How the World’s Leading AI-First Fashion House Flips the Cash Flow Equation - with Diarra Bousso

31:20So like they don't even open their mind to it. And then what happened is I did this. So these images are some of the items that were ordered when I first market in June. It was in resort for the resort collection. None of this is real. I mean, I made the prototypes in reality and I did the whole formal thing, but these images are not real. These models are not real. And these dresses are not real dresses on a shoot. but these things were bought by the buyers. So I have a very important retailer. You showed them that you told them that, Hey, just so you know, you guys just bought stuff. That's not real.

31:53Yeah. I didn't. I told them that afterwards. I didn't tell them, but afterwards I told them cause like whatever this, this first dress with the shawl, it was the best seller across the board. This image is not real. And the same buyers came to the fair and saw these dresses in person, but I showed them these photos and I was like, these photos after they bought it, it's like, these photos are not released images are not real, but you bought these things. once you bought them I went and got the real these are the real photos I actually took so I'm not getting rid of people's jobs I'm not getting rid of models I'm still shooting with doing my campaigns and all the stuff but now I'm doing it with the stuff that people bought I'm not doing I'm not shooting a hundred things and wasting everybody's time and wasting all these resources I'm shooting and photographing and capturing and doing the dreamy magical stuff with the real deal that has signal that has demand so this is what the retailers bought I'm like well because you bought it we made it for real you know this is a photo shoot that is a real person, real model.

32:46And I went through this whole journey to understand it. So while I was doing that, the experiment was I found another retailer who's very forward-thinking and I didn't tell them I'm going to Fashion Week. I told them I'm going to design for them and they should just tell me what they are looking for. So they gave me their mood boards and their colors and I cannot mention their name yet. It will come out in the spring, but they gave me all of their information of what they are looking for, the trends, the colors, and I created, this was some of the things I showed them. This is all AI. But before I get here, I use my own proprietary tools to do my sketches and my processes, whatever I built before that's really fast.

33:21And then I rendered it on AI and they were just voting. So it was very simple. I gave them a Google slide. I'm like, put a green dot on everything you like. And this is like the big buyers, the merchandisers, people who have the same power as my Instagram. Like one person is probably like a thousand people because they're constantly buying stuff and selling stuff and they understand. So I developed a collection for them. the results were insane it was 30x volume so i did this whole headache i went to new york i carried the suitcases i rented a hotel i paid this agency they take commissions on sale we've had a hundred plus buyers come in from all over the country we did secure some really good sales like that i'm proud of in terms of like relationships the volumes were very small and the difference between that way of doing things versus when i just reached out to one retailer just one and told them i'm going to design what you want give me the price architecture sure you like so I can source the right materials for that price point even the colors and the prints and I'll come up with examples and this is just one but I gave them like 30 plus options because this AI there's no limits can I actually go and question on all this I mean like I it's obviously incredibly cool and it seems to be the logical way of doing stuff within technology right now as I'm sure you will say nobody's doing this yet and I think we all know that this will be the way that it will be done at one point it has to maybe walk us through the steps of what will need to happen and i guess mostly it's like when do you think that the humans are in the loop that are currently in the loop will kind of get around to this is it as simple as somebody like you will have to have massive success and then everybody will copy it or do you think that increasingly people are kind of getting their head around that made to order like this is the way for it i think there are definitely a few key players in the industry who are thinking this way.

35:10And, you know, I saw last week that OpenAI went to the CFDA, which is the Council of Fashion Designs America, and did like some presentation just to show how you can use AI to prototype and like those things that most designers reject. Because earlier this year, I went to speak at fashion school at FIT, New York. And I talked about my work from the math standpoint. So when I say I use math equations to generate prints, everyone is mind blown and claps. The moment the word AI comes up, people's faces, you can see the switch of disappointment and grief immediately. And it's like the concept is the same.

35:43It's using a generative process that saves you time to get something faster and then decide if that thing is good enough before you actually move forward. It's literally, I'm just trying to fail faster than everyone else. That's it. But if it's done with math and generative, anything that sounds not AI, it's mind-blowing. The moment the word AI comes in, it cheapens the whole thing. And literally that's how it's branded. It's like, it's cheap and it's not artistic and it's like a button and it's whatever. So I think that mindset really has to shift because you could use all the AI tools in the world.

