Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you’re listening to Reqless, R-E-Q-L-E-S-S, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, and maybe the rest of the world as well. And let’s play the theme song, and then, you know what, Rich? You know what I’m gonna do?

Rich: What?

Paul: I’m gonna read you a poem.

Rich: It’s Monday, dude.

Paul: It’s Tuesday when they’re listening. Everybody’s already ready. Everybody’s ready for a poem.

Rich: All right, let go.

[intro music]

Paul: Okay, this is a poem by C. P. Cavafy. Greek poet. Written in about 1898.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? It’s called “Waiting for the Barbarians.” You ever heard it?

Rich: No.

Paul: Okay, so, you know, it’s gonna take about three minutes. Everybody settle in.

Rich: Go.

Paul: Let’s open with a little poetry.

Rich: The floor is yours.

Paul: What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,

in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.

He’s even got a scroll to give him,

loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

So this poem has nothing to do with Elon Musk or DOGE. [laughter] Just doesn’t… Didn’t pop into my mind.

Rich: You needed foreboding background music as you were reading.

Paul: Eh, you know, it didn’t pop into my mind while I’ve been watching the news.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay, so we’ll come back to the poem a little later in the podcast, Richard, but let me tell you some stuff that’s going on. Right now—have you heard of DOGE?

Rich: Yes. Efficiency…

Paul: Department of Government Efficiency. It’s a backronym created by Elon Musk and his minions. And they’re going into the big federal departments—the Treasury.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay? Which is where all the money is. Like, [laughing] we actually are back to ancient Rome kind of stuff.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: The General Services Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, on and on. And they’re gutting USAID. They’re sort of gutting a lot of stuff. And Elon Musk’s minions—literally minions, former Tesla and SpaceX employees—are in there kind of in the code bases, pulling stuff out.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. So that’s—

Rich: Sort of unclear what’s going on.

Paul: It’s incredibly unclear what’s going on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s unclear if they can change things. There’s federal injunctions. So this is a, you know, a kind of flood-the-zone moment, as typical of our current governance model in America.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Which is we’ll create a lot of chaos, and maybe they won’t notice this other thing going on over here and just—

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? And then the overall broad strategy of this thing—get ready, get ready. Once they have gotten in there and fixed all the code is—they’re kind of playing the Twitter playbook out here. What technology do you think they’re going to use to really make the government efficiency…efficiency efficient? What are they going to do to make us really run smooth and get everybody on the same page?

Rich: AI?

Paul: Yeah, you got it, baby. Wow, you pulled that out like a McKinsey consultant.

Rich: Yeah, but that’s not even clear, what they mean by “using AI.”

Paul: Well, they do mean, you know, GSA, the General Services Administration?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: They’re going to have GSAI.

Rich: G-S-A-I. I like that.

Paul: Yeah. It’s going to be a chatbot, and it’s going to help everybody make better decisions.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: They’re going to feed—

Rich: I saw something about this. It wasn’t clear to me what it meant. I don’t think, I think it’s still very murky right now. And I heard AI in the mix because it’s, like, “Well, AI will bring efficiency.”

Paul: Well, I think if it had been five years ago and this, we were back in this situation, we would be talking about crypto.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But the idea that crypto is the solution has moved away. Even though it’s bigger than it ever was.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s funny to me, like, blockchains rarely come up as the answer anymore.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But everybody still likes their crypto money.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So now AI is the solution to everything. So what are they saying they’re going to do? They’re saying there’ll be a chatbot that’ll help General Service Administration people, I don’t know, access things. It’s very hand wavy, right? And then they’re going to use AI to analyze all the contracts.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And it’s going to find where the fraud is.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay?

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So that’s, that’s something right there.

Rich: Okay. I have a few thoughts. Some, I think veer away a bit from maybe the core topic of this podcast, but I want to share them anyway.

Paul: Yeah. Go for it.

Rich: If that’s okay.

Paul: Go ahead.

Rich: I’m going to first be a bit optimistic for a split second.

Paul: I mean, this is, this is you.

Rich: This is me. Government is probably undoubtedly terribly inefficient and bloated.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: It’s just government. I mean, I don’t think that’s a shocker to anyone.

