SIO420: Technological Anti-Solutions

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and this is episode 420. Ha ha ha! Nice! 420! And I have planned a episode that has nothing to do with that at all. I actually just didn't know it was episode 420 until literally this moment. So, sorry about that. But, instead, I've got an amazing conversation.

This was one of those ones that was slotted for the and went double the use so this is a surprise two-parter and very much worthwhile because we talked for gosh a couple hours at least and of course I edited all that down to be much more are clear and manageable. And we've got two great parts for you. Guest today is Alejandro Ruiz. Going to tell us about his background, so I won't go too much into that here.

He wrote a very fascinating blog post about a year back, maybe two, called Technological Anti -Solutions. Got a lot of attention and it's Alejandro is so much fun to talk to. We talked about technology and it's for, what it isn't for, when it goes wrong, when it's just downright counterproductive, and when it's being sold as a kind of a lie to fix a problem that it can't fix. So much more. This went lots of places and so, as I said, it's in two parts.

I won't make you wait. I'll put them both out pretty close together. So I'm excited to get on over to part one here. First, if you're hearing this on Thursday, January 25th, when it's coming out, it is time for another patron hangout. It's already been a month and for the top two tiers of patrons of either Serious Inquiries Only or Where There's Woke. That's a, that's an actual Zoom hangout, that we're all together.

That's not you that's not a one -sided thing we're hanging out we're playing Code Names Lydia and I have a fierce rivalry going we're also talking getting to know each other it's been a lot of fun it's gotten bigger each time and more fun each time it's not too late if you'd like to you know edit up your pledge or anything or pledge a new at patreon.com/seriouspod or patreon.com/wherethereswoke and that's at 3 p .m. again today Thursday the 25th of January 3 pm Pacific Time. I hope you'll be able to make it because we have been just having an absolute blast with those. That plus, obviously, ad-free shows over on the Patreon. You won't have to hear the auto-ad that's about to happen right now. Barring that, I really hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. So here we go. And I'm joined by Alejandro Ruiz. How are you doing today?

0:02:46 Alejandro: Thanks for having me.

0:02:47 Thomas: For coming on. I'm really excited about this. So excited. I you have kind of called, I want to hear about that. But first, we thought that part of the story might be your background. So why don't you lay it on

0:03:04 Alejandro: Will. Well, minor correction, actually. It's not a term of art. I coined it.

0:03:07 Thomas: Yeah, like for real? Oh, that's excellent. Okay. Yeah.

0:03:09 Alejandro: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I coined it.

0:03:12 Thomas: That's really, I love it.

0:03:13 Alejandro: I did want it to sound like a term of art to sneak it into the discourse.

0:03:15 Thomas: You pulled it off.

0:03:17 Alejandro: Oh, hell yeah.

0:03:18 Thomas: It couldn't be better. That's awesome.

0:03:21 Alejandro: Piece I wrote about this was like a thousand words and I probably spent more time thinking about the name than writing the word. So I'm glad to hear I pulled it off.

0:03:29 Thomas: I mean, it's the ultimate test where I first was like going to credit you with it. And I was like, well, I'm sure someone already made that up.

0:03:34 Alejandro: Perfect. Perfect.

0:03:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:35 Alejandro: Yeah, perfect.

0:03:35 Thomas: That's exactly what you would want.

0:03:37 Alejandro: Is maybe a little bit of a tangent, but none other than the great Cory Doctorow once tweeted out this post wrote. And I always see it on the internet attributed to him. And it's like, there is no more flattering, it's, like, the most flattering possible compliment like attribute my idea to Cory Doctoro. So thank you.

0:03:52 Thomas: Okay. But let's face it. You're probably pissed off about that. Like, be real.

0:03:59 Alejandro: No, actually, it is quite flattering. I've been a Cory Doctora fan for so long.

0:04:01 Thomas: No, I Love that he gets Credit for my thing I thought of. It's my favorite thing, actually, it's like, awesome, love it so much, that guy, awesome, great, yeah.

0:04:11 Alejandro: Comment, yeah.

0:04:11 Thomas: But Tell us about yourself, uh, did we get here, where do you want to start, oh?

0:04:13 Alejandro: So Right now I'm a, I'm a software developer, that's my job, um, I kind of took a funny path, it's a non-standard path, but it's also not an uncommon path, so I studied physics at MIT, um, through there I was super lucky to to have a chance to work at CERN, actually, uh, and as an undergrad, it but it was also not what I expected. But that's another story for another podcast.

0:04:29 Thomas: That's awesome. I would do that one, that would be really interesting, just gonna be like, I actually coined the term CERN, it's not well known, Cory Doctorow came and fucking stole it, that guy

0:04:43 Alejandro: Yeah. I was going to say more Cory Doctorow thing. For experimental particle physics, there's like a ton of code, right? So that's how I got into software. Code, there's a big international collaboration, a lot of data. It's complicated. That's how I got into coding. I graduated. To the aforementioned experience at CERN, I sort of wasn't really interested in continuing graduate school and all that stuff. I into tech as every 2011 MIT graduate seems to have done. That was the standard path. Very different time in tech. People still thought Google was going to save the world or whatever. Whatever. I think they still had don't be evil as their slogan even.

0:04:44 Thomas: Yeah yeah yeah Right. Yeah.

0:05:18 Alejandro: I did my 10 years working at different companies. You've heard of, some you haven't. I 2020, I foundeded Interstitial Cooperative. It's interstitials technology. We're a worker cooperative. Founded it because I've been working in tech for 10 years -ish and I was I was like, well, it'd be cool if I could like do good stuff with tech that like helped people, you know, like sort of nice.

0:05:40 Thomas: Our motto is don't be really bad, and that's gonna work like

0:05:45 Alejandro: And yeah, yeah. Don't be evil is sort of like a low bar that they then dropped, right? And it'd been nice

0:05:50 Thomas: That's too high, let's scrub that from the record.

0:05:52 Alejandro: To have like something aspirational. I don't know. So be good, do good things, help people with stuff. I found this with a couple of friends And shoutouts to my friends Ben and Chris. Them. And it's grown and it's great. It's going great. So I work a lot in human rights specifically. One of the thing I learned very quickly is it's actually quite hard to do good things with tech. That's sort of on its face is confusing because on the one hand it's so obviously useful, Like, don't think anyone could possibly make a case that digital technology, like, is it useful?

