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🎧 Episode Summary
“Send kids to business school later — first, send them to art school.”
“We can do anything when we vibe.”
“Our chatbots should talk to each other.”
“Once the gatekeepers fall, we become the curators.”
“Agency is the real currency of the AI age.”
Cyberpunk Utopia offers a fresh take on our technological future. While "cyberpunk" traditionally paints a dark picture of corporate-controlled tech (think Blade Runner), hosts Teresa and Paul flip the script by exploring how we can use these same powerful tools to build something better.
Through their unique synergy, Teresa (an intuitive explorer) and Paul (a systems thinker) explore how emerging AI technologies can augment human potential by weaving together philosophical inquiry and real-world experiments in building what they term a 'meaning-centered economy.'
Central to their approach is the Japanese concept of ikigai—finding harmony between passion, capability, societal need, and economic viability. This framework guides their exploration of how individuals and communities can maintain agency and discover meaning in an AI-augmented world.
Yeah, I always, because look at that, I always filter a lot. On this thing? Well, no, in general. So then when I'm in front of them, I feel like it needs to be very coherent. But then I don't really know what my brain's going to say next. Especially Rummy. Especially Rummy. Well, I think with other intuitives I always have that, right? Because of the way that stuff flows. Like, I always know if I'm talking to a sensory person, like a sensory friend, then we always run out of stuff to talk about. Because there's a certain amount, because it's very factual grounded. At some point, it's like, well, we caught up. I told you what I'm doing. And it's like, well, I just don't know what to say next. But I never have it within intuitive people, because of the way that you just trigger each other. Feed the beast. Yeah, exactly. So that's a distinct phenomenon. And I could never figure out what that was. For me, it's like... Now I can describe what that is. That phenomenon. What is it? Well, that intuitive connection. That's what it is. I call it vibing. Yeah, vibing. Yeah, no, I guess vibing is, or to me, always felt more like, a similar, or you get along, but this is a bit more nuanced, I think. For me, in my language, it's heart open, heart-sender, which allows the free flow of energy, which in human ways, that we understand energy is usually through stories and sharing our lives together and sharing our ideas. Yeah. Or our observations. A lot of people complain a lot. I have some friends, boy, lately they've been complaining a lot. And it's very draining. They're not wrong about anything they're complaining about, but it's just like, wow, at some point you feel like you have to go. Since I've been studying energy, for me, and this happens all the time, at least there's more awareness among my mom and my sister. And we will come in now, hot, and say, "I'm going to hot potato you." It is emotional dumping. Right. Yeah, yeah. No, that's true. My sister does tend to use far more emotional than I am. And it's like, okay, let's get past that stuff. I love... This week I've been playing with so much. And one thing, and this has to do with the frame that lost school, that's true. That is a... Lost school was a choice that I'm trying to move away from. Yes, it's come up though. Yeah. Well, it wasn't a dream that I had last night. But I'm replacing that experience, which was quite emotional for me, I remember, because I didn't want to go. And I just made a really bad choice. Yeah. But I struggled through that. I'm still glad I did. But going to art school is just giving me so much more perspective than that being said. I don't know if I would be enjoying art school if I wasn't 46. Yeah, that's true. There's a right moment for things, right? You know, I am learning from myself in a life well-lived, where you start to appreciate why things have happened for you and integrating that. I am very grateful that I chose the order that I chose. Okay. Yeah. At least I learned early that there was no effing way that I wanted to do anything with the law. And now watching the American system, how will you use the word fail? What a waste. Yes. At least you didn't. Because earlier we were talking about feeding the beast. At least you didn't feed the beast. I did. Well, student loans are another thing. Sure. But student loans, that gives me a segue into one of the things that I was playing with this week, which was creating an article. And I'm starting to try to create articles or artifacts based on something, some sort of stimulus that I got from the universe, which is what I'm learning at art school, is like be stimulated by the things around you and then how to direct that energy and actually produce something. So I am in sub-stack. I have created the dyslexic library to, it's an experiment. It's like a new canvas for me. But the article that I was working on this week was comparing an article that another sub-stacker had written. And she's a professor, Elizabeth Richard Cox. She's quite famous on the sub-stack world. Doesn't matter. She's really good at what she does. And I wanted to take one of her articles and then kind of respond to it and give myself a homework assignment and try to get the article in sub-stack, in AI, written in the way that I wanted. And what I realized when I got to the end of writing this article on student debt and trying to compare that to the Argentine and bailout, I really enjoyed the responses that AI