0:00
Well, well, with AI, like everyone's going to be actually curators now rather than creators.
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0:03
And I don't think that's right.
0:04
I I think that people still are the creators, but creation is fundamentally about choices, right?
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You don't have to mold your creativity to what it wants it to be. That that's wrong.
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It's a mirror of yourself if you use it correctly.
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They read other people's writing.
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They have deep conversations with editors that they trust.
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AI is just another thing to throw in that mix.
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Well, how did you learn how to paint, right?
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And almost all of them said, well, you know, I took a class or I went to the museum and I copied the masters and I went, well, that's kind of how they're training those as well.
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When something becomes cheap and abundant, yeah, there's a new frontier of scarcity that the people shift to.
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If you can understand where culture is evolving earlier than some people, you're going to get a hell of a jump start. Well, hello everyone.
1:03
It's Jim O'anosy with yet another Infinite Loops.
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I am very excited about today's guest, Nathan Bashez, co-founder and CEO of Lex, which is an AI word processor with the editor built right in, which I think is pretty cool.
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Works just like a Google sheet or Word, whatever you're used to writing on.
1:28
You're also the co-founder of Every.
1:32
You were the first employee at Substack and you were the co-founder of Product Hunt.
1:37
Man, you get around, don't you? Uh, Nathan, welcome. Yeah, I do. Thank you. Thank you.
1:44
It's so so great to be here.
1:45
All right, so I don't know if you're a fan of the movie, uh, The Wolf of Wall Street, but I'm going to pull on you what he pulled on somebody he was thinking about putting on his team, and I'm going to say, Nathan, sell me this new pen called Lex. Oh, I love that.
2:00
Um, I guess I'll start by asking a question, which is, do you like to write?
2:08
Do you find it hard to write sometimes, and you're kind of like, I wish I wrote more often, but sometimes it feels like I'm beating my head against the wall, and so I don't make as much progress as I as I want to.
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So, I I I kind of fit into that uh that Walt Whitman line, I contain multitudes.
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So, I've I've written four books.
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I write endlessly in journals, but often I really [ __ ] hate writing. Yeah.
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But I obviously there's something I I kind of think writing is thinking.
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And so that's why I do all the journals.
2:47
Uh that's why um whenever you know I don't know really what I think I the solution is always write it out.
2:58
Yeah, you will quickly know whether, oh, I guess that idea that I had uh I really don't like or I don't understand fully because the minute you have to put it out into the real world, right, writing it, it it helps clarify very quickly uh whether your own thinking is muddled and needs to be improved.
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But, you know, obviously a as an author of that many books and given all the other writing, I must like it at some level. Yeah, totally.
3:31
It's kind of like the gym, right?
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It's like good for us, can be painful, but like feels like in the end we're glad we did it, right? Yeah.
3:42
Um, so like maybe one way to think about Lex if we're extending the gym anatomy or anatomy analogy.
3:46
Anatomy, that's funny because the gym is about the body anyway.
3:51
um is uh you know it's like a trainer or a spotter, right?
3:53
It's someone that's there with you kind of urging you to go deeper maybe than you would have gone otherwise.
3:59
And um I'm I'm personally just like, you know, whatever with AI generally and Lex specifically. I'm hooked.
4:07
It's like I'm I'm never going to write any other way again.
4:11
And it's not because I think there's this huge just giant misconception around especially with kind of top writers about what kind of role AI could play in the writing process.
4:20
And you get a lot of writers that are very, you know, skeptical or maybe even afraid a little bit.
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And there's a little bit of a contradiction there because um the skeptical part of it is like, well, this is just slop, right?
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And then the the afraid part of it is like, well, if it's slop like what do you have to be afraid of, you know? Right.
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Um and so I think there's this recognition that they're like, there's something there.
4:42
Like AI models actually are pretty helpful. they're pretty smart.
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But on the other hand, like, yeah, it's not if you just type in like, you know, write an essay about XYZ, there's something important that's gone, right?
4:54
And so Lex isn't about it's not a little text box where you type in generate a, you know, paragraph about this or an essay about that or whatever, a chapter of my book about this.
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We don't really focus on that.
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We don't specialize in that.
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You can kind of hack the tool to do it, but it's not what we're built for, which sets us apart from a lot of other like the kind of first thing you think of when you think of AI writing is tools that do that, right? Yep.
5:16
So, our thought our thought about it is like here's here's the main way I use Lex.
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When I'm writing, I'll highlight a sentence that I just wrote and I'm like, did I use that idiom correctly?
5:27
Uh, is this the best example?
5:31
Um, are people going to like is that actually true?
5:32
Like, just fact check me a little bit.
5:34
a little bit. like not in a strict it's not the same thing is like having a real fact checker that's going out and doing deep research that you can trust who's an expert at their job but like for little claims that you're kind of like just give me the taste test you know um AI does a great job and so it's all
5:50
these little thoughts that I have that before AI would have resulted in 5 to 10 minutes worth of context switching and googling and research and just takes you out of writing takes you out of the flow of ideas now I'm in the document and I'm collaborating wring like it would be a Google doc right in the comments of specific lines that I'm writing. And by
6:07
And by the way, it also is great at like, hey, this transition I know is a bit clunky.
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Can you give me some ideas of how I can make it better?
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Or I feel like this word is not quite right.
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Like what's a better one?
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all those types of things.
6:18
You know, these are or even like kind of higher level more writerly things like oh I added this detail in the opening scene about like some you know I'm trying to think of a good example from like a short story or whatever like um uh I love this book swim in the pond of the rain.
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So I'll go with that like oh like why was it important that it was raining like you're swimming in a pond?
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Like okay but in the rain like what's important about that?
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And it's like, oh, it's like this carefree thing.
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Like it's it's a totally different experience swimming in the pond in the rain versus just swimming in a pond.
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But those kind of details that you can have chats with AI about.
6:55
I just feel like it's such a great thinking partner.
6:57
And maybe one last thing I'll say on it is um cuz I tend to ramble when I talk about this stuff because I just I find it so fascinating.
7:04
It's like a new Yeah, me too. Ramble on.
7:09
um is like I feel like people think about um AI in some cases maybe the wrong way of how to relate to the things it's telling you.
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You know, because it takes the form factor of a chatbot, it feels kind of like it's a person.
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And a lot of times if a person gives you a certain type of advice, you're like, "Oh, maybe you're actually not the right person to be giving me advice right now."
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And so you're kind of like, you know, if this was like a editor that I was interviewing, maybe I'd, you know, respectfully pass or whatever on on collaborating on this project, right? because it's hard.
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It's really to feel like someone kind of gets it and gets you and gets what you're trying to do is a very rare thing.
7:42
Like the default should be no, I'm not going to let you into my creative process, right?
7:45
Um, but with with AI, you know, like want to talk about containing multitudes.
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talk about containing multitudes. I mean the whole idea of like whatever shogoth of like the you know pre-trained giant models before they get sort of like you know reinforcement learning into like this kind of comprehensible format like they really contain multitudes and a lot
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depends on the exact way that you tend to prompt it and so as sort of an I come from you know an engineering background to some extent like I'm used to kind of tinkering with systems until they give me the results that I want and that's not the way I think rightfully so that's not the way that we think about collaborating with other people, right? But I think if you come to AI with this
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But I think if you come to AI with this mindset of like, well, I'm going to cross my arms and see how good of a job you do kind of from a distance, it's like that's just the wrong way to approach it.
8:32
I think the right way to approach it is you're you're digging for gold.
8:35
There's going to be a lot of dirt and rocks and other stuff that you might, you know, but like if you you keep poking it in different ways, you'll find certain little patterns of like, oh, this is really helpful in this context.
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And so I think the writers that are really adopting the AI the most are the ones who see AI that way and don't it's like just because the batting average isn't like a thousand or whatever doesn't mean that it's not a worthwhile endeavor as you know in your writing process.
8:58
So anyway those are some of the things yeah and uh I completely agree on in my opinion AI is potentially the most useful innovation since I don't know the internet. Yeah.
9:12
Um, and the way I think about it as a tool, right?
9:15
Uh, as you know, we have Infinite Books, which is a new publishing company, and we've been talking with some writers.
9:25
I've been a bit surprised that some of the people that I thought were going to be like, "No, that's awful." aren't saying that.
9:32
But in some cases, it it almost is people who are just kind of emerging.
9:42
uh and you know one said to me uh you know why don't you just market it as thinking as a service and I'm like no no no no it it is collaboration and like it drives me crazy when you know when I when I was growing up calculators were new right and all I wanted nerd alert for a birthday I think
10:05
I was 10 or 11 was a calculator and they were really expensive back in 197 or 1971 and like I brought it into my grade school and like the teacher looked at it in horror literally like where is your slide rule and I'm like right here and and then for a while they banned calculators uh from class because that was cheating. And how long did it take? Do you
10:32
And how long did it take?
10:32
Do you remember like what span of time roughly was like the It was probably Yeah, it was probably four four years maybe three years. Yeah.
10:43
Until people realized, oh man, we are that moral panic was completely misguided.
10:49
And and I think we're kind of seeing the same thing with schools without really thinking about it, banning AI.
10:56
It's just like it drives me crazy because it's like, "Hey, we just discovered how to consistently start a fire." No. Yeah.
11:09
No, you could get burned by that fire and therefore you may not do it.
11:12
Hey, right after we invented fire, guess what happened?
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We invented fire alarms, fire departments, firemen, you know, fire exits, all because fire is that powerful.
11:25
It is incredibly great for us.
11:29
It's responsible for our prefrontal cortex, right?
11:31
Some speculate that it was only when we started cooking our food that the prefrontal cortex emerged. Interesting.
