David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) on the ‘Post-SaaS era' | E1856

32:33And of course, you'll get up to$100 ,000 in startup credits. So here's what I want you to do. Head to equinixstartups.com to apply. And when you apply, James from Equinix is going to reach out to you directly. That's equinixstartups.com to apply. E-Q-U-I-N-I-X startups.com. i would say funding is down 75 so it will take you i'd say for the average founder it's going to take you five times longer to raise 10 as much money yes you know compared to the peak zurp environment and you know if you can raise 250k you can raise 500k but these five million dollar seed rounds three million dollar seed rounds ten million dollar seed rounds that's over uh and it's much easier like you're saying just to have three or four really good people build it yourself start making money don't raise any money or raise a hundred thousand whatever the minimum you need yes to you know because not everybody has money saved you might need that first hundred k um and sometimes it's the constraint that really makes the great entrepreneurs when you and i started in the late 90s early 2000s you know there just wasn't a lot available to founders so you had no choice to be a founder exactly you had to be able to produce a product product whether weblogs inc which brian alvey and i did or 37 or delicious or flicker that whole cohort was built by people who were builders and that's it i was a writer brian alvey was you know a coder matt mullenweg was a coder you know we made our own cms put out a couple blogs we sold some ads i sold them and we all of a sudden were off to the races uh and a lot of value got created and now you look at your company i mean you guys make millions of dollars or more in profit every year.

34:15And just every year that goes by, that just goes to the founders. Yeah. And I think it's that sense that constraints are actually good. For a long time, at least as I perceived it, Silicon Valley kept telling founders that constraints are bad. No, you need more money, you need more people, you need to go faster. And you know what, I can, there's a logic to that somehow, somewhere that does produce these outsized paybacks, right? You make a thousand angel investments one of them or two of them are going to be these blowout unicorns it's going to pay for everything and there's some wisdom in there too but we were always speaking from the other end of it you know what out of a cohort of a thousand what if we could get like 300 great companies or 400 great companies rather than just one or two and then the rest of it gets sort of mangled by this process um and then being our own example do you know what running a profitable company that's made millions of dollars in profits for 20 years straight and being conservative with it, just sticking your money like I do.

35:12I'm such a boring investor. I just stick it all in ETFs. And I go like, you know what? I don't need alpha. Can you just give me market returns over 20 years, millions of dollars accumulating? It's going to add up. Totally. And you're not going to be left wanting for a bigger yacht or whatever. And I think that that example, I want to give that testimony. Do you know what? This is a way, even when there is the unconstrained path is a choice, which is was during SERP, right? Money was just flowing everywhere. It was gushing everywhere. Now money isn't gushing anywhere. This choice is still here and it's going to apply to a lot more people because you don't have an alternative and don't boohoo about it.

35:52It's freaking great. It is more fun in many ways to live under those constraints. The creativity that happens when you have to make do and you have to reuse and you have to double hat and you have to play five different positions on the same team. Do you know what? It's amazing. It's great. A lot of founders, or at least a lot of the story goes like, oh, doing a startup is so hard. As long as I get to the next phase, once I have 500 people, it's going to be so much better. No, it's not. I've talked to so many founders who wish back to the days where they were just four people, 10 people or whatever.

36:27It was more fun. It was more invigorating. It's that pressure cooker those constraints that really make you see what you're made of and it's fun so let's not poo poo it so it's like all that entitlement all of that extra money created a massive amount of entitlement where people came to work and they felt like i gotta bring my whole self to work and there's all this extraneous stuff that you know we have so much resources we can sit here and today talk about i don't know this war that's happening here or the social injustice that happened here or this tragedy that happened here and then work became like this platform for every issue in the world as opposed to just the narrow focus you uh had chaos inside your company for a brief moment in time before you got control of it uh i think brian armstrong led the charge and saying hey listen i know that this stuff is important to y 'all it's not important to me what's important to me at coinbase is like just making the world financially uh more fair and that's all we're going to work on here so maybe you could give us a recap of after all the chaos and you cleaned everything up and you let people who wanted to have a free for all and talk about social issues all day long you let them exit quite generously and uh you got everybody who's at the company focused on work and making software so how's it been for you just in terms of enjoyment and this refocusing because it's been a couple years now after this right this happened in 2020 It's been like two and a half years.

37:58And it's one of those things where I was not eager to conclude anything from it. Even six months passed, even a year passed. It was difficult. You don't really know how it plays out until you can look back upon it with some degree of distance because there's some emotional aspects tied up into it. Now it's two and a half years. It is without a doubt one of the very best decisions we have ever made in the 20 years that we've been in business, Jason or I. It was very difficult for about a couple of weeks and then was cumbersome for a couple of months. And after we passed the one-year mark, it was just bliss.

