[Unedited Transcript]
Rich Ziade: [00:00:00] Do you hear that, Paul?
Paul Ford: I hear it fine.
Rich Ziade: It’s a rumbling sound. The internet is buzzing again.
Paul Ford: Oh, I thought you were just talking about your voice cuz I’m, I’m doing the engineering on the podcast. The internet is rumbling. You say
Rich Ziade: rumbling, buzzing. Humming.
Paul Ford: What’s humming? Is it bees?
Rich Ziade: I know you’re gonna guess that it’s the acquisition of PornHub by, I think a private equity firm called Ethical Partners or something.
Do you know about this?
Paul Ford: No.
Rich Ziade: Okay. There anyway,
Paul Ford: I’ve been a little distracted. Is this what I’m missing in the world right now?
Rich Ziade: PornHub got acquired by private equity. There’s a,
Paul Ford: there’s a whole podcast there that I guess we’re just not gonna do at this stage. No. Because we want to eventually succeed at something else and not have that podcast define the rest of our lives.
So we’ll just leave that alone.
Rich Ziade: [00:01:00] Leave it alone. But it is something that happened. PornHub is a force on the internet. It’s one of the most popular sites on the internet. It’s, it’s a, it’s part of culture. Let’s not deny ourselves, but that’s not what’s making the internet buzz.
Paul Ford: What makes the internet buzz? They are Oh good. A chat.
Rich Ziade: Chat. G P T and and Mid Journey and Stable Diffusion. And Bart. Bart or Bard?
Paul Ford: Bard Bar. Bar Bard is the transit system.
Rich Ziade: Bard is the transit system. Bard, which is Google’s hat in the ring with regards to ai and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. And you know, I wanted to be cynical old man. I was like, that’s not gonna get my job.
Um, I have a few observations to share in one really big predict.
Paul Ford: Oh my God, thank, thankfully now we’re making.
Rich Ziade: meaty. We’re making some, this is gonna be a meaty one.
Paul Ford: All right. You’re driving this one. I’m, I’m a little distracted this week, so I’m gonna just, I’m gonna be here, I’m gonna be reacting and I’m, I’m in this conversation. Let’s go.
Rich Ziade: First off, we [00:02:00] got fired from customer service cuz we sucked at it for 20 years.
Paul Ford: you and me.
Rich Ziade: and me, the world just trying to. Someone to refund you for shipping on the package that took an extra week
Paul Ford: to a bank,
Rich Ziade: talking
Paul Ford: I’m still angry. I still wake up some mornings. The, the greatest anger I have in my life is towards the company T-Mobile. Hmm.
Rich Ziade: Hmm, I, I haven’t spoken to a human at T-Mobile and I don’t know how long.
Finally, I had to do something pretty serious that required a human, like adding another, like my child to the plan, and I finally got hold of a human and it sounded like they were on a boat and had been at sea for years.
Paul Ford: Oh, it’s the girlfriend who will only talk to you when you say, I want to break up. And you’re
like,
Like where?
Rich Ziade: All right.
What’s up, rich? What’s going on? So, you know what? That we don’t, it turns out we didn’t want the job.
Paul Ford: Oh. Of customer service
Rich Ziade: of many jobs. [00:03:00] There’s many. It’s like, oh my God, they’re coming for my job. It turns out you didn’t want it, like you really didn’t want the job anyway. And so, you know what? Technology’s gonna free you up.
You can go back to school if you want, or learn some other skill and figure it out again.
Paul Ford: Well, let’s be clear, there’s enormous call centers all around the world. It’s not like it’s done. Yes.
Rich Ziade: And that’s observation one, which is some of the jobs that are gonna go away. We never really aced
Paul Ford: no
Rich Ziade: So that’s like put a pin in that
Paul Ford: Yeah. Also, I want to see, I do wanna see the robots do.
Rich Ziade: do better. Yeah.
Paul Ford: We’re not quite there yet, too. All right,
Rich Ziade: They’re gonna get
Paul Ford: that one. Okay. You’re right, you’re right. They’re gonna get better, so, so what are you saying here? You’re saying that, okay, there were jobs that we did that were really kind of bad human jobs, like customer service, and now we have this infinitely patient robot that can reply to anything.