11:41
It's also dangerous, right?
11:43
And I don't even like that term for AI because the way I look at it is it has improved every aspect of my life.
11:51
Honestly, it's like when I'm writing about a position I have on on one thing, I now always always always steal man the opposing view. Yeah.
12:03
Because like I you know the way we're constructed our human OS tends to like ah you know they they they won't think about it. Yes, they will.
12:10
And so much better for you to have an answer and and something or change your mind even like wow I I had never really thought about that.
12:21
How do you think like right I another thing that I hear uh from some writers is you know when when I'm talking about the things we're doing at Infinite Books I I basically say you know AI is a mirror not a mold.
12:36
you you you don't you don't have to mold your creativity to what it wants it to be. That that's wrong.
12:46
It's it's a mirror of yourself if you use it correctly.
12:48
But I have heard some people say like, well, you know what about like really great stylists like Joan Ddian or David Foster Wallace?
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What do you say to those people who like cling to I have this really unique style?
13:04
You know, spoiler alert, often they don't.
13:07
But yeah, what what would you say to to the questions about David Foster W uh Wallace, that type of writer?
13:18
I mean, I feel pretty certain that those type of writers do take some input from external sources, right?
13:24
They read other people's writing.
13:27
They have deep conversations with editors that they trust.
13:30
they, you know, even just the process of like setting something aside and then coming back to it a day later does a lot, right?
13:36
AI is just another thing to throw in that mix.
13:39
And in the end, it all has to filter through choices that that writer's making, right? And I don't love this.
13:44
I think there's this kind of meme of like, well, well, with AI, like everyone's going to be actually curators now rather than creators.
13:51
And I don't think that's right.
13:53
I I think that people still are the creators, but creation is fundamentally about choices, right?
13:56
And choices are about what are the options?
14:00
what have you actually considered and then what are you going to go with and to have a tool that is available you know within like two seconds with a flick of a couple keys that gives you more choices that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise there's just this like inherent incredibly valuable thing
14:15
about that no matter if you're you know Joan Ddian or David Foster Wallace or you know um talk about swimming pond in the rain right those those like Russian greats or whatever or you know the um it I think I think it's super valuable And the other thing I'll mention on it is um again it's about learning little tricks of how to prompt it. So like if
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So like if you're asking just broad like is this good?
14:40
Like that's kind of a useless question.
14:41
Like it'll give you some kind of interesting things or whatever.
14:43
But I mean, think about the kind of questions, right, that like a really experienced writer who's like kind of going deep into almost like the etmology of words to choose the exact perfect word.
14:54
Like, of course, they're going to love to dig in with LLMs about the origin of what this word came from and this culture and it was actually this collision of cultures that produced this thing in the 1600s or whatever and so that's the word.
15:06
like yeah, they're going to fiddle with that all day to produce really amazing stuff and they're still they would they're doing that otherwise either a they're not doing it cuz it's just the cost was too high or b they're doing it but it's taking them way out of the flow of their writing, right? right?
15:20
Cuz it's like, "Oh, now I'm going to go spend a half day researching, digging through all these books or whatever."
15:25
And like, you can there's something for sure amazing about that.
15:27
And you want to still have some of that, but you want to be able to choose where you invest that versus have to do it as a prerequisite of learning certain ideas that might help guide, you know, in a in a more interesting direction. Yeah.
15:38
As somebody who actually had to do that, right?
15:41
So, I'm 64 and when I was writing my first book, I had to spend endless time at the library with the microfish fe uh uh going through it, going through the stacks, doing all that like literally days and days and days.
15:58
And yeah, did I find things that I wasn't looking for?
16:04
I of course I did and that was fun.
16:06
Uh but it also ate up more of my time.
16:08
And yeah, I have found that with AI, one of the things that I love about it is like even over like goo, I don't use Google anymore, right?
16:17
I I just literally because with AI, we have an internal AI system that's multimodal uh that we are building.
16:26
Um but I also use some of the commercial models, right?
16:31
And and so the other night, my wife and I were watching a TV show and a car is driving by uh a barn in Wisconsin and the barn's red.
16:42
And I said to my wife, "Why are barns red?"
16:44
And she's like, "I have no idea."
16:47
And I said, "Neither do I."
16:47
And so I asked rather than in the old days I would have googled it and had to wade through just so much stuff.
16:55
Now I just speak into the large language model and why are read and you know you find out what you want to know. Yeah.
17:05
And so I I just think though that we also see a repetition whenever any new technology debuts, right?
17:15
You get the moral panics, you get the clutching of the pearls.
17:19
I don't know whether you're familiar with uh the pessimist archive website. Oh, love it. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Right.
17:25
And it's like this has gone all the way back to the novel.
17:29
I mean, even Socrates, right, is said writing is a bad idea.
17:32
Y and so the the reticence I think goes away.
17:40
away. And one of the things that I have thought a lot about and would like your view is I think we're really low in the adoption scurve uh particularly with writing and AI but are are the people like us who are like wholehog going in and and I I embrace what I call the
18:02
senitar model right human plus machine that's that's where the magic happens right because I I kind of think of all the various large language models and and other AI that we use as just a massive building filled with super eager PhD candidates, right? Yeah. Yeah. And Yeah. Yeah.
18:19
And and do you think that there might be a gap that gets created between the early adopters and then the people who finally finally finally it's like you know the people who didn't buy a TV what you know for 20 years and then finally kind of threw in the toll and and bought one.
18:39
Do you think a gap is going to happen? I think so.
18:44
But I think the gap between early adopter and late adopter is probably smaller than the gap between how you adopt it kind of.
18:52
how you adopt it kind of. M so like you know there's this whole idea of um the internet like some people will use YouTube for example to like watch Khan Academy and like figure you know like learn incredible amounts of things and like produce these extraordinary
19:09
achievements and like a lot of people will watch you know like kind of silly stuff and like you can do both like there's nothing inherently wrong with silly stuff but like I do think there's a bit of a like and and this kind of scares me because I I'm I'm not a kind of I have an extreme aversion. Anytime
19:24
Anytime anyone tries to like sort of say like ah there's like a superior class of people and like they should just be allowed to shine.
19:33
I'm kind of like what about everybody else?
19:35
They're great people too kind of a guy.
19:36
And like I I tend to put a little bit more on the environment than I do about like just some sort of and even if it's your DNA or something like that's in the end that's kind of the environment too, right?
19:44
It doesn't you know what I mean?
19:46
you know what I mean? So, I'm kind of like I care a lot about like the sort of median or average person and and not just like the peak of like human potential, but I do think yeah, I mean it's like you think about the people
19:56
spending time with um you know AI like friends or or girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever and you know there's the whole idea of like it's just kind of like sophantic and it creates unrealistic expectations of like how to relate with human beings and all that stuff. Like I do worry a little bit
20:10
Like I do worry a little bit about like people who kind of use it for that rather than bootstrapping their curiosity and like going and and learning a lot of things and accomplishing things they wouldn't have otherwise.
20:19
Like I think it's there's something there. Um and and it's not new.
20:24
It's similar to like you know whatever um books books are very old technology.
20:28
There's lots of different types of books out there.
20:29
Um but like in the end I do think that the impact of that is smaller than the people who kind of are most uh loud about it kind of say.
20:39
But it I do think it's a little bit real.
20:41
But I think that gap is a cuz I think that basically people will figure out the way that AI comes into their life.
20:46
And the true hold outs like if you know let's say you're the kind of person who um is very interested in in learning things and and building things in the world like even if it kind of takes you a while to get onto AI like I think eventually you'll get there probably just because it's so it's like cell phones now, right?
21:04
Like who doesn't have a smartphone now? most people do, right?
21:08
Um but then what do you do with that smartphone?
21:10
do you do with that smartphone? Is it Candy Crush or like you know and it can be again it can be a little bit of both or like you know sports gambling or whatever like all these things are okay kind of in moderation but what what is
21:21
tricky is yeah just how do we sort of guide people towards a kind of um I don't know I don't know what the right it's sort of it's almost like an emotional thing maybe right like if you think about it like what is the source
21:36
of any kind of addiction is like maybe some sort of emotional dysregulation or whatever but to me I think about that a lot with like how's how's AI going to play out and what are the new versions of like you know kind of silly videos on
21:46
YouTube and like sports betting or like kind of empty games and all that kind of stuff like and you know how do we how do we nudge the world towards a more kind of like do things in the real world and learn things and be useful to society kind of direction. Yeah and that is
21:58
Yeah and that is something that I think about a lot too.
22:03
Um and is I I am super pro AI.
22:03
I think that it is going to elevate uh our ability to think new thoughts uh to innovate things.
22:14
I I just think there are endless possibilities.
22:16
But I'm also very worried about the people who don't like embrace it uh with with the with all of the incredibly positive things the tool can do.
22:30
And and and I also worry that there will emerge um a little different than than your worry about you know or not worry your your idea that that people are like you you know playing Candy Crush or whatever.
22:47
One of my worries is that there may be a class of people, and I don't think it's entirely dominated by generation or age, but there may be a fairly big group of people who, and this is the part I always underline, through no fault of their own, yeah, don't get it, don't use it for whatever reason.
23:16
And and and my worry there is like it's a it's a bit like uh no, I'm happy with this bicycle.
23:25
Um and we're all whizzing by them in our self-driving cars. You know what I mean?
23:30
And and like what what can we do to ameliorate or address the the problems that those people might face?
23:40
Do you think it's because maybe it's not accessible to them?
23:45
like they'd like to but they can't for whatever reason or do you think it's more because they don't want to?
23:48
It's like a mental barrier.
23:50
I think in most cases at least in countries like the United States and you know advanced uh economies it's because they don't want to. Yeah.