Paul: No. And in fact, I mean, for context, one of the, you know, there’s lots of documentation on that. And so, like, the DOGE people are going to these budget reports that show tens, hundreds of billions of dollars—

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Very—you know, sort of, they don’t always know where all the money’s going.

Rich: Look, here is the reality we should all just embrace. We are a fabulously wealthy country that is just, just, it’s just gobs and gobs of money. Right? And with gobs and gobs of money comes a lot of unnecessary process and ceremony, because there’s just too much money. Like, if you had, and we talked about this with constraints, with DeepSeek and constraints. If the U.S. Government had, like, real limitations, then you sort of are forced to figure out how to make things work with, like, PHP, and with less people. But because we’re so, so absolutely flush with money, there is just a lot that’s caked on.

Paul: Well, it’s a weird, we’re a weird country, right? Because there are parts of Mississippi that might as well be Afghanistan.

Rich: That’s true. And that’s too bad. But if we’re talking about the federal government, the federal government—

Paul: Oh—

Rich: It’s a, it’s, it’s siphoning of federal income. Federal taxes in general.

Paul: I mean, for the last hundred years, you get that federal job, you’re eating good.

Rich: You’re doing good.

Paul: You’re in the union, you’re doing good. And that’s, that’s actually, like, that’s kind of a cornerstone of American society, once you get that federal job. And they’re blowing that up.

Rich: Yeah, they’re blowing—they’re trying to blow up.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Let’s see how it goes. And what you have is the institutionalization of processes that don’t even look wrong. They’re just sort of, like, part of life. It’s just part of the process of renewing your driver’s license, or part of the process of getting building permits. It’s just, it’s become calcified into the system in such a deep way that no one pauses to think, well, gosh, that’s a ridiculous—that’s how it was done in 1958. But why are we still doing it that way? Because there’s all kinds of—

Paul: Well, sometimes also, they jam—and they’re not going after this system. They jam slowdowns into tax collection. They jam slowdown—you know that, the number one is anything related to gun registration is pretty much still paper.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Paul: Because they don’t want any searchable database.

Rich: I get the need for paper, in a lot of cases, like, dangerous circumstances or serious consequences if things go wrong.

Paul: Or just trying to slow down—like, they don’t want a national database of gun owners.

Rich: I get it. And guess what? I know I sound like I’m making a case. I’m about to do a plot twist in a minute. Just give me a minute.

Paul: Get Socratic.

Rich: Guess what, Paul?

Paul: Yeah?

Rich: Guess what?

Paul: Uh huh?

Rich: It is nearly impossible to dislodge it.

Paul: It is.

Rich: It’s nearly impossible. You kind of have to take a sledgehammer to it. There’s just no other way. Wars do it.

Paul: Financial crisis.

Rich: Financial crisis does it. A pandemic does it. Like, it’s a typically, what, five to seven years to get a drug through trials?

Paul: Oh yeah.

Rich: The pandemic forced it in, like, six months, eight months, whatever it was. Why? Because it was an absolute necessity in that very moment. And the truth is, what’s happening here is a massive disruptive force is coming into a system that is just made out of concrete and stone and marble, that has been there for a very long time.

Paul: And has all the money.

Rich: And has all the money. Now let me take a shit on all this.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Okay? First of all, I have two issues. One is data and information and personal information. I’m all for sledgehammers. I’ve built businesses based on a very subtle velvet sledgehammer. I believe in them, because I think change is hard, and sometimes you just got to ram through. But people’s information and data is actually critically important. And so you do need to take a beat. Now—

Paul: I can actually contextualize you for people. You do take a, you take a swing, but you have empathy. And so you have this kind of empathetic sledgehammer. And I would say, without a doubt, when you and I started working together, one of the things we decided on was we’d emphasize growth, always. We’re not in there, we were never the consultants that you brought in to end the department.

Rich: No.

Paul: Right? And you do try to protect the people there. You do care about the jobs that are, you know, you try to create jobs wherever you can.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: So there’s a kind of sledgehammer where you’re like, look. And there’s also another element of, like, I kind of see a crisis coming if we don’t make some changes right now.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I know you don’t want the change.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I know you don’t want the crisis, but if we have the crisis now, we’ll have less crisis later.

