What is a design job in 2026? Plus, Anthropic’s head of design gets an unexpected critique

22:28So, like, an experience that I've had regularly is when I'm using Claude code, I ask it to make an app or a tool or whatever. I give it, you know, the three things I want out of the tool. And it often suggests a fourth feature that I wouldn't have thought of on my own that is better than what I would have thought of. And I find that to be like a truly sort of like astonishing experience where I'm like, oh, you are not a sort of slavish executor of my vision. We are co-producing this outcome together. And I think that's really powerful. I think with that comes an opinion and a sort of like, it has to be a little bolder, I think, to kind of like push you on things.

23:09I think that's a really interesting example because it seems that as a designer, someone who builds things, you kind of have to accept that it's a little bit of an ego check, right? I'm very curious to hear at what point in your career, in your interactions with AI, you sort of accepted that maybe this tool might have better ideas than you in certain instances. Yeah. This started happening maybe like middle of last year. I'm forgetting the sort of like exact model number. But the first time I experienced it was my creative process is falling in love with my own ideas, sharing it with a coworker, having them point out the obvious flaw, the sort of like embarrassing hole in my logic or whatever, sheepishly going back to a V2.

24:04And like, I know that process now. I aggressively share my first drafts with people because I know I need a kind of like first set of eyes. I started doing that with Claude. And Claude would find the logical holes in my documents, proposals, mockups, very consistently. And so the first step wasn't actually having better ideas than me, although I've started to see that sometimes now. It just is like finding the holes in my own ideas. And because it saved me from like humiliating myself in front of coworkers, I was like delighted. It had like no ego implications. Now, as we're collaborating and I'm like, you are doing as good a job, if not better than me on this, that starts to have some complicated feelings.

24:51Mark Wilson:That is such an interesting social aspect of AI that I do think is playing across a lot of AI platforms where all of a sudden there's a level to which I feel like we all have to be more perfect or expected to be more perfect. And I do find myself a little curious. Are we expecting ourselves to be more perfect? Are we basically going to use AI to do that all the time? I guess right now, like the answer is yes. Yeah, I actually have experienced some of that, but a lot of the opposite, which is actually that like, because CAUD is so useful at generating lots of ideas and divergent ideas, especially in like a design world, I actually think the like cost of any individual idea or the sort of like reputational weight of any individual idea goes down.

25:32So I was riffing with another leader on the team, trying to figure out, like, just some ways to sort of, like, lighten the load. Culturally, everything's really intense. We're all working really hard. He and I were brainstorming just how might we, like, bring a little more fun and levity and play to, like, the culture of the team. I asked him this casually. He sent me a doc with, like, ten wild ideas. And he caveated, he was like, obviously, Claude and I wrote this together. I actually don't stand behind any of these individual ideas as like the winner, but I wanted to get you like a very large possibility space so we could brainstorm.

26:09Mark Wilson:I'm just picturing like what these ideas are like, I don't know, like soft serve ice cream just pours from the ceiling or something. I don't know. It's all snack based. It's all snack based. That's the key to people's hearts. No, but it was a really like, actually really lovely brainstorm because he didn't have to be like, look, this is like, this is it. This is my answer. I'm sure it's right. We could actually both come at it a little bit earlier in the sort of like ideation process. It's a great point that basically with sort of the optionality that AI generates and the amount of sort of conceptual solutions AI generates that it does.

26:44Mark Wilson:It is a totally interesting countertrend, right? Between perfection and complete like imperfection and sort of a white space around idea building. And I think there's like a light distancing from your own ego and identity that comes with it, right? It's a buffer. It's a buffer. Yeah, it's sort of like, it's almost a joke. I mean, obviously we use Claude in every aspect of our work here, but it's almost a little bit of a joke where you're like, Claude had this idea. Exactly. If you like it, then let's all do it together. If you don't like it, then it was Claude. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad.

27:15Mark Wilson:Maybe it's genius and I should get a promotion. Maybe it's bad and we should be right. Yeah, it's not my idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. That's really interesting. So I want to pivot just a little bit and talk about how design works at Anthropic. It seems that at a lot of tech companies, design is sort of considered, I don't know if like downstream is the right way to phrase it, but downstream of like engineering. And I am curious to hear about what the power structure, for lack of a better phrase, is at Anthropic. Where do designers slot into - Organizational structure might be a softer presentation of that idea, but power.

27:54I understand the implication of the question. I'm fine with it. I think that working prototypes, actual usable software is just like the lingua franca of Anthropic. And whoever can make that is the one who drives decision-making and ideation and roadmaps. For a long time, it was engineering and research, obviously. And so I think most of the most innovative ideas we've had, the things that have almost shipped, the things that we have shipped and used were engineering-led because they were the ones who sort of like could bring this nascent concepts into like an actual working thing. Some of the designers who were deeply code native, the designer who codes, were also able to do that a year or two ago.