36:12You will never get these images I just showed you because there's a lot of work behind it that comes from taste, that comes from being a designer, that comes from being an artist, that comes from culture, that comes from my upbringing, that comes from just understanding design based on my brand's DNA. And before I get to this render, I've probably got like 20 steps before where I had a sketch, I drew something, I use art, I have an app to render it quickly on like a sketch version, and then I can put it in chat GPT or Omid Journey or any tool to get it on a person. So people just assume you press a button, but I think the AI hides all the creative human work that gets you to get dressed like this with a print.

36:51This print was actually one of my math prints from before. So if you want to give me credit because I say I'm a mathematician. Sure, it's still here. I really think this point is very profound because I think it's not just in fashion. I think it's anywhere else. I'll give you an example. I'm building this other product and we were having the debate this week of basically we will go over to, let's call it like a vibe-coded kind of first principle where it used to be when you build software, often a founder, assuming it's not a non-engineer founder, will kind of like articulate whatever the problem is for the customer and then articulate some kind of way to solve it and then you often go through a product head or something like that and then they will spec some features out and then they'll go to the engineering team the engineer will build it there'll be some you know testing and then you'll go back right now obviously increasingly the non-technical founder will be able to vibe code a feature really fast and then saying hey this is this is what i'm looking for and then it'll all be spaghetti code and be all these things that you know which is true and then he or she will also just break it immediately by writing a prompt and then obviously the bot will kind of like ruin it and then they won't necessarily know how to get it back there's all this issue with it but i do think there is a very fair argument that you will see many companies now software companies being built basically by non-engineering folks that will be the prime kind of originator of features and then you'll have to have engineering people involved to make sure that it works in this way.

38:19But I am curious on how fast that change is going to be. You know, I think you're articulating it very well, obviously for fashion. I think I see it in technology and engineering and, you know, we see it with pet stuff with bark and stuff like that. But there's this real, real tension that I think you are describing, which is very real. Like people get not just slightly upset, people get angry about the whole premise that basically non-craft people can now go out and create craft. And I think that's not, hang on. That's not what Henry, correct me if I'm wrong, Diara, you're saying the very people who can create the craft are resistant.

39:04You're saying it's not just push a button that nobody in the world can just, Oh, just make a Diara blue dress. that it involves tons of experience. I think that is the subtlety. And nuance. People are the, you know, obviously, Tara, tell me I'm wrong. When they are going out to a fashion school and there's a bunch of designers there, I think there is, and I think in fashion, it's a little bit different because they are often the fashion designer is also the founder. And then, you know, they have the ability of making the drawings themselves. But for many people now, you will have somebody who have great taste, who have like the buyers that you mentioned, who knows about colors, who knows about patents, but what they do not know is how to whip up a piece of paper and then draw the thing.

39:45And they will now be able to become the fashion designer because they'll be able to instruct a bot to kind of like produce this thing. And I see that in many areas right now, that that is hugely confusing and kind of like create a lot of vegetation for people because now it can be people who don't understand the original coal craft are now able to be the originator and the producer of this kind of creative development. Yeah, I think what you're describing is exactly, it's both that and what Jeremy describes. I think you have people who don't have the craft, who can now be creative directors. That's the word.

40:24And you know, every fashion house has a creative director. That's the face. Like most designers, actually, many creative directors are not designers. Like if you look at the big houses, like right now Louis Vuitton's men's creative director is Pharrell Williams. He's an artist, he's a musician, but I'm pretty sure he didn't go to fashion school or sketches but his vision and his taste is what makes him the creative director and then he hires a bunch of designers who are actually technical and sit down and draw things and there's all these different types of designers and you have the actual like silhouettes designers you have the technical designers you have the textile designers and those jobs are still valid as a matter of fact they are even more relevant now because the volume of what you can create is so high but you need somebody to execute it to make the dress you're going to receive match the idea you had.

41:08And I think that's where people are losing the plot is that I said this to the students too. And back to Jeremy's point, I also met a designer recently, very talented designer. He does luxury dresses that are like$20 ,000. And I was asking him how his business is doing. And he said, cashflow is tough because sampling is expensive. So I said, why do you have to sample dresses that cost$20 ,000? That sounds so silly to me. And he's like, well, these high profile customers, they want to see something that they can touch and understand and then they'll decide if they want the beading on this side.

