Transcript
Speaker: Hey Alfie, why don't you go ahead and give me a little bit of a rundown on who you are, what you do, that kind of thing.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Thank you for having me on your pod, Drew.
Speaker: My name's Alfie.
Speaker: I am the founder and chief exec of a company called Alpha Technology, which hires the world's best software engineers for companies across the United Kingdom.
Speaker: I run a podcast where I speak to
Speaker: I guess the world's best technical leaders about the future of technology and digital trends and that sort of thing.
Speaker: An author, speaker, husband, father, wearer of many different hats.
Speaker: And yeah, my areas of expertise are really around, I guess, building technical teams and the future of technology and that sort of thing, really.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: You said your father.
Speaker: How many kids do you have?
Speaker: I have one seven-month-old son.
Speaker: Do you have any kids?
Speaker: I have one seven-year-old.
Speaker: Seven year old.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you've been through the basically the entire process, which I'm going through.
Speaker: So you get it, man.
Speaker: I totally get it.
Speaker: I know it's it's tough, especially in the first year to either schedule things or get things done or get any kind of sleep.
Speaker: uh hopefully yeah that's it's tricky man i i'm lucky that i've got an amazing wife and she um you know uh is obviously taking the the majority of that on on herself but um you know it's going it's going really well and um it's tricky to start a baby life and also a a company in like the same year that's been a bit of a challenge it's been like having two startups but um but yeah both of them are still here and growing and uh doing well so um man it's an adventure definitely
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Why don't you tell me about your startup?
Speaker: You said you just started it this year?
Speaker: Yeah, we launched, well, it's been a year now.
Speaker: So I spent five years working, Drew, for a huge corporate technology recruitment company.
Speaker: They recruit everything, but I always focused on software engineers.
Speaker: It was always my expertise.
Speaker: And joined there as a trainee, worked my way up the ranks, spent a couple of years living in New Zealand and then London, and worked my way up to become a national lead for the United Kingdom and Ireland, looking after a big team of
Speaker: talented consultants who were helping companies grow their software engineering divisions.
Speaker: A lot of them, great experience.
Speaker: After five years of corporate life, though, I kind of felt like it was time to be an entrepreneur and be a founder and start something myself.
Speaker: And yeah, we set up just over a year ago now.
Speaker: Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker: I'm kind of in the middle of a startup myself.
Speaker: I graduated a coding boot camp.
Speaker: I don't know if you're familiar with Elixir.
Speaker: Yeah, I know, Alexa.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: So I graduated from a boot camp and I got together with a couple of the devs from the actually I went through the beta of the boot camp.
Speaker: It's kind of kind of a new thing.
Speaker: And then I went through the first cohort.
Speaker: And so I got together with a couple of people from the beta and we've started a kind of a startup.
Speaker: We're doing small SAS projects at the moment.
Speaker: That's kind of mind.
Speaker: It is mindery.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, that's my, that's our first one.
Speaker: Not launched yet.
Speaker: Hopefully in the next few months, I'm looking to, to start getting some, some users that, so we can start testing things out and see what's broken, what we need to fix and that kind of thing.
Speaker: But
Speaker: What is Mindery?
Speaker: Describe it in a sentence.
Speaker: So in a sentence, Mindery is a reminder app that will text you when you've got something either due that... One of the things I found personally...
Speaker: is that I tend to forget when streaming services are due or things like that.
Speaker: And putting things on the calendar just doesn't seem to work that well for me.
Speaker: I tend to ignore the calendar somewhat.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Or it's not enough of a...
Speaker: hey, I'm due or, or hey, you need to do this kind of thing.
Speaker: So texts work better for me.
Speaker: So I always read texts no matter what they are.
Speaker: So the idea is to be the, the biggest nag you could ever want for something that's due or something that you need reminding of.
Speaker: So this is a product by Elixirize, which is your, like what you're holding, okay.
Speaker: Well, how do you describe that?
Speaker: Yeah, Elixir Eyes is kind of the company and then Mindery is the product.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay, very cool.
Speaker: You can tell I do podcasting, right, given the fact that we're two minutes into this and I've already subconsciously flipped the scales and started interviewing you.
Speaker: Which is completely fine because I don't think a lot of my guests actually ask me a lot of questions.
Speaker: So, you know, it's kind of nice to be on the flip side.
Speaker: It's a conversation, man.
Speaker: You don't want it to be one way, do you?
Speaker: No, no, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I had... Oh, what was it?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: So you said you've been a year into your startup.
Speaker: So what was it like kind of getting going initially?
Speaker: That's a good question.
Speaker: Well, there's so much, you know, to it in the first couple of months, especially from, you know, when you're a...
Speaker: employee within a large corporate, you have many, many, many different things to do, which are all delegated and split up and given to different people.
Speaker: So that's everything from the finance to the marketing, to the legal, to the tech, to the sales, to the
Speaker: you know, the actual products building itself and, you know, in our case people.
Speaker: So there's so many different components, which as a leader within a big, you know, FTSE 250 business, you've got a wonderful team that can, you know, take care of that stuff for you.
Speaker: And you focus on strategy and on vision and on succession planning and all of that stuff.
Speaker: When you're at a startup and it's just you, it's literally the complete opposite, Drew.
Speaker: You know, it's you, a computer, a phone, a notepad, a pen,
Speaker: and no salary so you've got to go and make some money you've got to build something you've got to sell it and you've got to start making some cash otherwise you know my wife my baby my mortgage doesn't get paid you know all of the all of the important things in life that that need to get done don't get done if you don't have any money so um you know you need sales ultimately so first few months are really you know
Speaker: spent building out product and getting everything working and then getting out there to the market and then building up a book of clients, getting repeat business with those that keep coming back to you and then scaling it through systems, automation, building out a team.
Speaker: And yeah, I'm really happy with the progress that we've made over the past year and where we are today.
Speaker: Always want to be doing more.
Speaker: So I'm always looking back and thinking, oh, damn it, I wish I'd, you know,
Speaker: uh, did that earlier or did that differently or hired that person earlier or whatever.
Speaker: But, um, but yeah, so, so far so good.
Speaker: Hindsight's a beautiful thing, isn't it?
Speaker: And, uh, excited for year two as well.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Um, so did, did you have to, or I, I guess you already, you were already recruiter at this point, right?
Speaker: So, yeah, I did.
Speaker: So five years as I recruited within that company, the past year, um, I wasn't really recruiting myself.
