Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Krish Ramineni on whether you can trust AI

27:55Yeah, when we set up our company, we had obviously the option to be able to have an office somewhere, right? But then we realized that actually, if we really wanted to grow a company that was truly diverse, and you had people from different walks of life, and you go where the best talent is, then you can't have something that has as much friction as an office. And almost like telling everybody that they have to come to the office every single time, right? There's people that I've worked with in our organizations that I've never met in real life. And the first time I met, my co-founder used to live in Cancun, and I lived in Dubai.

28:33Got it. So what was happening there was like, we're running this company and growing it, and we're not anywhere near each other. Obviously, over time, we got a little bit closer because of time zones, et cetera, et cetera. There's a system around it. But effectively, I think that it can be done if you have a system around it, and if you're not using systems of old to be able to build a company of tomorrow? I don't know what you have to say about it. Well, for me, I only had one year of corporate experience before starting the company. I worked for one year at Microsoft. They're pretty traditional.

29:04Everyone's in the office. This was before the pandemic. And you're going in five days a week. What's interesting is when we started our company, investors said, I think there is a significant risk to you choosing to be remote. and my co-founder and I started out remote. This was in 2016. In fact, the way I met my co-founder was actually remote. We worked on some class projects. He went to MIT. I was at Penn. So for two years, we worked on remote projects and never met in person. Yeah. And then we met in person like six months before we decided to say, hey, let's go all in and start a company together.

29:44So, you know, people talk about like online dating and meeting strangers, right? So that's actually a really interesting thing. They're asking a lot of wedding planners, how did people meet? And right before it was like 80 % through friends of friends, through family at work. Now it's like 70 % are from a dating app. Yeah. Yeah. So that's like, so what was, what I would say about remote work is in the past, there was a stigma because one, the technology was not good enough. Like you could not get a constant, consistent webcam connection. Internet before 2011 was quite slow. Certainly the upload.

30:21Upload was really slow. And then you're going to always have the static, the issues of actually having a proper interaction. But now I would have... You also had an interesting problem, which is the call was only as good as the most technologically incompetent person on the call. Yeah, it takes them 30 minutes to get into the call. So it only took one Luddite to be going, you know, permanently on mute, fiddling with their camera, etc. And the whole call was wrecked. So it took the pandemic to get people up to that, basically, the threshold of competence. Even though the technology was there, it always takes people a couple years to become okay with it, and then it has to be socially acceptable.

30:56It's technologically feasible, but is it socially acceptable? My argument when we started the company was, I looked at investors, I talked to folks and said, there is nothing that a knowledge worker cannot do remotely today that you can only do in person. Obviously, if you're a doctor, you're not going to be able to perform surgery remotely. Well, maybe a robotic surgery. But there is so much that a knowledge worker can do remotely. So we're going to go all in on that. And then the theory for us was we could do hybrid. But the problem is the people in the office might know certain pieces of information.

31:31And the people that are away are going to be left out. So we had to make a decision where either you have to be all in person or all remote. and so the advantage of being all remote was we could hire people across 20 countries and that comes with its own challenges with time zones so remote is not necessarily easier if i'm being candid i would take your real estate budget and spend it on an annual jolly exactly possibly in cancun yeah we do we go to a tropical place every year and we bring everyone in for a week or two and what's crazy is there are people we have a rule in our company this goes even extreme you you do not need to have your camera on.

32:08That's crazy, right? So there are people I've hired where, other than when I saw them during the interview, I've never had my camera on or their camera on. So all I know is their voice and their profile picture. So putting the picture to a face in real time and their voice was the craziest experience we had this past year when we did our offsite. And you often get the surprise by them about how tall or short people are, because you have no idea. Yeah. I mean, no, I mean, I definitely, I think, you know, What I wouldn't do is bank the real estate, the rent savings entirely. I think there's compensatory expenditure needed.

32:43And indeed, you know, some people, some of the time, prefer co-locating not necessarily at a head office, but somewhere. I think there are going to be property costs entailed somewhere. And actually, bluntly put, I think those two weeks are very, very powerful because you bond in a space like that. In a way, to be absolutely candid, you don't bond in an open-plan office in the same way. Yeah, what we realized when we would bring people, and this is why I've worked before, and even in our company, when you bring people in one place, not a lot of, like, well, the efficiency of what you get done doesn't get better.

33:19It actually gets worse, because everyone wants to make the most of connecting with each other. I'm very chatty in person. And so I have to, for me, the open office space, I'm gonna get distracted, someone's gonna come up to my desk, we're gonna have a conversation. What I do love about in-person, though, you can have that spontaneity of let's go to the conference room, let's whiteboard. So I do feel like the transfer of information can be more spontaneous. But the advantage with remote is everything has to be documented and written down. So you don't have to explain yourself twice. You don't have to have the same meeting twice.

33:52When we're onboarding someone, we just refer them to the Firefly's previous recordings or the notes. So everything is like right there. But the one thing that I do think is so important, we talked about self-driving, we talked about commuting. So the biggest challenge was, the epiphany was, I went to India. I went to Delhi and had one of my employees. We took the train, and then he was explaining to me how long it takes to go from the suburbs where he lived to into the city. And we were literally packed like sardines. It was insane. And I'm thinking, you commute two hours to the office. You're exhausted.

34:30You're going to spend another 30 minutes in front of the coffee machine. I don't know how much work you're going to be able to actually do, versus take that two hours every day, spend it with your family, go for a walk, live in an area where it's not as expensive as living in the city, in like zone one, and it's transformational for them. Yeah, one thing that I realized, though, to challenge all of our thoughts, though, is that was the purpose of an office simply just to do work, right? Or was the other social, almost like benefits of being around different peoples and peers? I think I watched a podcast where Emma Greed, behind Skims and Good American, etc.

35:13She talked about the fact that actually, because she was able to see leaders in front view, and how they acted, and how they spoke, and how they moved, and how they communicated, it allowed her to build up her own skills, right? Because she could see a live example of how somebody moved. So maybe if you're like a junior getting into the industry and you haven't had the opportunity to work somewhere before, and you haven't had the opportunity to actually see greatness or someone that's senior in your role do what they do, how do you grow? How do you gain those skills? How do you gain that experience?

