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

Speaker 1 This episode is supported by KPMG.

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Speaker 4 But what do they really mean for you?

Speaker 6 KPMG's agent framework demystifies agents, creating clarity on how they can accelerate business-critical outcomes.

Speaker 9 From strategy to execution, KPMG helps you harness AI agents with secure architecture and a smart plan for your workforce's future.

Speaker 12 Dive into their insights on how to scale agent value in your enterprise. Curious?

Speaker 2 Head to www.kpmg.us/slash agents to learn more.

Speaker 15 Hard Fork Live, the podcast's inaugural event, was sponsored by Premier sponsor IBM, associate sponsor InvescoQQQ, and supporting sponsor Intuit QuickBooks.

Speaker 14 Well, Casey, what was your favorite part of Hard Fork Live?

Speaker 16 I mean, there's so many things to choose from, Kevin. I think we know one thing that 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.

Speaker 14 I went right up to the security.

Speaker 16 I said, hi, I'm Casey. I'm here to co-host the show.
And they said, Who?

Speaker 16 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.
That's good.

Speaker 14 What was your favorite part? I told them not to let you in. That's why that happened.

Speaker 16 Dang it, Roose.

Speaker 14 You got me again, you scoundrel. My favorite part was definitely, so we had this, you know, bit where we're changing out of our regular pants into some mechanical robot exoskeleton pants for a demo.

Speaker 14 And we had practiced this the day before during rehearsal in sort of like an empty backstage area.

Speaker 14 And I'm taking off my pants and I look up and there's Patrick Collison just looking at my fleshy, pale thighs.

Speaker 16 I know, yeah, one of like 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?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so suffice to say, you know, if you weren't backstage on Hard Fork Live, you didn't see the whole show.

Speaker 14 I'm Kevin Russia, tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork.
This week, it's part two of Hard Fork Live.

Speaker 16 We'll talk to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and try on some robot pants with Skip's Catherine Zealand. Plus, members of the live audience, ask us anything.

Speaker 14 Anything? And they did.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 They were starting to build a company called Stripe. And in the years since, it has grown into a juggernaut.

Speaker 16 And Patrick, I think, has become one of the most interesting and influential thinkers in tech outside of his day job.

Speaker 16 He and Tyler Cowlin wrote a piece in The Atlantic about the need for a new science of progress.

Speaker 16 He also is the co-founder of the ARC Institute, which is doing a bunch of really important biomedical research.

Speaker 16 And just to top it off, in April, he joined the board of Meta, which is currently reshuffling its AI team in ways that might be fun to talk about.

Speaker 16 So I'm extremely excited to welcome to the stage Patrick Hollison.

Speaker 16 hey

Speaker 14 it's real hi how are you good to see you

Speaker 14 all right Patrick thank you so much for coming thanks for having me how are you I'm doing well it's it's it's wonderful to be here where I've come to so many long now talks here and now it's now it's you guys there is no longer now than a podcast is what is what they say 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

Speaker 14 What is the most urgent abundance-related need right now? Is it housing, land use, fast-tracking approvals for new drugs? What is it? Building.

Speaker 14 And why is that? Well,

Speaker 17 I think, look,

Speaker 17 there are so many domains where we need more

Speaker 17 progress than we've garnered.

Speaker 17 The rate of improvement of life expectancies has really diminished. And

Speaker 17 you still get colds, right?

Speaker 17 Like, that's crazy we're on a trajectory supposedly to you know invent new deer fusion and AGI and you know so many but like we haven't cured even the common colds right so there are a lot of

Speaker 17 challenges we face in many domains there are many you know pursuits in science and technology where you know we we should be going much faster however I think the place where the constraints are most unnecessary most self-imposed

Speaker 17 and easiest to

Speaker 17 at least in principle easiest to address are in any kind of physical construction. And by the way, California and San Francisco used to stand for this, right? You know, we have the

Speaker 17 Kaiser signs around the bay and the Marin ship was in California. Those stories of the ships that got built in a day, they happened here.

Speaker 17 And so I think California is kind of this funny super position where in the 40s, 50s, 60s, I mean, actually, my favorite example of this is Treasure Island we built to celebrate the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Speaker 17 We were just so

Speaker 17 drunk on the fervor of having finished the Golden Gate Bridge, we were just caught up in the momentum of it, and we're like, well, let's just go build another thing. And so we built an island.

Speaker 17 And so California and San Francisco used to stand for this.

Speaker 17 And now California, my favorite example of this is, you know, we passed a ballot prop for California high-speed rail.

Speaker 17 And they used to have on the website, you had to go there and the forecast completion date was 2033.

Speaker 17 And now I just checked recently and they've now taken it down. So

Speaker 17 it used to be a 37-year project and now

Speaker 17 who knows?

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's so interesting.

Speaker 14 I was interviewing someone once about their AI forecast and how everything was going to change in the next two or three years.

Speaker 14 We were going to have super intelligences and robot factories and we're sitting in Berkeley and looking out over the Berkeley sort of downtown.

Speaker 14 And I said, do you think any of that will get permitted by zoning? And he was like, no.

Speaker 14 So even the people thinking about the wildest possible futures cannot imagine land use reform

Speaker 14 in the Bay Area.

Speaker 17 Yeah, well,

Speaker 17 another I think kind of funny example of this was

Speaker 17 there was the sort of announced aspirational city project in Solano County back a couple years ago. You guys covered it on the podcast.

