Challenge: Don’t Mention AI

Summary

After fielding internal pleas from their team to talk about literally anything else, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade attempt a 20-minute “no AI” experiment on the Aboard Podcast. They mostly succeed. Rich opens with Jony Ive’s new Ferrari design — an electric, powder-blue, “upside-down bathtub” shape that has set off a wave of meme outrage from the brand’s traditional sports-car base. From there they spiral into the real story of the show: online sports gambling. Rich, who watches the Yankees on the Gotham Sports app, describes a screen that’s two-thirds yes/no betting prompts and one-third actual game. They argue that America rolled out gambling “like blockchain” — quietly, with no public debate — and the country now needs a moment of bravery to put it back in the box.

Paul follows with two parenting-driven riffs. First, he asked an LLM to recommend “smart shows” for his pre-teen daughter and realized the AI was rummaging through the same Netflix algorithm she already swims in: a narrow, sealed cultural smoothie where everyone gets the same dozen shows. He uses this to argue that America used to be much, much weirder — Oneida communities, Shakers, Slayer shirts under church suits, Megadeth recommendations in junior high — and that escaping the feed is the actual hard work of culture now. Then he pivots to The Maintainers (themaintainers.org), a community focused on repair and longevity over disposability, prompted by his own daughter learning to sew with his wife. Rich shares his own attempts to learn lead-free soldering to fix a busted headphone jack on a synthesizer.

They close on optimism: the Virtual OS Museum (a 150-gigabyte torrent of 570 operating systems, curated by Andrew Warkentin) as Christmas for retrocomputing nerds; the relaunched Commodore 64 his friend just ordered; and a defense of the open web — “anybody can go publish any web page they want any time. They never took that away from you.” Paul notes the audience boos at commencement speeches that tell graduates to “get ready for AI” and reads that defiance as healthy. Rich asks listeners to write in about something they’re doing that doesn’t involve a prompt.

Highlights

”It’s banana cakes how much we talk about it”

“It is the most interesting thing that’s happened, but this sort of… it’s banana cakes how much we talk about it.” — Paul Ford, 2:06

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Jony Ive’s “upside-down bathtub” Ferrari

“This vehicle, it looks very… looks like an upside down bathtub.” — Paul Ford, 3:00

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Sports gambling: “the handmaiden of the internet”

“My God, does gambling look like social decline? And it is really—it is the handmaiden of the internet. It just feels to me like a society that can’t get it together is doing—and I’ll tell you why, it’s because we didn’t just introduce this, we rolled this out like blockchain.” — Paul Ford, 8:29

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”Two-thirds of the Gotham app is betting prompts”

“On the Gotham app, 1/3 is the screen, is the game. 2/3 are these yes/no options so I can bet.” — Rich Ziade, 6:00

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A prerequisite for myopia: see very little of the world

“We have everything. We have access to everything… And yet the world that has been put in front of them is actually incredibly narrow… A prerequisite for us to dig in and have one view and a very myopic view of the world is that you see very little of the world.” — Paul Ford, 13:28

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A Slayer shirt under a Presbyterian suit

“I wore a Slayer shirt underneath my suit when I got brought into the Presbyterian church when I was 15. I just wanted to be a paradox.” — Paul Ford, 18:39

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A library of books vs. a session with an LLM

“This office is filled with shelves of books because each one of these represents years and years of human effort from people who are trying to organize and make sense of the world and I swear to God it’s just as valuable as a session with an LLM.” — Paul Ford, 25:22

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The open web is still here

“Society is a mess, but the actual core of the web means that anybody can go publish any web page they want any time. You really can. They never took that away from you.” — Paul Ford, 29:34

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Key Points

• Setup: 20 minutes without saying AI (0:09) - Paul says the team is sick of AI talk; they’ll try to discuss tech without it.
• Is AI worth $6 trillion? (1:55) - Paul muses on the price tag; Rich: “above my pay grade.”
• Ferrari designed by Jony Ive (3:08) - The new powder-blue Ferrari looks like an enamel cooking pot; Italians are reportedly furious.
• LoveFrom and the Sam Altman connection (4:30) - Paul ties Ive’s design firm to the OpenAI partnership.
• Rich’s first topic: online sports gambling (5:09) - “It’s not a piece of news, it’s a piece of life.”
• The Gotham Sports app math (6:00) - Two-thirds of the screen is yes/no betting prompts; one-third is the actual Yankees game.
• $200 sign-up credit for new gamblers (6:29) - Apps front-load the dopamine with free credit.
• America was extremely anti-gambling (7:01) - Paul: outside Vegas/Reno/Atlantic City, you literally could not gamble without breaking the law.
• Native American casinos as “step one” (7:49) - Reservation casinos opened the door; FanDuel ads on TV are the endgame.
• The “rolled it out like blockchain” framing (8:29) - Gambling deployment was a quiet societal shrug.
• Teen gambling crisis (10:52) - Paul: “there’s like teen suicide because they get underwater gambling.”
• Bet365 ads on Premier League (10:38) - Rich notes this is global, not just American.
• Climate is the bigger story still being ignored (11:32) - Paul: people don’t want him on their podcast to talk about climate and tech.
• The Netflix algorithm experiment (12:32) - Paul asked an LLM to recommend “smart shows” for his daughter; it returned the same algorithmic narrow set she already watches.
• America used to be a lot weirder (15:45) - Oneida community, Roycrofters, Shakers, intentional communities, free love.
• Rebellion as a path through the feed (18:00) - Rich’s parents thought Led Zeppelin IV was satanic; that friction is how you find weird stuff.
• The Maintainers (themaintainers.org) (20:48) - Paul plugs the maintenance-and-repair community and their PDF study guide.
• Star Wars movie consumption math (21:33) - $90 tickets, $60 treats, a soda you could swim in — Paul’s shame about disposable consumption.
• Lead-free solder is its own discipline (23:25) - Rich is learning to fix the headphone jack on his synthesizer.
• Books as a technology (24:44) - Paul defends reading books from people you might disagree with; argues it’s as valuable as an LLM session.
• Booing at commencement speeches (26:04) - When speakers say “you’ve got to be ready for AI, get that job,” audiences boo. Paul calls that healthy.
• The Virtual OS Museum (27:20) - Andrew Warkentin’s curated torrent of 1,700 operating systems (250 platforms, 570 OSes); 150 GB of computing history.
• Commodore 64 relaunch (28:55) - Paul’s friend just ordered the modern reissue.
• Books, pianos, and computers without internet (29:12) - Paul: “going away and reading a book or looking at stuff and using a computer to organize some thoughts without a whole internet attached.”
• The web isn’t dying (29:35) - Anybody can still publish a web page; audience economics changed, but the substrate didn’t.
• LLMs can’t teach piano (30:43) - Paul: “I can’t get an LLM to do it for me… I need my teacher and he’s Argentinean and he’s just a little sad-eyed.”