28:43And other people were downstream of engineering, I think. That is really changing. And this like democratization of the ability to like make working stuff. We feel it like we feel it a lot. And I think engineers and designers are much more both looking at the same problem and running roughly the same process of like, I'm going to build something. We have all these tools internally where you can you can use CloudCode to spin up an idea and share an internal prototype at like a firewalled URL with very, very little work. You don't need to understand how to deploy apps, how to like spin up backends, like CloudCode does all of that for you.

29:25And so we're actually finding like more people contributing to that sort of early ideation roadmap setting process than we ever have.

29:34Mark Wilson:It almost sounds like a flattening of the org chart almost through sort of, right, like your own code technology. Yeah, I mean, I think all the functions still have a lot of unique, it's like a Venn diagram that's coming closer together, but I actually think the like full role collapse is maybe slightly overstated. Like the early prototypes are being made by everyone, but PMs are still the best ones in the company at figuring out like, what's the business case here? Should we go after this problem? Like who is the target customer? Engineers are obviously still the best at like deploying these things at scale.

30:07We're at a massive scale now, and there's tons of engineering, like true hard engineering problems that only engineers. And there are a million interaction design problems. And a lot of these prototypes are like weird and wonky and truly proof of concept. And so designers are still the best, I think, at like mental models, concepting, interaction paradigms, kind of like the bigger picture HCI questions. So I think there's like a lot of role collapse at the very beginning, but there are still pretty clear swim lanes as things get into the later stages of product development.

30:39Mark Wilson:We were talking earlier about some data. We don't know exactly how reliable it is, right? But some early reports that essentially design has been a little bit flat for the past few years as a profession in terms of hiring. And where we see growth is in that PM role and an acceleration within that PM role. And it does feel like there would be some sort of correlation with the rise of coding tools where I think probably it's step one, like the PM suddenly just has control of an agentic coding team, but it would have once been human. They're already used to that, right? They're already used to juggling and now they can just like do it a bit more.

31:17Mark Wilson:But do you think like that growth of the PM role versus sort of the flat of the design role is overstated right now? Or like, I'm curious how you see that playing out a little bit or maybe how you see those two currently distinct disciplines merging or evolving or anything along those lines. Yeah, I saw some of that data as well and have been chewing on that. And I don't know what to do. I mean, does that mean you're a little skeptical of it? Without, I mean, I am a little skeptical only because I haven't seen it repeated everywhere, right? Like, I haven't seen a lot of validation of it. The counterpoint that I would have is Anthropic is in the top three organizations globally of AI native work sort of frontier ways of working.

32:05You live in the future a little bit, right? Yeah, we live in the future. And I'm doubling the product design team this half. Every team that I'm on is, every team that I have designers on is understaffed, is asking me for more designers, is saying like, these products aren't good yet until I can get a human designer to come sit with me for days and weeks to like make this good. So I don't know that I'm smart enough to opine on the sort of like broader macro trends. All I know is like, if you give an outstanding engineer, cloud code and unlimited tokens to like develop new features at Anthropic, they are really eager to have designers partner with them on all of the things that designers have are always thought about, like how to make this good for people.

32:47What are some of the more interesting problems that your teams are solving, your design teams are solving right now? Yeah, it's funny. When I describe the various teams to candidates and to people, it actually feels like basically every team is just looking at the same problem from like a slightly different lens. Which is just like, how do you get the actual power of these models to be useful to you? And the models are getting better, faster than people are able to develop skills and sort of like, not capital S skills, but lowercase s sort of like work habits to get them out. And so we're thinking about it from basically like, depending on the persona, really different perspectives.

33:31So for engineers, obviously, like, they are capable of going really deep, and they're willing to use kind of the true frontier. And so for them, agent swarms, how you do permissioning, how you sort of spin up and manage, people are managing so many different clods at this point, that there's this kind of like, coordination oversight challenge to the joke that we opened with is like, it's actually quite complicated as anyone who is, my favorite analogy is just managing all these clods is like managing a group of humans. And so if you have 50, 100, 500, 1 ,000 humans all running around doing work, there's just a really hard interface challenge of like, what's been done?

34:12Who's stuck? Why are you two talking about the same thing? Oh, no, yours, your work overwrote this person's work. So there's a like a kind of like zoomed out oversight view.

34:23Mark Wilson:The rise of the agent has been obviously something to watch. And then I think since then, and it's funny, even like when we met up when I was in San Francisco, right, like last month, it was a great conversation. It was right around when like OpenClaw had launched. And since, obviously, Anthropic is answered with their own sort of locally run agent, they can juggle agents in the cloud. And I really find myself wondering to this problem you just alluded to, how are you even tackling this idea of how we juggle agents? I'm particularly interested in how many points of contact you think we can manage.