gave me because I started out with a logical, like what I called KQED and Americans will understand that it's like the more liberal way of looking at things. And then I went to the, I called it MEGA, Make Everything Great Again version. And Chad understood what I was getting at and came back with a populist article that, the first time it did it, it pulled out all the words that it was going to change. And it did. It made it from a logical kind of mapping exercise of why this is a bad decision when I compared the, trying to help people understand, like, these are choices that we get to make right now. And ignoring student debt because of emotional challenge is threatening to the Republic. It is really toxic. Yes. And it's an internal, it's, because it's also internal. And a lot of right now it's external. So anyway, I was playing with some of that stuff. The article that came back was good. So I had two articles that were basically positioning the same sort of argument that I wanted to frame. And then I thought to myself, no, the best way to explain that is a Star Wars analogy. That one by far was my favorite version of it. But then when I thought about like, well, what do I want to post on Substack? I tried to kind of do a summary of that, but I wouldn't quite lay it out in the way that I wanted. But when I did the summary, I actually got the integrated learning from myself. And what I learned was, and it was kind of what I wanted to set out, which is I wanted to take the three different frames of the topic, and kind of pull it out of like, well, what are these frames actually getting at underneath? And the article that that chat came back and I agree was that these are, it's kind of like a logical way of looking at the issue, an emotional way of looking at the issue and the mystic way, which is the Star Wars. Thinking about energy of the force and teasing that out a little bit. So that's kind of where I ended up. And I really liked the process and the synthesis. And as I'm learning in art school, like you take notes of, oh, I have an experiment. In this case, it was a written article that I even wrote any of those articles, but I directed my writing machine to help me. Yes, you were the conductor of the orchestra. Yes, and it was, I had so much fun. I did come to the conclusion that I can't post, well, I want to post everything in some respects and saying, okay, well, here are my integrated learnings, because that's kind of comes at the heart of why I'm playing with all this stuff is, yeah, my experience right now going to art school, not law school, and I'm learning so much more about how we can work more effectively. So I send kids to business school, send them to art school. We can teach them business later. And in fact, half of the businesses that I love, small businesses in Amsterdam, are ex-students of the Rietveld Academy, which is the Dutch art school. Sure, sure. Yeah, that's interesting indeed. So I think the, you know, one of the benefits of AI kind of augmenting us is that we can learn those business skills anytime we want in a pretty time efficient manner. So it is around how being a conductor, how we sort of wire things together, that sort of more humanity side the art becomes more important. You and I were talking about this earlier, right? Because I think that the things that keep coming up in our coffee table conversation is how we want to look at a future and think about framing it in a possibility. That's a good outcome. Yeah, we've spoken before about, you know, agency. That's a theme that I really like. So where do we see examples of giving people agency? You're taking agency now and going to art school, and then you're also learning about the process, but you're also creating these outputs now, you're publishing ideas, and hopefully those ideas are also giving other people agency. Yes, and if people like those ideas, I want to be able to earn an income from that. Like you're an AI guy, right? I think he was an early role model of how small groups of people can start banding together. Technically, you're banded with him. We're disciples. Sure, absolutely. You create a like-minded community, and the community supports each other. And then in my art school, you know, hippie way, I'm like, now we're vibing. We can do anything when we vibe. I always put it this way. I played college sports. I played sports. And that's probably the most understandable, relatable way when people watch their team either succeed or fail, because you can almost feel it, right? Yeah. And a moment will shift everything, and you can feel the energy in the whole stadium just go whoop. And there's nothing you can do to get it back. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah. So, yeah, I've been taking a look at your sub-stack blog. It's pretty interesting to see. You said that up in 2022, but you didn't quite get started. Now you've got started. I thought that was amazing. I really like the articles you've published so far. I'm really excited to see this new one coming, and I'm liking that I can see that you feel kind of comfortable and that this is authentic enough to put out there. You've got your assistant there, but it's still authentic enough of your voice to put it out there. That's actually, okay. First, I'm very strategic in this now, and now that I have some life energy back and some space, which I think is really important for creative activities. But the question that I had for you was, does it sound like me? Yes. I mean, I found it, I like the coherence, so that's a word that I like. But at the same time, it did have your, I could tell you