0:05:53 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Like, be good, oh yeah. Yeah.

0:06:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well,

0:06:24 Alejandro: It's ridiculous.

0:06:26 Thomas: And this might be dumb, but like, do we need to draw a distinction? I mean, anything we do now involves tech of some kind, but do you mean like specifically tailoring like new, I don't know, products or solutions to do good? Like what, how exactly do you mean using tech to do get?

0:06:41 Alejandro: Yeah, you're really where I'm going. The, because of my experience through sort of the physics, I come from this slightly different direction, you know? A little bit different perspective. But like, one You know, I had the same, like what is tech? What are we doing here? How do I explain what I'm trying to do to other people?

And one of One of the things I realized is in all of my years working in tech, I never really had anyone articulate a clear, affirmative vision of what is the better world we are building? What is tech for? What is Tech? For? Give me a theory of computer. How can computers help? How can they hurt? And this is a shocking thing for someone coming from a physics background because physicists physicists speak quite beautifully about what physics is for, right? Actually have a little quote ready for you, which is that there's a famous physicist who won the Nobel Prize. Let's is one of the few things which lifts human life above the level of farce and gives it some the grace of tragedy, right? So that's like a insightful, kind deep of understanding of, like, physics and its role in the world and how it helps humanity. And if you look at, like, you, of similar tech leaders that, like, doesn't exist, right? Marc Andreessen wrote the techno -optimist Manifesto, and it's trash philosophy, philosophy, like, awful, yeah.

0:07:24 Thomas: Oh, interesting.

0:07:52 Thomas: Yeah. And Well like you said, There to be. I feel like, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg thing was always lofty. Like, we're connecting people and we're whatever. And then even after several, you genocides fueled by Facebook or whatever, they still do the same thing. And you're like, oh, that doesn't really mean anything, I don't think, or or something.

0:08:03 Alejandro: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, if you go actually even further back, so, you know, part of this, like, whole journey I went on is I read some early works from, like, the 60s and 70s, sort of like the early days of computing, and there really had, like, deep interrogations into what computers were for in those days in a way that, like, the tech industry doesn't do at all right now, right? So I'm a really big fan of, there's Stafford Beer, I don't know if you've heard of him.

0:08:16 Thomas: Hmm.

0:08:29 Alejandro: He's sort, not super famous anymore, and he's, he's actually, like, a very influential figure, um, more famous outside of the Anglosphere, especially in, like, uh, Latin America and Russia.

0:08:29 Thomas: No, I don't think so.

0:08:41 Thomas: Gotcha. I'm firmly in the Anglosphere. So yeah, but get me

0:08:41 Alejandro: Um, Yeah. Yeah, um, He, he was a cyberneticist.

0:08:46 Thomas: Out of this Anglososphere.

0:08:47 Alejandro: Yeah, yeah, you want to go wherever Stafford Beer was popular, those are the fun places. But he, you articulated a lot of theories, computers, and there, know, there's a really famous, um, I don't remember exactly where it was from because I'm talking from memory, but there's really famous slide from some, like, early presentation in the 60, I think it was, like, at the MIT PC Sale Lab, that's, uh, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, that was, like, you, the words, like, computers can't be held accountable, therefore they should never make management decisions. It's like, oh boy, we've strayed far from God's light, right? That's

0:09:17 Thomas: Yeah. Now they're like, hey, computers can't be held accountable. So definitely they should, they should execute people. Like we should put them in charge of criminal justice. Us, yeah.

0:09:22 Alejandro: The point, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And Like war machines, right? Like, we should AI should decide who gets murdered on the battlefield. Um, the whole point of that local tangent is, like, I, this, like, moment of, like, well, I don't know what tech is for, why can't I help people with it, why am I struggling to, like, do this thing. Like, this is useful, but why can't I help people, right? Like, I had this, like, moment of crisis and personal crisis, as we all do every few years, I think. Probably. I think that's normal.

0:09:30 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:09:45 Thomas: Bunch of listeners, like, geez, this guy. Uh, no, most of us just, we're, we're, like, fucking, we work at a bank or something. I don't know. No, one ever asked why. That's good, they're just like, yeah, no, we're evil, we just do evil things, it's fine, we work here at Goldman Sachs, we never ask, like, are we connecting the world and making the world a better place? Nope, they just do it.

0:10:00 Alejandro: Yeah. So, So my lack of ability to just do it, and my infinitely recursing self-introspection. Actually founded another thing, which is the website for which I wrote the original technological anti -solutions post. And it's the Luddite.org. And its sort of core project is this, what we've been talking about, like what is tech for? And because I live in the existing hegemony, I think of started with what is it not for, right? Think my very first post ever was about Substack and why it's stupid and no one should use it. But over time, I think, yeah, I mean, in some ways, horribly, because no one listened. But in other ways, everyone hates it now. Because who could have seen that coming?

0:10:28 Thomas: How's that going for you Yeah, Oh, they do. Oh,

0:10:59 Alejandro: Well, Well, they're currently like I think they're currently in the hot seat for platforming Nazis or something. Thing. I

0:10:59 Thomas: Oh, Yeah, well, oh, that's so funny. Yeah, I just googled I it, and and the 17 hours ago headline, Substack keeps the Nazis, loses platformer. I, I thought that was an exaggeration, but, no, yeah, I guess they're keeping the Nazis. Well, of Substack, I mean, we recently, I guess this was on, uh, Where There's Woke, but we talked about, you when know, we're roasting Richard Dawkins's stupid anti -trans anti-woke Substack.

0:11:16 Alejandro: Yeah, you know. It's the... No, yeah, yeah.

0:11:30 Thomas: Um, found it confusing why he was even doing that, but Eli mentioned that, like, well, part of it is whoever, you know, the Nazis is in charge of Substack, is really throwing a lot of money around to, like, get people to try to you utilize Substack, and and the, the person doing that, I think, is the right winger, right? Or, I mean, anyway, it's, it'S, well, that might explain the Nazis. I looked it up at the time and now I forget, but I think that might be what's going on. You know, itS one of those, I Peter Thiel types, you know, IT'S like that, that kind of thing.