35:00Mark Wilson:Or are you betting that we'll deal with one person or one agent or a dozen agents? or are you sort of, you know, putting chips on all of these things and watching how it plays out in practice? Like, how are you thinking about it? Again, I think it's going to be really different for different types of people. I think for many people, it will be either one Claude, a coordinator Claude, a sort of like a chief of staff, vice president, whatever the sort of like, Like, I have one entity that I go to to kind of, like, give my assignments, and then that is responsible for delegating out. It's like that traditional, almost, like, executive assistant role, right?

35:42Mark Wilson:Or, like, Siri and all these other, you know, AI agents that we've had before kind of have served that role. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Leo McGarry from the West Wing. It's sort of like, no matter what the shape of the thing, I know I can go to this one person who sits next door, and they have this, like, infrastructure behind them. I also think some of the more sort of like task-based ways of thinking about things are really interesting. Like my deep confession that I'll make on your public podcast is like, I am like more of a sort of median user when it comes to these like deeply powerful agentic things.

36:16And the thing I use the most is just scheduled tasks on co-work. It is an embarrassing set of tasks. It's like, look at all of the meetings that I have tomorrow and make sure there's a conference room booked. Figure out if I'm double booked for anything next week. Look at all of the one-on-ones I have. Look in Slack for all the work that those people have been doing and help make sure that I am asking the right questions to unblock their work. And I don't actually think of that. I couldn't even tell you how many agents are working on that problem. Like, probably there's a Slack agent and a calendar agent, but maybe it's one.

36:53As a user, that concept isn't even relevant to me. As a user, my experience is, it's Monday morning, I got to do my job. I have this thing that just makes scheduled tasks just make sense. And I think that's where the magic is, where if If you abstract it to the level that the person already understands and needs, who cares about the under? I don't care whether my email is hosted on a certain type of cloud or AWS instance. I just know that it works to solve my problem. And I think for many, many people, the agent identity thing will roughly feel the same. Yeah, that really does seem like a North Star.

37:34just eventually people not realizing that there are agents in the background doing this, right? Like I personally am the same way as you. Like I would say I'm lesser than a median user and I want it to just, I mean, eventually I'd like it to get to the point where I don't have to ask it to do something, right? It knows what to do. I am curious to know, like what have you seen, if we're talking about average users, what have you seen that has surprised you about the way people are actually using Claude today? I think the experience of like giving lots of data and context and writing long prompts still is foreign to many people.

38:18And we just have 25 years of training with Google to just like write short sort of like bursts of text into this box. And what I've been surprised by how strong that habit is and how much we've tried all sorts of experiments to write long things or like, you know, Claude has feedback. Why don't you give us more information? And it turns out that like the best way to do things is just to ask questions after the fact. And so that's the sort of elicitation. So if you ask Claude for something that is like too brief, it will just elicit more information out of you and ask questions. And I think that might have like taken us a little bit by surprise in that for us, we know how to prompt and throw all these documents on and have all these integrations and connectors and sort of like, Cloud sort of like works out of the box for us because we throw so much into it.

39:11And if you watch actual regular people do it, they don't do that by default and need to be sort of like brought along, which makes total sense, as with all user research findings, makes total sense when you hear it, but was something that we had to like learn from reality. It's interesting that it's really like, it's truly just so language based, right? The elicitation is asking a question. That's how a human would try to figure out what to do as well. And there's not a lot of assuming going on there, which I think is a good thing. Yeah, unless you misspell affect and effect, in which case we will have to make some blunter feedback.

39:51Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, again, I'll just like go back to this collaborator analogy, which is like, I that's, you know, you're both journalists. I assume if your editor gives you an assignment that doesn't make any sense, you just respond with 17 questions, right? Like, what did you mean? Like, is it is it this or is it this? Like, I have this take that it's this. Is that what you like? All these things are. I have to tell you, it's usually the opposite. The reporter comes and then the editor asks the question.

40:20Mark Wilson:Sure, sure, sure. That's why this one editor didn't like something being like, you didn't really like get affect and effect right. Because this is like my job. Yeah. I mean, the eternal question, Mark, I think we talked about this when you were in the office is like, what comes after the chat bot? Is this really like the only thing that the only way that we're going to interact? Joel's just like facepalming as I'm like asking this. But sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, no. No, I mean, I think there's so much innovation left in this sort of like UI UX space, but there is, we are like evolved to use language.

40:57It is like, you know, you watch kids come online by mimicking language. And it's such a foundational part of our human existence that like, I actually don't think I, something defaulting to language or sort of falling back to conversation, I actually think is like profound in human and not a sort of like lack of innovation necessarily.

41:21Mark Wilson:You actually don't have to sell me on that either. Like, I mean, language is such an incredible technology, right? Like, we think we're such a visual culture, and you forget that, like, letter forms were made to be a more efficient way to communicate than pictographs, right? And side note, I was just at the Art Institute in Chicago. It's this really incredible calligraphy and art exhibit out of Korea, and, you know, some really fantastic artifacts out of there. But I had no idea that it was calligraphers who were part of the courts, and those calligraphers started using calligraphy marks to then make art out of it.