Speaker: I was, you know, pure, um,
Speaker: leadership but you know when I'm starting this up myself I'm back again on the tools which is quite a quite a fun thing to be doing definitely missed that part of the role you know helping people and speaking to people about perhaps the most important thing that they'll do in their life you know their job and their career and their profession right are certainly up there I think the thing that people tend to forget about
Speaker: talent and recruitment is that if you get the right job for somebody, you can change that person's life.
Speaker: You can get them an opportunity where they finally enjoy working.
Speaker: You can get them more money so they can have a better life for their family and get a better house and kids, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: And then at the same time, if you get the right person for an organization,
Speaker: you can transform that business if you get the right person involved and they can take that product that service to a completely new level that benefits the team the company and then all of their customers and obviously the economy as well so the art and and science of recruitment for me is it's about a lot more than just getting somebody a job it's about really impacting the the wider remit of things as well and you know which is you know very fun to do
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: Do you have to or did you already have relationships with companies?
Speaker: Like what's your what's kind of your.
Speaker: Trying to think of the right word.
Speaker: Like business development sales kind of strategy.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, to a degree.
Speaker: I mean, I've, you know, been doing.
Speaker: purely software engineering recruitment now uh for many many years and um yeah i mean i think most people certainly in london where i'm where i'm based if you uh if you mentioned my name and uh to a cto or to a tech founder or to a head of engineering i'd say there's a good good good chance that the majority of people will have will have either spoken to me at some point or met me at an event that we run or being on my podcast or
Speaker: vice versa or whatever right so um yeah i mean the network really really is everything there's a you know the old cliche that success is not always about what you know but rather about who you know recruitment is very much the perfect example of that you know we don't have a um a physical product that that we're selling you know we're connecting people we're um
Speaker: You know, years and years and years of building up a network of thousands of software engineers where, to the point, Drew, you could say, look, Alfie, I need to hire this particular skill, whether that's Java, Python,.NET, Ruby, Alexa, whatever.
Speaker: And then you need to pay this amount of money, this amount of range.
Speaker: You need people in the office this many days a week.
Speaker: You need people that have this type of visa and this type of industry and domain and sector knowledge.
Speaker: If you was to say those things to me, within 20 seconds, I can compute in my mind and tell you who the best free people are in the city who are currently looking for work and who would be a good fit for you.
Speaker: Not just based on the skills that you've given me on paper, but based on you as a person, your personality, how you operate and that sort of thing as well.
Speaker: And then obviously we have a massive database to offload my brain a little bit, to give me a second brain to...
Speaker: to type in the filters and get the results right so yeah it's all about networking it's all about relationships all about who you know and um that's unfortunately um or fortunately depending on how you look at it that's not the sort of thing drew that you can um that you can shortcut really um it's just about putting in the time having 10 000 coffees and then at the end of all that you you become an expert and a connector on on who it is that people need to speak with if that makes sense
Speaker: I hear coffee is the thing.
Speaker: Like you got to have that.
Speaker: Without the coffee, everything crumbles.
Speaker: Is that true?
Speaker: Oh, man, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, why else would people want to meet?
Speaker: I mean, I'm British, so, you know, a cup of tea perhaps.
Speaker: But no, even for like, you know, business and networking, it's all about the coffee, man.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: Do you have a lot of devs that just contact you for assistance or do you- Yeah, I'd say we get hundreds a week of people.
Speaker: We advertise on every platform you can imagine, from LinkedIn to all of the UK job boards and beyond to find the right people.
Speaker: But that only gets you people looking for work who will come to you.
Speaker: I guess the best candidates I know are people that we have to approach, that they're passive, they're not looking for work.
Speaker: They're really good.
Speaker: They get five messages a week from recruiters trying to poach them away from wherever they are.
Speaker: And if it was something really, really exciting, really, really interesting, really appealing, then maybe they'd be open to opportunities.
Speaker: And I'd say the vast majority of people probably fit that criteria at any given point, really, unless they are super happy with where they are.
Speaker: But then even so, Drew, if I said, look, you want to be the next CEO of Microsoft, they'd probably say yes.
Speaker: So, I mean, everybody's got a price at the end of the day, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, we get hundreds of people a week contacting us.
Speaker: But we certainly are able to help a lot of those people.
Speaker: But I would say a lot of the time, the best people that we find, we have to headhunt.
Speaker: We've got to get referrals.
Speaker: We've got to, you know, chase them a little bit because they're in demand.
Speaker: They're rare and they're hard to find.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Is this your first startup?
Speaker: Um, I've been involved my entire life to a degree in, in starting things.
Speaker: Um, it's the first one that's made me like quite a bit of money, you know, to, to the point where I can do this and, um, you know, help other people as well and, and, and, and build a team.
Speaker: My, when I was, um, very, very young, I have a, a little bit of a different background to, I guess, um,
Speaker: almost everybody really in that when I was a teenager and even a kid I got into magic as a hobby like performing magic tricks, card tricks, sleight of hand, anything to do with casinos kind of got me very excited, sleight of hand psychology, that sort of thing and I started to get pretty good at it.
Speaker: I would just read and read and read, met a lot of other magicians.
Speaker: It was very much a passion and a hobby as a kid but I started to get pretty good and then I would perform at parties and events and
Speaker: met a bunch of celebrities and then started to do stuff in the media, was on
Speaker: show called Britain's Got Talent and then I had my own tv show and um yeah got to travel doing lots of tricks which was a lot of fun for like you know a kid and a teenager but it wasn't I don't know if I call it a business show business but perhaps I turned it into a business um through accident really I guess I was just too busy doing different shows and events and I'd get a request to do one I'd be in you know
Speaker: the uk doing a show and i'd get requested one in spain and then one in china and i i couldn't physically be in all these places at the same time you know despite me being magic but i um i'd hire other magicians to do them for me i'd you know i'd outsource the work charge a margin um and get paid off the results of others rather than myself so that's why i kind of got into recruitment i built up a talent agency for magicians as a teenager um
Speaker: which was a lot of fun, but eventually kind of realized that even though it's fun, it's not commercially scalable because the magic world is like, what, you hire somebody for two hours for a corporate event and then that's it.
Speaker: That's once a year.
Speaker: Developers seems to be a lot...
Speaker: more stable you know people work for full-time jobs right so uh when I pivoted to that yeah exactly man it was a much it's an actual industry to uh to go after but tech was always my thing ever since I was a kid I was always obsessed with technology whether that was learning to code so I could build out my own website for magic whether that was learning how to design and video edit so I could produce my content um it was always my thing it was you know if I'd be a dev if I wasn't doing what I'm doing now I didn't
Speaker: most likely.