35:45And also, a lot of people's friends they meet at work, a lot of people's couples meet at work, right? So maybe the role of the office is... Yeah, remote work, it takes a certain type of person. You went back to your phrase about context, and I think generally what we're looking for is wrong. We're looking for what is the right place to work. in fact what you want to do is provide people to some degree at their own choosing but to some degree not with as wide a range of contexts as possible in which they can work yeah so that there are moments where you want to be sociable there are moments when you want solitude okay i've often said the ideal office is half library half pub yeah you know and what we've got is an open plan office which is neither one thing nor the other it's neither sociable nor is it a solitary space where you can get on with stuff.

36:41I also think you, you know, there are people who are introverts who we ought to nudge to go into the office more, and they're probably people who are extroverts who we ought to nudge to stay at home more. Paul Dolan, very good behavioral economist at London School of Economics, always said his rule was go into the office one day more than you would left to your own devices. In other words, it's a bit like forcing yourself to go to a party. When my wife has kind of bullied me to go to a drinks party, I'll be honest with you, at the time I just want to sit at home and watch a YouTube documentary about traction engines, okay?

37:16And I'm bullied to go and get dressed and go to this party. More often than not, I'm glad I went, okay? Now, that doesn't mean you force yourself to go to every party you're invited to, but some degree of just pushing yourself against your natural inclinations is probably pretty wholesome. I'd also say there's also, you know, if you take your colleague in Delhi, You know, two days a week, why doesn't he work from home in the morning and probably at lunchtime the train's empty? Okay? So he can work on the train, conceivably. You know, there's also the question of just simple time shifting. Yeah, because usually the 9 a.m.

37:49traffic and then the 6 a.m. traffic is insane. Yeah. Yeah, and so the other advantage of remote work—well, there's pros and cons to this. The advantage of remote work is I feel that we operate at our best. We have these epiphanies when we're out on a walk or when we're doing something else. Of course. And you're like thinking about it. It's not you sitting for eight hours being monitored by your boss. So those sort of epiphanies happen when you're doing other things and it's working in the background. But the other advantage is you can also, when you're working remotely, you can choose to take like a couple hours during the day to do other things, but then people will work in the evening.

38:26Yeah. So that you have that flexibility. It's good use of, it's optimizing the use of daylight. I mean, if you think of anyone you know who's based in Scandinavia, they spend about four months of the year going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. When I was in Seattle, that's what happened. Seattle's pretty much the same, yeah. Yeah, get home. Yeah. So it's about the same latitude as London, I guess. Seattle is in the 49th parallel, a bit further north, I guess. But it's interesting in that respect in that, you know, the reason it might very well be natural for human beings to work for four hours, take four hours off and work for another four hours.

39:04And it was commuting that effectively made that impossible. Not, you know, it wasn't anything to do with productivity or value. The fact that you had to cram everything into a kind of eight hour stretch is undoubtedly a product of, you know, wanting to get home at a reasonable time. And then you're exhausted afterwards and you want to do something else. You want to go to the gym or you want to you get into like this routine and then weeks, months go by. But the other thing is a lot of the tech, the big tech companies who were all in on remote work during the pandemic were slowly saying, no, you actually have to be back three days in the office.

39:42And now most of these companies are five days in the office or you need to resign. there I feel that are you doing that to get them to be more collaborative work more or did people abuse the system where they were working the bare minimum and now I need to see you be a busy body in the seat and I need to monitor you so that your product you know your productivity levels can actually be tracked there is a problem there which is you are calibrating your level of uh stricture and general bossiness to the people in the office who are least trustworthy and least motivated, which then imposes a massive cost on the people who are your most talented and valuable staff, who are people who are talented and are motivated.

40:31And so by forcing those people effectively to a lowest common denominator of general attendance, that seems a pretty dangerous thing if you want to hold on to talent. Yeah, especially the, so we have this policy at our company. I'm not looking at when you're clocking in or when you're clocking out. We actually barely have any recurring meetings. Instead, what we're doing is we're measuring output, whether that takes you five hours or eight hours, we know what output you're going to be able to deliver. Because I have friends in finance where, no, I just have to act busy for my boss, for my MD and I have to be there, warm the seat.

41:07And we said, we're going to be the complete opposite of that. It's not about, you're not getting paid to look busy. You are getting paid to actually deliver outputs and we'll measure outputs. And if we have issues around outputs, we'll see like what the causes of that are. But yeah, a lot of times the people that are the most productive, the most creative, the high performers, they want more freedom. And so remote work is naturally comes with a lot of freedom. But to maintain freedom, you need to also have a lot of discipline. So it takes a certain type of person because there will be people that can easily fly under the radar, push their work under the rug, and do the bare minimum.

41:49But we don't want to punish everyone else because of those low performers. And going back to your point there, you talked about maintenance, right? So how does a company maintain a remote workforce, right? So what are What are some of the things that you have to learn and unlearn to be able to make sure that you get the positive outcome of remote working? One is you can still create a really strong bond with your teammates. It can be lonely. We tend to hire certain types of people that are extroverted introverts, where we trend to... We started something this past year where people in different regions can get together once a month and co-work together for a few days at a time.

42:31And so that starts to build like the bonds. We have the offsite where we fly everyone to a country away from the hustle and bustle. They can work together. But a lot of times we're also constantly connected on the like Slack or any of these messaging platforms. So people are very understanding if, hey, I have to go pick up my kids right now at this time. Could you go do this? and people will sub in. So one of our sales people has to go, they have an emergency, someone else will slot in. The other beauty of remote work is we'll have someone come in from our customer facing team and they say, Hey guys, I have a customer here.

43:07They only speak French. Can anyone come and do a demo for them in French? And one of our engineers who's never done a product demo is like, Hey, I'll step in and I'll take care of it. So that's like the cool part of like the diversity. And you have different people, everyone's like working together and helping each other out in skills that they might not be familiar with. The European phrase for that is total football, isn't it? Which was a Dutch concept where every player can play in every position. Yeah. And tying this to AI, I'm a big believer that we have gone from hiring specialists to now only hiring generalists.

43:40The very interesting application of bottleneck theory here. So, without turning this whole thing into a total distraction, which is always dangerous, I'm a bit of a Georgist, which is, you know, the belief that I wouldn't go into the whole single tax on the value of land business. But the core insight of Georgism, or one of many insights, is that there's no theoretical limit to the amount of capital you can have. There's no theoretical limit to the amount of labor you can, or worthwhile labor that can be used because we can increase productivity potentially to an extraordinary degree. So the limiting factor is land.

