How Notion rebuilt for the age of AI

19:08Ivan Zhao:Yeah.

19:10Aria:I like to think there's a bucket of your capabilities, what you can do. There's another bucket, your judgment, your taste, your values. What do you care? What do you want to bring to the world? Your aesthetics, second bucket. The third bucket is like your agency, your drive, your will. So in some sense, language model truly democratized the access to knowledge and access to capabilities. like coding is it's the most scared capability until three years ago it's become abundant yes so now the bottleneck in a tech company is no longer can you build it it's what should you build it's the judgment the taste yeah and that's can you wheel through the walls that have difficulty to push that into the world into the world so the knobs are different now

20:00Reid:yeah

20:00Ivan Zhao:well this reminds me of your essay I think it was Steam steel and infinite minds and you know where individual workers now have essentially infinite minds and so um satya i think also and satya i think refer to this as well so how are you seeing that sudden re-change of imagination about what's possible in terms of work you know kind of generation of you know kind of content ip etc like what are you what are you seeing so far about that that that change of imagination and infinite minds

20:45Aria:it's changing yeah i don't know i don't think anybody know what's gonna happen in the other end um i wrote that because like a lot of thoughts in my head i think a way to communicate those thoughts or try to predict a little bit future is to look into the metaphor of the past we already talked about programming is completely different. It's like that's almost the first profession that's completely disrupted by language model. It turns out to be the most secret profession in the free AI era. But the rest of the knowledge work likely gonna have similar things too. So the analogy we can think about is, okay, the first and second industrial revolution, power energy source become abundant so then you can have industrial revolution scale production of physical goods what it's like to have that but for intellectual or for mind goods yes knowledge for economy is half the u.s economy today and as if we discover the infinite energy source to power this yeah then what the world is going to look like all right the slower changing bit once again it's our habit it's the calcified mindset about what knowledge world is an analogy i like to think is kind of like before we discover fossil fuels most a lot of power in factory and mills are powered by water mills right so then steam engine and fossil fuel all those combinations happened and the first generation steam engine actually did not bump the productivity of factories by much because the factory owners are just replacing the centralized water mill with the centralized steam engine shaft then they realize wait a second the energy source is abundant they don't need to be sitting next to a river yeah they can sit in next to a port they can sit into a flat line the way they can use parallel water energy sources parallel multiple steam engines So the mindset change then allowed the second industrial revolution to happen.

22:53Aria:Now we have all the textile industry and all the goods for the good, for the worst, but a lot of things in the world, right?

23:01Reid:I don't think we have that mindset change for knowledge yet.

23:04Aria:We are in the water wheel, early water wheel, just adopting steam engine era of what to do with this thing that we're shifting bits around.

23:15Ivan Zhao:Well, this is a little bit like the earlier question, which is the notion of like right now most people think oh it's going to have a person and then you have your ai agent but of course you're going to have like a team of ai agents you're going to have a team working with individuals you're going to have teams working within companies and there'll be various patterns of interface between humans and you know workers and ais both individually individually teams and then teams what do you think it kind of shifts about like the notion of what is a team yeah what is organization you know um you know so i've been thinking about like okay what's the directory of like you have a uh an active director human resources directory but now you're gonna have a director that includes all these agents i know i mean it's a good question

24:06Aria:for workday, right? There are multiple dimensions. One is what can drive economic outcome. The other dimension is what human likes to do. So I would say we're still in largely the single-player era of using language models, right? Developer looking at their own coding agents in their own terminals. So actually we're brushing against this problem. How do you manage a team of coding agents with a team of developers? We're looking at this problem right in front of as of this month february 2026. and so how do you solve this multiplayer ai problem collateral ai problem something we are passionately we're solving a notion but i think as an industry we need to think about how to how do you managing rather individual agent but a fact of agent yes right that's like a productivity in human computer interface problem to unlock and on the human nature side there's a lot of talk which i agree there likely will be one billion people uh one billion dollar startup running by one person probably already happened somewhere um i don't think yet but i think it makes sense yeah it makes sense right but i i think it's still

