah, blah.” And the other one will go, “Yeah, but let’s remember our job is to, like, be really valuable to people, so that they want to give us the money.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it sounds really simple, but it’s really easy to architect things just purely around profit and forget to build a product.

Rich: A lot of business books, a lot of advice, business advice books, talk about an obsession over, like, the customer and the happiness of the customer. It’s very normal stuff.

Paul: Now, so that’s our world.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And there’s a deep, rich tradition there. On the tech left, there is a deep tradition of, like, we have to center the humans and everything that the technology does. And that actually goes back decades and decades. And over on the right, there’s actually a different Silicon Valley tradition, which is a little weirder, because it gets into your, like, dark enlightenment and actually starts to overlap with the current government. But it goes back, actually all the way back to the 60s, but really around the 90s, a whole, like, life-extension movement, and all this stuff started to start to kind of percolate up, as connected to the internet. There was a website called Less Wrong. There still is. Where people started to, you know, like, really think about rationality and AI started to work into that. And so there actually is this kind of complicated, interlocking, weirdly reactionary cultural zone of thinking. So that’s why these ideas sort of pop up so strongly, right? They’re actually not coming from nowhere.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They’re coming from traditions that people might not even always identify. Like, I think you could really believe in AGI and know none of this history, but you’ve kind of picked it up from the water in Silicon Valley. And you can really hate generative AI over on Bluesky because you went to, like, a really progressive school and it just feels wrong.

Rich: Right.

Paul: You’re not quite sure why. And, you know, you’re young and you, you’re figuring it out. So I’m seeing all that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I’m sitting here in the middle, and I feel that it’s my job to both build a business with you, but also, like, culturally, what is my respon—I want to explain it, and sometimes I want to explain it to people who are kind of do-gooders and they’re very suspicious of it. And so I have to sit down and show them stuff.

And what, you know, this is a funny topic for a podcast, but really, I think the only solution for me is to just be—stop defending, ever, in any way, because I think the value is there and it’s just going to have to show itself, and just be incredibly empathetic. The guy on Bluesky who just hates it all day?

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: And who is angry at Ethan Mollick every day?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Even though I’m more aligned with Ethan Mollick. I’m going to look at that guy and I’m going to go, “Okay, what are you worried about? What are you trying to figure out here? What scares you? What’s frustrating to you?”

The person who believes in AGI and thinks that the computer is going to be artificially fully intelligent and maybe take over the world. “Where are you coming from? What are you trying to figure out? Who are you?”

And in the middle, the business people who are trying to profit a lot of times they believe that they’ve got the all-time solution. They’re going to add a chatbot to this and they’re going to make—I mean, we’ve been down this, everybody thinks their idea is worth a trillion dollars, right? So we’re seeing a lot of that too. And I’m trying to remind myself, because it’s so frothy.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And you see this, you get kind of, you get caught up, and you start to feel twisted and torn up. I basically believe one thing, which is that this is a really weird database with a lot of utility and that we need to be really, really patient with everyone as they figure it out.

Rich: I think the mistake here is to read into innovation and make moral judgments about it on its own.

Paul: We always do it. Humans judge tools from a moral perspective.

Rich: Humans judge tools, right? And the truth is, innovation is going to happen because humans are just curious and they just keep banging away, right? And that’s going to happen.

Paul: Also, it’s not really a mistake. Like, I think it’s good to criticize Microsoft Word or whatever. Like, it’s—

Rich: No, no. But it’s not even, I think there’s something more fundamental here. I don’t think they’re criticizing—I’m not talking about criticizing Microsoft Word, because Microsoft Word is downstream from the true innovation, which is affordable computers that allow you to write on the screen first, and then hit print.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Which decimated the typewriter industry, right?

Paul: You actually needed—

Rich: It was probably angry—

Paul: You needed the memory industry first.

Rich: Yeah, exactly. And the truth is, humans are very quick to, before the innovations even have—before Microsoft Word showed up, it’s like, what, you’re going to stare at a screen all day at work? There is an impulse to sort of see that kind of dramatic change as a threat to our humanness. It’s inevitable.

