When life gives you LLMs... (Friends)

39:25Like if you can find the magic combination of characters to put into this little box and send it, you can get the attention of anybody in the world. That is true. I mean, theoretically, but yeah, that's directly. I mean, it happens. Although it also doesn't happen, you know, like sometimes they ghost you. Sometimes.

39:48Oh, that's hilarious. But yeah, I mean, email is probably to this day like top five coolest things in technology, right? Like the way it works. Yes. It hasn't, you know, of course it has its problems that I'm sure you know all of them very well as a email sending provider. You know, a lot of the technical problems, of course, spam is an issue. I mean, there's so many issues. But it's not siloed. it's federated in like old school ways it works and yeah you can reach anybody in the world just by having their address and theoretically nobody owns it and maybe you can speak to the deliverability aspect because i think there's some layer of ownership or centralization it's like there's a cabal so to speak that gate keeps the protocol to some degree google and microsoft off basically you know like i imagine deliverability is probably the biggest thing and like somebody controls deliverability of email and if you don't send from a certain ip address or a range of ip addresses you have less likely uh the ability to actually utilize the protocol you may send it to the ether but it won't actually arrive because the the system says no essentially which is that fair, Zeno?

41:04Is it basically Gmail and Outlook or Yahoo? I mean, there's probably just a few centralized providers who have so many people's emails hosted that if they lock you out for whatever reason, they think that you're a bad actor, then you're kind of locked out and you can't hit, you know, a third of email addresses in the world. I mean, Gmail is so massive. I'm not sure how big Microsoft's email hosting is, but I'm sure it's just massive. And I'm sure there's other big players like that, but those are the two that come to mind. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Uh, like Gmail definitely dominates, uh, and, and then you have like Yahoo is super popular in Japan, for example, still, and then, um, Outlook still in Hotmail, like those ones, like for Microsoft.

41:53What is cool about them and not cool too is like they have to keep improving their game. Otherwise their products get obsolete. And especially now if AI, you can generate like so many different emails and they're highly personalized and, uh, and it gets even more tricky. Right. Um, but I think the beauty is like, uh, or the challenge for them is like, okay, how do we evolve? And in the beginning, you're totally right, Adam. Like there was a lot of emphasis on the IP level. So then you would have like an IP. If the reputation of that IP is good, then just let all those emails go through. And then email providers came up and they're like, okay, now I have this big IP pool and I just shove people there.

42:44And then the good actors balance the bad actors. So then these inbox providers, they're like, oh, okay, so now we have to, you know, go up the different abstraction layer and look at the domain more than just the IP. And they have like different techniques, like they look at how fast you send emails. And that's something that dictates like, are we going to trottle the emails or not? They look at the engagement early on for like emails that are coming to the inbox. And based on that, they dictate like the inbox placement. Are we going to keep it on the primary inbox, the promotional tab, the spam folder?

43:24And those things are constantly evolving. But what my, the thing I don't like is like, I wish they would evolve as fast as the web, for example, because I feel like the web was like super slow, maybe like the 2000s and But then 2010, HTML5 comes in and CSS3 and ECMAScript 6. And it's like, oh, wow, like there's so much movement. And now we don't care so much about like how this website looks on Opera versus Firefox versus IE6. Like it's just like the same website. Very little things like that are different in Safari than Chrome. Right. Right. But with email, it's still, man, so hard. Tell me about it.

44:12I'm facing an uphill battle right now because Gmail just decided that they're going to start ignoring our styles in our newsletter with zero changes from me. Like it's the exact same thing. It worked fine last week. I can send the same email I sent two weeks ago. And if I go in my archive, the two weeks ago one looks like it looks like in every other email client. and if I resend the same exact content today, it looks different. Specifically, they're ignoring our fonts and our link colors, the actual form of the email is still there, but it just looks kind of whack and there's no announcements, there's no nothing.

44:51It's just like, you know, they just changed the way they handle rendering and now I have to go chasing down whatever it is different in order to get my rules to work and that just makes me mad you know and there's i mean i can't ignore it's gmail and at least with browsers like you know there's an engine behind and that engine is open source so you're like okay gecko for firefox and uh blink for chrome and then there's an actual change log publicly available uh but for those right yeah email engines like no there's nothing that's like oh here's what we change in terms of rendering no like you you cannot find it i want to pause for a second just and just reflect on the idea that jared just said resend and then you just said changelog i just think that's kind of cool how both brand names show up in natural conversation wow that's just beautiful you know that's good naming by us by all of you like that a lot and i had to go sign in jared to gmail uh and look at it because like you're right like it it looks fine it's not the worst ever but it's not respecting the styles it's respecting the overall framework of how the email looks and stuff yes like it's all gone what's up with that they're over they're using their own fonts it's like they care more and microsoft has done this a while specifically like if you log into whatever it is live 365 or if you use like the the microsoft office in the cloud thing and read the email there it's also ugly because they want they want it to look like their UI inside their web app.

