Hello friends, I am Paul Ford, the co-founder of Aboard. I'm Rich Cioti, the other co-founder of Aboard. And this is the Aboard Podcast. You can check out Aboard at Aboard.com. It's a tool to help you organize everything, get work done. It's personal productivity, but it's also you can share it with others. Check it out. The rich, we have a couple subjects for this podcast. I kind of want to move this along,
give it a little, like a classic twist. You drive. Alright, I'm going to do that. So I thought we could hit a little news, and then you had a subject you wanted to hit, which was how the vibes are off. The vibes are off. We want to talk about the vibes for a minute. It's March 21st. It's March 24. 2024. 2024. This will air next week. So this might be old news next week. Everything is all news within an hour. I think the vibes may still
be off next week. So we should tell the people also, we're the co-founders of this company. We talk about big, broad, interesting, wild, weird stuff that we think is cool rather than beating you over the head with our wonderful, wonderful product that you should check out. Great news things are coming soon. We should just hit it just because we always talk about this. Apple's getting sued for antitrust. The whole market was up, and then it was like,
no, I'm sad now. Market sad. Out of the market sad, it's just that Apple is one of the biggest planets in the solar system. As you look at, like when you see the S&P 500, that's just 500 stocks. Yeah. One of them is Apple. And it's like 50 of them. Apple got punched in the face today. What is the case? What are what are what are the US and the United States okay? Is suing Apple okay? For pretty much anti-competitive practices. Which one's bigger?
Well, United States. Yeah. Definitely. It's got a couple trillion in spending, whereas Apple is just worth a couple trillion. I saw chart ones where they went through the biggest economies and companies, and Apple was kind of in the middle amongst countries. You know who always does badly in that is Spain. Portugal, everybody's given up one years ago. Yeah. But then they're like Spain. Apple's a lot bigger than Spain. It's shocking. Yeah.
And you're like, wow, man, that was day days to really be quite something. Anyway, so why are we suing again? Well, I think the Apple iPhone ecosystem, you can't say, oh, Apple dominates mobile phones because Android's, I don't know the stats, it's probably close to, it's probably exceeds around the world. It's cheaper and whatnot. So it's not, that's
not the issue. They're not shutting out another device maker. The issue is the billion and one billion iPhones out in the world have effectively created an economy inside of them, right? Fair enough. Yeah. I mean, my phones are used for as well as you can put your credit cards on them. Sure. Phones can install apps where other businesses effectively thrive through Apple's ecosystem as well as others. No, I mean, as a company that produces software,
I love being in the Apple App Store going through their approval process. And then if I ever try to get any revenue, I can gladly give them 30%. That's great for me. And the capitalist society that I live in. There's a set of rules that you have to comply with to be in Apple's ecosystem. And those rules pretty much openly, it's not even covert, say that if you tread on functionality that we already put in, yeah, we won't let you in. It's just him
cook going, I need to wet my beak. Well, it's not just about them taking money. What I'll give you an example. This was this was big news years ago to buy a book for your Kindle app. You had to leave the Kindle app. Go to a browser, open Amazon, buy the book, then go back to your Kindle app and sync it. You couldn't buy things in the Kindle app. You couldn't do that. Why? Because they had I books, which is their bookstore thing.
You know what I love is when you when something like that doesn't really work, but then one day it starts working. And you're like, wow, you guys got together and decided to really screw us together. Like it's beautiful. Yeah. And so and there are other examples of where really the businesses that are on the ecosystem make their money through smaller transactions as part of the relationship with the customer, like video games where you're buying items.