41:36And I'm like, would you be open to using AI to do that? And he's like, AI can never replace me, girl. And I said, no, no, no, it's not replacing you. It's going to replace all that wasted time that you show them what they don't like. So the real thing that they will like will come from you, but you're going to learn what they don't like faster versus wasting time making all these prototypes they don't like. And then he paused for a second and he's like, oh. I'm like, yeah, it's never going to replace you. But it would replace all the waste that you're doing in terms of time, bids, resources. And he's like, well, if you're going to teach me, sure.

42:06And I'm like... Diara, you know who's going to replace him. This actually, this is, we're saying the same thing, but coming at it from different angles. Henrik, it's true what you're saying, that there's a democratization element. And it's also true what Diara started out by saying, which is that the people who are primed to leverage the technology the most, who are primed to be the most augmented, are ironically the most resistant. And what you should have said, Diara, to this guy is, AI is not going to replace you. Now, someone like you, who's AI native is going to be the person who sells the next$20 ,000 dress.

42:39And if you don't disrupt yourself, for sure, someone who's AI native will. But you have this$20 ,000 dress designer as all of the requisite context and expertise. But let me throw a counter to that argument, Duren, because I agree, but I cannot, As we know, some models work basically where they output something, and then you have the version model that basically kind of decides, right? And so the way that we create, for example, imagery of people who look at something is that the model will create a gazillion versions, and then another model will say that one's like a human. Now, it's not difficult to imagine a world where I let out a bunch of agents that just design stuff.

43:22And not just one design here, and I don't have tastes in the same way that there are. has so i'll just create thousand of them and then i'll put them on facebook and facebook's model will basically put a few of them in front of it and so then suddenly something will kind of happen because there will be a thousand different versions and one of them by chance is going to resonate with some people maybe and so there you could have a scenario where suddenly you have taken the human element of it because you basically just create it kind of like the math model of saying if you create a thousand dresses then you'll find customers on the internet if you show it to enough people yeah and i i think that's valid the problem is that if you make that really at scale then the whole world is going to be creating a thousand dresses that are going to start being very similar because you know all these air models kind of think the same way and what's going to stand out is that craft person who knows how to create a dress that is not yet trained because they are thinking outside of the box.

44:25And I think back to Jeremy's point, if that person amplifies themselves with AI, they would be unstoppable. So I think when I went to the school, that's what I was telling them. I'm like, AI is not going to replace you. It's going to amplify you and make you so unstoppable because now everybody has the same tools, but your advantage of having gone to fashion school or having taste or understanding creations or trends makes you even, I feel like AI is a level playing field, but it only amplifies what you are already. It's going back to the Ironman space suit. We talked about this with Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic.

44:55It's like your underlying strength matters, Henrik. You and I both know this. So AI can 10x anybody, but do you want to be 10x on your 100-pound bench press or do you want to be 10x on your 300-pound bench press? Exactly. And if you're able to do more, if you're able to process more, if you have more taste or whatever, then you are a person. Now, by the way, a human who's a hundred pound bench presser who gets 10X'd will outperform the 300 pound bench presser who refuses, who resists the technology. I think that's what's happening. That's what they are looking at right now. You have the very talented designers who are like thousand pound bench pressers.

45:35And then over time, if they don't upskill and use technology to their advantage, the hundred pound bench presser can be 20X in front of them. You know what's daunting on me? I think what people, when they get scared, when they get angry, I wonder if people are just getting angry. It's basically the imposter syndrome that gets them scared. What they're really saying is, I might not have the originality that allow me to use my taste to pick something that is truly original. And so what I have right now is the note that it's technically difficult to do this. and when everybody quote-unquote can do it then i might just be every yoker and there for somebody else and that makes me angry yeah and i think there's also another element and this came up in schools it was the fact that the students were saying like they were very happy about the examples of how i'm using ai because i shared the whole sustainability and waste and like a decision it's more like an operating system for me it's not replacing creativity it's like operationalizing it so that it makes sense.

46:37And a lot of the students were saying what was hard for them at first was that they go to school for four years to study something and that somebody who didn't do that training can just go press a button. And I could understand that frustration. Like, I think it's very logical to feel that way. And I think the reframe was, now you have four years ahead of those people of knowledge that if you go and do the training of what they do, you're going to amplify even more than them. And that's kind of how I got them to be excited, to be like, okay, how do we start? And I think it has to be, back to your original question, what's going to make this industry shift?