0:11:50 Alejandro: I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah there's always a Peter Thiel behind everything. I see them everywhere. That's only a half joke.

0:12:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I bet.

0:12:10 Alejandro: I go down the road about Substack. Even even a year and a half ago, whenever I wrote that, it was obvious that this is the path that we're going to go down because they're as a service. Truly, you can't get any more shallow than website, website.

0:12:22 Thomas: Well, Well, yeah, actually, I MEAN, I, I KNOW this is probably a tangent, but why, why the hate on Substack back back then, I don't really, I guess now that I think about it, I don't know in particular why you would have written that. What was the gist of it?

0:12:29 Alejandro: I because, so this is going to be quite a tangent, but one with the tech industry as it exists today is tech is like a cultural package, right? There's a, like, printing words is barely tech, like, on some, like, in the way like if you ask the, like, man on the street style interview, right, what is technology, people are going to say things like, I don't know, innovation, space, whatever, right, and like printing word is like, all right, so that's yeah that's I mean, this is my joke with you, can tell tech is advancing because now we have Blue Sky, right? It's like the ninth iteration of Twitter or whatever, um,

0:12:36 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Was like the first thing we did on computers. Like, okay, we've recreated typewriters. Oh, yeah, yeah?

0:13:11 Alejandro: It's like now you can write short form text and anyone can read it, like, wow, incredible, good stuff, um, but no, that so, at the time, I what bothered me was, so, cultural package of tech is venture funded, right? That's like the way, like, I've started a couple of companies, um, won't go down that tangent because none of them ended well. Spoilers, spoilers.

0:13:15 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah? Yeah?

0:13:28 Alejandro: But the kind of

0:13:30 Thomas: Well, you didn't have any right wing Nazi startup money is that sounds sounds like the issue, right?

0:13:34 Alejandro: My problem is that I wasn't a Nazi. No, that's not true. That's not sure in a lot of layers.

0:13:37 Thomas: Oh, you are a Nazi. Okay, yeah. That's

0:13:43 Alejandro: But no, package that is tech, right? It comes with like it's venture funded, right. So like when when I started a company, the assumption is you're going to raise money. And why do you raise venture capital? What's it for, right? Well, traditionally, your economics 101 answer is like, well, how else are you going to build the factory or whatever? But tech if there is one industry that shouldn't require venture capital, it's the one where you can use a computer. So Substack raised something like, when I wrote that post, I think they had just raised like, I don't know, $80 million dollars. Now,

0:13:43 Thomas: Not true. Definitely a Nazi, okay, got it. No, Hmm, oh, fair,

0:14:14 Alejandro: What the hell are they doing with $80 million, right?

0:14:15 Thomas: Yeah, yeah... Are they gonna invent some new letters to put on their text website?

0:14:21 Alejandro: Exactly. What can they possibly do? And there's only one answer to that question. So if your product is website as a service, which is, again, barely a product, right, there's like no innovation here, there'S nothing, what can you possibly be doing? And the only one way to answer which is you're giving everyone free stuff so that they'll show up.

0:14:37 Alejandro: And your goal is, once everyone's there, you figure figure out a charge event, right? That's unfortunately, Cory Doctorow, not unfortunately, I love the guy.

0:14:21 Thomas: Yeah, yeah yeah yep yep yep Okay. You really called it. I'm going to have to check this piece out. Yeah.

0:14:51 Alejandro: But, you written that. He's come up with a whole framework for this, which he called in shitification.

0:14:55 Thomas: We just called it what? Now there's a term. I mean, that guy, he's come up with tech anti -solutions and in shitification. He is two for two in my book and CERN, I think.

0:15:00 Alejandro: I'm going

0:15:09 Thomas: That one three for three.

0:15:09 Alejandro: To him back and claim I coined that one.

0:15:11 Thomas: Yeah, that's a good, that'S a fair trade. Should negotiate that one.

0:15:15 Alejandro: I think so. Yeah. Well, lawyers will work it out. We have the framework, but then he has three or four steps or whatever. Step one is like, you're great to your users and everybody shows up. And then, you know, as you go on, the steps become, like, extract everything once they're there and they're stuck. Right?

0:15:15 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's real, this is like a real issue for me because of Patreon. Patreon, it's a perfect example where Patreon started early on, you know, I wasn't the earliest adopter, but I was, I guess, in retrospect, one of the pretty early adopters. I saw some people doing it with on in the podcast days and I thought, well, that's dumb, why would you, why would people just give you money for doing a podcast? And then, like, you know, all these years later, it's like, oh, oh, that's literally my entire livelihood. But as the years went on, like, Patreon fine right away, more or minus, like, they could have given us a few things.

It took them a while to give, like, a Patreon RSS feed. Like, that's the most important thing they ever did for us. And I grant Patreon was not just for podcasts. You know, I have no idea what percentage of their revenue was podcast, but, you know, it's for a lot of things. So I get it, not like that would have been the top priority, but if I were in charge, charge, as a consumer, I would have been like, all right, Patreon, fantastic.

Initially they gave us a lot of stuff about how creators, creators, creators, therefore we only charge five percent, was their whole thing, which is fucking awesome. It's like, all right, great, that's

0:15:36 Alejandro: Absolutely. Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:16:34 Thomas: I love it, yeah.

0:16:35 Alejandro: Five percent is not a bad cut.

0:16:36 Thomas: Not at all. And then, as the years go on, all one point they got some eleventy gajillion dollars of the exact thing you're talking about, and it was like, what are you gonna do with that, like, how, how are you going to take what's already, this is already fine, like it's already, it's done. You don't need, we don't needs to fucking keep, what they always say, breaking things. And no, what's the other dumb term they move that.

0:16:36 Alejandro: Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:58 Alejandro: Moving fast and breaking things.

0:17:00 Thomas: But there's the term that's it's a you're disruptor, you know, they don't, you don't even disrupt enough of the disc. It's all just rupt. Just go ahead and rupt it. It's like, yeah,

0:17:02 Alejandro: Oh, disrupt. Yeah, yeah. Disrupt. Yeah. Yeah. That's what computers are for. It's for disrupting.