38:33Bliss in a way I had a hard time in envisioning was possible. This is the problem with how the culture changed out of a lot of tech companies. That we went through, basically, I see it as Trump gets elected. People start going, becoming far more involved in politics in a way that just wasn't present before. People lost their minds. It felt existential to people. I get it. Yes. And it seeped into work at that same time in the same way that now this was something we're all on the same team resistance, supposedly, all this other stuff, right? And it just builds up and builds up and builds up. And then it just went nuts.

39:06In 2020, it just went completely crazy to the point where now I look back upon some of these conversations we had on our work platforms where just like, this is just insane. Why were we doing this stuff? Right? And I think you do it because you get cooked. And you do it because the culture around you seems to embrace it. All companies are doing this. They're all building up a big bureaucracy to enforce this and inject it everywhere. The DEI machinery really got rolling in those days. And you just think like, this is the new reality. This is going to be the 10-year reign of whatever the hell this is.

39:44And we just went cold turkey. And that's why it was so sort of harsh at the time. I mean, it was called Turkey at sort of perhaps the peak or right around the peak, right, of when this was the most crazy. And the public response was just nuts. We had thousands of people. We were trending on Twitter. I had tens of thousands of people calling me all sorts of names and white supremacy this and racist that. And like, because we don't want to talk politics at work. And then you get these two and a half years, right? And we look back upon it and we go like, wow, amazing. And then I look in the broader culture and I go like, it's not even anything anymore.

40:18A company says, like, we don't talk politics at work. It's completely just no one even shrugs anymore. This is how quickly the pendulum can swing, which is one of those things that just gives me so much optimism. Sometimes we go like, oh, this thing is terrible. It's going to be terrible forever. No, do you know what? Just like give it five minutes. It may very well totally change. It's like a storm. It was like this crazy storm blew in and people were like. It was exactly a storm. And then all of a sudden it clears. Yeah. I like the storm metaphor because you know what? no matter how strong you are if you're caught in a hurricane you're going to spin around there's just there was no amount of personal conviction of power you had in that moment at the peak of that moment where you could have stopped the storm it was it just had to pass right and this is i think why so many companies at the time just laid flat right like a storm comes through and it flattens all the houses all these executives go out they say exactly the same thing there's more work to do all this nonsense right and now the storm has passed in tech at least it hasn't passed at large and in academia and other places it's still raging almost at full strength but in tech all this stuff just got dismantled all the bureaucracies that were built up like you don't even hear about it anymore and first of all i think that's wonderful um we were in a really some dark ages there for a brief moment but also wow i mean it's only been two and a half years you could have told me it was 15 years since we were in the thick of this and i would have believed you it was it was very intense because it was very personal like if you didn't take a stance on something or if you said hey we're not going to do this there was this machine that was the press and social media where it was like well we have to destroy this person for saying you know this isn't the mission of the company and uh i'm not comfortable with that and you know we actually had it um and where people were like well how many of these founders have you funded how many of these founders have you funded and it just turned out because i happen to have a lot of uh diversity on my team in terms of women um that we had funded a lot of women founders i think looking back on it It was because women felt more comfortable applying because we had more women.

42:32And we had done some events for underrepresented founders. But I had to go back to my team and say, just so we're clear here, we can increase the number of applicants. We can be supportive of everybody and encourage everybody to start companies. And that's good work. But when we make the investments, we're an investment firm. It has to be blind. We're not investing based on gender, based on age, based on any other criteria. we we do not we cannot use that criteria and i you know i had this conviction but it was kind of like it was a little shaky for me to say it because i was like it's illegal for us to do this and now here we are you know the the harvard uh case and everything supreme court hey you know you really can't pick people and exclude asian people from harvard because they're asian and you have too many asians and they score they just did too well we can't do that if it turns out some group of people and their startups perform better i can't say well we can't invest in you because of this and a lawsuit happened for this company uh this venture firm fearless founders their their mission was to invest in more uh black founders a female black founders and i said okay yeah that's great you know it's your money you do what you want but a group of asian women and white women are now and i think hispanic are now suing them so this is where you realize identity politics is a road to nowhere because somebody's going to get left out somebody's going to feel bad and it's going to just result in chaos and you know it's easy for me to say like a meritocracy is best but it does need to be a meritocracy let's be honest i don't think anybody wants a handout so you know and we can have this conversation now you couldn't have this conversation three years ago or else people would clip it and say oh my god look at these monsters saying that it should be a fair process and the person who has the best results should get the opportunity you know 100 and i think that's it wasn't just a road to nowhere it was a road to hell the identity politics as they grip tech and a lot of other uh domains just led to absolute hell and you don't even get the outcomes you want for the people you're trying to help this theory of disparate impact that if you can do a statistical analysis um that shows that certain group didn't get this or didn't get that that that de facto proves discrimination it's just the most insane theory to ever grip an entire paradigm and go like, this is how we should structure everything, that everything has to be subdivided in a bunch of things.

