Hard Fork Live, Part 2: Patrick Collison of Stripe + Kathryn Zealand of Skip + Listener Questions

More from our first live show taping, including a robot pants demo and audience questions.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI. Hard Fork Live, the podcast's inaugural event, was sponsored by premier sponsor IBM, associate sponsor Invesco QQQ, and supporting sponsor Intuit QuickBooks.

• 0:45Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, what was your favorite part of Hard Fork Live?

• 0:49Casey Newton?

  I mean, there are so many things to choose from, Kevin. I think one thing comes to mind was when I showed up at the venue and they had no idea who I was and didn't want to let me in. I went right up to the security. I said, hi, I'm Casey. I'm here to co-host the show. And they said, who? I said, oh, gosh, am I going to have to pull up a website on my phone and show you my face? And I did. And then they let me in.

• 1:08Kevin Roose?

  That's good.

• 1:09Casey Newton?

  What was your favorite part?

• 1:10Kevin Roose?

  I told them not to let you in. That's why that happened.

• 1:12Casey Newton?

  Dang it, Roos, you got me again, you scoundrel.

• 1:14Kevin Roose?

  My favorite part was definitely, so we had this bit where we're changing out of our regular pants into some mechanical robot exoskeleton pants for a demo. And we had practiced this the day before during rehearsal in sort of like an empty backstage area. And I'm taking off my pants and I look up and there's Patrick Collison just looking at my fleshy, pale thighs.

• 1:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah, one of Silicon Valley's great thinkers and leaders. And there we are, our trousers dropped, and he's thinking, what kind of show is this exactly? Yeah, so suffice to say, if you work backstage on Hard Fork Live, you didn't see the whole show.

• 1:58Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 2:00Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

• 2:01Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 2:02Casey Newton?

  This week, it's part two of Hard Fork Live. We'll talk to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and try on some robot pants with Skip's Catherine Zelen. Plus, members of the live audience ask us anything.

• 2:14Kevin Roose?

  Anything?

• 2:15Casey Newton?

  And they did.

• 2:33Casey Newton?

  Well, this next guest, I'm extremely excited about. I have known Patrick Collison and his brother John since the early 2010s. They were recently arrived in the city. They were starting to build a company called Stripe. And in the year since, it has grown into a juggernaut. And Patrick, I think, has become one of the most interesting and influential thinkers in tech. Outside of his day job, he and Tyler Cowen wrote a piece in The Atlantic about the need for a new science of progress. He also is the co-founder of the ARC Institute, which is doing a bunch of really important biomedical research. And just to top it off, in April, he joined the board of Meta, which is currently reshuffling

• 3:18Casey Newton?

  its AI team in ways that might be fun to talk about. So I'm extremely excited to welcome to the stage Patrick Collison.

• 3:28Casey Newton?

  Hey!

• 3:31Casey Newton?

  It's real. Hi, how are you?

• 3:33Kevin Roose?

  Good to see you.

• 3:35Casey Newton?

  All right. Patrick, thank you so much for coming.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:38Casey Newton?

  How are you?

• 3:38Speaker 03

  I'm doing well. It's wonderful to be here, where I've come to so many long now talks here, and now it's you guys.

• 3:46Casey Newton?

  There is no longer now than a podcast, is what they say.

• 3:50Kevin Roose?

  So Patrick, you are a big proponent of what they call the abundance agenda. I think I can say that without paying a royalty to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. What is the most urgent abundance-related need right now? Is it housing, land use, fast-tracking approvals for new drugs? What is it?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Building.

• 4:10Casey Newton?

  And why is that?

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Well, I think, look, there are so many domains where we need more progress than we've garnered. The rate of improvement of life expectancies has really diminished, and there are still... You still get colds, right? Like, that's crazy. Run a trajectory supposedly to invent new deer fusion, AGI, and so many... But like, we haven't cured even the common cold, right? There are a lot of challenges we face in many domains. There are many pursuits in science and technology where we should be going much faster. However, I think the place where the constraints are most unnecessary, most self-imposed,

• 4:53Speaker 03

  and easiest to, at least in principle, easiest to address are in any kind of physical construction. And like, by the way, California and San Francisco used to stand for this, right? You know, we have the Kaiser signs around the bay and the marine ship was in California. Those stories of the ships that got built in a day, like, they happened here. And so I think California is kind of this funny superposition where in the 40s, 50s. I mean, actually, my favorite example of this is Treasure Island, we built to celebrate the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We were just so drunk on the fervor of having finished the Golden Gate Bridge. We're like, you know, we're just caught up in the momentum of it and we're like, well, let's just go build another thing, as we built an island.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  And so California and San Francisco used to stand for this. And now California, and my favorite example of this is, you know, we passed a ballot prop for California High Speed Rail. And they used to have on the website, you could go there and, you know, the forecast completion date was 2033. And now I just checked recently and they've now taken it down. So, you know, it used to be a 37-year project and now, you know, who knows? And so.

• 6:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. I was interviewing someone once about like their AI forecast and how everything was going to change in the next like two or three years. We were going to have superintelligence as a robot factories and we're sitting in Berkeley and looking out over the Berkeley sort of downtown. And I said, do you think any of that will get like permitted by zoning? And he was like, no. So like even the people thinking about the wildest possible futures cannot imagine land use reform in the Bay Area.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, another, I think, kind of funny example of this was, you know, there was the sort of announced aspirational city project in Solano County back a couple of years ago. You guys covered it on the podcast. But I thought kind of the response was sort of funny where. Thousands of times in its history, and you know, America's history is only a couple hundred years, America decided, hey, let's build a city. And that is a thing that has in fact ensued. And you know, there is a city there today. And it's happened even recently with Irvine and so forth. But the response to that was astonishment and people aghast and that kind of audacity was kind of offensive. But when somebody says, hey,

• 7:13Speaker 03

  we're going to create a super intelligence, populate the cosmos, we're like, yep, seems pretty reasonable. When someone says, we're going to build a new city in California, it's like, that's just ridiculous.

• 7:22Casey Newton?

  I do think that there is an element separate from that, which is that with a lot of tech, I think some folks just feel like they've gotten a bad bargain, right? Maybe with social media, they don't quite like the bargain that they've gotten, or they worry about the environmental impact of some of these technologies. And so sometimes I do think technologists come along and they say, we want to take a crack at this. And people just think, I don't actually trust you to do that. And I imagine you have done some thinking about this as somebody who is trying to bring your influence to bear on public issues. So how do you reckon with that?