Speaker 17 But I thought kind of the response was sort of funny where

Speaker 17 thousands of times in its history, and you know America's history is only a couple hundred years,

Speaker 17 America decided, hey, let's build a city. And that is a thing that has in fact ensued.
And there is a city there today. And it's happened even reasonably recently with Irvine and so forth.

Speaker 17 But the response to that was

Speaker 17 astonishment and people aghast and

Speaker 17 that kind of audacity was kind of offensive. But when somebody says, hey, we're going to create a super intelligence to populate the cosmos, we're like, yep, seems pretty reasonable.

Speaker 17 When someone says we're going to build a new city in California, it's like, that's just ridiculous.

Speaker 16 I mean, 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?

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 17 Well, I am

Speaker 17 yeah, you've the homework car problem, and nobody wants it. Yeah, so

Speaker 17 I think that in,

Speaker 17 are they,

Speaker 17 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,

Speaker 17 they are brimming with ideas for how it could be done better.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 I think in many cases, it's actually about unleashing the ideas kind of inside the system that are you know existing and you know not yet manifested and you know one of my favorite examples and one of the most striking examples of this is

Speaker 17 we ran a survey a couple of years ago of

Speaker 17 practicing top-tier scientists and we asked them

Speaker 17 you know not if you had not whether you had more money, but if you could spend your current funding dollars however you like.

Speaker 17 Because today funding dollars come with all sorts of restrictions and they're allocated by committees and by consensus and with kind of tight

Speaker 17 field definitions and so forth.

Speaker 17 So 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?

Speaker 17 And I thought that

Speaker 17 the results might be striking.

Speaker 17 Maybe a third of scientists would actually like to be doing something else.

Speaker 17 79% of respondents in that survey said they would change their research agenda a lot.

Speaker 17 And that just blew my mind because, you know, we go to, I mean, these scientists, they're so self-sacrificing.

Speaker 17 Like, they could go and make, you know, a bajillion dollars or, you know, these days, you know, $100 bajillion dollars by

Speaker 17 doing something more lucrative. And they've decided to try to better humanity

Speaker 17 by working inside the academy.

Speaker 17 They spend decades training. And then 80%

Speaker 17 are telling us that

Speaker 17 they would be doing something very different.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 That was one of the influences for ARC, but I think in many of these cases, whether it's urban design and urban planning or any kind of construction or something or whatever, I think the insiders often know how to do it a lot better.

Speaker 14 You mentioned the 100 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 $100 million to come work for them.

Speaker 14 Have you been helping with that? And what kind of advice are you giving to Mark Zuckerberg about that?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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 a pizza or a burrito.
I imagine you're not...

Speaker 16 If you have two hours for it to complete that process. Yeah.

Speaker 14 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?

Speaker 17 Well, look, Stripe enables the transactions and the money movement

Speaker 17 beneath the surface. And so we're...

Speaker 17 to some extent agnostic about and enthusiastic about all the different modalities uh in which uh that might uh that might happen and you know when stripe started mobile wasn't nearly as big a thing as it is today and uh you know stable coins didn't exist and so forth so you know we're we're we're we're um you know we're we're enthusiastic about the uh the the reinvention here and from my standpoint um you know the the the

Speaker 17 um the variety that one can uh that can you know benefit from on the internet is tremendous uh and uh I think it's amazing that you can have so many niche businesses that are serving these preposterously large global

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 much less

Speaker 17 less that's possible.

Speaker 17 But very few people say, the thing I love about internet commerce is after I click on the thing that I

Speaker 17 am brought to sort of a

Speaker 17 checkout form.

Speaker 17 Yeah, like a 30-field form to fill out and then fax it and parts of it in Latin.

Speaker 17 It feels very antiquated.

Speaker 17 And so I think the promise for these,

Speaker 17 I mean, I don't know, I think agents sounds very kind of highfalutin, but these

Speaker 17 critters to go and to

Speaker 14 sort of

Speaker 17 be the paperwork minions for you,

Speaker 17 to sort of dispatch one and say, hey, go handle that, and then

Speaker 17 I will resume whatever else I was doing. I think that's very promising, and I think it's going to be

Speaker 17 better for everyone.

Speaker 14 Will the agents use dollars or crypto?

Speaker 17 well i'm i'm here with you know well-known crypto booster occasion using but um

Speaker 17 i um i think i think i think they will um i think they will use amounts denominated in the local currency um uh so i think in the us things will be um uh will be uh in dollars and uh and you know

Speaker 17 euros in ireland uh and uh and so forth uh and i i think there's kind of an irony where you know with the invention of crypto uh i mean it is an amazing kind of computer science invention and technology and so forth.

Speaker 17 Obviously,

Speaker 17 the sort of initial conception of Bitcoin was,

Speaker 17 we're going to throw off the shackles of

Speaker 17 the monetary tyranny and oppression that we're sort of subjected to and liberate ourselves of this new currency.

Speaker 17 And look, Bitcoin has obviously garnered a lot of traction, but a majority of cryptocurrency transactions today are in stablecoins, are dollar-denominated.

Speaker 17 And I think it might be the case with stable coins that 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.

Speaker 17 I think this is the biggest thing that's actually underappreciated by people here in America, which is for outsiders,

Speaker 17 lots of currencies are not a great thing to hold savings in or not a great thing to transact in.