0:17:11 Thomas: But like I, something like this, I think it's exact example of what you're talking about where it's like you're you're fine, we, we can survive as creators, we can get paid, and it's five percent, that's a great business transaction, just do that forever, have a handful of people be in charge of Patreon, you think there is, you uses for money in any business, but as your point about like, well, tech should have low overhead or should essentially not need you money, I think might, you know, be a little bit more on the side of like, well, you know, servers and tech support and, you a lot of things you can spend venture money on, but maybe not, you or whatever, but they

0:17:15 Alejandro: It is. Mm -mm. Yeah,

0:17:49 Thomas: Could have just had a modest kind of modest income, and made good money delivering a great product forever. But that just can't happen. They had to have all this bazillion dollars of seed money, and I don't know how in the world they were ever going to make investors money back on that, because there's not a lot of room for once you're already charging people 5 % and they're like, this is fine. This is adequate. I love it. Okay.

Now can we somehow get a bunch more money out of you? And then the next several years were them introducing all these things that sucked. And I don't know how, how they're working. I mean, maybe some people are using them. They have a merch service where they charge you an and a leg for merch, which it might make sense.

I think they charge You a percentage, which I guess if you're small time would make sense, but if you make any sort of money at all, it's charging like astronomical amount to sell a few t -shirts, you know, kind of thing. But anyway, point is, I take your point and I feel like this has happened. I think, I feel Like being a Patreon creator might be a bit of a niche thing, but like Like, I think most people in their lives probably have some company where they have this thought, you know, where it's like, wow, they could have just kept it how it was. But no, well,

0:17:49 Alejandro: Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

0:18:59 Alejandro: Absolutely, I mean, everyone remembers when Twitter, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, right? Like there's like,

0:19:05 Thomas: That's a different story.

0:19:05 Alejandro: It's Kind of not, though, right? Because they're, was open to everybody and it was great, and you mean you could use it as like a source, right, for like news articles suddenly who had embedded tweets from like nine years ago, where suddenly had broken links, right? To go back a little little bit to just a steady business.

0:19:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:19:24 Alejandro: The problem with venture capital, the problem, I would never say the problem. Among the 20 billion problems with venture capitol, one of them is once you've raised venture capital you're to just run a sustainable business. Paul Graham talks about this a lot. Paul Graham, person I hate, bad person. I think my second post ever was about how much I hate Paul Graham.

0:19:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, bad person. Okay. Geez, Geez, he must have stolen a lot of your terms of art. Yeah.

0:19:48 Alejandro: Yeah. He's probably the most influential people in tech. Is not quite as famous, but he is the Y Combinator guy. You might have heard of Y Comminator.

0:19:57 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. I've heard of Y Combinator.

0:19:59 Alejandro: Yeah, so talks about this a lot, about how the economics of venture capital, you so talked about earlier about how they will never ever make the money back. Only That's way they can make the money back is by going public, right? And like having like a billion dollar IPO. So from the venture capitalist perspective, when they fund 20 companies, the difference between a company worth $10 million and a company that goes bankrupt is a lot smaller than the difference in the $10 billion company and the billion dollar company.

0:20:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:20:26 Alejandro: So, from their perspective, from their balance sheet, those are both failures. Those first two I mentioned are both failures so Once you're on that path, they, is where you go, like, there's no other. So when I saw that Substack was raising money, I don't remember if they're a Y Combinator company, a shocking number of like the big companies oh

0:20:31 Thomas: Right, right. I should have said, just for people who don't know, remind me what Y Combinator is. Is it a, what's the, I'm blanking on the word. Is incubate, that's, yeah, okay.

0:20:47 Alejandro: It's an incubator, that's the word you're looking for, yeah. Yeah they're, yeah.

0:20:52 Thomas: Yeah, it was exactly the word, so you hatch a lot of eggs out of it. A lot of, yeah and

0:20:55 Alejandro: Yeah there, they hatch the creepy little tech spider, spider eggs all over our society, just crawling all over

0:21:02 Thomas: They hope one of those out of however many will be worth a billion dollars or something. Gotcha.

0:21:05 Alejandro: Exactly yeah It's probably some, like, good, like, I don't know, insect joke to make about, like, their strategy, like, some of them, like, they have a lot of babies but like only one lives exactly Yeah, so many of our society's super bugs came from Y Combinator. They are the mother spider, um, Once you're down that path, you're where you're going, right? Like, that, that, the reason I was able to call Substack is A, because I've raised venture capital. So I know how that works, right? I know when you pitch that meeting, you have to say, we're going public in four years and we're gonna be worth $2 billion, right. And everyone knows that you're all lying, but that has to be the vision.

0:21:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I hope one of them's the super bug. I don't know. Gotcha.

0:21:42 Alejandro: Otherwise, they'll never give you money.

0:21:37 Thomas: Yeah. I could never do this line of work in a million fucking years. I could not. Anything where people say the same tired, cliched bullshit that they know is lies, I can't do. I tap out. Yeah we're going to disrupt the fucking... I quit. I quit my job. Never mind. Don't give any money to this. That sucks. It's absolutely terrible. That would be me and my pitch. So I'm I'm never doing it. It must not be fun.

0:22:03 Alejandro: Yeah. It's there's a reason most of my business partners learn to keep me away from the capital. It plays well with others, um, why how we ended up on that tangent.

0:22:12 Thomas: I don't know.

0:22:13 Alejandro: No.

0:22:13 Thomas: But it is actually a very interesting topic, you that you has to be. And I don'T know if there's a product. Is this uniquely American in your view or is this something worldwide, you KNOW?

0:22:24 Alejandro: This is this is actually, um, is a capitalism problem, but

0:22:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, there are flavors of capitalism. I mean there's.

0:22:32 Alejandro: That's why I was trying I was try to decide like how how how big to pitch the scale of my answer because I am a registered socialist, but I understand that that people if aren't here to hear me quote Karl Marx, they're here for me to talk about tech.

0:22:34 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, sure, sure sure. Sure, a lot of them might be, I don't know, yeah, sure,

0:22:47 Alejandro: Read old Uncle Karl guys, he's got good ideas. Yeah, I think the is specific, it's not American, but it is specific to tech because like capitalism, think would not say that I'm strawmanning them when they say that competition is important in capitalism, right? That that's like their big thing. That's like the linchpin of the system. But one of the problems with digital technology is that it's on the internet. So they, competition is super fierce, Right. Like, you start at bakery, right, in my small town. My town has a few thousand people. I don't know, I'm competing with what, four or five other bakeries, like- -it's anyone within a 20 minute drive, but if you start a website let's say you- right.