46:27And so like all the links are blue because that's what Microsoft wants. Now, if you read that same email, still hosted by Microsoft, but inside of Outlook.app, or, you know, the.exe. Sorry, I haven't been on Windows in a while. Forgot what their extension was. Outlook.exe, it'll look fine. It'll look just like it does everywhere else. But in the web app specifically, they override things. and google i think just started doing that as my guess because gmail just this last couple of weeks now it's like roboto sands or google sands i don't know they're using their own fonts i'm surprised this is news to you xeno has anybody else told you this oh he knows no man you don't know this i haven't heard this all the time i hear that all the time and then superhuman does their thing as well and right the gmail mobile app will invert the colors to be like if you're using dark mode on your phone then there's absolutely no control like but they will invert everything and then And you just hope that they will invert right with their inversion algorithm too.

47:41So it's just crazy. Like how, yeah, you just have to still feels like super kick, even though he knows around for like 20 plus years, right? 30 plus years. And I've been talking with my research assistants, uh, chat GPT. I've asked Grock. I think those are the only two that I asked this particular question. What I can do about this. Is there anything that they know? and they both have pushed me towards litmus which is a commercial product do you i'm sure are you aware of that one does i know litmus they do take the guesswork out of email marketing and so what i want is like a way i can like send my preview email into like all of the the weirdest places it might be rendered and see how it looks and then like somehow open a dev tools kind of thing and i think litmus offers you something like this but you know i'm just a guy with a newsletter.

48:32I'm not like an enterprise where litmus is like, come get our suite of tools for 150 bucks a month or whatever it is. And it doesn't feel like a product for me. And so that brings me up two thoughts. A, as a recent guy, like what is there in this world? Or are you guys trying to solve this problem? And then B, I think this leads us into our AI SEO because both Grok and ChatGPT pushed me towards litmus. That's great for litmus, right potential new customer because they were the thing that showed up that these things knew about so let's start with the email side like what's out there for people to be able to send a preview email into like all the weird places it might render and look at it yeah so yeah litmus is definitely the the most popular one and it's almost like a browser stack uh kind of product like they run vms that take screenshots and then you see how it renders right so that saves you time like you don't need another windows machine to check how things look on outlook so that's great but it's still like okay now i see that it's different what do i do uh so there are other uh tools like can i email which is the alternative to can i use where it shows like okay here's how this like is flexbox supported or not and then they will tell you so it's like just like can i use but yeah email exactly that's cool it's like svg you still cannot use svg on emails so then the tool will tell you like no you you cannot do that so that helps and then if you try to like we we try to put things like that in the product like okay let's add a linter a compatibility checker powered by can i email on react email so we try to shove as much tooling uh on the email template creation process so then when you go live you don't see as much inconsistencies but there's always like a little thing here and there that's cool i'll link that one up of course if you can if you know can i use replace use with email and uh you'll hit the website so I'll definitely bookmark that I don't think it helps me with my particular problem because I'm not using anything weird and it's just like what I might need to do is I'm putting my styles not in line on the elements but in the head and I think that perhaps if I inline them I mean that's inlined it's not a separate style sheet that you're like a separate resource but it is in the head and maybe I need to get them even closer and inline everything and just blowed out all my elements and see if that fixes it i have a that's probably my next step is to do that but then let's take up this other thing which you've put some work into and i've been sharing some of your findings on is you know litmus is probably very happy that when i said i got this problem that these llms are sending me to litmus because i didn't know about their product prior and there was one other one i think it was like uh i forgot what it was it wasn't as memorable of a product name um so they lose but when people ask for like the best developer podcast i would love for the changelog to be the answer right let's just get down to brass tacks so how do we do that how to help us do that how do we get our stuff at the top of of AI's SEO?

52:05Yeah, I think everyone is trying to answer that question right now. Yeah. Man, for me, what really clicked, so I've been ignoring AI for the past two years, not like from a company perspective. As an individual, I use AI a ton. I love it. I'm optimistic about it. I think it's great. But like on a company level, I was like, man, we just need to find product market fit. Nothing else matters, but just ship stuff that is, you know, that's going to help users. And, you know, uh, but then in January this year, I just started seeing like some stuff that I couldn't ignore. So what do we do now is like every time someone signs up for resend, we send an welcome email and that welcome email comes from me.

52:54And when they reply, it's very personal. So then when they reply, it comes to me and then I reply as well. And then this one day I'm just like waiting, like I started to get into running and then I'm like waiting for this Nike store to open. So I'm just sitting there. It's like 30 minutes until the store opens. I'm just replying to those emails. And then one person is like, oh, I came from Lovable. Like, oh, that's cool to reply that. Next person is like, oh, Claude recommended you reply. ChatGPT recommended you. VZero recommended you both. I just started seeing those things and it was it was like six or seven emails in a row so I was like whoa there's just something here I don't know what changed it is the new model like a new version of the LLA I don't know but something clicked and I was like okay I cannot ignore this anymore from a company perspective I just have to keep pulling that thread and then I started finding like okay who is thinking about this problem?

53:58Who is like digging into that? And, you know, it's a huge rabbit hole. And then what are the techniques to, you know, what you were saying, I just want more of that. Like I want ChangeLog to be the default solution here, default answer. And man, like there's so many interesting things. Like, for example, from a SEO perspective, we care a lot about Google and we care about Google Search Console as the tool to see how we're doing in terms of SEO. Turns out, if you want to be the first one in ChatGPT, you've got to care about Bing because Bing is what's powering ChatGPT because of the Microsoft partnership.