45:01What was so interesting for me was I was very sympathetic to a lot of the core ideas. Hey, yeah, let's help people who have had a tough break or this, that, and the other thing. I came from Denmark, a society that has a broad safety net and does a bunch of things to level the playing field however you want, but it's leveling the playing field in terms of opportunities. We're not going to ban you from getting the chances. But when you step up to the bat, I don't care who you are, what determines whether you make the team is whether you hit the ball. That's it. You cannot go like, oh, well, you can't hit a ball.

45:35You're still going to be on the team because you're team red jersey or something. No, no, no, no, no. And that falsehood, I think, was really the root of all evil as it came to this,

45:50forth and this evolution that i went through was was really instructive and it was one of those things where i there's i don't know how many colored pills there are at this point but i was pilled in whatever color it was to some degree starting reading um other authors like thomas sowell and listening to uh glenn lowry and and other thinkers on this who came at the question from a conservative perspective where prior to all this nonsense going i would have been like, you know what, I'm a left leaning, I'd probably vote Democrat, I do all these other things. And I just like, go wherever this flow is going.

46:24And then something like that happens together with COVID, which itself was a mind right and handling that we just go like, you know what, now let's take two steps back revisit things from first principles go, do you know what this disparate impact theory of how to organize society is just an absolute not just dead end, but a road to hell. We can't do it. We got to step back, We got to get somewhere else. And do you know what the irony is? At our company, so we had about a third of the company quit, right? Our company ended up more diverse after the fact. Ah, interesting. More gender diverse, more ethnic diverse, more diverse in terms of how many people were in the U.S.

47:01versus outside the U.S. These things are not in direct opposition. And this is the fallacy of so much of this nonsense, which is often spewed from people, not necessarily in those groups, although it is sometimes. but also a bunch of other people who, for whatever reason, have guilt that they need to process in a public sphere. And they do it in a way where, do you know what? This is just not true. This is just not true. And we said, no, we're not doing that. At a time where that was difficult to say, now it's not difficult at all, right? Like now it's not even the standard. We barely even talk about it.

47:34That's how quickly the discussion changed. It went from, if you say anything about this, we're going to haunt you on Twitter. This is also why, by the way, I think this was one of the pivotal changing points, right? You can look at what made the storm pass. One out of maybe four major factors was that the ownership of Twitter now X changed hands. And Elon just went in. We're not going to do things the old way. It's not going to be tilted and slanted with this ideological bent. So that was a huge change. As you said, this Harvard decision from the Supreme Court, huge change. And I also just think at some point, people are going to be tired of being in the storm.

48:13You know what? I think there's something exciting about a storm, right? Storm chasers and all this other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These forces are just so awesome to watch, right? And you go like, do you know what? It reminds me of public hangings. So I think this was abolished in France in like what, late 1700s or something. It was not abolished because the people didn't want the public hangings. Public hangings were amazingly popular. one of the favorite pastimes of people in france they were like this is great we get to see someone flogged or tortured or hanged sign me up for that right this is the modern equivalent of that when the storm was going crazy every day you have every day a different person got canceled or destroyed right and you're like i think at some point even um people who might enjoy that for a moment go like okay and it's enough yeah that's it's way too much now in terms of optimism we've got people very concerned uh about uh we saw this pretty acutely with open ai uh and some of the um i guess um people who want to slow down ai progress because they're concerned and people who want to accelerate progress so much so that we now have this e excel thing people are putting in their uh bios and then you got people who want to be everybody wants to be part of some group i'm not sure who's running these groups exactly um but what was your take watching this whole crazy mishugana over at open ai and if it was in fact because people some people want to slow down progress and some people want to speed it up where do you land on that speed it up slow it down you worried so the first thing i'd say is um one of the uh benefits of being past the age of 40 and having gone through some of this stuff is i have perhaps less stringently sort of one take positions on this um but at the same time i do lean accelerate i do lean optimism i do lean this is the better default that we have to have more to go on and it has to be more concrete than do you know what i have this fantasy that robots is going to kill us all you know what that's not operational that it needs more than that and i am more in mark and dreesen's camp here than i am in um in some of the doomers camp um and this idea that we can have a time out is just gnostic it is like we have this sort of ceremony here that we're gonna sacrifice some goats to the gods and then they're going to be kind and then our crops will grow well next year right i think there's this quest right now search for meaning broadly speaking i think that's what powered a lot of the nonsense that was happening with all the woke stuff that kind of just has drifted into this because we're dealing with the same root problem right um we've killed god as nicho said and like what are we going to put in this place we've killed organized religion we need to believe in something we're not going to apparently believe in country anymore so what's up well you can pick team doomerism or team e-accelerate and like that can give you some sense of identity for me i just go like you know what this is going to happen anyway accelerate step on this paddle sure until we have something where like do you know what it is more than a thought experiment um that there's more to it we gotta go right we could have stopped everything imagine someone pitching you the internet oh yeah anybody can say whatever they want any information can be share with anybody yes there was this actual discussion at the beginning which was what if somebody puts a bomb recipe on the internet it's like yes well then the police come they arrest them if it's against the law on the internet for 30 years yes you've been able to find the anarchist handbook you've used search hard enough right do you know what that was not the end of civilization it's not the end of society so i think this idea that if you can look at that and you can also look at another debate which is the encryption debate which corner was really hot in the 90s that was how we got pgp they were just about to ban encryption and then pgp goes out there um whatever simmerman or something else forget his name puts the software out there and would any of us think that it would be responsible to walk around with a pocket computer that if we dropped it someone could get all our health information someone could get all our communication history someone could get all of this stuff it's almost impossible to think that encryption could have been illegal, or could have been banned, or could have been backdoored, or could have been something else such that we couldn't protect our own information.

