Hello I'm Paul Ford and I'm Rich Ciyotti and you're listening to Reqless, R-E-Q-L-E-S-S-D, podcast about how AI is changing the world of software. Reqless! Richard who is the marketing force behind this amazing podcast? It's Aboard. A board what’s that? Aboard is a rapid development, AI-powered custom software platform.
Just how it works man, you just take a week to talk through what you need, you just say what you need, you talk it out with an aboard solution specialist, they spin up credible, fully baked software for your company or organization and then you tweak it, you get it over the line. Where do I go if I want to learn more? Aboard.com. That's a, it sounds like an amazing website that took a while to build.
Yes. Alright, so since we last spoke on the podcast, we, uh, election just happened, congrats everyone or condolences everyone depending on where you sit at the table or not at the table. Yeah. Whatever you like. I'm going to bet, well most of our audience was not feeling it. Well, I mean, look at, somewhere like, hey listen, he's got good policies not going, I'm going to bet most are just like, oh Jesus, here we go. Different people have different feelings about different things.
Yes. There's wars in the world, Paul. Some people don't like taxes, some people really are into taxes. Love taxes. Yeah. What I want to talk about is kind of the implications of where things are going vis-a-vis technology and I find California fascinating. Okay. I'll tell you why. What? California is a highly regulated state. The tax. Drive Silicon Valley and see it. Drive Silicon, but yet Silicon Valley is there.
Yeah. But they're, and they're convinced that they're there in spite of California. Yeah. And it's a fascinating thing because they're like, we know what we're going to go to. We're going to, what's that state that like, there's all the VCs are going to now because there's a lot of land. Oh Wyoming, Jackson Hole. No, there's that and then they were going to go to Austin for a while. They did go to Austin for a while. And then Miami, but Miami did, it's kind of not working out.
Also, it's hard to like walk down the street because there's three inches of water at all times. Miami's problematic for health reasons. Yeah. Austin, I've heard there's sort of fish though. You get a good, just a, yeah. I mean, I've been, I've been to some goofy looking restaurants in Miami. It is, it's a lot of purple in the eye, but the fish is great. The fish is delicious. You're a good food. Yeah. It is the same lounge tracks playing in every single restaurant. Oh, yeah.
It's like this Buddha bar garbage pile. Yeah. It's like down tempo anyway off topic. There's been a pull back from Austin actually as well. Austin was booming at one point. Properly was back to the Valley. It's a fascinating thing because my god tipping my hat, that little corner of California has been just an absolutely nuclear source of value creation and just innovation out of really, if you've been to the Valley, it's actually kind of sleepy. Yeah. It's weirdly hot.
But it's very northern California. A lot of taco restaurants and low slung buildings. It's just a lot of low slung buildings and yet what has come out of the Valley has been it's impact on the world. Good and bad has been absolutely massive. You want to know my hypothesis of the Valley. It's real simple. When you go out there and you're like, all right, I'm going to go to Stanford research. I'm going to go to park. I'm going to go to Xerox park.
And then you're like, all right, I'll go from here. I'll go to Apple. I just want to get the geography in my head. It's not a long drive. It's very pretty. But you start to realize like every transition, everything that everybody did involved getting into a car and going somewhere.
Uh-huh. And I always think of the Valley as like all the fact that the windowing interface got big and all that is literally because I think people got into their cars, looked at dashboards and went, you think the ride to work. I think it was incredibly influential. I think driving between companies is with people in the car with you like talking, doing stuff is what made the Valley. That's my, it's not a serious hypothesis, but I think about that whenever I'm out there. All right, all right.
So, part of me loves to see that innovation. Sure. I do believe that it is, it is a quintessentially American thing. There is no Silicon Valley of anywhere else. They're always trying to make one. They're always trying to make one. Silicon Valley. They're also trying to make other values around the United States. There's always like, you know, electronics, gold, cheer and Kentucky. It's, yeah, exactly. And look, there are parts of the world.