25:19Ivan Zhao:a bit of a tb there's there's interesting question around like for example uh there is run by one person there's run by zero people there's run by lots of people anyway this is all yeah what is

25:32Aria:the entity of a corporation yeah it's an invention also i think that's the interesting question um i think the capability is there then the constraint might be the legal entity like some company has to be a human to sign the paper your ceo cfo has to be on a hook when anything bad happens right so that's one factor and another interesting factor is like do you want to do that do you want to run a company by yourself totally would you want to are you is it too lonely for you right i think human teamwork is kind of like when productivity become abundance and assuming there's a baseline of human welfare protection what would you like to do would you like to play a game by yourself all day long for tens of years would you like to play a game with another humans i think that That teamwork flavors is a question that I prefer the world that you work on problems with other humans.

26:26Aria:That's what makes a company fun. That makes me running Notion more interesting because there's a group of people I love working with. We go to battle, we go to puzzle solving together. I hope that doesn't get lost as the productivity of an individual gets greater with language models.

26:42Reid:That feeds directly into my next question. A lot of people are talking about the capabilities of the model and how that is going to sort sort of springboard companies to the next level and have them keep growing. But other people are saying, no matter how good the technology gets, this is actually an organizational problem. Humans are social animals. They want to hang out with each other. You have interpersonal questions. You have some people resistant to change. So what is your take on that dynamic as sort of the AI implementation is sort of just a model question or it's an organizational change question?

27:17Aria:Oh, it's definitely an organizational change. I think any given time you're bottlenecked by the slowest piece in the factory. Right now, the capability of model is pretty good. Now, the constraint is human adaptation on the organization level, our habits, right? So, we talk about the steel metaphor, all those things are in the organization problems. The way I like to think about those kinds of problems is like, what are the invariables? what doesn't change like ever since we come out of africa we have hands and fingers and we have language we learn to use fire these things doesn't change they change much much slower right culture change faster meme change internet meme change a lot faster but those things doesn't change as fast so until we have brain computer interface system we need to see the thing then therefore interface buttons and all that stay with us at the moment and we like to human like to gossip human like to spend that time with other humans so even if i with infinite abundance of productivity through language models we likely want to do this maybe we'll just come to work and chit chat and watch the machine seriously that could be a possible future right and i i think from that lens it's like what doesn't change is the human part that doesn't change um the world around us what probably it's like the changes seems to be accelerating

28:51Ivan Zhao:yeah well i think elements of the human thing don't change like i agree with the fact is kind of like are we part of the like um like we're social animals right aristotle You know, what people don't understand when they say we're political animals, it's actually we're citizens of the polis. And back to the city metaphor, which I think we want to get back to as well. But it's, and I think so those elements will stay. But I also think we change and evolve through our technology, right? It's not just eyes closed, microphones, you know, compute software. But it's like, you know, for example, telescopes, microscopes change the way we think, change the way we see the world.

29:37Ivan Zhao:I think that one of the questions, and so I think that we'll both be that eternal human beings wanting to be citizens of the polis or citizens of the company kind of his way. But I think there will also be changes in it. And like one of the jokes I'm sure you were also hearing and participating in for a couple of years back was like, well, my agent, my AI agent will write your AI agent an email. Yours will. Sure. Yes. Summarize. The whole thing is round trips through emails, through agents. And so what do you think in the information system it's going to be most useful to keep our kind of metacognition kind of tuned to?

30:30Ivan Zhao:Because some of the changes that we guarantee are going to happen are speed. Yeah. Right. Because there's various ways in which compute information stuff at speed just works that way. It's part of the reason why our developers now are using multiple AI agents and parallelizing. I don't know. It's because you're like, okay, I can get to something at speed. I think the same thing is going to happen with various forms of informational work. So what – and so therefore, it becomes a necessity because of the speed. Necessity because of the interface point to lots and lots of information. What are the points of metacognition you think will be, as we call it, longest lived or most important for people to be thinking about as they do work?

