The Exchanges

Q also a decision that you made, which was to build Ghostwriter on top of your own models. So something like a co-pilot is built on top of GPT-III to my knowledge, and that's a decision to be built off another platform, but you went a different route. So can you speak a little bit more to how you made that decision and what kind of inputs led to that output?

A Well, first of all, how crazy it is that, uh, that Microsoft had a dependent on another company, whereas Replit built our own thing. There are like multiple ways to answer this. One of them is UX. UX is inherently inseparable from the infrastructure for how a product works. I think most people think as the, they're separate things, but if you're serious about making products, you know, uh, you know, famous, um, Alan Kaye quote to Steve Jobs, he told Steve Jobs, if you're serious about making software, you have to make hardware. Um, and that's why like Apple's this full stack company is because they think about everything from the transistor to the touch, right? And so I think for us, it was like, just. Like if this is going to be a core interaction with our platform, we have to be able to optimize it and we have to get the latency down to the point that we, we like, we feel it's going to be a really great user experience. And we weren't able to really get that when we're hitting something over an API. Cause the latency will be all over the place. We can get the caching ride. We can get the, um, you know, location, right? We didn't have control about any of these things. That's a huge downside of being a consumer of a mere API. And then, uh, the other part is a strategic part, which is like, if you think, if you believe that this is a primary platform shift and this is going to …

AI assessment note: “if this is going to be a core interaction... we have to get latency down”

Q then also vet their clients and say, okay, this is, You know, a good project. This is worthwhile for us to introduce into this marketplace. And then they match people. And then of course those marketplaces take some commission for doing so. And so since many of these already exist, like how do you see bounties as an ecosystem differentiating or maybe providing something new to people within the community?

A I think it's already differentiated. And the reason it's already differentiated is because the development environment is built into the system. If Uber was a marketplace to connect you to people and then they have to go get their own car, right? Like, so you have to go meet someone at a coffee shop and then you and them go get a car. That's an absurd example, but that's what happens at Upwork or some of these marketplaces. Like I asked for a piece of software. And then you go make it in something that I don't know. And then you send me a zip file. And then what do I do with that? Right. And Replit, I just sent you a link, a link to a computer that's running, that's running your application. That's like fundamental innovation on top of that. And then like all the services just being integrated right there. Like you're opening out AI API key that the cloud runtime, like all that stuff, the database, we just added, uh, Postgres support. Just Repli being this complete platform, just like makes this process a lot more efficient.

AI assessment note: “the reason it's already differentiated is because the development environment is built into the system.”

Q word fun. Um, and after I learned to code, I saw it in a different light. And I think that's really important is this idea where it's like, how do you make coding fun? So what are your thoughts there? How have you been able to design Replit to actually enhance people's creativity and make them want to come back and make them see this skill in a new light?

A So I think most things that are fun tend to be devoid of a lot of drudgerous routine work, right? You know, when, when you're playing a video game, you're not like building the video game every time or setting up the TV or, or, or doing some like rote IT task, right? When you are, um, doing a sports hobby, you're in the flow, you're doing the thing you're excited about doing. The problem with coding is that a lot of the maintenance around the development environment and the packages and the integration of all the different components, Was the thing that engineers were spending most of their time doing. The moments they were coding, they were an absolute bliss, but those moments were actually very little in terms of the, if you think about the pie charts of what it meant to work as a programmer. So the first thing that Repli did is remove the need to do all this setup. That in itself made programming a lot more, uh, fun. And then add the collaborative aspect. Like a lot of what we find fun in life has to do with other people. We're just social animals, right? And so like, if I can share my program with you with just a link, that's really fun. That's what makes Figma fun. That's what makes Any other collaborative tool fun is that I can just like send you a link and you're, you're in there with me, or you can play it and try it out. And then finally, there's like a lot of like exp…

AI assessment note: “the first thing that Repli did is remove the need to do all this setup.”

Q have been built with AI. So those are two examples of how this technology not only, you know, maybe made things faster, but actually made things possible. If that makes sense, things that weren't prior available. So have you seen any glimpses of that or any thoughts around just like having, you know, we could position it as somewhat of a superpower, having that superpower accessible. What does that change?