Speaker: So even though I am not a full-time developer myself, it's the industry that I support and operate in and have always been involved in.
Speaker: And in a weird way, that's kind of how I got into entrepreneurship through something completely unrelated, which connected itself to it.
Speaker: It's like that old Steve Jobs speech where he says, you can't connect to the dots looking forward, you have to look backwards.
Speaker: And that's kind of how it happened, really.
Speaker: Wow, that's awesome.
Speaker: So how did you get into podcasting?
Speaker: Is that sort of an extension of the recruiting or was that something else?
Speaker: Yeah, I'd say it was probably close-list related to the recruiting side.
Speaker: During COVID, I used to do these events prior to COVID where I'd get hundreds tech founders in a room and we'd have a panel and speakers and have a great event.
Speaker: And then COVID happened and we couldn't do any of those.
Speaker: We're all locked in our bedrooms, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: right right wanted to keep my community going somehow so i started a webcam podcast um that was what three four years ago now whenever covid was and um yeah we've done 128 29 episodes or something now and then about maybe about a year ago we started recording in person in a professional studio um with all the you know best cameras and mics and lights and everything else in between and it's a
Speaker: probably higher production quality than most TV shows now, but we've got our own editing team and production staff and everything.
Speaker: And we've recently gone back into the live events.
Speaker: So once every month or so, we're hosting a live meetup in London where we'll bring together 100, 200 tech entrepreneurs and we'll do a very similar format, but do it live on stage and have different voices contributing.
Speaker: And it's great.
Speaker: We really enjoyed podcasting.
Speaker: It's amazing to see my first one in
Speaker: My bedroom, speaking to somebody on a 10-minute Zoom call has now evolved over 100 episodes later into live conferences and being watched by thousands of people on Spotify and Apple and X. And we have a small following on YouTube and LinkedIn and those platforms as well.
Speaker: But yeah, it's a fun journey.
Speaker: It's something that I'd recommend anybody that's interested in podcasting can go on.
Speaker: And it opens up so many doors and opportunities and allows you to meet a lot of very cool people as well.
Speaker: Yeah, it definitely does.
Speaker: That's been my experience also.
Speaker: I pretty much try to talk to – I mean, I'll talk to anybody.
Speaker: I'm not too particular.
Speaker: I try to keep it to devs, though, or people in tech.
Speaker: But yeah, I really enjoy it.
Speaker: It's been a blast.
Speaker: I've been doing it for about a –
Speaker: I guess about a year I did take a kind of a break I took about a maybe a four or five month break when I was doing the boot camps um when you're doing programming for eight hours a day five days a week and then I've worked a full-time job also um yeah it's a lot to do right but you know it's important to find the time and I think consistency is so important with
Speaker: podcasts i i don't know what the exact stat is i'm going to butcher this a little bit drew but um i think like 95 plus of people like never make episode two they'll make the first one and then obviously nobody will watch it because it's their first episode and then uh then they give up and then i think it's i mean it's probably less than like 0.0001 make it past like 100 episodes it's got to be something like that
Speaker: But that's when you start to get people watching.
Speaker: It took us probably 80 to 90 episodes for us to start to get some pretty big guests and start to get an actual recurring viewership of people, which is great.
Speaker: I mean, if I gave up episode 50 or 60 or 70, then none of that would have happened.
Speaker: So a lot of work initially to put in for people that want to try podcasting.
Speaker: It's going to be
Speaker: one to three years of pain and then eventually you can make it work.
Speaker: I mean, that's probably the rule.
Speaker: I mean, there are obviously exceptions to that rule.
Speaker: And I do see some people that make episode five and they're getting millions of views right away.
Speaker: And that's amazing.
Speaker: I haven't done that.
Speaker: So I probably can't tell you how to do that.
Speaker: All I can tell you is, you know, put in the work, put in the graft and eventually it will start to show some returns.
Speaker: So what you're saying is I need to push more episodes so I can hit episode 100 quick.
Speaker: I think, yeah, I mean, quality and quantity, right?
Speaker: I mean, nobody massively influential in their domain is probably going to want to go on a podcast if it doesn't have a big following or if it doesn't have a lot of...
Speaker: you know, content and library.
Speaker: Because if people don't have the following, but they do have the work, then most people that, you know, have achieved success in their field can look back at that and go, hey, he's doing the work.
Speaker: Eventually, there's a good chance this is going to take off.
Speaker: So, you know, I'd love to help people that do three episodes and then try and get, I don't know, Elon Musk on their pod.
Speaker: It's just not going to happen, is it?
Speaker: Like, let's have common sense, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: That would be a big fish to reel in for sure.
Speaker: It would, but it surprises me, like, the ignorance of the whole thing.
Speaker: And I speak to people that are looking to start podcasts, and they're like, oh, yeah, I just reached out to, like, you know, Stephen Bartlett or, you know, Reid Hoffman or, you know, I just emailed...
Speaker: Sergey Brin or whatever.
Speaker: I'm like, well, you know, that's amazing.
Speaker: Like keep sending those emails by all means.
Speaker: Like, you know, you've got to, you've got to keep doing that.
Speaker: But, but also, also email some C-listers as well.
Speaker: Cause if you get 20 C-listers, you'll be able to get a B-lister.
Speaker: If you get 20 B-listers, you'll be able to get an A-lister.
Speaker: You know, it's about, you know, working it up in like tiers and levels to this thing.
Speaker: That's, that's an interesting way of thinking about it.
Speaker: I hadn't really, I hadn't really considered that.
Speaker: I tend, I mean, so like lately I've been interviewing people that are kind of in my circle.
Speaker: Either I've met them through the bootcamp or, or met them on LinkedIn or in your case, uh, you reached out to me, uh, due to a Twitter post I made in 2022, I think it was.
Speaker: it's a good way to find opportunities to collab.
Speaker: Like Twitter search is very much underlooked.
Speaker: If you search looking for podcast guests or looking for speakers for my event in and then put the city that you live in or whatever, like you, it's, it's, and then just go to the latest and then just scroll through DM, you know, a bunch of people that have DMs open.
Speaker: Um, within one hour of work, you can book 10 podcasts.
Speaker: You can book five speaking opportunities.
Speaker: It's, uh,
Speaker: Twitter search is a massively underlooked platform in my opinion.
Speaker: I would agree with that because I've never done that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's crazy.