Mentions

Companies

• Ferrari (3:05) - Subject of design controversy over its new Jony Ive-designed EV.
• LoveFrom (4:39) - Jony Ive’s design firm, partnered with OpenAI.
• OpenAI (4:40) - Rich speculates LoveFrom got sold to OpenAI.
• Apple (implicit via Mac Studio/Mac mini, 0:58) - Paul’s daily-driver Mac Studio is four years old and still going.
• Netflix (12:07) - Source of the algorithmic monoculture Paul ran into with his daughter.
• Gotham Sports (5:44) - The Yankees streaming app whose UI is mostly betting prompts.
• FanDuel (7:21) - The face of normalized sports gambling in the US.
• Bet365 (10:38) - UK gambling brand on Premier League ads.
• Le Creuset (2:44) - The cookware brand whose enamel pots the new Ferrari resembles.
• Aboard (29:47) - Paul and Rich’s company; no real pitch this episode.
• Commodore (5:28) - The Commodore 64 is being relaunched.

Products & Technologies

• The Maintainers / themaintainers.org (20:48) - Community and PDF study guide focused on repair, maintenance, and longevity.
• Virtual OS Museum (27:46) - 150 GB torrent curated by Andrew Warkentin containing ~1,700 operating systems.
• Commodore 64 (28:55) - Modern relaunch of the 1980s home computer, with some “modern niceties.”
• Mac Studio (1:03) - Paul’s four-year-old workstation.
• Lisa OS / NeXTSTEP / Human68k / AT&T Unix PC System V (28:25) - Operating systems Paul lists from the Virtual OS Museum.
• The Maintainer’s Study Guide (PDF) (21:00) - The downloadable book that goes with The Maintainers.

People

• Jony Ive (3:08) - Designed the new Ferrari that everyone is dunking on.
• Sam Altman (4:30) - Mentioned as Jony Ive’s OpenAI partner.
• Barbra Streisand (14:44) - Performed “Guilty” with Barry Gibb; Paul played the duet for his daughter.
• Barry Gibb (14:44) - The other half of the “Guilty” duet.
• Slayer / Megadeth / Rush / Led Zeppelin (18:39) - The rebellion-music canon of Paul and Rich’s youth.
• The Pope (0:46) - Mentioned as putting out encyclicals about AI.
• Andrew Warkentin (27:20) - OS emulator developer and OS historian who curated the Virtual OS Museum.
• Paul Ford (0:00) - Co-host, Aboard co-founder.
• Rich Ziade (0:02) - Co-host, Aboard co-founder.

Surprising Quotes

“Ferrari is for the immensely successful, two buttons open entrepreneur, t-shirt, shirt buttons open entrepreneur with the small wee-wee. That’s the point of Ferrari. This is not going to help that at all.” — Rich Ziade, 3:53

“When you’re 15, whether you’re looking at porn or you’re looking to gamble, you can lie and it’s not hard and… it’s in your pocket. Unlike alcohol, which still has some barriers, you have to go get it, it’s a physical thing.” — Rich Ziade, 9:30

“My kids feel like they are tied to a chair and being fed a very narrow, like, smoothie of stuff that is all the same.” — Rich Ziade, 19:39

“I’m a larger man, I’ve made terrible regretful decisions in my life, but I just, I’ve never felt a hotter shame. Like, I’m going to go see a Yoda puppet and then I’m going to drink out of this thing made from dinosaur skulls. I’m going to drink a gallon of diet soda out of it so that I feel virtuous.” — Paul Ford, 21:54

“It’s very healthy for people in their 20s and or before who grown up with this stuff to look at you and grown up with sports betting to look at you and me and go what the hell dudes? What the hell? How’d you why is it like this? How could you let this happen?” — Paul Ford, 26:04

“I can’t get an LLM to do it for me. I really can’t. And I’ve tried to get LLMs to help me with my piano playing. They’re just not good at it.” — Paul Ford, 30:43

Transcript

Paul Ford: 0:00 Hi I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: 0:02 And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul Ford: 0:03 And this is the Aboard podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, except today we’re going to switch it up Richard.

Rich Ziade: 0:08 Oh yeah?

Paul Ford: 0:09 Yeah. Everyone in the company is like could you guys talk about literally anything else. Are you still capable of talking about the tech industry without AI?

Rich Ziade: 0:17 That’s fair.

Paul Ford: 0:18 And I think we should try. I think we should. Let’s do 20 minutes.