Rich: Yeah, that’s—

Paul: We’re not seeing that.

Rich: Well, this leads to my second, more important point. The motivation behind this, and the tone behind it.

Paul: It’s just destruction, man.

Rich: Well, it’s not even that. It’s worse than that, and it’s more insidious than that. The issue, it reminds me… You said it. You said it very casually, which is interesting, because you just sort of zipped by due process. You said, “We’re gonna go find fraud.” When you start with where the evil is by default, you are bringing shades of McCarthyism back into the picture here. By essentially going in with the preconceived idea that there is evil lurking and we must find it, that is much, much more dangerous. I’m worried about people’s data. But what is more dangerous is the tone and the assumption that you are fighting bad people and evil people. Like, I’m not saying they are saintly by any means. And there’s probably—it’s a vast, vast world. There’s probably fraud somewhere.

Paul: Of course, there are tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments in the United States system.

Rich: Yes. And so that lack of due process and the tone behind it, and there is absolutely no conversation about, like, we’re going to bring these new efficiencies in, and then we’re going to retrain people so they can work better, so the government can work faster and better. This is none of that.

Paul: No—this is the danger of AI. It’s basically just another, like, another sledgehammer wrapping the other sledgehammer.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s a double sledgehammer.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So I’m going to hit you in the head with this, and you’re going to hear about how you’re a fraud and everything you’ve done sucked and you’re a bad employee and you didn’t make a better government just like the one in my head.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Which is. I mean, classic CEO activity.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Which is to be, like, “I imagined it last night, and it’s not done yet. What’s wrong with you?”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But not really how the government is supposed to work, because we’re supposed to have a process.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: But then, B) we’re going to get in there and we’re like, “Okay, you know what? Whatever I do, whatever I break, I’m going to be able to fix it with the new thing.” And there’s no process. It’s pretty ugly.

Rich: I think there’s a, there’s a few things going on. One is, look, you’re allowed to appoint people. I mean, the truth is, you know, this reminds me of Kushner, Jared Kushner. Like, he signed giant peace treaties for the government.

Paul: I mean—

Rich: You’re allowed to appoint people.

Paul: The guy—

Rich: So I—

Paul: The guy won the election. Whatever.

Rich: No, it’s not that. He could also appoint people.

Paul: No, I know.

Rich: And so he appointed this guy. Now, he appointed a guy who happens to have a particular style around moving quickly. That is a style that has actually worked in business. He’s trying it here in government. I don’t mind attacking inefficiency and old systems. I don’t mind it. I actually don’t—I think, I think it is jarring and it is bruising, but it can be good. It can actually be good. I think when you go in, like, “We’re gonna find the criminals and find fraud,” and this and that? That’s back to, that’s, again, shades of McCarthyism. It’s shades of—essentially, it’s driven not by inefficiency and saving money, which I want to get to in a second. It’s driven by ideology. And when you drive… When you’re driven by ideology, you’re in an emotional place. You’re in an irrational place. And you’re in a demonization, you’re demonizing people. And peoples’ lives were ruined in the 50s with McCarthyism. Like, literally entire lives were destroyed. And the guy—

Paul: A lot of our listeners are just actually not going to know what McCarthyism is. Go ahead and take just one minute and explain what happened.

Rich: Yeah, Joseph McCarthy was a senator, I think, from Minnesota.

Paul: Yep.

Rich: And it’s at the height of the Cold War, there’s a lot of paranoia about communism and the communist threat.

Paul: Red Scare. And there are actual communists in America, in a way that there kind of aren’t today. Like—

Rich: There were communists in America.

Paul: People in Hollywood and so on. There was an element of, like, a far left, pro-Soviet Union vibe in America.

Rich: That’s right. So what started happening was people from all walks of life, writers, doctors, scientists, professors in colleges, roped in and asked if they were communists. I mean, I’m talking about things like they were rummaging through your, your garbage. They were, like, invading your privacy.