47:12It has to be at the very beginning. It has to be in education. Like the teachers at these fashion schools need to amplify. And I met a teacher at FIT actually, who's trying to do that. She created a course called AI and Ethics in Fashion Design. You know, she asked me to come and support a bit. I didn't really have the time, but I really liked what she was doing because a lot of these teachers are also from an older generation. where the sketching and the craft, they even reject, like, some of them reject using computers to render things, even outside of AI, because the craft is about the touching and the art and the magic.

47:40And I think it has to start at the schools because that's where people's minds get shaped. As a former teacher, what happened in the classroom is what you believe in. And I think if your teacher can amplify you and tell you, hey, you're amazing as you are, imagine how much you can amplify that awesomeness and nobody can take that from you. But yes, it's like the person who goes to the gym every day and trains is going to outperform you eventually, no matter how fit you are if you don't do anything about that fitness. So I think it has to start there. And I also think in terms of the industry, I'm thinking about it both ways.

48:10As a matter of fact, my last experiment, which I want to share, is the one that I'm working on right now, which is how do I operationalize all the things I've been learning with Diarablu and all these experiments and turn them into a product and a separate company that allows other brands to just leverage it. And I've been really thinking about how do I do it in a way that's still human, that feels empowering, that has the right values, but it's also built by the right team. And as I'm thinking about it, I'm like, if I do this, who am I proposing it to? Is this a tool that I sell to like a Nolsham or Bloomingdale's because they have the volume and they can make the noise?

48:41Or is it something I go and bring on TikTok to all these small creators who are starting out and give them an opportunity to just launch a fashion brand from their bedrooms? And I've been thinking about it a lot. And I'm quite, to be honest, I'm still like ideating on the best way and who needs it? Because the established brands already have their systems. They are traditional, old, and wasteful, but that's what they know. So my way of testing this is now, like this experiment I just showed you when I 30x my wholesale volume with this retailer, I want to use that as a case study to other retailers and see who bites, and then use that as an opportunity to have this conversation with them, just like I'm having on this podcast, and really share.

49:18Just so you know, these are the experiments I've been running. I know all the pain points they all have. It's all waste. It's all cash flow. everybody's trying to guess what people are going to want in six months all the time which is the serious thing because people don't even know what they're going to want tomorrow but like you make decisions billions of dollars lots of ways based on guessing what people are going to want in six months and then six months later you realize you are a little bit wrong and things go on sale anytime you see a sale it means people were wrong with the guessing we were wrong we we forked our models off we were very wrong we're going to go 50 we are super wrong we're going to go on clearance 80%.

49:52So I want to have a conversation and see who's resonating with it and understand how to shape it. But I genuinely, in this last five years of doing these experiments and learning, and I think back to what Jeremy said, I'm a sponge and I just absorb everything. I'm seeing the problem and I'm also very much aware of the solution because I've solved it for myself. I'm solving it every day and hurting myself sometimes but I want to solve it at scale now. And I think that's my new challenge. Yeah. professor i have two hands raised so as everybody knows diara was my former student who's now my hero and professor and i'm asking you may i take the mic as a professor for a moment here diara because you're my teacher now i want to flip the roles and maybe it's obvious to you i can't help but say like go will you go back a few slides here even in your presentation yeah let's see because i want to i want to show you something um go back back back back back to the to the poll one more I think or yeah there Diara I hope I'm gonna give you a gift right now what is the equivalent of doing this to make that decision should you give this tech to Nordstrom or to TikTok creators I wonder if you already have the instincts and ability to pre-sell and to pre-gauge the market to answer that question.

51:17Oh. You're saying to Paul. Diara, you already know how to do it. Now just do it for a different product in a different market. Oh, okay. You just, okay. Now I feel like I need to turn the camera off and start making a happy day. I'm just having an aha moment, but it's being captured on camera and it doesn't look pretty. Mm-hmm. Well, okay, Jeremy, we have a call at 2 p.m., so we're going to talk about this. All right. All right. Hey, I'm just saying once, you know. Yeah. It feels like you have the keys to the answer to this question actually in your hand uniquely. Yeah. And you hadn't thought about connecting the two.

52:00We could go on and on forever, obviously. Is there anything that we didn't cover? I know you had prepared a few examples, but is there anything? I would love, maybe we could end on this because it's an interesting personal note, and then we should wrap just out of the interest of your time and also listeners. We've heard from folks, they love it, that these conversations usually don't go beyond an hour. So that's something we try to stick with. But tell us about burnout, mental health, sustainability, because I think for a lot of people when they hear, you can do more, you can do more, you can do more.

