How Notion rebuilt for the age of AI

In this episode of Possible, Reid and Aria talk with Ivan Zhao, co-founder of Notion, about what happens when intelligence becomes abundant rather than scarce. Zhao shares his philosophy of treating computing as a material — like steel or steam — and why organizations must be built for human scale in an AI-driven world. From Renaissance cities to Xerox PARC, the conversation traces a shift from productivity software to cognitive infrastructure, and arrives at a clear conclusion: in an AI-powered future, human judgment, taste, and values matter most. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In 2015, Ivan Zhao and his co-founder moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, where they spent 18 hours a day in a two-story house so small that only a traditional shoji screen separated the bedrooms, rebuilding Notion from scratch after scrapping three years of code. It's one of tech's great reset stories, but it's also a window into a radically different way of thinking about software.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Today, Ivan runs a company with over 700 AI agents, working alongside roughly 1,100 employees at Notion. But this isn't a conversation about AI for AI's sake. It's about what happens when you treat computers not as industrial machines, but as materials to be mastered, like steel, like steam engines, like the fundamental elements that reshape entire civilizations.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Today, we're asking, how do we design organizations, not just tools? How can we think of human scale and centeredness in this age of AI? And what can Renaissance Florence, the design of cities, and Douglas Engelbart's vision of augmented intellect teach us about building in an age of infinite minds? Without further ado, welcome to Possible, Ivan Zhao. Ivan, I've been looking forward to this for a number of months, so welcome to Possible. And we're here at this unsurprisingly very cool office. And again, not surprising, given the design background, given the focus on kind of the human touch of this. How did you also deliberately curate the office?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  What's the kind of design and the kind of artistic sensibilities that you bring to the office and to the kind of the culture of the company?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Artistic sensibility, that's it, it's very serious.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yes, we can use less, less serious words.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  No, no, this is fine. Artistic, it's kind of intuitive, I would say. Just like, since Notion was small, we all care about what's surrounding us. You don't want to hear noise, but you also don't want to see ugly things. So if we have a choice, we prefer, at least personally, I prefer to see a beautiful Eames chair. And yes, they're a little bit more expensive, but it's extremely comfortable on your body and comfortable on your eyes. That's one factor. The other factor is we're quite inspired by timeless tools in history. So why not? Surround yourself with timeless office tools so we can design timeless software.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, makes sense. So like one of the things I heard about is apparently there was a rug from your childhood.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  That was in Notion's first office, so.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Uh, it was until like our last office, until maybe six months ago.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Um, I I grew up in the rug from my hometown, uh, because my hometown was in this Muslim part of China, so we use a lot of rugs. Just, um, there's this red and blue rug we've been ever since, uh, been using ever since the first Notion office. And it has been traveled with us to all the offices. And uh, six months ago, we moved to a new office in SF, so we, I finally took the rug home. Yeah, it's still clean.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  That is awesome. So I want to dig right into Notion. And so can you talk about the core problem that Notion AI has tried to solve? And has that changed over the last few years?

• 3:14Speaker 02

  A lot of people think Notion is a productivity tools, um, AI-powered workspace. We actually start more from a more philosophical angle with tools and technology. I was really inspired about the computing generation in the sixties and seventies. You know, the hippie generation took acid, thought about, okay, what, on the west coast largely, what should you do with this mainframe computer in the basement? That's turning out, printing out paper with numbers on it. But if you connect this machine with a this, a monitor display, you can make it interactive and can become a new type of medium. So I was reading their paper, uh, in the last year during my college and I realized,

• 3:59Speaker 02

  uh, this is the most meaningful thing I can do. By being a programmer, by being a designer, bring this medium of computing to more people, democratize it. Right? So it's no longer just the digital scribe can use that medium, but more people can do. So I've been working on Notion as idea more than a decade. Started as this kind of you can do everything product. In the last three years, AI is this kind you can do everything new technology. So it's become a new piece of new Lego blocking the two set for us.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And so in some ways, it feels like we are a million years from that time in the sixties and seventies. And other times it feels like we're right back in Xerox PARC. We're creating this new technology. We're so excited. You've said that AI came about at sort of the right moment. Like, how did you know it was the right moment and sort of not too early, not too late? How is it just right?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  If you use it, at least the first model that clicked with us with me was the GPT four class. GPT three point five three class is like useful. But if you see GPT four class model, it's like it's not just a text regurgitator.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  It's a piece of mind in there, piece of little human thought in this thing. And it's a brand new material that's just like relational database, just like bitmap display. It's a new thing that can just unlock so many new possibilities with it. And there's a funny story that when we got early access from GPT four, because our friends were working on OpenAI, we thought everybody got access to it as well. So like, holy shit, we're gonna race to the world to to build the first product. We actually launched our first notion product a week before ChatGPT happened. Because we're just rushing for it.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  And the story was my co-founder Sam and I was got access during a company retreat in Mexico, Cancun. And we just lock ourselves in the hotel room, the entire company retreat, except the keynote I have to do. Then we're just building the first prototype. And it's it's if you build tools with this, you know, it's a completely different material.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I remember the GPT four moment because I was on the board of OpenAI at the time. And when I got, when I saw the difference in three point five and four, that's part of what made me create the, the, the book before last one impromptu. To try to get to show AI as a collaborator in, in writing a book, that piece of the human mind as ways of doing it. Because as you probably remember, the G P T four launch date was kind of moving. So we ultimately ended up publishing it through Amazon directly to be able to