0:23:03 Thomas: Yeah mm -hmm, yeah a few thousand people, you got one bakery, I'll be honest with you, maybe two, you

0:23:28 Alejandro: Yeah. So my town is 4,000 people, and we have, uh,

0:23:31 Thomas: -have half a bakery, you don't even have have a full- -one.

0:23:32 Alejandro: -got- We- -have one, we have actually two delightful bakeries, um, we'll see how long they're around. But you start you- website as- -a service, right, you're a sub stack and you start web site as a surface, any idiot can start Sub, stack right? It's nothing, it's a nothing product. So what economics that- that you make is, you have to win, right? Is no stable competition there. Like you have play for keeps.

0:23:33 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like- -monopoly- -is- -like the end game, yeah.

0:23:56 Alejandro: Exactly. It has to be, there is only rent seeking. There is not like a stable competitive, right. Like it's really, it's difficult. Like, if long as there are venture capitalists willing to pour a hundred million dollars into Substack, then you have do that too. You know, like there is, like, "Oh, that's okay, they're in New York," like, We're in small town Vermont, it doesn't matter, no, right?

0:23:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Different- -internet.

0:24:14 Alejandro: Like- -it's- -one internet, yeah. Um, I think that's part of it, but, I- answers are many, but that's the tech side of it, I think. But I- I think really exacerbates it, it's-

0:24:14 Thomas: Yeah. So- -was, uh, still part of your, um, story of being, you, little bit, uh, disenchanted? Is-

0:24:28 Alejandro: -my- my disenchantment with tech, my- or, I guess, my- my frustration and my inability to do good despite my constant fevered attempts- -I-

0:24:35 Thomas: Yeah. Well, -give me an example of the kind of thing you're talking about when you say you wanted to do good in tech and couldn't, you know, do you- -have any, yeah.

0:24:42 Alejandro: Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the things, you know, after we started Interstitial, first of all, there aren't a lot of worker period, in the U.S. The worker cooperative movement is, and for people who don't know, worker cooperative is one one vote. We each have one share. All decisions are democratically made.

0:24:52 Thomas: Oh- -instead- -of- -like a CEO- -or instead of the management kind of structure, gotcha.

0:25:03 Alejandro: Yeah. So I am actually the president of Interstitial right now. I was just elected a couple of days ago, but I was elected. I Was actually elected to the board and the board, whatever. No one cares about that. The point is we're democratically run. Of Interstital has -one vote in of our decisions. So there aren't a lot of worker cooperatives in the US, this is like an uncommon structure. Shortly after we founded it, we pretty quickly found that, like, there actually is a pretty big appetite for, like, people trying to do good stuff with tech, right, like, especially, like, I know we found it in 2020, um, think by then society had mostly turned on tech, right? Like, 10 years ago, people were- -like, "Tech is gonna bring," like, remember the Arab Spring, people were, "Technology is going to make liberal democracy-" -everywhere- -yeah.

0:25:16 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:25:46 Alejandro: -by 2020. So we founded it, we pretty quickly found that there's like an interest in what we're doing, which means we get inbound stuff, right, we got inbound requests for, like, "Hey, you help us with this," right, like, "You're a mission driven tech organization," you- we're a small startup, we're on a- -thing-

0:25:38 Thomas: Hmm. -oh- Yeah. Yeah. What- -you talking- -about like building, building apps or what? Sorry, I just don't even know.

0:26:02 Alejandro: So, so we do, yeah, maybe I should- I should back up, Interstitial is engineering, we do any engineering, we've- we've got electrical engineers, we've got mechanical engineers. Do software. Yeah, so we're a full -service engineering firm.

0:26:09 Thomas: Oh, wow. Okay. You You got a guy who drives a train. Know, I have any, any kind of engineer.

0:26:14 Alejandro: Oh, I wish.

0:26:17 Thomas: You just have one guy in like the train outfit. He's like, God, I don't get a lot of inbound as, as you call it.

0:26:17 Alejandro: That would be so cool. If we had a engineer, train I wouldn't be here. I'd be out riding the train right now.

0:26:25 Thomas: As a kid, that caused me a lot of confusion. I'm not going to lie. Like I thought engineer meant like you drove a train like forever and then be like, oh, you're going to be an engineer. Jeez. A lot of people are going to to be driving a lot of people want to be drive. I don't think there's that many trains in the U.S. that need to be. OK, well, good luck. It's a competitive field.

0:26:36 Alejandro: There's a lot of trains. The The U.S. would be a way better place if most of our software engineers were train engineers. Years we'd be a much more productive country. Um, but so we do, we did get, um, know, we get inbound requests for different projects or whatever and actually where the technological, bringing it back like a pro right now, where the technical anti-solutions framework came out of is evaluating these inbound quests.

0:27:08 Alejandro: Like, know, I get these requests to be like, what's wrong with this, like, what's, what's the pathology here, I want to like diagnose, knows, because these are sincere people, like You know, for example, let me give you an example, that once in a while I've actually had several of these, company, I got an email, this is, hey, we're a small company and we're trying to solve food deserts.

0:26:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, mm hmm. OK.

0:27:25 Alejandro: By, we have these automated containers and these automated containers, they're like solar paneled or whatever and have little hydroponics and they grow fresh food and we can drag them to the middle of an urban desert and they'll have tomatoes and lettuce or whatever. I would give you these emails and I'd be like, this bad.

0:27:45 Alejandro: This But I didn't have a way to communicate that. So actually that is Where the technological anti-solutions framework comes from. Needed a way, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic, but I knew I need to go name the demon, you know, take away its power. So now, you know, when I got, I was like, any solution pass, right? Yeah.

0:27:28 Thomas: Hmm. OK? Yeah. Hmm .OK.

0:28:03 Thomas: Interesting. But you define anti-solution then for people, because I don't know that we've necessarily done that, okay.

0:28:08 Alejandro: We Haven't, so I'm going to define it for you, but I actually have, it's a, it's whole little framework, got like my five little tenets. Let's do like soft definition first and build the intuition, and then we'll go through it. So I would say a product that attempts to replace a boring, boring but solvable political or social problem with a technological one that won't work, right?

