54: Ian Rogers - Never a Spectator

26:40Um, and, but I think he's probably late thirties. Okay. Well, you know, he's old, well beyond his years. I, because I mean, I would, let me, let me approach this in a couple of ways. Cause I just think it's kind of patently false. Um, first of all, I would, my challenge would be name one culture that's not derivative. I can't think, I mean, that's not how humans work, right? Like everything that we do is derivative, right? We're always building on the, on the shoulders of giants in every aspect of life without, and, you know, without, without, um, Robert Johnson, there's no Rolling Stones and without next, there's no iPhone, right?

27:17Like this, all of these things are true. We're always, we're all, everything is derivative, um, by definite, by definition. Also, I would argue that like, there's so much subculture on, uh, you know, look on Instagram and YouTube. It's like the humor is so specific. Like, by the way, doom scroll forever, please, ladies and gentlemen. How about fake music BR on, on Instagram, like doom scroll, doom scroll forever. I don't know if the comedy is made only for me, but it's my favorite thing on the internet period. You know, and, and really I would say we have so much more subculture, like, you know, if you're, if you're super, whatever you're super into, it's on YouTube.

27:57Right. Right. And it's, some of it's super deep, right? Like, you know, you think about like, whatever. This thing's been around forever. Fan fiction and this, and this sort of, you know, and this sort of stuff. Sorry to interrupt you. Fan fiction's maybe a great point to latch onto though, because I think part of the, the point here isn't that there's infinite depth on whatever. I want to also talk about internet niche. I think I totally agree with you there. I think the point is less like you can go infinite YouTube rabbit hole on anything you want, but that it's sort of regurgitated. Like it's, it's like compounding in on itself versus progressing culture forward.

28:30I'm still not sure I agree with that. Honestly, I really think it feels like somebody saying, um, media used to work like this when I was a kid and it doesn't work like that anymore. Right. You know what I mean? Because media physics changes. It reminds me of even like, you know, I remember I was at the JP Morgan conference in 2021. And I remember just this moment of watching these like old billionaires sit on stage and ask, like they They were like furrowing their brow and asking like, when do we go back to a more centrist political dialogue? And I was like, you just asked, when do we go back to three channels on television?

29:03Like the answer is we don't go back to three channels on television. Therefore, we don't go back to a more centrist political dialogue. You know, you'll always encounter old people saying, oh, there's no good music anymore. Right. Right. I'm just, I'm not saying that's what this guy's argument is. I'm just saying it's, this is like, you will encounter this in your life. and it's a sort of a similar argument. Okay, so here's what you do. Always in that case say, what year would you say music was great? And they're 18. So first of all, the answer is when they were in college, like invariably, don't lead them, but I'm sure that'll be the answer.

29:38Then what you do is you pull out your phone, you type in Billboard Hot 100 that year, and then you show it to them and they will go, oh, but yeah, that's not what I was listening to. And I would say, exactly. in those days, you were looking at the underground, you were looking for the good shit. And now you are judging music based on the Billboard Hot 100. Right, right, right. And so this is the problem with these things. Like anytime, and by the way, also, anytime anyone tells you something sucks, you can just say, shut up and do your job. It's so easy to find things that suck. 99.9 % of all music, all movies, all books, all human beings.

30:18All NFTs. Yes. are garbage, right? Do your job. Find me the 1 % that's awesome. That's what I would say to him, right? This year, it's Twisted Teens. Fucking greatest band I've heard in 10 years. And what are they? They're New Orleans steel guitar punk rock. Are they a part of a scene? Are they even a part of a genre? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, but it's awesome. And that's all that matters. Part of this maybe too is that you have to be looking, I think I was texting you about this. I recently interviewed Tyler Cowen and my friend Nabil, and I currently have a viral Instagram reel going crazy because Tyler was saying, I think he literally said rap is basically dead and electronica is kind of born out and he's like waiting for AI music to get good.

31:03I think part of the implication here too is like, you can't look in the spot you were looking prior. Yeah. And there is something really fresh and interesting and new, but it's probably not quite 2025 shaped, let alone 2015 shaped. It also might not be your taste. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I'm experiencing that with, with hip hop generally. Right. I was like a, like a nineties hip hop nerd. Right. I listened to like, you know, Pitchfork tells me this is a great new rap record. I put it on and nine times out of 10, I'm like, oh, this is not for me. And that's probably just me. Not, it's not the music.

31:35Maybe. Do you think it's possible that hip hop is significantly less artistically innovative than it was 10, 15 years ago? It makes sense given how dominant the genre is. Yeah, but I think you could say that about every genre, right? I mean, like, just actually start with the oldest, right? Go put on, like, a new blues record from Alligator Records. Is it innovative? Right. No, it is not innovative in the slightest, right? There's always these moments when art forms are new, and the best thing about them is that there's no rules. Like, I would argue that hip hop is dead since you could say that's not hip hop.

32:12You know what I mean? And then everything else is exceptions to the rule. You know what I mean? Like, as soon as you could say, oh, that's not hip hop. Like, well, now actually, now you've made a box and you tried to put the art in a box. And it's only the people that escape that box that are going to be interesting. Right. And so, but I, and I think all, you know, certainly electronic music is that. Like electronic music was so exciting when it was new and it was like, what is this? Like the first time I heard, you know, Richard D. James album by Apex Twin, I was like, this is the future of music, period.

32:46Like, I don't even know what - For what it's worth, Tyler was definitely praising Apex Twin, but - It's a great example because like, if you, if in the nineties, you were like, oh my God, this is going to be so exciting. And then ultimately you realize that electronic music wasn't even a genre. It was just an excuse to take drugs. Then you were super disappointed, right? Cause Apex twin really felt like the future of classical music, you know, like, wow. And so now you're just like, oh no, it's just like, you know, it's just people, you know, like four on the floor, like, like getting high in a car.

33:1990 % of everything is boring. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in other words, yeah, exactly. So, and I think, but I think it's the same, the same with the same with hip hop, right? Like it, like every other genre, most of it's terrible. It's not like a genre is good. It's not like hip hop, good country, bad. No, most hip hop is terrible. Most country is terrible. And guess what? There's amazing shit in both too. If you're willing, you know, to do the filtering and, and look. Um, and also like, I also think I love the exceptions that prove the rule. And you know, the one for the past year is Clips. Yeah.

33:50Best record, you know, I mean, I don't know best record. One of my favorite records of, of the past couple of years is the Clips record. I mean, Push is so talented as, as like just a rapper. He has everything that I want. You know, he's, he's, he's, he's clever. He's wordplay. He's swag. He's smart. He's also dumb. You know, he's not dumb. He's, he's super smart, but he knows when to play dumb and to like, have it be about drug talk or, you know, and, you know, it's, it's to me, it's like everything that I want, like having malice back, like everybody, I could tell you, like we saw clips in LA and like when malice walks out on stage, it's like, I felt like everyone in the room wanting to start crying, you know?

34:37Cause, and to me, like clips doesn't even sound contemporary. It sounds like the hip hop I grew up with. You know what I mean? Between that feeling like something you used to love also new versus just feeling, feeling nostalgic. Yeah. I think, and I think by the way, I, I'm comfortable at age 53 saying, I don't know. And I don't feel like I need to know, you know what I mean? Like it's all about tier one to you. And having kids teaches you that as well. It's like, I don't care what they listen to. I just love that they love music, you know? And, and so we all realize that, you know, like there is not a, there is, there are no absolutes there.

35:16You know, there isn't a, there isn't a good, I mean, I'm a music snob, but I also know there is no such thing as good or, or bad. I think old dirty bastard is the most talented vocalist of the 20th century. And I probably will be hard-pressed to find anyone who agrees with me, but that's okay. Why do—we're dangerously close to the taste discourse, but why do—across artistic mediums, it's almost a recursive question, but the people with good taste seem to converge on similar things. Mojo magazine. I read—I don't know if you know the magazine, but British magazine has been around for, I don't know how long, 50 years, I think.

35:53I feel like I—there was a Joni Mitchell cover a couple of issues ago that I think said 50 years on it. I, I, I, I, a mojo. I don't really know how old you are. I apologize if I got that wrong, but I mean, I read it cover to cover every month. And, and they are, I say that because they are kind of like, we converge on good taste in a way. And, you know, guess who's on the cover this month? The Rolling Stones, right? Like, you know, like every other year. But it is things that are worth following, you know, and oftentimes I discover things through that channel that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

36:31And that is why it's important to me. That is what Pitchfork, that's the role that Pitchfork served for a very long time, less so today, unfortunately, but still sometimes. But it's kind of outside of scenes. the people that I think are the coolest or the smartest or whatever seem to generally trend towards, even if they're coming from very different scenes, they seem to converge on similar types of stuff, which I find really interesting. The fact that Tyler Cowen can talk to Rick Rubin about music, granted, maybe they both just truly love music, but like the fact that those two guys who are very dissimilar, maybe they're similar in age, have converged.

37:03You and Rick is maybe less surprising, but. But I think Rick and I probably converge less than you might think. You know what I mean? Like he, one of my favorite things to do when I visit him is to just sit and play songs. And I've never heard most of the songs he plays me and he hasn't heard most of the songs that I play for him. Also, I was just talking to someone about this and we were talking about kind of where we come from. And that's actually why I went down the path of talking about the rock and roll first side, because it's like, you kind of have to see the arena rock to appreciate the punk rock and, and also like I came from heavy metal, so I never got pop punk and, you know, that doesn't mean pop punk is bad.

37:43It just means that like, if you, if you, if you were into like, you know, Britney Spears, and then you discovered no effects, that makes sense to me. Right. Like, you know, whereas, you know, when I was, since I came from, you know, heavy, heavy, then, you know, I'm more likely, you know, so I think that we all just have this personal experience and you know you that that's why i think tier one to the individual is is really much more important for me you know all the music stuff i did digital music for 20 years and for me what was important was that we enabled people to do whatever they wanted to do with music i never wanted to be a music critic there's a there's a time for that you're sitting with friends you're like i love this record have you heard it you know you want to share but like i what i loved about winamp was you could just play anything you wanted to.

38:33And I don't care what you play. I just want you to love music. And so if you're loving it, that is, that is, that is fantastic. And I think that then the other side of it is like, it really should just be about sharing. Another, another way to put this is no three-star reviews. The only, like whenever, like that, that's what pisses me off about Rolling Stone. It's like every, you look through it. I don't know if it's still the case. I haven't looked at Rolling Stone in God knows how many years, but it used to be all three-star reviews. And I'm like, you guys are pussies. Three out of four or three out of five?

39:03Three out of five. Yeah. This is why I love the four star scale is you have to choose. You have to go thumbs up or thumbs down. Yeah. Which is all the, it's only, if you're, if you really want to do me a favor, if it's three stars, just leave it out. Who cares? There's only two things I care about. One is I didn't know about it and it's awesome. Awesome. Please tell me about that. The other is I might've wasted my time on it. I would, in the old days, it would be wasted my money on it. Right? Like, in other words, like, if that new record from that artist that I was probably going to buy really sucks, please warn me.

39:36Those are the only two things you need to do. This is kind of okay. Like, I don't have time for that. You know, I'm too busy trying to find the good stuff. That's the AI's right about it, man. Don't tell me something is mediocre. What is the point? Totally agree. But I would also say, don't tell me something is bad. Duh. Just tell me the good stuff. Really. Like people just talking about shit they don't like. It's really at this point, like, what is wrong with you? What's the point? Like, tell me stuff that, tell me something that's worth watching. I agree. We talked about it or at least we talked around it a lot.

40:12You've been a strong advocate that the internet is maybe a way I put it in the past is like, it's about niche at scale. It's not about the mainstream. There's an idea that you, I think, talked about with Rick a couple of interviews ago, which is the blockbuster versus the snowball. I'd love to hear you just riff on that briefly because I thought it was one of the more interesting cuts on this and it just like so well, it feels like it's every year that passes describing modern culture better. Yeah, and all credit goes on this goes to Umair Haak who wrote this piece called The Blockbuster Versus the Snowball and I think 2003, really prescient.

40:50There was actually something that came before that. There was somebody around 2000 who basically was saying that the popularity of Fox News was due to the internet. And the point was that, you know, if when you only have, when you have limited distribution, you have two newspapers in a town that to get the most viewership, they're going to drift toward the middle. But the point was, you know, well, when you have unlimited choice, then you've got to stake out a position. I actually think, and John Higgs, who's my favorite author, he has a contemporary theory on this to kind of bring this all the way to today.