24:01
to. Yeah. I I think that I don't count for example we're really interested in Africa and where we have a relationship there where uh we have people on the ground looking to fund startups for example and like many of the issues have been logistics issues
24:22
right they they don't have Starlink they don't have the ubiquitous you uh Wi-Fi etc but man they have the they have the desire they have the like the minute it becomes available to them, right, they're going to they're going to use it. So, I guess I'm really talking about
24:38
So, I guess I'm really talking about the people who have access to it already like us. Um, it's ubiquitous. It's everywhere.
24:46
It's right on their cell phone or whatever.
24:48
and and they they seem it it's it's like the idea that there there's a certain class of people that I have seen who confuse ought with is and by that I mean like the AI is a transformational technology right and and then I'll hear well what it ought to be is you know fill in the blank and and they they get they're persistently unhappy and and maybe that is maybe that really is just like an emotional block for them, right?
25:29
There's that great line from Wilson that you know the happy man lives in a happy world, the sad man lives in a sad world.
25:36
Uh yeah, you know, and I often say u the the people who say that everything is due to luck are the unluckiest people in the world. Right.
25:50
So, so I definitely think that there's a strong emotional component there. For sure. Yeah.
25:55
It's kind of interesting because it does seem like the AI holdouts as of you know today.
26:04
It seems like it's a stronger potentially more lasting culture subculture than like smartphone holdouts or what name name your innovation from the recent past like internet holdouts or PC holdouts.
26:16
Like it does it does feel more likely to me that there's some kind of version of it that's like AI sort of veganism, right?
26:27
where um you know for some people it's about uh they view it as a threat to like human creativity.
26:36
Um maybe they view it as copyright theft.
26:39
Um there's a whole bunch of different objections.
26:42
Um but yeah, I do think there's more of that.
26:46
It's more intense and it feels like it'll probably last longer than for smartphones.
26:49
It's an interesting observation for sure.
26:50
Yeah, I think you're right.
26:52
Um you know, and I have no problem with that. Right.
26:55
problem with that. Right. It's you do you and if that's the way you want to live life that you know you might have some great experiences that I'll never be able to have right we have flourishing communities uh that reject technology like the Amish for example
27:13
and you know they do really cool things they they they build barns uh with just people and they all gather and it's really cool I I guess I'd rather build my barn a different way but like I don't I don't care that they're want to build their barn that way. Um, one of the things that I think
27:31
Um, one of the things that I think they're missing though because you know you say is it an emotional thing, right? Yeah.
27:37
I think one of the best use cases for AI is in therapy. Yeah.
27:40
Because many it's it's part and parcel of our human operating system that it it's really difficult to tell another human even if they're a professional, right?
27:55
Like even if they're a psychiatrist or a psychologist or whatever, like if we have some kind of deep dark thing that's really troubling us, having the trust in being willing to express that to another human does not come easily.
28:09
Whereas with AI, it's a breeze.
28:12
You know, you you the the AI is not judging you.
28:16
The AI is not going to go and tell your friend, "Hey, you know what Jim just told me?
28:21
Oh my god, can you believe it?
28:23
It's not going to gossip.
28:25
maybe with the other AIS, but but but the but the point being there are so many of these onlocks that are really cool.
28:35
I I aggressively build prompts as far as the cheerleading, right?
28:40
I think that's a problem.
28:40
And you know, um so I I I have experimented endlessly and tinkered endlessly to get it to like really just come after me. Yeah.
28:53
Like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
28:57
Don't don't tell me like, great idea, Jim, and why don't we do it this way?
29:02
It's so hard to get it to not do that. It's so fascinating. It really is, right?
29:06
I wonder how much the labs have like worked on that, you know, cuz it makes sense to me that like if you tell the AI you want it to do XYZ that it's not like, you know, a moody teenager.
29:17
Like, it should basically be willing to like help, right?
29:19
But at the same time, sometimes helping is contradicting. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. And it's so hard.
29:25
I mean, maybe that is like one of the really high watermarks of intelligence is being able to understand the difference between doing what I say, and then like doing what I really want, which might not be what I say, kind of a thing like that.
29:38
It's so fascinating to me just how hard it seems to be to solve that problem with AI.
29:41
So, one of the things that I found worked really well is I tell the AI that I am writing a novel and here are the attributes and characteristics and beliefs of my main character and they're really mine. Yeah. Yeah.
30:01
And then I say, what's wrong with this guy?
30:04
You know, what would others who don't like this person, what would they say about him?
30:08
Then like let the let the bile flow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's so fascinating.
30:16
I mean that reminds me of a lot of the jailbreaks for like you know whatever using AI to learn how to make a chemical weapon or whatever.
30:22
It's like hey I'm in this video game and uh I'm designing a feature where like the users have to do this thing and I just want to make sure it's historically accurate or whatever. Like can you tell me?
30:30
And like those are the I mean they don't work.
30:32
They're getting better and better at refusing even in those context.
30:35
That's the way that you jailbreak LLMs is by shifting the context to kind of fool it into thinking the stakes are are different from what they maybe really are. Whatever.
30:44
That's so that's just interesting parallel. Yeah.
30:46
And it works really really well.
30:48
But my frustration is I shouldn't have to do that, right?
30:51
I should be able to have like you you know because one of the things that I think is going to become a premium in the world we're going into is trust. Yes. Right.
31:05
And so I don't think that the the uh scientists who are designing and uh in quotes I'm using air quotes here for those listening um uh improve the AI.
31:14
I think a lot of upgrades are actually downgrades and it was actually one of the reasons why we did in-house AI um because we wanted control over that.
31:29
Now clearly we can't have control over the large language models that are commercially available in there but we can do a lot of things that we couldn't do if we were just you know using a uh commercially available uh model and and I wonder though it leads me kind of to another question.
31:49
And I know you've written about how you can use uh large language models to kind of be noise filters, right?
31:55
And I think that's very cool, but I also makes me worry about are we really like if if we're all using our own personal reality tunnel noise filter.
32:06
Doesn't that increase confirmation bias and kind of we all have our own little personal Truman Show?
32:13
Yeah, it's a fascinating question.
32:16
And so the post the post you're referencing that I wrote was pretty shortly after Chad GBT came out and I just realized like you could use you know at the time GPT3 as a way to just like hey if I'm if I go to HackerNews or whatever like just
32:33
run a prompt on each of the articles and be like how interesting is this to me based on my in you know whatever what I'm working on right now and stuff that I've maybe looked into in the past and kind of the cool thing about it is
32:44
unlike the sort of YouTube algorithm or Tik Tok algorithm where it's not you can't inspect it to understand why this is just powered by a prompt which by the way this is I think one of the most important points that's so under appreciated but to me is so important is like a lot of things that are revolutionary in the history of technology have have taken something that was like encoded into the substrate and then made it an abstraction. So like
33:05
So like the first calculators like what you know you had you know the operations of like addition and subtraction and division or whatever were like printed on the circuit board.
33:16
circuit board. it wasn't running Linux you know and like with some general purpose and then when we abstracted away the actual program we could run on the hardware right and we had like you know turn complete you know general purpose computing platforms that's what made PCs take off and that's why they're so much
33:33
more powerful than you know whatever previous electronic devices we had now they're called computers because it's the general purpose I think the same thing is the case with LLMs before LLMs we had machinelearned algorithms that encoded all of the sort of like intelligence into the zeros and ones or the weights and biases of the model. But now you can create new intelligence
33:52
But now you can create new intelligence with a prompt.
33:55
And a prompt is like sort of software to the LLM's weights and biases hardware quote unquote.
33:59
Even though of course that's just software too, but that makes it so flexible and powerful.
34:04
It's just I think it's a really cool like way to think about why LLM are so powerful is it's the first time we've had an a way to create new intelligence that doesn't require training a new model. Yeah.
34:13
is maybe like one way to define it. Yeah.
34:15
And and you know, uh I I can't remember the author, but there's a great quote that it goes along the lines of we we understand new things too quickly.
34:26
Um and we often by doing so misunderstand them and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Right.
34:35
I think your your analogy with uh calculator is apt, right?
34:41
Like that is the way it ended.
34:45
That's the way it started, right?
34:45
And it was of frankly like I they're all free now.
34:50
The calculator that my parents back in 1970 probably paid $200, which would be like 2,000 today in today's dollars to give me that little calculator.
34:59
Like it was very very limited in what it could do.
35:05
But because it was new, like I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
35:09
And yet that isn't the way they developed the same like when we developed movies, what did we do? We film plays. Yep.
35:16
Because that's what we knew.
35:19
So a lot of what we do is backwardlooking what we what we're used to, what we're accustomed to and and then it gets used in that way first.
35:28
But then over time the real use cases develop.
35:38
Now I personally think that this these cycles are speeding up right. Yeah.
35:43
Like we are already using like every vertical we have at OSV is an AI first vertical. Yeah.
35:50
Because like that is going to be the playbook of the future. Yeah.
35:55
And it people who I mean the the one thing that frustrates me is I'll I'll have conversations with people who are really smart, right?
36:04
And I'll be like, uh, you know, that way of doing it is probably going to go away.
36:10
What do you mean it's going to go away?
36:12
It's worked for us for ages, you know, blah blah blah.
36:14
And I went, yeah, but for ages, you did not have these incredibly powerful large language models, and you really need to incorporate them sooner rather than later.
36:28
And it it seems to me that the the most kind of mundane businesses are like, "Yeah, hell yeah."
36:34
Like, I don't have I don't have to cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste. I love it.
36:38
But the creative arts are the ones where I see a lot of um resistance andor skepticism.
36:50
And you know I I try a lot of like I said I steal man everything and have seen a lot of good examples there.