A Man, this is such a brilliant question. Like, I actually haven't thought about it as much, and I think I should. Like, uh, you know, your example with chess also happened with Go, you know, with the Lisey Doll game. Do you remember that move? That basically what happened is the AI made a strange move that made it, gave it a disadvantage in the near term and a huge advantage in the long term. And they were so confused about it because it's almost like alien intelligence intruding on this thousand year old game, right? And, and producing this fundamentally novel move. So I don't think we've seen that entirely in, in programming yet, but I'd be definitely on the lookout for that. What I would say we've seen is that tasks that were previously would require A ton of work, like a ton of insane amount of laborious work getting done like that. You know, for example, the parsing question. GPT-III is incredibly good at parsing. If you give it a malformed JSON, it will still parse it. Writing parsers is one of the hardest things you can do in programming. Writing parsers in GPT-III is one of the easiest thing you could do. You could spend 15 minutes in the OpenAI Playground. And so really that goes from a task That requires hours and maybe days and weeks of building and testing to something that takes a 15 minute. And so that's a fundamental phase shift in, in how we do things. That's act…

AI assessment note: “I don't think we've seen that entirely in, in programming yet, but I'd”

Q year embedded within the charts. So let's look forward. We're now in 20, 23. We've got some great data from 20, 22, and I know you actually looked at 20, 21 as well. So we'll include that too in the show notes. But as we look forward, like what should we be paying attention to? What kind of apps do you think are going to thrive in this new year?

A So there's already an early, I don't want to say winner, but maybe an early leader for 2023. Which is Temu, which is a new commerce app developed by a large Chinese company called Pinduoduo. And in China, the version of this app is a full group buying experience. Say you're going to purchase a bag of apples or something, and the price on the app is two dollars. The more friends you invite to add a bag of apples to the order, the price can go all the way down to like 10 cents, five cents. Um, so it kind of gamifies commerce. The US version of it is, um, a little bit less sophisticated so far, but it is basically deep discounts on these Products that are largely kind of shipping from overseas. There is quite a bit of gamification around inviting your friends to get extra points that then you can win free items shipped directly from you, or even withdraw cash from the app by inviting other friends to download it. So unsurprisingly, that has resulted in a ton of downloads.

AI assessment note: “So there's already an early, I don't want to say winner, but maybe an early leader for 2023. Which is Temu”

Q year embedded within the charts. So let's look forward. We're now in 20, 23. We've got some great data from 20, 22, and I know you actually looked at 20, 21 as well. So we'll include that too in the show notes. But as we look forward, like what should we be paying attention to? What kind of apps do you think are going to thrive in this new year?

A So there's already an early, I don't want to say winner, but maybe an early leader for 2023. Which is Temu, which is a new commerce app developed by a large Chinese company called Pinduoduo. And in China, the version of this app is a full group buying experience. Say you're going to purchase a bag of apples or something, and the price on the app is two dollars. The more friends you invite to add a bag of apples to the order, the price can go all the way down to like 10 cents, five cents. Um, so it kind of gamifies commerce. The US version of it is, um, a little bit less sophisticated so far, but it is basically deep discounts on these Products that are largely kind of shipping from overseas. There is quite a bit of gamification around inviting your friends to get extra points that then you can win free items shipped directly from you, or even withdraw cash from the app by inviting other friends to download it. So unsurprisingly, that has resulted in a ton of downloads.

AI assessment note: “there's already an early, I don't want to say winner, but maybe an early leader for 2023. Which is Temu”

Q on the today show and had this big exclusive segment, which in the past would have been like, Huge for, for an application or a company. And he said he thinks it generated a thousand downloads. So I guess what I'm getting at is like, how do you effectively grow an app when a lot of the existing channels just don't really compare to this idea of word of mouth?

A I see word of mouth as kind of the purest maybe form and most lasting if you can get it right form of acquisition, just because the barrier that's probably hardest to overcome Like, I mean, you can pay people to download your app. You can pay influencers to talk about it, but to get a normal person who isn't looking for startups every day to recognize a new product and then go use it and then tell someone else about it because it's that valuable or interesting to them. That's kind of the ultimate to me, like the peak of a great consumer product. I do think we still see like TikTok as an organic channel is still very powerful. It's probably harder to build an audience on TikTok, especially as a startup, than it was a year and a half ago or two years ago, and it'll get harder and harder over time. Companies are starting to use TikTok ads, which is also interesting. Again, like, low cost for now, great channel for now, similar to how Instagram and Facebook ads got so much more expensive. Kind of the arbitrage opportunity of these new platforms tends to go away over time. What is interesting and always fun to see is sometimes there's these big acquisition moments that aren't at all orchestrated by the company, but orchestrated by the user base. And they're almost their own kind of special form of word of mouth, but at like massive scale. One of the top apps this year was called Tal…

AI assessment note: “I do think we still see like TikTok as an organic channel is still very powerful.”

Q so ignore the acquisition. If someone, a founder built a successful social app that trended even for a few months and made several million dollars, like I would say that's a success. It's not a fang level success where you go on to be multi-billion dollar company, but I think Maybe would you say there's an argument to people focusing more on that given the state of the app store?