41:26And it really does, you know, you really do ask yourself like, okay, how do you get the viewership, right? So again, limited distribution, two newspapers in a city. If you want the maximum viewership, you've got to be centrist, right? Well, now on the internet, if you want maximum viewership, what do you have to do? You have to be polarizing, right? And so I like the way John put it. I find it actually very optimistic because what he says is, is like those two centrist newspapers didn't really represent any of us. Right. Because they were more centrist than any of us as human beings actually are.

42:03Now, his theory now is that media is so polarizing that it doesn't actually represent any of us. Oh, it's optimistic in that way. It's optimistic in that way. Where we were deluded prior into thinking, because I was going to say it was more optimistic when they were converged because we got to all believe we were really similar, but that was a delusion. Yeah, it was an illusion. And by the way, maybe that is a positive way to live. I mean, I fell for it, right? I mean, I grew up in all white, Ghost Indiana watching Sesame Street and Different Strokes, and I really believed that we were all the same.

42:36And it took me moving to big cities you know, to realize like that racism was real. You know what I mean? Like I, I, I really, I didn't feel racism when I was growing up, um, because media taught me it was over. Um, so I, I agree there's something positive in that. I was talking with, with, you know, one of my, one of my daughters, oh, she was like, she made the comment, like, you know, everyone's mad about Bad Bunny at the Superbowl. And my, my thought was having the John Higgs thing in my head, My thought was, well, but are they? Like, in other words, like if I walk out on the street right now and start asking people, are you upset about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl?

43:12My guess is they're probably going to go like, no, Bad Bunny's cool. Right. You know, but, you know, the polarizing algorithm, which is polarizing by definition. Right. like intentionally would make you think that everybody's bad about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. So what Umair had said in 2003 with the blockbuster versus the snowball is the way he put it was it is media physics. I don't know if that was his term or mine, but that was the way I thought about it. In that, you know, because we went from limited distribution to unlimited distribution. So the media I grew up with is limited distribution.

43:52There's only 13 channels on television. There's only so much FM spectrum. There's only so many magazines you can fit at the Hallmark store, you know, like that limited distribution. But the Internet is I'm going to make, you know, Mr. T8 my balls dot com. And guess what? I have, you know, I'm I'm now memerific. Right. Like that's the that's the unlimited distribution Internet. Yeah, your TAM is$8 billion. Yeah, exactly. And so what Humair said is that, you know, in that, we're in the old world. When you're making a movie, you know, especially in the 80s or 90s, you're not trying to make Citizen Kane.

44:31You're trying to get people to go to theater A instead of theater B this weekend. So if you've got an extra$2 million, where do you invest it? Do you invest it into making the movie better or do you invest it into marketing, right? You're going to put it into marketing because I just need people to go to theater A instead of theater B. And then his point was, you know, in the new world, and he said this in 2003, he really predicted house of cards, I would say, right? Because he said, it's quality is hyper-efficient, not marketing. If you have the choice, you're gonna put that money into making the product better because the only thing that actually works is word of mouth.

45:09And you're competing at a global level. This is Reed Hastings talking about and Netflix competing with sleep, in a sense. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and if you listen to the history of rock and roll and 500 songs, which I recommend, you'll hear him say every episode, if you enjoyed this show, please tell just one person the best way for creative works to reach people is word of mouth. And that is definitely true today. I'm actually okay with that. I think that that's not a terrible outcome. What I, I don't want to coming back to this is what I was going to say earlier when I started saying that about people enjoying whatever music they want.

45:49All I've ever wanted is efficiency. And that seems silly, but I grew up with like this pop music radio that, or I could, I could recite for you so many songs that I dislike. Like, I know the whole song. I know all the lyrics. And then if you said, do you like that song? I would say, I hate that song, right? And that's because we were just inundated because of limited distribution. We were inundated with things we didn't want to hear. Yet there's incredible stuff that's not reaching us. And that inefficiency is always like what I've wanted is I've just wanted every, like, if you would like this, I want it to reach you.

46:29Kind of a beautiful cut on efficiency. efficiency like yeah yeah it's a meritocratic yeah in a sense and if you don't like it okay i don't want to force it on you i don't i don't want you to listen to it until you like except for twisted teens you're not going to like it the first time but by the 10th time you'll be hearing the melodies in your sleep that's happened to me a couple that happened to me with jesus for sure that happened you listen to uh cameron winter yes happened to me initially with him i was like i don't but i just couldn't i think by the way i i'm i definitely like i agree with you on cameron winter that was those were genuine earworms really creative i felt like the camera winter record is sort of like uh astral weeks for you know this year or something like it had that kind of like i didn't know when a song was over yeah you know sort of feeling yeah um like like on astral weeks and i i love the geese record i think like you know the i mean the the previous record i thought was great but i felt like it was almost like a bunch of talented musicians in new york that were sort of like, yeah, I was like, oh, well, that's the Radiohead reference and that's the Thin Lizzy reference.

47:34And like, you could feel it. It hadn't merged. Yeah, the new record, I mean, the latest one, I mean, I know people love to hate on them and I'm like, what are you talking about? This is genuinely challenging. Like you put the most challenging song at the front of the record. I love that. That's like a ween move. Yeah. And the one real like key is the guitar melodies get stuck in your head. Same for Twisted Teens, by the way. There's steel guitar. So you got two melodies. the guy the guy who writes the songs amazing melodies and then you've got the steel guitar in the background there's like this second melody i think that's why you hear it in your sleep it's really insidious but yeah the the but i i yes i think that that that thing yeezus by the way i hated that album when it came out i've that is a bit it grew on you oh yeah i mean it's yeah yeah but i literally hated it like i was like kanye i love this sucks can i tell you can you tell you my personal story with that record?

48:25First of all, I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but there's a project that I think that I would like to do. If anyone would like to do this with me, please contact me. I'm afraid I'm actually gonna have a lot of people contact me because we all have stories. The book is called People Who Tried to Help Kanye. I know at least a few. Yeah, because he is truly, truly talented, right? So the first time that I met Kanye, um Gaio Siri asked me if I would come over to his house and talk to Kanye because Kanye wanted and it was a guy was smart on this he's like I think what Kanye is trying to do is like his grand royal like will you come talk to him I'd love to so dark twisted fantasy had been out I just like dark twisted fantasy blew my mind yeah um much more palatable on the first list I think it's still yeah true and but that's why the story's good because so I go over there and um um sit with Kanye we have a pretty cool conversation interesting conversation actually one of the things talking about boxes he said I feel like music is a box and I need to get out of it he's like I'm done one thing one funny thing from that meeting with him is he he goes yeah I mean I made a record that's a 10 out of 10 on Pitchfork Dark Twisted Fantasy he said my punishment is that I have to do press and tour you know um he's like I made a record with Jay-Z he's like there's nowhere to go from here but down.

49:46And I was like, you made a record with Jay-Z? He's like, yeah, you don't read the news? And I was like, no. So you could put it on the timeline because I guess he'd made the record and people were talking about it, but I didn't know about it. And the record wasn't out yet. This is Watch the Throne? I watched the Throne, exactly. But I left Guy's house that day thinking, Kanye is never going to make music again because that's what he told me. He told me he wasn't going to make music anymore. Music is a box. So when he was in Chicago, he felt like he was in a box. He had to get out of the box. Music is a box.

50:16I've got to get out of the box. And I was like, wow, wow. Kanye's not going to make music anymore. Wow. Okay. That's how I left. I left there believing and feeling that. And one day Mike D told me, you know, Kanye's up at Rick's working on a record. Um, like, you know, Mike's in Malibu, Rick's in Malibu. And I was like, oh, really? Huh? I didn't think he was going to make music anymore. so the fact that what came out of that is yeezus makes perfect sense to me as soon as they like you make them unlike you because kissing people's ass is so unlike you only rapper compared to michael i mean yeezus is it's punk rock it is so fucking punk rock it is just from the moment it starts It's like, it's hard.

51:05It's difficult. And he is as good an MC on that record as almost ever. Think what? Although one Kanye thing, my daughter would be so bummed that I'm like big up in Kanye because like she's so disappointed with swastikas and, you know, for good reason. Yeah, I think you can hold both of those things. There's nothing cool about a swastika, man. Like, dude, come on. But if you're ever interested, like there was a Art of Rap, I think it's called. Search Art of Rap Kanye and watch him do, he does a verse from Dark Twisted Fantasy. I promise you never knew how good that verse was until you hear it acapella.

51:53i mean wow so anyway yeah i just wanted to say that easus is amazing and that we'll have to do a hotline gmail account for the uh for the book yeah exactly i mean i know this is a controversial topic it's not so controversial to me like i have sly stone tattooed on my arm like i like music and you know so i think uh you know we don't always um We don't always share political views with the people whose music we enjoy. Those are not, I don't know. Those are strange bedfellows. Do you think I'll ever make anything that good again?

52:37I don't know. I mean, I hope so.

52:42But I don't know. I mean, I think that this is, I mean, it's not for me to, not really for me to pontificate. To me, the more interesting question there is like, how does kind of the machinery interfere with the art? You know, and I think that's a lot of the story, right? I mean, so A, there's personal issues. You know, he's a human being with his own issues. At the same time, then there's like everything's around. That's why I think that the people who tried to help Kanye book, which is a joke, obviously. But I also think that that's one of the things that I find sad about it because there's so many people that really believed in his genius that wanted to help and that just couldn't.

53:32And that's unfortunate. I want to talk briefly about brand. we we briefly met uh in early 2020 and i was building this gaming thing and there's this line you said that stuck with me for years and years um and i don't even know if we totally followed the advice um as much as we should have but you said never forget you're selling culture not product what does that actually mean well i think that selling culture is a prerequisite to selling product is sort of the way that, that I thought about it. And I really, I really loved working at LVMH to see that. The great thing about LVMH brands is that in some ways they're caricatures of, of brands, you know, where, whereas, and what I mean by that specifically is, you know, I, I work with Dr.

54:21Martins today and you can, you could be excused for saying like, well, there's a lot of utility in what we sell, right? It's a black boot. It's comfortable. I you know what I mean like there's and and but but but that's actually like you're kind of doing yourself a disservice when you do that because you're missing you're missing the real reason that that motivates someone to buy something. there's a there's a great um human being david slew who worked with tony fidel for a very long time still works with tony and he taught me something about um about consumer electronics which is that the front of the box is for the heart the back of the box is for the head right and so you know the front of the box is that lizard brain like i want that yeah oh that's cool shiny object, right?

55:10The back of the box is, I've got to justify to my partner why I spent, you know,$500 on this. Uh, well, look, it's got blood, it's got blood, it's got this feature, and it's got that feature. Look, it's a great buy, you know? And, and so I think, but it's that same thing, right? You're selling the part that touches you first, right? And then once you've crossed that barrier, well, now I can sell you the product. It's also funny. It's telling that Apple products have very little on the back of the box. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, the Apple thing over the past 20 years is just... Crazy. Yeah. You couldn't have...

55:49I mean, in fact, I think that's a 20 years interesting timeline to look at it. Because if you'd have told me in 2006 that... If you'd have described the iPhone to me, you know, said there's a mostly proprietary platform that's going to take 30%, you know, from anybody who wants to have an app on their platform, I would have said, that's not the internet. You know, the internet is like open and available to anyone. And we're about open source and we're about, you know, open access and blah, blah, blah. And I would just would have bet against it. I'd have bet against it all day long. And obviously I'd have been very wrong.

56:27um but yeah i think it's a there's so many so many lessons lessons in that i think though the bigger lesson in in apple is the the um clayton christensen one the you know the when the technology is not yet good enough the integrated solution always wins and they had that combination of software and hardware that you know a company like sony never knew how to do the funny thing is that I would agree with you. And there's this classic, I don't know if you've ever read, Ben Thompson has this piece, what Clayton Christensen got wrong about the iPhone not getting compressed from the bottom. And basically, it was almost both of those things.

57:07Yeah, it's really unlikely thing to your point in so many ways. No, I mean, and by the way, like it's super personal for me because when I was at Yahoo in the 2000s, you know, we were, our, our kind of our whole MO was, yeah, yeah, yeah. Apple's killing it right now, but the disintegrated solution comes next. Right. And so like, you know, I, I took the trip to Japan with Dave Goldberg in 2005 to try to convince Sony to join Yahoo and Microsoft on the fight against, you know, the disintegrated solutions that were going to, you know, ultimately overtake the iPod. But I think that that's actually what Apple, I think it is Clayton Christensen.