Paul: A lot of people were like, if you’re reading on a Kindle, is that even reading?

Rich: Yeah. And look, there’s, there’s times we miss the cues, right? Because, like, I feel like the momentum around kids and phones is, like, 10 years late, because we actually saw the side effects of it, and the actual impact of it on mental health and all that. What’s tricky about AI is that it is definitely one of those earthquakes. Like, it is like, CPU, phone, internet. It’s definitely at that level. And because of that—

Paul: It’s also landing in a moment where a broad cultural conversation with a regulatory potential is not going to happen, because we’re—

Rich: It’s just timing-wise, that’s what happened.

Paul: —incredibly distracted by everything right now.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And so what you end up with—

Paul: And huge AI boosters are jamming themselves into the White House.

Rich: World hunger used to be much worse than it is today.

Paul: Correct.

Rich: The cost of food is much lower.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: There was a day when, like, eating meat once a week was a big deal.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And it got to the point now where you could have donuts and meat every day if you want. Not great. Not suggesting that.

Paul: And not everybody, but way more people.

Rich: Way more people. And there are people who argue that the reason for that is Monsanto.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Monsanto makes extremely, they’ve genetically engineered crops to make them much more durable, withstand much less environmental, like, pressures, lack of water and things like that. And there’s a lot of people who give them credit for actually reducing world hunger. There are other people who are like, “Oh dear God, Monsanto is evil, sinister.”

Paul: Well—

Rich: We don’t have to get into it.

Paul: But, no, no, but hold on. Let’s just—the reasons they say that are that Monsanto asserts intellectual property over their crops so that even when they do grow, if they, you know, if they go to another farmer’s field, they’re, like, you can—

Rich: Patented corn.

Paul: Yeah, exactly, right? And then there’s a lot of other, you know what, before we derail this podcast, it’s a great Wikipedia page if you’re at all interested.

Rich: It is, it is a great Wikipedia page. And, and I guess what I’m getting at is what happened with Monsanto is they innovated a thing. They had an innovation moment. Right? And they are a for—

Paul: They were one of many, right?

Rich: One of many. But they are global conglomerate.

Paul: But then there was that one guy who just made the rice more nutritious.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I mean, look, genetically modified crops, like, a lot of people argue you can actually make healthier food out of it if you do it right. But obviously—

Paul: GMOs—

Rich: With power comes—what we’re getting at here, Paul, is with innovation comes great responsibility, blah, blah, blah. I modified the famous term. Can people use these things as weapons? Honestly, if you use AI to poke at people’s emails without getting, you know, granting, like, access? Honestly, you could even argue that the AI LLMs that are out today are overzealous in their willingness to just digest anything that’s out in the world.

Paul: Oh, they’ve just hogged all the material.

Rich: Yeah, Utterly valid argument. The other side of it is I think somebody in a poor country that is good with a prompt and can be productive can, might be able to get a good job. Like, I don’t know. I think there is going to be more productivity in the world. So there’s a lot of—

Paul: But see, you’re, you’re arguing from a point. Right? And that’s fine. Like, it’s a valid point. All I’m saying is that I’m literally going full Switzerland on this thing. I’m like, “Wow, you hate this. And you’re pretty sure it’s going to be really bad for everyone in the world?”

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: “Okay.” Because I don’t have any fight anymore.

Rich: I’m not saying I don’t disagree with both sides—

Paul: And over here, there’s a person who’s going to say, “We need to give all medical care immediately to AI and get rid of all the doctors.” And I’m going to go… I’m going to sigh.

Rich: Well, that’s just dumb. Right?

Paul: Yeah. But you know what? I’m going to just, I…I just am going to soak up all the ideas. [laughter] Not because I think they could be right, not because I don’t have my own point of view, but I just think we’re at a point where you have to be very tactical and empathetic with everybody, because they’re overwhelmed and confused.

Rich: I don’t disagree.