• 6:46Speaker 02

  To hit the date.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  To be on the exact right date, because part of the thing was, I wanted to show what was possible with G P T four. Now, when you think about, Notion has this kind of textual workspace. But part of what, you know, brings up in a tool for everything. But part of what comes is one thing is obviously AI doesn't just change the, what is a document or what is the kind of equivalent, but also changes interface modalities, right? So like, you know, last year and trying to get people to use AI more, it was kind of like voice pilling. So how do you think about how the nature of kind of the interface to computing changes? What's the fabric?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  That Notion's becoming and adding that in?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Rather than consider it as a fabric, we like to think in terms of building blocks.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  And to me, it's very difficult for one company to change the building block or language of any, anything that humans use. Software UI is kind of just like a language, right? It's like, we all grew up using graphic user based interface. We understand there's a box you're supposed to click on it. It double click mean a different thing. It's almost like speaking French or English. It's a language you learn.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  And there's all the building block within the language. In some sense, the premise of the first version of Notion was, okay, what are the core language of computing? Can we, which is historically always been in the hand of programmers? Can we open up to allow non-programmer to? Stitch it together, those building blocks. The line, the building block being text, you mentioned in one. Text editing, relational database. It's one of the most powerful building blocks, language. Tabular format, different graphic user interface pieces, right? Normal people should be able to do with that. I would say the constraint, even AI opened up a lot of possibility, but constraint is still there.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Like, still have to look at a computer screen to interact with whatever thing is. There's more modality introducing through voice and sound, then that's new. But the higher bandwidth thing is still looking at it. Until we invent something, popularize the brain-computer interface, which is not far probably, right? So, that's another topic.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  But until then, there's a constraint, which is human biology of seeing things, touching, clicking on things, and talking to things.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Language model changed that a lot, but still we're constrained by human biology, constrained by our cultures of understanding how to interact with those boxes on the screen. So we sort of can see work coming back to a circle a little bit. So if you think about the first version of the popular AI product is the chatbot.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  What's the previous version of the killer app before chatbots? Google, it's a chatbot, it's a text input.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  That's how we understand this new tech. The most powerful new technology we have, language model. We mirror looking the image of Google, right? And if you think about in the past couple of years, year or so, coding agent have become really popular, IDE become popular. So everybody was running coding agents. But in the past six, nine months, people realized you have a limited bandwidth managing one coding agent. When you're managing a dozen coding agent, what do you do? It's, it's a freaking can't ban bore. We're going back to a project management software. So we're, the constraint, it's somehow changed quite slowly because humans don't learn as fast.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Because it's really hard to change the physical, physical display in front of you.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. How is the kind of the, the flow of work at Notion created in terms of humans, agents? Which things agents do, which way are amplified between them? And where do you think that's evolving to?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think anybody knows. I think that's, that's the honest answer.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Nobody know the right answer. Everybody share practice on Twitter.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Blog post. So figuring out this together, I would say the overall trend is if you think you have a company of ten people or a hundred people or a thousand people, ten thousand people. Which of such group of people are doing information passing or coordination or alignment? And those are necessary to align a group of hundred or thousands or tens of people. They're necessary, right? Language model can almost do this kind of information passing alignment better than human can at this point. Pretty even a year ago, two years, a year and a half ago. So why don't you just let language model do those simple alignment work?

• 11:30Speaker 02

  The metaphor, I like to think about this is almost like, um, we're in New York City. It's almost like buildings. You think about, um, until a hundred thirty, a hundred fifty years ago, most buildings no more than five, six floor tall.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  It's brick or iron. Because if you build more than six floor tall, the weight of it will collapse itself.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  And that's kind of similar to human organizations. You have a lot of people, the organization naturally slowed down because there's more work need to do to align to such a group of people. Um, and that's grows, scales super linearly as the organization itself. At some point, when you have a really large organization, you either have to move to GM structure, some corporation, or just slow to a halt. Language model can do this coordination work for you. Language model, the metaphor we like to use is the steel beam of organizations. Allow organizations to grow in terms of throughput without adding more people just to do the information passing part of work.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  So human can elevate to more strategic order loop way of thinking rather than information passing.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  AI is also more dynamic and has more elements of human thinking. So what's the, what's the ways you kind of chart this trajectory? Because it won't simply be note taking, it won't just simply be, oh, well, we had this meeting and then someone else needed to hear the results. So it was information summarized, communicated, you know, human loop. But there's be a part of how it changes, like our pistemology or, you know, how we, how, what we understand to be true. Um, the way we communicate. So what are some of the earliest? Ideas that you have on that, whether it's for