52:45I think, again, this is all about odds, it's about the future, we don't know, but I would guess that AI is going to be more like encryption and more like the internet than it's going to be like the atom bomb. That it's going to be more like, we cannot even conceive that you remember in the 2023s when these doomers were about to blow up open AI, just at the cusp of major productivity gains and flourishing and and whatever um because of some fantasy about the end of the world jesus christ that would have been a bad idea i hope that's how we look back upon it i think it will be because you know i'm looking at the results from it i think everybody just watches these language models give them a response and they're like oh my god this is amazing and then i'm like did you check those facts because i just checked three of the facts and they're completely wrong and i think what just happened was it just read like 20 how-to articles and then it just rewrote them.

53:38And so it's really good at rewriting something. But because it's going line by line, you actually in the UX, think it's thinking. And because it took a second, you know, and I thought it was very interesting with barred where it's just like, boom, here's the rewritten version. But with chat GPT, it writes it. And so you're like, Oh, I guess it's thinking and it's spinning the wheel. And, and then I look at it, I'm like, these facts are wrong. And this is taken from this how-to article on this website or this core answer, this actually isn't thinking. It's guessing the next predictive word. So I think we're like almost jumping the gun.

54:13But that is so human. That is so human. That's what I actually love about it. The fact that this makes mistakes proves that we're on the path of something, that perhaps we are running large language models in our heads right now, right? This is why we spew facts that aren't facts. why we draw connections that aren't true, why we come up, why we hallucinate, why we invent facts, right? This to me is actually the most endearing part of the whole AI thing, that it is so human in all its failings that I actually could believe, do you know what? Maybe something profound has been discovered here that this is actually maybe how consciousness works.

54:51Now we get really gnawed about what is actually going on in there, and we don't know. But I look at that and I go like, do you know what? This is very human, which perhaps is the argument for the Doomer side, right? Like if it is so human, isn't it going to defend or descend all into savagery at some point and whatever? The Lord of the Flies. Okay, fine. But again, we got to see where this goes. To me, it's also just interesting. AI is the most interesting thing that has happened to computing since the internet. To me, it's far more interesting than mobile. It's the internet, right? It's the internet over again.

55:25And that doesn't come around that often. Like in my lifetime, that has literally only happened once before. The other thing I look at is the internet, at least once it got going, and you had Amazon.com and a few other things, normal people instantly got it. Right? You'd put them down in front of something, they'd have a question, they'd search the internet, they'd look something up on Yahoo, they'd go like, wow, this thing, this network can do things and tell me things I could not do or could not know before. I'm in. I've shown ChatGTP. to my wife, to my kids. I've let them play with it. They get it instantly.

56:00Not just to get it, right? There's an intellectual understanding. No, no, like I'm going to use it more. They use it. Don't take it away from me. I need it. Exactly. Yes. And that to me is the wisdom of the masses, right? We can have doomers who are very articulate in their theories about how the world is going to end. And then you have a whole millions of people at this point. This is why ChatGCP is the fastest growing product ever. People are voting with their feet. This is what capitalism, open free markets is supposed to give us. It's supposed to direct progress. We should have more of this progress because it's very appealing.