44:15And so what tends to happen is because land is the thing that you can't make any more of, the people who who own the land tend to acquire disproportionate power to extract value from the people performing useful work on the land which they own, which is economic rent. And that's of course, time and land are fundamental limiters. Land always appreciates over time. And consequently, of course, they're not making it anymore. Land always appreciates. and nearly all so the argument is effectively in georgism is that it's as if by the way you own any improvements to your land in georgism if you build a house or you make your farm more productive or whatever you get to keep the gains okay um however land is treated as though the actual land itself were owned by the government and held in common for the populace so the only tax you apply actually texas is not miles from this you have no income tax but you have uh land And value taxes.

45:15Property taxes. Property taxes. And that's actually technically it shouldn't be a property tax in George's terminology. It should just be on the value of the land on which the property sits. Because if you build a barn on your farm, that's the product of your labor and the gains are yours to keep. To be honest, I think it's a very, very insightful way of looking at the world. But it is also, it occurs to me, it's something that actually derives from asking the question, where's the bottleneck? What's the constraint? And, I mean, one of the interesting things with AI is we can ask the question, what are the cognitive constraints?

45:48Okay, like not being able to hold seven meetings in your head simultaneously. Okay, what are the cognitive constraints which this can help resolve? Yeah, that's a really good point. One of the things that we look at is we have a rule, especially with Dunbar's law, that we want to keep our company as small as possible. 150. 150. So we're around 120. We're getting very close. For the longest time, we kept it to 100 people, even though we've scaled 10x. And right now we service about 20 million people. And we only grew our support team by three people from one to 20. So that's because we use AI in every aspect to help automate half of our support tickets, our support conversations.

46:36In fact, the next phase of Fireflies, which I haven't announced in many places yet, is why have Fireflies just be a silent note-taker on a call? This goes back to your thing. Can it be interactive? Why not have the AI just go take the meeting on your behalf? Especially if it's a recurring meeting, if it's like a redundant meeting. So the first AI we're going to roll out is an AI recruiter that will go screen and interview hundreds of candidates simultaneously for you. And it knows the questions you as a recruiter ask, how detailed you get, your persona, and you're essentially cloning your best recruiter to go take on that stuff.

47:18Now, does that mean like, oh, our recruiters are not going to be able to do other work? Absolutely not. It's actually going to give them more coverage and then to be able to do the more analytical part and decide the right candidate. But if your bottleneck is, I can't be on 10 interviews every single day interviewing candidates. I need someone else to do that so that I can go find the best candidate. We want to be able to allow people to do that. So that's one bottleneck we've solved. That raises some important ethical issues, though, because one, we need a system. A good recruiter would occasionally hire a wild card.

47:52they would also vary their criteria every now and then simply out of... Because cognitive... So if you optimize, the danger would be you optimize for one thing. And actually what you need to be optimizing for to a degree in a team is optimizing for complementary skills and variety. Yeah. So there are some really... I mean, there are some very, very dangerous questions we've got to ask. We don't want to have the AI decide who to hire. It's shortlist. It's basically doing, if you think about, like, the robotic tasks that a person has to do, where they go through a list of questions, ask the same questions.

48:27Can you explain that to me a little bit more? The nice thing is we've trained our AI where it'll go through the list of questions. It's just purely doing the functional screening interview. But if one of the answers isn't very detailed or it feels off, it'll automatically note it. Can you go a little deeper there? Can you explain that? I feel like this is different from what you said earlier. It pays attention to the little nitty-gritty stuff. I'm guessing if you take Fireflies, it'll learn about you, right? And your patterns over time. And I'm guessing you're cloning your best recruiter, so they've probably done like 500 of these interviews, so it knows when it pivots, it knows when it gets a certain, almost like, cue, to be able to almost like counteract what the computer says it should do.

49:13You give this AI agent an end goal, right? I want to know these criteria or these pieces of information. You figure out what's the best way to ask those questions to get me that information. And then you do it across 100 candidates. And then you analyze all the candidates. And you give me the data. I will ultimately make the decision. But now I can look at everything and make that call. So there's no shortage of data. So this is something that I believe like paradox of choice is only going to get crazier in AI, because there was a limit to how much I could research when I were to buy something, right?

49:53Like I want to go buy a new iPad. Coaster or iPad. Yeah. I am one of those crazy functional buyers where I will look at every stat, every spec. There's a clear reason why I'm a Samsung user and not an iPhone user. Go on, I am as well. Explain that. I'm also a Samsung user. Explain the healthy loyalty to the Gloria CK system. It's so funny. There's something about Apple that all of my friends, as they start getting married, they switch from Samsung to Apple. The green bubbles, the blue bubbles, the peer pressure to get on that, they all switch. So I'm like one of the lone survivors that uses a Samsung.

50:34I'm like, objectively, I get my stylus. The screen is bigger. The camera is like... It folds. Yeah, there's a foldable version. But yeah, I have for a... I also have a suspicion, which is that if a Samsung phone is reasonably popular, it is popular on its intrinsic merits, okay? Whereas I always get the impression that Tim Cook could suddenly launch the new Apple turd on a stick. And there'd be a load of Apple fanboys queuing around the block to go, oh, I love the way it tapers towards the end. You know, doesn't it smell glorious? You know, okay. And my suspicion is that I don't fully trust peer pressure and social proof with Apple, whereas I do with Samsung.

51:14If a Samsung phone is popular, there's reason to believe it is actually a pretty good phone. If you're a functional buyer, you do this. Now, you've said this yourself in the past, that the reason marketing works is because humans are irrational buyers. We appeal to emotion, we appeal to what feels good, and especially back in the 50s and you know, the bad men era. It's like where a good ad campaign could completely change the perception about a product. Also, do you remember when there was this huge craze for that Twitter thing where you could all go and chat in a room together? What the hell was it called?