0:28:25 Thomas: Okay. Uh, Right.

0:28:28 Alejandro: Is no world in which, like, food poverty is, we have enough food, right? Like, We have In A Food, it's Not a food Problem, and you know what, it's definitely not, it's like a tech problem. When there is no world where like there's a container with solar panels or whatever. And, you know, one of the problems that you run into really quickly with anti-solutions is a lot of the times they don't even work on their own terms. Once you really flesh them out, because what they are is, there, world so broken politically, right? Like we, so, so broken. We have no vision for, like, a different than the way we do them. What they are is people's, I think, a lot of times earnest attempts to solve a problem using only, you, technology, or using, it's an outsourcing, right, we're outsourcing our political problems

0:28:35 Thomas: Yeah. It's Not A Food Problem per se, yeah. Right.

0:29:13 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:13 Alejandro: To, to a technology, right. So you, a good con requires a mark that wants to to believe, and we all want to believe that we can solve these problems, right, with like a technology, like I want there to Be, be a container that I can drag to the middle of an urban food desert and be like, free tomatoes for everybody. That sounds awesome. It's not going to happen. And one of the things for that one specifically, their big pitches at the time was like, oh, we only takes up real the estate of like three parking spaces, whatever. And I was like, okay, so let's assume, let's do back of the envelope. They like, we can make this many pounds of produce or whatever.

It's like three packing spaces. What if we grew potatoes in three packing places? You can grow half the calories that their thing have just by literally sticking it in the dirt, right, and just growing potatoes. And a lot of times that is what you find at the end of nanny solution, you find that even when evaluated on their own terms, um, don't work. So, for example, this, why should you care about this pitch, right?

Because like, okay, some companies making whatever, right, like they're not actually going going to solve urban food deserts, but like maybe someone will grow, I don't know, they'll be able to grow some pot in their backyard with their fun toy

0:29:14 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

0:30:13 Alejandro: And it'll be cool. No one gets hurt. But like the, know, do you know about the Paris Climate Accords? They're the big ones. Okay. What How would you say the outcome of the Paris climate accords were?

0:30:18 Thomas: Yeah. Uh, Well, I mean, it's kind of still still ongoing, right? I mean, they Set Set A lot of voluntary, like And I remember you, Trump dropped them, famously, and then I, I Can't remember if we were able to get back in them or not, but it also, I don't think it particularly mattered, because it was like, yeah, we can just keep doing the, what we want to do anyway and Oh, Two

0:30:26 Alejandro: It is still ongoing, but yes, there's a magic Number, though. There's a magic number associated With It, two degrees, there it is, that's What I've been fishing for.

0:30:48 Thomas: Degrees Or Yeah. Cool. Yeah. No, I'm glad I, am the I fish. I don't know.

0:30:53 Alejandro: So now that I fished you Now I Think I've baited you, I'm going to switch you Yeah.

0:30:55 Thomas: Yeah, catfish meat. No. Right. Two degrees. Yeah no two degrees. Well, two degrees is bad though. I mean 1 .5.

0:31:03 Alejandro: Now Degrees is already catastrophic, yeah. Like People in The developing world were quite mad that that was the agreement, but what Have I told you that once you add up all of the carbon, carbon budgets that They agreed on, what they add actually up to is 3.3 degrees.

0:31:04 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah mm -hmm. Okay. Holy shit.

0:31:17 Alejandro: Like a big deal. But the reason they were able to do that is because shortly before the Climate Accords, this Austrian scientist whose name I'm forgetting wrote a speculative paper, which again, there's nothing... One thing I want to make very clear about this, technological anti -solutions are something that have to exist in context, right? Operational framework for evaluating a technology in the world, in the actual world. A big believer in R&D. I studied physics, for Christ's sakes, right? There Is no useful application for high-energy particle physics. It just is awesome, right? Big believer in, like, cultural production and pure science and all these things, right. But shade on this person. I don't know anything about this story. I don't even remember this person's name, but this person wrote this paper.

It was like, hey, I have this idea for a bioenergy with carbon capture system, and the idea was like, okay, what if made power by growing trees, right? No more fossil fuels, let's grow trees, we can cut them down And Then we can burn them in special plants to capture and then bury the carbon, therefore making energy actually carbon negative. And like, okay, whatever, this is a fine paper, you know, someone wrote it up. But then the at the Paris Climate Accords were like, oh hell yes, right? This is our trick. So this is BECCS. This is a relatively unknown thing at the time, but it's actually in the Paris Climate Accord models. They assume that we're gonna transition to BECCS.

And then, so using BECCS for a lot of our energy. And since then, much like the container at the Solomon Urban Food problems, scientists have since worked it out. And it turns out you have to replace two thirds of the world's arable land with trees to be able to do. And it would require like an infrastructure project, like bigger project than just converting to renewables. You know what I mean?

0:31:42 Thomas: Yeah yeah. Okay hmm. Yeah

0:33:04 Alejandro: By the way, I'm getting all this from Jason Hickel's book, Less Is More. Cite him.

0:33:04 Thomas: So blame him if it's no I'm I'm just kidding.

0:33:10 Alejandro: Jason Hickell is cool and good. Everyone should like him. Unlike Paul Graham, who's not cool. And Cory Doctorow, who we seem confused about.

0:33:14 Thomas: Well, Cory Doctor, he's the one I'm interviewing, right? What the, what, no. Well let's let's step back. Okay. This Idea of tech anti-solution. I want to talk about, not like make a devil's advocate case or anything, but I do, I do see, it's interesting because I think people could be coming at this from a couple of ways. For one, you, you could have the, you know, Ayn Randian, like, yeah, the government just fucking sucks. And what we need is the companies to do all this, the private blah, blah, and that's garbage and crap and it's fake. And it's every good thing.

Innovation actually had government money to start, you know, the whole internet thing, all that. But there's you also, also a sense in which you come at it or people come at it from the left, which is, and it could be in my opinion hey well um you know Mitch McConnell and a bunch of evil people broke our government so we don't get to do that anymore like that's just not available to us um so can we find some other fucking way and from that perspective it's like yeah I don't I don't really blame people for being like well we're racism we're not going to actually you know solve the food desert thing um maybe we can grow some tomatoes or something?