31:19Aria:It's a good question. If we bring back to the framework we're talking about, which is capability is the first bucket, your value, your taste and value is the second bucket, then your agency, your last bucket, right?

31:38Aria:we can put speed in the capability bucket. Yeah. There tend to be a right answer.

31:44Reid:Mm-hmm.

31:45Aria:To me, the middle bucket, it doesn't actually have a right answer.

31:49Reid:Mm-hmm.

31:49Aria:What is your value? Mm-hmm. What is your, right now the buzzword, like what is your taste, right? Mm-hmm. Like what, do you like Chinese food? Do you like Italian? There's no right or wrong answers. Like are you drinking tea or are you drinking water? Mm-hmm. Whatever, to each of their own, right? So I think as soon as we're living in this human society of rule of law of people obey this thing and CFO have to sign a legal docking corporation, it's then human need to be at the final say of what is this entity of business or project trying to do in the world, the value, the taste. and to me that is uniquely human and likely doesn't have a right answer meaning that economy is it it's a chaos system it's it's like the market is the chaos chaotic system it's nobody know the outcome because every participant can change the outcome the participation of it change the outcome it's by us pulling together our marketing market idea business ideas we create a market then there's a pick and choose the market and when they're flushed out and it's um it's almost like um it's almost like art world right like yes you need to look like a piece of art but it's it's our decision as a human group decide what's a good piece of art um i think business might likely become uh creating art in the sense that when everybody can create a lot of things really quickly, then it's just you have to inject your value system

33:32Reid:into the market, into the world.

33:35Aria:Then let the world decide, should that be the best thing for people to buy, to follow, to like? And then there's no right answer. You have to participate. And your participation is your value, is your aesthetic.

33:49Ivan Zhao:Well, I mean, to some degree, there are at least directionally right answers because it's kind of like, you know, this is the entrepreneurship journey that we all three have participated in various ways, is you're making both a prediction and an intervention in order to say, this is what I think the market will respond to. And you could be very right, partially right, not very right, totally wrong. And one of the things I think that the, like you know we know the whole world's accelerating because of the speed of compute but it's kind of like you could almost say like you know uh how does information now flow at a much faster rate and what does that mean for you know kind of how we bring these kind of human systems together yeah i think the it used to take like you're you guys invest in the typical 18

34:54Aria:month cycle of a series a company to find idea product market fit and try right should it be 18 days now impossible used to take 50 people to have find the scaled product market company can it take for five people can it take a weekend so it's in a sense the economy almost can becomes everybody has their own Etsy shop. Putting some like, hopefully valuable, but maybe at least a piece of art, then humans can vote on that through the thing we call dollars or whatever currency it is. And you buy other people a piece of art, then that's what we do in the maybe post-AGI world. And the speed can do that.

35:36Aria:And if leverage can do that, it's on a daily, weekly basis or something. I don't know. That's some style experiments. Yeah, exactly.

35:42Reid:Well, so you were talking about values and how we can all participate and shape them. And so before this conversation, we were talking about walkable cities. And we were talking about how we are in New York right now. It is one of the great walkable cities in the United States. And you were saying how, well, pretty 100 years ago, there was lots of walkable.

36:01Ivan Zhao:As the New Yorker, you have to say great walkable cities in the world. And that'll have plenty in the Europe. Missy, I got Iron Man.

36:08Reid:Missy, I got Iron Man. Missy, I got Iron Man. Missy, I got Iron Man. Missy, I got Iron Man. One of the.

36:11Ivan Zhao:Missy, New York.

36:12Reid:Totally, totally. I'll say best walkable city in the US is right up there with the great walkable cities in Europe. But you made the great point that over 100 years ago, a lot of the cities in the US were walkable. Even like Akron, Kansas City, a lot of these places were walkable. And then we totally changed the tenor of cities when the automobile came in and highways shot through the center of town. And you were saying that we're sort of at that same moment here with AI. We sort of made one choice 100 years ago that sort of changed the trajectory of some of our cities. I would candidly say it's the wrong choice since we shaped it in one direction.