52:28It's like, oh, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Can you talk about how you maintain peace and health and vibrancy in the midst? You've also, I think on our last conversation, you mentioned how you're pulling more all-nighters than ever before because you're just so stinking excited, right? So what does it look like? What is sustainability personally, not just from a fashion brand perspective, but from a human perspective, what does that look like in the age of AI? I think it's been proved quite a bit. You remember last time we had a conversation, I was telling you how I'm not sleeping and I'm so excited.

52:59It was like, I'm on a creative high all the time while also having real operational job to do. And it was really hard to navigate. on one hand I'm excited I'm testing all these things and I feel like I'm unstoppable but on the other hand my brain is just tired and I'm like overloading the team with all these experiments and no structure and they're all over the place and this year I was like you know what I want these systems to actually work not just for the company and for the industry but for my own health and this is the first year in my life that I feel like I'm a healthy balanced person like I I have been actively working out more.

53:34I've lost 15 pounds this year, building muscles. I'm eating better. I'm traveling less, which is before I used to associate traveling with like, I'm killing it. I'm adrenaline on a plane on this and that. I've said no to so many things. And last time I missed the podcast because I was pulling an all-nighter doing a photo shoot in South Africa. Before, I would want to be everywhere. And I'll show you how I use AI to get more sleep now. is that I find really good people around the world who can do, for example, the creative stuff. Directing a photo shoot requires me to be there. Like I'm the creative director.

54:04I know how they want to pause. But now I'm like, I'm going to leverage these people who are way smarter than me at executing because I'm not a good executor when I'm in the creative space. And this was the villa we got in South Africa and I was directing the shoot. And I was like, I can pull an all-nighter, which is not the healthiest thing to do. Or I could waste two weeks of my schedule flying to South Africa, being off in terms of time zone, having to mess up my diet, my exercise, be off with my work, and then just for a photo shoot. So I chose all-nighter was better. So I still didn't all-nighter, missed the podcast as a result.

54:36But this is how I was directing it. I was literally drawing six stick figures in different places of the villa with the pauses I wanted, and then using my AI renders of my models. This is not real. To explain to them, this is how I want her to stand, where this is how I want her to pause when she sits with the stick figure. It was very silly, but it worked. Look, these are the final images. there's way more but like just to show you an example i did not go to south africa i did this shoot in 10 hours from my bedroom and ai was helping me live give them exactly what i wanted in terms of pauses and it wasn't even a zoom call it was on whatsapp so i'm a whatsapp group there's a person in the shoot who's meant to be the whatsapp person and she's just live taking photos of what's going on and sending it to me live and i'm just plugging it into this mid-journey chat gpt creating videos movements and just giving them the feedback but i didn't have to mess up my sleep or get on a flight.

55:25Yeah, that's so cool. You know, it reminds me of something that Virgil Abloh said once. He was talking about designing from his iPhoto. Yeah, his iPhoto. Yeah, he's saying my iPhoto is the way that I design. And he said, I'm constantly, I'm just marking stuff up with my finger and I'm sending it to the team. Because I'm like, if you think about it, what is design? It's translating a language of things that you see for other people to construct and show to the world. And I think we overcomplicate it sometimes with all these steps like The magic is in the seeing, is in the vision. Nobody's going to ever replace that.

55:58Like you can go to South Africa and directly shoot, your images will be completely different from me. But I realized that my biggest blessing is my ability to dream and see beauty in things that people might not see. But now I get to capture that in a healthier way. And yeah, I'm like as much as I can automate things, delegate them, train people to do them better and just kind of have more, I'm not going to say ease, I work a lot still, but I'm a little calmer and I prioritize my health way more than I used to before. Like I'm not trying to do everything all the time at all times anymore. And I find it possible with a lot of these AI tools have helped me quite a lot and helped my team too.

56:39So yeah, I'm excited for the next chapter. I'm excited for this new company I want to build. I'm terrified because I know how hard building something is. And I'm really trying to think, how do I build something now differently where I optimize for, I mean, of course, you want to optimize for the typical things that companies optimize for. But how can I also optimize for joy and like ease, peace while doing these things? Like how do you build the next big company? But differently, that's been my big philosophical questions lately. And we'll have you back on in another 18 months and you can share.