57:49I would love to talk to Ben about this because... What Clayton Christensen says is when the technology is not yet good enough, the integrated solution wins. As the technology becomes better, the integrated solution must move upmarket to solve bigger problems. Now, I think that they did create a lock-in with FaceTime, iMessage, AirDrop, which has prolonged that. And that's probably the lesson is that there are ways of creating network effects that create lock-in. Well, and frankly, to go back to the question, it's also a cultural object. How much of it is iMessage and how much of it is having an iPhone?

58:35you could debate. I'm sure it depends on the person. But the fact that they've created a product that ultimately is like a vanity object in some sense and this ultimate utility object is kind of strange. Also on the brand note, you've kind of classic line, maybe it's from you or maybe it's from Arnaud, but storytelling plus time equals value. I thought about this a lot. And I thought about this a lot while we were building this gaming thing, in part because we had so much of the brand was, we had the brand and then we had all these influencers and creators underneath it. Um, we live in the age of the individual in so many ways.

59:09Um, how can brands accumulate value or maybe, maybe accumulate meaning in a way that people can't, because it's so much easier for Mr. Beast to get the low hanging fruit of attention compared to a brand or a label or whatever. And it feels an individual, not a brand in this conversation. Well, so this introduced an interesting sub question, which is, um, notably, uh, perhaps most of LV's, LVMH's signature brands are, were originally namesakes. Um, and so maybe there's an element of that, but I don't know, the metaphor I always, I always use is like, it's really cool that Louis Vuitton is like this camera and Virgil can hold that camera for a little while.

59:53And then Pharrell can come in and hold that camera or whoever. Um, Jonathan Anderson comes in and holds the Dior camera and you get a, it's Dior, it's super Dior and it's Jonathan. Um, to me, Mr. Beast is not that maybe at some point you, you talk with Rick Rubin about this at one point where you're like, could this be done with the Beatles or with Daft Punk or something? But it seems very few new brands are being created. It seems to me. Um, and it almost feels like brands have this lendiness that you can't even like there's the, I realize this is a very convoluted question, but there's this tension between if your goal is to succeed in the near term or even the medium term, you're way better building around a single individual.

1:00:33If your goal is to last 10 years or a hundred years, you're way better having a brand or a label or whatever. Hmm. I love this question. I don't, I don't find it convoluted. I think it, I think it is like, it is that challenging of a question. I think, um, I think actually maybe it always starts around an individual. And I think that you're right that, I think there's always few brands that get created relative to the number of people who try. It's just like music where you're always gonna have more aspirants than you have success stories. And, you know, the winners are maybe also somewhat unlikely, has to do with timing, has to do with other things.

1:01:12You know, in other words, like, you know, you're right, like the brands that you're talking about probably did start out as individuals, right? And then over time, they live on. You know, I had that conversation with Rick and I really, I would love to see people do this with music. Probably harder with music than a product. Yeah, I think though that like, you know, for example, the Beatles is just a great example where, you know, that the Beatles could come to represent love, you know, like they could be just spreading love and joy, right? And also, yeah, I mean, Louis Vuitton gone a long time, Dior gone a long time.

1:01:48Christian Dior gone a long time, yet the brands are bigger than ever. So first of all, I think there is something mechanical to that. You know, if you look at, you know, brand marketing for a great brand, and I would say, and Louis Vuitton is interesting, right? Which is, which are there more people of in the world? People who love Louis Vuitton or dislike Louis Vuitton? It actually might be dislike. I don't know the answer to the question, to be honest, and that's not a diss at all. I'm just saying that like, that's okay. You know, you have to remember that, you know, Ben, I don't know, is the wealthiest man in Europe and probably 85 % of the population are not his customers.

1:02:23Right. So, um, that's okay. Like you don't need to, you, you, you, the goal is not to appeal to everyone, right? The goal is to appeal strongly. His product, especially so. Yeah. But I think for all brands, I don't, I don't think even when, look, even when this to go back to Mr. Beast, perhaps this is the tension. And, and also I, I, Mr. Beast doesn't appeal to everyone, but he's trying to i don't know is he i would i'm not sure i think it'll look when when the most popular it's like oh everybody loves britney spears you know like when i was running yahoo music but still if we put her on the home page like less than 30 percent of people would click right you put a picture of a dog and a cat hugging on the home page and 70 percent of people would click right so i just think it culturally like culture never appeals to everyone you know great seth godin quote if you should find yourself a nickel anytime you use the word everyone or nobody because the moment you say it, every word that comes after it is wrong, right?

1:03:17It's not true. There's never an every, there's nothing for everyone, nothing's for nobody. And so then what you're doing is you're trying to make a business out of what you love to do. I always point to satisfy because I've had like a closeup view of watching Breece build Satisfy Running and he's just had incredible patience way more than I would have had if I were doing it. He had a great thing I heard him say to another brand, a young brand owner recently where he said, look, if you think now's your time, then you've already missed your window. You always, as the brand, you always have to have in mind that your time is tomorrow.

1:04:01Your time is yet to come. And I just thought that's such an amazing way of looking at it. Because what that means is that you have an expansive vision and you know it can go somewhere else. The other is like when you look at the marketing of a Louis Vuitton and you look at, you go, well, look, they do magazines, they do outdoor, they do online, they do Google shopping, they do all this. What works? You know, where's the leverage? And when you do the research, the answer is everything, you know, at different levels. Of course, they all have different ROI, but they all have positive ROI, which means it's literally a machine where you put money into the marketing and it makes the brand bigger for tomorrow.

1:04:42And, and that, and so I would argue that nothing is compromising tomorrow. Yeah, exactly. And, and so you, and, and, and you have to have that very long time horizon. I think the, the biggest problem that people have is they, they don't really understand what it means to build a brand and building a brand is like building an artist. You know, artists are rarely popular in their lifetime. Well, I mean, like I golden goose is a, is a great example. I was introduced to golden goose through Virgil, right? Because Virgil was a golden goose fan. I didn't know golden goose before. I don't know the exact numbers.

1:05:13I think I've, I think I maybe talked about it on Rick's podcast, but they, you know, they, it was a slow go for 15 years. Like, let's say it, let's say it took 12 to 15 years to get to 20 million, just roughly. I don't know if it's 15 or 20 or like, you know, order of magnitude. And then over the next 15 years, it went to 500 million. Deep in the compound. You know? Yeah, exactly. So, but I think that to me, that's also generational, right? It's, it's like, it, it kind of takes a generation to prove itself. And then what - You can't grow too fast. Can, it's impossible. So anyone who thinks there was an entrepreneur who started a fashion brand here in Paris a few years ago.

1:05:53And, um, I sat next to her, she's a good friend, but I sat next to her at a, at a dinner, you know, and I, you know, the brand was going okay, but I was like, how are things going? And she said, there's something you said to me when I was raising money that rings in my head every day. And I was like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. What was it? And she said, you said to me, fashion brands are not venture businesses. And what I meant by that was, you know, venture has a certain time horizon, but to build a brand, and I don't think it's fashion brand. I think it's brand. This is like a generation. Like, and you're not really there until a Virgil can say, yo, that was my shit when I was 15.

1:06:37Like, that's how long it takes. Yeah. You know, it's almost like 10 years is the, you're, it's not even a conversation until you're 10 years. It's not even a conversation. Because you have to have, yeah, one other thing. Look at the row, Mary-Kate and Ashley, who took them seriously? They had to stick around long enough that people were like, I guess you guys aren't going away, you know? And then it's like, oh, well now we can look at the quality. Right. Before it was the gimmick. Before it was a gimmick. And like, maybe you got lucky and like, oh, I'm sure you can't do it again next year. Yeah.

1:07:08But after that, like 15 year mark, people are like, you know, yeah. It looks like you guys know how to do this, you know? And so I just think that that's human nature. Also, by the way, and I'll tell you, like, you know, knowing Brees satisfy, I mean, I talked to Brees today because I talked, because I knew he was going to go to the Kevin Morby show last night. And I was like, how was the show? He was like, oh, I gave my tickets away. I was in the office till 11. He's 11 years in on this brand. Right. And you find me somebody that works harder than Brees. They don't exist. Right. And like people, people discount that people think like, oh, well he's just like, you know, how, how hard can it be to make running shorts?

1:07:51You know, how hard can it be? But no, he's like steering that ship 24 seven with a singular vision that, you know, no matter if it was up or down yesterday, it's on tomorrow. You know, like people don't, most people simply don't have what it takes for people like that obviously him at a at a very kind of targeted focus level maybe someone like bernard bernardo no at the kind of like larger scale the defining trait at least as you're describing his patients i think that sounds right when and how my assumption is certainly for bernard but probably for breeze too is that there's a intensity and aggression that shows up amidst the patients.

1:08:38For sure. Is that true? And if so, yeah. How does that, how does that show up? I think that's a, that's a, that's a great, like what a unique combination of traits. Right. And that's why I kind of look at them with a lot of awe because I don't have the patience, you know? And also I think partly coming from tech that, that that's a, you know, like where, you know, tech doesn't love history or time. I mean, look at what we've been through in AI this year, where it's like, we went from token maxing to token economizing in 30 days, right? Like the whiplash is severe in our industry. And I, and I'll also, by the way, that's why a lot of those kinds of people have a very difficult time in this industry, right?

1:09:13Like you're either, you know, not everyone's not built for everything. Um, I realized that just being a startup and I've done 13 startups. And what I realized is I'm kind of built for it. You know, I'm built for like, guess what? I'm coming in tomorrow, I'm working hard and I don't care if yesterday was shit. I'm coming in today with a smile on my face and I'm telling everybody everything's going to be great, right? Like they're not everybody is built is, is built for everything. Um, but I, I think that, yeah, those people that are, that are great at, at, um, at brand, they, they do have, I mean, Jonathan Anderson is certainly one of those people where he has all of the creativity, but he's also, he's competitive, he's intense, he's hardworking.

1:09:52Like those are, you know, there is definitely a special mix of traits that makes people great in that world. And there are very few people that really have it. The Gallianos and the Jonathan Andersons and the Brice Partouches are few and far between, I think. You said you aren't patient. My sense is that in some sense, you are definitely impatient. But in another sense, you've actually been very patient, particularly on the technology side. You've had the right level of patience to see out maybe things that felt inevitable to you, but certainly weren't inevitable on an obvious time horizon and not the least of which crypto and streaming music or internet music, really?

1:10:37Like you basically wrote internet music for 15 years, maybe longer. Yeah. Do you, yeah. I don't know. I, I, how do you, you, you clearly are patient in some dimension. that that's maybe the the obvious one because you know it's it's but but also i think there's just personal things in that right like it i didn't know how to do a business at all right so the fact that someone wanted to pay me to make websites was just like okay great right and then all this dot-com stuff was happening and i was like what's going on like i don't even know what public company means you know i that's not part of you know my mom you know worked in a factory and then became a nurse and my dad was a, was a fireman.

1:11:17Like we didn't, we didn't have like investments in public companies in my family really, you know, and I didn't know what it even meant. So I just never had that. Like, um, you know, I just didn't know what, what else, you know, you know, so what was I doing? You did it for another 12 years after you had already. Right. But I mean, so the, before the doc, during the dot-com bubble, I was making music apps after the dot-com bubble, I was making music apps simply because I didn't know how to do anything else. And I was just passionate about it, I think, to be honest. But let's say Yahoo, you're trying to do it at Yahoo.

1:11:46You're trying to do a$5, all you can eat, subscription, music. You're trying to do Spotify at Yahoo in 2002? 2004. 2004. And then you guys sell to Beats or just all to Apple, excuse me, in 2013. My sense is it wasn't like that was the only thing you could do for the next eight years. Yeah. That's a, it's a, it's a good question. I wouldn't say it was patience though. So I think it was because it was at the time it was frustrating, you know, like when I was at Yahoo Music and I'm arguing with Leroy Cohen about music streaming rights, like that wasn't patience. That was genuinely frustrating. You have a great thing on your blog about the context talk.

1:12:26Yeah. 2007 or 2008. It's kind of like right in the middle of that period. You're like, come on, people. That one keeps coming back to me. The content versus context thing. Yeah. That's a, that I was definitely onto something there that is like, I didn't realize that I would still be thinking about that one today. But yeah, the, well, another way to look at it is like, I've always just tried to find like, what's the technology people are gonna hate next? You know, from like, you know, file sharing to, you know, to streaming, to crypto, to now AI. Like, what's the technology people are gonna be really angry about tomorrow?