Rich Ziade: 0:23 Let’s do it.

Paul Ford: 0:42 Okay, so lot going on in the world of AI today.

Rich Ziade: 0:44 Ah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Paul Ford: 0:46 And you got the Pope putting out encyclicals, people are saying like hey, maybe it’s not that big a deal, there’ll be lots of work and jobs. Whatever. Let’s imagine a post-AI world. We’re not talking about it all the time. Okay? What would it be like?

Rich Ziade: 0:58 You’d be a Mac mini in the post-AI world. Just a… you’d be on my desk.

Paul Ford: 1:03 I would like to be a Mac Studio. Those are great. I have one at home. The big metal one? It’s like three or four years old now. No, no, those are… they’re not actually just like sort of a double stacked mini. It’s like the quarter-pounder version of… they’re awesome though. They’re very powerful. Mine’s like four years old now and I got… I got nothing to complain about. I know. You’ll never need another computer. Well that’s not what this is about, is it?

Rich Ziade: 1:25 What is this about? This is about how we are going to have terrible things happening to us because of technology that is not AI.

Paul Ford: 1:38 Oh, that’s great. So we’re going to… we’re going to go from the harms of AI to the harms of everything else. Yes. I think that’s actually important to do because I… I definitely feel that we’re in an era where, first of all, you and I from the beginning have been saying AI is a technology that will kind of end up as infrastructure in the tech industry.

Rich Ziade: 1:53 Yes.

Paul Ford: 1:55 Is it worth $6 trillion?

Rich Ziade: 2:00 That’s above my pay grade.

Paul Ford: 2:01 Literally above my pay grade.

Rich Ziade: 2:02 Unless you want to pay me more.

Paul Ford: 2:04 They’re not going to do that.

Rich Ziade: 2:05 Fine.

Paul Ford: 2:06 But this is… so here we are, right? We’re in this world and it’s like look, it is the most interesting thing that’s happened, but this sort of… it’s banana cakes how much we talk about it. So what do you… I’ll tell you what I got. Let me… let me start with a light one.

Rich Ziade: 2:18 All right. Little… little appetizer. Go.

Paul Ford: 2:21 Okay. I’m going to show you a picture. Now, we’re on a podcast. I’m going to show you a picture and I want you to tell me who made this.

Rich Ziade: 2:31 Okay. That is… it’s got electric vibes. It’s an electric vehicle made by… Oral-B. The toothbrush people.

Paul Ford: 2:44 No. You know what it looks like? Who makes those really nice pots? Creuset. Creuset. Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 2:50 They’re real… if you’re not… if you’re listening only audio, this is an extremely smooth… you can’t cut your finger on the edges of…

Paul Ford: 3:00 This vehicle, it looks very… looks like an upside down bathtub.

Rich Ziade: 3:03 Or like an enamel cooking pot.

Paul Ford: 3:05 Yeah, that’s the new Ferrari.

Rich Ziade: 3:07 No.

Paul Ford: 3:08 Yes, that is a Ferrari and I encourage everyone to go look at it because Jony Ive designed it.

Rich Ziade: 3:15 Let me imitate the Italians when he showed them this. Ready? Let’s just go for broke then. Let’s lose all of it. Johnny, what about the penis?

Paul Ford: 3:25 No. I’m selling this business. The um, that is actually what you just said which we’re not going to cut out. I’ll tell you why because it absolutely summarizes all the online discourse about this. Like literally everyone is like there are just AI generated memes of guys with cappuccino sobbing.

Rich Ziade: 3:53 No! This is not Ferrari! Ferrari is for the immensely successful, two buttons open entrepreneur, t-shirt, shirt buttons open entrepreneur with the small wee-wee. That’s the point of Ferrari. This is not going to help that at all.

Paul Ford: 4:11 No, that’s the thing. And so, like, so here we are in a world… I mean, so what I’m really glad about…

Rich Ziade: 4:17 This is for groceries. You don’t get groceries with your Ferrari.

Paul Ford: 4:21 It’s very satisfying to watch this. I’m not going to lie. Like this, you got Ferrari and then they got Jony Ive and everything. Also powder blue as the prototype?

Rich Ziade: 4:29 Yeah, yeah.

Paul Ford: 4:30 And what else don’t forget like Jony Ive is also over there with Sam Altman and and the you know the name of Ive’s company?

Rich Ziade: 4:37 It’s like LoveTo?

Paul Ford: 4:39 LoveFrom.

Rich Ziade: 4:40 LoveFrom. Yeah. And that is I’ll tell you that nothing makes me hear Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival in my head more than just just… they sell it? I think LoveFrom got sold to somebody or maybe AI OpenAI bought it.

Paul Ford: 4:58 I think we have to refuse to care. We just have to not care. We’re going to move on.

Rich Ziade: 5:01 I don’t know, it only gets less tragic from here. Okay, so I have some things I want to talk through.

Paul Ford: 5:05 We’ve got things that are… nothing could be worse than this Ferrari. What do you got? I’ll look it up here on the internet.

Rich Ziade: 5:09 All right. Well, this you don’t even have to look it up. Okay. It’s not a piece of news. Okay. It’s a piece of life. Okay. And it’s everywhere now. Piece of life.

Paul Ford: 5:16 Piece of life.

Rich Ziade: 5:17 I’m a Yankee fan.

Paul Ford: 5:18 Boy are you. And you know and this this is like you saying you’re lawyer. You’re like I’m a Yankee fan but I’m also I’ve been a Yankee fan from when they really really sucked.

Rich Ziade: 5:28 I do say that a lot. There’s like three things that make you really happy: good Lebanese food and your family, but well we’ll put that aside. The Yankees, and Commodore 64 computers.