A Oh, absolutely. I think it all comes down to what you as a founder are wanting to build. And I think the opportunity maybe has never been greater to build and monetize a mobile app quickly, make a few million dollars and retire if that's what you want to do. Uh, clearly Nikita is still building, so he's not at the retirement point yet. Um, but I think his, One of his last tweets about the app before the acquisition said they had had like, ten million downloads and six million in revenue, which is just amazing. There used to be this kind of paradigm in consumer where the goal was to build an app, get it to the mainstream, get it to Facebook level, Instagram level, millions, if not hundreds of millions of users, and then you would monetize people through ads, like the user kind of becomes the product. And now, I'm, I've been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is. I think it's a mix of like Apple Pay and Google Pay adoption and saturation, people getting more comfortable making purchases online. Maybe it's the younger generation, um, who is, you know, happy and feels safe buying something on their phone versus my parents' generation is still like suspicious of Venmo and thinks their money is going to get stolen every time. Um, but we are seeing many more apps get big and make money at the same time and at an early stage in their life. Lenza is another really good example of this, …

AI assessment note: “Oh, absolutely. I think it all comes down to what you as a founder”

Q but I think there's maybe a further extension of that. Which is not just solo interacting physically, but also how, how do these digital apps potentially impact the way that we engage with other people physically, right? Like kind of a cyclical nature to our digital and physical lives. So are there examples of apps that you've seen that our online behavior actually penetrates the physical world or changes it?

A Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think like the first wave of subscription products, Uh, like the comms, the head spaces, the fitness apps, the nutrition apps were very much kind of single player mode and helping you optimize yourself and your life and your habits. We've definitely seen kind of this rise of this new wave of apps focused around relationships and really, you know, the app just needs you and one other person to work, but they'll prompt you with daily questions about the other person, things you want to talk about, basically ways to use this digital product to enhance This real world relationship that's happening and, and to maybe make things easier or to strengthen or to improve these relationships. The most kind of basic version of this was the widget apps that went popular. Lock it widget, the founder, um, he's a, his name is Matt Moss. I think he's either a college student or a recent college graduate. He made it for his girlfriend. They were in a long distance relationship and they wanted to see what each other was up to every day. Uh, and I think that use case is, is very strong of kind of how can we integrate technology more seamlessly to help us have better in person or in real life relationships. Another trend that we're seeing quite a lot of is apps and products, and especially platforms like TikTok, to be honest, driving traffic and driving engagement toward…

AI assessment note: “We've definitely seen kind of this rise of this new wave of apps”

Q they just be combing through previous successful apps, like a Yik Yak, for example, and just creating the Yik Yak of 2023? Because we've seen how effective they can be and how also kind of evergreen they are, because there's these like innate human emotions like Gazzap to be complimented or be real to like To be understood, right? There's, like, these fundamental human emotions that don't change across generations.

A I feel like a consistent debate in the tech world of, like, who's gonna build the first anonymous social app that has, like, true staying power and becomes a billion-dollar company on its own. There's already, in twenty-twenty-three, a new app that just raised a seed round that hit number one in Germany. It's called Slay, very similar to Gazzap and TBH. So another example of kind of that trend. Playing out. I think there's, I mean, and Nikita himself has said this, there's always going to be a question of, um, These apps that are based around kind of anonymous, uh, networks. Can you really build like a lasting social network? Because people aren't really storing relationships on the app. They're not really communicating or direct messaging through the app. So they get very popular very, very fast. If there's no maybe act two of the app, like if there's no what's next, then they can also kind of decline very, very fast as that core dense group of people. That joined unravels a little bit more and moves on to the next thing.

AI assessment note: “It's called Slay, very similar to Gazzap and TBH. So another example of kind of that trend.”

Q some people could argue that some of these aspects of social video And discovery commerce that you're describing are already in certain applications. I'm just going to use Instagram as an example here. So what gaps do you see in terms of how social implements discovery or changes its involvement with e-commerce and how perhaps does this maybe compared to other parts of the world that have a different state?