56:34It is genuinely making lives better, more interesting, more novel, more everything, right? Yeah. Do you know what? That's a good general predictor, and we should follow that. Generally speaking, when we follow what people want, we end up in a better place. It was interesting today. I was like, you know what? i released this blog post in my sub stack and on linkedin and i was like oh you know what i didn't put a header image on it so i opened up uh dollies and i was like make me an image uh for a productivity blog post and they gave me this like thing like a desk with productivity i was like add a cup of coffee and a bulldog it adds a cup of bulldog and i put it on the site it looked like i spent i kid you not a thousand dollars hiring an illustrator to make this beautiful image and i was like wow coming from a magazine background in the 90s where we used to hire illustrators that was probably the best illustration we ever would have paid for and illustrations took two weeks and i just described something and it just happened oh my god this is clearly going to be a situation where i'm going to say you know what i really loved uh the sopranos and i love these two episodes can you make me a couple more like that and it's just literally gonna be like you know what yes here's a four episode sopranos just for you jay cal and it's it's in your it's waiting for you and i'm going to be thrilled with that or i love this mark knoffler song and dire straits song and dire straits is never going to come back together but here's here's their you know here's another five tracks here's five dire straits songs that they never wrote it's going to be awesome and it's so you can see you feel like it's so close right yes and not even close it's already here i mean the sense the degree to which i was shocked by the DALI stuff, the image generation, mid-journey, and all those things.

58:16That, to me, was even more mind-blowing than the L &Ms. I would not do... No way you could have asked me in, whatever, five years ago, that the first thing that AI is going to replace is essentially the creative field. Or not replace, augment, whatever you want to call it, right? A viable option. Hyper-productize. And this is why it's so interesting that we cannot predict where all this is going to go which is why we must follow the white rabbit we must follow where the white rabbit goes because that's just where life is more interesting more appealing and this is what um my uh my family just did uh with dolly they generated my uh my son had this thing of gang for kids of 10 year olds who just like to be in a group together right they're called the chicken wings and they're like i'd like to have a chicken that has a gun with an explosion in the back and it turned out amazing and we got it printed on some t-shirts and we just went like this is the future like it this is so far future that i could not even have predicted this was remotely possible like 10 years ago 10 years ago look at me i i went and dolly make me an inspiring header for a blog post about productivity with the dimensions of this and it made me these two images i was like wow that looks like pretty amazing like fast company would have spent $5 ,000 stress, like, make it even more inspiring and include hot coffee in a bulldog.

59:37And I'm like, boom, this is the great. Like, are you kidding me? This is unbelievable. So good. It's so good. It totally understood. So good about AI. You don't have to squint and imagine things at a very high conceptual level. You can literally look at it right now, today and go like, holy the world is different now. Now, what's so fascinating about it, you can recognize that change that has already happened, and you can go like, you know what? I don't have the faintest clue what the world is going to look like in five years, and neither does anyone else. Not the doomers, not the accelerators.

1:00:12We just don't know. Isn't that wonderful? Yeah. This is the next one I did. I was on a board call, and they had questions about who should run an Amazon Web Store, right? and i'm literally on a bar call and i just wrote what are the titles and responsibilities of an amazon marketplace manager because i'm like i know that's the title but i don't know what they actually do and it's like oh here's exactly what they do here's the responsibilities and i'm like ah yep that's it thank you for doing that so quickly while i'm on a call and you think about like the base camp original logo and i was talking to somebody about logos i remember in the 90s when people started companies in the 90s what did a logo cost like if you hired an ad agency or an agency when you had your agency what would you charge out for a logo in 1999 oh it was thousands even the 90s it was even the 90s it was 5 000 bucks right and you have a meeting and then you do like a back and forth a presentation right it would be what a month engagement four weeks six weeks something like that totally maybe three or four meetings to be 10 people in the room and you take it out all this now you just like make me a logo for this new company once.com and here's what we do and you just next next next and a couple little things and all of a sudden you have a logo that probably would have been five thousand dollars in expense yes and it's it's better yes and you did it so this is something that has never existed in humanity this is the thing i find really inspiring people who didn't take the time to learn how to draw as but one example do illustration and now they can make really compelling illustration so you've compressed that right you've democratized illustration you're going to democratize writing copy you're democratizing and just make making everybody at 80 maybe in the top third of designers and then yeah there'll always be elite designers elite logo people but if everybody becomes really good let's put aside elite let's pretend elite's going to exist forever but if everybody becomes really good at making logos and copy that's a pretty compelling world every product gets a little bit abundance right yes you look at something and you get so much abundance so much productivity orders of magnitude this is how we get growth right you look at a lot of growth curves and they actually look kind of depressing you think like haven't we been doing so much of it let's just say the last 15 years or so right and you're like you know what the growth curves are a little yeah right they're not actually not as much as happened as we would like to think oh everything's moving so fast, everything's getting so much better, everything's getting cheaper.

1:02:45And you know what, a lot of really important things haven't gotten better, faster, cheaper. Some of the big things in education, for example, this is the one that really blows my mind. Like yesterday, I was talking to my son about Einstein's relativity theory about quantum computing. And you know what, I don't know all the specifics about all of these things in the history tracing on E equals MC square. You know what, we asked a couple of questions of chat GDP, something that perhaps in the olden days, you would have Googled for it, which is, by the way, why I think this is absolutely an existential threat to Google.