57:15Probably about a new company. We'll see. Brilliant. okay jeremy ottley dude jeremy ottley that's henrik's uh jeremy uh eleanor rigby remix gray album what would you call it that okay so if danger mouse created the gray album as the mashup between the white album and the black album you're more of a green guy than than the black so like what would your mashup be would it be the lime album i don't know i'll take the lime I think that back to business though, professor. Diara, I mean, first of all, I love students who become heroes and Diara certainly fits the bill. Student who's become a hero, just incredible founder.

57:58I mean, when we talked to her 18 months ago, she was ahead of the curve and I think she's only stayed farther ahead of the curve now. She's just, she's accelerating, which is really exciting. And to hear some of her more recent updates are super fun. And you know, one word that she used, which I loved and I wrote down to talk with you about later is the word yet. Yet. She said that at the beginning, right? I can't do that yet. And that I have found is a hallmark of a growth mindset. You talk about this whole, the classic kind of growth versus fixed mindset. One of the ways it's manifested as I understand it is use of the word yet implies someone has the expectation of progress.

58:37And I just love that she started there because so much of her personality and potential gets unleashed by that sense of she is someone in motion making progress. And I think for anybody who feels stuck adding the word yet to your statements, especially about your abilities, I can't launch a fashion design company yet is a totally different posture. anyway yeah that's that's one word that i think has enormous uh power i mean like we talk a lot about experimentation on the podcast i think sometimes it's as we talked about in the conversation here sometimes it's misused a little bit because it's kind of like becomes the excuse for mediocre kind of like ideas and and a little bit like also just you know i was just testing so i think there's two things which if we double click on the experimentation part i thought was interesting the one thing is that she kind of talks about how she's helping specifically some of our junior folks with the origination which i think is interesting because i think there's been like this kind of business practices for many years was like you know i'll just set overall goals and i'll just let my team do that thing right and you get the sense that yara is like active in her brainstorm and probably even has like a strong voice i would imagine too but on the flip side i think she also is aware of her abundance of ideas and you know she talks about how she's like i don't know if she said they used all over the place but she used kind of terms realizing that she kind of has a lot of ideas and a lot of stuff going on and so she asked her staff to help manage output right which is obviously a very kind and not very forceful approach and so i thought there was an interesting dualism in her approach to experimentation which is it's okay to be somewhat explicit with some of the ideas that you have for what people should experiment with but there's also kind of like a stand what you can say but i realize i also say a lot of different things and maybe i'm just saying all this because it resonated a lot with me so you have to manage me back when i come with 10 different things that you can't kind of like run experiments on maybe just manage me back and saying you know hey here's the two things i heard that i like the most from all these ideas you had and those are the ones i'm going to test for next sweet.

1:00:52Yeah. I love the fact that the culture of experimentation leads people to be excited about sharing ideas. She mentioned, you know, her operations lead who's going, oh, you got to see this. I'm creating this tool. But having that leading with that kind of attitude has a ripple effect on others that they start sharing work in progress. They start sharing ideas that are maybe outside of their lane. And it has a really fabulous impact on culture when the founder is the kind of person who says, you actually manage me. It allows other people, I think, to have that attitude too, which I thought was cool.

1:01:29I saw this beautiful episode. I'm a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain's. And he have an episode where he goes to Denmark to visit Noma. And this is an old episode, obviously, because he's not been here for a lot and in that episode there's a scene where they after final close of the restaurant which probably is like 11 o 'clock midnight every week all the chefs at the restaurant stay back and they show different things that they have like different ideas they have like experiments and they do it in front of everybody else and then they talk about them and renee who owns the restaurant, then critiques it.

1:02:09And what was also beautiful is after that, so one is like this whole kind of idea, we're all here to try to come up with great things and do great work. Now at one point, Anthony Bonin says, what are you going to do? Are you then going to put, like, if somebody does something really well, are you going to put it on the menu? And he goes like, of course not. He goes like, what do you mean? He goes like, well, this is their dish. This is not my dish to put in my restaurant. This is their dish to put in whatever they want to do, right? Which I thought was like such a beautiful thing that they were not out there to mine new ideas to just make his restaurant better they were here for the intellectual interestingness of trying to come up with great stuff and then when they came up it was theirs to keep which i thought was like such an interesting stuff and so i think there's also the idea which kind of made me think more about as business owners we should probably allow people to experiment more with their own things like have their own side project they're working which they should be allowed to be just theirs because that by experimenting something that is just theirs they probably lean even more into it and then i'm sure they'll come up with ideas then that is useful for the business but doesn't have to be that direct idea that they kind of were talking about you know one of the things that i wrote down this is kind of like a mantra but i wrote down your life is your preparation and there's something to the conversation we were having about folks being intimidated maybe by how fast younger people are getting up the learning curve.