Speaker 17 name names and single any poor currency out, but like, you know,

Speaker 17 there are many currencies where when you go to give them to your counterparty, they look at you funny and asking you, what is that?

Speaker 16 Kohl's cash comes to mind.

Speaker 17 And there's a lot of currencies

Speaker 17 that have lost 75% of their value in the last five years. And so providing the ability for people outside the U.S.
to hold dollars is, I think, going to be a big deal.

Speaker 17 I think there's kind of an irony in crypto where

Speaker 17 one of the most important and consequential things it may end up enabling is the dollar's greater success.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Do you think there is something that can be done about the common cold? And are you going to work on it?

Speaker 17 We have a big announcement tonight.

Speaker 14 No. And so

Speaker 14 that would be so dope.

Speaker 14 Yes,

Speaker 17 that mist on the way in was actually a vaccine. No.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 humanity has,

Speaker 17 this was only a penny that dropped for me a couple of years ago. Humanity has never cured a complex disease.

Speaker 17 And what I mean by that is, so there are some genes that are, assuming there are some diseases, infectious diseases, the cold, COVID,

Speaker 17 what have you.

Speaker 17 Then we have monogenic diseases, Huntington's, things that are the product of some specific genetic abnormality.

Speaker 17 But then you have all these diseases that are some combination of the environment and

Speaker 17 what you do with your life and genetic risk factors you might have. So this is most cancers, most cardiovascular disease, most neurodegenerative disease,

Speaker 17 most autoimmune disease, and so forth. Anyway, we've never cured one of these.

Speaker 17 It's too complicated because figuring out how the genes and the environment and the durations that elapse and so forth, it's just

Speaker 17 kind of incorrigible. So,

Speaker 17 we set up Arc Institute to try to, I mean, again,

Speaker 14 no

Speaker 17 time will tell

Speaker 17 whether they're actually able to make any

Speaker 17 progress here.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 17 the idea was, hey, can we try a different strategy for going after these complex diseases? And one of the things that has been a real boost for us over the last

Speaker 17 two years is actually AI, where

Speaker 17 I think the LLMs as we interact with them, they're obviously wonderful and enable all sorts of productivity enhancements and so forth. But there's another language,

Speaker 17 DNA, the language of life.

Speaker 17 And hitherto we haven't really,

Speaker 17 it's billions of base pairs, and we can't at a human level understand what's going on there. It's kind of beyond what any individual can comprehend.
And what we've seen with some

Speaker 17 early work, I mean, we published our first virtual cell model yesterday, actually, by coincidence. Yeah, tell us about that.

Speaker 14 What is a virtual cell?

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 why haven't we cured cancer or any, again, complex disease? I mean, on some level,

Speaker 17 the problem is that

Speaker 17 experiments in biology are slow and expensive. Like you're dealing with actual physical cells.
You have to wait for them to grow.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 The supply chains, you know, span multiple countries. So just it's it's laborious.

Speaker 17 So you know in software and engineering, you know, you have an idea, you know write a quick command to the command line, and you know,

Speaker 17 10 milliseconds later, you have your response. In biology,

Speaker 17 that REPL takes months to

Speaker 14 elapse.

Speaker 17 And so the idea behind a virtual cell, and others have had this idea, this is not Arc's idea, but the kind of core idea is if you actually had

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 But really, if you just like computationally do your thing, then again, if that was actually accurate, it would be an enormous accelerant to biology. So anyway, that's the kind of idea.

Speaker 17 We haven't until recently,

Speaker 17 is this too much biology to say?

Speaker 14 No, we like it. Okay, all right.
You guys like biology? Woo!

Speaker 17 In the last,

Speaker 17 one more thing that I'll stop.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 17 in the last couple of years, we've got sort of technologies in three different domains that are really important. So with,

Speaker 17 you know, a computer is composed of the ability to read, to think, to compute, whatever, and then to write.

Speaker 17 That's the core three operations.

Speaker 17 In biology, in the last just couple 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.

Speaker 17 We've gotten deep neural networks and transformers and all that stuff so we can kind of think over data of very significant complexity.

Speaker 17 And then we've had huge advances in functional genomics and CRISPR and the ability to make individual edits to individual cells. And so those are all big breakthroughs in their own right.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And again, if that worked, it would be hugely on balgi.

Speaker 17 You guys don't type that type of works.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 17 Gosh,

Speaker 14 well,

Speaker 17 I think reading the AI summary has, I think it can be useful.

Speaker 17 I think it has

Speaker 17 a powerfully inoculating effect.

Speaker 17 I think TV is a waste, like long-form

Speaker 17 lots of episodes, TV is a waste of time.

Speaker 16 We told you there would be hot takes tonight.

Speaker 17 But it's very tempting, right? Like you watch an episode, and you're like, oh, geez, I really want to know what happens here.

Speaker 17 And so I discovered a couple of years ago, obviously, the solution is you immediately go to Wikipedia and read the entire summary of the season,

Speaker 17 and then you're cured of the desire to watch any more episodes. So

Speaker 17 I think there is a therapeutic benefit to AI summaries.

Speaker 14 That is the most San Francisco thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 17 I love it.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 17 one does not derive any

Speaker 17 deep pleasure

Speaker 17 or betterment from it. So I've never written an AI book summary.

Speaker 14 Yeah. All right, Patrick, can we do some lightning round questions? Okay.
What age.

Speaker 17 When do I get to ask for the Stripe feedback?