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Well, I am, yeah, you have the Homer car problem. Nobody wants it. Yeah. So I think that in, are they, in many domains, I think it's the case that if you go and you talk to the insiders and the people who've been plowing some lonely furrow for a long time, they are brimming with ideas for how it could be done better. And it's not a matter of somebody careering in from outside with some delusions of grandeur and some sense for how it could all be done differently. I think in many cases, it's actually about unleashing the ideas kind of inside the system that are existing and not yet manifested.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  And one of my favorite examples, and one of the most striking examples of this is, we ran a survey a couple of years ago of practicing top-tier scientists. And we asked them, not if you had, not whether you had more money, but if you could spend your current funding dollars, however you like, because today, funding dollars come with all sorts of Restrictions and they're allocated by committees and by consensus and you know with kind of tight fund excuse me a field definitions and so forth. We asked these scientists if you could keep your current funding level, but if you could spend those dollars however you want, how much would your research agenda change? And I thought that you know that the results might be striking, you know, maybe, you know, maybe a maybe a third of scientists would actually like to be doing something else.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Seventy nine percent of respondents in that survey said they would change their research agenda a lot. And that just blew my mind because you know we go to, I mean, these scientists, they're so self sacrificing like they could go and make, you know, a bajillion dollars or you know, these days, you know, a hundred bajillion dollars by doing, doing something more lucrative. And they've decided to try to, you know, better humanity by, you know, by, you know, working inside the academy. They, they, they spend decades training and then four eighty percent are telling us that they, they, they would be doing something very different, not again, not if they had more money, but if they had fewer strictures attached to their current money. So I think that's one striking example. That was one of the influences for ARC.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  But I think in many of these cases, whether it's urban design and urban planning or you know, any kind of construction or whatever. I think the insiders often know how to do a lot better.

• 10:10Kevin Roose?

  You mentioned the hundred million figure. So I have to ask, you are on the board of Meta, which is currently reshuffling its AI teams, building a super intelligence team and reportedly offering people a hundred million dollars to come work for them. Have you been helping with that? And what kind of advice are you giving to Mark Zuckerberg about that?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  You add the payments guy to the board and then all of a sudden, yeah. I've just had one board member, actually one board meeting, so I shouldn't comment.

• 10:33Kevin Roose?

  Okay. Well, let me ask you about something you can't comment on then, which is this idea of agentic commerce, which I've heard a bunch of times recently, and I think it means something like robots buying stuff. This is a big idea in the tech industry right now, that you're just going to have these bots going out and buying things on your behalf, or that there's going to be agents transacting with each other. Right now Stripe is a platform to help people, human beings, pay for things. But I can go on Operator and have it buy me, you know, a pizza or a burrito. I imagine.

• 11:02Casey Newton?

  If you have two hours for it to complete that process.

• 11:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I imagine you're planning for a world in which this kind of thing is happening more. What does that look like? And is Stripe still necessary in that world?

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Well, look, Stripe enables the transactions and the money movement beneath the surface. And so we're, to some extent, agnostic about and enthusiastic about all the different modalities in which that might happen. And when Stripe started, mobile wasn't nearly as big a thing as it is today, and stable coins didn't exist and so forth. So we're enthusiastic about the reinvention here. And from my standpoint, the variety that one can benefit from on the internet is tremendous. And I think it's amazing that you can have so many niche businesses that are serving

• 11:55Speaker 03

  these preposterously large global audiences and customer bases that couldn't exist without the internet, right? Because if you're only restricted to the hinterland that you locally serve, you get much less, as much less as possible. But very few people say, "The thing I love about internet commerce is after I click on the thing that I am brought to sort of a..."

• 12:17Kevin Roose?

  Checkout flow.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a 30-field form to fill out and then fax us, and parts of it in Latin. It feels very antiquated. And so I think the promise for these, I mean, I don't know, I think agents sounds very kind of highfalutin, but these critters to go and to sort of be the paperwork minions for you, to dispatch one and say, "Hey, go handle that, and then I will resume whatever else I was doing." I think that's very promising, and I think it's going to be better for everyone.

• 12:54Kevin Roose?

  Will the agents use dollars or crypto?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Well, I know I'm here with a well-known crypto booster, Katie Newton, but I think they will use amount-denominated in the local currency. So I think in the US, things will be in dollars and euros and...

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Ireland and so forth. And I think there's kind of an irony where, you know, with the invention of crypto. I mean, it is an amazing kind of computer science invention and technology and so forth.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Obviously, the sort of initial conception of Bitcoin was, you know, we're going to throw off the shackles of our, you know, of the monetary tyranny and oppression that we're sort of subjected to and liberate ourselves with this new currency. And then you look at Bitcoin has obviously garnered a lot of traction. But a majority of cryptocurrency transactions today are in stable coins, are dollar denominated. And I think it might be the case with stable coins, what actually happens is rather than kind of overthrowing the dollar, it actually enables people outside the US to access the dollar in ways they couldn't previously. I think this is the biggest thing that's actually underappreciated by people, you know, here in America, which is for outsiders, you know, lots of currencies are not a great thing to hold savings in

• 14:19Speaker 03

  or not a great thing to transact in, like for, no, I don't want to name names and single any, you know, poor currency out. But like, you know, there's, there are many currencies where when you go to give them to your counterparty, they look at you funny and ask you, what is that?

• 14:33Casey Newton?

  Kohl's cash comes to mind.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  And there's a lot of currencies that have, that have lost 75% of their value, you know, in the last five years. And so providing the ability for people outside the US to hold dollars is, I think, could be a big deal. And so I think there's kind of an irony in crypto where, you know, one of the most important and consequential things it may end up enabling is the dollar's greater success.

• 15:00Casey Newton?

  You are a co-founder of the ARC Institute. You mentioned it a moment ago. You also mentioned the persistent problem of the common cold. Do you think there is something that can be done about the common cold and are you going to work on it?

• 15:11Speaker 03

  We have a big announcement tonight. No, and so.

• 15:14Casey Newton?