51:51It only lasted. It was a bit of a flash in the pan. Was it Clubhouse? The Clubhouse. Now, now, Twitter built their own version. They built their own version. But there was this thing, Clubhouse, which was available on iOS, but not on Android. Yeah. Now, what was so funny is it came out during the pandemic, at exactly the whole part-time, as things like the Me Too movement and the whole question of prejudice and division. Yeah. And I said, sorry, does nobody on iOS have a fundamental objection to the fact that Clubhouse is iOS exclusive? Yeah. Okay. Because, you know, if I went and opened up a white Sony golf club, right, there'd be a thousand people outside really objecting to this.

52:34Okay, not unreasonably. And yet these people go, well, obviously it's only on iOS. I'm kind of going, hold on, this is not acceptable. There's more Android users than iOS users. Worldwide, of course. The US is slightly unusual because I think it is Apple penetration in the US might be quite high. Yeah, we always see... Violent prejudices against Koreans, by the way. We see every tech company first release on iOS before Android. and I was like the one person that said no we're releasing either both at the same time or releasing Android first yeah because it just didn't matter and now obviously there's the whole lawsuits and stuff that are going on about Apple and is it allowed to force you to only pay through like Epic the Fortnite game creator so there's there's a lot going on around like who controls the system but what I think about with AI and this functional buyer that I am the majority of people are irrational buyers where we want something that feels nice.

53:34Like we've already made that decision and then we decide, okay, I want to buy it. I'm going to justify it. But in the world of AI, a lot of people are going to go to ChatGPT or Perplexity or another AI tool and say, go find me the best toaster to buy and do all the deep research and come back with specs. Now, will that AI agent or assistant be influenced by this creative, beautiful marketing ad? Or is it just going to be like, I'm going to look purely at the facts and the stats and then tell you what to buy? It's interesting that because one of the assumptions is people want to make decisions fast.

54:09And actually, there are a lot of decisions dating real estate, etc., where you want it to be iterative because you use the process of search to refine your own preferences. OK, I'll give you an example. If you're buying a toaster, you can now buy a glass sided toaster. Now, once you've seen the glass sided toaster exists, it's clearly superior to ordinary toasters because you can eject it at exactly the right moment. OK. And so, you know, there is this element of we embark on a decision without really fully knowing what's really important to us. Yeah. Or indeed how to compare various attributes, because most products have incomparable attributes.

54:49You know, there's aesthetics versus performance would be an obvious one. They're both important. You've got to be careful you don't get overly obsessed as a performance buyer, as a rational buyer, because there are things that are important that have a number attached, and there are things that are important like usability, for which there isn't a number. And the danger people like you will always fall into is getting obsessed with how many kilowatts the toaster is rather than how pleasant it is to use. And yet, in the scheme of things, both matter. The thing I was going to add to that as well, sorry to jump in there, I was like, some of the times the reinforcement of how people act around you or how they treat you based on your purchase is also the thing that drives your decision making.

55:29Yeah, iPhone in India is a luxury, it's a status symbol. Yeah. Yeah, to have it. So even though you might go with a rational purchase, when you receive it and somebody says, what are those? Or somebody doesn't give you almost like the social reinforcement that you want. Yeah. You might actually adjust the prompt, right? to say that it's currently popular. Do you know what I mean? It'll still, in some shape or form, fall almost foul of social pressures. We go out to a social event, and we take pictures on different cameras for friends, and then my friend on the iPhone will say, I don't really like my pictures.

56:07Send me your pictures. Wow, this is so great. Which version of the iPhone is it? Oh, that's that thing. I don't use an iPhone. This is why you should consider maybe using another phone. They're like, no. Like, I want people to know that I'm holding an iPhone, and I don't want to be the odd one out in the group when I send a text message. I ruin my family group chats, my friend group chats, with the green bubbles. And they're like, you're the one person ruining it for all of us. Drake even had a lyric that said, Texts go green. Right? It's actually a thing. By text go green. Yeah, text go green.

56:34You could argue they shot themselves in the foot with exclusivity and that FaceTime, had they opened it up, might have become Zoom stroke Teams. Or WhatsApp, yeah. Or WhatsApp. Okay. So their own arseholery sometimes, I think, backfires. I have a particular grudge because there was, I think it was called Prime Phonic, a very, very good classical music app because Spotify is terrible for classical music because it doesn't understand, you know, movements. It just, you know, it only understands tracks and albums, effectively. And so Prime Phonic was a fantastic classical music app and Apple bought it, claiming they were going to turn it into something wonderful.

57:11On day one, they shut off the Android app, which I'd been happily using for some time. And then they proceeded to do absolutely nothing with the iOS equivalent. In fact, I think it's now just dead, okay? So, occasionally, they do these things. That struck me as so gratuitously malicious, to buy an app and immediately close off their use to Android users, that I've had a kind of grudge against them ever since for that small thing. I don't know if you know this, but the founders of Siri, you know, they sold Siri to Apple. later they came out built another company almost exactly identical called bixby and sold it to samson yeah and uh it's literally the same product you played it twice so that's uh it's very interesting again not to harp on apple they make fantastic products uh but this is the thing that i think about in the world of ai is how transparent do we need to be so in the past the salesperson had all of the information power, right?

58:14Once the internet came out, people have done 50 % of the research themselves. They know at least something before going to the car dealership, right? To now where you can go buy a Tesla online and Tesla doesn't do any marketing. Well, Elon's one tweet is equivalent to doing an entire marketing campaign. By the way, I would argue, just to defend the advertising industry here, they would sell a lot more cars and at a higher price if they did advertising with people from a Silicon Valley background it's an article of faith. It's not really a business decision. There's a kind of engineering purity which believes that your product should sell itself on its own merits.

58:51Okay. And actually, there are quite a few, I think there are quite a few digital businesses. I mean, Amazon is actually one of the world's largest advertisers. We shouldn't forget, okay. But there are quite a lot of products out there which would sell more and make a larger margin if they did advertise. But it's kind of a tech bro signaling mechanism. I absolutely was the same person for five years, and we've now started doing marketing. And I realized, wow, there are so many people. Because we think that everyone that needs to know about Fireflies already knows about it, either you're using it or not.