Rich Ziade: Here’s what I think happened. It’s not that we failed, I’m being funny. What really happened was technology and communications took us to a whole other scale,
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: then we rushed to kind of fill in the blanks and [00:04:00] it was too big. And, and, and as a result, you have this attempt at automating the normal stuff of all of this scale.
Paul Ford: Let me give you an example. I can actually, I can clarify what you’re saying here. Imagine what one password would look like for you if you opened it in the year 1992,
Rich Ziade: 19, right,
Paul Ford: right. It would be about nine password. Your bank pin.
Rich Ziade: you’re right. I must have 300
Paul Ford: Your phone more. I probably have a thousand at this point.
Wouldn’t you count like logins to newspapers and so on? Yeah. Each one of those implies a call center in customer service. Totally.
Rich Ziade: It’s, it’s massive.
Paul Ford: you’ve scaled three, four orders of magnitude in the relationships that you have with entities. And those entities have like, I’ll, I’ll tell you another.
We try to block my son’s access to certain websites.
Rich Ziade: Okay. Fair.
Paul Ford: really distracted and so that’s the right way
Rich Ziade: He’s a young, he’s 11 [00:05:00] years old.
Paul Ford: He’s 11. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we, we did that during the pandemic, and it turns out to be a disaster because like, okay, you can block YouTube. Sometimes they need it for education, and you gotta unblock YouTube.
Okay. Okay. Okay. But then you hit some website that the school is like, go check out this website. But suddenly it’s blocked because we blocked like a tracking pixel from Amazon because we’re trying to whitelist things. Because every one of those webpages hits a, hits another couple webpages, which then go and hit another.
So like a transaction on behalf of your kid’s school might still talk to like 500 servers. So white listing is impossible. Those companies all work with all these other companies and they need customer service.
Rich Ziade: That’s right. And, and, and the history of technology is us inventing things that get away from us.
Paul Ford: Boy is
Rich Ziade: it? Right. And then once it gets away from us, we kind of do a lousy job of reigning it back in. It’s all catch up.
Paul Ford: I mean, you should see my desktop
Rich Ziade: a wall of icons, right? Yeah. And so tools like this to help us catch up, [00:06:00] I think are good. So that’s, that’s. Observation I wanna make, another observation I wanna make is that AI inadvertently stole a move I make.
I am, in many respects, a salesman,
Paul Ford: I’m not like a cool dance move. That’s what I was hoping for.
Rich Ziade: a
Paul Ford: you were just gonna get up on this podcast, like get up on the table and shimmy a little bit, but no. Okay, so AI has stolen a sales move.
Rich Ziade: sales. Yeah. Even if I’m not a hundred percent.
Paul Ford: I
Rich Ziade: what I’m talking about when I say something in that setting. I say it with absolute confidence and authority
Paul Ford: Yes.
Rich Ziade: louder and and the less I know about it and what I’m noticing cuz I’ve been playing with these tools.
Paul Ford: it is, it is very comforting when I’m in the room with you, cuz I’ll be like, hold on a minute, that’s gonna be really complicated. And you’re like, there is a solution right in front of us here. And I’m just like, woo boy.
And I mean like the physical relief I feel cuz I’m like, hold on a minute. We didn’t check the footnotes,
Rich Ziade: yeah. Uh, and, and Chachi b [00:07:00] t doesn’t do this. Um,
Paul Ford: oh, it never does.
Rich Ziade: well, hold on. Well it depends,
Paul Ford: does, it does get that little, that little cursor stops sometimes . Yeah. It’s
Rich Ziade: Yeah. I’ve noticed
Paul Ford: but actually what? What you do, cuz you’re a human, you look at that and you go, wow, it must be really working
Rich Ziade: steam’s coming out of the windows.
Whatever.
Paul Ford: I’m about to get is gonna be amazing.
Rich Ziade: But when it does say it’s peace, it says it as if it’s fact and it’s absolute authority.
Paul Ford: SA Saturn was, uh, named a moon of, of Pluto 22 years ago and you’re like, oh my God, there it
Rich Ziade: And look, let’s be, it’s gonna get better and better. It is incredible to watch. It is gonna get better, but today, um, that self-assuredness, just be careful.