Speaker: You could schedule 10 podcast episodes tonight if you just went through and spent a couple of hours messaging people on it.
Speaker: When you launch podcasts, do you do them like once a week or a couple of times a week?
Speaker: What's your schedule like when you release episodes?
Speaker: If we have a very, very big guest, like we've had people like Carrie Stebbings, who has 20VC, which is probably the most popular business podcast in the world.
Speaker: We had DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, you know, is one of the most famous technologists on the planet.
Speaker: If we have people like that, you know, we film when they're available to film, you know, for obvious reasons.
Speaker: They've got crazy schedules.
Speaker: If it's somebody perhaps not with that profile, we typically film in person once or twice a month in our studio.
Speaker: And then we will record.
Speaker: I'll typically book four days for different episodes where I'll do anywhere from three to five episodes in a day, which are about an hour each with a short break in between for me to not go crazy.
Speaker: um and we'll bring you know i'll bring wardrobe changes we'll um we have a great assistant who coordinates all that and make sure everybody's looked after and it's on time because it's you know a full day of of production and shooting really and then those episodes are typically released once a week so we try and release one a week um and they look like they're filmed every single week but obviously behind the scenes and we you know we do a lot of work to
Speaker: schedule and batch which i think is really important because if you're you know if you've got a family if you're running a business you can't be you know uh trying to like do these individual tasks and if it's spread across the calendar too thinly it's too much distraction you kind of need to book days for these sort of things in my opinion it's a lot more effective to do it that way um but yeah we will typically film once or twice a month and then that will give us enough content for the month
Speaker: So you guys don't do, you're not doing in person, right?
Speaker: You're still doing.
Speaker: No, no, we do it in person.
Speaker: So in the studio, we do, yeah, we've got a full production house now where we have, like I say, all the best equipment, all the best, great team there.
Speaker: We've got a great place in the city and in London.
Speaker: And we bring together London founders and CTOs and heads of engineering, sometimes developers, but usually people in more leadership roles, tech investors, VCs,
Speaker: best-selling authors we bring together the brightest minds from across the uk and europe we've been flying a few people in recently and um and yeah we've hosted i'd say 90 of them now we host them in our in our live studio maybe five percent of them we do um our live events um and then we do like five percent of them on zoom if we've got somebody like he's my friend who like lives in you know the valley or somewhere in the states or somewhere like that what kind of um what kind of music do you listen to
Speaker: That's a great question, man.
Speaker: Nobody's ever asked me that on a podcast.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: I am a, probably if I had to pick a genre, it would be like psychedelic rock.
Speaker: I love, I love the Beatles.
Speaker: I love Dylan.
Speaker: I love Pink Floyd.
Speaker: I love Zeppelin.
Speaker: So many, man.
Speaker: I mean, I've got a mix of everything, though.
Speaker: My Spotify playlist is probably the most diverse thing you can imagine.
Speaker: Everything from 90s rap to 60s rock.
Speaker: I don't really listen to anything modern, to be honest.
Speaker: It's just not my style.
Speaker: But yeah, real mix.
Speaker: No muse, huh?
Speaker: Muse.
Speaker: I like the Muse.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, uh, I don't really know much of what they've done, but, um, I, if I, I probably got a couple of songs on my, um, on my playlist from them.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm kind of the same.
Speaker: I have a wide range of listening.
Speaker: I grew up in the, I guess, the 80s.
Speaker: So I have a lot of 80s, 90s.
Speaker: I listen to some modern stuff, but I'm picky.
Speaker: It has to jump out at me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so that's kind of...
Speaker: That's kind of the way it goes for me.
Speaker: But I mean.
Speaker: It's Supermassive Black Hole.
Speaker: Is that the muse?
Speaker: Yeah, that's the muse.
Speaker: Yeah, I know that song.
Speaker: Yeah, I know that.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, not in my top 10, but yeah, they're great.
Speaker: I enjoy some of their stuff sometimes.
Speaker: Nice, nice.
Speaker: So you talk a lot about AI.
Speaker: I've listened to some of your podcast episodes.
Speaker: And so you seem to follow AI pretty hard.
Speaker: I'm not much.
Speaker: So I use like, you know, ChatGPT or I've tried some of the other ones like Find.
Speaker: I think it's spelled P-H-I-N-D.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And that sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've heard that, and I haven't tried four, so I don't know, but I've heard that it's gotten worse than, or it's worse than 3.5.
Speaker: Is that true?
Speaker: Is that kind of- Kind of.
Speaker: I mean, the hallucinations have probably increased.
Speaker: But I wouldn't, you know, it's-
Speaker: These things take a little bit of time.
Speaker: I'm more on the BARD train at the moment.
Speaker: I quite like it.
Speaker: It's very nicely integrated into Google.
Speaker: And the UI is a little bit cleaner, in my opinion.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I use AI tools daily.
Speaker: I use AISBARD for all different types of content creation.
Speaker: when we're looking at CVs as well for changing the tone of certain CVs based on what industry of client they're going towards.
Speaker: And then I don't use these myself as much, but my editor uses Midjourney and Dali.
Speaker: And we use, I think it's Autopod, I think it's called, which is great for podcasts.
Speaker: It kind of gets out of the ums and the ahs and automatically edits episodes, cuts cameras back and forth based on speaking.
Speaker: Yeah, we use a ton in our business.
Speaker: We probably pay for like, anywhere from like five to 10 different AI subscriptions at the moment.
Speaker: And they're great.
Speaker: You know, I was speaking to Harry Stebbings about this the other day.
Speaker: He said that 85% of all AI companies are probably going to go like bust in the next year, which is probably true.
Speaker: That's probably unfair.
Speaker: Yeah, it's probably more than that.
Speaker: I mean, but of the 5%, 10%, 15% of those that really make it, we are going to see complete industries be created by this thing.
Speaker: We're going to see billion-dollar companies that didn't exist six months ago.
Speaker: There's probably two or three people right now building something, which will be a billion-dollar company in two, three years from now.
Speaker: So AI, I mean, it's probably the biggest technological advancement since
Speaker: the internet, since the microprocessors, you know, and it's only just beginning.
Speaker: Like, we're seeing GPT, we're seeing Mid Journey, and we're like, wow, that's cool.
Speaker: We can do, you know, text to text.
Speaker: We can do text to picture.
Speaker: What happens when we get text to video?
Speaker: What happens when you type in, I want to watch this with these actors, with this kind of, you know, format, and then it's produced a Netflix quality TV show for you?
Speaker: Is that going to replace YouTube?