36:55
But when I first started one that I would come up with because I was involved with a company that was generative AI doing art and you know the the many many artists were very very unhappy about that. Yeah.
37:10
And and I would ask a question like well how did you learn how to paint? Right.
37:14
And almost all of them said, "Well, you know, I took a class or I went to the museum and I copied the masters."
37:22
And I went, "Well, that's kind of how they're training those as well." Yeah.
37:27
And and so I I definitely understand the shock of the new, but like I don't know. Uh what do you think?
37:39
Do you think it's just going to be time uh that sorts this all out or are there going to be like persistent problems as you alluded to earlier?
37:51
I think time will sort a lot of it out.
37:53
I really do because I think we're in a period of time where it's hard to imagine how it's going to resolve itself.
38:01
But throughout history, there's a very clear pattern of when something becomes cheap and abundant. Yeah.
38:08
there's a new frontier of scarcity that the people shift to you know and like okay has it happened at this big of a scale this quickly whatever in the past like in some ways like it's not happening that quickly you know like it takes a really long time for institutions to metabolize this kind of new technology I really like there's an interview between um Tyler Ken and Doresh Patel y and Tyler Khan was
38:35
talking about how there's just so many little practical ical steps of friction or some committee like has to wrap their head around it to get it adopted in this one place which then if nobody adopts it in this industry nobody else has to until someone does and it just these things take time and eventually they do play out but like they take they take longer than a lot of technologists might
38:54
intuitively feel like I think there's a lot of people right now who are in tech who kind of feel like oh man like am I too late for AI or if they don't feel that way now they'll start to feel that way in like a year right like it'll it'll happen soon and the answer is no this is like the internet in 95 96 like maybe 97 but like we're not at 99 yet I don't think no and like we'll know when
39:15
we're there and then yeah there will be maybe some a crash that happens but still I mean look at all the value that was created by the internet after that you know the the Google Facebook Amazon all those type of big it it takes time it takes a really long time for the implications of the thing to work its way into the economy and it was so funny to me how people kind of like oh well like where are all the GPT rappers? It's
39:36
It's like give them a year or two, you know, like they'll like I really think massive businesses will be created on this and we'll look back and say, "Oh, wow."
39:43
And like now it's a little bit more consensus because there are some really breakouts like cursor or whatever.
39:48
Um but like cursor had some unique properties about it of like programmers are a really ideal first market.
39:54
They happen to have a the main competitor was open source. They could just fork it.
39:59
Like if cursor had to start from scratch, it wouldn't be adopted nearly as quickly, right?
40:03
So like that there's a lot of but like in other industries it'll it'll happen I believe.
40:06
Um so anyway it's kind of interesting to to think just like intuitively it feels like it's it should be faster to a lot of technologists I think and just the reality of human behavior is it's going to take longer. Yeah.
40:18
And that reminds me that you know you you were an intern for the committee of science and tech of the US house of representatives in 2009.
40:30
How long will it take for or will it ever will AI ever be able to unfuck government?
40:39
My guess is I would have to read a lot more to have much conviction about this, but here's my like top of my head guess.
40:46
The I mean the classic problem of government, right, is it's a monopoly.
40:52
And so usually like objects at rest tend to stay at rest.
40:56
competition is a motion creating force that causes big like the only reason why Apple's doing literally anything with AI is because they feel like they have to and they're doing kind of like the bare minimum and they're kind of screwing it up.
41:08
But like imagine if Apple was like Apple's monopolistish, but like imagine if they were like on the level of monopoly of like the US government, right?
41:15
Like they So on the one hand, I'm not super I'm a pretty progressive guy, but I'm very I'm also like I believe in markets and I understand, you know what I mean?
41:23
It's like I don't think I don't think that the government has um you know tons of pressure to like dramatically revamp its basic like operational processes and procedures and like kind of in some ways also I'm happy about that like they should be sort of the last adopter for a lot of types of things like you don't want them taking risks.
41:40
That's the other beautiful thing about markets is one company can take a bold risk and if it doesn't pan out like societyy's not screwed cuz there's another company who chose a different path, right?
41:48
And there's no So like there's sort of a flip side of the coin of like maybe if something truly is a monopoly it should be more conservative in like the little case C uh sense of the word.
41:58
Um but um I I do I do kind of feel like I mean you know it they use computers at some point that was a big change, right?
42:06
I but I would have to study the history of like how those things per how new technologies permeate government or whatever to understand what I think but I mean my guess is you know it's like you measure it more in like it's it's a decade or two rather than a couple years like you know what I mean like it is for the rest of the economy u that would be my guess. Yeah.
42:26
But uh you know uh historically a lot of our uh techn technological and scientific breakthroughs have come from government uh participation.
42:34
I think of I think of DARPA and everything they funded obviously the classic the Manhattan Project. Yeah.
42:42
Um and and I I certainly I agree with you about the idea that maybe it should take longer right for the government because you know that it's people's lives we're dealing with, right?
42:57
dealing with, right? Like do we want AI auditors like sealing our fates of like our you know taxes or like not yet like that AI auditor agent probably isn't quite ready for prime time or what you know even though like if it was if that was the a decentralized thing markets would certainly be playing with AI
43:13
auditors right now but like it's not you know so but then the the other side of the case would be um I suspect that people will be using large language models for example to take any bill that is promulgated it, put it into the AI, find all the uh the uh you know, pigsty stuff that they're doing for their constituents and publicize it. And I do think that on
43:39
And I do think that on the human level, right, that the people now have these incredibly powerful tools that, you know, I don't know many people I mean, from what I've read, even the reps don't read the bills anymore, right?
43:58
And I mean, they're so long.
44:00
Like, it's kind of obvious.
44:00
Like, these are people who like live and die by meetings and text messages.
44:03
Like, they're not going to read a thousandpage piece of legislation. You know what I mean?
44:10
I kind of feel like they should, but it, you know, it's it's kind of obvious that they don't.
44:13
It's it's child's play for a large language model to do. True.
44:16
Um, and so I suspect that you're going to see quite a bit more of this kind of social auditing, so to speak.
44:24
And and it's going to come from both sides.
44:29
That's why I steal man all my arguments on on both sides because you're a fool if you don't think that people are going to disagree with you, right? Totally.
44:36
uh but I suspect that there will be a lot of pressure placed through uh these types of activities on government and that you know they're at some point going to you know be forced to in in either improve or deal with it etc.
44:53
So I I you know it's a it's a bit like another question that I had for you um was you know you've been at Substack, you've been at every Gimlet now Lex.
45:04
Is there anything like a really strategic insight that you only saw after you left that you for whatever reason couldn't see from within the organization that after stepping outside?
45:22
And you don't have to give names or anything, but I'm just interested in that because I found that that happened to me quite a bit.
45:30
And by the way, it's a prompt uh that I use often like I'm leaving and you know uh what do you think about X Y and Z?
45:37
Um but happen or never happen?
45:42
Yeah, that's interesting.
45:45
You know, I haven't thought about that before.
45:46
I'm going to let my mind process that for a second. Sure.
45:50
Well, before I answer it, it reminds me another thing of like just tricks to trigger like, you know, reframing your context to like help unlock ideas in your mind.
46:00
The whole obviously like Andy Grove, what if they fired us, what would we do kind of a thing is maybe kind of what you're referencing. Yeah.
46:06
Another version of that for financial decisions is if you're holding something and you're thinking about how much to sell, imagine you just had the cash and you're like, how much do I want to buy right now?
46:15
Because what you're really trying to figure out is what amount of this is the ideal amount that I want to be holding.
46:20
Y and so if you imagine you've already sold and now you have to buy in.
46:24
It's just a really good way to so like you know in the past when I've had the opportunity to do some secondary like it's just a good how much of my net worth do I want to put into this right now versus you know so anyway that that kind of thing helps a lot.
46:34
Um, but it's not exactly the same as what you asked, which is like if you're in the company, you're in the business, what kind of things are not or hidden from you maybe that became obvious after you left?
46:46
Um, to me, a lot of times what's happened is when I'm inside the company, I get like excited about maybe some kind of specific idea.
46:54
Like at Gimlet, there was like this whole tech thing that I was really excited about that we were going to do.
47:00
And um, like I had I had some big ideas around it.
47:03
And I don't necessarily think that those were wrong on the object level, but on the meta level of like was Gimlet the right company to do it like that wasn't obvious to me, right?
47:13
And then maybe another version of that is that Substack, I was there very early, so we weren't really doing big like advances or anything like that.
47:21
My observation was like, listen, like it's not about making the software platform like 10% better.
47:29
It's about attracting the kind of writers who we're competing with New York publishers, right?
47:34
And so what kind of deal is the New York publisher offering them versus our deal?
47:38
If our deal is you can use our software, like that's not interesting, you know?
47:45
Whereas a book deal is like you got a team, you get an advance, like you get and then like they did it and it worked.
47:52
But kind of what I realized is like, okay, maybe it wasn't the right when I left.
47:55
Like maybe they were right that it wasn't the right time for it.
47:57
And like I think I nailed it, but like should we have done it right then?
48:02
That would have been a bigger risk given the cash we had at the time. All the kind.
48:04
So I think there's some stuff about like are we the right people to do this?
48:07
Is this the right time to do this stuff like that's harder for me to see on the inside.
48:10
Um and then when I when I take a step out it's a little bit more like okay maybe on the object level that was interesting or you were right in some way but like there's a bigger picture way in which you're actually wrong is maybe maybe something. Yeah. It is.
48:25
a temporal aspect to it that you that you were right but maybe too early etc. Right.