that you wrote it. Yeah. Yeah. Because you spun in various kind of themes that I've heard you speak about before. You brought in some elements of your background, like you used to live in Barcelona. And the metaphors. You really like metaphors a lot. I could see all of those elements in the writing. Yes. So what I did is I'm working on a workflow, right? Because my experiment is, can I write with AI and start gaining attention, attraction, maybe a loss of attraction since I'm in that, I like the mystic world, based on some of my ideas. I don't want to be stopped by either my internal fears or external pressure that I internalize as fear, as opposed to be more willing to experiment, again, confidence that I'm learning from arts school. And the more willing to, well, I'm just going to put this out there. And what I did is I capture my notes over the week of something that interests me, and then I try to create an article of it. And it can be simple. Like I take all my physical notes or some photos and I throw them into chat to be tea, just to say, hey, I want to talk about this. Or sometimes I do a voice memo into it. In the case of the podcast right now, I'm literally taking our transcripts and trying to figure out whether we want to edit this more, just leave it as a raw thing. And then, but what I'm also learning is that it would be helpful to, and we've learned this at work, as we make decisions, have the AI keep track of the decisions we've made. Yes, absolutely. That is a key point of collaboration. People spend a lot of time talking about things. But there are moments when you make a decision, and when I say you, I mean collectively. And there's an art to recognizing this moment because there's a time to talk about things and go around in circles. Of course, everyone has an opinion, and the more people you are, the more opinions you have. I think particularly as a product manager, you have to kind of move the group forward. And I think key thing is recognizing, have we made a decision or when should we? Because some decisions you can make later, right? You just discuss it. And like in a work situation, you have these time boxes. You have a meeting for, you know, it's 30 minutes on an hour. One thing is certain, once the meetings of everyone goes away, it's 100% certain. It's not always certain that you made a decision or knew you made a decision. So that's an interesting one. I think that's kind of recognizing. Because that's a point where, particularly decisions where, you know, there isn't an easy path back. Those ones where you commit yourself. Yeah. Yeah. And knowing those are one-way decisions. Yes. Those are the ones you need to think more about. And then, you know, when you make a decision, you've got to go for it. And then you're on the path. So it's really interesting that you say that. Like when you and I, because we work together, when we had to make those sorts of decisions before anything came out, like, I would call, like, as a manager, I was always looking for all the inputs. And I felt it was my job to take in all the inputs and find the best input, right? And then the other part of my job was to make sure that once we had that we all had the same picture, even if we didn't know the outcome. And then we could gather more data as we went. But in order to do that, you had to really trust all the AIs around you. And it sounds like an open network system. Like, you are an agent. I am an agent. But at some point, one of us had to be the agent in charge. Right. Yeah. Right? And then we had to finalize that decision, make it concrete and move it forward. And that's usually what our role is. But in that process, knowing how different models worked in this analogy, like how you work, because I can be, I'm the circle talker. But there's a reason why I do that. Sure. And it can be helpful in that position because you're taking in all the information and the circle process is evaluating all that information against the same sort of probabilities. Yes. Now, what happened is I learned that you were much better at seeing the 3D world or the possibilities of things based on constraints, much more than I am. And I get frustrated when constraints get put on me. But what I didn't get frustrated is when you saw them, you saw the best path and I'm like, yes, let's do that. Right. Because I could trust that you're, and it was my how you saw things that it would, it would produce a more likely outcome. Plus, it was other stuff that you shared with me that you had already thought that thing. Now, I don't always agree with you. And so, but I would trust yours. And then what I would do in, this is just a choice thing, right, especially with those ones that you can't go back on. Although I looked back at our decision making for our project and I thought we did a fairly good job. We didn't make any choices that we couldn't come back from. That's true. And I think I've seen that more in retrospect. I think at the time I didn't quite have as much commitment to the vision where you seem pretty confident in it. But I think looking backwards, I should have been more patient with the process. But until you actually go through that, and it was a, it was a hypothesis of mine because I know we've been frustrated. But the first time in my career that I'm like, well, you gave me the keys. Sure. See what happens. But even down to my writing and kids in general, I gave, we create more environments that are safe to allow people to understand how we work. And that was the brilliance because we optimized. We started to vibe together. It took us some trial and error, but most, let's