And they've been in war with Epic games for a while. That's right. And so, you know, Apple's like, look, you're going to you're going to do money transactions on a phone on our phone. We want our cut. Yeah. Right. And and so Apple's counter argument is this. If it was 2.5% like a credit card, okay, it's 30%. Well, even 30. I don't know if that's the that's not their argument. That's not okay. That their argument is Apple's argument. Let's start
with Apple's argument is you don't have to be here. You're on our land. It's true. You're going over to Android. Go to Android, right? And that argument for many years was valid. And for a lot of companies, if you look at the history of companies that start to get anti competitive, is they reach a certain scale? Yeah. Well, you could say, yeah, we
are on your land, but you're two thirds of the earth. Right. It's too big. Right. And now what you're starting to see is it is big enough to thwart markets to thwart market places to thwart competition. And it actually becomes counterproductive to the economy as a whole. That's the argument. That's why the United's why would the United States care to sue Apple is if you're starting to constrain the forces that can drive growth in a marketplace,
then we're going to come come and and renew it. All right. What's the best thing for consumers that could happen as a result of this? I mean, the best thing that could happen is that we have more options that competition drives down cost because what happens is they a lot of people have to factor in that cut that Apple takes. It's kind of like the mob. It is real. Like you're like, all right, I need to add and a lot of people do that. They're
like, if you don't buy it on Apple, I can give it to you a lot cheaper. They try that. But very often they eat it. And by eating it, essentially, the dynamics that lead to innovation and competition that is good for everybody, often consumers too, is sort of stunted. Like they effectively have control over this gated community and they can price how they want. That's what you have here. So we'll see where it goes. This is not new. It's happened
to everybody. This will take a long time. Congratulations to the lawyers though. There are a lot of lawyers are going to win. It's a good time. Yeah, good time for a lot of people. Something something and something. Yeah. Offer them. A lot of testimony. Yeah. A lot of depositions. I'm going to share a piece of news just because I thought it was fascinating. I don't I don't follow F1 racing. Do you? No, it's big now. It's huge. The team called Williams. They they have a new leader. Uh-huh.
And he's like, we got to clean this place up. We got to fair. Why is everything. Why is everything so slow? Uh-huh. One of the reasons everything is so slow. This is an RS Technica. He's that they were managing all the parts for the car in a single Excel spreadsheet with 20,000 rows. Like the whole team. Oh my god. So I'll read you just one. The consequences of the row column chaos and resulting hiccups were many. Williams missed early preseason
testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team's factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority. Other parts came late and some piled up and yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was viciously expensive. Making up for the painful process required. Quote humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking. So it was harder to update the software than to race a car in F1. And incredibly common story.
Very, very common. This is why we exist. But it was nice to see it validated right there in the article. Yeah. It's I guess what is throwing me off is you just stumbled on this spreadsheet. It wasn't it kind of like the thing that everyone knew about. Well, this new boss. Ah, he's like, what the heck is this? Wait, what? Yeah. What? Yeah. Yeah. The thing is is that's everywhere. And the reality is the old boss. I'm sure one to get rid
of this spreadsheet. Yeah. And everybody can't can't touch my spreadsheet. Well, free advice for this F1 team. There's a product called Zoho Sheets. Oh, God. Solve this all for you. Oh, no, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. That is a solvable problem. Glad that the F1 team is looking into it. I mean, I think the static is not two billion people use spreadsheets and not all of them are doing it doing math on them. There's putting stuff
in the bottom of the box. This is so, you know, we're in there too. You had a subject you went to hit. So I'll set this up for you, which is you and I are in a co-working space. We noticed it like a little kind of gloomy. Often people just don't come to work. Yeah. It's kind of watching the vibes used to be very different in a place like this as little as five years ago. Yes. They were it wasn't that it would like be
busy and thriving and they would be like high-fiving. I love I love my job. But it was, you know, people say high in the halls. It's all good. But boy, it all does feel a little bit bleak, doesn't it? Not only, you know, co-working space, but like getting a coffee has a hint of bleakness to it. I'm I'm I'm I'm you go to the coffee shop. You go to the coffee shop and look, I get it. I'm we're in Brooklyn, New York. It's almost part of the stick to either
be a bartender or barista that's kind of in a bad mood. Sure. Like apparently you get better caught the worst the mood, the richer the flavor. The flavoring is actually barista tears. I don't know if they're yes tears. Exactly. You know who it is that like the male barista with the tattoos. Boy is he crabby. My brother owns a restaurant and he said to me once beware of beware of chefs with sleeve tattoos. Yeah. There's just something going
on. Not because you started like three in a row quit on him. Yeah. He was now I find myself looking at their arms. Yeah. There's just something going on where it's like you know, I got a lot of income living my life. And then it's like you're you want you want a cortado? You absolute. You are just fascist monstrosity. Yeah. There's like a great cloud over things I feel like to a some extent. I have a theory about it. So wait, this is
it. So we walked around the office is empty. People are being grumpy, certain you coffee in Brooklyn and that's it. You've been able to extrapolate that to a theory. Here's what I think has happened. I think humans do a very good job of keeping them. Keeping themselves busy and not worrying about dying. Like it's necessary. So our number one priority. So number one priority. You got to get a job. You can play for your vacations. We redo
your garden. You just keep busy. Keep busy. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. And all of a sudden life hits you. Everyone gets hit eventually. But you just keep going. And then three years ago the pandemic hit. And I think it reset our relationship with work. Like I think it reset it in such a profound way that now when we go to work, we see work differently. Okay. I don't think we're we fully processed. How consequential that was.