A So I think you're right in the sense that on Instagram, we already all shop from Instagram. Most of the time we get lots of product inspiration from the ads. But whether or not we actually complete the transaction right there and then that's still a TBD. And I think it's because a lot of the platforms today, the Western platforms still have way too much friction between inspiration to discovering more and learning about the product to finally doing the actual checkout, the actual payment completion. Today, you might find inspiration on Instagram. You might find a video of an influencer talking about a product, but you might not click and complete the purchase right there. And then you might instead open a browser and go to sephora.com and go search for that item or go to Nordstrom.com and go search for that outfit. The transaction right now is still kind of being broken up and that's because there's a lot of friction and the actual implementation of it's not great. But I think the other thing about video that's still very underdeveloped is the idea of something like live video and live video is a fantastic way to sell things. And it is something that I'd say we haven't really explored out in the West yet outside of these other platforms like whatnot that does live shopping for collectibles and other categories. And the reason why live is so powerful is a bunch of things. One th…

AI assessment note: “the Western platforms still have way too much friction between inspiration to discovering more”

Q All right. And I am so excited to talk about this topic because we've been seeing this theme across several of our big ideas, this transition from physical to digital. And before we get into that, I just want to hear from you. I mean, we heard Ray Oldenburg's definition, but how would you define this idea of a third space?

A I think of third spaces as physical locations that are not your home and not your work, where you can explore different but important parts of your identity. To me, there's sort of two dimensions. One is obviously the actual physical location, but the other is a person's mental and psychological state. Third spaces are places that enable freedom and safety outside of our workplaces and our homes. I think in terms of the physical location dimension, They're places you congregate socially, and you're able to explore different parts of your, uh, identity freely and safely. Psychologically, to me, these are spaces where you don't have a defined role responsibility. For instance, at home, you might be a parent, right? Or you might be a breadwinner, um, or head of household, or both. But at work, you have a specific job duty, uh, and associated responsibility. Neither of these places, uh, offer true freedom. Colleges, to me, are really good earlier life examples of good third spaces, so there's lots of communities and spaces where you're free to explore and free to interact with whoever you want. For adults, this could be religion in churches. It could be games and gaming bars, cafes, arcades. For fitness enthusiasts, this could be gyms, and for art lovers, you know, this could Could be a museum, or a particular museum, or even space within a museum. But there's been definitely a dwi…

AI assessment note: “I think of third spaces as physical locations that are not your home”

Q a recent example of this is ChatGPT, which is throwing out a lot of correct answers, but also a lot of incorrect answers, and humans are just kind of taking it at face value. So maybe we don't even need human-like bots to trick humans. It seems like less evolved bots are already doing that. So what do you think about that? Have we already kind of crossed that chasm?

A Oh, absolutely. Um, and I think the question here is, like, at what point do you cross the chasm in whatever domain to deceive humans? So, for example, it's like, you used to read the words, like, don't believe everything you read on the internet. Now, I think this applies to AI. Like, don't believe everything you read from AI. Um, the Turing test, as you say, is like a flawed metric, and the reason for this is in part because It is too low of a bar. It is a binary bar, so it's either intelligent or not intelligent, and it tests for deception, not real understanding. What these AIs do is they Try to understand the underlying rules that generate the dataset that they're trained on, um, and then generate an approximation of what they believe is the next token. But it doesn't mean that it's right. Like in the case of chat GPT, it communicates with a lot of confidence. A great example of this might be say, asking chat GPT to multiply a 153 times, 257. Like it might get an answer that's close to correct and it communicates it like it is correct, but it's not correct. And this is a deterministic domain where you know what the right answer is. There are a lot of domains where there isn't actually a right answer. The right answer is much more amorphous. Say like you ask about China's, what should China's AI strategy be? Like this is a very complex question and it is dictated by say lik…

AI assessment note: “Oh, absolutely.”

Q in some other cases, There is perhaps a more correct solution to a problem, and there's a little less what you might call fault tolerance in the system. And so as we think about maybe workflow applications or enterprise applications, are there any that come to mind with similar potential, maybe a little more tolerance in terms of getting wrong answers or there not being maybe a specifically correct solution?

A Yeah, first of all, I love how you put that, uh, fault tolerant. Um, You know, I think that's notably different from other areas where the bar is incredibly high. Um, autonomous vehicles would be a good example of that. Uh, the stakes are, you know, the highest, right? Um, people die if the product isn't right. Um, and, and as a result, the process of getting there may take a bit longer. On the other hand, I believe that the potential workflow applications of AI are enormous and incredibly near term. And a lot of that is due to this, again, more tolerance for, for faults. And right. I think a lot of these workflows are actually oriented around AI assist. So in other words, where AI is making the human more productive, but humans still stay in the loop. And as a result, they can be deployed immediately. Um, I think coding has been pretty salient recently. I've even heard developers say that they can't work without it. You know, that's not to say that AI is, you know, developers are saying, Hey, you know, create this app soup to nuts, right? That, that may be in the future in the very near future. But, um, today what developers are doing are, um, using it to code complete, right. And, and figuring out how they can make their process, especially the, the repetitive parts of their job. Just way more efficient and faster. And, um, you know, we always talk about finding new solutions…

AI assessment note: “I think coding has been pretty salient recently... Video editing with companies like Runway”

Q a recent example of this is ChatGPT, which is throwing out a lot of correct answers, but also a lot of incorrect answers, and humans are just kind of taking it at face value. So maybe we don't even need human-like bots to trick humans. It seems like less evolved bots are already doing that. So what do you think about that? Have we already kind of crossed that chasm?