be honest, most things that we're going to do in whatever future we create, we're going to have to work together. Whatever, whatever it looks like, whether it's your Death Star, Big Tech Utopia, dystopia or our Shire Village, Amsterdam, everybody cycles to work. Wait a minute, that exists. So anyway, we shift the topic a little bit because you are going to Chicago. I am. Yeah. So word has gotten out about my kind of, you know, dabbling in. Possibly in humble. AI toys. Because maybe I bring it up now and then. So I've been invited to a summit in Chicago by our user experience team. And so they're very interested in how they can gain agency to do more rapid prototyping, like go from an idea to having, you know, something, something working or something visual or concept. And yeah, so they're all getting together for a week in Chicago to brainstorm this to work in teams and come up with various concepts and prototypes. So I'm tagging along. So yeah, I've been thinking about what I can contribute. And so I decided I'm going to do a presentation on the AI Lego kit. That's something that we discussed before we never did it because you were not very good at doing the things you say. But wait a minute, we are here today. We are here. We are back getting a lot better at communicating our ideas to the world. So I, we had a conversation before we got on the big scary mics. I'm going to park that one because I really want to get more. And that's what, because there's two things here. There's how companies are looking at and supporting their employees. How do we actually integrate AI? Because I know we've talked about it, but I have been in these companies. I know how things work. And it's going to take a while for, I think, people to understand how to integrate this into our daily workflows that makes life better for us. So I applaud and I love the idea that you're going with the Lego kit because as we started to understand this, it helped me understand where, like, it's, that kind of comes back to the art school thing. It's a human, like, how do we want to implement this? How do we actually want to thoughtfully think about when we do implement it, what are the possible outcomes? Yeah, I've really loved that analogy and I really use it a lot wherever I can. I try to relate things to Lego because the cool thing about Lego is everyone pretty much played with Lego, right? When they were a child. So you can, you can describe an analogy and everyone gets it. What they've done with Legos is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of, you know, you have this vision of something in your mind and you have these set of blocks available. And it's all about just, you know, assembling the blocks. The blocks change over time. You have new blocks, new capabilities. So if you understand, you know, what's, what's in your kit then gives you a common vocabulary of capabilities that you can use. So, you know, thinking of, we're talking about roles here, which are what product managers and UX designers, those all kind of more specialized, agents you could say, maybe product managers a bit less so because we tend to do a bit of everything. But if you think of a, of a, you know, UX designer, even those are specialized. So people do very specific, they provide a very specific input. Of course, it's just an input or two another process. Something like a static design is not, doesn't solve a real problem. Right. So now with some of these new, you know, tools and mega kit components, someone who's a specialist can actually do a lot more. You can actually build a whole working system. So you can also be a product manager. You can also be an engineer. So, okay. So if I understand this correctly, just based on your, our own jobs. So you guys might, the UX team might discover that we can get rid of product managers. Well, that is part of the discussion, right? Because, you know, there's a few people in that team who are a little bit more technical and they are actually making, working prototypes that they've deployed. And the question is, can we look, well, how far do you go? Does everyone in the design team do that? Now there are some people who are enthusiastic about this. Other people don't really want to. So indeed, that was a discussion I had this week with the organizer of the summit, like, well, what, you know, how should people see their role? Now you can do those kind of things, but you do need to figure out where the balance is also like, what do you want to do? But certainly there's a lot more possibilities than there were before. I think this is not an angle that I thought it would go, but it's actually really interesting because it actually impacts my job. A likely outcome of implementing AI at a UX level. Sure. It's kind of, well, I see it as a democratization of skills, like my skills are your skills, your skills are my skills. And so I think that's happening to all sort of at least knowledge workers. So on the one hand, that's very scary. It's very threatening because you think, well, okay, maybe you don't need me so much. But the other hand, you can also do what other people are doing. So, you know, that's less of a constraint. So then you can go from an idea or a problem you want to resolve to an actual solution out there. And there's many circumstances where, you know, a person could do that, whether it's in their work life or their personal life. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Yeah, well, because we are cyberpunkutopia, we're going to stay on the positive rift. I think it's as fascinating as people experiment with it. And that's actually what I would say is, and I love, because it's the only way we're really going to understand things is the ability to prototype, put something out there in the physical world and see how we get feedback. Yes. If I'm looking at the example of our UX team, and just knowing a little bit of our own process, like the prototyping thing was good, but the challenge that I had, and I've always had it as a product person, was that we couldn't work more directly with our customers in that rapid prototyping process. Sure. Right. So, and we were unwilling to talk about some of the bigger constraints that may have brought it. Yes. You know, like, which brings me back to the humanity. Right. I mean, the real world is complex and messy. Right. So I've always thought another key skill that I've learned as a product manager is identifying the type of product manager. The point of identifying the type of problem you're dealing with, you know, the type of problem. The worst thing you can do is not understand the nature of the problem. I feel like, not that we at the product level, I mean, like, you know, the lower level product level didn't understand the nature, where I found the most bureaucracy was in the middle. Yes. Right. In the management, which, which was governed by bigger constraints, right? Sure. And that limited their ability to take risk. Yes. Where, and that limited our ability to offer them a solution because we were literally working within the constraints of what we had in the market already. Yeah. Indeed. And that's true of a lot of products that have been around. You have a lot of existing, you know, stuff. Yeah. And so now I think a lot of that stuff is under threat because you can go to having new stuff, better stuff, a lot less constraint. And so, you know, that, that old stuff that's been around and it's hard to replace is easier to replace now. So I'm going to bring that back to the Lego kit, like back to that prototyping, rapid prototyping, whether it's, you know, for, for the company or for what we're doing here with cyberpunk. Maybe you can use cyberpunk as kind of example for your Lego kit of possible ways of how I can have a better workflow and how the leg understanding that Lego kit makes this easier for me. Yes. You're not someone who enjoys spending a lot of time in front of a keyboard, right? Got a little bit more. I think one of our earlier conversations was about typewriter. She sounds free. Every analog person. I am an analog person. I am totally embracing this. It is my language. Right. I love playing with with AI because I think it's fun. Yeah. It scares the shit out of other people and I'm kind of like in a rebel mood right now, which is also in the article, you know, X-wing, small business, X-wing, small teams. So I'm much more of a digital person. I kind of like tinkering with stuff. You just need stuff to work. If it doesn't work, you're not going to use it. So I think if I get stuck emotionally, if I don't understand how to fix it. Yeah, got it. And I don't have the patience to deal with the machine. Indeed. Working on it. So actually putting your ideas out there, quite a few steps. I mean, sitting in front of a fairly complex podcasting setup, you got to get the audio off the device into the cloud and then you got to do a whole range of other process steps, which is not easy. So that is a constraint and if you reduce that and you can do that, you can get to the outcome you want much sooner. It's more likely that it'll happen. Well, I'll tell you why. Because once I get out of my fear and because I'm not, I spent 15 years in IT, I have skills, but I need to translate those skills to these new platforms that I want to work in. And there's a lot of decisions that I need to make about how I start putting that content out there. Then I realize I don't need to make all these decisions right now. And in the prototyping, what you just described, like there are places because I'm thinking about how do I want to use AI? And I go back to your Lego kit when you kind of explain how it works, right? You've got different tools for different things. And in my exploration, I'm learning this at art school, like you can use everything, right? You can print stuff, you can use charcoal, you can use clay in the AI world to create some sort of media. You have all these tools available to you. Right now I feel overwhelmed with that. Yes, it is pretty overwhelming. I mean, for me, it's kind of like a part-time job to keep up. But that's an interesting thing. It's a whole job to keep up with. Yeah. And not all of it's good. Well, that's why I think the Lego kit is kind of like a distillation of that. So what can I put together that in an hour? You can learn what to do. That's now is two. So can you run through the Lego kit in concrete examples? I think it lends itself more to kind of a visual presentation. So maybe we will do that sometimes. You're going to write an article? Good slides. It'll be more slides, I think. But it's a question of different modalities. So a lot of people are familiar with the term like large language model. And that's what we think of when you think of generative AI. And what is generative AI? Well, it's in the name. It's being able to generate something, right? You create some kind of output. Now the fundamental-- Is that sort of an input, like a prompt or-- Yeah, so the inputs of a model, which actually relates quite well to what I'm going to say, is not-- doesn't have to be language. It can be language. So large language models are trained on a whole bunch of text. And the most common use case is output is text, which hopefully