Like, I understand the impulse. Also want to know, how do you judge if you, and, you know, a little bit of a side story to your worker collective, I'm curious how the decision making goes there. Like, are you all on the same page? Or some of you like, no, maybe this will work. And, you kind of vote on like, is this worth doing? But how are you evaluating when something is, well, this could do a bit of good. Throw that in too, too. Maybe mitigation is a

0:33:26 Alejandro: Okay. Yeah,

0:34:53 Thomas: Part of it. Maybe these things aren't going to solve. And I think you mentioned that, too. Maybe this isn't going solve a problem, but maybe it will help. How are you making that decision? How are you putting that label on it where instead of, oh, this is a, you know, it's a cool idea that might help some people versus no, this Is the thing that's trying to solve a whole problem like food deserts and it just fucking won't.

0:35:12 Alejandro: This is a great question. And I think maybe a lot of it will be answered if We get into my little like framework, um, Argue that five criteria you have to meet for something to be an anti-solution, right? So the first is it claims to solve a serious political or social problem. The second is it's intrinsically incapable of solving that problem, them, right? Third is it's profitable or fundable, or, you know, you can make money doing it.

0:35:15 Thomas: Okay. Let's do it.

0:35:34 Thomas: Okay. Yeah.

0:35:36 Alejandro: The fourth, this one's really important. And I think it's the one that you're getting at is it further entrenches existing power structures. Then the fifth is it sexy, Right? This is like your, your Apple, you walk into the Apple store and everything's like clean and white and beautiful. That's, it's is at its core, what the technological anti-solution sort of is, it's kind of a political economy analysis, analysis, right? It's like, we the technology, how does it interact with existing power structure? There, right. So, the point, I think, is a little bit what you're getting at.

So what's here, right, like, okay, people make stuff, we can mitigate it, you now, I think the easiest way to point that out, I have a lot of examples here, but I want to talk about a really big one that I think will be very intuitive to everybody, this is what Elon Musk does, right, is a technological anti-solution salesman.

If you go through his list of companies, that's like pretty consistently what he's doing, right, self-driving cars, transit is a disaster, it's a disaster, like every single person that lives in the United States knows in their bones how stupid transit is, right.

0:35:43 Thomas: Hmm. Okay, yeah.

0:36:36 Alejandro: Like we sit in these stupid.

0:36:37 Thomas: Well, let's not underestimate how many Americans have never heard of Europe. So, you know, yeah, they're like this. There's no other way, though.

0:36:41 Alejandro: That's true. But even, even if you have it right, like you've sat in traffic, you've felt the like, the My God. But I think even, even, if they don't know that there's an alternative, they feel like you're in this 4,000 pound machine that can go 70 miles an hour. And here you are sitting in this queue of thousands of them all trying to go in the same place. It's crazy. It is a crazy. And we do this every day twice a day five days a week during a climate crisis, it is like on its face just absolutely banana, and then on top of all that, all These colors are financed to the hill, it's a mess.

0:37:14 Thomas: What's Yeah.

0:37:17 Alejandro: Like Many of These people are, you know, they're one injury away from missing their, their car payment, and then, like, they can't work and their whole life spirals. I mean, it's, it's Whole situation is Catastrophic. It Absolutely sucks, and I think that is the petri dish, right, that grows these anti-solutions. Like you said, most Americans just can't imagine an alternative, right? It's like beyond the pale to like even, like, in that, like, milieu of just like hopelessness. Like, we, we're just a huge society of willing marks just waiting for the right con man, right? And like, that, that is the self -driving car thing.

0:37:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yep. The Thing Sucks. I agree. Well, Or Or hostesses, I

0:37:53 Alejandro: Sure, hostages.

0:37:54 Thomas: Yeah, I think There's a certain amount of us that's like, well, we're fucked because nothing can, what do we, what are we going to do, build a train that doesn't happen here, we don't, we don' Have the engineers. No.

0:37:55 Alejandro: Yeah, Yeah, it doesn't happen.

0:38:04 Thomas: I'm just kidding. Yeah.

0:38:04 Alejandro: Right, yeah, like, I in my original post, I pointed out that, like... A city has to be old enough to have trains, which is, like a crazy concept. How can that be... If technology is advancing all the time, why did we forget how to make trains?

0:38:11 Thomas: Yeah, that's Fair. You Know, know what used to be a thing in every single class for some stupid reason, in like middle school, was they're gonna have these trains that are magnets, yeah, they'll hover, the man You know, so I was like, yeah, there's no friction, so it'll be easy to, you know, like fuel wise or whatever the hell, you, like, I saw that so many times as a kid, and do we have any of those, does anybody do those at all, I bet you it's something that, uh, Musk proposed at some point, right, it's got to be.

0:38:28 Alejandro: Yeah.

0:38:42 Thomas: It has to be

0:38:42 Alejandro: Well, He took that to the next level with, like the Hyperloop or whatever, right? In a vacuum. Yeah. In a vacuum tube. Yeah, like what if it was a train but if something goes wrong everyone died instantly?

0:38:45 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, the vacuum Similar idea, yeah Instantly,

0:38:53 Alejandro: Yeah, great idea. Yeah What if

0:38:54 Thomas: Yeah Faster, yeah You don't want one of these slow Deaths that happens when you Derail, you want just instant pop But

0:39:00 Alejandro: Yeah I if there's a leak I want to be as bad as if a spaceship leaks That's what I want in my train

0:39:07 Thomas: Yeah, so I will just say Some of us are just hostages who are like Well, there's no, I mean, fucking We can't, you know, we'll keep trying I think we all should not lose faith in the system. That I have faith in it for any like naive reasons, but because when you're a hostage, you got to do everything you can. So like trying to make some progress in every sense is my philosophy. But point but I see your, framework. Your I think that makes sense. I mean, having why I said earlier, there are kind of a few different ways you could be coming at it. I think Elon Musk is a person who thinks genuinely this is the role, like this isn't government's role. This is business's role, you know, and there's that attitude, which I think is insane, stupid. And then there's the attitude of like, well, you not try to do what you can sort of thing.