Paul: Objectively, a witch hunt. Like, we’re going to—

Rich: Objectively—

Paul: We have to find the commies wherever they are.

Rich: A witch hunt.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And it got to the military, and that’s where it ended, actually. They started to question the loyalty and allegiance of generals and soldiers and whatnot. And it was so ugly and it got to such a grotesque place that it actually ate itself alive. And it was an embarrassing black mark on American history, in fact. If you back on it. And it even roped in homosexuality.

Paul: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, who was, who was McCarthy’s little buddy?

Rich: Roy Cohn.

Paul: Who was Trump’s mentor.

Rich: Who was Trump’s mentor. And it’s a period that is, like, not a cool chapter in the history books. It’s looked back on as, like, we kind of lost our minds and we almost destroyed ourselves because of it. And this guy actually ended up in a very, like McCarthy himself ended up in a very sad place.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: What is fundamental to it, and you’re seeing shades of it here, is we’ve lost trust in ourselves and in our own fellow citizens who maybe aren’t working great, or maybe disagree. But if we’re reaching a point where ideology is driving agenda in such an emotional and irrational way, that’s an ugly thing. It never ends well.

Paul: We’re seeing it.

Rich: We’re seeing it.

Paul: We are really, I think, like, we’re tending to go straight to, like, “This is it. This is step one of fascism. It’s all over,” et cetera. And maybe that’s real. I don’t know what’s real anymore, right? But what I would say, I think what—and like, or maybe it’s not. Maybe this is kind of where we’re going to end up and things are going to slow down. I don’t have control over that. But I think what you’re saying is very, very real, which is the due process, it’s not just them swinging sledgehammers to own the libs.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They’ve created an ideological framework where the government itself is the enemy, and they have no compunction about wrecking longstanding systems that have a lot of constituents. Make sure people, make sure that veterans get their health care, that kind of stuff.

Rich: There’s a way to do it. There is terrible inefficiency and terrible bureaucracy in the government. There’s a way to do it. There needs to be some balance around it. And we can also come out and say, “Look, these are civic servants that have been doing their jobs for 40, 50 years. We’re going to take it a step at a time.”

Paul: We don’t—there’s no thank you for their service. There’s literally, you have—

Rich: I’m not even saying thank you—

Paul: You have five minutes to get out the door. That’s what we’re doing right now.

Rich: The world changes. Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. So there’s a lot of, like, sort of let’s wipe the slate clean.

Paul: So let’s, actually, I think there’s a thing you can do here, kind of with your legal bearing, that’d be really helpful for people, which is, let’s say the Department of Government Efficiency was operating in a kind of highly structured, accountable way.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But with the same mandate. On fire, change everything.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Got to get in there.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Don’t want to—don’t slow me down. Okay? Describe how that—and, you know, there’s some ideology there. Okay? Describe how that could work, so that people can start to compare—like, what is the delta between, all right, you guys won and you want to blow up the government a little bit, here’s how you do it versus what’s happening today, which just seems to be drunken monkeys running through halls.

Rich: Okay, I’m going to talk about this for another minute, and then maybe we can come back to AI because this is an AI podcast.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But I’ll say this for one minute.

Paul: Well, don’t forget. No, no, I think this is totally relevant because the thing that they’re going to tear down here, then they’re going to, they’re saying they can rebuild it with AI. And I think that’s what everyone is going to hear in the world. So we have to kind of like straighten this out a little bit.

Rich: So you’re asking, okay, let’s say, hey, go, move fast, make clean things up, but what’s the proper way to do it? Is that what you’re asking?

Paul: Yes. Yeah.

Rich: Okay, so I think there’s a few things going on. First off, a lot of this stuff is appropriated through laws. [laughing] Like, they’re in place because laws exist.

Paul: Congress would be one…

Rich: Yeah. Like, the laws created these institutions, A), and B) the laws, future laws, afterwards give them budget, so they fund them. So, like, USAID gets put together, I think Kennedy stood it up.

Paul: I swear to God, they got the whole—they have the House and the Senate. They could have gotten a rubber stamp in, like, two weeks.

Rich: Too slow, right?

Paul: Two weeks!