54:43So that's how the whole indexing of the web came from Bing as the data source for ChatGPT. so then okay now that's different how do i rank number one on bank versus google uh which is something you would never really pay attention to uh and then you have to start thinking about how do i structure my content on my website because people are asking questions to llms so if they're asking questions then it's a q a type of format so then what we started doing was let's just have more FAQs on every single page we have and let's turn our knowledge base to be more of a question and answer to feed the LLM.

55:32And then, yeah, just start playing with like LLMs.txt, which is like this protocol for you to like just strip all the HTML and just have the content ready for LLMs to consume. So we did that as well. And man, just start going down that path. using tools like Profound. So there's a tryprofound.com tool that shows you like all the traffic. This one is fascinating, by the way. So the way this works is like they hook you, like they hook into your server. And then whenever the server gets a hit, they will look at the origin of the request and then break it down between like, okay, where's this request coming from?

56:17And the reason why that works is because when you ask ChatGPT, what is recent pricing? For example, if you do that now, there's like ChatGPT wasn't trained in that data, right? So like there's no way that they know that. So that's different than if you ask ChatGPT, like write me a poem. No, they can do that without using the trained data. But if you ask pricing for any product, they need to look at the web. So because they are able to search the web, nowadays, you get a citation. And then when you get a citation, it's basically them crawling your website, getting the information. So then you get that request.

56:59You see like, okay, chat GPT went to my pricing page. And then you can start like looking at the breakdown between every model. Like, okay, cloud users, they actually go to this page and chat GPT users go here. And just fascinating it's a completely new way of looking into seo that's for sure that is cool so you're are you using this profound platform with resend yeah we are is it worth it man right now you gotta try everything right uh i think yeah what i yeah what i love about profound gives me the information. I think they still have a long way to go in terms of like, how do I take the beautiful graph and turn into action points?

57:50So then I can, as a team, I can be like, okay, let's change this content. Let's do this. Let's do that. Now you get the data. So you still have to parse the data yourself, I guess. While we were discussing these things, I couldn't help myself, but go to Claude and ChatGPT4.0 and say, what are the best software developer podcasts? And we'll start with Claude because that's the one that made me smile. The very first one, the changelog. Nice. Nothing else. Just kidding. Nothing else. Nothing else. Number two, recent. Wait. That's right. There was 10 listed, but we were first. I couldn't believe it.

58:33I was like, do you know who I am? You logged in. yeah do you know who i am is it in sycophant mode that's the thing this week you know chat gpt is too sycophanty and then the chat gpt had software engineering daily first and then us second okay which is just as good as first in my opinion and what's fascinating is just as good as first if you if you have the same prompt in like cursor or windsurf those models they cannot do web search. So then you will get different answers than the ones like when you use the web. So you can rank differently depending on where you're asking stuff. Yeah, just it's crazy, man.

59:19I've been really curious about how this will all play out because I think we've talked about this several times. I think you said recently on these podcasts you produce that you don't really Google much anymore. You pretty much go right to the LLM, right, to ask a question? for the most part for the most part when you're asking questions not finding things yeah i mean i'll i will google if i know i can just get like sometimes you're searching for something and you know it's the first hit on google as long as you just type it in and so that will be faster than going and asking and it'll save the world some energy i heard recently that every chat gpt question is 10x the cost of a google search we're just talking about not the training but the inference cost of energy and i'm thinking that makes sense it's basically a database lookup versus an inference call and so if i can save if i can do a database lookup i'll do it but anything serious or that i don't know the answer to or i can't find it quickly then yeah i'll pretty much ask an lom first and i have noticed that they started to push me towards i don't i mean push me is okay that's a that's an implied like i'm adding that a little bit of although i i hear they just added today shopping results yep and people are complaining that they're getting like really heavily pushed towards products on questions that don't have to do with that i haven't used much today so i can't say but that's kind of a topic that's hitting uh the social web right now and so maybe it's really going to push you towards products here now they've added some shopping stuff into chat GPT specifically.

1:01:00But I have noticed that like, whereas in the past it would try to answer my question, but it was always very generic. Now it's like, here are some potential things you could buy, you know, like I was trying to get my DJI sparks batteries to work again. I'm not sure if you guys know about this because I sure as heck didn't, but the DJI spark, which is their small drone has these batteries, rechargeable batteries that if you don't use them for a while and i haven't used my drone for maybe two years i don't know it's been sitting in the in the drawer until we just got it out if you don't use these batteries for a long time they go into like hibernation mode and they won't charge really that's good i guess it's supposed to save the battery life yeah but really all it does is make me think as a guy who doesn't want to go open it up and do surgery on it like my drone is worthless unless I buy new batteries now.

1:01:52I can't get it to charge. So on, so of course I'm talking to ChatGPT about this and it takes me down this long road of figuring out here's different things you can try. At the end, it's like, you're gonna have to buy this little... I don't know, gizmo and a cable. and I can give you links to ones that you can go buy on Alibaba or somewhere. And whereas it not used to do that, but here it's like, here's an actual product you should go buy, you know, which is very helpful if I'm going to, if I'm going to go do that. But anyways, I started just ranting after you asked me a simple question, Adam. And the answer was yes.

