The Exchanges

Q this guy called WG Grace, who no American would have heard of, but he was this sort of famous cricketer who had this enormous beard and dominated the sport and invented half of what people do now, and he was notorious for gamesmanship and for, um, You know, for demanding money on all possible occasions. So that's always been that kind of tension of, is it a business or not?

A And, and look, it's interesting because this is what happened with tobacco advertising, with the tobacco advertising directive in, in, in 2003. And, and F one was one of the most watched events, um, in the world. I think it's just right after the Olympics and the world cup, it is one of the most watched events and it provided the tobacco industry. With, which was at the time, one of the biggest sponsors with unparalleled marketing exposure. And so the ban had ultimately a massive financial impact on, I think, was it four or five of the major F-one teams at the time? Um, sort of Jordan, McLaren, Benetton, um, none of the, apart from McLaren, but Jordan and Benetton are no longer F-one teams. And so to your point, they had this massive income of money coming in through tobacco. And then all of a sudden, You realize, shit, we're going to have to find another revenue stream, um, which became interesting in that time. Um, and then you realize it really is a business.

AI assessment note: “to your point, they had this massive income... then you realize it really is a business.”

Q So they just had the, so they just had the colors?

A Not worse. It was like a barcode. So it didn't look like the logo, but so they had black and red lines along the cars. But when the cars were going at such a speed, it would look like the Marlboro logo. And so ingenious when you think of it. Um, and so it's brilliant. It was one of, and so, When they came out with the cars, people were like, that's so weird, why would you have an ugly barcode on the side of your car? Until the cars start going round the tracks and you go, ah, got it, it's the Marlboro package. Um, so they've tried for a long time to find different ways around this, um, I don't want to say, they found loopholes around that for sure.

AI assessment note: “It was like a barcode. So it didn't look like the logo”

Q I mean, maybe that's a bad example because one of them is audio and the other's text, but you see what I mean? You make a specific product.

A It's an age old problem. Like I remember selling. Campaigning software. And to your point, most of the political parties were very happy keeping all of this in an Excel spreadsheet. They're like, all we need is five rows, name, you know, name, voter registration, donation number, and we're just gonna use it. Why, why should we merge all of this? Because what you're asking of us is a lot of work, bringing all of this into a new piece of software. And then you're telling us that this software can do 10 other things that we never thought of that we don't actually think we need, but you're convincing us that that's the future. And now we have to do a bunch of API calls.

AI assessment note: “It's an age old problem. Like I remember selling. Campaigning software.”

Q have control. Um, and so this gets us to do this very kind of messianic, very religious idea that you can kind of remake the internet with this stuff. Um, and you can kind of go off and, you know, proliferate definitions. So you can say, well, what was web two point now? Why web three? You know, what does this have to do with early versions of open source?

A Just, just to chime in there, there was some, when I was trying to truly, in the most simplistic way possible, try and understand the difference between web one, web two, web three, and someone came up with a really interesting lens, or I thought it was useful, of just like thinking about where we hung out, so if web one was you, it was your email, email was your home, web two, it was the social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and so web three was this whole idea that you could, exactly what you were saying, you could actually even own the platform on which you are hanging out, Which gives you that more decentralized aspect that everyone is talking about, which I thought was an interesting way of like, where do you hang out online? And that evolution from web one to web three.

AI assessment note: “try and understand the difference between web one, web two, web three”

Q years. It goes back to Salesforce or longer. It's old. It's boring. It's done, but it's only sort of a third of enterprise workflows because this stuff just takes a while. And if you're the CIO, why would you invest in moving people off, off, um, fax workstations onto AWS? Like, like next year, next year, next year. Um, and so some of this is, it will just take time.