0:39:11 Alejandro: Yeah, me too Yeah,

0:40:00 Thomas: And and continue if you didn't get through your framework. But I hear your definitions in your framework and I actually, I think I agree with all that. It makes sense. It's a good way to look at it. But I wanna know how you can kan identify that in an accurate way. You know, like how do you know the difference? I think that was what I was getting at was someone comes to your company, for example, and they have an idea like this. How are you folks evaluating whether or not this is, is, you know, something that might help a little, something that might be, you Know, maybe it's not going to solve the whole problem, but maybe it'll make things a little better versus like now is a fucking waste of time. And in fact, it's actually harmful.

0:40:36 Alejandro: That's a really good question I you actually sort of answered it a little bit yourself. So one of the things I look for do they claim to solve the problem? So here's Actually, with this Client and So these people are super cool, they're called Project Footprint. And what I've actually have not been lucky enough to work with them myself, but some of my colleagues have. What do is, you know, you have a hurricane or whatever, and it's a mess and FEMA shows up and FEMA show up with these huge generators and like, you dirty. And So what they is they show up to emergency sites with solar panels and they just offer them for free, right? To like your FEMA camps or whatever. And not an, look how well scoped it is, right. It's use of technology, but they're not solving climate change.

0:41:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:17 Alejandro: They're not stopping transit.

0:41:17 Thomas: Gotcha. Gotcha.

0:41:18 Alejandro: They've scoped. It right. And good engineering is scoped, right, that's like a really important part of solving a problem. Yeah, I'm gonna push back a little bit on the word ambitious, but I with what you're saying. I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, yeah, I think "not a lie" is how I would phrase it, like, it's not a lot like, your container of the gross tomatoes will not solve urban food deserts.

0:41:19 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. It's not too ambitious. Okay, okay, sure. Yeah, not overly ambitious, I guess, maybe. Okay? All right. Sure. Yeah?

0:41:41 Alejandro: Like, that isn't a goal, that is a lie, that is an investor lie, right?

0:41:45 Thomas: Like if you put that same money into just delivering groceries from somewhere that has groceries to somewhere that doesn't like, skip the whole container, you know? Know, like, yeah.

0:41:50 Alejandro: Yeah, right, I mean, this is the self-driving, like, we've, we as a society, because of how we've organized ourselves, have poured over a hundred billion dollars into self-driving cars, right? We could have solved so many things had we done that. And even like, know, you, to this day there is no data that self-driven cars are better than, like, human drivers, right? Like,

0:42:04 Thomas: Hmm. Think that it could be the kind of thing that it doesn't look, I'm not an Elon Musk defender. I can't stand Elon Musk. I, I hope everyone who listens is solid, uh, on that, even though I do drive a Tesla, but you know, we got it unrelated to, yeah, and I, I love a lot of things about it. I also hate a lot lot of things about it, but we don't have the fucking self -driving bullshit because that's nonsense. But something like self -driven cars is the kind of thing that is complete garbage until it's not, you know, it's sort of a binary where it's like, until you've reached the level you would need to be, yeah, it'S going to look terrible.

You've spent a whole bunch of money on something that does nothing, doesn't work yet. But once it does, then it's, I all all software pretty much. I guess hardware too, but like it's, it's easily replicable. And so once you reach that level, you could say, yeah, okay. But when we do, it could be a really good investment because maybe it's so good that it saves a bunch of lives or whatever, you know? So I guess I'm just pushing back on like data about them now versus what they maybe could be soon or something.

0:42:17 Alejandro: Sure, I didn't know that, that's funny, me.

0:43:17 Alejandro: I'm not, I'm not going to disagree with that. I Um, will say, I think, I I quibble. I don't know. I'm going to quibbles. I do love a quibbel.

0:43:22 Thomas: Sure. Oh, I love quibbling. Love it. Good. Love

0:43:25 Alejandro: I do love a Quibble on

0:43:26 Thomas: A good quibble. Serious Quibbles Only was the first name of the show. Yeah.

0:43:30 Alejandro: Was, that was also almost the name of the Luddite. So big quibbles, um big quibblers with technology. Think there is a little bit, uh, like like it is not a given that technology will always get better, right? Is that you make them, you must continue working on them, right. But and again, I have no problem with R and D People should work on self-driving cars. Like they're dope, right, like they're fun. I want one, you want one. Everyone wants one, the cool is hell. But said, I the don't really have a problem with self-driven cars per se, right? But I do have a problems with them being pushed onto the street and acted like they're a solution to our transit problem, right, which, you even some, not to like tangent the tangent but there's even some like early research that's like actually people who have self-driving drive more right so like we Because it makes sense right if I could just read in the back of my car I would go more places. Yeah.

0:43:35 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Yeah okay. Oh, I see. Yeah, so it's like further, you know, congesting things and all that. Gotcha.

0:44:26 Alejandro: So So you know this is part of my you know my big how I end my technological institutions article is like I say you of assuming that a technology can't solve a problem we should say, what is the world we want? Is there a technology in that world? Anyway, let's back that tangent a little bit. I think recently, when York Times reported shortly the company had between think it was between 1.5 and 3 employees on standby per self-driving car which actually makes them less autonomous than Regular cars

0:44:53 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah! It usually takes me just one to drive.

0:44:57 Alejandro: Right So I think that's I where you can see sort of it's not like I have a problem with self-driver in cars as you now you can start seeing like that's what you see like the power structure is coming in right I say there's no good data, I mean, the data that we do have is iffy and we like it's coming from the company itself, right? And it's, you know, I think there was recently an article comparing self-driving cars to like regular human drivers. First of all, wrong comparison, right, they're taxis. You should compare them to other taxis, they drive different kinds of miles, professional drivers, et cetera. But second, we have no idea how many people they have at HQ manning that taxi. Taxi.

0:45:28 Alejandro: And then there's also the counterfactual. What if we spent a hundred billion dollars making taxis safer? I think that'd be actually really effective use of money. If we wanted taxis to be really safe, we'd If every taxi driver just worked less and had a mission control that was like very, I bet they'd be really sick.

0:44:58 Thomas: Yeah... yeah... yeah, right, right. Yeah right. Right.

0:45:53 Thomas: All right, we're calling it there for part one. Much more in part two, including some more real-life examples of tech anti -solutions I think are a lot of fun. So, looking forward to that. Again, to Alejandra and I will see you in the next episode.

0:46:25 Alejandro: Me tell you about uh I don't know if I'm nd8 or not um I

0:46:29 Thomas: Should