Paul Ford: 5:40 I mean old computers make me happy. It’s nostalgic to me.

Rich Ziade: 5:43 I get it.

Paul Ford: 5:44 And I’m watching on Gotham Sports which is this like streaming app for the Brooklyn Nets, the Yankees, and some other stuff. I think they do Liberty basketball games, the women’s basketball. And if you use the app, every pitch…

Rich Ziade: 6:00 It’s like, do you want to bet on if Grisham takes a timeout? Do you want to bet on if the pitcher makes it through the inning? There’s a 10% chance that this guy is going to hit a home run. Do you want to bet on that? And I kid you not, no joke, on the Gotham app, 1/3 is the screen, is the game. 2/3 are these yes/no options so I can bet.

Paul Ford: 6:28 Yep.

Rich Ziade: 6:29 And this has been talked about, but it’s worth talking about because I think this is one of the most horrible uses of everything, both culture and technology, that exists. It is depressing. It is the worst form of dopamine hit you can chase. I think online sports gambling—and I have a history with gamble—like my family’s been through bad experiences because of compulsive gambling—and for young people to have access to this stuff, and they give you 200 bucks by the way, Paul, to get going. They give you $200 of credit.

Paul Ford: 7:01 I think we gotta take a step back here, right? And the step back is that when you and I grew up, America was extremely anti-gambling, right? And so there were like—

Rich Ziade: 7:14 It was the mob!

Paul Ford: 7:15 Yes. You actually essentially—

Rich Ziade: 7:16 You called a bookie.

Paul Ford: 7:17 Unless you went to Vegas, or Reno, or Atlantic City. But it was like, unless you went to one of these pockets, there were hard laws against gambling. And there were occasional, you know, there’s the Aqueduct Raceway, etc., etc. There’s always lots of footnotes, but in general, on a day-to-day basis, you could not gamble easily in America without actually breaking the law unless you lived in one of those places.

Rich Ziade: 7:41 You couldn’t even—for certain racetracks, like horse racetracks, you couldn’t go in if you were a certain age. You had to be a certain age to get in.

Paul Ford: 7:49 That’s right. And then the Native American reservations started to open up casinos. So that was like sort of step one. But this is an unprecedented moment where you just see FanDuel all day long. All day. And I gotta say, there are a few things—I tend not to be like, I try not to be kind of Pollyanna-ish about it, but I’m like, I tend to believe that, you know, progress is possible and so on. And I actually think that things people freak out about, like—I think our current political situation is complicated, but probably more representative of who we are as a nation than we even want to admit.

Rich Ziade: 8:29 Yep.

Paul Ford: 8:29 But my God, does gambling look like social decline? And it is really—it is the handmaiden of the internet. It just feels to me like a society that can’t get it together is doing—and I’ll tell you why, it’s because we didn’t just introduce this, we rolled this out like blockchain. It was just sort of like, “Hey guys, there’s gambling everywhere now. Is that cool? There’s online poker. Hey, do teens want to actually really engage like— Oh, hey, your high school-aged son is now 24—” 4,000 dollars in debt.

Rich Ziade: 9:02 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 9:03 Right? And we just kind of unlocked that as a society and honestly shrugged.

Rich Ziade: 9:07 Yeah, it’s out there. And not only is it out there, it’s not out there and sort of boxed in and cordoned off like you’re describing what the past used to look like, which is like you’d have to go to a casino.

Paul Ford: 9:16 It’s on your phone.

Rich Ziade: 9:17 It’s not just on your phone. It’s not just that you can bet on whether the Yankees win or lose. It’s that there are these microtransactions that have seeped into the whole experience.

Paul Ford: 9:27 It’s all the Candy Crush dopamine stuff.

Rich Ziade: 9:30 It’s all that dopamine stuff. And it’s really the conditioning of it, I think, is what is most disturbing. And the truth is, you know, when you’re 15, whether you’re looking at porn or you’re looking to gamble, you can lie and it’s not hard and you can like, it’s in your pocket. Unlike alcohol, which still has some barriers, you have to go get it, it’s a physical thing. Whereas here, everybody is kind of bullshitting on their phones and then running into this and playing. And it is a disease for certain people. Certain people who don’t have the mechanisms and don’t have the like wherewithal to know how to navigate out. Most won’t get hooked. Some will get hooked and it will ruin the house. Like that is just life. And it’s just gross. And you’re right. I think you’re taking a macro picture of it and I think it’s awful. And I don’t know how this goes back in a box. Like it’s got crypto smeared all over it and I just think it’s all gross.

Paul Ford: 10:31 My friend, this country has is going to have to have some moments of bravery. Like it’s… it’s going to have to go back in the box.

Rich Ziade: 10:38 But I will say, by the way, this is not just America. There’s Bet365. I see these ads on Premier League games in the UK.

Paul Ford: 10:46 This is global.

Rich Ziade: 10:47 It is kind of everywhere and it’s become kind of normal and that’s I think what’s disturbing.

Paul Ford: 10:52 That’s… that’s what spooks me. It just kind of showed up. It just scares the hell out of me because you and I both have young sons. And those… there’s like teen suicide because they get underwater gambling. Like it’s… it’s just madness. And and the fact is like, we’re in this kind of rolling zone of crisis and things like this, like blockchain and… this kind of stuff and and gambling, somehow I think because the folks in charge right now are just like, “No, no, it’s okay, it’s okay, just leave it alone.” We’re letting it roll. And I think the hangover on this is going to be a real rough one. It’s a funny thing, I know we’re not talking about AI but like AI as a structure is being debated. Oh my god, we might be pissed about it.

Rich Ziade: 11:30 There’s no conversation about this.