A I saw, um, a friend of mine sent a, shared an email with a few of us. I think it was a friend of mine. Um, it might have even been you, but I don't think it was you, um, who just got a news update that the way that we, that they can contact their bank has now changed. The fax machine will no longer be, um, in, in order. And you go, wow. Um, you know, didn't know that anyone was still sending fax machine, you know, faxes in this day and age, but to your point, that change took what, 20 years for someone to To say, oh, it's time we send that email to tell everyone to no longer send a fax.

AI assessment note: “to your point, that change took what, 20 years for someone to”

Q customer that wants to feel a certain way, and is that a perfume, or is that a garment, or is that a makeup, or is that maybe something else, and how would you serve that customer? And, and you would work back, and so the brand would, you start with the brand, and you get to the factory at the other end, and so you start with the advertising first.

A I don't even think you, Start with the brand. I think what we've seen with most D to C brands today is you start with the audience. You listen to the audience, you figure out what the audience wants because you've built your brand is maybe yourself. And then you figured out, oh my God, there's a whole audience of people who want the same thing as me. You build the product, which makes them successful because the moment you go, that's it. You start with the story and then the ad, and then maybe you have advertising, but maybe you don't even need it by the end of it. If you start with the story, You've got the audience, you've got the product.

AI assessment note: “I don't even think you, Start with the brand... you start with the audience.”

Q would live in a different universe. Like we don't, that's not, that's not possible, but you can find kind of poke away and ask, well, how do we think about what this could be and what you might be able to automate it, automate with it? And we've had this conversation a lot of like you and I sort of sitting and thinking like, what do we use this for?

A Yeah. And it took me a while to realize, oh, wait, the reason why benchmarking in this space is so much more complicated than trying to evaluate, you know, traditional software is the diverse skill sets and use cases. Hey, there's that like the diversity of how this can be used, but also what's actually possible today versus how this actually is going to be used in 1015 years just makes it incredibly complicated to try and figure out a how people are using it, what makes it good or bad. And to your point, you might find one specific, you know, application and go, this is actually brilliant and genius for me. And I'll look at it and go, I have no idea how I would ever use this. Um, okay. That's bucket number one. What are your two other buckets?

AI assessment note: “the reason why benchmarking in this space is so much more complicated”

Q know, the price can come down in principle and the weight can come down in principle. You know, the chips can get smaller. Maybe it doesn't need the screen on the outside, you know, maybe the better materials, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, you know, with all of these things, you have to ask, okay, if this was smaller and lighter and cheaper, would I want one?

A And the only comparison I have is I went out and bought the very different tech, but the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, Price point, really affordable. They Ray-Ban sell glasses that are more expensive than the price point of these meta Ray-Ban glasses. I can see, I have a few couple of instances where they're very cool to use, like being inside of a garage, being able to lean into a Formula One car and stuff like that. But on the day-to-day, and easy, I've put them on my face and completely forgotten that I have them there. I've actually used them more to listen to music than I have to actually take pictures. Because I might as well, if I want a good picture, I might as well just take out my phone. And quite frankly, the picture of a POV of my face just doesn't. I've also banned my husband from taking pictures because I've realized how tiny I am compared to him.

AI assessment note: “the only comparison I have is I went out and bought... the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses”

Q Met Horizons is a social app, but you start in a three-day environment and you can launch all sorts of different apps. So it's not just a social thing, but it's where is it that you come from? What is it that you think you should be trying to do? And I think Apple has sort of made the opposite trade-off to Meta. Every step all the way through this.

A It's also interesting when you, and again, I'm still stuck on, um, on the pricing of what are people most likely to do? Are you most likely to buy? You know, obviously not everyone. Fewer people will spend three and a half thousand US dollars on this thing, but the MVP being so good, will they look at it and go, holy shit, this is incredible, and I can't wait for the next version, versus meta, where it's just like more people are going to buy it, but more people are going to struggle with it and go, I don't get it, this is not perfect, I will never buy this Again, like, it's always an interesting, like, what's the habit of your consumers here?