1:13:00How do I get into that one? That was never intentional. I just like new disruptive things. And it turns out that new disruptive things are often disliked. But I mean, look, music is, and obviously I talk a lot about music here because it's the only thing I'm qualified to talk about. Like I'm genuinely qualified to have a conversation about music. The rest of it, I'm like sort of armchair, you know, armchair historian. But so I think that's why the music one makes a lot of sense. and also that's why I'm very lucky that I got to come work at LVMH because I'd also reached a level in the music business I had three nice outcomes in music which is you know that's what people look for people that have won before and I'd won a couple times so you kind of did it I mean from my perspective I did what I wanted what I set out to do like I built this thing in college that was a streaming you search for music you could stream it and it was the early 90s.

1:13:59And then in 2015, it was on every iPhone. I couldn't have been more proud. I was like, that's a career. I've had a career. I could be done now. And I would be, I'd be quite satisfied with what I did. That's my point is you were patient enough to see that through whether or not it was full. I would say lucky enough to see that through really, because it was not my idea. It was Dr. David Fenske at the Indiana University Music Library who gave me a job with the task of move the reserve listing materials to, you know, from behind the desk to workstations throughout the library. I kept doing that over and over for a lot of years.

1:14:34There were a lot of people who cared way more about my career than I did. John Silva, probably Mike from the BC Boys, Jim Evans, Dave Goldberg, Rob Lord, and ultimately Jimmy. I remember Jimmy calling me. I was locked out of my own house. It's sitting on my back steps. My phone rings. It's a 310 number. I answer it. Jimmy, Ian, what are you doing? Ian, you're a major league player. Why are you playing in the minors? And I'm like, oh, Jimmy, I'm like, I work my ass off of my startup, man. Like, why don't you just buy my startup? Why are you being mean to me? I'm already locked out of my house, dude.

1:15:15Like, why are you yelling at me? He's like, get out of the minor leagues. You know, but my point is, is like Jimmy saw something in me that I didn't see. Um, so that's why I would say I was lucky to be able to do it much more than I was, you know, visionary or, or, or patient. I had, I had something. And, and, and I think that that is, I, I really have a lot of pride in that because I think one of the things that Jimmy Ivey and, and Ben, I don't know, share is they see something in people, you know? Um, it was, it was, uh, you know, the story of Ben, I don't know, hiring John Galliano is that, you know, Galliano comes into his office as it was described to me, it was leather vest, no shirt, dreadlocks, flip-flops.

1:16:02Mr. Arnault's assistant tries to send him away. And Mr. Arnault's like, no, no, no, I've heard good things about this guy. Send him in. Mr. Arnault hires him on the spot. Um, you know, I watched the, you know, Tom Petty and and Bruce Springsteen documentaries, and you see Jimmy yelling at them. And it makes, it gives me like a pit in my stomach because I know what it's like to be yelled at by Jimmy. But then I'm like, hey, I was yelled at by Jimmy too. And that's what Jimmy does is he takes people that he thinks have promise and he gets them to do things that even they didn't know they were capable of.

1:16:38And so the fact that people like Jimmy Iovine and Ben, I don't know, have like tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, I think you can do more. That's kind of like the real honor, I think. You are someone who's spent your career communicating these new technologies that might be inevitable in some sense, but are certainly not here yet to the world. And I think you've done a good job of communicating, particularly outside of the existing kind of community it's in. my sense is that while there are some notable exceptions uh most people in the technology world are decidedly bad at this talking to the rest of the world um yeah why do you think that is and what do you think has made you good at it i mean it's really funny in ai these days right like yeah i feel like you know like that you you would think that like the ai people they should start with like let me tell you why this is going to benefit humanity and then and then like once Once I've told you, like, look, this is going to be incredible for, you know, for learning.

1:17:42It's going to bring new opportunities to, you know, people around the world that didn't have them before. Like, once we've gotten through all that, we can say, and also there are some risks. And then let's talk about those risks. And it seems like the heads of the Frontier Labs have just gone the other route. Now... Started to change the tone, but man. Yeah, yeah. Sam has started to reverse course a bit. And, you know... Maybe part of it is they just weren't talking to anyone. like Sam was writing these blog posts in 2018 and nobody, yeah, nobody was listening. And yeah, yeah. So, um, but I think, I think for me, like, um,

1:18:17I, first of all, I've always worked with artists and, and that, that's, that's also easier, right? It's like, I can help, I want to help your artistic vision come to life. This is in service of that. Yeah. It's in service of that. And that can't possibly be wrong. You know what I mean? Like, there's no way it can be wrong. It's a beautiful thing about art art is an incredible shield right as soon as you said it's art it automatically doesn't appeal to everyone and so it doesn't matter if you like it or not right so um i think that that's one thing also um the the punk rock thing does come into it a bit because for me technology has always been i've always been interested in empowerment of through technology and i don't mean that in some like corny political way i just mean like i didn't have a voice and i didn't have a way to reach the people that might like what I do.

1:19:06And now I do, you know, that's what I mean by that. And those things are like quite easy to explain in a way. And they're also easy to identify with if you're talking to the right people. You know, I always say that like, if you ever made a fanzine with a Sharpie and a photocopier, then you understood the internet the moment you saw it, you know, but that's not everybody, you know, but those are the people that I talked to. I see. You know what I mean? I'm like, hey, look, you can use - Those weren't obvious tech people, critically. Right, exactly. But they were people that still kind of got - Were primed to get it.

1:19:42Yeah, they were primed to get it. Exactly, they were primed to get it. I do think that's a very key part of my worldview. And I realize this more as I get older because I think that where I really don't connect with people is when, And because if people sort of think about like mass culture, then there's no way for me to get my message across. And we're probably not going to relate to one another either. It's back to the guys talking about when we're going to go back to the center. Yeah, exactly. Like that's kind of like, but I think that that's probably true. Like I grew up like mail ordering records and watching skateboard videos on VHS, right?

1:20:20So therefore the internet like spoke to me. Now, if you loved like top 40 radio, then you were the person that was like, why do we need the internet right right um and so i think that's the other that's the other part of it to me and i and i i've i heard a great quote um uh sol khan from khan academy was on david eagleman's podcast last year he did like a two-parter on ai and education which was super good and sol khan just said this offhanded remark that i i think about every day which is he said Khan Academy is great for the 15 % of people who are curious. And there's some other stat. I'm going to get it precisely wrong, but the idea you'll get, which is that, you know, I can't remember the numbers, 85 % of people die within 20 miles of where they were born.

1:21:10Yeah. Okay. So does this mean that 85 % of people are NPCs? You know, on some level that like, if you're not a curious person, Yeah. Right. then the things I say probably aren't going to appeal to you. So I think that that - The world is motivation constrained, for sure. Exactly. We've gotten, I struggle with this though, because on one hand, Balaji has this thing he talks about, it's like the Ramanujan problem, which is the Ramanujan was happened to be, is this mathematician who was kind of Einstein, like brilliant person. And he happened to be discovered in India by some British professor. And it was like pure luck that he got pulled out and turned out to be an Einstein-like figure.

1:21:52And Balaji's Ramanujan problem is like, how do we make sure all those people are discovered? It's kind of your thing, which is 15%, but they're not even, yes, it's efficiency. Conversely though, like there's a, this relates to agency thing, which is like maybe there's agentic people and there's non-agentic people. Although my theory is that it's actually closer to like, Elon Musk is a 10 out of 10 on agency. And a lot of people are one, but you sit somewhere on the gradient. And critically, at least one of the things that gets me excited about technology and media and so many other things is that you can move people up.

1:22:22Like going and living in San Francisco will raise your bar. And so I totally agree with you on one hand. Like just look at the numbers. It's so clear that Khan Academy, like access to education is no longer the bottom. There's some wrinkles here. You need to have an interconnection. You need to be able to have the time to study, whatever. But it's not how it used to be. And I'm like, man, are we just going to let 85 % of people, like I want to go shake them. Yeah, that's my monologue. No, I agree with you. But I mean, we know this in our lives in so many ways, right? You can't help somebody who doesn't want to be helped.

1:22:59My positive model for humanity is that every single one of us has magic and imperfection. and then the other side of that is you choose what to see you know i had a you know you have a super frustrating experience in a coffee shop or a airport or whatever right and you can choose to see the imperfection or you can choose to see the magic in that moment and for me like one of you know my practices in life is to see the magic and i think we need that the place we need that the absolute most is like in our personal lives and with our partners and our business partners, you know, I mean, look, I've, I've been divorced twice.

1:23:46Right. And, um, you, if you're, if you're looking for something, you're going to find it. Right. And so if what you want to see in me is the imperfection, there are plenty of them. You're going to find them all day long. if you want to see the magic it's there too and and you can you know so you really it's like we we all choose so i i think that on that 85 thing i think that is how we bring it out of people right is by seeing their magic and pointing them at their magic yeah yeah um totally and i think that's where education is important too and where you know the way that we educate you know the fact that we're still educating people for industrialization is a huge disservice.

1:24:36The fact that we aren't investing in different kinds of education, the fact that only the rich are going to get to go to alpha school. Like, you know what I mean? These are, I think these are some of the biggest, these are where we just have a really simple choice as society. We know that, you know, investing in education leads to a more successful society. And I think this is what creates the 85 % problem, because if you are resourceful, then you're like, well, I'm not learning what I want to learn in school, but look at this Khan Academy. I can do everything. I can learn all this stuff I didn't know before.

1:25:12But yeah, I think the education is probably the only actual path out of what you just said. Why are you so into interfaces? maybe you wouldn't put it that way but there is a through line of your career that is maybe the lvmh side a little less so but it seems that your particular cut on technology is like i'm going to help people maybe part of it is that it's these obscure technologies that aren't quite yet but yeah i think that i think that you know the best example of this is like when i when i came here to ledger and i i told tony fidel you know i'm going to go run the consumer business at Ledger and he said, there is no consumer business.

1:25:53That's not B to C, it's B to G, business to geek. And your job is to build a consumer business. So that speaks to what you just said, which is like, you're going in early when there is no interface. I mean, when I started building for the web, there were no background colors. There was no CSS. There was no layout. It was like an image was a character and like, you know, you, you laid it out like as if you You could lay out the letter A, or you could lay out a GIF, not even a JPEG. So I think when you're starting in those days, then you're like, now you're in the business of building a better UI.

1:26:29It's just kind of what you're in the business of, whether you wanna be or not. But also I think since you are trying to bring the technology to more people, I think it's hilarious that when we thought we were doing big stuff at yahoo in the early 2000s and we had you know the number one music video service before youtube and the number one radio service before pandora you know we were like we're we're huge right but like you're just getting people to listen to music on a windows pc like what kind of interface is that compared to i remember the first time that i heard that people were like just driving to work with pandora on in their car you can't imagine how absurd that sounded you're like wait first of all you're getting that good a bandwidth to your car like whoa second of all what's your data plan dude like like can you do that for what two days and and then it's over like you know i mean that was just insane yeah the kids are never gonna know how good yeah it's just like man the fact that i can like download lossless you know while i'm walking to work is just i remember counting text messages oh my god brutal yeah i mean it's yeah people it's people can't can't remember can't understand but yeah so i think when you're in those days then you're in the business of interface right because i mean i can't even tell you like i i built like music app just trying to play a song on like an old flip phone we're talking like 2002 you know like a phone that like, what do they call it?

1:28:05WEP, you know, you know, so, and, but, you know, at that point though, you are like, okay, I don't even say it's interface. You're at that point, you're just like, can I make it work? Like, is it possible? But yeah, that's, and I like that part of it. Like, I feel like we're there with AI right now and I'm having more fun right now than ever in my career. but a lot of it is like can this work and then you know you know we're it's funny like we're talking with one of the guys on the team yesterday because we're finding things in cursor that are just don't work at all and you're like this company just sold the space has 60 billion and you know what i mean like but we're just in such the early days you know we're yeah it's so new we're we're in and by the way you you have on one end of the spectrum you have a thing that doesn't work at all on the other end of the spectrum you have the craziest capacity that has like ever been had.