• 13:20Speaker 00

  the product and the customers, or how you're operating here in Notion.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  We talk about multimodality of like, at least for me, I no longer write anymore in the traditional sense. What I do oftentimes, sometimes making, making tea in the morning, I talk to my fall. And I, I open a Notion app and start meeting notes.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  And with myself.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  A meeting of one.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And when I finish it, I have like my rambling in a piece of meeting notes and I turn AI into a doc. And because AI is good at summarizing, good at regurgitating, good at editing, the docs is actually better than I can typically write. Or, uh, so, and the more people are picking up this habit, right? So also my relationship with email inbox is a little different.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  And no longer going after triage each single item, I trust this intermediate layer enough that, okay, I trust you to know what's important in my inbox, service the one to me, that archive the rest.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Right? Uh, those are the product we're building, we're releasing more to the public.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  But it changes how I use computing.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  So AI is often changes sort of one-on-one, how each employee is doing their job, is using their inbox, is instead of writing docs, they're, you know, speaking to their AI over, over tea and coffee. And I think some people are saying that the companies that are going to win are the ones that are starting now or started last year because they can be AI native. But Notion seems to be turning that on its head. You guys are one of the few companies that has really transformed from sort of the more traditional SaaS company into truly an AI native, AI-first company. So do you have any thoughts about that sort of journey that you guys have been on and sort of what has, what has made you successful?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  It's still early to, to say, uh, but it's very difficult. It's very, very difficult. I, I agree with you, almost no S scale software company has done this transition well, right? Um, we're probably one of the best.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Well, you have to be AI powered yourself as leaders.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Like, I live and breathe every single new tools.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Every single model come out. I vibe call building games or on weekends during the breaks. So you have to feel, you have to feel this new material.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  I think another thing we've been doing pretty well at Notion is just no sacred cow to reinventing yourself. Like, took us a long time to get product market fit. Took us like four or five years to get product market fit. We rebuilt Notion three, four times to get to product market fit.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  In fact, we've been building with AI three years now. We pretty much are re-architected our like core AI agent layer product five, six times.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Because the industry is changing so fast, right? If you don't do that, your architecture will be unusable by language models. Then you're just, then you're not drawing, drawing the game. So.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Not a one-time event. This is something you constantly have to iterate and watch and improve as you're going.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  I, I think that organizations calcify. It just is nature of it, right? Once you calcify, you can't change. What's changing is the environment. Language model get out every month. There's every couple of weeks now, there's a new one. They do a little bit different things. The new trick got discovered. If you're calcified, you're not going to be able to adopt. Other people adopt it faster. And this will give you such a quicker compounding return. Soon enough, you can all compete it. This is what keeping me up at night. I also made the game really exciting because pre-AI era feels like a P, sleep, sleepwalk.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Or sleep stumble.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sleep, sleep, sleep. No.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Can you think, were there any particularly sort of hard trade-offs that you had to make during that transformation? Or do you have any advice for other founders who are sort of going through similar? They're going through these tough times also and are looking for advice?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Just don't think about cost. Hmm. Like, people think, oh, I need to adjust the ROI of um this and that. It's like by the time you finish our calculation, it's wrong. The second is too late. Yeah. So we actually encourage our engineer to burn as many tokens as you can. Yeah. This is a sense of pride. It's not a sense of cost saving.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Um. Use the tool. I think be okay, just you don't know anything coming into it. It's like just having that, nobody know the answer. Even the people create model, they don't know the answer.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  How could you know the answer, right? So changing the mindset from planning into perfect plan, just to just, just let's just try it. Mm hmm. Um, die up the urgency, agency, those are typical ones. Great.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally agree. And part of it is like the, the not knowing the answer is also have the, kind of the humility of the fact that your own particular skill set and what makes you unique may be changing. And it has to change in part with how you use the tool. So it's like, I have all this knowledge, right? Well, the AI is also bringing a bunch of knowledge table. So be engaging, don't be trying to say, no, no, what I know is I know this particular, you know, history of design better, or this particular set of techniques. Like, okay, how do I use it effectively? And start engaging.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  And and more or less, one of the things that I tell individuals now is if you haven't discovered something by which AI can help you on any serious thing you're looking at, you just haven't tried hard enough.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of like you're, as a human, it's not just your knowledge and your capabilities.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  It's, there's other dimensions.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  It's what can, I like to think there's a bucket of your capabilities, what you can do. There's another bucket, your, your judgment, your taste, your values. What do you care? What do you want to bring to the world, right? Your aesthetics, second bucket. The third bucket is like your, your agency, your drive, your will. So in some sense, language model truly democratized the access to knowledge and access to capabilities. The coding is the most scarce capability until three years ago. It's become abundant.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  So now the bottleneck in a tech company is no longer can you build it, it's what should you build? It's the judgment, the taste.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I mean, that's can you will through the walls of difficulty to push that into the world, into the world. So the knobs are different now.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, this reminds me of your essay, I think it was Steam, Steel and Infinite Minds. And, you know, where individual workers now have essentially infinite minds. And so Satya, I think also, and Satya Nadella, I think referred to this as well. So how are you seeing that sudden re-change of imagination about what's possible in terms of work, you know, kind of generation of, you know, kind of content IP, et cetera? Like, what are you seeing so far about that change of imagination and infinite minds?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  It's changing.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  I don't know, I don't think anybody know what's gonna happen in the other end. I wrote that, it's like a lot of thoughts in my head. I think a way to communicate those thoughts or try to predict a little bit of future is to look into the metaphor of the past.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  We already talk about programming is completely different.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  It's like, that's almost the first profession that's completely disrupted by language model. Turns out to be the most secret profession in the free AI era.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  But the rest of knowledge work likely gonna have similar things too. Right? So the analogy we can think about is, okay, the second of, the first and second industrial revolution, power, energy source become abundant.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  So then you can have industrial revolution scale of production of physical goods. What is like to have that but for intellectual or for mind goods?