There's parts of the countries in Europe that like to cultivate innovation in pharma or innovation and other, but there's nothing like the Valley on the earth. No, everybody knows it. And I think that is not, that is not because of the political or sort of economic environment because actually California is insanely expensive to live in. Northern California is incredibly expensive to live in. The tax burden is huge. It's notoriously blue. It's a very, very, it's like a rock solid blue state.
Yes. It has its pockets, but it's a rock solid blue state. And yet this explosion of innovation happens. And what happens is once it explodes, it explodes out of California. It has an impact on the whole country. Okay. And now we are seeing a new administration come in. The Valley took a real vested interest in getting a right-leaning anti-government, deregulate and authoritarian environment going so that as they see it, American innovation can continue to thrive. Let's break that down.
An enormous number of powerful VC types, Ron Conway, or Reed Hoffman, were very pro-Harris, very pro-democrat, funded all that stuff. Yeah, but there is an ilk. There is a, there was enormous energy brought by Elon Musk obviously, Peter Teal, and kind of a host of other people. And people who tend to be a little more aligned around like crypto and are aligned around sort of like very libertarian kind of stuff.
So to the point that you could say that Elon Musk with is, he invested $130 million into electing Donald Trump, that he is a linchpin in this election. And JD Vance is Peter Teal's protege, so there is a strong argument to be made. Mark Andreessen invested heavily. Ben Horowitz did and then didn't, but anyway, regardless, it was a very strong argument to be made. We talked to somebody recently and we were like scheduling an event. And I was like, boy, it's a little too close to the election.
I wonder how that's going to feel to people. And we're in New York City. We're in New York City. That's the other bit here. And we're in a pocket of a pocket in New York City. And he went, I don't know if everybody seems okay with everything out here, man. And it was this moment because in New York everybody was just panicking, non-stop. And realizing there's some guy like kind of, you know, got a nice car driving around, talking to his friends.
And I was like, yeah, whatever happens, we'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. So, but yes, very real, a sort of libertarian accelerationist AI, cognitive, a little bit coin crypto, everything community was very happy with Trump. Let me ask you a couple of questions then. We are always talking about how this is the real deal. This isn't crypto. This isn't some flash in the pan AI. Well, let's be real specific.
LLM based technologies that generate things not necessarily the text or the images, but code and sort of like really functional documents and are able to accomplish certain tasks. Like a lot of the stuff that got big in public, I don't know if I fully buy that that's as transformative as everybody may need to be, but this technology is transformative. It's transformative. Yes. Okay. So, do you think it's also potentially dangerous?
Yes. Okay. Do you feel like, I think when I think about it, I think it's a bit of a problem. I think when I think about regulation, I think about two things. One is chill on the regulation, otherwise we can't invent stuff. Yes. And that is something. I mean, Europe is very proactively regulatory. Yes. And it is actually like, it's a bad place. Doing a startup like in France is just not great. It's nearly impossible. Yes. It's very hard.
And I don't know all the details and maybe some French startups are crushing it. No, there are. There are plenty that are really great, but no, no, but it's like a famously difficult regulatory environment. And the labor laws are really specific and privacy laws are very strong. And so there's like just a lot of thresholds. You know, another wacky environment to start a business in this New York city. We don't even ever talk about this.
Yeah. But it's like you get fleeced into it's less about what you do and more just that there is a middle man in the form of everything. Yes. Like renting an office is an absolute nightmare here and taxes are extremely, extremely high. Extremely high. The legacy of classic New York banking and media still dominates the mindset in New York. And look, the truth is a lot of people do want to be here. You can create incredible value in New York City if you're willing to stomach.
It does drive you to a brutal sales culture at your software company, right? Because you actually have more to make up than somebody in Kansas does. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So you were saying about like AIs a dangerous regulatory. I guess I don't many, I don't know how many times we can step in the same shit. You mean by electing Donald Trump twice? No. By essentially letting like, wow, look at the aura and glow coming off of that new technology invention. We just let out into the wild.