Read all the words. It’s making a lot of mistakes
Paul Ford: The whole, this is a hilarious moment for technology. I’ll admit a few things. One is I’m a little checked out from this particular part of that world right now cuz I’m just like, eh, everybody says this is [00:08:00] gonna lead to a new kind of cosmic brain.
And I’m like, I’ve been through the cosmic brain thing before, friends. I don’t need to go down that
Rich Ziade: yeah.
Paul Ford: But as a, as a new tech, I’m like, yeah, absolutely. This is hilarious. It’s gonna be really interesting. I, I don’t, because I’m not in it and it’s actually hard to build with, and I don’t really have a lot of applications for it on my day to day.
I’m like, okay, we’ll, we’ll, I’ll eventually, this’ll be built into whatever I’m using and I’ll, I’ll get into it.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. And, and, and it’s gonna evolve, it’s gonna get better,
Paul Ford: I’m not amazed by the code generation yet. Like someone the other day is like, look, I taught it to. Pong and Tetris, and I’m like, yeah, it saved you sometime, but like a pretty good programmer could have whipped together that stupid demo fast
Rich Ziade: Do you know what programmers don’t want to do
Paul Ford: do
Rich Ziade: with most of their time?
Paul Ford: Uh, do anything except browse web comments about how their programming language is better?
Rich Ziade: Debug. Well that,
Paul Ford: yeah.
Rich Ziade: Debug someone else’s code. That’s true. They’d rather write it. They always think there’s a better way.
Paul Ford: Oh, it is [00:09:00] true.
Rich Ziade: Right. And so let’s see how that goes.
Paul Ford: really is just like a narrow re layer over human hatred,
Rich Ziade: here. just a coding
Paul Ford: really is. Like you would never, you never want to take that
mask off, man.
Rich Ziade: Um, so I wanna move on to my predict.
Paul Ford: All right.
Rich Ziade: And this one is, I think, is going to blow your mind a little bit. I hope. Maybe, maybe not. You have a big mind. You’re probably like, yeah, sure. Why not? I’ve, I’ve heard you say that before. I come to you with something, an exciting revelation.
You’re like, sure, . It’s, it’s a little underwhelming
Paul Ford: I’ve lived in New York City for 250 years. If I was easily surprised, I would be a bad business partner.
Rich Ziade: be a. So people are thinking, oh my God, we don’t need designers, we don’t need writers, we don’t need programmers. Uh, and I think they’re thinking through the lens of human delivery of a permanent artifact.
And what [00:10:00] I predict is going to happen is that AI will find a path that signals the end of permanence.
Paul Ford: Oh, it, okay. This is interesting.
Rich Ziade: And what I mean by, let me give you an
Paul Ford: example. Yeah. Gimme an example.
Rich Ziade: Every time you, if you share the article with a friend, the header image will be different every time.
Paul Ford: Yeah. I, I actually like this. I, I see this.
Rich Ziade: Uh,
Paul Ford: yes.
Rich Ziade: A musician, Beyonce will come out with an album that has tracks on it that every time you play.
Paul Ford: them,
Rich Ziade: They stay within part Elaine, but are different every time, every single time. Humans. If you look at the history of craft and creativity, it is always towards a permanent end state. I’m going to paint for weeks on end, and eventually I may open my doors and show you my painting.
I’m going to write a book for two years and when it’s [00:11:00] done, and the reason that existed was because of.
Paul Ford: the,
Rich Ziade: The gravity of packaging up that final artifact, like the printing press, can’t let you hack around for months. You gotta give them the final thing and they’re gonna put the letter press letters in and they’re gonna print the damn book.
And don’t you dare get a typo in there cuz that’s the end of it. Where we’re heading towards is the end of. Of permanence around the things that are delivered and does, what does that mean? Does that mean an article can kind of shapeshift, we’re sort of doing it today with the like New York Times article that keeps kind of getting paragraphs tacked on to the top.
As things change, we are seeing it with generative art and whatnot. I think we are going to see a world where every time you go to the thing, it’s a, it’s different.
Paul Ford: All right. [00:12:00] I’m gonna, I don’t, I don’t violently disagree, but I’m gonna add a big framework around this that I think will be.