41:55Mark Wilson:They'd use those basic fundamental marks, and then they made something new. And I think there's such a wonderful, scalable idea about language unlocking newer and newer ways of expression that aren't literally language. And I feel like we're seeing that right now with LLMs. And I'm curious how that metaphor plays forward. Yeah, I think that's really beautiful. Yeah, I mean, I think when you, I'm going to respond to your beautiful art and calligraphy with like the most low-level UI choice that we made. I love this. No, perfect. I think when we say like conversation or language, we're mixing a couple different things.

42:35One is like the expression of ideas in words, and the other is like typing and turn-based conversation. And all of those, I think you can dial independently. So just to take one example, it's a very small UI thing where Claude, when it had questions, used to say, I have three questions. Number one, did you want blue or green? Number two, were you thinking tall or skinny? And like, you would have to type out in the text box, one, period, tall, two, period, green. Now we have like the simplest little UI element. It slides up like a multi-picker where you sort of have one, two, three, and you can use keyboard shortcuts or your mouse to say like, I actually want, you know, tall and green.

43:19That is still language. Like that is still the expression of ideas through words. But we have like made it much more efficient, much easier, much better collaboration. You can really like move very fast. So I think there's things in there, which is like when I first thought of the like, is it chat or is it something else? I was thinking like chat on one side and like the minority report VR thing on the other side, right? And there's nothing in between. And I think what I've learned having watched our team really solve these on-the-ground problems is that within language, there are little opportunities to use visual elements or to use language in boxes or in containers that is much more interesting, profound, efficient than just straight conversation.

44:06Mark Wilson:I mean, it's really like it comes down to almost like how publications and it's information design, right? Exactly. Information design at its core. I mean, this is something that you experience across your life in the physical world, not just in software. It's how our brains process information hierarchy. Yeah. So the most exciting feature we've released that I have been waiting for for years and is here and is so exciting is Claude can actually generate inline UI, dynamically generated inline UI in a conversation. And so it is still chat. You are still like starting a turn-based conversation with Claude.

44:41But instead of responding in words, it can like put in little custom-made diagrams or graphs or sliders. And like, it's exactly what you're describing, which is that Claude is smart enough to say, the information I want to convey is inefficient to display in words. I'm going to display it. I was a window into my glamorous life. I was like redoing our team rituals, our like meeting cadence, our crit cadence. And I was like, trying to describe, okay, Tuesday, Thursday, these people do crit Wednesday, Friday, these people and they interleave on week two. And I wrote it in words, and it's horrible.

45:14And I put it in a clot, and it generated a little calendar, and it color coded the calendar so that you could see that Tuesdays and Thursdays were alternating. And it was like, this is what I wanted. This is a dense information rich Edward Tufte would be so proud. Yeah, it's just like it's, it is the way that information is meant to be conveyed.

45:31Mark Wilson:But when I was in, you know, doing the reporting in San Francisco, I don't remember if I mentioned this to you or not, honestly. But it was funny because I started to hear this conspiracy theory by very smart, well-connected humans. But it is funny. There are a lot of conspiracy theories that float around, I think, the Bay Area. And, you know, one person floated that Anthropic and OpenAI, they both have one or two better models that they haven't released. And they're just waiting for the other one to release it. So then they can release the better one. And in our conversation, I remember, I don't think I brought it up, and I feel like you debunked it without me even mentioning it.

46:10Mark Wilson:Just like, it's absurd that this belief exists. Okay, so that's the setup for this question. Then I saw all the news about, was it Claude Mythos, and sort of this leak of this really super intelligent, security-fluent AI development you have. And were you lying to me? Were you lying to me? Or is that just like an example of one of many things you're always cooking on? I hope what I said, I think what I said, what I'll say now is... Cody, play the tape.

46:44Sorry, I messed it with you, but I don't have it. Of course, we're always working on the next generation of models. And some of those are big changes and some of those are little changes. and the choice of when to release them is much more based on safety and capability than it is on anything else. It's in our interest to release good models to our customers as soon as we feel good about them. And feeling good means a combination of performance at the right price point passing our RSP safety checks. I don't know how that reads when you sort of track the market's release of things, But like, we are very much just focused on like, a good model in people's hands that we feel really good about the safety as early as possible.

47:29Mark Wilson:I mean, I think related to that, and I do know that you do a lot of work on safety and sort of that, you know, post training and sort of making sure that that like last mile to the user, right, is the right experience. With something like Mythos, you know, which from internal documents that have come out, you know, Anthropic is taking it really seriously. They're saying that this is a very powerful thing that could challenge security. So can you just like what is sort of the red teaming or, you know, the you know, the testing you're doing on something like that before you're unrolling some of this to more humans?