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Knowledge war economy is half the US economy today. And as if we discover the infinite energy source to power this.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Then what the world's gonna look like, right? The slower changing bit, once again, it's it's our habit. It's the calcified mindset about what knowledge war is. An analogy I like to think is kind of like before we discovered fossil fuels. Most, a lot of power in factory and mills are powered by water mills. Right? So then steam engine and fossil fuel, all those combinations happen. And the first generation steam engine actually did not bump the productivity of factory by much. Because the factory owners are just replacing the centralized water mill with the centralized steam engine shaft. Then they realize, wait a second, the energy source is abundant. They don't need to be sitting next to a river.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  They can sit in next to a port.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  They can sit into a fat line the way they can use parallel water energy sources, parallel multiple steam engines. So the mindset change then allowed the second industrial revolution to happen. Now we have all the textile industry and all the goods for the good, for the worse, but a lot of things in the world, right? I don't think we have that mindset change for knowledge war yet.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  We are in the water wheel, early water wheel, just adopting steam engine era of what to do with this. Saying that we're shifting bits around.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Well, this is a little bit like the earlier question, which is the notion of like right now, most people think, oh, I it's gonna have a person and then you have your AI agent. But of course, you're gonna have like a team of AI agents. You're gonna have a team working with individuals, you're gonna have teams working within companies. And there'll be various patterns of interface between.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Humans and, you know, workers and AIs, both individually, individually teams and then teams. What do you think it kind of shifts about, like, the notion of what is a team?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  What is organization, you know, you know, so I've been thinking about like, okay, what's the directory of, like, you have a, an active director, a human resources director, but now you're gonna have a director that includes all these agents?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  I know. I mean, it's a good question for Workday, right?

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  There are multiple dimensions. The one is what can drive economic outcome. The other dimension is like what it's, what human likes to do.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  So I would say we're still in the largely the single player era of using language model, right? Developer looking their own coding agents in their own terminals. So actually, we're brushing against this problem. How do you manage a team of coding agent with a team of developers? We're looking at this problem right in front of, as of this month, February 2026. And so how do you solve this multiplayer AI problem? Collaborative AI problem, something we are passionately, we're solving a notion, but I think as an industry, we need to think about how do, how do you managing rather individual agent, but a factory of agents?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Right? That's like a productivity in human computer interface problem to unlock. And on the human nature side, there's a lot of talk, which I agree, there likely will be one billion,

• 25:08Speaker 02

  one billion dollar startup running by one person, probably already happened somewhere.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  I don't think yet, but.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  I think it makes sense.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it makes sense.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  But I, I think it's still a bit of a TV. There's, there's interesting question around, like, for example, there is run by one person, there's run by zero people, there's run by lots of people. Anyway, this is all.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. What is the entity of a corporation?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  It's invention also. I think that's the interesting question.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  I think the capability is there. Then the constraint might be the legal entity, like some company has to be a human to sign the paper. Your CEO CFO has to be on a hook when anything bad happens, right? So that's one factor. And another interesting factor is like, do you want to do that? Do you want to run a company by yourself?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Would you want to, are you, is it too lonely for you, right? I think human teamwork is kind of like when productively become abundance. And assuming there's a baseline of human welfare protection. What would you like to do? Would you like to self-play a game by yourself all day long for tens of years? Would you like to play a game with another humans? I think that teamwork flavors is a question that where I prefer the world that you work on problem with other humans. That we're making a company fun. That makes me running notion more interesting because there's a group of people I love working with.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  We go to battle, we go to puzzle solving together.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I hope that doesn't get lost as the productivity of individual gets greater with language models.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  So that feeds directly into my next question. A lot of people are talking about the capabilities of the model and how that is going to, you know, sort of spring, springboard companies to the, the next level and have them keep growing. But other people are saying like, no matter how good the technology gets, this is actually an organizational problem. Like humans are social animals. They want to hang out with each other. You have interpersonal questions. You have some people resistant to change. So like, where do you, what is your take on that dynamic as sort of the AI implementation is sort of just a, a model question? Or it's an organizational change question?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Oh, it's definitely organizational change. I think any given time you're bottlenecked by the slowest piece in the factory. Right now, technology, the capability of model is pretty good now. The, the, the constraint is human adaptation on the organization level, our habits. All right, so we talk about the steel metaphor, all those things are in the organization problems. The way I like to think about those kind of problems is like, what are the invariables? What doesn't change? Like ever since we got out of Africa, we have hands and fingers and we have language. We learn to use fire. These things doesn't change, they change much, much slower, right? Culture changed faster.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Meme changed, internet meme changed a lot faster, but those things doesn't change as fast. So until we have brain-computer interface system, we need to see the thing. Then therefore, interface, buttons and all that stay with us at the moment. And we like to, human like to gossip, human like to spend that time with other humans. So even if we have infinite abundance of productivity through language models, we likely want to do this. Maybe we just come to work and chit chat and watch their machine. Seriously, that could be a possible future, right? And I, I think from that lens, it's like what doesn't change is the human part that doesn't change.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Um, the world around us, what probably it's like, the changes seems to be accelerating. Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Well, I think elements of the human thing don't change. Like I agree with the fact is kind of like, are we part of the like, um, like we're social animals, right? Aristotle, you know, when people don't understand when they say we're political animals, it's actually we're citizens of the polis. And then back to the city metaphor, which I, I think we want to get back to as well. But it's, and I think so those elements will stay, but I also think we change and evolve through our technology. Right? It's not just eyes, clothes, microphones, you know, compute software. But it's like, you know, for example, telescopes, microscopes change the way we think, change the way we see the world.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  I think that one of the questions, and I, so I think there will both be that eternal like.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Human beings wanting to be, you know, citizens of the police or citizens of the company kind of as way, but I think there will also be changes in it. You know, like one of the jokes, I'm sure you were also hearing and participating in, you know, for a couple of years back, it's like, well, my agent, my AI agent will write your AI agent an email, yours will.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Summarize the.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Right, you know, like, and just the whole thing is, is round trips through emails, uh, through agents. And so, um, and so what do you think in the information system? It's going to be most useful to keep our kind of metacognition kind of tuned to because some of the, the changes that we guarantee are going to happen are speed.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Right, because, uh, there's various ways in which compute, you know, information stuff at speed just works that way. It's part of the reason why our, you know, developers now are using multiple AI agents and paralyzing and all this because you're like, okay, I can get to something at speed. I think the same thing is going to happen with various forms of informational work.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  So what, and so therefore it becomes a necessity because of the speed, necessity because of the, uh, interface point to lots and lots of information. What are the points of metacognition you think will be, as we call it, longest lived or most important for, for people to be thinking about?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  As they do work?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  It's a good question. Um, if we bring back to the framework we're talking about, which is capability is first bucket, your value, your taste and value, second bucket, then your agency, your last bucket, right?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  We can put speed in the capability bucket.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  There tend to be a right answer.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  To me, the middle bucket, it doesn't actually have a right answer. What is your value? What is your, right now the buzzword, like what is your taste, right? Like what? Do you like Chinese food? Do you like Italian? There's no right, there's no right or wrong answers. Like, are you drinking tea or drinking water? Whatever, to each after all, right? So, um, I, I think as on as we're living in this human society of rule of law of, or like people obey this thing. And CFO have to sign a legal document in a corporation.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  It's then human need to be at the final say of what is this entity of business or project trying to do in the world? The value, the taste. And to me, that is uniquely human and likely doesn't have a right answer. Meaning that