36:49Reid:But now we have this other choice. And so what are the choices that we are facing as it relates to AI and how that will shape knowledge work and work in general?

36:58Aria:The concept I really, really like, I think a lot more people should intuit this concept is called human scale. Still going back to what doesn't change, right? A human-scale city is a typical European city. Like Florence is a perfect human-scale city. One hour from one end to another, you can walk. The streets are no longer like this, but times three times, right? So, and 100 years ago, we discovered this thing called automobiles with gasoline you can travel at much faster speed than horse and human walking and so scale of city is changing and change to car scale they have pro and cons car scale allow America to go to the west to connect all the towns that's really difficult to be connected the con is the human scale city become forced to become car scale um so on one end you have florence on the other end of dallas yeah right um i'm not saying that was bad i never actually been to dallas so maybe amazing

38:09Reid:right um but they're different i have they're very different very different right so um i think even

38:15Aria:people from both cities would like say that yeah um i think just like language model give us the power of steel beam to transfer information with and and speed and scale we're doing that similar thing we did with cars in the information space in the knowledge work space um the choice we need to make i think it's really difficult to know where the leverage points of the choices are because it's just such a complex system but i think we need to be aware of what's happening because oftentimes by the time we realize what's happening your city got run through by highways already or marshall mccung often cited saying we drive faster faster into the future through the rear view window because our understanding of the present usually through what we know in the past right yeah um so by the time you notice this it's it's it's gone right you're become part the culture you cannot dial back i think this is happening right in front of us yeah um in some sense the value system of the language model and the economy might not match the value system humans it's like the car has the will on the zone in some sense right car is a meme as a tool wants to multiply too right um the economy wants to grow yeah and it happened to be aware that cfo has still be the person to sign the legal papers.

39:48Aria:I think while human are the people signing legal paper, we should be conscious what kind of world, branches of the world we can be entered into. Unfortunately, I don't have a right answer. If I do, I'll be like...

40:02Reid:Right, but we should go in with our eyes open and ask the questions. Otherwise, we end up in this place that we realize didn't match our values. If we choose that place, that's fine, but we don't want to end up there without at least saying let's try to shape this to end up with a place that matches our human values i think more people should talk about it

40:21Aria:it's surprising not in the dialogue of yeah like people building building language model people using language model building on top language model like company like we're so in the weeds of in the arena we're not asking about what is the arena for where does the arena itself going

40:41Ivan Zhao:Well, I think one of the things I completely agree with some of these threads, which is, one, ask the questions, be intentional. Two, understand that your drive forward in the creation of the new technology is, generally speaking, what you can more clearly see is the rear view mirror versus the front mirror. and that, you know, like Kevin Kelly is what technology wants. There's a, the creation of different kinds of technologies create different kind of gravitational fields and artifacts. Totally. So for example, cities are natural network densifiers, whether it's an economy, in knowledge, in, you know, kind of getting people to work together and all the rest.

41:31Ivan Zhao:And that's part of the reason why the drive of a lot of kind of economic and cultural prosperity has been driven by cities. And I think your parallel in thinking about this is AI has that kind of similar densification of network, enablement of more people and densification of networks. And it's a parallel that's worth thinking all the way back to kind of like what the organization of work is. like what counts as a market how do people work together and I think that part of the thing about this is we won't be able to we'll only be able to partially it's very much like it's like driving forward in a fog in somewhat uneven ground but with jetpacks so it's like okay I like that analogy it's a little scary it treats people out but it's like that's where we are so what do you think are the most like if you said hey we as kind of humanists and not particularly within value of Florence or Dallas or other, what are some of the questions that you think everyone should be asking themselves like what are some of the questions you're asking yourself and you know i asked partially asked this because i think it's one of the things we should also be doing you know as possible is what we're trying to do is like ask the right questions to make technologies possibilities

43:10Aria:are more human future are you operating in human scale is the human in the center of this or it's market in the center of this okay like this is a technology slash business slash culture podcast and a lot of listeners probably are tech business people I would say probably majority decision it's not a human in the center it's the market in the center we are we're participating in the market we help market move yeah but the the the beneficiary is the market and it's the corporation, right? The not necessary, then oftentimes there's a huge overlap with the value of the individuals or with a group of humans, but not always.