Speaker: Is that going to replace...
Speaker: you know, movies and Hollywood.
Speaker: What happens when you can type in any, like, artists in the world, any song you want them to sing, and it will produce a, you know, a Spotify quality song, and you can't tell it's been made by AI?
Speaker: What's going to happen to Spotify?
Speaker: What's going to happen to, you know, Amazon Music?
Speaker: Like, all of these questions and all of these industries are going to get disrupted in the next year.
Speaker: 18 months to two years, it's coming very, very quickly.
Speaker: So I think AI is massive.
Speaker: And those are just a couple of high level examples.
Speaker: It's gonna start with content.
Speaker: But I mean, you know, if we open up the door to sentience and other, you know, important questions, who knows where this ultimately is going from.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: How far away do you think we are from AI sentience?
Speaker: you know it's a yeah it's a pretty difficult question isn't it um i mean like everybody will give a different definition of what agi means as well i think 2045 you know that the kurzweil um prediction is probably um i would say at the um
Speaker: pessimistic standpoint, I think we'll probably get it before then.
Speaker: I mean, you know, when you have AI that creates AI, which creates AI, I mean, there's no stopping it at that point.
Speaker: It's, you know, and we talk a lot on my part about AI replacing jobs and not just jobs like, you know, construction workers or Uber drivers with self-driving robot taxis or whatever.
Speaker: I'm talking about white collar office jobs.
Speaker: When AI can replace developers, I mean, you know, at that point, what happens?
Speaker: I think AGI is coming a lot sooner than we think.
Speaker: An interesting question is, what does that mean, though?
Speaker: After that's happened, what happens next?
Speaker: Does it turn on us?
Speaker: Does IoT?
Speaker: We turned on other species and we invaded islands and killed them off.
Speaker: Do we get wiped out?
Speaker: Your refrigerator will kill you.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean...
Speaker: maybe i mean i mean it's the sort of thing that we like joke about we laugh about it's funny but like who knows like we don't know nobody knows what what's going to happen the ultimate way of phrasing it is is it possible with enough computing power to replicate biological consciousness and i i think the answer is probably yes but i don't know what level of of computing power you need to to do that and if you do that
Speaker: is it sentient in the same way that we are?
Speaker: Probably not.
Speaker: But it will be able to see, and it will see a lot better than us because it's got cameras everywhere.
Speaker: So if it can access every camera, it's got a billion eyes.
Speaker: It will be able to hear because it's got microphones everywhere that are all connected to things that it will be able to feel because of the senses.
Speaker: I don't know about taste, but does it need taste?
Speaker: I mean, probably not, but, you know, it's superior to us.
Speaker: It doesn't need food, doesn't need water, doesn't need air.
Speaker: I mean, like, you know, you've got to keep all these things in mind.
Speaker: You know, we are creating...
Speaker: the next version of evolution to some degree and in the same way that we wiped out our predecessors, is it going to do the same thing to us?
Speaker: Or
Speaker: Is it just going to be a great tool which completely revolutionized everything?
Speaker: And obviously, that's what the optimist in me would like to happen.
Speaker: But I don't think anybody can predict it.
Speaker: And I think all these people that are pretending to, I think they've got no idea what they're talking about.
Speaker: It's far too advanced for us monkey brains to even begin to take.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: It's pretty... The opinions are very widespread.
Speaker: And it's very hard to say which way things are going to go.
Speaker: Have you seen a show called Person of Interest?
Speaker: Yeah, I've seen it.
Speaker: It was a couple of years ago, right?
Speaker: It was... Oh, well.
Speaker: It was the guy... Harold Finch.
Speaker: It was...
Speaker: Yeah, I know it was the CIA thing, right?
Speaker: It was like a billionaire and like a CIA guy.
Speaker: It's like, is it a machine or something?
Speaker: It can like predict the future.
Speaker: It's like AI like surveillance and safety.
Speaker: Yeah, like surveillance.
Speaker: It was built to find terrorists or predict terrorist attacks or kind of find people that were planning terrorist attacks.
Speaker: And then the flip side is it also would discover a lot of other premeditation type things.
Speaker: And so it would it would basically spit out a social security number.
Speaker: And then, you know, they'd have to run around trying to save the people.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't watch a lot of TV and I wish I could, but I don't even watch a single TV show now in a good six months probably.
Speaker: I don't blame you one bit.
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: It's hard when you've got a bit of a man.
Speaker: It's a lot to do.
Speaker: But I do remember watching that vaguely a couple of years ago.
Speaker: And I don't think we're that far off, that sort of thing, in terms of the amount of data.
Speaker: I mean, humans can only compute so much data.
Speaker: But, I mean, computers, it's infinite, depending on how many GPUs you've got, really.
Speaker: So anything like that, in theory, is possible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What, um, so you, how long have you been on, on Twitter or X, whichever one we're calling it now?
Speaker: Yeah, I've been on it for a long time.
Speaker: I, I had an original account probably like a year or two after it was created.
Speaker: Um, and then I, um, stopped using it for a while and then I've just checked, uh, just said, and I signed back up in 2011.
Speaker: So I've been, I've been using it every single day since 2011.
Speaker: It's like the first app I open, first app I close before I go to bed.
Speaker: I use it mainly for news.
Speaker: I've got a bunch of different lists categorized by people.
Speaker: I've got an AI list, a metaverse list, an economic list.
Speaker: And the different things I'm interested in, I'll have lists.
Speaker: And I use it basically to follow their news.
Speaker: I don't post on it as much as I should do.
Speaker: I use it to keep in touch with friends and friends.
Speaker: And that sort of thing.
Speaker: But I use it mainly for news and just kind of seeing what's happening in the world.
Speaker: I think it's a really powerful platform.
Speaker: I think it's a little bit different to all of the other social media sites in that I always look at X or Twitter or whatever as almost special.
Speaker: It's different because it's where...
Speaker: the leaders of the world have their conversations.
Speaker: And it's where it's the second brain for the world's most influential and interesting people.
Speaker: You know, there's not many platforms where, I mean, Elon Musk isn't posting Instagram stories, is he?
Speaker: No, definitely not.
Speaker: Yeah, like Sam Altman isn't posting a Facebook update.
Speaker: Like you go to X for those things.
Speaker: And that's what I'm interested in.
Speaker: All the other social platforms, I have somebody else that, you know, does the majority of the content for them.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: That was my next question.
Speaker: Yeah, I post all my stuff on X personally.
Speaker: I'm the only person with the login details to it.