1:03:15I cannot imagine that most people are going to go to Google first going forward for most of their questions. They may still want to find a business or do something else. Okay, great. Am I going to ask Google tomorrow? Like, hey, tell me what that Amazon Marketplace Manager did. That would be a Google search for you two years ago. It's never going back to being a Google search, right? You're just going to ask an AI for questions like that. And in education, that is so damn powerful that not only can you constantly go, tell me more, you can go, tell me more, but you know what? The way you explained it was a little complicated.

1:03:51Can you make it simpler for me? And it will. So I think there's these massive unlocks of abundance coming. Imagine you had the greatest tutor the world had ever seen, well-versed in every language ever spoken know every book know every classic know every field and you could ask them anything for as long as you wanted and they had infinite patience to teach you i mean this is nirvana when it comes to education just as one aspect of it it's gonna our kids are gonna have a much different experience i i literally was driving with my 13 year old and they were like hey what's this thing with hamas and like explain it to me and i literally have set up my um action button there's a thing called the action button on the new iphone 15 and i set my action button up to be the you know the with chat gpt you can have a conversation with it now and it talks back to you and so i set it up to that so i'm driving i press and hold the button and i'm like explain to me the uh israeli-palestinian conflict and what the solutions are and we just sat there and drove for 10 minutes and it explained it to us and you know i've read about it i it was very accurate and i was like wow this is incredible you could just be driving like you said and you have this tutor there who's going to explain everything to you and i know you don't like you know you're like a big fan of copy but while we were sitting here i just decided i'd make the once logo here's your one ship it ship it and then i was like you know what make it more organic like a forest because i know you like a little bit more and it's good oh my god it's so good what is happening like yes and this is year by the way this is the end of year one of chat gpt 3.5 like literally this week is when it came out and you just think about well what's year two gonna be like i will tell you nothing had made me more susceptible to the idea that we live in a simulation than this because i could not comprehend the acceleration happening like i go like you know what?

1:05:51I built software for a living. I know how long it takes to ship a feature. How is it possible that AI is advancing every few weeks in these major leaps? It doesn't even seem plausible, right? Everything I know about software does not compute with this, which is again, why I find it so exhilarating that it had that same quality of like, I don't fully understand this. I understand some of it and I've looked at some of this and this is Transformers this and this is pairings and it's the next word yes yes yes i still don't get it how do we get from that math to this outcome right like that it feels like we really have created gods out of sand and silicon and that is just imagine a time to be alive right yeah i think of you know what i'm halfway done i am 44 yep you're halfway me too i'm halfway yeah how fortunate i should be to have seen not just the internet in time our generation gen xers were there for the internet and for ai we have the before and after it's incredible yes and and that's in our in my lifetime i have known people who were born prior to world war one like yeah the the span of human acceleration this is why whenever i get pessimistic and i think i'm a recovering pessimist i'll say whenever i used to You're like, do you know what?

1:07:09The world is ****. This is ****. That's ****. It's like, no, no, no. Zoom out. Look at the big picture on this little blue dot. In like people's I know and could touch his lifetime, we've gone from not having an airplane to have an AI. Yeah. That's just incredible. We should be very optimistic people, of course, trying to make things better and so on. But I think you actually do make things better faster if you are an optimist. This is why I really just can't connect to the dumerism because it smells so much of like the drag that often gets injected into innovation with bureaucracy, right? Like, hey, do you know what?

1:07:45What does this actually mean, dumerism? It means that some people supposedly much smarter than all the rest of us should get to decide exactly where the limits are, where the contours are, what should we not go beyond? Do you know what? If we had given the high priests of the dark ages the license to forever dictate where the boundaries of astronomy went, do you know what? We wouldn't be firing rockets to Mars. nope no no satellites no starlink and if you it almost feels like there's a generation as well who they've been raised so coddled they they haven't had adversity and so they don't actually understand like what abundance is because all that's all they've kind of had it's only been abundance there's never been like a headwind they didn't have vietnam they didn't have any of these you know um this suffering or pain and we might be the last generation that actually in the united states at least in the west that kind of remembers the generation telling us like who the nazis oh vietnam they have to be actually hard yeah this was really brutal your arm got blown up by a literal trauma like trauma wasn't yes i was made to feel bad trauma these words hurt my feelings but I literally had physical trauma where my arm was blown off by a mortar or my brother didn't come home, God forbid, from this war.