Speaker 14 Oh, well,

Speaker 16 I am a Stripe customer. Actually,

Speaker 16 very quickly, you're doing automated disputes now? Yes. Very excited to try this.
Okay, good.

Speaker 14 All right, good.

Speaker 14 And everything else working well? Everything else worked great. Okay, that's right.
All right, lightning round questions. What age will the median child born in 2025 in the U.S.
live to be?

Speaker 17 25 today? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Gosh,

Speaker 17 95.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 17 Reason over the scientific literature.

Speaker 17 It gets tripped up in the paywalls.

Speaker 14 Well, we know how.

Speaker 17 And I think, like, why hasn't anyone in that space done anything about it?

Speaker 14 We love paywalls in this house.

Speaker 14 Patrick, what trait do you hire for?

Speaker 17 Imagine if you had critters paying at them on behalf of unsuspecting people.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I love that. That's a business model for the media.

Speaker 14 I'm excited to present the critter strategy at the next meeting.

Speaker 14 What trait do you hire for that most companies undervalue?

Speaker 17 For Stripe, we really care about long-term thinking.

Speaker 17 What's a lightning ranch, but infrastructure can't happen overnight. We've been working on it for 15 years.
We still feel like we're just starting.

Speaker 17 And so if somebody, you know, like

Speaker 17 our products don't have TikTok trajectories.

Speaker 17 And the super successful ones still take a decade to fully play out.

Speaker 17 And so

Speaker 17 I like the analogy that

Speaker 17 those kind of technology companies building cars and roads. And we need cars, and cars are super cool and beautiful and all the things.
But someone's got to build the roads.

Speaker 17 And Stripe looks for the kind of people who are predisposed to to work on roads.

Speaker 16 Is there a book you read recently that made you say, everyone I know needs to read this?

Speaker 16 Or even not that recently?

Speaker 17 I'll give you two. So

Speaker 17 The Dream Machine is like, hands up here, who feels like they really have a good understanding of the history of the Internet.

Speaker 16 Shame on you.

Speaker 17 It's funny. Alan Kaye once commented that computer science is a pop culture.
He thought that we were

Speaker 17 kind of recapitulating the same ideas in kind of blissful ignorance for history.

Speaker 17 And I think there is something kind of funny where we as technologists, we're not as into and fascinated by, I think, our own history as people are in other domains.

Speaker 17 And so The Dream Machine is the best history of

Speaker 17 the internet and the kind of thinking around it and the motivations around it. And

Speaker 17 it's also

Speaker 17 yeah, it's Polish Rice Trike Press.

Speaker 17 And then one I read recently, recently, that kind of blew my mind was

Speaker 17 The Demon Under the Microscope,

Speaker 17 which was, you know, you all know that

Speaker 17 penicillin was the first antibiotic.

Speaker 17 He said there wasn't. There was one before it.
It changed the world. The story behind its invention is very interesting.
So those are my two.

Speaker 14 Great. Patrick Hollison, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 16 Thank you so much.

Speaker 14 Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 17 When we cut back even more of Hardwork Live.

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Speaker 14 Well, Casey,

Speaker 14 we are wearing what I would call robot pants.

Speaker 16 Yeah, Yeah, I think that's fair.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and why are we wearing these robot pants?

Speaker 16 We are wearing these robot pants because it gives us a great excuse to talk to Catherine Zeeland.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so Catherine Zeeland is the founder and CEO of Skip. They're the company that makes these pants.

Speaker 14 The company spun out of X, the Google Experimental Research Division, not the social media network owned by Elon Musk, in 2023.

Speaker 14 And since then, she's been working on this exoskeleton movewear, like these pants, which have been called e-bikes for walking. Let's bring on Catherine Zeeland Zeeland from Skype.
Step in next.

Speaker 14 Thank you, Catherine.

Speaker 14 Thank you.

Speaker 30 Good to see you.

Speaker 14 You guys didn't see, but backstage, we just did the best quick change

Speaker 14 in theater history.

Speaker 16 I just took my pants off in front of Patrick Hollison.

Speaker 16 So, Catherine, in a few words, tell us who your products are for and what problem you're hoping to solve.

Speaker 30 So, I'm sure I'm not the only one here who's got a loved one that struggled with movement, or maybe you've got knee pain or had an injury.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 30 This is our first product, this is the MOGO, and this is actually aimed at people who want to go hiking.

Speaker 30 But often, you know, they may be struggling a little bit either with knee pain or with a kind of reduced mobility.

Speaker 30 So, an e-bike is a really great analogy, just kind of particularly helps with the inclines, steep hills and stairs, things like that.

Speaker 30 But then eventually will help, hopefully, everyone.

Speaker 16 So tell us, like, what is in these pants?

Speaker 16 You know, 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 partner with Arcturix to make these pants, there's also some pretty heavy machinery on here.

Speaker 16 So what is this stuff doing?

Speaker 30 Yeah, so the real magic is kind of these lightweight motors. Here's one I prepared earlier.

Speaker 30 And really, it's only in the last decade or so that robotics has gotten efficient enough, affordable enough, light enough.

Speaker 30 You can have something this small that can do up to maybe 40% of like a healthy person's muscle forces. And so there's a motor that's kind of providing physical oomph.

Speaker 30 And then built into the pant, those near the front can maybe see this sort of a little bit of a cuff situation to help transfer that force to the body.