Paul Ford: 11:32 This is just… we’re just kind of letting this go along with other… for me the big one frankly remains climate, which is just kind of hanging out. Just hanging because we’re like, “Oh, we got other stuff to deal with” and it’s like, “Really?”

Rich Ziade: 11:42 There’s more in our faces right now, right?

Paul Ford: 11:44 Yeah! And I’m still working on it, but I’ll tell you, people don’t want me to come talk on their podcast about climate and tech. They want to talk about AI. Anyway, onward. What else you got? What’s… is that… that’s it? That’s your… that’s your good news for the week?

Rich Ziade: 11:54 Well, I mean the goal here is to make AI look like just absolute pristine on the other side of this podcast. So here we go.

Paul Ford: 12:00 My number two is a thought I had and it’s not a piece of news. It’s an observation.

Rich Ziade: 12:05 Okay.

Paul Ford: 12:07 And that is my kids were looking for something to watch on Netflix this weekend. Right?

Rich Ziade: 12:12 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 12:14 And for whatever reason, I forget, we just didn’t weren’t tidy about it. We used the same account.

Rich Ziade: 12:19 Yeah, sure.

Paul Ford: 12:21 So I’m there’s like, you know, pre-teen coming of age shows and…

Rich Ziade: 12:25 World War Two documentaries.

Paul Ford: 12:26 My World War Two documentaries and all this other shit, right? So it’s all in the same thing.

Rich Ziade: 12:29 Rommel’s regret.

Paul Ford: 12:32 And then I was like, you know what? I’m gonna bring AI in just for a minute. I was like, my daughter’s smart. She’s a pre-teen. Suggest some smart shows or movies for her to watch, right?

Rich Ziade: 12:43 That’s fine.

Paul Ford: 12:44 And it came up with a list I’d never seen before. I don’t know what she watches. I know there’s like there’s restrictions on age, you know, shows that are rated for her age. And I went through like a dozen names and she knew them all.

Rich Ziade: 12:58 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 12:59 And what I realized was the same algorithms that AI is rummaging through are the algorithms that fed her these shows, right? And they’re all they all look exactly the same.

Rich Ziade: 13:11 All the shows.

Paul Ford: 13:11 All the shows. And the observation that I walked away with and I’m seeing this with my own kids and this is a much more subtle thing is we have everything. We have access to everything, right?

Rich Ziade: 13:26 Mhm.

Paul Ford: 13:28 And yet the world that has been put in front of them is actually incredibly narrow. And when I think about oh social media’s dividing us, social media’s putting us at each other’s throats. What it left me thinking was that a prerequisite for us to dig in and have one view and a very myopic view of the world is that you see very little of the world.

Rich Ziade: 13:58 Correct.

Paul Ford: 13:59 And I feel like we are products of systems that narrow our world by the time we’re six years old, seven years old and it doesn’t really get much better. And it’s the same thing. And I’m sure like I’m sure that our variety of thinking, our willingness to have conversations with each other and if we run into someone who’s from the South and loves country music, you don’t look at them weird is our resistance to that is a product of just the way we consume things today, right?

Rich Ziade: 14:27 This is a little sounding a little abstract but…

Paul Ford: 14:30 I actually think because probably because I have kids and maybe that’s the theme here for the first couple of these. I want my kids to see some weird shit. I want them to experience different things. I want them to understand I showed don’t judge me. My daughter loves to sing and I said you really need to see this music video and I pulled up the duet Guilty by Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb.

Rich Ziade: 14:49 You don’t have to ever apologize for that.

Paul Ford: 14:55 It’s like this soft disco duet that has such a cool

Rich Ziade: 15:00 groove, and my daughter was like transfixed. First off, she’d never heard Barbara Streisand. So she’s like—

Paul Ford: 15:07 I’m sorry, I was starting to play it, but we’re not going to be able to get the rights to Guilty.

Rich Ziade: 15:12 Boy, you sure won’t. No, keep going. By the way, I found out Barbara Streisand has her own lighting person, no matter where she is.

Paul Ford: 15:17 She deserves that. She worked hard and she grew up in Flatbush.

Rich Ziade: 15:20 But my daughter’s reaction was so great because she was like, first off, she’d never heard a voice like that that was that adept and amazing. And she’s like, ‘the groove is kind of funky.’ And it is! It’s kind of this weird kind of Telecaster guitar from the disco era or whatever. And I was just happy that I’d show—I took her off the road for a minute, just a minute.

Paul Ford: 15:43 Let me riff for a minute.

Rich Ziade: 15:45 Go.

Paul Ford: 15:45 America used to be a lot weirder. It was flat-out weirder because we didn’t—so first of all, we had TV as a monoculture.

Rich Ziade: 15:52 Yes.

Paul Ford: 15:53 And then after that, now we have the internet. The internet was supposed to flower into like a million different cultures, but actually didn’t turn out that way. And I think the thesis that I have is that we’re essentially, we kind of tune the radio to get the news. And so the news for a couple years was: you have to be very aware of this set of political concerns all the time and you should really only talk about those things.

Rich Ziade: 16:17 Well, the news is breaking news. It’s hot all the time.

Paul Ford: 16:19 And it’s an instant endless feed and we are just dopamine-focused creatures. And it’s how we get safety. We’re like, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ And the news is like, ‘I’ll tell you what’s going on because you’re going to want to know this because if you don’t know this, you’re going to get cancer.’ Right? Like, it’s just over and over. Now I want you to go back in time with me. Like, pre-World War I.

Rich Ziade: 16:41 I can’t go back that far.

Paul Ford: 16:43 We’re going back that far.

Rich Ziade: 16:44 Okay.