AI assessment note: “Fewer people will spend three and a half thousand US dollars on this thing”

Q probably an Oracle database and there's a thousand people in India processing them. But if you were a Silicon Valley company, what would you say when you heard we have two and a half million invoices a year, you would start thinking of product. And that to me is what digital transformation means, is what would all the product be that you would do now when you hear that number?

A I love that. I was on the call with an institution or a company that's been around for more than 70 years, and we were talking about doing an ebook with them, and we spent a big 40 minutes of the conversation talking about how they were going to get this ebook on their website and how people were going to download it, because the software that they had or the website that they had, and to your point, The tech stack that they had would not allow for an ebook to be easily just uploaded. And I was just thinking about this. It took me two seconds to get that on my own website, but obviously my own website, to your point, I'm using tools that were built a couple of years ago by people who saw a problem, saw a solution straight away. Um, and so it was just a really good reminder of, oh, I'm working with an institution that's been around for seven years. Who's probably.

AI assessment note: “I'm using tools that were built a couple of years ago by people who saw”

Q further question, which is yes, might it, but might it actually replace the entirety of everything you do? And we saw this kind of completely cack-handed attempt at doing this from, from, from Rabbit, which is now well on the way to being a smoking hole in the ground. Um, but, but that's kind of the thesis. Is you can take, take over, you can take over all of it.

A And it's interesting because I think you start to see, you start to see that a little bit of just like all the different things that you do of how they're starting to come together. And what I mean by that is, for example, like CapCut is being much more integrated into TikTok, CapCut being an editing tool that has a lot of AI features being embedded. But it's interesting, whereas you would previously maybe open CapCut, edit your video, then open TikTok, post the video. Now TikTok is saying, well, CapCart is embedded into TikTok, so don't even leave TikTok to use CapCart. Start doing it. It's interesting how all of these little tools and little workflows, I shouldn't say little, but are coming and piecing together a broader workflow within the same space, which is just fascinating. In that space, I'm just like, how do you get more people to use these tools without leaving your app?

AI assessment note: “you start to see that a little bit of just like all the different things”

Q So you can either look at that and say, well, then we should be terrified because we've got no way of knowing if it's going to get there, or you can say, well, it's got no way of knowing whether it's going to get there. Why are we even talking about this?

A You know, it's funny that, that feeling for me has been best encapsulated in how fast the European Union Basically struck a deal on an AI act and we're like, yep, 20, 24, we're going to have regulations on AI. And I don't think I've seen the European Union come together so fast on a piece of technology. So new in inverted commas. Um, and I was just like, oh yeah, this is a feeling that even at the European Union level where they're like, we have no idea what this is, but we know we need to move and we need to act fast and they're not the fastest on this kind of stuff. So it was interesting for me that encapsulated everything that you've just laid out there, which is, we don't even have the basic information here.

AI assessment note: “that feeling for me has been best encapsulated in how fast the European Union”

Q get turned into those? But there's a sort of second point, which is, well, can Google do this? Why can't Google do this? Why is OpenAI breaking out? But there's a third layer, which is simply doing a new search engine with a completely new user interface could be an opportunity to take share, even if it's actually just a Up front and onto the same thing you had before.

A And you know what's interesting hearing you talk about that? I was messing around. I can't, there's so many of these talks as we talked about last, last week as well, but I think it was something called avatar AI, where you can like, you know, talk with people, whether it's a Lewis Hamilton or Barack Obama, you name it. And I realized I was doing, I was doing a back and forth with fake Lewis Hamilton. And I had the moment of, wow, I've just spent So to your point, when you go to Google and you type in something, you leave pretty quickly the moment you have your answer, which got me thinking about your point, like advertising and time spent. We know that this is something that TikTok has done really well. It's like, they've managed to keep people on the platform scrolling for so long. And I had this moment the other day with this avatar. I was just like, I've just been sat in the same page and the same conversation in the same chatbot for 30 minutes. And I couldn't remember the last time that I'd spent so much time honed in on something. I was like, this is a whole new opportunity here to your point about how you How you think about how people are spending their times and when they're spending it and keeping them in the same space and just like thinking about ad revenues and different models as well.