I am 54 years old. I live through 9.11. I've my family fled a civil war. I have more context. But let me tell you a 27 year old today who went through that at essentially a nonstop hit after hit booming economy for pretty much entire lives. And then getting that thrown at them and hearing numbers like millions are dying. And it's coming for you and how divisive the world the country was and the world was about it. I think it got it fades
away. And then to me, the best analogy I can think of is like the the soldier that's coming back from Vietnam was just trying to go back to work now. They're putting their shirt on and they're going back. You can always see the hurt locker. Yes. There's a scene the hurt locker where the guy who defuses IADs goes to the supermarket and he's like, yeah, no, and then he's back. And he's back. That's it. That's a case of like, I got
to go back. But for many, there is no going back like Vietnam ended, right? The war ended and they come back and they try to kind of, you know, ingratiate themselves back into society. But there's a lot still stewing underneath. I believe that's the case. I've been real harsh even on this podcast about how like like really old man vibes of like young people don't seem to work anymore. It takes me 20 minutes to get anything. But it was
just a lot of grumpy old man stuff. And I'm realizing that I don't think it's just about that. I think it's also about the fact that I don't think we fully, we fully forgotten like this seismic thing that happened. It's still there in the background. It, we've made it through it. But I think, you know, trauma tends to kind of stew underneath and manifest itself in other ways. And I think it's hard for people to just be overly excited
about work. I'm generalizing. I don't have statistics or anything Paul. All right. Let me give this back to you because I think that there's another way to look at there's a couple of ways to look at this. And I think we need to talk about where things are going. That's what we do. So, okay. I'm going to, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt because I also kind of picked it up. Like I'm just like, it's just weird
walk. It's funky vibes. Walking around New York City is weird. It just, everything feels a little hollowed out. And then you go into like a fancy lunch spot and it's completely mobbed. And you're like, what, where is everybody? Yeah. Yeah. And the offices are empty. Yeah. It's like a zombie movie on one, on one neighborhood and a romcom in the other. Yeah. And so, okay. So let's just say for, for the purpose of this hypothesis, the vibes
are off there. I think there's a couple of different ways to react to this. One is to be like, all right, we got to just kind of like process this, figure out what's up and get back to it. I think, you know, let's, let's start our businesses, let's get our health insurance and let's go. And again, America, that's a, you know, that's Joe Biden. Like, let's go on the other side. I mean, his opponent is like, this is the worst time we've
all ever experienced. America's going to hell again. So people are like literally half the country is like split down the middle desperately trying to avoid that debate, but we're having it. I think in the middle, you have this other thing, which is like a group of, if I'm 27, if I'm that mythical 27 year old, I don't know if they exist, but let's say, and you tell me this, I'm going to look at you and I'm going to go like, yeah, that's
a really interesting supposition. You twice my age work is stupid. Like everything you're asking me to do is meaningless. I can diet any moment in a pandemic. I literally came to all the town halls and all the meetings you asked me to and you weren't able to protect me from this endless void. And you, you like, aside from health insurance, what do you have for me? And I think that like, first of all, I think every 27 year old fundamentally
asked that question about their job, even when there isn't a pandemic. Yeah. But I think they have a good reason to ask it because like the whole structure of like, I'm going to get a job and I'll do okay and I'll get my house and so on. Whether you can still do that or not, the national narrative is such that you can't. America is like, nah, you're never
going to get a house kid. Sorry. There's a lot of that. I mean, the truth is inflation as a product, probably also a byproduct of the pandemic is we sort of open to firehose a money into the economy and we got to pay the bill. And so inflation went out of control. So borrowing money became nearly impossible. Rental markets went through the roof because young married couples couldn't buy it that house that they wanted. So like, we'll rent
for a while. So that everybody rushed to rent and rents went like, we're in New York city. They went out of bound, like out of control. Right. So, so let me ask you, this group of people, let's let's put the vibe shift back to the people who are like, hey, I'm not feeling it. I'll go to work as much as I need to or to pay my rent, which sucks anyway. But honestly, I don't see a lot of upside and I don't really want to smile when I'm serving
in your coffee because who cares? Who cares? Yeah. Okay. Now you got to tell me what to do. Like, how do you get out of that? What's next? Yeah. I think there's, I think there's a couple of things. How do you get out of that? I think we are coming out of it. I think we are coming out of it to an extent. I think, I think we didn't talk about just being online and phones in our pockets as a component of this. I think that's a real company.