Rich Ziade: helpful.
Paul Ford: There is a quote that I always go back to. It was Roger Ebert, the film critic who passed away. Wonderful critic. Yeah. And so he, they were talking about, he was sort of famously like, video games aren’t really art, which caused the internet to explode, et cetera, et cetera.
But it was the early days of hypertext narratives. And he, he said this thing
Rich Ziade: about like Infocom games and
Paul Ford: And just sort of like, but games in general, just kind of moving in a certain direction. And he goes, look, people didn’t sit around a.
Rich Ziade: fire,
Paul Ford: Tell a story and then say, do you go on the left or do you go to the right?
Okay. That wasn’t what Cave people did. Yeah, and I, I feel that that is fundamental, a, a tremendous amount of human art is. Um, predetermined for a purpose. Now there are, and, and actually there is no place that exemplifies this better than games because games either are extremely [00:13:00] open world or relatively closed worlds.
The ones where there’s like a thousand possible endings sort of fall flat. You either are no, like
Rich Ziade: is no a thousand possible. You just kind of keep going. Grand theft auto kind of just, you could live in
Paul Ford: in it. The infinite world or the predetermined narrative, like the last of us, those seem to be the cultural spaces that we’ve created for games.
Rich Ziade: Yes. Games are a great waypoint in this journey.
Paul Ford: Lot of, lot of stuff in the middle there. So I think now do I think that there could be advertising and narrative experiences where things get customized? Sure. Do. I think there could be a kid’s cartoon where the kid is like worked into the cartoon.
Sure. Non-player characters, all kinds of stuff. But I don’t think that like the Beyonce example, This reminds me of like when Peter Gabriel in the nineties, um, which I mean, I’m, I’m aging myself here, but like, was a very like, smart se cerebral pop guy who wrote the song in Your Eyes. Right. Which, so like, [00:14:00] he used to be very, he’s very experimental and
Rich Ziade: yeah, yeah. I was his thing.
Paul Ford: he released a set of CDs on the Explorer label and uh, they allowed you to mix his songs yourself.
Okay. And nobody wanted.
Rich Ziade: well also they’re on CDs.
Like It’s not
like he gave you the Wave
Paul Ford: five. No, no. It was interactive CDs. I’m sorry, I should be really clear. Oh yeah, no, like cd, ros.
Rich Ziade: Oh, like macro media
Paul Ford: director. I went and downloaded them. Yes. Literally. Yes. No. And you know who did that too is Sting.
And I’m gonna tell you there are two, if you wanna, two ridiculous artifacts from the nineties. Um, Will people dabble with and play with this? Yes. Will there be art? Yes. Will some of the art be successful and interesting? Yes. Because the technology is successful and interesting. Will AI write a song where people are like, it’s kind of a good song, man.
Yes. Will Beyonce play around with ai? Possibly, but I don’t think, I think the humans have shown over and over and over and over that we like to have an.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: except in places [00:15:00] where we can go in, I, I feel that there’s two human motivations when it comes to experiencing media. One is, I need something that allows me to increase my power and authority in the world.
So I will participate in this and learn from it. I’m gonna read the paper so I know what’s going on so that when I’m interacting in the world, I’m the,
Rich Ziade: I’m not a dummy,
Paul Ford: I’m the guy who knows what’s going on. Yeah. Or, and so, . And so that’s like, but I don’t wanna have the journalist improvising in real time in front of me.
That’s the, actually doesn’t, that diminishes my power and increases the journalist’s power. Meanwhile, over on the other side, I’m gonna go into, into Planet Grand Theft Auto 25, which is the giant mmo, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Go,
Rich Ziade: go where you want, I’m
Paul Ford: get my hip points, I’m gonna get my, my team together.
My crew and I are gonna, we’re gonna win. We’re gonna, we’re gonna acquire the territory, right? And so I. How does AI help in those two motivations? I think the, the second one is really easy, which is there’ll be more characters for you to kill and things for you to acquire. Like AI plus [00:16:00] Fortnite. I’m sure it’s already happening.