1:29:00Ever. Like you can't even imagine that it's real. Which kind of explains why some of the things might not work. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is just like where we've been with AI for a while and, you know, where you're like, how can you be so stupid and so outrageously smart? Now, you know, the outrageously smart is like, you know, starting to really dominate the feeling, right? Whereas a year ago, but a year ago, it wasn't at all. I mean, I remember, you know, coding with AI last summer super well and it was like so frustrating like fist on mouse like oh what are you doing why did you do that and and then it was you know end of last year that it became like no fucking way wow yeah get on wow hang on yeah well i want to talk about the agent stuff but maybe first on the kind of broader theme of of ledger and crypto you we talked about that old piece about convenience and your kind of argument is like convenience, there's so much hubris, like you have to trust that people ultimately are going to go where the thing is convenient.

1:30:04It seems to me that consumers have voted with their feet, certainly against privacy and to a lesser extent against security in favor of convenience. Ledger almost by definition is a product that is about offering, hopefully offering you a fair amount of convenience, but really saying like security is, we're going to be almost ideological. How do you think about that? Like, how is that, depending on who you asked in crypto for the last, and maybe soon in AI, like for the last 10 years, there's always been the people who say, we're going to find a way. And the other people are just saying like, there's just no way everybody's going to have a hardware wallet.

1:30:40I don't think we've ever thought that everybody's going to have a hardware wallet. Again, like find yourself a nickel anytime you use the word everybody, right? And also remember that, you know, the richest man in Europe is not trying to address, you know, the majority of the market. So that, that's never been my, never been my vision. My, my vision has always been that it's a very big sky and, you know, you want to make the, you want to make the premium product and you want, and you want, and, and like a, it's just better business, right? Like leading people down the wrong path is ultimately bad business.

1:31:13You know? So if you're, if you're making a software wallet and convincing people that it's secure and you're kind of leading them into danger, then ultimately they'll get wrecked and that's just a bad way to have a consumer relationship. And I also think that like, you know, the strength of Ledger has been that it's always, it has been ideological, that there's no compromise on security or self-custody. Those are like the two tenets. And it's really handy to have those because, you know, there are lots of times over the last 12 years, like we're kind of the only company in crypto that's been saying exactly the same thing for 12 years, right?

1:31:52Like the wind blows, people move from this to that. There's lots of things that we could have done. You know, we could have done software wallets, we could have done MPC, you know, but we've always said, look, that doesn't meet our security standards. And also, you know, doesn't mean our self custody standards. We've said like, if we stick to those two things, we think that those things, there's a cohort that will always find those things valuable. Interestingly, the choices that we made on those play perfectly into now where digital security needs to go broadly. Because that's another lens on it, would be to say that actually what Ledger is, is it's a digital security company where crypto was the need for digital security.

1:32:39So what is Ledger really? it's a piece of hardware with a secure element chip in it. So it's the same chip that's in your credit card or your passport. The one that's in your credit card protects the secrets of the bank. The one that's in your passport protects the secrets of the government from you, by the way, that's the point. Like you're not supposed to have access. And the one that's in your ledger protects your secrets. So you have secrets as an individual. If you think you don't have secrets, then please email me the password to your email. I'd be happy to see it because I know you don't have secrets.

1:33:12So just email me your password to your email and I'll be happy to validate the fact that you don't have any secrets for you. We all have secrets, right? And we deserve a right to privacy. Privacy is normal. And that's fundamentally what Ledger does. It uses this technology that was created to protect secrets from us. And it uses it for us. It's as if your credit card has an operating system, which is over the air upgradable and you can load arbitrary apps on. So you can make security applications. So, you know, if you build this level of security 12 years ago, 2014, what's the application, you know, for that ledger, I'm sorry, for that level of security?

1:33:56And that's where, you know, Bitcoin was the first and then other digital assets come after that. And by the way, I'm still a Bitcoin bull. I'm still a digital art bull. These things mean a lot to me for the same reason that they did 10 years ago. And, you know, but there's also, if you think about it as the only operating system and open development environment on top of smart card technology on the planet, then in an era where, you know, it's funny because last October I stood on stage here in this building in Paris and I said, an agentic future is coming. and an agentic future where you give your passwords, your identity and your credit card to an agent is a security nightmare.

1:34:46And it was just crickets. Like nobody heard - I was gonna say October was like right before. Yeah, nobody heard me. And now this year you've got Marc Andreessen running around saying, we are poised for a computer security apocalypse, right? Yeah, Mythos is gonna, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So here we are, you know, in the computer security apocalypse. So having a better security solution, having, in other words, an operating system, an open development environment on top of smart card technology is extremely valuable. You build something with that ideology and then you end up finding different use cases for it.

1:35:25Why did you, why this from LVMH? That whole ideology story is great. hopefully somebody's going to build it ledger was already going like yeah we you know for me covet had had something to do with it because i actually my story on this is quite specific in that you know there's there's someone in my office at topspin parker top brooks um who told me about bitcoin very early i took a look at it and i was like this is amazing but like the government governments won't allow this to exist that was my take you know but that means actually i went deep on it enough to like, have that feeling. Oh yeah.

1:36:07This, like, I was like, I get this and this threatens sovereignty. Right. And so that will be, I mean, I've, I've lived through like Napster Nutella. I'm like, they can shut that down. And my lesson from Napster Nutella wasn't like you can stop the code, but you can stop any business from being in the business of this. Right. So I can't stop, you know, the government can't stop Nutella. They can't stop pirate Bay, but they can say that, hey, guess what? You're not in the business of Nutella or Pyra Bay. So that was kind of my take on it. Then there was a point which it got kind of like big enough where I was like, hmm, this is going to be hard to stop.

1:36:41Like, this is big enough. And that to me was around like 2013, 2014 is kind of when I felt that. And I bought the like programming Bitcoin book, and like I came at it from like a developer mindset. um but you know i was like i'm still like well you know okay well we'll like kind of see what this does but during covid i was like this is it like the technology's here the technology's good enough we had these ideas about smart contracts and stuff but like now it actually exists you know and you know you've the money money printer is like fully on like we were in And I remember, you know, the CFO of LVMH telling me, yeah, we are in unprecedented territory.

1:37:28Wow. Two trillion of stimulus in the US, a trillion in Europe or whatever the numbers were. But like, no one knew what comes next. It's never been done before. Like, what are we looking at here? But I was just like, oh yeah, this is the time. And by the way, we were right. You know, you look at 2021, you know, here at Ledger, we just couldn't keep the product in stock. You know, it was so crazy. And you had all of these like other narratives, you know, you had all of the altcoin narratives, you had the NFT narrative. There was just a lot, you know, a lot of, a lot of interesting possibility about what, what this could be used for.

1:38:04And I don't, I think it's revisionist history to say otherwise, you know? So, and also like for me talking to Pascal, I'd made some friends here in Paris. One of them was Pascal Gauthier, first investor in Ledger. Other one was Tony Fidel, who's, you know, inventor of the iPod, co-inventor of the iPhone, creator of Nest. And we were talking about like, what could this be? You know, and the interesting thing is that now I'm having like a bit of a deja vu moment relative to, you know, when we were, when we thought we were building interesting things on the internet, but we were only building them for Windows PCs.

1:38:38And then 10 years later, and there's a proliferation of iPhones. You're like, oh, this is why we built it. I'm having a very similar thing now where it's like, yeah, we built the best digital security platform. And the first application of that was crypto. And now we are entering, you know, again, what Marc Andreessen calls a computer security apocalypse. And, you know, there is for sure a use case for this technology in this agentic world. And the interesting thing, to come back to your original question about ideology, is many of the decisions that we made have turned out to be very valuable in the AI world, where the fact that every time you connect a ledger, it phones home to an HSM, which checks, is this the firmware I'm expecting?

1:39:19Is this the chip I'm expecting? That gives you proof of human. It's the basis for our technology for proof of human. um you know the fact that you have a secure screen and we've never compromised on the secure screen allows you to approve a complex transaction that an agent is signing which is something that like a yubi-key couldn't do for kind of getting to pick all this fruit yeah exactly you know you've you've made you've made decisions for ideological reasons in the past but it turns out that they paid dividends today and that that's like it's cool quite encouraging yeah um you know to be honest you've been at ledger i think for six years five and a half you've spent a lot of your career in these sort of cycles that equate to roughly five years um ledger's come a long way this other stuff is starting to work one could have taken the view that now would be the time for the next thing you've instead taken on a new role at ledger well i would argue that is the next thing right i mean And so, you know, when I was at Yahoo, there was a moment where I was like, okay, I'm going to do something else.

1:40:28That thing I do might be at Yahoo. And I looked at that. And I also looked at things outside and I left. It was similar at LVMH. You know, it was possible that my next job at LVMH was at LVMH. When I started at LVMH, I told them, I said, you know, I think this is a 10-year job and you should have me do it for five. Because, you know, after five, you've heard all my jokes, you know? Like, I think that's normal. Like you've added to it what you're going to add to it. That's a journey with the company, your point is. Exactly, yeah. I think that it's great to have, you know, if somebody's been in a role for five years, you probably really have gotten out of them what they're going to bring to that role.

1:41:07And so now it's actually great to have someone else come in because they're going to bring something different, you know? So, and if you get somebody really complimentary, you get somebody even better, you know, that I think it's a really good thing for a company. I think similarly for me here, I came in to look after the consumer business. We've grown a lot over that time. We've gone from, you know, kind of these devices that look like USB sticks to these really nice touchscreen devices that are much easier to use. Actually, like we've achieved the goal of like ease of use with, you know, with a secondary security device.

1:41:41And we've gone from a business that was kind of 0 % services to 50 % services. So buy, sell, swap, stake, lend, credit card, all of these services that you put on top of it. So we really accomplished something over that time. And then it probably is good for the company to have, you know, somebody who wants to come prove they can do it better than me come in. And that's a great thing. That's the way it works at LVMH as an example, right? If you're not performing as a CEO, they will bring in a new CEO. And you know what that CEO wants to do is to prove they can do it better than you. And that's great dynamic for the company, for the shareholders.

1:42:19It's not a personal thing. It's like, that's the dynamic that works for the shareholders. And for me, look, I, I, um, I've been delivered this incredible gift in my life. I'm an old command line nerd. Like I'm ambidextrous. I know VI and Emacs key bindings. And that's just where I, I'm an old sysadmin. That's where I come from. Um, and I, you know, like I started, you know, I had a, I used to have an RS6000 under my desk and a next on my desk and I lived at the command line. So last summer, you know, when, when I started using, you know, Claude code, if you'd have asked me like, is this the next big thing?

1:42:59I'd have said, uh, no, no way. It's great for me because I'm that guy. I love, I love this interface. I love like typing at the command line and watching it think like this is just perfect for me for the normal person No way. So I'm completely surprised that I was nobody was as surprised as me as for sort of like Claude code winter, you know, you know Everybody that went away for a Christmas break and came back, you know, Claude code converts um And you know, but what a huge gift And so there was a point at the beginning of this year where pascal who's my good friend and the ceo of ledger he said, look, you know, we, we really need to triple down and figure out like how we can secure this environment.

1:43:43Um, and I said, well, I'm really glad to hear you say that because this is what I've been doing instead of my day job for the last six months, because I'm just obsessed with this technology. So there was just kind of like perfect fit there. Um, for us, you know, my title before was chief experience officer, which was a, which was a bit of a controversial title because people are like, well, what does that actually mean? And what it meant was, you know, the experience in crypto is, is pretty bad. You know, when you buy an iPhone, you're not buying a piece of hardware, you're buying an experience.

1:44:13You're buying blue bubbles instead of green bubbles. What's our version of that? How can we improve the experience in, um, you know, in, in, in crypto? My title now is chief human agency officer, which, you know, chief AI officer, you might as well be called chief job killer, right and but we realize that our role is actually something different that every that agents can only suggest and every action needs to be approved either by a policy which has been set by a by a human or by a human those are the only options every action that an agent takes must be approved This is not happening currently.

1:44:55I think I should know. At least my sense is that the classic just to spam approve on Claude. Yeah. Well, and, you know, I think that this is, you know, at the same time, there are, there is an attempt at policies which are baked into the system, right? Now we have guardrails and mythos. Yeah, we're trusting. So that's a, you know, which we know can be jailbreak, but like that, you know, so there's an attempt at that. But I just think that's the wrong division of labor, right? You know, you, you, you, you should put a boundary. Or it's the wrong supervisor. Outside of that. Exactly. And, you know, you can, a much better outcome is that you have, you know, you have an LLM can be what it is and it can do what it's good at, which is reasoning and suggesting.