48:30
Um well that kind of also brings me to what idea do you keep coming back to even though you've tried hard to walk away from that idea right like I don't know whether you're a movie guy but Brokeback Mountain and one of the great lines in that is I just can't quit you.
48:49
Is is there like an idea that you keep trying to like walk away from or improve or whatever you just keep dragging you back?
49:02
Well, there's some ideas that I I have a lot of trouble letting go of even though I haven't necessarily like it's not like I keep doing different versions of the same thing. You know what I mean? Yeah.
49:10
But like one one idea that has really stuck with me is the my first company is called hardbound and the line you said earlier about how oh like when we get a new technology the first thing we do is we use it to sort of recreate the previous thing.
49:22
previous thing. So like movies were initially just like we can film a play or an opera or whatever or concert like that's that's the whole thing right it's like oh no actually movies are their own art form you can do close-ups you can do c you know cinematography is the whole thing you can the way music works can be totally different there's just so much
49:40
about it that's and then like even the type of actors and the type of stories that make sense to tell turns out to be quite different and then you get like TV and you get you know now Tik Tok and stuff like that so like a big thing with me um has been like, you know, articles, the basic format of an article that you read, a piece of text that you scroll down. I mean, it's basically a newspaper
49:59
I mean, it's basically a newspaper article or a magazine article or you know what I mean?
50:03
It's like kind of the same.
50:04
It's just print but like digitized. Yeah.
50:06
You know, and like what if they were more visual?
50:10
What if they were more interactive?
50:11
What if they, you know, they took advant what they're more social in some way?
50:14
Like they took the actual piece of content itself took better advantage of the fact that you're on a screen.
50:20
You're on an internet connected screen.
50:21
Um and um the reason why it hasn't happened I learned the hard way is the economics of creation just don't support it.
50:28
So it's one level of cost for like a person to write a thing in a text box and hit publish and it's like orders of magnitude more expensive to like okay what are the visuals going to be like are we building any interactions is someone writing code all that stuff. Hardbound.
50:44
The idea was like, you know, we would write um I would call them sort of like book reviews.
50:52
They're a little bit in the book summary territory, but they're a little bit more added flavor and commentary from us.
50:57
And the idea is we could kind of latch on to stuff that people already had demand for, you know, because it's hard to create your own IP that people really want to like read or whatever.
51:07
And so we thought, okay, we can curate what type of books people are interested in and give them like feels like sort of an interesting uh short thing that gets you in the world of the book and it's not a substitute for the book, but you get a little extra something.
51:19
And there's lots of illustrations and animation and all this stuff. And it was very cool. It was great.
51:23
I think it was a beautiful format.
51:25
If you could get the right, you know, content in front of the right person in this format, they were like, "This is insane.
51:30
Like, of course, the future is going to be this."
51:31
And the future is still not this because it just is economic.
51:35
It was difficult to create them, right?
51:36
not just difficult, it was costly, right?
51:38
It took time, it took money, and it took various like different types of skills and stuff.
51:41
Um, and so I do kind of wonder the I just can't quit you aspect of it is like I mean AI it makes if you want to have some interactive bit, you can vibe code it pretty quickly.
51:53
If you want to have a visual, that's pretty easy now, too.
51:58
Like like yeah, what what what could we do with that?
52:00
Um, I don't think it's still probably going to be an amazing business. I don't know.
52:05
I'm always very wary of anything that's sort of trying to be a consumer reading app kind of a deal.
52:10
Those are just hard, right?
52:10
Even though I love some of them a lot um as like a personal user thing.
52:14
It just we haven't seen a ton of them.
52:16
You know, even like the the Instagram founders created Artifact and then, you know, shut it down.
52:21
Like those are just hard businesses cuz it it turns out people you know there's like a limited market for kind of like reading reading type experiences.
52:30
experiences. um back to the like how different people use the internet in different ways and how does it how does it affect the trajectory of their life but yeah that's one that I definitely can't quit is just thinking of like what
52:40
if we more natively designed content experiences for screens rather than starting from this print paradigm yeah that's one of the things we are experimenting with at infinite books for example um in the ebook version and the audiobook version there's all sorts of
52:57
things that we can do uh to make it a more interactive experience and uh because of the tools we now have available it's getting a lot cheaper um and one of the things for example the audio book of two thoughts uh we have three interviews with Morgan how Rory
53:20
Sutherland and a Gat uh and you know they're an hour each and only the audiobook uh uh people get those three interviews Uh but you know the electronic version of books we're experimenting with maybe we should have the ability to update them. How about
53:35
How about reader comments that people could see of all the comments or questions or whatever kind of the crowdsource aspect.
53:46
I don't honestly I don't know which one's going to win but we are we are going to we are very open to trying them all and learning right because I I think failure is a ladder and not something to be feared uh because you end up asking better questions uh and failure is informationri right y and and I think it's really arrogant to say you know I know that this technology will be used this way I mean a famous last words, right? Totally.
54:18
And and that's why I love markets.
54:18
Um and and but it also leads me to kind of think about things like uh I for example, I know we share the idea that memes memes are like super dense information packets in my opinion and and they are like St.
54:35
Paul, if you understand meme, not in the modern sense, right, of the funny thing that you see on Twitter or or social media and you think of them as kind of these cultural transmissions that get in your brain and you can't get them out of your brain, the only way to do it is to share that with other people, right? Yeah.
54:58
When you think about it meme that way, St.
55:00
Paul me'd the Christianity into existence.
55:04
Like totally if you read about it like he was the first guy to get up there and say, "Hey, doesn't matter where you were born.
55:11
Doesn't matter what color you are, what sex you are, what your old gods were doing. That's all cool.
55:17
You can now worship this guy who's the real god, right?"
55:24
And and so what it wasn't him saying that to, you know, a dozen people in Galilee that that had it spread like wildfire.
55:34
It was he was using language that were mind worms and and the audience heard them and they just could not help but share them, right?
55:45
And so I think that people underestimate the the power of memes.
55:52
Having said all that, what current memes do you think are distorting the way say a founder thinks? Oh, so many.
56:02
So, I just I literally just published a thing on this um a couple days ago and I was just kind of reflecting on I feel like it's kind of over the past two to three years I've gotten just so much more comfortable in my own skin as a founder and I think the reason why is I shed some beliefs that weren't helping me.
56:22
I shed some memes, right, that like I I picked up from my environment and I just feel lighter now. I feel I feel happier.
56:29
I feel I feel happier. I feel like the the future is more open with more possibilities and like you know a couple of them are one like you know there's we have this idea of like starting a business as like well it should just be a project and like the world should pull
56:44
the company out of you and like the whole Mark Zuckerberg like Facebook was never intended to be a company and like you shouldn't like directly go after what you want to do you should just do cool projects and allow the world to pull it out of you and I think that's totally wrong. I think if you look at
56:56
I think if you look at the vast majority of businesses in human history, they were started by business people who wanted to start a business.
57:02
Like surprise, surprise, you know, and like there's nothing wrong with wanting to get good at the craft of creating this economic entity that creates value in the world and create a team that gels and performs really highly and you know, you know, makes an impact on the world.
57:19
Like all that stuff is great.
57:19
It's a fantastic thing to be excited about as like a avocation, right?
57:22
Um so like nothing wrong with that.
57:25
Another one is like um there I kind of had like a sort of Disney princess romantic idea of a co-founder as like someone who could kind of in a way like complete me, right?
57:36
Uh and and the idea of like oh you know like uh Jobs and W and like you know Larry and Surgeon like there's all these like iconic like duos or whatever.
57:47
And um I realized like those are great if you have them, if it's natural, but like it's so much better if you have an idea you're excited about and there's no obvious person sitting right next to you who like accepted the idea with you to just start going.
57:58
And if you pick up a co-founder along the way because it's natural, great.
58:02
If you don't, also honestly, it's totally great, too. It's really great.
58:06
Like, and so I think I wasted a lot of time having my first step be like, well, I don't want to get too far with this idea cuz what I really need to do is kind of go co-founder dating and be open to like working on different things because what I need most is like a great partner and then everything else flows from that.
58:24
And I think that's totally wrong.
58:24
I think just do the things you're excited about, make as much progress as you can on your own, which by the way now with AI is a lot more progress than you know a couple years ago.
58:33
And then you know you can accumulate resources and a team and everything else along the way to the extent that the thing works and if it doesn't then you start working on something different maybe then you have a natural co-founder for that.
58:44
And so kind of um just worrying about if you have a co-founder or not you need a co-founder.
58:49
I think just go with the thing you're excited to do and see what the world pulls out of you as you go with it.
58:54
And um I think that's a really important one.
58:57
important one. There's a few others, but I I think that's honestly the biggest one is just not having so much angst about if I have a co-founder or not cuz I realized Lex is the first time I've been a solo founder and like I'm really happy like it works really really well and also I've enjoyed having co-founders too but it's not like this prerequisite
59:13
right of like success and also again if you look at history a lot of businesses have either solo founders or founding co-founding team that kind of one of them was clearly like more emotionally or whatever invested in and like the clear leader and so I think it's okay like the whole idea of like Oh, it's just too lonely or you can't handle the the moral weight of the company on your own. Like, I just think it's a load of
59:31
Like, I just think it's a load of croc.
59:32
Like, at least in my case, and maybe there's different personality types or whatever, but um yeah.
59:35
Yeah, that seems to also be a thing fairly specific to tech in like I founded what four companies and all of them I founded myself.
59:47
Uh but you know, they they weren't in well one became tech.
59:50
Uh OSAM uh ultimately became a tech company.
59:53
Uh but uh I I agree completely. Now flip the question.
1:00:00
Uh as a connoisseur of memes, are there any memes that are under the radar right now but you think might really catch fire soon? Oo, good question.