Paul Ford: 16:45 America is filled with little farm communities, very conservative, very religious, and also lots of weird alternative intentional communities out there. You got the Oneida community, and you got Roycrofters, and you got all these places, especially on the East Coast. You got free love, you got religion, you got all sorts of things. There’s books, and we are at—it’s a place of freedom and strangeness and I grew up—my grandfather used to talk about this stuff. Like, the Shakers were still alive. They didn’t just make furniture.

Rich Ziade: 17:22 Mm-hm.

Paul Ford: 17:22 And he would make a lot of really inappropriate jokes about the Shakers and how they—why they would shake. I don’t really have to, you know, it’s a family podcast.

Rich Ziade: 17:32 No, it’s all good.

Paul Ford: 17:32 And strangeness for us was very different. You go find a magazine, you go find a little something, you go to a library. We just had somebody in here and they just started talking about chicken sexing. We’re going to have them on the podcast, I don’t want to like—but it was so exciting to hear something that wasn’t like coming from a feed.

Rich Ziade: 17:42 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 17:42 And so I think that getting out of the feed is really hard.

Rich Ziade: 17:46 It’s really hard.

Paul Ford: 17:46 We’re trying to do it right now.

Rich Ziade: 17:47 It’s a struggle. It’s funny that you—here’s I think there is a theme here around—we’re both parents and we have kids that are kind of coming into this world and are being—paying attention to this world. Right, and that is rebellion. My parents, who are Lebanese immigrants, thought Led Zeppelin IV was absolutely satanic, like everyone did. Meanwhile, it was a nerdy medieval story, like, it wasn’t satanic.

Paul Ford: 18:16 Yeah, but when—when I was 15, I thought it was both, and I was really excited.

Rich Ziade: 18:22 Yes! No, but paths to rebellion, which is essentially kids venturing out and saying, ‘I’m going to go somewhere—I told you I was going to the library, but I’m actually going to the East Village, and it’s going to be weird, and I’m going to listen to weird music that you would never want me to listen to.’

Paul Ford: 18:37 Look, parents overreact this way—

Rich Ziade: 18:38 No, but it’s good!

Paul Ford: 18:39 I—it was South Street in Philly for me. I wore a Slayer shirt underneath my suit when I got brought into the Presbyterian church when I was 15. I just wanted to be a paradox.

Rich Ziade: 18:54 Yeah, yeah. And the truth is, they came out of social dynamics. Like, how are you going to find—find out about Slayer? I was pulled aside in junior high and told, ‘You need to listen to the new Megadeth. What are you doing?’ It was that, A, and B, it was something that—

Paul Ford: 19:13 I want to make sure that you don’t get to date for at least another five years. That’s what that kid said.

Rich Ziade: 19:21 Well, that was 2112. When Rush showed up, I had to wait a minute, right?

Paul Ford: 19:26 Our entire childhoods were people taking us aside and saying, ‘It’s very important that girls dislike you. I’m going to just give you a set of things to participate in.’

Rich Ziade: 19:33 It is… my kids… you know that scene at the end of A Clockwork Orange where they make him watch—

Paul Ford: 19:38 Yeah, yeah, they jam his eyes open.

Rich Ziade: 19:39 They jam his eyes open, they make him watch, I think it’s just violence… violent videos, and then all the while, they cause terrible pain in his stomach so he can associate… My kids feel like they are tied to a chair and being fed a very narrow, like, smoothie of stuff that is all the same. And I want them to venture out. I don’t know how to get them to, because they think I’m lame no matter what I suggest. I’m like, ‘Let me show you what I used to listen to.’

Paul Ford: 20:11 I’m going to take you out of it. I’m going to take you out of it. We’re going to stop talking about bleak and we’re going to talk about some fun.

Rich Ziade: 20:15 No, I got one more bleak one.

Paul Ford: 20:17 All right, get it done and then we’re going to go ahead.

Rich Ziade: 20:18 No, no, no, go ahead, take me out.

Paul Ford: 20:19 Okay, so this is going to be a two-part series, by the way. My… what did my daughter do with my wife on Sunday? They learned to sew together. Okay? Now my daughter is into clothes. She’s into thrift and vintage. She goes with her buddies and they go and shop. It’s very wholesome. Very—but it’s a very normal teen girl, like a little bit vain, a little bit of all of it, right? And it’s—I love her and she’s doing great, but she wants to take care of her stuff and she wants to know how to make stuff.

Rich Ziade: 20:46 Great.

Paul Ford: 20:48 That is where we’ve got to be doubling down. And so there’s a cool website I think everyone should check, not an AI website, it’s called The Maintainers, themaintainers.org. Okay? It’s got a mailing list. I’ve been following it for a bit. Okay. And so the Maintainers has among other things a book, a PDF, it’s called the Maintainer’s Study Guide. It’s very pretty.

Rich Ziade: 21:08 And it’s a little woo-woo. What is it?

Paul Ford: 21:11 The Maintainers is focused on maintenance, on—

Rich Ziade: 21:15 Anything?

Paul Ford: 21:16 Yes, that’s right. Don’t throw it away. How can you fix it? It could be a jet engine—

Rich Ziade: 21:20 This is for cheap people.

Paul Ford: 21:22 No, it’s for a world where you shouldn’t be throwing everything away. And I got to tell you, man, you walk down the street, it’s just, I mean, there’s so much plastic trash. There’s so much all trash. I went to see the new Star Wars movie yesterday with my family.

Rich Ziade: 21:36 Okay.

Paul Ford: 21:37 And it was sort of a treat. We haven’t been to a movie in a while and so I was like, yeah, yeah, okay, let’s get popcorn, we’ll get a soda, so on and so forth. So the movie is, it’s 90 bucks for the tickets, it’s 60 for the treats. And then you just have this bucket of popcorn and they gave me a soda that is—

Rich Ziade: 21:52 It’s wild, isn’t it?