And I gotta tell you, since I mean, I broke my foot, I'm in this boot. So I'm walking in a very like, I'm slow. I'm just like, I'm slow and I got to watch, watch where I am because my balance isn't that great. And it's really hard to get around like literally on the subway four inches from the tracks, just people just staring at their phone just like, I'm like, they're all going to die. I can't, I can't get past them like they don't
perceive me. Yeah. And I've noticed it before, but it's really, it's actually a little dangerous how much people are checked out from the physical environment that they're in. This isn't like, oh my god, they're spending too much time on their phones. I'm like a 90 ton, hurtling cannonball is within like one hand's breath from your magic glow screen and you don't care. I think that's right. And I think, I think I'm not going to sit here and lecture
everyone on how phones are bad. I'm on my phone a lot too. I'm not going to lie about that. But I don't think there is a lecture here. I think that where I'm at is like, okay, this is like a macro thing. There isn't an individual behavior that's going to change us. Yes. And I think phones are a microscope on how brutal the world actually is. And you
can peer into that brutality anytime and many hours a day. And when you few peer at it, if you peer into it and stare at it and just become conditioned to it, your relationship with others, I think, changes. You become a little more, you feel like why bother? It's depressing. It could be depressing. The world is a brutal place. What happens when you punish the mice with little electric shocks or the dogs? You punish them with little electric shocks
and but there's no reason. It's totally random. What happens to them? Do you know? No. They give up. They lie down. They get depressed. They're just like, I don't even know. I don't know why it's this way. I have no control. I give up. I'm not going to eat. Right. Okay. Let's be very empathetic. Maybe we're going through that as a culture. People still have resources. They can still go. They can still do things. They can still ride jet skis.
But regardless, they feel that they're getting randomly punished by the universe. I think that's real. Okay. So they're lying down. They don't want to give you their coffee or they'll give you your coffee, but it's it's grumpy. Okay. The 2020 answer to this was guys, I'm going to get you motivated. We're going to do an off site. We're going to talk about how great it will be to serve coffee. We're going to talk about our single source beans.
We're going to hug it out and we are going to get in there. We're going to change the culture around serving coffee in Brooklyn, New York. Pre-pandemic. Can't say that anymore. People will shoot you. They will drive a coffee spoon through your eyeball. Go away. So now what? What is the post-fraud way to motivate and engage people? I will say this. I'm going to answer that question. I think I think we had a bad set of things come together all at
once. We had this pandemic, which is just terrible. Terrible psychologically for everybody. Terrible, really terrible physically for some. Killed a lot of people. Yeah. That happened. We watched the world be the world at close up with our phones. During this whole mess. In fact, we had no choice. It was the only way to feel safe and in control and the phone
was right there. And you weren't allowed to talk to anybody anyway. That's right. And on top of that, the phones gave us sort of a false sense of like activist power that we thought we could like, if I just yell into that input box, I could probably make a difference and it turns out you can't most of the time. And so now here we are. And it turns out, look, for all those, all that activism, all that motivation, essentially melted
away. It disintegrated and it left people feeling very powerless. That's the word I would use. The pandemic plus the sort of numbing nature of a phone and the fact that you really actually don't have much of an impact because you're one of six billion people left everyone feeling powerless. And when I see a grumpy barista, I see someone that has just decided that they have no power over the world in any way, shape or form. And guess what? You
don't. But here's what you do have power over. And I think this is where we're paying the price. I think you have power over making the person next to you feel good because when the person next you feel good, you actually feel good too. And we're not, we're doing a lot less of that. I think that, I think I'm going to say something maybe slightly controversial.