  That would be so dope.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Yes, that mist on the way in was actually a vaccine. No. So humanity has, this was only a penny that dropped for me a couple of years ago. Humanity has never cured a complex disease. And what I mean by that is, you know, there are some genes that are, excuse me, there's some diseases, you know, infectious diseases, the cold, COVID, you know, what have you. Then we have monogenic diseases, you know, Huntington's, you know, things that are the product of, you know, some specific genetic abnormality. And, but then you have all these diseases, there are some combination of the environment and, you know, your, whatever, what you do with your life and, you know, genetic risk factors you might have. So this is most cancers, most cardiovascular disease, most neurodegenerative disease, most

• 16:02Speaker 03

  autoimmune disease and so forth. Anyway, we've never cured one of these. And it's, it's too complicated because, you know, figuring out how the genes and the environment and, you know, the durations that elapse and so forth, it's just, it's, it's kind of, it's incorrigible. So, so we set up our institute to try to, I mean, again, no, no, time will tell, you know, whether actually able to make any progress here. But the, the sort of, the idea was, hey, can we try a different strategy for going after these complex diseases? And one of the things that has been, you know, a real boost for us over the last two

• 16:42Speaker 03

  years is actually AI, where, you know, I think the LLMs, as we interact with them, you know, they're obviously wonderful and enable all sorts of productivity enhancements and so forth. But, you know, there's another language, you know, DNA, the language of life, and kind of hitherto, we haven't really, you know, it's, you know, it's billions of base pairs and, you know, we can't at a human level understand what's going on there. It's kind of beyond what, what any individual can comprehend. And, you know, what we've seen with some early, early work, and we published the, our first virtual cell model yesterday, actually, by coincidence.

• 17:20Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, tell us about that. What is a virtual cell?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  And so the... Why haven't we cured cancer? Or any, again, complex disease? On some level, the problem is that experiments in biology are slow and expensive. Like, you're dealing with actual, physical cells. You have to wait for them to grow. And so if you have some hypothesis or some idea, you do things to the cells, and then you wait three months, you wait six months. You have to purchase the reagents, the ingredients, they're expensive, the supply chains, you know, span multiple countries. So, just, it's laborious. So, in software and engineering, you have an idea, you write a quick command to the command line, and 10 milliseconds later, you have your response.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  In biology, that ripple takes months to elapse. And so, the idea behind a virtual cell, and this is not, you know, others have had this idea, this is not Arx's idea, the core idea is if you actually had a useful, accurate way to perform computational experiments, where you try the thing that you, in accordance with your hypothesis, in silico, as the biologists say, because they always like to make things complicated and fancy, but, you know, really, if you just computationally do your thing, then, again, if that was actually accurate, it would be an enormous accelerant, that's biology. So, anyway, that's the kind of idea. We haven't, recently, I mean, is this too much biology?

• 18:41Speaker 04

  No, we like it.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  You guys like biology!

• 18:44Speaker 03

  In the last, one more thing, then I'll stop. But, in the last couple of years, we've got technologies in three different domains that are really important. So, with, you know, a computer is composed of the ability to read, to think, to compute, whatever, and then to write, you know, the core three operations. In biology, in the last just couple of years, we've got the ability to sequence individual cells, to figure out what's going on in just like one cell, which is a big deal. We've gotten deep neural networks and transformers, all that stuff, so we can kind of think over data of very significant complexity. And then we've had huge advances in functional genomics, and CRISPR, and the ability to

• 19:28Speaker 03

  make individual edits to individual cells. And so those are all big breakthroughs in their own right, but when you put them together, there's kind of this shimmering potential promise, that, hey, maybe you could, for the first time, enable these accurate computational predictions very quickly, very cheaply. And, again, if that worked, it would be a huge deal in biology.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Great wall.

• 19:49Kevin Roose?

  Great wall.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  You just don't type it, it works.

• 19:57Casey Newton?

  You are a voracious reader. What is your case for reading the whole book instead of an AI summary? Or is that not a case you would make?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Gosh, I, well.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  I think, I think reading the AI summary has, I think it can be useful. And I think it has a, a powerfully inoculating effect. Like sometime, like I think, I think TV is a waste. Like long form TV, lots of episodes, TV is a waste of time.

• 20:29Kevin Roose?

  We told you there would be hot takes to rent.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  But it's, but it's very tempting, right? Like you watch an episode and like, oh geez, I really want to know what happens here. And, and so I discovered a couple of years ago, obviously, the, the solution is you immediately go to Wikipedia and read the entire summary of the season. And, and you're cured of the desire to watch any more episodes. So there is a, I think there is a therapeutic benefit to AI summaries.

• 20:54Kevin Roose?

  That is the most San Francisco thing I've ever heard.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  But.

• 20:59Kevin Roose?

  I love it.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  But, but it's, it does not derive any, any, you know, deep pleasure or, or betterment from it. So I've, I've never written an AI book summary.

• 21:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Kevin Roose?

  All right. Patrick, can we do some lightning round questions?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:15Kevin Roose?

  What age will the median?

• 21:17Speaker 03

  When do, when do I get to ask for the Stripe feedback?

• 21:19Casey Newton?

  Oh, well.

• 21:20Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so you're Stripe customer.

• 21:21Casey Newton?

  I am a Stripe customer, actually. Very quickly, you're doing automated disputes now?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:26Casey Newton?

  Very excited to try this.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Okay, good. All right. And everything else is working well?

• 21:30Casey Newton?

  Everything's also working great.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Okay, great.

• 21:32Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Kevin Roose?

  All right. Lightning round questions. What age will the median child born in 2025 in the US live to be?

• 21:44Speaker 03

  So is it 25 today?

• 21:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Gosh, 95.

• 21:51Casey Newton?

  Oh, great. What is one thing you wish an agent could do, an AI agent could do for you reliably that it can't quite yet?

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Reason over the scientific literature. It gets tripped up in the paywalls.

• 22:08Casey Newton?

  Well, we know how.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  And I think, like, why hasn't anyone in that space done anything about it?

• 22:14Kevin Roose?

  We love paywalls in this house.

• 22:22Kevin Roose?

  Patrick, what trait do you hire for?

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Imagine if you had critters paying at them, you know, on behalf of unsuspecting people.

• 22:29Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I love that. That's a business model for the media.

• 22:33Kevin Roose?

  I'm excited to present the critter strategy at the next meeting.

• 22:38Kevin Roose?

  What trait do you hire for that most companies undervalue?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  For Stripe, we really care about long-term thinking. Like, infrastructure, with the lightning round, but infrastructure can't happen overnight. You know, we've been working on it for 15 years. We still feel like we're just starting. And so if somebody, you know, like,

• 23:03Speaker 03

  our products don't have TikTok trajectories. And the super-successful ones still take, you know, a decade to fully play out. And so, you know, I like the analogy that, you know, those kind of technology companies building cars and roads. And, you know, we need cars, and cars are super cool and, you know, beautiful and all the things. But like, someone's got to build the roads. And Stripe looks for the kind of people who are predisposed to working on roads.