is something coherent that's useful for us. But it doesn't have to be text. So the underlying sort of technology or architecture behind it is really like what's known as a transformer architecture. So it can take in other kinds of modalities. So images or video, all sorts of things. And you're starting to see different applications of that. So you can see OpenAI release Sora 2 recently, which people can create quite interesting memes, short video clips, where they can even include themselves in that. So that's an example of transforming a sentence into an actual video. So the exciting part is being able to transform from one modality to another. So here's an image, create a whole 3D game world from that. Or Microsoft has a model called Dolphin Gemma, which is actually trained on Dolphin language. And they put it on a phone and you can go underwater and you can talk to the dolphins apparently. Because dolphins do communicate. And so if there is meaning in that. Anything that pulls me back to my humanity, I'm going to give you a big-- [Music] Yes, yes. Okay, so now I'm starting to understand this Lego kit better. Right? And so, because it was conceptual and I think it is. But the more we talk about it in practice, I think this is where people are going to be really excited. Because again, as I go to art school and recover from my programming. And in art school, you are experimenting with different modalities. You've done like, you're doing some things with charcoal. This last week you were doing sound. Now that's multimodal, right? The same thing. Going from an idea to sound, to sound to an idea. Okay, so at the heart of all my studies, I'm coming down to energy as a very simple language to explain everything around us. Sure. But you know, I'm interested in the big-- It's not even a big question for me. It's like, what can I learn along the way? Yeah. So that's high level. Then the modality thing. As I get more conscious and more in the flow state when I like to vibe with the world, I start to see a lot more. And I think that's what artists see. The more that you are in the environment, the more your senses are open to the environment. That's what I love about modalities. And whether it's AI or art, a piece of art, like the more that you spend time in this world, the more that you get to experience. That's been my personal experience. So the ability to start playing with different materials is another experience. And to take an idea that's big and beautiful in your head and try to create a process to put that as an experiment into the world and then see what happens. Yes. To me, that sounds like science. Right. Absolutely. It sounds like science. Okay, so it's more on the humanity side. But in my life, I look at tech and I'm like, all I see is mystics. And in fact, I remember when they had this AI thing not too long ago in Amsterdam that you sent me that that I didn't quite connect with. There was one woman who was talking on AI and mystics. And to your point, so I know you gave me the question about modality. Yes. But in my mind of possibilities, it just starts to network out in this beautiful utopic vision where I watch young people find out who they are. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, so it's. There we go. I'm going to go live until I get this whole thing filled with funky sounds. Yeah, so it's an interesting capability to translate between these different modalities in a way that is very accessible because you don't need to be experts on it. Yeah, so you could, for example, describe an object and come up with a sort of 3D structure and then you could just 3D print that and then you've gone from just describing something even verbally to an actual object that is now a manifestation of why you described. Yeah. And you know what I learned in art school? First off, it's going to reduce, well, let me use your language. It's going to reduce the barrier for people to start experimenting artistically. Yeah. I'm going to talk about that because it was my bridge into law school. Art school. What's going on? There's definitely some shadow work there. And the second piece is what you've mentioned in the Lego kit that this is agency for more people. This is democracy and how people are using the idea. I watch a lot of YouTube videos. It's the kids that are learning how to use this faster than old fart. I mean, I look at our whole East app, which I'm certain not a single person has run anything through chat. And yet they're making decisions on how students are going to learn through AI. It is picking up now. You're already starting to see that people are really engaging with this even over the last 12 months. People like you and me or? I think very broad section of people now. Because somewhere on LinkedIn, my source is so, but I actually trust this source quite a bit. I was curious how many, like what people are using this for. There's some interesting research. So a couple of the sort of big AI model vendors. Anthropic who actually does a lot of interesting research, but also open AI, both of them have done an analysis on how people are using their chatbots in different domains, which is pretty interesting reading. Yeah, because you go and take a look at that because your sense of. Well, it seems like at least right now the two leading things from a solution standpoint, right, of how this could come in. Are these chatbots, which basically take some sort of knowledge and makes it a lot more accessible to a broader group of people. Yes. The most simple chatbot that you could create is like in most people's experiences, the customer service