Speaker 16 And I know that, you know, one of the things that

Speaker 16 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 to

Speaker 30 so I think your mark your market may actually be larger than you first suspected yeah and I'm actually having a similar problem because I don't know if you noticed but I am quite pregnant and I wasn't gonna say anything thank you

Speaker 16 and it's eight months Catherine joined us at eight months pregnant so please do give her a round of applause

Speaker 30 And all of a sudden, yes, I also need help walking upstairs and standing up on a chairs.

Speaker 14 Now do you envision a world where lots of people are wearing kind of exoskeleton type movewear or do you think this will primarily be for people who have mobility issues?

Speaker 30 I think a bit of both. So I think if you're truly able-bodied, you know, some a product like this is probably just not worth your time necessarily.

Speaker 30 Um but there's a huge range of people who might be recovering from an injury, they might be pregnant, they might you know have a joint pain, they might have had a surgery.

Speaker 30 And so I think you know probably most people at some point in their life will use one of these products.

Speaker 30 And we also do RD and 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.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 30 I was going to say, are you trying to dunk a basketball?

Speaker 14 Is that the best?

Speaker 16 I've been trying since 1992.

Speaker 30 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?

Speaker 30 You could also try ankle weights. I think they're going to make a comeback.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 That's good. Now, exoskeletons are a staple of science fiction.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So why is this taking longer than other types of futuristic technology?

Speaker 30 I think there's two reasons.

Speaker 30 One is that hardware is hard, and people are really sensitive to what's on their body, So I mean, you're wearing an early version of the prototype, and it's probably not super comfortable.

Speaker 30 The fit's not always perfect. And you might tolerate an uglier and imperfect robot if it's just kind of in a factory.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 30 I think the second reason is actually around AI. And so

Speaker 30 historically, exoskeletons and all robotics do very repetitive tasks, right?

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 30 But when you think about maybe an older adult who wants to like move about their community, they're doing lots of different movements and they're moving in weird ways. And I'm like a fidgeter.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 30 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, oh, and everyone's water spills and there's chaos.

Speaker 14 That was actually the plot of Megan 2.0.

Speaker 14 That happened there.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 30 You signed the disclaimer, right, backstage?

Speaker 14 No. No, we're just going to wing it.
Excellent.

Speaker 14 So, yeah, let's stand up and maybe take us through

Speaker 30 the demo here. 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.

Speaker 14 Mine is is already blue. Does that mean it's on? No, that means it's

Speaker 30 now you're whoa, hello, and so now you can try standing up and sitting back down is like a very common movement.

Speaker 14 Okay, I feel like I'm um,

Speaker 14 yeah, this is giving mecca. Yeah, I feel like yeah, you can do some squats.

Speaker 16 It actually is helping me stand up. Yeah,

Speaker 14 no, this is great. I feel um

Speaker 14 yeah, like you know, when you have like a spotter at the gym,

Speaker 14 you wouldn't know. Um,

Speaker 14 It's like that feeling when you're just getting a little boost.

Speaker 30 Exactly, but the problem is you both strike me as quite fit, healthy people.

Speaker 14 Oh, thank you.

Speaker 16 We're always hearing that.

Speaker 30 Exactly.

Speaker 30 So, we were trying to think: like, what's a way that we could make this a little bit more challenging for you so you really can appreciate the technology?

Speaker 30 So, I don't, have you noticed that there's a stem loster behind the street?

Speaker 14 You did

Speaker 14 her!

Speaker 14 I did. Can I try?

Speaker 14 Yeah. With my okay, please clap.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 Wow, it's uh, yeah, it's wow, we're really doing it.

Speaker 14 Okay, let's put the stairs on. Okay.

Speaker 14 So, you know, like, I'm on a level three or four. Okay, I'm at five.
I like to live on the edge. Great, great.

Speaker 31 Okay, it's good. It's like, I feel

Speaker 14 like what I'm doing is not climbing stairs, it's like climbing stairs adjacent. It's sort of like the

Speaker 14 physical equivalent of vibe coding.

Speaker 14 It's vibe. I'm vibe walking.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 30 So if you want, we could turn it off and then you might see the difference.

Speaker 14 Oh, you're going to remotely disable it? Yeah, please. I was just saying we can.
No, do it, do it. I want to experience this on my own two feet.

Speaker 30 All right, we're going to turn you off in three,

Speaker 14 two, one,

Speaker 14 off.

Speaker 14 Oh yeah, that's much harder. I don't like that.

Speaker 14 Can you turn it back on?

Speaker 30 You want it back on? Yes.

Speaker 14 This is how you get your customers. They can't go back.
This is genuinely harder. I've heard of the hedonic treadmill, but this is ridiculous.

Speaker 14 Okay, you're back on that.

Speaker 30 Did that have been easier?

Speaker 14 That's good. That's good.
Thank you. Whoops.

Speaker 16 I mean,

Speaker 16 I think that was all right, you know.

Speaker 16 I don't know that it could have been done better.

Speaker 14 Oh, would you like to try?

Speaker 16 Would it be okay if I tried?

Speaker 16 Hey, it's Casey just cutting in from the studio here, and you're not going to hear it in the podcast, but I do want to tell you what happened immediately after this, which is that I challenged Kevin to see if I could do better on the Stair Master wearing the robot pants, and I did while accompanied to the song Work Bitch by Britney Spears.