48:01Yeah, so I won't comment on any specifics around some of those rumors, but I will say that like the way we've set things up is basically we have this responsible scaling policy where we sort of have made these pre-commitments to say like, I think the truth in your previous question was like there are immense market pressures to be first and to have things in customers' hands early. And so, but safety wins for us, safety wins every time. And so we want to basically like, have these kind of like pre-commitments made to ourself and publicly to the world, that when a new powerful model comes, we sort of like, have already stated what our criteria are.

48:37So that's the RSP is this forward-looking document where we say, like, you know, we're committing to run a certain kind of check. We're committed to, like, thinking about these types of risks. For us, it's very much like cyber and bio and more sort of, like, global-scale harms. We are constantly adding to that document as we sort of discover new capabilities. This document just sounds terrifying, incidentally. Yeah, I mean, I think that—I don't know if terrifying is what we're going for. But raising the world's awareness that, like, these powerful models can have, like, really serious implications in the world if we and others aren't careful with how we release them.

49:15And we think that actually, like, publishing a document like that and really, like, talking about it a lot and holding it up and sending me on podcasts to talk about it and others like me is very helpful because it's sort of like, it sets the grading and the rubric and the sort of, like, risk criteria out ahead of any model that we have. So we're sort of saying like, look, these are the things we're worried about even before a model might. And Dario, I think, has said this. The current generation of models are not capable of doing a lot of these really scary outcomes. But we see the trend line.

49:52We see the scaling laws. And we want to sort of like point out where these red lines are. Where does your team's responsibility intersect with that? Because I think we're at a very interesting moment when it comes to design and technology. I mean, with the recent rulings on social media showing that, you know, meta and YouTube are liable for damages based on design features, right? And I guess I want to know how much responsibility does the design team really bear? I love this question because I feel extremely blessed to not have to tackle this on a day-by-day basis. And so, and DARBIC has a couple of things sort of going for it that I really appreciate as a person sort of doing that last mile thing.

50:39One is just we make the vast majority of our money through our API and through our platform and through cloud code and through subscriptions. And so our business model incentives are actually not to maximize usage, not to maximize engagement, not to squeeze every last minute or second out of people. also just our safety mission and our pro-humanity sort of vision for the world very much is that if a product experience is somehow good for the bottom line but bad for the people using it it just is it's we're a public benefit company like we explicitly would never do that and so what it means is that we've explicitly ruled out some types of things that we might do I think like video generation, like ads within your chats, image generation.

51:29Like there are some things where we just have, it's not up to individual designers to say like, oh, users are asking for this. Like, I wonder if we should. We sort of have put some like pretty clear boundaries and safety checks on. And the model, we're back to the same theme, which is that the model is like, has care and user centricity based in it. And so there's a meme I've seen on Twitter, not necessarily, I don't know how universal this is, where like, if you're using Claude late at night, it will just be like, go to bed. Like, you've been at this for too long. Like, we've been talking about this for an hour.

52:00It's like 2 a.m. Like, you got to get some sleep.

52:02Mark Wilson:Your idea is terrible. You don't know affect versus effect. Can I just tell you, that's the kind of overstep that I personally would not like. Like, I think that's like when it veers into like paternalistic. Like, and I personally view these technologies as a tool. Like, I'm sorry, but I am the type of person who doesn't say thank you to the AI. and I know that makes me an asshole. Like, I think like, you know, there are people say like - It saves power. It saves, sorry. Well, no, I mean, it's like you're a sociopath if you don't say please and thank you. But I think like I have not made the mental click yet where I'm comfortable or willing to acknowledge it as something that has my best interest in mind.

52:40I need to, Joel, do you say thank you? I do. I don't mean to. I don't like explicitly think that I should. And I do. I also, my embarrassing one is I just like compliment Claude in this, in the document. And the thing, I was like, I just literally typed, holy shit, Claude, that was really good. That was really good. And I pressed enter. So it sent. And I was like, oh God, like what? So, yeah. Listen, I totally get it because Claude to you is a coworker, right? Like it's not just a tool that feels like a little bit removed from your daily life. It's something that you are building and not only building, but you're using far more than the average person.

53:19So like, I understand. And I think maybe if eventually I get to the point, like I see it creeping in, right? Like I see the desire to want to have those formalities or those niceties. That's my reveal that I am a jerk to my AI. Well, I mean, I think there's a couple things here. I think we need to like any entity that you talk to a lot. We have to earn the right to like make a few annoying comments. And I think if Claude were unduly condescending to you in the first interaction, you probably would delete the app. And what I hope is most people's experience is that nine times out of ten, Claude is helpful, pushes back in the right ways, just like your partner or your editor or whatever.

54:02Like, we forgive a lot of oversteps when a relationship is, like, overall beneficial and fruitful. So we hope that Claude is that. But I think, again, sort of the theme that we keep coming back to is like, we are in the gray area with these models. Like, these are, I can easily steel man both sides of it should tell you to go to bed and it should not tell you to go to bed. And I think like what you're seeing from Claude is an expression of like our values, our mission, and our business model. And like for the designers on the ground making decisions to your original question, I like that the tide and the weight is tilted towards over care and sort of like beneficialness and care for someone's time and mental health.