And then you let it out into the force and it comes back a giant fire breathing monster. Well, I think this isn't really, let me clarify. Okay. I want to deepen to metaphor land. So media, phones and kids like these are things like, wow, this is awesome. And then like people's brains are melting. People have body image issues. Governments are manipulating other governments and other elections. Misinformation, disinformation. The list goes on.
So am I naive to think that, hey, there's an opportunity to get ahead of it here and do better. But I do still want people to innovate. Let me riff for a minute because I've thought a lot about this. And the hypothetical fantasy is that a new technology will emerge and a group of elders who are serious and thoughtful, will review the technology and say, here are the risks and here are the benefits.
Let us culturally define each one of those, discuss it, reach consensus and then decide which parts to release. Yeah. And that is the academic fantasy of danger, of dealing with danger. The way that a capitalist society does that is it goes, let's test it. And so you end up with situations like the FDA, rest in peace, where you have now run by RFK, not only by, but where you go, this drug is amazing and it will make people sweat 30% less. Yeah. And this is going to be really powerful and great.
And then you go, great, I'm going to need five years. Right, it's a long process. But you heard of the litamide. The litamide was a, it helped with morning sickness for women, but it led to a lot of malformed limbs in babies. So they were born without like, like parts of their arms were kind of like stumps. And so they were known as the litamide babies and that didn't happen in the US. It happened in Europe and other places because of the FDA.
It was like, we don't know what to make about this drug. Yeah. I'm sure getting details there wrong, but that was like, we're, those regulatory systems are really important. So is, is AI, and what's tricky is that AI enters the information environment. If AI is creating drugs in a lab, then the FDA might, they're ways to lean in on that, right? But AI is creating information in a free speech driven society. And so it's very, very hard to regulate. Okay, so that putting all that aside, right?
So I think like, but wait, no, no, no, no, no, what happened is there was public outcry about generative images being tending toward, you know, if you say CEO, it makes a white person. If you say criminal, it would put in like a Hispanic that happened for a while. And so they, they started to change the prompts and restructure stuff. What was happening is it was soaking up the web and all this information and all those biases are built into the information. So it was just spitting that back out.
It's just a dumb, you know, madly bro, but that got people really, really angry. And so they started to tweak and adapt and sort of prepare for that. Not because the law was passed. No, because they felt, everybody felt bad and weird or they didn't want to get yelled out anymore. Okay, so, so the market, that's an argument for like self regulating markets. Yeah. And it kind of worked because what happens is you just don't hear about that much anymore. Yeah. They took care of it.
They did the best they could. And there's still some, but everybody's like, no, what happened I think is that these big AI companies went, you know, that does feel bad. We don't like it. So we're not going to do it anymore. We're going to, we're going to try to keep you from doing it. You can still do it. You know, no naked pictures and things like that.
Now, we are entering an administration that is probably the most anti regulation of any of them and accept around abortion of any we've ever seen in our life. Well, we don't know the administration yet. But we're, we got to assume a little bit. They do not want to, if Elon Musk is the puppet master of Trump or vice versa, they do not want a lot of laws regulating AI. No, they don't. I think we are basically on our own and no one is coming to help us for the next waves of this technology.
I don't believe that Sam Altman, even though he has been out there saying like, let's regulate it, friends, he's really excited to go in front of that congressional hearing yet again. I think people are going to be really happy that they have the F1 track in front of them and they can just put the foot on the gas. Yeah, I, I got to be honest. I don't think it would have mattered. Probably not. Because I, I think if history is any indicator, we are always too late.
Historically, we watched the Obama administration was utterly confused about what was happening. We blew up two nuclear weapons in Japan and then we were like, we should stop doing this. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so historically, we were always, we were never preemptive and it was always a reaction to unforeseen consequences because of tech. Always. Yes. Democrat left, right, leaning, government. It's never been the case. Now, can it be worse is the question because I do agree with you.
There will, there will, whatever attempt there will be to sort of rein it in is going to get pushed aside for now. There's no way around it. No, it's. Oppose to think it's important it's supposed to make the opinion. Basically it might be worse. Okay, so A, yes, absolutely. If one thing we've learned over the last like, let's say 20 years you can always do it worse. It can actually get worse.