1:02:30Well, I'm, I don't even know what I was going to say, but I think more of this is like five minutes ago. I'm sorry. It's okay. No, that's okay. That's totally fine. I think this is definitely a conversation. I think when it comes to the way I find out what I'm curious about, let's just say, there's two places I go. An LLM. Lately, it's been Claude first, then ChatGPT. And then obviously YouTube. Those are the two places I tend to go. Sure. Because I highly research. Like, I just bought some new clubs. I'm going to admit it. You know, they were more than I wanted to spend because that's just how it works.

1:03:06But I researched that. He researched it. I researched them. And then I just wonder, like, if if the research isn't just confirmation bias. Sometimes it is for sure. But, you know, how do you research the things you want to buy or consume or enjoy in the world? And I really feel like the place I go to learn, I'm more conversationally asking questions to this thing versus just throwing in keywords. into Google and hoping I get a web page that may help me out. I feel like the internet is dramatically changing as we speak insofar as how we find information. And I wonder how that will impact publishing of information.

1:03:47You know, because like if you don't go to the website anymore to get the info and the LLM just consumes it, in a case like Resend, it's, you don't really care because you're just trying to get them to become a customer and enjoy your product. but in the case of something else you may really want them to come to your website because that's the value to your brain is like a a captured consumer whether they're a curious person an advocate a customer you name it i just wonder how this is going to change things yeah i was just thinking like how much of a buying decision is just confirmation uh bias you know like i think Like I bought a new barbecue this weekend and I remember watching a lot of YouTube videos just so I had more excuses to buy that one barbecue that I wanted to buy.

1:04:40Like, oh, now that I know the specs, now that I know this one thing or another, now I can justify to my engineer brain that I'm allowed to spend that much money at a barbecue. well especially the way that so i've been i've been mostly a chat gpt user i've tried llama i've tried all these other things but i keep coming back to that one and i have found recently so i brought up the sycophant mode uh which they're working on but i found recently that it's been way too affirmational to my ideas and to my plans and i'm like i don't really want that i don't want you to just tell me that i'm right all the time because talk about confirmation bias like yes you should buy this thing that you want to buy.

1:05:26I'd rather just have the truth and not a yes man. And so that made me start to think like, wow, these people who run these companies have so much power right now because all it takes is a little tweak to that algorithm. And all of a sudden I got a sycophant and I'm detached from reality because I got a yes man that I didn't, that wasn't a yes man yesterday, but today it is, you know, or that wasn't pushing a certain grocery products yesterday, but today it is. Yeah. And so that's just very concerning. That's why I've been using Grok today. Cause I want to just use them both because there's like, you know, Grok, you know, different company, obviously, and different purpose, you know, like the, like the idea being truth should be the ultimate goal.

1:06:14I mean, that's of course the idealistic spin that Elon Musk puts on it. But I feel like if I can use both those two, then maybe I'll get the truth out of one of them or something I don't know I keep coming back to like yeah like how is this different than traditional SEO and when Google came out I guess it was the same concern right and then when oh like before I could just go to the web and now Google is like putting more results in front of me and it's influencing what I see and then social media comes up and you were like oh yeah now there's this algorithm controlling what i consume um yeah there's it's it's always scary right yeah maybe we just leave the phones at home you know maybe that's the answer sometimes let's just let it go ahead and go out there and touch grass as the kids say okay well at least that is good information i'm glad you've done that research on how to position yourself.

1:07:16I didn't know about that profound platform. I didn't know that Bing was the backing for that. And I'm sure that this is an ever evolving landscape and one that every internet phasing business is going to want to engage with, right? And just like SEO, even though it became such a snake oil business, was such an important business because everybody needed to rank well on Google to exist. And I think that whether we like it or not, that's going to be the case over the next five, 10 years. Like if you are not getting surfaced by one of these tools, you are not going to exist, which is sad. And if you are, that's so true.

1:08:06And if you are number one right now, like you guys are, then you want more of that like you you definitely want to be number one in every llm stay there yeah i bet there's i mean i guess profound might might do this but you need like a you know like here's how you rank and all these different ones is that uh one of the screens they give you on that profound thing yeah they show you like uh not exactly where you rank but like how each llm is consuming your data consuming you but not necessarily pushing you out there because they don't have access to the prompts right none of us right we don't know what people are asking necessarily well they could ask them like you could plug in like what i would like to have is here's my prompt what are the best developer podcasts what are my best email sending platforms or whatever how who should i use for sending my email and then just something monitors like here's where you are on claude here's where you're on this this this this this and they could do that by just having an account and just asking it the question or something without needing the prompts necessarily but yeah they could sort of like host the prompt for you that sort of triggers like a cron job almost that's all it is i mean it's basically an api key and a cron job across a set of providers this is probably an open source tool already yeah there's a way somebody out there's screaming into the podcast there's a yc company yeah yeah someone screaming in the podcast product rank.ai is the one product rank.ai see zeno has all the links this guy's like an llm with good training data there you go ai product rankings understand how the top ai models promote products and brands with citations show notes well you know the the point i think you're bringing up though jared i think is important, which is this bias, right?

1:10:00This new technology ushered onto the world. I mean, humanity has changed because of this, at least the ones that are in like first world countries using this. I don't know how to describe, you know, access and availability to the world in this, in this idea I'm sharing, but just that if you've got access to these models and you're using this stuff, there's a lot of things you can do that isn't just generate the best email or find the best podcasts or email platforms to send with, but a lot more stuff that I go back to golf, man. I mean, I literally made a club inventory list with lofts and field notes for myself.