Speaker 16 For copyright reasons, we're not going to include that in the show, but you can just kind of hum it to yourself or maybe play it on Spotify later today.

Speaker 16 I think when I kicked my legs up, the Stair Master stopped because it was afraid for me.

Speaker 30 Yeah, but it's always a good sign when the worst part of our demo that goes wrong is the Stair Master. So that's a win.

Speaker 14 Absolutely. That was incredible.
Now, Catherine, tell people where they can find out more about these pants if they're interested.

Speaker 30 Yeah, so we're Skip, so skipwithjoy.com. I presume that'll be in the show notes.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 you can pre-order them now. We'll be shipping next year.

Speaker 30 And we also do like rentals and experiences, especially for folk who like really want to achieve like a dream hike but they're not able to at the moment we're trying to help them do that and get feedback and how how much for the pants um a bit like an e-bike so five thousand dollars bearish okay um and what would it take to bring that price maybe down a little

Speaker 30 it would either take a discount code if you know me which i feel like we're all now friends um

Speaker 30 yeah or you know improved international supply chains which is a different competition.

Speaker 14 All right, well, Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. We really had a great time.
Thank you.

Speaker 16 Thank you.

Speaker 14 Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 16 Well, Kevin, as we say at the end of so many podcast segments, it's time to get out of these pants.

Speaker 1 This episode is supported by KPMG.

Speaker 2 AI agents.

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Speaker 6 KPMG's agent framework demystifies agents, creating clarity on how they can accelerate business-critical outcomes.

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Speaker 16 Well, I know what you're thinking, which is, can the show possibly go on longer? And yes, it can.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 But you guys email us each and every week, and we just wanted to talk to you directly. So here's what's going to happen.
We have some people with roving microphones.

Speaker 16 They're going to be, you know, sort of scurrying around. And if you want to ask us something, you can ask us now.
And like, we're going to let it go on for a little bit. So I don't know.

Speaker 16 Let's get the energy up, ask fun questions. If you have more of a comment, maybe save that for an Apple review.

Speaker 16 But we're excited to hear what's on your mind. And can I say, those of you who are wearing your hard fork hats, you look so beautiful.

Speaker 14 So good. What?

Speaker 16 What a memory you're creating for me. Okay, great.
Now, does anyone have a question for the Hard fork program?

Speaker 16 We have one right here, sort of middle.

Speaker 14 Hmm.

Speaker 16 Vamp a little while she's going up the stairs, Kevin.

Speaker 14 All right, we're good.

Speaker 32 Okay, this is a very hard question. Yeah.
Last week you introduced the nickname Chapatiti.

Speaker 16 Chapatiti, yes.

Speaker 32 Which I have been using frequently.

Speaker 32 And I would like to know what nickname you would use for each of the popular models.

Speaker 14 Oh.

Speaker 16 Let's see.

Speaker 14 I'm going to let you handle that one, Mr. Improv.

Speaker 16 Well, of course, I feel like Geminini

Speaker 14 is kind of right there, bing-a-ling-a-ling.

Speaker 14 I think. Sometimes I do say cloud, just because I think it's like

Speaker 14 more of the authentic pronunciation. Make it two syllables.

Speaker 16 Thank you for asking that.

Speaker 14 I'm serious. That was the right energy.
Okay.

Speaker 16 What else would you like to know?

Speaker 16 Let's see. I see one back here.

Speaker 14 Oh, I see one right here. Who's pointing here?

Speaker 16 You know what? You point this one.

Speaker 14 Okay, let's go right there.

Speaker 33 Hi, I love listening to you guys, so thank you. It's a highlight of my week.
I feel like you have a better

Speaker 33 or a broader view of what's happening in the industry than maybe a lot of us do.

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 14 I think I'm most worried about the pace of change.

Speaker 14 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, the cars drive themselves, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 14 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 safety nets for people who may lose their jobs as a result of AI or other technologies.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And I also, you know, we've been around the block. Like I know that even the best intended technological projects have unintended consequences.
So we saw this happen with social media.

Speaker 14 All these companies said, we're going to save the world and connect the world and everything's going to be great. And we've seen what's happened with that.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 14 We ran out of time.

Speaker 16 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 experiencing these extreme mental health challenges with ChatGPT,

Speaker 16 they're signing a deal with Mattel and they're saying we're going to put it into toys.

Speaker 16 Now, 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. But there are just a lot of unanswered questions here.

Speaker 16 And if I learned anything from the past 10 years, it's that you unfortunately cannot count on lawmakers to do any meaningful pushback.

Speaker 16 So honestly, one of the reasons why we make this show is because we just like talking talking to you about: here is a problem that no one actually has a plan for.

Speaker 16 So, we'll keep doing that.

Speaker 14 You call me. Great question.

Speaker 16 I will call

Speaker 16 this person right here, sort of in the dead center. It's gonna be challenging to get the microphone.

Speaker 16 No, this will be funny. Everybody gets sort of why, how does the microphone get to this person?

Speaker 14 Okay, and we're gonna pass it down, and that's community.

Speaker 16 Beautiful.

Speaker 34 Hi, I'm Hendrik. 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.

Speaker 34 And I was curious just to get your guys' opinion on

Speaker 34 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

Speaker 34 it's like plagiarism. There needs to be like balancing act.
But from my perspective and from how I've used it,

Speaker 34 I just feel like it's actually really useful so I'm just curious to get your view thanks

Speaker 14 yeah I it's a great question

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I think that was a mistake, and they now, many of them have sort of come around to trying to say,

Speaker 14 how do we teach with this technology and about this technology?