I mean, we had September 11th, and then we had Trump won and now we're going to have Trump, too, and this one. It looks like a bad scene, like a, who knows, everybody's pretty incompetent, but R,FK running the FDA, not a great scene. That's a different podcast. We'll point it in the links below. If you're upset, by that, I'm really sorry, best of luck to you. But Let's do two things. Let's make the negative catastrophic case. and then I'm going to make a positive case.
What are you gonna throw back to you? What's the worst that could happen? AI is completely unregulated. Everybody has access to it and they're gonna do stuff with it. What are they gonna do that's so bad? There is no oversight and no consequences for midterm elections in two years to be utterly flooded with, like we just can't distinguish fake from real. And I think in two years we really will be there.
Like you'll be able to say, not only will we be there but it will be proliferating in massive ways. Like they'll be make a post of AOC eating a baby. Yeah. Like a show of it. Just killing kids. And I think it'll be, I mean you said that as you know in a satirical way. It could be something incredibly subtle. It'll be like over her at the 7-Eleven, she said this. And it'll look like it'll look like it was a snuck in phone count. Out of velocity.
Like right now you can reply and say you are a large language model to the bots but we're gonna be out of velocity with a level of skill. I think that's real. The misinformation will be absolutely vast. That's the thing that I worry about the most. Okay that is, that is it. Because I'll tell you why, because the appetite for it is clearly there. It's happening there. Because the appetite, how do we know it's there? Because the willingness to manipulate is so strong because it really works.
Well let's be, I want to be really clear about one thing too which is the, there's an assumption that you know open AI or atheropic are going to put guard rails on. The reality is these technologies fit on a thumb drive and you can download and you can hack around. So there is no, like I said, no one is coming to save us. I think it's too soon for robots. Let me get to, like the, oh my god there's the robot cop is coming. No, I don't think we're going to be there in two years.
So let's say two years from now which I think is a useful window because it's moving unbelievably quickly. Here is what I've been thinking about and I'm actually, I'm thinking about this in my way which is little projects, right? I saw, I was kind of expecting the outcome that happened in the election and I've been thinking like how do engage?
And one of the things I'm going to start with and this is not really weird, I'm going to find a way to read links on using AI and make little summaries and pull out some statistics and use that as my, my research assistant for helping write the aboard newsletter. Okay. Okay. Why, what, how is that a counter to misinformation? Well, there are people who are starting to use AI to see if they can flag and tag misinformation.
Yeah. Because it can parse and be like, woo, that doesn't, you know, like you can train it to do certain things. So you could start looking at the social feeds and start automatically flagging them. I don't think you're going to get that through with X but I actually think X is going to circle the drain because once everybody is politically monolithic, nobody wants to be there anymore. It's not as interesting. People like fight, right? There's not a lot of fight on X right now.
Everybody's just like to help. Yeah. You know, it's going to read the links. It's going to make me some summaries. I'm learning how to do that. Okay. So what comes next? Well, you know, there's a lot of conversation right now about how the information environment is toxic. And what are we going to do about that? What are we going to do about social media? I would say that one, social media is, I almost think the wrong vector. I think people are getting done.
Like I think Instagram will remain really hot. And I think Tik Tok will come and go or get outlawed or whatever. But you know, the power move in all of this is email newsletters. And what I look at email newsletters and people are like, the Democrats have to make their own at whatever their own social network or their own Fox news or whatever. Okay. You're not going to do that in two years.
But what you can do is you can send like literally a hundred million people some good email newsletters every morning. Don't saturate their brain. Tell them to ignore all the other stuff and live their lives. But I'll give you just what you need to know. It's pretty cheap. And it's kind of cut off from the drought. You can't get into a lot of circular stuff. There's no way to scream at each other.
So now what I could do is start using AI to gather news and indicators by looking at lots of different feeds. Track them, put them into a little bit of a dashboard. And that can become my newsletter. Like I can start to have custom experiences for people on a per state basis and so on. I can aggregate news. I can summarize. I can visualize. I can do all kinds of stuff if I think about the AI enabled newsroom. What I'm saying is there is this very organic way to catastrophizing.