1:03:36We talked about the experienced designer who's gone, wait, the person who can lift 300 pounds, but somebody can only lift 100. If AI is going to be 10Xing them, they're going to be able to outperform. And Diara's comment that you've already done the hard work. Learning how to collaborate with AI is actually not the hard work. You have done the thing that can't be replicated. You've got, you're able to bench 300 pounds right now. Imagine what will happen if you could unleash. And I just, I really liked that, that kind of, that felt like a very uplifting statement. Like your life is the training.

1:04:11You've been training. Now use AI to get the supercharge, use AI to get the uplift, the augmentation. That was really cool. And the last thing that I wrote down that I thought was kind of interesting is just this validating of the novice perspective or the kind of naivete. As you know, I'm a glutton for kind of origin stories of innovation. And so many great origin stories come from the person who doesn't know that it shouldn't be done that way. And Diara said, that's one thing she said is like, I did this because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to, you know? And you said, I mean, it seems like that's the way that everybody should do it.

1:04:47And she goes, well, that's not how the industry does it. And the only reason I did it is because I didn't know you weren't supposed to. And I think that that just vindicating and validating, sometimes not knowing is really important. So is acquiring knowledge and apprenticeship and all that stuff. It's these things, they seem to contradict, but they don't. That your naivete or your fresh perspective is sometimes a tremendous advantage to see an existing system in a new way. And there are tons of examples of this throughout the history of innovation. I just love seeing it before our eyes with how she's disrupting the fashion industry.

1:05:24The last thing I added, which I think is building on that is this kind of like world that I think started way back in making an easy landing page day where, I mean, I remember the first BarkBox we did, that was just a Photoshopped kind of box, right? Like there wasn't really a BarkBox at the time where I went out to a dog park and tried to sell it to people with my co-founders now obviously now you can just render that very fast you can make a website all these different things and so i wrote this post a long time ago about morality versus virality about where do we as founders feel we have a responsibility to the people that we are asking to serve the customers and what's nice about this example is that she already have the raw material she already have to your point the system on which she can make this thing come to life and so she feels very comfortable that she can actually go out sell it and then actually deliver on it but some people without her ethics might not kind of feel like what and so i am curious and scared and inspired by this whole next two or three years where I think the internet just will be filled all this stuff that is rendered and we all will have to figure out how we navigate in this world.

1:06:43Like as founders for sure, because we will need to, we'll get tempted to just. Stewardship, yeah. And then I think there, as we talked about in the premise of the book and all that stuff is relationship capital, like authenticity and authority and being a trusted partner is something that's going to matter a lot. Therefore, hopefully people will gravitate to it because the internet will also be transparent. So if you're somebody who just renders stuff and then don't deliver, you're going to have a short career. Well said, Henrik. Well said. Sounds like you wanted to stop the podcast. Well said.

1:07:17As in like, can I go now? No, but I love, we got to keep that part in because that's hysterical. But the, you know, it's funny, Henrik, you saying that is collaborators mind at Stanford for years. Because like you're, if you're in the middle of a lecture or whatever, sometimes you can lose track of time and a shorthand that we used to use on stage was if while the other person is speaking you say that's really interesting what that meant was shut up we've got to keep going you know what we do you feel like and like you use it a few times you're like that is really interesting yeah like you know that means to be quiet we have at pre-hype uh it's just this coming incubator product studio i worked in for a long time we had this phrase called elmo which i think i ponder my philip kind of came up with which is short for enough let's move on and so he would just go like you know i'm gonna throw an elmo here so the very kind of non-threatening way was basically like please shut up that's good there you go oh we're elmo we're elmoing it until saying thank you elmo until further notice so until then thank you so much for listening in And as ever, do you want to do the begging today, Jeremy?

1:08:33Begging. Begging, pleading. For likes and subscribes and all that. Yeah, just do it. Do the thing. Do the thing that you know. By the way, I did notice on Apple Podcasts, we got a rude comment recently, which I would love to bury. So maybe we say the code word is bury the rudeness. and if you've made it this far and you haven't ever written a review, we need your help to bury the rudeness that is currently at the top of Apple Podcasts. And with that, bye-bye.