Yeah, right. Like, because it makes more challenges and it makes for a more interesting interactive environment. AI plus journalists, it could be really interesting if it, but you gotta get the factual accuracy part locked
Rich Ziade: No journalists, I would carve those out. To me, journalists are like, they are reporting, they’re, we’re not looking for you to be too creative. You could be a good writer, but you’re supposed to, A journalist I think is supposed to, that’s the definition of one.
It’s reporting facts in the world. Let me ask you
Paul Ford: wait, wait, let me actually, one more point, which is what is interesting here and where I could be. The Peter Gabriel example is good because it’s like, here’s his song and you’re going to do some work and remix it to create an experience.
You want
Rich Ziade: Nobody wants to do the work.
Paul Ford: 2% of out one per one. Peter Gabriel fan out of a thousand wants to Yeah, but like, and and that’s Peter Gabriel. Right? So nobody really wants to do that work. Now the thing [00:17:00] with. Could it give me more, essentially pleasure, more like variety and excitement and, and sense of connectivity to myself or to others by dynamically changing something that I like over and over again.
Can I
Rich Ziade: I give you something that people love? Sure. The remix. Yeah, people love a good remix. It’s a hit song. It’s not even a hit song. There’s communities that form around this stuff and they’ll take a, you know, a jazz vocals track
Paul Ford: Mm,
Rich Ziade: say, I wanna put a beat on this. I think this would sound great on the beach.
Would you mind if I did that? And then another DJ takes that song and puts it back out. And with the blessing of the original, uh, artist puts it back out.
Paul Ford: If you tell me that the future includes, I open Ableton live music production software, and there is a generative way to say, find me all the songs that could be mashed up with this new.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: and then I’m able to make mashups by hitting a button and then tweaking a few sliders and [00:18:00] put them back onto SoundCloud or wherever.
Rich Ziade: magic
Paul Ford: People will do that. That’s right.
Rich Ziade: Because it’s easy.
Paul Ford: I, I think what we’re, what we’re, what I’m getting to there though is that even with these tools, I think you have the.
Rich Ziade: everything
Paul Ford: you’re describing, I get it. But it still looks to me like creation and creation. I’m very paranoid after 25 years on the web because there’s a fantasy that humans want to create and they don’t. Yeah, they, humans are creative. They, they want to create in certain context, but mostly they want to consume.
I don’t want to make a movie. Movies are exhausting and added, and directors seem
Rich Ziade: terrible.
Paul Ford: terrible. I want to go watch Goodfellas.
Rich Ziade: Yes. Agreed. Most people do want to
Paul Ford: I don’t ever want to have to direct Robert De
Rich Ziade: have an analogy for you. A landscaper, not a landscaper who’s just mowing the lawn. A landscaper who
Paul Ford: Like a landscape architect.
Rich Ziade: and landscape architect. A landscape architect can tell you, I’m gonna put some of these here, some Hydrea there, and I’m gonna put some tulips
Paul Ford: No, nothing is more bayridge. Yeah. [00:19:00] Than the way you do
Rich Ziade: I’m gonna put some of these here.
Paul Ford: what is the, what’s the fancy plant? Yeah, it’s.
Rich Ziade: They’re
going to, they have a vision in their minds, but guess what? Even if you told them, I like that. Go ahead. They actually don’t have any idea how it’s gonna turn out. They have a general idea, but they’re plants.
Yeah. They don’t really know where it’s gonna go. And what I mean by that is, Imagine every time you open that Beyonce song, the beat’s different. And for some reason, on a Sunday you opened it and it was an acoustic version and she didn’t do anything. So what she’s done, she’s like that landscape architect.
She’s saying, I want these elements in the mix, and then I want it to play around.
Paul Ford: actually, let me, let me throw you something a little wilder than that. So, uh, okay. Yes. I can see that being interesting. What I think is more likely in here, again, you go back to like the tool, people are still gonna use music production tools.
Like it’s not gonna do everything for you. It’ll be [00:20:00] in the music production tools. There is, um,
Rich Ziade: uh,
Paul Ford: I can’t remember the name of the artist, but there was an artist, she’s sort of really experimental. First name is Holly, and she created a voice model. Anyone can sing and the AI transfers her voice tone Sure.
To it. And then like there was a lot of crypto stuff and on and on. Anyway, it got all complicated. But that idea that you or I could sing like Beyonce at karaoke.