59:24And then you realize there is half the world that is not aware of it. And so when we started doing marketing, whether it's digital marketing, billboard marketing, the things we get is like, I didn't know this sort of wizardry existed. like i i'm just like looking for some some voice transcription memo tool and you're giving me like full-on notes and you you're having it fill out stuff and so the constant education part like for me marketing is like a huge part of setting the context and educating people that don't that don't even know that something exists like the awareness and brand marketing is like been a game changer for us the last like i'll give you a tip too you could try and i genuinely believe this from a behavioural standpoint, try what I call, actually a few, one or two people did it, CAGI, I don't know if you know CAGI, the meta search engine, you pay for it, but it actually gives you what you're looking for rather than what somebody else wants you to see, okay, and I suggested to them, and they adopted it, an honest subscription model, which is in any given month, if you don't use the product, we refund your subscription, because I think one of the problems you face, one of the mental bottlenecks you face, is subscription fatigue, which is a lot of consumers out there are once bitten, twice shy.

1:00:38In other words, they've suddenly realized they're paying for things they never use because our bank accounts are now too chaotic. And there's no software that'll help you track your subscription. There's donotpay.com, which I think is an AI cancellation tool, if I'm right. But actually, if you simply have the proposition that you don't use it, you don't pay. In other words, you make very, very clear up front, you're not an inertia seller. Yeah. Okay? Your business model is not to get a load of people to forget to cancel after the trial period. Like a gym. We will never be able to, well, we probably could do a test to prove it.

1:01:16Well, we actually give our product out for free. Free. It was a free version of it, which people use. And then it's only after they've accrued a ton of value that they realize, oh, I'm running out of storage. I need to buy more or I want to unlock these new integrations or advanced capability. But for us, our entire marketing funnel for five plus years was you as the user are the champion of the product. Every time you bring it to a meeting, you're advertising Fireflies for us. How does it interact with, say, email and other messaging tools? So right now it's going to send you the meeting recaps.

1:01:53Are you saying, like, can it actually read that? Can it actually read email? Everyone asks this question. Why stop just at meetings? Why not do my emails and Slack messages? So for now, we're doing meetings. But I think it's something that's on our radar is if Fireflies had the context. If you think about relationships. They are actually relevant, aren't they? Because every meeting is probably the product of an email exchange. That's what I was partly thinking. So every communication stream, right? Whether it's an email conversation, a Slack text messaging conversation, a video call voice call yeah if you can bring all of that together like the meeting might only be 70 of it but you need that email exchange and the text messaging exchange now fireflies can be your like personal relationship manager i can tell you it can tell me every conversation i've ever had with rory every email i've ever had and help me prep in a much better way so and you even gave me an example when we're speaking off air about the fact that it can also help you with content creation, especially in an era when we're going into personal branding.

1:02:56The reason why a lot of people are not posting is because they don't have the headspace, the time to even think about valuable content for other people. But if you have a backlog of a lot of the stuff that you've spoken about, you might be creating like nuggets and moments that you don't even think about. Is there a way you can like go into those archives and be able to like bring it in front of you to see which content you're... You can have Fred essentially search back through. So I'll give you an example two examples one is like for sales yeah i can't sit and listen to every one of our sales reps calls no so but i love learning and listening to everything that a customer says uh so i to this day i read every single feedback nps score that a customer uh fills out in fireflies so every day i'm reading hundreds maybe thousand plus messages of when someone churns why do they churn from Fireflies or when someone gave us like a 10 out of 10 versus an 8 out of 10, what do they want?

1:03:52And so we've gotten to a place where it's just so much information. Now we're having the AI go and read everything and classify it for me. But one of the things that I can do with Fireflies is I want to know how our sales rep is doing. So I'll say, what are like the biggest objections that customers had this past week when they had a call with Kim? And then it'll list out the top 10 objections. Hey, everyone wants these new features or everyone wants a discount on this new tier. And that informs 50 % of our roadmap today. This is extraordinary because I knew someone very, very astute. I better not name them.

1:04:32But when they were product manager for Microsoft back in the, I think it was the early 2000s, they took the unusual step of putting the call center in the middle of the product development team. so it was a closed loop. The voice of the customer. Most people would have put the call center 500 miles away and based it on price. They said, no, no, no. The great thing about something like a call center, by the way, is really important because what you learn from a call center is the things that people can't tell you through another interface. Because the call center is generally the last resort, it's the last port of call.

1:05:09If everything else fails, I call the call center. Those calls are disproportionately valuable because they're actually telling you not about trivial problems, but about insurmountable or really, really stubborn problems. For the first two years of our company, we had no product roadmap other than taking everything from support tickets and using that to drive our roadmap. Because people are going to scream the loudest about certain things. And the problem with product managers is we have our own theories. We like to sit in our own vacuum in our room and think this is what's going to be right for the customer.

1:05:45And then you go build that and you still realize that people are screaming about something else. Like why is the upload taking 10 minutes instead of five minutes? So if we just, all we did was listen to customers and build what they needed, we knew that our support tickets would go down. And then we could actually breathe at night because in the early days, it was just me, my co-founder, either writing code, designing or answering support tickets. So we need to do anything to keep the support tickets from piling up. A lot of the times, because obviously, we used to work for a company called Gymshark that was very social-driven.

1:06:21A lot of the times, people thought that the reason why the company did very well was because of what we were posting and putting out there. But actually, it was a massive listening aid, right? It was a hearing aid, because we would put things out, the customer would tell us what they wanted, what they didn't want. We would see people buying hoodies and almost like cutting them up, and then we started to make crop hoodies, right? So we'll just listen to what the consumer says. We'll stay close to the customer. We'll see, I actually describe social as behavioral psychology at scale, right? Yeah.

1:06:50Because if you just see how people act in the wild, you're able to understand the patterns, and you're able to act off the back of that. And what happens there is customers always believe that you know exactly, almost like where they're going, you make them feel seen, you make them heard. Actually, there's a company called Nando's. I don't know. Obviously, Rory, you know Nando's. And one of the earliest, almost like examples of this, was when I saw a tweet, because what used to happen back in the day, when Nando's was for the youths, we used to go to Nando's, and people didn't have enough money to actually buy a Coca-Cola.

1:07:23So they'll buy a water, and we'll go to the machine and get a Coca-Cola. And then the Nando's handle tweeted saying, all of you that go to the machine with a bowl of water and you take a Coke, we see you, right? And the audience realized, oh my God, we're being seen. This is a brand that cares about us, et cetera, et cetera. So going back to your point, using this technology to be able to listen to the consumer and get to the actual bottlenecks and challenges is actually a great advantage, right? But then going back to that point as well, I think we're talking about the importance of hiring people.