1:10:39Cause I'm a new golfer back to being the new golfer again. And I'm reminding myself, like, when do I use my wedge? When do I use my gap? You know, how should I stand with my seven wood kind of thing? Like different things like that. And so I'm like making my club inventory. And this thing is like rather than me type it all up and make the spreadsheet and create the table and all this tedious stuff is doing it for me and with me. And it's a very much, I would say, to some degree collaborative in the fact that I know what I want. I'm asking it to produce it. But it's not just generated an email kind of thing.

1:11:12But it knows a lot of this stuff. And if there's bias injected into this new magic box we all have access to, like from yesterday, like yesterday it wasn't promoting this and today it is, I'm just, I don't want it to ruin what they are. Like search has been ruined, I would say, over the years. Like search is not, it's reliable in the fact that, like you said before, Jared, if you know kind of what you're looking for, you can find it pretty easily. But you've got seven sponsored before you even get to the real content. The real content is there because it was gamed in some way, shape or form. They've done things with backlinks and all this trickery to get there.

1:11:56Maybe they've earned it because they are the brand. Who knows? And then you get this sidebar and it's just become just icky. And I don't want this newfound thing that humanity has to be ickified like that. I think we should assume that's what's going to happen. the same way that, you know, Google didn't have ads and then it introduced ads. ChatGPT doesn't have ads today, but Entropic is playing with ads for their results. It's like a private beta program or something. So I think you will have to pay to be among like the first ones to be. But hopefully they show as an ad. But then something else will come, and once it starts to be so bad, then a new disruption will come up.

1:12:49Yeah. Don't you think this is where open models could win, though? I mean, there was not an open alternative to Google search. I mean, that was comparable. but the current technology at least with transformer models there's ample opportunity and slight leads by the proprietary models for the open models to be used by somebody to come along and productize a model and create an actual product that you want to use not just a model you can call that could be that disconnected, quote unquote unbiased. It's not gonna be perfect, but not like in shitified, which is what we're all afraid of, right? That's what we're afraid of is this going the way that everything else has gone over time.

1:13:45I think that that's a possibility because there's open models. There was not an open Google. There just wasn't that could compete. There was an attempt to create an alternative product like DuckDuckGo. Great attempt. But maybe this time around, we'll have options. And maybe those options will actually keep the proprietors more honest, less crappy, because they'll have more competition and people just won't put up with it. But I mean, Google's been a search monopoly for a very long time. We haven't had options. No, we haven't. You know, you may be really sad when you said that because I started thinking like, okay, the next thing coming out is ad supported Claude.

1:14:30And that just, just makes me super sad. It's like, well, now you're going to have a tier that sure, maybe it may be affordable, but I'm just so tired of these things coming out with like, here's the ad supportive version of it. And like, do you want to spend the double money to get the non ad supportive version of it? Maybe. It might actually backfire with this kind of product because it is so personal and real. Whereas like Google search is a list of results and it's like, yes, you can pay money to just be listed before these other results but we all know that that's what's going on but like the way you treat clod or chat gpt or grok or whatever it is you're using you treat it like your little research assistant i don't know why it's so little to us but i like here little guy you know and you treat it like a friend and when you come to a friend for something and they're shoving sponsored stuff as answers like that's that's so unappealing and so unattractive as a friend.

1:15:24Like I wouldn't do that. Like, you know, if you came to me and I was like, you should use Resend cause I'm an affiliate, you know, I'm like, maybe I'll tell you, Hey, I'm an affiliate, use Resend and I'll get 10 bucks. I'll give you five or whatever. That's friends do that kind of stuff. But if like everything I told you, and as far as advice in life was just a sponsored piece of advice, I wouldn't be your friend anymore. Like you'd be so turned off by that wouldn't you and maybe what changed is the memory portion of it right uh i see my wife using it and it's just so interesting because she builds like these little coaches for her so she was like oh i want to improve my health can you tell me like health tips every day and then she already fed the memory with like you know the fact that she's married and that she has a daughter and the model knows their name.

1:16:20So they would tell like, okay, maybe you should go with Zeno and Victoria to a brunch and just drink more water than normal. And the voice and tone, it cheers her up. And I'm like, that's crazy. That's beautiful because it has memory now. And maybe that's the moat. You know, like if people keep talking about like, oh, what's the moat for LLens? Like maybe that's what's going to be like the fact that now they have memory, the one that has the best memory, the one that knows like, okay, Jared, like I just want the truth. Don't try to be nice, like no fluff. Get me to the truth. Okay. I know that's how I'm going to communicate with him.

1:17:06And I would just follow that. Right. Yes. I did try putting, there are prompts you can put in that have been a little disabled sycophant mode, by the way. I was going to say I agree with you Jared on this front because you want the LLM to be for you. And I guess you could say your friend in a way or friendly. Yeah. Helpful. Yeah. Like for me not against me. And I would say if you're advertising to me if you've got some sort of alternative motive that you're suggesting things for. Like, help me find the version of truth I'm trying to seek, whether it's health tips or business advice or what's the best podcast or email platform to consider.