• 23:30Casey Newton?

  Is there a book you read recently that made you say, "Everyone I know needs to read this"? Or even not that recently?

• 23:38Speaker 03

  I'll give you two. So The Dream Machine is, like, hands up here who feels like they really have a good understanding of the history of the internet.

• 23:49Kevin Roose?

  Shame on you.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny, Alan Kay once commented that computer science is a pop culture. He thought that we were recapitulating the same ideas in blissful ignorance of our history. And I think there is something funny where we as technologists, we're not as into and fascinated by, I think, our own history as people are in other domains. And so the Dream Machine is the best history of the internet and the thinking around it and the motivations around it. And it's also, yeah, it's Polish Rice, Dry Press. And then what I read recently that kind of blew my mind was The Demon Under the Microscope,

• 24:31Speaker 03

  which was, you all know that penicillin was the first antibiotic, except there wasn't. There was one before us, it changed the world. The story behind its invention is very interesting, so those were my two.

• 24:43Kevin Roose?

  Great. Patrick Carlson, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thank you.

• 24:49Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 24:55Casey Newton?

  When we cut back, even more of Hard Fork Live.

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• 27:11Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, we're wearing what I would call robot pants.

• 27:16Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think that's fair.

• 27:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And why are we wearing these robot pants?

• 27:19Casey Newton?

  We are wearing these robot pants because it gives us a great excuse to talk to Catherine Zellin.

• 27:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so Catherine Zellin is the founder and CEO of Skip. They're the company that makes these pants. The company spun out of X, the Google Experimental Research Division, not the social media network owned by Elon Musk, in 2023. And since then, she's been working on this exoskeleton move wear, like these pants, which have been called e-bikes for walking. Let's bring on Catherine Zellin from Skip.

• 27:47Casey Newton?

  Catherine.

• 27:55Casey Newton?

  Thank you, Catherine.

• 27:56Speaker 09

  Of course. Thank you.

• 27:59Kevin Roose?

  You guys didn't see, but backstage, we just did the best quick change in theater history.

• 28:04Casey Newton?

  I just took my pants off in front of Patrick Hollison.

• 28:10Casey Newton?

  So Catherine, in a few words, tell us who your products are for and what problem you're hoping to solve.

• 28:16Speaker 09

  So I'm sure I'm not the only one here who's got a loved one that's struggled with movement, or maybe you've got knee pain or had an injury. And so at Skip, what we want to do long-term is help anyone achieve whatever they want to do, regardless of any kind of mobility impairment. This is our first product, this is the Mogo, and this is actually aimed at people who want to go hiking. But often they may be struggling a little bit, either with knee pain or with a reduced mobility. So an e-bike is a really great analogy, it just particularly helps with the inclines, steep hills and stairs, things like that. But then eventually we'll help, hopefully, everyone.

• 28:50Casey Newton?

  So tell us, what is in these pants? Folks who may be sitting a little further back may not be able to see, but in addition to these pants, which I believe you partnered with Arcturix to make these pants, there's also some pretty heavy machinery on here. So what is this stuff doing?

• 29:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the real magic is these lightweight motors. Here's one I prepared earlier. And really, it's only in the last decade or so that robotics has gotten efficient enough, affordable enough, light enough. You can have something this small, that can do up to maybe 40% of a healthy person's muscle forces. And so there's a motor that's providing physical oomph, and then built into the pant, those near the front can maybe see this, a little bit of a cuss situation, to help transfer that force to the body.

• 29:33Casey Newton?

  And I know that, one of the things that these pants can do is help you stand up, which you were sort of explaining to me, is so helpful for folks who are older and need some help with that. And I thought, I need that help now. So I think your market may actually be larger than you first suspected.

• 29:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, and I'm actually having a similar problem, because I don't know if you noticed, but I'm quite pregnant. I wasn't gonna say anything.

• 30:00Casey Newton?

  Thank you. It's eight months. Catherine joined us at eight months pregnant, so please do give her a round of applause.

• 30:11Speaker 09

  And all of a sudden, yes, I also need help walking upstairs and standing up out of chairs.

• 30:16Kevin Roose?

  Now, do you envision a world where lots of people are wearing kind of exoskeleton-type move wear, or do you think this will primarily be for people who have mobility issues?

• 30:25Speaker 09

  I think a bit of both. So I think if you're truly able-bodied, a product like this is probably just not worth your time necessarily. But there's a huge range of people who might be recovering from an injury, they might be pregnant, they might have a joint pain, they might have had a surgery. And so I think probably most people at some point in their lives will use one of these products. And we also do R&D in things like Parkinson's disease and people who have more severe issues as well. But for sure, it's much broader than the first set of products that you're seeing coming on now.

• 30:55Casey Newton?

  As this technology develops and you're able to shrink it down, do you see a world where more able-bodied people might just choose to wear it because they like feeling a little bionic when they walk around town?

• 31:05Speaker 09

  I was gonna say, are you trying to dunk a basketball? Is that where you're headed?

• 31:09Casey Newton?

  I've been trying since 1992.

• 31:13Speaker 09

  For sure, yes. But I would say if you just want to make your exercise harder, because this is something that some people ask, they're like, "Oh, can I get resistance mode?" You could also try ankle weights. I think they're gonna make a comeback. Yeah.

• 31:24Casey Newton?

  That's good.

• 31:25Kevin Roose?

  Now, exoskeletons are a staple of science fiction. I remember watching movies as a kid that had exoskeletons, and lots of other stuff in those movies has become commonplace, but not exoskeletons and this kind of hardware. So why is this taking longer than other types of futuristic technology?

• 31:41Speaker 09

  I think there's two reasons. One is that hardware is hard, and people are really sensitive to what's on their body. So I mean, you're wearing like an early version of the prototype, and it's probably not super comfortable, the fit's not always perfect. And you might tolerate an uglier and imperfect robot if it's just kind of in a factory, but when you've got to wear something, it's important that it's comfortable, that it fits really well, that it looks good. So the bar is really high for anything that's worn. I think the second reason is actually around AI. And so historically, exoskeletons and all robotics do very repetitive tasks, right? Like, in a warehouse, doing lifting was one of the first places you saw exoskeletons actually become used because it's the same task again and again. But when you think about maybe an older adult who wants to like move about their

• 32:24Speaker 09

  community, they're doing lots of different movements and they're moving in weird ways. And I'm like a fidgeter. So you know, in one of our early prototypes, I was sitting at a very important meeting with my boss and I was tapping my foot because I was a bit nervous. And all of a sudden, it thought I was trying to stand up and it turns on and it like throws my leg up and the whole table goes like, and everyone's water spills and there's chaos.