1:07:59I have this analogy, which is, you should aim to be more Quincy Jones than Michael Jackson these days, right? conducting an orchestra as a leader, right? So it's like, actually, you have all these tools at your disposal. How do you conduct your orchestra? And then you can bring in people for almost like individual tasks and then bring them out for when you don't need them. This is a generalist idea because everyone is going to be a manager, whether you like it or not, whether you're managing people or you're managing a bunch of AI tools. Like our designer now tells six other tools to do stuff and can create 10, 20 different graphics, whereas if he were only able to do it by himself.

1:08:34Yeah. So you need to learn to manage other tools. Like, that's inevitable. I have this belief that the future is going to be, if it's a 20-person company, you're going to have 50 AI agents, AI teammates, and then 20 humans. So you're going to need to have, like, literally a workforce of just AI agents that need to be managed by someone. Where are bottlenecks good? Now, one of the things we've got to be alert to in AI is there are certain things which is where friction is desirable. For example, litigation. If you literally create a world where everybody has an arsehole lawyer in their pocket, which is potentially being created.

1:09:13So in other words, whereas normally, if your neighbour was mildly annoying you because their rotten fruit was dropping onto your lawn, you'd settle it through a decent conversation. you wouldn't go to a lawyer because it would cost you three thousand dollars and mean you'd have to talk to a liar just okay it's like disincentive in itself okay suddenly if you create a world where for example everybody can dispute everything yeah effectively not necessarily solving the problem but using the tools of a bureaucracy to make everything unbelievably slow and turgid and and problematic okay so you know your your dispute with your neighbor over their rotten fruit may not actually go anywhere, but it's a way in which you can just be a massive pain.

1:09:57OK. You know, there are large elements of behavior where actually the fact that it's difficult is a feature, not a bug. Yeah. Absolutely. One of the things that we've seen with our own product is Firefly's is taking these notes, automating things for you. And there was another competitor that came up where their core summaries tech isn't that great in an autonomous way. But what it does is it lets the user write their own notes and then cleans up those notes a little bit. And then those people would shout out the top of their lungs, this is magical, this is the best thing in the world. But it's usually the 1 % that are actually going to pull out a sticky note and then type everything.

1:10:42And we're like, is something going wrong? Why are these people saying this is so much better? And then we look at it, 90 % of the adoption is still from the lazy folks like us who don't want to write anything. They still want to use it. But the people that are the loudest on social media, it's like the IKEA furniture thing. You're putting in a little bit of effort. You feel like the reward is going to be greater. I see. Oh, so it's the effort-reward heuristic. Yeah, it's because I'm typing my own notes. I'm still putting in all the effort. It takes away from the magic of not having to type anything and just listening on a call.

1:11:14It's rather like the psychology that people's enjoyment of a play is sometimes proportionate to how much they paid for the ticket. Yeah. Because you feel a greater obligation to actually enjoy something if you've invested in it. Yeah, because it's like your own notes that you've written. There's a terrifying theory that that explains 90 % of high fashion. That people like the clothes not because they're particularly good. To be honest, you can get something from ASOS for 15 quid that's just as good. but having paid 400 quid for the dress, you've kind of got to like it. I recently saw a stat that 75 % of high-end luxury fashion is actually bought by lower and middle class.

1:11:59100%. Yeah, because it's about status signaling. But then going back to the conversation around Apple, right? So there's two levers there, right? There's that, the status symbol, obviously the fact that it costs more. There's obviously the storytelling elements of the marketing. is able to distill something very, very complicated in a simple way. But then the third one that people don't talk about is the ease, right? And not necessarily the ease of use. And even though it is easy to use, it's more so it's just so easy for it to be attached to a wider ecosystem. And actually, the reason why you don't want to get out of it is because it'll be too much effort to get out of the ecosystem, right?

1:12:33Because it's attached to your iPad, it's attached to your laptop, it's attached to everything. So attached that you're like, for me to be that person that's going to break out of it It's just so much effort. And I think that's how they've kind of got you into that ecosystem as well. The habit-changing things that people tend to have. Salvation lies within. A quote from the Shawshank Redemption. There you go. There you are. The Samsung Galaxy Fold. It's turned off, actually, because I'm on a podcast. I'm sure Apple's going to come out with something like that. We can rescue you from the cult. Deprogramming.

1:13:08Before you're all lining up in front of Tim with his bloody Kool-Aid, we can rescue you, don't worry. The thing that when you said about friction and if people can sue others as easily as pressing a button on like Uber, and you just end up having that, because now the AI is going to triage all the legal cases, you can eventually have a slippery slope where a human can't be the arbiter of the final result. So you submit the case, your AI lawyer, whoever, looks through it, and then an AI-powered judge makes the decision and says, okay, you need to pay him 100 pounds. You need to do this. So essentially, there's just going to be too much volume for a human to do.

1:13:50They're just going to delegate it to an AI. That would be a crazy dystopian world, but that's how you transfer power over to AI. What doesn't it understand? I mean, what are the qualities where its empathic abilities are limited? Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, to what extent? I mean, obviously it doesn't know what anger feels like or unfairness feels like, but it sort of understands it at a verbal conceptual level. Yeah. Okay. Now, I'm just concerned because when you look at automated decisions, it always strikes me, okay, let's take something like car park fines, which have been increasingly automated, okay?

1:14:28There's no longer a traffic warden. It's automatic number plate recognition, something of that kind. Now, okay, let's look at six different parking infractions. One of them is you pay for three hours and you stay for three hours, ten minutes. Okay? Is it fair to fine someone£100 for that? Most people would say, no, under the terms of the rules for parking, yes, it's not fair. Okay? Equally, you park honestly in a place, you know, four days a week, every week of the year, and one day you forget. Now, they have the data about, you know, you previously paid them£600 for parking at the railway station, and unsurprisingly, on one day of the year, you're just going to get distracted and forget.

1:15:09Is it unfair to charge somebody? I would argue yes. If someone persistently parks illegally and they get caught for a second offence,£100 is probably pretty fair if there's no record of them paying a hell of a lot, honestly. But the extent to which there's a very nuanced human view, and another one would be classically, which happens literally, which is people literally find£100 for a ticket which, had they bought it legally, would have been£3.50. Is that really proportionate? No. And so there seem to be things which are innate to us as humans, which are a sense of what is proportionate, fair and just.