Paul Ford: 21:54 —you could swim in it. And I mean, like, I’m a larger man, I’ve made terrible regretful decisions in my life, but I just, I’ve never felt a hotter shame. Like, I’m going to go see a Yoda puppet and then I’m going to drink out of this thing made from dinosaur skulls. I’m going to drink a gallon of diet soda out of it so that I feel virtuous.

Rich Ziade: 22:13 Oh my god.

Paul Ford: 22:14 And then you know how in the movie theater, like, you start by eating one piece of popcorn at a time, but then you kind of like, you start going like the crane? The crane comes down and you’re just picking—

Rich Ziade: 22:31 I don’t know how you eat popcorn, but go on.

Paul Ford: 22:34 And I mean, it’s just a disgusting scenario. And just, and then you’re greasy by the time the 48 minutes of previews are over.

Rich Ziade: 22:43 Your neck is greasy.

Paul Ford: 22:45 Yeah, yeah, and you can’t get to the movie. They just show you preview after preview, right?

Rich Ziade: 22:49 Oh, I know.

Paul Ford: 22:50 And I just felt this moment. I went home and I looked up the Maintainers because I knew about it. I was just like, I just need to think about things lasting and things not being disposable. And so, it’s, look, there’s a culture of this. There are guides, there are tools.

Rich Ziade: 23:07 Doing things is cool. Getting my kids to do things would be really cool.

Paul Ford: 23:13 I think you got to keep trying until you get it.

Rich Ziade: 23:16 Well, my daughter has the patience to do stuff. She stitches. She does—what’s it called? Stitch—

Paul Ford: 23:21 Sons are a different story. Sons are a different story. Sons take a little more time.

Rich Ziade: 23:25 They take a little more time. No, I’ll tell you what, I have this one synthesizer and it’s got the headphone jack is gone on it.

Paul Ford: 23:30 Okay.

Rich Ziade: 23:31 And I took it apart and I looked at it and I’m like, oof. And now I’ve been learning about how to solder, but it actually turns out it’s like a real lead-free solder requires a totally different approach than what you might dabble with in your electronics kit. So man, I am all in on this and I think about it a lot and I’m realizing I have to practice and rehearse before I can switch. You want to feel productive. It’s a $1 thing, but it’s a, it’s like a $1,500—it’s my piano that has like piano keys. So like, I got—

Paul Ford: 24:00 get good at maintaining my stuff because I really do feel we just end up in prison by our stuff. So the maintainers.org they’ve got and it’s a little bit of a philosophy and it’s a little bit about how to take care of the world. It’s good to feel like you’re being a little additive to the world, isn’t it? Well, I think what I’d say is like you know here’s the problem, right now we’re in this world and it’s what you it actually ties in what you’re saying. The everybody being so focused on one particular narrative that is making them feel comfortable and in control, which is what social media is about.

Rich Ziade: 24:32 Or angry all the time.

Paul Ford: 24:34 Both of those at once, right? That leads to this kind of monolithic and actually kind of consumery culture. And this applies to the left too.

Rich Ziade: 24:43 Of course.

Paul Ford: 24:44 Let me let me make an argument for books as a technology. Here’s the maintainers. The maintainers is probably, you know, I probably do a lot of things that the maintainers people wouldn’t necessarily love and they do some things that I kind of roll my eyes at. But that doesn’t mean I can’t go read the book. And I can’t internalize their worldview and I can’t have some empathy and some interest and then see what applies to me or not. And this is the simplest damn thing, but literally every single day you and your children and me are being told like whoa whoa don’t look over there. Don’t look over there.

Rich Ziade: 25:21 All the time.

Paul Ford: 25:22 All the time. This is one of the reasons this office is filled with shelves of books because each one of these represents years and years of human effort from people who are trying to organize and make sense of the world and I swear to God it’s just as valuable as a session with an LLM.

Rich Ziade: 25:31 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 25:32 Even though those are valuable too.

Rich Ziade: 25:35 Yes.

Paul Ford: 25:35 So I’m going to give you one more thing if you’re ready.

Rich Ziade: 25:38 Yeah, let me just to just share a thought here. I think there’s hope and I’ll tell you why I think there’s hope from we’ve gotten a couple of different dates we had a class in here a couple months ago that visited and they were very suspicious and skeptical about AI but more than anything else there was a defiance and a kind of a rebellion to them which is like I don’t like your status quo, right? And and that was promising to see that they didn’t want to just fall into a machine and just come out as sludge.

Paul Ford: 26:04 I gotta say as a as a AI… There’s a lot of booing right now by the way at commencement speeches when people go ‘you got to be ready for AI, get that job’. It’s very healthy for people in their 20s and or before who grown up with this stuff to look at you and grown up with sports betting to look at you and me and go what the hell dudes? What the hell? How’d you why is it like this? How could you let this happen?

Rich Ziade: 26:40 Yeah. They should.

Paul Ford: 26:47 They should. That’s totally fair. And God bless ‘em, right? I hope they eventually as their lives go on they will understand that we meant well too.

Rich Ziade: 26:51 Yeah, yeah.

Paul Ford: 26:51 But but it’s okay like this is not an optimal scenario. And this is why everybody is kind of assuming status quo I’m like no no a lot of stuff is going to break in the future. And we’re going to have to take care of it.

Rich Ziade: 26:57 Well they’re snapping out of it and they’re angry and that’s good.

Paul Ford: 27:00 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 27:00 What’s your closer here?