Paul: And they’re going to take every bit of intellectual tradition that they’re part of and their own personal biases and anxieties, and they’re going to project them onto this giant thing. Why do people get so upset about Monsanto? It’s food. [laughter] Like, it’s like, right? Like, why do people get so upset about AI? It’s us. It’s a mirror of people.

Rich: And look, it is resetting the status quo. Peoples’ professional careers are being seen through a whole other lens because of this—

Paul: It’s an in—

Rich: It’s a disruptive—

Paul: It’s a very—

Rich: There’s no way around it.

Paul: It’s a confusing and chaotic moment in world history. And then we said, “We’re going to take, like, the thing about cognition that you think is stable, and we’re going to just make it kind of rubbery and bouncy.” [laughter] And then you—run across that.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You know, it’s like, I basically feel like everyone is in one of those shows where you have to, like, jump across water on foam, you know?

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: That’s sort of where we are as species right now.

Rich: I agree with that.

Paul: So, and, you know, because I’m, we’re building out a space upstairs and we’re bringing people in, and we want to bring in the NGOs and the businesses.

Rich: We’re in New York City, by the way.

Paul: Yeah. And we want to make sure that AI and NY can kind of, like, hook up a little bit.

Rich: Can I ask you a question? Actually, it’s a yes/no question.

Paul: All right.

Rich: Close it on a yes or a no.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Do you think that there’s a lot of potential positive outcomes because of this technology?

Paul: Yes. There’s absolutely no way I could do this job if I didn’t really, really believe that.

Rich: I could follow up, but I don’t want to, because I think that is the fundamental sentiment here. I think it tests us, as humans, to be decent and make good ethical decisions about how we use it. But I agree with you.

Paul: And a lot of the people that I’m really fond of and sort of aligned with do not agree with me.

Rich: Understood. And I think that’s the conversation you’re trying to open up.

Paul: It’s not just that. I just don’t want to fight with them. I’m just going to listen and—but they’re also welcome to have the conversation.

Rich: You know who we need right now in this moment in history? Dick Cavett.

Paul: Aw, good old Dick Cavett. [laughter] He was great. For anyone under the age of 250, he was a talk show host in the—

Rich: There’s good YouTube videos.

Paul: He did, unfortunately, I gotta say, as a larger man? He got a, he had, like, a column in the Times, and he just one day just came out and was just like, “I hate fatties. Just frickin’ hate ’em.”

Rich: What!?

Paul: Yeah, just turns out like, Dick Cavett is, like, looking, was looking around all day long just going, “You pig!”

Rich: Really?

Paul: No, no—and it, like— [laughter] It kind of—

Rich: That’s ridiculous.

Paul: It kind of melted him in public discourse. It was—

Rich: That’s really great.

Paul: It was a rough one to go out on.

Rich: That’s really funny.

Paul: But his old shows, if you can just go poke around on YouTube, like, and it is definitely one of those moments where you go, “We may have lost something in our society.” [laughter] Like, it’s just, there’s no…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Even this podcast doesn’t come close. Okay, so I know this is a soft and abstract one, Richard, but what I’m saying really is, like, as we’re building this company, we’re going to see businesspeople who think this is going to save their business. We’re going to see people who hate it. We’re going to see people who think it’s the future. And I am going to just kind of try to be a little almost like a, like a, like a good minister. Like, just sort of like, “Okay, tell me.”

Rich: Switzerland.

Paul: Yeah, exactly.

Rich: Good. So you’re opening a bank that has banking secrecy. That’s great.

Paul: It’s good for business. [laughter] All right, so…

Rich: Check us out at aboard.com. Big things—we keep saying that, but this is the most excited I’ve been professionally.

Paul: Yeah, this is good.

Rich: Can’t wait to share the new stuff.

Paul: One day the big things are going to be in your hands, and I think you’re going to be interested.

Rich: But reach out with topics, ideas, questions. Hello@aboard.com

Paul: Hello@aboard.com!

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

[outro music]