AI assessment note: “this is a whole new opportunity here to your point about how you”

Q And are they allowed to make real time adjustments, make adjustments to the cars?

A Oh, good question. Yes and no. Um, there's a whole thing of being in Park Fermi, which means that you can't touch the cars, and you can, and actually something that we haven't said, the most bizarre thing about F-One is with every other sport, you can kind of pick up your tennis racket, you can pick up your ball, you can pick up your cricket bat, and you can practice. You can't actually just jump into an F-One car and practice, and so for some of the new drivers, the first time that they're getting into an F-One car is during a free practice session, which happens on the Friday of A race weekend. And so you're practicing in broad daylight with, you know, obviously spectators because people come and watch the free practice sessions. And these are the only times where you can kind of tweak the car. And this is when you're learning. And so I had a whole conversation with someone around comms in F one. You can hear when you're watching, uh, an F one, um, race, you can hear the comms coming from the drivers and from the pit lane and back and forth. And so someone was asking me a question going, Hey, does everyone hear the communications that's happening? And yeah. That was, you know, it was an advantage in the days. You would listen to other teams, communications and comms to understand how they were, what they were doing. And so that is, they are tweaking and changing during the fr…

AI assessment note: “Yes and no. Um, there's a whole thing of being in Park Fermi”

Q there should be regulation. But you're in this sort of really weird new sphere in which there's like 15 people in the San Francisco Bay Area who could theoretically decide what presidential candidates in Australia can say to the electorate. At least in like a kind of major chunk of how they would say it. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we, do you want us to have that power?

A And that's it. And they probably don't. And you talk to most of these tech companies. I think this is the, this is the thing that really gets me pissed off is when you listen to the academics or the journalists, it makes it sound as if, you know, the heads of these giant social media platforms want to be making those decisions. I think you'd ask any of them and they say, God, no, I absolutely don't want to be in charge of what we sense and what we did. If we could take away that problem entirely, which obviously you can't, but they don't want to be seen as being the world's, you know, global sensors. But there's something there around also of what you said, Which is the, there's a fundamental, in my opinion, difference that needs to be made between the social media platforms. And again, how do you define them? Are they a tool? Are they content creators? Are they, you know, editors, whatever you want to call them. And we can have a conversation about that because I know you've got thoughts about that, but also that we've got to make a difference, but basically between the social media platforms, where you go to have your voice being amplified and the software companies. And it was something that we, again, when I used to sell campaigning Software struggled with a lot. A, because it was political and it was, there's a massive difference in the US versus Europe. In the US, campaig…

AI assessment note: “the heads of these giant social media platforms want to be making those decisions... God, no”

Q Netflix, um, you know, name a dozen big companies and not think in, okay, how many other companies that are important that you touch the touching every day? What is the Objective here. Is it to be able to wave a flag that says we've got the big tech company, or is it that your citizens benefit from the tools and services and economic dynamism that come from that creation?

A It's interesting. It's so interesting you say that, Benedict, because so this, and I think for me, this is the paradox of Europe is that everything that Europe focuses on is always for Consumer protection for the best of the citizens. You look at everything, whether it's roaming charges, whether it's the default setting, privacy settings on your iPhone, whatever it is, they always do it with the consumer in mind. But then this idea of waving a flag, and I always look at it, and I'm, I'm a bizarre product of the European Union in that I was born in France, British by passport, but never really lived in the UK until recently. Lived in Brussels for most of my life, and, um, Where I was going with this is I would love to see more European flag waving versus nationalistic waving. Um, but sadly, that's, that's just not the, that's just not the case. Um, and the best example I have of this is, um, Grand Prix that happened this weekend. It was the first Frenchman who won a Grand Prix in 24 years, and France went absolutely apeshit. Um, he was on the front page of every French newspaper, Emmanuel Macron won him, and there was this, like, French pride that this thing that hadn't happened in 24 years has happened. So I don't know, I still think there is something there about attaching your national flag to a company.