1:45:39And then when it's time to take an action, that action is checked by a deterministic player in the mix, which is either a policy which has been set by a human or a human. Yes. Those are the only two options. and that's why, you know, we talk about human in the loop, but I take that very seriously. Human in the loop. The challenge is, I think we're current, we're current, we're, I don't know when this will come out where we are hitting the limits on like LLM as a kind of like do this thing for me. And we're going to like go off and do stuff and I'll, I'll check back in the, how long does an agent run for?

1:46:11Whether it's an hour or two weeks, perhaps we haven't yet felt, really felt the pain of letting it go human in a loop for a long time. But I guess my, my more like functional question for you would be like, if I have agents that can go run for two weeks, what does human in the loop even mean? If I have a, if I'm controlling an army of fables that are my developer team that I'm checking in with sometimes, like what is human in the loop? Well, I like when Balaji says, AI is middle to middle. Humans are end to end. Okay. So what it means is, AI is going to take a lot of the middle work off of our plate, but we still need to be there end to end.

1:46:53So the danger, which you're pointing to, is that we're kind of end, not end to end, right? Like we put things in the front and then we just like don't check in. Don't make any mistakes. Yeah, yeah, we don't check in at the end. I think that's kind of the failure case, right? But, you know, I think we do need to stay end to end. You know, the important piece last year written by Mustafa Suleiman at Microsoft, I think the title was, we need to build AI for humans, not to be human, right? And I think that, you know, this is where you zoom out and you say, what is it we're actually doing? I think we'll get there, to be honest, because I think right now we're playing.

1:47:38And I think that as we try to figure out where does this actually fit into our workflows, and AI comes in at the workflow layer, not the data layer, right? If you think about the work we did 15 years ago, what Palantir is based on is that data layer, right? AI is now coming in at the workflow layer. How does it change the way that we work? And I think as we figure that out, those will become practical questions. It either meets the need or it doesn't. I think that we will have extremely powerful versions of this. For example, science, right? Like doing research and auto research loops. There will be maybe less altruistic versions of that where, like for me, there are a ton of places in the world where I would like to distribute Ledger as a more secure signer, but I don't have the engineering manpower to get ledger into all those places well you know now i do you know now i now i can have you know a um you know ai can discover those places it can suggest you know the the integration that integration you know a human can just look at it and go yep looks good go right it can implement that integration it can tell you when it's done a human can like review the prs or have multiple AIs review the PRs and give the results and then sign off.

1:49:05So these to me are like very practical workflows where tons of heavy lifting will be done by AI. You know, I just had a experience where, you know, I've been developing tons of materials for the business that I'm building this year. A lot of those have been developed with AI. I hit the nuclear reset button this week and I zoomed out and I said, I'm going to write, I'm going to write this now with all of my own words, just the way I used to. Right. You could say like, okay, now I'm going Amish or something. Right. But I did. But then once I was done, I fed it into fable and I said, how could this be better?

1:49:47Right. And it, it gave me a narrative suggestion that was actually pretty good. I probably accepted 80 % of it actually. And I went through and then I said, okay, okay, thank you for the narrative. I've incorporated the parts I want to. I didn't incorporate all of it, but I took a lot of it. Now let's go through word by word. Go through every word in this presentation and make suggestions to me on how it could be better. And I did the same thing. I went through word by word and I either took its suggestions or I didn't, right? And then I went through and I said, look at these five documents that I've prepared in the past.

1:50:23tell me what in these documents like is worth you know pulling into this you know etc and and so my point is is like i'm working with it you know and we do this all the time right i mean you know we're working with pro tools or we're working with you know any kind of technology we're working you know we're working with it a farmer is working with a combine you know what i mean like This feels like a different technology. Somebody I interviewed her, her point, Jasmine, was that the point of these tools though, is not to be a tool. It's to one shot everything. Like in the end state, the, um, this is Sam Altman talking about, we want to augment humans.

1:51:04We don't want to, um, replace them. I hear you. And yet what I know most people are going to do with fable six is just going to say like, press go, make no mistakes. Yeah. I, I, I just don't, I think that that's a nice party trick, but I don't like to do, to do what in the end, I think is the question, right? Like, I agree with that. You know, I mean, because look, I, you know, I've, I built so much, I've written more lines of code in the past 12 months than in the previous 20 years. And, you know, now I have personal code, you know, I have personal tech debt. So I don't, I don't think that's actually like what people want to do with this technology.

1:51:43I look at it a slightly different way, which is I wake up every morning. I look in the mirror and I say, my job is to automate my job. And I do think that is, comes back a little bit to the Clayton Christensen point, right? Like that's me moving up market. Yes. Right. That's me moving up market away from there. There really is a lot of stuff that we do, which would be better automated. I think that a lot of like the work that we do and I'm just like, you're just constantly context switching between email and WhatsApp and, you know, whatever, like a thousand Slack and a thousand channels. And these are not great ways of working.

1:52:24It's not like we're constantly out of flow. Yeah. It's not, it's not like we're leaving something beautiful behind. Um, that it's just not factual. So I think it's just sort of trying to find that better way where as an individual, I can move up market to the higher value, you know, either work or maybe experience, you know, I would love to think that we're going to be working less, but I don't see any sign of that. You know, I mean, I can't remember who it was. There was, you know, one of the, you know, top economists of the 20th century said in the first half of the 20th century that we'd all be working like four hours a day by 1950 or something.

1:53:02Right. I'd like, I think that's, I can, you can, first of all, you can understand why you would think that like, wow, technology is progressing so much that we can just accomplish everything that we're already accomplishing in so much less time. There's no ceiling. Yeah, exactly. And absolutely no one did that. Right. I mean, except for, you know, um, uh, you know, Tim Ferriss for our work week or whatever it was called. I just don't think that that's actually what we're going to use this for. In some sense, Maybe the future of Ledger in this regime would be a bit of being able to place friction between me and the machine where I want it to be.

1:53:42I really think of it as a division of labor. Yeah. That LLMs are probabilistic and that's their gift. Yeah. That, you know, the code that, you know, I wrote 20 years ago or even five years ago, not that I was writing a lot of code five years ago, but you were anticipating, you had to anticipate everything that might happen, everything that my user might do. You know, you're making a game, character goes that direction. It's because you built the framework so that if they pointed their mouse in that direction, they went that direction. You'd model the entire world. Yeah, you'd model the entire world.

1:54:12Now you have computers that can see around corners. That is extraordinary. Just absolutely mind-bendingly extraordinary. We're already used to it, but yeah. Yeah, and so my point is, don't handicap them. Yeah. Let them be great at that. but when, but don't give them secrets. You know, for example, we have these command line interfaces for Ledger wallet. Um, what that means is that I can build like crazy portfolio management, um, you know, art collection management, all these crazy tools. And I never have to worry. I can be like, do your worst, like go crazy, come up with ridiculous ideas, try this, try that.

1:54:57And I know that before it actually moves any value, it has to ask me. It has to go, hey, Ian, will you please sign this? And I can go. Yeah, it's obvious in the crypto sense. Yes. Maybe we haven't really been made to feel it on the other stuff. Yeah, but look, I mean, the world that we're living in right now is bizarro land. Like, okay, we know what happens in London, right? Like you're talking on your phone. I've heard multiple people I've heard this from, right? Talking on your phone, someone rides by on a scooter, they grab your phone out of your hand and they just do anything they can do while your phone's still open, right?

1:55:29So the ironic thing is they're not gonna get into your Revolut account anymore because Revolut solved this problem. But if they were to just open Claude, it's got access to your Slack, your Confluence, your Snowflake, your like basically everything, like who knows? Like I don't think we're, you know, the attacks are that sophisticated yet, but give it a year, right? And so it is not tenable that we have no security between agent operator and agent. Or that you just trust OpenAIR and ThoughtWorks. Yeah. And now what are people building? They're building an agent identity system. This is really as short-sighted as credit cards were for the internet.

1:56:13Credit cards were bearer tokens before the internet, meaning you get my credit card number, you call up LL Bean, and you can order yourself a parka. Right. I love this reference for anybody who gets it. Please, please text me. Um, the, uh, and that was the way credit cards worked before the internet. Now the internet comes along and they were like, Whoa, wait, this doesn't work because now I can electronically steal a credit card number and, and spend it worldwide. Right. So they had to come up with something that was transaction time security. So right now they're talking about, Oh, I'm going to give this agent an identity and now the agent can bank.

1:56:50No way. Without transaction time security, then you don't actually have an audit trail. What you have is like an invitation for chargebacks, right? And so to me, like there are just very basic security questions which haven't been addressed yet. How are you securing the connection between, you know, you basically have a new economic player and you have no security between - It's going to quickly outnumber us. Yes, exactly. You are going to very soon count agents per employee at a company, right? And we have no way to identify them, secure the channel between the operator and them, control their access to resources.

1:57:38We're doing this today with Cloud Routines, but anyone who's doing it knows this is not scalable. And why is hardware so important in this? So where could you put the trust boundary? One way to think about this is, you know, every kind of technological step up over the last, let's say, 50 years, you know, you've got the personal computer that led to McAfee, Symantec, right? There, you know, there's a perimeter that needs to be secured in each one of these. Then you go to the internet. Oh, it's a new perimeter that needs to be secured with the internet. Then you go to crypto, digital ownership.

1:58:15There's a new perimeter that needs to be secured. Now we have computers that can act on our behalf. And that's a new perimeter that needs to be secured. Okay, so then, well, how do we secure it? You could do it in the software. But again, I think that that would be, first of all, it'll never be 100 % because they're probabilistic creatures by definition. Prompt injection is a feature, not a bug. You know, this thing can take in arbitrary commands. That's what makes it powerful. Therefore, you have risk. So doing it in the software, not an option. You could do it on your phone or on your computer, but, you know, your phone or your computer are sort of like thick stacks of software that can be overtaken by attackers and overtaken by attackers more easily than ever, thanks to AI.

1:59:03So relying on, you know, Ledger's team, the Donjon, broke 25 % of all Android phones this year, right? And that's, you know, if your phone has that level of a compromise, then there's no way to protect yourself. You could do it in something like a YubiKey, which proves I have possession of this YubiKey, but it doesn't approve the transaction. It's still relying on your computer screen to approve the transaction. Whereas approving on a secure screen, on secure hardware with a secure screen means I approved this transaction. And that's really what you need, right? Because what you have is you have an AI agent can suggest either a policy set by a human or a human by looking at the transaction needs to approve.

1:59:53And in either case, you get a transaction record of what was approved and by whom, either because of the policy, which ultimately traces back to a human who approved the policy, or because a human approved that actual thing. And now you've got an audit trail. Now you have something which could stand up to regulation, right? And this is where we must be. I mean, think about what agents are capable of. Like now imagine the court system tomorrow, right? Of saying like, did your agent do this? Well, yes, it did. Was that your decision? Well, no, I mean, it wasn't me, it was my agent. You know, that's like, it's a chargeback, right?

2:00:34Like, you know, you, you, you paid 49.99 for this parka. Well, no, I didn't. Wow. It's your credit card. Yeah. It wasn't me. It's exactly the same. You, you know, if you, if you don't have human set policies or human approved transactions, then, you know, I'm going to be a weird world. It's a weird world. You know, I, I really think if I could, if I could say one thing here, I wrote a piece for Rick's Tetragrammaton that, um, that I, I, that I'm proud of. So I'll mention it, which is that, you know, I, again, that the piece from Mustafa Suleiman was really, um, influential on me, like, because I realized that like there is, so people want to rail against, against AI.

2:01:20Um, I think that's very misdirected. Um, I think what in most cases they're really doing is railing against rich people. So, okay, that's, that's legit, but call it what it is. Like, don't say, I hate AI, say, I hate rich people. Like, come on. I think what we can and should stand against is seemingly human AI. Meaning like personhood. We won't because it's actually just simply more fun and more pleasant to interact with AI that talks like us. But we should then recognize that we will be fooled by that same AI. The same way that we are fooled by doom scrolling, fooled by sugar and salt and fat, fooled by nicotine, fooled by opioids.

2:02:11We will be fooled by these sycophantic characters that tell us what we want to hear and lead us into places that we don't necessarily want to be. I think it's kind of inevitable, but awareness. awareness i was gonna say it seems your your argument in that piece that i understood is basically that we just must kind of fundamentally reject personhood amongst ai's from a legal standpoint otherwise it just seems so unlikely to me maybe we'll have a new classification but if this is where agents are now well we're already you know estonia has already um like introduced uh something i don't know if it's a law or bill or how they put it but um that that grants kind of rights of people, some personhood rights to agents.