Speaker 14 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 into the economy if there still are jobs.

Speaker 14 And I think it's really naive to think that you're just going to take it out of the classroom.

Speaker 14 Now, I do think that teachers 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 time more for discussion and face-to-face interaction and maybe assign homework differently.

Speaker 14 But I don't think this stuff is going away. And so I think the sort of enlightened schools are the ones that are sort of planning around its existence for the future.

Speaker 16 Yeah, thank you for the question. Thank you for listening.
I think, you know,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And I think the challenge is when I was in high school, I didn't know

Speaker 16 how good is good enough at critical thinking. You know what I mean?

Speaker 16 I do believe that the more you use AI as a substitute for reading, for writing, your your critical thinking skills are not going to develop to where they otherwise might.

Speaker 16 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 reading one out of every three books that's assigned to you.

Speaker 16 And I'll say that while so much focus is on the school stuff right now, I think very soon the conversation is going to shift to AIs as companions.

Speaker 16 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 they know in their real life.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 14 Okay,

Speaker 14 great questions.

Speaker 16 You call the next one.

Speaker 14 Let's go up here, the balcony. Do we have a mic up there?

Speaker 14 No, I picked the hardest possible spot.

Speaker 14 Okay. Oh, wow, you need the robot pants.

Speaker 35 Thank you very much, Kevin and Casey. Love the show.
You guys are awesome.

Speaker 35 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?

Speaker 16 The best Black Mirror episode to me is just you're trapped inside Italian brain rot.

Speaker 14 Like

Speaker 16 you have an objective to accomplish, but like you have to get like Crocodellini Babbalini on board.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that comes to mind for me.

Speaker 14 How about you?

Speaker 14 I think the AI friend stuff was kind of. I liked when you had the conversation with Turing, my AI friend.
He couldn't be here tonight, by the way, but he sends his regrets.

Speaker 14 It was a configuration error. Yeah.

Speaker 14 So, yeah, that would be mine.

Speaker 14 Let's do a couple more.

Speaker 14 Casey, your call.

Speaker 16 Oh, how about right here?

Speaker 16 We didn't realize how big this venue was until we started asking people to run around with microphones.

Speaker 14 You know, like a t-shirt cannon with microphones. Hi.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 14 But, you know, I really want

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 37 Have you talked to anyone who has a realistic timeline and roadmap

Speaker 37 for this?

Speaker 16 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 we're so thrilled with Catherine bringing her rig.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 They've raised billions of dollars over the past several years.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 So that's kind of the reason that people think we're about to see this step change in function. But to your point, hardware is hard.

Speaker 16 I would say that in 2028, you will probably still be folding your own laundry. But I could be wrong.

Speaker 14 I could be wrong.

Speaker 14 All right.

Speaker 14 Let's go right here.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So I'm curious if you know more of the details of that and then just what your guys'

Speaker 36 take is.

Speaker 16 The way that these contracts tend to start is like, there should be an AI assistant inside the Pentagon. And you could ask, like, what missile do I put on this jet? And it's like, you know,

Speaker 14 that's like,

Speaker 14 that's real.

Speaker 16 That's like, that's sort of what they are.

Speaker 16 And that's like the foot in the door.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 So, you know, I don't know what to tell you other than like, yeah, I'm super worried about it.

Speaker 16 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 writing about what I imagine are going to inevitably some dark things.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I don't love love it either. I have some real qualms about it.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 DeepMind had a sort of famous clause in its Google acquisition deal that they couldn't use their technology

Speaker 14 for the military. Now, they've since sort of

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And yeah, it really,

Speaker 14 I don't love it. And I'm glad that there are people inside these companies

Speaker 14 who are sort of resisting that pull.

Speaker 16 All right. I see somebody right here.

Speaker 38 Thank you so much, longtime listener. And I just have to say, I hope you guys do this again here in San Francisco.

Speaker 16 Shall we do it again?

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 38 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 trying to get a lot of people.

Speaker 14 But you can't pause and you can't make us faster, which is great.

Speaker 38 I was really hoping Sam Altman would be here tonight. I'm so glad you guys got him.

Speaker 38 One of the questions I have for you guys, and maybe,

Speaker 38 you know, in your vast experience of covering AI and everything that's come about,

Speaker 38 one of the important things to me is regulation and how

Speaker 14 that

Speaker 38 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

Speaker 38 that's going to be a real quantum leap to my mind and to get to get Congress and people really educated into how

Speaker 38 Things need to move forward for our safety and whether it's military or kids or anything anything else.

Speaker 38 It impacts so many different people in so many different ways. I just thought, do you guys have someone in your mind who would be like top of mind that you would nominate for that role today?

Speaker 38 Or do you see someone like Sam doing that in 10 years, 20 years?

Speaker 16 I think we cannot look to the industry to lead this, right? I mean, Kevin 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 But I will just say, 10 years to have no regulation at the state level is an extremely long time.

Speaker 16 Like, if you believe anybody who's come on our show, like, in 10 years, that will be sort of the end of the ball game. Like, you know, very powerful intelligence is here.

Speaker 16 So, what I hope is that as people learn more about this stuff, they push more.

Speaker 16 And I think we're going to need to see some sort of bottom-up public participation here, because it's not going to come from the industry.