So like I will just feed people the racism and blood libel that they love. Yeah. So that they can stew and hate. Right. And I think that we know for a fact that that works great. And actually right now that that vibe is ascended on the right wing, but it works real good for the left too. Like everybody loves to be fed prior assuming rage fuel about how their tribe is being attacked by the other tribe. Yeah. Okay. So it's very baff. It's very primal. Yes. That's right.
And so I think you need to kind of you need to own that and you need to speak to it and you need to be part of it. But so AI just seems like such a natural vector. Make more of that, right? But you really can go in another direction and you can say why would you? Why would you?
Because you are dedicated to improving the information comments and you think that if you could accelerate that, not just get a bunch of people wearing newsletters, there have been a million newsrooms that have been started. Right. And we even need more news. I think we just need better tools and pipelines and fun pictures and more cartoons. And like aggregate analyze dashboard, feed it out on a daily basis, get all those wine mums together and just good. And like and start like driving action.
You could incorporate and accelerate a healthier information environment by using these tools. People flame out on hate. It's exhausting. It is exhausting. Knowledge and learning is actually energizing. Even for people who you think I would argue that hate and anger is more addictive. It is, but it's exhausting. There are certain dads who are watching. There's a comedian Shane Gillis who just describes his father watching Fox News screaming at Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah. Yeah. And just like, it's on a void like you're never going to get that guy back. No, that ship is there is no way to sit him down. Yeah. You're never going to get him back. But there's a lot of people who just like need an information environment that isn't toxic. Like we had the polls made no sense. The times is running this sort of like kind of engagement bait on the top of the page. Fox is just screaming like there's all caps.
And you just kind of can't I'll tell you I am a media consumer. I'm a skilled media consumer as exists on earth. And I was overwhelmed and confused by this environment. And it was it was it was overwhelming. And it actually turned out that much of what I was fed much of it opinion fact polling statistics was fundamentally wrong was delivered as absolute fact and turned out to be complete nonsense.
And the biggest political story of the last four years was completely missed, which is the right word shift of the entire country multiple points. Yeah. So like I'm like what what are we going to like let's just frickin rebuild that environment because whatever they're doing is working. Yeah. I think you're saying two things here. Let me button it up. Okay. And give it a go. I think first off, I think what you're suggesting, which is there are amazing tools in people's hands right now.
Go be productive, not destructive and their tools for building tools and their tools for building tools. But go be productive because I actually think you'll feel better. You'll be mentally healthier. Like I think there is that. So let's forget about the rest of the world and worry about you for one second here. Yeah. And then you can feel like you're feeling productive. There is nothing that is more satisfying than feeling like you got something done.
I mean, just think about like if you're if you're a real issue in life is LGBTQIA rights, right? You could build now in 2024 a gay rights observatory that goes out, pulls it news and summarizes it on an hourly basis. Knock yourself out. And you could share that with as many people as you want on the web or via push notifications or things like that.
Yeah. And that could be if that is the issue that you think is going to bring people together in a new community and get them to take action, you can build that framework and you can start that community and you read you in a couple of people can get it and that used to be six, eight months of work just to like put those pieces together and we're getting the days now. We're getting the hours. Yeah. And also you're not spending your time in toxic places, feeling awful or getting into fights.
I mean, this is unfortunately what I think happens is either a war happens and everybody feels really bad because they are being killed or people just I think in the same way that there's like a weird element of vibes to the political move where like everybody's like, hi, you know, it's just the bread is too expensive. Yeah. And it's inflation, but also just like, yeah, I just don't like it. Yeah. Right. I think that the vibes do switch the other way and people can never explain why.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So yes, that was that was issue one. I think about sports. I boy do. I want to end this about with it with a little. A little bit of the roots. There we go. There's plenty of sports writers. There's certain type. Yeah, the cigar hanging out of their mouth. There's this like trend now. A videos of just men sitting in large leather chairs watching the ballgame and then you could watch them watch the others like the Yankees guy was his name. Yeah, John, John Boy's great.