chatbot. Yeah, that's powered by AI. And I'm laughing right because I'm from the human perspective and I just watched my mom go through this experience. She's in her seventies and she's a good digital immigrant and she struggled. I think a lot of the stuff that's actually out there is not necessarily a good reflection of the current technology, I think, because they were those. I was at one of the fast food chains, put in an automated system and was getting people's orders wrong. And I was trying to figure out the timeline. So I think it was built by IBM. They thought, well, by the time you get that in production, you probably started working on it four years ago. So it's probably actually not a good reflection of Genitiv AI. Well, I'll put it this way. The only chatbot I want servicing me is the chatbot that I have created already. Sure. Yeah, we're all making our own, right, recreating ours. Yeah, because it's a curator to my life. Sure. So I think what we need actually is our chatbot should talk to the chatbot. Okay, since I picked up that AI book at the AI summit, which I didn't pay for, but I got a lot of value. That's kind of the realization that I'm talking about. So one of the biggest challenges I've always had as a product person is that the systems are old and they were built to learn. They were and what when you build to learn, you build on top and top and top and top and you get a monolith. And most of the infrastructure, at least in the Western world, is built on old monoliths like this. And I'm looking at every company who's still on Microsoft Windows. It was to you. It's a 10 year road map to transition from one Microsoft product to the next. Now, that's that to me is cost. That is a huge cost. Now I'm going to go after Microsoft because you came where we're, well, let me think about this. Most companies move to Google doesn't even have to be Google. It's just products in the cloud. That's the cheapest way for us to do that. Sure. And if you were going to build repositories within your companies that have more redundancy and decisions that are getting being made. This to me is a huge opportunity for some smart, clever person to come along and say, like, how do I get huge companies off of these old systems? Think about the migration path off these old systems into new systems that are built with AI agents and chatbots. Sorry to lead it out there from some smart motherfucker. That's a huge opportunity. Exactly. Well, they could at least hide the mess from us. We'll just talk to our chatbots. Okay, go to not only that, but some sort of, I don't like Bitcoin because I think it's too expensive, but some sort of system that logs and makes things transparent. Yeah. So that the organization retains more of its intellectual property in actual value. Sure. Than humans. I've solved multiple problems right here. Exactly. By pointing an opportunity. Ideas are free. AI and agency. Small teams. Like I need a lot of small teams to build better systems. Systems are okay. They're not bad. They're just fragile right now. Yeah. That is true. I do think a lot of the tools that, you know, companies give to the employees by the time you get access, at least 18 months for the company to build it and then six months for it to get approved. So it's two year old technology. Meanwhile, everyone's bringing their own private stuff, which is, you know, was you got the latest feature last week. There's so many. Okay. There's so many problems to solve internally that people just started focusing on their own internal problems. Yeah. And I'll even get away from this. Because my internal problem right now is I got a group of friends and we all want to start creating more small businesses, which I back to the agency, the people, because I. I can poke at and make fun of corporate world, but I'm not going to shift that unless somebody picks up my idea. I'm not going to do it, but I want to work more locally with my community because I feel very strongly that trust right now is the most important currency that we could be building. Yes. It needs to happen at the local levels. I don't want Amsterdam ever to turn into what it felt like here in Nazi Germany. I can still at least tangentially feel that and I can definitely get that reflected to me by my own country right now. So my focus is local. Yeah, I forget that a lot. But starting this podcast with you. And starting to connect with how we can have a stronger small business environment, whatever that looks like to support more small business, both from a local and a medium perspective and coordination. I know this is kind of high level stuff, but thinking of more circular economies. How do we really start moving towards those things? And if we focus there, then I think a lot of these bigger empire problems, which it's okay. I just think we're in a human period where we can start trusting each other to live more locally. Sure. Yeah. Well, I do think that a certain type of things become more abundant. I think certainly anything in the digital realm, then the nature of value changes. So there's more value in trust and authenticity rather than in the... Transaction. ...output. Right, because the output is widely available. So those things kind of rise to the surface more. Yeah. And in some ways, I... Well, I'll put myself. A small business person, I was able to afford these microphones and have a pretty decent sound. Yeah. Part of that was fun. I didn't need to do that to get this started. We had a lot of recordings, which at some point we'll put out there to see what we can do now that AI allows us to do more with the same pieces of