1:15:47It's like a social score, like a Black Mirror episode, where you're like, you know, you're not that bad of a human being, so we're going to give you this sort of fine. Oh, your track record looks really bad, so we're going to give you this sort of fine. Actually, I mean, that sort of fuzzy logic, I guess, is actually how humans have learned to operate. And, you know, I have this fundamental issue with things like speed cameras, which are automated decision making. You can barely call it an artificial intelligence. okay um gps or sat nav would be another example of a very very crude single function artificial intelligence and we ought to spend a bit of time discussing what's good and bad about those simply because they're they're now long established and i would argue that you know a non-contextual fine for speeding infractions okay what we have now is in london they brought a lot of the speeds down to 20 miles an hour.

1:16:41Now, who gets nobbled when you have random speed changes from 30 to 20 miles an hour throughout London? The people who get nobbled are people who drive a lot in London, okay, who don't drive the same route every time. What they're called is taxi drivers, okay? Now, I can't remember a taxi driver told me the number of taxi drivers who are losing their license or getting temporary bans every month as a consequence of the 20 mile an hour limit, okay? Now, for a taxi driver losing your license has disproportionately painful consequences financially okay is it fair to apply the same rules in that in that environment to a taxi driver or to someone driving at three o 'clock in the morning at 25 miles an hour on a dual carriageway okay versus someone driving down Oxford Street no we all know it's not fair and yet for some reason what we've had we've got is a world where we have all the data to make nuanced decisions, but instead we calibrate the whole system to the strictest possible interpretation of everything, with no benefit of the doubt.

1:17:45SatNav interests me, or GPS, because yes, it's very, by the way, it's very creative sometimes. I mean, every now and then your GPS will suggest a route to you that literally never occurred to you or which is counterintuitive. Equally, I do like to look at alternatives because there are facets which the sat-na about my own personal context, which it doesn't understand. You see, it might not understand I'd rather take the scenic route, or actually, I don't want to get there as fast as possible. I want the route with the lowest variance. In other words, I don't want to miss my flight. So I'd rather go on a route that always takes 70 minutes than go on a route that mostly takes 50, but occasionally takes 120.

1:18:23Yeah. So there are, I mean, I mean, the same thing goes on my PA goes insane with me because I will never fully delegate I'll never fully delegate a flight yeah because there are too many weird preferences and I have which are in which some of which are tacitly understood not explicitly understood without which I can't fully make a decision I mean you're probably the same buying a new piece of tech okay yes you're looking at performance, but you are also looking at a whole load of factors which, you know, for example, with an airport journey, it would depend on how long I'm going for, therefore how much luggage I have.

1:19:07There are a whole load of variables like what the weather's likely to be like, which would determine whether I take a taxi to the airport or a train or drive myself. Yeah, like Virgin has this thing where if you want to upgrade to business class, how much are you willing to pay for it if there's an availability for the upgrade. And so everyone has a different threshold, right? It could be based on the duration. It could be the time of the flight. Oh, is it an overnight flight? Do I need to sleep? So all these... By the way, weirdly, although economically or rationally, logically, we should say for a flight of a given length, I should be prepared to pay X for an upgrade to, let's say, upper class or mid class, okay?

1:19:45Weirdly, it also depends on how much we paid for the economy ticket, doesn't it? To an economist, it wouldn't because your upgrade has utility, okay? But if we paid 700 pounds for our economy ticket and the upgrade's 300, we're probably, yeah, go on. Whereas if we paid 300, okay, you know, we're going, ooh, that's twice the price. It's always comparison, right? Yeah. That's one of my theories, which is I think everybody will get AI wrong because they'll try and come up with a single right answer. And what we actually want is, A, a short list, or possibly an iterative conversation where you go, have you got anything a bit more modern?

1:20:24Or is there a hotel that's a bit closer to the sea? Because we're fundamentally refining our utility function. I do see like a convergence like with AI where a classic example of this is when I go on LinkedIn and I start reading posts, they all start sounding the same. And they all are using the same phrases that ChatGPT would use. because I think what most people are doing is going to ChatGPT and saying, I need to post something on LinkedIn, and so write me a post. And I'm a human, and I can see that, okay, the sentence structure here, oh, it's not this, it's revolutionary. The long hyphen. Yeah, the words, the hyphens, the grammar.

1:21:07I can just see it, and I lose interest. You have to put a joke in to prove it's a human. And I realize, or maybe you need to put in typos, because everything looks the same. Or swear words, yeah. And what I realized is AI sure can write good content. It can take someone with 70 % skills, bring them up to 85%. But ultimately, at the end of the day, today at least, people that are going to use AI to the max potential, you need to have good taste so that the AI has good taste. Otherwise, it's just going to regurgitate information, and it's going to give that information to 20 other people. There's nothing different from what you post versus what they post.

1:21:47And it all just starts looking the same. There's a client of mine, which I won't name, although I admire them greatly in every respect, and they give all their employees very, very good presentation training. And it's very, very good at the individual level in that you put one foot in front of the other, you make certain hand gestures. It's extremely good. Except if you have to have five of these presentations in a row from the same client where you go, oh, here we go again. I just got it. So it's just the feed, everyone looks, the content looks the same. Whereas what I think about is use AI to curate, shortlist, but you need to have your own unique ideas.

1:22:27And then use that as a way to reference or clean up, but not have the AI do the creative thinking for you. At least not now. Because it's just then you start to wonder, how many other people have you told the same lie to? So that ends up becoming a reason why it looks so monotonous. How many people, that's beautiful, Rose. How many people do you tell the same lie to? Exactly, yeah. I bet you say this to all the girls, is the equivalent, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. The role that AI plays. But we obviously talked about AI, we talked about remote teams, we talked about Apple, we talked about everything.

1:23:02So, Krish, what's the one thing that you would love to leave the audience with? Like, out of everything that we've said, what's the most important thing that we should know about the world that we're going into? I think we're going into a world where human connection is going to be a premium. I feel that now you're going to have AI that sells to you, that markets to you, that does everything. I really feel that there's going to be a premium put on human delivered experiences. You know the funniest thing? When people leave like Goldman Sachs or banking or sometimes management consultancy, okay, they always like buy a vineyard or a brewery.