A Oh, absolutely. Um, and I think the question here is, like, at what point do you cross the chasm in whatever domain to deceive humans? So, for example, it's like, you used to read the words, like, don't believe everything you read on the internet. Now, I think this applies to AI. Like, don't believe everything you read from AI. Um, the Turing test, as you say, is like a flawed metric, and the reason for this is in part because It is too low of a bar. It is a binary bar, so it's either intelligent or not intelligent, and it tests for deception, not real understanding. What these AIs do is they Try to understand the underlying rules that generate the dataset that they're trained on, um, and then generate an approximation of what they believe is the next token. But it doesn't mean that it's right. Like in the case of chat GPT, it communicates with a lot of confidence. A great example of this might be say, asking chat GPT to multiply a 153 times, 257. Like it might get an answer that's close to correct and it communicates it like it is correct, but it's not correct. And this is a deterministic domain where you know what the right answer is. There are a lot of domains where there isn't actually a right answer. The right answer is much more amorphous. Say like you ask about China's, what should China's AI strategy be? Like this is a very complex question and it is dictated by say lik…

AI assessment note: “Oh, absolutely. Um, and I think the question here is, like”

Q is that just a reality that there's just friction, there's inertia in the way we do things, which sometimes is different to other parts of the world? Or is there some sort of misnomers or some sort of misunderstanding where people think, oh, there's like a different culture and therefore it won't apply here. I'm just trying to understand why it takes so long for us to absorb these learnings.

A It requires a very open mind because you have to go at it or think about product. With the assumption that, you know, just like ratatouille, anyone can be a cook. Like anyone can come up with a great product idea. And if you come up with that mentality, you become much more open-minded and you actually want to see as many examples of success or failure as possible. And I think another big reason though, why some of this stuff takes a while to implement is twofold. One, It requires huge organizational changes. This is really a top-down decision. It's very difficult to change this type of mentality bottoms up. And the reality is if you are changing your business model of say like an Instagram newsfeed and you start pushing all these live shoppable videos, that's taking up space that otherwise would have gone to an ad that generates money, right? So your P and L takes a near-term hit. You are using a pixel space that could have gone to something else. And so this is a very high level decision or high level framework that needs to really come from the top and have really strong buy-in from the top, because there are near term consequence, not consequences. There are, there are near term impacts when you try and make these big shifts, right? The second reason I'd say is as much as we use our phones and are addicted to our phones in the U S I think we are still mobile, but also PC. O…

AI assessment note: “why some of this stuff takes a while to implement is twofold.”

Q Completely. I think that's a perfect segue into framework number three, which is that innovators don't always build a bridge. Can you speak more to that?

A Yeah. Right. So here's, here's the challenge that innovators often have. It is that they are so familiar with the value of the thing that they've created that they Do not realize that other people do not see that value, or do not understand it, or don't understand how it fits into their lives. I mean, I think that Silicon Valley is guilty of this all the time, of introducing very revolutionary ideas Without doing the groundwork of connecting this new idea to something that people are already comfortable and familiar with. So to play that out, I'll take you back on another historical story. So in the, uh, in the 1800, the car was introduced. People didn't call it the car. They called it the horseless carriage, and that, of course, is if they were being generous. If they were not being generous, they would call it the devil wagon, because they totally Um, thought these things were the devil wagon, and they would throw rocks at them, and if you drove down the street in one of these early cars, somebody would literally yell, get a horse, get a horse! They would yell, get a horse at you. And, um, and when people tell the story now of how cars became the dominant mode of transportation, what they tell is the story of Henry Ford. The Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing, and therefore made cars cheaper and more accessible to the masses. And though that is true, it skips over an imp…

AI assessment note: “introducing very revolutionary ideas Without doing the groundwork of connecting this new idea”

Q of the pushback there was, and there's the train, something that also had pushed back when it was being introduced into society, but Jason, I want to say thank you for taking the time here and for sharing all of these thoughts through your many years of research and talking to different people within this field. If anyone does want to find you or your book, where should they look?