1:09:06And this is where - I mean, the irony of course is, I mean, old men has since forever sat around in circles and talked about how the young ones are like not gritty enough, not smart enough. So I think that's part of it, but that also doesn't mean that some of it isn't real, right? What I just think is hopefully we're trading it in for something. If we're trading in the grit and resilience of past generations, and I do think we are to some extent, I hope we're getting something back in return. And it's not as obvious right now what that is. What are we getting back from all this grit and independence and so on we're giving up?

1:09:41So I just lived three years in Denmark. And it's really interesting because Denmark, when it comes to raising kids, for example, exists in what almost can be described as a time bubble of what the United States used to be in 1980. where you could let a nine-year-old out by themselves, walk a mile, take a metro, do something that would absolutely get you arrested in any major city in America today. And you go like, huh, that's so fascinating. Like I remember being a kid in the 80s. My wife was American. Remember being a kid in America in the 80s where these things were possible. It's no longer possible.

1:10:17And I don't think we fully realized, well, some people have. Jonathan Haidt, for example, not only is he a great scholar on moral philosophy, but he also looks into this idea of independence with kids that why what the coddling of the american mind covers this idea that kids have lost so much independence and this is partly why gen z is a little crazy on some things and a little fragile and see trauma and behind every door and so forth it's because you know what if you were never gave them the opportunity to to face some degree of adversity some degree of uncertainty some degree of like you're gonna figure the out on your own yeah um you're not gonna develop those skills right and this is also one of those things i think i've changed my mind on more like more gone to do you know what i need to make sure that my kid has some days yes it's an adversity rainbows yeah it's gotta be something yeah yes i uh i have a strategy for that uh taking the kids skiing on very cold days or taking them on hikes in the rain it turns out weather we talked about the storms earlier but like literal storms yes when it's really brutal the germans have some expression i think it's the germans that there's it's there's no bad weather there's just bad clothes and so that one exactly that same one yes so i heard that at some point and uh one morning i promised my daughter was 13 you know when she was six i was going to take her on a hike she loved these hikes to the beach and it is a storm like bay area storm like you wouldn't believe and she's like i guess we can't go on the hike i'm like no heck yes here's your boots here's your jacket we're going we go on this hike she talks about it to this day i have the pictures from that hike we pull them up sometimes we got to the ocean it was like chaos yes there was rivers flowing everywhere there's just lightning and everything and when we got to the trail i get to the trail end and there's like three or four people coming off trail like don't go down there and my daughter and i like yeah we're going down there and they're like it's crazy i'm like awesome and we did it it was great and you know the same thing happens with skiing and i remember with my dad going out on these like hard ski trips and the winds hitting in the face this is my tip like the weather and like harshness and being out there in the mountains or whatever that's a good way to get some grit going i mean for me in brooklyn it was the new york city subway system but slightly different i i just read a book called the comfort crisis that covers this this idea that we've lost connection to physical hardship and that that is not good for us at all and it really comfort the comfort crisis it's written by a men's journal journalist who goes out on this month-long expedition in alaska to hunt wow and basically have to just live in alaska for a month out in the blizzards and wilderness and and hardship and difficulty and so forth.

1:13:03And it was actually reading that book that made me start taking cold showers. It's funny because cold showers is one of those things that to me seemed like such a Silicon Valley fad, which I will attest to the fact that, you know what? If something just comes out of that, I have a natural skepticism that will make it less likely for me to just adopt it. And I read that's the comfort crisis and go like, you know what? I should also just occasionally feel things that aren't as nice as they could be. which the irony of this is this piece of wisdom is literally thousands of years old you can look back to the stoics and you can read seneca talking about you know what occasionally you should walk without shoes just to feel the pinch on your the bottom of your feet sometimes you should just be out in the rain sometimes you should embrace this uh hardship in part so that you can appreciate as you say the abundance that you have in your daily life you can appreciate oh do you know what But just having heat is actually a luxury of immense benefit.

1:14:01Having light that you can just turn off. All these trappings of modern life we take for granted. And then we become insolent, entitled f***ed hearts. So much of the time. I can't wait to read this book. Yeah. Yes. Getting that exposure to the wilderness. Getting willful exposure to the fact that the obstacle is the way. I think is another phrase from the Stoics. Yeah, no. Make it hard. Because it's hard. It's good. I got the cold plunge. I got the cold plunge. and i do it and when i do it i'm like i really don't want to do this but if i do it and i get through it i feel so alive and it yes i did all the research on it and i was listening to huberman or whatever and they kind of explained it they're like if the temperature and the length you want to do it is what is challenging so there are people who've gotten so good at this cold plunge stuff that they could sit in there for five minutes i was with a friend who did it for four minutes in like 46 degrees or something i did it i got hypothermia immediately i started like panting and like oh it's just like my body started quivering and shaking but you have to do it to feel uncomfortable get through it and like you're saying like getting through it is the thing that the obstacle is the path and um and being uncomfortable is good being cambered all the time will make you soft will make you weak and it's one of those things it's so funny because As we talked about over the last five years, I think I've had personal turning points on more big topics than in the rest of my entire life.