1:23:37Because after 30 years of working with intangibles, the joy of just seeing a truck leave the factory full of beer is just, you know, or indeed, you know, a cellar full of wine. Finally, something tangible and physical. And I've often wondered the same thing about this, which is that the only really great thing I've ever heard from a futurologist is the phrase, there are no trends, there are only vectors. and where you get a trend, you always get a counter trend. And the example I'd give is, the thing I love is farmer's markets, okay, which are basically the way you can construct a farmer's market.

1:24:16They're totally illogical economically because you buy direct from the producer and yet you pay a premium for it, okay. Cut out the middle man and pay more, okay. And it's totally inefficient. It takes place out of doors. You've got to pay nine times. You've got to have a conversation with everybody, okay. But we precise, so at Farmer's Market, in one respect, is a Tesco Metro that you've made absolutely shit, okay? But on the other hand, we like it precisely because of what it isn't. And so I think this is absolutely true. There will be this huge premium on organic content of some kind or another.

1:24:50We tried to automate sales and said, you know what, we're going to have self-service. Everything is going to be on the website. You don't even need to come talk to us. Just go buy it. And there will be people, usually in the older demographics, 40, 50-year-olds, where like, I know everything is great, but I just want to talk to a human and reaffirm all of this information. So that forced us to build a sales org. And a lot of times, they've already convinced themselves, they know they want this, but they just want the reassurance from a human. Can I give you the most boring advice, the most boring business advice, but I could actually start a business school where one term would be devoted to the single sentence, answer the fucking phone.

1:25:26because the extent to which business is now, right? You ring up a restaurant and because it's all bloody Gen Z, if they're busy, you know, doing whatever Gen Z do, like photographing their own genitals or whatever, OK, right, OK, you know, sorry, I was probably going to get cut, OK. They just don't answer the phone. Now, I grew up in a small business. My dad ran a whole series of small businesses. He was a small entrepreneur. It was a capital offence not to answer the phone. Even when I was 11 years old, I had to answer the phone and say, Mr. Sutherland isn't here, but I can take a message. OK, because you were throwing away business every time you didn't answer the phone.

1:26:01The inference of not answering the phone is either they're shut, they've gone out of business, or they're not interested. It's the worst thing you can do. Negative brand perception. And yet everybody, you know, you mentioned the thing about, I think it's an article of faith in Silicon Valley that you don't do marketing. OK, because your product superiority is supposed to speak for itself like that's ever happened. Right. And the other thing is, you know, there's this article of faith that you don't use physical direct mail, you don't use the telephone, because anything that involves organic matter is somehow an inefficiency.

1:26:33Okay. It's a terrible, terrible, I mean, actually having a really, really great call center is still one of the greatest things you can do. The AI counter to this is if you're a real estate agent, you're on the field, or if you're busy and you're a small business. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is where I think AI can actually also help take the phone call on your behalf. So just like how you have an AI recruiter, we'll have an AI receptionist and an AI SDR, wherefore, we cannot have sales calls with the smallest of customers today. But we will have an AI that can at least have that vocal, verbal conversation with you.

1:27:10Are you open right now? You know, literally is probably... But the point is that everybody interprets a no reply as the answer no. Yeah. So we want to answer everyone. And that's where we said, like, we really care about our SLAs. And the worst is sometimes people just need to know that, okay, your issue is being solved. You've been hurt. That's all they need, like, from support. And so we said, let's just have the AI have that conversation with them if a human is busy, rather than saying, sorry, we can't take anything right now. We don't take phone calls. So this is the, you're just going to have to come back in six days.

1:27:49By the way, you are being heard, okay, is possibly the most important sentence in that the rise of populism, okay, in politics. The great book to read about this, Dan Davis, The Unaccountability Machine, but he wants to revive cybernetics, which is probably come across in the 1970s kind of discipline, which looks at business through the lens of information flows rather than just money flows, which is what we tend to do at the moment. And his whole point is that if you literally don't have a feedback loop between the customer and the organisation, or indeed the elector and the government, okay, the only signal you can give over that is a scream, okay?

1:28:31Everything basically resolves to a scream. And that fundamental point about, by the way, we heard you. Yeah. The refusal to actually acknowledge an opinion, it doesn't matter if you, to be honest, even if you don't act on it, just admitting we know it's crap, but, okay, is probably 80 % of the value of that call. And if you think about it, things like the Domino's app, when you order a pizza and it tells you how long it's taken. Or the Uber on the map, you know it's coming. It's that assurance that, okay, at least it's happening. And it's the same thing where I wonder in politics, how many people elect an official, but then actually are able to reach that official?

1:29:15Or like, you know what, we should be able to like send them a submit a form saying you are I need you to do this, or I request this. And that person should sit one day and read all the requests from its his or her constituents and say, I've heard you. And I'm going to address A, B and C. I'm not going to be able to do these things right now. No one's going to have that conversation, right? So that's a this is absolutely fascinating. Yeah, I think the the folks the royal family in Dubai They do this where they sit down and they like go around and get everyone's problems Like just come and listen to it.

1:29:49It's like the voice of the customer. Like who are you representing? And then you go and try to address it So a lot of times you think stats and data and you look at the trends that's going to be enough to address it but But many times you can just go sit and listen to a call, a customer call, or a support conversation. And the change that you're going to be able to make is massive. Like Amazon did this with packaging, where people were sending Jeff Bezos emails about, hey, that plastic packaging, it's a pain to cut open. Like I'm hurting myself. It's so painful. And so that's why they switched to the paper packaging.

1:30:28It's also environmentally friendly, way easier to open, and then you can bulk package multiple things at once. And recycle it. Yeah. And that comes from listening to a customer. You can look at as much data as you want on why is this person's ratings five-star, not four-star, but you need the qualitative stuff. I actually had the Larry David moment once where I bought a pair of scissors in order to open some impossible-to-open packaging. And the scissors itself came in packaging, which was impossible to open. Yeah. You gotta listen to the customer. That's a great note to end up. First episode with Chris.

1:31:04Great end. Absolutely superb. Great chatting. Absolutely. What a pleasure.