• 32:48Kevin Roose?

  That was actually the plot of Megan 2.0. That's, that happened there.

• 32:54Casey Newton?

  Okay, well, so we've talked a bit about this product. Anything else we should know about it before we see what it can do?

• 33:00Speaker 09

  You find the disclaimer, right, backstage?

• 33:02Kevin Roose?

  Uh, no. No, we're just gonna wing it.

• 33:05Casey Newton?

  Excellent.

• 33:06Kevin Roose?

  So, so yeah, let's stand up and maybe take us through

• 33:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, so start by turning it on even while you're sitting if you want. There's a little button at the back here. Press and release and the LEDs should change color.

• 33:16Kevin Roose?

  Mine is already blue. Does that mean it's on?

• 33:18Casey Newton?

  No, that means it's

• 33:19Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 33:19Casey Newton?

  Now you're

• 33:19Kevin Roose?

  Whoa, hello.

• 33:20Speaker 09

  And so now you can try standing up

• 33:22Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 33:23Speaker 09

  And sitting back down is like a very common movement.

• 33:25Kevin Roose?

  Okay, I feel like I'm, um, yeah, this is giving Mecca. Yeah, I feel like

• 33:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, you can do some squats.

• 33:31Casey Newton?

  It actually is helping me stand up.

• 33:35Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Kevin Roose?

  No, this is great. I feel, um, yeah, like you know when you have like a spotter at the gym?

• 33:43Casey Newton?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:43Kevin Roose?

  You wouldn't know.

• 33:47Kevin Roose?

  It's like, it's like, it's like that feeling when you're just getting a little boost.

• 33:52Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 09

  Exactly. But I, the problem is you both strike me as quite sit, healthy people.

• 33:57Kevin Roose?

  Oh, thank you.

• 33:58Casey Newton?

  We're always hearing that.

• 34:00Speaker 09

  Exactly. So we were trying to think like, what's a way that we could make this, you know, a little bit more challenging for you?

• 34:06Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 09

  So you really can appreciate the technology. So I don't, have you noticed that there's a stand master behind you?

• 34:11Casey Newton?

  The stand master!

• 34:14Kevin Roose?

  I did. Can I try?

• 34:17Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 34:17Kevin Roose?

  With my, okay, please clap.

• 34:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Kevin Roose?

  Wow, it's, uh, yeah, it's, wow, we're really doing it. Okay, let's put the stairs on, okay.

• 34:30Speaker 09

  So, you know, like, am I on level three or four?

• 34:32Kevin Roose?

  Okay, I'm at five. I like to live on the edge.

• 34:34Speaker 09

  Great, great.

• 34:35Kevin Roose?

  Okay, it's good. It's like, I feel, um, like what I'm doing is not climbing stairs. It's like climbing stairs adjacent. It's sort of like the, the, the physical equivalent of vibe coding.

• 34:49Kevin Roose?

  It's vi- I'm vibe walking.

• 34:51Speaker 09

  Right.

• 34:52Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 34:53Speaker 09

  And one problem we have is like, your brain is amazingly good at getting used to a new feeling. And so sometimes people, they're not even sure how much it's helping. So if you want, we could turn it off, and then you might see the difference.

• 35:03Kevin Roose?

  Oh, you're gonna remotely disable it?

• 35:05Casey Newton?

  Yeah, please do.

• 35:05Speaker 09

  I'm just saying we can, if you want.

• 35:07Kevin Roose?

  No, do it, do it. I wanna, I wanna experience this on my own two feet.

• 35:10Speaker 09

  All right, we're gonna turn you off in three, two, one, off.

• 35:16Kevin Roose?

  Oh yeah, that's much harder. I don't like that. Can you turn it back on?

• 35:21Speaker 09

  You wanna back on?

• 35:22Kevin Roose?

  Yes. This is how you get your customers. They can't go back.

• 35:24Speaker 09

  This is genuinely how we have to get customers.

• 35:27Kevin Roose?

  I've heard of the hedonic treadmill, but this is ridiculous.

• 35:29Speaker 09

  Okay, you're back on now. Is that, is that a bit easier?

• 35:33Kevin Roose?

  That's good, that's good. Thank you.

• 35:41Casey Newton?

  I mean, I, I think that was all right, you know? I, I don't know that it couldn't be done better.

• 35:47Kevin Roose?

  Oh, would you like to try?

• 35:49Casey Newton?

  I, is, would it be okay if I tried? Hey, it's Casey, just cutting in from the studio here. And you're not gonna hear it in the podcast, but I do wanna tell you what happened immediately after this, which is that I challenged Kevin to see if I could do better on the Stairmaster, wearing the robot pants. And I did, while accompanied to the song "Work Bitch" by Britney Spears. For copyright reasons, we're not going to include that on the show. But you can just kind of hum it to yourself, or maybe play it on Spotify later today.

• 36:16Casey Newton?

  I think when I kicked my legs up, the stairmaster stopped because it was afraid for me.

• 36:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, but it's always a good sign when the worst part of our demo that goes wrong is the stairmaster. So that's a win.

• 36:28Casey Newton?

  Absolutely.

• 36:29Kevin Roose?

  That was incredible. Now Catherine, tell people where they can find out more about these pants if they're interested.

• 36:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're Skip, so skipwithjoy.com. I presume that'll be in the show notes. And you can preorder them now. We'll be shipping next year. And we also do rentals and experiences, especially for folk who really want to achieve a dream hike, but they're not able to at the moment. We're trying to help them do that and get feedback.

• 36:53Casey Newton?

  And how much for the pants?

• 36:55Speaker 09

  A bit like an e-bike, so $5,000 bearish.

• 36:59Casey Newton?

  OK. And what would it take to bring that price maybe down a little?

• 37:06Speaker 09

  It would either take a discount code, if you know me, which I feel like we're all now friends.

• 37:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, or improved international supply chains, which is a different conversation.

• 37:17Kevin Roose?

  All right, well Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. We really had a great time.

• 37:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, of course.

• 37:21Kevin Roose?

  Thank you.

• 37:22Casey Newton?

  This was so fun. Thank you.