AI assessment note: “this is the paradox of Europe is that everything that Europe focuses on is always for Consumer protection”

Q you've got, you know, the internet unsplits these two things apart. You've got this physical asset, and you've got the product. And where is the point of leverage, or maybe they're both points of leverage in different ways. And so if those get broken apart, and now you don't need one, is that better for you, or is that a catastrophe for you, or does it not make any difference?

A I think we saw that from the journalistic perspective. I mean, you and I have spoken about this before, but with something like a sub stack where the barrier to entry now is any journalist or anyone with an opinion, um, and a following can create a newsletter that a bit because the barrier to entry is now so low and anyone can do it. What I found myself finding myself, the situation that I found myself with is overwhelmed by the amount of people Who are putting things out there in the world. And what I really need is someone to tell me, okay, there are 20 people writing about LLMs. This is, these are the two people of substance who actually have an opinion that's founded in experience or expertise. Well, who's the other one?

AI assessment note: “I think we saw that from the journalistic perspective... with something like a sub stack”

Q talking about is text and video, but there's a sort of more general, like, what does it mean if I can just ask for software that does this? Because, heck, that That does feel like it gets you quite a long way towards Hal 9000. You know, if I can just ask the computer to make something that does this for me, that feels very sort of pregnant with possibility.

A And we're having a, you feel like you're having a conversation with someone who understands you. I think this is what I was having with, even with just, like, Chat, GPT conversations, or with Avatar, just like, I'm not feeling like I'm spinning my wheels asking for something. I'm on the receiving end. They don't get they being, you know, the Avatar, whatever, but I'm actually starting, the more you have the back and forth conversation, the more you realize, shit, it feels like we've got the same information, and we've got the same context, and the same understanding of what I'm trying to get to, which is both incredible and very scary also, that, that thought of, oh, you're asking for something.

AI assessment note: “feels like we've got the same information, and we've got the same context”

Q what are the things where it would matter and which of those components do you need in order to do that for the, you know, and there's the purity test versus the reality of you make this product that's different because it uses crypto. Which bits of crypto does it have to use? Does it have to use? Every aspect of that. There's all very kind of vague questions, sorry.

A But they're good vague questions in that what I, the sense that I'm getting right now, which I think is totally fine, is that most of us don't know what we're actually trying to build when you talk with people in crypto and whether it's like trying to create a DAO, whatever it is that people are wanting, the desire that people have, we're not, I don't think we know exactly what problems we're trying to solve and I think that's okay because I think we might come across things that we probably weren't thinking of in the first place. Similar to the way that you just explained the whole story of open source is I think people had an idea of what they were trying to solve. And in the end, they actually ended up solving maybe different problems in different ways, which is exciting and great, but that's the, I, I, or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm not talking to the right people, but the sense I'm definitely getting in crypto is what are you, what are we trying to build and what we're trying to solve for here?

AI assessment note: “most of us don't know what we're actually trying to build”

Q And why? And how will that work? And we're not quite at that stage yet. Like there is no OpenOffice and there's no Linux. We're like, we're three steps before that. But those are the sort of architectural questions to what might the questions be.

A It's like the architectural and the infrastructure questions, and it's fascinating to me because I am definitely someone who starts with the infrastructure and then thinks about what's possible based on the infrastructure that you have. But I also know that a lot of people think to your, to what you've just explained of just like, what could it be? Let's think really big and we'll get down to the weeds and the infrastructure. Like that's the last thing we need to think of. Um, Which becomes fascinating, because I always wonder, like, why are people interested in web three right now? Is it because they want to think of a new way to build that infrastructure, or are they more interested in that projection of what could be and what all of this could build down the line?