• 32:41Speaker 02

  economy is, it's a chaos system. It's, it's like

• 32:47Speaker 02

  the market is a chaos, chaotic system. It's, nobody know the outcome because every participant can change the outcome. The participation of it changed the outcome. It's by us pulling together our marketing, market idea, business idea. We create a market, then there's a pick and choose the market and a winner flushed out. And it's, it's almost like, um, it's almost like art world, right? Like, yes, you need to look like a piece of art, but it's, it's our decision as a human group decide what's a good piece of art. I think business might likely become, uh, creating art. In a sense that when everybody can create a lot of things really quickly,

• 33:28Speaker 02

  then it's just you have to inject your value system into the market, into the world. Then let the world decide, should that be the best thing for people to buy, to follow, to like? And then there's no right answer. You have to participate. And your participation is your value, is your aesthetic.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, to some degree, there are. At least directionally right answers, because it's kind of like, you know, this is the entrepreneurship journey that, you know, we all three have participated in various ways, is you're making both a prediction and an intervention in order to say, this is what I think the market will respond to. And you could be, you know, very right, partially right, not very right, totally wrong. And one of the things I think that the, like, you know, we know the whole world's accelerating because of the speed of compute, but it's kind of like, you could

• 34:29Speaker 00

  almost say, like, you know, how does information now flow at a much faster rate? And what does that mean for, you know, kind of how we bring these kind of human systems together?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think the, it used to take, like, you're, you guys invest in the typical eighteen month cycle of a Series A company to find an idea, product market fit, and try, right? Should it be eighteen days now? Possible. Used to take fifty people to have, find the scaled product market company. Can it take for five day people? Can it take a weekend? So in a sense, the economy almost can becomes, everybody has their own Etsy shop, putting some like, hopefully valuable, but maybe at least a piece of art. Then humans can vote on that through the thing we call dollars, or whatever currency it is, and you buy other

• 35:27Speaker 02

  people a piece of art. Then that's what we do, in the maybe post-AEIGI world, right? And the speed kind of, that can, can do that, and if leverage can do that, it's on a daily, weekly basis or something. I don't know. That's some thought experiment.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Well, so you were talking about values and how we can all participate and shape them. And so before this conversation, we were talking about walkable cities. And we were talking about how we are in New York right now. It is one of the great walkable cities in the United States. And you were saying how, well, pre a hundred years ago, there was lots of walkable.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  As the New Yorker, you have to say, great walkable cities in the world. And that'll plenty in Europe. See, I got higher.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  I was like, I have some heavy lifting. One of the.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  New York.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. I'll say best walkable city in the US and right up there with the great walkable cities in Europe. So, but you made the great point that, you know, over a hundred years ago, a lot of the cities in the US were walkable, you know, even like Akron, like Kansas City, like a lot of these places were walkable. And then we totally changed the tenor of cities when the automobile came in and we, you know, highways shot through the center of town. And you were saying that we're sort of at that same moment here with AI. We sort of made one choice a hundred years ago that sort of changed the trajectory of some of our cities. I would candidly say it's the wrong choice since we shaped it in one direction. But now we have this other choice. And so what are the choices that we are facing as relates to AI and how that'll shape