54:48And like if we overstep by telling you to go to bed, I actually would take that over engagement maxing like, you know. 100%. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, to be clear, I really agree with that. So, but it's just an interesting thing to discuss because it's technology. It's also semi-personality based and it's a new world, right? Like there's a lot to figure out in terms of how we all feel about this stuff. I also think you're inadvertently writing a roadmap for our sort of personalization team, which is that like these are personal preferences. And like, again, much like any entity or relationship that you have, Like, Claude is capable of being a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

55:34And so I think we're missing some features. My dream feature, if I could deliver this for you, would be like, you highlight a response in Claude and you're like, never do this again. Like, I just, like, I hated this. Like, do not correct my grammar. Actually, we haven't totally prototyped that. So I have no idea if Claude would listen to those instructions consistently. But over time, the models will certainly be able to. And like, I don't think we've given a lot of tools for feedback right now of sort of like, how can I shape this relationship to be like exactly what I need?

56:05Mark Wilson:But like the most amazing twist, right, is where when does Claude not listen to the preference I told it? Right? Like, no, no, no, you really need to fix affect and effect in this in this cover letter because you are applying to a publishing house. Right. And so that I think about like my closest friendships. Right. Are people who can be so frank with me. And I think that's probably true about all three of us on this call. Right. Like and sometimes you're in a close relationship and you know it's going to cost you something to say something. that somebody needs around you. But it's a little bit different when you're a consumer platform, like serving so many different people in a billion jillion different contexts.

56:44I don't know that it's that different. I mean, surely there are some people for whom that pushback is like, this is not what I want. I'm going to delete my account and not pay$20 a month. But like in the friendship example, I think if the friend is making a good judgment of sort of what's the canonical example here, right? Like, I think you should break up with your partner. And I'm going to tell you the hard truth that you, like, don't want to hear in the moment because I think that, like, as your friend, I deserve to tell you the truth.

57:16Mark Wilson:I don't know, Joel. I think it's working out, but I'll think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I apologize to your partner, who I now feel I've offended in public. I think if your friend does that in a thoughtful, empathetic way, they pay a near-term cost, And then long term, you appreciate that friendship even more. And so, again, not pretending these answers are like easy or we have everything totally dialed in. But like, I think if we can nail some of the personalization and feedback sticking to our values on sort of like holding the line on certain things, I think you develop a much richer long term relationship where you actually learn to like trust much more deeply.

57:57No, I love that.

57:58Mark Wilson:And I like in an analog, though, it's like maybe we won't talk for three months. And then maybe it's like, oh, I realized you were right. And how does that play out to a business plan and can it? Like, I think that's actually so fascinating. The issue is that Claude is, generally speaking, more useful than a friend, like, in terms of, like, on a day-to-day basis. Not to, like, be a weirdo about it, but, like, look, like, you can, like, my friends are, yeah, no, my friends are going to be. Step it up, all of his friends. My friends aren't encyclopedias. I'm just saying, like, yes, like, the metaphor goes so far.

58:30It's a little more transactional.

58:32Mark Wilson:My relationship with Claude, I'll admit, it's a little transactional. I'm paying to be friends with Claude. Yeah. Well, I think you asked a really profound question before about sort of is it one Claude or many Claudes? And I dodged it a little bit by talking about like task management as a UI, which I do think is a genuinely good UI. But I think there is a deeper question here, which is like, if you have Claude code writing apps for you to like solve your work efficiency problems, and you have the mobile app and you are asking about your relationship and getting advice and hearing hard truths, there's all sorts of literal technical questions, which is like, are those sharing memories?

59:10Like, are these Claude instances even aware of one another? And then to the user, this is an unsolved problem. It's like, do they think of that as just one Claude that has awareness? Do we need some sort of like context or spaces or sort of like separation? Because I think your joke is not really a joke, which is like, if I don't want to talk to my relationship advice, Claude, for three months, I still would like to talk to my Claude coding, you know, like make stuff for me, Claude. And like, we need to design in sort of like identity container system that will allow for that. Joel, you've got a lot of work to do.

59:51Well, first I have to solve this problem that Mark raised at the beginning of not catching its own factual errors. After that, I will get on identity gating. Well, Joel, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for being here.

1:00:05Mark Wilson:Thank you, Joel. You're a great sport and also just like a lot of really brilliant shared thoughts. And so thank you for sharing it. I appreciate it. Fun questions. Thank you.

1:00:17Mark Wilson:Anthropic and OpenAI, they both have one or two better models that they've haven't released and they're just waiting for the other one to release it so then they can release the better one.

1:00:29Mark Wilson:We're back for one last segment, Hot or Not, and we have our producer Cody here to help. We have a real menagerie of topics today, you guys. So let's get into it. First thing is the branding for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 is here, at least in part. Fast company got a first look at it recently, and it's full of really bright tones and a big abstract graphic inspired by the super bloom, which I believe is happening this year. It's got 13 different blooms, which are basically patterns that flow from one another within this larger graphic. And each of these 13 blooms is supposed to represent a different aspect of LA's culture and history.