content. Perhaps. I don't know. At the very least, it becomes a repository of ideas that once we have a system that can track these things much better, we might be aware that small teams are working and they can coordinate faster, which is actually a peer review. Yeah. But that being said, it allows us to start experimenting. And I don't know what will happen, but I don't want to be stuck because I don't have access to equipment like this. Yes. But that was the barrier to entry before the gatekeeping. Yeah. That if you think of... For the printing press, having access to information was only for the elite. Before telegraph, subsea telegraph labels. If something happened on the other side of the world, information only traveled at the speed that someone could... Take it on a ship or something like that. Then we got telegraph cables and then at least it was possible for information or knowledge to exchange a lot faster. It was still only available to the elite. Now today, most people on Earth can communicate instantly. We can put our content out there. We can record it professionally. So that sort of gatekeeping falls over time. It always has a dark side. Technology is always dual use. So when things become abundant, of course, you have a curation problem. There's a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of noise out there. Some of it pretty toxic. But that's always been happening. I mean, once with the printing press, anyone could publish something. There was still a barrier to entry. Now you can self publish. You can live stream all day at minimal cost. So that's where the curation comes in. Once the gatekeeping disappears, then there's a need for more and more curation. That's interesting if I follow that line. Because let's say we're at the beginning curve of self publishing. Now it's been out there for 20 years. But there are really... A great example yesterday, now that I'm back in art school, they had this BYOB. Bring your own book, fair. I have never had more fun in my life. It was interesting to talk to the people who were putting their ideas out there. A lot of this was senior thesis. And I'm like, wow, that's a senior thesis I would actually read. I don't think I would read anybody's senior thesis for any major college or university. I'm like, no. But because these were personal, some were memoirs, some were just... You could see their inspiration, how they got there. They don't even know why they made those decisions. But some of it... There was a beautiful book by a young person who had taken different ways to structure and break down sentences. And they were beautiful. They were beautifully designed. They were interesting. Obviously, it's vibing with other stuff that I'm learning. Actually, and it relates directly to what's happening with the AI models. Because how AI is going to learn. Right now, it's a decision tree. Then it builds these tokens and it tries to guess what the next likely outcome is. That's a predictability, but you get into some biased stuff. Bias is always present in every context, right? Because curation is bias in itself. Something that trick is how does the group collectively agree on what is good and what is not good? Politics. Oh boy. Maybe we should... I think on that note, because I want to keep this a utopia, I think there's a really good discussion. Good jam. And I think we've made some decisions. So as a decision long, I'm going to start posting these raw. And I'm working with AI to see... And Paul's Lego Kit, once I kind of get an idea of how I want to edit these. But I'm really looking for AI to do most of the support in editing. Because I love riffing. But I know not every audience listener wants to dedicate 49 minutes to listening to Paul and I talk. So how can we make this a more commercial podcast? That being said, we're going to run it as an experiment and put a podcast one out, which is just CPE One. Ready Player One. And, you know, CPU Two. That was my idea. Paul's my co-host. Yeah, I think we should play with the modalities. It's like taking long form content. I really like if I have a sort of large volume content, getting a mind map. So it really gives you kind of a structure. What are the main topics? Then you can see which ones are you interested in. Then you can drill down and then you get into the more nuanced parts. So that's great for a visual way of presenting the information in a different form to somewhere where they can say, "I want that." You can argue, okay, there's value definitely in just being a participant in the whole journey, the full one hour. There's also value in saying, "Well, I'm going to invest my time here. Can I choose to dip into that topic?" Yeah, as I watch, first off, I'm very conscious of attention. And where people pay attention, I used to listen to podcasts, but I actually don't do that much anymore. Because I got to a point where they were just saying the same things over. And I could find patterns. And then what I realized is they're just cyclical. And a lot of them are just vying for attention, which the easy bait to do is to talk about what's happening right now. And since we're not doing that. But my curiosity is more long term and maybe not necessarily needs an audience, but more can we start creating generative ideas that help reframe the way that we're approaching integrating with the machines. And we've made that choice. I see the tech pros and I'm like, okay, they're the capitalists. How do I cyberpunk utopia this? What do we say? We're going to be your guides to agency in an AI augmented world. We're going to FN try. Alright, thank you. Do we? There.