• 36:55Speaker 01

  knowledge work and work in general?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  The concept I really, really like, I think a lot more people should to intuit it. This concept is called human scale. Still going back to what doesn't change, right? A human scale city is a typical European city, like Florence is a perfect human scale city. One hour from one end to the other, you can walk.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  The street are no longer like this, but times three times, right? So, and a hundred years ago, well, we discovered this thing called automobiles.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  With gasoline, you can travel at much faster speed than horse and human walking. And so scale of cities changing and change to car scale.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  They have pros and cons. Car scale allow America to go to the West, connect all the towns that's really difficult to be connected. The con is the human scale city become forced to become car scale.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  So on one end, you have Florence, on the other end, you have Dallas.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Right? Um, I'm not saying Dallas bad. I never actually been to Dallas, so maybe amazing, right? But they're different.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  I have. They're very different.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Very different, right? So, um.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  I think even people from both cities would like say that.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, I think just like language model give us the power of still being to transfer information with and and speed and scale, we're doing that similar thing we did with cars in the information space.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  In the knowledge workspace. Um, the choice we need to make. I think it's really difficult to know where the leverage points of the choices are because it's just such a complex system. But I think we need to be aware of what's happening.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Because oftentimes, by the time we realize what's happening, your city got run through by highways already. Marshall McCoon often cited saying, we drive faster, faster into the future through the rear view window. Because our understanding of the present usually through what we know in the past.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Um, so by the time you notice it's it's it's gone, right? You're become part of the culture, you cannot dial back. I think this is happening right in front of us.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Um, in some sense, the value system of the language model and the economy might not match the value system of humans.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  And it's like the car has a wheel on the zone in some sense, right? Car is a meme, as a tool wants to multiply too, right? Um, the economy wants to grow.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  And it happened to be where the CFO has still be the person to send the legal papers.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Um, I think while human are the people signing legal paper, we should be conscious what kind of world.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Branches of the world we can be entering to. Um, I don't have, unfortunately, I don't have a right answer. If I do, I'll be like.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Right, but, but we should, we should go in with our eyes open and ask the questions. Otherwise, we end up in this place that we realized didn't match our values. If we choose that place, that's fine, but we don't want to end up there without at least saying, let's try to shape this to end up with a place that matches our human values.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  I think more people should talk about it. That it's surprising not in the dialogue of, like, people building, building language model, people using language model, building a top language model, like, company like, we're so in the weeds of, in the arena. We're not asking about what is the arena for, where is the arena itself going?

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Well, I think one of the things, I completely agree with some of these threads, which is, um, one, ask the questions, be intentional. Two, uh, understand that your, your drive forward in the creation of the new technology is generally speaking, what you can more clearly see is the rear view mirror versus the front mirror. And that, you know, like Kevin Kelly is what technology wants. There's a, the creation of different kinds of technologies create different kind of gravitational fields and artifacts.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  So, for example, cities are natural network densifiers, whether it's an economy in knowledge, in, you know, kind of, uh, getting people to work together and all the rest. And that's part of the reason why the, the drive of, of, of a lot of uh, kind of economic and cultural prosperity has been driven by cities. And I think your parallel in thinking about this as AI has that kind of similar densification of network, enablement of more people and densification of networks. And it's a parallel that's worth thinking all the way back to kind of like what the organization of work is, right?