2:03:00And like this, this stuff is, you know, that, that sounds dystopian, but I understand how it creeps in. Like, you know, one of the most consequential things that they have in the 20th century is that companies got rights of people. So companies which can't go to jail, can't be killed, have a lot of the same rights as people. And this impacts society in very real ways. Look, the Mustafi Salim's piece from last year came about because Anthropic had posted some research that showed that AI felt distress under certain circumstances. And Suleiman lost his mind, rightfully so. He was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, you can say lots of things.

2:03:34Like you can, you know, you can call it something, but please like, don't, don't say the AI feels distressed. People already are, it's, it feels like magic. This goes back to the Google engineer from five years ago, right? Yeah, exactly. We are going to have of repeated conversations about AI, you know, sentience, right? AI - Consciousness. Yeah, consciousness. And - And you can unplug it from the wall, right? I mean, you can RM minus RF, you can change the weights, you can, you know, so we, I understand that we will feel like it's conscious, but that's different than consciousness, right? Can you convince me that you feel like your conscience?

2:04:28Yes, you can. But are you? You are not. You are not. And also, by the way, I feel like this argument is, people will ask, can AI achieve consciousness? I would just make the question simpler. Just say, can AI achieve human consciousness? Because the answer is patently no. and no other definition matters, frankly, right? You know, it can't achieve human consciousness and therefore it can't have human rights, period. End of story. Like, you know, anything else is an academic argument by someone who loves science fiction. I'm sorry. I think your other point though is a, and we could litigate this forever, but your other point is a really important one, which is independent of how anyone feels about this right now, we will be persuaded.

2:05:18Yeah, it's inevitable. by the, not only by some, if you want to say they're going to maliciously persuade, but we will be persuaded because the companionship is so good. This is what my boyfriend is AI. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's it. That was someone, someone said to me, you know, I make my AI, you know, feel more human because it's simply more fun. I'm like, I identify with that. I like fun, you know, I agree, you know, But that also means like you're accepting a danger. That's sort of like the, you know, I only smoke once in a while, you know, sort of trap, right? It's a similar, you know, okay.

2:06:00Just got to realize it's a trap. Yeah. A couple quick things on looking ahead. You said you're always looking for the fundamentals. It's never a trend. It's an anti-trend. What's real here? What do you think makes you good at seeing what's real here? something you've seemed to have done for a long time? First of all, I'd say I'm not sure I'm good at it, but I'll tell you what I try is I'm just a, I'm a, I'm a, I like observable facts. I think that's just, you know, where, where I, where I, where I live for better and worse, you know, quantum theory is quite difficult for me and very difficult for me to, you know, it doesn't fit.

2:06:36I have the same, I wouldn't say that because that sounds immodest, but I, And I understand when I hear that, you know, Einstein, you know, consistently, you know, argued against his own theories because he just felt they defied common sense. Like I totally. God doesn't play dice with the universe. Yeah, I completely understand that because I just prefer to like to really look at, you know, what can we observe here and what can we learn from what we observe and then try to expand that aperture, you know, like expand it back through history, back through generations. You know, like how, what else could we learn if we expanded the aperture and, you know, the aperture a little more?

2:07:15And also, I think, be very comfortable with not knowing. I'm often, or usually actually, when I'm correct, I'm not correct. I'm directionally correct. The specifics are actually way off, but the direction was right. Right. And that's like also being comfortable, actually being excited about being wrong is a bit of a superpower. you're like, it's more data. I know, I know, I know what direction we're going, but I have no idea how it actually plays out. I can't wait to see like, that's a, that's kind of a normal posture for me. That's why you're good at it in a way is like, you can go, okay, I see that this is going to totally change things.

2:07:59I can kind of feel the way the wind's blowing, but wow, I don't know where it's actually going. And I'm, that's exciting. That's not scary. that's exciting. There's a word I got from Cyan Bannister, who I interviewed, which is a French word, derive, sort of this intentional drift. You've said you're not an opportunist. I think you said that to me earlier today. And yet you, and you seem to have had this kind of unlikely drift throughout your career, but it's certainly not an unintentional one. Your path has been very zigzaggy, but there's some kind of like thing that is drawing you in. Why, maybe like, what are you motivated by slash what keeps you pushing like why what keeps you working so hard i think i i mean i i definitely i i just have a curiosity that i feel i feel like lucky to have and and also i realize like there's like a particular kind of crazy you know that that um and i know i one one thing i feel is like we're all crazy so i feel very lucky to be crazy in a way that's useful, you know, to, to, to somebody who, to people who want to employ me.

2:09:09I don't know there's, for me, it's always been a combination of things, right? Like I, I, I love, um, creation. And what that means to me is making something that wasn't there yesterday. And that, you know, that, that could be, that could be music. It, it, it could be writing. It could be technology, right? Like to me, they're all kind of in the same category. It's human beings, um, you know, doing just incredible things that, you know, that, that you didn't know were possible and, and really feeling that. And then, but just personally, I always, I just like fun and I like cool. And I, and I don't, I don't, I don't know.

2:09:54I almost feel like, I don't know, it's not the most useful way to look at the world, but for whatever reason, that's. I think if it keeps you going, it's probably worthwhile. Yeah. And it's just fun. Like I'm always, I really am always in search of fun. You know, even when I started this job, you know, at Ledger with Pascal, I knew I saw what he was trying to build. I thought I think I can help I think like what I how I do things combination of having the technical acumen having the passion knowing how to work with human beings to build things which is what you do you know day in and day out being able to explain things that are complex to people who you know would like to understand them better um all all these things and these were all true and I felt that.

2:10:47And I was like, okay, I think I can do a good job there. I think I can probably add more value there. And that was, that was what it was the end of the day for me. Like maybe I could have gone to be a CEO of an LVMH Maison, but I really thought there are other people who are better at that job than me. And I don't know people who are better at this job than me. Like this job is kind of made for me. So that was, that was my motivation. But I also, and we've talked about this since, I also said to Pascal, I was like, also, it's just going to be more fun. Like we're going to have, fun. Like it's going to, it'll be funnier if we do this together than if we did it with someone else, you know?

2:11:24And I think that that's important. Um, I know important is not the right word. Yeah. Um, you know, but I, I think, you know, it's, it's a motivator is a, is a better way to put it. You talk all the time about how our lives are increasingly digital. Um, there's an old quote, which is, I was one of the first people on the internet and I intend to be one of the first people off it how's that going not so well at the moment i mean ai ai like really jacked me in i i wasn't anticipating it to be honest like i thought maybe i was like reaching reaching the end of the arc because i mean i just found i think the internet is so boring like i don't i don't you look at my screen time my phone you're not going to find instagram or youtube or i don't even have I have TikTok, I don't have Telegram, I don't have, I don't know, fill in the blank.

2:12:14Like my phone is for work. The only thing you're gonna find there that's for pleasure is Apple Music, to be honest. So I just, you know, the internet, I'm done. Like I would rather go for a run, read a book, play drums, play vinyl, you know what I mean? Like I'm already there. But I really do feel like I've been delivered this incredible gift of like opening terminal, making it full screen and just like barking commands at like, you know, hitting control T, control T, control T, control T, T mucks. And, you know, like for a, you know. It's probably more like playing drums than serving the internet in some sense.

2:12:59Definitely. And it's also, it's also, again, like talking, coming back to the beginning, you know, are you an observer? you know are you a spectator or are you a participant yeah you know i mean you know there's a great feeling of like you know my my my girlfriend's like this uh this i've got this pdf of these recipes and it's it's a nightmare i can't i can't find anything i'm like i'm gonna fix that for you you know and uh you know and and and two hours later i also i was like what recipe app is good. She's like, New York times one is really good. I'm like two hours later, I cooked in New York times.

2:13:38Like I, my, my recipe app kicks their ass. That's, that's fun. That's cool. You know, that's, that's fun. Um, you said you would give a Ted talk on skateboarding and failure. What's the, give us the brief synopsis. Yeah. So the, the, the Ted talk is becoming good at failure, but I realized I used to have the only vert ramp in Los Angeles and watching pro skateboarders skate my ramp. What I realized is the number one thing they are better at than you is falling. The way that it works, if you're a pros, if you're skating vert as a pro skateboarder is you drop in and you do a trick or you attempt a trick, you can land like 85 % of the time.

2:14:20you get the other wall 75 and like you just keep going until you're you reach that trick that you've never landed and you go for it and they get you know 10 feet above an 11 foot high ramp and they're upside down and they're making a split second decision to put the wheels down just under coping and ride to the other side and hit the other side or kick the board out yeah knee slide to the bottom um, climb back up the ladder and try it again. So falling is, so if you can, if you, and there's a thing in life. So if you can, um, you know, uh, metaphorically be, you know, 10 feet above an 11 foot ramp upside down and unafraid of, of failure, you know, because you know, you're going to fail some percentage of the time.

2:15:14And actually you're so good at failure that you're not, you're not concerned. You know how to fall well. You know how to fall well. You're not going to, you're not going to, you know, you're, you're going to knee slide to the bottom, stand up, pick up your board, walk back up that ladder and drop in again. Now you are invincible. Not as risky as you think then. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think it's like, we talk about like not being afraid to fail, et cetera. I think it's beyond that. I think it's becoming skilled at failure because once you're skilled at failure, you are untouchable. Yeah. You get to keep going.

2:15:50Yeah. Now you're just learning because in all, in all cases, there's only two outcomes. You win or you learn, you know, if you believe in failure, you're already at a disadvantage. Um, because now you're going to have that fog of like, I don't know if I can do it. Whereas like what that pro skateboarder knows is, well, I didn't get it that time. Plus one new life. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to get it. I will get it. Yeah. You know, and by the way, it is really beautiful. Like, what does it mean to be a pro skateboarder? It simply means that you've got enough 85 % tricks in your bag that you can impress somebody, right?

2:16:25You know, you're just like, I can drop in, I can do this, then I can do that. Then I can do this. Then I can do that. Then it is. And then by the time you're done, people are like, holy shit, you know, but you're just leaving out the 25 % ones when it's time for your run in the competition. You know what I mean? Like, but you're always working on those. Based on a reference you made it to, I believe a Willie Nelson record, what is the top five Desert Island album list? I can tell you top three easily because I think about those a lot. Number one is Sly and the Family Stone Fresh. You can watch a Sly documentary, but to be honest, like I didn't resonate with me.

2:17:04No, no disrespect to, to, to, to Questlove, but to me, there's a, there's a different story of, of Sly. There's a lot of the stories there, but there, there's a, you know, he, he was a radio announcer in San Francisco and, and he put together this just incredible kind of like multiculti group. That was everything that, that, you know, you, they'll, that you'll read about him is, but then he was getting closer to the source. If you listen to Fresh and Small Talk, which are, you know, his kind of mid seventies albums where the reviews were like, Sly has lost the plot. From my perspective, he was getting like closer to the source, like whatever that is.

2:17:46And Fresh to me just has this, like this looseness where he's always kind of like, it's on the edge, but it's always right in the pocket. and it's been my favorite records since i was 16 years old and still is wow um number two is funhouse by the stooges and if you think about that record i think it was 1970 it makes no sense like they what they were doing was so primal um and you just it's literally it's lightning in a bottle like i yeah i can't i can't it's just impossible to believe that it exists and I would rather listen to Funhouse than do pretty much anything. People are like, why don't you watch movies?

2:18:32I'm like, why would I watch a movie and I could just listen to Funhouse again? Like you're telling me that movie's gonna be better than one more listen to Funhouse? I really doubt it actually. So, and then the third is Willie Nelson Spirit. 1996, not the best known Willie Nelson record. But Willie has this incredible gift of singing really sad things positively. You know, it's not on the record, but like the best example is if you'd only come over, I'm sure that you'd see we're not lonesome, my cricket and me. But Spirit has songs like Too Sick to Pray. I've been too sick to pray, Lord. That's why we ain't talked in a while.