A Um, yeah. So, Steph, thanks. This was so fun. I really enjoyed it and really, um, I'm just honored you had me on. Uh, I've been a long time listener to the show. So, um, my book where a lot of this comes from and much more is called Build for Tomorrow. You can find it audiobook, ebook, uh, hardcover, wherever you get books. And, uh, it's really, it's, it's designed to be a guide to adaptability, um, to help people think through great changes in their careers and their lives. And, uh, otherwise get in touch with me. My, um, my website is jasonfeifer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Um, there you can get links to my social media accounts, my newsletter that I write, um, on this subject. And, uh, and I, you know, I'd, I'd love for people to reach out and, um, I promise I will respond to anyone who does.

AI assessment note: “my book where a lot of this comes from and much more is called Build”

Q Progress doesn't wait either. Let's bookend that and move on to number two. What is the second framework that you've developed?

A Yeah. So the second one is that we don't often know what things are for. And if we don't know what something is for, then we will either be alarmed by it because it seems like it's, uh, you know, to go back to what we were just talking about, kind of breaking something that we were familiar with, or we just think that it's, it's frivolous. So oftentimes I'll go and I'll speak to crowds and I'll talk about change and adaptation and technology. And then somebody will raise their hand and say, but you make a print magazine. Why are you still doing that? And The answer is, well, look, I think that it's important to ask if I'm in the content business and I am, what is content for? What's it for? Decades ago, content was for monetization. So you could sell ads against your content. You could sell subscriptions to your content. Now you can, you can do that, but it doesn't make you nearly as much money. And I'm not just talking about entrepreneur. I'm talking about the entire media ecosystem. So I look at content and I think, well, what is this for? Content is for relationships. That's what it's for. Why does Red Bull pour a ton of money into content? If you like extreme sports, then a Red Bull is your place. They got a magazine for you. They got videos, they got events. They make money off of that. I have no idea. Probably not. They probably lose money off of it. You know where they m…

AI assessment note: “So the second one is that we don't often know what things are for.”

Q for vain women. And then there is a much longer paragraph which basically talks about how a woman no longer has to go into a store or go back home in order to fix up her makeup or see her face. She now has it on her. She can now see herself at any point in the day. Little aids for vain women. Where do you think this fits in?

A Okay, uh, so that's definitely number two, which is that we don't often know what new things are for, because they're describing something very similar to how we talk about selfies today, right, which is that, um, um, these mirrors, uh, are exacerbating and playing into people's vanity, and I mean, those, those, those old articles about the mirror would talk about women who, um, who will, like, literally not pull their faces up From the mirror. There were, there were concerns that women would be wandering out into streets and get hit by cars because they're looking at the mirror, uh, the whole time. Um, and of course, now we talk about that with our cell phones and, um, and with, with selfies. But what people didn't understand was that, you know, the mirror wasn't going to override our basic humanity. Um, the mirror was going to be a wonderful new tool that people used in certain circumstances, and that frankly, everybody would be happy to have one.

AI assessment note: “so that's definitely number two, which is that we don't often know”

Q Progress doesn't wait either. Let's bookend that and move on to number two. What is the second framework that you've developed?

A Yeah. So the second one is that we don't often know what things are for. And if we don't know what something is for, then we will either be alarmed by it because it seems like it's, uh, you know, to go back to what we were just talking about, kind of breaking something that we were familiar with, or we just think that it's, it's frivolous. So oftentimes I'll go and I'll speak to crowds and I'll talk about change and adaptation and technology. And then somebody will raise their hand and say, but you make a print magazine. Why are you still doing that? And The answer is, well, look, I think that it's important to ask if I'm in the content business and I am, what is content for? What's it for? Decades ago, content was for monetization. So you could sell ads against your content. You could sell subscriptions to your content. Now you can, you can do that, but it doesn't make you nearly as much money. And I'm not just talking about entrepreneur. I'm talking about the entire media ecosystem. So I look at content and I think, well, what is this for? Content is for relationships. That's what it's for. Why does Red Bull pour a ton of money into content? If you like extreme sports, then a Red Bull is your place. They got a magazine for you. They got videos, they got events. They make money off of that. I have no idea. Probably not. They probably lose money off of it. You know where they m…

AI assessment note: “So the second one is that we don't often know what things are for.”

Q the fact that there would be an elevator without some of those things, and now there are, but I never noticed how that might influence people today because we're so used to elevators and just accepting the fact that they're part of our everyday lives, but there was a time where I guess that really mattered. That's so fascinating. Let's move on to number four. What's your framework number four?