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Like what, like what counts as a market, you know, what, um, you know, how do people work together? And I think that part of the. The, the thing about this is we won't be able to, we'll only be able to partially, like, kind of like, it's, it's very much like, it's like driving forward in a fog, in somewhat uneven ground, but with jetpacks.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  So it's like, okay.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  I like that analogy.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  No, wow.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. It freaks. A little scary. Well, it freaks people out, but it's like, that's, that's. It's where we are. It's where we are. So what do you think are the most, like, if you said, hey, we as, as kind of humanists, and not particularly within, you know, value of Florence or, or Dallas or other, what are some of the questions that you think everyone should be asking themselves? Like, what are some of the questions you're asking yourself? And, you know, I asked, partially asked this because I think it's one of the things we should also be doing, you know, as possible is what we're trying to do is like, ask the right questions to make technologies, possibilities are more human future.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Are you operating in human scale? Is the human in the center of this? Or it's market in the center of this?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Like, this is a technology slash business slash culture podcast, and a lot of listener probably are tech, business people.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  I would say probably majority of decision, it's not a human in the center, it's the market in the center. We are, uh, we're participating in the market, we help market move.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  But the, the, the beneficiary is the market. And it's the corporation. Right? The, not necessarily, then oftentimes there's a huge overlap with the value of the individuals, or with a group of humans, but not always. As the scale change become greater, like what the, the market can do with language model, just like what cars, who is in the center?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  And I don't want to sound like, um, a la di trying to break the textile industry or.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Well, and you're building a technology company.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  I am building a technology company. I, I think it's to be conscious of it.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  If everybody can be 10% more conscious of that. Mm hmm.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  One of the themes throughout and that you just hit on was talking about sort of human scale. And we also talked a lot about single player versus multiplayer. Single player is sometimes not that fun. We all have more fun when we're playing video games next to a friend. We all have more fun when we go to an office and we genuinely like the people we're working with. And so many AI tools are chatbots where you're just talking to AI. But no is really building something for a team, for a company. Can you talk more about sort of what is the difference when you're fundamentally in single player versus this is multiplayer AI for everyone?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're still in the PC era of the PC files era of AI tools, which is files you live in your local PC by yourself. Hasn't moved on to the cloud yet. We're probably gonna have a speed run towards the cloud, but we're not in the cloud yet.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  So for example, you can use coding agents, work with your Git repo locally. You know, Git is the collaboration framework for allow engineer to collaborate. But fundamentally, it's a single human work with one or few agents, right? So the question become, how do you allow a group of a human to work with a group of agents?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Not just a group of agents, a factory of agents. That's in fact what we're building our upcoming product is how do you build a factory of agents and make so easy to to for human to to tinker and create? And how do human collaborate with a factory agent? That's our product.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  I think it's important for multiple reasons. One is just a solve a real bottleneck in productivity of how to work with those things. Second is make a lot more fun. And this will be especially but useful for business enterprises, which are usually larger, larger group of people. This give them a solution that they don't have to go to their coding agent, work with local files. You have all out of the box solution for team of human and team agents.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  And I think so many times when you think of work software, we just think like productivity. But you've said the word fun so often. You've said the word beauty, like people need to want to use these tools. And if they are fun, if they are beautiful, if they are aesthetic, like that will also lead to more adoption and us having better teams, which I love.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  It's more adoption for our product or other people's product, but also just it's more fun for the people using it, right? So why not? It's like you want to have people to, if you create something, you want the user of the thing you created to enjoy it, so.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  So another theme, and there's at least eight or nine themes here that we could go on for hours on, which are super interesting. But one of the other ones I think would be like as a personal kind of thing is, is also the focus on agency.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  And there's multiple reasons. One is, I think it's one of the things that people most worry about in technological changes, how their agency shifts. That's part of the reason, last book, Super Agency is, is part of it. Part of it is obviously agentic, right? Technology. And there's this kind of ambiguity in agency, because one's just like, well, my agency, does it take agency from it? But you also have like a travel agent. You have a, you know, there's agents that are on your behalf. So it has this kind of this, this lens. What are the things do you think in the AI age? That in addition to asking kind of that 10% question about human scale?

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Are the ways that we should try to make human agency along with AI the right result?

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Agency for me feels like muscle. It can grow for a person, can auto atrophy. I got married last year. I've been together with my wife for many years now. I noticed something I used to do as a, before in the marriage independently, because she does it more frequently. I don't do that anymore. So my agency or my habit of doing that activity. Um, just like a become rely on her to do that, right? I noticed, oh, I used to be able to do this. I can still do it, but I naturally, uh, my agency got weaker. I think if we're not careful, a lot of this will happen to the thing we're doing with our, our minds, right?

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Whether that's a good or bad, I don't want to provide values, but it's actually that literally happens before, um, before printing press. Humans are amazing at remember things, right? Yes. There's a lot of techniques for memorizations. The scribes, all the class of the, the scholar scribe class are can remember tons of stuff. Printing press happens and it killed the, um, memorization. It killed the travel musician who travel news, poetry, right? Those are all those poetry and rhyme are for memorization to contain information which are atrophying to go one place to the other. Those are lost. Yep. And printing press by printing press also bring enlightenment, a lot of good things.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Then we had Google, right? I remember when I was in college, my first year of college, my English teacher was the only teacher asked us to use the physical library.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Like he just forced us, everybody use Google Scholar, why do you use physical library? But I still remember the, the color of the books, where did you find that thing? You citation, the physical tactical nature of things, right? We don't do that anymore, right? Maybe right now the kids growing up with chat GPT of the world, they don't use Google anymore. They don't need to go read the links and digest the link. And they just get the answer. So there's a sense of atrophying of your agency, your habit of doing things. I think we gain a lot, we gain a lot of efficiency productivity, we probably, but there are things that are being lost.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  I think it's really hard to predict which part is important, which part is just,