2:19:15Your Memory Won't Die in My Grave. Like, please go listen to these songs. Like they are brilliant. Like just the way that his, And Willie is Willie. The album is mostly hymn, guitar, piano, very sparse. His playing is incredible. The songwriter is incredible. His phrasing is just unbelievable. I mean, try to sing along with a Willie Nelson song. You're not going to get it right because his phrasing is so him. you know um i think another one that i would that i would add to the list i've been thinking about a lot i've been coming back to a lot is marquee moon by the band television um you know this this record was i think most of the songs were written around 74 it wasn't recorded until 76 they were um or maybe it was end of 75 came out in 76 somewhere in that in that they were a real cbgb's band they were in there with like the ramones the dictators and blondie and talking heads you cannot believe that like 24 year olds made this album and and also it comes back to what we were saying earlier where genres are great when anything's possible like what was television like they don't fit into like if you think about the CBGB's band like our bands it's not like they sound like the Ramones like there's no sonic similarity between the Ramones and television right they're both part of the same scene to come back to earlier um but and is marky moon is just one of those records like i can put it on over and over and over and every time i'm just like how does this exist how does this exist um yeah so then i and then and then i don't know there's so many other places like i i could go but i i think yeah there's a first of all twisted teens instead I mentioned Twisted Teens, but I mean, I don't know.

2:21:12I would say - I'm excited to check that out. And I think like Paul's Boutique changed my life. So that deserves mention for sure. I'm trying to think like what other like hip hop records like really, really changed my life. That's where you start to get random. Master Ace, Slaughterhouse. It was like super important album to me. I think it's genius. it's it's like it's also i think comes from that time when like things didn't go in the box yet like slaughterhouse is an incredible rapper from new york basically making fun of gangster rap um but with just incredible flow really interesting beats like you know this he had this offbeat on beat thing and like you can tell like that record doesn't fit anywhere you know and into the into any canon but it's cool that so many of these have persisted for a really long time for sure black sabbath slayer the misfits sade i mean listen to cherish by sade tell me like how anyone had so much restraint like what is amazing about that song is what's a knot in it like i don't know you know, no musician knows how to play so little.

2:22:33Like people that made that song are gifted geniuses. The radio station. Yeah. Turn on the Twitch stream or something. I don't know if I'd get any listeners, man. It's so specific. It's on every night in my house. Just come online. Internet of niche. Thankfully, Hedwig loves it. So that's, I've got an audience. I've got an audience of one. It's the only one that matters. That's great. um any advice for working or maybe any thoughts on working with your friends oh man i feel like yeah i've um you know i i don't know it's that's an interesting one to reflect on because i feel like many times in my career we've been a we've been a family not a business um you know we still like every day with we have for topspin which is company we had from 2008 to 2013, basically, we have a WhatsApp group and it's active every day.

2:23:27Wow. Like, so, you know, that's a family, you know, Nullsoft, which was Winamp, like that was much more of a family than a company. So those are beautiful moments. It's also like, you know, I've been working with Tony Fidel and Pascal Gauthier. Who were friends first, as I understand. Yeah, we were friends first before we worked together. And I think, you know, we've been we've been through some hard, some hard times. You've watched, there's a video on YouTube. It's the road to ledger stacks. And you see like the difficulty we had making that product. And we're all three in there, me and Pascal and Tony, and you see the difficult.

2:24:01So to the difficulty of making that product. And by the way, like those are real tests of people like, you know, who bails, who points fingers, but also I think, you know, you know, what's beautiful about watching the Beastie Boys work is like, they're super different people, those, those three guys. and you'll never hear, you know, them, you would never hear them, you know, talk badly about the other one. It's only like, you know, it's a team and they like face the world together, supporting each other. That's the advice. Like you have to, you know, you really, you have to be a team. It's easy to talk shit.

2:24:36It's easy. I mean, magic or imperfection. You won't, if you look for it, you're going to find it. If you're looking for the imperfection, you're going to find them. If you're looking for the magic, you're going to find them. run through so much of what we talked about. Choose what, choose which one you've done it in a few different, a few different times, a few different ways. Any advice on parenting? I think the one parenting rule is you only say no, if it matters. And when you say no, it means no. I think that's the, the, the, like the, the biggest, the biggest rule of parenting. Um, I think there's another one that I've discovered, which is, I think we, we want our kids to listen to us, but we should just acknowledge that they won't, especially at a certain age, they have to stop listening to us.

2:25:25It's how they develop their own id. But there's this very predictable thing that happens. So your kid as a teenager is going to reject you on some level, right some are some are worse some go through this in a much more severe way than others right um but they have to it's how they create themselves as individuals then they have this period college is not for learning things college is when you're too old to live at home and you're too young to be in the real world so you go to this utopia where nobody really checks in on you very often and you fuck around and you know you get what you can out of it right um then ultimately you get popped out of that system, however you spend it.

2:26:10By the way, spend it in college because don't waste it. Yeah. Like even if it's community college, it doesn't matter. There's a college for everybody. Spend that time in college because ultimately you're going to get popped out of the other side of it. You're going to realize that you're in the fucking real world, which sucks, by the way. And you freak out, like inevitably, like a 22 year old kid comes out of college is like, what is this shit? Like, wow, being a grownup really sucks. Right. And, and so what do you do? You turn back to your parents' morals. So I think it's important that your kids know who you are and what your ideals are.

2:26:50And you don't expect them to give a shit when they're 16. But they have something to return to. Yeah. And that's why I think being a lenient parent is a disservice to your kids. Because if you're just like, oh, whatever, you're not gonna listen to me anyway, then they don't know. They don't know where you stand. You have to show them where you stand. Wherever it is you stand, you show them where you stand. And then I promise you, when they are in their mid-20s and they're in the real world and they're alone and they're scared, they're gonna come back to whatever your ideals and morals were and lean on them.

2:27:28So give them to them, give them scaffolding. Any advice on relationships or thoughts on love? Oof, I mean, I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but maybe I've learned something in all of my mistakes. I just think that like it has to be deliberate. You know, it's again, magic and imperfection. And when you're a partner, you choose which one you're going to see. If you're looking for something, you're going to find it. If you're looking for them to be disloyal, you'll find that disloyalty. If you're looking for loyalty, you'll find the loyalty. So, you know, choose, choose what it is you're looking for.

2:28:05And also, um, I think that, you know, we're, we're all on a journey. Um, and, you know, sometimes you team up with someone and you go on that journey together. There is no guarantee that, that, you know, that you will stay on that journey together or that You're going to the same place even. So I think, you know, again, coming back to Willie Nelson's spirit, when he says, you know, he says, I'm not trying to forget you anymore. I've got back into remembering all the love we had before. You know, he's basically talking about, you know, it was someone that I loved. And, you know, now, you know, things have changed.

2:28:49but I'm, um, now I'm going to remember like the great times that we had instead of, you know, regretting the fact that I don't, I don't have you anymore. And I think that if you, if you take that, that sort of position with a relationship, then you can kind of always be in a place where, you know, even if it ended today, I don't regret this. And this was time well spent and, And, you know, nothing is forever. Who is it? It's Esther Perel who says, all relationships end in death or divorce, right? So all relationships end, you know, it's a question of how, and then, you know, you want to have made them the best out of that time.

2:29:38But then I think if you want it to stay a partnership, then that's got to be a deliberate thing. I mean, I think for, you know, for me and Hedwig, there's a part of it that it is because it is, but there's a big part of it that is because we want it to be. So, you know, if you're not sold, it can't work. But, you know, if you're sold, then you can find a way to, to, to make it work. my last thing actually there's one that comes from jimmy iveen's dad if the cat is bigger than the shit keep the cat if the shit gets bigger than the cat you gotta get rid of the cat i think i love that in a relationship because there's never perfection there's always shit the question is like is there more shit than cat?

2:30:35that's where you gotta make the decision at the end of the day if the cat's bigger than the shit keep the cat a final quote this must be the end of the world all the people turning into pigs and ponies I can't let it happen to me by the way I feel that way watching everybody go world cup crazy I'm like everyone's turning into pigs and ponies. Can't let it happen to me. It's a Frank, it's for a quote from a Frank Zappa album. I don't think it's actually a Frank Zappa quote, but I think it's like one of the characters shows up a couple of different times. I was trying to find the real source. I think it's on Playground Psychotics, which is like a great Zappa period.

2:31:14It's when he had Mark Volman and Howard Kalin. I hope I'm getting their names right. From the turtles with him. It's an amazing Zappa era. Live at the Fillmore, 1971. one playground psychotics playground psychotics is the one to go listen to that's the way in i haven't really listened to him at all there's no way into zappa because you know it's funny i had this conversation with gail zappa when she was still alive frank was was no longer alive but gail zappa was and she was looking after the estate she was very reluctant to put frank's music onto streaming and um i tried so hard i tried so hard and i think there was one moment when I got through to her.

2:31:52I said, listen, Frank's music is a genre. It's not an artist. It is a genre of music. And it doesn't matter who you are. There is a Frank Zappa song you were going to love and there is one you're going to hate. Like, you know, and there's everything in between, right? True for every human being on the face of the earth, I promise you. And no one is going to explore that catalog like I did, Gail. one double or triple CD set at a time for like$29 each. Like I was spending my last dollars buying Ricoh Disc CDs. How old were you? In college, like, you know, Zappa CDs, Bowie CDs, like, you know, like that's what we were doing.

2:32:35But yeah, the way in would be Hot Rats. And actually underrated Bongo Fury. Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, super underrated. 1976, I believe, because there's a song on there called 200 years old, which is about America, which just turned 250 years old. So, um, so yeah, anyway, no pigs, no ponies. What do you, what do you think you're resisting? How do you keep holding on?

2:33:05I have no idea. I'm not sure that I am. I like, I really, I, I really, uh, yeah. I mean, And the older I get, like, yeah, I feel very lucky to have made it this far, to be honest. I wish I could, you know, I wish I could see how the puzzle pieces fit together exactly, but I'm not quite there yet. I think you're holding on to some kind of, we talked about it this morning, there's a fighting inertia that I admire in all kinds of people. And I think the longer you fight it and the longer you hold on to the punk rockness or the curiosity or whatever, life stays interesting. Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting.

2:33:41I look at like, I think there's a lot of inspiration, right? You look at, you know, I mean, I just saw Mike D play here in Paris, you know, Mike 60, and he's on stage with his kids playing an amazing show, like being Mike D from the Beastie Boys, you know,

2:33:58a long story that I'll make short, sitting, having tea with Paul McCartney in his house once upon a time. And he said to me, I met Eminem last night. And I said, oh, how was that? He said, he said to me, you're Paul McCartney. I said, yes, I am. He said, do you feel like Paul McCartney? And I was like, what a weird thing to say. And Paul said, no, I know what he means because normally I just feel like a bloke having a cup of tea. he said but then i get on stage i put on that rickenbacker and i feel like paul mccartney from the beatles and you know so i think there's a there's those are the stories you know paul's in his 80s right and he's and he's still curious and pushing and wants to be relevant and you know and he's still kind of amazed by it all i think totally which is the cool i was so happy for that opening because I was like, I wanted to ask you, like, do you ever look in the mirror and go like, yo, I was in the Beatles.

2:35:01He was like, I do. It's crazy. But that's great too. That's inspiring. Like, you know, hanging with, you know, Glenn Friedman, who's, you know, 10 years older than me and still as idealistic as ever seeing that like Henry Rollins and, you know, Ian McKay are putting out like the cramps, you know, discography, like, you know, just this reminder that we can like, Like we can, as long as we're breathing, we can still like create and like bring, I always want to say like - Participate. Yeah, participate. Put beauty in the world. And I say that like, I'm like, is putting like the Cramps compilation in the world beauty?

2:35:38It is to me, you know? But yeah, I think, so those are the things that inspire me. I see. That's all I got. We're way over time. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Dialectic with Ian Rogers. You can learn more at dialectic.fm slash ian-rogers, where I'll have a transcript and links to everything discussed in the show, as well as all of that amazing music Ian talks about. I'd also like to thank Notion once again for presenting Dialectic. Notion has been a supporter since I went full-time on the show, and they are a tool and company that despite being started over a decade ago, has found itself in a unique position for the AI era.

2:36:15Because Notion is where you and your collaborators have all of your work already, it is an amazing hub for working with AI and agents. Notion is also thoughtful about helping you automate away the busy work while allowing you to focus more deeply and collaborate on the work that counts. There's been much discussion lately about the cost of tokens, about the quality of models, especially newer open weight models. And the beauty of Notion is that you don't have to choose. You can work with the most frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI and Google, and you can also work with faster or cheaper models for the work that doesn't need such high horsepower.

2:36:50And as everything continues to change, being able to have access to all of the newest models the day they come out right where all of your work is reduces so much complexity and makes it easier to focus on the real work. Thanks again to Notion, and thank you for listening to Dialectic. I will see you next time.