Speaker 14 All right. Next.
Yes.

Speaker 39 Love the show. It's been said over and over.

Speaker 16 And I'll say, we'll keep hearing it.

Speaker 39 Several people that you've interviewed on the show and technology leaders, you know, there's a lot of techno-optimism, and I think a lot of it is warranted.

Speaker 39 But one area where I'm kind of not buying it is the, and everybody will reap the benefits of the wealth and,

Speaker 39 you know,

Speaker 39 the monetary benefits of this.

Speaker 39 And

Speaker 39 I understand how the people who create the AI reap the benefits of the well,

Speaker 39 but I have never heard anyone talk about how that trickles down or gets redistributed. And I'm wondering what you've heard.

Speaker 14 This is anything else. This is such a good question.
This drives me insane.

Speaker 14 When people just come on the show and they say, you know, we had these guys on last week from Mechanize.

Speaker 14 They said, you know, this is all going to trickle down. We're all going to have, you know, radical abundance.
And it's like, that is a deliberate policy choice that many people do not want to make.

Speaker 14 That does not happen automatically.

Speaker 14 And so I think if I were, you know, running these companies, which 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.

Speaker 14 It's not just enough to build the technology.

Speaker 14 We also, I also, it drives me insane. I'm just going to get this off my chest.

Speaker 17 I'm popping off tonight. Freach it!

Speaker 14 People are always comparing this to the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 14 During the Industrial Revolution, there was a 50-year period called Engels Pause where productivity and profits went up, but wages did not.

Speaker 14 So workers literally for 50 years did not see the benefits of the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It sucked for a lot of people for a long time, and I want them to know that.

Speaker 16 Yeah, don't say.

Speaker 14 All right.

Speaker 16 I haven't really called on anyone over here, and I see a person at the farthest extreme of the theater.

Speaker 14 And I would like to. We just want to make sure our mic runners are getting their steps in.

Speaker 16 Yeah, the steps are in. It's very important.
The steps are in.

Speaker 14 Vamp, Casey. Oh,

Speaker 14 have you? Oh, we're right there. Okay, great.
Right here. Yeah, over here.

Speaker 17 Thank you so much.

Speaker 17 Love the show. I'll say it again.

Speaker 17 Long time 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.
And I wanted to hear more about that.

Speaker 17 And Kevin, interested in yours as well. But Casey, seemed like you had a picture of it.
And so I want to hear it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and I want to say that I'm not necessarily advocating for this as a perfect outcome. And I'm not rooting for this as happened as quickly as possible.
But I work with an assistant who is amazing.

Speaker 16 She helps me schedule things. She helps me sell advertising.
She helps me help you with customer service if you're a platform or subscriber and you need to change your email address.

Speaker 16 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 room has their version of that.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And if 0789 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 It's like, no, it would just do what my assistant did.

Speaker 14 Does that sound crazy?

Speaker 14 A little bit. Okay.
You did talk about having an assistant a lot.

Speaker 14 Let's do one more.

Speaker 14 Let's do one more, and let's do it right up there. Yes.

Speaker 14 Okay, I got it.

Speaker 40 So, gentlemen, last week, standing in my kitchen, chopping vegetables, listening to you earnestly try to give PR advice to mechanize, and I almost cut my finger off because I was laughing so hard

Speaker 14 lose a lot of fingers that way

Speaker 40 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

Speaker 16 to PR advice yeah let's see who needs it right now

Speaker 16 Meta could use some PR advice and here's why They think that when you go around saying we're offering people $100 million,

Speaker 16 that people are gonna be like, Wow, that's so cool. When what it really means is you would have to pay me a hundred million dollars to work at Meta.

Speaker 14 All right,

Speaker 16 I think that's everyone.

Speaker 14 From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.

Speaker 1 This episode is supported by KPMG.

Speaker 2 AI agents, buzzworthy, right?

Speaker 4 But what do they really mean for you?

Speaker 6 KPMG's agent framework demystifies agents, creating clarity on how they can accelerate business-critical outcomes.

Speaker 9 From strategy to execution, KPMG helps you harness AI agents with secure architecture and a smart plan for your workforce's future.

Speaker 10 Dive into their insights on how to scale agent value in your enterprise.

Speaker 12 Curious?

Speaker 2 Head to www.kpmg.us slash agents to learn more.

Speaker 19 Can your software engineering team plan, track, and ship faster?

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Speaker 16 Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyak.
Refectech by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood.
Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell.

Speaker 16 Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube, and you should, at youtube.com slash hardfork.

Speaker 16 Special thanks to the New York Times live event team, Hilary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Kate Carrington, Chantal Renier, Melissa Tripoli, Natalie Green, Angela Austin, Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Farinha, Jennifer Feeney, and Morgan Singer.

Speaker 16 Thanks to everybody at SF Jazz, and thanks to the Brass Animals, our live band. Also, special thanks to Matt Collette, Paula Schuman, Puy Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda.

Speaker 16 You can email us at heartfork at lytimes.com, but you should know that we're on vocation right now.

Speaker 41 And now, a next level moment from ATT Business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows, and they need to be there in time for International Sleep Day.

Speaker 41 You've got ATT 5G, so you're fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding. And International Sleep Day is tomorrow.

Speaker 41 Luckily, ATT 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you. ATT 5G requires a compatible plan and device.

Speaker 41 Coverage not available everywhere. Learn more at ATT.com/slash 5G network.