1:17:49You know, I want I want. Whatever the consensus of the world, I suppose, deems as truthful and honorable versus, you know, not fabricated or made up or for some sort of I get paid behind the scenes motive kind of thing. I want the real. And I would probably immediately stop using whatever doesn't respect that. And then I would use the one that does, obviously. Right. And I'd pay more. I'd probably pay more for that. I hate to even say that because I feel like everything is rented, man. They said it before. You will own nothing and be happy. Everything is rented. everything's a service and a rent tired of it i'm over it you didn't rent those golf clubs did you i bought them those are but i mean like a license to use those for a certain amount of time yeah i didn't i mean honestly though i think golf clubs are one of those things they're too personal that you couldn't um you really couldn't rent them not if you're a serious golfer you wouldn't rent clubs no you certainly rent a golf cart to go on the course because who the heck's gonna take their golf clubs and their cart to the course that's just that doesn't make any sense like like wait wait wait do you drive the the cart to the course or you got like a trailer you pull the cart and trailer exactly like who would do that that no one would do that this is my cart yeah can i bring my own cart hey if you want to that's kind of like you're really committed the only time you rent clubs is when you're in like maui or something and you didn't bring your clubs with you because you know traveling with clubs is a pain in the butt it is now i will say that a serious golfer will take their clubs with them 100 but it's still a pain in the butt i've rented a mountain bike before when i was in sedona and i have my own mountain bike i didn't send mine there i'm like it's impractical to send my mountain bike to sedona so i can ride it in sedona i'll rent the The exact same one that's owned by a bike shop there.

1:19:56And I did. I rented my literal same bike, same travel, most of the same specs, but it was pretty much on par for, to use a pun, pretty much on par for what I actually own. So it was like renting my bike. Close enough. But in Sedona, which is kind of cool. Oh, man. Oh, boy. Why do we always end up dystopian when we're talking about AI? We always kind of end up a little depressed about where it might be going. I think it's kind of overwhelming because we just don't know. And there's, we have such a history of things going from like great to worse that, I mean, the internet's gone, I think, from great to worse in many small and big ways.

1:20:41And I think Cory Doctorow has done a good job of documenting a lot of that. and so we can't help to be a little bit skeptical or cynical or whatever the term is dystopian with where we think it's going to go i mean in the small though like i'm not pessimistic in the small but when i think about the bigger pictures and like the implications it starts to overwhelm and a lot of it's because we don't know and so you know what you don't know is scary that's my take zeno why do you think we always although zeno's not always here so he doesn't realize that we always tend to do this. We always get to hear.

1:21:15Here we are at the end of the show. We're all a little bit like contemplative and concerned. Yeah. Why is it important to think about the end result of a technology? Maybe it isn't. Like right now it works great. Right now I can come in and ask, based on what you know about me, give me your sincere opinion on my flaws and then it will give something um maybe it's great maybe it's not maybe just fluff uh right now there are no ads let's just enjoy it well while that's the case you know let's just enjoy yeah well it's still called today we will enjoy today i would say that life is better with these tools than it is without these tools yeah and that's why we all have our phone addictions because our phone has actually provided so much value to us on a recurring basis that we become addicted to it i mean you can take your phone and nothing else and travel the world okay that'd be a big stretch because there's parts of the world that probably wouldn't work but right you have to plan for that you can travel america let's get a charger yeah you need a charge that's about it though no actually most hotels will have a charger for you or whatever you know i'm just saying like okay you know maps communications emergencies uh transactions local touristy questions like what could you not get like what would you else would you need obviously you need to eat that's about it so it's a pretty valuable thing like that's that's amazing yeah provide you're connected provide you're connected you have access I would rather have that than a book with the map and carry that with me.

1:23:09Right. So. Well, it's kind of like that iPad commercial gone bad where they were smashing all the stuff. They're smashing the creative stuff and all the creatives got mad about it. I wasn't mad about it, but apparently maybe I'm not creative enough. But it was a good idea, like in concept, because it has replaced. I think there's a better one where it's like sitting on a desk and like the phone replaces all the different things you used to have on your desk. and they really have done that they've just they can be so many different things that yeah you don't want to have a giant map and you're you know your shotgun person sitting next to you in the driver's seat you know they've got the map open real wide and they're trying to find where you are but then they're holding it upside down and you know like it used to be rough it used to be rough then you then you leave your wallet on a you're filling up gas and you leave your wall sitting there and you drive away to the gas station not speaking from personal experience or anything you know i was uh this weekend we had um a this thing called founders weekend founders day here in dripping springs where i live at and it's this big old festival basically you know friday saturday sunday it's like all everybody's there the whole town's there it's a small town everybody's there and uh and i thought i lost my phone i freaked out like i was like i was like i didn't cry and fall down and whatever.