Rich Ziade: Yeah,
Paul Ford: that’s gonna be.
Rich Ziade: jamming. So is Yeah. I
Paul Ford: she’s gonna, she’s gonna license her voice at some point.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. That’s creepy. But people will have a lot of fun
Paul Ford: Oh, but it’s revenue
Rich Ziade: a lot of revenue
Paul Ford: also, it’s actually really hard to sing, like Beyonce. So now you’re gonna get that, you’re gonna be able to be like, you’re gonna sing into a microphone. Beyonce’s voice will come out.
Rich Ziade: out. Yeah. I think I, I think this is gonna be played around with mainly because for a lot of this, look, we’re all like in awe and enjoying ourselves. But [00:21:00] I, I, I used Mid Journey for a couple of weeks. I ended up goofing around like two weeks in. I, I couldn’t think of a real world application. I started to hit the limits and I started messing
Paul Ford: around. You hit the limits. And the, the fact that there are like dudes in their twenties saying, this is going to take over the universe. You better watch out.
Becomes a little ridiculous. If you have any, all you have to do to really understand this new technology is give it about two weeks. You find the limits
Rich Ziade: very quickly. Yeah. There’s still, there’s still not that element of surprise disappears fast.
Paul Ford: wanna be clear. It’s gonna get better and better, but the moment of magic is actually over now.
Like the moment
Rich Ziade: it’s real world application.
Paul Ford: you could say, draw me a picture of two penguins wearing funny hats in a law office, and it would.
Rich Ziade: it. Yeah.
Paul Ford: I’d never seen that before, but what we’re gonna see from now on is steady refinement so that the penguins get, you know, more and more accurate law briefs in their hands.
Rich Ziade: I, the reason I think there’s gonna be motivation to mess with these variations [00:22:00] and very little work is that when you, when you, when you mutate the original, People come back to it, there will be more engagement. There’s an Instagram model that has 2.8 million followers on Instagram. She’s very beautiful.
Paul Ford: is your little Mikayla, you this or, or something like that.
Um,
Rich Ziade: that. Yeah. The
Paul Ford: yeah, thi this is your best counterpoint.
Rich Ziade: This is what you’re seeing. People love the twist. They love the twist. I used to collect bootleg audio of the same songs that I already owned because it was new and it was it, it was new and familiar.
You gimme those two things.
Paul Ford: I love mashups.
Rich Ziade: You gimme the Exactly, exactly. There’s a wonderful dj. He’s on YouTube, but his stuff is like, it lives in copyright, left land. Uh, it named Margo Goway.
Paul Ford: He’s great. DJ Earworm,
Rich Ziade: thing. These, they, they see the world as a sort of a playground, but it’s very appealing to me because, oh man, I love [00:23:00] Otis Redding.
I love Marvin Gaye. This is fun. He mashed it up with Wu-Tang clan. Yes. Good times. That’s fun and that’s really fun. And I think people love the twist. And when the, and usually the twist takes a lot of money. You gotta get Beyonce back in the studio. It’s about to get real cheap. To give it a little
Paul Ford: this. Now we’re talking, right? Cuz the economics around this are ridiculous.
Rich Ziade: coming down to money, isn’t it?
Paul Ford: it? It is. No. Suddenly you can do things, you’re gonna be able to sing in a microphone. Sound like a brilliant singer. Change the nature of the tone of the women. I wanna be a gravelly Joe Cocker style, or I want to sound like Joni Mitchell. Doesn’t matter. Yeah. Doesn’t
Rich Ziade: Like, it, it, it, it is, it is resonates in a familiar way, but it feels a little fresh and it doesn’t, it didn’t require us to lease out a studio. That’s a big
Paul Ford: deal. Well, let me tell you, I’m gonna close this out for us cuz here’s what happens. That is amazing for probably as many as 18 months. And then humans learn all the new [00:24:00] patterns,
Rich Ziade: You know what ends up
Paul Ford: everybody gets bored and we’re gonna be back to like people playing acoustic guitars and coffee shops.
Rich Ziade: This is real people. Whenever things go to scale and automation sets in, they revert back to what is genuine. And you see that because I pay three times as much for my strawberries just to get them organic.