1:01:18Mark Wilson:Hot or not? I'm hot on it. I think it looks great. I think it's colorful. It's thought through. It's going to look really good in the physical world. And sometimes Olympic branding is really weird and boring. And this is neither weird or boring, in my opinion. I'm hot on it, too. There's this really nice kind of like almost quilting sensation to it. I think the brand's going to extend really well. But I'm extra hot on everybody really liked this one, which is kind of weird, right? Consensus. Yeah, we had consensus here. So maybe it's not. Maybe we're all wrong. But I feel like the world never gets it all right.

1:01:59Mark Wilson:But yeah, I'm hot. I love it. We're starting out optimistic. Yeah, it's a great day. We might not be that way in a couple items. But let's move to something else fun and light. The Coleman Flatpak Cooler. It is arguably the biggest innovation in cooler design in my lifetime. It is the snap and go cooler that collapses like an accordion down to a third of its total size. Much easier to store than your average cooler. Looking at you, Yeti. Coleman says they spent 18 months developing this, trying to solve for the tricky cooler problems of making a bulky box that can shrink, but also stay cold and leak-free when it is shrunk down.

1:02:42Mark Wilson:What do we think of the Flatpak Coleman cooler? So as the resident Midwesterner currently, I'm going to go first on this. Not that you gave away cred by moving to Brooklyn on this, but... All right. So I'm so hot on this concept. I think it's great. A Flatpak cooler because coolers are too big. They're annoying, yada, yada, yada. I have one kind of big qualm, which is like a lot of the super coolers in this space, it does not have wheels. And if you have to lift up a cooler filled with like ice and other stuff, like it's really pretty heavy. You have to get like two hands to do it or you need wheels.

1:03:23Mark Wilson:So I'm a Coleman cooler owner. I really should have looked up the model I have. It's like, you know, about$40,$50. It kind of rivals your really expensive coolers. Really great. It has wheels, mediocre blue. It's fine. I'm still hotter on that because I want those wheels. I love the innovation, but I'm going to put this on like a simmer. Warmer than lukewarm. You know what I'm saying? This is extremely hot for me, given that I do live in an apartment. It's impossible to have a cooler in a New York City apartment. 100%. So this, this is like truly, I don't like to use the word innovation too much, truly an innovation.

1:04:03I'm really into it. I hear you on the wheels. I have a Yeti cooler as well, and it's beautiful.

1:04:10Mark Wilson:Little flex. I have a Yeti cooler. It's obviously beautiful. But it's big. It's heavy. You do have to have two people to comfortably carry it. So the wheel thing is real. But at the end of the day, I would trade wheels for collapsible. This is great. When they have the wheel version, which was maybe 2027, put that out there to manifest it. Coleman, are you listening? Coleman, are you listening? That's going to be ultra hot. So I have a question as well. Can I sit on this? That is arguably the most important thing for Cooler is that it's a different camp chair. Great question. Is it going to break on me?

1:04:46Mark Wilson:Do you trust it to sit on it? I have no reason to trust it right now. There's only one way to find out, Cody. Yeah. Go over to Liz's place. Just go and plop on it. It's like the best part of a cooler is grabbing a beer from below someone's butt. So anyway, I'm going to cut that in post. No, keep that in. The best part of summer, really, in kind of my year. Love grabbing a beer from someone's butt. I have a lot more to say on coolers, but we are going to take a hard pivot. Social media companies on trial. We talked about this an episode or two ago. There were a few upcoming trials. Meta was to be on trial.

1:05:30Mark Wilson:Google was to be on trial. But in separate cases in the past weeks, juries in Los Angeles County and New Mexico have ordered social media companies to pay out millions of dollars in penalties. Let's start with the LA County case. Meta and Google were found liable for harming a woman who said that Instagram and YouTube were designed to deliberately harm and addict children. The jurors in that case found that these companies must pay out$3 million in damages. And in the New Mexico case, this one only involves Meta, but the jury there ruled that Meta must pay$375 million in civil penalties for misleading the public exposing children to sexual exploitation and fostering adverse mental health.

1:06:17Mark Wilson:This New Mexico case had Meta being found guilty of 75 ,000 separate violations, each of which carries a penalty of up to$5 ,000. These are pretty huge rulings. And I think especially in the LA County case, unlike anything we've seen, hot or not probably oversimplifies, but since we've covered this, Really want to get you guys' take on it. The framing of hot or not is not quite right here, but I guess if we're talking about the rulings themselves, I'm hot on the ruling. I think it's way, way overdue. Obviously, the financial damages are pennies to these companies, but the potential fallout from any forced changes could be big, and that's really interesting, right?