44:04Aria:As the scale change become greater, like what the market can do with language model, just like what cars, who is in the center. And I don't want to sound like Luddite trying to, that break the textile industry or something.

44:24Ivan Zhao:Yes, well, and you're building a technology company.

44:26Aria:I am building a technology company. I think it's to be conscious of it, if everybody can be 10 % more conscious of that.

44:37Reid:One of the themes throughout and that you just hit on was talking about sort of human scale. And we also talked a lot about single player versus multiplayer. Single player is sometimes not that fun. We all have more fun when we're playing video games next to a friend. We all have more fun when we go to an office and we genuinely like the people we're working with. And so many AI tools are chatbots where you're just talking to AI. But Notion is really building something for a team, for a company. Can you talk more about sort of what is the difference when you're fundamentally in single player versus this is multiplayer AI for everyone?

45:13Aria:Yeah, I think we're still in the PC era of the PC files era of AI tools, which is

45:19Reid:files you live in your local PC by yourself, hasn't moved on to the cloud yet.

45:27Aria:We're probably going to have a speed run towards the cloud, but we're not in the cloud yet. So for example, you can use coding agents, work with your Git repo locally. Git is the collaboration framework for allow engineer to collaborate, but fundamentally is a single human work with one or few agents, right? So the question becomes, how do you allow a group of human to work with a group of agents? Not just a group of agents, a factory of agents. In fact, what we're building our upcoming product is how do you build a factory of agents and make it so easy for humans to tinker and create and how do humans collaborate with a factory agent?

46:09Aria:That's our product. I think it's important for multiple reasons. One is just solve a real bottleneck in productivity of how to work with those things. Second is make it a lot more fun. And this will be especially useful for business enterprises, which are usually a larger group of people. Just give them a solution that they don't have to go to their coding agent and work with local files. You have an out-of-the-box solution for a team of human and teams agents.

46:37Reid:And I think so many times when you think of work software, we just think like productivity. But you've said the word fun so often. You've said the word beauty. Like people need to want to use these tools. And if they are fun, if they are beautiful, if they are aesthetic, like that will also lead to more adoption and us having better teams, which I love.

46:55Aria:It's more adoption for our product or other people's product, but also just it's more fun for the people using it, right? So why not? It's like you want to have people to, if you create something, you want the user of the

47:06Ivan Zhao:you created to enjoy it so so another theme and there's at least eight or nine themes here that we could go on for hours on which are super interesting but one of the other ones i think would be like as a personal kind of thing is is also the focus on agency um and there's multiple reasons one is i think it's one of the things that people most worry about in technological changes, how their agency shifts. That's part of the reason, last book, Super Agency is part of it. Part of it is obviously agentic technology. And there's this kind of ambiguity in agency because one's just like, my agency, does it take agency from it?

47:48Ivan Zhao:But you also have like a travel agent. You have a, you know, there's agents that are on your behalf. So it has this kind of, this lens. What are the things do you think in the AI age that in addition to asking kind of that 10 % question about human scale, are the ways that we should try to make human agency along with AI the right result?