1:15:29And this is one of those things where it felt so insufferable listening to some of this stuff. Oh, cold plunge is this or hardship this or walk around bare feet or whatever. It's one of those things you can't really convey. You got to tell people, but you know what? My best argument is just give it a try. Just for example, I had not taken a cold shower in probably 15 years prior to that. Like I had just lived in a world where the water always came out hot or I could wait for it to become hot. And I never had to subject myself to anything even cold, which is so ludicrously pampered. Yes. In the sense of like the human experience over the period of time.

1:16:09Right. That, wow. Imagine humans can live today and they are never exposed to anything less than that pampering. And then you do it and you go like, oh, no argument, no verbalization, no articulation. of the benefits Hooperman listing. Oh, this is good for you because longevity, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. You got to feel the shock in your own body. That's going to be the argument for this above all else. It's easy to be cynical. You know, it's easy. I tell the people about this about Burning Man. I was like New Yorker, cynical about Burning Man. And then I went and I was like, you know what?

1:16:38It's kind of cool to watch people go build art and music and this community over a week in the desert. And it's super inspiring. and i thought wow this is like amazing i went to the art projects and i was like you know i never really appreciated going to art galleries but driving around the flower on a playa on a bicycle and hearing people play music and looking at the art they created i found like really inspiring and yeah it's easy to be like yeah burning man is a bunch of dirty hippies and weird and whatever and it's like nope it's kind of cool it's kind of cool there's a lot of really soul because my current mental image is that burning man is exactly a bunch of privilege we and this is why i love coming on the podcast because some of that challenge of do you know what um i can also just i can yes we'll go to burning man together i mean literally i'm telling you like and there is a douche like these dudes like like a bunch of russians came and like set up like a pop-up camp when a bunch of russian billionaires like set it up whatever and they were not part of the community and they just kind of whatever did an exclusionary kind of thing but they actually have this like rule set and radical self-reliance and inclusion are like two of the kind of rules there it turns out like being self-reliant you don't get to experience that much and then also if you have like a camp and you're hosting dinner you're having dinner you can't exclude people like if somebody walks by you're you're the the philosophy of it is like yeah just invite them in and give them some food you know like oh wow the world can be nice and kind and interesting and so anyway it's absolutely easy to be cynical about it and then when you go you're like wow this person spent months building this incredible beautiful art installation and it looks dope that's great and i think that that connects exactly to that general sense of optimism as a recovering pessimist that what i'm trying to work on is just you know what the world is more interesting when people are doing different that i can't currently in my position imagine being good or beautiful or whatever.

1:18:40And then they do it anyway. And I should try some of those things more. I should try to lean in harder. I should try leaning harder intellectually into ideas that I find challenging or difficult or even stupid. Even better if they're stupid, right? Even better if you look at something straight in the eye and go, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And then you just sit back and you keep staring at it. Check this thing out. Oftentimes sticking with that degree of, okay, that's pretty cool. So literally I was in this is a, I'm driving down the playa and I see this from miles away and it was called the tree of to Neri.

1:19:18Anyway, it's burning man, 2017. And I see this tree that the leaves are made of like LEDs and you could see it from across the playa. And I'm like, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. How did they do it? How did these lunatics make each leaf into an led? I don't know. And I don't know what they spent on this. looks like this cost a hundred thousand dollars it could cost a million dollars they made a tree of leds look at all these weirdos like hanging out at this tree it was literally far off in the plier at the end of the playa this crazy tree anyway i and this is where i can just i can almost preempt this with the comment section here's a bunch of privileged um venture back capitalist Silicon Valley, types who just squander money when we could be saving starving children in Africa or whatever effective altruism argument you can make for all the resources of the world should go to these few specific problems and nothing else.

1:20:18And you know what? F*** that. That is such a dead end of thinking of being, right? That everything has to be rendered in this context of like, oh, you could have done this. Do you know what? We are humans. We can do more than one thing. Life is better when there's also music and art and weird, dirty hippies in the desert. On top of also trying to solve other problems in the world, right? This dichotomy thinking of unless you are a paternal pessimist about all the things because there are structural inequities or this, that, and the other thing, you're just privileged. it's just that's perhaps one of the things i've gotten most over and most tired of watching just in the last uh few years i mean you could literally complain about the i've every night the eiffel tower has a light show that is delights everybody who comes there and squanders amounts of energy shouldn't all that energy you could the world another there's somebody starving where they couldn't it's like no there's enough energy that we can light it up and people could feel some joy in their life and what a great episode david thanks for coming on uh we'll book it for a year from now and we'll we'll rant about everything and we'll catch up soon and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye-bye