A Right. So framework number four is we mistake a one percent problem for a worse problem. So I'll tell you another story from history, which is, um, which is that the waltz, when it was first introduced centuries ago, was, people talked about the waltz in, uh, society Europe The way that people talked about Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs a few years ago, right, like it was this incredibly scandalous, awful, destroying the youth kind of thing. Society had all sorts of reasons why they hated the waltz. It was, it was, you know, it was sexual, it involved too much, too much physical contact among young people, um, but doctors were saying that the waltz was Physically harmful. That dancing the waltz would take years off of their people's lives. Now, this is something that comes up all the time. I, I, you know, mentioned a little earlier, you know, there were doctors who said that the bicycle made people insane, and that novels made women infertile. But I, I talked to a historian of the waltz, and he made this really interesting point, which was that in that case, the doctors were actually right. The waltz was actually very bad for people's health. But the thing was that they thought it was the dance that was harmful, the spinning, the contact. It wasn't the dance. It was literally everything around the dance. So how did people dance the waltz in the, in like the early 1800? Well, …

AI assessment note: “framework number four is we mistake a one percent problem for a worse problem.”

Q media or, This big airplane. It could be the mirror. It could be the teddy bear. It could be jazz music. There are many things that people have faced with resistance that you would not expect today. And I think the lesson that we'll get to is that, you know, we see many parallels. So why don't we dive in? Why don't you introduce the first framework from the six?

A Number one is we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability. If you look back through time, and this even won't be unfamiliar to listeners of the A-sixteen Z podcast, because I know that Mark was talking about it not that long ago, which is that you find throughout time incredible concern that is repetitive about new things. So, uh, the number of things that have been claimed to be addictive, or it goes on forever, right? You know, the things that people say about social media, you heard about the radio, Um, but it also, you know, it gets kind of funny and time-specific. The spinning wheel of the bicycle, in the early days of the bicycle, people thought would make people go insane. Novels were believed to make women infertile, among many other things. But what I think you're seeing, and I'll tell you this one story that really captures it, that we generally believe that we exist in a kind of balance, and that that balance is very easily upset by new things. And so, when something new comes along, we tend to process it as a loss. We see some new way of doing something, and then we instantly identify the thing that we will no longer have access to, or that the thing that we're very comfortable with that maybe we won't be able to do in the same way, and that feels like loss. And then, because we, we cannot imagine what the gain will be, and maybe don't even believe that …

AI assessment note: “Number one is we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability.”

Q right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens and many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right? They're not in the three to third dimension. They feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, They stopped playing their game after five hours and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse. And I, 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. Um, a lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a, a flat window into a three-dimensional world. And so, if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. Um, but now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face. And it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse in order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian tec…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse.”

Q right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens and many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right? They're not in the three to third dimension. They feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, They stopped playing their game after five hours and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse. And I, 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. Um, a lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a, a flat window into a three-dimensional world. And so, if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. Um, but now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face. And it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse in order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian tec…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse.”

Q I know you originally created something called astrograph, and I heard you say on an interview that actually seeing the amount of stuff, some of it being valuable, some of it being junk, actually caused you to cry because it was so, I guess, devastating, or maybe let's hear from your words. Why did that trigger that kind of emotion in seeing that?

A My career started NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab working on Mars missions, but when I moved to Mali, In 2006, I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the telescopes on top of Mount Haleakala, and all of a sudden, at that time in 2006, there were only 1200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage. And I'm like, what? Like, this doesn't make any sense. Holy cow! Like, this is ridiculous. How is that, how is it okay for, like, 96% of the stuff that we put in space to turn out To be garbage. Like, we don't see that in other domains. We don't, we don't have as acceptable. Okay, we're going to put a bunch of stuff out here on the land, but 96% of the stuff we're going to put out is going to be trash. Like, we don't do that.

AI assessment note: “How is that, how is it okay for, like, 96% of the stuff”

Q Alex, I want to hear from you. How much space debris are we talking? Sounds like it has increased with time, but I don't know if many people have a sense of the sheer magnitude of stuff up above us.

A So we're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter. But the only thing we can really see from ground-based radar is stuff that's bigger than the size of a softball. So, you know, when, when Morbus says there's these 26,000 things or, you know, whatever that, that, that number is precisely, those are things the size of a softball doing roughly 18,000 miles an hour. And, you know, MV squared, still MV squared. So, it's, it's a real problem because the little pieces of debris, the things you can't see can really hurt you. In space. Uh, you, you wouldn't get on a passenger jet if you got told when you boarded the plane, there's a million little bullets flying around, and this is going to make your life potentially very miserable. We just don't know. Um, hope you make it. Like that would be, but that's kind of what's going on with space flight. The first challenge is you have to be able to see everything so that we can put together a plan on how to solve for that. And astrograph, wayfinder, these are tools to help enlighten Uh, the world and kind of bring attention to the problem first so that we can all align on what the best solutions are for cleaning up space, which is kind of one side of Privateer's mission of making space safe and accessible for humankind.