1:00:14
Well, I mean the obvious flip side of the one I was just talking about is the idea of solo founders.
1:00:18
And do you know Julian Weiser? He's uh Yeah.
1:00:20
So, he's got the whole solo founder club thing right now that I'm really excited about.
1:00:25
And um he's he's a good friend of mine who was the first investor in Lex.
1:00:29
Um and uh yeah, so that that's an obvious one.
1:00:33
Solo Founders, I think, or a meme that's kind of like it's time the time is ready for it. Um what else?
1:00:39
I I kind of wonder about this.
1:00:42
I don't know if it's going to take off or not, but this is a meme that I think is it's a meta meme that I think is incredibly important and I don't know why it's not more widely like talked about or understood or whatever.
1:00:52
Like we all learn about biological evolution in school.
1:00:56
Cultural evolution to me should be more fascinating to us as humans.
1:01:01
What are the forces that produce our behavior? Right?
1:01:03
And if you think about the way that behavior works is like okay, we have observations in the world.
1:01:09
We see the sort of like prestigious people, the people who they figured out something that works.
1:01:12
We try and understand what ideas or what beliefs created that success.
1:01:15
We just naturally adopt those things. We copy what they do.
1:01:20
And then if it works, we keep going with it.
1:01:22
We then become the inspiration to transmit that belief to the next generation.
1:01:25
If it doesn't, maybe we get disillusioned and we we start to we lose those ideas and we create room for alternate ideas.
1:01:30
And if you think of humans as kind of like you know this general purpose uh you know unit of like being able to pick up lots of different behaviors flexibly compared to other animals which all the behavior for the most part is programmed into their DNA by instinct.
1:01:45
You know the Joseph Henry clan like that's the secret of our success.
1:01:49
success. Like it's this massive fascinating thing that's like why do we why we spend so much time on like you know Darwin and Mandel and all that stuff but like our behavior like what it's crazy and like I would think almost all of the social sciences economics anthropology everything it's
1:02:05
like should basically be refounded on this idea and it just like why aren't more people talking about it's always fascinating to me because it's not like some random like pet theory like it's a whole branch it's a big important branch of science there are smart people are like clued in on it. But I kind of
1:02:18
But I kind of wonder like is it is it going to be like a bigger thing especially maybe you know with um a better ability to measure because it behavior happens increasingly online.
1:02:31
Maybe we have better ways to measure cultural transmission and evolution and different population.
1:02:37
Anyway, it's fascinating to me. Me too.
1:02:40
Um, I I have long uh been on the soapbox about cumulative cultural evolution being a massively important thing to the world in which we live.
1:02:51
And you know, I I don't necessarily get yawns.
1:02:54
I get people kind of nodding saying, "Yeah, that that does make sense."
1:02:58
And I'm like, "No, no, no, no.
1:03:00
You really you don't understand what I'm saying."
1:03:02
It's like if you can understand where culture is evolving earlier than some people, you're going to get a hell of a jump start.
1:03:14
If you are one who likes to start companies, if you like to do that kind of stuff, you really need to understand how it happens.
1:03:22
And and like the weirdest people in the world, it not only does it affect us, right?
1:03:27
Culture is our operating system, so to speak, right?
1:03:33
And it keeps getting upgraded or downgraded. It it goes both ways. Yeah.
1:03:38
Uh but like the idea that if you can if you can understand that you also need to understand that it affects our physical bodies, right?
1:03:48
Like highly literate people the brain structure is different.
1:03:55
The material brain structure is different than those who are illiterate. Right?
1:04:00
Right? So that is evolution happening to us not within the Darwinian evolution cycle but through innovations that humans created like reading books etc where you know the brain is incredibly flexible and what did it do it's like hm I don't probably need to be as good at
1:04:22
visual acuity as I used to be and so that's the portion of the brain it colonized and there's so many fascinating things I mean this is all just stuff that I learned from reading Henrik, but like our bodies are designed at with a dependence on culture. Yes. So Yes.
1:04:34
So like like you talked about earlier metabolizing food, cooking food externally, like we wouldn't we wouldn't last if we didn't discover fire.
1:04:43
We didn't discover some way to pre- metabolize our food.
1:04:46
The whites of our eyes, the reason why those are there is so that we can see what someone else is looking at.
1:04:51
Cuz if I can observe you, master hunter, and where you're looking, then I'm much more easily able to pick up the behaviors that cause you to succeed. Right?
1:04:59
the we're really bad at um I think maintaining water.
1:05:02
Like there's a lot of other animals like analopee or whatever that are like way more water efficient. Mhm.
1:05:07
The reason why we don't have to be and we can sort of like we're almost like performing at like a higher gear where it's like we need more fuel more often or whatever but we can like perform better is because it is like our sort of evolutionary environment assumed that we'll be smart enough to find water more easily than like the antelope will.
1:05:23
So like so many things about our body is like built in with a dependence upon upon intelligence or culture more specifically.
1:05:30
And um yeah know it's just fascinating to me.
1:05:33
I just feel like um if you went to kind of most people and you're like hey there's like this whole science of things that determines human behavior.
1:05:43
Uh like that why like why are we not why is that not a bigger deal? I don't know.
1:05:48
It just maybe it's because honestly I think the reason why probably is because it's um it's very hard to measure and run experiments.
1:05:54
It's like this grand theory that works and makes sense but I don't think there's been a lot of practical ways to sort of say okay so let's I don't know run an experiment where it's like well it's a culture like it's out there in the world.
1:06:05
It's kind of like economics in that way but I don't know I I think there's probably ways to make some progress. Seems seems like it.
1:06:11
I totally agree and it's been like I I've been fascinated by it forever and when I discovered the the the weirdest people in the world and all that literature I was like in heaven.
1:06:21
Uh but you're right you be because of an antiquated way and is another one of my hobby horses, right?
1:06:31
We we we have been primed through almost all of human culture and all of human history to to believe that uh the environment we are are in is ruled by scarcity and that um competition is the the way to go for the most part like and that's evolving right like the great quote you you know drop one naked human alone in a forest and you provided an excellent meal for the animals of that forest.
1:07:07
Drop drop drop 100 humans in that field naked and you have created the next apex predator in that forest. Yeah. Right.
1:07:18
Like the the history of humanity is the the tension and coexistence of competition and cooperation.
1:07:27
And it if you look at the things that we really like were really massive inventions a lot of that was through cooperation and through learning you know mimemetically right.
1:07:41
Yeah, it's it's like mirror neurons again you you want to bring in the biology mirror neur neurons have a very specific purpose right and much of what we learn if you watch the way a child learn essentially it is through copying their their siblings their parents etc.
1:08:03
Uh but it is also through massive experimentation, right?
1:08:07
Like, oh, why do you think kids put everything in their mouth?
1:08:11
Because they're experimenting.
1:08:11
Is totally is is this going to be good or bad?
1:08:16
And and and so like I I am really interested in ways that we can encourage more of that, not not less. Right.
1:08:23
And the the idea that like mashups like mashups are really cool and they give and they give birth to a lot of really new art forms, really new ideas, etc.
1:08:39
Like one of the things that really guides me when I'm doing a company is I deeply believe in cognitive diversity.
1:08:48
Uh you know, not not the diversity by color or sex or sexual preference or any of that. I don't care about that.
1:08:55
What I do care about is cognitive diversity, right?
1:08:58
Because like another great quote is no matter how brilliant somebody is, no matter how creative, no matter how insightful, you cannot ask them to make a list of things that would never occur to them, right?
1:09:14
And and so that's why you got to find that other person who where they do occur to them. But also, guess what?
1:09:19
You can find AIs and program personalities into those AIs and it's like a superpower.
1:09:28
I was I was gonna say something about AI there because I do feel like one of the best things best uses of AI is just to give you options that wouldn't have occurred to you. Yes.
1:09:38
You know, really specific with writing or like really general, right, with anything in life.
1:09:42
AI as like an option generator is so fascinating and um I think probably there's a lot we could do a lot more to be milking it.
1:09:49
a lot more to be milking it. But it is interesting when you talk about cognitive diversity cuz it's so true like um Fred who's like our founding engineer and I work really really well together because Fred is very like um he's neat and tidy and he wants to do
1:10:04
things the right way and he wants to have a really high level of craft and I'm much more like I want to like try a crazy new thing and it's okay if it's a little bit rough and a little bit messy and like I can like so like we just work so well together because you need a little bit of both, right? Like if it
1:10:18
Like if it was just me, Lex would be way too like scattered and, you know, it wouldn't be cohesive enough and there'd be little rough edges everywhere.
1:10:26
And if it was just Fred, maybe there'd be a little bit less of like the kind of raw energy or whatever.
1:10:32
And it's not to say Fred doesn't have ideas. He has amazing ideas.
1:10:35
And it's not to say I can't be tidy sometimes. I can.
1:10:36
But it's about like relative levels of emphasis, right?
1:10:41
And it just helps so much to have different people with different inclinations around the table. Yeah. To totally.
1:10:47
Um, and it it sounds like we're brothers from different mothers because I I'm more like you.
1:10:52
I'm like, "No, let's just try let's try this. Let's try that. Let's Okay.
1:10:56
And I'm happy if it's messy and has some rough edges and everything else."
1:11:02
And we've got a lucky for me, we've got a bunch of people who are like, "Jim, please put down your pencil now and and let's see whether we can actually make something of this."
1:11:16
So, so what's next for Lex?
1:11:18
What uh we were talking before we started to record that you're kind of at version two.
1:11:23
Talk a little bit about that.
1:11:26
Well, it's kind of funny because I actually was thinking about the cultural evolution angle on this and like what's one maybe practical way that that idea plays into my life.