AI assessment note: “I am definitely someone who starts with the infrastructure and then thinks about what's possible”

Q general purpose software and it's general purpose tool that anyone can just use. I always feel like go watch the office and imagine saying, I'm just going to give co-pilot to Dwight and Fat Keith and David Brent. And so you don't need to use our accounting tools anymore. You can just use ChatGP until you do the invoicing. Are you sure? Do you really think that's a good idea?

A It's interesting that you bring this up. I was In the middle of, um, I don't know if I should actually share this, but I was in the middle of renewing my O-one visa, and obviously my lawyer is an immigration lawyer, not a business lawyer, because I have a single member LLC. She was saying, it'll be good for you to get a letter from your own LLC saying that you'll be employed by that LLC. So I was like, wait, you want me to write a letter on behalf of Tony Karen Brown saying that I'm going to hire Tony Karen Brown as a creator. That makes no sense. And she was like, well, I've seen a couple of clients do that. Anyway, I went to chat GPT, asked a few things, but what was interesting is chat GPT gave me a couple of really good answers of how I should structure this. But the last bit, I just found it, but the last bit of that chat GPT answer was really interesting to me. It's like, would you help, would you like help drafting an authorization for you? And I was like, I hadn't even thought of that. I went to chat GPT to help me understand the problem. Not in my wildest dreams that I think, oh wait, ChatGPT can also draft me the legal authorization that I will then use for my O-one visa application. And so I was just like, yeah, please go ahead, draft me an authorization, which it did. And then, you know, the next answer was like, who's the best person to sign this and what are the l…

AI assessment note: “Went back to my lawyer and I was like, well, does this work? And she was like, oh, that's great.”

Q So the radio, so anyone, so the other teams can hear the radio. Is that a legal requirement as well?

A It used to be, they redesigned their whole, and now we're digging into things that I know a little less about, but. They were redesigning their whole comm structure and the whole, how the radio was functioning. And back in the day, it wasn't official, but you could easily listen in to your other teams radios, but the FIA has to, which is the governing body for formula one has to be able to listen into all of the communications that are happening. And so now all of the other teams, so the moment that the race starts, um, basically the comms is open to all, um, until the moment they go back into the garage where public communication then becomes private again. Um, and also someone else asked me a question, and this was when I was writing, um, my guide to remote working, which funnily enough, I wrote it in January. Um, so it couldn't have been more timely, but someone had asked the question when they debrief, so they have the pre-free practice sessions and then they go back into their, their rooms and they start discussing the race and the track and the tires and what worked, what didn't. They all have their headphones on. Even if they're sat with each other in the room, everyone is listening to each other via headphones. And the reason for that is there might be only like I think it's around 60 crew members during the race weekend on the pit with them. But back home at HQ, there'…

AI assessment note: “the FIA has to... be able to listen into all of the communications”

Q you have the removal of all the social constraint, and the peer pressure on the influence of the village, the church, and the family, and the community, and in the city there's no church, no family, no community, and you have, particularly in the 18th century, you have this explosion of, sort of, revolutionary mobs, revolutionary movements, And what do you do about that? How do you think about that?

A Your city's analogy is always fascinating, because I can't help but think about God, we're doomed. Like, there's no way out of this apart from if you take it all down and start from scratch. Um, but you, but your Google piece was fascinating. I found myself in a room in Washington DC with people from the RNC, the DNC, Google, Facebook, I think, um, and other social, um, platforms, but also other campaigning platforms. And there was a big debate about how Google was politically biased, um, towards one political party, except that both the RNC and the DNC can decide which one. So the RNC was saying, no, no, they're biased against us. And the DNC was saying, no, no, they're biased against us. And so it was fascinating thinking about, wait, are you saying that we have platforms like Google, Facebook, and we've seen this argument a lot that face, you know, Twitter is biased against the Republicans and Facebook is biased again, you name it. And so there's just this thing of reminding, no, in my opinion, These platforms are not biased against one political party or another. They're here to make money. Why do we seem to forget that? So they're obviously going to build the best platform that actually enables more money to be made. So to your point about, well, what if we stopped sharing on Facebook? My mind went to, would that help with their business model? Would that hinder that? And …

AI assessment note: “Your city's analogy is always fascinating... but your Google piece was fascinating.”