Rich: Too much drama. And I think, well—

Paul: The problem is, also the Congress will then lard it up with pork-barrel stuff.

Rich: They’ll lard it up. And that’s real. And that’s, and that’s the thing. So first off, I think you’re gonna start to see a lot of stay orders, mainly because you can’t flout a congressional mandate through law, that has come down through law.

Paul: Stay order meaning like a federal judge says—

Rich: “Stop. We’ll sort this out.”

Paul: Well, we’re seeing that now.

Rich: The other, I think, is information which seeps into national security. Here’s what a lot of people aren’t talking—like, “Oh my God, my data.” My data is not interesting. I’m just a dude from Brooklyn, right?

Paul: I’ve seen it. It’s not interesting.

Rich: It’s not interesting.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: What is not just interesting, but potentially quite dangerous, is you’ve got this dragnet that is getting cast wide and far, and there is sensitive knowledge in that data. There is, there are people with sensitive information. There are security considerations.

Paul: We have given a lot of little Discord kids the ability to access some of the most critical information in the world. And they are all, every single one of them, is a delicious bon-bon for a foreign agent to pluck off. Do you know how many Russian women are freshening up their makeup right now as they go to parties in D.C.?

Rich: That is where you really have to start to worry, because these organizations, even aid organizations, are actually sources of tons of intelligence for us, and whatnot. So it is, it is a little too much, right? And so I think you’re gonna see the courts continue to step in.

Paul: I mean, we’ve been rendered vulnerable by this. I do agree with that.

Rich: Yeah. So it’s a sloppy mess. Now, is there a way to do it? There’s a way to do it. You have to have a little bit, you have to have, like, put someone else in place that is also partnered, that is making sure that certain things are moving in a certain way, in a certain process, and you carve out certain information that just can’t be, you just go, don’t go there for now.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Maybe we’ll get to it in a year, right? But I think, I think what you have here is—

Paul: Boring!

Rich: Exactly. And I think what you’re seeking out is results and headlines and…

Paul: Attention.

Rich: And attention, and so that’s just a sloppy mess.

Paul: Distraction. They put on the circus.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, let’s go to AI now for a quick second.

Paul: Yeah. So now we’ve torn it all down to the studs.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And now we’re going to rebuild it with AI.

Rich: Yeah. So—

Paul: Well, I’ll talk for one second. Which is, like… It’s too soon. Even if everyone was actually like—I don’t see a lot of actual sort of good intentions out there. But let’s say the intentions were good. It’s too soon to jam this technology into, like, something critical.

Rich: You still should read the code of a color picker you had AI generate.

Paul: For the government.

Rich: [laughing] Still, like, we are just now trying to get our bearings on the power of this thing—

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: —and kind of how unwieldy it can be.

Paul: The right place to be skipping steps is where we are, which is a startup.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you know, it’s a small group of people who are really experimenting because we want to accelerate the hell out of software. Good for us. This is our marketing podcast, right? Jamming the message in, even in this context.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But that’s, that’s where it’s supposed to be. It’s you and me saying let’s put some, we’re going to place some bets that we can skip steps and get away with a little bit of murder because we think we can build a hell of a business. Woo, good boys. That’s great. But that is not the deal that people make when they pay their taxes.

Rich: I think, look, I want to come back to, to the optimistic side again, because I do think AI is going to be great for government. I think it’s going to be great.

Paul: This is—I mean, honestly, I’m sort of sad that they’re doing it this way, because I completely agree.

Rich: Yeah. And I think things can become more accessible. Information could be more readily available. It’s all kinds of things—

Paul: I will give you one example where probably $100 billion could get saved, which is you have this enormous amount of federal contracting, Huge legacy code bases. Legacy code, I’m really seeing patterns where you can write a bunch of tests for the legacy code, translate the legacy code to the new code.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And make sure it all runs—

Rich: Old COBOL code or whatever.

Paul: Exactly. And get things into languages like Java or modern frameworks or even things, Richard, like more critical technologies like Ada or Rust, where you have memory safety and you can really sort of take care of what the computer’s doing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There are things you can do with AI, with computers and a bunch of programmers, that are so specifically good at where the government gets bogged down.