48:14Aria:Agency for me feels like muscle. It can grow for a person, can also atrophy. I got married last year. I've been together with my wife for many years now. I noticed something I used to do before the marriage independently, because she does it more frequently, I don't do that anymore. So my agency or my habit of doing that activity, just I could become rely on her to do that. I noticed, oh, I used to be able to do this. I can still do it, but naturally my agency got weaker. I think if we're not careful, a lot of this will happen to the thing we're doing with our minds. right um whether that's a good or bad i don't want to provide values but it's actually that literally happens before um before printing price humor are amazing and remember things right yes there's a lot of techniques for memorizations the scribes all the class of the

49:15Reid:the scholar scribe class can remember tons of stuff printing press happens and it killed the

49:24Aria:memorization. It killed the travel musician who travel news, poetry, right? All those poetry and rhyme are for memorization to contain information, which are atrophying to go one place to the other. Those are lost. And printing press also bring enlightenment, a lot of good things. Then we had Google, right? I remember when I was in college, my first year of college, my English teacher was the only teacher asked us to use the physical library like he just forced us everybody use Google Scholar why do you use physical library but I still remember the color of the books where did you find those things you citation the physical tactical nature of things right we don't do that anymore yeah right maybe right now the kids growing up with chat GPT of the world they don't use Google anymore they don't need to go read the links and digest the link and they just get the answer so there's a sense of atrophying of your agency or habit of doing things i think we gain a lot we gain a lot of efficiency productivity we probably but there are things that are being lost um i think it's really hard to predict which part is important which part is just right it's okay I think going back to the theme of our conversation today is let's be conscious what's in gain.

50:47Aria:Let's be conscious what's lost. Let's constantly flip this thing and see if the human's in the center, if that's what you care about. Just be more conscious about the situation.

51:01Reid:Well, I think one of the ways we can do that is by thinking about the past, learning from history, etc. And so I'm going to give each of you a sheet of paper. And so we have some.

51:12Aria:What is this physical paper? It's physical paper.

51:17Ivan Zhao:Printing press hasn't completely gone out the window. Yeah.

51:21Reid:So these are iconic thinkers, you know, from the past 60, 80 years. and I'm going to, there's a few quotes from each of these thinkers and I'm going to ask each of you in turn to pick one of those quotes and agree, vehemently disagree, give us an observation. So you can choose whichever quote you want and then tell us a little bit about it. And Reid, we will start with you so you can model. So we have four quotes from Alan Kay. So please choose one.

51:49Ivan Zhao:So the one I would choose is the first, which is the best way to predict the future is to invent The creation of that future is actually driving through a fog with jetpacks. And so you can't, it's how you steer much more than, and how you create and invent more than just how you participate in.

52:09Reid:And it just gets us away from the victim mentality because it just says you can create, you have agency, you are empowered. So let's next do Douglas Engelbart. Ivan.

52:20Aria:I like the second one. The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better. He talks a lot about concept bootstrapping. Can you use the system to create itself, then the things that improve itself? And that's a faster compounding loop than you just working, you humanly create that system. We see this with language model right now. Truly, it's happening. The compounding loop through, if you're building a product, the product builds itself. It's happening right in front of us.

52:49Reid:Absolutely. Reid, pick a quote from Richard Feynman.

52:54Ivan Zhao:I will pick the third one, which is I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. Yeah, it's a good one. Yes. And I think it's in part because there's actually two parts of it. Part of the questions that can't be answered is, I actually think that's part of the mystery of life in terms of what we're doing. And some of the really important questions I think are really ultimately unanswerable but still very important to participate like the sense the meaning of life is participating in the journey for that question and then also of course answers that can't be questioned tend to have a rigidity of thinking that is maladaptive to how we create the future we wanted that we should create it's actually related to

53:41Aria:the first bucket and my theory in the first bucket is the changing perspective is worth 80 points of IQ. To ask a question is to finding a perspective. And that's usually changed the whole thing. It's not by knowing the answer. Like scientific revolution happened by asking the right question, not by having the right answers. And that's from better perspectives.

54:03Reid:I think that also directly relates to language models today because people are like, well, what are we if we're just getting answers? And it's again, well, are you asking the right questions? Like you have to have the taste to be able to do that. And Ivan, you mentioned Marshall McLuhan earlier. So do you have a quote there?