Q sense of, not as a generic term for crypto, but if you built a website on a blockchain and it was interconnected with other websites on a blockchain, then you'd sort of have that. If you have an LLM, how does that work? Maybe that's another website use case, except you can't, you can't, except crypto that an LLM can't actually tell you which particular website drove the trash in.

A You know, what's interesting is I've just realized that when I do research for whatever it is, There's always, and I imagine it's the same for you. You've got a notes doc somewhere or a Google doc somewhere, and you're, you're inputting all the links of all the sources and everything that you found. And you might be copying, you know, a certain paragraph of an article and then you add the link to it. And I've just realized that if I'm doing any kind of search and chat GPT, I don't think I've ever copied anything out of it in terms of what I would normally do with sources. A, there's no sources that they're giving me. But you know how when you start doing research on any other topic and you're aggregating all of the information left, right, and center, then I'm inputting all of that information into another separate document. Not something that I would ever do. Not something that I've done with ChatGPT. The data, like everything I'm given just stays there.

AI assessment note: “A, there's no sources that they're giving me.”

Q make that happen, then you can, because that's the whole pitch is that that's what you should do. I mean, Airbnb is sort of the remote world company, you know, it is so you can be anywhere company, at least if you're single, um, and don't have children or commitments, um, then, then it seems very obvious that you can do that. Um, how well that will work in practice?

A Um, Yeah, to see. But look, the big difference for me, let's look, reading again, the commitment that they put out there in the world is, A, they were super decisive, and it wasn't wishy-washy. I think so many companies are, we're gonna sit and wait and see and do a hybrid model, and that hybrid model generally never works, but it was very much, you know, it was simplicity, very, very clear in its simplicity. We have five bullet points, and this is what we're gonna do, and this is what we're gonna focus on. Um, but I did think you, it was interesting going back, like, there's maybe something interesting here, just going back to, You know, when did this hybrid model start the remote? When did we start thinking about working remotely? When did we start doing hot desking? Like, it's just interesting to think that none of this is new, but, and we still haven't figured it out 20 years later.

AI assessment note: “they were super decisive, and it wasn't wishy-washy”

Q Richard Scarry car. You know, it's like a sausage with, with a wheel in each corner. And there's a guy sitting in the front in the middle with a leather helmet and a little windscreen. And he's going ridiculously fast in this thing. But like until like the mid sixties, I suppose they didn't have all the wings and stuff that you see now. And so how did that happen?

A I don't know the exact history of how all of that happened, but it was obvious. I think it's, and I guess it's human nature. Like, as the cars went fast and faster, there was this thing of, okay, how much more money can we pour into this? How can we get the aerodynamics that they're closer to the ground? There was a point I remember, I can't remember the exact dates, and I apologize for this, but there was, they had wings that were stacked up really high, and they realized that actually they were deadly, um, because they would just come off, and you could easily chop someone's head off with the wing just flying off. Of the top of the carts, but they were really high up on the back of the cars, like, like on, like wings on stilts. It looked ridiculous, but I think this is one thing that's fascinating with F-One is it's trial and error. They've tried and tweaked, and I think there's something like every 20 minutes in F-One history, a tweak has been made on a car, and so they're constantly tweaking and changing, um, how you make these cars go faster, and they've tried things. I mean, one of the things that's interesting in what In the sort of trial and error era is thinking about the pit stops, which has now become, you know, an incredible part of an F one race strategy of, and now the pit stops have become less than, what is it? Two seconds. I think Red Bull and Williams beat, be…

AI assessment note: “I don't know the exact history of how all of that happened, but”

Q maybe, maybe Elon Musk's X, maybe a couple of other things, maybe even Microsoft will have its own model. Fine. What does this mean to the rest of us? This is commodity technology. Um, what else happens? And so then the two second buckets I had were, okay, what are these models actually good for? And how do you deploy them? How do you build companies and products with them?