• 37:32Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, as we say at the end of so many podcast segments, it's time to get out of these pants.

• 38:32Speaker 06

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• 39:38Casey Newton?

  Casey, what's next? Well, I know what you're thinking, which is, can the show possibly go on longer? And yes, it can. Because here's the thing, and this, I mean from the bottom of my heart, the very best thing about this show is hearing from you all. It's, look, when two men decide they love the sound of their own voices enough to start a podcast, you never know if you're gonna hear anything back. But you guys email us each and every week, and we just wanted to talk to you directly. So here's what's gonna happen. We have some people with roving microphones. They're gonna be, you know, sort of scurrying around, and if you want to ask us something, you can ask us now. And like, we're gonna let it go on for a little bit. So I don't know, let's get the energy up, ask fun questions. If you have more of a comment, maybe save that for an Apple review.

• 40:23Casey Newton?

  But we're excited to hear what's on your mind. Can I say, those of you who are wearing your Hard Fork hats, you look so beautiful. So good. What a memory you're creating for me. Okay, great. Now, does anyone have a question for the Hard Fork program? We have one right here, sort of middle. Hmm. Vamp a little while she's going up the stairs, Kevin. Nope, all right, we're good.

• 40:50Speaker 10

  Okay, this is a very hard question.

• 40:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 10

  Last week, you introduced the nickname Chapatiti.

• 40:56Casey Newton?

  Chapatiti, yes.

• 40:57Speaker 10

  Which I have been using frequently.

• 40:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 10

  And I would like to know what nickname you would use for each of the popular models.

• 41:04Casey Newton?

  Oh.

• 41:05Kevin Roose?

  Hmm.

• 41:06Casey Newton?

  Let's see.

• 41:08Kevin Roose?

  I'm gonna let you handle that one, Mr. Improv.

• 41:10Casey Newton?

  Well, of course, I feel like Gemmanini.

• 41:15Casey Newton?

  Is kind of right there. Bingalingaling.

• 41:20Casey Newton?

  I think.

• 41:21Kevin Roose?

  Sometimes I do say Cloud, just because I think it's like.

• 41:23Casey Newton?

  Cloud.

• 41:24Kevin Roose?

  More of the authentic pronunciation.

• 41:26Casey Newton?

  Make it two syllables.

• 41:27Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Casey Newton?

  Thank you for asking that. I'm serious. That was the right energy. Okay. What else would you like to know? Let's see, I see one back here. Oh, wait, see one right here.

• 41:39Kevin Roose?

  Who's pointing here?

• 41:40Casey Newton?

  You know what? You point this one.

• 41:42Kevin Roose?

  Okay, let's go right there.

• 41:44Speaker 11

  Hi, I love listening to you guys, so thank you. It's a highlight of my week. I feel like you have a better

• 41:52Speaker 11

  or broader view of what's happening in the industry than maybe a lot of us do. So I might bring the vibe down a little bit, but what are you the most concerned about when you look at these, like, evolving technologies and how they'll impact our lives?

• 42:05Kevin Roose?

  I think I'm most worried about the pace of change. I used to feel like when I left San Francisco, I was like going back in time about 18 months to anywhere else in the world, just in terms of the stuff we have here. You know, the cars drive themselves, blah, blah, blah. Now, I feel like that gap is opening up, and I'm really worried that the society as a whole is just not prepared, either in terms of, you know, safety nets for people who may lose their jobs as a result of AI or other technologies. Just in terms of, like, it takes a lot of energy to absorb this much change all at once, and I'm just not, I'm not sure people sort of fully grasp what's happening. And I also, you know, we've been around the block, like, I know that even the best-intended technological projects have unintended consequences.

• 42:50Kevin Roose?

  So we saw this happen with social media. All these companies said, "We're gonna, you know, save the world and connect the world, and everything's gonna be great," and we've seen what's happened with that. So I just, I hope that the folks in Silicon Valley, including some of the folks we've had on the stage tonight, are really thinking through some of the unintended consequences beforehand.

• 43:07Casey Newton?

  Yeah, like to the extent that anything that happened over the past decade just made you concerned about the ability of lawmakers to regulate technology, we're now heading into an era where I do believe the technology is going to be even more powerful than like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. We still have not answered a lot of basic questions about, for example, how do children use this product safely? When should they start using it? When should they stop using it, right? We ran out of time. I really want to talk to Sam and Brad about the fact that the same week that they're signing a military contract, the same week that The Times is publishing a story about people, you know, experiencing these extreme mental health challenges with ChatGPT, they're signing a deal with Mattel and they're saying, "We're going to put it into toys." Now, you know, I talked to OpenAI about that and they said, "Well, we're going to build toys for families first and sort of kids 13 and up."

• 43:52Casey Newton?

  But there are just a lot of unanswered questions here. And if I learned anything from the past 10 years, it's that you unfortunately cannot count on lawmakers to do any meaningful pushback. So honestly, one of the reasons why we make this show is because we just like talking to you about, here is a problem that no one actually has a plan for. So we'll keep doing that. You fall in that song. Great question. I will call, uh, this, uh, person right here is sort of in the dead center. It's going to be challenging to get the microphone. Just toss the mic. No. This will be fun. Everybody can sort of, how does the microphone get to this person? Okay. And we're going to pass it down. And that's community. Beautiful.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Hendrick. I love this show. I listen to it every week with my family. I'm a 13-year-old student and I've always felt that I don't see much AI in my classrooms, in my friends' classrooms. And I was curious just to get your guys' opinion on how, how much AI you think maybe we should have in the classroom and how we should integrate it. Because I can see it from the teacher's perspective that like, we, it's, it's like plagiarism. There needs to be like balancing act, but from my perspective and from how I've used it, I just feel like it's actually really useful. So I'm just curious to get your view. Thanks.

• 45:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I, it's a great question.

• 45:14Kevin Roose?

  I think this is really crucial. I think a lot of schools reacted to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots by just sort of trying to stamp it out, banning it, detecting it. I think that was a mistake and they now, many of them have sort of come around to trying to say, how do we, how do we teach with this technology and about this technology? I think AI literacy is a really important thing for schools to be teaching because these are tools that people are going to be using in their jobs when they graduate and go out to the, into the economy if they're still our jobs. And I think it's really naive to think that you're just going to take it out of the classroom. Now, I do think that teachers and, and schools need to revamp the way that they teach to sort of assume that people are going to have access to this stuff and maybe use class

• 45:56Kevin Roose?

  time more for discussion and face-to-face interaction and maybe assign homework differently. But I, I don't think this stuff is going away and so I think the, the sort of enlightened schools are the ones that are, are sort of planning around its existence for the future.