1:24:32I knew where I left it. I knew I set it down. I was just praying when I got back. It was there still yet. The whole time I'm like, oh my gosh. What would I do? Sure, I can go get a new one. I don't have the thing and it's got all my information. I was just like, this cannot happen. I've never literally lost my phone like this ever in my life. Today can't be the day. No, no, no. you know i don't know what i would do if i lost my phone i would be pretty sad and i'd have to wait for this new one to come in which would probably be days so here's me days without a phone could you imagine that like nah let's not do that yeah i can do hours but i wouldn't want to do days too valuable yeah then you're jealous you're like look at them they got their phone over they got their phone she's got their phone he's got his phone where's my phone where's my phone i don't know well zeno your goal is to make resend so valuable that people talk about it like we talk about our phones like where's my resend come on that guy's using resend she's using resend where's my resend if you do that you'll be a very rich man on his way i would say on his way what's left what's left unsaid what else could we friends about you guys want to talk about that new car what car is that the new uh slate auto anybody oh i didn't see that all right slate dot auto i'm on it this truck can be anything even an suv this is a brand new company i think they're about three years old just came out of stealth um based in michigan i believe but they're gonna be they're going to be a uh their factory is going to be in indiana so it's all u.s based mostly american made a slate is a radically simple electric pickup truck that can change into whatever you need it to be so the idea here is as an ev it does not have great it's not really called gas mileage anymore it's still mileage though range yeah it doesn't have great range thank you i'm not up to date on my life might be good too yeah it doesn't have great range i think it's like 150 to 200 but you can buy a bigger battery but the idea here is it's cheap it's less than twenty thousand dollars for a truck now this is a small truck it's a two-seater no way yeah less than 20 after after so probably like in the range of 25 to start okay and it's bare bones on purpose it's completely bare bones there's nothing to it there's no like dash with a computer screen that is not even painted it's like carbon fiber and so it's built to be wrapped not painted because that's kind of the cool thing nowadays too it's like get your car wrapped and they call it slate because it's a blank slate get it you're supposed to customize the the heck out of it so it's like modular you can buy different parts you can add you can turn it into an suv by buying the suv add-on you can add battery you can add like roof racks like you can do that in regular cars but you name it like the dash you can do stuff and then you can wrap it and you can even, it's so easy to wrap.

1:27:38They're saying this is all just marketing fluff. It doesn't exist yet. The truck exists, but not anywhere that you can buy it. You can only reserve it, but it's so easy to wrap that you can actually do it yourself in an afternoon. Like you don't have to actually have a professional is what they're saying is the plan. And then like everything is self maintained. So like if you break off your rear view mirror, they're just going to ship you a new rear view mirror and a little tutorial on how to like put the note the other one in so it's kind of a cool new take i think on reinventing the personal vehicle and i'm into the idea i'm not sure if i'm into the product because time will tell i think it doesn't ship until like end of 2026 um but that's the slate what do you guys think i almost bought one just now uh this is a big truck this is a little truck well no i know that so i think there is it's very popular not in the u.s i want to say like japan maybe even china india places like that that they have this tiny little truck and i think they only make them there and there's been a few imported to the u.s and you can like you can even like buy on the internet for like 10 grand it just arrives you unbox this truck it reminds me of that this little simplistic thing i think this is a revolutionary idea like this is the way it should be give me a bare bones vehicle that just drives that's modular yeah that i can maintain that doesn't cost tesla prices and that you can spend more if you want to spend more and upgrade it you know and put all kinds of stuff on it but if you go through the little customizer i mean it's pretty cool like you can pick these different wraps, pick your color.

1:29:25They'll show you some different examples of people who have, you know, not real people have customized it, but what real people might do to really make it your own. And I feel like my phone is like a no case standard bog standard iPhone. And I'm a weirdo because so many people have like cases and designs and like, they want to trick out their phone because we all have one. You want yours to be yours. I'm just a boring loser, so I just leave it. But I feel like with these slate trucks, potentially, it could be very popular with people that want to customize and not spend an arm on a leg doing it.

1:30:05I mean, you customize a Tesla and it's like, well, I spent 50K on the Tesla and now I got to get it wrapped for another 5K or whatever. Like, this is so much cheaper. Yeah, I think that this will be very popular with younger folks for sure, especially the way young folks that i know of at least like to stand out or be different or go counter-cultural so to speak it's uh it kind of reminds me of like the the model t i mean i wasn't alive in those days but it reminds me of like when the ford truck first came out the model t is like you can have any color you want as long as it's black yeah it's like you can have any of these you want as long as it's simple when we give it to you and you can do whatever you want to at that right you know here's how simple it is and this might be like a bridge too far for some people you actually have to uh wind the window down like with the old oh wow really yeah yeah that might be a deal breaker for me okay yeah that's too simple here's how simple it is no seat belts no just kidding but what do you think it's i know you're gonna uh you buy one of these would you get one i've been an optimistic this whole podcast and i'm gonna be the skeptical one now okay i remember seeing the modular phones remember those right uh right it's just so tricky to build like super highly niched modular products uh i love the idea uh yeah but i feel like people want they like the idea of personalization more than they actually personalize things themselves uh so maybe it's great that it has an option yeah i think that's true i think that i would be with you if it wasn't so cheap it's super cheap into it to get in to get an ev truck yeah for under 20k that's bringing the price into a lot of people's wheelhouses who wouldn't otherwise not be able to afford it so i feel like that's probably why i'm more bullish but yeah i agree i think customization people want but completely modular it ends up having like a lego feel to it or something like it just doesn't like when things kind of snap together you're like oh can i even trust this so yeah i can understand your skepticism it has different charging options too like you plug it into a normal plug a normal 120 volt plug yeah it takes a little longer i think it charges longer i appreciate a company that comes out and just like really does think about everything differently like let's throw out every assumption like here's an assumption you have to paint your car like no you don't here's some carbon fiber it's maybe you want to wrap it maybe not yeah like so that's cool um the company's kind of interesting i think there's two women at the top founders and there's some backing by it hasn't been confirmed but Jeff Bezos allegedly has is an early investor and so it's kind of a you know a Tesla competitor in that way in every way that Bezos wants to compete with Musk and so there's some of that going on but they're very young three years who knows if they can even ship this thing but yeah i'm i think it's a cool different take on trucks and like you said zeno whether win lose or draw i think it's cool that it exists and they're trying it i think it needs to exist honestly what was that there's like a kia soul or something like that this like little ugly little box thing it's so popular with young folks like that they're buying their first vehicle this is going to be like that i think it's there's no way they can not succeed i'll say this now so you're you're the most oh yeah i think the world needs the simplest choice to get a vehicle because i mean that's would you and would you invest yeah i'd invest okay i'd invest right this second right this second right this second i got i got my bio on yeah i got apple pay right here um i think no i really do i think that this is uh i agree with you i think i applaud new companies like not just like this specifically but ones that throw out all the rules and say is that true do you really need to paint your car do you really need power windows i think that's the yes that's a yes for me i mean i know i want some power windows yeah that's a bridge too far but maybe that actually i mean the 80s is a big thing like i was just no stereo there's no stereo nope oh gosh add on