A Can I ask before we go into the two buckets, has it always been the case with this sort of, um, big tech evolutions that we can bucket what we're seeing in terms of, there seems to be like two buckets of inquiry, the future trajectory, the questions that we have that we actually don't have the answers to, which is where is this going? How is it going to be used? And then all the questions about the current approaches, like, how is everyone using it right now? How are we employ, you know, how are we addressing this? How are we deploying this? How are we managing these technologies? Is it always true that we've got this like present bucket and then the future trajectory, or is this unique to AI?

AI assessment note: “Can I ask before we go into the two buckets”

Q generalize into other things? So on the one hand, you've got lots of people looking at that imagery and saying, what do we do with this? This is amazing. What's this for? And then the other question is, but what are the implications of that beyond images and text? What else could you do with it? So there you are. That's, that's the five minute. What the hell is this?

A What, what, what are we talking about? What's the journey here? But I think it's interesting to look at. I, and I don't know if this is just me personally, but I've definitely had an easier time imagining the different use cases With the natural language descriptions versus the imagery. Like it was, it was fun to play around with the chat GPT and just like start asking these questions and asking for descriptions and understanding. And I can definitely see the argument why people are saying, oh, this is an alternative right now to Google. And that's just one tiny example. The thing I wanted to chat with you about, which I kind of knew, but I hadn't completely wrapped my head around and realized is a lot of this AI evolution seems to hinge on cleaner data and Better accessible or better data, more accessible data. And I hadn't realized that there was this whole thing about synthetic data. Um, and I just read that there was actually a, which is kind of insane to think about, but there's a lack of good data in this space that's stifling the innovation. So we need to go out and create more and better data for this innovation. What can, is there anything interesting there to chat about or that you can like add a bit more?

AI assessment note: “The thing I wanted to chat with you about, which I kind of knew”

Q would always give is you've got this retailer who knows everything about the physical store, but they don't know what shopping cart abandonment rate is. Does that mean, is that, but is that a tech thing? Or is that like saying, you know, you built, you know, here you are, you were a department store, now all of your outlets are in malls. Do you understand how car parks work?

A It's the story that always fascinated me with people interested in F one of always trying to understand why Red Bull was in F one, because if you're Mercedes, it makes sense. If you're Ferrari, it makes sense. If you're McLaren, it makes sense. You're trying, this is an advertising opportunity to sell your supercars on the road. And the fascinating obviously story with Red Bull is they don't even know the production company. They don't even own the production that make the facility that makes the cans. They are purely a content-based marketing opportunity. And they pull of their marketing budget into Formula One to run these cars to basically send more cans of this stuff. It is just a fascinating world when you think of it. I'm like, what are you?

AI assessment note: “It's the story that always fascinated me with people interested in F one”

Q you going to get me users, or am I bringing you my users? And if I'm bringing you my users, that's fine if I'm Jesse Watts' name, or Noah Watts' name, or Bill Bishop, or on the other hand, Glenn Greenwald. If you've got your audience and you take it to Substack, that's fine. And Substack isn't giving you more users. Ok, why are you paying 10% in that case?

A The business model for me is really interesting as well, because, and I agree with it. Like I like the idea of the business model, but I also had this moment of, I just started a newsletter. I'm not planning on going paid anytime soon. Hence, they are never really going to care about me because I'm not bringing them any money. So they're never going to help me grow my audience. And why should they? And I remember talking with someone at Substack at the start of the year of, are you, are you actually just the software or do you want to be something more? Because if you're just the software, then I don't think you ever have to worry that much about content moderation. But the moment that you're a little bit more, in my opinion, than just the software, then the content moderation piece is a huge part of your business.

AI assessment note: “if you're just the software, then I don't think you ever have to worry”