Paul Ford: 27:00 A lot of time and I’ve written a lot about this in my in my writing career about how to resurrect old computers, make them… we have a Commodore 64 from back in the 80s here in the office. You and I have used it. We’ve talked about… we like old machines. And because they represent history and they they represent ways of solving problems and they’re historically important and they’re essential. I love old computers. Computers before you could talk to them. Okay. And I have spent a lot

Rich Ziade: 27:19 Yes.

Paul Ford: 27:20 And someone, God bless, I don’t know who, I’m gonna read the about the curator. Okay. Andrew Warkentin. Warkentin is an OS emulator developer and OS historian. Created the Virtual OS Museum. Okay? And it has all of them. It’s a torrent. It’s like 150 gigabytes.

Rich Ziade: 27:46 Okay, so it’s not an actual museum where you can walk into?

Paul Ford: 27:49 No, it’s a giant blob of data and software.

Rich Ziade: 27:53 Wow.

Paul Ford: 27:54 That contains, count them, 1,700 operating systems. Back to the earliest ones where you would just flip little toggles up to like, you know, modern Windows and early Mac stuff.

Rich Ziade: 28:09 Whoa.

Paul Ford: 28:11 Yes. So this is Christmas. And it’s also a place to go in the computer… there was computer before today. And I think that’s important, right? And so this is a beautiful effort. 250 separate platforms, 570 distinct operating systems.

Rich Ziade: 28:25 Oh my god.

Paul Ford: 28:26 And we got everything. We got AT&T, AT&T Unix PC System V. We got things I’ve never heard of like Human68k.

Rich Ziade: 28:34 Sure.

Paul Ford: 28:35 And we got Lisa OS for the Mac, we got NeXTSTEP for the NeXT that became modern OS 9, all of it. All of it. Including like I said, the ones where you just hit the buttons.

Rich Ziade: 28:46 I think they also harken back to an era where computers were empowering and not just devices that pushed consumption, right?

Paul Ford: 28:55 I have a really good buddy, known him forever, and he just ordered the re-launch the Commodore 64.

Rich Ziade: 28:59 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 29:00 And you know, it’s got some modern niceties too, and fast, it’s a little faster and so and so forth. And he got it and he’s just loving it. And he’s type… he’s writing in it, he’s doing all sorts of stuff in it.

Rich Ziade: 29:11 Sure.

Paul Ford: 29:12 There is a lot to be said, like a lot to be said as a technology for going away and reading a book or looking at stuff and using a computer to organize some thoughts without a whole internet attached.

Rich Ziade: 29:24 You turned the whole podcast kind of optimistic.

Paul Ford: 29:28 I… here’s, you know, here’s my thing.

Rich Ziade: 29:30 What are you doing?

Paul Ford: 29:31 No, you know how everybody says the web is dying?

Rich Ziade: 29:34 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 29:35 It’s not. Society is a mess, but the actual core of the web means that anybody can go publish any web page they want any time. You really can. They never took that away from you.

Rich Ziade: 29:45 No, they didn’t.

Paul Ford: 29:46 Now they have siphoned off audience, they’ve thrown ads everywhere, they’ve made it economically not rewarding.

Rich Ziade: 29:52 But the actual thing you can do where you expression express something and put it out in the world.

Paul Ford: 29:56 Yeah, I can. The thing is, and I think what drives me crazy is everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, but you’ll never get any audience.’ And I’m like, but I wrote for 10 years online and sometimes I would get like 20 readers if I was lucky.

Rich Ziade: 30:10 Yeah. Everyone keeps score, right? And that shouldn’t be what it’s about because you can write something or publish something or draw something or create something pretty amazing and that is satisfying in and of itself, right? I mean—

Paul Ford: 30:22 I’ve been lucky in my life because I did that, not in spite of it. And so— so I don’t— I mean, if you could take one thing away and I— I gotta tell you, like a big part of my life is now going and staring at a piano and not a screen and trying to figure out where my fingers should go in the weird mathematics of that piano keyboard.

Rich Ziade: 30:41 Sure. Humbling.

Paul Ford: 30:43 It is, and I’ll tell you what, I can’t get an LLM to do it for me.

Rich Ziade: 30:48 No.

Paul Ford: 30:49 I really can’t. And I’ve tried to get LLMs to help me with my piano playing. They’re just not good at it. I need my teacher and he’s— he’s Argentinean and he’s just a little sad-eyed sometimes I think when—

Rich Ziade: 30:58 Ah, there we go. I was hoping we’d bring it back to sad.

Paul Ford: 31:01 Yeah, it’s a little sad. You know.

Rich Ziade: 31:02 Nice. Well done. Um, this is great. I had more, but we don’t have to do more. I think this is perfect.

Paul Ford: 31:08 Let’s call it, you know, we’ll be back to AI soon enough.

Rich Ziade: 31:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I— I’m optimistic, strangely.

Paul Ford: 31:16 Me too. Me too. I’m gonna do— I’m gonna do the optimism thing. There’s going to be a lot of maintenance opportunities is the way I would put it.

Rich Ziade: 31:25 And if you need maintenance, you should reach out.

Paul Ford: 31:28 Yeah, that’s right. If you want to talk about anything but AI or AI, you can check us out at Aboard, but let’s not overpush it. Let’s just— we’ll keep this one where it is.

Rich Ziade: 31:36 No pitch this time?

Paul Ford: 31:37 Nah, everybody knows what’s up. Aboard.com. Take care of yourselves, go venture out, go into the woods, be curious.

Rich Ziade: 31:45 Yeah, tell us about something you’re doing that doesn’t involve a prompt.

Paul Ford: 31:47 That’d be nice. Be nice to hear about that. Have a great week.

Rich Ziade: 31:51 Bye.