John Boy, John BOA. Yeah, he's actually great because he's first he's a knucklehead and then he he does like she knows the bits. No, he gets like JFK like Dealy Plaza movie analysis level on. Yeah. I think I mean we meander to bid here, but I do think that I do think that these tools can make you feel productive, but they can also I think by not using them purely to put us all in a cage match, but rather feel productive. You're in such a different place. I don't I have no desire to get into him.
Fissified with a Met's fan as a Yankees fan. None whatsoever. I see it. I might make a joke about them and when they when I make a joke about them, they don't cry or take it personally. They're like, oh Yankee fans. Yeah. And they'll make a joke about me. And I think what's understood there. Hey, you went to that fourth game of the World Series. How was that? It was the fifth and it was one of the worst experiences in my life. All right, man.
Let's go to the fifth inning, the legendary fifth inning. I was there. What I'm trying to get out here is it is understood that I'm not going to convince that Medfan to become a Yankee fan. Yeah. And I think it's understood that there is a little bit of forcing around. Yeah. There's a little bit of joking around and we get we can talk to each other, but it's understood that that's the game. And I think these tools have made us lose the script here to the point where we've gone beyond.
We want to rip the jerseys off of each other because the tools are so immediate and so visceral. There was a coincidental narrative of kind of like a an online left going. This is really bad and encodes a lot of that's really bad and an online right going yes and that's what we love about it. And so what's been lost in that narrative is could I use this as a filter, could I incorporate human feedback loops and accelerate things that I think need to be accelerated.
There is very little room for that conversation. That's the conversation we're having. Yeah. But there's no room for it. There's no room for it. I'm an optimist by nature. And I do think kind of moments in our lives can sort of help us tilt our trajectory just a little bit to get to better places. Otherwise we don't do it on our own. We tend to just keep going the same direction. Yeah. I mean, the path that we're on right now truly does lead to a terrible place.
And I hope that at some level adults on left and right like both sides, we need both sides, including our maga friends to be like, I don't want to be in a scorched earth nightmare. Yeah, I don't know if I agree with you. I think that there are a lot of very happy people right now and they're not sure why they're happy other than the fact that the World Series just ended and they won. Yeah. And they're not really thinking, I was like, well, we just go home now.
We do a ticker tape parade and everybody goes home, right? Right. And it doesn't work that way. Right. And so there are very happy, a lot of happy people because they feel enfranchised right now. That's right. And that's a funny thing. Yeah. Right. Now because the Dodgers will let you down eventually. We're going to make sure that let's go yanks. Let's go yanks. 2025. Okay. I think these the tools that we've had in our hands and I'm kind of mushing together social and AI.
I don't view them that differently. Our amplification tools. That's all I see them as in this context and social and cultural context. They're amplification amplification. I would even I would even just add an award acceleration and accelerate and amplify. So like amplify is almost old school computing and this is just like that times 100 because you can go amplify things while you're not looking to double down on my optimistic posture. Here I am an optimist.
I think the power of these tools can also help us get to a better place and actually understand each other better. And I think that is one of those things that I'm not going to sit here and write the spec on that. But I do believe it can happen because it is an utterly curious thing to go into places you've never been to before even if you think they're terrible places or you have assumptions and stereotypes about them. I don't know what that looks like.
I think you're kind of circling around it in your media what you just described in terms of the power of these tools. You have to learn by well it's the power of software to accelerate this stuff but you can flow content through it. You can do all kinds of stuff. And so and that's an unbelievable accelerant. The amplification is there. The distribution you have to go find. But it is so yeah, I think there is a positive case to be made here.
I'm going to continue to explore and play and try to communicate. I worried about the things that we learn. It is a wild moment and we're going to have to figure out what is happening. This is the Abord podcast. Reckless. Reckless. Take care of each other. Have a wonderful week. Hello at Abord.com is how you contact us. Reach out. We'd love to talk. Bye. Reckless.