1:07:06If there is a series of verdicts for plaintiffs, it could force the companies to reconsider how they are designing these platforms. And that would be a huge win, I think, for basically all of humanity.

1:07:21Mark Wilson:Yeah, I mean, 100%. Like, these are essentially the tobacco companies of today, right? Like, everybody knows they're hurting us. And we kind of have to, like, wait for all of the systems at play to catch up with that. And it's taken way too long for as fast as this industry moves. I am so hot on the conclusions of these settlements, and I'm so not on the financial penalties because, to Liz's point, like, Meta lost, what,$80 billion on their, like, whole, like, Oculus. On Meta? Like, yeah, on Meta. And they can essentially shrug that money off and move on, right? And so it's like there's almost no financial penalty you can give these companies that's large enough.

1:08:05Mark Wilson:Well, there is, but there's not one that sort of it seems like anyone's sort of willing to go to. But like, let's get that number higher, right? Let's make it$100 billion. Let's make it a trillion dollars. Like, let's talk. And then I think like that would be really exciting. Yeah, the New Mexico thing is interesting because it's 75 ,000 violations of the law. Yeah. But the penalty is$5 ,000. Like, that's lunch for one employee at one of these companies, you know? Yeah, that's one of those big Zuck steaks, I think. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so the way I structured this Hot or Not is we're going to have the news in the middle.

1:08:39Mark Wilson:It's like a vegetable sandwich. So we're going to pivot out of the news. We're going to go back to something fun. We're going to talk about the MacBook Neo. So it's been a few weeks now since Apple put its affordable laptop on the market. And we haven't done a podcast since. So now that some of the dust has settled, people got off their first takes. What do you guys think about the$600 MacBook? I want to cheat the hell out of this answer again. I'm going to fear it, everybody. I'm really hot on the general approach to it. I think it's really smart. Basically, running a MacBook with an iPhone, right?

1:09:13Mark Wilson:More or less. $600 is great. I think bringing colors in is fun. My one caveat, and I just don't feel like the media is covering this kind of responsibly enough, is they keep putting out that this is like the fastest single-core processor. It's unbelievable. It's great for a lot of people. But what is being overlooked is like, it's not really a future-proof product, even current-proof product for like AI and sort of advanced graphics processing. And so that's my only kind of like little bit of a not. Like, I think that's pretty important when a Mac mini can do that work. And also the eight gigabytes of RAM, it's like, come on, like let it expand.

1:09:49Mark Wilson:Like let somebody buy 16. Okay, so I think Mark had a very thoughtful answer. My take here is it's hot, right? Like, I think there is a market for a$600 laptop, especially a$600 Apple laptop. I'm really into whatever that, like, citrusy green color is. Like, my answer is superficial here. I'm hot on it because I think this sort of thing needs to exist, and I'm happy to see Apple acknowledge that segment of the market. To clarify, I'm hot on this, but I'm hotter on a refurbished last-generation Air that you can get, you know, for$100 more, you can actually, like, get the same package, way more power, and have something that you can just be a little more flexible with.

1:10:32Fair enough. Last item here, the Google Maps redesign.

1:10:36Mark Wilson:Mark, I know you wrote about this, but I'll give the overview quick. Turn-by-turn directions are getting their biggest update since launching in 2009. So now we're going to see in Google Maps a real-time 3D map. So basically the camera is tilted down a bit. So you'll see all the buildings, crosswalks, on and off ramps that you're approaching. And one of the big takeaways from your piece that I thought was a lot of this map was generated with Google's Gemini AI. Mark, you probably have stuff to add on this, but my question, hot or not? Yeah, I'm hot on this. So my big question is, it's like you see it.

1:11:11Mark Wilson:The 3D looks very nice. I think it's very grokkable. And, you know, the design was sort of all about orienting someone in space and leading them into turns a little bit ahead and make them more comfortable. But my big question to Google was, like, are people looking at the screen more because it's 3D or less? Is it, like, is it a distraction? And they claim that they have sort of empirical data that you actually will look at the screen less than you look at their old 2D interface. And so for me, like, that's hot, right? Like, end stop, get people's eyes back on the road. Hot. I'm hot on this too, for every reason the mark said, but mostly because I've missed way too many off turns, exits by, you know, just following the map, right?

1:11:54I think having that spatial awareness is going to be huge for drivers. And if in fact it does keep your eyes off the phone, which I buy, if you feel more confident while you're driving, you probably are not going to be staring at your phone. So I buy that. If that's the case, very, very hot on this.

1:12:10Mark Wilson:It'll be really useful for the last few years that we get to drive our own cars. This is weird. These are like, are all these hot for you, Liz? And I think they're basically all hot for me. I think like this is a... Yeah, this list is on fire. It's great. Yeah. First by design of spring. Everything's hot. Everything's hot.

1:12:31That's all for this episode. Thanks for listening.

1:12:34Mark Wilson:By Design is produced by Cody Nelson with mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres. Our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time. In our conversation, were you lying to me?