Rich: 100%.

Paul: And the other tricky thing is there’s just going to be intense capture of all of the value of that by places like Booz or Deloitte. And it makes me really anxious, because I think, like, these big firms are going to be, like, “You guys don’t get to touch the new stuff because you’re the government. You don’t ever get to play with the new stuff. We’ll do it for you.”

Rich: Look, maybe on the other side of this mayhem that we’re seeing right now, the likes of Booz get checked. Like, I’m going to be a little, I’m going to go back to my optimism for a split second here. I remember the Obamacare online story.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They probably used, like, old-school contractors to put together the Obamacare site.

Paul: Oh, they did. They absolutely did.

Rich: They couldn’t stand it up, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And then what happened was, it actually reminds me of like the young bucks showing up and using modern technology to stand up a scalable Obamacare. Like, the Musk teams? I know everybody’s making fun of these kids, but the truth is it took probably younger people who had a more aggressive posture towards pushing code and modern technologies to get Obamacare up. And that did happen. It was, I know some of the people at the firm that was brought in to do it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: In fact some of them worked for me.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? And so those people were, I can tell you without a doubt, self-taught, wickedly sharp comp-sci computer programmers.

Paul: And I think everyone would accept maybe a little full of themselves, like, a little bit like, “I know the right way to do this always.”

Rich: Yeah, always.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But you know what? They were desperate that, like, he promised like universal healthcare, and the website didn’t work.

Paul: It was, it was a bad one.

Rich: They had to leave D.C.’s system of, like, government-approved contractors to get it done.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: That happened, right? And now what you’re, so what you’re seeing here is probably really, really talented people are swirling around. The problem is there’s no rule book and there are real consequences, and they’re also, there’s also shades of a witch hunt. Just carve that out, bring that efficiency in. We want it, it’s needed. But there’s a way to do it so people don’t feel like they’re getting chased with torches, A), and B) I want to know that my government is airtight-sealed. I need to know that.

Paul: Unfortunately, the thing that you’re describing kind of, like, that dialogue went out of the world with, like, John McCain. Like, we’re just not there anymore.

Rich: I don’t know. I mean, unfortunately, you might be right. And I think other systems will have to kick in, like courts and Congress and other places.

Paul: I hope so!

Rich: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is where we are above our pay grade. I do think AI is going to be great for government. I think it’s going to be great for government. I think it’s going to be great for, for almost all sectors.

Paul: We may need to just focus on the states for a while.

Rich: Yeah, sure.

Paul: Federal may need to work itself out for a bit.

Rich: It’s a sloppy mess, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s the Wild West right now.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? And so that’s real.

Paul: But I do think they’re going in at the wrong altitude. Like, if you really wanted to make government more efficient, like, saying we’re going to slop a bunch of AI on, on systems that we grabbed the control bit?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Is not a way to actually create more efficiency. I don’t see the path from A to B.

Rich: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t even know. You know what, this is the other bit. And this is, I think, my last rambling point, is we just don’t know what’s going on.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: We, it’s unclear whether they want to purge systems.

Paul: Rich, we know what’s going on.

Rich: I don’t know if we—

Paul: Occam’s razor is like, there, everyone, it’s the same as Twitter, which is just start turning off servers and see when they scream.

Rich: That’s right. That’s right.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Yeah, but that was Twitter.

Rich: Yeah. Different game. Different game.

Paul: Yeah, so, I mean, here we are. Anyway, look, my summary on this is it’s the constant narrative with all these technologies. You got to keep your eyes on what they do well and where they can move you and your community along, and try to ignore some of this bigger, larger narrative, because you’re about to hear a lot of nonsense about AI in government.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you’re about to hear a lot of foolishness. And just sort of, like, what I would say is keep your ears open. But, you know, there’s no fix. There’s no, like—there’s also no, like, magic brain that they’re going to find all the bad contracts. Like, it’s just, there’s a lot of hand-waving nonsense.

Rich: Yeah. And look, go find the bad contracts. But I got to tell you, if I’m a foreign actor, I’m pretty pumped right now.