54:18Aria:I think in part of a mission strategy doc in Notion, we always open that we shape our tools. Thereafter, our tools shape us. I think it might not directly attribute to Marshall McLuhan, but most people think it's Marshall McLuhan. Just be aware of what's happening. Be aware of the perspective you are in. Understanding that it's the system that culture is the thing that once you shape it, it will shape back to you. Absolutely.

54:44Reid:And we talked a lot about cities. Reid, do you have a Jane Jacobs quote?

54:48Ivan Zhao:Well, I think unsurprisingly of these three, because I think this is very much in the theme of our discussion, is there is no logic that can be superimposed in the city. People make it. And it is to them, not buildings. We must fit our plans. And that's a different way of saying human scale.

55:07Reid:Well, I was saying to everyone this morning that I was reading about Buckminster Fuller on the subway this morning and I missed my stop because I was reading so many interesting things. So, Ivan, do you have a quote for him to bring us home?

55:19Aria:I actually like the first one. I did not know this quote, but I like the idea of it. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, you build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. I think Einstein said something similar. To solve the problem, you have to get out of the box and figure out a new thing, which is similar to the perspective one. That's the promising part about that new technology we have. Because to solve the problem of the old technology we brought to us, a lot of problem that innate with us, cancer, global warming, whatever those problems, require new tools and new perspectives.

55:57Aria:I think language model gave us this opportunity. As science were careful with this new fire, maybe we'll find a new way to solve our old problems.

56:06Ivan Zhao:So we have four questions, which we term rapid fire, but you can answer at any length that you want, that we ask all our guests. That's kind of a little bit of an amuse-bouche and just kind of a fun angle through it. So I'll start. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

56:27Aria:I recently discovered this production company called Merchant Ivory. It's a trio. they're making mostly period adopted novels, usually not on the high budget, but they're particularly about the detail, beautifully shot. Adoption like A Room With A View, Merchant, Death in Venice. And I wouldn't say using the word optimism, but it's very human. It's topic about things that happen between a group of humans in a beautiful set, historical pieces. My wife and I have been watching one by one. There's like two dozens, tons of those movies by them, but each one is encapsulated of something very, very human.

57:15Aria:I highly recommend everybody to discover it.

57:19Reid:What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

57:22Aria:Where did you get your jacket?

57:25Reid:Love it. Great answer.

57:27Ivan Zhao:Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry, outside of the tech industry, that inspires you?

57:33Aria:I would say overall history. If you're zooming out from what's present, it just makes you marvel both in the science domain, in the business domain, in just history itself, make you marvel about human ingenuity. Like this meatball machine coming out of Africa can figure out how to cross the ocean, figure out what's up there, figure out what's down there, just by keep thinking hard and with agency and cleverness and never give up on a lot of things. This is the thing I think is most worthwhile to preserve.

58:09Reid:Absolutely. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve in the next 15 years if everything breaks humanity's way and what's the first step to get there i think we

58:19Aria:have the technology to using angle bar's turn to bootstrap the intellectual industrial revolution and it's like we're not it's happening already yeah and um it can solve all our yes jays problem if we fly with the jackpac somewhat carefully um i think and i hope we'll do that and i think i I hope, I really, really hope that we preserve what makes us human, human in the meanwhile.

58:47Reid:Well said.

58:47Ivan Zhao:Well said. That's awesome. And I've had many, many things to talk about, but this has been great. Thank you.

58:53Aria:Thank you. Yeah.

58:54Ivan Zhao:Possible is produced by Pallet Media. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imozu, Trent Barbosa, and Tafadzwa Mimorundwe.

59:09Reid:Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rellis. And a big thanks to Amelia Salyers, Camille Ricketts, Joseph Duncan, Amy Wu, Grace Donovan, Miles McDonnell, Emily Fernandez, Michael McGinley, and the rest of the team at Notion.