Speaker: Yeah, and my Twitter DMs are like my...
Speaker: It's like my second email.
Speaker: Some days I'll use it more than email.
Speaker: It's a great platform.
Speaker: I know people love to hate it, but for me, the value I get from it is too great for me to say anything bad about it.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, I enjoy X. I've been on there since maybe 2012 or 13, I think.
Speaker: I've never been a super heavy user.
Speaker: I've probably used it more in the last couple of years than I've ever used it.
Speaker: And I've actually started using it kind of to keep up with news and things like that.
Speaker: It's so handy because everything, if something has happened, you can pretty much search it and it'll come up.
Speaker: Like, you know, there'll be info on it.
Speaker: Whether or not, you know, any of the major news organizations has posted on it or not, or, you know, even if it's some small obscure one, you can pretty much find info on it, which is great.
Speaker: yeah I like it for if there's a very niche particular thing that I'm trying to solve or it's a problem or something I'll search that in in the problems and see people that I've been talking about it and then and then DM them and there's been a couple of times recently where I paid people for like a zoom call like not a crazy amount of money it's you know just a regular person posting on x but
Speaker: If there's something that they've been talking about, which I am trying to solve, there was this thing recently with YouTube tags or something that we were having issues with.
Speaker: And we found somebody that is a content creator, which talks about how to make YouTube videos and that sort of thing.
Speaker: Now, I could have gone on YouTube and done a bunch of research and bought a book and trying to figure it out myself, which would have taken me hours and hours and hours.
Speaker: Instead, I paid, I think it was like $100 for like a half an hour Zoom call with somebody.
Speaker: And I got the answer within like six minutes.
Speaker: So it's such a great tool.
Speaker: Like I understand why people are against Elon and some of the, let's say, you know, crazier things that he does.
Speaker: At the same time, I just got finished reading Walt Isaacson's book on him that came out the other day.
Speaker: Oh, I haven't read that one.
Speaker: Yeah, it just came out like, what, a week ago or something?
Speaker: It's, you know, followed him around for a couple of years and wrote what probably is the best book on Elon.
Speaker: What's the name of it?
Speaker: It's just called Elon Musk.
Speaker: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.
Speaker: Walter Isaacson.
Speaker: Yeah, he wrote the Steve Jobs biography and he's done a bunch of other ones, everyone from Ben Franklin to Leonardo da Vinci.
Speaker: I've read most of his books.
Speaker: The Innovators, that's a really good one by him, if that's the right word for it.
Speaker: But yeah, I just got finished reading that book and there was a...
Speaker: quote in it where I think he was referencing some Saturday Night Live skit that he did a couple of years ago.
Speaker: But the quote was something like, you know, hey, I'm trying to put people on Mars and solve climate change.
Speaker: Did you think I was going to be a normal dude?
Speaker: And it hit me.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, like there's nobody does those things and then you can expect them to be normal on social media.
Speaker: So, um, I don't blame him for being a little eccentric.
Speaker: No, no, not at all.
Speaker: I definitely don't either.
Speaker: I'm a big fan.
Speaker: I watch the SpaceX stuff all the time.
Speaker: You know, it's so crazy to watch rockets take off and then land.
Speaker: That is amazing.
Speaker: I saw a cool collage the other day.
Speaker: Somebody took all of the crashes from
Speaker: Basically in a timeline.
Speaker: So they, from the, from the first one.
Speaker: And they just, they kind of spliced them all together.
Speaker: So it was like, bang, bang, bang, everything blowing up, you know, and then slowly start to almost land and then start to land.
Speaker: It was, it was pretty wild.
Speaker: Well, somebody did that to Elon before he started SpaceX.
Speaker: You know, he sold his first company was X, right?
Speaker: And then Zip2.
Speaker: And, you know, he had his early platforms where he made, you know, a couple hundred million.
Speaker: And then he was able to start Tesla and SpaceX, which...
Speaker: you know, it took him to billionaire level.
Speaker: And before he started SpaceX, he wasn't the first person to try and do private space travel.
Speaker: He was the first person to succeed, but he wasn't the first person to try.
Speaker: And people, Elon's friends, they gathered him.
Speaker: and they made a compilation of exactly what you're talking about the video is exploding exploding exploding showing him what's going to happen like you've hit the lottery twice you've made hundreds of millions you're going to throw all of that away elon trying to try and do the impossible and there's very very very few people forget the world but in history that would look at you know his friends who are obviously super successful in their own right
Speaker: and go no i'm gonna i'm gonna plow everything that i've achieved into this and try and find a way to make it work and then despite all the failure i mean they were like one more like um explosion away from bankruptcy i believe at some point and then they made it work
Speaker: you know and then they got people on the international space station and then you know they're going to be sending people to the moon and mars i mean how many people out there in the world right now are trying to put people on mars or solve a problem as big as that and almost when i see him
Speaker: buying X. I do love the fact that he's trying to protect freedom of speech, and obviously that's an important thing.
Speaker: But I really do wish sometimes he'd just put all of his focus on trying to get us to Mars, because that is a mission, a calling, greater than almost any other potential problem in the world.
Speaker: I mean, there's only so many moonshots I can think of.
Speaker: like what curing cancer um yeah you know trying to build agi trying to build immortality i mean there's a couple of big moon shots out there and i think going to mars is is probably one of the biggest ones right so people can hate him and i i will gladly stand there clapping at the crazy ones trying to change the world right
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there's, you know, there's not really that many of them.
Speaker: I mean, I think Amazon's got, they have rockets now too, right?
Speaker: Amazon.
Speaker: Blue Origin, Jeff's, I don't know if it's tied to Amazon.
Speaker: I think it's more of just a Jeff Bezos venture, but he hasn't had the same success that Elon's had.
Speaker: I mean, you know, Jeff's, you know, busy with other things, but I mean, he's achieved success in his own right.
Speaker: I mean, Amazon is the most successful company in history, I believe.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: If he isn't able to crack space, then who cares?
Speaker: He's been able to bring every product to every individual in every country in the world.
Speaker: That in itself is a moonshot that he's achieved.
Speaker: I wonder though if that's due to not being willing to blow enough stuff up.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe, maybe.
Speaker: You know, I recall Elon at some point saying that he pretty much he knew he was just going to blow shit up.
Speaker: A lot.
Speaker: Well, it's guaranteed to happen, right?
Speaker: Yeah, guaranteed.
Speaker: There's no way.
Speaker: You need to fail.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: With every explosion.