• 46:10Casey Newton?

  Yeah, thank you for the question, thank you for listening. I think, you know, if, if I were 13 in this moment, the main thing that I would want to make sure that I took away from school was the ability to think critically. And I think the challenge is, when I was in high school, I didn't know like how, how good is good enough at critical thinking, you know what I mean? I do believe that the more you use AI as a substitute for reading, for writing, your critical thinking skills are not going to develop to where they otherwise might. And so I think that is a good reason to make sure that you are actually, you know, writing the essays that are assigned to you and, you know, reading one out of every three books that's assigned to you. And I'll say that while so much focus is on the school stuff right now, I think very

• 46:54Casey Newton?

  soon the conversation is going to shift to AIs as companions. And I have to say, I'm so much more worried about folks your age who feel like ChatGPT is a better friend to them than anyone that they know in their real life. That is such a dark path and nothing is preventing us from walking down that path right now. So, real friends over AI friends is what I would say about. Okay, great questions. You call the next one.

• 47:18Kevin Roose?

  Uh, let's go up here, balcony. Do we have a mic up there? No, I picked the hardest possible spot. Okay. Oh wow, you need the robot pants.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Thank you very much, Kevin and Casey. Love the show. You guys are awesome.

• 47:38Speaker 05

  Of any of the stories that you've had in the last 18 months, I think about this a lot, which one would make the best Black Mirror episode?

• 47:48Casey Newton?

  The best Black Mirror episode to me is just you're trapped inside Italian brain rot.

• 47:55Casey Newton?

  You have an objective to accomplish, but like you have to get like crocodilini bombolini on board.

• 48:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah, that comes to mind for me. How about you?

• 48:06Kevin Roose?

  I think the AI friend stuff was, I liked when you had the conversation with Turing, my AI friend. He couldn't be here tonight, by the way, but he senses regrets. It was a configuration error.

• 48:19Kevin Roose?

  So yeah, that would be mine. Let's do a couple more. Casey, your call.

• 48:24Casey Newton?

  Oh, how about right here?

• 48:28Casey Newton?

  We didn't realize how big this venue was until we started asking people to run around with microphones.

• 48:33Kevin Roose?

  You know, like a t-shirt cannon of microphones.

• 48:36Speaker 12

  Hi. So you've had at least two different speakers tonight say that hardware is hard. And you showed us, you know, a partial expensive exoskeleton, and that's promising. But, you know, I really want the AI to get into a robot, a personal assistant, so that it can load my dishwasher, it can do the laundry, it'll fold the clothes, and it'll put them in the right drawer. Have you talked to anyone who has a realistic timeline and roadmap for this?

• 49:10Casey Newton?

  It's funny. We talked to several robots. One thing we knew about this show was there was gonna be a damn robot on stage, okay? And so, and we're so thrilled with Catherine bringing her rig. But there are a number of other companies in San Francisco who are working on stuff like this. One of them is called Physical Intelligence. They've raised billions of dollars over the past several years. And the reason is that you can actually take a large language model, you know, sort of similar to a ChatGPT, put it inside a robot, and it's much more useful than it was before. So that's kind of the reason that people think we're about to see the step change in function. But to your point, hardware is hard. I would say that in 2028, you will probably still be folding your own laundry. But I could be wrong. I could be wrong.

• 49:50Kevin Roose?

  All right. Let's go right here.

• 49:55Speaker 13

  Less of a light question, but twice you mentioned that OpenAI has these new defense contracts, which to me is very concerning, especially when Homeland Security is like grabbing people off the street. So I'm curious if you know more of the details of that and then just what your guys' take or take is.

• 50:16Casey Newton?

  The way that these contracts tend to start is like, there should be an AI assistant inside the Pentagon and you could ask it, like, "What missile do I put on this jet?" And it's like,

• 50:30Casey Newton?

  that's like, that's real. That's like, that's sort of what they are. And that's like, the foot in the door. But to your point, like, yes, this goes like so many dark places so quickly. Facial recognition technology is already basically perfect. You combine that with AI systems, things get dark in a hurry. So, you know, I don't know what to tell you other than like, "Yeah, I'm super worried about it." And I actually think that a role of journalism in this moment is just to point out what tech companies are doing with the military and, you know, writing about what I imagine are going to inevitably some dark things.

• 51:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I don't love it either. I have some real qualms about it. And it's interesting, like, some of the people who are building this technology from the beginning were so concerned about the use of this technology for military applications that they actually started requiring clauses in their contracts and acquisition deals. DeepMind had a sort of famous clause in its Google acquisition deal that they couldn't use their technology for the military. Now, they've since sort of, you know, sort of adapted that. But I think the tension here is that there's so much money to be made. The Defense Department has a huge budget. They're willing to spend lots of money to sort of catch up in AI. And yeah, it really, I don't love it,

• 51:43Kevin Roose?

  and I'm glad that there are people inside these companies who are sort of resisting that pull.

• 51:50Casey Newton?

  All right, I see somebody right here.

• 51:53Speaker 14

  Thank you so much, long time listener. And I just have to say, I hope you guys do this again here in San Francisco and...

• 51:59Casey Newton?

  Shall we do it again?

• 52:03Speaker 14

  And I definitely feel like I'm listening to you right in my headphones. So whatever you're doing on stage is, you know, it's definitely.

• 52:10Kevin Roose?

  But you can't pause and you can't make us faster, which is great.

• 52:16Speaker 14

  I was, I was really hoping Sam Altman would be here tonight. I'm so glad you guys got him. One of the questions I have for you guys and maybe in your vast experience of covering AI and everything that's has come about, one of the important things to me is regulation and how that is that going to be someone you feel that comes forward from industry, who kind of makes a bundle and then sort of sees the greater good and then really sort of goes from sort of poacher to gamekeeper and, and I mean, how, that's going to be a real quantum leap to my mind and to get, to get Congress and people really educated into

• 52:58Speaker 14

  how things need to move forward for our safety and whether it's military or kids or any, anything else, it's such a, it impacts so many different people in so many different ways. I just thought, do you guys have someone in your mind who'd be like top of mind that you would, you would nominate for that role today? Or do you see someone like Sam doing that in 10 years, 20 years?

• 53:20Casey Newton?