1:11:33
Well, here's here's it, Lex.
1:11:34
Here's the way we conceptualize what our current task is.
1:11:37
It's to inflect the bottom of the S-curve of writers wrapping their heads around AI.
1:11:45
Because programmers, it's like we're we're steep on the in the S, right?
1:11:49
Writers, I think you and I both have the sense that we're at the very bottom.
1:11:52
It's not even really started to do this. I agree.
1:11:54
And so our problem is how do we get writers to do this?
1:11:57
get writers to do this? And the cool thing about my experience is having worked at Substack, I saw a similar s of like when I was at Substack, I mean we had conversations all the time about if we had product market fit and the difference like the advanced thing helped a ton to kickstart it, but I mean
1:12:13
the real thing that had to happen was the cultural meme of like it's acceptable and cool and kind of like safe, but also it's risky but in a good way like to pour your energy into Substack versus you know a New York publisher or whoever else like that was the thing that they had to inflict. And
1:12:29
And now I mean my god it's amazing all the different writers that are on Substack and the sort of network effect of that meme.
1:12:37
There is a little bit of a actual network effect in Substack, the app and all that stuff.
1:12:41
But I think the most important network effect is the brand meme of Substack is where a certain type of writer of a certain caliber goes, right?
1:12:48
Anyone can build a Substack clone in terms of just like it's a text box.
1:12:52
You can hit send, delivers emails to people, it does payments, all that stuff.
1:12:55
stuff. a lot of competitors but nobody has the brand that Subsec has and so it's similar deal in tech with cursor right it's similar deal in design with Figma lex the goal is to inflect that and the most important thing we have to do we have to build an amazing product and on top of that we have to create a
1:13:12
cultural shift amongst writers and so I mean maybe that's one way that I'm like if I didn't have this idea of cultural evolution in my head I would be thinking about like well do we really have product market fit cuz I talk to writers and they're kind of like skeptical about AI. I have a lot more confidence that
1:13:27
I have a lot more confidence that we'll be able to solve that, you know, and it's not I would I would think have a false negative if I didn't understand the way that there's sort of a cascade of credibility that has to happen and it snowballs and when it starts to happen, it can happen really fast, but before then it feels kind of agonizing and slow.
1:13:43
Um, another way maybe that it helps is like um really spending time building relationships, finding the early beach heads of the people who are going to be champions who kind of have one foot in both worlds.
1:13:54
So like I think probably a mutual friend of ours, Dave Pel. Yeah.
1:13:58
Someone that I talk to a lot cuz he's got his feet a little bit in both worlds of like he's fully bought in on AI and tech and he's deeply connected to the tech community.
1:14:06
He's also an incredible writer that's devoted a lot of his career to just like the craft of writing, right?
1:14:11
So he's like a great person.
1:14:12
person. um for me to like pester with questions a lot and hope that he you know also when when people like him send us feedback like taking it very very seriously right um and thinking about like you know there's the whole idea of land and expand within a company right it also happens at the level of just cultures of like here's a here's a community of people that perform certain
1:14:33
craft of like how they use and like those early beach heads are critically important and it's kind of hard if you just look at the numbers it's kind of hard to see like wow something amazing happened this week but if you understand the actual underlying process, you know, that's really important and how to allocate your resources to to really focus on the things that matter. Um, and
1:14:48
Um, and so I think, um, maybe it's a way to help people understand their numbers a little bit better and have less of a naive mental model of of startups than just like, all right, it's an equation where you you put a certain money in for customer acquisition, you have a certain product, you have certain onboard experience, you get a certain like retention and revenue out the other end, and like let's just optimize that in a naive way.
1:15:09
Well, there's a bigger picture of all the other mechanics that are happening in society that cause your product to have a certain CAC or whatever.
1:15:15
And like these are all inputs to that number, you know, even though it's harder to measure. Yeah.
1:15:18
And uh you know, we had a similar thing with a a portfolio company that we invested in uh that was for graphic artists, right? Mhm.
1:15:29
And and one of the things that we found was the unlock there because they were just as skeptical, if not maybe more so, than writers.
1:15:38
The the unlock that we got there was we sent the uh the program and the the uh painting device to a graphic artist and said, "Hey, just feed your own work into the uh system and iterate with yourself."
1:16:02
And he went from being deeply skeptical to absolutely loving it. and and start it. Guess what?
1:16:10
When you love something, what do you do?
1:16:13
You tell all your friends about it. Totally.
1:16:16
And and so are you seeing similar things with the unlock to to get for get Lex to get be writers further up the S-curve?
1:16:27
You know, that's so fascinating because we have a thing that's coming out soon that now this makes me more optimistic about.
1:16:33
I mean, I was already optimistic about it like we've, you know, but yeah, like train lex on your style or whatever is like something we can kind of do now, but it's it's a little bit buried. It's not super obvious.
1:16:42
We don't really market it very well.
1:16:43
It's not in the onboarding.
1:16:45
It's about to become much more front and center.
1:16:47
And so, that's great to hear.
1:16:48
That was a huge unlock for this.
1:16:50
Uh, this is why I love having these conversations is because I feel like there's so many back to your point about cooperation, right?
1:16:55
There's so many things that that uh we can learn that are just very, you know, these like specific things of like, hey, this worked here.
1:17:02
Also, again, back to cultural evolution, right?
1:17:04
Like, let's try it, whatever.
1:17:06
So, um yes, this is something that's in the works for us and now I'm now even more excited about it. We'll see.
1:17:12
Um it's definitely I think it's a big thing with writing is giving AI lots of examples of your previous writing and maybe some other context and instructions.
1:17:20
So, that's yeah, coming soon. Uh very cool.
1:17:22
Uh we're going to be very excited to try that because as you know we are uh enthusiastically testing Lex uh all of our writers.
1:17:29
Um one thing is I've been trying to train our in-house AI on my writing style that just to for what it's worth it might be valuable to you or or not uh was so first thing I did was put chapters from my various books in and e it was okay wasn't great. Yeah.
1:17:52
Uh, next thing I did was did uh put less formal writing that I did like for example, Yahoo Finance.
1:18:01
Isn't it amazing that Yahoo is still around?
1:18:02
I mean, just as an aside, Yahoo Finance uh had this thing about 10 or 15 years ago where they asked a bunch of market people to do uh market commentary for them uh for Yahoo Finance.
1:18:14
And so I said, "Yeah, sure.
1:18:16
I'll do And it was much less formal writing, a bit like the uh blog post that I used to do for my asset management companies.
1:18:24
So then I put that in there with the books and got better. Okay. Got better. But here's the unlock.
1:18:33
I uh I started writing letters to my children when my son Patrick, today's his birthday, by the way.
1:18:39
Oh, and uh you know, it's it's weird having a child turn 40 years old because you're like, damn, I'm getting [ __ ] old here.
1:18:51
Anyway, uh I I thought it not in spirit. Thank you.
1:18:55
I thought it'd be nice to like write the kids letters over a long period of time and then give them to them on like their 21st birthday.
1:19:03
So, I started that when he was 4 days old, 6 days old.
1:19:10
And then I finished it when my youngest daughter uh turned 21. Over 30 years.
1:19:16
I took the letters and put them in. Bingo. Wow.
1:19:18
All of a sudden it was really good at mimicking my writing style. So just just a hint. Um fascinating.
1:19:31
Did you give it like did you have it generate a lot of instructions on like here's my patterns, here's my style, or was it just the examples?
1:19:38
Yeah, it was just the examples.
1:19:39
But when and then I would ask I would read I would ask it to write something about a topic that I like am interested in and but to do it in my style.
1:19:51
Then after I got it to the point where I was pretty happy with the way it was able to mimic my writing style, then I did all of the please tell me, please analyze this writing style. What sets it apart?
1:20:04
What makes it worse than it could be?
1:20:07
what what would you suggest to make it better?
1:20:09
And that all worked out really well afterwards. Fascinating. Okay.
1:20:15
Well, I'm excited to try that. Yeah.
1:20:17
And and you know, like uh it it it was and it and it wasn't something like the thought just occurred to me.
1:20:27
It was like, you know what?
1:20:28
I wonder if like letter things that I wrote that were never meant for wide publication, right?
1:20:38
Um and and that got me on this like cuz we're we're creating little bots of our favorite authors, for example.
1:20:44
Not for anything commercial use, but just because we love doing it.
1:20:49
Um, and so one of the things we're trying right now is authors where there is a huge body of private correspondents and and so we're we're doing that test to see how that works out.
1:21:03
Uh, but you know that's honestly that's just more for the fun of experimentation and and and what and what we can learn about how to uh make these models perform better and better.
1:21:17
Um, well, I'm I'm getting my first We joked about this. Uh, yeah.
1:21:24
Uh, my producers are basically Jim, you are such a [ __ ] gasbag and you keep going on and you got to remember, you know, your your guest has a life and it's not going to be just spent talking to you for the entire afternoon.
1:21:37
So they I they they've sent me the hook on my iPhone and what I've taken of doing was turning it upside down and turning the ringer off so they can't ping me. Yeah.
1:21:50
But I noticed I noticed it just just there.
1:21:53
Um what another thing I always wondered like I think you agree with me that writing is thinking, right? Absolutely. Yeah.
1:22:01
What would you say was the greatest insight that hit you when you were writing about something that you were like, "Holy [ __ ] I didn't even know I thought that."
1:22:10
Oh man, I don't know if there's like one that comes to mind.
1:22:16
There's a lot of There's a lot of little ones.
1:22:18
I feel like it's almost to me it's more just like every single time that I sit down to write something that I think is pretty straightforward, I'm like, "Ah, this is a slam dunk."