Paul: I hate to say that. That is real. I think if I’m China and Russia and a bunch of—I think a bunch of other countries are like—

Rich: China’s already in there.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, China—like, China’s spy, you know, technologies, they’ve been, they’re constantly there. Like, they’ve constantly been playing there, even before this administration.

Paul: This is what ideology does. Ideology, at the absolute extreme, makes us vulnerable because it’s monolithic. I’m going to close with an idea that I’ve been just rattling around in my head. Okay, so, you know, I talked about this like, we’re in a, it is an era of large global forces. Climate change, the MAGA movement, and sort of a rightward drift in a lot of governments around the world. You also have a progressive urge where you have a lot of things about gender identity and so on coming out. And everyone seems to have a fantasy that they’re going to get to put it back in the box. The left seems to think that maybe we let MAGA burn out or spirals into fascism. The right seems to think that we can, like, make trans people go away by legislating. Everybody seems to have forgotten climate change, or assumes that eventually the adults will show up and manage it. And I think we’re in an era where nothing’s going to go back in the box, and AI is like another—like, a lot of people want AI to go back in the box. We had an event, and I asked somebody, “Hey”—a person who’s, like, big in the, you know, sort of doing a lot in the industry. I said, “If you could put this away, would you?” Right? And they said, “A lot of the people, a lot of my constituents would love me to.” [laughter] Right? “But I wouldn’t, because I just think it’s there and we have to deal with it.”

Rich: We have to deal with it.

Paul: Yeah. And so all of these things. The right isn’t going away. The left isn’t going away. Gender identities aren’t going away.

Rich: Climate change.

Paul: Climate change. AI and DOGE is not going away. Elon Musk is going to be there for the rest of our life, unless ketamine gets him first. And so, like, pace yourself, everybody.

Rich: Yeah. And I think the overarching theme here is there’s a lot of power in our hands. And that could be, you know, you and your bedroom in Queens, or you could be, you know, an appointed person in government. And I think understanding the implications of it and using it responsibly, I think is really what’s, what’s at play here.

Paul: And you’re gonna have to make those decisions for yourself.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because right now the guidance from the sort of larger sphere isn’t consistent.

Rich: It’s not. It’s not. And humans tend to step in shit first and then realize, “Oh, we should probably put a velvet rope around that shit so no one else steps in it.” We just tend to do that. We tend to not anticipate.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And we tend to kind of make the mistakes and then fix afterwards. But here we are.

Paul: So, to me, Richard, and I know this sounds bananas, but this is why I kind of love what we are doing. Because what we are doing is about accelerating and getting stuff done very quickly and cheaply, so that you can iterate on software over and over and over again until you find the right solution.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And the more chaos comes into the world, the more I feel really good about that, because we’ve now we’re a couple years in, and we’re, like, in about a month or two, we’re going to show people, kind of take this thing out on the road.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But you can make software that solves problems and organizes data in minutes, and you don’t even need Aboard to do it. You can use a lot of different tools to do it.

Rich: There’s a lot of capabilities out there.

Paul: So there’s a new set of capabilities in the world that is emerging, and it is exciting and interesting, and it is a way to start to deal with, I don’t, I don’t mean that like, “Hey, you can go smash MAGA with Aboard.” Like, it’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, you can start to organize your world and take control of your world with software and not be dependent on others.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: With these tools.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Relatively far away from the government. So we do pay our taxes.

Rich: We do.

Paul: [laughing] We really pay a lot of taxes.

Rich: Hey, maybe things get so messy they won’t ask us for any more money.

Paul: Well, they’re gonna reboot the whole system. So—

Rich: I mean, hold down that power button! I’ll see you in five years.

Paul: It’s all good until we get the $6-trillion bill in 2033. [laughter] In whatever, Dogecoin hyper-inflated nonsense we’re in the middle of. All right, so on that note, if you need anything, get in touch. Hello@aboard.com. We are building a hell of a software platform. We’re very excited to show it to you. It’s got AI all the way through, whether that gives you the wiggles or not. And Rich, anything else?

Rich: No. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Have a wonderful week.

Paul: Bye.

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