  I think we cannot look to the industry to lead this, right? I mean, Kevin, you know, asked about this during the chat, but where a lot of these folks start is, oh no, the people building AI aren't safe enough. I'm going to do my own thing and I'm going to do it differently and safer and we're going to pass a lot of regulations. And then they get really successful and they're like, I'm going to amend my comments about what I said, right? And so I think we just cannot sort of trust them to do that. There are a number of nonprofits who are working in this space, like the Future of Life Institute, that have really mobilized around this potential 10-year moratorium that we're seeing. But like, I will just say, 10 years to have no regulation at the state level is an extremely long time. Like, if you believe anybody who's come on our show, like, in 10 years, that will be sort of the end of the ballgame, like, you know, very powerful intelligence is here.

• 54:04Casey Newton?

  So what I hope is that as people learn more about this stuff, they, they push more and I think we're going to need to see some sort of bottom-up, like, public participation here because it's not going to come from the industry.

• 54:15Kevin Roose?

  All right, next. Yes.

• 54:18Speaker 15

  Love the show. It's been said over and over.

• 54:21Casey Newton?

  And I'll say, we'll keep hearing it.

• 54:27Speaker 15

  Several people that you've interviewed on this show, in technology leaders, you know, there's a lot of techno-optimism, and I think a lot of it is well-warranted. But one area where I'm kind of not buying it is the, "And everybody will reap the benefits of the wealth and, you know, the monetary benefits of this." And I understand how the people who create the AI reap the benefits of the well, but I have never heard anyone talk about how that trickles down or gets redistributed, and I'm wondering what you've heard, if you've heard anything else.

• 55:10Kevin Roose?

  This is such a good question. This drives me insane. When people just come on the show and they say, you know, we had these guys on last week from Mechanize, they said, you know, "This is all going to trickle down, we're all going to like have, you know, radical abundance." And it's like, that is a deliberate policy choice that many people do not want to make. That does not happen automatically, and so I think if I were, you know, running these companies, which I thank God I'm not, but like, you actually do have to be out there advocating for the kind of world that you want to see. It's not just enough to build the technology. We also, I also, it drives me insane, I'm just going to get this off my chest, I'm popping off tonight. Preach it! People are always comparing this to the Industrial Revolution. During the Industrial

• 55:53Kevin Roose?

  Revolution, there was a 50-year period called Engels' Pause, where productivity and profits went up, but wages did not. So workers, literally for 50 years, did not see the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. What worries me when people say, "This is just going to be like the Industrial Revolution", is that they have not actually read their history. It sucked for a lot of people, for a long time, and I want them to know that.

• 56:15Casey Newton?

  Yeah, thank you. All right. I haven't really called on anyone over here, and I see a person at the farthest extreme of the theater. And I would like to...

• 56:29Kevin Roose?

  We just want to make sure our mic runners are getting their steps in.

• 56:32Casey Newton?

  Yeah, the steps are in.

• 56:33Kevin Roose?

  It's very important.

• 56:34Casey Newton?

  The steps are in.

• 56:38Kevin Roose?

  Vamp Casey.

• 56:39Casey Newton?

  Oh, um, have you, oh, we're, we're right there. Okay, great. Uh, right, right here? Yeah, over here?

• 56:45Speaker 16

  Thank you so much. Um, love the show. I'll say it again.

• 56:48Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 56:49Speaker 16

  Longtime listener. So Casey in particular, I think you had mentioned a couple of weeks ago that you had a really clear picture of your definition of AGI.

• 56:59Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 16

  And I wanted to hear what that, more about that. And Kevin, interested in yours as well, but Casey seemed like you had like a picture of it. And so I want to hear it.

• 57:06Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and I want to say that like I'm not necessarily advocating for this as like a, a perfect outcome and I'm not like rooting for this as happened as quickly as possible. But I work with an assistant who is amazing. She helps me schedule things. She helps me sell advertising. She helps me, um, help you with customer service. If you're a platformer subscriber and you need to, uh, change your email address. So when people say AGI to me, I think, oh, it will do that. Do you know what I mean? And I think everyone in this room has their version of that. There is kind of the subset of things that you do that are mostly routine, that feel a little bit like drudgery to you, that are not the sort of creative part of your job that's exercising all of your human muscles.

• 57:47Casey Newton?

  And if O7, 8, 9 can just kind of do that layer of things, that would be AGI to me. Now, you know, I love my assistant. I want to keep working with her. So one question would be like, well, is there some new set of tasks that she could work on? That's to be explored. But when everybody is like, AGI, it's just a marketing concept. It's so fuzzy. It's like, no, it would just do what my assistant did. Does that sound crazy?

• 58:11Kevin Roose?

  A little bit. Okay. You did talk about having an assistant a lot.

• 58:16Kevin Roose?

  Let's do one more. Let's do one more and let's do it, uh, right up there. Yes.

• 58:25Speaker 17

  Okay, I got it. So gentlemen, last week, standing in my kitchen, chopping vegetables, listening to you earnestly try to give PR advice to mechanized, and I almost cut my finger off because I was laughing so hard.

• 58:39Kevin Roose?

  Lose a lot of fingers that way.

• 58:42Speaker 17

  So I want to give the opportunity to give PR advice to four or five other companies that you think might need it right now.

• 58:49Casey Newton?

  To PR advice?

• 58:50Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 58:51Casey Newton?

  Let's see, who needs it right now?

• 58:56Casey Newton?

  Meta could use some PR advice, and here's why. They think that when you go around saying, "We're offering people $100 million," that people are going to be like, "Wow, that's so cool." When what it really means is, "You would have to pay me $100 million to work at Meta."

• 59:18Kevin Roose?

  All right.

• 59:20Casey Newton?

  I think that's everyone. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.

• 59:23Kevin Roose?

  Thank you!

• 59:24Casey Newton?

  Dell Technologies!

• 59:27Casey Newton?

  Thank you! Thank you, everybody! That's it!

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoai. That's dell.com/yourwaytoai.

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• 1:01:48Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube, and you should, at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to the New York Times Live Event Team: Hillary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Kate Carrington, Chantal Renier, Melissa Tripoli, Natalie Green, Angela Austin, Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Farina, Jennifer Feeney, and Morgan Singer. Thanks to everybody at SFJazz, and thanks to the Brass Animals, our live band.

• 1:02:30Casey Newton?

  Also, special thanks to Matt Collette, Paula Schuman, Pui Wing Tam, Daya Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected]. We should know the web vacation right now.

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