Paul Ford: I know. No, no, no. This is completely, we need so badly as a
Rich Ziade: that authenticity.
Paul Ford: we’re gonna go back to it. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll partake of the pleasure and then we go, no, that’s enough.
I’m.
Rich Ziade: and I want the real thing.
Paul Ford: We’re very perverse as a species. We’re just like, when, when everything is, because what’ll happen then culture is led by people who zig instead of zag, but they have to zig in such a way that then people can follow along. So it’s a very reliable kinda zigging. So the zigging will be like, I’m done with all that stuff.
I, you know, I put away my 8 million synthesizers and now I just play one string gently and it’s a loot and I [00:25:00] sing in the original Greek. And everyone will be like, well, that’s actually what I really like. That’s, I always hated all that other stuff as they put away their Beyonce tour t-shirts, and that’s where, yes.
Yeah. This is a new thing that will ebb and flow and I, I, I think that is actually, if you’re gonna take a point away from the Ford advisor, you’re gonna take some advice. It’s that the big new thing. Go ahead. Ride the wave. But it is a, AI is here in this new way, and we’re gonna be really excited about machine learning, and it’ll draw pictures for you and so on and so forth.
And then one day the bottom will fall out and everybody who’s like a VC in California will be like, talking about something new and you’ll
Rich Ziade: It’ll be something new.
Paul Ford: And you’ll be like, wait, I thought you guys were all about ai. There’s a
Rich Ziade: a wonderful, uh,
Paul Ford: snippet,
Rich Ziade: A video from Family Guy where the Kool-Aid guy comes smashing through the wall and he screams, oh yeah.
And like, everybody’s like, what the hell’s that? And he tiptoes back into the wall . And he’s [00:26:00] like, oh man, I, I, I guess I wasn’t invited to this. Nobody wanted this. And he kind of drifts away. There’s always a coolaid guy. Every, we’ve been around tech long enough to see Kool-Aid guys smash through walls every five years.
Paul Ford: we’ve been the Kool-Aid guy.
Rich Ziade: been the
Paul Ford: And there’s a point, you know, I, I no longer, I don’t want to smash through the wall cuz it hurts your shoulders. And I, and I don’t want to tiptoe out.
Rich Ziade: got tendonitis,
Paul Ford: Yeah. Then you gotta call a contractor. Like that’s the whole experience. Right. So I think, um, that’s a, that’s a funny moment to be in, but like it’s no longer wait and see.
It’s like, yeah. Oh, that’s gonna happen. There’ll be something there. There’s probably. Billions of dollars of businesses to be built on that. No doubt. And then it’ll kind of suck because that’s how the world goes. And there’ll be a new thing
Rich Ziade: and it’ll settle in and it’ll be a new thing. Exactly. Uh, this is Ziti and Ford Advisors.
People have been telling us that we should change our theme song. We can say with complete.
Paul Ford: oh, no, no, no. They only said it once and it was because
Rich Ziade: I’ve heard it from other people, dude.
Paul Ford: Yeah. Why don’t they [00:27:00] like it? I love it.
Rich Ziade: it. Oh, I think they just think it’s too much, which is exactly why it
Paul Ford: Turn it all the way
Rich Ziade: up it will be our permanent theme song forever.
Paul Ford: Advisors won’t
Rich Ziade: get. The AI treatment. AI treatment, that theme song,
Paul Ford: A theme song is a work of art.
Rich Ziade: uh, hit us up five stars wherever. I dunno if people still do that. Five stars, five thumbs.
Paul Ford: As many thumbs as you
Rich Ziade: as many thumbs as you got. Uh, we’re on all the podcast platforms. We’re on Ziti Ford. We’re Ziti Ford on Twitter, and we love feedback questions, topic ideas.
hello@zitiford.com. Paul, you don’t change my friends. Stay who you are.
Paul Ford: I think at this stage of my life, there’s a pretty good chance
Rich Ziade: Oh yeah.
Paul Ford: Right through the wall.
Rich Ziade: Have a lovely week.
Paul Ford: Bye. [00:28:00] [00:29:00] [00:30:00] [00:31:00] [00:32:00]