Speaker: I remember I was speaking to Peter Wang on my pod a few months ago.
Speaker: He's like CEO of Anaconda, which is like the world's largest data visualization platform.
Speaker: He's one of the most influential Python leaders in the world.
Speaker: And he was, I was having this debate with him around SpaceX because it was just after, I think it was Starship launched and blew up.
Speaker: And the media was saying like, is this the end of SpaceX?
Speaker: Like, you know, like what?
Speaker: Like, what did you think was going to happen?
Speaker: But did you think it was just going to go to Mars and then land and then come back and then do a little trip on the way and Jupiter or whatever?
Speaker: No, like these things that you send it up, it explodes.
Speaker: You track what happened, you track what went wrong.
Speaker: And then the next time you send it up, you fix those issues and it's probably going to explode again.
Speaker: You fix more stuff, you fix more stuff.
Speaker: And eventually we get to Mars.
Speaker: Like explosions are the stepping stones to that success.
Speaker: Like that's where the mainstream media, they don't get it.
Speaker: Like it's legacy news and there's a reason for it.
Speaker: I think that's also, that's part of the reason why NASA's so slow moving.
Speaker: Partly, I think, because they're a government agency, for one.
Speaker: But also because they're not willing to blow enough shit up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Walt talked about that in his book.
Speaker: They said, like, when Elon was trying to go to Mars, the first thing he did was he went to the NASA website and was trying to find the plan.
Speaker: He was like, well, look, I'd love to see if I can be involved in some capacity.
Speaker: Let's see what NASA's planning.
Speaker: And
Speaker: there was no plan that he goes on the website.
Speaker: They're not going to Mars.
Speaker: There wasn't a mission.
Speaker: There was no agenda.
Speaker: There was no timeline.
Speaker: There wasn't a schedule.
Speaker: So, you know, he is a private individual and the only private individual in history to ever, um, you know, send rockets successfully into space and get them back.
Speaker: Um, did that.
Speaker: That's what people forget.
Speaker: You know, this is a private individual that did something which a government, the world's most powerful government wasn't able to.
Speaker: you know, hate him, love him.
Speaker: You can't deny that that is insanely brilliant.
Speaker: That is just incredible.
Speaker: Completely agree.
Speaker: Completely agree.
Speaker: Did you hear about Elon possibly doing like a small charge eventually for Twitter to kind of drive off most of the bots?
Speaker: Did you hear about that?
Speaker: I think it's, I think, I mean, I, I would happily, you know, pay to use.
Speaker: I, you know, I do, obviously I have the,
Speaker: the Twitter blue or ex blue, whatever they're calling it now.
Speaker: I think the actual headline was just legacy media taking something out of context.
Speaker: It was an AI panel interview that he did about four or five days ago.
Speaker: And I believe there was a question during that around it, which Elon gave an answer and some journalists chopped it up.
Speaker: I saw a community notes.
Speaker: Yeah, they chopped it up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, ex-community notes clarified exactly what he meant by it, and it wasn't what the headline was.
Speaker: So, yeah, I don't think he's going to do that.
Speaker: I mean, I think that would... If you look at the... If you talk about it purely from a commercial business perspective, the pivot to authentication via...
Speaker: paid verification hasn't worked very well.
Speaker: It's a very small percentage of the operating income for X as opposed to advertisers, which is still trying to get back with the appointment of Linda as CEO, which I think is a great move to get that community involved more and take away the focus on attacking Musk as a CEO.
Speaker: He can focus on tech and products and get somebody else to do the
Speaker: the deals.
Speaker: So I'd happily pay for it if I needed to, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Speaker: I think, yeah, I think if they did that, I think it would be horrendous for, you know, from a
Speaker: financial perspective, just based on the perspective that a very, very, very small percentage of people have paid for the verification.
Speaker: Therefore, a very small percentage of people are probably going to pay to use the app.
Speaker: And then, oh my God, we might have something like Threads that takes over.
Speaker: I mean, can you imagine that?
Speaker: If that happened, then AGI can kill me now.
Speaker: Yeah, I was going to ask you about Threads, but I think you answered that earlier when you said you had somebody else handle that.
Speaker: I was all for it when it came out.
Speaker: I was like, cool, this is new, this is exciting.
Speaker: And then after I went on it, got a couple of followers, a couple of thousand followers from the other social platforms by plugging it a little bit.
Speaker: And then I realized that it's like a terrible version of Twitter.
Speaker: It's what happens when you rush to get a product out there, which I'm okay for doing for an MVP.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: On one degree, it was the most successful social media launch in history.
Speaker: But then on the same degree, it's the biggest failure in history because now the DAU is a nothing compared to what they used to be when it launched, right, in that first week.
Speaker: So I think props to Mark for going about it.
Speaker: And I think Mark's done amazing with his PR over the past year to rebrand himself.
Speaker: But yeah, it's just like a weak version of X.
Speaker: right now at the time of this recording.
Speaker: I hope it turns around because the more platforms are better.
Speaker: I want to, you know, spread my content to the most people possible.
Speaker: But right now it sucks and X is just infinitely better in every capacity.
Speaker: Yeah, it's definitely not great.
Speaker: I tend to try to avoid anything Facebook related, mainly because... Yeah, I haven't signed into Facebook in years, man.
Speaker: It's terrible, right?
Speaker: I know that most of these big platforms, they gather your data, they sell your data.
Speaker: you know but facebook tends to be a bit more egregious than others in my own personal opinion so i tend to try to avoid anything facebook related um which is hard they power a big chunk of the of the internet man i mean i uh it is difficult it's the same with trying to get away from google you know it's it's it's not easy i have some friends that are very anti-google and they jump through hoops to try to not use it at all you know um
Speaker: Which is, you know, which is fine.
Speaker: I don't, you know, I don't blame them.
Speaker: But it's, it's not an easy thing to kind of get away from.
Speaker: Just, you know, from the sheer size of Google.
Speaker: And all the.
Speaker: Everything, right?
Speaker: I think one thing that Google has been able to do.
Speaker: very, very well from a branding perspective is they make almost all their money in ads from search.
Speaker: Was it DoubleClick, the acquisition, when they bought the tech behind the ad tracking software?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: I think that's what that was.
Speaker: I think it was probably, I mean, it's probably, I don't know for certain, but I predict it's probably the most successful acquisition in history than buying the DoubleClick guys.
Speaker: But they make all the money basically from that in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker: And then they have everything else from maps to...
Speaker: you know, docks to, you know, barred and everything else in between, right?