AI assessment note: “we're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter.”

Q didn't expect. I think one example that I've heard you give is that electricity was obvious to be applied to light, but electricity then generating electric guitars, less obvious. So are there perhaps less obvious things that you've been exposed to or that you've started to think through maybe even for a future book in terms of some of these technologies being applied in ways that we might not expect?

A That's a, that's a great question. Uh, so I may have to think about it for a second. You know, um, so for example, one of the, the, one of the two main projects that my team worked on at Magic Leap is called Baby Goats. And it simply populated your environment with baby goats that would run around. They would jump up on the furniture and, um, And kind of interact socially, but it wasn't a game game. It wasn't like you're not trying to score 10,000 goat points and kill the goat boss. It just, it was just an ambient kind of experience of these, these creatures running around. Um, and so it had to do all those things I mentioned. I mean, the, the, the goats had to know where the furniture was and they had to know, well, okay, I can jump one meter In the air, so I can, I can't jump directly to the top of the bookcase, but I could jump to the table, and then from there I could jump to the bookcase. So the furniture would be placed, you know, by the level designer, and the possible paths that where the animal could move would be so pre-programmed, and so the, the animal's just making a decision to follow a certain pre-programmed path. Uh, and, and there, you can use some AI there too, uh, you know, if you want. In the AR version of this, you have no way of knowing what every person's living room is going to look like, you know. Um, and so you can't have any pre-programmed map of the …

AI assessment note: “one of the two main projects that my team worked on at Magic Leap is called Baby Goats.”

Q Yeah, I think so too. I think another design decision that you made with Lamina One, which seems to be not adjacent to the things that you, you just discussed, is also to make the chain carbon neutral. Can you speak to why that design decision was made?

A I mean, we started talking about this, Lamina One, just a few months after I published a novel, Termination Shock, which is all about global climate change. So it would seem weird for me to publish that novel and then a few months later announce a, Uh, a chain project that's going to be putting carbon into the atmosphere. Now, there's a, again, for people who are not crypto dorks, I should explain that old school Bitcoin uses, um, a system, underlying system called proof of work. Which relies on solving complicated math problems that inevitably consume a lot of energy, and so it is terrible from, ah, an energy standpoint or from a carbon footprint standpoint. Newer chains, by and large, are going to a completely different system called proof of stake, which is orders of magnitude more efficient. So on a modern chain, it uses proof of stake. Ah, if you're using this for, ah, kind of, Routine transactions. The carbon footprint really is no worse than what you're already doing anyway. If you drive your car around, or turn on your air conditioner, or, you know, take a plane flight. In proof-of-stake systems, which Lamina-one will be, it's, it's not that bad, but it doesn't matter. You're still At some level responsible for putting some carbon into the atmosphere. So, um, the, um, what we're gonna do is, um, Is design the system, and this is one of these things that you, you have th…

AI assessment note: “it would seem weird for me to publish that novel and then announce”

Q on this topic because it's something that interests you. It's, it's certainly an area of opportunity. As I mentioned, we'll be doing a separate episode on it, but given that you've dived so deeply into this arena, what would you say are some of the most exciting, maybe more optimistic things that you've learnt, or maybe certain companies that you're seeing attack this problem that you think are really exciting?

A I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California, uh, founded by a friend of mine named Casey Hanmer, who's a physics PhD who was, uh, in space, working in space, you know, JPL and that kind of thing, but decided to address this, this issue, and they are developing a system for using photovoltaics to extract carbon From the atmosphere and, and turn them into synthetic fuels. Net zero carbon exchange because, you know, you're, you're pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, you're selling fuel, which gets burned in an airplane engine or whatever, and puts the carbon back in. But, uh, still a big improvement on sucking it out of the ground and adding, adding new carbon. You know, we've all gotten kind of conditioned to Think that anytime you're using energy, it's bad, and you should, you should feel bad, and you should curtail your use of energy. That's only true, really, if it's energy produced by burning fossil fuels. Energy from renewable sources, and particularly photovoltaics, you know, isn't hurting anyone, and the cost of Making photovoltaics is, is coming down. It's come down a lot already, and it's still going down. So, so I think where we end up is in a situation where, um, we're using energy from those kinds of sources to, um, to get carbon out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the atmosphere. For me, that's an optimistic trend that I…

AI assessment note: “I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California”