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  it's okay. Um, I think going back to the theme of our conversation today is let's be conscious what's can gain, let's be conscious what's lost, let's constantly turn, flip this thing, see is that humans in the center, if that's what you care about.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Just be more conscious about the situation.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the ways we can do that is by thinking about the past, learning from history, et cetera. And so I'm going to give each of you a sheet of paper. And so we have some.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  What is this, physical paper?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Physical paper.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  I try.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Printing press hasn't completely gone out the window.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  So these are iconic thinkers, you know, from the past sixty, eighty years. And I'm gonna, there's a few quotes from each of these thinkers, and I'm gonna ask each of you, in turn, to pick one of those quotes and agree vehemently disagree, give us an observation. So you can choose whichever quote you want. And then tell us a little bit about it. And Reid, we will start with you, so you can model. So we have four quotes from Alan Kay. So please choose one.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  So the one I would choose is the first, which is the best way to predict the future is to invent it. The creation of that future is actually driving through a fog with jet packs. And so you can't, it's how you steer much more than, and how you create and invent more than just how you participate in.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  And it just gets us away from the victim mentality, because it just says you can create, you have agency, you are empowered. So let's next do Douglas Engelbart. Ivan.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  I like the second one, the better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better. It's the concept of, he talks a lot about concept bootstrapping. Can you use the system to create itself, then the things that improve itself? And that's a faster compounding loop than you just working, you humanly create that system. We see this with language model right now. Truly, it's happening, the compounding loop through, if you're building a product, the product builds itself, that just, it's happening right in front of us.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Reid, pick a quote from Richard Feynman.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  I will pick the third one, which is I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good one.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Yes, and I think it's in part because there's actually two parts to it. Part of the questions that can't be answered is, I actually think that's part of the mystery of life in terms of what we're doing. And some of the really important questions, I think, are really ultimately unanswerable, but still very important to participate, like the, in a sense, the meaning of life is participating in the journey for that question. And then also, of course, answers that can't be questioned tend to have a rigidity of thinking that is maladaptive to how we create the future we want to, that we should create.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  This actually relates to the first bucket. And my theory in the first bucket is the changing perspective is worth 80 points of IQ.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  To ask a question is to finding a perspective.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  And that's usually changed the whole thing. It's not by knowing the answer. Like scientific revolution happened by asking the right question, not by having the right answers.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Right? And that's from better perspectives.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  I think that also directly relates to language models today, because people are like, well, what are we if we're just getting answers? And it's again, well, are you asking the right questions?

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Like, you have the, you have to have the taste to be able to do that. And Ivan, you mentioned Marshall McLuhan earlier, so do you have a quote there?

• 54:17Speaker 02

  I think in part of a mission strategy document, we always open that we shape our tools thereafter, our tools shape us. I think, might not directly attribute to Marshall McLuhan, but most people think Marshall McLuhan. Just be aware of what's happening. Be aware of the perspective you are in, understanding that it's the system that culture is the thing that you want to shape it will shape back to.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we talked a lot about cities. Reed, do you have a Jane Jacobs quote?

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Well, I think unsurprisingly, of these three, because I think this is very much in the theme of our discussion, is there is no logic that can be superimposed in the city. People make it, and it is to them not buildings. They will, we must fit our plans. And that's a different way of saying human scale.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Well, I was saying to everyone this morning that I was reading about Buckminster Fuller on the subway this morning and I missed my stop because I was reading so many interesting things. So I've been to you have a quote for him to bring us home.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  I actually like the first one. I did not know this quote, but I like the idea of it. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, you build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. It's, I think Einstein said something similar, right? You have to solve the problem. You have to get out the box and figure out a new thing, which is similar to the perspective one. That's the promising part about that new technology we have. Because to solve the problem of the old technology we brought to us, a lot of problem that innate with us, cancer, global warming, whatever those problems, require new tools and new perspectives. I think language model gave us this opportunity. As long as we're careful with this new fire,

• 56:03Speaker 02

  maybe we'll find new way to solve our old problems.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  So we have four questions, which we term rapid fire, but you can answer it any length you want, that we ask all of our guests. It's kind of a little bit of an amuse-bouche and just kind of a fun angle through it. So I'll start. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 56:26Speaker 02

  I recently discovered this production company called Merchant Ivory. It's a duo, it's a trio. They're making mostly period adopted novels. Usually not on a high budget, but they're particular about the detail, beautifully shot. Adoption like A Room with a View, Merchant, Death in Venice. And, and I wouldn't say using the word optimism, but it's very human.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  It's topic about thing that happened between a group of human in a beautiful set historical pieces. My wife and I have been watching one by one. There's like two dozens, tons of those movies by them. But each film is encapsulate of something very, very human. I highly recommend everybody to discover it.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Where did you get your jacket?

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Love it. Great answer.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry, outside of the tech industry, that inspires you?

• 57:32Speaker 02

  I would say overall history.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  If you're zooming out from what's present, it just makes you marvel, both in the science domain, in the business domain, in just history itself, make you marvel about human ingenuity. Like this, this meatball machine coming out of Africa can figure out how to cross the ocean, figure out what's up there, figure out what's down there, just by keep thinking hard and with agency and cleverness and never give up on a lot of things. This is the thing I think is most worthwhile to preserve.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve in the next 15 years if everything breaks humanity's way? And what's the first step to get there?

• 58:17Speaker 02

  I think we have the technology to, using AngloBar's term, to bootstrap the intellectual industrial revolution. And like we're now, it's happening already.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  And it can solve all our E S J's problem if we fly with the jack pack somewhere carefully.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  I think and I hope we'll do that. And I think, I hope, I really, really hope that we preserve what makes us human, human in the meanwhile.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Well said.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  Well said. That's awesome. And I've been many, many things to talk about, but this has been great.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nirmurundwe.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Special thanks to Surya, Yala Manchili, Sayida Sapiyeva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Amelia Saliers, Camille Ricketts, Joseph Duncan, Amy Wu, Grace Donovan, Miles McDonald, Emily Fernandez, Michael McGinley, and the rest of the team at Notion.