Speaker: And I think that part of the reason why Google's just got so many different projects is so they can say, look, we're a tech company.
Speaker: We don't do, we're not a search company.
Speaker: No, we do self-driving cars and we send hot air balloons into space to give people Wi-Fi.
Speaker: We do all these things.
Speaker: And then that way, if a government goes after them from a monopoly perspective,
Speaker: They can look, we're 2% of the tech ecosystem.
Speaker: We're not a monopoly.
Speaker: When in reality, when it comes to search, you know, you don't even say search it, you say Google it, right?
Speaker: So they have got a monopoly from that perspective.
Speaker: Should there be some government intervention to break that up?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not a big fan of governments getting involved in companies.
Speaker: But
Speaker: it's certainly a question right and I think it is a question to be asked just given their dominance on that field and then what they can do to silence competitors and they do.
Speaker: I watched a good documentary probably like I don't know like a year ago now it was about the people that created Google Earth, Google Maps and Google's ability just to steal the technology and
Speaker: you know, and a great, great story kind of showing what happened.
Speaker: And yeah, and it's, you know, Google's don't be evil motto, which they originally started with.
Speaker: I don't think that applies anymore.
Speaker: I think they actually got rid of that too.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean, they got rid of it unofficially a long time before it was official.
Speaker: But, you know, mad, mad respect to, you know, Larry and Sergey and Eric and, you know, Sundar and everyone, obviously, you know, it's amazing.
Speaker: It's not my favorite tech company, but, you know, obviously incredible what they've been able to build.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: No, I completely agree with that.
Speaker: Um, so I, I know we're, we're getting close to an hour.
Speaker: I don't know how much, um, much time you have left, but, um, you probably need to get back to your family.
Speaker: I, I, there's no hard stop, but yeah, any, any in the next sort of 20 minutes would be awesome.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Um, oh, so have you looked into blue sky?
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Uh, so that's kind of, um, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so I got a beta invite from Jay, their CEO, when they launched and was able to try it out.
Speaker: And then Peter Wang, who I mentioned I had on the podcast earlier, he's one of their advisors.
Speaker: I think he might be on the board, actually.
Speaker: So, yeah, I've used it.
Speaker: I understand the tech and understand the protocols and the systems behind it.
Speaker: And I recently advised a competitor to Blue Sky,
Speaker: when they were trying to get some funding.
Speaker: And I didn't join their board, but we talked about it.
Speaker: I think it's an interesting idea, but it hasn't worked in the same way that
Speaker: you know, something like X has just in terms of the users.
Speaker: I've seen so many of these from like Mastodon to Blue Sky and, you know, you name it, Post.
Speaker: I mean, there's been so many of them.
Speaker: And I just don't think they're going to work unless there's some super viral factor.
Speaker: Like saying we're not Twitter is not enough.
Speaker: And that was their...
Speaker: their thing basically blue sky were a little bit different with the fact that it's decentralized but but so is freds i mean freds kind of fred freds has got they're going to call it the freddy verse soon and and they're i don't know i don't know if this is um but i've been speaking to people i know who work there and work at instagram and
Speaker: I've got a lot of friends who were super high up at Instagram and then they did this massive layoff in London.
Speaker: And a lot of angry, disgruntled people kind of told me a lot of things which they probably shouldn't have, which one of them is the future of Fred.
Speaker: But yeah, they're going to be going down that route as well, going after like,
Speaker: blue sky i think it's an interesting idea i think 99.9 of people don't care that that it's um you know like decentralized but um i think it's interesting take i don't know if x can really do that like um it's just a bit hard now given that
Speaker: I kind of don't think they really need to.
Speaker: I mean, if the whole point of X is to be kind of the, not the marketplace, but kind of like the town square, which it always kind of has been, I don't think decentralization actually helps that, you know.
Speaker: It doesn't help to be the town square when your town square is kind of split up into a whole bunch of other little squares.
Speaker: You don't need to decentralize everything, right?
Speaker: You don't need to put everything on the blockchain, for example.
Speaker: And everyone's like, oh, put Twitter on the blockchain.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great strap line.
Speaker: It sounds cool, but does it need to be?
Speaker: I mean, just because it seems like with a lot of that stuff, whether it's decentralization, blockchain, whatever, it very much seems like it's a hammer looking for a nail rather than, you know, does it...
Speaker: It's a solution.
Speaker: It is a solution, but it's not the solution to every problem.
Speaker: A lot of the time there isn't even a problem there.
Speaker: It's just like kind of trying to create a problem so it can solve it.
Speaker: Yeah, it kind of smells like Web3 a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: just because it's, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know a whole lot about the Web3 space.
Speaker: So, yeah, I admit I'm ignorant on that.
Speaker: But it just seems like almost like a trend versus a, you know, like it's trendy to let's be, let's be,
Speaker: let's be decentralized instead of it actually solving an issue.
Speaker: Well, we're seeing the same thing with AI right now.
Speaker: I mean, everyone is rebranding as an AI platform, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's AI everything.
Speaker: Every time I turn around this, there's another website with.AI at the end and I just have to roll my eyes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think most of the big innovations from AI are probably not going to come from a coffee shop rebranding themselves as an AI powered coffee shop, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: you know, similar to, to, to the decentralization argument, like, does it need to, um, be an AI platform?
Speaker: Um, if it does amazing, you know, great, but, but does it like, and in the vast majority of situations, the answer is probably no.
Speaker: So it's that question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Agreed.
Speaker: Well, thanks, Elfie.
Speaker: I appreciate you coming on, man.
Speaker: Um, I'll, I'll let you go.
Speaker: Uh, you have anything.
Speaker: No, no, I appreciate you.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: having me on your pod.
Speaker: If people enjoy that and I guess want to learn more on my podcast, I interview... I'll be linking your podcast.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We post weekly and interview the world's greatest technical leaders across everything from AI to the metaverse to blockchain and beyond.
Speaker: So if you want to learn about the future, if you want to get advice and ideas and inspiration and insights from the people that are kind of making...
Speaker: the news happen, then check us out.
Speaker: And if you enjoy, feel free to follow along, subscribe, et cetera, et cetera, whatever the word is on the platform of your choice.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thanks, Drew.
Speaker: Cheers.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to this episode of Citizen Coder Podcast.
Speaker: You can find links to anything we covered in the show notes.
Speaker: If you'd like to sponsor the show, you can reach out to me at info at citizencodercast.com or hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Speaker: Thanks, and as always, I'll see you next time.