I think it's becoming less controversial. I think it's, I think working from home and staring into our phones and only going out for coffee once in a while is not good for us because we are social creatures and we need to be around people. I think young people need to be around people. I think older people need to be around people. I feel it myself because I thought it was nice and convenient and I started to see it wear away at me. I told you
we had to leave your little office near your house. I just, the way I put it was you have to wear a belt. Yeah. And look, I think this got appropriated as like your boss doesn't have to tell you where you need to be. It's, it's the world is connected. You have control. It's not the point. So you're not doing this for your boss. You're doing this for yourself because it is, it feels good. I grew up Lebanese the way the Lebanese coped with all that instability is the houses
were always full of people like your neighbors didn't have it. There was no locks on doors like people just hang out around each other. And they were some of the best memories for them because humans find peace in each other like even if they're not buddies just being around each other and mocking each other and making fun of each other. It is something fundamental to us. And I think all this convenience and all this isolation I think has led us to a certain place. I have no
scientific backing for any of this. All right. So here we are. You and me we're going to build an organization together. Yeah. We've been building it but we need to keep growing it. We need to do things like sales and marketing. Yeah. Factor this in. I have a theory by, we need to talk about AI all the while while we're sitting there alone and sad. Computers decided to get real chatty. All this is weird isn't it? They won't shut that up. Even when they don't know what they're talking
about. It's like the really cheerful friend who just what you like your grandma just died and she just won't stop talking about the superannas. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's a it's a lot right. I have a theory about about business and I'm going to I'm not going to give people life advice. That's not this podcast. Not going to give people life advice. I give people business advice.
I believe that in a world that has been overindexing on automation and quick answers that people are actually hungry to connect and I believe that if you want to differentiate your business and I doesn't even have to be in tech go see people. People want to see each other. People acting. They may not say they want to see each other but they actually want to see each other. I see a lot of sales calls and coffee shops dude on video and let me tell you man if you can go over if they're
in the same city get up and go see them. Like that's the best advice I can give people. If the one thing the robot can't do. It's the one thing the robot can't do. How else are you going to differentiate? How else? Cool ads. We didn't solve it. We didn't solve it. We just we pointed at it. We said it's real and we said we're going to try to factor it into our future. We will. We will. I will for my own personal mental health. Yeah. But I think I want to if like we are fortunate
enough to be able to have an influence over the kind of culture we want to create. I would like to create a culture where it is valued that you want to see people. I think that's healthy. Even beyond the goals of the business. I think I want to create that culture. I think if it's a culture where you're repulsed by the idea of having to be around other people. I don't want to build that culture. All right. Well, let's rehearse. Okay. I just walked into the office. Good to see you.
Hey. No, don't do that. Hey, Rich, how are you? I like talking to people. Hey, what'd you do this week? Yeah. You ready? You ready? Get ready, Rich, because that's what's coming if you want to build this culture. I'm okay with that. I like your sweater. My goal for a lot of my life is to find people. I want to I'm going to be around the people I work with more than going to be around coffee time.
Geez. Monday. High five. All right. All right. That's it. That's all we got. Okay. What is a weird one? It's a weird one right here. You asked for it, Paul. I did. I don't know. Well, this is the conversation we're having in person. I think a lot of this is getting written about and talked about. I said it as if it's fact, which it's not. It's just a vibe thing. I think it's about vibes. It is. When we pick the graphic, it should be about vibes vibes. All right. I'll go pick the
stock art. This conversation should inspire you more than anything else to check out an amazing software tool called a board on the internet at abord.com. You want to get in touch with this, Rich, what's a good way to actually have contact with these two human beings? Hello at abord.com. But we're also going to throw a party soon. We'd love to actually see more humans. Yes. And eventually, we're going to want to talk to people who are interested in the board. Eventually. Eventually.
I don't want to deal with people. Coffee time. Have a good week.