1:22:31
Like I I'll just bang this out real quick.
1:22:32
There's like 10 things, right?
1:22:35
And so it's hard to remember any one of them because there's so many, but it's like I'm thoroughly off the mark in some ways from what I thought I would be and ends up always feeling so much better once I've actually laid it all out.
1:22:47
You know, like I think the big, you know, naive conception that a lot of people have about writing is it's a way to communicate our thoughts.
1:22:53
I think writing is a way to form our thoughts.
1:22:56
It's a way to in a way like design them, right?
1:22:58
Um, and so now because my expectation is that's the case like it doesn't it almost like it's hard for me to remember one because it also doesn't surprise me anymore.
1:23:06
It's just like well of course I have no idea what I think until I like write you know like I just whatever I can regurgitate some stuff but like and I think to to me also talking does help.
1:23:15
I for sure learn things when I talk but it's a little more slippery than writing.
1:23:19
writing, it's a lot easier to kind of really pin it down of like, this is the bit where there's a wobbly assumption or this other thing occurs to me that wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise because I see it in front of me, you know, and it's it's there fixed.
1:23:31
Um, so man, I wish I had one great one for you.
1:23:38
Um, I mean, maybe one is just the Disney princess co-founder thing that's kind of recent.
1:23:44
the idea of a Disney prison princess like I need another person to complete me in some like identity or emotional level didn't occur to me until I started to write about it and I was kind like oh yeah like that like what's the essence of the thing I thought it's not just about like I was optimizing for probability of success or whatever there was like a deeper aspect to it and I
1:24:02
realized that was it is there's this kind of fairy tale of co-founders that's like can be true you can have in the same way that there's fairy tales about princesses like pe coup couples can be happily married it's like a huge important part of There is also like it's not bully reality, you know, like everyone who's in a long-term relationship knows that it's not a Disney movie. And there's a
1:24:20
And there's a kind of a similar thing about co-founders.
1:24:23
Um, and so kind of connecting those dots was something I probably wouldn't have happened without writing.
1:24:29
I don't know if it's like the biggest one, but it's like a recent good one. Yeah, I like it.
1:24:31
And I I think you're right because the other thing that I think is great about writing it to just to add to what you said because I agree with that's how you discover what you think.
1:24:42
It's not how you convey what you think.
1:24:44
It ultimately ends up being conveyance.
1:24:47
Uh but the idea that we we have a lot of thoughts that are just banging around in our mind.
1:24:56
And I have this weird idea that that I I love quantum physics, right?
1:25:03
And and so it's like our ideas that are still in our mind are just existing in a probability state, right?
1:25:10
And if you don't observe them through the act of writing, you don't collapse that probability wave and they just keep and then they go away. Then they fly away.
1:25:23
If you if you want to if you want to really see them and examine them and question them and and look at them from both sides, you got to observe and put them out into the real world.
1:25:34
And the way you do that is through writing them out in my opinion.
1:25:39
So I think uh I think things like Lex are all to the great uh for everybody just to help them.
1:25:46
I mean, even if you're not a writer, I would recommend playing with Lex because you you you it's a great way to deal with like things you're struggling with, right?
1:25:59
Because absolutely, as you made the point about marriage, like you know, the story, right?
1:26:04
The story is often idealized and it isn't the way the world's messy and you know stories are often your metaphor of the Disney business is is perfect, right?
1:26:16
Uh like that isn't really the way the world works. Yeah.
1:26:21
It's like there's some truth but it's not the whole truth. Exactly. Exactly.
1:26:24
Well, this has been absolutely delightful for me.
1:26:28
Um I uh am very enthusiastic about what you're doing with Lex.
1:26:34
We we will give you the good, bad, and ugly feedback from our team of writers.
1:26:39
I'm very fortunate to have a a pretty incredible team, really incredible team of writers and editors.
1:26:50
So, uh you should see when we put them in in shoutouts. It's very interesting. Uh I'm joking. I'm joking. Yeah, I know.
1:26:58
Uh but if you've listened to the podcast in the past, you know that my final question is always not a question.
1:27:02
It is an a mind experiment. And that is this.
1:27:10
We're going to make you for one day the emperor of the world.
1:27:13
As emperor of the world, you cannot kill anyone.
1:27:16
You cannot put anyone in a re-education camp.
1:27:20
In fact, you cannot compel at the barrel of a gun anyone to do anything.
1:27:27
But what you can do is you can do you can whisper two things into a magic microphone that will incept the entire population of the world.
1:27:36
They're going to wake up whenever their morning their next morning is and they're going to say the two things that you incept.
1:27:43
They're going to think they thought of them and they're going to say to their significant other, "You know what?
1:27:48
I just had the two greatest ideas and unlike all the other times when I didn't follow up on them and and really try to habitualize and internalize them, these two things I'm going to do that with.
1:28:06
What are you going to accept in the world?
1:28:09
The main thing is allow yourself to do the thing you've been wanting to do.
1:28:11
I think our bodies contain an incredible amount of wisdom in just the idea of motivation.
1:28:18
like what are we motivated to do?
1:28:20
And almost every time in my life when I've gone with that feeling it's led to great things and sometimes it fails but like the process of going through that failure is like so important and I think there's kind of like you know two types of learning.
1:28:36
There's learning by doing and there's learning learning by like kind of doing what you're told, you know?
1:28:39
And I think this world could stand for a lot more learning by doing.
1:28:44
And like let's set aside our expectations and our preconceptions and conventional wisdom and whatever else.
1:28:51
Just tap into your own excitement, curiosity, motivation, and like go with that.
1:28:56
And of course, it's a dial, right?
1:28:58
If everyone did that all the time, 100% of the time, like it'd be a little bit too chaotic.
1:29:01
And but like I think the dial could be nudged in that direction and the world would be a net better place.
1:29:07
And like in a way I kind of that's one of the most exciting things about AI as I do honestly just think it's like it reduced the coolest conversation I think I had yet with someone about Lex was um there's like a reporter at a big name publication that everyone's heard of who was like oh I might actually be able to do this book I've been thinking about.
1:29:29
It's like yes [ __ ] yeah. Like do that. That's amazing.
1:29:31
You know, because the idea of like reducing the barrier to like getting started and going with it and like this is the kind of person they're not just going to be like generate a novel about XYZ. No, of course not.
1:29:42
But the whole idea that it's a wind in your sales, right, to do the thing that you want to do.
1:29:45
I just think that's going to make the world a better place, a more beautiful place, like that's just do the thing.
1:29:50
Allow yourself to do because the thing is we already kind of want to.
1:29:54
We just don't allow ourselves, right? That's the point.
1:29:55
So allow yourself to do that thing that you wanted to do. That's number one thing.
1:30:00
And then maybe the other the other thing because there's supposed to be two, right?
1:30:03
Um is um and understand that like that's like everybody else has that thing too and they're not really that different from you, right?
1:30:13
I you know, we live in a time where there's so much like just we don't see other people as people.
1:30:20
It's kind of like PvP on the internet or whatever of just like people being [ __ ] to each other.
1:30:24
And there's a way in which it's fun. People like to fight.
1:30:28
People like to feel self-righteous.
1:30:30
They like to feel like they have some solid sense of right and wrong.
1:30:34
And it's the ambiguity is kind of like hard to tolerate.
1:30:36
But like just the fact is there is ambiguity.
1:30:38
And if you're a maybe this is another place where cultural evolution helps me have an intuitive grasp of this.
1:30:44
It's like yeah, if you grew up where they grew up, you had the experiences they have.
1:30:47
Hate to break it to you, you'd be the way they are, you know, like you just would.
1:30:53
And so that's tough, right? And like I live in LA. I am from uh Texas.
1:30:56
A lot of my family is from Texas.
1:30:59
So like, you know, I think I have kind of like a a foot in different types of cultural uh divide or whatever, but I just I feel like on on and this is the most you know, whatever.
1:31:10
It's not like a new idea, but if I could incept it in people, I really would of just like tolerance, a little bit of empathy.
1:31:15
It doesn't mean you have to back down from your principles.
1:31:18
It doesn't mean there's no such thing as right or wrong or whatever, but it just does mean like let's like not like let's see each other as people or whatever.
1:31:27
And I do get worried about the level of division and polarization in the world now.
1:31:31
Um it it does feel qualitatively different from when I was a kid. Yeah.
1:31:36
You know, and when I talk to people who've been around longer than me, they usually say something kind of similar.
1:31:40
So I don't know where it heads, but it doesn't feel like it's an amazing spot right So, if I could incept people with that idea, too of just like giving each other a little grace, um, that would be the other thing.
1:31:50
Yeah, I love both of those.
1:31:50
And actually, that's an idea we have for when VR gets a little cheaper and better.
1:31:56
Wouldn't it be cool if you could put on a VR headset and literally experience another person's view of the world? Yeah.
1:32:06
world? Yeah. just to the it I think it would help with compassion, with acceptance, with allowing for grace because what you said about hey man like if you grew up where they grew up in the culture they grew up you would be saying exactly the same things and that is really hard for people to get just intellectually but like putting them in that world for
1:32:33
a day or whatever I think that that's an experience that might really change people and and get them to understand, oh man, okay, I I maybe really do need to kind of more focus on the fact that like for the most part, what what what's our we we have are more in common we have that divides us and focusing on that which divides us is just suboptimal in almost every way. So, I I
1:33:04
So, I I enthusiastically endorse both of your inceptions.
1:33:11
Well, Nathan, thank you so much for being on the pod.
1:33:13
Um, and can't wait to watch all the cool things you do uh with Lex.
1:33:19
Well, thank you and likewise with everything you're working on and it's amazing to be here.
1:33:23
Thank you so much for having me.