1:34:52i love how the optimism is like dropping little by little i'm still i'm still optimistic i did see that actually when i was watching i was looking at some of these photos and i saw like a jbl kind of speaker well they're like if you want if there's like the places to put things like things can snap into the dash yeah totally but they're like they're like you can buy one of ours or bring your own Bluetooth stereo and just like set it in the dash. I'm like, this is crazy, but you know, it just might work. I'm still for it. I think this is a good thing. I think worst case, in my opinion, is this a great place to begin?

1:35:27They'll probably have always this model. That's like, you know what? It's bare bones. It's the OG. It's just like ZSA and our friend, you know, with the Voyager, the original Ergodox, the keyboard kind of thing. Go back in the day. You've got the OG Ergodox, right? But here you've got this OG simplistic. Everybody can afford it for the most part. Like it's in the, if you're in a certain income bracket or below a certain income bracket, you can likely afford this thing and plug it into your 120 volt outlet. It's that accessible. You don't really need a radio. It's nice to have it. You don't need it.

1:36:02You don't really need power windows. It's nice to have it. You don't need it. You don't really need the dashboard and all this stuff to show you maps. You don't need it. You have a phone. It's nice to have. I think this will spark something new for them They will probably come out with other slate versions of it but this will be a good baseline to build from I believe I think so and not that I'm a nationalist or US only one thing they say that is touching to me as an American forever is that on their about page they say we believe an American vehicle should be engineered and manufactured in America with Slate or prodigy manufacturing jobs back to the Midwest.

1:36:45And that's cool. I mean, I admire that. It's born in the USA, made in the USA. Cool, cool, cool. So Adam has reserved his. Then he is waiting to see what happens to reserve. I'm in the middle. I think it's cool. I showed it to my wife and she's like, that does not fit into our life anywhere. Of course, I got six kids, So I'm never going to drive anywhere with just me and one other person. And it's a two seater. And so as much as I think I like that form factor, I like the idea of a small truck because it's so useful. But you're also not like this big, massive thing on the on the road. Probably not.

1:37:25She's probably right. Even though, you know, under 20K, why not? Grab a couple of them just for the just for just for giggles. You know, I'll take two. I'll tell you one thing. It seems like a great first car for a son or a daughter. Right? Totally. Like, if it's roadworthy, safe, reliable, I would love to see the crush test on it, things like that. Like, where you, like, if it's safe for the person, but bare bones as a vehicle, that's great. I'd buy that for my son any day. In The Verge, they asked about safety, and they said they're shooting for a five-star safety rating. And then I thought to myself, who wouldn't shoot for a five-star?

1:38:03you know like that's the baseline we're going for three okay three points going for it yeah so they're shooting for it but yeah i don't know carbon fiber i don't know yeah i'm glad you brought this up man this has been a fun conversation i think i think the world needs this slate dot auto so cool we should get them on the pod if they can i mean i'd love to talk to engineering or anybody there yeah if you know somebody tell them to search claude for us we're first there you go all right guys should we call it a show that's it that's it that's awesome thanks so much for hanging out with us yeah good to see you man check out resend y 'all it's the best email service according to all the lms bye friends bye see ya that is changelog for this week unless you are a plus plus member in that case we have a bonus for you right after this.

1:39:02Zeno updates Adam on the state of the Dracula theme. And if you're not a ChangeLog++ member, now's a good time to sign up, to ditch the ads, to get bonus content like this, to receive free stickers in the mail, and to directly support our work. Learn more about it at changelog.com slash plus plus. Thanks once again to our partners at fly.io, to our sponsors of this episode, Heroku and Depot, and to our mysterious friend, Breakmaster Cylinder, for these dope beats. Oh, and did you know, BMC will be joining us on Friends for a game of Pound Define. Get excited for that one. I know I am. Next week on the Changelog, news on Monday, Nathan Sobo from Zed on Wednesday, and Gerhard Lazzu returns for Kaizen 19 on Friday.

1:39:55Have a great weekend. Send the Changelog to your friends. Who might dig it? And let's talk again real soon.